***************************************************************** 08/27/02 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 10.219 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POLICY 1 British Energy shares soar on news of talks with BNFL 2 Power plant: Panel to present report 3 SA: Greenpeace refuses to back down 4 British Energy in talks with BNFL 5 N. Korea frustrates nuclear inspectors -- 6 US officials in North Korea over nuclear issues, MIA search 7 UK: Talks On Magnox Continue NUCLEAR REACTORS 8 US: NRC Proposes to Amend Event Notification Regulations 9 US: NRC Announces the Availability of License Renewal Application fo 10 US: 11 I must own up to playing a part in the downfall of nuclear power in 12 UK: Nuclear power plans stall NUCLEAR SAFETY 13 US: NRC Seeks Public Comment on Proposed Rule Regarding Very Low 14 US: MSNBC's Donahue addresses leukemia in Fallon 15 US: Fallon tests find high blood levels of substance 16 US: Tests find tungsten in Fallon residents 17 Military training team for nuclear disaster NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE 18 Radiation alert over waste at Felixstowe 19 US: Approval of Shattuck cleanup pact wins cautious support of neigh 20 US: N-waste truck hit by pickup; no leaks or injuries 21 Uranium company eyes Jackson site 22 US: Ken Cook: Lifting Yucca awareness 23 US: Letter: Don't assume it's sound science 24 US: Del Papa vows fight in courts against Yucca 25 US: Nuclear Waste Measure Ordered onto Utah Ballot 26 US: Yucca: Nevada's fight just beginning 27 US: NUMEC cited by hundreds as cancer source 28 US: Former employees detail alleged safety violations at NUMEC's pla 29 US: Government investigations proved fruitless 30 US: Searching for truth about cancer cause 31 US: 'Trouble, this is going to be trouble' 32 US: Woman warns of living near plant 33 US: Local case has ties to Silkwood 34 US: Lawsuit against ARCO, BWXT rolls on 35 US: Public meeting set to discuss Weldon Spring plan 36 BNFL make take over troubled nuclear group * 37 Hot Property, Cold Cash 38 Experts differ on risk of proposed uranium plant * NUCLEAR WEAPONS 39 UK: Makeover for nuclear weapons plant 40 Makeover for nuclear weapons plant 41 US: Defense goes Hollywood for anti-terror training US DEPT. OF ENERGY 42 Gov't Offers Radiation Equipment 43 Labs yield potential AIDS therapy 44 Strange substance might also purge nuclear waste 45 Geiger Counters Reused for Training 46 Federal Agencies Cooperate To Provide Radiation Detection OTHER NUCLEAR 47 NASA Glenn gets key role on ion engine ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** FULL NEWS STORIES ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** 1 British Energy shares soar on news of talks with BNFL Scottish business news - by Philip Howard [feedback@businessam.co.uk] Last update: 08:45, Aug 27, 2002 BRITISH Energy, the UK's largest electricity generator, said today it may agree to run the ageing, loss-making Magnox reactors owned by British Nuclear Fuels in a move to ease its funding problems. The news sent shares in East Kilbride-based British Energy up 14.8% to 67.5p in early trading, after they had lost nearly half their value in the past month after shutdowns in two of its nuclear power plants. The deal would conclude talks begun over four months ago on the future management of some of Britain's oldest nuclear power plants and give British Energy financial breathing space after it was hit by a steep fall in power prices. "British Energy continues to be in discussions with BNFL on a wide range of issues, including fuel service arrangements, new nuclear build, the possible operation of Magnox plant and transportation," the company said in a statement. A British Energy spokesman declined to comment on the timing of a possible deal with BNFL. There was press speculation it might come this week. Officials for BNFL were not immediately available for comment. A contract with BNFL would give British Energy valuable revenues at a time when the company faces a financial crunch which has prompted speculation of possible renationalisation after it underwent privatisation six years ago. The government is thought to be anxious to avoid a repetition of the collapse of Railtrack, where the state-owned operator of the rail tracks was brought to its knees by funding problems. British Energy, which generates around 25% of the UK's electricity, has struggled to react to a fall in prices after the introduction of new wholesale trading agreements (Neta) in 2001. Critics of Neta say the scheme means producers like British Energy can no longer sell power profitably. On Sunday, the energy minister, Brian Wilson, hinted the government could introduce changes to the wholesale electricity trading market to help shore up the nuclear power producer and help it get a higher price for its product. Unlike other power utilities, British Energy has no retail business to offset the effect of lower wholesale prices on its generating plants' profitability. Its shares have fallen from a year high of 336p reached last September due to the company's exposure to weak prices. Copyright © Businessam.co.uk 2002 ***************************************************************** 2 Power plant: Panel to present report The Taipei Times Online: 2002-08-27 STAFF WRITER, WITH AGENCIES A panel of legislators probing alleged corruption by fellow lawmakers regarding sloppy construction work at the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant is expected to submit a report of its investigation to the legislature's Discipline Committee on Friday. Panel members, however, said the report will only include facts that the panel has discovered so far and does not mean the investigation has been completed, as prosecutors are still looking into the case. The panel will be reshuffled after the next legislative session starts in September. The controversy surfaced in mid-June when TSU Legislator Su Ying-kwei (Ĭ¬Õ¶Q) claimed that fellow lawmakers from the DPP had pressured the state-run Taiwan Power Co to award contracts for construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant to a favored firm. Su said he had evidence, provided by China Shipbuilding Corp (¤¤²î), the government-owned company responsible for the project's reactor pedestals, to back up his charges. This story has been viewed 406 times. URL=[http://www.taipeitimes.com/news/2002/08/27/story/0000165840] Copyright © 1999-2002 The Taipei Times. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 3 SA: Greenpeace refuses to back down Activists claim they saw no sign of security at Koeberg nuclear power station for 40 minutes ENVIRONMENTAL activists, who launched a daring publicity escapade on Saturday at Koeberg nuclear power station to protest against the use of nuclear power in SA, will not abandon their tactics despite facing court action this week. Twelve Greenpeace activists will appear in the Atlantis Magistrate's Court in Cape Town on Friday on charges of trespassing and breaching security at a national installation, the international environmental group said yesterday. Mike Townsley, a nuclear campaigner at Greenpeace, said the organisation would "continue to shine a spotlight on issues of corporate corruption and environmental degradation" that world leaders need to address at the World Summit on Sustainable Development. He declined to comment on any other publicity programmes the activists had in store for the summit, while Greenpeace boat Esperanza is docked in Cape Town. The protestors came ashore in two inflatable boats on Saturday morning, and scaled a five-storey seawater cooling pumphouse to display banners saying Nukes out of Africa. The four-hour standoff with the police and Koeberg security finally ended when three of the activists on the roof of the pumphouse handed themselves over to police after the other nine were arrested. Townsley expressed shock at the ease at which the activists were able to enter the Koeberg security area, and scorned suggestions that Koeberg security officials were waiting for them. He said it took up to 40 minutes before there were any "obvious signs" of a security presence. "If they (Koeberg security) were waiting for us, I'm surprised they allowed six people in orange uniforms to climb up the pumphouse and that they allowed two banners to be displayed from the roof," said Townsley. Carin de Villiers, a spokeswoman for Eskom, said the Koeberg station manager had been informed by Greenpeace they were conducting a "peaceful protest", and security officials had been instructed to use "minimum force" in dealing with the protestors. "They put their own lives in danger. I think it was irresponsible. If they had not told us that they were coming, they could have been blown out of the water," said De Villiers. Koeberg security, the police and defence force officials had a debriefing yesterday to discuss the security breach. The activists appeared briefly in court yesterday when the case was postponed. Lawyers for the 12 would make representations to the director of public prosecution over the next few days, Townsley said. Immigration officials have warned Greenpeace that they were considering deporting them all before the development summit was over. "The Greenpeace action at Koeberg was a peaceful demonstration to highlight the dangers of the nuclear industry and call on the SA government to take a lead in developing clean, renewable energy. "It is not Greenpeace that poses a threat to the security of SA, it is the use and further development of nuclear power," he said. The activists are from Argentina, Spain, Britain, Canada, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Mexico and Australia. BDFM Publishers 2002 ***************************************************************** 4 British Energy in talks with BNFL BBC NEWS | Business | 27 August, 2002, [Nuclear power plant, Dungeness] British Energy runs eight power plants in the UK British Energy has said it is continuing discussions which could lead to the company operating BNFL's magnox power stations. The nuclear power generator is heavily in debt and is struggling to sort out its finances. A deal with BNFL could provide it with additional fees. The magnox reactors are the UK's oldest atomic power plants and were left with BNFL when the rest of the nuclear generation business was privatised with the flotation of British Energy. A contract to run the plants could last until 2010, when the reactors reach the end of their working life. A deal is unlikely to solve the company's problems but would allow a breathing space. There has been growing speculation about how British Energy will deal with its financial problems with newspaper reports suggesting the government would pay off some of the debt or even renationalise the business. Market distortions In a statement to the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday, British Energy said that it was continuing its discussions with BNFL on a wide range of issues. These included "fuel service arrangements, new nuclear build, the possible operation of magnox plant and transportation". The company said that it was continuing to inform the government about the market environment and the effect on the business of "market distortions including climate change levy exemption and business rates". British Energy has been arguing for a reduction in the business rates it pays on its power stations to bring them into line with its non-nuclear competitors. The company also wants to be excluded from the climate change levy. Wholesale changes? Energy Minister Brian Wilson hinted on Monday that the wholesale electricity market could be changed to help British Energy. He said that the company had been badly hit by last year's introduction of new wholesale energy trading arrangements (NETA). This led to increased competition and lower wholesale electricity prices. Unlike other electricity generators, British Energy does not have a retail business to offset these lower prices. Mr Wilson said the government would look at "the impact of NETA on the viability of generators". British Energy operates eight power plants in the UK, and runs other nuclear power operations in the US. On Tuesday morning the company's share price rose 16.5% to 68.75 pence. On Friday it hit a low of 59p after news that it had shut a second reactor at its Dungeness power station for maintenance. ***************************************************************** 5 N. Korea frustrates nuclear inspectors -- The Washington Times August 26, 2002 By Nicholas Kralev VIENNA, Austria - The International Atomic Energy Agency says it is increasingly "frustrated" after a decade of failed attempts to inspect North Korea´s nuclear capabilities and has toughened a previously "softer" approach. The unusually stern warning from the media-shy IAEA - the world´s only safeguard against the diversion of nuclear energy programs for warfare purposes - comes as North Korea makes intense diplomatic efforts to ease its international isolation. But the North´s political overtures to South Korea, Japan and the United States have not been accompanied by a willingness to cooperate with the IAEA, a senior official said in an interview at the agency´s Vienna headquarters. "We´ve been frustrated for 10 years," said Piet de Klerk, the IAEA´s director of external relations and policy coordination. "We´ve continued to talk" since Pyongyang pulled out of the treaty requiring it to cooperate with IAEA inspections in March 1993, "but it has been a roller-coaster," he said. "We´ve never had a complete picture, so we are unable to give any assurances that there are no nuclear activities in North Korea." The IAEA, worried that the North could still have plutonium from a suspected nuclear weapons program that it agreed to freeze in 1994, wants a full account of what happened to the smallest amount of the potential bomb-making material. "In 1994, North Korea unloaded a 5-megawatt reactor very hastily and put the materials in cans, so we need to check the radioactivity levels," Mr. de Klerk said last week. But the government of Chairman Kim Jong-il has consistently ignored the agency´s demands. While it has allowed IAEA representatives to look at some documents, it did not allow even the copying of the papers, Mr. de Klerk said. For years, he said, the IAEA remained understanding of how slowly things happen in the reclusive state and held meetings twice a year with the North Koreans. But the North kept avoiding the real issues on the agenda, making the gatherings almost meaningless. "They have a number of very good people, so we´ve had some articulate discussions, but with very strict confines," Mr. de Klerk said. Earlier this summer, the IAEA took several North Korean experts to a nuclear site in Britain to show them "exactly what we would do if we went" to the North. But, he said, the gesture was futile. The IAEA is ready to "welcome them back at any time as members [of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or NPT], because when they left, that limited our dialogue but they have not responded," Mr. de Klerk said. The agency became so impatient that, when the North Koreans refused to accept some of the topics on the agenda of the last scheduled meeting in June, it canceled the date. That meeting has yet to be rescheduled. "We can´t spend more of our budget on a nonmember state," Mr. de Klerk said. "A few years ago, we were much softer and agreed to discuss less significant issues like preservation. There is no point in that anymore." He dismissed as not serious recent North Korean threats to withdraw from the 1994 agreement with the United States, known as the Agreed Framework, which froze Pyongyang´s suspected nuclear weapons program in exchange for the promised construction of two light-water reactors. "We´ve heard this before," he said. "Pulling out of the agreement will be a very high price for them, so they will sleep on it for another night." During ministerial talks with South Korea earlier this month, officials from the North warned they might have to go their "own way" if the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), the U.S.-led international consortium building the reactors, does not complete the project. Both U.S. and KEDO officials said at an Aug. 7 concrete-pouring ceremony at the plant´s site in Kumho, on North Korea´s northeastern coast, that if Pyongyang does not allow the IAEA inspectors in by the time the buildings are finished, no nuclear components will be delivered and the project will be suspended. Undersecretary of State John Bolton went further in a draft of a speech prepared for delivery in Seoul this week, saying the United States would pull out of the agreement if it was proven that Pyongyang had ever diverted plutonium from its nuclear energy program. The final contents of the speech remain under discussion at the State Department. The Agreed Framework, negotiated in 1994 by the Clinton administration after North Korea withdrew from the NPT, requires Pyongyang to allow IAEA inspections to resume when a "significant portion of the project is completed and before the nuclear components are delivered." Asked about the usefulness of the accord, which has some harsh critics in the Bush administration, Mr. de Klerk replied in a quintessentially diplomatic manner. "The Agreed Framework defused a dangerous situation at the time," he said. "We have accepted it as a fact. One can make the case that it has delayed our work, but whatever its drawbacks, it gives us leverage in dealing with North Korea." All site contents copyright © 2002 News World Communications, Inc. ***************************************************************** 6 US officials in North Korea over nuclear issues, MIA search Monday, 26-Aug-2002 3:10AM Story from AFP / Jun Kwanwoo Copyright 2002 by Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet) SEOUL, Aug 26 (AFP) - US officials are in North Korea discussing the communist state's nuclear facilities and searching for the remains of American soldiers missing in action (MIAs), officials said Monday. In a new sign the North is desperate to end its long isolation, the two separate US-North Korean contacts began just ahead of the Japanese-North Korean diplomatic negotiations resumed in Pyongyang on Sunday. Officials working with the Korean Energy Development Organization (KEDO) said a group of US State Department officials, including nuclear experts, began their five-day visit to the North on Saturday. "The US working-level officials are checking and discussing technical issues over the spent fuel rods of the North's frozen nuclear facilities," a KEDO official told AFP. KEDO is the international body to implement a landmark US-North Korean nuclear deal which would provide Pyongyang with a nuclear power plant in return for a halt in its suspected nuclear weapons programs. "They are made up of a State Department deputy director in charge of the Korean affairs and nuclear experts. Their visit will last for five days," the KEDO official said, adding that the US State Department has been in charge of preventing the sealed fuel rods from corroding since the 1994 nuclear deal. South Korea's state-run Yonhap news agency said the US team began talks in Pyongyang on Sunday with North Korean foreign ministry officials. Officials at the foreign ministry in Seoul refused to comment. Separately, a US team of defense officials and scientists arrived in Pyongyang for an MIA search on Saturday, officials said. Officials at the US and South Korean defense authorities said the US team would be engaged in its second of the three MIA search operations allowed in North Korea this year. The third search is due in October. In June, the United States and the North agreed to conduct three joint searches this year with each operation lasting 30 days. More than 8,100 American soliders are said to be missing in action from the 1950-53 Korean War, according to US defense statistics. Washington has recovered 159 sets of US remains in North Korea since 1996 despite strained ties with Pyongyang over the communist state's suspected nuclear ambition, which was frozen by the 1994 landmark nuclear deal. But both sides have been waging a war of nerve, threatening to break the deal which had saved the Korean peninsula from a real war. The Korea Times, an English-language newspaper in Seoul, said Monday that the US delegation would push North Korea to allow International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) special inspections into its nuclear sites. The North's foreign ministry earlier this month warned it may drop the nuclear deal of freezing its weapons programs, which "stands at the crossroads of abrogation or preservation". The Stalinist state has blocked IAEA inspections of a nuclear site, just north of Pyongyang, to push for a delay in the timetable for fulfilling the nuclear agreement from the end of 2003 until 2008. ***************************************************************** 7 UK: Talks On Magnox Continue Headline news from Sky News - Witness the event [http://www.sky.com] Troubled nuclear power group British Energy has confirmed it is continuing talks with British Nuclear Fuels to operate the firm's Magnox reactors. The move is seen as providing short-term relief to the ailing firm, which has been hit by the sharp drop in electricity prices. Analysts say the Government is pinning its hopes on such a deal. Breathing space A management contract could provide valuable fees to British Energy and would give the company some breathing space as ministers work on a wider rescue package. The Magnox reactors, the oldest atomic power plants in the UK, were left with BNFL after the rest of the country's nuclear generation business was privatised with the flotation of British Energy. Talks on an agreement started in May and it has now been revealed that the two companies are close to concluding discussions. Reports have suggested that the Government is considering helping rescue the group from financial difficulties. Last Modified: 08:44 UK, Tuesday August 27, 2002 © 2002 BSkyB ***************************************************************** 8 NRC Proposes to Amend Event Notification Regulations NRC: Press Release - 2002 - 97 - U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs Telephone: 301/415-8200 Washington, DC 20555-001 E-mail: opa@nrc.gov [opa@nrc.gov] www.nrc.gov No. 02-097 August 26, 2002 The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is proposing to amend its notification and reporting requirements for security and other events involving licensed nuclear facilities and the transportation of certain types of nuclear material. The proposed revisions would change several reporting requirements for independent spent fuel storage installation (ISFSI) and monitored retrievable storage (MRS) facility licensees to more closely align them with those of nuclear reactor facilities. In addition, the proposed revisions would change the requirements for when written followup reports on safeguards events must be submitted. This change would affect power reactors, ISFSIs and several other categories of facilities that produce, possess, or transport spent fuel or special nuclear material. The changes would reduce, consolidate and remove some licensee reporting notifications and lengthen the reporting period for other notifications. Some new requirements would also be added to permit NRC to effectively carry out its regulatory responsibilities and respond to public and media inquiries during emergencies. Overall, the proposed changes would help the NRC and its licensees to better focus their efforts on the most safety-significant issues and to communicate timely information on recent and ongoing events. Among other changes, a new requirement would have licensees submit an immediate followup report for degradation in the level of safety of an ISFSI or MRS or other worsening condition, including a declaration of an emergency, a change from one emergency classification to another, or termination of an emergency class. This proposed revision would enable NRC to determine if an immediate response or corrective action is necessary to protect public health and safety. A requirement would also be added to maintain an open, continuous communication channel with the NRC Operations Center, upon request by the NRC. These requirements would be consistent with those of reactor licensees and would ensure that, during an emergency, the continual communications between the licensee and the NRC are not interrupted by overloaded telephone lines. The rulemaking also proposes to eliminate the redundant requirement that licensees notify the NRC not later than four hours of a fire or explosion that affects the integrity of spent fuel or high level waste or its container. The report of such an event instead would be provided immediately, when an emergency is declared, under the licensees approved emergency response plan. The proposed rulemaking would also add a requirement that licensees notify the NRC not later than four hours after the discovery of any event or situation involving spent nuclear fuel or high level waste related to the protection of public health and safety of onsite personnel, or that of the environment, for which a news release is planned or notification to other governments has been or will be made. This requirement is consistent with current reactor licensee reporting requirements. The comment period ends on November 5, 75 days after publication of the Federal Register Notice on this subject, dated August 22. Comments on the proposed revisions may be submitted to the Secretary of the Commission, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555-0001, Attention: Rulemakings and Adjudications Staff. They may also be delivered to the NRC Public Document Room at 11555 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Maryland. Comments may also be provided by e-mail to NRCs home page interactive rulemaking web site located at http://ruleforum.llnl.gov/cgi-bin/rulemake?source=EN_PRULE [http://ruleforum.llnl.gov/cgi-bin/rulemake?source=EN_PRULE] . Links to the proposed rule, supporting documents, and public comment form will be posted there. The documents will also be available for inspection at the Commissions Public Document Room and through the NRCs Agency-wide Documents Access and Management System (ADAMS). For help in using the interactive web site, contact Ms. Carol Gallagher at 301-415-5905 or by email at cag@nrc.gov [cag@nrc.gov] . Help in using ADAMS is available by contacting the NRC Public Document Room staff at 301-415-4737 or 1-800-397-4209, or by sending an email message to pdr@nrc.gov [pdr@nrc.gov] . For further information on this rulemaking, contact Tony DiPalo, Office of Nuclear Materials Safety and Safeguards, at telephone (301) 415-6191 or by email at ajd@nrc.gov [ajd@nrc.gov] . ***************************************************************** 9 NRC Announces the Availability of License Renewal Application for Summer Nuclear Power Plant NRC: Press Release - 2002 - 99 - U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs Telephone: 301/415-8200 Washington, DC 20555-001 E-mail: opa@nrc.gov [opa@nrc.gov] www.nrc.gov No. 02-099 August 27, 2002 The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is announcing the availability of an application for a 20-year renewal of the operating license of the Virgil C. Summer nuclear power plant. South Carolina Electric & Gas Co. submitted the application on August 6. The plant is located in Fairfield County, South Carolina. The current operating license for the facility expires on August 6, 2022. A copy of the application will be available at: http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/licensing/renewal/applications.html on the NRC web site. The application also is available through the NRC's Agencywide Documents Access and Management System (ADAMS). Help in using ADAMS is available by contacting the NRC Public Document Room staff at 301/415-4737 or 1/800/397-4209, or by sending a message to pdr@nrc.gov [pdr@nrc.gov] via e-mail. In addition, a copy of the license renewal application is available at the Fairfield County Library, in Winnsboro, S.C., and at the Thomas Cooper Library at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, S.C. The NRC staff is currently conducting an initial review of the application to determine whether it contains enough information for the required formal review. If the application has sufficient information, the NRC will formally "docket," or file, the application and will announce an opportunity to request a hearing. ***************************************************************** 10 [newsobserver.com, Raleigh, NC] Site Updated: 2:04 AM | WEDNESDAY, Tuesday, August 27, 2002 4:33AM EDT Using land near Harris Plant owners plan for growth nearby By RICHARD STRADLING, Staff Writer Progress Energy, the largest private landowner in Wake County, is looking to develop some of its vast holdings in a once-remote corner of the county. Progress Energy owns nearly 17,000 acres in Wake, the equivalent of three Umstead state parks, most of it taken up by Harris Lake, the Shearon Harris nuclear plant and surrounding land west of Holly Springs. The company owns more land than it needs to buffer the lake and the nuclear plant, making hundreds of acres available for development. "We look at that area as obviously a very high potential growth area," said spokesman Garrick Francis. "We will continue to analyze all the property we have in that area for its development potential." Progress Energy's subsidiary, Carolina Power &Light, took the first step last winter when it asked Holly Springs to annex 425 acres, making it eligible for town water, sewer and other services. The company took the second step last week when it persuaded Holly Springs commissioners to rezone 53 acres of that land along U.S. 1 to allow commercial development. Progress Energy will jump into the development business in a big way this fall, when it breaks ground on a $100 million office, retail and residential complex in downtown Raleigh. Twenty miles away, the company's land near Shearon Harris could fuel the westward expansion of Holly Springs into a part of the county that once seemed beyond the reach of development. Holly Springs was the state's fastest-growing town in the 1990s, and town officials, unlike their counterparts in Apex and Cary, have no interest in slowing down. Mayor Dick Sears and other town officials met with Progress Energy representatives this week to say they're eager to work with the company on future development. "We talked about the possibility of partnering on more commercial development, high schools, water treatment facilities, residential, and that's about as far as it's gotten," Sears said. "They do have a lot of land down there that we are interested in." CP has no immediate plans to develop the 53 acres along U.S. 1, but the company's rezoning application says an office park, shopping center or mixed-use project are possibilities. "We're just preparing ourselves so that when the market turns around we'll be in a better position to use the asset," Francis said. "Obviously that area has great potential." The rezoning surprised neighbors of the property, a forested tract surrounded by other forests and a smattering of houses. Elizabeth Ray, who has lived off Friendship Road since 1996, said people expect more building in their part of the county, but always considered the CP land off limits to development because of the nuclear plant. "There's enough signs that something's going to come our way," said Ray, whose 25-acre lot backs up on the company's land. "We just didn't expect it so soon. And we did not expect it from CP." CP acquired thousands of acres of farm and forest land in the southwest corner of the county in the 1960s and 1970s as it planned to build four nuclear reactors at Shearon Harris. After the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979, the company scaled back the plant to one reactor, which required less cooling water and a smaller lake, Francis said. Francis could not say how much Progress Energy land might be available for development, but he said it's more than the 425 acres annexed by Holly Springs. Company land abuts the town in several places, including the town's industrial park. The land is within five miles of the nuclear plant, but company officials don't think that will discourage development. Developers have planned or built hundreds of homes that are as close. "There certainly are lots of people who live in pretty close proximity to the plant and feel safe," Francis said. "Whatever you create out there, people would be willing to use it." The 53 acres rezoned last week are split by U.S. 1. Company officials say that makes them a logical place for commercial development, even though the nearest interchange on U.S. 1 is several miles away and the land is reachable now only by a gravel road. Progress Energy will ask the state Department of Transportation to build an interchange nearby before it develops the property, Francis said. Town officials will support a new interchange when the time comes, Planning Director Gina Bobber said. Finisterra, a planned 775-acre golf course subdivision just south of the recently annexed CP land, calls for up to 2,100 homes, enough to justify new access to U.S. 1, Bobber said. Meanwhile, Progress Energy's moves to develop its property have caught Ray and her neighbors off guard. They learned about the rezoning only about two weeks ago, she said. Now they're anxious about having a big chunk of commercially zoned property in their midst. "I don't feel it is fair to rezone a piece of property without giving the adjacent landowners time to understand the impact or what they plan to do," Ray said. "Right now it's all up in the air." Staff writer Richard Stradling can be reached at 829-4739 or rstradli@newsobserver.com [rstradli@newsobserver.com] . © Copyright 2002, The News &Observer Publishing Company. All material found ***************************************************************** 11 I must own up to playing a part in the downfall of nuclear power in Britain Independent.co.uk Because of my actions, there has been no serious attempt to deal with the growing problem of what to do with nuclear waste By Michael Brown 27 August 2002 Brian Wilson, the minister for energy at the Department of Trade and Industry, is not attending the Johannesburg earth summit. After the recent rows about the attendance of the Environment Minister, Michael Meacher, this is understandable. Indeed there was no suggestion that Mr Wilson should have gone in the first place. And in any case he has other fish to fry following the latest reports that British Energy, the privatised nuclear electricity company, is facing bankruptcy. Yet of all the ministers in government who have the opportunity actually to deliver the objectives of any protocols agreed in Johannesburg, it is Mr Wilson who may hold the answers. I have a personal confession to make to him as to why this country consumes more fossil fuels than those at Johannesburg might find desirable. Back in 1985, when nuclear power was regarded as the answer to our energy needs, the Government agency Nirex (Nuclear Industry Radioactive Waste Executive) nominated four sites in England for the shallow disposal of low-level radioactive waste. One of the sites selected was on an area of land owned by the old nationalised Central Electricity Generating Board in my constituency. The other three sites were in constituencies represented by Conservative government ministers ? including the Attorney General and the Chief Whip (John, now Lord, Wakeham). There was an outcry from local residents. In my own case, property values in the area surrounding the proposed site fell by as much as 50 per cent. I led protest groups, local authorities and parish councils on marches, and took delegations to ministers. Because of my lack of relative influence as a backbencher, compared to my rivals who were ministers, I suspected that my constituency would end up drawing the short straw. Knowing that I could not win my arguments in the division lobbies ? I was one vote out of 650 ? I decided on kamikaze action and, in a speech in the Commons, made it clear that "there would be no nuclear waste in my constituency so long as I remain an MP." Government ministers correctly interpreted this as meaning that I would resign and cause a by-election should I fail to get my way. As a result, the proposals were dropped six weeks before the 1987 general election. Since then privatisation of all sections of the energy industry (save for British Nuclear Fuels) has taken place and the nuclear industry has stalled. Many have praised the stance I took on behalf of local residents, but others have, probably correctly, accused me of being the original Nimby (not in my back yard). The fact that my own house was less than two miles from the site may well have had something to do with my ability to understand the sense of local outrage. As a consequence of my actions, there has been no serious attempt to deal with the growing problem of what to do with nuclear waste, and the reputation of the nuclear power industry has remained in the doldrums. In the meantime, we have signed up to the Rio and Kyoto treaty objectives on climate change and greenhouse gas emissions. Yet the only way we can ever hope to meet our obligations is if we reduce our consumption electricity generated by fossil fuel. This is an area where the famous "joined up" government we have heard so much about simply does not work. Mr Wilson does not have the strategic ability to take decisions over the need for a deep-disposal facility. One of the arguments I deployed against the waste dump in Cleethorpes was because it was to be shallow. If it had been a deep facility, and substantial compensation payments had been offered to the locals (which is what happens in France, which generates 70 per cent of its power from nuclear energy), I would have been lobbying to have the site in my patch. Every MP has his price ? and likewise his constituents. But such decisions on disposal facilities are taken by the Department for Rural Affairs, specifically by Mr Meacher, who is known to be less sympathetic to nuclear power. Mr Wilson will also need to take on the dreaded Treasury if he is to have any hope of rescuing British Energy, short of the embarrassment of having to bring forward contingency plans to renationalise British Energy. One of the most bizarre decisions taken by the Government ? at the behest of the Chancellor ? was to subject nuclear power to the climate-change levy. This levy, designed to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels by industry, loads the price of nuclear power by 0.43 pence per kilowatt-hour. Industry is able to choose its power source, but the inclusion of nuclear power in this levy means industry has no incentive to switch from using fossil fuels. The nuclear power debate in this country has been stuck since 1987, yet it is clear that, with the ageing Magnox power stations facing decommissioning and the need to face up to the likelihood of an energy deficit in the years ahead, only a programme of new nuclear stations can provide the answer. Sir Jonathon Porritt, the Prime Minister's chief adviser on sustainable development, believes that this gap can be filled by renewable energy sources such a wind power. He is unlikely to make a convincing case when renewables account for less than 3 per cent of output. Even Denmark, which has managed an impressive 20 per cent of wind power, has decided that further progress is impossible. Meanwhile, in Finland, the public has been educated to support the construction of both a new nuclear station and waste disposal facility with virtually no protests. As Johannesburg debates the need for improved water and sanitation for the developing countries, there will also be pressure to end the destruction of forests in Africa and Asia. Much of the smog that hangs over Asia in countries such as Indonesia is the result of individuals burning wood for fires. Clearly they will need to build power stations, which are bound to use fossil fuels. We face the prospect that, in the short term, increased development to benefit the third world will actually increase greenhouse gas emissions, blowing a hole in the agreements reached at Rio and Kyoto. This is bound to put pressure on the developed world to reduce further its power generation by means of coal, oil and gas. The irony is that, at the very moment that nuclear power may come to be more sympathetically regarded by environmentalists ? except Sir Jonathon ? the British nuclear power industry is facing bankruptcy. Thus it is probably Mr Wilson, sitting alone in Whitehall this week while his colleagues are in Johannesburg, who faces the greatest immediate challenge as he prepares the forthcoming white paper on energy, to be published this autumn. I shall be cheering him on, but he needs to recognise, as his Tory predecessors did not, that bribing local people to accept waste disposal sites will make his task far easier. Meanwhile, my apologies to him for being the cause of this mess in the first place. mrbrown@pimlico.freeserve.co.uk ***************************************************************** 12 UK: Nuclear power plans stall Scotsman.com Tue 27 Aug 2002 /Fraser Nelson Westminster Editor/ GOVERNMENT plans to save Britain?s privately-owned nuclear power stations from financial ruin have run into stiff opposition from the industry watchdog. Callum McCarthy, the Energy Regulator, has made clear that ministers cannot redraw the entire energy wholesale market to save one company. His opposition makes it more likely that Torness and Hunterston nuclear power stations in Scotland ? both owned by British Energy ? could have to be renationalised along with the entire company. Mr McCarthy has dismissed suggestions by Brian Wilson, the energy minister, that British Energy has been the unintended victim of the new energy market which ministers created under the name Neta. ?Neta does not artificially bring down prices. It produces the lower prices that you would expect in a competitive market,? he said. He then suggested that Mr Wilson should have foreseen that British Energy would be caught short when the price of wholesale electricity plunged by 25 per cent when the Neta market went live. ?All that is happening is not illogical nor, indeed, unexpected,? he said. Mr Wilson had previously argued that British Energy?s financial turmoil is a consequence of its inability to get ?a price for its product which is reasonable?. He confirmed that ministers are monitoring British Energy?s progress and would not allow the company to fail. It has £450 million of debt which it is unable to pay off ? compounded by the £50 million cost of shutting two generators at Torness last month after a technical failure. If Mr McCarthy remains intransigent, Mr Wilson could be forced to relieve it from the £100 million climate change levy it pays to the government. As a last resort, he is understood to be willing to buy British Energy back from the stock market rather than see it go into administration. ©2002 scotsman.com ***************************************************************** 13 NRC Seeks Public Comment on Proposed Rule Regarding Very Low Levels of Certain Radioactive Material NRC: Press Release - 2002 - 98 - U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs Telephone: 301/415-8200 Washington, DC 20555-001 E-mail: opa@nrc.gov [opa@nrc.gov] www.nrc.gov No. 02-098 August 26, 2002 The NRC is seeking public comment on proposed amendments to its regulations regarding the transfer of very low levels of source material from organizations or persons licensed to handle this material to those not licensed. Source material is uranium and thorium, both radioactive materials, that exist naturally in soil and appear in trace quantities in many chemical mixtures and compounds. The proposed rule would ensure the protection of public health and safety from transfers of very low concentrations of radioactive material. Currently, NRC regulations exempt persons from licensing requirements for source material if they possess or use only materials that contain less than 0.05 percent by weight of uranium and thorium. A report issued in June 2001, Systematic Radiological Assessment of Exemptions for Source and Byproduct Materials, NUREG-1717, indicates that, in certain situations, quantities of source material in concentrations below the 0.05 limit could potentially result in exposures to radiation that exceed NRCs public radiation dose limits. The proposed rulemaking would ensure that transfers of source material at very low concentration levels from specific licensees to persons exempt from licensing do not cause undue risk to the public. A licensee seeking to transfer such low levels of source material would have to submit information to NRC on the type and quantity of the material, location of the transfer, end use of the transfer, individual public dose estimates, and assumptions used in estimating the dose. The NRC would independently analyze the request before approving the transfer. Copies of the proposed rule will be available from the agencys web site, at http://ruleforum.llnl.gov/ [http://ruleforum.llnl.gov/] . Interested persons may submit comments electronically within 75 days after publication in the Federal Register, expected shortly. Comments may also be mailed to the Secretary, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC, 20555-0001, Attention: Rulemakings and Adjudications staff. The proposed rule will also be accessible from the Publicly Available Records component of NRCs Agencywide Documents Access and Management System (ADAMS). ADAMS may be accessed from the NRC website at http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams.html (the Public Electronic Reading Room). Copies of NUREG-1717 will also be available on ADAMS. Help in using ADAMS is available by calling the NRC Public Document Room at 301/415-4737 or 1/800/397-4209, or by sending an e-mail message to pdr@nrc.gov [pdr@nrc.gov] . ***************************************************************** 14 MSNBC's Donahue addresses leukemia in Fallon August 27, 2002 [online@rgj.com] RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL 8/26/2002 01:24 pm To contact the Fallon families: Fist89406@yahoo.com The state health official in charge of the Fallon leukemia cluster investigation defended the probe’s progress on Friday in the face of criticism from cancer patient families on the Phil Donahue cable TV show. State epidemiologist Randall Todd said federal and state investigators are using cutting-edge technology to examine blood samples from the patient families and control families. The preliminary results of those tests are scheduled to be announced Tuesday in Fallon. On the live show, Todd defended the pace and methods of the investigation. Guests on the MSNBC program included family members of two patients. The families said more must be done to find the cause of the cluster of 16 children diagnosed with leukemia since 1997, three of whom have died. “We’re asking the state to start to work with us as a family group,” said Reto Gross, whose son, Dustin, 6, has recovered from leukemia. Gross appeared on the program with his wife, Brenda, and Dustin. “We want to join the community in finding the problem, not a lawsuit, not accusations,” Gross said. “We want to end the problem so no other child goes through what Dustin went through.” The Reno Gazette-Journal reported Friday that about half the 16 families of Fallon patients founded the Families In Search of Truth, or F.I.S.T., to conduct their own investigations if necessary and find the cause of the cluster. F.I.S.T. members said many stones have been left unturned. The Gross family and Floyd Sands, a former Fallon resident whose daughter, Stephanie, 21, died of leukemia last year, said the state has not fully investigated the underground pipeline in Fallon. That 6-inch steel pipe brings JP-8 fuel 63 miles from Sparks to the Fallon Naval Air Station. Federal and state officials have repeatedly exonerated the pipeline as a cause of the epidemic. “We do not believe that it is definitely the pipeline,” said Brenda Gross. “We definitely feel it needs more research. We need to get out there and dig and see what is going on.” Sands said he was “absolutely positive” jet fuel from the pipeline is related to the cancer outbreak. He said the State Division of Health and the federal investigators rushed to pronounce the line safe and conducted only a paperwork review and superficial examinations. “There is not one bit of independent, verifiable investigation or evidence about the viability of that pipeline, ever,” said Sands. Kinder Morgan Energy Partners LLC, the pipeline’s owner, has said the firm has gone beyond federal requirements to ensure the pipeline is intact. They said the line can’t be responsible for any health concerns and there are no records of leaks in the 45-year-old pipe. In May, Todd said the pipeline issue had been “pretty much laid to rest,” but he said on the show that the line “may be the cause, but we have considerable data that supports it doesn’t leak.” Reto and Brenda Gross said all possible causes should be relentlessly pursued until a cause is found. Donahue asked whether investigators could agree that the cluster stems from an environmental problem and asked “shouldn’t we know more by now?” Todd said the matter is still wide open and clusters are difficult to solve. “All clusters are pretty much considered by the public environmentally caused until proven otherwise,” he said. Todd said other factors, such as a viral origin, are possible. He said the state was keeping an open mind in conducting the probe. © Copyright Reno Gazette-Journal, a [http://www.gannett.com] Newspaper. ***************************************************************** 15 Fallon tests find high blood levels of substance Frank X. Mullen Jr. [fmullen@rgj.com] RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL 8/26/2002 01:26 pm State and federal health officials and others close to the Fallon leukemia cluster probe said Monday that Fallon residents whose blood samples were studied had a substance in their bodies found at higher levels than in the general population. The officials won’t reveal what the substance is, except to say it’s not a recognized carcinogen and still requires further evaluation to determine if it’s linked to the cancer epidemic or is otherwise potentially harmful. The CDC is scheduled to release the details of the Fallon biological tests today in a public meeting beginning at 6:30 p.m. at the Fallon Convention Center, 100 Campus Way. The CDC tested biological samples for heavy metals, radioactivity, pesticides, trace elements, major ions, infectious agents and viral antibodies. “The blood analysis that was done is very sophisticated,” said Randall Todd, Nevada state epidemiologist. “The substances tested for can be analyzed down to the parts-per-trillion.” Over the last year, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has collected thousands of blood, urine and DNA samples from about 200 people, including leukemia patients, their family members, and four Fallon “control families” per patient family. Since 1997, 16 children and young adults with links to the Fallon area have been diagnosed with leukemia and three of them have died. The most recent diagnosis came this month and the third death was last week. The expected rate of childhood leukemia in Churchill County would be one case every five years, health officials said. Last year, an expert panel convened by the state concluded the epidemic probably isn’t a random occurrence and a viral or environmental cause is suspected. What’s happening in Fallon, as tragic as it is, could be a “lighthouse” for cancer investigations in the future, said Dr. Shelly Hearne, director of the Trust for America’s Health, a public health advocacy group. She said state health departments have been using 17th century methods to deal with 21st century problems. In Fallon, she said, the CDC’s bio-monitoring approach coupled with a search for environmental pollutants and their potential pathways to residents could set the stage for future “SWAT teams” to investigate cancer clusters. Hearne said the substance found in Fallon residents’ blood or urine may or may not be related to the cancer epidemic, but still raises important questions. “We know it’s there, but why is it there?” she asked. “Where does it come from? Why are Fallon residents’ levels higher than people in the rest of the nation?” Those questions are a starting point, she said, that could solve Fallon’s mystery and aid other communities’ public health problems. “The CDC in Fallon is using the kinds of tools that should be standard in any state’s public health arsenal,” Hearne said. “But instead, they are only available at the CDC. If you can routinely apply these tests to any population at risk, you will find telling clues to what’s going on.” The Trust for America’s Health has been lobbying for a national disease tracking network and Sens. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., have sponsored a bill to fund pilot programs around the nation. Last month, the CDC issued a request for proposals for the program. “It’s not rocket science; we’re talking about well-known laboratory procedures,” Hearne said. “But it takes the will and the money to be able to do it routinely. When such things are standard, we’ll be able to tell who is at risk and what are the potential problems in a community. “Instead of having everything be theoretical, we’ll be working with real data and then can move more quickly into the answer phase.” The CDC began its probe about a year ago. The agency collected biological samples, including blood and urine, for analysis. The second part of the CDC’s probe involved an environmental analysis of about 17,000 samples of air, soil, dust and water. The CDC today will only present a portion of its findings from the biological investigation and more results are expected later this year. © Copyright Reno Gazette-Journal, a Gannett ***************************************************************** 16 Tests find tungsten in Fallon residents August 27, 2002 Metal in bodies: No data linking it with leukemia, official says [fmullen@rgj.com] RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL 8/26/2002 01:49 pm Marilyn Newton/RGJ ANSWERS: Dr. Carol H. Rubin, chief of the health studies branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, addresses residents of Fallon on Aug. 20 concerning high levels of arsenic and tungsten found in both leukemia patient families and control group families. From the Aug. 21, 2002 edition: FALLON — Federal health officials said Tuesday that urine tests on leukemia patient families and Fallon control group families showed high levels of the metal tungsten in the bodies of both groups. “Our results engender several questions,” said Dr. Carol H. Rubin, chief of the health studies branch at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Where is it coming from and how is it getting into people’s bodies?” Rubin said there is no data linking tungsten with leukemia. The levels of tungsten found were 11 times higher than in the reference population used for a national CDC toxics study, Rubin said. She said 80 percent of the 205 people tested in Fallon had tungsten levels that exceeded the reference population. No geographic pattern was found, she said, and there was no difference in the results between the case families and control families. Since 1997, 16 children connected with Fallon have been diagnosed with leukemia and three have died. The expected rate of leukemia in Churchill County is one case every five years. State and federal health authorities have been investigating the cancer cluster for more than a year. The CDC took blood, urine and cheek-swab samples last year and analyzed them for dozens of metals, chemicals, pesticides and other contaminants. On Tuesday, state and federal investigators reported the results of the metals tests at a public meeting at the Fallon Convention Center attended by about 200 people. Investigators said the elevated rate of tungsten in the urine of the residents was the most significant factor noted. Tungsten is not a known carcinogen and is not listed as hazardous by state and federal environmental or occupational health agencies. But scientists say very few studies have been done on tungsten and little is known about its effects on humans. Laboratory studies indicate tungsten can be toxic in conjunction with other substances, such as cobalt. An Air Force study noted the metal can damage cells. “I suppose that may have something to do with the cancer, but apparently no one knows enough about tungsten to say much about it,” said Matt Warneke, whose daughter, Annastacia, 7, has recovered from leukemia. “Maybe it’s genetics. Maybe everyone here has it in their systems but because of our genes, our kids are affected by it. “Or maybe it’s a red herring and doesn’t mean anything.” Researchers also found unusually high levels of arsenic in the test subjects’ urine. Rubin said because Fallon’s water contains arsenic at twice the national standard, the levels were much higher than expected. She said the people in the study who had very high levels of arsenic were advised to consult their doctors. Arsenic can cause lung, skin and bladder cancer but hasn’t been linked to leukemia. Rubin said the tests showed the subjects did not have high readings for other metals, such as mercury. But she said the results of the tests for chromium and nickel are pending. A factory that operated in Fallon from 1996 until last yearused chromium and nickel for the manufacture of molds used for auto parts. The factory cameunder public scrutiny for its use of nickel carbonyl, a toxic compound, but Nevada environmental regulators said the plant did not emit the chemical into the environment in dangerous amounts. Rubin said because the readings for tungsten and arsenic were so high the CDC decided to report to the community as quickly as possible. Tungsten, also called wolfram, is a steel-gray to tin-white metal naturally occurring in the Earth’s crust, according to metallurgical dictionaries. A major use of tungsten is in the production of hard metals, such as tungsten carbide, which is common in rock drills and metal cutting tools. The metal is mined in Nevada, with 17 inactive tungsten mines in Churchill County alone. In Fallon, at least one plant, Kennametal Inc., uses it. The tested families the scientists and the public officials are trying to determine where the tungsten in the residents’ bodies is coming from. Medical experts said tungsten, when ingested, generally is eliminated from the human body within two days. Although Fallon well water was tested by the U.S. Geological Survey twice since 1995, the USGS did not test for tungsten. Officials said the USGS will test tap water for the metal and that dust samples collected from the 69 Fallon families’ homes will be screened for tungsten and arsenic. “Because of the way the urine samples were collected, it had to have been a recent exposure (to tungsten),” said John Osterloh, a CDC investigator. “If it’s representative of what’s in people’s bodies all the time, then it would have to be a continuous exposure on a daily basis.” CDC officials said the biological test reports are preliminary and all the agencies involved will continue to study the results and compare them with the findings of the environmental tests, which are due to be released in the fall. Assemblywoman Marcia de Braga, D-Fallon, said the CDC report is interesting but may or may not shed light on the cause of the leukemia cluster. “The contamination may be part of the equation,” she said. “That, in conjunction with something else, that triggered the leukemia. “But even if it has nothing to do with the cancer, let’s find out what’s happening and fix it. It’s as the CDC doctor told us in the beginning: don’t wait for science to explain everything. If we find something that’s wrong, let’s clean it up.” RESULTS STILL AWAITED The CDC released Tuesday partial results of blood and urine samples. Results still to come are: o Trace elements, including chromium and nickel. o Radioactivity, including radon, alpha/beta/gamma radiation and uranium isotopes. o Pesticides, such as malathion, parathion, promethon, DDE organochlorides and organophospates. o Major ions, such as calcium, chloride, sodium, sulfate, silicon, magnesium, potassium and fluoride. o Infectious agents, including antibodies and pieces of viruses, including common viruses and retroviruses. A retrovirus can incorporate itself within the host’s DNA and is related to some cancers and AIDS, according to medical dictionaries. o Volatile organic compounds, such as benzene, other solvents and fuels. © Copyright Reno Gazette-Journal, a [http://www.gannett.com] Newspaper. ***************************************************************** 17 Military training team for nuclear disaster Monday » August 26 » 2002 Dan Rowe National Post A team of emergency-response workers from Toronto is receiving training this week at an Alberta military base to respond to chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear accidents. The 25 employees of the Toronto Police Service, Toronto Emergency Medical Services, Toronto Fire Services and Toronto Public Health are the first group of civilians to receive this level of emergency training from the military. "It is precautionary. It's part of our preparedness posture," said Warren Leonard, the manager of emergency planning, works and emergency services for the City of Toronto. "Nothing like this has happened in the city before, but we're aware of what goes on worldwide and we feel this is an enhancement of some of the capabilities we have.... It would be for any accidental or intentional release of these agents." Toronto has wanted to create a team trained in handling hazardous materials since 2000, he said, though the Sept. 11 attacks introduced a greater urgency. "I don't think there's any doubt it raised awareness at all levels of government and it certainly assisted in making this kind of military training available to a non-military group like the City of Toronto emergency services." Beginning yesterday, the group's members are being put through the paces at the Canadian Forces Base in Suffield. "The training that they get out there is pretty high level," said Mr. Leonard. The co-operation among different city organizations has been another selling point. "Whether it related to terrorism or a natural disaster or an accidental event, the joint approach has a great deal of support at high levels," he said. © Copyright 2002 National Post ***************************************************************** 18 Radiation alert over waste at Felixstowe August 26, 2002 BY PAUL GEATER August 26, 2002 18:00 NUCLEAR experts and government officials were today in the middle of a full-scale enquiry after a bungle at Felixstowe allowed radioactive material to go on a 70-mile rail trip through Suffolk and Essex. At one stage, 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, it was found to be a small bolt that had somehow been contaminated and was no danger. Now councils in the area are to be asked to seek assurances from the government and port bosses that procedures will tightened to ensure there is no repetition of the incident. 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. A Home Office spokesman today confirmed that the incident took place on August 1, and the material was eventually dealt with by officials from the Health and Safety Executive. "At no time was anyone in any danger at all, this was made safe quickly and dealt with by the appropriate people," he said. However the material should have been dealt with before it left the port of Felixstowe ? and for some time on August 1 there was confusion about where it was. Initial reports suggested that the container was on a lorry ? but in fact it was on a Freightliner train heading away from the port. "We are reviewing our procedures in the light of this incident," said the Home Office spokesman. When proposals to install monitoring equipment at Felixstowe port were first revealed in the wake of the attacks on America last year, Customs and Excise officers based at their London headquarters were leading the proposal. Major ports throughout Britain are taking part in a trial with this equipment ? which can be moved to different sites. It is unclear how the bolt, which is understood to have measured 15mm by 8mm, had become contaminated with radioactivity. It was part of a container load of scrap being sent from Sierra Leone in West Africa to a scrap dealer at Rainham in Essex. Felixstowe councillor Dennis Carpenter ? a member of the town and district council ? was very concerned to hear about the incident. "Because of the danger from terrorists using "dirty bombs" it is very important that when unauthorised nuclear material is discovered coming through the docks that it is intercepted straight away," he said. "In this case it seems to have been allowed to travel 70 miles through Suffolk and Essex before any action was taken. "We must find out what went wrong in this case. "Fortunately, this time it appears to have been a radioactive bolt which accidentally got mixed up with some scrap metal. But it could have a very dangerous situation where nuclear material was being imported for a dirty bomb that could have put many lives at risk. "I will be asking Suffolk Coastal District Council and Felixstowe Town Council to take this issue up with the Home Office and Felixstowe Dock to avoid a repetition of this very serious incident." Copyright © 2002 Archant Regional. All ***************************************************************** 19 Approval of Shattuck cleanup pact wins cautious support of neighbors Denver Post.com [rmorgan@denverpost.com] Denver Post Staff Writer Tuesday, August 27, 2002 - U.S. District Judge Wiley Daniel on Monday approved a deal between the federal government and the owner of the Shattuck Superfund site in south Denver, opening the door for the removal of 150,000 cubic yards of radioactive waste. Citigroup Inc., which owns the former radium-processing plant in the working-class Overland Park neighborhood, will pay the Environmental Protection Agency $7.2 million to remove radioactive materials from the site. Shattuck Chemical Co., a previous owner of the site, paid $26 million to build a cement cap over the waste, but neighbors still wanted the material removed. Neighbors who attended the hearing in which Daniel approved a consent degree expressed cautious optimism. The agreement is a good step, said activist Deb Sanchez, who has been trying to get the waste removed since 1987. The agreement contains several "re-opener" provisions that will allow neighbors and the government to sue Citigroup for additional cleanup funds if more contamination is discovered outside the site or in the groundwater. Citigroup will also sign the property over to a private trust, which will sell it. The proceeds from the sale will be used to help pay for the cleanup. All contents Copyright 2002 The Denver Post or other copyright holders. All ***************************************************************** 20 N-waste truck hit by pickup; no leaks or injuries Denver Post.com The Associated Press Tuesday, August 27, 2002 - CARLSBAD, N.M. - A truck carrying nuclear waste from Idaho to the federal government's waste dump near Carlsbad was hit by a pickup truck that caught on fire. Officials said no one was seriously injured and there was no leak of radioactivity. "There was absolutely nothing wrong with the transport containers at all," said Kerry Watson, assistant manager for the waste program at the Department of Energy's Carlsbad field office. The truck was bound for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad with two shipping containers from the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, he said Monday. It was about 42 miles from WIPP when the crash occurred at 1:50 a.m. Sunday on U.S. 62-180 on the north side of Carlsbad. State police said the driver of the pickup, 19-year-old Israel Alvidrez of Seminole, Texas, was charged with drunken driving and driving without a license. He was being held at the Eddy County jail on $1,750 bail. The WIPP transport driver, who works for Colorado-based CAST Transportation, was in the right lane when he noticed a vehicle coming up behind the WIPP truck "fairly quickly," Watson said. The driver tried to move to the shoulder to get out of the way, but the pickup struck the transport truck's left rear, he said. The crash bent the corner of the trailer's heavy, square-tubing bumper, cut the outside left rear tire and damaged the fender. The pickup caught on fire in the median of the road, but Watson said the WIPP truck had pulled over about 100 yards away and the flames never came near it. The WIPP drivers - Jerry Hanway and his wife and co-driver, Rita Hanway - were not injured. Alvidrez was transported to Carlsbad Medical Center, where he was treated for minor injuries and released, police said. The Hanways called 911 and WIPP's central monitoring room after the crash and authorities arrived within minutes. All contents Copyright 2002 The Denver Post or other copyright ***************************************************************** 21 Uranium company eyes Jackson site al.com: News The Huntsville Times TVA, county officials say unaware of energy consortium's proposal 08/24/02 By BRIAN LAWSON and DAVID BREWER Times Staff Writers An international energy consortium which has been rebuffed twice in its efforts to build a $1.1 billion uranium processing plant, is seriously considering a site adjacent to TVA's Bellefonte Nuclear Plant in Jackson County, the company announced Friday. Louisiana Energy Services made the announcement Friday, but details are limited and both TVA and Jackson County officials said they were unaware of the proposal. LES is a partnership which includes several large U.S. energy companies and a Great Britain-based firm. It said Bellefonte and a site in Hartsville, Tenn., are the ''finalists'' for the location of its proposed uranium enrichment plant. Both sites are near unfinished TVA nuclear plants. LES had planned to locate the plant in Erwin, Tenn., but faced opposition from environmentalists to a facility that would take weapons-grade uranium and convert it to low-enriched uranium for use in commercial nuclear reactors. LES planned to build a similar plant in Louisiana several years ago. Opponents accused the group of environmental racism for picking a site populated by minorities. And the company ran into trouble with a Louisiana court. The court stripped the company of its environmental licenses after finding it had not followed state law in evaluating the environmental impact of the proposed plant. The company gave up its effort to locate in Louisiana in 1998, after a seven-year struggle. LES Chairman Dr. Pat Upson could not be reached in London on Friday for comment. In its news release, LES reported it had notified the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission of its finalists list and it expects to complete the selection process by Sept. 15. LES said if it met all project milestones, which would include state and federal regulatory approval, the proposed plant could be ready for operation in 2007. The company's news release also contained erroneous information regarding the location of the Bellefonte site. It listed Bellefonte in Montgomery County rather than its actual Jackson County location. A TVA spokesman said the consortium had not talked to TVA about the plant and TVA Consortium has not talked to TVA about plant, spokesman says Uranium Continued from page A1 had no business connection to LES. The LES consortium includes England-based Urenco Ltd., construction giant Fluor-Daniel Corp. and energy companies Duke, Entergy and Exelon, according to the news release. TVA has other contract TVA has a contract with another uranium processor, Maryland-based USEC Inc., to process some 33 metric tons of weapons-grade uranium for use in its reactors. Costs for converting the uranium are estimated at $750 million. Jackson County officials said they do not know anything about the uranium processing proposal. Scottsboro Mayor Ron Bailey said he was aware that TVA has been looking at several options, but not that one. Some of the options TVA has been considering for Bellefonte include partnering with Texaco to convert part of it to a coal gasification plant, and completing it as a nuclear plant. Three years ago, the U.S. Department of Energy looked at using the plant to produce tritium for its stockpile of nuclear warheads. Tritium is used to intensify a nuclear blast. After several public hearings and visits by former Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson, the DOE chose Watts Bar Nuclear Plant near Spring City, Tenn., for the tritium project. Last year, Bailey and Hollywood Mayor Bill McClendon began discussing the possibility of merging their towns and developing an industrial park in Hollywood near Bellefonte. Both men have said the annexation of Hollywood by Scottsboro would help the town to get bigger police and fire departments and other infrastructure that would attract industries to the park. In June, Hollywood City Council refused to call an election on whether the town should become part of Scottsboro. But petitioners for an election can ask Jackson County Probate Judge Floyd Hambrick to certify their petition that has been signed by more than half of the town's 516 voters. By law, the signatures of one-third of the voters, or 172, are needed to hold an election. If certified, Hambrick must order the council to hold an election in 40 to 90 days. Bailey, McClendon and other officials have declined to discuss what types of industries may be interested in the 151-acre site, for which the local Economic Development Authority paid more than $500,000 in TVA in-lieu-of tax money. Commission to buy acres The Jackson County Commission is expected to soon close a deal to buy 37 more acres for the park from Scottsboro lawyer Gary Lackey, a former county attorney and former EDA member, and Jack Holder, a Scottsboro real estate agent. The commission agreed in June to pay Lackey and Holder $210,000. Asked whether annexation of Hollywood and the development of the industrial park were an impetus to getting the uranium-processing project, Bailey said it's ''sheerly coincidental.'' But he said, ''I applaud TVA's efforts in trying to get a return on its massive investment'' in Bellefonte. With Us © 2002 al.com. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 22 Ken Cook: Lifting Yucca awareness Las Vegas SUN: Where I Stand -- Guest columnist Today: August 27, 2002 at 8:37:24 PDT Editor's note: In August the Where I Stand column is written by guest writers. Today's columnist is Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit, Washington-based organization. The Environmental Working Group uses computer-assisted research to turn data into usable information to improve public health and protect the environment. "I THINK they're full of crap," spat the Energy Department's exasperated chief spokesman, Joe Davis, in reference to my organization, "and you can print that in your newspaper." Happily, The Herald of Ogden, Utah, did just that on July 2, boosting the spirits of everyone here at the Environmental Working Group as we hunkered down for the final days of the Senate fight against the DOE's Yucca Mountain nuclear dump boondoggle. I think it's fair to say that Joe veered just a bit outside Bush administration guidance on how to "change the tone" in Washington. But we had seen it coming. He seemed on the verge of losing it a few days before, when he sputtered to a Scripps-Howard reporter in alimentary contradiction that EWG was "full of prunes" for digging up an embarrassing document that his boss, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, had signed in 1998 when he was a U.S. senator. No, I am not referring to the legislation Abraham had once introduced to abolish the Department of Energy, the agency George Bush ironically tossed him as a consolation prize after Michigan voters booted Abraham out of office in 2000. I'm referring to the letter then-Sen. Abraham sent to Bill Clinton's DOE head, Bill Richardson, expressing indignation that Michigan officials had not been adequately informed -- nor sumptuously funded -- in connection with a shipment of nuclear material the feds planned to truck through the state and over a bridge that Abraham understood to be awfully busy. "The ramifications of an accident," wrote the senator, with a principled shiver, "are too serious to consider anything less than the very best emergency response preparedness." Some of you are noting, correctly, that there should be two $$'s in the official government spelling of "preparedness." But the bigger problem with Abraham's letter was the awkward timing of its re-emergence. Cloaked in the full authority of the bureaucracy he had wanted to legislate out of existence, Abraham was in the midst of barnstorming the nation to promote the Yucca Mountain dump. He assured all who would listen that there was absolutely no risk whatsoever in sending 77,000 tons of lethal radioactive waste cross country, through thousands of cities and towns, via thousands of train and truck shipments over 30 years or more, all of it heading for Vegas. Indeed, the official line from the Bush administration was that even the slightest concern about wrecks or terrorist attacks was the work of anti-nuke nuts, environmental panty-waists, Saddam lovers, or one of those scaremongering, sore losers from Nevada, led by the likes of Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. John Ensign and Gov. Kenny Guinn. As a candidate, Bush famously and earnestly lied to Nevadans. He told them that Yucca would go nowhere without his full and presidential review, which in the event took less of his time and sweat than one of those jogs he says helps to clear his head, and we've never had a president with a clearer head. Not that the heat of the Yucca debate caused the Bush administration to forget the state that tipped the election his way. His appointees always remembered to question the integrity of a Yucca skeptic like Jim Hall, the respected former head of the National Transportation Safety Board, on grounds that they had stooped to accept payment for their service from the biased, defensive citizens of Nevada. No wonder the DOE press shop went nuclear when reporters asked about Abraham's own fraidy-cat phase, in which he officially fretted over a one-time shipment of radioactive material weighing just 11 pounds. It could have fit in his lunch box. To be fair, Spencer Abraham hardly had the franchise on hypocrisy, flip-flops or falsehoods when it came to Yucca Mountain. By the time we got in the fight, latecomers arriving June 11, only a month before the Senate vote, the nuclear industry had spent hundreds of millions of dollars over several decades on lobbying, political donations and public relations. Important truths about the Yucca dump were buried in a mountain of disinformation. We entered the fray with a website designed to excavate one of those truths: Transportation would put nuclear waste in the middle of America's biggest cities long before it ended up in the "middle of nowhere" in Nevada. Made possible by support from Brian Greenspun, editor of the Las Vegas Sun, www.mapscience.org enabled Internet users to type in an address and instantly see on a detailed map how close they were to one of DOE's proposed rail or highway routes for Yucca-bound nuclear waste. Davis and his chorus in the nuclear industry wearily informed reporters that our Web maps were a yawn, since everyone already knows how close they live to interstates and rail lines. I have to hand it to them, their spin made its way into hundreds and hundreds of stories about our site. The Internet has an almost magical power to transport users to an infinity of topics across time and space, so of course most of us mainly use it to find new ways home. More than 250,000 people have retrieved nuclear waste route maps from our site thus far, and even today, long after the Senate vote, as many as 500 people a day log on. We're betting visitation will reach into the millions by the time DOE selects its final routes to Yucca Mountain. We expect the broader awareness of Yucca's relevance outside Nevada will translate into an even more spirited debate over the wisdom of pursuing the dump, and of perpetuating a power source whose fuel we utilize for a few years, and are then bound to guard for 10,000. It's hard to see how even the estimable Harry Reid could have done much more to stop Yucca Mountain. Utterly unpersuaded by their colleague John Ensign, all but two other Senate Republicans lockstepped behind their president in favor of the dump. As for the Democrats, too many betrayed both Reid and their principles, and in doing so breathed undeserved new life into the nuclear power industry. All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 23 Letter: Don't assume it's sound science Las Vegas SUN Today: August 27, 2002 at 9:06:19 PDT Want to know why our government leaders are rapidly losing any credibility they may have left? How about this: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's assistant for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs, Dr. Dale Klein, argued in support of more testing at Nevada Test Site by saying that "from a scientific standpoint you need to have experimental data to go along with the modeling and analytical study." I guess that's the kind of "sound science" President Bush used in deciding to approve Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste dump. But wait ... what happened to the "experimental data to go along with the modeling and analytical study" when it comes to the burial casks and transportation containers for the waste to be stored at Yucca? As I understand it, no actual burial casks or transportation containers actually exist yet! The "sound science" here is based solely on computer modeling. And, as someone who has worked with computer modeling for years, the assumptions you put in the model have a dramatic impact on the results. And we all know the old adage: Don't assume, because when you do you make an ass/u/me (that is, you make an ass of you and me). In this case, the collective asses of Nevadans and all our brethren along the transportation routes will be in danger of being put into a radioactive sling. BARRY JACOBS All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 24 Del Papa vows fight in courts against Yucca Las Vegas SUN: Las Vegas SUN Today: August 27, 2002 at 11:18:45 PDT By Cy Ryan < [cy@lasvegassun.com] > SUN CAPITAL BUREAU RENO -- Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa said today the next 18 months are critical in the state's fight to stop the construction of a high-level nuclear dump at Yucca Mountain. Del Papa's comments came at the conclusion of a strategy meeting with the private attorneys hired to push the state's five suits in the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. The suits should come to fruition in the next year and a half, said Del Papa, who added that construction of the repository at Yucca Mountain is "not a done deal." She was to make similar comments at a press conference with the legal team later today in Reno. The press conference was expected to reflect a briefing held in Las Vegas earlier this year at a meeting of the state Commission on Nuclear Projects. Del Papa said she is more confident than ever that the state will be successful in blocking the repository. It takes only one successful lawsuit to derail the Energy Department, she said. "Every one of our cases is strong on legal merits, and we believe absolutely that this is the right thing to do," Del Papa said. "Yucca is not science, nor is it a mountain. It is an open-air container farm on a seismic ridgeline. It is unsafe at any price." The state's past efforts in the courts have gained little success. The state has won only one or two of the more than eight lawsuits it has filed. Nevada's new private legal team is made up of nuclear engineers, nuclear physicists, former nuclear industry regulators and constitutional law experts. The meeting between Del Papa and the private attorneys has refined the legal strategy and explored at new avenues, she said. The state probably will file at least one more lawsuit, but that is not ready yet, she said. The state also plans to fight the Energy Department's efforts to get a permit to build the dump from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "The heart of the dispute over Yucca Mountain is no longer politics, but safety," Joe Egan, the lead lawyer in the state's effort, said. "Well, we intend to hold the NRC fully accountable for meeting the letter and spirit of the law." The state still has a lawsuit pending in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas over water use. No date has been set for hearing that complaint. All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 25 Nuclear Waste Measure Ordered onto Utah Ballot The Salt Lake Tribune -- Tuesday, August 27, 2002 BY JUDY FAHYS Utah's urban voters won a landmark victory over rural voters Monday as the state Supreme Court declared part of the state's citizen-initiative law unconstitutional. Adamant that people reign over government and that government does not rule over people, the state's highest court also ordered the Radioactive Waste Restrictions Act, a citizens initiative, onto upcoming statewide election ballots. The lengthy and strongly worded ruling scrapped the Legislature's strategy for blocking Utah's urban majority from dominating rural Utahns in the process of direct citizen lawmaking. The lawmakers' 1998 rural-support requirements had stopped the proposed waste law from getting on the Nov. 5 ballot, even though the initiative had more voter support than any other in state history. "Because the people's right to directly legislate through initiative and referenda is sacrosanct and a fundamental right," justices said in their 3-2 ruling, "Utah courts must defend it against encroachment and maintain it inviolate." Justice Leonard H. Russon penned the 3-2 decision, and his reasoning was backed by Chief Justice Christine M. Durham and Justice Richard G. Howe, who served 18 years in the Legislature. Court of Appeals Judges James Z. Davis and William A. Thorne, filling in for Supreme Court Justices Matthew B. Durrant and Michael J. Wilkins, filed a lengthy dissent. While initiative-process defenders immediately began considering how to counter the ruling, defenders of the Radioactive Waste Restrictions Act applauded the depth and breadth of the justices' decision. "It is a huge victory in our minds for all Utahns," said Deno G. Himonas. "They have said, 'Just get it on the ballot.' " Himonas said the ruling showed the justices felt strongly about addressing issues at the heart of state and federal governance. The Utah court had asked attorneys on both sides to examine fundamental principles of governance in both the state and U.S. constitutions. Its decision cited U.S. Supreme Court decisions from the civil rights era and from the pivotal 2000 case that made George W. Bush president in interpreting the one-person, one-vote principle. The court majority attacked Utah's so-called 20-county rule, part of a two-pronged test developed by the Legislature for placing a citizen initiative on the ballot. It requires initiative petitions to be signed by 10 percent of the number of registered voters who voted in the past gubernatorial election, and also that the 10 percent threshold be reached in at least 20 of Utah's 29 counties. The Radioactive Waste Restrictions Act, backed by the Utah Education Association, garnered almost 95,974 signatures, nearly 20,000 more than needed to pass the statewide number test. But a minimum number of signatures was gathered in just 14 counties, six short of the geographic distribution hurdle. The court said the rule rendered a Daggett County signature "1,000 times as valuable as the signature" of a Salt Lake County voter. The majority said: "The statutory scheme is discriminatory in that it essentially raises registered voters in rural communities to the level of gatekeepers who can effectively keep initiatives off the ballot despite the existence of significant numeric support for the initiative in urban portions of the state." Asserting the 20-county rule "invidiously discriminates against urban registered voters," the court said lawmakers lacked "a legitimate legislative purpose" to use the rule to thwart initiatives. Waste-law opponent Hugh Matheson said his group, Citizens Against Unfair Taxes, had not ruled out challenging the decision, which he called "liberal and permissive." His group, joined by six state lawmakers, argued in the Supreme Court that the initiative law was proper. "It's unfortunate," said Matheson. "Now the voice of rural Utah has been silenced." He said opponents of the waste law will be out this fall in full force to try to get it defeated. The proposed waste-law would ban waste more radioactive than the mildly contaminated soil already allowed in Utah. It also would raise taxes on the radioactive waste already permitted and channel any tax revenues to school and public aid programs. Legislative General Counsel Gay Taylor noted the ruling did not order her office to prepare the voter-pamphlet information that traditionally accompanies ballot questions. Deadlines have passed already for the usual impartial analysis, pro and con statements, and rebuttals, she noted. Taylor predicted lawmakers would soon revisit the initiative law because the court's decision Monday "appears to be legislating [and] that's troubling." "It's incumbent on us to respond," she said. © Copyright 2002, The Salt Lake Tribune All material found on ***************************************************************** 26 Yucca: Nevada's fight just beginning Las Vegas Business Press By Joseph R. Egan, Special to the Business Press "You can't fight city hall," the adage goes. According to some polls, a significant minority of Nevadans believe the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump is now a done deal. Some argue that Nevada should negotiate with the government for benefits instead of fight in the courts and at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). This reaction, while legally unjustified, is certainly understandable. After 20 years of studying and tinkering, and spending $7 billion doing so, the U.S. Energy Department recommended that Yucca was good to go. After a full 24 hours of review, the president ratified that recommendation. Over the sound objections of Gov. Kenny Guinn and the tireless opposition of the Nevada delegation, Congress cut the final ribbon on the "Screw Nevada" bill, approving the site designation in July with a joint resolution. President Bush signed the resolution into law. And now, a gleeful Nuclear Energy Institute has moved its coffers from Washington and is spending money in Nevada trying to convince citizens that the game is over. But the game is not over. In the field of law, it truly has just begun. Nevada has an excellent chance of stopping or severely crippling the project in any of several federal court battles now pending, or in what promises to be the most complex nuclear licensing proceeding ever held at NRC. Previous legal challenges by Nevada, many of which were lost, have not been on the legal and factual merits of the Yucca Mountain project. They centered mostly on issues like who will pay for the cost of the State's scientific reviews, or what rules will be applied to the government's review. To the extent Nevada challenged the merits of the project, courts ruled the cases were not yet "ripe," that Nevada would have to wait until the President has acted - the point we're at right now - before waging war on the merits. Nevada now has five challenges pending on the merits - two against the Energy Department, one against NRC, one against the Environmental Protection Agency, and one in defense of Nevada's State Engineer, who earlier this year yanked Yucca's water permit. A sixth major front, grounded on the U.S. Constitution, may be docketed by the Attorney General in September. Nevada will also be a party in Yucca's NRC license proceedings, a three-year review starting in late 2004 that will evaluate the safety of the repository and assess its environmental impacts. In Congress, the question before elected officials was, Is Yucca Mountain sensible public policy? Not surprisingly, a majority decided it was better to have nuclear waste in Nevada than piling up in their own back yards. In the upcoming legal battles, two very different questions will be put to judges who will be far more impartial: Is this project grounded in the law? And is it safe? Congress spent almost no time on those questions this summer. Litigation is rarely misplaced where the stench of expediency overwhelms every rationale an opponent advances. My favorite law professor at Columbia, the late Harold Korn (who wrote the leading treatise on civil procedure), used to put it simply: Whenever there's a real injustice, there's always a real remedy. The heart of the dispute over Yucca Mountain is no longer politics, but safety. The laws and regulations governing Yucca were, or should have been, designed for that purpose. Nevada has assembled a world-class team of legal experts to dissect the safety of Yucca Mountain and the laws enacted to ensure safety. Our team includes the former Solicitor of NRC, the former Executive Legal Director of NRC, a nuclear engineer, the former head of the White House Office of Legal Counsel, one of the nation's top constitutional litigators, and two of the nation's leading environmental litigators. Lawyers on our team have clerked for the U.S. Supreme Court, licensed nuclear waste sites, and handled many of the highest-profile nuclear disputes worldwide in the last decade. Our opponents at the Energy Department, stymied by ethical mishaps in hiring Yucca lawyers, have yet to engage a single attorney who has ever appeared in an NRC proceeding. Because of conflicts, they may not find one. For Nevadans, "Battle Borne" remains the better adage. In this difficult war, we do not expect to win every legal battle, nor do we expect to lose them all. Victory in one may well be enough. In the end, Nevada will secure its real remedy: Yucca Mountain will never open as a nuclear waste repository. Joseph R. Egan, an MIT-trained nuclear engineer and attorney, is heading the state's Yucca Mountain legal team for the Nevada Attorney General's Office. He is U.S. Director of the International Nuclear Law Association. Copyright 2002 Las Vegas Business Press ***************************************************************** 27 NUMEC cited by hundreds as cancer source PittsburghLIVE.com - [Valley News Dispatch] Tuesday, August 27, 2002 At least 400 residents and workers died or have illnesses caused by nuclear fuel processing in Apollo and Parks, according to lawsuits and claims to the federal government. If one were to believe that nuclear fuel production and research operations in the Valley caused cancer among residents and workers, then these people were unwitting patriots. From the late 1950s through the 1970s, at least three companies produced or experimented with uranium and plutonium fuels at plants in Apollo and Parks Township. Through the heart of the Cold War, these plants - independent contractors to the federal government - pioneered the fuels that now routinely power naval ships and pacemakers. Scientists there created fuels for atomic-powered rockets that never were produced. In short, they helped win the Cold War. But, according to recently declassified federal documents, the pressure to produce, to create and invent and keep our nation ahead of the Soviet Union now has a hefty price tag that's come due. More than two hundred people sued Atlantic Richfield Co. and Babcock &Wilcox - the subsequent owners of the nuclear facilities started by the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp. (NUMEC) - alleging radioactive releases from those plants caused various cancers. Residents won a landmark suit in 1998, with a federal jury agreeing that their cancers were caused by smoke stacks at NUMEC's former Apollo facility, which spewed radioactive contamination at high levels. The trial, a test case featuring eight of the 200 plaintiffs, took place in federal court in Pittsburgh, and a jury awarded $36.7 million. But U.S. District Judge Donetta Ambrose set aside the verdict and granted a new trial to the two companies, saying there were errors in the first trial in the admission of evidence. Since then, hundreds more plaintiffs have been added and either a new trial or settlement is expected sometime this year. In addition to the lawsuit, former workers stricken with cancer and the families of deceased workers have applied for the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Act, signed into law in October 2000. Former nuclear workers and their families can be entitled to a $150,000 lump sum payment plus medical expenses if workers can prove their illnesses were caused by nuclear contamination as a result of government nuclear research or production. So far, about 91 former employees from the Apollo and Parks plants originally owned by NUMEC have filed claims. Applications haven't been approved yet because the federal government is still working on plans for dose reconstruction for each claim. The Apollo facility opened in 1957 and ceased operations in 1983. Many workers are waiting to find out if they qualify, while others have been turned down. Bill Milks, 66, of Parks cannot get a "clean copy" of his exposure records. The records from BWX Technologies (BWXT has the records although Milks worked for the first owner, NUMEC) are illegible. He doesn't know how his claim will even be processed. "Could this be a snow job?" asked Milks, who was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1964 but today is cancer free. "Where does the money go for employees who are turned down?" The potential hazards of the nuclear fuel processing plants have been debated for years. Indeed, the debate continues as the Army Corps of Engineers took the reins from the NRC to clean up the Parks nuclear burial dump along Route 66, courtesy of legislation from Rep. John Murtha, D-Johnstown. The Parks facility, demolished over the past four years, ceased operations in 1996. The Apollo plant was razed in 1993-1994. That required the protection of a plastic bubble. The site was released for unrestricted use in 1997, making it the first major fuel facility in the nation to achieve "green-field" status, according to BWX Technologies. The NRC is reviewing the final surveys to close out the Parks facility. "All of your (NRC) regulations have been violated at the Parks site," said Carmen Scialabba, a top aide for Murtha during a meeting with company owners and the NRC. "Stuff has been thrown into the trenches. The safety and health of the country has been violated there. You're playing with fire." For many former workers, that warning comes too late. copyright © 2002 by The Tribune-Review Publishing Co. ***************************************************************** 28 Former employees detail alleged safety violations at NUMEC's plants PittsburghLIVE.com - [Valley News Dispatch] By Mary Ann Thomas and Ramesh Santanam VALLEY NEWS DISPATCH Tuesday, August 27, 2002 It was a different time. That's the answer you'll get when you ask former workers from Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp. why they risked exposure to potentially lethal radioactive material for years at the Apollo and Parks plants. "They were crazy days," said former employee Gary Walker, 61, of Vandergrift. "When I first started, no one told you what this could do to your health. It's not like they took you in there and said, 'Hey, this stuff is going to kill you.' They'd have no one working there." NUMEC founder Zalman Shapiro defended his company's health practices with employees in a deposition taken in the late 1990s. He insisted that workers received instructions and that the company produced studies on their health. According to Dr. Niel Wald, professor of environmental and occupational health at Pitt, NUMEC was concerned that the company be prepared for accidents involving workers. The University of Pittsburgh had a facility to bring nuclear workers from the area for treatment. "NUMEC were right on our backs making sure we were doing the best we could," Wald said. Still, workers experienced over-contamination. Health records from the early 1960s reveal some of the employees received doses 33 times the maximum dose limit. Comparing stories Walker meets with his old work buddies from NUMEC at a diner in Parks Township. Amid the clang of coffee cups, they recount stories from their days at the Apollo and Parks plants. They laugh at old stories, laugh at stupid things they and others did. That sense of humor serves as a defense mechanism, Walker said. It would be too depressing to dwell negatively on their experiences. Favorite stories include: + One worker, who licked uranium wafers, boasted his tongue could prove whether the wafers contained 93 percent or 97 percent uranium. + Another employee, who opened 55-gallon drums of trichloroethylene (TCE), a harmful cleaning solvent, and inhaled the fumes to get dizzy. + Yet another worker, with his bare hands, sifted through uranium powder, known as "yellow cake." + Stories of pipes leading to a water fountain by the time clock at the Apollo plant being inadvertently switched and the fountain pumped out a yellow, radioactive substance instead of water. "That is insane," said Earle Hightower, a former Atomic Energy Commission assistant director of safeguards and security, when told about the employee who licked uranium wafers. Hightower said the dangers of uranium were well-documented at the time, and the AEC called for rigorous safety measures. "They just didn't convey it down the line apparently," he said. "They had a lot of safety measures. In places like Los Alamos (N.M.), the safety measures were extreme. In places like NUMEC, it wasn't enforced. They were on the outer fringes of the program." Hightower added, "A lot of time the small contractors would resist putting in any safety measures because they were expensive." Walker spent 26 years at NUMEC and with the plants' subsequent owners, Atlantic Richfield and Babcock &Wilcox. It was the only job Walker held. He joined NUMEC immediately after high school and stayed there. Now, Walker said he realizes he put his life in jeopardy. While at NUMEC in the 1960s, Walker once was splashed in the face with hydrofluoric acid and uranium. He also was exposed to radioactive materials, and the levels in his body were so high he was removed from the plant and got a job transporting the materials instead. He never could go back into the plant to work because of the high level of radioactive material he was exposed to. "The last time I was overexposed was the reason I started to drive a truck," he said. "I wasn't allowed back into the plant." Walker took a job at NUMEC'S Tru-Flat building and hauled nuclear materials. Walker now attributes his renal disease, - he is awaiting his second kidney transplant - to the years spent at NUMEC. "My transplant doctor told me usually, when you lose your kidneys like I did, you have sugar diabetes, high blood pressure. I had no sugar diabetes, no high blood pressure," Walker said. "There are 15 in my family, and no one had kidney disease. He thinks (my kidneys) were overexposed." Bob France began working at NUMEC in 1968. He handled radioactive clothing in the laundry with his bare hands, loaded nuclear fuel rods with his bare hands and was exposed to high levels of radiation. In one accident, France was automatically closed into a room with a plutonium leak. France is convinced his countless health problems were caused by NUMEC. "My esophagus is gone. (The) trap in my stomach is gone," he said. "My prostate is swelled up, and they can't figure out why. They took nine biopsies of my prostate. My spleen was all swelled up." Trusting the company Walker, France and other former NUMEC and/or B workers - Bill Milks, Harold Quepec and Al Serwinski - acknowledge they were ignorant of the hazards posed by nuclear technology when they started working for the company. In the 1950s, Serwinski served on a U.S. battleship that carried nuclear warheads but he, too, knew little about what handling nuclear material meant. "I may have been more aware of the radioactivity because of the battleship I was on, but I was never educated to the fact of what that stuff would do," said Serwinski, 65, of Kiski. But Serwinski got wiser the longer he worked at NUMEC and, when he became a supervisor, he began checking his clothing and car for radioactive material. "After I went on salary, I had access to the counters," he said. "I don't know how many sets of (car) floor mats I put in my car. Every few weeks, I would take my floor mat out, check it, throw it away and go get a new one." Quepec, too, had no idea what "that stuff" could do and admitted he was certainly naive about the material he was handling and its effects. When he was young and working at NUMEC, Quepec said he heard that when people had cancer, they were treated with radiation. So he believed if he was exposed to a lot of radiation at NUMEC, he could likely avoid getting cancer. "I didn't think anything of radiation," Quepec said. "I thought the radiation would just clean out everything. That's what I thought." Walker remembers another occasion he was exposed. "My hands were high one time," he said. "I was on the morning shift and it took them eight hours to get my hands clean. They scrubbed my hands for six or seven hours to get my count down." These men inherently trusted the company. "There was a camaraderie with all those guys and you felt whatever they said was OK," Milks said. "They said, 'Go in and do the the job.' That was it. Six or seven guys worked in there with no respirators and street shoes." There was one main reason why all these men went looking for employment at NUMEC, often starting for as little as $1.50 per hour in the early 1960s. They needed the money. In the 1950s, the Alle-Kiski Valley was a depressed area. Unemployment was high and these men needed jobs. And when NUMEC opened in Apollo in 1957, it was a godsend. "There was no other work," Walker said. "I had a wife and three children," Serwinski said. "A steady loaf of bread was better than none." Quepec, too, went to NUMEC because he had to. "It was hard to find a job at that time," he said. "I was getting laid off all the time. It wasn't much money, but it was steady." When Quepec started in 1961, his salary was $1.50 per hour, when he quit 10 years later, he was earning $3.38 an hour. France has no illusions as to why he was hired to handle radioactive material. He is illiterate and readily admits he was hired because he would not question what was asked of him. "I wasn't supposed to know what was going on," he said. "They just said, 'Do this, do that and that.'" When he worked in the laundry, he made $3.95 an hour. "I thought it was a lot of money," France said. The accidents A day at work for France in 1973, loading plutonium rods for nuclear submarines and reactors, ended with him lying on a granite slab. "I was in this little room. I'd open the vault, take these rods out, take them out of their container, put them on a little tray that had these V-shaped holders and then lay my hand on the monitor and push (the rods) in," France said. He wore silk gloves so the rods wouldn't be contaminated, he said. Just white gloves made of silk. "I got into the fifth batch of rods and I got one and put it in there and just touched it and it went "Wrrrrrnnnnnnnn. It went off the scale." The alarm went off and the door locked," he continued. "How am I supposed to get out the door? So I stuck (the rod) back in the holder. I thought while I am here I better get the rest of them. Three more. Then it made me mad 'cause I couldn't get out." Milks remembers the incident. "They had masks, rubber suits to rescue him," Milks said. "He was in there with nothing on." France's ordeal had just begun. He was taken from the plant and given a body count of radioactivity at a hospital in Pittsburgh. "A big marble table makes you feel like you're lying on a sarcophagus made out of granite. That gives you a good feeling," France said. "They give you a hot shower, get you all warmed up and then lay you on that cold piece of granite. They put a cloth under you so you don't get too cold." "You're laying there shaking and they're saying 'Hold still, you're going to be here for three hours,'" he said. "This thing goes over you. It starts at your feet as it comes up your body and it takes three hours. It sees inside you. I asked the girl and she said, 'You're hot. You're probably not going to be working at the plutonium site no more.'" France was transferred to another building at NUMEC's Parks site. And, then, very matter-of-factly, he remembers another incident: "It wasn't 'til later that I got hot uranium waste sprayed over me, mid-chest and up. I wasn't allowed in the hot area because (my exposure) was so high from high-enriched uranium." text copyright © 2002 by The Tribune-Review Publishing Co. ***************************************************************** 29 Government investigations proved fruitless PittsburghLIVE.com - [Valley News Dispatch] By Mary Ann Thomas and Ramesh Santanam VALLEY NEWS DISPATCH Tuesday, August 27, 2002 This is the last of three parts about the mysterious history of the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation and allegations that weapons-grade uranium was stolen from the company. Seymour Hersh, in his book, "The Samson Option," claims former CIA Deputy Director Carl Duckett recanted his allegations against NUMEC and its founder, Zalman Shapiro, in 1991. Hersh quoted Duckett as saying he knew "nothing at all to indicate that Shapiro was guilty" of diverting uranium to Israel. But Duckett, according to various reports, always maintained there was circumstantial evidence. Recounting a meeting with Duckett on Jan. 25, 1978, Henry Myers, former aide to U.S. Sen. Morris Udall, wrote: "Duckett believes that the totality of circumstantial evidence supports the conclusion that there is a significant likelihood that Apollo uranium went to Israel." Duckett based his conclusions, Myers wrote, on there being "no benign explanation" about the missing uranium, Shapiro's contacts with Israel and "reasonably solid evidence that the Israelis had nuclear weapons or expected to obtain them" in the mid-1960s. Although Shapiro, 82, of Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood declined to discuss the investigations into NUMEC with the Valley News Dispatch, he has long denied any wrongdoing. "I am not aware of any factual basis for the repeated allegations that 'material unaccounted for' at NUMEC was caused by an illegal diversion," he told congressional investigators. Shapiro told Congressional investigators in the 1970s that there were two likely reasons he was suspected of smuggling weapons-grade uranium to Israel. "One, that it was a means of those who wished to demonstrate that nuclear power should be abandoned because of the possibility of diversion; and the other, I believe, was because it suited some people, also, to use this as a means of embarrassing Israel." The FBI, however, seemed convinced NUMEC funneled uranium to the Israelis and demanded that the Atomic Energy Commission, the agency then in charge of America's nuclear materials and research, withdraw Shapiro's security clearance. In a 1969 memo to the AEC, then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote the FBI's "thorough and extended investigation of Shapiro for more than a year developed information clearly pointing to Shapiro's pro-Israel sympathies and close contacts with Israeli officials, including several Israeli intelligence officers." At the time, Shapiro held "Q" and "Secret" security clearances - among the highest available - with the AEC and U.S. Air Force respectively, and NUMEC had AEC contracts for nuclear fuel production. Hoover believed Shapiro posed a security risk because of his access to sensitive AEC material and information. "The only effective way to counter this risk would be to preclude Shapiro from access to classified and sensitive data, specifically by terminating his classified contracts and lifting his security clearances," Hoover wrote. But the AEC refused to acquiesce to Hoover's demands. AEC Security Director William T. Riley wrote to Hoover on Oct. 2, 1969, saying the FBI's investigation "did not produce enough evidence which would provide AEC a sufficient basis either to revoke Dr. Shapiro's security clearances ... or to bar him from further classified contract activity." Also, AEC Chairman Glenn T. Seaborg did not believe the FBI gave enough reason to warrant the revocation of Shapiro's security clearance. "Harboring pro-Israeli sympathies and meeting with Israelis were still legal activities, as far as I could ascertain," Seaborg wrote in his memoir, "Adventures in the Atomic Age: From Watts to Washington." Clearance questions But the issue of Shapiro's security clearance didn't disappear after he left NUMEC. In 1970, after NUMEC had been acquired by Atlantic Richfield, Shapiro - who, according to a justice department memo, was forced to resign - requested a higher security clearance from the AEC for a job at Kawecki Berylco Industries near Reading. This time, it wasn't Hoover who was the obstacle but Attorney General John Mitchell, who later was convicted in the Watergate scandal that brought down the Nixon administration. The Nixon administration was very interested in the NUMEC affair. A February 1969 memo from Hoover states he was told by Mitchell that Nixon was "quite interested in ... the Shapiro case." Other documents reveal the FBI sent information on the Shapiro case to the Nixon White House. In particular, the information was sent to someone in the office of Nixon's assistant, Peter Flanigan. The person's name is blacked out in every document. Numerous attempts by the Valley News Dispatch to contact Flanigan in New York were unsuccessful. Also, one FBI memo states Shapiro "is known to be critical of Internal Revenue Service, 'other government agencies' and President Richard M. Nixon." Because Shapiro's loyalty was being questioned, the normal procedure for him to get higher security clearance was for the AEC to hold hearings where he could hear the charges and defend himself, Seaborg wrote. That was not about to happen. Instead, the Nixon administration wanted Shapiro's request to be denied immediately. The AEC was in a quandary - hearings couldn't be held because it was not allowed to see the FBI files detailing the allegations against Shapiro, and clearance could not be issued or denied without a hearing. "We had no power to obtain the files," Seaborg wrote. "We could not even reveal to Shapiro the whole story of the reason for the delay. "Mitchell simply told us to deny the security clearance without a hearing. Never in history had any government agency done that, and we AEC commissioners were not about to be the first." Seaborg sought a solution, but Mitchell was unwavering. Seaborg turned to Secretary of State William Rogers, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and a presidential science adviser, all of whom agreed with him. But trying to sway Mitchell was futile. "Mitchell was unmoved and it would be fruitless to butt heads with him since he was one of Nixon's closest associates," Seaborg wrote. "Mitchell was satisfied simply to let Shapiro fight it out with the government in the courts. ... When it came to Mitchell, the watchword 'tough' was better spelled 'unpleasant.'" Seaborg said he explained to Mitchell the AEC was certain there had been no diversion of nuclear material to Israel. "(Mitchell) never addressed the substance of my arguments, but simply repeated his own position," Seaborg wrote. "The attorney general of the United States, the country's top law enforcement official, was not only telling but forcing us to abandon due process and established procedure." The AEC realized a court battle with Shapiro would be embarrassing and politically disastrous. Thanks to contacts in the industry, however, Seaborg and the AEC found a solution. "We convinced Westinghouse to make an attractive job offer to Shapiro that did not require any upgrade in his clearance," he wrote. "Westinghouse was glad to hire someone of Shapiro's accomplishments. We indirectly passed the word to him about the difficulties with his clearance request and he accepted the job and withdrew his clearance application." Eight years later, in a statement to Udall's congressional committee investigating the missing NUMEC uranium, Shapiro said he didn't know why his security clearance was delayed. The AEC security officer told him, Shapiro said, "that administrative matters would hold things up for a short time." But the issue of higher security clearance became moot, Shapiro told investigators, when "in the spring of 1971, I was offered and accepted an attractive job at Westinghouse at a substantial increase in salary." No access The AEC was not the only one stymied by the FBI. When it came time for a congressional inquiry into the NUMEC affair in the late 1970s, Udall and his aides realized their investigative powers had limitations and finding out the truth would be an arduous, likely impossible, task. "We didn't have the facilities in dealing with classified documents very well," Udall's former aide, Henry Myers, told the Valley News Dispatch. "We didn't have any jurisdiction over the CIA and Justice Department." Michael McNulty, former chief counsel to Udall and now an attorney in Tucson, recalled, "(Udall's) staff was pretty convinced that fissionable material had been spirited out of the country. But to get to the bottom of it required a law enforcement agency rather than the congressional committee." Getting information from the FBI and CIA wasn't easy. Internal memos within Udall's office reflect the frustration felt by aides trying to obtain information. "The further we get into the NUMEC matter, the more we see that either the FBI has not leveled with us or that their investigations have been inexplicably truncated," Myers wrote to Udall in May 1978. A few months earlier, Myers told his boss, "We have not been getting a straight story from either the FBI or the CIA." When Udall's staff requested NUMEC-related documents, including FBI-generated reports, from the justice department, they were told the previous briefings they got were adequate. "You will understand the difficulty involved in disseminating information concerning a pending and active investigation," Patricia Wald, assistant attorney general, wrote to Udall in June 1978. Commenting on this letter, Myers expressed his frustration in a July 1978 memo to Udall. "The last paragraph in (Wald's) letter sounds like we had asked for the White House tapes," he wrote, referring to the difficulty Watergate investigators had getting Nixon to turn over the infamous recordings of conversations in the Oval Office. "The fact is that the FBI has not been forthcoming in their discussions with us; they have not interviewed a relevant AEC person with whom we have discussed the matter; and our overall impression is that the FBI, for whatever reason, is not making a serious effort to get to the bottom of the matter," Myers stated in his memo. And when Myers requested additional information from the CIA, he was told CIA Director Adm. Stansfield Turner would have to make that decision. Turner was concerned about making the information public. In a Feb. 21, 1978, letter to NRC Chairman Joseph Hendrie, Turner wrote, "CIA's findings or conclusions relating to the alleged diversion of nuclear material from the NUMEC facility should be classified SECRET. To do otherwise in an open hearing would be a public official acknowledgement of CIA's intelligence role as it relates to Israel, which could have serious repercussions." It was obvious to McNulty how little Congress could do. "I was disappointed the powers of Congress were pretty limited," he said. "Committee staff were generally not very well trained in detective work and, after a while, it became clear we were wasting our time and we didn't have the tools to make people talk, issue search warrants or track people down. We needed someone in law enforcement to figure that out. We certainly never proved anything." But that doesn't stop Myers from believing something illegal happened. "Someone had to know that some stuff left NUMEC in a container and went to Israel and we never knew that," Myers said. "When people tell you there's nothing to this, there's that thing Duckett said, "about President Johnson putting a lid on the whole matter when senior officials brought the diversion theory to his attention. But Myers acknowledged it's possible Shapiro was treated unfairly. "A lot of people thought we were just being unfair to Shapiro," he said. "Shapiro thought this was an unjust thing and he was being unfairly treated, which, if he is right, he was." Shapiro recently refused to talk about the furor caused by the unaccounted-for uranium, but expressed his opinion years ago to congressional investigators. "Vague, secret allegations by nameless, faceless accusers," he said, placed an "enormous burden ... upon my family and me by years of repeated investigations and reinvestigations of both NUMEC and myself. My scientific career has been severely damaged; I have been foreclosed from the opportunity to do useful work in various areas in which I am highly qualified, and my family and I have experienced great anguish over these unwarranted and scurrilous charges. I would welcome the opportunity to confront my unidentified accusers and to refute their charges, but to my great regret, that opportunity has never been afforded to me." The "material unaccounted for," Shapiro claimed, "can be and has been explained by normal processing loss mechanisms." But almost 25 years after delving into the NUMEC affair, Myers remains skeptical about that possibility. This, he said, will likely remain a great, unsolved mystery. "Someone from the CIA told me that there are just some things you can never know. He said this could be one of those." copyright © 2002 by The Tribune-Review Publishing Co. ***************************************************************** 30 Searching for truth about cancer cause PittsburghLIVE.com - [Valley News Dispatch] Suspects radiation leaks (WILLIAM LARKIN, staff photographer) By Mary Ann Thomas and Ramesh Santanam VALLEY NEWS DISPATCH Tuesday, August 27, 2002 Eliza Johnson knows what it's like to live with cancer in the family. Her husband, Coley - better known as "Frutie" - had cancer of the stomach, pancreas and liver. He was diagnosed in March 1993. Six months later, the 72-year-old Parks Township man was dead. Frutie Johnson - he got the nickname at an early age from an aunt who said he looked like a bowl of fruit - was a coal miner for 42 years. He was diagnosed with black lung in 1979 and had his gallbladder removed nine years later, his wife said. "He always had this pain in his stomach," she said during an interview in January. "He always complained about that." In 1993, Frutie Johnson had difficulty swallowing and was sent to Pittsburgh to have his stomach examined. "That's when he found out he had cancer," Eliza, now 79, said during a June 1999 deposition for a lawsuit against the companies responsible for nuclear fuels facilities in Apollo and Parks. "He had his operation in April and he died in September." Frutie Johnson suspected his cancer was a result of emissions and radioactive leaks from the Parks plant, but he never had proof, Eliza said during her deposition. Frutie Johnson spent much of his life in Parks, about two miles from the plutonium-processing plant. "He grew up there," his wife said. In 1945, Frutie Johnson moved to a house at Eisenhower and Main streets, just blocks from the NUMEC plant. In 1974, he moved to another Main Street house even closer to the plant, she said. He also was an avid hunter, she said, and often hunted on land where nuclear and chemical wastes are buried in unlined trenches. "He didn't know all this was there. It wasn't fenced off," Eliza Johnson said. "He used to hunt at night. He had a couple of trained dogs he used to hunt with. They used to hunt all over the place back there, sometimes by himself, sometimes with friends. He used to hunt years before when he was younger and continued hunting all those years in that area." Eliza watched cancer consume her husband, an active, vibrant man she married in 1977. She laughs when she remembers meeting him in 1975, realizing it wasn't exactly in the most romantic of places - the funeral of a mutual friend. "(He) was an all-around person," she said. "He was a mechanic, electrician, carpenter, coal miner. He could do everything. No outside help came into the house, because he was able to do all these things." But all of that changed. After he was diagnosed, Frutie Johnson underwent chemotherapy three times per week. "He'd get straightened up and it was time to go back," Eliza Johnson said. In August 1993, they found out the cancer had metastasized; in other words, it spread. "I brought him home," she said. "I didn't like the hospice person. I didn't like the name - hospice. It meant no hope. I wasn't giving up." But the cancer was debilitating. "He wasn't able to do much of anything," Eliza Johnson said. "If he went anywhere, I'd have to do all the driving." In her deposition, she said, "He wasn't able to feed himself, and he couldn't turn over. I had to turn him over." And his inability to function normally affected Frutie Johnson deeply, she said. "He was an independent person, and when I had to feed him, he would say, 'Has it come to this?' " she said. Frutie Johnson lived only a few short months after being diagnosed. "During the end," his wife said, "he was in a lot of pain." "One morning, I woke up early," she recalled about his final days. "He was breathing, and then he had stopped. I was giving him a bath. So, I called the ambulance. They were supposed to take him to Allegheny General (Hospital), but they said they couldn't make, didn't think he'd make it. They stopped at (Allegheny) Valley. He was there five days, and he died." Eliza Johnson pauses, her voice failing. She said she knew her husband was dying when she saw him in the bath. "But I was not going to sit there without taking him somewhere," she said, trying hard to hold back tears. "He was just a kind, sincere, loving person." During her deposition, Eliza Johnson was asked how her life had changed because of her husband's death. "Well, companionship," she replied. These days, she also has to take care of things herself. When her oven acts up or a belt snaps on her car, she longs for her companion and handyman. "If something broke, he was there," she said. "I'd just ask him to go and do it." Now, she told lawyers in 1999, she has to do chores she never had to do while her husband was alive. "I never had to cut the grass or anything," she said. "I can have the grass cut, but, so far, I think that keeps me going. It gives me something to do." copyright © 2002 by The Tribune-Review Publishing Co. 11 12 13 14 ***************************************************************** 31 'Trouble, this is going to be trouble' PittsburghLIVE.com - [Valley News Dispatch] Breast cancer survivor (WILLIAM LARKIN, staff photographer) By Mary Ann Thomas and Ramesh Santanam VALLEY NEWS DISPATCH Tuesday, August 27, 2002 Nancy Erwin believes keeping a positive attitude is crucial. She should know. Erwin, 53, of Allegheny Township was diagnosed with breast cancer on June 18, 1985, a day she remembers vividly. "It's like a death sentence," she said. Her first reaction was to think of her sister-in-law, who had been diagnosed 10 years earlier with similar cancer. Two years later, Erwin's sister-in-law died. "When I was first diagnosed, they said they couldn't even operate," Erwin said. "They said, 'We have to see if it went to your bones or liver.' And I'm thinking, 'Oh my God, I came in this morning and now they're telling me I'm going to be dead.'" But after a bone scan, she was told surgery was possible. "And I said to the doctor, 'Ah, thank you. I am going to live.'" Erwin, a former surgical technician at the now-Armstrong County Memorial Hospital, knew exactly what a mastectomy entailed. She'd seen them performed when she helped surgeons in the operating room. Two days after being diagnosed, Erwin's left breast was removed. It was an easy decision. "There was no thought about saving a breast," she said. "The breast isn't everything. What is one breast compared to a lifetime? Because here I am 16½ years later. I count six months, even, because it's a reward." There's no doubt in Erwin's mind how she got cancer. "Think of the area where we live. I've never moved out of the area." She's lived all her life close to the former plutonium plant in Parks, previously owned by Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp. (NUMEC) and Atlantic Richfield before B took control of it. "I lived half a mile from there," Erwin said. "We drive past it every day. Everybody ate at Veado's Restaurant," a stone's throw from the Parks plant. When she was younger, Erwin played at her grandparents' farm across the river from the plant. "We played as little kids down around the tracks, down around the river," she said. And, she said, her grandfather suspected the plant would be trouble for the community when he saw it being built. "My grandfather watched that plant being built and he did say, 'Trouble, this is going to be trouble,' " Erwin said. "This man had amputated legs, he couldn't go anywhere. All he could do was watch that plant being built." Given her medical experience, Erwin was convinced she could deal with her mastectomy. "The very, very first day, I thought, 'It's me. I'm the victim. I can handle this because of the past experience working in the operating room,'" she said. "I got into the shower and looked down on myself and nearly fainted. My husband had to help me get out of the shower because I nearly had a breakdown from seeing someone else's body attached to my soul. I could not believe this was really me." Two of her sisters-in-law were diagnosed with breast cancer. The Erwins' first child was stillborn without legs in the late 1960s. And two-and-a-half years after Nancy Erwin was diagnosed with breast cancer, their youngest daughter, Jacquelyn, then 15, suffered a brain hemorrhage as a result of an arterio-venous malformation. AVM is an abnormal collection of blood vessels. Malformations are areas that lack capillaries, which help lessen the pressure of blood from the arteries to the veins. The lack of capillaries results in "arteries dumping (blood) right into veins and the veins cannot handle that pressure," said Michael Horowitz, neurological surgeon at UPMC Presbyterian in Pittsburgh. AVM has a 2 percent to 4 percent risk of hemorrhage, and a 4 percent rupture rate per year, he said. Although some people can live with no complications from AVM, a hemorrhage can be lethal, he said. That's almost what happened to Jacquelyn. "It nearly killed her," Nancy Erwin said. "They actually said she had two minutes to live. It still gives me the chills." She credits her husband, Jack, with whom she shares a birthday, with getting her through the tough times. "He is my right hand," she said. "He has been with me from the very first minute I was diagnosed. Every blood test, every bone scan, every liver scan, every lung X-ray, every mammogram. He would call for the results. I couldn't even call for the results." For Jack Erwin, it was no less traumatic an experience. "I was like in shock for the first year," he said. He'll never forget the day his wife was diagnosed. "I remember the doctor calling me and telling me he wanted me to come down to the operating room to see him. I knew instantly it was cancer," he said. "The entire way down the hallway might have been 20 yards and it was like someone was pushing at my chest, like I don't want to get down there. When (the doctor) said, 'Yes, we found cancer,' I was leaning against a wall. And if it weren't rough plaster, I would have fallen. My fingers were embedded in it." Two years after being diagnosed, Nancy Erwin looked at herself in the mirror, she said, and thought, "Hey, I'm still here and I'm gonna beat this." A few years after her mastectomy, a benign lump was removed from her remaining breast. After five years, the Erwins felt relieved - there hadn't been a recurrence in the time frame set initially by the doctor. Now, 16½ years later, Nancy Erwin remains confident she beat cancer. Being cancer-free, though, doesn't mean a day goes by when she's not living with the aftermath. "She has a pill cocktail," her husband, Jack, said, referring to the several pills she takes every day. And living with the disease has its side effects. The anxiety caused Nancy Erwin to be stricken with irritable bowel syndrome, a common disorder of the intestines that can be disabling and that made her use the toilet up to 50 times per day. "Even with proper medication, I can't tell when it will reoccur," she said. Then there was the year her thyroid became overactive because she was taking Tomoxifin, a hormone-reducing drug used by breast cancer survivors. "I literally lost my mind," Nancy Erwin said. "I cannot remember that year." "She doesn't remember her grandson being born," her husband added. Also, she's allergic to the dye used for bone scans. So other methods are used. "There are little things other people can do that she can't do," Jack Erwin said. "She can't go for long walks. She has to wear special orthotics," which sometimes throws her off-balance. And there's the pain of dealing with being a woman. She requires special surgical bras that cost $37.50 each, in addition to the prosthesis. "My bras are specially made," she said. "No Victoria's Secret or specialty shops for fancy bras. I was 37 years old when this happened to me. I can't even go swimming, because the breast-removal is so apparent." Her self-image, she said, has forever been altered. And that's something she lives with every day. "It doesn't get any easier," Nancy Erwin said. "It's always with you. You might not think of it 24 hours a day; you think of it 18 hours a day. And especially when you go to take a shower." copyright © 2002 by The Tribune-Review Publishing Co. ***************************************************************** 32 Woman warns of living near plant PittsburghLIVE.com - [Valley News Dispatch] Recommends staying away (JEFF SWENSEN, staff photographer) By Mary Ann Thomas and Ramesh Santanam VALLEY NEWS DISPATCH Tuesday, August 27, 2002 Donna Soulier warns she might cry during an interview. And then, almost immediately, she does. But listening to her story - her life since being diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer in the summer of 1990 - you understand why her voice strains, cracks and trembles as she recalls the past 12 years. Yet, despite all she's endured - several cycles of chemotherapy, mastectomy, recurrence of cancer, removal of a lymph gland, bone marrow transplant, remission, another recurrence of cancer on her liver and more chemotherapy - the 51-year-old teacher from Washington Township remains optimistic. "I just keep thinking I'm going to beat it," Soulier said, dabbing at tears streaming down her face. She asks you to ignore her tears. "I keep praying I'm going to have a miracle," she said. "I'm willing to do anything. I would go anywhere and do anything I could because I don't want to die and I'm not ready to die." Soulier was raised in the Valley. From 1950 to 1980, she lived in Vandergrift and then moved to Apollo, where she lived for 12 years about one block from the plant that processed uranium. Soulier believes emissions from that plant caused her cancer. Her advice to house-hunters: Don't live in Apollo, Parks or the surrounding areas. "Knowing what I know, it would be nowhere near (the Kiskiminetas River), it would be nowhere in Apollo, it would be nowhere along the river going toward Leechburg," Soulier said. "It makes me sad because I've grown up in this area," she added. "I've always lived in this area. It makes me sad because there are so many unknowns. Why are there so many people who have cancer in the area? Why are there so many people I personally know? My mother died of cancer, my grandma, my grandpap, my uncle." Twelve years after being diagnosed, Soulier battles the disease. The initial diagnosis, she said, was "devastating, totally overwhelming. Everything happened so fast. It was like a whirlwind. You had no time to think." As recently as mid-January, Soulier was undergoing chemotherapy after the cancer had spread into her liver. Soulier also had chemotherapy from September 2000 to February 2001 and felt confident. "I finished chemo and my tests were OK," she said. "It hadn't gone away, but they felt I had responded well to the chemo." But last August, tests showed "there was more (cancer) in the liver," she said. Again, Soulier underwent chemotherapy and then was referred to a surgeon at the Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. Recalling this is emotionally draining for her. She wipes away tears amid sobs and continues. "What he was going to do was cut out the spots or burn them," she said, her voice trembling. "But when I went to have it done, he couldn't do it because there were too many spots. The only way they could tell was, I was cut open and they did the actual ultrasound - where they ran the instrument - right on my liver and that showed them more than an MRI or anything." So back Soulier went for more chemotherapy from October until early January, when she had another MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging. "(The doctor) said some spots are smaller, but some spots are bigger," Soulier said. "So I start chemo again." This would be the third time she has undergone chemotherapy in the past 18 months. Soulier's support system once consisted of three other friends. She is the only survivor. The other three died of breast cancer. Soulier has other very good friends, she said. And her 87-year-old father often accompanies her to medical appointments. But she doubts her family dealt with her illness. "They look at me and see that I look OK," she said. "They see I basically do all the things that I have always done, and so to them, it's like I'm OK." A nephew often calls to find out how she's doing, Soulier said. For her 50th birthday, she was thrown a surprise party at the Grand Concourse at Station Square in Pittsburgh. "There were 12 good friends and my dad," she said. "Not many people are that lucky that somebody would do that for them. I've just been blessed. I truly have been." Soulier also find solace in her religion. She takes her rosary with her wherever she goes - she jokes her friends might think she's crazy - and keeps about five rosaries in her bed, she said. "I just could not make it if I didn't have my faith." Of course, she sometimes questions why she was stricken with cancer. "You know when I feel angry at God? When I have a recurrence and I get that test and they say to me, 'You've got to do this again,' " Soulier said. "I've lost my hair four times. The first time is absolutely devastating. "I get angry at God when I think that I've really tried to do everything I should do," she said. "I always follow up with doctor appointments. I go for all my tests. I try to eat right. I try to exercise, but it never ends." Soulier is determined to win her battle. "I just think I'm going to beat this," she said. Having cancer changed her priorities. She plans on retiring this year from her job as a reading specialist for first- through sixth-graders in the Kiski Area School District. "I think everybody deals with things differently," she said. "My way of dealing with it is to put it completely out of my mind and enjoy life to the fullest and live each day." The day she was diagnosed, she bought herself a Mercedes. "And I've had one ever since," she said, finally cracking a smile. Then, she proudly adds that she recently bought a new Mercedes. She's also a Steelers fan and goes to all of the home games. When the Steelers were pounding on the Baltimore Ravens during last season's playoffs, Soulier was at Heinz Field cheering. "I live my life to the fullest," she said. "I do whatever I want to do." copyright © 2002 by The Tribune-Review Publishing Co. ***************************************************************** 33 Local case has ties to Silkwood PittsburghLIVE.com - [Valley News Dispatch] By Mary Ann Thomas and Ramesh Santanam VALLEY NEWS DISPATCH Tuesday, August 27, 2002 The lawsuit over radioactive contamination in Apollo has ties to a previous, more famous radiation case - that of Karen Silkwood. Residents of the Apollo area who sued, claiming their cancers were caused by radiation from the former NUMEC plant in Apollo, used Silkwood's lawyer - Fred Baron - for their case. In fact, it was through Silkwood's father that Apollo residents got in contact with Baron. Environmental activist Patty Ameno, now of Leechburg, called Bill Silkwood in the early 1990s seeking advice on how best to deal with the purported high number of cancer cases in the borough and the operations of NUMEC. Bill Silkwood referred Ameno to Steve Woodka, a former official from the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union and a lawyer. Woodka was Karen Silkwood's union representative at the time she complained of lax safety controls at the Kerr-McGee plutonium fuels plant in Crescent, Okla. Ameno convinced Woodka to visit Apollo. "Here was a facility handling highly radioactive material right in the middle of the town with people living all around it," Woodka said. "Even the topography was terrible. It was in the bottom of a river valley with the potential for air to get trapped there." The case was too big with too many plaintiffs and too much documentation for Woodka's plate, so he called Baron. But the connections between NUMEC and Silkwood don't stop there. One of Silkwood's complaints about worker safety at the Kerr-McGee plant concerned a contract rivalry between Kerr-McGee and NUMEC to produce plutonium fuel rods for the government, according to Woodka. "My understanding was that there was competition between Kerr-McGee and NUMEC on this contract," Woodka said. And NUMEC was out-producing Kerr-McGee in the contract, he said. "That is what led to the falsification of the quality-control program at Kerr-McGee. "That's what (Silkwood) uncovered. That's what she was going to talk about when she was going to meet me and a reporter from the New York Times." The reporter and Woodka were waiting to meet with Silkwood. She died in a car crash on her way to the meeting. copyright © 2002 by The Tribune-Review Publishing Co. ***************************************************************** 34 Lawsuit against ARCO, BWXT rolls on PittsburghLIVE.com - [Valley News Dispatch] By Mary Ann Thomas and Ramesh Santanam VALLEY NEWS DISPATCH Tuesday, August 27, 2002 A federal court awarded $36.7 million in 1988 to eight Apollo-area residents who sued Atlantic Richfield Co. and Babcock &Wilcox alleging radioactive releases from their plants caused various cancers. Residents claim that the radioactive pollution came from the uranium fuel processing plant in Apollo, originally owned by Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp. (NUMEC), and operated from 1957 to 1986 by NUMEC and its successors, Atlantic Richfield and Babcock &Wilcox. But U.S. District Judge Donetta Ambrose set aside the verdict and granted a new trial to the two companies, saying there were errors in the first trial in the admission of evidence. The trial served as a landmark victory for local residents and the law firm representing the plaintiffs, Baron &Budd of Dallas, Texas. Fred Baron, ranked as one of the country's top plaintiff lawyers in Forbes magazine in May 2001, was contacted by Leechburg resident and environmental activist Patty Ameno. Ameno found Baron's firm by way of a phone conversation with Bill Silkwood, the father of the late Karen Silkwood, a union activist at the Kerr-McGee plant in Oklahoma who died in a mysterious car crash in 1974. Baron took the case on a contingency basis in 1994. "Patty Ameno was very instrumental in assuring that this case would be handled by a law firm that had the capability of litigating a massive complex case," Baron said. "She was an impetus to the hiring of our firm and provided a great deal of guidance and information. This had been a long difficult case. "I feel like a dog that grabbed onto to someone's pants leg," he said. "We're not going to let go until we find justice for our clients." A new trial was scheduled to begin in January but was delayed. A settlement may be hammered out. But it won't be for just eight plaintiffs. That list has grown to about 400. The original list of plaintiffs was more than 200 but only eight cases were taken to trial as a test case to see if their claims would hold up in court. Of the expanded list, 300 claims are for death and illnesses - primarily cancer - caused by nuclear operations in Apollo and 100 claims for property damage, according to Baron. This is not a class-action suit. Each case is handled individually because every case is different, Baron said. "In class-action suits, plaintiffs can be left in the dust because they're grouped together and treated as one uniform case, and we know each individual has a different problem. "The most important part of this lawsuit, from a precedent standpoint, is the fact that the jury found that our clients' injuries and diseases were indeed caused by exposure to radioactive materials coming from the facilities," Baron said. "It is very unusual for a case like this to be tried successfully from the plaintiffs' point of view. Even though the judge granted a new trial, the first jury's findings are important." The defendant companies disagree. "We have great compassion for all individuals who suffer from cancer and other serious diseases. However, we have never believed that the operations of the Apollo facility had any connection to the claims of the plaintiffs," said officials from BWX Technologies (formerly Babcock &Wilcox) in a statement in 1999. Only about a dozen similar cases have made it to trial, according to Baron. The law firm reviewed about 3 million pages of material for the trial. "That is unprecedented in my experience but, with all the agencies involved and the massive record-keeping requirements, it was not unexpected," Baron said. The case documented high exposures to radiation from the Apollo plant. For example: If someone was walking by the Apollo plant on Feb. 14, 1963, when a uranium fire erupted inside, dispersing seven pounds of radioactive dust into the air, the radiation they received would have been equivalent to 20,000 chest X-rays, according to nuclear researcher Bernd Franke, who testified on behalf of the plaintiffs. "But the difficulty is proving the quantum of exposure that each individual sustained or had," Baron said. The documentation for the case, provided by activists and research by the law firm, was instrumental for setting the stage for the trial, Baron said. All of the investigations by the FBI, CIA and other agencies that were looking for the missing uranium they suspected of being diverted from the former NUMEC plants to Israel contributed to the case. "The jury was aware that practices of the companies were less than optimal and were construed as uncaring," Baron said, "There was a whole pattern and practice of inappropriate conduct at that site." No one was able to prove that uranium from NUMEC was given to Israel. A new trial or settlement? Judge Ambrose overturned the the $36.7 million award to plaintiffs on appeal and ordered a new trial. In granting a new trial, Ambrose in 2000 cited errors in the first trial in admitting evidence. She also ruled that testimony from Mary Ann and Donald Hall should not have been permitted. The couple recounted their mental anguish when their 24-year-old daughter, Tina, died of leukemia on Christmas Day in 1992. To complicate matters, Babcock &Wilcox filed for bankruptcy in February 2000 in New Orleans. The company blamed its financial problems in part on payments for asbestos-related illness claims filed by its workers. Ambrose's ruling said a new trial would be based on the sole issue of whether violations of federal standards caused high emissions which caused cancers, including leukemia and breast cancer. One of the technical issues for a new trial is the disagreement over cancer studies. Baron said his firm and the defendants interpret the health studies differently. Baron's team of experts have found a higher rate of cancer within a one-mile radius of Apollo. ARCO and Babcock &Wilcox attorneys argue there aren't increased cancer cases in the Apollo area. copyright © 2002 by The Tribune-Review Publishing Co. ***************************************************************** 35 Public meeting set to discuss Weldon Spring plan News Tribune - 08/26/02 ST. CHARLES, Mo. (AP) -- The Missouri Department of Natural Resources has questions about the latest federal government plan to deal with radioactive waste at Weldon Spring in St. Charles County. Bomb material produced at Weldon Spring during the Cold War left behind 1.5 million cubic yards of contamination, capped under tons of rock. Cleanup of the contaminated site, at a cost of nearly $900 million, is almost finished, but the Department of Energy has responsibilty for explaining how it will keep the area safe for the approximately 10,000 years that the waste remains radioactive. And the state isn't satisfied with a second draft of the department's stewardship plan, which James Werner of the Department of Natural Resources says still doesn't address key questions such as how the necessary work will be paid for. "We're very disappointed in this next draft plan," said Werner, director of air and land protection for the department. "It fails to respond to our earlier comments. Also, it doesn't respond to community concerns." The plan will be up for discussion Wednesday night at a public meeting in St. Charles. An Energy Department office in Grand Junction, Colo., is taking over what it calls the "long-term surveillance and maintenance" of Weldon Spring, the first of dozens of similar bomb-making sites to go into mothball status. The department acknowledges its long-term responsibility for the site and proposes annual inspections to make sure the mound of waste is still intact. Additional surveys and evaluations would be done every five years. The government's latest version of its plan resembles earlier proposals. In addition to making surveys and evaluations, the agency would maintain a fluid collection system in the waste dump, control trees and grass that grow on the mound, and conduct ground water monitoring. Ray Plieness, deputy manager of the Grand Junction office, said the department deliberately left some holes in the Weldon Spring plan in order to get local input. "We heard that (Missourians) wanted to be involved at an early stage" of plan development, he said. "I think we could be faulted for taking that too literally." The department has asked St. Charles County to take over the site's museum-like interpretive center and an administration building. The Missouri Department of Conservation, which manages the adjacent August A. Busch Memorial Conservation Area and Weldon Spring Conservation Area, would be responsible for maintaining the Hamburg Trail, a new hike-bike path connected to the Katy Trail. The Conservation Department also would inherit several areas still contaminated with traces of radioactive waste, including Burgermeister Spring, several fishing lakes, a few culverts and a drainage area. John Vogel, who manages the Busch wildlife area, said the Conservation Department knows there is some work left to do but has "no major concerns" about the proposed plan. But Werner's list of what he considers deficiencies include a lack of public involvement, a lack of specifics on matters such as warning signs, no assurance that Missouri will be a party to legal agreements controlling the site, no specific provisions for future funding and no mention of monitoring for additional radioactive elements that may be in ground water. [http://www.trussellassoc.com] All Contents © Copyright 2002 [http://www.newstribune.com] ***************************************************************** 36 BNFL make take over troubled nuclear group * /online.ie 27 Aug 2002/ Troubled nuclear power group British Energy today confirmed it was continuing talks with British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) to operate the firm's Magnox reactors. The move is seen as providing short-term relief to the ailing firm, which has been hit by the sharp drop in electricity prices. The Financial Times reported today that the British government was pinning its hopes on such a deal, and quoted a "senior government source" as saying that a deal with BNFL "could be very beneficial" to British Energy. The paper said a management contract could provide valuable fees to British Energy and would give the company some breathing space as ministers work on a wider rescue package. The Magnox reactors, the oldest atomic power plants in the UK, were left with BNFL after the rest of the country's nuclear generation business was privatised with the flotation of British Energy. Talks on an agreement started in May, and it was reported today that the two companies were close to concluding discussions. In a statement to the stock exchange, British Energy said: "In May 2002, we announced that we were in discussions with BNFL on a wide range of issues including, fuel service agreements, new nuclear build, the possible operation of Magnox Plant and transportation. "These discussions continue." It added: "British Energy continues to inform the [British] government about the market environment in which we operate and the need to tackle market distortions including climate change levy exemption and business rates." The statement follows weekend reports suggesting that the government was considering helping rescue the group from financial difficulties. Energy minister Brian Wilson denied reports that a secret plan was under way to turn the company, which faces debts of hundreds of millions of pounds, into another Railtrack by stepping in and effectively re-nationalising it. But he said options under consideration included charging the consumer more for electricity from nuclear energy, as with other "clean" renewable energy sources. The UK's Department of Trade and Industry was keeping a close eye on British Energy's predicament, Mr Wilson said. Contact webmaster. [seamus@inthesetimes.com] ***************************************************************** 38 Experts differ on risk of proposed uranium plant * * *Tuesday, 08/27/02* | Middle Tennessee News & Information* By JACK HURST /Staff Writer/ A proposed $1.1 billion uranium-enrichment plant that may locate in Hartsville, Tenn., would deal with uranium far below the grade used for making bombs and weapons, but whether it could constitute other kinds of threats to the community is a matter of experts' debate. ''This plant can't blow up or get a meltdown like in a reactor,'' said Thomas B. Cochran, director of the Washington-based, environmental-organization nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. ''Here, your concern would be primarily the accidental emissions. Most of the hazard comes from ingestion rather than from the direct exposure, and ingestion is very hard to measure.'' Frank L. Parker, Vanderbilt environmental-engineering professor and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, said the enrichment in the product of the plant proposed by Louisiana Energy Services ? which would produce uranium for fuel ? would be 3%-5%. The percentage used in bombs and other weapons is 90 or more, he said. But Arjun Makhijani, who holds a doctoral degree in nuclear fusion and is president of another Washington-area environmental group called the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, said Hartsville residents ''should be prepared to live with'' the residue of the used, or ''depleted,'' uranium for a long while. ''It will raise a lot of local environmental questions, and the main question it's going to raise is, 'What are you going to do with all the depleted uranium?' There are already more than half a million tons of depleted uranium that nobody knows what to do with, just in this country. ''The last time such a plant was proposed, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission proposed that depleted uranium should be classified as a Class A, low-level waste. I think the idea that depleted uranium could simply be dumped in the ground ? is particularly egregious.'' Hartsville is vying with Hollywood, Ala., another city with an unfinished TVA nuclear plant, for the uranium-enrichment plant to be built by Louisiana Energy Services, a consortium. LES representatives have said they plan to decide on the site by Sept. 15 and hope to have the plant operating by 2007. LES is a partnership led by Urenco, which operates uranium-enrichment plants in the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Germany. Unlike the low-enrichment uranium production facility that has operated for many years at Paducah, Ky., and which uses gaseous diffusion, the plant proposed for Hartsville would use centrifugal force to separate the elements of the uranium, which have different weights and can be divided at high speed. Experts have testified that gaseous diffusion is less efficient and becoming no longer viable economically. The United States is the least-productive uranium-producing nation in the world, generating 6% of the world's total production. The leader, Canada, generates 27%, followed by Australia and then nations of the former Soviet Union. Asked whether there have been notable problems with low-enrichment, ''centrifuge'' plants overseas, Parker said most problems that occur in nuclear plants are on the inside, from handling materials, breathing dust and so on. ''But as far as anybody having problems around them, I've never even read a story about problems about that,'' he said. / Jack Hurst covers science and medicine. He can be reached at 259-8078 or online at jhurst@tennessean.com . / © Copyright 2002 The Tennessean A Gannett Co. Inc. ***************************************************************** 39 UK: Makeover for nuclear weapons plant FT.com Monday Aug 26 2002. All times are London time. By Anna Fifield Published: August 27 2002 5:00 | Last Updated: August 27 2002 5:00 nuclear power plant The nuclear weapons plant at Aldermaston is to get a makeover, complete with tree-lined boulevards and a cycle track, in a move its owners hope will help shake off its "sinister" image. The consortium that runs the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston has released plans to improve operational efficiency and create a nicer working environment at the 750-acre former second world war airfield in Berkshire. It has denied suggestions that the improvements are designed to help it de-velop new nuclear weapons. The AWE admitted that the 1950s development, with its large slab-sided buildings, boiler house chimneys and 60km of steam pipes, appeared "sinister". The plant is owned by British Nuclear Fuels, the state-owned atomic energy group; Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defence contractor; and Serco, the contract management group. It designs, manufactures and decommissions Britain's nuclear warheads. The site has been the target of many anti-nuclear demonstrations. Avril Burdett, AWE community liaison officer, said the plant's hydrodynamics, laser technology, super computing and materials facilities would be expanded as these were essential to its programme in a nuclear test ban era. "There's a lot of cutting-edge technology here, but the 1950s architecture doesn't give that impression," she said. No budget had been set for the overhaul, and planning permission would be requested for each stage of the redevelopment, expected to take 10-15 years. Revamping Aldermaston's "industrial factory image" into a businesspark-like campus is just part of the solution. Trees will be planted along fence lines and "boulevards", street furniture will be installed and a recreational pavilion is planned near wildlife ponds. Cycle and pedestrian tracks will also be built, and AWE has even bought cycles for staff to reduce traffic on the site. Greenpeace, the environmental group, questioned why AWE would upgrade its site if it were not interested in building new weapons. "They're basically refurbishing the entire site so what you're going to end up with is a brand new nuclear factory. They're not going to invest billions of pounds in a site and build all these facilities if you're not going to be building nuclear weapons," it told BBC Radio 4's /Today/ programme. Ms Burdett denied the overhaul was linked to the creation of new nuclear weapons, saying it was to underwrite Trident, the Britain's only nuclear weapon system, and to maintain the capability to design a successor warhead to Trident should it be required. "We have to maintain a capability to develop new weapons should we be asked, but we haven't been asked." "Financial Times" ***************************************************************** 40 Makeover for nuclear weapons plant [http://www.ft.com] By Anna Fifield Published: August 27 2002 5:00 | Last Updated: August 27 2002 5:00 The nuclear weapons plant at Aldermaston is to get a makeover, complete with tree-lined boulevards and a cycle track, in a move its owners hope will help shake off its "sinister" image. The consortium that runs the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston has released plans to improve operational efficiency and create a nicer working environment at the 750-acre former second world war airfield in Berkshire. It has denied suggestions that the improvements are designed to help it de-velop new nuclear weapons. The AWE admitted that the 1950s development, with its large slab-sided buildings, boiler house chimneys and 60km of steam pipes, appeared "sinister". The plant is owned by British Nuclear Fuels, the state-owned atomic energy group; Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defence contractor; and Serco, the contract management group. It designs, manufactures and decommissions Britain's nuclear warheads. The site has been the target of many anti-nuclear demonstrations. Avril Burdett, AWE community liaison officer, said the plant's hydrodynamics, laser technology, super computing and materials facilities would be expanded as these were essential to its programme in a nuclear test ban era. "There's a lot of cutting-edge technology here, but the 1950s architecture doesn't give that impression," she said. No budget had been set for the overhaul, and planning permission would be requested for each stage of the redevelopment, expected to take 10-15 years. Revamping Aldermaston's "industrial factory image" into a businesspark-like campus is just part of the solution. Trees will be planted along fence lines and "boulevards", street furniture will be installed and a recreational pavilion is planned near wildlife ponds. Cycle and pedestrian tracks will also be built, and AWE has even bought cycles for staff to reduce traffic on the site. Greenpeace, the environmental group, questioned why AWE would upgrade its site if it were not interested in building new weapons. "They're basically refurbishing the entire site so what you're going to end up with is a brand new nuclear factory. They're not going to invest billions of pounds in a site and build all these facilities if you're not going to be building nuclear weapons," it told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. Ms Burdett denied the overhaul was linked to the creation of new nuclear weapons, saying it was to underwrite Trident, the Britain's only nuclear weapon system, and to maintain the capability to design a successor warhead to Trident should it be required. "We have to maintain a capability to develop new weapons should we be asked, but we haven't been asked." Home [http://www.ft.com] ***************************************************************** 41 Defense goes Hollywood for anti-terror training / Tinsel Town's top minds brainstorm for Pentagon [http://sfgate.com] [chronfeedback@sfchronicle.com] Tuesday, August 27, 2002 --> Los Angeles -- Three big-name Hollywood talents huddle around a conference table and let the ideas fly. "Apocalypse Now" co-writer John Milius sketches a soldier of the future with a Transformer-like weapon that doubles as a vehicle part. David Ayer, who wrote "Training Day," suggests building sensors that link every weapon system in the country. Ron Cobb, the creature designer for "Star Wars," describes a personnel carrier with four independent steering wheels that could "whip around and is buffered with lots of shields." This Hollywood brainstorming session will never produce something for the neighborhood megaplex. That's because it took place not on a studio lot, but inside a nondescript Army think tank on a quiet street in west Los Angeles. The Institute for Creative Technology is the country's only organization that draws on entertainment industry know-how to sharpen military training through futuristic games and simulation. The institute's Hollywood consultants also write story lines for virtual-reality military training videos -- plots with swirling suspense and drama that aim to make a soldier's training more compelling. Since it was founded in 1999, the institute has popped in and out of public view, vacillating between the military's need-to-know tradition of secrecy and Hollywood's need-to-dish culture. Most recently, it drew national notice when it asked screenwriters, producers and directors to generate terrorist scenarios in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Their ideas have been kept under wraps; one Army spokeswoman cited national security in declining to release them. From the outside, the office building looks as forgettable as a 1970s bank. Inside is another story. The interiors were created by Paramount's Herman Zimmerman, who was in charge of production design for several "Star Trek" movies and TV series. The blond wood walls pitch toward the ceiling, like the Starship Enterprise, and automatic pocket doors pull apart down the middle and close back up again with that unmistakable shush. While the institute has Hollywood and military consultants on retainer, there are 45 full-time scientists, researchers and administrators who work in offices equipped with bunk beds. "They bring in people with diverse backgrounds: artificial intelligence, video game people, social research people," Ayer said. "It's like the most amazing dinner party." This "party" costs the Army $45 million in a five-year contract, and millions more come from other military branches. Hollywood consultants are paid anywhere from $500 to $1,000 a day, although most only work a few days a month. "It says a lot about our military that they don't feel sufficiently comfortable thinking out of the box and they have to go outside of themselves for that advice," said Christopher Hellman, senior analyst at the Center for Defense Initiatives, a nonprofit, independent think tank in Washington, D.C. "They need someone without that baggage to think almost whimsically about their structure." The premise for this type of collaboration is not new; the military and Hollywood have long helped each other, most recently with extensive technical support from the Pentagon on military-themed movies like "Black Hawk Down," "Behind Enemy Lines" and "The Sum of All Fears." Recently, the head of research and development at Walt Disney Co. announced he was leaving to head all research at the Pentagon's National Security Agency. The Army keeps tabs on ICT through daily e-mails with its executive staff and extensive monthly reports. Many of its Hollywood consultants say that the institute provides welcome distance from the entertainment industry's relentless emphasis on generating commercial hits. "I don't find the film entertainment world that liberating. It's pretty formulaic," said onetime Hollywood producer and writer Jim Korris, who serves as ICT's creative director. "Entertainment companies don't reward innovation." A. Michael Andrews II, the Army's chief scientist and the institute's founder, said one of its finest hours came after last fall's terrorist attacks. "Since we had such a very unusual action against the United States, I thought it might be worthwhile to look outside our normal way of thinking about the problem," Andrews said. He asked ICT to corral entertainment industry volunteers who could dream up terrorist plot lines in hopes they might expose a weakness in the real-life anti-terrorism network. This panel of about 30 Hollywood volunteers, some of whom were already institute consultants, met during two evenings in October, creating terrorist "characters" and then following the story lines through. They wanted to know what tools were available to the soldiers who would be exploring unlit caves. They also wanted to know what was being done to deter the hypothetical terrorist characters. ICT began, as most Hollywood projects do, with a "meeting on the lot." It was 1999, and the lot was Paramount. Andrews, who has a doctorate in electrical engineering, arrived with a picture of a bridge arching between the Pentagon and the Hollywood sign. To Korris, accustomed to high-tech gadgets and slick presentations, it looked both clumsy and endearing. At the institute's opening ceremony on Sept. 26, 2000, the audience was packed with top military brass as well as Hollywood's chief lobbyist, Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America. Within a few months, ICT had attracted an array of consultants who don't fit neatly into Hollywood's left-leaning image. Ayer spent two years in the Navy as a sonar man aboard a nuclear submarine. Cobb fought in the Vietnam War. And Milius is a proud hawk. ©2002 San Francisco Chronicle. ***************************************************************** 42 Gov't Offers Radiation Equipment Las Vegas SUN: August 26, 2002 By H. JOSEF HEBERT ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON- The Energy Department is making surplus radiation detection equipment available to state and local officials in case it is needed to respond to a nuclear terror attack, the department said Monday. The equipment will "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," Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said in a statement. The equipment, most of which is being refurbished after being declared surplus at DOE weapons sites around the country, first will go to states with the largest urban population centers, officials said. The devices, including hand-held dosimeters, filtering systems, glove boxes and monitoring equipment, is being refurbished at the Energy Department's material recycling center in Oak Ridge, Tenn., before its distribution. Jointly administered by DOE and the Justice Department's Office of Domestic Preparedness, the program is part of a broader federal effort to better prepare police, fire officials and others who would be the initial responders to a nuclear incident, officials said. Attorney General John Ashcroft said in a statement supply of the material "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." The Justice Department office will decide how the equipment will be distributed, and the Energy Department will deliver the devices to the states and communities, officials said. Training police, firefighters and other local officials in how to use the equipment will be conducted by federal agencies and through the private Health Physics Society, an organization of radiation safety professionals. In an initial test phase of the program, equipment will be made available to states with the nation's 10 largest metropolitan areas: Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington. Much of the equipment is classified as surplus at DOE weapons complex facilities because the sites have been cleaned up or closed after being part of the government's nuclear weapons complex, according to a fact sheet provided on an Energy Department web site. "In the past this equipment would be disposed of as waste at considerable cost to the American taxpayers. ... DOE is now putting the equipment to new uses in defending our nation," said the fact sheet. On The Net: Energy Department: www.oakridge.doe.gov Justice Department: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/odp/ [http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/odp/] All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 43 Labs yield potential AIDS therapy Albuquerque Tribune Online TAGS BETWEEN PARAGRAPHS AS SHOWN --> By [svorenberg@abqtrib.com] Tribune Reporter A potential AIDS treatment has been floating around in the most unusual place. It has been clogging nuclear waste filters at the Department of Energy. May Nyman, 35, who has a Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico and is a scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, accidentally discovered a material that can attach itself, like a tiny straitjacket, to the AIDS virus in the blood stream, rendering it unable to hurt other cells. "It really was just an accident," she said. "It was just a matter of stumbling on to it, so to speak." Nyman, a Virginia native who has lived in New Mexico since 1993, said she found the material while investigating filters designed to take radioactive portions out of liquid nuclear waste at South Carolina's Savannah River Site. The filters were clogging before a significant amount of material passed through them. It turned out a manufacturing defect in the filtering material was gumming them up. Nyman found it, but she also thought the defect's crystalline structure was interesting, and decided to see if she could make a batch of it. "I didn't have in mind any actual application when I synthesized it," she said. "It was just scientific curiosity. I just wanted to see if I could make it and see what it was." The defect, which is a crystal made of the element niobium, is part of a class of materials that scientists call HPAs, or heteropolyanions. The medical community has been interested in HPAs as a possible treatment for AIDS. Their unusual ability to bind with a virus makes it difficult for other cells to be attacked. Most HPAs are stable only in acid solutions, and human blood is neutral. Nyman's HPA, however, is different. It is stable in neutral and basic solutions, meaning it could be ideal to trap viruses - including AIDS - in the human body. Until Nyman learned how to manufacture the material - chemists call it niobium HPA - nobody knew how to make an HPA made entirely of niobium, Nyman said. No medical research has yet been done with the new material, since its discovery was just announced this month in the journal Science. But the idea of using Nyman's discovery for medical purposes is intriguing, said Craig Hill, an expert in HPAs and renowned chemistry professor at Georgia's Emory University. Hill said Nyman's paper shows her discovery is more stable in basic liquids than neutral ones, but if niobium HPA remains stable in a neutral liquid for a sustained period of time it could have significant potential for AIDS treatment. "If the thing has a lifetime of hours (in the blood) versus minutes or seconds, then it is very likely to have interesting anti-viral properties," he said. "There's a reasonable chance that its toxicity (ability to cause damage in the human body) may be fairly low." Hill said he would be interested in testing the substance at Emory, which has tested more types of HPAs as a treatment for AIDS than any other research facility in the country. Nyman, who is expecting her second child in late September, said she was surprised to make such an unusual discovery so early in her career. "I think the baby brought it on," she said. "Babies bring their own luck. And this discovery was certainly a lucky accident." [http://www.abqtrib.com/print/index.cfm] © The Albuquerque Tribune. ***************************************************************** 44 Strange substance might also purge nuclear waste Albuquerque Tribune Online > By Sue Vorenberg [svorenberg@abqtrib.com] Tribune Reporter A Department of Energy discovery of a material that could potentially treat AIDS could also help problems close to home. Sandia National Laboratories researcher May Nyman has discovered a material with unique virus-fighting properties in a substance that was clogging nuclear waste filters. It could be ideal to remove radioactive parts of liquid nuclear waste, because of its ability to bind with plutonium, uranium and neptunium, she said. "Nuclear waste pools are typically basic, with lots of non-radioactive metals and other materials inside them," Nyman said. "Radioactive materials are actually only a small component. To find a material that will selectively attach itself to a specific material and stand up to the basic conditions is pretty challenging." DOE's Savannah River Site is experimenting with Nyman's discovery - a material called niobium HPA - by throwing it, as a powder, into waste pools and then, after 24 hours, removing it, along with any radioactive waste it has bound to. Nyman and other DOE scientists think the niobium HPA may filter radioactive material out of waste pools more efficiently and quickly than other filtering methods - including the filtering material it was originally found in. If it does, it could speed up the filtering process and pull out smaller, more concentrated packages of waste to be disposed of, she said. "The current material is too slow," Nyman said. "To increase safety and decrease the cost of any waste processing, it's good to get the size of what you remove down. When you do that, it's less expensive and provides less exposure to workers." © The Albuquerque Tribune. ***************************************************************** 45 Geiger Counters Reused for Training Las Vegas SUN: Today: August 27, 2002 at 6:45:14 PDT ASSOCIATED PRESS OAK RIDGE, Tenn.- Thousands of Geiger counters and other radiation detectors that had been destined for the scrap heap or auction block are being recycled for the war on terrorism. The Energy and Justice departments are teaming up to offer the refurbished equipment and training in their use police, fire and emergency management agencies around the country. Most of the instruments were used in Department of Energy cleanup operations and became surplus after the jobs were completed. Others were replaced by more sophisticated equipment. "We are bringing the equipment to Oak Ridge, checking it out to make sure it is functional and useful for its intended purpose and then making it available to first responder agencies," Richard Meehan, who is overseeing the project at energy department's national recycling center in Oak Ridge, said Monday. The Justice Department will provide hands-on operation and maintenance training. The 6,000-member Health Physics Society also will offer training and help in calibrating the instruments. All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 46 Federal Agencies Cooperate To Provide Radiation Detection Equipment and Training To Emergency Responders energy.gov - Headquarters' Press Release RELEASE DATE: 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 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/] . Media Contact: Dolline Hatchett, DOE, 202/586-5806 David Hess, DOJ, 202/307-0703 Release No. PR-02-170 ***************************************************************** 47 NASA Glenn gets key role on ion engine 08/27/02 Brie Zeltner Plain Dealer Reporter Cleveland's NASA Glenn Research Center will play a key role in the agency's initiative to develop an ion propulsion system that will send astronauts deeper into space than ever before, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said. He visited Glenn yesterday as part of a tour of three NASA centers leading the Nuclear Systems Initiative. The NSI will develop a new generation of in-space propulsion and power generation systems and will be the "single most important initiative to the agency." Glenn's designation as a critical part of this research area offers piece of mind to a NASA center that has suffered budget cuts and lost important projects to other centers. O'Keefe, appointed by President Bush in January, has made a concerted effort to promote coordination among NASA's 10 research centers. O'Keefe identified the NSI as an example of this effort, stating "We can do a lot more collaboratively than we ever could by fighting each other." He said he wants to discourage the funding battles that have threatened politically weaker centers like Glenn and led to perennial worry over its future. The NSI will coordinate the research of Glenn, Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The mission: to develop cheaper and faster ways to travel deeper into space. Continued work on better fuels and lighter, more powerful propulsion systems will allow NASA to explore further and stay longer in space than now is possible. The weight of the fuels in chemical propulsion systems the space shuttles use presents a technical limit to the depth of space exploration. Researchers expect a threefold improvement in speed, revolutionizing space travel. Glenn was recently awarded $21 million to develop the Next system, an ion engine that will use gas and electric power to fuel spacecraft. Glenn has been a leader in propulsion research since its establishment in 1941. It is also responsible for the development of electrical power and communications technology for NASA's aeronautics and space missions. To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: bzeltner@plaind.com, 216-999-5703 © 2002 The Plain Dealer. Used with permission. ***************************************************************** NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: *****************************************************************