From: Peace though Reason Subject: (abolition-usa) NucNews (US-2) 2/01/99 - AmeriScan key articles 1/5-26/99 Date: 01 Feb 1999 07:41:28 -0500 --=====================_358990==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" 4. AmeriScan: January 26, 1999 http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jan99/1999L-01-26-09.html *PLUTONIUM STABILIZATION RESUMES AT HANFORD *DEPLETED URANIUM MAY BE CAUSE OF GULF WAR ILLNESS 5. AmeriScan: January 19, 1999 http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jan99/1999L-01-19-09.html LATEST VERSION OF "MOBILE CHERNOBYL" OPPOSED 6. AmeriScan: January 7, 1999 http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jan99/1999L-01-07-09.html *NUCLEAR PLANTS ALLOWED DISCRETION IN SEVERE WEATHER *BILL TO CREATE PERMANENT NUCLEAR REPOSITORY INTRODUCED *YUCCA MOUNTAIN FOCUS OF NUCLEAR WASTEREVIEW BOARD MEETING 7. AmeriScan: January 6, 1999 http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jan99/1999L-01-06-09.html NUCLEAR PLANT LEAK HITS CONNECTICUT BAY 8. AmeriScan: January 5, 1999 http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jan99/1999L-01-05-09.html *PROLIFERATION RESISTANT PLAN FOR BOMB GRADE SPENT FUEL *NUCLEAR FUEL SHIPMENTS TO VALLECITOS CHALLENGED *NEBRASKA DENIES US ECOLOGY NUCLEAR WASTE LICENSE 4. AmeriScan: January 26, 1999 http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jan99/1999L-01-26-09.html PLUTONIUM STABILIZATION RESUMES AT HANFORD The thermal stabilization of plutonium has resumed after a two-year suspension at the Plutonium Finishing Plant on the Hanford Nuclear Site in southeastern Washington. The process converts chemically reactive plutonium-bearing scraps and powders into a safer form for starage by heating the material in small ovens at 1,000 degrees Celsius for two to four hours. This drives out the moisture and volatile chemicals and converts the material into impure, inert plutonium oxide that can be sealed in containers for long-term storage in shielded vaults at Hanford. The plant holds 4.3 metric tons of scrap plutonium in 17.8 metric tons of plutonium-bearing materials in metal, powders, scraps, liquids and polycubes. In October 1996, B&W Hanford Company (BWHC) took over management of the Plutonium Finishing Plant. Their staff passed a rigorous Operational Readiness Review January 15 after inspection by a team from the Department of Energy (DOE) and one from Hanford's principal contractor, Fluor Daniel Hanford. The DOE says B&W Hanford has resolved problems raised by the May 14, 1997 chemical explosion at the Plutonium Reclamation Facility, which is part of the Finishing Plant. * * *DEPLETED URANIUM MAY BE CAUSE OF GULF WAR ILLNESS The National Gulf War Resource Center, a coalition of veterans groups based in Washington, now estimates that as many as 600,000 Gulf War soldiers could have been exposed to depleted uranium, the San Francisco Examiner reported Saturday. The exposure could be an explanation for the pervasive and so far unexplained Gulf War illness. Last December, nearly eight years after the Gulf War, the Pentagon showed President Bill Clinton's Oversight Committee a map of the Gulf War battlefield, that detailed sites where Army tanks and Air Force jets fired more than 300 tons of depleted uranium ammunition at Iraqi troops in 1991. "The map shows that almost every combat unit goes through contaminated areas twice," said Paul Sullivan, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center. He said that soldiers traveled on contaminated roads and may have camped on contaminated land for two months. * * *5. LATEST VERSION OF "MOBILE CHERNOBYL" OPPOSED http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jan99/1999L-01-19-09.html The Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), a Washington, DC based nuclear watchdog group, is organizing a campaign against the latest bill introduced in Congress to move nuclear waste to a central storage facility from power plants across the country. NIRS is urging calls and letters, faxes and email to Congress opposing HR 45, introduced on the first day of the 106th Congress by Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican and Edolphus Towns, a New York Democrat. Because of the potential risks of shipping nuclear waste across the country, critics of the plan refer to the bill as "Mobile Chernobyl." NIRS spokesman Michael Mariotte says, "The latest public opinion polls we have available show that some 67 percent of the public opposes Mobile Chernobyl, but only about 1/3 of the public even knows about it. Moreover, the more people learn about it, according to the polls, the more likely they are to oppose it." Nuclear power plants say the need for a central waste storage depot is urgent as they are running out of on-site storage capacity. * * *6. AmeriScan: January 7, 1999 http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jan99/1999L-01-07-09.html NUCLEAR PLANTS ALLOWED DISCRETION IN SEVERE WEATHER The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has given the NRC staff approval to exercise discretion expeditiously on enforcement actions during severe weather conditions where safety will not be undermined. Previously, the use of enforcement discretion for these types of situations required prior Commission approval. Now, the Commission will be notified in writing after the action has been taken. The new policy was immediately used by the Point Beach Nuclear Plant in Wisconsin where enforcement discretion was requested and granted Tuesday by the NRC regarding the Unit 1 shutdown required by a frozen recirculation line. The line was thawed and Unit 1 is now being returned to 100 percent power after being cut to 23 percent during the crisis. The plant, owned and operated by the Wisconsin Electric Power Co. is located on the west shore of Lake Michigan, about 30 miles southeast of Green Bay. * * *BILL TO CREATE PERMANENT NUCLEAR REPOSITORY INTRODUCED U.S. Congressmen Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican and Edolphus Towns, a New York Democrat, last night introduced legislation that would establish an integrated nuclear waste management system with centralized interim storage and permanent disposal of used fuel from commercial nuclear energy plants. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1999 (H.R. 45) is similar to a previous bill approved in the 105th Congress by a margin of 307-120. The nuclear industry applauded the legislation and said a recently released report on the viability of a site at Yucca Mountain, Nevada being evaluated as a permanent repository "increases confidence that our nation's brightest technical minds can engineer a repository that safely isolates used fuel." The Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear energy industry's Washington-based policy organization said, "The government's failure to meet its 1999 deadline to begin disposing of used nuclear fuel means that the meter is running on potentially tens of billions of dollars in damages from litigation already under way. Electricity consumers who already have financed the government's $15 billion nuclear waste fund for a disposal program they haven't gotten, deserve a solution to this issue now." * * *YUCCA MOUNTAIN FOCUS OF NUCLEAR WASTE REVIEW BOARD MEETING The Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board will hold its winter meeting, which is open to the public, on January 26 and 27 in Las Vegas, Nevada. On January 26, the meeting will focus on progress on alternative repository design, scientific and engineering investigations, and regulatory criteria pertinent to a potential repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has been invited to send a representative to discuss the NRC's draft rule for disposal of high-level waste at Yucca Mountain. On January 27, the focus of the meeting will turn to the U.S. Department of Energy's Viability Assessment. Representatives from the DOE will make presentations on different aspects of the VA, including repository design, waste package characteristics, total system performance assessment, the license application plan, and repository life-cycle costs. Time will be set aside at the end of both days to take public comments. The meeting opens at 1:00 pm on January 26, and 8:00 am on January 27 at the Alexis Park Hotel, 375 East Harmon, Las Vegas, Nevada 89109. * * *7. AmeriScan: January 6, 1999 http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jan99/1999L-01-06-09.html NUCLEAR PLANT LEAK HITS CONNECTICUT BAY Millstone Nuclear Power Plant near New London, Connecticut The state of Connecticut has been notified that at least 840 gallons of waste water containing trace amounts of radioactive tritium have leaked from the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant into Niantic Bay. Early Monday morning a leak in a heater loop for the Unit 3 'A' waste test tank was discovered. Waste water in the tank contained radioactivity and boric acid. The leak of about one to two gallons per minute was isolated. A berm surrounding the tank had been installed due to a prior leak but did not contain this leak. Upon subsequent surveys of the storm drain system, tritium was detected at the DSN-006 sample point. Owned by the Northeast Nuclear Energy Company, Millstone is located 3.2 miles southwest of New London, Connecticut. * * *8. AmeriScan: January 5, 1999 http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jan99/1999L-01-05-09.html PROLIFERATION RESISTANT PLAN FOR BOMB GRADE SPENT FUEL The Department of Energy (DOE) has announced a plan to avoid reprocessing most of the foreign and domestic spent fuel containing bomb-grade uranium now stored at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. DOE plans to get rid of the highly enriched uranium by employing a new process known as "melt-and-dilute" that directly converts the spent fuel into low-enriched uranium ingots. These ingots are considered well suited for geological disposal and unattractive for nuclear weapons use. The alternative considered by DOE - reprocessing the spent fuel in the H-Canyon at the Savannah River Site - would separate the highly enriched uranium in a weapons-usable form and extend use of the aging reprocessing plant, posing proliferation and environmental risks. The choice of melt-and-dilute over reprocessing is outlined in DOE's "Savannah River Site Spent Nuclear Fuel Management Draft Environmental Impact Statement," released December 28. Paul Leventhal, president of the Washington, DC based watchdog group Nuclear Control Institute, hailed the DOE plan but warned that adequate funding must be in place. "Turning this plan into reality will require adequate funding and a final record of decision before the 2000 election," Leventhal said. "We are concerned that this promising new technology could be smothered in the cradle by a lack of funding." * * *NUCLEAR FUEL SHIPMENTS TO VALLECITOS CHALLENGED Environmental groups in the Bay Area, California towns of Livermore, Sunol and Pleasanton are worried about the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's approval of a shipment of ten irradiated nuclear fuel rods from the Limerick, Pennsylvania nuclear power plant to the Vallecitos Nuclear Center in their neighborhood. Vallecitos was closed in 1997 by General Electric after its location over an active earthquake fault became known. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) web page lists the facility as "closed down." But, since 1977, Vallecitos has received 50 shipments of irradiated nuclear fuel rods, containing 513 kilos of solid radioactive fuel. At least 11 shipments have come in the last five years, all without any public notification, the nuclear watchdog group Tri-Valley CARES complains. The Limerick nuclear power plant encountered "minor problems" during the last week in November during loading of the fuel rods into a shipping cask, according to an internal NRC report. "There were also believed to be some irregularities, so the operation was halted," the memo said. The shipment is now scheduled to take place sometime in 1999. Tri-Valley CARES is working with other citizens' groups to demand public meetings at which information about the hazards of nuclear transport and storage would be released. * * *NEBRASKA DENIES US ECOLOGY NUCLEAR WASTE LICENSE Two Nebraska agencies have issued a denial of US Ecology's license application to construct a low-level radioactive waste facility in Boyd County. The announcement was made in late December by Randolph Wood, director of the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality, and Dr. David Schor of the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services Regulation and Licensure. A preliminary decision of the intent to deny had been announced in August. The license was denied for six reasons: 1.The site lacks sufficient depth to the water table. It provides no depth, let alone a sufficient depth, to ground water. 2.The site lacks an adequate buffer zone. Ground water is capable of infiltrating the facility's liner and leachate collection system. 3.Engineered structures and barriers are planned substitutes for a suitable site. 4.Ground water discharges to the surface within the disposal site. 5.There is a need for continuing active maintenance after site closure. 6.The applicant has not demonstrated that it meets the financial assurance requirements for the construction of a low-level radioactive waste disposal facility. US Ecology has until January 21 to file a written petition for a contested case hearing. _____________________________________________________________ * NucNews - to subscribe: prop1@prop1.org - http://prop1.org * Say "Please Subscribe NucNews" NucNews Archive: HTTP://WWW.ONELIST.COM/arcindex.cgi?listname=NucNews since January 13, 1999; for earlier editions - write prop1@prop1.org --------------------------------------- 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: _____________________________________________________________ --=====================_358990==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
4. AmeriScan: January 26, 1999
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jan99/1999L-01-26-09.html
*PLUTONIUM STABILIZATION RESUMES AT HANFORD
*DEPLETED URANIUM MAY BE CAUSE OF GULF WAR ILLNESS

5. AmeriScan: January 19, 1999
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jan99/1999L-01-19-09.html
LATEST VERSION OF "MOBILE CHERNOBYL" OPPOSED

6. AmeriScan: January 7, 1999
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jan99/1999L-01-07-09.html
*NUCLEAR PLANTS ALLOWED DISCRETION IN SEVERE WEATHER
*BILL TO CREATE PERMANENT NUCLEAR REPOSITORY INTRODUCED
*YUCCA MOUNTAIN FOCUS OF NUCLEAR WASTEREVIEW BOARD MEETING

7. AmeriScan: January 6, 1999
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jan99/1999L-01-06-09.html
NUCLEAR PLANT LEAK HITS CONNECTICUT BAY

8. AmeriScan: January 5, 1999
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jan99/1999L-01-05-09.html
*PROLIFERATION RESISTANT PLAN FOR BOMB GRADE SPENT FUEL
*NUCLEAR FUEL SHIPMENTS TO VALLECITOS CHALLENGED
*NEBRASKA DENIES US ECOLOGY NUCLEAR WASTE LICENSE

-----------------------------------------

----------------------------------------

4. AmeriScan: January 26, 1999

http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jan99/1999L-01-26-09.html
PLUTONIUM STABILIZATION RESUMES AT HANFORD

The thermal stabilization of plutonium has resumed after a two-year suspension at the Plutonium Finishing Plant on the Hanford Nuclear Site in southeastern Washington. The process converts chemically reactive plutonium-bearing scraps and powders into a safer form for starage by heating the material in small ovens at 1,000 degrees Celsius for two to four hours. This drives out the moisture and volatile chemicals and converts the material into impure, inert plutonium oxide that can be sealed in containers for long-term storage in shielded vaults at Hanford. The plant holds 4.3 metric tons of scrap plutonium in 17.8 metric tons of plutonium-bearing materials in metal, powders, scraps, liquids and polycubes. In October 1996, B&W Hanford Company (BWHC) took over management of the Plutonium Finishing Plant. Their staff passed a rigorous Operational Readiness Review January 15 after inspection by a team from the Department of Energy (DOE) and one from Hanford's principal contractor, Fluor Daniel Hanford. The DOE says B&W Hanford has resolved problems raised by the May 14, 1997 chemical explosion at the Plutonium Reclamation Facility, which is part of the Finishing Plant.

   * *

*DEPLETED URANIUM MAY BE CAUSE OF GULF WAR ILLNESS

The National Gulf War Resource Center, a coalition of veterans groups based in Washington, now estimates that as many as 600,000 Gulf War soldiers could have been exposed to depleted uranium, the San Francisco Examiner reported Saturday. The exposure could be an explanation for the pervasive and so far unexplained Gulf War illness. Last December, nearly eight years after the Gulf War, the Pentagon showed President Bill Clinton's Oversight Committee a map of the Gulf War battlefield, that detailed sites where Army tanks and Air Force jets fired more than 300 tons of depleted uranium ammunition at Iraqi troops in 1991. "The map shows that almost every combat unit goes through contaminated areas twice," said Paul Sullivan, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center. He said that soldiers traveled on contaminated roads and may have camped on contaminated land for two months.

   * *

*5. LATEST VERSION OF "MOBILE CHERNOBYL" OPPOSED

http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jan99/1999L-01-19-09.html
The Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), a Washington, DC based nuclear watchdog group, is organizing a campaign against the latest bill introduced in Congress to move nuclear waste to a central storage facility from power plants across the country. NIRS is urging calls and letters, faxes and email to Congress opposing HR 45, introduced on the first day of the 106th Congress by Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican and Edolphus Towns, a New York Democrat. Because of the potential risks of shipping nuclear waste across the country, critics of the plan refer to the bill as "Mobile Chernobyl." NIRS spokesman Michael Mariotte says, "The latest public opinion polls we have available show that some 67 percent of the public opposes Mobile Chernobyl, but only about 1/3 of the public even knows about it. Moreover, the more people learn about it, according to the polls, the more likely they are to oppose it." Nuclear power plants say the need for a central waste storage depot is urgent as they are running out of on-site storage capacity.

   * *

*6. AmeriScan: January 7, 1999

http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jan99/1999L-01-07-09.html
NUCLEAR PLANTS ALLOWED DISCRETION IN SEVERE WEATHER

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has given the NRC staff approval to exercise discretion expeditiously on enforcement actions during severe weather conditions where safety will not be undermined. Previously, the use of enforcement discretion for these types of situations required prior Commission approval. Now, the Commission will be notified in writing after the action has been taken. The new policy was immediately used by the Point Beach Nuclear Plant in Wisconsin where enforcement discretion was requested and granted Tuesday by the NRC regarding the Unit 1 shutdown required by a frozen recirculation line. The line was thawed and Unit 1 is now being returned to 100 percent power after being cut to 23 percent during the crisis. The plant, owned and operated by the Wisconsin Electric Power Co. is located on the west shore of Lake Michigan, about 30 miles southeast of Green Bay.

   * *

*BILL TO CREATE PERMANENT NUCLEAR REPOSITORY INTRODUCED

U.S. Congressmen Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican and Edolphus Towns, a New York Democrat, last night introduced legislation that would establish an integrated nuclear waste management system with centralized interim storage and permanent disposal of used fuel from commercial nuclear energy plants. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1999 (H.R. 45) is similar to a previous bill approved in the 105th Congress by a margin of 307-120. The nuclear industry applauded the legislation and said a recently released report on the viability of a site at Yucca Mountain, Nevada being evaluated as a permanent repository "increases confidence that our nation's brightest technical minds can engineer a repository that safely isolates used fuel." The Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear energy industry's Washington-based policy organization said, "The government's failure to meet its 1999 deadline to begin disposing of used nuclear fuel means that the meter is running on potentially tens of billions of dollars in damages from litigation already under way. Electricity consumers who already have financed the government's $15 billion nuclear waste fund for a disposal program they haven't gotten, deserve a solution to this issue now."

   * *

*YUCCA MOUNTAIN FOCUS OF NUCLEAR WASTE REVIEW BOARD MEETING

The Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board will hold its winter meeting, which is open to the public, on January 26 and 27 in Las Vegas, Nevada. On January 26, the meeting will focus on progress on alternative repository design, scientific and engineering investigations, and regulatory criteria pertinent to a potential repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has been invited to send a representative to discuss the NRC's draft rule for disposal of high-level waste at Yucca Mountain. On January 27, the focus of the meeting will turn to the U.S. Department of Energy's Viability Assessment. Representatives from the DOE will make presentations on different aspects of the VA, including repository design, waste package characteristics, total system performance assessment, the license application plan, and repository life-cycle costs. Time will be set aside at the end of both days to take public comments. The meeting opens at 1:00 pm on January 26, and 8:00 am on January 27 at the Alexis Park Hotel, 375 East Harmon, Las Vegas, Nevada 89109.

   * *

*7. AmeriScan: January 6, 1999

http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jan99/1999L-01-06-09.html
NUCLEAR PLANT LEAK HITS CONNECTICUT BAY

Millstone Nuclear Power Plant near New London, Connecticut

The state of Connecticut has been notified that at least 840 gallons of waste water containing trace amounts of radioactive tritium have leaked from the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant into Niantic Bay. Early Monday morning a leak in a heater loop for the Unit 3 'A' waste test tank was discovered. Waste water in the tank contained radioactivity and boric acid. The leak of about one to two gallons per minute was isolated. A berm surrounding the tank had been installed due to a prior leak but did not contain this leak. Upon subsequent surveys of the storm drain system, tritium was detected at the DSN-006 sample point. Owned by the Northeast Nuclear Energy Company, Millstone is located 3.2 miles southwest of New London, Connecticut.

   * *

*8. AmeriScan: January 5, 1999

http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jan99/1999L-01-05-09.html
PROLIFERATION RESISTANT PLAN FOR BOMB GRADE SPENT FUEL

The Department of Energy (DOE) has announced a plan to avoid reprocessing most of the foreign and domestic spent fuel containing bomb-grade uranium now stored at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. DOE plans to get rid of the highly enriched uranium by employing a new process known as "melt-and-dilute" that directly converts the spent fuel into low-enriched uranium ingots. These ingots are considered well suited for geological disposal and unattractive for nuclear weapons use. The alternative considered by DOE - reprocessing the spent fuel in the H-Canyon at the Savannah River Site - would separate the highly enriched uranium in a weapons-usable form and extend use of the aging reprocessing plant, posing proliferation and environmental risks. The choice of melt-and-dilute over reprocessing is outlined in DOE's "Savannah River Site Spent Nuclear Fuel Management Draft Environmental Impact Statement," released December 28. Paul Leventhal, president of the Washington, DC based watchdog group Nuclear Control Institute, hailed the DOE plan but warned that adequate funding must be in place. "Turning this plan into reality will require adequate funding and a final record of decision before the 2000 election," Leventhal said. "We are concerned that this promising new technology could be smothered in the cradle by a lack of funding."

   * *

*NUCLEAR FUEL SHIPMENTS TO VALLECITOS CHALLENGED

Environmental groups in the Bay Area, California towns of Livermore, Sunol and Pleasanton are worried about the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's approval of a shipment of ten irradiated nuclear fuel rods from the Limerick, Pennsylvania nuclear power plant to the Vallecitos Nuclear Center in their neighborhood. Vallecitos was closed in 1997 by General Electric after its location over an active earthquake fault became known. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) web page lists the facility as "closed down." But, since 1977, Vallecitos has received 50 shipments of irradiated nuclear fuel rods, containing 513 kilos of solid radioactive fuel. At least 11 shipments have come in the last five years, all without any public notification, the nuclear watchdog group Tri-Valley CARES complains. The Limerick nuclear power plant encountered "minor problems" during the last week in November during loading of the fuel rods into a shipping cask, according to an internal NRC report. "There were also believed to be some irregularities, so the operation was halted," the memo said. The shipment is now scheduled to take place sometime in 1999. Tri-Valley CARES is working with other citizens' groups to demand public meetings at which information about the hazards of nuclear transport and storage would be released.

   * *

*NEBRASKA DENIES US ECOLOGY NUCLEAR WASTE LICENSE

Two Nebraska agencies have issued a denial of US Ecology's license application to construct a low-level radioactive waste facility in Boyd County. The announcement was made in late December by Randolph Wood, director of the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality, and Dr. David Schor of the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services Regulation and Licensure. A preliminary decision of the intent to deny had been announced in August. The license was denied for six reasons:

 1.The site lacks sufficient depth to the water table. It provides no depth, let alone a sufficient depth, to ground water.  
2.The site lacks an adequate buffer zone. Ground water is capable of infiltrating the facility's liner and leachate collection system.  
3.Engineered structures and barriers are planned substitutes for a suitable site.  
4.Ground water discharges to the surface within the disposal site.  
5.There is a need for continuing active maintenance after site closure.  
6.The applicant has not demonstrated that it meets the financial assurance requirements for the construction of a low-level radioactive waste disposal facility.

US Ecology has until January 21 to file a written petition for a contested case hearing.

_____________________________________________________________

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_____________________________________________________________ --=====================_358990==_.ALT-- - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peace though Reason Subject: (abolition-usa) NucNews (US-1) 2/01/99 - Ohio Series, Cleveland Plain Dealer Date: 01 Feb 1999 07:43:35 -0500 --=====================_358904==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" 1. Environmentalists unhappy about RMI handling own cleanup http://www.ohio.com/bj/news/ohio/docs/011942.htm See Also: Titanium Cleanup-Glance http://www.ohio.com/bj/news/ohio/docs/005546.htm 2. Some paid heavy price for radiation exposure http://www.cleveland.com/news/pdnews/metro/casick31.ssf 3. RMI - part of dirty nuclear legacy http://www.cleveland.com/news/pdnews/metro/cawash31.ssf 1. Environmentalists unhappy about RMI handling own cleanup http://www.ohio.com/bj/news/ohio/docs/011942.htm ASHTABULA, Ohio (AP) -- The Department of Energy's decision to let a northeast Ohio titanium company handle its own radiation cleanup raises conflicts of interest, environmental watchdog groups say. RMI Titanium Co., which for decades during the Cold War forged uranium metal into plutonium for nuclear weapons, is working under a $188 million contract with the DOE to decontaminate its own property. It's a job that needs to be done, but by someone else, said David Adelman, an attorney in the nuclear program at the Washington, D.C.-based Natural Resources Defense Council. ``The key issue is it's the fox guarding the henhouse,'' Adelman said in a story published Sunday in The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer. ``It's a combination of a conflict of interest both with regard to the degree of contamination at the site, as well as in obtaining the contract itself -- the circularity of all that.'' James Henderson, manager of RMI Environmental Services, said the company has everyone's best interests in mind. ``The company never expected that they were going to extract a pound of flesh, if you will, from the government to the disadvantage of the taxpayers, the DOE or anyone else.'' Kenneth Morgan, a spokesman for the DOE, said the agency has an on-site project manager who is monitoring costs and the progress of the cleanup. ``Essentially, what's expected is that whoever did the pollution is expected to clean it up,'' he said. ``In the case of Ashtabula, where it was DOE-directed, the taxpayers pay for it.'' ``I have never heard of that before,'' said Diana D'Arrigo of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a Washington-based public-interest research group. ``It sounds like a big ripoff.'' RMI, the largest subsidiary of a newly formed holding company, RTI International Metals Inc., is primarily a contractor to the military and commercial aerospace industries. RMI said it would have been difficult to allow an outside contractor onto its property to handle the cleanup, although it is subcontracting about 60 percent of the project to experienced firms. In 1993, RMI obtained a no-bid contract from the DOE to decontaminate its property. The current value of the contract, which is not fixed, is $188 million, The Plain Dealer reported. The project calls for the demolition and removal of 21 buildings and the excavation and disposal of 40,000 tons of contaminated soil. It is expected to be completed sometime around 2005. RMI has asked the DOE to pay about $1.5 million in uninsured liability for the cleanup of Fields Brook, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site. The brook, a heavily polluted tributary of the Ashtabula River, runs behind RMI's property. ``It appears that RMI is trying to extract as much out of DOE as they possibly can,'' Adelman said. ``I think that just adds more kindling to the fire.'' Titanium Cleanup-Glance http://www.ohio.com/bj/news/ohio/docs/005546.htm BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, Cleveland Plain Dealer, January 31, 1999 A look at Ohio's small weapons component facilities: -- Feed Materials Production Center, Fernald: Largest DOE weapons plant in Ohio. Processed uranium from Hanford and Savannah River nuclear reactors from 1951 to 1989. Annual cleanup budget exceeds $260 million. -- Alba Craft Laboratory, Oxford: Machine shop that produced uranium slugs for AEC reactors from 1952-57. -- Associated Aircraft and Tool Manufacturing Inc., Fairfield: Drilled and reamed uranium slugs for the Atomic Energy Commission in 1956. -- B&T Metals, Columbus: Extruded uranium metal rods for Hanford nuclear reactor during 1943. -- Battelle Columbus Laboratories, Columbus: Performed atomic energy research between 1943 and 1980. -- Baker Brothers, Toledo: Machined uranium rods into slugs to fuel the Oak Ridge graphite reactor in 1943-44. Also performed uranium machining for Hanford reactor. -- Copperweld Steel Co., Warren: Straightened and degassed uranium rods for Hanford and Oak Ridge reactors in 1943. -- Herring-Hall Marvin Safe Co., Hamilton: Machined uranium in slugs in 1943. -- Harshaw Chemical Co., Cleveland: Refined uranium for Oak Ridge in 1942-43. -- Brush Beryllium Co., Cleveland: Performed fuel and target fabrication for AEC in 1942-43. -- Brush Beryllium Co., Luckey: Processed beryllium and uranium in 1949-58. -- Mound, Miamisburg: Developed and built nuclear weapons components between 1947 and 1995. Also retrieved and recycled tritium from dismantled nuclear weapons. Annual cleanup budget exceeds $90 million. -- Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, Portsmouth: Began producing enriched uranium for nuclear submarine reactors and power plants in 1954. Still performs uranium enrichment for nuclear power utilities. -- RMI Titanium Co., Ashtabula: Formerly known as Reactive Metals Inc. From 1962 to 1988, extruded uranium received from Fernald for use as fuel and target fabrication at Hanford and Savannah River reactors. ---------------------------------------- 2. Some paid heavy price for radiation exposure http://www.cleveland.com/news/pdnews/metro/casick31.ssf Sunday, January 31, 1999 By TED WENDLING PLAIN DEALER REPORTER ASHTABULA - Chris Trepal remembers the day she was approached by a high school chemistry teacher while giving a presentation on the health and environmental hazards posed by RMI Titanium Co. "He told me one of his students had brought a hunk of uranium from RMI to school," said Trepal, who was giving a speech on behalf of the Sierra Club. "He said he told the kid to get it out of there. The kid said his dad brought it home. "I think RMI was really sloppy, but they were no different from every one of those nuclear weapons manufacturing plants. The whole industry was filthy. It had that cloak of secrecy and they did whatever they needed to get the job done, whatever the cost." During the 1980s, Trepal, joined by members of the Sunflower Alliance and Greenpeace, were unrelenting in their criticism of RMI, staging demonstrations near RMI's Ashtabula extrusion plant, lobbying Congress and bombarding regulators with requests for information. Widely viewed by RMI workers as outsiders and meddlers, the protesters got a boost in 1989 when Jack F. White, a former president of the United Steelworkers of America local that represented RMI's 100 employees, emerged as one of RMI's fiercest critics. White had worked as a forge inspector for 15 years before being stricken with an undiagnosed illness that made breathing difficult and caused him to suffer rashes, loose teeth, bleeding gums and blurred vision. A 1988 report by his doctor said White's symptoms "represent the results of continued exposures to uranium, plutonium and radiation." A decade later, White still lives in Ashtabula, not far from RMI. At 52, he said he has no desire to tangle with RMI again and declined requests for an interview. Trepal, who now co-directs the Earth Day Coalition in Cleveland, said White suffered terribly. "The weird thing about health and human risk is, I remember going to a union meeting with Jack and there were men there who were perfectly fine," she said. "They were as healthy as the day they were born, and then you had Jack, who was as sick as a dog." In even worse condition was Joe Pennington, another forge operator. During the mid-1980s, Pennington, 75, lapsed into a three-day coma, suffered kidney failure and contracted scleroderma, a disease in which his skin hardened. "Me and Jack met with a lawyer . . . but he said it [a lawsuit- would take years," Pennington said. "If we did that, they [RMI- would cut off our insurance and everything we had coming to us. We'd have nothing, so we decided not to sue. "RMI treated me pretty good, but they always said there was no danger. We had [radiation experts- come in one time, telling us the effects of uranium, like your hands would get all red and swell. Well, mine did. But when I asked them to look at my hands, they said, "Oh, that's not caused by uranium.' I said, "What the hell did you just get through saying?' "But they kept denying it, and it was a little after that that I came down sick. I couldn't walk 50 feet without sitting down, so I had to take retirement." Among RMI employees, forge inspectors received the highest skin radiation doses, a consultant's report warned in 1985. "Extremity doses have not yet been measured," the report added. "There is a potential for significant extremity doses, particularly for forge operators." Because uranium emits nonpenetrating alpha rays, it is most dangerous when inhaled or ingested, said Dr. Floro Miraldi, director emeritus of nuclear medicine at University Hospitals in Cleveland. That could occur from inhaling uranium particles or from eating or smoking after handling uranium, he said. At RMI, using gloves and masks or respirators would have all but eliminated the risk to workers, Miraldi said. But Pennington and Delton Fuller, another former employee, said that even though those items were provided, they weren't mandatory and so workers often didn't wear them. Pennington said he and White frequently handled the billets with their bare hands, wiping them down with penetrating oil and filing burrs on the tubes with metal files. Miraldi said that would explain the skin burns Pennington received. However, he warned: "Cancer can have many triggers. It's hard to pin it down because there are so many different things that can cause it." James W. Henderson, manager of RMI Environmental Services, a division of RMI Titanium that is overseeing the decontamination of the site, said he didn't know much about the company's health and safety standards in the 1960s and '70s. He said RMI's standards today exceed those of regulators. "The standards that are established by the regulators are the minimums that we have to meet," he said. "Internally, to my knowledge, we've always had [exposure- standards that are at least 10 percent below what the regulators require." By all indications, the cleanup of RMI is a minutely regulated undertaking. The preamble to the contract between the Department of Energy and RMI Environmental, which fills two large notebook binders, requires RMI to comply with eight regulatory agencies and laws that didn't exist during most of the period that RMI Titanium manufactured uranium bomb components for the government. Even the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has weighed in, informing RMI that the woods behind its plant provide "a potential habitat" for the Indiana bat, an endangered species. Despite the fact that no Indiana bats have been spotted on RMI's contaminated property, the federal agency has ordered RMI officials not to remove trees with shaggy bark or cavities in their trunks between May 1 and Aug. 31, the bats' prime nesting period. 3. RMI part of dirty nuclear legacy http://www.cleveland.com/news/pdnews/metro/cawash31.ssf Sunday, January 31, 1999 By TED WENDLING PLAIN DEALER REPORTER ASHTABULA - In 1990, when the Department of Energy forced RMI Titanium Co. to close its uranium extrusion operations here, environmental regulators realized that the 32-acre nuclear weapons-component plant had made a long-lasting contribution to a terrible national legacy. At 49 sites in 22 states, DOE atomic bomb-making operations had left in their wake an estimated 79 million cubic meters of contaminated soil, sediment, rubble and debris and 475 billion gallons of contaminated groundwater. The estimated price of the cleanup: $147 billion, making it the largest and most expensive environmental remediation project in world history. Because most of the weapons-production sites were owned by the government, U.S. taxpayers have been picking up the entire tab. That includes the cost of "decommissioning" even some privately owned sites such as RMI, which exercised a clause in its contract that required the DOE to pay for the cleanup. The company then formed an environmental engineering division, RMI Environmental Services, and obtained a $188 million, no-bid contract from the DOE to decontaminate its own property. The project calls for the demolition and removal of 21 buildings and the excavation and disposal of 40,000 tons of soil laden with uranium and radioactive technetium. Accidental spills and equipment leaks over the years also have left the soil contaminated with lead, barium, arsenic and trichloroethylene, a byproduct of a degreasing solvent. The soil alone would fill 7,000 trucks, each of which would have to be driven more than 1,600 miles to nuclear waste dumps in Utah or Nevada. Convinced that such an undertaking would be cost-prohibitive and present unacceptable transportation risks, DOE and RMI officials began experimenting with a technology that previously had been used to remove chemical pollutants from soil. They decided to "wash" the dirt. Soil washing was pioneered in Europe and first used in the United States in the early 1990s, but it has never been used on a large scale to remove radioactive contaminants, according to Ward E. Best, director of the DOE's Ashtabula Environmental Management Project. The plan calls for the excavation of contaminated soil to a depth of 18 inches. The soil will be loaded onto a conveyor system that transports it into a machine called a drum scrubber, which separates large material such as rocks and grass from coarse dirt and sand. The finer material will be mixed with a heated corbonate solution, fed through a machine that removes the soluble uranium and then sent through an ion-exchange system that extracts uranium from the liquid. The uranium will then be precipitated, producing "yellowcake," a uranium concentrate. Of the original 40,000 tons of soil, roughly 4,000 tons of yellowcake and soil that will be too contaminated to wash will have to be trucked off-site. Best said area residents and RMI employees have no reason to worry about accidental exposures to radiation. "Some guys have expressed some nervousness with me," he said, referring to plant workers. "I've explained it to them and some of the guys are comfortable with it and some are not. "It's not like I don't wander around that place. My daughter goes to preschool right across Route 11 [less than a mile from RMI]. It's not like I'm worried about that plant." Far more worrisome, Best said, are the risks associated with demolition and operating heavy equipment. "That's what's going to hurt somebody here if somebody gets hurt," he said. "The radioactive considerations are comparatively insignificant." _____________________________________________________________ * NucNews - to subscribe: prop1@prop1.org - http://prop1.org * Say "Please Subscribe NucNews" NucNews Archive: HTTP://WWW.ONELIST.COM/arcindex.cgi?listname=NucNews since January 13, 1999; for earlier editions - write prop1@prop1.org --------------------------------------- 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: _____________________________________________________________ --=====================_358904==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"
1. Environmentalists unhappy about RMI handling own cleanup
See Also: Titanium Cleanup-Glance

2. Some paid heavy price for radiation exposure

3. RMI - part of dirty nuclear legacy

-----------------------------------------

1. Environmentalists unhappy about RMI handling own cleanup


ASHTABULA, Ohio (AP) -- The Department of Energy's decision to let a northeast Ohio titanium company handle its own radiation cleanup raises conflicts of interest, environmental watchdog groups say.

RMI Titanium Co., which for decades during the Cold War forged uranium metal into plutonium for nuclear weapons, is working under a $188 million contract with the DOE to decontaminate its own property.

It's a job that needs to be done, but by someone else, said David Adelman, an attorney in the nuclear program at the Washington, D.C.-based Natural Resources Defense Council.

``The key issue is it's the fox guarding the henhouse,'' Adelman said in a story published Sunday in The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer. ``It's a combination of a conflict of interest both with regard to the degree of contamination at the site, as well as in obtaining the contract itself -- the circularity of all that.''

James Henderson, manager of RMI Environmental Services, said the company has everyone's best interests in mind.

``The company never expected that they were going to extract a pound of flesh, if you will, from the government to the disadvantage of the taxpayers, the DOE or anyone else.''

Kenneth Morgan, a spokesman for the DOE, said the agency has an on-site project manager who is monitoring costs and the progress of the cleanup.

``Essentially, what's expected is that whoever did the pollution is expected to clean it up,'' he said. ``In the case of Ashtabula, where it was DOE-directed, the taxpayers pay for it.''

``I have never heard of that before,'' said Diana D'Arrigo of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a Washington-based public-interest research group. ``It sounds like a big ripoff.''

RMI, the largest subsidiary of a newly formed holding company, RTI International Metals Inc., is primarily a contractor to the military and commercial aerospace industries.

RMI said it would have been difficult to allow an outside contractor onto its property to handle the cleanup, although it is subcontracting about 60 percent of the project to experienced firms.

In 1993, RMI obtained a no-bid contract from the DOE to decontaminate its property. The current value of the contract, which is not fixed, is $188 million, The Plain Dealer reported.

The project calls for the demolition and removal of 21 buildings and the excavation and disposal of 40,000 tons of contaminated soil. It is expected to be completed sometime around 2005.

RMI has asked the DOE to pay about $1.5 million in uninsured liability for the cleanup of Fields Brook, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site. The brook, a heavily polluted tributary of the Ashtabula River, runs behind RMI's property.

``It appears that RMI is trying to extract as much out of DOE as they possibly can,'' Adelman said. ``I think that just adds more kindling to the fire.'' 

Titanium Cleanup-Glance

BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, Cleveland Plain Dealer, January 31, 1999

A look at Ohio's small weapons component facilities:

-- Feed Materials Production Center, Fernald: Largest DOE weapons plant in Ohio. Processed uranium from Hanford and Savannah River nuclear reactors from 1951 to 1989. Annual cleanup budget exceeds $260 million.

-- Alba Craft Laboratory, Oxford: Machine shop that produced uranium slugs for AEC reactors from 1952-57.

-- Associated Aircraft and Tool Manufacturing Inc., Fairfield: Drilled and reamed uranium slugs for the Atomic Energy Commission in 1956.

-- B&T Metals, Columbus: Extruded uranium metal rods for Hanford nuclear reactor during 1943.

-- Battelle Columbus Laboratories, Columbus: Performed atomic energy research between 1943 and 1980.

-- Baker Brothers, Toledo: Machined uranium rods into slugs to fuel the Oak Ridge graphite reactor in 1943-44. Also performed uranium machining for Hanford reactor.

-- Copperweld Steel Co., Warren: Straightened and degassed uranium rods for Hanford and Oak Ridge reactors in 1943.

-- Herring-Hall Marvin Safe Co., Hamilton: Machined uranium in slugs in 1943.

-- Harshaw Chemical Co., Cleveland: Refined uranium for Oak Ridge in 1942-43.

-- Brush Beryllium Co., Cleveland: Performed fuel and target fabrication for AEC in 1942-43.

-- Brush Beryllium Co., Luckey: Processed beryllium and uranium in 1949-58.

-- Mound, Miamisburg: Developed and built nuclear weapons components between 1947 and 1995. Also retrieved and recycled tritium from dismantled nuclear weapons. Annual cleanup budget exceeds $90 million.

-- Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, Portsmouth: Began producing enriched uranium for nuclear submarine reactors and power plants in 1954. Still performs uranium enrichment for nuclear power utilities.

-- RMI Titanium Co., Ashtabula: Formerly known as Reactive Metals Inc. From 1962 to 1988, extruded uranium received from Fernald for use as fuel and target fabrication at Hanford and Savannah River reactors.

 ----------------------------------------

2. Some paid heavy price for radiation exposure


Sunday, January 31, 1999

By TED WENDLING PLAIN DEALER REPORTER

ASHTABULA - Chris Trepal remembers the day she was approached by a high school chemistry teacher while giving a presentation on the health and environmental hazards posed by RMI Titanium Co.

"He told me one of his students had brought a hunk of uranium from RMI to school," said Trepal, who was giving a speech on behalf of the Sierra Club. "He said he told the kid to get it out of there. The kid said his dad brought it home.

"I think RMI was really sloppy, but they were no different from every one of those nuclear weapons manufacturing plants. The whole industry was filthy. It had that cloak of secrecy and they did whatever they needed to get the job done, whatever the cost."

During the 1980s, Trepal, joined by members of the Sunflower Alliance and Greenpeace, were unrelenting in their criticism of RMI, staging demonstrations near RMI's Ashtabula extrusion plant, lobbying Congress and bombarding regulators with requests for information.

Widely viewed by RMI workers as outsiders and meddlers, the protesters got a boost in 1989 when Jack F. White, a former president of the United Steelworkers of America local that represented RMI's 100 employees, emerged as one of RMI's fiercest critics.

White had worked as a forge inspector for 15 years before being stricken with an undiagnosed illness that made breathing difficult and caused him to suffer rashes, loose teeth, bleeding gums and blurred vision. A 1988 report by his doctor said White's symptoms "represent the results of continued exposures to uranium, plutonium and radiation."

A decade later, White still lives in Ashtabula, not far from RMI. At 52, he said he has no desire to tangle with RMI again and declined requests for an interview.

Trepal, who now co-directs the Earth Day Coalition in Cleveland, said White suffered terribly.

"The weird thing about health and human risk is, I remember going to a union meeting with Jack and there were men there who were perfectly fine," she said. "They were as healthy as the day they were born, and then you had Jack, who was as sick as a dog."

In even worse condition was Joe Pennington, another forge operator. During the mid-1980s, Pennington, 75, lapsed into a three-day coma, suffered kidney failure and contracted scleroderma, a disease in which his skin hardened.

"Me and Jack met with a lawyer . . . but he said it [a lawsuit- would take years," Pennington said. "If we did that, they [RMI- would cut off our insurance and everything we had coming to us. We'd have nothing, so we decided not to sue.

"RMI treated me pretty good, but they always said there was no danger. We had [radiation experts- come in one time, telling us the effects of uranium, like your hands would get all red and swell. Well, mine did. But when I asked them to look at my hands, they said, "Oh, that's not caused by uranium.' I said, "What the hell did you just get through saying?'

"But they kept denying it, and it was a little after that that I came down sick. I couldn't walk 50 feet without sitting down, so I had to take retirement."

Among RMI employees, forge inspectors received the highest skin radiation doses, a consultant's report warned in 1985.

"Extremity doses have not yet been measured," the report added. "There is a potential for significant extremity doses, particularly for forge operators."

Because uranium emits nonpenetrating alpha rays, it is most dangerous when inhaled or ingested, said Dr. Floro Miraldi, director emeritus of nuclear medicine at University Hospitals in Cleveland. That could occur from inhaling uranium particles or from eating or smoking after handling uranium, he said.

At RMI, using gloves and masks or respirators would have all but eliminated the risk to workers, Miraldi said.

But Pennington and Delton Fuller, another former employee, said that even though those items were provided, they weren't mandatory and so workers often didn't wear them. Pennington said he and White frequently handled the billets with their bare hands, wiping them down with penetrating oil and filing burrs on the tubes with metal files.

Miraldi said that would explain the skin burns Pennington received. However, he warned: "Cancer can have many triggers. It's hard to pin it down because there are so many different things that can cause it."

James W. Henderson, manager of RMI Environmental Services, a division of RMI Titanium that is overseeing the decontamination of the site, said he didn't know much about the company's health and safety standards in the 1960s and '70s. He said RMI's standards today exceed those of regulators.

"The standards that are established by the regulators are the minimums that we have to meet," he said. "Internally, to my knowledge, we've always had [exposure- standards that are at least 10 percent below what the regulators require."

By all indications, the cleanup of RMI is a minutely regulated undertaking. The preamble to the contract between the Department of Energy and RMI Environmental, which fills two large notebook binders, requires RMI to comply with eight regulatory agencies and laws that didn't exist during most of the period that RMI Titanium manufactured uranium bomb components for the government.

Even the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has weighed in, informing RMI that the woods behind its plant provide "a potential habitat" for the Indiana bat, an endangered species.

Despite the fact that no Indiana bats have been spotted on RMI's contaminated property, the federal agency has ordered RMI officials not to remove trees with shaggy bark or cavities in their trunks between May 1 and Aug. 31, the bats' prime nesting period.

----------------------------------------

3. RMI part of dirty nuclear legacy


Sunday, January 31, 1999

By TED WENDLING PLAIN DEALER REPORTER

ASHTABULA - In 1990, when the Department of Energy forced RMI Titanium Co. to close its uranium extrusion operations here, environmental regulators realized that the 32-acre nuclear weapons-component plant had made a long-lasting contribution to a terrible national legacy.

At 49 sites in 22 states, DOE atomic bomb-making operations had left in their wake an estimated 79 million cubic meters of contaminated soil, sediment, rubble and debris and 475 billion gallons of contaminated groundwater.

The estimated price of the cleanup: $147 billion, making it the largest and most expensive environmental remediation project in world history.

Because most of the weapons-production sites were owned by the government, U.S. taxpayers have been picking up the entire tab. That includes the cost of "decommissioning" even some privately owned sites such as RMI, which exercised a clause in its contract that required the DOE to pay for the cleanup.

The company then formed an environmental engineering division, RMI Environmental Services, and obtained a $188 million, no-bid contract from the DOE to decontaminate its own property.

The project calls for the demolition and removal of 21 buildings and the excavation and disposal of 40,000 tons of soil laden with uranium and radioactive technetium. Accidental spills and equipment leaks over the years also have left the soil contaminated with lead, barium, arsenic and trichloroethylene, a byproduct of a degreasing solvent.

The soil alone would fill 7,000 trucks, each of which would have to be driven more than 1,600 miles to nuclear waste dumps in Utah or Nevada.

Convinced that such an undertaking would be cost-prohibitive and present unacceptable transportation risks, DOE and RMI officials began experimenting with a technology that previously had been used to remove chemical pollutants from soil.

They decided to "wash" the dirt.

Soil washing was pioneered in Europe and first used in the United States in the early 1990s, but it has never been used on a large scale to remove radioactive contaminants, according to Ward E. Best, director of the DOE's Ashtabula Environmental Management Project.

The plan calls for the excavation of contaminated soil to a depth of 18 inches. The soil will be loaded onto a conveyor system that transports it into a machine called a drum scrubber, which separates large material such as rocks and grass from coarse dirt and sand.

The finer material will be mixed with a heated corbonate solution, fed through a machine that removes the soluble uranium and then sent through an ion-exchange system that extracts uranium from the liquid. The uranium will then be precipitated, producing "yellowcake," a uranium concentrate.

Of the original 40,000 tons of soil, roughly 4,000 tons of yellowcake and soil that will be too contaminated to wash will have to be trucked off-site.

Best said area residents and RMI employees have no reason to worry about accidental exposures to radiation.

"Some guys have expressed some nervousness with me," he said, referring to plant workers. "I've explained it to them and some of the guys are comfortable with it and some are not.

"It's not like I don't wander around that place. My daughter goes to preschool right across Route 11 [less than a mile from RMI]. It's not like I'm worried about that plant."

Far more worrisome, Best said, are the risks associated with demolition and operating heavy equipment.

"That's what's going to hurt somebody here if somebody gets hurt," he said. "The radioactive considerations are comparatively insignificant."


_____________________________________________________________

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_____________________________________________________________ --=====================_358904==_.ALT-- - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Phyllis Turner Jepson/Local-Regional Coord." Subject: Re: (abolition-usa) New brochure Date: 01 Feb 1999 09:47:09 -0500 Dear Bob, Would you please send a sample brochures to the following addresses: Nancy Small, National Coordinator Pax Christi USA 532 W. 8th St. Erie, PA 16502 Dave Robinson, Program Coordinator Pax Christi USA 532 W. 8th St. Erie, PA 16502 Phyllis Turner Jepson Pax Christi USA Local/Regional Coordinator 442 33rd Street West Palm Beach, FL 33407 Thanks. Peace, Phyllis At 12:41 PM 1/26/99 -0500, you wrote: >Physicians for Social Responsibility is pleased to announce that in >February we will publish a new four-color brochure on abolition of >nuclear weapons, intended for mainstream distribution. The abolition >movement needs some easy-to-read pieces that are intended for the >general public, and we hope that this one will help to bring more people >into our effort and enlarge our base. > >The brochure was explicitly written so that other organizations will be >able to distribute it. While it mentions in two places that it is >produced by PSR, that fact is not featured prominently. Indeed, it >urges people to "join a group working to eliminate nuclear weapons," so >our hope is that other groups will want to distribute it. > >The back panel is left blank, but it is not a self-mailer. Thus you can >not only put your own mailing labels and postage, but also put on your >own return address. The size is approximately 5x7 inches. > >We will provide up to 50 brochures free to any organization that wants >them, though we will not pay for overnight mail. If you want more than >50, please contact me and we will discuss a price. > >For those who will be in Santa Barbara next month, I expect to have some >copies available for you there. > >We hope that this brochure will be helpful to you and to the abolition >effort. > >Shalom, >Bob Tiller, Physicians for Social Responsibility >phone 202-898-0150, ext. 220 >fax 202-898-0172 >e-mail > >- > To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" > with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. > For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send > "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. > +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Phyllis Turner Jepson Pax Christi USA Local/Regional Coordinator paxwpb@gate.net - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: DavidMcR@aol.com Subject: (abolition-usa) VitW 250 Mile Walk Against War reaches UN Date: 01 Feb 1999 13:56:03 EST << Subj: VitW 250 Mile Walk Against War reaches UN Date: 1/30/99 12:05:29 PM Eastern Standard Time From: kkelly@igc.apc.org (Kathy Kelly) To: kkelly@igc.apc.org ANNOUNCEMENT 250 Mile Walk Against War to arrive at United Nations on February 2, 1999 On February 2, 1999, at 12:30 p.m., Voices in the Wilderness members who will have walked 250 miles, from the Pentagon to the United Nations, carrying declarations of solidarity and support from people across the US, will meet supporters at First Avenue and 45th Street for a brief gathering across from the UN. They will then walk to the Isaiah Wall at 43rd Street and First Avenue, where they have invited UN representatives to join them. The walkers are carrying declarations from people across the United States that express solidarity with the campaign to stop the eight year state of siege which has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. Since leaving the Pentagon on January 15 to embark on an 18 day walk, the walkers have met with numerous groups, held media events, and spoken with many people along the route. Throughout the walk, they've encouraged people to express support for the United Nations as an organization founded "to eliminate the scourge of warfare." They've urged people to advocate that the UN now "walk away" from becoming an instrument of warfare. Voices in the Wilderness members assert that maintenance of economic sanctions against Iraq has constituted a lethal and devastating form of warfare that primarily brutalizes Iraqi children. UN statistics estimate that the deaths of 6,000 - 7,000 Iraqi children, each month, are directly attributable to economic sanctions. The sanctions clearly undermine the UN's credibility as an organization founded to eliminate the scourge of warfare. Their itinerary in New York also includes: February 1, 1999 7:30 p.m. CUNY Graduate Center Auditorium 33 @est 42nd Street: participation in a Citywide Teach-In call: 212-502-0707 February 2, 1999 11:00 a.m. morning walk from Maryhouse Catholic Worker, near Third Street and First Avenue, to the gathering spot across from the US Mission to the UN, 45th Street and First Avenue. For details about route and time, call Kathy Breen at the Maryhouse Catholic Worker: 212-777-9617 February 2, 1999 7:00 p.m. Candlelight vigil Isaiah Wall 43rd Street and First Avenue Walkers will light an Iraqi lantern with oil purchased in Iraq and encourage people and nations around the world to buy Iraqi oil and break the embargo. Contact: Susan Blake Peacesmith 516-798-0778 Sonia Ostrom Peace Action Metro NY 212-870-2304 For more information about the walk and its itinerary leading up to NY, call Voices in the Wilderness in Chicago at 773-784-8065 or Rick McDowell, 312-543-6540 or Trish Schuh at 212-673-1376 Voices in the Wilderness, a campaign to end the UN/US embargo against Iraq, has sent 19 delegations to Iraq in violation of the UN/US sanctions. Members oppose the development, storage sale and use of any weapons, whether nuclear, chemical, biological, conventional, or, in the case of sanctions, economic. The US government has issued them a pre-penalty notice of $160,000 in fines, charging that they have committed a crime by bringing "medicines and toys" to Iraq. The campaign has clarified that they will not pay any penalties, that they will continue to bring medicines to Iraq and that they invite US government members to join them in their efforts. Voices in the Wilderness A Campaign to End the US/UN Economic Sanctions Against the People of Iraq 1460 West Carmen Ave. Chicago, IL 60640 ph:773-784-8065; fax: 773-784-8837 email: kkelly@igc.apc.org website: http://www.nonviolence.org/vitw - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peace though Reason Subject: (abolition-usa) NucNews (US) 2/02/99 - Comments needed: Dawn Mining; DOE Budget Date: 02 Feb 1999 06:30:50 -0500 --=====================_33247364==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" 1. Washington State Department of Health Approves Renewal of License to Close Uranium Mill (and ship in radioactive waste) - COMMENTS NEEDED http://nt.excite.com/news/bw/990129/wa-state-dept-health 2. U.S. Budget: Energy Initiatives http://www.nytimes.com/library/politics/020299budget-spend-energy.html 1. Washington State Department of Health Approves Renewal of License to Close Uranium Mill (and ship in radioactive waste) - COMMENTS NEEDED http://nt.excite.com/news/bw/990129/wa-state-dept-health OLYMPIA, Wash. (BUSINESS WIRE January 29, 1999) - The Washington State Department of Health today approved the renewal of Dawn Mining Company's license to continue with the closure of a former uranium mill near Ford, about 30 miles northwest of Spokane. Closure activities include importing slightly radioactive material from other sites in the U.S. for permanent impoundment at the Dawn site. "We're convinced that the company's plan and our licensing conditions protect public health and safety and the environment," said Acting Department of Health Secretary Mary Selecky. "There's been a lot of local concern about this activity, so we extended the deadline for public comment to make sure we heard what everyone had to say." One of the main concerns of local residents was the effect of numerous heavy trucks transporting imported mill tailings on State Route 231 between Reardan and Ford. The state Department of Transportation studied the issue and determined that there would be increased wear and tear but that safety would not be adversely affected. The company has agreed to cover possible costs of road repairs. To ensure safety, the renewed license requires that hauling not take place while school buses are running their regular before and after school routes, that truck drivers be paid hourly rather than by the load to discourage speeding, that the trucks stop only for emergencies, and that emergency responders get additional safety training. "We welcome ongoing public input on this," said Selecky. "If new facts come to light, we can impose additional requirements needed to protect public health and the environment." 2. U.S. Budget: Energy Initiatives http://www.nytimes.com/library/politics/020299budget-spend-energy.html By MATTHEW L. WALD, February 2, 1999 New York Times The Energy Department's operating budget for the 2000 fiscal year would rise $717 million, or 4.1 percent about the 1999 figure, not counting one-time expenditures this year like buying enriched uranium from Russia and helping that country safeguard plutonium. Spending in 2000 would be $17.8 billion, about the same as what the department is spending this year, including those one-time expenditures. The Administration wants to spend $208 million more on renewable energy and energy efficiency, and $138 million for science projects, including supercomputers and a new nuclear laboratory at Oak Ridge, Tenn., that would use neutrons to investigate the properties of matter. The proposal also includes $109 million for "threats of nuclear, biological and chemical proliferation," and for doubling the counterintelligence effort, because of penetration of the department's laboratories by foreign spies. Other areas that would get big increases include a testing program for nuclear weapons that substitutes for explosions, and environmental clean-up of former weapons sites. The budget also proposes to pay for maintenance of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve out of tax revenues, rather than sales from the reserve, and the Energy Secretary, Bill Richardson, said he would soon propose some way to add oil. He said that this would not be a "budgetary initiative" but did not say how he planned to pay for increasing the reserve, which is at 561 million barrels, roughly two months' worth of imports. The budget also calls for $86.5 million, up from $78.5 million, for health studies of workers and people who live near weapons plants. The department is trying to determine, with the Department of Health and Human Services, which sites most merit study. _____________________________________________________________ * NucNews - to subscribe: prop1@prop1.org - http://prop1.org * Say "Please Subscribe NucNews" NucNews Archive: HTTP://WWW.ONELIST.COM/arcindex.cgi?listname=NucNews since January 13, 1999; for earlier editions - write prop1@prop1.org --------------------------------------- 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: _____________________________________________________________ --=====================_33247364==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"
1. Washington State Department of Health Approves
Renewal of License to Close Uranium Mill (and ship in radioactive waste)
- COMMENTS NEEDED

2. U.S. Budget: Energy Initiatives

----------------------------------------

1. Washington State Department of Health Approves
Renewal of License to Close Uranium Mill (and ship in radioactive waste)
- COMMENTS NEEDED


OLYMPIA, Wash. (BUSINESS WIRE January 29, 1999) - The Washington State Department of Health today approved the renewal of Dawn Mining Company's license to continue with the closure of a former uranium mill near Ford, about 30 miles northwest of Spokane.

Closure activities include importing slightly radioactive material from other sites in the U.S. for permanent impoundment at the Dawn site.

"We're convinced that the company's plan and our licensing conditions protect public health and safety and the environment," said Acting Department of Health Secretary Mary Selecky. "There's been a lot of local concern about this activity, so we extended the deadline for public comment to make sure we heard what everyone had to say."

One of the main concerns of local residents was the effect of numerous heavy trucks transporting imported mill tailings on State Route 231 between Reardan and Ford. The state Department of Transportation studied the issue and determined that there would be increased wear and tear but that safety would not be adversely affected. The company has agreed to cover possible costs of road repairs.

To ensure safety, the renewed license requires that hauling not take place while school buses are running their regular before and after school routes, that truck drivers be paid hourly rather than by the load to discourage speeding, that the trucks stop only for emergencies, and that emergency responders get additional safety training.

"We welcome ongoing public input on this," said Selecky. "If new facts come to light, we can impose additional requirements needed to protect public health and the environment."

----------------------------------------

2. U.S. Budget: Energy Initiatives


By MATTHEW L. WALD, February 2, 1999 New York Times

The Energy Department's operating budget for the 2000 fiscal year would rise $717 million, or 4.1 percent about the 1999 figure, not counting one-time expenditures this year like buying enriched uranium from Russia and helping that country safeguard plutonium. Spending in 2000 would be $17.8 billion, about the same as what the department is spending this year, including those one-time expenditures.

The Administration wants to spend $208 million more on renewable energy and energy efficiency, and $138 million for science projects, including supercomputers and a new nuclear laboratory at Oak Ridge, Tenn., that would use neutrons to investigate the properties of matter. The proposal also includes $109 million for "threats of nuclear, biological and chemical proliferation," and for doubling the counterintelligence effort, because of penetration of the department's laboratories by foreign spies.

Other areas that would get big increases include a testing program for nuclear weapons that substitutes for explosions, and environmental clean-up of former weapons sites.

The budget also proposes to pay for maintenance of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve out of tax revenues, rather than sales from the reserve, and the Energy Secretary, Bill Richardson, said he would soon propose some way to add oil. He said that this would not be a "budgetary initiative" but did not say how he planned to pay for increasing the reserve, which is at 561 million barrels, roughly two months' worth of imports.

The budget also calls for $86.5 million, up from $78.5 million, for health studies of workers and people who live near weapons plants. The department is trying to determine, with the Department of Health and Human Services, which sites most merit study.

 
_____________________________________________________________

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_____________________________________________________________ --=====================_33247364==_.ALT-- - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Norm and Karen Cohen Subject: (abolition-usa) Rally at Salem Nuke Plant 3/27 1-3 pm; its the 20th anniv of TMI meldown Date: 02 Feb 1999 10:14:47 -0500 Apologies to those who get this more than once, since I'm posting to so many lists, but its important. Please forward this announcement to your lists, please put in any group newsletters you might have: The UNPLUG Salem Campaign will be holding a rally at the Salem Nuke Plant, on Saturday, March 27th, from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM. The rally is to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Three Mile Island Meltdown, and to continue UNPLUG's campaign to shut down the two dangerous Salem Nukes. The Salem Nukes are in Lower Alloways Township, near Salem, NJ, just across the Delaware Memorial Bridge from Wilmington, Delaware. Confirmed speakers at the rally include: Wenonah Hauter, Director of Citizen Action's Critical Mass Energy Project (Citizen Action is one of Ralph Nader's groups): Joe Mangano, Associate Director of the Radiation Public Health Project: Norm Cohen, Executive Director of the Coalition for Peace and Justice; Jane Nogaki, Director of the NJ Environmental Federation; Madelyn Hoffman, Green Party Organizer; and Maya Von Rossum, Director of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network. Musicians such as blue singer Dennis Donnelly and the Eco-Chorale will be lending their talents to the event. We will also have a solar power demonstration area. We urge everyone in Delaware, New Jersey, and Eastern Pennsylvania to join with us in making this rally the biggest demonstration at Salem in the last 20 years. This is an important time to keep up the pressure on PSE&G and our legislators. Investigations of the NRC are going on in Congress, and deregulation in New Jersey will be making it harder for nuke plants to be profitable. Add to this the recent TMI-like accident at Salem II, and the time is right to demand to PSE&G that they turn off Salem now. UNPLUG Salem is a coalition of 54 environmental, college, citizen, peace, and religious organizations who's aim is to shut down the two dangerous Salem Nuke Plants. These two plants are rated #1 and #8 most dangerous in the US by Public Citizen. The NRC has fined PSE&G, the operator of the plants, millions. These plants kill BILLIONS of fish each year because they lack cooling towers. And nuke plants all produce high level nuke waste, which our government wants to bury at Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, even though the burial site is not safe. Organizations in UNPLUG include: NJ PIRG, Pennsylvania Environmental Network (PEN), Green Delaware, Clean Ocean Action, Physicians for Social Responsibility, SEAC-Region 13, NIRS (Nuclear Information Resource Service), Fish Unlimited, NJ Environmental Federation, Delaware Valley Peace Action, SJ Campaign for Peace and Justice, Coalition for Peace and Justice, Anne Arundel Peace Action, Stockton Peace Action, and many more. For information on the rally, to volunteer to perform or speak, to endorse UNPLUG, for directions, or for more information, please contact Norm Cohen, South Jersey Coordinator, PO BOX 2344, Cape May NJ 08204, 609-886-7988/889-8667 or norco@bellatlantic.net We welcome new endorsers for the UNPLUG Campaign from anywhere in our region. For directions to the rally site, to volunteer to help out, if you are a musician who wishes to volunteer to perform, or for more information, please contact: Norm Cohen, PO Box 2344, Cape May, NJ 08204; 609-886-7988/889-8667 or norco@bellatlantic.net. Coalition for Peace and Justice and UNPLUG Salem Campaign PO Box 2344, Cape May, NJ 08204 609-886-7988 or 609-889-8667 - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: DavidMcR@aol.com Subject: (abolition-usa) Re: Penny Poll Results on Clinton Budget Proposal Date: 02 Feb 1999 13:34:52 EST In a message dated 2/2/99 10:25:47 AM Eastern Standard Time, wrl@igc.apc.o= rg writes: << Subj:=09 Penny Poll Results on Clinton Budget Proposal Date:=092/2/99 10:25:47 AM Eastern Standard Time From:=09wrl@igc.apc.org (War Resisters League) February 2, 1999=09=09Contact: Chris Ney or Ruth Benn FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE=09(212) 228-0450 THE BUDGET: BROOKLYNITES SAY PUT IT IN EDUCATION AND HEALTH CARE; Poll Shows Overwhelming Preference For Social Programs Over Military NEW YORK, February 2, 1999=97More than 100 voters in a 90-minute "penny p= oll" conducted today in Brooklyn's Cadman Plaza opted to have the lion's share of the federal budget go to education (24%) and health care (24%). They allocated the smallest amounts to foreign aid (4%) and the military (4%). =09The poll was held to measure New Yorkers' support for the priorities outlined in President Clinton's budget for fiscal year 2000, released today. Clinton has proposed an increase in military spending of more tha= n $110 billion over the next six years=97the largest such increase since Ro= nald Reagan's first term at the height of the Cold War. If the Brooklyn penny poll participants are typical, Clinton's proposed allocation of federal dollars is exactly the reverse of what most Americans want. =09Penny poll participants indicated how they would like the government t= o spend their tax dollars by putting pennies into containers marked "Housing," "Education," "Public Transportation," "Military," etc. Ten pennies were provided to each respondent by the War Resisters League, the 75-year-old antiwar group that held the poll. When the pennies were counted, participants had voted 1,131 pennies for the following budget priorities: =09 Education=09=09256=0923%=09 Health Care=09=09256=0923% Housing=09=09153=0912% Environment/Energy=09106=099% Income Assistance=0979=097% Nutrition=09=0979=097%=09 National Debt=09=0969=096% Mass Transit=09=0969=096% Foreign Aid=09=0948=094% Military =09=0940=093% =09The poll took place during a protest against the presidential budget bonanza for the Pentagon. Opponents of Clinton's budget proposal and U.S= . military spending, which totals more than 50 percent of Federal expenditures, argue that those priorities damage communities at home and abroad. Notes Chris Ney, Disarmament Coordinator for the War Resisters League, "In addition to domestic needs that will go unmet so the Pentagon can buy more cruise missiles, a major boost in U.S. military spending wil= l in the long run increase international instability, spark regional arms races and lead ultimately to more wars and violence." ********** War Resisters League 339 Lafayette St. New York, NY 10012 212-228-0450 212-228-6193 (fax) 1-800-975-9688 (YouthPeace and A Day Without the Pentagon) wrl@igc.apc.org web address: http://www.nonviolence.org/wrl >> - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Jackie Cabasso Subject: (abolition-usa) Russian activist responds to DOE budget request Date: 02 Feb 1999 18:51:32 -0800 (PST) Socio-ecological Union 121019, Russia, Moscow, P.O. Box 211 Tel/fax: (095)278-4642; e-mail: ecodefense@glas.apc.org ======================================================= For immediate release: February 2, 1999 Contact: Vladimir Sliviak (415) 695-8786 (thru Feb. 5) or via email at ecodefense@glasnet.ru. Jackie Cabasso, Western States Legal Foundation (510)839-5877 Marylia Kelley, Tri-Valley CAREs (925)443-7148 DOE FY2000 BUDGET FOR RUSSIAN NUCLEAR INDUSTRY REFLECTS WASTEFUL AND MISGUIDED POLICIES OAKLAND, CA -- "The Department of Energy's FY2000 budget allocations for the disposition of Russian weapons-grade plutonium and improving nuclear reactor safety in the former Soviet Union are both fiscally unrealistic and technically unsound," according to Vladimir Sliviak, a visiting international activist working on nuclear issues in Russia. Sliviak, a member of the Socio-Ecological Union of Russia (Moscow) and ECODEFENSE! (Kaliningrad) attended yesterday's fiscal year 2000 Department of Energy (DOE) budget briefing at DOE's Oakland operations office, along with American anti-nuclear activists from the Western States Legal Foundation and Tri-Valley Citizens Against a Radioactive Environment. Sliviak added: "DOE's proposal to spend $200 million over a three-year period on plutonium conversion and mixed oxide (MOX) fuel fabrication facilities in particular poses a great proliferation risk and will continue to be met with resistance by activists in both countries." According to Sliviak, "What is sure to eventuate with the Russian MOX program directly contradicts the stated goal of DOE's plutonium disposition program: to take weapons-grade plutonium out of circulation by converting it into a form that prohibits its use in any future weapons production." Russia intends to "ultimately recycle any plutonium left in the MOX spent fuel" (Joint United States/Russian Plutonium Disposition Study, September 1996, p. ExSum-2, p. WR-35-37) and the Russian Minister of Atomic Power, Evgeny Adamov, has publicly stated that his agency would prefer to use MOX fuel in breeder reactors in order to generate more plutonium for a Russian MOX program of indefinite length. Sliviak said: "Transport of MOX fuel to civilian nuclear reactors, where security is much less stringent than at the military sites where weapons-grade plutonium is currently stored, also flies in the face of what DOE claims will solve both proliferation and stockpile security problems. The reprocessing of MOX fuel would ultimately lead not to a decrease in the amount of plutonium in Russia but rather an increase in stockpiles and promulgation of a plutonium economy which is not in the interest of either the environment nor democratic participation in determining Russia's energy future. Furthermore," he added, "a MOX program will produce large amounts of plutonium-contaminated waste, the handling of which is apparently not included in DOE's budget in spite of the fact that Minatom has not yet developed a strategy nor allocated sufficient resources to handle the radioactive waste accumulated during the Cold War." The MOX program, whether or not funded by DOE, will continue to be met with significant resistance from Russian and other grassroots environmental groups. According to Sliviak: "A much more cost-effective and environmentally - as well as politically - sound approach for disposition is to immobilize the plutonium through vitrification and safe and secure storage." In regards to reactor safety, DOE proposes $34 million to cover safety upgrades in 65 Soviet-designed reactors and the decommissioning of Chernobyl. Sliviak stated: "The precedent set by Westinghouse in making safety upgrades to the Temelin reactor in the Czech Republic, which cost at least $500 million per unit to re-engineer, the amount allocated by DOE for 65 reactors is outrageously unrealistic." He concluded: "Nuclear safety standards at Russian reactors fall considerably below what is required in the U.S. and combined with the costs expected to decommission Chenobyl's four units, it is difficult to understand what DOE planners were thinking when they arrived at the sum of $34 million." # # # ******************************************** WESTERN STATES LEGAL FOUNDATION 1440 Broadway, Suite 500 Oakland, CA USA 94612 Tel: (510)839-5877 Fax: (510)839-5397 wslf@igc.apc.org ********** Part of ABOLITION 2000 ********** Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: nukeresister@igc.org (Jack & Felice Cohen-Joppa) Subject: (abolition-usa) Proposal regarding Mission Statement & strategies Date: 02 Feb 1999 23:08:12 -0700 Dear fellow Abolitionists, I regret I cannot attend the meeting in Santa Barbara. Instead I offer my very best wishes and these personal views, informed by - but not representing - the Nuclear Resister newsletter I co-edit with Felice Cohen-Joppa. Together with other political tactics, I believe that the new U.S. campaign for nuclear weapons abolition should explicitly endorse "nonviolent direct action for nuclear disarmament" without reference to "civil disobedience." I hope the group would be unafraid to make the argument that nuclear weapons are what is illegal and unjust, in contrast to the legitimacy of nonviolent direct actions that educate the public and inhibit the political and material capability of the nation to use or threaten to use these weapons. This argument is being asserted creatively in the breech of the local courts of Scotland and England by the Trident Ploughshares 2000 Campaign [see and related comments of David McKnight, CND chair, in email excerpt below]. The argument is also evident in the phenomena of Citizen Weapons Inspections (see the Nuclear Resister #113 , page 2, and Vincent Romano's report of the Fellowship of Reconciliation's experience with this action scenario, among others). For this group NOT to address NVDA would be to ignominiously ignore acts of individual and collective conscience which have resulted in over 60,000 arrests in North America alone over the past half century, in the process playing a vital role in public education and agitation for a nuclear-free future at various points in our history. A separate question is whether this group would actively be involved in planning, endorsing, or coordinating particular NVDA campaigns. This question need not necessarily be considered now. Traditionally, major national groups advocating nuclear arms reduction or abolition have shunned any activity hinting of "civil disobedience." Arguments for this stance include statements that such acts are "ineffective"; that they alienate a more liberal, less radical constituency; and that they put at risk an organization's nonprofit status. If asked, I would be happy to address these and other arguments in the interests of healthy debate (but not in this email). For now, I will only ask that as you consider this question, recall that while the movement for nuclear abolition stumbled in the wake of the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty, groups such as the Community for Nonviolent Action stood up and carried the goal forward in their hearts and lives. Theirs and other nonviolent direct activism prepared the ground for the anti-nuclear resurgence of the 70s and 80s that made nuclear power, euromissiles, and warheads by the tens of thousands politically unsupportable. And after Reagan trumped the Freeze with warhead cuts, and the Freeze folded not long after failing to support the nascent American Peace Test (APT), it was APT and other organizations committed to NVDA who significantly carried forward the public demand for a total test ban and nuclear abolition into the current decade. Their nonviolent direct actions at the NTS even inspired a namesake movement in Kazakhstan (the Nevada-Semipalatinsk Movement) that successfully forced an end to Soviet nuclear tests in Central Asia. This is history made perhaps too simple, but these snapshots illustrate a movement leadership that has sometimes played footsey with success, overlooking or dismissing the significance of acts of conscience while accepting accommodation with policy makers and tax laws. We have conscience, morality, law, and history on our side as we struggle for nuclear abolition. I hope in your deliberations you will embrace tactics and strategies that embody in their nonviolent character the best of the nuclear free future we envision. Thanks for considering my views. Jack Cohen-Joppa PS FYI - by way of suggested introductions, I first got involved in the movement for nuclear weapons abolition in the fall of 1977, preparing for the April, 1978 Nuclear Crossroads demonstration at Rocky Flats. I then took part in the Rocky Flats Truth Force's NVDA blockade of the railroad tracks at Rocky Flats until the fall of 1979. Since 1980 I have co-edited the newsletter now known as the Nuclear Resister. The Nuclear Resister is a comprehensive chronicle of anti-nuclear and anti-war civil disobedience in the US and Canada, encouraging support for the women and men jailed as a result of these acts of conscience. In this capacity, my co-editor and wife Felice and I have actively sought to network anti-nuclear nonviolent direct actionists across the continent, and have met (sometimes in prison visiting rooms) with NVDA practitioners from coast to coast. There are currently about 800 subscribers in North America, and about 80 overseas. I was the only U.S. resident to participate in the delivery of the Nuclear Weapons Abolition Days Citizens' Summons to NATO heads of state in Madrid, July 1997, on the first anniversary of the ICJ advisory opinion on nuclear weapons. I recently addressed the 2nd National Conference on Civil Disobedience held at American University on the subject of "A Brief History of Anti-Nuclear Civil Disobedience in North America." This talk was taped and occasionally broadcast on C-Span during the last week. I am also an associate coordinator of the US Campaign to Free Mordechai Vanunu. {from a recent email} >>Friends, >> >>Over 50 people gathered in Lancaster Friends Meeting House last Saturday, >>(January 30) >>afternoon to hear Ann-Britt and Annika'a story about their arrest and >>imprisonment on remand following their 13th September action in >>Barrow-in-Furness along with Stellan who wasn't able to join us on the day. >> >>Ann-Britt and Annika's thoughful and quiet commitment to the nuclear >>disarmament cause impressed all who came to pack the small room where >>between 20 and 30 people had been expected. ... >>Dave Knight, Chair CND, spoke of CND's priorites for this final year before >>the millennium. He summarised his enthusiasm for ALE - ACTION, LOBBYING & >>EDUCATION - something for everybody campaigning, where all contributions >>are equally valued. He referred to the significance of NVDA in general and >>to the TP2000 actions at Faslane in particular, in challenging official >>policy. >> - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peace though Reason Subject: (abolition-usa) Feb. 16 Nevada nuclear waste summit (FWD) Date: 03 Feb 1999 14:22:18 -0500 --=====================_56597358==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Return-Path: owner-fnb-l@tao.ca From (REPLY TO): "Gary Vesperman (by way of Chris Gehlker)" <vman@SKYLINK.NET Hello! Below is an e-mail I sent to Hal Fox Thursday. We are trying to arrange for sponsorship by the Nevada Governor's office for the LENT demo at the Feb. 16 nuclear waste summit in Carson City. I thought some of your members may like to drive over and see the demo, if it is held. We have a few little nuclear problems like Iraq possibly acting up in preparation for smuggling nuclear bombs next to some of our nuclear power plants. The figure I remember is that a 1000-megawatt nuclear power plant running at full power for one year accumulates the radioactive equivalent of 2,300 Hiroshima atomic bombs. One Hiroshima bomb killed, and is still killing, 300,000 people. Let's assume a complex of two large elderly nuclear power plants in Illinois has in its waste fuel storage pools 10,000 Hiroshima bombs of radioactivity. Iraq smuggles in just one bomb and blows it up. (Notice that I did not say that an ICBM is needed to deliver the bomb.) We would then have a situation in our agricultural heartland far worse than Chernobyl. I remember reading that Italy alone had to dispose of $750,000,000 worth of radioactivity-contaminated food. I still try not to buy food imported from Europe. I recently saw a report that the inspectors never found and destroyed Iraq's nuclear apparatus. Their technical people are now free to finish building their own bombs within a few months. Iraq has been acting strangely confident lately with its saber-rattling. What the low-energy nuclear transmutation technology offers is a method of easily transmuting the radioactivity out of the waste nuclear fuel. I had sent out the e-mail to the environmental community to try to wake them up and stop wasting time and money on Yucca Mountain. Please support the development of the LENT process so that we can reduce the risk of nuclear terrorism. I don't think we have time to lose. Please forward this message to other nuclear activists. For more information about the conference, call the Nevada Governor's office at 775-684-5670. Thank you! Gary Vesperman 3123 Trueno Road Henderson, NV 89014-3142 702-435-7947 vman@skylink.net Dr. Hal Fox, President Trenergy, Inc. 3084 East 3300 South Salt Lake City, Utah 84109-2154 Voice 801-466-8680; Fax 801-466-8668 Hal, I am mailing a clipping from yesterday's Review-Journal stating that Nevada's new governor, Kenny Guinn, is inviting Nevada's congressional delegation and top elected state officials to a "State Summit on Nuclear Waste" in Carson City on Feb. 16. Below is part of the text of an e-mail from Dr. Bass, co-inventor of the theory of Low-Energy Nuclear Transmutation (LENT), along with you and Dr. Jin. It is absurd that so much money is still being wasted on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository when the radioactivity can be transmuted out of the waste nuclear fuel using a trivial amount of electricity. Opening up the referenced site, http://web.gcis.net/cincygrp , shows a color photo of a flake of non-radioactive copper that used to be radioactive thorium! How much would it cost to truck the LENT apparatus to Carson City and back to SLC? Let me know ASAP so I can call around for donations to cover the cost of the demonstration of transmuting thorium to copper, etc. Thanks, Gary Vesperman cc: Sara Besser (Senator Bryan's office) Senator Harry Reid Governor Kenny Guinn Congressman James Gibbons Congresswoman Shelley Berkely (Part of Dr. Bass's Oct. 17, 1997 e-mail follows next.) The next issue of _Journal of New Energy_ (an archival, peer-reviewed journal Abstracted in _Chemical Abstracts_, etc.) will contain a paper: "Operating the LENT-1 Transmutation Reactor" by Drs. Fox & Jin, who report successful transmutation of 0.1 gram of Thorium 12 times out of 12 runs, using 3 cents worth of electricity, in 30 minutes, and therefore submit this Low Energy Nuclear Transmutation (LENT) process is now a "scientific FACT" rather than an irreproducible anomaly (or a "faith-promoting rumor").... ======================================================= Robert W. Bass, M.A. Oxon [Rhodes Scholar]; Ph.D. [Johns Hopkins] Registered Patent Agent # 29,130 [ex-Prof Physics] Inventor: Topolotron, Plasmasphere, issued Innoventech, Inc. Authorized Distributor, Low Energy Nuclear Transmutation (LENT) for Radwaste Remediation (RR) Money-Back Guaranteed Systems, e.g. Cincinnati Group (CG) LENT-1^[tm] Kit, Price $3,000 See http://web.gcis.net/cincygrp (End of message) To leave this list write to LISTSERV@LISTS.SIERRACLUB.ORG and, in the text of your message (not the subject line), write: SIGNOFF GC-GENERAL vegetarian, nonviolence, consensus -Food Not Bombs List fnb-l@tao.ca -distributing food in opposition to violence -archive: http://archive.foodnotbombs.ca -active cities: http://webcom.com/peace -send '(un)subscribe fnb-l' to majordomo@tao.ca ____________________________________________________________ * Peace Through Reason - http://prop1.org -Convert the War Machines! * ____________________________________________________________ --=====================_56597358==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" Return-Path: owner-fnb-l@tao.ca

From (REPLY TO): "Gary Vesperman (by way of Chris Gehlker)"
<vman@SKYLINK.NET
GC-GENERAL@LISTS.SIERRACLUB.ORG
 
Hello!
 
Below is an e-mail I sent to Hal Fox Thursday.
 
We are trying to arrange for sponsorship by the Nevada
Governor's office for the LENT demo at the Feb. 16
nuclear waste summit in Carson City. I thought some of
your members may like to drive over and see the demo, if it is held.
 
We have a few little nuclear problems like Iraq possibly
acting up in preparation for smuggling nuclear bombs
next to some of our nuclear power plants. The figure I
remember is that a 1000-megawatt nuclear power plant
running at full power for one year accumulates the
radioactive equivalent of 2,300 Hiroshima atomic bombs.
One Hiroshima bomb killed, and is still killing, 300,000
people.
 
Let's assume a complex of two large elderly nuclear
power plants in Illinois has in its waste fuel storage pools
10,000 Hiroshima bombs of radioactivity. Iraq smuggles
in just one bomb and blows it up. (Notice that I did not say
that an ICBM is needed to deliver the bomb.) We would then
have a situation in our agricultural heartland far worse
than Chernobyl. I remember reading that Italy alone had to
dispose of $750,000,000 worth of radioactivity-contaminated
food. I still try not to buy food imported from Europe.
 
I recently saw a report that the inspectors never found and destroyed
Iraq's nuclear apparatus. Their technical people are now
free to finish building their own bombs within a few months.
Iraq has been acting strangely confident lately with its saber-rattling.
 
What the low-energy nuclear transmutation technology offers is
a method of easily transmuting the radioactivity out of the waste
nuclear fuel. I had sent out the e-mail to the environmental community
to try to wake them up and stop wasting time and money on Yucca
Mountain. Please support the development of the LENT process so
that we can reduce the risk of nuclear terrorism. I don't think we have
time to lose.
 
Please forward this message to other nuclear activists.
 
For more information about the conference, call the Nevada Governor's office
at 775-684-5670.
 
Thank you!
 
Gary Vesperman
3123 Trueno Road
Henderson, NV 89014-3142
702-435-7947
vman@skylink.net
 

Dr. Hal Fox, President
Trenergy, Inc.
3084 East 3300 South
Salt Lake City, Utah 84109-2154
Voice 801-466-8680; Fax 801-466-8668
 
Hal,
 
I am mailing a clipping from yesterday's Review-Journal stating
that Nevada's new governor, Kenny Guinn, is inviting Nevada's
congressional delegation and top elected state officials to a
"State Summit on Nuclear Waste" in Carson City on Feb. 16.
 
Below is part of the text of an e-mail from Dr. Bass, co-inventor
of the theory of Low-Energy Nuclear Transmutation (LENT), along with
you and Dr. Jin. It is absurd that so much money is still being wasted
on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository when the
radioactivity can be transmuted out of the waste nuclear fuel
using a trivial amount of electricity. Opening up the referenced
site, http://web.gcis.net/cincygrp , shows a color photo of a flake
of non-radioactive copper that used to be radioactive thorium!
 
How much would it cost to truck the LENT apparatus to
Carson City and back to SLC? Let me know ASAP
so I can call around for donations to cover the cost of the
demonstration of transmuting thorium to copper, etc.
 
Thanks,
 
Gary Vesperman
 
cc: Sara Besser (Senator Bryan's office)
Senator Harry Reid
Governor Kenny Guinn
Congressman James Gibbons
Congresswoman Shelley Berkely
 
(Part of Dr. Bass's Oct. 17, 1997 e-mail follows next.)
 
The next issue of _Journal of New Energy_ (an archival, peer-reviewed
journal Abstracted in _Chemical Abstracts_, etc.) will contain a paper:
"Operating the LENT-1 Transmutation Reactor" by Drs. Fox & Jin,
who report successful transmutation of 0.1 gram of Thorium 12 times
out of 12 runs, using 3 cents worth of electricity, in 30 minutes, and
therefore submit this Low Energy Nuclear Transmutation (LENT) process
is now a "scientific FACT" rather than an irreproducible anomaly
(or a "faith-promoting rumor")....
 
=======================================================
Robert W. Bass, M.A. Oxon [Rhodes Scholar]; Ph.D. [Johns Hopkins]
Registered Patent Agent # 29,130 [ex-Prof Physics]
Inventor: Topolotron, Plasmasphere, issued
 
Innoventech, Inc.
Authorized Distributor, Low Energy Nuclear Transmutation (LENT) for
Radwaste Remediation (RR) Money-Back Guaranteed Systems, e.g.
Cincinnati Group (CG) LENT-1^[tm] Kit, Price $3,000
See http://web.gcis.net/cincygrp
 
(End of message)
 
To leave this list write to LISTSERV@LISTS.SIERRACLUB.ORG and, in the text
of your message (not the subject line), write: SIGNOFF GC-GENERAL
 

vegetarian, nonviolence, consensus
-Food Not Bombs List fnb-l@tao.ca
-distributing food in opposition to violence
-archive: http://archive.foodnotbombs.ca
-active cities: http://webcom.com/peace
-send '(un)subscribe fnb-l' to majordomo@tao.ca

____________________________________________________________

* Peace Through Reason - http://prop1.org -Convert the War Machines! *
____________________________________________________________ --=====================_56597358==_.ALT-- - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peace though Reason Subject: (abolition-usa) NucNews (US) 2/03/99 - Los Alamos Safety; Costs; Dawn Mine; Date: 03 Feb 1999 15:26:33 -0500 --=====================_61523402==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" 1. Los Alamos National Laboratory Delays Repairs to Fire-Protection Unit System Serves Lab's Plutonium Facility http://www.abqjournal.com/news/7news02-02.htm 2. Budget Plan Benefits Labs - Nine Percent More Would Go To Nuclear Research ("$594 million for Los Alamos for weapons research next year, a 12 percent increase over 1999. Sandia should expect $521 million, 4 percent over this year.") http://www.abqjournal.com/news/4news02-02.htm 3. Dawn reclamation license granted five-year renewal Ruling allows importation of radioactive dirt to reclaim defunct uranium mill pit http://www.spokane.net/news-story-body.asp?Date=020299&ID=s524780&cat= 4. USEC's Production Plants Earn NRC Recertification NRC Says Plants are Safe and Comply with Regulations http://nt.excite.com/news/bw/990201/md-usec 1. Los Alamos National Laboratory Delays Repairs to Fire-Protection Unit System Serves Lab's Plutonium Facility http://www.abqjournal.com/news/7news02-02.htm Albuquerque Journal Staff Report, February 2, 1999 Repairs to a leak-prone fire-suppression system at Los Alamos National Laboratory's most sensitive technical area have been delayed, but lab officials say the system can still put out fires. The delay comes as LANL's Technical Area 55 gears up to make plutonium fission triggers, called pits, for nuclear warheads and bombs. Besides being toxic, shavings of plutonium metal can spontaneously ignite in the presence of air. Plutonium fires and inadequate fire safety contributed to the closure of the now-defunct Rocky Flats site outside Denver, the nation's last factory for plutonium pits. That work is being shifted to LANL's top-secret Technical Area 55, home to the lab's plutonium facility. Underground steel water mains that supply the TA-55 fire system were improperly installed in the 1970s and are corroding, with sporadic leaks. Lab workers watch the system pressure to detect the leaks and replace the most corroded pipes. The sprinkler systems inside buildings are not affected by the problem. Wholesale replacement of the pipes and installation of new seismic braces for the system's water tanks will cost an estimated $8 million. But the engineers hired to design the new fire-suppression system were unable to verify the validity of their new design and were fired by the lab last fall, said Deidra Yearwood, a nuclear engineer in charge of facility management at TA-55. "It's on hold now, of course. There's no design work going on," Yearwood said. The lab is seeking a new engineering contractor to redo the design, pushing the deadline for operation of the new system to the summer of 2000. Yearwood said she does not worry about the delay partly because the fire system has a back-up pump and is fed by two independent tanks, each capable of supplying the 150,000 gallons deemed necessary to extinguish a fire. "All I need to fight a ... fire is one tank and one pump," she said. "We have a very robust fire-protection system here at TA-55," Yearwood said. "We feel this delay is acceptable. We don't feel it presents any new risks to the facility or the public." Analysts at the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board agreed that single leaks in the system may not be a major safety problem. "However, should several leaks occur at once, it might be difficult to provide adequate water flow for the entire system," they noted in a recent report. Lab critics say the government and the lab have known about the corroding pipes for years yet placed a higher priority on securing weapons work than on fire safety. "It's frankly amazing they haven't fixed this yet," said Greg Mello, head of the Los Alamos Study Group, a nuclear-disarmament organization in Santa Fe. "There's many millions being spent on top-secret tests (of weapons components), but there doesn't seem to be any interest in providing fail-safe fire protection for the plutonium facility." Mello's group worries about earthquakes. The corroded pipes are vulnerable to breakage in the event of an earthquake, he said. "To me, that's a realistic scenario." Lab geologists say sufficiently large earthquakes probably occur in the Los Alamos area no more than once every 2,000 years or so. 2. Budget Plan Benefits Labs Nine Percent More Would Go To Nuclear Research ("$594 million for Los Alamos for weapons research next year, a 12 percent increase over 1999. Sandia should expect $521 million, 4 percent over this year.") http://www.abqjournal.com/news/4news02-02.htm By John Fleck Journal Staff Writer - February 2, 1999 The post-Cold War boom in the nuclear weapons business should continue next year, the Clinton administration signaled in its fiscal year 2000 budget proposal unveiled Monday. The budget calls for a 9 percent increase in nuclear weapons research spending at Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories, according to preliminary estimates. The budget also includes money to start work on a new National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque. Absent from the budget is money for a major new fusion research project being pushed by Sandia National Laboratories, noted Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M. Submission of the budget proposal is the first step in the budget process and will be followed by months of congressional debate before the final spending plan emerges. The budget also includes additional money to help the Russian government provide security for its nuclear materials and jobs for its nuclear weapons experts, a program in which the two New Mexico nuclear weapons labs are heavily involved. In his State of the Union speech two weeks ago, President Clinton announced a big increase in funding for the nuclear threat reduction effort. But a senior White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, acknowledged last week that much of the new money would be spent paying the bankrupt Russian government's share of costs for the work, rather than expanding the programs. Even with that caveat, however, the money is important to U.S. national security, Domenici said Monday. New Mexico continues to get more money from the DOE budget than any other state, noted Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M. Much of that goes to the two nuclear weapons labs, which are among the largest employers in the state. Bingaman, in a statement, said the budget would strengthen the labs' nuclear weapons research program and provide opportunities for future commercial research and development. Domenici agreed, calling the weapons budget proposal "healthy and sound." The Energy budget request delivered to Congress on Monday calls for a 3 percent overall increase in spending on nuclear weapons, with a 7.5 percent hike in nuclear weapons research. Topping the weapons research budget wish list is the labs' supercomputer program, for which Energy Secretary Bill Richardson wants $543 million for next year, an increase of 21 percent over this year's funding. Lab officials wouldn't comment on the budget Monday, saying they were still studying it. But preliminary tables released by the department called for $594 million for Los Alamos for weapons research next year, a 12 percent increase over 1999. Sandia should expect $521 million, 4 percent over this year. Richardson did not include any money for a proposed expansion of Sandia's "Z pinch" nuclear fusion research program, a shortcoming Domenici promised to try to address during Congressional deliberations on the spending plan. The budget also includes $5.5 million to begin the process of building a new National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque. The DOE-supported museum is housed at Kirtland Air Force Base, and museum and city officials are studying two possible sites off the base that would make public access easier. More detail -- 3. Dawn reclamation license granted five-year renewal Ruling allows importation of radioactive dirt to reclaim defunct uranium mill pit http://www.spokane.net/news-story-body.asp?Date=020299&ID=s524780&cat= Karen Dorn Steele - The Spokesman-Review February 2, 1999 Spokane _ Washington state has renewed a license for Dawn Mining Co. to import tons of radioactive dirt to fill and reclaim a defunct uranium mill pit near Ford. Dawn has had a radioactive waste import license since 1995 and the state is simply renewing it, said Mary Selecky, the Washington Department of Health's acting secretary. ``We're convinced that the company's plan and our licensing conditions protect public health and safety and the environment,'' Selecky said. The import plan is bitterly opposed by the neighboring Spokane Tribe of Indians, which has filed an environmental racism lawsuit in an effort to stop it. An environmental group, Dawn Watch, is also fighting the proposal. Dawn's five-year license renewal allows the company to bid this month for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers disposal contracts for Manhattan Project wastes from several sites on the East Coast. If Dawn's proposal is accepted, the wastes could start rolling into Spokane and on to Ford later this year, Dawn Executive Vice President David Delcour said Monday. ``The corps has indicated it will award one or two contracts, each up to $300 million in value,'' Delcour said. Dawn only wants a fraction of the government's Cold War wastes -- 30 million cubic feet -- to complete its reclamation work at Ford, Delcour said. "All we want to do is close this site,'' he said. Dawn's major competitor for the federal contracts is the EnviroCare site in Utah, which is much larger and is licensed to receive many kinds of nuclear and chemical garbage. Dawn is limited to accepting uranium waste, mildly radioactive discards from manufacturing uranium fuel for the nation's Cold War nuclear weapons program. Last year, Dawn signed an agreement with US Ecology, managers of the low-level radioactive disposal site at Hanford, to handle the project. ``US Ecology will be our site operator,'' Delcour said. Meanwhile, Sens. Bob Morton, R-Orient, and Lisa Brown, D-Spokane, are trying to block the import deal in the Legislature with two bills. The first would change state law to prohibit the company from using anything but clean, in-state dirt to fill the pit. The other would allow Spokane County and other Eastern Washington counties through which the wastes would be trucked to collect fees to pay for damage to roads and other impacts. With Dawn's license renewed, those bills are now on hold, Morton said Monday. ``We have asked our legal staffs to advise us on whether we can proceed,'' he said. Morton says no taxpayer dollars -- state or federal -- should be used to fulfill Dawn's reclamation obligation. Dawn opposes both bills, Delcour said. Dawn needs the federal contracts to pay for the mill reclamation and has promised to post a $6 million bond to pay for any road damage in Eastern Washington, he said. Under Dawn's plan, the uranium wastes would be shipped by rail to Spokane and offloaded onto trucks for the trip to Ford. That would mean about 40 large trucks, each loaded with up to 60,000 pounds of uranium wastes, traveling 260 days a year for five years over the rural roads from Spokane to Ford via Reardan. The renewed license limits the truck trips to times when school buses are off the roads. It also requires the truck drivers to be paid hourly rather than by the load to discourage speeding, and requires emergency crews to get additional safety training. ``If new facts come to light, we can impose additional requirements,'' Selecky said. Dawn is owned by Newmont Mining of Denver, the largest gold producer in North America. Dawn has posted a $14.4 million reclamation bond to assure the job will be completed and has spent more than $6 million on the mill site so far. The state's deadline for Dawn to complete the work is 2019. After that, the responsibility of long-term monitoring of the site will shift to the federal government. http://www.spokane.net/news-story-body.asp?Date=020299&ID=s524780&cat= (What are your thoughts on Dawn reclamation license granted five-year renewal? You can write at the above address.) [Methinks they might "protest too much?" -- et] 4. USEC's Production Plants Earn NRC Recertification NRC Says Plants are Safe and Comply with Regulations http://nt.excite.com/news/bw/990201/md-usec BETHESDA, Md. (BUSINESS WIRE, February 1, 1999) - The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has issued five-year recertifications to USEC Inc.'s subsidiary, the United States Enrichment Corporation, for the two uranium fuel enrichment plants it manages in Paducah, Kentucky and near Portsmouth, Ohio. These certificates, signed January 29, represent NRC's conclusion that there is adequate assurance that both plants comply with NRC's safety, safeguards and security requirements. The initial NRC certificates of compliance for the two plants were issued in November, 1996. The recertifications are for a five-year period. "We are pleased with the performance of both the Paducah and Portsmouth plants this year, not only with regard to NRC regulatory compliance, but also in the areas of production, efficiency and meeting customer demands. We will continue to strive for even better performance in the coming year," said James H. Miller, USEC Executive Vice President. "This has been a significant year for USEC's plants with the privatization of USEC and the transition to operating in a new regulatory environment under the NRC," said Miller. USEC Inc. is the world leader in production and sale of uranium fuel enrichment services for commercial nuclear power plants. A global energy company with customers in 14 countries, the Company's operations involve approximately 5,000 people. With headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, the Company manages production plants in Kentucky and Ohio and is developing an advanced laser enrichment technology in California. _____________________________________________________________ * NucNews - to subscribe: prop1@prop1.org - http://prop1.org * Say "Please Subscribe NucNews" NucNews Archive: HTTP://WWW.ONELIST.COM/arcindex.cgi?listname=NucNews since January 13, 1999; for earlier editions - write prop1@prop1.org --------------------------------------- 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: _____________________________________________________________ --=====================_61523402==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"
1. Los Alamos National Laboratory Delays Repairs to Fire-Protection Unit
System Serves Lab's Plutonium Facility

2. Budget Plan Benefits Labs - Nine Percent More Would Go To Nuclear Research
("$594 million for Los Alamos for weapons research next year, a 12 percent increase over 1999. Sandia should expect $521 million, 4 percent over this year.")

3. Dawn reclamation license granted five-year renewal Ruling allows importation of radioactive dirt to reclaim defunct uranium mill pit

4. USEC's Production Plants Earn NRC Recertification
NRC Says Plants are Safe and Comply with Regulations

----------------------------------------
 
1. Los Alamos National Laboratory Delays Repairs to Fire-Protection Unit
System Serves Lab's Plutonium Facility


Albuquerque Journal Staff Report, February 2, 1999

Repairs to a leak-prone fire-suppression system at Los Alamos National Laboratory's most sensitive technical area have been delayed, but lab officials say the system can still put out fires.                                    

The delay comes as LANL's Technical Area 55 gears up to make plutonium fission triggers, called pits, for nuclear warheads and bombs.  Besides being toxic, shavings of plutonium metal can spontaneously ignite in the presence of air. Plutonium fires and inadequate fire safety contributed to the closure of the now-defunct Rocky Flats site outside Denver, the nation's last factory for plutonium pits.                                  

That work is being shifted to LANL's top-secret Technical Area 55, home to the lab's plutonium facility.                                  

Underground steel water mains that supply the TA-55 fire system were improperly installed in the 1970s and are corroding, with sporadic leaks. Lab workers watch the system pressure to detect the leaks and replace the most corroded pipes. The sprinkler systems inside buildings are not affected by the problem.                             

Wholesale replacement of the pipes and installation of new seismic braces for the system's water tanks will cost an estimated $8 million. But the engineers hired to design the new fire-suppression system were unable to verify the validity of their new design and were fired by the lab last fall, said Deidra Yearwood, a nuclear engineer in charge of facility management at TA-55.                               

"It's on hold now, of course. There's no design work going on," Yearwood said.                                    
The lab is seeking a new engineering contractor to redo the design, pushing the deadline for operation of the new system to the summer of 2000. Yearwood said she does not worry about the delay partly because the fire system has a back-up pump and is fed by two independent tanks, each capable of supplying the 150,000 gallons deemed necessary to extinguish a fire.    
                          
"All I need to fight a ... fire is one tank and one pump," she said.                              
"We have a very robust fire-protection system here at TA-55," Yearwood said. "We feel this delay is acceptable. We don't feel it presents any new risks to the facility or the public." 

Analysts at the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board agreed that single leaks in the system may not be a major safety problem.

 "However, should several leaks occur at once, it might be difficult to provide adequate water flow for the entire system," they noted in a recent report.                                 Lab critics say the government and the lab have known about the corroding pipes for years yet placed a higher priority on securing weapons work than on fire safety. 

"It's frankly amazing they haven't fixed this yet," said Greg Mello, head of the Los Alamos Study Group, a nuclear-disarmament organization in Santa Fe. "There's many millions being spent on top-secret tests (of weapons components), but there doesn't seem to be any interest in providing fail-safe fire protection for the plutonium facility." 

Mello's group worries about earthquakes.  The corroded pipes are vulnerable to breakage in the event of an earthquake, he said. "To me, that's a realistic scenario." 

Lab geologists say sufficiently large earthquakes probably occur in the Los Alamos area no more than once every 2,000 years or so.

---------------------------------------  

2. Budget Plan Benefits Labs
Nine Percent More Would Go To Nuclear Research

("$594 million for Los Alamos for weapons research next year, a 12 percent increase over 1999. Sandia should expect $521 million, 4 percent over this year.")


By John Fleck Journal Staff Writer -    February 2, 1999

The post-Cold War boom in the nuclear weapons business should continue next year, the Clinton administration signaled in its fiscal year 2000 budget proposal unveiled Monday. 

The budget calls for a 9 percent increase in nuclear weapons research spending at Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories, according to preliminary estimates. 

The budget also includes money to start work on a new National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque.

 Absent from the budget is money for a major new fusion research project being pushed by Sandia National Laboratories, noted Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M. 

Submission of the budget proposal is the first step in the budget process and will be followed by months of congressional debate before the final spending plan emerges. 

The budget also includes additional money to help the Russian government provide security for its nuclear materials and jobs for its nuclear weapons experts, a program in which the two New Mexico nuclear weapons labs are heavily involved.

In his State of the Union speech two weeks ago, President Clinton announced a big increase in funding for the nuclear threat reduction effort.

But a senior White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, acknowledged last week that much of the new money would be spent paying the bankrupt Russian government's share of costs for the work, rather than expanding the programs. 

 Even with that caveat, however, the money is important to U.S. national security, Domenici said Monday. 

New Mexico continues to get more money from the DOE budget than any other state, noted Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M. Much of that goes to the two nuclear weapons labs, which are among the largest employers in the state.

Bingaman, in a statement, said the budget would strengthen the labs' nuclear weapons research program and provide opportunities for future commercial research and development.

Domenici agreed, calling the weapons budget proposal "healthy and sound."  The Energy budget request delivered to Congress on Monday calls for a 3 percent overall increase in spending on nuclear weapons, with a 7.5 percent hike in nuclear weapons research. 

Topping the weapons research budget wish list is the labs' supercomputer program, for which Energy Secretary Bill Richardson wants $543 million for next year, an increase of 21 percent over this year's funding.

Lab officials wouldn't comment on the budget Monday, saying they were still studying it. 

But preliminary tables released by the department called for $594 million for Los Alamos for weapons research next year, a 12 percent increase over 1999. Sandia should expect $521 million, 4 percent over this year.

Richardson did not include any money for a proposed expansion of Sandia's "Z pinch" nuclear fusion research program, a shortcoming Domenici promised to try to address during Congressional deliberations on the spending plan.

The budget also includes $5.5 million to begin the process of building a new National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque.

The DOE-supported museum is housed at Kirtland Air Force Base, and museum and city officials are studying two possible sites off the base that would make public access easier.

--------------------------------

More detail --

3. Dawn reclamation license granted five-year renewal Ruling allows importation of radioactive dirt to reclaim defunct uranium mill pit


Karen Dorn Steele - The Spokesman-Review February 2, 1999

Spokane _ Washington state has renewed a license for Dawn Mining Co. to import tons of radioactive dirt to fill and reclaim a defunct uranium mill pit near Ford.

Dawn has had a radioactive waste import license since 1995 and the state is simply renewing it, said Mary Selecky, the Washington Department of Health's acting secretary.

``We're convinced that the company's plan and our licensing conditions protect public health and safety and the environment,'' Selecky said.

The import plan is bitterly opposed by the neighboring Spokane Tribe of Indians, which has filed an environmental racism lawsuit in an effort to stop it. An environmental group, Dawn Watch, is also fighting the proposal.

Dawn's five-year license renewal allows the company to bid this month for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers disposal contracts for Manhattan Project wastes from several sites on the East Coast.

If Dawn's proposal is accepted, the wastes could start rolling into Spokane and on to Ford later this year, Dawn Executive Vice President David Delcour said Monday.

``The corps has indicated it will award one or two contracts, each up to $300 million in value,'' Delcour said.

Dawn only wants a fraction of the government's Cold War wastes -- 30 million cubic feet -- to complete its reclamation work at Ford, Delcour said.

"All we want to do is close this site,'' he said.

Dawn's major competitor for the federal contracts is the EnviroCare site in Utah, which is much larger and is licensed to receive many kinds of nuclear and chemical garbage.

Dawn is limited to accepting uranium waste, mildly radioactive discards from manufacturing uranium fuel for the nation's Cold War nuclear weapons program.

Last year, Dawn signed an agreement with US Ecology, managers of the low-level radioactive disposal site at Hanford, to handle the project.

``US Ecology will be our site operator,'' Delcour said.

Meanwhile, Sens. Bob Morton, R-Orient, and Lisa Brown, D-Spokane, are trying to block the import deal in the Legislature with two bills.

The first would change state law to prohibit the company from using anything but clean, in-state dirt to fill the pit.

The other would allow Spokane County and other Eastern Washington counties through which the wastes would be trucked to collect fees to pay for damage to roads and other impacts.

With Dawn's license renewed, those bills are now on hold, Morton said Monday. ``We have asked our legal staffs to advise us on whether we can proceed,'' he said.

Morton says no taxpayer dollars -- state or federal -- should be used to fulfill Dawn's reclamation obligation.

Dawn opposes both bills, Delcour said. Dawn needs the federal contracts to pay for the mill reclamation and has promised to post a $6 million bond to pay for any road damage in Eastern Washington, he said.

Under Dawn's plan, the uranium wastes would be shipped by rail to Spokane and offloaded onto trucks for the trip to Ford.

That would mean about 40 large trucks, each loaded with up to 60,000 pounds of uranium wastes, traveling 260 days a year for five years over the rural roads from Spokane to Ford via Reardan.

The renewed license limits the truck trips to times when school buses are off the roads. It also requires the truck drivers to be paid hourly rather than by the load to discourage speeding, and requires emergency crews to get additional safety training.

``If new facts come to light, we can impose additional requirements,'' Selecky said.

Dawn is owned by Newmont Mining of Denver, the largest gold producer in North America. Dawn has posted a $14.4 million reclamation bond to assure the job will be completed and has spent more than $6 million on the mill site so far.

The state's deadline for Dawn to complete the work is 2019. After that, the responsibility of long-term monitoring of the site will shift to the federal government.

http://www.spokane.net/news-story-body.asp?Date=020299&ID=s524780&cat= (What are your thoughts on Dawn reclamation license granted five-year renewal? You can write at the above address.)

--------------------------------------

[Methinks they might "protest too much?" -- et]

4. USEC's Production Plants Earn NRC Recertification
NRC Says Plants are Safe and Comply with Regulations


BETHESDA, Md. (BUSINESS WIRE, February 1, 1999) - The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has issued five-year recertifications to USEC Inc.'s subsidiary, the United States Enrichment Corporation, for the two uranium fuel enrichment plants it manages in Paducah, Kentucky and near Portsmouth, Ohio.

These certificates, signed January 29, represent NRC's conclusion that there is adequate assurance that both plants comply with NRC's safety, safeguards and security requirements.

The initial NRC certificates of compliance for the two plants were issued in November, 1996. The recertifications are for a five-year period.

"We are pleased with the performance of both the Paducah and Portsmouth plants this year, not only with regard to NRC regulatory compliance, but also in the areas of production, efficiency and meeting customer demands. We will continue to strive for even better performance in the coming year," said James H. Miller, USEC Executive Vice President. "This has been a significant year for USEC's plants with the privatization of USEC and the transition to operating in a new regulatory environment under the NRC," said Miller.

USEC Inc. is the world leader in production and sale of uranium fuel enrichment services for commercial nuclear power plants. A global energy company with customers in 14 countries, the Company's operations involve approximately 5,000 people. With headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, the Company manages production plants in Kentucky and Ohio and is developing an advanced laser enrichment technology in California.
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_____________________________________________________________ --=====================_61523402==_.ALT-- - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "David Crockett Williams" Subject: (abolition-usa) Flyer for UC Berkeley, March 1, 1999, Global Crisis Solutions Conference Date: 03 Feb 1999 14:13:29 -0800 This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ------=_NextPart_000_011C_01BE4F7F.9760D8A0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Flyer of 3FEB99 text below and MS WordPad.doc attached: Global Crisis Solutions Conference "6 Hours to Save the World" UC Berkeley Alumni House Monday, March 1, 1999 10AM-4PM To develop a comprehensive Global Peace Plan addressing the problems and solutions associated with today's global social and environmental crises: Dr. Fred Wood, PhD Electrical Engineering 1953, Systems Theory Pioneer reveals his Global Peace and Prosperity Cybernetics Program and discusses his proposal for relaxing government secrecy regarding advanced electromagnetic technologies. Dr. Brian O'Leary, PhD Astronomy 1967, Former NASA Mars Mission Scientist/Astronaut, energy technologies expert and author, discusses human consciousness, psychokinesis, UFO's, free-energy technologies, and "Twelve Ways to Re-Inherit the Earth". Rev. Yusen Yamato, Buddhist Monk and Zen Shiatzu Meditation Practitioner, initiator of the Global Peace Walk with the blessings of His Holiness Dalai Lama, discusses "Emptiness and Zero-Energy" as the basis of the spiritual reawakening necessary to correct human thinking for global peace and prosperity. Michael C. Ruppert, former Los Angeles Police Department Narcotics Officer, discusses increasing government secrecy relaxation evidenced in the CIA Inspector General's Report Volume II of 8Oct99 acknowledging CIA complicity in drug smuggling, and how truth will win the War on Drugs. Chris Conrad, activist and author, discusses corporate/media information control and offers a proposal to end the tragedies of The Drug War and to globally reactivate the USDA 1941 Hemp for Victory program to save the trees and heal the atmosphere before it is too late. David Crockett Williams, a coordinator of Global Peace Walk 1999-2000, initiator of Global Emergency Alert Response, discusses bridging science and religion with an understanding of the human mind that can cause true peace and prosperity while developing advanced human capabilities. Other presenters, booths, etc. Barry "Plunker" Adams, a co-initiator of the Rainbow Family annual Global Peace Prayer Gatherings, Wounded Earth Environment Project, producing PeaceTribes2000 motion picture and Peace Vortex 2000. Marc Comings, Bay area activist and organizer, introducing Dr. O'Leary, on Jose Arguellos' calendar cycles for expanding human consciousness. Dean House, former aerospace electronics engineer, Rainbow Family member, introducing Dr. Wood, on free-energy devices to replace nuclear and fossil fuel power. Andrew Mount, a director of DePalma Institute, organizing Capital Hills Research Center to implement conference resolutions. Macronet USA, progressive information and networking clearing house offering free directory to conference participants Global Sustainability Alliance, economics and infrastructure policies Electric Times Magazine, displaying electric motorcycle and advanced electric bicycle from Germany. Spiritual United Nations, movement for global spiritual unity Conference registration begins at 9:15AM, seating limited, advance discount tickets available. At the door: $75 General, $50 low income; Advance $60 General, $35 low income. 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MQ1odHRwOi8vd3d3LmFuZ2VsZmlyZS5jb20vb24vR0VBUjIwMDAgICAgICAgZ2VhcjIwMDBAbGln aHRzcGVlZC5uZXQgICAgODA1LTgyMi0zMzA5DQ0AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA== ------=_NextPart_000_011C_01BE4F7F.9760D8A0-- - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "David Crockett Williams" Subject: (abolition-usa) US Target of Nuclear Missiles? How to avert WWIII. Date: 03 Feb 1999 18:24:06 -0800 [evaluation following] The Bakersfield Californian Newspaper Wednesday, February 3, 1999, pA8 CIA: N. Korea close to developing missile that could hit United States NY Times News Service WASHINGTON -- North Korea is on the verge of developing ballistic missiles capable of hitting the continental United States, the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, told Congress on Tuesday. North Korea's communist government appears to be working to produce nuclear weapons covertly and to extend the range of its ballistic missles in ways that have surprised U.S. intelligence agencies, American officials have said. In a review of threats to U.S. national security, Tenet told lawmakers that North Korea was working on a new generation of missiles that could soon "be able to deliver large payloads" to the continental United States. North Korea's accelerated weapons programs comes against a backdrop of famine and increasing instability in the country, making its government's actions dangerously difficult to predict. "I can hardly overstate my concern about North Korea", Tenet told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "In nearly all aspects, the situation there has become more volatile and unpredictable." Tenet's comments concerning the threat from North Korea caps a remarkable reversal by U.S. intellegence agencies in the last few months. In July, a bipartisan commission headed by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld concluded that countries it describes as rougue states could hit the United States with ballistic missiles with little or no warning. [end article] Evaluation: The situation of economic disparity between the United States today and the rest of the world, especially the generally poor countries termed "rogue states" by U.S. authorities, but even including Japan, is brewing heightened levels of resentment and hostility towards the US. This is exacerbated by the blatant materialism and bragging kind of portrayal of American lifestyles depicted in US movies and television along with their glorification of violence. Wise observers will recognize that this situation of economic disparity is fueling a worldwide movement demanding economic justice in any "new world order" and that feelings now globally are peaking against the United States resulting in tensions even greater than those existing before the start of World War II. We must act now to take remedial actions to avert World War III before it starts. This is the theme of the Global Crisis Solutions Conference to be held at UC Berkeley Alumni House on Monday, March 1st, and the preceding events, also to promote the Global Peace Walk's 1999-2000 mission to the United Nations and Washington, DC, to bring out the prayer of "Global Peace Now!" as a universal human resolve for Global Peace2000. Start regular local Global Peace Walks now, please. For more information on these events, including the local Global Peace Walk from Oakland City Hall on Friday, February 26th, to UC Berkeley Upper Sproul Plaza for mid-day Global Peace Rally, and the noon Saturday to noon Sunday, February 27-28, Global Peace Prayer Vigil and Winter Love-In in Berkeley's Peoples Park, see http://www.angelfire.com/on/GEAR2000. David Crockett Williams, coordinator Global Peace Walk 1999-2000 Initiator, Global Emergency Alert Response gear2000@lightspeed.net - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: danfine@igc.apc.org (Daniel Fine) Subject: (abolition-usa) Santa Barbara meeting Date: 03 Feb 1999 23:14:59 -0500 Will not be able to attend, but following info might be of interest. Good luck (1) Dan Fine, member of Pittsburgh abolition coalition, and PSR-Pittsburgh (2) many here involved in abolition for decades (3) "ABOLITION 2000: Western Pennsylvania Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons", made up of ~30 area organizations (including Pennsylvania Peace Links, WFA-Pittsburgh, PSR-Pittsburgh, Thomas Merton Center, Friends Meeting etc etc), continuous activity since founding 1990 as W.PA Campaign for a CTB, and new name since 1995. Includes ~4 members of Abolition 2000 net. Current focus, planning Pittsburgh Conference, May 13-14, 1999: "ELIMINATING WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION: WHY NOT NUCLEAR ABOLITION", with General Lee Butler as keynote speaker, and sponsorship by many graduate schools and dept of the University of Pittsburgh and community groups, including Rotary, League of Women Voters, PSR-Pittsburgh, WFA, PA Peace Links; out of area-national= Albert Schweitzer Fellowship, Henry Stimson Center (Wash DC). Mission is to reach broad mainstream audience and media and broaden abolition support. (4) Work over years= WRL enola gay and Hiroshima exhibits, all over area schools, colleges, libraries, churches with Citizen Pledge petition campaign, abolition statement signed by religious and community leaders, medical -doctor abolition support, city council resolutions, delegations with above documentation to Senators, Pentagon, State Dept, UN, White House etc, and substantial media visibility. NEED CONNECTIONS to ABOLITION GROUPS IN OHIO, AND CENTRAL AND EASTERN PA (EG PHILADELPHIA). While we can not be in Santa Barbara, wishes for success and hope this helps. Dan Fine PSR-Pittsburgh -dedicated to the abolition of nuclear weapons - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: danfine@igc.apc.org (Daniel Fine) Date: 03 Feb 1999 23:19:33 -0500 PSR-Pittsburgh -dedicated to the abolition of nuclear weapons - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: ASlater Subject: (abolition-usa) Fwd: NUKE-WASTE: (Fwd) chicago nuclear spill scare Date: 04 Feb 1999 10:16:39 -0500 >Date: Wed, 03 Feb 1999 17:31:57 -0500 >Subject: NUKE-WASTE: (Fwd) chicago nuclear spill scare >Priority: non-urgent >X-FC-MachineGenerated: true >To: nuke-waste@igc.org >From: jquinn@igc.org (jquinn@igc.org) > >From Anna > >------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- >Date sent: Wed, 03 Feb 1999 12:52:42 -0500 >To: owner-nuke-waste@igc.apc.org >From: Anna Aurilio >Subject: chicago nuclear spill scare > >FALSE FEARS JAM KENNEDY >TRUCK CRASH RAISES EMPTY NUCLEAR THREAT > >By Diane Struzzi and Julie Deardorff, Tribune Staff Writers. Tribune >staff writers Marla Donato and Anthony Burke... > >February 03, 1999 > >Rush-hour traffic nightmares in Chicago have been blamed on everything >from blizzards to fender benders and police standoffs to potholes--even a >Dennis Rodman mural. > >Tuesday evening's massive headache on the Kennedy Expressway, however, >appeared to be the first blamed on what was feared to be a nuclear waste >spill. > >Put the emphasis on the word "feared" because, as it turned out, the six >stainless steel containers that flipped off the back of an overturned >semitrailer truck on the southbound Kennedy in Hubbard's Cave near >Chicago's downtown were empty. They once had contained fuel for nuclear >power plants. > >Even so, the freakish accident slammed southbound traffic on the Kennedy >to a halt for nearly two hours at the height of the rush hour as police >worked to first clear the truck and then to bring in state nuclear safety >experts to figure out exactly what they were dealing with. Rubberneckers >and gapers slowed northbound lanes to a crawl as well. > >And after the lanes were reopened, traffic heading away from the Loop was >locked bumper to bumper for hours in both directions. > >The truck, which bore the name RSB Logistic of St. Louis on its side and >had license plates from both Missouri and Oregon, was traveling south on >the Kennedy when it reached the Hubbard's Cave area about 4:30 p.m. > >It was transporting approximately 25 empty containers, each marked >radioactive, when it smacked the top of the Hubbard Street bridge, >overturned and dumped the containers, according to Bob Fleischmann, an >official with the Illinois Department of Transportation. > >The 1,400-pound canisters once held a gas called uranium hexafluoride, >according to the Illinois Department of Nuclear Safety. But a spokesman >for the Illinois State Police said the containers had been "emptied, >purged and cleaned" prior to the accident. > >"Initially people thought there was stuff inside but there was nothing," >said State Police Special Agent Mary Leonard. > >Canisters struck two cars, causing one to hit the median. The state >police said the driver of one car suffered minor injuries. > >Officials of RSB Logistic could not be reached for comment Tuesday. > >IDOT extricated the truck with a crane and hauled it to the Polk Street >turnaround station in the middle of the nearby Dan Ryan Expressway, but >he containers weren't moved until they were inspected by the nuclear >safety agency. "We're going to do additional tests, but at this point >there is no reason to believe there is a hazard," said Tom Ortciger, >director of the agency. > >Ortciger said the containers came from Richland, Wash., and were on their >way to a Harvey railroad yard to be shipped to Germany. > >The bridge has a clearance of at least 13 feet 6 inches, which is the >minimum for an interstate highway, state police said. > >But the truck entered the cave carrying at least one oversized container >on top of the flatbed rather than on a specially designed trailer, >according to an IDOT spokesman. > >"That's no good because the container then sits higher than it normally >should," said IDOT's Fleischmann. "The (overseas containers) are normally >put on trailers made for those boxes. On a regular trailer, they sit >higher and don't meet the clearance." > >The driver of the truck, Ronald Grafflin of Spokane, Wash., was cited for >driving an "over height truck," said Leonard. > >Local officials said they could not recall a similar scare over nuclear >material. > >Ortciger said uranium hexafluoride is a gas that can be converted into >uranium oxide, which is then used to fuel nuclear power plant reactors. >He said the canisters, made of stainless steel, were designed to sustain >high impacts. > >"Probably even if they were full there would be no public health safety >issue," Ortciger said. "The biggest threat is the traffic accident they >could cause." > >The accident shut the southbound Kennedy from Division Street to Randolph >Street from 4:30 p.m. to about 6:15 p.m., when police managed to open >three of the five lanes through Hubbard's Cave. > >Travel speeds for many commuters Tuesday were measured in feet-per-hour >rather than miles-per-hour. > >However frustrating the delays, though, they were far from >record-setting. > >After the recent blizzard, for example, expressway traffic moved to a >crawl and delays ran to nearly three hours. > >It also wasn't the first time a major block of a busy Chicago-area >expressway had been shut down during a rush hour. > >Five years ago, thousands of motorists on the Tri-State Tollway were >stranded for three hours when police surrounded a Milwaukee-bound >Greyhound bus near Deerfield because they believed a murder suspect might >be on board. He wasn't. > >In 1997, the Edens Expressway near Glencoe also was shut for three hours >when a Wisconsin woman rear-ended a delivery truck and then fired a >revolver at police. > >Stuck for more than 90 minutes on a Kennedy entrance ramp Tuesday, >salesman Joe Demicco debated whether to simply lock up his car and wait >out the delay in a nearby tavern. > >Even when traffic began to clear, Demicco was wary about driving past the >accident scene. > >"I definitely do not want to go in there," Demicco said after hearing a >radio report that the canisters once contained radioactive material. > >"I might wake up six months from now and have six toes on my foot." > >############################################################ >Elizabeth Hitchcock | Internet: lizh@pirg.org >Communications Director U.S. PIRG | Phone: (202) 546-9707 >U.S. Public Interest Research Group | Fax: (202) 546-2461 >218 D St., SE, Washington, DC 20003 | WWW: www.pirg.org >############################################################ > > >James Quinn >Electronic Outreach Specialist (Volunteer)& Board Member >Citizen Alert >"A Voice for the Land and People of Nevada" >jquinn@igc.org * http://www.igc.org/citizenalert > >************************************************************************** > To send a message to everyone on the list, address your message to: > NUKE-WASTE@igc.apc.org > To unsubscribe, send a message containing "unsubscribe NUKE-WASTE" to: > majordomo@igc.apc.org > Problems or Questions, contact James Quinn, Citizen Alert, Las Vegas NV: > jquinn@igc.org >************************************************************************** > Alice Slater Global Resource Action Center for the Environment (GRACE) 15 East 26th Street, Room 915 New York, NY 10010 tel: (212) 726-9161 fax: (212) 726-9160 email: aslater@gracelinks.org GRACE is a member of Abolition 2000, a global network working for a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons. - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: nukeresister@igc.org (Jack & Felice Cohen-Joppa) Subject: (abolition-usa) ANTI-WAR PROTEST ARREST INFO NEEDED Date: 04 Feb 1999 11:44:12 -0700 PLEASE POST - INFORMATION NEEDED ABOUT ANTI-WAR & ANTI-MILITARISM PROTEST ARRESTS Since 1980, the Nuclear Resister newsletter has chronicled anti-nuclear civil disobedience and provided support for people who are imprisoned as a result of these actions. In 1991, we also included resistance to the Gulf War, and reported more than 6,000 arrests of people protesting the bombing of Iraq. Since then, the newsletter has continued our expansion of coverage to include anti-war and anti-militarism protest arrests. We are aware of many vigils and protests in recent months throughout the U.S. and around the world which took place in opposition to the sanctions against and bombing of Iraq. For our upcoming issue, we would like to know of any arrests that have occurred as a result of these protests. (Or any other anti-nuclear or anti-militarism protest arrests.) Please provide as much information as possible, or include a person we might contact for more details. A response would be appreciated ASAP, since our deadline is not very far away! Thank you! Send a snail mail address if you'd like a free sample of this issue. Felice and Jack Cohen-Joppa _____________________________________ the Nuclear Resister "a chronicle of hope" P.O. Box 43383 Tucson AZ 85733 - information about and support for imprisoned anti-nuclear and anti-war activists - Jack & Felice Cohen-Joppa, editors phone/fax (520)323-8697 US$15/year/US$20 Canada/US$25 overseas - selections from current issue - updated prisoner addresses - & more can be read at: http://www.nonviolence.org/nukeresister * FREE SAMPLE ISSUE ON REQUEST * (please supply a postal address for samples) _____________________________________ - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peace though Reason Subject: (abolition-usa) NucNews (US) 1/24/99 - Tritium dangers Date: 04 Feb 1999 14:07:53 -0500 --=====================_2924774==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" 3. Tritium stirs concern at Test Site Scientists call element's dangers more worrisome than plutonium's http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/1999/jan/24/508316281.html By Mary Manning LAS VEGAS SUN, January 24, 1999 Recent news reports have alerted the public to the discovery of plutonium almost a mile from where underground nuclear weapons were exploded at the Nevada Test Site. But scientists working to clean up the site are more concerned about another element left from the more than 900 explosions set off 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas: radioactive tritium. Their concern is how fast and how far tritium has traveled in the ground water and whether it has escaped the site's boundaries. Tritium is considered the most dangerous of the materials left over from the nuclear blasts because it dissolves easily in ground water and poses a threat to public health for more than 100 years. The Department of Energy began cleaning up the Cold War's radioactive mess after 1992 when a moratorium was imposed on U.S. nuclear testing. Officials estimate it will take until 2070 to complete the task and remove the threat of widespread contamination. Above-ground tests that spread plutonium over the land in central Nevada were cleaned up first. The emphasis was switched to ground-water contamination after DOE scientists three years ago discovered plutonium in a water well far from a nuclear-bomb cavity. If plutonium can travel a mile floating in water, then tritium, which dissolves in water, would be a greater threat, scientists say. Congress gave the DOE's Nevada Operations Office an extra $6 million this year to drill six new wells, for a total of eight, south and west of Pahute Mesa to check for tritium in the ground water. The concern is that if tritium has flowed south and west, it will move into drinking supplies and irrigation water for crops and dairy cows. The new wells are expected to be completed by the end of the year. Samples will be analyzed and the results made public as analysis is completed, officials involved with the project say. The scientists also are working to determine the direction the underground water is flowing. That information may not be available until 2003, Gary Russell of the U.S. Geological Survey in Las Vegas said. Because of the secrecy surrounding the bomb blasts, little information on the content, size or number of weapons was available to outside scientists. By piecing together information from available public sources, physicist Anthony Hechanova, who works at the Harry Reid Center for Environmental Studies at UNLV, determined that at least 260 underground nuclear explosions took place at or under the level of the ground water at the Test Site from 1951 to 1992. Hechanova also gleaned from 10,000 pages of recently declassified DOE documents that a total of 921 bombs were set off at different levels during the same period, and he verified the number of ground-water blasts. He compiled his findings in a comprehensive report released last week and made available to the public at UNLV's James Dickinson Library. "This is the first time it has been compiled into one report accessible to the public," Hechanova said. Thus far records that give the contents of the nuclear weapons are not available, which is hindering scientists in the cleanup effort and slowing a flow of information that could offer warnings to residents if dangers exist. Hechanova found that the 921 underground nuclear-weapons experiments were conducted in 878 shafts and tunnels at the Test Site. "The DOE has not released source term data (information about what was left by the bombs) on the individual nuclear-test explosions at the NTS," Vernon Brechin, a former Stanford University electronics technician, said. He now is a consultant specializing in the effects of underground nuclear explosions. "Though the DOE has this information, it is still classified, reportedly to prevent the proliferation of nuclear-weapons technology," Brechin said. Information about the Test Site experiments has trickled out recently in DOE reports issued from the national laboratories at Los Alamos in New Mexico and Livermore in California. Hechanova, an MIT graduate, came to the Reid Center almost four years ago to work on the project. He has used the available DOE reports as well as those issued to the public from the U.S. Geological Survey to compile the study. The search for the nuclear elements escaping into the environment is important because the radiation could already be moving through the ground water toward communities such as Beatty and the Amargosa Valley, where crops grow and milk cows graze, Hechanova said. But he said no evidence currently exists of radiation creeping off the Test Site. There is, however, fear that the contamination may be widespread. In 1991, DOE Test Site Manager Nick Aquilina adopted a policy for ground-water protection while nuclear testing continued, and scientists began to try to track radioactivity moving in the ground water. "No one is willing to jeopardize the present water supply required for NTS (Nevada Test Site) operations, which includes drinking water," said DOE scientists Gregory Nimz of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Joseph Thompson of Los Alamos National Laboratory in a 1992 report. "Clearly, ground water is capable of carrying certain dissolved nuclides (radioactive particles) appreciable distances," Nimz and Thompson reported. In the 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission, predecessor to the DOE, experimented with ever-larger bombs at the Test Site. To avoid leaking radiation into the atmosphere, some of the nuclear devices were detonated near or below the ground water. By "near," the DOE means within 330 feet of subsurface water. First, today's scientists need to know the nuclear contents at the heart of those deep holes where the atomic explosions occurred, Hechanova said. Then researchers can begin piecing together information on radiation migration from the caverns through surrounding ground water and rock. Hechanova is trying to find out how much radioactivity is trapped in the caverns created by the original bomb blasts. "Then we can work our way out," he said. While DOE scientists at both Livermore and Los Alamos have reported plutonium riding tiny particles in the ground water, called colloids, a mile away from an underground nuclear test, the real health threat to people from ground-water contamination comes from tritium, Hechanova said. Hechanova and UNLV radiochemistry professor Vernon Hodge examined 78 possible radioactive contaminants in the Test Site's ground water. "We are trying to define the radioactivity posing the most risk to people," Hechanova said. The risk from plutonium in the ground water is small because the particles that get into the water don't move very far. It's unlikely they would reach a populated area. "Part of the problem is the perception that plutonium is very deadly, often called the most dangerous substance known to man," Hechanova said. Risks from plutonium exposure are much less than that of other radioactive materials left from bombs such as tritium, neptunium, americium, thorium and uranium, he said. The danger from plutonium comes if a speck of it is inhaled or ingested. Tritium appears to be the leading contender as the contaminant with the best chance of posing a threat to the public. Scientists must find out whether it's in the ground water and which way the water is heading. However, the Test Site is larger than Rhode Island. Scientists must play a guessing game on where to look. "The real problem, the real huge question is, where is the tritium plume?" Hechanova asks. Hechanova estimates that 100 million curies of the total blast residues came from tritium. The Environmental Protection Agency considers drinking a daily dose of more than 20,000 picocuries (one-trillionth of a curie) of tritium dissolved in two quarts of water to be dangerous. The rest of the radiation in the Test Site's ground water could come from cesium, strontium, iodine, plutonium, carbon, uranium or other remains of a nuclear blast. The DOE cleanup effort is focusing on water flowing south and west of Pahute Mesa in the northwest corner of the Test Site. The extra wells will be drilled in the potential path of the ground water. Pahute Mesa was loaned to the DOE by the Air Force for nuclear experiments so, technically, contaminated water on the mesa could be considered off-site. If radiation is found in the new wells, it would show that contaminated water had migrated off the Test Site property and could be heading for residents in Beatty and the Amargosa Valley. The DOE's own program for monitoring ground water chose to look at lead, carbon-14, tritium, iodine-129, uranium, cesium and plutonium because they were found in measurable quantities in water taken from the bomb cavities or nearby monitoring wells on the site. Scientists also are looking at how the radiation affects human health. The DOE is not only worried about people living around the Test Site, it also must examine the ground water to prevent workers drilling sampling wells from coming in contact with radioactive water, DOE Project Manager Bob Bangerter said. Tritium, iodine and carbon-14 dissolve and flow along with the ground water. Cesium, lead and plutonium normally cling to soil particles and move at a slower rate. Uranium can migrate somewhere between the other two groups. For Hechanova, who was blocked by secrecy, it took three years to find enough information to allow him to report on how much tritium was contained in five blast cavities. The size of some nuclear blasts and ground-water samples taken from nearby water wells years after the explosions existed in open government files. They gave Hechanova a good estimate of the tritium inside the cavities left by five nuclear experiments: Bilby, Dalhart, Baseball, Cambric and Cheshire. Bilby, a 249-kiloton blast triggered under the surface of the Test Site's northeast section in 1963, was the first underground nuclear experiment that rocked Las Vegas, about 75 miles southeast of the explosion. Hechanova and former Test Site scientist James O'Donnell combed U.S. Geological Survey and national earthquake records for Bilby's impact. It registered a 5.8 on the Richter scale at the International Data Center in Virginia. "That was a good-sized bomb," Hechanova said. In 1965, Cambric exploded with a force less than a kiloton -- or less than 1,000 tons of TNT -- but produced extremely high tritium, nine times larger per kiloton than what was expected from such shots in or near the ground water. Hechanova has a number of theories: the nuclear device fizzled, the scientists wanted to create tritium or the results were unexpected. Once Hechanova figures out the source amounts of tritium in the bomb caverns, he plans to develop a simple monitor available to anyone living near the Test Site's boundary. "Nothing like it exists now for the average person to sample well water," he said. If he receives a $100,000 grant request, Hechanova hopes to develop a tritium monitor at the Harry Reid Center with assistance from UNLV professors. "It's an early warning system that any farmer could put down his well," he said. _____________________________________________________________ * NucNews - to subscribe: prop1@prop1.org - http://prop1.org * Say "Please Subscribe NucNews" NucNews Archive: HTTP://WWW.ONELIST.COM/arcindex.cgi?listname=NucNews since January 13, 1999; for earlier editions - write prop1@prop1.org --------------------------------------- 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: _____________________________________________________________ --=====================_2924774==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"
3. Tritium stirs concern at Test Site
Scientists call element's dangers more worrisome than plutonium's


By Mary Manning <manning@lasvegassun.com>
LAS VEGAS SUN, January 24, 1999

Recent news reports have alerted the public to the discovery of plutonium almost
a mile from where underground nuclear weapons were exploded at the Nevada
Test Site.

But scientists working to clean up the site are more concerned about another
element left from the more than 900 explosions set off 65 miles northwest of Las
Vegas: radioactive tritium.

Their concern is how fast and how far tritium has traveled in the ground water and
whether it has escaped the site's boundaries.

Tritium is considered the most dangerous of the materials left over from the
nuclear blasts because it dissolves easily in ground water and poses a threat to
public health for more than 100 years.

The Department of Energy began cleaning up the Cold War's radioactive mess
after 1992 when a moratorium was imposed on U.S. nuclear testing. Officials
estimate it will take until 2070 to complete the task and remove the threat of
widespread contamination.

Above-ground tests that spread plutonium over the land in central Nevada were
cleaned up first. The emphasis was switched to ground-water contamination after
DOE scientists three years ago discovered plutonium in a water well far from a
nuclear-bomb cavity. If plutonium can travel a mile floating in water, then tritium,
which dissolves in water, would be a greater threat, scientists say.

Congress gave the DOE's Nevada Operations Office an extra $6 million this year
to drill six new wells, for a total of eight, south and west of Pahute Mesa to check
for tritium in the ground water. The concern is that if tritium has flowed south and
west, it will move into drinking supplies and irrigation water for crops and dairy
cows.

The new wells are expected to be completed by the end of the year. Samples will
be analyzed and the results made public as analysis is completed, officials
involved with the project say.

The scientists also are working to determine the direction the underground water
is flowing. That information may not be available until 2003, Gary Russell of the
U.S. Geological Survey in Las Vegas said.

Because of the secrecy surrounding the bomb blasts, little information on the
content, size or number of weapons was available to outside scientists.

By piecing together information from available public sources, physicist Anthony
Hechanova, who works at the Harry Reid Center for Environmental Studies at
UNLV, determined that at least 260 underground nuclear explosions took place at
or under the level of the ground water at the Test Site from 1951 to 1992.

Hechanova also gleaned from 10,000 pages of recently declassified DOE
documents that a total of 921 bombs were set off at different levels during the
same period, and he verified the number of ground-water blasts.

He compiled his findings in a comprehensive report released last week and made
available to the public at UNLV's James Dickinson Library.

"This is the first time it has been compiled into one report accessible to the
public," Hechanova said.

Thus far records that give the contents of the nuclear weapons are not available,
which is hindering scientists in the cleanup effort and slowing a flow of
information that could offer warnings to residents if dangers exist.

Hechanova found that the 921 underground nuclear-weapons experiments were
conducted in 878 shafts and tunnels at the Test Site.

"The DOE has not released source term data (information about what was left by
the bombs) on the individual nuclear-test explosions at the NTS," Vernon
Brechin, a former Stanford University electronics technician, said. He now is a
consultant specializing in the effects of underground nuclear explosions.

"Though the DOE has this information, it is still classified, reportedly to prevent
the proliferation of nuclear-weapons technology," Brechin said.

Information about the Test Site experiments has trickled out recently in DOE
reports issued from the national laboratories at Los Alamos in New Mexico and
Livermore in California.

Hechanova, an MIT graduate, came to the Reid Center almost four years ago to
work on the project. He has used the available DOE reports as well as those
issued to the public from the U.S. Geological Survey to compile the study.

The search for the nuclear elements escaping into the environment is important
because the radiation could already be moving through the ground water toward
communities such as Beatty and the Amargosa Valley, where crops grow and
milk cows graze, Hechanova said. But he said no evidence currently exists of
radiation creeping off the Test Site.

There is, however, fear that the contamination may be widespread.

In 1991, DOE Test Site Manager Nick Aquilina adopted a policy for
ground-water protection while nuclear testing continued, and scientists began to
try to track radioactivity moving in the ground water.

"No one is willing to jeopardize the present water supply required for NTS
(Nevada Test Site) operations, which includes drinking water," said DOE
scientists Gregory Nimz of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Joseph
Thompson of Los Alamos National Laboratory in a 1992 report.

"Clearly, ground water is capable of carrying certain dissolved nuclides
(radioactive particles) appreciable distances," Nimz and Thompson reported.

In the 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission, predecessor to the DOE,
experimented with ever-larger bombs at the Test Site. To avoid leaking radiation
into the atmosphere, some of the nuclear devices were detonated near or below
the ground water. By "near," the DOE means within 330 feet of subsurface water.

First, today's scientists need to know the nuclear contents at the heart of those
deep holes where the atomic explosions occurred, Hechanova said. Then
researchers can begin piecing together information on radiation migration from the
caverns through surrounding ground water and rock.

Hechanova is trying to find out how much radioactivity is trapped in the caverns
created by the original bomb blasts. "Then we can work our way out," he said.

While DOE scientists at both Livermore and Los Alamos have reported
plutonium riding tiny particles in the ground water, called colloids, a mile away
from an underground nuclear test, the real health threat to people from
ground-water contamination comes from tritium, Hechanova said.

Hechanova and UNLV radiochemistry professor Vernon Hodge examined 78
possible radioactive contaminants in the Test Site's ground water.

"We are trying to define the radioactivity posing the most risk to people,"
Hechanova said.

The risk from plutonium in the ground water is small because the particles that get
into the water don't move very far. It's unlikely they would reach a populated area.

"Part of the problem is the perception that plutonium is very deadly, often called
the most dangerous substance known to man," Hechanova said. Risks from
plutonium exposure are much less than that of other radioactive materials left
from bombs such as tritium, neptunium, americium, thorium and uranium, he said.

The danger from plutonium comes if a speck of it is inhaled or ingested.

Tritium appears to be the leading contender as the contaminant with the best
chance of posing a threat to the public. Scientists must find out whether it's in the
ground water and which way the water is heading.

However, the Test Site is larger than Rhode Island. Scientists must play a
guessing game on where to look.

"The real problem, the real huge question is, where is the tritium plume?"
Hechanova asks.

Hechanova estimates that 100 million curies of the total blast residues came from
tritium. The Environmental Protection Agency considers drinking a daily dose of
more than 20,000 picocuries (one-trillionth of a curie) of tritium dissolved in two
quarts of water to be dangerous.

The rest of the radiation in the Test Site's ground water could come from cesium,
strontium, iodine, plutonium, carbon, uranium or other remains of a nuclear blast.

The DOE cleanup effort is focusing on water flowing south and west of Pahute
Mesa in the northwest corner of the Test Site. The extra wells will be drilled in the
potential path of the ground water. Pahute Mesa was loaned to the DOE by the
Air Force for nuclear experiments so, technically, contaminated water on the
mesa could be considered off-site.

If radiation is found in the new wells, it would show that contaminated water had
migrated off the Test Site property and could be heading for residents in Beatty
and the Amargosa Valley.

The DOE's own program for monitoring ground water chose to look at lead,
carbon-14, tritium, iodine-129, uranium, cesium and plutonium because they were
found in measurable quantities in water taken from the bomb cavities or nearby
monitoring wells on the site. Scientists also are looking at how the radiation
affects human health.

The DOE is not only worried about people living around the Test Site, it also
must examine the ground water to prevent workers drilling sampling wells from
coming in contact with radioactive water, DOE Project Manager Bob Bangerter
said.

Tritium, iodine and carbon-14 dissolve and flow along with the ground water.
Cesium, lead and plutonium normally cling to soil particles and move at a slower
rate. Uranium can migrate somewhere between the other two groups.

For Hechanova, who was blocked by secrecy, it took three years to find enough
information to allow him to report on how much tritium was contained in five
blast cavities.

The size of some nuclear blasts and ground-water samples taken from nearby
water wells years after the explosions existed in open government files. They gave
Hechanova a good estimate of the tritium inside the cavities left by five nuclear
experiments: Bilby, Dalhart, Baseball, Cambric and Cheshire.

Bilby, a 249-kiloton blast triggered under the surface of the Test Site's northeast
section in 1963, was the first underground nuclear experiment that rocked Las
Vegas, about 75 miles southeast of the explosion.

Hechanova and former Test Site scientist James O'Donnell combed U.S.
Geological Survey and national earthquake records for Bilby's impact. It
registered a 5.8 on the Richter scale at the International Data Center in Virginia.
"That was a good-sized bomb," Hechanova said.

In 1965, Cambric exploded with a force less than a kiloton -- or less than 1,000
tons of TNT -- but produced extremely high tritium, nine times larger per kiloton
than what was expected from such shots in or near the ground water. Hechanova
has a number of theories: the nuclear device fizzled, the scientists wanted to
create tritium or the results were unexpected.

Once Hechanova figures out the source amounts of tritium in the bomb caverns,
he plans to develop a simple monitor available to anyone living near the Test
Site's boundary. "Nothing like it exists now for the average person to sample well
water," he said.

If he receives a $100,000 grant request, Hechanova hopes to develop a tritium
monitor at the Harry Reid Center with assistance from UNLV professors. "It's an
early warning system that any farmer could put down his well," he said.
_____________________________________________________________

       * NucNews - to subscribe: prop1@prop1.org - http://prop1.org *
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   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:
                <http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml>
_____________________________________________________________ --=====================_2924774==_.ALT-- - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Subject: (abolition-usa) February 1999 Grassroots Newsletter Date: 04 Feb 1999 17:30:33 -0800 (PST) February 1999 Grassroots Newsletter PETITIONS: **Petitions keep flowing in from all corners of the globe. Special thanks to Masaaki Sakai and Jan Harwood for their dedication and efforts--I can hardly keep up with all of the petitions they send in! This past month I have received over 4000 petitions, including almost 200 online signers. Great News From Costa Rica! Mitzi Stark writes: "We have about 400 signatures so far. Both ex-president Jose Figueres and his mother, Karen Olsen, a prominent political figure on here own, signed the petition. The entire staff at the Juan Santamaria Museum in Alajuela signed it." Petition gathering carries the added benefit of providing an opportunity to engage people in conversation about nuclear issues. MUNICIPALITIES: **On December 21, the City Council of Boulder, Colorado approved a resolution in support of nuclear disarmament. The passage of the resolution made the front page in the Boulder Daily Camera. Part of the resolution states "Whereas, while funding for nuclear weapons development grows, funding for the clean-up of radioactive materials at nuclear facilities including Rocky Flats remains far too low, endangering communities including Boulder...." Congratulations to Tom Marshall and the others at Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center for their hard work. NEW ABOLITION 2000 ORGANIZATIONS: 1. Wisconsin Green Party, US 2. Starlab Research Laboratories in Brussels, Belgium 3. Pakistan Institute of Labor Education and Research, Pakistan 4. Office of the Americas in Los Angeles, US 5. National Lawyers Guild in New York, US 6. Committee to Bridge the Gap in Los Angeles, US 7. Committee of Concerned Scientists in Bayside, NY, US 8. Goonellabah Medical Center in NSW, Australia 9. Peace with Justice Center of Pomona Valley, CA, US 10. Buddhist International, US 11. Montclair Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, NJ, US 12. U.S. Pacifist Party, Denver Colorado, US 13. Action Group Mahila Vikas Kendra, India 14. Urban Development Institute, India 15. Women's Intl. League for Peace and Freedom, Los Angeles Branch, US 16. Arbeiterwohlfahrt Bezirksverband Hessen Sued e,v., Germany For a complete list go to http://www.napf.org/abolition2000/organizs_all.html CHURCHES AND ABOLITION 2000 **Thanks to Joe Murray for his efforts to bring Abolition 2000 to his church. We encourage others to follow his example. In a letter to his bishop, he states: "Would it not be an eloquent and compelling move for the Diocese of Norwich formally to endorse the action of the Norwich City Council and itself to adopt a resolution calling for the abolition of all nuclear weapons? "It goes without saying that economic and political forces in our region are opposed to what Abolition 2000 stands for. Only ten days ago we read that another $1.5 billion submarine, outfitted with nuclear missiles, has been added to the defense budget. Where else but from the active support of our churches and from the work of grassroots organizations such as Abolition 2000 can change take place? "Pope John Paul has spoken out forcefully on the subject of nuclear abolition ever since the 1970s. In the spirit of his goals for the new millennium it would seem to me that there could be no higher priority for us than the promotion of an international treaty banning all nuclear weapons for all times, such as is proposed by Abolition 2000." **Reverend Kathleen McTigue, Minister of the Unitarian Society of New Haven, recently gave a sermon called "Disbanding the Nuclear Club." "In the spring, when India and then Pakistan detonated nuclear bombs, I felt such sadness. I felt shame and anger too, because I understand that the choices made by India and Pakistan were mirrors of the choices our own country made. We made possession of the bomb equivalent to the most elite kinds of power and strength. We declared a closed circle, those on the inside who could build as many bombs as they wanted and those on the outside who couldn't build any at all. Our blustery, predictable response was to punish them for their small nuclear bombs while righteously clinging to our own horde of enormous ones...Although I still have the vague feeling that I should apologize for raising this unhappy issue before us all, I will instead make you a promise: I will not let us forget it again. There's a group out there called Abolition 2000, and I will gladly supply any of you who want to join me with the action manual they've developed." FEEDBACK **Esther Farsnworth, from WILPF in Vermont, writes: "Most of our activities are centered on involving and engaging individuals. We believe that when the mass becomes educated and enraged at the insane nuclear policy, they will pressure the government. We have met little resistance. But we still have much work to do in convincing people that we, at the grassroots, are the ones who will bring change." **Dick Bennett wrote: "Last night a group of friends, long advocates of peace here in Fayetteville, AR, met to discuss what more we might do, given Clinton's extreme increase in military funds, even including money for Reagan's Star Wars (the extension of militarism to outer space, yes?). Tentatively, we are planning 1) confrontation of the military recruiters in the public schools, and 2) a reading of the names of the dead on both sides including civilians in US wars, invasions, attacks, bombings in the 20th C." OPPOSE INCREASE IN MILITARY SPENDING **We urge you to use Clinton's recent increase in military spending as an opportunity to voice your concern about this and related disarmament issues. Write to your local newspaper and point out that adding $112 billion to the military budget over the next six years is a step in the WRONG direction. We should not neglect our domestic policies just because our foreign policies are so lucrative for the arms dealers. NO-FIRST-USE **The opinion section of the Christian Science Monitor last week featured an article called "Time for a no-first-use policy." Increased coverage of this issue is encouraging, especially since the writers challenged NATO's outdated defense doctrines. They wrote: "We face a dilemma. If the political value of nuclear weapons is not reduced, many nations will find them hard to resist. Moreover, obtaining these weapons is no longer difficult, thanks to simple and widely available 1945-era nuclear-weapon technology." http://www.cwsmonitor.com:80/durable/1999/01/28/p11s1.htm RESOURCES **New Abolition 2000 four-color brochures are being produced by Physicians for Social Responsibility. Contact Bob Tiller for more information at btiller@psr.org **This is a link to BASIC's report called Nuclear Futures--Western European Options for Nuclear Risk Reduction: http://www.basicint.org/nuju3-0.htm **Statements of religious leaders on nuclear abolition may be found at http://www.napf.org/abolition2000/religious.html EVENTS **February 12-14: U.S. Abolition Campaign meeting in Santa Barbara. For information, email a2000@silcom.com **March 5: "People of Faith Call for Abolition" in commemoration of the signing of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Contact Oak Ridge Environmental Peace at arep@igc.org **March 8: Nuclear Power, Nuclear Weapons, and Y2K, Washington, D.C. Features Dr. Helen Caldicott, Michael Kraig, Dr. Ted Taylor, John Pike, and others. Contact:carrie@noradiation.org or 516-324-0655 **March 27: UNPLUG Salem Campaign (a coalition of 54 organizations) will hold a rally at the Salem Nuclear Plant in New Jersey to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Three Mile Island meltdown. Contact Norm Cohen at norco@hellatlantic.net - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Timothy Bruening Subject: (abolition-usa) Y2K Letter To The Editor Date: 04 Feb 1999 20:06:04 -0800 (PST) I am trying to write a letter to the editor about the danger of the Y2K bug triggering a nuclear war by causing our early warning systems to falsely indicate a nuclear attack, or by shutting down our early warning systems and thus causing our military personnel to panic and launch our nuclear missiles. However, I am suffering from writer's block. Please help. I am also trying to write a letter about Clinton's desire to deploy an ABM system. - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "David Crockett Williams" Subject: (abolition-usa) Y2K=>Nuclear Abolition 2000? Date: 04 Feb 1999 20:56:52 -0800 [suggestion following] The Bakersfield Californian Newpaper Thursday, February 4, 1999 Russia asks for advice, money to solve Y2K glitch by Angela Charlton The Associated Press MOSCOW -- Russia needs up to $3 billion to tackle the Year 2000 computer glitch -- six times the original estimate -- a top official announced Wednesday as he appealed to the United States and NATO to help fix computers that control Russia's nuclear weapons. While many countries have been working on the so-called Y2K "millennium bug" problem for years, some key players, including Russia and China, have been slower to address it. Last month, U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre acknowledged "some nervousness" in Washington about potential computer problems in Russia. "They don't seem to have the same level of urgency that we have had over it", he said. The man leading Russia's efforts to solve the Y2K finally responded Wednesday by asking NATO and the U.S. Department of Defense for advice -- and money. Russia wants all sides to "speak the same language", Alexander Krupnov, chairman of the Central Telecommunications Commission, said Wednesday. "We're in a critical situation in several areas" -- including the Defense Ministry. The problem arises because early programmers trying to save memory space used only two digits to identify the year -- meaning that 2000 looks the same as 1900, throwing off calculations involving dates. Russia has already agreed to let NATO experts investigate the potential danger to Russian weapons systems. While an errant misile launch brought on by a computer failure would be highly unlikely, computer snags could sabotage radar and telecommunications networks that are the backbone for Russia's system to detect foreign launches. Meanwhile, in China, a survey of the country's most crucial enterprises showed that more than half didn't even know how to detect the computer glitch in their systems, the official Beijing Morning Post reported Wednesday. Little assistance is being provided to agencies and enterprises outside crucial finance, aviation, telecommunications, and transportation sectors. Still, many analysts say Russia and China have less to worry about than countries like the United States, because they have far fewer computers and a lower overall level of technology. [end of article] [suggestion]: This indicates a reasonable approach to incorporate the movement for an agreement to abolish all nuclear weapons by the year 2000 (Abolition2000) with the concerns about the Y2K problem. With the intensity of activity on both of these issues, why not envision a deactivation of all nuclear weapons effective January 31, 1999, and all this year create public demonstrations of support for this idea with Global Peace Walks conducted regularly in communities around the world? "Nuclear and general disarmament is no longer a game of the mind, but the only realistic course for the future of humanity and all life on Earth", Nichidatsu Fujii For more information on conducting local Global Peace Walks in support of the Global Peace Walk 1999-2000, see http://www.angelfire.com/on/GEAR2000 - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peace though Reason Subject: (abolition-usa) NucNews (US) 2/5/99 - Plutonium dangers Date: 05 Feb 1999 06:34:16 -0500 --=====================_11805499==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" 1. Energy Dept. To Review Plutonium http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/ap/washington/story.html?s=v/ap/1999012 2/pl/plutonium_plan_3.html Plutonium Program May Be Dangerous http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/ap/washington/story.html?s=v/ap/1999012 2/pl/plutonium_plan_2.html 2. Westinghouse nuclear business ready to go - Sale needs final U.S. approval http://www.post-gazette.com/businessnews/19990204west2.asp Who Killed Westinghouse? http://www.post-gazette.com/westinghouse/default.asp 1. Energy Dept. To Review Plutonium http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/ap/washington/story.html?s=v/ap/1999012 2/pl/plutonium_plan_3.html SEE also: Plutonium Program May Be Dangerous http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/ap/washington/story.html?s=v/ap/1999012 2/pl/plutonium_plan_2.html By H. JOSEF HEBERT Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP January 22 1999) - The Energy Department plans to review a private study that claims using a plutonium-based fuel in civilian reactors poses greater safety risks than previously acknowledged, officials said. But a department spokesman said a summary of the Nuclear Control Institute study suggests some flaws. ``We do take issue with many of the basic assumptions,'' spokesman Matthew Donoghue said. The institute, a private watchdog group that specializes in nuclear proliferation issues, opposes an Energy Department plan to process 36 tons of weapons-grade plutonium into a mixed oxide, or MOX, and burning that fuel in civilian power reactors. It objects to mixing military and civilian nuclear programs because of proliferation concerns. The department is expected next month to issue a contract to a consortium - including two electric utilities - for processing and burning MOX fuel at six reactors in South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. The NCI study claims the department has severely underestimated the number of potential cancer deaths that would occur should there be a major release of radiation from reactors using the MOX fuel. Using the government's own calculations, Edwin Lyman, an energy physicist and the study's author, concluded nearly twice as many cancer deaths could occur from a severe accident using MOX fuel than if conventional uranium were in use. That could mean 1,430 to 6,165 additional eventual cancer deaths as a result of exposure during the first week after an accident, he said. Lyman said the fuel, processed from plutonium, would release a much larger burst of highly radioactive and toxic materials known as actinides - including plutonium, americium, cesium and curium - than the low-enriched uranium fuel that normally is used. These conclusions conflict sharply with the findings of the Energy Department. In a draft environmental impact analysis, the agency concluded that even a severe accident would cause at most 8 percent more - and possibly fewer - cancer deaths. That compares with the 27 percent to 96 percent increase calculated by Lyman. Lyman argues that the department study assumed an unrealistically low release of actinides and use of an advanced-design reactor not yet built instead of reactors that actually would be used. ``They didn't ask the hard questions,'' he said. The department on Friday stood by its calculations, although Donoghue, the spokesman, said the NCI study would be closely examined once the full report is received. Lyman made public only a summary, saying the report was being peer-reviewed. The consortium expected to be given the Energy Department contract consists of two utilities - Duke Power Co. and Virginia Power Co. - and the French nuclear fuel manufacturer Cogema. ``We believe the MOX program is safe,'' said Joe Maher, a spokesman for Duke Power, based in Charlotte, N.C. He noted the National Academy of Sciences has endorsed such disposal of plutonium. Richard Zuercher, a spokesman for Virginia Power, said the utility has been assured that use of MOX fuel would ``pose no added risk to the employees or the public, and that's a safe thing to do.'' Paul Leventhal, the NCI's president, acknowledged that Lyman's findings assume the severest of nuclear accidents - one in which the reactor's steel and concrete containment dome is breached and allows radiation to stream into the environment. Such an accident, he said, would be ``highly improbable,'' but must still be taken seriously by federal regulators weighing public risk. In America's worst nuclear accident, at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island power plant in 1979, the containment vessel remained intact. The world's worst civilian nuclear accident at Chernobyl involved a reactor without a containment dome. Duke Power has said it would use two reactors at the McGuire plant south of Charlotte, N.C., and two reactors at Catawba plant near Rock Hill, S.C. 2. Westinghouse nuclear business ready to go - Sale needs final U.S. approval http://www.post-gazette.com/businessnews/19990204west2.asp Thursday, February 04, 1999 By Len Boselovic, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Staff Writer Morrison Knudsen Corp. and its partner, British Nuclear Fuels Ltd., hope to complete their acquisition of the last pieces of Westinghouse Electric Corp. by the end of March, company officials said yesterday. The Boise, Idaho, engineering and construction firm said the only remaining hurdle was resolving government concerns over a foreign company getting its hands on federally supported nuclear technology. The U.S.-British joint venture is acquiring Westinghouse's nuclear energy and government operations businesses. Yesterday, the partners submitted documents to a government panel that now has 30 days to review the transaction. Morrison Knudsen officials said they have already discussed foreign ownership concerns with government officials. "We feel very confident it will close here in the next couple of months," said Morrison Knudsen Chairman Dennis Washington. Morrison Knudsen and British Nuclear announced in June they would pay nearly $1.2 billion for the Monroeville-based businesses, which had revenues of $420 million last year. Morrison Knudsen will own a 60 percent stake and British Nuclear will hold a 40 percent stake. The purchase includes $200 million in cash and the assumption of about $950 million in liabilities and commitments. The partners plan to keep the Westinghouse name as well as the Monroeville headquarters. The nuclear energy and government operations businesses employ 24,000, including more than 3,000 in the region, spokesman Vaughn Gilbert said. The nuclear business designs and maintains nuclear plants, while the government unit manages nuclear cleanup operations for the Army and Department of Energy. Washington said Morrison Knudsen will bring construction experience to the partnership while British Fuels will supply nuclear expertise. "We hope that we can grow this company and we're excited about the pool of talented people there in Pittsburgh," he said. Washington said the only major change at Westinghouse since the deal was announced last summer was the loss of the five-year, $1.4 billion contract to manage the Bettis Atomic facility in West Mifflin. The contract was awarded to the Bechtel Group. Thomas Zarges, the Morrison Knudsen executive who will be chairman of the government services business, said the company was bidding for a Department of Energy contract to manage the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. The five-year contract is scheduled to be awarded in June. DOE spokesman Brad Bugger said the current contract has an annual value of $600 million to $700 million. Who Killed Westinghouse? http://www.post-gazette.com/westinghouse/default.asp _____________________________________________________________ * NucNews - to subscribe: prop1@prop1.org - http://prop1.org * Say "Please Subscribe NucNews" NucNews Archive: HTTP://WWW.ONELIST.COM/arcindex.cgi?listname=NucNews since January 13, 1999; for earlier editions - write prop1@prop1.org --------------------------------------- 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: _____________________________________________________________ --=====================_11805499==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"
1. Energy Dept. To Review Plutonium
Plutonium Program May Be Dangerous

2. Westinghouse nuclear business ready to go - Sale needs final U.S. approval

----------------------------------------

1. Energy Dept. To Review Plutonium

SEE also:
Plutonium Program May Be Dangerous

By H. JOSEF HEBERT Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP January 22 1999) - The Energy Department plans to review a private
study that claims using a plutonium-based fuel in civilian reactors poses
greater safety risks than previously acknowledged, officials said.

But a department spokesman said a summary of the Nuclear Control Institute
study suggests some flaws. ``We do take issue with many of the basic
assumptions,'' spokesman Matthew Donoghue said.

The institute, a private watchdog group that specializes in nuclear
proliferation issues, opposes an Energy Department plan to process 36 tons
of weapons-grade plutonium into a mixed oxide, or MOX, and burning that
fuel in civilian power reactors. It objects to mixing military and civilian
nuclear programs because of proliferation concerns.

The department is expected next month to issue a contract to a consortium -
including two electric utilities - for processing and burning MOX fuel at six
reactors in South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia.

The NCI study claims the department has severely underestimated the
number of potential cancer deaths that would occur should there be a major
release of radiation from reactors using the MOX fuel.

Using the government's own calculations, Edwin Lyman, an energy physicist
and the study's author, concluded nearly twice as many cancer deaths could
occur from a severe accident using MOX fuel than if conventional uranium
were in use. That could mean 1,430 to 6,165 additional eventual cancer
deaths as a result of exposure during the first week after an accident, he said.

Lyman said the fuel, processed from plutonium, would release a much larger
burst of highly radioactive and toxic materials known as actinides - including
plutonium, americium, cesium and curium - than the low-enriched uranium
fuel that normally is used.

These conclusions conflict sharply with the findings of the Energy
Department. In a draft environmental impact analysis, the agency concluded
that even a severe accident would cause at most 8 percent more - and
possibly fewer - cancer deaths. That compares with the 27 percent to 96
percent increase calculated by Lyman.

Lyman argues that the department study assumed an unrealistically low
release of actinides and use of an advanced-design reactor not yet built
instead of reactors that actually would be used. ``They didn't ask the hard
questions,'' he said.

The department on Friday stood by its calculations, although Donoghue, the
spokesman, said the NCI study would be closely examined once the full
report is received. Lyman made public only a summary, saying the report
was being peer-reviewed.

The consortium expected to be given the Energy Department contract
consists of two utilities - Duke Power Co. and Virginia Power Co. - and the
French nuclear fuel manufacturer Cogema.

``We believe the MOX program is safe,'' said Joe Maher, a spokesman for
Duke Power, based in Charlotte, N.C. He noted the National Academy of
Sciences has endorsed such disposal of plutonium.

Richard Zuercher, a spokesman for Virginia Power, said the utility has been
assured that use of MOX fuel would ``pose no added risk to the employees
or the public, and that's a safe thing to do.''

Paul Leventhal, the NCI's president, acknowledged that Lyman's findings
assume the severest of nuclear accidents - one in which the reactor's steel
and concrete containment dome is breached and allows radiation to stream
into the environment.

Such an accident, he said, would be ``highly improbable,'' but must still be
taken seriously by federal regulators weighing public risk.

In America's worst nuclear accident, at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island
power plant in 1979, the containment vessel remained intact. The world's
worst civilian nuclear accident at Chernobyl involved a reactor without a
containment dome.

Duke Power has said it would use two reactors at the McGuire plant south of
Charlotte, N.C., and two reactors at Catawba plant near Rock Hill, S.C.

----------------------------------------

2. Westinghouse nuclear business ready to go - Sale needs final U.S. approval


Thursday, February 04, 1999

By Len Boselovic, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Morrison Knudsen Corp. and its partner, British Nuclear Fuels Ltd., hope to complete their acquisition of the last pieces of Westinghouse Electric Corp. by the end of March, company officials said yesterday.

The Boise, Idaho, engineering and construction firm said the only remaining hurdle was resolving government concerns over a foreign company getting its hands on federally supported nuclear technology. The U.S.-British joint venture is acquiring Westinghouse's nuclear energy and government operations businesses.

Yesterday, the partners submitted documents to a government panel that now has 30 days to review the transaction. Morrison Knudsen officials said they have already discussed foreign ownership concerns with government officials.

"We feel very confident it will close here in the next couple of months," said Morrison Knudsen Chairman Dennis Washington.

Morrison Knudsen and British Nuclear announced in June they would pay nearly $1.2 billion for the Monroeville-based businesses, which had revenues of $420 million last year.

Morrison Knudsen will own a 60 percent stake and British Nuclear will hold a 40 percent stake. The purchase includes $200 million in cash and the assumption of about $950 million in liabilities and commitments.

The partners plan to keep the Westinghouse name as well as the Monroeville headquarters. The nuclear energy and government operations businesses employ 24,000, including more than 3,000 in the region, spokesman Vaughn Gilbert said.

The nuclear business designs and maintains nuclear plants, while the government unit manages nuclear cleanup operations for the Army and Department of Energy. Washington said Morrison Knudsen will bring construction experience to the partnership while British Fuels will supply nuclear expertise.

"We hope that we can grow this company and we're excited about the pool of talented people there in Pittsburgh," he said.

Washington said the only major change at Westinghouse since the deal was announced last summer was the loss of the five-year, $1.4 billion contract to manage the Bettis Atomic facility in West Mifflin. The contract was awarded to the Bechtel Group.

Thomas Zarges, the Morrison Knudsen executive who will be chairman of the government services business, said the company was bidding for a Department of Energy contract to manage the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. The five-year contract is scheduled to be awarded in June. DOE spokesman Brad Bugger said the current contract has an annual value of $600 million to $700 million.


_____________________________________________________________

       * NucNews - to subscribe: prop1@prop1.org - http://prop1.org *
                         Say "Please Subscribe NucNews"
NucNews Archive: HTTP://WWW.ONELIST.COM/arcindex.cgi?listname=NucNews
           since January 13, 1999; for earlier editions - write prop1@prop1.org
                         
   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:
                <http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml>
_____________________________________________________________ --=====================_11805499==_.ALT-- - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Kathy Crandall Subject: (abolition-usa) [Fwd: Disarmament mission statement] Date: 05 Feb 1999 12:37:40 -0500 This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------61EFD140C23DE0213BC725CD Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Here are some suggestions on mission statement and strategies from Arjun Makhijani at Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) -- DISARMAMENT CLEARINGHOUSE Nuclear Disarmament Information, Resources & Action Tools Kathy Crandall, Coordinator 1101 14th Street NW #700, Washington DC 20005 TEL: 202 898 0150 ext. 232 FAX: 202 898 0172 E-MAIL: disarmament@igc.org http://www.psr.org/Disarmhouse.htm http://www.psr.org/ctbtaction.htm A project of: Friends Committee on National Legislation Peace Action, Physicians for Social Responsibility and Women's Action for New Directions --------------61EFD140C23DE0213BC725CD Content-Type: message/rfc822 Content-Disposition: inline Return-Path: Received: from pppe-11.igc.org (arjun@pppe-11.igc.org) by igce.igc.org (8.9.2/8.9.2) with SMTP id GAA14796 for ; Fri, 5 Feb 1999 06:17:37 -0800 (PST) Message-Id: <2.2.16.19990205091610.3dc716c0@pop.igc.org> X-Sender: arjun@pop.igc.org X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Pro Version 2.2 (16) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by igce.igc.org id GAA14796 X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-MIME-Autoconverted: from 8bit to quoted-printable by kds5.kivex.com id MAA20795 Kathy: Would you please post this to the Abolition list as my contribution the mission statment discussion? Thanks. Arjun Draft Goals Statement for the US Nuclear Disarmament Campaign Arjun Makhijani, 5 Feb. 1999 (Note: Section IV (Analysis) is meant as a contribution to the strategy discussion at the Santa Barbara meeting.) I. Goals The goal of the campaign for enduring nuclear disarmament is to reduce th= e risk of the nuclear weapons use by design, miscalculation, or accident to the lowest possible level at any given time and to strive to continually lower this risk. Explanation =20 Disarmament is a process in which all nuclear weapons states: =B7 take interim actions to continually reduce risks of nuclear weapons u= se arising from any cause =B7 refrain from actions that might re-ignite a nuclear arms race or that might cause or abet the reversal of prior steps or commitments to nuclear disarmament. =20 A major milestone in this process would be the achievement of the complet= e and verified dismantlement of all existing nuclear arsenals and the infrastructure to design, produce, and test them. However, the goal of enduring nuclear disarmament extends well beyond the verified elimination= of existing arsenals. Maintaining the grave economic inequalities and injustices in the world - less than four hundred people have more wealth that the world's poorest two billion - requires frequent resort to violen= ce and the threats of violence, from the local to the global. A sustainable state of nuclear disarmament cannot be achieved without addressing such underlying injustices. Therefore, much technical, economic, social, political, and moral effort will be needed to create conditions in which there is no reversion to nuclear weapons after the elimination of present arsenals. Within the nuclear weapons sphere, a principal requirement for preventing reversion to nuclear weapons will be that governments discard deterrence doctrines as the basis of their strategic postures and plans. Specifical= ly, they must reject all doctrines of nuclear weapons use or threat of use fo= r any reason, including retaliation for an attack of any kind (including nuclear, chemical or biological weapons) by a state or non-state party. = The doctrine of retaliation must be replaced by a non-retaliatory process to bring violators to justice in consonance with the Nuremberg principles an= d the universal declaration of human rights. Respect for human rights in the nuclear disarmament context includes taki= ng due account of the severe harm that has already been done by nuclear weap= ons production and testing to all generations since the start of the nuclear weapons era, extending out for uncounted generations into the future. Therefore, repair of the health and environmental damage to the extent possible as well as sound management of the toxic legacy of nuclear weapo= ns production and testing are essential to the process creating enduring nuclear disarmament. This redress of health and environmental damage mus= t include explicit recognition of the disproportionate harm that nuclear weapons production and testing has inflicted on many colonial and indigen= ous people. II. Morality, Deterrence, and Retaliation Almost everyone favors nuclear disarmament in principle, but this surface agreement hides differing points of view about nuclear deterrence, which form the core of the controversy about nuclear armaments. =20 At bottom, the problem of nuclear deterrence is a moral question, as was recently pointed out in a statement signed by 71 Pax Christi Catholic bishops. Those who advocate nuclear deterrence, whether in response to a nuclear strike or as part of a first use strategy, make an implicit moral assumption that pre-dates the nuclear era: they do not differentiate betw= een soldiers and non-combatants in a time of war. It is therefore considered acceptable to kill large numbers of non-combatants in response to such killing by another state. In fact, over the last few centuries, the distinction between combatants = and non-combatants has been steadily eroded. That erosion has been most dramatic in this century with the advent of air power. The terrorization= of civilian populations was put forward early in this century as the basic tenet of air warfare and it was carried out with terrible efficiency in World War II: Hitler's bombing of London and Coventry, the British bombin= gs of German cities, the US fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, and the atom= ic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since the distinction between soldiers and non-combatants has been steadi= ly eroded, partly due to the importance of industry (such as petroleum refineries or electric power plants) in war, one can view the moral probl= em most clearly by considering the effects of military doctrine on children. The central moral problem of nuclear deterrence is that it involves the planning of the mass killing of people, including children. This is beca= use the core requirement for the success for a deterrence strategy is that, t= o be effective, there must be a readiness to actually use the weapons. Its reality can be viewed not only in the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki b= ut also in all the terror bombings of World War II. The central public rationale of the US government put forward for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that American soldiers' lives were saved. Trading off children's lives for those of grown-ups was seen as acceptabl= e. (The idea that Japanese civilians were saved due to an early end to the w= ar as a result of the use of the two nuclear bombs was added as an embellishment after the war to further rationalize their use. Considerat= ion for Japanese civilians, or even Americans of Japanese origin, played no r= ole in the decision to use the bombs, any more than consideration for non-Japanese civilians was part of Japanese war policy. In fact many Americans, mostly of Japanese origin who were trapped in Japan at the sta= rt of the war as well as a few US prisoners-of-war, were killed in the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings.) To try to give a moral basis to society in which the killing of the child= ren is unacceptable even in retaliation for such killing by another person or state is neither far-fetched nor unachievable. No one would suggest, for instance, that the children of the Nazis operators of the death camps sho= uld have been killed for the actions of their fathers. It would be generally recognized as morally repugnant to suggest that terror be visited upon th= e family of Timothy McVeigh, whose bombing of the Murrah building resulted = in deaths in so many families. Yet, the practice of killing non-combatants, including children, has been integral to modern war-making. The nuclear establishment's endangerment of the people of their own countries, including children, through environmental damage also raises t= he same moral questions in an even more immediate way, since nuclear weapons production and testing results in some harm. For instance, atmospheric testing and much underground testing rained fallout on the entire United States, which resulted in high radiation doses to the thyroids of million= s of children who drank contaminated milk. The AEC and Pentagon were aware= of the patterns of the fallout. The AEC gave advance warning to Kodak about fallout patterns so Kodak could protect its film, but did not warn milk producers and consumers about contaminated milk they knew would result fr= om pastures polluted with iodine-131. Some underground testing has vented large amounts of radioactivity, and it will leave contamination undergrou= nd to threaten generations for hundreds of thousands of years. The situatio= n is qualitatively similar in other nuclear weapons states, though we a hav= e a less detailed idea of the environmental problems created there. If generations now living have not been adequately consulted, future generations have not been consulted at all. They are likely to bear some= of the worst effects of the burden of radioactive waste, and of contaminated soil, water, and materials. Nuclear weapons establishments seem incapabl= e of carrying out clean-up and waste management programs that have technica= l and environmental integrity, despite the presence of many competent and dedicated technical people inside them who could design and implement suc= h programs. In other words, nuclear-bomb-making seems to be connected with environmental endangerment of children's health, just as they jeopardize children's security. So long as there are nuclear arsenals, we can neith= er minimize health risks nor security risks. III. Steps towards enduring nuclear disarmament A variety of steps are needed to lay the foundation of a disarmament proc= ess that will lead to the elimination of existing arsenals and increase the likelihood that there will be no reversion to nuclear weapons. The measu= res described below related only to nuclear weapons. Progress in other areas will also be required. For instance, a good deal of the pressure to maintain arsenals arises from pork-barrel politics. These questions must= be addressed in parallel with the steps discussed below as part of the strat= egy and tactics of actually accomplishing the objectives listed here. 1. Short-term measures Short-term technical measures can be accomplished within about one year (= or less). Strategically, they should reduce immediate dangers to the larges= t possible extent, lay the foundation for verification of stocks of materia= ls, warheads, and delivery systems. On the political side, they are designed= to further trust and confidence by strict adherence to existing treaties, reduction of arsenals and elimination of first-strike and first-use postu= res. 1. Completion of at least one effective de-alerting measure for all nucl= ear weapons in all eight nuclear weapons states=20 2. Strict adherence to existing international arms control and disarmamen= t treaties, commitments, and agreements, including the ABM treaty as signed= in 1972, Article VI of the NPT as interpreted by the World Court, and the CT= BT.=20 3. Reduction of US and Russian strategic arsenals to less than 1,000 warheads each, with no reserve warheads or materials, permanent removal f= rom the US and Russian arsenals of all remaining "tactical" nuclear weapons, = and withdrawal of all weapons based abroad to the territories of the weapons = states. 4. Shutdown of production of all weapons-usable radioactive materials for military purposes (plutonium, highly enriched uranium, and tritium).=20 5. Unilateral declarations of no-first-use policies by all nuclear weapon= s states (China and India have already made such declarations) and reconfiguration of arsenals, military doctrines and training to correspon= d to such declarations. 6. A halt to new nuclear weapons production and design, and to modificati= ons of existing weapons. Nuclear warheads deemed unsafe should be dismantled. 2. Medium-term measures Medium-term measures can be accomplished within a few years. They are designed to lay the foundation for a transition to a complete elimination= of nuclear arsenals and a treaty that would enable the multilateral verification of that elimination. 1. Removal of all nuclear warheads from all weapons and withdrawal of all delivery systems from deployment; with multilateral monitoring and verification of their storage.=20 2. Shut down of all commercial plutonium separation and all other operati= ons that result in weapons-usable plutonium or uranium. 3. Long-term measures 1. A nuclear weapons convention signed by all parties that would permanen= tly eliminate nuclear arsenals as irreversibly and verifiably as possible. T= he convention should forbid the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons even= in retaliation for such use, as well as withdrawal from that treaty under an= y circumstances. It should include a verification organization that has explicit provision for verification by non-governmental parties. Strengthening of existing international judicial system to enable it to d= eal with use, threats of use, or manufacture of weapons of mass destruction. 4. Continuing measures=20 1. Dismantlement, decommissioning and clean-up of all nuclear weapons-related facilities, and institution of sound long-term management policies for managing weapons-usable materials and radioactive and toxic = waste.=20 2. Provision of assistance to those whose health may have been affected b= y those processes, independent of national origin or location, with due recognition of the disproportionate damage done to may indigenous and colonial people.=20 3. Progressive elimination of secrecy in the nuclear establishment.=20 4. Destruction of nuclear warhead delivery vehicles and strict controls o= n and verification of all dual-use (nuclear and non-nuclear) items and technologies.=20 5. Banning of production of ballistic missiles and strict verification procedures to ensure that no space launch vehicles can be used as nuclear weapon delivery vehicles. IV. Analysis=20 The Abolition 2000 movement has been a vital part of a huge accomplishmen= t of the global disarmament movement of the last four years. This movement has successfully put the elimination of nuclear weapons at the center of non-proliferation and disarmament agenda. It has done so in a period whe= n the nuclear weapons states, notably the United States, would have preferr= ed to stick to non-proliferation on the part of non-nuclear weapons states alone. The Abolition 2000 Network has also helped to bring greater attention in the international arena to the issue of the disproportionate burden suffered by indigenous and colonial people. Similarly, the drafting of a peoples' nuclear weapons convention has serv= ed as a guide for disarmament advocates, whether they be NGOs or governments. It puts forth criteria by which to judge an official treaty and official claims about the arms reduction process. Its continual refinement is als= o necessary as we learn more of the complexity of the process and its links= to other problems. 1. Clarifying "abolition" The spirit of the demands in the Abolition 2000 statement, which has been signed by a large number of organizations, is subscribed to by an even larger number of groups. The goal statement proposed here embraces the i= dea that elimination of existing nuclear arsenals is an essential part of nuclear disarmament. The health and environmental aspects of the disarmament process are also incorporated into it. In these respects, it= is very similar to the Abolition 2000 statement and other plans that have advocated a treaty as the route to the abolition of nuclear weapons. But= a modification of the approach is necessary both to clarify the goal of "abolition" and the strategy of relying on a treaty as the primary and mo= st immediate vehicle for achieving that end. The clarification of the goal = of "abolition" is necessary, among other reasons, for a full consideration o= f the moral basis for abandoning the doctrine of deterrence.=20 This statement on enduring nuclear disarmament attempts to address the fa= ct that elimination of existing nuclear weapons will inevitably be an imperf= ect achievement. We must live with the possibility of nuclear weapons use by = a state or non-state party even after all existing nuclear weapons have bee= n verifiably eliminated. Further, given the predictable imperfections of materials accounting and verification, there is no way to guarantee that = the process of disarmament will be free of cheating. Indeed, we do not know = if nuclear materials have already been sold from existing stocks to third parties, where it cannot now be accounted for.=20 We need to confront these issues in order to point out clearly how the program we advocate, including elimination of existing arsenals, can grea= tly reduce risks compared to the present. Today there is a growing risk of a large part of humanity being blown up in any given fifteen-minute period,= of nuclear black markets, and of the disintegration of a state with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. Short-term measures with very wide support would greatly reduce these risks and also lay the foundation for eliminat= ing existing arsenals. At the same time, a goal of continual risk reduction also embraces (i) measures to reduce the risk of weapons use by any party after elimination of known arsenals and (ii) strict adherence to the principle of non-use of nuclear weapons even in retaliation for such use.= =20 2. US-Russian context for a treaty We are not yet in a position to demand a treaty for an end to nuclear weapons because enduring disarmament will involve a very complex process with many details that cannot now be foreseen. Nor can all the important dangers be addressed by a treaty banning nuclear weapons and eliminating existing arsenals. A treaty is far more than a piece paper. It is the process leading up to it that will give meaning and staying power to it. = In order for the end result to be meaningful, the treaty process must be sou= nd and have a level of integrity which is impossible to achieve in the curre= nt political and military situation. Given the current US and Russian attachment to nuclear weapons - they both have first use doctrines at present - a treaty would be highly likely to contain huge loopholes. The= se would probably include provisions for large reserves of nuclear weapons a= nd nuclear-weapons-usable materials. It is also very likely to entrench the position of one country, the Unite= d States, as by far the dominant global power militarily. This is a significant present cause of repeated setbacks in the arms reduction proc= ess and in the unreliability of past treaty commitments - such as the ABM Treaty, the NPT, or even the simple matter of payment of United Nations d= ues (which is a treaty obligation). In this context, asking for yet another treaty of far larger consequence is problematic. Political, social, judicial, economic, and moral barriers of a higher order than characteriz= e the present environment are needed to prevent treaty violations. If a ma= jor nuclear weapons state withdrew from a nuclear weapons elimination treaty,= it could have consequences that are as disastrous as those we face at presen= t. And a withdrawal from a treaty in a crisis would provide much less levera= ge to the voices of calm and peace than at present, making it less likely th= at the world would step back from the brink. There are a number of other reasons why focussing on a treaty to eliminat= e nuclear weapons is the wrong approach at present. One problem is that th= e Pentagon is currently pursuing a vast program that aims at overwhelming U= S military superiority over everyone else for the foreseeable future. Under such circumstances, Russia and China are highly unlikely to agree to complete nuclear disarmament, even if the US were to offer to negotiate i= t. Nuclear disarmament talks in the context of a US goal of overwhelming military superiority would be utterly bogged down in recriminations and t= he need for action on weapons that are not now considered part of the nuclea= r arsenal. The United States is also determined either to pressure Russia to agree t= o change the ABM treaty or, failing that, to withdraw from it. This could trigger grave instabilities and a new arms race. For instance, China has announced that it will build more strategic weapons should the US deploy ballistic missile defenses and China has the means to do so. The entire process may become unstable and dangerous. Given these dangers, it will = be impossible to assemble the coalition that is necessary to pressure the US government to begin negotiations for a nuclear weapons convention.=20 The situation in Russia is also a great cause for concern, because Russia appears to be relying more and more on its nuclear arsenal in the face of the severe deterioration of its other military capabilities. Russia sees nuclear weapons as its only remaining card in global power politics. Thi= s makes the growing global dominance of the United States in military matte= rs an even more important problem in the context of nuclear disarmament. An effective disarmament statement that embodies the spirit of the Abolit= ion 2000 statement and most of the specifics, but which also fits the conditi= ons described above, is therefore needed. It must address the problems of th= e stability of the disarmament process and of the prevention of conditions that could create greater dangers of a first strike. For instance, drast= ic reductions in the Russian arsenal along with US deployment of extensive ballistic missile defenses (BMD) could create such dangers. Hence it is critical to prevent the deployment of BMD during the process of nuclear weapons reduction, especially when these numbers reach into the hundreds = of warheads (instead of the thousands in the US and Russian arsenals today). 3. Addressing other states with nuclear capability Furthermore, the nuclear disarmament strategy must address how India, Isr= ael and Pakistan are to be brought into the process of nuclear disarmament without legitimizing their nuclear arsenals, or on the other hand legitimizing the power that the five nuclear weapons states parties to th= e NPT want to wield over non-parties to the NPT. It is also crucial for th= e US nuclear disarmament movement to consider the questions related to the real or alleged nuclear weapons capability of Iraq, North Korea, and Iran. These countries are now in various ways in the center of various US milit= ary and political establishment plans and public rationalizations of present = US military policy that include: =B7 deploying ballistic missile defenses =B7 expanding authority of the Pentagon to the continental United States =B7 the continuation of the nuclear first-use policy to counter threats o= f use of chemical or biological weapons =B7 the proposed expansion of NATO authority to cover issues related to weapons of mass destruction. Given these links, it is essential to develop specific demands that take into account present realities that are also consonant with our principle= s. Finally, to have a treaty as a goal is to confuse strategy with the overa= ll goal. Treaties are breakable, and we can see that reality in the nuclear arena everyday. The goal for nuclear disarmament must be far bigger and more robust. 4. Conclusions Calling for strict adherence to existing treaties, verified de-alerting o= f all nuclear weapons, and the reduction of the US and Russian arsenals to less than 1,000 each, rather than seeking a treaty in the short term, addresses most of the immediate issues raised in this analysis. For instance, India, Israel, and Pakistan could be brought into the disarmame= nt process through a de-alerting process and ratification of the CTBT. Once the short-term objectives are accomplished, much or most of the framework for complete elimination of existing nuclear arsenals would be in place. Then it will be possible to attain a nuclear weapons convention that will allow trust to grow as disarmament proceeds, rather than the mistrust and instability that characterize the present arms reduction process as it is actually evolving. At the present time it is even unclear whether one should demand a new treaty or whether it would be better to demand an amendment to the NPT. This will depend in part on the evolution of the N= PT review process. Finally, enduring nuclear disarmament includes the goal of preventing a reversion to a nuclear-armed state after existing arsenals have been eliminated. This will be at least as difficult to achieve as the elimination of existing arsenals. It requires the nuclear disarmament movement, the nuclear weapons states, other governments, and the public a= t large to address the underlying moral issues. Specifically, it means tha= t nuclear retaliation must be ruled out under all circumstances, including = as a response to nuclear weapons use, as part of the process of agreeing to = the elimination of nuclear weapons. Only with advance agreement regarding non-retaliation will it be possible to get a treaty that will provide for the actual elimination of production, design, and testing capabilities, a= nd the conversion of all weapons-usable nuclear materials into non-weapons-usable forms. Without addressing the moral and strategic iss= ues underlying nuclear retaliation, it will most likely be impossible to assemble the coalition needed to get a nuclear weapons convention, much l= ess to actually get a sound treaty or to achieve enduring nuclear disarmament. The program discussed above does not explicitly address many of the links= to other struggles that will need to be made for ensuring the durability of = the elimination of nuclear arsenals. For instance, the use of nuclear power does not, in the short-term, conflict with the goal of eliminating nuclea= r weapons. But it does increase the likelihood of reversion of nuclear weapons in a time of crisis. It also increases mistrust and conflict, as demonstrated by the present US-Russian disputes over Russia's sales of a nuclear reactor to Iran (which is in compliance with IAEA safeguards) and the US agreement to provide North Korea (which is not in compliance with IAEA safeguards) with a nuclear reactor. A discussion about these links = is needed as the disarmament movement attempts to accomplish its short-term objectives, so that the links to other movements and struggles can be effectively made. ************************************** ************************************** Arjun Makhijani President, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research 6935 Laurel Ave., Suite 204 Takoma Park, Maryland 20912, U.S.A. Phone 301-270-5500 Fax: 301-270-3029 e-mail: arjun@ieer.org web page: http://www.ieer.org --------------61EFD140C23DE0213BC725CD-- - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Tina Bell Subject: (abolition-usa) WILPF (NY Metro) looking at hiring a Coordinator as Tina Bell is returning to Australia. Date: 05 Feb 1999 13:32:56 -0500 (EST) The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (NY Metro branch) is looking at hiring a new Coordinator. If interested please call Anne Florant (212) 533 2125. I am returning to Australia as I have had my long term working visa rejected I want to be closer to my family. I will still be connected to WILPF and other activist groups, so our paths may cross in the future. Thank you for all your amazing work and good luck for the future. Best wishes, Tina. - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "David Crockett Williams" Subject: (abolition-usa) Y2K and Nuclear Weapons Date: 06 Feb 1999 01:27:36 -0800 >From: Mark Sommer Subject: Y2K and Nuclear Weapons > >A Letter from Michael Kraig, Scoville Fellow, BASIC > >I am heading a project on Y2K and nuclear weapons arsenals at the British >American Security Information Council (BASIC) in Washington, DC, and London, >United Kingdom. We just released a first report on the nature of the >"Millennium Bug," or "Y2K Problem," as it relates to the Department of >Defense and nuclear operations. The report summarizes the generic computer >problem, the state of existing DoD Y2K remediation programs (including their >many management deficiencies and failures), and possible Y2K >vulnerabilities for nuclear weapons and associated nuclear operations, >including especially Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence >(C3I) systems (i.e., warning satellites, radar arrays, data storage and >correlation centers, communications nodes, and so on). It also outlines >some general policy alternatives in the conclusion, such as the reduction of >our alert rates from "launch on warning" to a lower state of readiness (also >known as the "de-alerting" of nuclear forces). The entire text (including >endnotes) can be found on BASIC's web page, www.basicint.org. > >I have sent the report to the key staffers of all house members and senators >with nuclear warhead storage or deployment in their own backyard, as well as >majority and minority staffers on the Armed Services Committee in the >Senate. Reports have also gone to some key committee staffers (for >instance, one person on Stephen Horn's Y2K subcommittee in the House, which >has given "D" grades to the DoD on their Y2K repair progress), and all >members of the Senate's Special Committee on the Year 2000 Problem. To >support these mailings, we have had several meetings with the offices of >Senators Jeff Bingaman, Robert Kerrey, John Kerry, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, >Pete Dominici, Tom Harkin, Joseph Lieberman, and Christopher Dodd. Our hope >is that senators such as Bob Kerry of Nebraska and Tom Daschle of SD -both >of whom are recommending "de-alerting" of the arsenals and unilateral >cutbacks- will add Y2K to their agenda, or possibly use it to gain leverage >with US Strategic Command (STRATCOM) in Omaha, Nebraska. In the past >several years, both STRATCOM and civilian nuclear planners in the Office of >Secretary of Defense have scuttled any attempts to consider de-alerting options. > >Helen Caldicott, currently head of the STAR Foundation (Standing for Truth >about Radiation) and former head and founder of the Physicians for Social >Responsibility, is putting together a symposium jointly with BASIC and the >Nuclear Information Resource Service (NIRS) in March with Bruce Blair, Ted >Taylor, myself, and multiple experts on the domestic, or energy, side of >nuclear power. Our policy goal is twofold: to get Congress to 1) charge the >DoD Inspector General to do a series of highly specific reports on >individual "high risk" nuclear systems, including nuclear C3I, and 2) to >move ahead on de-alerting (or at the very least, consider it as a realistic >policy option). > >The General Accounting Office (GAO) has done, and is doing, reports on DoD >procedures, test data, contingency planning, and so on for its remediation >program, but no one at the GAO is preparing narrowly focused reports on >critical nuclear systems. In other words, the activity at this point is at >least one step removed from the actual sources of potential trouble. > >If you are interested in this program or have your own suggestions for >action, please contact me at (202) 785-1266 or mkraig@basicint.org. John >Pike of the Federation of American Scientists has suggested, for instance, >that CPSR get 40 to 50 top computer scientists to write a letter to congress >containing clearly defined goals and policy alternatives, including the >tasking of Inspector General reports as well as more technical advice from >the field. > >As a last note, I should say that BASIC is pretty much alone on this issue. >Most expert analysts currently have other well funded programs, and thus, >other responsibilities for the foreseeable future. Other than appearing in >the joint STAR-BASIC-NIRS symposium in March, or keeping an updated web >page, no one seems to be devoting time or resources to the topic. I have >been looking for ways to split the research pie, as I cannot possibly cover >all facets of DoD-STRATCOM nuclear operations. If you know of someone who >could help on nuclear weapons, either in terms of original research or as a >source of technical information for nuclear C3I and/or launch platform >support systems, I would be very grateful. > >Sincerely, >Michael R. Kraig mkraig@basicint.org >Scoville Fellow (202) 785-1266 >BASIC >1900 L St. NW, Suite 401 >Washington, DC 20036 - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peace though Reason Subject: (abolition-usa) NucNews (US) 2/6/99 - Date: 06 Feb 1999 15:18:16 -0500 --=====================_5625445==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" 1. WIPP License Defended; EPA Asserts Safety in Face of Lawsuit http://www.abqjournal.com/news/1news02-03.htm 2. Don't eat the tumbleweeds http://www.spokane.net/news-story-body.asp?Date=020599&ID=s526309&cat= 3. Critics say NRC buckles to pressure A reversed ruling is but one incident cited as proof. http://www.phillynews.com/inquirer/99/Jan/31/national/NRC31.htm 1. WIPP License Defended; EPA Asserts Safety in Face of Lawsuit http://www.abqjournal.com/news/1news02-03.htm By Mike Taugher, February 3, 1999, Albuquerque Journal A proposed nuclear waste dump in southern New Mexico is about 10 times safer than regulations require it to be, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said in court papers filed this week Responding to a lawsuit filed by the New Mexico Attorney General's Office and environmental groups, the EPA defended the license it issued in May to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant The attorney general and environmental groups have charged that the license for what would be the world's first engineered underground nuclear waste dump is defective and should be withdrawn The lawsuit is one of two ongoing legal proceedings in which the Attorney General's Office and environmental groups are trying to prevent WIPP from opening Radioactive trash from the nation's nuclear weapons complex would be buried nearly 1/2-mile underground in ancient salt beds at WIPP, 26 miles east of Carlsbad. Construction was completed on the $2 billion project 10 years ago, but legal challenges and regulatory requirements have prevented it from opening In the first lawsuit, the attorney general and the environmental groups are seeking to prevent the U.S. Department of Energy, which owns WIPP, from shipping drums of nuclear waste from Los Alamos National Laboratory before state regulators issue a permit for non-nuclear hazardous waste On Monday, U.S. District Judge John Garrett Penn received final written arguments. Both sides expect him to schedule a hearing in the coming weeks or months The second lawsuit, which challenges the EPA license, is being handled by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The same court in 1997 rejected a lawsuit by the same parties when they challenged the EPA's licensing process at an earlier stage. A hearing is scheduled in that case May 6 The arguments being made now against the EPA license are intricate Still, one WIPP critic expressed confidence. "They clearly know they're in trouble on a couple of issues, I think," said Don Hancock of the Southwest Research and Information Center For example, Hancock said the EPA was wrong to certify WIPP independently from the laboratories that want to ship their waste to WIPP. In other words, WIPP's critics argue the EPA should have issued one license for the entire program instead of one license for WIPP, followed by separate certifications for batches of waste destined for WIPP And WIPP's critics argued that the EPA should have forced the Energy Department to use more than one "engineered barrier." Plans at WIPP now call for just one engineered barrier -- sacks of magnesium oxide, intended to moderate leakage, that will surround drums of waste The EPA defended both decisions in its court filings. 2. Don't eat the tumbleweeds http://www.spokane.net/news-story-body.asp?Date=020599&ID=s526309&cat= Associated Press - February 5, 1999 RICHLAND _ All that wind this week has stirred up some toxic tumbleweeds on the Hanford nuclear reservation. Hanford workers are being warned not to touch tumbleweeds rolling through the 200 East area because several have been found to be contaminated and to have rolled outside ``radiological control boundaries.'' Not that the tumbleweeds pose much danger. No one has been contaminated, officials said. ``A person would have to ingest several contaminated tumbleweeds to be subject to harm,'' lead contractor Fluor Daniel Hanford, Inc., said in a news release Thursday. The company said it will collect contaminated tumbleweeds and properly dispose of them. Hanford used to make plutonium for nuclear weapons and now contains the nation's largest collection of nuclear waste. 3. Critics say NRC buckles to pressure A reversed ruling is but one incident cited as proof. http://www.phillynews.com/inquirer/99/Jan/31/national/NRC31.htm By Rich Heidorn Jr., PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER STAFF WRITER In December 1997, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission panel voted to issue sanctions against the operator of a notorious Connecticut nuclear plant for targeting whistle-blowers for layoffs. Last June, without explanation, the same panel reversed its position. Northeast Utilities, operator of the Millstone nuclear plant in Waterford, Conn., would not be punished at all. "We could uncover no decent explanation for why this happened," said assistant Inspector General George Mulley, whose office issued a report this month on the incident. "Everybody forgot everything. Nobody could recall any other conversations [ between the two votes ] . There were no meeting notes, no nothing." The Millstone reversal is one of several recent developments that have led critics to charge that the NRC is buckling to political pressure from the nuclear industry and its supporters in Congress. The NRC renewed its vow to protect whistle-blowers after it was embarrassed by a 1996 Time magazine cover story that reported on the agency's failure to police Millstone. NRC later acknowledged that agency officials had allowed Northeast Utilities for years to ignore safety rules and to harass workers who raised concerns about the practices. The disclosures prompted the most sweeping changes in NRC policies since the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island. The NRC ordered all three Millstone units shut down and fined Northeast Utilities $2.1 million, the largest such penalty ever. The NRC also ordered the nation's other 100-plus plants to engage in costly safety reviews. Now, however, some say the agency has been cowed into allowing a premature restart of Millstone. Unit III returned to service in July, and Unit II is expected to be at full power by spring. Some industry watchdogs say the agency has been on the defensive since the industry defeated President Clinton's nomination of former NRC counsel Daniel Berkovitz to the commission in 1996. Then last year, Senate Appropriations Chairman Pete Domenici (R., Ariz.) proposed eliminating 500 of the NRC's 1,400 inspectors. The Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's trade group, also has called for cutting the NRC workforce. It says the industry is getting safer, noting that the incidence of "operational events" that could have led to severe accidents was lower in 1997 than in any year since 1970. David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists said Domenici's cuts would result in "drive by" regulation at a time when rapidly aging plants and economic pressures from electric deregulation necessitate increased vigilance. The NRC -- whose inspection hours per plant decreased by 20 percent between 1990 and 1997 -- ended up with a 3.8 percent cut from its 1999 budget request. Lochbaum says safety can coexist with cost-consciousness. Virginia Electric & Power Co.'s two nuclear plants, he points out, have the industry's lowest costs as well as its top safety ratings. Watchdogs say the public cannot count on the industry to police itself. "As the electric utility deregulates, safety margins may be compromised when licensees cut costs to stay competitive," the General Accounting Office warned Congress in July. Preparing for competition in Connecticut is what led Millstone's managers to cut spending on maintenance, the GAO noted. Lochbaum and former PP&L engineer Donald Ranft say such corner-cutting will continue unless the NRC does more to protect plant workers who express concerns. In November, the Union of Concerned Scientists asked the NRC for an independent review of Pacific Gas & Electric Co.'s treatment of whistle-blowers at its Diablo Canyon nuclear plant. The request was prompted when PG&E ordered Neil Aiken, a senior reactor operator with 20 years' experience, to undergo a psychiatric exam after he raised safety questions at a stockholders' meeting. Aiken was removed from his duties when doctors retained by PG&E diagnosed him as mentally ill. PG&E, which settled a separate complaint brought by another whistle-blower last year, denied that Aiken was punished for going public with his concerns. The company said NRC regulations required it to remove Aiken based on the diagnoses. "Mr. Aiken was free to get his own medical opinion. He did not," PG&E spokesman Jeff Lewis said. Aiken's coworkers have rallied to his defense; more than 40 signed a letter to the NRC attesting to his fitness, according to Lochbaum. For nuclear workers who blow the whistle, life is never the same. George Galatis, the Millstone engineer whom Time magazine put on its cover, left the industry for the ministry, convinced that little has changed at the plant or the NRC. Ranft, who was fired by PP&L after raising safety concerns at the Susquehanna nuclear plant, said he has been blackballed not just by PP&L but by the industry. Unable to find work for 11 months, Ranft recently started a sales job at half his previous pay. His ex-wife is taking him to court because his child support dropped. The legal bills from his case against PP&L already top $50,000, with no end in sight. He was hospitalized in December for heart irregularities, and frequently feels dizzy and lightheaded from the stress. "I've been in the industry for 25 years, and I never realized how much the deck is stacked by the NRC in favor of the utilities," Ranft said. "Assuming for the moment I'm wrong, there's got to be someone out there who's raising a legitimate issue. How do they survive? How do they do it? You've got to be a real masochist." _____________________________________________________________ * NucNews - to subscribe: prop1@prop1.org - http://prop1.org * Say "Please Subscribe NucNews" NucNews Archive: HTTP://WWW.ONELIST.COM/arcindex.cgi?listname=NucNews since January 13, 1999; for earlier editions - write prop1@prop1.org --------------------------------------- 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: _____________________________________________________________ --=====================_5625445==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"
1. WIPP License Defended; EPA Asserts Safety in Face of Lawsuit

2. Don't eat the tumbleweeds

3. Critics say NRC buckles to pressure
A reversed ruling is but one incident cited as proof.

----------------------------------------

1. WIPP License Defended; EPA Asserts Safety in Face of Lawsuit


By Mike Taugher, February 3, 1999, Albuquerque Journal

 A proposed nuclear waste dump in southern New Mexico is about 10 times safer than regulations require it to be, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said in court papers filed this week

Responding to a lawsuit filed by the New Mexico Attorney General's Office and environmental groups, the EPA defended the license it issued in May to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant

The attorney general and environmental groups have charged that the license for what would be the world's first engineered underground nuclear waste dump is defective and should be withdrawn

The lawsuit is one of two ongoing legal proceedings in which the Attorney General's Office and environmental groups are trying to prevent WIPP from opening

Radioactive trash from the nation's nuclear weapons complex would be buried nearly 1/2-mile underground in ancient salt beds at WIPP, 26 miles east of Carlsbad. Construction was completed on the $2 billion project 10 years ago, but legal challenges and regulatory requirements have prevented it from opening

In the first lawsuit, the attorney general and the environmental groups are seeking to prevent the U.S. Department of Energy, which owns WIPP, from shipping drums of nuclear waste from Los Alamos National Laboratory before state regulators issue a permit for non-nuclear hazardous waste

On Monday, U.S. District Judge John Garrett Penn received final written arguments. Both sides expect him to schedule a hearing in the coming weeks or months

The second lawsuit, which challenges the EPA license, is being handled by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The same court in 1997 rejected a lawsuit by the same parties when they challenged the EPA's licensing process at an earlier stage. A hearing is scheduled in that case May 6

The arguments being made now against the EPA license are intricate

Still, one WIPP critic expressed confidence.     "They clearly know they're in trouble on a couple of issues, I think," said Don Hancock of the Southwest Research and Information Center

For example, Hancock said the EPA was wrong to certify WIPP independently from the laboratories that want to ship their waste to WIPP. In other words, WIPP's critics argue the EPA should have issued one license for the entire program instead of one license for WIPP, followed by separate certifications for batches of waste destined for WIPP

And WIPP's critics argued that the EPA should have forced the Energy Department to use more than one "engineered barrier." Plans at WIPP now call for just one engineered barrier -- sacks of magnesium oxide, intended to moderate leakage, that will surround drums of waste

The EPA defended both decisions in its court filings.

--------------------------------------

2. Don't eat the tumbleweeds


Associated Press - February 5, 1999

RICHLAND _ All that wind this week has stirred up some toxic tumbleweeds on the Hanford nuclear reservation.

Hanford workers are being warned not to touch tumbleweeds rolling through the 200 East area because several have been found to be contaminated and to have rolled outside ``radiological control boundaries.''

Not that the tumbleweeds pose much danger. No one has been contaminated, officials said.

``A person would have to ingest several contaminated tumbleweeds to be subject to harm,'' lead contractor Fluor Daniel Hanford, Inc., said in a news release Thursday.

The company said it will collect contaminated tumbleweeds and properly dispose of them.

Hanford used to make plutonium for nuclear weapons and now contains the nation's largest collection of nuclear waste.

------------------------------

3. Critics say NRC buckles to pressure
A reversed ruling is but one incident cited as proof.


By Rich Heidorn Jr., PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

In December 1997, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission panel voted to issue sanctions against the operator of a notorious Connecticut nuclear plant for targeting whistle-blowers for layoffs.

Last June, without explanation, the same panel reversed its position. Northeast Utilities, operator of the Millstone nuclear plant in Waterford, Conn., would not be punished at all.

"We could uncover no decent explanation for why this happened," said assistant Inspector General George Mulley, whose office issued a report this month on the incident. "Everybody forgot everything. Nobody could recall any other conversations [ between the two votes ] . There were no meeting notes, no nothing."

The Millstone reversal is one of several recent developments that have led critics to charge that the NRC is buckling to political pressure from the nuclear industry and its supporters in Congress.

The NRC renewed its vow to protect whistle-blowers after it was embarrassed by a 1996 Time magazine cover story that reported on the agency's failure to police Millstone.

NRC later acknowledged that agency officials had allowed Northeast Utilities for years to ignore safety rules and to harass workers who raised concerns about the practices.

The disclosures prompted the most sweeping changes in NRC policies since the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island.

The NRC ordered all three Millstone units shut down and fined Northeast Utilities $2.1 million, the largest such penalty ever. The NRC also ordered the nation's other 100-plus plants to engage in costly safety reviews.

Now, however, some say the agency has been cowed into allowing a premature restart of Millstone. Unit III returned to service in July, and Unit II is expected to be at full power by spring.

Some industry watchdogs say the agency has been on the defensive since the industry defeated President Clinton's nomination of former NRC counsel Daniel Berkovitz to the commission in 1996. Then last year, Senate Appropriations Chairman Pete Domenici (R., Ariz.) proposed eliminating 500 of the NRC's 1,400 inspectors.

The Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's trade group, also has called for cutting the NRC workforce. It says the industry is getting safer, noting that the incidence of "operational events" that could have led to severe accidents was lower in 1997 than in any year since 1970.

David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists said Domenici's cuts would result in "drive by" regulation at a time when rapidly aging plants and economic pressures from electric deregulation necessitate increased vigilance.

The NRC -- whose inspection hours per plant decreased by 20 percent between 1990 and 1997 -- ended up with a 3.8 percent cut from its 1999 budget request.

Lochbaum says safety can coexist with cost-consciousness. Virginia Electric & Power Co.'s two nuclear plants, he points out, have the industry's lowest costs as well as its top safety ratings.

Watchdogs say the public cannot count on the industry to police itself.

"As the electric utility deregulates, safety margins may be compromised when licensees cut costs to stay competitive," the General Accounting Office warned Congress in July. Preparing for competition in Connecticut is what led Millstone's managers to cut spending on maintenance, the GAO noted.

Lochbaum and former PP&L engineer Donald Ranft say such corner-cutting will continue unless the NRC does more to protect plant workers who express concerns.

In November, the Union of Concerned Scientists asked the NRC for an independent review of Pacific Gas & Electric Co.'s treatment of whistle-blowers at its Diablo Canyon nuclear plant.

The request was prompted when PG&E ordered Neil Aiken, a senior reactor operator with 20 years' experience, to undergo a psychiatric exam after he raised safety questions at a stockholders' meeting. Aiken was removed from his duties when doctors retained by PG&E diagnosed him as mentally ill.

PG&E, which settled a separate complaint brought by another whistle-blower last year, denied that Aiken was punished for going public with his concerns. The company said NRC regulations required it to remove Aiken based on the diagnoses. "Mr. Aiken was free to get his own medical opinion. He did not," PG&E spokesman Jeff Lewis said.

Aiken's coworkers have rallied to his defense; more than 40 signed a letter to the NRC attesting to his fitness, according to Lochbaum.

For nuclear workers who blow the whistle, life is never the same. George Galatis, the Millstone engineer whom Time magazine put on its cover, left the industry for the ministry, convinced that little has changed at the plant or the NRC.

Ranft, who was fired by PP&L after raising safety concerns at the Susquehanna nuclear plant, said he has been blackballed not just by PP&L but by the industry.

Unable to find work for 11 months, Ranft recently started a sales job at half his previous pay. His ex-wife is taking him to court because his child support dropped. The legal bills from his case against PP&L already top $50,000, with no end in sight. He was hospitalized in December for heart irregularities, and frequently feels dizzy and lightheaded from the stress.

"I've been in the industry for 25 years, and I never realized how much the deck is stacked by the NRC in favor of the utilities," Ranft said. "Assuming for the moment I'm wrong, there's got to be someone out there who's raising a legitimate issue. How do they survive? How do they do it? You've got to be a real masochist."  
_____________________________________________________________

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NucNews Archive: HTTP://WWW.ONELIST.COM/arcindex.cgi?listname=NucNews
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   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:
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_____________________________________________________________ --=====================_5625445==_.ALT-- - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peace though Reason Subject: (abolition-usa) NucNews (US) 2/7/99 - MX Missiles Budgeted; Nuclear Plant Fire Date: 07 Feb 1999 06:35:28 -0500 --=====================_60953090==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" 1. Funding Sought as Deactivation of Some U.S. Missiles Is Delayed (MX) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-02/07/030l-020799-idx.html 2. Nuclear panel: Safety devices slowed plant fire Because of the severe damage, officials have not determined how the fire started. http://www.dispatch.com/pan/news/nrcnws.html 1. Funding Sought as Deactivation of Some U.S. Missiles Is Delayed http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-02/07/030l-020799-idx.html By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, February 7, 1999; Page A28 The Clinton administration has added $50 million to the fiscal 2000 Pentagon budget to keep in operation for at least another year 50 MX intercontinental ballistic missiles that were scheduled to be deactivated had Russia ratified the START II arms control treaty, according to administration sources. The decision to keep the 10-warhead missiles in operation was made in part to maintain the U.S. nuclear warhead count as the administration moves to decommission the four oldest Trident strategic ballistic missile submarines starting in 2002. That will leave in service 14 of the giant nuclear submarines, each of which carries 24 ICBMs with five or more warheads. The Trident decommissioning, which was originally timed to coincide with expected Moscow ratification this year of START II, had been in some doubt because of a congressional prohibition against reductions of the U.S. nuclear arsenal until the Russian parliament took positive action on the 1993 treaty. A major reason for taking the Tridents out of service is the cost of keeping them going. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen told Congress last week that it would cost "some 5 or 6 billion dollars" to refuel the nuclear reactors of the four older Tridents as well as modify them to carry newer Trident II missiles. In his testimony, Cohen said that despite the Trident reductions, the administration was going to "continue to insist that Russia ratify START II. I think if we have a ratification process which we abide by and they don't, then that undercuts the validity of having a process to begin with. So I think it's important that the Duma ratifies START II so that we can move on to START III." Although the Russian parliament has refused to ratify START II, which would force the United States to make deep reductions, Moscow has been unable to afford to keep its strategic nuclear bombers, submarines and land-based ICBMs at START I levels. At the Helsinki summit in March 1997, President Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin agreed that once START II was ratified the two sides would immediately begin to deactivate the U.S. 10-warhead MX and Russia's 10-warhead SS-18. In a related matter, national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger told Congress Thursday that he would recommend the president veto Republican-sponsored legislation that would mandate deploying a national system to shoot down enemy missiles based solely on a determination that the system was "technically possible." Berger said that although the administration had decided to set aside $10.5 billion to deploy a limited missile defense system, the planned June 2000 decision to go ahead would be based on several factors, of which technological feasibility would be only one. 2. Nuclear panel: Safety devices slowed plant fire Because of the severe damage, officials have not determined how the fire started. http://www.dispatch.com/pan/news/nrcnws.html By Bob Dreitzler Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch Staff Reporter, February 6, 1999 PIKETON, Ohio -- A fire at a uranium fuel processing plant was "about as bad as it could be for that type of situation,'' a federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission official said yesterday. The fire began shortly after 6 a.m. on Dec. 9 in a large building at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, where uranium is enriched for use as fuel for nuclear reactors. For nearly two hours, the fire melted and burned metal piping in uranium processing equipment and buckled metal girders in an area about 100 feet by 30 feet. The blaze "could not have been any more serious,'' said James Caldwell, a deputy regional administrator for the NRC, but safety features incorporated when the plant was designed nearly a half-century ago helped firefighters contain the blaze. The building is constructed of cells equipped with sprinklers and separated by secure walls, which kept the fire from spreading. Two firefighters suffered minor injuries when they slipped in some of the 3,000 gallons of lubricating and hydraulic oil that was released during the blaze. The oil also caught fire and some leaked from the cell where the blaze originated into adjacent areas, but was quickly contained. Some uranium hexafluoride was released inside the building, but none escaped outside, officials said. No one was exposed to radiation or chemical contamination, they said. Because of the severe damage, officials have not determined how the fire started. But they know it was fueled by a reaction between molten aluminum and the gaseous uranium hexafluoride that is used in the enrichment process. The fire was like a continuously burning torch, said Patrick Hiland, chief of the NRC's fuel facilities branch. "It was a tremendously hot fire.'' Caldwell and Hiland are part of an NRC inspection team formed to investigate the fire. The team included specialists from the agency's headquarters and regional office personnel. The team met yesterday with plant officials to review their findings. About 100 people attended the presentation at Ohio State University's Piketon Research and Extension Center, which is adjacent to the enrichment plant complex. The federal team found that the emergency response to the fire was adequate but identified problems in areas of planning, training and operations. Among the findings, they said, was inadequate emergency breathing equipment in the area where the fire occurred, which resulted in two workers suffering smoke inhalation. Firefighters tried to supplement fogging equipment with foam spray but their foaming equipment would not work. And notices that should have gone out immediately to state and local agencies and the NRC were delayed. The NRC's written report detailing all its findings will be issued in about a week. Corrective actions already were being taken on some items before the NRC investigators discovered them, federal officials said. They concluded that such a fire could occur again, but that if it did the consequences would be within regulatory limits. Another phase of the investigation beginning in March will determine whether any fines or penalties should be assessed against Lockheed Martin Utility Services, the company that operates the plant for the United States Enrichment Corp. under a contract that is being phased out. Morris Brown, plant general manager, told the NRC team that he found its report to be comprehensive and accurate. "We appreciate that you noted the positive aspects as well as where we need to improve,'' he said. He said no discipline or reprimands were issued as a result of the fire. "But there were some expectations issued,'' he said. "We are handling it as a lesson learned.'' _____________________________________________________________ * NucNews - to subscribe: prop1@prop1.org - http://prop1.org * Say "Please Subscribe NucNews" NucNews Archive: HTTP://WWW.ONELIST.COM/arcindex.cgi?listname=NucNews since January 13, 1999; for earlier editions - write prop1@prop1.org --------------------------------------- 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: _____________________________________________________________ --=====================_60953090==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"
1. Funding Sought as Deactivation of Some U.S. Missiles Is Delayed (MX)

2. Nuclear panel: Safety devices slowed plant fire
Because of the severe damage, officials have not determined how the fire started.

----------------------------------------

1. Funding Sought as Deactivation of Some U.S. Missiles Is Delayed


By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 7, 1999; Page A28

The Clinton administration has added $50 million to the fiscal 2000 Pentagon budget to keep in operation for at least another year 50 MX intercontinental ballistic missiles that were scheduled to be deactivated had Russia ratified the START II arms control treaty, according to administration sources.

The decision to keep the 10-warhead missiles in operation was made in part to maintain the U.S. nuclear warhead count as the administration moves to decommission the four oldest Trident strategic ballistic missile submarines starting in 2002. That will leave in service 14 of the giant nuclear submarines, each of which carries 24 ICBMs with five or more warheads.

The Trident decommissioning, which was originally timed to coincide with expected Moscow ratification this year of START II, had been in some doubt because of a congressional prohibition against reductions of the U.S. nuclear arsenal until the Russian parliament took positive action on the 1993 treaty.

A major reason for taking the Tridents out of service is the cost of keeping them going. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen told Congress last week that it would cost "some 5 or 6 billion dollars" to refuel the nuclear reactors of the four older Tridents as well as modify them to carry newer Trident II missiles.

In his testimony, Cohen said that despite the Trident reductions, the administration was going to "continue to insist that Russia ratify START II. I think if we have a ratification process which we abide by and they don't, then that undercuts the validity of having a process to begin with. So I think it's important that the Duma ratifies START II so that we can move on to START III."

Although the Russian parliament has refused to ratify START II, which would force the United States to make deep reductions, Moscow has been unable to afford to keep its strategic nuclear bombers, submarines and land-based ICBMs at START I levels.

At the Helsinki summit in March 1997, President Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin agreed that once START II was ratified the two sides would immediately begin to deactivate the U.S. 10-warhead MX and Russia's 10-warhead SS-18.

In a related matter, national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger told Congress Thursday that he would recommend the president veto Republican-sponsored legislation that would mandate deploying a national system to shoot down enemy missiles based solely on a determination that the system was "technically possible."

Berger said that although the administration had decided to set aside $10.5 billion to deploy a limited missile defense system, the planned June 2000 decision to go ahead would be based on several factors, of which technological feasibility would be only one.

---------------------------------------

2. Nuclear panel: Safety devices slowed plant fire
Because of the severe damage, officials have not determined how the fire started.


By Bob Dreitzler Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch Staff Reporter, February 6, 1999

PIKETON, Ohio -- A fire at a uranium fuel processing plant was "about as bad as it could be for that type of situation,'' a federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission official said yesterday.

The fire began shortly after 6 a.m. on Dec. 9 in a large building at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, where uranium is enriched for use as fuel for nuclear reactors.

For nearly two hours, the fire melted and burned metal piping in uranium processing equipment and buckled metal girders in an area about 100 feet by 30 feet.

The blaze "could not have been any more serious,'' said James Caldwell, a deputy regional administrator for the NRC, but safety features incorporated when the plant was designed nearly a half-century ago helped firefighters contain the blaze.

The building is constructed of cells equipped with sprinklers and separated by secure walls, which kept the fire from spreading.

Two firefighters suffered minor injuries when they slipped in some of the 3,000 gallons of lubricating and hydraulic oil that was released during the blaze.

The oil also caught fire and some leaked from the cell where the blaze originated into adjacent areas, but was quickly contained.

Some uranium hexafluoride was released inside the building, but none escaped outside, officials said. No one was exposed to radiation or chemical contamination, they said.

Because of the severe damage, officials have not determined how the fire started. But they know it was fueled by a reaction between molten aluminum and the gaseous uranium hexafluoride that is used in the enrichment process.

The fire was like a continuously burning torch, said Patrick Hiland, chief of the NRC's fuel facilities branch. "It was a tremendously hot fire.''

Caldwell and Hiland are part of an NRC inspection team formed to investigate the fire.

The team included specialists from the agency's headquarters and regional office personnel.

The team met yesterday with plant officials to review their findings.

About 100 people attended the presentation at Ohio State University's Piketon Research and Extension Center, which is adjacent to the enrichment plant complex.

The federal team found that the emergency response to the fire was adequate but identified problems in areas of planning, training and operations.

Among the findings, they said, was inadequate emergency breathing equipment in the area where the fire occurred, which resulted in two workers suffering smoke inhalation.

Firefighters tried to supplement fogging equipment with foam spray but their foaming equipment would not work.

And notices that should have gone out immediately to state and local agencies and the NRC were delayed.

The NRC's written report detailing all its findings will be issued in about a week.

Corrective actions already were being taken on some items before the NRC investigators discovered them, federal officials said.

They concluded that such a fire could occur again, but that if it did the consequences would be within regulatory limits.

Another phase of the investigation beginning in March will determine whether any fines or penalties should be assessed against Lockheed Martin Utility Services, the company that operates the plant for the United States Enrichment Corp. under a contract that is being phased out.

Morris Brown, plant general manager, told the NRC team that he found its report to be comprehensive and accurate.

"We appreciate that you noted the positive aspects as well as where we need to improve,'' he said.

He said no discipline or reprimands were issued as a result of the fire.

"But there were some expectations issued,'' he said. "We are handling it as a lesson learned.''



_____________________________________________________________

       * NucNews - to subscribe: prop1@prop1.org - http://prop1.org *
                         Say "Please Subscribe NucNews"
NucNews Archive: HTTP://WWW.ONELIST.COM/arcindex.cgi?listname=NucNews
           since January 13, 1999; for earlier editions - write prop1@prop1.org
                         
   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:
                <http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml>
_____________________________________________________________ --=====================_60953090==_.ALT-- - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Timothy Bruening Subject: (abolition-usa) Re: Good news from Russia Date: 07 Feb 1999 18:11:52 -0800 (PST) At 12:46 PM 5/18/98 +0100, you wrote: >Dear Abolitionists, > >Ex-General Alexander Lebed has comfortably won the election for Governor of >the rich, strategic Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk. He polled 57% against >38% for the establishment-backed incumbent, Valery Zubov. The UK Guardian >Moscow correspondent James Meek reports that this "will provide a secure >rear base from which the General can launch an assault on the Kremlin in >presidential elections in 2000." > >The point of my highlighting this is that Lebed was one of the 61 >signatories of the Generals' & Admirals' Statement for the Abolition of >Nuclear Weapons! He also negotiated Russia's withdrawal from Chechnya. However, I recently read that Lebed no longer favors nuclear disarmament. - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Timothy Bruening Subject: (abolition-usa) Letter to Doug Ose On Reducing Government Waste Date: 07 Feb 1999 18:36:24 -0800 (PST) Below is a letter I wrote to Representative Doug Ose (R-CA, 3rd Congressional District): Dear Representative Doug Ose: To help you in your crusade to eliminate government waste, I offer you the following suggestions for reducing waste in the military: I. Cut $418.8 million for 6 C-130's made in Georgia, added by Congress to the Pentagon's request last year. II. Cut $50 million for the LHD-8 helicopter carrier made in Mississippi, also added by Congress to the Pentagon's request. III. Cut $25 million for an F-16 C/D made in Texas, also added to the Pentagon's request by Congress. IV. Allow the Pentagon to close unneeded military bases. Set up a base closing commission to impartially develop a list of bases to be closed, then require that Congress vote up or down on that list. This method has succeeded in the past. Adding military pork to the Pentagon's budget makes it more difficult to improve military readiness. Therefore, I urge you to oppose military pork as vigorously as you oppose pork in other areas of government. Sincerely, Timothy Bruening 1439 Brown Drive Davis, CA 95616 - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Timothy Bruening Subject: (abolition-usa) Letter to Doug Ose On Reducing Government Waste and Nuclear Date: 07 Feb 1999 18:36:27 -0800 (PST) Below is another letter I wrote to Representative Doug Ose (R-CA, 3rd Congressional District): Dear Representative Doug Ose: To help you in your crusade to eliminate government waste, I urge you to press for a reduction in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. In recent months, both the U.S. and Russian militaries have recommended reducing nuclear arsenals to save billions of dollars (and trillions of rubles). The New York Times reported on November 23, 1998 that "Pentagon officials are quietly recommending that the Clinton Administration consider unilateral reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal." Reducing the U.S. nuclear arsenal would save money, which could be used to boost troop readiness. Over the past two years, the Pentagon has spent $95 million on weapons which would have been dismantled under START II (stalled in the Duma for the past 6 years), which would reduce the 2 nations' nuclear arsenals to 3,000 to 3,500 warheads each. This year, the extra cost will be $100 million. The Navy will pay over $5 billion between now and 2003 to refuel nuclear reactors and install new missiles on four Trident subs slated for dismantling under START II. Implementing START II could save taxpayers $6.3 billion between now and 2008, and reducing nuclear warheads to the 1,000 (still more than enough to blow any nation to kingdom come) anticipated in START III would save even more. Moreover, reducing the arsenal would make it unnecessary to produce tritium (at a cost of $9.5 billion over the next 40 years), since tritium could be recycled from dismantled warheads. However, a law passed by Congress prevents the military from reducing the U.S. arsenal to under 6,000 warheads. Please sponsor legislation to repeal that law so that the Pentagon can save $6.3 billion by reducing our arsenal to START II levels. I believe that now is the time to push for nuclear arms reductions because Russia can no longer afford to maintain its arsenal of several thousand warheads, due to the Russian economic crisis (according to a report released in October by Deputy Prime Minister Maslyudov). Russia can only afford a few hundred nuclear warheads. Therefore, the Maslyudov report urges that START II be ratified and that negotiations on START III begin. Meanwhile, the Russian military is pressing the Duma to ratify START II, so that the U.S. will reduce its nuclear arsenal to a level Russia can match. I believe that, as Senator Kerry says, we should go "as low as the Russians are willing to go." Therefore, I urge you to press Clinton for immediate sharp reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal to save money and reduce the risk of nuclear war. I also urge you to urge Clinton to begin immediate negotiations to drastically reduce Russian and U.S. nuclear arsenals, also urge Clinton to reduce the risk of an accidental nuclear war (caused by the infamous Y2K bug or by other problems) by taking our missiles off alert, by removing the warheads from their delivery vehicles, and by calling on Russia to do the same to its nuclear missiles. Sincerely, Timothy Bruening 1439 Brown Drive Davis, CA 95616 - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: smirnowb@ix.netcom.com Subject: (abolition-usa) Fwd: Sustainable Energy Coalition: "Weekly Update" Date: 07 Feb 1999 23:49:36 -0600 (CST) ------Begin forward message------------------------- Return-Path: SUSTAINABLE ENERGY COALITION "WEEKLY UPDATE" February 7, 1999 The articles provided below were initially compiled during the past week by the SUN DAY Campaign (ph. 301-270-2258; fax: 301-891-2866) for the 36 member organizations of the Sustainable Energy Coalition (list available upon request). Feel free to distribute this newsletter to others. In addition, please let us know of other U.S. organizations, businesses, or government agencies that would like to be added to the e-mail list for this publication. This newsletter is presently sent to over 700 organizations nationwide. If you want any of the items we have offered to fax, please provide a number for a dedicated, 24-hour fax line. FEDERAL ENERGY BUDGET 1.) Fiscal Year 2000 Budget Request: The Administration's Fiscal Year 2000 (FY'00) budget request for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) totals $15.76 billion - an increase of $212 million over FY'99. RENEWABLE ENERGY: The budget includes $389.9 million for renewables compared to $336.0 million in FY'99 and a Sustainable Energy Coalition proposal of $517.2 million. The major renewable energy accounts are as follows: Solar Buildings - $5.5 M (FY'99-$3.6 M); Solar Thermal - $18.9 M (FY'99-$17.0 M); Photovoltaics - $$93.3 M (FY'99-$72.2 M); Wind - $45.6 M (FY'99 - $34.7 M); Biomass - $39.8 M (FY'99 - 31.2 M); Biofuels - $53.4 M (FY'99 - $42.0 M); Geothermal - $29.5 M (FY'99 - $28.5 M); Hydropower - $7.0 M (FY'99 - $3.3 M). Let us know if you would like us to fax you a copy of a 1- page release from the National Hydropower Association or a 2-page release from the American Wind Energy Association on their respective budget increases. All renewable energy accounts were increased except for the Renewable Energy Production Incentive (FY'99 - $4.0 M; FY'00 - $1.5 M; Coal'n - $20.0 M); National Renewable Energy Laboratory (FY'99 - $3.9 M; FY'00 - $1.1 M; Coal'n - $14.7 M); and International Solar (FY'99 - $6.4 M; FY'00 - $6.0 M; Coal'n - $0.0 M). The American Public Power Association has "raised a ruckus" about the cut in REPI funding and reports that DOE officials now acknowledge that they "screwed up" and will work to remedy the situation. ENERGY EFFICIENCY: The FY'00 budget request includes $837.5 million for energy efficiency compared to $691.7 million in FY'99 and a Sustainable Energy Coalition proposal of $900.1 million. The major energy efficiency accounts are as follows: Building Sector - $144.9 M (FY'99 - $96.2 M); State Grants & Weatherization - $$191.0 M (FY'99 - $166.0 M); Industrial Sector - $171.0 M (FY'99 -165.9 M); Transportation Sector - $252.1 M (FY'00 - $202.1 M); Federal Energy Management Program - $31.9 M (FY'00 - $23.8 M). The Alliance to Save Energy and the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy each released a 2-page news release on the FY'00 energy efficiency budget request; let us know if you would like us to fax you a copy of either one. An analysis of the efficiency budget has been prepared by the Alliance to Save Energy; see . NUCLEAR POWER: The budget includes an increase of $13.6 million for commercial nuclear R&D for a total of $87.3 million; the Sustainable Energy Coalition had recommended a budget of $0.0. The nuclear increases include $6 M more (for a total of $25 million) for the Nuclear Energy Research Initiative and $5 million for the Nuclear Energy Plant Optimization program which Congress refused to fund in FY'99. However, the FY'00 budget request proposes to zero- out the $50 million ITER nuclear fusion program -- a Sustainable Energy Coalition goal since 1992. Let us know if you would like us to fax you a 2-page news release on the nuclear budget issued by Safe Energy Communication Council. FOSSIL FUELS: The fossil R&D budget was reduced by $10 million to $364.0 M with most of the cuts absorbed by the natural gas research program (reduced by $3.3 M) and the fuel cell program (reduced by $6.6 M). The total includes $122.4 million for coal R&D, $50.1 million for petroleum R&D, and $105.3 million for natural gas R&D. 2.) Green Scissors: On January 28, U.S. PIRG, Friends of the Earth, and Taxpayers for Common Sense released a report, "Green Scissors '99 -- Cutting Wasteful and Environmentally Harmful Spending," which argued that $50.7 billion could be saved by cutting 72 federal programs. These include eliminating the coal, petroleum, and diesel research programs that "benefit large, profitable fossil fuel and auto companies [which] would save $1.6 billion and reduce subsidies that encourage global warming." The report recommends eliminating research funding for diesel engines that emit harmful levels of air pollution to save taxpayers $220 million as well as canceling DOE's noncompetitive contract to "recycle" radioactive metals and other atomic weapons and nuclear power wastes into consumer products to save $251.6 million. The full report can be found at . ELECTRIC UTILITY RESTRUCTURING 1.) Restructuring - Congressional Prospects: A February 4 "CongressDaily" article reports that "House and Senate leaders on energy policy are continuing to move in opposite directions on electric deregulation legislation." Some Senators, led by Energy & Natural Resources Chairman Frank Murkowski (R-AK), favor minimalist legislation with a separate bill to repeal the line-of-business restrictions in the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 (PUHCA). Moreover, Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) last week vowed the Senate would not take up electric deregulation this year. But many House members - including Commerce Chairman Tom Bliley (R-VA) and Commerce Energy & Power Subcommittee Chairman Joe Barton (R-TX) - are pushing a comprehensive electricity deregulation bill and oppose a stand- alone PUHCA bill. Barton plans to hold two to three weeks of hearings in March before sending a bipartisan bill to the full committee for approval this spring or early summer and possibly reach the full House floor in early September. Let us know if you want to see a copy of the 2-page article. 2.) PUHCA Repeal Pending: Reuters (January 28) reports that Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) has introduced legislation to repeal the Public Utility Holding Company Act (PUHCA). The bill reportedly has the support of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS). The less than a dozen electric utilities and three gas utilities that are registered holding companies want the law repealed so they can expand in the increasingly competitive energy market without having to seek approval from regulators. PUHCA repeal -- along with PURPA repeal -- is also a target of the utility deregulation bill expected to be introduced by Senate Energy Committee Chairman Frank Murkowski (R-AK). Public Citizen has prepared a 4-page alert about pending PUHCA repeal legislation that includes a short background description of S.313 accompanied by a proposed letter to members of the Senate and Public Citizen's recommendations on how to improve PUHCA. Let us know if you would like us to fax you a copy. 3.) PUHCA/Holding Companies: Public Citizen reports that the number of "registered" holding companies has been increasing. Today there are 16 electric and 3 gas registered holding companies that must comply with all sections of PUHCA, for a grand total of 19. Since 1992, five electric utilities have become registered holding companies: Ameren Corp (Union Electric and Central Illinois Public Service Co.), Cinergy Corp. (Cincinnati Gas & Electric and PSI Energy), Conectiv (Atlantic Energy and Delmarva Power & Light), Interstate Energy Corp. (aka Alliant, Wisconsin Power & Light, Interstate Power, and IES Utilities), and New Century Energies (Public Service of Colorado and Southwestern Public Service Co.) CLIMATE CHANGE 1.) Early Action Legislation: In his State of the Union address, President Clinton offered his full support for the burgeoning, legislative effort to provide companies with early credit for voluntary reductions of greenhouse gas emissions saying that he wants "to work with members of Congress in both parties" to craft a bill. However, Administration officials have since indicated that the White House will not take the lead on the issue or attempt to "put a bill on the table." This may reflect growing unease among environmental groups with the pending Chafee-Mack- Lieberman bill, S.2617, which - among other shortcomings - would allow the nuclear power industry to gain tradable emission credits for supplanting coal- fired power generation with nuclear power. 2.) State of the World: In its millennial edition of the "State of the World" report issued on January 16, the Worldwatch Institute warns: "The atmosphere is under assault. The billions of tons of carbon that have been released since the Industrial Revolution have pushed atmospheric concentrations of CO2 to their highest level in 160,000 years -- a level that continues to rise each year. As scientists predicted, temperatures are rising along with the concentration of CO2. The latest jump in 1998 left the globe temperature at its highest level sine record-keeping began in the mid-19th century. Higher temperatures are projected to threaten food supplies in the next century, while more severe storms cause economic damage, and rising seas inundate coastal cities. The early costs of climate change may already be evident: weather-related economic damages of $89 billion in 1998 exceeded losses for the decade of the 1980s. In Central America, 11,000 people were killed by Hurricane Mitch, and Honduras suffered looses equivalent to one-third of its annual GDP. "World energy needs are projected to double in the next several decades, but no credible geologist foresees a doubling of world oil production, which is projected to peak within the next few decades. ... Satisfying the projected needs of 8 billion or more people with the economy we now have is simply not possible. The western industrial model--the fossil-fuel-based, automobile- centered, throwaway economy that so dramatically raised living standards in this century--is in trouble. ... The broad outlines of a sustainable economic system that can meet the human needs of the next century are beginning to emerge. The foundation of such a system is a new design principle -- one that shifts from the one-time depletion of natural resources to an economy that is based on renewable energy and that continually reuses and recycles materials. A sustainable economy will be a solar-powered, bicycle/rail-based, reuse/recycle economy, one that uses energy, water, land, and materials much more efficiently and wisely that we do today." For further details, see . 3.) BP Amoco - Energy Taxes: The most recent issue of "Wind Energy Weekly" reports that on January 15, Rodney Chase, president and deputy CEO of BP Amoco, noted that an energy tax might be needed "as a last resort" to persuade industrial companies to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases. BP Amoco's preference is for an emissions trading system which it believes provides "the most economic and the most effective route" for reducing emissions, particularly among large, capital-intensive industries. However, a tax "which rewards certain behaviors" could also have a role to play in meeting Kyoto targets at a minimum cost especially "for smaller companies whose energy use is low and where emission levels receive a lower priority." MISCELLANEOUS 1.) House/Senate Caucuses Grow: The House Renewable Energy Caucus is now officially up to an all-time high of 138 members (77 D's, 60 R's, 1 I.) representing 41 states. The newest members include Reps. Rush Holt (D-NJ), Mark Udall (D-CO), Robert Underwood (D-GU), Steven Kuykendall (R-CA), Jack Metcalf (R-WA), Ken Calvert (R-CA), William Lipinski (D-IL), and John LaFalce (D-NY). In addition, the Senate Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency Caucus has grown to a new high of 20 members, representing 19 states. The newest Senators to join are Rod Grams (R-MN), Max Cleland (D-GA), Frank Murkowski (R-AK), and Charles Grassley (R-IA). Let us know if you would like us to fax you a 5-page list of the members of both caucuses. 2.) Sustainable Energy Periodicals Directory: The SUN DAY Campaign has released the fifth edition of its "National Directory of Sustainable Energy Periodicals" which provides a zip-coded listing of 800 U.S. newsletters, magazines, and other periodicals that report on renewable energy, energy efficiency, and related environmental issues. Each entry in the 75-page directory includes the periodical name and mailing address; most include the editor's name, telephone and fax numbers, and a short description; e-mail and web site addresses are also provided for many entries. Copies may be purchased for $15.00 prepaid from the SUN DAY Campaign (315 Circle Avenue, Suite #2, Takoma Park, MD 20912-4836. ## END ## ------End forward message--------------------------- - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "David Crockett Williams" Subject: (abolition-usa) Victims of Scalar Electromagnetic Weapons Date: 07 Feb 1999 22:50:33 -0800 Here are some references by web sites: Index File A-1790: Letter from Professor John. C. Syer, In Support of Cheryl Welsh http://www.mk.net/~mcf/syer.htm 1 page Mind Control Forum http://www.mk.net/~mcf/index.htm 8 pages Sprawozdanie z wywiadu udzielonego CNN prezez Cheryl Welsh http://www.upnaway.com/~zielinsk/welshcnn.html International Documents in Support of Claims of the Existence of Electromagnetic Anti-Personnel Weapons, By Cheryl Welsh http://www.calweb.com/~welsh/9.htm 17 pages The 1950's Secret Discovery of the Code of the Braim: U.S. and Soviet Scientists Have Developed the Key to Consciousnes for Military Purposes.. How The U.S. Government Won the Arms Race to Control Man: A documentary with quotes by leading scientists, professionals and several independent sources. By Cheryl Welsh, May 1998 64 pages http://www.calweb.com/~welsh/book.htm Mind Control Forum, Victims' Stories: Contents - 78 Victims, + 16 in Video Tape Transcript 43 pages http://www.mk-mcf/victim-hm.htm FBW,Sr., PhD UC Berkeley '53 Dr FBW,Sr., will be speaking at the Mar1st conference. For more info on him, his message, and conference http://www.angelfire.com/on/GEAR2000 ********************************************************* Global Emergency Alert Response: GEAR2000 David Crockett Williams 805-822-3309 20411 Steeple Court, Tehachapi CA 93561 USA ********************************************************* CAMPAIGN for a BETTER AMERICA with General Agency Services ********************************************************* UNITED NATION Global Peace Walk Oakland City Hall to UC Berkeley, February 26th* Annually: 22apr Taos, NM, ---> Santa Fe 26apr 1999: 16sep New York -> Washington DC 24oct Ceremony rededicating Washington Monument as a symbol of peace, UN DAY 24OCT99 2000: 15jan San Francisco --> New York 24oct 16sep Washington, DC ONE NATION, Aware of God as Love for All ! GLOBAL PEACE NOW !! Help Now !!! ********************************************************* http://www.egroups.com/list/global-peace-walk - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: smirnowb@ix.netcom.com Subject: (abolition-usa) Fwd: PUHCA sign-on letter Date: 08 Feb 1999 00:55:01 -0600 (CST) ------Begin forward message------------------------- Return-Path: Organization: Public Citizen Colleagues: Below is a letter to the Senate advising senators to oppose stand-alone PUHCA repeal. Please let me know if your organization can sign on. If you can sign on your organization by noon (eastern time) on Wednesday, February 10, then your organization will appear on a letter that will be hand-delivered on Wednesday to members of the Senate Banking Committee (as you may have heard, last week's markup of S. 313 was delayed until Thursday, Feb. 11). Although S. 313 is likely to get through the Banking Committee, we hope to encourage more senators to request that PUHCA be dealt with only in the context of comprehensive legislation. If you can't make the noon Wednesday deadline, please let me know if you can sign on by close of business Wednesday, February 17, after which a letter will be sent to the entire Senate in anticipation of a possible floor vote on S. 313. So, please let me know if your organization can sign on by noon Wednesday, Feb. 10, or by close of business Wednesday, Feb. 17. Thanks, -Charlie Higley- Public Citizen ********************************* Oppose S. 313: Oppose PUHCA Repeal Dear Senator: On behalf of our millions of members nationwide, we urge you to oppose S. 313, which would repeal the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 (PUHCA). Our members believe that PUHCA reform should only be dealt with in the context of comprehensive legislation that addresses the changes taking place within the electric power industry. Such legislation must include strong consumer and environmental protections as well as policies that create a level field for all competitors. PUHCA is the only federal law that protects consumers and the environment from market power abuses that are specific to the utility sector. The repeal of PUHCA could increase the flow of cross-subsidies from a holding company's regulated utilities to its unregulated subsidiaries. Utility ratepayers will pay higher rates as they subsidize other businesses, especially foreign ventures, without receiving any benefits. Utility holding companies could compete unfairly with businesses that do not receive guaranteed profits from captive customers. Repealing PUHCA may result in a larger wave of utility mergers than is taking place today. Mergers reduce the number of potential competitors and can increase the market power of surviving utilities, which could render competition meaningless. With an unfair share of market power, large companies that own and operate fossil fuel and nuclear power plants could have an interest in squeezing out renewable energy, energy efficiency, and other clean, high-value energy options. This could increase our dependence on fossil and nuclear fuels, further damaging human health and the environment. Because of the above concerns, we urge you to oppose S. 313. PUHCA reform should only be considered as a part of comprehensive restructuring legislation that includes strong protections against market power, as well as strong protections for consumers and the environment. Sincerely, Charlie Higley Public Citizen Ralph Cavanagh Natural Resources Defense Council ------End forward message--------------------------- - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Pamela Meidell Subject: (abolition-usa) URGENT: Bios for SB Meeting Needed Date: 08 Feb 1999 02:03:53 -0800 (PST) 2/8/99 Re: Last call for Background Statements Dear US Abolitionists, Thank you to everyone who has sent me a statement in preparation for the US Campaign meeting in Santa Barbara this coming weekend. (I am compiling the background/biographical statements of participants for the meeting.) However, of the 67 registered participants, only 10 people have sent in statements. I URGE THE REST OF YOU TO SEND THEM TO ME TODAY. I have extended the deadline until midnight tonight, Monday, February 8. Please send them by email to me at . I include the original request below as reference: "Dear Friends, To prepare for the Santa Barbara meeting, we are asking each participant to send us IN ADVANCE a brief biography of yourself and your organization. We will have a booklet with these statements in them waiting for you when you check in at Casa de Maria in Santa Barbara. We hope that providing this information to each participant will give us a common ground of understanding of the diversities and strengths that we bring to our common work of abolishing nuclear weapons. Please write a statement of about two or three paragraphs, including the following information: 1. Your name and relationship to the group you are representing 2. A few sentences about your own history of involvement in the issue of nuclear weapons abolition 3. A brief description of your group, including its name, address, telephone and fax numbers, email address, concise mission statement of your group, current projects, anything else you think pertinent 4. A statement of your and/or your organization's work to date on the abolition of nuclear weapons, and what arenas you have worked in (local, regional, national, international)" PLEASE RETURN TO YOUR STATEMENTS TO PAMELA MEIDELL BY MIDNIGHT, MONDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 1999 AT Thank you. I look forward to seeing you all there. In peace, Pamela ****** Pamela S. Meidell, Director The Atomic Mirror/EarthWays Foundation P.O.B. 220, Port Hueneme, California, USA 93044 tel: +1 805/985 5073, fax: +1 805/985 7563 email: pmeidell@igc.apc.org The Atomic Mirror is a founding partner in Abolition 2000: A Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peace through Reason Subject: (abolition-usa) NucNews (US-1) 2/8/99 - Yucca Mt.; Trinity Tours Date: 08 Feb 1999 07:22:03 -0500 --=====================_56733871==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" 1. Inside Yucca Mountain: Life-or-death safety issues simmering http://www.sacbee.com/news/news/local01_19990207.html 2. Trinity Site (Tourism twice a year) http://www.abqjournal.com/venue/day/2day02-07.htm 1. Inside Yucca Mountain: Life-or-death safety issues simmering http://www.sacbee.com/news/news/local01_19990207.html By Carrie Peyton, Bee Staff Writer, (Feb. 7, 1999) NEVADA TEST SITE -- A tunnel punched through the flank of Nevada's Yucca Mountain may soon become the portal to one of humanity's most enduring monuments. America's proposed final resting place for nuclear fuel, it would have to function longer than governments have stood, longer than languages have been spoken, longer than glaciers have taken to recede. "It's wonderful arrogance of the human population" to try to build for such longevity, said waste site researcher Bill Guertal. "But we have to do something." Environmentalists and the state of Nevada believe Yucca Mountain is too unstable and porous to safely contain nuclear waste. Others say the mountain may be suitable, but a tentative 2010 opening date is dangerously premature. Federal researchers acknowledge that over the ages, the proposed nuclear dump is certain to leak. While they believe they can keep leaks slight enough to do no harm, they concede that might be too optimistic and that the low radiation leaks could cause some additional cancers. They dismiss most of their critics' complaints as stalling tactics by people who want the waste anywhere but their own back yards. In the 41 years since a Pennsylvania reactor supplied America's first commercial nuclear power, used fuel has been stacking up by the ton. It waits in cooling pools and containers from Sacramento to Maine. It is so lethal that if it were left completely unsheathed, anyone standing next to it for a few hours would be dead within weeks. It is so long-lived that a million years from now it could still contaminate water. Its fate has become tangled in issues of money, science, politics and, ultimately, ethics. "Our present generation should be responsible for safely disposing the waste we created," said Thomas Pigford, a UC Berkeley nuclear engineering professor emeritus. Over the past decade, as Pigford has pored over the Department of Energy's evolving vision for Yucca Mountain, he has become increasingly concerned. "Quietly and without debate, we seem to have abandoned our ethical goals," he said. "At some future time the radiation exposures received by some future people far exceed any exposures allowable for present day operations." The slopes of Yucca Mountain, thrown up by a volcano millions of years ago, roll gently amid the craggier red-brown ranges of the Nevada Test Site, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The area's sparseness distorts scale -- a shed emerges from the distance as a warehouse, a propane tank turns out to be a trailer. Since 1987, when it was selected as the only potential site for ongoing study, it has been riddled with holes, dotted with weather stations and drilled by a $16 million, specially built boring machine that created a 5-mile research tunnel. Even the dung piles left by its pack rats have been raided, their centuries-old droppings studied for clues to climate shifts. Government researchers have been scraping, slicing, heating and soaking the mountain's volcanic ash in an effort to learn whether it can safely hold -- or at least slow the spread of -- nuclear waste. The 200 or so workers on the mountain today are backed up by about 1,300 more at a Las Vegas research site. There, climatologists work up centuries-long weather forecasts, materials scientists puzzle over container design, and nuclear physicists prepare plans to keep a lid on the simmering waste, which will be gathered from power plants, research reactors and nuclear submarines. More researchers are scattered in labs around the country, including a tiny Sacramento contingent working on water behavior. Scientists ride into the Yucca Mountain research tunnel on a clattering yellow train that mingles diesel exhaust with the faint silica-and-clay scent of the surrounding earth. Inside, they measure water flow, test humidity and monitor heaters intended to simulate the way nuclear waste would cook the mountain, unlocking its moisture and changing the rock in ways not yet fully understood. "When you heat the rock up, you move a lot of water around," said Mark Peters, who helped set up a test that will bake one tunnel branch for four years and cool it for four more. Outside the tunnel, Yucca Mountain research sprawls through buildings scattered across the southwestern corner of the Nevada Test Site. Guertal, a U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist, works down the road from the tunnel mouth, in a lab that once housed MX missile research. Today he and his colleagues measure rock samples' permeability on a machine they jury-rigged from used MX equipment. Across a two-lane road prowled by coyotes, a lab and warehouse handle every sample ever pulled up from 700-plus holes that pockmark Yucca Mountain. The buildings house rock by the boulder, rock by the micro-thin wafer and even a column of rock built to mimic a cross section of the mountain, for speakers to use before schoolchildren or civic groups. No other nuclear nation in the world has as optimistic a schedule for the permanent disposal site for its most dangerous, high-level wastes. The Energy Department plans to seek a license to build the repository in 2002, begin building in 2005 and begin loading fuel in 2010. That is ample time to do the job right, said Abe Van Luik, who is in charge of modeling how Yucca Mountain will perform over the ages. "There will be a lot of opportunity to do a lot of studies," he said, not just while construction is under way, but also during the 24 or more years it will take to fill the mountain's tunnels with waste. "If we have made a mistake of some sort, we will have plenty of time to back the trains out and back the stuff out and think of something else to do with it." In addition, he said, if Congress and the president permit the plan to go forward, nuclear regulators will have to sign off on it at least three times: Before construction begins, before waste-loading begins, and before 50 to 250 years of temporary monitoring stops and the mountain is closed for good -- sometime between 2084 and about 2290. "It's a very cautious way to go forward," he said. The seismic and volcanic objections raised about the site have been reviewed and are so unlikely to cause problems that they can be ruled out now, Van Luik added. "If there's a fatal flaw, we haven't found it. It's wetter than we thought, but we were naive" during initial assessments of the site, he said. The tentative Energy Department design for Yucca Mountain assumes the dump would leak. Tainted groundwater would flow southwest under what is today a stark, dry land dotted with gray saltbrush and yellow-green creosote, sheltering squirrels, coyotes and about 200 species of birds. It would feed wells in Nevada's Amargosa Valley, where farmers now raise alfalfa and tend dairy cattle. It probably would reach or come close to the surface just over the California border, in a dry lake bed called Franklin Lake Playa, before ending up in springs that feed Death Valley. As more and more containers began to corrode, the plume would grow and spread from Yucca Mountain, reaching its most toxic threat at inhabited sites 300,000 years from now, said federal forecaster Van Luik. Just how big that threat would be is a question mired in debates over current radiation exposure standards and over the soundness of assumptions and computer models used to predict the dump's eventual disintegration. Even if radiation exposure in the Amargosa Valley were limited to a once ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peace through Reason Subject: (abolition-usa) NucNews (US-2) 2/8/99 -Sandia Labs Cleanup; Utah Nuc Waste Site Date: 08 Feb 1999 07:21:15 -0500 --=====================_56733921==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" 3. Tackling a Mess Sandia National Labs has taken a new approach to hazardous waste removal, speeding cleanup and saving millions http://www.abqjournal.com/scitech/1sci02-07.htm 4. No 'Enlibra' with nuclear storage http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,30009979,00.html? 3. Tackling a Mess Sandia National Labs has taken a new approach to hazardous waste removal, speeding cleanup and saving millions http://www.abqjournal.com/scitech/1sci02-07.htm By John Fleck Albuquerque Journal, February 7, 1999 The smashed plastic bottles and little green trash can Sharissa Young's crew fished out of the dirt of an old Sandia National Laboratories landfill looked like little more than old household discards. The moon suits the workers wear suggest otherwise. Since last fall, the Sandia-funded team has been gingerly picking its way through 30-year-old hazardous waste, attempting to clean up the nuclear weapon research center's worst environmental problem. In the process, they are working themselves out of a job, cleaning up Sandia's environmental messes years before originally planned and at a fraction of what the Department of Energy once thought it would cost. Environmental cleanup efforts at Sandia date to the 1980s, when the Department of Energy realized radioactive and chemical wastes from decades of nuclear weapons research and manufacturing had become a major problem at weapons plants and laboratories throughout the United States. By the early 1990s, it looked like a $500 million job that would stretch well into the next century. But aggressive efforts to streamline the process and spend the money cleaning things up, rather than producing paperwork, has cut the project's cost nearly in half, said Warren Cox, chief of Sandia's cleanup program. "We're actually digging a lot of dirt," Cox said. The approach has won grudging support from one of Sandia's harshest critics, Albuquerque environmental activist Paul Robinson. "I think it's been handled better than it was done in the past," Robinson said. $271 million problem Nowhere is the progress more apparent than at the chemical waste landfill, a fenced patch of desert on Kirtland Air Force Base five miles south of Albuquerque's southern edge. Beneath the landfill, dangerous chromium has seeped deep into the desert soil, while traces of potentially cancer-causing solvents have drained into the ground water 500 feet beneath the arid site. In comparison to other Department of Energy nuclear sites, or to other ground-water contamination problems in New Mexico, Sandia's problems might seem minor. Large Department of Energy nuclear weapons factories like Savannah River Site in South Carolina and Hanford in eastern Washington state have far more serious problems with much higher price tags. "It's not like a Hanford or a Savannah River," Robinson said of Sandia's problems. "Sandia is really a minor site in the DOE world, for the simple reason that this is an R&D facility, not a production facility," said Hu Joy, chairman of the Sandia Citizens Advisory Board, a group of volunteers brought together by the DOE to provide community input into the cleanup process. Minor or not, the chemical waste landfill and a host of other contaminated sites at the New Mexico nuclear weapons laboratory pose a $271 million problem for Sandia and the Department of Energy to clean up. Sandia has had to clean up 50 contaminated sites, ranging from explosives ranges where lead and other debris were scattered around the ground to old landfills with leaking waste. Of the landfills, two have already been cleaned up, and work on the other two is now under way. But of all Sandia's environmental ills, the chemical waste landfill is the worst, because contamination reached the ground water. "It's serious because of the risk it indicates to the aquifer on that side of the city," Robinson said. Contaminated water From 1962 to 1985, chemical wastes from Sandia research programs were sent to the landfill using what was, at the time, standard industrial practice, Sandia cleanup manager David Miller said. Containers of hazardous waste were discarded, and until 1981, liquid waste was dumped in unlined trenches at the site. The result was a mess. In the late 1980s, traces of a cancer-linked solvent began showing up in ground water 500 feet deep in the ground. While the area is three miles from the nearest drinking water well, a Kirtland Air Force Base well, Sandia and the Department of Energy decided it would have to be cleaned up. Test wells showed that none of the contaminated ground water had moved more than 100 yards from the site, said Miller, the Sandia official in charge of the site. Sandia was also able to indirectly clean the ground water by using what amounted to a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking air through the contaminated earth beneath the site and removing the gaseous contaminants. But because of fears that more chemicals could leak from the waste pits, Young's crew began digging up the waste last fall. They start with a backhoe, which dumps its contents onto a screen table for sorting. If any intact containers of waste are found in the rubble, they're set aside so they can be sent to an off-site hazardous waste dump. Contaminated soil is set aside for chemical and heat treatment to clean most of the hazardous waste out of it. The remaining soil will be dumped in a huge plastic-lined pit now being completed some 50 yards from the chemical waste landfill where it will be permanently entombed. A different approach The cleanup picture at Sandia today is very different than it was a decade ago. In the late 1980s and early '90s, when Sandia and the Energy Department first began to seriously inventory the labs' waste sites and think about how to clean them up, it seemed like a mammoth task. Hundreds of potentially contaminated sites were found spread across Sandia's sprawling territory on the east mesa and in the hills south of Albuquerque. They ranged from old landfills to test sites where explosives and uranium had been scattered across the ground. By 1993, the estimated price tag for cleaning it all up had climbed to $500 million, Cox recalled. With environmental cleanup costs for larger, more complicated Energy Department nuclear sites spiraling out of control, it became clear that the only way to rein in costs and get the job done was to use a different approach. Cox and his colleagues adopted a technique intended to cut through the regulatory bureaucracy and reduce the amount of money spent without ever cleaning up sites. Under the old approach, huge amounts of money were spent studying a site before cleanup ever began, in order to develop a detailed cleanup plan to be submitted to state and federal regulators. Now, Sandia does a much more modest study, then just goes ahead and cleans a site. It's a technique being adopted at a number of other Department of Energy sites because of its ability to make efficient use of money, said department spokeswoman Tracy Loughead. Once the cleanup is done, an application is submitted to state regulators asking the site to be certified clean. There's a risk the state will say it's not clean enough and won't approve it, Cox said, but that's outweighed by the cost savings. That's how Sandia has cut the estimated cleanup costs from $500 million to $271 million, Cox said. The chemical waste landfill should be done over the next 18 months, and by the end of 2001, Sandia hopes to have the last of its contaminated sites cleaned up. "We're not planning on stretching this out and making careers out of this," Miller said. -------------------------- 4. No 'Enlibra' with nuclear storage http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,30009979,00.html? Deseret News editorial, February 07, 1999 Critics of Gov. Mike Leavitt are right, the spirit of "Enlibra," or compromise, does have a place in political negotiations outside the wilderness debate but not when he's defending the state's western front. It is no secret that Leavitt has vehemently opposed a proposal to store high-level nuclear waste on Goshute tribal lands in Tooele County. He solidified his position as a frenetic foe during his recent state-of-the-state address, a laudable stance all Utahns should support. Leavitt said he would not allow any vehicles carrying nuclear waste across any rail crossings where state permission is required, and he supports pending state legislation that would eliminate liability protections for anyone shipping such materials. In addition, he is teaming with Rep. Jim Hansen to trade federal lands around the reservation for state lands so the reservation can be turned into a land-locked "moat" inaccessible without the state's blessing. Not surprisingly, his tough talk did not sit well with proponents of the project. Tribal leaders and Private Fuel Storage, the entity seeking the repository, want to sit down with Leavitt in his spirit of Enlibra to resolve differences. But unlike the wilderness debate, with potential to find middle ground on some issues, the nuclear-storage issue is clear-cut: Either the stuff comes, or it doesn't. Its strength will not be diluted, nor will it be shipped only to, say, Vernal. The proposal is all or nothing. Leavitt and others fear that if they give an inch, opponents may take a mile. State concerns about public safety, transportation risks, environmental damage and a detrimental image as a dumping ground outweigh any real or perceived benefits. Yes, there could be some discussion about reasonable support for improving educational and economic opportunities for the Goshutes and other Native Americans within Utah. But no, storage of spent nuclear fuel rods should not be a bargaining chip in those talks. Leavitt is right to slam the door on this deal before the nuclear camel pokes its nose into the state's tent. _____________________________________________________________ * NucNews - to subscribe: prop1@prop1.org - http://prop1.org * Say "Please Subscribe NucNews" NucNews Archive: HTTP://WWW.ONELIST.COM/arcindex.cgi?listname=NucNews since January 13, 1999; for earlier editions - write prop1@prop1.org --------------------------------------- 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: _____________________________________________________________ --=====================_56733921==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"
3. Tackling a Mess                              
Sandia National Labs has taken a new approach to hazardous waste removal,
speeding cleanup and saving millions                    

4. No 'Enlibra' with nuclear storage 

----------------------------------------

3. Tackling a Mess      

Sandia National Labs has taken a new approach to hazardous waste removal,
speeding cleanup and saving millions                                                    

By John Fleck Albuquerque Journal,  February 7, 1999

The smashed plastic bottles and little green trash can Sharissa Young's crew fished out of the dirt of an old Sandia National Laboratories landfill looked like little more than old household discards.

The moon suits the workers wear suggest otherwise.

Since last fall, the Sandia-funded team has been gingerly picking its way through 30-year-old hazardous waste, attempting to clean up the nuclear weapon research center's worst environmental problem.

In the process, they are working themselves out of a job, cleaning up Sandia's environmental messes years before originally planned and at a fraction of what the Department of Energy once thought it would cost.

Environmental cleanup efforts at Sandia date to the 1980s, when the Department of Energy realized radioactive and chemical wastes from decades of nuclear weapons research and manufacturing had become a major problem at weapons plants and laboratories throughout the United States.

By the early 1990s, it looked like a $500 million job that would stretch well into the next century.

But aggressive efforts to streamline the process and spend the money cleaning things up, rather than producing paperwork, has cut the project's cost nearly in half, said Warren Cox, chief of Sandia's cleanup program.

"We're actually digging a lot of dirt," Cox said.

The approach has won grudging support from one of Sandia's harshest critics, Albuquerque environmental activist Paul Robinson.

"I think it's been handled better than it was done in the past," Robinson said.

$271 million problem                            

Nowhere is the progress more apparent than at the chemical waste landfill, a fenced patch of desert on Kirtland Air Force Base five miles south of Albuquerque's southern edge.

Beneath the landfill, dangerous chromium has seeped deep into the desert soil, while traces of potentially cancer-causing solvents have drained into the ground water 500 feet beneath the arid site.

In comparison to other Department of Energy nuclear sites, or to other ground-water contamination problems in New Mexico, Sandia's problems might seem minor.

Large Department of Energy nuclear weapons factories like Savannah River Site in South Carolina and Hanford in eastern Washington state have far more serious problems with much higher price tags.

"It's not like a Hanford or a Savannah River," Robinson said of Sandia's problems.

"Sandia is really a minor site in the DOE world, for the simple reason that this is an R&D facility, not a production facility," said Hu Joy, chairman of the Sandia Citizens Advisory Board, a group of volunteers brought together by the DOE to provide community input into the cleanup process.

Minor or n-proposed level of 100 millirem per person annually, in "every generation in that community of 1,500 people, there would be statistically five people who die of cancer who otherwise would not have," said Steve Frishman, an adviser to the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects. "Who's to decide that that's OK?" Frishman's job is to drive the dump out of Nevada, just as he helped Texas get itself off the waste site list in the 1980s. He and other opponents believe the federal government was drawn to Yucca Mountain not by its arid climate but by its palatable location -- on federal land already used for nuclear weapons testing. He has attacked Yucca Mountain as riddled with earthquake faults, potentially volcanically active and so leaky that water would quickly seep through and erode steel waste containers. The facility's tentative design, he said, is shaped by computer models so speculative that projections about its performance amount to little more than optimistic guesses. Berkeley Professor Pigford, who doesn't oppose the idea of a Yucca Mountain dump, nonetheless worries that the models are poorly conceived. When he removes what he considers overoptimistic assumptions, the annual radiation exposure in 100,000 years reaches "a life-shortening dose." Frishman and others have called for decades more study before America commits to Yucca Mountain. Already, researchers have repeatedly revised their view of how the waste site would perform. They once believed the climate was so arid, and the mountain so impermeable, that dryness alone would prevent waste from spreading. Now, environmentalists alarmed about how quickly water flows through the mountain say enough has already been learned to disqualify the site under the Energy Department's own standards. In November, more than 200 groups petitioned Energy Secretary Bill Richardson to strike it from further consideration. Richardson has not responded and is still mulling whether the Energy Department should instead revise its own standards to ensure that the site still qualifies, something it has been considering for two years. In December, he traipsed through the dusty research tunnel at Yucca Mountain and emerged to promise more analysis, reassuring Nevadans that "the nation's policy on nuclear waste must be based on science and not politics." Consistently outvoted in Congress, Nevadans fear it may already be too late for that. Their calls to move more slowly have been met with skepticism by those who question their motives, and impatience by some who have toiled for years on the mountain. "It sounds very altruistic," said Robert Jones, a Los Gatos nuclear engineer and industry consultant. But in reality it is "the sneaky way to declare war on nuclear power," he said, by limiting power plants' space for their used fuel. "You could study this thing forever. When are you going to say enough's enough?" said Patrick Rowe, an engineer who has worked at Yucca Mountain since 1982. The Yucca Mountain Project spends $100,000 a year to provide public tours and $260,000 a year to operate "science centers" in three cities, where interactive displays can entertain children and reassure a dubious Nevada. Tentative plans call for a visitor's center to be built 1,500 feet from buildings where the nuclear fuel rods would be loaded into canisters. "It's way too enthusiastic. ... It makes people come away feeling good," said Judy Treichel, director of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force, a shoestring environmental effort that fights the site on annual donations of about $40,000. She broods over Amargosa Valley, where today about 1,500 people -- miners, farmers, dairy workers and retirees -- draw water from an aquifer that runs under Yucca Mountain. It is a place surrounded by mountains so bare their bones show, layers of tan and gray faintly cloaked by scrub. In the valley, feelings about the proposed waste site are mixed. Some think the construction would bring well-paying jobs. Some hope they can worm a decent firetruck and maybe a fire station out of the federal government, so that they could respond if anything went wrong with transporting the waste. Some are resigned. "It wouldn't make that much difference," said Debbie Quintana. "We've already been contaminated" from decades of nuclear weapons tests. At the library where she works, killer bee alerts outnumber nuclear waste notices on the bulletin board three to one. James Quirk, who heads the town advisory board, believes that eventually, water traveling through the mountain would bring radioactivity to Amargosa's wells. "It's up to nature when that happens," he said. "Several hundred years or today, it doesn't matter. It's going to mess up someone's life." But the timing does matter. It will become a key issue when Congress and the president decide whether to bury nuclear waste under Yucca Mountain. Proposed qualification standards for the site may only require that it be proven safe for its first 10,000 years. Nuclear regulatory officials have said it simply isn't realistic to try to predict beyond that. Opponents say it is unconscionable not to. As the debate goes on, the short-term fate of the nation's used nuclear fuel is largely undisputed. Heavily shielded and exactingly monitored, the rods containing uranium, plutonium and fission products pose little threat if they are simply left in place for the next 50 to 100 years, according to all sides in the debate. Electric companies have lobbied and sued to get the used fuel moved because of finances, not fear. They've paid billions of dollars into a federal disposal fund, under a contract that committed the government to take the waste by 1998. "They have our money. We have their waste. It's that simple," said Leigh Ann Marshall of the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group. Among those suing the Energy Department over the broken congressional promise is SMUD, which has housed close to 500 slowly cooling fuel rod assemblies at Rancho Seco since 1989, when voters ordered the plant closed. It costs SMUD about $10 million a year to keep the rods in their cooling pool. The rods are scheduled to be moved to nearby dry-storage containers in mid-2000, which will reduce storage costs to about $1 million a year. Nevada's Frishman, who wants America to follow the lead of Sweden and France and go much slower before it chooses nuclear waste's final resting place, said there's nothing wrong with Sacramento shouldering that cost. "If the utility was willing to go into nuclear power ... they made money. Now there's some liability. That's part of the legacy," he said. "I don't believe the people of Sacramento would prefer to have it taken to a place where it only puts other people at greater risk." 2. Trinity Site (Tourism twice a year) http://www.abqjournal.com/venue/day/2day02-07.htm By James Abarr Of the Journal ... February 7, 1999 In the bleak desert of the Jornada del Muerto (Journey of Death), about 60 miles northwest of Alamogordo, is Trinity Site. Here, the world's first atomic bomb was detonated just before dawn on July 16, 1945, in a test shot that ushered in the nuclear age.c Trinity lies within the high-security White Sands Missile Range and is open to the public only twice a year -- on the first Saturday of April and October. On those dates, visitors can tour Ground Zero, where a triangular-shaped stone monument marks where the 100-foot-high tower that cradled the bomb stood. The tower was vaporized in the blast, but a portion of the original crater is still visible. The casing of a plutonium bomb of the type tested also is on display. Two miles from Ground Zero, visitors can inspect the McDonald ranch house, which was used by technicians to assemble the bomb's plutonium trigger. Information about schedules and other details of tours of Trinity, now a National Historic Site, is available by calling White Sands Missile Range's Public Affairs Office at (505) 678-1134. _____________________________________________________________ * NucNews - to subscribe: prop1@prop1.org - http://prop1.org * Say "Please Subscribe NucNews" Nuot, the chemical waste landfill and a host of other contaminated sites at the New Mexico nuclear weapons laboratory pose a $271 million problem for Sandia and the Department of Energy to clean up.

Sandia has had to clean up 50 contaminated sites, ranging from explosives ranges where lead and other debris were scattered around the ground to old landfills with leaking waste.

Of the landfills, two have already been cleaned up, and work on the other two is now under way.

But of all Sandia's environmental ills, the chemical waste landfill is the worst, because contamination reached the ground water.

"It's serious because of the risk it indicates to the aquifer on that side of the city," Robinson said.

Contaminated water

From 1962 to 1985, chemical wastes from Sandia research programs were sent to the landfill using what was, at the time, standard industrial practice, Sandia cleanup manager David Miller said.

Containers of hazardous waste were discarded, and until 1981, liquid waste was dumped in unlined trenches at the site.  The result was a mess.

In the late 1980s, traces of a cancer-linked solvent began showing up in ground water 500 feet deep in the ground. While the area is three miles from the nearest drinking water well, a Kirtland Air Force Base well, Sandia and the Department of Energy decided it would have to be cleaned up.

Test wells showed that none of the contaminated ground water had moved more than 100 yards from the site, said Miller, the Sandia official in charge of the site.

Sandia was also able to indirectly clean the ground water by using what amounted to a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking air through the contaminated earth beneath the site and removing the gaseous contaminants.

But because of fears that more chemicals could leak from the waste pits, Young's crew began digging up the waste last fall.

They start with a backhoe, which dumps its contents onto a screen table for sorting.

If any intact containers of waste are found in the rubble, they're set aside so they can be sent to an off-site hazardous waste dump.

Contaminated soil is set aside for chemical and heat treatment to clean most of the hazardous waste out of it.

The remaining soil will be dumped in a huge plastic-lined pit now being completed some 50 yards from the chemical waste landfill where it will be permanently entombed.

A different approach                            

The cleanup picture at Sandia today is very different than it was a decade ago.

In the late 1980s and early '90s, when Sandia and the Energy Department first began to seriously inventory the labs' waste sites and think about how to clean them up, it seemed like a mammoth task.

Hundreds of potentially contaminated sites were found spread across Sandia's sprawling territory on the east mesa and in the hills south of Albuquerque.

They ranged from old landfills to test sites where explosives and uranium had been scattered across the ground.

By 1993, the estimated price tag for cleaning it all up had climbed to $500 million, Cox recalled.

With environmental cleanup costs for larger, more complicated Energy Department nuclear sites spiraling out of control, it became clear that the only way to rein in costs and get the job done was to use a different approach.

Cox and his colleagues adopted a technique intended to cut through the regulatory bureaucracy and reduce the amount of money spent without ever cleaning up sites.

Under the old approach, huge amounts of money were spent studying a site before cleanup ever began, in order to develop a detailed cleanup plan to be submitted to state and federal regulators.

Now, Sandia does a much more modest study, then just goes ahead and cleans a site. It's a technique being adopted at a number of other Department of Energy sites because of its ability to make efficient use of money, said department spokeswoman Tracy Loughead.

Once the cleanup is done, an application is submitted to state regulators asking the site to be certified clean. There's a risk the state will say it's not clean enough and won't approve it, Cox said, but that's outweighed by the cost savings.

That's how Sandia has cut the estimated cleanup costs from $500 million to $271 million, Cox said.

The chemical waste landfill should be done over the next 18 months, and by the end of 2001, Sandia hopes to have the last of its contaminated sites cleaned up.

"We're not planning on stretching this out and making careers out of this," Miller said.

--------------------------

4. No 'Enlibra' with nuclear storage 


 Deseret News editorial, February 07, 1999

 Critics of Gov. Mike Leavitt are right, the spirit  of "Enlibra," or compromise, does have a place in  political negotiations outside the wilderness debate   but not when he's defending the state's western  front.

It is no secret that Leavitt has vehemently  opposed a proposal to store high-level nuclear waste  on Goshute tribal lands in Tooele County. He  solidified his position as a frenetic foe during his  recent state-of-the-state address, a laudable stance  all Utahns should support.

Leavitt said he would not allow any vehicles  carrying nuclear waste across any rail crossings  where state permission is required, and he supports  pending state legislation that would eliminate  liability protections for anyone shipping such  materials. In addition, he is teaming with Rep. Jim  Hansen to trade federal lands around the  reservation for state lands so the reservation can be  turned into a land-locked "moat"  inaccessible  without the state's blessing.

Not surprisingly, his tough talk did not sit well  with proponents of the project. Tribal leaders and  Private Fuel Storage, the entity seeking the  repository, want to sit down with Leavitt in his spirit  of Enlibra to resolve differences. But unlike the  wilderness debate, with potential to find middle  ground on some issues, the nuclear-storage issue is  clear-cut: Either the stuff comes, or it doesn't. Its  strength will not be diluted, nor will it be shipped  only to, say, Vernal. The proposal is all or nothing.

Leavitt and others fear that if they give an inch,  opponents may take a mile. State concerns about  public safety, transportation risks, environmental  damage and a detrimental image as a dumping  ground outweigh any real or perceived benefits.

Yes, there could be some discussion about  reasonable support for improving educational and  economic opportunities for the Goshutes and other  Native Americans within Utah. But no, storage of  spent nuclear fuel rods should not be a bargaining  chip in those talks. Leavitt is right to slam the door  on this deal before the nuclear camel pokes its nose  into the state's tent.  
_____________________________________________________________

       * NucNews - to subscribe: prop1@prop1.org - http://prop1.org *
      &cNews Archive: HTTP://WWW.ONELIST.COM/arcindex.cgi?listname=NucNews since January 13, 1999; for earlier editions - write prop1@prop1.org --------------------------------------- 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: _____________________________________________________________ --=====================_56733871==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"
1. Inside Yucca Mountain: Life-or-death safety issues simmering

2. Trinity Site (Tourism twice a year)

----------------------------------------

1. Inside Yucca Mountain: Life-or-death safety issues simmering


By Carrie Peyton, Bee Staff Writer,  (Feb. 7, 1999)

NEVADA TEST SITE -- A tunnel punched through the flank of Nevada's Yucca Mountain may soon become the portal to one of humanity's most enduring monuments.

America's proposed final resting place for nuclear fuel, it would have to function longer than governments have stood, longer than languages have been spoken, longer than glaciers have taken to recede.

"It's wonderful arrogance of the human population" to try to build for such longevity, said waste site researcher Bill Guertal. "But we have to do something."

Environmentalists and the state of Nevada believe Yucca Mountain is too unstable and porous to safely contain nuclear waste. Others say the mountain may be suitable, but a tentative 2010 opening date is dangerously premature.

Federal researchers acknowledge that over the ages, the proposed nuclear dump is certain to leak. While they believe they can keep leaks slight enough to do no harm, they concede that might be too optimistic and that the low radiation leaks could cause some additional cancers.

They dismiss most of their critics' complaints as stalling tactics by people who want the waste anywhere but their own back yards.

In the 41 years since a Pennsylvania reactor supplied America's first commercial nuclear power, used fuel has been stacking up by the ton.

It waits in cooling pools and containers from Sacramento to Maine.

It is so lethal that if it were left completely unsheathed, anyone standing next to it for a few hours would be dead within weeks. It is so long-lived that a million years from now it could still contaminate water.

Its fate has become tangled in issues of money, science, politics and, ultimately, ethics.

"Our present generation should be responsible for safely disposing the waste we created," said Thomas Pigford, a UC Berkeley nuclear engineering professor emeritus.

Over the past decade, as Pigford has pored over the Department of Energy's evolving vision for Yucca Mountain, he has become increasingly concerned.

"Quietly and without debate, we seem to have abandoned our ethical goals," he said. "At some future time the radiation exposures received by some future people far exceed any exposures allowable for present day operations."

The slopes of Yucca Mountain, thrown up by a volcano millions of years ago, roll gently amid the craggier red-brown ranges of the Nevada Test Site, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The area's sparseness distorts scale -- a shed emerges from the distance as a warehouse, a propane tank turns out to be a trailer.

Since 1987, when it was selected as the only potential site for ongoing study, it has been riddled with holes, dotted with weather stations and drilled by a $16 million, specially built boring machine that created a 5-mile research tunnel.

Even the dung piles left by its pack rats have been raided, their centuries-old droppings studied for clues to climate shifts.

Government researchers have been scraping, slicing, heating and soaking the mountain's volcanic ash in an effort to learn whether it can safely hold -- or at least slow the spread of -- nuclear waste.

The 200 or so workers on the mountain today are backed up by about 1,300 more at a Las Vegas research site.

There, climatologists work up centuries-long weather forecasts, materials scientists puzzle over container design, and nuclear physicists prepare plans to keep a lid on the simmering waste, which will be gathered from power plants, research reactors and nuclear submarines.

More researchers are scattered in labs around the country, including a tiny Sacramento contingent working on water behavior.

Scientists ride into the Yucca Mountain research tunnel on a clattering yellow train that mingles diesel exhaust with the faint silica-and-clay scent of the surrounding earth.

Inside, they measure water flow, test humidity and monitor heaters intended to simulate the way nuclear waste would cook the mountain, unlocking its moisture and changing the rock in ways not yet fully understood.

"When you heat the rock up, you move a lot of water around," said Mark Peters, who helped set up a test that will bake one tunnel branch for four years and cool it for four more.

Outside the tunnel, Yucca Mountain research sprawls through buildings scattered across the southwestern corner of the Nevada Test Site.

Guertal, a U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist, works down the road from the tunnel mouth, in a lab that once housed MX missile research. Today he and his colleagues measure rock samples' permeability on a machine they jury-rigged from used MX equipment.

Across a two-lane road prowled by coyotes, a lab and warehouse handle every sample ever pulled up from 700-plus holes that pockmark Yucca Mountain. The buildings house rock by the boulder, rock by the micro-thin wafer and even a column of rock built to mimic a cross section of the mountain, for speakers to use before schoolchildren or civic groups.

No other nuclear nation in the world has as optimistic a schedule for the permanent disposal site for its most dangerous, high-level wastes.

The Energy Department plans to seek a license to build the repository in 2002, begin building in 2005 and begin loading fuel in 2010.

That is ample time to do the job right, said Abe Van Luik, who is in charge of modeling how Yucca Mountain will perform over the ages.

"There will be a lot of opportunity to do a lot of studies," he said, not just while construction is under way, but also during the 24 or more years it will take to fill the mountain's tunnels with waste.

"If we have made a mistake of some sort, we will have plenty of time to back the trains out and back the stuff out and think of something else to do with it."

In addition, he said, if Congress and the president permit the plan to go forward, nuclear regulators will have to sign off on it at least three times: Before construction begins, before waste-loading begins, and before 50 to 250 years of temporary monitoring stops and the mountain is closed for good -- sometime between 2084 and about 2290.

"It's a very cautious way to go forward," hnbsp;                  Say "Please Subscribe NucNews"
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The seismic and volcanic objections raised about the site have been reviewed and are so unlikely to cause problems that they can be ruled out now, Van Luik added.

"If there's a fatal flaw, we haven't found it. It's wetter than we thought, but we were naive" during initial assessments of the site, he said.

The tentative Energy Department design for Yucca Mountain assumes the dump would leak.

Tainted groundwater would flow southwest under what is today a stark, dry land dotted with gray saltbrush and yellow-green creosote, sheltering squirrels, coyotes and about 200 species of birds.

It would feed wells in Nevada's Amargosa Valley, where farmers now raise alfalfa and tend dairy cattle. It probably would reach or come close to the surface just over the California border, in a dry lake bed called Franklin Lake Playa, before ending up in springs that feed Death Valley.

As more and more containers began to corrode, the plume would grow and spread from Yucca Mountain, reaching its most toxic threat at inhabited sites 300,000 years from now, said federal forecaster Van Luik.

Just how big that threat would be is a question mired in debates over current radiation exposure standards and over the soundness of assumptions and computer models used to predict the dump's eventual disintegration.

Even if radiation exposure in the Amargosa Valley were limited to a once-proposed level of 100 millirem per person annually, in "every generation in that community of 1,500 people, there would be statistically five people who die of cancer who otherwise would not have," said Steve Frishman, an adviser to the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.

"Who's to decide that that's OK?"

Frishman's job is to drive the dump out of Nevada, just as he helped Texas get itself off the waste site list in the 1980s. He and other opponents believe the federal government was drawn to Yucca Mountain not by its arid climate but by its palatable location -- on federal land already used for nuclear weapons testing.

He has attacked Yucca Mountain as riddled with earthquake faults, potentially volcanically active and so leaky that water would quickly seep through and erode steel waste containers. The facility's tentative design, he said, is shaped by computer models so speculative that projections about its performance amount to little more than optimistic guesses.

Berkeley Professor Pigford, who doesn't oppose the idea of a Yucca Mountain dump, nonetheless worries that the models are poorly conceived. When he removes what he considers overoptimistic assumptions, the annual radiation exposure in 100,000 years reaches "a life-shortening dose."

Frishman and others have called for decades more study before America commits to Yucca Mountain.

Already, researchers have repeatedly revised their view of how the waste site would perform. They once believed the climate was so arid, and the mountain so impermeable, that dryness alone would prevent waste from spreading.

Now, environmentalists alarmed about how quickly water flows through the mountain say enough has already been learned to disqualify the site under the Energy Department's own standards. In November, more than 200 groups petitioned Energy Secretary Bill Richardson to strike it from further consideration.

Richardson has not responded and is still mulling whether the Energy Department should instead revise its own standards to ensure that the site still qualifies, something it has been considering for two years.

In December, he traipsed through the dusty research tunnel at Yucca Mountain and emerged to promise more analysis, reassuring Nevadans that "the nation's policy on nuclear waste must be based on science and not politics."

Consistently outvoted in Congress, Nevadans fear it may already be too late for that. Their calls to move more slowly have been met with skepticism by those who question their motives, and impatience by some who have toiled for years on the mountain.

"It sounds very altruistic," said Robert Jones, a Los Gatos nuclear engineer and industry consultant. But in reality it is "the sneaky way to declare war on nuclear power," he said, by limiting power plants' space for their used fuel.

"You could study this thing forever. When are you going to say enough's enough?" said Patrick Rowe, an engineer who has worked at Yucca Mountain since 1982.

The Yucca Mountain Project spends $100,000 a year to provide public tours and $260,000 a year to operate "science centers" in three cities, where interactive displays can entertain children and reassure a dubious Nevada.

Tentative plans call for a visitor's center to be built 1,500 feet from buildings where the nuclear fuel rods would be loaded into canisters.

"It's way too enthusiastic. ... It makes people come away feeling good," said Judy Treichel, director of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force, a shoestring environmental effort that fights the site on annual donations of about $40,000.

She broods over Amargosa Valley, where today about 1,500 people -- miners, farmers, dairy workers and retirees -- draw water from an aquifer that runs under Yucca Mountain. It is a place surrounded by mountains so bare their bones show, layers of tan and gray faintly cloaked by scrub.

In the valley, feelings about the proposed waste site are mixed.

Some think the construction would bring well-paying jobs. Some hope they can worm a decent firetruck and maybe a fire station out of the federal government, so that they could respond if anything went wrong with transporting the waste.

Some are resigned.

"It wouldn't make that much difference," said Debbie Quintana. "We've already been contaminated" from decades of nuclear weapons tests. At the library where she works, killer bee alerts outnumber nuclear waste notices on the bulletin board three to one.

James Quirk, who heads the town advisory board, believes that eventually, water traveling through the mountain would bring radioactivity to Amargosa's wells.

"It's up to nature when that happens," he said. "Several hundred years or today, it doesn't matter. It's going to mess up someone's life."

But the timing does matter. It will become a key issue when Congress and the president decide whether to bury nuclear waste under Yucca Mountain.

Proposed qualification standards for the site may only require that it be proven safe for its first 10,000 years.

Nuclear regulatory officials have said it simply isn't realistic to try to predict beyond that. Opponents say it is unconscionable not to.

As the debate goes on, the short-term fate of the nation's used nuclear fuel is largely undisputed.

Heavily shielded and exactingly monitored, the rods containing uranium, plutonium and fission products pose little threat if they are simply left in place for the next 50 to 100 years, according to all sides in the debate.

Electric companies have lobbied and sued to get the used fuel moved because of finances, not fear. They've paid billions of dollars into a federal disposal fund, under a contract that committed the government to take the waste by 1998.

"They have our money. We have their waste. It's that simple," said Leigh Ann Marshall of the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group.

Among those suing the Energy Department over the broken congressional promise is SMUD, which has housed close to 500 slowly cooling fuel rod assemblies at Rancho Seco since 1989, when voters ordered the plant closed.

It costs SMUD about $10 million a year to keep the rods in their cooling pool. The rods are scheduled to be moved to nearby dry-storage containers in mid-2000, which will reduce storage costs to about $1 million a year.

Nevada's Frishman, who wants America to follow the lead of Sweden and France and go much slower before it chooses nuclear waste's final resting place, said there's nothing wrong with Sacramento shouldering that cost.

"If the utility was willing to go into nuclear power ... they made money. Now there's some liability. That's part of the legacy," he said.

"I don't believe the people of Sacramento would prefer to have it taken to a place where it only puts other people at greater risk."

-------------------------------

2. Trinity Site (Tourism twice a year)


By James Abarr Of the Journal ... February 7, 1999

In the bleak desert of the Jornada del Muerto (Journey of Death), about 60 miles northwest of Alamogordo, is Trinity Site. Here, the world's first atomic bomb was detonated just before dawn on July 16, 1945, in a test shot that ushered in the nuclear age.c Trinity lies within the high-security White Sands Missile Range and is open to the public only twice a year -- on the first Saturday of April and October.

On those dates, visitors can tour Ground Zero, where a triangular-shaped stone monument marks where the 100-foot-high tower that cradled the bomb stood. The tower was vaporized in the blast, but a portion of the original crater is still visible. The casing of a plutonium bomb of the type tested also is on display.

Two miles from Ground Zero, visitors can inspect the McDonald ranch house, which was used by technicians to assemble the bomb's plutonium trigger.

Information about schedules and other details of tours of Trinity, now a National Historic Site, is available by calling White Sands Missile Range's Public Affairs Office at (505) 678-1134.
_____________________________________________________________

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   NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is
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_____________________________________________________________ --=====================_56733871==_.ALT-- - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Shundahai Network Subject: (abolition-usa) Subcritical nuke test "Clarinet" to be exploded 2/9/99 Date: 08 Feb 1999 07:10:44 -0800 Good Morning Friends, We have just received word that the Department of Energy plans to explode its sixth subcritical nuclear weapons test "Clarinet" at the Nevada Test Site on Tuesday, February 9, 1999. "Clarinet" is a Lawrence Livermore test. The DOE says it consists of 3 packages containing 145 grams of chemical explosives and 170 grams of plutonium. (We do not know if each package would contain this amount or if this is the total amount of explosives and plutonium involved. If any one has more information we would appreciate it. We are having a meeting today to figure out what our response can be. We will let you know what we plan. Thanks for being out there and doing the good work that you all do! Peace, Reinard ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< SHUNDAHAI NETWORK "Peace and Harmony with all Creation" out,out5007 Elmhurst St., Las Vegas, NV 89108-1304 Phone:(702)647-3095 (FAX)647-9385 Email: shundahai@shundahai.org 0000,0000,fefehttp://www.shundahai.org Shundahai Network is proud to be part of: Healing Global Wounds Alliance, a multi-cultural alliance to foster sustainable living and break the nuclear chain; and Abolition 2000: A Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: ASlater Subject: Re: (abolition-usa) Fwd: PUHCA sign-on letter Date: 08 Feb 1999 10:36:06 -0500 Please sign me on for my organization to the PUHCA letter. Many thanks for doing this. Regards, Alice Slater Global Resource Action Center for the Environment (GRACE) 15 East 26th Street, Room 915 New York, NY 10010 tel: (212) 726-9161 fax: (212) 726-9160 email: aslater@gracelinks.org GRACE is a member of Abolition 2000, a global network working for a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons. - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "David Crockett Williams" Subject: (abolition-usa) PUHCA sign-on letter Date: 08 Feb 1999 09:51:37 -0800 I support your efforts and would affix my name and organization of Global Emergency Alert Response to the letter David Crockett Williams http://www.angelfire.com/on/GEAR2000 ********************************************************* Global Emergency Alert Response: GEAR2000 David Crockett Williams 805-822-3309 20411 Steeple Court, Tehachapi CA 93561 USA ********************************************************* CAMPAIGN for a BETTER AMERICA with General Agency Services ********************************************************* UNITED NATION Global Peace Walk Oakland City Hall to UC Berkeley, February 26th* Annually: 22apr Taos, NM, ---> Santa Fe 26apr 1999: 16sep New York -> Washington DC 24oct Ceremony rededicating Washington Monument as a symbol of peace, UN DAY 24OCT99 2000: 15jan San Francisco --> New York 24oct 16sep Washington, DC ONE NATION, Aware of God as Love for All ! GLOBAL PEACE NOW !! Help Now !!! ********************************************************* http://www.egroups.com/list/global-peace-walk -----Original Message----- ; nuke-waste@igc.org ; nukenet@envirolink.org ; Magnu96196@aol.com ; info@noradiation.org ; abolition-usa@lists.xmission.com >------Begin forward message------------------------- > >Return-Path: >Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 10:56:00 -0500 >From: Charlie Higley >Organization: Public Citizen >To: rage@list.local.org (Rage) >Subject: PUHCA sign-on letter > >Colleagues: > >Below is a letter to the Senate advising senators to oppose stand-alone >PUHCA repeal. > >Please let me know if your organization can sign on. > >If you can sign on your organization by noon (eastern time) on Wednesday, >February 10, then your organization will appear on a letter that will be >hand-delivered on Wednesday to members of the Senate Banking Committee (as >you may have heard, last week's markup of S. 313 was delayed until Thursday, >Feb. 11). Although S. 313 is likely to get through the Banking Committee, >we hope to encourage more senators to request that PUHCA be dealt with only >in the context of comprehensive legislation. > >If you can't make the noon Wednesday deadline, please let me know if you can >sign on by close of business Wednesday, February 17, after which a letter >will be sent to the entire Senate in anticipation of a possible floor vote >on S. 313. > >So, please let me know if your organization can sign on by noon Wednesday, >Feb. 10, or by close of business Wednesday, Feb. 17. > >Thanks, > >-Charlie Higley- >Public Citizen > > >********************************* > >Oppose S. 313: Oppose PUHCA Repeal > >Dear Senator: > >On behalf of our millions of members nationwide, we urge you to oppose S. >313, which would repeal the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 >(PUHCA). > >Our members believe that PUHCA reform should only be dealt with in the >context of comprehensive legislation that addresses the changes taking place >within the electric power industry. Such legislation must include strong >consumer and environmental protections as well as policies that create a >level field for all competitors. > >PUHCA is the only federal law that protects consumers and the environment >from market power abuses that are specific to the utility sector. > >The repeal of PUHCA could increase the flow of cross-subsidies from a >holding company's regulated utilities to its unregulated subsidiaries. >Utility ratepayers will pay higher rates as they subsidize other businesses, >especially foreign ventures, without receiving any benefits. Utility holding >companies could compete unfairly with businesses that do not receive >guaranteed profits from captive customers. > >Repealing PUHCA may result in a larger wave of utility mergers than is >taking place today. Mergers reduce the number of potential competitors and >can increase the market power of surviving utilities, which could render >competition meaningless. > >With an unfair share of market power, large companies that own and operate >fossil fuel and nuclear power plants could have an interest in squeezing out >renewable energy, energy efficiency, and other clean, high-value energy >options. This could increase our dependence on fossil and nuclear fuels, >further damaging human health and the environment. > >Because of the above concerns, we urge you to oppose S. 313. PUHCA reform >should only be considered as a part of comprehensive restructuring >legislation that includes strong protections against market power, as well >as strong protections for consumers and the environment. > >Sincerely, > >Charlie Higley >Public Citizen > >Ralph Cavanagh >Natural Resources Defense Council > > >------End forward message--------------------------- > > > >- > To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" > with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. > For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send > "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. > - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Squintyrb@aol.com Subject: (abolition-usa) thoughts/fears re: Santa Barbara meeting Date: 08 Feb 1999 13:23:03 EST I serve on the board of a small grassroots peace organization, North Suburban Peace Initiative, near Chicago. We’re one of those few very local, very small shops that has survived the shrinkage of the peace movement. We’re not affiliated to a national organization but realize that our efforts are strengthened or weakened by what happens on a nationwide level. Thanks to being near Chicago, NSPI has the good fortune to work with Kevin Martin at Illinois Peace Action--and I was even involved somewhat with the Chicago meeting for abolition organizers and have seen part of the struggle to get a national abolition campaign up and running. As things heat up for your big upcoming weekend, I need to express my great fear that this upcoming meeting in Santa Barbara will end as the Chicago and New York meetings have. We, as a movement, desperately need an effective abolition campaign to emerge from this coming weekend. We can’t continue to build up the energy for organizational meetings like this and then lose that momentum while waiting for another meeting to be scheduled. Don’t get me wrong, clearly, those meetings were not at all wasted. The Chicago, New York and now Santa Barbara meetings all provide excellent venues for different players to meet each other and build connections that will be critical to the success of any campaign. But despite the strengthened connections, a level of frustration seems to have also been a result of at least the Chicago meeting due to the lack of decisions having been made. Decisions about structure, mission--not even a name has been adopted yet. On the one hand, this dilemna is the result of a beautiful characteristic of the peace movement--activists are acutely aware that the process is just as important as the end result. And in that concern about the process and the desire not to offend, tough decisions are put off. On the other hand--if we do not make the difficult decisions and create a unified voice for the abolition movement, we are missing a fantastic opportunity to generate a nationwide outcry against nuclear weapons. For those of you in larger organizations, maybe that is not a concern, you will still be able to generate your materials and create an uproar from your own constituents. Even little NSPI will create it’s own pocket of outrage but to do so would mean we are missing out on the opportunity to have our members in Chicago’s northern suburbs be energized by those in other parts of the country and vice versa. I’m assuming we all know how important a national campaign is--we all know how entrenched the nuclear weapons complex is--can we dismantle it if we’re working separately like we have been? Plus, by working together I believe we increase our chances of reaching many more than just our dedicated choir members. And considering the graying hairs in our organization, it is critical to reach beyond our current constituents! This is the opportunity to actually meet and pull together the 80% or so of the population that says they support nuclear abolition. Just the thought of the potential is an exciting proposition!! So what’s been holding a national campaign back? Many of you know the answer to this question much better than I do but I’m hoping that in Santa Barbara these obstacles can be overcome. I just hope that whatever egos and obstacles there are, whether they’re organizational or individual, they can be overcome to make the hard decisions and come together behind a unified structure and plan. I’m also hoping that a major point of discussion will be how to reach and energize those outside of our immediate constituencies. How can we capture not just the minds, but the hearts of those who know nuclear weapons need to go? This goes beyond the need for information. Due to excellent work already done on this issue, we already have the forceful arguments and research needed to run a campaign. Valuable information and resources already exist--and are likely to increase now that it appears Warren Buffet has put money towards a think-tank for General Butler. But unless there is some charisma and energy and spark injected into this campaign--it seems likely we may still get stuck. I don’t have the answer on how to do this -- but I do know it’ll require us to think outside our boxes. Inspirational examples are out there: Bob Geldof pulled together rock stars for famine relief; The landmines campaign had graphic images to grab us; Amnesty has a powerful logo; Promise Keepers had preachers and big rallies to energize the masses; Britain has Red Nose Day every other year to raise funds in outrageous ways for developing countries; the AIDS campaign has their red ribbons. We can achieve this. Maybe this letter is simply stating the obvious, but this note is my plea for those of you directly taking on this gargantuan task. In Peace, Debby Reelitz-Bell 50 Sheldon Lane Highland Park IL 60035 (847) 266-1525 squintyrb@aol.com - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Shundahai Network Subject: (abolition-usa) Request for Legal Information Date: 08 Feb 1999 10:58:18 -0800 Hello Friends, Susi Snyder and myself, Reinard Knutsen, are scheduled to appear in Federal Court in Las Vegas on Wednesday, February 17, to face charges of: Disturbance ( 41 CFR 101.20.305 Conduct on government property which created or obstructed the performance of Government operations.) and Nonconformity (41 CFR 101.20.304 Nonconformity with direction during a demonstration.) that resulted from our September 8th nonviolent lock down action at the Las Vegas Federal Building to bring attention to the U.S. subcritical nuclear weapons testing program. We have already had our pre-trial hearing where we plead not guilty to the charges and consolidated our separate cases into one. This is our first time appearing in a Federal Court so we would appreciate any advice on what to expect. We plan on arguing: Technically we are not guilty of obstructing the Federal Building since our action did not block any access to the Federal Building and we had no criminal intent at the time. That our action falls within our first amendment rights Our Necessity defense follows that we were upholding Nevada State Law by trying to stop the further contamination of our groundwater by plutonium. We were upholding international law specifically, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 1996 ICJ ruling on illegality of preparations for nuclear war 1948 Nuremburg principles 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty If any body has any advice it is greatly appreciated. It is unfortunate that we are involved in so many important projects at the moment that we can not spend a whole lot of time preparing for this case. But we do what we can. Thanks for your help! Peace, Reinard ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< SHUNDAHAI NETWORK "Peace and Harmony with all Creation" out,out5007 Elmhurst St., Las Vegas, NV 89108-1304 Phone:(702)647-3095 (FAX)647-9385 Email: shundahai@shundahai.org 0000,0000,fefehttp://www.shundahai.org Shundahai Network is proud to be part of: Healing Global Wounds Alliance, a multi-cultural alliance to foster sustainable living and break the nuclear chain; and Abolition 2000: A Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Boyle, Francis" Subject: RE: (abolition-usa) Request for Legal Information Date: 08 Feb 1999 13:51:22 -0600 Dear Friends: Several years ago, I helped participate in the defense of the Actor Martin Sheen for one of his numerous anti-nuclear protest cases at the Nevada Test Site. He was represented by the attorney, Al Marquis. I suggest that you contact Mr. Marquis's office and try to get a copy of the papers he filed in Martin's case. You can tell him I sent you. Francis A. Boyle Albert G. Marquis, Esq. Marquis Haney & Aurbach First Floor 228 South Fourth Street Las Vegas, Nevada 89101 TEL: 702-382-0711 FAX: 702-382-5816 There is no DATE so I don't know how old this address is. -----Original Message----- From: Boyle, Francis Sent: Monday, February 08, 1999 1:11 PM Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, Ill. 61820 Phone: 217-333-7954 Fax: 217-244-1478 fboyle@law.uiuc.edu -----Original Message----- Sent: Monday, February 08, 1999 12:58 PM rherried@roxy.sfo.com; a-days@motherearth.org; nukenet@envirolink.org Hello Friends, Susi Snyder and myself, Reinard Knutsen, are scheduled to appear in Federal Court in Las Vegas on Wednesday, February 17, to face charges of: Disturbance ( 41 CFR 101.20.305 Conduct on government property which created or obstructed the performance of Government operations.) and Nonconformity (41 CFR 101.20.304 Nonconformity with direction during a demonstration.) that resulted from our September 8th nonviolent lock down action at the Las Vegas Federal Building to bring attention to the U.S. subcritical nuclear weapons testing program. We have already had our pre-trial hearing where we plead not guilty to the charges and consolidated our separate cases into one. This is our first time appearing in a Federal Court so we would appreciate any advice on what to expect. We plan on arguing: Technically we are not guilty of obstructing the Federal Building since our action did not block any access to the Federal Building and we had no criminal intent at the time. That our action falls within our first amendment rights Our Necessity defense follows that we were upholding Nevada State Law by trying to stop the further contamination of our groundwater by plutonium. We were upholding international law specifically, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 1996 ICJ ruling on illegality of preparations for nuclear war 1948 Nuremburg principles 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty If any body has any advice it is greatly appreciated. It is unfortunate that we are involved in so many important projects at the moment that we can not spend a whole lot of time preparing for this case. But we do what we can. Thanks for your help! Peace, Reinard ><>< ><>< ><>< ><>< ><>< ><>< ><>< ><>< ><>< ><>< ><>< ><>< SHUNDAHAI NETWORK "Peace and Harmony with all Creation" 5007 Elmhurst St., Las Vegas, NV 89108-1304 Phone:(702)647-3095 (FAX)647-9385 Email: shundahai@shundahai.org http://www.shundahai.org Shundahai Network is proud to be part of: Healing Global Wounds Alliance, a multi-cultural alliance to foster sustainable living and break the nuclear chain; and Abolition 2000: A Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons ><>< ><>< ><>< ><>< ><>< ><>< ><>< ><>< ><>< ><>< ><>< ><>< - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "David Culp" Subject: (abolition-usa) The Looming Threat to Disarmament in the U.S. Senate Date: 08 Feb 1999 17:03:54 -0500 [In the next few weeks, the U.S. Senate, and possibly the House of Representatives, is expected to vote on a bill supporting deployment of a national ballistic missile defense system. While the same legislation was defeated in the Senate last year by one vote, the Senate Republican leadership believes they can win this year. Below is a brief analysis of why this issue is critical to further = nuclear disarmament progress. David Culp] GOING UP THE HILL AND DOWN AGAIN: WHY THE ADMINISTRATION'S DECISION ON MISSILE DEFENSE IS A GENUINE CRISIS FOR NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT By Jonathan Dean Union of Concerned Scientists Washington, D.C.=20 February 4, 1999 Many people believe that deployment of nationwide missile defenses will have negative impact on prospects for nuclear disarmament. That's true. But there is an even more difficult problem: How do you get out of the mess once deployment has actually taken place?=20 The plans of the Clinton administration announced by Secretary of Defense Cohen on January 20 to proceed with preparations for deployment of a nationwide missile defense system by 2005 mean that the administration may well decide by mid-2000 on the deployment of a "thin" defense in two sites, necessitating extensive renegotiation with Russia on the ABM Treaty -- or U.S. withdrawal from the treaty.=20 The nearly certain result of missile defense deployment in the United States will be to freeze nuclear arsenals at their present or higher levels for decades to come, postponing deep cuts in nuclear weapons and blocking a stage where complete elimination of nuclear weapons can be seriously discussed.=20 These highly probable results of deployment mean that those interested in nuclear disarmament should join in strong opposition to deployment of missile defenses.=20 Background=20 Faced by these developments in U.S. policy, in the long run, Russia may agree to amend the ABM Treaty to permit two U.S. sites, as was the case with the original version of the treaty; Russia has a continuing interest in limiting the scope of United States missile defenses. But in return, Russia will also very probably require U.S. acquiescence in maintaining the Russian arsenal at around the 2,000 warhead level, rather than going down to the 1,000 warhead level that has been urged by many Russians. The 2,000 warhead level will be retained to assure Russia that it can still overcome a "thin" nationwide defense. Russia will in turn argue that multiple warheads (MIRVs) be retained in order to enable Russia to maintain a 2,000 warhead level without having to spend a great deal of money in constructing new single warhead "Topol M" missiles. (To do this, SS-19 multiple warhead missiles or even some of the heavy, dreaded SS-18 multiple warhead missiles would be retained in service until a new generation of Topol M multiple warhead missiles can be constructed and deployed.)=20 If these developments take place, the hope of reducing U.S. and Russian holdings of strategic-range missiles down to about 1,000 each in a few years through a START III Treaty and then bringing the other weapon states into negotiated reductions will have to be postponed indefinitely. China, which has repeatedly criticized the missile defense project, will probably decide to increase the size of its own nuclear arsenal in order to be able to surmount U.S. missile defenses and to maintain a deterrent. It may also develop MIRVs for its missiles if Russia retains them.=20 Once deployed, a "thin" nationwide defense can be fairly rapidly converted into a heavy nationwide defense and there will be continuing political pressure in the U.S. to do so. Fully effective, high capacity nationwide missile defense against all-out missile attack is probably impossible to achieve. Nevertheless, it is likely that other nuclear weapon states will follow worst case analysis and credit the U.S. with high capability. As a result of developments like these, nuclear disarmament will remain in indefinite stasis until some way around this obstacle can be found.=20 Can We Get Out of This Situation?=20 This is how the U.S. will march up the hill. To evaluate the seriousness of the situation, we have to calculate what it may take to march down again on the far side of the hill toward renewed negotiation of deep nuclear cuts.=20 One way, the easy way, would be for the grossly inflated threat of rogue missile attack on the United States to collapse before U.S. missile defenses are fully deployed, perhaps with the collapse of the North Korean regime and with peaceful Korean reunification, with collapse of the Iranian threat through emergence of a less theocratic regime and improved U.S.-Iranian relations, as well as with replacement of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. Then, the U.S. might return to leadership of incremental nuclear disarmament and regain Russia's interest in deep cuts through the United States' main source of leverage with Russia - money.=20 A serious nuclear incident, such as an act of nuclear terrorism, might also restore the momentum of nuclear disarmament.=20 Other than these fortuitous developments, the remaining possibility for restoring momentum to nuclear disarmament is the emergence of a United States or Russian leader who actively presses for disarmament. Prospects here are not very promising now.=20 In the material sense, what would have to be done to march down the hill is either to dismantle the "thin" nationwide defenses or abandon them unfinished, as was done with the United States Grand Forks site when the ABM Treaty was signed by President Nixon in 1972.=20 Then, at the height of the cold war, the U.S. and Russia decided that deployment of nationwide defenses would result in increased deployment of offensive missiles. Now, after the cold war has wound down, this argument lacks force. As stated, deployment of a thin system (and apprehension that it could someday become a thick one), will probably freeze current warhead levels in Russia, and may somewhat increase them in China. But if this takes place, it is improbable that the increased nuclear deployments would be so large that they would mobilize opposition public opinion in the U.S. against missile defenses, or even that public opinion would at this stage be intensely interested in the general problem. Some segments of public opinion might be engaged earlier if they understood that the road to nuclear disarmament might be blocked for a long period.)=20 That is the point. This new situation, and especially the difficulty of reversing missile defense deployment once it has taken place, means that organizations and individuals who support elimination of nuclear weapons will have to become involved in the opposition to deployment of nationwide missile defenses.=20 Arguments Against Missile Defense=20 There are four main arguments against missile defense:=20 1) It is an expensive waste; the equipment thus far has failed its tests and it probably will not work; countermeasures by attackers will make the task of defense much harder.=20 2) The danger of rogue missile attack has been greatly exaggerated. The contention that North Korea could produce a missile which could reach important areas of the U.S. has probably not been exaggerated. What has been exaggerated out of all proportion is the implication that the damage that could be done by one or two North Korean missiles strike is equivalent to the danger to which the U.S. was exposed in the cold war nuclear confrontation with Russia.=20 In the cold war, the entire population of the U.S. and Russia and the northern hemisphere were at stake -- and possibly all life on earth in a global winter. With North Korea, we are talking about one or two missiles with a small payload which probably would not hit their targets but which at worst could do damage in one or two restricted sites, leaving the U.S. fully able to retaliate with very strong conventional forces.=20 The administration should be pressed to give the U.S. public an accurate account of the limited dangers that actually face it from rogue ICBM attacks.=20 3) Given the current articulation of U.S. military strategy, the United States is itself increasingly dependent on its own missiles, especially cruise missiles, while trumpeting warnings over the dangers of missile proliferation and possible missile attack on the U.S. Consequently, the U.S. has not undertaken measures to control missiles beyond the Missile Control Technology Regime, whose members are missile-producing governments.=20 The administration should now be pressed to move step-by-step toward a worldwide regime restricting production, possession and deployment of long-range ballistic missiles for military purposes. One proposal is discussed in Jonathan Dean, "Controlling Ballistic and Cruise Missiles," Disarmament Diplomacy, Issue 31, October 1998.=20 4) Because the great damage from deploying missile defenses is to intensify competition in nuclear weapons, one possible way of mitigating the damage is to insist on maintenance of the ABM Treaty so that deployment of missile defenses can at least be limited rather than be allowed to develop into all-out competition.=20 Beyond this, it is argued by some that the safest way to move toward nuclear disarmament is to build missile defenses and then to agree on step-by- step nuclear disarmament, replacing deterrence with defense. Such defenses would not protect against attack by aircraft, cruise missiles, land-based rockets and artillery or terrorist action, all of which are more plausible than seriously damaging long-range missile attack or deal with other motives of the weaker states for retaining their weapons. Moreover, agreement to replace deterrence with defense would require the full trust among weapon states from the outset that is the hoped-for end result of step-by-step disarmament. It would also probably require a global missile defense system with global and completely standardized defense components available to all states willing to pay for them.=20 Even so, the U.S. and other rich countries could buy and deploy more defense systems than other countries -- to its potential military advantage. Consequently, there would have to be an agreed maximum limit per country based on some more or less equitable formula of population and area. All of this would not be an easy project and there is reason for real skepticism about this approach.=20 A more limited variant of this approach, intended to mitigate negative Russian reaction to U.S. deployment of missile defenses, would be for the U.S. to seek Russian agreement to collaborate on the development of missile defenses. The U.S. and Russia agreed in September 1998 to cooperate in warning of missile launches. But this approach would go beyond that limited agreement to require cooperation in the production of actual defenses. It is difficult to believe that such an undertaking could prosper when it comes to exchanging details of interceptor research, or that suspicious Russians would prefer it to maintaining high levels of Russian offensive missiles.=20 This brief review illustrates the real difficulty under today's conditions of getting rid of a missile defense system -- once it has been deployed -- in order to resume movement toward nuclear disarmament. It therefore makes clear the importance of energetic opposition to the deployment before it takes place.=20 ************=20 January 26, 1999=20 John Holum Director U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency 320 21st Street, NW, Room 5930 Washington, DC 20451=20 Dear John Holum,=20 With many others, I am worried by some major trends in U.S. defense policy over the past few years. I believe that two current, related Administration policies are having extremely negative effects on efforts to block the proliferation of nuclear weapons.=20 The first is the Administration's very energetic effort to make Americans aware of the dangers of attack by "Weapons of Mass Destruction" by rogue countries.=20 Over the past two or three years, this possible threat has gradually superseded the two-region war strategy as the dominant public justification, not merely of U.S. counterproliferation efforts, but of the U.S. defense budget generally. And because it is more vague and more menacing than the threat posed to U.S. security by a few small countries like Iraq, Iran or North Korea, this threat provides a more convincing public rationale for the U.S. defense posture.=20 This emphasis on WMD also gives rise, apparently deliberately, to the impression that the current threats to the United States from "Weapons of Mass Destruction" are equal in their gravity to the cold war threat of all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union. This approach seriously misleads the American public - one indicator is the rising number of biological warfare hoaxes in this country -- and results in a distortion of policy and diversion of scarce resources from greater threats to U.S. security than missile attacks by rogue states.=20 In actuality, other than mass nuclear attack by Russia and possibly China, no conceivable "WMD" attack on the United States for the next decade could affect more than one or two sites in the U.S., sites quite possibly not even the target of the attack. We are no longer in a situation where the entire country could be wiped out by a nuclear exchange. In the long term future, biological weapons might create such a possibility, but not now.=20 There is an enormous difference between a threat of total annihilation and a threat which may entail limited destruction. One major difference is that, in the case of limited attack, the United States would remain able to retaliate with overwhelming force against any known perpetrator. And if we talking of anything other than a covert terrorist attack, the perpetrator would probably be known. Quite aside from the fact that both chemical and biological weapons have considerable limitations; for the next decades, no country in the world except Russia and possibly China has or will have the delivery capability to do more than strike one or two targets in the United States.=20 Given these facts, the first negative effect of the current overemphasis on the WMD threat is that it diverts attention and resources from the greatest real threat both of possible direct nuclear attack and of proliferation of nuclear materials and knowledge -- the Russian nuclear arsenal. The Russian situation entails the entire range of threats from nuclear weapons, including accidental launch, illicit launch, launch on warning, threats of use, and, under extreme circumstances, deliberate attack. The dangers also include threats of use or actual use in or on the borders of Russia, violent seizure or theft of nuclear components and fissile material, and export of nuclear material and of expert knowledge. Given in particular the uncertain fate of the START process in Russia and the limited influence the Russian government has over the Duma, these risks amount to the most serious current threat to U.S. national security.=20 In the current economic misery of the Russian government and people, with its bitterness and anti-American feeling and with confused disputes over Russia's security interests, U.S. capacity to provide Russia money for disarmament actions is by far our greatest source of leverage. To meet our biggest genuine defense emergency, we should be willing to spend several times the cost of current Nunn-Lugar programs and to devise new ones to meet this threat more adequately. In other words, instead of spending $12 billion additional on force readiness, we should be spending it on buying warhead dismantlement and fissile material from Russia.=20 Second, the exaggerated focus on possible WMD attack on the U.S. has been accompanied by an Administration policy of deliberate ambiguity on possible retaliatory use of nuclear weapons by the United States, including their possible use in response to chemical or biological attack. These statements are obviously intended to deter such attack. But, here again, they are dangerous overkill.=20 I accept that in the event of massive, catastrophic, nationwide chemical or biological attacks on the U.S., any U.S. administration would consider retaliation with any weapon at its disposal, no matter what its stated doctrine on use of nuclear weapons. But we are not talking about such a situation. Only Russia has the delivery means for a nationwide chemical or biological attack and it would be ill-advised in such circumstances to use chemical or biological weapons instead of nuclear weapons. In any event, any form of long-range attack from Russia would presumably be deterred by U.S. second-strike nuclear capability. U.S. nuclear weapons will not be needed if limited biological or chemical attacks occur, nor, for political reasons, is it at all likely that U.S. nuclear weapons would in fact be used in response.=20 However, deliberate emphasis on the usefulness of nuclear weapons in such a situation is the most powerful advocacy of possession of nuclear weapons heard since the cold war ended. It dangerously undermines nonproliferation goals, first, by greatly increasing the attractions of having nuclear weapons and undermining the norm against any use of nuclear weapons, and second, by frustrating and annoying non-nuclear states which correctly conclude that this policy vitiates U.S. pledges not to use nuclear weapons in NPT negative security assurances and U.S. pledges of non-use in connection with nuclear free zones. This frustration can express itself in increasing support for extreme measures of nuclear abolition, in withholding cooperation for desirable improvements of the non-proliferation regime, and possibly in future demonstrative withdrawal from the NPT to make a political point.=20 The third negative effect of the overemphasis on the possibility and consequences of WMD attack on the U.S. is that it increases motivation to establish nationwide missile defense and to withdraw from the ABM Treaty. This issue is being widely debated in the United States and there is no consensus over it. However, whatever putative advantages it may have, a U.S. decision to deploy nationwide defenses and withdraw from the ABM Treaty will decrease Russian and Chinese willingness to engage in further steps of nuclear arms control. It could also motivate increases in their nuclear arsenals. As a result, it would perpetuate the risks to U.S. security from existing nuclear weapon arsenals. It would also divert resources from more productive programs and possibilities. For example, other than the MTCR, the administration is doing nothing to tackle the missile problem at the source.=20 What is needed, instead of current exaggeration of the damage from potential rogue state missile attack on the United States, is for the Administration to put the rogue state problem in perspective with the American public, making clear the wide difference of this threat from the cold war nuclear threat and pointing out that the United States would know where an attack came from, would remain fully capable of response, and would do so with its entire conventional arsenal, including targeting the decisionmakers involved. This posture would be a more effective deterrent than misleading and damaging threats of nuclear retaliation.=20 Sincerely,=20 Jonathan Dean Adviser on International Security Issues - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Sally Light" Subject: (abolition-usa) Press Release - Subcricital Nuclear Test "Clarinet" to be Detonated Feb. 9, 1999 Date: 08 Feb 1999 19:42:31 -0000 For Immediate Release February 8, 1999 Contact: Marylia Kelley, Tri-Valley CAREs (925) 443-7148 Sally Light, Tri-Valley CAREs (510) 527-2057 Livermore Lab-designed Subcritical Nuclear Test "Clarinet" is a Sour Note to Outraged Activists. Protest to be Held at Bechtel HQ in San Francisco, Feb. 9 at Noon. The US Department of Energy (DOE) has announced that another subcritical nuclear test will be detonated at its Nevada Test Site (NTS) tomorrow, February 9, 1999. Code named "Clarinet," and designed by weaponeers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, this will be the sixth such underground detonation at NTS since the start of the test series in 1997. A subcritical nuclear test advances nuclear bomb design capabilities by detonating high explosives along with fissile material, such as plutonium, a man-made radioactive metal with a half-life of 24,000 years. Exotic diagnostics record detailed data on the performance of the plutonium under the test conditions. The test is called "subcritical" because it is set up so the high explosives stop short of triggering a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in the bomb material. The DOE justifies these tests as necessary to maintain the "safety and reliability" of the US nuclear arsenal. However, peace and environmental groups such as Tri-Valley CAREs point out that the nuclear arsenal can be properly maintained without such tests, and, further, that subcritical nuclear tests contaminate the environment, risk public health and safety, spur the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and undermine the ongoing international ratification effort for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), signed by President Clinton in 1996 and now awaiting Senate ratification. Russia has answered the US subcritical tests "tit for tat" by conducting five of its own such tests, beginning late last year. Tri-Valley CAREs sees this as an inevitable result of the US tests. "Subcritical tests continue the US government's noncompliance with international treaties, such as the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the CTBT, which require us to end nuclear testing and, ultimately, to eliminate our nuclear arsenal," stated Marylia Kelley, Executive Director of Tri-Valley CAREs. "If we as a nation are unwilling to abide by the letter and spirit of the treaties we sign, we lose all moral authority to persuade other nations to forego nuclear weapons development and abide by their part of the bargain", Kelley added. Tri-Valley CAREs, along with allied groups, will hold a protest at noon on February 9, at Bechtel Corporation's international headquarters, 50 Beale St., San Francisco, 1 block south of Market St. Bechtel operates the Nevada Test Site for the DOE. "Bechtel's contract with the DOE is a perfect example of how the "military-industrial complex" works," said Sally Light, Tri-Valley CAREs' Nuclear Program Analyst. "Bechtel earns an enormous $1.5 billion over five years to carry out the DOE's nuclear tests, endanger the land, air, and water, not to mention the tribes and other people both in the surrounding area and downwind of the NTS," Light stated. For further information, please call Tri-Valley CAREs at (925) 443-7148 -30- - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Shundahai Network Subject: (abolition-usa) 2/9 Actions to stop the subcritical nuclear tests Date: 08 Feb 1999 23:01:46 -0800 Hello Friends, The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced plans to conduct a subcritical nuclear weapons test, code named "Clarinet" for Tuesday, February 9, 1999. The last Nevada Test Site radio transmission reported that everything was in place and they would be ready by 9am Tuesday. We believe that the Test will be conducted around 10am U.S. Pacific Standard Time. This test will take place on Western Shoshone land. This will be the sixth subcritical nuclear test in the US since the beginning of the test series in 1997. Subcritical tests help fan the flames that continue the cold war mind set (Russia took up the "challenge" by detonating 5 subcriticals in 1998). These tests also threaten the international ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. SUBCRITICAL TESTING MUST BE STOPPED! Call President Clinton and demand that this nuclear insanity must stop right now! (202) 456-1111 Department of Energy Washington DC Headquarters (202) 586-5000 In Nevada, Tuesday, February 9th: We will be having a Prayer Ceremony lead by Corbin Harney at the gates to the Nevada Test Site beginning at 9am. This is 60 miles north west of Las Vegas on Hwy 95 at the Mercury exit. A Nonviolent Direct Action will take place. Come early to join affinity group discussions. A protest vigil will be held 4pm - 5pm at the Foley Federal Building, 300 S Las Vegas Blvd. Bring your signs, drums and remember, we need to gather in as many numbers as possible to carry off a spirited, noisy, yet nonviolent event. Tell your friends, family, neighbors to join us. Call (702) 647-3095 for more information. In the Bay Area (San Francisco CA): A demonstration will be held on Tuesday, February 9, to protest continuing nuclear weapons development by the US. Bechtel manages the Nevada Test Site where the detonation will take place. Where: Bechtel Corp. HQ, 50 Beale St., San Francisco, 1 block south of Market St., near the Embarcadero BART station. When: Noon, Tuesday, Feb. 9, 1999 The test was designed by weaponeers at Livermore Lab and its parts transported to the test site. The demonstration will be conducted along nonviolent guidelines. A "risk arrest" is possible for those wishing to do one. Bring: Banners, signs, puppets, "rad" suits and whatever other creative props you desire. For more information about this event please call Tri-Valley CAREs (Communities Against a Radioactive Environment) < - is our web site, please visit us there! (925) 443-7148 - is our phone There will also be demonstrations in Japan, etc. If any one is able to organize solidarity vigils or events please let us know so that we can include it in our media work. Thank you for all you are able to do. Peace, ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< SHUNDAHAI NETWORK "Peace and Harmony with all Creation" out,out5007 Elmhurst St., Las Vegas, NV 89108-1304 Phone:(702)647-3095 (FAX)647-9385 Email: shundahai@shundahai.org 0000,0000,fefehttp://www.shundahai.org Shundahai Network is proud to be part of: Healing Global Wounds Alliance, a multi-cultural alliance to foster sustainable living and break the nuclear chain; and Abolition 2000: A Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Shundahai Network Subject: (abolition-usa) subcrit scheduled for 2pm Date: 09 Feb 1999 08:06:41 -0800 Dear Friends, We have just received word that the subcritical nuclear weapons test "Clarinet" is scheduled to be conducted at 2pm U.S. Pacific Standard Time. ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< SHUNDAHAI NETWORK "Peace and Harmony with all Creation" out,out5007 Elmhurst St., Las Vegas, NV 89108-1304 Phone:(702)647-3095 (FAX)647-9385 Email: shundahai@shundahai.org 0000,0000,fefehttp://www.shundahai.org Shundahai Network is proud to be part of: Healing Global Wounds Alliance, a multi-cultural alliance to foster sustainable living and break the nuclear chain; and Abolition 2000: A Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< ><<><< - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: ASlater Subject: (abolition-usa) Fwd: BMD vs disarmament Date: 09 Feb 1999 11:49:47 -0500 Dear Friends, We might want to consider the material below in preparing a strategy for the US Abolition Campaign. If we can't stop Star Wars, I'm afraid there's going to be more of an up hill battle on eliminating nukes. Regards, Alice Slater >Subject: The Looming Threat to Disarmament in the U.S. Senate > Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1999 17:03:54 -0500 > From: "David Culp" > > >[In the next few weeks, the U.S. Senate, and possibly the House of >Representatives, is expected to vote on a bill supporting >deployment of a national ballistic missile defense system. While >the same legislation was defeated in the Senate last year by one vote, >the Senate Republican leadership believes they can win this year. >Below is a brief analysis of why this issue is critical to further nuclear >disarmament progress. David Culp] > >----------------------------------------------------------------- > >GOING UP THE HILL AND DOWN AGAIN: >WHY THE ADMINISTRATION'S DECISION ON MISSILE DEFENSE >IS A GENUINE CRISIS FOR NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT > >By Jonathan Dean >Union of Concerned Scientists >Washington, D.C. >February 4, 1999 > > >Many people believe that deployment of nationwide missile defenses >will have negative impact on prospects for nuclear disarmament. That's >true. But there is an even more difficult problem: How do you get out >of the mess once deployment has actually taken place? > >The plans of the Clinton administration announced by Secretary of >Defense Cohen on January 20 to proceed with preparations for >deployment of a nationwide missile defense system by 2005 mean that >the administration may well decide by mid-2000 on the deployment of a >"thin" defense in two sites, necessitating extensive renegotiation >with Russia on the ABM Treaty -- or U.S. withdrawal from the treaty. > >The nearly certain result of missile defense deployment in the United >States will be to freeze nuclear arsenals at their present or higher >levels for decades to come, postponing deep cuts in nuclear weapons >and blocking a stage where complete elimination of nuclear weapons can >be seriously discussed. > >These highly probable results of deployment mean that those interested >in nuclear disarmament should join in strong opposition to deployment >of missile defenses. > > >Background > >Faced by these developments in U.S. policy, in the long run, Russia >may agree to amend the ABM Treaty to permit two U.S. sites, as was the >case with the original version of the treaty; Russia has a continuing >interest in limiting the scope of United States missile defenses. But >in return, Russia will also very probably require U.S. acquiescence in >maintaining the Russian arsenal at around the 2,000 warhead level, >rather than going down to the 1,000 warhead level that has been urged >by many Russians. The 2,000 warhead level will be retained to assure >Russia that it can still overcome a "thin" nationwide defense. Russia >will in turn argue that multiple warheads (MIRVs) be retained in order >to enable Russia to maintain a 2,000 warhead level without having to >spend a great deal of money in constructing new single warhead "Topol >M" missiles. (To do this, SS-19 multiple warhead missiles or even some >of the heavy, dreaded SS-18 multiple warhead missiles would be >retained in service until a new generation of Topol M multiple warhead >missiles can be constructed and deployed.) > >If these developments take place, the hope of reducing U.S. and >Russian holdings of strategic-range missiles down to about 1,000 each >in a few years through a START III Treaty and then bringing the other >weapon states into negotiated reductions will have to be postponed >indefinitely. China, which has repeatedly criticized the missile >defense project, will probably decide to increase the size of its own >nuclear arsenal in order to be able to surmount U.S. missile defenses >and to maintain a deterrent. It may also develop MIRVs for its >missiles if Russia retains them. > >Once deployed, a "thin" nationwide defense can be fairly rapidly >converted into a heavy nationwide defense and there will be continuing >political pressure in the U.S. to do so. Fully effective, high >capacity nationwide missile defense against all-out missile attack is >probably impossible to achieve. Nevertheless, it is likely that other >nuclear weapon states will follow worst case analysis and credit the >U.S. with high capability. As a result of developments like these, >nuclear disarmament will remain in indefinite stasis until some way >around this obstacle can be found. > > >Can We Get Out of This Situation? > >This is how the U.S. will march up the hill. To evaluate the >seriousness of the situation, we have to calculate what it may take to >march down again on the far side of the hill toward renewed >negotiation of deep nuclear cuts. > >One way, the easy way, would be for the grossly inflated threat of >rogue missile attack on the United States to collapse before U.S. >missile defenses are fully deployed, perhaps with the collapse of the >North Korean regime and with peaceful Korean reunification, with >collapse of the Iranian threat through emergence of a less theocratic >regime and improved U.S.-Iranian relations, as well as with >replacement of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. Then, the U.S. might >return to leadership of incremental nuclear disarmament and regain >Russia's interest in deep cuts through the United States' main source >of leverage with Russia - money. > >A serious nuclear incident, such as an act of nuclear terrorism, might >also restore the momentum of nuclear disarmament. > >Other than these fortuitous developments, the remaining possibility >for restoring momentum to nuclear disarmament is the emergence of a >United States or Russian leader who actively presses for disarmament. >Prospects here are not very promising now. > >In the material sense, what would have to be done to march down the >hill is either to dismantle the "thin" nationwide defenses or abandon >them unfinished, as was done with the United States Grand Forks site >when the ABM Treaty was signed by President Nixon in 1972. > >Then, at the height of the cold war, the U.S. and Russia decided that >deployment of nationwide defenses would result in increased deployment >of offensive missiles. Now, after the cold war has wound down, this >argument lacks force. As stated, deployment of a thin system (and >apprehension that it could someday become a thick one), will probably >freeze current warhead levels in Russia, and may somewhat increase >them in China. But if this takes place, it is improbable that the >increased nuclear deployments would be so large that they would >mobilize opposition public opinion in the U.S. against missile >defenses, or even that public opinion would at this stage be intensely >interested in the general problem. Some segments of public opinion >might be engaged earlier if they understood that the road to nuclear >disarmament might be blocked for a long period.) > >That is the point. This new situation, and especially the difficulty >of reversing missile defense deployment once it has taken place, means >that organizations and individuals who support elimination of nuclear >weapons will have to become involved in the opposition to deployment >of nationwide missile defenses. > > >Arguments Against Missile Defense > >There are four main arguments against missile defense: > >1) It is an expensive waste; the equipment thus far has failed its >tests and it probably will not work; countermeasures by attackers will >make the task of defense much harder. > >2) The danger of rogue missile attack has been greatly exaggerated. >The contention that North Korea could produce a missile which could >reach important areas of the U.S. has probably not been exaggerated. >What has been exaggerated out of all proportion is the implication >that the damage that could be done by one or two North Korean missiles >strike is equivalent to the danger to which the U.S. was exposed in >the cold war nuclear confrontation with Russia. > >In the cold war, the entire population of the U.S. and Russia and the >northern hemisphere were at stake -- and possibly all life on earth in >a global winter. With North Korea, we are talking about one or two >missiles with a small payload which probably would not hit their >targets but which at worst could do damage in one or two restricted >sites, leaving the U.S. fully able to retaliate with very strong >conventional forces. > >The administration should be pressed to give the U.S. public an >accurate account of the limited dangers that actually face it from >rogue ICBM attacks. > >3) Given the current articulation of U.S. military strategy, the >United States is itself increasingly dependent on its own missiles, >especially cruise missiles, while trumpeting warnings over the dangers >of missile proliferation and possible missile attack on the U.S. >Consequently, the U.S. has not undertaken measures to control missiles >beyond the Missile Control Technology Regime, whose members are >missile-producing governments. > >The administration should now be pressed to move step-by-step toward a >worldwide regime restricting production, possession and deployment of >long-range ballistic missiles for military purposes. One proposal is >discussed in Jonathan Dean, "Controlling Ballistic and Cruise >Missiles," Disarmament Diplomacy, Issue 31, October 1998. > >4) Because the great damage from deploying missile defenses is to >intensify competition in nuclear weapons, one possible way of >mitigating the damage is to insist on maintenance of the ABM Treaty so >that deployment of missile defenses can at least be limited rather >than be allowed to develop into all-out competition. > >Beyond this, it is argued by some that the safest way to move toward >nuclear disarmament is to build missile defenses and then to agree on >step-by- step nuclear disarmament, replacing deterrence with defense. >Such defenses would not protect against attack by aircraft, cruise >missiles, land-based rockets and artillery or terrorist action, all of >which are more plausible than seriously damaging long-range missile >attack or deal with other motives of the weaker states for retaining >their weapons. Moreover, agreement to replace deterrence with defense >would require the full trust among weapon states from the outset that >is the hoped-for end result of step-by-step disarmament. It would also >probably require a global missile defense system with global and >completely standardized defense components available to all states >willing to pay for them. > >Even so, the U.S. and other rich countries could buy and deploy more >defense systems than other countries -- to its potential military >advantage. Consequently, there would have to be an agreed maximum >limit per country based on some more or less equitable formula of >population and area. All of this would not be an easy project and >there is reason for real skepticism about this approach. > >A more limited variant of this approach, intended to mitigate negative >Russian reaction to U.S. deployment of missile defenses, would be for >the U.S. to seek Russian agreement to collaborate on the development >of missile defenses. The U.S. and Russia agreed in September 1998 to >cooperate in warning of missile launches. But this approach would go >beyond that limited agreement to require cooperation in the production >of actual defenses. It is difficult to believe that such an >undertaking could prosper when it comes to exchanging details of >interceptor research, or that suspicious Russians would prefer it to >maintaining high levels of Russian offensive missiles. > >This brief review illustrates the real difficulty under today's >conditions of getting rid of a missile defense system -- once it has >been deployed -- in order to resume movement toward nuclear >disarmament. It therefore makes clear the importance of energetic >opposition to the deployment before it takes place. > >************ > >January 26, 1999 > >John Holum >Director >U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency >320 21st Street, NW, Room 5930 >Washington, DC 20451 > > >Dear John Holum, > >With many others, I am worried by some major trends in U.S. defense >policy over the past few years. I believe that two current, related >Administration policies are having extremely negative effects on >efforts to block the proliferation of nuclear weapons. > >The first is the Administration's very energetic effort to make >Americans aware of the dangers of attack by "Weapons of Mass >Destruction" by rogue countries. > >Over the past two or three years, this possible threat has gradually >superseded the two-region war strategy as the dominant public >justification, not merely of U.S. counterproliferation efforts, but of >the U.S. defense budget generally. And because it is more vague and >more menacing than the threat posed to U.S. security by a few small >countries like Iraq, Iran or North Korea, this threat provides a more >convincing public rationale for the U.S. defense posture. > >This emphasis on WMD also gives rise, apparently deliberately, to the >impression that the current threats to the United States from "Weapons >of Mass Destruction" are equal in their gravity to the cold war threat >of all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union. This approach seriously >misleads the American public - one indicator is the rising number of >biological warfare hoaxes in this country -- and results in a >distortion of policy and diversion of scarce resources from greater >threats to U.S. security than missile attacks by rogue states. > >In actuality, other than mass nuclear attack by Russia and possibly >China, no conceivable "WMD" attack on the United States for the next >decade could affect more than one or two sites in the U.S., sites >quite possibly not even the target of the attack. We are no longer in >a situation where the entire country could be wiped out by a nuclear >exchange. In the long term future, biological weapons might create >such a possibility, but not now. > >There is an enormous difference between a threat of total annihilation >and a threat which may entail limited destruction. One major >difference is that, in the case of limited attack, the United States >would remain able to retaliate with overwhelming force against any >known perpetrator. And if we talking of anything other than a covert >terrorist attack, the perpetrator would probably be known. Quite aside >from the fact that both chemical and biological weapons have >considerable limitations; for the next decades, no country in the >world except Russia and possibly China has or will have the delivery >capability to do more than strike one or two targets in the United >States. > >Given these facts, the first negative effect of the current >overemphasis on the WMD threat is that it diverts attention and >resources from the greatest real threat both of possible direct >nuclear attack and of proliferation of nuclear materials and knowledge >-- the Russian nuclear arsenal. The Russian situation entails the >entire range of threats from nuclear weapons, including accidental >launch, illicit launch, launch on warning, threats of use, and, under >extreme circumstances, deliberate attack. The dangers also include >threats of use or actual use in or on the borders of Russia, violent >seizure or theft of nuclear components and fissile material, and >export of nuclear material and of expert knowledge. Given in >particular the uncertain fate of the START process in Russia and the >limited influence the Russian government has over the Duma, these >risks amount to the most serious current threat to U.S. national >security. > >In the current economic misery of the Russian government and people, >with its bitterness and anti-American feeling and with confused >disputes over Russia's security interests, U.S. capacity to provide >Russia money for disarmament actions is by far our greatest source of >leverage. To meet our biggest genuine defense emergency, we should be >willing to spend several times the cost of current Nunn-Lugar programs >and to devise new ones to meet this threat more adequately. In other >words, instead of spending $12 billion additional on force readiness, >we should be spending it on buying warhead dismantlement and fissile >material from Russia. > >Second, the exaggerated focus on possible WMD attack on the U.S. has >been accompanied by an Administration policy of deliberate ambiguity >on possible retaliatory use of nuclear weapons by the United States, >including their possible use in response to chemical or biological >attack. These statements are obviously intended to deter such attack. >But, here again, they are dangerous overkill. > >I accept that in the event of massive, catastrophic, nationwide >chemical or biological attacks on the U.S., any U.S. administration >would consider retaliation with any weapon at its disposal, no matter >what its stated doctrine on use of nuclear weapons. But we are not >talking about such a situation. Only Russia has the delivery means for >a nationwide chemical or biological attack and it would be ill-advised >in such circumstances to use chemical or biological weapons instead of >nuclear weapons. In any event, any form of long-range attack from >Russia would presumably be deterred by U.S. second-strike nuclear >capability. U.S. nuclear weapons will not be needed if limited >biological or chemical attacks occur, nor, for political reasons, is >it at all likely that U.S. nuclear weapons would in fact be used in >response. > >However, deliberate emphasis on the usefulness of nuclear weapons in >such a situation is the most powerful advocacy of possession of >nuclear weapons heard since the cold war ended. It dangerously >undermines nonproliferation goals, first, by greatly increasing the >attractions of having nuclear weapons and undermining the norm against >any use of nuclear weapons, and second, by frustrating and annoying >non-nuclear states which correctly conclude that this policy vitiates >U.S. pledges not to use nuclear weapons in NPT negative security >assurances and U.S. pledges of non-use in connection with nuclear free >zones. This frustration can express itself in increasing support for >extreme measures of nuclear abolition, in withholding cooperation for >desirable improvements of the non-proliferation regime, and possibly >in future demonstrative withdrawal from the NPT to make a political >point. > >The third negative effect of the overemphasis on the possibility and >consequences of WMD attack on the U.S. is that it increases motivation >to establish nationwide missile defense and to withdraw from the ABM >Treaty. This issue is being widely debated in the United States and >there is no consensus over it. However, whatever putative advantages >it may have, a U.S. decision to deploy nationwide defenses and >withdraw from the ABM Treaty will decrease Russian and Chinese >willingness to engage in further steps of nuclear arms control. It >could also motivate increases in their nuclear arsenals. As a result, >it would perpetuate the risks to U.S. security from existing nuclear >weapon arsenals. It would also divert resources from more productive >programs and possibilities. For example, other than the MTCR, the >administration is doing nothing to tackle the missile problem at the >source. > >What is needed, instead of current exaggeration of the damage from >potential rogue state missile attack on the United States, is for the >Administration to put the rogue state problem in perspective with the >American public, making clear the wide difference of this threat from >the cold war nuclear threat and pointing out that the United States >would know where an attack came from, would remain fully capable of >response, and would do so with its entire conventional arsenal, >including targeting the decisionmakers involved. This posture would be >a more effective deterrent than misleading and damaging threats of >nuclear retaliation. > >Sincerely, > >Jonathan Dean >Adviser on International Security Issues > > >-- >Bill Robinson, Project Ploughshares, >Conrad Grebel College, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G6 >Phone: 519 888-6541 x264 Fax: 519 885-0806 >E-mail: brobinson@ploughshares.ca >http://www.ploughshares.ca > >Project Ploughshares is a member of the Canadian Network to Abolish >Nuclear Weapons (http://watserv1.uwaterloo.ca/~plough/cnanw/cnanw.html) > Alice Slater Global Resource Action Center for the Environment (GRACE) 15 East 26th Street, Room 915 New York, NY 10010 tel: (212) 726-9161 fax: (212) 726-9160 email: aslater@gracelinks.org GRACE is a member of Abolition 2000, a global network working for a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons. - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: ASlater Subject: (abolition-usa) Fwd: New British website on NATO at 50 Date: 09 Feb 1999 15:06:52 -0500 >From: nbutler@gn.apc.org (nbutler@gn.apc.org) > >The British Ministry of Defence has a new website on the NATO at Fifty. >Its address is > >http://www.mod.uk/policy/nato/nato50/index.htm > >The text of two pages on nuclear policy follow: >**************************** >NATO'S NUCLEAR STRATEGY > >NATO's nuclear strategy is contained in the 1991 Strategic Concept. Its >principal elements are: > >oDeterrence: the unique and essential role played by nuclear weapons in >maintaining peace and stability and preventing war or coercion of any >kind. > >oParticipation and the trans-Atlantic link: an emphasis on the need for a >widespread sharing of the burdens and risks involved with nuclear weapons. >Furthermore, the importance of the US forward deployment in Europe as an >essential part of trans-Atlantic linkage. > >oReduced force levels: the decreased risk since the end of the Cold War of >nuclear weapons being used and the consequent reduction in NATO >sub-strategic forces. > >The United Kingdom believes that these elements still adequately describe >Alliance nuclear strategy, and we do not expect major changes to be made in >the new Concept. >***************************** >PROLIFERATION OF NUCLEAR, BIOLOGICAL & CHEMICAL WEAPONS > >The challenges faced in today's operational environment include those >arising from the proliferation of nuclear and, in particular, biological >and chemical weapons and their means of delivery. The threat is not new. In >January 1994 at the NATO Summit, the Heads of State recognised that it was >a matter of concern for NATO. > >Since then the Alliance has expanded its political and defence efforts >against NBC proliferation. It has continued to support the full >implementation and rigorous verification of international disarmament >regimes which remain essential in the prevention, and reversal of >proliferation. But it has also taken steps to ensure that NATO maintains >the range of military capabilities required to respond appropriately to the >developing threat. > >At their meeting in Brussels in December 1998, NATO Defence Ministers, >considering the issue of proliferation of NBC weapons, said in their >Communique: > >"Building on the successful work of the NATO groups on proliferation, we >are prepared to expand NATO's effort to address the evolving proliferation >threat. We join Alliance Foreign Ministers in tasking the Council in >Permanent Session to prepare for the Washington Summit proposals for an >initiative to ensure that the Alliance has the political and military >capabilities to address appropriately and effectively the challenges of the >proliferation of NBC weapons and their means of delivery." >************************* >Nicola Butler >The Acronym Institute >24, Colvestone Crescent, London E8 2LH, England. >telephone (UK +44) (0) 171 503 8857 >fax (0) 171 503 9153 >website http://www.gn.apc.org/acronym > Alice Slater Global Resource Action Center for the Environment (GRACE) 15 East 26th Street, Room 915 New York, NY 10010 tel: (212) 726-9161 fax: (212) 726-9160 email: aslater@gracelinks.org GRACE is a member of Abolition 2000, a global network working for a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons. - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "David Crockett Williams" Subject: (abolition-usa) Russia's Nuclear War Plans Date: 09 Feb 1999 12:50:15 -0800 Defector Reveals Russian War Plans Christopher Ruddy February 8, 1999 For NewsMax.com and The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review NewsMax.com has just released a new video with Colonel Lunev, and a speci= al report by Christopher Ruddy on how Y2K increases the risk of a Russian surprise attack against the United States. WASHINGTON - Russia cannot threaten the United States. She is poor. She i= s weak. She is starving. She is in chaos. Think again, says Stanislav Lunev. Col. Lunev is the highest ranking military intelligence officer ever to have defected from Russia. He did so in 1992 after the Soviet Union dissolved and Boris Yeltsin had come to power. At the time of his defection Lunev was living in Washington with his wife= , working a cover job as a journalist for TASS, the Russian news agency, while doing his real job: spying on America. As a GRU officer Lunev's spying related to military matters: gathering information on America's military plans; reporting on U.S. vulnerabilitie= s; devising special operations in the advent of war. Last year, Lunev detailed just some of his activities in a new book he co-authored with Ira Winkler, "Through the Eyes of the Enemy: Russia's Highest Ranking Military Defector Reveals Why Russia is More Dangerous th= an Ever" (Regnery, (800) 639-7629). The book is a light read with some sensational details about Russian plan= s to bring suitcase nuclear bombs into America and to use special forces to assassinate the president and congressional, military and other leaders during the initial phases of a war. Lunev claims in "Through the Eyes of the Enemy" that Russian military leaders still view a war with the United States as "inevitable" and that the Cold War never really ended. Save for some talk radio outlets and the Internet, Lunev's book got littl= e media coverage. This comes as no surprise since most Americans believe th= e United States won the Cold War. Russia is not a threat and any suggestion that it is has to be written off as just paranoid jingoism. Lunev is used to unfriendly receptions. When he did defect, higher-ups at the CIA and the Pentagon did not accept what he had to say. What he said was rather simple. Russia is continuing its old ways. The military is still preparing for war against the United States. A nuclear war. In the era of fuzzy warm feelings between the United States and Russia, American officials were not going to upset the applecart no matter how mu= ch evidence Lunev offered. In the intervening years, Russia has appeared to further disintegrate. Ca= n she really be a threat? skeptics ask. Lunev most certainly has been prove= n wrong. Lunev says think again. He retorts that Russia still retains a formidable military-industrial complex. She is one of the world's largest arms exporters. She makes quality products and delivers them on time. Russia continues to build nuclear submarines, bombers and missiles. Last year Yeltsin commissioned Peter the Great, the largest ballistic missile cruiser ever built by mankind. This past Christmas, Russia deployed a regiment of 10 Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missiles, missiles reportedly more sophisticated than anything we have. Just last month, Russia unveiled her stealth bomber. The New York Times reports Russia continues to build huge underground bunkers, some as large as cities, in case of war. She also continues to build an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. Russia's nuclear arsenal remains the world's largest. She continues testing of her nuclear weapons. Such facts demonstrate that Lunev, who refuses to be photographed for security reasons, is not to be dismissed. INTERVIEW Ruddy: Colonel Lunev, you were first and foremost a spy for Russia who posed as a journalist. In your book you discuss the help you received fro= m American journalists. How significant was the Russian penetration of the American press corps? How many American journalists were working for Russia? Lunev: In my book I talk about myself. Keep this in mind, when I worked i= n TASS' Washington bureau, I had two colleagues from the KGB also working a= s agents. So we had plenty of people undercover working as journalists. How many people they recruited? I don't know. But I can tell you that journalists, American journalists and foreign journalists in this country, were considered a major target. They were the same level of target as military= , government personnel or Capitol Hill staff. Ruddy: When you say targets, you mean? Lunev: Recruits. Ruddy: It has been acknowledged that the East German government had as ma= ny as 5,000 spies working for it in West Germany. Lunev: East German intelligence was very successful. Very successful. I don't know exactly how many people they recruited, but they were very successful. Not only in penetrations through Western Germany and the European establishment, but through American institutions located in Western Europe. Ruddy: What do you think the degree of penetration is of the U.S. government by communist or former communist countries in the CIA, the FBI= , and State Department? Lunev: It could be hundreds. But I don't know the exact number. Recently the FBI admitted there were a couple of hundred open cases of espionage they were investigating. These are the ones they know about. So you can multiply this number by many times to guess the number of people who are working as spies whom the government does not know about. Ruddy: You were not only a spy, but a military intelligence officer. Your work involved developing military plans and learning of other countries' plans. What did you study when you were in military schools in Russia? Lunev: We had a lot of special subjects we needed to learn, including military science. We learned basic ways of commanding armies and how to conduct military operations. Ruddy: How much of your training and education was geared toward fighting= a nuclear war? Lunev: All of our educational process and training was connected to the actual fulfillment of military plans in time of a nuclear war. Ruddy: Your book suggests that the whole Russian military structure, the whole society during the Soviet era was geared for a nuclear war, and tha= t has not changed under the new regime. Lunev: Yes. The Soviet plan was the use of strategic forces to destroy strategic targets in America and the West, followed by the use of nuclear and conventional forces. This was the Soviet way, and the Russian militar= y still thinks the same way today. They are much more dangerous now because the Russian military is relying more on their nuclear weapons. Ruddy: What about a first strike on the United States? The likely plan does not include use of missiles first. First the Russian= s would use their special operation forces, special troops, inside of the United States to destroy targets like communications facilities, airfield= s, command centers, and other targets that might be difficult to destroy wit= h a missile attack. Suitcase nuclear bombs at strategic locations are just one small part of their arsenal. I mentioned this in my book and I have been so surprised that the American public is so interested in this. Why? This is not something unusual for Russian military plans. Ruddy: One of your jobs here in the U.S. as a spy was to look for locatio= ns to hook up these suitcase nukes to electric power sources. It's not really necessary to have an electric power source because the devices can work on a battery. But not for very long. Ruddy: Are there such bombs in the United States already? Lunev: It's possible. Ruddy: How soon could this war come? Lunev: The Russian conventional forces are not in a state of readiness. Their rocket and nuclear forces are. This war scenario could be in place = by the request of Russian government in a short time. Russia is a country on the edge of social explosion. The total decline of living conditions: human, industrial, political, social, and now the financial crisis. This could lead to war. Ruddy: It's dangerous because the Russians may consider their only option is to use the "gun." At the same time, the United States has been destroying its nuclear forces. Lunev: Yes! I am sorry, but let me ask you, what's going on in this country? Right now the Russians are engaging in criminal extortion for money. This is the same method criminals use. Every other day, in conversations with Western leaders, the Russians are saying "show me the money or something dangerous will happen in my country with tens of thousands of nuclear warheads." It's extortion. There could be an explosion, a catastrophe. It could happen in Russia, an= d somebody like a major general or a one-star general or colonel will come = to power without any international experience. If such a person would come t= o power, pushing the nuclear button would be no problem. Ruddy: If that happened, how long would it take for a strong leader to ge= t the conventional forces ready if he wanted to start a nuclear war against the United States? Lunev: A few months. You have to remember that the Russians have the same number of submarines, nuclear missile submarines, ships, bombers, fighter= s, tanks and the like as they did at the height of Soviet military power. I know that Russian military downswing was connected with Army divisions only, and these divisions could be rebuilt in weeks or months. Ruddy: China also is moving closer to Russia. China has the largest conventional army in the world. What danger does that pose? Lunev: If China and Russia would ally in a war against the United States, with Russia providing the strategic weapons and China the troops, they could begin the war tomorrow. Ruddy: Recent press reports state that the Russians have been helping the Chinese develop ballistic missile technology. Lunev: I would say that actually the Chinese missile industry was created by the Soviet Union, by Soviet specialists, by Soviet technology and by education of Chinese engineers and scientists in Soviet institutions. So the Soviet Union, let's say, played the major role in the establishment o= f the Chinese missile industry. But this was in the '50s before the Sino-Russia split. This split was healed in the late 1980s and any ideological obstacle for helping China was removed. China, of course, pay= s big money to Russia for this technology. Ruddy: Well, it does seem that some steps the Russians are taking suggest war preparations. They are building a huge underground complex in the Ura= l Mountains. Have you heard about that? Lunev: You ask about Yamantau Mountain. Well, this is a huge underground city which could be used in time when many Russian cities are destroyed, but the military and political elite will survive and live until our plan= et will try to restore itself. Ruddy: The American military is downsizing because there is no Warsaw Pac= t. We have let down our defenses. If the Russians were to launch a first strike, a surprise attack against the United States, they could wipe us almost off the map. European countries like Britain and France have small nuclear arsenals. If the U.S. does not exist, Russia rules the world because after an attack, she will still have a huge nuclear arsenal. Lunev: Yes. Ruddy: Is it possible that the Russian Communists planned this? That the intelligence agencies and the military establishment said, "Hey, if we gi= ve up Eastern Europe, if we throw open the economy, democratize, allow the country to seem in chaos, the Americans will let down their guard. We can get them to reduce their strategic nuclear forces, and they won't think o= f us as a threat." Lunev: I believe there was a plan. I cannot prove it to you. It is my hun= ch this is what happened. This is based on my experiences, things I saw goin= g on. Because now, six years later, it looks like it was planned, but at th= at time we didn't have any idea that it was possible to plan all this activity. Ruddy: Well, it seems to me the most important information you have is th= at the Cold War isn't over: that the Russian military believes inevitably th= at there will be a war with the United States. Lunev: In April of 1998, Russia used its strategic bombers in an exercise against the United States. These exercises were organized for the future war against America. Before that there were several nuclear exercises. In the fall of 1998, President Yeltsin commissioned Peter the Great, the world's largest nuclear missile cruiser. They have been doing ground forc= es exercises. Airborne force exercises. All of these exercises are being conducted for a reason, for the future war against America. Ruddy: What do you think are the chances, I know this is highly speculative, that there will be a nuclear global war between Russia and t= he United States within the next five years? Lunev: I need to repeat myself. In a time of social explosion in Russia, nobody can exclude the possibility that it will begin. Preparations for this nuclear war are now being made in Russia. Ruddy: Would the Russian people support such a war? Lunev: In recent years and times, the feelings of the Russian people towa= rd America have begun to change. The Russian people believe the United State= s is giving money to the corrupt Russian government, which never helps the ordinary Russians. America has identified herself so strongly with Yeltsi= n, and now Yeltsin and his government are viewed as corrupt. There is a perception that America, who destroyed the old Soviet Union, i= s again trying to destroy Russia. Ruddy: A former American general, Benjamin Partin, suggested that if, aft= er the Allies had beaten Hitler in World War II, and the new German governme= nt was filled with ex-Nazis in the Cabinet, ex-Nazis in the military, ex-Naz= is in the private businesses, would we believe we won? General Partin notes that in today's Russia, ex-Communists, many high-level Soviet officials, run most of the government and private businesses. Most of the republics are run by former Communists. Lunev: Well, almost all, yes. General Partin is correct in his concerns. Ruddy: It appears that in 1917 when the Communists came to power in Russi= a, they were not much more than organized crime figures. Lunev: Yes, they are the same. They are together. There is no difference. Ruddy: It seems this permanent government will be always seeking domination, whether official or through organized crime means. Lunev: And you are right, but how will you sell this idea to America? Ruddy: You can't sell it to America, because they believe all the bad guy= s just gave up with the end of the Cold War. One day it was all over, we wo= n. End of story. Lunev: You should know this did not happen in one day, like on Christmas Day of 1991 when Gorbachev dissolved the Soviet Union. A long time before this the KGB began to transfer Communist Party money to private accounts under the names of different people in Western countries. At the same time the KGB moved some of their very experienced people, including generals, sometimes four-star generals, into the new private businesses being formed in Russia. For example, former KGB agents joined financial and industrial groups. Since they had intelligence backgrounds, they could be placed in various positions, like vice president in charge = of personnel or foreign operations. The KGB established these private accounts, controlled by their own peopl= e using money from the CCCP - the Communist Party assets - for the future, for the future restoration of communism. Ruddy: The power of organized crime in Russia developed so quickly. What role did the KGB play in its rise to power? Lunev: The KGB and the old-line Communists needed to use criminals in thi= s phase because who had experience in money laundering? Who has connections with drug cartels? With other organized crime groups in Western countries= ? The KGB worked closely with these groups and actually provided passports and permission for criminals to travel abroad. Organized crime in Russia has existed for a long time, as long as anyone can remember. Yet the criminals never played any sufficient or important role in Russian or Soviet society until the so-called reforms were begun under Gorbachev. Ruddy: You mentioned earlier that the KGB transferred funds outside of Russia for the future restoration of the Communist Party. Lunev: Yes, for the future. Ruddy: So people are thinking in terms of restoring the Communist Party there? Lunev: Yes, I think that they made plans to bring back the Communists. Th= e Politburo accomplished this at the end of the 1980s and the early '90s wh= en millions, if not billions, of dollars from Communist Party accounts were transferred by KGB officers with assistance and help from criminals. NewsMax.com has just released a new video with Colonel Lunev, and a speci= al report by Christopher Ruddy on how Y2K increases the risk of a Russian surprise attack against the United States. For More Info Click Here =A9 1998, NewsMax.com Original Site Design by David Grumm / HTML by Luke Kelly http://www.angelfire.com/on/GEAR2000 ********************************************************* Global Emergency Alert Response: GEAR2000 David Crockett Williams 805-822-3309 20411 Steeple Court, Tehachapi CA 93561 USA ********************************************************* CAMPAIGN for a BETTER AMERICA with General Agency Services ********************************************************* UNITED NATION Global Peace Walk Oakland City Hall to UC Berkeley, February 26th* Annually: 22apr Taos, NM, ---> Santa Fe 26apr 1999: 16sep New York -> Washington DC 24oct Ceremony rededicating Washington Monument as a symbol of peace, UN DAY 24OCT99 2000: 15jan San Francisco --> New York 24oct 16sep Washington, DC ONE NATION, Aware of God as Love for All ! GLOBAL PEACE NOW !! Help Now !!! ********************************************************* http://www.egroups.com/list/global-peace-walk - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Kathy Crandall Subject: Re: (abolition-usa) Fwd: BMD vs disarmament Date: 09 Feb 1999 16:39:47 -0500 You're absolutely right Alice. ASlater wrote: > Dear Friends, > We might want to consider the material below in preparing a strategy for > the US Abolition Campaign. If we can't stop Star Wars, I'm afraid there's > going to be more of an up hill battle on eliminating nukes. Regards, Alice > Slater > > >Subject: The Looming Threat to Disarmament in the U.S. Senate > > Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1999 17:03:54 -0500 > > From: "David Culp" > > > > > >[In the next few weeks, the U.S. Senate, and possibly the House of > >Representatives, is expected to vote on a bill supporting > >deployment of a national ballistic missile defense system. While > >the same legislation was defeated in the Senate last year by one vote, > >the Senate Republican leadership believes they can win this year. > >Below is a brief analysis of why this issue is critical to further nuclear > >disarmament progress. David Culp] > > > >----------------------------------------------------------------- > > > >GOING UP THE HILL AND DOWN AGAIN: > >WHY THE ADMINISTRATION'S DECISION ON MISSILE DEFENSE > >IS A GENUINE CRISIS FOR NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT > > > >By Jonathan Dean > >Union of Concerned Scientists > >Washington, D.C. > >February 4, 1999 > > > > > >Many people believe that deployment of nationwide missile defenses > >will have negative impact on prospects for nuclear disarmament. That's > >true. But there is an even more difficult problem: How do you get out > >of the mess once deployment has actually taken place? > > > >The plans of the Clinton administration announced by Secretary of > >Defense Cohen on January 20 to proceed with preparations for > >deployment of a nationwide missile defense system by 2005 mean that > >the administration may well decide by mid-2000 on the deployment of a > >"thin" defense in two sites, necessitating extensive renegotiation > >with Russia on the ABM Treaty -- or U.S. withdrawal from the treaty. > > > >The nearly certain result of missile defense deployment in the United > >States will be to freeze nuclear arsenals at their present or higher > >levels for decades to come, postponing deep cuts in nuclear weapons > >and blocking a stage where complete elimination of nuclear weapons can > >be seriously discussed. > > > >These highly probable results of deployment mean that those interested > >in nuclear disarmament should join in strong opposition to deployment > >of missile defenses. > > > > > >Background > > > >Faced by these developments in U.S. policy, in the long run, Russia > >may agree to amend the ABM Treaty to permit two U.S. sites, as was the > >case with the original version of the treaty; Russia has a continuing > >interest in limiting the scope of United States missile defenses. But > >in return, Russia will also very probably require U.S. acquiescence in > >maintaining the Russian arsenal at around the 2,000 warhead level, > >rather than going down to the 1,000 warhead level that has been urged > >by many Russians. The 2,000 warhead level will be retained to assure > >Russia that it can still overcome a "thin" nationwide defense. Russia > >will in turn argue that multiple warheads (MIRVs) be retained in order > >to enable Russia to maintain a 2,000 warhead level without having to > >spend a great deal of money in constructing new single warhead "Topol > >M" missiles. (To do this, SS-19 multiple warhead missiles or even some > >of the heavy, dreaded SS-18 multiple warhead missiles would be > >retained in service until a new generation of Topol M multiple warhead > >missiles can be constructed and deployed.) > > > >If these developments take place, the hope of reducing U.S. and > >Russian holdings of strategic-range missiles down to about 1,000 each > >in a few years through a START III Treaty and then bringing the other > >weapon states into negotiated reductions will have to be postponed > >indefinitely. China, which has repeatedly criticized the missile > >defense project, will probably decide to increase the size of its own > >nuclear arsenal in order to be able to surmount U.S. missile defenses > >and to maintain a deterrent. It may also develop MIRVs for its > >missiles if Russia retains them. > > > >Once deployed, a "thin" nationwide defense can be fairly rapidly > >converted into a heavy nationwide defense and there will be continuing > >political pressure in the U.S. to do so. Fully effective, high > >capacity nationwide missile defense against all-out missile attack is > >probably impossible to achieve. Nevertheless, it is likely that other > >nuclear weapon states will follow worst case analysis and credit the > >U.S. with high capability. As a result of developments like these, > >nuclear disarmament will remain in indefinite stasis until some way > >around this obstacle can be found. > > > > > >Can We Get Out of This Situation? > > > >This is how the U.S. will march up the hill. To evaluate the > >seriousness of the situation, we have to calculate what it may take to > >march down again on the far side of the hill toward renewed > >negotiation of deep nuclear cuts. > > > >One way, the easy way, would be for the grossly inflated threat of > >rogue missile attack on the United States to collapse before U.S. > >missile defenses are fully deployed, perhaps with the collapse of the > >North Korean regime and with peaceful Korean reunification, with > >collapse of the Iranian threat through emergence of a less theocratic > >regime and improved U.S.-Iranian relations, as well as with > >replacement of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. Then, the U.S. might > >return to leadership of incremental nuclear disarmament and regain > >Russia's interest in deep cuts through the United States' main source > >of leverage with Russia - money. > > > >A serious nuclear incident, such as an act of nuclear terrorism, might > >also restore the momentum of nuclear disarmament. > > > >Other than these fortuitous developments, the remaining possibility > >for restoring momentum to nuclear disarmament is the emergence of a > >United States or Russian leader who actively presses for disarmament. > >Prospects here are not very promising now. > > > >In the material sense, what would have to be done to march down the > >hill is either to dismantle the "thin" nationwide defenses or abandon