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Digest 85, originally sent Fri Apr 30 02:33:29 1999 :
There are 9 messages in this issue.
Topics in today's digest:
1. NucNews-0 Brief 4/29/99
2. NucNews-8 4/29/99 - Kosovo -- DOE Richardson; Appeal from Yugoslavian; Land Mines; U.S. House of Rep Voting Roll Call Air Strikes
3. NucNews-7 4/29/99 - China Spy US Labs (4+)
4. NucNews-6 4/29/99 - China/Westinghouse deal; China Spy (5)
5. NucNews-5-US 4/29/99 - Rocketdyne scientists indicted; Nuc Waste Idaho to NM (6); Hanford outraged at "Antz" by Dave Barry
6. NucNews-4-US 4/29/99 - Missing Iridium found; NRC "Y2K ok"; Judge bars CT restart; MI Waste Cost; Private Spy Satellite
7. NucNews-1-Int'l 4/29/99 - Depleted Uranium in Balkans & the World (5)
8. NucNews-2-Int'l 4/29/99 - Depleted Uranium (2); Russia (3); Yugoslavia files World Court; IIndia/China New World Order; Euro Aerospace Missiles
9. NucNews-3-Intl 4/29/99 - India New Reactor; Spain; Romania; Ukraine; Australia Jabiluka (3+); Sellafield missing plutonium/Greenpeace; Chernobyl Virus
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Message: 1 Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 13:07:37 -0400
Subject: NucNews-0 Brief 4/29/99
[Please address replies to the original publisher (with a copy to us). Your help in refuting false information appreciated!]
------------------------- NucNews-1-Int'l 4/29/99 - Depleted Uranium in Balkans & the World (5) NucNews-2-Int'l 4/29/99 - Depleted Uranium (2); Russia (3); Yugoslavia files World Court; IIndia/China New World Order; Euro Aerospace Missiles NucNews-3-Intl 4/29/99 - India New Reactor; Spain; Romania; Ukraine; Australia Jabiluka (3+); Sellafield missing plutonium/Greenpeace; Chernobyl Virus NucNews-4-US 4/29/99 - Missing Iridium found; NRC "Y2K ok"; Judge bars CT restart; MI Waste Cost; Private Spy Satellite NucNews-5-US 4/29/99 - Rocketdyne scientists indicted; Nuc Waste Idaho to NM (6); Hanford outraged at "Antz" by Dave Barry NucNews-6 4/29/99 - China/Westinghouse deal; China Spy (5) NucNews-7 4/29/99 - China Spy US Labs (4+) NucNews-8 4/29/99 - Kosovo -- DOE Richardson; Appeal from Yugoslavian; Land Mines; U.S. House of Rep Voting Roll Call Air Strikes
---(1)
[At last, more news on depleted uranium -- Los Angeles Times and Christian Science Monitor have now spoken up in the U.S. Hooray!]
1. A SPECIAL REPORT - The Trail of a Bullet Scott Peterson, APRIL 29, 1999 Christian Science Monitor http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/04/29/fp1s2-csm.shtml Photo, A-10 Warthog Ammuition http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/04/29/csmimg/0429p1a.jpeg The armor-piercing wonders of depleted uranium helped win the Gulf War. As it is loaded for use in Kosovo, questions about its long-term dangers linger. First of two parts. Clues in how DU is handled ... Risks as a breathable dust
2. A SPECIAL REPORT - THE TRAIL OF A BULLET DU's global spread spurs debate over effect on humans Scott Peterson, APRIL 29, 1999 Christian Science Monitor http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/04/29/fp12s3-csm.shtml Du's critics cite incidents to bolster their case against its use....
3. A SPECIAL REPORT - THE TRAIL OF A BULLET A rare visit to Iraq's radioactive battlefield Scott Peterson, APRIL 29, 1999 Christian Science Monitor http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/04/29/fp13s1-csm.shtml Photo Battlefield "Still Hot" http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/04/29/csmimg/0429p13.jpeg KHARANJ, SOUTHERN IRAQ - The men who guard the ruins of the remote Kharanj oil-pumping station near Iraq's border with Saudi Arabia don't wander around much. Destroyed by US air raids during the 1991 Gulf War, parts of this facility remain "hot" - radioactive. So the guards confine themselves to one small building to avoid wreckage contaminated by US bullets made with depleted uranium (DU).
4. A SPECIAL REPORT - THE TRAIL OF A BULLET Will America risk use of DU in Kosovo? Scott Peterson, APRIL 29, 1999 Christian Science Monitor http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/04/29/fp12s2-csm.shtml Photo Tank Hunters: http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/04/29/csmimg/0429p12a.jpeg If depleted uranium (DU) has not already been fired in Yugoslavia, what are the prospects that it will be?
5. WORLD - A SPECIAL REPORT - THE TRAIL OF A BULLET DU's global spread spurs debate over effect on humans Scott Peterson, APRIL 29, 1999 Christian Science Monitor http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/04/29/fp12s3-csm.shtml BAGHDAD, IRAQ - At least 17 countries already have in their arsenals bullets made from depleted uranium (DU). Many - such as Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Taiwan - get them from the United States. England and France buy DU wholesale from the US. Russia now sells DU rounds on the open market.
---(2)
6. U.S. fighters armed with uranium bullets - paper April 28 1999 (Reuters) http://www.dogpile.com/ [search "nuclear OR plutonium OR uranium OR radioactiv???"] BOSTON - U.S. Air Force A-10 fighters used in NATO's bombing campaign over Kosovo are armed with bullets that leave a radioactive trail and may be linked to Gulf War syndrome, the Christian Science Monitor will report on Thursday. Air Force officials told the daily newspaper that the bullets made with depleted uranium (DU) have not yet been used in Yugoslavia. The DU rounds were used in the 1991 Gulf War and against Bosnian Serb targets in 1995, said the report which was made available to Reuters before publication.
7. DISPATCH FROM KOSOVO Unexploded Weapons Pose Deadly Threat on Ground Arms: Cluster bombs turn parts of province into a no man's land. Number of amputations in capital skyrockets. By PAUL WATSON, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, April 28, 1999 http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/FRONT/t000038109.html
8. Russia Warns Against "Terrorist" Bombing Of Yugoslav Nuclear Plants MOSCOW, Apr. 27, 1999, Agence France Presse / Russia Today, Apr. 28, 1999 http://www.russiatoday.com/rtoday/news/1999042709.html Moscow served notice Monday it would regard as a terrorist act any NATO bombing -- even accidental -- of Yugoslav nuclear installations.
9. Russia up in arms over new NATO strategic doctrine 08:58 a.m. Apr 27, 1999 Eastern By Martin Nesirky, MOSCOW, April 27 1999 (Reuters) - Infoseek http://www.dogpile.com/ [search "nuclear OR plutonium OR uranium OR radioactiv???"] Russia's defence minister savaged NATO's new strategy and enlargement plans on Tuesday, saying Moscow would now have to reshape its own security doctrine and review its vast nuclear and conventional forces.
10. Russia Says Kosovo Peace Possible By The Associated Press, April 29, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Russia-Yugoslavia.html MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia announced today it has a new plan to solve the Yugoslav crisis and put an international peacekeeping force into Kosovo under U.N. control -- if NATO halts its airstrikes.
11. Yugoslavia Files World Court Cases April 29, 1999, Associated Press http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-World-Court-Kosovo.html THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) -- In an unprecedented legal maneuver aimed at stopping NATO airstrikes, Yugoslavia filed World Court cases against 10 alliance members today, claiming their bombing campaign breaches international law.
[Oh, dear, here are some more New World Order-ers]
12. India, China stress better ties at talks NEW DELHI, April 27 1999 (Reuters) -Infoseek http://www.dogpile.com/ [search "nuclear OR plutonium OR uranium OR radioactiv???"] India and China concluded talks on nuclear disarmament and security issues on Tuesday after stressing the need for the two neighbours to develop friendly relations, an Indian foreign ministry statement said. ``During the meeting, both sides emphasised the need for India and China to work together in developing friendly, good, neighbourly relations,'' the statement said. ``Both India and China had an important role to play in shaping the emerging new world order.''
13. British Aerospace Discusses Joint European Missile Venture By ALAN COWELL, New York Times, April 29, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/financial/euro-missiles.html LONDON -- British Aerospace PLC, the British military giant, acknowledged Wednesday that it was exploring a deal with French and Italian companies to create a European missile industry to challenge Raytheon of the United States, the global leader in missile manufacturing.
---(3)
14. New reactor being planned in Trombay Date: 28-04-1999, The Hindu http://www.webpage.com/hindu/daily/990428/02/0228000k.htm NEW DELHI, APRIL 27. Plans by the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to build one more research reactor in Trombay are expected to increase India's production capacity of unsafeguarded plutonium.
15. Acerinox Accused Of Spain Radiation Irregularities Apr 28, 1999 (Reuters) - Infoseek http://www.dogpile.com/ [search "nuclear OR plutonium OR uranium OR radioactiv???"] MADRID - A Spanish environmental group Wednesday accused steelmaker Acerinox and Spain's nuclear watchdog of irregularities after an accident last year when radioactive material was released into the atmosphere.
16. Romania nuclear company gets licence for reactor Apr 28, 1999, By Radu Marinas (Reuters) - Infoseek http://www.dogpile.com/ [search "nuclear OR plutonium OR uranium OR radioactiv???"] CERNAVODA, Romania, April 28 (Reuters) - Romania's national nuclear company Nuclearoelectrica SA received on Wednesday a licence to operate the country's sole nuclear reactor and pleaded for funds to complete a second unit.
17. Nuclear reactor restarted in Ukraine after unexpected shutdown April 28, 1999 CNN http://cnn.com/WORLD/europe/9904/28/BC-Ukraine-Nuclear.ap/index.html KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- A nuclear reactor was restarted at Ukraine's Rivne power plant after it shut down because of a malfunction, officials said Wednesday.
18. Senate to hold inquiry into Jabiluka's approval [Australia] Tuesday 27 April, 1999 Australian Broadcasting http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-27apr1999-76.htm The Senate is to hold an inquiry into the approval process that led to the Jabiluka uranium mine being allowed to go ahead. ALSO: Democrats to hold Government to task on Jabiluka mine Wednesday 28 April, 1999 Australian Broadcasting http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-28apr1999-14.htm
19. Students urged to protest against Jabiluka uranium mine 27 April, 1999 Australian Broadcasting http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-27apr1999-44.htm High school, university and TAFE students around the country are being called on to walk out out of class on Thursday.
20. Lobbyists list clients on-line By Judy Steed Toronto Star Ottawa Bureau, April 26, 1999 http://www.thestar.com/thestar/back_issues/ED19990426/news/990426NEW06_NA-SI DE26.html ...It shows that Earnscliffe's Harry Near lobbies on behalf of MDS Health Group Ltd., a Toronto-based firm. Subject matter: privatization of governmental agencies or services in the health-care field. Earnscliffe's Mike Robinson gives Ontario Hydro strategic advice related to its use of Russian plutonium. Near gives strategic advice to Uranerz Exploration & Mining Ltd., a Saskatoon firm, on policy issues that affect uranium mining.... (http://www.strategis.ic.gc.ca/lobbyist), access the registry and find out who's working for whom.
21. OUTRAGE OVER MISSING PLUTONIUM FROM SELLAFIELD'S DISCHARGES EcoNet, April 23, 1999 http://www.econet.apc.org/igc/en/hl/9904268749/hl1.html UK, April 22, 1999 - Greenpeace reacted angrily to today's news (1) that over a third of plutonium discharged into the Irish Sea from British Nuclear Fuel's (BNFL) nuclear plant at Sellafield in Cumbria has gone astray.
[Oops - yesterday's news story was that the virus failed; April 26 kept on rolling across the Pacific though....]
22. Virus Infects Computers Worldwide Damage Estimates In Hundreds of Millions of Dollars By Kevin Sullivan Washington Post Foreign Service Wednesday, April 28, 1999; Page A01 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-04/28/181l-042899-idx.html TOKYO, April 28 (Wednesday)-A computer virus named for the Chernobyl nuclear disaster erupted across the globe Tuesday, disrupting home, office and government computers from Norway to China. The virus struck more than 600,000 computers, with particularly severe impact in South Korea and Turkey, and caused damage estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars in wrecked equipment and lost business. [Postscript, on April 29, 1999 Associated Press reported that the hacker had been found, a former computer engineering student in Taiwan.]
---(4)
23. Missing shipment of iridium found USA Today April 28, 1999 http://usatoday.com/news/digest/nd1.htm BOSTON - A Federal Express package with a potentially lethal radioactive metal disappeared for 10 days before it turned up safely in England, to the relief of government inspectors.
24. NRC Says Y2K Audits At Nuclear Plants A Success Apr 29, 1999 (Reuters) - Infoseek http://www.dogpile.com/ [search "nuclear OR plutonium OR uranium OR radioactiv???"] WASHINGTON - An audit of 12 U.S. nuclear plants showed the facilities on schedule to address their potential Year 2000 computer problems and meet the industry's target date for readiness of July 1, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Wednesday.
25. Judge Bars Restarting of a Nuclear Reactor, Pleasing Environmentalists By MIKE ALLEN, New York Times, April 28, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/regional/ct-millstone.html Map: http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/regional/ct-millstone.1.GIF HARTFORD -- In a rare victory for environmentalists, a Connecticut judge issued an order Tuesday barring the restarting of the Millstone 2 nuclear reactor on Long Island Sound, just one day before the generator was to produce commercial power for the first time in three years.
26. Top Consumers Energy Executive: Federal Inaction Will Cost Utility Customers $32 Million Through 2004 Apr 28, 1999 (/PRNewswire/) - Infoseek http://www.dogpile.com/ [search "nuclear OR plutonium OR uranium OR radioactiv???"] LANSING, Mich. -- The federal government's refusal to live up to its obligation to accept spent nuclear fuel will cost Consumers Energy's electricity customers more than $32 million through 2004, a top utility executive told lawmakers today.
27. Private Spy in Space to Rival Military's By WILLIAM J. BROAD, April 27, 1999 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/042799sci-spy-satellites.html Satellite Photo Example: http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/042799sci-spy-satellite.1.jpg If all goes well Tuesday, years of planning, delay and debate will culminate in the launching of the world's most powerful civilian spacecraft for observing the Earth and its human dramas, inaugurating the first real rival to military spies in the sky.
---(5)
28. Rocketdyne employees indicted April 28, 1999 UPI http://www.webcrawler.com/news/u/990428/21/news-rocketdyne SIMI VALLEY, Calif., April 28 (UPI) A federal grand jury has returned a four-count felony indictment against three employees of a Rocketdyne laboratory in Simi Valley, Calif. ... specifically charged with violating environmental laws by illegally storing and burning explosive wastes at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory.... On July 26, 1994, two Rocketdyne employees, Otto Heiney and Larry Pugh, were killed and a third worker was seriously injured in an explosion that occurred during the burring of wastes. In April 1996, Rockwell, on behalf of its Rocketdyne Division, pleaded guilty to three felony counts of unlawfully storing and disposing of hazardous wastes and paid a criminal fine of $6.5 million. ALSO: Scientists Indicted in Deadly Blast Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, April 29, 1999 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-04/29/168l-042999-idx.html
29. Nuclear waste hits the road By Jim Hughes Denver Post Staff Writer http://www.denverpost.com/news/news0428.htm April 28 - The first interstate shipment of nuclear waste bound for a depository in New Mexico hit the road Tuesday, and it is scheduled to pass through Colorado via Interstate 25 on its way south from a national laboratory in southeastern Idaho.
30. Idaho nuclear waste heads for N.M. home Wednesday, April 28, 1999 Deseret News http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,80001339,00.html? Photo nuclear waste truck: http://deseretnews.com/photos/b28nuke.jpg The first shipment of plutonium-contaminated waste turns onto Highway 26 west of Idaho Falls Tuesday en route to the Waste Isolation Pilot plant near Carlsbad, N.M., for permanent storage. The nuclear waste is contained inside three shipping casks made of stainless steel, each holding fourteen 55-gallon drums. The shipment arrived safely at the storage site Wednesday.
31. Toxic waste takes first trip through Utah Rig headed to permanent dump site in N.M. By Lucinda Dillon, Deseret News, April 27, 1999 ttp://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,80001196,00.html? With no flashy escort vehicles, few Utahns may have noticed a semitruck carrying three cylinders resembling beehives making its way down I-15 under drippy gray skies Tuesday morning.... The truck and its cargo raised little fanfare or controversy in Utah.
32. Atlas tailings need to be moved (Editorial) Deseret News editorial, April 27, 1999 http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,80001087,00.html? Utah congressman Chris Cannon merits support in his effort to have 10.5 million tons of radioactive tailings moved away from the Colorado River near Moab. Cannon has introduced a bill to facilitate the effort.
33. Idaho Waste Leaves for NM State Cheers Removal of Waste to Dump By Mark Warbis The Associated Press April 27, 1999 http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/nuclearwaste990427.html I D A H OF A L L S,Idaho,April 27 - A truckload of nuclear waste left at dawn today for the nation's first permanent dump, 11 years after Idaho stared down the Energy Department and closed its borders to radioactive waste. Cheers from about 100 elected officials went up in the semidarkness as the truck's horn sounded and began its 32-hour trip to the $2 billion Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southeastern New Mexico. ALSO Truck loaded with waste expected to depart Decades of waiting for action appears over in eastern Idaho Mark Warbis - Associated Press, April 27, 1999 Spokane News (What are your thoughts on Truck loaded with waste expected to depart) http://www.spokane.net/news-story-body.asp?Date=042799&ID=s567266&cat=
34. Idaho Has WIPP Shipment Ready Weather, Court Could Stop Truck April 27, 1999 Albuquerque Journal http://www.abqjournal.com/news/3news04-27.htm IDAHO FALLS, Idaho _ Barring severe weather, an end is at hand to decades of waiting for the federal government to begin removing plutonium-contaminated waste stored in eastern Idaho.
35. Dave Barry's mutant ants really bug folks near Hanford Nuclear Reservation BY FLORANGELA DAVILA, Knight Ridder Newspapers, Lincoln Journal-Star http://www.journalstar.com/archives/042699/lif/sto3 On its way to Dave Barry, arguably the nation's best-known humor columnist, is an invitation from mayors living in the shadow of the Hanford nuclear reservation, irrefutably the nation's most contaminated nuclear site.
---(6)
36. Westinghouse Swaps Nuclear Technology With China Reuters, April 28, 1999 http://www.webcrawler.com/news/r/990428/01/news-nuclear-china BEIJING (Reuters) - Westinghouse Electric Corp of the United States has signed an agreement with a Chinese institute to exchange nuclear technology, the official China Daily newspaper reported Wednesday. It said Westinghouse was working with engineers and technicians from the Shanghai Nuclear Engineering Research and Design Institute to develop a nuclear reactor.
[Has anyone written letters or editorials about the spy flap? Since China knows all our nuclear secrets, there ARE no nuclear secrets any more, so the next logical step is to come to a global agreement on abolition of nuclear weapons.]
37. The Deadliest Download April 29, 1999 New York Times ESSAY / By WILLIAM SAFIRE http://www.nytimes.com/library/opinion/safire/042999safi.html WASHINGTON -- During President Clinton's watch, America's most vital nuclear secrets -- guarded intensely for five decades -- have been allowed to spill out all over the world. Five weeks ago I surmised that what now worried our scientists most was the possible theft of the "Lagrangian codes" from our national laboratories. These are the supercomputer programs that -- when fed secret data "benchmarks" from all our nuclear tests -- enable foreign scientists to simulate our explosions and erase our lead. We are now informed by The New York Times's Pulitzer-Prize-winning investigative team that the codes -- "legacy codes," as they are known at Los Alamos -- were allegedly downloaded by Wen Ho Lee in 1994. Our nuclear genie is out of the bottle....
38. Lab's Laxity in Spy Case Outrages Lawmakers By ERIC SCHMITT, New York Times, April 29, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/042999china-nuke.html WASHINGTON -- Senior lawmakers expressed outrage and frustration on Wednesday over the government's failure to monitor a scientist suspected of spying for China, who officials now say may have given away secrets to virtually every nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal.
39. Unsecure Codes Are Recipes for A-Bombs, Experts Say April 29, 1999 New York Times, By WILLIAM J. BROAD http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/042999china-nuke-code.html he secret computer codes that were downloaded into a nonsecure computer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and that federal experts fear were given to China are the distillation of more than a half-century of research on how to perfect nuclear weapons, experts in and out of government said Wednesday....
40. Richardson: Classified U.S. Lab Codes Transferred Apr 28, 1999 (Reuters) - Infoseek http://www.dogpile.com/ [search "nuclear OR plutonium OR uranium OR radioactiv???"] WASHINGTON - U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said Wednesday classified nuclear weapons computer codes at a U.S. government laboratory were transferred to an unclassified computer system.
41. U.S. Discloses 'Egregious' Nuclear Security Breach By Tabassum Zakaria, April 29, 1999 (Reuters) http://www.webcrawler.com/news/r/990429/00/news-china-usa-spying WASHINGTON - U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said Wednesday an "egregious" security breach had occurred at a U.S. government laboratory in which someone transferred classified nuclear weapons computer codes to an unclassified computer system.
---(7)
42. Spy suspect downloaded secret data USA Today, April 28, 1999 http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/ncswed02.htm WASHINGTON (AP) - For more than a decade, a scientist suspected of spying for China transferred top-secret nuclear weapons data from a highly restricted computer system to his own where the material could be widely accessible, government officials said Wednesday.
43. Official Confirms Security Breach Nuclear Secrets Shifted Out of Computer Net By Vernon Loeb and Walter Pincus, Washington Post, April 29, 1999; Page A01 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-04/29/051l-042999-idx.html The Clinton administration acknowledged yesterday that an espionage suspect at Los Alamos National Laboratory transferred secret nuclear weapons data from a classified computer network to an unclassified system vulnerable to outsiders.
44. Shelby Would Restrict Nuclear Lab Visits by Foreigners By Vernon Loeb and Walter Pincus, Washington Post, April 28, 1999 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-04/28/211l-042899-idx.html Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, introduced legislation yesterday that would restrict visits by scientists from China, Russia and other sensitive countries to the Department of Energy's nuclear weapons laboratories. ALSO: U.S. Bill Would Bar Lab Visits By Some Foreigners April 28, 1999, By Tabassum Zakaria (Reuters) http://www.webcrawler.com/news/r/990428/01/news-china-usa-spying
45. U.S. Says Suspect Put Data on Bombs in Unsecure Files By JAMES RISEN and JEFF GERTH, New York Times, April 28, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/042899china-nuke.html WASHINGTON -- A scientist suspected of spying for China improperly transferred huge amounts of secret data from a computer system at a government laboratory, compromising virtually every nuclear weapon in the United States arsenal, government and lab officials say. ALSO: U.S. Arsenal Compromised By China Spy Suspect-NYT Reuters, April 28, 1999 http://www.webcrawler.com/news/r/990428/03/news-nuclear-china-usa
---(8) Kosovo (non-nuclear)
46. Richardson Speaks At NAA Meeting by David Noack, Gannett E&P Interactive, April 27, 1999 http://www.mediainfo.com/ephome/news/newshtm/stories/042799c3.htm The nation's energy czar says the public and Congress need to be patient as the air war intensifies against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
47. Forwarded message Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 23:07:36 -0400 DU IN YUGOSLAVIA!!! Nikola Bozinovic (24) - Patrisa Lumumbe 4/5 18000 Nis, Yugoslavia <nikolab@kalca.junis.ni.ac.yu> Hi. I dont know you, but we are quite desperate over here in Yugoslavia. Please indicate your support and suggestions to Nikola: I read a lot about DU, and my best friend mother is working in Istitute for Radiology in Nis. It's 200 km souther from Belgrade and only 100 km from Kosovo capital, Pristina. During last 35 days, since NATO strikes begin, I was in contact with her, and provide her some more information about DU, that I found on Internet. They were searching for evidents of using of DU, and, although it wasn't used in first 25 days, two day ago they find DU in one nonexploded missile in Vranje, 80km southern from Nis. This findings are 100% reliable....
48. Land Mines Worry Relief Officials By The Associated Press, April 29, 1999 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Macedonia-Refugees.html BLACE, Macedonia (AP) -- As relief officials struggled today to find room for a relentless refugee exodus, another serious worry loomed: ethnic Albanians crossing remote mountain ranges dotted with minefields.
49. House Roll Call on NATO Airstrikes By The Associated Press, April 28, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-House-Air-Campaign-Roll-Call.html The 213-213 roll call Wednesday by which the House failed to approve a resolution supporting NATO airstrikes on Yugoslavia.
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Message: 2 Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 13:09:08 -0400
Subject: NucNews-8 4/29/99 - Kosovo -- DOE Richardson; Appeal from Yugoslavian; Land Mines; U.S. House of Rep Voting Roll Call Air Strikes
46. Richardson Speaks At NAA Meeting
by David Noack, Gannett E&P Interactive, April 27, 1999 http://www.mediainfo.com/ephome/news/newshtm/stories/042799c3.htm
The nation's energy czar says the public and Congress need to be patient as the air war intensifies against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
Bill Richardson, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, says the increased bombing by NATO is taking its toll on the economic, military, and political infrastructure of Yugoslavia. Speaking to newspaper publishers during an Associated Press luncheon yesterday in San Diego, Richardson said NATO's military strategy of degrading Serbian forces is beginning to pay off.
"We are starting to prevail," he told attendees of the Newspaper Association of America Publishers Convention. "My point is that the American people and Congress need to be patient with our efforts that are succeeding."
Richardson said the recent NATO summit meeting in Washington was a success because it showed the alliance is unified in continuing to apply pressure against Serb forces. He also called for the United States to remain "engaged" in world affairs and not to turn inward during times of crisis overseas.
He says if the Kosovo problem is going to be solved, Russia has to be involved. Recently, Russia has been trying to broker a peace accord with Yugoslav leaders.
"The message I want to give is at a time when we've had difficulties in Iraq and Kosovo, the relationship is nonetheless strong and very important to us," he said.
Richardson indicated Russia is in bad financial shape, with inflation expected to reach 60% this year, and an 8% decline in the size of the Russian economy. He explained that what happens in Russia affects the U.S. because it still has the world's second largest nuclear arsenal.
"The Russian financial crisis means the Russian nuclear infrastructure is crumbling and the last thing we want is a terrorist or some kind of degrading of a Russian nuclear city to happen, because all it takes is a softball of plutonium," he said. Richardson said the Energy Department is pursuing a number of cooperative agreements with Russia, where it is working to safeguard nuclear facilities.
On the controversy surrounding espionage at U.S. nuclear facilities, Richardson admitted security had been lax in the past and a presidential directive on tighter security was not followed. "There is no question that security secrets were compromised. They were compromised and accelerated China's nuclear development." He said that two weeks ago he ordered the shutdown of a computer linked to nuclear weapons information in an effort to test cybersecurity.
"Why do I mention China and Russia?" Richardson asked. "My message is that America has to stay engaged." He said punishing China through isolation is not the answer.
"The way to deal with China is not to isolate," he said. "The way to deal with China is to debate with them, debate our differences, to include them in the international community."
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47. Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 23:07:36 -0400 Subject: "Nikola Bozinovic" <nikolab@kalca.junis.ni.ac.yu>: DU IN YUGOSLAVIA!!! From: Sylvia Zisman <earthgoddess@juno.com>
Please indicate your support and suggestions to Nikola. I've told her of having written Of Cong Jim Saxton's ( R.N.J.) opposition to the war and his peace effort (NYT 4/23/99) He should be encouraged in his effort and sent copies of this letter I've also appealed to former Gov. Kean,now President of Drew and Cong Bob Franks S.Zisman.
From: "Nikola Bozinovic" <nikolab@kalca.junis.ni.ac.yu> Subject: DU IN YUGOSLAVIA!!! Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 18:25:33 +0200
Hi.
I dont know you, but we are quite desperate over here in Yugoslavia.
I read a lot about DU, and my best friend mother is working in Istitute for Radiology in Nis. It's 200 km souther from Belgrade and only 100 km from Kosovo capital, Pristina. During last 35 days, since NATO strikes begin, I was in contact with her, and provide her some more information about DU, that I found on Internet. They were searching for evidents of using of DU, and, although it wasn't used in first 25 days, two day ago they find DU in one nonexploded missile in Vranje, 80km southern from Nis. This findings are 100% reliable. I will talk to her tomorrow about some new evidences of DU using, and I would like you to inform your friends and public about it. Please, answer me if you recieved this letter. We are scared to death, not only because of bombs, but also because of DU. I dont know if this will have some effects, but I have to try something. For any further information, contact me on nikolab@kalca.junis.ni.ac.yu
Sincerely, Nikola Bozinovic (24) Patrisa Lumumbe 4/5 18000 Nis, Yugoslavia <nikolab@kalca.junis.ni.ac.yu>
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48. Land Mines Worry Relief Officials
By The Associated Press, April 29, 1999 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Macedonia-Refugees.html
BLACE, Macedonia (AP) -- As relief officials struggled today to find room for a relentless refugee exodus, another serious worry loomed: ethnic Albanians crossing remote mountain ranges dotted with minefields.
The refugee trek into the hinterlands is apparently the result of the expanding Yugoslav campaign to drive out ethnic Albanians. The frontier is laced with shepherd paths and trails, but straying from the routes can lead into Yugoslavian minefields.
Doctors in the Macedonian capital of Skopje treated at least six land mine victims, including a 2-year-old boy, hospital officials said today. The Macedonian Defense Ministry said five refugees were killed by land mines Wednesday on the Yugoslav side of the border 42 miles northeast of Skopje. The report could not be immediately confirmed.
More than 600,000 ethnic Albanians have flooded out of Kosovo since NATO airstrikes began March 24, including 371,000 to Albania and over 154,000 to Macedonia -- a figure Macedonian authorities say is low.
The refugee flow showed no signs of easing at the main Blace border post, where more than 4,000 people arrived Wednesday. Refugees were forced to sleep outside on plastic sheeting because there was no more room for tents -- and they reported that thousands of other people were seeking to board trains to the border.
Adding to the mounting humanitarian tragedy was a new worry: alleged ethnic cleansing moving into Serbia proper. Refugees in border villages said police and army units have begun sweeps of villages around Presevo, a main town near the Macedonian border.
``We may be seeing some sort of final push here,'' said Ron Redmond, a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. ``The consequences are scary.''
More than 62,000 refugees are packed into six camps in Macedonia, raising concern of possible epidemics from overcrowding and inadequate sanitation. Macedonian officials have been slow to authorize new refugee areas, saying the resources of their nation are being stretched to the limit.
Shifting aid to the mountain frontier with Serbia would further strain Macedonia's ability to handle the exodus.
In mountain villages north of Kumanovo, 30 miles northwest of Skopje, ethnic Albanian refugees from Serbia told similar stories: women and children rounded up and men told they had to report for duty with the Yugoslavian army.
``I think they just wanted to use us as human shields,'' said Murat Gashi, who said he fled the town of Ternovac last week after being ordered to report for military service.
Other refugees accused Serb forces of emptying most ethnic Albanians from the Serbian town of Bujanovac and other areas near Presevo.
Besides guns and threats, some refugees claimed Serb authorities were using another type of weapon: food.
Access to food for ethnic Albanians have been virtually cut off in many parts of Kosovo, refugees claimed. The few stores open sell only to Serbs or charge hugely inflated prices to the few ethnic Albanians remaining.
``We had to live off whatever we had saved. After that, we cleaned out the food from the homes of people who already left. It's horrible,'' said Muhament Bajrami from the Kosovo village of Urosevac.
Lindsey Davies, a spokeswoman for the World Food Program, said it appears ``people are being literally starved out.''
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49. House Roll Call on NATO Airstrikes
By The Associated Press, April 28, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-House-Air-Campaign-Roll-Call.html
The 213-213 roll call Wednesday by which the House failed to approve a resolution supporting NATO airstrikes on Yugoslavia.
A ``yes'' vote is a vote to approve the air campaign. Voting yes were 181 Democrats, 31 Republicans and one independent. Voting no were 26 Democrats and 187 Republicans. X denotes those not voting. Present denotes those who voted they were ``present'' at the time of the vote but did not vote ``yes'' or ``no'' on the issue.
There is one vacancy in the 435-member House.
The Roll Call:
ALABAMA Republicans -- Aderholt, X; Bachus, N; Callahan, Y; Everett, N; Riley, Y. Democrats -- Cramer, Y; Hilliard, Y.
ALASKA
Republicans -- Young, N.
ARIZONA Republicans -- Hayworth, N; Kolbe, Y; Salmon, N; Shadegg, N; Stump, N. Democrats -- Pastor, Y.
ARKANSAS
Republicans -- Dickey, N; Hutchinson, N. Democrats -- Berry, Y; Snyder, Y.
CALIFORNIA
Republicans -- Bilbray, N; Bono, N; Calvert, N; Campbell, N; Cox, N; Cunningham, N; Doolittle, N; Dreier, N; Gallegly, N; Herger, N; Horn, N; Hunter, Y; Kuykendall, N; Lewis, N; McKeon, N; Miller, Gary, N; Ose, N; Packard, N; Pombo, N; Radanovich, N; Rogan, N; Rohrabacher, N; Royce, N; Thomas, N.
Democrats -- Becerra, Y; Berman, Y; Brown, Y; Capps, Y; Condit, N; Dixon, Y; Dooley, Y; Eshoo, Y; Farr, Y; Filner, Y; Lantos, Y; Lee, N; Lofgren, N; Martinez, Y; Matsui, Y; Millender-McDonald, Y; Miller, George, Y; Napolitano, Y; Pelosi, Y; Roybal-Allard, Y; Sanchez, Y; Sherman, Y; Stark, N; Tauscher, Y; Thompson, Y; Waters, Y; Waxman, Y; Woolsey, N.
COLORADO
Republicans -- Hefley, N; McInnis, N; Schaffer, N; Tancredo, N. Democrats -- DeGette, N; Udall, Y.
CONNECTICUT
Republicans -- Johnson, N; Shays, N. Democrats -- DeLauro, Y; Gejdenson, Y; Larson, Y; Maloney, Y.
DELAWARE
Republicans -- Castle, Y.
FLORIDA
Republicans -- Bilirakis, N; Canady, N; Diaz-Balart, Y; Foley, N; Fowler, N; Goss, N; McCollum, N; Mica, N; Miller, N; Ros-Lehtinen, N; Scarborough, N; Shaw, N; Stearns, N; Weldon, N; Young, N.
Democrats -- Boyd, Y; Brown, Y; Davis, Y; Deutsch, Y; Hastings, Y; Meek, Y; Thurman, Y; Wexler, Y.
GEORGIA
Republicans -- Barr, N; Chambliss, N; Collins, N; Deal, N; Isakson, N; Kingston, N; Linder, N; Norwood, N. Democrats -- Bishop, Y; Lewis, Y; McKinney, N.
HAWAII
Democrats -- Abercrombie, N; Mink, N.
IDAHO
Republicans -- Chenoweth, N; Simpson, N.
ILLINOIS
Republicans -- Biggert, N; Crane, N; Ewing, N; Hastert, Y; Hyde, Y; LaHood, N; Manzullo, N; Porter, Y; Shimkus, N; Weller, N. Democrats -- Blagojevich, X; Costello, Y; Davis, Y; Evans, Y; Gutierrez, Y; Jackson, N; Lipinski, N; Phelps, Y; Rush, Y; Schakowsky, Y.
INDIANA
Republicans -- Burton, N; Buyer, N; Hostettler, N; McIntosh, N; Pease, N; Souder, N. Democrats -- Carson, Y; Hill, Y; Roemer, Y; Visclosky, N.
IOWA
Republicans -- Ganske, N; Latham, N; Leach, N; Nussle, N. Democrats -- Boswell, Y.
KANSAS
Republicans -- Moran, N; Ryun, N; Tiahrt, N. Democrats -- Moore, Y.
KENTUCKY
Republicans -- Fletcher, N; Lewis, N; Northup, N; Rogers, N; Whitfield, N. Democrats -- Lucas, Y.
LOUISIANA
Republicans -- Baker, N; Cooksey, N; McCrery, N; Tauzin, X. Democrats -- Jefferson, Y; John, Y.
MAINE
Democrats -- Allen, Y; Baldacci, Y.
MARYLAND
Republicans -- Bartlett, N; Ehrlich, Y; Gilchrest, Y; Morella, Y. Democrats -- Cardin, Y; Cummings, Y; Hoyer, Y; Wynn, X.
MASSACHUSETTS
Democrats -- Capuano, Y; Delahunt, Y; Frank, Y; Markey, Y; McGovern, Y; Meehan, Y; Moakley, Y; Neal, Y; Olver, Y; Tierney, Y.
MICHIGAN
Republicans -- Camp, N; Ehlers, N; Hoekstra, N; Knollenberg, Y; Smith, N; Upton, N. Democrats -- Barcia, Y; Bonior, Y; Conyers, Y; Dingell, Y; Kildee, Y; Kilpatrick, Y; Levin, Y; Rivers, N; Stabenow, Y; Stupak, Y.
MINNESOTA
Republicans -- Gutknecht, N; Ramstad, N. Democrats -- Luther, Y; Minge, Y; Oberstar, Y; Peterson, N; Sabo, Y; Vento, Y.
MISSISSIPPI
Republicans -- Pickering, N; Wicker, N. Democrats -- Shows, Y; Taylor, N; Thompson, Y.
MISSOURI
Republicans -- Blunt, N; Emerson, N; Hulshof, N; Talent, N. Democrats -- Clay, Y; Danner, N; Gephardt, Y; McCarthy, Y; Skelton, Y.
MONTANA
Republicans -- Hill, N.
NEBRASKA
Republicans -- Barrett, N; Bereuter, N; Terry, N.
NEVADA
Republicans -- Gibbons, N. Democrats -- Berkley, Y.
NEW HAMPSHIRE
Republicans -- Bass, N; Sununu, N.
NEW JERSEY
Republicans -- Franks, Y; Frelinghuysen, Y; LoBiondo, N; Roukema, N; Saxton, N; Smith, N. Democrats -- Andrews, Y; Holt, Y; Menendez, Y; Pallone, Y; Pascrell, Y; Payne, Y; Rothman, Y.
NEW MEXICO
Republicans -- Skeen, N; Wilson, N. Democrats -- Udall, Y.
NEW YORK
Republicans -- Boehlert, Y; Forbes, Y; Fossella, N; Gilman, Y; Houghton, Y; Kelly, Y; King, Y; Lazio, Y; McHugh, Y; Quinn, Y; Reynolds, N; Sweeney, N; Walsh, Y.
Democrats -- Ackerman, Y; Crowley, Y; Engel, Y; Hinchey, Y; LaFalce, Y; Lowey, Y; Maloney, Y; McCarthy, Y; McNulty, Y; Meeks, Y; Nadler, Y; Owens, Y; Rangel, Y; Serrano, N; Slaughter, X; Towns, N; Velazquez, Y; Weiner, Y.
NORTH CAROLINA
Republicans -- Ballenger, N; Burr, N; Coble, N; Hayes, Y; Jones, N; Myrick, N; Taylor, N. Democrats -- Clayton, Y; Etheridge, Y; McIntyre, Y; Price, Y; Watt, Y.
NORTH DAKOTA
Democrats -- Pomeroy, Y.
OHIO
Republicans -- Boehner, N; Chabot, N; Gillmor, N; Hobson, N; Kasich, N; LaTourette, N; Ney, N; Oxley, Y; Portman, N; Pryce, N; Regula, N. Democrats -- Brown, Y; Hall, Y; Jones, Y; Kaptur, Y; Kucinich, N; Sawyer, Y; Strickland, Y; Traficant, Y.
OKLAHOMA
Republicans -- Coburn, N; Istook, N; Largent, N; Lucas, N; Watkins, N; Watts, N.
OREGON
Republicans -- Walden, N. Democrats -- Blumenauer, Y; DeFazio, N; Hooley, Y; Wu, Y.
PENNSYLVANIA
Republicans -- English, N; Gekas, N; Goodling, N; Greenwood, Y; Peterson, N; Pitts, N; Sherwood, N; Shuster, X; Toomey, N; Weldon, N.
Democrats -- Borski, Y; Brady, Y; Coyne, Y; Doyle, Y; Fattah, Y; Hoeffel, Y; Holden, Y; Kanjorski, Y; Klink, Y; Mascara, Y; Murtha, Y.
RHODE ISLAND
Democrats -- Kennedy, Y; Weygand, Y.
SOUTH CAROLINA
Republicans -- DeMint, N; Graham, N; Sanford, N; Spence, N. Democrats -- Clyburn, Y; Spratt, Y.
SOUTH DAKOTA
Republicans -- Thune, N.
TENNESSEE
Republicans -- Bryant, N; Duncan, N; Hilleary, N; Jenkins, N; Wamp, N. Democrats -- Clement, Y; Ford, Y; Gordon, Y; Tanner, Y.
TEXAS
Republicans -- Archer, N; Armey, N; Barton, N; Bonilla, N; Brady, N; Combest, N; DeLay, N; Granger, N; Johnson, Sam, N; Paul, N; Sessions, N; Smith, N; Thornberry, N.
Democrats -- Bentsen, Y; Doggett, N; Edwards, Y; Frost, Y; Gonzalez, Y; Green, Y; Hall, N; Hinojosa, Y; Jackson-Lee, Y; Johnson, E. B., Y; Lampson, Y; Ortiz, Y; Reyes, Y; Rodriguez, Y; Sandlin, Y; Stenholm, Y; Turner, Y.
UTAH
Republicans -- Cannon, N; Cook, N; Hansen, X.
VERMONT
Others -- Sanders, Y.
VIRGINIA
Republicans -- Bateman, N; Bliley, Y; Davis, Y; Goodlatte, N; Wolf, Y. Democrats -- Boucher, Y; Goode, N; Moran, Y; Pickett, Y; Scott, Y; Sisisky, Y.
WASHINGTON
Republicans -- Dunn, N; Hastings, N; Metcalf, N; Nethercutt, N. Democrats -- Baird, Y; Dicks, Y; Inslee, N; McDermott, Y; Smith, Y.
WEST VIRGINIA
Democrats -- Mollohan, X; Rahall, Y; Wise, Y.
WISCONSIN
Republicans -- Green, N; Petri, N; Ryan, N; Sensenbrenner, N. Democrats -- Baldwin, N; Barrett, Y; Kind, Y; Kleczka, N; Obey, Y.
WYOMING
Republicans -- Cubin, N.
______________________
- Eighth of eight messages - ______________________
_______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________
Message: 3 Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 13:08:59 -0400
Subject: NucNews-7 4/29/99 - China Spy US Labs (4+)
42. Spy suspect downloaded secret data
USA Today, April 28, 1999 http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/ncswed02.htm
WASHINGTON (AP) - For more than a decade, a scientist suspected of spying for China transferred top-secret nuclear weapons data from a highly restricted computer system to his own where the material could be widely accessible, government officials said Wednesday.
While most of the transfers - including millions of lines of computer codes used to design and evaluate weapons - took place in 1994-95, some have been traced back to as early as 1983, the officials said.
The manipulation of computer data was uncovered only last month after Wen Ho Lee, a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, had been fired, the officials said.
Lee has been the target of an FBI investigation at Los Alamos since 1996 after authorities became concerned that critical information about one of the country's most modern warheads, the W-88, might have been obtained by the Chinese in the 1980s.
One government official, who spoke on condition of not being further identified, said there was no evidence that the data found in Lee's unclassified computer had been seen by anyone from outside the laboratory but that such access also could not be ruled out.
Investigators in early March, after Lee had been dismissed, found that over the years the scientist had downloaded massive amounts of top-secret data into his less secure computer, officials said.
The data included computer codes used in weapons design and analysis of nuclear tests. The codes are especially important in the government's assessment of weapons performance without actual nuclear testing, but could also be helpful to someone trying to copy U.S. warhead design, nuclear weapons experts said.
Lee's job at Los Alamos for some time involved work on the Energy Department's program of simulating nuclear tests, according to government sources.
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, who informed President Clinton of the discovery of the extensive file transfers in a briefing on March 31, said Wednesday he could not comment on specifics of the Lee case so as not to jeopardize an ongoing FBI investigation.
But he said computer security at the weapons labs have been dramatically increased.
''We believe we have now made it impossible to transfer information from a classified to an unclassified computer system'' through both a physical firewall and other restrictions, said Richardson. ''I believe we are cyber security safe.''
After evidence of improper transfers of weapons data was found last month, Richardson ordered all computer work at three government weapons labs, including Los Alamos, halted for two weeks until new security procedures could be put in place.
The file transfers were first reported Wednesday in The New York Times.
The discovery of top-secret data in Lee's less secure computer is expected to raise new questions about why the Taiwan-born scientist was allowed to keep his security clearance and allowed continued access to some of the lab's most sensitive weapons data long after he became a suspect in a major espionage investigation.
An internal Energy Department investigation has indicated both communications and judgment failures, one official said Wednesday. He said some officials in both the department and Los Alamos lab may face disciplinary action.
Although Lee had been the prime target of an FBI espionage investigation since early 1996, Los Alamos officials did not closely monitor his use of computers, including the lab's top-secret system, and he kept his security clearance until late last year.
One official said that the FBI could not even get access to Lee's computer until after he had been fired on March 8 because the Justice Department would not give approval for such a search.
But a Justice Department source, also speaking on condition of not being further identified, said he was not aware of any such prohibition, and that the department had only rejected an FBI request for a broad wiretap on Lee. Los Alamos officials have broad authority to gain access to computers on laboratory property, this official suggested.
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43. Official Confirms Security Breach Nuclear Secrets Shifted Out of Computer Net
By Vernon Loeb and Walter Pincus, Washington Post, April 29, 1999; Page A01 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-04/29/051l-042999-idx.html
The Clinton administration acknowledged yesterday that an espionage suspect at Los Alamos National Laboratory transferred secret nuclear weapons data from a classified computer network to an unclassified system vulnerable to outsiders.
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson called the data transfer, between 1983 and 1995, "a serious security breach that is unconscionable." But he stressed that FBI agents have yet to determine whether the highly sensitive data, covering years of nuclear weapons research and testing, have been pilfered from the unclassified computers by foreign countries.
"We need to make a thorough assessment and not compromise the law enforcement investigation," Richardson said in an interview. "We don't know the extent of the damage, but I hardly believe that it's on a massive scale, from our preliminary findings."
But Richardson's statement, confirming a report in yesterday's New York Times, raised the possibility that Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwan-born physicist at Los Alamos fired last month after reports he was a suspect, may have made available to China far more sensitive information than previously imagined. The acknowledgment also makes clear for the first time that serious security breaches and evidence of possible espionage, first uncovered at Los Alamos during the Reagan and Bush administrations, continued into President Clinton's first term.
This seemed likely to add fuel to a highly charged debate over the administration's handling of the espionage case centering mainly on Lee. For instance, Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said the new information about Lee's massive data transfer "confirms my worst fears" about lax security and counterintelligence at the weapons laboratories.
"I've known that this is an ongoing investigation and they were just at the tip of the iceberg -- and that's obvious now," said Shelby. "We've got to get to the bottom of this whole thing."
His concern was shared by leading nuclear weapons experts, who described the computer programs and data inputs transferred by Lee as a body of historic knowledge developed through 50 years of research and more than 1,000 nuclear tests.
"It's staggering -- I'm still in shock here," said Robert S. Norris, a senior analyst and nuclear weapons expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "If someone had access to [Lee's] unclassified computer, this could be all over the world."
Norris's colleague, physicist Matthew G. McKinzie, said that unauthorized access to those programs -- so-called legacy codes used to simulate warhead detonations -- would represent "an unprecedented act of espionage, in its scope. The espionage in the Manhattan Project [would] pale in comparison."
David Leavy, a National Security Council spokesman, said Clinton has been briefed on the case by Richardson and is "confident that he is doing everything that should be done."
Asked whether Clinton stands by a statement he made last month that there was no evidence indicating Chinese espionage on his watch, Leavy said administration officials are "investigating a number of recent allegations and are under no illusion that China and other nations continue to try to acquire our secrets."
"This does not come as news to this administration," he added.
One senior administration official, sounding far less optimistic than Richardson, said that "a massive amount of very, very sensitive information was transferred from classified to nonclassified computers, and we may never know if it went anywhere else."
The transfers took place from 1983 to 1995, when Los Alamos began installing a new mechanism that would have made such transfers more difficult. "It looks like he was moving quickly [in the last months] to get it transferred before the new system came in," the official said.
When the FBI finally searched Lee's computer last month, following his dismissal March 8, the official said, they found he had made an effort to erase some of the classified material.
The official said that a password was needed to access the information even after Lee transferred it from the classified computer system. The unclassified system allows investigators to determine when and whether the data was accessed, the official said, and initial indications are that the material was accessed "at least a little bit." Who was looking at it remains unclear, the official said, since Lee could have given his password to someone else.
Another high-ranking official reported no indication that the information was compromised. He denied a published report of evidence showing a password had been misused to gain access. He also denied that the FBI had been derelict in not searching Lee's computer at the beginning of the espionage investigation in 1996.
At the time, FBI agents from the bureau's Albuquerque field office wanted to search the computer but were told they needed a search warrant from a secret federal court under the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act. The warrant was denied, the official said, because of a lack of evidence showing that Lee was engaged in acts of espionage.
Lee became a suspect in 1996 after the Energy Department and intelligence agencies determined that a Chinese military document the CIA had obtained a year earlier contained classified data about the size and shape of the newest miniaturized nuclear weapon. The FBI was unable to gather hard evidence against him and he has not been charged with a crime. But Lee was fired in March for security violations after the investigation was disclosed. Officials said transferring data to an unclassified computer system could be a crime, depending on the intent of the person who did it.
As soon as FBI agents discovered Lee had transferred massive amounts of secret data to his unclassified computer, Richardson ordered a shutdown of the classified computer networks at Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories on April 2 for an extensive security overhaul. The FBI is still reviewing material taken from the search of Lee's home, some of it in Chinese.
"You couple these measures with polygraphs, a doubling of the counterintelligence budget and extensive background investigation of all scientists visiting from foreign countries and I believe we're on the road to a very strong security and cybersecurity program," Richardson said.
But those measures will do little to stop nine separate congressional investigations into the Los Alamos case. Indeed, one high-ranking administration official said disciplinary action will soon be taken against managers at Los Alamos and at Department of Energy headquarters for failing to move Lee out of his sensitive position years earlier.
"Obviously, there was a breakdown there," the official said.
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44. Shelby Would Restrict Nuclear Lab Visits by Foreigners
By Vernon Loeb and Walter Pincus, Washington Post, April 28, 1999 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-04/28/211l-042899-idx.html
Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, introduced legislation yesterday that would restrict visits by scientists from China, Russia and other sensitive countries to the Department of Energy's nuclear weapons laboratories.
Shelby acted following reports that Chinese spies have obtained highly classified warhead design information developed at the laboratories. He called his bill "a prudent step to safeguard this nation's most sensitive secrets."
Shelby credited the administration with implementing comprehensive counterintelligence reforms at the labs, but said those measures will take years to put fully into place. According to his legislation, he said, secretary of energy would have to personally request a waiver and give Congress 10 days' notice before a scientist from any one of seven sensitive countries could visit Los Alamos, Sandia or Lawrence Livermore national laboratories.
"For the last decade, the Senate intelligence committee has been concerned with the need to strengthen the Department of Energy's counterintelligence capabilities," Shelby said. "We have urged the department to devote more attention and resources to this important issue, and they have resisted and ignored our recommendations for years."
The Shelby bill and a similar measure introduced last week by Rep. Jim Ryun (R-Kan.) represent the first legislative moves in a highly partisan debate in recent months over the administration's response to suspected Chinese espionage at the labs. The debate stemmed from numerous congressional investigations last year into the transfer of sensitive dual-use technology, inquiries that also produced testimony regarding a criminal investigation into suspected Chinese espionage at Los Alamos.
Shelby and other leading Republicans have charged that the administration has sacrificed national security and played down allegations of Chinese spying in its pursuit of engaging the Chinese. Administration officials deny the charge, noting that President Clinton issued a decision directive 14 months ago in response to the Los Alamos spy case quadrupling counterintelligence spending at the labs and mandating polygraph examinations for certain nuclear scientists.
In an interview in today's Los Angeles Times, Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.), who heads a special panel looking into Chinese espionage, said China stole "the crown jewels of our arsenal" and that the spying "continues to this very day."
Shelby's legislation cutting off sensitive foreign exchanges faces uncertain prospects in Congress. After Shelby informed the White House last week that he planned to introduce the bill, Clinton immediately responded, saying the measure would "halt valuable scientific exchange programs" with Russian scientists aimed at safeguarding Russia's nuclear arsenal.
Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), chairman of the Budget Committee and the appropriations subcommittee that funds the labs, said he has not seen the Shelby bill, but added: "I believe before we are finished there will be an understanding of the significance of scientific exchanges to the very lifeblood of these labs."
Domenici said that he has attended hearings with Shelby "and he has been very judicious. His questions have been very good and so I don't quite understand why at this point he thinks this is necessary."
ALSO: U.S. Bill Would Bar Lab Visits By Some Foreigners April 28, 1999, By Tabassum Zakaria (Reuters) http://www.webcrawler.com/news/r/990428/01/news-china-usa-spying
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45. U.S. Says Suspect Put Data on Bombs in Unsecure Files
By JAMES RISEN and JEFF GERTH, New York Times, April 28, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/042899china-nuke.html
WASHINGTON -- A scientist suspected of spying for China improperly transferred huge amounts of secret data from a computer system at a government laboratory, compromising virtually every nuclear weapon in the United States arsenal, government and lab officials say.
The data -- millions of lines of computer code that approximate how this country's atomic warheads work -- were downloaded from a computer system at the Los Alamos, N.M., weapons lab that is open only to those with top-level security clearances, according to the officials.
The scientist, Wen Ho Lee, then transferred the files to a widely accessible computer network at the lab, where they were stored under other file names, the officials said.
The Taiwan-born scientist transferred most of the secret data in 1994 and 1995, officials said.
American experts said the data would be useful to any nuclear power trying to replicate this country's atomic designs. But one American scientist said the codes and accompanying data were not, by themselves, sufficient to produce an exact copy of an American weapon.
American officials said there was evidence that the files were accessed by someone after they were placed in the unclassified network. Other evidence suggests that this was done by a person who improperly used a password, the officials said.
The investigation is continuing, and officials do not know whether the data transferred by Lee was obtained by another country.
In 1996, Lee became the focus of an FBI investigation into a separate case, what American official believe was China's theft from Los Alamos of design data for America's most advanced warhead, the W-88. That theft apparently took place in the 1980s. China has denied stealing the material.
Now officials fear that a much broader array of nuclear test data may have been moved to Beijing in the 1990s. Lee has not been charged with any crime.
Federal investigators did not discover the evidence of huge file transfers until last month, when they examined Lee's office computer in connection with their investigation of the earlier theft at Los Alamos, a sprawling lab complex about 35 miles outside Santa Fe.
They then found evidence that Lee, who held one of the government's highest security clearances, had been transferring enormous files involving millions of lines of secret computer code, officials said.
Although Lee had been under investigation in the W-88 case for nearly three years, Los Alamos officials failed to monitor his computer use and let him retain his access to nuclear secrets until late 1998.
Lee was fired by the Energy Department for security violations on March 8. His attorney, Mark Holscher of Los Angeles, did not return a telephone call. In the past, Holscher has denied any wrongdoing by his client.
President Clinton was first told of the new evidence by Energy Secretary Bill Richardson on March 31. During a subsequent meeting at the White House residence in early April, the president told Richardson to "get to the bottom of it," Richardson recalled in an interview Tuesday.
Earlier in March, before being briefed by Richardson, the president said he had not been told of any evidence of espionage during his administration.
In response to the new evidence and with the president's support, Richardson shut down the classified computer systems at Los Alamos and two other major nuclear weapons laboratories this month. He ordered changes in the computer security procedures to make it more difficult to move nuclear secrets out of the classified networks.
"These Wen Ho Lee transgressions cannot occur any more," Richardson said in the interview.
Congressional leaders were told of the new evidence in classified briefings last week.
The huge scale of the security breach has shocked some officials, and has prompted a new sense of urgency in the FBI to solve the Los Alamos spy case. The bureau is now pouring additional agents and resources into the investigation. The evidence of transfers from his office computer provided the basis for an FBI search of Lee's home on April 10, officials said. Lee is believed to be still living in Los Alamos.
Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, said in an interview that the briefings on the new evidence "confirmed my worst fears that China's espionage is ongoing, it's deep and we can't wish it away."
There were varying assessments of the gravity of the security breach. One official familiar with the new evidence said, "This is much, much, much worse than the W-88 case."
But an Energy Department official said that because it remained unclear whether China actually obtained the data, the case at this point "is serious but not of the scope of the W-88."
The fact that the huge data transfers were not detected until the last few weeks has sparked outrage among officials who wonder why computer use by a scientist already under suspicion as a spy was not being closely watched by Los Alamos or the FBI.
An internal investigation at the Energy Department into why Lee retained access to American nuclear secrets while he was a spy suspect was begun a month ago and is nearing completion. It is likely to prompt disciplinary action against some lab and Energy Department officials, according to a senior Energy Department official.
FBI officials have told Congress that Lee and his wife, Sylvia, had prior relationships with the bureau. In the early 1980s, Lee volunteered information to the bureau, but officials would not provide details. Mrs. Lee provided the bureau with information on foreign visitors to Los Alamos from about 1987 to 1992, but her information was not considered valuable.
Until now, Clinton and his aides have portrayed Chinese nuclear espionage as a problem that occurred during previous administrations. Amid the furor over the administration's handling of the earlier theft of the W-88 data from Los Alamos, the White House has stressed that the espionage occurred in the 1980s, long before Clinton took office.
But the new evidence raises the stakes of the congressional investigations now under way into how the Los Alamos case was handled after the W-88 theft was first detected in 1995.
The information improperly transferred by Lee included what Los Alamos officials call the "legacy" codes. According to John Browne, director of Los Alamos, the legacy codes consist of computer data used to design nuclear weapons, analyze nuclear test results and evaluate weapons materials and the safety characteristics of America's nuclear warheads.
"They are codes that integrate our best understanding of the processes that go on in a nuclear weapon," Browne said in an interview.
The legacy codes can be used to help design nuclear weapons through computer simulation, and so are valuable on their own. But they become more valuable when combined with specific performance data, which would then enable someone to generate a computer simulation of American warhead designs.
Officials said Lee transferred both the legacy codes and the input data for specific U.S. warheads that go with the legacy codes. The codes and performance data provide what a Los Alamos scientist described as a "rough approximation" of the physical processes that occur in a nuclear weapon.
Ray E. Kidder, a nuclear-weapons physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said the combined data was equivalent to a scientific blueprint.
"If you've got the source code and the input data, you can reverse-engineer the thing and have a complete plan for nuclear explosive part of the weapon," Kidder said.
One lab official said investigators were still trying to determine the extent of the security breach and exactly how many warheads were involved in the data transfers.
The legacy codes and the warhead data that goes with them could be particularly valuable for a country, like China, that has signed onto the nuclear test ban treaty and relies solely on computer simulations to upgrade and maintain its nuclear arsenal. The legacy codes are now used to maintain the American nuclear arsenal through computer simulation.
Most of Lee's transfers occurred in 1994 and 1995, just before China signed the test ban treaty in 1996, according to American officials.
But officials say Lee may have started transferring files out of the classified computer network as early as 1983. So far, officials have not found evidence of transfers after 1995.
Lee, 59, began working at Los Alamos in 1978. His wife worked as a secretary at the lab.
Lee also traveled to China on several occasions while working at Los Alamos. In June 1986 he delivered a paper on nuclear-weapons related science at a symposium in Beijing with the approval of Los Alamos officials. In June 1988 he delivered another paper at a conference in Beijing, again with the lab's approval.
In 1995 U.S. intelligence officials began to suspect that China had obtained design data from the W-88 warhead. In 1996 the FBI began a criminal investigation of the W-88 theft, and Lee emerged as the principal suspect.
Yet by 1997 the bureau's investigation was stalled. The Department of Justice declined an FBI request to seek court approval to gain surreptitious access to Lee's office computer, officials said. Once the the request was rejected, officials of the bureau and the Energy Department determined that they needed Lee's approval to examine his office computer.
In April 1997 Lee was transferred to a new job at Los Alamos, where he was responsible for updating legacy codes for five American warheads. Although Los Alamos officials knew he was already under investigation in the W-88 theft, they believed that his continued access to the legacy codes would not be damaging because they knew he had had access to them for years, lab and Energy Department officials said. But Los Alamos officials also assured the Energy Department that there were fire walls in place to prevent the leakage of classified information, they added.
It was not until last month, just a few days before he was fired, that the FBI finally asked for and received Lee's authorization to search his computer, officials said. Once the bureau saw the transferred files in the unclassified computer network, investigators realized their significance.
Within days, Richardson was briefed, and he then told the president and shut down the lab's computer systems for two weeks. But the FBI still encountered delays in winning Justice Department approval to seek a court-ordered search of Lee's home, officials said, and did not conduct the search until April 10.
The FBI has told Congress that it believes that the new information of computer transfers is the strongest evidence they have against Lee, officials said. The New York Times delayed publication of this article for one day at the request of the FBI, which said the latest disclosure could impede its inquiry.
ALSO: U.S. Arsenal Compromised By China Spy Suspect-NYT Reuters, April 28, 1999 http://www.webcrawler.com/news/r/990428/03/news-nuclear-china-usa
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Message: 4 Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 13:08:52 -0400
Subject: NucNews-6 4/29/99 - China/Westinghouse deal; China Spy (5)
36. Westinghouse Swaps Nuclear Technology With China
Reuters, April 28, 1999 http://www.webcrawler.com/news/r/990428/01/news-nuclear-china
BEIJING (Reuters) - Westinghouse Electric Corp of the United States has signed an agreement with a Chinese institute to exchange nuclear technology, the official China Daily newspaper reported Wednesday.
It said Westinghouse was working with engineers and technicians from the Shanghai Nuclear Engineering Research and Design Institute to develop a nuclear reactor.
"China is glad to have this advanced mature technology," the newspaper quoted Qian Juexin, director of the Shanghai institute, as saying. "It's a good beginning for the two countries to cooperate in nuclear energy."
The paper said the new technology was safer, with fewer parts, and that the plant would cost less to build.
Westinghouse had been testing the technology for a decade and it was approved by the U.S. regulatory commission last year, the newspaper said.
It quoted Westinghouse vice-president Howard Bruschi as saying the agreement symbolized his company's "continued long term commitment to China."
The company formed a consortium with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. and several Spanish companies last month in a bid to provide commercial power plants, including a new passive water reactor, to China, it said.
The company hoped to contribute to two nuclear power plants in China in the future, the daily said.
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[Has anyone written letters or editorials about the spy flap? Since China knows all our nuclear secrets, there ARE no nuclear secrets any more, so the next logical step is to come to a global agreement on abolition of nuclear weapons.]
37. The Deadliest Download
April 29, 1999 New York Times ESSAY / By WILLIAM SAFIRE http://www.nytimes.com/library/opinion/safire/042999safi.html
WASHINGTON -- During President Clinton's watch, America's most vital nuclear secrets -- guarded intensely for five decades -- have been allowed to spill out all over the world.
Five weeks ago I surmised that what now worried our scientists most was the possible theft of the "Lagrangian codes" from our national laboratories.
These are the supercomputer programs that -- when fed secret data "benchmarks" from all our nuclear tests -- enable foreign scientists to simulate our explosions and erase our lead.
We are now informed by The New York Times's Pulitzer-Prize-winning investigative team that the codes -- "legacy codes," as they are known at Los Alamos -- were allegedly downloaded by Wen Ho Lee in 1994. Our nuclear genie is out of the bottle.
"The People's Republic of China is the number one proliferator," said Representative Chris Cox, chairman of the select committee on Chinagate. "Now the secrets are out there in the stream of commerce, and probably on to Iran and North Korea and Libya."
The hemorrhage is horrendous. How did it happen? The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is grilling F.B.I. Director Louis Freeh today in secret, but here are some facts:
Suspecting Lee at Los Alamos to be a spy for China, F.B.I. agents in 1997 alerted the White House and went to the Department of Justice's Office of Intelligence Policy Review to request application to a special court for a wiretap under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But Acting Director Gerald Schroeder and his aide Alan Kornblum decided the evidence was insufficient and refused to apply.
The F.B.I. then went over Schroeder's head to the office of Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder, and was turned down again. The F.B.I. never returned with new evidence to Schroeder.
Did Director Freeh appeal to Janet Reno about "over-lawyering" in a national security case, or was he too browbeaten to try? The bureau learned that when it comes to China, Reno Justice assigns only its most incompetent operatives and penalizes prosecutors who target Asian financing of the 1996 election.
Consider: Justice makes some 700 court applications a year for taps under that surveillance law.
Maybe once or twice a year, says a Justice intelligence official, it finally refuses the F.B.I.'s request that it apply. This case, involving an embarrassment to China when Clinton was proclaiming "strategic partnership," was the one.
Moreover, Congress should examine the ultra-gentle prosecution of a Los Alamos nuclear simulation scientist, Peter Lee, who was let off with a year in a halfway house. The sentencing judge was never told all Justice knew of his spying.
With his Chinese chickens coming home to roost, Clinton has been desperately trying to keep a lid on Chinagate. His first reaction -- that it happened back in the 80's and had nothing to do with him -- has been overtaken by eventful truth.
For 10 weeks he ducked a meeting with Cox and Norman Dicks of the House committee seeking security clearance of their 1,000-page report on China's penetration of our scientific and political worlds. Last week they met in a "sober" session; Cox expects his slightly sanitized report to be made public by May 15.
Two weeks after that, we'll see what the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board comes up with. Its chairman, former Senator Warren Rudman, was incensed by a prediction in this space of a whitewash: "It will be a hard-hitting report about security at the labs," he insists.
Rudman has hired nine new investigators and may come up with recommendations about locking the barn door now that the secrets of almost every nuclear test we have undertaken are on their way to Baghdad or Pyongyang via Beijing.
As the dangerous duping of this Administration unfolds, keep in mind Beijing's grand design: Use Asian fund-raisers to influence White House policy to sell China advanced computer and missile technology. Simultaneously, use spies to steal both the secret codes to program those supercomputers and to steal the data benchmarks enabling them to simulate our nuclear tests.
Thanks to the downloading of our secrets, American cities will be less safe in two years than they were at the height of the cold war. We owe it to ourselves to find out who let it happen and why.
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38. Lab's Laxity in Spy Case Outrages Lawmakers
By ERIC SCHMITT, New York Times, April 29, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/042999china-nuke.html
WASHINGTON -- Senior lawmakers expressed outrage and frustration on Wednesday over the government's failure to monitor a scientist suspected of spying for China, who officials now say may have given away secrets to virtually every nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal.
After a three-hour closed hearing, the Republican chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Frank Murkowski of Alaska, criticized witnesses from the Energy Department, CIA and FBI for not taking responsibility for lax security at Government laboratories.
"The ability to identify accountability in this process is very, very difficult," Murkowski said in an interview. "There are so many players. There's too much finger pointing."
The witnesses were two Energy Department officials, Notra Trulock, acting deputy director of intelligence, and Ed Curran, counterintelligence director; Robert Walpole, a senior CIA official, and Neil Gallagher, assistant director of the FBI national security division.
The scientist, Wen Ho Lee, downloaded millions of lines of computer code that approximates how the country's nuclear warheads work from a classified system at the national laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M., and transferred the data to a widely accessible computer network at the lab, Government and lab officials said.
The information, which Lee, who was born in Taiwan, transferred mainly in 1994 and 1995, was apparently accessed by someone after the files had been placed in the unclassified network, officials said.
Lee is the focus of a separate inquiry, into whether he passed on secret design information for the most advanced U.S. nuclear warhead, the W-88, to China in the mid-80's.
The FBI began investigating Lee in 1996, a year after American intelligence officials first suspected that China had stolen the W-88 information. In April 1997, Lee was moved to a new job, but was still allowed access to classified information. Los Alamos officials assured Energy Department superiors that safeguards in place would prevent any unauthorized leaks of sensitive information.
Lawmakers said on Wednesday that those assurances were wrong. "This clearly points out a situation where we have the utmost secret, national security weaponry blueprints, and oversight that's not working," Murkowski said. "During this time frame there were some inexcusable lapses of accountability."
Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., who is vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee, called the suspected transfer of the information, which could help any foreign power replicate America's nuclear arsenal, "especially disturbing."
A spokesman for the National Security Council, David Leavy, acknowledged that Energy Secretary Bill Richardson told President Clinton of the new evidence on March 31 and, again, on April 6.
"We're under no illusions that there are those who are trying to acquire sensitive technology," the White House spokesman, Joe Lockhart, said. "It's a serious problem, and we have taken steps to increase security."
House and Senate leaders pledged to step up investigations that committees on both sides of the Capitol are conducting.
The FBI director, Louis Freeh, is widely expected to face harsh questioning on Thursday at a closed hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The bureau, the main counterintelligence agency, encountered years of delays in obtaining approval from the Justice Department to seek a court-ordered search of Lee's house.
Only last month, shortly after Lee had been dismissed, did the bureau finally ask for and receive his permission to search his computer.
"It's inconceivable to the average person that Wen Ho Lee would not be watched closely after being suspected of espionage and be returned to an area of our most top guarded secrets," Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., who heads the Intelligence Committee, said in an interview.
A Justice Department official acknowledged missteps in handling the FBI request, which career prosecutors never knew about. "People in the criminal division," the official said, "would liked to have been consulted early on, and it didn't happen in this case."
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39. Unsecure Codes Are Recipes for A-Bombs, Experts Say
April 29, 1999 New York Times, By WILLIAM J. BROAD http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/042999china-nuke-code.html
he secret computer codes that were downloaded into a nonsecure computer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and that federal experts fear were given to China are the distillation of more than a half-century of research on how to perfect nuclear weapons, experts in and out of government said Wednesday.
Using the programs, which calculate step by step how a bomb explodes, they said, weapons designers could produce simulations of nuclear explosions realistic enough to check the feasibility of new designs before taking the costly step of testing arms in actual blasts.
At their most basic level, the codes are equations rooted in the laws of physics, which are taught in high school and college. But added layers of hard-won tricks and lore turn the codes into informational gems, spelling out, for instance, not only how nuclear weapons can be constructed, but also how they can be made smaller, lighter and more powerful.
"It's a stunning revelation," said Dr. Matthew McKinzie, a former Los Alamos researcher now at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a group in Washington that tracks nuclear arms. "It's the distillation of 50 years of work, over 1,000 nuclear tests and thousands upon thousands of man-hours."
In the days when the designers of nuclear bombs liked nothing better than unleashing the atom's power in huge explosions literally felt halfway around the globe, the scientists first conducted mathematical calculations to try to insure that their creations would not be costly duds and embarrassments.
Over 50 years, experts said, that work yielded 100 or so advanced computer programs, about as many as there are types of nuclear warheads in the U.S. arsenal.
Those secrets, known as the "legacy codes," consist of millions of lines of computer instructions that detail the physical principles at the heart of U.S. atomic warheads.
The secrets are now at the center of a political firestorm. Federal officials assert that a scientist suspected of spying for China improperly transferred large parts of the codes from a computer system at the Los Alamos, N.M., lab, potentially giving away the secrets of virtually every weapon in the U.S. arsenal.
Downloaded as well, federal and lab officials said, were data on the materials and shapes of parts that make up specific weapons designs. Someone who put all that data together could create virtual blueprints of the nuclear explosive parts of a weapon.
Still, the codes are highly complex, because they mimic how colossal forces of nature alter materials -- for instance, how temperatures hotter than the surface of the Sun and pressures greater than at the center of the Earth can transform dense metals at the heart of a bomb into hot fluidlike plasmas in a split second.
Over the decades, federal scientists said, the codes allowed computerized dry runs that checked the feasibility of designs before millions of dollars were spent to build and test a new weapon.
"They were used to decide whether a particular design was worth testing," said Dr. Randy Christensen, a bomb-code physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, one of three national labs that developed nuclear arms and now maintain them. In recent years, with the advent of the ban on nuclear testing, the codes have been used as a substitute for test explosions themselves.
A Los Alamos physicist who has worked extensively on bomb codes, Dale Henderson, said, "Computation is the only place where everything comes together."
With computerized go-aheads, hundreds of underground nuclear blasts rocked the test site in Nevada, a desolate expanse of desert bigger than Rhode Island.
In 1945, when nuclear weapons flashed to life, scientists struggled with side rules and crude computers to find the best way of slamming together the critical mass of bomb fuel -- uranium 235 or plutonium 239 -- to make the chain reaction that released huge bursts of energy.
High explosives working at room temperature were fine to ignite an atomic bomb, it turned out. But complexity soared in 1952 with the advent of hydrogen bombs, which use an exploding atomic bomb as a fiery sunlike torch to ignite deuterium and tritium, both heavy forms of hydrogen that make up the fuel of a hydrogen bomb.
Scientists say the computerized codes, developed with the world's most powerful computers, were critical to perfect the first hydrogen bombs and their numerous progeny, which today dominate the world's nuclear arsenals. The first hydrogen bomb was 700 times more powerful than the bomb that hit Hiroshima.
The codes start with raw physics, scientists said, like the equations that describe how X-rays that flash out of an atomic blast interact with the fuel of the hydrogen bomb. Experts say what goes into the modeling recipe is as important as what is left out and ignored.
A senior scientist at a nuclear-weapons lab who insisted on anonymity likened the general recipes to building codes adopted by communities to make sure that buildings are safe and sound. "They're all the rules you have to apply," he said.
Added to those general rules are the architect's details of how an individual house is to be built, height, shape, siding, materials and plumbing and electrical systems, producing a plan "so you end up with a house," the scientist said.
Federal and lab experts say such "input data" for specific weapon types was included among the information downloaded at Los Alamos. Such details include the shapes and sizes of bomb parts and extensive data on the physical characteristics of nuclear materials, which vary widely among the 100 or so designs that have been in the nuclear arsenal.
The various designs are used to give the arsenal greater variety in how the warheads could be deployed and launched and would vary depending on the type of intended target like deeply fortified bunkers, cites or missile sites.
For newer weapons, the codes include large numbers of ad hoc refinements and tricks gleaned from decades nuclear testing, scientists said. Such improvements are informal rather than derived from the laws of physics. Learned through trial and error, the advances are needed because the science is insufficiently precise to make computerized models of bomb-blast complexities in all their details.
"It's one way we've always compensated for not having perfect science or infinitely powerful computers," said Christensen of Lawrence Livermore.
A nuclear-weapons physicist at Livermore, Dr. Ray Kidder, said the combination of source code and input data was equivalent to a scientific blueprint, allowing a bomb to be reverse-engineered, analyzing the completed product. In theory, Kidder said, "you cannot only find out how it was done, but you can also improve the weapon by running the code and changing some of the parameters."
Parts of the design not spelled out in such computer data, Kidder added, include the gadgets and conventional explosives that help start the chain reaction, factors considered more or less common in bomb design for 50 years.
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40. Richardson: Classified U.S. Lab Codes Transferred
Apr 28, 1999 (Reuters) - Infoseek http://www.dogpile.com/ [search "nuclear OR plutonium OR uranium OR radioactiv???"]
WASHINGTON - U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said Wednesday classified nuclear weapons computer codes at a U.S. government laboratory were transferred to an unclassified computer system.
``While I cannot comment on the specifics, I can confirm that classified nuclear weapons computer codes at Los Alamos were transferred to an unclassified computer system,'' Richardson said in a statement. Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has been at the center of allegations of Chinese espionage.
The New York Times Wednesday reported that a scientist suspected of spying for China improperly transferred millions of lines of computer code related to how U.S. nuclear warheads work.
While Richardson did not comment on details of who transferred the data, he said: ``This kind of egregious security breach is absolutely unacceptable, and we now have strong barriers in place that will prevent these kinds of transfers.''
Since allegations erupted that China stole U.S. nuclear secrets through espionage, the Energy Department has started to implement new measures aimed at improving security at the U.S. nuclear weapons research laboratories it oversees.
``As part of our ongoing efforts to strengthen counterintelligence and security at the labs, we have placed a strong emphasis on improving cyber security,'' Richardson said.
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41. U.S. Discloses 'Egregious' Nuclear Security Breach
By Tabassum Zakaria, April 29, 1999 (Reuters) http://www.webcrawler.com/news/r/990429/00/news-china-usa-spying
WASHINGTON - U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said Wednesday an "egregious" security breach had occurred at a U.S. government laboratory in which someone transferred classified nuclear weapons computer codes to an unclassified computer system.
"While I cannot comment on the specifics, I can confirm that classified nuclear weapons computer codes at Los Alamos were transferred to an unclassified computer system," Richardson said in a statement.
Richardson did not identify the individual involved in the transfer at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. But The New York Times Wednesday reported that Wen Ho Lee, a former Los Alamos scientist suspected of spying for China, improperly transferred millions of lines of computer code related to how U.S. nuclear warheads work.
Los Alamos has been at the center of allegations of Chinese espionage. Lee was fired in March under suspicion of espionage, but has not been charged.
China repeatedly has denied allegations it stole U.S. nuclear secrets, saying the country had its own competent scientists.
The Times, quoting government and lab officials, reported that Lee transferred the files to an unclassified computer network at the lab in which they were stored under other file names. Officials do not know whether the transferred data were obtained by another country, the newspaper said.
Richardson said: "This kind of egregious security breach is absolutely unacceptable, and we now have strong barriers in place that will prevent these kinds of transfers."
Since allegations surfaced that China stole U.S. nuclear secrets through espionage, the Energy Department has started to implement new measures aimed at improving security at the U.S. nuclear weapons research laboratories it oversees.
"As part of our ongoing efforts to strengthen counterintelligence and security at the labs, we have placed a strong emphasis on improving cyber security," Richardson said.
"I know that the Chinese have gone very deep in their espionage, probably more successful than any country has ever been against the United States," Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Shelby said.
"To what extent, we're not sure yet, we just know that the possibilities, if not the probabilities, of the great loss of this information is real," Shelby told Reuters.
The Alabama Republican has introduced legislation that would bar foreign scientists from "sensitive" countries from visiting U.S. nuclear labs unless the energy secretary certified the visit was necessary for U.S. national security.
"We are under no illusions about the potential threat that our sensitive information faces from China as well as a number of other countries," added National Security Council spokesman David Leavy.
Last week, the head of the Los Alamos laboratory told reporters the fired scientist, Lee, had shown a suspicious pattern of behavior and failed to protect classified information.
But thousands of other people had access to the same information on the W-88 miniature warheads, Los Alamos National Laboratory Director John Browne has told reporters.
Lee was fired more than two years after the start of investigations into whether he might have provided sensitive nuclear information to China.
Some of Lee's colleagues at Los Alamos have cast doubt on the allegations against him, saying the accusations were politically motivated and there has been no evidence linking Lee to information obtained by China.
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Message: 5 Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 13:08:43 -0400
Subject: NucNews-5-US 4/29/99 - Rocketdyne scientists indicted; Nuc Waste Idaho to NM (6); Hanford outraged at "Antz" by Dave Barry
28. Rocketdyne employees indicted
April 28, 1999 UPI http://www.webcrawler.com/news/u/990428/21/news-rocketdyne
SIMI VALLEY, Calif., April 28 (UPI) A federal grand jury has returned a four-count felony indictment against three employees of a Rocketdyne laboratory in Simi Valley, Calif.
U.S. Attorney Alejandro N. Mayorkas said today that the defendants allegedly burned explosive hazardous materials that in one instance caused the death of two other Rocketdyne workers.
The three defendants are specifically charged with violating environmental laws by illegally storing and burning explosive wastes at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory.
The 2,700 acre facility was operated by Rockwell International Corp, Rocketdyne Division, which has since been purchased by the Boeing Corp. Mayorkas said Boeing has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
Those charged today were Joseph E. Flanagan, 58, James F. Weber, 49, and Edgar R. Wilson, 62.
The indictment alleges that from May 1, 1994 through July 20, 1994, Wilson unlawfully burned explosive wastes at the facility. The indictment further alleges that on July 21 and July 26 of 1994, all three defendants again unlawfully burned explosive wastes.
Flanagan and Webber were also charged with unlawfully storing the explosive wastes at the Rocketdyne facility.
Mayorkas said, "The environmental laws are designed to protect our natural resources, to protect our safety, and to protect the world for future generations."
"Individuals who violate those laws threaten our world in the most fundamental way," she said. "Those individuals will be prosecuted with all of our might, in the service of the public interest."
The waste products at the center of the indictment are considered to be explosive or "energetic." They were developed by Rocketdyne for use as gun propellants or aerospace fuels.
Mayorkas said all three defendants were charged with storing and/or disposing of hazardous waste without a permit as required by the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.
If convicted, each defendant faces five years in prison and fines up to $250,000 for each felony count.
On July 26, 1994, two Rocketdyne employees, Otto Heiney and Larry Pugh, were killed and a third worker was seriously injured in an explosion that occurred during the burring of wastes.
In April 1996, Rockwell, on behalf of its Rocketdyne Division, pleaded guilty to three felony counts of unlawfully storing and disposing of hazardous wastes and paid a criminal fine of $6.5 million.
ALSO: Scientists Indicted in Deadly Blast Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, April 29, 1999 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-04/29/168l-042999-idx.html
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29. Nuclear waste hits the road
By Jim Hughes Denver Post Staff Writer http://www.denverpost.com/news/news0428.htm
April 28 - The first interstate shipment of nuclear waste bound for a depository in New Mexico hit the road Tuesday, and it is scheduled to pass through Colorado via Interstate 25 on its way south from a national laboratory in southeastern Idaho.
The plutonium-contaminated waste, carried by a large flatbed truck, was on its way to the federal Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a $2 billion bunker carved into subterranean salt beds near Carlsbad, N.M.
The facility has been criticized by environmentalists, who claim the facility will leak and contaminate the Rio Grande and the Pecos River. A judge in March, however, found their arguments unconvincing and refused to issue an injunction blocking WIPP's opening.
WIPP's first shipment, from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico, was safely delivered March 26.
Department of Energy officials have denied there is any danger of radioactivity escaping the facility, which is nearly one-half mile underground.
And WIPP spokesman Dennis Hurtt on Tuesday said that the transport plan has been independently reviewed and tailored to meet the desires of each state along the route.
State officials will thoroughly inspect the truck and its cargo when it enters Colorado, said Tammy Ottmer, WIPP coordinator for the state Health Department.
Such assurances failed to mollify opponents, though.
"I think it's insane,'' said Betty Ball, who heads the anti-WIPP effort for the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center in Boulder. "I think it's totally insane that we're taking the risk of jeopardizing the lives of thousands of people by trucking this waste on major highways.''
The WIPP shipments were to have begun in 1988, Hurtt said, but were waylaid by various regulatory issues and legal battles. In that time, federal and state officials have made numerous preparations for the safe passage of the radioactive waste, he said.
"Since 1988, we have been training all the way along the corridor, training first-response personnel as well as medical technicians and hospital personnel,'' Hurtt said. "To date, from Idaho down to the WIPP site, we have trained over 10,000 people.''
And the payload of this first truckload - consisting of 42 55gallon drums of waste - is wellprotected, he said. The drums are packed into three large thermoslike stainless steel canisters, each holding 14 barrels.
Some of the waste shipped from Idaho on Tuesday originated at the Rocky Flats weapons plant, Hurtt said. It was shipped to Idaho before WIPP's construction as part of a short-term storage plan, he said.
Hurtt said that this week's Idaho shipment kicks off WIPP's longterm plan, which will send an aver
age of one truckload per week to the facility over the next 35 years. Shipments from Rocky Flats could begin as early as this year, he said. The Department of Energy has committed to cleaning out and shutting down that facility by 2006.
"Now that we're open, we can move ahead aggressively to meet that schedule,'' he said.
Still, environmentalists continue to fight the WIPP project and the shipping of waste materials by truck. Members of Ball's group were planning to greet the first WIPP truck in Colorado with protests as it made its way south along Interstate 25 Tuesday night, she said.
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30. Idaho nuclear waste heads for N.M. home
Wednesday, April 28, 1999 Deseret News http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,80001339,00.html? Photo nuclear waste truck: http://deseretnews.com/photos/b28nuke.jpg
The first shipment of plutonium-contaminated waste turns onto Highway 26 west of Idaho Falls Tuesday en route to the Waste Isolation Pilot plant near Carlsbad, N.M., for permanent storage. The nuclear waste is contained inside three shipping casks made of stainless steel, each holding fourteen 55-gallon drums. The shipment arrived safely at the storage site Wednesday.
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31. Toxic waste takes first trip through Utah Rig headed to permanent dump site in N.M.
By Lucinda Dillon, Deseret News, April 27, 1999 ttp://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,80001196,00.html?
With no flashy escort vehicles, few Utahns may have noticed a semitruck carrying three cylinders resembling beehives making its way down I-15 under drippy gray skies Tuesday morning.
The first of what will be increasingly frequent shipments of radioactive waste from the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory traveled through northern Utah on its way to the federal government's permanent underground dump in New Mexico.
The truck and its cargo raised little fanfare or controversy in Utah.
"The key is that it's going through the state, not stopping," said Bill Sinclair, director of the Utah's Division of Radiation Control.
State hazardous materials experts were on alert through the day in case anything happened to the cylinders, which are filled with 55-gallon drums containing clothes, gloves, soil and other items contaminated with radioactive materials during the production of nuclear weapons at the Idaho facility.
It is the first shipment of "transuranic" waste to travel through Utah, Sinclair said.
But soon the shipments will be common on Utah roads. Twenty shipments are planned through this year. By 2006, up to two shipments may be passing through Utah every day.
If anyone should be concerned about this trend, it is South Weber Mayor Henry Dickamore, who leads the community of 4,100 near the junction of I-15 and Interstate 84, where the truck will turn east and carry its radioactive load through Morgan and Summit counties, to the $2 billion Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southeastern New Mexico.
Dickamore is only mildly concerned.
More than 50 percent of all vehicles carry some kind of hazardous materials, he said.
There are major petroleum lines and gas lines going through the northern Utah community that have the potential to cause a major disaster at any time.
"We know these things are going through our community not just by truck but also by rail," he said. "It travels safely 99 percent of the time. They're here and they're gone, and everything goes on fine."
There is no cause for alarm, according to Sinclair. "It's similar in regard to radiocactivity to what we have going out to Envirocare," he said.
Envirocare, located in Clive, Utah, is a landfill for radioactive soil from around the country. About 10 million cubit feet of contaminated soil was dumped into an engineered landfill cell in 1998.
Railcars - each containing a permanent liner, a secondary plastic liner and a fiberglass lid to secure the dirt during shipping - deliver the soil to the west desert facility.
On Tuesday, another trainload of radioactive dirt from the former Fernald uranium processing plant in Cincinnati left Ohio headed for Envirocare.
The U.S. Department of Energy estimates 100 trainloads of contaminated soil will be shipped to the Envirocare facility over the next few years. The Utah Highway Patrol Department is not required to escort toxic loads like the one Tuesday, said Lt. Verdi White III, a department spokesman.
Two highly trained highway patrol troopers traveled to the remote area near Idaho Falls, Idaho, Monday night to inspect the truck before it crossed over the Utah line.
There are stringent requirements for trucks carrying this kind of material - much more stringent than for trucks carrying a regular load of merchandise, White said. Several officers will be trained to handle hazardous materials close by as the truck moves through the state, he said.
Emergency preparedness skirts the point, said Jock Glidden, a retired political science professor at Weber State University, and a member of Ogden's Sierra Club. Companies and facilities that generate this kind of material should be forced to store it on site.
"We're not doing it here in Utah, but we have to put up with the other communities that aren't taking care of it in their own responsibilities," he said. "If you require them to store it, then you remove the danger from communities like ours."
The shipment is the first out-of-state shipment to the New Mexico site - the nation's first.
Up until the New Mexico dump was finished, the United States had no permanent resting place for weapons-related plutonium waste. After 25 years of lawsuits, studies and protests, the dump carved out of the salt beds a half-mile deep beneath the desert finally began receiving shipments last month.
Once there, the materials - encased in the steel drums - will be buried in salt caves 2,000-feet deep near Carlsbad, New Mexico.
The salt eventually caves in on the drums and entombs the waste forever, Sinclair explained.
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32. Atlas tailings need to be moved Deseret News editorial, April 27, 1999 http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,80001087,00.html?
Utah congressman Chris Cannon merits support in his effort to have 10.5 million tons of radioactive tailings moved away from the Colorado River near Moab. Cannon has introduced a bill to facilitate the effort.
The Atlas Corp., which is responsible for the tailings, has proposed a much cheaper option - leaving them in place after capping them with sand and rock. That would cost only around $19 million as opposed to an estimated $150 million to move them.
Unfortunately, the federal agency that has jurisdiction, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, recently supported the capping option. Even Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt disagrees with that controversial decision. Capping the tailings is a potential health risk to 20 million people downstream who consume water from the river. Residents could be endangered for decades. Moving the tailings away from the river to a remote site eliminates the risk of contamination.
The waste repository spans 150 acres near the entrance to Arches National Park and just upstream from Canyonlands. It lies on a major fault that makes the potential for the release of radioactive isotopes into the river a risk in the event of an earthquake or flood. And Moab residents, many of whom make their living from tourism, don't like the thought of the capped 100-foot tailings pile permanently marring the approach to their city.
Cannon's bill would transfer jurisdiction of the Atlas site from the NRC to the Energy Department, which is more inclined to find ways of moving the tailings.
The federal government should not be gambling that capping will adequately take care of the tailings problem. According to one watchdog group, Oak Ridge National Laboratory reports predict that even with capping, radioactive wastes and toxic material would seep into the Colorado River for 270 years at a rate of 9,468 gallons of contaminated water a day.
Most other tailings repositories, left over from uranium process for Cold War nuclear projects, have been moved from their original spots to remote locations. The federal government needs to assist Atlas Corp. to see to it that the Moab tailings also are moved.
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33. Idaho Waste Leaves for NM State Cheers Removal of Waste to Dump
By Mark Warbis The Associated Press April 27, 1999 http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/nuclearwaste990427.html
I D A H OF A L L S,Idaho,April 27 - A truckload of nuclear waste left at dawn today for the nation's first permanent dump, 11 years after Idaho stared down the Energy Department and closed its borders to radioactive waste.
Cheers from about 100 elected officials went up in the semidarkness as the truck's horn sounded and began its 32-hour trip to the $2 billion Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southeastern New Mexico.
"As you can see, there's a new day dawning in Idaho," Gov. Dirk Kempthorne declared. "It's the day when we begin to see the nuclear waste leave this great state of ours."
Kempthorne, a first-term Republican, was joined by ex-Govs. Cecil Andrus, a Democrat, and Phil Batt, a Republican. In 1988, Andrus unilaterally closed Idaho's borders to any additional waste shipments after the Energy Department failed to make good on promises to begin removing waste.
Right On Time
The border was reopened a few months later. In 1995, Batt negotiated a settlement requiring the first shipment to leave the state by the end of April 1999.
Energy Department spokesman Brad Bugger said so far there is no schedule for additional shipments. But the settlement requires the agency to have all nuclear waste out by 2036.
Up until the New Mexico dump was finished, the United States had no permanent resting place for weapons-related plutonium waste. After 25 years of lawsuits, studies and protests, the dump carved out of the salt beds a half-mile deep beneath the desert finally began receiving shipments last month.
During the years of delay, the waste piled up at 23 weapons installations around the country such as Rocky Flats near Denver and the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, where it is kept mostly in 55-gallon drums on aboveground concrete pads, underneath bubble structures or in earthen mounds.
The New Mexico dump will eventually house up to 6.2 million cubic feet of waste, from rags contaminated with radioactivity to the graphite molds used to cast plutonium pits.
ALSO Truck loaded with waste expected to depart Decades of waiting for action appears over in eastern Idaho Mark Warbis - Associated Press, April 27, 1999 Spokane News (What are your thoughts on Truck loaded with waste expected to depart) http://www.spokane.net/news-story-body.asp?Date=042799&ID=s567266&cat=
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34. Idaho Has WIPP Shipment Ready Weather, Court Could Stop Truck
April 27, 1999 Albuquerque Journal http://www.abqjournal.com/news/3news04-27.htm
IDAHO FALLS, Idaho _ Barring severe weather, an end is at hand to decades of waiting for the federal government to begin removing plutonium-contaminated waste stored in eastern Idaho.
A single truck at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory was already loaded on Monday with the 42 barrels of so-called transuranic waste set to leave just after dawn today for the $2 billion Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southeastern New Mexico.
And New Mexico regulators said late Monday there were no plans to stop delivery of the three specially designed TRUPACT stainless steel shipping casks. Each crash-tested, 10-by-8-foot cask carries 14 55-gallon drums.
``We're not taking any measures to stop it,'' Environment Department spokesman Nathan Wade said, ``nor have we ever indicated that we would.''
Department officials had indicated there might be a preliminary determination on the shipment before the truck headed south across Idaho's high desert on the 32-hour trip to the dump near Carlsbad.
``But after talking to our staff of consultants, it seems like it will be more appropriate to offer a single determination and have that be later this week,'' Wade said.
New Mexico regulators have been skeptical of federal claims that the initial shipment -- the first to the permanent storage facility from outside New Mexico -- contains radioactive-only material that they have no jurisdiction over. The state has control over radioactive waste contaminated with other hazardous material and is not expected to issue a permit for its storage until late this summer at the earliest.
The waste has been building up in temporary storage for the past three decades at the INEEL.
``Idaho was never designed to be a nuclear waste repository,'' Gov. Dirk Kempthorne said. ``We have seen over decades the nuclear waste placed in Idaho. It's time to see the exodus of that waste. It just makes sense.''
Kempthorne was being joined at the INEEL by his two predecessors who forced federal acquiescence to state demands for waste removal dating back two decades.
Democrat Cecil Andrus and Republican Phil Batt led more than 10 years of political and legal battles with a federal government struggling to find a long-term solution for its stockpile of Cold War-era radioactive garbage. The governors' efforts led to signing of Idaho's one-of-a-kind 1995 legal agreement for removal of virtually all nuclear waste from Idaho by 2036.
The Batt-negotiated 1995 settlement required the first shipment to leave the state by the end of April 1999. Nick Nichols, a spokesman for INEEL contractor Lockheed Martin Idaho Technologies Co., said that deadline would now be met unless weather along the route turns so bad that it makes travel unsafe.
The first shipment includes graphite molds that were used to cast plutonium pits, the heart of nuclear weapons, at the now-closed Rocky Flats plant in Colorado. The drums also contain clothing, tools, rags and other debris contaminated with relatively low-level, long-lived radioactive material during the weapons-making process.
Bugger said there so far is no schedule for additional shipments. But the 1995 agreement with the state requires the agency to have 15,000 drums of transuranic waste out of Idaho by the end of 2002. It then must maintain a three-year running average of 9,700 drums a year being shipped out starting in 2003.
All the material earmarked for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is supposed to be out of Idaho by the end of 2015, and must be out by the end of 2018. The Energy Department currently puts the total at about 205,000 drums or about 4,900 shipments.
In the past decade, some 13,000 emergency response personnel in 11 states have been trained by federal officials to handle any highway accidents involving the shipments.
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35. Dave Barry's mutant ants really bug folks near Hanford Nuclear Reservation
BY FLORANGELA DAVILA, Knight Ridder Newspapers, Lincoln Journal-Star http://www.journalstar.com/archives/042699/lif/sto3
On its way to Dave Barry, arguably the nation's best-known humor columnist, is an invitation from mayors living in the shadow of the Hanford nuclear reservation, irrefutably the nation's most contaminated nuclear site.
Call it an act of public relations.
Call it the act of people who are thin-skinned.
Call it the proper thing to do, which is how folks in Southeast Washington explain their invitation for Barry to come have a look around.
Barry has never been to the Tri-Cities, and when contacted recently, he hadn't a clue as to where Pasco, Richland and Kennewick are. But now that he knows, he said if there were ever three cities that should be together, he most certainly would've picked these.
What's all the fuss?
Barry's April 18 column mentions Hanford.
Specifically, Hanford's radioactive ants.
"I start to worry when officials tell me not to worry," his column begins. In this case, he's worried about assurances that Hanford is safe.
In his very Barry way, the columnist describes his fear that one day soon giant mutant ants will be marching toward California, plotting nasty things. To defend the country, Barry suggests axing billion-dollar missiles for something much more practical: one giant Twinkie (to entice the ants) and one 18,000-pound shoe (to stomp them).
Last week, the Tri-City Herald ran a story on the column. The writer was most offended, and so were officials quoted in his story.
"The piece doesn't paint a flattering picture of the Tri-Cities," the story reads. "Nor is it complimentary of all the hard work and groundbreaking science going on at the federal Hanford site." How, laments the paper, could Barry have failed to mention "the pristine Hanford Reach; the winning Americans hockey team; the booming construction going on behind Columbia Center mall." All around the three cities -- and a fourth, because West Richland has joined the image crusade -- the grumbling grew.
"'The site glows like a Budweiser sign,'" Michael Turner said recently, quoting a line from the column. "That's a little bit more than inaccurate." Turner is a communications specialist with Fluor Daniel Hanford Inc., the primary contractor cleaning up the Hanford nuclear reservation, which was built during World War II to produce plutonium.
"Everybody should take things in good fun," Turner agreed. But the fact is, the region's 200,000 residents have a certain affection for Hanford. They know it's a radioactive, contaminated place. But it's home, he said.
Barry's stereotype ignores the reality, officials protested: Spent-fuel basins have been cleaned. So have some underground tanks. One of the reactors is in safe-storage mode. Nine defense-production reactors have been deactivated.
"The cleanup is moving along," Turner said.
At Fluor Daniel last week, the public-relations team debated writing an op-ed piece to counter the Barry column. But some didn't want to appear "easily offended." The Tri-City Visitors and Convention Bureau, meanwhile, promptly contacted mayors, arranging a jointly written invitation.
"The reality is that the real story, so to speak, is that the community has many positive attributes, like a great quality of life," said Kris Watkins, the bureau's president.
Some of the country's top scientists are working at Hanford, she said. There are some 40 wineries, eight golf courses, the Columbia River. And more than 300 days of sunshine a year, Watkins added.
The radioactive ants were first discovered last fall, along with radioactive flies and gnats. The bugs, which authorities call "contaminated," not radioactive, were eliminated. But on a regular basis, Turner said, officials find contaminated tumbleweeds.
"I think there are so many cultural attractions in the Tri-Cities," Barry said from his Miami office. "It's a well-known fact. The cultural centers of the world -- Paris, London and the Tri-Cities.
"Personally, I'm leading a group of 1,000 Miamians to the Tri-Cities in case we encounter an ant the size of a VW Bug."
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Message: 6 Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 13:08:34 -0400
Subject: NucNews-4-US 4/29/99 - Missing Iridium found; NRC "Y2K ok"; Judge bars CT restart; MI Waste Cost; Private Spy Satellite
23. Missing shipment of iridium found
USA Today April 28, 1999 http://usatoday.com/news/digest/nd1.htm
BOSTON - A Federal Express package with a potentially lethal radioactive metal disappeared for 10 days before it turned up safely in England, to the relief of government inspectors. The package contained 200 pounds of supplies from a Massachusetts technology company to a construction company in Toluca, Mexico. Inside was a cylinder of iridium, which is used to X-ray pipeline welds and in chemotherapy treatment for cancer. Because of the isotope's high radioactivity, anyone who opened the package unwittingly could be exposed to the equivalent of "thousands and thousands of X-rays" and die quickly, said Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The package turned up Monday, unopened, in a hangar in a small airport outside of London. A FedEx spokesman said the company was still trying to figure out how the package got there.
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24. NRC Says Y2K Audits At Nuclear Plants A Success
Apr 29, 1999 (Reuters) - Infoseek http://www.dogpile.com/ [search "nuclear OR plutonium OR uranium OR radioactiv???"]
WASHINGTON - An audit of 12 U.S. nuclear plants showed the facilities on schedule to address their potential Year 2000 computer problems and meet the industry's target date for readiness of July 1, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Wednesday.
``No problems were found at the plants that will interfere with the ability of their computers to control key safety systems starting next year,'' according to the NRC.
The agency conducted the audits on-site between last September and January of this year.
The Year 2000, or Y2K problem refers to computers' potential inability to recognize dates beginning with Jan. 1, 2000 and beyond. Many computer systems were designed to read only the last two digits of a calendar year.
If the problem is left uncorrected, these systems would read ``2000,'' as ``1900'' and could cause widespread malfunctions to plant equipment and operations.
The plants audited included Brunswick in North Carolina; Hope Creek in New Jersey; Davis Besse in Ohio; Wolf Creek in Kansas; Monticello in Minnesota; Seabrook in New Hampshire; Watts Bar in Tennessee; Limerick in Pennsylvania; Waterford in Louisiana; North Anna in Virginia; Braidwood in Illinois; and WNP-2 in Washington state.
Since many nuclear plant operators own more than one site, the corporate-wide nature of the Y2K audits impacted more than the 12 plants, leaving successful results at 42 of the 103 operating plants in the country, NRC said.
The agency said it had no indication Y2K computer problems exist with safety-related systems in nuclear power plants. Most commercial reactors have protection systems that do not rely on computer dates and are not vulnerable to the ``bug.'' Results of the audits and related information can be read at the NRC Web site: http://www.nrc.gov/NRC/NEWS/year2000.html.
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25. Judge Bars Restarting of a Nuclear Reactor, Pleasing Environmentalists
By MIKE ALLEN, New York Times, April 28, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/regional/ct-millstone.html Map: http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/regional/ct-millstone.1.GIF
HARTFORD -- In a rare victory for environmentalists, a Connecticut judge issued an order Tuesday barring the restarting of the Millstone 2 nuclear reactor on Long Island Sound, just one day before the generator was to produce commercial power for the first time in three years.
Robert W. Bishop, the general counsel of the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade group for the nuclear power industry, said this was apparently the first time a court had prevented the restarting of a nuclear plant once it had received its operating permit.
The owner of the plant, Northeast Utilities, fired up the reactor on Monday for low-power testing, and said it would continue to run in that mode, despite the ruling.
The judge, Robert J. Hale of Superior Court in Hartford, granted a temporary restraining order preventing Northeast Utilities from fully restarting the plant until he rules on a lawsuit filed by a Long Island environmental group, Fish Unlimited, and several other organizations. The suit contends that the reactor would devastate the local supply of flounder and other fish that are drawn into the giant water intake pipes that are used to cool steam from the generator.
The suit maintains that bigger fish are killed when they smash into screens designed to keep out trash and seaweed, and larvae die after they are sucked through the grate.
Environmental groups called the ruling a major victory because it almost certainly pushes the commercial restart of the plant past June 15, when the spawning season for flounder ends. In their suit, the environmental groups claim that the number of breeding female flounder in the Niantic River, near the plant, has been reduced to 4,000 in 1993 from 200,000 in 1981.
"A power plant is the biggest predator there is," said William Smith, the executive director of Fish Unlimited, based on Shelter Island, N.Y.
The Critical Mass Energy Project, part of Ralph Nader's organization, Public Citizen, said the ruling raised hopes that the plant would never reopen.
"The longer the reactor is shut down, hopefully the management at N.U. will read the handwriting on the wall and realize it's pouring good money after bad to restart an aged reactor," said James P. Riccio, a staff attorney for the group.
Millstone 2, one of the country's 103 active reactors, began operating in 1975 and has been shut down since Feb. 20, 1996. The reactor sits between two others. Millstone 1 is being decommissioned, and Millstone 3 is operating. The plants were ordered shut down by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1996 because of design, safety and paperwork problems.
At Hillyer's Tackle Shop, near the reactors at Waterford in southeastern Connecticut, the news was greeted with whistles. Jon Hillyer, the owner, said that in the late 1960's two anglers could easily catch 20 to 40 flounder in an afternoon. Now, they might come back with two. "That plant is like a big vacuum cleaner, sucking up Long Island Sound," Hillyer said.
A spokesman for Northeast Utilities, Terrence V. McIntosh, said the ruling could lead to blackouts or brownouts this summer, if the company could not meet its power needs. One alternative, he said, would be to fire up one of its dormant fossil-fuel plants, which would mean more air pollution. McIntosh also defended the company's efforts to protect fish, saying Northeast Utilities uses "the best technology available to minimize the effect on the marine life out there."
"We still believe that Millstone Unit 2 is a safe plant and should be able to operate," he said.
The ultimate solution to the fish-killing problem is a cooling tower, which recirculates the water and uses air to cool it. That could cost as much as $80 million. But an intermediate method, called a fish return system, would cost just $2 million. It uses a ladder and a sluiceway to return fish that are caught on the screens. McIntosh said the company was "strongly considering that." Such a system is currently in operation on Millstone 3.
Smith of Fish Unlimited criticized the company for starting up the plant, even at low power, on Monday, at a time when Judge Hale was hearing evidence in the group's suit against the utility. Calling the move "incredibly arrogant," Smith said: "They're killing an incredible number of fish right now. In good faith, they should power down." Northeast Utilities said it would not do so, because it wanted to stick as closely to its schedule as possible.
Judge Hale offered few clues to the reasons for issuing the temporary restraining order, writing that the environmental groups "have made out a prima facie case," but adding that the utility also had presented "a strong front." Northeast Utilities said it was disappointed by the ruling, but would abide by it and would not appeal.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lawyer for Riverkeeper, a group dedicated to cleaning Long Island Sound, said the ruling was a pleasant surprise, since utilities have so many resources that they are hard to fight. "If a fisherman out on Long Island Sound caught an undersized flounder out of season, they would be fined $250 a fish," Kennedy said. "Millstone wants the right to break the law."
The environmental groups, which include Don't Waste Connecticut, based in New Haven, and three Long Island organizations, concede that the fish issue is not unique to nuclear plants; fossil-fuel generators pose a similar risk.
The state's utility-deregulation law requires the company to put its nuclear assets up for auction by 2004, but McIntosh said the company planned to bid on the Millstone plants. "They're a valuable asset to the company," he said.
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26. Top Consumers Energy Executive: Federal Inaction Will Cost Utility Customers $32 Million Through 2004
Apr 28, 1999 (/PRNewswire/) - Infoseek http://www.dogpile.com/ [search "nuclear OR plutonium OR uranium OR radioactiv???"]
LANSING, Mich. -- The federal government's refusal to live up to its obligation to accept spent nuclear fuel will cost Consumers Energy's electricity customers more than $32 million through 2004, a top utility executive told lawmakers today.
"The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) was supposed to have a repository for spent nuclear fuel ready by January 1998. The DOE isn't even close. That means the customers of Consumers Energy and every other nuclear utility are paying twice: Once for the development of the national repository and again for the storage at power plants," said John W. Clark, senior vice president of Consumers Energy.
Clark testified before the Michigan House Energy and Technology Committee. He urged lawmakers to vote for a resolution calling on the federal government to meet its obligations to open a national repository for spent nuclear fuel. The resolution is sponsored by Rep. Mary Ann Middaugh, who chairs the House Energy and Technology Committee.
Middaugh's resolution notes that a 1982 federal law requires the DOE to build a permanent storage facility for spent nuclear fuel. DOE has been working on a proposed site at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
Clark pointed out that customers of electric utilities with nuclear power plants continue to pay more than $600 million a year for a national repository. The federal Nuclear Waste Fund totals $15 billion. The Michigan contribution to this fund is nearly $700 million, with $200 million coming from Consumers Energy customers, since its inception.
"Funding hasn't been a problem, yet DOE says 2010 is the earliest that it expects to have a facility open," Clark said. "It took the United States less than a decade to put a man on the moon, yet it's going to take nearly 30 years to open this repository. I find it difficult to comprehend why the federal government has failed to act."
Passage of the resolution will tell the Congress and the federal government that Michigan lawmakers and citizens want a facility completed at Yucca Mountain, Clark said. Clark also urged lawmakers to support a federal bill introduced by Michigan U.S. Rep. Fred Upton that would require the DOE to create an interim storage facility. "Passage and enactment of the Upton bill is imperative. The federal government must conclude that one federally built and licensed site in the Nevada desert is preferable to four sites in Michigan and another 100 sites across the United States," Clark said.
The House Commerce Committee recently approved the Upton bill and sent it to the full House for consideration.
The spent fuel is being stored at the nation's 103 nuclear reactors in 34 states. Many of the reactor units are running out of room in their original storage facilities.
Consumers Energy's Palisades plant has used a dry cask system approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to hold some of its spent fuel since May 1993. To date, 13 of the concrete and steel casks are being used and another five are scheduled to be filled, starting this May.
The utility's Big Rock Point plant was shut down in 1997 and is being decommissioned. The plant's spent fuel is scheduled to be transferred to seven casks in May 2002. The casks will be kept in a secure area and monitored as the plant site is returned to its natural state.
"The lack of a national repository for spent nuclear fuel will add a number of years to our efforts to return Big Rock Point to a green field," Clark pointed out.
Consumers Energy, the principal subsidiary of CMS Energy Corporation (NYSE: CMS), is Michigan's largest utility providing natural gas and electricity to more than six million of the state's nine and one-half million residents in all 68 Lower Peninsula counties.
For more information about Consumers Energy, visit our website at www.consumersenergy.com SOURCE Consumers Energy
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27. Private Spy in Space to Rival Military's
By WILLIAM J. BROAD, April 27, 1999 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/042799sci-spy-satellites.html
Satellite Photo Example: http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/042799sci-spy-satellite.1.jpg
If all goes well Tuesday, years of planning, delay and debate will culminate in the launching of the world's most powerful civilian spacecraft for observing the Earth and its human dramas, inaugurating the first real rival to military spies in the sky.
The satellite, built by Lockheed Martin for Space Imaging, a Colorado company, is to be hurled from a California launching pad into an orbit some 420 miles high, where its cameras will be able to record cars, homes, hot tubs, roads, buildings, bridges, convoys, tanks, jets, missiles and mass graves -- though not individual people.
And before the year is out, two more American companies plan to loft reconnaissance craft with similar powers. In all, a dozen or so are expected to be launched in the next decade.
Though civilian "remote sensing" satellites have been observing the Earth since 1972, their images are wide-scale and the details fuzzy. The new surveillance technology is likely to be a powerful new tool for miners, geographers, urban planners and disaster-relief officials, to name a few potential clients. But the sharp-eyed cameras to be launched raise fears, too, about lost privacy and the possibility that images from such satellites will be just as valuable to adversaries like Slobodan Milosevic.
Experts on space reconnaissance in and out of the Federal Government agree that the national security implications of the new technology have been inadequately thought out -- a worry thrown into sharp focus by the crisis in the Balkans.
"Any time a powerful new technology is introduced, there's a battle over the uses to which it's put," Christopher Simpson, a reconnaissance expert at American University in Washington, said in an interview. "Here, the potential for beneficial uses is very high, on balance. But the potential for abuse certainly exists and we'll no doubt see some of that."
The Clinton Administration released this genie in 1994 when it lifted technical restrictions on private companies, letting them build a new generation of satellites that could peer down to see objects on the ground as small as a yard wide -- enough to distinguish between a car and a truck. Even white lines on the black asphalt of parking lots are said to be discernible.
Today, the new companies organized to take advantage of the change have backlogs of orders, including at least $1 billion from Federal intelligence agencies eager to supplement their spy satellites.
Indeed, governments -- and military forces -- at home and abroad are expected to be top customers for years to come.
"The militaries have a well-developed idea of what they want and have the money to pay for it," said Albert D. Wheelon, a former Central Intelligence Agency official who helped run the nation's early spy satellites and is now retired. "On the civilian side, I think that will take a long time, like computers did."
The art of photographing the earth from outer space began when military spy craft were first lofted in 1960. Over the years, their vision sharpened, and military craft, particularly American craft, are still the undisputed leaders, their cameras said to be strong enough to see a car's license plate.
Until recently, photos from commercial satellites have been much fuzzier, revealing only large features like fields, lakes, rivers and mountains. But little by little, their cameras have improved.
Today, France, India and Russia sell the best commercial photos taken from outer space. The sharpest of all are Russian and show objects on the ground as small as two meters, or about six feet, enough detail to allow users to see tanks and other large military objects.
In December 1997, Earthwatch Inc. of Longmont, Colo., lofted a satellite meant to see features as small as 10 feet. But the craft failed in orbit, prompting American rivals to tread with caution. While many other American craft of the improved class are still in planning stages, no others have gone into service.
But Space Imaging is now ready to leapfrog ahead with a camera that sees objects as small as one meter, or about three feet -- the sharpest ever for civilian craft. Privately held and based in Denver, the company says it has about $700 million from a consortium of backers made up of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Mitsubishi and other international partners.
The company has 285 employees. Its president is Jeffrey K. Harris, who from 1994 to 1996 ran the National Reconnaissance Office, the secretive Federal group that builds and runs the Government's spy satellites.
Today's launching was first planned for December 1997 but was delayed after the Earthwatch failure. If all goes well, a nine-story Athena II rocket made, like the satellite, by Lockheed Martin, will carry the newest spy satellite aloft at 2:21 P.M. from Vandenberg Air Force Base, on the California coast north of Los Angeles. Because of its ability to send satellites into a north-south orbit that covers most of the Earth, the base is the launching site for most Government spy satellites that carry cameras.
The new spacecraft is a lightweight at just 0.8 tons. About 15 feet long with its solar panels extended, it runs on just 1,200 watts of power -- a bit more than a toaster. At its heart is the same kind of telescope that Isaac Newton invented: a round mirror with a curved surface gathers faint light, which is then magnified for human viewers.
In the spacecraft, a more complex version of this telescope points down toward Earth rather than up at the stars, gathering faint reflections from ground objects. Color and black-and-white television cameras then turn the resulting images into radio signals beamed to Earth.
Eastman Kodak, a top Federal contractor for optical espionage, built the telescope system. Its main mirror is 27 inches wide and so smooth that if it were 100 miles across the biggest bump would be 0.08 inches high.
Overall, the telescope is about five feet long. This feat of miniaturization allows the launching to be relatively low cost and is the kind of technical advance helping make possible the new generation of civil spy satellites.
Speeding around the planet at four miles a second, the spacecraft is to orbit once every 98 minutes, passing over all regions except the poles and able to photograph any particular spot on the ground once every one-to-three days. The craft is known as Ikonos 1, after the Greek word for image.
"We believe it will fundamentally change the approach to many forms of information that we use in business and our private lives," said John R. Copple, the chief executive of Space Imaging.
The first photos will go up for sale two to three months after the satellite goes into orbit, company officials say. A second craft, Ikonos 2, is ready for launching, but the date has not been set. The satellites are identical and are designed to function for up to seven years.
Copple, the company's head, said that photos from Ikonos (pronounced eye-KOH-nos) would cost $25 to $300 a square mile and that the minimum size of the ground area would probably be larger than a square mile. The company is taking orders and eventually plans to sell the imagery via its Web site, www.spaceimaging.com.
Commercial rivals also eager to launch this year are Orbimage, of Dulles, Va., and Earthwatch, which is still hard at work despite its 1997 setback. Both companies are building satellites with one-meter resolution.
Copple of Space Imaging said that military organizations from the United States and other countries would make up half his company's market at first but that their share would dwindle as civilians discovered the images. "The marketplace will surprise us all," he said.
Some experts worry about unhappy surprises, like terrorists' exploiting the imagery to plan attacks, for example.
"I don't think the Administration has thought through the implications," said Henry Sokolski, a Pentagon official in the Bush Administration who now runs the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, a private group in Washington.
In one twist, civilians are already using space photographs to track military arms. Such uses are expected to skyrocket as more powerful cameras come into play. Experts say such prying can promote peace by reducing military secrecy and false governmental claims.
"It provides an independent check on what the government is saying, for example about mass graves and other wartime atrocities in the Balkans," said John E. Pike, head of a space-reconnaissance project at the Federation of American Scientists, a private group in Washington.
Since 1994, when Clinton allowed commercial interests to use the powerful technology, the most contentious issue has been how to keep foes from getting the new images, especially in wartime. The Commerce Department, which licenses the craft, demands that Washington be allowed to exercise what experts call "shutter control," basically an abrupt cutoff of image sales.
To date, no restrictions have been proposed publicly for the Balkans, and industry officials say they expect none.
"We're fighting an air war," not one on the ground where the massing of troops for a surprise assault could be a key factor, said Copple of Space Imaging. "From a military standpoint, the only thing it's good for is damage assessment."
But other experts disagree, saying important details of allied military planning might be jeopardized by the new images, "particularly if we're building up for ground troops," said Pike of the Federation of American Scientists.
Gen. Richard B. Myers of the Air Force, head of the United States Space Command, which orchestrates the nation's military space activities, said earlier this month that Washington had yet to think through what to do in times of armed conflict.
"There's going to be risk in operations like this when you're selling what can be used against you," he told the annual meeting of the United States Space Foundation, a private space-policy group.
Keith R. Hall, the director of the National Reconnaissance Office, told the same group that today's scheduled lofting of the commercial spy satellite would force the issue.
"We're just in the beginning stages of developing the policies on this," he said, adding that the launching "will probably be the impetus for the Government to get its act together."
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- Fourth of eight messages - ______________________
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Message: 7 Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 13:07:52 -0400
Subject: NucNews-1-Int'l 4/29/99 - Depleted Uranium in Balkans & the World (5)
1. A SPECIAL REPORT - The Trail of a Bullet
The armor-piercing wonders of depleted uranium helped win the Gulf War. As it is loaded for use in Kosovo, questions about its long-term dangers linger. First of two parts.
Scott Peterson, APRIL 29, 1999 Christian Science Monitor http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/04/29/fp1s2-csm.shtml Photo, A-10 Warthog Ammuition http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/04/29/csmimg/0429p1a.jpeg
American anti-tank gunners in the Gulf War raved about it. It was their "silver bullet," piercing the armor of Iraq's Soviet-made tanks as if they were soda cans.
Gunners became accustomed to first-round, tank-fired shots that ignited Iraqi T-72s with such force and fire that the result was dubbed "Dante's Inferno." Fired from A-10 "tank-buster" planes in 30-mm form, this bullet stopped armored convoys in their tracks.
This is the tale of a high-density bullet made of depleted uranium (DU), a low-level radioactive waste left over from the making of nuclear fuel and bombs. Because of its success, DU has already become a staple of the US military's arsenal. It has been sold by the US and Russia to other forces all over the world.
In the war over Kosovo today, NATO has loaded DU rounds into the guns of Air Force A-10s. So far, the Air Force says, this highly effective antitank ordnance has not yet been used.
Wherever it is fired, it leaves a radioactive trail. A Monitor investigation of the Persian Gulf war zone, where this bullet saw its first live action in 1991, found that it has left the desert sprinkled with radioactive and chemically toxic dust.
Clues in how DU is handled
How dangerous is this unseen residue once the battle is over - whether in Iraq's southern desert or in a Kosovo to which hundreds of thousands of refugees are meant to return?
The US military has given mixed signals. A series of Pentagon reports and regulations cite serious health risks from depleted uranium, and still stipulate stringent, moon-suit type protective gear when approaching objects hit with DU bullets.
And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires the military to have a license to make or test fire a single DU round. In part because of safety and environment concerns over DU, the US Navy opted to use tungsten for its armor-piercing bullets.
But Pentagon officials today downplay that risk and cite other Pentagon reports that back their view. They confirm that thousands of US soldiers were "unnecessarily exposed" to DU in the Gulf, adding their view that those exposures were "not medically significant."
In Iraq, however, physicians describe a sharp upward spike after the Gulf War in the kind of health diagnoses - such as cancer - associated with exposure to radiation. Iraqi veterans interviewed by the Monitor supported those claims, if only anecdotally.
Perhaps one cause among many
But any increase in Iraqi health problems may have another cause, or many causes. The Gulf War was the scene of a "toxic soup" of dangerous chemicals. The Iraqis, and some American physicians and scientists, argue that DU is one of the most dangerous.
Indeed, some Western scientists who have examined DU believe that it could be one of the factors behind Gulf War syndrome - the much-studied, little understood set of symptoms claimed by as many as 1 in 7 US Gulf War veterans.
The American military designed DU bullets in the 1970s, during the cold war, to counter Moscow's advanced T-72 tanks. Denser than lead, DU burns and self-sharpens when it hits a hard target and scorches its way through inch after inch of armor in, literally, a flash.
American forces - and, to a very small degree, their British allies - fired the 320 tons of DU that was shot across the deserts of Kuwait and southern Iraq, where most of it still lies.
But it does not lie quietly. A Monitor reporter who traveled throughout the region watched a radiation detector carried over parts of those battlefields register about 35 times normal background radiation. Portions of old tanks "killed" with DU bullets showed radiation levels 50 times above background - results similar to what US Army teams found during the war.
Risks as a breathable dust
When DU is protectively encased and carefully handled, its health risks are considered small. So if DU is outside the body, these are not especially dangerous levels of radiation.
But when it smashes at Mach II into metal, DU burns and pulverizes into dust that can soar in the heat column of a flaming tank and waft for miles on the desert wind.
It is when this dust is inhaled or ingested that it becomes most dangerous as a radioactive substance and a toxic heavy metal, some experts say.
So far, DU bullets have received only limited public attention, though the Pentagon predicts that every future battlefield is likely to be strewn with their residue.
Reporting from Iraq, Kuwait, and the US, this Monitor series examines the possible long-term effects of this powerful spinoff of the nuclear age.
If there is a connection between human suffering and DU, then its use in the future will mean that lands of conflict will remain contaminated for the 4.5 billion years - a figure comparable to the age of the solar system - that DU remains radioactive.
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2. A SPECIAL REPORT - THE TRAIL OF A BULLET
DU's global spread spurs debate over effect on humans
Scott Peterson, APRIL 29, 1999 Christian Science Monitor http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/04/29/fp12s3-csm.shtml
BAGHDAD, IRAQ - At least 17 countries already have in their arsenals bullets made from depleted uranium (DU). Many - such as Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Taiwan - get them from the United States. England and France buy DU wholesale from the US. Russia now sells DU rounds on the open market.
Such proliferation has raised unanswered questions about the long-term health effects of the hard-hitting and controversial ordnance.
Is there a continuing health risk from DU fragments and particles for civilians in Iraq and Kuwait? And if the degree of danger to human health can't be nailed down, how should future use of DU be dealt with?
Several official bodies already take serious precautions. The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), for example, requires a license to handle or test-fire DU munitions. The US Army has 14 separate NRC licenses related to the substance. The Navy and Air Force each have one NRC "master materials" license.
Workers handling DU in the US must treat it as low-level radioactive waste. Disposal typically means the substance is locked into a 30-gallon canister, sealed with plastic, then sealed again inside a 55-gallon drum and, by law, buried in licensed underground dumps. Fine particles are mixed into concrete and locked into drums.
Definitive statements about DU's health risks to humans are not easy to make, scientists say.
"We don't know everything we'd like to know," says Ron Kathren, a physics professor and director of the US Transuranium and Uranium Registries in Richland, Wash. Attached to Washington State University, the registry has studied uranium and its effect on industry workers for 30 years.
"The reason people get panicky is because DU is radioactive, but [the battlefield dose] is so small that it never approaches chemical hazard," says Mr. Kathren.
Part of the problem with DU is public misperception, says John Russell, the associate director of the registries: "You say 'uranium,' and people think of the bomb. That's not the case here."
At the heart of the health debate is this question: Do small DU particles trapped in the body emit enough radiation over time - in the form of alpha particles - to cause physical harm?
Most of the concern is focused on dust particles left after a bullet is incinerated upon impact.
Carried aloft by the wind, the small particles can work their way into the human body, where the emission of alpha particles can be extremely damaging to cells, says Douglas Collins, a health physicist for 20 years and an NRC division director of nuclear material safety in Atlanta.
A 1990 study commissioned by the Army links DU with cancer and states that "no dose is so low that the probability of effect is zero." Dr. Asaf Durakovic, who was chief of nuclear medicine at the US Department of Veterans Affairs' medical center in Wilmington, Del., from 1989 until 1997, takes that a step further. Even the smallest internal alpha dose, he says, "is a high radioactive risk."
One safety memo, written by the US Army in 1991, says a single charred DU bullet found by US forces was emitting 260 to 270 millirads of radiation per hour. (A rad is a measurement of ionizing radiation absorbed into material.)
"The current [NRC] limit for non-radiation workers is 100 millirads per year," it noted. The limit for radiation workers would be some 30 times more.
Du's critics cite incidents to bolster their case against its use.
In 1992, for instance, a German scientist found a spent DU bullet in the Iraqi desert and was later arrested and fined by a Berlin court for "releasing ionizing radiation upon the public" when he brought it home.
"You're not playing with anything innocuous," says Leonard Dietz, a nuclear scientist who worked for 28 years at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in New York.
In 1979, DU particles escaped from the National Lead Industries factory near Albany, N.Y., which manufactured DU penetrators. The particles traveled 26 miles and were noticed in a laboratory filter by Mr. Dietz. The factory was shut down in 1980 for releasing more than 0.85 pounds of DU dust into the atmosphere every month - a fraction of the 320 tons fired during the Gulf War.
"It's still hot forever," says Doug Rokke, a Pentagon DU expert until last year. "It doesn't go away, it only disperses and blows around in the wind."
The British Atomic Energy Agency, at the behest of the Ministry of Defense in 1991, tried to quantify the risk. Based on an early estimate of just 40 tons of DU used during the Gulf War, it said that that amount could cause "500,000 potential deaths."
Recently declassified, its report says this purely theoretical calculation is "obviously not realistic" because it would require every single person to inhale similar quantities. But the sheer volume does "indicate a significant problem."
The Pentagon rejects that. "The problem is that all of that stuff has to be put into people. It physically can't happen," says Col. Eric Daxon, the radiological staff officer for the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute. The possibility of DU causing serious health problems in Iraq, he says, is "exceptionally small, to the point where it should be absolutely at the bottom of the list."
Bernard Rostker, the Pentagon's special assistant for Gulf War illness, also sounds an all-clear. The Gulf War "is not an extraordinary nuclear event," he said. "This area [where DU was used], we would say, is free for any agricultural, industrial use, any personal use."
But Dr. Durakovic says those areas are still dangerous. Widespread use of DU, he told Congress in 1997, means that "the battlefields of the future will be unlike any ... in history."
The result is that "injury and death will remain lingering threats to 'survivors' of the battle for years and decades into the future," he testified. "The battlefield will remain a killing zone long after the cessation of hostilities."
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3. A SPECIAL REPORT - THE TRAIL OF A BULLET
A rare visit to Iraq's radioactive battlefield
Scott Peterson, APRIL 29, 1999 Christian Science Monitor http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/04/29/fp13s1-csm.shtml
Photo Battlefield "Still Hot" http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/04/29/csmimg/0429p13.jpeg
KHARANJ, SOUTHERN IRAQ - The men who guard the ruins of the remote Kharanj oil-pumping station near Iraq's border with Saudi Arabia don't wander around much.
Destroyed by US air raids during the 1991 Gulf War, parts of this facility remain "hot" - radioactive. So the guards confine themselves to one small building to avoid wreckage contaminated by US bullets made with depleted uranium (DU).
The wind is a constant companion in this desert, but today it has eased. Driving into the former battlefield, as on a rare visit last year facilitated by Iraqi authorities at the request of The Christian Science Monitor, this reporter passes south through Iraq's rich Rumeila oil fields and along the area near Kuwait, which is pockmarked with rusting tanks and vehicles.
These machines were targets of armor-piercing DU "penetrators," the bullet of choice for American tank gunners and pilots during the Gulf War. Pentagon figures show that at least 860,000 DU rounds were fired.
Along a side road, a group of falconers are hunting, unaware of the potential risks, while elsewhere two men search for mushrooms.
Radiation occurs almost everywhere in nature, at low levels known as "background." But DU is a concentrated form, nuclear scientists say. It is the "tailings" left over from the enrichment process that produces nuclear fuel and bombs. When a DU bullet burns on impact, it turns to particles that emit potentially dangerous radiation.
Here, where the guards gingerly carry out their duty at the Kharanj pumping station, clues of radiation are plentiful. The bullets are now spent. The depleted uranium was either turned into dust or broke into fragments that now corrode in the sand.
But among the clues is one DU round the size of a thick marker pen that was fired from the sky at a 45-degree angle and grazed a wall. It created an eight-inch-long skid mark of encrusted DU particles. Mahmoud Hossein from Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission handled a radiation detector in a visit to the site observed by the Monitor.
Swept over the black specks of DU dust near a bullet-entry hole in a protected doorway, the instrument erupts with staccato chirping. Its meter surges to 35 times background levels, causing Mr. Hossein to appear startled.
The fighting that took place on these battlefields seven years ago (see map, page 14) was so intense and released so many pulverized DU particles that the entire area was almost certainly drenched in radioactive and toxic grit.
In the midst of the Rumeila north oil field, Iraqi officials examine a destroyed armored vehicle mired in wet sand. The turret had been blown off and sits 50 yards away. It is radioactive, along with the toe of a military boot.
But, for some, the danger is easy to ignore or to miss altogether.
An Iraqi officer jumps into the rusting hulk, radiation meter in hand, even as DU particles inside makes the instrument sing.
A glance behind shows that this site often gets local visitors. On the moist sand, clearly defined, is the fresh imprint of a bare human foot.
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4. A SPECIAL REPORT - THE TRAIL OF A BULLET
Will America risk use of DU in Kosovo?
Scott Peterson, APRIL 29, 1999 Christian Science Monitor http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/04/29/fp12s2-csm.shtml Photo Tank Hunters: http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/04/29/csmimg/0429p12a.jpeg
If depleted uranium (DU) has not already been fired in Yugoslavia, what are the prospects that it will be?
The US Army has no DU munitions "in theater" and no plans to send them, says Lt. Col. Bill Wheelehan, an Army weapons spokesman at the Pentagon. But the US Air Force does have DU capability in the conflict.
President Clinton announced April 13 that NATO forces were "taking our allied air campaign to the next level" against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic - and that "we are striking now at his tanks, and at his artillery."
America's best-suited plane for that task is the 1970s-designed A-10 "Warthog." It was "literally built around" a seven-barrel Gatling gun, a Pentagon report noted last year. "To further exploit the new cannon's tremendous striking power the Air Force opted to use the DU 30-mm round," the report said.
During the Gulf War, the 780,000 DU bullets shot from these planes accounted for 80 percent of all DU fired.
A-10s - which also carry an array of weapons other than DU - have been in action over Yugoslavia for weeks. The Air Force says it has the "capability" to use DU, but that it hasn't so far. "We still have not had any reports of any DU use in Kosovo," says Margaret Gidding, a US Air Force spokeswoman.
Chris Hellman, a senior analyst with the Center for Defense Information in Washington, finds that surprising: "If it is in fact true [that DU has not been used], it would require the Air Force to go significantly out of its way not to use DU," he says. DU rounds, he says, are the "standard load" for the A-10.
NATO used DU rounds against Bosnian Serb targets in 1995. Fragments were tested in Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital, so Serbs are aware of the propaganda value of any allied use of the bullets. A subcommission of the UN Human Rights Commission resolved in 1996 that DU was a weapon of mass destruction that should be banned.
"If you go after tanks that are moving, and ground forces, that is typically when those 30-mm depleted-uranium rounds would be used," says the Air Force's Ms. Gidding. Now, she says, the A-10s are instead using missiles.
What about President Clinton's "next level" of tank-busting? "I heard his comments as well," says Gidding. "But we have no reports that DU has been used."
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5. WORLD - A SPECIAL REPORT - THE TRAIL OF A BULLET
DU's global spread spurs debate over effect on humans
Scott Peterson, APRIL 29, 1999 Christian Science Monitor http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/04/29/fp12s3-csm.shtml
BAGHDAD, IRAQ - At least 17 countries already have in their arsenals bullets made from depleted uranium (DU). Many - such as Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Taiwan - get them from the United States. England and France buy DU wholesale from the US. Russia now sells DU rounds on the open market.
Such proliferation has raised unanswered questions about the long-term health effects of the hard-hitting and controversial ordnance.
Is there a continuing health risk from DU fragments and particles for civilians in Iraq and Kuwait? And if the degree of danger to human health can't be nailed down, how should future use of DU be dealt with?
Several official bodies already take serious precautions. The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), for example, requires a license to handle or test-fire DU munitions. The US Army has 14 separate NRC licenses related to the substance. The Navy and Air Force each have one NRC "master materials" license.
Workers handling DU in the US must treat it as low-level radioactive waste. Disposal typically means the substance is locked into a 30-gallon canister, sealed with plastic, then sealed again inside a 55-gallon drum and, by law, buried in licensed underground dumps. Fine particles are mixed into concrete and locked into drums.
Definitive statements about DU's health risks to humans are not easy to make, scientists say.
"We don't know everything we'd like to know," says Ron Kathren, a physics professor and director of the US Transuranium and Uranium Registries in Richland, Wash. Attached to Washington State University, the registry has studied uranium and its effect on industry workers for 30 years.
"The reason people get panicky is because DU is radioactive, but [the battlefield dose] is so small that it never approaches chemical hazard," says Mr. Kathren.
Part of the problem with DU is public misperception, says John Russell, the associate director of the registries: "You say 'uranium,' and people think of the bomb. That's not the case here."
At the heart of the health debate is this question: Do small DU particles trapped in the body emit enough radiation over time - in the form of alpha particles - to cause physical harm?
Most of the concern is focused on dust particles left after a bullet is incinerated upon impact.
Carried aloft by the wind, the small particles can work their way into the human body, where the emission of alpha particles can be extremely damaging to cells, says Douglas Collins, a health physicist for 20 years and an NRC division director of nuclear material safety in Atlanta.
A 1990 study commissioned by the Army links DU with cancer and states that "no dose is so low that the probability of effect is zero." Dr. Asaf Durakovic, who was chief of nuclear medicine at the US Department of Veterans Affairs' medical center in Wilmington, Del., from 1989 until 1997, takes that a step further. Even the smallest internal alpha dose, he says, "is a high radioactive risk."
One safety memo, written by the US Army in 1991, says a single charred DU bullet found by US forces was emitting 260 to 270 millirads of radiation per hour. (A rad is a measurement of ionizing radiation absorbed into material.)
"The current [NRC] limit for non-radiation workers is 100 millirads per year," it noted. The limit for radiation workers would be some 30 times more.
Du's critics cite incidents to bolster their case against its use.
In 1992, for instance, a German scientist found a spent DU bullet in the Iraqi desert and was later arrested and fined by a Berlin court for "releasing ionizing radiation upon the public" when he brought it home.
"You're not playing with anything innocuous," says Leonard Dietz, a nuclear scientist who worked for 28 years at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in New York.
In 1979, DU particles escaped from the National Lead Industries factory near Albany, N.Y., which manufactured DU penetrators. The particles traveled 26 miles and were noticed in a laboratory filter by Mr. Dietz. The factory was shut down in 1980 for releasing more than 0.85 pounds of DU dust into the atmosphere every month - a fraction of the 320 tons fired during the Gulf War.
"It's still hot forever," says Doug Rokke, a Pentagon DU expert until last year. "It doesn't go away, it only disperses and blows around in the wind."
The British Atomic Energy Agency, at the behest of the Ministry of Defense in 1991, tried to quantify the risk. Based on an early estimate of just 40 tons of DU used during the Gulf War, it said that that amount could cause "500,000 potential deaths."
Recently declassified, its report says this purely theoretical calculation is "obviously not realistic" because it would require every single person to inhale similar quantities. But the sheer volume does "indicate a significant problem."
The Pentagon rejects that. "The problem is that all of that stuff has to be put into people. It physically can't happen," says Col. Eric Daxon, the radiological staff officer for the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute. The possibility of DU causing serious health problems in Iraq, he says, is "exceptionally small, to the point where it should be absolutely at the bottom of the list."
Bernard Rostker, the Pentagon's special assistant for Gulf War illness, also sounds an all-clear. The Gulf War "is not an extraordinary nuclear event," he said. "This area [where DU was used], we would say, is free for any agricultural, industrial use, any personal use."
But Dr. Durakovic says those areas are still dangerous. Widespread use of DU, he told Congress in 1997, means that "the battlefields of the future will be unlike any ... in history."
The result is that "injury and death will remain lingering threats to 'survivors' of the battle for years and decades into the future," he testified. "The battlefield will remain a killing zone long after the cessation of hostilities."
______________________
- First of eight messages - ______________________
_______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________
Message: 8 Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 13:08:07 -0400
Subject: NucNews-2-Int'l 4/29/99 - Depleted Uranium (2); Russia (3); Yugoslavia files World Court; IIndia/China New World Order; Euro Aerospace Missiles
[At last, more news on depleted uranium -- Los Angeles Times and Christian Science Monitor have now spoken up in the U.S. Hooray!]
6. U.S. fighters armed with uranium bullets - paper
April 28 1999 (Reuters) http://www.dogpile.com/ [search "nuclear OR plutonium OR uranium OR radioactiv???"]
BOSTON - U.S. Air Force A-10 fighters used in NATO's bombing campaign over Kosovo are armed with bullets that leave a radioactive trail and may be linked to Gulf War syndrome, the Christian Science Monitor will report on Thursday.
Air Force officials told the daily newspaper that the bullets made with depleted uranium (DU) have not yet been used in Yugoslavia.
The DU rounds were used in the 1991 Gulf War and against Bosnian Serb targets in 1995, said the report which was made available to Reuters before publication.
When the bullets hit their target, the DU burns and scorches its way through armour in a flash, making them extremely effective against tanks, the report said.
The U.S. Army has no DU bullets ``in theatre'' and has no plans to send them, Lt. Colonel Bill Wheelehan, a Pentagon spokesman told the Boston-based newspaper.
The bullets were designed in the 1970s during the Cold War to counter Russia's advanced T-72 tanks, the Monitor reported.
Pentagon officials have played down the risks of the spent ammunition, the report said. The Pentagon confirmed U.S. soldiers were ``unnecessarily exposed'' to DU during the Gulf War but called the exposures ``not medically significant,'' the report said.
Doctors in Iraq have described a sharp increase in radiation-related illnesses such as cancer after the 1991 Gulf War. Some Western scientists told the Monitor that DU could be one factor behind Gulf War syndrome.
The little understood ailment, characterised by extreme fatigue, joint and muscle pain, concentration and memory problems, rashes and fever, has been reported by as many as one in seven U.S. Gulf War veterans.
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7. DISPATCH FROM KOSOVO
Unexploded Weapons Pose Deadly Threat on Ground
Arms: Cluster bombs turn parts of province into a no man's land. Number of amputations in capital skyrockets.
By PAUL WATSON, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, April 28, 1999 http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/FRONT/t000038109.html
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia--Even in the age of smart bombs guided to targets by laser beams, dumb weapons that fail to explode, or lie in wait to kill later, are turning parts of Yugoslavia into a no man's land.
Unexploded bombs litter more of Yugoslavia with each day that its war with NATO drags on. Adding to the concern is the possibility that armor-piercing shells, controversial weapons that some critics argue can release dangerous levels of radioactive waste, will be widely used by the alliance in Kosovo.
Also, both Yugoslav troops and guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army have been laying land mines since at least early March, when the threat of North Atlantic Treaty Organization airstrikes loomed closer and the civil war escalated.
During five weeks of airstrikes, witnesses interviewed here say, NATO warplanes have dropped cluster bombs that scatter smaller munitions over wide areas.
In military jargon, the smaller munitions are bomblets. Dr. Rade Grbic, a surgeon and director of the main hospital in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, sees proof every day that the almost benign term masks a tragic impact.
Grbic, who saved the lives of two ethnic Albanian boys wounded when other boys played with a cluster bomb they found Saturday, said he has never done so many amputations as he has since victims of the weapon started coming in.
"I have been an orthopedist for 15 years now, working in a crisis region where we often have injuries, but neither I nor my colleagues have ever seen such horrific wounds as those caused by cluster bombs," he said through a translator Tuesday.
"They are wounds that lead to disabilities to a great extent. The limbs are so crushed that the only remaining option is amputation. It's awful, awful." Since cluster bombs lay down a carpet of explosions, they are often the weapon of choice against moving tanks and other military vehicles, which NATO says are at the top of its target list in Kosovo, a southern province of Yugoslavia's dominant republic of Serbia.
But in a civil war like Yugoslavia's, when civilians are never far from military targets, the risks of hurting noncombatants with cluster bombs are high.
Pristina's hospital alone has treated between 300 and 400 people wounded by cluster bombs since NATO's air war began March 24, Grbic said. Roughly half of those victims were civilians, he said.
Since this number doesn't include those killed by cluster bombs, and doesn't account for the wounded in other regions of Yugoslavia, the casualty toll probably is much higher, he said.
"Most people are victims of the time-activated cluster bombs that explode sometime after they fall," he said. "People think it's safe, and then they get hurt.
"There are villages here where large portions of the area cannot be accessed because of a large number of unexploded cluster bombs," he added. "Even when all of this is over, it will be a big problem because no one knows the exact number of unexploded bombs."
Although NATO and Pentagon spokespersons routinely refuse to say what types of weapons are dropped on Yugoslavia by their warplanes, evidence of cluster bombs isn't hard to find in Kosovo.
One of the most recent indications was the remains of a yellow canister found about 30 yards from where it exploded Saturday. The blast killed five ethnic Albanian children, ages 3 to 15, in the village of Doganovic, about 30 miles south of Pristina.
The boys found the small canister in a field while herding cattle. While two of the boys went to tell an adult, the others apparently tried to pry it open with a knife.
Hours after the blast, the knife lay covered in blood beside a shallow blast crater. The two boys who went for help were about 20 yards away when they were hit by flying shrapnel, Grbic said.
The yellow canister is the same size and color as one of 202 bomblets that fall when a 1,000-pound CBU-87--a low-tech mainstay of the U.S. Air Force's cluster bomb arsenal--releases them in midair.
Although the explosion tore several holes through the canister, the letters A/B and the numbers 20-30 and 104-012 were still legible on the outside.
A telltale metal ring, which is known as a spider and clips over a bomblet's top, also was near the small crater. The bomblets in a CBU-87, which stands for Cluster Bomb Unit-87, can be set to explode at a certain height or time. They also can be set off by the vibrations of a passing person or vehicle. The metal casing of each bomblet is scored so that it will break up into as many as 300 pieces of shrapnel when it explodes, according to descriptions in published guides to military munitions.
Inflatable triangles and small parachutes often are attached to cluster bomblets to slow their fall, and journalists have seen numerous types and sizes at bomb sites across Kosovo during the past five weeks.
After a NATO attack on an airfield outside the southern Kosovo town of Urosevac, a drum-shaped cluster bomb dispenser lay smashed in the middle of a road that was pocked with deep baseball-sized holes.
More worrying to some experts is NATO's potential use of depleted uranium shells that can pierce armor more than 2 inches thick. The shells are suspected by some scientists of causing cancer and birth defects.
Depleted uranium shells are standard-issue ammunition on A-10 "Warthog" ground attack fighters, which already are flying over Kosovo, and Apache helicopters, which soon are expected to be operating in the province.
Although the Pentagon insists that the rounds aren't radioactive enough to harm anyone's health, scientists haven't resolved the debate, said Jean Pascal Zanders, a weapons expert at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
"It's very much an open question," Zanders, head of the institute's chemical and biological weapons project, said in a telephone interview from Stockholm.
Some Persian Gulf War veterans and the Iraqi government claim that depleted uranium shells are at least partly to blame for a higher rate of leukemia, birth defects and other ailments suffered by soldiers and civilians who were in areas where the weapons were used.
But the Pentagon's own studies show that depleted uranium weapons have no link to the various symptoms now known as Gulf War Syndrome.
"Right now, the assessments vary to a degree, and of course the whole issue of the Gulf War illnesses is one that's so highly emotional, sensitive and politicized that it is very difficult to accept at face value what any of the reports say," Zanders said.
A depleted uranium round explodes into flames when it hits an armored vehicle. Radioactive dust particles that drift in the smoke after an attack may present health risks to people not killed or injured in the initial blast, Zanders said.
The A-10s, which also carry Rockeye II cluster bombs, are armed with a 30-millimeter revolving cannon that can fire 3,900 rounds a minute. The rounds most often are made out of depleted uranium, Zanders said.
Apache helicopters are armed with a similar cannon that can fire up to 650 armor-piercing rounds a minute.
ALSO: Hidden menace lies in wait to kill or maim its victims Australia's "The Age," April 28, 1999 By PAUL WATSON PRISTINA, WEDNESDAY April 28, 1999 [LA Times rewrite] http://www.theage.com.au/daily/990429/news/news11.html
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8. Russia Warns Against "Terrorist" Bombing Of Yugoslav Nuclear Plants
MOSCOW, Apr. 27, 1999, Agence France Presse / Russia Today, Apr. 28, 1999 http://www.russiatoday.com/rtoday/news/1999042709.html
Moscow served notice Monday it would regard as a terrorist act any NATO bombing -- even accidental -- of Yugoslav nuclear installations.
Atomic Energy Minister Yevgeny Adamov, quoted by Interfax, said that if NATO directed a missile against any nuclear plants situated on Yugoslav territory or in a neighboring country Russia would regard this as "an act of nuclear terrorism."
The United States had been the first to insist it was inadmissible to conduct military actions near nuclear sites, the minister said.
"Today it is up to us to remind them of this," said Adamov, who has sent a letter with this message to Washington.
Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said recently there were "three nuclear reactors belonging to research centers in Yugoslavia and four nuclear reactors directly inside the conflict zone, and they are permanently in operation."
French experts say there are no nuclear power stations in Yugoslavia and only two small, low-power research reactors are in operation.
The only nuclear power stations operating in adjacent states are those at Kozlody in Bulgaria 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Yugoslav frontier, and at Paks in southern Hungary.
Adamov also suggested that the NATO bombing had complicated the issue of ratification by the Russian parliament of the Russian-U.S. START 2 nuclear disarmament accord.
"Even negotiations in the Duma (lower house of parliament) on START 2 are impossible at present," he said.
Because of the Kosovo crisis, the Duma on April 2 postponed indefinitely a debate on ratification of accords signed in 1993 and ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1996.
Russia has consistently opposed the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia since hostilities began and froze its relations with the North Atlantic Alliance.
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9. Russia up in arms over new NATO strategic doctrine 08:58 a.m. Apr 27, 1999 Eastern
By Martin Nesirky, MOSCOW, April 27 1999 (Reuters) - Infoseek http://www.dogpile.com/ [search "nuclear OR plutonium OR uranium OR radioactiv???"]
Russia's defence minister savaged NATO's new strategy and enlargement plans on Tuesday, saying Moscow would now have to reshape its own security doctrine and review its vast nuclear and conventional forces.
At a 50th anniversary summit in Washington last week, NATO leaders agreed a Strategic Concept that extends the alliance's sphere of operations and may open the way for action without U.N. Security Council backing.
``All this forces Russia to reconsider many provisions for ensuring its own military security,'' Marshal Igor Sergeyev told reporters in his first major statement on the summit outcome.
``This covers conventional forces and strategic nuclear deterrence forces,'' said Sergeyev, who led atomic forces before becoming minister two years ago to speed up military reforms.
He reiterated criticism of NATO air strikes on Yugoslavia, saying the whole post-Cold War security picture was at stake.
``If no peaceful solution is found in Yugoslavia, the world, in my view, will look entirely different from the way it looked before,'' the minister said in televised comments.
Sergeyev said Russia would never agree to the Baltic states -- Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania -- joining NATO. The three states are former Soviet republics that border Russia. NATO said it would keep the door open for up to nine potential new members, including the Baltics.
``This would be a great threat to Russia,'' he said. ``We will take all necessary measures to minimise the military threat that would follow from such a development.''
The defence ministry could not confirm news agency reports that Sergeyev would visit NATO-member Norway next Tuesday for talks with North European defence ministers. Interfax news agency said he would outline his complaints about NATO there.
A leading Russian daily newspaper, Izvestia, spelled out on Tuesday what Sergeyev's overall security review could involve.
In a front-page report, it said President Boris Yeltsin's advisory Security Council would meet later this week to consider military proposals to extend the service life of Soviet-era nuclear weapons, aircraft and submarines.
``This week, the Security Council will, in all likelihood, have to back these proposals,'' Izvestia said.
It said among them were plans to keep 10 Soviet-era Kalmar missile-carrying submarines, code-named Delta III by NATO, up to 2005 instead of retiring them next year.
The service life of RS-20 intercontinental ballistic missiles, known to NATO as Satan, would also be extended under the proposals. Long-range bomber aircraft would also be kept on station longer and Moscow may even ask Ukraine to return some Soviet-era strategic planes.
The defence ministry would not comment directly on the Izvestia story, but a spokesman told Reuters Russia was looking to modernise its nuclear and conventional forces.
Sergeyev told the military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda that Russia's new military doctrine would be completed in three months and presented to Yeltsin for approval.
It is not clear how Russia, in the depths of an economic crisis, could afford an overhaul or re-equipping of its forces. The emphasis hitherto has rather been on trimming and merging.
Interfax quoted First Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Maslyukov as saying Russia had neither the means nor the need to reassess defence spending.
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10. Russia Says Kosovo Peace Possible
By The Associated Press, April 29, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Russia-Yugoslavia.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia announced today it has a new plan to solve the Yugoslav crisis and put an international peacekeeping force into Kosovo under U.N. control -- if NATO halts its airstrikes.
Viktor Chernomyrdin, who heads Moscow's efforts on finding a political solution to the crisis, said he would present ``concrete proposals'' in Bonn, Rome and Belgrade today and Friday. But the key precondition is a halt to airstrikes, the former prime minister said before leaving Moscow for Germany.
``What talks can there be otherwise? It is useless trying to resolve the problem under bombs,'' Chernomyrdin said.
There appeared little chance that Chernomyrdin's mission would produce any quick results. NATO has insisted it will not halt the airstrikes until Yugoslav forces pull out of Kosovo and are replaced by a peacekeeping force that includes alliance troops.
The Russian plan calls for the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from Kosovo and the deployment of a U.N. force with a substantial Russian component. Chernomyrdin did not say if NATO nations would participate in the proposed U.N. force.
The U.N. must play the key role in solving the crisis and restoring peace, Chernomyrdin said.
``In the Balkans everything must be done under the aegis of the United Nations, which must play a colossal role in the settlement,'' he said.
Chernomyrdin met with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan before leaving for Germany. Annan was to meet later today with President Boris Yeltsin, Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov and Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov. The foreign ministers of Greece and Canada were also to have talks with Russian officials on Kosovo.
Chernomyrdin has raised hopes several times in recent days of a diplomatic breakthrough, only to see nothing develop.
And while Russia might be willing to play a major role in a peacekeeping force in Kosovo, the Russian government is broke and Western nations would presumably have to foot the bill for Moscow's involvement.
The Albanian refugees who have fled Kosovo might also not see Russian troops, who have strong sympathies with Yugoslavia, as a guarantee of safety for their return.
Moscow has become the focus of efforts to find a peaceful solution to the confrontation between NATO and Yugoslavia. But there is no sign yet that NATO or Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic will make the concessions each side believes are vital to starting peace talks.
``We're at the early stages yet,'' Annan said Wednesday. ``While the (NATO) alliance should remain firm, we should do whatever we can in search of a political settlement.''
NATO has said it will not stop the bombings until Belgrade meets its demands.
Western countries have been encouraging Russia to act as a go-between with Yugoslavia, and Moscow has welcomed the chance to play a prominent role in trying to forge a peace deal.
Russia insists, however, it will not be dragged into the conflict militarily.
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11. Yugoslavia Files World Court Cases
April 29, 1999, Associated Press http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-World-Court-Kosovo.html
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) -- In an unprecedented legal maneuver aimed at stopping NATO airstrikes, Yugoslavia filed World Court cases against 10 alliance members today, claiming their bombing campaign breaches international law.
Yugoslavia also asked the 15-judge court, the United Nations' highest judicial body, to demand an immediate halt to NATO's campaign while the case is being considered -- a process that can take years.
An emergency hearing is likely to be scheduled early next week to discuss Belgrade's request. Judges were believed to be meeting today to discuss their initial reaction.
``This morning, we filed proceedings against 10 NATO members,'' Sanja Milinkovic, legal counsel at the Yugoslav embassy in The Hague, told The Associated Press. She declined further comment and would not say which countries were named.
An American embassy official, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that the United States was one of the countries named.
The court, which has no enforcement powers and relies on states to comply voluntarily with its rulings, declined to comment on the case.
A state has never before filed simultaneous cases against 10 other countries at the World Court.
NATO began airstrikes against Yugoslavia on March 24 in an effort to stop Belgrade's purge of ethnic Albanians from the southern province of Kosovo.
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[Oh, dear, here are some more New World Order-ers]
12. India, China stress better ties at talks
NEW DELHI, April 27 1999 (Reuters) -Infoseek http://www.dogpile.com/ [search "nuclear OR plutonium OR uranium OR radioactiv???"]
India and China concluded talks on nuclear disarmament and security issues on Tuesday after stressing the need for the two neighbours to develop friendly relations, an Indian foreign ministry statement said.
``During the meeting, both sides emphasised the need for India and China to work together in developing friendly, good, neighbourly relations,'' the statement said. ``Both India and China had an important role to play in shaping the emerging new world order.''
Indian Foreign Secretary K. Raghunath, who led the talks in Beijing with Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan, said on Monday New Delhi wanted to build trust with Beijing.
Ties between the world's two most populous nations have chilled since India's nuclear explosion last May.
This month, New Delhi and Islamabad carried out ballistic missile trials, prompting more criticism from China.
India and China fought a brief border war in 1962, but since the 1980s have attempted to repair ties.
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13. British Aerospace Discusses Joint European Missile Venture
By ALAN COWELL, New York Times, April 29, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/financial/euro-missiles.html
LONDON -- British Aerospace PLC, the British military giant, acknowledged Wednesday that it was exploring a deal with French and Italian companies to create a European missile industry to challenge Raytheon of the United States, the global leader in missile manufacturing.
The news emerged one day after British Aerospace signed a formal agreement Tuesday to acquire the British General Electric Co.'s Marconi Electronics defense and missile business. The $12.7 billion takeover was first announced last January and will now be examined by regulators. It brings together British Aerospace's military hardware, such as the Tornado warplanes in action over Yugoslavia, with Marconi's military and civilian electronics and missile guidance systems. Britain's General Electric is not linked to the U.S. company of the same name.
The January deal makes British Aerospace the world's No. 3 military company after Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co. of the United States. An important but less publicized aspect of that deal also gives British Aerospace access to Marconi's 50 percent stake in a missile project with Alenia, owned by Italy's Finmeccanica.
British Aerospace already had a joint venture with the French Lagardere company's Matra subsidiary -- Matra BAe Dynamics. Mike Peters, a spokesman for British Aerospace, said the talks on a joint missile venture, first reported in Wednesday's Financial Times, were not surprising in light of British Aerospace's long-term goal of creating a pan-European military industry. "Discussions have been held and there'll be further discussions," he said. He declined to speculate on when the discussions might bear results and said their outcome depended partly on British and European regulatory approval of the British Aerospace-Marconi deal. "Until that happens, nothing can happen," he said.
Additionally, a separate merger involving Matra and Aerospatiale in France needs regulatory approval.
"What we are looking for is a restructuring to make Europe into a major player," Peters said. "We wish to grow the industry in Europe so that it can match the U.S. giants and so that, in future projects, Europe is treated as an equal partner."
News of the talks sent British Aerospace shares up 12 pence, or 2.6 percent, in London trading to 478.25 pence, or about $7.70.
Progress towards a pan-European military industry, which has strong political backing in France and Britain particularly but faces a range of hindrances, has been "glacial," said Chris Avery, a military industry analyst at Paribas.
The British Aerospace-Marconi merger infuriated Germany's DaimlerChrysler Aerospace AG, which had itself been pursuing a cross-border merger with British Aerospace, while Thomson-CSF of France had been wooing Marconi. Instead the merger created an all-British colossus with the likelihood of annual sales in excess of $20 billion -- more than twice that of any continental European rivals.
But there is a tangle of deals and joint ventures in missile manufacture that draw in many European countries. British Aerospace's joint missile venture with Lagardere's Matra subsidiary feeds into Matra's own merger with Aerospatiale, itself in the process of shedding state control. At the same time, Matra BAe Dynamics is linked with the missiles subsidiary of DaimlerChrysler Aerospace.
And an even broader array of missile manufacturers, including CASA of Spain and Saab Dynamics of Sweden, are grouped in a separate bid to produce new Meteor air-to-air missiles for Britain's Royal Air Force and other air forces.
The consolidation reflects over-capacity in the post-Cold War era. Despite regional crises, such as those in the Persian Gulf in 1990-91 and in the Balkans since 1992 -- leading to the current conflict in Kosovo -- European military budgets have been cut, leaving nationally based military industries with far more capacity to produce weapons than Europe's individual military establishments can afford or are able to absorb.
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Message: 9 Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 13:08:19 -0400
Subject: NucNews-3-Intl 4/29/99 - India New Reactor; Spain; Romania; Ukraine; Australia Jabiluka (3+); Sellafield missing plutonium/Greenpeace; Chernobyl Virus
14. New reactor being planned in Trombay
Date: 28-04-1999, The Hindu http://www.webpage.com/hindu/daily/990428/02/0228000k.htm
NEW DELHI, APRIL 27. Plans by the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to build one more research reactor in Trombay are expected to increase India's production capacity of unsafeguarded plutonium.
The new reactor will be similar to the 100-mega watt Dhruva that has been operating at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in Trombay since 1985. Dhruva was the source of plutonium for the Pokhran blasts of May 1998.
``The basic design of the proposed reactor will be similar to that of Dhruva but appropriate modifications in the design will be incorporated based on operating experience,'' BARC scientists said. The new reactor was expected to become operational by 2010, they said.
By that time, Dhruva would be 25 years old and the current 40-mw Cirus reactor, which is being refurbished, would also be nearing the end of its extended life.
Meanwhile, the Government has also approved a ``critical facility'' - a research reactor operating at almost zero watt power and used for conducting experiments in physics.
The critical facility will help scientists carry out experiments related to the design of the third-generation Advanced Heavy Water Reactors (AHWRS) that will use thorium as fuel.
In addition to the new reactor, BARC is refurbishing two of its ageing war horses - Cirus and the 43-year-old one - mega watt Apsara, the first nuclear research reactor to be installed in Asia. Apsara will be modified to test the basic design of a new multi-purpose research reactor (MPRR) being mooted by nuclear scientists.
BARC scientists have worked out on paper the design of a 5-10 mega watt multi-purpose reactor, Mr. S. K. Sharma, director of the reactor group at BARC, told visiting journalists of the Indian Science Writers Association. The design will be tested first on a small scale on the 1-mw Apsara reactor, he said. Work on Apsara modification will begin after the current refurbishing job on Cirus was over.
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15. Acerinox Accused Of Spain Radiation Irregularities
Apr 28, 1999 (Reuters) - Infoseek http://www.dogpile.com/ [search "nuclear OR plutonium OR uranium OR radioactiv???"]
MADRID - A Spanish environmental group Wednesday accused steelmaker Acerinox and Spain's nuclear watchdog of irregularities after an accident last year when radioactive material was released into the atmosphere. The Ecologistas en Accion group said Acerinox and the Nuclear Security Council (CSN) failed to inform the public in a timely fashion. It said they never fully cleared up questions over whether there were health risks for the general public or for workers of the Acerinox plant where the accident took place.
``There is a lack of transparency from both the company and the CSN. Acerinox never cleared up the issue and the CSN is concealing information from us,'' Jose Luis Garcia from Ecologistas en Accion told Reuters.
Acerinox officials declined to comment on the accusations.
``We won't make any more comment in the matter,'' an Acerinox spokesman said. ``There is no reason for criticism. As soon as we knew of the accident we reported it to the CSN.''
The Nuclear Security Council said last year that radioactive material Ceasium-137 was released into the atmosphere on May 30, 1998 after a machine containing the radioactive material was accidentally melted down in a furnace.
It took Acerinox nine days to report the accident to the Nuclear Security Council. The nuclear watchdog informed the general public three days later, after French and Italian surveillance offices reported increased radiation levels, the environmentalists said.
The Nuclear Security Council launched an investigation into the accident in June. At the time, the levels of the radiation released were not thought to pose health risks.
The environmentalists said workers at the plant in the southern Spanish province of Cadiz, where the accident took place, received contradictory information by the Nuclear Security Council on the level of radiation they suffered.
``No one really knows to how much radioactivity they were exposed to,'' Garcia said.
The environmental group said in a statement that average calculations showed that more than one worker could have been exposed to an amount of radioactivity exceeding the maximum annual permitted level.
Ecologistas en Accion have demanded a full explanation of the proceedings from the company and the nuclear watchdog.
The accident also stirred commotion outside Spain. The state prosecutor of the Italian city of Turin is investigating the incident, Ecologistas en Accion said.
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16. Romania nuclear company gets licence for reactor
Apr 28, 1999, By Radu Marinas (Reuters) - Infoseek http://www.dogpile.com/ [search "nuclear OR plutonium OR uranium OR radioactiv???"]
CERNAVODA, Romania, April 28 (Reuters) - Romania's national nuclear company Nuclearoelectrica SA received on Wednesday a licence to operate the country's sole nuclear reactor and pleaded for funds to complete a second unit.
Dan Cutoiu, head of the government commission overseeing nuclear activity, said the licence was valid from next month until April 2001 and subject to renewal.
``Romania has now officially entered the ranks of countries operating nuclear plants,'' Cutoiu told reporters after a ceremony at the plant 200 km (120 miles) east of Bucharest.
Cernavoda's first reactor, operated with heavy water and built with Canada's Candu technology, went on stream in 1996 and has been operating since with a trial licence.
Plans call for a second operator, now 40 percent complete, to be brought into the national grid. But construction was halted last year as the government sought $750 million in financing to complete construction.
``To continue work on the second reactor, we need an estimated $140 million this year,'' Nuclearoelectrica general manager Viorel Marculescu said.
Government ministers, hit by huge budget cuts as the country implements market reforms, have displayed varying degrees of enthusiasm for securing the necessary funds.
The single working reactor was shut down on the eve of the ceremony by a mechanical failure in a water tank. Officials said they hoped to restart the unit later on Wednesday.
Cernavoda was one of a series of mega-projects undertaken by communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu with initial plans calling for five reactors to be put into operation.
It is now accepted that three units, the shells of which now stand alongside the working reactor, will never be completed.
The first 750-megawatt reactor took years to complete for lack of funds and the need to replace some of the equipment and do much of the work again after international inspections.
``The Cernavoda plant is a highly modern plant, with a very low level of radioactive emission of about five one-thousandths of the acceptable threshold,'' Marculescu said.
Marculescu said the single reactor had produced more than 12 million megawatt-hours since being hooked to the national grid two and a half years ago. He said its power was produced much more cheaply than that of Romania's thermal stations.
Last year, it produced 4.9 million megawatt-hours, with a further 1.4 million in the first quarter of 1999.
Marculescu said Conel, the recently reorganised national electricity authority, was the sole buyer of Cernovoda's power as it holds a transport and distribution monopoly.
Conel presently owed Cernavoda, the equivalent of $40 million for 1998 electricity deliveries, leaving the plant unable, in turn, to pay its own debts.
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17. Nuclear reactor restarted in Ukraine after unexpected shutdown
April 28, 1999 CNN http://cnn.com/WORLD/europe/9904/28/BC-Ukraine-Nuclear.ap/index.html
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- A nuclear reactor was restarted at Ukraine's Rivne power plant after it shut down because of a malfunction, officials said Wednesday.
Reactor No. 3 was restarted Tuesday after a thorough check of its safety system, which malfunctioned and triggered the reactor shut-down Monday, the state nuclear energy company Energoatom said.
Energoatom did not say what caused the malfunction, but said no radiation leaks resulted from the incident.
Ukraine's five Soviet-era nuclear power plants operate 14 reactors, which provide more than 40 percent of the country's electricity needs.
With Ukraine's economy in decline, the nuclear plants are owed tremendous sums in unpaid energy bills and often cannot afford to finance complete equipment upgrades to prevent reactor malfunctions.
Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear plant marked the 13th anniversary of the world's worst nuclear accident on Monday, an explosion on April 26, 1986.
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18. Senate to hold inquiry into Jabiluka's approval
Tuesday 27 April, 1999 Australian Broadcasting http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-27apr1999-76.htm
The Senate is to hold an inquiry into the approval process that led to the Jabiluka uranium mine being allowed to go ahead.
The Democrat's move to hold the inquiry has been supported by all non-government parties, as well as the two Independents, Mal Colston and Brian Harradine.
The Democrats claim the Government failed to follow the proper process before approving the mine, an accusation which the Government has denied.
ALSO; Democrats to hold Government to task on Jabiluka mine Wednesday 28 April, 1999 Australian Broadcasting http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-28apr1999-14.htm
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19. Students urged to protest against Jabiluka uranium mine 27 April, 1999 Australian Broadcasting http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-27apr1999-44.htm
High school, university and TAFE students around the country are being called on to walk out out of class on Thursday.
The National Union of Students (NUS) has called the strike in protest against the Jabiluka uranium mine in the Northern Territory.
Parent groups say while they support students expressing political views, they would prefer if the action took place outside school hours.
But the NUS environmental officer Scott Alderston says young people who want a say in their future have been left with no choice other than to walk out.
"Because they don't have a vote they don't get much attention - you know with issues whether it be education, social issues, unemployment whatever," he said.
"The governments haven't spoken on behalf of them before so they are going to have to get out and start speaking for themselves.
"No longer can they be put aside and just consider OK they are not important because they don't have a vote."
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20. Lobbyists list clients on-line
By Judy Steed Toronto Star Ottawa Bureau, April 26, 1999 http://www.thestar.com/thestar/back_issues/ED19990426/news/990426NEW06_NA-SI DE26.html
OTTAWA - Corinne MacLaurin, the director of Lobbyists Registration, works out of a small Ottawa office notable for its silence.
That's partly because most of the registry's activity happens on-line.
MacLaurin handles 4,000 registrations a year representing billions of dollars worth of corporate activity at the critical intersection of public policy, private agendas and government legislation.
The registry requires lobbyists who approach the government on behalf of corporate clients to list those clients, and the issues on which they seek to influence the government.
It shows that Earnscliffe's Harry Near lobbies on behalf of MDS Health Group Ltd., a Toronto-based firm. Subject matter: privatization of governmental agencies or services in the health-care field.
Earnscliffe's Mike Robinson gives Ontario Hydro strategic advice related to its use of Russian plutonium.
Near gives strategic advice to Uranerz Exploration & Mining Ltd., a Saskatoon firm, on policy issues that affect uranium mining.
Robinson advises the B.C. Softwood Lumber Trade Council on ``allocation of softwood lumber quota'' under the Canada-U.S. free trade agreement.
The hottest topics being lobbied, MacLaurin says, are: home care; privatization of health care; education; pharmacare; environmental issues; endangered species; magazine legislation; softwood lumber.
It is free to file electronically, which is what most lobbyists do; it's also free for the public to log on to the Internet (http://www.strategis.ic.gc.ca/lobbyist), access the registry and find out who's working for whom.
It is part of the federal government's commitment to openness and transparency, MacLaurin says.
``Lobbying government is a legitimate activity. It's part of the democratic process.''
But it is open to abuse.
Which is why the registry was created by the Mulroney government in 1989. Mulroney's reforms initially called for lobbyists to reveal not only who they represented but how much they were paid.
Lobbyists successfully lobbied against having to reveal their fees; however, they now have to give more detail about the issues on which they talk to government. Contingency fees are forbidden.
Currently, 620 individual consultant-lobbyists are registered, as are 188 companies with in-house lobbyists. MacLaurin says many corporations who do their own lobbying are not registered. Changes are expected to the rules, to improve compliance.
In Ontario, legislation requiring lobbyists to register came into effect in January.
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21. OUTRAGE OVER MISSING PLUTONIUM FROM SELLAFIELD'S DISCHARGES
EcoNet, April 23, 1999 http://www.econet.apc.org/igc/en/hl/9904268749/hl1.html
UK, April 22, 1999 - Greenpeace reacted angrily to today's news (1) that over a third of plutonium discharged into the Irish Sea from British Nuclear Fuel's (BNFL) nuclear plant at Sellafield in Cumbria has gone astray.
"BNFL's logo says Sellafield is 'where science never sleeps'. This shocking evidence confirms that BNFL's science has in fact spent decades in a coma," said Mike Townsley of Greenpeace International.
Plutonium is one of the most dangerous radioactive substances known and one speck can cause cancer if inhaled. Plutonium discharged from Sellafield can blow onto coasts in sea spray, and it builds up in seafood such as mussels and lobster. A recent report from the Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority concluded that plutonium from Sellafield had contaminated all surface sea water in the Northern Seas, as far north as Greenland and the Arctic (2).
"The Government allows BNFL to pour 8 million litres of nuclear waste into the Irish Sea every day", said Townsley, "but it doesn't even know what happens to it. This shocking finding makes a mockery of official claims that the impacts on human health and the environment are known."
The UK's Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, is currently considering whether to grant BNFL a new radioactive waste discharge authorization. If granted, the authorization would allow nuclear discharges to sea to continue and discharges of some radioactive substances to air to significantly increase.
Last July, Prescott claimed to have shed the UK's image of "the Dirty Man of Europe" at a ministerial meeting of the OSPAR Commission for the Prevention of Marine Pollution in Sintra, Portugal. The agreement he signed with 14 other governments and the European Commission was to make "substantial reductions or elimination" of radioactive discharges by the year 2000, to ensure "close to zero" concentrations of radioactive substances in the marine environment by 2020 (excluding clean-up of historic contamination).
The UK has so far failed to submit the required proposals to OSPAR on how it will meet this agreement (3). Some 90% of radioactive discharges into the North-East Atlantic region come from Europe's three nuclear reprocessing plants at Sellafield in Cumbria, Dounreay in Scotland and La Hague near Cherbourg in France. Dounreay is currently shut but the Government is still considering whether to re-open the plant.
"Nuclear reprocessing is a dirty, old polluting industry, that produces nothing but dangerous plutonium and uranium we do not need," said Townsley, "Ireland must redouble its efforts to persuade the British Government to stop reprocessing now and start an immediate programme of responsible management of existing nuclear waste. Future generations will not forgive us if we allow this mindless pollution to continue."
ENDS
Notes to Editors: (1) "Now you see it...It's official: some of Sellafield's plutonium is missing", Rob Edwards, New Scientist, 24 April 1999, p 17. (2) Grottheim, S (1998), A preliminary report on radioactive contamination in the northern marine environment, NRPA, November 1998. (3) Proposals were supposed to be considered at a meeting of the OSPAR Radioactive Substances Working Group in January 1999, but none were submitted. The OSPAR Programmes and Measures Committee will consider the issue again in Luxemboug 3-7 May. The annual meeting of OSPAR will then be held in John Prescott's constituency of Hull, 21-25 June 1999.
For Further information:
Greenpeace on the web: http://www.greenpeace.org
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[Oops - yesterday's news story was that the virus failed; April 26 kept on rolling across the Pacific though....]
22. Virus Infects Computers Worldwide Damage Estimates In Hundreds of Millions of Dollars
By Kevin Sullivan Washington Post Foreign Service Wednesday, April 28, 1999; Page A01 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-04/28/181l-042899-idx.html
TOKYO, April 28 (Wednesday)-A computer virus named for the Chernobyl nuclear disaster erupted across the globe Tuesday, disrupting home, office and government computers from Norway to China.
The virus struck more than 600,000 computers, with particularly severe impact in South Korea and Turkey, and caused damage estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars in wrecked equipment and lost business....
[Postscript, on April 29, 1999 Associated Press reported that the hacker had been found, a former computer engineering student in Taiwan.]