* SRS radiation doses not fatal - Employees
inhaled plutonium on Sept. 1
* Nuclear waste to be trucked through Eastern Oregon
* Hearings On Uranium Plant
* Paducah plant hearings
* More funding sought for health screenings
* ADVISORY/Health Study Focuses on Uranium Workers
* With This Ring, I Thee ... Radiate?
* Panel suggests new nuke compact with S.C., N.J., Conn.
* 3 Los Alamos Officials Penalized Over Probe
* In The Millennium
* TMI reactor shut down for refueling, maintenance
* TVA brought more than electricity to Tennessee Valley
------------------------------------------------------------------
SRS radiation doses not fatal
Employees inhaled plutonium on Sept. 1
Web posted Sep. 10 at 10:27 PM
By Brandon Haddock Staff Writer - Augusta GA
http://augustachronicle.com/stories/091199/tec_066-6449.000.shtml
Test results indicate that four Savannah River Site workers inhaled plutonium during a Sept. 1 incident.
One of the employees received a dose of radiation estimated to be beyond the federal limit, said Jim Giusti, a U.S. Department of Energy spokesman at SRS.
The estimates prompted the Energy Department to launch its own investigation of the incident in the federal nuclear weapons site's ``FB Line,'' Mr. Giusti said.
Previously, Energy Department officials had allowed Westinghouse Savannah River Co., the contractor that operates the site, to investigate itself.
Plutonium is a radioactive metal used in nuclear weapons. It can cause cancer in sufficient doses.
The workers inhaled plutonium as they repackaged it in a storage area within FB Line, a facility used to stabilize the metal for long-term storage. After the incident, seven workers were found to have plutonium on their clothing and skin.
Health tests were performed on the seven workers to determine whether they inhaled or swallowed plutonium. Those tests revealed that four of the workers inhaled the metal, said Fran Williams, Westinghouse's vice president in charge of safety and health.
The workers will inhale small doses continuously for the rest of their lives, because the plutonium has settled in their lungs.
The workers are not expected to suffer significant health problems, Westinghouse spokesman Paul Jones said.
During the next 50 years, three of the four employees will receive estimated cumulative doses of more than 5 roentgen-equivalent man, or rem, Mr. Jones said. Rem is a unique unit used to measure doses of radiation in humans.
One worker will receive an estimated 50-year dose of more than 10 rem, Mr. Giusti said.
The federal government does not allow radiation workers to receive a dose of more than 5 rem per year. Also, an investigation is launched if a worker receives, from a single incident, a 50-year cumulative dose of 10 rem or more, Mr. Giusti said.
People receive a one-time dose of about 0.08 rem from a chest X-ray. A resident of the Aiken-Augusta area receives a dose of about 0.36 rem per year, mostly from natural radiation.
The National Academy of Sciences has estimated that a one-time dose of 10 rem would increase a person's lifetime excess risk of cancer by 0.8 percent.
Greg Rudy, the Energy Department's manager of SRS, will name a board next week to investigate the incident, Mr. Giusti said. The investigation will be ``Type-B,'' one of the department's most serious levels of inquiry.
The investigative board will be made up of officials from several federal nuclear-weapons sites, Mr. Giusti said. A local Energy Department official will chair the board, the spokesman said.
Westinghouse will support the Energy Department's inquiry, Mr. Jones said. The company has not determined what caused the contamination, he said.
Brandon Haddock covers energy issues. He can be reached at (706) 823-3409 or bhaddock@augustachronicle.com.
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Nuclear waste to be trucked through Eastern Oregon
The Associated Press 09/11/99 3:13 AM Eastern
http://flash.oregonlive.com/cgi-bin/or_nview.pl?/home1/wire/AP/Stream-Parsed/OREGON_NEWS/o0308_PM_OR--HanfordShipments
BAKER CITY, Ore. (AP) -- Trucks carrying drums of radiation-contaminated debris from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation will begin making their way through Eastern Oregon this fall.
The debris, which includes old clothing, tools and construction materials, is contaminated with very small amounts of radioactive elements, primarily plutonium, said Ken Niles, a transport safety analyst for the Oregon Department of Consumer and Business Services.
The government produced plutonium at Hanford for several decades for use in nuclear weapons.
The waste is called transuranic waste because it is contaminated with elements that are higher up on the periodic table than uranium. It is less toxic than other materials, such as cesium, that have been trucked through Eastern Oregon for more than 25 years, he said.
If the trucks, which will travel along Interstate 84, are involved in an accident, the waste poses less of a hazard than other materials because it doesn't contain liquids nor gases that could spread from an accident scene and be difficult to contain, Niles said.
"What they're moving is probably less harmful than what's being hauled up and down the highway every moment," said Mark Bennett, Baker County's emergency management director.
"We're not talking about spent fuel rods or weapons-grade material. I would be far more worried about being killed by a car walking down the street than the transuranic waste," he said.
The U.S. Department of Energy, which is responsible for cleaning up the Hanford site, has emphasized safety in preparing to truck transuranic waste to the department's underground disposal site in New Mexico.
"There's a certain sensitivity whenever radioactive material is involved," Niles said.
The waste, some of which has been buried in drums at Hanford since 1970, will be repackaged in new drums, he said. The 55-gallon drums will be sealed in larger containers that can hold as many as 14 drums.
Each truck can carry three of the larger containers.
Niles said government officials will monitor each truck by satellite, but the trucks will not be escorted by other vehicles.
Trucks will not be allowed to carry waste when weather conditions such as fog or snow make driving hazardous, he said.
The Department of Energy estimates it will transport 16,000 truckloads of transuranic waste from Hanford over the next 35 years, Niles said.
However, the process will begin slowly, with about six shipments scheduled through July 2000. The storage plant in New Mexico opened in March and has received about 25 shipments of waste from three other federal sites, in Colorado, Idaho and New Mexico.
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Hearings On Uranium Plant
Kentucky Headlines, September 10, 1999 Yahoo News Briefs
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/local/state/kentucky/story.html?s=v/rs/19990910/ky/index_2.html#1
(PADUCAH) -- Kentucky Senators Mitch McConnell and Jim Bunning want hearings in Paducah and on Capital Hill about the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant. Safety and health issues will be at the center of next Thursday's Congressional hearing. Current and former employees at the Uranium processing plant have filed lawsuits against the facility. They claim they were exposed to highly-radioactive plutonium without their knowledge.
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Paducah plant hearings
MSNBC, September 11, 1999
http://www.msnbc.com/local/WAVE/14365.asp
Paducah- The Oversight & Investigations Subcommittee will hold hearings into allegations of contamination and wrongdoing at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant next week.
Kentucky Republican Representative Ed Whitfield serves on the subcommittee, which will take testimony to assess worker-safety and environmental concerns at the plant.
In recent weeks former workers have raised concerns about the operations of the plant, which enriches uranium for use in nuclear reactors.
Among the most serious are allegations that workers were exposed to plutonium and other highly toxic substances, which have been linked to leukemia and other forms of cancer.
A huge cleanup operation is already underway at the 750-acre plant site.
There will be three sets of witnesses, which will include three plant employees who filed a federal whistle-blower suit. Representatives from contractors involved in uranium processing and environmental cleanup will testify. The third group will be made up of Energy Department representatives and Kentucky state government officials responsible for enforcing federal environmental laws.
Thursday there was a "safety stand down" so environment, safety and health teams from the U.S. Department of Energy could inspect the site.
The team didn't uncover any imminent dangers to the plant's workers or the general public but found some room for improvement.
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More funding sought for health screenings
The Associated Press 09/11/99 1:05 AM Eastern
http://flash.cleveland.com/cgi-bin/clv_nview.pl?/home1/wire/AP/Stream-Parsed/OHIO_NEWS/o0450_PM_KY--PaducahPlant
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) -- Health officials screening ex-employees at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant and two other plants want their budget quadrupled to speed up and expand a search for potential radiation-related diseases.
The increased spending, which requires congressional approval, would be used to test current and former workers at the Paducah plant as well as facilities in Portsmouth, Ohio, and Oak Ridge, Tenn.
An estimated 15,000 people are believed to be most at risk among the 34,000 former workers at the three locations, where nuclear-weapons components were made, The Courier-Journal of Louisville reported today. Paducah and Portsmouth now manufacture fuel for nuclear power plants.
The current program has a $1 million annual budget to screen 1,200 former workers at Paducah and the other sites.
Dr. Steven Markowitz, project director and an occupational medicine physician at Queens College, City University of New York, has asked the Department of Energy -- at the agency's invitation -- to boost spending to $4 million annually to allow about 5,000 people to be screened.
"The DOE site manager at Paducah has said the government is going to spend $1 billion cleaning up dirt, cleaning up the site around Paducah over a 15-year period," Markowitz said. "You've got to ask the question: Shouldn't workers be treated at least as well as dirt?"
Markowitz's project is under contract to the Paper Allied Industrial Chemical and Energy Workers International Union, which represents the workers at Paducah and other plants. The union received a federal grant for the project from the Energy Department.
As originally envisioned, the screening was to be a five-year pilot program only for former workers at Paducah, Portsmouth and Oak Ridge.
But after published reports that Paducah employees were not told that they were exposed to plutonium, uranium dust and other radioactive materials at the plant, the Department of Energy went to Markowitz and told him to request that the program be expanded and to "submit a (spending) proposal for what it would take," the doctor said.
Markowitz followed with a bid to quadruple the project's annual budget.
"We want to crank it up a lot" to add current and former workers "at an accelerated pace," he said.
The disclosures of worker exposure to plutonium at Paducah "caught us by surprise," Markowitz said, even though he said he had had "some inkling early on that there was potential exposure" to the deadly material.
"To me, it increases the urgency of doing cancer testing, particularly lung cancer," he said.
Fourteen current and former workers and their families have filed a $10 billion lawsuit against eight companies that operated the Paducah plant or produced nuclear fuel that was processed there. The suit alleges that employees were exposed to harmful levels of radiation. Lawyers for the plaintiffs want to expand the suit to class-action status, which would mean it could include as many as 20,000 people.
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ADVISORY/Health Study Focuses on Uranium Workers
(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 10, 1999--
September 10, 4:16 pm Eastern Time
Company Press Release
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/990910/expertsour_4.html
TOPIC: The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health is funding a study that focuses on the health of uranium workers. Certain workers from Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado who worked in the uranium mills in the '50s and '60s may receive monetary compensation if the study proves that their reported health problems are a direct result of radiation exposure.
EXPERTS: ExpertSource can offer several highly qualified experts to comment on this story:
Dr. David McFadden of D.M. Risk Assessment and Toxicology Services, Inc. is an expert in toxicology and employee health.
Dr. Armen H. Tashjian a professor at Harvard School of Public Health with an expertise in toxicology.
Howard D. Goodfellow, Goodfellow Consultants, Inc is an expert in occupational health and safety.
Scott DeVries is a lawyer for Nossaman, Guthner, Knox & Elliott LLP. He has experience in toxic tort litigation.
-0-
ExpertSource cannot guarantee the immediate availability of these experts or their familiarity with this specific issue.
Journalists seeking to interview any of these experts can obtain contact information by visiting the ExpertSource website: http://www.businesswire.com/expertsource.
ExpertSource, a collaboration of Business Wire and The Round Table Group, provides academic and industry experts to the media at no charge. Journalists are encouraged to submit queries to ExpertSource when seeking experts on specific subjects. An online registration form is available at the above web address.
Business Wire's Media Resource Center provides working journalists many free media services. Please visit the BW Media Resource Center at (www.businesswire.com/media) for more information.
Contact:
Business Wire, Phoenix Kara Stancell, 480/990-9942 kstancell@bizwire.com or Business Wire, New York Neil Hershberg, 212/752-9600, ext. 235 neilh@bizwire.com
---
With This Ring, I Thee ... Radiate?
Healing Our World: Weekly Comment By Jackie Alan Giuliano,
Ph.D.
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/aug99/1999L-08-30g.html
It is the destruction of the world in our own lives that drives
us half insane, and more than half. To destroy that which we were
given in trust: how shall we bear it? -- Wendell Berry
Previously I explored how the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the Department of Energy (DOE) have recycled millions of pounds of low-level radioactive material into the commercial marketplace. Recently, new evidence has surfaced that suggests that gold from dismantled nuclear warheads, some of it highly radioactive, has made its way into the jewelry industry over the last 50 years. Gold jewelry, if made from this contaminated material, could give the wearer twice as much radiation in one hour as most people get in a year.
Last week, the "Washington Post" revealed that the recovery of gold from nuclear weapons has been a little known mission of the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Paducah, Kentucky, since the 1950s. The Paducah plant is one of the government's uranium enrichment plants that turned uranium dust into material for nuclear bombs. Today the plant supplies uranium to the commercial nuclear power plant industry.
Nuclear weapons scheduled for dismantling were trucked into the plant under the cloak of night and heavy security. Gold and other metals were stripped away from the plating and circuitry of the bombs by workers, put into a smelter and made into ingots.
The real victims of the nuclear industry (Full story from the "Tennessee Times")
The Paducah plant is currently under investigation for gross negligence over the last 50 years. It seems that workers at the plant were not told they were in danger from handling the hazardous materials and strict safety precautions were not taken.
Workers currently suing the plant claim that the gold bars made from the warheads were never checked for radiation prior to their release. The workers also said that tests were not performed on aluminum and nickel ingots until many years later. When testing began, many were found to be too contaminated with radiation to be released.
One of the workers discovered radioactive gold flakes in an old mold used to make gold ingots in December 1998. Plant officials ignored his concerns.
Even if radiation levels are low, opponents of the DOE's plans to continue recycling more radioactive material into the commercial marketplace say that consumers should be given the knowledge they need to make an informed choice.
No one knows how much of the nation's gold, nickel and aluminum supply may be contaminated.
In the early 1980s, the New York State Health Department found 170 radioactive pieces of jewelry out of 160,000 surveyed. News accounts from that time report that at least 14 people developed finger cancer and some had suffered finger and partial hand amputations from wearing the radioactive jewelry. The source of the radioactive gold was believed to be the state owned Roswell Park Institute for cancer research and treatment.
An scientist or engineer would say that 170 out of 160,000 pieces was only a tenth of one percent and therefore statistically insignificant. Tell that to the people with amputated fingers.
With each passing month, more and more cover-ups and deceits are being discovered in our nation's nuclear industry. For decades, the public has been lied to about the risks associated with nuclear exposure. And a generation of scientists and engineers has been trained with misleading and often erroneous information about the dangers of exposure to nuclear material.
I have received a number of critical responses to my last few articles discussing the use of radioisotopes by NASA in our nation's space program and the use of recycled radioactive material in the marketplace. The comments of these highly trained and intelligent people are very revealing and to me are indicative of the systematic failure of our educational system to develop a sense of responsibility and conscience in its scientific practitioners and leaders.
An engineer who I had worked with for nearly 10 years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) told me in an email message that my comment in a past article that plutonium was arguably the most deadly substance on Earth, "shows a shocking lack of critical thinking that one would not expect in a supposedly educated man ... I would submit that cigarettes, alcohol, other drugs, and nerve gas are all far more legitimate holders of that title."
A retired metallurgical engineer, who claims to have "over 40 years experience, half of it in the nuclear industry," told me in an email comment that "you may want to live in a radiation free world, but it is not possible. For example, if you have a sleeping partner you will get more radiation from that partner than you would get from a nuclear power plant if you had your bed alongside the fence."
Leanne Rhodes lives near the Rocky Flats nuclear site and has a host of life-threatening health problems. (Photo courtesy "Tennessee Times")
I ask all scientists and statisticians to look into the eyes of the children who are suffering from the after effects of Chernobyl and tell them that we know how to manage radioisotopes. I challenge them to have a debate with those survivors of families who are dying of cancer because they live downwind from one of DOE's nuclear facilities. Let them tell the Navajo Indians with lung cancer and their children with horrible birth defects from working in the uranium mines of the southwestern U.S. that we know what we are doing. Bring a report and statistics to a child without arms or legs whose only crime is being born of parents who are considered disposable by the U.S. nuclear industry.
We undergo environmental onslaughts from so many directions, that all those "statistically insignificant" sources add up to a very significant amount. We have no research data to help understand the synergistic effects of all these pressures on our bodies and our world.
Why not err on the side of caution? Why not simplify? Why not embrace the idea of zero tolerance?
If these ideas were really mandated and enforced, engineering solutions would probably be found in less than a year. Engineers will always say it is impossible until they are told to buck up and find the answer. Then they usually do.
But as long as greed is at the top of the list of things to be achieved, we all run the risk of waking up tomorrow in pain.
RESOURCES
1. See the August 16, 1999 Healing Our World article at http://www.ens.lycos.com/ens/aug99/1999L-08-16g.html entitled "The Radioactive Dinner Table - An Industry Gone Mad" for many links to these issues and contacts for activism.
2. The Nuclear Control Institute has many links of nuclear issues at http://www.nci.org/home.htm
3. See a special report on illnesses in people who live and work around the nation's nuclear plants at http://www.tennessean.com/special/oakridge/part3/
4. See a summary of the radioactive metals issue at http://www.citizen.org/cmep/radmetal/radrecycle.htm
5. Joby Warrick of the "Washington Post" has been reporting on the Paducah plant in stories published on August 8 and August 14, 1999. You can find the stories (for a fee) in the archives at at www.washingtonpost.com ("In Harm's Way, And In the Dark; Workers Exposed to Plutonium at U.S. Plant" and "Radioactive Gold: Did It Go To Market?")
Visit the Healing Our World Archive and check out the many resource links in past articles.
{Jackie Giuliano, a writer and a Professor of Environmental Studies, can be found in Venice, California, wondering how any truth will surface in the midst of all the crap. Please send your thoughts, comments, and visions to him at jackie@healingourworld.com and visit his web site at www.healingourworld.com}
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Panel suggests new nuke compact with S.C., N.J., Conn.
By Associated Press, 09/11/99 01:02
http://www.boston.com/dailynews/254/region/Panel_suggests_new_nuke_compac:.shtml
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) If South Carolina wants to limit low-level nuclear waste dumped at the state's Barnwell County landfill, the best way is to enter another compact with other states, possibly New Jersey and Connecticut, according to a study.
The entire Nuclear Waste Task Force will consider the proposal Sept. 17, along with other options that include not joining any regional disposal agreement.
If South Carolina joins a regional compact again, the panel favors the Northeast Compact with New Jersey and Connecticut, state Rep. Joel Lourie, D-Columbia, said Thursday.
The Barnwell County site now takes waste from 38 states. Democratic Gov. Jim Hodges created the advisory group to find a way to end what he calls the state's role as the ''dumping ground'' for the nation's nuclear waste.
Hodges also wants to ensure sufficient disposal space for South Carolina's own waste, which is expected to increase in the next several decades as aging nuclear reactors are dismantled and disposed.
South Carolina was a member of the Southeast Compact until 1995, when then-Republican Gov. David Beasley pulled out because North Carolina, another compact member, had not fulfilled its obligation to build a replacement site for Barnwell, which is run by Chem Nuclear Systems Inc.
Beasley opened the Barnwell site to waste from across the nation with a plan to generate about $140 million a year for education from a disposal tax. But as the price rose, the amount taken there dropped and the tax has generated just $163 million in the past four years.
A return to the Southeast Compact could be complicated, Lourie said. South Carolina would have to work out an agreement to ensure its waste had priority, he said.
The Northeast Compact because its projected disposal needs are low enough to accommodate South Carolina's, Lourie said.
The task force is expected to present its proposal to Hodges and the General Assembly on Nov. 1.
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3 Los Alamos Officials Penalized Over Probe
By Vernon Loeb Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, September
11, 1999; Page A10
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-09/11/075l-091199-idx.html
Two former counterintelligence officials and the former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory received relatively mild administrative sanctions yesterday for failing to properly handle an investigation into suspected Chinese espionage at the nuclear weapons facility.
Officials at Los Alamos and the University of California, which manages the facility for the Department of Energy and directly employs lab officials and workers, announced the sanctions less than a month after Energy Secretary Bill Richardson recommended disciplinary action against Sig Hecker, the laboratory's former director; Robert S. Vrooman, its former counterintelligence chief; and Terry Craig, a counterintelligence team leader.
Richardson immediately responded that he "would have preferred the disciplinary action to be stronger," a DOE spokeswoman said. "Nevertheless, he believes the efforts undertaken by the University of California and Los Alamos have been thorough."
The three sanctioned employees were not identified by name in yesterday's announcement. But given their responsibilities during the espionage probe, the announcement made it clear that Craig, the official with the lowest rank, received the stiffest penalty, having his job assignment restricted and his salary frozen for at least five years.
Craig will also receive a letter of reprimand for failing to discover and inform the FBI in 1996 that physicist Wen Ho Lee, an espionage suspect fired from his post in March for security violations, had signed a waiver authorizing Los Alamos officials to search his computer.
Vrooman, who retired from Los Alamos earlier this year and has been serving as a consultant to the lab's director, has been stripped of consulting privileges for at least five years, the announcement said.
Richardson had recommended disciplinary action against Vrooman for failing to remove Lee from his sensitive post in the fall of 1997 after the FBI said it was no longer necessary to keep him there.
Hecker, who managed the laboratory from 1986 to 1997 and still works there as a senior scientist, will have, in his file, a letter from UC President Richard C. Atkinson "regarding his responsibilities at Los Alamos during the security investigation," the announcement said.
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In The Millennium
Saturday, September 11, 1999 Salt Lake Tribune
http://www.sltrib.com/09111999/nation_w/22869.htm
NUKE: For almost two weeks in 1979, the threat of nuclear disaster loomed in the Susquehanna River Valley outside Harrisburg, Pa. On March 28, radioactive gases were released into the atmosphere because of an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear-powered electric generating plant. Within 48 hours, Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials warned that the accident posed a serious threat to life in the area. Disaster was averted, but the accident cost $1 billion to clean up and prompted a major re-evaluation of the U.S. nuclear energy program. Seven years later, in April 1986, the world's worst known nuclear disaster occurred at the Soviet Union's Chernobyl plant near Kiev in the Ukraine. A core meltdown, explosion and fire resulted in the discharge of a massive radioactive cloud that spread across northern Europe. Thirty-two workers died and more than 100,000 people were evacuated.
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TMI reactor shut down for refueling, maintenance
By Associated Press, 09/10/99 23:18
http://www.boston.com/dailynews/253/region/TMI_reactor_shut_down_for_refu:.shtml
MIDDLETOWN, Pa. (AP) Three Mile Island's Unit 1 reactor was shut down Friday night for refueling and maintenance, a process that will cost owner GPU Nuclear more than $40 million.
When it shut down, the plant set its third world record for continuous operation 668 days. The milestone surpasses a previous record set by Unit 1 in 1997 by 51 days, said Ralph DeSantis, spokesman for plant owner GPU Nuclear.
The nuclear plant is now in its 19th year of operation. It was shut down for six years after the 1979 accident at Unit 2.
During the outage, GPU will buy power from the Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland power consortium, known as the grid.
TMI will remain off-line for five to six weeks. During that time, GPU will remove all 177 fuel assemblies inside the nuclear reactor. Of those, 105 will be returned to the reactor vessel along with 72 new ones, DeSantis said.
Fuel assemblies are 12 feet long and contain 208 fuel rods.
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TVA brought more than electricity to Tennessee Valley
By DUNCAN MANSFIELD The Associated Press 09/11/99 12:12 PM
Eastern
http://flash.al.com/cgi-bin/al_nview.pl?/home1/wire/AP/Stream-Parsed/BAMA_NEWS/j7893_AM_KY--KEP-TennesseeVall
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- Since its beginnings in the Great Depression, the Tennessee Valley Authority has always meant more than electricity to a once-impoverished region.
TVA harnessed the 650-mile Tennessee River, controlling its killer floods and ensuring a 9-feet-deep channel for navigation. It helped eradicate malaria in the valley, improved farming practices, built libraries and created a planned community.
Along the way, it changed the lives of those who live here.
"TVA's mission has never been solely to provide electric power," TVA Chairman Craven Crowell said.
But one can be forgiven for linking TVA and electricity. With 29 hydro dams, 11 coal-fired plants and three nuclear stations, the authority is the nation's largest public power producer, and its electricity is among the cheapest in the country.
TVA lights the homes of nearly 8 million people in 80,000 square miles of Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.
It has done so without taxpayer help since 1959, when its power program became solely supported by electricity users. But that hasn't stopped investor-owned utilities and their congressional supporters from attacking TVA as a government-subsidized program, pointing to federal dollars the agency receives for nonpower activities.
It also hasn't stopped environmentalists. They say TVA's coal-fired and nuclear plants, which now generate nearly three-quarters of the agency's power, are more of a problem than a solution.
TVA came to life in 1933 as part of the New Deal plan by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to lift the country out of the Depression. Its unique charter continues to be debated inside and outside the agency.
Roosevelt declared it would be "a corporation clothed with the power of government but possessed of the flexibility and initiative of private enterprise ... charged with the broadest duty of planning for the proper use, conservation and development of the natural resources of the Tennessee River drainage basin and its adjoining territory."
At the time, more than half the region's 3 million residents lived on farms, and less than a third of them had electricity. In the early years, most people welcomed, or at least accepted, TVA as it acquired 34,000 acres for power-producing and flood-controlling dams from Knoxville to Paducah, Ky.
Some 2,800 families were uprooted, often along with their homes. TVA even moved 30,000 graves, each meticulously recorded.
"They really wanted to make that relocation as smooth as possible," said Melissa Walker, a history professor at Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C. "There was general acceptance and general approval."
During the 1940s, TVA expanded into other endeavors: spraying for mosquitos and testing blood to combat malaria, building libraries for dam workers and converting them to public libraries once construction was complete. The authority created the planned community of Norris, Tenn., with common green spaces and all-electric homes.
In later years, TVA pioneered water-quality monitoring in the valley, developed a fertilizer research center in Muscle Shoals, Ala., and took steps to improve water quality by putting more oxygen into water flowing through its dams.
Years of congressional attacks, however, have reduced federal appropriations for such nonpower programs from their peak of $222 million in 1980. Next year, TVA will get $7 million to be used only for a nature preserve on the Tennessee-Kentucky border.
Resistance to TVA's programs gained steam in the 1960s as the agency bought up land for tributary dams designed not to produce electricity but to spur economic development and provide drinking water and recreation.
Environmentalists rose up and landowners grumbled.
TVA completed its last dam, Tellico, in 1979 after a long fight over a tiny fish called the snail darter, which lived in the Little Tennessee River and was protected by the Endangered Species Act.
Four years later, in a similar case, TVA halted the Columbia Dam project on the Duck River when another battle loomed over two endangered mussels.
Walker said the more TVA strayed from its original work, the more resentment it stirred up. She told of a woman whose farm was condemned for the Douglas Dam in the 1940s. The woman used the money to build a successful dairy in Loudon County, then lost it to the Tellico project.
Especially irksome to the woman was TVA's practice of taking more land than would be flooded by dammed-up water. "They took whole farms and then sold a lot of that at very high prices for development," Walker said.
TVA's first decade, when it completed most of its big dams and electrified the valley, may have been its most productive, said University of Tennessee historian Bruce Wheeler said.
Since then, he said, TVA has "desperately tried to find new ways it could serve" the valley.
TVA's nuclear program was supposed to be the nation's biggest, with a proposed 17 reactors at seven sites.
It proved instead to be a multibillion-dollar miscalculation of power demand, operating ability and construction costs. Only six reactors at three sites were completed, and five reactors operate today -- though they are among industry leaders in efficiency and output.
Troubles began in 1975 at the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant in Athens, Ala., when a fire caused $10 million in damage. The fire was the nation's worst nuclear accident before the 1979 partial meltdown at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island. More problems followed: unaccounted-for uranium, leaks of radioactive water into the Tennessee River, a fire that destroyed a $5 million cooling tower.
By 1985, TVA had scuttled three unfinished stations, put two others on hold and shut down its only two operating plants -- Browns Ferry and Sequoyah near Chattanooga -- because of continuing safety problems.
Repairs cost more than $1 billion and the nuclear program foundered until the 1988 arrival of former auto executive Marvin Runyon as TVA chairman.
Under his direction, Browns Ferry and Sequoyah each had a reactor back on line within a year. Runyon also froze electricity rates after years of increases and began laying off thousands of workers, earning the nickname of "Carvin' Marvin."
Today's TVA remains trimmed down. It employs 14,000 people, or 20,000 fewer than when Runyon became chairman.
The agency extended its rate freeze for an unprecedented 10 years. It finally relented in 1998 with a rate hike meant to halve in a decade its nuclear-driven $28 billion debt.
Crowell, a former TVA vice president, replaced Runyon as chairman in 1993. During his watch, TVA completed two decades of construction on the Watts Bar reactor in 1995, the last reactor to be licensed in this country. Several other long-idled projects, including Columbia Dam, were scrapped.
It's all part of an effort to prepare TVA for the deregulation of the utility industry, the debate over the future of public power and the fight over whether TVA should even exist.
Wheeler said he believes TVA has been a good thing for the valley overall, but its creation depended on a level of trust that the federal government no longer gets from most citizens.
"I think Roosevelt made them see government as a kind of paternalistic force that was out to help them," he said. "I don't think people see government in quite that light today."