-------- NUCLEAR (by country)

-------- russia

Reply Re: Was the Kursk carrying nuclear weapons?

Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 00:52:36 -0400
From: Joshua Handler - jhandler@princeton.edu

I would tend to disagree with the line of speculation in the Jane's article as to why nuclear weapons were onboard the Kursk.

In Sept-Oct 1991 Presidents Bush and Gorbachev, in their well-known back to back initiatives, stated all tactical nuclear weapons would be withdrawn from ships and submarines in the U.S. and Russian fleets during peacetime. President Yeltsin repeated this pledge in January 1992.

According to news reports at the time, by October 1992, the Commander of the Northern Fleet was saying that tactical nuclear weapons had been removed from the ships of the Northern Fleet. In February 1993, the Russian Navy announced the removal of tactical nuclear weapons from submarines; ships and aircraft had been completed.

Reports have been circulating in the U.S. government over the years that tactical nuclear weapons were still deployed on Russian ships and submarines. Certainly the Kursk's main mission of destroying US aircraft carriers would be made easier if it carried nuclear weapons on its anti-ship missiles for attack and nuclear-torpedoes for defense.

However, Russian naval officers have consistently denied these reports. One noted, that it would seem to make sense to have tactical nuclear weapons on board SSBNs (nuclear torpedoes for defense), which already carry many nuclear weapons, but that the Russian Navy does not even do this.

It would be logical for the Russian Navy to conduct exercises loading its tactical nuclear weapons on ships and submarines. Whether with real nuclear weapons or training weapons, I don't know.

Certainly, the U.S. at least twice a year does a regeneration exercise where a nuclear Tomahawk cruise missile is loaded on an attack sub. According to the DOD's "Nuclear Weapons Systems Sustainment Programs," May 1997 report, twice a year, the Navy selects an attack submarine for a "regeneration" exercise to evaluate the ability to redeploy nuclear armed-cruise missiles on submarines. The exercise tests the ability of the crew to reestablish nuclear capability in a "relatively short time." (This document was on the Pentagon website). It is unclear whether this involves a real nuclear weapon or not.

Also, a number of U.S. nuclear submarines regularly receive their nuclear weapons inspections. Maybe similar Russian exercises led US government sources to think nuclear weapons are on board Russian ships and submarines.

Nonetheless, some have theorized that one reason the Russian Navy was not interested in any foreign help is that there were some nucs on board, and they didn't want anybody to find out. This is based on the idea outlined in the Jane's article that these subs don't deploy without nuclear weapons.

I think they deploy -- put to sea -- without nuclear weapons per the presidential initiatives. But this scenario might have some plausibility if the sub was engaged in a nuclear weapons training exercise and for some reason they put a live nuclear weapons (not a training one) on board for the exercise.

Doesn't hurt to keep asking though.
Hope this helps, Josh Handler

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Divers still seeking way into sub
Norway's team more optimistic than Russia in opening hatch

MSNBC
08/20/00
http://www.msnbc.com/msn/445813.asp

Aug. 20 - Norwegian divers on Monday were examining a Russian submarine similar to the sunken Kursk, studying the escape chamber and the possible consequences of opening the Kursk's rear hatch. Earlier, Norway contradicted Russia's assessment that the escape hatch was severely mangled. The hatch appears to be intact, Norway said, though so far efforts to open it have failed. Norwegian divers also reported having possibly found air pockets inside the wreck.

THE SITUATION inside the escape chamber will be critical to any attempt to open it.

If the chamber is flooded, as the Russians say it is, divers can proceed to examine the lower hatch. But if the airlock is still in place, it will require a docking with a rescue vehicle to prevent flooding of any air that might still remain inside.

Norwegian Captain Erland Raanes told The Associated Press by telephone that his divers could "confirm that the hatch is intact."

But he said later that an unspecified pressure problem was making it difficult to open the hatch on the aft part of the submarine. The divers tried several times to wrest the hatch open with a crane but failed, Russia's RTR television network reported.

Raanes also said divers knocking on the hull for telltale sounds found indications that some air pockets may remain in the wreck.

Norway's Rear Admiral Einar Skorgen, heading the Norwegian rescue mission, said two divers later flew to a Russian naval base to examine a sub with a similar escape hatch as the Kursk's. "We have to clarify the consequences of opening it," he told Norway's TV2 television network.

Working 350 feet below the surface of the Barents Sea, the other divers were moving slowly because of the depth and each dive was taking several hours.

The Norwegian operation appeared to be the first time divers had descended to the Kursk since rescue efforts began a week ago. Russian escape capsules tried to reach the Kursk repeatedly, but the Russian navy reportedly had no skilled divers.

AIR INSIDE HATCH?

Another Norwegian spokesman, Kjell Grandhagen, later told Norway's NRK Radio the divers had found there was air inside the outer hatch of the Kursk's rear emergency exit, which he said was not damaged.

Russian television had earlier said the divers had opened a valve on the outside of the submarine which should have allowed water to enter the airlock and equalize the pressure with the sea. It said no air had come out of the chamber, suggesting it was already full of water.

Asked about the contradictory remarks, Grandhagen said: "We don't have a very coordinated information service with the Russians so I don't want to speculate about why there is different information. ... But the news I am giving comes directly from our divers who, as far as I know, are the only ones who've been down to look at it (the Kursk)."

Also Sunday, a Norwegian video camera was lowered to check the hull and the water was checked for possible radiation leaks from the Kursk's two nuclear reactors.

Russian officials have said the Kursk's nuclear reactors apparently switched off in the accident, but the new evidence of how the submarine was torn apart raised concerns that they could have been damaged in the explosion.

OBSTACLES AHEAD

Russia's deputy prime minister, Ilya Klebanov, earlier said from the scene that divers found that a valve in the escape hatch had been opened from the inside, indicating that a crew member had tried to open it. However, there was no indication of whether anyone was in the escape chamber.

Speaking from the command ship directing rescue operations, Klebanov said the divers might have to go to a navy base to determine whether their bulky diving suits could safely pass through the escape hatch if it is opened. That would cause a further delay.

No decision had been made on whether a British mini-submarine which arrived Saturday would be used in the rescue operation. Klebanov said the escape hatch was so badly damaged that it was unlikely the British vessel could latch on.

"The British submarine is similar to ours, so we believe that it will be unable to dock either," he said.

The Russian navy has virtually ruled out hope that any of the Kursk's crew are still alive. The navy said Saturday that most of the sailors died Aug. 12 when a huge explosion wrecked the Kursk and any survivors almost certainly drowned on the sea bed.

Klebanov gave further details on the damage Sunday, saying the submarine's front five or six compartments were flooded within seconds. He said some crew might have survived for a while in the back three compartments.

"Water almost instantly flooded the submarine's hull up to the fifth or sixth compartments. The crew in those sections died almost instantaneously and the submarine became uncontrollable," he said.

FOCUS ON CAUSE

The rescue operations will continue at least through Sunday, Russian officials said, adding though that the emphasis was shifting to what caused the tragedy on the Kursk, one of the navy's newest and most powerful submarines.

Many Russians said the Western aid was too late to make any difference, and expressed anger about the way President Vladimir Putin's government handled the rescue effort and took so long to ask for foreign help. Moscow for days declined offers of Western help.

"They should have accepted help as soon as they learned that the vessel was in distress," said Tikhon Bagryantsev, a Navy retiree whose son, Capt. Vladimir Bagryantsev, was feared among the dead. "Every minute counts there."

Putin said Sunday that "until the last minute, we will do everything to save everyone who could be saved. We will fight for the life of every one of our seamen."

A government commission investigating the disaster said Saturday that the Kursk suffered a massive explosion, which ripped through the confined space of the submarine. The explosion apparently was in the forward torpedo compartment, which was loaded with up to 30 warheads.

A probable scenario was that a torpedo in the Kursk's forward compartment exploded, setting off a much bigger explosion. U.S. and Norwegian authorities detected two explosions in the area Aug. 12 at the time the Kursk was lost.

LOOKING FOR TRIGGER

But it's unclear what triggered the explosion. Russian officials cite either a collision or an internal problem.

Klebanov said Sunday a Second World War mine or a collision with a foreign submarine were possible scenarios. The U.S. navy, which had two submarines in the area at the time, said none of its vessels were involved in the incident.

Klebanov said there were up to three foreign submarines in the area when the Kursk was lost. He did not specify which countries he meant.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

---

Russia Asks Britain to Send Down Sub Rescue Vessel

Yahoo News
Sunday August 20 9:27 PM ET updated 11:22 PM ET Aug 21
By Michael Steen
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000820/wl/russia_submarine_dc_81.html

MURMANSK, Russia (Reuters) - Russia has asked Britain to send its rescue mini-submarine down to the stricken Kursk nuclear submarine on the bed of the Barents Sea, British officials said on Monday.

``The dive time has not been confirmed but it is expected to be sometime in the late morning Russian time,'' a Defense Ministry spokesman in London said.

``There will be Russian personnel on the LR5 (mini-submarine),'' he added.

Carrying a crew of three -- two pilots and a rescue chamber operator -- the British mini-submarine is able to act as an underwater lifeboat for up to 16 people at a time.

The request for it to go down came as Norwegian divers examined a similar submarine to the Kursk to study the escape mechanism and the possible consequences of opening the rear hatch.

Russian officials believe the 118 crew members are dead.

The Norwegian divers, asked by Russia to assist in the week-long efforts to enter the Kursk, flew to Moscow's biggest naval base in the Arctic, Vidyayevo near Severomorsk, headquarters of the Northern Fleet, to study the hatches of the escape airlock on a submarine similar to the sunken vessel.

Rear Admiral Einar Skorgen, heading the Norwegian mission, said the divers wanted to examine the inside of the rescue chamber.

``We have to clarify the consequences of opening it,'' he told Norway's independent TV2 television, adding that rescuers were still ``a fair way off'' any attempt at opening the hatches.

The escape chamber remains the only way into the Kursk after an explosion on August 12 devastated the craft, apparently killing most of the crew instantly.

The Russian military retains overall control of the rescue efforts on the submarine, lying 108 meters (354 feet) down on the sea bed.

Divergence Of Reports

Itar-Tass news agency said Russia's Kursk crisis commission, headed by Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, was due to meet in Moscow on Monday.

Contradictory statements have come from the Russians and Norwegians.

Klebanov has said the hatch was stuck and that the divers were looking for ways to tear it off.

But a spokesman for the Norwegian armed forces said the divers did not believe the hatch was too mangled and thought it could be opened fairly easily.

``We have not drawn the conclusion the hatch is so damaged that it cannot be opened,'' John Espen Lien, spokesman for the Norwegian armed forces, told Reuters in Oslo on Sunday after the divers inspected the Kursk.

The Russian navy says it believes an explosion led to a detonation of the Kursk's torpedoes, causing a much bigger blast.

President Vladimir Putin, slammed for inaction in a crisis which has become a national tragedy, broke a three-day silence when he pledged on Sunday the rescue effort would go on to ``the last moment'' in the hope of saving someone.

Putin, speaking to Church leaders, delivered his most emotional remarks yet on the disaster.

``With sorrow in our hearts and, I do not exaggerate, tears in our eyes, we are following all that is happening in the Barents Sea,'' he said. ``The sailors are doing everything they can to save their comrades.

---

Russian Navy Says All on Sunken Sub Are Probably Dead

New York Times
August 20, 2000
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/europe/082000russia-sub.html

MOSCOW, Sunday, Aug. 20 -- The Russian Navy said on Saturday that all 118 members of the crew of the wrecked nuclear-powered submarine Kursk were now probably dead and that in the frantic initial hours trapped in the sunken vessel, survivors had signaled their comrades on the surface to send down air because their sealed compartments were filling with water.

Some of the men may have tried what would have been a suicidal exit through a rear hatch, a senior admiral suggested, thinking that they could swim to safety and causing one of the last dry compartments to flood.

Vice Adm. Mikhail Motsak, chief of staff of Russia's Northern Fleet, said most of the sailors died in the first minutes after a still-unexplained explosion sent the Kursk crashing to the seabed a week ago. He reported his preliminary findings in a grimly dramatic statement broadcast on state television from the Northern Fleet headquarters at Severomorsk.

At 7:30 this morning, Norwegian divers with video equipment began a descent to assess damage to the Russian submarine. Norwegian and British teams arrived at the site early today along with a British rescue submarine.

The Kursk disappeared on Aug. 12 during maneuvers in the Barents Sea. Western intelligence sensors and seismic monitoring stations in Norway detected two underwater explosions in the area of the submarine, with the second and more powerful blast registering the yield of one to two tons of high explosive.

Admiral Motsak, speaking from his desk without any prepared text, said the accident "was the worst catastrophe that I personally have known, and the worst in the history of the submarine fleet."

He said the navy was now investigating three possible causes of the blast: a collision with another vessel or a World War II mine, or some unknown internal accident that set off the explosion that ripped through the submarine.

Most of the crew died in the first minutes of the disaster, he said, just after the explosion destroyed the forward section of the submarine.

Admiral Motsak interspersed his factual presentation with descriptions of the drama that has gripped Russia since Monday morning, when the navy first reported the sinking. The rescue flotilla located the battered attack submarine with twin nuclear reactors at 4:55 a.m. Sunday lying on the seabed in 350 feet of water, the admiral said. Russian surface ships soon afterward detected noises from the bottom.

"We heard noises by crew members acting in accordance with the rules of organization of communication with sunken submarines," he said. "Analysis of the noises from the tail sections showed that the crew members were telling us that water was coming into the sections -- it was infiltrating -- and they asked us to supply air."

On Saturday night in a separate news conference, the admiral acknowledged that rescuers had been unable to supply the air to the sailors. "That's a possible construction defect, on which we'll have to work in future submarines," he said.

Some crew members, desperate to escape the flooding, he said, may have tried to open the rear hatch of the Kursk, causing sea water to flood in and kill them. "The systems responsible for a tight seal in that compartment broke down," the admiral said, perhaps because "some submariners tried to leave the sub from more than 100 meters depth, which is not envisioned."

Only deep-sea divers, he said, can verify whether the hatch seal was broken. If it was, he said, that would explain why navy rescue vehicles that have managed to dock on the hatch have not been able to evacuate water from the airtight corridor that must be established for rescue to occur.

On Saturday a navy spokesman said a Russian rescue submarine made a third dive of the day on the Kursk around 8 p.m. in an attempt to lock onto the hatch and open it.

Admiral Motsak said extensive flooding may have reached all of the submarine's nine compartments. That would mean that any sailors who survived the initial explosion had to endure conditions including icy water that further compressed any breathable air in the submarine to what he called lethal "high-pressure pockets."

Naval experts in the United States and Russia said a buildup of air pressure inside any flooded compartments could have killed crew members within a few days of the sinking. Any accident in which high-pressure piping is ruptured is considered the most dangerous, said Adm. Eduard Baltin, former commander of the Soviet submarine fleet in the Pacific.

Saturday night, Admiral Motsak and Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov both said at a joint news conference that after the Kursk had first been disabled by explosion or collision at periscope depth, it then lost "longitudinal balance" and fell into a steep dive. It hit the bottom with such force that it might have detonated a torpedo in one of the forward tubes, whose explosive equivalent is roughly equal to the blast measured by Western seismic monitors.

The explosion probably ruptured high-pressure pipes in the compartments, thus increasing air pressure, Admiral Baltin said. In addition, the Russian and American experts said, intruding sea water, itself under high pressure at a depth of 350 feet, compresses the air in the closed spaces and can reach the lethal state of 10 times normal atmospheric pressure.

"Slow flooding in the tail sections was taking place, which inevitably shortened the time for the crew to survive there and shortened the maximum time of sustaining life that we could count on," Admiral Motsak said. "It is possible that pressure in the compartments is very high. There are air pockets there, but in fact we crossed that critical line for the sustaining of life which is envisioned in all the guiding documents. This line, in fact, was being crossed yesterday, today and maybe tomorrow."

The absence of any crew noises from the boat since Monday led the navy command to conclude "that the critical state of the personnel has come," he said, adding, "No matter how hard it is to say this, it is quite likely that we will have to admit the worst expectations."

The admiral's sober report was issued a day after President Vladimir V. Putin returned to Moscow and cut short a vacation amid criticism that he had neglected the stricken families and delayed too long on a decision for foreign assistance in the rescue.

Officials in Murmansk said there were still no plans for Mr. Putin to travel to the area, where relatives again on Saturday were shown on television mourning what now appears to be the certain loss of their loved ones.

Rescue crews have reported that when they twice docked on the rear hatch and then tried to pump water out of the docking corridor, water just kept flooding in. At first, navy officials believed that deformed deck plates around the hatch were preventing a tight lock. Now, Admiral Motsak said, they also believe that the rear compartment under the hatch may have been flooded and so water was rushing into the docking corridor from inside the submarine.

The causes of the explosion that proved fatal to the ship and crew are still unknown, the admiral said. But a new possibility, he said, was that the 14,000-ton submarine hit a World War II mine. He said that between 1992 and 1999, six such mines have been discovered in the Barents Sea, the most recent last September.

The admiral said it was difficult to pronounce the crew beyond hope "because I have known the submarine's commander," Capt. Gennadi Lyachin, "for many years."

He said the rescue operation would now move to the "second stage," to concentrate on penetrating the hull of the 490-foot submarine to begin evacuation of bodies.

Admiral Motsak said that the navy would eventually raise the submarine to remove its weapons and nuclear reactors from the seabed, but that "it may take time."

---

Norwegians fail to find entry to sub

USA Today
08/20/00- Updated 03:20 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/nwssun01.htm

MOSCOW (AP) - Norwegian divers struggled to open the escape hatch on a nuclear submarine that sank with 118 men aboard, but they found no sign of life Sunday as Russian officials said most of the vessel was flooded in minutes when it went down.

The Russian navy has all but ruled out hope that any of the crew remains alive nine days after the Kursk sank, crippled by a massive explosion.

President Vladimir Putin, widely criticized for his slow and low-key public response to the crisis, pledged Sunday that ''until the last minute, we will do everything to save everyone who could be saved.''

But he did not appear optimistic. ''Regrettably, sometimes it's not us but circumstances which determine how the situation develops,'' he said.

The divers worked for most of the day and well into the night. They tried several times to wrest the hatch open with a crane but failed, Russia's RTR television network reported.

The divers found signs that some of the 118 crewmen may have tried to get out but were unable to open the escape hatch, Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov said on RTR. In a grim indication of what rescuers are likely to find when they get into the Kursk, Klebanov said there might be a body in the escape chamber.

The divers, working 350 feet below the surface of the Barents Sea, were moving slowly because of the depth. Each dive was taking several hours, navy officials said.

Speaking from the command ship directing rescue operations, Klebanov said the divers might have to go to a navy base to determine whether their bulky diving suits could safely pass through the escape hatch if it is opened. That would cause a further delay.

No decision had been made on whether a British mini-submarine which arrived Saturday would be used in the rescue operation. Klebanov said the escape hatch was so badly damaged that it was unlikely the British vessel could latch on.

''The British submarine is similar to ours, so we believe that it will be unable to dock either,'' he said.

Conflicting signals emerged from the three-nation rescue operation. Russian officials have said for days that the escape hatch is severely mangled, but a spokesman for the Norwegian military said Sunday it was in good shape.

''We confirm that the hatch is intact,'' Captain Erland Raanes told The Associated Press by telephone. The hatch is ''so good that there are possibilities there.''

But he said later that an unspecified pressure problem was making it difficult to open the hatch.

New details emerged Sunday of how severely the Kursk was shattered in the first few minutes. For days, the Russian navy had insisted the submarine was in good condition.

''Water almost instantly flooded the submarine's hull up to the fifth or sixth compartments. The crew in those sections died almost instantaneously and the submarine became uncontrollable,'' Klebanov said.

Some of the crew might have survived for a time in the three aft compartments, he said. Norwegian divers banged on the Kursk's hull to see if there were indications of air pockets, officials said. They got no response.

The Norwegian operation appeared to be the first time divers had descended to the Kursk since rescue efforts began a week ago. Russian escape capsules tried to reach the Kursk repeatedly, but the Russian navy reportedly had no skilled divers.

Russian officials have said the Kursk's nuclear reactors apparently switched off in the accident, but the new evidence of how the submarine was torn apart raised concerns that they could have been damaged in the explosion.

With hope for survivors all but gone, officials indicated the emphasis was shifting to what caused the tragedy on the Kursk, one of the navy's newest and most powerful submarines.

A probable scenario was that a torpedo in the Kursk's forward compartment blew up, setting off a much bigger explosion. U.S. and Norwegian authorities detected two explosions in the area last Saturday at the time the Kursk was lost.

Klebanov said Sunday that a World War II mine or a collision with a foreign submarine were possible causes. The U.S. and British navies, which often have submarines in the area, denied their vessels were involved.

Klebanov said there were up to three foreign submarines in the area when the Kursk was lost and that requests for information from foreign countries had not been answered. He did not specify which countries he meant.

---

A Disaster Puts Putin in a Bind

New York Times
August 20, 2000
By WILLIAM E. ODOM
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/oped/20odom.html

WASHINGTON -- The Russian submarine disaster in the Barents Sea has been more than a human tragedy. It has also been a test of the true character of President Vladimir Putin and his senior military. Judging just by their arrogant public handling of the crisis in its first days, he and his commanders have again confirmed the worst.

As the news first unfolded, the commanders issued conflicting accounts of the sinking of the Kursk submarine, and for days Mr. Putin issued no statement at all. Although we still don't know the details of what caused the disaster, we do know enough about the context to speculate about the larger implications.

The rundown state of the Russian military is no surprise. For years there have been revelations about suicides in the military ranks, cruel abuses of first-year conscripts and corruption in the senior officer corps. The Committee of Russian Soldiers' Mothers bravely collects and publishes such information in the face of the military's hostility. At the same time, generals and admirals complain that Russian youths are insufficiently patriotic and that the defense budget is too low. As officers skim off money for personal gain, unit training and weapons maintenance as well as procurement of new arms are woefully neglected. Not only are most of the ships in poor repair, but many sailors and junior officers have rarely or maybe never been at sea.

Why then did the admirals risk launching a large, complex naval exercise in the Barents Sea?

The answer may lie in the Russian navy's competition with the land-based nuclear strategic forces for scarce resources. The power struggle began as a result of Boris Yeltsin's half-hearted effort to reform the military.

Under Mr. Yeltsin, it was a two-sided fight between the strategic nuclear forces and the conventional ground forces over who controls all the services and over budget priorities. Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev had the advantage under Mr. Yeltsin. He created an independent command for the land-based nuclear rockets, bought new long-range ballistic missiles and cut the conventional forces.

More recently, the chief of the general staff, Anatoli Kvashnin, a commander in the first war in Chechnya, seemed to be making a comeback for the conventional forces.

Under Mr. Putin, however, the struggle has become three-sided. Inspired by his rhetoric about being a world-class naval power, the admirals insist that their missile-equipped submarines, rather than the land-based rocket forces, should be Russia's main nuclear deterrent.

In late July, the quarrel between Marshal Sergeyev and General Kvashnin became conspicuously public. Mr. Putin let them abuse each other in the media for several days before a security council meeting on Aug. 11 when he reportedly imposed a compromise between the nuclear rocket forces and the conventional forces.

Then word leaked out that he had given the navy an edge over the land-based rockets, which would be reduced and eventually folded into the air forces. The large exercise in the Barents Sea is likely related to the infighting. Ready or not, the commanders of submarines and ships may have been determined to demonstrate their capabilities to reassure Mr. Putin.

This interservice strife is largely of Mr. Putin's making. Last November he began talking about the navy's role in reviving Russia as a great power, and in recent remarks to naval personnel in Kaliningrad, he repeated that line.

Mr. Putin has also sought to reassure the ground forces, beginning in the spring of 1999 with his support of its plans for an invasion of Chechnya.

As the war boosted his popularity in the presidential race, he promised more money to the ground forces.

Although the costs of the war in Chechnya greatly exceeded expectations, the president continued his rhetoric about Russia's great-power status. Encouraging the expectations of both the admirals and the ground-forces generals, he also signed the new national security doctrine that appeared to give priority to the strategic rocket forces.

Little wonder the generals and admirals have been ebullient about Mr. Putin. They were unable to avoid the huge cuts in the Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras, and for nearly 15 years, they have hoped that eventually the military would again take first place in devouring the state budget.

The question is whether Mr. Putin can provide money as well as the moral support. Russia's regional governors are already warning him that he cannot use their tax money for that purpose. Alternatively, he might purge scores of senior officers, as opposed to a token few, and make the military live within the state's means. This seems unlikely. How is he to assert control over the regions, collect more taxes, and break the influence of the oligarchs without military support?

Moreover, his popularity is now at stake.

Although most Russians want him to reduce crime and cut corruption, soldiers' mothers, fathers and wives do not share his affection for the military and secret police. The tragedy of the Kursk and Mr. Putin's brazen reaction to it are bound to reinforce their dislike of the military and may also hurt his highly favorable public opinion ratings.

Whatever the technical causes of the sinking of the Kursk, the event confronts Mr. Putin with a political crisis.

His allies in the military clearly helped him come to power, and this leaves the Russian president with some very difficult choices.

William E. Odom, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and adjunct professor of political science at Yale, is author of ``The Collapse of the Soviet Military.'' A retired Army general, he was director of the National Security Agency from 1985 to 1988.

---

Russians Give Up Hope of Saving Sub Crew
British and Norwegians to Continue Rescue Mission

Washington Post
Sunday, August 20, 2000; Page A01
By Daniel Williams Washington Post Foreign Service
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-08/20/150l-082000-idx.html

MOSCOW, Aug. 19-Hope and despair clashed dramatically today as the saga of the nuclear submarine Kursk drew to a close. Only hours before British and Norwegian rescuers arrived at the Barents Sea site of the sunken sub, Russian officials acknowledged that the vessel's entire 118-member crew is almost certainly dead.

Vice Adm. Mikhail Motsak, the Northern Fleet's chief of staff, told reporters that sailors in the front of the sub died following a calamitous explosion and that if there were survivors, they probably suffocated, died from the cold or drowned as water leaked into the vessel's rear compartments. Russian television interrupted its regular programming to carry Motsak's announcement live.

"We have in fact crossed the critical borderline in terms of conditions compatible with human life," he said of possible survivors. "Most possibly, we will have to admit that our worst expectations have been met. This is the most severe disaster that I personally have known in the history of the submarine fleet."

Yuri Yevdokimov, the regional governor of Murmansk, added: "The crew has unfortunately perished. That is a fact."

Despite the announcement, British and Norwegian rescue teams arriving on the scene last night planned to go ahead with efforts to reach any survivors.

"As far as we are concerned, we are still very much involved in a rescue mission," said a spokesman for the British Defense Ministry, according to the Reuters news agency. "Unless we get absolutely compelling evidence that there is no point in continuing, the mission will stay on track as it is at the moment."

As of late last night, the Norwegian ship Normand Pioneer, which is carrying the British navy's LR5 mini-submarine, was in position five miles from where the Kursk is lying, the British Defense Ministry announced in London.

[The Interfax news agency reported early Sunday morning that a Norwegian diver had descended to the Kursk in order to inspect the sub's damaged escape hatch.]

Russian officials said the British undersea robot Scorpion, equipped with a sophisticated television camera, will be used first to inspect the Kursk, which lies in a tilted position about 350 feet below the surface. The actual rescue attempt, combining the state-of-the-art LR5 with the efforts of a dozen Norwegian divers, would be made Sunday.

Russian officials minimized the chances of getting inside the Kursk but said they would continue their efforts to gain access to the sub. They said Russian rescuers discovered damage to the sub's rear escape hatch, which apparently is the only one accessible. Moreover, if the space between the escape hatch and an inner hatch is flooded, water will blow out of the escape hatch when it is removed and throw the rescue sub off the hull.

"We will not look at the arrival of the British rescuers as a panacea, as they will encounter the same problems," said navy spokesman Igor Dygalo. "Damage to the escape hatch was insurmountable. The situation is beyond critical."

At the same time, however, naval officials noted that the presence of divers who can reach the hull of the Kursk improves chances of opening the submarine. But that suggestion raises the latest in a series of questions about the rescue mission: Why didn't the navy use divers earlier in the week, if for nothing else than to inspect the wreckage? Increasingly aggressive Russian commentators pointed out the contradiction.

"Why have Russian deep-sea divers yet to be involved?" asked the newspaper Trud. "The depth at which the Kursk sits would be a casual stroll for them."

The newspaper Izvestia ran a story about Nikolai Parkhomenko, a retired navy diver in Murmansk, near the Kursk's home port, who said he and colleagues volunteered to help. He said a navy duty officer turned them down. "We will sort this out without you," Parkhomenko said he was told.

Besides declaring a loss of hope for survivors, officials said that a special government commission headed by Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov had reached a verdict on why the Kursk sank. But as has been customary this week, no evidence was provided. A "high-yield explosion" inside the sub caused most of the damage, officials said. The first compartment, containing torpedoes, and a second, the control room, flooded immediately.

Only rear compartments remained intact, but those may be flooded because of cracks in the hull or damage to the rear propeller area.

The commission essentially combined this week's numerous theories about why the Kursk sank: During major training exercises last weekend, it concluded, the Kursk collided with something, setting off a blast in the torpedo hold, which contains about 30 warheads. "When the submarine hit the seabed at high speed, its torpedoes apparently detonated," Motsak, the Northern Fleet chief, said.

Naval officials repeated speculation that the Kursk either hit a World War II mine or collided with a foreign submarine.

The reference to a foreign submarine is diplomatically explosive. The U.S. Navy was monitoring last week's exercise with ships and at least two submarines. Russian officials today also mentioned the presence of a British sub. "It is no secret that when we hold exercises in neutral waters, foreign subs are always present and practice some of their maneuvers. One could have been there, could well be," said Vladimir Navrotsky, a spokesman for the Northern Fleet.

The United States denied that its two submarines were close to the Kursk and has said no U.S. ships were involved in the accident. The Defense Department has not provided pictures of the vessels to show them undamaged, nor said exactly where they are.

"You would think that with such grave charges flying around, the Pentagon would do more to put them to rest," said Joshua Hendler, a naval expert at Princeton University.

Putin, who came under the most intense criticism of his presidency for not returning to Moscow from vacation to take charge of the rescue operation, was reported to be working in the Kremlin, where he met today with his prime minister and security officials. He returned to the capital ahead of schedule early this morning.

Because of deficiencies in the rescue mission and the inconsistencies in the information that has been provided, public suspicions of the navy's motives were reaching a fever pitch. The Russian command said initially that the sub sank Sunday, but it was actually Saturday. It claimed that signs of life were heard until Tuesday, but today said the sounds stopped Monday. The Russians also announced falsely that oxygen and electric power were being supplied from surface ships to the Kursk. On different occasions, high-ranking naval officers said that oxygen supplies on the Kursk would last until Friday, then today, and then until Aug. 25. The navy employed its most sophisticated rescue sub only Wednesday, after using less effective ones early in the week. Russia resisted offers of foreign help until Wednesday, saying it could handle the rescue on its own.

Some Russians began to speculate that there is something to hide--evidence of incompetence or faulty equipment or weaponry that officials want to keep from prying eyes. "Things just do not add up," said Aleksei Gusev, a retired submarine captain. "It very much looks like what is going on now in the Barents Sea is not a rescue of our boys, but the funeral of a military secret."

---

Grieving City Criticizes Rescue Effort
Murmansk, Near Sunken Sub's Home Port, Lashes Out at Russian Government

Washington Post
Sunday, August 20, 2000; Page A20
By Anna Nemtsova Special to The Washington Post
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-08/20/072l-082000-idx.html

MURMANSK, Russia, Aug. 19-As residents of this far northern seaport began to mourn the apparent loss of 118 sailors aboard the sunken submarine Kursk today, their grief was tinged with anger at a military establishment and government they feel have deceived them over the circumstances of the disaster.

On hearing the news that the navy had given up hope of rescuing anyone, residents sharply criticized the slow pace of the rescue and decisions they said ended the chances of bringing anyone out alive. "Our admirals are killers. We should scream so the whole world knows about this," said Anastasia Mityakina, a housewife.

"We knew this would happen," said Valentina Boldyreva, a pensioner. "They were just wasting time."

Murmansk is intimate with the sea. It lies on Kola Bay, just 25 miles from Severomorsk, the naval station that is home to the Kursk. Its harbor is just off downtown, and its gray waters are full of ruined ships. The city's rundown neighborhoods attest to the poverty of military life in Russia, beset by low budgets and austere salaries, and to Russia's prolonged economic decline.

In the past few days, patrons in bars and cafes offered toasts "to the health of the boys" aboard the Kursk. The toasts stopped today.

Among the residents' main complaints is the government's unwillingness to ask for foreign help in the rescue until Wednesday. "Why not ask right away? It couldn't have hurt," said Larisa Makarova, a schoolteacher.

Residents heaped scorn on President Vladimir Putin, in part because he remained at a Black Sea resort on vacation instead of returning to Moscow to oversee the rescue operation. "As for Putin, his popularity is dying now," said Lora Lobuynova, wife of a retired sailor. "It is too obvious that the government turned their backs on people."

The sadness here has been deepened by the steady arrival of relatives of crew members. Today, a group pulled into the city's pre-revolutionary train station from Kursk, the city south of Moscow for which the submarine is named. A cordon of sailors kept the crowd of 300 reporters at bay. No one shouted out questions.

Residents of Murmansk tried to press money into the hands of the relatives, who tearfully declined with a shake of the head.

The relatives were ushered along by the governor of the Kursk region, Alexander Rutskoi, a former vice president of Russia. "You look like a clever person," he told one reporter. "What do you have in mind when you ask questions like 'How do you feel now?' "

On Friday, a group of relatives met with Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov in Vedyaevo, a town where many Northern Fleet families reside. Klebanov was sent to Murmansk to soothe the relatives, but the meeting soon exploded into a storm of recrimination. "Have you no children?" shouted one woman. "Don't you know how we feel?"

Murmansk is familiar with military wrongdoings. Its 11 miles of shore along Kola Bay are lined with the rotting carcasses of nuclear-powered vessels. As the hulls decay, radiation seeps into the cold waters that lead into the Barents Sea.

"This is the Sibir--a nuclear icebreaker resting in the middle of our town. They bring these boats here for maintenance, which is against all international rules," said Lena Vasilyeva, an ecologist, taking reporters on a tour of the harbor.

Vladimir Volkov, a retired merchant mariner, said that given Murmansk's experience, the fate of the Kursk crew was no surprise. "We are dying slowly here. And they died slowly, too."

---

Russian Navy Faces Criticism

Associated Press
August 20, 2000 Filed at 2:38 p.m. EDT
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Russia-Bungled-Rescue.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- Lacking its own expert deep-sea divers, the Russian navy had to wait for days for foreign divers to arrive at the sunken nuclear submarine Kursk, and Russian divers discharged by the navy for lack of funds say their own offers to help were rebuffed.

The navy's failure to get divers to the scene in the early days of the crisis has sparked wide criticism. Officials initially said the weather was too bad for divers, but that claim was questioned by many experts.

After saying for days that foreign aid wasn't needed, Russia finally requested British and Norwegian rescue crews. Russian officials began describing Norwegian divers as the last chance to save any of 118 crewmen of the Kursk, which sank in the Barents Sea on Aug. 12 after a devastating explosion.

Until Norwegian divers began rescue efforts on Sunday, the navy spent days trying to reach the Kursk with rescue capsules that are essentially mini-submarines.

Facing angry questions about the Navy's failure to get Russian or foreign divers to the scene earlier, Vice Adm. Nikolai Konorev gave little explanation.

``It's a painful question to answer,'' he told reporters. ``We had deep confidence that we would be able to do the work with rescue capsules.''

The failure has brought rebukes from former divers.

Yuri Filchenkov, a former navy diver with 15 years experience, was quoted in the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda on Saturday as saying that he called the Navy to offer his help just as first reports about the disaster appeared, but was rebuffed.

In the following days he helplessly listened to reports describing the numerous vain attempts by the Russian rescue craft to latch on to the Kursk submarine lying at a depth of 350 feet.

``In stormy seas, you can't get a rescue craft connected with a hatch without a diver helping it,'' Filchenkov was quoted as saying. As a result, he said, futile attempts by Russian rescue capsules to dock with the Kursk ``were only driving their exhausted crews to the grave.''

Filchenkov said he and other former divers were eager to rush to the disaster site, but it was unclear whether the Navy still had the pressurized suits and other gear necessary to carry out the work. Specialized ships on which deep divers were based have been mothballed years ago.

The Soviet navy had two schools for training deep divers, and deep diving units existed in each of Russia's four fleets until the mid-1990s, when the navy disbanded them because of a shortage of funds, according to former naval officials and media reports.

Anatoly Vyrelkin, who formerly headed a Northern Fleet deep-diving unit, said it would have taken his men less than one day to reach the Kursk during Soviet times. Vyrelkin said divers would have been able to evacuate survivors quickly using diving bells pressurized from the surface.

``But there is not a single specialized ship in the Northern Fleet now, and the people manning rescue capsules have never carried out a real-life exercise on docking to a submarine,'' Vyrelkin said, according to Komsomolskaya Pravda. ``And there isn't a single deep water diver available.''

It appears that the rescue capsules have even failed to adequately film the submarine surface, despite official assurances that it was thoroughly examined. When a Norwegian robot camera surveyed the submarine's exit hatch, officials extolled the footage as major news.

---

Norwegian Divers Struggle to Open Kursk Hatch

New York Times
August 20, 2000
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/00/08/20/late/20russia.html

MOSCOW, Aug 20 - Norwegian divers struggled on Sunday to open a hatch into the stricken Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, whose 118 crew members are already believed to be dead.

Norwegian and Russian officials contradicted each other as to how tough it would be to release the hatch on the submarine, lying 108 metres (354 feet) down on the bed of the Barents Sea.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, leading a commission of inquiry, said the hatch was so badly damaged it would have to be torn off.

He said a decision had been made to use a crane on the Norwegian rescue ship to pull it off.

A spokesman for the Norwegian armed forces said the divers did not believe the hatch was too mangled and thought it could be opened fairly easily. He also denied a Russian television report that a man had been found in the airlock below the hatch.

The Kursk plunged to the bottom of the Barents Sea on August 12 after an explosion or collision, or both.

"We have not drawn the conclusion the hatch is so damaged that it cannot be opened," John Espen Lien, spokesman for the Norwegian armed forces, told Reuters in Oslo after Norwegian divers inspected the crippled Kursk.

"The hatch is not destroyed and is in a fair condition...We think it should be possible to open it with a British or a Russian rescue capsule," he said.

His comments contradicted Klebanov, Moscow's most senior representative at the accident site, who told Russia's RTR television the hatch was so badly damaged the divers had failed for several hours to open it, even using powerful tools.

USE CRANE TO REMOVE HATCH

"A decision has been made to pull it (the hatch) off using a crane set up on the Norwegian rescue ship," Klebanov said.

He said the attempt would be made soon but that the Norwegian team wanted to rehearse the manoeuvre on land.

Klebanov said a British mini-submarine would not be able to dock to the Kursk due to the damage on its hull.

But Norway's NRK radio quoted the head of the armed forces in north Norway, Rear Admiral Einar Skorgen, as saying there might not be major problems in attaching a rescue capsule.

Another Norwegian spokesman, Kjell Grandhagen, later told NRK the divers had found there was air inside the outer hatch of the Kursk's read emergency exit, which he said was not damaged.

RTR had earlier said the divers had opened a valve on the outside of the submarine which should have allowed water to enter the airlock and equalise the pressure with the sea.

It said no air had come out of the chamber, suggesting it was already full of water.

Klebanov said that once the hatch was opened, some of the divers would go into the Kursk.

"It is clear someone will go in, maybe someone will refuse, this is a difficult psychological situation, but we are sure several will agree and the operation will carry on," he said.

The Russian navy says it believes an explosion led to a detonation of the Kursk's torpedoes, causing a much bigger blast. Russian officials admitted on Saturday, just hours before Norwegian and British teams arrived to help, that there was practically no chance of rescuing any of the crew alive.

President Vladimir Putin, slammed for inaction in a crisis which has become a national tragedy, broke a silence which has lasted since Friday when he pledged on Sunday that the rescue effort would continue to "the last moment" in the hope someone might be saved.

EMOTIONAL PRESIDENT PUTIN

Putin, speaking to Church leaders, delivered his most emotional remarks yet on the disaster.

"With sorrow in our hearts and, I do not exaggerate, tears in our eyes, we are following all that is happening in the Barents Sea," he said. "The sailors are doing everything they can to save their comrades.

Before the divers went down, the vessel was inspected by a robot camera, which Klebanov said showed a serious crack.

"That is why we think that the British sub will not be able to dock and our main hope is on the manual work, together with a (diving) bell of the Norwegian divers."

The divers also hammered all over the hull of the Kursk in a bid to find air pockets inside the mostly flooded vessel.

Klebanov said up to six of the forward sections had been hit by the blast and only sailors in the last three had any chance.

There was a bitter irony that rescue teams from NATO members Norway and Britain represented the only hope, however remote, for the crew of the Kursk, an attack vessel designed primarily to destroy aircraft carriers of the Western military alliance.

After days of failed attempts to dock with the sub because of the damaged hatch, Russia grudgingly agreed to foreign aid.

The differing interpretation of events by the two sides seemed to indicate the complexity of three teams working together.

Skorgen had earlier conceded some time had been wasted in the operation and that he had been forced to go directly to the head of Russia's Northern Fleet to get things moving.

"It's a little hard to manage. That has to do with two different cultures having to operate together on a Russian nuclear submarine," he told NRK public radio.

NOT ALL QUESTIONS ANSWERED IN ADVANCE

"You can well imagine that not all questions are answered in advance when that's going to happen."

Rescuers had hoped to use the British navy's LR5 rescue mini-sub, sitting on a mother ship some 10-12 km (six to seven miles) from the Kursk, but Klebanov's remarks appeared to indicate the state-of-art vessel may remain untested.

In London, a spokesman for Britain's Ministry of Defence was asked how long the LR5 would remain on standby.

"Until such time as the Russians have given up all hope and declare that there is no chance of finding any survivors, the rescue attempt continues and we will make ourselves available to help," he said.

Russians reacted to the disaster with a mixture of sorrow, shock and anger over the authorities' handling of the affair.

In the northern town of Murmansk, a packed congregation of Russian Orthodox worshippers prayed for the sailors.

"I prayed for them even though the authorities say it's too late. I believe in miracles," said Valentina Voloshina, a retired teacher. "We feel for the sailors."

---

Running Silent, Deep and Sometimes Deadly

New York Times
August 20, 2000
By CHRISTOPHER DREW
http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/082000submarine-review.html

There is a famous bit of publishing lore about how Tom Clancy's first novel, "The Hunt for Red October," caught on in the mid-1980s. President Reagan read the tale of submarine disaster and derring-do and mentioned publicly that it was mesmerizing. The novel, published by the tiny Naval Institute Press, quickly became a runaway best seller.

Reagan's instincts for pure and simple drama catapulted Clancy to fame. But they also help explain why the world has been so transfixed by the sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk in the Barents Sea and the desperate attempts to reach the 118 men either trapped or dead inside. At week's end, rescue attempts were unsuccessful.

Everyone knows that tales of sea adventure and calamity have always held deep appeal, and best sellers like "The Perfect Storm" and movies like "Titanic," "Das Boot" and "U-571" have tapped into that fascination. But what is it about the sea -- and especially submarines -- that often makes the drama of those trapped below the waves resonate more than similar disasters on land, like mine cave-ins?

Part of the answer is that for all the advances in science, the sea remains a mysterious -- and mystical -- force. Since the 1960s, every achievement in the space program has been covered so minutely by the news media that outer space has a familiar feel. But once you slip below the ocean's waves, you enter a dark, unpredictable and often claustrophobic world that, in some ways, rivals space as the final frontier.

A frontier, but one so hauntingly close as to still feel a part of daily life. At just 350 feet down, the men stuck on the Kursk were tantalizingly near to safety last week, even as storms and rough seas frustrated rescue efforts. If the Washington monument were standing at that depth, only two-thirds of it would be under water.

What also sticks so hard in many people's hearts is a sense of the courage and ingenuity of the men who volunteer to serve on what, as some like to point out in happier times, are the only ships that are actually designed to sink.

Through frantic depth-charge scenes in World War II movies, many people are attracted to the strong, and enviable, bond that unites so many of these men when danger strikes. When the alarm bells ring on a submarine, "You have to be able to rely on the first man who comes to the scene to do what needs to be done," said Carlisle A.H. Trost, a retired admiral and a former chief of naval operations.

When he was a young submarine officer during the Cold War, Trost and several of his mates were briefly overcome by gases while disengaging a torpedo that had suddenly begun to ignite. Partly as a result of the common risk of such accidents, he said, there also is "a bond of camaraderie" between American and Russian submariners, a sense of brotherhood, that always transcended the antagonisms between the countries.

Indeed, the allure has been deepened by new revelations about this formerly secret world.

Since the start of the Cold War, the use of submarines for spying has been cloaked under the tightest secrecy. And it is only in the last few years that some of those exploits have surfaced.

U.S. submarines, for instance, have spent lots of time off Russian naval ports, waiting to intercept radio communications and check out the capabilities of each new class of Russian missile boats. The stakes were high. The goal of these submarines was nothing less than to avoid another Pearl Harbor, a surprise attack in the much deadlier age of nuclear weapons.

To that end, the United States also sent a few specially equipped submarines into Soviet seas to dispatch divers, who tapped into underwater communications cables and retrieved pieces of Soviet test missiles.

But despite all this heroism, it has only been at the time of accidents like the Kursk sinking that the public has had a chance to peer inside this hidden world.

The U.S. Navy lost two nuclear-powered submarines, the USS Thresher and the USS Scorpion, in the 1960s. The Scorpion sank in an accident on the way home from the Mediterranean, and no one realized it in time to stop family members from waiting for her on a rainy dock in Norfolk, Va.

The Russians have suffered far greater calamity, losing more than 500 men in submarine accidents over the last 40 years, according to the newspaper Izvestia. The loss of the Kursk is particularly poignant because many of the men were in their 20s and the submarine was not on a risky military adventure, but simply taking part in a training cruise. And the exercise, the largest in recent years, seems to have been held as much for political reasons as for tactical ones, in a forlorn bid to recapture some of the Russian navy's former power and glory.

Still, it is the image of men possibly huddled in the hull, banging for attention as the air turned foul and the sea churned through their sub, that will linger most.

---

The Concorde And the Kursk

Washington Post
Sunday, August 20, 2000 ; B07
By Jim Hoagland
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54592-2000Aug19.html

Physical mishaps caused the fiery crash of a Concorde jetliner near Paris on July 25 and the sinking of a Russian nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea last week. But these separate disasters are linked by political causes and effects that possess a global dimension.

Britain, France and Russia simultaneously confronted last week the costs of maintaining an inflated and obsolete sense of national grandeur based on technological overreach: At almost the same moment that the two European Union nations announced the halt of all Concorde flights, Russia desperately appealed for foreign help to rescue the Kursk.

These distant tragedies make a similar point: Modern nations must find more appropriate, and more affordable, symbols of power and achievement in a world that values efficiency over grandeur. Britain and France are capable of doing that on their own. Russia needs help.

The Concorde first: The sleek, droop-nosed supersonic jet was for Britain and France their premier symbol of national economic resurgence in the 1960s. They had given up empires in Africa and Asia to concentrate on Europe and the Atlantic. Their taxpayers paid $2.5 billion to put a test Concorde in the air in 1969 to challenge American and Soviet technological superiority.

Instead the plane became the most exciting commercial failure in history. OPEC's taking command of oil prices in 1973 and rising concern about environmental damage from breaking the sound barrier kept other airlines subsonic. Only Air France and British Airways took seven Concordes apiece to ferry expense-account flyers, wealthy celebrities and occasional novelty seekers between New York and Europe in 3 1/2 hours at $10,000 a round-trip pop.

Their opaque financial accounts are written to suggest that each airline makes about $100 million a year in profit from Concorde flights. These operating profits would be erased by structural changes to fix the problems that caused the July 25 inferno and the loss of business it will likely cause. The temporary grounding of all Concordes announced last week may well become permanent.

For all its technical glories and thrills, Concorde had become an expensive distraction out of a more nationalistic era. The future lies in greater Europe-wide cooperation and pooling of resources: The four-nation Airbus partnership followed consumer demand for bigger and cheaper, not sleeker and faster, and is raking in orders. The European Union could hardly want a better metaphor for its continental-scale advantages.

In Russia, the grim fate of the Kursk will play into an even sharper debate about national resources and national pride. Whatever the specific causes, the disaster illuminates the difficulties of trying to maintain a great-power military machine on a small-power military budget. The $5 billion Russia budgeted for its military this year cannot support 1.2 million soldiers, maintain a vast navy and pay for a superpower-sized nuclear arsenal as well.

Russian generals have been arguing over putting proportionately more money into nuclear missiles to maintain a semblance of Moscow's former global status (Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev's desire) or channeling scarce funds into salaries, maintenance and restocking conventional forces (the demand of Gen. Anatoly Kvashnin, chief of the general staff) so they can fight more credibly in Chechnya.

While wishing no more atrocities on the Chechens, Americans have a horse in this race and it is Kvashnin. Russia's conventional forces will present no threats to NATO for decades to come. The rusting rockets Sergeyev clings to can still destroy the world.

American politicians should be doing everything they can to encourage the devaluing of nuclear weapons as national status symbols and to lessen Russian fears that the Pentagon seeks a "first-strike" ability to wipe out Russian nuclear forces without suffering retaliation.

But the politicians do the opposite. The Clinton administration raises Russian nuclear paranoia with its limited national missile defense plan, which is simply too stupid to be accepted at face value. No wonder Russians think these guys in Washington must be hiding something clever and awful behind all the smoke.

The Clintonites also cling to outmoded arms control negotiations that reinforce Moscow's pretensions to military superpower status. Despite some promising beginnings, George W. Bush has yet to show how he would change U.S. strategic forces to spur Russia to live down to its foundering technological base.

Helping Russia understand how to make that adjustment should be a high-priority U.S. political objective. Grandeur through unneeded and expensive technology is a bad investment in a world where even nationalism must pay its own way or yield.

-------- u.s. nuc facilities

-------- colorado

Uranium miner gets shaft
Congress OK'd `compassionate' payout, cancer victim hasn't seen a cent

Spokane Spokesman Review
August 20, 2000
Gary Harmon - Cox News Service
http://www.spokane.net/news-story-body.asp?Date=082000&ID=s841021&cat=

GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. _ Richard Stocks has a technicolor resume. He worked the Yellow Cat, White Canyon, Blue Lizard and Red Canyon. He worked off a creek named for salt, La Sal, and he toiled in the Great White North.

Not that Stocks paid much attention to the colors, save one: He was looking for the yellow rock that the United States used to fend off its Cold War antagonists. Stocks was a uranium miner and all the colorful names listed here were tight little excavations called "dog holes," also known as uranium mines.

Now 81, Stocks is dying. The federal government owes him $100,000, but it's unlikely he'll ever see it. His attorney is prodding a Senate committee to break out of budget lockstep, with no luck so far.

"They've plumb ignored me," Stocks said. "I think it's a stinking deal."

Stocks can't pass along the award for someone else to claim after his death. He has no blood relatives eligible to receive a posthumous award, so the compassionate payment would simply revert to the federal government, said his attorney, Keith Killian.

"Unfortunately, our client has been diagnosed with terminal cancer," Killian wrote this week to Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, a Colorado Republican. "He is not expected to live until fall. This deserving uranium miner needs your help!"

Campbell sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee, which could jump-start the process of getting Stocks his compassionate payment. Killian already has written all the other members of the Appropriations Committee, but so far has come up empty, and time is running short.

Stocks said he had no interest in pushing his survival to its medical maximum.

"I've signed up," he said. "I don't want tubes in me or nothing. I want to die when my time comes."

Stocks started courting cancer unknowingly when he was 14 and went to work in the uranium mines, where the work was hard and the pay was good.

"You could work for yourself and make a pretty good living," he said. Of course, a miner had to pack his tools to the mine on his back, but it was 1933 and the uranium business looked to be more profitable than the sawmill job his father had, he said.

Breathing was hard in the mines, enough so that miners such as Stocks blasted at night and allowed the dust to settle before they went in during the day.

Stocks spent years in the mines before war broke out.

"I worked until I went into the service and then after that I went to Alaska to work a uranium mine there, all high-grade ore."

Drafted into the Army in World War II, Stocks served in four major campaigns in the Pacific Theater and wrapped up his military service in Korea, where he was among forces that supervised the Japanese surrender.

During his times in the mines, he said, no one ever mentioned the possibility of contracting radiation-related disease, such as cancer.

Stocks' cancer started in his prostate gland, he said, and might have been checked there had his doctor not lost a report. "Incidentally, he's not my doctor anymore," Stocks said.

The cancer radiated to his bladder and physicians most recently noticed that nodules on his lungs had metastasized and one of his kidneys no longer functions, said Stocks' niece, Delma Pangreen, who cares for him.

Congress in 1990 recognized that uranium workers worked in dangerous conditions without being told of the health hazards. Those workers, Congress decided, would be eligible for $100,000 payments if they contracted radiation-related diseases.

Stocks was one of the first to seek compensation and submitted a claim in 1992, which was rejected. His second claim was the one that netted him the government's IOU.

This year, even after the trust fund for the payments ran dry, Congress expanded the payments to include people who worked in uranium mills and who hauled the ore.

Congress moved quickly this year on a bill by one of Stocks' senators, Orrin Hatch, to expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, but it seems paralyzed on the subject of Stocks himself.

Stocks is in a sort of no-man's land.

"If it get it, I'll send some kids to school," he said of the $100,000.

Killian said he worries that Stocks won't survive to see the next federal budget cycle, but Stocks said he was optimistic.

"It's possible I could live for a year yet," he said. "Or it could happen tomorrow. At my age, you never know.

-------- missouri

USA Today
08/20/00
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Missouri

Weldon Spring - Federal officials will dump nuclear wastewater into the Missouri River instead of disposing of it in a nearby creek that flows through St. Charles County. After residents complained about the plan, the Department of Energy said it will mix wastewater seeping from a 70-foot-tall disposal cell with other waste that it sends through a pipeline into the Missouri River. The agency treats the wastewater to meet discharge standards before dumping it in the Missouri.

-------- new mexico

FBI agent says Lee polygraph unacceptable

USA Today
08/20/00- Updated 01:36 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/nc1.htm#poll

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - A scientist who breached security at Los Alamos National Laboratory has passed a private company's polygraph tests, an FBI agent said Friday. Wen Ho Lee, who is being charged with 59 counts involving downloading secret files containing classified information, passed polygraphs administered by a security company. An FBI agent says, however, that the tests were not done with proper FBI protocol in mind and the FBI doesn't agree with its conclusions. The agent says some of the information given in testimony last December was incorrect. Lee faces life in prison if convicted of the charges.

-------- new york

Repairs begin at IP2

By Tom Andersen
The Journal News
8/20/2000

BUCHANAN -- The first major step in replacing Indian Point 2's aging steam generators started just before midnight Friday when workers at Consolidated Edison's nuclear power plant began removing and storing the reactor's radioactive fuel.

Working around the clock, crews of 16 people are expected to complete the painstaking task by today or tomorrow, according to Con Edison. By removing and safely storing the fuel, the utility will be able to begin dismantling and removing four old steam generators and installing replacements. A tube in one of the steam generators leaked in February, causing the first emergency alert in the plant's 26-year history.

Removing and storing fuel is far from routine at a nuclear power plant. Normally, fuel is taken out of the reactor only at two-year intervals, during a regularly scheduled refueling outage. At Indian Point 2, workers have gone through the process only 13 or so times, said Steve Quinn, a Con Edison vice president who was formerly the head of the company's nuclear operations.

An indication of its importance can be seen in the staffing levels, he said. The entire power plant can be operated with a crew of 14, Quinn said. Removing and storing the fuel alone requires the same number.

"What happens, as you can imagine, when you're operating every day at 100 percent power, it becomes routine," he said. "And refueling is just not an operation that is done as often.

The plant's enriched-uranium fuel is kept in the reactor vessel, where the nuclear fission that creates energy takes place. The uranium pellets are packed in thin, 12-foot-long rods, 204 of which are bundled together in an assembly. Each assembly is 9 inches square and 12 feet long. The reactor -- which is 15 feet in diameter, and 44 feet deep and "looks like a Tylenol," according to Quinn -- holds 193 assemblies.

The vessel itself resides in the plant's domed containment building, sitting deep in a cavity sunken below a concrete deck on which the steam generators are arrayed.

Atop the reactor vessel is a concrete "missile block" that protects the reactor in case equipment should fall on it and a "bed spring," which holds electrical equipment, and flips up and out of the way when workers need access to the reactor.

After the missile block and bed spring are removed, a machine begins to remove bolts from the reactor top, four bolts at a time.

"Then you just lift it up with the crane," Quinn said. "Then as you're lifting this, you're flooding the cavity up behind it with water for shielding."

Water is an excellent insulator against radiation and is treated with boron, a chemical that stops nuclear reactions.

The water rises to a level 25 feet above the top of the reactor vessel, which is exactly the same as the water level in an adjacent building that contains a pool that holds Indian Point 2's spent-fuel. Achieving the same level in each building is important because the two are connected by a canal, and if the levels are different they would soon equalize, perhaps at a level too low to contain the radioactive fuel.

When the reactor vessel is flooded and the top is off, a horizontal crane slides above the vessel. From the crane, a device called a "refueling mast" is lowered. The mast grabs a fuel assembly and, keeping it submerged, shifts it to a machine called an "up-ender" -- essentially an underwater railroad flatcar outfitted with an arm that rises to a perpendicular position. The crane lowers the assembly into the perpendicular arm, which is then returned to its flat position on the railroad car.

The car then moves through the canal to the spent fuel pool, where the process is reversed.

The crane stores the assembly in a preassigned location within the pool, so it can be monitored and kept track of. Quinn said that two quality assurance workers verify that the assemblies are in the right place, and a video is made and reviewed to confirm their positioning.

From reactor vessel to spent-fuel pool, the process takes about 20 minutes for each assembly, the cranes and trolleys and up-enders synchronized to make efficient use of the time.

"It's really a productive affair," Quinn said. "It's almost like a ballet."

----

UraniumOnLine
August 20, 2000
COMMUNIQUE No. 3 provided exclusively
by New York Nuclear Corporation http://www.uraniumonline.com/nynco/uol2/UOL_Updates/Communique_3/communique_3.html

Great Neck, N.Y. - By now most of you have read or heard about the August 18, 2000 auction of UF6 that took place on UraniumOnLine, so this communiqué might already be old news. But we did want to share with you the story that Reuters released late yesterday afternoon and which we have heard has already been picked up by Yahoo! News and a CBS radio affiliate in Silicon Valley.

By Chris Reese

NEW YORK, Aug 21 (Reuters) - Add radioactive uranium to the list of items you can buy and sell with the click of a computer mouse, and it might seem like a nuclear bomb-maker's dream come true.

"An (Internet) auction for uranium seems far out, but it's really quite straightforward. It's like any other commodity," said Becky Battle, director of marketing for New York Nuclear Corp. which owns and operates the uranium trading web site UraniumOnLine.com.

Through the New York-based web site, nuclear power plants now can purchase uranium fuel needed to make electricity through an Internet auction process.

But Battle and others in the uranium production industry are quick to caution that it would be nearly impossible for terrorists to acquire the material online.

"There is no additional risk at all as a result of online trading," said Charles Scorer, chief executive officer of Nufcor International Ltd, a London-based uranium production and trading company.

Nufcor, equally owned by South African mining giant AngloGold Ltd. and South African banking to insurance group FirstRand bought 120,000 pounds of uranium oxide via UraniumOnLine.com's first Internet auction in July.

"Any physical movement of uranium must be from a licensed producer to a licensed trader or buyer," Scorer said, adding that the international community of uranium traders is relatively small and any new bidders would quickly be recognized as such.

Also, auctions on UraniumOnLine.com are private, and participants must be invited by New York Nuclear Corp.

The uranium is used as nuclear fuel in about 430 power plants worldwide to supply about 20 percent of the planet's electricity needs, Battle said.

"The general public may have a difficult time separating what they think of as defensive (weapons grade) uranium and commercial uranium," Battle said, "But the content (of nuclear fuel) is very very much different from bomb grade. We are talking apples and oranges here."

Bomb-grade uranium must go through a much more extensive and complex refining and enhancement process than uranium used for nuclear fuel. The process requires sophisticated and generally unavailable enhancement technology closely monitored by government agencies, industry sources said.

The online auction is seen as a step forward because it should allow for a more open-market, free trade of uranium by giving utilities and producers a more transparent uranium price and allowing the application of financial derivatives, such as futures contracts and hedging.

"With the deregulation of the electricity industry, the fuel procurement process will be more open," Nufcor's Scorer said. "It's more efficient than the traditional system."

Traditionally, most power plant operators buy uranium under long-term contracts with producers, with the price per pound kept secret.

"Naturally and organically, the market will become more liquid (with time), and people will use more of these online services as (they) develop," Scorer said.

At an online auction on Friday, the third one held on UraniumOnLine.com, an undisclosed buyer picked up 56,320 kilograms of uranium for $23.05 per kilogram.

This compares with a current average market price reached through traditional trading of $23.28 a kilogram, Battle said.

Friday's round attracted a "handful" of active bidders and "at least two dozen" more observers who are studying the mechanics of the process for possible future participation, she said.

For additional information or if you would like to be removed from our email list, please contact Rebecca T. Battle, rb@nynco.com

---

The Long Shadow of Science Past

New York Times
August 20. 2000
By MICHAEL COOPER
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/regional/082000ny-science.html

ORIENT POINT, N.Y. -- Long Island has long had a deeply uneasy and sometimes bizarrely suspicious relationship with the scientific enterprises that have taken root on its shores.

A deadly disease was sure to escape from the Plum Island Animal Disease Center -- a mile off the eastern end of Long Island here. The genetics research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory was sure to develop altered foods that would ruin people's health and the environment alike. If Brookhaven National Laboratory did not completely radiate Suffolk County, it was sure to cause a black hole that would pull everyone from Alec Baldwin to Amy Fisher in for good.

Of course, the institutions themselves are partly to blame. Although it was confined to Plum Island, there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease there in 1978.

Cold Spring, for its part, was a leader of the shadowy eugenics movement during the first half of the 20th century, propounding racist pseudoscientific human breeding theories. And a byproduct of Brookhaven's Nobel Prize-winning research was enough pollution in the area to make the federal government name the lab a Superfund site; the government also found that the lab should have done more to prevent, or at least detect, a leak of radioactive water that was discovered in 1996.

It has become one of the great enduring battles of Long Island: finding an acceptable balance between the scientific institutions and a highly divergent population that mixes commuters and celebrities, baymen with moguls, pensioners and new homeowners. The arguments take on a special vehemence here, where conservatives and liberals are united by a radical environmentalism and a whole generation has cut its political teeth keeping the Shoreham nuclear power plant from opening after it was built at a cost of $5.5 billion.

As a result, some laboratories now find themselves fighting against their own pasts.

For institutions like Plum Island and Brookhaven, which are run by the federal government, it is more than a question of good neighborliness. If they fail to win support from the community, and the politicians who represent their areas, they will lose government financing and programs.

Take Plum Island. Some neighbors like to paint it a latter-day island of Dr. Moreau, and they trade outlandish yarns about 50-foot chickens who scratch and peck there. Others have more carefully reasoned concerns about safety precautions at the lab, and its occasional requests to transport viruses or infected animals on and off the island. Recently, when the government proposed giving Plum Island the ability to study animal viruses that can be passed on to humans, those concerns boiled over. The plan was scuttled, for now.

So David Huxsoll, the new director of Plum Island, which is run by the Department of Agriculture, said the relationship with the public would be a large part of his job description. And he has a radical plan to win community support: he wants to open up the long-isolated island to guided tours.

The proposal has met with, well, mixed reactions. "Visit Toxic World -- A New Day of Fun Dawns at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center," was the headline of one mocking article in Dan's Papers, a weekly Hamptons institution.

A similar "see for yourself" approach is employed farther west, in Upton, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Its director, John H. Marburger 3rd, is also trying to make up some of the goodwill that was lost before his watch began. To that end, he has invited more local civic groups -- including critics -- onto panels about the lab, has briefed more community organizations and has continued to hold open houses about research projects.

Given the lab's past, it can still be a very hard sell, and one that some scientists worry is undermined by a fear or distrust of science itself.

"The public has never been more dependent on science, and yet the public has never been more distrustful of science," said Dr. Robert P. Crease, an associate professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, who is working on the second volume of a history of Brookhaven National Laboratory.

In some cases the fear originates with fringe groups that spread odd conspiracy theories worthy of "The X-Files," like a book called "The Montauk Project" that is cited by people who insist that the Army experimented with space aliens in Montauk during World War II.

But the fear also manifests itself in groups closer to the mainstream that are worried about the environment and children's health and concerned by what they consider a cavalier and sometimes misleading attitude on the part of scientists in the past.

This is not just found on Long Island. A report on the topic released recently by the British House of Lords warned that "public unease, mistrust and occasional outright hostility are breeding a climate of deep anxiety among scientists."

Some scientists warn that this view is too simplistic. As Dr. Marburger, the director of Brookhaven, said, "Parents still want their children to learn about science, and they are not unhappy if their children become scientists or engineers."

But for institutions that are dependent on public financing, any loss of confidence is a dangerous thing. Brookhaven is a case in point.

The 5,300-acre laboratory, which employs 3,200 people, is less famous these days for its groundbreaking research and its Nobel Prize winners than for its recent environmental problems. Built in 1947 on what was then a fairly remote stretch of the Island, the laboratory conducted its research for many years unchecked by environmental laws. By the end of the cold war, the site was so polluted with industrial solvents, pesticides and radioactive waste that it was declared a federal Superfund site.

Its recent troubles began in late 1996, when laboratory officials announced that they had discovered a plume of radioactive tritium leaking from its High Flux Beam Reactor. The leak, and the discovery of official inaction that had prevented it from being detected earlier, led the government to dismiss the organization that had run the lab for 50 years. The lab also shut down the reactor -- temporarily, officials thought.

News of the leaking tritium -- a radioactive isotope of hydrogen -- galvanized civic groups in Suffolk County. Organizations like Standing for Truth About Radiation, an East Hampton antinuclear group which features celebrities like Mr. Baldwin and the model Christie Brinkley on its board, mobilized to shut the reactor down. Some advocacy groups claimed, without hard evidence, that the lab was spreading cancer.

Soon the cause was taken up by politicians. Representative Michael P. Forbes, who represents the area, and Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato joined forces to keep federal dollars from being used to restart the reactor. It was a significant break from the past, when elected officials deferred to scientists when making policy decisions about the lab and took pride in sending money for new projects home to their districts.

Scientists, meanwhile, grumbled that the elected officials were bowing to the will of uninformed lay people and Hamptons celebrities to earn political mileage.

Representative Forbes said in an interview that he lobbied to shut down the reactor for the good of the neighbors and the laboratory.

"I was concerned that an effort would be launched to shut down the lab completely if the problem wasn't addressed," he said. "This was like a tourniquet -- close the reactor, stop the bleeding, save the laboratory."

The reactor was shut down permanently in November 1999 by the Department of Energy, which oversees the lab. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said the decision was made for economic reasons, not environmental ones.

Dr. Steven Shapiro, who used the reactor for his physics research for 30 years, said that he felt betrayed.

"It is partly science's fault," he said. "Scientists probably haven't done a very good job of outreach to the public. And celebrities naturally have an audience -- they're beautiful people, they have an aura that scientists definitely don't have. They're much better looking than me. But what's disturbing is that they're being taken as authorities."

Concerns about the lab's nuclear reactor paled in comparison with the next accusation that was hurled at Brookhaven: that it was creating a doomsday machine.

This accusation surfaced in 1999 in an article in The Sunday Times of London, which suggested that the lab's crowning new glory -- its Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, which smashes together the nuclei of very heavy atoms at nearly the speed of light -- could destroy the world.

Then an article in Scientific American magazine raised the possibility that the collider could create a black hole. Once again groups protested, and a lawsuit was filed to keep it from opening. Once again the lab was deluged with e-mail messages and phone calls. But it managed to collide two beams of gold ions.

"The world did not end," said Thomas Ludlam, a scientist who works on the collider.

If Brookhaven has long been a flashpoint, Cold Spring, by contrast, has enjoyed rather low-key relations with its neighbors.

Then, this summer, a cornfield was vandalized -- the very field where the late Barbara McClintock did her Nobel Prize-winning research on corn to learn about genes. A militant environmental group claimed responsibility, saying it was taking a strike against genetically modified foods. (The lab, clearly shaken, responded that the corn was naturally bred, not genetically altered, but said little else for fear of encouraging copycat crimes.)

It is in this highly charged atmosphere that Dr. Huxsoll, the new director of Plum Island, now finds himself. To try to convince his neighbors of the benefit of the work the lab does, he said, he hopes to open a visitors center on Orient Point where people can watch video displays about the importance of studying foot-and-mouth disease, and the economic ravages that would be caused if there was an outbreak of it.

But there have already been bumps in the road. A plan to bring in the carcasses of several hundred sheep that are believed to be infected with a variant of mad cow disease ran into significant local opposition. And many neighbors are still angry over the way the government tried to upgrade the laboratory to Biosafety Level Four in 1999, giving it the ability to study diseases that animals can give to humans, without seeking community reaction.

Representative Forbes successfully lobbied the Clinton administration to remove the financing for the upgrade from the budget. But the Agriculture Department still wants to upgrade Plum Island.

Dr. Huxsoll said he still hoped to win the community over.

-------- ohio

Compensation package for uranium workers in danger of being dropped

Akron Beacon Journal
Sunday, August 20, 2000
http://www.ohio.com/bj/news/ohio/docs/005713.htm

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- A proposal to provide money and health care to nuclear weapons plant workers sickened by radiation exposure in a southern Ohio plant and elsewhere is in danger of not making it through Congress this year.

The measure could be dropped from a defense bill being considered by a House-Senate conference committee, The Columbus Dispatch reported Sunday. The bill is expected to clear the committee next month.

``On top of everything else southern Ohio and these workers have been subjected to, it's just another blow and another kick,'' said Dan Minter, president of the union that represents many of the workers at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant near Piketon. The 1,400 workers who will lose their jobs when the plant stops production in June would feel ``exposed, bruised and thrown away.''

The plant processed uranium for nuclear weapons during the Cold War. It now enriches uranium for nuclear power plants.

``I hope this package is not in trouble,'' said Rep. Ted Strickland, D-Ohio, whose district includes the plant. ``There is no way anyone can justify not taking care of these people.''

The measure would give workers who got sick at plants such as the one in Piketon, its sister facility in Paducah, Ky., and a closed plant in Tennessee up to $200,000 and health care benefits.

Opponents of the bill say there are already too many spending proposals on the table for entitlement spending. And they argue that it never went through House committee hearings.

Rep. Lamar Smith R-Texas, said in a letter to Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., a key member of the committee in charge of the bill, that several bills had been introduced to address the workers' situation.

``It would be irresponsible for the House to enact these provisions without the committee of primary jurisdiction's careful review,'' Smith wrote.

Hunter said he was ready to have a Sept. 14 hearing but the conference committee wants to wrap up the bill by Sept. 12 to meet its scheduled adjournment on Oct. 6.

A U.S. Department of Energy investigation found workers were exposed to dangerous materials, including airborne uranium, fission products, fluorine, asbestos and PCBs.

Congressional estimates show more than 10,800 nuclear workers nationwide would benefit from the program at a cost of $2.3 billion over five years.

---

Federal investigation of USEC finances continues

Akron Beacon Journal
Sunday, August 20, 2000
http://www.ohio.com/bj/news/ohio/docs/024295.htm

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is taking longer than expected to investigate the finances of the U.S. Enrichment Corp., the privatized federal corporation that is the nation's only domestic source of enriched uranium for power plants.

The report originally was supposed to be issued early this summer. Commission spokeswoman Mindy Landau said NRC staff members are ``working feverishly on it. We are hopeful it will be ready soon.''

USEC critics say the corporation's recent financial troubles and its plan to end most operations at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion plant in Piketon in June threaten a requirement that the company be a ``reliable and economical domestic source of enrichment services.''

If the commission decides USEC no longer meets that requirement, it could pull the company's certification.

Landau said that regardless of what the report contains, she doesn't expect it to recommend any action.

``If there are recommendations or conclusions...they will have to be made by Congress,'' she said.

The Piketon plant and its sister plant in Paducah, Ky., made weapons-grade enriched uranium during the Cold War. They now produce commercial-grade uranium for nuclear power plants.

USEC spokeswoman Elizabeth Stuckle expressed disagreement with comments by Rep. Ted Strickland, D-Lucasville, that the corporation will not be a reliable source of enriched uranium in the future.

``Of course we're a reliable source,'' Stuckle said. ``The cost-cutting efforts we've made lately, the layoffs and the pending closure of the plant, all are efforts to make us more efficient and remain successful as a business.''

She said the USEC is pursuing several technologies for uranium enrichment.

---

Briefs from Columbus, Cincinnati and Washington

Akron Beacon Journal
Sunday, August 20, 2000
http://www.ohio.com/bj/news/ohio/docs/026311.htm

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- A proposal to provide money and health care to nuclear weapons plant workers sickened by radiation exposure in a southern Ohio plant and elsewhere is in danger of not making it through Congress this year.

The measure could be dropped from a defense bill being considered by a House-Senate conference committee, The Columbus Dispatch reported Sunday. The bill is expected to clear the committee next month.

``On top of everything else southern Ohio and these workers have been subjected to, it's just another blow and another kick,'' said Dan Minter, president of the union that represents many of the workers at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant near Piketon. The 1,400 workers who will lose their jobs when the plant stops production in June would feel ``exposed, bruised and thrown away.''

The plant processed uranium for nuclear weapons during the Cold War. It now enriches uranium for nuclear power plants.

``I hope this package is not in trouble,'' said Rep. Ted Strickland, D-Ohio, whose district includes the plant. ``There is no way anyone can justify not taking care of these people.''

The measure would give workers who got sick at plants such as the one in Piketon, its sister facility in Paducah, Ky., and a closed plant in Tennessee up to $200,000 and health care benefits.

---

USEC's finances still under federal scrutiny

Columbus Dispatch
Sunday, August 20, 2000
Jonathan Riskind Dispatch Washington Bureau
http://www.dispatch.com/news/newsfea00/aug00/391059.html

WASHINGTON -- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is continuing a probe into USEC's financial condition, commission spokeswoman Mindy Landau said last week.

Critics say the privatized federal corporation's sagging finances in recent months and its decision to shut down the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant next year threaten a requirement that USEC be a "reliable and economical domestic source of enrichment services.''

USEC foes say that if the regulatory commission determines USEC no longer is such a source, it might pull USEC's certification. They have sent letters in recent days to Richard Meserve, regulatory commission chairman, asserting that such a move could be needed.

The commission report was to be released by early summer, but commission staff members still are "working feverishly on it. We are hopeful it will be ready soon,'' Landau said.

She said she didn't expect the report to recommend what actions should be taken. "If there are recommendations or conclusions . . . they will have to be made by Congress,'' Landau said.

The plant in Piketon, Ohio, and a sister facility in Kentucky produce commercial-grade enriched uranium used to fuel nuclear-power plants. USEC, known as the United States Enrichment Corp. until it was privatized in 1998, is the country's sole domestic source of enriched uranium.

The planned Piketon closure, along with a decision to drop development of new technology called AVLIS, "raises concerns about whether USEC will be a reliable economic source of domestic enrichment services in the foreseeable future,'' say Rep. Ted Strickland and Michigan Rep. John Dingell, the House Commerce Committee's top Democrat.

"A single gaseous-diffusion plant and no credible plan for succeeding technology is not what Congress intended for the privatized corporation when it passed these laws,'' Strickland, D-Lucasville, and Dingell wrote in a letter last week to commission Chairman Meserve.

However, Elizabeth Stuckle, USEC's spokeswoman, said: "Of course we're a reliable source. The cost-cutting efforts we've made lately, the layoffs and the pending closure of the plant, all are efforts to make us more efficient and remain successful as a business.''

USEC is pursuing several technologies for producing enriched uranium, she added.

"To assure a long-term domestic source of uranium enrichment USEC must succeed as a business and therefore must make at times tough business decisions,'' Stuckle said. "We encourage political leaders and the community to join with us in pushing Congress to rapidly appropriate cleanup funding to provide jobs for the Portsmouth workers.''

Last week, Rep. Tom Bliley, chairman of the House Commerce Committee, also wrote a letter to Meserve, stating that he was concerned that the commission staff had finished a draft report but had it rejected by commissioners.

Bliley wrote that commission staff members have said that William H. Timbers, USEC chief executive officer, raised objections to the draft report's findings. Bliley has demanded that the regulatory commission hand over by the end of this week "all records relating to NRC's financial review of USEC, or any certification or licensing issue related to USEC since Jan. 1, 2000.''

But USEC's Stuckle said Timbers did not voice objections about a regulatory commission draft report. Indeed, she said, to the best of her knowledge, Timbers did not see such a report. "I don't know where that came from,'' she said.

---

Hopes fade for radiation compensation
That the bill might be torpedoed as the community braces for a planned June shutdown of the Portsmouth plant adds "insult to injury."

Columbus Dispatch
Sunday, August 20, 2000
Jonathan Riskind Dispatch Washington Bureau
http://www.dispatch.com/news/newsfea00/aug00/391058.html

WASHINGTON -- Once thought to be on a fast track, prospects are dimming this year for congressional passage of legislation to compensate nuclear workers in southern Ohio and elsewhere sickened from Cold War-era exposure to radiation.

The legislation, granting up to $200,000 a person and health benefits, is in danger of being dropped from a defense bill a House-Senate conference committee is expected to pass next month.

Frustration doesn't begin to express the emotions felt by Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant workers and their families who might be eligible for compensation, said Dan Minter, president of Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers International Union Local 5-689.

For years, the plant produced weapons-grade enriched uranium for the nation's atomic-defense program, said Minter, whose union represents many plant workers. That the bill might be torpedoed as the community braces for a planned June shutdown of the plant, now run by a private company, adds "insult to injury,'' he said.

"On top of everything else southern Ohio and these workers have been subjected to, it's just another blow and another kick,'' Minter said. Workers and their families would be left feeling "exposed, bruised and thrown away.''

Although bipartisan support from senators such as George V. Voinovich, R-Ohio, and Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., won passage in the Senate version of the defense bill, some House members object to the measure.

Voinovich, Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, and more than 20 other senators have signed a letter urging the conference committee to retain the compensation program.

"The compensation amendment adopted by the Senate is based on expert judgment and sound science,'' the July 28 letter said. "We believe the time is now to begin to remedy the mistakes of the past and provide compensation to those who sacrificed so much for our country.''

It is estimated that nearly 5,500 former and current workers at the Piketon plant, a sister facility in Kentucky and a now-closed enrichment plant in Tennessee would be eligible for compensation during the next decade. More than 10,800 nuclear workers nationwide would benefit at a cost of $2.3 billion over five years, according to congressional estimates.

Rep. Ted Strickland, D-Lucasville, whose district includes the Piketon plant, said he is frustrated that the legislation could die this year. It will be even tougher to get the legislation passed in the future, he said.

"I hope this package is not in trouble,'' Strickland said, noting that 104 House members have signed a letter in support of the bill. "There is no way anyone can justify not taking care of these people.''

But opponents say the measure never received House committee hearings. Plus, they contend, there are too many proposals for increased spending on various entitlement programs in the overall defense bill.

One of those objecting is Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas. He is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on immigration and claims, as in claims made against the federal government.

"Several bills have recently been introduced to address this issue. No hearings on these different approaches have been held by the House Judiciary Committee to examine the issue,'' Smith said in a recent letter to Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., a key member of the House-Senate conference committee in charge of the defense bill. "It would be irresponsible for the House to enact these provisions without the committee of primary jurisdiction's careful review.''

Hunter said he was prepared to hold a Sept. 14 hearing. However, the conference committee seems determined to wrap up the bill by Sept. 12 to meet a scheduled Oct. 6 adjournment date.

Other congressional sources say the problem is greater than Smith's desire to hold judiciary committee hearings. One senior GOP staff member familiar with the defense bill said key House members think the Senate version contains too many provisions increasing mandatory spending programs.

"There is a sense that there are a lot of Senate items that are very costly,'' said the staff member, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They are good causes and the recipients deserve the help. The question is, where do you draw the line and who gets hurt if this one goes in and others drop out?''

-------- u.s. nuc weapons

Navy ponders problem with $2.4B sub

USA Today
08/20/00- Updated 01:36 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/nc1.htm#poll

GROTON, Conn. - The Navy has suspended testing of the USS Seawolf while engineers investigate a welding problem on the $2.4 billion attack submarine. The problem affects the air flasks, which affect the submarine's ability to dive and surface. ''We think the safe thing to do is to keep the submarine in port,'' Cmdr. Bob Ross said Friday. He said the problem is limited to the USS Seawolf and will not affect other ships in the same class, the USS Connecticut and the USS Jimmy Carter.

---

Issue One: Campaign 2000 and All That
Credibility on the line

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Sunday, August 20, 2000
http://www.post-gazette.com/forum/20000820issue9.asp

Sandwiched between the cozy platitudes of George W. Bush's acceptance speech at the Republican convention were these harrowing lines: "And at the earliest possible date, my administration will deploy missile defenses to guard against attack and blackmail." And in the next sentence: "Now is the time, not to defend outdated treaties, but to defend the American people."

Under this vague veil of principle, Bush expressed his willingness to dismiss arms control measures in favor of deploying an unreliable and expensive missile defense system. This "outdated" treaty is nothing less than the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, signed by the United States and what is now the Russian Federation. In the treaty, both nations agreed not to develop national missile defense systems; instead, they pursued policies of reciprocal disarmament. The ABM treaty serves as the sine qua non of subsequent arms control agreements.

The only way to overcome the Cold War legacy of nuclear stockpiles is to get serious about denuclearization. With Russia and the United States possessing well over 10,000 nuclear warheads, many on hair-trigger alert, this remains a pressing task. Platitudes aside, now is not the time to risk the future of arms control by abrogating the ABM treaty.

Once America begins unilateral repudiation of treaties, what credibility will it possess with its allies?

CHANDLER G. KETCHUM Mt. Lebanon

Editor's note: The writer is on the board of the World Federalist Association of Pittsburgh.

----

UN support for U.S. missile defence weak

CBC News
WebPosted Wed Apr 26 05:27:04 2000
http://cbc.ca/cgi-bin/templates/view.cgi?/news/2000/04/26/missile_defence000426

UNITED NATIONS - Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy told a United Nations conference Tuesday that a missile defence system could threaten international security and damage the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

LINKS: Websites related to this story

http://cbc.ca/cgi-bin/templates/view.cgi?/news/2000/04/26/missile_defence000426#links

The U.S. wants to amend the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty so it can proceed with what some are calling a newer version of the Star Wars defence system.

Canada hasn't voiced an official position or whether it supports or is opposed to the system, but Axworthy spoke out against it during his speech.

He later criticized missile defence further when speaking to reporters.

"Why make a decision on a highly expensive, unproven arms system that could have major repercussions on the broad arms control regime when there are other options, there are ways of dealing with these matters multilaterally," Axworthy said.

Nearly every non-nuclear state at the UN is opposed to the American plan. Washington is defending it. The U.S. says it's being created to defend against missile attacks from rogue states such as North Korea.

Russia's foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, says he's against any amendments to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Russia has said that would force an upgrade of its system, triggering a new arms race.

Instead, Moscow wants the UN to back its plan of limiting rogue states access to missile technology.

The other major concern at the UN is about countries known or believed to have nuclear powers who have not yet signed the Nuclear non-proliferation treaty. They are India, Pakistan, Israel and Cuba.

That treaty came into force in 1970. Under its terms, the U,S, Russia, Britain, China and France are allowed to keep nuclear weapons. In exchange, they must take steps to reduce the size of their arsenals.

Canada has been named to head a committee which will deal with the question of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and South Asia. That committee will meet four times during the month-long review at the UN.

---

www.fas.org
July 6, 2000

President William Jefferson Clinton The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20502

http://www.fas.org/press/000706-letter.htm

Dear Mr. President:

We urge you not to make the decision to deploy an anti-ballistic missile system during the remaining months of your administration. The system would offer little protection and would do grave harm to this nation's core security interests.

We and other independent scientists have long argued that anti-ballistic missile systems, particularly those attempting to intercept reentry vehicles in space, will inevitably lose in an arms race of improvements to offensive missiles.

North Korea has taken dramatic steps toward reconciliation with South Korea. Other dangerous states will arise. But what would such a state gain by attacking the United States except its own destruction?

While the benefits of the proposed anti-ballistic missile system are dubious, the dangers created by a decision to deploy are clear. It would be difficult to persuade Russia or China that the United States is wasting tens of billions of dollars on an ineffective missile system against small states that are unlikely to launch a missile attack on the U.S. The Russians and Chinese must therefore conclude that the presently planned system is a stage in developing a bigger system directed against them. They may respond by restarting an arms race in ballistic missiles and having missiles in a dangerous "launch-on-warning" mode.

Even if the next planned test of the proposed anti-ballistic missile system works as planned, any movement toward deployment would be premature, wasteful and dangerous.

Respectfully,

Sidney Altman YALE UNIVERSITY 1989 Nobel Prize in chemistry
Philip W. Anderson PRINCETON UNIVERSITY 1977 Nobel Prize in physics
Kenneth J. Arrow STANFORD UNIVERSITY 1972 Nobel Prize in economics
Julius Axelrod NIH 1970 Nobel Prize in medicine
Baruj Benacerraf DANA FARBER CANCER INST. 1980 Nobel Prize in medicine
Hans A. Bethe CORNELL UNIVERSITY 1967 Nobel Prize in physics
J. Michael Bishop UNIVERSITY OF CALIF., SAN FRANCISCO 1989 Nobel Prize in medicine
Nicolaas Bloembergen HARVARD UNIVERSITY 1981 Nobel Prize in physics
Paul D. Boyer UCLA 1997 Nobel Prize in chemistry
Steven Chu STANFORD UNIVERSITY 1997 Nobel Prize in physics
Stanley Cohen VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY 1986 Nobel Prize in medicine
Leon N. Cooper BROWN UNIVERSITY 1972 Nobel Prize in physics
E. J. Corey HARVARD UNIVERSITY 1990 Nobel Prize in chemistry
James W. Cronin UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 1980 Nobel Prize in physics
Renato Dulbecco THE SALK INSTITUTE 1975 Nobel Prize in medicine
Edmond H. Fischer UNIV. OF WASHINGTON 1992 Nobel Prize in medicine
Val L. Fitch PRINCETON UNIVERSITY 1980 Nobel Prize in physics
Robert F. Furchgott UNY HEALTH SCIENCE CTR. 1998 Nobel Prize in medicine
Murray Gell-Mann SANTA FE INSTITUTE 1969 Nobel Prize in physics
Ivar Giaever RENSSELAER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE 1973 Nobel Prize in physics
Walter Gilbert BIOLOGICAL LABORATORIES, CAMBRIDGE, MASS. 1980 Nobel Prize in chemistry
Sheldon L. Glashow BOSTON UNIVERSITY 1979 Nobel Prize in physics
Roger C. L. Guillemin THE SALK INSTITUTE 1977 Nobel Prize in medicine
Herbert A. Hauptman THE MEDICAL FOUNDATION OF BUFFALO 1985 Nobel Prize in chemistry
Dudley R. Herschbach HARVARD UNIVERSITY 1986 Nobel Prize in chemistry
Roald Hoffmann CORNELL UNIVERSITY 1981 Nobel Prize in chemistry
David H. Hubel HARVARD UNIVERSITY 1981 Nobel Prize in medicine
Jerome Karle NAVAL RESEARCH LABORATORY 1985 Nobel Prize in chemistry
Arthur Kornberg STANFORD UNIVERSITY 1959 Nobel Prize in medicine
Edwin G. Krebs UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON 1992 Nobel Prize in medicine
Leon M. Lederman ILLINOIS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 1988 Nobel Prize in physics
Edward B. Lewis CALTECH 1995 Nobel Prize in medicine
Rudolph A. Marcus CALTECH 1992 Nobel Prize in chemistry
Franco Modigliani MIT, SLOAN SCHOOL 1985 Nobel Prize in economics
Mario Molina MIT 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry
Marshall Nirenberg NIH 1968 Nobel Prize in medicine
Douglas D. Osheroff STANFORD UNIVERSITY 1996 Nobel Prize in physics
Arno A. Penzias BELL LABS 1978 Nobel Prize in physics
Martin L. Perl STANFORD UNIVERSITY 1995 Nobel Prize in physics
Norman F. Ramsey HARVARD UNIVERSITY 1989 Nobel Prize in physics
Burton Richter STANFORD UNIVERSITY 1976 Nobel Prize in physics Richard J. Roberts NEW ENGLAND BIOLABS 1993 Nobel Prize in medicine
Herbert A. Simon CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIV. 1978 Nobel Prize in economics
Richard E. Smalley RICE UNIVERSITY 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry
Jack Steinberger CERN 1988 Nobel Prize in physics
James Tobin YALE UNIVERSITY 1981 Nobel Prize in economics
Daniel C. Tsui PRINCETON UNIVERSITY 1998 Nobel Prize in physics
Steven Weinberg UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS, AUSTIN 1979 Nobel Prize in physics
Robert W. Wilson HARVARD-SMITHSONIAN, CTR. FOR ASTROPHYSICS 1978 Nobel Prize in physics
Chen Ning Yang SUNY, STONY BROOK 1957 Nobel Prize in physics
Owen Chamberlain* UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY 1959 Nobel Prize in physics
Johann Diesenhofer* UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS SOUTHWESTERN MEDICAL CENTER 1988 Nobel Prize in chemistry
Willis E. Lamb, Jr.* STANFORD UNIVERSITY 1955 Nobel Prize in physics

*These laureates signed the letter within hours after the letter was delivered to the White House.

---

Stage Set For Decisive Missile Defense Test
Greenpeace Anchors Ship To Spoil Launch

WCCO News
Updated 8:12 p.m. EDT July 7, 2000

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon is counting down to a rocket launch Friday night that could change the course of U.S. defense policy and present the next president with one of the most contentious international arms control debates in decades.

Although much is riding on the outcome of the national missile defense test, Defense Secretary William Cohen is trying to clamp down expectations by saying that it is not a make-or-break event.

http://www.defenselink.mil/bios/secdef_bio.html

In a sense, some missile defense critics agree.

Regardless of the outcome, they believe that President Clinton will move forward with building a nationwide shield against missiles.

Cohen stressed that the test, the last before Clinton makes his decision, is only one in a series of more than a dozen that will ultimately determine the feasibility of defending all 50 states against a limited attack of ballistic missiles.

The goal of the missile defense system is to destroy a hostile warhead in space by ramming it head-on with an interceptor missile.

"We are trying to hit a bullet with a bullet," Cohen said.

Many critics believe that the technology is not feasible and that the Pentagon's testing methods are fatally flawed. Other critics say that even if it worked, the weapon would not be worth the international outcry against it -- most notably Russia's threat to unravel other arms control treaties.

Meanwhile, anti-nuclear activists were hoping to halt the test by positioning a ship in an area of the Pacific where a rocket stage is expected to splash down.

Greenpeace planned to station a vessel about 110 miles offshore from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Steve Shallhorn, the group's campaign director, said.

The Air Force has asked pilots and mariners to avoid the area during the test or risk damage or injury but said that the test could continue even with a ship in the zone.

Greenpeace also set up camp outside Vandenberg's main gate, about 180 miles northwest of Los Angeles. And a group of protesters not affiliated with Greenpeace threatened to delay the launch by breaking into the base.

The scenario for Friday's test is similar to that of the last, unsuccessful test in January: A target missile -- a Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile with a dummy warhead -- launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.

Twenty minutes later, the interceptor rocket takes off from Kwajalein Atoll in the remote Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. If it works as designed, a "kill vehicle" will detach from the interceptor rocket and guide itself into the path of the dummy warhead, destroying it by force of impact 144 miles above the earth.

The test, scheduled for as early as 10 p.m. EDT, depending on weather, has drawn unusually close attention around the world because it could set the stage for Clinton to give the go-ahead for building a full-scale missile defense. The one being tested uses prototype interceptors and radars.

---

$100M Missile Launch Fails Failure Possibly Delays Pentagon Time Table

WCCO News
Posted 2:52 a.m. EDT July 8, 2000
http://www.channel4000.com/sh/news/stories/nat-news-20000708-053714.html

LOS ANGELES, Posted 2:52 a.m. EDT July 8, 2000 -- A U.S. missile interceptor launched from a Pacific island missed its intended target Friday night.

"We failed to achieve an intercept," said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman.

The failure raised the possibility of a substantial delay in the Pentagon's timetable of having a national anti-missile defense system ready for use by the end of 2005.

The next attempted intercept is scheduled for this fall, but depending on the severity of the problem with Friday's test, that could be pushed back a number of months.

Congress says that the defense system is urgently needed; critics decry it as unworkable.

The Pentagon's rocket scientists lit the fuse on a $100 million missile defense test Friday night.

After fixing a last-minute technical glitch that delayed the start of the test by about two hours, a modified Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile with a dummy warhead atop its third stage rocket blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., at 9:19 p.m. PDT, Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. Craig Quigley said.

The rocket headed toward the central Pacific.

Twenty-one minutes later, at 9:40 p.m. PDT, an interceptor missile carrying a warhead-blasting "kill vehicle" launched from Kwajalein Atoll, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said.

The interceptor was scheduled to collide with the mock warhead after about 10 minutes of flight over the Pacific.

Pentagon officials monitored the flight test from a basement office with a live video hookup.

The "kill vehicle" was programmed to use target data gathered from ground-based radars to maneuver itself into the path of the dummy warhead 140 miles above the Earth.

The goal was a 16,000-mile-an-hour collision that would disintegrate the warhead by sheer force of impact.

At stake is the future of a multi-billion dollar project that has upset Russia and China and caused many of America's closest European allies to wince at the prospect of a U.S.-only defense against a missile attack.

Although President Clinton says that he will decide soon whether to keep the project moving toward an anticipated deployment in 2005, it will be up to his successor to make the final steps to build and deploy it.

Clinton's fast-approaching decision deadline gave Friday's test extra urgency and public attention.

The last-minute technical glitch was a weak battery that supplies power to a telemetry system which is needed to help engineers on the ground record the exact point of impact between the dummy warhead and the "kill vehicle."

The battery was recharged and all other systems appeared normal prior to liftoff, officials said.

The Pentagon's independent advisers have said that the 2005 timetable may be overly ambitious.

Cohen said in an interview Friday with National Public Radio, before the missile test, that he did not expect to make his recommendation for another three or four weeks and he could not predict what it would be.

This was the third in a series of missile intercept tests. The first, last October, succeeded. The second, in January, failed. Friday's test was delayed more than two months to fix the problem that plagued January's test.

The anti-nuclear activist group Greenpeace had hoped to halt Friday's test by placing a ship in the Pacific where a rocket stage is expected to splash down about 110 miles offshore from Vandenberg, said Steve Shallhorn, the group's campaign director.

Greenpeace also set up camp outside Vandenberg's main gate.

"I would say a hit doesn't automatically suggest success, nor does a failure automatically come with a miss tonight," Crowley said.

One of the biggest backers of missile defense in Congress, Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., said in an interview Friday that he believes America can afford a missile defense even though defense dollars are tight.

"Without a doubt, Congress will approve the funding for a missile defense system" so long as U.S. military leaders feel confident it is technologically ready for deployment, Cochran said.

Estimates of the missiles' cost range from the Pentagon's $36 billion to the General Accounting Office's $60 billion.

By law, the Pentagon must deploy a national missile defense as soon as it is technologically feasible.

Feasibility and cost are two of four factors Clinton has said that he will take into account in deciding whether to give the Pentagon the go-ahead to begin preparing a construction site on Shemya Island in the Aleutians.

The "X-band" radar would be built there to track a missile in flight toward the United States.

The other two factors Clinton will consider are the urgency of the missile threat against the United States and the implications of building a missile defense for U.S. foreign relations.

---

Another failure for U.S. interceptor missile

CBC News
WebPosted Sat Jul 8 20:24:18 2000
http://cbc.ca/cgi-bin/templates/view.cgi?/news/2000/07/08/missile000708

VANDENBERG AFB, CALIFORNIA - A U.S. interceptor missile failed to hit a target missile over the Pacific early Saturday. The failure botched a $100 million US test that was supposed to decide whether the controversial U.S. missile defence system is ready for deployment.

LINKS: Websites related to this story

http://cbc.ca/cgi-bin/templates/view.cgi?/news/2000/07/08/missile000708#links

ARCHIVED: Test of U.S. missile defence system fails

http://cbc.ca/cgi-bin/templates/view.cgi?/news/2000/01/20/missile000120

In the test, a minuteman II target missile blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base. About 6,800 kilometres away on Kwajalein atoll, the "kill missile" was launched.

Pentagon officials said the failure occurred in the interceptor's boost phase. The kill missile is designed to seek out and destroy the incoming warhead in space. But it failed to separate from the booster rocket's second stage.

ARCHIVED: Canada under pressure to support missile defence

http://cbc.ca/cgi-bin/templates/view.cgi?/news/2000/03/16/missile000316

The idea behind this defence system is to provide a shield protecting the U.S. from enemy missiles, a version of the "Star Wars" initiative of the 1980s. The problem is the tests have been disastrous.

"What it tells me is that we have more engineering work to do," said Lt.-Gen. Ronald Kadish.

But some scientists and business leaders say scrap the entire program. They fear it could spark a new nuclear arms race.

"We're talking about spending $60 billion US for a program that credible arms experts tell us have never worked, and cannot work, while 11 million underprivileged children in this country have no medical care," said Alan Kligerman, who is with Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities.

Countries like Canada, Russia and China are opposed to the program. They've called for the program to be scrapped.

Sometime in the next few months U.S. President Bill Clinton must decide whether to do just that, or allow the tests to continue.

---

Aides: Clinton Will Decide Missile Plan's Fate Albright Says President Should Not Leave Issue To Successor Despite Test Failure

WCCO News
Updated 4:43 p.m. EDT July 10, 2000
http://www.channel4000.com/sh/news/stories/nat-news-20000710-190850.html

WASHINGTON, -- Clinton administration officials said this week that they expect that the president will decide whether to go ahead with the next phase of a national missile defense system and not leave it up to his successor.

Pressure to shelve the proposed missile shield was apparent in the wake of Saturday's failed test of a component.

Senators raised concerns about spending billions on the proposed system, which failed an important test early Saturday, and some suggested that the United States faced more potential threats from terrorists on the ground than missiles in the air.

Meanwhile, Reuters news service reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin plans to ask President Clinton to drop the plan when the two attend the G8 big power summit July 21-23 in Okinawa.

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000710/pl/arms_russia_dc_1.html

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said it would be "irresponsible" for the administration to put off the decision, as suggested by Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. Such a delay, she said on ABC's "This Week," would give countries such as North Korea and Iran more time to develop missiles that could threaten the United States.

"I think the president will be making his decision later this summer," she said, based on recommendations from her, Defense Secretary William Cohen and Sandy Berger, the national security adviser.

"There are four criteria that the president is going to be looking at: the threat, the technology, the cost and what it does to overall American security," Albright said.

The missile defense project early Saturday had its second failed intercept in three tries. The warhead-busting "kill vehicle" failed to separate from its booster rocket and passed harmlessly by the target missile.

Berger said Saturday's failure does not necessarily mean that the president will scrap the plan.

"Obviously, this does go to the question of technical feasibility or how far along the system is, but we need an assessment," he said.

Presidential Campaign Issue

Hagel contended that the next president should decide whether to continue. He supports a missile defense plan by Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush that is more extensive than that proposed by Clinton.

http://www.channel4000.com/sh/election2000/stories/election2000-20000218-162839.html

"We can't hold America's national security interests hostage to any threats from some other nation," Hagel, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on CBS' "Face the Nation."

Bush has said that he would be willing to violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which forbids such systems. The Clinton administration, including Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic presidential candidate, has not ruled that out but would prefer to see the treaty amended to allow a national defense system.

http://www.channel4000.com/sh/election2000/stories/election2000-20000218-163010.html

Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., questioned the administration's premise that North Korea, Iran and other countries threaten U.S. national security when the United States has such an edge in the number of missiles.

"The threat is not at all clear to me, number one. And the response to the threat seems to me to be adequate where we are now," Biden, ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, told CBS.

Biden also questioned whether investing in a missile defense system was prudent, given the cost -- by some estimates $36 billion to $60 billion -- when the country might be more vulnerable to a nuclear, chemical or biological weapon delivered on a pickup truck.

"We are clearly more vulnerable to a terrorist attack with a weapon of mass destruction than we are from an (intercontinental ballistic missile) coming out of the blue with a return address on it," Biden said.

But Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., insisted that an anti-missile defense system is vital and that the United States is aware of the potential for other threats.

"People overlook the fact that we're spending several times what we're talking about for a missile defense program on anti-terrorism programs in this country. ... We've got to do both," Thompson, chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, said on "Fox News Sunday."

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., noted that Congress has authorized some 16 more tests. "Too much has been made of this one test over the weekend," Lieberman, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on Fox. "And I think President Clinton, notwithstanding this disappointment on Saturday morning, ought to decide to at least keep the process moving forward."

-------- MILITARY (by country)

-------- colombia

The Ghost of Vietnam Haunts 'Plan Colombia'

Los Angeles Times
Sunday, August 20, 2000
By TAD SZULC
http://www.latimes.com/news/comment/20000820/t000078189.html

WASHINGTON--As in Vietnam nearly 40 years ago, the United States has embarked on the phantasmagoric enterprise of destroying the countryside of Colombia in order, supposedly, to save it.

In the 1960s, the mission was called "Search and Destroy." Today, it's Plan Colombia, the objective of which is to eradicate cocaine drug lords, leftist and rightist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitary vigilantes, thugs and thousands in between. In Vietnam, the enemy was identified as communists. In Colombia, everyone seems to be a potential enemy.

Congress quietly approved U.S. armed intervention in Colombia last month, complete with at least 60 Black Hawk and Huey-2 helicopter gunships with U.S. crews. U.S. Army Special Forces are already training two Colombian battalions in counterinsurgency. President Bill Clinton is expected to endorse the mission Aug. 30 on a one-day visit to Colombia.

Most Americans seem to have no idea that Plan Colombia threatens to suck the United States into the longest and most brutal civil war in the Western Hemisphere, which has lasted on and off for 160 years. It has never been explained to them, just like Vietnam was never explained at the outset.

In another ghastly reminder of Vietnam, the administration has persuaded Colombia to develop a powerful biological herbicide against coca and heroin poppy fields. It is a fungus known as fusarium oxysporum, derived from the coca plant. Washington's idea is to spread it across hundreds of thousands of acres cultivated for poppies. Nobody appears to know the impact of this fungus on humans, which evokes memories of the Agent Orange defoliant in Vietnam that killed and maimed the Viet Cong and Americans alike.

Plan Colombia is the result of the administration's festering frustration over its continuing inability to stem the huge flow of cocaine and heroine produced in Colombia, notwithstanding billions of dollars spent over the years on interdiction and for what passed for cooperation with Colombian authorities. The plan's chief author is the White House drug czar, Gen. Barry M. McCaffrey, former head of the U.S. Southern Command. Congress allocated $1.3 billion to put it into action.

To the extent that it can be understood, the plan calls for the elimination of the guerrillas, no matter their allegiance, who guard the fields, so small aircraft can safely spray the fungus over the poppy plantations. This task is to be carried out by U.S.-trained Colombian counterinsurgency battalions ferried to the poppy fields by U.S. helicopters. Nothing has been said about what would happen should a U.S. chopper be shot down and members of its crew killed or injured.

A complicating factor is that a half-dozen guerrilla wars or conflicts are currently underway in Colombia, making it difficult for McCaffrey to decide whom and where to hit. The most important guerrilla group is the FARC (Spanish acronym for Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), whose 15,000 troops occupy the southern departments of Putumayo and Caqueta, an area the size of Switzerland, and function as a virtually independent coca-rich state. The FARC's ranks have swelled since the U.S. launched Plan Colombia. The counterinsurgency battalions will have a tough time with the Marxist-Leninist force, as will their U.S. advisors. The Vietnam-era question of how many Americans will be needed to overwhelm the guerrillas will surely arise.

In the north, the ELN (National Liberation Army), a more politically moderate organization, controls its own smaller "mini-country," equally wealthy in coca. It has no more than 5,000 fighters. Then there are right-wing paramilitary units at war with the guerrillas and local peasants. These units have a frightening human-rights record, but so do the guerrillas. Hardly a day passes in Colombia without dozens slaughtered on all sides. The Colombian army and police have been accused of working quietly with the paramilitary squads, but under Plan Colombia, they are to ensure peace and probity.

It does not require much imagination to conclude that Plan Colombia, as most informed Colombians know, is simply unfeasible. In Brasilia last week, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, on a mission to sell the plan in Latin America, was told that Brazil would have no part of it. Most other Latin American governments feel the same way, leaving Washington isolated in its undertaking.

Perhaps the greatest threat and tragedy facing the U.S. in its Colombian venture is that the plan was developed by men and women who know little of Colombia's history, culture and politics. This, too, is reminiscent of Vietnam, where President John F. Kennedy engaged the U.S. without consulting the handful of officials who actually knew something about Hanoi, Dien Bien Phu, Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong.

The shakiness of U.S. knowledge of Colombian history is best illustrated by the widely repeated falsehood that the civil war there has been going on for 40 years. Actually, the first great civil war that would define subsequent ones erupted between the Liberals and the Conservatives in 1840, 21 years after Simon Bolivar won Colombia's independence from Spain. These wars never really stopped, and a key milestone were the savage riots in Bogota, the capital, in 1948, when the leftist liberal presidential candidate Jorge Eliecer Gaitan was murdered.

The civil war--the violencia--continued after 1948, leading to military coups, a restoration of formal democracy and the emergence of large guerrilla forces. What's left of that democracy today is in tatters, and Plan Colombia will clearly not rescue it. It is difficult to "save" a nation about whose history and identity our top Washington policymakers know so little.

Tad Szulc Has Written Extensively About International Politics and Foreign Policy

---

Colombia Pledges to Investigate Killing of 6 Children by Troops

New York Times
August 20, 2000
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/americas/082000colombia-rights.html

BOGOTÁ, Colombia Aug. 19 -- In a test of its commitment to improving its human rights record, the Colombian government has promised a full-scale investigation of an army attack on an elementary school hiking trip that left six children between ages 8 and 10 dead this week.

Immediately after the children were gunned down on Tuesday, top commanders of the army publicly blamed guerrillas involved in Colombia's long-running insurgencies for the deaths, saying that rebels were using the children as human shields in a gun battle. But throughout the week, various witnesses came forward to say that there were no rebels near the shooting in a coffee field in northwestern Colombia.

The episode came at a particularly embarrassing moment for President Andrés Pastrana, who is preparing for President Clinton's six-hour visit on Aug. 30.

Over the next few days, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright is to certify whether Colombia has met several human rights conditions in order to be eligible to receive the military component of a new $1.3 billion aid program designed to combat drug trafficking in two southern provinces dominated by Marxist guerrillas.

If Dr. Albright does not certify Colombia, President Clinton can still grant it a national security waiver to release the aid. A halt in aid -- which Clinton administration officials say is vital to slowing the flow of Colombian cocaine to the United States -- is considered highly unlikely.

The government has announced that it is investigating 25 soldiers and officers of the army's Fourth Division in the shootings of the children and says that 43 investigators of three government agencies have been put on the case. Five officers and 33 soldiers have been given administrative duties until the investigation is completed, with President Pastrana promising to monitor the inquiry himself.

Forensic specialists have already been sent to the village of Pueblo Rico in Antioquia province to examine the bodies of the six children who were killed. Several other children were wounded. Four of the children killed were on a school hiking trip. Two others lived in the coffee fields where the shooting took place.

Government officials insist that the killings were not intentional. "The only option we can definitely rule out is that Colombian soldiers would have fired intentionally on the children," Attorney General Alfonso Gómez Méndez said.

"It remains to be determined if an error was inevitable or not," said Defense Minister Luis Fernando Ramirez. "There was no intention by members of the armed forces to cause damage to civilians."

Army officials said the incident occurred as units of two army battalions were chasing rebels of the National Liberation Army, the country's second-largest rebel group best known for kidnappings and bombing oil pipelines. Francisco Galán, a spokesman for the group, denied his forces were anywhere in the area.

The shootings have been harshly criticized by human rights activists.

José Miguel Vivanco, director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch, said the incident "goes straight to the heart of the issue -- which is the abuse of the armed forces, including attacks on the civilian population."

He added, "I don't think Colombia qualifies at this stage for U.S. military support."

-------- guatemala

Guatemala's Missing Children

New York Times
August 20, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/editorial/20sun2.html

Probably thousands of children disappeared in Guatemala's 36-year civil war, the vast majority taken by the security forces, typically after the army had attacked a Mayan Indian village and massacred many of its inhabitants.

While most of the children were probably killed, there is reason to think that many of the younger children were adopted illegally by soldiers or taken to orphanages and later adopted by families in other countries, including the United States.

The whereabouts of abducted children has become a major issue in Argentina, where mothers and grandmothers of children who disappeared during the "dirty war" of the 1970's brought this horror to international attention. In El Salvador, a nongovernmental group, Pro-Búsqueda, has reunited dozens of children with their biological families. But with war increasingly fought in villages instead of battlefields, more nations need to find abducted children and connect them to their families.

The war ended in 1996, but Guatemalans are

only now beginning to realize the dimensions of this problem.

The Archdiocese Human Rights Office of Guatemala City's Roman Catholic Church recently released a report that documents the cases of 86 children who disappeared and lists hundreds more. Independently, a new group called Watch (watchproj@aol.com) is being set up in Guatemala and Chicago, to collect information and begin efforts to find children. But the archdiocese office, like the nation's truth commission, which published its report last year, urges that the government set up an organization.

A governmental group would be best at spreading the word to Mayan communities that vanished children might be alive and also at ensuring the safety of families who look for them. More important, only a governmental group can combat the obstruction of the armed forces, which has been a problem in Argentina and El Salvador.

President Alfonso Portillo seems more willing than his predecessor to help victims of the war. Guatemala has announced that it will admit state responsibility, pay reparations and push for justice in 60 cases of atrocities that Guatemalan groups had taken to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. This is groundbreaking, but justice may remain an empty promise given that the still-powerful military is defiant and human rights activists continue to be intimidated and killed. A priority for investigation should be the children who have disappeared. This is one instance where those presumed dead could indeed be brought back to life.

-------- u.n.

Number of U.N. Peacekeepers Doubles in Size

New York Times
August 20, 2000
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/world/un-peacekeepers-afp.html

UNITED NATIONS, Aug. 19 -- The number of soldiers and civilian police serving in United Nations peacekeeping operations has almost doubled in the last six months, from 18,927 to about 37,350, the United Nations said this week.

The estimated cost of operations has also increased, from about $1.56 billion in the 12 months ending on June 30, to a projected $2.2 billion this year.

The increases are largely as a result of sending huge peacekeeping missions to Sierra Leone and East Timor.

---

A U.N. Reform Group Favors Gore Over Bush

New York Times
August 20, 2000
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/082000un-us.html

UNITED NATIONS, Aug. 18 -- Vice President Al Gore would give more unqualified support to the United Nations and be more willing to sign international treaties than his Republican opponent, George W. Bush, an independent United Nations watchdog organization said this week.

But Mr. Gore is still hedging his support for some important international initiatives, as President Clinton did when he met stiff resistance from Republicans in Congress.

The group, the Campaign for United Nations Reform, which is based in Washington, sent both major candidates in this year's race a comprehensive questionnaire on topics involving United States participation in international affairs.

Congressional candidates were also polled.

Mr. Bush replied in a brief letter to Don Kraus, executive director of the Campaign for United Nations Reform, saying that while he believed that international organizations can serve the cause of peace, he would never place American troops under United Nations command. He would pay United States debts to the organization, he said, only when its bureaucracy has been reformed and American dues lowered. He also said that he wanted reforms at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, but he did not elaborate.

Mr. Gore responded to more than a dozen questions, often at some length. He said that it was time the United States paid its dues to the United Nations "in full, on time and without conditions." He added that there had already been substantial reforms in the United Nations system. He said that agencies of the United Nations "offer the U.S. an effective means of doing our fair share to alleviate suffering in some of the most miserable corners of the globe."

On outstanding treaties not signed by the United States, Mr. Gore gave unequivocal support to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Law of the Sea Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to stop the testing of nuclear arms.

But Mr. Gore continued to call for changes in an international agreement banning land mines, reflecting longstanding objections from the Pentagon. And he declined to endorse the International Criminal Court, now taking shape without American support. His said in his reply that the court's treaty still had "significant flaws."

The Campaign for United Nations Reform is a 25-year-old organization that advocates stronger American support for the United Nations.

Among Congressional responses to the organization's questionnaire, attitudes to the United Nations ranged very widely, said Jennifer Taylor, program director for the campaign. Some members of Congress were very supportive of the United Nations adherence to international treaties. But others, a small minority, responded by advocating that the United States quit the organization, which they said did not serve American interests.

-------- u.s.

USA Today
08/20/00
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Maryland

Baltimore - Neighbors of Memorial Stadium say they're worried about noise and commotion from a Navy explosives training session scheduled for next week at the old ballpark. City officials approved the Navy's use of the former home of the Orioles and the Baltimore Colts. A Navy spokesman says the explosions will be small.

---

Now Close the Gap In Military Pay

New York Times
August 20, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/letters/l20pay.html

To the Editor:
Re "The G.O.P.'s Pay Gap," by Cindy Williams (Op-Ed, Aug. 17):

Regardless of its origin, the pay gap between the military and civilians that Ms. Williams refers to is real, and it must be closed. Current spending plans would not close the gap until 2026. That means that soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines and Coast Guardsmen volunteering to serve today would serve a full career before achieving pay equity with their civilian counterparts.

There is no good reason in a time of unprecedented prosperity that the pay gap shouldn't be closed by 2006. As a retired general and a former chief of staff of the Army, I know that the quality of our armed forces starts with recruiting and retaining quality people. Paying them fairly is the least the next administration and the next three Congresses should do.

GORDON R. SULLIVAN Arlington, Va., Aug. 18, 2000 The writer is president of the Association of the United States Army.

-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

Santa Cruz betting $1M on electric bikes

USA Today
08/20/00
http://usatoday.com/news/digest/nd1.htm#verizon

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. - Santa Cruz officials are practically begging people to get out of their cars and onto electric bicycles - an environmentally friendly product that has been slow to catch on elsewhere. As part of a $1 million plan, called the most comprehensive of its kind in the nation, county residents will be eligible for discounts, rebates and even interest-free loans on electric bikes, which can cost upward of $1,000. The plan is being championed by a former fixture of the transportation establishment, Lee Iacocca. He now runs EV Global, which makes electric bikes.

-------- environment

Gore touts environment

USA Today
08/19/00- Updated 05:01 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/ncssat03.htm

DUBUQUE, Iowa (AP) - With the sprawling Mississippi River as a backdrop, Al Gore touted his environmental record Saturday and maintained that Republican rival George W. Bush would allow polluters to foul the air and water.

''I will clean up the environment,'' declared Gore. ''My opponent does not reflect that commitment in what's going on in his home state.''

Opening the second day of his picturesque four-day riverboat ride down the Mississippi, Gore said the trip caused him to reflect on the need to focus on the environment. Aides believe Bush is vulnerable on environmental issues because of his record as governor of Texas.

While polls have not shown the environment as a major issue in the campaign, Gore's strategists argue it's a sleeper where they can demonstrate sharp differences with Bush.

'George W. Bush has fought on behalf of the big polluters,'' said campaign spokesman Chris Lehane. ''He's very vulnerable to the message we have on the environment.''

Gore has used the riverboat trip as a way to build momentum bursting out of his nominating convention, and aides maintain that the tactic is working.

His crowds have been large and enthusiastic and media attention has been heavy. Several thousand cheering supporters showed up along the riverbank Saturday, as Gore worked his way south aboard the 400-passenger boat.

He held dockside rallies at each stop. Each day he picks a new issue to hammer on. Environmental protection was the message Saturday.

''It makes a difference if you have someone in the Oval Office who is willing to stand up to the oil companies and the big polluters,'' said Gore, his voice growing increasingly husky as his boat trip proceeded.

Gore has said it's merely the strain of delivering several big speeches a day and he's taking throat lozenges. The riverboat trip is taking Gore through a series of battleground states in the industrial Midwest that are crucial in the election.

Gore's strategists argue the heavy attention he's getting on the swing will give him a boost in the polls throughout the region.

On Saturday, Gore took note of his special ties to the region. ''This is a very special state to me,'' said Gore of Iowa. His victory in Iowa's leadoff caucuses launched him on the road to the nomination. But Bush is by no means ceding the region and was planning his own campaign swing through Iowa on Monday.

Gore's boat trip was taking him past the Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois, where thousands of workers have lost their jobs because of defense cuts.

The Bush campaign trotted out Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who blamed the Clinton-Gore administration for the job losses.

The arsenal is one of only two remaining Army weapons factories in the country.

The arsenal layoffs have been blamed on decisions by the Pentagon to use more private contractors because of budget cuts. Grassley called on Gore to stop at the arsenal and pledge to protect its 1,200 current jobs. But there are no plans for such a visit. Instead, Gore kept to his environment message.

Casting himself as a fighter on behalf of working families and against corporate polluters, Gore said: ''There are those who put their short-term profits ahead of the best interests of all the people.''

''The presidency is a fight to make the future what it should be,'' he continued. ''We've got a lot to do and my focus is on families and those who are struggling.'' Gore reserving big chunks of private time aboard the boat Saturday to spend with his wife, Tipper, who celebrated her 52nd birthday.

The couple planned a birthday party Saturday night in Clinton, Iowa.

In Dubuque, Gore arranged to have a string quartet play a birthday greeting as Mrs. Gore emerged from an elevator into a hotel lobby. The vice president, his daughter Karenna, and her husband, Drew Schiff, softly sang Happy Birthday. ''Oh that's nice,'' said the surprised Mrs. Gore.

---

Piercing the Arctic's Icy Unknown
U.S. Cutter Explores Northwest Passage, Polar Melting

Washington Post
Sunday, August 20, 2000; Page A01
By DeNeen L. Brown Washington Post Foreign Service
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-08/20/073l-082000-idx.html

ABOARD THE U.S. COAST GUARD CUTTER HEALY-The ship slams against the wicked ice of the Northwest Passage. From inside the vessel's belly, the ice seems to be fighting back, roaring, screaming, pounding against the steel hull. The ship is stopped cold in the frozen tracks of the passage. It pauses, backs up in black water, then rams the great white frozen ridges again.

The weakened ice finally bends and gives way.

The Healy, the newest icebreaker in the U.S. Coast Guard, moves slowly forward, as if putting a foot through the throat of the Arctic. But to either side of the ship, the ice is untouched, six feet thick, looking like a frozen extension of land.

Explorers have battled the passage's ice for hundreds of years, trying to find a northern shortcut to riches in Asia. The battle was fierce. Often it was the ice that killed, luring in ships and their woolen-covered crews, then without warning closing quickly behind them, trapping, deep-freezing and burying them.

Today, the once-unbreakable slabs of ice are melting, dripping more quickly than ever before. The passage may yet become navigable, opening a new trading route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. But that accessibility may mean ecological disaster.

The world, it seems, is melting from the top.

The Healy has made it this far at a good pace in part because the polar cap is shrinking, thinning. Some scientists say it may disappear entirely, little by little each summer, in just 50 years. The coverage of Arctic Sea ice has shrunk by about 6 percent since 1978. The average thickness of the ice has gone from 10.2 feet in the 1950s to 5.9 feet this year, a loss of 42 percent, according to the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Norway.

While it is clear the ice is melting, scientists disagree as to why and what it means. The effect could be benign, or it could be the start of catastrophic climate change that would kill polar bears, whales, plankton and other life in the north and flood coastal cities in the south. It is here at the top of the world, where the environment is the most pure, most delicate, most serene, that scientists can draw conclusions.

"Clearly, the temperatures are getting warmer. Is this part of the natural process or is this due to things people have done, burning too much carbon dioxide?" asks Capt. Jeffrey M. Garrett, commanding officer of the Healy.

His ship's 26,000-nautical mile voyage began in January in the warm waters of the Mississippi River in Louisiana, where the ship was built. The Healy sailed to waters off northern Canada, crossed the Atlantic to call in Ireland and Greenland, then headed for the passage en route to Seattle.

The purpose was to let the Healy, a 420-foot, diesel-propelled floating science lab, test its icebreaking powers and begin scientific studies. On the voyage so far, scientists have used Doppler radar to make images of the ocean floor, finding previously unknown structures and contours. They have taken samples of water at different depths and readings on ice conditions.

"The effects will be seen in the polar regions first," Garrett says. "The ice is not as thick nor is it as extensive."

Still, as he talks, the Healy shakes and rolls as the ice continues to resist its advance.

It is July 21, and the ship is moving through Barrow Strait. It is making better speed here because the ice has diminished, floating in chunks. The water is a great dark abyss that looks inviting, even though it would kill any crew member who fell overboard in less than three minutes.

The ship combines its mass, 16,500 tons, the design of the hull and its diesel power to ride up on ice sheets that get in its way, then break them with its weight.

Capt. Garrett stands starboard in Coast Guard blue. He is trying to determine the lay of the ice, the thickness of its ridges. Looking for the path of least resistance. The midnight sun won't go away. It could be midnight; it could be 10 in the morning. Time doesn't matter here.

With so much ice and water, it is difficult to imagine that this is a desert in terms of precipitation. In the 24-hour daylight of summer, temperatures rise to 50 degrees. In the endless dark of winter, they drop to 60 degrees below zero, freezing any flesh left exposed. The wind is persistent. Magnetic compasses are not reliable so close to the North Pole. Here, one must rely on the human mind.

"For those of us who sail icebreakers and go to the polar regions," Garrett says, "the Northwest Passage has long had an almost mystical appeal. Many in the crew had read up on the centuries of exploration and searches for the passage, much of which ended in tragedy."

On his mind, he says, is the voyage led by Sir John Franklin in 1845. No one in that 129-man expedition returned. One theory is that they were poisoned by the lead that sealed the cans of beef they ate.

It was not until 1903 that explorers succeeded in completing the voyage the Healy is attempting. They were led by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and took three years. In 1940, the St. Roch, a schooner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, also succeeded. It took two years. By 1967, only seven ships had traveled the passage end to end.

Sarah Corteville, a 22-year-old ensign whose dream it was to travel the passage, is in her cabin listening to the words of Canadian songwriter Stan Rogers. From her computer in the cramped quarters comes the eerie song:

Ah, for just one time
I would take the Northwest Passage
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea.
Tracing one warm line through a land so wide and savage
And make a Northwest Passage to the sea.

Earlier in the voyage, the song came spilling out of the public address system, scratchy and hesitant. But Sarah listened and, with a gifted ear, began singing it. "The Northwest passage, it's a romantic thing," she says. "So few people get to go through it. And this song was so cool."

Outside her porthole, the endless white dazzles.

It is late on July 21, and the Healy has entered Peel Sound. It is forcing itself through a five-foot-thick wall of ice. The deck of the ship sways. The stomach grows uneasy unless one has sea legs and Dramamine pills from the ship's medic. The ship shakes. It backs up and rams again. The questions arise only for a second: Will the ship make it? What is the way out?

As always, it does make it. The ocean and ice ahead look like a blue Slurpee from 7-Eleven. Snow piles up like whipped cream. The ship cuts the ice more easily now. The ice swirls and turns over. Behind the ship is a trail of crushed chunks.

With the naked eye, Dan Crosbie, an ice service specialist with the Canadian government's department of environment, sees a difference in the ice. "The melt is occurring earlier," Crosbie says. "What we used to face were drastic conditions. The ice itself is not as thick as normal."

He is one of three Canadians on board the Healy; the mission was an icebreaker of sorts between the United States and Canada.

For decades the waters of the Arctic have been the source of conflict between the two countries. Canada has asserted sovereignty over the passage, claiming it has a right to draw straight baselines around the perimeter of the archipelago, limit the territory of the sea and control who can and cannot go through.

The United States, contending that the passage is international water, presses for freedom of navigation. The last time it sent an icebreaker here, in 1985, it did not ask Canada for permission. But in 1988, the countries agreed that all navigation by U.S. icebreakers in waters claimed by Canada would be undertaken with consent from the Canadian government.

"As far as Canada is concerned, all Arctic islands [and waters] are national territory and fall under our jurisdiction," says Rene Turenne, captain of a Canadian coast guard icebreaker, who is along for the ride, both for his expertise and as a diplomatic courtesy to Canada.

He notes that not a few people in Canada believe that the passage should be closed to navigation. "It's a fragile environment. Unless you have serious reasons, you shouldn't disturb the ice. . . . Some environmentalists think just the noise the ship makes transmits through the waters for hundreds of miles, possibly 1,000 miles away, disrupting the migration of the bullhead whale. There is some speculation the whales can hear each other across the Arctic Ocean, but no whale has mentioned that."

He smiles.

Other environmentalists argue that simply breaking the ice causes damage, leaving behind more jumble. The breaking of ice may speed the melting of ice. A seal might be crushed.

Anything done by people has an impact on the Arctic, they say. One can map the evolution of poisons in the ecosystem: coal, oil, the toxin DDT, nuclear debris. The evolution of industry in the past 100 years can be tasted in the ice.

The Arctic is fragile. It doesn't have the biological activity to break down waste. "The biological systems here are more vulnerable because there is no one else here to share the pain," Turenne says. "There is no safe place. The Arctic knows no refuge from anyone."

It is Saturday, July 22. In Victoria Strait, the ice looks deceptively like solid land. Ahead, it specifically resembles a ridge. The Healy cuts cleanly through. Pieces of ice circle and swirl, turning over in the blue Kool-Aid water of the ship's wake.

From the second deck, the smell of steamed, frozen crab legs and lamb chops seeping from dinner in the mess hall mixes with the chill and stillness of the air.

Most of the crew has been on board six months, a long time from home. The time on board is marked by reveille, work, meals, movies, e-mail and sleep through daylight that never ends. Morale is high. The more progress the ship makes against the ice, the higher the hope that home will come sooner.

Frank Perniola, 38, a senior chief machinery technician, looks over the rails from two stories above the ice.

"It's clean," Perniola says of the vast expanse. He reflects on how few people have been here before. There is no visible evidence of pollution. He wonders what harm people will bring if the passage becomes more viable. "What more can we screw up? Some places were just meant to be left alone."

The sea is back to ice and water now. It looks like Aqua Velva. The ship is moving through Peel Sound.

It is 2300 hours, but the sun still shines. On the bridge, chief warrant officer Timothy Malcolm is on watch while most of the crew sleeps, the light slipping through their portholes, the ship rocking them in their bunks.

Faintly at first, there is a signal, a long jagged mark of neon green that blinks on the radar screen. It beeps again, this time more persistently. What could it be? The cutter is alone in the passage, except for the seals, the polar bears, the narwhals, the birds, the water and the ice. No other ships for hundreds of miles.

"Something is giving us this radar return. We are getting radar reflection," says Malcolm. "Why there would be one here I have no idea."

The ship is going 7.2 knots. Here, the water looks shallow.

The signal beeps again. Malcolm checks the binoculars. He sees nothing but great slabs of ice and cupcakes of snow. The cutter moves closer, closer. The signal continues its persistent call, clear as day.

When a crew has been too many days at sea, sometimes the horizon appears elevated. The light bends. Mariners call it a fata morgana, "a complex mirage, characterized by marked distortion, generally in the vertical. It may cause objects to appear towering, magnified and at times even multiplied," says the Glossary of Marine Navigation.

Malcolm changes course 3 degrees. Finally, the ship passes the location of the faint signal.

Nothing.

Perhaps it was a metal antenna left on an ice floe by someone. By whom? And why hasn't it fallen deep into the black water?

The signal disappears. "That was weird," Malcolm says.

Was it a whale with a tag?

"I don't think it would stay there in the same place," Malcolm says. "It must have been the ice giving that signal. But I've never seen ice give a signal."

The maritime log calls it a phantom signal, something that shows up on radar but doesn't have an actual presence.

A signal in the passage. A phantom echo.

---

Gore touts environment on Miss. River trip

USA Today
08/20/00- Updated 01:36 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/nc1.htm#poll

DUBUQUE, Iowa - With the sprawling Mississippi River as a backdrop, Al Gore touted his environmental record Saturday and maintained that Republican rival George W. Bush would allow polluters to foul the air and water. ''I will clean up the environment,'' declared Gore. ''My opponent does not reflect that commitment in what's going on in his home state.'' Opening the second day of his picturesque four-day riverboat ride down the Mississippi, Gore said the trip caused him to reflect on the need to focus on the environment. Aides believe Bush is vulnerable on environmental issues because of his record as governor of Texas. While polls have not shown the environment as a major issue in the campaign, Gore's strategists argue it's a sleeper where they can demonstrate sharp differences with Bush.

-------- imf / world bank

Much-criticized IMF sees watchdog office by April

Reuters,
August 20, 2000
From: Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>

WASHINGTON A watchdog office for the much-criticized International Monetary Fund should be up and running by next April, but the fund wants tough restrictions on what the new evaluation agency will be allowed to do.

IMF documents released on Friday said the new Independent Evaluation Office should not investigate active IMF lending programmes to member states or look at policies under active discussion by the IMF board.

"There is broad agreement that the EVO must avoid interfering with ongoing operational activities, or micro-managing responsibilities in the institution," said a statement from IMF Managing Director Horst Koehler, who chaired an Aug. 3 board meeting reviewing the watchdog proposal.

"Policies and procedures under active discussion in the Fund and current Fund programmes would not therefore be appropriate areas for EVO evaluation... The issue will be reviewed again before final decisions on the EVO are made."

The IMF, set up to rebuild the world financial system after World War II, came in for fierce criticism during the world financial crisis of 1997-99, accused of recommending inappropriate polices to countries teetering on the edge of financial disaster.

It says it changed tack promptly to respond to those complaints and points to a remarkable turnaround in most of the countries swept into the crisis as proof that policies worked.

Checks and balances

An independent watchdog, part of a drive to increase transparency at the global lender, could provide a new set of checks and balances on IMF activities. But its strength will depend on the scope of its investigations and recommendations.

The World Bank, the IMF's sister organisation, already has an independent assessment unit, which earlier this year accuse the bank of ignoring its own guidelines when it approved a controversial resettlement loan to China.

China refused to accept new conditions and announced it would fund the project without World Bank help.

If an IMF watchdog could not investigate 'current fund programmes," it would not be able to look into sensitive projects until after a lending programme was complete.

The IMF has already commissioned several independent assessments into specific areas, including surveillance, research and lending programmes for poor countries.

The IMF documents said the board would report on the evaluation office to the IMF's policy making International Monetary and Finance Council in Prague next month.

The office, with a staff of up to 11 people, should be operational before the IMFC meets in Washington in April 2001, the IMF added. It would be operationally independent and should report directly to the IMF's executive board, which is responsible for day-to-day decisions on IMF loans and policy.

"Directors viewed the EVO as an important complement to the overall review and evaluation work undertaken in the fund which would enable the institution to better absorb lessons for improvements in its future work," Koehler said.

"Directors considered that the EVO should primarily cover issues related to general policies and their implementation, comparative cross-country analyses, and completed country operations."

The IMF said it was also asking members of the public to comment by e-mail on its proposals for an evaluations office.

-------- spying

CIA courting Silicon Valley
U.S. spy agency's venture capital fund now bankrolling 8 high tech startups

August 18, 2000: 3:17 p.m. ET
http://cnnfn.cnn.com/2000/08/18/cashflow/q_cia/index.htm

NEW YORK (CNNfn) - It is probably among the last places most entrepreneurs would think of tapping for venture capital funding. Regardless, the Central Intelligence Agency has gotten into the game of providing much- needed seed money for high technology startups.

It took a lot of arm-twisting to persuade Congress and some in the intelligence bureaucracy that starting a venture capital fund to keep critical government agencies like the CIA at the forefront of new technology would be a good idea. Yet, that task was accomplished and Congress approved $28 million last year for the project and In-Q-Tel was born.

To date, In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture fund, has reviewed more than 300 business plans and provided seed money for eight high-tech companies. Most of them share a common mission of creating new security technology.

Indeed, In-Q-Tel is going to provide money only to companies whose products can in some way benefit U.S. security interests. Gilman Louie, In-Q-Tel's CEO, said in an appearance Friday on CNNfn's Market Call that in addition to computer security he is interested in such things as sensor technology that could help U.S. military and spies detect biological and chemical weapons.

In-Q-Tel differs from traditional venture funds in at least one significant way: It is not a money-making operation. The fund has non-profit status and any earnings it makes on its investments will be sent straight to the United States Treasury.

A departure for Washington

The fund is a real departure for Washington and for the United States' spy agency. Traditionally, technology for government agencies was developed in tightly secured government labs or contracted with private corporations. These days, however, information lags far behind technology, meaning that by the time anyone finds out about it, the next wave is already on the way. In the information explosion of the last decade, the CIA lost a lot of the edge it had in high technology.

Wireless gadgets and high-tech products like satellite images and electronic surveillance equipment, now available to the public, including terrorists, were once the exclusive domain of the government. Creating this fund is an experiment to try to put the CIA back in the position of high-tech predominance it held throughout the Cold War. (230K WAV) or (230K AIF)

CIA spies have a host of technology needs. In addition to tiny sensors and the most secure computers in the world, the agency has put out the call for stronger Internet search engines, technology that will allow them to surf the Internet in complete secrecy, and software that can translate every language in the world.

Former computer game designer leads effort

The choice of Louie to run the fund also is a departure for Washington. Louie, 39, is no government wonk. He's a former Silicon Valley techno whiz who earned digital renown when, in his early 20's, he created the flight simulator, Falcon. He later sold his company to Hasbro for $70 million.

Most recently, Louie was Hasbro Interactive's chief creative officer and general manager of the Games.com group, which oversees Hasbro's Internet games site.

Not only is the pace of technology too fast for government agencies to keep up, Louie said, but it is rapidly becoming too costly to try to develop all the technology to meet government needs alone.

Louie described his position at In-Q-Tel as that of a human translator. He explains the government's technology needs to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in the hope of inspiring them to work with In-Q-Tel. He also hopes to convey to cutting edge firms in Silicon Valley that in many areas, such as information security, the governments needs are very much in line with the needs of corporate America.

"The CIA has very advanced needs," he said. "We can really help them get the first mover advantage because a lot of companies have these needs, too."

At least two other government agencies, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U.S. Postal Service, are looking at creating similar ventures.

-------- police

Imprisoning the Wrong Man

New York Times
August 20, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/editorial/20sun3.html

Kerry Sanders, a man with a history of mental health problems, served more than two years in a New York State prison because he shares a last name and a birth date with a violent criminal. Despite repeated protests from Kerry Sanders that he was not Robert Sanders, the escaped convict whom police were really after, no one at any stage of the criminal justice system took even the minimal steps needed to learn that the wrong man was in prison. Now the New York State Department of Correctional Services is refusing to own up to the negligence of its actions.

The bare facts, chronicled by Benjamin Weiser in the Aug. 6 New York Times Magazine, are not in dispute.

Mr. Sanders was arrested in Los Angeles in October 1993 after spending a night on a public bench.

The arresting officer and public defender say Mr. Sanders acknowledged being Robert Sanders from New York, an escaped felon, though he signed documents as Kerry Sanders.

Incredibly, neither in California nor in New York were Kerry Sanders's fingerprints or photograph compared to those of Robert Sanders.

Nor did anyone on Kerry Sanders's mental health team at Green Haven prison in Stormville, N.Y., raise questions about how a prisoner with no previous record of mental health problems (Robert Sanders) had become schizophrenic, and why a New Yorker kept talking about his hometown as Los Angeles.

The real Robert Sanders was arrested in a drug bust in October 1995, and it was then that the State of New York realized there was a man sitting in Green Haven who had not been convicted of a crime.

Kerry Sanders was returned to his mother in Los Angeles carrying $48, a pack of cigarettes, a soda, some medications and deeper mental troubles.

The family hired a lawyer, who has settled with Los Angeles County for its role in this wrongful imprisonment.

But in New York, the case is headed for trial in federal court. That is an outrage given the scandalous negligence and incompetence shown by the state in failing to identify its prisoner properly. The state should negotiate a settlement with Mr. Sanders that would acknowledge its negligence, fairly compensate him for two lost years and provide him with top-notch psychiatric care for the rest of his life.

On a heartening note, New York's attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, has indicated to this page that he is open to the possibility of settling the case.

He said that a settlement would not amount to a dangerous precedent for the state because the facts in the case are "so unique." One would hope so.

-------- spying

Poland Spy Inquiry Said to Be a Failed Political Tactic

New York Times
August 20, 2000
By STEVEN ERLANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/europe/082000poland-spy.html

WARSAW, Aug. 17 -- A special Polish court last week cleared the popular president, the former Communist Aleksander Kwasniewski, and a former president, the Solidarity hero Lech Walesa, of charges that they spied for the Communist secret police.

But behind that bizarre and embarrassing drama, Poles believe, are the desperate straits of Solidarity's current leader, the ambitious Marian Krzaklewski, whose own candidacy for the presidency is floundering badly.

Mr. Krzaklewski's Solidarity coalition, running Poland with a minority government, is widely unpopular and is expected to lose parliamentary elections, probably next spring, to Mr. Kwasniewski's reformed Communists.

And Mr. Kwasniewski himself, now that he has been cleared, is almost guaranteed re-election as Poland's president. The only question is whether he will win an absolute majority in the Oct. 8 first round against about 18 opponents, or whether he will be forced into a runoff against the second-place finisher.

There's the rub for Mr. Krzaklewski, 50, widely considered the brains and puppet master behind the government. He is acknowledged by Western diplomats in Warsaw as a shrewd politician, but they say he failed to come into the open and actually run the government, and now seems likely to pay the price.

Should he fail to force Mr. Kwasniewski into a second round -- or even worse, run third and not make the cut -- his political career could be in ruins, and the party's showing in the parliamentary elections would suffer further.

At the moment in the polls, Mr. Krzaklewski is running third, with only 6 percent of the vote. Mr. Kwasniewski has a whopping 62 percent, former Foreign Minister Andrzej Olechowski is a distant second with 10 percent, and Mr. Walesa, the Solidarity labor hero of the Communist era who persists in running against his own Solidarity inheritor, is fourth with 4 percent.

So Mr. Krzaklewski needs Mr. Walesa's votes. Anything that reduced support for Mr. Kwasniewski or Mr. Walesa, or forced them to withdraw from the race, would be beneficial.

Therefore, many Poles and Western diplomats believe, Mr. Krzaklewski turned to a 1997 law that requires those seeking high office to declare whether they collaborated with the universally despised Communist secret police.

The idea behind the trials, this theory goes, was to embarrass Mr. Kwasniewski and force Mr. Walesa out of the running.

If so, the maneuver appears to have failed, clearing the former Communist president of suspicion and generating sympathy for Mr. Walesa.

Mr. Walesa originally said that the accusations against him -- that in the early 1970's, before he became a national figure, he was an agent known as "Bolek" and informed the secret police about his friends and colleagues -- were the result of a vendetta by former Communists.

But after the closed court cleared him, Mr. Walesa suggested that former allies in Solidarity, who control the government, were to blame.

"It looks like they wanted to humiliate Walesa," said Jacek Kucharczyk, deputy director of the Institute for Public Affairs, an independent research organization here. "It appears that Krzaklewski's people sent papers to the court to incriminate him, and then sent papers at the last minute to get him off the hook," he said. "Solidarity seems pretty desperate about its standing in the polls and they decided to play hardball." Now Mr. Walesa may benefit from a sympathy vote, Mr. Kucharczyk said.

Spokesmen for Mr. Krzaklewski and the government denied any attempt to manipulate the legal process. But Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, the previous prime minister and himself a reformed Communist, said he had no doubt that the accusations against Mr. Kwasniewski and Mr. Walesa -- and the timing and manner of their trials -- were part of a political game by Mr. Krzaklewski and his allies.

"We thought Solidarity had strong proof against Kwasniewski, especially when Krzaklewski decided to run" for the presidency, Mr. Cimoszewicz said. "But it's important to kill your target, and now he's getting killed. Solidarity wanted to destroy Kwasniewski, but he's now immunized against attack."

The 1997 legislation, based on a Czech law, imposes no legal penalty for confessing to collaboration with the old secret police, so long as the person declares it -- as Mr. Olechowski did, apparently with no great harm to his popularity. But anyone found to be lying, through an investigation by the secret police and the finding of this secret screening court, is banned from politics for 10 years.

So all presidential candidates were bound to be screened in any case. The evidence against Mr. Kwasniewski, a member of the Communist Party, was thin. But Mr. Walesa had a harder problem, given his own admission that he signed some awkward documents in late 1970, when he was 26, just after he participated in workers' strikes at the Gdansk shipyards. And clearly he had a big file with the secret services, which had faked some documents in the early 1980's, trying to deny him the Nobel Peace Prize he won for leading the Solidarity trade union.

While Poles do not want the mercurial, unsophisticated Mr. Walesa to return as their president, they do not want him humiliated, nor to think of him as a collaborator.

Part of Mr. Krzaklewski's problem was his decision in 1997 to be the back-room boss of the government, ordering around his former professor, Jerzy Buzek, whom he made prime minister. Mr. Krzaklewski managed to undermine Mr. Buzek while not avoiding blame for the government's growing unpopularity.

"Krzaklewski is a wonderful organizer and politically clever," said one European Union ambassador. "But if he wanted to be the top young politician in central Europe, he should have become prime minister himself. He didn't grow from his victory in 1997, and it's sad for Poland, which had a chance to modernize its politics."

Mr. Krzaklewski, recognizing that he must at least run second to Mr. Kwasniewski, or watch his control of a panicked party disintegrate, is sounding an increasingly populist and nationalist note on the hustings, especially about the problems presented by Poland's application to join the European Union. And Mr. Kwasniewski, 45, who has gotten plump in office, is on a weight-loss regimen to renew his magnetism for Poland's less substantive voters, trying to spare the electorate the bother of a second round.

-------- activists

Opinionline What people are saying about the Democratic convention Glitz, family issues collide at convention

USA Today
08/18/00- Updated 08:53 AM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/comment/opline.htm

Meredith Oakley, columnist, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: "If Bill Clinton and Al Gore have been so good for the country, why would so many dissenters create such a ruckus at the coronation of Al Gore and Joe Lieberman? Could it be that the throngs in the streets really believe that this election is about issues? What a novel concept!"

---

USA Today
08/20/00
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

California

Temecula - Fifty Libertarians and self-described "patriots" drove through a Border Patrol checkpoint in a protest. The horn-honking caravan of 22 vehicles sported placards reading "Temecula is not the U.S./Mexico Border." The inland checkpoint on Interstate 15 about 65 miles north of the border and another on coastal Interstate 5 are unconstitutional, intrusive and a waste of taxpayer money, protesters say.

-------- chemicals

Government cracks down on food chemicals

USA Today
08/20/00- Updated 01:36 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/nc1.htm#poll

WASHINGTON - With concerns growing about the use of antibiotics and hormones in food, the government is preparing to stop meatpackers from selling meat from carcasses in which excessive chemical residue is found. Under current rules, meatpackers can throw out the part of the animal that's been tested for drug residue and sell the rest. The new policy, which could be final early next month, would require that the entire carcass be destroyed. Agriculture officials say the rules would apply to all livestock, but would primarily affect slaughtered dairy cows, the source of about 40% of the hamburger meat people consumer. USDA officials say their intent is to bring their procedures into line with FDA policies.

--------

OneList subscribers:

1. Nuclear Time Bomb
From: ivan buchbinder <pentaske@memes.com>

2. NucNews 00/08/19 - Oboe update; Announcements; Candidates; Political Sites
From: Oscar Rosen <otaka@earthlink.net>

3. Some Interesting Non- Submarine items
From: FoE Sydney - Nuclear Campaign <nonukes@foesyd.org.au>

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

Message: 1
Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 09:20:17 -0700
From: ivan buchbinder <pentaske@memes.com>

Nuclear Time Bomb

Y'all, Well as y'all might guess the mainstream corporate media has ignored the nuclear time bomb that this sub represents. Does any one know the prevailing currents of the Barents Sea?

Later

"Damage extends back to the sail, suggesting that those spaces forward of the reactor compartment including the control room and accommodation spaces were rapidly flooded, leaving no time for personnel in those compartments to escape. According to the Russian Navy, both the submarines reactors have been shut down. They also insisted that there were no nuclear weapons on board"

http://www.janes.com/defence/naval_forces/news/jdw/jdw000818_1_n.shtml

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

Message: 2
Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 14:03:53 +0000
From: Oscar Rosen <otaka@earthlink.net>

NucNews 00/08/19 - Oboe update; Announcements; Candidates; Political Sites

August 20, 2000

Your message about Oboe 5 reminded me that Oppenheimer recommended that tests be done by computer rather than live before he was stripped of his security clearance and role in the program. Three bombs had already been detonated by then.

Oscar Rosen Atomic Veterans Radiation News

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

Message: 3
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 14:34:06 +1000
From: FoE Sydney - Nuclear Campaign <nonukes@foesyd.org.au>

Some Interesting Non- Submarine items

John Hallam
Friends of the Earth Sydney,
17 Lord Street, Newtown, NSW, Australia, 2042
Fax (61)(2)9517-3902
ph (61)(2)9517-3903
nonukes@foesyd.org.au
http://homepages.tig.com.au/~foesyd

Dear All,

While the world has been transfixed by the tragic spectacle of the Kursk, some important events have been quietly happening behind the scenes, almost unnoticed by media.

In geneva, US and Russian arms control negotiations have been taking place with the object of preventing or making less likely the possibility of accidental nuclear war. This has been taking place under the umbrella of 'Start-III' and in the background of



1) U.S., Russian Arms Negotiators Meet (AP)
Wednesday August 16
By ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS,
Associated Press Writer

GENEVA (AP) - Top U.S. and Russian arms negotiators met Wednesday, seeking to build on a commitment by Presidents Bill Clinton and Vladimir Putin to improve safeguards against the accidental launch of a nuclear war, officials said.

U.S. officials refused to reveal the location of the three-day meeting between teams led by John Holum, the Clinton administration's chief arms negotiator, and Yuri Kapralov, head of the Russian arms control directorate. Russian officials, however, said it was taking place in the Russian diplomatic mission to U.N. offices in Geneva.

A statement issued by the U.S. mission said the meeting was ``following up on the joint statement of President Clinton and President Putin in Okinawa on cooperation on strategic stability.'' The statement said the negotiators would continue a year-old series of talks aimed at writing a new treaty to reduce long-range nuclear weapons.

In conjunction with the G-8 summit in Okinawa, Japan, last month, Clinton and Putin issued a statement saying they planned to set up a joint U.S.-Russia center for exchange of data from systems that provide early warning in the event of a missile launch. The negotiators have to work out implementation.

A second project, proposed by the Clinton administration, would involve ways for each side to warn the other that a test missile or a space rocket has been launched. The objective is to allay misunderstandings and avert a dangerous response.

Also on the table for consideration at Geneva is a joint U.S.-Russian project known as RAMOS - for Russian American Observation Satellite - designed to improve sensors in early warning satellites.

At the same time, the United States is seeking Russian agreement to amend the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty so that it can deploy a shield to guard against a missile attack from nations like North Korea or Iraq. Russia - with the backing of China and even U.S. allies - is strongly opposed to any change in the ABM treaty on the grounds that it could undermine international arms-control treaties and spark a new arms race.

The United States also has proposed working on parts of a text for a third Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START III, to reduce U.S. and Russian long-range nuclear warheads.

The START II treaty, concluded in January 1993, reduced warheads to 3,000-3,500 on each side. Ratified by the U.S. Senate and finally, this year, by the Russian parliament, it has yet to take effect.

----

2) The Dodgy Science of Missile Defense
Business Week,
AUG 17, 2000
COMMENTARY By Stan Crock

The complexity of the systems makes the possibility of failure all too real -- and deadly

When President Clinton decides whether to press ahead with a national missile-defense system, he'll base his judgment on the nature of the threat to the U.S., the system's cost, the availability of technology, and the overall impact on U.S. national security. Stock Lookup But an even more fundamental consideration is missing from his analysis: whether it makes any sense to rely on rocket science to defend the nation. The President's land-based system and the sea- and space-based schemes advocated by some Republicans may well be feasible. But they are fraught with complexities and possible flaws. Feasibility isn't necessarily reliability. And there's the rub.

The most serious problem concerns the fundamental nature of rocket science.

It is what students of complexity theory call brittle. If one part -- design, computer even a small part -- fails, the whole thing fails. This is qualitatively different from other complex systems.

On an airplane, for example, if one engine burns out, the aircraft can still fly and land. If one pilot has a heart attack, the other can take the controls -- or, as in the movies, an air-traffic controller can teach a passenger how to land. There's plenty of time to adapt to problems. ICBMs, in contrast, are in flight for half an hour or so. There is neither the ability nor the time to make adjustments when snafus crop up.

FLUB FACTOR. Missile-defense supporters insist that a little more engineering, testing, and quality control can help solve these problems. But they're missing the point. Glitches still plague some Boeing and Lockheed Martin satellite launches, and those companies have been at it for four decades. Amazingly, after all this time and experience, Boeing feels it needs to schedule a Delta II launch with a dummy payload on Aug. 23, to show customers it can put something aloft successfully.

Compounding the "brittle factor" is the complexity of the missile-defense systems. They involve early-warning radar, tracking sensors, launchers, and "kill vehicles" that will hit the incoming warheads. All of these are lashed together with central command posts. But the more complex a system is, the more likely it is that unanticipated flubs will occur. During the July 8 test of the national missile defense system, the kill vehicle didn't separate from the booster -- a malfunction that wasn't even on the list of Pentagon concerns.

As systems get more complicated, it's utterly predictable that something unanticipated will happen. The U.S. shouldn't rely on a system in which "the booster fails to separate from the payload -- and New York is history," says Gottfried J. Mayer, an adjunct professor of kinesiology at Pennsylvania State University.

DEADLY BUGS. The challenge of software, which underlies the entire scheme, is particularly daunting. Think about how often far simpler programs, such as Microsoft Windows, crash. Then consider that experts say the increase in the difficulty of writing software isn't linear, but rather exponential. So going from 10 lines to 20 lines isn't twice as hard but 100 times as hard. The implications for a program with millions and millions of lines of computer code boggle the mind. With Windows, bugs are a nuisance. With missile defense, bugs mean death to the system's capabilities.

Missile-defense supporters say there's a way to get around what they acknowledge is the system's unreliability. If the best a good missile could do is hit incoming warheads 70%, or perhaps 80%, of the time, the solution is to aim four missiles at every enemy warhead. That theoretically enables the chance of a hit to approach 100% -- though it never reaches perfection. The goal is to have "a vanishingly small chance of failure," says one industry expert. "But that chance is always there."

Of course, those are the odds on paper. What works in the fog of war is far different. Patriot ground-to-air missiles didn't work in Desert Storm with the perfection they did in tests. Not much does. For systems where so many things can go wrong, it's ludicrous to assume a 99% success rate.

TRACK RECORD. So proponents of missile defense argue that something far less than perfection is good enough. Right now, a rogue state leader knows that any first strike would get through, and a missile-defense system, however leaky, would sow doubts about that ability. But a leader rational enough to make such a calculation should be rational enough to know that he would face annihilation through a retaliatory strike.

Deterrence and diplomacy have a 50-year track record of averting nuclear Armageddon. Given the considerable drawbacks of a missile-defense system, they may be the best weapons for the future as well.

Crock covers national-security issues for Business Week from Washington. Edited by Douglas Harbrecht

------

3) Collaboration, Not a Missile Shield, Is the Best Defense Solution
International Herald Tribune,
Fri, Aug 18
By John C. Polanyi

- The tragic failure of a nuclear submarine serves as a reminder of the disrepair of Russian forces. There is the danger that Russia may keep its intercontinental ballistic missiles on high alert to counter inadequacies in its early warning capabilities.

So one can understand the general state of nervousness that leads to demands for a U.S. national missile defense.

Yet we know that the world is safer than in the days of the Cold War. We know, too, that it was not missile defenses which made it so, but the spread of openness and responsible government around the world.

The best hope for a secure world lies in fostering this trend. But missile defense runs counter to it by attempting to fence one nation in. This wrongheaded solution is not improved by the fact the fence will be an imperfect one.

What is to be done?

On June 4 in Moscow, Presidents Bill Clinton and Vladimir Putin signed an agreement committing them to a permanent military collaboration. They pledged to establish a jointly staffed monitoring agency for missile launches. This early warning system is known by the initials JDEC (''Jaydec'' in Pentagonese), for Joint Data Exchange Center.

Since warnings would be crucial to missile interception, this will have implications for the U.S. missile defense.

The JDEC concept is revolutionary. It means a joint center for espionage, to be located in Moscow. Not any old espionage, but spying on the most fearsome weapons that history has known. For Russia and the United States to engage in this activity jointly is to give the strongest imaginable signal that the Cold War is over.

Provided, of course, that JDEC works. The signals coming from the radars and satellites of each party must be available to the other for analysis, so that each can assess their truthfulness and dependability. False data are dangerous.

This is so obvious that neither party would consent to engage in such an exchange without a high degree of transparency. Neither will then end up with many secrets in regard to its missiles, but neither has many now, nor does it need them for deterrence.

We have here an unprecedented opportunity to prevent accidents arising from malfunctioning on either side.

Such collaboration would be a far-fetched dream but for the fact that the dreamers are the presidents of Russia and the United States, who have committed themselves to establishing this joint missile warning center within a year.

The two parties can be expected to notify one another of rocket launches in advance and in detail, since they will jointly be observing them.

In this way they can build confidence in the dependability of their data exchange. Advance notification is not a new concept. Negotiations to make it mandatory are under way.

Mr. Putin has invited third parties to contribute to JDEC. The staff in Moscow should include experts from Europe.

The cost, which could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, is to be shared equally between Russia and America. This cost, about 1 percent of that of the thinnest U.S. national missile defense system, is sufficiently small that other nations can contribute significantly in cash and in kind to see that the initiative does not die. They should offer to do so, without delay,

Does this affect missile defense? Greatly, but without eliminating it from consideration.

Supposing that there do exist ''rogue'' nations, immune to massive deterrence, their preparations for a surprise attack will be detected by JDEC since their weapons must be tested. These nations will then be the subject of intense diplomatic and economic pressures, of the sort that are already succeeding in taming North Korea and Iran.

If, even in the setting of a new regime of international restraint, they were to persist in testing, the question would be asked whether they have the right to threaten their neighbors with annihilation. If not, precision munitions could destroy their missile sites.

Should the world be unready to take the civilized step of preventing small nations from making dire threats, on the plausible grounds that large nations still reserve the right to do so, then there is a form of missile defense that could be contemplated. This is the boost-phase system proposed by Mr. Putin.

Defensive missiles would be placed near the rogue state to intercept its offensive missiles. Mr. Putin proposes that these defenses be operated not by a single nation but jointly.

This boost-phase interception has the advantage that the missile is an easy target - multi-stage and blazing. Rocket scientists will be happy.

Strategically it means that retaliatory missiles hidden in the oceans or the hinterland of large nations are immune. The major powers should be satisfied.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with defense. Only with defense that is unilateral and provocative, as national missile defense would be.

The writer, a professor at the University of Toronto and a Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry, is a member of a committee of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston that is studying the Joint Data Exchange Center. He adapted this personal comment for the International Herald Tribune from a longer article in The Globe and Mail.

---------

4) Signs of Arms Race Worry Japan
INTENATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE,
AUG 18 2000
By Nagao Hyodo

The Japanese government has so far kept silent over missile defense. China and North Korea have registered hostility.

The Chinese see U.S. missile defense as directed not only against North Korea but also against themselves. The small size of the Chinese strategic missile force makes it vulnerable to even a limited missile defense system. Beijing and Pyongyang aresituated at more or less the same distance from America. The Chinese quite naturally fear that the credibility of their nuclear deterrent will be seriously undermined.

A decision to deploy missile defense might lead China to a fundamental re-examination of its already substantial nuclear modernization program and provide an excuse to upgrade its nuclear capability, one of the worst scenarios for Japan.

If India reacted similarly, this could precipitate a response by Pakistan. Thus, if U.S. missile defense were deployed, Asia might be more at risk of destabilization than Europe.

Japan should share Europe's anxiety about possible strategic instability and a renewed arms race between the United States and Russia. Russia is one of Japan's most important neighbors.

Half-century-long peace treaty negotiations to solve the outstanding territorial issue are at a very delicate stage. Good Russian-American relations are essential for its solution.

Some European leaders seem to fear that U.S. missile defense could lead to ''decoupling.'' Once it has been deployed, would America be willing to help Europeans at a time of crisis? Some Asian countries might have similar worries.

After World War II, the United States honored its commitments to the security of the Asia-Pacific region at enormous cost, in particular in Korea and Vietnam. But, given the scale of the price it paid, it might be reluctant to help Asia again at a time of crisis.

The concept of missile defense seems in part to reflect isolationist sentiment.

The launching of a Taepodong missile two years ago by North Korea shocked Japan and for the first time made its people face the missile threat squarely. The test prompted Japan to step up a joint technical study program with the United States against missile threats. Germany and Italy have similarcooperation agreements with America.

But cooperation in the development of theater missile defense should not mean unreserved support for deployment of national missile defense.

Some specialists have suggested boost-phase defenses. However, there are problems that technology alone cannot solve. Most defensive measures can be interpreted as offensive by potentially hostile nations, which not unnaturally fear that ''limited'' missile defense can provide the basis for much more substantial defenses.

The first phase of eventual U.S. national missile defense seems to be targeted mainly on North Korea. In the light of some signs of a change in North Korean external policy, is it not worthwhile to reassess the North Korean threat? In so doing, Washington should listen to the voices of its friends in Asia.

Whether active North Korean diplomacy reflects a real change in a positive direction remains to be seen. Threats other than missiles should also be considered seriously in this connection.

Signs that the crucial decision on missile defense might be deferred to the next presidency are welcome.

The writer, a former Japanese ambassador to Belgium, contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.

-------

5) U.S., Russian Officials Wind Up Geneva Arms Talks
Fri Aug 18
Reuters

GENEVA (Reuters) - Senior U.S. and Russian arms control negotiators were due Friday to finish three days of talks on a START-3 treaty and related anti-ballistic missile issues, a U.S. spokesman said.

The Geneva talks were aimed at building on the agreement reached by President Clinton and Russian President Vladimir Putin at last month's G8 summit in Okinawa, Japan, to cooperate on strategic stability, he added.

Russian has been pressing the United States to abandon plans to deploy an anti-missile defense shield that Moscow says would violate the landmark 1972 ABM treaty and spark a new global arms race.

John Holum, under-secretary for arms control and international security, and his counterpart, Yuri Kapralov, director of the security affairs and disarmament department of the Foreign Affairs Ministry, led the delegations to the technical-level talks.

``Mr. Holum is meeting Mr. Kapralov to coordinate activities on cooperation and to continue discussions on START-3 and ABM issues,'' a U.S. spokesman in Geneva said.

No press events or final statements were expected.

----

6) U.S., RUSSIA END ROUND OF ARMS TALKS ON MISSILES
August 20, 2000
Chicago Tribune

GENEVA,SWITZERLAND -- Top U.S. and Russian arms negotiators Friday ended a round of talks for further cuts in nuclear arsenals and improving safeguards against triggering a nuclear war, officials said.

A key goal of the session was to build on commitments by President Clinton and Russian President Vladimir Putin to cooperate on strategic stability, U.S. officials said.

Clinton and Putin said in Okinawa, Japan, last month that they planned within a year to set up a joint U.S.-Russia center to exchange data from early warning systems in the event of a missile launch.

The Geneva session was to work on implementing the commitment, U.S. officials said. [Image] Also on the agenda was a second project, proposed by the Clinton administration, on ways to advise each other that a test missile or a space rocket has been launched without setting off alarm bells.

The talks were the latest in a series that began a year ago on a third Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START III.

The United States also is trying to persuade Russia to amend the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty to permit deployment of a shield against limited missile launches by unstable nations.

-----

7) UN disarmament conference under scrutiny for lack of progress
Sun, Aug 20
AFP

GENEVA, Aug 20 (AFP) - Diplomats and experts are increasingly questioning the purpose of the UN Conference on Disarmament (CD) which, dogged by disagreement, has effectively been unable for the last two years to get its work programme off the starting blocks.

Only a few weeks away from rounding up its annual session here on September 22, the Geneva-based Conference has still not managed to agree on how to launch negotiations on creating a 'de-nuclearised' world.

In the short-term, the Conference cannot even agree on how to start talks on the drawing up of a treaty banning the production of fissile material used in making nuclear bombs.

The 66 Conference members are divided between those who see a link among all the issues dealing with general disarmament, and others who want them dealt with separately.

In addition, the five officially recognised nuclear powers -- US, France, Britain, Russia and China -- all have differing stances.

"If within the next months no compromise is achieved to make possible the resumption of serious negotiations in the CD it would be reasonable to dissolve the CD," vice-president of the Geneva International Peace Research Institute Jozef Goldblat said.

At the end of last year's session of the Conference, the French and British representatives both expressed doubts about the effectiveness of the body.

Hubert de la Fortelle of France said the Conference was "gravely ill", while Britain's Ian Soutar described it as having reached a "lamentable impasse".

A year later, and some diplomats are still saying the same thing. Others such as Algeria's Ambassador Mohamed Dembri still want to have faith in the Conference, the only body to discuss disarmament at the international level.

But the mechanisms of this body whose basic rule is agreement by consensus meaning each member has the right of veto, need reviewing, Goldblat believes.

For this reason, he has called for the treaty dealing with the elimination and halt of fissile material production to be discussed outside the Conference.

"Since all the nuclear countries, the five official ones and three non-official ones (India, Pakistan and Israel) agree on the principle of such a treaty, why not discuss it somewhere else?" he has said.

Such a method was put forward by Canada for the banning of mines, one of the subjects which remains on the Conference's agenda. It resulted in the signing of an international convention in December 1997 in Ottawa. However the signatures of the US, China and Russia are notable in their absence.

Another bone of contention is the US programme of anti-missile ballistic missiles -- called Nuclear Missile Defense (NMD) -- which the US holds on to as a way of better countering new additions to the club of long range missile owners such as North Korea.

China and Russia oppose the programme, Moscow believing it in violation of the ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems) agreement it concluded with Washington in 1972 on reducing missiles of this kind.

"The international dynamic at the beginning of the nineties after the collapse of Communism which favoured the banning of nuclear tests and the indefinite extension of a treaty on nuclear non-proliferation, no longer exists," Goldblat said.

The Conference on Disarmament is virtually blocked, at least until the summer of 2001, or six months after the US takes over the presidency of the body, some diplomats have noted.

However, between now and then, diplomats will continue to meet every Thursday during the three annual sessions to restate their differences.

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

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1. The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet Chelyabinsk Nuclear Disasters
From: magnu96196@aol.com

2. History of Radiation and Radiation Protection
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3. USEC's finances still under federal scrutiny
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4. Hopes fade for radiation compensation
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6. Low-temp drying technology planned for transuranic waste
From: "jseusw" <jseusw@uswest.net>

7. part 1 --- ORNL TRU Waste ROD
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8. part 2 --- ORNL TRU Waste ROD
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9. part 1--- Uranium Enrichment Newsletter August 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

10. part 2 --- Uranium Enrichment Newsletter August 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

-----------

Message: 1
Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 07:44:59 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet
Chelyabinsk Nuclear Disasters

http://www.logtv.com/chelya/cheldis.html

The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet

Chelyabinsk Nuclear Disasters

Plutonium and Tritium for Soviet nuclear weapons is produced at three closely guarded locations, each of which includes a "closed" city of workers. These cities do not appear on maps, and until recently, travel to and from them was all but prohibited. Even now, foreign visitors have been allowed to see only two of the sites. Each of the sites has an official name, often including a number that indicates a post office address, but each was known by another name or names abroad as well as in the Soviet Union.

The complex officially known as Chelyabinsk-40 is located in Chelyabinsk province, about 15 kilometers east of the city of Kyshtym on the east side of the southern Urals. It is situated in the area around Lake Kyzyltash, in the upper Techa River drainage basin among numerous other interconnected lakes. Between Lake Kyzyltash and Lake Irtyash is Chelyabinsk-65, the military-industrial city once called Beria, but today inhabitants call it Sorokovka("forties town").

Another Mayak laboratory, the All-Union Institute of Technical Physics, is located just east of the Urals, 20 kilometers north of Kasli. It is better known by its post office box, Chelyabinsk-70. It was opened in 1955, shortly after the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory opened in the United States.

Chelyabinsk-65, was reported to have 83,000 inhabitants and "almost 100,000 people." Chelyabinsk-40, the reactor complex, covers some 90 square kilometers, according to a recent ministry report, and is run by the production association Mayak("beacon" or "lighthouse"). All the reactors are located near the southeast shore of Lake Kyzyltash and relied on open-cycle cooling: water from the lake was pumped directly through the core.

Probably fashioned after the U.S. Hanford Reservation in the state of Washington, Chelyabinsk-40 was the first Soviet plutonium production complex. Construction was started on the first buildings of the new city in November 1945. Some 70,000 inmates from 12 labor camps were reportedly used to build the complex. It is here that the physicist Igor Kurchatov, working under Stalin's deputy Lavrenti Beria, built the first plutonium production reactor, called "Anotchka" or A Reactor, in just 18 months.

The people of the Chelyabinsk Region have suffered no less than three nuclear disasters: For over six years, the Mayak complex systematically dumped radioactive waste into the Techa River, the only source of water for the 24 villages which lined its banks. The four largest of those villages were never evacuated, and only recently have the authorities revealed to the population why they strung barbed wire along the banks of the river some 35 years ago. Today, as a result of Kyshtym-57's (a local environmental group lead by Louisa Korzhova) fight for radiation victims, a new law was introduced which allows residents of Muslyumovo to resettle themselves elsewhere. Unfortunately, the new law is limited only to one village.

In 1957, the area suffered its next calamity when the cooling system of a radioactive waste containment unit malfunctioned and exploded. About two million curies spread throughout the region, exposing to radiation over a quarter million people. Less than half of one percent of these people were evacuated, and some of those only after years had passed.

The third disaster came ten years later. The Mayak complex had been using Lake Karachay as a dumping basin for its radioactive waste since 1951. In 1967, a drought reduced the water level of the lake, and gale-force winds spread the radioactive dust throughout twenty-five thousand square kilometers, further irradiating half a million people with five million curies.

Chelyabinsk-40, or the Kyshtym complex is best known to the outside world as the site of a disastrous explosion in 1957, only recently acknowledged by Soviet officialdom. The tanks were entirely immersed in, and cooled by, water. But the monitoring system was defective. The system failed in one of the tanks, however, and the waste began to dry out. On September 29, 1957, exploded with a force equivalent to 70-100 tons of TNT. Seventy or 80 metric tons of waste containing some 20 million curies of radioactivity was ejected -- about one-fourth the amount released in the 1986 Chernobyl accident.

About 90 percent of the radioactivity fell out immediately around the vessel. The rest formed a kilometer-high radioactive cloud that was carried through Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk, and Tumen provinces.

There were 217 towns and villages with a combined population 270,000 people in the area that was contaminated to greater than 0.1 curies of strontium 90 per square kilometer. By comparison, the total strontium 90 fallout at this latitude from past atmospheric tests is 0.08 curies per square kilometer. Virtually all water supply sources in the area were contaminated. Evacuation of the most highly contaminated areas, where 1,100 people lived, was not completed until 10 days after the accident. Other areas were evacuated a year later, after the population had consumed radioactive food. In the years following the accident, 515 square miles of land was plowed under or removed from agricultural use; all except 80 square kilometers was returned to use by 1978.

About 10,000 people lived in the 1,000-square-kilometer area contaminated with more than two curies of strontium 90 per square kilometer. One-fifth of these people eventually showed a reduction of leukocytes in their blood. There are no records of deaths caused by the accident.

This accident is only part of Chelyabinsk-40's deadly legacy, because there was no management of radioactive waste at all before September 1951: for years the high-level nuclear waste was simply discharged directly into the Techa River. And over the years, workers at the complex have been exposed to astonishing levels of radiation.

During 1949, the first full year of operation, workers at A Reactor received an average dose of 93.6 rem -- three times the standards then set by the ministry, where were too high to begin with: about 30 rem per year. (Standards for nuclear workers in Russia, as in the United States, are now about 5 rem per year, although they are about the be lowered in the United States to 2 rem.) Workers were exposed to an average of 113.3 rem in 1951, and a small percentage received more than 400 rem annually during this early period.

In 1951, radioactivity carried by the Techa River from Chelyabinsk-40 was found in the Arctic Ocean -- although 99 percent of the radioactive material was deposited within the first 35 kilometers downstream. This discovery prompted a change in dumping policy: The Techa and its floodlands were excluded from human use, some inhabitants were evacuated, and others were supplied with water from other sources.

Reservoirs were created to keep water from flowing out of the most contaminated areas, and plant wastes were discharged into Karachay Lake, which has no outlet, instead of into the river. The lake, actually a bog, eventually accumulated 120 million curies of the long-lived radionuclides cesium 137 and strontium 90. By comparison, the Chernobyl accident released one million curies of cesium 137 and 220,000 curies of strontium 90. In 1967, wind dispersed radioactivity from the lake, contaminating about 1,8000 square kilometers. Today, radioactivity in the ground water has migrated two to three kilometers from the lake. A person standing on the lake shore near the area where wastes are discharged from the plant would receive about 600 roentgens of radiation, a lethal dose, in an hour. The lake is now being filled with hollow concrete blocks, rock, and soil to reduce the dispersion of radioactivity.

The Techa River was originally cordoned off with a wire fence and people were forbidden to fish in it, or to pick mushrooms and berries or cut hay nearby. Today, the shattered remains of the fence rust by the riverside and regulations are widely ignored by the population. There are 400 million cubic meters of radioactive water in open reservoirs along the river. Fish in one reservoir are reported to be "100 times more radioactive than normal."

-This page consists of excerpts of an article "A First Look at the Soviet Bomb Complex", by Thomas B. Cochran and Robert S. Norris-

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Message: 2
Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 07:59:40 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

History of Radiation and Radiation Protection

http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/hist.htm

--

Essays and items of interest dealing with the history of radiation protection, radiation and health physics.

General Areas of History
Bureau of Atomic Tourism (Atomic Museums)
National Atomic Museum
The Health Physics Historical Museum Collection (ORAU - Dr. Paul Frame)
Radiation Oncology - A Project Of Radiology Centennial Inc
The First Fifty Years of Radiation Protection by R. Kathren and P. Ziemer
First Half Century of Radiation Protection Timeline
A Brief Chronology of Radiation and Protection by J. Ellsworth Weaver III 1994,1995
X-ray Century , a WWW periodic publication dealing with the History of X-rays
Radiation Warning Symbol by Paul Frame
Radiation Warning Symbol Up-date by Paul Frame
The Discovery Of Radioactivity: The Dawn of the Nuclear Age
Atomic History and the First Reactor (ANL)
A Short History of Nuclear Regulation, 1946-1992
Atomic Bomb related photos- Hiroshima, Japan - 1945
World War II Leaflet No. 2046 dropped over Japan prior to Atomic Bomb Dropping
Notable People in the History of Radiation
Figures in Radiation History1
Historical Figures
Physicists and Nobel Prizes
The Electronic Nobel Museum
Radioactivity: Historical Figures
Radioactivity: Historical Figures - Glossary
The Discovery Of Radioactivity: The Dawn of the Nuclear Age
A Philatelic History of Radiology
Antoine Henri Becquerel
Rolf Sievert
W. C. RoentgenThe Discovery of the X-ray
Background Information on W. C. Roentgen and the Discovery of the X-ray
Madame Marie Curie (Curie Inst. in French)
Marie Curie Découvre L'Amérique
Madame Marie Curie
Curie, Marie (1867-1934)
Maria Sklodowska-Curie 1867-1934

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Message: 3
Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 08:13:20 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

USEC's finances still under federal scrutiny

August 20, 2000
Jonathan Riskind Dispatch Washington Bureau
http://www.dispatch.com/news/newsfea00/aug00/391059.html

WASHINGTON -- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is continuing a probe into USEC's financial condition, commission spokeswoman Mindy Landau said last week.

Critics say the privatized federal corporation's sagging finances in recent months and its decision to shut down the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant next year threaten a requirement that USEC be a "reliable and economical domestic source of enrichment services.''

USEC foes say that if the regulatory commission determines USEC no longer is such a source, it might pull USEC's certification. They have sent letters in recent days to Richard Meserve, regulatory commission chairman, asserting that such a move could be needed.

The commission report was to be released by early summer, but commission staff members still are "working feverishly on it. We are hopeful it will be ready soon,'' Landau said.

She said she didn't expect the report to recommend what actions should be taken. "If there are recommendations or conclusions . . . they will have to be made by Congress,'' Landau said.

The plant in Piketon, Ohio, and a sister facility in Kentucky produce commercial-grade enriched uranium used to fuel nuclear-power plants. USEC, known as the United States Enrichment Corp. until it was privatized in 1998, is the country's sole domestic source of enriched uranium.

The planned Piketon closure, along with a decision to drop development of new technology called AVLIS, "raises concerns about whether USEC will be a reliable economic source of domestic enrichment services in the foreseeable future,'' say Rep. Ted Strickland and Michigan Rep. John Dingell, the House Commerce Committee's top Democrat.

"A single gaseous-diffusion plant and no credible plan for succeeding technology is not what Congress intended for the privatized corporation when it passed these laws,'' Strickland, D-Lucasville, and Dingell wrote in a letter last week to commission Chairman Meserve.

However, Elizabeth Stuckle, USEC's spokeswoman, said: "Of course we're a reliable source. The cost-cutting efforts we've made lately, the layoffs and the pending closure of the plant, all are efforts to make us more efficient and remain successful as a business.''

USEC is pursuing several technologies for producing enriched uranium, she added.

"To assure a long-term domestic source of uranium enrichment USEC must succeed as a business and therefore must make at times tough business decisions,'' Stuckle said. "We encourage political leaders and the community to join with us in pushing Congress to rapidly appropriate cleanup funding to provide jobs for the Portsmouth workers.''

Last week, Rep. Tom Bliley, chairman of the House Commerce Committee, also wrote a letter to Meserve, stating that he was concerned that the commission staff had finished a draft report but had it rejected by commissioners.

Bliley wrote that commission staff members have said that William H. Timbers, USEC chief executive officer, raised objections to the draft report's findings. Bliley has demanded that the regulatory commission hand over by the end of this week "all records relating to NRC's financial review of USEC, or any certification or licensing issue related to USEC since Jan. 1, 2000.''

But USEC's Stuckle said Timbers did not voice objections about a regulatory commission draft report. Indeed, she said, to the best of her knowledge, Timbers did not see such a report. "I don't know where that came from,'' she said.

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Message: 4
Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 08:20:24 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Hopes fade for radiation compensation

August 20, 2000
Jonathan Riskind Dispatch Washington Bureau
http://www.dispatch.com/news/newsfea00/aug00/391058.html

That the bill might be torpedoed as the community braces for a planned June shutdown of the Portsmouth plant adds "insult to injury."

WASHINGTON -- Once thought to be on a fast track, prospects are dimming this year for congressional passage of legislation to compensate nuclear workers in southern Ohio and elsewhere sickened from Cold War-era exposure to radiation.

The legislation, granting up to $200,000 a person and health benefits, is in danger of being dropped from a defense bill a House-Senate conference committee is expected to pass next month.

Frustration doesn't begin to express the emotions felt by Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant workers and their families who might be eligible for compensation, said Dan Minter, president of Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers International Union Local 5-689.

For years, the plant produced weapons-grade enriched uranium for the nation's atomic-defense program, said Minter, whose union represents many plant workers. That the bill might be torpedoed as the community braces for a planned June shutdown of the plant, now run by a private company, adds "insult to injury,'' he said.

"On top of everything else southern Ohio and these workers have been subjected to, it's just another blow and another kick,'' Minter said. Workers and their families would be left feeling "exposed, bruised and thrown away.''

Although bipartisan support from senators such as George V. Voinovich, R-Ohio, and Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., won passage in the Senate version of the defense bill, some House members object to the measure.

Voinovich, Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, and more than 20 other senators have signed a letter urging the conference committee to retain the compensation program.

"The compensation amendment adopted by the Senate is based on expert judgment and sound science,'' the July 28 letter said. "We believe the time is now to begin to remedy the mistakes of the past and provide compensation to those who sacrificed so much for our country.''

It is estimated that nearly 5,500 former and current workers at the Piketon plant, a sister facility in Kentucky and a now-closed enrichment plant in Tennessee would be eligible for compensation during the next decade. More than 10,800 nuclear workers nationwide would benefit at a cost of $2.3 billion over five years, according to congressional estimates.

Rep. Ted Strickland, D-Lucasville, whose district includes the Piketon plant, said he is frustrated that the legislation could die this year. It will be even tougher to get the legislation passed in the future, he said.

"I hope this package is not in trouble,'' Strickland said, noting that 104 House members have signed a letter in support of the bill. "There is no way anyone can justify not taking care of these people.''

But opponents say the measure never received House committee hearings. Plus, they contend, there are too many proposals for increased spending on various entitlement programs in the overall defense bill.

One of those objecting is Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas. He is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on immigration and claims, as in claims made against the federal government.

"Several bills have recently been introduced to address this issue. No hearings on these different approaches have been held by the House Judiciary Committee to examine the issue,'' Smith said in a recent letter to Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., a key member of the House-Senate conference committee in charge of the defense bill. "It would be irresponsible for the House to enact these provisions without the committee of primary jurisdiction's careful review.''

Hunter said he was prepared to hold a Sept. 14 hearing. However, the conference committee seems determined to wrap up the bill by Sept. 12 to meet a scheduled Oct. 6 adjournment date.

Other congressional sources say the problem is greater than Smith's desire to hold judiciary committee hearings. One senior GOP staff member familiar with the defense bill said key House members think the Senate version contains too many provisions increasing mandatory spending programs.

"There is a sense that there are a lot of Senate items that are very costly,'' said the staff member, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They are good causes and the recipients deserve the help. The question is, where do you draw the line and who gets hurt if this one goes in and others drop out?''

========

Comments:

The biggest problem around gas diffusion plants is HF emissions and chemical health effects, and this is left at the lowest and most arguable level in the bill----and subject to interpretation.

The chemical effects of HF not only affect the workers, but the communities as well.

This radiation titled bill does not fit these needs. The bill is a version of RECA, which is not good either, and neither of these bills come up to the black lung standard that coal miners have in hand.

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Message: 5
Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 21:19:12 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

WELL-KNOWN POLITICIANS AND ENVIRONMENTALISTS SAID "NO" TO NUCLEAR WASTE, "YES" TO GREEN REFERENDUM

PRESS-RELEASE, ECODEFENSE! Int'l
Kaliningrad, August 10, 2000

Member of Governmental Duma, lower house of Russian parliament, Vladimir Nikitin said he opposes the import of nuclear waste to Russia at today's press-conference in Kaliningrad. Vladimir Nikitin represent the Kaliningrad region in the Duma for about 5 years but for the first time decided to speak out at the joint press-conference with environmentalists.

Today's press conference was organized by ECODEFENSE! environmental group to announce officially the start of collecting the signatures to hold the All-Russian referendum on 3 issues - general ban of the import of nuclear waste, reestablishing of the independ-ent agencies dealing with environmental protection and forest management. Russian president Vladimir Putin signed a decree to disband both agencies on May 17, 2000.

Environmental groups all across Russia are working to collect about 2 million of signatures to start national referendum.

"Break up for the environmental protection agency could well mean that issue of environmental protection can dissappear from governmental policy at all", said Alexandra Ko-roleva of ECODEFENSE! council at the conference. "President decided that environ-mental protection can be done by the same ministry which exploiting the environment. Just like the fox would protect the chiken. It's not right."

Many well-known politicians in Kaliningrad have said they are opposing the import of nuclear waste and signed the petition to hold referendum. Baltic military fleet' commander Vladimir Egorov who will also fight for the governor chair in Kaliningrad this year, former governor of Kaliningrad Yury Matochkin, chief-editors of the newspapers and other well-known citizens are all among signers.

"Import of nuclear waste is the criminal proposal of Ministry of atomic power which now may be stopped by referendum only", said Vladimir Slivyak leading Anti-nuclear cam-paign of the Socio-Ecological Union - natiowide environmental ambrella group, who also member of ECODEFENSE!' council. "Russian citizens would never like their country to become an int'l dump site for nuclear waste. Referendum will give them right to vote and so influence incorrect governmental policy."

For more information: +7(0112)448443, 407106 - Alexandra Koroleva, Vladimir Slivyak

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Message: 6
Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 21:15:50 -0600
From: "jseusw" <jseusw@uswest.net>

Low-temp drying technology planned for transuranic waste

August 15, 2000
from staff reports
http://www.oakridger.com/

The Department of Energy has completed a major step in preparation for the treatment of transuranic waste at Oak Ridge National Laboratory by issuing a record of decision under the National Environmental Policy Act.

DOE has decided to proceed with the low-temperature drying technology for waste treatment, with final disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, and disposition of low-level waste at the Nevada Test Site.

"This drying technology was our preferred alternative and we view it as the method offering the best technology and greatest efficiency for treating the laboratory's transuranic waste," said Bill Cahill, DOE's document manager for the environmental impact statement.

This action will reduce risk to human health and the environment by properly treating both liquid and solid transuranic waste that is in trenches, vaults and metal buildings at ORNL. Transuranic waste includes clothing, tools, rags, debris and residues and other disposable items contaminated with radioactive elements, mostly plutonium.

The record of decision is the final step in the National Environmental Policy Act review, which began with issuing a notice of intent to prepare an environmental impact statement on Jan. 27, 1999. A draft environmental was issued for comment March 3.

The final environmental impact statement, was issued June 30. Comments on the draft document were submitted by the Oak Ridge Site-Specific Advisory Board, the Local Oversight Committee and the city of Oak Ridge.

Comments were also received from regulatory agencies, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation.

In August 1998, DOE awarded a contract to Foster Wheeler Environmental Corp. to construct a transuranic waste treatment facility adjacent to the Melton Valley Storage Tanks at ORNL. The selection was contingent oncompleting the NEPA review and the selecting Foster Wheeler's technology and the decisions incorporated in the record of decision.

"With issuance of the ROD, Foster Wheeler can proceed with construction of the treatment facility," said Gary Riner, DOE's Transuranic Waste Program manager. Construction of the treatment facility is expected to begin in 2001 with waste processing to start in January 2003. "We are delivering on our commitment to regulators in our site treatment plan to move forward with the treatment of our transuranic waste now in storage."

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Message: 7
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 03:08:26 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

part 1 --- ORNL TRU Waste ROD

[Federal Register: August 9, 2000 (Volume 65, Number 154)]
[Notices]
[Page 48683-48688]

From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

[DOCID:fr09au00-45]
----------

DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

Record of Decision on Treating Transuranic (TRU)/Alpha Low-Level Waste at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory

AGENCY: U.S. Department of Energy.
ACTION: Record of Decision.

----------

SUMMARY: The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is issuing this Record of Decision (ROD) for the treatment of transuranic (TRU)/alpha low-level waste at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), located on the Oak Ridge Reservation in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. DOE has selected the Low- Temperature Drying Alternative [the Preferred Alternative in the Final Environmental Impact Statement for Treating Transuranic (TRU)/Alpha Low-Level Waste at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee (DOE/EIS-0305-F, June 2000)] and will proceed with a contract with the Foster Wheeler Environmental Corporation (Foster Wheeler) to construct, operate, and decontaminate and decommission a TRU Waste Treatment Facility. The facility will use low-temperature drying to treat TRU mixed waste sludge and associated low-level waste supernate, and will treat TRU solid waste by sorting and compacting. Any solid waste containing hazardous constituents regulated under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) will be macroencapsulated.

The waste to be treated is legacy waste, i.e., waste generated from past isotope production and research and development that supported national defense and energy initiatives. The legacy tank waste is currently being stored or consolidated in the Melton Valley Storage Tanks (MVSTs), and legacy solid waste is stored in bunkers, subsurface trenches, and metal storage buildings. Waste that would be generated from ongoing operations at ORNL during the operation of the TRU Waste Treatment Facility (expected to operate for about 5 years) will also be treated in the facility. DOE will dispose of the treated TRU waste at DOE's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), located near Carlsbad, New Mexico, and treated low-level waste at DOE's Nevada Test Site (NTS).

In making its decision, DOE considered the analysis in the Final EIS and public comments on it. In addition, DOE considered consistency with previous Departmental programmatic decisions and agreements and the costs associated with the treatment technologies.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: For further information on the TRU Waste Treatment Project or the Final EIS, or to receive a copy of the Final EIS, contact: John O. Moore, Waste Operations Integration Team Leader, U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge Operations, 55 Jefferson Avenue, P.O. Box 2001, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37831; Telephone: (865) 576-3536. Facsimile: (865) 576-5333. E-mail: moorejo@oro.doe.gov. For further information on the DOE National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process, contact: Carol M. Borgstrom, Director, Office of NEPA Policy and Compliance (EH-42), U.S. Department of Energy, 1000 Independence Avenue, SW, Washington, D.C. 20585; Telephone: (202) 586-4600, or leave a message at (800) 472-2756.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:
I. Background

Since the mid-1940s, DOE and its predecessor agencies have generated TRU waste,\1\ alpha low-level waste,\2\ mixed waste,\3\ and low-level waste \4\ at ORNL during isotope production and research and development activities. ORNL currently manages the largest inventory of remote-handled TRU/alpha low-level waste \5\ in the DOE complex, and also manages a smaller portion of the contact-handled TRU/alpha low- level waste.\6\ DOE is storing legacy waste at ORNL, which consists of about 550 cubic meters of solid remote-handled TRU/alpha low-level waste stored in concrete bunkers and subsurface trenches and 1,000 cubic meters of contact-handled TRU/alpha low-level waste stored in metal buildings. Some of the solid TRU/alpha low-level waste containers may also contain mixed waste. DOE also is consolidating 900 cubic meters of TRU mixed waste sludge and 1,600 cubic meters of associated remote-handled

[[Page 48684]]
low-level waste supernate in the MVSTs at ORNL.

\1\ TRU waste is waste containing alpha-emitting radionuclides with an atomic number greater than 92 and half-lives greater than 20 years, at concentrations greater than 100 nanocuries per gram of waste.

\2\ Alpha low-level waste is low-level waste that contains alpha-emitting isotopes.

\3\ Mixed waste contains radioactive waste regulated under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as amended, and a hazardous component subject to RCRA regulation.

\4\ Low-level waste is any radioactive waste that is not classified as high-level waste, spent nuclear fuel, TRU waste, byproduct material, or mixed waste.

\5\ Remote-handled TRU/alpha low-level waste contains alpha-, beta-, and gamma-emitting isotopes with a surface dose rate greater than 200 millirem per hour.

\6\ Contact-handled TRU/alpha low-level waste contains alpha-, beta-, and gamma-emitting isotopes with surface dose rates of 200 millirem per hour or less.

\6\ Contact-handled TRU/alpha low-level waste contains alpha-, beta-, and gamma-emitting isotopes with surface dose rates of 200 millirem per hour or less.

In September 1995, the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) Commissioner issued an order to implement the ORNL Site Treatment Plan (under the Federal Facility Compliance Act) that mandates specific requirements for the treatment and disposal of ORNL TRU/alpha low-level waste and sets out specific milestones. Two primary milestones are: (1) The submittal of a Project Management Plan by September 30, 2001, which includes schedules for treatment and shipment off-site of the ORNL legacy TRU waste; and (2) the completion of the first shipment of treated TRU waste sludge to WIPP by January 2003.

Accordingly, DOE needs to treat a total of about 4,050 cubic meters of legacy TRU/alpha low-level wastes in preparation for disposal of TRU waste at the WIPP and of low-level waste at NTS. These disposal sites were designated in RODs for TRU waste, for the WIPP Supplemental EIS and the Waste Management Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (WM PEIS) (DOE-EIS-0200-F) (63 FR 3624, January 23, 1998 and 63 FR 3629, January 23, 1998, respectively), and the ROD for low-level and low-level mixed waste for the WM PEIS and the amended ROD for the NTS Site-wide EIS (65 FR 10061, February 25, 2000).

In accordance with the provisions of Section 216 of DOE's NEPA regulations (10 CFR part 1021), the Department awarded a contingent contract to Foster Wheeler in August of 1998 for the construction, operation, and decontamination and decommissioning of a TRU Waste Treatment Facility. Proceeding with construction, operation, and decontamination and decommissioning of the treatment facility under the contract was contingent upon DOE's completion of the NEPA review process and issuance of a ROD that selected the low-temperature drying waste treatment process proposed by Foster Wheeler. Based on the provisions of the contingent contract, construction of the TRU Waste Treatment Facility would begin in December 2000 and be completed by December 2002, with operation of the facility by January 2003. After DOE certification that the waste has been treated to meet the waste acceptance criteria (WAC), shipments would begin to the appropriate disposal facility before the end of January 2003.

II. Alternatives Analyzed in the EIS

DOE analyzed five alternatives in the EIS, which are summarized below: the No Action Alternative; the Low-Temperature Drying Alternative (Preferred Alternative); the Vitrification Alternative; the Cementation Alternative; and the Treatment and Waste Storage at ORNL Alternative. For all the action alternatives, TRU sludge and liquid alpha low-level waste would be transported through an above-ground pipeline from the MVSTs to an onsite treatment facility. DOE would deliver the solid waste (casks of solid remote-handled TRU/alpha low- level waste and drums and boxes of solid contact-handled TRU/alpha low- level waste) to the treatment facility by truck. The treatment facility would be constructed, operated, and decontaminated and decommissioned by a contractor. Any waste not conforming to the treatment facility's WAC would be returned to DOE for management. TRU waste from ongoing operations at ORNL, generated during the operation of the TRU Waste Treatment Facility, would also be treated at the facility.

DOE would require that all activities associated with the proposed action be performed safely and in compliance with applicable Federal and State regulatory requirements. The selected contractor would be responsible for achieving compliance with all applicable environmental, safety, and health laws and regulations. Regulatory agencies would be responsible for monitoring compliance by the contractor. The State of Tennessee would regulate the selected contractor according to permits under the State's purview (the RCRA Part B permit and the Aquatic Resource Alteration Permit to be issued by the State of Tennessee). DOE would regulate occupational safety and health and nuclear safety according to specific environment, safety and health requirements.

The No Action Alternative

No treatment facility would be constructed under the No Action Alternative. DOE would continue to store legacy solid remote-handled and contract-handled TRU/alpha low-level in concrete bunkers, subsurface trenches, and metal buildings, and would continue to store legacy TRU mixed waste sludge and the associated low-level waste supernate in the MVSTs. For purposes of analysis, institutional control was assumed for 100 years, after which DOE assumed there would be a loss of institutional control.

The No Action Alternative would violate RCRA regulations that prohibit indefinite storage of hazardous waste without treatment, milestones contained in the ORNL Site Treatment Plan under the Federal Facility Compliance Act, and the Order issued by the State of Tennessee regarding the treatment and shipment of TRU waste. The No Action Alternative would also result in the continued release of contaminants to the soil, ground water, and surface waters from the solid TRU/alpha low-level waste stored in subsurface trenches in the Solid Waste Storage Area (SWSA) 5 North.

The Low-Temperature Drying Alternative (Preferred Alternative in the Final EIS)

Under the Low-Temperature Drying Alternative, a waste treatment facility would be constructed on about 5 acres of land adjoining the MVSTs. Supernate would be pumped from the MVSTs through an above-ground pipeline to tanks in the facility. A low-temperature dryer would receive the supernate from the facility tanks for concentration and drying. TRU mixed waste sludge would be retrieved from the MVSTs by sluicing and transferred through an above-ground pipeline to tanks in the facility. Gravity settling would concentrate the sludge, which would be transferred to the low-temperature dryer for treatment.

All solid waste would be characterized by nondestructive examination and assay methods. Containers of only alpha low-level waste would be compacted for a 50% volume reduction. Solid TRU/alpha low- level waste would be remotely sorted to segregate any RCRA waste. Once segregated, solid TRU waste would be compacted. All waste containing RCRA constituents would be treated by macroencapsulation to meet RCRA land disposal restrictions (LDR) standards.

The duration of the Low-Temperature Drying Alternative would be about 11.5 years: with 2.5 years for licensing, permitting and design reviews; 2 years for facility construction; less than 5 years for waste treatment, during which treated waste would be transported to the appropriate disposal facility; and less than 2 years for decontamination and decommissioning of the treatment facility. The licensing, permitting, and preliminary design review process is currently underway. As a result of waste treatment and decontamination and decommissioning of the facility, about 600 cubic meters of TRU waste would be shipped to WIPP, and about 2,800 cubic meters of low- level waste would be shipped to NTS.

Vitrification Alternative

Under the Vitrification Alternative, a waste treatment facility would be constructed on 5 to 7 acres of land

[[Page 48685]]

adjoining the MVSTs. The waste in the MVSTs would be retrieved by pulsed jet mixing and transported through an above-ground pipeline to the treatment facility, where the waste would be mixed with additives and heated to form a stable glass product (vitrified). Contact-handled solid waste would be treated before any remote-handled solid waste was received at the treatment facility. All solid waste would be characterized by nondestructive examination and assay methods and then sorted in a hotcell. All RCRA wastes would be segregated and macroencapsulated to meet RCRA LDR standards. Special waste material, such as batteries, aerosols, and gas bottles, would be segregated for treatment or sent to some other applicable treatment facility, as directed by DOE. The remaining contact-handled or remote-handled solid waste would be compacted. Compacted solid waste would be placed in 55- gallon drums, and the drums would be filled with grout.

The total duration of the Vitrification Alternative would be about 10 years: with 2.5 years for licensing, permitting, and design reviews; 2 years for facility construction; 3.5 years for waste treatment, during which treated waste would be transported to the appropriate disposal facility; and 2 years for decontamination and decommissioning of the treatment facility. As a result of waste treatment and decontamination and decommissioning of the facility, about 1,100 cubic meters of TRU waste would be shipped to WIPP, and about 5,000 cubic meters of low-level waste would be shipped to NTS.

Cementation Alternative

Under the Cementation Alternative, a waste treatment facility would be constructed on about 5 acres of land adjoining the MVSTs. Waste would be retrieved from the MVSTs by sluicing and transported through an above-ground pipeline to the treatment facility. The TRU waste sludge and low-level liquid waste would be separated with a hydrocyclone followed in series with a centrifuge. Supernate would be recycled back to the MVSTs for sluicing operations. Additives would be mixed with the separated sludge and liquid waste streams to form a stable grout mixture. A grout pump would transfer the waste and grout mixture into 50-gallon drum liners, and the mixture would be allowed to harden. The liners would be placed inside 55-gallon carbon steel overpack drums before for shipment. All contact-handled and remote- handled TRU/alpha low-level solid waste would be characterized by nondestructive examination and assay methods, sorted and compacted (as appropriate), and grouted before packaging for shipment similar to the methods described for the Vitrification Alternative.

The total duration of the Cementation Alternative would be about 12.5 years: with 2.5 years for licensing, permitting, and design reviews; 2 years for construction of the treatment facility; 6 years for waste treatment operations during which waste would be transported to the appropriate disposal facility; and 2 years for the decontamination and decommissioning of the treatment facility. As a result of waste treatment and decontamination and decommissioning of the facility, about 1,800 cubic meters of TRU waste would be shipped to WIPP, and about 5,400 cubic meters of low-level waste, including remote-handled low-level waste, would be shipped to NTS.

Treatment and Waste Storage at ORNL Alternative

Under the Treatment and Waste Storage at ORNL Alternative, a waste treatment facility would be constructed using any one of the treatment processes described previously. About 5 to 7 acres of land would be used for the treatment facility, depending on the treatment technology used (described above). In addition, 0.75 to 2 acres of land (depending the treatment technology used) would be required for the construction of waste storage facilities at ORNL. DOE plans to ship treated waste offsite for disposal as soon as it is treated, but if off-site waste disposal facilities were not available, treated waste would require storage at ORNL. For purposes of analysis, institutional control of the treated waste in storage was assumed for 100 years, after which DOE assumed there would be a loss of institutional control. This alternative, if implemented, would not meet the milestones set in the ORNL Site Treatment Plan regarding the treatment and shipment of regulated TRU waste and would violate the TDEC Commissioner's order that requires implementation of the ORNL Site Treatment Plan.

The schedule for waste treatment under this alternative and the volume of waste resulting from treatment and decontamination and decommissioning of the treatment facility depend on the treatment process used, as described above.

III. Potential Environmental and Human Health Impacts

In the Final EIS, DOE analyzed the potential environmental impacts associated with each alternative. The potential environmental impacts for all the alternatives would be small and are summarized below.

None of the alternatives analyzed would result in a change in land use classification (currently industrial) or scenic resources. The action alternatives would result in further development of 5 to 7 acres of land for the treatment facility, and the Treatment and Waste Storage at ORNL Alternative would require an additional 0.75 to 2 acres of land for buildings to store the treated waste. For both the No Action and the Treatment and Waste Storage at ORNL Alternatives, the Final EIS analysis assumed loss of institutional control after 100 years. Assuming loss of institutional control, the land where the waste was stored would be permanently committed to waste storage, which, if implemented, would result in an irreversible and irretrievable commitment of land.

All of the action alternatives would result in a temporary loss of a small amount of forested habitat (5 to 7 acres) for the treatment facility. The No Action Alternative would not result in loss of the forested habitat.

All action alternatives would reduce soil and water contamination because a source of contaminants in SWSA 5 North would be removed. Under the No Action Alternative, contaminants from the SWSA 5 North waste trenches would continue to be released to the soils, groundwater, and surface water, resulting in a small impact to aquatic biota. Under the No Action Alternative, assuming loss of institutional control after 100 years, the TRU waste in the MVSTs, bunkers, and buildings also would eventually be released into the soils and groundwater. Under the Treatment and Waste Storage at ORNL Alternative, assuming loss of institutional control after 100 years, the treated waste eventually would be released from storage buildings. However, because the wastes would have been treated under the Treatment and Waste Storage at ORNL Alternative, the impacts would be less than under No Action.

Implementation of any of the action alternatives would result in the elimination of a small wetland (0.03 acres) when the treatment facility was constructed. The No Action Alternative would have no impact on the wetland as long as institutional control is maintained.

Under the action alternatives, construction of the proposed treatment facility, although not located in a floodplain, and therefore not subject to the provisions of 10 CFR part 1022

Con't to part 2

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Message: 8 Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 03:08:37 EDT From: magnu96196@aol.com Subject: part 2 --- ORNL TRU Waste ROD

Con't from part 1--

[[Page 48686]]
regarding floodplains, would have a small impact in the 100- and 500- year floodplain of White Oak Creek due to increased surface runoff. The increased sediment in the White Oak Creek floodplain would provide additional shielding from existing radioactive contamination (a small beneficial impact). Under the No Action Alternative the contaminants in SWSA 5 North trenches would continue to be released to the soil and groundwater, which would subsequently enter surface water and the White Oak Creek floodplain.

Under the action alternatives, all legacy TRU-alpha low-level waste would be treated and some secondary waste would be produced. The total volume of waste that would be produced under the different treatment alternatives were estimated to be about 10,500 cubic meters for Low- Temperature Drying, 34,000 cubic meters for Vitrification, and 29,000 cubic meters for Cementation. The volume of contact- and remote-handled TRU waste \7\ that would be produced ranges from about 600 cubic meters for the Low-Temperature Drying Alternative, to about 1,000 and 1,800 cubic meters for the Vitrification and Cementation Alternatives, respectively. The volume of low-level waste \8\ that would be produced ranges from about 2,800 cubic meters for both the Low-Temperature Drying and Cementation Alternatives, to about 5,000 cubic meters for the Vitrification Alternative. Only the Cementation Alternative would produce remote-handled low-level waste (about 2,500 cubic meters). All the treatment alternatives would produce small quantities, i.e., less than 25 cubic meters, of mixed low-level waste.\9\ The volume of sanitary wastewater \10\ that would be produced ranges from about 1,600 cubic meters for the Low-Temperature Drying Alternative, about 7,000 cubic meters for the Vitrification Alternative, and about 7,500 cubic meters for the Cementation Alternative. The volume of non-radioactive construction debris that would be produced ranges from about 5,500 cubic meters for the Low-Temperature Drying Alternative to about 20,800 cubic meters for the Vitrification Alternative and 14,000 cubic meters for the Cementation Alternative. Under the No Action Alternative the legacy TRU/alpha low-level waste would continue to be stored, along with the 60 cubic meter of liquid low-level waste and 20 cubic meters of TRU waste that would be produced annually from research and environmental remediation activities at ORNL.

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\7\ TRU waste would be disposed of at WIPP.

\8\ Low-level and remote-handled low-level waste would be disposed of at NTS.

\9\ Mixed low-level waste would be disposed of at a DOE site or at an off-site commercial disposal facility.

\10\ Sanitary wastewater and non-radioactive construction debris would be disposed of at offsite commercial disposal facilities.

The action alternatives would result in minor emissions of air pollutants during normal operations. The Low-Temperature Drying Alternative would result in slightly higher volatile organic emissions than the other treatment technologies. The Vitrification Alternative would result in slightly higher nitrogen dioxide emissions than the other treatment technologies. The Cementation Alternative would result in slightly higher particulate emissions than the other treatment technologies. The No Action Alternative would not result in air emissions. All alternatives would comply with applicable air quality regulations.

The probability of a cancer fatality from radiological releases to involved workers, non-involved workers and the offsite maximally exposed individual (MEI) were estimated to be small for the Low- Temperature Drying, Vitrification, and Cementation Alternatives. The highest collective offsite dose to the public, estimated to be 6.8E-01 person-rem and would potentially result in 3.0E-04 latent cancer fatalities (LCFs), was from the Vitrification Alternative. Under both the No Action and Treatment and Waste Storage at ORNL Alternatives, an estimated 2.2E-02 LCFs would occur in the involved worker population, and impacts to non-involved workers and the public would be small.

The accident scenario estimated to have the greatest impact would occur under the No Action Alternative if the MVSTs were breached during an earthquake, releasing 50,000-gallons of TRU waste into the environment. (This accident was not evaluated for the action alternatives since waste treatment would occur in less than 10 years and the probability of this type of earthquake occurring during so brief a time would be small.) The consequence of this accident, were it to happen, was estimated to be 108 LCFs for the affected population. The frequency for this kind of accident happening was estimated to be 1E-04 per year. The calculated risk for this accident (evaluated by multiplying the accident consequence, frequency, and time period) would be 1.1 LCFs to the population during a 100 year time period and proportionately higher for longer periods. The MEI and non-involved worker were estimated to have a 1.1E-05 and 9.2E-04 probability of a cancer fatality, respectively.

Under the action alternatives, the accidental breach of the waste transfer line during a transfer between the MVSTs and the proposed facility was the accident with the greatest impact. The consequence of this accident, were it to happen, was estimated to be 52 LCFs for the population (for all action alternatives). The frequency of this kind of accident happening ranged from 1E-02 to 1E-04 per year. The EIS estimated the risks from this accident scenario as ranges from 0.16 LCFs for Low-Temperature Drying Alternative to 0.31 LCFs for the Cementation Alternative. The probability of a cancer fatality for the MEI was estimated to range from 3.2 E-06 for the Low-Temperature Drying and Vitrification Alternatives, to 6.3E-06 for the Cementation Alternative. The probability of a cancer fatality for the non-involved worker was estimated to range from 2.8E-04 for Low-Temperature Drying and Vitrification Alternatives, to 5.5E-04 for the Cementation Alternative.

Routine exposures from waste retrieval activities were estimated to result in 8.0E-03 LCFs in the involved worker population under all action alternatives. Radiological emissions from waste retrieval accidents were estimated to result in 6.3E-05 LCFs to the public. Industrial-type accidents from retrieval activities were estimated to result in 7.5E-04 fatalities in the involved worker population.

All the action alternatives would result in 300 truck shipments of remote-handled solid waste and 245 shipments of contact-handled solid waste from the ORNL storage locations to the treatment facility. Radiological emissions from onsite transportation accidents between the current storage locations and the treatment facility were estimated to result in 2.9 E-05 LCFs to the public. The probability of a cancer fatality for a non-involved worker and public MEI were estimated to be 5.3E-07 and 6.2E-09, respectively, from waste retrieval and transportation accidents. In addition, 3.3E-05 non-radiological fatalities from onsite transportation accidents were estimated for the worker population.

The Treatment and Storage at ORNL Alternative would involve about 3,340 shipments of treated waste from the treatment facility to storage buildings at ORNL, using the waste volumes produced by the Cementation Alternative as the bounding case. These shipments are estimated to result in 2.3E-04 transportation related fatalities to involved workers. In addition, construction of the onsite storage

[[Page 48687]]

facilities and the loading and unloading of the treated waste were estimated to result in 3.4E-04 and 2.5E-03 non-radiological accident fatalities, respectively, to the involved worker population.

The No Action and Treatment and Storage at ORNL Alternatives would not result in off-site shipments of treated waste. The number of off- site truck shipments of treated TRU waste were estimated for the Low- Temperature Drying Alternative (400), the Vitrification Alternative (1,000), and the Cementation Alternative (2,400). The estimated number of non-radiological LCFs related to routine transportation of contact- handled TRU waste ranged from 5.3E-03 for both the Vitrification and Cementation Alternatives, to 8.7E-03 for the Low-Temperature Drying Alternative. LCFs from routine transportation of remote-handled TRU waste ranged from 3.1E-02 for the Low Temperature Drying Alternative to 2.7E-01 for the Cementation Alternative. The number of fatalities estimated from transportation accidents ranged from 4.4E-02 for the Low-Temperature Drying Alternative to 3.0E-01 for the Cementation Alternative.

The number of offsite shipments of treated low-level waste were estimated to be about 300 for the Low-Temperature Drying and Vitrification Alternatives, and more than 900 for the Cementation Alternative. The LCFs related to routine offsite transportation of treated low-level waste were estimated to be small for all the action alternatives, with the largest being 7.5E-09 for the Cementation Alternative. The number of transportation accident fatalities was estimated to range from 3.6E-02 for both the Low-Temperature Drying and Vitrification Alternatives, to 1.2E-01 for the Cementation Alternative.

The estimated electricity requirements ranged from 2,200 megawatts (MW) (No Action Alternative) to 47,200 MW (Treatment and Waste Storage at ORNL, using vitrification as the treatment technology). The Cementation Alternative would have the lowest electricity requirements (11,250 MW) of the action alternatives. Because adequate electricity is available from utility lines in the vicinity of the proposed TRU Waste Treatment Facility, impacts would be minimal.

The estimated total water usage varied from 5 million gallons (No Action and Low-Temperature Drying) to 20 million gallons (Treatment and Waste Storage at ORNL, using cementation as the treatment technology). Water for the TRU Waste Treatment Facility would be supplied from a City of Oak Ridge Water Treatment Facility via a local main. The impacts on the Water Treatment Facility would be small because the daily water usage under any of the alternatives would be small and the Oak Ridge Water Treatment Facility is currently operating at only 50% capacity (28 million gallons per day).

There are no special circumstances that would result in any greater impacts on minority or low-income populations than on the population as a whole, and no disproportionately high and adverse impacts on minority or low-income populations would be expected.

Environmentally Preferred Alternative

As described above, all impacts from the proposed action would be small, and the greatest potential human health and environmental impacts would occur under the No Action Alternative. Under the No Action Alternative, waste contaminants would continue to be released to the environment from the unlined, subsurface trenches in SWSA 5 North and the potential impacts from a breach of the MVSTs would be high should institutional control be lost. In addition, although the long- term impacts of the Treatment and Waste Storage at ORNL Alternative would be less than No Action because the waste would have been treated, the Treatment and Waste Storage at ORNL Alternative would not provide a permanent solution for controlling the waste contaminants.

The Low-Temperature Drying Alternative, and the other action alternatives involving off-site shipment of treated waste, would result in small, short-term potential impacts to public and worker health, air quality, utility usage, and transportation; however, treatment would prepare the waste for disposal at WIPP or NTS, as appropriate. The Low- Temperature Drying Alternative would result in lower impacts than the other action alternatives because it would generate the least amount of treated and other waste, would require the lowest water usage (but not electricity) of the action alternatives, and would require the least number of offsite shipments for disposal.

In conclusion, while the potential impacts for all of the action alternatives are small, the Low-Temperature Drying Alternative results in the lowest potential impacts of any of the action alternatives. DOE therefore believes that the Low-Temperature Drying Alternative is environmentally preferable.

IV. Public Comments on the Final EIS

DOE distributed approximately 80 copies of the Final EIS to appropriate Congressional members and committees; the States of Kentucky, Nevada, New Mexico, and Tennessee; various American Indian Tribal governments and organizations; local governments; other Federal agencies; and other interested stakeholders. DOE received comments on the Final EIS from the U.S. Department of Interior's Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which are addressed below.

In a letter dated July 13, 2000, the Fish and Wildlife Service stated that the Biological Assessment contained in the Final EIS was ``adequate and supports the conclusion of not likely to adversely affect.'' The Service concurred with this conclusion, and that the requirements of Section 7 of the Endangered Species Act had been fulfilled. As the Fish and Wildlife letter indicates, DOE will reconsider its obligations under the Endangered Species Act if new information reveals that the TRU Waste Treatment Facility may affect listed species in a manner or to an extent not considered, the proposed action is modified to include activities not addressed in the Biological Assessment, or new species are listed or critical habitat is designated that might be affected by the proposed action.

The Fish and Wildlife Service also indicated that DOE's response to Fish and Wildlife Service comments on the Draft EIS (Volume 2 of the Final EIS) is not consistent with the Biological Assessment (Appendix E of the Final EIS), with regard to the presence of habitat for the gray bat. In DOE's response to comments from the Fish and Wildlife Service on the Draft EIS, DOE indicated that ``[Q]ualified biologists did a site walkover * * * and [n]o habitat for the gray bat was identified. * * *'' In this statement, DOE was referring to the 5-7 acre ``site'' for the proposed treatment facility (not the Oak Ridge Reservation). The discussion of gray bat habitat in the Biological Assessment (and in section 4.3 of the Final EIS) indicates that the nearest potential habitat for the gray bat is at least 1 mile away from the proposed TRU Waste Treatment Facility boundary and activities at the proposed site are not expected to impact the gray bat habitat. While DOE's response to comments made by the Fish and Wildlife Service on the Draft EIS could have been clearer, the wording in the comment response document does not conflict with the Biological Assessment

[[Page 48688]]

or other sections of the Final EIS addressing ecological resources.

The Fish and Wildlife Service also stated in its comments on the Final EIS that the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (Title 16 United States Code, Chapter 701) should have been included in Chapter 8 (Applicable Laws and Regulations) of the Final EIS. DOE did consider the requirements of Migratory Bird Treaty Act, but because the proposed site for the TRU Waste Treatment Facility will be small (5-7 acres) in comparison to other nearby suitable habitat, and there were no known unique or special features associated with the proposed site that would be important to migratory bird species, DOE did not provide a reference to or a discussion of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in Chapter 8 of the Final EIS.

In a letter to DOE dated July 20, 2000, regarding the Final EIS, EPA acknowledged that, in general, its comments on the Draft EIS were addressed satisfactorily. However, EPA indicated continuing concern about potential process releases and project impacts. DOE notes, however, that the estimated impact EPA is addressing--3E-04 LCFs from the project's releases--is small, and the EIS shows that the releases would not contribute significantly to cumulative impacts in the exposed population. Moreover, the methods used to estimate these releases and their impact are conservative--i.e., likely to overstate the impacts. Finally, the alternative DOE has decided to implement (see below) is the environmentally preferred alternative.

V. Consistency With DOE Programmatic Decisions and Agreements

The selection of any of the action alternatives, except Treatment and Waste Storage at ORNL, would be consistent with DOE's programmatic decisions for the treatment, storage, and disposal of TRU and low-level wastes. As stated in the Record of Decision for the Department of Energy's Waste Management Program: Treatment and Storage of Transuranic Waste, DOE decided to ``develop and operate mobile and fixed facilities to characterize and prepare TRU waste for disposal at WIPP'' and ``[E]ach of the DOE's sites that has, or will generate, TRU waste will, as needed, prepare and store its TRU waste on-site * * * prior to disposal.'' In the Record of Decision for the Department of Energy's Waste Management Program: Treatment and Disposal of Low-Level Waste and Mixed Low-Level Waste; Amendment of the Record of Decision for the Nevada Test Site, DOE decided to establish regional low-level waste disposal capabilities at DOE's Hanford Site and NTS, which are to receive low-level waste from other DOE sites when the waste meets the WAC for the site.

The Low-Temperature Drying, Vitrification, and Cementation Alternatives would all be consistent with previous negotiated agreements and commitments, and allow DOE to comply with the primary milestones of the ORNL Site Treatment Plan. The No Action and Treatment and Waste Storage at ORNL Alternatives would not be consistent with previous agreements and commitments. The No Action Alternative would not comply with the two primary milestones identified in the ORNL Site Treatment Plan. The Treatment and Waste Storage at ORNL Alternative would not comply with the ORNL Site Treatment Plan milestone requiring shipment of treated TRU waste sludge to the WIPP to be initiated by January 2003.

VI. Costs Associated With the Technologies

Analyses of the Low-Temperature Drying Alternative showed that it is cost effective based on previous cost studies conducted by DOE and comparison of the submitted private sector proposals for the treatment of TRU/alpha low-level waste at ORNL. The cost for implementing the Low-Temperature Drying Alternative was estimated to be about $193 million, compared with about $700 million estimated for both the Vitrification and Cementation Alternatives. Implementing the Treatment and Waste Storage at ORNL Alternative would entail costs of constructing and maintaining onsite waste storage facilities in addition to the costs associated with the each action alternative without storage on site.

VII. Decision

DOE has selected the Low-Temperature Drying Alternative (Preferred Alternative) in the Final EIS for treating TRU/alpha low-level waste at ORNL. DOE will proceed with the Foster Wheeler contract to construct, operate, and decontaminate and decommission a TRU Waste Treatment Facility to treat a total of about 4,050 cubic meters of legacy waste \11\ in preparation for offsite disposal at the WIPP and the NTS. This decision is based on the following factors: the analysis in the Final EIS indicates the impacts of all action alternatives would be small; the choice of the Low-Temperature Drying Alternative is consistent with previous DOE programmatic decisions and agreements on the treatment, storage and disposal of TRU, low-level, and mixed low-level wastes; and costs associated with the Low-Temperature Drying Alternative are the lowest of the action alternatives and the other action alternatives do not have compensating advantages for higher cost.

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\11\ In the future, DOE may treat small quantities of TRU waste from other DOE sites at the TRU Waste Treatment Facility (e.g., 15 cubic meters of TRU waste from the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant). DOE would need to conduct further NEPA review, as appropriate, for any proposal to ship TRU waste to ORNL for treatment from the Paducah Site or any other site in the DOE complex.

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VIII. Mitigation of Impacts

The DOE is committed to operating a TRU Waste Treatment Facility in compliance with all applicable laws, regulations, executive orders, DOE orders, permits, and compliance agreements. DOE is consulting with the State of Tennessee on State mitigation measures related to wetlands (an Aquatic Resource Alteration Permit has been filed with TDEC), and a Mitigation Action Plan required by 10 CFR 1021.331 will be prepared. Volume 1, Chapter 6, of the Final EIS described the mitigation measures that will be taken to minimize the potential impacts associated with the construction, operation, and decontamination and decommissioning of the proposed TRU Waste Treatment Facility (e.g., use of dust control measures during facility construction; use of efficient emission controls and erosion control measures; and protocol to be followed in the event that cultural resources are found).

IX. Conclusion

DOE has selected the Low-Temperature Drying Alternative (Preferred Alternative) in the Final EIS for treating TRU/alpha low-level waste at ORNL. DOE will proceed with the Foster Wheeler contract to construct, operate, and decontaminate and decommission a TRU Waste Treatment Facility to treat a total of about 4,050 cubic meters of legacy waste in preparation for offsite disposal at the WIPP and the NTS.

Issued in Washington, D.C. this 3rd day of August 2000. Carolyn L. Huntoon, Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management. [FR Doc. 00-20093 Filed 8-8-00; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 6450-01-P

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Message: 9 Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 03:21:17 EDT From: magnu96196@aol.com Subject: part 1--- Uranium Enrichment Newsletter August 2000

http://www.earthisland.org/yggdrasil/UEN_aug_2000.htm

Uranium Enrichment Newsletter August 2000

The Uranium Enrichment Project publishes a monthly online newsletter summarizing events within the US uranium enrichment establishment. The newsletter is edited by Mary Byrd Davis, who can be contacted at francenuc@francenuc.org . A grant from The John Merck Fund makes the newsletter possible.

I. OAK RIDGE
II. PADUCAH
III. HEALTH ISSUES
IV. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY (DOE)
V. UNITED STATES ENRICHMENT CORPORATION (USEC)
VI. RUSSIA
VII. URANIUM MANAGEMENT
VIII. URANIUM MARKET
IX. SCRAP METAL

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I. OAK RIDGE
Incinerator

Justin Wilson, policy deputy to Tennesseeīs Governor Don Sundquist, has sent a letter to the manager of DOEīs Oak Ridge Operations Office, in which he confirms approval of shipments of liquid waste from DOE facilities in Ohio and Kentucky to Oak Ridgeīs Toxic Substances Control Act incinerator (TSCA). According to an article by Paul Parson, he also states in the letter that the governorīs office is considering allowing shipments to the facility from Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) and the Rocky Flats Plant. Frank Munger writes that the state has approved DOEīs "burn plan" for the incinerator, "including limited authority to bring toxic wastes to Oak Ridge from DOE sites in Colorado and Idaho." In February 1999, Sundquist had rejected a request from DOE to burn out-of-state waste in the incinerator, but Sundquist says that DOE has since responded to some of the stateīs concerns regarding Oak Ridge. (Paul Parson, Oak Ridger, 7/6/00; Frank Munger, 7/4/00)

Claim for Harm to Health

Donzettia and Gary Hill of Clinton, Tennessee, are seeking $7 million in compensatory damages from Lockheed Martin Energy Systems (LMES). They claim that Donzettia Hill suffers disabling illnesses and other problems because of unsafe working conditions on property managed by LMES. "LMES negligently failed to maintain the DOE Oak Ridge Reservation, K-25, Y-12 and X-10 [ORNL] premises in a reasonably safe condition." "LMES knew or should have known that toxic metals and/or chemicals, including, but not limited to, beryllium, mercury, nickel and others, the identity of which is presently unknown to Mrs. Hill, were present on the premises, and that these metals and/or chemicals presented a danger to the health and safety of Donzettia Holbrook Hill and others . . . " (Paul Parson, Oak Ridger Online, 7/11/00)

Violation of Clean Water Act

DOEīs "Oak Ridge Gaseous Plant" appeared on the list of major federal facilities that violated the Clean Water Act for at least part of the period from October 1997 through December 1998. The list was obtained from the Environmental Protection Agency by the US Public Interest Research Group through a Freedom of Information Act request. (Gannett News Service, 7/24/00)

Waste Characterization Errors

DOEīs Office of Inspector General (IG) has released a report showing that DOE contractors at Oak Ridge did not accurately characterize the hazardous and radioactive waste that they generated and stored. For instance, they overstated the inventory of mixed waste (radioactive and hazardous waste) by including the weight of the storage containers in the weight of the waste. "The department could not rely on the (Oak Ridge) data to make informed decisions regarding the amount of mixed and low-level waste to be treated or disposed of, and avoidable costs were incurred." DOE plans to visually inspect 6500 existing containers of waste and to adopt new waste procedures that the

IG recommends. Bechtel Jacobs points out that most of the waste characterization was done before late 1997 when Bechtel Jacobs became manager of the cleanup and waste-management program. (Frank Munger, Knoxville News-Sentinel, 7/7/00)

Contaminated Drinking Water

The Tennessean obtained documents and maps showing that at the K-25 complex, water lines carrying purified drinking water were mistakenly connected for decades with lines carrying impure creek water for fighting fires and cooling machinery. The creek water was contaminated with a variety of toxic substances from nuclear fuel production. Former supervisors told The Tennessean that the contaminated water mixed with the water drunk by thousands of plant workers. The article in The Tennessean was, in part, a preview of a report by a team of three doctors who had been investigating, for DOE, health problems of workers at the K-25 plant. They released their report August 1. (Tennessean, 7/30/00)

II. PADUCAH
Judge Russell

US District Court Judge Thomas Russell has stepped aside as judge in a lawsuit brought by 700 plant workers and former workers against past operators of the Paducah plant. In the past the judge had represented Martin Marietta, Lockheed Martin, and Union Carbide in fighting compensation claims made by workers. He maintained that this legal work did not cause a conflict of interest, but said that he stepped aside because he realized that he knew well "some of the parties" in the suit. Lawyers for the plaintiffs had demanded that the judge remove himself from the case. (James Malone, Courier Journal, 7/9/00; Associated Press, 7/1/00)

Cleanup of Groundwater Contamination

DOE has released a "Feasibility Study for the Groundwater Operable Unit at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant" (DOE/OR/07-1857 & D1). The study discusses cleanup of groundwater contamination under and around the Paducah site. The contaminants of greatest concern are the radionuclide technetium-99 and the degreaser trichloroethylene. Two hundred thousand gallons of the latter leaked into the water table. The study presents eight options for public comment. They range from doing nothing (the contaminants would degrade through natural processes in 7000 plus years) to undertaking a $917 million project that would include ozone injection, underground vaporizers, an electrical grid, and an underground dike. The costly project would destroy the chemicals in fifteen years, DOE believes; but would necessitate the drilling of hundreds of off-site monitoring and injection wells. July 18 DOE held a public meeting to discuss the options. DOE will accept public comments until November 9. (Paducah Sun, 7/15/00; James Malone, Courier-Journal, 7/19/00)

Drum Mountain

The Kentucky Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Cabinet (KNREP) issued a notice of violation of clean air standards against DOE after a state inspector saw dust coming from the conveyor belt that feeds into a bailer the drums in the Drum Mountain waste dump that have been shredded. "Reasonable precautions were not being taken to prevent particulate matter from becoming airborne," said the notice. A DOE spokesperson said that the problem was quickly remedied by improving the spraying of water onto the moving waste. DOE could be fined up to $25,000 a day for each of two violations, but as of the end of July KNREP had not been able to revisit the site and had not decided what action to take. (Gil Gideon, Courier Journal, 28/7/00; M. York, KNREP, Personal Communication)

As of July 29, only 8% of the estimated 85,000 drums in Drum Mountain had been removed. Bechtel Jacobs, which has a contract to remove the drums, has subcontracted the work to USEC, Inc. Problems with the bailer and the conveyor belt have slowed the work. As a result, USEC is considering modifying the removal process. (Bill Bartleman, Paducah Sun, 7/28/00)

Seismic modifications

USEC announced July 25 that it has completed the structural changes to the C-331 and C-335 process buildings that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) required to make these buildings resistant to earthquakes. The changes will allow the plant to operate at higher power levels when needed, as well as provide earthquake protection. The project was part of the Compliance Plan, agreed to by USEC in 1996. Other buildings at the site needed no alterations to meet NRC requirements. (Joe Walker, Paducah Sun, 7/28/00; USEC press release, 7/25/00)

III. HEALTH ISSUES

A study commissioned by British Nuclear Fuels found that workers in uranium processing plants who are exposed to radiation may be at increased risk of lung cancer. David McGeoghegan from Westlakes Scientific Consulting in Cumbria analyzed the health records of 19,500 people who worked at the Springfields Uranium fuel fabrication plant in the United Kingdom between 1946 and 1995. He found that 225 people suffered from lung cancer, and that those who had been exposed to higher levels of radiation suffered more lung cancers. The association between work and lung cancer only becomes statistically significant twenty years after exposure. (Rob Edwards, New Scientist, 8/7/00)

IV. US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY (DOE)

The version of the Energy and Water Appropriations Bill for FY 2001 approved by the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee includes three projects for the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant: $33 million for conversion of depleted uranium; $78 million for cleanup work; and $1.75 million for an epidemiological study of workers to be conducted by the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville. (Presumably the bill provides similar funding for the Portsmouth Plant, but when we were drawing up the newsletter we could not reach anybody who could confirm this.) As of the end of July, the bill had not been voted on by the full Senate. Furthermore, the version of the bill that the House passed differs from the Senate version. (Paducah Sun, 7/14/00)

V. UNITED STATES ENRICHMENT CORPORATION (USEC)
Freon

Certain sources are regarding as over-optimistic the statement by Howard Pulley, USECīs manager at the Paducah plant, that a substitute for the coolant freon has been field tested and could be in use in less than two years. (See July UEN.) They say that substitutes have indeed been field tested, but that they were not found to work efficiently. In a September 10, 1999 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, USEC stated that freon leaks from plant facilities at about a 6% rate. Thus leaks amount to 750,000 pounds per year. At that time USEC had a "strategic inventory" of 2.0 million pounds, which it believed "should be adequate to allow the plants to continue to utilize freon through at least calendar year 2001." The company was working on developing a substitute, the report said.

Electricity Contracts

USEC announced July 11 that it has signed a ten-year electricity supply contract with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The contract runs from September 1, 2000-May 31, 2010. Prices are fixed through May 2006, but include summer and non-summer rates. After that date, prices will change from year to year. According to the agreement, TVA will gradually become USECīs primary source of electricity as its other electricity contracts come to an end. USEC believes that the contract with TVA will enable it to reduce the cost of a unit of enriched uranium by some twenty-five percent. According to Nuclear Fuel, TVA will receive credit for $45 million in electricity costs in FY 2001 against TVAīs future purchases of enrichment services. As security, TVA will hold a portion of USECīs uranium hexafluoride (UF6) inventory (Paducah Sun, 7/12/00; Nuclear Fuel 7/24/00)

Con't to part 2---

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Message: 10
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 03:21:30 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

part 2 --- Uranium Enrichment Newsletter August 2000
Con't from part one---

Bill to Replace USEC

July 18 Congressman Ted Strickland, an Ohio Democrat, introduced legislation that would direct the government to buy back the United States Enrichment Corporation. A new, government-owned corporation called the United States Enrichment Enterprise would take over USECīs stock and assets. USECīs debtors and investors would be compensated. Specifically the legislation (HR 4883) directs an appointed Transition Manager, working with DOE and the Department of Treasury to draft a plan to reacquire 100% of USECīs assets and authorizes the government to implement the plan thus created.

Financial Report

For the fiscal year (FY) ending June 30, 2000, USEC reported a gross profit of $233.6 million as opposed to $346.6 million for FY1999. After taking into account special charges and an inventory adjustment, USEC had a net income of $8.9 million in FY 2000 as compared to $152.4 million in FY 1999. For the fourth quarter of FY 2000, USEC reported a net loss of $62.4 million. In the fourth quarter of FY 1999, USEC had, instead of a loss, a net income of $41.0 million.

Earnings for FY 2000 reflect lower revenue due to the lower average SWU price billed to customers and also due to lower production levels and higher unit costs as a result of purchases of greater quantities of Separative Work Units (SWU) from Russia, USEC said. The average SWU price billed to customers declined 7% and revenue from the sale of SWU shrank by $87.2 million-from $1475.0 to $1387.8 million. SWU from Russia represented 41% of USECīs supply mix in FY 2000 in contrast to 31% in FY 1999.

To bolster its income in FY 2000, USEC sold from its inventory, uranium valued at $101.6 million. Uranium valued at $56.7 million was sold in the fourth quarter of FY 2000. During all of FY 1999 USEC sold uranium valued at only $53.6 million. The average market price of uranium sank 9% during the year (in part because of USECīs sales from its inventory), but, because of downward pressure on uranium prices at the end of the fiscal year, the market price on June 30, 2000, was actually 22% lower than that on June 30, 1999. The value of the USECīs uranium inventory is based on the market price of uranium. Therefore, $19.5 million was charged against the companyīs income for FY 2000 to reflect the decline in the value of its uranium inventory. (USEC press release, 7/26/00)

VI. RUSSIA

USEC has petitioned the US Department of Commerce for exclusive permission to import from Russia for up to two years one million separative work units (SWU) per year of commercial enriched uranium. One million SWU would equal about 15% of USEC's annual sales. The imports would be part of an arrangement with the Russian agent Techsnabexport (Tenex), according to which, from 2002 through 2013, Tenex would lower the price it charges USEC for uranium that has been down blended from nuclear weapons. Today USEC pays a fixed price of approximately $88 per SWU, although the spot price is about $80 per SWU. The current price agreement expires in 2002. Reportedly the new agreement would allow USEC to purchase blended-down uranium in the low sixties per SWU, and commercial Russian SWU at $60 per SWU. The National Security Council and the State Department support USEC's request because they think that it would strengthen the US-Russian HEU agreement. Representatives of uranium mining and conversion companies and some members of Congress strenuously oppose the arrangement. Also opposed to the agreement is Energy Secretary Richardson. DOE has refused to approve the draft agreements. (Nancy Dunne, Financial Times 5/27/00; Michael Knapik, Nuclear Fuel, 5/29/00; Nancy Dunne and Matthew Jones, Financial Times, 6/3/00; www.nuke-energy.com/data/other/usec_portsmouth.html).

May 5 Russia's minister of atomic energy informed US Energy Secretary Richardson that it would stop shipping down-blended uranium to the United States, because Russia feared that payment for the uranium would be seized as a result of litigation by the Swiss trading company Noga. Noga has filed suits in Paducah and in New York to recover a more than $64 million international arbitration award against Russia, stemming from debts unrelated to uranium. June 22 President Clinton issued an executive order declaring that the holdup of Russian uranium shipments posed an " unusual and extraordinary" proliferation threat and created a "national emergency." He declared that Russian assets directly relating to implementation of the US-Russian HEU agreement cannot be attached. The order allows Russia to resume uranium shipments. However, as Joe Walker of the Paducah Sun observes, it could lead to "a court battle between the executive and the judicial branches of the US government." (Text of Executive Order, US Newswire, 6/22/00; Associated Press, 6/22/00, printed in the Las Vegas Sun; Joe Walker, The Paducah Sun 6/24/00)

VII. URANIUM MANAGEMENT

Management of Stocks in General

In response to Section 3172 of the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2000, DOE has issued an Integrated Materials Management Plan. The report addresses the integrated management of national security materials, non-national security materials, and excess materials. The plan does not discuss nuclear materials in low-level, high-level, and transuranic waste. The nuclear materials that are evaluated are grouped in the following categories: uranium materials, plutonium materials, spent nuclear fuel, and other nuclear materials such as sealed sources and special isotopes. The uranium materials covered are high-enriched uranium (HEU), low-enriched uranium, natural uranium, depleted uranium, and uranium 233. Among the planīs purposes is providing "the first consolidated account to Congress and the public of the departmentīs unclassified inventory of nuclear materials and a description of how and where we manage these materials."

DOE has in the past withdrawn 174 metric tons (MT) of HEU from the weapons program and declared them to be excess. They are stored at the following sites: Idaho (23 MT), Oak Ridge (85 MT), Pantex (17 MT), Portsmouth (22 MT), Savanna River (22 MT), and Other sites (5 MT). The Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge is DOEīs primary facility for storing and processing HEU. DOE plans to build a new HEU Materials Facility at Oak Ridge to store high-quality HEU. It hopes to construct at Oak Ridge an as-yet-unauthorized Enriched Uranium Manufacturing Facility to blend, process, or recover HEU, for weapons purposes only. DOE has already transferred ownership of 62 MT of its 174 MT of surplus HEU to USEC. USEC will receive 48 MT of the 62 MT over the next six years, as specified in the USEC Privatization Act. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) will receive 30 to 40 MT of off-specification HEU for use in its reactors. Half will be down-blended at Savanna River; half at an undetermined commercial facility. DOE is in the process of deciding how to dispose of the balance of the excess HEU.

DOE has not yet decided how to dispose of its low-enriched uranium and natural uranium. The depleted uranium will be converted, as already set forth in a Record of Decision. Uranium 233 is stored at Oak Ridge and at INEEL; future management options are being evaluated.

Disposal of Converted DUF6

The Department of Energy has released an Assessment of Preferred Depleted Uranium Disposal Forms (ORNL/TM-2000/161), prepared for the department by Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The department intends to convert the depleted uranium hexafluoride now stored in cylinders at the gaseous diffusion sites to depleted uranium tetrafluoride (UF4), depleted uranium oxide (UO2 or U3O8) and/or depleted uranium metal. The report will guide the department in disposing of the converted uranium if uses cannot be found for the material. The authors found that all of the potential conversion products are suitable for near-surface disposal. They prefer the Nevada Test Site (NTS) for the disposal site, "because of its unique geohydrologic and institutional setting." Envirocare would be "questionable," due to certain restrictions on the types of materials it can accept.

Of the four potential forms, depleted UO2 would be most useful, followed by metal. Neither depleted U3O8 nor UF4 has any direct uses. However, the estimated cost for converting 700,000 MT of depleted UF6 and packaging, transporting, and disposing of the product is lowest for UF4--from $730M to 1100M. The oxides would cost $1200M-$1500M. Metal would be most expensive at $2500M. The fact that DOEīs stockpile of depleted UF6 includes UF6 generated by USEC would not give the NRC jurisdiction over disposal activities at NTS. The report, which was written by A. G. Croff et al., is available at the Web site: www.ne.doe.gov/

Starmet

Starmet Corporation in Concord, Massachusetts, has announced that it has received a Phase II Small Business Innovative Research (SIR) contract from DOE to further develop methods for making fluoride gases used for chemical vapor deposition in the manufacture of photovoltaic and semiconductor devices. The contract will assist in the full-scale commercialization of Starmetīs Fluorine Extraction Process for the production of germanium tetrafluoride and tungsten hexafluoride. The process can be used to extract the fluorine from the stockpile of depleted uranium hexafluoride now in storage at the three enrichment plants. According to Starmet, other processes for converting depleted uranium hexafluoride to uranium oxide produce only low-grade hydrofluoric acid. In contrast, Starmet can make high purity fluoride compounds. Starmet press release, 7/13/00)

In a letter to Carol Browner, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Governor Paul Caleche of Connecticut has asked that the Starmet site in West Concord be added to the National Priority List, known as the Superfund list. Starmet, formerly Nuclear Metals, made penetrators of depleted uranium for the Army for several decades. From 1958 to 1986 it dumped waste from the penetrator manufacturing process into an unlined holding basin on its property. Experts retained by a Concord citizens organization charge that, unless intervention occurs, the waste will eventually reach nearby aquifers and the Assabet River. (Tom McLain, Sun, 7/14/00)

New Method for Packaging Depleted Uranium Oxides

Scientists at DOEīs Brookhaven National Laboratory have received a patent for a process that encapsulates depleted uranium oxides in thermoplastic polymers. Uranium oxide powders and non-biodegradable thermoplastic polymers are simultaneously heated and mixed to form a product that can be molded into special shapes and that forms a dense solid when cooled. The final form is said to "emit very low levels of radioactivity" and is reportedly suitable for counter weights and for shields against gamma and neutron radiation. (Environment News Service, 7/19/00)

VIII. URANIUM MARKET

Uranium 1999: Resources, Production and Demand, the latest edition of the "Red Book" published by the Nuclear Energy Agency of the Office of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reports that producers of new uranium currently supply only about 60% of world demand. The remainder is met by the drawdown of civilian and military stockpiles, uranium recovered from the reprocessing of irradiated fuel, and the re-enrichment of depleted uranium.

Energy Resources International, Inc. (ERI), based in Washington, DC, reports that it does not expect uranium prices to exceed $12/lb (in constant 2000 dollars) over the next ten years. It anticipates that the European enrichers will increase their share of the US market from 18% in 1999 to 25% in 2000 with all the increase being made by Urenco. Prices for SWU could rise somewhat in the coming years, but in 2005 prices can be expected to be between $80 and $88 per SWU depending on circumstances. (Nuclear Fuel, 7/10/00)

The US Energy Information Administrationīs 1999 uranium industry report states that US utilities bought 10.0 million SWU under enrichment contracts in 1999. USECīs two plants provided 46% of that amount; and foreign enrichment plants the balance. These figures represent a decrease for USEC, which provided 56% in 1998.

The conversion industry, like the enrichment industry, is in the doldrums. In the past two years the price that the Honeywell plant in Metropolis, Illinois, receives for converting uranium oxide to uranium hexafluoride has decreased by more than half, going from $5.50 to $2.50 for a kilogram of hexafluoride, as foreign competition gluts the market. (Associated Press, 7/24/00)

IX. SCRAP METAL

July 13 Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson suspended release of potentially contaminated scrap metals for recycling from DO sites. "I am making this decision to ensure American consumers that scrap metal released from Energy Department facilities for recycling contains no detectable contamination from departmental activities," Richardson said. "The suspension will remain in effect until our sites can confirm that they meet this new more rigorous standard." DOE is also beginning a feasibility study on the possibility of recycling steel from decommissioned facilities into items such as waste containers for use by DOE. Wenonah Hauter of Public Citizen points out that Richardsonīs action is a "discretionary decision, not a regulation. It lasts only as long as Secretary Richardson or the next secretary of the Department of Energy keeps it in effect." Furthermore, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) will continue to work on setting a standard for the amount of radiation that the public can be exposed to from products containing recycled materials from government and commercial plants. (DOE press release, 7/13/00; Public Citizen press release, 7/14/00)
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Radiation dosimeter

Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 01:08:58 -0600
From: "Paula Elofson-Gardine, Exec. Dir." <pelofson1@home.com>

Very interesting site. Annoying geiger counter noise. It doesn't look as good as the Radalert monitor that many of us on the list have, which measures alpha, beta, gamma, and xray radiation sources, FYI.

http://www.dosimeter.ru .