------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
*Russia Sends Mixed Signals on Laser System Sale to Iran
*Russia: Laser Deal With Iran Blocked
*India tests surface-to-air missile
*A 'Tilt' Toward India
*Plan in Doubt to Compensate Nuclear Workers
*The Buck Stops at Justice
*Wen Ho Lee, and Our Calls for Human Rights

MILITARY
*The Defense Contractor Welfare King
*Foreign aid: too little but not too late
*The Bad News on Trade With China
*Roll-Call Vote on China Trade Bill
*In Clinton's Words: 'An Outstretched Hand'
*Senate Votes to Lift Curbs on U.S. Trade With China
*New Realism Wins the Day as Senate Passes Trade Bill
*Results of PNTR vote, WTO passage
*Senate easily OKs China trade status
*Cocaine seizure an Arkansas record
*Aide Seeks to Be First Woman to Run for President in Iran
*House GOP report says Gore's policies hurt U.S.-Russian ties
*Atlantis returns to Earth
*Women's unequal treatment hurts economies

OTHER
*Metro Briefing
*Deep Peril for Deep-Sea Corals
*Conservation Plan Rocks the Cradle of Fly-Fishing
*IMF Warns the EU of Risks If Delays in Reforms Persist
*Central Europe's Economies Diverge As They Seek to Join European Union
*Farmers are warning that they could derail a new clean water initiative
*NOT GOOD ENOUGH:
*Persistent Poverty
*Forgiving Debts of the Poor
*Blast near London spy complex investigated
*Pentagon Admits on Deutch Case

ACTIVISTS
*Philadelphia's message on political protest
*New Protests on Fuel Costs Tie Up Europe
*Fishermen, farmers block fuel shipments
*Greens stage sit-in at Gore campaign office in oil protest
*Heart Set For Benefit With Wynonna, Sheryl Crow, Cyndi Lauper
*Diamond Rio Charity Golf Tournament Breaks Its Record

*

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

Russia Sends Mixed Signals on Laser System Sale to Iran

New York Times
September 20, 2000
By JUDITH MILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/20/world/20ARMS.html

The White House said yesterday that Russia had suspended a contract to sell Iran sophisticated laser technology that Washington says can be used to make fuel for nuclear weapons. But the Russian scientific institute involved says it still plans to make the sale.

In an e-mail response yesterday to questions from The New York Times, Boris Yatsenko, director of the Science and Technology Center of Microtechnology, a unit of the government's D. V. Efremov Institute of St. Petersburg, said his institute was planning to sell the equipment, which he said was solely for "medical, industrial, and scientific purposes."

"As we believe, Iran will use lasers and some electrophysical equipment deliverable by us for the scientific, industrial and medical purposes," Dr. Yatsenko said in the e-mail. "Our scientists and technicians will execute maintenance and guarantee support of the deliverable equipment during agreed periods."

Because the equipment was purely for nonmilitary purposes, the e-mail added, "we do not need the government's approval."

P. J. Crowley, spokesman for the National Security Council, said: "We will continue to work with the government of Russia to ensure that no Russian entities provide support to the Iranian nuclear weapons program. We're moving in the right direction, but clearly this remains a work in progress."

Administration officials have said they have been trying for three months to persuade Russia to cancel the sale. They said yesterday that Russia had agreed to suspend, but not cancel, the sale at a meeting of experts in New York earlier this month, just before President Clinton and President Vladimir V. Putin met.

"We were assured at the United Nations summit in New York two weeks ago that the Russian government had ordered a suspension of this sale pending a joint investigation into whether the laser technology could help Iran acquire a nuclear capability," a White House official said. "I think the institute's e-mail indicates some of the problems that the Russian government may be having in trying to rein in some of the more cash-strapped scientific centers."

"We think that the Russian government is negotiating in good faith," the official said. The official said he was convinced that the "Russian government has the authority to stop the sale if it chooses to do so."

A spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington, informed that the institute believed that the sale was proceeding, said he could not comment on that issue since "the dialogue between the White House and the Kremlin is confidential."

An administration nuclear expert said he believed that the American team of experts had made a "very persuasive technical case" that the equipment the institute is trying to sell Iran could not be used efficiently for other than military purposes. "I cannot conceive of this type of equipment being used for any other purpose other than the once we are concerned about," the official said.

An expert in nuclear technology said there were many types of lasers, only some of which pose proliferation concerns.

In his message, the institute director said his center was "planning to supply to Iran the laser equipment of different types for the medical and scientific purposes by an average power of 15-20 W," with the letter standing for watts.

The expert in nuclear technology said that the Nuclear Suppliers Group - which identifies the technologies that require international safeguards because they are of proliferation concern - said the threshold for the type of "copper vapor" the institute is planning to sell Iran is 40 watts.

While the institute's lasers are less powerful than the suppliers group threshold, "they can still be of concern," he added. "It depends on how Iran is planning to use them, on what other equipment Russia is selling, and what the entire system looks like."

American officials have long believed that Iran is trying to acquire nuclear technology for a weapons program. Iran denies that, and asserts that it has forsworn nuclear weapons and is under international safeguards.

--------

Russia: Laser Deal With Iran Blocked

Washington Post
Wednesday, September 20, 2000 ; A25
By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+FTContentServer?pagename=wpni/print&articleid=A40361-2000Sep19

Russian authorities have assured the Clinton administration that Moscow has suspended a contract for a research institute in St. Petersburg to provide Iran with a laser facility that could be used to produce weapons-grade uranium, a senior U.S. official said yesterday.

"The Russians don't want to see Iran acquire nuclear weapons, and we expect the contract to be canceled outright," the official said.

Beginning last spring, when U.S. intelligence agencies learned of the proposed deal, American officials have been pushing Moscow to halt the transaction between Iran and the D.V. Efremov Institute because "there is no question that the turn-key facility was intended for" Iran's nuclear weapons program, the official said.

The issue was raised again early this month at a working session in New York to prepare for a Sept. 6 summit meeting between President Clinton and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the United Nations.

Kremlin officials told White House aides during the planning session that the contract "has been suspended and is being reviewed" by the Russian government to determine whether the laser isotope enrichment facility could be used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons, the U.S. official said.

The laser project was first reported in yesterday's editions of the New York Times.

Since 1994, Russia has been helping to complete a nuclear power plant in the Iranian city of Bushehr.

German companies started work on the electrical generating facility, but they left after the 1979 Islamic revolution that overthrew the shah.

U.S. officials have been concerned over the years that the Bushehr facility could be used by the Tehran government as a cover for developing nuclear weapons technology.

In 1994, then-President Boris Yeltsin promised Clinton that Russia would not permit the export of any enrichment technology unless it was clearly associated with the civilian power plant, not with nuclear weapons.

U.S. experts believe that Iran has been pursuing research on laser techniques for producing the highly enriched uranium used in weapons.

They also say that the laser method would not be economical for producing the low-enriched uranium used in civilian power reactors, because it would be less expensive to buy low-enriched uranium on the world market than to produce it with lasers.

"If Iran were interested in commercial applications for uranium fuel, lasers would be the worst way to get it," said Joseph Cirincione, head of the nonproliferation project of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Cirincione added that "all scientific institutes" in Russia "are trying to sell things" because government support for science has been sharply cut, though the U.S. Energy Department provides some financial support to keep former Soviet nuclear weapons scientists employed on civilian projects.

According to U.S. officials, Clinton raised the laser contract with Putin in July, when the leaders of the Group of 8 countries met on Okinawa, and Vice President Gore has also discussed the issue with Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov.

Part of the official Russian response has been that Moscow did not know of the contract until early last year because the St. Petersburg institute had not sought an export permit, sources said.

The senior U.S. official said that some Russian laser-related equipment theoretically could be cleared for export to Iran but that the Clinton administration believes that, "taken as a whole package," the laser facility clearly "was intended and designed for weapons-grade enrichment."

-------- india / pakistan

India tests surface-to-air missile

Florida Today
September 20, 2000
http://www.flatoday.com/space/explore/stories/2000b/092000f.htm

NEW DELHI, India (AP) - India's most sophisticated surface-to-air missile was successfully test-fired Tuesday off the country's eastern coast.

The Akash (sky) missile was fired from India's testing range at Chandipur, off the coast of Orissa state, United News of India news agency quoted military officials as saying.

The Akash, one of five missiles being developed by India's Defense Research and Development Organization, has a range of 15 miles.

The missile can carry a payload of 110 pounds. With its multifunction radar, it can track 64 targets and engage four simultaneously, the news agency reported.

India conducted five nuclear tests in 1998 and is perfecting a delivery system.

Tuesday's exercise at Chandipur, 750 miles southeast of New Delhi, was the ninth of a series of tests.

---

A 'Tilt' Toward India

New York Times
September 20, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/20/opinion/20WED1.html

Two years ago, India's nuclear tests provoked worldwide condemnation and retaliatory sanctions by the United States. Yet in recent months, culminating in Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's visit to Washington last weekend, the United States has drawn closer to India diplomatically than at any time since the early 1960's. President Clinton has shaped a new foreign policy course in South Asia by embracing India and distancing the United States from Pakistan's military government. These steps have far-reaching ramifications for all of Asia, including China, as well as for the issue of nuclear proliferation. The shift is justified by India's growing importance. But it should be accompanied by more pressure on India to exercise nuclear restraint and defuse tensions with Pakistan.

Before the end of the cold war, American foreign policy in South Asia was characterized by Richard Nixon's famous decision that the United States should "tilt" toward Pakistan in its war with India in 1971. With the withdrawal of Russian troops from Afghanistan and the collapse of the Soviet empire, the United States and India have repaired their ties. A vibrant new generation of Indian immigrants to America has contributed to an era of good feeling, as has India's participation in United Nations peacekeeping operations. India can still be a nettlesome friend. It has fiercely criticized American positions on global warming and nuclear weapons. But as the world's most populous democracy, it is a natural American ally on many issues.

In improving its friendship with India, the United States needs to be particularly careful not to incite feelings of distrust in India's two wary neighbors Pakistan and China. The Senate vote yesterday to give permanent trade benefits to China caps President Clinton's welcome effort to stabilize relations with Beijing and to give Chinese leaders every incentive to open their nation to commerce and new ideas. India should now move quickly to sign the nuclear test ban treaty, which Mr. Vajpayee has promised, and to exercise more restraint on the deployment of missiles and production of fissile materials, since failure to do so will not only provoke Pakistan but raise anxiety in Beijing.

The dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, India's only Muslim-dominated state, poses one of the gravest threats to world stability. In the last two years, it is Pakistan that has engaged in more provocative behavior by supporting guerrilla insurgents and, a year ago, sending its own forces across the border into the Kargil area. Mr. Clinton's pressure on Pakistan to withdraw the troops was successful, but it became a factor in a subsequent military coup last October by Gen. Pervez Musharraf. India was restrained in its response to Kargil, but its leaders need to do more to recognize that there can be no military solution to the Kashmir problem. In the end, greater autonomy must be granted to the region, and there should be more willingness to let the United States or other outsiders try to mediate a political solution.

After meeting with Mr. Vajpayee, Mr. Clinton made it clear that he hoped to cement a new relationship with India that the next president could expand. That may be difficult, not only because of the uncertainty over the American presidential election's outcome but also because Mr. Vajpayee appears to be in frail health. His Hindu nationalist government contains some claimants to leadership who might revert to an unacceptably militant posture toward Pakistan. But if handled sensitively, this new phase of friendship between India and the United States, and America's warming relations with China, should be forces for greater stability in the region and throughout the world.

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

Plan in Doubt to Compensate Nuclear Workers

New York Times
September 20, 2000
By MATTHEW L. WALD
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/20/national/20NUKE.html

WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 - An administration plan to compensate private-sector workers who were made sick by exposure to hazardous chemicals or radiation while building nuclear weapons may fall victim to a jurisdictional dispute, according to administration officials.

A provision that would authorize compensation passed the Senate on a voice vote, as part of the Defense Authorization bill, but there was no similar provision in the House legislation, so the issue is now before a House-Senate committee.

Agreement in the conference committee has been held up because the Senate bill calls for the program to be administered by the Labor Department, but members of the House Judiciary Committee want it channeled through a Justice Department office that also handles radiation claims against the government arising from nuclear weapons testing.

The legislation would cover thousands of people who worked for private contractors on weapons projects. Nearly all are ineligible for workers' compensation because their illnesses developed years or decades after their exposures, according to the Energy Department. The department acknowledged earlier this year that hundreds of workers had a lung illness that could have been caused only by their work on nuclear weapons components.

The Energy Department says the Senate version of the program would cost about $1.8 billion in the first five years, and less thereafter. It would provide each worker with reimbursement for lost wages or $200,000, whichever is larger, plus health care expenses. The Senate provision, though, is only an authorization, not an appropriation, leaving it to a future Congress to provide the money.

The Judiciary Committee favors a package modeled after the one already on the books for uranium miners and people who were exposed to fallout for weapons tests, which offers $100,000 per victim. Among the issues before the conferees is why one group of victims should be compensated more generously than another. It plans hearings on Thursday, although the issue could be decided by conferees on Wednesday.

Seeking to win compensation, 104 members of the House, including many with victims in their districts, wrote to the conferees asking them to adopt the Senate version.

Paul E. Kanjorski, a Pennsylvania Democrat whose district includes a defunct plant where workers were exposed to beryllium and where some now suffer a debilitating lung disease as a result, said he was "cautiously optimistic" that the Senate version would be approved.

Robert Alvarez, a former Energy Department official who is now a consultant for a union representing some of the workers, said the House program amounted to an "apology payment" as opposed to reimbursement for losses, because it does not offer reimbursement for lost wages.

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson early this year became the first head of that agency to acknowledge that weapons manufacture had sickened or killed some of the 600,000 people who have worked in the plants.

In a letter sent on Monday to Floyd D. Spence, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, he said: "The men and women who worked for the Department of Energy and served our nation in the nuclear weapons industries of World War II and the cold war labored under difficult and dangerous conditions with some of the most hazardous materials known to mankind. It is time for Congress to act to ensure that they get the help they have long deserved. These workers, many of whom are now seriously ill, should not have to wait to be compensated."

-------- new mexico

The Buck Stops at Justice

New York Times
September 20, 2000
By MICHAEL R. BROMWICH
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/20/opinion/20BROM.html

The finger-pointing has begun in the failed case against Wen Ho Lee, and there is plenty of blame to go around.

President Clinton, strangely positioning himself as an outsider, said he was troubled by the actions of the Justice Department and F.B.I. in detaining Mr. Lee without bail prior to trial. Mr. Clinton has called for an inquiry of unspecified dimensions by unspecified entities. Members of Congress, many of whom denounced Attorney General Janet Reno for insufficient zeal in going after Mr. Lee, now want to find out how things could have gone so wrong in prosecuting him. The press, notably this newspaper, played an active role in stirring the investigative pot.

Ultimately, who deserves blame? Only one entity had the power to launch a criminal investigation, to prosecute and deprive someone of liberty before trial: the executive branch. Accountability for what went wrong must be placed squarely at the feet of the F.B.I. and Justice Department.

Ordinarily, the F.B.I. and prosecutors are partners in investigation and prosecution. But this relationship has been impaired in recent years by the bureau's proclivity in high-profile cases to air differences in public, seeking political gain at the Justice Department's expense. This was the case when Louis Freeh, the F.B.I. director, embarrassed Ms. Reno by urging her to appoint an independent counsel to investigate possible violations of political fund-raising laws.

In the Wen Ho Lee case, the bureau went public early and often, most notably over the attorney general's decision in 1997 not to approve F.B.I. requests to seek authority for placing a national security wiretap on Mr. Lee's phones. Ms. Reno took enormous heat for that decision. In retrospect, her ruling - that the evidence was too fragmentary and dated - seems to have been correct.

Even though F.B.I. officials discovered in 1999 that Mr. Lee had mysteriously downloaded sensitive information, it is not clear why they chose to press ahead with its 59-count indictment against him, accusing him of gathering, retaining and receiving restricted information.

It is almost impossible to imagine that such unprecedented charges - the first-ever criminal charges under the Atomic Energy Act - would have been made if Mr. Lee had not been previously targeted. The government's claim that it wanted to solve the mystery of what happened to the information is not compelling: Criminal charges are rarely brought to solve mysteries and, as the judge pointed out, the government has yet to explain why Mr. Lee's offers, before his arrest, to explain the missing tapes were not sufficient to meet the government's legitimate concerns.

The F.B.I.'s unflagging commitment to prove Dr. Lee guilty of something made it extremely difficult for the Justice Department to resist throwing the book at him. In the end, it was the department's job to resist, despite the intense pressure. That is the crucible in which a prosecutor proves himself, asking tough questions, pointing out weaknesses to aggressive investigators and, if necessary, saying "no" to prosecuting a case that shouldn't be brought. That is where prosecutors in the Wen Ho Lee case appear to have failed.

The experience proves that an aggressive F.B.I. and compliant prosecutors are a risky combination. We can only hope that the self-scrutiny and investigations to come yield meaningful warnings to the next generation of agents, prosecutors and others in pursuit of a hot case.

Michael R. Bromwich served as inspector general of the Justice Department from 1994 to 1999.

---

Wen Ho Lee, and Our Calls for Human Rights

New York Times
September 20, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/20/opinion/L20WEN.html

To the Editor:

"For Wen Ho Lee, a Tarnished Freedom," by Gish Jen (Op-Ed, Sept. 15), should remind us that the human rights situation in the United States is far from perfect. For example, where were Dr. Lee's constitutional rights during his extended confinement? Where was the principle of presumed innocence?

While we should always strive for an improvement in the human condition worldwide, we could stand a dose of humility when commenting on the human rights condition in other countries.

ROBERT H. TREADWAY JR. Ann Arbor, Mich., Sept. 15, 2000

To the Editor:

Gish Jen makes some good points in the context of the Wen Ho Lee case ("For Wen Ho Lee, a Tarnished Freedom," Op-Ed, Sept. 15). As a naturalized Indian-American scientist, with two American-born children who are as American as apple pie (both to my comfort and dismay), I find that this matter goes to the core of my being.

Given the large numbers of Asian- American scientists in laboratories all over the country, Dr. Lee could easily have had an Indian- or Asian- American name. The fact is that Asian-Americans as a group have achieved success in this country. Yet because they look "different," they suffer racial profiling. This kind of tragedy should not happen again.

AKHIL KUMAR Murray Hill, N.J., Sept. 17, 2000

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

-------- arms sales

The Defense Contractor Welfare King

Common Dreams
September 20, 2000 in the Seatlle Post-Intelligencer
by Geneva Overholser
http://commondreams.org/views/092000-104.htm

WASHINGTON -- If we're ever going to achieve reason on defense spending, we're going to need a good villain image. A bloated defense-contractor king, maybe.

You remember the welfare queen: Her role in the national lore was to embody welfare as devourer of the national budget and creator of dependency, a self-regenerating maw of wasteful consumption we seemed powerless to do anything about -- until her ugly visage rose and energized us, and we acted at last.

Now, imagine if politicians had proposed as a solution not "ending welfare as we know it" but piling on more money -- feeding the voracious welfare queen yet more generously.

There you have the defense-spending picture today.

Our military budget for next year will be somewhat more than $310 billion. It will absorb just about half of every dollar available for discretionary spending. It is bigger than the combined military spending of the next 10 military powers. Yet the two men who seek to be president are tripping all over each other promising more. Al Gore said recently he'd spend $100 billion of the projected surplus on the military. He took the occasion to jab at George W. Bush because he had proposed "only" $45 billion in additional defense spending.

"This is simply a bidding war," said John Isaacs, president of the Council for a Livable World, a Washington arms control agency.

The candidates manage to look serious while committing this fiscal recklessness because they couch it as a matter of military readiness. What decent American can stand to see our armed services inadequately supported, our defense unready?

But if it were readiness that consumed our political leaders, their approach would be entirely different. Wisconsin Rep. David Obey last year estimated that, of the $27 billion Congress had added to the president's defense budgets over the preceding four years, $3.5 billion went to readiness. The rest feathered congressional districts and the defense industries therein. As for this year's defense appropriations bill, John McCain estimated the pork in it at a cool $7 billion.

If the military is unready, it's not because the defense budget is being starved.

Yet what a dirge the campaigns took to the VFW convention, outdoing one another in lamentations about how underattended are America's defenses. Bush charged Clinton with "long neglect," a military overextended and "in decline." Defense Secretary William Cohen fought back, saying it was President Bush's administration that had weakened the military and the Clinton administration that rescued it, with substantial increases in spending.

Dick Cheney, Bush's defense secretary, retorted with his own exposition of Clinton administration underfunding: "Defense spending today is lower as a percentage of GNP than at any time since 1940, the year before the attack on Pearl Harbor."

That's true. But it says a lot more about how big the economy is than how small is military spending. If you think budgets are more logically based on need than on cash available, this other fact may be more enlightening: Military spending totals are almost 95 percent of what they were on average during the Cold War.

Defense dollars are in direct competition with dollars for Head Start and other education programs, as well as health care, the environment and other social programs. Yet only in defense does waste win the enthusiastic respect of those who dole out the dough.

This irresponsibility continues in part because the public pays little attention. A Pew Research Center poll last June, in a typical finding, showed military issues ranking "very low" in voter interest.

When voters do pay attention, they're wonderfully sensible. Consider a tidbit from "Madam President: Shattering the Last Glass Ceiling" by Eleanor Clift and Tom Brazaitis. Ted Stevens, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, complained last year, the authors tell us, that women don't support military spending because "there's all these touch-feely things that they want to spend money on." Women constantly ask him, added Stevens, "Why do you want to spend more money on the military? Don't they have enough?"

That isn't opposition to military spending. That's opposition to waste. These women probably assume -- quite correctly -- that we have the strongest military in the world. And also that we have other needs that should be addressed. And that resources should be distributed more equitably, more wisely, more sensibly.

I say, hand those women a microphone. And make sure, too, that they have on stage with them a cardboard cutout of the corpulent defense contractor king who looms over the self-satisfied little congressman. Maybe the picture will finally begin to become clear.

Geneva Overholser is a columnist with The Washington Post Writers Group.

---

Foreign aid: too little but not too late

MSNBC
09/19/00
By Michael Moran MSNBC
mailto:Michael.Moran@msnbc.com
http://www.msnbc.com/news/463305.asp

U.S. needs to show it has more than bullets with which to battle the planet's many problem. East Timorese refugee children hope for charity at their camp in Tua Pukan, Kupang, West Timor last week. Humanitarian aid has not been one of the U.S.'s priorities when it comes to overseas aid.

NEW YORK, Sept. 19 - Foreign aid is primed for a comeback. In 2001, the U.S. budget for this area will still be only half of what it was during Ronald Reagan's presidency. But, after years of dodging any kind of increase in overseas aid, Democrats and Republicans in Congress now seem responsive to hiking this part of the budget. A sudden bipartisan humanitarian wave? Nope, the politicians are happy to support more foreign aid when sales of U.S. arms are a hefty part of the package.

WHILE THAT SUPPORT may be misguided, increased overseas aid is an urgent global need. A handful of facts from the Congressional Budget Office and the federal budget show how acute the problem is:

The U.S. spends less yearly on foreign aid than it spends weekly on Social Security. Total foreign aid for 2001 - $13.3 billion - is less than half of one percent of all federal spending.

Of that $13.3 billion - .01 percent of America's gross domestic product (GDP) - some $6 billion will go to the military and security establishments of countries that live on the edge of conflict, including Israel and Egypt, Greece and Turkey. Another $1.3 billion will go to Colombia's military to fight a leftist rebel movement that has allied itself with drug cartels.

federal budget

Aid to just one recipient, Israel, amounts to $3.1 billion - about $500 per Israeli, and will rise if a new peace deal is signed. As as a somewhat uncomfortable State Department official told me recently, "If you add what we spend in Africa and Latin America together, it doesn't approach $3 billion."

ADDING IT UP

For those who hate figures, let me simplify this. The cuts in foreign aid that began in the mid-'90s under a Republican Congress have stabilized somewhat, but more and more of what goes out each year to other nations is military in nature. Thus, in an era of unparalleled prosperity at home and unquestioned dominance economically and militarily abroad, the United States is spending almost nothing in relative terms to help educate, feed, clothe and ensure the democratic development of the rest of the world. Gone are most of the educational and nutritional programs that spring to mind when the term "foreign aid" is used. In their place are military training, arms transfers and - the newest entry - huge subsidies in the form of "security guarantees" aimed at bribing the Egypts, Israels and Bosnia's of the world into signing peace deals.

In an era of unparalleled U.S. prosperity we are spending almost nothing in relative terms to help educate, feed, clothe and ensure the democratic development of the rest of the world.

Other interesting figures show where the money goes:

In 1999, U.S. arms makers, aided by congressionally mandated programs that require the purchase of U.S. arms and training packages as a condition for some kinds of aid, delivered more weapons to these foreign recipients than the rest of the world combined, according to the Center for Defense Information.

In 1999, the United States spent more on its national defense than Japan, China, Russia, Great Britain and France combined, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

INVESTMENT STRATEGY

Back in the Cold War, spending money this way could be justified if you believed in a certain rationale. Then, winning "hearts and minds," an awful phrase with a noble goal, was half the game. The other half, of course, was keeping "our guys" in power and Soviet allies at bay. In service of that philosophy, the United States, by some estimates, spent well over a trillion dollars rebuilding Europe and Japan, propping up allies, both savory and unsavory, and fighting wars from Korea to Vietnam to Grenada (to name only the overt ones).

A trillion dollars is a great deal of money, even in this era of inflated expectations. So, rather than bemoaning (again) America's isolationist tendencies, let's look at this in cold, hard business terms. Consider that trillion or so spent on weapons, foreign aid and other Cold War items from 1947 to 1989 as an enormous investment, one that paid dividends. Those windfalls include the stabilization and democratization of Europe and Japan, the collapse of the Soviet Union and liberation of Eastern and Central Europe, the wave of democratic conversions that swept through Africa and Latin America and the embrace of capitalism in such unlikely places as New Delhi, Managua and Beijing.

Relieved of the burden of sustaining the endlessly spiraling expenditures of the Cold War, American economic growth exploded, raining prosperity down in unequal chunks all around it.

SQUANDERING THE DIVIDENDS

So, what has the United States done with its capital gains in the years since 1989? Almost immediately, the U.S. decided to stop investing in the rest of the world. A judgement was reached, voiced most famously in the GOP's "Contract with America," that with the Cold War over, foreign aid was obsolete.

The end result is a U.S. military constantly demanding money to maintain weapons systems more suited to the Cold War, rather than making the hard choices associated with moving into the future.

Yet, at about the same time, the U.S. began intervening selectively in foreign conflicts, first committing its forces to battle but more importantly, in the long run, committing the taxpayer to sustaining long post-war peacekeeping operations. From the Gulf War in 1990-91, continuing in Somalia ('92), Haiti ('94), Bosnia (belatedly, '96) and finally last year in Kosovo, the U.S. deployed troops to more foreign shores in nine years than it had in the previous 40. Except for Somalia, all led to significant long-term commitments of U.S. forces. The end result is a U.S. military constantly demanding money to maintain weapons systems more suited to the Cold War, rather than making the hard choices associated with moving into the future.

GETTING DISCONNECTED

The growing chasm between what the United States does abroad with its military and what it is willing to do to help other nations develop their own sustainable economies is even more startling in the information age. These days, jet aircraft wing people to America from myriad lands to take jobs in an economy that is outstripping the domestic labor force.

The United Nations estimates the world population will be in the range of 7.3 to 10.7 billion in the year 2050, depending on the assumed fertility trends. It has issued three projections of what low, medium and high annual growth rates will mean for the world's population. The U.N.'s goal is to slow population growth at least to the medium scenario.

Source: United Nations Population Division, World Population Prospects, The 1998 Revision

Meanwhile, those who insist foreign aid be kept to a bare minimum continue to view the rest of the world's problems as somehow separate from its own. Such an attitude - "live and let die" - simply won't do in today's world. Set aside ethnic violence and there's still plenty of room for help. This is a world where AIDS is now killing up to half the under-30 population of some sub-Saharan African nations. Other diseases once thought conquered - malaria, tuberculosis and syphilis - have resurfaced anew as threats to human life across the globe. The response from the U.S. is heavy on rhetoric, light on actual leadership. And if the U.S. expects the United Nations to grapple with the problem instead, America's decision to continue withholding its contribution to the U.N. budget is a funny way of helping.

SELF-FULFILLING SOPHISTRY

If simple humanity doesn't seem motive enough, consider this: In the new democratic states spawned by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, as well as those that emerged in Africa, Latin America and Asia after 1989, a new generation that does not measure their well-being by how hard things were under the previous system is coming of age. This means, for instance, in states once dominated by communism, the youngest generation now equates democracy, not communism, with the misery that has come to define life in places like Ukraine, Belarus, Romania and Albania. The assumption on this side of the Atlantic about these places continues to be based on the fairly optimistic theory that they will someday "bottom out" and ultimately stabilize into prosperous, European democracies. Nowhere, these days, is there any intelligent discussion of what a new wave of authoritarianism in that region, especially Russia, really means for the world.

Foreign aid cannot fix any of this alone, but it is part of a complicated answer to a complicated world. With only a modest increase in what this country devotes to nutrition, development and democratization programs, the U.S. can reinvest some of its profits in a better future and show that it has more than bullets with which to battle the planet's many problems. Without it, the United States, in the eyes of a planet yearning for leadership, looks more like Sparta than Athens with each passing day.

Michael Moran is senior producer, special reports at MSNBC.

-------- china Time

The Bad News on Trade With China

Time Daily
September 20, 2000
http://www.time.com/time/daily/0%2C2960%2C55391-101000921%2C00.html

Conflict will persist in the new era of relations with Beijing, argues TIME.com's Tony Karon. But the issues will be less about politics than about trade. President Clinton announces the normalization of trade relations with China.

The China trade deal is an historic breakthrough to be sure, but that doesn't mean it justifies the current giddy optimism over what it will mean for the Chinese people or for relations between Beijing and Washington. The Senate's ratification Tuesday of permanent normal trading-partner status for China "will dim the role of government in people's daily lives and strengthen those within China to fight for higher labor standards, a cleaner environment, for human rights, for rule of law," gushed President Clinton. But anyone who's been paying attention to conditions in China over the past couple of years won't be holding their breath.

In order to gain access to the World Trade Organization and improve the prospects for its exports, China has agreed to far-reaching liberalization measures in its economy - but for the U.S. to enjoy the benefits of those changes, it had to end the annual practice of making trade relations with China contingent upon a congressional review of Beijing's political and human rights record. Now that both the Senate and the House have voted to do just that, President Clinton will sign the legislation and open a new era in relations with Beijing. But that new era will hardly be free of conflict - quite the contrary.

Despite more than two decades of trade with the U.S., China remains an authoritarian state ruled by an all-powerful Communist party. And there's a furious struggle at the very top of that party over China's economic and political direction - a struggle in which hard-liners obsessed with maintaining order are currently dominant. Arch- reformer prime minister Zhu Rongji had hoped to use the conditions attached to WTO membership as a whip with which to dramatically accelerate the pace of economic reform, but Zhu has been increasingly marginalized over the past 18 months, particularly after President Clinton backed out of concluding a permanent trade agreement last April at the height of the furor over allegations of Chinese nuclear espionage.

The overriding priority for Beijing's leadership is maintaining order and social control, and liberalizing the economy will necessarily bring unemployment and uncertainty to millions of ordinary Chinese, raising the specter of massive social unrest that could potentially tear China apart. The depth of that fear among the leadership was evident in last year's crackdown on the apparently harmless Falun Gong religious sect, and it will almost certainly act as a brake on Beijing's implementing the economic liberalization measures to which it has agreed. So while the Senate vote ends the annual unpleasantness between Beijing and Washington when Congress would rattle its saber at China before dutifully extending normal trade status for another year, it opens what promises to be a new era of conflict over the terms of trade.

The U.S. can't disengage from China, from which it imported some $80 billion in consumer products last year alone. But as with trade relations with Japan in the '80s, Washington may well find itself continually at loggerheads with Beijing over the rules that govern its economy. In what may be the ultimate sign of China's transition from communism to an authoritarian capitalism, the annual political showdown with Beijing may be finally eclipsed by that most capitalist of geopolitical conflicts - trade warfare.

---

Roll-Call Vote on China Trade Bill

New York Times
September 20, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/20/world/20ROLL.html

WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 (AP) - Following is the 83-to-15 roll- call vote by which the Senate voted today to extend permanent normal trade relations to China. A yes vote was to approve normal relations and a no vote was to reject normal relations. Thirty- seven Democrats and forty-six Republicans voted yes. Seven Democrats and eight Republicans voted no.

DEMOCRATS YES

Baucus, Mont.; Bayh, Ind.; Biden, Del.; Bingaman, N.M.; Boxer, Calif.; Breaux, La.; Bryan, Nev.; Cleland, Ga.; Conrad, N.D.; Daschle, S.D.; Dodd, Conn.; Dorgan, N.D.; Durbin, Ill.; Edwards, N.C.; Feinstein, Calif.; Graham, Fla.; Harkin, Iowa; Inouye, Hawaii; Johnson, S.D.; Kennedy, Mass.; Kerrey, Neb.; Kerry, Mass.; Kohl, Wis.; Landrieu, La.; Lautenberg, N.J.; Leahy, Vt.; Levin, Mich.; Lincoln, Ark.; Miller, Ga.; Moynihan, N.Y.; Murray, Wash.; Reed, R.I.; Robb, Va.; Rockefeller, W. Va.; Schumer, N.Y.; Torricelli, N.J.; Wyden, Ore.

DEMOCRATS NO

Byrd, W. Va.; Feingold, Wis.; Hollings, S.C.; Mikulski, Md.; Reid, Nev.; Sarbanes, Md.; Wellstone, Minn.

DEMOCRATS NOT VOTING

Akaka, Hawaii; Lieberman, Conn.

REPUBLICANS YES

Abraham, Mich.; Allard, Colo.; Ashcroft, Mo.; Bennett, Utah; Bond, Mo.; Brownback, Kan.; Burns, Mont.; Chafee, R.I.; Cochran, Miss.; Collins, Me.; Craig, Idaho; Crapo, Idaho; DeWine, Ohio; Domenici, N.M.; Enzi, Wyo.; Fitzgerald, Ill.; Frist, Tenn.; Gorton, Wash.; Gramm, Texas; Grams, Minn.; Grassley, Iowa; Gregg, N.H.; Hagel, Neb.; Hatch, Utah; Hutchison, Texas; Kyl, Ariz.; Lott, Miss.; Lugar, Ind.; Mack, Fla.; McCain, Ariz.; McConnell, Ky.; Murkowski, Alaska; Nickles, Okla.; Roberts, Kan.; Roth, Del.; Santorum, Pa.; Sessions, Ala.; Shelby, Ala.; Smith, Ore.; Snowe, Me.; Stevens, Alaska; Thomas, Wyo.; Thompson, Tenn.; Thurmond, S.C.; Voinovich, Ohio; Warner, Va.

REPUBLICANS NO

Bunning, Ky.; Campbell, Colo.; Helms, N.C.; Hutchinson, Ark.; Inhofe, Okla.; Jeffords, Vt.; Smith, N.H.; Specter, Pa.

---

In Clinton's Words: 'An Outstretched Hand'

New York Times
September 2000, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/20/world/20TEXT.html

WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 - Following is President Clinton's statement today in the White House Briefing Room on the Senate vote on trade relations with China, as transcribed by the Federal News Service.

Today the Senate voted to pave the way for permanent normal trade relations between the United States and China. This landmark agreement will extend economic prosperity at home and promote economic freedom in China, increasing the prospects for openness in China and a more peaceful future for all of us.

When we open markets abroad to U.S. goods, we open opportunities at home. This vote will do that. In return for normal trade relations, the same terms of trade we offer now to more than 130 other countries, China will open its markets to American products, from wheat to cars to consulting services. And we will be far more able to sell goods in China without moving our factories there.

But there's much more at stake here than our economic self-interest. It's about building a world in which more human beings have more freedom, more control over their lives, more contact with others than ever before, a world in which countries are tied more closely together and the prospects for peace are strengthened.

Trade alone won't create this kind of world. But bringing China under global rules of trade is a step in the right direction. The more China opens it markets to our products, the wider it opens its doors to economic freedom and the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people.

When China finishes its negotiations and joins the W.T.O., our high-tech companies will help to speed the information revolution there. Outside competition will speed the demise of China's huge state industries and spur the enterprise of private-sector involvement. They will diminish the role of government in people's daily lives. It will strengthen those within China who fight for higher labor standards, a cleaner environment, for human rights and the rule of law. And we will find, I believe, that America has more influence in China with an outstretched hand than with a clenched fist.

Of course, none of us should think for a moment that any of these outcomes are guaranteed. The advance of freedom ultimately will depend upon what people in China are willing to do to continue standing up for change. We will continue to help support them.

Peace and security in Asia will depend upon our military presence, our alliances, on stopping the spread of deadly weapons. Some will continue. So we will continue to be a force for peace, and we will not rest in our efforts to make sure that freer trade also is fairer trade.

These are some of the most important issues that our nation faces. That's why this vote was so important and, for many, so difficult. I want to thank Senator Lott and Senator Daschle, Senator Roth, Senator Moynihan and Senator Baucus, as well as those who led our effort in the House, and everyone within this administration who worked so hard to achieve this important milestone.

But I also want to acknowledge those who raised important questions about this policy and say to you this is not the end of the story. It is the beginning. We have a chance - not a certainty, but a chance - to strengthen our prosperity and our security and to see China become a more open society. Now our test as a nation is whether we can achieve that. I hope and I strongly believe that we will.

---

Senate Votes to Lift Curbs on U.S. Trade With China

New York Times
September 20, 2000
By ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/20/world/20TRAD.html

WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 - After a long and often tumultuous struggle, a bill to remove restraints on trade with China passed the Senate today in a strong bipartisan vote, giving President Clinton what he considered one of his crowning foreign policy goals.

Coupled with approval by the House in May, the vote today ended the annual Congressional review of China's trade status, a ritual for 20 years that Beijing considered degrading but that critics argued was necessary to force China to improve its record on human rights and religious freedom.

After the historic vote, which passed with little debate today, Mr. Clinton told reporters, "This landmark agreement will extend economic prosperity at home and promote economic freedom in China, increasing the prospects for openness in China and a more peaceful future for all of us." [Transcript and roll call, Page A16.]

The broad margin of the victory, 83 to 15, was all the more remarkable coming less than two months before the presidential election, and after nine months of passionate debate. It demonstrated how a foreign policy issue could retain bipartisan backing even in the heat of a campaign.

Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, the Republican presidential nominee, has supported the legislation. After the vote, a spokesman for Mr. Bush, Ray Sullivan, said, "This measure will help open markets to American products and help export American values, especially freedom and entrepreneurship."

Although Vice President Al Gore feared losing the support of allies in organized labor who opposed the measure as a threat to union jobs, he voiced qualified support for it today. But he stressed that American workers' rights must be protected. "We must combat unfair trade practices abroad when they harm our working families," Mr. Gore said.

Senate supporters hailed the deal, which will expand a vast overseas market for American goods, as a path-breaking step toward a new economic and security relationship. Senator Fred Thompson, a Tennessee Republican who tried unsuccessfully to amend the bill to penalize Chinese companies that export advanced weapons, voted for it but said he would continue to press China to curb its arms trafficking.

"Generally, free trade leads to freer markets, and freer markets can lead to more open societies," Mr. Thompson said in a statement. "I will keep pushing to hold the Chinese accountable for their actions."

Passage of the measure ensures that the United States will benefit fully from a market-opening accord that Washington and Beijing negotiated in November to slash Chinese tariffs on a range of farm and industrial products and removes barriers to American service providers, like banks and telecommunications companies. Almost everything from apples to wine will have a better chance of getting into the Chinese market.

The November agreement paves the way for China to enter the World Trade Organization, the 135-member group that sets the rules for global commerce. China will join the organization, probably later this year, and would have done so regardless of the vote today. But without Congress's blessing, China could have withheld some trade benefits from the United States that it extended to other members of the group.

"For U.S. farmers, businesses and working people, this agreement opens up a range of opportunities in China across all sectors and all fields of a magnitude unprecedented in the modern era," said Charlene Barshefsky, the United States trade representative. Some parts of the pact have taken effect, she said, noting that orange exports to China from Florida and California, for instance, have risen 100-fold since May.

Dave McCurdy, president of the Electronic Industries Alliance, said, "From semiconductors to circuit boards, from PC's to cell phones, China is simply the most dynamic international market for U.S. high- tech exports."

Overall, the United States bought $82 billion worth of Chinese-made goods last year, $69 billion more than the value of what it sold to China. The trade deficit, America's second-largest, was slightly smaller than the one with Japan.

The bill's supporters warned that several challenges remain in dealing with China, most immediately resolving disputes over some agriculture tariffs and how Taiwan will join the Word Trade Organization at the same time as China. "We've got a lot of work ahead of us," said Senator Max S. Baucus, Democrat of Montana.

The outcome of the vote today was never in doubt. The fierce lobbying that pitted corporate America against labor and religious groups before the House's approval of the measure in May, by a vote of 237 to 197, never materialized in the upper chamber because all sides knew the question in the pro-trade Senate was never if the measure would pass, only when and by how much.

But supporters still faced a delicate procedural and political balancing act in the Senate, where lawmakers zealously guard their prerogatives and a lone senator has the power to delay the most popular bill.

Backers of the legislation said it was essential to press for a measure free of amendments because there was not enough time to reconcile an amended Senate bill with the House version before Congress adjourned for the year. "We knew we had the votes, but what was difficult was that there was no margin for error in the Senate," said Steve Ricchetti, a deputy White House chief of staff who was Mr. Clinton's point man for the bill in the Senate. "It had to pass exactly as it passed out of the House."

So supporters adopted a low-key strategy aimed at leaching from Senate consideration all of the volatile politics that enmeshed the House vote. Tactically, that meant having Mr. Clinton - who eight years ago was on the opposite side, criticizing President George Bush's policy of engagement with China - project enough support to show that he still cared deeply about the bill, but not raise the debate temperature high enough to prompt some foes to take the bill hostage to delay it.

When Mr. Clinton's original point man on the bill, Commerce Secretary William M. Daley, left the Cabinet in June to head Mr. Gore's presidential election campaign, some supporters worried that momentum was slipping away.

The Senate majority leader, Trent Lott of Mississippi, balked at scheduling a vote before the July 4 recess, arguing that the Senate had more pressing business in wrapping up many of the 13 must-pass spending bills that keep the government running. "If we go into September, our chances for passage drop precipitously," Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic leader, warned in late June.

And for a while, critics seemed to have a point. Just as the vote in the House created unusual political alliances between liberal labor groups and conservative religious organizations in opposition to the bill, the Senate bill produced odd political couplings. Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, perhaps the Senate's most liberal Democratic member, teamed up with Jesse Helms of North Carolina, one of the staunchest Republican conservatives, to back amendments on human rights, religious freedom and prison labor.

But the gloomy predictions proved wrong. Mr. Lott and Democrats agreed in late July to bring the bill up for a final vote after the five-week summer recess. Despite its long-simmering tensions with Taiwan, Beijing heeded private warnings from administration officials to avoid any diplomatic or military provocations that could fuel opposition to the bill.

The trade bill never became a political football, partly because pro- trade Republicans were loath to antagonize their corporate benefactors in a hotly contested election year, and labor leaders never believed that they could win enough Democrats.

One after another, 20 different amendments to improve human rights, religious freedom and labor standards in China fell by lopsided votes, not because senators opposed them on merit but because of their potential harm to the underlying bill.

A similar fate awaited the most popular amendment, sponsored by Mr. Thompson and Robert G. Torricelli, Democrat of New Jersey, to penalize Chinese companies that trafficked in nuclear, chemical or biological weapons and long-range missiles. The measure struck an especially strong chord with lawmakers who had grown increasingly alarmed by intelligence reports of Chinese arms exports.

In the vote, all but 7 Democrats and 8 Republicans supported the bill. Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat who is Mr. Gore's running mate, was campaigning in California and Ohio and did not vote. Senator Daniel K. Akaka, Democrat of Hawaii, also did not vote.

Supporters said the agreement would benefit American business and values. "The Senate has cast an epic and overwhelming vote today," said Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York. "By so doing, we bring China back into the trading system that it helped to establish out of the ashes of the Second World War."

But opponents criticized the measure as one that would undercut America's moral authority in the world, and reward a government that threatens its neighbors, persecutes its citizens and sells advanced weapons to America's enemies.

"The safety and security of the American people come first," Mr. Helms said. "That safety and security will be ensured ultimately not by appeasement, not by the hope of trade at any cost, but by dealing with Communist China without selling out the very moral and spiritual principles that made America great in the first place."

China Applauds Bill's Passage

SHANGHAI, Wednesday, Sept. 20 - China's Foreign Ministry today heralded the Senate's approval of the bill removing restraints on trade as paving the way for more stable relations with Washington.

At the same time, China criticized clauses in the bill intended to maintain pressure on Beijing to improve its human rights record. Hu Chusheng, spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation, reiterated irritation at the human rights monitoring panel in the trade bill, saying it "still contains certain clauses that are irrelevant to trade and are intended to interfere in the internal affairs of China."

---

New Realism Wins the Day as Senate Passes Trade Bill

New York Times
September 20, 2000
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/20/world/20ASSE.html

WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 - The Senate's overwhelming vote today to give permanent trade benefits to China ended a clash between America's global economic interests and the notion that the United States could use the annual threat of trade sanctions to change Beijing's behavior.

In the end, it wasn't even close - and behind that lies a new reality in how the United States deals with China, the world's most populous nation.

Despite the huge margin by which President Clinton won today - 83 to 15, his biggest legislative victory in the foreign policy arena since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 - the reversal of policy toward China cemented into law today was hardly assured, given all the impediments over the years.

During the past four years alone, it looked like the effort to normalize trade relations could be derailed by allegations of Chinese meddling in American elections, by accusations that Chinese spies had stolen American nuclear secrets, by considerable evidence that China still ships missiles to Pakistan, by Chinese threats against Taiwan.

Indeed, the measure passed today despite the State Department's recent conclusion that China's human rights violations have, if anything, grown more egregious this year. And it passed precisely seven weeks before a presidential election, even though America's labor unions viewed the accord as a threat to their jobs and strongly hinted they would punish Democrats who supported it.

Yet every time a crisis erupted and receded, China's economic and political role in the world seemed to loom ever larger, from Motorola plants in Illinois to farms in Iowa. Over time it became clear that Congress' periodic threat that it would refuse to renew China's annual trade status was empty, and the Chinese came to dismiss it as saber-rattling. Meanwhile, American business became more energized about stabilizing the economic relationship with China - and thus preserving their ballooning investments there - than on any other issue in recent legislative history.

So today senators of every stripe ended up voting for the trade bill. That included Fred Thompson, the Republican from Tennessee who conducted the campaign finance investigation and last week derided the "little people" in the business community who "need to be taken down a notch" because they orchestrated the defeat of an amendment to the trade bill that would have punished China for the spread of arms.

Now, though, the hard part starts.

Arguments still rage about whether the North American Free Trade Agreement helped or hurt the booming American economy. In the case of China, the facts are different: all the trade concessions were on China's part, the price of entering the World Trade Organization. Nonetheless, it can be expected that China will begin to drag its heels on carrying them out, for fear that letting in American steel will wipe out huge state-owned industries or letting in Japanese and American cars will threaten China's efforts to become the next industrial behemoth.

But the real test will come as America tries to use its deepening trade relationship as leverage to open China's political system.

Mr. Clinton won the battle over trade with China by first convincing himself, and then helping convince Congress, that rejecting normal economic ties with the world's most populous country would hurt the American economy, and benefit Japanese and European competitors. Then he gradually elevated the argument from the economic to the strategic, making the case that rejection would also help political hard-liners in China who are certain that America's real agenda is to contain growing Chinese power.

"The argument that made the difference in the Yellow Oval Room had to do with what happens if this didn't pass," said Samuel R. Berger, the president's national security adviser, referring to the room in the White House residence where Mr. Clinton twisted arms. "We would undermine China's reforms, scare the daylights out of our allies, and send a message to the world that at the pinnacle of our power we are in retreat."

Mr. Clinton today celebrated his victory with a line he used often during those nighttime sales pitches, telling reporters this afternoon, "We will find, I believe, that America has more influence in China with an outstretched hand than with a clenched fist."

And in the next breath, as eager as always to repair the breach with unions and environmentalists and others who believe they were sold out by the White House, he insisted that opening China to more commerce with shrink the control of the government. "It will strengthen those within China who fight for higher labor standards, a cleaner environment, for human rights and the rule of law," he said. Maybe he will be proven right, maybe not - it will be years, maybe decades, before anyone can judge. As Mr. Clinton himself acknowledged today, "none of us should think for a moment that any of these outcomes are guaranteed."

But what makes the experiment interesting is that only eight years ago both the Congress and Mr. Clinton were headed in precisely the opposite direction.

In 1992, when memories of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre were still vivid, Congress made the annual renewal of China's trading rights conditional on a range of changes in Beijing. President Bush vetoed the measure. The Senate fell just short of the two-thirds vote needed to override him - which would have essentially terminated China's trading privileges with the United States - by a vote of 60 to 38.

Within months, Mr. Clinton was charging Mr. Bush with "coddling dictators." It was not until he arrived in the White House, and spent a year unsuccessfully trying to link trade with China's human rights record, that Mr. Clinton ended a fierce fight within the White House and reversed himself. He became a passionate adherent of Mr. Bush's policy - and took it several steps further.

"This was a case where Clinton's new position gathered momentum slowly," said Lee Hamilton, the former Indiana congressman who spent much of his career dealing with China issues. "Tiananmen seems like a long time ago. Then the business interests started lobbying this very hard. And good economic times have been a factor: People are now persuaded that trade has a lot to do with our prosperity."

But not everyone is persuaded - not by a long shot. Those who voted "no" included a hardy band of China's strongest critics on the left and right, liberals like Paul Wellstone, the Minnesota Democrat, and Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Then there were the disillusioned, but resigned, human rights advocates. Mike Jendrzejczyk, a top official of Human Rights Watch, noted that the timing of the vote "is particularly unfortunate, just as human rights conditions are worsening."

"Beijing is closing down all channels of political dissent - including the Internet," he added, "even while it is opening its economy."

Charlene Barshefsky, the United States trade representative, who finished the 13-year negotiations with China over the rules under which it would enter the World Trade Organization, said in an interview this week that she learned two major lessons from the roller-coaster effort to negotiate the huge accord.

"The first is that you need an economic agreement whose advantages are beyond any doubt," she said. In fact, one of the differences between this debate and the arguments over the North American trade pact is that few, save for the most ardent union leaders, argued that the China trade deal would send American jobs overseas. ("No one ever made that case to me," Mr. Berger said. "I was amazed.")

But the second argument, Ms. Barshefsky said, is that, "You can only get trade agreements this big if you put them in a broader security framework, and link it to the security of the United States, or peace in Asia." That, of course, is the hallmark of Mr. Clinton's foreign policy: The linkage of trade to broader diplomatic goals. Essentially, he is betting that China cannot open its markets without also opening its political system. It cannot let in Amazon.com, he believes, without also letting any Dissidents.org broadcast their message around China. The Chinese leaders also believe that their entry into the W.T.O. will bring about change, ushering in foreign technology and foreign capital. But they think it is change they can manage and control.

The vote today has cemented in place the Clinton imprint on American foreign policy, the use of economic engagement to foster political change. But the judgment about whether he has created a second opening to China depends, in the end, on what China's leaders do with the economic and political opportunity.

---

Results of PNTR vote, WTO passage

USA Today
09/20/00- Updated 01:20 AM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/ncstue11.htm

Highlights, according to a White House fact sheet, of the results of permanent normal trade relations with China and China's entry into the World Trade Organization:

The Agriculture Department estimates that China's WTO accession would result in $2 billion annually in additional agriculture exports by 2005.

China makes significant, one-way market-opening concessions, including increasing access to its markets for agriculture, services, technology, telecommunications, and manufactured goods. China also agrees to eliminate ''unseen'' barriers, such as exclusive rights to import and distribute goods.

On U.S. priority agricultural products, tariffs will drop from an average of 31% to 14% by January 2004, with even sharper drops for beef, poultry, pork, cheese, and other commodities. China will significantly expand export opportunities for bulk commodities such as wheat, corn, and rice.

Industrial tariffs on U.S. products will fall from an average of 24.6% in 1997 to an average of 9.4% by 2005.

China will phase in trading rights and distribution services over three years, and also open up sectors related to distribution services, such as repair and maintenance, warehousing, trucking, and air courier services.

China will eliminate tariffs on products such as computers, semiconductors, and related products by 2005.

China will open its telecommunications sector and significantly expand investment and other activities for financial services firms. It will greatly increase the opportunities open to professional services such as law firms, management consulting, accountants, and environmental services.

For the first 12 years, the United States can take effective action in case of increased imports of a particular product from China that cause or threaten to cause market disruption in the United States.

---

Senate easily OKs China trade status

Washington Times
September 20, 2000
By Carter Dougherty
http://208.246.212.80/business/default-2000920214016.htm

The Senate yesterday overwhelmingly approved historic legislation that will expand commercial ties with China and end annual congressional reviews of the Asian giant's trade status that have produced much bluster but little action.

By a decisive 83-15 margin, senators adopted the bill without changing the version approved by the House in May, clearing the way for swift approval by President Clinton without the usual House-Senate conference.

"This is one for the history books," said Sen. Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat who helped lead the fight for the trade bill.

Sen. William V. Roth Jr., the Delaware Republican who heads the Finance Committee, called the vote "a defining moment in the history of this chamber and in the history of our country."

Mr. Clinton, who pushed aggressively for the bill, welcomed its passage, a top legislative priority in his last year in office. The vote proved to be a major test of his leadership that had divided Democrats from a key constituency, organized labor, as Vice President Al Gore struggled to invigorate his presidential campaign.

"This landmark agreement will extend economic prosperity at home and promote economic freedom in China, increasing the prospects for openness in China and a more peaceful future for all of us," Mr. Clinton said.

The trade legislation will extend China permanent normal trade relations, a status that, under current law, is renewed on an annual basis and subject to congressional review. It extends to China the same tariff treatment accorded all but a handful of "rogue" nations such as Iraq, Cuba and North Korea.

The change, which abolishes the summer votes that had become an occasion to debate every aspect of Sino-American relations, will also smooth the way for China's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO). It also opens the Chinese market to a broad array of American goods and services under a trade agreement negotiated by the United States last year.

To smooth passage in the House, backers also included provisions to guard against sudden surges in Chinese imports and to create a commission to monitor China's dismal human rights record.

The bill will go into effect once China wraps up final WTO negotiations and formally enters the Geneva-based international commercial court, probably early next year.

Voting against the bill were seven Democrats and eight Republicans. Democratic vice presidential candidate Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut did not vote.

Sen. Robert Byrd, West Virginia Democrat who opposed the bill, said the Senate made "a grave mistake" by rewarding a government that has been repressing religion "and generally behaving like the Bobby Knight of the international community."

Sen. Jesse Helms, North Carolina Republican, called the bill ill-advised and said Congress should be dealing with Communist China by stressing moral and spiritual principles instead of pursuing "the hope of trade at any cost."

The House passed the trade legislation in May by a margin of 235-195 after a bitter debate. Senate approval was never in doubt, but passage without amendments was not a foregone conclusion.

Senators last week turned back the most serious challenge to the bill, an amendment on weapons proliferation sponsored chiefly by Sen. Fred Thompson, Tennessee Republican. Backers of the legislation defeated many other amendments as well, arguing that the House would refuse to hold another vote on the China trade bill if the Senate amended it, effectively killing the legislation until the next Congress.

"It has been a long process, but every senator has had an opportunity to have his or her say," said Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, Mississippi Republican. "All things considered, trade is in our interest."

The House vote was marked by a massive campaign coordinated from the White House and heavy lobbying - and campaign contributions - by major corporations and business groups. Organized labor, along with a diverse set of allies from the right and left, responded in kind with aggressive pressure tactics that many observers believe ultimately backfired.

These groups largely wrote off the Senate, which has a history of strong support for trade-liberalizing measures.

Despite supporters' jubilation at having won a monthslong campaign to pass the legislation, Mr. Baucus also cautioned that having China in the WTO would not be a panacea for Sino-American commercial disputes, nor would it ensure improvements in human rights and weapons-proliferation disputes.

"China is still a volatile country, a country struggling to find its future," Mr. Baucus said. "There is still a major battle in the Chinese leadership between the forces of reform and the forces of reaction."

Business groups, aware of China's atrocious record in complying with international agreements, also warned that future administrations would have to be vigilant in extracting the full benefits of the WTO agreement from China.

"This is just the beginning of the work we need to do to make sure China's obligations as a member of the WTO are fully implemented and enforced," said Calman Cohen, president of the Emergency Committee for American Trade, an organization of major corporations.

Tacitly conceding that forcing China to live up to the agreement will be a major challenge, the Clinton administration announced a plan earlier this year to enforce U.S. rights under the pact.

-------- drug war

Cocaine seizure an Arkansas record

Washington Times
September 20, 2000
Around the Nation Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://208.246.212.80/national/aroundnation-2000920213352.htm

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - More than 10 tons of cocaine valued by authorities at $125 million was confiscated from a transport truck in what Arkansas authorities said yesterday was the largest cocaine seizure in the state's history.

Randy Ort, spokesman for the state's Department of Transportation, said state highway policemen were inspecting a tractor-trailer rig on Interstate 30 near Hope, Ark., when they uncovered processed cocaine hidden in a shipment of cantaloupes.

The truck driver and a passenger, both believed to be Oklahoma residents, were arrested and jailed in the town of Hope.

-------- iran

Aide Seeks to Be First Woman to Run for President in Iran

New Yorrk Times
September 20, 2000
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/20/world/20TEHR.html

TEHRAN, Sept. 19 - A little-known conservative said today that she hoped to be the first woman to run for president here, a goal that some people say is unconstitutional.

"I've made my decision to run in next year's presidential elections," the woman, Farah Khosravi, 41, said in an interview. "I'm going to fight in the polls as an independent." She spoke on Women's Day, celebrated on the anniversary of the birth of Fatima, daughter of the prophet Muhammad.

The day was celebrated by a training flight by Maryam Pakshir, 19, that made her the nation's youngest pilot who is a woman, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

The status of women has improved since the election of a reformist, Mohammad Khatami, as president in 1997. About 58 percent of first-year students at universities were women last year, according to official figures. Mr. Khatami appointed a woman as a vice president, and 11 women sit in the 290-member Parliament.

Women can hold public office, a role barred elsewhere in the region. Although no official date has been set for the election, it is generally expected in May.

The Guardian Council, which acts as an upper chamber of Parliament and oversees elections, rejected an application from a liberal-minded woman who sought to run in 1997, saying it was unconstitutional.

The Constitution says the presidency is open to "rijal," a Farsi term that has been interpreted to mean men. Some experts say that should be interpreted as "respectable people," regardless of sex.

"I'm hoping very much that the council will approve my application in order to pave the way for women to play a greater social and political role in the establishment," Ms. Khosravi said.

She is in charge of postings at the Ministry of Sciences, Research and Technology and has a master's degree in management. She also is secretary-general of the conservative-leaning Iran-e- Farda Society, a little-known group of politicians.

She ran for Parliament two times unsuccessfully.

Reformists who support Mr. Khatami say Ms. Khosravi's candidacy could be a publicity stunt.

"Hard-liners are trying to discourage Khatami from running or at least trying to undermine his votes through different tactics, including bringing forward a woman candidate," said a reformist lawmaker, Fatemeh Haqiqatjou.

Mr. Haqiqatjou said Ms. Khosravi would be "no serious challenge" to the popular president, who said in July that he planned to run for another four-year term. Women and young Iranians were a base for Mr. Khatami when he defeated a hard-liner in 1997. He was elected with more than 70 percent of the vote, winning more than 20 million votes.

Although they lost the presidency and control of Parliament, the hard-liners, led by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, still wield considerable power and have tried to stall Mr. Khatami's reformist movement. Hard-liners control the judiciary, military and broadcast networks.

-------- russia

House GOP report says Gore's policies hurt U.S.-Russian ties

Washington Times
September 20, 2000
By David Sands
http://208.246.212.80/national/default-2000920215218.htm

The Clinton administration's close identification with a few corrupt Kremlin officials has badly tarnished America's reputation in Russia and set back U.S.-Russian relations by at least a decade, a new congressional report says.

The 209-page report, to be released today by a dozen senior Republican House members, takes direct aim at Vice President Al Gore's stewardship of policy on Russia over the past eight years, and it has already drawn prerelease fire from Mr. Gore and congressional Democrats unhappy with its conclusions.

"After tens of billions of dollars and eight years of mismanagement by the Clinton administration, the U.S.-Russian relationship is in tatters, characterized by deep and growing hostility and divergent perceptions of international realities and intentions," according to the report, titled "Russia's Road to Corruption."

The report criticizes the administration's record on a variety of fronts, including aid in building a market economy in Russia, weapons proliferation, efforts to fight Russian corruption, and the focus on President Boris Yeltsin and a few favored aides while ignoring Russia's parliament and other regional and private power centers.

The survey notes that Russia's relations with China have improved sharply, with the two talking openly of warmer ties to frustrate U.S. foreign policy goals.

"To find a foreign policy failure of comparable scope and significance, it would be necessary to imagine that after eight years of American effort and billions of dollars of Marshall Plan aid, public opinion in Western Europe had become solidly anti-American, and Western European governments were vigorously collaborating in a 'strategic partnership' directed against the United States," the report says.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert commissioned the study in March. House GOP Policy Committee Chairman Christopher Cox, California Republican, chaired the group, which included the chairman of the House Banking and Financial Services, International Relations, Intelligence and Appropriations committees.

Democrats criticized both the report and its timing, coming out just weeks before the presidential election.

"This is a partisan report not worth the taxpayer-provided paper it's written on," said Douglas Hattaway, a spokesman for Mr. Gore yesterday.

"While they play politics with foreign policy, Al Gore has put the national interest ahead of politics to help Russia reduce its nuclear arsenal and move toward a free-market democracy," Mr. Hattaway said.

"This is a political hatchet job. It's outrageous," said Rep. Sam Gejdenson, Connecticut Democrat and the ranking minority member of the International Relations Committee.

Mr. Gejdenson was one of five senior Democratic House lawmakers who wrote a letter Monday to Mr. Hastert, Illinois Republican, complaining about the report, although they had not seen the text.

A copy of the report was obtained yesterday by The Washington Times.

"This document should come out under the letterhead of the Republican National Committee," added Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher, California Democrat. "It's only meant to inflame the electorate 48 days before the election."

Mr. Gore has been closely identified with the administration's Russia policy since being appointed by Mr. Clinton to head a joint commission with former Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin overseeing a number of bilateral issues, including energy and space exploration.

Mr. Cox, in an interview with reporters and editors of The Washington Times, said the report was not intended as a partisan attack.

"The next president is going to face tremendous challenges and tremendous opportunities in our relationship with Russia," he said. "It's important to understand how we got to where we are and not repeat the mistakes of the past."

To Mr. Cox, the last eight years represent a series of squandered opportunities that have left Russia poorer, U.S. influence weaker and the average Russian far more cynical about U.S. intentions.

The report cites the State Department's own surveys tracking a sharp decline in favorable opinion among Russians toward the United States during the 1990s, from 70 percent favorable in 1993 when Mr. Clinton took office to just 37 percent in February.

Mr. Cox said an "insular troika" of advisers - Mr. Gore, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and Deputy Treasury Secretary (now Secretary) Lawrence H. Summers - largely set U.S. diplomatic and economic policy toward Russia.

Their unflagging support for Mr. Yeltsin and close association with corruption-tainted aides such as Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin and privatization chief Anatoly Chubais backfired badly as Mr. Yeltsin's popularity flagged and the economy staggered in the ruble crisis of August 1998, according to the Republican report.

Because of their rhetorical and financial support of figures like Mr. Chernomyrdin and Mr. Chubais, the report argues, the administration became associated with their policy failures and with the scandals involving money laundering and theft of state assets that plagued the Yeltsin years.

The administration has cited a number of successes in its foreign policy with Russia, including progress in decommissioning Russia's huge nuclear stockpile and Russia's efforts to broker an end to the conflict with Yugoslavia over Kosovo last year.

While the House report castigates U.S. economic policy toward Russia, a new International Monetary Fund survey forecasts over 7 percent economic growth for Russia in 2000, the country's best performance in years.

The House Republican report says the incoming administration will have a chance to repair Russian relations, but must broaden its contacts beyond a small Kremlin circle, must promote private sector solutions to Russia's woes, and more aggressively combat official Russian corruption.

-------- space

Atlantis returns to Earth

USA Today
09/20/00
http://usatoday.com/news/ndswed01.htm

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - Space shuttle Atlantis and its crew returned to Earth in the pre-dawn darkness Wednesday, capping a successful mission to the international space station.

''We've had a really great flight this time,'' flight director Wayne Hale said.

Powerful xenon lights illuminated the 3-mile-long landing strip as Atlantis swooped through the sky like a ghost ship, with a half-moon as a backdrop. Landing was right on time, at 3:56 a.m., just as launch was back on Sept. 8.

''Welcome home,'' Mission Control said once Atlantis rolled to a stop. ''Congratulations on an outstanding job. We are proud of you all.'' It was only the 15th nighttime landing in space shuttle history. Nighttime landings are becoming more common, though, now that NASA has a space station in orbit. All three previous shuttle flights to the space station also ended in darkness.

During their five days inside the space station, Atlantis' astronauts and cosmonauts hauled in 3 tons of equipment for the first permanent crew.

Among the supplies: shampoo, cream, shaving gel, moist towels and napkins, Russian and American meals, ear plugs, medical kits, labels, printer parts, clamps, brackets, camera equipment and small bags for the crew to use to relieve themselves in case the toilet jams.

The seven shuttle crewmen also installed the toilet, oxygen generator and treadmill in the new living quarters, and ran power and TV cables up the outside.

Getting an extra day helped. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration stretched the mission to 12 days to give the astronauts more time inside. ''We started with 52 items in our to-do list and wound up doing 74 different tasks on board the station, large and small,'' Hale said Tuesday.

The only disappointment was with one of five new batteries that were plugged into the Russian modules. It would not charge properly and was disconnected; the first residents will deal with the problem when they arrive.

Another shuttle crew is scheduled to depart for the space station on Oct. 5 aboard Discovery. The first space station residents will follow on Oct. 30 aboard a Russian rocket, arriving two days later for a four-month stay.

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

U.N. report: Women's unequal treatment hurts economies
Worldwide abuse 'a massive violation of human rights'

CNN
September 20, 2000
By Jonathan D. Austin CNN.com Writer
http://www.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/europe/09/20/un.population.report/index.html

UNITED NATIONS -- Women throughout the world continue to be the victims of violence, sexual exploitation and discrimination -- at a considerable cost to their countries' economies, according to a United Nations report.

The report, issued by the U.N. Population Fund, notes that conditions for women have improved since 1994, when 179 countries met and pledged to do more for their female citizens.

But Stan Bernstein, a senior research adviser with the fund, said the continuing discrimination against women constitutes "a massive violation of human rights that takes various forms around the globe."

The annual report, which was released Wednesday, is an attempt to underscore "what the costs of inequality are, what has kept it in place in the past, and what's being done to address it now," Bernstein said.

Pocketbook factors

Bernstein said the report includes economic data because "sometimes people don't pay attention to misery until it hits them in the pocketbook. So we felt we had to report on both sides."

According the report, titled "State of the World Population 2000," a 1 percent increase in female secondary schooling results in a 0.3 percent increase in economic growth.

If you use Pakistan as an example, that estimate means the increased investment in education would have upped the country's economic growth by $262 million in 1999, excluding inflation, which was estimated at 6 percent.

Grim statistics

The report also tries to show the link between abuse, illness, early deaths, abortions and degradation. According to its data:

One in three women will experience violence during her lifetime -- most often at the hands of people she knows.

Two million girls under age 15 are forced into the sex trade each year.

Complications from pregnancy and childbirth kill 500,000 women each year.

Stillbirths or newborn deaths total an estimated 8 million yearly, with the lack of obstetric care cited as the primary cause.

About a third of all pregnancies each year -- 80 million -- are unintended or unwanted.

An estimated 50 million abortions occur each year, 20 million of which are unsafe, resulting in 78,000 maternal deaths. The report says a quarter of those unsafe births are to girls between the ages 15 and 19.

Abuse breeds additional miseries

"Abused women tend not to use family planning services ... for fear of reprisal from husbands," the report states, citing a Ghana study in which "close to half of all women and 43 percent of men said a man was justified in beating his wife if she used contraceptives without his expressed consent."

Likewise, abused women who participated in focus groups in Peru and Mexico said they did not discuss birth control with their husbands, fearing a violent reaction.

The resistance to contraception, the report said, "takes a tremendous toll, both physical and emotional, and causes immense damage to a woman's reproductive health." Unwanted pregnancies, unsafe abortions, frequent high-risk pregnancies, and sexually transmitted diseases are among the results.

Nations agree

The miseries surveyed in the report have "direct consequences for the lives of women, for the lives of men, for the quality of their partnerships, for the development of their communities, and the development of their countries," Bernstein said.

The report refers to the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt. At that conference, 179 countries agreed to increase domestic allocations to health care, including reproductive health, and agreed to share technical data from successful programs.

In a 1999 review of the conference goals, representatives from those countries agreed that empowering women and meeting their education and health needs were necessary, according to the report.

"The countries included many of these goals for reproductive health, for women's empowerment, for reduction of women's mortality and HIV/AIDS deaths," Bernstein said.

Improvements noted

The report cites changes in legal or administrative codes that have since improved conditions for women, including:

The ban of female genital mutilation in eight African nations.

The adding of sexual and reproductive rights and gender equity to the new Venezuelan constitution.

The approved sale of low-dosage oral contraceptives in Japan.

Legislation to increase access to reproductive health services in Mexico and Peru.

The report also cites advancements in Cambodia, which enacted comprehensive abortion legislation; in Ecuador, which is discussing the addition of sexual and reproductive rights to its constitution; and in Albania, Burkina Faso, Fiji, Madagascar, Poland and the Sudan, all of which adopted measures to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex.

"The world has moved these topics to the center of the international development agenda," Bernstein said. "This is a time of extraordinary opportunity, and we have to rise to the occasion.

"We know what needs to be done, and we need to commit ourselves to do the action," he said. "There are not going to be too many second chances."

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

USA Today
09/20/00
States
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Arkansas

Jonesboro - For $40 people can buy a brick for a veterans' monument to be built on the Craighead County Courthouse grounds. The monument will honor veterans of any era who either live or have lived in the northeast Arkansas county. Each brick will contain space for three lines of text.

-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

Metro Briefing

New York Times
September 20, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/20/nyregion/20MBRF.html

MADISON: POWER PLANT TO USE WIND The largest wind-power generating station in the state is scheduled to begin commercial operations at the end of this month, its owner said . Known as a wind farm, the power plant is also the first on the East Coast to sell power to commercial energy distributors, according to its owner, the PG&E National Energy Group of Bethesda, Md. The plant's seven propeller- driven turbines, each rising 220 feet above the cornfields of Madison County, will generate 11.5 megawatts of electricity. (NYT)

-------- environment

Deep Peril for Deep-Sea Corals

New York Times
September 20, 2000
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/19/science/19CORA.html

For nine miles along a submerged ridge, the corals rise in lumpy hillocks that spread out 100 yards or more, resembling heaped scoops of rainbow sherbet and Neapolitan ice cream. The mounds, some 100 feet tall, sprout delicate treelike gorgonians that sift currents for a plankton meal. Fish, worms and other creatures dart or crawl in every crevice.

This description could apply to thousands of coral reefs in shallow, sun-streaked tropical waters from Australia to the Bahamas. But this is the Sula Ridge, 1,000 feet down in frigid darkness on the continental shelf 100 miles off Norway's coast.

The pinks, yellows, oranges and other colors are apparent only under the blazing artificial light beamed from remote-controlled submersibles wielding video cameras. Absent such intrusions, this is a world of utter blackness.

Nearly 250 years ago, Scandinavian scientists, including Linnaeus, first described some of these cold- water corals, but only from bits and pieces pulled up in fishing nets or on hooks. Only in the last decade or so, as research submarines and robotic devices have become widely used, has the diversity and extent of these banks and reefs become apparent.

Marine biologists now say that deep-sea corals and attendant organisms easily rival tropical reefs in their diversity - and their fragility.

The same scientists who have been mapping these ecosystems for the first time in waters off Alaska, eastern Canada, Northern Europe, Australia and New Zealand have simultaneously been chronicling widespread damage from fleets of trawlers with gear that has been dropped ever deeper as fisheries in shallower waters are depleted.

"On sonar you can see the trawl tracks, like linear scars in the bottom," said Dr. Jan Helge Fosse, a marine ecologist at the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research.

Often, it has been commercial hook-and-line fishermen who have alerted scientists to the damage from the factory-scale fishing boats, which they see as a threat to their catch. That was the case in Nova Scotia, where reports surfaced several years ago of pairs of trawlers towing bottom-dragging cables between them to systematically topple forests of treelike Paragorgia corals so nothing would snag their gear on later passes.

Biologists have become alarmed by the extent of damage, with surveys in Norway indicating that a third to half of the charted deep reefs show some harm from fishing. This is particularly distressing, scientists say, not only because it could take centuries for the slow-growing corals to regenerate, but also because they contain clues to past climate and ocean-temperature shifts.

Variations in their microscopic growth rings and chemical composition provide the deep-sea equivalent of the climate record in tree rings, and scientists are just beginning to assess this newfound trove of data, said Dr. Michael Risk, a geologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who recently published a paper in Nature on the temperature data in a coral sample.

"The weak point always in every climate model is that we don't know what happens in the oceans, and here we've got this benthic tape recorder," Dr. Risk said. "The problem is, it's being wrecked."

He said a fisherman provided an early hint of the potential locked in the corals. "He hopped a fence at a wharf a couple years ago, went to a trawler and grabbed a specimen out of their net," he said. "He shipped it to me and it turned out it was 500 years old. That fisherman started getting death threats. And that piece was one-and-a-half inches in diameter. We hear stories of corals as big around as your leg. Some of these things may live thousands of years."

At the first international conference on deep sea corals, held this summer in Halifax, Nova Scotia, nearly 100 biologists and geologists compared notes and issued a statement calling for the expansion of marine protected areas to shield deep corals. So far only Norway and Australia have begun to do so.

"Most scientists are rather cautious types, but at the conference there was a very strong feeling that we have to step out from the closet of science and do something to protect them," said Dr. Martin Willison, a biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, who helped organize the conference.

The joint statement said, "It is essential that existing national laws and international conventions for the protection of biodiversity and the regulation of fisheries be extended to cover these unique and vulnerable deep-water habitats."

In a recent interview, Dr. Willison marveled at how knowledge of deep corals had exploded in the last couple of decades. Scientists have now mapped them in the Gulf of Mexico and Mediterranean, along continental shelves on both sides of the Pacific and Atlantic, and from Tasmania to the Arctic.

"I can get under my belt the idea of coral reefs in northern waters," Dr. Willison said, "but to think of them above the Arctic Circle was really quite spectacular."

Shallow-water corals are colonies of two organisms - a plankton-eating polyp and sun-dependent algae called zooxanthellae. Unlike them, the deep corals have only the carnivorous polyps, which use sticky mucus or stinging arms to capture zooplankton meals. This trait has allowed them, over tens of millions of years, to break free of dependence on light.

Fossil evidence shows some similar kinds of deep-sea mounds dating from 400 million years ago, geologists say. Reefs in different places are dominated by different forms. Bulbous colonies of Lophelia pertusa are typical in Northern Europe. The sea bottom off Nova Scotia and eastern Maine is more likely to hold forests of treelike pink Paragorgia corals, nicknamed "bubble gum tree" by Canadian fishermen, and Primnoa, a genus that has finer branches and is more bushlike.

Generally, scientists say, the deep corals seem to thrive in places where a hard rock bottom protrudes from the silt, providing a firm anchor, and a place for plankton to thrive - sites like the waters off the Bay of Fundy or areas around sea mounts, submerged mountains whose peaks reach within a thousand feet or so of the surface. They also tend to grow in places with strong, turbulent bottom currents, like ridges on the continental shelf off Norway that were left behind by the retreating glaciers of the last ice age. Sula Ridge off Norway is one such formation.

One theory is that the corals are binge eaters, relying on a spring rain of zooplankton from the surface that is then swept along the bottom by strong currents, said Dr. Andre Freiwald, a geologist at the University of Týbingen in Germany, who last week began a three-week trip using side-scan sonar to map corals in waters from Norway to Spain.

But there are other theories. Dr. Martin Hovland, a marine geologist, who surveys pipeline routes for Statoil, Norway's state-owned oil company, first mapped some of the country's extensive offshore corals nearly 20 years ago. He said many of the mounds seemed to be over areas of sea floor seeping hydrocarbons, which could be providing sustenance for plankton and creating a food chain supporting the deep reefs.

The diversity of life in the interstices of the coral mounds is dizzying, and just beginning to be appreciated. Several years ago, Andreas Jensen and Rune Frederiksen, from the Zoological Museum of the University of Copenhagen, dissected 40 pounds of coral hunks retrieved from a reef near the Faroe Islands, east of Iceland. They counted 4,626 organisms belonging to 256 species, with 42 other species in loose coral rubble that came up with the pieces.

Nearly 100 species had never been recorded from that region before. And when the scientists compared the creatures with those from coral samples taken from reefs in Norway and the Bay of Biscay, there were only a few overlaps, indicating just how variegated this deep-sea quilt is.

Surprises continue to pop up. At the Halifax conference, Sanford Atwood, a longtime hook-and-line fisherman from The Hawk, a Nova Scotia village, showed some visiting scientists a few of the small, pillow- shaped corals he had collected. They were eight or nine inches across and were called "hard hats" by the locals because of their shape.

"Some experts there said the chances of hauling that up where you said you did is the same chance as finding something in our forest that belongs in a rain forest," said Mr. Atwood, who recently shifted to lobster fishing because of declines in stocks of haddock, cod and other fin fish. He said the destruction from trawling could well be contributing to the drop in fish populations.

At the Hell Hole, a spot favored for generations by Nova Scotia long-liners, he said, the corals were always a well-known feature of the bottom. But now they appear to be mostly knocked down, he said, and the fishing suffers.

"I'm not an expert when it comes to science, but I do know how to go fishing and what fish depend on," he said, adding that it made no sense to let the destruction of the corals continue. "We take and take and take but never give. It's about time we did something for the ocean."

---

Conservation Plan Rocks the Cradle of Fly-Fishing

New York Times
September 20, 2000
By ALAN COWELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/20/world/20BRIT.html

ABBOTTS BARTON, England - Silky smooth, the river flows through pampered banks, and anglers, crouching to cast lines to skittish, savvy trout, like to say that this is their shrine, the place where the arcane arts of fly-fishing were honed one hundred and more years ago. Indeed, this spot where willows weep and the waters sparkle is known not just to Britons but to American fly- fishers too as the cradle of their skills.

Yet throughout the summer this three-mile stretch of the River Itchen, crisscrossing the water meadows of Hampshire near Winchester, has been propelled from understated idyll to burning issue. A local conservation agency struck dread into the hearts of the anglers by decreeing that part of the hallowed Abbotts Barton fishery must be allowed to revert to nature.

No more would riverine weeds be trimmed or bankside reeds cut back to create a perfect habitat for trout - a kind of piscatorial Hilton with just the right mix of sheltering weed and gravel beds. No more would the streamside footpaths be cropped smooth for the benefit of anglers. No more would farmed brown trout be stocked alongside wild brown trout, and no more would voracious pike - which eat most things from ducklings to milder species of fish - be kept far away.

The anglers struck back. Letters were written to The Times of London. Legislators were drafted into the fray. Fly-fishing magazines took serious umbrage. "Cultural vandalism," thundered Total Flyfishing. "Tragedy at Abbotts Barton," said Trout and Salmon. And, for all the episode had echoes of the summertime silly season, there were - as in the stream itself - darker currents.

Was this in essence a class war between the conservationists and the 25 anglers in the Abbotts Barton club - known, in fly-fishing parlance, as rods? The members brave a five- year waiting list and then pay $1,500 a season to fish three days a week six months a year.

Or was it a broader question of where conservation begins and ends. Does it start, for instance, before the time in Roman Britain when the rivers were first harnessed to drive mills, or later, in the mid-17th century, when farmers created a complex of ditches and carrier streams to flood the surrounding water meadows?

Or, yet later, in the late 19th century when, as industry overtook agriculture in Victorian Britain, anglers took over the waters for their sport and managed them as a place devoted to the business of catching trout using bits of feather and hackle tied to barbed hooks?

The answer, perhaps, lies in a particular British reverence for chalk- stream waters like the Itchen and its sister stream in Hampshire, the Test, where fly-fishing has become especially refined as a skill and where access is largely restricted to sometimes snooty clubs and syndicates whose annual fees make the Abbotts Barton water look cheap.

"This can rightly be described as the cradle of dry-fly fishing," with the fly on the surface, said Roy Darlington, 59, who held the lease to the Abbotts Barton fishery for 25 years.

The local Hampshire Wildlife Trust - one of a plethora of environmental agencies - ended Mr. Darlington's tenure this year, giving him until the end of September, when the season closes, to wind up his affairs on the two-thirds of the fishery it owns. The rest is owned by a local family that has not objected to the anglers' regime.

To explain the finer points, which might seem arcane to nonfishers, or even to people satisfied with worms on hooks or plastic lures, Mr. Darlington said that, up till the late 19th century, people who fished with imitation flies did so by casting their lines downstream with the lures submerged.

In 1879, however, a group of English fly-fishers, including Frederic Halford and G. S. Marryat, took over the Abbotts Barton fishery and began experimenting with upstream fishing using imitations that floated on the surface. That caused a revolution in equipment. Then, in 1883, a young lawyer, George Edward Mackenzie Skues, also began fishing here, and noticed that many trout feed not only on hatching insects on the surface but also on larval insects underneath.

He, too, devised new techniques to cast a line upstream, using what are termed nymphs. "Modern fly-fishing has its origins here," Mr. Darlington said.

But the issue is not solely about fishing, says the Hampshire Wildlife Trust, which bought the Abbotts Barton property in 1981 to forestall housing and other development. Rather, the trust argues, it is about what flourishes there, how it is managed and who gets to enjoy it.

"In essence, it is a nature reserve that's been intensively managed for fishing," said Ian Woolley, the trust's chief executive officer. "We would like to see biodiversity and not just for trout."

Indeed, he said, since the trust suspended Mr. Darlington's lease this year, preventing him from intensive management of the river and banks, "there are many varieties of flowers and insects that are there now and weren't there previously."

Mr. Darlington sees it differently. "We argue that it's because of management over 400 years or more that there is biodiversity for the wildlife," he said. And without management, he said, the reeds would clog carrier streams, reducing water flows. The streams would silt up, raising water levels so that the area becomes swampy, with less varied flora and fauna.

Some anglers seem to think that they are being penalized by the trust as if they were seen as spoiled toffs despite their varied, nontoff backgrounds. But Mr. Woolley says that his membership "includes the whole range of classes from the urban poor to the extremely rich."

"We have some millionaires and some people on unemployment," he said. "We want the whole spectrum of society to visit" Abbotts Barton.

A compromise may be in the works, permitting fewer anglers - only 15 - to fish on shorter stretches of managed water while the rest of the fishery is left to nature. Mr. Woolley says the proposal is under consideration as part of a five-year plan for the whole area of streams and water meadows that could, indeed, make parts of the property soggier than now.

"The fishing is one of a whole series of issues," Mr. Woolley said, but "we are not going to walk away and turn it into a bog."

---

USA Today
September 20, 2000
States
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Delaware

Dover - Farmers are warning that they could derail a new clean water initiative. Members of the Delaware Nutrient Management Commission, a panel controlled by poultry farmers, say they will fight new federal regulations to protect waterways from manure and fertilizer runoff. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency unveiled the proposed rules this summer.

Idaho

Boise - Goodman Oil Co., which has nine gas stations in Idaho, is going to court to fight a $736,000 penalty assessed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The fine for 35 alleged violations involving underground fuel tanks is the largest ever sought for such infractions in the Northwest. Goodman denies wrongdoing and rejected an offer to settle out of court.

Illinois

Carlyle - State officials want to develop land about 40 miles east of St. Louis that is also home to the rare Eastern massasauga rattlesnake, a candidate for the endangered species list. Officials say a proposed $1.5 million development that includes cabins and a hotel will provide jobs for economically depressed southern Illinois.

Indiana

Indianapolis - The state Department of Environmental Management didn't have to go far to investigate a mercury spill Beads of the liquid metal were found at the department's office. About 120 employees were evacuated as a precaution, but testing showed no health threat. The mercury came from a device used in a previous cleanup.

Massachusetts

Boston - Rainfall in Massachusetts contains 10 times the level of mercury considered safe by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, according to a report by the National Wildlife Federation. Mercury is linked to learning disabilities and immune system and heart problems. Some of the mercury comes from incinerators and power plants in states to the west.

Minnesota

Ely - The town could face a $137,500 penalty from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for allegedly disposing of sewage sludge containing nitrate levels that exceed federal guidelines. The proposed fine comes after four years of wrangling with state regulators over how to clean up the sludge the city used to spray on land near White Iron Lake. A decision on the fine is expected next month.

Washington

Pasco - A Seattle City Council resolution in favor of removing four Snake River dams has offended communities in eastern Washington, where the dams are located. The Whitman County commission has asked the Seattle council to withdraw its resolution. It was intended to help restore the river's salmon population.

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

IMF Warns the EU of Risks If Delays in Reforms Persist

Wall Street Journal
September 20, 2000
By DAVID WESSEL and PAUL HOFHEINZ Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB969396136135422967.htm

Further Western European ambivalence or uncertainty about admitting Eastern European nations to the European Union could "weaken the commitment to and momentum of reforms" and make the ex-Communist countries "more susceptible to economic or political shocks," the International Monetary Fund warned.

In its semiannual World Economic Outlook, released Tuesday in Prague, the IMF urged the EU to "clarify the terms and conditions of entry" and "establish a more credible and certain timetable" for enlargement.

The World Economic Outlook includes the IMF's forecast for the world economy, but the organization's chief economist, Michael Mussa, on Tuesday cautioned that the outlook is clouded by the recent increase in oil prices. The IMF predicts the world economy will grow by 4.7% this year and 4.2% next year, which would be the strongest two-year period for the global economy in a decade.

Mr. Mussa said the forecast was based on the assumption that oil would cost $26.53 (31.07 euros) a barrel this year and $23 next year. Since the IMF crunched the numbers in August, oil has spiked to around $35 a barrel.

Impact on Inflation

"Assuming that the increase in oil prices does recede," Mr. Mussa said, the IMF now expects growth is more likely to be around 3.75%. "If oil prices were to stay at $35 a barrel, or escalate, the impact on inflation and world growth would be more significant."

The 10 Eastern Europeans countries that are candidates for the EU are: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovak Republic and Slovenia. Before it can admit so many new members, the EU must change voting procedures in the European Commission, restructure its costly farm-subsidy programs and rejigger its system of regional subsidies.

"Delays in these reforms have raised substantial doubts about the conditions under which enlargement will occur, and when full membership can realistically be expected for even the first group of applicants," the IMF said.

The IMF noted that several of the countries are attracting large amounts of Western investment "that, to some degree, may be based on expectations of timely accession." A change in that outlook could disrupt the flow of money to Eastern European economies and, thus, their economic growth.

The 15 current members of the EU said last year they aim to overhaul the body's institutions by January 2003, but they haven't set an entry date for the applicants. German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer publicly mentioned a date for the first time earlier this month, when he said he was hoping Poland would be ready to join by 2005.

Key Driving Force

Any hesitation on the part of the existing EU members poses a threat to progress in Eastern Europe. "The goal of EU accession has become one of the key driving forces behind the adjustment and reform efforts that these countries are actively pursuing," the IMF economists concluded.

A report by two outside economists -- commissioned by the IMF but not endorsed by the agency -- was more blunt. "By postponing reforms, the EU creates uncertainty about the value of membership," said Erik Berglof of the Stockholm School of Economics and Gerard Roland of the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. If Eastern European countries conclude that membership depends more on internal EU politics and less on the progress towards market capitalism, the EU leverage speed reforms will weaken, they said.

The academics also said that the EU shouldn't admit the transition countries as a group or lump countries together simply because of geographic proximity, but instead should provide "incentives for countries to differentiate themselves by accelerating reforms."

Write to David Wessel at david.wessel@wsj.com and Paul Hofheinz at paul.hofheinz@wsj.com

Growing Ex-Communist economies that are candidates to join EU

Population (millions)
Per capita GDP (in US$)

Bulgaria 8.3 1,540
Czech Republic 10.3 4,516
Estonia 1.4 3,694
Hungary 10.1 4,805
Latvia 2.4 2,572
Lithuania 3.4 2,885
Poland 38.7 3,984
Romania 22.4 1,523
Slovak Republic 5.4 3,479
Slovenia 2 10,982

EU Enlargement:
Past & Future
Countries Date joined EU Increase in EU population in % Increase in EU GDP in %

Denmark, Ireland, U.K. 1973 30.7 24.5
Greece 1981 3.5 1.8
Portugal, Spain 1986 16.7 8.4
Austria, Finland, Sweden 1995 7.6 7.6
Turkey -- 17.6 2.2
Ten ex-Communist countries -- 27.9 4.3

Source: International Monetary Fund (World Economic Outlook)
1999 gross domestic product at then-current exchange rates

---

Central Europe's Economies Diverge As They Seek to Join European Union

Wall Street Journal
September 20, 2000
By PAUL HOFHEINZ Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB96939291274411453.htm

Ever since the European Union invited Central Europe's leading countries to prepare to join the euro club, analysts have said that interest rates, inflation and the cost of capital in the two halves of Europe would soon converge. Instead, Central Europe's leading economies seem to be doing more to diverge from each other.

Poland and Hungary are the most notable cases. Both countries are in the forefront of the region's efforts to integrate with Europe, and yet they find themselves facing radically different economic situations. Poland is fighting an epic battle with inflation and has a high current-account deficit. In response, its central bank has raised interest rates four times in the past year. Hungary, by contrast, is fighting moderately rising inflation, but its current account is well under control. Its central bank has lowered interest rates six times in the past year. Interest rates in Poland stand at 19%, compared with 10.75% in Hungary.

The result is a curious choice for investors. Assuming you buy into the "convergence" play -- the notion that bond prices will rise in the EU accession countries as their cost of capital falls to Western European levels -- you now have two remarkably different ways of placing your bet. Ten-year Polish treasurys offer a yield of 12.1% -- or 6.7 percentage points over German government bonds. Hungarian treasurys, meanwhile, offer 8.1% -- a lower yield, but one that comes with markedly less risk thanks to Hungary's sounder economic fundamentals.

'Tremendous Value'

So which is the better deal? The answer depends on how much risk you're willing to assume. Sonja Gibbs, an economist at Nomura in London, thinks the Polish paper is particularly attractive. "There's tremendous value to be had in the Polish bond market," she says, noting that investors seem to have overreacted to Poland's recent round of troubles.

In particular, Ms. Gibbs says, the yield curve for Polish treasurys is around 1.5 percentage points higher than it was just six months ago -- even on what analysts call the long end of the curve. In other words, investors are betting that inflation will still be a problem in Poland 10 years from now, even though the country is committed to getting inflation down to Western European levels within the next four or five years. "Why should people change their expectations [of what will happen 10 years from now] because of what's happening now?" Ms. Gibbs asks. She thinks Polish bond prices will rise when the market sees that it has reacted excessively to the current wave of troubles.

Others, like Merrill Lynch's Andrew Kenningham, think the Hungarian paper is a better buy. Noting that Hungary seems set for a credit upgrade in the near future, he says its euro bonds are nonetheless trading at a yield of 0.14 percentage point over their Polish equivalents. "It's the opposite of what you would expect," he says. "Hungarian bonds shouldn't be trading [at a higher yield than] Poland."

Effect of Euro

Who is right? At a glance, the Polish paper offers better terms. But when you buy zloty-denominated debt, you are also making a bet that the Polish government and central bank will be able to gain control of the current-account deficit -- now 7.2% of gross domestic product -- and 11.6% inflation without having to let the zloty depreciate. Some economists, like Salomon Smith Barney's Wike Groenenberg, predict that this feat will be difficult to pull off. She calculates that Poland might need to let its currency slip some 10% on a trade-weighted basis in order to help service the country's current-account deficit.

At the end of the day, the profitability of Central European bonds probably will be determined less by the economic situation in the countries themselves than by the euro's relationship to the dollar. For better or worse, the markets are treating Central Europe's leading currencies as if they already were part of the euro zone. As a result, Central Europe's leading currencies have lost much of their value against the dollar as the euro grows more and more anemic.

The result is a strange anomaly: Some dollar-based investors in Poland have made profits in zloty terms, but lost money in dollar terms. Given the fact that most emerging-market fund managers still count their profits in dollars, euro weakness has sometimes turned what ought to have been gains into net losses.

But, Nomura's Ms. Gibbs points out that if you can ignore the past, the weakened euro might hold certain advantages for the future. "It's hard to see how the zloty might weaken against the euro," she says, though she adds, "These are small, thinly traded currencies. It doesn't take much to move them around."

Write to Paul Hofheinz at paul.hofheinz@wsj.com.

-------

The Industry Standard
September 18, 2000
International News Briefs
By Industry Standard Staff
http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,18480,00.html?partner=xdrive

NOT GOOD ENOUGH: The United States plans to pursue World Trade Organization action against Mexico over telecommunications competition, despite new measures to rein in the country's telephone giant, Telefonos de Mexico. Regulators will force the telco, also known as Telmex, to cut the rates it charges other companies to hook into its vast local network. But Washington said that was not enough to give U.S. firms a better chance to compete in Mexico.

---

Persistent Poverty

Washington Post
Wednesday, September 20, 2000 ; A33
By Robert J. Samuelson
http://washingtonpost.com/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+FTContentServer?pagename=wpni/print&articleid=A40345-2000Sep19

The World Bank recently issued a massive report on global poverty. The aim seems to have been to demonstrate that big reductions are possible, but the impression that emerges from the 335 pages of charts and text is just the opposite: Large parts of the world seem impervious to sustained, rapid economic growth; globalization's reach is limited. The question of why will preoccupy the economic and finance ministers now gathering in Prague for the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Plenty of countries have dramatically reduced poverty. China is the most obvious example. Since 1980, its economy has grown about 10 percent a year. By the World Bank's count, the number of desperately poor (defined as those living on $1 a day or less) has dropped by more than 200 million since 1978.

The frustration is that so many other countries can't--or won't--adopt policies that do the same. The World Bank report contains one stunning table that illustrates the problem. It shows poverty changes in different regions between 1987 and 1998. (Again, poverty is defined as the share of population living on $1 a day or less). Here are the figures:

Population in Poverty (in percent)
1987
1998

East Asia (including China)
27
15

Latin America/Caribbean
15
16

South Asia (India, Pakistan etc.)
45
40

Sub-Saharan Africa
47
46

TOTAL DEVELOPING WORLD
28
24

The table qualifies the glowing claims for globalization. Trade, technology and pro-market economic policies are supposedly beating back poverty. Well, not yet. The World Bank figures that 1.2 billion people still live on $1 a day or less.

Outside East Asia, little progress occurred in the past decade. The advances in Asia came despite the region's 1997-98 financial crisis that hurt some countries (Indonesia, most notably). Indeed, the figures actually make things look better than they are. In South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh), the share of people in poverty dropped slightly. But population growth meant that the number of people in poverty rose almost 50 million. And, in the former Soviet bloc (not shown), the share of people in poverty rose from less than 1 percent to 5 percent.

What happened?

Globalization's opponents say that the benefits of growth didn't flow to the poorest of the poor. This argument has glib appeal: greedy multinational companies and corrupt political and economic elites are grabbing all the gains. The trouble is that it's untrue. The World Bank has studied the relation between overall economic growth and poverty reduction in the 1980s and 1990s. It concludes: "In the vast majority of cases growth led to rising consumption in the poorest fifth of the population, while economic decline led to falling consumption."

This is common sense. To cut poverty, countries have to get richer--and the effects do trickle down.

Globalization's boosters claim it's been stymied: Too many countries abstained from reforms--or botched them. True. Africa largely missed the process. In Russia, the dismantling of the command-and-control economy enriched local elites through corrupt "privatization" programs. The overall economy slumped, even as a blessed few profited. But these facts beg the basic questions. Why did some countries reject reforms? Why did they fail elsewhere? Much of Latin America, for example, abandoned longstanding policies of trade protectionism and favoritism for local companies. Between 1985 and 1996, the average tariff in Latin America fell from 50 percent to 10 percent. The results so far have been modest.

What explains the contrasts?

Perhaps culture. The gospel of capitalism presumes that human nature is constant. Given the proper incentives--the ability to profit from hard work and risk taking--people will strive. Maybe not.

In a recent book entitled "Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress," scholars from the United States, Africa and Latin America argue that strong social or moral values predispose some peoples for and against economic growth. Among some, corruption is an accepted way of advancement. Culture affects politics, and some societies--as a result of history, tradition, religion--can't easily adopt capitalist attitudes, institutions and policies. Even when they try, they often fail because it's so unnatural.

"Competition is central to the success of enterprise, the politician, the intellectual [and] the professional," writes Mariano Grondona, an Argentine political scientist and columnist. "In resistant societies, competition is condemned as a form of aggression." Daniel Etounga-Manguelle, a development specialist from Cameroon, contends that Africa suffers from a reverence for its history. "In traditional African society, which exalts the glorious past of ancestors through tales and fables, nothing is done to prepare for the future," he writes.

Once stated, culture's impact seems obvious. Yet, caveats apply. Culture, though deep, is not immutable. It's changed by experience. Since the late 1980s, India has gradually shifted from protectionism and state control toward pro-market policies. It has raised annual economic growth to about 6 percent. Nicholas Stern, chief economist of the World Bank, expects this will soon produce noticeable drops in poverty.

No one likes to talk about culture, because it raises two contradictory objections. The first is that the West (mainly the United States) is foisting its values on others in the name of economic growth. The second is that some cultures perpetuate economic inferiority or poverty. But culture will not vanish because it's inconvenient. It's constantly colliding with rampant global capitalism. This is a defining conflict of the new century.

---

Forgiving Debts of the Poor

Washington Post
Wednesday, September 20, 2000 ; A33
By Bernard Cardinal Law
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40363-2000Sep19.html

For many religious believers, the year 2000 is a Jubilee Year, a time not just to celebrate the millennium but to make new beginnings and to right old wrongs. In the Old Testament, Jubilee called in particular for a fresh start for the poor, for reestablishing justice and equity. In the spirit of the Jubilee, the Archdiocese of Boston recently forgave $28 million of debts, owed mostly by the 30 poorest parishes. This step is similar to actions by other dioceses and is linked to Pope John Paul II's urgent call for debt relief for poor countries during this year.

More than 30 very poor countries owe well over $100 billion, most to other governments and international organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Like the Holy Father and other religious leaders, many governments, including our own, many prominent economists and policymakers and key members of Congress have called on the wealthiest nations to reduce this crushing debt burden of the poorest.

In the next few weeks, Congress will decide whether the United States will do its small share. This is the last chance to make the year 2000 a time of hope for millions of the world's poorest people. It will take $435 million. This is an amount large enough to make an important difference to many of the poorest countries, but a tiny three-hundredths of one percent of the federal budget. This small amount would fund two years of the U.S. commitment to the debt relief program approved by the G-7 leaders last year at Cologne, Germany. It is an amount that would encourage other countries holding much more debt than the United States to come forward with their much larger share of the cost of the program.

Unfortunately, it is also an amount that Congress so far has been unwilling to provide.

I find it very difficult to explain to Catholic bishops, missionaries and relief workers in Africa and Latin America why the United States, blessed with such wonderful resources and such a powerful economy, is reluctant to commit such a relatively small amount. They know our budget has a surplus projected to reach trillions of dollars over the next decade. Nor do I have an answer to the pope's appeal. He asked many months ago: "[Why is] progress in resolving the debt problem . . . still so slow? Why so many hesitations? Why the difficulty in providing the funds needed even for already-agreed initiatives? It is the poor who pay the cost of indecision and delay."

A U.S. failure to fulfill its Cologne pledge would be devastating. If the United States walks away from its commitment, others will surely follow, thus jeopardizing the whole program. Already major debt relief for Bolivia and Honduras is being held up for lack of U.S. funding. The possibility that this initiative will fail is something that our church partners in Africa and Latin America dread to contemplate. Through a host of church institutions, from relief and development programs to hospitals and schools, they are with the poorest of the poor and see every day in countless ways the practical consequences of debt.

They know that debt relief is not a panacea. It alone will not end poverty. Poverty is much too complex and deep-seated for that. They know that it must be tackled first by their own governments and people working together on a variety of fronts for the common good. Yet their people are too poor to do it alone. Unless the debt burden is sharply reduced, it will continue to drain resources needed for education, health and other essential investments, and make the task of poverty reduction immensely more difficult.

A few weeks ago, the Senate and the House were set to approve only very small amounts for poor-country debt relief. Then something most heartening occurred during the House floor debate on the foreign aid bill. Members from both sides of the aisle stood up to press for much more substantial relief.

Rep. John Kasich, chairman of the Budget Committee, argued that, with our "unprecedented economic power, it does not make any sense to not share some of the bounty that we have with those that have little." Rep. Spencer Bachus, the Alabama Republican, explained: "[I]t is not a total solution to poverty, to hunger, to disease; but it is the first step. It is a necessary step. It is where the journey should begin to free these countries of the burden of debt, the chains of poverty, the shackles of despair."

In the end the House voted to triple funding for debt relief, but this is still only about half what is needed. I hope, nevertheless, that the momentum generated by the signs of substantial bipartisan support for generous funding will translate into the full appropriation of $435 million. With the crowded agenda and the rush to adjourn, funding for debt relief could get pushed aside. I hope that this does not happen. My fervent prayer is that, when Congress adjourns, we will be able to say to the people of Africa and Latin America: "Yes, our country, which has been blessed with so much, will act, in the spirit of Jubilee, to allow a fresh start for the poorest of the poor in your country."

The writer is Catholic archbishop of Boston and chairman of the U.S. Catholic Conference's Committee on International Policy.

-------- spying

Blast near London spy complex investigated

USA Today
09/20/00
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/nwswed04.htm

LONDON (AP) - Firefighters and witnesses said at least one possible explosion went off late Wednesday near the headquarters of the MI6 intelligence service in central London. Emergency officials reported no casualties.

The blast reportedly took place in the area of the MI6 building, close to Vauxhall Bridge, which crosses the Thames River not far from the Houses of Parliament.

The London Ambulance Service, which sent crews to the scene, said there had been no reports of any casualties 90 minutes after the reported blast. ''I think an hour and a half later it is safe to assume there are none,'' a spokesman said.

A report overheard on the police radio said everyone in the building had been accounted for and that there were no injuries.

A London Fire Brigade spokesman said crews were called to the Vauxhall Cross area on the south bank of the River Thames at 9:25 p.m., and that the incident was believed to be an explosion.

Police, who said only that they were investigating two loud bangs, immediately closed off the area. The building looked intact from a distance of several hundred yards, but witness James Trott, 42, said there was shattered glass on the river side of the building.

The MI6 headquarters, a big modern structure, was featured in the James Bond movie ''The World is not Enough'' and in one scene was shown being blown up by a terrorist bomb.

''We just heard two God-almighty bangs, a loud one first, and then another one,'' Theresa Harding, 68, who lives nearby, said. ''We honestly thought it was fireworks.''

One witness, Andrew Preece, told BBC News 24 he was driving home when he saw a flash of light coming from the top of the MI6 building.

''It looked as of it was internal from the center of the building but the flash of light was from the top of the building,'' he said.''It was followed by a large bang and the ground seemed to shake and my car was shaking.''

Witness Alex Frank said he was in his his bedroom across a railway from the building when he heard two explosions.

''I heard two distinct explosions and massive white clouds over the railway tracks,'' he said. ''There were definitely two explosions of the same strength. They were loud enough to shake the building I'm living in.''

The Foreign Office, which is responsible for MI6, said it was aware of the incident but had no details.

----

Pentagon Admits on Deutch Case

By Larry Margasak
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, Sept. 20, 2000
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000920/aponline190818_000.htm

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon acknowledged Wednesday that it had access in 1998 to computer files that would have permitted the agency to assess the damage of classified information entered on unsecured computers by former CIA Director John Deutch.

The Pentagon, which only began its investigation in February, initially blamed the delay on a lack of access to the documents or computer files that contained the secrets.

But on Wednesday, the Pentagon confirmed that the CIA offered to provide the relevant documents well before that - an offer that Defense Department investigators did not accept.

"It indeed appears an offer was made by CIA investigators to a DOD investigator in June of 1998 to examine information ... that the CIA had gathered in its investigation of Dr. Deutch," Rear Adm. Craig Quigley said. "That offer was declined by DOD investigators without ever informing senior leadership within DOD of the offer."

Quigley commented after a rare public dissent by the CIA, in which the spokesman for the spy agency disputed the Pentagon's original explanation this week for why it waited nearly two years to begin investigating Deutch's security lapses.

Deutch entered classified defense as well as intelligence information on his unsecured computers.

The Pentagon initially blamed the delay on the fact that it did not have access to the documents or computer files that contained the secrets.

CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said Wednesday the spy agency offered in June 1998 to provide the Pentagon access to Deutch's computer journals containing the classified information, but defense officials never accepted.

Informed of the CIA's statement, Quigley told The Associated Press the Pentagon's latest version of events. He said that the Pentagon investigators declined the offer because "in their professional judgment, no productive purpose would be served by starting a separate effort" parallel to the ongoing CIA probe.

"Our investigators had confidence in their counterparts over at CIA," he said.

Harlow said Wednesday, "Our records show that the CIA did offer them access on June 17, 1998, to the journals that Deutch was working on. The journals were the parts that would have been of interest to DOD. We did offer them access to that at the time. They didn't pick up on it at that time."

Harlow added that the Pentagon was briefed in August 1999 on the spy agency's findings about Deutch's handling of classified information.

But, he said, defense officials "didn't request the underlying documents until February 2000."

The AP reported Monday that internal Defense Department memos show that in summer 1998 the CIA urged the Pentagon to conduct a damage assessment because of Deutch's security lapses.

Those memos, however, did not mention the CIA's offer to provide the Pentagon with the computer files relevant to the military data.

On Tuesday, Quigley, a spokesman for Secretary of Defense William Cohen, said, "This was all about a potential compromise of classified information on computers that we did not have in our possession.

"It's not clear to me how we would have proceeded without reinventing a lot of the effort that CIA investigators were doing at the very same time frame."

Quigley said the Pentagon began its probe February, only after the CIA provided the materials from its investigation.

Deutch was a former top Pentagon official before moving to the CIA, where he was director from May 1995 to December 1996. Now a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Deutch has apologized for his behavior.

Harlow said that in June 1998, the CIA asked for help from the Pentagon and at the same time, offered the journals with classified defense information. The spy agency wanted Deutch's e-mails and access to his DOD computer accounts.

"They made a determination to wait until our inspector general report was completed," Harlow said.

Quigley said he could not estimate when the Pentagon's investigation would be completed.

-------- activists

Philadelphia's message on political protest

Philadelphia Inquirer
Wednesday, September 20, 2000
Letters
http://web.philly.com/content/inquirer/2000/09/20/opinion/CORN20.htm

Is there anything that would get you to stop traffic?

Of course there is. Whether it's to Free Mumia or secure justice for slain Police Officer Daniel Faulkner, each one of us feels strongly enough about something to get out there and try to get the message across. Except now, after what happened after the Republican convention (Inquirer, Sept. 16), we've all got more to think about.

That's because we've learned that, in Philadelphia, political protest comes with a heavy price. Arrested on a misdemeanor, you may spend days in jail before your arraignment and then receive bail in the six figures. Use your house to make up some signs (or puppets) for a protest, and the police may get a friendly judge to give them a warrant to come and take it all away. And if you become a leader of your cause, you risk being picked up on sight and your cell phone marked as an "instrument of crime."

Your rights under the Eighth, Fourth and First amendments mean nothing in this city. (Those are the ones that bar excessive bail, illegal searches and seizures, and the abridgment of free speech.) Police Commissioner John F. Timoney or District Attorney Lynne Abraham can do pretty much whatever they want to you. And until we are ready to stand up for everyone's rights, even those with whom we passionately disagree, then things will never get any better.

What we must all admit now is that the rules change in the justice system when politics are involved. And that should upset you, whatever your views on the issues.

If anybody thinks that the message sent by the police and the District Attorney's Office is just meant for some kids dressed in black and overturning newspaper boxes, they are dead wrong. Their message is meant for you. And if you think twice now before you pick up a sign or sit down in the street to protest injustice, then that message has gotten through.

Daniel Patrick Touey
Philadelphia

---

New Protests on Fuel Costs Tie Up Europe

New York Times
September 20, 2000
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/20/world/20EURO.html

LONDON, Sept. 19 - Truckers, farmers and fishermen staged fuel-price protests from the North Sea to the Mediterranean today as divisions deepened among European governments on how to deal with the continuing unrest.

Traffic was disrupted in Spain, Germany and Sweden. In Ireland, most of the country's fishermen tethered their boats in a 24-hour work stoppage.

European Union transport ministers moved the crisis meeting planned for Wednesday from Brussels to Luxembourg, acting on fears that truckers might repeat protests that brought the Belgian capital to a standstill last week.

Ministers plan to discuss measures to ease the hardship that high fuel prices inflict on agriculture, trucking and fisheries.

Germany criticized other European governments for caving in to demands from truck drivers and farmers for cuts in fuel taxes as oil prices hover near 10-year highs.

"It is not very sensible to react with tax cuts in such a situation," said Ernst Welteke, head of the German central bank, to reporters in Berlin.

A senior official in Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's Social Democrat- Green coalition - which has resisted calls to abandon plans to raise so- called "ecology taxes" - also lambasted the concessions.

A senior German government official said Mr. Schröder wanted to see European governments coordinate their responses to the higher cost of oil, which has become tied up with concerns about the slump in the euro against the dollar.

But the European Commission warned that it would take legal action against member governments if their actions to support truckers, farmers or other sectors broke European Union rules on state aid.

France cut taxes on diesel fuel by 15 percent after a week of protests by haulers and farmers. Italy averted protests by temporarily cutting fuel taxes and speeding up rebates on earlier fuel tax reductions.

Spain appeared hardest hit by the protests today. An estimated 100,000 farmers drove tractors through Madrid and dozens of other Spanish cities, warning of more aggressive action if there is no agreement to compensate them for higher fuel costs by October.

---

Fishermen, farmers block fuel shipments

USA Today
09/20/00- Updated 08:04 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/nw1.htm#bomb

MADRID, Spain - Thousands of fishermen and farmers throughout Spain shut down seaports, surrounded wholesale fish markets and blockaded fuel distribution centers Wednesday to protest rising fuel costs. Almost 200 farmers on tractors and in trucks shut off fuel delivery to parts of southern and eastern Spain when they surrounded three fuel distribution centers early Wednesday. The blockade, which shuts out even passenger ferries, will ''interfere with boat traffic for as long as we can hold out,'' said Pep Bonnin, spokesman for the Mallorcan Fisherman's Guild. ''We're at the edge of an economic abyss.'' Talks were continuing Wednesday between the government and a coalition of truckers, farmers and fishermen.

---

Greens stage sit-in at Gore campaign office in oil protest

Washington Times
September 20, 2000
By Bill Sammon THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://208.246.212.80/national/default-20009200200.htm

Hundreds of environmentalists yesterday commandeered Al Gore's campaign headquarters in Olympia, Wash., to protest the vice president's ties to Occidental Petroleum, which plans to drill for oil on sacred Indian grounds.

Ten protesters were arrested during the seven-and-a-half-hour standoff, police said. No injuries were reported, although the Gore campaign accused protesters of breaking windows.

It was the second time this year that police arrested environmentalists protesting Mr. Gore's ties to Occidental. During the primary season, eight persons were jailed in New Hampshire after disrupting a Gore event by demanding he sever ties to the oil giant.

Yesterday's protest began around noon when a small group of environmentalists entered the warehouse-style building that houses Mr. Gore's local campaign in Olympia.

"As the afternoon wore on, the group swelled to about 200," said Gore spokeswoman Maria Meier. "Some of them chose to get violent. I don't know if that was because cameras showed up, but I understand some windows were broken."

Environmentalist Kim Marks insisted she and the protesters were nonviolent, in the tradition of the U'wa Indians. "We just took over Al Gore's headquarters office," she told The Washington Times by phone from inside the campaign building.

The protesters were upset about Occidental's plans to drill on lands claimed by U'wa Indians in Colombia. Mr. Gore controls at least half a million dollars worth of Occidental stock.

"We're not leaving until Occidental Petroleum is off their land and until the Colombian military as well is off their land," Miss Marks vowed. "We're staying here until at least Al Gore takes some sort of stand."

At one point, police gave the demonstrators a choice - leave or be arrested. Most of them promptly exited the building, although about 10 remained, making their bodies go limp so that it was difficult for police to haul them outside.

For the last several hours of the standoff, only three demonstrators remained inside Gore headquarters. They fastened U-shaped bicycle locks around their necks and sat back-to-back, locked to each other in such a way that police found it difficult to move them.

"If they tried to move any one of them, they would risk breaking the others' necks," Miss Marks explained.

Finally, shortly after 7:30 p.m. local time, police managed to evict the final three protesters, who were given stern warnings but not arrested.

Miss Marks said the protest was designed to call attention to Mr. Gore's inaction on the U'wa Indian standoff. The tribe has threatened to commit mass suicide if Occidental proceeds with plans to drill on lands the Indians consider sacred.

But Miss Meier said the vice president has already taken action by asking Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright earlier this summer to make sure the rights of the U'wa Indians were not being trampled.

"Beyond that, to what level does a politician involve himself in business decisions?" she asked.

Besides, Miss Meier said, the vice president does not actually own the Gore family's Occidental stock, which is in a trust for his mother.

"He does not own stock in Occidental," Miss Meier emphasized.

That did not satisfy Miss Marks.

"That's not the type of president that we want," she said. "We want somebody who can take a leadership role. He's supposed to be the green candidate, the environmental candidate. As an absolute bare minimum, he needs to denounce -publicly, not privately - Occidental's goals in Colombia."

• Robert Stacy McCain contributed to this report.

---

Heart Set For Benefit With Wynonna, Sheryl Crow, Cyndi Lauper, And Others

Launch.com
(9/20/00, 10 a.m. ET)
http://www.launch.com/Features/fs_Start/?contentType=NEWS&contentId=8076

Nancy Wilson will regroup with sister Ann under the Heart moniker next month to play a couple of high-profile benefit concerts in the Los Angeles area. "We are playing on October 2 for a multiple sclerosis benefit in Century City, and then 12th of October we are playing at the Wiltern for a thing called Girls With Guitars, which is benefiting breast cancer research," she tells LAUNCH.

The show, which is officially titled Women Rock!: Girls & Guitars, is being staged by Lifetime Television and Marie Claire magazine, and will be taped to air on Lifetime on October 22 at 8 p.m. ET/PT. The lineup also features Melissa Etheridge and Amy Grant, who will join the other artists on the bill for some musical collaborations.

Wilson gives LAUNCH a preview of some of the pairings in the works. "Me and Ann are going to do a song, and then I think Ann and Wynonna Judd are probably going to do a duet. I'll probably do a duet with Sheryl Crow, and then Cyndi Lauper will be there, who I'm really excited to see."

Wilson is currently making the rounds promoting Almost Famous, the film loosely based on the teen years of her real-life husband, director/writer/producer Cameron Crowe. Wilson wrote the score and some of the songs in the movie that are credited to the fictitious band Stillwater.

-- Craig Rosen, Los Angeles

Got news tips, comments, or questions? Send them to newstips@launch.com

---

Diamond Rio Charity Golf Tournament Breaks Its Record

Launch.com
9/19/00, 5 p.m. ET)
http://www.launch.com/Features/fs_Start/?contentType=NEWS&contentId=8068

Diamond Rio's recent celebrity golf tournament in Nashville raised more than $230,000 for the American Lung Association's asthma education program. This is the ninth consecutive year that the award-winning group has hosted the event, and this was their top-grossing year yet. Contributions from sponsors raised more money than the group anticipated, as lead singer <B>Marty Roe</B> tells LAUNCH, "We've been real fortunate and had a lot of corporate friends that have helped out, and our celebrity friends, too. It's getting bigger every year."

http://www.launch.com/music/artistpage/1,,1007203,00.html

Highlights from the tournament will be featured in a one-hour special on the Golf channel on December 19. Some celebrity participants in this year's tournament included Cledus T. Judd, Larry Stewart (Restless Heart), comedian Henry Cho, and Opry legends Jimmy C. Newman, Billy Walker, and Charlie Walke.

Also in attendance was Congresswoman Mary Bono (widow of Sonny Bono), who is currently dating Diamond Rio drummer Brian Prout.

-- Margy Holland, Nashville

Got news tips, comments, or questions? Send them to newstips@launch.com

-------

NucNews - Please circulate -- help educate! - http://prop1.org

1. AIRBORNE LASER ON SCHEDULE
From: "Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space" <globalnet@mindspring.com>

2. Witness list for House Judiciary Hearing 9/21 on Nuclear Weapons Compensation
From: easlavin@aol.com

3. LIVE AUDIO OF JUDICIARY HEARING 9/21 9AM EDT
From: easlavin@aol.com

4. Check out House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde's Press Release
From: easlavin@aol.com

5. A $100k bribe bill with no health care is not a "legacy"
From: easlavin@aol.com

6. SPACE COMMAND CELEBRATES
From: "Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space" <globalnet@mindspring.com>

7. Sick workers and residents will win next year
From: easlavin@aol.com

8. Nuclear labs become targets of e-mailed humor (1 of 2)
From: Steve Wagner <hanforddownwinder@yahoo.com>

9. Security scare grist for e-mailers' mills (2 of 2)
From: Steve Wagner <hanforddownwinder@yahoo.com>

10. Cancer Rise Linked to Power Lines
From: ivan buchbinder <pentaske@memes.com>

11. CRAC-2 Report, HORRORS At Every Commercial Nuke Plant InThe USA
From: "Bill Smirnow" <smirnowb@ix.netcom.com>

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

Message: 1
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: "Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space" <globalnet@mindspring.com>

AIRBORNE LASER ON SCHEDULE
Anti-missile laser plane project on schedule
United Press International
Tuesday, 19 September 2000

SEATTLE, Sept. 19 (UPI) -- A futuristic plan to arm a Boeing 747 with an anti-missile laser weapon continued on schedule Tuesday with modifications to the massive aircraft more than half completed.

Team ABL (Airborne Laser), which consists of defense contractors Boeing, Lockheed Martin and TRW, said Tuesday that crews at Boeing's Wichita, Kansas facility were continuing to work on the plane's electrical system and fuselage supports as well as the location on the nose where the laser will be mounted.

"You can see the nose modification where we will install the turret in about a year and a half. It is being made by Lockheed Martin and will weigh about 14,000 pounds," said Brad Gorsuch, the ABL project manager at the Wichita facility.

After a year of testing and once in the air in 2003, the 747 should be capable of shooting down incoming missiles such as the Soviet-built Scud that was used by Iraq during the Gulf War. The ABL is designed to home in on missiles shortly after they are launched and blow them out of the sky above their launch sites.

The aircraft is on schedule for completion in January 2002, Gorsuch said. It will undergo flight tests at Edwards Air Force Base in California, including an attempt to shoot down a live missile sometime in 2003.

"For the magnitude of the modification involved, we are doing an outstanding job," Gorsuch said. "We have some schedule issues because of the magnitude of the work, but we'll work through those and we're going to deliver this airplane on time in January 2002."

The Air Force plans to eventually have seven ABL planes that can be quickly flown to hot spots anywhere in the world.
--
Bruce K. Gagnon Coordinator Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space PO Box 90083 Gainesville, FL. 32607 (352) 337-9274 http://www.space4peace.org globalnet@mindspring.com

----------

Message: 2
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: easlavin@aol.com

Witness list for House Judiciary Hearing 9/21 on Nuclear Weapons Compensation

WITNESS LIST COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY SUBCOMMITTEE ON IMMIGRATION AND CLAIMS Legislative hearing on H.R. 675, H.R. 3418, H.R. 3478, H.R. 3495, H.R. 4263, and H.R. 4398, dealing with compensation for beryllium-related illnesses September 21, 2000 9:00 a.m. 2237 RHOB

Panel I
Senator George Voinovich
Senator Edward Kennedy
Congressman Paul Kanjorski
Congressman Marcy Kaptur
Congressman Ted Strickland
Congressman Ed Whitfield
Congressman Mark Udall
Congressman Zach Wamp
Congressman Tom Udall

Panel II
The Honorable Bill Richardson, Secretary, U.S. Department of Energy
Dr. David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of the Office of Environment Safety and Health, U.S. Department of Energy

Panel III
Lisa Ledwidge, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research
Steve Markowitz, Director, Center for the Biology of Natural Systems
Richard D. Miller, Policy Analyst, Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers International Union
Ken Rosenman, M.D., Michigan State University
Dan Guttman, Esquire, Former Executive Director, President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments
Lawrence Repsher, M.D.

Panel IV
Ann Orrick of Knoxville, Tennessee
Sam Ray of Lucasville, Ohio
Clara Harding of Paducah, Kentucky
Raymond Slaughter of Las Vegas, Nevada
Pete Lopez of Amarillo, Texas

----------

Message: 3
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: easlavin@aol.com

LIVE AUDIO OF JUDICIARY HEARING 9/21 9AM EDT

http://www.house.gov/judiciary/schedule.htm
Committee on the Judiciary - Hearing Schedule
For live audio of the 9/21 9AM Judiciary Committee compnesation hearing, click here and then click again on the words LIVE AUDIO under the hearing title. Then hope it works.

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

Message: 4
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: easlavin@aol.com

Check out House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde's Press Release

http://www.house.gov/judiciary/na092000.htm
09/20/00
Committee on the Judiciary - News Advisory</A>

-----------

Message: 5
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: easlavin@aol.com

A $100k bribe bill with no health care is not a "legacy"

In a message dated 9/20/00 7:43:41 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Libby_Wood@thompson.senate.gov writes:

Ed, Glenn et al --
I feel the need to correct a misstatement at the bottom of this e-mail message. The BIPARTISAN Thompson(R)/Bingaman(D) amendment passed unanimously by the Senate proposed $200K and medical benefits, OR lost wages and medical benefits -- the workers' choice. The DOE proposal

-- which was never formally sent to Congress as a legislative proposal

-- had a $100K lump sum and NO medical benefits OR lost wages and medical benefits. I recognize that not everyone shares my boss's desire (sic) to keep politics out (sic) of this and just do what's right (sic) for the workers, but at least everyone should have the facts straight.

Dear Libby:

Neither you nor your boss "have the facts straight," to use your interesting turn of phrase. The DOE-Thompson bill passed "unanimously" because there was no voice vote and Senators did not know what they were doing -- not unprecedented in a body for too long run more on the fiction of "unanimous consent" (and individual deals with special interests like those that employed Senator Thompson's son, e.g., Lockheed) than with Gladstone's ideal of our United States Senate being the "greatest deliberative body in the world." Shame on you. You and United States Senator Fred Dalton Thompson have only answered one (1) of the following 50 questions, posed in June. I do respect your candor in admitting the answer to question to: the DOE-Thompson bill was written by DOE (question 2). As a result, no one believes that you and Senator Fred Thompson have the best interests of the workers in line.

Talking "straight," indeed: how novel for someone who never returned my phone calls, never thanked people for testifying, refused to allow live testimony critical of DOE and ran a dog-and-pony show in favor of DOE's legislation, introduced in 1999, which Senator Thompson did not inform sick workers about before, during or after the hearing. Contrary to your erroneous assertions, the DOE's proposals were repeatedly introduced into Congress, mechanically, by both Republicans and Democrats, in various metastasized forms, throughout the 106th Congress -- including but not limited to Senator Thompson's awful bill, which you yourself admittedly to sick Oak Ridge workers that DOE had drafted.

Don't insult our intelligence, Ms. Wood. DOE and its contractors have been calling the shots. Senator Thompson and you have been unjust environmental stewards, betraying Tennessee workers and the chickens are coming home to roost.

I hereby challenge you and United States Senator Fred Dalton Thompson to a public debate, anytime, anywhere. Your sins have found you out.

The DOE-Thompson bill is a proverbial "dog with fleas." The putative payout was even made taxable for DOE's victims, but only after the fact of the Senate's "unanimous" passage. Please let's have some answers by 9 AM tomorrow morning, ma'am -- you and Senator Thompson have had some over three months since June to answer the following 54 questions:

54 Questions for Senator Fred Dalton Thompson on Amendment 3250 to S.2549

June 10/12 2000

Here are fifty questions to ask Senator Fred Dalton Thompson in letters, faxes, E-mails, telegrams, phone calls, personal visits, press conferences, fundraisers, etc. (You may also wish to address them to the Senate cosponsors, who were apparently frustrated by Thompson's refusal to compromise on the Amendment.)

1. Why are there no Congressional findings and purposes? Isn't that customary, particularly in a piece of reform legislation? Why was this left out?

2. This Amendment reads like a rewrite of DOE's bad bill -- who drafted the Amendment? Was the proposed Nuclear Weapons Workers, Veterans and Residents Compensation and Health Act (NWWVARCHA) ever even considered? See http://www.downwinders.org/summary.htm and http://www.downwinders.org/new_draft.htm .

3. Why didn't Senator Thompson offer the Voinovich-Kennedy bill as a floor amendment and put it to a vote?

4. Why are there no action-forcing deadline mechanisms, as in the Voinovich-Kennedy bill, where claims are automatically granted if not denied by the deadlines?

5. Why are federal court lawsuits required to obtain discovery for beryllium victims? This is expensive, time-consuming and cumbersome -- the Department of Labor Office of Administrative Law Judges has its own discovery rules.

6. Why must beryllium victims wait 180 days before commencing a lawsuit to compel discovery? No such forced delays exist in DOL compensation litigation.

7. Why is the only mention of the word "court" in the entire bill in connection with beryllium workers having to sue to obtain discovery? Why aren't existing DOL administrative law judges used to decide cases with independence?

8. Why is there no provision for an award of reasonable attorney fees, other than for a lawsuit seeking discovery in federal court?

9. Why is there no ban on attorney solicitation, as there is in the Black Lung bill?

10. Why is there no ban on contingency fees, and a provision for attorney fees at reasonable hourly rates, as in Black Lung legislation?

11. Why are there no penalties for solicitation and contingency fees, as in the Black Lung legislation?

12. Why are there no penalties for perjury and document withholding by DOE and its contractors?

13. Why does the bill not say that it is remedial and to be liberally construed? Why do the words reform, remedial or liberal construction nowhere appear in the legislation?

14. Why is there no apology to workers DOE made sick -- as in Rep. Kanjorski's bill, filed some 18 months ago?

15. Why does the bill involve DOE deciding who to compensate for its own toxic chemicals?

16. Isn't that a conflict of interest to involve DOE in any way deciding who gets compensated?

17. Why are victims of cyanide, heavy metals and other toxicants left to the tender mercies of state workers' compensation systems?

18. Why isn't there funding of the compensation through a polluters-pay provision, requiring DOE contractors to pay for what they have done through their recklessness?

19. What discussions were had by Senator Thompson's office with Lockheed, DOE, insurance companies and other special interests?

20. Did Senator Thompson ever consider any of the testimony from his March 22, 2000 hearing in drafting the bill? Does he think this bill will help any of those witnesses? Why were the witnesses who filed written testimony with Senator Thompson not sent letters of thanks (common Congressional courtesy)?

21. Why were Senator Thompson's hearings so limited in duration and scope? Why were non-DOE witnesses limited to only five or ten minutes? Why were whistleblower and criminal law issues excluded from the hearing?

22. Why is there no provision in Senator Thompson's bill regarding investigation and prosecution of DOE contractors?

23. Why are the DOE-proposed medical panels in the legislation?

24. Aren't medical panels susceptible of influence and control? What lessons have been learned from the Reagan Administration's pressures on Social Security judges to deny benefits?

25. Why aren't medical panels protected by 5 U.S.C. 3105, the law that protects the independence of administrative law judges?

26. Why is there nothing to prevent pressures by DOE upon medical panel members?

27. Why is there an irrevocable election?

28. Why aren't rights to sue contractors for intentional torts preserved?

29. Why isn't the Federal Tort Claims Act amended to eliminate the discretionary function exemption for ultrahazardous activities?

30. Why is the phrase ultrahazardous activities totally missing from the legislation?

31. Why aren't Administrative Law Judges in the bill?

32. Why aren't appeals to the Administrative Review Board in the bill?

33. Why is there no provision for judicial review?

34. Why aren't genetic injuries to children and grandchildren covered?

35. Why aren't injuries to spouses and other household members covered?

36. Why aren't sick residents and Downwinders covered?

37. Why isn't the Administrative Procedure Act made applicable to hearing requirements?

38. Why aren't more diseases covered?

39. Why aren't more toxicants covered?

40. Why aren't cyanide, mercury and hydrogen fluoride -- the three major Oak Ridge toxicants -- never mentioned in the legislation, with compensation left up to the weak workers compensation system in states like Tennessee?

41. Why isn't independent medical care assured, free of influence by DOE and its contractors?

42. Why isn't independent medical research provided for, free of influence by DOE and its contractors?

43. Why is there no provision for a memorial to sick workers and residents whose suffering made the Cold War victory possible?

44. Did Senator Thompson ever do lobbying work for Lockheed Martin or any other DOE contractor? What kind of campaign contributions and other support has he received?

45. Did Senator Thompson's son ever work for Lockheed Martin, as indicated in a news report? When? Where? Why? What job duties? What salary/benefits? Is his son still working for Lockheed Martin? Where does he work now? 46. Did Senator Thompson talk about this legislation with his son? What was the discussion with Senator Thompson's son?

47. Did Senator Thompson talk about this legislation with Howard Henry Baker, Jr., whose corporate law firm spent some $159,000 in DOE money to sue DOL to prevent a hearing in Dr. Reid's case? What was the discussion with Howard Henry Baker?

48. Why did Senator Thompson serve as an obstacle and a stumbling block to real reform, breaking his promises to compensate and protect sick workers?

49. Just what did Senator Thompson think this bill is going to accomplish?

50. How many workers does Senator Thompson really think will be compensated under this bill? What is the source of the $1 billion estimate? Who made it?

51. Why is there no subpoena power in Senator Thompson's Amendment? Why does the word subpoena nowhere appear in the Amendment.

52. Why wouldn't United States Senator Fred Dalton Thompson, the former Minority Counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee want workers in nuclear weapons compensation cases to have subpoena power, but make them apply to federal court to compel discovery? Could it be that he knows that East Tennessee federal judges, who work in the Howard H. Baker, Jr. Federal Courthouse and were largely chosen by Howard H. Baker, Jr., will not enforce worker discovery rights that step on DOE/LOCKHEED's toes?

53. Does Senator Fred Dalton Thompson know and can he illuminate, what DOE lawyer or manager thought up these flawed, non-judge medical panels, based on what, when, where?

54. Who in the world with any relevant legal knowledge and experience even thinks that U.S. Government doctors lacking in independence could fairly decide who to grant compensation to, given the Reagan Administration's efforts to pressure independent Social Security Administration Administrativer Law Judges to deny benefits, sending those who found too many workers disabled to what Rep. Barney Frank called "remedial judging school?"

Edward A. Slavin, Jr.

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

Message: 6
Date: Wed, 20 Sep
From: "Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space" <globalnet@mindspring.com>

SPACE COMMAND CELEBRATES
U.S. Space Command looks back, celebrates 15th anniversary
20 Sep 2000
by Army Staff Sgt. Jack Siemieniec U.S. Space Command Public Affairs

PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. (AFPN) -- Tracing its roots back as far as 1945, when the first missile and space tests were conducted, U.S. Space Command celebrates 15 years of existence Sept. 23. Formally activated Sept. 23, 1985, to consolidate and streamline America's space defense operations, USSPACECOM's mission has evolved along with the technology it depends upon.

When that technology advanced man's exploration capabilities higher and higher into the atmosphere -- and beyond -- the United States' military services began exploring the possibilities that space held for the nation's defense. What began as independent, individual efforts grew into a loose affiliation of space pioneers.

In January 1946, the RAND Corporation published a study discussing the opportunities for scientific study, observation and global communications which satellites afforded. As early as 1948, the secretary of defense's annual report to congress made reference to studies on the feasibility of an "earth satellite vehicle program." A 1954 Air Force study outlined the military value of satellites and the Department of Defense approved further research into the subject. Also in 1954, the Continental Air Defense Command, called CONAD, was created. A joint command -- located at Ent Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colo. -- CONAD was given the operational control of Army Anti-Aircraft Command, created in 1951; the Air Force's Air Defense Command and Naval Forces Continental Air Defense Command, the Navy's component to CONAD.

While experiments into space exploration and utilization continued, the concept of space as a potential Cold War battlefield received new emphasis with the surprise launching and success of the Soviet Union's Sputnik satellite in 1957.

In response, DOD conceived the Advance Research Projects Agency to coordinate military and scientific space endeavors in February 1958. As a result, DOD became the first administrator of the nation's space program. Later that year, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was created. It was envisioned that NASA would oversee civilian space research and technology, acting as a kind of civilian counterpart to ARPA.

In June 1959, the chief of naval operations voiced the idea of a unified military space command that would coordinate space activities, much like the joint task force which was created for nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific.

DOD turned down the idea, with the explanation there was no need for a centralized command for space systems, which did not yet exist. September 1959 brought a two-year sojourn away from the idea of a centralized space authority. DOD transferred responsibility for military space projects away from ARPA and back to the Navy, Air Force and Army individually.

But service rivalries came into play and criticism arose of the duplication of efforts. So, in 1961, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara issued DOD Directive No. 5160.32, "Development of Space Systems," which stated each service could conduct preliminary research into space projects, but gave the Air Force the responsibility for final development.

Then, in 1970, the directive was amended; allowing other services a role in space research and development, and systems funding; but retaining Air Force leadership over their acquisition and operation. Throughout the 1960s and '70s, the military services advanced space technologies in areas of communication, meteorology, navigation, reconnaissance and geodesy -- the measurement of large tracts of the earth, its curvature and location of exact geographical points. These advances prompted discussions regarding improving organizational arrangements and operational control of space systems. As the years passed, it became increasingly evident that space was growing in importance in matters of national security.

July 1, 1975, saw the creation of Aerospace Defense Command. A specified command, ADCOM superseded the previous Air Force-only Aerospace Defense Command, and was tasked with space surveillance and defense responsibilities. It also assumed the past responsibilities of the Continental Air Defense Command, which was disestablished. The Air Force began its Directorate of Space in 1981 to centralize its space integration activities and, in September 1982, created Air Force Space Command here, signaling its increased emphasis in space operations.

The Navy followed suit, and in October 1983, the Naval Space Command was activated in Dahlgren, Va. One month later, the Joint Chiefs of Staff made a formal recommendation to the secretary of defense for the creation of a unified space command. It would control all DOD space assets and serve as a forum for developing new space warfighting concepts.

Army Space Command began in September 1984 as an Army staff field element, which acted as liaison to Air Force Space Command. ASC participated in planning for the Army's participation in the new presidential-approved unified U. S. Space Command. In September 1985, as USSPACECOM was activated, it was redesignated as the Army Space Planning Group.

Since its activation, USSPACECOM continues to grow into its mission. The late 1980s saw the beginning of ballistic missile defense and a focus on support of the tactical operations of conventional forces. The 1991 Gulf War proved what an asset space operations are to theater warfare, whether in missile warning, communications or through the use of the global positioning system satellites.

Just one year ago, the command assumed responsibility for computer network defense and, on October 1, will take up the offensive tasks of computer network attack. (Courtesy of USSPACECOM's News Service and Office of History)

Bruce K. Gagnon Coordinator Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space PO Box 90083 Gainesville, FL. 32607 (352) 337-9274 http://www.space4peace.org globalnet@mindspring.com

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

Message: 7
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000
From: easlavin@aol.com

Sick workers and residents will win next year

Good morning:

Be of good cheer -- we are winning for sure: the cost estimate went from a few workers at K-25 and a few million dollars in bribes to tens of thousands of workers and several billion in one year. Even John Duncan, Jr. has written constituents that "many" people in Knoxville have been hurt by Oak Ridge. Two years ago, everyone was dismissed as "crazy" and "paranoid." Never forget how far we've come.

Those at the hearing: look the beast in the eye knowing the voters will make some changes, and that the likes of Smith are unlikely to chair any committees in January.

I always thought we'd have to kill a bad bill to get a good bill. It would be almost naive to think otherwise. History teaches that most major pieces of legislation don't ever pass the first time out anyway. Anything worth passing is worth fighting over and worth waiting to get the right words in the right order. Civil rights. Antitrust. National Labor Relations Act. Black Lung. Motor Voter. FMLA. ADA.

Only special interest or unimportant bills without opposition get passed in a right smart bit, and they often stink to high heaven in time. Capper-Volstead Act (agricultural cartels), McCarren-Ferguson Act (insurance cartels), Smoot-Hawley (tariffs). Often with disastrous results.

The fact that the President and Congress are striving to pass something, anything, even if unsuccessfully, even if a half-measure, should be a source of wonderment and cheer for the victims (who don't even have a PAC), and CHE (which doesn't even have a staff).

DOE delayed too long, not introducing legislation until May, and then doing it in Senate secrecy.

DOE cynically raised people's expectations in an effort to push through something not worth passing.

DOE should never be trusted again. Like big tobacco or asbestos, DOE kills and lies and maims.

Workers and residents know that a bad bill is a bad bill is a bad bill. Let's use this as an opportunity to make Democrats grateful to have yet another issue to run on -- in key Congressional Districts, this could be important, yet another reason to dislike the willful men who impeached and tried Bill Clinton while ignoring the crimes of Rockwell, Westinghouse, Wackenhut, BNFL, Union Carbide, Lockheed, Bechtel and the University of California. The time for equivocation is over. In discussing environmental ills in "Earth in the Balance," Vice President Gore has quoted Sir Winston Churchill, who said: "The Government simply cannot make up their minds, or they cannot get the Prime Minister to make up his mind. So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.... The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences."

A good comp bill is worth waiting and planning and fighting for. We shall overcome.

Regards,
Ed Slavin

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

Message: 8
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: Steve Wagner <hanforddownwinder@yahoo.com>

Nuclear labs become targets of e-mailed humor (1 of 2)
The Oakland Tribune http://www.InsideBayArea.com

This is one of two articles in today's Oakland (California) Tribune on "e-mailed humor." From Oakland Tribune, page 6-LOCAL, Wed., 9-20-2000:

Nuclear labs become targets of e-mailed humor Workers enjoy the comic relief by William Brand Staff Writer

LIVERMORE -- Now that phsyicist Wen Ho Lee is free and President Clinton has had his say, the security scare at the nation's national nuclear laboratories at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Livermore is fading from the headlines.

But America's phantom e-mail humorists haven't forgotten.

The lost laptop hard drives at Los Alamos live on in a trail of e-mail messages -- some so outrageous they're even laughing inside the labs. Sort of.

Bogus DOE memo

The best e-mail so far purports to be a memo from U.S. Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson proclaiming new security procedures "effective Monday."

"The brown paper bag in which we store the computer disk drives that contain the nation's nuclear secrets will no longer be left on the picnic table at the staff commissary during lunch hour. They will be stored in the vault," the phony memo says.

The memo goes on to add, "The three-letter security code for accessing the vault will no longer be B.O.B. To confuse would-be spies, that security code will be reversed. Please don't tell anyone."

Laugh and trash

"I saw that one," said David Schwoegler, Lawrence Livermore National Lab's official spokesman. "I trashed it. I laugh every time I see something like that. That's about all you can do. They don't make me feel any dumber than usual."

Livermore physicist Manuel Garcia says he not only laughs, he posts the best ones on his bulletin board. "Political humor points out the absurdity in our lives," Garcia said. "There's lots of it about the labs. Some guy on Yahoo even has a Web site with cartoons about labs."

"It helps people to think clearly about these sorts of things. Our work at the lab is so serious and so insular -- it's nice to have your bubble burst once in a while," Garcia said.

Alan Dundes, a folklorist at the University of California, Berkeley, agrees.

Dundes, a professor of anthropology, studies the genre because he finds the thoughts expressed are truly the views of the people.

"It's not like reading an opinion piece in a newspaper or talking to someone famous," Dundes said. "It's the voice of the people."

Dundes, whose latest book on folk communiques, co-authored with Oakland attorney Carl Paget, "Never Try and Teach a Pig to Sing," comes out this month, has collected folk missives for years.

"You never know who writes these things," Dundes said. "Nobody knows. It's not one individual. It's like when you tell a joke, each teller makes changes."

"E-mails are more fixed and they're easier to distribute. One author can send them to a thousand people. But they are also changed."

Dundes did have some good news for those at the national laboratories who are sensitive about the jokes and jives. "This one will never last," Dundes said. "It's too topical. It's like the 10 rejected slogans for Firestone Tires and the Concorde.

"A year from now they'll be forgotten."

So, about the memo's caution not to link the lab computer network to www.swedechicks.com and www.hackers.com: We were only joking.

-----------

Message: 9
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: Steve Wagner <hanforddownwinder@yahoo.com>

Security scare grist for e-mailers' mills (2 of 2)

This is from The Oakland (California) Tribune, page 6-LOCAL, Wednesday, September 20, 2000:

Security scare grist for e-mailers' mills by William Brand, Staff Writer

No one know who writes phantom e-mails, says University of California, Berkeley, folklorist Alan Dundes. But they can be topical and funny, even in the most serious of circumstances.

"I know this is an inconvenience to many of you, but it's a sad sign of the times," a phony memo to national laboratory employees states. It informs scientists that hard drives with nuclear secrets must be stored in the vault, not on the picnic table.

Some more orders from the Internet humorists:

[] "Visiting scientists and graduate students from Libya, North Korea and mainland China will no longer be allowed to wander the hallways without proper identification. Beginning Monday, they will be required to wear a stick-on lapel tag that clearly states, 'Hello, My Name Is.....' The stickers will be available at the front desk."

[] "On Bowling Night, please check your briefcases and laptop computers at the front counter of the Bowl-a-Drome instead of leaving them in the cloakroom. Mr. Badonov, the front-counter supervisor, has promised to keep an eye on them for us."

[] "The computer network used for scientific calculations will no longer be hyperlinked via the Internet to such Web sites as www.moammar.com, www.swedechicks.com, or www.hackers-r-us.com. Links to all Disney sites will be maintained, however."

[] "Staff members will no longer be allowed to take home small amounts of plutonium, iridium, or uranium for use in those little weekend projects around the house. That includes you parents who are helping the kids with their science fair projects."

[] "Employees may no longer borrow the AA batteries from the burglar alarm system to power their Game Boys and compact-disc players during working hours."

[] "And, finally, when reporting for work each day, all employees must enter through the front door. Raoul, the janitor, will no longer admit employees who tap three times on the side door to avoid clocking in late."

"I know this crackdown might seem punitive and oppressive to many of you," the memo concludes.

"But it is our sworn duty to protect the valuable national secrets that have been entrusted to our care. Remember: Security isn't a part-time job -- it's an imperative, all 37 and 1/2 hours of the week."

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

Message: 10
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000
From: ivan buchbinder <pentaske@memes.com>
Subject: Cancer Rise Linked to Power Lines

Y'all, Hell I ain't an expert.... this seems like a Dragon fart of a smokescreen to me, trying to mask the damage cased by EMP's. Later

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_933000/933678.stm

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

Message: 11
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000
From: "Bill Smirnow" <smirnowb@ix.netcom.com>

CRAC-2 Report, HORRORS At Every Commercial Nuke Plant InThe USA

http://www.geocities.com/mothersalert/crac.html

http://www.geocities.com/mothersalert/probability.html NRC Admits To Congress 45% Chance Of Core Melt Over 20 Year Period

http://www.geocities.com/mothersalert

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


DOEWatch List ----A Magnum-Opus Project
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1. Dirty Rotten Reactors
From: magnu96196@aol.com

2. MOX N' Roll
From: magnu96196@aol.com

3. The Energy Crunch
From: magnu96196@aol.com

4. By Earth, Water, Wind or Fire
From: magnu96196@aol.com

5. Proposal to compensate nuclear workers in jeopardy
From: magnu96196@aol.com

6. Administration issues position statement on nuclear compensation
From: magnu96196@aol.com

8. Wamp steps beyond rift with Richardson
From: magnu96196@aol.com

9. USEC, DOE considering gas centrifuge
From: magnu96196@aol.com

10. Feds may kill Fernald health group
From: magnu96196@aol.com

11. Fernald to serve as test site for Energy Department program
From: magnu96196@aol.com

12. Retired worker left ill by radiation exposure thinks job was worth it
From: magnu96196@aol.com

13. Workers here handled atom bomb material from the start
From: magnu96196@aol.com

14. Day 1: Post-Dispatch investigation of radiation problems
From: magnu96196@aol.com

15. Day 2: Post-Dispatch investigation of radiation problems
From: magnu96196@aol.com

16. Day 3: Post-Dispatch investigation of radiation problems
From: magnu96196@aol.com

17. Day 4: Post-Dispatch investigation of radiation problems
From: magnu96196@aol.com

18. Day 5: Post-Dispatch investigation of radiation problems
From: magnu96196@aol.com

19. Day 6: Post-Dispatch investigation of radiation problems
From: magnu96196@aol.com

20. Day 7: Post-Dispatch investigation of radiation problems
From: magnu96196@aol.com

21. "Spike": a US Navy MIA/POW was left in Iraq!
From: blazedell@aol.com

22. Meetings on iodine-131 releases
From: magnu96196@aol.com

23. Y-12 transition team schedules public meeting
From: magnu96196@aol.com

24. K-25 cleanup over budget, behind schedule: Report
From: magnu96196@aol.com

25. Water study asserts safety Contaminants found meet regulation levels
From: magnu96196@aol.com

26. Platts - Wednesday, September 20, 2000
From: "Paul Maser" <pmaser@govmail.state.nv.us>

27. Saddam 'receiving cancer treatment' or is it GWI?
From: magnu96196@aol.com

28. Re: Meetings on iodine-131 releases
From: magnu96196@aol.com

29. Delegates working to include Nevadans in compensation bill
From: magnu96196@aol.com

30. Letter: NTS workers deserving of compensation
From: magnu96196@aol.com

31. Sustainable Economics
From: "Nick" <discussions@no-interestloans.org>

32. Researchers Say DoD Tied Their Hands on Gulf War Illness Study
From: magnu96196@aol.com

33. URGENT
From: P12KNIGHT@AOL.COM

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

Message: 1
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Dirty Rotten Reactors

TIME EUROPE September 18, 2000, Vol. 156 No. 12
By JAMES O. JACKSON
http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/2000/0918/russianukes.html

While the West phases out nuclear power, Russia refurbishes its old plants and builds new ones

West Europeans may think that shutting down nuclear power stations in nearly every country but France will make Europe a safer place. But this well-intentioned initiative may actually serve to increase the danger of a nuclear accident. For every relatively safe Western plant to be shut down in coming years, Russia plans to build at least one new one or refurbish an obsolete and potentially dangerous one.

The logic is simple. Western Europe will have to import energy, largely in the form of natural gas, to fill the gap left by its decommissioned nuclear plants. The Russian government has figured out that its nuclear generators â€" lacking the sophistication and elaborate safety features imposed on Western nukes â€" can produce electricity more cheaply than gas- or coal-fired stations. Thus, the plan is for Russia to use nuclear power for much of its own electricity needs while the government-owned monopoly Gazprom sells its vast natural gas reserves in the West. "We plan to develop nuclear energy in such a way that it is both good for the country and advantageous for Gazprom," says Vladimir Vinogradov, deputy minister at the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy. "Given the impact of fossil fuels on the climate and environment, we must develop nuclear power."

Even as the West cuts back, Russia plans to triple its nuclear power generating capacity with a $25 billion expansion strategy that by 2030 will increase the number of operating reactors from 29 to 59, some of them to be financed with the help of E.U. loans. At the same time, Russian engineers will be upgrading old reactors, including the country's dangerous rbmk units similar to the one that exploded at Chernobyl in 1986. Ukraine has announced plans to shut down the remaining units at Chernobyl itself by December 2000, but even older rbmk units at Kursk and St. Petersburg are to be overhauled and equipped with stopgap safety improvements to prolong their lives for another three decades.

The Russians also plan to earn huge fees for storing and reprocessing radioactive waste piling up unwanted in the West â€" including spent fuel from the European reactors that will be decommissioned in coming years. That means building and expanding controversial fast-breeder reactors, a technology largely abandoned in the West, to make use of reprocessed uranium fuel as well as the plutonium from the 20,000 Russian nuclear warheads being dismantled under arms control treaties.

"The Nuclear Energy Ministry believes that the future of nuclear energy lies with fast reactors," says Vladimir Kuznetsov, a former official of Gosatomnadzor, the Russian nuclear safety service who is now an adviser to the Russian ecological organization Green Cross International, headed by Mikhail Gorbachev. He says the ministry plans to use weapons-grade plutonium from decommissioned warheads to produce mox â€" mixed plutonium and uranium oxides â€" as fuel for fast breeders. "Handling uranium is not a problem," he says. "But plutonium is highly toxic, and it is not yet clear how it should be handled and what consequences its use might have."

The consequences of operating Soviet-designed and operated nuclear plants were dramatically illustrated at Chernobyl, but that was not the only nuclear accident in the former Soviet Union's history. A confidential report prepared by a group of experts earlier this year for the Russian government said that during the past 50 years there have been 384 reactor accidents with release of radiation, causing 58 deaths and 214 cases of acute radiation poisoning â€" and that does not count the Aug. 12 sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk.

By comparison the French nuclear power industry, with twice as many reactors as Russia, has had just one accidental release of radiation with no deaths. "Reactors of Russian design would not be licensable in Western countries because they do not have all of the safety features that are mandatory, such as a containment dome over the top," says David Kyd, spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. He says the more recent Russian designs use "confinement," a tower containing a cascade of tanks intended to capture and condense radioactive steam escaping from an out-of-control reactor. But the system, says Kyd, "has never been tested on a full-scale model and has never been tested - thank goodness - in reality."

Many Russian reactors are deficient even by Moscow's lax standards. "None of the Russian nuclear plants fully meets current safety requirements," Kuznetsov asserts. "None has gone through a procedure of thorough examination for safety." The worst are the Chernobyl-type rbmk reactors. They lack even the "confinement" cascades built into other Soviet-era designs. They also rely on flammable graphite, a form of carbon, to moderate the speed of neutrons so a controlled nuclear reaction can take place. Most other reactors, including the latest Russian designs, use water both as the moderating element and coolant. If a water-moderated reactor loses coolant there may be overheating and even an explosion, but the reaction slows down when coolant is lost.

When an rbmk reactor loses its water coolant the graphite remains in place and a nuclear reaction continues producing heat that, combined with oxygen, can set the graphite on fire. In the Chernobyl accident a furious blaze in the uncovered core burned for nine days, sending vast clouds of highly radioactive particles into the atmosphere and around the world. "They should be shut down," declares Kuznetsov. He says plans to upgrade old rbmks and complete others, such as the half-finished unit 5 at the Kursk power station that was mothballed after the Chernobyl disaster, should be scrapped. "The commissioning of Kursk 5 should not even be discussed," he says. "It's criminal."

But Russian officials insist that new safety measures like training simulators, faster-acting control rods and upgraded control computers make even rbmks safe to operate. And thanks to the West's high-minded decision to phase out nuclear power and the resulting hunger for natural gas, Russia's most dangerous reactors will continue operating for decades to come. If another one goes the way of Chernobyl, West Europeans may come to regret decisions to scrap their unloved - but safer - nuclear reactors.

With reporting by Jan Stojaspal / Prague and Yuri Zarakhovich / Moscow

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

Message: 2
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

MOX N' Roll

By NICHOLAS LE QUESNE
TIME EUROPE September 18, 2000, Vol. 156 No. 12
http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/2000/0918/nuclearpower.html

Nuclear power is cheap and clean, but what do you do with the leftovers? Paris

Europe's nuclear power plants may produce cheap electricity without CO2 emissions, but they also churn out something less desirable: large quantities of highly radioactive spent fuel. France alone produces 1,200 tons of it each year. Spent nuclear fuel contains plutonium-239, an intensely toxic substance with a half-life of 24,360 years.

Different countries have adopted different approaches to the problem. Spain and Italy have followed the U.S. example, leaving spent fuel to cool down for decades on site before consigning it to a permanent deep-storage center. France and Britain have developed technology to reprocess spent fuel into uranium, plutonium and other less toxic waste products. Reprocessing plants at La Hague and Sellafield accept spent fuel from French and British reactors, respectively, as well as from those in other European countries like Germany, Belgium and Switzerland.

Reprocessing's future was looking uncertain even before Germany announced it would pull out of the program in 2005. The main reason for reprocessing was to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. With stocks far exceeding the needs of weapons producers, the reprocessing business had pinned its hopes on plutonium being used as fuel in a new generation of fast-breeder reactors. But Britain and France abandoned their fast-breeder programs because of safety problems and cost over-runs. The plutonium produced by reprocessing is now recombined with uranium to make a nuclear fuel called MOX â€" mixed oxide. But MOX gives out less energy than ordinary enriched uranium, cannot be reprocessed and must be left to cool for 150 years before it can be permanently stored. Thus reprocessing does little more than put off the day when a hard choice has to be made about nuclear waste.

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

Message: 3
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

The Energy Crunch

By THOMAS SANCTON
TIME EUROPE September 18, 2000, Vol. 156 No. 12
http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/2000/0918/energy.html

Soaring fuel prices set off protests and raise questions about Europe's sources of power Paris

Not since the early 1970s have skyrocketing oil prices caused such havoc. As the price of Brent crude reached a 10-year high of $34 per barrel, angry French truckers and farmers blocked more than 100 oil depots and put a chokehold on much of the nation's fuel supply. Service stations around the country were forced to put up "empty" signs, flights were canceled or rerouted at some airports, and fuel had to be requisitioned for essential services. Taxi and ambulance drivers snarled traffic with go-slow protests and boatmen in Paris jammed the Seine. By the end of the week, similar demonstrations had spread to Belgium, Britain, Italy and Spain.

What triggered the French snowballing protests was not just the rising price of crude â€" up 36% since the beginning of the year â€" but heavy taxes that comprise nearly three-quarters of the consumer price. Thus the main target of criticism was not the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries but the French government. "There are too many taxes," fumed trucker JÃ(c)rôme Favre-Monnet at a service station south of Paris. "It's nothing to do with the prices charged by the producer countries. It's the state lining its own pockets."

The Socialist-led government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin had unwittingly encouraged the latest protests by offering a generous compensation package to striking fisherman the week before. But this time, after truckers refused a government offer of a 15% cut in the tax on diesel, Jospin held firm and announced that there would be "no more negotiations." The defiant drivers reinforced their action, though there were signs over the weekend that both truckers and farmers were slowly beginning to lift some of the barricades.

With oil prices causing deep concern throughout the industrialized world, all eyes were on Sunday's meeting of opec oil ministers in Vienna. Prices eased slightly at week's end when Saudi Arabia's oil minister said he expected the cartel to increase production from 500-700,000 barrels per day. But with winter fast approaching in Europe and North America, and existing oil stocks at low levels, most analysts expected prices to remain high at least until the end of the year. And even if the cost of crude does settle down, many experts predicted a delayed-action slowdown of the world economy.

The flareup of oil prices has had another, potentially more significant effect: it suddenly put the subject of energy back on the front burner. The crisis was a sobering reminder of the volatility of oil prices, the exhaustibility of fossil fuels and the urgent need for long-range thinking about stable, reliable, non-polluting energy sources â€" not just for trucks, cars and boats, but for the electrical power that is the lifeblood of a modern industrial economy.

In France, the latest oil shock seemed to underscore the wisdom of relying heavily on nuclear power. "I am very happy that nuclear energy provides 75% of our electricity at a time when the cost of gasoline has doubled," Industry Minister Christian Pierret said last week. But France, typically, is the odd man out in a post-Chernobyl Europe that is steadily turning away from nuclear power.

Last June, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder announced an accord that would phase out virtually all of the country's atomic plants by 2021. The decision was based on a 1998 election deal between Schröder's Social Democrats and their Green coalition partners. Yet it had far-reaching implications, not only for Germany but for most of its European neighbors as well. In promising to close down the 19 reactors that currently supply 35% of its energy needs, Germany joined Italy, Austria and Sweden in formally renouncing nuclear power. Most of Germany's other European Union partners have decided not to build new nuclear facilities when the current crop of reactors goes off-line over the next two decades. France alone remains firmly wedded to atomic energy.

Western Europe's energy future now looks increasingly non-nuclear. The problem is that there is no easy, affordable and environmentally sound way to replace the atomic plants that currently generate 23% of the E.U.'s electric power. With renewable sources like wind, water and solar energy limited to a fairly marginal role in most countries for the foreseeable future, the only large-scale alternatives are oil, gas and coal, all of which produce carbon dioxide that contributes to global warming. Yet the E.U. is committed by the 1997 Kyoto accord to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 8% from 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012 â€" a goal that will be impossible to meet if there is a massive move from nuclear to fossil fuels. But while fossil fuels produce CO2, nuclear reactors generate large amounts of radioactive waste that can remain potentially lethal for hundreds of years. Current methods of reprocessing and stockpiling are no more than stopgap solutions, pending the development of some now-hypothetical technology that could actually get rid of the deadly detritus (click here for more).

Schröder's decision was based more on political horsetrading than serious energy policy. The government-industry accord of June 14 put a limit of 32 years on the working life of each of its 19 nuclear power stations. That means that the first plant should go off-line in 2002 and the last one around 2021. To meet energy needs once the nukes shut down, the government plans a three-pronged strategy calling for energy conservation, more use of renewable sources and the replacement of coal-burning plants (currently 51% of output) with modern gas-powered facilities that produce less than half as much CO2.

Meanwhile, the government is cutting off its subsidies for the European Pressurized Water Reactor (EPR), the next generation of nuclear power facilities that Germany's Siemens AG is jointly developing with France's Framatome. But the two companies vowed to continue working on the epr and in July announced the merging of their nuclear activities into a new company, Framatome ANP. Though the German phaseout deprives the new joint venture of a major customer for the epr, Siemens chief executive Heinrich von Pierer is confident the decision will be reversed. "The government's current policy will not be the last word about nuclear energy in Germany," he says. "There is no convincing answer to the question of how the electricity from nuclear power plants can be substituted."

The German decision came as a major psychological blow to Paris â€" and could have important economic consequences as well. Not only is the epr project threatened by the loss of the German market; so is the state-owned COGEMA reprocessing plant at La Hague, which depends on Germany for 10% of its turnover. With Germany committed to ending waste shipments to La Hague by 2005, the French unit will be hard-pressed to find new customers in a world of declining nuclear industry.

Perhaps a greater threat to France's nuclear establishment is the deregulation of the European energy market. In this new liberalized landscape, most of Europe's power will be generated by anywhere from 50 to 150 private companies. Those firms will be much less likely than the old state monopolies to risk the huge investments involved in building new nuclear facilities. In July France's state planning commission delivered a 288-page report to Prime Minister Jospin that could signal an important reassessment of the country's energy strategy. Noting that "it will be hard for France to go it alone in a world that is opening up to competition," the report examined six scenarios, allowing for different levels of demand and varying fuel costs over the next half-century. The most plausible outcomes, it concluded, were the ones in which the share of nuclear energy falls to between 40% and 70% of French electricity production, with gas generation providing most of the remainder.

Most other West European countries have already sworn off nukes or seem headed toward a de facto decommissioning as their aging facilities wear out. Britain, for example, currently relies on nuclear energy for about 28% of its electricity, yet all but one of its reactors will have ceased functioning by 2020 and there is no plan to build new ones. Italy voted to abandon nuclear energy in 1987 and has turned largely to imported fossil fuels to meet its needs. But under the impetus of the Kyoto accords â€" and, more recently, the feverish rise of oil prices â€" the government is aiming to cut fossil fuel usage by 13% over the next 10 years, mainly through more efficient consumption, development of renewable sources and more use of methane gas, which is the main constituent of natural gas.

Twice as efficient and half as polluting as other fossil fuels, natural gas is widely considered the best alternative to nuclear power. Its attractiveness is enhanced by new combined-cycle technology in which hot gases that are burned to drive one turbine are recaptured and used to drive a second turbine. While conventional gas plants operated at only a 30% to 40% efficiency, the new piggyback method can boost that to nearly 60%. Says Christian Lescure, executive vice president for corporate planning and control for state-owned Gaz de France: "The German decision can only encourage the pronounced European trend to give gas an important role."

There is a downside to gas dependency, however: two of the three main producers, Russia (32% of the E.U.'s supplies) and Algeria (22%), are politically unstable. That means supplies could be interrupted and prices could soar. Warns Fatih Birol, head of economic analysis at the Paris-based International Energy Agency: "In the future, there could be gas crises just as there were oil crises in the '70s."

As for renewable sources, opinions differ on how much of the future energy burden they can bear. Some experts see their role limited to the 5% to 10% range, but others are more optimistic. A report published by Shell at the end of last year predicts that the share could increase to 50% by mid-century, and Italy's Environment Minister Willer Bordon is hoping for close to 100% clean energy by 2100. That may be wishful thinking, but if Europe and the rest of the industrialized world have any hope of developing a safe and reliable energy strategy in the long run, this is where they should focus their efforts.

Most forms of renewable energy are dependent on geographic and environmental factors that vary widely from place to place. Wind and solar energy are more feasible in Spain, for example, than in Austria, whose numerous rivers and mountains make it better suited to hydroelectric power. Most alternative sources, moreover, are costly. A nuclear reactor or a coal plant in Germany can produce one kilowatt-hour of electricity for about 1.5¢. Wind energy costs up to 10¢, water up to 20¢ and solar about $1. "People seem to think that fossil fuels are on the way out and that we are moving into a new era of sun, wind and waves," says Jan Murray, deputy secretary-general of the World Energy Council in London. "We've got a long way to go."

Nonetheless, research is underway on all the renewable sources, and the results are encouraging in some cases. Spain's Energía HidroelÃ(c)ctrica de Navarra last year produced 418 megawatts of wind power and is planning to build 1,800 generators with a capacity of 1,400 megawatts â€" enough to meet the needs of a million families â€" over the next three years. France's EDF has built 84 wind turbines in Morocco and plans to be generating up to 500 megawatts in France by 2005. The downside of wind power is that it takes up a lot of valuable land and has met considerable resistance from local inhabitants, who object to the unsightliness and noise of wind farms. Perhaps the best bet is to build floating installations offshore.

Solar energy â€" both panels to heat water and photovoltaic cells to produce electricity â€" has considerable potential in countries in sunny climes. "Of all the renewable energy sources, photovoltaic is the one that shows the most promise in the medium term," says Marcello Garozzo, director of the renewable sources division at Italy's Institute for New Technology, Energy and the Environment (enea). The problem, he admits, is that it "currently costs too much, so we need to push on both supply and demand so the technology will advance and become competitive."

Biomass - including such fuels as straw, dung and sawdust - also has potential for local energy production. Britain's Energy Power Resources, a private utility, will soon launch the world's largest straw-fired power station in Cambridgeshire. Fueled by an annual 200,000 tons of straw collected from local farmers, it will provide 283,000 megawatt-hours a year. The company already has a power station in Fife, Scotland, that cranks out 79,000 megawatt-hours per annum. Its fuel source: 110,000 tons of chicken droppings and litter.

Perhaps the most exciting alternative energy source is hydrogen, which exists in practically limitless quantities and can be used in fuel cells to produce clean power through a process of reverse electrolysis. "Hydrogen is the long-term solution to the pollution problem," enthuses Raffaele Velone, director of advanced technology at enea. For now, most hydrogen research is focusing on vehicles. Later this year, Iceland will launch some hydrogen-powered buses developed by Shell, Daimler-Chrysler and Norway's Norsk Hydro. In California, carmakers and energy companies are working intensely on fuel-cell development, spurred by a state law that will require 10% of all new cars to produce zero emissions by 2004. France's Gaz de France is developing fuel cells that could eventually provide electric power for individual buildings. The main drawbacks: fuel cells, which contain platinum, remain very expensive, and most of the hydrogen must currently be derived from fossil fuels. Future technological advances could bring down the price and enable the large-scale extraction of hydrogen from water.

With the exception of hydroelectric power, which is already being used close to its full capacity in Europe, most renewables in the foreseeable future will continue to be scattered, small-scale, local power sources. That's not necessarily a disadvantage. "With open markets," says French economist Jean-Marie Chevalier, "the trend toward building bigger and bigger equipment is being reversed. We're going in the direction of decentralization and multiple sources of electricity, with a greater share for renewable sources."

Unfortunately, there is no simple, universal response to Europe's energy dilemmas. Nor can Brussels, which has no legal authority in this area, draw up an E.U.-wide plan. Ultimately, each country will have to work out its own policies according to its particular circumstances, geography and political imperatives. Austria and Norway, for example, will continue to rely heavily on water resources. France will remain largely nuclear. Germany and Britain will probably ease out of the atomic age and rely more heavily on gas. Spain, too, is giving up its nukes, but its climate and topography will allow wind and solar energy to pick up some of the slack. Few issues are less suited to a unified European solution. But the latest surge in oil prices may have done Europe a great service by focusing all eyes on the problem.

With reporting by Helen Gibson / London, Nicholas Le Quesne / Paris, Martin Penner / Rome, Ursula Sautter / Bonn and other bureaus

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

Message: 4
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

By Earth, Water, Wind or Fire

TIME EUROPE September 18, 2000, Vol. 156 No. 12
http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/2000/0918/altenergy.html

The pros and cons of different types of power generation

HYDROELECTRIC
Advantages: A proven technology for electricity production, capable of generating large amounts of power. Large hydroelectric plants typically have a capacity of 300-400 megawatts. It's also entirely renewable with no CO2 emissions.

Disdvantages: Public-environmental opinion has turned against hydroelectric plants and the dams they require. Potential sites in Europe have mostly been used already. Projects to use the remaining sites would run into strong local opposition. Even smaller hydroelectric plants cause some damage to the landscape.

Current contribution: 13% of electricity production
Forecast for 2010: 12.4%

WIND
Advantages: Entirely renewable with no CO2 emissions. Existing technology is already relatively high-output and affordable â€" individual machines with 2-3 megawatt capacity are being developed for offshore applications.

Disdvantages: Not everywhere is suitable. With output proportional to wind speed, wind turbines only make sense in coastal areas and on high ridges. Wind is not a constant energy source, so wind energy supplements rather than replaces fossil or nuclear sources. Unsightly and noisy.

Current contribution: .2%
Forecast for 2010: 2.8%

PHOTOVOLTAIC
Advantages: Renewable with no CO2 emissions. Contrary to popular belief, PV modules can convert diffused light as well as direct sunlight into electricity so they could be used from northern Europe to the Mediterranean, although they're more productive â€" and so cheaper â€" with more sunlight.

Disdvantages: Cost is exceptionally high, although prices are starting to come down. They require a large surface area and high-capacity plants would only be viable in southern Europe.

Current contribution: .03%
Forecast for 2010: .1%

FUEL CELLS
Advantages: Highly efficient. They could generate significant quantities of electricity without CO2 emissions and could replace internal combustion engines in cars â€" a major source of greenhouse gases.

Disdvantages: Prohibitively expensive and still dependent on fossil fuels to produce the hydrogen they require.

Current contribution: 0%
Forecast for 2010: 0%

BIOMASS
Advantages: Proven technology and plentiful sources in waste products from agriculture, forestry and food processing. It is renewable and is not dependent on fossil fuels. Gases produced could be used in combined-cycle plants. Surrounding forests can act as sinks for CO2 emissions.

Disdvantages: Burning biomass creates polluting gases and liquid waste. At large plants it's economically feasible to install technology to recycle and process the wastes, but there are still doubts about the ecological impact of smaller biomass plants. Collecting, transporting and storing biomass is expensive.

Current contribution: .95%
Forecast for 2010: 8%

COAL
Advantages: Highly efficient and cheap. Plentiful resources still exist within Europe.

Disdvantages: Major producer of greenhouse gases and a cause of acid rain. It also liberates radioactive elements within coal in quantities higher than properly operated nuclear power plants, but well below minimum levels tolerated by E.U. states.

Current contribution: 31%
Forecast for 2010: 25%

GAS
Advantages: Widely available, easily transported and efficient. CO2 emissions are far lower than other fossil sources.

Disdvantages: Gas reserves will be exhausted well before reserves of coal run out. Most of Europe's gas comes from Russia and Algeria making it vulnerable to unpredictable political events.

Current contribution: 12%
Forecast for 2010: 22%

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Message: 5
Date: Wed, 20 Sep
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Proposal to compensate nuclear workers in jeopardy

September 20, 2000
By MATTHEW L. WALD The New York Times
http://www.thestate.com/nation/docs/nukeworkers20.htm

WASHINGTON -- An administration plan to compensate private-sector workers who were made sick by exposure to hazardous chemicals or radiation while building nuclear weapons may fall victim to a jurisdictional dispute, according to administration officials. A provision that would authorize compensation passed the Senate on a voice vote, as part of the Defense Authorization bill, but there was no similar provision in the House legislation, so the issue is now before a House-Senate committee.

Agreement in the conference committee has been held up because the Senate bill calls for the program to be administered by the Labor Department. Members of the House Judiciary Committee want it channeled through a Justice Department office that also handles radiation claims against the government arising from nuclear weapons testing.

The legislation would cover thousands of people who worked for private contractors on weapons projects, including those who worked at the Savannah River Site in Aiken.

Nearly all are ineligible for workers' compensation because their illnesses developed years or decades after their exposures, according to the Energy Department. The department acknowledged earlier this year that hundreds of workers had a lung illness that could have been caused only by their work on nuclear weapons components.

The Energy Department says the Senate version of the program would cost about $1.8 billion in the first five years, and less thereafter. It would provide each worker with reimbursement for lost wages or $200,000, whichever is larger, plus health care expenses. The Senate provision, though, is only an authorization, not an appropriation, leaving it to a future Congress to provide the money.

The Judiciary Committee favors a package modeled after the one already on the books for uranium miners and people who were exposed to fallout for weapons tests, which offers $100,000 per victim. Among the issues before the conferees is why one group of victims should be compensated more generously than another.

It plans hearings on Thursday, although the issue could be decided by conferees today.

One hundred four members of the House, many with victims in their districts, wrote to the conferees asking them to adopt the Senate version.

Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa., whose district includes a defunct plant where workers were exposed to beryllium and where some now suffer a debilitating lung disease as a result, said he was "cautiously optimistic" that the Senate version would be approved.

Robert Alvarez, a former Energy Department official who is now a consultant for a union representing some of the workers, said the House program amounted to an "apology payment" as opposed to reimbursement for losses, because it does not offer reimbursement for lost wages.

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson early this year became the first head of that agency to acknowledge that weapons manufacturing had sickened or killed some of the 600,000 people who have worked in the plants.

In a letter sent on Monday to Floyd Spence, D-S.C., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, he said: "The men and women who worked for the Department of Energy and served our nation in the nuclear weapons industries of World War II and the Cold War labored under difficult and dangerous conditions with some of the most hazardous materials known to mankind. It is time for Congress to act to ensure that they get the help they have long deserved. These workers, many of whom are now seriously ill, should not have to wait to be compensated."

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Message: 6
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Administration issues position statement on nuclear compensation

September 19, 2000
By Katherine Rizzo ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2000/sep/19/510790539.html

WASHINGTON - The Clinton administration on Tuesday endorsed swift enactment of a compensation plan for nuclear weapons plant workers sickened on the job. But there was no recommendation for helping Nevada Test Site workers.

In a letter to House Armed Services Committee Chairman Floyd Spence, R-S.C., Energy Secretary Bill Richardson asked that a compensation program be passed as part of an unrelated military bill.

Richardson supported guaranteed funding for the compensation, requiring the government to pay the benefits, regardless of cost, without gaining approval each year through the congressional appropriations process.

Some House Republicans have expressed reluctance to create any new benefits entitlement, and the administration's own budget office expressed concern about the unpredictable long-term cost.

Congressional negotiators had been waiting for weeks for the administration to clarify its position.

House Republicans who favored more study had been citing disagreement between the Energy Department and the Office of Management and Budget as reason to hold off a decision.

Richardson's letter said the Clinton administration strongly supports compensation for workers exposed to radiation or beryllium. He made no mention of miners who breathed lung-clogging silica while digging tunnels under the Nevada Test Site.

Dr. David Michaels, DOE's top health official, said that's because "the administration hasn't formally closed and sent its recommendations on that."

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said it was a victory to get the administration to be silent about silicosis.

"They were originally going to oppose this, and only include the workers exposed to radiation or beryllium," he said. "We'll take what we can get."

Reid said he was mainly concerned about House leaders' opposition to including silicosis victims in a compensation program.

"We have a real problem with leadership over there," Reid said.

No Nevadans sit on the conference committee of representatives and senators discussing the bill.

Workers at the Nevada Test Site oversaw nuclear weapons tests from 1951 to 1992. As many as 100,000 Southern Nevadans worked at the test site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, though it's not clear how many suffer from silicosis.

Michaels said he thought prospects for achieving agreement on a compensation program had brightened.

"We think it has a very good shot," he said. "I think politically there's enough support to make this work."

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that a Senate-passed compensation plan could cost about $2.4 billion over the first five years, including coverage of silicosis.

After running into resistance from House Republicans, the administration and some of the program's Senate backers proposed changes that would bring the five-year cost down to about $1.8 billion.

Among the changes under discussion:

- Reducing the sick workers' cash benefit from a minimum of $200,000, as passed by the Senate, to $100,000. There was no clear consensus Tuesday on whether that $100,000 would be the total paid to each eligible worker or the minimum, House and Senate aides said.

- Giving workers with life-threatening beryllium disease more benefits than those with beryllium sensitivity.

- Limiting all benefits to only those who worked in the weapons complex at least a year.

No compensation program for the workers with radiation-caused illnesses or beryllium disease has passed the House, though two House subcommittees have scheduled hearings on competing compensation bills.

The bill numbers are H.R. 675, H.R. 3418, H.R. 3478, H.R. 3495, H.R. 4263, H.R. 4398, HR 5189 and SB 2519

On the Net: Bill texts: http://thomas.loc. gov

Justice Department's Radiation Exposure Compensation Program: http://www.usdoj.gov/civil/torts/const/reca/index.htm

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Message: 8
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Wamp steps beyond rift with Richardson

September 20, 2000
By Frank Munger News-Sentinel staff writer
http://www.knoxnews.com/editorsview/munger/fm09202000.shtml

U. S. Rep. Zach Wamp, R-Tenn., never held a microphone he didn't like, and the Third District congressman seemed particularly anxious to grab the stage last week when Energy Secretary Bill Richardson visited Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Wamp wanted to say some nice things about Richardson during the secretary's fourth -- and probably final -- visit to Oak Ridge during a two-year tenure at the energy helm.

The fact that a few hundred people were present in Wigner Auditorium may have been a factor, too. Wamp, of course, is running for re-election (his Democratic opponent, Will Callaway, was conspicuous at Richardson's visit to an Oak Ridge union hall earlier in the day), and it rarely hurts to flaunt your wares before potential voters.

Wamp and Richardson served together in Congress, and they both like to tell good-time stories of member basketball games in Washington and other moments of bipartisan recreation.

Not so long ago, however, Wamp bitterly attacked Richardson for his decision to halt the nuclear recycling program in Oak Ridge. Wamp called the secretary's decision "nonsensical," politically motivated and without any basis in science.

DOE has since taken steps to continue some aspects of the recycling effort in Oak Ridge, without releasing any of the slightly radioactive products to the commercial market.

At ORNL last week, Wamp made an apparent reference to that dispute with Richardson.

"I don't always agree with him, and I had to disagree with him not long ago," Wamp said. "I don't always agree with my wife, but I respect my wife .... He inherited a lot of challenges; he inherited a lot things at DOE that had not been addressed, things that had to be addressed, and he took the bull by the horns. Whether you agree with him all the time or not -- sometimes we need not to agree -- but the fact is, he's a doer, and he's got courage."

Indeed, Richardson has repeatedly shown his willingness to face up to tough issues, although he cut his Oak Ridge visit short by about an hour, and there was speculation that aides weren't anxious for him to take any more questions about Wen Ho Lee or deal with the ABC-TV "20/20" crew tracking him for comments on security problems at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant.

I recently characterized Richardson as the most decisive energy secretary ever, saying he was a refreshing change from some of the lightweight do-nothings in the past.

Wamp noted that Richardson is the third energy secretary during his time in Washington (the others being Hazel O'Leary and Federico Pena), and he offered a succinct view of each.

"They all had different skill sets. They all had pluses and maybe some minuses. But I thought about three words that kind of summarized my reflections. Secretary O'Leary was a lot of 'show.' And, under Secretary Pena, it was sometimes 'slow.' But this guy (Richardson) is all 'go.'"

WHO DAT: They say politicians never forget a face, and that's probably true. Names are another thing.

One of the odder moments during Richardson's visit last week was when the secretary thought he spotted former ORNL Director Al Trivelpiece in the audience.

Nope, that was David Moncton, the executive director of the Spallation Neutron Source, whom Richardson obviously has met on a number of occasions.

Even though current ORNL chief Bill Madia kept telling Richardson that was Moncton, the secretary kept pointing and saying he recognized the former lab director.

The stage officials managed to segue past the embarrassment with a minimum of damage.

OSTI RUMOR: When asked if DOE planned to relocate the Office of Scientific and Technical Information from Oak Ridge to Montana, Richardson (after looking to an aide for help) simply shook his head and said, "No."

He gave the impression that was a nonissue, even though published reports in Montana suggest a senior DOE official visited Bozeman and spouted off about moving the Oak Ridge-based document repository to Big Sky Country.

Wamp later said his staff had been tracking the issue and pressuring DOE for information.

"From all the knowledge we've gained, this individual did not have the authority to do what he was doing," Wamp said.

The congressman smirked at the notion that DOE might relocate work to Montana for quality-of-life reasons. He said the West is nice enough, but can't compare with the Volunteer State.

"Besides, you can't go to a UT football game in Montana," Wamp said.

Frank Munger covers the Department of Energy for the News-Sentinel. He can be reached at 423-482-9213 or at twig1@knoxnews.infi.net. This column is also available on the Web at www.knoxnews.com/editorsview/munger/

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Message: 9
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

USEC, DOE considering gas centrifuge

The Paducah Sun September 20, 2000 Paducah, Kentucky
By Joe Walker jwalker@paducahsun.com--270.575.8650
http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/news2000/nn10784.htm

A new agreement between USEC Inc. and the U.S. Department of Energy will provide at least a year of research into gas centrifuge as a possible cheaper replacement for the outdated, expensive technology used by the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant. Terms call for USEC to spend $4 million to boost research and DOE to provide the setting â€" the Oak Ridge (Tenn.) National Laboratory operated under governmental contract by the University of Tennessee and Batelle Corp.

The project will employ 12 USEC workers, 10 USEC subcontract people and the equivalent of seven full-time Oak Ridge employees. USEC spokeswoman Elizabeth Stuckle said it is too early to say if any of the workers will come from Paducah.

DOE will oversee the one-year project, which, depending on the findings, could be lengthened or expanded if public money becomes available, she said.

"Essentially, we're leasing the rights to (DOE) technology and their facilities," she said.

The study will help determine the feasibility of a centrifuge plant in the United States. Meanwhile, USEC will keep studying centrifuge technology that has been used by foreign uranium enrichment plants for many years, as well as a new, laser-based technology known as SILEX, she said.

The agreement allows USEC to use DOE facilities and expertise "at no cost to the taxpayer," according to a release from William Magwood, director of DOE's Office of Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology. "However, under this arrangement, the public will benefit from any advances to the technology made by USEC."

The work includes the designing of centrifuge parts; refurbishment and restart of facilities to make, assemble and test the components; and project planning and assessment.

Gas centrifuge uses about one-third of the electricity of gaseous diffusion. The Paducah plant and its sister plant near Portsmouth, Ohio, each uses power comparable to that of a major city, and electricity accounts for about half of production costs.

USEC has reportedly entertained building a pilot centrifuge plant at Oak Ridge and then a commercial start-up facility at the Portsmouth diffusion plant, which will be closed next summer. In 1985, before USEC was created, DOE pulled the plug on a new centrifuge plant at Portsmouth just as it was ready to open.

While that facility was being built, DOE decided it was cheaper to abandon centrifuge in favor of research toward another laser-based technology called AVLIS. USEC, which succeeded DOE as manager of the enrichment plants, stopped research of AVLIS last year, saying it was not cost efficient.

The centrifuge equipment at Portsmouth was removed 15 years ago. Stuckle declined to say if the building gives Portsmouth an edge over Paducah for the eventual construction of a centrifuge plant.

"Certainly, one of the options for locating a centrifuge plant would be the building at Portsmouth," she said. "But that's merely an option at this point."

Last week, Richard Miller, Washington-based policy analyst for the enrichment plants' atomic workers' union, predicted increased DOE involvement in centrifuge research within a few days. Without a replacement technology, USEC's financial status is dire, as reflected by a new Nuclear Regulatory Commission report, he said.

The study, which has not been made public, said USEC does not plan to have gas centrifuge on line until 2009, Miller said, quoting sources who had read the report. But that might be too late, because USEC is not expected to be profitable beyond 2003 unless dramatic measures â€" possibly including closing the Paducah plant, too â€" are taken, he said.

First District U.S. Rep. Ed Whitfield, R-Hopkinsville, said last week that he wasn't sure USEC will invest in centrifuge without DOE involvement.

Earlier this year, USEC asked the department for $50 million to build the pilot centrifuge plant, a $1.2 billion loan guarantee to finance the start-up plant, and permission to use the Portsmouth building, which would save USEC $300 million. The project would also cost DOE $150 million to transfer the building to USEC.

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson responded with a letter asking USEC to justify the need for centrifuge help and why the company abandoned AVLIS after the government had invested hundreds of millions of dollars in research.

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Message: 10
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Feds may kill Fernald health group

By Andrew Conte, Post staff reporter
http://www.cincypost.com/news/fern091900.html

Federal officials want to disband a group of community leaders and scientists looking into potential health effects caused by the former Fernald uranium processing plant.

Because the government's own work at the site has neared completion, federal officials want to also end the work and quarterly meetings of the Fernald Health Effects Subcommittee. Officials will meet with the community Wednesday to discuss the proposal.

It comes just months after the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry recommended further study of past, present and future health effects. Agency officials are uncertain about the extent of ground water contamination in private wells near the Fernald site, according to a May report.

During the 37 years that the uranium-processing facility operated, Fernald residents were exposed to radioactive materials from the site that resulted in a higher-than-expected risk for lung cancer, the report concluded.

Community leaders - angered that they were not consulted earlier about terminating the group - say they are opposed to its cessation because they feel the government has not completed its work.

''They made this decision behind closed doors without discussion, without asking the committee or the public,'' said Lisa Crawford, director of Fernald Residents for Environmental Safety and Health (FRESH). ''They say they're done, but we don't believe they are done.''

In a March letter to subcommittee members, representatives of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, the National Center for Environmental Health and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health called for a discussion on whether the group could stop meeting. The two latter agencies fall under the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The heads of all three agencies would make the ultimate decision of disbanding.

''We would like to discuss how to best approach bringing the subcommittee's business to closure,'' the letter said.

The Fernald plant stopped producing uranium metal products in 1988, and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry found that people who live near the plant are not now at risk from contaminated air, water or soil.

Government researchers who wrote that report, however, pointed out that the agency could not determine the current groundwater risk to nearby residents who have private wells. They recommended an in-depth assessment of past exposure in the wells, continued monitoring and an in-depth assessment of current usage and potential exposure.

The report also calls for continued monitoring of radon during the cleanup process.

And it found that air contamination could occur if an accident - ''such as a natural disaster or an act of terrorism'' - happened while workers are removing and transporting radioactive materials from the site.

Community leaders have seized on these uncertainties as reasons why the group should remain involved in looking at potential health risks.

''We understand that there is an end, but it's not right now,'' said Edwa Yocum, who serves on the board. ''There's still unanswered questions.''

Based on evidence of past exposures, residents are not quick to abandon the search for current and future pathways for contamination. They also want more complete information on how the plant's neighbors have been affected, Ms. Crawford said.

''The bottom line here is that we've been used as guinea pigs for almost 50 years, and we want to know what the whole picture of the health effects are,'' she said. ''CDC can leave when they're done with that, but not until then.''

NIOSH already has withdrawn from the subcommittee, saying it felt it should deal directly with Fernald workers. And officials from the National Center for Environmental Health have said previously that they have no further work to do at Fernald. Officials from those agencies could not be reached for comment Monday.

The Fernald Health Effects Subcommittee plans to hold a public discussion about its status from 6-8 p.m. Wednesday at the Plantation Conference Center, 9660 Dry Fork Road, Harrison. Information: 513-738-1659 or 404-639-2550. Directions: 513-367-5610.

Publication date: 09-19-00

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

Message: 11
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Fernald to serve as test site for Energy Department program

By JOHN NOLAN
The Associated Press
9/19/00
http://www.oregonlive.com/newsflash/index.ssf?/cgi-free/getstory_ssf.cgi?o1240_BC_OH--RadioactiveWaste-&&news&newsflash-oregon

CINCINNATI (AP) -- The government is studying whether electronic equipment, rather than people, could be used for decades to monitor the environment for radioactive waste left behind at former Cold War sites, including the Hanford nuclear reservation.

U.S. Department of Energy officials plan to use the 1,050-acre Fernald site in Ohio, which for 38 years processed uranium for nuclear weapons, as a test site when high-tech monitoring equipment is chosen.

The site is to house seven underground disposal cells of radioactive waste covering a total of 56 acres. They will need monitoring for many years to ensure that no material is leaking from the lined cells, officials said Tuesday.

"We're closing the largest site where there will not be continuing operations," said Susan Brechbill, a regional Energy Department manager.

The technology is likely to involve having electronic sampling devices collect information about wastes stored in underground cells, then transmit it into a computer somewhere else for record-keeping and monitoring so that problems could be detected, officials said. Although final decisions are years away on how monitoring will be done, department officials assume millions of dollars can be saved if people do not have to be kept on site for monitoring, Brechbill said.

Fernald neighbors have been consulted about the process. They will meet with Energy Department officials to discuss details next week, said Edwa Yocum of Fernald Residents for Environmental Safety and Health.

The Fernald cells will be covered by 40-foot-high mounds and completely encased in layered liners of clay, polyethylene, rocks and gravel. The monitoring precautions are intended to be responsible stewardship of the waste sites, not an assumption that the cells will leak, said John Bradburne, president of Fluor Fernald, the engineering company cleaning up the Fernald site for the Energy Department.

The Fernald site, 18 miles northwest of Cincinnati, is to be closed by the end of 2006 when environmental cleanup there is done. The Energy Department is talking with residents about possibly using the site afterward as a natural habitat, educational center for Cold War activities, or a burial site for American Indian remains.

Energy Department officials estimate that it could cost taxpayers $100 million annually for years to monitor about 100 sites nationwide where Cold War activities including bomb development and construction left radioactive contamination. But that is substantially less than the billions spent each year now to clean up and dispose of waste on those sites, officials said.

Lessons learned in monitoring tests could be used at other government-owned, radioactive cleanup sites, said Brechbill, whose field office also oversees the 306-acre Mound site in Miamisburg near Dayton.

Mound made triggers for nuclear weapons. Much of that site is being converted for use as an office and industry park. But the Energy Department still plans long-term monitoring of ground water there to check for radioactive contamination.

Brechbill and Bradburne were interviewed at an Energy Department-sponsored conference with companies that could supply various types of monitoring technologies for the testing. The University of Cincinnati, host for the two-day conference, and Florida International University are to help the Energy Department evaluate the technologies chosen in the next few years, department officials said.

----------

Message: 12
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Retired worker left ill by radiation exposure thinks job was worth it

September 20, 2000
By Virginia Baldwin Gilbert Of The Post-Dispatch
http://www.postnet.com/postnet/stories.nsf/ByDocID/83D3B49EC25304C786256960003E4C97

Fred Asikainen survived the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, though many in his paratrooper outfit did not.

Asikainen returned home to Florissant to raise a family and to get a good-paying job at Mallinckrodt Chemical Works' uranium processing plant.Twenty-nine years later, he retired - suffering from liver and kidney problems that have since been linked to radiation exposure.

Today, at 77, having survived actual combat in World War II, Asikainen remains reluctant to believe he might be a casualty of the Cold War that followed.

He and thousands of others in the St. Louis area who have suffered the physical consequences of exposure to beryllium or radioactive substances on the job could become eligible for compensation under a proposal before Congress.

The House Judiciary Committee will begin hearings Thursday on a collection of bills that would cover work-related disabilities or deaths among employees of private companies under federal contract to make nuclear weapons.

"They are very much warriors of the Cold War," said Sam Stratman, a spokesman for Henry Hyde, D-Ill., chairman of the committee. "Mr. Hyde is anxious to reach some accommodation on a compensation plan and move it forward."

The issue began with a bill to compensate workers suffering from chronic beryllium disease, a lung condition similar to brown lung or silicosis. Beryllium is a nonradioactive metal used in uranium processing. It is also used to make parts for aircraft and missiles.

About one person in 10 who is exposed to beryllium has a sensitive reaction that can cause scars in the lungs. Repeated exposure can result in loss of lung function, leading to disability and even death.

Chronic beryllium disease is relatively rare, striking less than 1 percent of the U.S. population. It can nearly always be traced to someone who worked with beryllium or who lived with someone who did.

The original legislation, introduced in February 1999 by Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa., arose from claims by former workers at a defunct beryllium plant in Apollo, Pa. The claimants, whose employer had a contract with the Department of Energy and its precursor, the Atomic Energy Commission, were asking for the same compensation they would have received had they been federal employees with a recognized occupational disease.

As members of Congress became acquainted with the issue, bills were introduced to expand the coverage to all beryllium workers employed by private contractors doing work for the Energy Department.

Now the committee is discussing bills that would expand eligibility to include two more groups:

* Employees of private contractors doing work for the Department of Defense who contracted chronic beryllium disease. This could conceivably include people who worked on aircraft or spacecraft with beryllium parts. Jo Anne Davis, a spokeswoman for Boeing Co., which bought the old McDonnell Douglas Corp., said beryllium was used in the manufacture of some spacecraft parts in the early 1960s but that the workers in that program have been tracked carefully and have shown no health problems.

* Employees of private contractors that did radiation work for either the Energy or Defense departments, and who have been diagnosed with any of the diseases on a list of cancers or kidney disease associated with radiation exposure. This would include Mallinckrodt uranium workers and their families.

Uranium workers

In the St. Louis area, about 3,000 people worked in uranium processing for Mallinckrodt from 1942 to 1966. The work began at Mallinckrodt's plant downtown and moved in 1957 to the government-owned plant that Mallinckrodt operated at Weldon Spring in St. Charles County.

Workers at a nuclear-fuel plant in Hematite in Jefferson County also worked with beryllium, according to federal records. The plan was built by Mallinckrodt in 1956 and is now owned by Westinghouse Electric, its sixth owner. But whether those workers ever worked under federal contract is uncertain.

Radiation workers at Mallinckrodt wore badges that measured their radiation exposure, and they got frequent physical exams.

But they were not counseled about what the exposures meant or what physical problems might have shown up in those exams.

The data were carefully preserved in a database in Oak Ridge, Tenn., but no effort has been made to identify "Cold War warriors" whose lives might have been shortened by their exposure to radiation or beryllium.

The only study so far of Mallinckrodt workers published earlier this year. It looks only at the workers who have already died, to see patterns or links to specific causes of death.

Compensation

Most of the half-dozen or so bills would make affected workers and their families eligible for compensation under the Federal Employees Compensation Act. Some of the bills would include a provision for back pay and retroactive medical expenses. Some would pay for medical expenses in the future. Some offer a lump-sum payment that would eliminate all future claims for medical expenses or survivor benefits.

If he were eligible for federal workers' compensation, Asikainen said, he'd take it, "especially for the medical, and for my wife. She's put up with a lot."

His Mallinckrodt pension is tiny - less than $300 a month.

In addition to his kidney and liver problems, Asikainen also has diabetes. The diabetes, which led to the loss of his right leg, showed up years after he left the job and has not necessarily been linked to his exposure.

Even today, Asikainen considers his and his co-workers' uranium work "a necessary evil."

"It kept us out of war, where millions of guys like me would've died with a hole in them."

To contact reporter Virginia Gilbert:\E-mail: vhick@postnet.com * Phone: 314-862-2153

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

Message: 13
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Workers here handled atom bomb material from the start

September 20, 2000
By Virginia Baldwin Gilbert
http://www.postnet.com/postnet/stories.nsf/News/E3FD84D2323A09BB86256960003EC577?OpenDocument&Headline=Workers%20here%20handled%20atom%20bomb%20material%20from%20the%20start

St. Louis' association with nuclear weapons started in April 1942, when Edward J. Mallinckrodt Jr., president of Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, agreed to purify uranium to be used in the first atomic bomb.

Workers in those days were told very little about the dangerous material with which they were working. Even after the first bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, to end World War II, workers knew very little about the toxicity of the radioactive materials they handled.

Handled was the operative word. In the 1940s, workers often touched the uranium, thorium, radium, plutonium and other highly radioactive substances. Even into the 1950s and beyond, workers cleaned or repaired equipment without shields, breathed contaminated dust and were exposed to hundreds of times the radiation considered safe even at the time.

When the Soviet Union and Communist China exploded their own atomic weapons, the Cold War intensified. And the demand for uranium for nuclear weapons for the U.S. arsenal grew.

"We couldn't work fast enough," said Fred Asikainen, who worked in the "green salt" process, one of the later stages of purification. "The government had to have the uranium. If they'd told us what we were working on, they wouldn't have had enough men down there to run that place all those years."

Mallinckrodt processed uranium for bombs in its downtown plant until 1957. Then operations were moved to a new federally owned facility in Weldon Spring, built on the site of a TNT plant operated by the military during World War II.

About 3,000 area residents worked in Mallinckrodt's nuclear operations over the years.

NATION & WORLD \IN THE NEWS: COLD WAR CASUALTIES\postnet.com/links: Read the entire award-winning Post-Dispatch series from 1989 on the effects of processing nuclear material in north St. Louis County.

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Message: 14
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Day 1: Post-Dispatch investigation of radiation problems

By Carolyn Bower, Theresa Tighe and Louis J. Rose Of the Post-Dispatch
Feb. 12, 1989
http://www.postnet.com/postnet/stories.nsf/News/6CDE1726CB8C5BFB8625695F00595546?OpenDocument&Headline=Day%201%3A%20Post-Dispatch%20investigation%20of%20radiation%20problems%20

A MIRACLE WITH A PRICE...ATOMIC WASTE IS ONE LEGACY OF A ST. LOUIS FIRM'S PATRIOTIC WORK

A SEVEN-PART POST-DISPATCH SERIES

THE Atomic Age in St. Louis began on April 17, 1942, over lunch at the Noonday Club, 319 North Fourth Street.

Chemical manufacturer Edward J. Mallinckrodt Jr. had his usual - a bowl of cold cereal. His companion, Arthur Holly Compton, the renowned physicist, did most of the eating - and the talking.

Compton was well aware of the topics of the day. Adolf Hitler's Germany was battering the Allies in Europe; Japan was on the verge of driving U.S. forces from the Philippines.

But Compton and other scientists involved in a top-secret project at the University of Chicago were distressed about something else.

They had received intelligence reports that German scientists were ahead of them - perhaps two years ahead - in developing the ''ultimate weapon.''

So Compton had come here to ask his old friend to try what three other companies had deemed too dangerous. He wanted Mallinckrodt to purify uranium in large amounts for an atomic bomb.

If Mallinckrodt could succeed, the United States could win the race for the bomb and win World War II.

On a handshake, Mallinckrodt began work that afternoon.

Within three months, Mallinckrodt Chemical Works was producing a ton of pure uranium daily.

It was, Compton said later, ''a technological and industrial miracle.''

But the miracle had its price.

As Mallinckrodt employees helped win the war, and as they proudly continued their work through the Cold War, piles of government-owned radioactive waste grew and were dispersed around the St. Louis area.

Today, more than 2.3 million cubic yards of contaminated material remain scattered across the area - in St. Louis, north St. Louis County and St. Charles County. If brought together, it would more than fill Busch Stadium.

The U.S. Department of Energy has put a $700 million price tag on cleaning up the major portion of the waste.

That estimate does not include the cleanup of other waste in the area, including some in Jefferson County and possibly some in nearby Illinois.

Most scientists and other experts think this low-level waste is hazardous to human health at least to some degree. Some say it poses a significant risk; others say the risk is minuscule.

Nonetheless, almost all experts say the waste should be cleaned up. For one thing, it will remain contaminated for billions of years.

If left spread out over the area, waste easily can be lost or forgotten. This already has happened with surprising frequency in just 47 years since the waste was first generated.

To understand the problem of radioactive waste here and to evaluate the options that lie ahead, it is necessary to understand what happened between 1942 and the present.

In 1942, scientists at the University of Chicago needed about 40 tons of uranium for the experiment that would prove self-sustaining nuclear reactions possible.

No more than half a cup of uranium pure enough to sustain fission existed in the country. It had been purified in ether, a volatile chemical, in a laboratory.

The need now to produce it tons at a time was what caused Compton - a former professor at Washington University here and later its chancellor - to turn to Mallinckrodt for help.

It was a smart choice. Mallinckrodt's father and uncles had started their chemical business in 1867 on the family's potato farm between North Broadway and the Mississippi River.

By 1942, all traces of Mallinckrodt's rural beginning were gone. The company had an international reputation for the purity of its chemicals. One of its specialties was producing ether for anesthesia.

After the April 17 luncheon, Edward Mallinckrodt and his team did not even bother with blueprints. Engineers and chemists sketched their ideas on scraps of paper, or chalked them on a wall or the floor.

In a day or two, carpenters and pipefitters began turning the ideas into equipment.

They needed stainless-steel kettles and they needed motors - items unavailable during the war years. Mallinckrodt had one of his plants in New Jersey dismantle a production line and ship the equipment to St. Louis.

''People worked morning, noon and night,'' said Harold E. Thayer, who was in charge of acquiring supplies for the project. He later became president and board chairman of Mallinckrodt.

''They worked in alleyways and corners of laboratories'' trying to find ways to process the uranium safely, he said.

Mallinckrodt chemists and engineers knew they could purify uranium without an explosion if cooling took place quickly. They would mix one part of a hot liquid form of uranium, with two to three times as much cold ether.

The liquid uranyl nitrate entered the mixture at 176 degrees Fahrenheit; the ether was chilled to 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Ether boils at 95 degrees.

Mixing the ether and the uranyl nitrate was like dropping water (in this case, the ether) into a hot skillet (the uranyl nitrate). The ether would bubble up; if the pressure became too great, there would be an explosion.

Mallinckrodt workers tested their theory in a small experiment in an alle yway rather than in a building. Just in case.

When there was no explosion, workers installed a 300-gallon mixing tank and seven smaller tanks in Building 52. The small tanks were used for storing water, which was pumped into the large tank to wash the mixture and remove impurities.

The men who operated the contraption called it ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.''

Refrigeration did not exist at the plant in 1942. So the ice man delivered huge blocks of ice that sat outside the building melting into cold water, which was circulated around the tanks to keep them cool.

Leo Burkhart, one of the first men in the uranium division at Mallinckrodt, says one of his most important duties was to make sure there was always enough ice.

It was also one of the hardest. Burkhart stood 5 feet 7 and weighed 118 pounds. The ice blocks frequently weighed 80 pounds or more.

As he worked in the August heat, Burkhart knew that at any moment the highly volatile ether could explode. The week before, someone on the night shift goofed and all the windows had blown out of an adjacent building.

Otherwise, Burkhart was unaware of any health hazards connected with the job.

Mallinckrodt purified all the uranium used in the experiment on Dec. 2, 1942, that proved the atomic bomb possible. On that day in a squash court under Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, Enrico Fermi triggered the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction.

Operating in secret, the government built three cities - Oak Ridge, Tenn., Hanford, Wash., and Los Alamos, N.M. - in less than two years.

In St. Louis at Washington University, physicists would use the cyclotron to produce some of the world's first plutonium, used as a trigger for atomic bombs.

Great jumps in knowledge and technology - leaps that normally would have required years of study and testing - occurred daily throughout the country during the Manhattan Project.

For many at Mallinckrodt, the toughest job was keeping everything about their work a secret. FBI checks prompted neighbors to speculate about the workers' character.

Burkhart remembers how FBI agents had quizzed his neighbors on Angelica Street. They asked about his character. Did he gamble? Chase girls? Drink heavily? Was he rowdy? Did they ever hear him talk about his work?

The questions seemed ludicrous. After all, Burkhart, 24, was married and had a small child. He had been working 14 hours a day, seven days a week.

Whenever he asked his supervisor what was going on, the supervisor would put his finger to his lips and say, ''Shhh.''

Burkhart had heard the material he was dealing with was radioactive, but the word had little meaning. One of his co-workers speculated that if it was radioactive it must be for radios.

Richard F. Schroeder, another uranium worker, recalls that FBI agents approached him in a bowling alley.

When the agents identified themselves, Schroeder said he immediately stammered: ''What did I do?''

Nothing, the FBI men assured him. They merely wanted him to keep his eyes and ears open and give them a call if he saw or heard anything suspicious.

When Mallinckrodt began purifying uranium, most workers called it by name - although only a handful could guess how it would be used.

Executives dubbed the project Uranium Oxide S.L. 42-17. They chose the name deliberately to imply that the uranium compound was merely another Mallinckrodt chemical.

But that wasn't secret enough for military police.

Said Thayer, the former Mallinckrodt board chairman: ''We got told in words of one syllable that it was a secret. We were not to say 'uranium.' ''

One worker managed to miss the company lectures on that subject, and while in a nearby saloon, he mentioned that he was working on uranium at the plant.

''Five hours later, they (the FBI) were all over the bar,'' Thayer said. ''They found him in a day. And they made damn sure he didn't talk about it again.''

The incident impressed everyone. The material they were processing changed overnight from uranium to Tube Alloy - after movie star Myrna Loy, some employees say.

Code names such as Biscuit, Juice, Oats, Cocoa and Vitamin were slapped on all the steps of the process. Correspondence about the project read like a breakfast menu.

Today, former uranium workers say that being kept in the dark didn't bother them. The work was exciting. They trusted their company, and they knew they were working for their country.

The workers had a lot in common. They were making good money. Mallinckrodt paid 75 cents an hour at a time when 65 cents to 70 cents was the norm. They became a family.

After work, they met for bowling and formed softball teams. They took their wives and girlfriends dancing. They went with their families on picnics.

They were young and their health was the last thing on their minds. They had no idea that - decades later - their lives and their work would become the subject of national and international health studies.

The employees always sensed the work was important. They learned j ust how important on Aug. 7, 1945, the day after the bombing of Hiroshima.

Newspaper and radio accounts of the bombing brought two new words - atomic and radiation - to most Americans. The words would be forever linked to death and destruction.

In 1945, the atomic bomb meant victory and an end to the war. Some military strategists estimated that an invasion of Japan would have cost a quarter-million American lives or more.

The workers were elated. Like most Americans, they had brothers and friends in the Pacific ready to storm Japanese-held beaches.

Mallinckrodt employees, such as Larry Faulkner, also knew they had done their part to win the war.

''I felt like I was doing something,'' Faulkner said. ''My brother was taken prisoner in Germany. Two of my brothers and my nephew were decorated. My son served in Vietnam. All I can say is, 'I worked for Mallinckrodt.' ''

Faulkner, who had asthma, was unable to qualify for military service. Other early uranium workers, who were either 4-F or who received deferments because of their work, voiced similar sentiments.

After the bombing, the uranium workers were given a day off - for some, only the second or third day off in as many years. Secretary of War Henry Stimson sent each worker a certificate and a silver medal the size of a nickel and bearing an ''A'' for atom.

The certificate was ''in appreciation of effective service.'' It said the workers ''had participated in work essential to the production of the atomic bomb.''

Mallinckrodt executives put a bronze plaque alongside the entrance to Building 51, part of the first plant. It said: ''In this building was refined all the uranium used in the world's first self-sustaining nuclear reaction December 2, 1942.''

Mallinckrodt Chemical Works would go on for the next two decades to discover and refine ways to produce materials for the Atomic Age. The company would process thorium and mechanize processes for purifying uranium salt and metal.

With the old Atomic Energy Commission, Mallinckrodt began the first industrial hygiene and safety program in the uranium-processing industry.

The uranium division workforce grew from 24 in 1942 to 1,050 in the early 1960s, when Mallinckrodt's uranium processing at a plant at Weldon Spring was at its peak. About 3,000 area residents worked in Mallinckrodt's nuclear operations over the years.

Propelled first by World War II and then by the Cold War, speed and inventiveness would be the earmarks of all operations.

''It's almost impossible to believe now,'' Thayer said of his company's early accomplishments.

''It all started at a lunch. There was no contract. There was nothing but a conversation between a leading scientist and Mr. Mallinckrodt. . . .

''You must understand that even though all this work was going on, no one really knew if it would work.''

But it did work, and Thayer and others say they can never forget their role in helping unlock the power of the atom for the United States.

As Thayer put it, ''We were proud as all sin.''

Gerry Everding, a Post-Dispatch special correspondent, contributed to this story.

Some Definitions Of Atomic Terms...

HERE ARE definitions of some terms in the story about the start of the Atomic Age in St. Louis:

Fission: Bombarding or splitting the nucleus of an atom to release a large amount of energy and heat: the principle of the atomic bomb.

Plutonium: An element produced by irradiating uranium. It is used in nuclear weapons and as a reactor fuel. It is one of the most toxic and carcinogenic substances known.

Radioactivity: A process in which some atoms become stable by expelling particles or bursts of energy. The particles are invisible, odorless, tasteless and soundless but can cause sickness and cancer.

Thorium: A radioactive element used in making gas mantles and electronic equipment and as a fuel source for nuclear reactors. During and after World War II, Mallinckrodt processed thorium for potential use in nuclear weapons.

Uranium: A radioactive element that occurs in nature. Uranium products are used in nuclear weapons and as fuel for nuclear reactors. Uranium-235, one of several main isotopes of uranium, is a highly fissionable material.

Uranyl nitrate: Toxic, explosive, unstable yellow crystals containing uranium. Early uranium workers heated it to make it liquid during the purification process.

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

Message: 15
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Day 2: Post-Dispatch investigation of radiation problems

By Carolyn Bower, Theresa Tighe and Louis J. Rose Of the Post-Dispatch
Feb. 13, 1989
http://www.postnet.com/postnet/stories.nsf/News/0C7E2006FC3AF5B28625695F00594FF8?OpenDocument&Headline=Day%202%3A%20Post-Dispatch%20investigation%20of%20radiation%20problems%20

SOME FEARED FOR HEALTH OF ORE HANDLERS BUT MOST WORKERS BRUSHED OFF RISKS; NO ONE KNEW WHAT EFFECTS MIGHT BE

URANIUM-PROCESSING workers on the night shift filed into the lunchroom at the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works in north St. Louis for one of Mont Mason's lectures on the safe handling of nuclear materials.

Mason, just two years out of the Marine Corps, sized up his audience. Most were in their 20s, and they were cutting up and cracking jokes like bad schoolboys.

The year was 1947. Mallinckrodt had just hired Mason to find ways to protect its employees from radiation and hazardous chemicals.

Some of the men in the room had been handling uranium since 1942, when Mallinckrodt began processing the ore for the Manhattan Project, the program that resulted in the United States' first atomic bomb. They had been told what they were doing only after the bombing of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.

Mason spent much of his time trying to convince the men that materials they had been handling could be a problem.

On this night, few of the workers seemed concerned about Mason's safety lecture. A couple of them even dozed off.

Years later, one explained: ''We were young, just back from the war, and Mason and these guys were talking about protons and neutrons.

''A lot of us didn't understand what they were talking about. Half of the men slept through the lectures. They tried to tell them, but you know how people are. Some of them won't listen.''

Some of the foremen told the men the work might make them sterile, but most workers laughed at that suggestion.

Earl Keppel, 64, the father of seven, would later joke that he thanked God that he was sterile. ''No telling how many kids I'd have if I wasn't,'' he said.

Mason caught some men's attention in 1947 by telling them the truth. He said that although scientists did not think radiation would be a problem, no one knew for sure what the radiation they were being exposed to would do to their health.

In the 26 years Mason worked for Mallinckrodt, he earned the reputation as a straight shooter. He never stopped trying to find out whether radiation had harmed the workers.

Until his death on Aug. 16, 1988, Mason pleaded with government officials for studies of the workers' health. It infuriated him that the government had never completed definitive studies of the effects on humans of the levels of radiation allowed in the nuclear industry.

In interviews during the year before his death, Mason contended that such studies would lay to rest the fears of some Mallinckrodt workers and help to quell opposition to nuclear power.

Others remain convinced that reliable studies would have the opposite result.

In 1947, the workers pushed to the back of their minds any fears they may have had. The chemical company raced to meet the government's ever-growing demand for purified uranium for nuclear weapons.

In addition to processing uranium, the company experimented with thorium.

''It was a very exciting time,'' Mason said. ''We were literally setting a (health) criteria for uranium plants of that generation. We were starting from scratch. I had to build my own instruments to measure the radiation.''

From the beginning of the nuclear work in 1942, Edward J. Mallinckrodt Jr., president of the family-owned chemical company, insisted that employees wear respirators and go to Barnes Hospital for tests. Most other nuclear plants didn't take such precautions until four years later.

In 1945, Mallinckrodt employees began wearing badges to measure radiation.

Despite the company's efforts, early workers were exposed on a daily basis to levels of uranium dust that were more than 200 times the current allowable limits.

>From 1942 to 1949, most uranium-processing work was done manually, and there were no limits on radiation exposure for workers.

Workers remember hand-scooping powdery uranium ore, sprinkling uranium oxide into trays, milling cakes of uranium tetrafluoride into green salt and picking beads of uranium out of waste.

In 1950, after working with the government to establish exposure limits, Mallinckrodt offic ials transferred 36 workers with the highest cumulative exposures out of the uranium division.

The workers were told the doses they received were not a cause for alarm, but were high enough to make it unwise for them to continue working with radioactive material.

One of the workers transferred was Arthur Tunnicliff, now 72.

Tunnicliff worked in Plant 4, a rented building on Broadway between Destrehan and Angelrodt streets. Workers dubbed it ''The Dirty One.''

The plant was closed in 1948 because the dust in the building could not be reduced to the levels safety officers considered acceptable.

Conditions were cramped in the two-story brick building, and the temperature in the furnace room reached 145 degrees in the summer. The workers say a film of dust covered everything. Sometimes, the dust even crept into the lunchroom and the showers.

On the plant's second floor, Tunnicliff and others fired uranium oxide into metal. They mixed uranium tetrafluoride, a shiny shamrock-green salt, with magnesium and packed the mixture in a metal cylinder they called a bomb.

They would put the bombs in a furnace and heat the oven to 2,560 degrees. The mixture would explode in the tube, creating the uranium metal.

Then, former workers say, the fun would begin.

''Once, twice, maybe three times a shift, sparks, fire, hot uranium metal shot through the room,'' Tunnicliff recalled. ''We'd all dive for cover.''

The hot metal escaped the container because the men hadn't yet learned to pack the mixture tight enough or to bolt the covers on securely enough, he said.

Tunnicliff became animated telling stories of his youth during an interview last year at his home in south St. Louis. But the tales disturbed Anna, his wife of 47 years.

''It's a good thing I didn't know what you were doing,'' she said.

Anna Tunnicliff has worried for years about the effects of her husband's work on her family's health.

''I had eight miscarriages when we were young,'' said Anna Tunnicliff, who also had two healthy babies. ''I always thought it might have something to do with the radiation.''

And Arthur Tunnicliff, who doesn't like to dwell on such things, said: ''Whenever a health problem comes up, I sort of wonder if my work could be the cause.''

Tunnicliff says that at the time he was transferred out of the uranium division, health considerations were not paramount in his mind. His biggest concern was whether he would make as much money in another division.

Uranium workers regularly put in 14-hour days and seven-day weeks to meet the ever-increasing government demands for uranium products.

To meet that demand and to handle pitchblende - the hottest ore ever to be processed in the United States - Mallinckrodt built Plant 6 in 1946.

Thick brick walls shielded workers from the ore, which averaged 25 percent uranium; some was as high as 70 percent uranium. Most uranium ore contains .3 percent uranium.

The soot-black, claylike ore, originally from the Belgian Congo, came to Mallinckrodt by rail in old cattle cars and was sent with such haste that the first shipments smelled like manure.

Workers who handled pitchblende were required to shower before lunch, before going home and any time they got dusty.

From 1942, men who worked with nuclear material had been issued a full set of clothing down to their undershorts.

Federal reports show that over the years the Atomic Energy Commission spent about $300,000 for dust control and other safety measures in the Mallinckrodt complex in north St. Louis.

By 1956, to meet production quotas, all of Mallinckrodt's plants were producing more than three times their designed capacity. By 1957, it was clearly impossible to increase production without losing control over health risks.

To solve the problem, the Atomic Energy Commission in 1957 opened a new factory - operated by Mallinckrodt - at Weldon Spring, in St. Charles County.

The plant also ran at three times capacity for most of the years before it closed in 1966.

Former uranium-division workers still say with pride that they never missed a production quota. They note that they always provided their government with the uranium it needed for nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

Most also believe their company did its best to protect them.

''To me, it was like getting on a plane,'' said Carl Feisel, one of the workers. ''I feel the pilot is not going to kill himself; he is on that plane, too.''

Feisel began working at Mallinckrodt when he was 16, and he spent 48 years in its employ. He rose from an errand boy to a production foreman. Old Germans, as he calls them, showed him how to handle chemicals without injuring himself. He taught younger men to work safely with acids that could burn through their fingers.

Feisel, who lives in north St. Louis County, does not think working with radiation posed an inordinate risk to his health.

Some other workers and their families are not so confident.

A few years ago on a slow night at the plant, a group of former ura nium division employees began talking about colleagues who had died young - under 50.

In a few hours, the group had compiled a list of 40 names. More than half of the deaths, according to the group, were believed to involve leukemia or lung cancer - two cancers associated with radiation.

Dick Schroeder, 63, a resident of North County, voices the feelings of many former uranium-division workers.

''I don't regret the work,'' Schroeder said.

''They didn't know anything and they still don't have the true answers. I try not to worry. I just hope I wake up each day and can play golf. What's done is done. But I pray a lot.''

Gerry Everding, a Post-Dispatch special correspondent, contributed to this story.

--

Feb. 13, 1989
CANCER DEATHS SEEM HIGHER FOR WORKERS; NEW STUDY IS AWAITED

FEDERAL researchers found an elevated number of deaths from four kinds of cancer in a preliminary study of 2,731 workers who processed uranium at Mallinckrodt Chemical Works in the St. Louis area from 1942 to 1966.

The study shows that, through June 1976, seven workers died of cancer of the esophagus - more than three times the 2.1 deaths expected for the number surveyed.

Researchers also found 24 percent more deaths from leukemia than normally would be expected.

Researchers also discovered an elevated mortality rate from cancer of the pancreas among workers who had received the highest doses of radiation. The study was financed by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Most Mallinckrodt workers and state health officials were unaware of the study, published in a Swedish medical journal in 1981.

The Mallinckrodt workers processed uranium and thorium for the federal government at the company's plant in north St. Louis and at a federally owned plant near Weldon Spring in St. Charles County.

The authors of the study caution against leaping to the conclusion that the men's work jeopardized their health.

They say the study did not prove that radiation caused the cancers, adding that the elevations in the death rates were small enough to be explained by chance.

Shirley Fry, who is in charge of the research being done by Oak Ridge (Tenn.) Associated Universities, said a more complete study of the Mallinckrodt workers would be ready for publication by the middle of 1990.

She said it would include data on worker deaths through 1983. The preliminary study included worker deaths only through June 1976.

The Mallinckrodt study is part of an investigation of the health of about 280,000 current and former nuclear workers at fuel and weapons plants across the country.

Scientists say the studies could help determine whether the health of nuclear workers has been jeopardized by exposure to low-level radiation.

Black and female employees were excluded from the Mallinckrodt study. Federal researchers said that women were too difficult to track and that there were too few black employees to produce meaningful statistics.

Although 405 workers had died before July 1, 1976, the findings in the preliminary study were based only on 390 death certificates that researchers were able to find. The cause of death for the other 15 could not be verified.

Epidemiologists say that as a result of the 1976 cutoff, some cancer deaths might have been missed. They said there often is a lag of 20 to 30 years between exposure to low-level radiation and the appearance of cancer.

Despite this, the federally financed health studies indicate that an excessive number of the nation's nuclear workers have died of respiratory diseases and cancers.

A number of individual studies show that people who worked at some uranium and plutonium processing plants in the United States have experienced h igher than expected death rates from several types of cancer.

The results vary from plant to plant, with no single cause of death common to all facilities.

The studies attributed elevated numbers of deaths among nuclear workers to leukemia, Hodgkin's disease and cancers of the lung, brain, larynx, esophagus, digestive tract, rectum and prostate.

For example, elevated levels of laryngeal cancer, pneumonia and respiratory disease were found among 995 men who worked at a uranium processing plant in Buffalo, N.Y., between 1943 and 1949.

Researchers for the Energy Department said the number of deaths was too small to determine whether radiation actually caused the cancer.

They said other factors, such as tobacco or alcohol, could have contributed to some of the deaths; data on the workers' smoking and drinking habits often was unavailable.

Since World War II, government policy for exposure to radiation has been based mostly on what happened to survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and on the effects of radiation on animals.

But some scientists say low-level radiation is quite different from high-level radiation. They think the body's reaction to constant exposure to low-level doses may not be comparable to a one-time exposure to a high level of radiation.

Beyond that, they question the accuracy of some of the data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The stakes riding on the outcome of the health studies are enormous.

Any evidence showing that levels of radiation below existing standards cause cancer or genetic damage could pressure the government and private industry into spending tens of billions of dollars to revamp nuclear power plants and weapons factories.

Critics of the Energy Department argue that it would be far better if the studies were done by groups independent of the agency. The department finances 80 percent of all radiation research done in this country.

The critics question the ability of the agency charged with the development of nuclear weapons to pay for unbiased research.

But Fry, who is in charge of the health studies, said: ''If the government weren't paying for these studies, nobody would be doing them.

''We consider ourselves independent scientists. We don't have to answer to the government for our results. We report what we find.''

A group of researchers headed by Dr. Alice Stewart of Birmingham, England, plans to conduct its own health study of the 280,000 nuclear workers included in the studies being paid for by the Department of Energy.

Stewart's group received $1.4 million to do the study as part of the settlement of a lawsuit connected with the Three Mile Island disaster.

But, says Stewart, the Energy Department has yet to provide her with the workers' exposure records needed for the project. Her attorneys are trying to subpoena the data.

--

Feb. 13, 1989
15 BUILDINGS SHOW TRACES OF RADIATION

DESPITE major cl eanups in the past, traces of radioactive contamination have been found in or under parts of 15 buildings at the Mallinckrodt Inc. complex in north St. Louis, federal officials say.

The contamination connected with seven of the buildings may date to the Manhattan Project during World War II, when Mallinckrodt helped the United States develop the atomic bomb.

>From 1942 to 1958, the company purified uranium and thorium at its St. Louis plant for nuclear weapons under contracts with the federal government.

Andrew Avel of the U.S. Department of Energy said radiological tests showed some readings in excess of federal guidelines in, around or under parts of the 15 buildings. Avel oversees federal plans for an eventual cleanup of the complex.

Avel said the Energy Department now estimates that 127,000 cubic yards of contaminated material must be removed from the buildings and grounds. That is nearly double an earlier estimate of 70,000 cubic yards. One source estimated the cost at $46 million.

Mallinckrodt officers say the radiation levels are extremely low and pose no threat to workers or the public. They say the company has conducted its own radiological surveys and continually monitors the plant.

''I don't believe (employees) are at risk in those buildings,'' said Raymond F. Bentele, president and chief executive officer of Mallinckrodt Inc. ''If we thought it wasn't safe, we wouldn't have people working those areas.''

Avel said scientists hired by the Energy Department conducted tests last year on Mallinckrodt's buildings and grounds, as well as at some neighboring businesses. A draft report on the survey should be completed in April, he said.

The federal government financed cleanups at the Mallinckrodt complex from 1948 to 1950 and from 1957 to 1962. In the cleanups, buildings were torn down, walls scrubbed down, soil dug up and areas backfilled.

In the early 1960s, at least 5,000 truckloads of contaminated rubble from eight to 10 buildings at the Mallinckrodt complex were hauled to a quarry near Weldon Spring in St. Charles County and dumped there.

The cleanups restored the plant to levels then considered permissible by the federal government. By 1962, the government had returned the entire complex to Mallinckrodt for unrestricted use.

Fifteen years later, the government returned to check levels of radiation at the plant against tougher standards. A report issued in 1981 - based on a 1977 survey - concluded that many buildings remained contaminated.

Bentele said a radiological survey the company made in 1984 and monitoring data since then proved that employees were not at risk and had not been receiving any significant exposure.

He said the company would continue to monitor radiation levels in the complex until the Department of Energy ''completes final remedial action.''

The 1981 report made no mention of two documents that recorded the burial under Building 101 of radioactive material in 1972 and 1973. The documents, filed with the city by Mallinckrodt, showed that Mallinckrodt buried about 233,000 pounds of ore containing 4,814 pounds of thorium.

The ore was in 30-gallon steel drums buried before the warehouse was built. They were placed in trenches and covered with at least 4 feet of dirt. Plans for the warehouse called for a 10-inch-thick concrete floor.

----------

Message: 16
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Day 3: Post-Dispatch investigation of radiation problems

By Carolyn Bower, Theresa Tighe and Louis J. Rose Of the Post-Dispatch
Feb. 14, 1989
http://www.postnet.com/postnet/stories.nsf/News/6D4BB647195F47DF8625695F00594F5A?OpenDocument&Headline=Day%203%3A%20Post-Dispatch%20investigation%20of%20radiation%20problems%20

BUILDING A MOUNTAIN OF RADIOACTIVE WASTE

IN THE SUMMER of 1966, Leo Vasquez, 13, and his friends run out and pick up the yellow dirt that falls from trucks lumbering past his family's farmhouse north of Lambert Field.

The youngsters take the dirt and swirl it in water. They are panning for gold.

Every six minutes or so, a truck rumbles east on Frost Avenue headed for Latty Avenue from an airport waste dump. The boys are determined to get rich. Despite all their efforts, they wind up with nothing.

Unknown to the boys, they are panning waste from uranium processing that resulted in America's first atomic bomb.

Shortly after World War II ended in 1945, representatives of the federal government were looking for a place to store radioactive waste generated at Mallinckrodt Chemical Works in St. Louis. They wanted a place that was accessible, free from floods and sparsely populated.

The government settled on property north of Lambert Field, even though the western third of the land was in the floodplain of Coldwater Creek.

The landfill was top secret. Drivers hauling waste there were not told what they were transporting. For the first three months of operation, the government didn't even own the land.

When the government filed suit to acquire the 21.7-acre property, federal and Mallinckrodt officials refused ''for security reasons'' to disclose the exact nature of the waste.

Officials said the residue was neither radioactive nor dangerous. At the time, information about nuclear operations was classified. The United States was trying to preserve its lead over the Soviet Union in the development of atomic weapons.

For the next decade, Tom Green and four other independent truck drivers together hauled about 18,700 tons of uranium residue to the airport dump each year, Green later recalled.

Green and two other drivers hauled at least 5,000 tons each a year; the other two hauled much less. Each load weighed between 8 and 9 tons.

Green, a Navy veteran of World War II, worked six or seven days a week. His health and exposure to radiation were never monitored. Years passed without a vacation. His son, Mike, remembers that his father was too busy hauling the waste to come watch him play Khoury League ball.

Some of the residue Green hauled was from ore that originated in the Belgian Congo. He called it pitchblende, ''the richest dirt in the world.''

By the time the residue got to Green's truck, much of the uranium was gone, leaving high concentrations of radium, another highly radioactive substance.

Many times at the airport site, the pitchblende waste would stick to Green's shoes. When a worker held a Geiger counter to measure the radioactivity in Green's truck, the instrument's needle ''would jump all over the place,'' he told his family.

In the winter when it snowed, the waste would turn into a quagmire. Green's truck would slip and slide; sometimes he had to push it from the muck.

Friends said Green never feared the radioactive material during the 12 years that he hauled it. But after he got cancer, he said the job might have cost him his life.

Green died on June 8, 1979, at the age of 63. His death certificate attributes the cause to cancer of both lungs. Green smoked cigarettes for most of his life; he stopped several years before his death.

The place where Green dumped the waste turned from a green and brown patchwork of farm fields into a moonlike world.

A huge yellow mountain, the remnants of Colorado ore, rose from flat land on its western boun dary. A chocolate brown peak, the residue of ore from around the world, stood to the east.

Row after row of rusty 30-gallon and 55-gallon black drums stretched as far as the eye could see from Brown Road, now McDonnell Boulevard, to Banshee Road.

Workers from Mallinckrodt tooled around the site on bulldozers and trucks, reshaping the earth to make room for more waste, and they hand-packed radioactive residue in drums.

Richard F. Schroeder, now 63,(7.11.25) said it was fun making mountains, moving them, carving out mesas and roads.

''That's why I never minded going to work,'' Schroeder said. ''Everything was so interesting.''

Sometimes the workers drove their cars on top of the piles to watch the planes fly in and out of Lambert Field to the south. The mounds, perhaps 40 feet tall, were so high the workers could feel the heat from the aircraft engines.

Schroeder remembers selling drums that had contained uranium ore to merchants, who would resell them.

Bruno Bevolo tells about the day they buried the pickup truck.

''An AEC (Atomic Energy Commission) man came out and said the truck was too hot, don't use it anymore, bury it,'' said Bevolo, a foreman at the airport.

''We got a backhoe and dug a hole right there. They wouldn't let anybody have it. I said, 'That's too bad.' I could have used a truck.''

Bevolo, now 72, said it bothered him that the trucks tracked muddy residue along McDonnell Boulevard and that when the drivers washed out the trucks, the residue overflowed into Coldwater Creek.

''I bitchedok like hell,'' Bevolo said.

''I told them, 'You people are messing up the creeks.' All they kept saying was, 'Don't worry about it.' ''

Bevolo and Schroeder, who often play golf together now, tried to keep the radioactive material from spreading.

Before dumping truckloads of waste in railroad cars headed for reprocessing plants in other cities, Schroeder would line the cars with wax paper and stuff rags in the holes.

Then he'd wet the dirt to keep the dust down.

''I always hoped somewhere along the route someone would wet the stuff down again,'' Schroeder said. He was never told where the material went.

There wasn't anything the workers could do about the wind that blew the powdery residue toward a cornfield that later became the Berkeley ballfields.

Bevolo said: ''I saw them putting in those ballfields right next to the place. I said, 'That's too close.' But they said, 'Don't worry about it.' ''

Last year, federal officials confirmed that the ballfields contain radioactive contamination. They have said, however, that the ballfield area poses a hazard only if someone eats the dirt.

The city of Berkeley closed the fields last April 19;1988 they remain closed.

In the summer of 1966, the trucks were rolling again, this time hauling waste from the airport to an industrial park on Latty Avenue about a mile to the north.

A Los Angeles firm, Continental Mining & Milling Co., bought the material in an effort to recover valuable minerals such as copper and cobalt.

Workers for companies along Latty Avenue remember the caravan.

''The dirt would fall off the trucks,'' said Skip Cothran, now 59, who drove a forklift for Wagner Electric Co. at the time.

''There was waste all over Hazelwood and Latty (avenues). Sometimes if it rained, the stuff got so thick and sticky it looked like cow manure.''

Velma Vasquez, mother of one of the boys who had played with the radioactive dirt, didn't think much about the dirt falling from the trucks.

''Nobody considered it as radioactive,'' said Vasquez, now 63.

But today her yard may be part of a cleanup. Last fall, Bechtel National Inc. completed drilling holes up to 100 feet into her property to see how far the contamination spread.

Less than a month after Continental Mining & Milling Co. moved the dirt, the company went bankrupt. Several years later Cotter Corp., a subsidiary of Commonwealth Edison, a utility based in Chicago, bought the residue and over the years shipped most of it to its plant in Canon City, Colo.

But enough thorium, uranium and radium seeped into the ground and remained in the buildings that the property remains contaminated.

Berkeley police Maj. Louis Charboneau - then a patrolman - moonlighted about 40 hours a week between 1967 and 1971 as a private security guard at the Latty site. Security officers like Charboneau wore no badges to detect exposure to radiation.

''They told us there was no danger,'' Charboneau said.

Charboneau, 54,birthday 10/88 knows that scores of neighborhood children played in the sandy piles of radioactive material on Latty Avenue.

But he doesn't think the children were harmed because he thinks he has spent more time there than they did, and he thinks the radiation hasn't affected him.

Three of the children were the sons of Ceil and Jim Bogowith.

With their dogs and bows and arrows and BB guns, the boys, then ages 8 to 15, played off and on from 1966 until the early 1970s around the piles of dirt and in the creek.

Ceil Bogowith said she wasn't aware that the radioactive material at Latty Avenue could be a problem until she heard environmentalists discuss the dangers at a meeting in Florissant in 1979.

''I was quite angry,'' she said.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission arranged for Kenneth Bogowith and Richard O'Brien - the two boys who had played at Latty Avenue the most - to fly to Oak Ridge, Tenn., for tests. The families were told that the boys were fine.

But federal officials cautioned that they were unable to determine whether the boys had inhaled radon. Radon gas, which has been linked to cancer, is present at the site.

Kenneth Bogowith, now 25, joined the Navy and worked on nuclear submarines. He says he has no qualms about his health. His mother says she has come to accept the situation, but she is not happy about it.

O'Brien, now 24, is not worried about his health, family members say.

In the meantime, in 1973, radioactive material had secretly been trucked to Bridgeton from Latty Avenue. A St. Ann company had a contract to dry the waste at Latty Avenue and send it to Cotter Corp. in Colorado.

Instead, the firm, B&K Construction Co., working with four other trucking firms, hauled 8,700 tons to West Lake landfill.

It wasn't until three years later - when an anonymous source tipped a Post-Dispatch reporter - that the unauthorized dumping came to federal attention.

After 15 years, uranium, radium and thorium have seeped through the landfill to nearby property. Experts think there may be 170,000 cubic yards of contaminated material in the landfill now.

No one knows for sure.

Several years ago, West Lake employees called Gilbert Schroeder, a farmer from Hazelwood, and told him that people might test for radioactive contamination on land he farms west of the landfill. Schroeder has grown soybeans there for 10 years.

Government memos indicate that thorium-230 and radium-226 have been found in the field. Although the radioactive substances substantially exceed amounts normally found in soil, they are below levels at which the government requires a cleanup.

When a Post-Dispatch reporter told him about the findings, Schroeder said no one had ever called him back to tell him about the test results. He added that he wasn't particularly surprised and intended to continue farming there.

Soybeans grown in a contaminated area would have radiation levels higher than background radiation, but they would not endanger health, federal officials say.

In the mid-1970s, Herb Thies, who has farmed in the area for decades, was trying to grow crops at the Latty Avenue site.

His efforts failed.

''That land just wouldn't grow anything,'' said Thies, 58.as of 5/88 ''I put in soybeans. I planted early in the spring, and, after May and June, there was nothing to harvest.

''The outer edges worked, but the middle - it was dead dirt. It never came out right.''

Thies was allowed to farm the land because the Atomic Energy Commission had declared it clean in 1974.

Two years later, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a successor to the AEC, said the Latty site remained contaminated. The Health and Safety Research Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory also found excessive radioactivity.

But nobody told E. Dean Jarboe.

In 1977, Jarboe, whom associates consider a shrewd businessman, paid $115,000 for 3.5 acres of property in the 9000 block of Latty Avenue. He made it headquarters for his plastic-coatings business.

Three days after closing the deal on the property, Jarboe learned from federal officials that his property was contaminated.

''I watched one guy come in the door, and then two and then three, and I said, 'What the hell is going on?' '' Jarboe, 62, recalled in an interview at his Futura Coatings office.

''About nine of them came in. We all sat down and they said, 'You can't use that property.' ''

The officials told him it was contaminated with radioactive waste.

''I was shocked,'' continued Jarboe, who turns 63 this week.dob 2.17.26 ''I mean I had no idea. I wouldn't have bought this.''

Jarboe and his sons spent the next year with other workers digging up contaminated dirt and tearing out radioactive buildings.

In 1980, he thought he had the perfect solution to the waste problem and the future of his business.

On the theory that the government would have all the waste cleaned up and shipped away from Latty Avenue in two years, Jarboe paid about $100,000 for about seven more acres of contaminated property.

Jarboe thought it was a sweet deal. The government would consolidate all the waste on the new seven-acre parcel next to his business offices. He would get $15,000 from the government to temporarily store the waste there.

Once the radioactive material was gone, his business could expand.

Nearly a decade later, he's still waiting.

Every morning as he walks into his office, he sees two mounds of radioactive waste looming beside his corporate headquarters.

Jarboe employs 85 people in his business of supplying roof co atings, wine-tank coatings and - a new venture - plastic liners for hazardous-waste disposal sites.

Sitting in his office at the site, Jarboe reflected on the problem. The government paid him $100,000 for the plastic tarps that cover the radioactive piles on his property, but that's little consolation.

''Look, I don't know what I'm going to get out of this except a clean piece of property,'' he said, adding: ''I may not even be here when that happens.

''You can't sue the government. I tried that in the beginning. I couldn't find anything to sue them for. That's what my legal staff told me. You can't do it.''

Gerry Everding, a special correspondent of the Post-Dispatch, provided information for this story.

--

Feb. 14, 1989
CHANCE SPARKED CRUSADE TO CLEAN UP WASTE HERE

UNTIL a chance meeting in 1978 between a Catholic nun in St. Louis and a nuclear physicist from Cornell University, few residents even knew there was radioactive waste stored in the St. Louis area.

Sister Mary Ann McGivern was returning by plane to St. Louis from New York, where she had attended a meeting on nuclear disarmament.

McGivern found herself seated next to Robert Pohl, a physicist on his way to testify at a hearing on uranium mining on Indian lands in the West.

As they chatted over dinner, Pohl asked McGivern whether she was fighting to have the nuclear waste in the St. Louis area cleaned up.

''What waste?'' she asked.

The waste on ''Laddie Avenue'' in south St. Louis, Pohl replied. He told her he had just read about it in a report about waste from the making of the atomic bomb.

Even with Pohl's mispronunciation of the address, it took McGivern and friends only two weeks to find the material on Latty Avenue in Hazelwood in North County.

It was time for a new crusade, and McGivern knew just the person to lead the fight.

That was Kay Drey, the tall, slender activist from University City who had been instrumental in the campaign that thwarted Union Electric Co.'s plans to build a second nuclear reactor in Callaway County.

Once briefed by McGivern, Drey threw herself at the new problem.

Her basement became a repository of documents on radioactive waste in the St. Louis area. Today, her library is the starting point for people who want to study the problem. Even officials from the U.S. Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have used it.

As she learned about the history of radioactive waste in the area, Drey bombarded political leaders with letters, petitions and protests. Typically, she would spend hours drafting what she wanted to say.

In 1979, Drey recruited about 40 people in North County for a pitched battle with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which then had responsibility for the waste at Latty Avenue.

The fight began after the NRC made public plans to truck contaminated material from Latty Avenue and combine it with other radioactive waste at a 21.7-acre federal site north of Lambert Field. Once the Latty waste was deposited there, officials wanted to pave over part of the property and turn it into a driver-training course for local police departments.

Drey and William Crow, an official with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, sparred frequently at municipal meetings.

Crow said the plan was a way to get the waste safely consolidated in one place.

''You get as much radiation standing next to that dirt as (you do) standing next to a human being,'' he said.

Drey countered: ''Some communities say, 'Support your local police.' Here in St. Louis we say, 'Irradiate your local police.' ''

She produced a federal report showing that radioactive waste already was leaking from the site adjacent to the airport into Coldwater Creek, which flows through residential neighborhoods in much of north St. Louis County.

Because of the uproar caused by the environmentalists, the contaminated material stayed at Latty.

Drey views it as only a partial victory. ''It's one thing to stop something, but we've never been able to get them to move it away,'' she said.

''The federal government finds money to make new bombs; it can find money to clean up old ones,'' Drey said.

Crow says politics, hysteria and emotionalism killed a good plan.

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

Message: 17
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Day 4: Post-Dispatch investigation of radiation problems

By Carolyn Bower, Theresa Tighe and Louis J. Rose Of the Post-Dispatch
Feb. 15, 1989
http://www.postnet.com/postnet/stories.nsf/News/53FEA332E3D115DB8625695F00594DF2?OpenDocument&Headline=Day%204%3A%20Post-Dispatch%20investigation%20of%20radiation%20problems%20

CONTAMINATION OF 'THE CLEAN ONE'...HOW WELDON SPRING WENT FROM MODEL TO MESS

LIKE an abandoned set from a science-fiction movie, the Weldon Spring complex sits behind a 6-foot wire fence off Missouri Highway 94, two miles southwest of Highway 40.

Rusting steel buildings rise from farmland taken by the government before World War II began for the production of high explosives and later used to process uranium for the country's nuclear arsenal.

Viewed up close, the 68 buildings show their age. Miles of pipe drip rotting insulation. Steel drums, fork lifts, trucks and other equipment lie rusting in the factory yard. The buildings, equipment, thousands of drums and tons of soil are contaminated with radium, uranium, thorium, nitrates and myriad other chemicals.

It is so contaminated that federal officials require visitors to check in with a guard and, for the most part, stay in federal vehicles while at the site. No one is allowed to walk in certain areas without latex rubber boots and protective clothing.

Bright yellow and purple signs warn of radioactive contamination in and around the buildings.

Several years ago, the Army sprayed thick orange polyurethene foam on some particularly hot equipment in one of the buildings to prevent the spread of contamination.

When the Atomic Energy Commission opened the plant in 1957 to process uranium, the agency proclaimed it a showplace of technology. The complex employed about 1,000 people and attracted visitors from several countries.

One-fourth of the $57 million construction cost went for measures to protect workers from radiation.

Workers called the plant ''The Clean One.'' It eliminated many of the processes at the old Mallinckrodt buildings in St. Louis that involved handling uranium by hand.

''The new plant was all automated,'' said Paul P. Englert, a resident of St. Charles, who was an operator in the uranium refinery. ''With a dial you could speed up production.''

Hoppers, each holding between 5 and 10 tons of uranium, would dump their contents automatically into 10,000-gallon tanks containing acid as part of the new, improved process of purifying uranium.

>From the start, the plant produced beyond its capacity in order to meet the government's demands. Designed to process 5,000 tons of yellow uranium ore a year, the plant actually averaged 16,000 tons a year from 1958 to 1964.

Englert and other workers remember conserving every precious gram of uranium.

If the material got too hot, the lids on large pots used in one stage of the refining process would blow off, spewing puffs of orange uranium trioxide all over. The workers would wash down the spilled powder and pump the liquid back for further processing.

Even rainwater became a source of uranium. Workers recount how they would capture rain that fell on roofs where uranium dust may have collected. The water was funneled inside the plant so the uranium could be separated out.

Radioactive residue and acids were disposed of by pumping them into several outdoor ponds at the plant, called raffinate pits. Today the ponds cover 25 acres. The mucky residue is 15 feet deep in places.

Pipes were run from the pits to a sewer line. If it rained and the pits filled, any overflow would drain southeast from the plant toward the Missouri River.

Robert J. Toomey, a retired Mallinckrodt employee, remembers when strange-looking frogs began appearing on the banks of the pits.

The frogs had bumps on them where bumps shouldn't have been, Toomey said, adding: ''We didn't know if it was from the acid or what.''

Many workers didn't worry about radiation.

Richard F. Schroeder, a retired Mallinckrodt worker, explained their feelings:

''It's all invisible, right? It's like standing somewhere and the wind's blowing. You can feel the wind, but you cannot feel radiation. You don't know what it's doing.

''I don't think any of us at the time worried about it,'' said Schroeder, now 63. ''It was just another job.''

Englert remembers when a conveyor belt carrying a 55-gallon drum of uranium ore got jammed. When a worker reached up to get the drum loose, it tipped, spilling its contents on him.

The worker's superiors wanted to send the man to Oak Ridge, Tenn., for tests and medical treatment, but he refused.

For many workers, the risks of accidents involving sulphuric, hydrofluoric and nitric acids used at the plant caused more anxiety than the threat of radiation. Hydrofluoric acid was a special concern. Some described it as ''fast-acting leprosy.''

Special cards were issued to workers to alert doctors about the acids used at the plant. Employees tell how friends who got acid on their fingers at work later would wake up during the night to find their hands swollen to twice their usual size.

The late Mont Mason, a health physicist at the plant, recalled in an interview last year: ''I had some people who took knives in the middle of the night and split their hands open, they hurt so bad.''

By 1963, the plant started receiving enriched uranium from Oak Ridge, and workers were warned that passing the enriched material over other enriched material could set off an explosion.

The Weldon Spring plant also worked on recovering uranium from waste material shipped from Oak Ridge.

''It came on boxcars in drums,'' Englert said. ''It looked like mud. They'd dump it in tanks. It looked like someone had cleaned up a plant and sent us the old sludge.''

Empty drums that once contained uranium residue were collected near the Weldon Spring plant. Workers remember a man coming to inspect the drums. They say he took thousands of them to another site, where he had them pressed into blocks for sale to a junk dealer.

''The drums were supposed to be washed out, but you could see stuff stuck there in them,'' said Bruno Bevolo, a retired Mallinckrodt worker.

Late in the summer of 1966, Mallinckrodt officials took workers aside and told them that the Weldon Spring plant was going to close. The AEC contract for processing uranium was being shifted to National Lead Co. in Fernald, Ohio.

It was a bitter blow; Mallinckrodt people had designed the process and had even helped train the people at Fernald.

Workers at Weldon Spring were incensed or heartbroken. Some of the men say they cried when they heard the news.

The workers had become a family. Now some of them would be without jobs.

Company officials say Mallinckrodt got out of the uranium business because the demand for purified uranium had decreased and the government shifted production to the newer plant at Fernald.

But most of the workers insist it was ''politics,'' arguing that Ohio's congressional delegation outmaneuvered the Missouri delegation.

The Atomic Energy Commission ordered Mallinckrodt to place the plant on standby. Mallinckrodt fulfilled its contract and ceased production by the end of 1966.

One of the last 35 men to work in the refinery at Weldon Spring was Paul Englert. ''They cleaned up real good,'' he said. ''They washed down the place and wiped it with rags and everything.''

Other parts of the plant looked more like people had left in a hurry.

Some environmentalists in St. Charles County suggest an atomic accident might have closed the plant. But workers and company officials say that isn't the case, and there is no indication of an atomic accident in government records.

Today, the plant is a spooky place. The roofs are falling in, and clumps of mold grow on the floor and walls. But otherwise, it is as if the workers would return tomorrow.

Coffee cups sit on tables in the cafeteria. China and glasses are piled in dishwashers in the kitchen. Hundreds of unused beakers, flasks and test tubes sit in drawers and cabinets in the laboratories. Aspirin, bandages, tongue depressors, blood pressure cups and other medical supplies sit in the infirmary, ready for use.

For 20 years after the 1966 closing, every contractor and every government agency that entered the plant was surprised at the amount of radioactive material that remained.

In 1967 and 1968, representatives of National Lead of Ohio went to the Weldon Spring plant to see what they could salvage for the plant at Fernald.

National Lead was given its pick of contaminated stainless steel pipe, valves, vessels, spare parts and other equipment. A total of 20 rail cars and one truckload of material were shipped to Fernald.

The amount of uranium oxide found after the plant closed defied all previous expectations.

When a worker removed a ventilation pipe, uranium dust began to pour out.

He got a broom and a shovel, and he alternately swept and scooped and poured the dust into barrels.

Twenty barrels of the oxide sweepings were sent to Fernald. Eventually, National Lead recovered $75,000 worth of uranium oxide from the barrels and other steel pipe and equipment.

For several months, workers for the Daniel Hamm Co., a St. Louis subcontractor that helped to load the material for National Lead, lacked protection on the job. They had no badges to measure radiation exposure, no rubber shoes, no gloves and no respirators.

In 1968, during an ill-fated Weldon Spring cleanup attempt conducted by the Army, seven truckloads and 81 rail cars of contaminated material were shipped to David Witherspoon Inc. of Knoxville, Tenn.

The Witherspoon firm planned to decontaminate the equipment to conform with the standards of the day and then reuse it.

One of the laborers collecting materials for shipment to Witherspoon was Roger L. Pryor, now business manager of Laborers Local 660 in St. Charles.

''We put pipes, electric motors, stainless steel tanks in the cars,'' Pryor said. ''They weren't clean. Some of that stuff had that yellow cake in it. All that stuff was hot. Most of it was contaminated.''

During the 1968 cleanup, the government dumped 900 truckloads of radioactively contaminated material into an old quarry, four miles south of the plant.

The quarry already contained rubble from the Army's manufacture of high explosives - TNT and DNT - in the 1940s.

It also contained tons of radioactively contaminated rubble from Mallinckrodt's Destrehan Street plant in St. Louis. That material included toilets, mahogany stairs, thousands of drums of thorium and residue from the uranium processed for the first atomic reaction.

During the 1960s, teen-agers had dared each other to swim in the quarry.

Over the decades, warning signs were removed from the quarry area and a chain-link fence surrounding it was torn.

People had little idea of how contaminated the Weldon Spring plant was. The federal government routinely received proposals for its use.

St. Charles County wanted to use part of the plant for a home for low-income elderly people.

The University of Missouri and Francis Howell High School each wanted the complex for classroom space. Fred T. Wilkinson, then Missouri corrections director, wanted to put a maximum-security prison there.

The groups all lost interest when they learned the extent of the contamination.

Army Corps of Engineers security guards frequently caught curious teen-agers trespassing at the plant or stealing Army gas masks and other equipment.

In 1986, employees of the U.S. Department of Energy and its contractors arrived at the plant in 1986 to start a 12-year, $400 million cleanup. Even they were surprised at the condition of the plant.

About 100 pounds of pure uranium metal were found scattered around the plant grounds and 1 ton of thorium was found in an abandoned building.

An estimated 214 tons of uranium and 129 tons of thorium remained in the pits.

Water bubbled up from broken water lines at the rate of 200,000 gallons a day. It carried uranium, thorium and radium into the August A. Busch Memorial Wildlife Area.

The leaks have since been fixed. But during heavy rain, contaminants still flow off the site into the streams and lakes of the Army Reserve and the Busch and Weldon Spring wildlife areas. The U.S. Geologic Survey has found that contamination from the pits has leaked at least 100 feet into the ground water.

In addition to all the radiological waste, there were large volumes of chemical wastes and acids.

Rodney Nelson, manager of the cleanup, said that the greatest surprise for his team was the discovery of carcinogenic nitrates from the processing of TNT and DNT during World War II.

Said Nelson of the cleanup, now expected to extend past the year 2000, ''We never expected it to be this complex.''

Gerry Everding, a Post-Dispatch special correspondent, contributed information for this story.

---

Feb. 15, 1989
WORKER CARRIES SCARS OF CLEANUP

IN 1968, Charles A. Reed used a jackhammer to break down a radioactively contaminated floor at the Weldon Spring uranium processing plant. Brown chips of brick would fly upward, and yellow-green paste from beneath the bricks would soak his leather work boots and gloves.

''Some of the younger guys were careful not to let stuff get on them,'' said Reed, a swarthy man of Cherokee-Indian descent.

''But me, I get on a job like digging a hole . . . and I wallow in it. . . . All I think about is digging that hole.''

Reed, now 52, proudly displays like war wounds the sores on his arms and legs. Frequently, he rolls up his trousers to show his hairless shins - as bare as a baby's legs.

He traces the problems to his work 21 years ago.

In 1968, Reed worked with several hundred carpenters and laborers to remove radioactive material from three of the 68 buildings at the plant in southern St. Charles County. The plant had stopped processing uranium in 1966.

The Vietnam conflict was heating up. To combat the North Vietnamese guerrillas, the Army wanted to use the plant to produce Agent Orange, a highly toxic herbicide used to defoliate the Vietnam jungle.

After spending $2.8 million and collecting 6 tons of uranium oxide in 1968, the Army abandoned its efforts to clean the three buildings. By then, the Army realized it would cost more than $30 million to reduce the radiation to levels in which people could work.

The cleanup was a total failure; some say luckily so. If it had succeeded, federal officials today might have had dioxin, a contaminant in Agent Orange, to add to the list of poisons at Weldon Spring.

As he worked in 1968, Reed occasionally would rest with his stomach on the hanner and holler to a man with a Geiger counter to take a reading.

''The closer the man would get, the more that counter would rattle,'' said Reed, who was 32 at the time.

Reed is convinced that working on the 1968 cleanup caused him skin cancer and shooting pains and numbness in his feet and legs. Those problems, he says, make it impossible for him to earn his living as a laborer.

Reed is divorced and lives in a trailer in rural Warren County with his sons, Eric, 15, and Jesse, 12. They live on about $500 a month Reed gets from a laborers-union disability pension.

A physician who examined Reed, Dr. Vincent Palermo, said there was no doubt that radiation damaged Reed's feet and legs. But Palermo, a former pathologist at St. John's Mercy Medical Center in Creve Coeur, and other doctors say it would be difficult to prove that radiation caused the pain and numbness that Reed says prevent him from working.

Each summer for the last few years, Reed has picketed on certain days along Highway 94 outside the Weldon Spring plant. His large sign protests the conditions under which he worked and urges protection for any future workers brought into the plant.

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

Message: 18
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Day 6: Post-Dispatch investigation of radiation problems

By Carolyn Bower, Theresa Tighe and Louis J. Rose Of the Post-Dispatch
Feb. 17, 1989
http://www.postnet.com/postnet/stories.nsf/News/63070227D8FF80868625695F00594C73?OpenDocument&Headline=Day%206%3A%20Post-Dispatch%20investigation%20of%20radiation%20problems%20

REDISCOVERING 4 FORGOTTEN SITES...GOVERNMENT LOST TRACK OF NUCLEAR OPERATIONS HERE AND NATIONWIDE

PROPPED UP in his bed at Cochran Veterans Hospital, Tom Green described how he had worked for 12 years as a truck driver hauling radioactive material in the St. Louis area.

He spoke at a fast clip as Kay Drey, a local environmental activist, struggled to take notes.

Drey had never met Green before, but she knew from his family that he was seriously ill with cancer of both lungs. Green, who had been a smoker, blamed the cancer on radiation exposure from his job.

As they talked in 1979, Green had no way of knowing that nearly a decade later his comments would lead to the discovery and testing of a potentially contaminated site long forgotten by federal officials.

Green, then 63, told how he had driven truckloads of heavy uranium ingots across the McKinley Bridge to a plant in Madison during the latter half of the 1950s.

He described how the barrel-shaped ingots, 18 inches in diameter and height, were heated and reshaped at the plant at College and Weaver streets then operated by Dow Chemical Co.

Three months after his conversation with Drey in the hospital at 915 North Grand Boulevard, Green died of the cancer that had spread through his spine and intestines.

Now his account is prompting federal officials to take a new look into whether the former Dow plant may be contaminated.

The Madison plant is one of four ''forgotten'' sites the Post-Dispatch has discovered in the St. Louis area - sites where radioactive material was processed or stored in virtual secrecy after World War II.

There are dozens of such sites across the country that the federal government lost track of in the postwar years.

Department of Energy officials say there is no reason to believe that any of the four St. Louis-area sites poses a serious health threat. In at least one case - the former Tyson Valley powder plant in far west St. Louis County - there appears to be no threat at all.

But the agency plans to conduct tests within the next several months at the old Dow plant and at another Illinois site, the old General Casting plant in Granite City. The tests would determine whether buildings or equipmen t in those two places are contaminated by radioactivity.

The fourth local site would be hard to test. It was a large building - torn down eight years ago - at the former small-arms plant complex in north St. Louis.

Across the nation, federal and military investigators have spent millions of dollars over the last 14 years searching for and testing such ''forgotten'' sites.

Investigators admit they may not be able to identify all the factories, businesses and warehouses once involved in the country's top-secret production of nuclear arms.

What follows is a discussion of the four area sites that were lost in the shuffle:

The Old Dow Plant...

Tom Green had worked from 1946 until about 1958 for several small trucking companies that hauled materials for Mallinckrodt Chemical Works in north St. Louis. The company processed uranium for the federal government under contract to the Atomic Energy Commission.

About a year ago, Post-Dispatch reporters, examining the notes taken by Drey, noticed the references to Dow.

They were able to confirm through documents and interviews with former Mallinckrodt employees that experimental uranium extrusion work had been performed at Dow during the late 1950s.

But the Department of Energy had lost track of the experimental work.

''We found nothing regarding it. We can't find anything in (our) records,'' was the first response from Andrew Wallo, an Energy Department spokesman.

After an extensive search, the agency found two brief documents that mentioned the extrusion work at Dow.

''We hope to be conducting a radiological survey there later this year,'' Wallo said. ''You could get some contamination in the equipment or the building somewhere depending on the equipment and procedures they used.''

Wallo said he doubted there would be enough contamination to pose any serious health threat.

Dow operated the plant in Madison from 1954 to about 1969, employing about 850 workers at one point. The plant has been used primarily for the fabrication of aluminum and magnesium metals.

The plant's current operator is Spectrulite Consortium Inc., which took over the facility in late 1986. About 450 people now work there, producing rolled and extruded aluminum and magnesium products.

A Spectrulite spokesman said: ''We are aware of the interest being displayed in the incident in the past. But we are not commenting.''

Officials at Dow's corporate headquarters in Midland, Mich., could find no reference to the extrusion work done at the Madison plant.

Neither could Mallinckrodt. Raymond F. Bentele, president and chief executive at Mallinckrodt, said the company long ago had turned over to the government any records of work it performed for the old Atomic Energy Commission.

In the extrusion process, heated metal is reshaped by forcing it through a specially designed opening.

Uranium bars that ultimately would be used in nuclear reactors were extruded from cylindrical ingots of uranium metal. Each ingot weighed about 3,300 pounds and measured 18 inches in height and diameter.

The tests at Dow were intended to help Mallinckrodt perfect large-scale extrusion procedures for use at the Atomic Energy Commission's uranium processing plant near Weldon Spring.

Wallo said that contamination could have occurred during the heating and extrusion process if uranium oxide flaked off the metal and was carried as dust or small specks in the air.

''There is potential for there to be residual radioactive material above our guidelines, but we certainly don't expect any significant hazard or risk,'' he said.

The old Atomic Energy Commission generally required careful control of uranium metal for security reasons as well as safety, Wallo said. Also, he said, some degree of cleanup or decontamination normally was required once a job was completed.

Environmentalist Drey takes a more pessimistic view. She said she was concerned that uranium-oxide dust might have settled into cracks in floors, ceilings or concrete walls and still be present.

Robert Alvarez, a frequent DOE critic, said he would not place much confidence in the effectiveness of decontamination efforts at Dow or anywhere else during the late 1950s.

''I am unaware that there were any real standards for decontamination at all at that time,'' Alvarez said. He is an environmental research professional who is now on the staff of a Senate committee investigating the Energy Department's nuclear programs.

Granite City Plant...

On his death bed, Green also told Drey that uranium metals may have been taken for X-ray to the former Dow plant in Madison.

But Energy Department researchers, while checking that statement, found this work actually had been done in Granite City at the old General Castings plant.

>From 1958 to about 1966, records show, uranium products from Mallinckrodt had been taken to the General Castings building to be examined for defects with equipment similar to a large X-ray machine.

Now the structure, isolated and no longer in use, is part of the Granite City Steel complex.

Wallo said the Energy Department hopes to test the building within the next few months.

Small Arms Plant...

In 1979, St. Louis officials bought and later razed a massive concrete building to make way for an industrial park. They had no way of knowing that tons of radioactive uranium material had been stored at the building after World War II.

Now, eight years after the demolition, no one seems to know for sure where all the rubble from the 725-foot-long structure was hauled and buried. Nor does anyone know whether the building became contaminated as a result of the products stored there.

The building - known as the ''proof house'' - was part of the Small Arms Plant complex off Goodfellow Boulevard in north St. Louis. It was used during World War II to test-fire machine-gun ammunition manufactured at the complex.

After the war, from 1947 to about 1950, the building was virtually stripped bare and later used by the old Atomic Energy Commission to store uranium products destined for government facilities producing nuclear fuel and weapons.

Workers using flashlights and often groping in the dark in the gutted firing ranges stacked metal and fiberboard containers of uranium products into thick-walled concrete corridors that ran through the building.

Sources interviewed by reporters said that most items stored in the proof house were finished products from Mallinckrodt awaiting shipment to government facilities at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and other locations.

Federal officials can find no documents relating to the storage.

Wallo of the Department of Energy said parts of the huge building could have become contaminated. But, he said, it is doubtful this ever would have posed any serious health risk.

Alvarez, the critic of the Energy Department, argued that the Energy Department lacks the documentation needed to draw valid conclusions about the site.

''If they weren't monitoring it, they can only guess,'' said Alvarez.

Mallinckrodt officials say they have no records about what was stored at the proof house; all such records had been turned over to the government in 1966.

Harold Thayer, retired Mallinckrodt board chairman, said he knew of no way to accurately gauge the volume of material that may have been stored in the cavernous building.

''There were tons of it,'' he said. He said the building was used for temporary storage of such materials as uranium tetrafluoride and uranium dioxide - commonly referred to then as green salt and brown oxide.

Others recalled seeing wooden crates containing uranium metal stored at the proof house, as well as empty 55-gallon drums. The materials were trucked from Mallinckrodt to the proof house and later shipped out by rail.

Thayer said Mallinckrodt used the building at the government's request. He said he did not know whether efforts were made to decontaminate the structure, or whether decontamination had even been needed.

Asked if there could have been contamination problems, Thayer said: ''I don't see how, unless somebody broke a container and spilled it or dropped it. It was all sealed products, as far as I know.''

During the Korean War, the government decided to reactivate a number of buildings at the Small Arms complex, including the proof house. A St. Louis firm, Alport Construction, got a contract in 1954 to rehab the structure to put in more sophisticated ammunition-testing equipment.

In 1979, the city's Planned Industrial Expansion Authority bought a 44 1/2-acre tract at the former Small Arms complex, including the proof house. The purchase was part of an unsuccessful attempt to persuade General Motors Corp. to use the property and keep open its nearby assembly plant.

One year later, the agency contracted with Spirtas Wrecking Co. to demolish about 50 structures at the site, including the proof house.

Arnold Spirtas, president of the company, said in a recent interview that his company no longer had records relating to the demolition or which landfills or dumps were used to dispose of the rubble.

Spirtas said he could not recall details, but he said his company had fully complied with terms of the demolition contract.

One former employee of a nearby business told reporters he had watched some of the demolition work and believed that part of the rubble from the proof house had been buried on site.

However, Thomas J. Mullen, of the city's Economic Development Corp., said he spent a lot of time at the site and he was sure all of the rubble from the building was hauled off.

Mullen said he did not know where the wrecking firm took the debris.

Tyson Valley Powder Plant...

This is the case of the disappearing waste.

More than 60 tons of radioactive material were stored after World War II in concrete bunkers at what is now Washington University's Tyson Research Center in far west St. Louis County. It was moved somewhere - presumably to a plant near Pittsburgh - but no shipping records can be found.

Federal records that had gone unnoticed for decades show that the old Atomic Energy Commission used at least two bunkers at Tyson for storage in the late 1940s.

The site, about 20 miles west of St. Louis on Interstate 44, was then part of the Tyson Valley Powder Plant, where explosives and ammunition were stored during World War II. The government turned the 1,963-acre tract over to the university in 1963 for use in wildlife and environmental research.

Documents found last year in AEC files said the radioactive material was stored in 250 wooden barrels and metal drums - including 14 containers without tops. The residue was described as ''68,103 pounds of C-Special and 53,252 pounds of C-4.''

C-Special and C-4 were code names for slag residue from the production of uranium metal.

The AEC stored the material at Tyson from at least May 1947 through March 1948, when memos were being exchanged to negotiate shipment of the residue to a plant at Cannonsburg, Pa.

Federal officials say they are not sure where the material was taken.

University officials did not learn about the storage of radioactive residue at Tyson until reporters brought it to their attention last year.

With the university's cooperation, reporters visited the site in June and took radiological readings in and around 16 of the old concrete storage bunkers. None of the readings showed radiation exceeding normal background levels.

University radiation specialists later tested all remaining structures at the site, including 50 concrete bunkers.

No elevated readings were found, university officials said.

Gerry Everding, a Post-Dispatch special correspondent, contributed information for this story.

Waste Drums Stored Secretly...

THE federal government secretly stored more than 25,000 drums of radioactive residues at the U.S. Army Depot in Granite City for a five-year period during the 1960s.

Some of the drums were so badly rusted that they leaked or allowed water to collect in them. Others ruptured and spilled their contents while being transferred to rail cars and trucks for shipment.

The drums contained more than 6 million pounds of thorium-bearing residues and rare-earth residues. They were placed at the depot by the General Services Administration under a program to guarantee the nation supplies of ''strategic materials.''

In the early 1960s, government officials, concerned about the deteriorating metal drums, got permission from the Atomic Energy Commission to dump them in an AEC-owned quarry near Weldon Spring.

More than 3,400 drums were pitched into the quarry, before the General Services Administration made a deal to sell all 6 million pounds of the residue to a New York-based firm. The company, seeking to recover valuable metals from the residue, even sent workers back to the quarry to haul out the discarded drums.

Inventory records indicate that the last of the residue was shipped out by May 1966.

At the direction of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a radiological survey was made about six years ago at the Granite City installation, now called the Charles Melvin Price Support Center. The 930-acre complex is used by about 55 Army and federal agencies.

The survey report said that no radioactive contamination was found.

--

Feb. 17, 1989
HEMATITE: NO RECORDS OR MARKINGS ON BURIAL PITS

HEMATITE, an unincorporated rural area of Jefferson County, is home to the nation's oldest commercial uranium-fuel production plant.

On the plant grounds are 40 earthen pits containing radioactively contaminated material, possibly including a pickup truck. No one, not even the plant's operator, knows the precise location of each pit. Nor does anyone know exactly what is buried there.

Because the plant is about a quarter-mile from Joachim Creek, some critics have said they fear that either the buried waste or plant operations could contaminate the creek. But officials of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission say they have no reason to believe that.

Despite its pioneer role, the Hematite plant has received little publicity over its 32-year history. It lies on a 155-acre tract off Route P, about 35 miles south of St. Louis.

Combustion Engineering Inc., with headquarters in Stamford, Conn., owns and operates the plant. It produces uranium dioxide in powder and pellet form for use as fuel in nuclear reactors.

Combustion Engineering is the fifth operator of the plant since it was built in 1956 by Mallinckrodt Chemical Works.

Burial pits for radioactive waste were first dug at the plant in the late 1950s, according to the NRC.

Each of the 40 pits is said to measure about 20 feet by 40 feet by 12 feet deep. The pits were not lined, capped or specifically prepared to prevent leakage. The buried waste was covered by fill. One federal report said the coverings ranged from 2 to 5 feet in thickness.

Most of the pits are outside a fence that surrounds the plant. But no one knows for sure exactly where. Nor are there records detailing what and how much was buried.

Said James A. Rode, plant manager for the last 14 years and an employee there since the plant opened: ''I can tell you approximately where they are located, because I was here at the times the pits were used. . . . But without markings, you can't exactly identify (their) locations.''

According to a 1983 report prepared for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, some 60 pounds of highly fissionable uranium-235 were scattered throughout materials buried in the pits. There are no other records breaking down the volumes of what was buried there.

For the most part, the burials were made in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They complied with Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulations then in effect. Such burials no longer are allowed by the NRC.

The report in 1983 on the radiological survey conducted for the NRC said in part:

''Apparently, the bulk of buried material consisted of paper, plastic and wood items. Some metal items, such as pipes and buckets, have been buried, although no major metallic objects, except possibly a pickup truck, were disposed of.''

''. . . The overall conclusions are that relatively small quantities of uranium have been buried and that the buried material is essentially stable at this time. The burial pits have little or no effect on the population or the surrounding environment.''

In 1985, a former worker at the Hematite plant told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission he feared that leakage from the burial grounds might be contaminating nearby Joachim Creek.

Metal barrels used in the burial of radioactive wastes during the 1950s and 1960s were not always sealed, said the complainant, whose name was kept secret by the agency. He also alleged that water had been observed on occasion in the burial trenches.

But after interviews and a review of documents relating to the pits, the NRC concluded that there was no evidence to support allegation.

Over the years, the plant at times processed a material that was 90 percent uranium-235.

But for the last 14 years, Rode said, the plant has processed material that was no more than 5 percent uranium-235. This has helped reduce risks of accidents and contamination.

''We don't think of ourselves as posing any more risk to the public than any other chemical plant, and probably less, because our industry is heavily regulated and inspected,'' Rode said.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission records show that the plant was authorized for one year in the early 1970s to possess up to 10 kilograms of plutonium in the form of sealed fuel rods or assembled fuel elements.

That's roughly enough to trigger an atomic bomb of the type that was dropped on Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Plutonium is one of the most toxic and carcinogenic substances known.

But in a recent interview, Rode said: ''We have never had or processed plutonium here at the Hematite plant. . . .

''It would have been a cause for concern'' if plutonium had been brought to Hematite, Rode added. ''I am very happy it was never done. . . . That is a horse of a different color. . . . You have to have a facility that is designed for it.''

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

Message: 19
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Day 5: Post-Dispatch investigation of radiation problems

By Carolyn Bower, Theresa Tighe and Louis J. Rose Of the Post-Dispatch
Feb. 16, 1989
http://www.postnet.com/postnet/stories.nsf/News/BC58D32685364E138625695B006479D8?OpenDocument&Headline=Day%205%3A%20Post-Dispatch%20investigation%20of%20radiation%20problems%20

PARENTS FIGHT HEALTH THREAT CLEANUP OF PLANT BRINGS QUESTIONS BUT FEW ANSWERS

ROGER NELSON, a feisty man, looks forward to bantering with students as he arrives at Francis Howell High School in St. Charles County. He is there on a mission on this third day of April 1987.

He knows that some students will express fears that they will get cancer or become sterile during the federal cleanup of radioactive contamination at an abandoned uranium processing plant half a mile away.

Nelson, a safety officer on the Weldon Spring cleanup, wants to assure them that they will be safe. His daughter, Corina, attends the school.

As his presentation begins in the school library, Nelson displays a Geiger counter that chirps continually - proof, he says, that radiation exists everywhere. Nelson tells the nearly 150 students that the chances of getting cancer from the radiation are remote.

In the audience is Mary Halliday, a homemaker who is a founder of St. Charles Countians Against Hazardous Waste. Halliday knows that scientists and doctors disagree about the danger of low-level radiation. She also knows that most scientists believe exposure to radiation increases the risk, however slightly, of cancer.

Halliday wants the high school closed or relocated during the planned $400 million cleanup. Otherwise, she plans to take her son, Jason, out of the school. She challenges Nelson's statements.

Through the library windows, students can see the distant ruins of the sprawling Weldon Spring complex. Some buildings are so contaminated that visitors are prohibited from entering them. Mallinckrodt Chemical Works purified uranium and thorium at the plant off of Missouri Highway 94 for the federal government from 1957 through 1966.

During his talk, Nelson asks students to pass around and examine a sealed petri dish containing a uranium compound. By the time it gets back to Nelson, it has a crack in the top. And that triggers a confrontation.

Halliday and her colleagues accuse Nelson of endangering the students' health.

Nelson says the petri dish - even with a crack in it - is completely safe. He says youngsters would have to eat the compound for it to pose any threat to their health.

A threat, real or perceived, to the health of children turns parents into instant activists.

Nowhere is that more evident than in St. Charles County. The environmental movement there was born 2,000 strong in 1982, when the U.S. Department of Energy proposed permanently storing radioactive waste from five states at the abandoned uranium processing plant just upwind from Francis Howell High School.

The federally owned site is between the August A. Busch Memorial and Weldon Spring wildlife areas, where thousands of families hike, fish and hunt.

During heavy rains, uranium dust washes off the plant grounds into both wildlife areas.

The buildings at the plant still contain uranium and thorium. Radioactive and chemical sludge fill four waste ponds on the plant grounds and a quarry, four miles to the southwest.

The quarry leaks and the ponds seep into the groundwater. The quarry is less than one-half mile from wells that supply about 63,000 St. Charles County residents with drinking water. Officials say the contamination has not reached the well field.

Nobody gave the situation much thought until July 23, 1982, when residents read in the newspaper that the Department of Energy wanted to dispose of radioactive waste from five states at the plant site.

One of those readers, Meredith Bollmeier, a mother and homemaker who lived within walking distance of the plant, swung into action.

With the help of five other mothers, a chemist and a member of the Francis Howell School Board, Bollmeier mobilized the county.

More than 2,000 residents turned out in the Francis Howell gymnasium to protest the project at a public hearing on Aug. 10. Energy Department officials say such meetings usually draw between 10 and 70 people.

Federal officials attribute the size of the crowd to the proximity of the site to the high school and people's concern for their children.

Bollmeier agrees.

Before reading that newspaper account, Bollmeier's activities outside her home had been limited to a few interior- decorating consultations for friends or relatives.

Now she was an instant activist. She rapidly developed the courage to pass around petitions and hold news conferences. She learned everything she could about radioactive waste.

''I was like a mother tiger,'' she said. ''I felt a threat to my family and my community. I didn't understand what uranium and thorium were at the time, but radioactive waste - any kind of radioactive waste - seemed like bad news.''

Bollmeier began spending every free hour reading federal reports on the plant and quarry, and crawling around the wildlife area with a Geiger counter to measure radiation and a flask for taking water samples. She is now the paid executive director of St. Charles Countians Against Hazardous Waste.

But in the summer of 1982, all she was trying to do was get a crowd out to that first hearing.

''When we saw the stream of cars coming down (Highway) 94, we were ebullient,'' Bollmeier recalled. ''We had collectively thrown the biggest party in town.''

The crowd jammed the gymnasium; some county residents had to be turned away. More than 40 people spoke. Not one was in favor of storing the waste at Weldon Spring.

One speaker threatened to blow up the bridges across the Missouri if the Energy Department tried to bring in the waste.

Kenneth Rothman, who was lieutenant governor at the time, said, ''This is the worst possible spot for a radioactive dump, or an atomic dump site anywhere in the state.''

The crowd cheered.

Officials of the Department of Energy said radioactive runoff was no threat to wells in the county because most wells were dug 700 feet into the earth.

The crowd moaned.

''Mine's 175 feet,'' one man shouted. ''Mine's 200,'' yelled another.

After the meeting, agency officials said the crowd was one of the most vocal and hostile they ever had encountered. Eventually, the government dropped its plan to bring in waste from five states.

Lea Keller, one of the agency's representatives at the meeting, recalls feeling frustrated that night because the Department of Energy never had a chance to present its case.

''I looked around. I saw the banners. I heard the cheering, booing and jeering,'' he said. ''I was frankly convinced nothing of value would be accomplished. The people had come to vent their frustration. So we listened, and we left.''

Keller, 60, retired two years ago. He spent 30 years working for the federal agencies charged with developing atomic energy for power and defense.

Keller said it is one of the disappointments of his career that he was unable to convince residents in the St. Louis area that the risk is minimal.

''Someone would have to camp on any of the (radioactive waste) sites in the area for 24 hours a day for 50 years to get a dose that can be statistically linked to cancer,'' he said.

Bollmeier countered: ''We have studied enough federal reports to know how they present select information more protective to the Department of Energy than to the welfare of the citizens of St. Charles.''

At the heart of the fears of residents of St. Charles County is concern over childhood leukemia there.

Prodded by area mothers, state health officials took a look at a number of leukemia cases that had occurred in the county.

The state found that 13 children, ages 14 or under, in St. Charles County were diagnosed as having leukemia during a five-year period in the 1970s. That is almost twice the expected rate.

The 13 leukemia cases occurred from 1975 through 1979 - with six cases discovered in 1979 alone. Seven cases would have been normal for the five-year period. Eight of the 13 leukemia victims died.

But in July 1986, after three years of investigation, the Missouri Department of Health announced there appeared to be no evidence linking the unusually high number of leukemia cases to radiation from the old processing plant.

Members of St. Charles Countians Against Hazardous Waste questioned the methods used in the study.

John Crellin, the state epidemiologist who did the study, acknowledged there were significant gaps in the data the Energy Department gave him for radiation dose estimates.

Over the years, the St. Charles Countians became masters at questioning officials and nudging state and federal agencies into action. They are credited with bringing the radioactive waste near Weldon Spring to federal attention and pressing until the government agreed to finance a cleanup.

But it was a bit of election-year one-upsmanship that produced the federal commitment to s pend money.

In 1984, Walter Mondale, the Democratic nominee for president, was scoring points against Republican incumbent Ronald Reagan by attacking Reagan's record on the environment. He would make his speeches on this topic at hazardous-waste sites.

Four days before Mondale was scheduled to tour the Weldon Spring plant, Reagan stole center stage by announcing a 10-year, $357 million cleanup of the site.

Under a revised plan, the work was scheduled to take 12 years and cost $400 million.

But because of proposed budget cuts, managers on site say that both the cost and the length of time for the cleanup could double.

In July 1986, the Department of Energy set up the first of what would eventually become an encampment of 25 house trailers onto the old plant grounds.

Rodney Nelson, a Wisconsin farm boy who grew up to be an engineer and public servant, was one of the first to arrive.

Nelson (no relation to Roger Nelson) is the on-site manager of the cleanup for the Department of Energy. Nothing in Nelson's experience had prepared him for the suspicion he would encounter in St. Charles County.

One afternoon, Nelson asked his colleagues: ''Do people really believe that scientists and doctors in this country are in a conspiracy to keep the truth about the dangers of radiation from people?''

Press aide Martin Janowski responded that yes, some people believe that.

Later, Nelson learned the extent of people's fears when he met a woman at a cocktail party. She told him she never opens the windows of her home lest her family be exposed to a particle of radiation from the plant.

Nelson and his family feel quite secure in their home in Lake Saint Louis, which is downwind from the plant. But he finds it hard to answer when someone asks him whether it is safe to move to St. Charles County.

''I understand radiation, and I live here,'' Nelson said. ''But there are people who will tell you there is no safe level of radiation, period.''

On a personal level, Nelson has won the trust of many county residents. Still, environmentalists question whether scientists know enough about radioactive waste storage and the dangers of low-level radiation to do an adequate job.

Mary Halliday, the treasurer of St. Charles Countians Against Hazardous Waste, says she feels Nelson is sincere.

''I believe Rod Nelson and the other people cleaning up the site will do everything they can to to protect people,'' she said. ''But as long as doctors and scientists disagree about the dangers of radiation, I won't risk my child's health by leaving him at school.''

Gerry Everding, a special correspondent of the Post-Dispatch, provided information for this story.

--

Feb. 16, 1989
WHAT'S SAFE? EXPERTS DIFFER ON RADIATION

HOW DO YOU decide whether it is safe to live or work near a radioactive waste site in the St. Louis area?

The answer depends on whom you ask. Environmentalists are likely to say the low levels of radiation at St. Louis sites are a risk to your health. Some government spokesmen are likely to say there is no health threat unless you eat the waste.

Neither group is lying.

People disagree because no one knows the effects of low-level doses of radiation.

Because radiation can cause cancer and genetic damage, scientists have studied the effect of low-level radiation on people's health. But the studies do not include enough people to offer undisputable answers. After all, one in every four people in the country dies of cancer, and there are many causes.

In the 1940s, scientists believed there was a threshold below which radiation exposure would not hurt a person. Now, nearly all scientists agree that exposure to any level of radiation poses a risk - no matter how small - of cancer and genetic effects.

That is why when officials set exposure standards they say that a level of radiation is permissible or poses an acceptable risk, never that the dose is safe.

Scientists today disagree about how much cancer is caused by radiation exposure.

Most scientists in the United States say the laws that currently regulate exposure are either too strict or just fine. The International Commission on Radiation Protection shares this position. Some researchers say that the additional cancer caused by the low levels of radiation allowed by law may be too small to measure.

Most authorities believe that anywhere from 10 to 500 people will die of cancer for every million people exposed to one rem, a measure of exposure to radiation.

But Karl Z. Morgan of Atlanta, the physicist who laid the groundwork for radiation exposure standards, now says that no fewer than 1,000 and more likely 3,000 people will die of cancer for every million people exposed to one rem.

Morgan and some others say the standards are eight to 10 times too lenient and may cause needless additional cancer deaths.

Current regulations are based on animal studies and mathematical calculations based on what happened to people exposed to high levels of radiation. Morgan and others say that low-level radiation may work in an entirely different way from high-level radiation. They say standards need to be based on human experience. Britain recently made its radiation exposure regulations more stringent.

Although they would disagree on the size of the risk, most scientists say that the threat to a person's health from sites in the St. Louis area is statistically small.

But scientists also say the effects of radiation are cumulative . We are exposed to radiation from the sun, rocks, X-rays, fallout from nuclear weapons and consumer goods such as mantles for gas lanterns.

Radiation's effects on a person's health also depend on such things as age, sex and length of exposure. Dr. Alice Stewart, a British scientist, says children and pregnant women, among others, may be at greater risk.

If a pregnant woman is exposed to low-level radiation, her child may develop cancer, Stewart said.

Scientists involved with nuclear medicine and nuclear energy say that the risk from exposure to radiation from nuclear power plants, nuclear medicine and radioactive waste cleanups is no greater than other risks that we accept in exchange for modern convenience.

In 1987, for example, 46,000 people died in traffic accidents.

Actuaries deemed 13 deaths an acceptable risk in figuring the insurance cost of the construction of the Gateway Arch in the 1960s. No construction worker actually died on the project.

Most people seem willing to accept a comparable risk from radiation in exchange for medical treatment.

But people seem less willing to accept the risk of radiation from nuclear energy and plants that produce nuclear weapons.

Environmentalists base their opinion that the risk is unacceptable on research by Morgan and others. They point out that over the last five decades, radiation exposure guidelines have changed four times, each time becoming more strict. And they cite the Department of Energy's history of secrecy about radioactive pollution.

So, how do you decide?

The only way you can decide is by finding out the levels of radioactivity present at a site, comparing them to current standards and bearing in mind that some people say those standards are too lenient. You also will have to consider your family medical history and determine how much radiation you are willing to accept in your life.

Dr. Karl Wilson of St. Charles County, director of Four County Mental Health Services Inc., has looked at the facts and says he is apprehensive about letting his daughter, now a sixth-grader, attend Francis Howell High School during the dismantling of an old uranium plant nearby.

Wilson said: ''The nightmare as a parent is: What if they find out there was a risk years later? I don't want it to be my child they find out on.''

On the other hand, many of the people who work at the cleanup say they will be perfectly comfortable sending their children to Francis Howell during the demolition.

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

Message: 20
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Day 7: Post-Dispatch investigation of radiation problems

By Carolyn Bower, Theresa Tighe and Louis J. Rose Of the Post-Dispatch
Feb. 19, 1989
http://www.postnet.com/postnet/stories.nsf/News/C2043E89D5F0539A8625695F0059490A?OpenDocument&Headline=Day%207%3A%20Post-Dispatch%20investigation%20of%20radiation%20problems%20

LOOKING AHEAD WASTE WAR LOOMS AS CITIES GRAPPLE OVER SITES, FUNDS

St. Louis is by no means alone in trying to figure out what to do about radioactive waste. The problem is national in scope. It pits cities, counties and states against each other in a scramble for limited federal cleanup money.

Especially stiff competition is coming right now from operating weapons plants in Fernald, Ohio; Rocky Flats, Colo.; Hanford, Wash.; and near Aiken, S.C. Safety problems at those plants are receiving intense public scrutiny.

Cost estimates for cleaning up all present and former installations connected with the nuclear-weapons industry range from $130 billion to $200 billion. The cleanup price tag for the St. Louis area's portion now stands at $700 million.

''Everyone wants his site cleaned up,'' says Mike Kosakowski, a regional official of the Environmental Protection Agency.

''There is not enough money in the bank. There is not enough engineering talent to address all the sites.''

Cleanup issues are at the forefront here 47 years after radioactive waste began piling up from the processing of uranium and other materials for the atomic bomb and the Cold War nuclear-arms race.

Over that time, virtually no progress has been made toward permanently containing radioactive materials.

To some, the problem borders on the unsolvable. Said environmental activist Kay Drey: ''There's no good place to safely dispose of it. We may never know what to do with what we have.''

Even the federal government admits that the most up-to-date earthen storage containers would be effective for no more than 1,000 years and possibly for as few as 200 years. Critics doubt the containers would last much longer than 50 years.

Most of the nuclear waste in this area will remain radioactive for at least 4.5 billion years.

Some people view the health risks of low-level nuclear waste as less than acute. They say that to spend $700 million or more on cleanups in the area would be a misuse of money. And they contend that society's resources could be better used on more pressing matters - perhaps educating people about the dangers of alcohol or drugs or lowering the infant mortality rate.

Said Dr. Henry Royal, director of nuclear medicine for the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology: ''My fear is that society will spend more money than it should spend dealing with low-level radioactive waste.''

But most scientists, citing health hazards, say the government must do what it can to contain the waste.

Even the Energy Department, which constantly downplays the health threats, insists that the material must be cleaned up.

Andrew Avel, an Energy Department manager at Oak Ridge, Tenn., said that although radioactive sites such as the closed-down Berkeley ball fields are not now much of a hazard, they could be if someone grew food or built houses there.

''We don't know what will be out there in 200 to 300 years,'' Avel said.

So, the Energy Department is trying to clean up the old Mallinckrodt plant in north St. Louis and various North County sites at a cost exceeding $250 million.

And it already has embarked on a 12-year, $400 million cleanup at the old uranium plant near Weldon Spring in St. Charles County.

The Energy Department won't touch the highly radioactive West Lake landfill in North County or 40 waste-burial pits at Hematite in Jefferson County. Those sites come under the purview of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Here is a rundown of the agency's cleanup activities in the metropolitan area:

At Impasse

With The City

The Energy Department has proposed building an earthen bunker to store 925,000 cubic yards of waste on some 80 acres of land now owned by the city of St. Louis.

To make this possible, the Energy Department wants the city to deed back the 21.7-acre site where the government first buried the first nuclear waste from Mallinckrodt. The government gave the land to the city in 1973.

The Energy Department also wants the city to deed over another 60 acres of adjoining land.

Buried in the bunker would be:

About 250,000 cubic yards of contaminated material from the original airport site, off McDonnell Boulevard, north of Lambert Field.

About 211,000 cubic yards of contaminated material from Latty Avenue, including two large mounds covered with green plastic on the property of Futura Coatings Inc.

About 337,000 cubic yards of contaminated material that seeped, blew and leached from the airport storage site and Latty Avenue into nearby ditches, ballfields and Coldwater Creek.

About 127,000 cubic yards of contaminated material from the Mallinckrodt property in downtown St. Louis.

But so far, the St. Louis Board of Aldermen has refused to go along with the plan.

Mary Ross, chairman of an aldermanic committee on radioactive waste, says a history of federal secrecy and doubletalk are why the aldermen want to retain control over the site.

''If we trusted the Department of Energy, we probably would have signed a deed a long time ago,'' Ross said.

Energy Department officials have threatened to pull out of the cleanup effort unless the city agrees to turn over land for a bunker.

In that event, they say, the city might wind up liable for damage claims or cleanup costs.

In Search Of A Rural Site

Alderman Ross and her colleagues are not alone in opposing the Energy Department plan.

Other local governments - including St. Louis County and several North County municipalities - have called for moving the radioactive waste out of the heavily populated area.

Their solution would be a site in rural Missouri. It is unrealistic to expect other states to accept Missouri's waste, any more than Missouri would accept theirs.

Said Drey, the activist: ''The radioactive waste should not be located in the center of our state's largest metropolitan area. I think all of Missouri's radioactive waste should be consolidated in one place, and that should be in Callaway County where we already have a nuclear power plant.''

Two years ago, two state legislators from Callaway County responded to that idea by suggesting that the waste be put at Weldon Spring or in University City, where Drey lives.

Drey and others who want the waste taken away got a boost from Rep. Jack Buechner, R-Kirkwood. Buechner said Friday that he would file legislation requiring the Energy Department to examine possible sites outside the metropolitan area before requiring the city to turn over the airport land.

If a rural site could be agreed upon, the federal government probably would require the state of Missouri to share the cleanup cost.

There at least is precedent for this kind of solution.

Local officials in South Salt Lake, a suburb of Salt Lake City, Utah, won a prolonged battle to have radioactive material moved 85 miles to a remote site in the state. Utah paid 10 percent and the federal government 90 percent of the cost of the two-year cleanup, which was completed last June.

Cleanup Near Weldon Spring

A truce prevails in St. Charles Count y as the cleanup gets under way at the old uranium processing plant on Missouri Highway 94 near Weldon Spring.

Department of Energy officials have suggested storing the waste in an earthen storage container covering anywhere from 45 to 58 acres on the site.

Although most residents welcome the cleanup, they want assurances that the Department of Energy will do it correctly. One of their greatest fears is that radioactive dust from the demolition of 68 buildings at the plant may endanger the health of 2,300 students and employees at Francis Howell High School.

The school is a half-mile downwind from the old plant. Federal officials say the work will pose no threat.

In a building moved here from Ohio at a cost of $1.5 million, federal employees, construction workers and scientists plan how to proceed. Men in moon suits conduct tests to determine the extent of the contamination.

About four miles to the south is a nine-acre quarry filled with black water and about 10,000 truckloads of radioactive debris.

The quarry is less than one-fourth mile from the well field that supplies much of St. Charles County with drinking water.

Pending the outcome of geological and hydrological tests, federal officials are leaning toward moving waste from the quarry to the earthen storage container at the old plant site.

The cleanup of the plant and the quarry originally were expected to be completed at the end of the year 2010.

But Rodney Nelson, manager of the cleanup, said proposed cuts in the project's annual budget could double both the $400 million cost and the 12-year timetable.

That would make the cleanup of all waste in the St. Louis area - waste that began so innocently with the effort to develop the Atomic Bomb - a project of more than $1 billion.

Gerry Everding, a Post-Dispatch special correspondent, contributed information for this story.

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

Message: 21
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: blazedell@aol.com

"Spike": a US Navy MIA/POW was left in Iraq!

Dear Friends, Colleagues and Neighbors,

I apologize in advance if this is too far off subject. I believe this fits in our combined agenda of helping make this world a bit safer and more secure!

This is NOT an urban legend, this is very real and very tragic story as displayed in the links below. Last night 60 Minutes aired a special on the Gulf War that both shocked and appalled me. Apparently there is a real possibility that there is a POW, possibly still alive, sitting in Iraq, worse yet his family has suffered an outrageous injustice. As an ex-USAF crash/rescue firefighter that experienced this conflict first hand, I can only imagine his families grief. I beg you to review the following information and then take action---> we MUST force our Nation's leaders to account for Lieutenant Commander Michael Scott Speicher, call sign "Spike"!

Please Help Right This Wrong! A) Forward this email on to everyone you know and ask them to do the same. B) Write/call/fax/email every person in the media or politics that you can find and join me in asking that that we not rest until this American Hero's outcome has been accounted for! (here's a link that will help: http://www.mrsmith.com/index2.html "email Washington")

It may be "very" late, but we can still make a difference -we owe it to Spike, his family and all of our servicemembers past, present and future!!

see: http://cbsnews.cbs.com/now/story/0,1597,191049-412,00.shtml (CBS) On Jan. 17, 1991, the first night of the Gulf War, Lieutenant Commander Michael Scott Speicher was shot down over Iraq. He became the conflict's first American casualty. But there's one problem: There is no evidence that he is dead.

Additional sites: http://www.nationalalliance.org/gulf/spike01.htm http://www.navy.mil/homepages/vfa-81/main/lcdr_speicher.htm http://members.nbci.com/Gulfvet/adopt3.html

With Kindest Regards, Mike Blazedell President/Founder; The WorldSafety.com Resource Center USAF Crash/Fire/Rescue '88-92'

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

Message: 22
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Meetings on iodine-131 releases

September 20, 2000
http://www.oakridger.com/

Two meetings scheduled for next week will address historic releases of iodine-131 in Oak Ridge and surrounding areas.

Owen Hoffman, who participated in the recent Oak Ridge Health Studies Project, will speak at both meetings. The Health Studies Project addressed the effect of radioactive iodine releases on thyroid cancer.

On Monday, Hoffman will speak to the Roane County chapter of Save Our Cumberland Mountains during its meeting from 6:30 to 9 p.m. Monday at the Kingston Community Center.

Trisha Pritikin, another guest speaker at the meeting, will discuss how exposure to iodine-131 has personally affected her life.

Then Hoffman will address the Scarboro Community Environmental Justice Committee during its meeting from 6 to 8 p.m. Tuesday at the Scarboro Community Center.

=========

Comments:

I-131 estimates appear to have some possible errors in OR, and I-131 highly affects the thyroid gland. It was rated the top effect in OR by the ORHASP panel study. The ORHASP Tank One study did the I-131 risk analysis and the dose reconstruct data that is in question was supplied by ChemRisk. Good to question that, but--

If we look at other pollutants that also affect the thyroid, we find that the UF-6 and resultant HF and fluorides released from the gas diffusion process, Y-12, and the two large coal plants here, plus ALCOA, can also very likely contribute to the thyroid toxic load and thyriod illnesses. Again, poor dose contructs by ChemRisk and poor ORHASP panel emphasis contribute to the problems.

The troubling thing is Owen Hoffman and SENES also had the responsibilty on the uranium study, task 4, and they are not flagging the uranium study errors for all the same reasons as they are the I-131 study.

Very odd and inconsistent for an analysis that should be organ based studies, not singular pollutant based. If the chlorine and fluorine based water effects of the area water supplies are included, all the worse result for the thyroid effects.

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

Message: 23
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Y-12 transition team schedules public meeting

September 20, 2000
by Paul Parson Oak Ridger staff
http://www.oakridger.com/

Those interested in what's going on with BWXT Y-12's transition into the managerial role at the Oak Ridge Y-12 Plant should plan to get out of bed early Saturday morning.

The team overseeing the transition has scheduled a public meeting for 8 a.m. Saturday in the club room of the Oak Ridge Mall to discuss the status of the shift in management at the plant.

The meeting, which is expected to last approximately an hour and a half, is intended to provide employees and the public an opportunity to understand the process of transition, receive updates on the milestones reached and get answers to questions related to the new contractor, officials said.

In addition to Department of Energy representatives, the transition team consists of officials from Lockheed Martin Energy Systems, Y-12's current manager, and their counterparts within BWXT Y-12. The team's goal is to determine what needs to be accomplished before BWXT Y-12 assumes full responsibility for the plant on Nov. 1.

BWXT Y-12 -- an alliance between Bechtel National Inc. and BWX Technologies Inc. -- was awarded a five-year, $2.5 billion contract on Aug. 31 to manage and operate the Y-12 Plant.

BWX Technologies Inc. and Bechtel National Inc. are also partners in BWXT Pantex, which in July was awarded the year-year management and operation contract for the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, ending the 40-year-plus reign of Mason & Hanger Corp.

Shortly after the contract announcement, the Day & Zimmermann Group, which owns Mason & Hanger Corp., filed a bid protest with the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress that hears challenges to federal procurement from dissatisfied bidders.

While the Pantex protest is still under investigation by the GAO, the deadline for a protest of the Oak Ridge contract is over and none has reportedly been filed.

"That is good news," John Mitchell, president of BWXT Y-12, said in a statement. He added he appreciated all the help the company in receiving from Lockheed Martin Energy Systems during the transition.

--------

Message: 24
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

K-25 cleanup over budget, behind schedule: Report

September 20, 2000
The Associated Press
http://www.oakridger.com/

An audit by the U.S. Department of Energy's inspector general shows that a nuclear cleanup project at Oak Ridge is over budget and behind schedule.

"To put the problem in perspective, we estimate the project will cost $94 million more than the current contract amount of $250 million and that completion is at least two years behind schedule," Inspector General Gregory Friedman wrote in a Sept. 12 memo to Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.

The contractor -- a subsidiary of British Nuclear Fuels -- is cleaning up three huge buildings at the K-25 site where uranium was once enriched for reactor fuel and bombs.

DOE and BNFL Inc., signed a $238 million, fixed-price contract in 1997. The contract later was adjusted to include some waste-disposal activities, bringing the total to $250 million.

The work has drawn criticism from several fronts, including union leaders upset about safety conditions at the site and congressional members angry about cost overruns.

"As of March 2000, BNFL had incurred 61 percent of the costs associated with the current value of its contract, but it had completed only 14 percent of the project," the report said.

BNFL released a statement late Tuesday saying the audit raised a lot of problems already addressed publicly.

"The report does not reflect the corrective action that has been made to the project over the past year nor the commitments made by the company on the project in a congressional hearing on this matter in July of this year," BNFL spokesman Norman Hammitt said.

Hammitt said the contractor now has a "highly qualified and capable" management team in place.

He admitted the work turned out to be more difficult because the buildings were older and more contaminated than expected. "This has affected the work flow and aggressive scheduling that was originally envisioned," he said.

Hammitt said BNFL plans to absorb project costs that increased as a result of the company's "own actions." He said other costs are still being discussed with DOE, which declined to comment on the audit.

----------

Message: 25
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Water study asserts safety Contaminants found meet regulation levels

September 20, 2000
by Paul Parson Oak Ridger staff
http://www.oakridger.com/

There are no levels of contaminants in the Oak Ridge K-25 Site's drinking water that exceed Environmental Protection Agency and state-regulated levels.

That conclusion is part of a special report released today concerning recent water tests at the former gaseous diffusion plant site, also known as East Tennessee Technology Park. The report emphasizes that K-25's water is "safe to drink."

Tests on the K-25 water were conducted in early August after site employees voiced concerns that cross-connecting water lines could have resulted in exposure to hazardous materials at the site. However, the report states K-25 maintains a state-approved cross connection control program.

The tests were completed by the Sampling Planning and Oversight Team, which consisted of representatives from the Department of Energy; OMI, the contractor for the water plant and distribution system at K-25; the Community Reuse Organization of East Tennessee;the Paper, Allied-Industrial and Chemical Employees Union; the Oak Ridge Reservation Local Oversight Committee's Citizen Advisory Panel; the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation; and Bechtel Jacobs Co. LLC.

More than 475 drinking water samples at 19 sites were collected by the team, double-sealed to prevent tampering and submitted to a state-certified laboratory for analysis.

"This one-time initiative led by SPOT to test for metals, chemicals and radionuclides in water taken at the tap goes well above and beyond regulatory requirements," the report states.

As for the water samples collected by SPOT, more than 90 substances were tested for and not detected, including altrazine, aluminum, arsenic, benzene, beryllium, cyanide, mercury, nickel, silver, simazine, toluene and uranium-236.

The bacteriological, chemical and radiological tests showed that more than 20 contaminants present in the water meet Environmental Protection Agency and state-regulated levels. Those contaminants include coliform bacteria, asbestos, barium, chloride, chromium, copper, fluoride, lead, nitrate, sodium, sulfate, uranium-238 and zinc.

"Secondary maximum content levels, which are related only to aesthetic properties of water and do not pose a health risk, were exceeded for iron and manganese in one drinking water sample out of the 19 locations sampled," the report states.

K-25's drinking water comes from the drinking water treatment plant, K-1515, located on Bear Creek Road, which draws water from the Clinch River.

"It should be noted that all drinking water, including bottled water, may reasonably be expected to contain at least small amounts of some contaminants and does not indicate the water poses a health risk," the report states.

"The reason most contaminants are present is that drinking water is taken from rivers, lakes, streams, natural springs and wells," the report states. "As water travels over the surface of the land or under the ground, it dissolves naturally occurring minerals and radioactive materials such as carbon-14, beryllium-7, potassium-40 and radon.

"It also picks up substances left by animal or human activity as it travels to its destination. Microbial contaminants may come from septic tanks, livestock, wildlife and wastewater treatment plants. Pesticides and herbicides come from agricultural and excess residential runoff. Other contaminants come from urban runoff, petroleum products, mining and industrial wastewater."

However, chemical and radiological analyses are routinely performed on the K-25 treatment plant's water, which is required by the state of Tennessee and the EPA. The state also requires monthly testing for bacteria and chlorine at the treatment plant and from four locations within the distribution system, or at the top.

OMI voluntarily collects an additional 26 samples per month for the distribution system and performs bacteria and chlorine analysis at its on-site lab. Lead and copper tests are also performed at locations in the distribution system every three years in accordance with regulatory requirements.

While the report released Wednesday does not reflect the data from regulatory testing, its results are consistent with the findings of those tests.

DOE's efforts to have K-25's water tested have met with criticism from several people, specifically some current and former site employees. One of the main problems voiced about the water tests has been they were not conducted by an independent agency.

And at least one mishap regarding the water testing has been acknowledged by DOE. A small set of samples was lost in transit. Although the samples were later discovered, DOE spokesman Steven Wyatt told The Oak Ridger they were not tested because they were considered out of date.

In addition to the tests authorized by DOE, replicate samples were taken by the Environmental Protection Agency at seven of the selected sites, but the agency's results are not available yet.

The report released Wednesday also states that there have been some "suspected and confirmed" historical cases of cross-connections between K-25's drinking water and other water and wastewater systems. A review of the system is ongoing and, so far, no major problems have been found. There is also a plan in development to analyze visible steam plumes.

===========

Comments:

This is not the whole story yet, as there appears to be a phase two to this analysis. Scuttlebutt has it the phase two will reveil some problems.

One part of the analysis is also suppose to take pipe and take wall residues to look at the contaminate deposition histogram.

Historic problems remain like Sr-90 in the water supply and problems like fire water supplies with chromium have been routed to drinking water in certain buildings in the plants history.

------

Message: 26
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: "Paul Maser" <pmaser@govmail.state.nv.us>

Platts - Wednesday, September 20, 2000
Commentary & Analysis from Platts

Uranium sellers see nothing but bears Washington (NuclearFuel) Sept. 19 More and more market participants--even typically over-optimistic sellers--are coming to the conclusion that spot uranium prices are likely to continue to drop for some time and that any rebound over the next few years is likely to be anemic. For prices to strengthen, said one analyst, there is going to have to be a lot more demand emerge, and the demand is going to have to continue over a significant period of time. Otherwise, there is nothing to really keep the price ``from notching down'' to below $7 a pound U3O8 in the U.S. This week both TradeTech and the Uranium Exchange Co. (Ux) did not change their estimates of the spot uranium price in the U.S. TradeTech's price stayed at $7.50 a pound U3O8 and Ux stayed at $7.55/lb U3O8. The forward two-week NuclearFuel range for transactions in the U.S., however, declined 20 cents on both ends to $7.20-$7.60/lb U3O8.

--------
Nuclear News Flashes
Sept. 19

Washington - DOE to turn over centrifuge info to USEC DOE would turn over design information it holds on centrifuge enrichment technology to USEC Inc. under a Cooperative Research & Development Agreement that the two parties have been discussing and that is close to being announced, sources said. USEC would pay about $4-million this year to fund development work on the centrifuge design by UT-Battelle, which runs DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. DOE would also make available some of its facilities for testing the redesigned centrifuges. DOE had spent about $3-billion on centrifuge research until it abandoned the program in the mid-1980s in favor of a laser program, which USEC abandoned last year.

--------

Nuclear News Flashes
Sept. 19

Washington - USEC, TVA discuss new peaking capacity USEC Inc., the Tennessee Valley Authority, and an unnamed third party are discussing possible arrangements for the supply of power or the construction of new generating capacity for use principally during the peak summer months, USEC said in its annual report filed with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission.

--------

Message: 27
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Saddam 'receiving cancer treatment' or is it GWI?

September 4 2000 MIDDLE EAST
BY RICHARD BEESTON, DIPLOMATIC EDITOR
http://worldnews.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.sunday%2Dtimes.co.uk/news/pages/tim/2000/09/04/timfgnmid01001.html


SADDAM HUSSEIN is to undergo chemotherapy for lymph cancer and has made arrangements for his son to take over if he dies, an Arabic newspaper claimed yesterday. According to a detailed report in the London-based Asharq al-Awsat, the Iraqi President is being treated by a Western medical team, including three French, one German and one Swedish doctor, working under the supervision of Abed Hmoud, the presidential secretary.

Despite numerous reports of his illness in the foreign media, few facts are known about Saddam's real state of health in the controlled Iraqi media. Certainly, he looked well last month when he personally drove President Chávez of Venezuela on a tour of Baghdad.

Nevertheless, according to an Arab doctor quoted in the report, Saddam is suffering from breathing difficulties, temporary memory loss and poor vision. To treat the illness he is said to have turned one of his palaces in Baghdad into a private clinic equipped from neighbouring Jordan.

The onset of the cancer reportedly convinced the Iraqi leader that he had to decide about his succession. He allegedly called a meeting of his ruling clan and appointed his son Qusay to head a ruling council in the event of his death.

----------

Message: 28
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Meetings on iodine-131 releases

Correction and addendum in third paragrah below from comments section on I-131 article.........

I-131 estimates appear to have some possible errors in OR, and I-131 highly affects the thyroid gland. It was rated the top effect in OR by the ORHASP panel study. The ORHASP Tank One study did the I-131 risk analysis and the dose reconstruct data that is in question was supplied by ChemRisk. Good to question that, but--

If we look at other pollutants that also affect the thyroid, we find that the UF-6 and resultant HF and fluorides released from the gas diffusion process, Y-12, and the two large coal plants here, plus ALCOA, can also very likely contribute to the thyroid toxic load and thyriod illnesses. Again, poor dose contructs by ChemRisk and poor ORHASP panel emphasis contribute to the problems.

The troubling thing is Owen Hoffman and SENES also had the responsibilty on the uranium study, task 4, and they are not flagging the uranium study errors for all the same reasons as they are the I-131 study.

begin correction
Corrections on this sentence due to task recall error. Task 4 was the Clinch River isotopes effects and was done by SENES. Chemrisk did the ORHASP uranium study and this was Task 6, and this dose reconstruct appears well underestimated and the HF evaporations effects not included. SENEs did the task 7 screening study "originally," and this is what should have picked up the HF and fluorides emissions effects. Task 7 apparently was SENES until 96, 97 time frame and ChemRisk took over this Task and controlled the funding. Task 7 apparently had a flawed Phase 1 screening method, which if done correctly would have picked up the HF emission problems and connections to the task 6 uranium losses. Phase one was not redone with the correct method, and this left off the HF health effects that affects thyroid and other health effects out of the picture. Task 7 appears to have severe shortcomings that were influced by ChemRisks funding controls. This omission and its effects on thyroid and other ills still needs to be brought out well, similar to the complaints on Chemrisk Task one screw ups.
end correction

Very odd and inconsistent for an analysis that should be organ based studies, not singular pollutant based. If the chlorine and fluorine based water effects of the area water supplies are included, all the worse result for the thyroid effects.

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

Message: 29
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Delegates working to include Nevadans in compensation bill

By Benjamin Grove <grove@lasvegassun.com>
September 20, 2000
LAS VEGAS SUN
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2000/sep/20/510794641.html

WASHINGTON -- Nevada's congressional delegation is scrambling to find out if ailing Nevada Test Site workers will be covered by a new federal compensation plan for laborers who built the nation's nuclear arsenal.

In a letter, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson urged Congress to approve a sweeping plan to compensate the nation's nuclear weapons laborers for work-related health problems. The letter, dated Sept. 18, was sent to Rep. Floyd Spence, R-Tenn., a leading negotiator on the panel debating the compensation plan.

Richardson wrote that the Clinton administration supports compensation for workers exposed to "beryllium, radiation and certain toxic substances."

But that created some confusion. Some of Nevada's nuclear workers who labored in the tunnels under the Nevada Test Site suffered from silicosis, caused by breathing silica in dust that can cause lung scarring.

"I'm very confident we'll be able to include those workers," Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., said. "We're working hard to get this program established. We don't want to eliminate anyone."

But not everyone is so sure.

Richardson's letter was directed at a panel of House and Senate negotiators -- budget hawks who are hammering out the details of the plan, estimated to cost between $1.8 billion and $2.4 billion over five years. None of Nevada's delegates is on the panel, forcing them to merely lobby on behalf of Nevada workers.

The panel has been waiting for the Clinton administration to clarify where the president stands on which workers should be included.

"The administration hasn't formally closed and sent its recommendation on that," David Michaels, DOE's top health official, said.

But Michaels also said silicosis victims have "a very good shot."

House Republican leaders have been reluctant to approve the money for silicosis victims, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said. Reid said coverage for silicosis victims would be a "tough sell," because House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, and Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas, were sweating the cost.

"I don't know how you can put a pricetag on health," Reid said. "I know what it's like to hear people cough their lungs out, literally."

Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev., agreed the White House seems behind the silicosis provision.

"Our concern is the Republicans in the House have raised this as an issue," Bryan said. "I would hope that the House Republicans would all recognize the justice of this."

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

Message: 30
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

NTS workers deserving of compensation

September 20, 2000
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2000/sep/20/510794082.html

In response to your recent editorial regarding compensation for ill and injured Department of Energy employees at the Nevada Test Site, I agree that it is a disgrace that it has taken so long for the DOE and the administration to acknowledge responsibility for the lasting scars of these injured veterans of the Cold War. We in Congress will continue working to get compensation for those who sacrificed so much for our security and safety.

Let me recap the course of this legislation so far. During mark-up of the Department of Defense authorization bill, I authored an amendment that would have created such a compensation program, but it was stricken on procedural grounds.

Working with a bipartisan group of legislators from districts with DOE facilities, I then obtained commitments from the key House Committee chairmen with jurisdiction over a compensation program to hold hearings this year.

While this was not a complete victory, it was progress.

As a member of a bipartisan working group, I have been pressing hard to encourage my House and Senate colleagues to include a DOE workers compensation program in the Department of Defense Authorization Act.

These efforts have also made legislators aware of silicosis and other occupational illnesses involved in hard-rock mining at the NTS.

On behalf of the affected DOE workers, I will not rest until the day when sickened and injured NTS workers are no longer worried about how to get the government to pay for illnesses and injuries for which it is responsible.

JIM GIBBONS Representative, U.S. House

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

Message: 31
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000
From: "Nick" <discussions@no-interestloans.org>

Sustainable Economics in a Nutshell

Our free market economy is nothing more than a huge auction called 'Supply and Demand' - which very efficiently puts a price on everything. The only problem is that it allows businesses to sell the last drop of oil, the last tree, the last fish, the last of everything - growth into oblivion - a fatal flaw of the present world economic system.

The solution? - Reserve prices on natural resources - just like reserve prices on rare and valuable items at any other auction - easy. These reserve prices can then be adjusted to ensure a sustainable supply of natural resources.

Enter the 'Environmental Protection Service' (EPS)

The purpose of the EPS is to prescribe reserve prices for natural resources, goods and services when a business ... - wastes natural resources, - sells or consumes natural resources at a level that is unsustainable or - causes other unsustainable damage to the environment.

EPS has begun to prescribe a reserve price for OPEC crude oil and OPEC Members have to confirm that they have applied the reserve price by depositing it into the No-Interest Loans Fund for no-interest loans.

So far it appears that OPEC has applied the prescribed reserve price but has failed to deposit it into the fund.

Failure to deposit a prescribed reserve price into the fund puts a monetary value on the environmental damage a business is causing - in this case OPEC. It is then up to YOU and everyone else concerned about the state of the environment to take appropriate actions to remedy the situation.

Enter Subsidized Consumer Boycotts (SCB)

EPS, for their part, will subsidize consumers to boycott businesses that fail to apply and deposit reserve prices as required.

If you would like to take part in subsidized consumer boycotts, receive information and updates on planned actions - and a clean copy of this e-mail to send to family, friends and co-workers, send a blank e-mail to: scb@no-interestloans.org.

We look forward to your support.

Environmental Protection Service (EPS) http://www.no-interestloans.org/eps.html eps@no-interestloans.org

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

Message: 32
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Researchers Say DoD Tied Their Hands on Gulf War Illness Study

By Randolph Fillmore Stars and Stripes Medical Correspondent
http://stripes.com/20sep00/gulfwarillness.htm

National Academy Institute of Medicine researchers, in releasing a study on the causes of Gulf War illness Sept. 11, complained that their efforts were inconclusive because the Defense Department did not release classified data on biological and chemical agents used during the Gulf War.

"Without [the DoD data] this study is inconclusive," said Dr. Harold Sox, chair of the department of medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H., and head of the IOM's Committee on Health Effects Associated with Exposures During the Gulf War.

"For this committee, one of the most important lessons of the Gulf War is the need for accurate record-keeping of what happens to soldiers in war. Without that crucial piece of information we cannot draw conclusions regarding whether the agents present in the Gulf War theater are the cause of the health problems among veterans who served there," Sox said.

The IOM panel studied 1,000 peer-reviewed, published studies in a search for links between "potential health effects" and chemical and biological agents used during the Gulf War. But their 300-plus-page report said that no links were found. The panel in part blamed the DoD.

The panel, commissioned by the VA, looked at four substances and plans to examine 29 others in the future. Under review were sarin (nerve gas); pyridostigmine bromide (PB), given to troops to protect them from the nerve gas soman; depleted uranium (DU) in munitions; and vaccines against anthrax and botulism. Based on the Tokyo subway sarin attack, the panel members concluded that there might be a "causal relationship" between sarin and Gulf War illnesses. The best-documented effect of sarin, however, is immediate death.

PB, which the panel noted is routinely used in the treatment of the muscle-weakening disease myasthenia gravis, was found to have "no adverse long-term effects." The panel said its data suggested that the relationship between PB and immediate, mild, transient symptoms was strong, but could draw no conclusion on long-term effects.

The investigation of depleted uranium, used in tanks and munitions and as well as other occupational settings, was "inconclusive." The panel recommended follow-up studies on veterans with "embedded fragments of depleted uranium" in their bodies. There had been suggestions that DU could be responsible for cancers and kidney diseases, but the panel said it could draw no conclusions.

The panel said the effects of the vaccines in question were "unclear" and "cannot be assessed." The researchers did document short-term side effects such as redness and swelling at the injection site, but could not assess long-term side effects because there were no published studies on long-term health effects of the vaccines.

Sox said the panel came up "well shy" of the evidence needed to establish the linkages it was seeking.

"We'd like to give veterans and their families definite answers, but the evidence is simply not strong enough," said Sox. "Without data on the levels of exposure in the Persian Gulf theater, answers will remain elusive."

A review of 29 additional agents and substances will follow, he said, adding: "Our recommendation as researchers on this issue is that DoD release its classified data."

=====

Comments:

Typical, DOD not giving up the effects of low level sarin, or its low level decomposition products effects. The DOE won't do it either for HF.

Fluorides are calcium seekers, which means they also have an affinity for the calcium rich mylelin lining of nerves.

At least they admitted they did not declassify the data.

-----------

Message: 33
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
From: P12KNIGHT@AOL.COM

URGENT

PLEASE SIGN THIS PETITION TO HELP ANIMALS KILLED FOR THEIR FUR. It only takes half a minute, and you will be doing something compassionate.

REGARDS, WILLIAM JOHN DIVNEY COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY ACTION COALITON send this link to everyone you know!!!!!!!!

If you can't access the link, go to www.ethepeople.com, put burlington in the search engine and the petition will come up. Many thanks,

William John Divney

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



NUCLEAR POWER CONTENTS
1 Permanent Yucca work could start before it is licensed
2 Clearfield mayor joins chorus against Goshute waste storage
3 OH--RADIOACTIVE WASTE-MONITORING-GLANCE
4 Cleanup water likely headed for brook
5 Groundwater at Middletown plant is OK
6 USEC, DOE Sign Cooperative Agreement on U.S. Centrifuge
7 USEC, DOE considering gas centrifuge - By Joe Walker
8 Uranium Institute News Briefing 00.38 | 13 - 19 September 2000
9 Taiwan To Face Pwr Shortage Without Nuclear Plant- Source
10 Nuke plant cancellation may leave power vacuum
11 Tang favors nuke plant
12 GOVT TO HOLD N-POWER PLANT HEARING
13 Russia: Dirty Rotten Reactors
14 Cover Story: MOX N' Roll |
15 The Energy Crunch |
16 Verification Issue Keeps Atomic Energy Agency Busy
17 BNFL execs bid to drum up trust and new deals
18 500 jobs may be lost at Sellafield
19 Armenia: Authorities Likely To Delay Nuclear Plant Closure
20 Cancer Rates Increase Near Chernobyl
21 CHERNOBYL NEWBORNS AT RISK
22 EDITORIAL: Nader on Yucca

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

NUCLEAR POWER ARTICLES

1 Permanent Yucca work could start before it is licensed
Today: September 20, 2000 at 11:45:29 PDT
BY MARY MANNING LAS VEGAS SUN

The Department of Energy may begin building an unprecedented high- level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain before scientific evidence proves that it is safe to license, an advisory committee of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was told Tuesday.

A viability study by the DOE allows the department enough flexibility to begin construction on the $50 billion project even if scientific studies are not complete, officials for both the NRC and the state's Nuclear Projects Office told the independent Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste.

Yucca Mountain is the only site being studied for the nation's first high-level nuclear waste repository. If it passes scientific muster, it could begin accepting 77,000 tons of waste by 2010. The NRC is charged with issuing both a construction license and then final approval before a repository is opened.

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., joined the meeting by telephone, urging the NRC and its reviewers to move in an entirely different direction.

"Instead of continuing the Yucca Mountain Project, I urge that you begin to consider shutting it down," she said.

Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., today said the scientific process shows the administration and the DOE are moving ahead with bringing nuclear waste to Nevada before the studies are completed.

"That shocks me, because clearly the law says that you can't establish a site until the science is completed," Gibbons said. "That is terrible news for Nevada."

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said today that the NRC seems to be "moving forward on licensing before the (scientific) questions are even asked. Right now, we have more questions than we have answers."

The viability study and the DOE's draft environmental statement also repeatedly refer to scientific studies of Yucca Mountain as ongoing once a repository is built, Steve Frishman, Nevada's technical coordinator, said, but NRC regulations say the science should be complete before a license is granted.

Frishman and NRC staff members told the advisory committee that they doubted the data on crucial studies will be available to the commission until as late as June 2001, when the Energy secretary is due to make a site recommendation to the president. A license application could be submitted to the NRC as soon as 2002.

NRC staff said information on ground water flow rates and crucial studies on the ages and origin of tiny gas and water bubbles trapped in Yucca's minerals may not be ready until next summer.

Information on ground water is important because if water corrodes canisters holding nuclear waste, radioactivity could be released into the environment. The tiny gas and water bubbles, called fluid inclusions, could indicate whether ground water might rise to the level of the canisters within the lifetime of the repository.

DOE Project Manager Russ Dyer said today that Yucca Mountain is on schedule and the Energy Department expects to complete a progress report to Congress by December. Final environmental impacts and a site recommendation are expected next summer, unless Congress cuts the DOE's Yucca budget, he said.

Frishman called the DOE's approach to licensing a repository "incremental, " and said Nevada officials fear important scientific study results will not be available for years.

"There's work undone that needs to be completed," Frishman said.

NRC staff member Neil Coleman noted that basic questions such as whether the mountain's rock drips without hot and radioactive containers in place have not been answered. But, he added, "Certainly the best thing to happen is excavate the mountain," to discover what Yucca's environment is like.

The DOE has placed cloth in some alcoves in the exploratory tunnel to catch any drops, but it will take time to find out if the mountain drips, Coleman said.

One consultant said the public does not trust the NRC to demand tough standards during the licensing process.

"The NRC is trying to become an educator of all things nuclear when the public may be concerned with the integrity of the licensing process itself," Michael Baughman, a nuclear consultant for Lincoln County, said.

Judy Treichel, director of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force, said if regulators do not know enough about how Yucca behaves over thousands of years, the public will not accept a repository.

"There has never been a mountain or any piece of geology used in this way," Treichel said. "The public health and safety are what is up for grabs here.

"This project, unlike a (nuclear) reactor, cannot be turned off," Treichel said.

Advisory Board Chairman John Garrick agreed with Treichel, saying the measure of risks from burying the highly radioactive wastes "has to pass the test of accountability."

The problem is "who does the risk assessment and how it is performed, " Garrick said.

NRC staffer Bill Reamer tried to reassure state officials that the commission would investigate every conceivable concern. For the NRC to meet its responsibilities, the DOE's application must be complete and of high quality, he said.

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2 Clearfield mayor joins chorus against Goshute waste storage
Mayor Thomas Waggoner stands with colleagues to oppose proposed Tooele site
Wednesday, September 20, 2000
The Associated Press

SALT LAKE CITY--Clearfield Mayor Thomas Waggoner has added his voice against the Goshute Indians' plan for a nuclear waste storage site on their Skull Valley reservation in Tooele County.

Waggoner and other area mayors say the public needs more time before the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission ends its public comment period on Thursday.

Waggoner said the storage site could harm Hill Air Force Base and diminish its value as the nation's live-ordnance test- bombing range in the U.S.

"This is a national asset," Waggoner said. Hill will lose one of its most valuable resources if the new military storage facility forces the military to limit access around the storage site, he said.

The NRC is taking comment on its draft environmental impact statement for the high-level nuclear waste site.

The mayors said they will send petitions with 3,000 signatures to the NRC to ask for six more months for public comment.

Private Fuel Storage, an eight-utility consortium that wants to build the waste facility, has promised the Skull Valley Band and Tooele County cash payments.

Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson said, "If Tooele needs some economic help, this is not the way to do it; if the Goshutes need some economic help, this is not the way to do it."

The Utah Association of Realtors says property values would decline 15 percent, or up to $5 billion, along the 100-mile railroad corridor.

The mayors questioned who would get stuck with the cleanup costs if the waste casks were damaged in an urban center.

Bruce Whitehead, a Utah spokesman for PFS, expected many of the comments the NRC has received would be negative and reflect the "scare tactics" seen in the hearings.

The NRC has told Citizens Against Radioactive Waste, a group that opposes the storage facility, there are no plans for a comment-period extension.

-----------

3 OH--RADIOACTIVE WASTE-MONITORING-GLANCE
Oregon Live
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 9/19/00 5:49 PM

U.S. Department of Energy officials say the long-term costs of monitoring radioactive wastes at cleaned-up, Cold War sites should be substantially less than what it costs to run and clean up those locations now. A list of how much is budgeted annually for cleanup at some current sites:

--Fernald near Cincinnati; $290 million.

--Mound in Miamisburg, Ohio; $95 million.

--Hanford near Richland, Wash.; $1 billion.

The Energy Department spends about $6 billion a year nationwide on cleaning up old radioactive sites.

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4 Cleanup water likely headed for brook
Wednesday, September 20, 2000
By SCOTT FALLON Staff Writer

WAYNE--Township officials said Tuesday that they will not let the Army Corps of Engineers discharge treated water from the radioactively contaminated W. R. Grace cleanup site into the municipal sewer system.

The declaration appears to pave the way for the water to be flushed directly into Sheffield Brook, which lies near the former industrial grounds off Black Oak Ridge Road.

Although corps officials said Tuesday they are still deciding whether to continue trucking the water to a treatment site in South Jersey, they said last month that they would "likely" discharge it into the brook--a much more cost-effective measure.

Some township officials said last month that the sewer plan was still an option and a township consultant was going to study its health effects.

But concerned over the safety of municipal workers, Public Works Director George Holzapfel wrote to the corps soon after, expressing the township's desire not to have the water sent into the sewers.

"The township has continued to have reservations about this, " Holzapfel said Tuesday. "The concern is that they [township workers] are dealing with materials that they are not trained to deal with. We would expose workers to potentially contaminated material."

The corps is supervising the removal of the remaining 17,000 cubic yards of thorium-laced waste soil left on the property. Thorium breaks down into the radioactive element radon, which has been linked to liver disease and cancer.

The corps expects to flush up to 80,000 gallons a week, depending on rainfall. The water would be pumped into tanks where it would go through a series of filters that would remove any remaining solids, including thorium-tainted soil.

At the insistence of the township, the state Department of Environmental Protection then would test the treated water to determine if it is safe before discharging it.

Township officials said last month that they had not decided whether to allow the corps to discharge treated water into sewers or into Sheffield Brook--a plan that has generated heavy criticism from neighbors.

But corps officials said Tuesday that before those pronouncements, Wayne had already given permission. Before the corps was granted a permit from the Department of Environmental Protection to discharge treated water into the Sheffield, Wayne officials agreed to the plan, said Joseph Forcina, corps project manager for the site.

"We have concurrence from Wayne Township," said Forcina. "The township made some suggestions, and we came to an agreement on that. It was part of the process in obtaining the permit."

Township officials could not be reached for further comment Tuesday.

Contaminated water from the site has been siphoned into tanks where it is transported by truck to the Gloucester County Utilities Authority. But with as much as 2.1 million gallons of water still at the site, local treatment is more cost-effective, corps officials have said.

"It's either the Sheffield or trucking it," said Forcina. "Those are the two options."

Forcina said a new method of water disposal would begin next month.

Some Township Council members have called for continued use of the Gloucester County disposal site. Others say that with absolute guarantees about the safety of the treated water, discharge into the sewer system should be considered.

But most deferred to township employees' wishes. "If they have any concerns, then we shouldn't be using the sewer system," said Councilman Gerard Porter.

----------

5 Groundwater at Middletown plant is OK
THERE IS NO IMMINENT DANGER FROM NUCLEAR WORK THERE, TOM HARKIN SAYS.
DesMoinesRegister.com | News
REGISTER WASHINGTON BUREAU 09/20/2000

WASHINGTON, D.C. - A new Army report to Congress says that groundwater at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant near Middletown does not pose a risk to human health or the environment.

"This report suggests there is no imminent danger from the environmental legacy of nuclear weapons work at the IAAP," said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Ia., who requested the report. "However, we must not stop here. This report is just another indicator of how much more work needs to be done."

Both the Department of Energy and the Army vowed to continue reviewing plant records and monitoring environmental contamination.

The plant is about 10 miles west of Burlington, and there are residences relatively nearby. From 1947 until mid-1975, the former Atomic Energy Commission conducted operations at the site, assembling and disassembling nuclear weapons. Operations were transferred to a Texas plant.

Harkin asked for an update on cleanup at the site in his position as a top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee.

The report says personnel records at the plant indicate the prime contractor operated two types of production lines, one for the Army and one for the Atomic Energy Commission. About 4,000 workers were employed on the atomic energy line, although some worked on both lines.

Currently there are no confirmed reports of excessive radiation exposure or chronic beryllium disease in former workers, the report said, but due to the large number of workers and the difficulty involved in identifying them, as well as other issues, "completion of this process will require time."

The Department of Energy is overseeing that review and has included Iowans in a national monitoring program.

---------

6 USEC, DOE Sign Cooperative Agreement on U.S. Centrifuge Development
TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 19, 5:45 PM EASTERN TIME
Press Release
Company Exploring Centrifuge as Advanced Enrichment Technology

U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to begin designing a new gas centrifuge based on the uranium enrichment technology developed by DOE in the 1980s.

USEC began its review of U.S. centrifuge last year as a potential next enrichment technology. This work will enable the company to determine the feasibility of deploying a centrifuge plant in the United States, while continuing to review other technology options.

The Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) provides that employees from USEC and DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, operated by UT-Battelle, LLC, will partner for at least one year to begin development of a new centrifuge design. USEC's design will use all the advantages of DOE's design while incorporating key technological advancements and cost reductions. The parties will conduct their research at DOE's East Tennessee Technology Park (ETTP) in Oak Ridge, where centrifuge test facilities already exist.

Over the next year, USEC and UT-Battelle will perform cooperative research in three key areas: ÿ ÿDesign of key centrifuge components, ÿRefurbishment and restart of facilities to manufacture and test ÿcentrifuge components and ÿPlanning for potential deployment and operation of a centrifuge ÿenrichment plant.

USEC Inc., a global energy company, is the world's leading supplier of enriched uranium fuel for commercial nuclear power plants. Contact:

USEC Inc. Charles Yulish, 301/564-3391 or Elizabeth Stuckle, 301/564-3399

--------

7 USEC, DOE considering gas centrifuge - By Joe Walker
The Paducah Sun
Wednesday, September 20, 2000

A new agreement between USEC Inc. and the U.S. Department of Energy will provide at least a year of research into gas centrifuge as a possible cheaper replacement for the outdated, expensive technology used by the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant.

Terms call for USEC to spend $4 million to boost research and DOE to provide the setting - the Oak Ridge (Tenn.) National Laboratory operated under governmental contract by the University of Tennessee and Batelle Corp.

The project will employ 12 USEC workers, 10 USEC subcontract people and the equivalent of seven full-time Oak Ridge employees. USEC spokeswoman Elizabeth Stuckle said it is too early to say if any of the workers will come from Paducah.

DOE will oversee the one-year project, which, depending on the findings, could be lengthened or expanded if public money becomes available, she said.

"Essentially, we're leasing the rights to (DOE) technology and their facilities," she said.

The study will help determine the feasibility of a centrifuge plant in the United States. Meanwhile, USEC will keep studying centrifuge technology that has been used by foreign uranium enrichment plants for many years, as well as a new, laser-based technology known as SILEX, she said.

The agreement allows USEC to use DOE facilities and expertise "at no cost to the taxpayer," according to a release from William Magwood, director of DOE's Office of Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology. "However, under this arrangement, the public will benefit from any advances to the technology made by USEC."

The work includes the designing of centrifuge parts; refurbishment and restart of facilities to make, assemble and test the components; and project planning and assessment.

Gas centrifuge uses about one-third of the electricity of gaseous diffusion. The Paducah plant and its sister plant near Portsmouth, Ohio, each uses power comparable to that of a major city, and electricity accounts for about half of production costs.

USEC has reportedly entertained building a pilot centrifuge plant at Oak Ridge and then a commercial start-up facility at the Portsmouth diffusion plant, which will be closed next summer. In 1985, before USEC was created, DOE pulled the plug on a new centrifuge plant at Portsmouth just as it was ready to open.

While that facility was being built, DOE decided it was cheaper to abandon centrifuge in favor of research toward another laser-based technology called AVLIS. USEC, which succeeded DOE as manager of the enrichment plants, stopped research of AVLIS last year, saying it was not cost efficient.

The centrifuge equipment at Portsmouth was removed 15 years ago. Stuckle declined to say if the building gives Portsmouth an edge over Paducah for the eventual construction of a centrifuge plant.

"Certainly, one of the options for locating a centrifuge plant would be the building at Portsmouth," she said. "But that's merely an option at this point."

Last week, Richard Miller, Washington-based policy analyst for the enrichment plants' atomic workers' union, predicted increased DOE involvement in centrifuge research within a few days. Without a replacement technology, USEC's financial status is dire, as reflected by a new Nuclear Regulatory Commission report, he said.

The study, which has not been made public, said USEC does not plan to have gas centrifuge on line until 2009, Miller said, quoting sources who had read the report. But that might be too late, because USEC is not expected to be profitable beyond 2003 unless dramatic measures -possibly including closing the Paducah plant, too - are taken, he said.

First District U.S. Rep. Ed Whitfield, R-Hopkinsville, said last week that he wasn't sure USEC will invest in centrifuge without DOE involvement.

Earlier this year, USEC asked the department for $50 million to build the pilot centrifuge plant, a $1.2 billion loan guarantee to finance the start-up plant, and permission to use the Portsmouth building, which would save USEC $300 million. The project would also cost DOE $150 million to transfer the building to USEC.

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson responded with a letter asking USEC to justify the need for centrifuge help and why the company abandoned AVLIS after the government had invested hundreds of millions of dollars in research.

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

8 Uranium Institute News Briefing 00.38 |
13 - 19 September 2000
Aweekly summary of international news relevant to uranium and the nuclear energy industry.

[NB00.38-1] SWEDEN: PLANS FOR THE CLOSURE OF BARSEBACK- 2 LOOK LIKELY TO BE POSTPONED, following Prime Minister Goran Persson's opening speech to the new session of the Swedish parliament. Commentators are interpreting Persson's statement that the unit would be closed down as soon as conditions laid down by the government had been met as indicating that it will be several years before the 1997 closure decision could be implemented. (NucNet News, 308/00, 19 September; see

USEC HAS FINANCIAL PROBLEMS BUT THE NRC WILL TAKE NO ACTION AGAINST IT, the regulator has decided at the end of its financial review of the company. At issue was USEC's ability to fulfil the legal requirement that it remain a reliable and economic domestic source of enrichment services. Had the NRC ruled that USEC no longer met these conditions it could have withdrawn the company's certification. NRC decided that to deny USEC its certification would, in shutting down the domestic supply altogether, not serve the broader statutory purpose. Nevertheless NRC is reported to have found that USEC would be unable to generate profit from its own SWU production after 2003 and could only be profitable after that as a broker for Russian or other materials. It would be unlikely that new enrichment technology could be deployed before 2009. (FreshFUEL, 18 September, p1; Nuclear Market Review, 15 September, 3]

RIO ALGOM HAS ENTERED INTO A 'CONFIDENTIALITY AND STANDSTILL' AGREEMENT WITH NORANDA, which provides due diligence access for Noranda. Noranda has indicated that it may be willing to offer at least C$27.50 (about US$18.49) per share for all Rio Algom's common shares but has not yet made a formal offer to Rio Algom shareholders. Meanwhile, Rio Algom's board has unanimously recommended that shareholders accept the offer of C$27.00 (about US$18.16) per share made by Billiton. The Billiton offer expires on 6 October. (Rio Algom, 15

[NB00.38-4] US: ALL US ENERGY CORP AND CRESTED CORP (USECC)'S INTEREST IN THE GREEN MOUNTAIN MINING Venture (GMMV) is to be transferred to Kennecott Uranium Company for US$3.25 million in cash, under an agreement to settle all remaining issues in the pending litigation between the two companies. USECC is also to receive a reported 4% net profits royalty interest on any future uranium production from 'certain GMMV properties'. All liabilities for reclamation on GMMV properties, including the Sweetwater mill, will be assumed by Kennecott. Sweetwater has not operated since 1983. (FreshFUEL, 18 September,

[NB00.38-5] NAMIBIA: ROSSING URANIUM IS SPENDING US$15-20 MILLION ON A PILOT PLANT for a radiometric sorting process to exclude low-grade waste, as part of ongoing efforts to improve operational efficiencies and reduce costs. The pilot plant is expected to start up in 2001. A full-scale separation plant would increase the mine's capacity from 4500 tU3O8 (3816 tU) to 6000 tU3O8 (5088 tU). (Mining Journal, 15 September, p210)

[NB00.38-6] THE LATEST ROUND OF CLIMATE CHANGE NEGATIONS IN PREPARATION FOR COP6 FINISHED IN LYON on 15 September. November's COP6, where a strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels in the period 2005-2012 is due to be drawn up, promises to be a political challenge as Parties disagree on priorities and positions. Some interest groups and political parties want to exclude nuclear energy technologies from climate change solutions. However both the Umbrella Group (including the large developed countries - Japan, the United States and Canada) and the business and industry community argue that all emissions- free, or low emissions, technologies should be made available to developing and developed countries to assist them in their efforts to meet international greenhouse gas reduction targets. (UNFCCC, International Chamber of Commerce and 'on the ground' at SB13, Lyon)

[NB00.38-7] THE KOREA ELECTRIC POWER CORPORATION (KEPCO) HAS ASKED CANADIAN VENDOR AECL to update its previous proposal to build two CANDU-9s by mid-September, as the country prepares to embark on the next stage of its nuclear expansion - the construction of two units at Kori and two at Shin-Wolsong. KEPCO reportedly intends to compare AECL's proposal with a domestic proposal to build two Korean Standard Nuclear Plant (KSNP) PWR units. The results of the comparison exercise are expected to be passed on to the country's Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy by the end of October. (UNECAN News, 7 September, p6; see also News Briefings

IT SHOULD BE POSSIBLE TO COMPLETE CERNAVODA-2 THANKS TO A PACKAGE OF budget support and tax breaks, according to officials from the country's nuclear utility SNN SA. SNN is negotiating a project management contract for the CANDU unit with AECL of Canada and Ansaldo SpA of Italy, the original contractors on the project. A government ordinance ensuring support from the state budget foresees start-up by the end of 2006. The Romanian government is expected to contribute a total of about US$200 million over the completion period, but more will be needed from external loans. Romania has applied for a loan of US$350 million from Euratom, and also hopes to raise finance from electricity counter trade or direct export contracts. (Nucleonics Week,

[NB00.38-9] THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION (EC)'S TRANSPORT AND ENERGY DIRECTORATE IS TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY for nuclear safety issues instead of the environment directorate. The move is part of a new policy for promoting nuclear safety in central and eastern European countries. The new policy also approves the principle of approving Euratom loans for safety upgrading and completion of existing reactors in the former Soviet Union in the context of mutually agreed energy and nuclear safety policies. (Nucleonics Week, 14 September, pp11, 13)

[NB00.38-10] THE US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY IS TO ISSUE A REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS IN OCTOBER for a contractor or team to design, build and operate facilities to convert its depleted uranium hexafluoride inventory to a more stable form. Projects, to be located at the Portsmouth and Paducah sites, are to include maintenance of the existing inventory of about 57 000 cylinders of DUF6, transportation and disposition of the conversion products, and disposition of the empty DUF6 cylinders. The latest RFP will structure the project as a cost-type contract financed by government appropriations and subject to Congressional authorisation, rather than the previously mooted privately financed contract. (FreshFUEL, 18 September, p6)

[NB00.38-11] CANADIAN NUCLEAR UTILITIES HAD ACCUMULATED 1.43 MILLION BUNDLES OF SPENT FUEL in either wet or dry storage by 31 December 1999, according to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC). (UNECAN News, 7 September, p5)

[NB00.38-12] GLOBAL COOPERATION HAS ENABLED 'NOTABLE STRIDES' TO BE MADE IN NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGY, safety and verification but more needs to be done to meet the challenges of the 21st century, Director General Mohamed ElBaradei said at the opening of the IAEA's 44th General Conference in Vienna. (IAEA, 18 September) Senior Russian and US officials met with the Director General to review progress on the trilateral initiative launched in 1996 to develop a new IAEA verification system for weapons-origin material released from defence programmes. Both the US and Russia intend to submit weapons-origin fissile materials to IAEA verification under planned new agreements. (IAEA, 19 September)

[NB00.38-13] US: CAROLINA POWER & LIGHT INTENDS TO SUBMIT AN APPLICATION FOR A 20-YEAR LICENCE extension for its Robinson plant to NRC in the final quarter of 2002, a year earlier than previously announced. The plant's current licence expires in 2010. An extension application for the Brunswick plant will be made in 2004. (Nuclear Market Review, 15 September,

[NB00.38-14] KAZATOMPROM HAS SIGNED CONTRACTS WORTH US$200 MILLION TO SUPPLY copper-beryllium alloys and uranium to the US market, according to Mukhtar Dzhakishev, the head of the Kazakh company. Three of the four contracts, executed with Nukem, involve copper-beryllium, and the fourth formalises agreements already in place before the July 1999 termination of the US-Kazakhstan antidumping suspension agreement. (FreshFUEL, 18 September, p6; see

BNFL MADE A PRE-TAX LOSS OF GBP337 (US$472) MILLION IN 1999-2000, despite a rise in turnover of over 30% to GBP2.06 (US$2.9) billion. It was forced to cancel its dividend payment to the country's government. Charges against the company resulted from the MOX data falsification scandal, the early closure of the Hinkley Point A Magnox power station, provisions for losses on some long-term decommissioning projects, and a review of the long-term costs of plant decommissioning and waste storage. Negotiations to secure new contracts in Japan were identified as a priority for the company by CEO Norman Askew, without which the Sellafield MOX plant would be unable to open. 00.36-12)

[NB00.38-16] THE US-BASED NUCLEAR INFORMATION AND RESOURCE SERVICE (NIRS) AND NETHERLANDS-BASED World Information Service on Energy (WISE) have announced a 'formal affiliation' between the groups that will form 'the world's largest, most effective anti-nuclear/sustainable energy organisation'. NIRS/WISE has identified organising opposition to the inclusion of nuclear as a Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in international negotiations on the Kyoto protocol as its first major project. (NIRS/WISE, 12 September)

[NB00.38-17] RUSSIA: ALEXANDER NIKITIN, A FORMER NAVAL OFFICER ACCUSED OF TREASON for passing information about nuclear pollution to Norwegian environmental group Bellona, has been cleared by the country's Supreme Court. Nikitin was arrested in 1996 and initially acquitted last year. The Supreme Court ruling, on an appeal against Nikitin's acquittal, is final. (BBC

Prepared by the Uranium Institute Information Service. All news and views are those of the publications cited.

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

9 Taiwan To Face Pwr Shortage Without Nuclear Plant- Source
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20 4:33 PM SGT

SEOUL (Dow Jones)--Taiwan's northern region will likely face a serious electricity shortage if the government decides not to allow the completion of the country's fourth nuclear power generation plant, a spokesman from state-run Taiwan Power Corp., or Taipower, said Wednesday.

"If the nuclear plant isn't finished, then maybe in 2007, the power demand and supply in Taiwan will be in imbalance in the northern areas...," Clint Chou, a Taipower spokesman, said. "We'll be short about 2,550 megawatts in the north."

Taiwan's northern region will be short 1,630 MW in 2006, but in 2007, the region will be short 2,550 MW, which accounts for 15% of the north's consumption, Chou said.

Demand in the island's northern region is estimated to total 17,000 MW in 2007, he said.

The nuclear power plant, located in northern Taiwan, has a total planned capacity of 2,700 MW, with the first reactor expected to come online by the end of June 2005 and the second a year later.

Taipower has already spent NT$48 billion (US$1=NT$31.275) to complete 33% of the plant.

More Independent Power Plants An Alternative

Taipower's Chou said the government may have to consider approving the construction of additional liquefied natural gas-fired independent power plants to make up for the loss of the nuclear generated power. He said the government has so far approved 15 independent power plants.

"The largest Taipower thermal unit is 550 MW, so depending on the size of the IPP (independent power plant) units, we may need more than three new IPPs in the North," Chou said.

Chou said the government could also consider turning the nuclear plant into an LNG plant.

"It's technically possible, but we'd have to tear everything down and reinstall different equipment," he said. "The biggest difficulty will be the pipeline."

State-owned Chinese Petroleum Corp. (Q.CPC) would have to supply LNG to the plant via pipeline from its loading terminal in the South, Chou said.

"We have several LNG plants in the north, but they are fueled by a long-distance pipeline," he said. "We would have to extend that line; in that case, we've also got to consider the opposition from local residents along the pipeline route."

An ad-hoc solution would be to transmit power from central and southern power generating units to northern consumers, Chou said.

"But we prefer to keep a regional balance in power supply," he said. "The long-distance transmission has us losing 6% of the power annually. It would also leave us vulnerable to natural disasters that could disrupt transmission lines."

Chou said Taiwan's northern region produces 25% of Taiwan's total power generation but accounts for 45% of the island's total electricity consumption.

Taipower operates 70 power generation plants, including nuclear, thermal and LNG. It is the only company in Taiwan that owns electricity transmission and distribution networks.

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10 Nuke plant cancellation may leave power vacuum
The Taipei Times Online: 2000-09-19
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19TH, 2000
BY RICHARD DOBSON STAFF REPORTER

UTILITIES: Taipower believes that the best way to meet future electricity demand would be to allow more independent power producers to operate in the market

As it looks increasingly likely that construction of the Fourth Nuclear Plant will be cancelled, attention is turning toward who will take up the slack of the plant's projected generation capacity, with the Taiwan Power Co (¥x¹q) suggesting that the power production sector be opened further.

Taipower, which has already spent around NT$40 billion in building the nuclear plant, told the Taipei Times yesterday that if the construction of the nuclear plant is halted, more independent power producers (IPPs) should be allowed into the market.

This plan echoes the course of action suggested in a report forwarded by the Ministry of Econo-mic Affairs (¸gÀÙ³¡) to Premier Tang Fei (­ð­¸) over the weekend on possible "alternative" plans for power generation if construction is halted. The ministry's report also states that estimated losses--including the around NT$50 billion in compensation for cancelled contracts with foreign firms--would amount to NT$90 billion, which would be borne out over five years in raised electricity prices.

Both Taipower and the report said that IPPs should be encouraged to set up natural gas-fired power stations along the west coast to help fill the projected 2,700-megawatt vacuum left by the uncompleted nuclear plant.

This shortfall in power, while not directly affecting the country's overall supply, will contribute to northern Taiwan's expected power shortfall of around 2,550 megawatts by 2007, according to the Taipower.

But due to the dense population in northern Taiwan and a general lack of space, Taipower said it was unlikely that more power plants could be built there and that the majority of the power for the region will still have to be supplied by stations in the central and southern areas of the country.

The long-term validity of this scheme would in turn depend on the speed with which Taipower can construct a fourth extra-high voltage transmission cable to carry the additional power from south to north; a project that is still "some way off" from completion, said a company spokesman.

Of the 11 IPPs that have been approved by the government to produce power in Taiwan, only the Formosa Plastic Group's (¥x¶ì) Mailiao plant and Everpower's (ªø¥Í¹q¤O) Taoyuan plant are up and running. While only two generators at the Mailiao plant are currently in operation, Formosa is hoping to eventually install seven generators--producing a total of around 4,200 megawatts--while Everpower's plant is expected to be producing around 900 megawatts by the end of the year.

More than eager to step up to the plate, Wang Yung-ching (¤ý¥Ã1/4y) chairman of Formosa, has suggested that by scrapping the nuclear plant and investing in thermal a plant, the government could reduce the size of the expected NT$90 billion loss of cancelling the nuclear plant. Building a thermal plant with the same capacity as the nuclear plant would cost only NT$50 billion, coming in at more than NT$30 billion less than it would cost to complete the nuclear plant, whose cost was seen at over NT$170 billion, Wang said. This story has been viewed 266 times.

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11 Tang favors nuke plant
The Taipei Times Online: 2000-09-19
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19TH, 2000
BY MONIQUE CHU STAFF REPORTER

AGAINST THE GRAIN: The premier says he supports building the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant and may even resign if the project doesn't proceed as planned

Premier Tang Fei (­ð­¸) said yesterday he supports the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant ((r)Ö¥|) project and would consider resigning if construction did not go ahead.

Tang's view clashes with the official stance of the DPP and President Chen Shui-bian (³¯¤ô"ó), who has said he is against the project.

Tang made his comments in the legislative chamber yesterday morning when responding to New Party legislators Lai Shyh-bao (¿à¤h¸¶) and Hau Lung-bin (°qÀsÙy).

He said safety at the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant was 10 times higher than the existing first nuclear power plant. "So, I continue to support the ongoing construction project," Tang said.

The KMT premier said he was aware that it was Chen's and the ruling DPP's aim to scrap the construction project. If the final decision is to scrap the project, Tang said he would quit.

He cautioned, however, that a final decision would take time.

"The committee's recommendation is not the only yardstick for the Executive Yuan's final decision [over the issue]. We should look on the result as a mix of factors, involving the public and DPP," Tang said.

The Fourth Nuclear Power Plant Re-evaluation Committee ((r)Ö¥|¦Aµû¦ô(c)e­û·| ) under the Ministry of Economic Affairs, which was set up soon after Chen's inauguration to evaluate the feasibility of the project, finished its work last week, voting nine to six in favor of stopping construction of the plant.

Tang said last week that if the committee decided to give the plant the thumbs down, the Cabinet would invite another group of experts to review the project and reserved the right to overturn the committee's verdict.

The premier also said the new round of evaluation would take another two months to complete.

After more than a decade of disputes and protests from environmental groups, Taiwan's Atomic Energy Council issued permits for construction of the plant in March 1999--five years after the Legislative Yuan passed a budget for the long-delayed plant.

But the fate of the project in Kungliao township, Taipei County, had been in the balance since Chen--who had pledged to scrap the project during his election campaign--won the presidential race in March.

Responding to Tang's statement about resigning, Eugene Chien (²¤S·s), deputy secretary-general of the Presidential Office, repeated what the president said in a press conference last week.

"The president expressed his support for scrapping the project, but stressed that it was only his personal view, as well as that of the DPP, over the issue," Chien said.

The DPP included an anti-nuclear power energy platform in its election pledges.

Analysts said the Cabinet's vacillation on the issue--probably until the end of this year--cleared the way for a debate on next year's financial budget, which is to be reviewed during the current legislative session.

Putting off the decision until the budget debates are over could allow the KMT and New Party opposition to negotiate a budget to their liking in return for scrapping the power plant.

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12 GOVT TO HOLD N-POWER PLANT HEARING
Daily Yomiuri On-Line
Yomiuri Shimbun

YAMAGUCHI--The government has decided to hold the first public hearing next month on the construction of the Kaminoseki nuclear power station in Kaminosekicho, Yamaguchi Prefecture, it was learned Tuesday.

The hearing will be held on Oct. 31 at a public gymnasium in the town, government officials said.

Although Chugoku Electric Power Co. originally planned the construction, the hearing is believed to be an important step in having the project recognized as a national project. However, the government may face strong opposition to the project.

The project entails the construction of two 1.37 million-kilowatt power generators, putting them among the largest nuclear power generators in the nation.

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13 Russia: Dirty Rotten Reactors
TIME Europe |
By JAMES O. JACKSON

WHILE THE WEST PHASES OUT NUCLEAR POWER, RUSSIA REFURBISHES ITS OLD PLANTS AND BUILDS NEW ONES

West Europeans may think that shutting down nuclear power stations in nearly every country but France will make Europe a safer place. But this well-intentioned initiative may actually serve to increase the danger of a nuclear accident. For every relatively safe Western plant to be shut down in coming years, Russia plans to build at least one new one or refurbish an obsolete and potentially dangerous one.

The logic is simple. Western Europe will have to import energy, largely in the form of natural gas, to fill the gap left by its decommissioned nuclear plants. The Russian government has figured out that its nuclear generators - lacking the sophistication and elaborate safety features imposed on Western nukes - can produce electricity more cheaply than gas- or coal-fired stations. Thus, the plan is for Russia to use nuclear power for much of its own electricity needs while the government-owned monopoly Gazprom sells its vast natural gas reserves in the West. "We plan to develop nuclear energy in such a way that it is both good for the country and advantageous for Gazprom, " says Vladimir Vinogradov, deputy minister at the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy. "Given the impact of fossil fuels on the climate and environment, we must develop nuclear power."

Even as the West cuts back, Russia plans to triple its nuclear power generating capacity with a $25 billion expansion strategy that by 2030 will increase the number of operating reactors from 29 to 59, some of them to be financed with the help of E.U. loans. At the same time, Russian engineers will be upgrading old reactors, including the country's dangerous rbmk units similar to the one that exploded at Chernobyl in 1986. Ukraine has announced plans to shut down the remaining units at Chernobyl itself by December 2000, but even older rbmk units at Kursk and St. Petersburg are to be overhauled and equipped with stopgap safety improvements to prolong their lives for another three decades.

The Russians also plan to earn huge fees for storing and reprocessing radioactive waste piling up unwanted in the West - including spent fuel from the European reactors that will be decommissioned in coming years. That means building and expanding controversial fast-breeder reactors, a technology largely abandoned in the West, to make use of reprocessed uranium fuel as well as the plutonium from the 20,000 Russian nuclear warheads being dismantled under arms control treaties.

"The Nuclear Energy Ministry believes that the future of nuclear energy lies with fast reactors," says Vladimir Kuznetsov, a former official of Gosatomnadzor, the Russian nuclear safety service who is now an adviser to the Russian ecological organization Green Cross International, headed by Mikhail Gorbachev. He says the ministry plans to use weapons- grade plutonium from decommissioned warheads to produce mox - mixed plutonium and uranium oxides - as fuel for fast breeders. "Handling uranium is not a problem," he says. "But plutonium is highly toxic, and it is not yet clear how it should be handled and what consequences its use might have."

The consequences of operating Soviet-designed and operated nuclear plants were dramatically illustrated at Chernobyl, but that was not the only nuclear accident in the former Soviet Union's history. A confidential report prepared by a group of experts earlier this year for the Russian government said that during the past 50 years there have been 384 reactor accidents with release of radiation, causing 58 deaths and 214 cases of acute radiation poisoning - and that does not count the Aug. 12 sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk.

By comparison the French nuclear power industry, with twice as many reactors as Russia, has had just one accidental release of radiation with no deaths. "Reactors of Russian design would not be licensable in Western countries because they do not have all of the safety features that are mandatory, such as a containment dome over the top," says David Kyd, spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. He says the more recent Russian designs use "confinement, " a tower containing a cascade of tanks intended to capture and condense radioactive steam escaping from an out-of-control reactor. But the system, says Kyd, "has never been tested on a full-scale model and has never been tested - thank goodness - in reality."

Many Russian reactors are deficient even by Moscow's lax standards. "None of the Russian nuclear plants fully meets current safety requirements, " Kuznetsov asserts. "None has gone through a procedure of thorough examination for safety." The worst are the Chernobyl-type rbmk reactors. They lack even the "confinement" cascades built into other Soviet- era designs. They also rely on flammable graphite, a form of carbon, to moderate the speed of neutrons so a controlled nuclear reaction can take place. Most other reactors, including the latest Russian designs, use water both as the moderating element and coolant. If a water-moderated reactor loses coolant there may be overheating and even an explosion, but the reaction slows down when coolant is lost.

When an rbmk reactor loses its water coolant the graphite remains in place and a nuclear reaction continues producing heat that, combined with oxygen, can set the graphite on fire. In the Chernobyl accident a furious blaze in the uncovered core burned for nine days, sending vast clouds of highly radioactive particles into the atmosphere and around the world. "They should be shut down," declares Kuznetsov. He says plans to upgrade old rbmks and complete others, such as the half-finished unit 5 at the Kursk power station that was mothballed after the Chernobyl disaster, should be scrapped. "The commissioning of Kursk 5 should not even be discussed," he says. "It's criminal."

But Russian officials insist that new safety measures like training simulators, faster-acting control rods and upgraded control computers make even rbmks safe to operate. And thanks to the West's high-minded decision to phase out nuclear power and the resulting hunger for natural gas, Russia's most dangerous reactors will continue operating for decades to come. If another one goes the way of Chernobyl, West Europeans may come to regret decisions to scrap their unloved - but safer - nuclear reactors.

- WITH REPORTING BY JAN STOJASPAL / PRAGUE AND YURI ZARAKHOVICH / MOSCOW

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14 Cover Story: MOX N' Roll |
9/18/2000
TIME EUROPE
By NICHOLAS LE QUESNE Paris

NUCLEAR POWER IS CHEAP AND CLEAN, BUT WHAT DO YOU DO WITH THE LEFTOVERS?

Europe's nuclear power plants may produce cheap electricity without CO2 emissions, but they also churn out something less desirable: large quantities of highly radioactive spent fuel. France alone produces 1,200 tons of it each year. Spent nuclear fuel contains plutonium- 239, an intensely toxic substance with a half-life of 24,360 years.

Different countries have adopted different approaches to the problem. Spain and Italy have followed the U.S. example, leaving spent fuel to cool down for decades on site before consigning it to a permanent deep-storage center. France and Britain have developed technology to reprocess spent fuel into uranium, plutonium and other less toxic waste products. Reprocessing plants at La Hague and Sellafield accept spent fuel from French and British reactors, respectively, as well as from those in other European countries like Germany, Belgium and Switzerland.

Reprocessing's future was looking uncertain even before Germany announced it would pull out of the program in 2005. The main reason for reprocessing was to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. With stocks far exceeding the needs of weapons producers, the reprocessing business had pinned its hopes on plutonium being used as fuel in a new generation of fast-breeder reactors. But Britain and France abandoned their fast- breeder programs because of safety problems and cost over-runs. The plutonium produced by reprocessing is now recombined with uranium to make a nuclear fuel called MOX - mixed oxide. But MOX gives out less energy than ordinary enriched uranium, cannot be reprocessed and must be left to cool for 150 years before it can be permanently stored. Thus reprocessing does little more than put off the day when a hard choice has to be made about nuclear waste.

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15 The Energy Crunch |
9/18/ 2000
TIME EUROPE
THE ENERGY CRUNCH
By THOMAS SANCTON Paris

SOARING FUEL PRICES SET OFF PROTESTS AND RAISE QUESTIONS ABOUT EUROPE'S SOURCES OF POWER

Not since the early 1970s have skyrocketing oil prices caused such havoc. As the price of Brent crude reached a 10-year high of $34 per barrel, angry French truckers and farmers blocked more than 100 oil depots and put a chokehold on much of the nation's fuel supply. Service stations around the country were forced to put up "empty" signs, flights were canceled or rerouted at some airports, and fuel had to be requisitioned for essential services. Taxi and ambulance drivers snarled traffic with go-slow protests and boatmen in Paris jammed the Seine. By the end of the week, similar demonstrations had spread to Belgium, Britain, Italy and Spain.

What triggered the French snowballing protests was not just the rising price of crude - up 36% since the beginning of the year - but heavy taxes that comprise nearly three-quarters of the consumer price. Thus the main target of criticism was not the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries but the French government. "There are too many taxes," fumed trucker Jérôme Favre-Monnet at a service station south of Paris. "It's nothing to do with the prices charged by the producer countries. It's the state lining its own pockets."

The Socialist-led government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin had unwittingly encouraged the latest protests by offering a generous compensation package to striking fisherman the week before. But this time, after truckers refused a government offer of a 15% cut in the tax on diesel, Jospin held firm and announced that there would be "no more negotiations." The defiant drivers reinforced their action, though there were signs over the weekend that both truckers and farmers were slowly beginning to lift some of the barricades.

With oil prices causing deep concern throughout the industrialized world, all eyes were on Sunday's meeting of opec oil ministers in Vienna. Prices eased slightly at week's end when Saudi Arabia's oil minister said he expected the cartel to increase production from 500-700,000 barrels per day. But with winter fast approaching in Europe and North America, and existing oil stocks at low levels, most analysts expected prices to remain high at least until the end of the year. And even if the cost of crude does settle down, many experts predicted a delayed-action slowdown of the world economy.

The flareup of oil prices has had another, potentially more significant effect: it suddenly put the subject of energy back on the front burner. The crisis was a sobering reminder of the volatility of oil prices, the exhaustibility of fossil fuels and the urgent need for long-range thinking about stable, reliable, non-polluting energy sources - not just for trucks, cars and boats, but for the electrical power that is the lifeblood of a modern industrial economy.

In France, the latest oil shock seemed to underscore the wisdom of relying heavily on nuclear power. "I am very happy that nuclear energy provides 75% of our electricity at a time when the cost of gasoline has doubled," Industry Minister Christian Pierret said last week. But France, typically, is the odd man out in a post-Chernobyl Europe that is steadily turning away from nuclear power.

Last June, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder announced an accord that would phase out virtually all of the country's atomic plants by 2021. The decision was based on a 1998 election deal between Schrö der's Social Democrats and their Green coalition partners. Yet it had far-reaching implications, not only for Germany but for most of its European neighbors as well. In promising to close down the 19 reactors that currently supply 35% of its energy needs, Germany joined Italy, Austria and Sweden in formally renouncing nuclear power. Most of Germany's other European Union partners have decided not to build new nuclear facilities when the current crop of reactors goes off-line over the next two decades. France alone remains firmly wedded to atomic energy.

Western Europe's energy future now looks increasingly non-nuclear. The problem is that there is no easy, affordable and environmentally sound way to replace the atomic plants that currently generate 23% of the E.U.'s electric power. With renewable sources like wind, water and solar energy limited to a fairly marginal role in most countries for the foreseeable future, the only large-scale alternatives are oil, gas and coal, all of which produce carbon dioxide that contributes to global warming. Yet the E.U. is committed by the 1997 Kyoto accord to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 8% from 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012 - a goal that will be impossible to meet if there is a massive move from nuclear to fossil fuels. But while fossil fuels produce CO2, nuclear reactors generate large amounts of radioactive waste that can remain potentially lethal for hundreds of years. Current methods of reprocessing and stockpiling are no more than stopgap solutions, pending the development of some now-hypothetical technology for more).

Schröder's decision was based more on political horsetrading than serious energy policy. The government-industry accord of June 14 put a limit of 32 years on the working life of each of its 19 nuclear power stations. That means that the first plant should go off-line in 2002 and the last one around 2021. To meet energy needs once the nukes shut down, the government plans a three-pronged strategy calling for energy conservation, more use of renewable sources and the replacement of coal-burning plants (currently 51% of output) with modern gas-powered facilities that produce less than half as much CO2.

Meanwhile, the government is cutting off its subsidies for the European Pressurized Water Reactor (EPR), the next generation of nuclear power facilities that Germany's Siemens AG is jointly developing with France's Framatome. But the two companies vowed to continue working on the epr and in July announced the merging of their nuclear activities into a new company, Framatome ANP. Though the German phaseout deprives the new joint venture of a major customer for the epr, Siemens chief executive Heinrich von Pierer is confident the decision will be reversed. "The government's current policy will not be the last word about nuclear energy in Germany," he says. "There is no convincing answer to the question of how the electricity from nuclear power plants

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16 Verification Issue Keeps Atomic Energy Agency Busy
Environment News Service:

VIENNA, AUSTRIA, September 19, 2000 (ENS) - U.S. President Bill Clinton says its contribution to world peace and security is incalculable, and 130 countries look to it for scientific and technical guidance on all matters nuclear. It is the International Atomic Energy Agency and this week, the Vienna based inter-governmental forum, holds its 44th general conference.

The official IAEA flag was approved in 1999 and officially unfurled during the 43rd IAEA General Conference. (Photo by B.Blann, courtesy IAEA)

The annual conference brings together the world's foremost scientific experts and policymakers, from the tiny west African nation of Burkina Faso to the mighty United States.

This year's agenda is dominated by the issue of verification and the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) role following the historic 2000 Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons conference in May.

The topic of radioactive waste and its safe disposal is expected to take up most of Wednesday's session.

The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, also referred to as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), obligates the five acknowledged nuclear weapon states - the U.S., Russian Federation, United Kingdom, France, and China - not to transfer nuclear weapons, other nuclear explosive devices, or their technology to any non-nuclear weapon state.

May's conference furthered the treaty by not only committing nuclear weapon states to unconditionally and irreversibly eliminating their arsenals, but by identifying practical steps towards this goal.

Several countries that addressed Monday's opening sessions saw a greater role for the IAEA, a strong proponent of nuclear non-proliferation, in helping to verify that the disarmament process is transparent and accountable.

Sweden summed up the mood of many countries' delegates by calling the 2000 NPT Review Conference "a vote of confidence" in the IAEA's role in promoting nuclear non-proliferation.

Fuel measurement by IAEA staff at the Soviet built IRT-5000 reactor during the 7th UN nuclear inspection in Iraq. (Photo by Mouchkin, courtesy IAEA)

"Sweden sees a growing role for the agency as nuclear arsenals continue to diminish and further states join in a moratorium and - soon, we hope - in a ban of the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons and other explosive purposes."

The U.S. reaffirmed its support for an end to new production of fissile material and improved controls on existing nuclear materials. It expects to submit a verification agreement for the Trilateral Initiative with Russia and the IAEA to the agency's board in December.

Minister of the Russian Federation on Atomic Energy, Evgueny Adamov, administrator of the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, General John Gordon, and IAEA director general Mohamed El Baradei, met Monday to review progress on the Trilateral Initiative.

The initiative was launched in 1996 to further accomplishment of the U.S. and Russia's obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and to develop a new IAEA verification system for weapons grade material released from defense programs.

Mindful of defense secrets, Russia and the U.S. believe the success of the verification agreement hinges on the IAEA being able to identify weapons material without gaining access to information relating to the design or manufacture of such weapons.

The U.S. said it expects the IAEA to monitor its bilateral agreement with Russia, which will result in destruction of 64 metric tons of U.S. and Russian weapons grade plutonium.

El Baradei told delegates in Vienna today that the IAEA's work directly supports the best efforts of governments to solve the greatest challenges before the world.

IAEA director general Mohamed El Baradei. (Photo courtesy IAEA)

"Earlier this month, the Millennium Summit of the United Nations identified a number of major challenges humanity faces," he said. "High among them are the efforts of the international community to achieve freedom from fear and freedom from want."

El Baradei said the agency's mandate is "inextricably intertwined with these efforts."

Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent call for an international project to generate nuclear power without requiring or producing weapons grade material, will be supported by the IAEA, said El Baradei.

The IAEA will also support a plan to develop technology to burn long lived radioactive wastes from spent nuclear fuel and weapons stockpiles.

The director general pledged help in arranging a Middle East forum to establish verification arrangements and contribute to the establishment of a nuclear weapons free zone.

The agency will organize a radioactive waste management forum next year, bringing together scientists, policy makers and the media in an effort to build consensus on the issue.

Vienna International Centre along the Danube River, home of the IAEA. (Photo by Pavlicek, courtesy IAEA)

All this will take money, which is why El Baradei concluded his address by reminding delegates that all 130 member states must live up to their budget funding requirements.

"The regular budget of the agency is underfunded. It is imperative therefore that corrective action be initiated before long ... to ensure that our programs can continue to be implemented with the expected effectiveness and efficiency."

IAEA member states approved the memberships of Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, and the Central African Republic.

The Conference elected as president Ibrahim Othman, director general of Syria's Atomic Energy Commission.

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17 BNFL execs bid to drum up trust and new deals
Wednesday, September 20, 2000
THE JAPAN TIMES

LONDON (Kyodo) Executives from British Nuclear Fuels PLC, which was embroiled in a fuel falsification scandal last year, will travel to Japan next week in a bid to drum up new orders and regain the trust of Japanese customers, BNFL said Monday.

The company believes that without Japanese contracts, BNFL's mixed plutonium-uranium oxide (MOX) fuel business is doomed.

BNFL, which is desperate to restore its credibility in Japan, hopes the trip by BNFL executives and trade union officials will "lay the foundations" for new orders, a company spokeswoman said.

The visit will start Monday.

The MOX trade between Britain and Japan stopped last year after it was disclosed that BNFL workers in Sellafield, northwest England, falsified quality assurance data on two consignments of fuel ordered by Kansai Electric Power Co.

The falsification was first revealed last September, and then expanded in December.

Since the revelations, BNFL has agreed to take back the September consignment, which had been shipped to Japan.

"The visit is part of our process of rebuilding customer confidence and re-establishing BNFL as a credible MOX fuel supplier," a BNFL spokeswoman said.

"The delegation will be laying the foundations for the future rather than actually coming home with signed and sealed contracts."

She said the talks would involve existing reprocessing customers, including Kepco, adding that Japanese nuclear plant operators remain committed to the idea of using spent nuclear fuel to create MOX.

The trade union officials who will be traveling to Japan in the BNFL delegation "will have a different message . . . They will be stressing how important the MOX industry is for the local community around Sellafield," the BNFL spokeswoman said.

There are currently no MOX contracts between BNFL and any Japanese utility.

Last week, BNFL Chief Executive Norman Askew said Japan was central to his company getting permission from the British government to start operating the company's new purpose-built MOX plant at Sellafield.

"Without Japanese orders, we cannot justify opening the MOX plant, " Askew told The Independent newspaper. "We have not time to finesse this: we have until about next January or February to convince the Japanese, otherwise we shall have to abandon the project."

His comments followed the publication of disastrous results for the 1999-2000 financial year, which saw BNFL make a loss of 337 million British pounds (50.5 billion yen).

The results also showed the MOX incident cost the state-owned company 113 million British pounds (17.3 billion yen)--40 million British pounds (6.1 billion yen) in compensation for Kepco and 73 million British pounds (11.2 billion yen) for bringing back the tainted shipment of MOX fuel.

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18 500 jobs may be lost at Sellafield
ireland.com - The Irish Times - IRELAND
Tuesday, September 19, 2000
FROM RACHEL DONNELLY, IN LONDON

Up TO 500 jobs at the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing installation in Cumbria could be lost and a mixed oxide fuel (Mox) producing plant abandoned if British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) does not secure vital Japanese contracts, the company has said.

BNFL recently reported losses for 1999/2000 had reached œ337 million sterling following the controversy about the falsification of quality control data at its Mox Demonstration Facility last year. Further problems could be in store for the company because without the Japanese orders, jeopardised because of the falsification scandal, BNFL says the Mox plant cannot operate.

The chief executive of BNFL, Mr Norman Askew, warned yesterday that unless the Japanese orders were secured by January or February next year it could not justify opening the Mox plant, which reprocesses fuel into Mox fuel that can then be converted into electricity.

"If the plant does not secure new orders, then it will not be economically viable to run and it will not open," Mr Askew said. "Sellafield Mox plant has already been more than three years in gaining regulatory approval to operate. Clearly we need to get the plant operating commercially in the future."

If the Mox plant begins work, Sellafield has said up to 500 people would be employed.

A BNFL delegation will travel to Japan at the end of this week to continue the process of rebuilding the company's profile with its customers.

The company's reputation was badly damaged by the data falsification incident involving paperwork accompanying a Mox fuel consignment sent to the Kansai Electric Power Company in Japan, and BNFL has now agreed to bear the cost of bringing eight fuel consignments back to Britain. It has also agreed to pay œ40 million compensation to Kansai, which has lifted its suspension on new Mox reprocessing business.

At least six Japanese utilities have entered into "variable commitments" with BNFL to receive mixed oxide fuel, but a BNFL spokeswoman said these letters of intent needed to be turned into firm orders.

But Mr Mark Johnston, of Friends of the Earth, said BNFL's warning about the Mox plant was its way of "preparing the ground" for the British government to refuse authorisation for its operation: "The company has never been able to show convincingly that it had the clients to justify the plant.

"The Environment Department will want the issue cleared from its desks before the general election," Mr Johnston said.

"The reason for this is not the collapse in confidence in BNFL but the collapse in confidence in plutonium. The plutonium Mox fuel option is more dangerous and more expensive compared to conventional nuclear fuels.

"Using it makes no commercial sense. The fact that BNFL, a publicly owned company, has already sunk œ450 million into building such a white elephant is a national scandal."

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19 Armenia: Authorities Likely To Delay Nuclear Plant Closure
By Emil Danielyan
Radio Free Europe
19 September 2000

Yerevan, (RFE/RL)--Armenia's Metsamor nuclear power station is likely to continue to be operational after the year 2004, despite its government's earlier pledge to the European Union to close it by that date. A spokeswoman for the Armenian Energy Ministry told RFE/RL yesterday that the deadline for decommissioning the Soviet-designed plant--which produces 40 percent of the country's annual electrical output--is "no longer realistic." Zhasmena Ghevondian said her government no longer believes it possible to find alternative energy sources in the next three years.

Late last week, Armenian authorities made sure that a reference to 2004 was removed from a clause on Metsamor in a statement adopted by an Armenian-EU joint parliamentary committee. This was an obvious effort to water down its earlier promise to close the facility permanently within 39 months' time.

Located some 40 kilometers west of Yerevan, Metsamor was shut down for safety reasons shortly after the country's 1988 devastating earthquake, but was reactivated seven years later to end crippling power shortages. Metsamor is the sole nuclear facility in the world to go back on line after so long a period of disuse.

The decision to reactivate Metsamor was taken over the objections of leading Western nations, which cited serious safety concerns. Unable to prevent its re-launching, the EU and the United States have since spent large sums on strengthening the plant's safety standards. In return for the aid, Armenia undertook to close it by the end of 2004.

The EU ranks Metsamor among those potentially dangerous Soviet-built nuclear stations--including Ukraine's notorious Chornobyl--whose reactors must be brought to a halt as soon as possible. But the Armenian government is now understood to be trying to postpone its shutdown indefinitely by setting additional conditions.

The conditions were voiced last week by Armenian parliamentarians at a meeting in Yerevan with a group of their EU counterparts. After the two-day session, Hovannes Hovannisian, the chairman of the Armenian parliament's foreign-affairs committee, told reporters:

"We are not obliged to do so, but we hope and desire to close the nuclear station, provided that we have alternative and corresponding sources of energy that would be unaffected by further blockades of Armenia [by neighboring states]." The bilateral statement adopted by the Armenian and EU parliamentarians after their meeting calls for Metsamor's eventual closure, but mentions no specific date -- a fact underlined by Hovannisian and other Armenian officials. Authorities in Yerevan now say they expect an EU commitment both to assist in the planned construction of a strategic gas pipeline linking Armenia to neighboring Iran and to seek the lifting of Turkish and Azerbaijani blockades resulting from the unresolved Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

The European Commission, the EU's main executive body, has already expressed support for the Iran-Armenia pipeline by agreeing to include it in its far-reaching INOGATE project. The pipeline would significantly reduce Armenia's dependence on Russian natural gas. But getting Turkey and Azerbaijan to reopen their borders with Armenia before a solution is found to the intractable Karabakh conflict would be a far more difficult, if not impossible task, for the EU.

Well aware of that, Yerevan is apparently looking for pretexts to justify its reluctance to stop producing nuclear energy. Energy ministry spokeswoman Ghevondian says the EU "seems to agree" with the change in Armenian position on Metsamor's future. But there has not yet been any official reaction from Brussels.

Still, comments by a senior member of the European Parliament, Ursula Schleicher, must have encouraged the Armenian government. She said in Yerevan that a majority of the EU parliament believes that if the Metsamor facility is closed, its energy output must be replaced elsewhere. That, she concluded, is "why a plan of action must show how the energy problem is going to be addressed."

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20 Cancer Rates Increase Near Chernobyl
LAS VEGAS SUN
September 20, 2000 at 8:27:56 PDT
ASSOCIATED PRESS

JERUSALEM (AP)--After the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Mikhail Gechtin got hold of a Geiger counter and learned the terrible truth that Soviet authorities were hiding from people living around the crippled reactor--the ground remained hot with radiation.

Gechtin had to make a heartbreaking choice--either send his children into safe exile or keep them at home at a terrible health risk. The computer engineer sent his 8-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter to Israel where they were taken in by Chabad, a New York-based group that tries to return Jews to their faith.

At a news conference Tuesday marking the arrival of the 2,000th child in Israel, Chabad said it had underestimated its projections of the number of children needing rescue--the area is as radioactive as it was after the meltdown.

The incidence of cancer is rising, said Yogesh Choudri, an Indian doctor conducting research around Chernobyl.

"The results raise a red flag about the health dangers to those living in contaminated areas," he said at the news conference.

As an example, Choudri said his studies show a 70 percent rise in breast cancer since the disaster--an increase that he said shows no signs of abating.

Chabad spokesman Jay Litvin said that when the project was launched, officials predicted the numbers of people brought to Israel would taper by now on the assumption that radiation levels would drop.

With evidence of radiation levels remaining the same, the project shows no sign of shutting down, he said. Chabad also assists U.N. programs that diagnose and treat those children who stay in the area. U.N. figures say that 7 million people, including 3 million children, are at risk.

Some parents sent their children to Chabad only for a few years; many for longer.

Gechtin told reporters that it had been devastating to send his children away.

"They were so small," said Gechtin, now reunited with Ira and Yevgeni. "We didn't really know where they were being taken or who would look after them."

The Gechtins were living in Gomel, Belarus, 87 miles from Chernobyl, which is across the border in the Ukraine. At first the Soviet government did not tell the people about the explosion, Gechtin said, and then it did not say how serious the situation really was.

But after checking radiation levels, he said, "I realized I had to get the children out of there."

David Volpov was only 10 when he left his parents behind in Dnieperpetrovsk, in the Ukraine. "I missed my Mom and Dad," he said. "The Chabad people made us really welcome, but I cried a lot, especially at the beginning."

David, who is now 17, was wearing a skullcap and white fringes under his shirt. The pious environment at Chabad influenced the children, who came from secular families, and they have adopted the clothing and customs of the religious.

Gechtin said he did not resent the religious education.

"I felt that I had come out of hell," he said. "I'm grateful to everyone who looked after them."

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21 CHERNOBYL NEWBORNS AT RISK
Discovery.com News Briefs

SEPT. 19, 2000-- Babies born now in Chernobyl face as great a risk of radiation-related illnesses as the children who lived there when a nuclear reactor exploded in 1986, Israeli experts said on Tuesday. Research conducted by Israel's Selikoff Centre for Environmental Health and Human Development showed that the longer children stayed in the Chernobyl area in Ukraine, the more likely they were to become ill.

The results of the study were released at a news conference by the Hassidic Jewish Chabad movement's Children of Chernobyl project, which marked the arrival of the 2,001st Jewish child it has brought to Israel from the region in the last 10 years.

"Not only are children at risk, but every day they stay in the Chernobyl area, that risk increases," said Jay Litvin, medical liasion for Chabad. "We literally consider ourselves to be in a race against time."

Most of the children brought to Israel from affected areas in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia arrive without their parents. But the movement said they were later reunited and families usually stayed in Israel.

Mikhail Gechtin sent his children on the first Chabad flight to Israel in 1990.

"We didn't know what happened," he said of the Chernobyl accident. "We were out parading for May Day and no one said anything."

Later, when Gechtin measured radiation around his home he was afraid for his family and sent his son and daughter to Israel and later joined them.

"I felt that I came from hell," Gechtin said. "For me, the sooner I got them out of there, the better."

The medical study found that infants and children in the Chernobyl area were as much at risk now as youngsters were at the time of the disaster because their rapidly developing cells were especially vulnerable to radiation.

"Radiation is very insidious," Litvin said. "It can enter the body, mutate cells and lie dormant, slowly doing its work."

The report studied 1,080 children brought to Israel since 1990.

Dr. Yogesh Choudhri, chief epidemiologist for the study, found thyroid, liver and other diseases more prevalent than in unexposed children. A high incidence in breast cancer was also found in young women who were exposed to the radiation as girls.

The Chernobyl disaster exposed more than three million children to radiation.

A U.N. report in April said the worst health effects were yet to come and radiation levels would remain high until the middle of the century.

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22 EDITORIAL: Nader on Yucca
Wednesday, September 20, 2000
Las Vegas Review-Journal

Ralph Nader is an excellent rabble rouser, but that doesn't make him qualified to be America's top leader. Nevertheless, Mr. Nader is better on one issue than any other presidential candidate--Yucca Mountain.

Mr. Nader, while in Las Vegas last week, called nuclear waste "the greatest single risk in the history of the state."

That might be an overstatement, but the issue is obviously extremely crucial to Nevadans. Burying nuclear waste forever in the ground under Yucca Mountain is a bad idea. You don't have to be the inventor of the Internet to know that. Yet, Al Gore--Mr. Environment--is pitifully bland on Yucca Mountain. Mr. Gore parrots the position of his boss, President Clinton, by saying that if--if--storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain proves scientifically unworthy, then he will be against it whole-heartedly. George Bush is about the same.

Gee, guys, don't do us any favors. Of course, the major party candidates are weak on Yucca Mountain because they don't live here and Nevada's four electoral votes don't mean much. In addition, Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush have lots of friends in the industries eager to bury nuclear waste in the Silver State. When Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush make statements on Yucca Mountain, they are carefully crafting their words to give themselves enough wiggle room to keep their friends and still get your vote. Mr. Bush and Mr. Gore should adopt the plank in Mr. Nader's platform on Yucca Mountain. It's the right position.

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NUCLEAR WEAPONS CONTENTS

1 Proposal would compensate warriors of the Cold War
2 HANFORD BEGINNING NEW PROCESS FOR STABILIZING PLUTONIUM
3 8,000 acres go up in smoke at INEEL
4 Wamp steps beyond rift with Richardson
5 Water study asserts safety
6 K-25 cleanup over budget, behind schedule: Report
7 Y-12 transition team schedules public meeting
8 Meetings on iodine- 131 releases
9 FERNALD TO SERVE AS TEST SITE FOR ENERGY DEPARTMENT PROGRAM
10 Nevada consultant warns of nuclear risks
11 Feds may kill Fernald health group
12 AGING SCIENCE LAB MATERIALS IMPERIL STATE'S STUDENTS
13 Delegates working to include Nevadans in compensation bill
14 Nevada consultant warns of nuclear risks
15 Protesters may face re-trial over submarine damage
16 Foreign Sub Collision Most Likely Cause of Kursk Disaster, Says
17 Russia to expand nuclear cooperation with India: Klebanon
18 Conversations: 'More Nuclear Tests Make Sense' |
19 Reallocating money for a California nuke lab
20 Norway wants to check on aid money to Russia
21 Nuclear Worker Compensation Urged
22 Administration issues position statement on nuclear compensation
23 Proposal to compensate nuclear workers in jeopardy
24 Workers here handled atom bomb material from the start

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NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARTICLES

1 Proposal would compensate warriors of the Cold War
postnet.com
GOOD EVENING, ST. LOUIS
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2000

Workers on one of three shifts at Mallinckrodt's uranium division gathering for a safety awards ceremony in the mid-1950s. Fred Asikainen, back row, third from left, and co-workers on three shifts at Mallinckrodt's uranium division. (Charles Grauer/P-D)

Of The Post-Dispatch

Fred Asikainen survived the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, though many in his paratrooper outfit did not.

Asikainen returned home to Florissant to raise a family and to get a good-paying job at Mallinckrodt Chemical Works' uranium processing plant.Twenty-nine years later, he retired - suffering from liver and kidney problems that have since been linked to radiation exposure.

Today, at 77, having survived actual combat in World War II, Asikainen remains reluctant to believe he might be a casualty of the Cold War that followed.

He and thousands of others in the St. Louis area who have suffered the physical consequences of exposure to beryllium or radioactive substances on the job could become eligible for compensation under a proposal before Congress.

The House Judiciary Committee will begin hearings Thursday on a collection of bills that would cover work-related disabilities or deaths among employees of private companies under federal contract to make nuclear weapons.

"They are very much warriors of the Cold War," said Sam Stratman, a spokesman for Henry Hyde, D-Ill., chairman of the committee. "Mr. Hyde is anxious to reach some accommodation on a compensation plan and move it forward."

The issue began with a bill to compensate workers suffering from chronic beryllium disease, a lung condition similar to brown lung or silicosis. Beryllium is a nonradioactive metal used in uranium processing. It is also used to make parts for aircraft and missiles.

About one person in 10 who is exposed to beryllium has a sensitive reaction that can cause scars in the lungs. Repeated exposure can result in loss of lung function, leading to disability and even death.

Chronic beryllium disease is relatively rare, striking less than 1 percent of the U.S. population. It can nearly always be traced to someone who worked with beryllium or who lived with someone who did.

The original legislation, introduced in February 1999 by Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa., arose from claims by former workers at a defunct beryllium plant in Apollo, Pa. The claimants, whose employer had a contract with the Department of Energy and its precursor, the Atomic Energy Commission, were asking for the same compensation they would have received had they been federal employees with a recognized occupational disease.

As members of Congress became acquainted with the issue, bills were introduced to expand the coverage to all beryllium workers employed by private contractors doing work for the Energy Department.

Now the committee is discussing bills that would expand eligibility to include two more groups:

*Employees of private contractors doing work for the Department of Defense who contracted chronic beryllium disease. This could conceivably include people who worked on aircraft or spacecraft with beryllium parts. Jo Anne Davis, a spokeswoman for Boeing Co., which bought the old McDonnell Douglas Corp., said beryllium was used in the manufacture of some spacecraft parts in the early 1960s but that the workers in that program have been tracked carefully and have shown no health problems.

*Employees of private contractors that did radiation work for either the Energy or Defense departments, and who have been diagnosed with any of the diseases on a list of cancers or kidney disease associated with radiation exposure. This would include Mallinckrodt uranium workers and their families.

URANIUM WORKERS

In the St. Louis area, about 3,000 people worked in uranium processing for Mallinckrodt from 1942 to 1966. The work began at Mallinckrodt's plant downtown and moved in 1957 to the government-owned plant that Mallinckrodt operated at Weldon Spring in St. Charles County.

Workers at a nuclear-fuel plant in Hematite in Jefferson County also worked with beryllium, according to federal records. The plan was built by Mallinckrodt in 1956 and is now owned by Westinghouse Electric, its sixth owner. But whether those workers ever worked under federal contract is uncertain.

Radiation workers at Mallinckrodt wore badges that measured their radiation exposure, and they got frequent physical exams.

But they were not counseled about what the exposures meant or what physical problems might have shown up in those exams.

The data were carefully preserved in a database in Oak Ridge, Tenn., but no effort has been made to identify "Cold War warriors" whose lives might have been shortened by their exposure to radiation or beryllium.

The only study so far of Mallinckrodt workers published earlier this year. It looks only at the workers who have already died, to see patterns or links to specific causes of death.

COMPENSATION

Most of the half-dozen or so bills would make affected workers and their families eligible for compensation under the Federal Employees Compensation Act. Some of the bills would include a provision for back pay and retroactive medical expenses. Some would pay for medical expenses in the future. Some offer a lump-sum payment that would eliminate all future claims for medical expenses or survivor benefits.

If he were eligible for federal workers' compensation, Asikainen said, he'd take it, "especially for the medical, and for my wife. She's put up with a lot."

His Mallinckrodt pension is tiny - less than $300 a month.

In addition to his kidney and liver problems, Asikainen also has diabetes. The diabetes, which led to the loss of his right leg, showed up years after he left the job and has not necessarily been linked to his exposure.

Even today, Asikainen considers his and his co-workers' uranium work "a necessary evil."

"It kept us out of war, where millions of guys like me would've died with a hole in them."

To contact reporter Virginia Gilbert:\E-mail: vhick@postnet.com * Phone: 314-862-2153

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2 HANFORD BEGINNING NEW PROCESS FOR STABILIZING PLUTONIUM
Oregon Live
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 9/19/00 7:36 PM

RICHLAND, Wash. (AP)--Contractors this week begin using a new process to stabilize for storage some of the 4 tons of scrap plutonium at the Hanford nuclear reservation.

The plutonium is found in about 18 tons of material, including solutions, residue, cubes and metals, left over from defense production work at Hanford.

The stabilization process, which begins Wednesday, is being done at the Plutonium Finishing Plant.

"Converting PFP's plutonium nitrate acid solutions to a stable oxide form is the top priority for the staff. That's because plutonium in solution form poses the greatest potential safety risk," Bob McQuinn, Westinghouse PFP director, said Tuesday.

Workers are recovering plutonium from nitrate solutions by adding magnesium hydroxide to the liquid, creating a slurry that can be filtered and dried out, before being baked in a small furnace.

"Processing our plutonium solutions represents a major step in reducing risk and allowing us to get on with cleanup and the ultimate dismantling of the PFP complex," said Jay Augustenborg, the U.S. Department of Energy's assistant manager for nuclear materials and facilities stabilization.

From 1949 to 1990, the PFP took plutonium nitrate liquids from other Hanford chemical processing plants and converted those solutions into hand-size plutonium buttons.

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3 8,000 acres go up in smoke at INEEL
Idaho State Journal
BY ANNE MINARD Journal Staff Writer

POCATELLO - A range fire burned nearly 8,000 acres on the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory before being contained early Monday.

"It's 100 percent contained, meaning it's not out but surrounded with a fire break," said Jason Bohne, a spokesman for the site.

"The last report we've had is the winds are very low. They changed crews this morning, so there's a fresh crew of our guys and BLM guys, " he said early Monday. INEEL fire crews continued enhancing the fire line and monitoring for hot spots throughout the day. Bohne said the fire did not burn through any known contaminated areas at the site.

The site maintained 12 sample locations throughout the fire that "indicated decay patterns of naturally occurring radioactivity, " Bohne said, adding radiation counts were similar to those taken during site fires earlier this summer. More specific test data will be available at a later date, he said.

First spotted about 3 p.m. Sunday, the fire was located on the INEEL desert site about three miles north of U.S. Highway 20. It probably started as a result of lightning strikes Saturday evening, smoldered throughout the day Sunday and erupted into flames when afternoon winds picked up.

INEEL Firefighters and heavy equipment operators tried to direct the fire toward an area that burned earlier this summer. They were assisted by firefighters and two fire trucks from Arco. A Bureau of Land Management air tanker dropped fire retardant on the flames. Cooler temperatures and calm winds aided the firefighting efforts during the night, and the fire burn area did not grow appreciably. At its height late Sunday evening, the blaze burned toward the southeast and at one point was within a half-mile from the Power Burst Facility complex. The employees working at the facility were voluntarily evacuated as a precautionary measure Sunday afternoon, and preventive measures were taken to apply fire-retardant foam to propane fuel tanks. No injuries were reported, and operations there returned to normal Monday.

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4 Wamp steps beyond rift with Richardson
The Knoxville News-Sentinel

U. S. Rep. Zach Wamp, R-Tenn., never held a microphone he didn't like, and the Third District congressman seemed particularly anxious to grab the stage last week when Energy Secretary Bill Richardson visited Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Wamp wanted to say some nice things about Richardson during the secretary's fourth--and probably final--visit to Oak Ridge during a two-year tenure at the energy helm.

The fact that a few hundred people were present in Wigner Auditorium may have been a factor, too. Wamp, of course, is running for re-election (his Democratic opponent, Will Callaway, was conspicuous at Richardson's visit to an Oak Ridge union hall earlier in the day), and it rarely hurts to flaunt your wares before potential voters.

Wamp and Richardson served together in Congress, and they both like to tell good-time stories of member basketball games in Washington and other moments of bipartisan recreation.

Not so long ago, however, Wamp bitterly attacked Richardson for his decision to halt the nuclear recycling program in Oak Ridge. Wamp called the secretary's decision "nonsensical," politically motivated and without any basis in science.

DOE has since taken steps to continue some aspects of the recycling effort in Oak Ridge, without releasing any of the slightly radioactive products to the commercial market.

At ORNL last week, Wamp made an apparent reference to that dispute with Richardson.

"I don't always agree with him, and I had to disagree with him not long ago," Wamp said. "I don't always agree with my wife, but I respect my wife .... He inherited a lot of challenges; he inherited a lot things at DOE that had not been addressed, things that had to be addressed, and he took the bull by the horns. Whether you agree with him all the time or not--sometimes we need not to agree -- but the fact is, he's a doer, and he's got courage."

Indeed, Richardson has repeatedly shown his willingness to face up to tough issues, although he cut his Oak Ridge visit short by about an hour, and there was speculation that aides weren't anxious for him to take any more questions about Wen Ho Lee or deal with the ABC-TV "20/20" crew tracking him for comments on security problems at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant.

I recently characterized Richardson as the most decisive energy secretary ever, saying he was a refreshing change from some of the lightweight do-nothings in the past.

Wamp noted that Richardson is the third energy secretary during his time in Washington (the others being Hazel O'Leary and Federico Pena), and he offered a succinct view of each.

"They all had different skill sets. They all had pluses and maybe some minuses. But I thought about three words that kind of summarized my reflections. Secretary O'Leary was a lot of 'show.' And, under Secretary Pena, it was sometimes 'slow.' But this guy (Richardson) is all 'go.'"

WHO DAT: They say politicians never forget a face, and that's probably true. Names are another thing.

One of the odder moments during Richardson's visit last week was when the secretary thought he spotted former ORNL Director Al Trivelpiece in the audience.

Nope, that was David Moncton, the executive director of the Spallation Neutron Source, whom Richardson obviously has met on a number of occasions.

Even though current ORNL chief Bill Madia kept telling Richardson that was Moncton, the secretary kept pointing and saying he recognized the former lab director.

The stage officials managed to segue past the embarrassment with a minimum of damage.

OSTI RUMOR: When asked if DOE planned to relocate the Office of Scientific and Technical Information from Oak Ridge to Montana, Richardson (after looking to an aide for help) simply shook his head and said, "No."

He gave the impression that was a nonissue, even though published reports in Montana suggest a senior DOE official visited Bozeman and spouted off about moving the Oak Ridge-based document repository to Big Sky Country.

Wamp later said his staff had been tracking the issue and pressuring DOE for information.

"From all the knowledge we've gained, this individual did not have the authority to do what he was doing," Wamp said.

The congressman smirked at the notion that DOE might relocate work to Montana for quality-of-life reasons. He said the West is nice enough, but can't compare with the Volunteer State.

"Besides, you can't go to a UT football game in Montana," Wamp said.

Frank Munger covers the Department of Energy for the News-Sentinel. He can be reached at 423-482-9213 or at twig1@knoxnews.infi.net. This column is also available on the Web at www.knoxnews.com/editorsview/ munger/

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5 Water study asserts safety
Oak Ridger Online
Wednesday, September 20, 2000
Oak Ridger staff

CONTAMINANTS FOUND MEET REGULATION LEVELS

There are no levels of contaminants in the Oak Ridge K-25 Site's drinking water that exceed Environmental Protection Agency and state- regulated levels.

That conclusion is part of a special report released today concerning recent water tests at the former gaseous diffusion plant site, also known as East Tennessee Technology Park. The report emphasizes that K-25's water is "safe to drink."

Tests on the K-25 water were conducted in early August after site employees voiced concerns that cross-connecting water lines could have resulted in exposure to hazardous materials at the site. However, the report states K-25 maintains a state-approved cross connection control program.

The tests were completed by the Sampling Planning and Oversight Team, which consisted of representatives from the Department of Energy; OMI, the contractor for the water plant and distribution system at K-25; the Community Reuse Organization of East Tennessee;the Paper, Allied-Industrial and Chemical Employees Union; the Oak Ridge Reservation Local Oversight Committee's Citizen Advisory Panel; the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation; and Bechtel Jacobs Co. LLC.

More than 475 drinking water samples at 19 sites were collected by the team, double-sealed to prevent tampering and submitted to a state- certified laboratory for analysis.

"This one-time initiative led by SPOT to test for metals, chemicals and radionuclides in water taken at the tap goes well above and beyond regulatory requirements," the report states.

As for the water samples collected by SPOT, more than 90 substances were tested for and not detected, including altrazine, aluminum, arsenic, benzene, beryllium, cyanide, mercury, nickel, silver, simazine, toluene and uranium-236.

The bacteriological, chemical and radiological tests showed that more than 20 contaminants present in the water meet Environmental Protection Agency and state-regulated levels. Those contaminants include coliform bacteria, asbestos, barium, chloride, chromium, copper, fluoride, lead, nitrate, sodium, sulfate, uranium-238 and zinc.

"Secondary maximum content levels, which are related only to aesthetic properties of water and do not pose a health risk, were exceeded for iron and manganese in one drinking water sample out of the 19 locations sampled," the report states.

K-25's drinking water comes from the drinking water treat