NucNews - December 12, 2004



-------- NUCLEAR 


-------- accidents and safety

Restarting a Reactor With a Flawed Part

The New York Times Company

By JOHN SULLIVAN

December 12, 2004

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/nyregion/12salem.html?pagewanted=2&oref=login

Managers of the Salem nuclear power station want to restart a troubled reactor later this month, even though New Jersey regulators have objected and an internal company report warn that flaws in a critical pump could cause an accident.

Restarting the reactor at the giant plant in southwestern New Jersey will require the approval of federal regulators. Officials of the plant's operator, P.S.E.G. Nuclear L.L.C., said that restarting the plant would pose no danger to the public and that contingency plans had been drawn up should the pump fail.

The first serious problems with the pump, called a recirculation pump, were raised in an internal report written by company engineers in April 2003. The pump helps cool one of the three reactors at the nuclear power station, about 10 miles south of Wilmington, Del.

Last month, a second engineering team concluded the pump's steel drive shaft was probably cracked, noting that, at certain speeds, the pump bangs "like a freight train." And, an advisory from the reactor's manufacturer, General Electric, said the pump has run far longer than it should without a drive shaft inspection.

One internal company report warns that if the pump burst, it could cause an accident by spilling cooling water from the reactor vessel. The company says this type of accident is highly unlikely. Officials said such an accident would not endanger the public, but it could flood the gigantic building that surrounds the Hope Creek nuclear reactor with radioactive water.

"We would cool the plant down, and we would go in and fix it," said A. Christopher Bakken III, president and chief nuclear officer of P.S.E.G. Nuclear.

Top managers at Salem, as a result, have not replaced or fully repaired the pump, and they have concluded that it can be safely operated in the short term. With the company planning to restart the Hope Creek reactor - it was shut down for repairs following an unrelated emergency in October - company officials say they are prepared to use the pump for another 18 months.

"I would not authorize start-up nor would I allow operation of Hope Creek if I had any doubts about the operational safety of this system or any major plant system," Mr. Bakken said in a written statement.

New Jersey's top nuclear regulator, however, has disputed the decision, arguing that the pump should be repaired before the reactor restarts. Other experts have said the pump is so important - and the potential consequences of its failure so serious - that repairs are required.

"We have advised Chris Bakken that we thought they should replace it," said Jill Lipoti, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection's assistant director for radiation protection. "But we have no regulatory role to tell them to shut it down and do so."

That authority rests with the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which now has inspectors reviewing the condition of the plant. Commission officials must sign off on the operation of the pump before the Hope Creek reactor is allowed to restart. Diane Screnci, spokeswoman for the commission's regional office in King of Prussia, Pa., said the agency was reviewing data supplied by P.S.E.G. and would not comment until the review was completed.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, a nuclear watchdog organization in Washington, has called on P.S.E.G. to replace the drive shaft. David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer with the organization, said there was ample evidence that the pump was damaged and that there was no reason to delay repairs. "The place is shaking itself apart," he said.

The story of the Hope Creek pump is unfolding against a backdrop of chronic problems that P.S.E.G. acknowledges have plagued the station for years. Salem, the country's second largest nuclear power plant in terms of electric generation, supplies electricity to more than two million customers.

But it has recently drawn the ire of regulators for maintenance problems. A nine-month federal investigation this year uncovered problems from a leaky generator to malfunctioning water pumps. Some employees also said they were reluctant to report problems because they feared retaliation from supervisors.

After the investigation finished this summer, regulators placed the plant under increased scrutiny.

The company has committed to spend millions of dollars to fix the problems, both by replacing equipment and ensuring that workers are free to complain without retaliation. In a public meeting on Dec. 2, N.R.C. officials said P.S.E.G. had made notable progress, although more improvements are needed.

The Hope Creek recirculation pump did not figure in the recent federal investigation, although questions have surrounded its operation for several years. The recirculation pump, which is connected by pipes to the Hope Creek reactor vessel, helps move water through the core to increase the reactor's efficiency.

The water level is critical because it helps generate power and cools the fuel inside the reactor. The plant can safely shut down even if the recirculation pump stops, but it cannot operate long without the pump.

"The recirculation pump is an important component of the plant's cooling system and, therefore, is an important safety component," Mr. Bakken said in a recent statement.

Workers first called attention to the pump because parts called seals were wearing out far faster than normal. The seals, which help stop water from spilling from the pump, are supposed to last six years, but they were wearing out every 18 months.

Workers also reported that the pump leaked radioactive water, according to an internal company report. In fact, the report says, it leaks so much that it has forced operators to shut down the reactor at times to avoid exceeding federal limits.

Also, engineers found that pressure waves from the pump had been rattling nearby equipment, causing valve handles and wheels to fall onto the floor. For years, workers have simply screwed the parts back on, Mr. Bakken said. He said the pressure waves were not related to problems with the pump's drive shaft, but were caused by a different part of the pump.

After workers' reports, P.S.E.G. assigned a team of engineers to examine the pump and recommend repairs. In April 2003, the engineers concluded that the steel drive shaft that runs the pump was bent, causing the machine to vibrate every time it rotated. Their report recommended that managers replace the shaft when the reactor was off line for scheduled repairs this fall.

Managers were preparing to shut the reactor down for repairs when a broken steam pipe forced the reactor operators to conduct an emergency shutdown on Oct. 10. During that shutdown, a critical safety system used to blast water into the reactor failed. P.S.E.G. recently said that the failure was caused by workers using the wrong type of lubricant on a pump - unrelated to the recirculation pump - that powers the system, causing the other pump to seize up at a key moment.

After the emergency, the plant remained closed for scheduled repairs. Mr. Bakken then hired the engineering firm Sargent & Lundy to evaluate the recirculation pump.

The firm concluded that the recirculation pump was safe to use for 18 months longer, but the engineers warned that this could change rapidly. In the report, Sargent & Lundy recommended that P.S.E.G. add sensors to the pump and monitor them carefully. If the vibrations increase, Sargent & Lundy said, the "window between the rise and potential shaft failure is expected to be small."

Sargent & Lundy relied on seven years of readings from sensors that record vibrations to make their recommendation. Engineers use the readings to evaluate damage to internal parts like the drive shaft. Engineers with P.S.E.G. have said the vibrations at Hope Creek are well below the manufacturer's safety limits.

After analyzing the readings, Sargent & Lundy concluded that the vibrations were stable and the pump could continue to operate safely. According to Sargent & Lundy's report, the vibrations worsened - nearly doubling - from 2000 to 2002. But in 2002, they suddenly decreased.

Mr. Bakken said P.S.E.G.'s engineers are not certain about why the system suddenly improved. The company acknowledges that it moved the sensors used to measure vibrations at the same time the vibrations lessened. But Mr. Bakken said that did not affect the ultimate analysis that the vibrations had lessened and that the pump was safe.

In any case, Mr. Bakken said, the sensors would be constantly monitored from now on. He said an alarm system was being connected to the sensors, and if vibrations rose, the alarm would sound. Mr. Bakken said he was confident that operators would have enough time to shut down before the pump's drive shaft could break. "I will personally make sure of that before this plant is allowed to start up," he said.

The company is now making its argument to regulators. Although the state says the company should replace the bent drive shaft, the final decision will rest with the federal regulators at the N.R.C.

The commission has assigned a team to evaluate P.S.E.G.'s plan, including pump experts from N.R.C. headquarters. Although the federal regulators will not comment until the investigation is complete, meetings are scheduled with P.S.E.G. officials sometime this week.



-------- britain

Nuclear 'white elephant' eyes a profit

By Clayton Hirst

12 December 2004 UK Independent

http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/story.jsp?story=592201

A controversial BNFL nuclear plant at Sellafield, which has cost taxpayers £473m and been branded a white elephant, is expected to make its first profit next year, according to confidential figures.

The Independent on Sunday has learnt that BNFL is expecting to generate £45m of income in the 12 months to 31 March 2006 from the sale of so-called Mox fuel from its Cumbrian facility.

The projections have been passed to the Government's new Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), which will use the money to help fund the clean-up of Britain's radioactive sites.

The Mox plant has been dogged with technical problems and, despite the huge sums of money invested in it, BNFL still has not managed to complete the assembly of any Mox fuel.

However, BNFL executives hope to secure the first sale of Mox fuel to the Swiss power company NOX next year. It is understood that BNFL has also secured potential orders from German energy giant E.ON and Swedish utility OKG.

Tony Blair personally pushed through the go-ahead for the Mox plant in 2001 against the wishes of his then environment minister, Michael Mea-cher. The Government has written off the £475m invested in the plant. Mr Meacher, along with the former Conservative environment secretary John Gummer, is calling for a parliamentary inquiry into the Mox plant.

Mr Gummer said: "We need clear and open information from BNFL to show that the money they expect to make from Mox is going to be there."

The NDA will begin life on 1 April with £2.2bn to spend in its first year. Around £1bn of this is expected to be used on cleaning up and operating BNFL's Sellafield facility. The various Sellafield operations, including Mox fuel generation, are forecast to produce £860m next year.

A BNFL spokesman said: "We cannot comment on the Mox figures as they are commercially confidential." The NDA also refused to comment. 



<a name="du"></a>

-------- depleted uranium

Danger Dismissed: How the Pentagon downplays the risks of depleted uranium weapons
Uranium Dust Leaves a Trail

dailypress.com

December 12, 2004

http://www.dailypress.com/news/specials/dp-du-day1super,0,588771.htmlstory?coll=dp-breaking-news

While U.S. forces fight in the streets of Iraq, scientists are finding more evidence that the depleted uranium weapons we've given them to defeat the enemy are a hazard to friend and foe.

The weapons, first used in the Persian Gulf War, provide a decided battlefield advantage. But the mildly radioactive toxic dust that results when they're used successfully also might be why veterans of the 1991 war have a disability rate three times as high as those for Vietnam and World War II vets.

The Pentagon dismisses any link between those illnesses and depleted uranium. This week, the Daily Press takes an in-depth look at the latest science.

You'll see why some experts think now is too soon to pull the plug on research into whether cancers and brain damage result from breathing the dust. You'll find out why the U.S. military uses an inferior process to identify whether our forces have depleted uranium in their bodies and how British vets are signing up for a better test.

You'll meet Matt Rohman of York County, a Gulf War veteran who's lost all feeling in his feet and fingers, living every day in pain. Government doctors say his problems are related to the war, but they don't know how or why. Will a new generation of warriors meet the same fate?

-----

Part One of the series 

'Silver Bullet,' Black Dust - Chapter 1: Looking for a cause, looking for a cure.

Many vets suspect the magic weapon of the 1991 Persian Gulf War caused their continuing health problems. The Pentagon dismisses the dangers.

dailypress.com
BY BOB EVANS
December 12 2004

http://www.dailypress.com/news/specials/dp-du1,0,6357027,print.story?coll=dp-breaking-news

For Matt Rohman, the symptoms began about the time that his unit returned to its barracks in Germany after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

First came a fatigue that sleep couldn't cure. Then severe pains in his joints. His teeth started falling out; his hands and feet went numb. Asthma grabbed his lungs. Debilitating migraine headaches squeezed his skull for days at a stretch. Sleeplessness and other symptoms followed.

Now every day for Rohman, 40, begins the same: waking up in his York County home and trying to figure out how many of the pills and inhalers from the Veterans Affairs hospital he'll have to use.

He wants to swallow just enough to keep his lungs working and the pain at tolerable levels. He's willing to ignore some of his problems to keep some of the drugs in their bottles. That way, his wife, 22-month-old son, 11-year-old daughter and what's left of his life don't disappear into a medicinal fog.

At best, he'll spend the day with no feeling in his feet or hands, watching his kids play, pretty much stuck to a chair or the couch. You could stub out a lit cigarette on any of his fingers or toes, and he wouldn't feel it because of the neuropathy - a nerve disorder that leaves him unable to feel anything. On a good day, he's able to hobble across the room or maybe go out with his family for an hour or two.

The bad days bring pain in his head too intense for him to be much help to his family or himself. Those days can also mean swelling in his extremities so severe, the tips of his toes and fingers look like toadstools and he can't walk at all.

After years of testing and examinations, doctors from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs have concluded that something happened to Rohman's brain or central nervous system during the war. The neurological and other symptoms make that clear.

Repeated tests, including brain and body scans, show that his brain is swollen. But there's no evidence of a physical injury or cause, those doctors' reports say, leaving them stumped about why he's so debilitated.

The neurological and other symptoms that Rohman suffers are mirrored in tens of thousands of others who served in the war. When Rohman filed his final plea for VA benefits related to wartime service, the document noted that Rohman had 11 of the 13 officially recognized symptoms consistent with Gulf War service-related illness. One of the 13 applied only to women.

The government lists 20 active theories of what caused these problems.

But it provides no answers.

It doesn't even know how many veterans have these problems or where they live. All that's known is that of the 697,000 who deployed in the war, more than 183,000 had service-related disabilities at the end of 2003, with thousands more applications pending. That's 26 percent of the total, three to five times higher than the rate of disability after World War II (9 percent), the Korean War (5 percent) and the Vietnam War (9 percent) for a comparable period.

All from a war that lasted 100 hours, while the others went on for years.

Why?

Perhaps it was the highly potent bug repellent that the military used to keep away the sand fleas and other pests in the deserts of Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Perhaps it was the experimental pills that troops were ordered to take to ward off the effects of disease and chemical weapons.

Perhaps it was the residue of their own government's most effective weapon for defeating enemy armor - the tank-killing projectiles made from depleted uranium.

In the past few years, while the media and public have been paying attention to another war in the region, doctors and researchers have been finding out more about depleted uranium and how it might be responsible for some of the problems suffered by veterans of the Gulf War. Some of this research hasn't been made public yet, while other findings made ripples only among doctors and professors still in the hunt for a cause and a cure.

There's now physical evidence that depleted uranium, once in the body, migrates to the brain, lungs, bones and testicles of rats and mice. Researchers have found that even a single particle placed in contact with human bone cells can set off a chain reaction of cell and chromosomal abnormalities of the type thought to cause cancer.

They've also found that rats with depleted uranium in their bodies develop tumors and cellular mutations consistent with cancer. And that mice who breathe in tiny bits of the metal - just like the soldiers on the battlefield - get genetic mutations thought to be indicative of cancer.

PENTAGON UNWILLING TO FUND NEW RESEARCH INTO ILLNESS

Despite their efforts, these researchers haven't been able to show why brain scans on Gulf War vets show abnormalities that don't appear in scans of other servicemen and women who didn't go to the war. They just know that it's further proof that there's a real problem among those vets.

They also can't say why men and women who deployed in the Gulf War are twice as likely as others their age to get a fatal neurological disorder known as ALS - Lou Gehrig's disease.

The questions demand answers. To get them, more money and scientific patience is needed, these scientists say.

But the main source of that money for the past 13 years - the Pentagon - says it isn't interested in pursuing new research into the health problems of its former soldiers. Especially when it comes to studying the health effects of using depleted uranium on the battlefield, a use that gives the United States and its allies a lopsided advantage in ground wars.

Pentagon officials have long dismissed the possibility that any of the veterans' problems are the result of the radioactive toxic dust that results when depleted uranium weapons hit hard targets. This fall, they released a $6 million study that they labeled "Capstone" - a title picked because they say it should close the book on whether inhaling depleted uranium on the battlefield is a health risk worth considering.

A number of scientists say it's too soon to stop investigating the possible dangers of these weapons, especially when there have been so few experiments that show what happens when animals or humans inhale the special type of dust created when depleted uranium weapons hit their targets.

None of the recent research that points to possible problems with the weapons was included or addressed in Capstone, not even the work performed by government scientists or researchers financed by the Army and Department of Defense. The Army officer who oversaw the study says that's because there was a conscious effort to base the work on "mainstream science," instead of "preliminary data."

Critics say that's the government's way of simply ignoring the emerging and potentially damning evidence on the subject. With the building body of data, they say, this is no time to label something the final word on depleted uranium's dangers.

The skeptics include a panel of scientists, doctors and veterans appointed by the Bush administration to study the nature and status of research into the cause of the veterans' illnesses. The panel issued its first report last month and said more research into possible health effects from depleted uranium was needed.

"We're not finished," says Lea Steele, the panel's scientific director.

The committee's report says poorly planned and administered research programs are partly to blame for having so little to show for the $247 million spent on research into Gulf War illnesses so far. It points no fingers, but it does note that 74 percent of that money has been controlled by the Pentagon and that most of it has gone to support the now-discounted idea that stress and psychological problems account for the physical symptoms that vets suffer.

Steve Smithson is a member of the panel and the assistant director of the American Legion's Veterans Affairs and Rehabilitation Division. He says the Pentagon has been trying to prematurely end the debate about possible health hazards from depleted uranium for years.

"These are very effective weapons," he says, "and they want to keep them."

WEAPONS' POTENTIAL DANGERS WERE KNOWN FOR DECADES

Depleted uranium was used in combat for the first time in the Gulf War. The weapons proved so effective, troops began calling them "The Silver Bullet," in honor of their near-magical ability to kill the enemy.

The weapons enable U.S. tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles to fire accurately and decisively from much greater distances than other anti-tank weapons used in ground combat. That means U.S. troops can kill the enemy before the enemy can fight back.

Last year, when Operation Iraqi Freedom began, the weapons' effectiveness played a big role. It was a reason commanders said they could whip Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein with a smaller, lighter - but more mobile - force than they used in the 1991 Gulf War.

Before that, many people thought that depleted uranium wasn't much more than low-level nuclear garbage.

Depleted uranium is the byproduct of making "enriched uranium" for nuclear weapons and fuel. The process involves stripping natural uranium of its most radioactive components for use in bombs and power plants. What's left is "depleted" uranium.

In the early days of making nuclear weapons, this byproduct was considered a problematic waste. But almost immediately, weapons researchers began trying to make something with it. It took more than 20 years, but by the late 1970s, they'd succeeded. The Army, Navy and Air Force each had a weapon using the material.

But they had to wait to see their creation anywhere except a test range. The first war that involved U.S. forces using tanks against hostile forces who also had tanks was the Persian Gulf War.

One of the weapons' special properties creates what all acknowledge is the downside of these weapons.

When those weapons strike something hard, they slice through the target, getting sharp where other metals get dull. They get sharper by shedding millions and millions of tiny bits of flaming depleted uranium, spitting out the bits like shavings from a pencil in a high-speed sharpener.

Once cool, those bits become mildly radioactive toxic black dust particles, most of them small enough to inhale deep into the lungs. The Capstone study says those toxic particles will likely remain in the lungs for years.

U.S. researchers have known that the weapons' use created a long-lived radiological risk to the lungs since at least the early 1980s. They've also known that these tiny bits of black dust pose a potentially catastrophic health hazard for troops on a battlefield.

None of that was revealed publicly when the weapons were put to use. It wasn't until the mid-1990s that the government officially and publicly acknowledged that troops in the Gulf War had been exposed to this hazard and should have been warned and trained about the dangers beforehand.

By then, thousands and thousands of troops had started suffering the debilitating pains, neurological problems and other symptoms.

Rohman was one of them.

'WE ACTUALLY SLEPT UNDENEATH DESTROYED TANKS ...'

For three months after the fighting stopped, Rohman and his buddies in a 3rd Armored Division combat engineer squadron were ordered to crawl around in the black dust left over from successful shots of depleted uranium.

He was ordered to live and breathe in it while finishing the job of destroying damaged Iraqi tanks and munitions, to make sure that the enemy's equipment couldn't be used again.

"We actually slept underneath destroyed tanks and stuff because we figured they wouldn't fire at their own destroyed vehicles," Rohman says.

For months, the black dust covered many of those vehicles, rubbing off on Rohman's clothing, getting on his skin and often into his food and water.

Hundreds of other soldiers were ordered to do the same work, while thousands of others might have come in contact with the dust through curiosity or happenstance.

Neither Rohman nor the military can say how many of them got sick like he did. Rohman says none of the other soldiers from his unit came from nearby towns or cities, so he lost touch with them while focusing on his own deteriorating health. Researchers say the military didn't keep, or pursue, the kind of information that would help them make such determinations. They also say one of the biggest obstacles to solving the riddle of the illnesses is that people who appear to have the same experiences reacted differently - some getting ill and others staying well.

Many soldiers didn't pay the black dust any notice during the war because the military had never told them about the dangers.

"We didn't know any different," Rohman says.

The Pentagon acknowledged seven years after the war was over that it should have provided training that advised troops to avoid contact with the dust or to use safety masks and suits in the situations that Rohman described.

Instructions on depleted uranium weren't added to the Army's regular training program until the late 1990s. Since then, the requirements for telling troops about depleted uranium have been gradually relaxed for troops who don't fire or handle the weapons.

The Army has a long list of medical and training requirements that must be met before a soldier is supposed to be sent off to war. The checklist for Transportation Corps soldiers deploying from Fort Eustis to Iraq is long. But for the past two years, it hasn't included a requirement that soldiers in transportation units receive depleted uranium hazard training, even though the Army's own radiological experts said in 1997 that they should.

Military and medical officials say it's too early to tell what the effect will be on troops involved in the continuing fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Department of Defense policy - spurred by members of Congress critical of the way that the military handled health complaints after the Gulf War - requires all soldiers, sailors and airmen who come home from overseas wars to fill out a multipage questionnaire about their health and what they experienced.

The only specific mention of depleted uranium exposure on the questionnaire involves one item near the end of a list of 22 possible exposure risks. The list includes such mundane items as "paints," "sand/dust" and "vehicle or truck exhaust fumes." Some soldiers returning from Iraq say that because they were never given instruction on the possible hazards, they didn't know what to choose when given the options of "No," "Sometimes" or "Often" on this question.

Army, Air Force and Navy officials say anyone who checks "Sometimes" or "Often" is questioned further and tested, if necessary. They also say any man or woman in the military who deployed and asks for a test for depleted uranium will be given the test, no further questions asked. Department of Veterans Affairs officials say the same applies to those who served in the Persian Gulf War.

PROMISE TO PERFORM TESTS NOT FULFILLED FOR VETERANS

Yet, Rohman's medical records show that he made VA officials aware of his exposure to depleted uranium six years ago. He's sure that he told them earlier, but many of his records have been lost, and the earliest date that he can document is 1998.

When the Daily Press called the VA administrator responsible for the local testing program to find out why this problem persisted, she immediately agreed that a mistake had been made and took steps to bring Rohman in for evaluation. He still hasn't been tested.

It isn't clear whether things have gotten any better for veterans of the more recent fighting in Iraq.

The Government Accountability Office, Congress' investigative arm, checked in the past year the health forms filled out by more than 1,000 troops who'd returned from the Gulf War. It found that very few of those who'd chosen "Sometimes" or "Often" got tested, said Dan Fahey, a congressional adviser who participated in a briefing on the study.

Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, a veterans advocacy group, says he's talked to dozens of soldiers just back from the current war who told him that doctors can't diagnose their ills but have refused to test them for depleted uranium exposure.

The soldiers even showed him medical records and other paperwork to prove it, he says. They won't go public for fear retaliation from the military.

Robinson and Smithson say they won't be surprised if there are thousands of veterans with undiagnosed, unexplained illnesses once the totals are in from Operation Iraqi Freedom and its aftermath. Rohman says he won't be surprised, either. He wonders whether this new generation of warriors will succumb to the same undetected poisons that he believes hit him. His brothers still wear military uniforms and could be called to combat tomorrow - one a Marine the other in the Army.

PENTAGON: WE'RE CONVINCED OUR METHOD IS ACCURATE

The Pentagon will say only that as of October, 20,000 troops had been evacuated from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for noncombat-related illnesses and injuries and that, on average, about 5,800 troops are on "medical hold" each day because military doctors haven't finished diagnosing or treating them. Only five people have tested positive for depleted uranium from the most recent war - all victims of friendly fire who had depleted uranium shrapnel in their bodies, the Pentagon says.

Getting tests for depleted uranium exposure from the U.S. military and VA might be a waste of time, anyway, say Robinson and experts who have developed those tests for other countries. "Even the test they offer is a less-than-respected test," Robinson says.

Scientists overseas have spent years creating a more accurate method of detecting whether there are even tiny amounts of depleted uranium in the human body.

They say the U.S. government relies on testing procedures and equipment that have a high margin of error and are capable of discerning the presence of depleted uranium only in limited circumstances. They say it's not much of a test if you really want to find radioactive and toxic dust in particles small enough to the inhaled.

The British government officially takes the same stance as the United State on the dangers of depleted uranium, but it's financed a much more exacting test capable of finding out whether someone has even small quantities of depleted uranium in their system. It doesn't settle whether the depleted uranium is harmful, but it can identify the veterans' who definitely have it in their bodies.

That would be an important step forward, several researchers say.

British veterans of the Persian Gulf War began signing up for the tests in late September.

Rohman would like to take it, but the U.S. military says it has no need to use it or even find out how it works.

"We're convinced that our method is sufficiently sensitive and accurate enough," said Lt. Col. Mark Melanson, manager of the health physics program at the U.S. Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine, the Army's public health agency.

'OUR HUMAN RESEARCH ... HAS A LOT OF SEVERE LIMITATIONS'

He says the government labs used to identify soldiers with depleted uranium in their bodies can detect the substance as long as there are at least 3 to 5 nanograms of uranium per liter in a day's worth of urine.

The British test also involves a 24-hour urine sample. But it can accurately detect depleted uranium when only 0.1 nanogram of uranium per liter is present, making it capable of detecting amounts 30 times smaller or more.

The British also say their degree of uncertainty at these lower levels is less than 1 percent, a much smaller margin of error than the U.S. tests.

Melanson and other U.S. officials say anything below 3 nanograms of uranium in such a sample is clearly inconsequential. They cite studies of the known, respected science involving the health effects of uranium, specifically studies by the U.S. Institute of Medicine and the World Health Organization.

But the co-author of the Institute of Medicine study, as well as an epidemiologist who was asked to review it to make sure it was scientifically sound, say that wouldn't be an accurate reading of the work at all.

Establishing a lower limwit for inhalation of depleted uranium hasn't happened, they say, because too little is known about how the substance reacts with tissues in various parts of the body.

"We have no idea," said Carolyn Fulco, the co-author of the Institute of Medicine study.

Beate Ritz, an epidemiologist and expert on cancer at the University of California, Los Angeles, agrees: "Our human research, as valuable as it is, has a lot of severe limitations."

Ritz, one of the scientists and health experts whom the institute asked to review its work to ensure accuracy, says it might take decades of following Gulf War veterans to have even a hazy picture when it comes to cancer.

Fulco and others note that the Institute of Medicine and the World Health Organization said explicitly that the data on depleted uranium's health effects were limited and that more research needed to be done.

Still, Melanson thinks that the 50 years of research considered by the studies is enough to show that low levels of uranium or depleted uranium in a human's blood, lungs and other body tissue isn't a problem.

Most of that research involved uranium millers, miners and processors.

It fed the government health standards that the Pentagon used in the Capstone study to establish that inhaling or breathing the dust from the weapons shouldn't be considered a significant health risk on the battlefield. Alexandra Miller, a radiobiologist at the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute, says using that research to dismiss the possible health effects of depleted uranium weapons is a mistake.

There are many studies of uranium miners' health that indicate problems, she says. In addition, she says, the studies of miners and millers are, in many ways, irrelevant to the experiences of soldiers on the battlefield.

When it comes to depleted uranium, she says, there simply hasn't been enough research on animals to know what happens when rats or humans inhale the dust from these weapons.

The amount of depleted uranium dust that can be inhaled without harm simply isn't known yet, she says.

"We don't really know," she said. "Not even for a rat."

-----

Of Rodents and Radiation - Chapter 2:From the nose to the brain.
Experiments with rats find that inhaling dust from depleted uranium weapons can cause genetic mutations.

dailypress.com
BY BOB EVANS
December 12 2004

http://www.dailypress.com/news/specials/dp-du2,0,6750244,print.story?coll=dp-breaking-news

In a New Mexico laboratory, researchers have been sliding rats into clear Plexiglas tubes with small holes at the end, openings just big enough for the animals' noses to poke through. Once in the tubes, the rats' noses jut into a central space called a plenum. All the air that they breathe comes through that space.

The plenum sits at the center of the tubes, like the hub of a big Plexiglas wheel. When the experiment begins, the air in the plenum is laced with carefully measured, breathable specks of depleted uranium.

Depending on the dose, the rats spend 15 minutes to six hours in the tubes, breathing the uranium-infused air. The researchers carefully have determined the amount of uranium and the length of time to mimic what happens to soldiers on a battlefield.

Afterward, some rats are dissected to find out whether the uranium that they breathed shows up in their brains, lungs, livers, larynxes, tracheas or bronchial lymph nodes. The rest of the rats will meet the same fate a few days, weeks or a year later - to test long-term effects from the same exposure.

The goal is to see whether the tiny pieces of uranium have migrated through their bodies into places that might explain the illnesses suffered by veterans of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute in New Mexico, home of the Plexiglas tubes and the rats, is one of the few places in the world where scientists are able to accurately simulate what happens when impurities in the air are inhaled. Some of the groundbreaking research on the effects of air pollution has been done there, and the U.S. military has turned to this lab since the 1970s to try to determine the health effects of inhaling depleted uranium.

Lovelace's labs typically are used to investigate hazards to the lungs. Government engineers and scientists have known for decades that the tiny bits of depleted uranium created when the weapons are used pose a health hazard in the lungs and kidneys. They've used computers and other methods to try to determine the details.

The Pentagon has spent millions of dollars to prove that there's no significant radiological or toxicological risk from the pieces of depleted uranium on a battlefield that are small enough to be inhaled. Their studies have focused on potential damage to the kidneys and lungs, where decades of science based on studies of uranium miners, millers and processors predict the most significant effects will be shown.

Scientists in New Mexico are looking at those organs, but they have their eye on a different, more important target this time: the brain.

In the controversy over depleted uranium weapons, nearly everyone agrees that soldiers and others in the immediate area of a blast at the time of impact might be endangered. They also agree that people who later crawl around in the dust or on the destroyed vehicles should use protective gear.

The big disagreement involves whether the dust can simply blow around in the desert away from the explosion, be inhaled, and kill people or make them sick. If this type of minimal contact is harmless, it means depleted uranium is an unlikely cause of the debilitating illnesses suffered by many Gulf War veterans.

If inhaling just a little bit is shown to cause dysfunction in the brain, central nervous system or other parts of the body, the U.S. military might be forced to give up using one of its most effective weapons for land warfare.

The Pentagon has dismissed this danger repeatedly and says there's no serious harm from inhaling depleted uranium on the battlefield - not when someone is in a tank struck by one of the weapons and certainly not afterward, from the dusty residue.

A number of scientists say that's a premature conclusion and that important questions need to be answered first.

SIMULATED MARCH THROUGH DESERT YIELDS A SURPRISE

One of those scientists, professor Johnnye L. Lewis of the University of New Mexico's College of Pharmacy, is trying to find out what happens to the brain and other parts of the central nervous system when someone inhales a lot of the dust and what happens when they inhale a little.

Unless there's evidence that depleted uranium is somehow getting into the brain or central nervous system, it's unlikely to be linked to the neurological and physical problems that many Gulf War veterans suffer. Doctors haven't been able to figure out why the veterans have those medical problems, and little is known about the effect that depleted uranium has on the brain.

The Army officially says depleted uranium is entirely safe in these scenarios, but it does want to know more. So it's financing Lewis' work.

Some of the tasks in Lewis' experiment are done with colleagues at Lovelace. But most take place in her lab at the university, a few miles away.

Before exposing the rats to uranium, Lewis and her colleagues spent months analyzing data, reading research reports and talking to Army generals about how troops move around during a war. They had to find other labs, such as Lovelace and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where the different parts of the experiment and analysis could be authoritatively done. The goal was to design experiments that duplicated, as accurately as possible, what real soldiers on a battlefield encountered, Lewis says.

Once the scientists were satisfied, the Lovelace rats went to work.

In the first year, Lewis and her co-workers tested what they called the "tank-impact scenario," which involved exposing several groups of rats to very high doses of uranium (500 milligrams per cubic meter of air) for 15 minutes. That experiment simulated what would happen to someone in an enclosed area, such as a tank, when a depleted uranium weapon struck it.

What came next - detecting the very small quantities of uranium that entered the rats' bodies - takes specialized equipment, Lewis says.

To analyze the rats' brains, for instance, Lewis and her co-workers used a machine to cut the brains into slices thinner than 4/10,000th of an inch.

She also had to find another lab capable of detecting small quantities of depleted uranium in such small samples without destroying them.

Lewis picked Livermore, where a particle accelerator the size of a football field bombards the brain slices with protons. The barrage of protons produces X-ray signals and other readings that allow scientists to determine the presence or absence of uranium and other substances, as well as how much there is in the sample being tested.

When the Livermore scientists did their analysis during the first stage of the experiment, they found no evidence of uranium in the rats' brains, Lewis says. Some of the rats died from kidney damage before they were scheduled to be sacrificed and analyzed, but this was not too surprising. Years of research on uranium miners, millers and processors showed that the kidneys are particularly vulnerable during exposure to uranium dust.

Then the scientists began testing what they call the "march-through scenario," simulating what might happen if soldiers were ordered to walk through an area where tanks or other equipment had been hit with depleted uranium weapons. In this scenario, the rats are exposed to very small quantities of uranium (only 1 milligram per cubic meter of air) for six hours, Lewis says. Nothing remarkable happened.

The next phase involved finding out what happened if the insides of the rats' noses had been irritated by dust, like the small-grained Iraqi desert sand, before the animals are exposed to the uranium.

To do this, the lab used a component of bacteria that produces the same kind of bodily reaction as the powdery sand that blasts at troops in the Iraqi desert. After the irritation, the rats got the low dose of uranium in their air tubes.

This time, the rats had an important story to tell.

"In that case, in a small subset of animals, we did see uranium in the brain," she says.

The depleted uranium was even tracked from one part of the brain to another, linked by a neural pathway. That means it could go deeper in the brain, Lewis says.

The results are preliminary and involved only two of six rats in one group, But Lewis says the implications could be very important as the experiment is repeated and if the same results occur. She says it will be at least a year or more before she can say for sure how significant her findings are.

Lewis expects this phase to produce the best test of what most soldiers experienced in the war.

"If somebody's inhaling dust in the desert, they're likely to get some sort of irritation," she says. Later, when they walk or drive near battle sites, the dust would have been kicked up by others walking or driving ahead of them or by the winds, she says.

EXPERIMENTS COULD EXPLAIN HARM TO NERVOUS SYSTEMS

Scientists generally think that the body has a natural protective barrier called the blood/brain barrier. When impurities, such as toxins, get into the body, they are generally absorbed into the bloodstream. Blood cells, enzymes and other factors then break down those toxins before they get to the brain, protecting it from harm.

It appears that the uranium found in those two rat brains bypassed that process and is the result of direct neural transfer, Lewis says. That means the uranium probably went directly from nerve endings in the nose to the olfactory tissue in the brain, bypassing cleansing agents in the blood.

"I feel some confidence that this is a plausible pathway," Lewis says. If so, toxic aspects of inhaled uranium might also be carried directly from nerves in the nose to other parts of the brain to do damage elsewhere - and might explain many of the problems that Gulf War veterans are having, she says.

Those organs and parts haven't been looked at yet, she says.

If the migration of uranium to the brain can be repeated with more rats, the next step is to see how far into the brain the uranium can go, whether it reaches the spinal cord and central nervous system, and what effect it has, Lewis says. The big question is whether depleted uranium can be linked to the neurological problems experienced by Gulf War veterans.

Mohamed B. Abou-Donia and other Duke University researchers tested that possibility with rats and found evidence that the answer is yes. Because of tight restrictions placed on depleted uranium (the military and Department of Energy strictly regulate its ownership and use), they used a chemical compound very similar to the toxicity and radiological properties of what's used in military weapons. The substitute, uranyl acetate, is frequently used by military and other government researchers as a substitute for depleted uranium in experiments.

Abou-Donia and the scientists at Duke injected rats with various concentrations of the compound and found that high doses killed the rodents. Low doses significantly affected their ability to perform several sensory and motor-skills tests, such as gripping and walking on a beam. When they examined those animals' brains, they found changes in chemicals that affect how well the brain could function.

"The present results suggest that low-dose multiple exposure with uranyl acetate causes long-term neurobehavioral deficits after the initial exposure has ceased," the Duke scientists wrote in the journal Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior in 2002. They said the work showed that the weapons' use could affect the central nervous system, as well as the peripheral or neuromuscular system of the body, and that more research was needed.

SCANS OF THE BRAIN SHOW REDUCED CHEMICAL LEVELS

Rats and mice can tell us much about how chemicals will affect the human body. But sometimes, exposures that cause damage to the little animals do nothing to humans.

Do the illnesses suffered by Gulf War vets have a link to the brain?

A number of researchers have used brain-scanning equipment to study that question and say the answer is yes.

Using the scanners to look at the brains of sick Gulf War veterans, they've consistently found evidence of reduced levels of chemicals required for proper brain functions.

In the veterans, the scans zeroed in on parts of the brain thought related to chronic fatigue syndrome and the veterans' neurological problems.

Researchers say it's unlikely that these brain abnormalities existed before the war because the soldiers' behavior, physically and mentally, would have been noticeably impaired and prevented deployment. But the tests can't confirm what caused the problems or exactly when they began.

The suspects for the cause include depleted uranium dust, the use of heavy-duty bug spray, experimental anti-chemical-warfare medicine, vaccinations for diseases peculiar to the Persian Gulf region, genetics and exposures to toxins after the war. Some of those are known to affect the brain; others are being evaluated.

So far, the uranium in Lewis' experiments has shown up only in the olfactory bulbs of the rats' brains, an area where damage isn't likely to cause the symptoms that Gulf War vets suffer.

The smaller particles might be more dangerous, she says, because they're more likely to end up in the nose and therefore are available for transport into the brain. These smaller, lighter particles are also the ones more likely to be in the air - at nose level - hours, days or months after use of depleted uranium weapons, kicked up by vehicles, boots or winds.

Lewis suspects that in subsequent experiments, with longer exposures or higher doses, there will be evidence of depleted uranium migrating deeper and deeper into the brain, past the olfactory bulb and into places that might be linked to the debilitation that some of the veterans have experienced.

It's possible some people, and some rats, are more capable of withstanding the onslaught of the dust or uranium, perhaps because of stress, genetics or a combination of factors, she says. That would explain why some rats' brains succumbed to the one-two punch of dust and uranium and others didn't. It might also explain why some soldiers have come down with these symptoms, while others in their unit didn't.

SUSPECTED PREDICTOR OF CANCER FOUND IN VETS' BLOOD

Lewis says she hasn't completed the part of her research that involves looking at whether the inhaled uranium changes the neurochemicals in the brain - the chemicals that make the brain function well or poorly. That would help show whether inhaled uranium affected the neurological health of veterans exposed to it.

Her research follows work by other scientists who found that tiny pellets of depleted uranium implanted in the bodies of rats have resulted in collections of uranium in the brains, bones, kidneys, testicles and lymph nodes.

Terry C. Pellmar, a researcher at the Armed Forces Radiobiological Research Institute, found evidence of changes in the brain as a result of those depleted uranium implants.

Some of the rats initially exhibited loss of mental function, but the effects weren't substantial or long-term, she says. Tests given to Gulf War vets with shrapnel in their bodies have shown no demonstrable evidence of impairment in their mental capacities either, she says. Memory loss, confusion and other mental impairments are among the symptoms that other veterans of the war complain of.

The Pentagon and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs have been following several dozen Gulf War veterans who have small pieces of depleted uranium shrapnel in their bodies, testing them periodically for various health problems and indicators of carcinogenic and genetic abnormalities. A few soldiers thought to have inhaled depleted uranium dust are also in the study.

The most recent installment of this continuing study said no significant harm to the soldiers had been found, other than the obvious wounds of war that they'd suffered. The Pentagon often points to this research when asked about the health effects of the weapons, noting that these veterans likely have larger quantities of depleted uranium in their bodies than anyone who inhaled some dust on a battlefield.

What Pentagon officials don't mention is what some researchers in the program think is a potentially important finding.

Richard J. Albertini of the University of Vermont's Vermont Cancer Center is one of several co-authors of the shrapnel study. His part of the work included examining cells taken from the veterans to look for genetic changes that might prove harmful.

Albertini's specialty involves research into the hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyl transferase, or HPRT, gene, one of the 30,000 genes that every human being has in their cells.

Albertini is particularly interested in HPRT genes in T-lymphocytes - white blood cells important to the body's ability to ward off diseases, including cancers.

Albertini said blood samples from three of the 39 veterans in the most recently published shrapnel study showed an increased frequency of mutations of the HPRT gene, compared with earlier samples. The three-out-of-39 ratio is a statistically significant number, the study says.

Many scientists think that increased frequency of mutation in HPRT genes is a predictor of cancer. That's why HPRT was included in the study.

Albertini says the link between HPRT mutations and cancer hasn't been proven. A much larger study than those available to date would be needed to know for sure. Then would come research to determine what rate of increase might be indicative of a greater risk of cancer.

Right now, he says, "it's a canary in a coal mine. Just because the canary dies does not mean the miner is going to die, but it's a warning."

Cancer isn't one of the documented problems experienced by Gulf War veterans, Albertini says. Experts say it's too early to tell whether increased rates of cancer will be part of the problems those veterans suffer, though some forms might become evident now.

RATS THAT INHALED PARTICLES, DEVELOPED MUTATIONS

At this point, what's important about the mutation-rate increase is that it might indicate the possibility that veterans exposed to depleted uranium face increased risk of cancer in the future, Albertini says.

The increased mutations in the HPRT gene among veterans spurred another researcher in New Mexico, Vernon Walker, to hook up more rats to tubes to breathe in uranium.

"Lo and behold, he did get an increase in the frequency" of mutations of the HPRT genes in the rats, Albertini says. "So we think this sort of confirmed our hypothesis."

That hypothesis says "the important exposures are from inhalation, where all blood cells can be exposed, not from the shrapnel in a few where the exposure is local," Albertini adds.

All blood flows through the lungs and lymph nodes as part of the process of carrying oxygen to all parts of the body, while only a small fraction of someone's blood would come close enough to the tiny pieces of embedded shrapnel in veterans, Albertini says.

He says it makes sense that even a tiny piece of radioactive dust in someone's lung would have the potential to alter the genetics of more blood cells than shrapnel or a pellet.

That's why he thinks the potential for long-term harm from inhaled uranium dust is greater than that from shrapnel, especially given the small pieces the military leaves in the body when its doctors decide that more damage would result from surgery.

Albertini says he'd like to test that theory further, but so far, the military hasn't made any samples available from troops with more recent exposures.

Obtaining newer samples is crucial for determining whether there's a link between depleted uranium weapons and the mutations and, ultimately, cancer, Albertini says. The rate of mutations in HPRT genes returns to normal after a period of time, he says, so the veterans of the 1991 war won't exhibit this warning sign forever.

In the most recent examination of the veterans with shrapnel, he says, only two people exhibited the increased mutations seen in the earlier study.

That doesn't mean the other soldiers aren't at a higher risk of getting cancer, he says. The HPRT gene mutations are a marker that indicates that the radiation is having an effect on the blood. But they aren't the mutations suspected of causing cancer themselves. Those mutations are likely continuing, if the theory is correct, and could cause the chain reaction of effects that result in cancer, Albertini says.

Samples from troops exposed to depleted uranium dust in Operation Iraqi Freedom haven't been made available yet, but Albertini says further studies of how HPRT genes react in relation to depleted uranium are being planned. The object is to determine whether the relatively weak alpha radiation from small pieces of inhaled depleted uranium cause the type of mutations in the HPRT genes that were seen in the veterans, Albertini says.

Other researchers have seen similar genetic effects from exposure to depleted uranium. A German study found that 16 British soldiers who reported inhaling depleted uranium during their wartime service had five times the frequency of chromosomal aberrations as a group of 40 people who hadn't been exposed to the dust. The aberrations were of the type known to be indicative of radiation that alters the atomic structure of matter, the study said. None of the British veterans had depleted uranium shrapnel wounds.

Whether those veterans actually inhaled depleted uranium - and how much of it is left in their bodies all these years later - is unknown, the German scientists wrote.

At the time of their research, there was no reliable way to measure whether someone had inhaled very small amounts.

The German researchers noted that studies had found the type of uranium that results in the black dust from depleted uranium weapons remains in rat lungs longer than other forms of uranium. The high, intense heat that's part of forming the depleted uranium dust makes the particles not as prone to be dissolved by the blood and other fluids. On one of the few occasions when scientists have been able to perform an autopsy on a Gulf War veteran thought to have inhaled the black dust, lymph nodes related to the lungs showed unexpectedly high concentrations of particles from the decay of uranium, the German study says.

RESEARCH INDICATES A LONG LIFE IN THE LUNGS

Depleted uranium dust created after the weapons' use and small enough to inhale lasts for years in simulated lung fluid, according to a Pentagon study released this fall. The study says the smaller pieces tended to take longer to dissolve half their mass.

That means those bits, though small, are in contact with living tissue for a long time.

Researchers concerned with the safety of the weapons say that could prove important, as the conventional wisdom in science says that chemical toxicity, not radioactivity, is the likely source of any possible ills from inhaled depleted uranium.

Like other heavy metals (such as mercury, zinc and lead), uranium is a toxic chemical. Like those other metals, it's also a naturally occurring element. Nature puts a certain level of those metals into the food chain, the air we breathe and the water we drink. Mankind and modern life has added more, via air pollution and working with what's found in nature to create plumbing, machines, weapons and other tools.

As a result, our bodies and their waste products, including urine, contain some degree of all these metals.

How much is a safe level and how much is too much is the question, whether it be figuring out safe levels of mercury in fish or how much black depleted uranium dust a soldier can inhale without incident.

The toxic effects of these metals typically act like poisons carried through the bloodstream. They collect in parts of organs - often the kidneys or liver - and can destroy them. Uranium miners, millers and processors exposed to too much uranium dust typically have kidney damage; little tubes in the organs break down and malfunction.

Depleted uranium's radiological properties act differently. Until very recently, scientists thought that the effects of radioactivity occurred in very predictable paths and patterns, depending on the material, how big it was and whether it was emitting alpha, gamma or X-rays.

Like all uranium, depleted uranium emits mostly alpha radiation. Typically, alpha radiation isn't considered very dangerous because its power doesn't go very far and is easily blocked by a sheet of paper, clothing, the top layers of skin and other mundane items.

But once an alpha radiation source gets in the body, it's another story. Then there's no shield to protect the cells and tissue. The radius of alpha radiation is relatively short, but it's long-lasting and therefore powerful.

STUDY ANSWERS ALL QUESTIONS, PENTAGON SAYS

Pentagon and other government officials say risk from that radiation is negligible because the soldiers, even those caught in a tank hit with the weapons, wouldn't inhale enough depleted uranium dust to create a problem.

The military spent five years and $6 million to gather data on what actually happens when tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles are hit with depleted uranium. It released the data and its findings this fall in what it called the Capstone Study - a title designed to tell people that their research was the final word on the subject.

Real vehicles and vehicle parts were hit with depleted uranium weapons in a large building in Aberdeen, Md. Sophisticated machines capable of gathering and counting millions of tiny pieces of dust recorded the data. Researchers with respirators, wearing devices that could also collect the depleted uranium and other dust particles in the air, wiped the vehicles down afterward and examined the insides.

It was the most complete and sophisticated examination of what happens when depleted uranium weapons strike a vehicle, Lt. Col. Mark Melanson says. He manages health physics programs at the Army's public health agency, which commissioned the study.

Using the established government standards for acceptable levels of uranium inhalation and ingestion, the researchers in Capstone found that even under the worst circumstances, people in a tank or Bradley Fighting Vehicle hit by a depleted uranium weapon would incur no significant health risk.

They wouldn't inhale enough for there to be a toxicological danger to their kidneys or other organs, the study says. And the tiny bits that remained in the soldiers' lungs, even the ones that stayed there for years and years, would not be of sufficient quantity to pose a radiological hazard anywhere near as great as smoking cigarettes, it says.

Possible radiological problems from the weapons have been dismissed by many in the military for years.

"The issue is chemical, not radiologic, risk," says Melissa A. McDiarmid of the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the VA hospital in Baltimore. McDiarmid directs the government's monitoring of Gulf War veterans with shrapnel in their bodies and has participated in other government-financed research.

McDiarmid says the tiny amount of black depleted uranium dust that a soldier could inhale several hundred feet away from an explosion is inconsequential. Even if particles are inhaled in that scenario, they wouldn't constitute a big enough dose of radiation or toxic chemical to change lives, she says. Fifty years of research based on the experiences of workers in the uranium mining, milling and processing industries prove that scientists have good models to use to compute what is - and isn't - a harmful dose of inhaled uranium, whether it's depleted or not, she says.

CHALLENGING THE MODEL ABOUT HOW RADIATION HARMS

The government standards used in the Capstone Study are based on the research on those occupations and its hazards. Scientists then develop a model of what's safe and unsafe, using computers and theories. Many well-respected scientists say the models are fine but aren't a substitute for testing the models' assumptions out on living creatures or cells. Tests on animals often prove that the models are wrong, they say.

Alexandra Miller is a scientist at the Armed Forces Radiobiological Research Institute. Miller has spent much of the past 10 years testing whether very small particles of alpha radiation can have lasting and catastrophic effects on cells. She and others around the world are challenging the conventional wisdom that it takes large doses of radiation - either in a single blast or prolonged exposure - to make someone sick or die.

The research on uranium industry workers used to support the argument that depleted uranium dust in battlefield situations isn't a significant hazard is limited, Miller and these scientists say. There are studies that contradict each other, that are poorly done and don't really match up with what troops in the 1991 war experienced, they say.

Their point isn't that the weapons are more dangerous than the military says. They simply say that now is too early to reach a conclusion about safety and that more work needs to be done.

In one recent experiment, Miller exposed human bone cells to alpha particle radiation from depleted uranium and other forms of uranium. Scientists have known for years that when uranium or depleted uranium gets in the body, more of it tends to migrate to the kidneys and bone than any other parts.

Miller says her experiments with the bone cells had two significant findings.

First, she found that the cells went through transformation from normal cells to cancer cells. When those cells were then injected into animals, tumors developed. A genetically similar group of animals used for comparison didn't develop those tumors, she says.

Although the precise cause of cancers isn't known yet, scientists think that these sorts of transformations get the carcinogenic ball rolling, Miller says. The results of that experiment weren't too surprising, she says, though they were important.

The surprise came when she started counting how many cells turned to cancer cells and noticed how far away they were from the source of the radiation.

"BYSTANDER EFFECT" BRINGS UNEXPECTED DAMAGE TO CELLS

Scientists have been working with uranium long enough to be able to say with certainty how much alpha radiation a given piece of uranium or depleted uranium holds. Extremely sensitive devices can measure it.

Scientists therefore think that they can predict in advance how far away the radiation effects can be felt.

But when Miller applied those rules of science to the cells in her laboratory, the rules didn't work. Those same rules underlie the Pentagon's Capstone Study.

"We actually got more damage to chromosomes than we expected, based on the number of alpha particles," she says. "That was the first surprise to me, as a scientist."

Other scientists and other experiments have made similar discoveries. Now they're trying to figure out what it means and why it happens.

Miller says the transformations might result from uranium's toxicity, not its radioactivity. But she suspects that it's a combination of radiation and toxicological effects.

The radiation starts the damage, and the toxicological properties carry it further, she theorizes. The radiation causes another change, and the process is repeated, over and over, until many more cells are altered.

Another possible explanation is that the cells damaged by the initial radiation excrete a hormone or other chemical that spreads to a nearby cell and damages it, Miller says. The damage gets repeated, over and over.

No one is sure of the cause, but scientists do have a name for it: the "bystander effect." That simply means cells, chromosomes and genes that are nearby - but not in the path of actual radiation - are affected.

The effect seems to be more pronounced with alpha radiation, as opposed to the other varieties, Miller says.

"It's actually changed radiobiology dogma in the past four to five years," providing a new look at a hundred years of science, she says.

Whether it will also change what science considers a healthy or unhealthy dose of radiation remains to be seen.

So far, the government agencies and industrial groups that set what are deemed to be safe levels of exposure haven't revamped their standards in light of the bystander effect, Miller says.

Now is probably too early for that, she says, but by the same token, it's too early to say we know enough about depleted uranium to decide what's safe.

When Miller published her first paper on how uranium might damage cells, it was 1998.

She says only two other scientists had published experiments on the topic before that. More work needs to be done, she says. Similarly, Miller says, more work needs to be done on inhalation of depleted uranium, as opposed to ingestion.

When uranium is swallowed, most of it passes immediately through the digestive system and is eliminated in body waste. But when a particle small enough to be inhaled directly lands on lung tissue - with no clothing, paper or outer layers of skin to block the path of the alpha radiation - what happens to that lung tissue?

"We simply don't know," she says. "The body of data out there on uranium is limited."

McDiarmid thinks that we do know enough to reach the conclusion that inhaled depleted uranium isn't a significant radiological danger. And she thinks that the failure to acknowledge this might be hurting ill veterans from the Persian Gulf War.

"What we have here is a witch hunt for an explanation," she says, fed by the public's fear of radiation and fanned by opponents of the weapon and ignorance of the actual science.

"The thing I'm worried about with everybody chasing depleted uranium is that we're missing the boat," she insists.

With so much attention on depleted uranium, other possible causes for the veterans' illnesses go unexplored and the veterans aren't helped.

Her most recent research paper about the veterans with shrapnel in their bodies also points to another risk of pursuing this line of inquiry into depleted uranium, known by scientists and others as "DU."

"Questions regarding the long-term health consequences of these exposures have fueled considerable debate regarding continued use of DU in combat," it says.

If the weapons are proven to create toxic dust that swirls around the desert and contaminates the air in virtual perpetuity, the United States, Great Britain and their allies might be forced to give the weapons up. They might also be forced to spend billions of dollars cleaning the dust up and taking it out of the desert.

Lurking in the background of this scenario is the argument by some antinuclear activists, Iraqi physicians - and the former régime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein - that the black dust left behind from the Persian Gulf War caused deformities, cancers and death for thousands of Iraqi children since 1991.

So far, those statements have been buried behind the curtain of Saddam's tyranny, beyond verification by credible groups. Now that Iraq is open to outsiders and run by a friendly interim government, credible medical and scientific experts have started work to figure out whether these stories are propaganda - or the worst sort of bad news.

The United Nations and other organizations recently began financing studies to determine whether the depleted uranium left behind in Iraq and Kuwait in the two wars are linked to health problems in the two countries.

The head of the U.N. effort - Pekka Haavisto, a former Finnish minister of the environment - said this fall that the British government gave his workers information on places where it used depleted uranium weapons but that the U.S. government hadn't.

U.S. military munitions experts say losing depleted uranium from this country's arsenal would be a disaster - and might cost more soldiers' lives in combat than scrapping the weapons might save.

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How Dangerous Is Depleted Uranium?

Some Say Radioactive Arms Cause Gulf War Syndrome

Hearst Newspapers
December 10, 2004

http://www.thechamplainchannel.com/helenthomas/3989401/detail.html

The Pentagon claims that American forces and Iraqis are not at risk from contact with depleted uranium, which is used in armor-piercing munitions and protective tank plating.

That's baloney to some scientists who insist the widespread use of depleted uranium during the American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq poses a grave danger.

Despite attempts to reassure the public, the Pentagon remains on the defensive.

Depleted uranium, or DU, is a radioactive by-product from the industrial process used to enrich uranium. It is the leftover uranium-238 that results when scientists seek to transform naturally occurring uranium into uranium-235, which is used to produce nuclear energy.

The Army values munitions manufactured from depleted uranium because, when fused with metal alloys, they are considered the most effective warhead for penetrating enemy tanks. Also, because depleted uranium is twice as dense as lead, the Army uses DU as armor plating.

Once a depleted-uranium round strikes its target, the projectile begins to burn on impact, creating tiny particles of radioactive U-238. Winds can transport this radioactive dust many miles, potentially contaminating the air that innocent humans breathe.

This inhalation may cause lung cancer, kidney damage, cancers of bones and skin, as well as birth defects and chemical poisoning.

The 1991 Persian Gulf War was the first conflict to see the widespread use of depleted uranium, both in armor-piercing projectiles and in the protective armor of the new generation of Abrams tanks.

Studies by the Pentagon and the National Academy of Sciences established no linkage between DU and the "Gulf War Syndrome" ailments after the first Gulf War.

Some 70 people are still under study for the effects of contact with DU, with particular emphasis on what happens when people breathe the air where DU projectiles have vaporized.

Dr. Helen Caldicott has dedicated her life to warning about the hazards of nuclear war and the effects of DU.

Born in Melbourne, Australia, she first became interested in nuclear hazards when she saw the movie "On the Beach" at the age of 15. The film deals with a nuclear accident that leads to a global nuclear war.

Growing up, she led a movement in Australia against the French atmospheric nuclear tests in the Pacific and tried to win a ban on Australian uranium mining.

She became a medical doctor and later founded Physicians for Social Responsibility, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. She also has been a nominee for the same prize. She is a strong, vocal antiwar activist.

In her book, "The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush's Military-Industrial Complex," Caldicott claims that DU qualifies as a nuclear weapon because of its low-level radioactivity. She said that huge quantities of DU were created during the Cold War when the United States made thousands of nuclear weapons.

"Weapon researchers and developers have now succeeded in putting this toxic 'nuclear waste' to use through the creation of depleted uranium bullets and shells," she added. The weapons can cause enormous damage in Iraq, she said. Depleted uranium particles are soluble in water and the waters around the battlefields, as in Iraq and Kuwait, are at risk of radioactive pollution, Caldicott said.

She warned that DU maintains radioactivity for billions of years and can concentrate in the food chain, with children and babies more vulnerable to the carcinogenic effects of ingested radiation than adults.

Medical reports from Iraq indicate that childhood malignancies are seven times more frequent than they were before the first Gulf War.

The complaints of the veterans of the first Gulf War are "surprisingly similar in pattern to the various pathologies induced by uranium exposure as described by the U.S. military," Caldicott said.

Some 50,000 to 80,000 veterans were afflicted with Gulf War Syndrome during that war, and there has been no definitive answer -- but a lot of dispute -- as to the cause.

The military use of depleted uranium is still being questioned. But one thing is certain: War is dangerous to your health.

(Helen Thomas can be reached at the e-mail address hthomas@hearstdc.com).

Discuss Helen Thomas' Opinion

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Controlled Press Ignores Criminal Obliteration of Fallujah

American Free Press
Christopher Bollyn
12/12/2004

URL : http://www.anti-imperialism.net/lai/texte.phtml?section=CE&object_id=23321

Medias and disinformation The controlled press has scrupulously avoided discussing the devastation and prima facie evidence of war crimes committed during the U.S. siege and assault of Fallujah.

As Americans prepared for Thanksgiving, an estimated 100,000 residents of the besieged Iraqi city of Fallujah, trapped in their homes, struggled to survive without fresh food, water or electricity, reportedly cut off by U.S. forces on November 8.

Meanwhile, on the streets of Fallujah, a city of more than 350,000, dogs gnawed on bloated and rotting corpses that remained unburied for weeks.

Thousands of families in Fallujah were reported to be in a critical humanitarian situation after U.S. forces prevented the delivery of relief supplies. An Iraq Red Crescent Society (IRCS) humanitarian aid convoy, reportedly blocked by U.S. troops for more than two weeks, was allowed to deliver aid to residents in the heart of the city on November 25.

On Thanksgiving, U.S. forces permitted the IRCS convoy carrying thousands of food parcels, blankets, tents and medical supplies to enter the city and allowed one of the clinics to be converted into a temporary hospital to treat the injured. Rana Sidani of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva, Switzerland however, told American Free Press on Nov. 30 that "many civilians" were still prevented from receiving aid or medical care.

At the beginning of the U.S. operation in Fallujah on Nov. 5, a hospital in the central Nazzal district of Fallujah was "reduced to rubble" as a result of U.S. air and artillery bombardment. "Only its façade, with a sign reading Nazzal Emergency Hospital, remained intact," Reuters reported.

"A nearby compound used by the main Falluja Hospital to store medical supplies was also destroyed," witnesses told Reuters. Fallujah's main hospital was occupied by U.S. forces when the ground offensive began. These actions are apparent violations of international humanitarian law.

"Bodies can be seen everywhere and people were crying when receiving the food parcels," Muhammad al-Nuri, a spokesman for the IRCS in Baghdad, said. "It is very sad. It is a human disaster."

Al-Nuri said that it is difficult to move in the city due to the large number of dead bodies in the streets. The ICRS estimates there are more than 6,000 dead in Fallujah, al-Nuri said.

AFP asked Major Jay Antonelli at the Coalition Press Information Center (CPIC) in Baghdad if the ICRS estimate of 6,000 dead in Fallujah was credible. "We do not keep a count of dead Iraqis," Antonelli said. Asked the same question, the ICRC's Sidani said, "We don't know."

Antonelli said, "U.S. forces never blocked aid convoys from reaching the wounded. We only recommended to the aid convoys that they should not enter the city because the MNF [Multi-National Forces] could not guarantee their security or safety."

"The ICRC is very worried about the humanitarian situation in Falluja," Sidani said. Asked what the ICRC was doing to alleviate the suffering in Fallujah, Sidani said: "We are reminding the parties of their responsibilities under international humanitarian law."

It should be noted that the U.S.A. and Britain, the belligerent occupying powers in Iraq, are the two largest contributors to the ICRC, providing more than 42 percent of its budget for field operations.

A second convoy from Baghdad, headed by Dr. Said Ismael Haki, the IRCS president, delivered aid to Fallujah on Nov. 26. "There are no houses left in Fallujah, only destroyed places." Haki said. "I really don't know how the people will return to the city. No one will find their homes."

As U.S. troops in Fallujah engaged in what has been described as the most intense urban combat since Vietnam, the controlled press scrupulously avoided discussion or footage of the devastation of the rebellious Sunni city. For example, during the second week of the attack, rather than discuss the widespread devastation of Fallujah, U.S. television news programs focused largely on a brawl between basketball players and fans in Detroit.

Lt. Col. Brandl, commander of the 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, was filmed giving a "pep talk" to his marines: "The enemy has got a face – he's called Satan," Brandl said. "He's in Fallujah, and we're going to destroy him."

At least 136 U.S. soldiers were killed during November in Iraq, and more than 800 were wounded, most of them in Fallujah, making it the most costly month, and operation, in terms of U.S. lives lost since the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003.

FOR WHAT CAUSE?

Michael Ware, Baghdad bureau chief for Time magazine, who has been in Fallujah during the fighting, said U.S. actions in Fallujah are "creating the nightmare that we are seeking to prevent."

"I stood there as I saw American boys die," Ware told Chris Matthews of MSNBC on Nov. 24, "I mean, a man shot at close range, blown apart by a rocket propelled grenade. He dies there in front of you and I can't help but think why? For what cause?

"I see us creating the very thing that the president said we went there to prevent," Ware said, "…subsequent to this invasion and the occupation and the guerrilla war that is currently underway, we are the midwives of the next generation of al Qaida and Islamic terrorist."

Ware, who has interviewed senior insurgent leaders, said they study the writings of the Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap, Che Guevara, and Mao Zedong. "They're bringing it straight from the Vietnam, and the broader insurgency playbook," Ware said.

"The name of the game is deny the population to the insurgents," Ware said. "That's what we're trying to do, win hearts and minds. But we're not winning them."

The U.S. struggle to win Iraqi hearts and minds suffered a further set back when NBC TV broadcast footage of a U.S. marine executing a wounded and unarmed Iraqi in a Fallujah mosque. The much-publicized shooting, apparently part of a massacre of a group of wounded resistance fighters, "was a rare crack in the façade that Washington, with the complicity of most of the corporate media, has tried to present to the world of its brutal assault on the rebel Iraqi city," Rohan Pearce wrote in The Greenleft Weekly Australia on Nov. 24.

The New York Times has reported actions taken by U.S. forces in Fallujah, which appear to be prima facie evidence of war crimes, without mentioning that the actions constitute clear violations of the Laws of Land War found in the U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10.

For example, a Nov. 20 Times article by Edward Wong, with two correspondents in Fallujah, reports that U.S. marines had transformed a mosque into a fortress with snipers and machine gunners perched on the roof.

Then, using the passive form, Wong goes on to say that "no neutral group has been able to enter the city," without mentioning that U.S. forces blocked humanitarian aid convoys. Likewise, Wong wrote, "Electricity and water had been cut off."

The Times, whose motto is "All the news that's fit to print," apparently didn't think that it's readers needed to know the U.S. forces had cut off the water and power to a city of 340,000 people.

Asked if U.S. forces had cut power and water to Fallujah, Maj. Jay Antonelli of CPIC wrote: "MNF did, with approval of the Interim Iraqi Government, cut off electricity to the city of Fallujah as Operation Al-Fajr began. Water was not cut off intentionally, however the water system did sustain some kinetic damage during strikes."

American Free Press asked the Pentagon's Lt. Col. Joe Yoswa if it is true that U.S. forces were using mosques as fortresses. "It's not possible," Yoswa said. "Under no circumstances. We would not set up snipers in a mosque in an offensive position."

CPIC's Antonelli said: "MNF would not use a mosque as a 'fortress.' MNF and Iraqi security forces would only fire from a mosque if they were being fired upon and were firing back in self-defense."

Abu Sabah, a refugee from Fallujah, reported seeing phosphorus bombs: "They used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud. Then small pieces fell from the air with long tails of smoke trailing behind them. These exploded on the ground with large fires that burnt for half and hour," Abu Sabah said. "When anyone touched these fires their bodies burnt for hours."

Eyewitnesses from Fallujah also reported seeing "melted" bodies.

"THROW-AWAY SOLDIERS"

Having seen what appeared to be a depleted uranium (DU) missile fired at a building in Fallujah on CNN during the first week of the fighting, AFP asked the Pentagon if DU weapons are being used in Fallujah. "Yes," Yoswa said, "DU is a standard round on the M-1 Abrams tank."

Because U.S. marines in Fallujah are very close to the poison gas produced by exploded DU shells, AFP asked Yoswa if anything was being done to protect the troops from DU poisoning. Yoswa seemed unaware of the dangers posed by the use of DU.

Marion Fulk, a retired nuclear scientist from Livermore National Lab told AFP that U.S. troops in DU contaminated battlefields are considered "throw-away soldiers." The Marines exposed to DU in Fallujah, and elsewhere, face greatly increased risks of cancer, deformed children, and other health problems in the future.

OBLITERATION OF FALLUJAH

The "obliteration of Fallujah" is a serious war crime, according to Francis A. Boyle, a professor of international law at the University of Illinois. "The obliteration of Fallujah continues apace," Boyle wrote in his Nov. 15 article, A War Crime in Real Time: Obliterating Fallujah. "Article 6(b) of the 1945 Nuremberg Charter defines a Nuremberg War Crime in relevant part as the 'wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages.' According to this definitive definition, the Bush administration's destruction of Fallujah constitutes a war crime for which Nazis were tried and executed." 

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Throw Away Soldiers & Disposable Civilians

Vive le Canada
December 12 2004

http://www.vivelecanada.ca/article.php/2004121214584783

World Tribunal for Iraq

The records have to be kept and, by definition, the perpetrators, far from keeping records, try to destroy them. They are killers of the innocent and of memory. The records are required to inspire still further the mounting opposition to the new global tyranny.

The new tyrants, incomparably over-armed, can win every war - both military and economic. Yet they are losing the war (this is how they call it) of communication. They are not winning the support of world public opinion . More and more people are saying NO.

Finally this will be the tyranny's undoing. But after how many more tragedies, invasions and collateral disasters? After how much more of the new poverty the tyranny engenders? Hence the urgency of keeping records, of remembering, of assembling the evidence, so that the accusations become unforgettable, and proverbial on every continent.

More and more people are going to say NO, for this is the precondition today for saying YES to all we are determined to save and everything we love. John Berger, 18.06.2003, Paris - Mieussy World Tribunal

Premeditated Death and Destruction Unleashed Against a Sovereign Nation and People by Niloufer Bhagwat

Opening statement before the Iraq tribunal hearings at Tokyo, 11 Dec 2004 Honorable Judges , Prosecutors , Amici Curiae , witnesses of the satanic death and destruction of the people of Iraq , of homes and livelihood , of hospitals , schools and places of worship; concerned citizens of Japan .

We live in strange times. For even as a war rages fiercely in Iraq which in epic terms can be compared to a "Mahabharat" , a fierce war between the forces of right and wrong , justice and injustice , occupation and national liberation ; we resume this trial in the dark shadows of an "Apocalypse" which is the continuing military occupation and the reduction of the entire population of Iraq into the inmates of a vast concentration camp unmonitored even by the Red Cross and other UN and other International humanitarian organizations. Unprecedented in the annals of legal history, evidence is being recorded in this trial even as crimes continue to be committed with impunity, bringing home to us the reality of human existence, that words are never enough to defeat a brutal tyranny and even those of us who use words as tools are speechless in the face of the deliberate and premeditated death and destruction unleashed against a sovereign nation and people ,a member state of the United Nations waged solely to capture its oil resources and with that objective to subjugate and eliminate its population through one strategy or another.

Millions of people in the world including in the United States , even before the aggression and military occupation commenced , much before we commenced our slow and painstaking examination of evidence and precedents , sensing imminent and unprecedented danger to the peoples of the entire world including to soldiers recruited to defend Republics and parliamentary democracies proceeded to pronounce their verdict against the doctrine of "continuous war " against one nation or another ;against the conversion of domestic economies into "war economies" even as thousands and thereafter millions were rendered unemployed .The people across continents opposed the policy of "blood for oil" and declared their rejection of this strategy of pre-emptive war for the control of resources of other societies and nations .

The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War had estimated before the military onslaught that a fresh attack against Iraq would result in the deaths of anywhere between 48,000 to 260,000 Iraqi citizens and that post-war effects could take the lives of an additional 200,000 Iraqis excluding those killed in the 1991 attack on Iraq and those dead because of illegal sanctions imposed on the civilian population of Iraq by the Security Council and issue which I had dealt with in detail at Kyoto, quoting extensively from the statements of Mr. Dennis Halliday a former International Civil Servant of rare integrity who had resigned on the issues of sanctions claiming that it amounted to an illegal declaration of war on the civilian population.

Now in the 19 month of the occupation by the military forces mainly drawn from the United States and UK along with other smaller contingents all members of the coalition of the aggressors ; Lancet Online Medical Journal based in the UK has published a study by American health experts and researchers at the John Hopkins School of Public Health, Columbia University and al Mustansiriya University Baghdad on the deaths of Iraqi civilians under the military occupation. The study confirms that : " Violent deaths were widespread….and were mainly attributed to coalition forces. Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children…"

The report went on to say that: "Making conservative assumptions , we think that about 100,000 excess deaths , or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes of coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths."

Les Roberts and Gilbert Burnham who collaborated on the research published informed the media that they had evidence of the use of air power in populated urban areas. Richard Horton editor of the Lancet in an editorial emphasized that the "findings also raise questions for those far removed from Iraq – in the governments of the countries responsible for launching a pre –emptive war". The mounting evidence of the human catastrophe in Iraq not seen since the days of the Second World War prima facie indicates that the death toll may be more but not less than 100,000 and even the Lancet report however sincere has underestimated the death toll from all facets of the Occupation.

In assessing the extent of Genocide it is necessary to focus on the destruction and attack on hospitals and health clinics to deny medical relief to those who could be saved if the Iraqi health service was not destroyed . This strategy was visible in the policy of organized looting and destruction of Iraqi hospitals in the weeks and months after the attack .The deliberate bombing of water pipes, the cutting off of water supplies to cities and town under siege by US, UK and other forces , destruction of sewage pipes and sanitary facilities , of electricity and heating have condemned millions in Iraq to consume contaminated water and food ,as a consequence the old, the feeble, and the children have been dying of diarrhea and related diseases caused by contamination of food and water with lack of medicines and health care leading to an increase in mortality. This is an indicator that apart from death by violence the Occupation has condemned people to death from malnutrition and lack of food , and water and food borne diseases with inadequate health care directly caused by the Occupation .

The intrepid reporter Dahr Jamail reporting for a weekly in Alaska has disclosed that from what he had seen in six months in Iraq at close quarters , it was difficult to find any family in Iraq who had not had a member killed on account of the conditions arising from the Occupation. And what of the heroic city of Fallujah which dared to resist the mercenaries of US and UK Security Companies and Agencies, who have no combatant status under the Geneva Convention in any armed conflict , yet are to-day high profile in one war after another in Bosnia, in Kosovo , in Afghanistan and other theatres including in the trafficking in human beings as slaves .On 14th October 2004 sensing that the city of 300,000 was to be singled out for destruction as it had become a symbol of Resistance against the Occupation ; the people of Fallujah through several organizations of Teachers, Tribal Leaders, the Shura Council , the Bar Association, through the President of the Study Centre of Human Rights and Democracy forwarded an urgent appeal to the Secretary General of the United Nations in these words:

" Your Excellency, It is obvious that the American forces are committing crimes of genocide every day in Iraq .Now while we are writing to Your Excellency , the American warplanes are dropping their most powerful bombs on the civilians in the city , killing and injuring hundreds of innocent people . At the same time their tanks are attacking the city with their heavy artillery…" "On the night of 13th October alone American bombardment demolished 50 houses on top of their residents. Is this a genocidal crime or a lesson about democracy? It is obvious that the Americans are committing acts of terror against the people of Fallujah for one reason only : their refusal to accept the Occupation."

"Your Excellency and the whole world knows that the Americans and their allies devastated our country under the pretext of the threat of the Weapons of Mass Destruction .Now after the destruction and the killing of thousands of civilians , they have admitted that there were no weapons found .But they say nothing about all the crimes they have committed .Unfortunately everyone is now silent and will not dignify the murdered Iraqi civilians with words of condemnation .Are the Americans going to pay compensation as Iraq has been forced to do after the Gulf War……."

" We know we are living in a world of double standards .In Fallujah , they have created a new vague target: AL ZARQAWI. This is a new pretext to justify their crimes, killing and daily bombardment of civilians. Almost a year has passed since they created this new pretext and whenever they destroy houses ….they said ‘We have launched a successful operation against AL Zarqawi. hey will never say that they have killed him because there is no such person. And that means the daily killings of civilians and the daily genocide will continue."

"At the same time the representatives of Fallujah , our tribal leader has denounced on many occasions the kidnapping and killing of civilians , and we have no links to any group committing such inhuman behaviour." " Excellency , we appeal to you and to all the world leaders to exert the greatest pressure on the American administration to stop the crimes in Fallujah and withdraw their army….the city was quiet and peaceful when its people ran it ….We simply did not welcome the Occupation. This is our right according to the UN Charter , International Law and the laws of humanity. If the Americans believe in the opposite they should first withdraw from the UN and all its agencies before acting in a way contrary to the Charter they have signed"

" It is very urgent that your Excellency along with the world leaders, intervenes in a speedy manner to prevent a new massacre…." This was the voice of the people of Fallujah appealing to the UN and to world leaders and what was the response? After the administration of the United States had taken care of the African-American voters and others through the Diebold electronic voting machines on the 8th November commenced the destruction of Fallujah which to the United States was a symbol of Iraqi resistance throughout the world. There is hardly a home intact in the city of Fallujah. The first attack by US forces with the Black Watch Regiments poised on the highways , was on the Fallujah hospitals and medical personnel who report the casualty figures and treat the wounded the messengers of the devastation and loss of lives .Dr Khamis al-Muhammadi of the Fallujan General Hospital has informed the media that she was seized and taken away by Occupation forces even as she was about to cut an unbilical cord during child birth; several doctors have been reported to have been killed and all hospitals and clinics destroyed. AL ZARQAWI like BIN LADEN was never captured despite the destruction of the entire city. Yet who can destroy the spirit of Fallujah which has survived many attempts of a whole century to crush it.

Even as use of Depleted Uranium , of napalm, of banned chemicals spread throughout the world , Mr . Kofi Anan reacted to the appeal of Fallujah and pronounced what had already been known to millions that : "The Occupation of Iraq is illegal…" with the Japan Times subsequently reporting that the Secretary General of the United Nations would pay the price for this statement with calls for his resignation despite past services rendered and though the real price for the fraudulently conceived ‘FOOD FOR OIL’ program vests with the Security Council and the entire policy and its implementation was illegal as it sought to impose control over the resources of anther sovereign country to regulate production and distribution of Oil.

With the war declared categorically illegal even by the Secretary General of the United Nations , on what basis does the US administration plan to increase troop levels .Why has it concealed from the world that it has already created four military bases in Iraq with the objective of permanent occupation . And what is the nature of the liberation of Iraq. Dahr Jamail reports that Baghdad after 19 months remains in shambles bombed out buildings sit as insulting reminders of unbroken promises of reconstruction 70 % of Iraqis at the very minimum are unemployed and there is a five mile petrol lines in an oil rich country.Engineers and doctors are unemployed and ply taxis .there are mass graves of innocent civilians in Fallujah and bodies with skins melted by napalm .bodies bloated and rotting devoured by dogs in the street after the complete destruction of the city of Fallujah water supply is frequently cut off from cities and towns targeted for attack children lie deformed by Depleted Uranium exposure in shattered hospitals from lack of treatment or even pain medication the Iraqi Red Crescent, other relief teams and the Red Cross has been obstructed in rendering aid mosques are bullet ridden with blood stained carpets."

Even as governments and heads of State continue to deal with war criminals we must recall that the assault on Fallujah and other cities , towns and villages of Iraq are covered by article 6 (b) of the 1945 Nuremberg Charter and in the trials of the Far East or Tokyo trials among the war crimes defined include the" Wanton destruction of cities , towns or villages " crimes for which the Nazi leaders and other Generals and militarists were tried and executed .The acts perpetrated by US,UK forces in the onslaught on Fallujah constitutes a clear violation of the laws of Land War found in the US army Field Manual 27-10. What of the US, UK soldiers used as one half of the poor to kill the other half ;recruited from working class families from isolated and marginalized communities and towns affected by the economic recession and the downturn sweeping the United States and England with employment opportunities steadily decreasing. Christian Bollyn of the American Free Press , Washington D.C asked Lt.Col. Joe Yoswa if the US was using Depleted Uranium in Fallujah and received the reply that " DU is the standard round on the M-1 Abraham Tanks" which have been used in Fallujah. Because of the nature of poison gas exploded by the exploded DU shells, American Free Press asked Yoswa if the troops were protected from DU poisoning .Lt.Col. Joe Yoswa seemed unaware of the dangers posed by DU. Marion Falk a retired Nuclear scientist from Livermore Lab informed the media that US troops in DU contaminated battlefields are considered "throw away soldiers" who are dispensed with once exposed , and replaced by others who become throw away in their turn with risks of cancer ,deformed children from genetic damage and serious health problems. There is no higher purpose to fulfil for the "throw away soldiers" than the war and oil profits of the Corporations at stake from the continued occupation and the fear and unemployment at home; the bankrupting of the US economy are two sides of the same coin of which one side is the Occupation and the other side is the whipping up of fear and frenzy in the United States. Uranium Weapons

There is a direct connection between the appropriation sought for the war at the cost of sweeping budget cuts and the steady elimination of social security funds and post office savings .There is also a direct connection between the nature of elections held in the United States , in Kabul where Mr.Hamid Karzai the representative of the UNOCAL Company cannot stir out of Kabul , and the elections proposed to be held in Iraq under conditions of Occupation and coercion .

In all three countries the strategy is the same ; coerce the electorate and declare an election as "won" after which without a constitutional mandate enslave the majority of the people by obfuscating political ,economic and social rights reducing countries to garrisons .In recognition of these similarities and the impact of the illegal war on the people of the United States that the anti-war coalition has supported the "absolute right of the people of Iraq to resist the occupation of their country" and declared their own resistance to re-instate the draft and to prepare for resistance if conscription returns. In what has far reaching consequences for International Security the movement has declared that "it is incumbent on us to reject that notion that smaller countries must disarm and leave themselves defenseless at the demand of Bush and the Pentagon. Such demands are not only hypocritical , irrational and unjust , they amount to little more than a pretext for more invasions and occupations " . In the context of the fact that the resistance to the Iraq war has more than one front with the the military front in Iraq and the political front in the Americas it is necessary in view of the Security Council having acquiesced to the Occupation despite the fact that it is illegal that the General Assembly should be moved by a member of the United Nations to initiate moves for the vacating of the aggression against Iraq under Article 35 read with article 11 (2 ) . Any organization in which some powers have the hegemony of the veto can never fulfill the requirements of a new democratic international order .

Prof. Niloufer Bhagwat

11 December, 2004 At Tokyo This article was posted at Crimes and Corruptions of the New World Order News



-------- india / pakistan

Pakistan, India to discuss agreement on missile tests next week

AFP Dec 12, 2004
	
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1535&ncid=731&e=9&u=/afp/20041212/wl_sthasia_afp/pakistanindianucleartalks

ISLAMABAD (AFP) - Nuclear-armed Pakistan and India are due to meet in Islamabad next week to discuss a possible agreement on giving advance notice to each other before conducting missile tests, foreign ministry spokesman said.

The expert-level talks on confidence building measures (CBMs) will be held December 14-15 in Islamabad, foreign ministry spokesman Masood Khan told AFP.

Pakistani and Indian officials would also discuss setting up a hotline between top foreign ministry civil servants to avoid the possibility of nuclear conflict because of any mishap or misunderstanding, Khan said.

They already have a hotline between senior military commanders, who have conversations scheduled once a week.

Pakistan and India held nuclear tests two weeks apart in 1998 and have since come close to war twice in their dispute over Kashmir (news - web sites).

The two sides have been conducting periodic missile tests throughout a peace dialogue which has been underway since January.

Though an informal agreement about prior notification of missile tests exists between the two South Asian neighbours, the meeting is expected to finalise the draft of a formal agreement, Khan said.

Khan said the meeting would help improve communications between the two sides.

The talks are aimed at establishing "strategic stability" in the region that constitutes nuclear and missile restraint, conventional balance and conflict resolution, Khan said.

"We covered some ground in June this year in New Delhi and we want to build on this momentum and elaborate some concrete CBMs," Khan said.

The first round of talks on nuclear issues was held in the Indian capital New Delhi in June where both reiterated a 1999 agreement that neither country would conduct another nuclear test "unless, in exercise of national sovereignty, it decides that extraordinary events have jeopardised its supreme interests."

-------- 

Pakistan, India to discuss agreement on missile tests next week

ISLAMABAD (AFP)
Dec 12, 2004

http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041212113548.h8s45o2u.html

Nuclear-armed Pakistan and India are due to meet in Islamabad next week to discuss a possible agreement on giving advance notice to each other before conducting missile tests, foreign ministry spokesman said Sunday.

The expert-level talks on confidence building measures (CBMs) will be held December 14-15 in Islamabad, foreign ministry spokesman Masood Khan told AFP.

Pakistani and Indian officials would also discuss setting up a hotline between top foreign ministry civil servants to avoid the possibility of nuclear conflict because of any mishap or misunderstanding, Khan said.

They already have a hotline between senior military commanders, who have conversations scheduled once a week.

Pakistan and India held nuclear tests two weeks apart in 1998 and have since come close to war twice in their dispute over Kashmir.

The two sides have been conducting periodic missile tests throughout a peace dialogue which has been underway since January.

Though an informal agreement about prior notification of missile tests exists between the two South Asian neighbours, the meeting is expected to finalise the draft of a formal agreement, Khan said.

Khan said the meeting would help improve communications between the two sides.

The talks are aimed at establishing "strategic stability" in the region that constitutes nuclear and missile restraint, conventional balance and conflict resolution, Khan said.

"We covered some ground in June this year in New Delhi and we want to build on this momentum and elaborate some concrete CBMs," Khan said.

The first round of talks on nuclear issues was held in the Indian capital New Delhi in June where both reiterated a 1999 agreement that neither country would conduct another nuclear test "unless, in exercise of national sovereignty, it decides that extraordinary events have jeopardised its supreme interests."


-------- iran

'The Persian Puzzle': Misjudging Iran

December 12, 2004
By ERNEST R. MAY
The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/books/review/12MAYL.html?pagewanted=print&position=

WHEN ''The Threatening Storm'' came out in 2002, it caused a sensation. The author, a Brookings Institution scholar who had been a Central Intelligence Agency analyst and the director of Persian Gulf affairs on President Bill Clinton's National Security Council staff, offered a measured and thoughtful argument paralleling that of hard-liners in the administration of President George W. Bush. The subtitle of the book was ''The Case for Invading Iraq.''

''The Persian Puzzle'' deals with the other big country in Kenneth Pollack's portfolio: Iran. To the question is it, too, a brief for pre-emptive war, the answer is a qualified ''no.'' Pollack (who, for the record, now says he made a mistake about Iraq, based on faulty intelligence) sees more cons than pros to a war with Iran -- too many Iranians, too many mountains, too many potential guerrillas and too many possibilities for trouble elsewhere. He finds more of a case for a pre-emptive strike against Iran's nuclear facilities, like Israel's 1981 bombing of the Iraqi nuclear facility at Osirak, but here too he sees more cons than pros. He recommends that the United States cope with the challenges posed by Iran by forming a tight combination with other nations and presenting Tehran with really big carrots and sticks, mostly economic.

But ''The Persian Puzzle'' is most rewarding when it deals with the past, not the future. Many Americans were surprised to learn from the recent report of Charles Duelfer, the chief American weapons inspector in Iraq, that Saddam Hussein had pretended to have weapons of mass destruction because he was preoccupied with deterring Iran. Pollack reminds us again and again how often American assumptions about Iranian concerns were wrong.

The pivot of Pollack's narrative is the C.I.A.-sponsored 1953 coup that unseated the demagogic reformer Mohammed Mossadegh and entrenched young Mohammed Reza Shah. The coup created among Iranians a lasting belief that the United States not only wanted to but could control Iranian politics. Early on, Pollack quotes Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's 2000 St. Patrick's Day speech expressing regret at the ''setback for Iran's political development.'' He returns to it toward the end of the book, insisting that, however small the immediate result, confession of past errors is the starting point for avoiding future mistakes.

The Americans who engineered the 1953 coup understood neither Mossadegh nor the shah. Mossadegh believed that the United States thought Iran vitally important and that he could win concessions from Washington by appearing willing to bargain with the Soviet Union -- making him look, to American eyes, like Moscow's cat's-paw. The shah saw himself as totally dependent on the United States yet so necessary to it that he could squeeze Washington like a protection racketeer -- and he did, most clearly in 1973, when he prodded OPEC into its most extravagant price gouging. (''The shah turned around and screwed us,'' Robert Hormats, then at the National Security Council, has been quoted as saying.) The shah's sense of dependency was most nakedly visible in his last days, when he considered trying bloody all-out suppression of the Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamist revolution but told the American ambassador that he could not take such action except on orders from Washington -- orders that President Jimmy Carter refused to give. Pollack is unsparing in his criticism of Carter administration policy making; hard-liners and soft-liners, he says, were both ''operating under completely false assumptions.''

The litany of mutual misjudgments continues through chapters on Ayatollah Khomeini's rule, the hauling and tugging between theocrats and secular Westernizers that followed and the recent past, when, as Pollack sees it, the theocrats solidified control by following the Chinese model -- trading some social liberalization for surrender of all political power. Khomeini is said not only to have blessed taking the embassy hostages but to have held on to them with the specific aim of costing Carter votes in 1980 -- as a payback for 1953.

The title of Chapter 7, ''At War With the World,'' captures the essential thread of the 1980's. Iran was at war with Iraq. At the same time it was building up Hezbollah and supervising plans for attacks like the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut. The internal struggles within the Reagan administration and the Iran-contra scandal may be highest on the register of American mistakes. The decision to put marines in Lebanon, Pollack writes, ''was a disaster for U.S. policy toward the region, and it was a disaster for U.S. policy toward Iran. It was a mistake to have intervened in Lebanon at all.'' Of Iran-contra he comments, ''Congress had denied the administration funding for the C.I.A. program to support the contras, but the N.S.C. and C.I.A. had found a way to tie one harebrained scheme to the other.''

Not surprisingly, Pollack's view of the Clinton administration is more sympathetic. He gives Clinton's tough talking credit for Iran's pullback from anti-American terrorism after the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia. (Perhaps because of censors at the C.I.A. or N.S.C., he doesn't discuss the 9/11 commission's evidence that Iran facilitated the travel of the Saudis who were 9/11 muscle men.) Still, he concedes that the Clinton-era gestures came to naught. The hopes Pollack invests in his own recommendations seem to rest primarily on Tehran's pragmatic cooperation immediately after 9/11 and during the military campaign against the Taliban.

For a background understanding of U.S.-Iranian relations, ''The Persian Puzzle'' is matchless. No one newly appointed to the second Bush administration will have time to read it, but every young person who wants to work in the national security apparatus should memorize it. Pollack says he started this book before an editor diverted him to writing a book on Iraq. That was a shame. If it had been the other way around, ''The Threatening Storm'' might have had a more cautionary thesis.

Ernest R. May, a professor of history at Harvard, was senior adviser to the 9/11 commission. His most recent book is ''Strange Victory: Hitler's Conquest of France.''

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Iran warns it will quit nuclear talks with EU if no progress made

TEHRAN (AFP)
Dec 12, 2004

http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041212084242.78khejdu.html

Iran's top nuclear negotiator Hassan Rowhani warned Sunday that the Islamic republic would abandon key talks with the European Union on its nuclear programme if it was clear no progress was being made.

The talks, set to begin in Brussels on Monday, are aimed at building on Iran's agreement to suspend sensitive uranium enrichment activities that have sparked fears the clerical regime is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.

The two sides will be hammering out a long-term accord that includes "objective guarantees" Iran will not develop the bomb and a package of trade, technology and security incentives.

"We will continue the negotiations for as long as they are progressing," Rowhani told the official news agency IRNA before leaving for the Brussels talks.

"If at any point that our negotiations are not progressing, we will stop them. The end of these three months of negotiations will indicate to us which point we have reached," added the cleric, who heads Iran's Supreme National Security Council.

Iran has pledged to maintain its nuclear fuel cycle freeze for the duration of the negotiations.

On Monday, Rowhani is to meet the British, French and German foreign ministers in a steering committee conference on the sidelines of an EU ministerial gathering.

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The U.S. vs. a Nuclear Iran

The New York Times Company
By DAVID E. SANGER
December 12, 2004

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/politics/12nuke.html

This article was reported by Thom Shanker, Eric Schmitt and David E. Sanger, and was written by Mr. Sanger.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 11 - The Bush administration says the prospect of Iran's obtaining a nuclear weapon is "intolerable," and from the White House to the State Department, officials express considerable skepticism that Europe's efforts to negotiate quietly an end to Iran's nuclear activities will succeed.

Yet, though President Bush threatened Iraq before the war there, he has said almost nothing about the possibility of resorting to military action in Iran.

That may reflect the fact that Pentagon war planners, reviewing available options, say there are no good options for Mr. Bush - or for Israel, which has expressed even greater alarm about a nuclear-armed Iran if negotiations fail.

Almost unanimously, these planners and Pentagon analysts say there are no effective military ways to wipe out a nuclear program that has been well hidden and broadly dispersed across the country, including in crowded cities. Confronted with intelligence evidence, Iran admitted to inspectors last year that it had hidden critical aspects of its civilian program for 18 years, and even today there are questions about whether all of its nuclear-related sites are known.

The Bush administration has talked about the possibility of going to the United Nations to seek sanctions against Iran if a recent accord with the Europeans falls apart, as a similar agreement did last year. But the Iranians themselves are aware of the whispers about military strikes, many of them fueled by Israeli officials who view the threat as much more urgent than the Europeans do.

Even so, such talk may amount to little more than bluffing in a high-stakes diplomatic game that the deputy secretary of state, Richard L. Armitage, recently described as "kind of a good-cop, bad-cop arrangement," with Washington playing the bad cop. But a senior European official related a conversation in which Iranians deeply involved in the talks warned that any military action would be futile.

The official said the Iranians boasted that "they can rebuild the facilities in six months," using indigenous technology. He also said they believed that after any military action to slow Iran's program, they could "develop a weapon as a national cause, with more consensus than now."

Senior officers and Pentagon officials confirm that war planners, in particular Air Force targeting teams, have updated contingencies for dealing with Iran's nuclear ambitions, as they periodically do. But they immediately emphasize that this does not reflect any guidance from the civilian leadership to prepare for military confrontation.

Instead, they say, it is part of an effort ordered by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to begin a constant process of refreshing contingency planning throughout the world, an effort partly inspired by the outdated plan for invading Iraq that had to be rapidly dusted off and radically rewritten before the war there.

"Military planning always continues," said one senior officer based in the Middle East. "We are constantly updating plans."

But interviews with military planners, Pentagon policy makers and academic experts drew a unanimous sentiment that the challenge in 2005 would be to contain the situation so that neither the United States nor Iran took a misstep or miscalculated, bringing on military action.

The Iranians remember Osirak, the site of a lightning Israeli airstrike against an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 that set back Saddam Hussein's nuclear ambitions by a decade. American and European intelligence officials say Iran has taken the lesson to heart, spreading its nuclear facilities around the country, burying some underground and putting others in the middle of crowded urban areas.

For example, the International Atomic Energy Agency last year found centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium, behind a false wall at the Kalaye Electric Company in a densely populated corner of Tehran, where there would be no way to conduct a military strike without causing major civilian casualties. "They are not about to make the same mistake Saddam did," a senior administration official said.

Thus the military options range from the bad to the unimaginable.

None guarantee success, military planners say. Many risk causing not only casualties but a political crisis in the Middle East. The planners, many of them involved in the war against Iraq, argue vehemently that Iran presents a growing proliferation problem better approached through diplomatic channels than by airstrikes, Special Operations missions or an all-out invasion.

"There's no big war plan on the shelf," said one administration official involved in the planning process. 

Part of the caution appears linked to the realization that while Iran's nuclear facilities are far more advanced than Iraq's ever were, the administration has yet to prove that Iran is secretly planning to build a weapon. The country has opened many of its sites to international inspectors, though there is still wrangling over whether the agency will be able to visit two military sites that some experts suspect could house a parallel, secret military effort to produce uranium.

If such sites exist, they would violate the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which Iran has signed and which requires that all of its facilities must be solely for civilian use. So far, the inspectors have asked to see only one of the sites, and Iran has not indicated whether it would provide access.

The director general of the international agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, has carefully stopped short of declaring that Iran is seeking a weapon, though recently he noted that Iran "tried to cheat the system."

But whether it is a civilian program or something more nefarious, Iran is using an approach to developing nuclear fuel through the enrichment of uranium that is far easier to hide than the approach that Iraq took two decades ago.

So there is no central plant like Osirak to bomb.

"Osirak is not a paradigm," said Robert S. Litwak, director of international studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center here. "It was an exceptional case, in which all of the conditions for success came together. Israel had accurate intelligence on the target, collateral damage effects on the nearby population were judged minimal because the nuclear core had not yet been loaded into the reactor, and Saddam Hussein then had no capacity to retaliate directly against Israel."

In Iran today, said Mr. Litwak, who worked on proliferation issues as a National Security Council staff member in the Clinton administration, "none of those conditions pertain."

That view is echoed at the senior levels of the military. "Iran takes great care to protect its technology and production/storage capability with multiple layers of security, hardening and dispersal," said one Air Force general with experience in the Middle East. "All this complicates identification, targeting and execution."

Analysts of the Iranian political scene also point out that many in the American government view a growing and energized Iranian civil society, in particular the young and women, as an agent of change toward a democratic Iran.

News of the energy agency's restrained action helped Iran's stock market, which had suffered over fears that the nuclear dispute could result in a military confrontation with Israel or the United States. Any American military strike on Iran, these analysts say, would cancel any positive feelings these people have toward the United States, and probably galvanize support for the more militant Islamic leadership.



-------- japan

Japanese govt to act on aging nuclear power plants

Yomiuri Shimbun

2004-12-12

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20041212wo02.htm

The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, a nuclear safety regulator under the jurisdiction of the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry, will establish Monday a special section to take measures to ensure the safety of aging nuclear power plants.

The plants, which have been operating for more than 30 years, are being targeted as part of efforts to strengthen safety measures to prevent accidents.

Also as part of these efforts, the NISA will Thursday establish an advisory panel of experts.

The agency was prompted to act by a steam blowout at the No. 3 reactor of the Mihama Nuclear Power Plant in Mihamacho, Fukui Prefecture. The accident in August at the Kansai Electric Power Co.-run plant killed five workers and injured six others.

The new measures herald a change in NISA policy, which previously was totally dependent on electric power firms to ensure safety measures at nuclear power facilities.

Fukui Gov. Kazumi Nishikawa has strongly urged the NISA to strengthen safety measures for old nuclear power plants. He claimed that the steam blowout was a result of a failure to act against the deterioration of the plants.

To date, the NISA has urged electric power firms to assess the safety of equipment at nuclear power plants after 30 years of operation, and to map out maintenance and inspection plans. But there is criticism of the plans' contents and feasibility.

The special section will start with five employees and increase in size depending on the situation. It will aim to survey accidents and problems caused by deteriorating nuclear power plants and formalize preventive measures against problems. It also will make public the contents of the preventive measures and enhance the transparency of the inspection procedures.

The advisory panel of experts--to meet for the first time in Fukui on Thursday--will be set up under the nuclear safety and security division of the advisory committee for natural resources and energy, a consultative organ to the METI minister.

===

JCO opens plant to public

MITO--JCO Co. opened its nuclear fuel processing plant in Tokaimura, Ibaraki Prefecture, to residents Saturday for the first time since a fatal nuclear accident occurred at the plant in September 1999.

The event was organized by the Tokaimura village government to ensure the fatal incident is always remembered, village government officials said.

Later this month, the village government is expected to approve the removal of equipment from the former uranium reprocessing building at the plant on the condition that the pieces can be reassembled.

The stainless steel sedimentation tank in which the accident occurred on Sept. 30, 1999, has remained in the building next to solution and storage towers. Readings of 70 to 80 microsieverts--a measure of radiation--have been detected inside the tank. 

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Site of nuclear accident opened to tours

(Kyodo)

Dec. 12, 2004

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?nn20041212a7.htm

MITO, Ibaraki Pref.  JCO Co. opened its nuclear fuel processing plant in Tokai, Ibaraki Prefecture, on Saturday to local residents for the first time since a fatal accident in 1999, which killed two workers and exposed more than 660 nearby residents to radiation.

About 160 people have signed up for tours of the facility. JCO said it will conduct the tours from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day through Thursday.

The Tokai Municipal Government plans to dismantle a processing tank and other parts of the facility and store them in drums for future restoration.

The village plans to create a life-size model of the facility for a future exhibition using 50 million yen from the national government.

The accident occurred at 10:35 a.m. Sept. 30, 1999, when two JCO employees poured too much uranium into a processing tank -- bypassing several required steps -- and caused a nuclear fission chain reaction.

The two employees were exposed to massive doses of radiation and later died from multiple organ failure.



-------- korea

Washington's Nuclear Tunnel Vision
	
Korea Times 12-12-2004
By Mike Weisbart

http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/opinion/200412/kt2004121215363854190.htm

The United States is walking out of step with its partners in the six-party talks. It’s focusing on the wrong issues and, potentially with the gravest of consequences, is having difficulty seeing the forest for the trees.

That’s the thrust of a new report by the Task Force on U.S. Korea Policy, chaired by long-time Korea hand Selig Harrison and cosponsored by the Center for International Policy and the University of Chicago’s Center for East Asian Studies.

The task force’s key recommendation is that the Bush administration should stop concentrating on the what-ifs and maybes of the alleged possession by North Korea of a highly enriched uranium program and begin to negotiate with the North on the basis of providing incentives for a complete and verifiable freeze and the ultimate removal of the very real threat embodied in the country’s well-documented plutonium program.

The plan would involve a multiphase process with incentives including security assurances, the normalization of U.S.-DPRK relations, the resumption of the oil shipments stopped in 2002, and development assistance based on a monetary value assigned to the plutonium that is catalogued and removed.

The report is well thought out and cogent, reflecting the combined talents and wisdom of a 26-member all-star team of former ambassadors, Korea experts, acade