NucNews - February 6, 2005



-------- NUCLEAR 



-------- accidents and safety

Nuclear watchdog exposes safety crisis
Staff shortages, heavy workloads and industrial disputes put power stations at risk 

By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor
06 February 2005 UK Sunday Herald

http://www.sundayherald.com/47583
 
THE safety of Britain’s nuclear power stations is being put at risk by staff shortages, heavy workloads and a prolonged industrial dispute at the government’s nuclear watchdog.

The Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII), which guards against accidents and spillages at over 20 nuclear sites around the country, is facing one of the worst crises in its history. It is struggling to cope with mounting demands for safety regulation at the same time as suffering a severe shortage of nuclear inspectors.

Front-line inspections of nuclear plants have had to be cut back, while a backlog of other work has built up. “Prolonged reduction of inspection will undermine our ability to effectively monitor the safety performance of the nuclear industry,” warned Laurence Williams, who has just quit as the NII’s chief inspector.

He said that the inspectorate’s increasing workload is “starting to detract from our regulatory oversight”. Inspectors are having to help set up the government’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority in April, to reorganise the major nuclear companies, British Nuclear Fuels and British Energy, and to combat new threats from terrorists.

But at the same time the NII is having serious difficulties in recruiting new inspectors. An advertising campaign last year failed to attract many applicants, leaving the inspectorate, as at February 1, 14 inspectors short of its target of 179.

“There is a growing backlog of work that is being delayed or not being done and this, together with new work arising from industry programmes, concerns me,” Williams said. He left the NII at the end of December and is due to start work with the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority this month.

The crisis at the NII has been deepened by an unpublicised work-to-rule by nuclear inspectors over the last 18 months. Backed by their trade union, Prospect, they have been refusing to work any unpaid overtime in protest against a 10% drop in their real rates of pay over the last 10 years.

Their industrial action is part of a wider dispute by all inspectors at the government’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE), which includes the railway and hazardous installations inspectorates as well as the NII. “There is a huge amount of frustration within the HSE,” said Prospect’s negotiations officer, Mike Macdonald.

“Over time there will be a rundown of the service provided and the reputation of the HSE as an employer. This undermines the credibility of the NII which is crucial for safety.”

He confessed to being “jumpy” about the risk of a nuclear accident or a leak of radioactive waste. “Even when the impact is very low, the general public is extremely anxious,” he said.

Macdonald attacked the Treasury for being “insensitive” to the plight of inspectors, who earn between £40,000 and £54,000 a year, less than equivalent safety engineers in the nuclear operating companies.

Macdonald warned that his members would soon have to choose between accepting a pay cut or escalating their industrial action which might jeopardise safety.

The combination of pressures afflicting the NII have sparked anxiety and alarm outside the nuclear industry. “It is important that the nuclear industry continues to be regulated effectively and frontline inspection is a key part of that,” said Ian Jackson, an expert nuclear consultant based in Cheshire.

Pete Roche, a consultant to the environmental group Greenpeace, said it was “extremely frightening” that the NII had cut its inspections of nuclear plants. He argued that inspections should be increasing because of the cracks that had been recently discovered in the graphite bricks that surround reactor cores.

Unexpected graphite cracking has been discovered by British Energy at the Hartlepool nuclear station in England. There are also fears that cracking might shorten the lives of Scottish nuclear stations at Torness in East Lothian and Hunterston in North Ayrshire, though this has been played down by British Energy.

“Any reduction in a station’s lifetime has such serious financial implications for the company that we need a strong regulator to make sure that safety remains paramount. It mustn’t be sidelined by short-term economic considerations,” Roche said.

Other nuclear sites inspected by the NII in Scotland are the Dounreay complex at Caithness and the reactors being decommissioned at Chapelcross in Dumfries and Galloway. Nuclear inspectors also monitor activities at military nuclear facilities, including the Rosyth naval dockyard on the Firth of Forth and the nuclear submarine bases on the Firth of Clyde.

In order to combat the staff shortages, the NII said it is having to keep inspectors working beyond their normal retirement age. It has also launched a new recruitment campaign aimed at bringing in 17 new inspectors.

The government minister of state for work, Jane Kennedy, has been told by the NII’s new acting chief inspector, Dr Mike Weightman, that industrial action has reduced front-line activities but “this has not resulted in an inadequate level of nuclear regulatory oversight to date.”

The minister has also been kept informed of the staffing and workload problems facing the NII, and plans to discuss them further, an NII spokesman said.

“NII management are continuously re-prioritising the work done by inspectors to ensure that safety-critical issues are dealt with.”



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

-------- depleted uranium

Lowry unrealistic about depleted uranium

By ROGER LONGLEY
GUEST COLUMNIST
Thursday, February 6, 2003 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/107382_uranium06.shtml

The Jan. 28 column by Rich Lowry on the hazards of depleted uranium tops my list for disinformation ("Depleted uranium effective but not politically incorrect"). He is in the ballpark when he says 300 tons of depleted uranium was used in the first Gulf War, but he is confusing the issue, and perhaps himself, when he says DU is depleted.

Most of the radiation in natural uranium comes from Uranium 238 (U-238). What largely remains in DU is U-238, its decay products and other contaminants from irradiation of uranium. Gamma radiation from this mix can be dangerous when a large quantity of DU is finely divided, even without ingesting or inhaling it.

It is highly misleading to say that living next to a ton of U-238 is harmless because the issue is not the hazard of DU as a metal but its effect as a gaseous, dispersed oxidized material after it has been used as an armor piercing weapon. DU burns as it passes through armor.

Lowry further confuses the issue when he says no adverse health effects have been found for DU. There have been no studies where DU has been used as a weapon so this statement is meaningless.

A decaying U-238 atom presents the same danger as a decaying Plutonium 239 (Pu-239) atom but U-238 is considered harmless because it decays about 200,000 times slower than Pu-239. Where Pu-239 is dangerous if you ingest a fraction of a millionth of a gram, you have to consume about 0.025 grams of U-238 to produce the same hazard.

Possibly 100 tons of the 300 tons of DU used in Iraq were converted on impact into gaseous uranium oxide or a finely divided uranium powder. Both the oxide and the powder will settle out on the ground locally or drift in the wind. In terms of grams, this is 100,000,000 grams, enough to be harmful to hundreds of millions of people if it is ingested.

Inhalation of U-238 into your lungs is much more serious than ingestion. Inhalation is considered dangerous if the air concentration of U-238 is greater than a millionth of a gram per cubic meter. If 100 million grams of U-238 oxide and finely divided U-238 particles were spread out on the ground and stirred into the air up to a height of 1 meter, it would cover more than 10 million square miles at this concentration.

In fact DU is not spread that far in Iraq and exists locally in much higher, more dangerous concentrations. Even today one can measure gamma radiation levels up to 3.5 millirad/hour around the tanks on the "Highway of Death," a separate hazard from inhaling or ingesting DU.

Defenders of DU like to say uranium is everywhere, that we all have a little uranium in us. This is true. There is a lot of uranium in the ocean, but you would have to drink about 25 tons of seawater before you would need to worry. If you dug up all the dirt in your back yard, it's doubtful you would be able to detect any uranium.

The issue with DU as a weapon is all about concentration. We should understand from such places as Hanford, it is the localized concentration of radioactive materials that presents problems. Even though DU is weakly radioactive, its use as a weapon in multi-ton quantities raises the level of radioactivity in the area of use to dangerous levels.

This use of DU in armor-piercing ammunition effectively puts us in the same class as someone who would use a "dirty" bomb to contaminate an area with radioactivity. The difference is that we do it, and have done it, on a much grander scale than a terrorist could possibly realize.

Roger Longley of Friday Harbor was a senior nuclear engineer for nine years at General Dynamics/Fort Worth.



-------- iran

Iran Would Accelerate Nuke Program if Attacked

Sun Feb 6, 2005 10:45 AM ET (Reuters)
By Paul Hughes and Parisa Hafezi

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7549023

TEHRAN - Iran would both retaliate and accelerate its drive to master nuclear technology if the United States or Israel attacked its atomic facilities, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator warned on Sunday.

Hassan Rohani, secretary-general of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, also told Reuters there was nothing the West could offer Tehran that would persuade it to scrap a nuclear program which Washington fears may be used to make bombs.

Asked about a possible attack by the United States or Israel, which have both said a nuclear-armed Iran would be unacceptable, Rohani said: "If such an attack (against Iran's atomic facilities) takes place then of course we will retaliate and we will definitely accelerate our activities to complete our (nuclear) fuel cycle." Speaking in a rare interview, Rohani said Iran's ability to produce its own nuclear parts had made it "invulnerable" to attack since it could simply rebuild whatever was destroyed.

"But I do not think the United States itself will take such a risk ... They know our capabilities for retaliating against such attacks," the mid-ranking cleric added.

Iran has ballistic missiles which can hit Israel and U.S. bases in the Gulf and has vowed to retaliate strongly should either country try to repeat Israel's 1981 successful bombing of Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor.

NO INCENTIVE BIG ENOUGH

Iran says its nuclear program will be used to generate electricity, not make bombs. Washington says Tehran is using a civilian nuclear program as a front for weapons development.

President Bush has refused to rule out military strikes against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons. But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Friday a U.S. attack was "not on the agenda."

Vice President Dick Cheney last month warned Israel could in the future try to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. Israel -- believed to be the Middle East's only nuclear armed state -- has not said it will attack.

The European Union, led by Britain, Germany and France, is trying to persuade Iran to turn a temporary freeze on sensitive nuclear work, like uranium enrichment, into permanent cessation in return for economic and political incentives.

But Rohani said even the removal of U.S. sanctions on Iran or security guarantees from Washington would not be enough to tempt Tehran to give up its nuclear drive.

"Uranium enrichment is Iran's right, based on the NPT's (nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty's) article four ... I do not think anyone in Iran would exchange or swap this right for anything else."

EU MUST BE MORE SERIOUS

EU diplomats have voiced frustration at Iran's refusal to give way on what it calls its "red line" -- developing a full nuclear fuel cycle -- saying Tehran's stance is "unacceptable."

Rohani complained the EU talks, due to resume in Geneva this week, have yet to result in anything concrete thus far.

"Our expectations were higher. We believe the Europeans should be more serious," he said.

Rohani said Iran would review progress in the talks in mid-March before taking any decision on whether to resume uranium enrichment which it froze in November.

"If we witness considerable progress in the talks our patience will increase, if we observe no progress, it will shorten our patience. But, as I have said before, the period of (enrichment) suspension is limited to some months, not a year."

EU diplomats in Vienna have told Reuters Iran is breaking the spirit of its agreement to freeze enrichment by conducting quality control checks of enrichment centrifuge parts.

But Rohani insisted Iran was sticking to the deal it made with the EU in Paris last November.

"We are fully committed to whatever we have agreed with the Europeans ... I can tell you that we have not contradicted the Paris agreement at all," he said.



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



-------- nevada

Art's Last, Lonely Cowboy

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
February 6, 2005 NY Times Magazine

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/magazine/06HEIZER.html

You just don't get it, do you? This is a czarist nation, a fascist state. They control everything. They tap my phone. They'll do anything to stop me. We're the front lines, man, fleas fighting a giant.''

It is a clear, crisp, gorgeous winter afternoon in the high desert in Nevada, and Michael Heizer, who has spent the past 32 years and many millions of mostly other people's dollars constructing ''City'' -- one of the biggest sculptures any modern artist has ever built, one and a quarter miles long and more than a quarter of a mile wide -- is in a state of extreme agitation, even for him. His pique is rising as he maneuvers his truck down a bumpy mountain pass, filling the truck's cabin with cigar smoke. I sense that he's rather enjoying himself.

We are driving through Murphy Gap. Pinyon and juniper cluster along the slopes on either side. This narrow, serpentine passage of astonishing beauty cuts through the Golden Gate Range, far from civilization. Aside from Heizer's voice and the truck's engine, there is an endless, empty, engulfing silence.

Coal Valley, on the eastern side of the mountain range, is a desolate, flat plain of yellow rabbit brush and silver sage for grazing cattle. To the west, Heizer's valley, Garden Valley, is vast and nearly uninhabited. Size is deceptive out here. ''City'' looks from the edge of the valley like a low-lying bump, barely visible. When you drive just a mile from it, south across the valley, it basically disappears into the brush. But picture a sculpture the size of the Washington Mall, nearly from the steps of the Capitol to the Washington Monument, swallowing many of the museums on either side. That's how big it is. Only once you're inside do you see all the mounds, pits, passageways, plazas, ramps and terraced dirt, most of the sculpture having been dug below ground level, masked from outside by berms. The shapes echo the mountains. ''I'm not selling the view,'' Heizer contradicts when I mention this. ''You can't even see the landscape unless you're standing at the edge of the sculpture.'' True. Even so, the echoes are plain as day.

We are maybe 30 miles from Nellis Air Force Base and the military's supersecret Area 51, and more than 100 miles from Yucca Mountain, where the federal government, if all goes as planned, will begin to collect the nation's nuclear waste in 2010. Trains will transport the waste from across the country, through the middle of Atlanta and Chicago and Salt Lake City and Kansas City, to Caliente, a town just north of here. From there, more than 300 miles of track will have to be laid, at a cost of more than $1 billion, to carry the waste the rest of the way.

As it is currently conceived, the route will cut across Garden Valley, within ear- and eyeshot of Heizer's sculpture and the ranch right next to it where he lives, a kind of survivalist compound of cinder block and solar panels, an oasis of cottonwoods and wild plum trees in the middle of a wide, empty plain. Having moved long ago to this virtual end of the earth, and having also moved heaven and earth to build in isolation his immense sculpture, Heizer now finds the federal government is plotting, as he sees things, to ruin it and him.

Heizer knows it's highly unlikely that he or anyone else will suddenly stop Yucca cold, but he says he's hoping at least to persuade Department of Energy officials at this 11th hour to redirect the tracks next door through Coal Valley and Murphy Gap. Of course he is deeply pessimistic. ''I've always been a pessimist,'' he tells me, ''but now I think things are going to get really, really bad.'' Squinting into a fresh plume of cigar smoke, which rises like a dark cloud around him, he starts imagining first the rail, then wells, then electric power lines invading the valley, while ''sniveling toady'' politicians, as he calls them, do nothing.

His soliloquy crescendos, linking defense contractors like Kellogg Brown & Root and Bechtel to the government as a sinister cabal machinating against him -- ''I wouldn't be surprised if they sent out a hit squad to kill me!'' -- when the silence of Murphy Gap is suddenly shattered by a heart-stopping boom.

An F-16 buzzes our truck. It looks as if it can't be more than 100 feet overhead, turned sideways to maneuver low through the snaking pass. Then as quickly as it appears, it's gone.

Who knows? I think. Even paranoids may be right sometimes.

his is a story about a man, his dream and a railroad. Everything in it is outsize, including the landscape. It's otherwise a familiar Western saga, pitting a brooding, determined loner against big, bad Washington, except that in this case the hero's personality is at least as radioactive as the train barreling toward him.

At 60, with hawkish steel gray eyes, a kind of wary stare, a deeply lined face and haphazardly combed-over hair, Heizer is still gaunt from a decade-long battle with a neurological disorder that left him weak and in crippling pain. If illness reinforced his native martyr streak, it also strengthened his resolve, making the sculpture a mission. The knowledge that the government or his body or both could prove his work's undoing makes him more fierce at the same time that he seems swallowed up in his clothes: dusty khakis, a checked vest over a plaid shirt, a sheepskin hat with earflaps and cowboy boots. He affects the look of other ranchers in this hardscrabble stretch of range, a resemblance that partly belies his upbringing.

Born in Berkeley, Calif., Heizer comes from an accomplished family of academics, geologists and miners with some history in Nevada, a history that he's proud of and that explains how he ended up making art here. During the 1960's, sculpture moved outdoors, and Heizer was one of the movers. In the early 60's, Claes Oldenburg, Carl Andre and Walter De Maria were digging holes or talking about digging holes, making performances out of the process. De Maria was imagining milelong parallel walls in the desert, and Robert Smithson was mapping the New Jersey landscape, visiting quarries, making ''Nonsites'' out of rocks he collected and conceptualizing Earth Art, which became a catchall term for disparate experiments. It was an era of chest-thumping, clashing personalities, proclaiming to remake art from scratch, and Heizer fitted right in.

His contribution was to go West. The Abstract Expressionists had linked American art with scale. Jackson Pollock's paintings were said to refer to the Western landscape. Heizer took the idea to its logical next step. He literally made art out of the Western landscape, replacing scale with size: his works didn't just allude to big things; they were enormous. The bigger the hole or ditch he dug, the more monumental the sculpture. Negative sculpture, as Heizer called art made out of the space left behind from digging, crept into the mainstream consciousness, even if many people have never heard of him. Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the memorial design for ground zero are both riffs, in part, on Heizer's negative vocabulary.

Adventuresome patrons and dealers like Robert Scull, Heiner Friedrich, Richard Bellamy, Virginia Dwan and Sam Wagstaff gravitated to the moody Westerner with the Ayn Rand vision and smoldering charm. They bankrolled his most radical art adventures. He dug holes in the Sierra Nevada, near Munich, Germany, and elsewhere; mostly the holes were shallow, the slopes gentle. But awe, even fear, was sometimes part of the work: the fear a viewer might feel about falling into one of the deeper holes. Heizer also scattered dyes and powders and drove a motorcycle to leave tire tracks, like drawings, across dry lake beds. He dug trenches, at intervals across hundreds of miles in the desert.

His best-known work was ''Double Negative,'' for which he cut a 1,500-foot-long, 50-foot-deep, 30-foot-wide gash onto facing slopes of the Mormon Mesa in Nevada by blasting and scraping away 240,000 tons of rock. It became a landmark of Earth Art, never mind that Heizer wanted nothing to do with any movement -- or, increasingly, with most other artists. ''I burned hot and was making something totally original,'' he recalled one afternoon while shuffling through some stacks of photographs of ''Double Negative'' in his office. ''It was a moment of genius and unprecedented.''

Then he couldn't resist taking his usual gratuitous whack at Smithson, his former friend, whose ''Spiral Jetty'' in Utah, finished just after ''Double Negative,'' became an icon of Earth Art. Smithson, as Heizer sees it, ''just copied my M.O., did a complete heavy borrowing, an identity theft.'' Smithson died in a plane crash in 1973. Over the years, most of Heizer's friendships with artists he knew then have fallen away.

In 1972, Heizer acquired land in Garden Valley and began work on the first part of ''City,'' his own version of Easter Island or Angkor Wat: a modernist complex of abstract shapes -- mounds, prismoids, ramps, pits -- to be spread across the valley. It was to be experienced over time, in shifting weather, not from a single vantage point or from above but as an accumulation of impressions and views gathered by slowly walking through it. Artists in the 1960's and 70's -- Donald Judd, Andre, De Maria, Smithson, others -- were pushing sculpture off its pedestal. This was sculpture pushed all the way into the Western desert, the sort of work that you couldn't buy or sell even though it was very expensive to produce. Its materials were dirt and rock and cement and rebar, not marble or porcelain or bronze, and its tools were not chisels but heavy machinery.

The sculpture was meant not just to employ nature -- the soil, sun and air -- but also to make art out of engineering. Heizer traded in his paintbrush for a bulldozer, which, not incidentally, he could operate himself, unlike some of the other so-called Earth artists, but the work still required a crew. Artists have always had assistants. Heizer's happened to be construction workers with cranes and forklifts.

''City,'' in its vastness, was meant to synthesize ancient monuments, Minimalism and industrial technology. The work derived inspiration from Mississippian tumuli (ancient North American mounds), the ball court at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan and La Venta in southern Tabasco, where his father, a prominent anthropologist and archaeologist, had excavated. At the same time, it suggested airport runways and Modernist architecture.

Heizer resists such strict comparisons, stressing his basic abstract impulses. ''The trouble is,'' he explained to me, ''once you say something about a source, then you've pegged it down, and so now I'm reluctant to say anything. If I say I developed 50 different shapes from Mississippian tumuli, that doesn't mean they're copies of tumuli -- I'm not ripping off those shapes. I said I derived some of the shapes from the serpent motif at Chichen Itza, and now I have to live with this forever, as if that's the whole meaning behind it.'' Years ago he told another interviewer, ''The only sources I felt were allowable were American; South American, Mesoamerican or North American. That might mean Eskimos or Peruvians. I wanted to finish off the European impulse.'' Whatever its sources, in its ambition and idiosyncrasy, it is clearly a very eccentric, American vision.

uring the mid-1950's, the National Academy of Sciences raised the question of what should be done with the country's radioactive military waste. The academy proposed various underground sites around the country. Nevada wasn't on the initial list.

But Nevada was where the military had been exploding weapons, where fallout from atomic tests had drifted across mountains and valleys near Heizer's ranch. Nevadans came to learn firsthand what it meant to live in the shadow of the blasts and to distrust what the government said. ''Part of my art,'' Heizer explained when he picked Garden Valley, ''is based on an awareness that we live in a nuclear era. We're probably living at the end of civilization.''

In its remoteness and its intimation of eternal landscapes and ancient monuments, which survive after the societies that built them disappear, ''City'' reflected this sentiment. At the same time, it was inspired, Heizer said, by what he calls the ceremonial city: ''Every old city has the same sort of ceremonial feature, whether it's the Tuileries or St. Peter's or Teotihuacan. The long, stretched-out format of my sculpture is in dialogue with this ancient way of formatting space.''

Heizer also designed ''City'' to blend into the contours of the valley and to act as a kind of bunker or container, open to the sky but dug into the earth, low to the ground (he admires Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings) and, as much as possible, disguised from outside, so that the natural vista would be largely preserved.

The military metaphor of the bunker, with its defensive aura, is hard to miss. When officials from the Department of Energy recently flew over the valley to survey the rail line, they reported briefly mistaking the sculpture for a military project. Years ago, Heizer compared the first part of ''City'' -- a sloped, flat-topped mound with projecting beams that he called Complex One -- to a blast shield. He has since constructed pits and perimeter mounds, turning his work into a sort of airy, roaming fortress made of millions of yards of dirt, so many yards by now that he long ago lost count. ''My interest is in making this thing internalized,'' he said while driving the two of us slowly across the sculpture late one afternoon as the setting sun turned the mountains orange and purple and cast the deepest pits in black shadows. ''It is connected to the environment but not to the landscape. Landscape to me is a planar thing, just a view. Environment is everything down to the ecosystem. Big difference.''

Ten years after Heizer conceived ''City,'' Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which insisted that the Department of Energy find deep geological disposal sites -- and also that the United States must permanently dispose of spent fuel from nuclear reactors, not reuse it, which meant that there would be less dangerous plutonium floating around in the world, but more waste to dispose of. After much political wrangling, three remote Western sites were recommended to President Reagan in 1986, one in eastern Washington State, near Hanford, where the U.S. had already built nuclear facilities for bombs; another in Deaf Smith County, Tex., near a secret plant for nuclear warheads.

The third was Yucca, near Area 51, where the Air Force conducts its so-called black programs, testing its most secret weapons. This is a no-fly zone. Fighters escort out, or shoot down, any plane that strays into the area. The pilot who flew me by helicopter to Heizer's ranch one stormy summer day last year was careful to check in with the Air Force controllers; still he kept one cautious eye on the horizon for lightning, the other out for military jets.

Naturally, no state wanted to store nuclear waste. Nevada, during the mid-1980's, was not in the best negotiating position. Las Vegas was still far from being the boomtown it would become. The state had only one congressman. So it wasn't altogether surprising when in 1987 Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act, ordering the Department of Energy to focus exclusively on Yucca.

By then, Heizer had reached an impasse on ''City.'' He finished Complex One in 1974, mostly working by himself, using a paddle-wheel scraper a farmer lent him and following plans drawn up by seismic engineers; then he started on Complexes Two and Three, gargantuan mounds that proved to be vastly more troublesome. Combined, the three Complexes were meant to form a horseshoe, like a stadium open at one end, around a broad pit or plaza. Complex One had protruding, 30-ton, T-shaped and L-shaped columns; Complexes Two and Three were angular dirt mastabas, crystalline shapes, up to a quarter mile long, entailing hundreds of thousands of yards of dirt, one with pointed slabs, like ancient stelae, 70 feet high. ''A lot of money over the years went into simply trying to maintain old, useless equipment,'' Heizer said. ''I never stopped working on the pit and the Complexes, whenever I could afford to. But we're talking crazy optimism here.''

He took commissions to raise money and kept revising the plans for ''City,'' which he had never imagined to be a lifelong undertaking but which was clearly turning out to be one. Some help arrived during the late 1980's when Charlie Wright, the director of the Dia Center for the Arts, visited with potential sponsors and provided cash to shore up what had already started to erode because of harsh weather and construction problems. Dia was founded in 1974 by Philippa de Menil and her husband, Heiner Friedrich, a charismatic but spendthrift German art dealer who sponsored Heizer's Munich sculpture years before. Friedrich considered supporting Heizer at the start of ''City,'' but the two fell out. Then Dia's fortunes briefly collapsed. Wright, with fresh patronage, revived Friedrich's original ambition to back all sorts of grand art projects, like Heizer's.

Then Heizer got sick. In 1995, he mistook pain in his fingers and toes for frostbite because he had been standing in the cold 12 hours a day working on his sculpture. ''I thought I was eternal,'' Heizer told me one evening, relaxing after dinner in his living room, flexing his hands while staring absently at the Science Channel. ''I still do. But back then I took no care of myself. I hadn't seen a doctor or a dentist for 20 years.'' When the pain moved to his back, a medevac helicopter had to speed him to a doctor, who prescribed Tylenol and told him he was drinking and smoking too much. The pain became unbearable. On his way by plane to a hospital in New York, he collapsed and nearly died.

Polyneuropathy was the diagnosis, a nerve disease that progressively caused him to lose much of the use of his hands. His weight plummeted. For a while he couldn't walk, then he had to use crutches. He was in the hospital for months. His recovery was slow. Fed up, he resolved to demolish what he had done so far of ''City.'' Meanwhile, Wright had been succeeded at Dia by Michael Govan, who picked up his plan to aid Heizer in 1996, cultivating more donors, above all the Lannan Foundation. Able to hire workers and rent heavy equipment at last, Heizer went back to work. Although still ailing, he finished the first Complexes by 1999, when I initially visited him -- 27 years after he started. Unbowed, he declared there were another four, even grander, stages to go.

If he'd never gotten to those, he would still have accomplished a feat on a scale not unlike, say, Mount Rushmore, which, along with the cowboy paintings of Charles Russell and Frederic Remington, is just about the only American art Heizer now volunteers to praise. Two Remington cowboy sculptures are on either end of the long table in his living room, and he keeps handy an old book of Russell's paintings of the West. ''I love these artists because they're so precise and faithful,'' he says.

I was flabbergasted when I returned last summer, after several years away, to see what Heizer had accomplished since my earlier visit. I couldn't decipher the work at first, save for a few distinctive shapes. The sculpture melded with the valley. But then Heizer packed me into his truck and drove me to the sculpture, a quarter mile away from the ranch. The additions now dwarf the first phase of the project, making

Complexes One, Two and Three, which are collectively nearly the size of Yankee Stadium, look tiny and precious. The new phases are more pneumatic -- raked dirt formations resembling hills, valleys and mountains. There is a patch of unspoiled sage, like a park, smack in the middle, for flood runoff through the valley (Heizer was thrilled to discover that it actually worked during the recent January storms); and there's now a concrete sculpture, ''45o, 90o, 180o,'' which both evokes ancient Egypt and resembles a board game on the scale of an airport hangar. ''I call it a defracted gestalt,'' Heizer said while slowly steering the truck to the steep precipice of what he calls Alpha mound. ''From the ground you grasp the size but can't make out the shapes -- the opposite of what you sense from the air -- and your perception changes as you move around.''

Heizer occasionally refers to the valley as virgin land; he obsesses about the originality of his conception, about protecting his property and his art from violation by the rail, from developers hunting for underground water, from people trying to sneak in to see the sculpture before it's finished. His project is propelled by anger and resentment and monomania but also by Eros: sculpture as voluptuous, unspoiled and ecstatic, an organic body (one mound from the air, I saw, clearly resembles an erect phallus).

The question, at a time when there's so little talk about government financing for new art of any sort, is whether a country that claims to prize its rugged individualists and its native treasures, both natural and cultural, will care enough to try to avoid ''City'' by running the nuclear train elsewhere -- whether accommodations will be made simply to preserve a sculpture and the equally obscure, awesome valley it occupies.

Obscure, in the art's case, not just because it's physically remote, but also because Heizer has frightened away almost everyone from seeing ''City.'' He's the opposite of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whose ''Gates,'' to be unveiled this week in Central Park in New York -- another gigantic sculpture project decades in the making -- is ephemeral. Christo and Jeanne-Claude regard the public spectacle of their installation as part of the work itself: the art is a kind of temporary performance. Only when ''City'' is finished -- Heizer predicts it could take another decade to complete the 15 miles of concrete curbs that delineate the mounds and shore up the dirt slopes -- will the public be invited. Meanwhile, as he kept insisting to me while we were bumping down what sufficed for the path through Murphy Gap, anyone trying to show up uninvited will be arrested for trespassing or shot at.

Before I visited him the first time, he interrupted a tirade on the telephone against critics and people he contemptuously called art tourists who want to make the rounds of Earth Art. Then I heard gunshots. When he got back to the phone, he said he'd had to shoot at some coyotes. Then he just picked up the tirade where he left off. In a narrow pass along the drive across the desert this time around, I noticed someone had crudely painted ''Mike's Country Stay Out'' on a rock. The only directional sign for 35 miles was pocked with bullet holes -- used as target practice by ranchers, Heizer told me. It's a message, he speculated. Like him, he said, they just want to be left alone.

Heizer's ranch is a three-hour drive north of two million people in Las Vegas, but it's an hour's drive from almost anyone. His driveway is an unmarked dirt road meandering across several empty valleys and mountain ranges, more than an hour from blacktop. He rarely leaves the ranch these days, and hardly anyone visits except the construction crew. Heizer's Garden Valley is in Lincoln County, which, like half of Nevada, is a place where ranchers run cattle up-country during the spring and summer, down-country during the winter. This is mountainous range. Gold miners used to prospect here; there is still mining for opal and vermiculite.

Heizer and his second wife, Mary Shanahan -- a slender, friendly, brown-haired woman with a wry sense of humor, 21 years his junior, a painter, who was his assistant before they married -- tend a small herd of cattle. They're raising beefalo. They also grow alfalfa. Their house is simple, comfortable, a low two-story building with a big kitchen in front. Heizer fixed it up with hickory floors and fir beams. There's a metal shop, a dog kennel, a bunkhouse for workers to sleep in overnight, pens for cattle and farming equipment scattered along with half-finished sculptures in the yard.

Mary, although she's from Michigan, is a Western classic, soft-spoken and steady. She can birth a calf, make plum jam, change a truck tire, help oversee the complicated accounting on the project, ride herd over construction workers and ranch hands, format the digital images of the sculpture on the computer, reprogram electronics for the testy solar panels and in her spare time retreat to a studio behind Heizer's office and paint abstract pictures of an ethereal calm and Western light. She's in charge of the herd. The plan is to keep expanding it, she said. She and Heizer live pretty much like many small-time ranchers in their elective isolation. He's just the only guy around building the equivalent of the ancient pyramids in his front yard.

Lincoln County is Mormon country, where ranching families go back to the 1800's, people don't like the government telling them what to do and outsiders are regarded with suspicion. It took a while for locals to get to know Heizer, who stayed to himself. His prickliness was always partly calculated: it kept away unwanted busybodies and skeptics while burnishing his reputation as art's ornery outlaw. One evening I discovered Mary and Heizer laughing in the living room. She had come across some old letters that Robert Heizer, Michael's father, had written to various people. They were rants, she said. Like father, like son, I surmised.

When I initially visited Heizer, his pent-up frustration had made him extremely testy with what was then a laconic crew that had no experience constructing anything like ''City.'' The dozen or so men who now work with him -- several of whom trek hundreds of miles each week across the desert to accommodate Heizer's sudden decisions to shift several hundred thousand yards of dirt a few inches this way or that -- profess deep affection. He's a perfectionist; they shrug.

If Heizer, over the years, picked fights and lost allies, insisting, against common sense, he was the first, the only, the best artist around, clearly some people have stuck loyally by him. ''The people who really spend time with him love him,'' says Michael Govan, who, along with Lynne Cooke, Dia's longtime curator, visits maybe three or four times a year to check on the sculpture's progress. ''Never a nickel gets spent on anything that's not necessary,'' Govan adds. ''If Mike weren't managing the construction and we had used outside contractors, it would have cost double, I'm sure. He's honorable.''

The patrons Govan has enlisted -- the Lannan Foundation, the Riggio family and the Brown Foundation, the same Browns, by the way, of the defense contractor Kellogg Brown, which Heizer said was scheming to bump him off -- have stuck with a project that could cost nearly $25 million by the end. ''Mike does things how he wants,'' says J. Patrick Lannan Jr., the foundation's president. ''But it's going to be a monumental gift to culture for generations to come.'' Even Heizer is astonished: ''I told them they're playing with fire. I'm an artist. I don't work with drawings or models. This is a creative process. It's an act of faith on their part.'' When I traveled with Govan and Cooke to ''City'' last summer, Govan mentioned that he had reread Irving Stone's ''Agony and the Ecstasy.''

Later he dug up a passage from the book and e-mailed it to me:

''During all these months the Pope kept insisting that Michelangelo complete his ceiling quickly, quickly! Then one day Julius climbed the ladder unannounced.

'' 'When will it be finished?'

'' 'When I have satisfied myself.'

'' 'Satisfied yourself in what? You have already taken four full years.'

'' 'In the matter of art, Holy Father.'

'' 'It is my pleasure that you finish it in a matter of days.'

'' 'It will be done, Holy Father, when it will be done.' ''

eizer figures that when his own work is done, it will be there for anybody to see for centuries -- that he's building not for today but for the ages. It's a perspective he came by naturally. His father was collaborating on a book about the transport of massive stones in antiquity when he died in 1979, at 64. An obituary by colleagues from the Berkeley anthropology department described Robert Heizer as ''a lone, work-addicted man whose prodigious production required rigid self-discipline.''

Preserved in a file cabinet in Heizer's office is a page from The San Francisco Chronicle, dated Dec. 17, 1941. It's a picture of a slender, youngish Robert holding a box of 350-year-old rusty iron spikes that bound the oaken ribs of a sunken Spanish explorer ship. A 1946 newspaper cartoon of Robert is tucked in the same folder. He's depicted as a bespectacled Indiana Jones in tie and tweed jacket, brandishing a skull before a pile of bones. Some of the mounds in ''City,'' it occurs to me when I see the cartoon, are shaped like bones, and the stelae are a bit like the spikes.

In front of Heizer's house there is also a gigantic perforated sculpture resembling Swiss cheese. During the 1930's, Robert Heizer discovered tiny perforated horns, shamanist objects, left behind by hunter-gatherers who lived beside a prehistoric lake in Nevada.

Heizers have been in or around Nevada since the 1880's. Heizer's grandfather, Olaf, whose own father was chairman of Stanford's physiology department, became the chief geologist for California. He conducted geological surveys in Sumatra and helped map Tennessee, Washington and California. (A family story, Heizer says, is that one of Olaf's horses was used by Eadweard Muybridge for his stop-action photographs.) Ott F. Heizer, Heizer's other grandfather, ran the largest tungsten mining operation in Nevada.

Heizer recalls: ''I was taken out of school by my dad when I was 11 and lived in Mexico City, then later in Paris. I went with him to excavate in Bolivia and Peru. I never finished high school. I was a straight F student anyway. My father admitted to me later that he'd thought I would come to no good. It was tough for my parents because I hated school. I didn't have many friends. I wasn't a sports guy, a team player. The only sport I liked as I grew up was riding motorcycles, and you do that alone.''

At 19, he briefly took a few art classes in San Francisco and started making geometric paintings, then moved to New York in 1966. He supported himself working for slumlords, lugging a compressor over the cobblestone streets in SoHo, hooking up a spray gun and painting a six-story building top to bottom (white in the rooms, brown in the stairwells) in a day. ''It was a hand-to-mouth existence, but I met a lot of artists that way,'' he remembers. ''I met Walter De Maria painting his loft. If you wanted your loft painted for $60 in three hours, I was the guy to call.''

His switch to sculpture in 1967 grew partly out of the geometric paintings he had been doing, which were shaped canvases. These served almost as diagrams for the sculptures he would make in the earth. Much of that first outdoor work was fleeting, almost provisional, the opposite of ''City.'' In 1968, he was included in ''Earthworks,'' the influential group show at Virginia Dwan's gallery, and then in the Whitney Museum's painting annual in 1969, where his contribution wasn't strictly a painting but -- and this helped in a small way to redefine photography -- a huge photograph of a dye painting in the desert.

''When I met him he was 24,'' Dwan recently told me, ''a young 24, sensitive and vulnerable. He has changed over the years, as a result of defending himself from attacks, real or imagined. I was flummoxed by the work. I couldn't figure out this person who seemed to come from outer space, so I asked Walter De Maria, who said, 'Yes, Virginia, he's an original.' So I knew this was someone to be reckoned with.''

For ''Double Negative,'' in 1969, Dwan gave Heizer money, sight unseen. Working partly with Dwan's gallery director, John Weber, Heizer called her from Los Angeles one day to say it was done. A few years later, Dwan bought for Heizer the first parcels of property in Garden Valley, which he chose because the land was cheap, the soil and climate were right and not much of the rest of the valley could be homesteaded. ''When I visited at first Mike was living in a trailer and had a big young Mormon working for him,'' Dwan recalls. The road in and out was a weedy livestock trail, which sometimes got so bad in winter that Heizer would be locked in for months, seeing only a couple of sheep trailers and an occasional pickup truck. Fearful of being robbed, he surrounded the place with cyclone fencing and left only at night to get back before dawn.

Eventually he built himself a house out of cinder-block seconds. When Dwan finally saw the first Complexes, she cried. ''There he is in the middle of nowhere, without an art world to talk to, without a bar where he can go find friends for support, building something much larger than anyone has ever built, knowing he is going to be criticized for grandiosity, and yet going ahead and building what he must. That takes courage.''

Heizer still commuted to New York and Los Angeles, doing commissions, networking. He liked the dinners at Odeon, the parties at Chateau Marmont with movie stars -- until he decided he didn't. ''They're frivolous, I'm not,'' he told me. ''You don't control your own destiny in New York. It's fine if you trust the system and agree to move along the street in an orderly fashion. But you can't carry a weapon to protect yourself, even though it's more dangerous there than here. I find it castrating.''

It has been said that the early works Heizer and Smithson and De Maria and others did outdoors seemed like a fresh start, full of promise. Nancy Holt, the sculptor who was married to Smithson and who used to be close to Heizer, recalled traveling with the two men: ''To go outside into the landscape, that sense of liberation, just crossing the Hudson River, it was glorious. The mass media picked up quicker than the art media what was happening. This was when everyone was seeing the earth from outer space for the first time; 'ecology' was a new word. And when you look at the old photographs of us, you can see the joy in our faces.''

That was then. Should the rail go through, Heizer now claims, he'll dynamite ''City,'' never mind that he is building it to be indestructible for thousands of years, or that the people giving him money aren't likely to fork over another million or so dollars to destroy it and return the desert to its original condition. But with him, it has become all or nothing. Posterity isn't the next generation; it's a millennium. ''Double Negative'' was ''the most incredible sculpture I've ever seen or done,'' Heizer says. ''When I finished I laughed. I knew I'd done it. There was no precedent in the history of mankind.''

And he did not just add his sensibility to radical art movements of the 60's and 70's. As he sees it, he single-handedly, without influence from any other living artist, started a ''revolution.'' ''I'm self-entertaining,'' he declares in another fervid soliloquy. ''My dialogue is with myself.''

The sculptor Richard Serra, Heizer's contemporary, who was an acquaintance of Heizer's during the 60's and whose own work sometimes now rivals Heizer's in size, has said: ''Whoever tells you he dropped from heaven knows the opposite is equally true.'' Serra hasn't seen ''City,'' but he told me that he could imagine ''the work may empower people in ways that don't have to do with scale, in ways that we can't foresee. Heizer's stance is empowering because what artists do is individuate themselves, and this guy has done it to the nth degree.''


Of course, Heizer is not really on his own in the desert, as the nuclear train proves. There was also the MX during the 80's, he reminded me one morning. We were in his kitchen with Gracian Uhalde, his nearest neighbor, who has a ranch about 15 miles away and who works as a contractor on ''City.'' We sat before cups of strong espresso that Heizer likes to serve in glass tumblers at the table his father built for him years ago out of mining timbers scavenged from some abandoned mine shafts in the Golden Gate Range. The MX plan was to crisscross Garden and other nearby valleys -- Coal, Dry Lake, Delamar -- with rail tracks leading to silos for moving around and hiding missiles. (''Peacekeepers,'' as President Reagan called them.) Mary spread an MX map over the kitchen table. It showed the valleys as a checkerboard of rail lines. ''With the MX we won,'' Uhalde said, meaning the government decided not to go through with it. ''Now they're back at it.''

When I found Uhalde working at ''City'' later that same morning, he moseyed over, stomping his feet against the bitter cold, and slid a pinch of chewing tobacco into his cheek. In his early 50's, he has a broad, well-creased face, partly hidden behind a huge white handlebar mustache. His faded overalls matched his light blue eyes. I noticed part of his left pinkie was missing. A calf-roping accident, he told me. Heizer calls him a cowboy, a small-time rancher, which to Heizer is a big compliment.

''People are here because we want to be here, because we're attached to this place,'' Uhalde said. ''You don't come to Lincoln County to make it in the world.'' Like Heizer, he has become outspoken against the Yucca rail plan, which he fears will destroy his cattle's grazing land.

''My grandfather came from the French Pyrenees in the 1880's -- he was Basque -- and at first he emigrated to Idaho as a sheepherder. At some point he was asked to take a herd of about 2,000 to Carson City. He didn't speak a word of English. He told me he had been given a burro and a tent, and when a bear killed the burro, which he needed to carry the tent, he had to leave the tent behind. In return he got 400 sheep, and he settled in Ely, north of here, where there was a Basque community, a kind of subculture.''

Uhalde went on: ''Now we have about 10,000 acres altogether, between the ranch here and one up north, and we farm about 150 acres for hay and have a couple thousand sheep plus 600 cows. We've been around for 100 years. I think the government figured they'd have no resistance in Garden Valley because no one lived here.''

He handed me a palm-size square pamphlet titled ''Atomic Tests in Nevada,'' which was printed in March 1957 by the United States Atomic Energy Commission. Uhalde had been carrying it around lately. It showed cartoons of bowlegged cowboys on the range, watching mushroom clouds rise over the mountains. Allowing that ''fallout can be inconvenient,'' it provides helpful tips like opening windows to avoid shock waves, wearing sunglasses if staring at fireballs and brushing off clothing when covered with radioactive dust.

''I believe it was in 1962,'' Uhalde continued, ''that they did a hydrogen test that looked to me like snow falling in the mountains, the fallout was so bad. My dad never trusted the government. So he and Joe Fallini, his closest neighbor then, who lived 60 miles away, bought a Geiger counter. Deer started showing up with burn patches. Joe's cousin, a little boy, died of leukemia after that. There were dozens of test shots back in those days. We would try to figure out where the pink clouds were heading.

''Then in the late 80's my sister started having symptoms. They thought at first she was epileptic. She was in college at the time. By '92 she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Around then I got a tumor growing in my bladder. We both applied for downwinders' compensation. We got a total of $50,000.

''Now we say, just leave us alone and take your nuclear glow train through some other valley, along the highway or whatever. Just not here. Here you've got ranching -- small-time, old-style ranching, with the valley as a natural, reusable resource -- coexisting in peace with Mike's project, a cultural monument. The rail will kill all that.''

Heizer joined us in the freezing cold, and he piped in that there were even bigger threats from developers who want to tap the valley's water table. ''The train is just part of the problem,'' he said. ''Developers want to rape this place.'' Railroad Valley, just next to Garden Valley, has oil wells and a refinery in it, Uhalde added.

Is there oil in this valley? I asked.

''God, I hope not,'' he said.


At the end of 2003, the Department of Energy announced the proposed nuclear rail line to Yucca. The Bureau of Land Management, which controls public lands, meaning most of Garden Valley, issued what's called a temporary segregation to reserve the rail route. Next will come an Environmental Impact Statement. When I called to ask about Heizer's fate, Joe Davis, a spokesman for the Department of Energy, said simply that Dia had proposed various ''interesting alternatives we're considering.'' The department plans to issue a draft of what it calls the ''Rail Alignment Environmental Impact Statement'' by late spring or early summer. After that come hearings and another chance for public response before the final E.I.S. is issued and the fate of the rail line is decided sometime early in fiscal year 2006, Davis said.

''We have several laws to comply with,'' Gene Kolkman added. He is field manager for the B.L.M. in nearby Ely and oversees land withdrawal. If the rail line intersects free roaming area for wild horses, that will require modifications because the horses are protected by the Wild Horse and Burro Act. Ranchers must be compensated if the rail cuts off grazing lands and harms their livelihood. ''It's very seldom that a project comes in, especially a controversial project like the Yucca Mountain railroad line, and that it ends up being authorized as it was originally configured,'' Kolkman said.

A former Energy Department consultant on Yucca who is rooting for Heizer's plan to move the route to another valley (and so who asked not to be identified by name) nonetheless defended the selection of Yucca. No site is perfect, he said. But he acknowledged the problem of shipping the waste to Yucca. Spent fuel contains heavy metals, and they aren't called heavy for nothing. They require massive rail containers for transport. Cement for constructing the storage site must also be carried to it, tons of cement, on the scale of Hoover Dam. This is to be one of the largest public work projects ever. The shortest route would skirt Las Vegas, but the more politically feasible path -- and the one mapped by the Department of Energy -- goes from Caliente through the middle of nowhere, which is to say, right through Michael Heizer's front yard. Politics has trumped art, the consultant said, at least for the moment.


Heizer disappeared from the living room where he retreated after dinner one evening and retrieved an old, crumbling children's book. ''Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel,'' the 1939 classic by Virginia Lee Burton, is about Mike Mulligan and his red steam shovel, Mary Anne. They quit the big city, frustrated because steam shovels were succeeded by electric and diesel shovels, and they find work in the countryside. In faraway Popperville, they dig a cellar for a new town hall but, in their haste, they forget to leave a way out. They end up entombed in the cellar, Mike as the janitor, Mary Anne as the furnace. Heizer says he loved the story so much as a boy that his mother used to call him Mike Mulligan.

At the sculpture the next morning, while Heizer tinkered in his studio at the ranch, I spotted Jim Hicks hunched beside his truck with his coat collar turned up, cupping his hands against the freezing wind to light a cigarette and looking absently out from the rim above Pits 4 and 5, a nearly sheer drop of 50 feet. Hicks has the chapped lips and weathered face of a cowboy who has spent his life in the great Western outdoors. He has been working on ''City'' for years. He told me he makes the daily commute across the mountains and the desert from Ely, two hours each way, to work 10-hour shifts on this project. ''I can't sleep anyway, so why not drive?'' he said, laughing. Like the other men, he enjoys working for Heizer.

''I've worked on an airport runway and on highways,'' he said, ''where you've got big crews; the bosses flood the projects with equipment, nothing's complicated, you know beforehand the shape and the curve or whatever. This is completely different, 180 degrees.''

How so? I asked.

He nodded toward Beta Mound, an immense, quarter-mile-long construction of dirt with sloping sides, a flat top and a rounded nose. Hicks pointed to the nose. ''I used an 16-foot blade on the grader and most of the time, to get that angle just right on the mound, only about one foot of the blade was scraping the ground.'' He paused. ''I did that. Maybe you wouldn't notice, but somebody will. And that will last hundreds of years.''

When I came across Bill Harmon, who pours concrete for the curbs, he echoed what Hicks said about discovering, in the process of building ''City,'' an American can-do ideal, the fine art of heavy construction. Harmon is from Ruby Valley, 230 miles north, and during the week he lives in a trailer at Uhalde's ranch across the valley with six other guys working on the project, including his two sons, Clint and Bo.

''Mike is demanding,'' he said. ''But that's why things are as good as they are. I've worked in concrete all my life, and I've never had the time or money to do something to the best of my ability. Everything is hurry up. It's about making money. That's the American way. But here we have to produce something that has more to do with accuracy than I've ever been allowed even to imagine. This here is my chance to do the best I can. I travel over 400 miles a week just to be here. And my boys take pride in it, too. When it's finished, I'll be able to say, I had the chance to do that.''

I asked him what he thinks the sculpture is about. ''It's hard to explain,'' he added. ''At the beginning I was lost. I can read a set of blueprints, but I had no idea what we were building. I could not see why we were doing this. I got stuck on the practical stuff -- was this a stadium? Were we going to live in it? And then Mike wanted everything within a sixteenth of an inch, even on a concrete slab that was 78 feet by 240 feet.

''But gradually I got the idea. I can't say exactly what it means now, but I know it has to do with history and with making something that will last. I'm not an artist, but I can tell you I'm real proud to be working on something like this.''

Gracian Uhalde, whom I came across later, echoed that sentiment. ''It takes a while to get used to how Mike does things. But we admire him because he's not afraid to be different. And we're glad for him. It's not too many people in life get to see their dream come true, is it?''

I left at dawn the following day. Roaming antelope and coyote hunting for rabbits had made the dogs bark at night. Now a dozen cats huddled in the cold on the long wood table outside Heizer's kitchen window. Heizer had risen early to say goodbye. He told me he was sleepless, fretting about some of the things he'd said. He didn't want to hurt people's feelings. He wanted to give credit to people like Virginia Dwan, John Weber, Robert Scull and Richard Bellamy, who had supported him, and to Mary and his former wife, Barbara. So much of Heizer's hubris is bravado, I think -- his not having enough people around to vent to, to talk back to him. And in the end the work, which possesses him and drives him and other people crazy, is the only thing that will count -- if it isn't spoiled by the nuclear rail line or if Heizer doesn't blow it up first.

He walked me to my rental car and kicked the tires. ''They're crap,'' he said. ''They'll blow out if you hit a big rock, and then you'll be stuck.'' He reminded me to call when I reached the paved road, so that he'd know I got there.

With that, I drove off, tires crunching in the cold gravel, as the first rays of sun hit the snow on the mountains, casting the valley in a pearly gray pool of winter light.

Michael Kimmelman is the chief art critic for The New York Times.



-------- ohio

Safety of nuclear power plants remains emotional issue in nation's energy debate

By TOM HENRY
TOLEDO BLADE STAFF WRITER
February 6, 2005

http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050206/NEWS08/502060356/-1/NEWS

Nuclear power provides a fifth of America's electricity. It provides close to all of the power in France and Japan. China, now one of the most rapidly developing nations, has announced plans to build nuclear plants in its country at a pace of nearly one every two years for the next two decades.

But almost since the dawn of the nuclear age began with former President Dwight Eisenhower's famous "Atoms for Peace" speech on Dec. 8, 1953, nuclear power has been an emotional issue in the United States.

Why? Hasn't it established itself as a safe, clean, and affordable form of energy?

Yes and no.

President Bush is sold on it. In his State of the Union address, he said that "safe, clean nuclear power" remains a cornerstone of his national energy policy.

The remark drew a swift response.

Joe F. Colvin, Nuclear Energy Institute president and chief executive officer, said that nuclear is poised to help the United States meet a demand for electricity that is expected to rise 45 percent by 2025. The industry in recent years has been touting nuclear power as an emissions-free technology that deserves another look in light of efforts to address global warming.

But Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, said there is nothing safe or clean about nuclear power. While nuclear plants do not emit greenhouse gases that cause global warming, they leave behind tons of radioactive waste for future generations, he said.

The industry comes off as euphoric in its anticipation of the next generation of reactors. The new breed has been licensed elsewhere but is still under review in the United States. Advanced reactors are to have "cookie-cutter" designs for engineering consistency, someday making today's hodgepodge fleet of 103 plant designs a thing of the past.

But engineering aside, the nuclear industry has other issues: Money.

No new plants have been authorized for construction since the Three Mile Island Unit 2 partial meltdown near Harrisburg, Pa., in 1979. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission points out, though, that the stoppage wasn't ostensibly because of Three Mile Island. Wall Street pulled the plug on nuclear power before Three Mile Island because almost every plant had come in millions of dollars over budget. Just this past October, a U.S. Department of Energy official told members of the Society of Environmental Journalists that Wall Street is still so fickle about nuclear power that utility boards know their company stock could plummet if they even hint about financing new plants.

"American capitalism is brutally honest," mused Eric Epstein, chairman of a Harrisburg-area watchdog group called Three Mile Island Alert.

Though one of the industry's fiercest critics, Mr. Epstein told The Blade that eastern Pennsylvania wasn't emotionally conflicted about nuclear power before Three Mile Island. He said it was decidedly pro-nuclear, caught up in the era when the industry had promised future electricity that would be too cheap to meter.

Attitudes changed with Three Mile Island. Among the things that weren't immediately revealed was the presence of a potentially explosive hydrogen bubble in the plant's reactor. To this day, the amount of radiation that was vented to the atmosphere - and its effect on the population - remains hotly debated.

Many people think of Three Mile Island as America's only reactor meltdown. It's not. While it's the only one on U.S. soil that has involved a commercial-sized power plant, the first meltdown actually was a scarcely-noticed event in 1960 near New Stanton, Pa. It involved an experimental reactor at Westinghouse's Waltz Mills complex southeast of Pittsburgh.

David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who grew up in Pittsburgh and is the son of a retired Westinghouse employee who worked at Waltz Mills, acknowledged that nuclear power is a complex technology that "cannot really be fault-free."

Mr. Lochbaum followed his father into the nuclear industry by becoming a nuclear safety engineer.

He is among the skeptics who wonder if the industry has been given an unreasonable amount of latitude by the NRC and, consequently, been allowed to teeter on the edge far too long. They question if problems can be expected to rise as plants continue to age, costs rise, utilities keep trimming their staffs, and the generating capacity of each facility is increased.

In other words, at what point is doing more with less unacceptable to the NRC?

The agency has been grappling with that issue since at least 1982, when the concept of minimal staffing requirements was first taken up by its headquarters. Concerns were raised again in 1999 by U.S. Rep. John Dingell (D., Dearborn) and others, resulting in the current move to develop a rule for regulating worker fatigue under fitness-for-duty laws. A proposal is to be presented to the NRC's governing board by December.

Nuclear plants are typically licensed to operate 40 years. With no plants lined up to replace the existing fleet, utilities are seeking 20-year extensions for existing facilities.

NRC officials have said there's nothing magical about 40 years from an engineering standpoint: The length of time was almost arbitrarily chosen, based on the anticipated time required to pay off bonds that were used to build the facilities.

Mr. Lochbaum said his group's concern is that the NRC and the industry have a history of downplaying events, including those at FirstEnergy's Davis-Besse nuclear plant in Ottawa County and Detroit Edison Co.'s Fermi II nuclear plant in Monroe County. Both are along Lake Erie, each about 30 miles from Toledo.

At Davis-Besse, FirstEnergy admitted that a profit-ahead-of-safety mentality had become pervasive in the 1990s. The result: The plant's old reactor head nearly blew open in 2002, which would have allowed radioactive steam to form in containment.

The utility has acknowledged that too much work had either been neglected, done inadequately or postponed to save money. The plant was shut down for scheduled maintenance Jan. 17 for the first time since the NRC had authorized restart 10 months earlier. But operators apparently didn't compensate for sub-zero weather and freezing rain. Ice chunks formed inside the plant's massive cooling tower and fell, breaking a lot of fiberglass parts. That will require more costly repairs.

On the afternoon of Jan. 24, control room operators at Fermi II noticed the plant's radioactive containment area was experiencing unexplained leakage.

The NRC blew a sigh of relief because Detroit Edison assumed nothing and shut down Fermi II's reactor.

The most pressing question - whether the leak involved radioactive coolant that passes through the reactor, a symptom of a potential meltdown - was answered a few hours later, when chemistry tests on water samples pointed to a non-nuclear secondary cooling system. Fermi II restarted Wednesday night and was expected to be back at full power this weekend.

John Austerberry, Detroit Edison spokesman, said the safety record of America's nuclear plants "stands up very good against any major industry in the country."

Contact Tom Henry at: thenry@theblade.com or 419-724-6079.



-------- south carolina

S.C. touted for nuclear plant

Some politicians and businesspeople think the Savannah River Site is the ideal spot for America's next commercial nuclear reactor

By LAUREN MARKOE, Washington Bureau
Posted on Sun, Feb. 06, 2005
The State (SC)

http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/politics/10829619.htm

It's been nearly 30 years since construction began on an American commercial nuclear reactor.

But a growing number of powerful business people and politicians want the hiatus to end — in South Carolina, at the Savannah River Site, near Aiken.

Hurdles to building nuclear plants have lowered, they say. And the political and economic cost of fossil fuels has risen. The federal government is newly willing to defray the costs of new plants.

They also point to SRS — a hive of nuclear waste management and research for decades — as the ideal place for nuclear power's new American dawn.

“The winds have changed,” said U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett, R-S.C., whose district includes SRS and who hopes to hold a summit there this month on building a new nuclear reactor.

“We've been working with community leaders,” Barrett said. “We've been working with folks from Westinghouse, Duke Energy, Bechtel. I've even contacted Santee Cooper to ask, 'Are you interested in a new nuclear reactor?' Without fail, every one of them said, 'Absolutely, yes.'”

Dan Keuter, vice president of nuclear development for New Orleans-based Entergy Corp., visited Aiken last month to pitch the idea of a new commercial plant. Entergy is part of a consortium of energy-related companies — the NuStart Energy Development LLC partnership — that wants to take advantage of the warmer nuclear climate and begin planning a new plant. Construction could begin as early as 2010.

But if the will to build is strong and the environment for building is better than it has been in decades, getting a nuclear power plant financed, designed, licensed, constructed and running is still an arduous and drawn-out process.

“There may be a lot of momentum, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of money,” said David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer with the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, which does not take a position as to whether nuclear power should expand in the United States.

“I've been in this job eight years,” he said. “About every year the industry comes up with the 'renaissance of nuclear power.' Ask them how many groundbreakings there have been in eight years.”

But nuclear proponents say Republicans in the White House, the Department of Energy and Congress are going to help with those previously prohibitive costs. Improved nuclear technologies will create more efficient plants. And investors will take notice.

“We want to show Wall Street and the bankers that we can do this quickly instead of taking 12 to 15 years. We can do it in six years, at a reasonable cost,” said Mal McKibben, a former SRS employee and executive director of Citizens for Nuclear Technology Awareness. The proof, he said, comes from abroad.

“France and Japan have shown you can do it a whole lot cheaper.”

GAS HAS TRIPLED

Barrett in December flew to France to see for himself what a new nuclear power station looks like. He saw three — all of them technologically a generation ahead of the newest American plants.

“I look at my plant in Oconee, one of the best and most efficient in the United States. These new plants are smaller, more efficient, and they can use reprocessed fuel,” he said.

Therein lies a potential synergy.

SRS is owned by the Department of Energy and, during the Cold War, produced the key components for the nation's nuclear stockpile. It also has been designated by the DOE as a future site for the production of reprocessed fuel.

In a mixed oxide or MOX plant at SRS, weapons-grade plutonium would be transformed into nuclear fuel suitable for a commercial nuclear reactor.

For Entergy's Keuter, factors other than technology are driving interest in reactor construction.

“The main reason the industry hasn't been looking at nuclear is that natural gas was far less expensive,” he said. “Now, nuclear looks very competitive.”

Gas prices have tripled in the past several years, and the federal government estimates that Americans will pay 7 percent more for natural gas this winter than last.

Political instability in the Middle East, moreover, also has made nuclear fuel more attractive to American consumers. OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries — most of which are Middle Eastern — controls half of the world's gas reserves.

Those heralding a rebirth of the American nuclear industry also cite the federal government's renewed interest.

In his first term, President Bush set a goal for a new American nuclear plant by 2010. Most nuclear experts — whether they embrace or disdain nuclear power — say that goal is unrealistic.

Still, the federal government has made it easier to begin thinking about breaking ground on a new plant by streamlining the licensing process and offering to pay half the enormous costs of siting and licensing nuclear plants. Keuter estimates pre-construction costs at about $400 million. Construction amounts to about $2 billion.

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who represented Barrett's district when he was a House member, also is pushing a package of incentives for the nuclear industry in Congress. One would extend to nuclear plants the tax breaks enjoyed by other energy technologies that don't burn fossil fuel.

“We have stifled the growth of nuclear power through irrational policies,” he said.

Even a segment of the environmental community is open to changing some of those policies, he said. Worried about greenhouse gases produced by non-nuclear fuels, they are showing a new openness to nuclear power.

English scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock, whose writings are widely read in the United States, last summer wrote, “I am a Green, and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy.”

THE COMPETITION

In South Carolina, the NuStart Energy Development LLC partnership will not have to face tough opposition if it picks SRS for a new commercial plant.

Despite leaky nuclear storage tanks and threats that nuclear material from SRS is seeping toward the Savannah River, the nuclear campus has enjoyed strong support in and around Aiken since the 1950s.

In addition to Entergy, the second-largest nuclear generator in the nation, NuStart includes Westinghouse and General Electric — both of which build nuclear power plants. In September, Keuter said, NuStart aims to have narrowed its search for a site to two contenders.

One strong competitor for SRS is the Grand Gulf Nuclear Station in Port Gibson, Miss. It may be easier, NuStart reasons, to build a plant where one exists.

But SRS also has its attractions.

In addition to the community support and SRS's status as a national laboratory, the size of the campus — 300 square miles — will allow for two new plants and the resulting economies of scale, Keuter said.

Bob Guild is one South Carolinian who says South Carolina will be better off losing to the competition.

The Columbia environmental lawyer, and the Sierra Club's S.C. chapter chairman, said South Carolinians too quickly dismiss the threats to the environment and human health that SRS already poses.

“We still haven't figured out what to do with the inevitable nuclear waste stream,” said Guild, noting that Nevada's Yucca Mountain, the designated federal repository for high-level nuclear waste, may not be open by its 2010 target.

And though Guild acknowledges that the possibility of a major accident is low, its catastrophic nature would argue against a new nuclear plant.

“In Charlotte, N.C., they calculated early fatalities for a core meltdown at the (nearby) Catawba or Maguire plants in the tens of thousands,” Guild said. “There have been over 100,000 deaths attributable to the accident at Chernobyl. What is the cost of making a plan 'good enough'? That cost makes the technology uneconomical.”

And that is why, he said, the nuclear industry is pushing the willing Bush administration for hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies.

Geoff Fettus, a lawyer with The National Resources Defense Council, said the need for subsidies should tell South Carolinians something.

“There has not been a nuclear power plant built in the United States for about 30 years,” said Fettus, who stressed that his nonprofit does not consider itself pro- or anti-nuclear.

“That's not because we don't yet have a waste depository,” he said. “That's not because of public opposition to nuclear power or the risk of proliferation. It is because it is uneconomical. Commercial nuclear generation can't compete in the market place.”

Nuclear power proponents reply that though the startup costs may be high, once a nuclear power plant is up and running, nuclear fuel is cheaper to produce than competing energy sources. It works in Europe and Japan, they say.

Opponents counter that nuclear fans don't count the price — both environmental and economic — of storing waste safely for the thousands of years that it remains a threat.

JOBS AND MONEY

Guild proposes an alternative: Sink the money the federal government wants to invest in nuclear energy into energy conservation programs. Make it easier for people to insulate their homes, use public transportation and buy hydroelectric cars. Make it more expensive for them to drive gas-guzzlers.

Must Americans, he asks, who make up less than 5 percent of the Earth's population, use 25 percent of its energy?

If Barrett's Westminster home is typical, then conservation isn't on the American agenda.

“Every light is always on; the computer's always on; the coffee maker is always going,” the congressman said. “We are not going to change our lifestyle.”

Like many lawmakers who support nuclear energy, Barrett has collected generous campaign contributions from individuals and companies with nuclear interests.

Duke Energy's political action committee, for example, gave him $4,500 before his most recent election, according to the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics. BNFL Inc.'s PAC — a subsidiary of British Nuclear Fuels — gave him $2,000.

But Barrett, in his second term in the House, said support from the nuclear industry followed his principles, not vice versa. “I grew up around nuclear power. I've been a proponent and enthusiast long before I became a politician.”

And from an employment perspective, it makes perfect sense to expand SRS's mission, he said.

SRS has lost jobs steadily since the height of the Cold War. A decade ago, 25,000 people worked there. Now, 13,000 do. Last year, SRS announced that it would shed another 2,000 jobs over the next two years.

Keuter said a new nuclear plant would require as many as 1,000 people to run it and 3,000 people to build it.

Those jobs should go to SRS, said Barrett. “We do things right at SRS.”

With the next American commercial nuclear reactor, he said, South Carolina can be “a shining star for the nation.”

Reach Markoe at (202) 383-6023 or lmarkoe@krwashington.com.


-------- MILITARY 


-------- china

EU, U.S., China and trade

Letters to the Editor, February 06, 2005 Washington Times

http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20050205-101559-8979r.htm

    William Hawkins, in his excellent Commentary column on the European Union's plans to lift its arms embargo on China ("Helping Europe arm China?" Thursday), clearly delineates how the continued security of Asia and U.S. strategic interests are being compromised by the EU's quest for profits.

    By lifting the embargo, the European Union would not only define itself as merely a trading association that seeks profit at every opportunity without regard to human cost, but also implicitly pardon China's leadership for its atrocious murders during the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.

    The ban, originally imposed to show the EU's condemnation of the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, must remain today as a check on China's ambitions in Asia and an unambiguous reminder that tyrannical oppression of democracy will not be tolerated or condoned.

    This past week, the House overwhelmingly voted in favor of a resolution titled "Urging the European Union to maintain its arms embargo on the People's Republic of China."

    A good first step. But, as Mr. Hawkins writes, "talk is not enough." The United States needs to put into law that foreign persons, EU companies and shipping carriers that sell to China will not get off scot-free. Why? Because the EU's removing of the embargo would have strategic ramifications for decades for all of China's peace-loving neighbors, especially Taiwan.

    China already has 500 to 600 missiles aimed at Taiwan, and the lifting of the ban would only facilitate Chinese efforts to prepare for military action against Taiwan.

    Moreover, one day, these European arms may be used against U.S. armed forces, should conflict break out in the region.

    The United States must therefore be resolute in its actions and unwavering in its disapproval of the EU's perilous course of action. Only then will it provide for the security for all living under China's ominous shadow in East Asia today, as well as for the security of the United States.

    MING-CHI WU
    President, Formosan Association for Public Affairs
    Washington


-------- iraq

CIA Studies Provide Glimpse of Insurgents in Iraq
Analysis Describes Groups of Fighters, Gives Clearer Picture of Their Operations

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 6, 2005; Page A19

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1508-2005Feb5.html

As reflected in CIA classified studies last month, U.S. military and intelligence officials are still trying to understand the various Iraqi insurgency groups that they expect will continue to fight, even after last week's election.

The CIA studies included a detailed look at an at-large Iraqi fighter who is motivated to fight because the United States is occupying his country, a senior intelligence official said. 

 "This person, with a tribal background, has a mix of motives including a family grievance, someone was hurt by coalition forces," said the official, who asked not to be identified because the reports are still classified. "There is also [in this Iraqi insurgent] religion and nationalism that results in a view he must fight on to get non-Muslims out of Muslim territory."

In looking in depth at one insurgent, the agency was able to describe the group to which the fighter belongs and how it operates, the official said.

The CIA last month also updated its analysis of the breadth of the Iraqi insurgency, including Iraqis that are not only former Baathists, "dead enders," but also newly radicalized Sunni Iraqis, nationalists offended by the occupying force and others disenchanted by the economic turmoil and destruction caused by the fighting.

Foreign fighters associated with Abu Musab Zarqawi and his al Qaeda-affiliated insurgent group, who once were seen as the prime opponents along with tens of thousands of criminals freed by Saddam Hussein before the war began in 2003, are now described as lesser elements but still a source of danger.

Michael Scheuer, the former CIA analyst who ran the agency's Osama bin Laden section in the 1990s, said yesterday, "The administration doesn't seem to have thought through the continuing danger from foreign fighters."

He said countries such as Saudi Arabia and Algeria in the 1980s released imprisoned Islamic radicals to go fight the Soviets in Afghanistan "hoping they would die in the process." Now, Scheuer said, "Iraq is a more attractive fight for those radicals, and the Saudis currently want to unload the firebrands they have at home." The Sunni government in Riyadh is also unhappy with the prospect of a Shiite state on the border, he added, "so they think it is a great thing for their people to do."

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said last week on CNN's "Larry King Live" that the insurgency "has clearly been . . . more intense than had been anticipated." He said that "in many instances, the ones . . . that are fomenting this insurgency" were members of the Sunni Iraqi army division in the north that were not captured or killed because U.S. troops could not invade through Turkey.

But Rumsfeld added that the future level of fighting could depend on this question: "To what extent do Iran and Syria not cooperate and make the insurgency worse?"

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who disclosed the existence of the CIA reports during testimony last Thursday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, could not say how many insurgents there are.

"We know the elements of the threat very well," Myers said, but "to come up with accurate estimates is just very, very difficult in this type of insurgency."

Members, however, focused on the numbers because, as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) put it: "I don't know how you defeat an insurgency unless you have some handle on the number of people that you are facing."

Sen. Carl M. Levin (Mich.), ranking Democrat on the panel, said Gen. George W. Casey Jr., head of the Multinational Force Iraq, reported during a closed hearing two weeks ago that the coalition forces killed or captured 15,000 suspected insurgents last year, a number far larger than earlier U.S. estimates of 6,000 to 9,000.

McCain raised the question of the reliability of any figures the administration offered. "We went from a few dead enders to killing or capturing 15,000 in the period of a year, and that's why there's a certain credibility problem here as to what the size and nature of the enemy we face."

Myers said that there are classified estimates, but that it is difficult to get accurate numbers because "there are so many fence-sitters." 


-------- us

Bible Belters in the Sunni Triangle

Tehran Times Opinion Column, Feb. 6, 2005 By Hamid Golpira

http://www.mehrnews.ir/en/NewsDetail.aspx?NewsID=155310

TEHRAN, Feb. 5 (MNA) -- Who are the U.S. soldiers occupying Iraq?

Well, most of them are not ideological and they are not the imperialist storm troopers or false Christian crusaders that they are made out to be, although some of their commanders and many Pentagon officials are.

Most of the U.S. soldiers in Iraq are teenagers or in their early twenties. Many joined the army because they were unemployed. Some joined because they wanted to learn a skill in the military or to finance their university studies through the GI Bill.

A significant number of them enlisted before the 9/11 events, which the U.S. imperialists used as a pretext for the invasion of Afghanistan and the so-called war on terrorism. They did not expect to find themselves in the middle of a war.

Others are members of the U.S. National Guard and reserve forces. These troops are only sent to war zones when there is a shortage of troops, as is the case today. Thus, these people also did not expect to be in a war.

Compared to the time of the Vietnam War, the only major difference is the fact that there is no conscription. However, in the absence of the draft, many of these young men were forced into the military for economic reasons.

At the end of the Vietnam War, half of the U.S. citizens drafted into the army refused to serve. Thousands took asylum in Canada, Sweden, and other countries.

As the war dragged on, U.S. soldiers in Vietnam began to disobey orders, having realized that they were regarded as cannon fodder and that there was no clear game plan, besides filling the coffers of the military-industrial complex. Some defected to the North Vietnamese side. Others began fragging their commanding officers to avoid being sent on dangerous and seemingly meaningless missions. Fragging is a word coined by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam which means killing the commanding officer, usually with a fragmentation grenade.

Fragging has not become common, but many of the other things that happened in Vietnam are now happening in Iraq.

Soldiers are refusing to obey orders. They are complaining about the lack of armor on their vehicles. And they surely took note of U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's flippant remarks in response to this complaint, in which he said, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had.”

U.S. troops are definitely beginning to think the Pentagon regards them as cannon fodder. Morale is low. And they know that they are being exposed to depleted uranium dust, which many experts believe is the cause of Persian Gulf War syndrome. Unfortunately, Pentagon officials order the use of weapons of mass destruction like depleted uranium as they see fit and view the death and illness of U.S. troops as collateral damage.

According to some reports, at least 10 percent of the U.S. occupying troops are not even U.S citizens. They also enlisted for economic reasons, having been told that they would be given green cards if they survived the war. They are the new U.S. foreign legion.

Although there is no conscription, there is a sort of backdoor draft in which soldiers whose tour of duty is over are being forced to stay in the military. Obviously, these soldiers are not happy about being forced to stay in harm's way longer than necessary.

A large segment of these soldiers are from the inner city ghettoes of the United States and only joined the military because they saw it as a way out of poverty. Others are from the Bible Belt, an area in the U.S. South and Midwest that is a bastion of conservative Christian fundamentalism.

Many young people from the Bible Belt also joined the military to escape poverty or to fund their university studies. Some of them even joined the military to get away from Christian fundamentalists.

Ironically, these same youths who sought to flee a stiff fundamentalist interpretation of Christianity are now being killed by Al-Qaeda supporters with a stiff fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. If these young men from the Bible Belt know about the Najaf seminary, they probably prefer the fundamentalism of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and his followers, who are offering U.S troops a face-saving way to withdraw from Iraq.

The majority of low-ranking U.S. soldiers are just scared kids with M-16s in their hands, hoping that they get out of Iraq alive. These Bible Belters in the Sunni Triangle are wishing that they were somewhere else, anywhere else, even in the relative safety of Karbala.


-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE


-------- police

FBI Pushes to Expand Domain Into CIA's Intelligence Gathering
Common Ground Not Yet Reached on Agency Roles in U.S.

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 6, 2005; Page A10

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1496-2005Feb5?language=printer

The FBI is dramatically expanding its intelligence role in the United States and is seeking control over the CIA's domestic activities, according to current and former intelligence and law enforcement officials.

At stake is control over a pool of U.S.-based intelligence assets and information that has been invaluable in the past to understanding the intentions of foreign nations and groups.

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III is pushing to rewrite the rules under which the CIA and FBI have operated domestically for decades and to assert what he views as the FBI's proper authority over all domestic intelligence gathering as part of a vast, but slow-going, restructuring of the bureau to focus on counterterrorism.

But for decades, the CIA has been allowed under U.S. law to recruit foreign officials, business executives and students living in or visiting the United States to spy for the agency when they return home. CIA case officers working in the National Resources Division, which has stations in major U.S. cities, routinely debrief, on a voluntary basis, U.S. business executives and others who work overseas.

The CIA is generally viewed across the U.S. intelligence community as more experienced and skilled at handling foreign assets, who eventually return abroad, where the CIA leads in intelligence gathering and operations.

Under an executive order signed in 1981, the CIA is prohibited from spying on or conducting operations against U.S. citizens in the United States.

FBI and CIA counterterrorism and counterintelligence officials have been in heated debates the past few weeks, trying to hash out a new "memorandum of understanding" on domestic intelligence gathering. Mueller had endorsed a draft memo in December that was rejected by CIA Director Porter J. Goss as too far-reaching. The meetings were first reported by the Los Angeles Times.

So far, the two sides, which are officially portraying the discussions as an effort to better coordinate domestic intelligence, have made little progress, said intelligence and law enforcement officials. Mueller and Goss plan to meet on the matter soon, administration officials said.

"We're trying to put some coordinated structure to it so we don't trip over each other or expose one another's assets," one FBI official said.

"We believe that neither agency should have complete responsibility for domestic collection," a CIA official said. "Instead, responsibility should be divided in a way that takes advantage of each agencies' strengths."

In the past year, the CIA and FBI have sought to vastly expand the use of multinational corporations to recruit Americans willing to share information from their trips abroad. The CIA is also making a big push to embed its spies in U.S. companies doing business overseas, but only with a company's knowledge and permission.

The agencies are seeking to deepen their outreach to U.S. research and academic institutes, and subcontractors for major government contracts.

The FBI has also created intelligence squads for each of its 56 field offices around the country, a departure from the days when such squads were found only in larger offices such as Los Angeles, New York and Washington. These squads find and cultivate Americans traveling overseas. The bureau has begun, as well, to beef up its agents in U.S. embassies to collect intelligence from assets it established in the United States.

Mueller also wants to put the FBI in charge of disseminating all intelligence reports from sources -- foreigners or U.S. citizens -- living in the United States. Currently, the agency that collects such information is responsible for disseminating it. FBI officials say putting the bureau in charge would avoid duplication and confusion. CIA and other intelligence officials note that the FBI is still frequently behind in disseminating its reports, and several months ago had a backlog of more than 100 terrorism reports it had not distributed. Many of those reports are not outdated.

Former and current CIA officers and other intelligence officials said the FBI, which is still struggling to set up an intelligence-gathering department, is not ready to assume the lead role in domestic intelligence and is inexperienced in handling foreign assets whose real value is their work overseas, where the CIA runs intelligence gathering.

Taking control of the foreign intelligence-gathering role in the United States "is a bit ambitious for an agency that is just now building its intelligence capacity," said an administration official familiar with the discussions. "The CIA has been collecting foreign intelligence for over 50 years and has the skills, ability and reserves to do the job."

The FBI argues that existing statutes have long given the FBI the ability to conduct such operations. "We always had that ability; it's whether we exercised it or not. . . . We now have a much more robust counterintelligence program, and we don't want to lose opportunities to obtain information."

One FBI official said the bureau is now interested in tackling more responsibilities because it is rebuilding its intelligence program. The FBI now has a senior executive overseeing intelligence and analysis operations and is struggling to attract a trained cadre of analysts.

For the first time last year, the FBI implemented a comprehensive set of rules for its foreign counterintelligence program, following the launch of similar guidelines for its counterterrorism program in late 2003, officials said last week.

FBI officials cited examples of possible new bureau activities that include the recruitment of foreign nationals working at embassies and the United Nations, interviews of business executives with extensive trade overseas, and more intensive monitoring of suspected dual-use technologies sought by the Chinese military and other powers, the official said.

All of these activities are what the CIA's National Resources Division has been doing for decades.

Staff writer Dan Eggen contributed to this report. 


-------- OTHER



<a name="environment"></a>

-------- environment

Apocalypse now: how mankind is sleepwalking to the end of the Earth

Floods, storms and droughts. Melting Arctic ice, shrinking glaciers, oceans turning to acid. The world's top scientists warned last week that dangerous climate change is taking place today, not the day after tomorrow. You don't believe it? Then, says Geoffrey Lean, read this...

06 February 2005 UK Independent

http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=608209&host=3&dir=507

Future historians, looking back from a much hotter and less hospitable world, are likely to play special attention to the first few weeks of 2005. As they puzzle over how a whole generation could have sleepwalked into disaster - destroying the climate that has allowed human civilisation to flourish over the past 11,000 years - they may well identify the past weeks as the time when the last alarms sounded.

Last week, 200 of the world's leading climate scientists - meeting at Tony Blair's request at the Met Office's new headquarters at Exeter - issued the most urgent warning to date that dangerous climate change is taking place, and that time is running out.

Next week the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty that tries to control global warming, comes into force after a seven-year delay. But it is clear that the protocol does not go nearly far enough.

The alarms have been going off since the beginning of one of the warmest Januaries on record. First, Dr Rajendra Pachauri - chairman of the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - told a UN conference in Mauritius that the pollution which causes global warming has reached "dangerous" levels.

Then the biggest-ever study of climate change, based at Oxford University, reported that it could prove to be twice as catastrophic as the IPCC's worst predictions. And an international task force - also reporting to Tony Blair, and co-chaired by his close ally, Stephen Byers - concluded that we could reach "the point of no return" in a decade.

Finally, the UK head of Shell, Lord Oxburgh, took time out - just before his company reported record profits mainly achieved by selling oil, one of the main causes of the problem - to warn that unless governments take urgent action there "will be a disaster".

But it was last week at the Met Office's futuristic glass headquarters, incongruously set in a dreary industrial estate on the outskirts of Exeter, that it all came together. The conference had been called by the Prime Minister to advise him on how to "avoid dangerous climate change". He needed help in persuading the world to prioritise the issue this year during Britain's presidencies of the EU and the G8 group of economic powers.

The conference opened with the Secretary of State for the Environment, Margaret Beckett, warning that "a significant impact" from global warming "is already inevitable". It continued with presentations from top scientists and economists from every continent. These showed that some dangerous climate change was already taking place and that catastrophic events once thought highly improbable were now seen as likely (see panel). Avoiding the worst was technically simple and economically cheap, they said, provided that governments could be persuaded to take immediate action.

About halfway through I realised that I had been here before. In the summer of 1986 the world's leading nuclear experts gathered in Vienna for an inquest into the accident at Chernobyl. The head of the Russian delegation showed a film shot from a helicopter, and we suddenly found ourselves gazing down on the red-hot exposed reactor core.

It was all, of course, much less dramatic at Exeter. But as paper followed learned paper, once again a group of world authorities were staring at a crisis they had devoted their lives to trying to avoid.

I am willing to bet there were few in the room who did not sense their children or grandchildren standing invisibly at their shoulders. The conference formally concluded that climate change was "already occurring" and that "in many cases the risks are more serious than previously thought". But the cautious scientific language scarcely does justice to the sense of the meeting.

We learned that glaciers are shrinking around the world. Arctic sea ice has lost almost half its thickness in recent decades. Natural disasters are increasing rapidly around the world. Those caused by the weather - such as droughts, storms, and floods - are rising three times faster than those - such as earthquakes - that are not.

We learned that bird populations in the North Sea collapsed last year, after the sand eels on which they feed left its warmer waters - and how the number of scientific papers recording changes in ecosystems due to global warming has escalated from 14 to more than a thousand in five years.

Worse, leading scientists warned of catastrophic changes that once they had dismissed as "improbable". The meeting was particularly alarmed by powerful evidence, first reported in The Independent on Sunday last July, that the oceans are slowly turning acid, threatening all marine life (see panel).

Professor Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, presented new evidence that the West Antarctic ice sheet is beginning to melt, threatening eventually to raise sea levels by 15ft: 90 per cent of the world's people live near current sea levels. Recalling that the IPCC's last report had called Antarctica "a slumbering giant", he said: "I would say that this is now an awakened giant."

Professor Mike Schlesinger, of the University of Illinois, reported that the shutdown of the Gulf Stream, once seen as a "low probability event", was now 45 per cent likely this century, and 70 per cent probable by 2200. If it comes sooner rather than later it will be catastrophic for Britain and northern Europe, giving us a climate like Labrador (which shares our latitude) even as the rest of the world heats up: if it comes later it could be beneficial, moderating the worst of the warming.

The experts at Exeter were virtually unanimous about the danger, mirroring the attitude of the climate science community as a whole: humanity is to blame. There were a few sceptics at Exeter, including Andrei Illarionov, an adviser to Russia's President Putin, who last year called the Kyoto Protocol "an interstate Auschwitz". But in truth it is much easier to find sceptics among media pundits in London or neo-cons in Washington than among climate scientists. Even the few contrarian climatalogists publish little research to support their views, concentrating on questioning the work of others.

Now a new scientific consensus is emerging - that the warming must be kept below an average increase of two degrees centigrade if catastrophe is to be avoided. This almost certainly involves keeping concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main cause of climate change, below 400 parts per million.

Unfortunately we are almost there, with concentrations exceeding 370ppm and rising, but experts at the conference concluded that we could go briefly above the danger level so long as we brought it down rapidly afterwards. They added that this would involve the world reducing emissions by 50 per cent by 2050 - and rich countries cutting theirs by 30 per cent by 2020.

Economists stressed there is little time for delay. If action is put off for a decade, it will need to be twice as radical; if it has to wait 20 years, it will cost between three and seven times as much.

The good news is that it can be done with existing technology, by cutting energy waste, expanding the use of renewable sources, growing trees and crops (which remove carbon dioxide from the air) to turn into fuel, capturing the gas before it is released from power stations, and - maybe - using more nuclear energy.

The better news is that it would not cost much: one estimate suggested the cost would be about 1 per cent of Europe's GNP spread over 20 years; another suggested it meant postponing an expected fivefold increase in world wealth by just two years. Many experts believe combatting global warming would increase prosperity, by bringing in new technologies.

The big question is whether governments will act. President Bush's opposition to international action remains the greatest obstacle. Tony Blair, by almost universal agreement, remains the leader with the best chance of persuading him to change his mind.

But so far the Prime Minister has been more influenced by the President than the other way round. He appears to be moving away from fighting for the pollution reductions needed in favour of agreeing on a vague pledge to bring in new technologies sometime in the future.

By then it will be too late. And our children and grandchildren will wonder - as we do in surveying, for example, the drift into the First World War - "how on earth could they be so blind?"

WATER WARS

What could happen? Wars break out over diminishing water resources as populations grow and rains fail.

How would this come about? Over 25 per cent more people than at present are expected to live in countries where water is scarce in the future, and global warming will make it worse.

How likely is it? Former UN chief Boutros Boutros-Ghali has long said that the next Middle East war will be fought for water, not oil.

DISAPPEARING NATIONS

What could happen? Low-lying island such as the Maldives and Tuvalu - with highest points only a few feet above sea-level - will disappear off the face of the Earth.

How would this come about? As the world heats up, sea levels are rising, partly because glaciers are melting, and partly because the water in the oceans expands as it gets warmer.

How likely is it? Inevitable. Even if global warming stopped today, the seas would continue to rise for centuries. Some small islands have already sunk for ever. A year ago, Tuvalu was briefly submerged.

FLOODING

What could happen? London, New York, Tokyo, Bombay, many other cities and vast areas of countries from Britain to Bangladesh disappear under tens of feet of water, as the seas rise dramatically.

How would this come about? Ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica melt. The Greenland ice sheet would raise sea levels by more than 20ft, the West Antarctic ice sheet by another 15ft.

How likely is it? Scientists used to think it unlikely, but this year reported that the melting of both ice caps had begun. It will take hundreds of years, however, for the seas to rise that much.

UNINHABITABLE EARTH

What could happen? Global warming escalates to the point where the world's whole climate abruptly switches, turning it permanently into a much hotter and less hospitable planet.

How would this come about? A process involving "positive feedback" causes the warming to fuel itself, until it reaches a point that finally tips the climate pattern over.

How likely is it? Abrupt flips have happened in the prehistoric past. Scientists believe this is unlikely, at least in the foreseeable future, but increasingly they are refusing to rule it out.

RAINFOREST FIRES

What could happen? Famously wet tropical forests, such as those in the Amazon, go up in flames, destroying the world's richest wildlife habitats and releasing vast amounts of carbon dioxide to speed global warming.

How would this come about? Britain's Met Office predicted in 1999 that much of the Amazon will dry out and die within 50 years, making it ready for sparks - from humans or lightning - to set it ablaze.

How likely is it? Very, if the predictions turn out to be right. Already there have been massive forest fires in Borneo and Amazonia, casting palls of highly polluting smoke over vast areas.

THE BIG FREEZE

What could happen? Britain and northern Europe get much colder because the Gulf Stream, which provides as much heat as the sun in winter, fails.

How would this come about? Melting polar ice sends fresh water into the North Atlantic. The less salty water fails to generate the underwater current which the Gulf Stream needs.

How likely is it? About

evens for a Gulf Steam failure this century, said scientists last week.

STARVATION

What could happen? Food production collapses in Africa, for example, as rainfall dries up and droughts increase. As farmland turns to desert, people flee in their millions in search of food.

How would this come about? Rainfall is expected to decrease by up to 60 per cent in winter and 30 per cent in summer in southern Africa this century. By some estimates, Zambia could lose almost all its farms.

How likely is it? Pretty likely unless the world tackles both global warming and Africa's decline. Scientists agree that droughts will increase in a warmer world.

ACID OCEANS

What could happen? The seas will gradually turn more and more acid. Coral reefs, shellfish and plankton, on which all life depends, will die off. Much of the life of the oceans will become extinct.

How would this come about? The oceans have absorbed half the carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming, so far emitted by humanity. This forms dilute carbonic acid, which attacks corals and shells.

How likely is it? It is already starting. Scientists warn that the chemistry of the oceans is changing in ways unprecedented for 20 million years. Some predict that the world's coral reefs will die within 35 years.

DISEASE

What could happen? Malaria - which kills two million people worldwide every year - reaches Britain with foreign travellers, gets picked up by British mosquitos and becomes endemic in the warmer climate.

How would this come about? Four of our 40 mosquito species can carry the disease, and hundreds of travellers return with it annually. The insects breed faster, and feed more, in warmer temperatures.

How likely is it? A Department of Health study has suggested it may happen by 2050: the Environment Agency has mentioned 2020. Some experts say it is miraculous that it has not happened already.

HURRICANES

What could happen? Hurricanes, typhoons and violent storms proliferate, grow even fiercer, and hit new areas. Last September's repeated battering of Florida and the Caribbean may be just a foretaste of what is to come, say scientists.

How would this come about? The storms gather their energy from warm seas, and so, as oceans heat up, fiercer ones occur and threaten areas where at present the seas are too cool for such weather.

How likely is it? Scientists are divided over whether storms will get more frequent and whether the process has already begun.