NucNews - April 3, 2005 -------- NUCLEAR -------- accidents and safety French Authorities Didn't Disclose Extent of Chernobyl Radiation - Experts From: "Michael Kerjman" Date: Sun Apr 3, 2005 10:56pm BBC Monitoring International Reports, March 27, 2005 Source: Radio France Internationale, Paris, in French 1600 gmt 27 Mar 05 (Presenter) Almost 20 years after the Chernobyl (nuclear) disaster, a report says the French authorities lied by omission at the time. In 1986 the authorities were aware of the degree of radioactivity of the Chernobyl cloud but didn't say everything on this issue. These are the first conclusions of an experts' report ordered by the judge in charge of the investigation in France. These pieces of information, which were revealed yesterday, do not surprise Roland Desbordes, the president of the Criirad, the Commission for Research and Independent Information on Radioactivity. The Criirad brought a civil action in 2001. It accuses the authorities of not having reacted sufficiently: (Desbordes) Minimum measures, which were taken in all neighbouring countries, were not taken. On the contrary, people were encouraged not to change their habits, while in neighbouring countries some countermeasures were taken, that is to say in relation to children. Some products were withdrawn from consumption. Perhaps this wasn't satisfactory, perhaps this wasn't completely satisfactory, but in any case people tried, governments tried to do things. People here did exactly the opposite. But today what is most distressing today for us is that, from the point of view of the authorities, people continue to say that things were managed well in 1986, that is to say panic was avoided. And if tomorrow there were to be another accident, things would be reproduced and done again in exactly the same manner. For us this is obviously absolutely not satisfactory. For the time being in France people have learnt no lessons from Chernobyl, except that it would be necessary to communicate better, which is indeed a minimum requirement, but it's not sufficient. (Presenter) That was Roland Desbordes, the president of the Criirad, the Commission for Research and Independent Information on Radioactivity. His remarks were recorded by Marie-Morgane Le Moal (name phonetic)-by RFiles. -------- britain Fears over plans to dump nuclear waste in Scotland By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor 03 April 2005 UK Herald http://www.sundayherald.com/48827 RADIOACTIVE waste could end up being dumped at 30 nuclear sites in the UK, under plans to be unveiled by government advisers this week. In Scotland this would mean burying large volumes of low-level waste at six places: Hunterston in Ayrshire, Faslane near Helensburgh, Torness in East Lothian, Rosyth in Fife, Dounreay in Caithness and Chapelcross in Dumfries and Galloway. The plans would see more dangerous waste being disposed of in holes deep underground at one or more geologically suitable sites in the UK. Before that, it could be put in “interim storage” above or just below the ground. The recommendations are to be published tomorrow by the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM), set up by the government in 2003 to try and find a way to deal with the huge variety of waste created by the nuclear power and weapons industries over the last 50 years. According to CoRWM’s estimates, there will be a total of 470,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste to get rid of, including plutonium, uranium and high-level fission products. Some of these wastes remain radioactive for just a few years, others for hundreds of thousands of years. This total doesn’t include the 18 million cubic metres of soil and concrete thought to be contaminated with low-level radioactivity from leaks and spills at nuclear sites. There are an estimated 81,000 cubic metres of contaminated soil at the Hunterston A reactor site in Ayrshire. CoRWM’s proposal is for some of the short-lived waste to be buried in shallow pits on the nuclear sites where it was created. This would avoid the need to transport the waste around the country. “It would mean that some radioactive waste would stay put,” CoRW’s chairman, Gordon MacKerron said. “But only if we were sure that the risks to future generations were negligible.” For longer-lived waste, CoRWM thinks the best solution is some kind of “deep disposal”. One option is to put the waste permanently in an underground chamber between 300 metres and two kilometres deep where the surrounding rocks would reduce the risk of leakage. A second option is to put the waste down deep holes from which it could be retrieved if something went wrong. Before either of these options are implemented, waste could also carry on being stored in tanks near the ground’s surface for some years. CoRWM is not making any suggestions as to where these deep disposal sites might be. An official shortlist from the 1990s of about a dozen sites – many of which are suspected of being in Scotland – has been kept secret by the government. In a consultation document to be released tomorrow, CoRWM will for the first time be ruling out 11 ways that have been seriously suggested for disposing of radioactive waste. These include blasting it into space, injecting it into rock, freezing it in polar ice and dumping it at sea. “Everyone has played their part in helping us draw up our final shortlist. Now we can start to focus on the best options and see which will work and which won’t,” said MacKerron. CoRWM has had difficulties drawing up its recommendations because two of its members are suspended pending an investigation being carried out by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The committee has also been attacked by some experts for wasting time trying to establish the obvious. But its role has been defended by UK environment minister, Elliot Morley. “The CoRWM programme will ensure that there is a complete decision-making audit trail. We are ultimately talking of solutions that will cost billions of pounds and decades to implement. Taking a little time now to get the decision right represents time and money well spent.” CoRWM is aiming to submit its final report to ministers in July 2006. The newly formed government agency which will oversee the £50 billion job of cleaning up Britain’s nuclear plants, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, came into existence on Friday. -------- iran Top Iranian deputy challenges US to join nuclear negotiations TEHRAN (AFP) Apr 03, 2005 http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050403125407.clpkf8v7.html A prominent Iranian MP on Sunday challenged arch enemy the United States to join the European Union in negotiations on the Islamic republic's nuclear programme, saying Tehran would be ready to "examine" Washington's participation. "The United States should either accept the results of the negotiations with the Europeans or otherwise, if they do not accept the position of their European allies, they should come to the negotiating table," Mahmoud Mohammadi told AFP. Mohammadi, a former senior diplomat and now deputy head of the conservative-controlled Iranian parliament's national security foreign policy commission, said there was "no question of bilateral talks" with the US. But he asserted that "if the United States wishes to assure itself of the peaceful nature of our nuclear activities, their participation in the negotiations can be examined." Iran and the United States broke off diplomatic relations shortly after Iran's Islamic revolution in 1979. The two sides remain fiercely at odds, with the US accusing Iran of seeking to acquire nuclear weapons under the guise of an atomic energy programme. Iran is in the midst of tough talks with Britain, France and Germany, who are trying to secure "objective guarantees" Iran will not develop the bomb. In return, the so-called EU-3 are offering a package of incentives. The United States has given its backing to the European effort after earlier pushing to take the matter before the United Nations for possible sanctions, but has also not ruled out using force. But the talks remain deadlocked over Iran's insistence that it maintain the right to enrich its own nuclear fuel. There are widespread fears that the technology could be diverted to produce highly enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb. Mohammadi was critical of the US position throughout the negotiations, saying Washington "has been ignoring the results of months of negotiations with the Europeans." The latest round of EU-Iran dialogue on the issue began in December, when Iran agreed to freeze its sensitive fuel cycle work. In the past, Iran has given mixed signals over its attitude over the presence of the United States in the negotiations, with some officials saying it was not required and others saying it could be disastrous. -------- israel U.S. says Israel must give up nukes By Amir Oren, Sun., April 03, 2005 Haaretz http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/560047.html The State Department yesterday called on Israel to forswear nuclear weapons and accept international Atomic Energy Agency safeguards on all nuclear activities. This is the second time in about two weeks that officials in the Bush administration are putting the nuclear weapons of Israel, India and Pakistan on a par. The officials called on the three to act like Ukraine and South Africa, which in the last decade renounced their nuclear weapons. The similar phrasing used by the officials refers to Israel's military nuclear capability, as distinct from "nuclear option," which is to be rolled back, although not necessarily in the "foreseeable future." The rare use of these terms contradicts the custom of senior administration officials to avoid any possible confirming reference to Israeli nuclear weapons. The officials, who hold middle-level and lower ranks, are Jackie Wolcott Sanders, ambassador, Conference on Disarmament and special representative of the president for the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and Mark Fitzpatrick, acting deputy assistant secretary for nonproliferation. Sanders was quoted yesterday in the State Department's Electronic Journal, published ahead of the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference scheduled in New York at the beginning of May. Fitzpatrick spoke on March 17 at a security conference of the Organization of American States (OAS). On March 7 President George Bush called for a strengthening of the NPT regime and thwarting the efforts of rogue states and terrorists to obtain weapons of mass destruction. Bush devoted his statement to enforcing NPT clauses on treaty regime members (like North Korea and Iran) and ignored non-member states (India, Pakistan, Israel and Cuba). In the past six years, since the Wye conference in 1998, presidents Clinton and Bush repeatedly promised then prime ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak and also Ariel Sharon that Israel's strategic capability to protect itself will not be harmed. Israeli experts on Bush's nuclear policy say that the president is focusing on objecting to the nuclear process of North Korea and Iran, and even approves aid to India - in nuclear energy among other things - and to Pakistan (selling F-16 planes), while far lower ranks abound with verbal formulas to excuse the withdrawal of the NPT regime during the Bush era. Sanders and Fitzpatrick refrained from calling on Israel, India and Pakistan explicitly to renounce their weapons. The expectation of these three states was phrased in terms of a vow - a verbal pledge to forswear, rather than real action. Nor was this demand accompanied by a time table, conditions and sanctions. An official known for his sympathy for Israel, Robert Joseph, has been nominated undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, and has been serving in a similar position on the staff of the National Security Council. His predecessor in the post is UN ambassador-designate John Bolton, also known for his sympathy for Israel. Sanders and Fitzpatrick hold more junior ranks in the administration. In her statement yesterday Sanders said: "The Conference should also reinforce the goal of universal NPT adherence and reaffirm that India, Israel and Pakistan may join the NPT only as non-nuclear-weapon states. Just as South Africa and Ukraine did in the early 1990s, these states should forswear nuclear weapons and accept IAEA safeguards on all nuclear activities to join the treaty. At the same time, we recognize that progress toward universal adherence is not likely in the foreseeable future. The United States continues to support the goals of the Middle East resolution adopted at the 1995 NPT Review and Extension Conference, including the achievement of a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction." According to the Israeli experts, the American administration does not want to expand nuclear proliferation to additional states in the region and agrees that in time it would be preferable to have the Middle East nuclear free, but disagrees with the immediate adoption of a policy which would prevent American forces like the Sixth Fleet ships and airplanes from carrying nuclear warheads in bombs and missiles as well. This is the seventh time that the Review Conference is convening, to mark the 35th year of the NPT's establishment. The conference, held every five years, will end at the end of May, shortly before the IAEA governing council meets in Vienna in June to elect a director general. The U.S. has not decided yet whether to support incumbent IAEA Director General, Mohammed ElBaradei for another term. -------- japan Japan mourns death of peace-seeking Pope TOKYO (AFP) Apr 03, 2005 http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050403051603.kjta01d0.html Japanese leaders on Sunday joined the nation's Catholic community in mourning Pope John Paul II, hailing his efforts for peace and his solidarity for the only nation to have been hit by nuclear weapons. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi sent a message of condolence expressing "his greatest respect for the feat achieved by the late Pope's efforts towards world peace," the foreign ministry said in a statement. Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura sent a separate message, hailing his "great efforts towards consolidation of peace in various parts of the world, as well as for the promotion of inter-religious dialogue." The mayor of the city of Hiroshima voiced sorrow while thanking him for backing an arms reduction drive by the city that was flattened by the US atomic bombing in the final days of World War II. "I feel a deep sorrow," Tadatoshi Akiba said in a statement, recalling 25,000 people packed the city's peace memorial park in 1981 when the pope visited. "The Pope deeply moved the audience as he prayed for atomic-bombing victims, announced an 'Appeal for Peace' and strongly urged the abolition of nuclear arms," the mayor said. "We must bear his message anew in our mind," he said. "I pay deep respect to the tremendous achievement by Pope John Paul II." In his address on February 25, 1981, the pope said: "War is the work of man ... To remember Hiroshima is to abhor nuclear war. To remember Hiroshima is to commit oneself to peace." The United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, killing around 140,000 people -- almost half the city population of the time -- immediately, or in the months afterward from radiation injuries or horrific burns. Hundreds of Roman Catholics also prayed for the Pope at St Mary's Cathedral in Tokyo. "I am terribly shocked ... It has given me spiritual support that I saw him in person and talked for several minutes," fashion designer Yumi Katsura, who designed a garment for the Pope, said at the cathedral. At the World Expo in the central region of Aichi, flags at the Italian pavilion were at half-mast while tearful clerks at the Polish pavillion wore black ribbons. Mostly-Buddhist Japan has 450,000 Catholics, according to the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Japan. There are two Japanese-born cardinals -- Seiichi Shirayanagi and Fumio Hamao. Hamao lives in the Vatican and Shirayanagi will leave for Rome on Monday or Tuesday, according to a spokeswoman for the Japanese conference. Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said Cardinals will hold their first congregation since the death of Pope John Paul II on Monday morning to begin planning the pontiff's funeral. -------- latinamerica Venezuelan police hunt missing killer capsules of radioactive Iridium-192 Sunday, April 03, 2005 Bylined to: David Coleman http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=29254 Venezuelan police have begun an extensive hunt for two killer capsules of radioactive material that went missing last month One of the two capsules of radioactive Iridium-192 -- used in equipment to check oil industry pipes for faults -- went missing March 15 from a barge on Lake Maracaibo. Another went missing March 21 after it is claimed it fell off the back of a workers' truck in Monagas. Iridium-192 emits powerful gamma radiation and is often used in treating prostate cancer and faults in underground industrial pipes. Venezuela's Energy Ministry director of Nuclear Affairs Angel Diaz says "they were lost through negligence ... we're in a state of emergency and looking for them." Authorities say the public should not to open the red and yellow containers which also carry radiation warning signs. Diaz says everyone within a range of at least five meters would be exposed to harmful radiation if the containers were opened. Venezuela's National Guard (GN), Civil Defense and police are also involved in the nationwide hunt. The capsules were encased in protective containers of depleted uranium and are said to be "about the size of a lunchbox." "The health and lives of people around would be at risk ... since they're quite heavy, people might think they have something valuable inside." Venezuela's Civil Defense chief Antonio Rivero is concerned that the capsules might fall into terrorist hands ... "they could be used in a malicious fashion ... someone might try to place these capsules near a person or a place where people were gathered, for terrorist purposes." -------- pakistan Pak's Khan and Mehmood met Osama: CIA Press Trust Of India Posted online: Sunday, April 03, 2005 at 1331 hours IST Updated: Sunday, April 03, 2005 at 1814 hours IST New Delhi, April 3: Pakistani scientists Abdul Qadeer Khan and Sultan Bashiruddin Mehmood had held meetings with Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders, exchanged letters with militant organisations like the Lashkar-e-Toiba and attended their gatherings and rallies, a media report said. http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=44314 "When the CIA searched Sultan Bashiruddin Mehmood's UTN (Umma Tameere-Nau) office in Kabul, they found large amounts of data on the construction and maintenance of nuclear weapons from the Kahuta laboratories. It also found letters exchanged between the UTN and islamist extremist organisations including Lashkar-e-Toiba", a report in Pakistani weekly said. Mehmood, a close confidante of A.Q. Khan and a former Director of Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, was arrested on October 23, 2001, at the headquarters of the UTN which he had set up for ‘humanitarian work in Afghanistan, it said. Quoting the famed journal Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the article said Khan and Mehmood and other scientists of his organisation ‘attended Lashkar-e-Toiba gatherings’. Khan also appeared in the rallies of the LeT headed by Hafeez Saeed. The militant outfit, which later changed its name to Jamaat al-Dawaa after being banned, "is alleged to have helped in equipping Al Qaeda with ‘dirty bombs’, the article said. Mehmood, who was used to enrich uranium in Pakistan's Khushab plant, and Khan were also known to have held meetings with top Al Qaeda leaders including Osama bin Laden, the paper said. The Friday Times said Mehmood "may have been a genius but he was crazy in his religious zeal" and had a firm belief that plutonium enrichment in Pakistan "should not be kept secret and should be passed around to islamic countries to challenge Israel and the West. He also had expert knowledge of the global nuclear black market". After his arrest, Mehmood had denied he had ever met bin Laden. However, after months of questioning "he admitted to having met Osama, Al Zawhiri and other Al Qaeda members repeatedly, including on the day Al Qaeda struck in New York" (9/11). The weekly said, "this time he (Mehmood) disclosed that he discussed the bombing of an American city with nuclear weapons. He told the CIA that Osama had obtained fissile material from the islamic movement of Uzbekistan of Tahir Yuldashev, recently said to be in hiding in South Waziristan. Mehmood said he had passed on information on nuclear technology to Osama, but had not discussed creating a Hiroshima-like nuclear blast in America". When he was thereafter subjected to a lie detector test, he failed it", the weekly said. -------- u.s. nuc weapons A Fierce Debate on Atom Bombs From Cold War By WILLIAM J. BROAD Published: April 3, 2005 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/science/03nuke.html? For over two decades, a compact, powerful warhead called the W-76 has been the centerpiece of the nation's nuclear arsenal, carried aboard the fleet of nuclear submarines that prowl the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. But in recent months it has become the subject of a fierce debate among experts inside and outside the government over its reliability and its place in the nuclear arsenal. The government is readying a plan to spend more than $2 billion on a routine 10-year overhaul to extend the life of the aging warheads. At the same time, some weapons scientists say the warheads have a fundamental design flaw that could cause them to explode with far less force than intended. Although the government has denied that assertion, officials have disclosed that Washington is nevertheless considering replacing the W-76 altogether. "This is the one we worry about the most," said Everet H. Beckner, who oversees the arsenal as director of defense programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration. Some arms-control advocates oppose the 10-year overhaul program, saying it could produce not only refurbishments but also deadly new innovations. They like the replacement option even less, saying it could prompt the government to conduct underground detonations that would undo the global ban on nuclear testing and start a new arms race. Moreover, some argue that nuclear weapons are dinosaurs that have little use in American military strategy and that it makes no real difference if the W-76 is ineffective. "That's why people are so passionate about this," said Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington. The W-76, developed in the early 1970's for destroying large targets like military bases, now sits packed in clusters of up to eight atop hundreds of missiles in a dozen nuclear submarines. While the exact figures are secret, federal officials and private weapons experts agree that it is the nation's leading weapon by virtue of sheer numbers. The experts say that of 5,000 active warheads in the arsenal, 1,500 are W-76's. Each is meant to be about seven times as powerful as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The W-76's importance is rising as the nation's nuclear force relies more on submarines and less on bombers and land-based missiles. "It's by far the most numerous" warhead, said Hans M. Kristensen, a weapons expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a private group in Washington that monitors nuclear trends. "It's the workhorse in terms of targeting." Several factors lie behind the current worries and repair plans. The W-76 is one of the arsenal's oldest warheads. As warheads age, the risk of internal rusting, material degradation, corrosion, decay and the embrittling of critical parts increases. The overhaul to forestall such decay is scheduled to go from 2007 to 2017. In all, it is expected to cost more than $2 billion, say experts who have analyzed federal budget figures. Questions also surround the weapon's basic design. Four knowledgeable critics, three former scientists and one current one at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which designed the W-76, have recently argued that the weapon is highly unreliable and, if not a complete dud, likely to explode with a force so reduced as to compromise its effectiveness. Federal officials, while denying that, disclosed in interviews that the warhead is being considered for a new program that intends to replace old warheads with more reliable ones. Congress and future administrations would have to approve a replacement for the W-76. Officials would give no estimate for that endeavor's cost or length of time. But they acknowledged that they have carefully weighed the W-76's potential problems and the alternatives for fixing them. "I've spent a lot of personal time on this," said Dr. Beckner, of the National Nuclear Security Administration. The W-76, and its troubles, were born during the cold war, when American bomb makers sought to win the arms race with designs that made nuclear arms lightweight, very powerful and in some cases so small that a dozen or more could fit atop a slender missile. Where most nuclear powers had to make do with weapons that were ponderous if dependable, the W-76 epitomized the American edge. It was a hydrogen warhead - known as thermonuclear because a small atom bomb at its core worked like a match to ignite the hydrogen fuel. Standing shorter than a man, it had undergone an extraordinary degree of miniaturization. "It was the tightest design we had," said one top nuclear scientist who did not want his name used for fear of retaliation for releasing confidential information. . "They crammed in everything with a shoehorn." Tensions ran high, especially for senior designers like Charles C. Cremer, the leader of thermonuclear design at Los Alamos. In 1974, as W-76 plans took shape, Mr. Cremer committed suicide. Richard L. Morse, a physicist at the weapons laboratory who directed advanced concepts for bomb design as well as a separate group devoted to laser fusion, said in an interview that much tension centered on the weapon's so-called radiation case. In usual fashion, it was to be made of uranium, which is nearly twice as heavy as lead. Leaders at Los Alamos wanted the case to be as lightweight as possible, so they envisioned it as extraordinarily thin - in places not much thicker than a beer can (albeit with plastic backing for added strength). Its physical integrity was vital. The case had to hang together for microseconds as the exploding atom bomb generated temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun, forcing it to emit radiation that kindled the thermonuclear fire. If the case deformed significantly or shattered prematurely, the weapon would fail, its thermonuclear fuel unlit. >From 1978 to 1987, about 3,400 W-76's rolled off the production line, said Mr. Kristensen, of the defense council. The design was considered so good that Britain made a variant of the W-76 for its submarines. Even with their seeming success, arms designers continued to do underground tests to determine how cases would behave in the first milliseconds after the atomic blast. But in 1992, after the cold war, the United States joined a global moratorium on nuclear tests. It was no longer possible to detonate weapons to check their reliability. In secret, experts and officials say, debate on the W-76 began almost immediately after the test ban; suggestions included an alternative design that would thicken the radiation case and give the new warhead a much longer life. By 1995, the work had become formalized in a joint effort between the Navy and the nation's nuclear weapons complex. As the test ban persisted, American nuclear officials singled out the W-76 as the first warhead to undergo precautionary scrutiny. The program employed teams from Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, its archrival. Usually, the meetings were cordial. But a vocal dissenter emerged. It was Dr. Morse, who had left Los Alamos in 1976 for the University of Arizona but returned in 1996 and aided the W-76 assessment. Dr. Morse specialized in scientific explanations for the complex flows that curl through the extraordinarily hot gases known as plasmas, which lie at the heart of an exploding nuclear weapon. His main goal was to help scientists develop a giant laser that, in lieu of an atomic match, would fire on a tiny radiation case surrounding an even tinier pellet of hydrogen fuel, releasing a burst of nuclear energy. Heat from such miniature hydrogen bombs was envisioned as one day being used to make electricity. But Dr. Morse found that nature had erected tricky barriers to that goal. In particular, he documented how a form of turbulence known as Rayleigh-Taylor instability (named after the physicists Lord Rayleigh and Geoffrey Taylor) could perturb the expanding plasma of the very hot radiation case, forming waves, ripples and whorls that blocked ignition of the thermonuclear fuel. He also found that extremely small variations in the case were responsible for the onset of turbulence, making it hard to eliminate. In 1996, Dr. Morse brought similar analyses to bear on the W-76's thin case, arguing that it would probably fail. He said that for decades, officials had swept the issue under the rug and that Mr. Cremer, the designer, had struggled with the problem. In an interview, Dr. Morse said he was soon "disinvited" from the evaluation and left Los Alamos for Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. But he added that concerns about the W-76 only grew. Dr. Beckner disagreed. He said the joint review found that the W-76 "looks like a pretty good weapon." Even so, the government began preparing for an extensive refurbishment of the warhead in a bid to extend its life by 30 years. The planning started around 2000 and foresaw the installation of new fuses, electronics, batteries, cables, valves and the conventional high explosives that light the atomic match. It also sought to increase the warhead's accuracy and flexibility in targeting. In 2003, amid preparations for the refurbishment, Dr. Morse once again sought to stir debate. He says he felt compelled to do so because of the W-76's rising importance to the nation's nuclear forces. At a secret meeting in March 2004 at Los Alamos, Dr. Morse led four critics who laid out their concerns to lab and federal officials, including Dr. Beckner. Dr. Morse characterized the discussion as acrimonious. "It was a verbal mud-wrestling match," he recalled. The lab and federal officials "would not be candid with us. We told them things they didn't know. It was very, very disappointing." In contrast, Dr. Beckner said the meeting and subsequent analyses left him with "high confidence that this nuclear weapon is a good design, was built properly and will function if required." In early July, news reports in New Mexico began to describe the dispute, and the director of Los Alamos days later scheduled a secret lab symposium to review the "technical challenges" to understanding how radiation cases act in the first microseconds of a nuclear blast, according to a synopsis of the planned meeting. As the number of news reports grew, officials denied that there was any problem with the W-76. They cited a history of detonations of the weapon at the Nevada Test Site. In late November, the dependability issue emerged nationally as Congress approved a small budget item that began a new weapons design effort known as the Reliable Replacement Warhead program. Its goal is to have weapons scientists design a new generation of nuclear arms that are more reliable and more durable, reversing the cold war trend of making small, lightweight, powerful weapons. If possible, the effort is to proceed without nuclear testing. Dr. Beckner, of the nuclear administration, said the W-76 is a candidate for redesign. The current work to extend the warhead's life, he said, could expand to include more fundamental design changes. "That is not the plan at present, but that could happen," he said, adding that he could not discuss the issue of thickening the radiation case. Thomas B. Cochran, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said a thicker, heavier case for the W-76 might force compensating cuts in the weight of the weapon's hydrogen capsule. And that, he added, would reduce the weapon's overall force. Dr. Morse applauded the new federal interest. "What's out there in those boats," he said, "is at best unreliable and probably much worse." Sandra Blakeslee and Kenneth Chang contributed reporting for this article. -------- u.s. nuc facilities -------- nevada Bennett not hot on Yucca now He may opt for leaving radioactive waste at the reactors By Robert Gehrke The Salt Lake Tribune 04/03/2005 http://www.sltrib.com/utah/ci_2638114 WASHINGTON - In a gamble to block a proposed nuclear waste storage site 45 miles from Salt Lake City, Utah Sens. Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett threw in three years ago with the Bush administration's effort to bury nuclear waste deep inside Nevada's Yucca Mountain. But now, as Yucca's political and scientific problems mount, Bennett, at least, appears to be hedging his bet. He indicated in an interview last week that he might entertain the option of leaving the waste at the reactors that produced it - a step away from the White House and toward closing a divide between the senators and other Utah politicians. Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. has come out squarely against Yucca and in support of leaving the highly radioactive nuclear material on site at the reactors. Two of the three U.S. House members from Utah have said they oppose Yucca, and Rep. Chris Cannon, who voted to send the waste to Nevada, has changed his stand. And an increasingly vocal cadre of state lawmakers has joined the chorus. They agree that building Yucca Mountain would not kill the proposal by Private Fuel Storage (PFS), a consortium of electric companies, to "temporarily" store 44,000 tons of spent nuclear rods on Utah's Skull Valley Goshute Indian reservation and would, in the best case scenario, mean thousands of tons of waste would be shipped through the state. "Now people are starting to focus on the fact that, well wait, Yucca Mountain is also a sorry idea. Why haven't we been thinking of something else?" asked state Rep. Steve Urquhart. The St. George Republican says the "straight to Yucca" strategy is driven more by politics than reality, and he predicts a change. "On this one, Hatch is the weather vane and if the political winds are changing, he'll turn," Urquhart said. Hatch is up for re-election next year. The drive toward Yucca Mountain suffered a serious setback last month when it was revealed U.S. Geological Survey scientists may have falsified documents on the suitability of the site. The FBI has launched a criminal investigation, according to The Associated Press. With Yucca Mountain already well over budget and years behind schedule, opponents hope the latest episode dooms the project. A House Government Reform subcommittee will hold a hearing Tuesday on Yucca's safety and viability. Cannon, who voted in 2002 to build Yucca Mountain, now says much has changed and storing the waste at the reactors offers a safe, practical alternative. Continuing the Yucca push could actually make it more likely the fuel would end up in Utah and stay longer, he says. "The more distant [Yucca] appears, the more likely that we will get temporary storage in Utah," he said. "So either we have to have assurances that Yucca is going to work, or we have to be thinking, 'What else are we going to do with it?' " Bennett and Hatch also voted for Yucca in 2002, based on an assurance from the White House that it would make the PFS site unnecessary. They reiterated their support after another meeting with the White House last month. "It's what has to be done under the circumstances and we're going to do everything to help them get there," Hatch said. He remains committed to Yucca Mountain, a spokesman says, but Bennett said Thursday that he could reconsider. "My previous support of Yucca has never been based on the science because the science says to me leave it where it is, but the politics take that off the table," Bennett said. "I am perfectly willing to consider other alternatives if they are politically viable." The politics are prickly. Not only does the nuclear industry and Bush administration back Yucca, but congressional delegations from Eastern, urban areas that rely on nuclear power support it. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., chairman of the Senate Energy Committee and the subcommittee that sets the budget for energy programs, is concerned about the delays and cost of the project, but he remains committed to building the repository and is not considering other options, said his spokeswoman Marnie Funk. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who has spent years trying to kill Yucca, will introduce legislation this month that would allow the federal government to assume responsibility for the waste and store it in casks near the reactor sites. He was scheduled to meet privately with Huntsman in Salt Lake City on Saturday and was expected to discuss the issue. "If we have a Yucca Mountain ultimately, well, 90 percent of that garbage is going to go right through our state, and if I don't stand up and try to protect what I think are the best interests of this state, then I'm not adequately and properly serving my constituents," Huntsman said in a news conference last week. The nuclear industry and companies backing the Private Fuel Storage facility say Reid's idea is flawed and would not solve the storage and security problems many reactors are facing. Time may be running out to stop the Goshute facility. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will hold a hearing Tuesday on Utah's challenge to the PFS license. If the NRC grants the license, the state can challenge it in court. The Interior secretary could also stop the facility by vetoing the lease between PFS and the tribe or preventing a rail line across federal land to the reservation. -------- new york NY: The Nuclear Option April 3, 2005 NY TIMES WESCHESTER http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/opinion/nyregionopinions/WE_Nuclear.html?pagewanted=print&position= Time will tell, to use an old editorial dodge, whether Josh Rattner is a prophet or just a noodge. Mr. Rattner pulled a driver from a burning gasoline truck last year, risking his life and earning an invitation to a "Heroes Breakfast" at the Hilton Rye Town last week. But when it came time to smile and accept his plaque, he pulled a Marlon Brando and refused it, saying he could not allow himself to be a public relations tool of one of the day's corporate sponsors, Entergy Nuclear Northeast, which owns the Indian Point power plant. Mr. Rattner says Indian Point is a menace that should be shut down. Mr. Rattner, an electrical contractor from Irvington, thus fired an early shot in what promises to be a long and ferocious struggle over the relicensing of Indian Point, the Hudson Valley's vital energy resource or nuclear nightmare - take your pick - in Buchanan, about 35 miles north of Times Square. Already the environmentalists are out in force, firing away with news conferences and op-eds and calling in reinforcements from the hundreds of politicians and dozens of town and village boards that have called for the plant to be decommissioned. Besides traditional anxieties about meltdown, radioactive waste and the nuclear industry's wobbly economics, the enemies of Indian Point have a new trump card to play - the fear of terrorism - now that 9/11 has jolted people into taking long-shot possibilities seriously. Supporters of nuclear power have a trump card of their own: global warming, which looms as the environmental crisis of our age. This has prompted more than a few people in the green camp to argue that fossil fuel, not radiation, is the clear and present danger, and to embrace nuclear plants as a proven, readily available way to reduce carbon emissions and save the planet. This page has been largely agnostic about nuclear power in general and Indian Point in particular, though it has expressed serious reservations about security at the plant, which is badly placed in a densely populated region, where a mass evacuation in an emergency would be extremely difficult. We have called for greater fortifications and a competent security force at Indian Point, but have seen no immediate reason to shut it down. We hope the coming clashes will clarify what the region's residents think about whether to embrace or reject nuclear power along the Hudson. We hope further that this grappling will lay the groundwork for a much broader debate - the kind of national discussion the Bush administration should be leading but is not, given that its energy policies amount to little more than an unwavering fixation on the maximal extraction and consumption of fossil fuels from anywhere and everywhere. It may seem early in Westchester -Indian Point's reactor licenses are not up for renewal until 2013. But Indian Point is one of the biggest nuclear controversies around, aside from the long struggle over burying waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, and thus is a prime opportunity to sort out our energy priorities, reassess our seemingly boundless appetite for cheap power and weigh our tolerance for risk - not just in the region, but across the nation. -------- MILITARY -------- arms Israeli military receives Apache Longbow helicopters JERUSALEM (AFP) Apr 03, 2005 Agence France-Presse http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050403122450.pyjamnsx.html The Israeli military took possession Sunday of three US-made Apache Longbow helicopters, equipped with Hellfire missiles, military sources said. The helicopters were all transported in a giant Antonov transport plane to the Ramon airbase in the southern Negev desert. The Longbows, which are manned by a two-strong crew, have a combat range of around 300 miles (500 kilometers) and can fly at up to 168 mph. -------- business High stakes for high-tech war Raytheon Aurora bidding to provide billions in software to military Sunday, April 03, 2005 By Kelly Yamanouchi Denver Post Staff Writer http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%7E33%7E2794412,00.html War always involves a battle for the best information, but the military is investing in new technology that will bring it into the Internet age. The Department of Defense plans to spend $40 billion developing products that will "bring bandwidth to the battlefield." When all is said and done, the Pentagon will have a new constellation of satellites and a ground-based network that will boost soldiers' ability to share information in war zones (Click here for graphic). In fiscal 2004, Colorado companies reaped nearly $3.2 billion from Department of Defense contracts, earning the state a ranking of 20th. (California ranked first.) Other big contracts are up for grabs. Raytheon, based in Waltham, Mass., would like to provide the military with software that will power an Internet-like communications network. A team at its 2,700-employee Aurora office is working on the bid. Two years ago, Raytheon teamed with Boeing, General Dynamics and AT&T, and about 80 to 100 engineers from all four companies have spent the past year and a half preparing a proposal for the $2 billion Transformational Satellite Mission Operations System (TMOS). Winning the contract when it is awarded in the fall would mean work for years to come. They are competing against teams led by Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. The Lockheed team is based out of San Jose, Calif. TMOS is the ground segment of the Transformational Satellite system (TSAT), a multi-faceted infrastructure that will allow soldiers to exchange battlefield information as easily as civilians exchange e-mails. "Communications on the move is a huge problem for the Department of Defense right now," said Trip Carter, who works in advanced programs for Raytheon's Intelligence and Information Systems unit. "That's one of the things that this solves. "We're changing the way we fight wars. Whoever has the greatest access to information and can combine that information to make effective decisions is going to be the safest and is going to defeat the enemy." Former Pfc. Jessica Lynch and her convoy, for example, got lost in Iraq "because they were moving," Carter said. "They didn't have the communications they needed to understand where they were and where they should be hooking up with the rest of their group." Lynch and nine other U.S. soldiers took a wrong turn outside Nasiriyah, Iraq, in March 2003 and were ambushed. Nine were killed, and Lynch was rescued eight days later. Wars are often fought in places, like Iraq, that lack good fiber-optics communications infrastructure. Soldiers must depend instead on satellites to relay the information they need. Even the nature of their information is changing. Soldiers may get images from space platforms or unmanned aerial vehicles. They may want to send or receive infrared images that tell them where the enemy is. They may need to transmit voice recordings or e-mails to gather intelligence, coordinate attacks, describe the formation of troops or discuss what kind of equipment is being deployed. That kind of data transmission requires 30 times the bandwidth - or the size of the virtual "pipe"- that was needed to fight the 1991 Persian Gulf War. An image that now takes more than 12 minutes to transmit from an unmanned aerial vehicle, for example, would take less than a second using the new Transformational Satellite. Eventually soldiers would have a laptop - or perhaps someday a personal digital assistant - on which they could access all the necessary information through a single portal. The connection would be as fast as commercial DSL and as easy to use as a commercial laptop with the Internet and other applications. TSAT is part of the system that will help make that possible, a constellation of satellites that will be launched around 2013 to help upgrade the U.S. satellite fleet. Soldiers will be able to bounce information from one satellite to the next as they travel without losing a connection, their signals transmitted from the satellite through a network of nodes installed in such places as unmanned aerial vehicles or Humvees. If things work as planned, users will be oblivious to the new communications infrastructure and the multiple information systems it requires. The military requires a series of draft requests for proposals (RFPs) before any final contract is awarded. The Air Force released its third draft March 21 and expects to release a final RFP about May. The contract will be awarded about October by the Air Force Space Command's Space and Missiles System Center in El Segundo, Calif. If Raytheon wins, another 300 employees will work on the contract. The contract will last until 2016, but the work could continue much longer if the resulting network can be evolved to match needs in the future. "Potentially this program will be around a very long time," Carter said. "So it's a big thing for us at Raytheon Aurora. It's a big thing for Aurora and really the greater Denver community." As Aurora's largest private employer, Raytheon and the TMOS project are very important, said Wendy Mitchell, president of the Aurora Economic Development Council. "You're seeing this really stable, constant growth with Raytheon," she said. In 2002, Raytheon's Aurora group won a $1 billion contract to provide space-based environmental data that are expected to improve weather forecasting and climate prediction, called the National Polar Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System. About 15,000 aerospace employees work in Aurora, Mitchell said, at Raytheon as well as Buckley Air Force Base, Northrop Grumman, Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Lockheed's main Colorado campus is at Waterton Canyon in Jefferson County. "I think as long as we have the war on terrorism, the space business in Aurora will continue to be strong," said Dick Hinson, the council's vice president. "The whole impact of 9/11 and homeland security has been a big boost for this industry," said Tom Clark, executive vice president of the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp. He said local officials are interested in helping aerospace business expand here. Staff writer Kelly Yamanouchi can be reached at kyamanouchi@denverpost.com -------- israel / palestine Calm before the storm as Gaza settlers vow to fight Sun 3 Apr 2005 ANNETTE YOUNG IN NEVE DEKALIM http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=352672005 GINGERLY stepping over broken glass as he walked through the ruins of the once popular Palm Beach resort in the Gaza Strip, Israeli settler Moshe Herstik was determined to present an upbeat attitude. "Look at this hotel, it used to be crowded with visitors before the intifada, but please don’t take photos of the ruins. We just want the world to see the beauty of this place and what we are being asked to leave behind," he said, while pointing to the pristine beach below and the sparkling blue waters of the Mediterranean beyond. "Yes, no talk about shattered dreams," added Herstik’s cousin, Moti Rosenberg, who was acting as Herstik’s interpreter. In July, along with about 8,000 other Gaza settlers, Herstik, his wife Ilana and their six children, will be called on to leave their home in the settlement of Neve Dekalim (Hebrew for Palm Oasis) just up the road from the Palm Beach resort. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s controversial Gaza disengagement plan overcame its final legislative obstacles last week when the Knesset voted against a proposal for a referendum on the issue. Now, with the deadline of July 25 drawing closer and fears that the pullout will deteriorate into a bloody affair, senior government officials along with high-ranking Israeli Defence Force (IDF) officers have begun finalising plans to limit the potential for violence. From as early as June 1, it has been reported that the area will be sealed off as a closed military zone with the IDF setting up roadblocks and the navy blockading it from the sea to prevent thousands of anti-disengagement protestors from entering the area to join the settlers. Following talks between government officials and a small group of settler leaders, it was announced on Thursday that soldiers and police evacuating the settlements will be unarmed. In return, Israel’s Internal Security Minister, Gideon Ezra, said settlers will be asked to turn in their arms shortly before the evacuation begins but that weapons will not be collected forcibly. But as talks continue, the battle lines are being drawn with threats of violence by far right-wing protesters. Religious leaders also weighed into the debate with former chief rabbi Avraham Shapira joining a group of rabbis in calling on reservist soldiers not to evacuate settlers. Back at the heavily guarded settlement of Neve Dekalim, with its suburban villas and manicured lawns, the mood was tranquil, despite a banner at its entrance that declared "We will not leave here alive!" Herstik said: "We are all very calm and I’m trying not to think about what it will be like when it happens." He added he would not resist physically when the soldiers turn up at his front door, but said: "But we will be here to the very end. "It is not moral what is happening. But I view it as a temporary setback for the Jews, remember it took us 2,000 years to come back and rebuild the Jewish state." The offices of the Gaza Coast regional council, based in Neve Dekalim, has become a war room for those settlers who believe the pullout can still be thwarted as they try to win local as well as international support. "Four months is a very long time in the Middle East," said council’s media spokeswoman, Debbie Rosen. Sitting on the lawns outside the council offices were Ilon and Tal Sarig. Married three weeks ago, the young religious couple had just moved into a mobile home in Neve Dekalim. Ilon, 28, who studies at a nearby yeshiva , had the option of moving to Jerusalem where Tal was living, but both decided to begin their married life in Gaza. "This is a horrible crisis in the history of the Jewish people," Ilon Sarig said. "Why are we giving our land to people who killed our children?" -------- prisoners of war Green light for Iraqi prison abuse came right from the top Classified documents show the former US military chief in Iraq personally sanctioned measures banned by the Geneva Conventions. Andrew Buncombe reports from Washington 03 April 2005 UK Independent http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=625909 America's leading civil liberties group has demanded an investigation into the former US military commander Iraq after a formerly classified memo revealed that he personally sanctioned a series of coercive interrogation techniques outlawed by the Geneva Conventions. The group claims that his directives were directly linked to the sort of abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib. Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reveal that Lt General Ricardo Sanchez authorised techniques such as the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners, stress positions and disorientation. In the documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Gen Sanchez admits that some of the techniques would not be tolerated by other countries. When he appeared last year before a Congressional committee, Gen Sanchez denied authorising such techniques. He has now been accused of perjury. The ACLU says the documents reveal that the abuse of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere was the result of an organised and co-ordinated plan for dealing with prisoners captured during the so-called war on terror that originates at the highest levels of the chain of command. It says that far from being isolated incident, the shocking abuse at Abu Ghraib that was revealed last year was part of a pattern. "We think that the techniques authorised by Gen Sanchez were certainly responsible for putting into play the sort of abuses that we saw at Abu Ghraib," Amirit Singh, an ACLU lawyer, told The Independent on Sunday. "And it does not just stop with Sanchez. It goes to [Defence Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, who wrote memos authorising these sorts of techniques at Guantanamo Bay." In the September 2003 memo, Gen Sanchez authorised the use of 29 techniques for interrogating prisoners being held by the US. These included stress positions, "yelling, loud music and light control" as well as the use of muzzled military dogs in order to "exploit Arab fear of dogs". Some of the most notorious photographs to emerge from the Abu Ghraib scandal showed hand-cuffed, naked Iraqi prisoners cowering from snarling dogs. Six weeks after Gen Sanchez issued his memo, a subsequent directive banned the use of dogs and several of the other techniques following concerns raised by military lawyers. The ACLU says that at least 12 of the techniques listed in the memo went beyond the limits for interrogation listed in the US Army's field manual. "Gen Sanchez authorised interrogation techniques that were in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions and the army's own standards," said Ms Singh. "He and other high-ranking officials who bear responsibility for the widespread abuse of detainees must be held accountable." The Abu Ghraib scandal sent shockwaves around the world and further undermined US credibility in the Arab world. In the immediate aftermath, insurgents who captured and beheaded a US engineer, Nick Berg, said they had done so in retaliation for the abuse at the infamous prison west of Baghdad, where prisoners were sexually humiliated and tortured. A number of low-ranking reservists have been charged over the abuse. An alleged ringleader, Charles Graner, 36, was convicted last January and sentenced to 10 years in jail. At his trial his lawyer, Guy Womack, claimed his client was being used as a scapegoat. "The government is asking a corporal to take the hit for them," he said. "The chain of command says, 'We didn't know anything about this stuff'. You know that is a lie." When he appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee in May 2004, Gen Sanchez flatly refused approving such techniques in Iraq, and said that a news article reporting otherwise was false. "I never approved any of those measures to be used ... at any time in the last year," he said under oath. The ACLU accuses him of committing perjury and has asked the Attorney General to investigate. In a letter to Alberto Gonzales, the group said: "Gen Sanchez's testimony, given under oath before the Senate Armed Services committee, is utterly inconsistent with the written record, and deserves serious investigation. This clear breach of the public's trust is also further proof that the American people deserve the appointment of an independent special counsel by the Attorney General." A number of investigations have been carried out into the abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. While some have referred to a break-down in the chain of command, none have placed responsibility with senior officers or politicians. Kathy Kelley, a spokeswoman for the anti-war group Voices in the Wilderness, said the new documents obtained by the ACLU showed a pattern of abuse by US forces. "It saddens me but I am not shocked," she said. Gen Sanchez is currently commanding general of the US V Corps based in Germany. He has yet to comment on the release of the memo. A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment. The Pentagon originally refused to release the memo on national security grounds, but passed it to the ACLU after the group challenged it in court. Mr Rumsfeld last week dismissed suggestions that it had been withheld to save the Pentagon's embarrassment. But the ACLU said the reason for the delay in delivering the more than 1,200 pages of documents in which the memo was contained was "evident in the contents", which included reports of brutal beatings and sworn statements that soldiers were told to "beat the fuck out of" prisoners. -------- spies Daily Intelligence Briefings Are Vague, Officials Say By SCOTT SHANE and DAVID E. SANGER April 3, 2005 NY TIMES http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/politics/03report.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1112787699-p7aNhhHDTascCwScfyYCEA&pagewanted=print&position= WASHINGTON, April 2 - The small group of top government officials who read the President's Daily Brief, a summary of the most timely and critical intelligence on threats to the United States, told a presidential commission on intelligence that they find the highly classified document of little value, according to the commission's co-chairmen. The officials told the commission that they read the brief, known as the P.D.B., mainly for "defensive" purposes, Charles S. Robb, a former Virginia senator and governor, and Laurence H. Silberman, a senior federal judge, said in an interview on Friday. "They knew that was going to drive the president's schedule on a given day, and they had to be prepared for that reason," Mr. Robb said. "I cannot recall any particular current or former official saying that they believed the P.D.B. was in and of itself that valuable to them. It was more of a defensive reading of the document." The comments suggest that the grave shortcomings of the daily briefs before the Iraq war, detailed as part of the commission's sweeping 601-page indictment of the nation's intelligence agencies, have not been remedied despite efforts in recent months by the Central Intelligence Agency to improve them. Asked about how the briefs have changed and whether they were still "more alarmist and less nuanced" than the underlying information warranted, as the commission concluded, the White House refused to comment. Questions about the commission's critique and how the process has changed, directed to Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, went unanswered. His spokesman, Frederick Jones, said the White House did not want to discuss a "privileged presidential document." Since taking over from Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Hadley has said to his staff that he is disappointed in how prewar intelligence was handled and that he wants improvements. But the White House's refusal to describe the changes to the daily brief left some experts inside and outside the administration wondering whether the system is different from the one the commission so roundly criticized. It is a potent issue, because these days the briefs carry the latest intelligence on nuclear threats from Iran and North Korea, the activities of Al Qaeda and emerging threats elsewhere around the world. The nine-member commission found that the quality of the intelligence agencies' reporting on threats suffered from the same shortage of reliable sources that plagued the reporting on Iraqi weapons. So the commission's finding that the P.D.B. "likely conveyed a greater sense of certainty" than the data warranted is still very much a concern, Mr. Robb and Judge Silberman said. The quality of the brief may be particularly crucial in this administration because by the accounts of close aides and intelligence officials, President Bush is extremely interested in what the spy agencies tell him. He has been described by aides as asking frequent questions, sometimes calling in C.I.A. officers for direct briefings. A senior intelligence official sits on the staff of the national security council to act as an intermediary, and to demand more information. But none of that questioning pierced through the huge errors in the Iraq intelligence, the commission concluded. It said the briefs "left an impression of many corroborating reports where in fact there were very few sources." Some administration officials say Mr. Bush now demands to see some of the backup sourcing, but they could not say how often he hears dissenting views, and Mr. Hadley's office would not comment on that issue. Mr. Bush receives an oral briefing each morning from 8 to 8:45 on foreign intelligence and domestic security. The C.I.A. briefer is usually accompanied by the agency's director, currently Porter J. Goss. Contrary to his image in some circles as a man with little appetite for detailed study, Mr. Bush asked early in his presidency that the brief be expanded and delivered in a loose-leaf notebook to include more than just the 10 to 15 pages of finished intelligence analyses on current topics. The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, as it is formally called, reviewed about two years of the President's Daily Briefs in the period before the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It found the reports were "disastrously one-sided," giving the president a "daily drumbeat" of sensational headlines. They noted that Mr. Goss has said that preparing, studying and delivering the daily brief takes as much as six hours a day. Although Mr. Bush has said the newly appointed director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, will become his "primary briefer," Mr. Robb and Judge Silberman said they thought that would distract Mr. Negroponte from his main task of overseeing the 15 intelligence agencies and coordinating their work. The commission chairmen suggested that intense competition among the intelligence agencies and their divisions to get their own reports into the president's brief often skewed the document. In response to the commission's searing criticism, the agencies have begun to defend themselves. One former senior intelligence official said Saturday that "a little-known secret" of the commission's critique was that it borrowed heavily from the C.I.A.'s own internal review of the Iraqi weapons failure, conducted from July 2003 to May 2004. The official said that since the review was completed last year, the team of analysts and editors who compile the brief each night have tried to make changes along the lines the commission recommends. Headlines are less sensational and "more neutral," the official said, and alternative views of other agencies are included more often. But the former official said that taking a longer-range view of world developments, as the commission recommends, is not easy. "The daily mission eats your lunch," he said. "Policymakers ask dozens of questions every day that have to be answered within 24 hours." ---- A Failure of Policy, Not Spying By Ashton B. Carter Sunday, April 3, 2005 Washington Post; Page B07 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20057-2005Apr1?language=printer President Bush praised the Robb-Silberman commission report for its scathing and perceptive analysis of "intelligence failures" in the "axis of evil" states of Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Indeed, the report contains many useful recommendations for improving intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. But the fallacy in the administration's appointment of a commission to study intelligence failures is that there is almost never such a thing as a pure intelligence failure. Intelligence failure is usually linked to policy failure. It's easy to see why Bush, or any president, would not want to call attention to that link. But the commission should have. Let's take the case of North Korea. While the commission's chapters on North Korea's nuclear program are rightly classified, the unclassified summary suggests that spies and satellites have yielded very little information about that country's nuclear weapons efforts. But what does it matter? North Korea has admitted, indeed boasted, of its growing nuclear arsenal, and the United States has done nothing to stop it. How could a few more details provided by the CIA make a difference? If you don't have a policy, intelligence is irrelevant. North Korea's runaway nuclear program is a policy failure, not an intelligence failure. What's worse, policy failure has actually caused intelligence failure in North Korea. From 1994 to 2003 North Korea's plutonium was at a known location, Yongbyon, where it was measured, handled and surveilled by international (including American) inspectors. We could inspect it -- or bomb it -- at any time. But when North Korea threw the inspectors out and threatened to truck the plutonium away to a hidden location, the United States did nothing. In due course the North Koreans made good on their threat and took the plutonium away. Are we now supposed to believe that it is an "intelligence failure" that we don't know where it is? A second member of the axis of evil, Iran, demonstrates the same point. Iran, unlike North Korea, denies it has a nuclear weapons program. The Bush administration firmly contends that it does and is almost surely right, even though the intelligence is apparently not a "slam dunk." But since the administration does not plan either to attack Iran's nuclear sites or to try to negotiate them away (the Europeans are supposed to be trying the negotiation route), it hardly matters whether we know all the details. The "intelligence failure" that prompted the creation of the Robb-Silberman commission was, of course, Saddam Hussein's missing weapons of mass destruction. Here there surely was a policy -- full-scale invasion, no less -- and no one can accuse the Bush administration of inaction. Knowing what we thought we knew, invasion was absolutely the right decision. WMD are too dangerous to take chances. But Bush has since made it clear that even if he knew then what we know now -- that the information on Hussein's weapons was "nearly worthless," in the words of the Robb-Silberman commission -- he would have invaded anyway. There were other reasons for his policy -- Hussein's mistreatment of his population and the wider implications for the Middle East of his continued rule in Iraq. Future historians will decide whether his policy was a failure or a success, but they will know from his own testimony that the CIA's "intelligence failure" was not the determining factor. It therefore is a fact that in the three most important cases studied by the commission -- Iraq, Iran and North Korea -- the intelligence failures the commission so carefully identifies and makes recommendations to correct made no difference to policy success or failure. The commission's recommendations focus on improving intelligence on classical proliferation targets -- rogue regimes such as the three axis-of-evil states and Libya. But in the post-Sept. 11 world, we have to fear WMD not just in the hands of national governments but in the hands of terrorists. Here the policy-intelligence mismatch is also evident. Osama bin Laden has declared it a "sacred duty" of jihadists to get nuclear weapons. We hardly need more intelligence on his intentions. But to make a bomb, bin Laden's followers must get either plutonium or highly enriched uranium. U.S. efforts to safeguard these materials worldwide, even after Sept. 11, have been halfhearted. The tremendous success of the Nunn-Lugar program in denuclearizing the former Soviet Union in the 1990s has not been replicated in the post-Cold War era of terrorism. If the United States had such a vigorous set of policies to combat nuclear terrorism, it would need good intelligence to implement those policies. But until we get the policy right, it hardly matters that the intelligence is imperfect. Without a comprehensive policy to combat WMD, better intelligence will not improve U.S. security. Bush was right to say that keeping the worst weapons out of the hands of the worst people is a U.S. president's highest national security priority. Since Sept. 11, under his leadership, we have scored many successes against the worst people. But U.S. policy toward the worst weapons is still in a pre-Sept. 11 state. Indeed, since Sept. 11 the United States has suffered greater setbacks in counterproliferation than at any time since the 1980s, when Pakistan went nuclear. Until this changes, preventing intelligence failures will still not matter. The writer is co-director of the Harvard-Stanford Preventive Defense Project and was assistant defense secretary in the Clinton administration. He testified before the Robb-Silberman commission. -------- un The man who tried to blow the whistle on the UN oil-for-food scandal By Philip Sherwell in Washington (Filed: 03/04/2005) UK Telegraph http://portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/04/03/wun03.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/04/03/ixworld.html No one would listen to the man who tried to blow the whistle on the UN oil-for-food scandal. Two years later he finally received a response - he was fired. Rehan Mullick finally got the chance to tell his story last week. For four months in late 2002, he repeatedly tried to explain to high-ranking officials at the United Nations how Saddam Hussein had infiltrated and manipulated the $65 billion oil-for-food programme with the collusion of UN staff. The softly spoken database analyst should know - he had spent nearly two years working at the UN mission in Baghdad and was appalled by the chaos and abuses he witnessed - but at the organisation's headquarters in Manhattan, nobody wanted to listen. Instead, he was treated with the contempt reserved for whistleblowers the world over - first ignored and then, when he persisted, fired. Among the startling revelations in the dossier he compiled were details of relatives of senior Saddam loyalists running the database at Unicef, the UN agency that claimed that sanctions had killed 500,000 Iraqi children. If that dossier tells much about the abuse of the oil-for-food programme on the ground, Dr Mullick's treatment by the UN is a damning indictment of the culture of cover-ups at an organisation also plagued by allegations of sexual harassment at its headquarters and sexual misconduct by its peacekeeping troops in Congo. It is all the more striking as Dr Mullick is a self-confessed supporter of the UN and he arrived in Baghdad opposed to sanctions. On Tuesday morning, the 39-year-old Pakistani-American detailed these experiences to Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman appointed by Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, to lead an inquiry into the oil-for-food scandal. A few hours later, the Volcker commission released an interim report highly critical of Mr Annan's handling of the controversy. But the impact of Dr Mullick's remarkable testimony could turn out to be just as devastating for the UN when the investigation is completed this summer. (The UN has declined to comment while the inquiry is under way.) The biggest so-called "humanitarian" operation that the world has seen was established in 1996 to allow Iraq, which had been placed under strict UN sanctions after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, to import food, medicines and other goods crucial for its civilian population using income raised by authorised oil sales. It is now known that Saddam skimmed off at least $2 billion in kickbacks and doled out lucrative oil vouchers to foreign supporters, possibly including UN officials. In his only interview since his appearance before the Volcker commission, Dr Mullick told The Telegraph that he realised there were serious problems almost as soon as he arrived in Baghdad in October 2000. He was to discover that Saddam was diverting supplies intended for his long-suffering people to his military machine; that the UN operation was riddled with senior Ba'athist officials; and that nobody had any real grasp of how the programme was running. Dr Mullick's expertise in databases and statistics gave him an immediate and shocking insight into the disorganisation at the UN mission. At first he thought the system was simply terribly badly organised. Only later did he discover that nobody wanted to fix it. Dr Mullick made his first attempt to alert his UN bosses in Iraq to problems soon after his arrival in October 2000. He repeatedly raised the alarm and filed reports and recommendations for nearly two years, but was rejected or ignored at every turn. Frustrated by his treatment in Baghdad, he took his complaints to New York in August 2002 with stacks of documents to back up his criticisms. The Telegraph has seen the devastating report that he submitted in vain to a series of UN chiefs. "The regime's subversion of and access to the UN's information nerve centres [its various databases] is scandalously blatant," he wrote. Dr Mullick's failed whistle-blowing came at a time when, publicly, there were only unsubstantiated rumours that Saddam was abusing the programme. The endemic scale of the corruption only started to become clear in 2003 after the US-led invasion. At the time of Dr Mullick's campaign, UN chiefs were desperate to keep a lid on the allegations as they had allowed Saddam to pervert the programme - including the introduction of kickbacks on every contract and the appointment of supporters to key posts in the UN mission - to maintain his co-operation. So important was the "success" of the oil-for-food programme deemed to be in New York that senior officials were apparently willing to turn a blind eye to even the most outrageous abuses. Saddam took full advantage. The UN was required to employ hundreds of local Iraqi staff as part of its deal with Saddam, yet little effort was apparently made to ensure that this did not lead to widespread penetration of the mission's most sensitive operations by regime loyalists. Indeed, among the most important disclosures in the report is the scale of infiltration of the database staff at Unicef, the UN's children's agency. This was the organisation that had produced the much-quoted but highly controversial estimate that 500,000 Iraqi children had died because of sanctions, a figure based partly on an extrapolation of statistics provided by Saddam's own health ministry. In his report, Dr Mullick told his bosses that the Unicef database was "run by a coterie of individuals with direct links to the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The daughter of an Iraqi deputy prime minister and her cousin closely guarded the date-related activities there." Although the 500,000 statistic was produced before he was posted to Baghdad, Dr Mullick told The Telegraph that he was sceptical about the accuracy of figures emerging from Unicef in Baghdad. "The death of a single child because of sanctions is a tragedy, but there is no excuse for exaggerating the figures," he said. Similarly, he listed the local staff working on the oil-for-food database: the son-in-law of the deputy foreign minister, the daughter of a top official, the son of a retired intelligence official, the son of a former ambassador and the relatives of other Ba'ath party members. As well as using relatives of Saddam loyalists, the Iraqis also recruited foreign UN officials, particularly those from neighbouring Arab countries. Dr Mullick said that the officers in charge of the database during his time there included a Lebanese and a Jordanian who were both married to Iraqi women from powerful families with close regime connections. He was told at one stage by local Iraqis that he could have "anything" he wanted if he dropped his efforts to expose the programme's failings. He did not know if other UN staff took bribes, but said that many colluded with Saddam's manipulation of the system because otherwise the Iraqis would block the renewal of their visas and that would cost them their lucrative assignments. "A lot of these people came from poor developing countries so these jobs were very important to them. Others were just opposed to the whole sanctions regime, so they were happy to see it undermined," he told The Telegraph. Saddam, for his part, had a dictator's instinct for the importance of controlling information. By distorting or hiding accurate statistics, it was much easier for him to exploit the programme for his own ends. As Dr Mullick discovered, even such basic information as a breakdown of population figures by provinces - vital for accurately assessing where goods should be distributed - remained a closely guarded secret. "The result of this lack of accurate information is that UN observers would go out to see goods being distributed, but have no real idea of what they were looking for or recording. Most UN workers really were conscientious and doing their best, but the system just didn't work. "The UN allowed oil-for-food to become a wonderful control mechanism for Saddam. The whole country was dependent on the programme and he manipulated it to his advantage. I would truly say that the regime achieved all its goals." He said that the Iraqi regime stage-managed a "humanitarian catastrophe" while at the same time using oil-for-food supplies to rebuild its battered military. In particular, it routinely diverted thousands of trucks, four-wheel drive vehicles and pick-ups to its armed forces and intelligence agencies. What Dr Mullick experienced in Baghdad was bad enough, but worse was to come when, despairing of exerting any influence in Iraq, he flew to New York in August 2002, sure that there he would find someone to listen. He was wrong. He approached the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (the UN wing that first hired him) and also sent a copy of his protest to Dileep Nair, the head of the Office of Internal Oversight and one of the officials reprimanded in the Volcker report last week. Finally, in December, he received his response - a letter informing him that his contract would not be renewed because UN officials in Iraq said they had heard nothing from him. He listed 35 occasions on which he had been in touch with the UN, but he still lost his job. Now he hopes that the evidence he has given to Mr Volcker will play its part in forcing change at the UN. Yet the prospects of reform still seem limited at an organisation where, with Alice in Wonderland logic, Mr Annan and his senior aides managed to interpret last week's Volcker report as an "exoneration". It is correct that it did not find Mr Annan guilty of any criminal activity with regard to the oil-for-food programme and uncovered "no evidence" that he exerted influence over the awarding of a crucial contract in 1998 to Cotecna, a Swiss firm with whom Mr Annan helped his son Kojo get a job in 1996. However, the Secretary-General came in for heavy criticism for his failure to address several apparent conflicts of interest involving himself, his son and Cotecna and for his overall handling of the troubled programme. The report also found that his chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, ordered the shredding of key documents linked to the investigation. Mark Pieth, a commissioner who had reportedly opposed efforts by Mr Volcker to absolve Mr Annan, made clear his annoyance at UN attempts to spin the report. "We should not brush this off," he said. "A certain mea culpa would have been appropriate." A closer reading of the report makes it clear that Kofi Annan had links with Cotecna over many years and that his son, who describes himself as an "independent businessman" and insists that his work for the company had nothing to do with UN contracts, enjoyed privileged access through a family friend to the UN's procurement department. As recently as last November, the Secretary-General made no mention of meetings with Cotecna executives in an interview with the Volcker commission, only to recall them two months later. There was also a series of telephone calls between Mr Annan and a friend who worked for Cotecna, after The Telegraph revealed Kojo Annan's links to the company for the first time in January 1999. "The trouble is that people at the UN seem to suffer from sudden memory loss one week and then remember everything the next week," said a senior investigator with one of the six US congressional committees investigating the scandal. "One thing's for sure: this was no exoneration." The air of "another week, another scandal" at the UN deepened last week when a management review turned up evidence of sexual harassment, misused office funds and cronyism at the UN elections division that helped organise the recent ballots in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories. Dr Mullick is no longer surprised by such news. "I believed deeply in the importance of the UN," he said. "But the oil-for-food scandal brings shame on the whole organisation. The UN has to take a hard look at itself and should start to reform now. It's running out of time - fast." -------- venezuela Chavez wants 1.5m army reservists Sunday 03 April 2005 Aljazeera http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/9411F5CA-69F5-45E5-8005-98A51BAE14B5.htm Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez has said 1.5 million people will be trained to form the military reserve in order to defend the country. The reserve troops will be trained by military officials and will be "ready to defend, with the people, the sovereignty and greatness of this land", Chavez said during his weekly radio and television show on Sunday. "If anyone were to come here and to try to seize the fatherland from us, we would make him bite the dust," he said. The reserve troops will serve under Military Reserve Commander Julio Quintero Viloria, a staunch Chavez ally. Chavez did not say who the enemy could be, but he has repeatedly accused the US of planning to invade Venezuela and seize its bountiful oil reserves. He has also said the US was behind the failed two-day coup in 2002, which Washington was slow to condemn. US officials have denied the claims and have criticised Venezuela's purchase of 100,000 Kalashnikov rifles from Russia, which they say could end in the hands of armed rebels in the continent. Venezuelan officials say that the arms will only be used by the military. The US is Venezuela's top oil buyer, but relations have been tense due to Chavez's strong criticism of US policy in Iraq. However, the president said this week that he did not want to be "an enemy" of Washington, and a US senator met Chavez on Saturday in an attempt to improve relations. ---- Venezuelan police hunt missing killer capsules of radioactive Iridium-192 Sunday, April 03, 2005 David Coleman VHeadline.com http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=29254 Venezuelan police have begun an extensive hunt for two killer capsules of radioactive material that went missing last month One of the two capsules of radioactive Iridium-192 -- used in equipment to check oil industry pipes for faults -- went missing March 15 from a barge on Lake Maracaibo. Another went missing March 21 after it is claimed it fell off the back of a workers' truck in Monagas. Iridium-192 emits powerful gamma radiation and is often used in treating prostate cancer and faults in underground industrial pipes. Venezuela's Energy Ministry director of Nuclear Affairs Angel Diaz says "they were lost through negligence ... we're in a state of emergency and looking for them." Authorities say the public should not to open the red and yellow containers which also carry radiation warning signs. Diaz says everyone within a range of at least five meters would be exposed to harmful radiation if the containers were opened. Venezuela's National Guard (GN), Civil Defense and police are also involved in the nationwide hunt. The capsules were encased in protective containers of depleted uranium and are said to be "about the size of a lunchbox." "The health and lives of people around would be at risk ... since they're quite heavy, people might think they have something valuable inside." Venezuela's Civil Defense chief Antonio Rivero is concerned that the capsules might fall into terrorist hands ... "they could be used in a malicious fashion ... someone might try to place these capsules near a person or a place where people were gathered, for terrorist purposes." -------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE -------- torture Green light for Iraqi prison abuse came right from the top Classified documents show the former US military chief in Iraq personally sanctioned measures banned by the Geneva Conventions. 03 April 2005 Andrew Buncombe reports from Washington Independent News & Media (UK) http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=625909 America's leading civil liberties group has demanded an investigation into the former US military commander Iraq after a formerly classified memo revealed that he personally sanctioned a series of coercive interrogation techniques outlawed by the Geneva Conventions. The group claims that his directives were directly linked to the sort of abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib. Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reveal that Lt General Ricardo Sanchez authorised techniques such as the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners, stress positions and disorientation. In the documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Gen Sanchez admits that some of the techniques would not be tolerated by other countries. When he appeared last year before a Congressional committee, Gen Sanchez denied authorising such techniques. He has now been accused of perjury. The ACLU says the documents reveal that the abuse of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere was the result of an organised and co-ordinated plan for dealing with prisoners captured during the so-called war on terror that originates at the highest levels of the chain of command. It says that far from being isolated incident, the shocking abuse at Abu Ghraib that was revealed last year was part of a pattern. "We think that the techniques authorised by Gen Sanchez were certainly responsible for putting into play the sort of abuses that we saw at Abu Ghraib," Amirit Singh, an ACLU lawyer, told The Independent on Sunday. "And it does not just stop with Sanchez. It goes to [Defence Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, who wrote memos authorising these sorts of techniques at Guantanamo Bay." In the September 2003 memo, Gen Sanchez authorised the use of 29 techniques for interrogating prisoners being held by the US. These included stress positions, "yelling, loud music and light control" as well as the use of muzzled military dogs in order to "exploit Arab fear of dogs". Some of the most notorious photographs to emerge from the Abu Ghraib scandal showed hand-cuffed, naked Iraqi prisoners cowering from snarling dogs. Six weeks after Gen Sanchez issued his memo, a subsequent directive banned the use of dogs and several of the other techniques following concerns raised by military lawyers. The ACLU says that at least 12 of the techniques listed in the memo went beyond the limits for interrogation listed in the US Army's field manual. "Gen Sanchez authorised interrogation techniques that were in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions and the army's own standards," said Ms Singh. "He and other high-ranking officials who bear responsibility for the widespread abuse of detainees must be held accountable." The Abu Ghraib scandal sent shockwaves around the world and further undermined US credibility in the Arab world. In the immediate aftermath, insurgents who captured and beheaded a US engineer, Nick Berg, said they had done so in retaliation for the abuse at the infamous prison west of Baghdad, where prisoners were sexually humiliated and tortured. A number of low-ranking reservists have been charged over the abuse. An alleged ringleader, Charles Graner, 36, was convicted last January and sentenced to 10 years in jail. At his trial his lawyer, Guy Womack, claimed his client was being used as a scapegoat. "The government is asking a corporal to take the hit for them," he said. "The chain of command says, 'We didn't know anything about this stuff'. You know that is a lie." When he appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee in May 2004, Gen Sanchez flatly refused approving such techniques in Iraq, and said that a news article reporting otherwise was false. "I never approved any of those measures to be used ... at any time in the last year," he said under oath. The ACLU accuses him of committing perjury and has asked the Attorney General to investigate. In a letter to Alberto Gonzales, the group said: "Gen Sanchez's testimony, given under oath before the Senate Armed Services committee, is utterly inconsistent with the written record, and deserves serious investigation. This clear breach of the public's trust is also further proof that the American people deserve the appointment of an independent special counsel by the Attorney General." A number of investigations have been carried out into the abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. While some have referred to a break-down in the chain of command, none have placed responsibility with senior officers or politicians. Kathy Kelley, a spokeswoman for the anti-war group Voices in the Wilderness, said the new documents obtained by the ACLU showed a pattern of abuse by US forces. "It saddens me but I am not shocked," she said. Gen Sanchez is currently commanding general of the US V Corps based in Germany. He has yet to comment on the release of the memo. A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment. The Pentagon originally refused to release the memo on national security grounds, but passed it to the ACLU after the group challenged it in court. Mr Rumsfeld last week dismissed suggestions that it had been withheld to save the Pentagon's embarrassment. But the ACLU said the reason for the delay in delivering the more than 1,200 pages of documents in which the memo was contained was "evident in the contents", which included reports of brutal beatings and sworn statements that soldiers were told to "beat the fuck out of" prisoners. -------- ENERGY -------- alternative energy In search of alternatives: Leave nuclear power out of the solution to the energy crisis By John Reynolds, April 3, 2005 For The Eugene, Oregon, Register-Guard http://www.registerguard.com/news/2005/04/03/b1.ed.col.reynolds.0403.html George Will promotes nuclear energy in his March 28 Register-Guard column. He spends more time offering a faintly patronizing history of Nevada than in supporting a nuclear waste dump there, and no time at all supporting his statement that "the U.S. should generate much more than one-fifth of its electricity currently produced by nuclear power." Far from Will's assertion, the U.S. should phase out nuclear power as soon as possible. Instead, the country needs a wholehearted commitment to renewable energy sources, including solar and wind. Nuclear power plant waste must be shipped and then guarded for more than 300,000 years, as has been recently determined in federal courts. In the United States, nuclear waste sits in pools at each nuclear plant - including a guarded pool at the shut-down Trojan plant on the banks of the Columbia River. If the nation ever manages to build that central waste depository under Nevada's Yucca Mountain that Will supports, deadly waste will then be shipped through our cities and farms, giving terrorists a new, slow-moving target. In the few countries where nuclear reprocessing occurs, with its enormous requirement for energy, shipments also become targets. The last Japan-to-France waste transfer attracted worldwide objections. The threat of global warming has revived talk of an increased role for nuclear power, because it produces so few gases that contribute to global warming. Some advocates even describe nuclear power as "renewable." Given the obvious environmental and political disadvantages of fossil fuels, is nuclear a better choice? I believe the answer is clearly no. Nuclear power is renewable only if we accept the plutonium option involving breeder reactors. I can scarcely imagine a worse choice, combining the most severe nuclear-proliferation threats with an increase of hundreds of thousands of years of threat from nuclear waste. Plutonium is the terrorist's gold. It has a half-life of more than 200,000 years. It should not be under discussion as an answer to our energy supply. Nuclear power brings with it the extraction of uranium with pollution from mine tailings. It requires enormous amounts of energy in the enrichment process, subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, before it can be used as fuel. Nuclear plants demand extraordinary security because they are such extraordinary targets. Those advocating nuclear power point to the pebble-bed reactor as a less complex, safer, easier model for the future. We certainly should insist on an improved reactor design as one condition before discussing nuclear power. But another condition must be a vast improvement in waste storage. In the December issue of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni magazine Technology Review, Matthew Wald explores our options for dealing with nuclear waste. The gist of this lengthy article is: "We don't know how to safely store it forever. Let's leave the solution to a generation that will." In other words, stop generating more of this stuff. We are not dealing adequately with the nuclear waste we already have. While we phase out nuclear power, we must act quickly and forcefully to advance renewable energy. Opponents are those who would lose control of worldwide energy supply - those who now have their hands so profitably on the valves. Their arguments against renewable energy are predictable. They include: "Solar, wind and biomass cannot possibly supply the world's needs." This is patently false. Our daily solar and wind resources are many times greater than our daily energy use. Renewable energy must supply these needs when nonrenewable fuels are depleted. The faster we increase our energy efficiency in cars, homes, businesses and industries, the sooner renewable energy can meet our needs. "Who wants our farms and forests covered with solar collectors and wind turbines?" No one does, of course. With photovoltaic arrays on most roofs and turbines in the windiest stretches of land, as well as offshore, we can protect our forests while increasing the incomes of farmers and ranchers who work right around the turbines that pay them welcome royalties. A study released on March 1 by the Energy Foundation found that rooftop space is not a constraining factor for solar development. Residential and commercial rooftop space in the U.S. could accommodate up to 710,000 megawatts of solar electric power (if all rooftops were fully utilized, taking into account proper orientation of buildings, shading from trees, rooftop ventilation equipment, and other solar access factors). The total electricity-generating capacity in the U.S. today is about 950,000 megawatts. We must proceed quickly to develop renewable energy resources, because: • Solar and wind are labor-intensive in manufacture and installation, contributing to local economies. • They can be installed almost anywhere, thus are not limited to a few places worldwide. • Once installed, solar and wind have zero fuel costs, contributing to local economies money that formerly went to pay far higher utility bills. • Solar and wind are inherently terror-resistant because they are widely distributed rather than concentrated. Which is a more vulnerable target: one nuclear plant whose rupture would lead to a massive radiation release, or 700 wind turbines spread over 1,000 acres in Eastern Oregon? • Solar energy, in particular, offers some blackout protection, because it can be so easily integrated in the building it serves. My solar water heater, for example, has a photovoltaic-driven pump. When I experience a loss of electricity from the Eugene Water & Electric Board, the sun can still warm my water. • Solar and wind, once in operation, contribute almost no pollution or other environmental damage. Bird kills by wind turbines are an unfortunate exception, and turbine locations away from flyways are a way to reduce, but not eliminate, this threat. This is a huge reduction in pollution from the chain of extraction, shipping, refining, combustion or fission, and waste disposal associated with nonrenewable fuels. But the most important reason to advocate rapid renewable energy development is its contribution to world peace. Solar, wind, and biomass resources are spread across the Earth, not concentrated in a few Middle Eastern countries. Indeed, the poorest countries get the best year-round solar resources - those nearer the equator, including Africa and South America. By definition, nonrenewable energy sources are finite. They are an inherited energy bank account that draws no interest, being steadily depleted. Renewable sources, by contrast, are a steady, widely dispersed source of energy income, forever. They are our energy future, and with our support, that future can be very close at hand. Meanwhile, we can use some of our inherited fossil fuels to build the hardware for our renewable energy future. -------- energy Forum: Going nuclear for electric car April 03, 2005 Washington Times Letters http://www.washingtontimes.com/commentary/20050402-111007-7168r.htm To reply - mailto:letters@washingtontimes.com I admire the thought behind Max Boot's article deploring U.S. dependence on foreign oil to fuel our vehicles (March 27, B1). But I would be interested to see scientific support for the sensational claim by him and Frank Gaffney and R. James Woolsey that 500 mpg cars are "not science fiction; they are achievable now." While other ways to propel vehicles are available as well as fuels other than petroleum-based gasoline, such sensational and unsubstantiated claims should not be made in a responsible newspaper without referring to the research on which they are based. I have professionally worked in the transportation field and must take exception to glib claims of a 500 mpg automobile. Fundamental mechanical laws cannot be repealed, most prominently here that propelling an automobile on a highway involves work not only against friction but particularly air stream resistance, which rises with the square of the velocity. No matter how efficient the engine in extracting the available latent energy of the fuel, the work that must be done to move the car remains. Mr. Boot suggests we have 50 mpg cars today [actually a result of the use of regenerative braking, which recaptures the kinetic energy of stopping the vehicle] and that 500 mpg cars are possible. He suggests hydrogen fuel cell cars are pie-in-the-sky, perhaps recognizing there are no hydrogen extraction plants or mines and seemingly ethanol- and methanol- based fuels will permit 500 mpg cars. Though no chemist, I find it preposterous to suggest increasing the energy available from a gallon of ethanol- and/or methanol-enhanced fuel by a factor of 10. In fact, I have noticed a diminution my own mileage during the months when the addition of ethanol to gasoline is mandated by law. If the authors of the report making the claim want to solve the problem of dependence on oil, a totally electric car is the answer. But many practical, though hopefully solvable, problems remain for such a car. We still cannot avoid the fundamental issue of the original energy source to provide the electricity. Oil is of course ruled out by their own hypothesis. It seems nuclear power is the way to go, and I would favor that. But will environmentalists? No new U.S. nuclear power plants have been built in this country for many years. I understand 15 years are needed to get a nuclear plant on-line. Mr. Boot is right to suggest a problem looms. But squeezing more work out of a gallon of fuel for a vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine doesn't seem the right tack with available fuels. Unless chemists can find or create a fuel with tenfold the present available energy per gallon to meet Mr. Boot's claim of 500 mpg cars, there is no other solution other than nuclear to supply power for our future electric vehicles. JOHN D.S. MUHLENBERG (P.E., Calif.) Vienna, Va.