NucNews - June 5, 2005 -------- NUCLEAR -------- china Report: Taiwan Test-Fires Cruise Missile Jun 5, 2005 10:22 AM EDT (AP) http://ap.washingtontimes.com/dynamic/stories/T/TAIWAN_MILITARY?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Taiwan successfully test-fired a locally developed cruise missile capable of striking southeastern areas of mainland China, a newspaper reported Sunday. The missile - fired from the Jiupeng Missile Base in southern Taiwan - cruised about 300 miles before hitting a dummy target at sea off outlying Green Island, the China Times quoted an unidentified military source as saying. The report did not specify the date the test was conducted. Taiwan's Defense Ministry declined comment. Taiwan is widely believed to have secretly developed cruise missiles. Military officials have argued such weapons could deter China from launching an attack against the island. However, it may be several years before Taiwan can begin mass production of the missile, the newspaper said. China has deployed hundreds of ballistic missiles along its southeastern coast facing Taiwan. The mainland and the island are divided by the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait. Taiwan and China split amid civil war in 1949, and China has repeatedly threatened to retake the island by force to prevent it from declaring formal independence. Taiwanese military analysts have suggested that the cruise missiles should be deployed on four Kidd-class destroyers that the United States is scheduled to deliver to Taiwan later this year, the report said. -------- europe Straight to the radioactive 'heart' Workers rely on remote-controlled machinery to dismantel Germany's older nuclear power plants Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Publishing Group Germany | Georg Küffner June 5, 2005 http://www.iht.com/getina/files/251354.html http://www.faz.net/s/RubB443EC63397F4BAFBD6ACED075B4B2CC/Doc~E1038F4392EFF428CAF5E8E00FDB1D76D~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html Not even nuclear power plants are permanent. When, because of old age or for political reasons, they can no longer produce electricity, the plants are turned off and their fuel rods are removed. Through this process the radioactivity at the plants drops to one-tenth of a percent of what it was when they were still active. Yet, the remaining concrete, lead and steel still has enough residual radiation that the location cannot be left behind unsupervised and untreated. Especially for nuclear reactors there is no getting around the necessary work performed after the plant is shut-down. One option is to leave the reactor in a "safe enclosure" state, to look after the reactor and simply wait. But this is more complicated than it sounds. According to the natural laws of radioactive decay, it takes 30 to 50 years for the radioactivity to drop to levels where it is safe to remove the reactor. The process is so complex and costly that it has been performed at only three of the 19 nuclear plants in Germany that have been decommissioned. Much more common is immediate dismantling, where the power plant is taken apart "promptly" after shutdown. Here, the detailed knowledge gained by the plant's workers can be employed and they can keep their jobs at least until the ultimate goal of re-cultivating the area into a "green meadow" has been accomplished. At the former site of the Würgassen nuclear plant in Bavaria, it will take at least another ten years before daisies will start sprouting. The demolition of the 670 Megawatt boiling-water reactor, which was in operation for 23 years until it was shut down in 1994, will take appreciably longer than its construction. It is estimated that the total demolition and re-cultivation will cost around EUR700 million ($864 million) - three and a half times more than original construction. The nuclear plant's operator must pay the costs. According to the guidelines of the German atomic law owners are asked to make provisions for demolition, reclamation, and nuclear waste disposal while the plant is still in operation. Dismantling a nuclear power generator is by no means routine. The first experiences with the process came at the beginning of the 1990s with the complete disassembly of the 100 megawatt Niederaichbach test reactor in Bavaria. The reactor was run at full capacity for only 18 days between 1972 and 1974, as even at the beginning of operation cracks in the steam generator became apparent. After its unexpected early retirement, the plant was left to mothball for several years. By the fall of 1990 enough practical knowledge of nuclear reactor disassembly had been acquired that the costly process of tearing down the old plant could begin. An important component of the process was the development of a manipulator system, which allowed workers to take apart the radioactive 'heart' of the plant from a safe distance. The insight acquired in Niederaichbach benefits the 400 or so workers and engineers that are involved in the dismantling of the Würgassen reactor. As in Niederaichbach, they dismantle the plant starting on the inside and work outwards. The turbines and generators in the power house were removed, so that room could be made for a "handling area" where more precise dismantling, decontamination, and packaging of the reactor's fixtures could take place. Here, the metal piping of the cooling system and the concrete exterior of the nuclear containment apparatus can be prepared so that they can leave the safety area. Because a large portion of the parts are only contaminated on the surface, it is enough to wash them and dry them off with towels. In cases where radioactive particles have been embedded in the exterior skin of metal and concrete parts - despite a special coating that should make materials nearly non-porous - they must be milled down. Concrete is worked with tiny needle hammers; the metal is bombarded with extremely fast-moving needle-sized steel balls in a centrifuge accelerator. Afterwards, the parts emerge shiny as new. But although they might look clean, it is left to the Geiger counter to decide if they are decontaminated. If the radioactivity of the material is less than 0.1 becquerel per gram (based on Cobalt-60) it may be returned to the normal flow of recyclable resources. Old concrete is broken into small pieces and used in street pavement. The steel is melted down. In Würgassen workers must dispose of 255,000 tons of material. Around 80 percent of this is concrete, the remainder is mostly steel. All but about 2 percent of the entire nuclear plant can be reused. The unusable material, approximately 5,000 tons of radioactive waste must be packed into specially-built steel barrels and stored in a nuclear repository. However, while a final disposal location for the material has not yet been created, it is temporarily stored in two specially-created buildings at the old plant. Large amounts of radioactive waste will not be accumulated until 2009 when work will begin on removing the reactor pressure vessel and the biological shield that surrounds it. Over the past weeks, specialists were busy cleaning out the reactor pressure vessel and removing the control rod and fuel assembly casing. In order to prevent contaminated dust from accumulating, the work was performed under water with remote-controlled equipment. Pneumatic tools at the end of long poles can be submerged to depths of up to 90 meters in a large water container that absorbs radioactive particles. From a safe distance workers can watch the entire operation on television monitors. The demolition of a nuclear power plant is not only technically demanding, but requires precise organization of the work. Every step must be planned ahead. Those in charge must have a complete overview of the work being performed and fully document every object that is removed, no matter how tiny. Every screw must be followed on its trip to the nuclear waste repository or if it is not contaminated to the scrap yard. To aid in the process workers rely on a specially designed waste-material tracing system, which at the touch of a button can display the location, condition and next step in the handling cycle for every single object. -------- india Department of Atomic Energy will be setup a deemed university New Delhi, 5 June, 2005 http://www.jansamachar.net/display.php3?id=&num=3179&lang=English Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh has approved the Department of Atomic Energy's proposal to set up a deemed university -- Homi Bhabha National Institute bringing together ten premier institutions all over the country under a single research driven framework. Addressing BARC scientists and engineers, the Prime Minister said "The proposed unit will bring together ten premier institutions all over the country under a single research driven framework and help in ensuring that our scientists and our scientific establishments remain at the forefront of the pursuit of excellence comparable with the best global standards." Following is the text of his speech: “I am delighted to be here today. We live in an age in which human knowledge is growing at an exponential pace. It is a pace that was unthinkable only a few decades ago. Human knowledge and science and technology are the new determinants of national development. In the gigantic task of national development and nation building that is before us, the members of the BARC fraternity have played an outstanding role, and I salute you for it. I thank you on behalf of the nation for your efforts. It is therefore a pleasure for me to speak to such a distinguished gathering of scientists today. This great national enterprise that BARC is takes its name after the Father of India’s Atomic Energy Programme – Dr. Homi Bhabha, a great visionary and a great patriot who laid the foundations of a self-reliant nuclear programme for India. I pay homage to his memory and I salute his vision. The Bhabha Atomic Research Centre has gained national and international recognition as the mother institution of our Atomic Energy Programme. BARC has been instrumental in the birth of a whole host of DAE institutions, ranging from cutting edge R&D to commercial operations. The BARC Training School has become the primary source of human resource talent for the entire Department of Atomic Energy. Our nuclear programme has benefited from a generation of outstanding scientists and engineers. We recall with gratitude the contributions made by my friend and colleague, Dr Homi Sethna, Dr. P.K. Iyengar, Dr. M. R. Srinivasan, Dr Chidambaram and the late Dr. Raja Ramanna. Dr. Kakodkar is carrying on this great tradition and I compliment him and his colleagues for their dedicated work. All these outstanding scientists have been nurtured by this great centre of scientific excellence. This is a fitting example of how great institutions and outstanding individuals reinforce each other, a model we must replicate elsewhere in our country, in the management of our affairs and in our academic institutions. The Department of Atomic Energy, which marked the Golden Jubilee of its establishment last year, has made tremendous strides ranging from fundamental scientific research to development and commercial applications of nuclear energy. Our Scientists have—and I say it with great pride—mastered all aspects of nuclear fuel cycle technology. This is an achievement for which the nation is grateful to them. They have also achieved high standards in safety and environment management. Nuclear technology developed in this Centre has found applications in industry, health, agriculture, food preservation, urban waste management and desalination. It is a matter of national pride that India is among a select group of countries with advanced capabilities to utilize the entire gamut of fuel cycle operations. The technology to recover plutonium from irradiated nuclear fuel and use it to produce nuclear power in thermal as well as in fast reactors, making use of our vast thorium reserves, is critical to Dr Bhabha’s vision of a phased but unconstrained development of our nuclear power programme. We remain committed to doing all that is necessary to realize Dr. Bhabha’s vision. Our Government will ensure that the resource and capability base that BARC represents will be nurtured to meet our security needs in the years ahead. To ensure our energy security in future, we must recognize that nuclear energy is an important component of our overall energy basket. We cannot allow energy constraints to retard our economic and social growth. Nuclear energy is a clean and safe alternative to our dependence on fossil fuels. It is therefore imperative for the country to embark on a major expansion of nuclear energy. Our objective is to generate at least 20,000 MW of nuclear power by the year 2020 and we are determined to achieve this target. Such an expansion will require a focused national effort. However, when we succeed, it will provide considerable scope for the establishment of nuclear power plants through international collaboration. We hope that countries with advanced nuclear power industries will come forward to make use of the growing opportunities in India for cooperation in civilian nuclear energy. This is not just in India’s interest, but indeed in the interests of the international community as a whole, worried as we all are by global warming and all that goes with it. India is a responsible nuclear power. While we are determined to utilize fully the advanced technologies in our possession – both civilian and strategic, we are also prepared for a constructive dialogue with the international community to remove hindrances to a free flow of nuclear materials, technology and know-how. Our non-proliferation and export control credentials are impeccable and have been further strengthened through a comprehensive legislative action against WMD proliferation that our Parliament passed only a few weeks ago. Our nuclear programme has reached global standards of excellence. Our scientific and technological achievements have given us the will and confidence to explore enhanced interactions and exchanges with the outside world. Artificial barriers and technology denial regimes are an anachronism in the age of globalization, and must be progressively dismantled. Given our scientific credentials we can add value to international cooperative endeavours. India would like to participate in all efforts to find alternatives to traditional sources of energy. The most valuable resource in any scientific endeavour is its human resource base. This Centre must continue to attract the best scientific talent in the country. I am glad that the Department of Atomic Energy is encouraging greater student involvement in its research programmes and is strengthening linkages with our university system. I am happy to announce today that the Department’s proposal to set up a Dr. Homi Bhabha National Institute has been approved. This will bring together ten premier institutions all over the country under a single research-driven framework. This will help ensure that our scientists and our scientific establishments remain at the forefront of the pursuit of excellence, comparable with the best global standards. In conclusion, let me once again convey my deep appreciation for your dedication and your deep commitment to our nation’s growth. The nation is proud of the achievements of our scientists and technologists working dedicatedly here to develop our capability in atomic energy. In this journey of excellence, I assure you of the sustained support of the Government and our people. You should remain in the forefront of the national scientific endeavour. That is my prayer, that is my hope. May your path be blessed.” -------- korea N. Korea Again Faults U.S. Nuclear Policy By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS June 5, 2005 Filed at 5:41 a.m. ET http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Koreas-Nuclear.html?pagewanted=print SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- North Korea on Sunday repeated its demand that the United States drop what the communist nation calls a hostile policy toward resolving the nuclear standoff, two days after it struck what appeared to be a conciliatory tone with the Bush administration. The remarks Sunday with the precondition for the North's return to talks came after Pyongyang's rare praise for President Bush on Friday, welcoming his use of the title ''Mr.'' when referring to leader Kim Jong Il. ''The U.S. intention is to corner our republic as a terrorist nation and internationally isolate us,'' the North's Cabinet newspaper Minju Joson said in a commentary carried Sunday by the North's official Korean Central News Agency. A Japanese newspaper reported Saturday that U.S. and North Korean officials recently spoke by telephone and likely discussed resuming six-nation talks aimed at ending North Korea's nuclear weapons ambitions. A senior Bush administration official on Saturday would not confirm the report, but said the United States from time to time contacts the North's U.N. representative in New York to communicate, not to negotiate. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Bush administration has not heard from the North Koreans that they will return to the talks. North Korea, which has a history of using brinksmanship to wring aid from the West, has stayed away from the nuclear talks since June last year. Efforts to resume the talks -- among the two Koreas, United States, China, Japan and Russia -- gained urgency in February when the North claimed it already had nuclear weapons. It has since announced it has removed fuel rods from a nuclear reactor, a step toward extracting weapons-grade plutonium. Associated Press writer Deb Riechmann contributed to this report from Crawford, Texas. -------- u.s. nuc weapons Manhattan Project's brilliant, but flawed leader June 05, 2005 Washington Times Books AMERICAN PROMETHEUS: THE TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY OF J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER By Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin Knopf, $35, 736 pages REVIEWED BY JEFFREY MARSH http://www.washtimes.com/books/20050604-091914-9739r.htm In the 600-plus pages of "American Prometheus," Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman have produced a massively detailed account of the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), the absentminded polymathic professor who transformed himself into the charismatic leader of the Manhattan Project, became the ultimate insider in the councils of science and government, and was suddenly cast aside after a highly tendentious hearing declared him a security risk, largely because of events that had occurred years before and long since been forgiven. Mr. Bird and Mr. Sherwin have cast new light on a host of details of Oppenheimer's life. The book, Mr. Sherman tells us, represents the fruits of a quarter century of research on his part, plus five years by his invited coauthor. Many of the people they interviewed over that long period, including colleagues and friends of Oppenheimer over the years from the 1920s to the 1960s, are no longer alive, so while this is unlikely to be the last biography of Oppenheimer, its successors will have many fewer new firsthand accounts of the man and his times. Mr. Bird and Mr. Sherwin sum up some of the contradictions in Oppenheimer's personality in their introduction: "his ambitions and insecurities, his brilliance and naiveté, his determination and fearfulness, his stoicism and his bewilderment." And, in the words of Oppenheimer's long-time friend, the late Nobel prize winning physicist I. I. Rabi in a 1982 interview with Mr. Sherwin, he was "very wise and very foolish." The authors trace Oppenheimer's confused personality back to his youth, when the effortless academic superiority he demonstrated at New York's Ethical Culture school was accompanied by a deep-seated sense of insecurity and immaturity. And this insecurity was in turn exacerbated by his mother's hyper-protective attitude, following the loss of a younger child in infancy. Robert compensated for the coddling he received at home by becoming a skilled and fearless sailor of the 28-foot sloop his father gave him as a 16th birthday present, venturing out into the stormy seas of the Atlantic ocean off Long Island. This daring was also demonstrated intellectually. As a chemistry major at Harvard, Oppenheimer realized he was more interested in physics. Yet despite his shaky foundation in some basic areas of physics and mathematics, he petitioned the physics department to take a number of upper level courses. When one professor saw the list of 15 advanced physics books Oppenheimer told them he had read, he remarked, "Obviously, if he says he has read these books, he's a liar, but he should get a Ph.D. for knowing their titles." After graduating from Harvard in three years summa cum laude, Oppenheimer set off to Europe, then still the Mecca of physics. Within months, he had a nervous breakdown, placed a poisoned apple on the desk of his tutor (future Nobel Prize winner P. M. S. Blackett) and attempted to throttle one of his closest friends while on vacation. His father managed to persuade Cambridge University not to press criminal charges and sent him to several psychiatrists. Then, after putting himself together, he plunged into the heart of the quantum mechanics revolution, and was soon invited by Max Born, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, to come to Gottingen. There, he distinguished himself not only by his brilliance, but by his constant interruption of seminars to demonstrate his superior grasp of whatever the speaker was saying, a habit which led his fellow graduate students to petition Born to keep Oppenheimer quiet. However his work at Gottingen earned him a reputation among leading physicists that let him write his own ticket when he came back to America, and during the 1930s, working closely with the experimentalist Ernest O. Lawrence, he turned the University of California at Berkeley into the leading physics school in America, turning out a new generation of gifted physicists. With his academic salary supplemented by family wealth that had emerged unscathed from the crash of 1929, Oppenheimer lived well, and he used his money not only to expose his students to the life style of the rich and famous, but also to support a host of left wing causes, especially after he became romantically entangled with two women with strong communist connections. The first was Jean Tatlock, the emotionally unstable psychiatrist daughter of a Berkeley English professor. The second, the heavy drinking Kitty Harrison, nee Puening, was of German extraction. To quote one irrelevant but interesting example of the book's thoroughness, her mother had once been engaged to Wilhelm Keitel, a cousin of hers who later became a field marshal in Hitler's Wehrmacht and was executed as a war criminal. Kitty's first husband was a communist party worker who died fighting in the Spanish civil war, and when Oppenheimer met her was unhappily married to an English physician. After their divorce, Oppenheimer married her, but continued his relationship with Tatlock sporadically until her suicide during the war years. When the Manhattan Project began, General Leslie Groves, the Pentagon-appointed head of the massive undertaking, recognized Oppenheimer's ability to instantly grasp the essentials of any technical problem and selected him to lead the massive scientific effort. Oppenheimer's inspirational leadership, persuasive eloquence and hitherto unsuspected organizational talent led the Project to success. After the war ended with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer became an iconic figure, the symbol of science as a national asset. In the postwar era, Oppenheimer became a leading advisor to the government on nuclear affairs, and was not reluctant to express his belief that the dangers inherent in nuclear weapons could only be brought under control by an international arms control regime. He opposed the development of the so-called "Super," the hydrogen bomb championed most famously by Edward Teller and supported by many influential figures in Washington. Following the acquisition of the atomic bomb by Stalin, President Truman ordered full speed ahead on developing the H-bomb, and Oppenheimer was a marked man. His foes, fearful that he would use his charismatic powers to turn national strategy in a dovish direction, decided he had to be removed from any vestige of power, and in the fervently anticommunist atmosphere of the times, exposure of his fellow traveling past, long outgrown and, in fact, well-known and discounted at the time of the Manhattan Project, served as a convenient means to that end. Oppenheimer's most powerful opponent was Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in the Eisenhower administration and, ironically, the man who gave Oppenheimer his postwar position as director of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton. The hawkish Strauss's opposition to Oppenheimer's approach had been transformed into personal hatred when Oppenheimer, in his well-practiced manner, humiliated him in a public hearing. Strauss masterminded the AEC hearing, ensuring that Oppenheimer's defense was hamstrung by lack of knowledge of the case against him, while Oppenheimer weakened his own position by failing to pick an aggressive trial lawyer as his counsel. He had no rational answer to why he had told security officers several contradictory stories about an abortive approach made during the war to recruit him as a Soviet spy, other than the true answer, "I was an idiot." Mr. Bird and Mr. Sherwin show how Oppenheimer's own weaknesses helped his self-destruction, first of all by ignoring the advice of Rabi, Einstein and others that he simply allow his clearance to lapse and not fight to remain an official adviser when his advice was no longer wanted. After the hearings, Oppenheimer returned to IAS, which was roiled by academic politics after he offended the mathematicians by inviting scholars in less rigorous fields. Mr. Bird and Mr. Sherwin, turning to a less familiar aspect of Oppenheimer's life, describe the free flowing liquor but sparse food at the social events he and Kitty hosted, and the long interludes they spent at their second home in St. John in the Virgin Islands long, idyllic except for the Hatfield-McCoy type feud between them and their closest neighbors, from whom they had bought their property after much persuasion. Oppenheimer, a chain smoker, died of throat cancer at 62. The late George Kennan, recruited by Oppenheimer to the IAS after his distinguished diplomatic career, recalled at his own 100th birthday party that he had once asked the physicist after his security hearing ordeal if he had considered relocating to a foreign academic institute that would welcome him. Oppenheimer replied, "Damn it, I happen to love this country." Perhaps the tragedy of Oppenheimer's life as an American is less well explained by heavy psychologizing than by the classic song "Cigarets and whisky and wild, wild women. They drive you crazy, they drive you insane." Jeffrey Marsh has written widely on scientific topics and public issues ranging from nuclear strategy to social policy. -------- u.s. nuc facilities -------- us nuc waste Alternative to deep burial of nuclear waste is considered Plan calls for storing spent fuel in casks on Indian reservation Matthew L. Wald, New York Times Sunday, June 5, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/politics/05waste.html?pagewanted=print http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/06/05/MNG4ND3T9C1.DTL Washington -- As the Energy Department falters in its effort to bury nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, the nuclear industry and Congress are taking steps toward a radically different storage strategy: putting the waste in huge casks that could be parked in a handful of high-security lots around the country for decades. That idea advanced on two fronts last month. A panel of judges at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission recommended May 24 that a private utility consortium be allowed to open a lot to store 4,000 casks of waste on an Indian reservation west of Salt Lake City. On the same day, the House voted to order the Energy Department to establish similar storage areas, providing $10 million for the project. In the Senate, Pete Domenici, R-N.M., who is chairman of the Energy Committee, has expressed interest in the concept. And the Energy Department itself has opened the door to considering an alternative to what has long been the favored strategy of deep burial of nuclear wastes. But even if President Bush receives and signs legislation, it may be years before the Energy Department sets up any lots. The proposal already has encountered opposition from elected officials whose districts include potential storage lots. Laying out the rationale for the new approach, Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Energy and Water Development Committee, said: "If we want to build a new generation of nuclear reactors in this country, we need to demonstrate to Wall Street that the federal government will live up to its responsibilities under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to take title to commercial spent nuclear fuel." Since the act was passed in 1982, the Energy Department has focused on deep burial of nuclear waste, and the government has signed contracts with reactor owners guaranteeing that it would take the waste. Congress later voted to make Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, the prime storage site. The Energy Department was supposed to have the site ready by 1998, but the effort has stumbled, and it is now unclear whether it will open. When it became obvious, more than a decade ago, that the government would not fulfill its obligations on time, reactor owners built steel casks to put the waste in, filled them with inert gas to inhibit rust and loaded them into concrete silos. Storage overdue The Yucca project is now so far behind schedule that some of the reactors have been retired and torn down, leaving nothing but a field of storage casks. An Energy Department spokeswoman, Anne Womack Kolton, suggested this week that federal officials would consider the storage lots as an interim solution. "The administration believes that permanent storage at a geologic repository is the appropriate approach, Yucca Mountain is the place to accomplish that, and we are moving forward with that goal," Kolton said. But she added: "Yucca Mountain's capacity is currently limited by statute, and therefore, we are studying Chairman Hobson's proposal." Domenici, a strong supporter of nuclear power, said in a statement that he believed that the Yucca Mountain project should proceed but that the spent fuel should be kept on the surface to allow reprocessing to recover its plutonium, which can be used as reactor fuel. "Interim storage is a key component of that," he said. A utility consortium, Private Fuel Storage, has negotiated a 50-year lease with the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians for a storage site on 840 acres of the tribe's reservation about 50 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. The group has applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license. In May, a panel of administrative law judges appointed by the commission rejected the last technical objection, an argument raised by Utah that a plane from a nearby Air Force base could crash into the silos and release radiation. The state will appeal to the full five-member commission and plans a variety of other challenges, including trying to block the transportation routes. Members of the commission said they would not talk about Skull Valley before they had voted. But the chairman, Nils Diaz, was asked in a public appearance in March if the commission could back such a project, because it conflicts with a 23-year-old federal policy to focus on deep burial. He replied, "This is an issue of the law. The Atomic Energy Act asks us to proceed with certain types of actions, including license applications, that meet the qualification of protection of public health and safety." Interim solution helpful Many reactor sites have casks, usually a few dozen, and unless Yucca Mountain opens for burials or unless big surface storage sites like Skull Valley are established, the nation could eventually have more than 60 of these sites. The casks are licensed by the regulatory commission for 20 years, but the licenses can be renewed. Nuclear engineers said they could last a century or more, a tiny fraction of the time it would take the radioactivity to die away. If burial plans eventually go forward, experts say, it will be easier to handle fuel that has been stored in casks and that no longer generates as much heat. For the commission, one problem is a decades-old policy stating that building reactors was environmentally sound because there would be a waste solution in place by 2025. A century of interim storage could sidestep the problem. Another problem is money. Every reactor operator has sued the Energy Department for failure to accept the waste on time. The department, the courts have ruled, must pay storage costs beyond the date when it was supposed to accept the fuel. "The Department of Energy recognizes that the only way to mitigate its damages is to find someplace to put this material, to get it off the utilities' hands, so they can get out of these lawsuits," said Joe Egan, a lawyer for the state of Nevada, which opposes construction at Yucca Mountain. -------- MILITARY -------- spies Trial to Reveal Reach Of U.S. Surveillance Wiretaps to Be Used Against 4 Terrorism Suspects By John Mintz Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, June 5, 2005; A03 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/04/AR2005060401319_pf.html For a decade, FBI agents covertly monitored every telephone call and fax sent and received by Florida university professor Sami al-Arian as he communicated with alleged top leaders of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group about its suicide bombings of Israelis, shaky finances and high-level turf struggles. Starting tomorrow, many of those 20,000 hours of phone calls and hundreds of faxes will be revealed in a federal courtroom in Tampa, where al-Arian and three other alleged members of the terrorist group will be tried on charges of conspiracy to commit murder through suicide attacks in Israel and the Palestinian territories. The trial, expected to last at least six months, will provide a rare view of what the government contends are the clandestine operations of a terrorist group. It is the first case in which vast amounts of communications monitored under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) will make up the bulk of the evidence in a criminal prosecution of alleged terrorists -- demonstrating the enormous power the government now wields under that counterterrorism law. The wiretaps, approved in 1993 through 2003 on as many as 10 phones by a secret FISA court, were originally intended for use only by FBI agents conducting open-ended "intelligence" probes, and not for use in criminal trials. But after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the enactment of the USA Patriot Act and a ruling by the supersecret FISA court of appeals allowed much greater use of intelligence material in investigations such as this one. Many civil liberties experts express grave concern about U.S. officials' introduction into criminal court of years of wiretaps approved by FISA judges under a lower standard of proof than that demanded by criminal-court judges. But U.S. District Judge James Moody has rejected defense attorneys' arguments that the information should not be heard in court. Using FISA wiretaps in court is "a serious problem" that puts defendants at a disadvantage, said David Cole, a Georgetown University expert on the law related to terrorism. "Unlike with criminal wiretaps, FISA doesn't give defendants any meaningful chance to challenge the validity of the tap." U.S. officials say al-Arian and three associates who worked with him at a cluster of institutes affiliated with the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa were secretly top leaders of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, sharing duties with other leaders in Syria. Attorneys for al-Arian, a USF professor of computer engineering until he was fired in 2003, and the other defendants contend that their clients do not condone the terrorist group's violent tactics, and that U.S. prosecutors are criminalizing their opposition to Israeli policies. The U.S. government declared the Palestinian Islamic Jihad a terrorist organization in 1995, making any association with it illegal. Defense attorneys have said that any promotion of the organization by al-Arian and others before then was protected political speech. "The government has a major leap trying to connect people talking on the phone in Tampa, and doing fundraising, with bombs exploding in Israel 6,600 miles away," said lawyer Stephen Bernstein, who represents defendant Sameeh Taha Hammoudeh, a former USF student. "The government is trying to say, 'If you have an interest in a subject, and if you talk about it with other people, then you must have been involved in it.' " Moody has also ruled that he will limit defense attorneys' efforts to bring up during the trial the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in their bid to dramatize the Palestinians' plight and their right to resist what they see as Israeli oppression. The defense asserts that the U.S. government has embraced the Israeli government's intelligence findings on the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and that the group represents no threat to the United States. Lawyer Kevin Beck, who represents defendant Hatim Naji Fariz, manager of an Illinois-based Muslim charity, said there will be clashes in court over "the context and meaning of some conversations," including some in which he said officials unfairly assert the defendants spoke in code about the terrorist group. The prosecutors' case "is built on assumption built on assumption built on assumption, with some hearsay," he said. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad, founded in Egypt in 1979 and largely funded by Iran, has devoted itself to two missions: the destruction of Israel and the creation of a Muslim Palestinian state. The group is bitterly opposed to peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians and has often stepped up attacks when talks show promise. It has also targeted sites symbolic of coexistence, such as a Haifa restaurant co-owned by Jews and Palestinians, where an operative of the terrorist group exploded a bomb that killed 21 people in 2003. The al-Arian case has been the subject of intense controversy for a decade. It is a kind of proxy battle for the Middle East conflict, and it has stirred emotions as raw as those in Israel and the Palestinian territories. In October 1995, after years directing a campaign of deadly attacks on Israelis, Fathi Shiqaqi, then the head of the terrorist group, was assassinated in Malta by the Israelis. His successor was Ramadan Shallah, a longtime top official of al-Arian's USF-affiliated think tank in Tampa. Al-Arian and others at the think tank, the World and Islam Studies Enterprise (WISE), said they had no idea Shallah had ties to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Weeks later, federal agents raided the homes and offices of al-Arian and his associates. Al-Arian denied any wrongdoing or any link to the terrorist organization, and for years academic-freedom activists supported his contention that he was being pilloried for being an anti-Israel Muslim activist. Much of that controversy died when al-Arian and eight other people, including Shallah, were indicted in 2003. The indictment included lengthy quotes from FISA intercepts indicating that al-Arian had been in close contact for years with Shiqaqi, Shallah and other top group leaders about the group's most secret internal operations. U.S. officials were allowed to use the FISA intercepts in the case because the USA Patriot Act of 2001 and a FISA appeals court decision in 2003 had torn down the long-unbreachable wall between FBI criminal investigators and intelligence personnel. The legal wall had previously prevented FBI intelligence agents from sharing any information about the FISA taps with agents pursuing criminal cases. Conviction on the main charges -- including conspiracy to commit racketeering through the murder of Israelis, money laundering and other crimes -- could bring life sentences for al-Arian, Hammoudeh, Fariz and a fourth defendant, Chicago dry cleaner Ghassan Zayed Ballut. All four also are accused of extortion as part of that conspiracy, on the theory that the Palestinian Islamic Jihad threatens Israelis with death if they do not leave Israel. Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, said he believes that is an unprecedented use of the extortion law, but he added that it appears to be legally sound. McCarthy said the case most resembles a classic Mafia trial, in which prosecutors charge that simply by being in, say, the Gambino family, all the defendants conspired to commit the array of crimes that each committed individually. "You've got to convince the jury the entity is evil," he said. Prosecutors said they intend to place on the witness stand dozens of Israeli survivors of Palestinian Islamic Jihad attacks. To illustrate the effects of an attack, officials may also play videotapes they made of a bus being blown up in Florida. Five of the nine indicted defendants are overseas and not in custody and will not be tried. They are Shallah, who still runs the organization from Syria; Abd al Aziz Awda, its original spiritual leader; al-Arian's brother-in-law, Mazen al-Najjar; leading Muslim scholar Bashir Nafi; and Muhammed Tasir al-Khatib, the group's alleged treasurer. In the early- to mid-1990s, al-Arian, Shallah, al-Najjar and Nafi were all at the WISE think tank in Florida, and U.S. officials said they were four of the 10 members of the terrorist group's worldwide Shura Council, or top leadership body. Last month, Assistant U.S. Attorney Walter E. Furr III said in court that the Tampa group was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad "cell" that acted as "the communications center" for the Syria-based group by, among other things, disseminating announcements of its suicide attacks. Al-Arian's alleged role as a conduit of information among group leaders is outlined in the intercepted conversations and faxes. The intercepts also detail the alleged roles of al-Arian and the other WISE defendants in straightening out the Palestinian Islamic Jihad's financial problems, as well as the arguments with various group leaders about how much to tell their Iranian financial patrons about the embezzlement allegedly committed by the group's treasurer. Al-Arian's attorneys note that he was well known for advocating that Muslims participate in U.S. politics. Al-Arian worked hard to get himself invited to gatherings of powerful officials, meeting with President Bill Clinton and with then-presidential candidate George W. Bush in 2000. Those meetings "seem to belie the notion that Dr. al-Arian was in any way considered by anyone in the intelligence or law enforcement communities to be any kind of threat," his attorney, William Moffitt, said in a court document. ---- A spy's memoirs, serious CIA critic By Joseph C. Goulden June 05, 2005 Washington Times Books http://www.washtimes.com/books/20050604-091914-9702r.htm Ted Shackley has a bias which he states in the very first sentence of his memoir, Spymaster: My Life in the CIA (Potomac, $27.95, 295 pages), written with Richard A. Finney: "I make no secret of the fact that I am a strong believer in HUMINT, collection of intelligence by a human source, in other words, by a spy." Shackley was at once "best of breed" and probably also the "last of breed" in the CIA's Clandestine Services, which he served for 28 years. Sadly, HUMINT has been shoved into the shadows by a generation which chooses to rely on overhead satellites and communications intercepts, rather than on-the-ground case officers who ferret out secrets. The first part of Shackley's memoir is a sort of casebook on how to become an Agency case officer. He tells how he learned "the business" from one of the more masterful CIA operatives of all time, Bill Harvey, with whom he served in Berlin. An example: Shackley soon realized the futility of trying to run agents behind the Iron Curtain because of stringent security by the KGB and its adjuncts. So, at the advice of an Austrian friend, he began utilizing commercial travelers, chiefly German, who had free access to East Europe. The intelligence they garnered was invaluable in assessing Soviet activities. Shackley also learned the dark and dirty side of his profession. Intelligence literature is replete with tales of KGB utilizing forgeries to discredit U. S. officials. He gave the communists tit-for-tat when he ran operations against Czechoslovakia. Shackley and colleague Warren Frank decided to ruffle the feathers of a "senior communist official" who was a hard-liner for the Soviets. He had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1941. CIA's Technical Services Division (TSD) fabricated two letters: one from a Gestapo chief to headquarters stating that the man had volunteered to serve as an informant in the Slovakian underground; the other accepting his services. TSD used papers, inks and "all the cachets, formats and bureaucratic language" from the period. The package was given to the Vienna newspaper Wochenpresse, ostensibly by a Slovak patriot who found the letters in postwar turmoil. "I don't believe that this operation was the sole cause of our victim's eventual fall from grace," Shackley writes, "but I do think it was one more dab of grease that helped set the skids for him." The bulk of the book describes Shackley's role in what Congress and the media still persist in calling "the CIA's secret war in Laos." He takes particular umbrage at the late Sen. Stuart Symington (D, Mo.) for piously professing ignorance of activities he had witnessed personally. He also deals with his stints in Vietnam and as head of the Kennedy-directed CIA task force that worked from Miami in a futile attempt to oust Fidel Castro. Oddly, Shackley chose to remain silent on the last part of his career, the years he spent running CIA's Southeast Asia division. Shackley, who died in December 2002, griped to me for months before his final illness that the CIA's Publications Review Board "is giving me a . . . fit" over some things he wished to include in the book. Presumably no one at Langley is prepared to reveal past operations concerning a Chinese regime which it is cautiously courting. A pity, for colleagues who worked with Shackley on the China brief said he was an extraordinarily capable director. To be sure, he was not universally loved. He was better at the spook business than most other persons, and he did not always bother to conceal his superiority. Nonetheless, this is a good read that deserves four cloaks and as many daggers. A few weeks back, I heard former CIA case officer Melissa Boyle Mahle speak to a group of some 220 persons, chiefly Old Boys from or friendly to CIA. The topic was her book, Denial and Deception: An Insider's View of the CIA From Iran-Contra to 9/1 (Nation Books, $26, 403 pages), a sharply critical view of how the Agency became "anorexic" because of inept leadership and political correctness. Among other things, her scorn extended to the odd-ball environmental requirements imposed on CIA during the Clinton-Gore years; at one point, she said in effect, "I will risk my life to fight terrorists, but I will not die for a rain forest." So how did the CIA-friendly crowd react? Seven persons sat at my table; six of them went to the lobby and bought her book. (I was the seventh; I already had a review copy). To me, the lesson was clear: Discontent with the intelligence community runs dangerously deep. If your eyes flickered over a crowd, Ms. Mahle — a slender and rather pretty blonde in her early 40s — would be the last person to stand out as an intelligence operative. However could this woman function in the Middle East? Well, most importantly, she is fluent in Arabic, and, during her 14 years in the Agency's Clandestine Services, she had five tours in the Middle East, working the streets and running agents. Wearing local clothes and draping a veil across her face enabled her to walk freely through markets. Much of Ms. Mahle's work, understandably, was directed against terrorism. One episode, among many, reflects her frustration. In 1995 a "tidbit" of information located Khalid Shaykh Muhammad in Qatar. He was wanted for masterminding a Philippines-based operation aimed at seizing dozens of airliners. Ms. Mahle argued for a "snatch operation," to lure Mr. Muhammad out of Qatar and capture him as he traveled. But the FBI insisted on making a formal request to the Qatar government; during the dithering that followed, the man disappeared. He was finally caught in Pakistan in 2003 and handed over to the United States — years after a plot similar to the one he planned resulted in September 11. Sadly, at the very time the Agency needed Arabic-speaking street operatives, Ms. Mahle was forced out. Because of secrecy requirements, all she can say is that she made "an unauthorized contact" that was "not reported in a timely manner." Despite determined snooping, I could find no details. But one of her former colleagues told me, "For a male, this would have been a parking ticket, not a capital case." She and her husband and daughter now live in Fairfax, where she works as a consultant on Middle East affairs. Joseph C. Goulden is writing a book on Cold War intelligence. His e-mail is JosephG894@aol.com. -------- un Unexpected third world opposition to UN restructuring By UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL Published June 5, 2005 http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20050605-055602-9120r UNITED NATIONS -- Leaders of African nations have told the U.N. secretary-general they are unhappy with a proposed increase in the permanent members of the Security Council. They expressed their reservations in a private meeting with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan at a donors' conference for Darfur organized by the Organization of African Unity, a diplomatic source said. The African reaction was surprising because if the U.N. proposal goes through it would give Africa two permanent Security Council seats -- now they have none. A reform panel for the world organization has proposed that six new permanent seats should be added to the original five held by the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia. Germany, India, Japan, and Brazil are lobbying hard for four of the seats. Egypt and South Africa have been mentioned as possible candidates for the African seats. The success of the proposal relied on a widely held assumption that it had the backing of a majority of member states in the U.N. General Assembly. But besides African opposition, several developing countries are also believed to be unenthusiastic about the idea, which they feel strengthens the power of the Security Council and further weakens the General Assembly, the source said. -------- war crimes International court to look at war crimes in Darfur Sunday, June 5, 2005 Updated at 12:05 PM EDT Associated Press http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050605.wdarfur0605/BNStory/International/ The Hague — The International Criminal Court will launch a formal investigation into allegations of war crimes in Sudan's troubled Darfur region, officials familiar with the case said Sunday. The court has been analyzing the situation in Darfur since the United Nations referred to it allegations of rape, murder and plunder in April, following a UN Security Council vote. Dozens of court officials have begun preparing for the investigation, the largest and most important yet to be handled by the fledgling body since it was established in July 2002. Prosecutors were to announce the decision to move forward in Darfur on Monday, and Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo will brief the UN about his plans later this month in New York. The vast western Sudanese region of Darfur is the scene of what the UN has called one of the world's worst humanitarian crises. An estimated 180,000 people have died — many from hunger and disease — and about 2 million others have been displaced since the conflict began in February 2003. The referral of the Darfur case was made possible when the United States — which fiercely opposes The Hague-based court — backed away from exercising its veto powers as a permanent member of the Security Council. Washington, which says it fears the court will initiate bogus charges against American nationals, has actively undermined it by signing nearly 100 bilateral treaties with countries that have agreed not to surrender U.S. citizens to the court. Meanwhile, 99 countries have ratified the court's founding treaty, including all of American's major allies in the European Union. A special UN commission of inquiry on Darfur, which spent several months gathering evidence of war crimes, handed the court its findings, including a list of 51 potential suspects. Darfur's crisis erupted when rebels took up arms against what they saw as years of state neglect and discrimination against Sudanese of African origin. The government is accused of responding with a counter-insurgency campaign in which the ethnic Arab militia known as Janjaweed committed wide-scale abuses against ethnic Africans. Trials are planned later this year at the International Criminal Court against alleged perpetrators of war crimes in two other violence-wracked African nations, Uganda and Congo. The court is intended to step in only when countries themselves are unable or unwilling to take action against war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide committed on their soil. 11:56ET -------- ACTIVISTS Quiet enforced on Tiananmen Square anniversary June 05, 2005 By Joe McDonald ASSOCIATED PRESS http://www.washtimes.com/world/20050604-094736-1363r.htm BEIJING -- China tightened security around Tiananmen Square yesterday to prevent memorials on the anniversary of the bloody 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. But in Hong Kong, tens of thousands of protesters staged a candlelight rally. Tiananmen Square, the symbolic political heart of China, was open to the public. But extra carloads of police watched tourists on the vast plaza, where weeks of student-led demonstrations that drew tens of thousands ended in a military crackdown 16 years ago. Troops killed hundreds and perhaps thousands of protesters that day. There was no public mention of the anniversary in China nor any sign of attempts to commemorate it. The United States used the anniversary to press Beijing for a full accounting of the dead, missing and detained from what it called the "brutal and tragic" events of 1989, and demanded that China generally show greater respect for internationally recognized human rights. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the United States remembered the many Chinese citizens killed, detained or missing in connection with the protests. In addition to those who died, thousands of Chinese were arrested and sentenced without trial, and as many as 250 still languish in prison for Tiananmen-related activities, he said. "We call on the Chinese government to fully account for the thousands killed, detained or missing, and to release those unjustly imprisoned," Mr. McCormack said. "It is now time for the Chinese government to move forward with a re-examination of Tiananmen and give its citizens the ability to flourish by allowing them to think, speak, assemble and worship freely. We continue to urge China to bring its human rights practices into conformity with international standards and law," he said. In Singapore, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld criticized China for increasing military spending despite the absence of a threat from another country and said the Asian power risks diminishing its global influence unless it opens up its political system. "The implication that freedom means destabilization, I believe, is incorrect," Mr. Rumsfeld said in response to a question from a participant in an Asian security conference. The day was especially sensitive because it followed the death in January of Zhao Ziyang, the former Communist Party leader who was purged in 1989 for sympathizing with the protesters. In Hong Kong, a crowd estimated by organizers at 30,000-40,000 raised candles in the air in Victoria Park and sang solemn songs in the only large-scale memorial on Chinese soil. They carried signs that read: "Don't forget June 4" and "Democracy fighters live forever." The former British territory retains many of its Western-style civil liberties -- a status that many there say obligates them to speak out while those on the mainland cannot. "Hong Kong people will not forget this history when a government uses guns and tanks to crush students. It's very atrocious," said Shum Ming, a 58-year-old construction worker. ---- Veteran Russian ecologists form Green Russia party MOSCOW (AFP) Jun 05, 2005 http://www.terradaily.com/2005/050605171724.xxuamo3g.html Some of Russia's leading opposition ecologists joined forces Sunday to launch the Green Russia party which they said could become an influential political force ahead parliamentary elections in 2007. Delegates chose World Environment Day for the meeting in Korolyov, outside Moscow, where they debated the party's charter and were voting on a leadership, Interfax news agency said. The provisional name chosen was Green Russia, Russian television reported. Alexei Yablokov, a respected nuclear safety campaigner and an adviser in the 1990s to then president Boris Yeltsin, was elected president. Yablokov, who has also campaigned for human rights in Russia, said there were hopes the Greens could unite other Russian ecological organisations and become a significant minority in the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, in the 2007 elections. "We won't get a majority, but we could become a key partner without which you can't take decisions, just like they did in Germany," he said on Russian television. Yablokov was among civic society leaders who met with US President George W. Bush during his visit to Moscow in May. According to Yablokov, he warned the US leader of growing authoritarianism under President Vladimir Putin. Chosen as one of Yablokov's three deputies was Alexander Nikitin, a former Soviet naval captain who was arrested and accused of treason in 1996 after preparing a report with Norway's Bellona Foundation on safety problems in Russia's nuclear fleet. Russia's Supreme Court eventually cleared Nikitin of all charges in 2000. Under a new law, said by critics to reduce political freedom in Russia, parties entering parliament under proportional representation must gather a minimum seven percent of the vote to win seats. Previously, the threshold was five percent. To be able to participate, parties must also have 50,000 registered members, up from 10,000 under the old rules. The State Duma is currently dominated overwhelmingly by the pro-Kremlin United Russia party.