NucNews - August 31, 2005


-------- NUCLEAR 


-------- australia

WA Greens back NT nuclear dump protests

Wednesday, August 31, 2005. 7:28pm (AEST) Australian Broadcasting

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200508/s1450442.htm

The Australian Greens say they will not stand by and let radioactive waste be transported through Darwin Harbour.

Western Australian Greens Senator Rachel Siewert is in Darwin to attend tonight's protest meeting against the Federal Government's proposal to build a nuclear waste facility in the Northern Territory.

Senator Siewert says the transportation of nuclear waste is one of the riskiest stages in the nuclear fuel chain.

She does not believe the the Northern Territory is an appropriate location for the dump.

"This is high level nuclear radioactive waste that they are talking about bringing into the Territory," she said.

"The Howard Government's been very cunning in reclassifying the waste. It is no longer called high level radioactive waste, but it is high level radioactive waste that will be coming into this proposed dump.

"If that is spilled the whole of this area is at risk."

The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation has previously said there is little chance radioactive waste could spill while being transported.



-------- canada

Bay Street Week Ahead - Uranium Explorers Stake out Canada

Story by Nicole Mordant
REUTERS CANADA: August 31, 2005

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/31865/newsDate/1-Aug-2005/story.htm

VANCOUVER - Canada's hot and humid summer is often a quiet time in the mining industry but some exciting uranium finds this year have kept prospectors and investors from lounging at the lake.

There's been a 44 percent surge in the uranium price this year, and Canada's exploration industry has fanned out across almost every province and territory in search of new deposits of the heavy metal, which is fairly abundant in the Earth's crust.

Uranium is popular again as the world hunts for new and cheaper sources of energy to generate electricity and as coal-fired power plants get a bad rap from those worried about carbon dioxide emissions and global warming.

From British Columbia in the west to Nunavut in the north and Labrador in the east, some 60 junior mining firms are hunting for the next big lode of uranium, which is mostly used to produce electricity in nuclear power stations.

"The recent news of a new discovery in the Athabasca Basin by partners UEX Corp. and Cogema appears to have the market buzzing again about junior uranium explorers," said National Bank Financial analyst Brian Christie.

The Athabasca Basin in northern Saskatchewan is already the world's biggest uranium-producing region, where world No. 1 miner Cameco Corp. each year unearths millions of pounds of the dense, silvery-white metal.

UEX and Cogema's discovery comes at a time when spot uranium prices, most recently at $29.50 a pound, are at their highest levels since the 1970s because of industry estimates of a 35 to 45 million pound shortage of mined material a year.

Although the deficit is still being met out of above-ground stockpiles, for many years a millstone on prices, these could run out in a few years. There are 440 nuclear reactors worldwide needing uranium and energy-hungry China alone is planning to build another 30 over the next 15 years.

Christie's research shows that the number of active uranium-seeking junior miners listed on Toronto's two stock exchanges has more than tripled to 60 in only four months.

With just about every inch of land in the Athabasca staked, new explorers such as Firestone Ventures Inc. have headed to less geologically-tested areas like southern Alberta.

"The appeal to a junior explorer like us is to go out and find an area. What we like about southern Alberta is that it could be a whole new district. The uranium potential is unknown," said Lori Walton, Firestone's president.

"Alberta has a history of being an energy rich province with oil, gas and coal. I think we would have a really good reception to being a uranium producer too," she told Reuters.

Less certain about their reception are explorers in neighboring British Columbia, which imposed a moratorium on uranium exploration and mining between 1980 and 1987 after a commission concluded that the health risks for the people who extract the radioactive metal were too great.

At least three junior companies, Aldershot Resources Ltd. , Sparton Resources and Santoy Resources Ltd. are busy trying to acquire uranium claims in the Okanagan area in south-central British Columbia.

According to Geoff Freer, BC's assistant deputy minister of mining and minerals, there is nothing today to stop companies from applying to the West Coast province's government for a uranium exploration permit. But no one has yet.

He added though that nuclear energy "is not in BC's future". And any suggestion of a uranium industry in the environmentally conscious province has already angered some green movement activists.

They point to its use in making nuclear bombs, the problem of where to store radioactive waste and to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion in 1986 that killed 30 people and forced 200,000 to flee a cloud of radioactive debris as it drifted over the then Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

BC's Green Party, which has some clout in the politics of the province, has called for the moratorium to be reimposed.

Asked if the potential opposition even before the company had started to explore made it worth the bother, Santoy Resources spokesman Rupert Allan had few doubts. "The potential economics are very attractive. I think it's worth the effort," he said.



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

-------- depleted uranium

Nuclear war in Iraq?

08/31/2005 17:52 Pravda

http://english.pravda.ru/mailbox/22/101/399/16082_iraq.html

Throughout history liberal ranting by appeasers has never ended any conflict or stopped terrorism

One of the latest charges against the Bush administration made by Cindy Sheehan, liberal whacko's and other various peaceniks around the world is that the United States is waging a nuclear war in Iraq. This came as news to me since nuclear war brings thoughts of mushroom clouds and the death of millions to mind. I just don't remember this happening in Iraq.

Of course this propaganda is understandable since it originated in the minds of the deranged. The left's 'illogical' reasoning for the unwarranted accusations of nuclear war is this: The United States military is using depleted uranium tipped artillery shells on the battlefields of Iraq.

Although laughable by the sane, these arguments seem to be the latest talking points among liberal appeasers around the world. This illogical nonsense more than likely originated from the office of Paul Begala or James Carville, fellow stooges of the "American Back Stabbing Club" who are out to get President Bush at any cost.

I wrote in last week's column that, "Mrs. Sheehan also proved her lack of intellect stating that, 'We are waging a nuclear war in Iraq right now. That country is contaminated. It will be contaminated for practically eternity now.' I must admit, nuclear war is news to me.  Has anyone else heard of this?"

I received many emails from propaganda filled zombies of the far left from around the world informing me that, "When Ms. Sheehan refers to nuclear war in Iraq she is talking about the thousands of tons of depleted uranium the United States has gleefully rained down on all of the people of Iraq."

Gleefully rained down?  Thousands of tons?  Let me see if my math is correct. We will just say, for arguments sake, that the emails are correct. I will use one thousand tons of depleted uranium as a starting point. One thousand tons equals approximately two million pounds of depleted uranium rained down on Iraq. That certainly is a lot of uranium, especially since each shell contains a very small amount of uranium.

As usual, it is so easy to completely smash any argument made by the left, I sometimes wonder if it is even worth the effort. But I will anyway in order to stick up for the good name of the United States.  Something liberals in America fail to do these days.

Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word nuclear as, c (1) : being a weapon whose destructive power derives from an uncontrolled nuclear reaction  <the nuclear age> <nuclear war>

Uncontrolled nuclear reaction is the key word here. Depleted uranium does not produce an uncontrolled nuclear reaction. In fact, it does not produce any nuclear reaction at all and is approximately 40 percent less radioactive than natural uranium found in the earth.

Depleted uranium used in armor piercing shells and in enhanced armor protection for some Abrams tanks is also used in civilian industry, primarily for stabilizers in airplanes and boats.

I guess all the recreational boaters tooling around on the lakes and rivers around the world are also engaged in a nuclear war. Although I should not have brought up this point since I'm sure environmentalist whackos around the world will soon use this argument in an attempt to ban boats from rivers and lakes.

A common misconception liberals are trying to spread is that radiation emitted from depleted uranium shells is the primary health hazard to the unfortunate soul on the receiving end of one of these weapons. This is not the case under most battlefield scenarios. Explosion is the primary hazard, not nuclear radiation or contamination.

Yes depleted uranium shells emit alpha particles, beta particles, and gamma rays. But alpha particles, the primary radiation type produced by depleted uranium, are blocked by the skin. Beta particles are blocked by battle dress utility uniforms and the gamma radiation emitted by the shells is very low.

Depleted uranium does not significantly add to the background radiation that we encounter every day. The average person receives more radiation from dental and medical x-rays or sitting in the sun in a year then they would receive from a direct hit by uranium tipped weapon. But does it really matter since the recipient of a depleted uranium shell is usually killed by the explosion?

Throughout history liberal ranting by appeasers has never ended any conflict or stopped terrorism. Only armed conflict has prevailed. Why can't the left see this and stop all the lies?

Hopefully Cindy Sheehan's time spent in the ditch in Crawford, Texas will do some good. I think mothers of terrorists around the world should take her advice and keep their sons and daughters at home. It is inevitable that the United States will win the war on terrorism and their love ones will surely die. Depleted uranium or not.

So why bother?

Steve Darnell

The opinion of the author may not coincide with the point of view of Pravda.Ru editors 



-------- europe

German Greens attack Merkel advisor's stance on nuclear power

BERLIN (AFP) Aug 31, 2005

http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050831151825.xa67u16z.html

Greens in Germany on Wednesday attacked proposals to promote nuclear energy outlined by the future economic advisor of Angela Merkel, who looks set to become leader after the upcoming general election.

Heinrich von Pierer, a former boss of electronics giant Siemens who would shape economy strategy for Merkel's Christian Union if it wins on September 18, sparked controversy by calling for Germany's nuclear energy programme to be extended over a 60-year period.

That is almost twice as long as the 32-year target for phasing out nuclear power stations set by the current coalition government of the Greens and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats.

Environment Minister Juergen Trittin, a member of the Greens, said von Pierer was "acting like a lobbyist for nuclear energy companies".

Instead of coming up with an innovative energy strategy, von Pierer was "promoting the supposed merits of old and inefficient technology", Trittin said.

Greens co-leader Claudia Roth meanwhile accused the Christian Union of being "ignorant of the dangers of nuclear technology".

The Christian Union -- the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union -- is pledging in its election manifesto to reverse the phase-out of nuclear energy, but Merkel had until now called for the programme to be extended only over 40 years.

Polls show the Christian Union holds a clear lead over the Social Democrats.



-------- iran

'Islam forbids military use of nuclear power'

Compiled by Lebanon Daily Star staff
Wednesday, August 31, 2005

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=18098

Iran's new defense minister said on Tuesday using nuclear technology for military purposes was forbidden by Islam but Tehran would continue to develop a nuclear program to meet its electricity needs. Speaking at a ceremony to mark his official introduction as minister, Brigadier General Mustafa Mohammad Najjar added Iran would continue to develop ballistic missiles as a deterrent against attack.

Accused by the U.S. of seeking atomic arms, Iran says it has no intention of using its nuclear facilities for anything other than peaceful purposes.

"As our Supreme Leader (Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) has said, the nonpeaceful use of nuclear technology is religiously forbidden," the official IRNA news agency quoted Najjar as saying.

"Since fossil fuels are going to run out we should replace them with nuclear energy," he said, adding that Iran must prove through negotiations that it is not trying to build atom bombs.

Concern in the West over Iran's nuclear program was heightened this month when it broke UN seals and resumed work at a uranium conversion facility - a key plant in the process to create atomic reactor or bomb-grade fuel.

Iran has rejected demands by the board of the IAEA that it stop uranium conversion, a stance which some EU officials have warned could see it referred to the UN Security Council for punitive action when the IAEA meets again next month.

Iran's new top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani headed to India in an apparent bid to drum up support from New Delhi in the looming international clash over its nuclear program.

State radio said Larijani would be in New Delhi for one day to meet with India's National Security Adviser MK Narayanan and "discuss peace in the region and deepen ties between the two countries."

India is a key member of the Non-Aligned Movement, whose members have been more sympathetic to Iran's quest to possess the nuclear fuel cycle.

India's Foreign Minister Natwar Singh is due to visit Iran early next month for talks with President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad that will likely include a proposed $7.4 billion gas pipeline between Iran and India.

In his speech, Najjar highlighted the importance of Iran's Shahab-3 medium-range ballistic missile - capable of hitting Israel and U.S. bases in the Gulf.

"One of the major projects pursued by this ministry is the production of deterrence weapons and the manufacture of Shahab-3 is in accordance with that policy and will not be halted," the semi-official ISNA news agency quoted him as saying.

Opposition groups say Iran plans to use the Shahab-3 to carry nuclear warheads. Iran says Shahab-3 is a conventional weapon which would only be used if Iran came under attack.

Meanwhile, Iranian state television reported that the country has made a new breakthrough in its controversial nuclear program, successfully using biotechnology to extract larger and cheaper quantities of uranium concentrate from its mines, state television reported.

Quoting the unnamed manager of the project, state television said on Monday "the new technique used for the production of yellow cake will reduce costs, and efficiency will increase one hundred fold as well."

Yellow cake, or concentrated uranium oxide, is an early stage of the nuclear fuel cycle which Iran says it needs to master to feed atomic reactors which will generate electricity.

Iran hitherto used acid to turn uranium ore mined in its central desert region into yellow cake. Using biotechnology, the television report said, would be better for the environment.

Iranian officials have recently boasted that while some sensitive parts of the atomic program were frozen during the last two years while negotiations were held with the West, Iran's atomic scientists have been busy perfecting other, less sensitive, parts of the nuclear fuel cycle. - AFP, Reuters



-------- israel

Senior official in Dimona nuclear facility suspected of taking bribe

By Nir Hasson, Haaretz Correspondent
Last update - 21:41 31/08/2005  	

http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/619567.html

Police on Wednesday announced they have recently arrested a senior official in the Dimona nuclear facility on suspicion of accepting bribes from suppliers.

The Beer Sheva Magistrate's Court on Wednesday extended the suspect's remand by six days.

The suspect, 52, from Beer Sheva, is a senior worker in the facility's purchase department.

He is suspected of having accepted bribes and other perks from suppliers during the last five years in exchange for contracts with the facility.

The Beer Sheva court lifted a gag order initially placed on the police investigation.



-------- japan

Japan draws up security steps for airports, reactors

31 Aug 2005 12:12:25 GMT
Source: Reuters

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/T258805.htm

TOKYO, Aug 31 (Reuters) - Japan, which is tightening security ahead of an election next month, has drafted guidelines to shut down major airports and train stations if a terrorist attack seems imminent, Kyodo news agency said on Wednesday.

Japan votes in a general election on Sept. 11 and many in the country are worried about a repeat of last year's deadly train explosions in Madrid, which came just three days before an election.

Spain, like Japan, had provided support for the U.S. war in Iraq.

Under the new rules, the government would immediately close any major airport or train station if it obtains information about a possible attack on such facilities, Kyodo said.

Security at key facilities such as nuclear power plants would be improved by installing more surveillance cameras and sensors, it added.

The guidelines also call on research facilities handling hazardous materials to strengthen steps against theft, Kyodo said.

Government and police officials were not immediately available for comment.

Concerns about an attack in Japan rose last week after France's top terrorist investigator, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, was quoted by the Financial Times as saying that al-Qaeda was preparing an attack on an Asian financial centre such as Tokyo, Sydney or Singapore.

The National Police Agency has said up to 13,600 police would be deployed throughout Japan in the run-up to the election, with the emphasis on major cities such as Tokyo and the western city of Osaka. 



-------- korea

A Four-Way Struggle Between Gyeongju, Pohang, Gunsan, Yeongdeok

AUGUST 31, 2005 06:49
by Sung-Jin Choi Chang-Soon Choi (choi@donga.com cschoi@donga.com)
Donga News Agency

http://english.donga.com/srv/service.php3?biid=2005083155108

As of August 30, a day before the deadline of applying for low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste facilities, the competition has narrowed down to four cities and county.

The cities of Gyeongju and Pohang in North Gyeongsang Province, Gunsan in North Jeolla Province, as well as Yeongdeok County in North Gyeongsang all handed in their applications for the facilities to the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy (MOCIE) on August 30. On the same day, the City Council of Samcheok in Gangwon Province voted down a bill applying for the facility, 7–4, with one invalid vote.

The prospective sites for the nuclear waste repository are Bonggil-ri, Yangbuk-myeon in Gyeongju; Sangok-ri, Jukjang-myeon in Pohang; Sangwon-ri, Chuksan-myeon in Yeongdeok; and Bieung Island in Soryong-dong, Gunsan, each with a size ranging between 300,000 and one million pyeong (990,000 and 3.3 million square meters).

The four cities and county will be going through the process of a final governmental examination on the suitability of the sites, a proposal of a plebiscite by heads of local governments (before October 22), followed by all the residents voting on the decision (before November 22), as well as other procedures.

The government had announced earlier that if more than two local bodies apply for the facility, the region with the highest resident approval ratings will be chosen as the final candidate.

More regions than originally expected have signed up for the facility, which seems to be a result of the procedures which make it mandatory to gain the agreement of local assemblies and to carry out plebiscites, as well as a special act which provides incentives such as 300 billion won in support funding, relocating the headquarters of the Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power Company, and establishing a proton accelerator.

Uljin County of North Gyeongsang Province had been a strong candidate in the beginning, but the motion was rejected on August 29 by a vote of 5-5 in the county council.

Uljin had been considered most likely to win the bid as it scored the highest resident approval ratings in government surveys carried out in possible regions for building the nuclear dumpsite. The county also had favorable geological and topographical conditions, as well as a nuclear power plant already in operation.

When its county council delayed passing the bill on the waste disposal facility, Buan County of North Jeolla Province declared on August 30 that it will hand in its application to MOCIE on the deadline of the August 31, through use of the local government head’s right to make prior decisions authorized by the local autonomous government law. The application does not look likely to take place however, as the county council is still opposing the plan.



-------- latinamerica

The Brazilian Navy’s atomic bomb ambition

Wednesday, 31 August, 2005, South Atlantic Merco Press

http://www.falkland-malvinas.com/Detalle.asp?NUM=6356

An atomic bomb as powerful as those dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was almost built in Brazil at the beginning of the nineties under the supervision of the Brazilian armed forces.

The news was revealed by nuclear scientist Jose Luiz Santana who was president of the Brazilian National Atomic Energy Commission under former President Fernando Collor de Mello, 1990/92.

According to Mr. Santana who was the guest star in the program “Fantastic” of the Globo television network, his team not only found uranium, but a detonator and other elements including a special sphere to lodge the nuclear explosive.

On finding the evidence Mr. Santana was ordered to immediately deactivate the Brazilian Navy’s atomic bomb program, and ended with police protection following three attempts on his life.

However the Brazilian National Atomic Energy Commission in an official release this week tried to dismiss Mr. Santana’s statements arguing that “no documents or information in the institution’s archives have been found to support the claim”, adding that all Brazilian nuclear material is stored under supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Two weeks ago former Brazilian president Jose Sarney (1985/90) revealed on the same program that in 1986 he was informed that the Armed Forces had deep drilled in the north of the country with the purpose of testing an underground nuclear explosive.

“We found out the military wanted to test a bomb, but I immediately ordered the hole to be refilled and all atomic weapons experiments stopped”, said Mr. Sarney. The then Brazilian president admitted keeping the entire incident secret so as not to offend neighbouring Argentina.

The two revelations would confirm that the Brazilian Armed Forces disobeyed a civilian president and ignored the 1988 constitution which specifically bans all nuclear development which is not specifically for peaceful purposes.

According to Mr. Santana part of the uranium to be used as fuel for the bomb was stored for some time in the University of Sao Paulo campus, possibly in the Nuclear Research Department.

“I took office in April 1990, but only in August was the Atomic Energy Commission able to get hold of the container”, added Mr. Santana who said the enriched uranium was sent by a country with which Brazil had secret nuclear cooperation agreements. Mr. Santana refused to name the country.

Nationalist sectors of the Brazilian Armed Forces had the entire project under strict secrecy and it was not easy to dismantle it, since over fifty different teams of scientists and experts were involved, all working independently.

“I guess most of the scientists involved had no idea that the final objective was an atomic bomb”, Mr. Santana said. When asked how powerful a bomb, he replied like “those in Japan”.

Apparently Brazilian intelligence services were aware of what the Brazilian Navy was up to, but the Sarney administration was too involved in restoring democracy and civilian control to a country which had experienced 21 years of military rule (1964/85).

Pedro Paulo Leoni Ramos, former head of the Strategic Affairs Office revealed that on taking office President Collor de Mello he ordered the arrest of a van which was leaving government house packed with documents, and “among the many papers we found some with clues leading to the atomic bomb project”.

The van belonged to government intelligence, at the time under control of the military, which had an office next to the president’s desk.

It was finally former president Collor de Mello who in a public act dropped lime into the Amazon drilled well which he ordered destroyed thus symbolically ending Brazil’s nuclear arms race.

In November 2003, the first year of ruling President Lula da Silva, Science and Technology minister Roberto Amaral surprised the world revealing that “Brazil has the largest uranium reserves in the world, so instead of enriching it in Canada, we’ll do it here in Brazil; we have the necessary capacity, and it’s a far more effective system”.

He went on to say that “whether you are responsible or if the material could end in terrorist hands are questions never asked to Canada, but why to they ask those questions to South Americans?”.

The original Brazilian atomic energy development project included three nuclear plants for electricity generation, of which two are operating, and building a nuclear powered submarine which still remains in the blue prints. 



-------- terrorism

Bush is the real threat

Tony Benn
Wednesday August 31, 2005
The Guardian

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9115,1559617,00.html

Now that the US president has announced that he has not ruled out an attack on Iran, if it does not abandon its nuclear programme, the Middle East faces a crisis that could dwarf even the dangers arising from the war in Iraq.

Even a conventional weapon fired at a nuclear research centre - whether or not a bomb was being made there - would almost certainly release radioactivity into the atmosphere, with consequences seen worldwide as a mini-Hiroshima.

We would be told that it had been done to uphold the principles of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) - an argument that does not stand up to a moment's examination.

The moral and legal basis of the NPT convention, which the International Atomic Energy Agency is there to uphold, was based on the agreement of non-nuclear nations not to acquire nuclear weapons if nuclear powers undertook not to extend nuclear arsenals and negotiate to secure their abolition.

Since then, the Americans have launched a programme that would allow them to use nuclear weapons in space, nuclear bunker-busting bombs are being developed, and depleted uranium has been used in Iraq - all of which are clear breaches of the NPT. Israel, which has a massive nuclear weapons programme, is accepted as a close ally of the US, which still arms and funds it.

Even those who are opposed, as I am, to nuclear weapons in every country including Iran, North Korea, Britain and the US, accept that nuclear power for electricity generation need not necessarily lead to the acquisition of the bomb.

Indeed, many years ago, when the shah - who had been put on the throne by the US - was in power in Iran, enormous pressure was put on me, as secretary of state for energy, to agree to sell nuclear power stations to him. That pressure came from the Atomic Energy Authority, in conjunction with Westinghouse, who were anxious to promote their own design of reactor.

It is easy to understand why president Bush might see the bombing of Iran as a way to regain some of the political credibility he has lost as a result of the growing hostility in America to the Iraq war due to the heavy casualties suffered by US forces there .

It is inconceivable that the White House can be contemplating an invasion of Iran, and what must be intended is a US airstrike, or airstrikes, on Iranian nuclear installations, comparable to Israel's bombing of Iraq in 1981. Israel has publicly hinted that it might do the same again to prevent Iran developing nuclear nuclear weapons.

Such an attack, whether by the US or Israel, would be in breach of the UN Charter, as was the invasion of Iraq. But neither Bush, Sharon nor Blair would take any notice of that.

Some influential Americans appear to be convinced that the US will attack Iran. Whether they are right or not, the build-up to a new war is taking exactly the same form as it did in 2002. First we are being told that Iran poses a military threat, because it may be developing nuclear weapons. We are assured that the President is hoping that diplomacy might succeed through the European negotiations which have been in progress for some months.

This is just what we were told when Hans Blix was in Baghdad talking to Saddam on behalf of the UN, but we now know, from a Downing Street memorandum leaked some months ago, that the decision to invade had been taken long before that.

That may be the position now, and I fear that if a US attack does take place, the prime minister will give it his full support. And one of his reasons for doing so will be the same as in Iraq: namely the fear that, if he alienates Bush, Britain's so-called independent deterrent might be taken away. For, as I also learned when I was energy secretary, Britain is entirely dependent on the US for the supply of our Trident warheads and associated technology. They cannot even be targeted unless the US switches on its global satellite system.

Therefore Britain could be assisting America to commit an act of aggression under the UN Charter, which could risk a major nuclear disaster, and doing so supposedly to prevent nuclear proliferation, with the real motive of making it possible for us to continue to break the NPT in alliance with America.

The irony is that we might be told that Britain must support Bush, yet again, because of the threat of weapons of mass destruction, thus allowing him to kill even more innocent civilians.

· Tony Benn will be talking about War; Religion and politics; and Democracy, at the Shaw Theatre in London on September 7, 8 and 9

Tony@tbenn.fsnet.co.uk



-------- u.s. nuc weapons

Group debunks bunker buster

ROGER SNODGRASS, roger@lamonitor.com
August 31, 2005 Los Alamos Monitor Assistant Editor

http://www.lamonitor.com/articles/2005/08/31/headline_news/news04.txt

SANTA FE - Whether the nuclear weapon project known as the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) lives or dies may depend on how hard Sen. Pete Domenici fights for it.

That's why opponents of the concept are beating the bushes in northern New Mexico this week, looking for support from Domenici's constituents that might be decisive.

"He's the person we hope to convince," said Sue Gunn, senior Washington representative for the Union of Concerned Scientists. "If we could just get 50 people to write."

Domenici, chair of the Senate Energy and Energy Appropriations subcommittee, included a $4 million item in the FY06 budget to support the study, which was not included in the House version.

The issue, among a number of discrepancies between the House and Senate on nuclear weapons, will be decided in a conference committee after Congress resumes next month.

In those negotiations, Domenici's influence and how he plays his cards will be critical, the UCS officials said.

Gunn and UCS Senior Scientist Robert Nelson met with the Monitor Tuesday to discuss the legislative status of the bunker buster, as it is also known.

The RNEP is the subject of a proposed engineering study on reconfiguring the B83 nuclear warhead in a stronger and heavier casing, for the purpose of attacking hard, deeply buried targets.

The work would be done at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, in collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories, which has satellite offices there.

The idea has had a roller coaster ride in Congress, after receiving some initial funding. Last year it was zeroed out by the House and defended by Domenici in the Senate, but abandoned in the last minute crunch to pass a comprehensive appropriations measure.

This year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., proposed an amendment to strike the RNEP provisions from a Senate appropriations bill.

In debate on the Senate floor, Domenici said the issue was not about making a new nuclear weapon.

"I don't know what you could build for $4 million," he said, adding, "None of that (arguments against nuclear weapons) has anything to do with this amendment. The United States of America, through its experts says we should have a study."

The amendment was defeated by a 53-43 vote, along party lines.

Nelson said it was another old Cold War fossil that was resurfacing using 9/11 and the war on terrorism as an excuse.

"They say, 'It's just a study,' that's the cover they use," he said, noting that last year NNSA was asked to do a five-year budget projection which gave a different impression.

The total came to $485 million, "all the way out to the phase 6.3 production stage where they actually cut metal," said Gunn, a theoretical physicist working on technical arms control and nonproliferation issues at Princeton University and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Gunn published a technical study in Science and Global Security in 2004 that disputed the effectiveness of bunker busters against buried targets used for chemical or biological weapons.

Only a fraction of the chem-bio agents close to the underground explosions would be destroyed, he concluded.

"Agent munitions located outside of the small sterilization zone, but within the final crater volume, would be ruptured by the shock and ejected along with the radioactive fallout," Gunn wrote.

A National Academies of Sciences study, requested by Congress last year and released in April, agreed with the Defense Department's premise that many underground targets were beyond the reach of conventional explosives and that they might be "held at risk of destruction by one or a few nuclear weapons."

But the NAS report also concluded that "the number of casualties from an earth-penetrator weapon detonated at a few meters depth is, for all practical purposes, equal to that from a surface burst of the same weapon yield."

"It would be a big mess," Gunn said, who believes a better strategy for dealing with bunkers would be to seal access points until the site could be captured and safely decontaminated.

In defending the House's decision not to fund the RNEP, Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, said that in briefings with DOD he had never heard of any specific mission for the bunker buster.

"The development of new weapons for ill-defined future requirements is not what the Nation needs at this time," he said in a key speech before the Arm Control Association in February.

Hobson has also argued against the contradiction of advocating nuclear non-proliferation in the world, while developing new nuclear options at home.

UCS, a nonprofit citizen-scientist partnership based in Washington, D.C., will be holding informational meetings in New Mexico through this week. The meetings began in Taos Monday night and Santa Fe Tuesday. The team will be in Albuquerque at UNM on Wednesday and finish the week at N.M. Tech in Socorro and NMSU in Las Cruces.

Gunn and Roberts said they had tried to arrange a Los Alamos meeting but were unable to find a local sponsor. 

----

Inside nuclear bunker, awaiting fateful call

By Adam Tanner Wed Aug 31, 2005 10:59 AM ET (Reuters)

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050831/us_nm/arms_nuclear_dc_1

QUEBEC LAUNCH CONTROL CENTER, Montana - Shortly after a visitor entered a reinforced concrete bunker 60 feet below ground in a remote area of Montana, an electronic beep that could signal an order to launch nuclear missiles sounded.

"That's the message; can you please step to the back of the capsule?" asked 1st Lt. Adam Bell as he sat beside Air Force Capt. William Swan scanning buttons that could trigger 10 U.S. missiles, each with up to three warheads.

The signal was just a test, as it has been since Malmstrom Air Force Base opened the first U.S. land-based nuclear missile site in 1961. "It gets your blood racing a little," said Bell.

Washington may be fighting a conventional war in Iraq and developing exotic defenses against terrorist attack, but Malmstrom with its 200 ICBMs remains a backbone of the U.S. nuclear deterrent as the largest U.S. missile base.

"This is a world very few people know about -- ICBM operations," said Col. Scott Gilson, who oversees missile command and control. "We are damn proud of who we are and what we do."

The job of firing the missiles falls to airmen like Bell and Swan, both 27, who operate 20 launch bunkers on 24-hour shifts. They stand ready to act if so ordered by the president.

They know secret codes to combination padlocks, behind which are launch keys. "This is some of the most secure data in the world," said Bell, who was fascinated by James Bond when growing up.

If the airmen simultaneously turned keys on different sides of their command console, deadly rockets from nearby fields would travel at 15,000 mph (24,000 kph) up to 7,000 miles.

In the Cold War, the Soviet Union was the prime target for the ICBMs. Today, the missiles would be targeted from U.S. Strategic Command in Nebraska only after launch, said Malmstrom spokeswoman Capt. Elizabeth Benn.

The missile operators -- or "missileers" in Air Force lingo -- have plenty of downtime in a tiny space occupied by military equipment as well as a bed, refrigerator and microwave oven. "I personally read a lot of books," said Alexander Speed, a fan of J.R. Tolkien.

The bunkers also have televisions, and on September 11, 2001, missileers alerted one another to tune into the attacks on the World Trade Center.

"This is one of those jobs you hope you never have to do it," said Aaron Pifer, 29, who was on duty that day. "That's the closest I've come since I've been here to doing anything."

On rare occasion, the shift extends over several days, such as last Christmas, when crews had to stay five days underground because replacements could not get through heavy snow.

'THE GLAMOUR PART'

Every day, maintenance crews visit several silos located at the end of dirt roads off highways and farmland across 23,500 square miles, an area about the size of West Virginia.

"From the very first moment I could remember anything, I remember that silo and understanding that we would be a target if the unthinkable happened," Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer said of a silo a mile from where he grew up. "It really had a profound affect on me and my psyche."

Behind a fence topped by barbed wire, hardened concrete caps the silos; an explosive charge would be needed to remove it. "If you have a cow in the way, you pretty much have a hamburger," said Capt. John Mora, who oversees maintenance crews,

On a recent morning, two military officers entered codes for two combination locks to open silo Q-20. A crew accompanied by a reporter climbed down a 60-foot (18-meter) metal ladder to check on the equipment, some of it dating from the 1960s.

What maintenance supervisor Master Sgt. Ken Hanson called the "glamour part of the business" sat at the center of the silo. Mostly enclosed and separate from the air conditioning, diesel and other supporting hardware, the Minuteman III showed the word "loaded" on its side.

An M-870 shotgun was stored inside the silo. "They're prepared to kill whoever comes down the hole," Hanson said.

He added his crews did not need to worry about the lethal load in their midst. "This is not scary as long as you are doing your job as you're supposed to," he said.

Despite Malmstrom's long history, some say the base's days may be waning as the United States could choose to rely on Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming and Minot in North Dakota, each of which has 150 missiles.

"If the next wave of decreases in nukes is divisible by 200, Malmstrom Air Force Base will cease to exist," Schweitzer said about future arms control talks with Russia. "Without a second mission at Malmstrom Air Force Base, their future is very much at risk." 

----

From The Outer Beach Looking West To An American Hiroshima

08/31/05 · 1:09 am  
By Greg O’Brien
Codfish Press

http://www.capecodtoday.com/blogs/index.php/Codfish/2005/08/31/from_the_outer_beach_looking_west_an_ame

The closest Cape Codders have ever come to witnessing war firsthand—or the direct affects of war—was in 1918 when Orleans residents were stunned to see a German U-Boat surface just offshore and fire on an unarmed tugboat and four barges it was pulling. The moment was surreal; as if it were an eerie out-take from a 1960s classic, like The Russians Are Coming!

“Torpedoes set the tug ablaze and injured its crew, while constant shelling sank the barges,” notes the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities history of the event. “Thanks to the skill and courage of Coast Guardsmen, everyone was rescued. Some of the shells fired from the sub landed on the beach, making this the first time the U.S. mainland had been attacked since the War of 1812, and the only time the country was attacked during World War I. Massachusetts had been producing arms, vehicles, and supplies for the war effort and sending soldiers abroad, but no one expected what occurred that Sunday in Orleans.”

Cape Codders since have regularly stood on the eastern shore and pondered wars, conflicts and weapons worlds away, sensing the tragedies of its victims.

But lost in the recent newspaper headlines of the 60th anniversary of the dropping of nuclear bombs over two Japanese cities that brought World War II literally to a screeching halt are the “downwinders” of this country—the forgotten victims of our atomic testing program in the 1950s and 60s, the road kill of this American Hiroshima, the scores who have died from radiation exposure and their families who were left to cope with this numbing loss.

The government had told the downwinders it needed to test these fireballs to stay ahead of the Soviets, who had detonated their first atomic device on Aug. 29, 1949; in the years to follow, the Soviets ignited 266 surface and air nuclear bombs in the Kazakhstan region of Semi Palatinsk. And so no one in the remote downwind corridor of southern Utah and northwest Arizona blinked when over the course of two decades more than 100 nuclear weapons were exploded above and below the ground at the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Residents—many of them patriotic Mormons who seldom questioned the government’s authority—were not dissuaded in the early days from viewing the explosions at a distance.

Warnings at first were casual. Families were told there would be a test, and hours later the ash would fall—at first light, then heavy—as pink clouds of fallout, carried by downwind air currents, drifted over Arizona and Utah. The ash tingled the skin, almost stung. Children brushed it off. The debris covered playgrounds, homes and fields where milk cows ate the grass coated with radioactive ash.

It wasn’t long before children and their parents began getting sick. Many died, and soon the downwiders began to feel that they had been deemed “expendable” by their government in its quest for nuclear superiority. Government officials privately specified that “if it turns out that we have killed children, as we were clearly doing in the 1950s, lie about it,” Stewart Udall, Interior Secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, and a lawyer for some of the downwinders, said several years ago in an interview for a documentary, “Downwind of Morality,” produced by Bill Turpie. I served as associate field producer on the project and co-wrote the script.

The government lies would hide a multitude of sins: at the Nevada Test Site and the Los Alamos (New Mexico) Lab where the bombs were designed; at Hanford reservation in southwest Washington where the government processed plutonium during World War II and the Cold War, and secretly released radioactive iodine up the stack of a plutonium processor in 1949; and at government laboratories throughout the country, like Oak Ridge Laboratory in Tennessee where a number of terminal patients were injected without consent many years ago with plutonium (the critical isotope needed in a nuclear chain reaction) to determine how much exposure humans could endure. Not only is radiation that is injected or burns the skin deadly, but equally lethal is the absorption into the body of plants and animals that have been contaminated.

“We have killed off or maimed millions of people without any war at all,” Rudi Nussbaum, an expert on the nuclear issue who then taught at Portland State University in Oregon, noted in Downwind of Morality.

“In our fear, we sacrificed whole parts of this country by the creation of these weapons,” William Lanouette, biographer of Leo Szilard, the Hungarian scientist who first contemplated a nuclear chain reaction, said in the documentary. “We sacrificed a generation of people—through the radiation affects of producing these weapons.”

The litany of suffering and death in the wake of atomic test explosions in the Nevada desert is stunning. It defies any coincidence suggested by defenders of the testing program, or statements by nuclear energy officials, that evidence of radiation poisoning is anecdotal. One woman interviewed for the documentary said she had a brother whose entire class, with the exception of one, ultimately died from cancer. A retired Air Force worker said that after Nevada test blasts Geiger counters were often placed on cars in the area, and “they buzzed like rattlesnakes!” And in nearby Utah, a hardware store owner lost 14 members of his family to cancer. “The government lied to us,” said a downwinder in Northern Arizona. “That’s the greatest travesty. They told us we were safe, and they knew that we were not.”

More than 50 years later, the tragedies continue. Entire family trees have been seared, and the toll, passed down through heredity, sadly keeps rising. 



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

GE offers reactor design

August 31, 2005
BLOOMBERG NEWS

http://www.washtimes.com/business/20050830-092554-9859r.htm

    General Electric Co., the world's biggest maker of power-plant equipment, said it sought formal certification from regulators for its new nuclear reactor design, another step toward construction of the first U.S. plants in 30 years.

    General Electric's 19-chapter, 7,500 page application for its 1,500-megawatt reactor was submitted to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission last Wednesday, the company said in a statement. GE and British Nuclear Fuels Plc's Westinghouse were hired by NuStart LLC, a group of U.S. utilities formed in 2004, in May to design reactors.

    The reactors would meet rising power demand amid soaring energy prices and criticism against gas emissions, which are blamed for global warming. Existing nuclear plants produce power more cheaply because of lower fuel costs compared with coal and gas. GE estimates construction of a plant using its new design could begin in 2010, with commercial operation in 2014.

    The U.S. Department of Energy agreed to pay half the design costs, NuStart said in May.

    Nuclear plants generate power using heat from the decay of radioactive fuel, a process that produces no carbon dioxide, unlike the burning gas or coal for heat. Carbon dioxide is blamed for global warming.

    GE, based in Fairfield, Conn., calls its design the economic simplified boiling water reactor. It said the submission to the regulators culminated 10 years of design work. 



-------- louisiana

NRC MONITORING APPROACH OF HURRICANE KATRINA; WATERFORD SHUTS DOWN

Last revised Wednesday, August 31, 2005 
U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/news/2005/05-118.html

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Sunday dispatched additional personnel to three nuclear power plants in Louisiana and Mississippi in response to the expected landfall Monday of Hurricane Katrina.

One plant near New Orleans - Waterford - informed the NRC it shut down to ensure that all safety precautions are in place ahead of the storm.

The NRC is monitoring the hurricane from operations centers in Arlington, Texas, and its Rockville, Md., headquarters.

"We are staying on top of the situation because protecting public health and safety is paramount," said Nils Diaz, chairman of the independent regulatory agency.

At the Waterford plant the major concern beyond winds was the storm surge, last predicted to approach the top of an 18-foot levee on the Mississippi River. Nuclear plants are very robust structures designed to withstand winds in excess of those in Katrina and associated storm surges. Both Waterford and the other plants have watertight doors at key safety systems.

All three plants the NRC was monitoring are owned by Entergy Nuclear. The Waterford plant is about 20 miles west of New Orleans. The River Bend plant is about 25 miles north-northwest of Baton Rouge, La., and Grand Gulf is located 25 miles south of Vicksburg, Miss.

Waterford initially declared an "unusual event" because of the approach of the hurricane, and will raise its level of preparedness on the NRC's four-step scale to an "alert" as winds reach hurricane strength and to a "site area emergency" should winds exceed 110 mph. The alert levels are specified in advance precautionary plans dictated by the NRC. The "site area emergency" classification is associated with plant personnel safety.

The NRC will have to approve the restart of Waterford and any other plant that shuts down. Additionally, the Federal Emergency Management Agency will have to determine that evacuation routes in the area are passable.



-------- michigan

NRC RENEWS OPERATING LICENSES FOR DONALD C. COOK NUCLEAR PLANT FOR AN ADDITIONAL 20 YEAR

U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION August 31, 2005 

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/news/2005/05-119.html

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has renewed the operating licenses of the Donald C. Cook Nuclear Plant, Units 1 and 2, for an additional 20 years.

The D.C. Cook plant is located about 11 miles south of Benton Harbor, Mich. The licensee, Indiana Michigan Power Co., submitted its license renewal application on Oct. 31, 2003. With the renewal, the license for Unit 1 is extended to Oct. 25, 2034, and the license for Unit 2 to Dec. 23, 2037.

The NRC’s environmental review for this license renewal is described in a site-specific supplement to the NRC’s “Generic Environmental Impact Statement for License Renewal of Nuclear Power Plants” (NUREG-1437, Supplement 20), issued in April. The review concluded there were no environmental impacts that would preclude renewal of the licenses for environmental reasons. Two public meetings to discuss the environmental review were held near the plant on March 8 and Nov. 9, 2004.

After carefully reviewing the plant’s safety systems and specifications, the staff concluded that there were no safety concerns that would preclude license renewal, because the licensee had demonstrated the capability to manage the effects of plant aging. The “Safety Evaluation Report Related to the License Renewal of the Donald C. Cook Nuclear Plant, Units 1 and 2,” was published in May. In addition, NRC conducted inspections of the plants to verify information submitted by the licensee. The reports relating to the D.C. Cook renewal are available on the NRC Web site at this address: http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/licensing/renewal/applications/cook.html.

On July 18, the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards – an independent body of technical experts which advises the Commission – issued its recommendation that the operating licenses for D.C. Cook be renewed. That recommendation is contained in “Report on the Safety Aspects of the License Renewal Application for the Donald C. Cook Nuclear Plant, Units 1 and 2.” This document is available on the NRC Web site at: http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/acrs/letters/2005/.

The D.C. Cook renewals bring the total number of renewals to 35 reactor units. A complete listing of renewal applications can be found on the NRC Web site at http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/licensing/renewal/applications.html.



-------- mississippi

Reactors & racism

by Joseph J. Mangano
8/31/05 San Francisco Bay View

http://www.sfbayview.com/083105/reactors083105.shtml

The Entergy Nuclear company of Jackson, Mississippi, with the blessing of the Bush administration, is seeking preliminary approval to add one or two new nuclear reactors to its existing reactor at Grand Gulf. If the move is approved, the company, a subsidiary of Entergy Corp., will become the first U.S. utility to order a nuclear reactor since 1978. This expansion, viewed by critics as a form of environmental racism, would worsen already significant health hazards to the area’s poor, mostly Black population.

Since African slaves began arriving two centuries ago, the Grand Gulf region of woods, soybean farms and cotton farms has been plagued by the grinding poverty characteristic of the Deep South. In the five counties within 30 miles of the site, which are home to 92,000 people, poverty and unemployment levels are double the national levels.

Poverty means undernourishment, inadequate housing, lack of access to medical care – and ultimately more deaths. Placing a buffet of radioactive chemicals in the midst of vulnerable people is like holding a lighted match over kerosene.

In the two years after Grand Gulf first started emitting airborne radioactivity in 1982, local infant deaths jumped by 35 percent and miscarriages by 58 percent. Adult death rates soared past the state and nation beginning in the early 1990s.

The nuclear experiment in Mississippi also exemplifies economic injustice. Large construction cost overruns in the building of the first plant were conveniently tucked into the electric bills of consumers who could ill afford them.

Grand Gulf promised local jobs, but just 125 plant workers, or 18 percent of the total, live in Claiborne County, where the plant is located. The plant also promised tax dollars, but soon after Grand Gulf opened, a new state law reduced Claiborne County’s share of the utility’s state taxes from 100 percent to 30 percent – the rest going to the 44 counties that use the greatest share of Grand Gulf electricity.

The Claiborne County NAACP, the Mississippi Sierra Club, the Nuclear Information Resource Service and Public Citizen have attempted, so far unsuccessfully, to halt the proposal to expand the plant, basing their opposition in part on the lack of attention paid to the special needs of local residents. But Bush’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission rejected the claim in January.

According to the government’s 719-page environmental assessment, the new reactors would cause a microscopic .0004 additional cancers and birth defects each year within 50 miles. In addition to failing to assess how vulnerable the local population may be to radiation exposure, the report also ignores the threat of a terrorist attack and doesn’t discuss how to dispose of the staggering amounts of dangerous nuclear waste.

Numerous local residents showed up at several public meetings, including one on June 28 in Port Gibson, to decry the expansion. But Entergy, playing its cards shrewdly, has successfully gained the backing of some key local players, including the mayor of Port Gibson and the Claiborne County supervisor, both Blacks.

Meanwhile, Entergy Nuclear president Gary Taylor has called for federal loan guarantees for constructing new nukes – a curious cry for taxpayer help from a $10 billion company whose stock price has more than tripled in the past six years.

Whether or not the push to revive nuclear power succeeds, one thing is clear: The government-industry partnership will do whatever it can to bring new nukes to America, even if it means jump-starting the process by employing white-collar racism that targets society’s most vulnerable members.

Joseph J. Mangano is national coordinator for the New York-based Radiation and Public Health Project. This article, which first appeared in The Nation at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050815/mangano, is reprinted with the permission of the author.



-------- nevada

Attorney General Sandoval seeks help

Aug. 31, 2005 at 2:37PM (UPI)

http://www.washtimes.com/upi/20050831-022733-2310r.htm

Nevada's attorney general sent letters to attorneys general in 10 states seeking help in the fight against the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear dump.

      The letter from Attorney General Brain Sandoval urges them to oppose the new radiation standards proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency. Sandoval said the new standard would set a "dangerous precedent for the relaxation of all radiation protection standards for Department of Energy sites everywhere."

      The EPA set a two-tier standard for radiation in the area. For the first 10,000 years the limit is 15 millirems of radiation. That is the equivalent to a chest X-ray each year, according to the Las Vegas Sun.

      After 10,000 years, the limit would increase to 350 millirems a year for up to 1 million years.

      "This amounts to the least stringent radiation protection standard in the world by far," Sandoval wrote in his letter to attorneys general in Idaho, Washington, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Tennessee, South Carolina, Kentucky, Ohio, and New York.

      Sandoval said he chose those states because they each have a Department of Energy facility. He is asking them to write the EPA opposing the standard before the Oct. 21 deadline. 

----

YUCCA MOUNTAIN FIGHT: Sandoval recruits supporters

Nevada attorney general writes letters to colleagues in 10 states to oppose EPA radiation standards
By SEAN WHALEY
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL CAPITAL BUREAU
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Las Vegas Review-Journal

http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2005/Aug-31-Wed-2005/news/27129485.html

CARSON CITY -- Attorney General Brian Sandoval on Tuesday sent letters to the attorneys general in 10 states urging them to speak out about what he called unacceptable proposed radiation standards for the planned nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.

Letters sent to the attorneys general in Idaho, Washington, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Tennessee, South Carolina, Kentucky, Ohio and New York ask them to oppose the standards during the 60-day public comment period that ends Oct. 21.

Nevada officials believe those 10 states will be most affected by the radiation standards proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency.

"I am writing to alert you to a disturbing proposed rule that, if promulgated, has the clear potential to destabilize the cleanup standards for all Department of Energy facilities, including the DOE facility in your state," Sandoval said.

The proposed standard for Yucca Mountain "threatens to undermine the negotiations and tri-party cleanup agreements that have taken years for states to develop for the protection of their citizens from DOE's nuclear contamination," he said.

Sandoval said the EPA previously determined that people should be exposed to no more than 15 millirems per year. The new standard would permit exposures of between 350 and 1,050 millirem per year, depending on whether median or mean exposures are considered.

"This amounts to the least stringent radiation protection standard in the world by far," he said.

A person living in the United States receives an average annual 300 millirem dose of radiation from natural and man-made sources. A millirem is a small amount of energy.

An EPA official has said the standards, rewritten to satisfy a federal court ruling, would offer health protection to Nevadans from buried canisters of decaying nuclear fuel for as long as 1 million years.

Jeffrey Holmstead, EPA assistant administrator for air and radiation, has said the agency was attempting to set limits that will affect 25,000 generations.

"It's a real scientific challenge, but we think we've done it in a way that is consistent with the best science," Holmstead said.

The Energy Department, which seeks to entomb 77,000 tons of nuclear waste inside the mountain 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, believes it can meet the proposed EPA standard.

"The new standard is based on EPA's unstudied view that it is appropriate to expose unconsenting local populations to high levels of radiation so long as they do not exceed the highest levels of natural background radiation tolerated in the most radiation-prone states, such as Colorado," Sandoval said in the letter to Colorado Attorney General John Suthers.

In addition to the letters, Sandoval sent some background information on the proposed EPA standard.

It says the EPA proposal:

• Abandons any long-term groundwater protection standard.

• Includes home radon exposure in calculations of natural background levels used to set thresholds, a practice never done in such calculations because home radon exposure is routinely mitigated.

• Assumes it is ethically permissible to expose future generations to radiation levels far higher than would be tolerated today.



-------- new york

NRC meetings to draw officials, activists from region

By GREG CLARY
gclary@thejournalnews.com
THE NY JOURNAL NEWS
August 31, 2005

http://www.nyjournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050831/NEWS02/508310356/1020/NEWS04

The Indian Point nuclear power plant will be the focus of area emergency coordinators, public health officials and environmental activists who plan to attend Nuclear Regulatory Commission meetings in Maryland today and tomorrow that will address security at nuclear plants across the nation.

The meetings, which are open to the public, will be run by the agency's Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response and will deal with issues such as spent fuel pools and backup power for emergency alert systems, two areas that have been integral to the region's debate over Indian Point in Buchanan.

Participants will include officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Anthony Sutton, Westchester's commissioner of emergency services, said he would attend the sessions primarily to remind regulators that, while overall guidelines are important, so is the ability to assess each nuclear plant individually.

"There are many plants that they deal with where, quite honestly, there are more prairie dogs than there are people," Sutton said of the federal nuclear regulators. "They really need to treat sites, particularly like Indian Point, as individual sites and not try and use a cookie-cutter approach to emergency planning or response or guidelines."

Sutton said the New York metropolitan area was not a typical emergency planning zone for a nuclear power plant, mostly because of the estimated 20 million people who live close enough to Indian Point that they could be affected by an emergency at the site.

Rockland and Orange counties also will send representatives to Maryland. Putnam County is not, though the four-county coordinator for emergency preparedness will attend, Sutton said. The four counties fall within the 10-mile evacuation zone around the plant.

"We're sending people from our Health Department and emergency services, including our radiological expert, because this a very important issue," said C.J. Miller, a spokeswoman for Rockland County Executive C. Scott Vanderhoef. "This is an opportunity for us to learn more and be part of the regulation review process. In the post-9/11 world, it's very important that these regulations are revisited and redefined."

Jim Steets, a spokesman for Entergy Nuclear Northeast, Indian Point's owner and operator, said the company was sending a security official to the meetings.

In the two days, federal officials hope to hold round-table discussions on a variety of topics, including protective actions taken on and and off the sites of the more than 100 nuclear plants the NRC regulates. They include drills and other preparation exercises, how quickly the NRC and local officials are notified in the event of a problem, and alternatives for alerting the public.

Members of the environmental group Riverkeeper, a leading opponent of Indian Point, will attend the meetings to emphasize recent problems with Indian Point's emergency siren system, among other issues.

"We want to have immediate action on the backup siren issue," spokeswoman Lisa Rainwater said. "We want a direct answer from the NRC on the record as to what they're going to do to address the problem."

Indian Point's owner, Entergy Nuclear Northeast, has vowed to install backup power to the sirens or to replace the entire system within 18 months to two years, a schedule Rainwater said was troubling.



-------- north carolina

New nuclear plants may be safer
Possible new nuclear plants in state could be safer

By JOHN MURAWSKI, Staff Writer
Aug 31, 2005 NC News Observer

http://www.newsobserver.com/business/story/2771607p-9210019c.html

Progress Energy's H.B. Robinson nuclear power plant in South Carolina, once a mainstay of the nation's array of nuclear plants, is living on borrowed time. The Nixon-era relic is now entering middle age and, like many of the nation's 103 nuclear reactors, will be retired in the coming decades.

The nuclear plants that Progress Energy and other utility companies are considering building would be twice as powerful as some of the aging models. Driven by population growth and rising energy demand in the Southeast, the utilities are reviewing whether to start building nuclear plants in five years, long before the old nuclear plants are mothballed.

On Monday, Progress Energy, based in Raleigh, announced that it would select a site this year for a new nuclear reactor and pick a reactor design. Duke Power of Charlotte also will pick a site this year and select a reactor model. Both North Carolina utilities could take two years to make the final decision about building a nuclear reactor.

Manufacturers of nuclear plants, for years dependent on European and Asian sales to sustain business, covet the U.S. market.

"It's such a huge market with huge potential," said Andy White, president and chief executive of GE Energy's nuclear business in Wilmington. "With the retirement of plants by about 2040, you're going to need 100 to 200 new nuclear plants in the U.S. to keep up the energy mix."

It has been a quarter-century since a nuclear plant has been commissioned in this country, and such serious talk of building new reactors is reviving anxieties about the safety of nuclear plants.

Skeptics say the new reactor designs are experimental and tested only under simulated conditions. They wouldn't prevent the errors that have led to major fines and 107 plant shutdowns related to enforcement since the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, they contend. More important, the doubters say, the new designs don't alleviate concerns about terrorism.

"It's just a whole lot of hype," said Edwin Lyman, a Washington staff scientist at the Union for Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group long critical of the nuclear industry. "The objective of making something cheaper and safer at the same time just raises red flags for me."

Nuclear proponents say the new designs are not only more efficient, but safer than ever. The models are completely computerized and rely on fewer moving parts. They are equipped with enhanced emergency safety systems -- such as passive systems, which circulate cooling water without heavy machinery or electricity.

"Passive systems, if designed properly, can be more reliable because there's less failure of mechanisms," said William Beckner, director of new reactors and research reactors at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is reviewing the designs. "It would be very hard to imagine how it might fail, absent a structural failure."

The streamlined designs under development feature fiber-optic cable and touch screens. With fewer moving parts, they would cost up to 20 percent less to build, operate and maintain, nuclear advocates say.

"We're approaching five decades of knowledge in this area," said Peter Wells, general manager of marketing for GE Energy's nuclear business. "We're able to leverage tremendous efficiency."

State as trial ground

North Carolina, which is heavily dependent on nuclear power, could become the nation's testing ground for the new designs. Nuclear plants generate nearly half the electricity produced by Progress Energy and Duke Power. Nationwide, 20 percent of electricity is generated by nuclear power.

Progress Energy's four nuclear reactors in the Carolinas are among the nation's oldest and newest, a snapshot of where the industry stands today. The H.B. Robinson plant near Florence, S.C., has been generating electricity since 1971. Only five reactors of the 103 now operating were in existence when the Robinson plant was built.

By comparison, the company's Shearon Harris plant is only about half as old. The plant, 20 miles southwest of Raleigh, began operating in 1987.

As the NRC is reviewing the plant designs, Progress and Duke are conducting their own cost-benefit analysis.

"They should be cheaper, but that's what we're trying to decide," said Joe Donahue, Progress Energy's vice president for nuclear engineering and services. "I try not to listen to the hype of the vendors on those things. We need to prove it to ourselves."

Trade-offs

The selling point of nuclear power has always been cheap fuel and no air pollution. The main impediment is the lack of a permanent disposal site for radioactive spent fuel, which remains lethal for thousands of years and is being temporarily stored at scores of nuclear plants around the country.

After the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, the NRC toughened standards. The terrorist attacks in New York and Washington in 2001 led to more restrictions.

Plants, for instance, are patrolled by armed guards and tested with mock invasions. NRC cybersecurity rules require internal communications system that control reactor safety to have no link to the Internet or other networks, to keep out hackers and viruses.

Still, basic concerns remain. Despite the lessons learned after Three Mile Island, nuclear plants have experienced serious problems. For example, a reactor vessel at the Davis-Besse plant near Toledo, Ohio, had deteriorated and would have burst with radioactive water, if it had not been detected in 2002, according to NRC records. In April, the NRC fined FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company a record $5.45 million for the negligence, and barred one of the utility's engineers for five years from the nuclear industry.

Proponents say that the new reactors will have instruments that are more sensitive and more accurate and could minimize human error.

Progress and Duke are reviewing three plant designs, none of which have yet been approved for use in the United States. Areva, a French company with offices in Charlotte, has a model with four sets of emergency cooling pumps and backup diesel generators instead of the usual two. The company filed for NRC review this year, hopes to win approval in this country by 2009. A plant based on the design is being built in Finland and another is being bid on in China.

Westinghouse, based in Pittsburgh, has designed a passive emergency system doesn't require pumps or electricity to cool a reactor with water. Instead, a 500,000-gallon tank overhead would release water into the reactor below for up to 72 hours. Westinghouse's design has been provisionally approved by the NRC and is expected to win final approval this year.

General Electric, with operations in Wilmington, would use a similar passive system. GE completed filing its design documents with the NRC last week. The NRC takes up to four years to review and test a plant design.

Nuclear advocates express the likelihood of a nuclear meltdown today as once in a million years, or as likely as a comet striking the Earth.

"We have never had events in this country that have progressed to the point where these systems have been required -- except Three Mile Island," Beckner said.

Staff writer John Murawski can be reached at 829-8932 or murawski@newsobserver.com. 



-------- vermont

Uprate expected to be the hot topic at V-SNAP meeting

By K. CECCAROSSI
Brattleboro Reformer Staff
Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - 2:15:28 AM EST

http://www.reformer.com/Stories/0,1413,102~8862~3034044,00.html

VERNON -- It's their job to give opinions to the Legislature, the governor and to state agencies on matters of nuclear power.

And tonight they're getting together here, for the first time since last December, to discuss their upcoming business.

The Vermont State Nuclear Advisory Panel, better known as V-SNAP, meets at 6 p.m., in the Vernon Elementary School. The public is welcome.

Topping the panel's agenda is the plan to boost the power output by 20 percent at Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. V-SNAP will be weighing in on the issue as state and federal officials decide over the next few months whether to approve the proposal.

The uprate was approved by the state's Public Service Board last March, but with the condition that Entergy, the plant's owners, submit to an independent assessment of the reactor.

In August 2004, the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission led an inspection of the plant, but Public Service Board members haven't yet accepted that work as the assessment they were looking for. In the meantime, plant owners have spent upwards of a million dollars in uprate-related improvements to the reactor.

When V-SNAP last met in Vernon, in December, hundreds of Windham County residents turned out. Local people gave the panel a petition, asking V-SNAP to demand a more detailed inspection of Vermont Yankee.

"They promised they would act on it," says Peter Alexander, executive director of New England Coalition, nuclear watchdog group. "Now is the time for them to deliver."

Representatives from the coalition will make that charge directly to V-SNAP tonight.

There seems to be some disagreement among V-SNAP members on how to advise the state on the inspection question.

But at least a few members of V-SNAP have expressed a strong committment to doing another inspection at Vermont Yankee.

State Sen. Mark MacDonald, D-Orange, a V-SNAP member, requested tonight's meeting specifically to address the issue. He said he's concerned the uprate provides huge economic benefits for Entergy, but little incentive for Vermonters.

"Ratepayers will pay through the nose if there's a miscalculation in this," he said.

V-SNAP is made up of Rep. Steve Darrow, D-Putney and MacDonald, appointed from the House and Senate respectively; citizen members Russell Kulas and Timothy Nulty, appointed by former governors; Larry Crist, from the state Department of Health; Thomas Torti, secretary from the Agency of Natural Resources; and David O'Brien, commissioner of the Department of Public Service.

Its agenda also calls for discussion of a plan to bring on-site nuclear waste storage to Vermont Yankee; a summary of the fund that would cover costs of permanently shutting down Vermont Yankee; Vermont Yankee's operational report; and discussion of the plant's recent shutdown, due to a malfunction in the electrical yard. There is also time set aside for public comment. 

----

Yankee power decision won't come this year

August 31, 2005 Rutland Herald

http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050831/NEWS/50830003/1003/NEWS02

Federal regulators have told Entergy Nuclear it will not decide before early next year whether power can be boosted at Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.

In a timetable contained in a letter outlining its schedule, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission estimated it would issue its final environmental assessment on Feb. 7, with its final safety evaluation report on Feb. 24.

"The tentative schedule set forth could be delayed if the responses do not fully address the issues raised in the (request for additional information,)" wrote Brooke D. Poole, counsel for the NRC staff.

Poole said that the NRC would have "greater confidence" in evaluating its timetable by mid-September.

The Vermont State Nuclear Advisory Panel will meet tonight at the Vernon Elementary School to discuss various issues at Vermont Yankee, including the status of the requested power increase, or uprate, and the plant's unexpected shutdown last month.

Poole, in a letter sent to the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board dated Aug. 15, said that in early August the reactor's owner had sent the 30th and 31st supplemental reports to the NRC since the uprate request came under federal review two years ago.

Poole said the timetable is dependent on several meetings and discussions of Entergy's plans taking place in November and December.

And she noted that the timetable is also based on the expectation that there wouldn't be a full environmental impact statement needed for the project, although that issue still has to be decided.

NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said volumes of information are being generated by Entergy.

"An example of the volume of information being exchanged between the company and us is a 473-page response to NRC requests for additional information," he said Tuesday.

Robert Williams, Entergy Nuclear spokesman, was noncommittal about the effects of the delay.

Williams said that the company had hoped for a decision before the plant shuts down for its regularly scheduled refueling and maintenance period, which is slated for late September-early October.

The company has already made more than $60 million in renovations to the plant in anticipation of the NRC approval for the 20 percent power increase. It make those changes in early 2004.

Williams said that the continuing requests for more information from the NRC was not an indication of Entergy failing to answer the NRC's questions.

"We're responding to their requests for information," he said. "It's a matter of the NRC making sure they have complete information and complete understanding of our calculations. It's not indicative of the quality of the information we're providing them."

Instead, he claimed, it was an indication of "how in-depth, and how thorough the information is."

The Public Service Board has yet to sign off on a special engineering inspection, which took place a year ago, as one of the conditions of state approval of the 20 power increase.

Raymond Shadis, senior technical adviser to the anti-nuclear group New England Coalition, said Entergy has been sending volumes of information to the NRC. But he said it wasn't always well defined.

"Quite often the name of the game is to bury the opposition in paper, and in this case the NRC is the opposition," Shadis said. "They've been sending them endless reams of calculations. They could put a cover on a telephone book and ship it to them."

The Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, an arm of the NRC, is reviewing the special engineering report at the request of the PSB to determine whether its goals were met.

The VSNAP meeting starts at 6 p.m. today at the Vernon Elementary School cafeteria. The meeting is open to the public.

Contact Susan Smallheer at susan.smallheer@rutlandherald.com.



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


-------- terrorism

Ex-Counterterrorism Chief Cites Rise in Attacks

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 31, 2005; A19

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/30/AR2005083001669_pf.html

Richard A. Clarke, the former head of counterterrorism in the White House under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, said yesterday that there were twice as many attacks outside Iraq in the three years after the 2001 attacks as in the three preceding years.

Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda group "are no longer the traditional leaders as they were in the 1990s," Clarke said, adding that the terrorist leader had been building ideological groups from Afghanistan before Sept. 11, 2001, and that they had grown in the past few years into 14 to 16 separate networks.

Clarke said that bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, exercise "symbolic control and provide broad-brush themes" and that most of the networks operate independently, but "there are some signs of cooperation among some."

Clarke, now a corporate security and counterterrorism consultant, delivered his assessment of al Qaeda and the jihadist threat at a news conference at the New America Foundation designed to focus attention on a bipartisan, two-day policy forum set for next week in Washington, titled "Terrorism, Security and America's Purpose."

Clarke left the Bush administration in 2003 and has since alleged the Bush White House reacted slowly to warnings of terrorist attacks in early 2001.

Yesterday, Clarke said that Iraq is drawing a relatively small number of foreign fighters who train there and return home, but "it is unclear to what extent they are drawn by the U.S. presence or how much the U.S. is a magnet." Overall, he said that "there are more people participating [in jihadist networks] outside Iraq because of the U.S. presence" in that country.

"Al Qaeda has morphed from a hierarchical structure to a [worldwide] movement," he said. The goal of some is to create regional theocracies, he said, while others just want to overthrow their own governments. "They share the view that the U.S. is the great Satan and propping up governments that suppress Muslims," he said.

Asked why he believes there has not been an attack inside the United States since those on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Clarke cited first the increased vigilance by the FBI and federal immigration authorities. "That conveyed a message that this was an unwelcoming climate," he said but quickly added, "It's not clear it won't happen here" again.

Another factor that so far may have prevented an al Qaeda attack here, Clarke said, is that bin Laden's group has traditionally relied on support from the indigenous population -- and, unlike Europe, the United States "has no internal, large, alienated Arab population."

Clarke took sharp issue with President Bush's repeated statements that by fighting terrorists abroad, the administration is preventing attacks in this country. "That is illogical on its face," Clarke said. Citing bombings in Madrid and London, Clarke said that "absolutely nothing prevents them from coming here."

Clarke criticized the Bush administration for what he characterized as a lack of specific goals and objectives for homeland security.

"There have been lots of starts," Clarke said, citing establishment of the Department of Homeland Security for one, but he said the government should do a better job of determining where money needs to be spent.

"We are probably safer when it comes to passenger aircraft," he said but added that not enough has been done to make ground transportation safe and that chemical plants represent particularly dangerous targets for terrorists.



-------- ENERGY 


-------- alternative energy

US Windpower Firm Clipper Plans September UK Float

REUTERS UK: August 31, 2005

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/32265/story.htm

LONDON - California-based wind-power company Clipper Windpower said on Tuesday it planned to list its shares in London in two weeks.

Clipper and its adviser, investment bank Lehman Brothers, declined to comment on how much the company planned to raise or how much it would be valued at as part of the listing on London's junior AIM market.

The shares are due to start trading on Sept. 14, according to a regulatory filing.

It was not immediately clear why the US company had opted for a UK listing, and it made no further comment beside the filing particulars.

Clipper, whose UK chairman is former Olympic cox and Conservative sports minister Colin Moynihan and which says actor Anthony Hopkins is an investor, was formed in 2001. It said it has established two US wind projects valued at $240 million.

A source close to the company told Reuters in June that Clipper planned to use any IPO proceeds to develop a more efficient wind turbine.

The Santa Barbara-based company said it is one of the world leaders in wind turbine technology, which should cut the cost of wind energy production.

Its website said its two projects total 205 megawatts, and it has a development portfolio of 1,100 megawatts in the US and Mexico plus the largest planned project in the wind industry -- the 3,000 megawatt Rolling Thunder site in South Dakota.

Moynihan was appointed last year to run Clipper's business outside the Americas, which focuses on manufacturing the new generation of the firm's wind turbine and the development of offshore wind farms.

Clipper reported revenue of $5.2 million in 2003 and raised $10 million through private equity funding in 2002.

The company said the global wind power market is expected to grow by 15-30 percent per year for the foreseeable future.

It said renewable energy sources generate about 3 percent of the UK's electricity supply -- with 15 percent of that generated by wind power -- and the government intends to lift the renewable energy share to 15 percent by 2015.

----

Purdue Scientists Find Key to Hydrogen Production

WEST LAFAYETTE, Indiana, August 31, 2005 (ENS)

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2005/2005-08-31-09.asp#anchor7

A novel technique for producing hydrogen from water and organic material that could help speed the creation of safe and inexpensive hydrogen production and storage technology has been discovered at Purdue University.

Hydrogen is the most plentiful element on Earth and, once isolated, is a clean burning fuel that produces neither greenhouse gases nor toxic emissions. Hydrogen fuel cells are viewed as a potential replacement for internal combustion engines in automobiles.

The new method of producing hydrogen has not yet been evaluated for economic feasibility on a large scale, but chemist Mahdi Abu-Omar says it could offer solutions to several problems facing fuel cell developers.

The technique requires only water, a catalyst based on the metal rhenium (REE-nee-um) and an organic liquid called an organosilane, which can be stored and transported easily.

"We have discovered a catalyst that can produce ready quantities of hydrogen without the need for extreme cold temperatures or high pressures, which are often required in other production and storage methods," said Abu-Omar, an associate professor of chemistry in Purdue's College of Science.

"It is possible that this technique could lead to fuel cells that are safe, efficient and not dependent on fossil fuels as their energy source," he said.

Abu-Omar's research team, which includes Purdue's Elon Ison and Rex Corbin, published their findings today in the Journal of the "American Chemical Society."

Because hydrogen can be used for electricity production, transportation and other energy needs, many see a changeover to a hydrogen economy from the current petroleum based economy as the solution to global energy problems.

But before hydrogen can be used as fuel, it must be extracted from other substances that are often fossil fuels, and then stored safely in sufficient quantities. If these problems can be solved, hydrogen-powered generators, known as fuel cells, might replace internal combustion engines everywhere from electrical plants to cars.

Abu-Omar and his colleagues were not concentrating on these problems when they began studying organosilanes, a group of organic molecules that have been slightly modified in the laboratory.

"Initially, we were concerned with finding useful catalysts to convert these silicon-based fluids into silanols, another type of substance that is valuable in the chemical industry," he said. "It's the sort of work chemists do all the time, and it's usually of interest only to other chemists. But sometimes the byproducts of conversions are as interesting as what you wanted in the first place."

Abu-Omar's team took a compound based on rhenium, a rare metal found while mining copper, and added it to the organosilane in the presence of water. Over the course of an hour, the organosilane changed completely into silanol, leaving the water and rhenium catalyst unchanged. But the team also noticed there was a gas bubbling from the mixture.

"It turned out to be pure hydrogen," Abu-Omar said. "The reaction is not only efficient at creating silanol, but it also generates hydrogen at a high rate in proportion to the amount of water."

The team estimates that about seven gallons each of water and organosilane could combine to produce 6.5 pounds of hydrogen, which could power a car for approximately 240 miles.

"The big question is, of course, whether it would be economically viable to create organosilane fuels in the quantities necessary to power a world full of cars," Abu-Omar said. "As of right now, there simply isn't enough demand to make more than small volumes of this liquid, and while it's a relatively easy process, it's not dirt cheap either."

"I think the big point here is that hydrogen can be produced from water and a form of organic matter," he said. "If this rhenium-based catalyst can do the trick on organosilanes, perhaps we can find other catalysts that can generate hydrogen from garbage, or from biomass left over from the harvest." 

----

Automakers Steer Fuel-Cell Cars to California Roads

August 31, 2005 — By Leonard Anderson, Reuters

http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=8656

BERKELEY, Calif. — Automakers outlined plans Tuesday to introduce hydrogen-powered cars in California but said they had a long road ahead, despite strong support from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger who dreams of a "hydrogen highway".

General Motors Corp Japan's Honda Motor and Germany's BMW are pursuing competing technologies to introduce new "zero emission" cars that run on fuel cells and do not pollute, said engineering and marketing managers for the three automakers.

BMW, however, may have a leg up to market a new car in California and Europe powered by a gasoline engine and a hydrogen fuel cell system. The German automaker plans to offer a limited number of the new model in its 7 Series in 2010, Wilhelm Hall, general manager of environmental engineering at BMW North America.

He spoke at a briefing for reporters on California's efforts to persuade automakers to manufacture more environmentally friendly cars for California's "hydrogen highway."

BMW plans a production run of the new car "in the hundreds" in five years with sales aimed at fleet operators and individuals in Europe and the U.S., Hall told Reuters.

California drivers, battered by soaring prices at the gas pump, are snapping up new cars like Toyota's gasoline-electric Prius hybrid combining smart looks and high miles-per-gallon.

PRIUS VS HUMMER

Hollywood celebrities have adopted the quiet Prius as a kind of environmental badge of honor, while plenty of gas-guzzling Hummers continue to roar over the state's freeways where they are the object of envy and scorn.

California, which has paced the U.S. in implementing regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming, aims to promote the use of hydrogen fuel to reduce its dependence on oil while improving the environment.

The state's "hydrogen blueprint," one of Schwarzenegger's favorite programs, calls for up to 2,000 hydrogen vehicles and 100 refueling stations by 2010 at an estimated cost of $54 million.

The fuel outlets would be concentrated in San Diego, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay area and Sacramento.

Depending on the results of the first phase, California would aim for 20,000 hydrogen vehicles and 250 fuel stations.

GM is developing a demonstration car called the Sequel powered by a compressed hydrogen engine, said Al Weverstad, executive director of GM's Public Policy Center.

Weverstad said GM will complete its engineering analysis on hydrogen vehicles by 2010, but no timetable has been set for production and marketing programs. GM is concerned about development costs, he said, but added: "We are confident we will get there."

Honda has developed a hydrogen fuel cell demonstration car and also a car running on compressed natural gas that can be refueled at home.

Steve Ellis, manager of fuel cell marketing for Honda in California, said the company's strategy for lower-emission cars moves from high gasoline fuel economy to gasoline-electric hybrids to compressed gas to hydrogen fuel cell models. 



-------- OTHER


-------- environment

Depletion of Ozone Layer Leveling Off

BOULDER, Colorado, August 31, 2005 (ENS)

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2005/2005-08-31-09.asp#anchor1

Earth's ozone layer, while still severely depleted following decades of thinning from industrial chemicals in the atmosphere, is no longer in decline, new satellite based research reveals.

The study was conducted by scientists at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, a joint institute of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Other members of the team are with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois.

Greg Reinsel, a UW Madison researcher and the lead author of the study, was one of the first scientists to quantify the ozone decline more than two decades ago. He died unexpectedly in May after completing the study.

Betsy Weatherhead, corresponding author of the study, said the team documented a leveling off of declining ozone levels between 1996 and 2002, and even measured small increases in some regions.

"The observed changes may be evidence of ozone improvement in the atmosphere," said Weatherhead. "But we will have to continue to monitor ozone levels for years to come before we can be confident."

Weatherhead said it will likely be decades before the ozone layer recovers, and it may never stabilize at the levels measured prior to the mid-1970s, when scientists discovered human-produced chlorine and bromine compounds could destroy ozone and deplete the ozone layer.

Ozone depletion has been most severe at the poles, with levels declining by as much as 40 percent on a seasonal basis, said Weatherhead. But there also has been as much as a 10 percent seasonal decline at mid-latitudes, the location of much of North America, South America and Europe.

The team's findings were published online Monday in the "Journal of Geophysical Research."

The halt in the ozone decline follows the 1987 Montreal Protocol, an international agreement now ratified by more than 180 nations that established legally binding controls for nations on the production and consumption of halogen gases containing chlorine and bromine. Scientists say the primary source of ozone destruction is chlorofluorocarbons, or CFC's, which once were commonly used in refrigeration, air conditioning, foam-blowing equipment and industrial cleaning.

The new statistical study focused on levels of total-column ozone, which exists between Earth's surface and the top of the atmosphere. Total-column ozone is a primary blocker of UV radiation in the atmosphere.

The team analyzed data from NASA and NOAA satellites as well as ground stations in North America, Europe, Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand. About 90 percent of total-column ozone is found between 10 miles to 20 miles above Earth's surface in the stratosphere, Weatherhead said.

The ozone layer protects the planet from the harmful effects of UV radiation, including skin cancer and cataracts in humans and damaging effects on ecosystems.

Despite the new evidence for the beginnings of an ozone recovery, Mike Repacholi, The World Health Organization's environmental health coordinator in Geneva, warned that precautions such as UV-blocking sunglasses and skin protection remain vital.

"This study provides some very encouraging news," he said. "But the major cause of skin cancer is still human behavior, including tanning and sunburns that result from a lack of proper skin protection."

Other anthropogenic changes to the atmosphere such as methane levels, water vapor and air temperatures will affect future ozone levels, which are naturally maintained by complex chemical processes sparking the continual creation, destruction and redistribution of ozone, said Weatherhead. "Even after all chlorine compounds are out of the system, it is unlikely that ozone levels will stabilize at the same levels."

Scientists warn a return to higher atmospheric ozone levels may take up to 40 years. "Chemicals pumped into Earth's atmosphere decades ago still are affecting ozone levels today," said Sherwood Roland of the University of California, Irvine, who shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Paul Crutzen and Mario Molina for their work in identifying the CFC threat to the ozone layer.

"This problem was a long time in the making," said Roland, "and because of the persistence of these chlorine compounds, there is no short-term fix." 

----

New Rules Could Allow Power Plants to Pollute More

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 31, 2005; A01

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/30/AR2005083001949_pf.html

The Bush administration has drafted regulations that would ease pollution controls on older, dirtier power plants and could allow those that modernize to emit more pollution, rather than less.

The language could undercut dozens of pending state and federal lawsuits aimed at forcing coal-fired plants to cut back emissions of harmful pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, said lawyers who worked on the cases.

The draft rules, obtained by The Washington Post from the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group, contradict the position taken by federal lawyers who have prosecuted polluting facilities in the past, and parallel the industry's line of defense against those suits. The utilities, and the proposed new rules, take the position that decisions on whether a plant complies with the regulations after modernization should be based on how much pollution it could potentially emit per hour, rather than the current standard of how much it pollutes annually.

Under the new standard, a modernized plant's total emissions could rise if the upgrade allowed it to operate longer hours. In court filings, the EPA estimated in 2002 that an hourly standard would allow eight plants in five states -- including Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia -- to generate legally as much as 100,000 tons a year of pollutants that would be illegal under the existing New Source Review rule. That equals about a third of their total emissions.

EPA spokeswoman Eryn Witcher said the administration believes the existing power plant rule is no longer necessary because of other regulatory initiatives. She said a newer and different regulation designed to cut pollution from eastern power plants, the Clean Air Interstate Rule, would achieve greater pollution reductions than the New Source Review modernization guidelines.

"We are committed to permanent significant emissions reductions from power plants because what matters is environmental results, and we get far better results under the Bush administration's Clean Air Interstate Rule, which cuts emissions by 70 percent," she said. That rule sets a long-term cap that would cut industry-wide emissions over the next decade and allow less-polluting plants to sell credits to dirtier facilities to reach the overall goal.

But John Walke, NRDC's clean-air director, said: "This radical proposal is a 180-degree flip-flop from what the administration has been arguing in court. Instead of protecting public health, now EPA wants to protect the polluters. The proposal would completely sabotage clean-air law enforcement, and it would be open season for power plants to pollute even more than they do now."

The administration's new version of New Source Review marks the latest salvo in a regulatory and legal tug of war over how best to regulate aging plants that are major contributors to air pollution, producing much of the sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions, especially in the East. Those two pollutants cause more than 20,000 premature deaths a year, studies show.

Power plants account for two-thirds of the country's sulfur dioxide emissions and 22 percent of its nitrogen oxide pollution. Both have been shown to cause respiratory and heart disease.

Under the Clean Air Act, utilities must install new pollution controls when they engage in "major modifications," a requirement whose interpretation has sparked heated debate. Clinton administration officials began prosecuting utility companies in the mid-1990s for failing to comply, but Bush argued that this approach was too punitive. The administration sought to revise the rule so that new pollution controls would be required only when the cost of a plant upgrade amounted to 20 percent of its total value.

A federal court blocked Bush's proposal from taking effect nearly two years ago, prompting the EPA to come up with another approach. Now, the agency wants to use the amount of pollution a plant emits, rather than cost of an upgrade, to determine whether scrubbers are required.

The EPA proposal calls for the government to judge aging power plants by comparing "the maximum hourly emissions achievable at that unit during the last five years to the maximum hourly emissions achievable at that unit after the change" to determine if the company is required to install anti-pollution scrubbers.

New York state Attorney General Eliot L. Spitzer, who has taken legal action against six New York plants and 22 out-of-state plants for violating the Clean Air Act, said in an interview that the new rule "would be devastating to all New Source Review prosecutions, and reflects a fundamental, and what we consider an improper, new interpretation of the statute. . . . It would make our enforcement efforts much more difficult, if not impossible."

Eric Schaeffer, who headed the EPA's Office of Regulatory Enforcement before resigning in protest in February 2002, said the new rule undermines the original aim of the law, which was to slowly bring older plants into compliance with stricter air laws.

"Under this proposal, it would never happen," Schaeffer said.

In documents justifying its proposal, the EPA cites a June decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in Richmond, which sided with utilities in finding that it made more sense to judge them by hourly pollution levels. The agency is appealing that decision, with its lawyers calling the ruling "wrongly decided" and "fundamentally flawed in its analysis" of the Clean Air Act. Yesterday the 4th Circuit rejected that appeal, so the EPA must decide whether to take the case before the Supreme Court.

In another case, however, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected the hourly test in a June ruling, saying the government should evaluate polluters by their annual emissions. And on Monday, a federal trial court in Indianapolis sided with the D.C. Circuit.

Spitzer, who said he would challenge the rules in court if the administration presses ahead, said the bulk of recent legal decisions buttress the argument that regulators should scrutinize plants' annual emissions. "We think the overwhelming weight of the law is on our side," he said.

But utilities lobbyist Scott Segal defended the hourly standard, saying that in light of recent court rulings "there is an emerging consensus that is hostile to the simplistic annual standard as the basis for triggering New Source Review."

----

EPA Offers Liability Protection To Spur Mining Cleanups

August 31, 2005 — By Cheryl Wittenauer, Associated Press

http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=8662

ST. LOUIS — Environmental groups that volunteer to help government and businesses clean up waste from mine drainage in the West won't be held liable if there are future disputes over the pollution, the Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday.

The EPA's "good Samaritan" initiative is aimed at encouraging more groups to pitch in to protect drinking water and watersheds threatened by the nation's 500,000 abandoned mines, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson told a White House conference on the environment.

Some groups have worried about future responsibility if sites they help reclaim become Superfund sites -- the nation's worst toxic messes. Trout Unlimited, for example, wants to help the Forest Service clean up acidic mine runoff in Utah's American Fork Canyon. The Superfund law makes those who have worked at toxic waste sites potentially liable for future cleanups.

Trout Unlimited said it will hire experts to do engineering work to clean up the North Fork of the American Fork River with $300,000 raised from private and public sources. The river runs through the Uinta National Forest and private land south of Salt Lake City owned by the Snowbird ski resort.

"Many of these problematic abandoned mines are on private land and those responsible for the pollution are long since gone," Johnson said. "While there have been groups and local communities willing to take on the restoration of these watersheds, the potential liability of touching the sites has long discouraged voluntary cleanup efforts."

Johnson said that in the case of Trout Unlimited, EPA believes it can interpret the Superfund law "to remove the fear of liability and costly litigation to allow them to clean up waste from old mines."

Chris Wood, Trout Unlimited's vice president for conservation, said, "We want to hold this up as a model to replicate."

Western governors have been seeking that interpretation to leverage private and nonprofit support to pay for cleanups. Johnson and other EPA officials acknowledged that Congress has the last word on the Superfund liability law, and they said they planned to urge Congress to make the changes final.

In 2002, President Bush signed into law similar changes by Congress that gave developers more liability protection in cleanups of urban low-level contaminated sites known as "brownfields." 


-------- ACTIVISTS

Sheehan's protest embarks on bus tour

8/31/2005 7:21 AM (AP)

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-08-30-sheehan-packs-up_x.htm

CRAWFORD, Texas — As anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan's protest outside President Bush's ranch comes to an end, her supporters are embarking on a three-week bus tour of the country to continue rallying people against the war in Iraq.

The "Bring Them Home Now Tour" stops in Dallas and Austin Wednesday as it winds its way to a planned march in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 24.

Sheehan, who had pledged to remain at her Crawford camp for Bush's entire monthlong vacation unless he agreed to meet with her, said Tuesday she's glad Bush never showed up to discuss her son's death in Iraq because his absence "galvanized the peace movement."

"I look back on it, and I am very, very, very grateful he did not meet with me, because we have sparked and galvanized the peace movement," she said. "If he'd met with me, then I would have gone home, and it would have ended there."

Sheehan and about 50 other peace activists arrived in Crawford Aug. 6, the day after she spoke at a Veterans for Peace convention in Dallas. She and a few others spent that night in chairs in ditches, without food or flashlights, off the main road leading to the president's ranch.

Two top Bush administration officials talked to Sheehan the first day, but the president never did — although he has said that he sympathizes with her and acknowledged her right to protest. His vacation is to end Wednesday, two days early, so he can monitor federal efforts to help victims of Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast.

Sheehan's vigil attracted crowds of other anti-war demonstrators. Most stayed a few hours or days at the original roadside camp or at the second, larger site about a mile away on a private lot offered by a sympathetic landowner.

The massive response has transformed her life, she said.

"I thought nobody cared about our children killed in the war, but millions care, and millions care about our country and want to make it better," she said. "The love and support I've received give me hope that my life can someday be normal."

The protest also sparked counter-rallies by Bush supporters who accused Sheehan of using her son's death to push the liberal agenda of groups supporting her. Critics also said the protest was hurting U.S. troop morale in Iraq.

Sheehan will leave the tour next week to spend time with her mother who recently suffered a stroke, causing Sheehan to miss a week of the protest in Crawford. She plans to attend the march in the nation's capital, hoping to reunite with people she met on the Texas roadside that became known as "Camp Casey," after her son.

"When I first started here, I was sitting in the ditch thinking, 'What the heck did I do? Texas in August, the chiggers, fire ants, rattlesnakes, uncomfortable accommodations' — but I'm going to be sad leaving here," Sheehan said. "I hope people will say that the Camp Casey movement sparked a peace movement that ended the war in Iraq." 

----

U.S. Majority Supports Sheehan, Wants Bush Meeting

(Angus Reid Global Scan) August 31, 2005

http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/8747

Many adults in the United States back the antiwar demonstration taking place outside George W. Bush’s Texas ranch, according to a poll by TNS released by the Washington Post and ABC News. 53 per cent of respondents support what Cindy Sheehan is doing, while 42 per cent disagree.

Sheehan is the mother of U.S. soldier Casey Sheehan, who died in April 2004 during the coalition effort in Iraq. Sheehan—along with other relatives of fallen soldiers—met with Bush in June 2004 at Fort Lewis in Washington. Earlier this month, Sheehan camped outside the American president’s Crawford ranch seeking a new meeting with Bush and an explanation for her son’s death. 52 per cent of respondents believe the American president should meet with Sheehan again, while 46 per cent disagree.

On Aug. 11, Bush publicly addressed the issue, saying, "I sympathize with Mrs. Sheehan. She feels strongly about her position, and she has every right in the world to say what she believes. This is America. She has a right to her position, and I thought long and hard about her position. I’ve heard her position from others, which is: Get out of Iraq now. And it would be a mistake for the security of this country and the ability to lay the foundations for peace in the long run if we were to do so."

The coalition effort against Saddam Hussein’s regime was launched in March 2003. At least 1,876 American soldiers have died during the military operation, and more than 14,100 troops have been injured.

Polling Data

Do you support or oppose what Cindy Sheehan is doing?

Support
	

53%

Oppose
	

42%

No opinion
	

5%

Do you think George W. Bush should meet with Cindy Sheehan again?

Yes
	

52%

No
	

46%

No opinion
	

3%

Source: TNS / Washington Post / ABC News
Methodology: Telephone interviews to 1,006 American adults, conducted from Aug. 25 to Aug. 28, 2005. Margin of error is 3 per cent.