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AEP says federal judge dismisses nuke plant suit
Index:
AEP says federal judge dismisses nuke plant suit
Nev. Community Split on Nuclear Dump
Nevada site perfect for nuclear waste - Editorial
Nuclear Pioneer Releases Memoirs
U.S. buys drug antidote for nuclear radiation
=======================================
AEP says federal judge dismisses nuke plant suit
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 3 (Reuters) - American Electric Power <AEP.N> said on
Thursday a federal court judge in Ohio had dismissed a class action suit that alleged
AEP misled investors about problems at its Cook nuclear plant in Michigan.
The suit, dismissed on Dec. 26 by Judge James Graham in U.S. District Court in the
southern district of Ohio, claimed that AEP issued false and misleading statements
about conditions at the 2,110-megawatt plant to artificially inflate the company's stock
price in order to proceed with the acquisition of Dallas-based utility Central and South
West Corp.
AEP, based in Columbus, Ohio, completed its takeover of Central and South West
Corp. in 2000, making it the nation's biggest power generator, with some 38,000
megawatts of generating capacity.
The twin-reactor Cook plant was shut down in Sept. 1997 after the U.S. Nuclear
Regulatory Commission raised concerns about the design of the plant's safety
systems.
After nearly three years of work, Cook's Unit 2 was restarted in June 2000 and Unit 1
went back into operation at the end of 2000.
Class action suits filed against AEP in June and July 2000 were consolidated and the
case was moved to the Ohio court, AEP said in a statement. Specifically, the lawsuits
alleged that AEP made misleading statements about the length of the outage and the
cost to restart the plant. AEP denied the allegations.
A spokesman for the plaintiffs was not available to comment on possible further legal
moves.
----------------
Nev. Community Split on Nuclear Dump
AMARGOSA VALLEY, Nev. (AP) - For almost two decades now, on the farms, at the
post office and at the VFW-American Legion post, they have been arguing over the
federal government's proposal to bury radioactive waste 15 miles up the road. Now
the argument may be about to heat up.
Within weeks or even days, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham is expected to tell
President Bush whether he believes Yucca Mountain is a suitable place to bury
77,000 tons of the nation's spent nuclear fuel.
Nevada elected officials are lined against the proposal, but here in the Nevada
community closest to Yucca Mountain, there is no consensus on whether the dump
is a good idea.
``What I'm worried about is nuclear traffic,'' VFW post bartender Anne Davidson said
as she clicked on the beer lights, brewed a pot of coffee and set out the ashtrays
while farmers, ranchers and miners filtered in.
``We've got school buses that stop on that road,'' Davidson said, referring to the 70
mph, two-lane highway. ``We've got senior citizens who don't drive more than 40
mph. Trucks already come down that road. It'll only increase.''
Virgil ``Ben'' Bendix, a 73-year-old retired firefighter and Army veteran who wore his
Korean War unit on his cap, countered, ``That ground's contaminated anyway'' - a
reference to the Nevada Test Site, which includes Yucca Mountain.
Amargosa residents used to watch mushroom clouds over the horizon when nuclear
tests were conducted at the site from 1951 to 1992.
Between puffs of his pipe and pulls from his Budweiser, Bendix said the people of
Amargosa are ``red, white and blue out here,'' and he does not have a problem with
the project ``as long as it doesn't screw up the water.''
Nevada's four-member congressional delegation and state political leaders are
fighting the dump. The state has filed three lawsuits - trying to deny the federal
government crucial water rights, challenging the criteria Abraham is using to make
his decision, and challenging Environmental Protection Agency radiation standards.
Abraham is reviewing testimony and comments submitted during 66 public hearings
held last year, and will his first visit to the Test Site on Monday. Yucca Mountain is
the only place in the nation under study, and Congress wants an answer by Feb. 28.
Nevada officials and some local residents argue that Yucca Mountain was seen as
all but uninhabited when studies began in 1982, and the state had little political clout
then. Today, Nevada has 2 million people, including almost 1.5 million in and around
Las Vegas, 90 miles from Yucca Mountain. Amargosa Valley's 455 square miles
have nearly 1,300 residents.
A total of $7 billion has been spent so far on studying the project, which is projected
to cost $58 billion more to build if it opens on schedule in 2010. The waste would be
stored in tunnels carved out 1,000 feet below the surface and would remain
radioactive for more than 10,000 years.
``That's what gets me. The time,'' said Doris Jackson, saloonkeeper, town advisory
board chairwoman and opponent of the project. ``We're going to be the martyrs.
We're going to end up taking what nobody else wants.''
``People are so blase. They've lived next to the Test Site all these years,'' Jackson
said as she made a customer's sandwich at her Stateline Saloon and Gambling Hall,
a faded establishment with 10 slot machines, a worn pool table and a dance floor
with its veneer danced away over generations.
``Most people are for it. They say we need the money. They need the work. But the
biggest thing is the time. Eventually, it's going to contaminate the water and people
aren't going to be able to live here.''
Amargosa Valley gets its name from the Spanish word ``amargrar,'' meaning bitter or
miserable. On some maps, the broad, brown landscape is still labeled the Amargosa
Desert and the wind and sun never give up their effort to reclaim it. Electricity did not
arrive until 1963, telephones, 1965. Most roads are dirt. The lone traffic signal is a
blinking yellow light next to the elementary school.
Ed Goedhart, a town advisory board member and manager of the valley's biggest
business - an organic dairy and alfalfa farm, with 5,200 milk cows - counts himself
among the opponents of the project. The 37-year-old father of two worries about the
image of radioactivity leaking into the underground water source.
``My issue isn't so much the water, it's the perception,'' he said. ``Would you want to
buy products from the Amargosa Valley?''
------------------
Nevada site perfect for nuclear waste
NOLAN E. HERTEL
12/21/2001
The Atlanta Journal - Constitution
An extraordinary environmental success is passing almost unnoticed.
It illustrates the cost of ignoring good news --- in particular,
good news about a government effort to dispose of nuclear waste ---
in favor of bad. When the success story is missed, so is the
opportunity to reframe policy on the basis of what works instead of
always focusing on what doesn't.
Nearly three years ago, steel canisters containing plutonium-
contaminated waste from the nuclear weapons program were loaded on a
truck in Idaho and transported hundreds of miles to the Department
of Energy's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southeastern New Mexico.
There, with DOE and New Mexico officials looking on, the canisters
were placed in a geologic repository carved out of a salt cavern
more than a half-mile beneath the desert floor.
Thus began the permanent disposal of plutonium-contaminated waste,
which contains radioactive isotopes with half-lives that are
measured in many centuries. Today trucks carrying the waste arrive
almost daily at the New Mexico repository, traveling from government
installations in the Pacific Northwest and as far away as the
Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., where tritium was made for
nuclear weapons. The shipments have been carried out with absolute
safety. Eventually 1.1 million canisters of the highly radioactive
waste will be placed in seven miles of underground storage rooms and
tunnels that comprise the New Mexico repository.
The ease with which the Energy Department is transporting the waste
makes it easy to forget how hard the task looked at the outset.
Anti-nuclear groups predicted doomsday scenarios. Highway accidents
would occur, it was said, and the waste canisters would split open
and scatter radioactive materials in populous areas along interstate
highways.
With hindsight, it's obvious why nuclear critics were so mistaken.
Transporting nuclear waste seems dangerous only because few people
realize there have been more than 3,000 shipments of highly
radioactive waste during the past 40 years in the United States
without a single instance in which the public was harmed by
radiation. And many more shipments of radioactive waste have
occurred in other countries.
Yet environmental lobbies oppose efforts to transport spent fuel
from nuclear power plants for storage in a geologic repository at
Yucca Mountain in Nevada, contending that a highway or rail accident
could cause a disaster on the scale of the Chernobyl accident. Never
mind that for years --- and with scarcely any opposition from
environmentalists --- spent fuel from research reactors in Europe
and Asia has been shipped to the United States and transported long
distances by truck for storage at the Savannah River Site.
Leave aside the fact that no one seems to be complaining about the
cross-country shipment of plutonium-contaminated wastes to the
repository in New Mexico.
Today, some 45,000 metric tons of spent fuel are stored safely in
water pools and concrete casks at the Vogtle and Hatch nuclear
plants in Georgia and other commercial reactors around the country.
But many nuclear plants are running out of storage space for spent
fuel. Besides, long-term, on-site storage of spent fuel at nuclear
plants is impractical, because so many above-ground sites have to be
kept under constant surveillance, especially in the wake of the
Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States. Commercial nuclear
plants were built to provide electricity, not to be de facto waste
repositories.
Because nuclear power accounts for a large share of Georgia's
electricity supply, the state's ratepayers have a great deal at
stake in the licensing and operation of the Yucca Mountain
repository. Since 1983, they have paid more than $600 million into
the Federal Nuclear Waste Fund for construction of the repository.
Nationally, payments to the fund exceed $17 billion.
Congress should reject efforts by Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), deputy
majority leader, to curtail Department of Energy funds that are
needed to complete a decades-long study of the Yucca Mountain site.
Now that chances for approval of the Yucca Mountain repository seem
better than in the past, Reid and other critics are trying to block
funding for the project.
Yucca Mountain is the perfect place for a nuclear burial ground. It
is arid, geologically stable and the underground chambers holding
the spent fuel canisters would be a safe distance from the water
table. And the site is so remote that nuclear weapons once were
tested in this part of the Nevada desert. The Nellis Air Force Range
is nearby, providing more than adequate security against a possible
terrorist attack.
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham needs to rule on the suitability of
the site and recommend to President Bush that he approve plans to
begin storing spent fuel at Yucca Mountain once construction of the
repository is completed.
It is unconscionable that anti-nuclear activists who are trying to
shut down nuclear power in this country are spending so much effort
on stopping the shipment of spent fuel to Yucca Mountain.
Even if the production of nuclear-generated electricity were
entirely and immediately halted and the plants decommissioned, the
need to dispose of nuclear waste would remain. If plutonium-
contaminated wastes can be safely disposed of in a New Mexico
repository, then surely the same can be done with spent fuel at
Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
Nolan E. Hertel is director of Georgia Tech's Neely Research Center
and a professor of nuclear engineering and health physics.
--------------------
Nuclear Pioneer Releases Memoirs
LIVERMORE, Calif. (AP) - He was among the pioneering greats of nuclear science.
He was scorned for disavowing former boss Robert Oppenheimer. He didn't get a
Nobel but did pick up the unlovely title of ``father of the hydrogen bomb.''
At 93, Edward Teller looks back at a lifetime of science that saw him often
controversial but always influential.
``To put one point simply, I am blamed for having effectively worked on a horrible
weapon,'' says Teller, who tells all - or at least all as he remembers it - in his recently
published ``Memoirs: A Twentieth Century Journey in Science and Politics.''
In his book and in an interview with The Associated Press at his office at the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Teller makes no apologies for his role as
Cold Warrior.
He believed then, as he believes now, that the weapons he helped create kept the
world from tumbling over the brink of global war.
He quotes an old Roman motto: ``If you want peace, prepare for war.'' There will be
peace, he says, ``if the power is in the hands of those who want peace.''
On the issue of Oppenheimer, Teller is more ambivalent. Oppenheimer was the
brilliant physicist who served as top civilian on the Manhattan Project, which
developed the bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
After the war, a rift developed between the scientists over Oppenheimer's opposition
to Teller's plans for a more powerful hydrogen bomb.
The feud climaxed in 1954 at an Atomic Energy Commission hearing to review
Oppenheimer's security status where Teller recommended against granting
Oppenheimer clearance. Oppenheimer was judged a security risk; Teller was judged
a turncoat by many of his former friends.
Today, Teller admits he was wrong to testify.
He says he went into the hearing prepared to testify in support of Oppenheimer. But
at the last minute, he learned that Oppenheimer had made up, then recanted, a
damaging story about a leftist professor named Haakon Chevalier having been
approached about passing secrets to the Soviets. Teller says he was shocked and
confused by the incident and could no longer recommend clearance for
Oppenheimer.
Teller notes that he never questioned Oppenheimer's loyalty to the United States,
then or now, and appended a transcript of the testimony to his book to back that up.
Afterward, Teller said, Oppenheimer's friends treated him like a scapegoat. Teller, a
Jew who fled anti-Semitism first in Hungary and then in Germany before arriving in
the United States, described his ostracism as tantamount to a second exile.
Reactions to Teller's book, written with Judith Shoolery, vary from raves about his
painstakingly detailed chronicle of a long and fascinating career to scathing
denunciations of his version of the Oppenheimer affair.
Asked whether he thinks something good came out of writing the book, Teller waves
his arm at the stacks of copies sitting on his desk awaiting his signature, all
purchased by employees of Lawrence Livermore, the lab he helped found in the
1950s.
At home and at the lab, Teller relies on ``a crew of kindly women'' to maintain his still-
active schedule. His much-loved wife of 66 years, Mici, died in 2000.
Approaching his 94th birthday this month, Teller is hard of hearing and going blind.
But his wits - and his wit - remain sharp.
On the subject of the Nobel prize, he points out: ``The situation that I get the Nobel
Prize and people ask, 'Why the hell did you get it?' is less desirable than the situation
where I do not get the Nobel prize and people ask, 'Why the hell did you not get it.'''
That sly sense of humor pops up frequently in ``Memoirs.''
There's the story of how fellow scientist Bob Serber prepared for the dangers of the
first test of the atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert. Teller writes that he asked
Serber how he planned to deal with the rattlesnakes Oppenheimer had warned them
about. Bring a bottle of whiskey was the reply. Then, Teller noted that some
scientists feared the bomb could ignite the atmosphere. What would Serber do about
that? Take a second bottle of whiskey.
Before the bombs were dropped on Japan, some scientists wanted to try
demonstrating them first to try to scare the Japanese into surrender. Teller didn't sign
their petition, but now says it might have been better if the bomb had been blown up
in the sky over Tokyo, possibly ending the war without claiming so many lives.
His single-minded passion for defense through superior weaponry won him a title he
thinks is in bad taste, ``father of the hydrogen bomb.''
``So many times I have been asked whether I regret having worked on the atomic
and hydrogen bombs,'' Teller writes. ``My answer is no. I deeply regret the deaths
and injuries that resulted from the atomic bombings, but my best explanation of why I
do not regret working on weapons is a question: What if we hadn't?''
----------------------
U.S. buys drug antidote for nuclear radiation
WASHINGTON, Jan. 3 (Kyodo) - The U.S. Health and Human Services Department
has purchased 1.6 million doses of potassium iodide to prepare for possible release
of radioactive materials in terrorist attacks or nuclear power plant accidents, the
department said Thursday.
The department bought one million adult-strength tablets and 600,000 children's
doses in December for $180,000, spokesman Bill Pierce said.
It plans to spend $1 million allocated in an emergency spending measure for another
five million to six million doses, he said.
''It's just more broadly part of our strategy to be as ready as possible for
contingencies that might occur,'' Pierce said.
Potassium iodide, if taken in advance, can protect against thyroid cancer in case
people inhale radioactive materials or take them through contaminated food or milk.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sandy Perle Tel:(714) 545-0100 / (800) 548-5100
Director, Technical Extension 2306
ICN Worldwide Dosimetry Service Fax:(714) 668-3149
ICN Pharmaceuticals, Inc. E-Mail: sandyfl@earthlink.net
ICN Plaza, 3300 Hyland Avenue E-Mail: sperle@icnpharm.com
Costa Mesa, CA 92626
Personal Website: http://sandy-travels.com
ICN Worldwide Dosimetry Website: http://www.dosimetry.com
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