in other news

["Michael Stabin" <michael.g.stabin@vanderbilt.edu>]

The following from Sandy Perle:



From: "Sandy Perle" <sandyfl@earthlink.net>

To: "nuclear news list" <sandyfl@earthlink.net>

Date: Sat, 9 Mar 2002 09:40:48 -0800



Index:



-----------------

Energy Dept. Sued Over Nuclear Waste

Mayor NY should have been told about nuke fear

Tiny bubbles create nuclear fusion -- maybe

U.S. Developing Radiation Detectors

Demand Rising for Potassium Iodide

-----------------



Energy Dept. Sued Over Nuclear Waste



BOISE, Idaho (AP) - The Department of Energy is being sued over a proposal

to

abandon radioactive waste that has been buried in storage tanks, a practice

environmentalists say could threaten water resources.



The tanks, buried at sites in Idaho, Washington and South Carolina, held

millions of

gallons of liquid acid used to reprocess spent fuel rods until the late

1990s. The rods

were bathed in the liquid acid, which extracted uranium, plutonium and other

radioactive substances but left behind a highly radioactive stew of other

metals.



The waste fluid was stored in the underground tanks. Although much of the

fluid has

been pumped out and processed into a more solid form, a residual sludge

remains,

coating their bottoms and sides.



The lawsuit, filed by environmentalists on Friday in U.S. District Court in

Boise, asks

that the department not be allowed to abandon the tanks.



About 800,000 gallons of sludge remain in 10 tanks at Idaho National

Engineering

and Environmental Laboratory. The Energy Department plans to remove all but

about

1,000 gallons in each tank, leaving a total of about 10,000 gallons in

place, said

department spokesman Brad Bugger.



The other waste is buried at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington

and the

Savannah River Site in South Carolina. All three sites are near aquifers or

rivers that

could become contaminated if the containers leak, the lawsuit contends.



The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has classified the buried material as

high-level

waste, a designation which would not allow the department to abandon it. The

Energy Department wants the waste's rating downgraded so it has the option

of

leaving the waste at the three sites.



Bugger said there has been no decision to cap the tanks and that other

options are

also under consideration, including removing them.



Gary Richardson, director of the Snake River Alliance, one of the

plaintiffs, said the

department was trying to circumvent established rules for handling

high-level

radioactive material.



``We think that is a violation of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, and that

they are using

regulatory rule-making as a sleight-of-hand way to define away the

problem,''

Richardson said.

--------------



Mayor NY should have been told about nuke fear



NEW YORK, March 4 (Reuters) - Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other elected

representatives said on Monday that New York officials should have been told

about

reported fears of a nuclear attack on the city last October published by

Time

magazine.



Time magazine said on Sunday that a month after the Sept. 11 attacks, senior

federal officials feared a nuclear weapon obtained from the Russian arsenal

was

being smuggled into New York.



The White House's Counterterrorism Security Group, part of the National

Security

Council, was alerted to the danger through a report by an agent code-named

DRAGONFIRE, according to the magazine, but New York officials and senior FBI

officials were not informed in an effort to avoid panic.



"I do believe the New York City government should have been told," Bloomberg

said.



The threat was later determined to be false, but the magazine said

counterterrorist

investigators went on their highest state of alert -- without coordinating

plans with

New York officials, including then Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.



"I should have been notified, the governor should have been notified and the

state

police should have been notified, at a minimum," Giuliani told reporters on

Monday.



Said New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer: "There's always been a little

bit of

a wall between the federal government and the local about exchanging

intelligence. I

think 9-11 has shown us that can't happen."



New York's other Democratic senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton, said she was

"outraged" over the lack of communication.



"I was not informed and I'm outraged," Clinton said. "If it is true that

there were

credible threats of some kind of a nuclear attack on this city and the

mayor, the

police, the FBI, the governor, the officials responsible for protecting us

were not told,

that is a dereliction of duty."



U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he was not notified and was "not

unduly

distressed that I was not."



"I don't think I could have done much with the information," Annan added.

"What was

important is that the authorities who have the responsibility for security

did what had

to be done."

----------------



Tiny bubbles create nuclear fusion -- maybe



WASHINGTON, March 4 (Reuters) - Tiny bubbles imploding in a solution of

acetone

may have generated nuclear fusion, Russian and U.S. scientists said on

Monday, in

an experiment that, if confirmed, represents a giant advance in nuclear

physics.



The experiment was run in a series of beakers that would take up only a

corner of

any tabletop, using what amounts to souped-up nail polish remover and sound

waves.



Because the collapsing bubbles produced temperatures as hot as those found

in the

sun, the experiment does not mean that the long-sought goal of cold fusion

has been

achieved, scientists warned.



But if it can be replicated, it could mean an easy way to generate nuclear

energy has

been found -- one that mimics what the sun does and that would be many times

safer

than current nuclear fission methods used by modern-day power plants and

makers

of atomic bombs.



Nuclear fusion joins, or fuses, hydrogen atoms or other light atoms in a

reaction that

creates a third, heavier atom and creates energy as a byproduct. This is how

the sun

generates heat and light.



Bombs and nuclear plants use another process, nuclear fission, which is the

splitting

of an atom such as uranium to create a burst of energy.



Fusion is much more desirable as it can use the hydrogen found in water and

it

produces fewer radioactive waste products.



Reporting on their experiment in the journal Science, Rusi Pusi Taleyarkhan

of the

Russian Academy of Sciences and colleagues at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

in

Tennessee and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, said

they

had created a special form of the ordinary solvent acetone by substituting a

variant of

hydrogen called deuterium for the hydrogen atoms found in an acetone

molecule.



They chilled it to the freezing point of water and pulsed it with sound

waves. Tiny

bubbles, no larger than the size of a period (full stop), appeared and then

imploded,

sending out flashes of light and, they said, high-energy neutrons.



The process is called "acoustic cavitation," a phenomenon studied for nearly

a

century.



Temperatures inside these bubbles can be about as hot as the sun's surface,

and

recent experiments suggest they can be even hotter -- 10 million degrees or

as hot

as the temperatures inside the sun where nuclear fusion takes place.



"If the results are confirmed this new, compact apparatus will be a unique

tool for

studying nuclear fusion reactions in the laboratory," Fred Becchetti of the

University

of Michigan wrote in a commentary on the findings.



"But scientists will -- and should -- remain skeptical until the experiments

are

reproduced by others. Many, including the author, could not reproduce past

claims

made for table-top fusion devices," Becchetti added, referring to a

now-discredited

1990 experiment that made headlines when scientists said they had caused

nuclear

fusion in what amounted to a glass of water at room temperature.



Becchetti added that Monday's report had been reviewed by other scientists

and was

"credible until proven otherwise."



An immediate challenge has already come from the Oak Ridge National

Laboratory,

which helped conduct the experiment. The lab reviewed the work and said its

scientists could find no evidence of the key neutron emissions.



Taleyarkhan, who could not be reached immediately for comment, said the

reviewing

scientists had improperly calibrated their detector and misinterpreted the

findings,

Science said in a statement.

---------------



U.S. Developing Radiation Detectors



WASHINGTON (AP) - The Energy Department is developing a new generation of

devices to detect nuclear radiation, a capability that the Bush

administration views as

vital in the battle against terrorism.



Administration officials said Sunday the emphasis on radiation detection has

grown

in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and in response to fears that the

al-Qaida

terrorist network may succeed in its ambition to obtain either a nuclear

device or

materials to spread radiation in an urban area.



Several administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said,

however,

that they knew of no recent indications that al-Qaida had made any new

progress

toward obtaining such materials.



Separately, Time magazine reported that U.S. officials in October issued an

intelligence alert to a small number of agencies indicating that terrorists

were thought

to have obtained a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon from the Russian arsenal and

planned

to smuggle it into New York City.



The tip about the suspected device - which could kill roughly 100,000 people

and

irradiate 700,000 others, while flattening everything within a half-mile -

was kept

highly classified, Time said. Senior FBI officials and former Mayor Rudolph

Giuliani

were not told of the threat. Investigators eventually determined that the

information

leading to the alert was false, the magazine said.



The Washington Post reported in its Sunday editions that the administration

is

alarmed by growing hints of al-Qaida's progress in acquiring nuclear

material and

that the government has deployed hundreds of sophisticated sensors since

November to U.S. borders, overseas facilities and sites around Washington.



Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, said radiation sensors were used at the Salt Lake

Olympic

Games and the Super Bowl in New Orleans.



``We clearly are in heightened alert, and we should be,'' Craig said on

CNN's ``Late

Edition.'' ``At the same time, the American people have to get on with their

lives. But I

want to make sure that they are as safe as we can possibly make them.''



Research and development of better radiation sensors is being done by the

Energy

Department's national laboratories, officials said.



The Post report said newer devices for detecting radiation are placed around

some

fixed points in Washington. It said the devices are called gamma ray and

neutron flux

detectors that until now had been carried only by members of Nuclear

Emergency

Search Teams, which are on standby at various locations.



The Post also reported that Delta Force, the elite military unit with

anti-terror

responsibilities, has been placed on a new standby alert to seize control of

any

nuclear materials that are detected by the new sensors.



Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said Sunday he was unfamiliar with the deployment

of

newer radiation sensors. He said it is well known that the U.S. government

has been

concerned for years about nuclear materials falling into the wrong hands -

whether it

be terrorists or governments hostile to the United States.



``I don't know if the administration has new information or not, but it

seems perfectly

logical that that would be one of the avenues that a dedicated group of

terrorists

would pursue,'' McCain said on CBS' ``Face the Nation.'' ``But whether they

have

that capability or not, I just don't know.''



McCain noted that searches of al-Qaida hideouts in Afghanistan by U.S.

forces have

turned up plenty of evidence that the terrorist network is interested in

obtaining a

weapon of mass destruction.



``But I'm not sure that it's a reason for panic,'' he told CNN. ``I have

seen no hard

evidence that any terrorist organization has acquired these weapons,

although

Saddam Hussein, as we know, has been making significant progress in that

direction.''

------------------



Demand Rising for Potassium Iodide



BUCHANAN, N.Y. (AP) - All this talk of nuclear doom in the New York City

suburbs is

putting money in Troy Jones' pocket.



Jones, president of NukePills.com, is selling thousands of potassium iodide

tablets a

day in recent weeks, many to people near the Indian Point nuclear plant 35

miles

north of Manhattan.



The pill, better known by its chemical symbol KI, is meant to prevent

thyroid cancer,

one of the most common radiation-caused illnesses.



Since Sept. 11, when an airborne terrorist attack on nuclear plants suddenly

seemed

possible, the widespread distribution of KI has gained credibility here and

across the

country as a means of protecting the public.



Nine states - Alabama, Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Maryland,

Massachusetts, New

Hampshire, New York and Vermont - have requested a total of 3.7 million

tablets

from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is offering states enough

pills to

treat everyone within 10 miles of a nuclear reactor.



KI was proven effective, especially in children, after the 1986 accident at

Chernobyl.

NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said the commission still believes ``sheltering

and

evacuations would be the best way to go in the event of a serious nuclear

accident,

but potassium iodide is another tool.''



Some states are skeptical, saying distribution of KI distracts the public

from the more

vital issues of plant safety and evacuation.



Mike Sinclair, planning chief for the Illinois Nuclear Safety Department,

said KI

``doesn't add anything in terms of public health.'' And Mel Fry, North

Carolina's

director of radiation protection, worries that using KI pills would delay an

evacuation.



``I'd just as soon they don't stop and pop pills,'' he said. ``I just want

them to get out

of harm's way.''



Potassium iodide is available without a prescription at a cost of about $1 a

pill. KI

works by filling the thyroid gland, which absorbs iodine, with harmless

iodine before

radioactive iodine can get in.



Dr. Donald Margouleff, chief of nuclear medicine at North Shore University

Hospital

in Manhasset, cautioned that potassium iodine offers no protection against

any form

of radiation illness other than thyroid cancer.



Still, Margouleff said, ``It's not expensive, it doesn't have a short shelf

life, large

amounts are not required, the side effects are going to be minimal, if any,

in most

people, and the protection far outweighs the risk.''



Roseanne Pawelec, spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Department of Health,

said

officials from five adjoining states met this week to consider a coordinated

New

England-wide approach to distribution.



Tentative plans call for drugstores to distribute pills in advance to

households, with

separate stockpiles maintained at schools in case of an accident or attack

during the

school day, she said.



In Arizona, pills would be distributed only after exposure, at reception

areas outside

the danger zone. ``We don't want people taking time to hunt down their

pills. The

best thing to do is get out of there,'' said Aubrey Godwin, director of the

state's

Radiation Regulatory Agency.



The size of the distribution zone is also at issue. A lawyer for an

anti-nuclear group in

Connecticut said it ``borders on criminal negligence'' not to make pills

available

within 50 miles of a reactor - not the 10 miles prescribed by the NRC.



New York, which requested 1.2 million pills, is leaving the planning to

counties

around its three nuclear stations.



Westchester County, home of Indian Point, is asking schools, hospitals and

other

institutions to draft a distribution strategy that will not interfere with

evacuation.



``We're looking to make KI so widely available that it becomes the last

thing the

public has to worry about or think about,'' County Health Commissioner

Joshua

Lipsman said.



Robin Tinkhauser of nearby Chappaqua is ahead of the government, having

bought

tablets from her pharmacy. A mother of two, she keeps the pills in her

medicine

cabinet, her car and at her 8-year-old son's school, where she persuaded

reluctant

officials to administer it in case of radioactive fallout.



``If it's out there and it's available to protect us, especially the

children, who are most

vulnerable, I want to take advantage of that,'' she said.

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