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U.S. lacks coordinated strategy on nuclear smuggling: report



Index:



U.S. lacks coordinated strategy on nuclear smuggling: report

Bomb Material Missing From Tbilisi

Japanese Gov't affiliate provided info on nuke plant opponents

Chernobyl suspected in rise in UK child deaths

Nuclear Plant Owners Delayed Upgrade

First Nuclear Waste Transportation Accident Analysis

======================================



U.S. lacks coordinated strategy on nuclear smuggling: report



WASHINGTON, June 26 (Kyodo) - By: Todd Miller Poor coordination among 

six U.S. federal agencies tasked with preventing nuclear materials 

from being smuggled out of countries of the former Soviet Union could 

be increasing U.S. vulnerability to attack by nuclear weapons or 

dirty bombs, according to a report released Wednesday.

 

''U.S. assistance is not effectively coordinated and lacks an overall 

government-wide plan to guide it,'' according to the General 

Accounting (GAO) report on nuclear nonproliferation, which was 

requested by Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, the ranking Republican on the 

Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities. The GAO is the 

investigative arm of Congress.

 

''The Department of Energy is installing equipment at border sites in 

Russia and the Department of Defense is installing equipment in 

another country that is 'better able' to detect weapons-usable 

nuclear material, while the State Department has installed 'less 

sophisticated' radiation monitors in other countries,'' said the 

report.

 

''Consequently, some countries' border crossings are more vulnerable 

to nuclear smuggling than others,'' it said.

 

There is no single agency leading or coordinating the effort to 

effectively establish funding priorities and thoroughly assess 

recipient country requirements, it said.

 

The GAO report cited 181 incidents since 1992 of attempts to smuggle 

nuclear material that were foiled at borders.

 

In the same 10-year period, the six U.S. government agencies spent 

$86 million on radiation detection equipment and personnel training 

in 30 countries of the former Soviet Union, Central and Eastern 

Europe.

 

The six agencies that work to prevent the spread of nuclear material 

are the departments of Energy, State and Defense, the U.S. Customs 

service, the Coast Guard and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

 

While U.S. assistance is generally helping countries combat nuclear 

and other radioactive material smuggling, the report said serious 

problems associated with installing and maintaining radiation 

detection equipment have undermined U.S. efforts.

 

The report said effective follow-up measures must replace the current 

drop-and-run approach if the countries are to make effective use of 

the equipment.

 

In many cases, recipient countries are left with the responsibility 

of alerting the U.S. of equipment failures, meaning if country 

officials did not systematically report problems, malfunctioning 

equipment can go unrepaired for extended periods of time, the report 

said.

 

Other examples of the system's weaknesses cited in the report include 

an incident involving Lithuania, in which portal monitors to detect 

radiation were stored in the U.S. embassy basement for two years 

because the State Department and the Lithuanians disagreed over the 

cost of a power source for the equipment.

 

The report also said about half of the pedestrian monitors provided 

to one country in the former Soviet Union were never installed or are 

not operational.

 

In addition to technical and communications problems, corruption was 

also cited as a major problem. In one example given in the report, a 

border guard agreed turned off the monitor in exchange for alcohol.

 

The State Department also spent $900,000 to supply several countries 

with vans equipped with radiation detection equipment, but the van in 

one country was rarely used due to the frigid weather conditions, it 

said.

 

When the Soviet Union collapsed a decade ago, it possessed about 

30,000 nuclear weapons and over 600 metric tons of weapons-useable 

material, the report says.

 

Several cases of illicit trafficking in nuclear material in Germany 

and the Czech Republic in the early 1990s underscored the 

proliferation threat posed by the destabilization of the region after 

the Soviet Union's demise.

 

Russia alone shares almost 20,000 kilometers of borders with 14 

countries, including North Korea, and is also in close geographical 

proximity to Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq, said Sen. Roberts in his 

report.

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



Bomb Material Missing From Tbilisi



TBILISI, Georgia (AP) - International nuclear inspectors, already 

troubled by the disappearance of bomb-grade uranium from an ex-Soviet 

institute, want answers to an even more disturbing question: Has any 

equipment that makes such material disappeared as well?

 

The facts lie beyond easy reach, on the overgrown grounds of the 

abandoned facility in rebel-held Abkhazia, a breakaway province of 

this post-Soviet republic run by separatists as a de facto 

independent state since 1993.

 

Sometime after insurgents captured the Abkhazian capital, Sukhumi, 

driving Georgian scientists from the institute, its cache of highly 

enriched uranium - the stuff of nuclear bombs - vanished.

 

A 1993 inventory showed 655 grams (1.4 pounds) of the material at the 

site, the Sukhumi I. Vekua Institute of Physics and Technology. 

American nonproliferation specialists say Georgian sources report it 

may actually have totaled 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds).

 

It would probably take many times more than that to build a bomb. But 

the uranium dioxide pellets are of the highest grade - enriched to 

over 90 percent of the fissionable isotope U-235 - and it's the only 

known case of missing bomb uranium in the world, according to data 

maintained by California's Monterey Institute of International 

Studies.

 

Georgian authorities say they have no clue whether illicit 

traffickers, well-intentioned scientists or others took the material.

 

``There are many people who would be interested in it,'' the minister 

of Georgian state security, Valerian Khaburdzania, said in an 

interview here in the Georgian capital, 210 miles southeast of the 

Black Sea coastal city of Sukhumi.

 

``It would have been easy for them to take it out by a ship coming in 

from Turkey, or from Ukraine. It's an uncontrolled area.''

 

Scientists of Russia's Atomic Energy Ministry, regaining brief access 

to the institute in 1997, later quietly informed Monterey 

nonproliferation experts that the uranium was missing from its 

bunker. In May 2001, an International Atomic Energy Agency mission, 

finally allowed to visit Sukhumi, also found no highly enriched 

uranium, said Kenji Murakami, safeguards division director, in a 

telephone interview last week from the Atomic Energy Agency 

headquarters in Vienna.

 

The IAEA mission was dispatched at Georgia's request and under U.N. 

auspices to inspect the security of cesium and other radioactive 

materials still at the institute. Security there was ``far from 

acceptable,'' said an IAEA source, speaking on condition of 

anonymity.

 

The Sukhumi complex's work historically focused on enriching uranium 

to the high levels needed for bombs, and the U.N. agency, responsible 

for guarding against the spread of nuclear weapons, wants to learn 

what equipment was housed there and whether it is still there, the 

source said.

 

But the 2001 mission had neither the experts nor legal authority to 

conduct such an investigation. Even if it had easy access to 

Abkhazia, the IAEA still wouldn't have full international legitimacy 

for conducting an inspection; that would come only when the Georgian 

Parliament ratifies an international agreement granting the IAEA 

deeper access to nuclear programs.

 

The institute's history calls for such an investigation, the IAEA 

official said. ``It needs a more extensive inspection'' but, he said, 

``it needs a legal instrument.''

 

Said another agency official, spokesman Mark Gwozdecky, ``We're 

concerned about the situation in any non-nuclear-weapon state and the 

possibility they have equipment or material that could be involved in 

the development of nuclear weapons.''

 

In the 1940s and 1950s, with the aid of physicists from conquered 

Germany, Sukhumi scientists developed gaseous-diffusion and gas-

centrifuge technologies, processes in which uranium isotopes are 

separated and enriched sufficiently to produce an atomic explosion.

 

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russian scientists at the 

institute withdrew to Russia, Georgia became independent, and ethnic 

Abkhazians rebelled. The last 200 scientists and technicians fled to 

Tbilisi in 1993.

 

Isolated Abkhazia, in an uneasy truce with Georgia, has no 

international recognition and access from Georgia is severely 

restricted.

 

For Iraq and other would-be nuclear powers, enrichment technology is 

a major stumbling block. Even 40-year-old centrifuges or other 

enrichment equipment, if available at Sukhumi, could benefit a state 

or group with nuclear ambitions, said physicist David Albright of 

Washington's Institute for Science and International Policy.

 

``Anything helps. They certainly would look for what they could learn 

there at Sukhumi. Proliferation has always happened through slow 

acquisition of equipment to build a program,'' said Albright, who 

helped stifle Iraq's plans as an IAEA inspector in the 1990s.

 

The Sukhumi institute eventually branched out to other fields. Its 

equipment inventory remains unknown to the IAEA, but institute staff 

may have worked on enrichment technology until the end. Ukrainian 

officials have disclosed that scientists who fled Sukhumi helped 

Ukraine develop its own centrifuge-enrichment technology in the 

1990s.

 

``The secrecy was so deep at Sukhumi. Nobody talked to each other 

about what was going on,'' said Valter Kashia, a space systems 

engineer who heads a Sukhumi institute-in-exile in Tbilisi.

 

Kashia said the secrecy might account for reports that the highly 

enriched uranium at Sukhumi amounted to more than indicated in the 

1993 inventory. ``The Russians there might have been up to other 

things.''

 

Georgian scholar Tamara Pataraia, a nonproliferation specialist, said 

scientists in Tbilisi don't know what technology may have been stored 

at Sukhumi's top-secret sites. ``It seems very urgent to get a clear 

answer. Is equipment still at Sukhumi or not?''

 

In 1998, the U.S. Energy Department and other agencies organized the 

transfer of 4.3 kilograms (9.5 pounds) of enriched uranium from 

Georgia's other nuclear institute, in Tbilisi, to safekeeping in 

Scotland. But an Energy Department spokeswoman, Lisa Cutler, citing 

Abkhazia's inaccessibility, said last week she was unaware of any 

U.S. plans relating to Sukhumi.

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



Japanese Gov't affiliate provided info on nuke plant opponents



TOKYO, June 27 (Kyodo) -  An affiliate of the Natural Resources and 

Energy Agency provided local governments in 15 prefectures across 

Japan hosting nuclear power plants with annual lists of clients who 

opposed the plants or who turned down government benefits linked to 

them, sources close to the case said Thursday.

 

The sources said the Center for Development of Power Supply Regions 

received the lists from utilities firms, including Chugoku Electric 

Power Co. and Tokyo Electric Power Co.

 

Chugoku Electric Power's fiscal 2001 list identified 10 cases, and 

said of one that the client was not against receiving such benefits 

due to the client's political orientation over nuclear power plants, 

the sources said.

 

The sources said Tokyo Electric Power's fiscal 2000 list on Ibaraki 

Prefecture identified two clients who refused to accept government 

benefits while Miyagi Prefecture received from Tohoku Electric Power 

Co. a list of reasons given by a client for refusing to accept such 

benefits, the sources said.

 

The benefits are state subsidies paid to local governments hosting 

nuclear power plants and come in the form of discounts on utilities 

fees for households and companies.

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



Chernobyl suspected in rise in UK child deaths



LONDON, June 26 (Reuters) - Deaths and deformities caused by the 

fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the world worst civil 

nuclear accident, may have extended beyond the Ukraine, Russia and 

Belarus, British scientists suspect.

 

They said the cloud of radioactivity it sent over Europe could have 

increased infant deaths and birth defects in England and Wales in the 

three years afterwards.

 

John Urquhart, a researcher based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in north 

eastern England, estimated that at least 200 more children than 

normal died during those three years.

 

"We've probably been too complacent about the health effects from 

Chernobyl in western Europe," he told New Scientist magazine on 

Wednesday.

 

Urquhart calculated that in England and Wales the fallout may have 

caused more than 600 extra cases of Down's Syndrome, spina bifida, 

cleft palate and other abnormalities in these years.

 

After studying deaths and birth defects in children born in 15 health 

regions of England and Wales between 1983 and 1992, he found that 

most of the increased deaths and deformities occurred in just five 

regions, spread throughout the two countries.

 

"Death rates fell every year except for 1986, with the extra deaths 

mostly occurring in four of the five same regions. The odds that 

the overlap occurred by chance are 1 in 200," according to the 

magazine.

 

Urquhart presented his findings to a conference on low-level 

radiation in Dublin.

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



Nuclear Plant Owners Delayed Upgrade



TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) - Operators of a nuclear power plant waited more 

than a decade to add larger inspection holes in a metal 

platform that could have revealed corrosion that nearly ate through a 

6-inch steel cap over the reactor.

 

Bigger inspection holes should have been added years ago, said 

Richard Wilkins, a spokesman for FirstEnergy Corp., which owns 

the Davis-Besse plant in Oak Harbor. But he said that the poor view 

for inspections alone did not lead to the corrosion problems.

 

A Davis-Besse worker discovered boric acid deposits on the reactor 

head in March 1990 and asked that plant engineers install 

bigger inspection holes to get a better look at the deposits, 

according to company documents reviewed by The (Toledo) Blade.

 

FirstEnergy officials discussed the idea but didn't follow through 

until February, when the plant was shut down for refueling, Wilkins 

said Wednesday.

 

In March, inspectors discovered that acid had nearly eaten through 

the 6-inch thick steel cap that covers the reactor vessel on the 

plant near Toledo along Lake Erie.

 

It was the most extensive corrosion ever found on a U.S. nuclear 

reactor and led to a nationwide review of all other similar plants. 

Reviews found no damage in other plants but revealed a need for more 

inspections.

 

FirstEnergy is now investigating why it was delayed, Wilkins said.

 

At one point, Davis-Besse operators cited a $250,000 price tag as a 

factor for the delay, The Blade reported Wednesday. But 

Wilkins said, ``It wasn't simply a money issue.''

 

Davis-Besse has added 10 new inspections holes to a metal service 

platform that are a foot wide and allow a better view of the 

reactor.

 

Views from the original 18 inspection ports were blocked by 69 

control rod nozzles that protrude from the reactor head and a layer 

of 

metal insulation that shields the platform from the reactor's 600-

degree temperature.

 

Had the plant had bigger inspection holes previously, workers could 

have more closely inspected the reactor, however that would not 

have guaranteed that they would have found the corroded spots, 

Stephen Sands, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission project manager 

for Davis-Besse, said Wednesday.

 

FirstEnergy plans to replace the reactor head with a $55 million 

unused head from Consumer Energy's never-completed nuclear 

plant in Midland, Mich. The company plans to reopen the plant at the 

end of the year.

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



First Nuclear Waste Transportation Accident Analysis for 20 Major 

U.S. Cities To be Released Thursday



WASHINGTON, June 26 /PRNewswire/ -- The Department of Energy (DOE) 

says transportation accidents are inevitable if the nation 

ships thousands of shipments of lethal radioactive waste through many 

of America's largest cities en route to the proposed nuclear 

dump at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.  Though it has modeled the results of 

a generic accident releasing radiation, the government has 

not provided people along routes with health impact information about 

potential releases in their communities.

 

On Thursday, June 27, the Environmental Working Group will publish, 

"What If?  An Analysis of Potential Nuclear Waste Accidents 

for 20 Major US Cities."

 

Drawing on the federal government's data and its premier 

transportation accident models, this Web-based report will assess 

radiation exposure zones and health impacts arising from a moderately 

severe transportation accident in 20 U.S. cities.  In the 

models, such an accident cracks the seal of a container carrying high-

level radioactive waste of the type proposed for shipment to 

the Nevada repository.

 

EWG will present detailed maps and accident assessments for each 

metro area at the briefing and unveil the new Web-based 

findings, which will be available to the public at 

http://www.mapscience.org immediately after the briefing is finished.

 

The "What If?" briefing will be held: 

 

Thursday, June 27/ 12:30 p.m.

 

National Press Club/Lisagor Room 

 

The cities featured in the report are: 

 

Atlanta           Milwaukee  

 

Charlotte         Minneapolis  

 

Chicago           New Haven  

 

Denver            Phoenix  

 

Des Moines        Pittsburgh  

 

Jacksonville      Portsmouth, NH  

 

Kansas City       St. Louis  

 

Lansing           Salt Lake City  

 

Los Angeles       Washington, DC  

 

Miami             Wilmington, DE 





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

Sandy Perle

Director, Technical

ICN Worldwide Dosimetry Service

ICN Plaza, 3300 Hyland Avenue

Costa Mesa, CA 92626



Tel:(714) 545-0100 / (800) 548-5100  Extension 2306

Fax:(714) 668-3149



E-Mail: sandyfl@earthlink.net

E-Mail: sperle@icnpharm.com



Personal Website: http://sandy-travels.com

ICN Worldwide Dosimetry Website: http://www.dosimetry.com



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