Nuclear Dump Disrupts a Peaceful Taiwan Island

["Sandy Perle" <sandyfl@EARTHLINK.NET>]

Index:



Nuclear Dump Disrupts a Peaceful Taiwan Island

Military stocking up on anti-radiation pills

Arctic archipelago might not be the best place - nuclear waste

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



Nuclear Dump Disrupts a Peaceful Taiwan Island



AN YU, Taiwan, June 27 (NY Times) - Steep volcanic slopes carpeted 

with tropical vegetation vault out of crystalline waters and 

magnificent coral reefs here, while a peaceful tribe of aborigines, 

largely insulated from the outside world until the early 1970's, 

tries to cling to ancient ways. 



This island seems like a tropical paradise except for one problem: it 

is also home to one of the world's most troubled nuclear waste dumps. 

Up to 20,000 barrels of radioactive debris need to be fixed because 

chemical reactions inside are cracking the concrete with which the 

waste was mixed, the site's director says. The barrels are in seaside 

concrete trenches on the most windswept tip of this typhoon- and 

earthquake-prone island, at the base of a 1,500-foot-high bluff prone 

to rockslides. 

 

After President Chen Shui-bian recently said that Taiwan's government 

would be unable to keep a promise made 12 years ago to remove the 

dump by the end of this year, most of the island's 3,000 people, who 

belong to the Tao tribe, descended from Polynesian explorers, marched 

to the site. Some overran the dump and occupied it overnight. 



Local leaders threaten that unless action is taken soon, they may 

resort to more drastic action. 



"We will burn or dig out the waste and throw it into the ocean,'' 

said the Rev. Syamen Nga Rai, general secretary of the 25-member 

tribal committee that is negotiating with the government. "It will be 

in the whole world, because the ocean moves." 



Chen Chien-nien, the government's minister for indigenous peoples, 

who make up 1.7 percent of Taiwan's population, said the Tao were 

right to be upset. "If the residents were Chinese or Taiwanese in the 

beginning, they probably would not have built the dump there," he 

said. 



But Mr. Chen, an aborigine himself from the Puyuma tribe who is not 

related to the president, said the Tao should trust President Chen's 

recent promises to find a new home for the dump. "The Tao thought 

that once you say that, you have to do it immediately," he said. 

"Even if you want to work on it, removing the dump site takes six or 

seven years." 



Taipei has set up two task forces in the last month, one to step up 

the search for a new home for the waste and the other to draft an 

economic development plan for Lan Yu, one of the poorest places in 

Taiwan. 



The government's favorite choice, burying the waste under the seabed 

next to Wu Chiu Islet in the Taiwan Strait, still requires 

environmental studies. The plan is also likely to face objections 

from China, since the islet is just 16 miles from its coast. 



The dump here has only a 10-person technical staff, none of them 

aborigines, and a dozen local security guards and janitors. There is 

a six-foot-high stone wall around the dump. 



Wu Ruey-yau, the planning director at the government's Atomic Energy 

Council, said it would be difficult for anyone to break in and remove 

any radioactive waste. Each panel of the trenches' lids weighs 12 

tons, and the only cranes on the island are at the site. 



Under Japanese colonial rule through the end of World War II, this 

island was closed to outsiders and treated as a "living laboratory" 

for Japanese anthropologists to observe the Tao people. Tribal 

members wore loincloths made from the fiber of trees and led an 

unusually peaceful life in which land was communally held, warfare 

and weaponry were unknown and all decisions were made by panels of 

village elders. Flying fish were venerated as gifts of food from the 

spiritual world. 



After World War II and the Chinese civil war, the island became a 

military outpost for Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists, who had fled the 

mainland after their defeat by the Communists. Presbyterian 

missionaries visited and converted much of the population. 



Taipei opened the island to visitors in 1969 and, in the name of 

progress, bulldozed most of the traditional, stone-walled homes over 

the objections of residents. The government built them three-story, 

concrete-block apartment buildings and banned the use of the Tao 

language. 



Most of the Tao have lived in the apartments ever since, although 

some older residents still live in surviving stone-walled dwellings, 

fish from handmade canoes and wear loincloths. Their language is no 

longer banned, but nearly all school instruction is in Chinese. 



Oil price shocks in the 1970's prompted the government to build three 

nuclear power plants on the main island of Taiwan. 



Mr. Wu, of the Atomic Energy Council, said Lan Yu residents were not 

told that the construction project at the southeastern tip of their 

island, where two powerful sea currents meet and create the island's 

richest fishing ground, was actually a nuclear waste dump. 



Construction of the dump was finished in 1982. Workers at nuclear 

reactors on the main island of Taiwan began mixing radioactive waste 

with concrete, sealing it in 55-gallon steel drums and shipping it 

here for storage in the 23 reinforced-concrete trenches. But until 

1993, the drums were made of inexpensive steel that was not treated 

to prevent corrosion, and many of these barrels are now rusting, Mr. 

Wu said. 



Incomplete records were kept of what was in the early drums. Only low-

level waste is supposed to be inside, but it is not clear what kind. 

Workers will begin removing drums from the trenches later this year 

and drill holes in them in an effort to determine the contents. 



Low-quality cement was mixed with the radioactive waste in many of 

the early barrels, and is now expanding and cracking the steel 

barrels, said Paul T.H. Huang, the director of the site. As a result, 

the government is preparing to grind up to a fifth of the 98,000 

barrels here and remix them with fresh cement. 



Up to 10,000 or so barrels have good cement but the barrels are 

corroded, Mr. Huang said. The government plans to pack these barrels 

in larger containers and pour fresh cement around them. As many as 

30,000 drums need repainting to protect them from corrosion, while 

the remaining drums, nearly 40,000, are fine, Mr. Huang said. 



All this work is scheduled to begin here as soon as next year and 

must be finished before the waste can be moved to another storage 

facility. 



Michael Lin, the nuclear waste director at Taiwan Power, the state-

owned electric utility that has operated the site since 1990, said no 

radiation had leaked from the site. One of the semiunderground 

trenches developed a crack a decade ago, allowing water to seep in, 

but the crack was soon fixed, he said. 



Residents here are distrustful, saying there has been a spate of 

cancer cases lately and some fish have been deformed or have washed 

up dead on the beach. ``There's no way we can prove a link, but we 

are scared,'' said Syanan Gu Malin, a housewife with two young girls. 





Facing thousands of miles of open ocean, Lan Yu is battered several 

times a year by some of the most powerful storms on earth. A typhoon 

in 1984 had gusts of up to 201 miles an hour, according to data from 

a somewhat sheltered weather station in the middle of the island. 



The typhoons also dump up to a foot of rain a day, sending torrents 

down the bluff toward the site. The government has tried to divert 

the rain away from the dump with a 25-foot-wide drainage ditch, but 

this is filling with silt. 



Three months before construction began here in 1978, the island was 

hit by an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.8. Boulders tumbled down 

the bluff onto the site. Several dozen protective concrete pillars 

now stand at the base of the bluff to stop falling rocks. 



Until 1996, water contaminated by radioactive waste was distilled to 

remove as much of the contamination as possible and then dumped into 

the ocean in front of the site. Now the water is also stored. 



Large trawlers from the main island of Taiwan have recently swept the 

sea here practically clean of fish, forcing the aborigines to look 

hard for food. At low tide on a recent afternoon, several aboriginal 

women walked across the jagged volcanic rocks below the nuclear waste 

dump's sea wall, occasionally stopping and using long metal spikes to 

pry crabs from their holes. "I've been catching crabs here since I 

was a kid," said one of the women, who said she was in her early 

50's. "Before there were plenty of crabs and fish; now there are not 

so many."

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



Military stocking up on anti-radiation pills



WASHINGTON - (Reuters) - At the urging of the Bush administration, 

military commanders are quietly stocking up on anti-radiation pills 

and making plans to give them to U.S. troops should they be exposed 

to radioactive fallout from an attack or accident, according to 

documents and officials.

 

Suppliers of potassium iodide say shipments to the military have 

increased in recent months amid fears of war between nuclear-armed 

rivals India and Pakistan, and new terror threats against American 

targets including nuclear power plants.

 

One of the largest orders -- 134,400 potassium iodide tablets for 

9,600 troops -- was shipped to the U.S. Army on May 28, according to 

records obtained by Reuters.

 

If taken immediately after exposure, the tablets have been shown to 

protect the thyroid gland from diseases caused by radiation.

 

A spokesman for U.S. Central Command said it was not distributing 

potassium iodide tablets to troops in Afghanistan and other South 

Asian countries, disputing the claims of several suppliers.

 

The Pentagon would not discuss its potassium iodide policy, which was 

outlined in an internal memorandum issued two months after the Sept. 

11 attacks that killed more than 3,000 people.

 

In the memorandum, dated Nov. 19, 2001, William Winkenwerder, 

assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, directed Army, 

Navy and Air Force commanders to assess the risk to troops and to 

develop "implementation plans on the use of potassium iodide."

 

"The U.S. military overseas, their families, U.S. civilian workers 

and contractors may be at risk from hostile actions and other events 

against nuclear power plants resulting in radioactive iodine 

release," wrote Winkenwerder, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's 

chief health adviser.

 

In November and in a follow-up memo issued on Jan. 24, Winkenwerder 

told the services that they "must ensure availability of supply" of 

potassium iodide.

 

He also provided the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force with 

guidance on how the tablets should be administered. It depends on 

whether the radioactive material is inhaled or ingested and on how 

long troops are exposed to a radioactive plume.

 

Winkenwerder put the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in 

charge of reviewing the plans.

 

"We will take appropriate action when we get the plans," said Peter 

Esker, spokesman for the institute.

 

The Pentagon would not elaborate.

 

"The policy memo speaks for itself," said James Turner, a Pentagon 

spokesman. "The commanders-in-chief, in any given part of the 

world, will assess the situation and will be responsible for 

providing appropriate material to their troops."

 

Underscoring U.S. fears that terrorists will try to use weapons of 

mass destruction, Winkenwerder announced on Friday a separate 

policy to vaccinate some military personnel against anthrax and to 

stockpile the vaccine for civilian use. 	

 

POTASSIUM IODIDE ORDERS RISE

 

Between January and June of this year, the military purchased more 

than 400,400 potassium iodide tablets -- enough for at least 

28,600 troops -- through the Defense Logistics Agency and the Defense 

Supply Center in Philadelphia.

 

That amount represents an 80 percent increase over the amount of 

potassium iodide purchased by the military during the January to 

June period in 2001, according to Defense Supply Center records.

 

The tablets were supplied by two companies -- Anbex Inc. and Carter-

Wallace, which is now part of MedPointe Inc.

 

Potassium iodide orders surged after Winkenwerder's memo. In December 

and January alone, more than 303,000 tablets were 

purchased, enough for more than 21,700 troops. A 29,400-tablet order 

for 2,100 troops was filled by the Defense Supply Center on 

April 6, followed by the Army's 134,400-tablet shipment on May 28 for 

9,600 soldiers.

 

The Defense Supply Center's figures do not include orders placed 

independently by the military services and their divisions, suppliers 

say.

 

The move to supply potassium iodide to troops and their families 

comes amid heightened fears that terrorists might attack nuclear 

power plants in the United States and abroad, or try to use nuclear 

or radiological weapons.

 

But potassium iodide's usefulness is limited since it must be taken 

almost immediately after exposure and only protects against 

absorption of radioactive iodine. The tablets offer no protection 

against other radioactive isotopes, which might be released by a 

"dirty" bomb and other radioactive weapons.

 

Despite these limitations, the military is not alone in stocking up 

on potassium iodide. The Department of Health and Human 

Services has purchased 1.6 million doses and plans to buy 5 million 

to 10 million more this year, officials said.

 

The Department of Veterans' Affairs has placed two large orders so 

far this year on behalf of HHS -- the first went to Salt Lake City in 

case of an attack on the Olympic Games.

 

The second order was placed within the last month for HHS' office of 

emergency preparedness, according to Veterans' Affairs. 

Officials would not disclose its destination.

 

Stored in secret warehouses, HHS' stockpile would be tapped in the 

event of a "catastrophe, man-made or otherwise, at a nuclear 

power plant," spokesman Bill Pierce said.

 

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is also stocking up on the tablets 

as part of a program to make potassium iodide available to 

people living near nuclear power plants.

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



Russian minister says Russia likely won't build nuclear waste storage 

site on Arctic archipelago 



MOSCOW - Russia's atomic energy minister said Saturday that a remote 

Arctic archipelago might not be the best place to build a 

nuclear waste storage site.



 

Alexander Rumyantsev visited Novaya Zemlya on Thursday along with 

Russian Defense minister Sergei Ivanov, in part to assess 

plans for the storage facility.



Rumyantsev told ITAR-Tass news agency on Saturday that Russia had not 

yet made a final decision, but that a storage site will 

probably be built on the Russian mainland not on Novaya Zemlya.



"Scientific recommendations are not in favor of a burial ground on 

Novaya Zemlya," he said. "The latest findings show that the waste 

should be buried in monolithic granite without fissures. This is what 

the Finns and Swedes do."



He said the changing climate on the archipelago would make the long-

term storage of nuclear waste difficult. Rumyantsev also told 

ITAR-Tass that it would be four times more expensive to build the 

site on the archipelago than on the Russian mainland.



Three alternative sites are under consideration, he said, including a 

site in the Archangelsk region, one near Murmansk and one in 

the central part of the Kola Peninsula, ITAR-Tass reported.



Russian officials have said that the storage site would only be used 

to store spent nuclear fuel from decommissioned Northern Fleet 

submarines, not for nuclear waste from abroad.



Last summer, President Vladimir Putin ( news - web sites) signed a 

law allowing Russia to import spent nuclear fuel from other countries 

for storage and reprocessing, a measure that environmental groups say 

could turn Russia into the world's nuclear dumping ground.



***************************************************************

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



************************************************************************

You are currently subscribed to the Radsafe mailing list. To unsubscribe,

send an e-mail to Majordomo@list.vanderbilt.edu  Put the text "unsubscribe

radsafe" (no quote marks) in the body of the e-mail, with no subject line.

You can view the Radsafe archives at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/radsafe/