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Two men held in alleged extortion of Arizona nuclear plant



Index:



Two men held in alleged extortion of Arizona nuclear plant 

2 Japanese firms to join in building new reactor in S. Africa

Protesters sail to meet plutonium ship

Industry Tackles Packaging of Nuclear Waste for Yucca

Nuclear Waste Could Soon Pass Through Northeast Ohio

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



Two men held in alleged extortion of Arizona nuclear plant 



FONTANA, California  JUL 16 (AP) - Two men have been arrested for 

allegedly trying to extort dlrs 92,000 from an Arizona nuclear plant 

in return for the power plant parts for which they were sent to 

determine the cost of repairs, authorities said.



Kevin Mitlo, 20, and Tony Mitchell, 31, were arrested Friday and 

booked for investigation of extortion, grand theft and conspiracy, 

and were jailed on dlrs 2 million bail each, authorities said Monday.



The reactor cooling parts — worth dlrs 3 million — were recovered at 

a truck stop where they had arranged to meet plant officials. The 

parts weigh 45,000 pounds (20,250 kilograms) and required a 45-foot-

long (13.5-meter-long) flatbed trailer for hauling.



The Palo Verde Nuclear Power Generating Station, located 55 miles (88 

kilometers) west of Phoenix, supplies power to 4 million customers in 

Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and California.



Jim McDonald, a spokesman for Arizona Public Service, which operates 

the plant, refused to comment.



Steve Brownell, a local detective, said each of Palo Verde's nuclear 

reactors has two enormous water pumps for cooling, and their parts 

routinely require refurbishing.

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



2 Japanese firms to join in building new reactor in S. Africa



TOKYO, July 16 (Kyodo) - Two Japanese companies will take part in the 

construction in South Africa of a new type of nuclear reactor called 

the pebble bed modular reactor, officials of the two companies said 

Tuesday.



The new reactor has generated high expectations with regard to safety 

and economic considerations.



Nuclear Fuel Industries Ltd. will construct a factory to build 

special fuel -- spheres of graphite containing coated uranium -- for 

the reactor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. will be in charge of 

developing helium-powered turbine generators, the company officials 

said.



PBMR (Pty) Ltd., an international consortium including Eskom, South 

Africa's state-owned electricity utility, and British Nuclear Fuels 

PLC (BNFL), is planning the construction of the reactor.



The pebble bed modular reactor is a new type of high-temperature 

helium gas-cooled nuclear reactor, according to Eskom.



It is designed to produce 120,000 kilowatts, and more than one pebble 

bed modular reactor can be located in a single facility to create an 

energy park, according to officials close to the project.



A PBMR energy park can house a maximum of 10 modules sharing a common 

control center, allowing sequential construction of modules to match 

users' growth requirements, according to Eskom.



Depending on the building requirements, the construction cost per 1 

kilowatt of energy output would be around 100,000-150,000 yen, about 

half of that for light-water reactors, according to officials close 

to the project.



As the pebble bed modular reactors are small, the initial investment 

is relatively low and fuel can be changed while the reactors are 

being operated. They can also be run for six straight years, 

according to the officials.



South Africa plans to begin operating a pebble bed modular reactor in 

2007 and plans to construct up to 10 reactors in the future, they 

said.



The reactors may also be built in the United States, they added.

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



Protesters sail to meet plutonium ship



Australian Broadcasting Company JUL 16 - A protest flotilla is making 

its way between Lord Howe and Norfolk  Islands to greet a ship 

carrying plutonium to the United Kingdom.



The ship, which recently set sail from Japan and was last spotted by  

Greenpeace near Micronesia, is now believed to be near Vanuatu.



Greenpeace anti-nuclear campaigner Bunny McDiarmid says 11 boats are 

now  making their way to Lord Howe Island.



"It's the point which we think they will come through because they 

will  want to avoid going into the EEZ (exclusive economic zone) of 

Australia  and New Zealand," he said.



"That's where all the boats will gather to send a very strong message 

of  protest to the shippers which are the UK and Japan that we don't 

want to  see these shipment on our waters again." 



The ship is expected to pass close to Tasmania next Tuesday or  

Wednesday.

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



Industry Tackles Packaging of Nuclear Waste for Yucca



NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. JUL 16 (NY Times)— While lawyers, senators and 

even an occasional geologist argue over whether Yucca Mountain in 

Nevada is a suitable place to store nuclear waste, scientific 

entrepreneurs around the country are focusing on a finer detail: how 

the waste can be packaged to isolate it for 10,000 years.



The Senate's approval of Yucca on July 9 makes the question urgent.



So far, the Energy Department, which is in charge of Yucca, has 

chosen conventional materials; its current plan is for a cask made of 

steel alloyed with chrome, molybdenum and nickel, called alloy 22, 

and a titanium tent above that. The department says it needs 10,000 

packages, and plans to spend about $500,000 per package, so the 

financial incentives are significant.



But some scientists doubt that anything metal can sit for thousands 

of years without rusting in rock that has rainwater percolating 

through it. A few are offering alternatives, including recently 

developed ceramics and polymers.



In a laboratory here at Rutgers University, a start-up company, 

Nucon, is showing off a scale model made of an odd new ceramic. 

Ceramics are not known for strength, but this has the same 

compression strength as steel, Nucon says. Ceramics can be used as 

thermal insulators, but this one is cold to the touch, a sign that it 

conducts heat readily. This is desirable in a material that must 

isolate heat-generating waste that cannot be allowed to heat itself 

to the melting point. 



This ceramic has these unusual traits because it has exceptional 

density and has been painstakingly baked in a process called 

cintering.



Cintering gives it another odd quality. Tapped with a metal pen, the 

model rings like a bell. The sound brings a smile to the face of the 

company's chief engineer, Adam Khizh, who came to this country from 

Russia nine years ago. "Perfect cintering," Dr. Khizh said. "The 

sound is very clear."



Nucon's material is a spinel, or magnesium-aluminum oxide. Oxidation 

(or, in plain English, rust) is the big worry at Yucca. But oxides do 

not rust; they have already oxidized. 



So far, no one has cast ceramic containers large enough to hold 

bundles of spent nuclear fuel rods. Nucon believes it can do this, 

although the model it displays is about the size of half a large 

watermelon.



Dr. Jared L. Cohon, chairman of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review 

Board, a panel established by Congress, said that early plans for 

Yucca had included a ceramic covering over the metal, and that this 

was dropped because engineers doubted that the covering could 

withstand rough handling. But a ceramic that could would be 

appealing, he said, because it would resist corrosion far better than 

metal.



Some ceramics experts are dubious. Dr. Delbert E. Day, a professor of 

ceramic engineering at the University of Missouri at Rolla, and a 

former president of the American Ceramic Society, said it might be 

simpler to protect the steel by encasing it in concrete.



Paige R. Russell, the Yucca project's technical lead for waste 

package design and testing, said that no final packaging decisions 

had been made and that the design of the containers so far was 

"conceptual." But for now, she said, the Energy Department has come 

down in favor of a material it knows better: metal. She said the 

project would probably choose proven rather than experimental 

materials.



"We have to understand the performance of the material over time," 

she said. "We have to understand the performance of the material in 

different environments, how to manufacture and fabricate the 

material. There are a lot of positives to using materials that are 

already known and have been used in industry."



Ceramics are used to stabilize high-level nuclear waste, but only as 

a matrix material, not as a wrapper. 



For low-level wastes — as opposed to the high-level spent fuel that 

the department wants to bury at Yucca — the Energy Department is 

trying a new material, a polymer foam that its manufacturer believes 

will bind up radioactive materials indefinitely. But the big 

challenge is spent reactor fuel, which will remain intensely 

radioactive for centuries and has many components that policy makers 

want to keep out of underground water for millenniums.



The Energy Department's early plan was for ordinary steel, but it 

moved up to alloy 22 for better corrosion resistance. But alloy 22 is 

harder to weld than ordinary carbon steel, and welds, experts say, 

are where failure most often occurs.



The department's plan is for a "drip shield" of titanium over each 

container. The containers would be 6 to 7 feet in diameter, and about 

16 feet long, to be parked in a line, filling the tunnel like subway 

cars.



Nucon sees instead giant, 50-ton elongated watermelons made of 

ceramic, 18 feet long, with a wall 3 inches thick and an inner 

diameter of 5 1/2 feet. The ovoid shape is a way to reduce the risk 

of cracking the ceramic if it bangs into something; with rounded 

ends, the force of impact would be better distributed around the 

container.



Nucon believes it has made an important advance in being able to cast 

thick ceramics. Making a thick ceramic is a challenge because 

cintering requires even heating and cooling, increasingly difficult 

in thick structures. Nucon's solution is a combination of 

conventional thermal heating, plus microwave energy, which heats 

evenly. It recently won a patent on a microwave device for a second 

purpose: marrying together the two halves of the watermelon.



"Most of the leakage in metal containers begins at the point of 

sealing," Matthew O'Connor, the company president, said. But using 

microwave energy to fuse the pieces together would leave no seam, he 

said. The ceramic includes a "susceptor" that captures the microwave 

energy and converts it to heat. A proprietary technology allows 

application of the microwave energy without heating the wastes 

inside.



Another important characteristic is density, which is about 3.5 grams 

per cubic centimeter, about half that of steel but far heavier than 

most ceramics. With high density, or few voids, strength is improved, 

and so is thermal conductivity, which is essential to prevent the 

wastes from stewing themselves to the melting point.



Nucon raised density by using an optimized mix of grain sizes, from 6 

or 7 microns (millionths of a meter) in diameter down to 30 

nanometers (billionths of a meter). 



The spinel begins as a material that looks like talcum powder and is 

broken down further. The micron-range particles are made by 

tossing the material in a ball mill, with balls the size of 

marshmallows; the smaller particles are broken up by balls the size 

of BB's.



The nanometer-size particles are highly reactive, meaning that they 

glue together well. Using a radiation laboratory at Brookhaven 

National Laboratory, Nucon exposed a sample to one billion rads of 

gamma rays, 10 times as great as the exposure the Nuclear 

Regulatory Commission requires of a cask.



The company has yet to demonstrate its technology at full size and 

has not attracted much interest from the Energy Department, 

but others find the idea of a ceramic appealing.



Dr. Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and 

Environmental Research and an outside critic of the department who 

has studied its waste problems for 20 years, said, "Metal is a bad 

thing to put into Yucca Mountain if you want to say anything with 

confidence." Using a ceramic could increase confidence in the 

containers' durability, he said.



The department has taken a brief look at another technology, a foam 

called Ekor, which was sprayed over reactor rubble at 

Chernobyl. It was used on one mound about six feet long, three feet 

high and three feet wide that was giving off 1,000 rads per hour 

— in other words, a fatal dose in about half an hour — and appears 

unchanged after two years, said Paul C. Childress, vice 

president and general manager of the nuclear and environmental 

division of the company that makes the product, Eurotech. The 

Energy Department is not persuaded, so far, that it will last for the 

hundreds or thousands of years that will be required.



Mr. Childress, who formerly worked for the Energy Department, said: 

"Rainwater would just simply roll off. It completely repels water, 

whether it's acidic or alkaline. It's almost impervious to chemical 

attack."



But it is intended to encapsulate small chunks of waste, not hold 

large intact structures. It could be an alternative for another form 

of 

waste now planned for Yucca, sludges in tanks at the Hanford and 

Savannah River nuclear reservations. Those materials, under 

current plans, will be mixed into glass to stabilize them.



Ekor may also be used to coat the drip shields, he said. That will 

allow the shields to be made of something less costly than 

titanium, perhaps aluminum, Mr. Childress said.



Ms. Russell said, however, that the department was wary of polymers, 

because they contain materials that feed microbes, which 

can induce corrosion. So thus far at least, Yucca is planning an all-

metal solution. 

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



Nuclear Waste Could Soon Pass Through Northeast Ohio



Cleveland, OH (local news) JUL 15 - Just last week, Congress approved 

a plan to haul radioactive nuclear waste by trains and trucks 

to a site in Nevada. 



NewsChannel5's Paul Kiska reported that the trains and trucks might 

be moving through your back yard. 



A freight train derailed Monday in Medina County, but fortunately 

there were no hazardous materials on it. Near Milwaukee, another 

freight train crashed and caught fire. 



Train accidents are not uncommon, and that's exactly what worries 

Chris Trepal of the Earth Day Coalition. 



"It's just a colossal bad idea to put it on a truck or rail cars," he 

said. 



Trepal lives about 100 yards away from one of 27 train crossings in 

Lakewood. 



Because of the government plan to haul nuclear waste by truck and by 

train from plants on the east coast to a site in Nevada, 

specially designed trucks would transport nuclear waste down 

Interstate 90, the Ohio Turnpike and by trains on tracks that run 

right 

through northeast Ohio. 



Opponents said that 365 trains carrying nuclear waste would pass 

through the area every year -- one nuclear train every day. 



"I'm afraid there could be an accident," Trepal said. 



Lakewood was the first Ohio city to pass a resolution saying it 

doesn't want to catch nuclear waste moving through its back yards. 



"There's no assurance in the wake of Sept. 11 to what would happen in 

a terrorist attack sabotage or an accident," said Denis Dunn 

of the Lakewood City Council. 



The Nuclear Regulatory Commission must approve the plan to transport 

nuclear waste across the country. Trepal said that protests are 

planned to urge the NRC to derail the idea. 



"I don't want to be chased away from my home by a very scary 

situation," he said. 



To find out where in your city nuclear waste could pass through, 

visit the Environmental Working Group's Web site. At the site, click 

on the mapscience.org link and then put in your zip code for a 

nuclear waste route map. 

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

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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