Belgium seeks more info on US plutonium request

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

Index:



Belgium seeks more info on US plutonium request

Toshiba to step up reactor-dismantling business

UK nuclear waste cleanup costs rise 2 bln stg

In New Jersey, Nuclear Fears Have to Stand in Line

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



Belgium seeks more info on US plutonium request



BRUSSELS, Belgium (Reuters) - Belgium said Tuesday it needed more 

information before deciding whether it would accede to a U.S. request 

to recycle weapons-grade plutonium from an arms reduction deal with 

Russia.



Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt said his cabinet would not debate the 

U.S. request before additional information is made available.



"The prime minister wishes to evaluate how much this recycling 

project will contribute to helping to speed up nuclear disarmament," 

Verhofstadt's office said in a statement.



The Bush administration has asked Belgium to recycle 176 pounds of 

the highly fissile material into low-grade nuclear fuel under a deal 

with Russia to reduce each side's deployed strategic nuclear warheads 

to between 1,700 and 2,200 from about 6,000.



Belgium and France have the technology to convert nuclear weapons-

grade material into MOX fuel that can be used in civilian nuclear 

power plants, while the United States does not.



A U.S. embassy spokesman said last week that Washington planned to 

license the technology to build two similar plants in the United 

States, but it first wanted to ship a small amount of plutonium to 

Belgium or France to simulate the procedure in a test facility.



The Greens, the junior group in Verhofstadt's three-party coalition, 

has opposed the U.S. plan on grounds that it could pose risks to the 

environment.

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



Toshiba to step up reactor-dismantling business



TOKYO, July 17 (Kyodo) - Toshiba Corp. will organize a team of about 

20 nuclear plant experts to beef up the company's reactor-

decommissioning business, company officials said Wednesday.



The high-tech firm decided to boost the operations as some reactor 

operators are moving to shut down and dismantle their facilities, the 

officials said.



Toshiba may also consider forming a business alliance with European 

firms with advanced reactor-dismantling technologies, they said.



Japan Atomic Power Co. is to dismantle the No. 1 reactor at its 

Tsuruga nuclear power plant in Tsuruga, Fukui Prefecture, while the 

Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute will decommission the Fugen 

advanced thermal reactor, also located in Tsuruga.



The dismantling work is expected to begin on a full scale after 2010.



By then, Toshiba's nuclear team will have worked to improve 

technologies required in dismantling and decommissioning reactors, 

such as cutting, decontaminating and radiation monitoring, the 

officials said.



The team will also calculate decommissioning costs by simulation so 

that Toshiba can show them to electric power companies and other 

reactor operators, they said.

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



UK nuclear waste cleanup costs rise 2 bln stg



LONDON, July 16 (Reuters) - British state nuclear fuel firm BNFL, 

which is being readied for possible privatisation, revised its 

forecasts for dealing with nuclear waste on Tuesday, adding two 

billion pounds ($3 billion) to estimated cleanup costs.



BNFL said in its annual results it would take 2.35 billion pounds in 

exceptional charges -- ballooning its loss for the year to March 2002 

to 2.328 billion pounds from 66 million a year earlier.



The charges include a 1.94 billion hit to take account of the 

assumption that it will have to store rather than recycle nuclear 

waste in future -- adding to Britain's nuclear legacy bill for the 

next 100 years.



The charge will be added to the 45-plus billion pounds of 

undiscounted liabilities already facing the Liabilities Management 

Authority (LMA) -- a body being set up by the government to manage 

commercial and military liabilities.



The move is seen as a precursor to a possible privatisation of BNFL. 

Chairman Hugh Collum said on Tuesday that the government would be 

reviewing the possibility of privatising the industry in 2004-2005.



BNFL is the rump of Britain's state nuclear power industry, 

comprising its fuel and waste operations and its older nuclear 

reactors. The rest of it was privatised in 1996 as British Energy 

Plc.



GREEN ROW



BNFL is embroiled in an international row with environmentalist 

groups over a ship that is currently carrying rejected nuclear fuel 

back from Japan to Britain. Greenpeace wanted to stop the ship from 

sailing on the grounds that it posed a security and environmental 

threat, but BNFL has said it is safe.



The operation is costing BNFL 114 million pounds.



The Irish government, which has long campaigned for the closure of 

BNFL's Sellafield fuel reprocessing plant in northwest England, said 

the company's massive loss showed the economics of the operation did 

not add up.



"The Irish government has, on a number of occasions, articulated its 

views on the lack of economic justification for the operation of the 

Sellafield MOX plant. There is no justification... for spent fuel 

reprocessing activities," said Irish environment minister Martin 

Cullen.



Sellafield, 110 miles (180 km) across the Irish Sea on England's 

northwest coast, has been a long-running source of friction between 

the two countries.



Ireland says the plant pollutes the Irish Sea and presents a serious 

risk from an accident or attack, with fears heightened by the 

September 11 attacks in the United States.

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



In New Jersey, Nuclear Fears Have to Stand in Line



ANCHESTER TOWNSHIP, N.J., July 16 (NY Times) — The talk was of 

terrorists and the possibility that they might strike 15 miles from 

here at Oyster Creek, the nation's oldest operating commercial 

nuclear plant. But as she stood in line last weekend to collect 

federally issued potassium iodide tablets — a precaution in case of 

radiation exposure — Marcie Ekelmann said that in the event of an 

attack, she would most likely opt for something less medicinal, but 

perhaps more soothing.

 

"Chances are it will be too late," she said, "so I'll just grab a six-

pack and head out onto my boat."



Sunglasses perched atop her head, Ms. Ekelmann, 36, said she was 

collecting her handful of foil-covered pills mostly to calm the fears 

of her three children. But for herself, she waved away talk of any 

barleyfree precautions: "I think there is a lot of worrying over 

nothing."



She might well have been speaking for much of the rest of New Jersey. 

Residents of other communities in the New York region that are near 

nuclear reactors — the Indian Point plant in New York and Millstone 

in Connecticut — have been moved to anxiety and activism by fears of 

terrorism. But the response has been noticeably muted in New Jersey, 

which has four nuclear plants.



Distributions of potassium iodide tablets here have drawn a small 

fraction of the takers they have attracted elsewhere. The public 

debate over other steps that might be taken to prevent nuclear 

terrorism has been more subdued. And people on all sides of the 

debate say there is a perceptible nonchalance about potential dangers 

here that may be born of such factors as income levels, the chemical 

hazards common in New Jersey (insert your own toxic waste joke here) 

and this state's somewhat cynical view of itself.



"Bad things are part of being in New Jersey," said Frank Kasmer, 43, 

a maintenance worker in an Atlantic City casino who lives about a 

mile from the Oyster Creek plant. "It's a part of being everywhere. 

People in New Jersey have that type of attitude — you have to take 

the good with the bad."



New Jerseyans are well acquainted with the painful toll of terrorism: 

nearly one of every five people killed in the World Trade Center 

attack was from the state. There is a growing chorus of residents 

concerned about a possible nuclear disaster, and state emergency 

officials remain at their highest state of alert.



Still, the vague threat of calamity has left many here unfazed.



"Perception is always worse than reality," said Dr. Barry E. Truchil, 

a sociologist at Rider University. "If you look at what New Jersey 

has faced — we've had anthrax scares, chemical dumping in Toms River, 

the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, we have Superfund sites — 

New Jersey has a lot of reality that they can use to put this risk 

into context.



"It may be a false sense of security, but it also qualifies why 

people may not react in a loud, scary way."



Their silence may also stem from the location of the state's 

reactors, in small towns in South Jersey, far from densely settled 

places like Westchester County, N.Y., where Indian Point sits. The 

Oyster Creek reactor is in Forked River, about 80 miles south of 

Manhattan on the Jersey Shore. The Hope Creek and the Salem 1 and 2 

generators are clustered in Lower Alloways Creek Township, in the 

southwesternmost corner of the state. 



"This is a small town, and I don't think they've had anything happen 

here yet," Dolores Aviles, a waitress at the Forked River Diner, said 

of the threat of terrorism. "You're closer to it in New York, so 

you're more likely to be sensitive to it."



Consider the turnout for potassium iodide pills on Saturday at 

Manchester High School, about 15 miles north of Oyster Creek — one of 

five giveaways planned statewide during the next few weeks.



The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has offered the pills to everyone 

who lives or works within 10 miles of any of the nation's 74 nuclear 

power plants, suggesting that the tablets be ingested in the event of 

radiation exposure. Officials say the pills prevent cancer-causing 

radioactive iodines from invading the thyroid.



At Manchester High, residents took home only about 4,000 of the 

100,000 doses that Ocean County emergency officials had on 

hand. Three times as many pills were distributed last month during a 

similar handout in Rockland County, N.Y., across the Hudson 

River from Indian Point in Buchanan. Rockland has about half the 

population of Ocean County, but had stocked almost twice as 

many pills.



Likewise, there are more potassium iodide pills than people in 

Westport, Conn., where town officials last month bought 50,000 

doses — a figure roughly twice the town's population. And Westport is 

not even within the 10-mile radius in which the pills are 

recommended; Indian Point is more than 40 miles away, and the 

Millstone plant is more than 60 miles away, in Waterford, Conn.



Dr. Truchil wonders if the difference in the public response can also 

be traced to economics. The median income levels in Rockland 

and Westchester Counties are at least $15,000 more than those in 

Ocean and Salem Counties.



"The higher up the social plane you are," he said, "the more likely 

you are to have the wherewithal to deal with governments, the 

more likely you are to know how to work the system," he said.



In smaller, more remote communities, a power plant can also be a 

major economic engine, a provider of jobs and money. That is the 

case in Salem County, where an antinuclear group, the Unplug Salem 

Campaign, has been urging since September that all four New 

Jersey plants be closed because of the terrorist threat and other 

potential hazards. 



A similar campaign to close Indian Point has drawn hundreds of 

supporters to rallies. But the response in South Jersey has been 

disappointing, said Norm Cohen, a coordinator of the campaign.



"Salem County is unfortunately an econmically depressed area," he 

said. "People are looking at day-to-day realities like putting food 

on the table."



The group has actually been more successful in marshalling opposition 

the farther it gets from the Salem plant. But it is still difficult 

to mobilize New Jerseyans over issues of plant safety, advocates say.



"They don't seem concerned, but I think that people certainly need to 

be concerned," said Joe Deckelnick, an organizer with the 

New Jersey Environmental Federation, which has tried to focus public 

attention on ecological threats from the plants.



He attributes much of the indifference he has seen to a belief that 

safeguards will prevent accidents like the one in 1986 at the 

Chernobyl plant in the former Soviet Union. But he said Sept. 11 had 

shown the dangers of such assumptions. 



"We're not talking about people who think the way we think," he said 

of terrorists. "Certainly, if they could fly a plane into the trade 

towers, they can fly a plane into a nuclear plant."



Even if that were to occur, experts in nuclear power say that a large-

scale catastrophe is unlikely.



"The chances are just very, very small that you'll get a large 

leaking of radiation," said Raymond W. Durante, a Washington 

consultant on nuclear power issues.



Mr. Durante, a former official with Westinghouse Electric, a 

manufacturer of nuclear plants, said the buildings designed to 

contain 

nuclear reactors in the United States were stronger than those in 

other countries. That, he said, would prevent major radiation 

exposure.



He conceded that in an extreme case like Sept. 11 — heavily fueled 

jets striking power plants at sensitive points and starting hard-to-

extinguish fires — "we'd see a lot of serious damage, a lot of 

problems related to nonnuclear equipment."



But even then, at least four layers of protective coverings around 

the radioactive core must be destroyed before there is any serious 

danger of extreme radiation exposure, Mr. Durante said.



Emergency management officials have ordered extra security measures 

outside the state's nuclear plants since September. 

National Guard posts and loaded dump trucks in front of entrances at 

Oyster Creek are just some of the visible signs of the security 

changes. "Everything that can be done is being done," said Capt. 

William A. Nally, deputy coordinator of emergency management 

for Lacey Township, which includes Forked River.



Many people here seem content to leave the worrying to someone else. 

Even those who stopped by Manchester High for potassium iodide pills 

seemed to do so more out of curiosity than concern.



Carole Lake, 55, a software saleswoman from Bayville, a town that was 

evacuated last month because of a fire in the pinelands that ravaged 

1,300 acres, said the blaze was a reminder that some preparations can 

be pointless. "I have plenty of bottled water and an evacuation 

route, if necessary," she said, "but it'll be useless if we all get 

vaporized anyway."



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

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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