Gov't to End Public Nuclear Updates

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

Index:



Gov't to End Public Nuclear Updates

Philippines to convert 4 power plants to gas

Cassini Spacecraft Sees Saturn Lightning

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Gov't to End Public Nuclear Updates



WASHINGTON (AP) - Citing a need to keep information from terrorists, 

regulators said Wednesday the government will no longer reveal 

security gaps discovered at nuclear power plants or the subsequent 

enforcement actions taken against plant operators.



The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced the change in policy 

during its first public meeting on power plant safety since the Sept. 

11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It drew barbs from critics who said the 

secrecy would erode public confidence in the agency.



Until now, the NRC has provided regular public updates on 

vulnerabilities its inspectors found at the country's 103 nuclear 

power reactors, such as broken fences or weaknesses in training 

programs.



"We need to blacken some of our processes so that our adversaries 

won't have that information," said Roy Zimmerman, director of the 

commission's Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response, which 

was created after the attacks.



NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said commissioners voted to take the step 

March 29, but kept it quiet as agency staff worked to implement the 

plan. The vote itself was revealed Wednesday and had nothing to do 

with this week's warnings that terrorists had surveyed U.S. financial 

institutions, Burnell said.



"We deliberated for many months on finding the balance between the 

NRC's commitment to openness and the concern that sensitive 

information might be misused by those who wish us harm," commission 

Chairman Nils Diaz said in a written statement.



Michele Boyd, a lobbyist for the consumer group Public Citizen, said 

the NRC had not struck that balance.



"The public has zero confidence in NRC and making this information 

completely out of the public, not available, does not bring any more 

confidence," Boyd told the commission.



Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., a longtime critic of the nuclear industry, 

said the policy will "further deepen public skepticism of the 

commission's performance and calls into question whether the 

commission is doing what it must do to keep nuclear reactors safe 

from terrorist attacks."



Zimmerman of the NRC said the agency is considering providing general 

information on security vulnerabilities that would not include plant 

names or other details.



Protection at the nation's nuclear power reactors - located at 64 

sites in 31 states - has been boosted since the Sept. 11 attacks. 

Since then, the commission has been guarded about revealing specifics 

of the security efforts.



That has not stopped accusations of inadequate guard training and 

other security lapses.



Congressional investigations have found problems such as a guard 

falling asleep on the job and falsification of security logs. Reports 

from the Energy Department's inspector general noted other problems 

at sites run by that agency, such as guards being warned of upcoming 

security exercises and inconsistent training from site to site.



Nuclear activists expressed concerns at the meeting about the 

adequacy of guard training, fire protection, the security of pools 

containing spent nuclear fuel, and planning for different kinds of 

attacks.



They also raised concerns about the agency's plans to allow the 

security firm Wackenhut Corp. to run mock terrorist attacks on the 

plants, nearly half of which are protected by Wackenhut security 

guards.



"When you have Wackenhut test Wackenhut, nobody is going to believe 

those results," said Peter Stockton, senior investigator with the 

Project on Government Oversight, a research group.



NRC's Zimmerman said the agency would closely monitor the exercises 

to make sure no information about the timing or methods of the mock 

attacks is leaked to plant personnel.



In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, operators at the nation's 

nuclear power plants posted more guards, added security patrols and 

reduced access to the installations' most sensitive areas.



Military planes at nearby bases stood ready to intercept any 

suspicious aircraft; the Coast Guard patrolled the Great Lakes near 

power plants to keep ships away; and many facilities enlisted the 

help of National Guard troops.



Some critics say more needs to be done.



"The vulnerabilities at a lot of the reactors in this country have 

not been addressed," said Jim Riccio, a nuclear policy analyst for 

Greenpeace. "Here we are nearly three years from the attacks and I 

don't see anything they've done except extending the perimeters of 

these facilities."



NRC spokesman Eliot Brenner disputed that assessment, saying the 

agency has aggressively pushed plant owners to, among other things, 

sharply upgrade security programs and training; conduct more 

realistic tests of plant defenses; and communicate better with the 

intelligence community, law enforcement and emergency response 

agencies.



The energy sector contributed $3.7 million, more than half of which 

came directly from nuclear and electric power companies, to Democrats 

during the 2004 election cycle. Republicans got $9.2 million from 

energy sources, including $2.7 million from power companies.

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



Philippines to convert 4 power plants to gas



MANILA, Aug 6 (Reuters) - The Philippines said on Friday it aims to 

convert four idle power plants, including a never-used nuclear plant, 

into gas-fired plants next year as part of a plan to avert a looming 

power shortage in the country.



President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said the revival of the plants 

would also reduce the country's dependence on imported oil.



"We can significantly reduce our dependence on oil imports by making 

natural gas our fuel of choice. It's not only indigeneous, it's also 

cleaner," Arroyo said in a speech to rural electric cooperatives.



"Inactive power plants such as Sucat, Limay, Malaya and the Bataan 

nuclear plant should also be converted into gas-fired plants in 2005 

to ensure that additional capacity will be in place in Luzon by 

2008."



The Philippines produces up to 260 million cubic feet of natural gas 

per day mainly from its Malampaya gas field, while crude oil output 

is tiny at just 500-600 barrels per day.



The country consumes about 330,000 barrels of oil per day and imports 

nearly all its crude requirements.



Malampaya supplies natural gas to three power plants in Luzon, which 

have a combined capacity of 2,700 megawatts.



The four plants to be converted are also on Luzon.



Sucat, Limay and Malaya are diesel-fired power plants with a combined 

capacity of 1,115 megawatts that state-owned National Power Corp. 

aims to sell to raise $5 billion and help it reduce the government's 

budget deficit.



The 620-megawatt Bataan nuclear power plant was constructed during 

the presidency of Ferdinand Marcos at an estimated cost of $2.1 

billion to $2.3 billion. The nuclear plant, which was completed in 

1984, was never used because of safety worries and amid allegations 

that the project was overpriced.



The cash-strapped Philippines, where consumers pay some of the 

highest electricity charges in Asia, has said $25 billion needs to be 

invested over the next decade to meet rising demand for energy 

products and electricity,  



An additional 6,000 megawatts of electricity generating capacity will 

be needed over the next 10 years to meet demand, official studies 

say.

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



Cassini Spacecraft Sees Saturn Lightning



LOS ANGELES Aug. 6 (AP) The Cassini spacecraft's mission to Saturn 

has revealed a new radiation belt around the ringed planet and found 

that lightning in its atmosphere is occurring in different patterns 

than it did when NASA's Voyagers flew by in the early 1980s, 

scientists said.



The discoveries announced Thursday are part of an early wave of 

information about the Saturn system from Cassini, which arrived June 

30 on a $3.3 billion exploration expected to last four years.



''This is exactly the point of doing a mission like this,'' said Bill 

Kurth of the University of Iowa, the deputy principal investigator 

for Cassini's radio and plasma wave instrument, which detects 

''cracks'' and ''pops'' from lightning like those that can be heard 

on an AM radio during a thunderstorm on Earth.



''Cassini now has evidence for changes in the thunderstorms that 

occur on Saturn over more than 20 years since we first started making 

measurements of these,'' Kurth said.



One difference is that lightning is occurring much more sporadically.



''Some days we see no lightning at all; other days we see evidence 

perhaps of more than one storm,'' Kurth said. ''Back in the early 

1980s on Voyager such storms were detected extremely regularly.''



Another major difference is that the thunderstorms observed by 

Cassini are taking more time to rotate around the giant gas planet - 

about 10 hours and 45 minutes, compared to the 10 hours and five 

minutes in the 1980s.



Voyager scientists associated those storms with ''superrotational 

clouds'' near the equator, where a a high-velocity windstream can 

move them around Saturn faster than the planet itself rotates.



''The fact that Cassini is seeing a longer period suggests that the 

storms are coming from a higher latitude'' where the winds don't move 

as fast, Kurth said.



Scientists suspect that the difference in the lightning patterns may 

be due to the difference in the way shadows from Saturn's rings are 

falling on the planet now, compared to in the early '80s.



Then, the sun was nearly on the same plane as the rings, and their 

shadow fell along a narrow band close to the equator. Now, the sun is 

illuminating the southern hemisphere and the rings' shadows are 

falling broadly across the northern hemisphere.



''They're no longer concentrated in one place and they're spread out 

over a large part of the planet,'' Kurth said.



The new radiation belt was discovered just above Saturn's cloud tops 

by a Cassini instrument, showing that the belts extend much closer to 

the planet than had been known.



Radiation belts are invisible, symmetrical, doughnut-shaped regions 

in space where high-energy ions and electrons are confined by a 

planet's magnetic field.



Over the long term, radiation belts have an important role in the 

evolution of a planet's atmosphere and any moons and orbiting gas and 

dust, said Donald G. Mitchell, a scientist for the magnetospheric 

imaging instrument, from Johns Hopkins University, in Laurel, Md.



Temperature and chemistry of a planet's upper atmosphere are also 

affected by radiation belts, he said.



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

Sandy Perle

Senior Vice President, Technical Operations

Global Dosimetry Solutions, Inc.

3300 Hyland Avenue

Costa Mesa, CA 92626



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

Fax:(714) 668-3149



E-Mail: sperle@dosimetry.com

E-Mail: sandyfl@earthlink.net



Global Dosimetry Website: http://www.dosimetry.com/

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





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