[ RadSafe ] Newspaper: Hanford dose study was suspect

[Sandy Perle]

Index:

Newspaper: Hanford dose study was suspect
WIPP shipments from Los Alamos to resume
Framatome Sets Up US Team To Design,Site New Nuclear Reactor
Floating nuclear reactor among James River's 'Ghost Fleet'
EU says will not rush Japan nuke talks
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Newspaper: Hanford dose study was suspect

SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) - A landmark study that estimated radiation doses 
to the public from emissions from the Hanford nuclear reservation was 
conducted in part to defend the federal government from lawsuits, a 
newspaper reports.

The Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project, a $27 million 
study that began in the late 1980s, contained significant conflicts 
of interest, The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash., reported Sunday.

The study is part of a massive class-action lawsuit that is finally 
headed for trial this April, in which alleged victims of radiation 
releases say their health was damaged.

The records were obtained by lawyers for more than 2,000 people who 
sued Hanford contractors starting in 1990 over their exposure to 
radioactive iodine-131 releases during World War II and the Cold War, 
the newspaper reported.

The first phase of their trial starts April 11 in Spokane.

The documents show that after the secret Hanford releases were 
finally made public in 1986, the U.S. Justice Department opposed a 
dose study as useless public relations, but changed its mind when the 
first lawsuit for radiation damages was filed.

Some of the Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratories staff in Richland 
who worked on the study also worked for the Justice Department and 
for Kirkland & Ellis, the Chicago law firm hired to defend Hanford 
contractors against radiation injury claims, the documents showed.

The documents provide "startling evidence" that the study was shaped 
to "support the litigation positions that the government and Hanford 
defendants anticipated," including choosing radiation dose estimates 
that minimize the estimated radiation exposures, Seattle lawyer Tom 
Foulds said in a court motion.

Kevin Van Wart, of Kirkland & Ellis in Chicago, lead attorney for the 
Hanford contractors, denied the project was set up to favor the 
defense. Plaintiffs' lawyers also wanted a dose reconstruction study 
in the 1980s as a guide to future litigation, he said.

"It's absurd. This is all smoke. At trial, each side is going to 
present their own best estimates of the doses the plaintiffs 
received," Van Wart said.

The study's radiation dose estimates were also used by a second group 
of scientists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in 
Seattle for the $21 million Hanford Thyroid Disease Study, which 
explored the possibility of a link between the Hanford releases and 
thyroid disease in 3,440 people exposed as children.

In 1999, that study concluded it could find no link between Hanford's 
radiation clouds and excess thyroid death and disease downwind. That 
result was at odds with other studies in the Marshall Islands and 
Ukraine that showed clear associations between iodine-131 exposures 
and an increase in thyroid cancers and disease.

Lawyers for the downwinders will critique the two Hanford studies at 
the April trial, while the defense will present them as sound 
science.

The HEDR study has long been suspect, said Bob Alvarez, a prominent 
nuclear critic who served in the Clinton administration as deputy 
assistant secretary for planning and security at the Energy 
Department.

Washington and Oregon pressed for a dose study totally independent of 
the Energy Department after documents released in March 1986 showed 
massive clouds of radioactive iodine-131 escaped from Hanford in the 
1940s and early '50s during the production of plutonium for nuclear 
bombs.

"The die was cast in 1986 when DOE bestowed on Battelle the 
responsibility for dose reconstruction at Hanford. The primary 
motivation was to stave off liability associated with these large 
releases," Alvarez said.

The credibility of the Hanford study will be a central focus in the 
upcoming downwinders' trial.

During the trial of seven "bellwether" cases, the plaintiffs' lawyers 
will submit their own version of dose reconstruction. Some of their 
experts argue that the Hanford iodine-131 doses especially in 
outlying areas like Spokane could have been up to 12 times higher 
than the HEDR estimates.

U.S. District Judge William Fremming Nielsen ruled last week that the 
plaintiffs can present their alternative dose reconstruction 
analysis.
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WIPP shipments from Los Alamos to resume

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. (AP) - Los Alamos National Laboratory says it won't 
be able to finish moving its highest-risk radioactive waste from its 
dump and storage site to a Carlsbad repository until October at the 
earliest.

The nuclear weapons laboratory missed a December deadline for 
shipping that waste to the federal government's Waste Isolation Pilot 
Plant.

An audit report released by the lab Monday blamed a work shutdown in 
July and problems following U.S. Department of Energy procedures for 
the missed deadline, but said the DOE's failure to provide critical 
resources contributed.

Lab operations shut down in July after two computer disks believed to 
contain classified information were reported missing and an intern 
suffered an eye injury from a laser. Operations were gradually 
restarted during the following months.

The lab took much of the blame for falling nearly two years behind 
schedule in shipping waste left from years of weapons work. The audit 
by the DOE's Office of the Inspector General said the lab "did not 
adhere to waste certification requirements."

But the audit also said the DOE never delivered two mobile waste 
processing units the lab expected to use to sort about 19,000 drums 
of waste.

The shutdown and failure to follow procedures cost the DOE about $23 
million, the audit said.

In the five years before 2003, the lab shipped about 1,600 drums to 
WIPP.

The audit blamed the lab's attempt to increase the shipping rate for 
part of the program's woes.

"When Los Alamos attempted to increase shipping rates to 2,000 drums 
in a single year, operating procedures failed," it said.

The audit said the lab might not finish removing waste from decades 
of weapons work before 2014, four years after the DOE originally 
pledged to complete shipments from the lab. The project will be more 
than $70 million above the projected costs.

Greg Mello, director of the watchdog Los Alamos Study Group, said the 
waste is dangerous.

"It sits in tents and some of the drums contain proliferation-
sensitive quantities of waste," he said. "It is safer at WIPP than 
where it is."

Lab officials said they are working with the DOE to get shipments 
restarted by April to WIPP, which buries plutonium-contaminated waste 
2,150 feet below ground in ancient salt beds.

The lab stopped shipping waste in October 2003 after federal 
officials discovered 98 drums had not been properly certified for 
disposal in WIPP. The waste largely consists of such things as 
gloves, tools, clothing and radioactive sludge.

Sorting the waste resumed last summer, but was halted again by Los 
Alamos' shutdown.

Kathy DeLucas, a lab spokeswoman, said Los Alamos is working with the 
DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration to implement proper 
procedures and resume waste shipments.

The Los Alamos lab has produced about 40,000 drums of waste over 
about 60 years and has spent more than $350 million to sort, certify 
and dispose of it since 1997.

The Bush administration proposed increasing WIPP's operating budget 
next year, despite the DOE's failure to meet waste disposal goals.

WIPP critic Don Hancock, director of the nuclear safety project for 
the Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque, said 
WIPP is being rewarded for not producing.

Last year, the DOE told Congress it planned 1,700 shipments to WIPP. 
It sent 966.

For fiscal 2006, the DOE cut its shipping goal to 1,300 shipments and 
is asking for a 12 percent increase in WIPP's operating budget to 
$188 million.

Ines Triay, acting manager of WIPP for DOE, said the higher budget 
would allow the shipment rate to rise to meet the new target. 
Shipments come from DOE facilities around the nation.
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Framatome Sets Up US Team To Design,Site New Nuclear Reactor

NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- Framatome ANP, a joint venture of French state-
run nuclear engineering company Areva (427583.FR) and Siemens AG 
(SI), has set up a new team aimed at designing and siting new 
commercial nuclear reactors in the U.S.

In a press release Tuesday, Areva said the Framatome team will be led 
by Ray Ganthner and will push to get a new pressurized-water reactor 
called the EPR licensed and built in the U.S. The team will also 
support the global effort to develop a more advanced high-temperature 
gas reactor.

Despite a revival of the nuclear industry in Asia, support from the 
Bush administration for nuclear power in the U.S. and mounting 
concerns about emissions of carbon dioxide, no new nuclear reactor 
has been built here in a quarter century. A number of nuclear 
operators are, however, pursuing early site permits.

Framatome has approached the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission about 
its intentions to certify the EPR and plans to apply for design 
certification as soon as possible, Areva said in a release.

Licensing and engineering work will be done primarily in Charlotte, 
N.C., and Lynchburg, Va., Areva said.

Areva says it designed and installed 30% of the world's current 
nuclear generation capacity and provides nuclear fuel to 46%.
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Floating nuclear reactor among James River's 'Ghost Fleet'

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (AP) - The sign on a metal hatch in front of Ray 
Moses said "Caution Radiation."

Moses, an electrician with the Maritime Administration, unlatched 
several locks on a recent morning, broke through a plastic seal on 
the door and led several visitors inside.

Around a dark corridor was the refueling deck of a defunct nuclear 
reactor that sits on the James River. A large, egg-shaped containment 
vessel holds the old reactor. Contaminated metal and debris are 
sealed inside a nearby tank. Steel and concrete encase the entire 
area.

No, this is not Surry Power Station. Nor is it the Savannah, the 
world's first commercial nuclear-powered ship, which now languishes 
amid rusty vessels in the federal government's James River Reserve 
Fleet.

This is the Sturgis, a 440-foot-long World War II Liberty ship that 
the Army converted into a floating nuclear power plant in 1966. It 
provided power to the Panama Canal until 1976, when the Army decided 
to return the barge to the United States because of political unrest 
in Central America, said Hans Honerlah, project manager with the Army 
Corps of Engineers.

"When it was towed back from Panama, it got caught up in a 
hurricane," Honerlah said. "It sustained structural damage, which I 
think solidified its end." He pointed to a steel beam on the 
refueling deck that was originally vertical but is now bowed thanks 
to something large and heavy that bounced around the refueling deck 
during the hurricane.

Today, the Army Corps is studying what to do with the vessel. Unlike 
the rest of the James River fleet, it is not under the purview of the 
Maritime Administration and is not included in a 2006 deadline to 
dispose of obsolete ships in the reserve fleet.

Honerlah stresses that the Army removed the nuclear fuel from the 
ship long ago. "There's no real health or safety risk or hazard to 
human health and the environment," he said. Even with today's 
heightened awareness of terrorism, an explosion that would release 
the radioactive metal in the ship's tank would have to be huge - big 
enough to dwarf the risk of the radiation itself.

Honerlah is working on an environmental assessment that may be 
completed in September. The assessment will include the potential 
cost of fully decommissioning the Sturgis, which will range in the 
millions. The Army Corps didn't disclose a more precise estimate 
because the job may eventually go out to bid.

The Sturgis dates to an era when the Army was first exploring nuclear 
power.

The service built nine reactors in the 1960s. After the first was 
built in Fort Belvoir in northern Virginia, several others followed. 
All were designed to be easily set up and taken down at remote 
military bases in Wyoming, Alaska, Antarctica and Greenland.

"The idea was to provide power for a command post in any area that we 
occupied," Honerlah said.

The Sturgis was the only floating power plant, converted to nuclear 
use in Alabama. Among the more notable electrician assistants on the 
project was musician Jimmy Buffett, who describes working on the 
Sturgis as a teenager in his book "A Pirate Looks at Fifty."

The ship's engine and propeller were removed and a nuclear reactor 
was built in the center portion of the vessel. Workers added an 18-
inch-wide bulge of concrete as a collision barrier.

Mike Hunter served on the Sturgis during its first and only 
deployment to Panama in the 1970s. Hunter, now a civilian working for 
the Army Corps in Fort Belvoir, fondly remembers his eight-hour 
shifts.

"It was very unique," Hunter said. "It was a wonderful climate. And I 
really liked the people down there, the Panamanians." The Sturgis 
provided power to the canal during the dry season, when the 
hydroelectric dams in the region could not provide as much 
electricity.

Hunter said there were never any nuclear close calls on the vessel, 
which is now called a barge instead of a ship, since it is no longer 
self-propelled.

A list of regulations eventually made the nuclear business too 
expensive for the Army.

Hunter helped seal the barge's nuclear containment vessel at Fort 
Belvoir in 1976, before it was towed to the James River. In 2001, 
Honerlah and six safety specialists, environmental scientists and 
engineers opened the containment vessel to evaluate its contents.

"The biggest challenge for us was there was no air in there," 
Honerlah said. Air rushed into the vacuum after a crane removed a 
heavy concrete plug.

"You could hear the whoosh as good air was moving in, the bad air was 
moving out," Honerlah said. The assessment crew evaluated the volume 
and types of waste for their environmental report. They also 
catalogued the asbestos, PCBs and other hazardous materials in the 
rest of the barge.

The Maritime Administration helps with security and maintenance of 
the Sturgis.

"We have flood alarms and fire alarms, too," said Moses, who has 
mapped in his mind the location of each of the alarms situated in the 
depths of the barge's hull.

Moses is the vessel's unofficial tour guide, taking infrequent 
visitors through areas, such as the reactor control room, which is 
full of buttons and red tags dating from 1976 when the Army Corps 
decommissioned the plant.

Bare counters now stand out in a chemistry lab where scientists once 
sampled the water onboard to make sure it wasn't radioactive. The 
Army estimated that the Sturgis would have a 50-year safe storage 
period when it was decommissioned.

Malcolm McLeod, who provided engineering support for the Army's 
reactors in the 1970s, said the Sturgis represents the country's 
shifting philosophies on nuclear power.

"The country first had a philosophy of, 'Let's show a lot of the good 
things we could do with nuclear power,' " said McLeod. That was in 
the 1960s, when the Army built its reactors.

"But the philosophy toward nuclear power changed," he said. "In the 
1970s, nuclear power was seen as a hazard, particularly for the 
environmental impacts. That's not true. Our plants were very clean. 
But it was harder to site them. No one wanted them in their back 
yard."
------------------

EU says will not rush Japan nuke talks

HELSINKI, Feb 15 (Reuters) - The European Union will seek consensus 
with Japan on building a nuclear fusion reactor in Cadarache, France, 
rather than trying for a rapid conclusion of ongoing talks, the EU's 
energy chief said on Tuesday.

"I hope we'll find solution that's acceptable to all, even if it 
takes longer," Andris Piebalgs, the commissioner in charge of energy 
issues, told a news conference in Helsinki.

The plan to build the world's first thermonuclear reactor is 
sponsored by six partners -- the European Union, Japan, China, the 
United States, Russia and South Korea -- but the EU and Japan are 
competing with each other to host the plant.

EU officials said last year the bloc might consider going ahead 
without Tokyo if talks failed, prompting angry reactions from the 
Japanese.

When asked about the status of the negotiations Piebalgs declined to 
comment, saying they were still ongoing.

"We have made an official proposal and don't yet have an official 
response," he said.

Nuclear fusion has been touted as a long-term solution to the world's 
energy problems, as it would be low on pollution and use sea water as 
fuel. But 50 years of research have so far failed to produce a 
commercially viable fusion reactor.


Yucca Mountain chief says DOE underestimated document job

LAS VEGAS (AP) - The Energy Department underestimated how hard it 
would be to plug 20 years of documents into a database to support its 
application for a license for a national nuclear waste repository in 
Nevada, the departing project director said.

"People had left behind tons, millions of e-mails, and we had to sort 
them out, figure out criteria of what was relevant and what was not," 
Margaret Chu, director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste 
Management, told reporters at a utility regulators conference Monday 
in Washington, D.C. "The magnitude was just horrendous."

Chu announced last week she will resign Feb. 25. The inability to 
post all relevant documents on an Internet database called the 
Licensing Support Network for review by the Nuclear Regulatory 
Commission contributed to missed deadlines for the Nevada nuclear 
waste repository the Energy Department plans 90 miles northwest of 
Las Vegas.

Department officials have pushed back a target date for opening the 
$58 billion project by at least two years. Chu said last week it may 
not open until after 2012.

Chu said Monday she had expected to head the Yucca Mountain program 
for one presidential term. She was appointed to the job in March 
2002.

Chu told the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners 
that progress at Yucca Mountain depends on funding from Congress.

"I am confident we will eventually get there," she said.

Don Keskey, a former Michigan assistant attorney general, said 
utility ratepayers contributing to a Yucca Mountain construction fund 
were at financial risk because of delays with the program.

Electricity consumers served by nuclear utilities pay one-tenth-of-
one-cent-per-kilowatt-hour into the fund, which has accumulated $24 
billion since 1983. The current balance is $16.3 billion.

Keskey urged utility commissioners to consider withholding the fees, 
or placing them in escrow to show "that states are not ignoring this 
issue and are concerned."

However, Jay Silberg, an attorney representing utilities, said power 
companies would be caught in the middle if the commissioners acted to 
withhold fees.

He said licenses and governmental nuclear waste contracts could be 
jeopardized.

"If you disallow (fees), you are pressuring the wrong guys," Silberg 
said. "It is not the utilities' fault we are in this situation."
-----------------

Yucca Mountain setbacks sparking debate about privatization

LAS VEGAS (AP) - Frustrated by setbacks in development of a national 
nuclear waste repository in Nevada, states and utilities are reviving 
a proposal to privatize management of the Yucca Mountain project.

The idea, discussed Sunday during a conference of the National 
Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners in Washington, D.C., 
would create a government-chartered corporation with more 
independence than the Energy Department to manage construction of the 
$58 billion repository.

Proponents say that would give managers more freedom to raise and 
manage fees for the project and spend money from a nuclear waste fund 
now controlled by Congress.

A 1994 report touted the advantages of having the project run by a 
private business that could hire and fire managers, set salaries and 
promote accountability.

"It went nowhere," said Ronald Callen, an author of the 1994 report 
when he was a staff member for the Michigan Public Service 
Commission.

The idea still might not be attractive to Congress, where lawmakers 
oversee Yucca Mountain and a construction fund with a $16.3 billion 
balance.

But state officials and utility lobbyists taking a new look at the 
idea argue a corporate approach might be better than a government 
bureaucracy to oversee complex repository construction.

"DOE is not a building contractor," said Greg White, legislative 
liaison for the Michigan Public Service Commission and chairman of a 
nuclear issues staff subcommittee for the National Association of 
Regulatory Utility Commissioners.

The proposal reflects frustration among states and utility interests 
that have supported a government repository for nuclear spent fuel.

Customers of nuclear utilities have contributed about $24 billion 
into a fund to build a Nevada repository.

The Energy Department had pledged to take ownership of nuclear waste 
by 1998, but a repository has yet to be finished.

Last week, the department acknowledged it will miss a 2010 target for 
opening the Yucca repository, with officials saying it could be 2012 
or later.

The Yucca plan calls for entombing 77,000 tons of the nation's 
highest-level nuclear waste and spent fuel from commercial nuclear 
power plants in 155 miles of underground tunnels beneath the 
mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
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FirstEnergy seeks nuclear plant license extension

LOS ANGELES, Feb 14 (Reuters) - FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Group 
(FENOC) said on Monday it is seeking a 20-year operating license 
extension for its Beaver Valley nuclear plant in Shippingport, 
Pennsylvania.

The company, a unit of FirstEnergy Corp. , said it submitted its 
license renewal application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission 
(NRC) on Monday.

The Beaver Valley station, located about 35 miles northwest of 
Pittsburgh, has two units, the first with a capacity of 869 megawatts 
and the second 873 MW.

One megawatt powers about 1,000 homes, according to the North 
American average.

The license for Unit 1 would be extended to 2036 from 2016 while for 
Unit 2, the company is seeking an expiration of 2047 rather than 
2027.

The application is expected to take about 28 months to review, with a 
decision from the NRC expected in summer 2007.
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Protesters delay Italian nuclear waste exports

ROME, Feb 14 (Reuters) - Anti-nuclear campaigners chained themselves 
to railway tracks in the early hours of Monday to try to prevent two 
trainloads of radioactive waste leaving Italy for Britain's 
Sellafield reprocessing plant, police said.

Environmental campaign group Greenpeace organised the protest near 
Turin to publicise that the waste -- the last of 13 convoys -- would 
eventually return to Italy. They say the government has no policy on 
what to do with it.

"The attempt to export spent nuclear fuel abroad is a way of playing 
for time, a subterfuge to leave for the next generation the burden of 
taking decisions which are morally and politically beyond the wit of 
the current governing class," a Greenpeace statement said.

Officers removed protesters from the tracks after cutting them free 
with bolt cutters. The protest delayed a train -- carrying 53 tonnes 
of spent nuclear fuel -- from departing northern Italy for several 
hours.

Environmentalists want countries to stop sending spent fuel to 
reprocessing plants in Britain and France.

Eventually, the waste must return to the country of origin, which has 
the legal duty to store it safely. But environmentalists say no 
European country has yet decided how to deal with it effectively.

Italy closed its nuclear power stations in the 1980s after Italians 
voted to go nuclear-free, but the country is still dealing with waste 
from old plants.

Italian environmentalists fear they could face another battle if the 
country's politicians are successful at restarting Italy's mothballed 
nuclear programme.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has said Italy should rethink its no-
nuclear policy because it has no significant reserves of conventional 
energy and is a net importer of nuclear-generated electricity from 
neighbouring countries.

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Sandy Perle
Senior Vice President, Technical Operations
Global Dosimetry Solutions, Inc.
2652 McGaw Avenue
Irvine, CA 92614 

Tel: (949) 296-2306 / (888) 437-1714  Extension 2306
Fax:(949) 296-1902 

E-Mail: sperle at dosimetry.com
E-Mail: sandyfl at earthlink.net 

Global Dosimetry Website: http://www.dosimetry.com/ 
Personal Website: http://sandy-travels.com/