[ RadSafe ] Reid considering bill to make Yucca Mountain dump obsolete

[Sandy Perle]

Index:

Reid considering bill to make Yucca Mountain dump obsolete
Entergy scales back size of nuke waste facility
Atomic museum in Las Vegas traces history of weapons development
NASA Finds Safe Zone in Earth's Radiation Belt
Laboratory building reopens after radiation evacuation
Nordic authorities advise against use of tanning beds
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Reid considering bill to make Yucca Mountain dump obsolete

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - The U.S. Senate's minority leader is 
considering a bill that would make a nuclear waste dump at Nevada's 
Yucca Mountain - and a temporary holding spot for the waste in Utah - 
obsolete.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., plans to introduce legislation within the 
next few weeks that would authorize the Energy Department to assume 
ownership of the spent nuclear waste stored at reactors and store it 
at the facilities, The Salt Lake Tribune reported Saturday.

"This is the right thing to do and I look forward to discussing this 
option with my colleagues," Reid said.

Reid has been working for years to block the Yucca Mountain 
repository from being built in his state, but the prospects for this 
plan are uncertain since it runs counter to the stated desires of 
President Bush, Congress and the nuclear energy industry, all of whom 
want the Yucca repository built.

Reid said on-site storage could mean that Yucca and a proposal by 
Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of nuclear power generators, to 
temporarily store 40,000 tons of waste on the Skull Valley Goshute 
Indian reservation in Utah's west desert, about 45 miles southwest of 
Salt Lake City, would not be needed.

Joseph Egan, an attorney fighting Yucca Mountain on behalf of the 
Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, told The Tribune it is possible 
that moving ahead with Reid's on-site storage plan would make the PFS 
facility unnecessary.

Utah officials have feared that if the waste would be safe to ship 
and store in Utah, it should also be safe left where it is.

After meeting with White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card on 
Wednesday, Utah Republican Sens. Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett endorsed 
the administration's position of building the repository, saying the 
best way to block the PFS site is to make sure Yucca Mountain is 
built.

"They are committed to a strategy of straight to Yucca. Straight to 
Yucca means not stopping in Skull Valley," Bennett said Wednesday.

Gov. Jon Huntsman will go to Washington this week to meet with Bush 
administration officials about several issues, including the state's 
opposition to the nuclear-waste plan.

The new effort comes after the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board 
rejected the state's argument that there was an unacceptable risk 
that a fighter from Hill Air Force Base could crash into the waste 
site and release radioactive material.

The state has asked the board to reconsider its decision. If that 
fails, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will decide whether to 
license the facility.

Bush has requested $651 million in the coming year to work on Yucca 
Mountain, which is about half of what was projected for work on the 
facility. But Energy Department officials say the administration 
remains committed to seeing the project completed, even if it is done 
behind schedule.

"We believe it's necessary and we are committed to moving forward 
with the plan to build the repository" at Yucca Mountain, said Energy 
Department spokesman Joe Davis.
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Entergy scales back size of nuke waste facility

MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) - Entergy Nuclear has scaled back the size of a 
proposed high-level radioactive waste facility in Vernon, according 
to draft legislation proposed to the House Natural Resources and 
Energy Committee.

Rep. Robert Dostis, D-Waterbury, chairman of the committee, said 
Friday that Entergy's proposal was a first step toward breaking the 
regulatory and legislative logjam over the controversial waste 
project.

Entergy has asked for legislative approval to build a facility to 
store spent nuclear fuel in 12 casks, but last month it told the 
Windham Regional Commission it wanted to build a facility to 
accommodate 36 casks.

Robert Williams, spokesman for Entergy, refused to comment on the 
apparent scaling back of the project. "I'm not in a position to 
comment on the language," Williams said.

Dostis said his committee would be seeking an annual payment from 
Entergy in exchange for the state hosting the high-level radioactive 
waste facility.

Only two states in the country have legally wrangled some kind of 
oversight on nuclear waste - Vermont and Minnesota - and Minnesota 
receives an annual payment of $12 million, Dostis said.

"It's very appropriate for us to charge fees," he said, noting the 
money would be earmarked for renewable energy, energy efficiency and 
conservation programs.

Entergy is running out of storage space for the highly lethal old 
nuclear fuel and says without legislative approval for the waste 
facility, it would have to shut down the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant 
in 2007 or 2008. The nuclear utility's supporters say that the 
reactor provides one-third of all the electricity needed in Vermont, 
and at a relatively low price of just under 4 cents per kilowatt 
hour.

Entergy has maintained that it should be exempt from any legislative 
oversight.

The current law gives Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Corp. an exemption 
from state legislative review. But that corporation no longer owns 
Vermont Yankee. Entergy wanted "corporation" changed to "plant."

Dostis said his committee would hold public hearings in Windham 
County as well as Montpelier, to gauge public concern on the issue.
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Atomic museum in Las Vegas traces history of weapons development

LAS VEGAS (AP) - It's chilling to walk by a dented Army helmet with 
big tinted goggles on the brim, a frayed "atomic cocktail" recipe 
book and then come face to face with a family of mannequins, frozen 
in time in a fallout shelter.

Baby boomers will recognize the Civil Defense character Bert the 
Turtle and know by heart the instructions droning in black-and-white 
on the family's boxy Packard Bell TV: When sirens sound, find 
shelter. Don't look at the light. Duck and cover.

A digital countdown across the way tells when the steel doors of a 
cement-walled Ground Zero Theater will open.

Curators of the new Atomic Testing Museum hope the setting stirs the 
imagination for those with no memory of mushroom clouds and the role 
the Nevada Test Site played in the development of nuclear deterrence.

"Nuclear weapons aren't gone," museum Director William Johnson says 
as he leads the way through the $3.5 million (2.6 million) facility 
that opened last month just east of the Las Vegas Strip. "The world 
is just a different place now."

The museum traces a half-century of nuclear weapons testing in a 
nation that grew to love or hate the bomb. It describes developments 
that let scientists peer into the first millionth of a second of a 
nuclear blast before instruments vaporized, and it charts research 
that continued after earthshaking explosions ended in 1992 at the 
test site.

It also has drawn criticism as revisionist history among advocates 
who call it a forum for nuclear apologists, and it has reopened 
wounds for "downwinders" sickened by fallout from atmospheric atomic 
blasts.

"Once you've been a victim of nuclear weapons you're less 
enthusiastic about it," said Michelle Thomas, 52, a lifelong resident 
of St. George, Utah. "I don't hate or fear anyone bad enough to want 
to see happen to them what happened to us."

Johnson doesn't deny that testing caused problems. He points to 
exhibits describing the plight of downwinders and of test site 
workers sickened by silicosis, and to a reading room and nuclear 
testing archive containing more than 310,000 documents.

"I want people to come here and learn," he says. "But if there's only 
one message taken away, it's that the Cold War was a war. It was a 
struggle with the Soviet Union."

The story is told with a timeline, artifacts, interactive and touch-
screen displays and several films, including the 10-minute 
presentation in the Ground Zero Theater.

Visitors sit on varnished wooden seats modeled after the warped, 
weathered benches still on News Nob, a rocky outcrop overlooking 
Yucca Flat where journalists observed atmospheric nuclear tests 
beginning with "Charlie" in April 1952.

Light bursts as the big screen shows a nuclear test. The room rumbles 
with embedded speakers. Air blasts tousle the hair, imitating a shock 
wave.

"It's almost like you're sitting there. That's real stuff to me," 
says Mike Margalski, 49, a maintenance engineer who wants to 
experience what his father did as an Army soldier exposed to more 
than one nuclear test in the early 1950s. Eugene "Geno" Margalski 
died of prostate cancer in 1996, at age 65.

"My dad never ever talked about it until just a few days before he 
passed away," Margalski says. "He talked about going out and walking 
in it while they came around with Geiger counters."

But this is no theme park. It is as somber as the 230,000 deaths and 
injuries in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945; as sober 
as the concept of "mutually assured destruction" that shadowed the 
world for half a century afterward.

The entry to the 8,000-square-foot (720-square-meter) museum 
resembles a guard gate. Up a gentle ramp is a copy of Albert 
Einstein's August 1939 letter to President Franklin Roosevelt 
suggesting that uranium might yield "a new and important source of 
energy."

An inert model of the most common B61 nuclear bomb - 12-feet-long 
(3.6-meter-long), gray, unimposing - rests on its side next to 
displays of the "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" devices dropped on Japan.

Through a 10-foot (3-meter) diameter steel "decoupler" portal and 
down a tunnel lined with faux rock is the underground testing 
gallery. Visitors whisper when they stop to reflect or remember.

Some exhibits have a "gee-whiz" element - chronicling how scientists 
tested nuclear rocket engines, shrank the size of nuclear devices and 
measured the effects of radionuclides on plants, animals and food.

This being Las Vegas, the museum also chronicles how tourists sipped 
cocktails on casino rooftops, gazing at blast clouds on the horizon 
at the test site, 65 miles (105 kilometers) to the northwest.

The museum, a partnership between the Nevada Test Site Historical 
Foundation and the Desert Research Institute, is an affiliate of the 
Smithsonian Institution.

Administrators foresee schoolchildren marveling at the column of 
instruments used to measure underground nuclear explosions, working a 
manipulator arm like the one scientists used to handle radioactive 
materials and hearing the clicks of a Geiger counter measuring low-
level radioactivity.

"I would hope they come away with an understanding of what is 
radiation and why we did testing," says Loretta Helling, a former 
Energy Department public affairs specialist who spent eight years 
curating the collection. "We try to have a balanced view in there."

Preston Truman foresees the museum ignoring unpleasantries while 
teaching "that everything was good and beneficial and that America 
won the Cold War."

"In 50 years, when all the people who had a negative opinion are 
dead, it will be just that - one-sided history," says Truman, who 
founded and directs an advocacy group called Downwinders.

The 53-year-old Truman's first memory as a child is sitting on his 
father's knee in Enterprise, Utah, watching a mushroom cloud at the 
Nevada Test Site. He figures that was 1955, a year in which the 
government conducted 18 atmospheric tests.

"We're children of the bomb. We saw the flash. We heard the bangs. A 
couple of times, the shock waves broke out windows that they paid 
for," he says. "We got radiated and we got lied to."

Thomas remembers a fine ash falling like snow across St. George. When 
fallout warnings sounded, her mother would don an old straw hat, pull 
on rubber dish gloves and tie a dish towel around her own mouth to 
pluck laundry from the outdoor drying line.

"She would wash the sheets twice in hot water so her kids wouldn't 
have to sleep with radioactive fallout," Thomas says.

But Thomas began to develop maladies as a junior in high school: 
ovarian cysts, breast cancer, a benign salivary gland tumor. She was 
diagnosed in 1974 with polymyositis, an autoimmune system disease 
similar to lupus. She and two siblings each received a one-time 
"downwinder" payment of $50,000 (38,000) under the Radiation Exposure 
Compensation Act of 1990.

"I think we've learned that the government is fallible and may not be 
entirely upfront," Thomas says. "But it was considered unpatriotic in 
those days to question the government."

Johnson, 47, recalled hearing the wail of Friday morning Civil 
Defense sirens as a child in Miami.

He says the museum tried to put the nation's 1,054 above- and below-
ground nuclear tests in context. Of the 928 detonated at the test 
site, 100 were atmospheric tests. Seven tests were exploded elsewhere 
in Nevada, three each in New Mexico and Alaska, two each in Colorado 
and Mississippi and 106 on Pacific islands. Three tests were 
conducted on South Atlantic islands.

The number of nuclear tests peaked at 96 in 1962 - the year the 
United States and the Soviet Union stared each other down with their 
fingers on the button during the Cuban missile crisis.

"The paradigm of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s was that the Northern 
Hemisphere was going to be blown to bits," Johnson recalls. The 
scientists, technicians and administrators at the test site, he says, 
"were thinking they were saving the world."
------------------

NASA Finds Safe Zone in Earth's Radiation Belt

WASHINGTON, March 8 /PRNewswire/ -- Lightning in clouds, only a few 
miles above the ground, clears a safe zone in the radiation belts 
thousands of miles above the Earth, according to NASA-funded 
researchers. The unexpected result resolves a forty-year-old debate 
as to how the safe zone is formed, and it illuminates how the region 
is cleared after it is filled with radiation during magnetic storms.

The safe zone, called the Van Allen Belt slot, is a potential haven 
offering reduced radiation dosages for satellites that require Middle 
Earth Orbits (MEOs). The research may eventually be applied to remove 
radiation belts around the Earth and other worlds, reducing the 
hazards of the space environment.

"The multi-billion-dollar Global Positioning System satellites skirt 
the edge of the safe zone," said Dr. James Green of NASA's Goddard 
Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. He is the lead author of the 
paper about the research published in the Journal of Geophysical 
Research. "Without the cleansing effect from lightning, there would 
be just one big radiation belt, with no easily accessible place to 
put satellites," he said.

If the Van Allen radiation belts were visible from space, they would 
resemble a pair of donuts around the Earth, one inside the other, 
with the planet in the hole of the innermost. The Van Allen Belt slot 
would appear as a space between the inner and outer donut. The belts 
are comprised of high-speed electrically charged particles (electrons 
and atomic nuclei) trapped in the Earth's magnetic field. The Earth's 
magnetic field has invisible lines of magnetic force emerging from 
the South Polar Region, out into space and back into the North Polar 
Region. Because the radiation belt particles are electrically 
charged, they respond to magnetic forces. The particles spiral around 
the Earth's magnetic field lines, bouncing from pole to pole where 
the planet's magnetic field is concentrated.

Scientists debated two theories to explain how the safe zone was 
cleared. The prominent theory stated radio waves from space, 
generated by turbulence in the zone, cleared it. An alternate theory, 
confirmed by this research, stated radio waves generated by lightning 
were responsible. "We were fascinated to discover evidence that 
strongly supported the lightning theory, because we usually think 
about how the space environment affects the Earth, not the reverse," 
Green said.

The flash we see from lightning is just part of the total radiation 
it produces. Lightning also generates radio waves. In the same way 
visible light is bent by a prism, these radio waves are bent by 
electrically charged gas trapped in the Earth's magnetic field. That 
causes the waves to flow out into space along the Earth's magnetic 
field lines.

According to the lightning theory, radio waves clear the safe zone by 
interacting with the radiation belt particles, removing a little of 
their energy and changing their direction. This lowers the mirror 
point, the place above the polar regions where the particles bounce. 
Eventually, the mirror point becomes so low; it is in the Earth's 
atmosphere. When this happens, the radiation belt particles can no 
longer bounce back into space, because they collide with atmospheric 
particles and dissipate their energy.

To confirm the theory, the team used a global map of lightning 
activity made with the Micro Lab 1 spacecraft. They used radio wave 
data from the Radio Plasma Imager on the Imager for Magnetopause to 
Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) spacecraft, combined with archival 
data from the Dynamics Explorer spacecraft. IMAGE and Dynamics 
Explorer showed the radio wave activity in the safe zone closely 
followed terrestrial lightning patterns observed by Micro Lab 1.

According to the team, there would not be a correlation if the radio 
waves came from space instead of Earth. They concluded when magnetic 
storms, caused by violent solar activity, inject a new supply of high-
speed particles into the safe zone, lightning clears them away in a 
few days.

Engineers may eventually design spacecraft to generate radio waves at 
the correct frequency and location to clear radiation belts around 
other planets. This could be useful for human exploration of 
interesting bodies like Jupiter's moon Europa, which orbits within 
the giant planet's intense radiation belt.
-----------------

Laboratory building reopens after radiation evacuation

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. (AP) - An evacuated nuclear processing building at 
the Oak Ridge National Laboratory reopened Thursday, although a room 
where radiation set off alarms remained closed, officials said.

Fifteen people were evacuated from Building 7920 and others were 
ordered to take "shelter in place" after two continuous air 
monitoring alarms sounded on Wednesday.

The building reopened Thursday and a recovery team was working to 
restore normal operations in the laboratories section of the 
building, a Department of Energy statement said.

"The room where radiation monitors triggered alarms Wednesday remains 
closed, except for authorized personnel conducting recovery 
operations," DOE said. "The room is used for storage and transfer of 
radioactive materials and is normally limited access only."

DOE said no one was contaminated, there were no immediate health 
concerns and there was no radioactive release into the environment.

The facility chemically processes highly radioactive materials 
retrieved from the lab's High Flux Isotope Reactor, the world's most 
powerful research reactor. The reactor, which has been out of service 
since last month, produces isotopes for medical use and science.

The Oak Ridge laboratory, about 20 miles west of Knoxville, is DOE's 
largest science and energy lab, comprising hundreds of buildings and 
employing more than 3,800 people.
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Nordic authorities advise against use of tanning beds, citing skin 
cancer risk

OSLO, Norway (AP) - Nordic authorities on Monday advised against the 
use of solariums, saying such tanning machines increase the risk of 
skin cancer.

Children, young people and those with fair skin are at the greatest 
risk, said the 11-page warning against sun beds issued jointly by 
Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland, all of whom have many 
citizens with light skin and hair.

"The greatest cause of the increasing instances of skin cancer in the 
Nordic region is believed to be excessive sunbathing," said a news 
release from the Norwegian Radiation Protection Agency.

"The use of solariums is not recommended," the statement continued. 
"The use of solariums increased the risk of skin cancer."

The report said people between 16 and 24 years of age are the biggest 
users of sun beds. It also said children and adolescents may be the 
most susceptible to the harmful effects of ultraviolet radiation, 
including the most the most lethal type of skin cancer, melanoma.

The report also urged new rules for makers of solariums, requiring 
greater safety features, and that those operating tanning centers 
should have enough knowledge about potential risks to help their 
customers make informed decisions.

"If sun beds are used, it is necessary to keep the annual UV dose low 
and to provide users with all information necessary to minimize skin 
damage and other health hazards," the report said.

In October, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in the 
United States published similar findings, after an extensive study by 
international researchers.

They found that women of any age or hair color who regularly visited 
tanning salons once or more per month increased their chance of 
developing melanoma by 55 percent.

The Nordic warning was made jointly by the Danish National Board of 
Health, the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority, the 
Icelandic Radiation Protection Institute, Swedish Radiation 
Protection Authority, as well as the Norwegian authority.

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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) 296-1144

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