HANFORD WATCH NEWSLETTER
June 20, 1999
The best daily Hanford news is on the Tri-City Herald web
site. TCH is the newspaper for the Tri-Cities area around Hanford.
TANK WASTE MILESTONES COMING
Lynn Porter – June 20, 1999
The Dept. of Energy has reached an "agreement in principle" with Washington
state on new tank waste project milestones (cleanup deadlines) for the
Tri-Party Agreement. The TPA is a legal contract between DOE, EPA and
Washington on cleaning up Hanford. Public hearings on the new milestones
will be held in Oregon and Washington.
The milestones should be finalized by July 31, Office of River Protection
manager Dick French told a group of Oregon activists this week. Taken
directly from DOE’s contract with BNFL (British Nuclear Fuels Ltd.),
there will be three milestones for the next seven years – during which
BNFL will design and build a tank waste vitrification plant. Tank waste
will be mixed into glass logs to immobilize it and keep it out of the
environment. Construction on the plant begins in 2002, with vitrification
starting in 2007.
HANFORD FACES RISING TIDE OF FUNDING NEEDS
Tri-City Herald -- June 14, 1999
In Hanford slang, the next few years are known as "the bow wave." Think
of them as a tidal wave. The term refers to the assumption that the
amount of money needed to meet Department of Energy obligations at Hanford
will soar by hundreds of millions of dollars for the next several years.
Hanford budget crunchers have been warning for years that the bow wave
was just over the horizon. Now it's in sight, a tsunami bearing down
on efforts to clean up the nation's most contaminated site.
Federal budget plans set funding for Hanford's basic cleanup at a level
$1 billion to $1.1 billion through at least 2006. At that amount, annual
funding would fall more than $200 million short of what Hanford officials
estimate they'll need to meet legal obligations. Complicating the picture
is the so-called "set-aside" fund -- money being stashed away each year
eventually to pay for converting radioactive tank wastes into glass.
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/1999/0614.html
SCIENTISTS, PUBLIC TO TESTIFY AT HEARING ON HANFORD STUDY
The Spokesman-Review – June 18, 1999
Some of the nation's leading radiation experts will be in Spokane on
Saturday for a daylong public meeting on the controversial Hanford thyroid
disease study. The National Academy of Sciences' Board on Radiation
Effects Research is the final arbiter of the scientific credibility
of the study, conducted for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention.
Since January, several prominent scientists have criticized aspects
of the study, including its statistical power, reliance on computer-modeled
dose estimates and failure to explain why it found so much thyroid disease
and early death in the group of people studied. Other scientists who
critiqued the study for the CDC also asked why the study group had a
death rate 20 percent higher than normal. An unusually high number died
at or near birth, especially in Franklin County, they noted.
http://www.spokane.net/news-story.asp?date=061899&ID=s595877&cat=section.Spokane
SUIT ACCUSES HANFORD CONTRACTORS OF OVERBILLING MILLIONS FOR CLEANUP
The Seattle Times -- June 16, 1999
A lawsuit that accuses two Hanford cleanup contractors of cheating taxpayers
out of $85 million may be bolstered by a recent e-mail in which a top
Hanford manager says contractors' expenses "may have been overstated"
by millions of dollars for several years. The suit asserts that Westinghouse
Hanford and Fluor Daniel Hanford used illegal accounting practices --
and two sets of books -- to inflate their labor costs and pad overhead
expenses for which the federal government reimbursed them.
More than $15 billion has been spent during the past 10 years trying
to understand, contain and clean up Hanford. Five years ago, a top Energy
Department official estimated that one in every three cleanup dollars
sent to the site was wasted. The House Armed Services Committee, which
oversees the cleanup budget, last week asked the General Accounting
Office, Congress' investigative arm, to examine how effectively money
is spent at Hanford. "We've yet to get consistent answers from the DOE,"
said U.S. Rep. Adam Smith, D-Tacoma, who serves on the committee.
http://archives.seattletimes.com/cgi-bin/texis.mummy/web/vortex/display?storyID=3768520550&query=Hanford
RICHARDSON RESISTS SECURITY CHANGES
Newsday – June 15, 1999
The intelligence board, chaired by former Republican Sen. Warren Rudman
of New Hampshire, concluded in a report released late Monday that an
entrenched bureaucracy at the DOE has resisted security and anti-espionage
measures for decades and that even today change is being resisted by
mid-level bureaucrats and a ``culture of arrogance.'' In its scathing
report, the panel said the department was ``incapable of reforming itself''
and that while measures by Energy Secretary Bill Richardson to improve
security were welcomed, there was no assurance they "will gain more
than a toehold'' once Richardson departs.
http://ndsgi1.newsday.com/ap/rnmpwh1f.htm
‘CULTURE OF ARROGANCE’ CITED AT NUCLEAR LABS
USA Today – June 15, 1999
"Perhaps most troubling ... is the evidence that the lab bureaucracies,
after months at the epicenter of an espionage scandal with serious implications
for U.S. foreign policy, are still resisting reforms," the Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board said in its 57-page report formally released Tuesday.
"Organizational disarray, managerial neglect and a culture of arrogance
— both at DOE headquarters and the labs themselves — conspired to create
an espionage scandal waiting to happen," the report said. There was
"a staggering pattern of denial" when it came to security and the growing
threat of espionage from China and other countries, the report said.
To ensure improved safeguards against the theft of nuclear secrets,
the panel suggested two alternatives: create a semiautonomous agency
within the Energy Department with "a clear mission" to maintain the
nuclear weapons program; or, turn responsibility for nuclear weapons
programs, including the labs, over to a new independent agency similar
to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. http://www.msnbc.com/news/280017.asp
'CULTURE OF ARROGANCE'
William Safire, New York Times Op Ed – June 17, 1999
"Saturated with cynicism, an arrogant disregard for authority, and a
staggering pattern of denial . . . organizational disarray, managerial
neglect . . . pervasive inefficiency . . . an abominable record of security
with deeply troubling threats to American national security." "I think
Bill Richardson, who is a fine man," Rudman tells me, "has been seduced
by his own bureaucracy. He says he'll recommend the President veto our
proposed reorganization. But does anybody think Bill Clinton cares if
Congress reorganizes the Department of Energy?"
http://www.nytimes.com/library/opinion/safire/061799safi.html
ENERGY PLANS INTERNET TOOL FOR NUCLEAR CLEANUP RESEARCH
Federal Computer Week -- June 14, 1999
The Energy Department is planning a first-of-its-kind Internet resource
to allow the public to monitor the $6 billion-a-year cleanup of the
nation's nuclear research and weapons facilities. The Central Internet
Database, slated for deployment in January, will integrate six DOE databases
on nuclear waste and provide links to nearly 60 online databases and
reports relating to the department's cleanup activities.
The DOE database was ordered under a court settlement reached last
winter with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), an environmental
group that claimed the department had failed to disclose information
about its cleanup plans. Although some of the information to be included
in the database is already publicly available, some has never been released,
and none of it has been provided through a single, searchable source.
http://www.fcw.com/pubs/fcw/1999/0614/fcw-agcleanup-06-14-99.html
NUCLEAR WASTE: GOVERNORS AGAINST TRANSPORTING IT WEST
The Salt Lake Tribune -- June 16, 1999
Western governors voted 9-2 Tuesday in favor of a resolution calling
for the spent fuel from America's nuclear power plants to be left where
it is rather than be transported to a storage site in the West. The
governors' nonbinding resolution said: "The federal government should
not site such waste in a state for interim storage without written agreement
from the affected states' governors." "The political reality is, [nuclear
waste] is really going to have to stay where it's at," said New Mexico
Gov. Gary Johnson. "No state is going to accept this interim facility
-- it's just not going to happen."
http://www.sltrib.com/1999/jun/06161999/utah/1585.htm
VOTE OPPOSES TEST SITE NUKE STORAGE
Las Vegas Sun -- June 16, 1999
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee abandoned temporary
nuclear waste storage at the Nevada Test Site today, opting to keep
it piled at reactor sites in 34 states. The 14-6 vote would allow nuclear
waste to arrive at the proposed permanent repository at Yucca Mountain
by 2007. In a surprise turn, Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, proposed
keeping 40,000 tons of highly radioactive waste at reactor sites until
the government finishes studies on Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest
of Las Vegas, the only site under study as a permanent repository.
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/1999/jun/16/508935171.html
SENATORS TO LOOK AT OTHER OPTIONS FOR BURYING WASTE
Las Vegas Sun -- June 17, 1999
Key senators have agreed to re-examine the policy of the United States
to bury high-level nuclear waste permanently, most likely 1,000 feet
beneath Yucca Mountain. Sens. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and Harry Reid,
D-Nev., led the way to insert language in a bill passed by a Senate
committee Wednesday that would require a look at alternatives to burying
the nation's nuclear waste 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas by 2010.
The agreement came in new legislation proposed by Sen. Frank Murkowski,
R-Alaska, who pushed to abandon temporary waste storage at the Nevada
Test Site after five years of congressional efforts to pass any measure
failed.
One of the alternatives Domenici has been exploring is transmutation,
which eliminates much of the radiation from the spent uranium and plutonium.
The other is reprocessing, which would make the radioactive waste usable
again as fuel for nuclear power plants. Reprocessing technology was
abandoned in the 1970s because of the cost and fears that the material
could be stolen by terrorists.
A Department of Energy official said last week that transmutation could
take decades to prove its technology. Domenici says the Los Alamos lab
may have working technology within 20 years. In addition, DOE Yucca
Mountain Project Director Russ Dyer said, even if the technology is
proven as "a magic wand that can reduce the volume," it would still
leave piles of radioactive byproducts that would need to be kept out
of the environment for hundreds of years.
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/1999/jun/17/508940578.html
TROJAN NUCLEAR PLANT PLAN UNVEILED
State News Service -- June 16, 1999
Portland General Electric has unveiled its plans to decommission the
Trojan Nuclear Plant. Within the next few weeks, spent fuel rods from
the plant will be removed from a storage pond and placed in large concrete
cylinders where they'll remain until the federal government builds a
high level nuclear waste repository. Last month, the 240-foot long reactor
vessel was filled with concrete and removed from the containment building.
It will be barged to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation for burial later
this year.
http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/news/sns19.htm
NUCLEAR POWER INDUSTRY FACES UNCERTAIN FUTURE The Herald Rock Hill,
SC -- June 14, 1999
But critics say the nuclear power industry faces potential extinction.
British Nuclear Fuels Ltd., in particular, has plenty of detractors
in the anti-nuclear community. Some call the company an environmental
disaster waiting to happen. BNFL has an abysmal environmental history,
especially at its Sellafield plant in England, said Arjun Makhijani,
a scientist with the anti-nuclear Institute for Energy and Environmental
Research. Radioactivity at that site was so high that residents were
warned not to eat pigeons. The plant also released significant amounts
of radioactivity into the neighboring Irish Sea, making it, in the words
of nuclear critic Mariotte, ''the most polluted body of water in the
world.'' David Campbell, a BNFL spokesman, said the problems occurred
in the 1970s under different regulations then in place. In the last
10 years, BNFL has spent $10 billion on environmental cleanups, he said.
http://www.industrywatch.com/story/19990616/01/58/4454590_st.html