Livermore lab fails terror test

By Betsy Mason
Contra Costa Times

Article Launched: 05/13/2008 07:14:26 PM PDT

Lawrence Livermore Laboratory's protective force failed to deter a mock terrorist attack during a recent security drill, according to a Time magazine report online Monday.

During the simulated night-time attack several weeks ago, a team posing as terrorists was able to defeat the lab's defenses and get hold of their target of pretend nuclear material, according to unnamed sources.

Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the lab for the Department of Energy, told the Times that the initial results of the inspection were "disappointing."

But he noted that the simulated attacking force was given insider information and other advantages that "would be highly improbable in a real world scenario.

"While we have security measures in place that are working, in a number of cases they can be improved upon, and the system pointed that out," he said.

Four of the areas of the lab's security that were inspected during a routine, seven-week independent audit conducted by the Department of Energy's Office of Health, Safety and Security during April and March were rated as "effective performance," and four needed improvement.

The lab has taken action to fix problems uncovered by the inspection, said lab spokeswoman Susan Houghton.

"We've added officers, reassigned personnel, and we have accelerated our training from quarterly to daily," she said.

No nuclear material or sensitive information was ever at risk, Houghton said.

A DOE official familiar with the mock attack said that the Time report was exaggerated.

The attacking force did reach their objective, he said, and the defenders did not do as well as they could have in some areas, but the attack was unrealistic.

For one, the simulation started at the fence line of the plutonium facility known as Superblock, already well inside lab property, he said. The attack team was made up of security officers from other DOE sites and was allowed to haul in equipment, including ATVs and mock explosives.

Some members of the attack team were even positioned inside rooms in the Superblock, as if they had already cut fences, blown up walls and avoided guards. The mock attackers were also treated to a walkthrough ahead of the exercise.

"They knew exactly what was there, how to get to certain places and where the defenders would be," said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It just wouldn't happen in real life."

The whole point of the force-on-force test is to really stress the system and hit the pressure points, he said.

"Things don't run perfectly in a force-on-force," he said. "That's not the point. You want to see where the stress points are. That's why you do it."

Among the problems highlighted by the Time magazine report was the failure of one of the lab's powerful Gatling guns, capable of firing 4,000 rounds per minute, to get into firing position due to problems with a hydraulic system.

The guns were added to the lab's arsenal in 2006 to bolster its ability to protect the weapons-grade plutonium and highly-enriched uranium.

"Failing an exercise like a mock terrorist attack highlights serious and unacceptable security shortcomings," said Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Alamo. "I have insisted that the plutonium housed at Livermore be consolidated and moved away from Livermore to a safe location away from population centers as soon as possible."

In March, the National Nuclear Security Administration said it was on track to remove the plutonium from the Livermore lab by 2012, in part to reduce security costs by consolidating special nuclear materials at fewer sites.

National Nuclear Security Administration director Thomas D'Agostino told the Times that it makes sense to move Livermore's plutonium to its sister nuclear weapons lab in New Mexico because "you don't have communities growing up around Los Alamos."

The 2012 goal is two years earlier than the previous plan, but critics still think the plutonium can and should be moved sooner.

"We think this should be the DOE's highest priority," said Marylia Kelley of Livermore-based watchdog group Tri-Valley CAREs.

Kelley believes the plutonium could be safely packaged and removed by 2010, perhaps even by the end of 2009.

The recent security test "shows that the nuclear materials at Livermore lab isn't secure and cannot be made secure," she said.

Questions about uranium

By DUSTIN BLEIZEFFER
Star-Tribune energy reporter

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Ranchers and rural residents in northeast Wyoming say they've seen the brochure on how uranium producers perform in-situ leach mining. What they don't know is how it's going to work in their neighborhood, with the soils and aquifers under their homes.

Some say they're also unsure about how reliable producers are when it comes to self-monitoring, and whether state regulators are prepared to properly oversee a pending rush on in-situ uranium mining in the state.

The Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality has fielded numerous questions in recent weeks following a recent report documenting a long history of violations at Cameco Corp.'s Smith Ranch-Highland in-situ uranium mine in Converse County.

The in-situ mining process involves a series of closely spaced wells that flush uranium material through water aquifers.

Wilma Tope ranches with her husband in northeastern Crook County. She said the failures at Cameco's Smith Ranch-Highland mine are cause for concern regarding both the industry itself and the agencies that are supposed to regulate it.

"The water testing, the reporting, everything is self-monitored. And with Smith Ranch-Highland, it didn't work very well, so we know our concerns are founded," Tope said.

Based on a high volume of interest and the potential for significant uranium activity in northeast Wyoming, DEQ officials scheduled a public meeting in Sundance. The meeting is set for 6 p.m. May 28 in the basement of the Crook County Courthouse.

"It's time to get out there and talk to people," said Don McKenzie, DEQ Land Quality Division administrator.

Tope and several other northeast Wyoming residents recently organized a group called Ranchers and Neighbors Protecting Our Water, in affiliation with the Powder River Basin Resource Council. She said Powertech Uranium Corp., and possibly other uranium producers, have acquired extensive lease acreages in northern Crook County, and test drilling is already under way.

"Our goal is to educate people about the process of in-situ mining and possibility of leaking and other dangers," Tope said.

People also want to know which water aquifers might be targeted for uranium in-situ leach mining. Based on the failures of DEQ's oversight at the Smith Ranch-Highland mine, bonding levels may need to be increased and DEQ may need to add more staff, Tope said.

"These are questions we'd like answered," she said. "We need baseline (groundwater) testing -- that way if something goes awry, we have proof of what our water quality was beforehand."

Violations

McKenzie said that despite regulatory violations at the Smith Ranch-Highland mine, DEQ can assure the public there's been no groundwater contamination from the mine. That's based largely on monitoring information provided by Cameco itself. However, DEQ has taken its own samples from the mine's monitoring wells throughout the years, according to the agency.

"There's always been monitoring," McKenzie said.

He said the biggest issue at Smith Ranch-Highland was that Cameco delayed aquifer remediation in several instances -- as long as a decade in some cases. Those aquifers were not completely abandoned and ignored, but they simply were not treated and reclaimed in a prudent amount of time, he said.

DEQ spokesman Keith Guille said the agency can collect dual samples from monitoring wells to be analyzed in separate labs. He said that has been done at Smith Ranch-Highland in the past, and remains an option for future monitoring efforts.

In light of the Smith Ranch-Highland report, DEQ said it would ask Cameco to increase its reclamation bonding to $80 million.

Cameco spokesman Gord Struthers said the company would comply and increase its bonding to that amount, but said that Cameco is still working out the details with DEQ.

Cameco is in the process of meeting several requirements set forth in a notice of violation issued by DEQ in March, including the addition of staff to oversee remediation and monitoring activities at Smith Ranch-Highland.

"We had two good meetings with DEQ. They were both positive and constructive," Struthers said.

Energy reporter Dustin Bleizeffer can be reached at (307) 577-6069 or dustin.bleizeffer@trib.com.

Nuclear waste foe sought burial at Yucca Mountain

STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Joe Egan Attorney, who died May 7, wrote waste would be "buried here only over my dead body" -- Combative to the end, the attorney who led Nevada's legal fight against nuclear waste said his ashes would be scattered at Yucca Mountain.

In an obituary he wrote before he died on May 7, Joe Egan said he arranged for his remains "to be spread across the volcanic terrain."

The scattering, he wrote, would be accompanied by a eulogy: "Radwaste buried here only over my dead body."

Egan, 53, died of gastro-esophageal cancer, his family said, after he battled the disease for more than two years. A memorial Mass and a remembrance service are scheduled for May 22

Egan was Nevada's lead attorney since 2001 in lawsuits against the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. The obituary is posted at www.nuclearlawyer.com, the Web site of the firm, Egan, Fitzpatrick & Malsch, PLLC.

A spokesman for the firm said when or how Egan's wishes would be carried out was unclear. The Department of Energy, which controls access to the Yucca Mountain site, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, had no comment.

Playing Russian roulette with our children's health

Brian Moench

Article Last Updated: 05/09/2008 09:10:52 PM MDT

Click photo to enlarge

Brian Moench

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Despite opposition from Gov. Jon Huntsman and Rep. Jim Matheson, EngergySolutions now plans to use thse courts to force-feed Italian nuclear waste to Utahns.
Meanwhile, more nuclear threats have emerged. State legislators are planning to bring us nuclear reactors, and for the past eight months an incinerator has been showering radioactivity on homes in Layton with barely a public wimper.
EnergySolutions may have failed in strong-arming Huntsman and Matheson, but their PR department may have succeeded in neutering citizen outrage over exposing us all to more radiation. How quickly we forget.
In the 1940s some of the world's premier nuclear scientists saw mounting evidence that there was no safe level of exposure to nuclear radiation. This led Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb, to oppose development of the hydrogen bomb.
In the 1950s, Linus Pauling, the only two-time winner of the Nobel Prize, began warning the public about exposure to all radiation. In the 1960s, Drs. John Gofman, Arthur Tamplin, Alice Stewart, Thomas Mancuso and Karl Morgan, all researchers for the Atomic Energy Commission or the Department of Energy, independently came to the conclusion that exposure to nuclear radiation was not safe at any level.
The government terminated their services for coming up with what Dr. Gofman has called the "wrong answer" - that is, the opposite of what the AEC wanted to hear. The top Russian nuclear physicist in the 1960s, Andrei Sakharov, also a Nobel Prize winner, and Vladimir Chernousenko, who the Soviet Union placed in charge of the Chernobyl cleanup, are among other international experts who drew similar conclusions.
Government radiation standards have been based on supposedly acceptable levels of exposure for adults. But it is the embryo, the weakest link in the chain of life, for whom these standards are absurdly inadequate.
As with DDT and many other toxic agents, it is not the amount of radiation distributed throughout the environment that is so serious, it is the timing of exposure, the selective concentration in the food chain and ultimately in the organs of the developing embryo, that accounts for the toxicity. A single pelvic X-ray of a mother in early pregnancy can double the risk of her baby developing cancer.
Even very low levels of risk per individual have immense consequences in the aggregate. When low risk is permitted for billions of people there will still be millions of victims.
Many epidemiologic studies show that extremely low levels of radiation exposure increase the incidence of childhood cancers, low birth weight, premature births, infant mortality, birth defects and even diminished intelligence.
By damaging proteins anywhere in a living cell, radiation can accelerate the aging process and diminish the function of any organ system. But when the damage occurs in the nucleus of a germ cell the human gene pool is at risk.
The future of humankind is present today within the bodies of living people, animals and plants - the whole seedbearing biosphere. Chromosomal damage to all these organisms not only underlies adverse health outcomes now but can be passed on to subsequence generations.
The full extent of the consequences may not be manifest for decades or even for multiple generations. There has never been a comparable threat to public health.
Much of contaminated nuclear material is simply unsafe unless we can guarantee isolation from human exposure for hundreds of thousands of years. The events of the past week are a vivid illustration of the fact that we can't even guarantee isolation for a few decades. Radiation escapes into the environment at every stage of the nuclear fuel cycle including from properly functioning nuclear power plants.
If these scientists are correct, we are not only playing Russian roulette with our own health, but we are forcing our children and all subsequence generations to do the same.
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* BRIAN MOENCH is a Salt Lake physician and founder of Utah Physicians for Clean Air.

Hitting a Nuclear Roadblock

Friday, May. 09, 2008 By KATE PICKERT

A uranium tailings pile near Moab, Utah.

Peter Essick / Aurora / Getty

Steve Creamer wants to talk about saving the world. The CEO of EnergySolutions, a nuclear power cleanup and disposal company, says it's his personal mission to help usher in the "nuclear renaissance," an era he says is coming on the heels of the carbon emission dark ages. Creamer has spent the past three years amassing a near monopoly on low-level radioactive waste (LLRW) management in the U.S. His company now handles 99% of such waste, which includes contaminated clothing, equipment residue from reactor water and other materials. After acquiring eight companies and putting them under the Utah-based EnergySolutions umbrella, Creamer took the company public last November. Revenues for 2007 were just over $1 billion, but are expected to climb this year.

But Creamer's "renaissance" is the kind others don't want in their backyard. EnergySolutions had been, for the most part, operating under the national radar — until news of the company's plans to import 20,000 tons of LLRW from Italy hit the local Utah media late last year and the national media shortly afterward. EnergySolutions had hoped to process the waste at a Tennessee facility and deposit 1,600 tons of it into the company's radioactive waste landfill in Clive, Utah. But now a torrent of opposition has come up against that plan.

Local newspapers ran editorials opposing it. Utah Congressman Jim Matheson co-sponsored legislation that would stop LLRW importation altogether. And then came what may have been the deathblow. As public pressure mounted, Utah governor Jon Huntsman, who initially supported the plan, vowed to quash it. He ordered the state's representative to a multi-state compact that oversees LLRW disposal to vote against it. The company has since filed a federal lawsuit arguing that the compact does not have authority over the Utah landfill. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will ultimately approve or deny the application

EnergySolutions has invested heavily in reputation-building, including millions for naming rights to the basketball stadium that hosts the Utah Jazz. The company has also contributed to Senators and Congressman who wield power over the nuclear industry. EnergySolutions spent more than $1 million on lobbying in 2007 and its political action committees have donated more than $145,000 to House and Senate campaigns since 2005. (The company has operations in South Carolina and its political action committees and employees have given at least $45,800 to that state's senior Senator Lindsey Graham since 2005.) In Utah, the EnergySolutions Inc. Fund for Effective Government contributed $5,000 to Matheson in the 2005-2006 cycle and $1,000 so far in the 2007-2008 cycle. That seems to have been for naught. Matheson now declares that EnergySolutions wants to make Utah a "dumping ground."

Creamer says EnergySolutions has no plans to import foreign LLRW "wholesale" from Europe and pledged to limit its foreign intake in Utah to 5% of the facility's capacity. Still, says EnergySolutions senior vice president Jill Sigal, "If there are isolated instances where we can help other countries... that's something that would have to be considered." That hedging is at odds with a recent annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission that makes clear that the company defines its mission as a global enterprise. "Internationally, as countries endeavor to expand nuclear power generation, many seek to address the clean-up associated with legacy nuclear infrastructure. With our major presence in the U.S. and Europe we are in an excellent position to benefit from that trend." The report also says EnergySolutions' "business would suffer" if applications like the one in question were not granted.

EnergySolutions is not the first company to ask permission to bring waste into the U.S. In the past ten years, LLRW shipments have come in from Canada, Ukraine and Germany. The Italian shipment, however, would be several times larger than any that have come in before. EnergySolutions refused to say how much a contract for the Italian waste would be worth, and it's difficult to estimate, given that EnergySolutions would charge by the cubic foot, not by weight, and international rates for LLRW disposal vary widely.

EnergySolutions says there are no alternate sites for the Italian waste, which is why the company will exhaust all possibilities before giving up on its application, which cost $19,600 to file. The company hopes to open landfills for radioactive waste in Europe, profiting from what Creamer hopes will be a massive rollout of new nuclear power plants there and throughout the world. EnergySolutions has significant operations in Britain. About 50% of the company's revenues come from business in the U.K., where it manages 22 nuclear reactors, 18 of which are currently in the decommissioning phase. The waste from the decommissioning will remain in a landfill owned by the British government.

"It's been an amazing time, because three years ago when we started this, we thought we would build a company that would shut down the nuclear industry in America," he says, believing he'd make his money from the decommissioning of existing power plants. Then the business plan changed with global warming and the search for alternative, non-carbon based sources of power. Says Creamer: "Luck's better than skill any time."

Creamer now talks passionately about his belief that nuclear is the only option with enough potential to power the world. He stresses that cleaning up after nuclear power is the responsibility not just of individual countries, but the global community as a whole. He points to global warming. "If we burn up, it's not just going to be America that burns up — it's going to be the whole world that burns up, " he says. "We think the only way you're going to build new nuclear power plants is if we take the responsibility and the stewardship to take care of the past... If America's going to lead, we have to have a position in this industry." And leading the industry would be his Utah-based, world-reaching conglomerate. Now, Creamer just has to get that problem in Utah fixed.