China on alert for nuclear accidents after quake

A man searches for victims in the debris of collapsed buildings in earthquake-hit Beichuan County in Mianyang of southwest China's Sichuan province, Friday, May 16, 2008. (AP Photo/Color China Photo)

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BEIJING (AP) — China's nuclear safety agency had ordered staffers to be prepared for an environmental emergency the day after a massive earthquake jolted a region that includes several key atomic sites.

France's nuclear watchdog has said some of China's nuclear facilities sustained minor damage in Monday's magnitude 7.9 earthquake, though no Chinese government Web sites viewed Saturday mentioned any damage.

China's Nuclear and Radiation Safety Center, part of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, activated emergency plans the day after the quake and told all emergency personnel to be on standby in case of nuclear accidents, the center said in an announcement on its Web site.

Officials were in close contact with safety stations throughout the region and were monitoring operational data from nuclear power plants, the undated announcement said. The safety of drinking water was a top priority.

"With the deepening of the relief work, the main task is to prevent secondary environmental disasters and guarantee the safety of the environment in disaster areas," the Ministry of Environmental Protection said in a separate statement Friday.

The French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety said Chinese authorities "reacted well" to the quake and immediately shut down nuclear sites for inspection.

Thierry Charles, the group's director of plant safety, said China's nuclear safety agency, NNSA, had reported no leaks of radioactivity since the quake.

He said Friday the Chinese reported "light damage" to older nuclear facilities that were being dismantled before the quake, noting that seismic construction codes were less strict when those sites were built. China did not specify which facilities had damage, he said.

Phones calls to China's Ministry of Environmental Protection and its Nuclear and Radiation Safety Center went unanswered Saturday. A man who answered the phone at the ministry's Nuclear Safety Department said he had no information.

China has a research reactor, two nuclear fuel production sites and two atomic weapons sites in Sichuan province, where the quake struck, the French agency said. All were 40 to 90 miles from the epicenter.

French authorities do not yet have a full picture of any possible damage at the nuclear weapons sites, where information is more closely guarded, Charles said.

He said he didn't think there were any leaks because it would have been reported and the worst concern was the degradation of buildings.

Nuclear experts said there were several possibilities if any significant damage occurred at the plants, at least one of which is alongside a river. A radioactive leak could cause environmental harm, while internal damage could set back China's nuclear modernization, they said.

Mianyang, an industrial city of 700,000 people that is the headquarters of China's nuclear weapons design industry, was in the disaster area.

A switchboard operator at the site, which has been likened to the U.S. nuclear facility at Los Alamos, N.M., said Saturday that people there were at work.

China's largest plutonium production reactor is also in the quake zone at Guangyuan.

Hans Kristensen, a nuclear arms expert at the Federation of American Scientists, said the Guangyuan reactor is "at the center of China's fissile material production" and damage "would disrupt China's warhead maintenance capabilities.

Matthew Bunn, a senior researcher at Harvard University's Project on Managing the Atom, said the risk of radioactive leaks depended mostly on how the facilities were designed, details of which are known only by the Chinese government.

Associated Press Writers Lily Hindy, Angela Charlton and Foster Klug contributed to this report.

World's Deadliest Weapon

by Gordon Prather

On the 60th anniversary of the establishment, within the Mandate for Palestine, of Israel as a sovereign Jewish state, President Bush told Israel's legislature, that "Permitting the world's leading sponsor of terror to possess the world's deadliest weapon would be an unforgivable betrayal of future generations." Obviously, Bush does not intend to leave office having unforgivably betrayed future generations. And, presumably, Bush was not referring to Israel, arguably the leading sponsor of terror in the Middle East. So, apparently – if one assumes Bush considers a nuclear weapon to be the "world's deadliest weapon" – betrayal would mean his accepting at face value the reports of Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency that virtually all the West's concerns – set forth in an Iran-IAEA "work plan" signed last August – about Iran's IAEA Safeguarded programs have now been addressed and resolved. Iran – as required by the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons – entered into a Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA "for the exclusive purpose" of enabling the IAEA to "verify" that no "source or special fissionable materials" had been diverted "from peaceful purposes to nuclear weapons." The IAEA is routinely – but falsely – described by neo-crazy media sycophants as being the United Nation's "nuclear watchdog," responsible for determining whether an NPT signatory is in compliance or noncompliance with the NPT. In fact, the IAEA has no such responsibility. The IAEA was established as a UN agency almost twenty before the NPT came along and took advantage of the IAEA's existing capabilities, and as the IAEA Statute makes clear, the IAEA's principal mission is to "enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity throughout the world." The IAEA Statute does require the IAEA – in the course of carrying out its primary mission – to "ensure, so far as it is able" that activities over which it has some purview are "not used in such a way as to further any military purpose." In the event the IAEA Director-General has reason to believe a country is not in satisfactory compliance with its Safeguards Agreement – perhaps not implementing to the Director-General's satisfaction some health or safety regulation – he is required to report that noncompliance – if not corrected – to the IAEA Board, and to the UN General Assembly. However, contrary to reports by various neo-crazy media sycophants – such as Reuters – noncompliance with an IAEA Safeguards Agreement is not tantamount to noncompliance with the NPT. In fact, whether a signatory is complying with the NPT or not is none of the IAEA's beeswax. Since 1958, IAEA's principal mission vis a vis Iran is supposed to have been to assist the Iranians acquire and safely employ atomic energy for peaceful purposes. Furthermore, since 1968 the NPT has required that "parties in a position to do so" – such as the United States – "shall" contribute "to the further development of the applications of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes," especially in non-nuclear-weapons NPT signatory states such as Iran. So, at least since the early 1990s – following the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War and Bush the Elder's ejection of Iraqi invasion forces from Kuwait – the United States and the IAEA Board of Governors should have been doing everything they could to help Iran secure its "inalienable rights" under the NPT and IAEA Statute. Instead, The-Best-Congress-Money-Can-Buy and our Presidents have done everything they could to prevent Iran's even resuming the peaceful nuclear energy projects begun with US assistance under the Shah. ElBaradei included in his report last November the Iranian-supplied justification for the secretive manner in which they have pursued the civilian nuclear power fuel-cycle, which both the IAEA Statute and the NPT assure them is their inalienable right. "According to Iran, in its early years, the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) concluded a number of contracts with entities from France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States of America to enable it to acquire nuclear power and a wide range of related nuclear fuel cycle services, but after the 1979 revolution, these contracts with a total value of around $10 billion were not fulfilled. "Iran noted that one of the contracts, signed in 1976, was for the development of a pilot plant for laser enrichment. "Senior Iranian officials said that, in the mid-1980s, Iran started working with many countries to revitalize its nuclear program to meet the State's growing energy needs. Taking advantage of investments already made, Iran said it focused its efforts initially on the completion of the Bushehr nuclear power plant, working with entities from, inter alia, Argentina, France, Germany and Spain, but without success. "At that time, Iran also initiated efforts to acquire research reactors from Argentina, China, India and the former Soviet Union, but also without success. "Parallel to the activities related to nuclear power plants, Iran started to build supporting infrastructure by establishing nuclear technology centers in Esfahan and Karaj. "However, apart from uranium conversion technology acquired from an entity in China, Iran was not able to acquire other nuclear fuel cycle facilities or technology from abroad." So, in the mid-1980s Iran embarked upon the secretive – but not illegal under its existing Safeguards Agreement or under the NPT or international law – peaceful nuclear program it has been revealing, in confidence, to ElBaradei. In his most recent report ElBaradei was "able to continue to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran." Even for those nuclear "weaponization" studies that Bush and the Brits-French-Germans allege that Iran had conducted, ElBaradei noted that "the Agency has not detected the use of nuclear material in connection with the alleged studies, nor does it have credible information in this regard." Of course, it's possible that Bush doesn't consider accepting ElBaradei's assurances that Iran's IAEA Safeguarded nuclear programs are totally peaceful an unforgivable betrayal to future generations after all. In that case, imagine the Israelis trying to figure out what the man – adjudged by John McCain to be "dumb as a stump" – was talking about.

S.C. officials watch nuclear case

Foreign waste may be allowed at dump

By Sammy Fretwell - McClatchy Newspapers

Nuclear waste officials are closely watching a federal court case to see if it could allow for burial of foreign radioactive garbage at South Carolina's atomic refuse dump in Barnwell County.

Energy Solutions Inc., which operates landfills in South Carolina and Utah, insists it won't send Italian nuclear waste to the 37-year-old landfill west of Barnwell under a company plan to import waste to the United States.

But the company has challenged eight Western states in their attempt to block disposal of the foreign waste in Utah.

If Energy Solutions convinces the court that the Western states can't legally stop Italian waste shipments to Utah, it also might gain the right to use the S.C. landfill, experts say.

The Barnwell County dump, one of only three of its kind in the country, is governed by the same law that led the Western states to limit nuclear waste in Utah.

After years of rancorous debate, Barnwell County's landfill is scheduled to close July 1 to all states except South Carolina, Connecticut and New Jersey. The last thing South Carolina needs is foreign waste at the landfill, said Ben Johnson, who leads the Atlantic Compact, which oversees the S.C. dump.

"There are a couple of issues in that suit that if adopted by higher appellate courts, would definitely impact" the Barnwell County landfill, he said. "It would be a shame ... to have that site filled up with foreign waste and rendered useless for our own needs."

The Barnwell County landfill has been a source of tension in South Carolina since it opened in 1971. It has left a trail of groundwater pollution that, in some places, rivals that of the nearby Savannah River Site nuclear weapons complex. Waste sent to the landfill comes largely from nuclear power plants.

Opponents of the S.C. landfill tried for years to shutter the facility until Gov. Jim Hodges brokered a deal in 2000 to limit access by mid-2008.

Johnson and Atlantic Compact Commissioner Jill Lipoti said Wednesday the Energy Solutions lawsuit can't be ignored. Lipoti, who represents New Jersey on the compact, said her state reserved space for decommissioned nuclear reactors as part of the 2000 law - and she expects that space to remain available.

"We don't want any action to change that," she said.

Energy Solutions' plan is to import about 1 million cubic feet of low-level nuclear waste from Italy through either Charleston or New Orleans.

The material then would be shipped to a processing plant in Tennessee, with leftover waste being hauled to Utah for disposal, the company has said. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is considering an import license.

Six Years On, Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository

	Six Years On, Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository Slowly Moves Forward
	Energy Department officials confirmed this week that they plan to submit an application in June to license the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump as the nation's first spent-nuclear fuel repository.
	The move comes decades after the department first began studying the site, and six years after President Bush approved its development. The project has spent those years mired in lawsuits and beset by controversy over its safety and environmental effects. "We're in a holding pattern," said Gayle Fisher, spokeswoman for the department's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, which manages the site. "Construction has stopped, and most of the site has been shut down." Located in the Nevada desert about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Yucca Mountain would be the only permanent nuclear waste storage facility in the United States. Right now, the 56,000 tons of that waste that already exist are temporarily stored at 126 sites across the nation. Each year, nuclear power plants generate approximately 2,000 more tons of waste. Spent nuclear fuel rods contain highly radioactive elements that remain hazardous for many thousands of years. When removed from a reactor, the waste must first be cooled in a pool of water for months or years. Once cooled, the waste is moved to dry-storage bunkers made of concrete and steel. But these aboveground storage facilities are not designed to withstand weather and environmental factors for the thousands of years the waste will remain hazardous. As far back as the 1950s, scientists recommended that nuclear waste be permanently stored in deep underground storage facilities. The Department of Energy began evaluating Yucca Mountain's suitability as a storage site in 1978, and in 2002 President Bush approved legislation to build the repository there. But critics of the plan, including the state of Nevada, have mounted challenges ever since, filing a series of lawsuits against the federal government. Two grievances challenged the Department of Energy's guidelines and environmental impact statement. Another claimed that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission illegally revised regulations to develop Yucca Mountain. The state also contested the Environmental Protection Agency's exposure standards for residents near Yucca Mountain, saying that the amount of exposure EPA deemed acceptable was unsafe. In 2004, the U.S. Court of Appeals dismissed all of Nevada's cases except that against the EPA. The court said the agency's 10,000-year regulatory standard limit ran counter to recommendations from the National Academy of Science that found that the material could be hazardous much longer than that. The EPA revised their guideline, requiring the site to maintain low nuclear exposure limits up to 1 million years after Yucca Mountain is closed. Some critics believe this new rule will preclude the Yucca Mountain Project from ever opening. Yucca Mountain's opponents in Congress have also stymied the project by cutting its funding. In 2008 Congress refused to fully fund the Energy Department's $494.5 million budget request for Yucca Mountain, decreasing the amount to $386.5 million. As a result, the Yucca Mountain Program laid off 900 employees. "Yucca is a politically-charged issue," said Energy Department spokeswoman Angela Hill, "and as a result Congress has not appropriated at our request." The department is looking at other possible funding, she said, including a pool of funds from the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act that required all nuclear producers to pay for waste disposal. The Nuclear Waste Fund's current balance is approximately $20 billion dollars. "Due to a complicated loophole, the Yucca Program does not have access to this fund," said Hill. The DOE has petitioned Congress to change the legislation granting the project access to the fund. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., is one of Yucca Mountain's most ardent opponents. Vowing that the repository "is never going to open," Reid was instrumental in the project's $108 million budget cut. Reid writes on his Web site: "The Department of Energy has used science that is incomplete, unsound, and riddled with politics to sell this dead-end proposal, and Nevadans are not convinced." As Yucca Mountain remains idle, the amount of nuclear waste in the United States continues to increase. In April, Frank Moussa, supervisor of the DOE's intergovernmental operations department, said at a public meeting that if and when Yucca Mountain opens, it will not be able to hold the total amount of nuclear waste in the United States. Although Yucca Mountain could have the capacity to store 120,000 tons of waste, according to the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the repository can store only 70,000 metric tons. The legislation would have to be amended in order to expand the storage capability of Yucca. The DOE introduced legislation in 2006 requesting the statutory limit be lifted, and also plans to report to Congress on the need for a second repository later this year, according to Hill. In the meantime, Nevada continues to battle the Yucca Mountain project. Bob Loux, Director of Nevada's Agency for Nuclear Projects, said, "The DOE is engineering this to be a repository site instead of looking at the science that proves Yucca should be disqualified as a nuclear storage site. It has obvious scientific and technical flaws that cannot be overcome." "Our science is sound," responded Yucca spokesman Allen Benson. "Our tests are thorough and complete." The Department of Energy plans to submit its licensing application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by June 30, 2008. The NRC will have three to four years to review the application for approval. Loux says Nevada is planning lawsuits against the licensing application and the accompanying environmental impact statement. If the NRC approves construction, Yucca Mountain's earliest opening date would be 2017. ---- By Katie Mulik, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

Official Urged Fewer Diagnoses of PTSD

by Christopher Lee

A psychologist who helps lead the post-traumatic stress disorder program at a medical facility for veterans in Texas told staff members to refrain from diagnosing PTSD because so many veterans were seeking government disability payments for the condition.

“Given that we are having more and more compensation seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest that you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out,” Norma Perez wrote in a March 20 e-mail to mental-health specialists and social workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Olin E. Teague Veterans’ Center in Temple, Tex. Instead, she recommended that they “consider a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder.”

VA staff members “really don’t . . . have time to do the extensive testing that should be done to determine PTSD,” Perez wrote.

Adjustment disorder is a less severe reaction to stress than PTSD and has a shorter duration, usually no longer than six months, said Anthony T. Ng, a psychiatrist and member of Mental Health America, a nonprofit professional association.

Veterans diagnosed with PTSD can be eligible for disability compensation of up to $2,527 a month, depending on the severity of the condition, said Alison Aikele, a VA spokeswoman. Those found to have adjustment disorder generally are not offered such payments, though veterans can receive medical treatment for either condition.

Perez’s e-mail was obtained and released publicly yesterday by VoteVets.org, a veterans group that has been critical of the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonprofit government watchdog group.

“Many veterans believe that the government just doesn’t want to pay out the disability that comes along with a PTSD diagnosis, and this revelation will not allay their concerns,” John Soltz, chairman of VoteVets.org and an Iraq war veteran, said in a statement.

Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW, said in a statement: “It is outrageous that the VA is calling on its employees to deliberately misdiagnose returning veterans in an effort to cut costs. Those who have risked their lives serving our country deserve far better.”

Veterans Affairs Secretary James B. Peake said in a statement that Perez’s e-mail was “inappropriate” and does not reflect VA policy. It has been “repudiated at the highest level of our health care organization,” he said.

“VA’s leadership will strongly remind all medical staff that trust, accuracy and transparency is paramount to maintaining our relationships with our veteran patients,” Peake said.

Peake said Perez has been “counseled” and is “extremely apologetic.” Aikele said Perez remains in her job.

A Rand Corp. report released in April found that repeated exposure to combat stress in Iraq and Afghanistan is causing a disproportionately high psychological toll compared with physical injuries. About 300,000 U.S. military personnel who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan are suffering from PTSD or major depression, the study found. The economic cost to the United States — including medical care, forgone productivity and lost lives through suicide — is expected to reach $4 billion to $6 billion over two years.

Ng said diagnosing PTSD often requires observing a patient for weeks or months because the condition implies a long, lingering effect of stress.

“Most people exposed to trauma, in general, can get better,” Ng said. “You don’t want to over-diagnose people with PTSD. Whether it’s adjustment disorder is one thing. It’s usually a temporary disorder with severity that is not as bad as someone with full-blown PTSD.”

© 2008 The Washington Post