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abolition-usa-digest     Monday, February 8 1999     Volume 01 : Number 073




----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 18:11:52 -0800 (PST)
From: Timothy Bruening <[e-mail]>
Subject: (abolition-usa) Re: Good news from Russia

At 12:46 PM 5/18/98 +0100, you wrote:
>Dear Abolitionists,
>
>Ex-General Alexander Lebed has comfortably won the election for Governor of
>the rich, strategic Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk. He polled 57% against
>38% for the establishment-backed incumbent, Valery Zubov. The UK Guardian
>Moscow correspondent James Meek reports that this "will provide a secure
>rear base from which the General can launch an assault on the Kremlin in
>presidential elections in 2000."
>
>The point of my highlighting this is that Lebed was one of the 61
>signatories of the Generals' & Admirals' Statement for the Abolition of
>Nuclear Weapons! He also negotiated Russia's withdrawal from Chechnya.

However, I recently read that Lebed no longer favors nuclear disarmament.


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------------------------------

Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 18:36:24 -0800 (PST)
From: Timothy Bruening <[e-mail]>
Subject: (abolition-usa) Letter to Doug Ose On Reducing Government Waste

Below is a letter I wrote to Representative Doug Ose (R-CA, 3rd
Congressional District):

Dear Representative Doug Ose:

To help you in your crusade to eliminate government waste, I offer you the
following suggestions for reducing waste in the military:

I. Cut $418.8 million for 6 C-130's made in Georgia, added by Congress to
the Pentagon's request last year.

II. Cut $50 million for the LHD-8 helicopter carrier made in Mississippi,
also added by Congress to the Pentagon's request.

III. Cut $25 million for an F-16 C/D made in Texas, also added to the
Pentagon's request by Congress.

IV. Allow the Pentagon to close unneeded military bases.  Set up a base
closing commission to impartially develop a list of bases to be closed, then
require that Congress vote up or down on that list.  This method has
succeeded in the past.

Adding military pork to the Pentagon's budget makes it more difficult to
improve military readiness.  Therefore, I urge you to oppose military pork
as vigorously as you oppose pork in other areas of government.

Sincerely,

Timothy Bruening
1439 Brown Drive
Davis, CA 95616


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------------------------------

Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 18:36:27 -0800 (PST)
From: Timothy Bruening <[e-mail]>
Subject: (abolition-usa) Letter to Doug Ose On Reducing Government Waste and Nuclear Weapons

Below is another letter I wrote to Representative Doug Ose (R-CA, 3rd
Congressional District):

Dear Representative Doug Ose:

To help you in your crusade to eliminate government waste, I urge you to
press for a reduction in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

In recent months, both the U.S. and Russian militaries have recommended
reducing nuclear arsenals to save billions of dollars (and trillions of
rubles).

The New York Times reported on November 23, 1998 that "Pentagon officials
are quietly recommending that the Clinton Administration consider unilateral
reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal."  Reducing the U.S. nuclear arsenal
would save money, which could be used to boost troop readiness.  Over the
past two years, the Pentagon has spent $95 million on weapons which would
have been dismantled under START II (stalled in the Duma for the past 6
years), which would reduce the 2 nations' nuclear arsenals to 3,000 to 3,500
warheads each.  This year, the extra cost will be $100 million.  The Navy
will pay over $5 billion between now and 2003 to refuel nuclear reactors and
install new missiles on four Trident subs slated for dismantling under START
II.  Implementing START II could save taxpayers $6.3 billion between now and
2008, and reducing nuclear warheads to the 1,000 (still more than enough to
blow any nation to kingdom come) anticipated in START III would save even
more.  Moreover, reducing the arsenal would make it unnecessary to produce
tritium (at a cost of $9.5 billion over the next 40 years), since tritium
could be recycled from dismantled warheads.

However, a law passed by Congress prevents the military from reducing the
U.S. arsenal to under 6,000 warheads.  Please sponsor legislation to repeal
that law so that the Pentagon can save $6.3 billion by reducing our arsenal
to START II levels.

I believe that now is the time to push for nuclear arms reductions because
Russia can no longer afford to maintain its arsenal of several thousand
warheads, due to the Russian economic crisis (according to a report released
in October by Deputy Prime Minister Maslyudov).  Russia can only afford a
few hundred nuclear warheads.  Therefore, the Maslyudov report urges that
START II be ratified and that negotiations on START III begin.  Meanwhile,
the Russian military is pressing the Duma to ratify START II, so that the
U.S. will reduce its nuclear arsenal to a level Russia can match.

I believe that, as Senator Kerry says, we should go "as low as the Russians
are willing to go."  Therefore, I urge you to press Clinton for immediate
sharp reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal to save money and reduce the
risk of nuclear war.  I also urge you to urge Clinton to begin immediate
negotiations to drastically reduce Russian and U.S. nuclear arsenals, also
urge Clinton to reduce the risk of an accidental nuclear war (caused by the
infamous Y2K bug or by other problems) by taking our missiles off alert, by
removing the warheads from their delivery vehicles, and by calling on Russia
to do the same to its nuclear missiles.

Sincerely,

Timothy Bruening
1439 Brown Drive
Davis, CA 95616


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------------------------------

Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 23:49:36 -0600 (CST)
From: [e-mail]
Subject: (abolition-usa) Fwd: Sustainable Energy Coalition: "Weekly Update"

- ------Begin forward message-------------------------

Return-Path: <[e-mail]>
From: SUN DAY Campaign <[e-mail]>
To: "'Sustainable Energy Coalition: Weekly Update - List'"
     <[e-mail]>
Subject: Sustainable Energy Coalition: "Weekly Update"
Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 09:12:13 -0500

SUSTAINABLE ENERGY COALITION
"WEEKLY UPDATE"
February 7, 1999

The articles provided below were initially compiled during the past week by the
SUN DAY Campaign (ph. 301-270-2258; fax: [phone]) for the 36 member
organizations of the Sustainable Energy Coalition (list available upon request).

Feel free to distribute this newsletter to others. In addition, please let us know
of other U.S. organizations, businesses, or government agencies that would
like to be added to the e-mail list for this publication. This newsletter is
presently sent to over 700 organizations nationwide.

If you want any of the items we have offered to fax, please provide a number for
a dedicated, 24-hour fax line.


FEDERAL ENERGY BUDGET

1.) Fiscal Year 2000 Budget Request:

The Administration's Fiscal Year 2000 (FY'00) budget request for the U.S.
Department of Energy (DOE) totals $15.76 billion - an increase of $212 million
over FY'99.

RENEWABLE ENERGY:  The budget includes $389.9 million for renewables
compared to $336.0 million in FY'99 and a Sustainable Energy Coalition
proposal of $517.2 million. The major renewable energy accounts are as
follows: Solar Buildings - $5.5 M (FY'99-$3.6 M); Solar Thermal - $18.9 M
(FY'99-$17.0 M); Photovoltaics - $$93.3 M (FY'99-$72.2 M); Wind - $45.6 M
(FY'99 - $34.7 M); Biomass - $39.8 M (FY'99 - 31.2 M); Biofuels - $53.4 M
(FY'99 - $42.0 M); Geothermal - $29.5 M (FY'99 - $28.5 M); Hydropower - $7.0
M (FY'99 - $3.3 M).  Let us know if you would like us to fax you a copy of a 1-
page release from the National Hydropower Association or a 2-page release
from the American Wind Energy Association on their respective budget increases.

All renewable energy accounts were increased except for the Renewable
Energy Production Incentive (FY'99 - $4.0 M; FY'00 - $1.5 M; Coal'n - $20.0
M); National Renewable Energy Laboratory (FY'99 - $3.9 M; FY'00 - $1.1 M;
Coal'n - $14.7 M); and International Solar (FY'99 - $6.4 M; FY'00 - $6.0 M;
Coal'n - $0.0 M). The American Public Power Association has "raised a
ruckus" about the cut in REPI funding and reports that DOE officials now
acknowledge that they "screwed up" and will work to remedy the situation.

ENERGY EFFICIENCY: The FY'00 budget request includes $837.5 million for
energy efficiency compared to $691.7 million in FY'99 and a Sustainable
Energy Coalition proposal of $900.1 million. The major energy efficiency
accounts are as follows: Building Sector - $144.9 M (FY'99 - $96.2 M); State
Grants & Weatherization - $$191.0 M (FY'99 - $166.0 M); Industrial Sector -
$171.0 M (FY'99 -165.9 M); Transportation Sector - $252.1 M (FY'00 - $202.1
M); Federal Energy Management Program - $31.9 M (FY'00 - $23.8 M). The
Alliance to Save Energy and the American Council for an Energy-Efficient
Economy each released a 2-page news release on the FY'00 energy efficiency
budget request; let us know if you would like us to fax you a copy of either one.
An analysis of the efficiency budget has been prepared by the Alliance to Save
Energy; see <www.ase.org/takeaction/fy00budget.htm>.

NUCLEAR POWER: The budget includes an increase of $13.6 million for
commercial nuclear R&D for a total of $87.3 million; the Sustainable Energy
Coalition had recommended a budget of $0.0. The nuclear increases include $6
M more (for a total of $25 million) for the Nuclear Energy Research Initiative and
$5 million for the Nuclear Energy Plant Optimization program which Congress
refused to fund in FY'99. However, the FY'00 budget request proposes to zero-
out the $50 million ITER nuclear fusion program -- a Sustainable Energy
Coalition goal since 1992.  Let us know if you would like us to fax you a 2-page
news release on the nuclear budget issued by Safe Energy Communication Council.

FOSSIL FUELS: The fossil R&D budget was reduced by $10 million to $364.0
M with most of the cuts absorbed by the natural gas research program
(reduced by $3.3 M) and the fuel cell program (reduced by $6.6 M). The total
includes $122.4 million for coal R&D, $50.1 million for petroleum R&D, and
$105.3 million for natural gas R&D.

2.) Green Scissors:

On January 28, U.S. PIRG, Friends of the Earth, and Taxpayers for Common
Sense released a report,  "Green Scissors '99 -- Cutting Wasteful and
Environmentally Harmful Spending," which argued that $50.7 billion could be
saved by cutting 72 federal programs.  These include eliminating the coal,
petroleum, and diesel research programs that "benefit large, profitable fossil
fuel and auto companies [which] would save $1.6 billion and reduce subsidies
that encourage global warming." The report recommends eliminating research
funding for diesel engines that emit harmful levels of air pollution to save
taxpayers $220 million as well as canceling DOE's noncompetitive contract to
"recycle" radioactive metals and other atomic weapons and nuclear power
wastes into consumer products to save $251.6 million.  The full report can be
found at <www.taxpayer.net>.


ELECTRIC UTILITY RESTRUCTURING

1.) Restructuring - Congressional Prospects:

A February 4 "CongressDaily" article reports that "House and Senate leaders
on energy policy are continuing to move in opposite directions on electric
deregulation legislation." Some Senators, led by Energy & Natural Resources
Chairman Frank Murkowski (R-AK), favor minimalist legislation with a separate
bill to repeal the line-of-business restrictions in the Public Utility Holding
Company Act of 1935 (PUHCA).  Moreover, Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS)
last week vowed the Senate would not take up electric deregulation this year.
But many House members - including Commerce Chairman Tom Bliley (R-VA)
and Commerce Energy & Power Subcommittee Chairman Joe Barton (R-TX) -
are pushing a comprehensive electricity deregulation bill and oppose a stand-
alone PUHCA bill. Barton plans to hold two to three weeks of hearings in
March before sending a bipartisan bill to the full committee for approval this
spring or early summer and possibly reach the full House floor in early
September. Let us know if you want to see a copy of the 2-page article.

2.) PUHCA Repeal Pending:

Reuters (January 28) reports that Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) has
introduced legislation to repeal the Public Utility Holding Company Act
(PUHCA). The bill reportedly has the support of Senate Majority Leader Trent
Lott (R-MS). The less than a dozen electric utilities and three gas utilities that
are registered holding companies want the law repealed so they can expand in
the increasingly competitive energy market without having to seek approval
from regulators.  PUHCA repeal -- along with PURPA repeal -- is also a target
of the utility deregulation bill expected to be introduced by Senate Energy
Committee Chairman Frank Murkowski (R-AK). Public Citizen has prepared a
4-page alert about pending PUHCA repeal legislation that includes a short
background description of S.313 accompanied by a proposed letter to
members of the Senate and Public Citizen's recommendations on how to
improve PUHCA.  Let us know if you would like us to fax you a copy.

3.) PUHCA/Holding Companies:

Public Citizen reports that the number of "registered" holding companies has
been increasing. Today there are 16 electric and 3 gas registered holding
companies that must comply with all sections of PUHCA, for a grand total of
19.  Since 1992, five electric utilities have become registered holding
companies: Ameren Corp (Union Electric and Central Illinois Public Service
Co.), Cinergy Corp. (Cincinnati Gas & Electric and PSI Energy), Conectiv
(Atlantic Energy and Delmarva Power & Light), Interstate Energy Corp. (aka
Alliant, Wisconsin Power & Light, Interstate Power, and IES Utilities), and New
Century Energies (Public Service of Colorado and Southwestern Public Service Co.)


CLIMATE CHANGE

1.) Early Action Legislation:

In his State of the Union address, President Clinton offered his full support for
the burgeoning, legislative effort to provide companies with early credit for
voluntary reductions of greenhouse gas emissions saying that he wants "to
work with members of Congress in both parties" to craft a bill.  However,
Administration officials have since indicated that the White House will not take
the lead on the issue or attempt to "put a bill on the table." This may reflect
growing unease among environmental groups with the pending Chafee-Mack-
Lieberman bill, S.2617, which - among other shortcomings - would allow the
nuclear power industry to gain tradable emission credits for supplanting coal-
fired power generation with nuclear power.

2.) State of the World:

In its millennial edition of the "State of the World" report issued on  January 16,
the Worldwatch Institute warns: "The atmosphere is under assault. The billions
of tons of carbon that have been released since the Industrial Revolution have
pushed atmospheric concentrations of CO2 to their highest level in 160,000
years -- a level that continues to rise each year.  As scientists predicted,
temperatures are rising along with the concentration of CO2. The latest jump in
1998 left the globe temperature at its highest level sine record-keeping began in
the mid-19th century.  Higher temperatures are projected to threaten food
supplies in the next century, while more severe storms cause economic
damage, and rising seas inundate coastal cities.  The early costs of climate
change may already be evident: weather-related economic damages of $89
billion in 1998 exceeded losses for the decade of the 1980s. In Central
America, 11,000 people were killed by Hurricane Mitch, and Honduras suffered
looses equivalent to one-third of its annual GDP.

"World energy needs are projected to double in the next several decades, but
no credible geologist foresees a doubling of world oil production, which is
projected to peak within the next few decades. ... Satisfying the projected
needs of 8 billion or more people with the economy we now have is simply not
possible. The western industrial model--the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-
centered, throwaway economy that so dramatically raised living standards in
this century--is in trouble. ... The broad outlines of a sustainable economic
system that can meet the human needs of the next century are beginning to
emerge. The foundation of such a system is a new design principle -- one that
shifts from the one-time depletion of natural resources to an economy that is
based on renewable energy and that continually reuses and recycles materials.
A sustainable economy will be a solar-powered, bicycle/rail-based,
reuse/recycle economy, one that uses energy, water, land, and materials
much more efficiently and wisely that we do today."  For further details, see
<www.worldwatch.org>.

3.) BP Amoco - Energy Taxes:

The most recent issue of "Wind Energy Weekly" reports that on January 15,
Rodney Chase, president and deputy CEO of BP Amoco, noted that an energy
tax might be needed "as a last resort" to persuade industrial companies to
reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases. BP Amoco's preference is for an
emissions trading system which it believes provides "the most economic and
the most effective route" for reducing emissions, particularly among large,
capital-intensive industries.   However, a tax "which rewards certain behaviors"
could also have a role to play in meeting Kyoto targets at a minimum cost
especially "for smaller companies whose energy use is low and where
emission levels receive a lower priority."


MISCELLANEOUS

1.) House/Senate Caucuses Grow:

The House Renewable Energy Caucus is now officially up to an all-time high of
138 members (77 D's, 60 R's, 1 I.) representing 41 states. The newest
members include Reps. Rush Holt (D-NJ), Mark Udall (D-CO), Robert
Underwood (D-GU), Steven Kuykendall (R-CA), Jack Metcalf (R-WA), Ken
Calvert (R-CA), William Lipinski (D-IL), and John LaFalce (D-NY).  In addition,
the Senate Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency Caucus has grown to a new
high of 20 members, representing 19 states.  The newest Senators to join are
Rod Grams (R-MN), Max Cleland (D-GA), Frank Murkowski (R-AK), and
Charles Grassley (R-IA).  Let us know if you would like us to fax you a 5-page
list of the members of both caucuses.

2.) Sustainable Energy Periodicals Directory:

The SUN DAY Campaign has released the fifth edition of its "National Directory
of Sustainable Energy Periodicals" which provides a zip-coded listing of 800
U.S. newsletters, magazines, and other periodicals that report on renewable
energy, energy efficiency, and related environmental issues.  Each entry in the
75-page directory includes the periodical name and mailing address; most
include the editor's name, telephone and fax numbers, and a short description;
e-mail and web site addresses are also provided for many entries.  Copies may
be purchased for $15.00 prepaid from the SUN DAY Campaign (315 Circle
Avenue, Suite #2, Takoma Park, MD 20912-4836.

## END ##




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------------------------------

Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 22:50:33 -0800
From: "David Crockett Williams" <[e-mail]>
Subject: (abolition-usa) Victims of Scalar Electromagnetic Weapons

Here are  some references by web sites:

Index File A-1790:

Letter from Professor John. C. Syer, In Support of Cheryl Welsh
http://www.mk.net/~mcf/syer.htm 1 page

Mind Control Forum
http://www.mk.net/~mcf/index.htm 8 pages

Sprawozdanie z wywiadu udzielonego CNN prezez Cheryl Welsh
http://www.upnaway.com/~zielinsk/welshcnn.html

International Documents in Support of Claims of the Existence of
Electromagnetic Anti-Personnel Weapons, By Cheryl Welsh
http://www.calweb.com/~welsh/9.htm 17 pages
The 1950's Secret Discovery of the Code of the Braim:  U.S.
and Soviet Scientists Have Developed the Key to Consciousnes for
Military Purposes.. How The U.S. Government Won the Arms Race to Control
Man:  A documentary with quotes by leading scientists, professionals and
several independent sources.  By Cheryl Welsh, May 1998  64 pages
http://www.calweb.com/~welsh/book.htm

Mind Control Forum, Victims' Stories: Contents - 78 Victims, + 16 in
Video Tape Transcript 43 pages
http://www.mk-mcf/victim-hm.htm

FBW,Sr., PhD UC Berkeley '53

Dr FBW,Sr., will be speaking at the Mar1st conference.
For more info on him, his message, and conference
    http://www.angelfire.com/on/GEAR2000
*********************************************************
Global Emergency Alert Response:  GEAR2000
David Crockett Williams                805-822-3309
20411 Steeple Court, Tehachapi CA 93561 USA
*********************************************************
        CAMPAIGN for a BETTER AMERICA
              with General Agency Services
*********************************************************
      UNITED NATION   Global  Peace  Walk
Oakland City Hall to UC Berkeley, February 26th*
Annually:   22apr Taos, NM, --->  Santa Fe 26apr
1999:  16sep New York -> Washington DC 24oct
Ceremony rededicating  Washington Monument
as a symbol of peace, UN DAY 24OCT99
2000:  15jan  San Francisco --> New York  24oct
             16sep Washington, DC
   ONE NATION, Aware of God as Love for All !
       GLOBAL PEACE NOW !!     Help Now !!!
*********************************************************
http://www.egroups.com/list/global-peace-walk




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------------------------------

Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1999 00:55:01 -0600 (CST)
From: [e-mail]
Subject: (abolition-usa) Fwd: PUHCA sign-on letter

- ------Begin forward message-------------------------

Return-Path: <[e-mail]>
Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 10:56:00 -0500
From: Charlie Higley <[e-mail]>
Organization: Public Citizen
To: [e-mail] (Rage)
Subject: PUHCA sign-on letter

Colleagues:

Below is a letter to the Senate advising senators to oppose stand-alone
PUHCA repeal.

Please let me know if your organization can sign on.

If you can sign on your organization by noon (eastern time) on Wednesday,
February 10, then your organization will appear on a letter that will be
hand-delivered on Wednesday to members of the Senate Banking Committee (as
you may have heard, last week's markup of S. 313 was delayed until Thursday,
Feb. 11).  Although S. 313 is likely to get through the Banking Committee,
we hope to encourage more senators to request that PUHCA be dealt with only
in the context of comprehensive legislation.

If you can't make the noon Wednesday deadline, please let me know if you can
sign on by close of business Wednesday, February 17, after which a letter
will be sent to the entire Senate in anticipation of a possible floor vote
on S. 313.

So, please let me know if your organization can sign on by noon Wednesday,
Feb. 10, or by close of business Wednesday, Feb. 17.

Thanks,

- -Charlie Higley-
Public Citizen


*********************************

Oppose S. 313: Oppose PUHCA Repeal

Dear Senator:

On behalf of our millions of members nationwide, we urge you to oppose S.
313, which would repeal the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935
(PUHCA).

Our members believe that PUHCA reform should only be dealt with in the
context of comprehensive legislation that addresses the changes taking place
within the electric power industry.  Such legislation must include strong
consumer and environmental protections as well as policies that create a
level field for all competitors.

PUHCA is the only federal law that protects consumers and the environment
from market power abuses that are specific to the utility sector.

The repeal of PUHCA could increase the flow of cross-subsidies from a
holding company's regulated utilities to its unregulated subsidiaries.
Utility ratepayers will pay higher rates as they subsidize other businesses,
especially foreign ventures, without receiving any benefits. Utility holding
companies could compete unfairly with businesses that do not receive
guaranteed profits from captive customers.

Repealing PUHCA may result in a larger wave of utility mergers than is
taking place today. Mergers reduce the number of potential competitors and
can increase the market power of surviving utilities, which could render
competition meaningless.

With an unfair share of market power, large companies that own and operate
fossil fuel and nuclear power plants could have an interest in squeezing out
renewable energy, energy efficiency, and other clean, high-value energy
options.  This could increase our dependence on fossil and nuclear fuels,
further damaging human health and the environment.

Because of the above concerns, we urge you to oppose S. 313. PUHCA reform
should only be considered as a part of comprehensive restructuring
legislation that includes strong protections against market power, as well
as strong protections for consumers and the environment.

Sincerely,

Charlie Higley
Public Citizen

Ralph Cavanagh
Natural Resources Defense Council


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------------------------------

Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1999 02:03:53 -0800 (PST)
From: Pamela Meidell <[e-mail]>
Subject: (abolition-usa) URGENT: Bios for SB Meeting Needed

2/8/99
To: All participants in Santa Barbara Abolition Meeting
Re: Last call for Background Statements

Dear US Abolitionists,

Thank you to everyone who has sent me a statement in preparation for
the US Campaign meeting in Santa Barbara this coming weekend. (I am
compiling the background/biographical statements of participants for the
meeting.) However, of the 67 registered participants, only 10 people have
sent in statements. I URGE THE REST OF YOU TO SEND THEM TO ME
TODAY. I have extended the deadline until midnight tonight, Monday,
February 8. Please send them by email to me at <[e-mail]>.

I include the original request below as reference:

"Dear Friends,

To prepare for the Santa Barbara meeting, we are asking each
participant to send us IN ADVANCE a brief biography of yourself and
your organization. We will have a booklet with these statements in them
waiting for you when you check in at Casa de Maria in Santa Barbara.
We hope that providing this information to each participant will give us
a common ground of understanding of the diversities and strengths that
we bring to our common work of abolishing nuclear weapons.

Please write a statement of about two or three paragraphs, including the
following information:

1. Your name and relationship to the group you are representing
2. A few sentences about your own history of involvement in the issue
of nuclear weapons abolition
3. A brief description of your group, including its name, address,
telephone and fax numbers, email address, concise mission statement of
your group, current projects, anything else you think pertinent
4. A statement of your and/or your organization's work to date on the
abolition of nuclear weapons, and what arenas you have worked in
(local, regional, national, international)"

PLEASE RETURN TO YOUR STATEMENTS TO PAMELA MEIDELL BY
MIDNIGHT, MONDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 1999 AT <[e-mail]>

Thank you. I look forward to seeing you all there.

In peace,
Pamela
******
Pamela S. Meidell, Director
The Atomic Mirror/EarthWays Foundation
P.O.B. 220, Port Hueneme, California, USA 93044
tel: [phone], fax: [phone]
email: [e-mail]

The Atomic Mirror is a founding partner in Abolition 2000:
A Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons

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------------------------------

Date: Mon, 08 Feb 1999 07:22:03 -0500
From: Peace through Reason <[e-mail]>
Subject: (abolition-usa) NucNews (US-1) 2/8/99 - Yucca Mt.; Trinity Tours

- --=====================_56733871==_.ALT
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"


1. Inside Yucca Mountain: Life-or-death safety issues simmering
http://www.sacbee.com/news/news/local01_19990207.html

2. Trinity Site (Tourism twice a year)
http://www.abqjournal.com/venue/day/2day02-07.htm

- ----------------------------------------

1. Inside Yucca Mountain: Life-or-death safety issues simmering

http://www.sacbee.com/news/news/local01_19990207.html

By Carrie Peyton, Bee Staff Writer,  (Feb. 7, 1999)

NEVADA TEST SITE -- A tunnel punched through the flank of Nevada's Yucca
Mountain may soon become the portal to one of humanity's most enduring
monuments.

America's proposed final resting place for nuclear fuel, it would have to
function longer than governments have stood, longer than languages have been
spoken, longer than glaciers have taken to recede.

"It's wonderful arrogance of the human population" to try to build for such
longevity, said waste site researcher Bill Guertal. "But we have to do
something."

Environmentalists and the state of Nevada believe Yucca Mountain is too
unstable and porous to safely contain nuclear waste. Others say the mountain
may be suitable, but a tentative 2010 opening date is dangerously premature.

Federal researchers acknowledge that over the ages, the proposed nuclear dump
is certain to leak. While they believe they can keep leaks slight enough to do
no harm, they concede that might be too optimistic and that the low radiation
leaks could cause some additional cancers.

They dismiss most of their critics' complaints as stalling tactics by people
who want the waste anywhere but their own back yards.

In the 41 years since a Pennsylvania reactor supplied America's first
commercial nuclear power, used fuel has been stacking up by the ton.

It waits in cooling pools and containers from Sacramento to Maine.

It is so lethal that if it were left completely unsheathed, anyone standing
next to it for a few hours would be dead within weeks. It is so long-lived that
a million years from now it could still contaminate water.

Its fate has become tangled in issues of money, science, politics and,
ultimately, ethics.

"Our present generation should be responsible for safely disposing the waste we
created," said Thomas Pigford, a UC Berkeley nuclear engineering professor
emeritus.

Over the past decade, as Pigford has pored over the Department of Energy's
evolving vision for Yucca Mountain, he has become increasingly concerned.

"Quietly and without debate, we seem to have abandoned our ethical goals," he
said. "At some future time the radiation exposures received by some future
people far exceed any exposures allowable for present day operations."

The slopes of Yucca Mountain, thrown up by a volcano millions of years ago,
roll gently amid the craggier red-brown ranges of the Nevada Test Site, about
90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The area's sparseness distorts scale -- a shed
emerges from the distance as a warehouse, a propane tank turns out to be a
trailer.

Since 1987, when it was selected as the only potential site for ongoing study,
it has been riddled with holes, dotted with weather stations and drilled by a
$16 million, specially built boring machine that created a 5-mile research
tunnel.

Even the dung piles left by its pack rats have been raided, their centuries-old
droppings studied for clues to climate shifts.

Government researchers have been scraping, slicing, heating and soaking the
mountain's volcanic ash in an effort to learn whether it can safely hold -- or
at least slow the spread of -- nuclear waste.

The 200 or so workers on the mountain today are backed up by about 1,300 more
at a Las Vegas research site.

There, climatologists work up centuries-long weather forecasts, materials
scientists puzzle over container design, and nuclear physicists prepare plans
to keep a lid on the simmering waste, which will be gathered from power plants,
research reactors and nuclear submarines.

More researchers are scattered in labs around the country, including a tiny
Sacramento contingent working on water behavior.

Scientists ride into the Yucca Mountain research tunnel on a clattering yellow
train that mingles diesel exhaust with the faint silica-and-clay scent of the
surrounding earth.

Inside, they measure water flow, test humidity and monitor heaters intended to
simulate the way nuclear waste would cook the mountain, unlocking its moisture
and changing the rock in ways not yet fully understood.

"When you heat the rock up, you move a lot of water around," said Mark Peters,
who helped set up a test that will bake one tunnel branch for four years and
cool it for four more.

Outside the tunnel, Yucca Mountain research sprawls through buildings scattered
across the southwestern corner of the Nevada Test Site.

Guertal, a U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist, works down the road from the
tunnel mouth, in a lab that once housed MX missile research. Today he and his
colleagues measure rock samples' permeability on a machine they jury-rigged
from used MX equipment.

Across a two-lane road prowled by coyotes, a lab and warehouse handle every
sample ever pulled up from 700-plus holes that pockmark Yucca Mountain. The
buildings house rock by the boulder, rock by the micro-thin wafer and even a
column of rock built to mimic a cross section of the mountain, for speakers to
use before schoolchildren or civic groups.

No other nuclear nation in the world has as optimistic a schedule for the
permanent disposal site for its most dangerous, high-level wastes.

The Energy Department plans to seek a license to build the repository in 2002,
begin building in 2005 and begin loading fuel in 2010.

That is ample time to do the job right, said Abe Van Luik, who is in charge of
modeling how Yucca Mountain will perform over the ages.

"There will be a lot of opportunity to do a lot of studies," he said, not just
while construction is under way, but also during the 24 or more years it will
take to fill the mountain's tunnels with waste.

"If we have made a mistake of some sort, we will have plenty of time to back
the trains out and back the stuff out and think of something else to do with
it."

In addition, he said, if Congress and the president permit the plan to go
forward, nuclear regulators will have to sign off on it at least three times:
Before construction begins, before waste-loading begins, and before 50 to 250
years of temporary monitoring stops and the mountain is closed for good --
sometime between 2084 and about 2290.

"It's a very cautious way to go forward," he said.

The seismic and volcanic objections raised about the site have been reviewed
and are so unlikely to cause problems that they can be ruled out now, Van Luik
added.

"If there's a fatal flaw, we haven't found it. It's wetter than we thought, but
we were naive" during initial assessments of the site, he said.

The tentative Energy Department design for Yucca Mountain assumes the dump
would leak.

Tainted groundwater would flow southwest under what is today a stark, dry land
dotted with gray saltbrush and yellow-green creosote, sheltering squirrels,
coyotes and about 200 species of birds.

It would feed wells in Nevada's Amargosa Valley, where farmers now raise
alfalfa and tend dairy cattle. It probably would reach or come close to the
surface just over the California border, in a dry lake bed called Franklin Lake
Playa, before ending up in springs that feed Death Valley.

As more and more containers began to corrode, the plume would grow and spread
from Yucca Mountain, reaching its most toxic threat at inhabited sites 300,000
years from now, said federal forecaster Van Luik.

Just how big that threat would be is a question mired in debates over current
radiation exposure standards and over the soundness of assumptions and computer
models used to predict the dump's eventual disintegration.

Even if radiation exposure in the Amargosa Valley were limited to a
once-proposed level of 100 millirem per person annually, in "every generation
in that community of 1,500 people, there would be statistically five people who
die of cancer who otherwise would not have," said Steve Frishman, an adviser to
the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.

"Who's to decide that that's OK?"

Frishman's job is to drive the dump out of Nevada, just as he helped Texas get
itself off the waste site list in the 1980s. He and other opponents believe the
federal government was drawn to Yucca Mountain not by its arid climate but by
its palatable location -- on federal land already used for nuclear weapons
testing.

He has attacked Yucca Mountain as riddled with earthquake faults, potentially
volcanically active and so leaky that water would quickly seep through and
erode steel waste containers. The facility's tentative design, he said, is
shaped by computer models so speculative that projections about its performance
amount to little more than optimistic guesses.

Berkeley Professor Pigford, who doesn't oppose the idea of a Yucca Mountain
dump, nonetheless worries that the models are poorly conceived. When he removes
what he considers overoptimistic assumptions, the annual radiation exposure in
100,000 years reaches "a life-shortening dose."

Frishman and others have called for decades more study before America commits
to Yucca Mountain.

Already, researchers have repeatedly revised their view of how the waste site
would perform. They once believed the climate was so arid, and the mountain so
impermeable, that dryness alone would prevent waste from spreading.

Now, environmentalists alarmed about how quickly water flows through the
mountain say enough has already been learned to disqualify the site under the
Energy Department's own standards. In November, more than 200 groups petitioned
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson to strike it from further consideration.

Richardson has not responded and is still mulling whether the Energy Department
should instead revise its own standards to ensure that the site still
qualifies, something it has been considering for two years.

In December, he traipsed through the dusty research tunnel at Yucca Mountain
and emerged to promise more analysis, reassuring Nevadans that "the nation's
policy on nuclear waste must be based on science and not politics."

Consistently outvoted in Congress, Nevadans fear it may already be too late for
that. Their calls to move more slowly have been met with skepticism by those
who question their motives, and impatience by some who have toiled for years on
the mountain.

"It sounds very altruistic," said Robert Jones, a Los Gatos nuclear engineer
and industry consultant. But in reality it is "the sneaky way to declare war on
nuclear power," he said, by limiting power plants' space for their used fuel.

"You could study this thing forever. When are you going to say enough's
enough?" said Patrick Rowe, an engineer who has worked at Yucca Mountain since
1982.

The Yucca Mountain Project spends $100,000 a year to provide public tours and
$260,000 a year to operate "science centers" in three cities, where interactive
displays can entertain children and reassure a dubious Nevada.

Tentative plans call for a visitor's center to be built 1,500 feet from
buildings where the nuclear fuel rods would be loaded into canisters.

"It's way too enthusiastic. ... It makes people come away feeling good," said
Judy Treichel, director of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force, a shoestring
environmental effort that fights the site on annual donations of about $40,000.

She broods over Amargosa Valley, where today about 1,500 people -- miners,
farmers, dairy workers and retirees -- draw water from an aquifer that runs
under Yucca Mountain. It is a place surrounded by mountains so bare their bones
show, layers of tan and gray faintly cloaked by scrub.

In the valley, feelings about the proposed waste site are mixed.

Some think the construction would bring well-paying jobs. Some hope they can
worm a decent firetruck and maybe a fire station out of the federal government,
so that they could respond if anything went wrong with transporting the waste.

Some are resigned.

"It wouldn't make that much difference," said Debbie Quintana. "We've already
been contaminated" from decades of nuclear weapons tests. At the library where
she works, killer bee alerts outnumber nuclear waste notices on the bulletin
board three to one.

James Quirk, who heads the town advisory board, believes that eventually, water
traveling through the mountain would bring radioactivity to Amargosa's wells.

"It's up to nature when that happens," he said. "Several hundred years or
today, it doesn't matter. It's going to mess up someone's life."

But the timing does matter. It will become a key issue when Congress and the
president decide whether to bury nuclear waste under Yucca Mountain.

Proposed qualification standards for the site may only require that it be
proven safe for its first 10,000 years.

Nuclear regulatory officials have said it simply isn't realistic to try to
predict beyond that. Opponents say it is unconscionable not to.

As the debate goes on, the short-term fate of the nation's used nuclear fuel is
largely undisputed.

Heavily shielded and exactingly monitored, the rods containing uranium,
plutonium and fission products pose little threat if they are simply left in
place for the next 50 to 100 years, according to all sides in the debate.

Electric companies have lobbied and sued to get the used fuel moved because of
finances, not fear. They've paid billions of dollars into a federal disposal
fund, under a contract that committed the government to take the waste by 1998.

"They have our money. We have their waste. It's that simple," said Leigh Ann
Marshall of the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group.

Among those suing the Energy Department over the broken congressional promise
is SMUD, which has housed close to 500 slowly cooling fuel rod assemblies at
Rancho Seco since 1989, when voters ordered the plant closed.

It costs SMUD about $10 million a year to keep the rods in their cooling pool.
The rods are scheduled to be moved to nearby dry-storage containers in
mid-2000, which will reduce storage costs to about $1 million a year.

Nevada's Frishman, who wants America to follow the lead of Sweden and France
and go much slower before it chooses nuclear waste's final resting place, said
there's nothing wrong with Sacramento shouldering that cost.

"If the utility was willing to go into nuclear power ... they made money. Now
there's some liability. That's part of the legacy," he said.

"I don't believe the people of Sacramento would prefer to have it taken to a
place where it only puts other people at greater risk."

- -------------------------------

2. Trinity Site (Tourism twice a year)

http://www.abqjournal.com/venue/day/2day02-07.htm

By James Abarr Of the Journal ... February 7, 1999

In the bleak desert of the Jornada del Muerto (Journey of Death), about 60
miles northwest of Alamogordo, is Trinity Site. Here, the world's first atomic
bomb was detonated just before dawn on July 16, 1945, in a test shot that
ushered in the nuclear age.c Trinity lies within the high-security White Sands
Missile Range and is open to the public only twice a year -- on the first
Saturday of April and October.

On those dates, visitors can tour Ground Zero, where a triangular-shaped stone
monument marks where the 100-foot-high tower that cradled the bomb stood. The
tower was vaporized in the blast, but a portion of the original crater is still
visible. The casing of a plutonium bomb of the type tested also is on display.

Two miles from Ground Zero, visitors can inspect the McDonald ranch house,
which was used by technicians to assemble the bomb's plutonium trigger.

Information about schedules and other details of tours of Trinity, now a
National Historic Site, is available by calling White Sands Missile Range's
Public Affairs Office at [phone].
_____________________________________________________________

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<html><div>1. Inside Yucca Mountain: Life-or-death safety issues
simmering </div>
<div><a href="http://www.sacbee.com/news/news/local01_19990207.html" EUDORA=AUTOURL>http://www.sacbee.com/news/news/local01_19990207.html</a></div>
<br>
<div>2. Trinity Site (Tourism twice a year)</div>
<div><a href="http://www.abqjournal.com/venue/day/2day02-07.htm" EUDORA=AUTOURL>http://www.abqjournal.com/venue/day/2day02-07.htm</a></div>
<br>
<div>----------------------------------------</div>
<br>
<div>1. Inside Yucca Mountain: Life-or-death safety issues simmering
</div>
<br>
<div><a href="http://www.sacbee.com/news/news/local01_19990207.html" EUDORA=AUTOURL>http://www.sacbee.com/news/news/local01_19990207.html</a></div>
<br>
<div>By Carrie Peyton, Bee Staff Writer,  (Feb. 7, 1999)</div>
<br>
<div>NEVADA TEST SITE -- A tunnel punched through the flank of Nevada's
Yucca Mountain may soon become the portal to one of humanity's most
enduring monuments.</div>
<br>
<div>America's proposed final resting place for nuclear fuel, it would
have to function longer than governments have stood, longer than
languages have been spoken, longer than glaciers have taken to
recede.</div>
<br>
<div>"It's wonderful arrogance of the human population" to try
to build for such longevity, said waste site researcher Bill Guertal.
"But we have to do something."</div>
<br>
<div>Environmentalists and the state of Nevada believe Yucca Mountain is
too unstable and porous to safely contain nuclear waste. Others say the
mountain may be suitable, but a tentative 2010 opening date is
dangerously premature.</div>
<br>
<div>Federal researchers acknowledge that over the ages, the proposed
nuclear dump is certain to leak. While they believe they can keep leaks
slight enough to do no harm, they concede that might be too optimistic
and that the low radiation leaks could cause some additional
cancers.</div>
<br>
<div>They dismiss most of their critics' complaints as stalling tactics
by people who want the waste anywhere but their own back yards.</div>
<br>
<div>In the 41 years since a Pennsylvania reactor supplied America's
first commercial nuclear power, used fuel has been stacking up by the
ton.</div>
<br>
<div>It waits in cooling pools and containers from Sacramento to
Maine.</div>
<br>
<div>It is so lethal that if it were left completely unsheathed, anyone
standing next to it for a few hours would be dead within weeks. It is so
long-lived that a million years from now it could still contaminate
water.</div>
<br>
<div>Its fate has become tangled in issues of money, science, politics
and, ultimately, ethics.</div>
<br>
<div>"Our present generation should be responsible for safely
disposing the waste we created," said Thomas Pigford, a UC Berkeley
nuclear engineering professor emeritus.</div>
<br>
<div>Over the past decade, as Pigford has pored over the Department of
Energy's evolving vision for Yucca Mountain, he has become increasingly
concerned.</div>
<br>
<div>"Quietly and without debate, we seem to have abandoned our
ethical goals," he said. "At some future time the radiation
exposures received by some future people far exceed any exposures
allowable for present day operations."</div>
<br>
<div>The slopes of Yucca Mountain, thrown up by a volcano millions of
years ago, roll gently amid the craggier red-brown ranges of the Nevada
Test Site, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The area's sparseness
distorts scale -- a shed emerges from the distance as a warehouse, a
propane tank turns out to be a trailer.</div>
<br>
<div>Since 1987, when it was selected as the only potential site for
ongoing study, it has been riddled with holes, dotted with weather
stations and drilled by a $16 million, specially built boring machine
that created a 5-mile research tunnel.</div>
<br>
<div>Even the dung piles left by its pack rats have been raided, their
centuries-old droppings studied for clues to climate shifts.</div>
<br>
<div>Government researchers have been scraping, slicing, heating and
soaking the mountain's volcanic ash in an effort to learn whether it can
safely hold -- or at least slow the spread of -- nuclear waste.</div>
<br>
<div>The 200 or so workers on the mountain today are backed up by about
1,300 more at a Las Vegas research site.</div>
<br>
<div>There, climatologists work up centuries-long weather forecasts,
materials scientists puzzle over container design, and nuclear physicists
prepare plans to keep a lid on the simmering waste, which will be
gathered from power plants, research reactors and nuclear
submarines.</div>
<br>
<div>More researchers are scattered in labs around the country, including
a tiny Sacramento contingent working on water behavior.</div>
<br>
<div>Scientists ride into the Yucca Mountain research tunnel on a
clattering yellow train that mingles diesel exhaust with the faint
silica-and-clay scent of the surrounding earth.</div>
<br>
<div>Inside, they measure water flow, test humidity and monitor heaters
intended to simulate the way nuclear waste would cook the mountain,
unlocking its moisture and changing the rock in ways not yet fully
understood.</div>
<br>
<div>"When you heat the rock up, you move a lot of water
around," said Mark Peters, who helped set up a test that will bake
one tunnel branch for four years and cool it for four more.</div>
<br>
<div>Outside the tunnel, Yucca Mountain research sprawls through
buildings scattered across the southwestern corner of the Nevada Test
Site.</div>
<br>
<div>Guertal, a U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist, works down the road
from the tunnel mouth, in a lab that once housed MX missile research.
Today he and his colleagues measure rock samples' permeability on a
machine they jury-rigged from used MX equipment.</div>
<br>
<div>Across a two-lane road prowled by coyotes, a lab and warehouse
handle every sample ever pulled up from 700-plus holes that pockmark
Yucca Mountain. The buildings house rock by the boulder, rock by the
micro-thin wafer and even a column of rock built to mimic a cross section
of the mountain, for speakers to use before schoolchildren or civic
groups.</div>
<br>
<div>No other nuclear nation in the world has as optimistic a schedule
for the permanent disposal site for its most dangerous, high-level
wastes.</div>
<br>
<div>The Energy Department plans to seek a license to build the
repository in 2002, begin building in 2005 and begin loading fuel in
2010.</div>
<br>
<div>That is ample time to do the job right, said Abe Van Luik, who is in
charge of modeling how Yucca Mountain will perform over the ages.</div>
<br>
<div>"There will be a lot of opportunity to do a lot of
studies," he said, not just while construction is under way, but
also during the 24 or more years it will take to fill the mountain's
tunnels with waste.</div>
<br>
<div>"If we have made a mistake of some sort, we will have plenty of
time to back the trains out and back the stuff out and think of something
else to do with it."</div>
<br>
<div>In addition, he said, if Congress and the president permit the plan
to go forward, nuclear regulators will have to sign off on it at least
three times: Before construction begins, before waste-loading begins, and
before 50 to 250 years of temporary monitoring stops and the mountain is
closed for good -- sometime between 2084 and about 2290.</div>
<br>
<div>"It's a very cautious way to go forward," he said.</div>
<br>
<div>The seismic and volcanic objections raised about the site have been
reviewed and are so unlikely to cause problems that they can be ruled out
now, Van Luik added.</div>
<br>
<div>"If there's a fatal flaw, we haven't found it. It's wetter than
we thought, but we were naive" during initial assessments of the
site, he said.</div>
<br>
<div>The tentative Energy Department design for Yucca Mountain assumes
the dump would leak.</div>
<br>
<div>Tainted groundwater would flow southwest under what is today a
stark, dry land dotted with gray saltbrush and yellow-green creosote,
sheltering squirrels, coyotes and about 200 species of birds.</div>
<br>
<div>It would feed wells in Nevada's Amargosa Valley, where farmers now
raise alfalfa and tend dairy cattle. It probably would reach or come
close to the surface just over the California border, in a dry lake bed
called Franklin Lake Playa, before ending up in springs that feed Death
Valley.</div>
<br>
<div>As more and more containers began to corrode, the plume would grow
and spread from Yucca Mountain, reaching its most toxic threat at
inhabited sites 300,000 years from now, said federal forecaster Van
Luik.</div>
<br>
<div>Just how big that threat would be is a question mired in debates
over current radiation exposure standards and over the soundness of
assumptions and computer models used to predict the dump's eventual
disintegration.</div>
<br>
<div>Even if radiation exposure in the Amargosa Valley were limited to a
once-proposed level of 100 millirem per person annually, in "every
generation in that community of 1,500 people, there would be
statistically five people who die of cancer who otherwise would not
have," said Steve Frishman, an adviser to the Nevada Agency for
Nuclear Projects.</div>
<br>
<div>"Who's to decide that that's OK?"</div>
<br>
<div>Frishman's job is to drive the dump out of Nevada, just as he helped
Texas get itself off the waste site list in the 1980s. He and other
opponents believe the federal government was drawn to Yucca Mountain not
by its arid climate but by its palatable location -- on federal land
already used for nuclear weapons testing.</div>
<br>
<div>He has attacked Yucca Mountain as riddled with earthquake faults,
potentially volcanically active and so leaky that water would quickly
seep through and erode steel waste containers. The facility's tentative
design, he said, is shaped by computer models so speculative that
projections about its performance amount to little more than optimistic
guesses.</div>
<br>
<div>Berkeley Professor Pigford, who doesn't oppose the idea of a Yucca
Mountain dump, nonetheless worries that the models are poorly conceived.
When he removes what he considers overoptimistic assumptions, the annual
radiation exposure in 100,000 years reaches "a life-shortening
dose."</div>
<br>
<div>Frishman and others have called for decades more study before
America commits to Yucca Mountain.</div>
<br>
<div>Already, researchers have repeatedly revised their view of how the
waste site would perform. They once believed the climate was so arid, and
the mountain so impermeable, that dryness alone would prevent waste from
spreading.</div>
<br>
<div>Now, environmentalists alarmed about how quickly water flows through
the mountain say enough has already been learned to disqualify the site
under the Energy Department's own standards. In November, more than 200
groups petitioned Energy Secretary Bill Richardson to strike it from
further consideration.</div>
<br>
<div>Richardson has not responded and is still mulling whether the Energy
Department should instead revise its own standards to ensure that the
site still qualifies, something it has been considering for two
years.</div>
<br>
<div>In December, he traipsed through the dusty research tunnel at Yucca
Mountain and emerged to promise more analysis, reassuring Nevadans that
"the nation's policy on nuclear waste must be based on science and
not politics."</div>
<br>
<div>Consistently outvoted in Congress, Nevadans fear it may already be
too late for that. Their calls to move more slowly have been met with
skepticism by those who question their motives, and impatience by some
who have toiled for years on the mountain.</div>
<br>
<div>"It sounds very altruistic," said Robert Jones, a Los
Gatos nuclear engineer and industry consultant. But in reality it is
"the sneaky way to declare war on nuclear power," he said, by
limiting power plants' space for their used fuel.</div>
<br>
<div>"You could study this thing forever. When are you going to say
enough's enough?" said Patrick Rowe, an engineer who has worked at
Yucca Mountain since 1982.</div>
<br>
<div>The Yucca Mountain Project spends $100,000 a year to provide public
tours and $260,000 a year to operate "science centers" in three
cities, where interactive displays can entertain children and reassure a
dubious Nevada.</div>
<br>
<div>Tentative plans call for a visitor's center to be built 1,500 feet
from buildings where the nuclear fuel rods would be loaded into
canisters.</div>
<br>
<div>"It's way too enthusiastic. ... It makes people come away
feeling good," said Judy Treichel, director of the Nevada Nuclear
Waste Task Force, a shoestring environmental effort that fights the site
on annual donations of about $40,000.</div>
<br>
<div>She broods over Amargosa Valley, where today about 1,500 people --
miners, farmers, dairy workers and retirees -- draw water from an aquifer
that runs under Yucca Mountain. It is a place surrounded by mountains so
bare their bones show, layers of tan and gray faintly cloaked by
scrub.</div>
<br>
<div>In the valley, feelings about the proposed waste site are
mixed.</div>
<br>
<div>Some think the construction would bring well-paying jobs. Some hope
they can worm a decent firetruck and maybe a fire station out of the
federal government, so that they could respond if anything went wrong
with transporting the waste.</div>
<br>
<div>Some are resigned.</div>
<br>
<div>"It wouldn't make that much difference," said Debbie
Quintana. "We've already been contaminated" from decades of
nuclear weapons tests. At the library where she works, killer bee alerts
outnumber nuclear waste notices on the bulletin board three to
one.</div>
<br>
<div>James Quirk, who heads the town advisory board, believes that
eventually, water traveling through the mountain would bring
radioactivity to Amargosa's wells.</div>
<br>
<div>"It's up to nature when that happens," he said.
"Several hundred years or today, it doesn't matter. It's going to
mess up someone's life."</div>
<br>
<div>But the timing does matter. It will become a key issue when Congress
and the president decide whether to bury nuclear waste under Yucca
Mountain.</div>
<br>
<div>Proposed qualification standards for the site may only require that
it be proven safe for its first 10,000 years.</div>
<br>
<div>Nuclear regulatory officials have said it simply isn't realistic to
try to predict beyond that. Opponents say it is unconscionable not
to.</div>
<br>
<div>As the debate goes on, the short-term fate of the nation's used
nuclear fuel is largely undisputed.</div>
<br>
<div>Heavily shielded and exactingly monitored, the rods containing
uranium, plutonium and fission products pose little threat if they are
simply left in place for the next 50 to 100 years, according to all sides
in the debate.</div>
<br>
<div>Electric companies have lobbied and sued to get the used fuel moved
because of finances, not fear. They've paid billions of dollars into a
federal disposal fund, under a contract that committed the government to
take the waste by 1998.</div>
<br>
<div>"They have our money. We have their waste. It's that
simple," said Leigh Ann Marshall of the Nuclear Energy Institute, an
industry trade group.</div>
<br>
<div>Among those suing the Energy Department over the broken
congressional promise is SMUD, which has housed close to 500 slowly
cooling fuel rod assemblies at Rancho Seco since 1989, when voters
ordered the plant closed.</div>
<br>
<div>It costs SMUD about $10 million a year to keep the rods in their
cooling pool. The rods are scheduled to be moved to nearby dry-storage
containers in mid-2000, which will reduce storage costs to about $1
million a year.</div>
<br>
<div>Nevada's Frishman, who wants America to follow the lead of Sweden
and France and go much slower before it chooses nuclear waste's final
resting place, said there's nothing wrong with Sacramento shouldering
that cost.</div>
<br>
<div>"If the utility was willing to go into nuclear power ... they
made money. Now there's some liability. That's part of the legacy,"
he said.</div>
<br>
<div>"I don't believe the people of Sacramento would prefer to have
it taken to a place where it only puts other people at greater
risk."</div>
<br>
<div>-------------------------------</div>
<br>
<div>2. Trinity Site (Tourism twice a year)</div>
<br>
<div><a href="http://www.abqjournal.com/venue/day/2day02-07.htm" EUDORA=AUTOURL>http://www.abqjournal.com/venue/day/2day02-07.htm</a></div>
<br>
<div>By James Abarr Of the Journal ... February 7, 1999 </div>
<br>
<div>In the bleak desert of the Jornada del Muerto (Journey of Death),
about 60 miles northwest of Alamogordo, is Trinity Site. Here, the
world's first atomic bomb was detonated just before dawn on July 16,
1945, in a test shot that ushered in the nuclear age.c Trinity lies
within the high-security White Sands Missile Range and is open to the
public only twice a year -- on the first Saturday of April and
October.</div>
<br>
<div>On those dates, visitors can tour Ground Zero, where a
triangular-shaped stone monument marks where the 100-foot-high tower that
cradled the bomb stood. The tower was vaporized in the blast, but a
portion of the original crater is still visible. The casing of a
plutonium bomb of the type tested also is on display.</div>
<br>
<div>Two miles from Ground Zero, visitors can inspect the McDonald ranch
house, which was used by technicians to assemble the bomb's plutonium
trigger.</div>
<br>
Information about schedules and other details of tours of Trinity, now a
National Historic Site, is available by calling White Sands Missile
Range's Public Affairs Office at [phone].
<br>

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