* CCNS will host a talk on an
imprisoned Israeli nuclear technician on January 28.
* The Department of Energy may restart
the retired Fast Flux Test Facility, or FFTF, at the Hanford
Nuclear Reservation in Washington State despite Hanford's status
as the worst nuclear cleanup site in the western world. A panel
appointed by Secretary of Energy Federico Pe�a to review
operations at Hanford has determined that out of 177 underground
tanks of high-level waste, sixty-eight are already leaking.
Recently, the Department of Energy acknowledged that radioactive
leaks have reached the groundwater, and threaten the Columbia
River. The panel reports that employees who raise safety
concerns fear retaliation against their jobs, and that the site
has no system to analyze safety problems and deal with them. The
panel also said that "external credibility issues continue"
concerning government statements on tank leakage and that
previously identified management problems persist.
Despite all this, the Department of Energy is considering
investing $430 million dollars to restart the reactor and produce
tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen used to boost the
power of nuclear warheads, even though the government is short of
money to clean up the potentially disastrous leakage already
taking place. Groups that have worked for years to see the waste
contained and the Columbia River protected say that the
government should not restart a facility that will add two metric
tons of nuclear waste to the old reactor fuel rods already
decaying in open pools only 1,000 feet from the river. "It's a
blast from the past that threatens the future of Hanford cleanup
and the river and the millions who live downstream, " said U.S.
Senator Ron Wyden, a democrat from Oregon.
The government claims that the facility could also be used
for the production of medical isotopes, but a number of doctors
and experts have written Secretary Pe�a to say that the need for
radioactive isotopes is overstated. An Energy Department
spokesman admitted that the DOE's interest in restarting the FFTP
is primarily for the production of tritium for the nuclear
weapons program.
* Organizations representing over 8.5
million environmentalists, taxpayers and deficit hawks have
joined to recommend the cutting of 71 programs that waste
taxpayer dollars and threaten the environment. The Green
Scissors campaign has already successfully recommended cuts of
over 20 billion dollars in wasteful and environmentally harmful
federal programs. Among the 1998 Green Scissors proposals is
the termination of funding for the DOE's plutonium manufacturing
project, which the Green Scissors Report calls "Rocky Flats ll."
This project would increase Los Alamos Nation Laboratory's
(LANL's) plutonium pit production capacity. Pits are the cores
of nuclear weapons and act as triggers for their detonation.
Current pit production capacity at LANL is 20 pits per year, and
the project would increase this to 50 to 80 pits annually by the
year 2005. These pits would be in addition to the 10,000 pits in
storage, and an estimated 12,000 already in the current nuclear
weapons stockpile. A DOE report to Congress estimates total costs
of updates to LANL's pit production facilities at $1.1 billion
over the next decade.
Opponents of the project maintain that new pit production is
unnecessary to maintain all the weapons in the U.S. nuclear
arsenal. Many of the 10,000 spare pits in bunkers near Amarillo,
Texas, could be substituted in currently deployed weapons, if
needed. There are also several thousand pits in nuclear weapons
that are being held in reserve.
The Green Scissors report also pointed to the inherent
dangers of processing and manufacturing plutonium, and the fact
that the nuclear dump for contaminated waste at LANL is already
near full capacity. Expansion of that nuclear waste dump could
destroy valuable nearby Native American ruins.
* The U. S. Congress has been asked
by the Marshall Islands for additional funds to cover the cost of
treatment for victims of fallout from early U.S. nuclear weapons
testing. Recently declassified studies have revealed that many
more islands were affected by fallout than was previously
admitted .
* And in Europe, Greenpeace activists in
Amsterdam, the Netherlands have been forbidden by a Dutch judge
to block nuclear waste transports from the Dodewaard power
station to a processing plant in England. The judge threatened
the organization with a $50,000 dollar fine for each day the
station is blocked.
* The story of Mordechai Vanunu, a
whistle-blowing nuclear technician now in an Israeli prison, will
be told on Wednesday, January 28, at 7:00 P.M., at Cloud Cliff
Cafe, 1805 2nd St., Santa Fe. The featured speaker will be Sam
Day, writer, editor, peace activist, and coordinator of the U.S.
Campaign to Free Mordechai Vanunu.
Vanunu, a nuclear technician employed by Israel's secret
nuclear weapons program, is serving an 18-year sentence for
telling British newspapers about the program. Israeli agents
lured him to Rome and kidnapped him; he is now in his tenth year
of solitary confinement, in a cell measuring six by nine feet.
Vanunu is the subject of an international campaign calling for
his release, and for Israel's acknowledgment of its never-
declared nuclear arsenal. Amnesty International, the Jewish
Peace Fellowship, Terry Anderson and other former Middle East
hostages, and Joseph Rotblat, winner of the 1995 Nobel Peace
Prize, are among those calling for his release.
Sam Day has himself served state and federal prison terms
for non-violent civil disobedience at U.S. military and nuclear
installations. In 1992 he received the Martin Luther King Peace
Award of the U.S. Fellowship of Reconciliation. The lecture is
sponsored by Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety and The Los
Alamos Study Group.
