AAAAAA Welcome to The Environmentalist Newsletters --The Alvarez Family Connections. Alvarez, Tucker, Kittrell, Honiker, Cooper Brown, Egan, and others. How to screen nuclear activist groups for connections that DOE uses to its advantages. Many non-profits these days are used for the control of public opinion and to the advantage of Mil / Ind network. These are the results of checking for these connections. Preston Truman and the downfall of downwinders.

Welcome to
An Environmentalist Newsletters Exclusive---THE DOE Extended Family.
The Alvarez Family Connections.

An Open Exploration of Nuclear Issues

The DOE Extended Family, the FIXERS.

These are the allegations toward those that helped hide DOE's largest liabilities on HF and human experiments on indigenous persons.

This page on the DOE Family was designed at the request of Preston Truman of Hot Lava Spings, ID. He is the president of the NTS linked Downwinders organization. He claims that he could not put this info on his own downwinders pages. He and his organization hate the DOE Family described here and he supplied most of the information for this web page. Truman, or J as many call him, is a gay person and lives with his Sig. Other named Monte. J smokes like a fiend, and is not representative of someone that cares about his own health or deserving of compensation for NTS injury. J is not given to being upfront with all persons and is seen to act in a two-faced manner to achieve goals. This makes for problems in downwinders leadership. J can't seem to get many persons to help him do things like manage his downwinders email list, and when he does he fails to keep his list's moderator informed properly. The downfall of the downwinders is lack of being honest by persons like J, and this will distroy their credability. J is into HIV research and appears to be one reason why the truth is missing in HIV cause and effect, because the patterns are not unlike how the flu is spread from animals in flu seasons in other polluted areas. Downwinders have a saying, 'We are all downwinders,' but their focus remains only upon themselves. Downwinders doesn't do a proper job on the big picture. Their list is a poor place for honest networking, mainly due to J's dishonesty and lack of openness. Downwinders list practices censorship, calls some that list public information cyber-terrorists, and it has a gay bias that prevents factors connected with HIV's epidemic from being properly discussed. This will ultimately be the reason for the downfall of the downwinders. DOEWatch does not support much of what the poorly run downwinders organization does these days.

The DOE extended family connections is a hot and controversial topic at the moment, and one that can make a difference in the effectiveness of your health concerned organization. The topics that follow are the subject of a thousand behind the scenes debates on who is manipulating who in this arena, what are the control games and who do they protect. This is a problem that needs some airing and public debate.

This information is required reading for any hard hitting nuclear activists who really want to make a difference. Basically, this info comes from research into many of the local activists around Oak Ridge and goes on into national connections. This is not too unusual these days as many in the Military / Industrial Network fund non-profits to steer public opinion to their advantage. Example: http://www.lbbs.org/zmag/articles/apr97tokar.html The following is the story of how Oak Ridge and DOE have implemented their system to do just that and who the main players are. The pied piper network.

The following represents the observed opionion of DOEWatch, which has observed the nuke establishment game plays, set up alliances to protect itself inside ORNL in the 80's, watched these same plays enacted on the outside since 1987, and considered the opinion of other confidential individuals and groups that have similarly followed, been affected by, and observed those least effectual in the nuclear health movement for the last 30 or so years. This is the story of the ineffectual DOE public interest groups that hold zero effectiveness positions and take the lions share of grant funds from more hard hitting organizations. This is the story of DOE's FIXERS, BROKERS, and public information seeders. The opionion is these collective sick folks have been had by these behind the scenes dealings of this 'family' group, which benefits the DOE.

See the DOE Secret family Network that insiders at Y-12 called a 'Hippie Environmental Terrorist Organization' as it was being set up in 1987 to help Oak Ridge hide its largest problem, fluorine emissions. It was also designed to hide some problems with USAEC war crimes involving experiments on natives and issues of the Cuban Missle crisis. It is essentially a dispersed DOE alliance of 'handlers' and 'herders' to control the effectiveness of the public in trying to organize against the NTS radiation pollution and the fluoride problems around gas diffusion plants, a group of planted pied pipers. The isolated truth will set the public free, and their system is designed to obscure the simple truths.

These 'old hippie networks' are the remnants of the Govt. playing games on the antiestablishment young folks in earlier years and put to new uses protecting the Govt's. DOE liabilities. This network was enhanced in the early 80's with the onset of the Russians waging peace on the US and seeding the Nuclear Freeze movements with hippie persons to counter the Russian misinformation campaigns. It was essentially a continuation of the wars to control mens minds, using US methods. Good article on this is called 'The KGB's Magical War for Peace' in Readers Digest Oct. 82, pages 206-259. It also uses information leading techniques like those of Rockefeller in setting up the drug businesses and his education project. You can read a little more on this topic at: http://members.aol.com/magnu96196/rock.html and also at: http://www.eurosolve.com/charity/bava/drug_story.html. These are the money control mechanisms of cartels, and the same technigues used by DOE to control the fluorine liabilities. These techniques are what formed the AMA and major corporate empires and the techniques are well known to the uranium and oil energy cartel and the DOE. Example: http://www.getipm.com/personal/mcs-campbell.htm. The entire WTO thing on losing the environmental protections are about these industries trying to slide by liabilities using these techniques on a grand scale.

The formulation of the DOE extended family began way back with the incident of the Silkwood murder involving exposing plutonium problems at a plant in Oklahoma and the design of the first RECA bill. These were the times of the Gerry Spence, Robert Alvarez, Kitty Tucker, E. Cooper Brown, Jackie Kittrell, Cliff Honiker, and lots of others. They never really solved who killed Karen, but murder no less as claimed in many books, by what appears to be terrorism tactics with plutonium contamination and chemical harrassment with fluorine tricks that left her dead and the person she was to meet off the road and passed out in a cow pasture. Coincidences----no way. Other situations like Silkwood were to follow. Oak Ridge went shopping for help to hide its' fluorine problems in this group.

It is well known in Oak Ridge that freon breaks down with heat and if one does this by passing it thru an internal combustion engine burning hydrocarbons one gets methylated fluorine and chlorine compounds that are used as anesthetic gases in medicine and these cause persons to pass out in low concentrations. It is a standard harrassment technique used by the CIA and nuclear national security types. This is a part of the reason that the Silkwood murder is not fully investigated or solved. Fluorine also slows down mental reasoning and makes persons forget things and makes them more easily 'lead' or 'herded.' It is all part of well known techniques of control in Oak Ridge, which has strong CIA connections via Y-12 and K-25 non-proliferation offices.

Most everyone has heard of the CIA's MKULTRA projects that have been mostly declassified that were based on looking at mind control to combat odd things the Soviets were doing, it became a battle for men's minds. One key player was Sydney Gottlieb, and he experimented on unsuspecting US citizens using drugs like LSD. The idea was to extract information from targeted persons using mind altering drugs. While the LSD experiments are now well identified some of the others are not. Fluorine compounds also have strong mind altering effects and can last a very long time. It slows the mental processes allowing affected persons to be steered easily. When combined with mass media information seeding effects areas of sick folks like in Oak Ridge can be easily lead. The LSD techniques combined with fluorides tends to make persons self destructive. There are too many cases of persons being exposed to sensitive national security information and being found to jump out of windows. One case in point is Forrestal, who the DOE-HQ building is named for. He appears to have visited the information hidden at a particular highly classified DOE NTS location that keeps secrets on US war crimes committed by the USAEC involving indigenous persons of other countries.

Here one can read where some activists in Oak Ridge have long known about fluorine toxic problems at: http://www.holisticmed.com/fluoride/toxic.html and at: http://www.britannica.com/bcom/magazine/article/0,5744,219422,00.html From this one can notice that persons like Cliff Honicker have long known about UT special collections on fluorine toxic effects and the mental ability effects. Honicker calls this 'research,' but its more like a dated 25 year old book report that omits the obvious more recent research. Little is said to connect these issues to Oak Ridge fluorine, calcium-fluoride in barriers, or freon decomposition or that fluorine compounds in engines or incinerators burning methyl cyanide compounds forming methylated halogens that are used in anesthesia. The TSCA incinerator uses these techniques to control the toxicity of fluorine compound emissions and that is a pretty obvious technique as cars use these same techniques with additives and catalytic converters. TSCA's cyanide emissions help to raise blood and urine calcium in order to shed HF from air exposures. Now research, would have done things like look at and connect the high oxidative effects of fluorine and how the most sensitive part of cells is the mtDNA, and how fluorine thyroid, parathyroid, bone, and lymph node seeks, but none of that appears. It is in the readily available literature though. It is common sense too.

We know that elements behave in the body like related elements in the periodic table. We know that Sr-90 bone seeks because it is like calcium. We similarly know that fluorine is like iodine and affects the same places in the body as iodine. With the discovery of the mtDNA effects linked to iodine and the 'Krebs' or 'citic acid cycles' the method of energy regulation for cells in the body was known in 87. Then the mechanisms for CFS like illnesses and supressing the immune response easily follow. You can even read some of this easily found recent information at this location: http://members.aol.com/avalonsilk Or even more on the finer effects of fluorosis at: http://members.aol.com/magnu96196/fluorosis.html or the more special case for Oak Ridge involving HF releases at: http://members.aol.com/magnu96196/hf.html And still more here in this excellent book summary: http://www.rvi.net/~fluoride/smithbook.htm#bio and around 200 more study cites here: http://www.rvi.net/~fluoride/ref01.htm Also, http://www.trunkerton.fsnet.co.uk/fluoride_fantasies.htm for the connections of Fluorides to the Kellogg Corp that invented the fluoride resistant barrier materials for K-25. Kellogg developed sintering processes for paint sprayers. [Def: Sintering--The agglomeration of metal or earthly powders at temperatures below the melting point. Occurs in powder metallurgy and ceramic firing. Nickel and Ca-F both melt around 1400 degrees C, and sintering is quite well known as method of joining powders internationally---it would be the first method of investigation for any metal barrier design----the only unadulterated Earthly mineral at K-25 is Ca-F-----and its rat poison---most workers don't even know they've inhalled it----nickel dust is played up deceptively instead.] Convenient, these results of 25 year old plus studies omit a lot? Did it help Oak Ridge hide the real probems? If you know that Oak Ridge is high in thyroid diseases, and this links to fluorine toxic effects, then indeed to omit the obvious by using 25 year old book reports is especially helpful to Oak Ridge plant managers in loosing the obvious. How big is this network that looses the obvious? Large enough to change the public's perceptions in some cases? Well lets look some more and see, then let you decide.

Its main networking leader, Alvarez eventually moved to spawn a national network called the MPN, Military Production Network, [aka ANA these days] in the early 80's from Congressional hearings. This is the same time as the Russians waging peace campaigns and the US networks set up to control that. Today, its a small secret alliance of persons in the West and East that control things to the Govts. favor, using omissions, other distracting issues of lesser importance, poorly formed class action suits, and etc. The exact same techniques as used in the Russians peace freeze campaigns.

Oak Ridge, when it discovered problems with its' fluorine emissions studied the Silkwood arena and went shopping for an environmental oraganization to front for them and help them hide the fluorine toxics problems. This was easy in the light of some of the old hippie networks that countered misinformation in the early 80's from the Russians waging peace on the US. They readily recognized the chemical harrassment with fluorine signature in that case and that Kerr-McGee knew UF-6 and fluorine effects from its Gore, Okla. operations. It was not unusual for workers in Oak Ridge to pass out around some fluorine releases.

In 1987, the discovery of the mtDNA effects from fluorine exposures and the pathway into the lymph nodes and the effects on the immune system were known. I was, in fact, the principle discoverer of these connections in Oak Ridge in 1986. Details: http://molecular.biosciences.wsu.edu/Faculty/pall.html. Also: http://www.jleukbio.org/abs/v64n4/459-abs-frame.html. It explained things from cancers to HIV and immune disorders and highly affected the AMA edict on how things are suppose to be. With that revelation came the need to hide the fluorine local and national problems by Oak Ridge, which was at fault, big time. Oak Ridge helped fund and organize an Alvarez group called the OREPA, which was run under MPN, and brought in a person from Texas named Ralph Hutchinson [a part time preacher] and a counterpart from Nashville named Steve Smith [a veternarian], each hippie culture appearing types. This group was well funded by donations from Oak Ridge. They set up a project called the 'Oak Ridge Education Project' that played up the radiation contamination angle in Oak Ridge and omitted the greater problems, such as fluorine emissions from K-25 or from the HF, green salt, process at Y-12, or MSRE emissions at X-10, and etc. This patterned right after the old Rockefeller Education type manouvers for the AMA drug efforts of the early 1900's.

Alvarez eventually worked all the way up to advisor to the Sec. Of Energy to help control the Oak Ridge fluorine problems at that level. He was best friends with David Jhrad, who is Asst. Sec. for foreign nukes, and also the family relation to Sandra Reid. This connection at DOE heavily works with the CIA and with the K-25 office of non-proliferation that knows all about fluorine emissions as this is how UF-6 processes are detected from air sampling or satellites like HALOE. From here he could manipulate data in Oak Ridge's nuclear cover up's favor, he is the top dog running that deception. He had advance notice of every whistleblower at all sites, because they generally contacted one of his environmental planted organizations and the information went straight to the top. Total Control was the name of the DOE Oak Ridge games to hide fluorine effects.

Sandra Reid and husband Dr. Reid come to Oak Ridge in around 1991 and spotted wide spead health effects. Dr. Reid began with hair analysis and found toxic metals, immune problems he said looked like AIDS, and rashes he said were fungals coming thru skin. They looked at metals and radiation. The real causes of the rashes was activation of the cytokeins from toxic effects on cells, but Dr. Reid never appeared to connect these essential proofs of illness that activate the Th1 inflamation reponse. Explanation: There are two set of cytokines released by T-cells in cascades. The Th1 cytokiens -- INFLAMATORY Cytokines, which are TNF-a, IL-1, IL-2, INF-g, IL-6, GM-CSF, and so on, and the Th2 cytokines -- which in essense limit or suppress activation response -- such as Il-10, Il-4, IL-5 and so on, which suppress the production of Th1 cytokines. It is the interactions of the Th1 and Th2 cytokines that turn the immune response on, and keep it going, and then see it gets turned off before it over does it and the toxic effects of the Th1 cytokines start doing damage or set off autoimmune reactions. Dr. Reid has never connected the toxic cell cytokine and TNFa activations that lead to immune activation and damages that cause the rashes on workers and residents skin, the asthma seen in Scarboro children, or the arthritis seen in gas diffusion plant workers---------all of which link to fluorides toxic effects. Ignoring these proofs of harm and playing up metals and radiation harms and misleads the workers and communities. Dr. Reid plays family and DOE style diversion from the basic proof of the problems in OR.

Oak Ridge had long ago noticed these were large problems and they set up methods to pull the public's attention off the problems using fake environmental groups to educate the public only of things that helped DOE avoid accountabilty. Things similar to how Rockefeller did them in the early 1900's. Things like a hole in the aerial survey at Y-12 were planned way back in the 80's to draw attention to a uranium pile, that could not be well analyzed for pathway into the nearby community of Scarboro. Folks like Sandra Reid and Jackie Kittrell then followed along and got the Scaroboro community all upset and played up the heavy metals and radiation angle. Getting involved with these folks is somewhat like a Titanic experience, first you get pumped up, then you touch a sensitive issue or the tip of the chemical iceburg, and then your shackled to the titanic and all the sensitive issue deep sixed and lost from public view. They omitted the fluoridated air emissions and the Y-12 tricks of classifing some of these release stacks. An emission signature of fluorine that dominates health for 50 miles around, when K-25 is included. An emission signature that is a 100 tons/Yr large that dominates the regions air.

Sandra Reid and Jackie Kittrell was also involved in gaining access to a group of sick workers that called themselves 'The Exposed' at the K-25 plant in the 93-94 time frame. Reid was not happy with that name and was suggesting a name after some chinese mysterious inner force called 'che'. It appears this name was suggested to her by Kittrell. Interesting thing is this is also Kittrell's husband initials and some folks suspect this might really be termed the 'Cliff Honiker Experiment', CHE. Kittrell also knows about some mind control techniques and has admitted speaking to Alvarez about this in OR. Basically, this little click invaded and took control of the Exposed and renamed them to suit their purposes. Today, 'The Exposed' is one of the most exploited groups by the family controllers, and most of its sick members don't have a clue. Hopefully one day these folks will come to realize the degrees to which they have been chemically exposed, especially to the mind draining fluorides.

Reid worked with a number of sick persons connected to the MSRE reactor. She was introduced to an ORNL Maintenance Tech. [AE Massengill] that told her he refused work in the reactors basement to change broken exhaust fan belts that keep the HF vapors out of the building's air. Neither she nor Kittrell have done anything to help expose this obvious connection to chemical toxic fluoride effects. The reactor also had nuke criticality problems from slow UF-6 cookers, which caused numerous leaks and migration of fissle materials into dangerous configurations.

The sick workers of K-25 gas diffusion plant are highly affected by the chemical effects of HF vapors from the cutting open of the very clogged up K-25 building stages that dumped much persistent low level HF vapors into the plant and region. This effect of HF vapors causes mental fog and allows these very tired persons to follow pied pipers quite easily, and its an extension of the MKULTRA mind control techniques. This opening of the K-25 systems and using these techniques was planned at ORNL in the 80's to control the public's and sick worker's minds and hide what the real problem was. A very similar problem with nerve gas warfare in the middle east could also reveil Oak Ridge's health effects with Fluorides poisoning, and cover up of this associated effect was part of the plan.

In Aug 99, the fluorine problem was released onto sick worker lists and heavily exposed in Oak Ridge to a sick worker group called CHE, folks like Alvarez from DOE-HQ in Washington dumped Pu and Np documents into the Washington Post and did their typical thing that OREPA had done and exactly as planned by ORNL in the 80's-------play up the lesser damage, toxic metals or radiation angle. All planned at ORNL in the late 80's, and followed like the script to a play today. Its worse than a dime store organized crime mafia novel, but slickered off on the poor sick folks of Oak Ridge, Paducah, and Portsmouth, by these persons following Alvarez connections. Odd too that DOE-HQ opened the court seals on these Paducah suits in order to discuss radiation effects in the press. Does it buy them something, you bet it does.

Alvarez has buds on the NRDC that help Egan and other buddies play up the radiation angle at Paducah for the false claims lawsuit and the 10 million dollar one. Egan's involved with nuke waste in Texas and also the Russian uranium deal and something called the Non-Prolifertion trust, NPT, and this interferes with the USEC deals of Russian Uranium blend down. Check Egan's NPT board member connections: http://www.nptinternational.com/biographies.htm. See also a reference book called: "Washington Representatives" (Columbia Books, Inc. 2000): it lists Joseph R. Egan, Chairman, and Egan & Associates, 1500 K Street, N.W., Suite 200, Washington, D.C. 20005 Tel: 20210 220-9610 Fax: 202220-9608 as registered lobbyists, registered under the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA), lobbying for both Waste Control Specialists Inc. of Pasadena, TX and ABB Combusion Engineering Nuclear Power of Windsor, CT. Washington Representatives (Columbia Books, Inc. 2000) pages 66, 212, 688, 859 ISBN: 1-880873-40-0. So, we now have the Bush's involved and the Texas energy cartel with its uranium holdings. Particularly bad is an NRDC and NPT person named Cochran, that the foreign folks link to the CIA and driving up cold war tensions again. This same little cartel click had a lot to do with excessive dealings like Silkwood and even LBJ being from Texas and belonging to the chemical and energy cartel. LBJ was a prime holder in a large construction company in Vietnam and Texas liked pushing Agent Orange or dioxin there. Tn made the TNT used in Vietnam. The energy cartel did not like JFK's nuke test ban or his cut backs in nuclear weapons. Hence a problem not unlike that in 63, except this time with Gore and Clinton roles. Gore wants big military and star wars and Clinton wants scale down. Except now, its done with spin and politics, as all the long line of offed persons got to be obvious.

All these folks are part of a little network of behind the scene dealers that call themselves 'The Family' and for some of those that get screwed by their deals, they are called the DOE Mafia [Family in Italian], or sometimes a 'kabola' in Washington circles. Its a family that helps the military-industrial network hide the liabilities, manipulate politics, and control public opionion. Its even related to the Rockefeller type things, which pushed pharmacuticals by giving university grants to Universities that would sell the modern medicine. The Alvarez organizations take the non-profit monies and dominate the scene in all areas and leaves other more effectivly inclined groups economically disadvantaged.

Alvarez was an advisor to the Sec. of Energy and just before he left that position------he seeded the Np and Pu to the Washington Post. Alvarez was terminated because his wife Kitty was busted for having a Marijuana grow farm in the basement, which Alvarez was aware of. More of those hippie things around. Currently, Alvarez appears to be setting up a consultant firm with clients like the PACE Union and Gerry Spence. He is networking with Sandra Reid and Jackie Kittrell in Oak Ridge to set up hearing with Senator Thompson on Gaseous Diffusion and all is still silent on fluorine health effects using his press connections. Alvrez also just signed onto the STAR project for Sr-90 and baby teeth, and folks like Sandra Reid sit on that board. This Congresional hearing process is the same way that the MPN was formed in the early 80's.

Alvarez is working intensively with Sandra Reid and Jackie Kittrell in their little project called ORCA-----that is suppose to network nationally--------but appears to be a family run organization. The Kittrell's have an office called 'The Haven' in an old house in the Knoxville Fountain City area. Both Kittrell and her husband Honiker [both also old hippie appearing types] use sick workers to obtain grants, and without these sick persons held captive in their system, they have little money coming in. Workers are held information hostage in this family system, as they are not kept fully informed of the Alvarez connections or of the history of dissatisfactions of many from interactions with this group.

Kittrell and Honiker rent a huge 170 acre farm, house, and barns for a small sum from a former ORNL person who is the Presidential Science Advisor to President Clinton. His name is John Gibbons. John Gibbons was also the boss for Ram Uppullri at UT EERC, and Ram works for DOE Sec Michaels. The Kittrell and Honiker association go back some 20 years and this appears part of the link to how ORNL made its hippie connections to hide its massive problems and continue the cover ups.

Kittrell is one of the only activist lawyers with a DOE Q clearance too. She worked directly with the ORO office of declassification to do site level simple compound declassification. She would have seen things like lots of UF-6 releases and that these form HF that is then a cumulative fluorides inhallation hazzard. She would have seen that diffusion barriers are made from calcium-fluoride powder and nickel powder and known that calcium-fluoride and sulfuric acid is how HF is made in industry. She would also known that calcium fluoride powders inhaled would move to stomoch and cause chronic exposures to cumulative HF that would eat up persons stomochs over time. Yet, we see documents by husband Cliff Honiker that play up only nickel and recruit another poster person in the name of Ann Orrick, who was exposed to the barrier powders and the fluorides effects produce the more serious health harms. And then we have them living on high level ORNL persons land for a real low sum, looking and sounding like a fine deal for hiding the fluorides problems that ORNL found and planned to deceive the workers and the public about. Looks all the more like Kittrell and Honiker are directly involved in engineering the fluorides cover ups. Thus, we see the real ORNL and DOE motive for Kittrell to have a Q clearance. Kittrell used to work on Rockefeller contracts and later came to help cover up the chemical experiments on indigenous persons, much like whats happening here with the fluorides toxics cover ups.

Here is the skinny on Alarez and Tucker. They had another kid that committed suicide. This was from her former marriage to a black heroin dealer in New York. The remaining kid was this childs sister that turned them in for a marijuana growing operation in the basement and Tucker so out of control as to smoke MJ in front of police as the daughter slipped photos to the police from a back door. The first multiracial kids death was written of by them as a bad seed. This is the caliber of old hippies from this old system.

Sandra Reid's husband is Dr. Reid and has a number of sick worker and community patients. Oddly enough many of these sick persons in his care have high blood calcium levels and they all speak of wondering what this is. This is ultra simple in a place like Oak Ridge with high fluorine and HF emissions. MEDLINE lists well over a hundred sites for fluorine affecting the parathyroid and kidneys in such a fashion as to cause high blood calcium effects. In fact, it is standard business in detections for fluorine or HF exposures. Fluorides also have effects on the brain and nervous system, etc. Fluorine also calcium seeks and will deposit in calcified tissues and in the calcium rich myelin and is connected to diseases like ALS, MS, and fibromyalgae. The TSCA incinerator emits cyanide and causes high thiocynate in urine, which is an attempt to raise blood calcium and induce shedding of HF.

Basically, in a fluorine saturated town like Oak Ridge you have to be a real slow doctor not to connect these fluorine markers, or you have to be helping hide the basic and foremost Oak Ridge health toxic effect. Some might even go as far to call that malpractice to miss that diagnosis and then treat these folks for metals instead and allow them to become worse with flurine toxics. Fluorine also cause heart arythmia and many have this effect as well. Fluorine is one of the toxics that can affect the outcome of profits in the world of doctors and medicines. Just how is it that the fluorine dianosis is never made in Oak Ridge?

Kittrell represents persons like Joe Harding of Paducah and did all kinds of uranium contamination looking and none for fluorine. It is real obvious that one needed to look for that too. As one can't inhale uranium without this reaction: UF4 + 2 H2O ---> U O2 F2 + 4 HF. The HF has the dominate volatility, lung absorption, and toxicity. How could that be overlooked or missed? Harding did decon type work at Paducah and was inside the systems crawing around in cover alls with HF soaking into his joints from the HF and UF-6 wetting of metal surfaces. Harding had the most obvious case of ligament shieth hardening ever seen and a classic sign of extreme fluorosis. This became the mysterious finger nails and it stems from fluorine effects and not radiation.

Kittrell also represented the Reids and they lost everything. One comment from another of Kittrell's clients was that she made a great librarian, but not much else. So, today, we find her running a library at their Haven, just full of 25 year old declassified DOE documents. Which are of little use in the real Oak Ridge sickness issues, as they omit the mtDNA and lymph node effects found in 87. But of high value to DOE in misleading the public and winning court cases. Kittrell and husband Honicker worked on nothing but Rockefeller Foundation grants for many years and appears to have set up something like the Rockefeller education control programs. Columbia Univ. where Alvarez and Sea attended get huge Rockefeller grants each year also. Very revealing books on these well known Rockefeller control techniques are 'The Drug Story' and the 'House of Rockefeller' By Morris Bealle.

The Haven, or as some jokingly call it, the family buzzard roost, is now the home to a box car load of declassified DOE documents, mostly on heavy metals and radiation, and almost nothing on recent fluorine. The Kittrell's play up how Alvarez sponsored declassification. But if one looks at the fine print one notices he sponsored declassifications of only 25 year old documents, which omits the toxic stress protein indicators in blood and all the mtDNA damage effects of toxic metals and oxidizers. Not helpful at all to the real problems of Oak Ridge, and in fact more a part of what appears a time consuming scam or styme process.

Kittrell is the daughter of former slave owners and her father was a high ranking naval officer. Her husband is a sociologist that is playing up nickel contamination with Np and Pu in nickel. The metals recycling process strips these materials from the metals and leaves mainly the Tc-99. Kittrell's husband, Cliff Honiker, has a contract with Joe Egan of WCS fame. Honiker's pay checks were coming right from WCS to attack Envirocare. WCS is represented by Joe Egan, who appears to want to get control of all these recycled metals. We call this big effort to get all the gas diffusion metals for free the great 'recycled metals caper' or perhaps the great taxpayer train robbery because of the billions in metals this conspiring group is trying to get sent to their dumps and avoid any volumetric metals contamination rules for the present. When the metals contamination rules get written it will free up billions in metals into the market and immense profits. This hippie retirement fund for all those helping to pull this off are using all kinds of tactics, some that slander companies like Envirocare to slipping reports around that notice Egan's nuke pandering. Great scam ah, play up clean up, play up radiation and toxic metals, don't notice fluorides health effects, fail to set recycled metals standards, get DOE metals for free in your dump, get biilions richer when feds set recycle standards. Looks more like organized crime and racketeering issues.

Kittrell also knows Al Gore very well because they are both from Carthage, Tn. and she met him when he came home for summers from Prep school in DC. She has frequently visited the Gore residence and offered to take person to visit there. Kittrell used to work at the Highlander Center in the 80's, where this was the only environmental contact in the time ORNL and its crooks were looking for partners in helping them hide their huge mistakes.

The Haven crew have used a group called CHE to get EPA grants to fund expensive Xerox machines to copy 25 year old documents, set up a combined library, and apparently to travel all around the country and to do a few family community education things, again omitting fluorine toxic effects. The CHE group is economically disadvantaged by the processes to date. We don't see fluorine effects at all in the news, not from Egan's bunch, or from Alvarez, or from all those involved with this bunch. The related ORCA crew is composed of ORHL, Oak Ridge Health Liazon, and ORHSP, Oak Ridge Health Studies Project and is run by Sandra Reid and Jackie Kittrell. Sandra Reid is a non US Citizen from South Africa and until recently could not even type or operate a computer.

She was arrested recently for child abuse for leaving a young child in a car on a hot day. She orders her husband around like a controlling person. She gets considerable funding from a moviestar named CHER. She has lost fluorine reference books from folks loaning them to her to show the K-25, X-10, and Y-12 health problems connected with fluorine emissions. Most convenient, no too convenient !! Just after telling Reid the Oak Ridge fluorine problems this author was chemically harrassed in Win 95 with methods discussed only at ORNL. They form the central controlling 'click' for ORCA, Oak Ridge Community Alliance. Some call this the 'Jonah and the Whale' [ORCA] effect to swallow up all effective worker support. In this group is also Janet Michel.

ORCA is also connected to Mike Knapp, who co-wrote a book called 'What Have We Done', 1997, [ISBN: 0-9644659-2-2], for the Foundation for Global Sustainabilty, FGS. OREPA is a FGS group as well and was in ORCA. Knapp is also a second generation Oak Ridge person as his dad worked at one of the OR plants. In Knapp's book, little is said of the OR fluorides emissions problems, however, the HF emissions of nearby ALCOA with 500 tons/yr of emissions are cited. Knapp is now an organizer for SOCM Kingston chapter, just near the K-25 emissions. SOCM sponsored an Owen Hoffman meeting on I-131 that only protrayed partial truths on the ORHASP process and its omissions of thyroid disease drivers in the area. SOCM also has Ralph Hutchinson's [OREPA] wife Lisa working for it.

The family uses this ORCA group to heavily network with Alvarez and with their pal, E Cooper Brown, in setting up such things as the Thompson hearings on Gasseous Diffusion Plant workers, but they only talk radiation, fluorine effects are generally missing. They secretively operate from this group to pull off all kinds of Alvarez family specials and don't inform the CHE folks just how they are being used. They worked with Sen. Thompson to sponsor a bill and hearings that just considers radiation, and cancer outcomes, which conveniently is not the real problem in Oak Ridge. This inadequate result is called 'CON-pensation' as it is a CON game of compensations for health damages to workers and communities. There was also suppose to be a movie, but it is said this is not happening because the scipts make the workers look to dumb.

The Haven crew recently got special service from DOE FOIA office and Amy Rothrock with the release of the nickel documents from K-25. These heavy metals toxicity documents point to some of the low level studies of toxic metals damaging the immune response. Typical of the 25 year old studies that omit the protein stress signatures and the mtDNA effects and lymph node bioconcentration effects. And all planned to be that way by ORNL and its select crew of public portrayers who show off 25 or older research. Honiker involved the CHE group in looking thru a foot thick stack of these documents and then took what appears to be a year to write up the summary details and the whole thing is still not released as public knowledge to benefit all the sick folks, evidently because he has to find some deal to get credit. Basically this is something that would take a week or less to accomplish, as web sites work well in getting this information out, but that is not happening. Why? It appears more a process of styming effective progress. He has recently contacted the same reporter his buddy Alvarez dumped the Paducah radiation documents to in the Washington Post to attempt to push some heavy metals problems, but again avoiding the dominate and obvious fluorine problems at K-25. Why? Does this have the appearance of helping DOE lose its largest problem? Why read 25 year old documents to look for recent discoveries?

Honiker wrote this long nickel document with the appearance to distract from a more serious K-25 fluoride problem. URL: http://www.che-or.org/Documents/Nickel%20Powder-Nuclear%20Weapons,%20The%20Untold%20Story.htm. This paper serves a purpose for Oak Ridge in that it points to only toxic metal and radiation issues. Playing up the issues of the Pu and Np in the barrier nickel keeps prying eyes off K-25 biggest problem, the fact that these barrier nickel are made with calcium-fluoride or rat poison. The process is called sintering or 'cooking' of the fine nickel with the calcium-floride. The nickel and the earthy calcium-fluoride make a fluorine and UF-6 corrosion resistant diffusion barrier and its patterned after a paint spray nozzle. The small holes in the barrier stopped up for various reasons from corrosion of the steels at joints to wet air infiltration. The plant as it replaced the stopped up barrier materials smelted the contaminated nickel into ingots and released calcium-fluoride, HF, and other fluoride compounds into the air. Millions of pounds of barrier were processed. Bldg K-33 had all the barrier replaced twice in it operations.

When using calcium fluoride the fine dust in the barrier fabrication or dismantlement grinding up operations allow the dust to get airborne and some it it gets into workers lungs. Then calcium fluoride tends to move out of the lungs to the stomoch, where the actions of mild stomoch acid, sulfuric, cause the liberation of HF gas slowly. This is the same industrial process technique used to make HF from fluorite mineral. This exposes workers to HF and is connected to stomoch cancer effects. This same effect is what makes calcium fluoride rat poison. The DOE by deceptively declairing the calcium florides a proliferation issue hide this toxic effect from the public and many of the workers.

This would cause an instant problem if the public were to spot this, as calcium-fluoride is well associated with rat poison and it might trigger a closer look at the mysterious illnesses at this plant. It might also cause a closer look at the many other fluoride releases from the plant and show the thousands of tons of toxic fluoride this plant lost. So, what the plants managers planned was to propose that the barrier materials remain undisclosed by saying the problem was a proliferation problem. The barrier materials had long ago been compromised by being tracked into parking lots, homes, stores, and even dumped in intersections in downtown Oak Ridge. After 50 years, this secret was well out in the open and the plants failed security let the material get everywhere. They wanted only to keep the plants workers and area residents in the dark on the smelting releasing even more fluorides into the air. Pied Piper Honiker's nickel diversion document also helped along that cause for the DOE and its' corrupt management. The issues are calcium-fluoride is also seen in the steel industry where it is used as a flux. An epic report is that of The Donora Fluoride Fog that caused many on the town of Donora to have heart attacks and others long term ills. You can read about Donora here: http://www.fluoridation.com/donora.htm Like emissions happen in OR from smelting barrier materials.

How big is the industry cult to suppress and keep in the dark chemical injuries? Check: http://fedupfeds.org/matthews.htm Combine this suppression effect with that of the ORNL and Y-12 and ORO Hippie Terrorist Action group on one begins to see exactly how this issue is controlled to avoid the liabilties. The problem is an issue that affects the basic constitutional rights of the American public to be properly informed to whats going on with their health.

More things to keep in mind as the big picture of what the family types are pulling off in terms of foisting mysterious diseases, when the real problems are known----just covered up.

The National Labs knew things like DU in lungs from the Gulf War end up in lymph nodes and suppress the immune response, AND they also knew the precision bombing toxic releases would directly add to this effect---------AND the net overall effect would be higher diseases and cancers in the local populations---------THUS a form of terrorism against the countries to keep them in fear of another conflict as it would harm their very children and lifespan.

In order to do this, the national labs, govt., and family mystery maker helpers would have to fake some mysterious illnesses at places like gas diffusion plants with fluorides poisons all over the place and even with their own vets poisoned with the same toxics in the air. The illness of both the cold war and gulf vets being called mysterious is fully rigged by the Govt., whose national labs full well knew before the conflicts that the toxic releases would impair the cellular immunity and all the ravages of CFS, MCS, the toxic symptoms of fluorides and metals would appear, and the cellular immunity would be damaged, and even diseases from out of control microplasma, viruses, funguse, and bacteria would appear. Damaging the cellular immunity of the lymph nodes and cells has many disease outcomes, but only one basic function compromized and one basic pathway and mechanism in common.

In other words, the US Govt. and its national labs are lying, faking mysterious illness with the help of their family helpers, and trying to save their very butts by covering up this mess.

It has overtones of intentional war crimes being committed, conspiracy to hide these war crimes and liabilties, etc.

National Security in the US has become one in the same with murder and using the methods of organized crime.

How did Oak Ridge pull that little manover off on getting barriers declaired a proliferation issue? Simple, the DOE non-proliferation office was located at K-25, and K-25 had something they wanted hidden. The basic issue on barrier type enrichment is it takes around 1 Giga Watt of power, a huge plant, a huge amount of money, its easy to spot with satellites looking for fluoride releases, and its easy to target these plants in Middle East countries-----so basically if some country like Iraq were to proceed on some wild tangent to make one of these plants it would be both detected early on and likely bombed-if materials controls did not work. Most prolifertion countries go after the most efficient designs, which means centrafuge or mass spec systems. The black market in HEU is also a problem. Basically, the issues of barrier and proliferation risk was intended to cover up huge fluoride releases affecting workers and communities, and pulled on a plausible false excuse of proliferation. It was an illegal use of classification. Interestingly, the plants don't appear to have reported the releases from these smelting operations here and elsewhere. Honiker's nickel diverson paper does exactly what Oak Ridge mangers planed, diverting the attention off the huge toxic effects of fluorides and onto lesser problems of radiation and toxic metals.

The nickel diversion paper also presents another poster person used much like a Joe Harding. Hardings HF exposures were played down the radiation played up. The new poster person presented in the nickel dedication manipulation is Ann Orric, who has severe stomoch problems verging on cancer and many other ills. Orric worked around some of the barrier dusts and as this material gets into lungs it works its way on down to the stomock where it encounters sulfuric like acid that reacts with calcium fluoride in barrier dusts and forms HF, which is very destructive to cells. Playing up nickel toxic effects and ignoring the HF toxic effects makes her the latest profitable entry into this team of scammers diversion tactics. They appear to have planned to get 20 years out of making her their latest poster person.

The Raven crew likes to play down the old connections of the nuclear issues of how the nuke types believe that the Jews escaped from Egypt by poisioning their way out. Using things like nuclear toxic techniques and fluorine toxic warfare. Even the code names of Y-12 and X-10 relate to this. This little click also found it odd that fission reactions made xenon and krypton isotopes that made fallout products. Its standard science. It rather changes ones opionions of the biblical accords and of the Jews techniques once one notices such things. All kinds of controlling things happen with the Haven crew-----maybe it is intended to rhyme with Raven and the black bird connections to secret projects? They will, orchestrated with several others, play down anything that does not work in their control games. Kittrell, Honikers wife, goes by 'JackieO' on Email, odd connection there, too. All of them appear to be very controlling, herding, and acting as handlers. Jackie's favorite line is to be presented as an "angel", but she is no angel.

This Raven crowd just finished playing up cyanide and metals emissions from the TSCA incinerator to the press and a Gov's Panel, and left off the dominate fluorine emission component. Janet Michel, One of the ORCA players, is married to a fella named Russel who works for SAIC on the Russian Uranium blend down project that is suppose to feed USEC at Paducah. Janet Michel also went out to Jackson Hole to lecture Gerry Spence on Incinerators, the same person that played up metals and cynides here and omitted fluorine. Janet Michel is a former public affairs and public education type for the Oak Ridge plants. She is now the public affairs and voice person for sick workers called CHE, and the level of press releases and public education appears watered down considerably. Rumors persist that Michel was a huffer of glue in her younger days and does not want the DOE and company insurance to discover this, as it can add into her illnesses. Michel also started her own "Business Confidential" list and tried to compete with CHE presidency while holding allegence to Kittrell and other family types. This may also explain why she is not too much into exposing the chemical effects and helping others that help her keep her embarrasing secret. DOE loves to have leverage over persons, and the family loves to employ such useful knowledge. Jackie Kittrell, a long time pal of Alvarez and Tucker, is married to Cliff Honiker. He just got some work consulting to Gerry Spence on the incinerator in Idaho, which Alvarez is also doing. Honicker is connected with an editor of the Tennessean, its his dad, and got them to do stories that played up the metals and cyanides and sick workers and communities. The Tennessean never mentioned the fluorine problems either. Nice family connections, ayh. Does it make you want to look deeper and ask more questions and study what is really going on?

More of the Alvarez connections are persons like Geoffy Sea, who went to school with Alvarez at Columbia. Sea lurks in public meetings and on lists and does things like toss out information to pull attention now and then. He likes to toss out credentials and expertise, but no one seems to believe in his causes------cause they typically go nowhere. Sea tries to network some of the Portsmouth issues, and was quick to toss out radiation as the primary effects on the Gas Diffusion mess-----right in sycn with his Alvarez and Egan buddies. Sea is big on union networking and this is the likely reason Alvarez now consults to the PACE union in the Paducah suit. Sea will even play games with saying Alvarez is bad, then turn right around and help with the scams. He is a long standing member of the Alvarez family. Sea also saw the files of a Y-12 worker killed from salt shop exposures to fluorides and he claims to know the nuclear industry well, but failed to acknowledge that fluorine resembles a nuclear criticality exposure.

Speaking of Jackson hole, The extension of the family out west is persons like E. Cooper Brown and the NCRV and some other organizations. These folks have been played up as heros to the Navajo out there and all the while they have been slammed dunked by these family cooperations. The NCRV was started by Kitty Tucker and E Cooper Brown and today folks like Jackie Kittrell and Sandra Reid sit on the board. There are two branches of the family----one in the west with the NCRV and one in the east.

The family is an organization that spreads planted misinformation stories in the public to gain control of the litigation processes and 'herding' and acting as 'handlers' for the DOE liabilities. They jump into any area with problems and set up the appearance that they are there to help, but little help ever comes, just hopeless wandering. Typical confidence stories Kittrell speads is she sits down and quilts with folks and portrays herself as an angel. They are fairly numerous, so they sort of make it appear they are nice folks, but not so, they just alter persons perceptions with these tactics. Most of them are old hippies and they put on this show of concerns and huggy feely things, it appears just a confidence scheme. In the West they have effectively controlled the Navajo interests with Brown and NCRV and in Oak Ridge the same with groups like CHE, that have been lead into these schemes by DOE family folks like Kittrell and Honiker in AEHSP and ORCA. The Navajo have tossed good money after bad to these NCRV go nowhere controllers. Now these shows involve Gerry Spence and the INEEL incincerator show, to which Alvarez and Honiker both consult.

Family member E. Cooper Brown got caught bribing persons in the Marshall Islands nuclear bomb compensations in order to control things. E. Cooper Brown with the aid of NCRV and Jackie Kittrell rushing in to the Santa Fe human experiments hearing to get ahold of a person named Ernest Garcia, who had publically reporting bringing natives to the Panama canal zone to the US to be used in letal tests on humans. Garcia was an eyewitness to this and had extensive documentation. He was a member of an Army/CIA unit like the Special Forces that was set up to do that. This information is essentially an international war crimes charge against persons in the Manhattan Project and some industrialists that experimented on these natives in Panama.

E. Cooper Brown is using this information to leverage himself into postion in the courts, like the DOL ARB panel. He also leveraging this information to win other cases like Doris Brown. He and all his family friends know about these experiments, even Jackie Kittrell reports she knows this. This amounts to major double dealing and dishonesty and not reporting of international war crimes. This is all characteristic of the crooked deals this gang does. This also is leverage to get the Govt to dump all the gas diffusion metals into their gangs dumps and wait to set the volumetic contamination standards till later and reap billions in profits for having handled this for the Govt. and the Oak Ridge nuke crooks.

E. Cooper Brown back mailed the DOJ with the Garcia information to obtain settlements in his and Jackie Kittrell's human experiments cases. In doing this he screwed one of the biggest whistleblowers in US history giving testimony at the hearings in Santa Fe. Brown and Kittrell profited by screwing a whisleblower and in helping the US Govt. cover up some of its worst war crimes of the Manhattan Project. Kittrell sold out ethics for profits and leveraging this black mail information to her advantage and profit. Brown is also offering her a DOL position, as a carrot, if she can pull off something like RECA.

These folks are no angels, but major crooks in the cover up of DOE's big three problems-----1. The extensive fluorine damage around gas diffsusion plants----2. The human experiments on indigenouse persons in the Amazon and Panama---that were also used in nuke tests in the US at White Sands and NTS------and 3. The existance of these CIA/special forces type units that JFK helped expose in the 60's that was involved in the Cuban situation and took orders from the nuclear national security operations linked to OR. There is also a huge trail of several dead persons by suspicious cases like happened with Silkwood, that involved anyone that knew about the human experiments war crimes at NTS or White Sands. Persons like Dorthy Lagaretta, Dotty Troxel, and others were aiding in making these crimes public and met suspicious deaths like Silkwood and the documents that many knew they were carring disappeared. They were generally connected to the NCRV, which was set up by Alvarez, and a person name Geoff Sea always nearby. Silkwood was not the only person murdered to control this information.

The family groups vie for control of public interest groups using tactics that cause internal dispute and then move in to sieze control at weak moments. Always seeding the impressions that folks like Kittrell are angels and Brown are legal saviors on their side. This happened in the Marshalls, in deals with the Navajo compensation, and its happening in OR with the sick worker issues and the conceilment of the dominace of the HF issues that leaked hundreds of tons of HF per year into the regions air. A clean example of this lies in Kittrell jumping off the downwinders list in order not to have to answer questions about her using the Garcia information for her and Brown's financial gain. Her only move was to run and begin a campaign to discredit the person asking those embarrasing questions on her checkered past and claiming the person asking those question was crazy. She also has one person on the attack trying to cause a huge bit of noise and a dispute to be able to run in a gain control, all well planned and previously employed tactics they use frequently. Currently, these individuals are being given enough rope to hang themselves. One of the chief bad mouthing enforcers is a person named Hackett. Hackett has disclosed information on barriers fabrication using calcium-fluorides and gas diffusion seals made from sintered teflon [PTFE]plus another compound, resulting in seals having a green appearance. This appears, its pure hearsay this seems to be still classifed-though obvious for DKH, in violation of the NSA and AEA, since he saw the original classified documents while holding active security clearance. Hackett, a disgruntled physicist, is a school teacher these days and has an indian triket business. He has a web page and claims to be a whistleblower because he disclosed some residues on school kid tables at the Graphite Reactor of ORNL. Such things are shallow in comparison to the issues of the huge releases of fluorides into the regions air.

Gas diffusion plant seals soaked with PCB's used in the duct work for ventillation systems for the buildings are burned in the TSCA incinerator, where some degree of dioxin is produced. Similarly, other seals made of teflon can be burned in TSCA to solve what appears to be a classificaion problem, except this produces HF and other toxic fluorides. Seals in gas diffusion plants cause problems with process gas leaking out of systems and moist air leaking into systems.

Alvarez wrote sections of Chapter 7 of the book called 'Killing Our Own' about a sick worker, Joe Harding, in Paducah that inhaled uranium dust. You can read this section at: http://www.ratical.org/radiation/KillingOurOwn/KOO7.html. This book downplays or even omits the much more toxic fluorine exposures that damage bone and the immune system. With the DOE family, all is radiation and the fluorine component is missing, and that is the largest health damage vector at gasseous diffusion plants. Even the health panels like ORHASP are totally devoid of the fluorine problems. Their only public person was Ralph Hutchinson, who is OREPA and part of the Alvarez organization called the MPN.

Remember also, Gore used to be a reporter for the Tennessean and his daughters as well. Gore was the person that set up the recycled metals from the Gasseous Diffusion Plants and deals with BNFL. Basically, Oak Ridge has a serious problem with taking the diffusion plant apart without releasing too much toxic fluorine and harming the health of workers and residents. This problem was well known at ORNL in the 80s and that the toxic effect could be used to impair cognitive reasoning as well. They have already done this with high emissions in the summers of 93, 94 that made hundreds sick. They are highly impaired with mental impairments like that seen in Gulf War syndrome. Gore just moved his election campaign to Nashville and the Tennessean area. Gore has long had a finger in promoting Oak Ridge and protecting them. The entire recycled metals thing also pulls attention off fluorine toxic effects. In this case, we have a very large connected click------all acting to help DOE hide its most serious health problem.

Its the DOE 'CON-pensation' games; delivered and played up, just in time for the presidential election campaigns. The master political spin CON games to make the public loose sight of poison gas emissions, like a Bopal, from Gasseous Diffusion plants HF emissions. Now they only wanna talk radiations and cancers and put a few million on the table. When the real problems are trillions plus. Delivered to the public by Alvarez family related organizations like NRDC, NIRS, NCRV, OREPA, ORHL, ORHSP, and more-----a press sign on con-game that sucked in hundreds--------but missed the biggest DOE and national problem.

The NRDC and NIRS just recently jumped in the deceptive alliances to help Oak Ridge hide its problems. NRDC is a long known Alvarez connected organization doing slide shows on demand. The latest over portrayal is over the recycled metals from K-25. Here they have played up exposing children to radiation. One can drive around Oak Ridge with a geiger counter and stop in most subdivisions at metal curb drains and find recycled metal used in the Vulcan materials manufactured drains that register three times background. But recycled metals with volume contamination have been around for decades, whats the big deal now?

Most of the metals from K-25 have surface contamination that is easily removed and this results in very low volume contaminated recycled metals, that are lower than most recycled metals on the market. The exception is the nickel metal barriers, which do have trapped uranium and low concentrations of fission products and transuranics. Only the areas in the process where these reprocessed fuels were injected have the higher concentrations. These materials can easily be removed by acid washing the nickle before smelting and this too results in low contamination metals. Yet, the radiation contaminations and the traces of Np and Pu are being played up in the press and national campaigns by NRDC. Few realize that all metals, since the NTS tests, are volumetrically contaminated and many were always contaminated with NORMS. Yet, they stress zero contamination, its basically impossible to do.

So, what we saw in Oak Ridge was the ORCA click that networks with Alvares immediatly jump on the NRDC band wagon and play up radiation, everywhere. A most successful campaign signing on many mislead organizations. Now most think the problem is radiation in Oak Ridge and only cancers will result, and the net effect is DOE-ORO just got a lot of help in hiding its larger problems, fluorine. Its that evil radiation, but guess whats missing again, fluorine. See the patterns, it is always possible to see the DOE and Alvarez family by this trait of playing up radiation and losing fluorine, most obvious to most. The real problem in the metals recycling is taking the K-25 stages apart initially and releasing the trapped UF-6 gas and the calcium fluoride dusts in the barriers. This toxically injures workers and releases more poison gas into already devastated communities. The Alvarez family alliances of ORCA, NRDC, ANA, and some others totally omitted this dominate effect. Now the legislation is locked in on just cancer CON-pensations, which is not the dominate problem. IS this yet another case of Workers CON'ed again by the Alvarez family rat pack? You decide.

The other part of the rat pack in Oak Ridge are many of the old scientists that always say the K-25 system were sealed and did not leak. They also claim the K-25 processes ran well, but in reality they were often so plugged up that they took continual dismantlement and massive design changes. K-25 systems also leaked and leaked a lot, and thousands of tons of fluorine gas and uranium. So, on panels like the ORHASP the fluorine emission problem was not even on the list to be studied. Carefully hidden away from the publics view by the Old Scientists, Some DOE minions, and OREPA [an MPN Alvarez organization]. The public is not even represented on the ORHASP panel. What an extreme scam!

Oak Ridge also is involved in the DU ammo used in the Gulf War and they also used some fluorine techniques with Star Wars techniques--------both these are waste products from the Gasseous Diffusion plants. The GW also had lots of nerve gases used that break down into fluorine products. Pres. Bush baited Iraq to get in and shut down the nuke programs and then poisioned the region with DU and fluorine to make them as brain wasted as places like Oak Ridge, where the Govt. is trying to get away with toxic assalt and murder. Oak Ridge thought, what worked on Oak Ridge can work on Iraq as well and on GWV's.

Check out the Alvarez DOE Family in the articles below and see how they slickly seed information to the press on radiation and play behind the scense to manipulate things in DOE's favor and in theirs as well.

The DOE secret mafia family is something everyone needs to be aware of in national and even international networking.

Its one big circle that closes back to the time of Silkwood and Oak Ridge's use of these folks to hide the problems using the Rockefeller techniques. Its the biggest stage play running in the US------make sure to see it.

The even bigger part of the game happens at the Nevada Test Site with the Star Wars boys sneaking around to study the levels of fluorine in cattle, the food chain, and humans. This involves secret sampling of the fluorine levels around the country. The Star Wars boys hang out at NTS Area 51 where they can hide under a top secret cloak set up to hide these problems using the excuse of Star War weapons research. They play around with using jet engines as spray cans for chemical similar to that used with the TSCA incinerator experimental uses. They also have a couple a fluorine based weapons and delivery systems that make both extremly lethal radiochemical methods and non-lethal paralytic radiochemical methods. Mostly these are advanced methods of how Silkwood was killed, and these too have been used in harrassment. The high fluorine releases in Oak Ridge show how extreme the mind slowing effects are for those chemically affected. This is a part of why the Silkwood murder has not been solved, its connected to a top secret weapons technique.

In Oak Ridge the levels of fluorine releases are so high that they affect the mental agility of area persons. This makes them just able to do mostly what they aleady know and easly programmed with just what DOE wants them to know. They are tired, real tired, and easily 'herded' and 'handled.' They question little and even if they did, the mental power is not there to support finding the answers. For this reason, this is called the mind control project and it does helps Oak Ridge to hide the huge fluorine problems. Most folks in the know poke fun at how slow the Oak Ridge area is in comprehinding the obvious. It is a real life Simpson's cartoon. The Simpson's even know about the secret city, but few can even ask the relevant questions as to what has happened to them. The mindless control is that extreme.

Folks like Jackie Kittell admit knowing about the 'OR mind control' projects existence and this family connection practices these techniques daily. She's worked a long time on Rockefeller foundation grants and should know this Foundations role in the AMA, the Drug Story, and its early Education Project techniques. Just add some more Alvarez family types stressing that evil radiation and most of the crowd runs down the yellow brick road to Oz, and they forget to look behind the curtain to see who is pulling the strings. The master wizzard has veiled the presence of fluorine poisoning Oak Ridge and thus the world from similar freon poisoning effects. Evil wizards abound when the Govt. scientists screw up and they might get tossed in jails or loose their jobs. Its an evil that even tried to have downwinders play up radiation in the act to hide the fluorine problems in Oak Ridge and in that process empower the Alvarez family network.

The Alvarez family is the misleading public stage show fashioned after the Rockefeller techniques and combined with the secret cover of Star Wars DOD top secret research on fluorine, and that combined with the support of Tenn. and Texas politicians forms a sort of evil kabol. You can see the Gore and Bush politics is to highly fund Star Wars to keep the labs favor and continue the cover ups. It makes the Chinese and the Russians mad and rev's up a new cold war to make the weapons lab richer for having brought a health plague on the planet.

The system makes itself rich and promotes chemical pollution at the expense of more health care profits. Rockefeller techniques are nothing but Oil and Drug interactions for profits. The nuke and fluorine dodge plays are patterned after the same techniques employed by Rockefeller. It is ruining the country and the world. Just look what this evil system did to the Gulf Vets and the Iraq civilians. Then look what it did to sick workers around the nuke plant sites. What it did to Vietnam with agent orange. What it done with TVA adding toxic metals to fertilizers and into the food chains. What its done with Oak Ridge dentists promoting fluoride in tooth pastes and in the public water supplies, which helps hide the cancer hot spots around toxic releases across the country by raising the background health rates. Most of it all engineered right down here in Tennessee at Oak Ridge.

The Alvarez family covers up a local and a global health plague and basically hypnotizes the population with misleading information and deceptive reporting of the fluorine health problems.

This is why most in the know don't like the Alvarez mafia types. They hurt and kill people for a living using stage shows and deceptive issue focusing. They take all the foundation monies and deliver lesser issues. Its a simple plan hatched up at ORNL in 1987, a cold criminal practice. They call it national security.

The most current episode of the family involves playing up the issues of ORHASP Task One on I-131 and Oak Ridge. Part of this process involved having Owen Hoffman talk up some issues of the I-131 study. This process takes things out of context with the whole and leads the communities to wrong conclusions. Hoffman did three parts of ORHASP, Task One, Task Four, and Task Seven. He totally botched up the task seven screening and this is part of who and how the largest emissions in OR were not doing in ORHASP's 14 million dollar and 5 year study. Playing up I-131 in an area drowned in hundreds of tons of HF a years that highly damages the thyroid also buys the DOE some diversion and huge time delays. Hoffman worked for ORNL and left ORNL just ahead of these ORHASP studies. Hoffman for years refused to recognize the HF emissions and important and gave persons the run around. Hoffman and his family ties managed to bring in others to play up the I-131 issues in OR and try to deep six the much more dominate issues of thyroid damage due to HF here, and at the same hide his ORHASP screw ups and help DOE/ORNL hide the HF problems.

The basic science they hide is that the mtDNA is the most susceptable cell damage and the lymph nodes posess the highest toxic concentration from macrophage actions. These processes acting together shut down the immune competence and a range of disease results, even to the point of transmissions of HIV and STDs. This evil kabol hides these simple facts of the magnitude to which the Govt. and its scientist screwed up.

This kabol is one that is far removed from any ethical religion, its a pure evil group that misleads citizens off DOE's most sensitive issue.

Make sure to browse thru the news pieces below and keep in mind all the secret alliances these spell out. Alvarez is just recently branded "persona non grata" by the SS at the White House. These corrupt individuals are being mapped out, there will be other crooks spotted in the near future.

Check your area for connections to the DOE Alvarez family and see if your opionion of their performance agrees with ours. We think that once you spot these herding and handling techniques the power of you and your organizations can be greatly enhanced.

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The Evidence Files

[partial listing]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/aug99/paducah08.htm

In Harm's Way, But in the Dark

By Joby Warrick

Washington Post Staff Writer

August 8, 1999

PADUCAH, Ky. – Thousands of uranium workers were unwittingly exposed to plutonium and other highly radioactive metals here at a federally owned plant where contamination spread through work areas, locker rooms and even cafeterias, a Washington Post investigation has found.

Unsuspecting workers inhaled plutonium-laced dust brought into the plant for 23 years as part of a flawed government experiment to recycle used nuclear reactor fuel at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, according to a review of court documents, plant records, and interviews with current and former workers. The government and its contractors did not inform workers about the hazards for decades, even as employees in the 1980s began to notice a string of cancers.

Radioactive contaminants from the plant spilled into ditches and eventually seeped into creeks, a state-owned wildlife area and private wells, documents show. Plant workers contend in sealed court documents that radioactive waste also was deliberately dumped into nearby fields, abandoned buildings and a landfill not licensed for hazardous waste.

The sprawling Kentucky plant on the Ohio River represents an unpublished chapter in the still-unfolding story of radioactive contamination and concealment in the chain of factories across the country that produced America's Cold War nuclear arsenal. Opened in 1952 in an impoverished region, the 750-acre plant built a fiercely loyal work force of more than 1,800 men and women who labored in hot, stadium-sized buildings turning trainloads of dusty uranium powder into material for bombs.

Today, the Department of Energy contends that worker exposure was minimal and that contamination is being cleaned up. A lawsuit filed under seal in June by three current plant employees alleges that radiation exposure was a problem at Paducah well into the 1990s.

The Post's investigation shows that contractors buried the facts about the plutonium contamination, which occurred from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, in reports filed in archives. Plutonium, a core ingredient in nuclear bombs, is a highly radioactive metal that can cause cancer if ingested in quantities as small as a millionth of an ounce. The Paducah plant was designed to handle only uranium, a mildly radioactive metal.

"The community to this day has no idea of the kinds of contaminants they were exposed to," said James W. Owens, a Paducah lawyer representing residents whose water has been polluted by the plant.

Health consequences remain unclear. No comprehensive study of worker medical histories has been attempted at Paducah. In neighborhoods where older workers live, stories abound of cancer clusters and unusual illnesses. One 20-year veteran worker who died in 1980 compiled a list of 50 employees he worked with who had died of cancer.

"Everything was so safe, so riskless," the worker, Joe Harding, said in an interview just before his death. "Today we know the truth about those promises. I can feel it in my body."

Even though the plant's procedures and purpose have changed – Paducah's enriched uranium is now used in commercial nuclear power plants – problems have continued. Workers weave between makeshift fences that cordon off hundreds of radioactive "hot spots" scattered across the complex. In one corner of the plant, mildly radioactive runoff trickles from a nearly half-mile-long mound of rusting barrels that still contain traces of uranium.

"The situation is as close to a complete lack of health physics as I have observed outside of the former Soviet Union," Thomas Cochran, nuclear program director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in documents filed in the lawsuit.

The Department of Energy, which owns the plant, said it could not comment on allegations made in the suit because of the court-ordered seal. The agency is investigating the charges and dispatched a team to Paducah to determine if conditions posed an immediate threat to workers or the public.

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said the agency's national security goals had "sent many of our workers into harm's way," but he said the agency must now live up to its responsibility to "right the wrongs of the past." Two weeks ago, Richardson pledged millions of dollars for medical monitoring of nuclear workers who were exposed to beryllium, a highly toxic metal.

"The Department of Energy will continue to take any actions that are necessary to ensure the protection of public health, the workers and the environment," he said.

Still, agency officials, in a written response to questions from The Post, strongly defended past safety practices at Paducah and said no workers are at risk today.

"The plant's monitoring data did not indicate an accumulation of [plutonium and other highly radioactive wastes] in the workplace or the environment that would be a health concern to workers or to the public," the DOE said.

That position is vigorously contested in more than 2,000 pages of documents filed in the lawsuit by two of the plant's health physicists, or radiation safety experts, and a veteran worker who had his esophagus removed after three decades of work inside contaminated buildings. Copies of the documents were obtained by The Post from government sources.

[Note: Govt. Source was Alvarez]

"The management line for years has been there was an insignificant amount" of plutonium at Paducah, said Mark Griffon, a health physicist at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell who is participating in a federal study of radiation conditions at nuclear weapons plants, including Paducah. Griffon reviewed plant documents provided by The Post.

"If the levels were this significant," he said, "it raises an important question: Why weren't workers ever monitored?"

The two health physicists suing the plant say in court documents they tried to call attention to the radiation problems but were confronted by a culture of unconcern.

"I was told by my superior . . . in so many words that 'this is Paducah – it doesn't matter here,' " said one of the physicists, Ronald Fowler, 50, who came to the plant in 1991.

The suit was brought under a law that allows employees to collect payment for exposing fraud against the government. It was filed under seal to give Justice Department officials an opportunity to decide whether to join the suit or begin a criminal investigation.

The suit names Lockheed Martin and Martin Marietta, which managed the uranium enrichment plant during the 1980s and 1990s. It does not name the original manager, Union Carbide, which ran the facility for a 32-year period during which the bulk of the contamination occurred. None of the companies had been served with the suit and none would comment on the allegations.

The current plant operator, U.S. Enrichment Corp., a government-chartered private company that assumed management this year, concedes past problems but says safeguards are now in place. USEC, which sold shares to the public last year, says it has fully disclosed the plant's environmental problems to regulators, workers and stockholders.

"It was acknowledged by all sides that contaminated conditions existed, . . . but USEC wasn't responsible for them," said Jim Miller, USEC executive vice president.

Paducah is the latest DOE facility to be rocked by lawsuits and revelations of contamination. Cleaning up the complex is expected to cost $240 billion and take at least 75 years.

Measured by the gram, the contamination at Paducah isn't nearly as extreme as that in plutonium production plants such as Washington state's Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where vast swaths of land have been sealed off from humans. But unlike the workers at those plants, employees at Paducah did not know of the risks in the uranium dust they breathed every day.

Worker exposure to such dust has cost the government in the past. The Energy Department paid a $15 million settlement five years ago to former workers who had breathed uranium dust at the Fernald Feed Materials Production Center near Cincinnati.

The difference between the dust at Fernald and that at Paducah comes down to one word: plutonium.

For 2 Decades, Trains Brought Unknown Danger

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The Paducah complex was the second of three U.S. government plants designed after World War II to create enriched uranium. The plants were operated for the government by private contractors who over time were paid bonuses for running safe, efficient facilities.

In the beginning, uranium ore was scarce. The Atomic Energy Commission, forerunner of today's Energy Department, tried to fill the gap by "recycling" leftover uranium – from nuclear reactors that made plutonium for bombs – through the enrichment process at Paducah.

From 1953 to 1976, more than 103,000 metric tons of used uranium was shipped to Paducah, records show. It arrived in freight cars as a fine black powder. Unknown to workers, the powder contained dangerous substances left over from the plutonium-making process – fission byproducts such as technetium-99 and heavy metals known as "transuranics": neptunium and plutonium.

"Plutonium is roughly 100,000 times more radioactive per gram than uranium," said Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.

Over time, through spills and waste discharges, the contaminants accumulated in the miles of pipes used to gasify and enrich uranium, around loading docks and in ditches, documents show.

Plant officials were aware of the plutonium and other contaminants as early as the mid-1950s – it made their recycled uranium less efficient. But they believed the amounts were too small to pose a health threat.

Today, the DOE is able to rely only on a contractor's estimate of the total amount of contaminants introduced in that period: 12 ounces of plutonium, 40 pounds of neptunium and 1,320 pounds of technetium-99.

The government today takes the same position as it did in the 1950s: The amounts were most likely not enough to harm workers. "The general protection provided to workers from the hazardous effects of uranium would have provided adequate protection" from the contaminants, the DOE statement said.

But documents obtained by The Post show that plant officials became increasingly concerned about the contaminants. A 1992 report by Martin Marietta concluded that they caused "significant" environmental problems and "also pose a radiation hazard to the workforce." A 1988 study done for the DOE by a private contractor said the plutonium could "represent a significant internal dose concern even at very low mass concentrations."

Plant records draw an instructive comparison that underlines the hazards posed by plutonium: The 12 ounces of plutonium in the black powder delivered more than twice as much radiation into the environment as the 61,000 pounds of uranium that flowed out of the plant in waste water into the Ohio River between 1952 and 1987.

Bosses Took Threat With a Grain of Salt

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In the noisy, cavernous buildings where uranium was processed, workers did not receive the warnings. The conditions there were "extremely dusty . . . sometimes to the point where it was very difficult to see or breathe," said Garland "Bud" Jenkins, 56, a 31-year-veteran uranium worker and one of the three employees involved in the lawsuit against Lockheed Martin.

To protect their skin from the uranium dust, workers wore cotton coveralls and gloves. But respiratory protection was optional – old Army gas masks, which fit poorly and were seldom used, former and current workers said.

At lunchtime, workers brushed black powder or green uranium dust off their food. "They told us you could eat this stuff and it wouldn't hurt you," said Al Puckett, a retired union shop steward. To dramatize the point, he said, some supervisors "salted" their bread with green uranium dust.

The workers took the dust home at shift's end.

"We frequently discovered that our bed linens would be green or black in the morning, from dust that apparently absorbed into our skin," Jenkins said.

Exposure to uranium dust decreased after the late 1970s, when the plant stopped receiving the black powder and began processing a more refined form of uranium. In 1989, the DOE adopted more stringent worker safety rules.

By then the plutonium had permeated the land around the plant. In the 1960s and 1970s, when the powder spilled, workers would shovel it up and wash the remnants into the nearest ditch, Jenkins said. More than a dozen ditches flow directly from the plant onto state property and private lands.

There are no nationwide limits for plutonium in soil; cleanup standards depend on modeling the degree of public access to the contaminated spot. But the DOE has set cleanup limits at nuclear blast sites in the South Pacific of 15 picocuries of plutonium per gram of soil.

Contractors measured plutonium at levels up to 47 picocuries in ditches outside the plant and 500 picocuries on plant grounds.

Those measurements were made after the first evidence of environmental problems outside the plant surfaced in 1988, when a county health inspector found technetium and chemical carcinogens from the plant in a farmer's well. The discovery of the poisoned wells prompted a multimillion-dollar ground-water cleanup under the Environmental Protection Agency's oversight.

Although plant managers posted creeks and ditches with warning signs in the early 1990s, the signs do not refer to plutonium or any other radioactive contaminants. Some warn of possible contamination with cancer-causing chemicals; others merely caution against eating local fish.

Lawsuit Alleges Deliberate Dumping

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In addition to the substances that flowed or spilled out of the plant through the drainage ditches, the employees contend in their lawsuit that a wide variety of contaminated substances were deliberately dumped into the environment. Spilled black powder and empty radioactive waste containers allegedly were placed in dumpsters and trucked to a sanitary landfill on DOE property licensed only for trash and garbage. Rubble from demolished buildings and contaminated railroad ties allegedly were dumped in nearby woods and fields. Slag from uranium smelters was put in abandoned concrete bunkers in a state wildlife area outside the plant, according to the lawsuit.

"There was only one dumpster for all waste, whether radioactive, hazardous, toxic or ordinary," Jenkins said.

Plant records describe at least two dozen unlicensed radioactive debris piles on state lands outside the plant. Last year, ground-water tests turned up technetium directly beneath the sanitary landfill.

A 1990 DOE audit of Paducah found inadequate controls over waste disposal and a faulty system for tracking contamination that forced managers to rely on "word of mouth."

Charles Deuschle, 56, a health physics technician and the third employee in the lawsuit, said he was "shocked" when his surveys discovered radioactive contamination in such places as the plant's cafeteria.

"I saw conditions that would never have been tolerated in any other nuclear location where I have worked," Deuschle, who came to Paducah in 1992, said in court documents.

Internal plant surveys included in the suit found high levels of radiation on street surfaces, manhole covers and loading docks and in locker rooms as recently as 1996.

The plant's current managers maintain that all significantly contaminated areas have been addressed. "Hot" surfaces have been coated with absorbent paint, and warning signs have been posted, they said. Rope fences keep passersby away from radioactive equipment rusting in the open. Drain pipes and fire hydrants are coated with warning paint Two dilapidated buildings where the black powder was once processed are padlocked. In 1997, regulatory oversight of the plant was transferred to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which declined to comment on allegations in the sealed lawsuit.

Even the employees involved in the suit concede that safeguards have improved recently. But they insist that problems remain. This spring, elevated radioactivity was found in a parking area near the administration building, plant documents show.

Soil collected from a ditch outside the plant's fence by The Post in June and analyzed at a commercial lab contained 2.6 picocuries of plutonium, slightly higher than the NRC's suggested guideline for cleaning up nuclear sites.

The Post, using two hand-held detectors, also found sharply elevated radiation levels in the debris piles on the state wildlife lands. One such area was an unmarked pile of rotting railroad timbers near fishing ponds and campgrounds.

Public Reports Tell Only Part of the Story

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Environmentalists, plant workers and neighbors claim that plant officials play down the hazards.

"They cloak it in jargon," said Mark Donham, a member of a citizens advisory board that meets monthly with plant cleanup officials. "You have to order the documents and then spend hours and hours looking at them to learn anything."

DOE officials say the facts and figures about the plutonium contamination inside the plant have been duly recorded since 1991 in thick inspection reports. But these are kept in archives rarely visited by the public.

In the annual environmental reports that circulate to the public, the contamination is described as "trace" amounts of "radionuclides," a catchall term that can include mildly radioactive uranium as well as highly radioactive plutonium.

A 1991 "site investigation" report, done by the plant's contractor and stored in the archives, shows much higher levels of plutonium than the annual environmental reports. The DOE said the reports use different methods and measure different things.

The result has been that the DOE can claim full disclosure about the contamination while plant workers and neighbors remain in the dark, said Owens, the attorney for the plant's neighbors.

"The company has engaged in a cynical disinformation campaign that centered on downplaying risks and presenting confusing and misleading information," he said.

Inside the plant, the first disclosure of plutonium to workers came around 1990 after managers summoned top union leaders to discuss the results of tests ordered after the state found the poisoned wells.

"They took it seriously," a union official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said of Martin Marietta's presentation. But "the health effects weren't viewed as serious. We just vehemently stressed that the contamination should be cleaned up."

Plant managers insist that workers today are fully aware of the potential hazards. USEC cites worker training programs that it says include a briefing on plutonium and other radioactive hazards at the plant.

But officials with the union's Washington office contend workers still don't know a fraction of what they were exposed to. "What we're seeing now," said Daniel Guttman, former staff director of the federal Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, "is the outcropping of the glacier."

Deficient Monitoring Compounded the Risk

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The health effects for Paducah workers remain an open question.

The DOE said 442 Paducah workers were tested in 1997 and only 8 percent displayed measurable amounts of radiation. It said screening tests since 1992 have found no evidence of plutonium exposure in workers.

But the greatest exposure to workers would have occurred before the enhanced monitoring that began in the late 1980s.

In 1990, the DOE audited safety practices at Paducah and found scores of deficiencies in radiation monitoring and worker protection. The audit team said Paducah failed to properly monitor radiation to workers' internal organs – even though plant managers had been repeatedly warned to do so.

Radiation-measuring equipment was either missing or not properly calibrated, the report said, and workers weren't being tested for the kinds of radiation known to exist at Paducah. Whether the plant's equipment and personnel were even capable of detecting exposure to plutonium and other transuranics was "questionable," the audit said.

Bolstering claims by workers that they had been left in the dark about radioactive hazards, the report found no mention of transuranics in plant safety procedures.

"Onsite environmental radiological contamination conditions are largely unknown," the report said. "A formal program with well-defined monitoring, sampling and analysis requirements does not exist."

Independent experts are investigating Paducah as part of two national studies of environmental and safety issues in the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. Both studies are relying primarily on data supplied by the plant. Officials brought in two years ago to review past radiation hazards told The Post they were not informed that Paducah workers may have been exposed to significant amounts of plutonium.

Neither was Harold Hargan, a plant worker for 37 years. Hargan was one of about six workers who he says were told in 1990 that a test had found plutonium in their urine.

"It surprised me. Hell, it surprised the doctor," Hargan said. "Everybody knew there was no plutonium at Paducah."

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Richardson Orders Probe Of Uranium Plant in Ky.

By Joby Warrick

Washington Post Staff Writer

August 9, 1999

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson ordered an immediate investigation yesterday into reports that thousands of unsuspecting employees at a Kentucky uranium plant were exposed on the job to cancer-causing plutonium.

Richardson said he would meet with workers at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant and would request a National Academy of Sciences study to probe the links between worker illnesses and exposure to radioactive materials that occurred over decades at the federally owned plant.

He also called for expanding a newly created program to bring health screening and medical treatment to thousands of workers who may have been put in harm's way at Paducah and similar facilities that were part of the government's nuclear weapons complex.

"I have long maintained that we must correct the sins of the past by compensating workers who have been medically damaged," Richardson said in an interview. "I don't want this to be known as the department of excuses for not dealing with workers who have been harmed."

His remarks came after The Washington Post reported that workers at the Paducah plant had been unwittingly exposed to plutonium and other radioactive metals that entered the plant over decades in shipments of used uranium from military nuclear reactor fuel. The report was based in part on sealed court documents filed as part of a lawsuit by workers and an environmental group, the Natural Resources Defense Council. The suit alleges that government contractors concealed evidence of the exposure for decades while allowing plutonium and other hazards to spread into the environment.

The workers also allege that former plant managers allowed contaminated waste to be dumped into a state-owned wildlife area and a landfill not licensed for hazardous waste. They further contend that radioactively contaminated gold and other valuable metals may have been shipped out of the plant without being properly tested.

Thomas Cochran, a nuclear expert with the NRDC who reviewed conditions at the plant, said health and safety practices there were the worst "outside the former Soviet Union." Former plant operators had not been served with the suit and declined to comment. The whistleblowers and their Washington attorney, Joseph Egan, said they also could not comment because of the judge's seal on the case.

Energy officials sent a team to Paducah for an initial probe after the documents were first filed in June, Richardson confirmed. "They did not uncover any imminent threats . . . but we are continuing to investigate these concerns," Richardson said.

The expanded investigation he announced yesterday would seek to uncover "what actually occurred, who was responsible and what must be done to assure that it never happens again," he said.

Among the specific measures:

Top Energy Department officials will be dispatched to Paducah this week to check compliance with environmental and safety regulations. The agency's Office of General Counsel will assess whether former contractors, including Lockheed Martin Corp. or Union Carbide Corp., had fulfilled their responsibilities to protect workers and the environment.

Besides the health study by the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine, the Energy Department will institute a medical surveillance and screening program for employees. A screening of former Paducah workers is just beginning as part of the Former Worker Program, a congressionally ordered study of past exposures of employees in the U.S. nuclear complex.

The department's fiscal 2000 budget request will be reassessed and revised as necessary to include money to probe and rectify environmental and health concerns at the government's uranium enrichment plants.

Richardson will ask the White House to expand a newly created program to provide millions of dollars in medical screening and other benefits to Energy Department workers who were exposed to beryllium, a highly toxic metal used in nuclear weapons. "These actions are warranted given the concerns raised . . . and I will not rest until these issues are fully dealt with and any injured workers are fairly compensated," Richardson said.

Paducah workers were exposed to plutonium through shipments of contaminated uranium that arrived at the plant from 1953 to 1976, a period when national security priorities often surmounted concerns over risks to workers and the environment. The plutonium shipments stopped, but contaminants remain spattered over hundreds of acres of buildings and grounds. Workers did not learn of the problems until at least 1990, and some contend they were never told.

The U.S. Enrichment Corp., a government-chartered private corporation that took over management of the plant this year, contends that all significantly contaminated areas have been cleaned up or marked with warning signs.

Although no comprehensive study of worker medical histories has been conducted, current and former workers at the plant have linked past exposures to a string of cancers and other diseases.

Richardson said although many of the exposures at Paducah were historical, the government bears responsibilities for those who may have been injured.

"Even though it was the 1950s and everyone was gung-ho," he said, "it doesn't mean that you can forget about workers who have been made sick."

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Attorney: State not asked to hire client

An official says the attorney told the state he could offer more information on Paducah radiation problems if it hired his client, a cleanup firm.

By Joe Walker

Sun Business Editor

A Washington attorney denies trying to garner business for his client, a Texas waste management firm, by telling the state that radiation problems at Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant were far worse than portrayed.

Joseph Egan, who also is a nuclear engineer, said he was "flabbergasted" at a state spokesman's characterization of meetings by Egan and associates with last October with environmental protection, health services and attorney general's office officials.

"Our response was, well, there's nothing new here," said Mark York, spokesman for the Natural Resources Cabinet. "They indicated there was additional information that was of a privileged nature, so to speak, and could not be shared with us. However, this information could be disclosed if the firm was hired to do some work in regard to the situation (at the plant)."

Egan said York is mistaken. "At no time did we ever state, suggest or imply that if we were hired there would be additional information that we could then have to to Kentucky officials," Egan said. "It's flatly wrong and it would be highly inappropriate for us to have done that."

On June 1, Egan filed suit alleging Paducah plant workers were exposed to plutonium and other substances, and that former plant operator Lockheed Martin issued public documents discounting plutonium contamination in the plant environment.

Egan represents Waste Control Specialists, an Arlington, Texas-based firm that advertises a "broad spectrum" contract to receive waste from DOE facilities for treatment, storage and possible disposal. The firm also reportedly bid to build a plant in New Mexico to use a laser-based process called AVLIS to enrich uranium for USEC Inc., which now operates the Paducah plant. USEC scrapped plans for the AVLIS plant earlier this year.

Although Waste Control Specialists is licensed to receive low-level and mixed radioactive wastes, Egan said the business is "not legally authorized to dispose of the kind of waste that concerns our lawsuit."

John Cubine, director of the Division of Administrative Services for the Kentucky Attorney General's Office, wrote an interagency letter Dec. 3 summarizing the meeting with Egan as one to potentially secure business for the waste firm.

"During the (Oct. 22) presentation by Egan & Associates, they stated they represented Waste Control Specialists, a proposed waste facility in Texas," the letter said. "It is our understanding that their client may benefit from any acceleration of waste cleanup in any state, including Kentucky."

The letter was addressed to Michael Hines, deputy general counsel of the Natural Resources Cabinet.

Frankfort lawyer Tom Marshall, who is involved with Egan in the lawsuit, said he helped arrange the meeting at Egan's request. Marshall said he has connections in state government after having worked there in various capacities, including a stint as chief hearing officer for the Natural Resources Cabinet.

Marshall also denied the purpose of the meeting was to gain business. He and Egan suggested that if asked, Cubine would remember the meeting differently. But when called by The Sun, Cubine said through spokesman Corey Bellamy that "we stand behind our letter."

Cubine's letter said the meeting concerned the attorneys' claim that (1) the Energy Department had not fully told the public or the state the extent of radioactive material; (2) plant cleanup would take until 2030 rather than 2006, and (3) the state should immediately require DOE to make full disclosure and secure enough cleanup money.

Egan said Thursday that plutonium contamination at the plant is far worse than the public knows. He said he has evidence that plutonium in creek sediment near the plant was "very substantial," compared with little or no plutonium shown in annual environmental monitoring reports published by Lockheed Martin during the 1990s.

"Not only are they not accurate, I'd say they are deceptive," he said of the public reports. "That's one of the fundamental issues of our claim."

Dr. John Volpe, manager of the state Radiation Health and Toxic Agents branch, said he was involved in the meeting with the Egan group. State officials evaluated the claims and determined they were not new and being addressed by DOE, he said.

Volpe said the state was well aware of elevated levels of plutonium in a wastewater ditch on government property behind the plant. He said state sampling - independent of the plant - shows the amounts diminish greatly as creeks flow away from the plant and are no threat to people living nearby.

DOE spokesman Steve Wyatt said public documents prominently mention trichloroethylene, a degreaser, and technetium-99, a radioactive substance similar to plutonium, because those are the two main contaminants around the plant. They have gotten far more publicity than plutonium because they are much more prevalent and prone to move faster than plutonium because they are soluable in water, he said.

Traces of technetium and plutonium were in uranium from nuclear reactors that the plant processed periodically from 1953 to 1975. Unlike technetium, plutonium and uranium are insoluable in water and move very little, Wyatt said.

"I'm not trying to minimize the impact of plutonium," he said. "The department could've done a much better job of communicating it to workers and residents. There's no question about that."

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Nuclear Fuel, February 22, 1999 Pages 8 -10.

More proposals surface for sending spent fule to Russia for disposal

By Michael Knapik, Washington

"It's a non-starter" to even think that the Clinton admisistration might approve the shipment of any US controlled spent fuel to Russia for reprocessing, said one key administration official, commenting on a suggestion by the head of the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy in a recent letter to Energy Secretary Bill RIchardson.

However, the official said, if there were a proposal to ship spent fuel to Russia just for storage and the revenues from that storage were applied to solve "a larger issue," like weapons plutonium disposition, then the US might have a different view.

A proposal that attempts to meet those criteria is expected to be unveiled this week, sources said. The proposal is said to have the backing of, among others, Thomas Cochran of the Natural Resources Defense Council: former FBI and CIA Director William Webster, Bruce DeMars, the former head of the Navy's nuclear propulsion program; the Washington, D.C. law firm of Egan & Associates, and Alex Copaon, who had earlier developed a scheme to store waste on an island in the Pacific Ocean (NP, 10 March '97). The unofficial spokesman for the group, John Xyte of Egan & Associates, declined last week to disclose any details of the group's efforts, but he did indicate that some announcement was forthcoming, possibly this week. From discussions with others, this group's proposal would apparently, in the simplest form, have Western companies pay some fee to ship their spent fuel to Russia for long-term storage. Reprocessing would specifically be barred. The money would then be used to clean up contaminated nuclear sites and pay for disposal of excess Russian weapons plutonium.

Separately, Russia's Kurchatov Institute and Vir-ginia-based Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) have put together a proposal for what they call a monitored retrievable spent fuel storage facility at Krasnoyarak-26, also known as Zhelaenogorak, that would also have an international research center for "global collection, safeguarding, and disposal of stratgic nuclear materials." Kurchatov/SAIC would seek some initial funding for the project under DOE's Nuclear Cities Initiative.

The proposal envisions attracting some 10% of the annual spent fuel discharges from the world's reactors.......about the amount of spent fuel that is produced by Japan and Taiwan. With this amount of spent fuel, and a storage charge of $ 700 / kilogram of heavy metal, the project, which should be run by an international consortium, perhaps under the suspices of the IAEA, could turn a profit of $ 100 million / year, the proposal suggests. Reprocessing of the spent fuel would be an option for customers to select, with funds from the storage of spent fuel bing used to finish at 1,500 metric ton / year plant at Krasnoyarak-26.

In his letter in late December, Minatom head Yevgeny Adamov suggested that the US and Russia "examine the question of the possible transfer no a commercial basis, of spent fuel from US nuclear power plants to Russia for its long term storage and subsequent reprocessing at.......Minatom enterprises."

Although current Russian environmental law bars the import and long-term storage of most foreign nuclear waste, there is an apparent effort under way in Russia to modify that prohibition. That effort, according to news reports, enjoys the support of most parties in the Russian Duma. However, support is apparently far from unanimous. Organizations such as Greenpeace can be expected to campaign vigarously against having foreign waste sent to Russia.

Adamov and other Minatom officials have clearly had discussion with European companies about te shipment of spent fuel to Russia. Greenpeace in January obtained a copy of a "protocal of intentions" signed Sept. 17, 1999 by representatives of Minatom and Swiss utilities. The Swiss utilities, represented by NOK's Herbert Bay and EGL's Frans Hoop, said that the "most acceptable option" was the shipment of spent fuel to Russia "for back-end services on a noo-return basis." The utilities, however, apparently want to also keep open the iption of having the fuel reprocessd. The protocal noted that the Russuans believed the price offered by the Swiss utilities for the final disposal of high-level waste of spent fuel "should be higher." In a speech Jan. 5, Adamov mentioned the figure of $1,000 / Kg for disposal of spent fuel.

The protocol also contained the following interesting paragraph:

"The parties agreed to study together with Western fuel manufacturing companies the possibilities of enlarging the scope of services rendered to Switzerland by the Russian Federation in the front end of the fuel cycle, including manufacture of the fuel assemblies for the Swiss utilities. Such an approach will be logical in case this fuel would go for final use to the Russian Federation."

Greenpeace said it also had document that indicated that Minatom ws interested in pursuing the spent fuel disposal option with utilities in Germany, Spain, South Korea, Taiwan, and possibly Japan.

There are other proposals that have surfaced that would involve Russian storage of foreign spent fuel (NP, 30 Nov. 94, 1) And a group called Pangea Resources Inc., which is looking at developing a gloal repository for spent fuel in Australia (NP, 14 Dec. 94, 1), may also be looking to Russia for some unspecifid services, one source suggested.

One knowledgeable source with long term experience in international nuclear affairs said he remains skeptical of any schemes to send spent fuel to Russia. One of the big question marks, he said, is Russia's political stability. Is the US confident enough to allow spent fuel under its control----- spent fuel containing tons of plutonium------to be sent to Russia, he asked. In addition there are the issues of involving Russian nuclear cooperation with Iran that are going to have to be resolved before any such shipments would even be comtemplated, he added.

Another source knowledgable about Russian nuclear affairs said that despite the apparent enthusiasm of Russia's nuclear leadership, it is unclear that they will be able to find a region in Russia willing to store or dispose of the foreign spent fuel.

URL: http://www.whenergy.com/demos/nuclear/index.html

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http://www.bellona.no/e/russia/sfi_the_project.htm

The Non-Proliferation Trust Project

A group of German and U.S. industry, an NGO and several well-connected former government and Navy officials have set up a company with the goal to take title of 6,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from various countries (excluding the United States and Russia), with the aim to store that fuel for up to 40 years in Russia. The proceeds would pay for disposition of 50 metric tons of Russian excess weapons plutonium as well. The group, Non-Proliferation Trust, Inc. (NPT), plans to raise between $6 billion and $12 billion from the nations trying to rid themselves of their spent nuclear fuel. Proceeds exceeding costs, here based on minimum revenue projections, is divided up for the following purposes:

•Fissile materials and safeguards enhancements ($1.8 billion); •Spent nuclear fuel decommissioning and disposition, incl. the development of a spent fuel geological repository ($700 million); •Additional non-proliferation programs and charitable programs administered by Russia's nuclear energy ministry Minatom ($600 million); •A lump sum for Minatom, half of which would pay pensions and salary arrears for nuclear and defense workers ($400 million); •Various Russian environmental programs ($200 million) •Pension payments for eligible retirees ($200 million); •Payments to orphans (100 million).

NPT guarantees that the fuel will not be reprocessed and that the Russian plutonium will not be used for weapons production. But NPT does not yet know what to do with the fuel after the lease expires. In the contract, Russia has an option to keep it. If Russia exercises this option, it will be able to take title to the materials and do with them as it pleases, including reprocessing it. If Russia declines, NPT would have to find another place to store the waste. Absent voluntary takers, NPT cannot provide an answer to that question.

NPT hopes to work with Minatom in building a storage facility in a region already devoted to nuclear activities, such as Zheleznogorsk, Mayak or Seversk. NPT would assume responsibility of transportation of the materials to the storage facilities from the countries of origin. NPT promises that all facilities would be subject to international inspections and would comply with U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission requirements. All proceeds would be devoted to nuclear safeguards in Russia; NPT would not retain profits. NPT participants, however, will administer the project throughout its lifetime for handsome payments. The draft contract speaks about overhead payments not to exceed 10% of the project costs.

Key participants

Minatom Development Trust: A trust chartered to hold the funds created through the storage of foreign nuclear fuel and charged with disbursing the funds to the above-mentioned recipient projects. Board members include Thomas Cochran, National Resources Defense Council, Bruce deMars, Daniel Murphy, Judge William Webster, former CIA director, and Dr. William von Raab, former U.S. Customs Commissioner.

Non-Proliferation Trust: U.S. non-profit organization. On the board are two former admirals, Bruce deMars, chief of the U.S. nuclear propulsion program, and Daniel Murphy.

Alaska Interstate Construction: Construction and management. Would design and construct the storage facilities in Russia.

Wissenschaftlich-Technische Ingenieurberatung GmbH: German nuclear engineering company which designed the German spent fuel storage facility in Ahaus.

Gesellschaft fur Nuklear Service mbH: Responsible for radioactive waste in Germany. Also produces storage casks and monitoring systems.

Halter Marine: Large U.S. shipbuilder with military order book. Would build transportation vessels.

Egan & Associates: Legal adviser.

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Gold May Have Too Much Glow

By Joby Warrick

Washington Post Staff Writer

August 14, 1999

It was one of the most secretive missions at a factory that was all about secrecy: Nuclear warheads, retired from service and destined for the junkyard, were trucked at night to the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant to be dismantled, hacked into unrecognizable pieces and buried.

Workers used hammers and acetylene torches to strip away bits of gold and other metals from the warheads' corrosion-proof plating and circuitry. Useless parts were dumped into trenches. But the gold – some of it still radioactive – was tossed into a smelter and molded into shiny ingots.

Exactly what happened next is one of the most intriguing questions to arise from a workers' lawsuit against the former operators of the U.S.-owned uranium plant in western Kentucky. Three employees contend that the plant failed for years to properly screen gold and other metals for radioactivity. Some metals, they say, may have been highly radioactive when they left Paducah, bound perhaps for private markets.

The claim – based partly on circumstantial evidence – is now being investigated by Department of Energy officials who are also probing the workers' accounts of plutonium contamination and alleged illegal dumping of radioactive waste at the uranium plant.

"It is my belief that these recycled metals were injected into commerce in a contaminated form," Ronald Fowler, a radiation safety technician at the plant, states in court documents that were unsealed this week by the Justice Department.

The investigation comes amid heightened scrutiny of government efforts to recycle valuable metals piling up at more than 16 factories that are part of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. In the past week, congressional leaders, industry officials and scores of environmental groups have called on the Clinton administration to reconsider a controversial Department of Energy program to recycle scrap metal from nuclear weapons facilities into products that could end up in household goods or even children's braces.

Opponents' concerns soared this week with revelations, first reported in The Washington Post, that plutonium and other highly radioactive metals slipped into the Paducah plant over a 23-year period in shipments of contaminated uranium. The plutonium accumulated over decades in nickel-plated pipes where uranium was processed into fuel for bombs, government documents show. Smaller amounts of tainted uranium went to sister plants at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Portsmouth, Ohio, the records show.

Scrap nickel from those plants is now the primary target of the Energy Department's metal recycling program, which would be run jointly by the federal government, the state of Tennessee and a private contractor, British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. (BNFL).

"If DOE denied or didn't know plutonium was present at Paducah, why should we trust them to release waste from identical production plants into products ranging from intrauterine devices to hip replacements?" asked Wenonah Hauter of the watchdog group Public Citizen, one of 185 organizations to sign a letter to Vice President Gore Thursday demanding a halt to the program.

Recovering gold and other valuable metals from retired nuclear weapons had been a little-known mission of the government's uranium enrichment plants over the past five decades. At Paducah, the process began in the 1950s and was conducted under extraordinary security, with heavily armed guards escorting warheads into the plant under cover of darkness.

Garland "Bud" Jenkins, one of three Paducah workers involved in the lawsuit filed under seal in June, says he worked for several years in Paducah's metals program recovering gold, lead, aluminum and nickel from nuclear weapons and production equipment.

"We melted the gold flakes in a furnace to create gold bars," Jenkins said in court documents. "The gold was never surveyed radiologically prior to its release, to my knowledge."

Jenkins also says he never saw tests performed on nickel and aluminum ingots that were hauled out of the plant in trucks. In later years, when plant managers did begin screening the metals, many were found to be contaminated, he said. Hundreds of nickel ingots are still stored at the plant, too tainted to go anywhere, he said.

A plant report included in the lawsuit filings may shed light on the degree of contamination in the gold. In a radiological survey of the plant last year, technicians discovered gold flakes inside an old ingot mold used for gold recovery. The fish scale-sized flakes were tested and found to emit radiation at a rate of 500 millirems an hour, the report said. By comparison, the average person receives between 200 and 300 millirems each year from all sources, including X-rays, radon gas and cosmic radiation from space.

"If you had a wedding ring made out of those flakes you'd be getting twice as much radiation in an hour as most people get in a year," said Joseph R. Egan, a lawyer representing the employees.

Fowler, the radiation safety technician, said he filed a report on the discovery of the radioactive gold in December but received no response from the plant's management. Nothing further was done to investigate "the possibility that [the plant] may have contaminated the nation's gold supply" at Fort Knox, he said.

Plant officials shed little light on the process. U.S. Enrichment Corp., the plant's current operator, says gold recovery at Paducah was the responsibility of the Energy Department.

Department officials, in a response to written questions from The Post, acknowledged that gold was recovered from nuclear weapons at Paducah. But, "since these actions occurred many years ago, information regarding their past dispositions is not readily available," the statement said.

In a letter to Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.)., department officials strongly defended their efforts to salvage nickel and other valuable metals that have been piling up at nuclear complex sites for years.

"Let me assure you that the safety of the public and workers and compliance with state and federal regulations are of paramount importance," said Undersecretary of Energy T.J. Glauthier. Glauthier said BNFL's license requires that "any metals released for unrestricted use will not pose a risk to human health or the environment."

The recycling program, announced in 1996 by Gore as part of his "reinventing government" initiative, was touted at the time as a "win-win" deal for the environment, industry and taxpayers. BNFL, which was awarded the recycling contract in a noncompetitive bid, has already begun recycling some of the 100,000 tons of radioactively contaminated metal that were once part of the defunct K-25 complex at Oak Ridge, the world's first full-scale uranium enrichment plant. Eventually the program expanded to Paducah and other facilities.

Purifying nickel is technically difficult because the radioactive contamination extends below the surface of the metal. According to department officials, BNFL was awarded the contract because it has developed a unique technology that can safely remove nearly all of the contaminants.

But opponents say the technology has never been proven on such a large scale. Moreover, they note, there are no federal standards for releasing contaminated metal into the marketplace. Previous attempts to set such standards in the early 1990s were abandoned because of public opposition.

And, opponents add, the lack of restrictions on the recycled metal leaves the public in the dark about which products may have come from contaminated scrap. Even if radioactivity levels are low, consumers are entitled to an informed choice when buying materials that might be used by children, activists said.

"The DOE has admitted they can't protect the safety of their workers and misled them," said Robert Wages, executive vice president of the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical & Energy Workers International Union. "Now DOE wants to dump radioactive metals into everything from baby rattles to zippers . . . and tell us not to worry."

Because there are no federal standards, the Energy Department's recycling program relies on the state of Tennessee to set guidelines and regulate the process. In June, a federal judge sharply criticized the arrangement, saying the DOE had effectively thwarted public debate of an issue in which "the potential for environmental harm is great."

But U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler rejected an attempt by labor and environmental groups to halt the recycling program, citing a law that prohibits courts from delaying federal cleanup of contaminated sites. Still, in unusually blunt language, the judge accused the Energy Department of "startling and worrisome" behavior in its alleged attempts to avoid federal oversight and public review.

"There has been no opportunity at all for public scrutiny or input on such a matter of such grave importance," Kessler wrote in her opinion. "The lack of public scrutiny is only compounded by the fact that the recycling process which BNFL intends to use is entirely experimental at this stage."

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Radioactive Ooze Found in Paducah

By Joby Warrick and Joe Stephens

Washington Post Staff Writers

August 29, 1999

PADUCAH, Ky. – The discovery of radioactive black ooze seeping from the ground a quarter-mile from the U.S.-owned uranium plant here has buttressed workers' claims of unlicensed dumping of hazardous waste outside the factory fence.

The chance finding of the ooze by plant workers last month led to the uncovering of a burial ground for radioactive debris just north of the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, federal officials confirmed last week. The waste, barely hidden beneath a thin layer of soil in a grassy lot, came to light when workers noticed a tar-like substance pooling in the tracks made by their truck.

Department of Energy officials fenced off the site and reported the discovery to Kentucky's environmental regulators.

"We're very concerned about any improper disposal of radioactive material," said Mark York of the Kentucky Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Cabinet, which is investigating the incident.

The presence of contaminated material outside the plant appears to corroborate one of the most serious allegations contained in a worker lawsuit filed in June against the plant's former operators: that radioactive material was dumped outside the plant in areas within easy reach of the public.

The finding comes in the second week of an Energy Department investigation at the Paducah plant, which for 47 years produced enriched uranium for nuclear weapons, Navy submarines and commercial power plants. The probe was launched after reports of contamination and sloppy waste management at the plant, including worker exposure to plutonium and other highly radioactive material.

Thousands of tons of contaminated material are known to be buried in trenches or piled in scrap heaps inside the plant's security fence; a key point of contention is whether radioactive material was also dumped outside the plant in violation of state waste permits.

The suit by workers and an environmental group says contaminated debris streamed out of the plant for years. Some was allegedly dumped in woods and abandoned buildings in a state wildlife area. But other waste was trucked to a state-licensed landfill authorized to accept only nonhazardous trash, the suit contends. The landfill, which was closed in 1996, is on federal government property just north of the plant fence.

"If you can kick up black ooze just by driving across a field, it makes you wonder what else is out there," said Joseph Egan, a lawyer representing workers in the suit.

Both the Department of Energy and the plant's current manager, U.S. Enrichment Corp., have contended that they are unaware of any radioactive waste going into the sanitary landfill. Documents prepared by former contractors list the contents of the dump as "uncontaminated trash and garbage." The landfill is "permitted and operated according to Kentucky regulations," according to plant records.

But the discovery of the radioactive black ooze in an area just outside the landfill is sure to add heat to the debate. The ooze was found July 15 by contract workers preparing to install monitoring wells to investigate another possible indication of contamination: radioactive metals in ground water near the dump, discovered last December.

When workers noticed tar-like liquid in one of the tracks left by their drilling truck, they first suspected an oil leak. They dug into the earth and turned up what appeared to be bits of tar paper and asphalt shingles.

"Observations indicated possible roofing debris," an Energy Department report said.

Not until three weeks later, after further excavation at the site, did plant officials learn that material was contaminated. Radioactivity readings were hundreds of times above levels found naturally in soil; they were also nearly nine times higher than the plant's "action level," the limit that triggers immediate steps to seal contaminated areas inside the plant.

Lab tests confirmed the presence of uranium and technetium. Technetium, a radioactive metal that travels quickly through soil, was one of the contaminants brought into the plant inadvertently during the 1950s, '60s and '70s in shipments of recycled uranium from government nuclear reactors used to produce plutonium.

While the tests were underway, plant officials combed through archives for clues about the mysterious dumping. Some records suggested the spot was used as an off-site dumping ground for plant construction debris from the early 1950s to the 1980s.

"We knew it was an area of concern, so it wasn't a total surprise," said Jimmie C. Hodges, the Energy Department's site manager at the plant. He said the buried debris will be further investigated and incorporated into the plant's ongoing cleanup efforts.

The legal implications of the discovery are unclear. Although Kentucky has not issued a formal response, one senior official initially suggested the ooze would be treated as "a release from the sanitary landfill." That would be a de facto admission that the landfill contains radioactive hazards, in violation of the government's permit.

Even though the workers found the ooze a few feet from the landfill, York, the state environmental official, said on Friday the debris "was not part of the landfill." No enforcement action had been taken because the government had promptly reported the waste and was planning to clean it up, he said, adding that further enforcement steps had not been ruled out.

But if the waste was not part of the landfill, it might represent an uncharted and unlicensed radioactive waste dump, said Egan, the attorney. He also expressed skepticism about the government's position that the waste did not come from the landfill.

"It's a sanitary landfill with a ring of radioactive waste around it?" Egan said.

While government officials decide what to do about the discovery, the spot where the ooze was found remained cordoned off last week with plastic chains strung from concrete posts. The mound of red dirt covering the site had been topped off with a scattering of hay.

The contaminated area borders a state wildlife area, which is often traversed by horses and hikers. About a mile downhill from the dump lies a small pond, where on a recent afternoon three fishermen were trying their luck against the local catfish, using chicken livers as bait. A sign at the pond reads, "Notice: All grass carp caught in this lake must be released immediately."

One of the men, Wayne Whitfield, landed a 2-pounder and looked it over for obvious tumors.

"I ain't going to tell you [contamination] hasn't been in the back of my mind," Whitfield drawled as he slipped a fresh piece of liver onto his hook. "I'm waiting until I put one in the refrigerator and it glows."

The latest discovery comes at a time when the plant's neighbors are still recovering from an earlier radioactive scare at a home two miles from the facility.

On Monday, county emergency officials reported that three buried 55-gallon drums discovered behind a couple's West Paducah house were radioactively contaminated, touching off fears that hazards from the plant had spread into a residential neighborhood.

The homeowner, Jim Hutto, was scooping up soil in his yard Monday evening when he uncovered the three barrels a few feet behind his residence. A friend who happens to work at the uranium plant agreed the barrels looked suspicious and called in the Kentucky Department for Environmental Protection. Soon, several government officials were combing through the site.

A county disaster worker produced a radiation monitor, Hutto said, which showed dangerous levels of radiation on Hutto's clothes, on the front steps of his house, on the back of a state inspector's shirt and on an inspector's shoes. The men then walked toward the exposed barrels, holding the monitor ahead of them, Hutto said.

"It just went off, and they started running – I mean, running," he said.

Federal investigators and plant officials later arrived with more sophisticated equipment. But after hours of tests, they reported no evidence of radiation, except for small amounts on the state worker's shoes. State regulators declared the area a hazardous waste site and launched an investigation into the barrels' origins.

The confusion about radiation dismayed Hutto and his wife, Terri.

"How did it go from a high reading, to nothing? I'm not completely comfortable," she said. "I want someone to prove to me what the truth is."

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Paducah workers file $10 billion suit

20,000 might eventually join class action

By JAMES MALONE,

The Courier-Journal

PADUCAH, Ky. -- A $10 billion lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court yesterday asserts that eight companies that operated or produced nuclear fuel for the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant exposed workers and their families to harmful levels of radiation.

The suit was filed on behalf of 14 current and former workers and their families, but lawyers plan to seek class-action status, which could apply to as many as 20,000 people, said Bill McMurry of Louisville, an attorney working on the case.

The suit alleges that workers were unknowingly exposed to dangerous amounts of radiation and are suffering emotional distress because they fear becoming sick. Radiation exposure can cause various cancers, but the plaintiffs do not claim they are currently ill.

"Being exposed to high levels of radiation is like being (unknowingly) exposed to the AIDS virus," said Mark Bryant, a Paducah lawyer who filed the suit. "You never know if you will contract it. They worked there. They can't make that exposure go away."

The suit arose from disclosures in a whistle-blower suit that three plant workers filed in June. That suit alleges that Lockheed Martin Corp. and Martin Marietta Corp., former plant operators, had profited by lying to the government about the extent of environmental pollution around the plant and worker exposure to radiation. It alleges workers were unknowingly exposed to highly radioactive plutonium, which contaminated spent nuclear fuel that was shipped to the plant, and that plutonium was released into the environment.

Paducah has been rocked by disclosures in the whistle-blower suit. The plant is the community's largest employer, providing about 2,000 jobs in producing nuclear reactor fuel and continuing with a massive environmental cleanup that began in the late 1980s.

The three plaintiffs in the whistle-blower suit, Garland Jenkins, Charles Deuschle and Ronald Fowler, and their wives also are plaintiffs in the suit filed yesterday. One of their attorneys, Joseph Egan of Washington, D.C., also is a lawyer in the new suit.

Another plaintiff, David M. Sacharnoski of Paducah, said in a telephone interview that he worked at the plant from 1976 to 1980, replacing equipment in the buildings where reactor-grade uranium was made. He said he has had concerns about materials he had been exposed to. He said he was never told that he may have been exposed to highly radioactive metals, which contaminated some of the uranium processed in the buildings where he worked.

Named as defendants were Union Carbide Corp., Martin Marietta, Lockheed Martin and General Electric Co.

The suit alleges that General Electric produced fuel in Richland, Wash., that was shipped to Paducah for processing and that the company knew or should have known that workers would be exposed to radioactive contaminants.

But General Electric spokesman Gary Sheffer said yesterday that "GE had no role in Paducah, and GE's inclusion in the suit is specious. This was the result of events 30 years ago that were the responsibility of the government and not GE."

Department of Energy spokesman Steve Wyatt said yesterday he was not sure whether the contracts to operate the diffusion plants required the government to protect contractors against such lawsuits.

Among the plaintiffs' allegations were that they "inhaled, absorbed and ingested" radioactive materials as a result of the former operators' "intentional" failure to disclose the true nature of the plant's operations. Former operators concealed the truth for fear they would lose workers and be unable to maintain profit margins and contract bonuses, it says.

The suit also alleges a deliberate physical "battery" on workers by causing "extremely and illegally high doses of radiation, including plutonium to strike and injure the plaintiffs and class members."

Plaintiffs allege they have suffered sufficient exposure to claim emotional distress and fear of contracting "radiation-related diseases."

And it asserts that the defendants' conduct was "so outrageous in character and so extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency and to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in a civilized community."

Claims made in filing a lawsuit represent only one side of the case.

James Fetig, a spokesman for Lockheed Martin Corp. in Bethesda, Md., said they hadn't seen the suit and couldn't comment.

The telephones went unanswered late yesterday at Union Carbide Corp. in Danbury, Conn.

The Energy Department, after being served with the then-sealed whistle-blower suit in early June, sent an investigative team to Paducah that reported finding no serious problems.

But when the suit was leaked to the press, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson pledged a new investigation and dispatched department employees to investigate.

The inquiry's first phase ended yesterday, with a team returning to Washington to prepare a report that will be released in October.

Staff writer James R. Carroll contributed to this story.

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Tainted Water, or Writer?

By Howard Kurtz

Washington Post Staff Writer

October 4, 1999

In the weeks since the government's uranium plant in Paducah, Ky., was rocked by allegations of radiation hazards, Joe Walker has covered the burgeoning controversy for the Paducah Sun.

An unusual choice, to say the least, since Walker was the public affairs manager for the very same plant as recently as 1995.

In fact, in memos to other plant officials during his stint at the Energy Department facility, Walker suggested ways to minimize the public relations impact of plutonium contamination of area groundwater.

Walker says he asked his editors if he should recuse himself from the story after The Washington Post reported the allegations in August.

"I basically told them if they were confident in my ability to do a fair and accurate job, I would continue to do that," he says. While there may be an appearance problem "in the minds of some," says Walker, "I'm confident most people who know me and my reporting are confident I can do a fair and unbiased job of reporting. My superiors have basically put a vote of confidence in me to do the job."

But Joseph Egan, an attorney representing four whistle-blowers who have sued the plant's contractor, Lockheed Martin, says that "any ethical standard would say you've got to recuse yourself. . . . He is the guy who helped to orchestrate the public relations on what they are going to say about plutonium." Egan says the Sun "is producing astonishing stories that this is no big deal."

The Sun, for its part, defends its coverage in editorials as "much more balanced" than that of out-of-town news organizations and warned against "baseless fears" fueled by "anti-nuclear zealotry." But Egan points to two Walker articles last week.

In one piece, Walker quoted the head of the plant's guard union as saying one whistle-blower "lied under oath" in congressional testimony. Walker concedes he made no attempt to contact the whistle-blower or Egan, his lawyer.

Walker also wrote that traces of uranium, neptunium, thorium and strontium have been found in deer killed 15 miles from the plant--but quoted the engineer overseeing the review as saying that "the deer are safe to eat."

Isn't it difficult to cover former colleagues at the plant? "Reporters are constantly writing stories about people they know well or are friends with, and in journalism you constantly have to put that aside," says Walker, adding that he has broken some stories.

A longtime reporter for the 30,000-circulation Sun, Walker left to play a very different role for the plant from 1991 to 1995. In one internal memo, he wrote: "We know and the public knows that some people drank contaminated water. . . . Perhaps the best approach is to say we know we have some chemical contaminants . . . in important pathways such as the groundwater, and that we don't know yet if they are causing harm to the public."

If the plant announced that its limited studies had found no evidence of contamination, he added, "the first thing a reporter like [Andrew] Melnykovych of the Courier-Journal might do is go to a family like the Dicks [who drank the water] and get their side of it, which wouldn't be attractive."

And in a series of suggested answers before a public briefing, Walker wrote that two other officials "need to determine whether we disclose the results of the special testing" of one well contaminated with plutonium. He added: "Another avenue here is to refer comments to the regulators." Walker says he can't discuss the memos without reviewing them.

While Energy Secretary Bill Richardson last month ordered a one-day safety shutdown of the plant, Sun Editor Jim Paxton, who could not be reached, has a different perspective. In a column, Paxton assailed the "media feeding frenzy" and took a swipe at those "in the heady pursuit of Pulitzer prizes." He said he's sticking with Walker because the reporter has spent 19 years with the Sun and just four at the plant, "and I think that says where his loyalties are."

Still, Paxton said he would have to pull Walker off the story if his reporter became a witness in the case. That day may not be far off; attorney Egan says he plans to depose Walker in a $10 billion class-action suit by workers at the Kentucky plant.

Double Dutch

The New York Times had a terrific scoop on the creative fiction in Edmund Morris's biography of Ronald Reagan:

"A person in publishing circles, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that at one point during the long writing process, Mr. Morris, 58, inserted himself as an imaginary young contemporary of Mr. Reagan, observing and witnessing Mr. Reagan's early childhood in Illinois. Someone else, who read the manuscript, said Mr. Morris had adjusted his own age within the text in order to surface as an observer during Mr. Reagan's acting days in Hollywood in the 1940s."

That story by Doreen Carvajal ran on Sept. 28, 1998. No one much cared. But when Carvajal saw an advance copy of "Dutch" and wrote about Morris's fictional techniques two weeks ago, it created a literary and journalistic uproar.

Obviously, with the Random House book itself for ammunition, Carvajal had far more damning detail about Morris's invention of a fictional character--himself--who appears long before Morris was born. Her 1998 story about the long-delayed book didn't mention the fictional device until the 12th paragraph.

Carvajal says her earlier piece didn't make much of a splash "because it wasn't a done deal then. The book could still evolve. Edmund still wasn't confirming directly that was what he was doing. He was being very coy." She says the technique is more dramatic "between the covers of a real book, as opposed to a manuscript that wasn't even in galley form."

Credit Carvajal's dogged reporting for breaking the story--twice.

Media Morsels

What did Viacom chief Sumner Redstone have in mind when he said in Shanghai that news organizations should avoid being "unnecessarily offensive" to foreign governments? After all, Viacom, which is trying to peddle MTV in China, will soon own CBS. Redstone says that "journalistic integrity must prevail in the final analysis" but that media firms can't ignore "the politics and attitudes of the governments where we operate." . . .

When Mob moll Judith Campbell Exner died last week, the New York Times was rather dismissive of her affair with President Kennedy, saying Exner had "claimed" and "asserted" a "supposed relationship with Kennedy" and that JFK aides had denied it. But an editor's note three days later said the piece "should also have reflected what is now the view of a number of respected historians and authors that the affair did in fact take place," and should have cited such evidence as White House phone logs . . .

Speaking of affairs, New York Post gossip Cindy Adams says she knew three months ago that NBC's Geraldo Rivera was leaving his wife C.C. for a twenty-something woman. She writes that she didn't report it because "Geraldo's my friend" and that she would never "break a story that breaks up a couple with children."

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Message: 1

Date: Fri, 23 Jul 1999 19:11:08 -0400

From: "Jacqueline O. Kittrell"

Subject: Sign-On Ltr to Gore Against Radioactive Recycling

Please everyone--by group or individual, I am not sure (probably both) , sign on to this letter, which has been put out for signatures by NIRS, PACE, and NRDC. Our group, American Environmental Health Studies Project (AEHSP) is signing on too...

thanks, Jackie Kittrell

Jacqueline O. Kittrell

General Counsel

American Environmental Health Studies Project

318 Lynnwood Drive [Location of the Haven]

Knoxville, TN 37918

423.689.6631, work

423.689.8297, fax

jackieo@mindspring.com

SIGN ON BY August 5, 1999 to the following letter to VP Gore against RECYCLING RADIOACTIVE WASTE INTO CONSUMER PRODUCTS and specifically against the DOE/BNFL contract at Oak Ridge TN to recycle waste from 3 uranium enrichment facilities.

Please give your: Name Organization Address Phone Email address

Thank you. Questions- contact Diane D'Arrigo NIRS 202 328-0002 dianed@xxxx.xxx

__________________________

Dear Vice President Gore:

We are opposed to the recycling of radioactive waste from atomic weapons and power into consumer products, the marketplace and the environment.

We are writing to call your attention to, and express our agreement with, the findings in a recent Federal Court case, that the Department of Energy's project to recycle some 112,000 tons of radioactively contaminated metal from a nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, poses a "great" and unexamined potential for environmental harm. A copy of the opinion is enclosed.

The Oak Ridge project -- which you endorsed as an initiative that "solves an environmental problem" -- involves recycling and selling radioactively contaminated metals for use in commercial products, such as cookware, furniture, and children's toys. It also establishes a precedent for the Department of Energy ("DOE") and the commercial nuclear industry to release more than 1.5 million tons of radioactively contaminated metal from federal and commercial facilities throughout the country.

Our organizations oppose such releases of radioactively contaminated materials.

We request that you

(1) advise Secretary Richardson to discontinue the radioactive recycling project until DOE completes an environmental impact statement;

(2) take steps to assure that DOE promptly prepares an environmental impact statement pursuant to the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act ("NEPA");

(3) require DOE to provide information on companies and scrap metal dealers that have received, are and will be receiving radioactively contaminated metals and the products for which the metal is being used; and

(4) direct the Council on Environmental Quality to investigate the circumstances under which DOE proceeded with the project in the absence of meaningful public participation.

The Oak Ridge Radioactive Metals Recycling Project

Just prior to the 1996 election, on October 30, 1996, DOE announced that it was planning to award a contract to BNFL, Inc. ("BNFL") to recycle and sell for commercial uses radioactively contaminated metals removed from three nuclear materials processing plants at the Department's Oak Ridge Reservation. At this time, you commended the Oak Ridge project in a DOE press release for advancing your "reinventing government initiative" and "clean[ing] up the environment."

In 1997, prior to the award of the quarter-billion-dollar cleanup contract to BNFL, Robert Wages, then President of the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers International Union ("OCAW") wrote to you opposing the proposed project, arguing that it would "undermine the clearly stated environmental values of this Administration." Mr. Wages sought a meeting with you because he had serious concerns about the Administration's decision to allow radioactively contaminated materials into the marketplace -- particularly the potential impacts on workers. You denied Mr. Wages' request for a meeting.

At the same time, OCAW, other national environmental and labor groups, and local citizens' groups raised similar concerns in a letter to the Secretary of Energy, Federico Pena, and requested a meeting to discuss the Oak Ridge recycling project. Secretary Pena also rejected the proposed meeting; although in an effort to mollify their concerns, his office assured the groups that "the Secretary feels strongly that Department of Energy has a responsibility to the residents in all communities in which DOE operates."

Despite these efforts and others, DOE failed to provide any opportunity for meaningful public review. As a result, OCAW, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, and two Tennessee groups determined that no other recourse remained but to file suit seeking an order requiring DOE to prepare an environmental impact statement for the Oak Ridge Project. On June 29, 1999, however, U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler found that she was barred from addressing the plaintiffs' National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) claims by a provision of the Superfund law, 42 U.S.C. § 9613(h) ("Section 113(h)"), which denies federal courts jurisdiction to hear any challenges to Superfund cleanups until they are completed.

The Federal Court's Findings of Significant Environmental Impacts and Serious Procedural Irregularities

Judge Kessler found that DOE's recycling of radioactive metals for products used in American homes and businesses poses "great" potential for environmental harm, "especially given the unprecedented amount of hazardous materials [DOE and BNFL] seek to recycle." Judge Kessler concluded that there was "ample evidence that the proposed recycling significantly affects the quality of the human environment," and that "[i]n the absence of Section 113(h), an [environmental impact statement] would clearly have been mandated under NEPA."

Judge Kessler identified serious procedural deficiencies. Judge Kessler found that DOE failed to provide an opportunity for public notice and comment required under federal Superfund actions, and was "quite troubl[ed]" that DOE "provided no adequate explanation" for this omission. Judge Kessler went on to criticize DOE for limiting "public scrutiny or input on a matter of such grave importance" and found DOE's actions "startling and worrisome." These concerns were heightened because the absence of "public scrutiny is [] compounded by the fact that the recycling process which BNFL intends to use is entirely experimental at this stage."

Two years following the award of the contract -- after millions of taxpayer dollars have been expended -- Judge Kessler found that "Plaintiffs allege, and [DOE and BNFL] have not disputed, that there is no data regarding the process' efficacy or track record with respect to safety." Judge Kessler's concerns about safety were elevated again because "no national standard exists governing the unrestricted release of volumetrically contaminated metal," which includes contaminated nickel at Oak Ridge. According to the Judge, "[t]he result is no oversight by any federal regulatory agencies."

In addition to the problems identified by Judge Kessler, we note that the record in the case reveals many other troubling aspects of the Oak Ridge project, including (1) the highly questionable process by which the contract was awarded to BNFL; (2) DOE findings that the BNFL team has operated in violation of basic environmental and worker safety protocols -- indeed, several accidents this spring caused BNFL to halt the project to address worker safety deficiencies; and (3) the secrecy under which BNFL sought authorization from Tennessee to proceed with the unrestricted release of volumetrically contaminated nickel.

In sum, Judge Kessler's June 29 decision confirms that -- as labor, citizen, and environmental groups stated to you and Secretary Pena two years ago -- the Oak Ridge recycling project is proceeding in blatant and knowing disregard of basic principles of public participation, and your own commitment to protecting the environment and human health.

It is imperative that we meet with you as soon as feasible to discuss the actions necessary to assure that the many health and safety issues associated with the Oak Ridge project are addressed publicly and that the public is given an opportunity to comment formally on the project. Please contact Wenonah Hauter at 202-454-5150 to schedule a meeting.

Thank you for your consideration of this critical issue.

Sincerely,

Public Citizen, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, US Public Interest Research Group, Natural Resources Defense Council, Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers Union

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Message: 2

Date: Fri, 23 Jul 1999 19:49:37 -0400

From: jrmichel@icx.net

Subject: Re: Sign-On Ltr to Gore Against Radioactive Recycling

I highly recommend that CHE sign on to this letter!!! Once again, Big Al has refused to deal with issues in his "home" state. His photo op in the news today protraying him as an environmentalist (On aa canoe trip in New England) nauseated me.

Janet

At 07:11 PM 7/23/99 -0400, Jacqueline O. Kittrell wrote: Please everyone--by group or individual, I am not sure (probably both) , sign on to this letter, which has been put out for signatures by NIRS, PACE, and NRDC. Our group, American Environmental Health Studies Project (AEHSP) is signing on too...

thanks, Jackie Kittrell

Jacqueline O. Kittrell General Counsel American Environmental Health Studies Project 318 Lynnwood Drive Knoxville, TN 37918 423.689.6631, work 423.689.8297, fax jackieo@mindspring.com

Please give your: Name Organization Address Phone Email address

Thank you. Questions- contact Diane D'Arrigo NIRS 202 328-0002 dianed@xxxx.xxx

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Date: Fri, 23 Jul 1999 18:38:27 -0400

From: Michael Mariotte

Reply-To: nirsnet@nirs.org

Organization: NIRS

To: dianed@nirs.org

Subject: SignOn Ltr to Gore Against Radioactive Recycling

Please give your: Name Organization Address Phone Email address

Thank you. Questions- contact Diane D'Arrigo NIRS 202 328-0002 dianed@nirs.org

Dear Vice President Gore:

We are opposed to the recycling of radioactive waste from atomic weapons and power into consumer products, the marketplace and the environment.

Our organizations oppose such releases of radioactively contaminated materials.

We request that you

(1) advise Secretary Richardson to discontinue the radioactive recycling project until DOE completes an environmental impact statement;=20

(2) take steps to assure that DOE promptly prepares an environmental impact statement pursuant to the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act ("NEPA");=20

(4) direct the Council on Environmental Quality to investigate the circumstances under which DOE proceeded with the project in the absence of meaningful public participation.

The Oak Ridge Radioactive Metals Recycling Project

Despite these efforts and others, DOE failed to provide any opportunity for meaningful public review. As a result, OCAW, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, and two Tennessee groups determined that no other recourse remained but to file suit seeking an order requiring DOE to prepare an environmental impact statement for the Oak Ridge Project. On June 29, 1999, however, U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler found that she was barred from addressing the plaintiffs' National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) claims by a provision of the Superfund law, 42 U.S.C. =A7 9613(h) ("Section 113(h)"), which denies federal courts jurisdiction to hear any challenges to Superfund cleanups until they are completed.

The Federal Court's Findings of Significant Environmental Impacts and Serious Procedural Irregularities

It is imperative that we meet with you as soon as feasible to discuss the actions necessary to assure that the many health and safety issues associated with the Oak Ridge project are addressed publicly and that the public is given an opportunity to comment formally on the project.=20 Please contact Wenonah Hauter at 202-454-5150 to schedule a meeting.

Thank you for your consideration of this critical issue.

Sincerely,

Public Citizen, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, US Public Interest Research Group, Natural Resources Defense Council,=20 Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers Union

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From: Diane D'Arrigo

To: johnsonc@wou.edu ; johnsrud@csrlink.net ; can@shaysnet.com ; btiller@psr.org ; jackieo@mindspring.com ; lfoushee@mtn.org ; BoLake@longisland.com ; dm4stand@arn.net ; IICPH@compuserve.com ; cbghirsch@aol.com ; howardw@slip.net ; Janet Michel ; Ralph Hutchison

Date: Thursday, August 12, 1999 12:47 PM

Subject: GORE PRESS RELEASE AND LETTER went last nite

Nuclear Information and Resource Service Public Citizen

Press Release Contacts: Diane D' Arrigo (202) 328-0002

August 12, 1999 Wenonah Hauter (202) 454-5150

One Hundred Eighty-Five Organizations Call on Vice President Gore to Stop Radioactive Recycling into Consumer Products

Washington, DC--One hundred-eighty five consumer, public interest, labor and environmental groups from across the country and around the world delivered a letter to Vice President Al Gore today, calling on him to stop the release of radioactive materials from nuclear weapons and power plants into every day consumer goods and building materials.

Specifically, the letter calls for a halt to a Gore-supported contract by the U.S. Department of Energy and BNFL, Inc. at the massive, closed uranium enrichment buildings in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The contract allows over 100,000 tons of radioactive metal (nickel, aluminum, copper and steel) to be "processed" and released into the marketplace to produce consumer products such as belt buckles, zippers, frying pans, forks, and baby carriages. There would be no limit on the final use of the contaminated material and there has been no notification nor consent of the steel industry, workers and members of the public who will be exposed.

The same concern was recently expressed in June 29, 1999 federal court decision by US Federal District Court Judge Gladys Kessler, who found that:

"The potential for environmental harm is great, given the unprecedented amount of hazardous materials which [DOE and BNFL] seek to recycle. The parties have not provided the courtwith any evidence of the safey of recycling in comparison with any other method of disposal."

The groups also call for the government to reveal the companies to which the contaminated metal will be sent, and to investigate the highly questionable circumstances that led to the granting of the radioactive recycling contract at Oak Ridge.

Congressmen Ron Klink and John Dingell have charged in an August 5, 1999 letter to Secretary Richardson that "DOE [has] abdicated responsibility for the control of its radioactively contaminated weapons as they [leave] DOE's facilities."

"The contract is just the tip of the iceberg," stated Diane D'Arrigo of Nuclear Information and Resource Service. "Other nuclear power and weapons sites have begun the dangerous practice of sending their radioactive materials to be recycled. The very government agencies (NRC, DOE) and the officials that are supposed to protect the public are promoting or allowing radioactive metal, concrete and plastic to enter the marketplace."

The Oak Ridge, Tennessee facility is a sister to the uranium enrichment facility in Paducah, Kentucky, at which the Department of Energy misled workers about the presence of plutonium contamination. Plutonium has been found in the Oak Ridge facility in the same nickel that is destined to be recycled into commerce.

"If DOE denied or didn't know plutonium was present at Paducah, why should we trust them to release waste from identical production plants into products ranging from intrauterine devices to hip replacements?" asked Wenonah Hauter, Director of Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy Project.

"The DOE has admitted they can't protect the safety of their workers and misled them. Now DOE wants to dump radioactive metals into everything from baby rattles to zippers and they want us to believe they are telling the truth when their "reassurance experts" tell us "not to worry." In fact, this is all about profits for a contractor who want to cash in on the DOE's nuclear weapons complex clean-up bonanza," stated Robert Wages, Executive Vice-President of the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical & Energy Workers International Union ("PACE").

-30-

Nuclear Information and Resource Service

Public Citizen

August 11, 1999

Vice President Albert Gore, Jr.

The White House

Office of the Vice President

1600 Pennsylvania Ave., NW

Washington, DC 20500

Dear Vice President Gore:

We, the undersigned 185 national, international, state and local organizations are opposed to the recycling of radioactive waste from atomic weapons and power into consumer products, the marketplace and the environment.

We are writing to call your attention to the findings in a recent Federal Court case, that the Department of Energy's project to recycle over 100,000 tons of radioactively contaminated metal from a nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, poses a "great" and unexamined potential for environmental harm.

The Oak Ridge project -- which you endorsed as an initiative that "solves an environmental problem" -- involves recycling and selling radioactively contaminated metals for use in commercial products, such as cookware, baby carriages, and children's toys. It also establishes a precedent for the Department of Energy (DOE) and the commercial nuclear industry to release more than 1.5 million tons of radioactively contaminated metal from federal and commercial facilities throughout the country.

Our organizations oppose such releases of radioactively contaminated materials.

We request that you:

(1) advise Secretary Richardson to discontinue the radioactive recycling project until DOE completes an environmental impact statement;

(2) require DOE to provide information on companies and scrap metal dealers that have received, are and will be receiving radioactively contaminated metals and the products for which the metal is being used; and

(3) direct the Council on Environmental Quality to investigate the circumstances under which DOE proceeded with the project in the absence of meaningful public participation.

The Oak Ridge Radioactive Metals Recycling Project

Just prior to the 1996 election, on October 30, 1996, DOE announced that it was planning to award a contract to British Nuclear Fuels Limited, Inc. ("BNFL") to recycle and sell for commercial uses radioactively contaminated metals removed from three nuclear materials processing plants at the Department's Oak Ridge Reservation.

At the same time, environmental and labor groups raised similar concerns >in a letter to the Secretary of Energy, Federico Pena, and requested a meeting to discuss the Oak Ridge recycling project. Secretary Pena also rejected the proposed meeting; although in an effort to mollify their concerns, his office assured the groups that "the Secretary feels strongly that Department of Energy has a responsibility to the residents in all communities in which DOE operates."

Despite these efforts and others, DOE failed to provide any opportunity for meaningful public review. As a result, OCAW, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, and two Tennessee groups, Coalition for a Healthy Environment and Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, determined that no other recourse remained but to file suit seeking an order requiring DOE to prepare an environmental impact statement for the Oak Ridge Project. On June 29, 1999, however, U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler found that she was barred from addressing the plaintiffs' National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) claims by a provision of the Superfund law, 42 U.S.C. : 9613(h) ("Section 113(h)"), which denies federal courts jurisdiction to hear any challenges to Superfund cleanups until they are completed.

The Federal Court's Findings of Significant Environmental Impacts and Serious Procedural Irregularities.

Judge Kessler found that DOE failed to provide an opportunity for public notice and comment required under federal Superfund actions, and was "quite troubl[ed]" that DOE "provided no adequate explanation" for this omission. Judge Kessler went on to criticize DOE for limiting "public scrutiny or input on a matter of such grave importance" and found DOE's actions "startling and worrisome." These concerns were heightened because the absence of "public scrutiny is compounded by the fact that the recycling process which BNFL intends to use is entirely experimental at this stage."

In sum, Judge Kessler's June 29 decision confirms the Oak Ridge recycling project is proceeding in blatant and knowing disregard of basic principles of public participation, and your own commitment to protecting the environment and human health.

Thank you for your consideration of this critical issue.

Sincerely,

1. Abalone Alliance 2. Abolition 2000 3. Action for a Clean Environment 4. Air, Water, Earth Organization 5. Alliance for Nuclear Accountability 6. Alliance for Public Health and Safety 7. Alliance for Survival 8. Alliance to Close Indian Point 9. American Environmental Health Studies 10. Anti Atom International (AAI) 11. Arizona Toxics Information 12. At Home in the World 13. Audubon Council of Texas 14. Australian Peace Committee 15. Bastrop County Environmental Network 16. Bay Area Nuclear Waste Coalition 17. Bay Area Wash Campaign 18. Bison Land Resource Center 19. Burgerinitiative Umweltschutz (BIU), Czech Republic 20. California Communities Against Toxics 21. Californians for Alternatives to Toxics 22. Californians for Radioactive Safeguards 23. Campaign for Food Safety 24. Campaign for International Cooperation & Disarmament 25. Carolina Peace Resource Center 26. Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice 27. Center for Energy Research 28. Center for Environmental Health 29. Center for Safe Energy of the Earth Island Island Institute 30. Central Pennsylvania Citizens for Survival 31. Central Valley Institute 32. Centrum ENERGIE, Czech Republic 33. Chenango North Energy Awareness Group 34. Chicago Media Watch 35. Chico Peace and Justice Center 36. Childhood Cancer Research Institute 37. Citizen Action-Illinois 38. Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana 39. Citizen's Awareness Network 40. Citizen's Environmental Coalition 41. Citizens for a Better Environment 42. Citizens for Alternatives to Radioactive Dumping 43. Citizens Protecting Ohio 44. Citizens' Action for Safe Energy 45. City of Davis, CA 46. Clean Water, Boston 47. Coalition for a Healthy Environment 48. Coalition for Peace and Justice 49. Coalition on West Valley Nuclear Wastes 50. Columbia River United 51. Columbus Campaign for Arms Control 52. Committee to Bridge the Gap 53. Communities Helping to Oppose Radioactive Dumping 54. Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety 55. Connecticut Citizen Action Group 56. Connecticut Opposed to Waste 57. Conservation Council of North Carolina 58. Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment 59. Dawn Watch 60. Desert Citizens Against Pollution 61. Don't Waste Michigan 62. Don't Waste Arizona 63. Don't Waste Massachusetts 64. Don't Waste Oregon 65. Earth Action International 66. Earth Challenge 67. Earth Concerns of Oklahoma 68. Earth Cycles 69. Earth Day Coalition 70. Environmental Advocates 71. Environmental Coalition on Nuclear Power 72. Environmental Health Watch 73. Environmental Information Network 74. Environmental Research Foundation 75. Environmentalists, Inc 76. For a Clean Towanda Site (FACTS) 77. Friends of the Earth, U.K. 78. Friends of the Earth, U.S. 79. Friends of the Red Road 80. Fund for New Priorities in America 81. Gemeinsam gegen Atomgefahren, Austria 82. Global Resource Center for the Environment 83. Grandmothers and Others Alliance for the Future 84. Grandmothers for Peace International 85. Grandparents of East Harris County 86. Green Party of Santa Clara County 87. Green Party, D.C. 88. Greenpeace 89. Hanford Watch 90. Hawaii Green Party 91. Healing Global Wounds 92. Heart of America 93. Heartland Operation to Protect the Environment 94. Indian Point Project 95. International Institute of Concern for Public Health 96. Iowa City Green Party 97. IPPNW-Hamburg, Germany 98. Irradiation Free Food Hawaii 99. Lake Superior Greens 100. Liberation Collective 101. Long Island Alliance for Peaceful Alternatives 102. Maryland PIRG 103. Maryland Safe Energy Coalition 104. Massachusetts Citizens for Safe Energy 105. Mississippi Environmental Justice Project 106. Mothers and Others for a Livable Planet 107. National Environmental Coalition of Native Americans NECONA) 108. Natural Resources Defense Council 109. Nevada Desert Experience 110. Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force 111. New Jersey Environmental Lobby 112. New Mexico PIRG 113. New York State Labor & Environment Network 114. North American Water Office 115. North Carolina Waste Awareness & Reduction Network 116. Northcoast Environmental Center 117. Northwest Environmental Advocates 118. Nuclear Age Peace Foundation 119. Nuclear Energy Information Service 120. Nuclear Free New York 121. Nuclear Guardianship Project 122. Nuclear Information and Resource Service 123. Nukewatch 124. Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance 123. Ohio Citizens for Responsible Energy 126. Ohio Network for the Chemically Injured 127. Ohio Peace and Justice Center 128. Oklahoma Institute for a Viable Future 129. Ooe Ueberparteiliche Plattform gegen Atomgefahr, Austria 130. Oregon Peace Works 131. Our Earth, University of Oklahoma 132. Oyster Creek Nuclear Watch 133. Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers Union, Local 288 (Oak Ridge) 134. Parents Against Irradiation 135. Pax Christi USA 136. Pax Christi, New Mexico 137. Peace and Justice Task Force 138. Pennsylvania Environmental Network 139. Physicians for Life 140. Physicians for Social Responsibility 141. Physicians for Social Responsibility, LA 142. Prairie Island Coalition 143. Portsmouth-Piketon Residents for Environmental Safety and Security 144. Protect All Children's Environment 145. Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy Project 146. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility 147. Radioactive Waste Management Associates 148. Redwood Alliance 149. Reseau Sortir du Nucleaire 150. Safe Energy Communication Council 151. Save Our Cumberland Mountains 152. Save Ward Valley 153. Southern Coalition Opposing Plutonium Energy (SCOPE) 154. Senior Citizens Alliance of Tarrant County 155. Serious Texans Against Nuclear Dumping 156. Sierra Blanca Legal Defense Fund 157. Sierra Club, U.S. 158. Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition 159. Standing for Truth About Irradiation 160. Stichting Visie 161. Student Activist Union, Vassar College 162. SUN DAY Campaign 163. Sustainable Energy and Economic Development Coalition 164. Tarrant Coalition for Environmental Awareness 165. The Cancer Prevention Coalition 166. The Nuclear Democracy Network 167. The Southwind Group 168. The ZHABA Collective (ASEED-Europe) 169. Three Mile Island Alert 170. Toxics Action Center 171. Tri -Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment 172. Union of Australian Women 173. United States Public Interest Research Group 174. Valley Watch, Inc. 175. Vermont PIRG 176. Virginia Consumer Action 177. Voices of Central Pennsylvania 178. War Resistors League, San Luis Obispo 179. Washington PIRG 180. Waste Action Project 181. We the People Inc, of TN 182. Women's Environment and Development Organization 183. Western Nebraska Resources Council 184. Wisconsin PIRG 185. Women Legislators Lobby 186.Women's Action for New Directions 187.Yggdrasil Institute

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February 14, 1999

Campaign Donor Seeks N.M. Tax Breaks for Plant

Waste Control Specialists hopes a uranium enrichment company will select a Lea County site for its 1,300-employee facility

By Thomas J. Cole
Journal Investigative Reporter

A Texas company last year pumped tens of thousands of dollars into New Mexico politics, believing it might one day need friends in Santa Fe.

That day has come. Waste Control Specialists of Pasadena, Texas, has proposed selling some of the land it owns in southeast New Mexico to USEC Corp., the world leader in enriching uranium fuel for nuclear power plants.

USEC would then use the 450 acres in Lea County for a $2 billion-plus enrichment plant that would employ about 1,300 workers.

Gov. Gary Johnson has announced his support for Waste Control Specialists' proposal.

Also on board are Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., as well as public officials from Lea County, where fluctuating oil and natural gas prices have created a boom-or-bust economy.

Waste Control Specialists is now lobbying the Legislature on a package of tax breaks and other financial incentives to make the New Mexico site as attractive as possible to USEC.

USEC is considering at least two other possible sites for the plant, in Ohio and Kentucky. The company plans to make a decision sometime this year.

Waste Control Specialists last year contributed $5,000 to Johnson's re-election campaign and at least $17,600 to House and Senate candidates and political committees run by House and Senate leaders.

It also gave $10,000 to the New Mexico Republican Party, $5,000 to the state Democratic Party and $1,200 to the Lea County GOP.

Another $10,000 was donated to the State Legislative Leaders Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank in Massachusetts. The foundation's members include top leaders in the New Mexico Legislature.

Mark Turnbough, a lobbyist and environmental consultant for Waste Control Specialists, said the company made the political donations because of the possibility of doing a project in New Mexico.

"We didn't want to be strangers when we showed up with a request," he said. Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons controls Waste Control Specialists through a maze of family trusts and other companies, including Contran Corp. Contran contributed $35,000 to Johnson's campaign last year.

Johnson said the political donations by Contran and Waste Control Specialists have nothing to do with his support of the plant site.

"You're talking about a multibillion-dollar project that would employ thousands," the governor said.

Waste Control Specialists received help from the administration in preparing the site proposal it submitted to USEC last fall. Such assistance is available to any company seeking to locate a plant in New Mexico, said Lou Gallegos, the governor's chief of staff.

More contributions

Waste Control Specialists owns about 1,500 acres in Lea County and another 14,500 acres in neighboring Andrews County, Texas.

On the Texas property, it operates a facility that has received permits for treatment, storage and disposal of hazardous and toxic waste, as well as treatment and storage of radioactive waste.

Waste Control Specialists is donating some of its New Mexico land to Lea County for use as a landfill. The uranium-enrichment plant would be located nearby.

Turnbough said the company didn't learn until early October that USEC was looking for a plant site. That was after the campaign contributions to Johnson and the others.

As for the contributions from Contran to the governor, Turnbough noted that Simmons donates to politicians nationwide.

Federal Election Commission records show Simmons family members and political committees controlled by Simmons have contributed at least $1.5 million, mostly to GOP candidates and causes, since 1980, according to The Dallas Morning News.

Congresswoman Heather Wilson, R-N.M., last year received $1,000 from the political committee for NL Industries, another Simmons-controlled company.

In Texas last year, Simmons contributed $10,000 to Gov. George W. Bush and $103,000 to Rick Perry in his successful campaign for lieutenant governor, the Dallas Morning News has reported.

Waste Control Specialists also has contributed heavily in Texas, where it is now waging an intense lobbying campaign in the Legislature for the right to dispose of low-level radioactive waste at its Andrews County facility.

The plant that USEC plans to build would use new laser technology to enrich uranium ore -- part of a series of steps in preparing fuel rods for nuclear reactors.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California has been working on the technology.

Turnbough said Waste Control Specialists has offered to sell the New Mexico land to USEC for $1. The water for the plant would come from Texas, he said.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission would have to approve the site.

Turnbough said the site is environmentally sound, in part because of hundreds of feet of underlying clay that would serve as a barrier to any migration of dangerous materials.

Indirect benefits

Waste Control Specialists hopes the plant would draw other facilities involved in the uranium-enrichment process to Lea County, Turnbough said.

The USEC plant and any other plants would produce waste that could be handled by the company, he said.

Waste Control Specialists also wants to attract to the area government laboratories, U.S. agencies and others involved in researching and developing waste-treatment technologies.

Waste Control Specialists then could be positioned to implement such technologies, also potential money-makers.

"We don't get a lot out of it (the USEC plant) directly," Turnbough said. "We think we get a lot out of it indirectly. What we need is more technology support."

The goal of Waste Control Specialists is to develop more cost-effective, environmentally sensitive ways of dealing with wastes, he said. For example, technology could be used to reduce the radioactive threat of some wastes prior to burial.

He said locating the plant in New Mexico makes political sense because it would generate goodwill among Lea County residents. Those residents share the risk of having Waste Control Specialists in the area and, therefore, should benefit from the company's business, Turnbough said.

In addition to Turnbough, the lobbyists working the New Mexico Legislature for Waste Control Specialists are former Republican state Sen. Mickey Barnett; Dan Weaks, a former top official with the city of Albuquerque; and Marla Shoats, who once served as an aide to House Speaker Raymond Sanchez, D-Albuquerque.

Waste Control Specialists is lobbying the Legislature to renew tax breaks already available in law to manufacturers. The lobbyists also want lawmakers to continue to fund a program that provides money for in-plant training of New Mexico residents.

The company is backing a proposed law that would exempt manufacturers from paying gross receipts taxes on services, materials and equipment that were purchased for plant construction.

Waste Control Specialists also is backing a proposed change in the in-plant training program that would allow plants to receive money for the training of non-New Mexico residents.

Shoats said money for training of nonresidents would be made available only when a plant is located in an area where there aren't enough New Mexico residents to fill jobs.

If located in Lea County, the USEC plant would be expected to hire some workers from Texas. Those workers would pay income taxes to New Mexico.

Shoats said other New Mexico employers besides USEC would benefit from the legislation being worked on by the lobbyists. She also said representatives of other New Mexico businesses are supporting the continuation of economic-development incentives already in place.

Albuquerque Journal

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Source:
http://www.dailytexan.utexas.edu/webtexan/today/2000071001_s07_Dump.html

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Bush under fire in toxic waste battle
Dump opponents allege abuse of political clout

Kristen Tichenor
Daily Texan Staff

A toxic waste dump in West Texas is at the center of the latest battle between environmentalists and Gov. George W. Bush.

Texas environmental groups allege that the operator of the dump, Waste Control Specialists, has used the political influence of its CEO to buy its way into the billion-dollar radioactive waste dumping industry.

Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, CEO of WCS, was named Bush's largest campaign contributor by The Houston Chronicle in May 1999 after donating more than $800,000 between 1995 and 1998.

Environmentalists contend that WCS was able to gain exemptions to their radioactive waste storage permit, allowing them to dump radioactive waste, because of Simmons' political connection to Bush.

"I think the exemptions have everything to do with Simmons' contributions; the big political players get what they want," said Erin Rogers, coordinator of Texas Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an environmental activist group.

WCS is planning to lobby the Texas Legislature again to allow the dumping of low-level radioactive waste at its Andrews County site in West Texas, but the bill has been rejected in three previous sessions.

Meanwhile, WCS has obtained 14 amendments to their license to store the low-level waste, enabling them to dump it even though the state of Texas is not authorized to issue permits to dump radioactive waste.

Low-level radioactive waste includes items that have been contaminated with radioactive material or have become radioactive through exposure to neutron radiation, and comes from nuclear reactors, industry and research facilities, government sources, and medical facilities, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC oversees the storage and disposal of radioactive waste.

The NRC classifies low-level waste containing radioactive medical material as not particularly hazardous unless inhaled or consumed, but considers low-level radioactive waste from water processed at nuclear reactors capable of causing exposures that could lead to death or an increased risk for cancer.

"Representatives don't want our state to become a dumping ground, but the [Gov. George W. Bush] appointees at the [Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission], in addition to the Health Department, are in essence allowing them to skirt the law," Rogers said. "If you give enough money in Texas, you don't have to be bothered with little things like license and health permits."

The TNRCC, through a three-person, Bush-appointed committee, is authorized to give licenses to hold radioactive waste, but is no longer authorized to give license to dump it, according to Ruth McBurney, director of the division of licensing, regulation and standards at the TNRCC.

"Our acceptance of WCS's application for a permit [to store radioactive waste] was based on a scientific assessment of their facility, and not on any political pressure," McBurney said.

The manager of WCS's Document Specialist Division was unwilling to disclose information about the types of permits they held or the functions those permits allowed them to perform, routing questions to the Public Affairs Office.

The WCS Public Affairs office, which according to the company's receptionist reports directly to Simmons, would not comment about the allegations or about the types of permits the company holds.

Board member Bill Addington of the Sierra Blanca Legal Defense Fund, a group that successfully deflected the construction of a Department of Energy contracted radioactive waste dump in Sierra Blanca in West Texas, spoke of the amount of money involved in the disposal of nuclear waste.

"Simmons heavily influences the government, and may have had an influence on the Sierra Blanca decision because WCS wanted access to all of the waste," Addington said.

"The DOE's radioactive waste is the mother load of nuclear waste and worth $300 billion," he said.

WCS needs an actual license to dispose of radioactive waste in order to gain permission to dump DOE radioactive waste. It has unsuccessfully lobbied to gain a license in the past three legislative sessions.

Bush, the leading Republican presidential candidate, accepts Political Action Committee funds, while his Democratic counterpart Vice President Al Gore does not. According to an analysis by FECInfo, a group based in Washington D.C. that tracks campaign money, 20 PACs set up by electric companies with nuclear power plants have given Bush $61,670 between January 1999 and June 2000.

Ray Sullivan, Bush campaign spokesman, denied allegations that Waste Control Specialists's low-level waste storing permit, or the amendments that allow it to dump the waste, have anything to do with Simmons' campaign contributions.

"The decision about permits is made by individuals Bush bases his public policy positions on what he thinks is best for Texas," Sullivan said. "These are just more partisan political attacks, a part of the election process sure to increase as the governor increases his lead over Vice President Gore. These allegations are silly, misguided and partisan."

Robert Zapp, the mayor of Andrews, said he supported WCS and considered it a safe addition to the area.

"We've gone to the Glen Rose Nuclear Reactor and to Texas Tech University to talk to environmentalists, and they are supportive of it when you use the word 'nuclear,' people get worried, but the level of nuclear waste there is probably safer than what you have in your house," said Zapp. "We've dealt with Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material from the oil wells here for years, the WCS land is good for nothing else but waste, and WCS is very careful and responsible."

"My son's [biological] radioactive levels have actually dropped since starting to work there in 1997," he said.

But Peggy Pryor, Andrews resident and president of a local environmental organization, is afraid that the low-level radioactive waste will contaminate the city's drinking water. Andrews gets its water from the Ogallala Aquifer, the largest aquifer in the country, located 10 miles from WCS.

"WCS contends that the dump is not above the Ogallala Aquifer, but I think it is. Our water comes from underground and our water table increases with rainfall. We are a dry area, but this year we have already reached our rainfall level," Pryor said.

The Texas Tech study, which concluded that WCS does not tap into the Aquifer, was paid for by WCS.

Professor Alan Dutton of the UT Bureau of Economic Geology also released a report last March that said Tech researchers failed to substantiate their assertion with any scientific documentation.

During the last Legislative session when WCS was trying to form a compact to dump radioactive waste, these water findings were still under dispute at the hearings.

The NRC did not grant the company permission to dispose of its radioactive waste and withheld information about who in the organization believed that the TNRCC was authorized to do so.

"This is an internal aspect of operations I'm not willing to go into it. The NRC did not authorize WCS to dispose of the waste. That is the best information we have," said Sue Gagner, NRC public affairs officer.

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

RADIOACTIVE

* The State of Texas is not authorized to give out permits to dispose of radioactive waste.
* Waste Control Specialists has earned 14 amendments to their permit to store radioactive waste, enabling them to dispose of low-level radioactive waste without a permit.
* Texas environmentalist groups allege that WCS has used the political power of its CEO, Harold Simmons, to gain permission to dispose of radioactive waste.
* Simmons was named as Gov. George W. Bush's largest campaign contributor by The Houston Chronicle in 1999.

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

For More Information

* Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC): www.nrc.gov
* Waste Control Specialists (WCS): www.wcstexas.gov
* Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission (TNRCC): www.tnrcc.texas.gov
* Department of Energy (DOE): www.doe.gov
* Public Employees for Environmental Responsiblity (PEER): www.peer.org

==========================================================

Source: http://www. thenation.com/issue/991213/1213silverstein.shtml

December 13, 1999

Insider Enrichment

When the Clinton Administration privatized the United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC) last year, critics warned that the new company would seek to back out of a historic but unprofitable deal to reprocess uranium from Russian nuclear warheads. What they didn't know was that the privatization scheme itself was severely flawed by insider dealing that ultimately resulted in millions of dollars in benefits being paid out to company officials and advisers. Now, those same officials are claiming they need a federal bailout of up to $200 million or there will be severe consequences for the US-Russia nonproliferation program.

USEC has dispatched a team of lobbyists from one of Washington's top firms, Patton Boggs, to meet with members of Congress and the Administration to press its case. The Nation obtained a November 12 letter to White House Chief of Staff John Podesta from Thomas Hale Boggs Jr., top lobbyist for the firm, which says that a bailout "need[s] to be acted upon before Congress adjourns this year." (Congress took no action before adjournment, but the issue is still very much alive.) Another USEC hired gun, Greg Simon--former adviser and presidential campaign counselor to Al Gore, a leading proponent of the privatization scheme--is helping Boggs coordinate the lobbying campaign.

How did the government get itself into this mess? USEC's directors, led by board chairman William Rainer, approved the company's sale in June 1998 by a 3-to-1 vote (a fifth board member abstained). The privatization took place through a public stock offering (IPO), an option drawn up by USEC's incumbent management. That plan won out over competing bids from General Atomics and Lockheed Martin to buy the company outright, as well as a nonprivatization option. Rainer predicted that the IPO would net the government "appreciably higher proceeds" than the $1.9 billion Lockheed was offering; in fact it brought in precisely the same amount.

It's no surprise that USEC's managers preferred the IPO route. Lockheed and General Atomics both had their own management teams, so USEC's senior officials would likely have been out of a job if the company were sold to an outside bidder. Instead, at least six members of the old guard currently hold top positions at the new USEC. William Timbers, CEO and president of the new and old company, earned $325,000 when USEC was in public hands. Last February, the board of the newly privatized USEC set his base pay at $600,000 per year, gave him a $617,625 bonus and awarded him stock shares currently worth about $900,000.

Federal law bars government employees from taking part in decisions that affect their personal financial situation. Rainer granted Timbers's request for a waiver so he could participate in the privatization debate, stating that he and other board members would protect the integrity of the process. Board meeting minutes obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that Rainer authorized Timbers and a USEC lawyer to hear the ostensibly confidential presentations of competing bidders and subsequently allowed Timbers and other senior managers to critique those bids before the board. USEC's financial adviser, investment firm J.P. Morgan--which raked in more than $12.5 million in fees for its assistance--was also permitted to argue before the board in favor of management's IPO scheme. So, too, was USEC's outside counsel, Skadden, Arps, which made upward of $10 million in fees during the privatization debate.

Asked by a board member if privatization might lead to the need for a federal bailout, Skadden, Arps's Les Goldman replied that he could foresee no circumstances that might cause such an eventuality. Jim Derryberry of J.P. Morgan concurred, saying the company had "sufficient cash flow" to remain profitable. William Burton, who cast the one no vote on privatization, commented at one board meeting, "It's the expectation of all of us that if we go with an IPO that Skadden would remain counsel [to USEC]." In response, Goldman huffed, "There have been no discussions about future employment." But Skadden, Arps was indeed retained by USEC. George Rifakes, a senior USEC executive, said he was "offended" by the mere suggestion of bias on the part of management. "I'm 64 years old," he said. "I'm not looking for a new career." Following the privatization, Rifakes stayed on at USEC as the company's senior executive vice president. He stepped down on September 30, then signed a deal with USEC the following day that will pay him $95,000 for six months for eighty hours of consulting work per month.

The key difference between management's bid and the proposals from Lockheed and General Atomics was that the former promised to move forward rapidly with AVLIS, a new laser enrichment technology. Timbers told the board that AVLIS "is going to be the method by which this company stays viable." Lockheed and General Atomics were highly skeptical of AVLIS, a stance that proved prophetic. Eleven months after USEC was privatized, management announced that it was scrapping the technology.

Meanwhile, the nonproliferation deal with Russia, signed in 1994, gets shakier by the day. Under the terms of the agreement, USEC is to buy 500 metric tons of uranium from Russian nuclear warheads over the next twenty years and process it into fuel for commercial nuclear plants. Critics have warned all along that USEC enrichment plants in Ohio and Kentucky produce uranium for less than the price that the company is committed to paying Russia. Hence, a privately run, profit-maximizing USEC would have no incentive to maintain the deal with Moscow. That's precisely what has happened. In early November, Timbers complained that USEC should not be forced to "subsidize national security" and would therefore seek to modify the Russia agreement. Boggs's letter to Podesta warns that if no federal help is forthcoming, USEC might be "forced by its legal obligations to its shareholders...to terminate" its role in implementing the deal.

Lawyers for the Paper Allied-Industrial Chemical & Energy Workers International Union (PACE), which represents USEC workers, have asked Attorney General Janet Reno to investigate the privatization deal. At the House Commerce Committee, Democrat Ted Strickland, whose Ohio district includes one of USEC's plants, has joined Republican Tom Bliley of Virginia in pushing for Congressional hearings. "People with a vested interest in the privatization personally benefited from a process that was detrimental to national security and to the American people," he says.

And what of Rainer, the man most responsible for the unfolding debacle? Last June, President Clinton appointed him chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Rainer declined comment to The Nation other than to point to a statement he made during his confirmation hearings, when he said, "I was very proud of the decision that we made at the time...and one year later I look at the decision, and I still think it was the right decision."

Ken Silverstein and Ian Urbina

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Source: http://www.dail y-times.com/areanews/otherstories/1.html

RECA group seeks audit

Tribal lobby funds queried

Nathan J. Tohtsoni-Staff writer

The Navajo Nation has spent about $500,000 on lobbying efforts to make amendments to the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990, and for some, it's been money squandered.

A law firm in Washington, D.C., and a Navajo liaison office were not appropriated funding this fiscal year by the Navajo Nation Council for their lobbying efforts.

In September the Navajo Uranium Radiation Victims Committee, the liaison office, announced it would operate on a month-to-month basis and submit its receipts to the tribal offices in Window Rock, Ariz.

The Western States Uranium Workers Coalition, a group made up of organizations from the Four Corners, believes the lobbyists have been dragging out the uranium issue for the past two years for personal gain. The coalition is requesting an audit of documents and reports.

"That's why we're pushing for this audit. We'd like to see where this money has been spent," said Melton Martinez of Haystack, co-chairman of the Western States Uranium Workers Coalition and president of the RECA Reform Working Group of the Eastern Navajo Agency.

"Many times we tried to sit down and talk to them about RECA," Martinez said. "In a way, it seems they just wanted to carry this on and on. We feel they were using this as a way for them to make money without providing any results."

The coalition has asked that the Navajo Nation Council's Budget and Finance Committee file an audit against the lobbyists.

A meeting is scheduled at 10 a.m. Tuesday in Window Rock between Martinez, Navajo Nation Vice President Taylor McKenzie, a representative from the Office of Navajo Uranium Workers and members of the budget and finance committee to determine if an audit is warranted.

Martinez said he also will ask that the lobbyists be relieved.

"It's nothing personal. It's business," he said. "If you're not doing your job, you should be replaced."

Martinez feels that many people are being misled and are not given the latest information on the RECA bill.

Mellor Willie, press officer for the Navajo Nation president and vice president, said he's aware that McKenzie has a meeting scheduled Tuesday but is uncertain what actions will be taken after that discussion.

Phefelia Bradley-Johnson, legislative advisor for the Budget and Finance Committee, said an audit has not been filed with the tribe's auditor general's office, and much will depend on Tuesday's meeting.

"The Budget and Finance Committee has recommended an audit," Bradley-Johnson said. "The vice president's office was given a directive for a complete compilation of what this law firm does. After this meeting, the committee may consider making that recommendation that an audit should be completed."

The Senate passed a bill in November to improve RECA. The bill increases the number of uranium workers who can qualify for compensation, including uranium millers, open pit miners and transport workers. It also adds kidney-related diseases to the list of radiation-related diseases.

The bill reduces the number of working level months from 200 to 40 for miners, millers and transport workers to be eligible for compensation.

The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990 provides $100,000 in relief to miners who meet stringent requirements. Opponents say the guidelines are burdensome and do not address many other victims of radiation exposure, such as those who milled yellowcake and the families who lived near the mines.

The lobbyists were seeking amendments that included an increase in compensation from $100,000 to $200,000, inclusion of other cancers and afflictions that are believed to be radiation-related, and compensation for those who worked in mills.

Martinez said he received figures from the tribe that shows the Cummins & Brown law firm in Washington has received $328,962 since July 1997 and the Navajo Uranium Radiation Victims Committee $76,000 during that time span. He said if they were able to document what they have done, he wouldn't be asking for a change.

"Without a report, they received all this money," Martinez said. "All I want to know is if this money been spent on the people. We need documentation. The thing that needed to be looked into by our lobbyist hasn't. I feel they failed their jobs in informing the people.

"From the beginning, we stated this was the people's bill, not politics. We just wanted to get justice pushed for our people."

A tentative update meeting on Tuesday's events is scheduled Wednesday at the Thoreau Chapter House.

===========================================================

Source: Envirocare web page

ENVIROCARE, SEMNANI MOVE TO STOP LIES BY FAILED COMPETITOR

SALT LAKE CITY- Citing an extensive pattern of "flat out lies," Envirocare of Utah, Inc., and Khosrow Semnani, its owner and founder, today filed a defamation lawsuit against Waste Control Specialists, its former president, a private investigator and other unnamed defendants.

The complaint alleges that WCS, a competitor of Envirocare, and certain WCS agents, commencing in 1997, engaged in a secret, systematic, vicious and wide-ranging campaign to blatantly defame Envirocare and destroy Envirocare's business and business opportunities in the waste disposal market throughout the United States.

"The defamatory things WCS and the other defendants have said about us are absolutely absurd," said Envirocare President Charles Judd. "There is not a shred of truth to these statements, and the defendants knew or should have known that there was no factual basis whatsoever for this garbage."

"We don't like the idea of going to court, but we have no choice but to maintain our good name and protect our reputation which they have systematically attempted to destroy," Judd said. "We have been amazed at the extent and outrageousness of the flat-out lies."

Besides WCS, which is majority owned by Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, the lawsuit names former company president Ken Bigham, Southwest Security and Investigation Company, and its former investigator Paul Byerly hired by WCS, and additional unnamed defendants.

"They made defamatory statements to anyone who would listen, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, other regulators and customers, and private parties," Judd said. "As the lawsuit progresses, we expect to identify other defendants who were involved in this pattern of lies."

The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages to be proven at trial.

For additional information, contact Max Wheeler at (801) 521-9000.

=======================================================

Source: http://local-oversight.org/news5_00.html#nickel

Nickel recycling vs. coal ash recycling

By James S. Johnson, Jr., Ph.D.

Recycling of nickel from the gaseous diffusion process is on hold, in part because of concerns raised about residual radioactivity that would remain after decontamination.

The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation has evaluated the process and issued a permit to Manufacturing Sciences Corporation (MSC). The permit allows release of nickel decontaminated to a level, averaged over a shipment, of no more than 3 disintegrations per second per gram of nickel from technetium-99, and 0.6 from uranium. These limits are considered protective of health and consistent with existing regulations here and abroad.

However, the Department of Energy has suspended recycling activities and has instituted a task force in Washington to review this and related matters. Because sale of the recycled nickel is planned to defray a large fraction of the cost of remediation of old gaseous-diffusion facilities at K-25 and return of the area to private-sector industrial use, the matter is of considerable interest to the Oak Ridge community.

It seems worthwhile to make comparisons with other operations not favored with such attention. Babb International plans to build a plant near the Bull Run Steam Plant to make aerated concrete blocks from fly ash. If the fly ash contains the average amount of natural uranium and thorium, there will be about 2.2 disintegrations/sec per gram of the product. This may be compared with the 3.6 disintegrations/sec per gram permitted for the nickel. The actual unit activity of the released nickel may, in fact, be lower. MSC reports that its pilot results attained an average of 1.8 disintegrations/sec per gram from technetium, below the allowed value of 3.

There appears to be a disparity between the level of concern over release of radioactivity to the public sector in the form of nickel and of concrete blocks. When comparing the uses of these materials, keep in mind that the nickel is diluted twenty-fold when alloyed to make stainless steel, while concrete blocks may be used to construct houses, office buildings, and public facilities.

The LOC Board of Directors has written to Energy Secretary Bill Richardson to express concern about the recent DOE decision to curtail commercial recycling of metals with volumetric residual radioactivity. The letter states in part "the moratorium on release of this material will inevitably delay the cleanup and industrial reuse of these buildings."

===========================================================

From the CHE organization web page, CHE linked to ORCA, OREHSP, Kittrell, Honiker, WCS, Egan

Source: http://che-or.8m.com/Envirocare.html

Envirocare In the News

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JULY 14, 1998 06:06 EDT
Fake Engineer Approved Waste Dumps

By MATTHEW BROWN
Associated Press Writer

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — By chance, one state employee showing another how to use an Internet database of licensed professionals decided to use Alan A. Bargerstock as an example.

But Bargerstock, who as an engineer at Envirocare of Utah Inc. approved construction plans at a low-level nuclear waste dump, didn't show up in the database.

There was a good reason: he is not a licensed engineer, though he has certified more than 100 nuclear waste disposal plans during the past year and a half.

For the rest of the story:
Envirocare - State of Utah

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Friday, May 29, 1998

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Envirocare Agrees to Pay $80,000 Fine
BY BRENT ISRAELSEN
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

Envirocare of Utah has agreed to pay an $80,000 fine to settle a state enforcement action that accused the company of storing too much weapons-grade material at its radioactive-waste-disposal facility.

Read the rest of the story:
Utah DEQ Web Clips Salt Lake Tribune Story

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Envirocare asks judge to quash subpoena
Legal order seeks sealed transcript of deposition
Last updated 05/25/1998, 10:55 a.m. MT

By Joe Costanzo
Deseret News staff writer

Attorneys for Envirocare and Khosrow B. Semnani asked a federal judge Friday to quash a subpoena seeking the sealed transcript of Semnani's deposition in a Utah civil case. Semnani was deposed last month by attorneys representing Nuclear Fuel Services Inc., which is accusing Envirocare of conspiracy, extortion and corruption in their competition over storage of low-level radioactive waste in Utah.

For the rest of the story:
Deseret News Story - Envirocare 5-25-98

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Envirocare of Utah under attack over quantities of N-materials Last updated 05/03/1998, 12:01 a.m. MT

By Jerry Spangler
Deseret News staff writer

Envirocare of Utah, already beleaguered with legal and political troubles, is under attack again.

A report by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission indicates the low-level radioactive waste dump possessed SNMs or "special nuclear materials" in quantities above that allowed by the state and federal government.

For the rest of the story:
Deseret News Story - Envirocare 5-3-98

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Tuesday, April 14, 1998
Firm Seeks Stiff Penalties Against Envirocare, Attorneys

BY BRENT ISRAELSEN
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

A Tennessee company suing Envirocare of Utah asked a Utah court Monday to impose ``the harshest sanctions'' possible against Envirocare and its attorneys.

Nuclear Fuel Services Inc. (NFS) alleges Envirocare and its counsel concealed knowing about tape-recorded conversations between Envirocare owner Khosrow Semnani and Larry F. Anderson, the former director of the Utah Division of Radiation Control.

Read the rest of the story:
Salt Lake Tribune Story - NFS & Envirocare

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Utah Radiation Control Board Minutes: April 3, 1998 2. On November 25, 1997, a Notice of Violation and Proposed Imposition of Civil Penalties was issued to Envirocare listing a violation of License Condition 42 and a violation of License Condition 43. 4. By Order dated December 19, 1997, a civil penalty of $6500 was imposed ($4000 for violation of License Condition 42 and $2500 for violation of License Condition 43)

The rest of the Minutes:
Utah Radiation Control Board Minutes: April 3, 1998

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February 9, 1998
Anderson - Semnani lawsuits

A chronology of events has previously been provided in Envirocare Information Notices of June 2, 1997 and September 25, 1997. The following adds to events that have occurred or were not included since publication of the last Notice:

•Envirocare responds to NRC letter to EPA Region VIII of August 14, 1997 •EPA Region VIII issues letter concerning Envirocare radon emissions compliance under NESHAPS of October 16, 1997. EPA Region VIII determines that 40 CFR 61, Subpart W does not apply to Envirocare because Subpart W applies to facilities engaged in uranium extraction from ores and Envirocare is limited to waste disposal.
•National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) files a 2.206 petition with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission requesting appropriate enforcement action to avert death threats and other retaliatory actions against employees of Envirocare on December 12, 1997.
•Envirocare responds to the NRC Inspector General concerning the NRDC petition on December 23, 1997.

For the rest of the story:
Envirocare Information Notice from the State of Utah Division of Radiation Control

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Saturday, January 10, 1998
Envirocare Gag Policy Attacked

BY JIM WOOLF
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

The federal government has ordered Envirocare of Utah to revise a company policy that imposes a $30,000 fine on employees who disclose ``confidential or proprietary information'' about the operation.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) says the policy is ``inconsistent'' with rules that protect ``whistle blowers'' at federally licensed facilities handling radioactive material.

The Natural Resources Defense Council -- a national environmental group -- recently complained that the policy ``has and still is threatening to destroy the financial well-being of any employees'' who raise any concerns about Envirocare's low-level radioactive waste disposal operation in Tooele County.

Read the rest of the story:
Salt Lake Tribune Story - Envirocare 1-10-98

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ENVIROCARE OF UTAH, INC.
UPDATE

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Envirocare's owner, Khosrow Semnani resigns his position

Charles Judd named President of Envirocare

Khosrow B. Semnani, founder and President of Envirocare, Inc., resigned as President of the company, effective May 14, 1997. He also has submitted his resignation from the Utah Radiation Control Board.

Read the rest of the story:

envirocareupdate.html

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Critique of "Hidden Files," a shortshrift report

Hello Folks,

Here is a critique on "hidden files" of nickel. Was it complete or accurate? This written report has been kept uncirculated in CHE till recently, as it was web published, and has seen little CHE peer review outside of who wrote it. The nickel information of this report was presented to the NBC folks that came to Oak Ridge about two years ago and they walked out on it. Other things to note is lots of these little group titles below were under the same 501c3 and very interrelated. This is also the little click that is in CHE. The author's MA degree is in sociology. It was the release of these documents that resulted in the hauting of recycled metals operations in the gaseous diffusion operations, using a pal of Honiker named Alvarez and his organization connections. Because of this, many of these K-25 contaminated metals are now being scheduled to be burried at nuclear waste dumps.

The real story on this report is that it is a diversion of attention from the calcium-fluoride sintering process that forms the gaseous diffusion barriers and the fact that smelting these materils causes huge toxic fluoride emissions problems. It exactly follows an ORNL plan to hide these effects from the public using planted groups of old hippies that work for them.

Lets look at several points in this report---

=======================================================

Report Source URL: http://che-or.8m.com/Nickel03-28-00.htm

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Report Title and Authors: Nickel Powder/Nuclear Weapons, The Untold Story

By Cliff Honicker, M. A., Director, American Environmental Health Studies Project, Inc.,

with assistance from Jackie Kittrell, Esq., AEHSP; Sandra Reid, R.N., Romance Carrier, Oak Ridge Health Liaison; Cheryll Dyer, Coalition for a Healthy Environment; [CHE] George Kennedy-White, Esq., AEHSP; Janet Michel, CHE, Mike Knapp, SOCM and Kathryn Swain, M.A., CHE

=========================================================

Report Quote:

Security Guard, Harry Williams, K-25

"We would have responsibility all over the facility. When we were in that area, we had different kind of exposures than most people. We had tactical concealment, lay down in prone and low profile positions, made it easier for us to ingest the contaminants that were present. The facilities were not very well maintained, janitorial services, keeping dust and things in control, even containing extremely hazardous substances like UF6, yellow cake, nickel dust, anything you would run across, all sorts of nasty chemicals."

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

Comment:

Mr. Williams, as CHE's president, appears to have gotten a lot of quotes in this piece. Harry, as most folks call him, is no scientist. Everyone knows there is little "yellow cake" or UO2, uranium dioxide in the K-25 processes. There is a yellow cake appearing uranyl oxy-fluoride, UO2F2, that is everywhere from leaks in the systems. It is technically incorrect to call the yellow dusts at K-25 as yellow cake. Yellow cake is insoluble and UO2F2 is soluble in water. This effect is important in lung and body retention effects, makes one species less damaging. Mr. Williams was a guard commander at K-25 and one of the many persons that let barrier materials get everywhere outside the plant.

========================================================

Report Quote:

Retired worker, K-25

"People doing dose reconstructions and the like, they figure things on an 8 hour day and five day work week. What they don't realize is that we worked these facilities around the clock, seven days a week. The managers knew about the midnight ventings, but at the same time, they didn't want to know. We did not, and they did not leave a paper trail on the midnight ventings, because it meant more paperwork for everyone. But, the managers knew, and those higher up knew too. We had these huge fans and vents on top of the ceilings of those big old buildings. No monitors up there, no filters. Sometimes, that's how we took care of it. A manager or supervisor would walk in and we would say "venting to atmosphere!" and they would walk right out the door again. That's how we took care of it when the UF6 or the nickel got so thick in the air."

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Comments:

These venting of the converters to atmosphere using a technique they call "jetting" happened all the time at K-25 during stage tear downs------and large amounts of UF-6 were released into the air. Most of this went over the top of the air monitors at the plants as the stuff was thermally hot and rises. UF-6 also forms HF in air and this is heavier than air and comes back down in communities. These releases, due to daily tear down maintenance and system upgrades, poisoned the reservations pine trees and the local humans as well. Fluorides get into the food chain just like I-131 and cause similar damage to thyroid. These releases also are related to the high rates of thyroid disease in the area--------as fluorine is a halogen like iodine-------and the body concentrates the fluorides into the thyroid and parathyroid and cell and organ damages result. Fluorides can also compete with the thyroid hormone iodine effects to regulate cell metabolism. This effect is not rocket science---just simple obsevation off the periodic table.

========================================================

Report Quote:

"I think we have a problem here"

Flash forward to the early 1990's. A medical doctor new to the area of Oak Ridge, Dr. William K. Reid, M.D. has been sent a number of patients about whom other doctors have failed to make a solid diagnosis of their health problems. Dr. Reid possessed a strong background in medical research. He was trained in hematology, oncology, infectious disease, and biochemistry. He conducted extensive interviews and created profiles on the patients to eliminate the most probable causes of their health problems. He then gathered the occupational histories of his patients, It appeared to Dr. Reid that several of his patients, particularly workers, who exhibited clinical symptoms of chronic heavy metal poisoning. What stood out in Dr. Reid's mind was that he was seeing too many renal cell cancers in such a small population. He found in both, his cancerous and non-cancerous patients, advanced and aggressive immune system dysfunctions. The patients had AIDS-like symptoms, only they didn't have AIDS.

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

Comments:

Reid only got close to the major problem in Oak Ridge. He failed to consider fluorides in MSRE persons, K-25 workers, and area residents. The HF have the volatility and reactivity in lungs to produce the most substantial complete pathway to cause contamination build up in the body that can affect health. Fluorides damage the thyroid and cell metabolism, and they also damage the phagocyte activity. Anytime one sees thyroid damage to industrial sites one should always first suspect a halogen, ie F or Cl. Reid failed to do this obvious connection. With such a high thyroid disease presence in Oak Ridge, the HF emissions become a dominate issue. Fluorides, since they damage phagocytes, cause metals to build up in the tissues and organs and not be cleared. This allows various of the internalized metals to cause problems, clear examples are lead and beryllium. The mechnism of the immune system is essential to the causal effect relationship and it is totally missing in this discussion.

Reid is suppose to be an oncologist and know the phagocyte and lymph node effects, but appears to have ignored those mechanisms. Every oncologist knows that cancers spread first to the lymph nodes and its the phagocyte activity pulling the cancers into these nodes, and any impairment of the phagocytes impeds the abilty of these cells to completely destroy the cancer cells and cancer virus. Also. obvious is the metals and halogens concentrate into the lymph nodes as a result of damaging cell DNA, T-cell and phagocyte response, and the high contanination concentrations affect the immune cells mtDNA most significantly. Reid has not even applied the basics of immune system operation in explanations.

Both Janet Michel and Harry Williams, who are quoted in this article, are Reid's patients, and Reid has not diagnosed any HF or F linked ills----------desptite fluorides being associated to vitaligo and heart attacks-------as much or more than any metals. Janet Michel's letter to Gore calls her condition "metal poisoning"----her doctor calls it elevations-----------quite inconsistent language----------and very bad science as well.

The congress will be pleased to compensate Michell only for metals and radiations, as this misses the fluoride effects, and they will likely be due nothing.

Reid's observations of AIDs like symptoms are the direct effects of the fluorides impairing the lymph cells and phagocytes. In all areas where HIV has high transmissions, fluoride exposures are high as well.

========================================================

Report Quote:

Coincidentally, in an expose' by the Tennessean reporter, Susan Thomas, over 30 workers from K-25 were interviewed as to their health problems. Some of the symptoms sound similar to that of exposure to nickel carbonyl. Thomas summarized the symptoms: fatigue, tumors, memory loss, blood disorders headaches, reproductive abnormalities, dizziness, liver problems, sleeplessness, rashes, panic attacks, hair loss, tremors, numbness, vision loss, immune system deficiencies, depression, hearing loss, asthma, acute muscle and joint pain, chemical sensitivity, rapid heartbeat, thyroid malfunctions, nervous disorders and digestive troubles.

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

Comment:

Do notice the thryoid problems, which do call in the halogen component or HF and F exposures. Also, notice these symptoms more clearly fit effects of fluorides, not so much nickel. Do notice metals are not the only things that affect renal damage.

Fluoride poisoning- http://www.bruha.com/fluoride/html/symptoms_hypo_f.htm

F Doctor comment- http://www.nofluoride.com/ten.htm

F symptoms- http://www.all-natural.com/fleffect.html

F Renal effects- http://www.bruha.com/fluoride/html/adverse_health_effects.htm

Symptoms- http://www.wholywater.com/fluoride.html

The Gulf War folks also had problems with thyroid, which also calls in the F or Cl connections. Here the oil wells and uranium operations can put these F toxics in air in Kuwait and Iraq.

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Report Quote:

Reported Symptoms to Nickel Exposure

Abdominal Cramps Contact Dermatitis Bronchitis Cancer (Nasal, Lung) Cardiac Arrest Chromosomal Aberrations Convulsions Cool Body Temperatures Cough Cyanosis Death Delirium Diarrhea Emphysema Epigastric Pain Excessive Salivation Fatigue Giddiness Headaches In-coordination Increase In Blood Reticulocytes Increase In Leukocytes In The Blood Increase In Serum Bilirubin Increased Rate Or Depth Of Respiration Interacts With DNA Irregular breathing Lethargy Metal fume fever Muscle pain Nausea Pneumonia Substernal pain Vertigo Vision loss Vomiting Weakness

Suspected of Causing: Coronary construction Myocardial depression Liver Atrophy Kidney damage Hypoglycemia Low Birth Weight Testicular degeneration Sperm abnormalities

End Point Targets: Respiratory System Paranasal Sinus Central Nervous System(54)

In a separate section on the effects of Nickel Carbonyl, Wilson notes: Nickel Carbonyl is the most toxic of the nickel compounds and is (sic) has been historically established as a neurotoxin.(55)

There are several extremely important points to note. One is the obvious number of times the symptoms found by the Tennessean reporters matched the symptoms reported by Wilson as indicative of nickel exposure. What is also striking is the "end point" diseases of nickel exposure; i.e., lung and sinus cancer, are out-numbered over 15 to one in the clinical manifestations the exposure causes to the individual. Thus, it is very important to be looking for the clinical and sub-clinical symptoms of exposure in the effected people, rather than simply looking for the causes of death. It is also important to note that the Tennessean reporters, while not trained scientists, conducted in a sense, "door step epidemiology." Nowhere in the February 1997 articles were the reporters focused on nickel exposure. They merely collected the "raw data." The striking number of positive matches of symptoms certainly merits a symptoms-survey of the people currently suffering from "unexplained" illnesses and maladies that may be the result of working at or living near the the K-25 site.

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Comments:

The symptoms survey clearly points to HF and fluorides toxic effects in dominance.

While metals are present and act in similar ways------they add to the lymph node toxic levels that affect the phogocytes------------the metals are not the top smoking gun.

=========================================================

Report Quote:

For instance, research at the Pharmacology and Toxicology division of the University of Rochester Atomic Energy Project in 1949, a half century ago, found that "Because relatively large amounts of fluoride have been shown to be present in manufacturing areas where clinical beryllium disease has existed, it seemed reasonable to test the hypothesis that fluoride might contribute to the observed beryllium toxicity. Such a study has been performed in rats exposed either to beryllium sulfate mist or to hydrogen fluoride vapor alone, or to both agents in daily, alternating exposures for one month.

The results based on mortality, weight response and a study of histologic sections of the lungs of these rats were consistent in the various exposed groups and confirm the hypothesis under test, namely that hydrogen fluoride enhances the toxicity of beryllium sulfate when both agents are admitted through the respiratory route. By H.E. Stokinger, et al., 5/12/49, University of Rochester, Atomic Energy Project UR-68, page 4)

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Comment:

In this document are statements that for UF-6 exposures the fluorine atoms outnumber the uranium in workers by 1000 to 1------------should be more than enough example that the volatility of the HF released from UF-6 dominates the pathway and retention effects and thus dominates the health effects.

Author totally failed to note what was most important from this document.

The author of this nickel document also claims to be a fluoride expert, but cannot recognize the "clear and present danger" (this a title of a TV movie in the 80's about Donora and HF releases) of a very clear fluoride toxic damage that exceeds any of the metals and isotopes exposure.

While the metals do play a role and the situation is similar to that of the DU discussion in the Gulf War, it would be misleading to overly emphasize the metals over HF in the Oak Ridge discussion.

This is an interesting, but very dangerous report for some of its mistakes and lack of comprehension, even for its direction.

This is so typical of this small little controlling group in CHE. Emphasizing the metals will also help out DOE liabilties, as it avoids connecting all the immense thyroid disease rates here and its fluoride emissions connections.

In essence, this is a rewrite of the Jackie Kittrell defense plan used in the Joe Harding case, except Ni is substituted for U. In this case the HF and fluoride exposures were dodged also. This Harding plan is an exact replica of Kittrell's pal Alvarez, from the days of Silkwood. See:http://www.ratical.org/radiation/KillingOurOwn/KOO7.html

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Report Quote:

It will also take "de-coupling" the fears of liabilities and lawsuits in General Counsel's office of the DOE before a cooperative partnership can be formed between the affected people and the offending agency.

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

Comment:

I don't think the degree in sociology is applicable to a sitution where folks have been injured and these injured folks are suggested to sit down and expect justice from the blundering idiots that screwed them up in the first place.

DOE has engaged in sociopathic criminal patterns that injured many persons and they have been rewarded for doing that-------sociology should recognize patterns of criminal excess------------not endorse them.

=========================================================

Source: http://www.trufax.org/fluoride/bomb.html

"In the case of fluoride, "If the farmers won, it would open the door to further suits, which might impede the bomb program's ability to use fluoride," said Jacqueline Kittrell, a Tennessee public interest lawyer specializing in nuclear cases, who examined the declassified fluoride documents. (Kittrell has represented plaintiffs in several human radiation experiment cases.) She added, "The reports of human injury were especially threatening, because of the potential for enormous settlements -- not to mention the PR problem." "

Comment:

This sentence serves as a striking comparision to Kittrel and Honiker knowing the fluorides problems, yet failiing to represent this in the Harding case, and failing to acknowledge UF-6 releases result in HF releases, which is one of the worst species of fluoride to be exposed to. Failing even to acknowlege it in this paper, as well as failing to acknowledge it to the sick workers of Oak Ridge and their communities.

Such obvious failings to report can only mean there must be some reward in helping DOE dodge this F PR problem.

"I think we have a problem here."

==========================================================

Source:
http://www.oakridger.com/

July 25, 2000

Our Views: The (political) science behind recycling's end

The Wall Street Journal of Monday, July 25, had this to say about the Department of Energy's recent decision to suspend its metals recycling program. We pass excerpts of the newspaper's remarks along:

Maybe once the Democrats settle on a running mate for Al Gore, and Energy Secretary Bill Richardson realizes it's not him, the Secretary will stop using the Department of Energy for political ends. Until then, it's worth asking Mr. Richardson to justify actions that are hard to see as anything but an attempt to help get Al Gore elected, no matter what the costs.

Mr. Richardson has just announced the suspension of a decades-old activity now facilitated by an Energy Department program that cleans up metals and other waste from the nation's nuclear facilities and sends it all off to scrap dealers for recycling. . .

The Journal notes that DOE admits existing contamination standards are "far below what is allowed by federal policy," as well as below the radiation exposure standards imposed upon "the average salt substitute found in your local grocery story." Further, the newspaper notes the contradiction of permitting import of recycled metals from nations with standards 10 times as lenient as those in the U.S. It observes:

In scientific terms, Mr. Richardson's decision may not add up. But when weighed on a political scale it has an impeccable logic: Labor unions especially the AFL-CIO-affiliated Paper Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Union have long pushed for suspension. The reason? The Energy Department's recycling program puts cheap metal on the market, which competes with metal produced by, among others, the domestic car and steel industries.

The tragic part of this political pander to big labor, a core Gore constituency, is that "Suspending the program will cost Tennessee, where most of the recycling takes place, nearly a thousand jobs; about 300 workers at an Oak Ridge clean-up site were already sent home last week."

The Journal wryly guesses that DOE's promised "new more rigorous standard" will not likely be announced before Nov. 7 the presidential election day.

==========================================================

APPENDIX:

Note: Local organizations like OREPA received W. Alton Jones foundation grants and organizations run by Jackie Kittrell and Cliff Honiker received grants from the Rockefeller funds. The Human Experiments lost the trail of the Panama natives used in drug and nuclear experiments.

No surprise. Sierra Club endorses Al "NAFTA" Gore
http://www.algore2000.com/briefingroom/releases/pr_0724_nat_1.html

The following is from Questioning Official Environmentalism, By Brian Tokar, Read entire report at http://www.lbbs.org/zmag/articles/apr97tokar.html

"In the 1990s, large donors have begun to intervene more directly to set the course of environmental activism. For example, a $275,000 grant to the Sierra Club in 1990 to support work on population issues made population advocacy the highest-funded program in the Club’s budget. This raised concern among activists who feared the effort would inadvertently support the rising wave of anti-immigration sentiment that was just beginning to sweep the country.

"An examination of the Annual Reports of the major environmental organizations revealed an extent of overt corporate influence upon the leading national environmental groups that surprised all but the most jaded activists. Almost all of the leading groups were receiving substantial contributions from the most polluting corporations. MANY HAD RESTRUCTURED THEIR OPERATIONS SO AS TO BECOME MORE ATTRACTIVE TO SUCH DONORS, and the National Wildlife Federation, in particular, saw "dialogue" with "key industrial leaders" as a central part of its mission. Few were surprised when NWF later became the first U.S. environmental group to support the North American Free Trade Agreement

"Others began examining the boards of directors of the leading environmental groups. The Multinational Monitor found that 23 directors and council members from Audubon, NRDC, the Wilderness Society, the World Resources Institute, and World Wildlife Fund were associated with 19 corporations cited in a recent survey of the 500 worst industrial polluters. These companies included such recognized environmental offenders as Union Carbide, Exxon, Monsanto, Weyerhaeuser, DuPont, and Waste Management, Inc. Furthermore, some 67 individuals associated with just 7 environmental groups served as CEOs, chairpersons, presidents, consultants r directors for 92 major corporations.

"In1994, the Center for the Study of American Business at Washington University in St. Louis examined the established environmental groups’ stock portfolios, ostensibly developed as a hedge against fluctuating memberships, and found that the Wilderness Society, for example, held stock in Dow Chemical, Kerr McGee, and General Motors, and the NRDC in Dow, Westinghouse, and General Electric. For organizations committed to protecting the environment and combating pollution to become financially dependent on the stock values of major polluters may represent the ultimate corruption of ecological values.

"The World Wildlife Fund’s corporate contributors are now led by the likes of the Bank of America, Kodak, and J.P. Morgan (over $250,000), with the Bank of Tokyo, Philip Morris, WMX, DuPont, and numerous others playing supporting roles. Its budget grew from $17 million in 1985 to $62 million in 1993, with roughly half of its revenues coming from individual contributions. The National Wildlife Federation’s budget had increased by more than 50 percent since 1988, to $96 million in 1994. Major corporate donors included Bristol Myers Squibb, Ciba-Geigy, DuPont, and Pennzoil, and an additional 161 companies participated in the Federation’s matching gift program, in which individuals’ gifts to the organization are matched by their employer.

"Foundations often play a controversial role in movements for social change. Organizations that wish to sustain themselves over time, initiate new projects, and offer salaries to staff members invariably need to attract large donations, and the established foundations have long been the most available source of these. Political scientist Joan Roelofs has demonstrated the role of foundations in the decline of 1960s-era activism, arguing that grants were systematically allocated to assure "that RADICAL ENERGIES WERE BEING CHANNELED IINTO SAFE, LEGALISTIC, BUREAUCRATIC AND OCCASIONALLY PROFIT-MAKING ACTIVITIES". This pattern has been repeated in anti-poverty groups, women’s groups, and in the African American, Latino, and Native American communities, as well as in the environmental movement."

"In 1995, Northwest forest activist and journalist Jeffrey St. Clair joined with Alexander Cockburn to investigate the stock holdings of the three foundations that play the largest institutional role in supporting mainstream environmentalism. The three foundations, each the product of leading transnational oil fortunes, are the Pew Charitable Trusts (Sun Oil Co.), W. Alton Jones Foundation (Cities Service/CITGO), and the Rockefeller Family Fund. St. Clair and Cockburn found that the Pew endowment, with a total of $3.8 billion in holdings, is heavily invested in timber firms, mining companies, arms manufacturers, and chemical companies, as well as oil exploration. Alton Jones’ timber investments include a subsidiary of the notorious Maxxam conglomerate, which is attempting to liquidate the largest single expanse of old growth redwood forest that remains in private hands, along with Louisiana Pacific, the largest purchaser of timber from the National Forests. The foundation also holds a $1 million share in the controversial gold mining giant, the FMC Corporation. The Rockefeller fund holds investments in no less than 28 oil and gas development companies, as well as timber giants Weyerhaeuser and Boise Cascade. St. Clair and Cockburn traced a number of instances in which environmental compromises engineered by the Clinton administration, and by groups such as the Wilderness Society, directly benefited these foundations’ holdings."

"...just as the Caesers once used bread and circuses so ours were at last learning to use rock-and-roll idealism and non-inflammatory social issues to turn the youth off from more urgent concerns which might really threaten the power structure."

from Questioning Official Environmentalism, By Brian Tokar,
Read entire report at
http://www.lbbs.org/zmag/articles/apr97tokar.html

=========================================================

Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression
by DCDave

Strong, credible allegations of high-level criminal activity can bring down a government. When the government lacks an effective, fact-based defense, other techniques must be employed. The success of these techniques depends heavily upon a cooperative, compliant press and a mere token opposition party.

1.Dummy up. If it's not reported, if it's not news, it didn't happen.

2.Wax indignant. This is also known as the "How dare you?" gambit.

3.Characterize the charges as "rumors" or, better yet, "wild rumors." If, in spite of the news blackout, the public is still able to learn about the suspicious facts, it can only be through "rumors." (If they tend to believe the "rumors" it must be because they are simply "paranoid" or "hysterical.")

4.Knock down straw men. Deal only with the weakest aspects of the weakest charges. Even better, create your own straw men. Make up wild rumors (or plant false stories) and give them lead play when you appear to debunk all the charges, real and fanciful alike.

5.Call the skeptics names like "conspiracy theorist," "nutcase," "ranter," "kook," "crackpot," and, of course, "rumor monger." Be sure, too, to use heavily loaded verbs and adjectives when characterizing their charges and defending the "more reasonable" government and its defenders. You must then carefully avoid fair and open debate with any of the people you have thus maligned. For insurance, set up your own "skeptics" to shoot down.

6.Impugn motives. Attempt to marginalize the critics by suggesting strongly that they are not really interested in the truth but are simply pursuing a partisan political agenda or are out to make money (compared to over-compensated adherents to the government line who, presumably, are not).

7.Invoke authority. Here the controlled press and the sham opposition can be very useful.

8.Dismiss the charges as "old news."

9.Come half-clean. This is also known as "confession and avoidance" or "taking the limited hangout route." This way, you create the impression of candor and honesty while you admit only to relatively harmless, less-than-criminal "mistakes." This stratagem often requires the embrace of a fall-back position quite different from the one originally taken. With effective damage control, the fall-back position need only be peddled by stooge skeptics to carefully limited markets.

10.Characterize the crimes as impossibly complex and the truth as ultimately unknowable.

11.Reason backward, using the deductive method with a vengeance. With thoroughly rigorous deduction, troublesome evidence is irrelevant. E.g. We have a completely free press. If evidence exists that the Vince Foster "suicide" note was forged, they would have reported it. They haven't reported it so there is no such evidence. Another variation on this theme involves the likelihood of a conspiracy leaker and a press who would report the leak.

12.Require the skeptics to solve the crime completely. E.g. If Foster was murdered, who did it and why?

13.Change the subject. This technique includes creating and/or publicizing distractions.

14.Lightly report incriminating facts, and then make nothing of them. This is sometimes referred to as "bump and run" reporting.

15.Baldly and brazenly lie. A favorite way of doing this is to attribute the "facts" furnished the public to a plausible- sounding, but anonymous, source.

16.Expanding further on numbers 4 and 5, have your own stooges "expose" scandals and champion popular causes. Their job is to pre-empt real opponents and to play 99-yard football. A variation is to pay rich people for the job who will pretend to spend their own money.

17.Flood the Internet with agents. This is the answer to the question, "What could possibly motivate a person to spend hour upon hour on Internet news groups defending the government and/or the press and harassing genuine critics?" Don t the authorities have defenders enough in all the newspapers, magazines, radio, and television? One would think refusing to print critical letters and screening out serious callers or dumping them from radio talk shows would be control enough, but, obviously, it is not.

David Martin THE GREAT SPECKLED BIRD
http://thebird.org/host/dcdave/article3/991228.html

==========================================================

Sources for further reading:

Bealle,Morris A. The New Drug Story:A Factological History of America's $10,000,000,000 Drug Cartel-Its Methods,Operations,Hidden Ownership,Profits and Terrific Impact on the Health of the American People Columbia Pub. Co.,DC July 1950 20th printing,white wraps

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Bealle, Morris A Medical Mussolini Washington, D.C.: Columbia Publishing Co. 1939 Decorative Cloth. Very Good/No Jacket. Fifth Edition. Technical Director. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. VG copy of the fifth ed. Signed by H. C. Lowry, Technical Editor. No dj. 8vo. Pub by Columbia Publishing Co, Washington, DC., 1939. 255pp

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Bealle,Morris. THE DRUG STORY;A Factological History of America's $10.000,000,000 Drug Cartel...tp cont. Hornet's.Spanish Fork.1976.239pp. HB.VG.

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Bealle, Morris A. HOUSE OF ROCKEFELLER How A Shoestring Was Run Into 200 Billion Dollars In Two Generations Washington D.C. All America House 1959. VG+/No Jacket. 8vo Green w/gold lettering on spine, 287(1)pp; VERY clean & tight - light rubbing of gold frnt bd, name/address frnt pstdn. Study of the Rockefeller family and "how they grew.". Not Noted - Probably a First. Binding is Hard Cover.

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Bealle, Morris A. Dangerous Doses: Exhibits A to Z Patent Medicine's False Advertising Gimmicks Columbia Publ Pamphlet copyright 1964 Pamphlet, 64 pages, 5th printing 1966 good to very good stapled pamphlet .

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

Bealle, Morris A. Guns of the Regressive Right, or How to Kill a President, Columbia Publishing, Washington, DC, 1964, FIRST EDITION, a novel of the assassination fingering the Far Right as the impetus behind the plot was very controversial when it was published, but as time goes on maybe he was more truthful than even the author imagined, 7/10 in illustrated wrappe rs as issued, reading creases to spine and minor creasing to covers.

==========================================================

An old list discussion

I do tend to make some outrageous things that I receive public just to make it part of the downwinders list archive record or others now and then and show folks the crap that goes on back here. I don't think CC's to downwinder list is any different than Dave's CC to Glenn or vice versa. Dave went beyond just Email to me--------and Glenn and Dave forward stuff everywhere anyway. So, it not like they ever keep anything privledged. Who does on internet----stuff goes everywhere.

I first began this little practice when I was asking CHE's Janet Michel, who networks strongly with Jackie and Sandra, where the HF and fluorides problems were and she told me to "shut up" and not ask questions about why she, Jackie, and Sandra left this off in public presentations, in the bill making and so on over the past few years. It was done to illustrate an extreme of control and overbearing attitude publically coming from this what appears to be controlling bunch. I pushed rather hard to get the answers as to why the HF and fluorides was deep sixed with Jackie, Janet, and Sandra--------and this got played up into Jim was crazy and so on. Basically, they appeared to offer no answer and only continued the metals and radiation jargon. Following pretty much the Alvarez and Egan leads, some of which have gone on for 20 years or more.

Additional concerns happened later with CHE and Dave wanting a national movement. I knew Dave was doing dinners with Sandra and networking to ORCA-----which is this same little group that likes to control things. He ran around and even got the Jackie blessings. So, I said----nope not gonna go for you being the point man for this------------cause I don't support the behind the scenses players. Don't even think you know the national big picture and score well. I'll vote for the western crew that knows RECA and knows some of the public manipulators to take the national network lead. I still support that stand. So, downwinders list got a couple more revelations for the archives to remember from that and Dave going off. Dave went of on the typical crap that comes from Jackie and Sandra about Jim is crazy or on drugs------off his meds----the excuses are endless and like DOE tactics in some ways-----------and Dave quit downwinders and went on to whistleblower lists to do his Jim is crazy routine and also jumped on Ruth Murphy------------who had also been flagging Jackie and Sandra controlling things. Making money on victims and using them as poster children and keeping them ill informed.

The ones this past weeks are just more of the continuing little games, getting rather low, in attempting bad mouthing to the girl friend. She is environmental and health type too------and hates all things nuclear---------and rampant disregard of the environment. She also knows RECA issues and the players in the national movement, on down to CHE's manipulative players. Dave is still trying to network for CHE------and appears in the process to say Jim is nuts all around. Which really helps the manipulators. Really helped them to get a bill missing chemical and HF pre-admissions too. S is no dummy and she knows better than to buy this Dave bull crap.

Appears Dave and his pals really don't like the family page and the little alliances reveiled on there--------and are trying some sucker bait to try and got AOL all upset. Not going to work------everyone is just laughing at such baiting.

What does it all relate to that I know about? Well at ORNL we designed the plan to mask the gas diffusion fluoride health effects and arrange to get some public control folks, by dangling some rewards------metals values. This is playing out in the form of the Np and Pu being played up simultaneously with Joe Egan and Bob Alvarez and the resultant bill that is missing the highly dominate HF chemical compensation and pre-admission. The reward to get these groups to do this was to reward them for playing up the contaminated metals and radiations and getting them into their pals dumps. Hence, you might note I am very against following this scam too. I gets all the way into things like WCS and dump wars and the NPT and AVLIS reprocessing scamming. Things like Cliff Honiker having contracts with Egan, who is the lead lawyer for WCS and NPT. Its all political clear up to Richardson and Gore trying to get the enironmental nod.

Dave buys into this misleading control stuff heavily, to the point of being the pit bull to enforce it happening. Its been a long and obvious road of deceptions-----that I passionately object too-------and catch hell in the process. ORNL wanted to play up metals and radiations to hide HF. OR gets a doctor coming to town that becomes high profile playing up metals and radiations--------and leaves off the dominate fluorides effects that dominated the workers and a wide public region as well--------like the old Al plant abuses. This doctor is Sandra's husband. With this bagan the mysterious diseases-------when all along its been dominated by HF and fluorides emissions causing the increases metals retention effects and immune supression illnesses. Dr. Reid's in law just happens to be the asst sec type in DOE-HQ for foreign nuke issues----uranium blend down and NPT all related.

Then we get the TSCA incinerator played up big time, while the gas diffusion system gets cut open to evaporate the HF inside to prepare to take it apart. None of the CHE health leaders, which were Sandra, Janet, Jackie, even mention the fluorides or the U O2 F2 in the incinerator feed. All that follows the ORNL dodge plan on how to get the K-25 plant apart cheep and let the HF evaporate into the air---------and it made folks sick---------but the misleads on TSCA took the public attention. All this ORNL deception is attention draw plays. Real obvious ones ---- if you look back at the time lines.

Next, the CHE health folks go after a little community called Scarboro and get out ORNL's next big scam, a fly over survey with a hole in it. Who sprung that-----Jackie and Sanra. They played up a DU dump and never spoke of the Y-12 green salt operations and its high HF emissions.

The list goes on and on-----with the same old players----more draw plays. Sandra took up MSRE and her neighbor even worked there and is sick from it. She has stacks of documents that show the fluorides generation and I've introduced her and Romance to the fella that knows the vent fans broke a lot. Told her of other cover ups at MSRE directly. Even told her about the huge connections to UF-6 and HF and the large emissions of K-25. Since I have told her------I know she knows about HF.

I began with fighting the old scientists here all claiming the K-25 process was sealed and did not leak------------pretty much shot most of those lying idiots down these days---------Al Brooks is the most imfamous. ORNL also enlisted these old scientists to lie and save the fort. ORNL also set up some friendly public types too-----------which some insiders called "hippie terrorist types" They get paid and rewarded to harrass and control the public attention. You can usually spot them these days--------cause they all try to say I am totally nuts------ie discredit.

Today, since the ORNL infamous old scientists are back in their snake holes somewhere----------the only line of defense ORNL plan has left is this old hippie environment group they set up. The get rewarded if they can hide the HF and fluorides problems from OR and other gas diffusions plants and the temptation is the contaminated metals------------------they are going after that big time----------trying to get them in their dump. In the process, keeping the HF and flourides chemical effects off the news page. Suing in Paducah on marginal radiation issues that is not a big hit against DOE---------and missing the HF. Jackie Kittrell did the same scam in the early 80's-----sued for radiation and DOE defended it well------------left off the HF which DOE could not defend. Her client had the most raging set of fluorides symptoms around. Her husband is suppose to be a fluorides expert too. And a nickel expert. He is the one with contact with Egan.

The Sandra crew also had the bright idea to make themselves Hollywood heros by talking Cher into funding a movie something like Erin Brokovich. They were going to play up this hero doctor that exposed heavy metals and lots of silk folks. Cept when they miss fluorides health effects it would be like a Brokovich plot emphasizing arsenic instead of chrome VI. It would totally mislead the audience and leave the sick folks stranded. Their pal Alvarez and STAR are already using models like Brinkley and Hollywood actors to promote radiation problems all over the place. Would be nice if they did some ozone hole and freon breakdown effects, Cl and F in public water screwing up the clean water acts, coal emissions, and so on.

It was all planned at ORNL a decade ago-----------------I just point out and resist these scams.

While at the same time being rather passionate for the basic cause, and avoiding being used.

Thus, when some of these manipulators go over my sense of fair play, honesty in total reporting, overbearingly controlling, and Etc. Then you all get to see a little bit of it----for history and the archives.

I still don't want these slick scamsters and unknowledgeable types included in national networking and don't think too much of insistance to include them. I do support intelligent and fully informed networking lead by fully ethical folks and those directly affected that know the score.

==========================================================

-----Original Message-----
From: Kensilver@aol.com
To: rclapp@bu.edu ; simon@santafe-newmexico.com ; kmulloy@salud.unm.edu ; rickbird@cybercom.net ; Janontario@aol.com ; rkgjr@roadrunner.com ; emcneely@hohp.harvard.edu ; SandieAM@aol.com ; lsayre@cwa-union.org ; SPTuler@crocker.com ; ehdoc-list@bu.edu
Date: Thursday, November 02, 2000 7:57 AM
Subject: Fwd: APHA Nuclear Worker's Comp Update

>>From our allies Dr. David Michaels (DOE-ESH) and Richard Miller (PACE) > >

-------------------------- eGroups Sponsor -------------------------~-~> eLerts It's Easy. It's Fun. Best of All, it's Free! Click Here! ---------------------------------------------------------------------_->

--------------------
Return-path:
From: RickuDana@aol.com
Full-name: RickuDana
Message-ID:
Date: Wed, 1 Nov 2000 19:23:02 EST
Subject: Nuclear Worker's Comp Update
To: kitbob@erols.com (Robert Alvarez), ecbrown@us.net, mpbrown@ucla.edu, dcarson@iuoeiettc.org, SDELOSAN@pantex.com, rddobbin@worldnet.att.net, Nfdunne@aol.com, peisler@usatoday.com, jellenbe@aflcio.org, JEllenberger@compuserve.com (James Ellenberger), RICKENGLER@aol.com, dguttman@ari.net, judie@itsa.ucsf.edu, griffonma@worldnet.att.net, lewis@hcis.net, jgeiger@igc.apc.org, Mikehgibson@cs.com, drfuller@paducah.com, efrumin@uniteunion.org, lfrank@tennessean.com, erf@rachel.org, jhendricks@paceunion.org, edith.holleman@mail.house.gov, honicker@mindspring.com, hughes3@niehs.nih.gov (Hughes.Joseph), Mike_Knapik@mcgraw-hill.com, jackieo@mindspring.com, kkiely@usatoday.com, njnkey@hcis.net, Skieding18@aol.com, phil.landrigan@mountsinai.org, blawson@esper.com, newmanp@pe.net, dozonoff@bu.edu, Kensilver@aol.com, vsmith@shannonsoft.com, espieler@wvu.edu (Emily Spieler), GilWhittem@aol.com, RWilson@local285.com, sheljean@olg.com, loislane@magicaldesk.com, Bevin@bctd.org, orhl@mindspring.com (Sandra Reid), ppotter@fedstrategies.com (Philip H. Potter) CC: lbaker@isdn.net, Rich.Brancato@EM.DOE.GOV (Rich Brancato), jcarroll@gns.gannett.com, CBGHirsch@aol.com, pace@icx.net, CLAWBP@inel.gov, NEEF99@aol.com, michelle.dallafior@mail.house.gov, bill_dauster@feingold.senate.gov, rwages@isdn.net, mattwald@nytimes.com, steve_wing@unc.edu, mwright@uswa.org, James.Werner@EM.DOE.GOV MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Windows AOL sub 124

The occupational health community has the rare opportunity to help shape the first new workers compensation program in decades! If you want to participate, read on......

As you probably know by now, the next few months will be critical in the development of the new compensation program for workers who developed occupational disease in the course of producing, testing and cleaning up America's nuclear weapons. Now that the legislation has been passed, this administration, along with the one that will enter office in January, is responsible for developing and implementing the program. Our challenge is to design a program that is fair, efficient and actually helpful to the claimants, in other words, a system that may not resemble most workers compensation programs.

Richard Miller, recently of the PACE International Union, and I will be leading a discussion on the path forward for this new program at the upcoming APHA annual meeting. We will be using the slot of the workers' compensation subcommittee, which is Monday November 13, 2001 at 9:30 AM. We will meet in the Beacon G Room of the Sheraton, immediately after the Occupational Health and Safety Section business meeting.

If you would like to discuss ways to shape this program, please come to this session. We'd love to have your input and thoughts, and to convey them to those developing the program. Or if you can't attend, send them to me directly (via email).

And please pass this invitation on to others who might be interested in participating.

Thank you for your help on this.

David Michaels, PhD, MPH
Assistant Secretary for Environment, Safety and Health
US Department of Energy

Richard D. Miller
413/536-3858 (h)
413/536-9616 (fax)

========================================================

February 1, 1997

WASTE-WATCHDOG NEWSLETTER RAISES EYEBROWS

Publishers Tied to Competitors Of Radioactive Dump in Utah
BY JIM WOOLF
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

The first issue of an eight-page newsletter entitled Utah Rad Watch was distributed this week offering subscribers regular updates on the Envirocare scandal and other developments in Utah's radiation policies.

The cost: $595 for four quarterly updates.

While it looks like a normal industry newsletter geared toward busy corporate executives, the Denver-based publishers have strong ties to two of Envirocare's competitors and the premiere issue has strong political overtones.

Co-publisher Mark Gibson frequently has represented Dawn Mining, a company based in Ford, Wash., seeking to accept low-level radioactive wastes at an abandoned uranium mine near Spokane. When Envirocare tried to block Dawn Mining's project in the early 1990s, company officials responded with an aggressive public relations campaign highlighting problems at the Utah site.

And co-publisher Stephen Romano is a former employee and current consultant for U.S. Ecology -- operator of the low-level radioactive waste disposal site at Richland, Wash. U.S. Ecology executives have complained for years that Envirocare is taking wastes that should be sent to their site for disposal.

When asked whether the newsletter was just cover for spreading negative information about Envirocare, Gibson said: ``The newsletter speaks for itself. It is a report on the Utah nuclear-waste management policies affecting the nation. What is going on in Utah is very important.''

``It's unbelievable,'' said Charles Judd, executive vice president at Envirocare. ``Utah Rad Watch is an amusing attack by closet commercial interest parading as environmentalists. We are not planning to subscribe.''

Envirocare owner Khosrow Semnani revealed late last year that he made $600,000 in secret payments to former state Radiation Control Director Larry F. Anderson. Semnani said the money was extorted from him. Anderson said he had a legitimate business agreement with Semnani.

Semnani contends that competitors in the disposal industry are exploiting the incident to create problems for his company. The newsletter may bolster that argument.

Stories in the newsletter highlight many of the concerns about Envirocare that have been raised by competitors during the past several months. One focuses on the company's decision to accept ``ion exchange resins'' from an Arizona nuclear power plant. Another looks at Envirocare's practice of accepting wastes with higher radioactivity than allowed for disposal and then blending it with less radioactive materials to achieve a mix with the correct radioactivity levels.

Rad Watch is on Web, too
02/21/1997

As co-publishers of Utah Rad Watch, we found Karl Cates' puckish satire ("Beehive Bad-dump Bulletin," Feb. 4) quite creative. We wish to correct the misconception, however, that our reports are only published quarterly for $595 a year.

In fact, the publication is primarily geared to Internet users. Those visiting our World Wide Web home page at (http://www.capcon.com/utahradwatch) will find a series of new stories and analyses not covered in either our pumpkin-colored "dead tree" edition — or yours.
Mark Gibson
Stephen Romano
Denver, Colo.

=====================================================

Deseret News Archives,
Tuesday, February 4, 1997
`BEEHIVE BAD-DUMP BULLETIN' NEEDS A LITTLE SALT TO DIGEST

By Karl Cates, colomnist

I hadn't talked to my flack friend Donna Leaflet since trashing her big idea a couple of months ago to drain Lake Powell, so I was understandably nervous when we met for coffee yesterday to talk about her latest goofball project.

Would she be angry about having been publicly ridiculed by me back in December for associating her environmental-issue PR firm with the doomed-on-arrival Sierra Club notion to empty the second biggest man-made lake in the world in order to restore Glen Canyon?

Or would she feel simply hurt and betrayed? My greatest fear was that Donna might make a big, weepy scene at our table at Einstein's, located rather openly just inches from a bagel-line full of bored people dying for some kind of excitement to latch onto.

Silly concerns, as it turned out. I'd forgotten that flacks don't show their innermost feelings because that would imply some honesty on their part, which as any reporter knows is a rare and perhaps even mythical animal in the jungle of public relations.

I didn't mention Lake Powell and neither did she as we sat down at the bagelry. So I cut to the chase.

``So you started a newsletter?'' I asked rhetorically.
``Something having to do with the hazardous/ radioactive/toxic waste industry in Utah?''
``Right you are, and here's a copy,'' she said, handing me an eight-page document printed on mauve-colored paper under the title ``Beehive Bad-dump Bulletin.''
``Well, what do you want me to do about it?'' I asked, offering a reporter's standard response to most queries.
``Play it up, compadre,'' she said. ``Write a story, a column, an opus on this hot new publication.''
``Wait a sec','' I replied, eyeing the mauve newsletter with suspicion. ``This is remarkably similar to something I got the other day called `Utah Rad Watch' out of Denver. Theirs is a little different . . . it's printed on pumpkin-colored paper but, like yours, it's full of dirt about Envirocare of Utah and smells a little bit of underhandedness.''
``What do you mean, `underhandedness'?'' bristled Donna.
``Well, the guys that put that one out don't say so in their newsletter, but they work for companies that compete with Envirocare, so you have to take their `news' in that context. And unless things have changed, I believe your client stable includes those same companies, Donna.''
``Well . . . '' she said, avoiding direct eye contact and shifting squeamishly in her seat.
``Leaflet, the problem I have with your publication is the problem I have with theirs,'' I said. ``It's an apparent if not actual conflict of interest, a fact that renders your credibility - and theirs - nil.''
She stared at me silently, so I continued.
``As you know, the state is conducting a licensing review, the NRC is keeping its eye on those Envirocare boys and the Attorney General's Office is carrying on a full-blown criminal investigation into the scandal.
``And I don't have to say much about that sordid deal. As you already know, $600,000 in cash, gold and Park City real estate changed hands between Envirocare's owner and the state regulator who was supposed to be policing him.
``Your newsletter - while it is published in an attractive hue - just strikes me as an opportunistic blow to be taken with a grain of salt.''
``What else?'' Donna said, icily.
I eyed the masthead for more ammunition.
``You want $599 a year for it. That's four dollars more than `Utah Rad Watch,' so if I was going to subscribe I'd save four bucks and get theirs. Ultimately, I'll save $600 by avoiding both, so whaddya say you let me pay for your coffee?''
``You're not going to write anything are you?'' she sighed, her tone dripping with the pathos and pain of a flack found out.
``Probably just a column.''
``Oh no. To ridicule me again?''
``Of course not, Donna. I like you. I'll keep your words in context and let them speak for themselves.''

1995 Deseret News Publishing Co.

========================================================

SOME RUSSIANS TRY TO FIGHT IMPORTATION OF NUCLEAR WASTE
RESIDENTS OF ALREADY CONTAMINATED REGIONS
TRY TO STOP NATION FROM BECOMING DUMP FOR ALL
Atlanta Journal Constitution -- Friday, November 24, 2000
Margaret Coker - Cox Washington Bureau

Chelyabinsk, Russia --- Stacks of leaflets dwarf the motley activists huddled among half-empty tea cups and overflowing ashtrays for a strategy session aimed at defeating the latest government attempt to import nuclear waste to their back yard.

One in the group suggests mass e-mail messages and another newspaper editorials. The idea of lobbying their local member of parliament draws laughter and skeptical shaking of heads.

''Moscow officials are snobs. They want nuclear power and weapons. They don't listen to our views. Officials treat us mostly with contempt,'' says Nataliya Mironova, head of the Movement for Nuclear Safety, a group of students, professionals and grandmothers struggling to save this Siberian city and the surrounding region from further environmental degradation.

Welcome to the world of political activism, Russian-style. In a country where political freedom is still new, few of the pillars that buttress American democracy exist here.

Most notable is the lack of public participation in creating laws or accountability for government policies and spending.

But in a minor triumph for citizen participation this week, the Duma, the lower house of parliament, postponed a vote on three draft laws Mironova's group has fought to overturn.

The bills, backed by the Atomic Energy Ministry (MinAtom), would overturn current federal law and allow the importation of nuclear waste for the next 10 to 15 years. Under the proposed legislation, Bulgaria, Taiwan and Switzerland, for example, could send nuclear waste and spent fuel to Russia and ''lease'' storage space for it --- specifically, at a storage facility in Mayak, 48 miles from Mironova's home.

Meanwhile, Russia would recycle the fissile material, producing plutonium it could resell to nuclear countries or use in its own nuclear power plants.

''This law is bad for many reasons,'' said Mironova, a 50-year-old mother of two, sitting in a rented three-room downtown Chelyabinsk apartment the group transformed into an office. ''It would make Russia the world's nuclear dump site.''

Russia's nuclear industry has a checkered history. Residents of this region 1,200 miles east of Moscow had no idea at the time that major nuclear accidents occurred in 1955 and 1957 at Mayak, the Soviet Union's first nuclear weapons factory.

They also didn't know that Mayak workers were dumping nuclear waste into the Techa River, a waterway used by tens of thousands of people for drinking, bathing and watering crops.

''We just called it the 'river sickness' when people's hair and teeth started to fall out,'' said Gosman Kabirov, a teacher turned environmentalist from Muslimovo, one of the villages downstream from Mayak. ''No one told us why people were dying so young.''

In the last 10 years, the human fallout because of the Soviet Union's nuclear programs has been well-documented. Some 61 million out of 145 million Russians live in towns with dangerous levels of contamination, according to the state environment committee, an agency recently disbanded by President Vladimir Putin.

In Muslimovo, a bleak farming settlement of 4,500 people, the cancer rate is three times the national average and one of every three children has birth defects, villagers say --- although they are barred from examining official medical statistics on orders of the Mayak administration, a mix of military and civilian personnel from MinAtom. Little money has been given to clean up the land, rehabilitate people or relocate families.

Some Duma legislators say the profits from importation and treatment of nuclear waste --- an estimated $100-billion-a-year international business, according to Russian scientists --- could be used for environmental cleanup. MinAtom says Moscow would net $21 billion from countries licensing their nuclear waste to Russia, and an amendment tacked onto one bill stipulates a percentage of this amount for environmental projects.

''This is the only way for the problems to be fixed,'' said Duma Deputy Svetlana Gvozkina, a co-sponsor of the legislation.

Environmentalists think otherwise. The international environmental group Greenpeace argues that the proposal creates greater possibility for accidents, especially since the nuclear waste would be transported over vast distances to Siberian storage sites. Kabirov, who has fought MinAtom for 10 years to secure health records and scientific data for Muslyumovo, believes the motive behind the laws is mainly venal.

''MinAtom is trying to make a new business for themselves. There is no transparency in our country that would allow us to see where the money goes,'' said the affable Kabirov, 40.

At least some lawmakers agree. Deputy Viktor Opikunov, a co-author of the draft legislation, said that the parliamentary faction supporting the bills decided to take a ''one-month time-out . . . to explain the issues more fully to more deputies and the public.''

Even with some support in Moscow, environmentalists say their real hope rests with the decision the government makes on their unprecedented campaign to hold a national referendum on the issue of nuclear waste imports.

In late summer, some 200 citizens groups organized a two-month canvassing blitz, collecting 2.5 million signatures in support of a referendum that would allow citizens a vote on whether they wanted to make legal the importation of nuclear materials.

Now, the Central Election Committee has to validate the signatures, and then the Supreme Court must approve the procedure. If there is no glitch, the referendum must be held within three months of the court's approval.

''They are sincerely ignorant,'' Robert Nigmatulin, co-author of the laws and brother of the deputy minister at MinAtom, said of the referendum organizers. ''They react with emotion and not with the facts. I'm telling you the proposal is perfectly safe. That's not my opinion. That is a scientific fact.''

This disdain makes Mironova's coalition wary, especially given MinAtom's lobbying influence and the support shown to their proposal by a U.S.-based group called the Non-Proliferation Trust Inc., which is run by a who's who of former CIA brass and military officers, including William Webster and Adm. Daniel Murphy.
ON THE WEB: The Non-Prolifer-ation Trust: www.nptinternational.com

========================================================

Source: http://www.courier-journal.com/localnews/2000/0011/30/001130uranium.html

Nov. 30, 2000

U.S. to seek extension in uranium case
Government still deciding whether to join lawsuit

By JAMES MALONE
The Courier-Journal

PADUCAH, Ky. -- Federal prosecutors will seek a fourth extension of a slow-paced Justice Department investigation into whether to join a lawsuit against former operators of the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant.

Bill Campbell, an assistant to U.S. Attorney Steve Reed, said an extension to March would be requested today, the latest deadline for the department to disclose its intentions.

Federal law requires the Justice Department to investigate claims raised in whistleblower lawsuits that allege fraud against the government. The department also has the option of joining such suits as a plaintiff and sharing in any financial recovery.

"It may seem like it's taken a long time, but it's not unusual," Reed said of the lengthy investigation. ". . . It's very sensitive and very historical in that there has been a lot of turnover (of operators)."

Filed under seal in U.S. District Court at Paducah in June 1999, the suit alleged that two companies that ran the government's uranium-separation plant for nearly 50 years covered up environmental problems and health issues to obtain financial bonuses.

The amount of damages claimed has never been specified. But Joseph Egan, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said the total could run into the tens of millions of dollars.

Egan has said damages are difficult to determine because the plaintiffs -- three current or former plant workers and the Washington-based environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council -- do not know the full amount that the Department of Energy and its predecessors paid Union Carbide, Martin Marietta and its successor, Lockheed Martin, to enrich uranium at the plant and to monitor and protect the environment.

Three times previously, federal prosecutors have asked for an extension to decide whether to join the suit: in July 1999, November 1999 and April.

In the interim, authorities have conducted a detailed investigation into the suit's allegations. Reed characterized the probe as "massive, in which we have expended an extreme amount of time and resources." He said the government would spend whatever was required to verify or disprove the suit's claims.

Few details have emerged about the specifics of the probe. People who say they were interviewed by investigators reported being asked about production processes and waste streams, and at various times the government has dug parts of an old landfill and posted armed guards outside records vaults at the plant.

Several retired plant employees said in interviews that they accompanied prosecutors on tours of some older buildings. Others said they were shown logs of waste-treatment and equipment cleaning operations in which plutonium frequently was detected in the waste stream in the 1970s and '80s.

Campbell said the government has interviewed several hundred people and has reviewed a large number of the estimated 30 million pages of records at the plant. He said he thinks the investigation is nearing the end.

Last spring, the Justice Department began the first of four test excavations outside the plant's fence looking for improperly buried waste. Officials said they did not encounter any unexpected results in the digs, which collectively cost $1.4 million.

One aspect of the investigation emerged in a Texas lawsuit between two nuclear waste disposal companies, Waste Control Specialists and Envirocare.

David Siefken, a consultant and expert in groundwater movement and geology who has worked for Waste Control Specialists, testified in a Sept. 28 deposition that he also is working for the Justice Department in the Paducah probe under a confidentiality agreement.

Pressed about his tasks by a lawyer for Envirocare, Siefken answered, "We're doing a series of site studies related to the presence of contaminants in uncontrolled, unrestricted areas which would be the major focus of our investigation."

=========================================================

Source:
http://www.sltrib.com/01122001/utah/utah.htm

Jan. 12, 2001

Envirocare Owner Files Defamation Suit

BY BRENT ISRAELSEN and JIM WOOLF
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

The owner of a Utah radioactive-waste disposal company that has been under intense public scrutiny during the past four years has taken the offensive against his competitors and critics.

Envirocare of Utah founder Khosrow Semnani filed a defamation lawsuit this week seeking at least $5 million in damages. Semnani says up to 25 people, including an unnamed state official, have conspired to harm him and his company by spreading false and malicious rumors.

Most of the rumors, according to the lawsuit, center on Semnani, whom his detractors allegedly have accused of sleeping with female regulators, hiring a prostitute for a regulator, illegal arms trading, financing Middle East terrorists and making death threats. The alleged rumors also accuse Envirocare of collusion with state officials.

"These are not the kind of things you can let people say about you," said Envirocare attorney Brent Hatch. "The falsehoods are so outrageous and unconscionable they demand a response."

Hatch and attorneys from two other Salt Lake City law firms filed the complaint in Utah's 3rd District Court, naming 15 individuals and 10 "john does."

These defendants "formed a loose coalition with the purpose of conspiring to harm Mr. Semnani . . . and accomplish the destruction of Envirocare," the lawsuit says.

Envirocare, which runs a low-level radioactive-waste landfill about 80 miles west of Salt Lake City, has been fighting for years with out-of-state competitors for a share in the nation's lucrative nuclear-waste cleanup market.

The competition allegedly turned ugly in 1996 when Waste Control Specialists (WCS), based in Pasadena, Texas, and environmentalists became aware of each other's common distaste for Envirocare and began their conspiracy, according to the lawsuit.

Named as defendants are Dewey L. Alford III, Charles W. Bernhard, Joseph R. Egan, Mark Gibson, Cliff Honicker, Cynthia King, John R. Kyte, Alan Messenger, Stephen A. Romano and David Adams.

King is an activist for the Utah chapter of the Sierra Club, Honicker is an activist from Tennessee and Adams is a former state legislator who worked for Umetco, an Envirocare competitor in Colorado. The rest of the defendants worked for WCS or other Envirocare competitors as consultants, lawyers or employees, Hatch said.

Romano, vice president of Boise-based American Ecology, which runs a low-level waste dump in Washington, said the lawsuit is "kind of silly and paranoid."

The lawsuit accuses Romano, who once consulted for WCS and ran a newsletter that tracked radioactive-waste issues in Utah, of telling others Semnani, a native of Iran, is a relative of the former Shah of Iran and that the pro-Shah U.S. government, therefore, gave Semnani preferential treatment.

Gibson, the lawsuit alleges, perpetuated a rumor that Semnani was financing Middle East terrorist groups and diverting radioactive materials to nuclear-arms brokers dealing with Arab countries.

Contacted in Denver, Gibson denied making such a claim.

"There is no shortage of rumor, innuendo and bullsh-- in this industry about Mr. Semnani," he said. "What in the hell is this guy doing plugging up the courts with this kind of nonsense?"

King said she was not surprised by the lawsuit but declined to comment. Bernhard also declined to comment.

The remaining defendants could not be reached or did not return Tribune phone calls.

Envirocare first became aware of the alleged conspiracy on Jan. 11, 2000. Hatch said that on that date, Envirocare received documents related to a private investigation contracted by WCS to discredit Envirocare. Hatch would not specify who gave the documents to Envirocare.

Depending largely on the documents, Envirocare last April filed a defamation lawsuit in federal court against WCS, its president and Southwest Security and Investigations, the private investigation company.

Hatch said this week's lawsuit is based on information in the documents and on depositions in the federal lawsuit.

==========================================================

Source:
http://www.sltrib.com/02062001/utah/69024.htm

Envirocare, Texas Waste Firm Reach Truce in Their Lawsuits
February 6, 2001

BY BRENT ISRAELSEN
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

Texas-based Waste Control Specialists (WCS), which recently settled a billion-dollar antitrust lawsuit it filed in Texas against Envirocare of Utah, no longer is a defendant in a federal defamation lawsuit Envirocare and its owner, Khosrow Semnani, lodged last year in Utah.

As part of the Texas settlement, Semnani and Envirocare, which operates a radioactive-waste landfill in Tooele County, agreed to drop WCS as a defendant in the defamation action, said Envirocare attorney Brent Hatch.

However, former WCS president Kenneth Bigham, private investigator Paul Byerly and Byerly's former employer, Southwest Security and Investigation Co., remain defendants in the defamation lawsuit.

Attorneys for Bigham, Byerly and Southwest declined to comment.

Envirocare's defamation lawsuit alleges Bigham, Byerly and Southwest spread false rumors in an effort to ruin the reputation of Envirocare and Semnani.

Envirocare had hoped to open a radioactive waste landfill in west Texas but ran into a stiff fight with WCS in 1997.

The Pasadena, Texas, firm operates hazardous-waste and low-level radioactive waste facilities in Texas and is trying to expand its radioactive-waste disposal business.

========================================================

Comments:

Other defendants are:

Dewey Alford, Texas
Charles Bernard, Tennessee
Joe Egan, Virginia
Mark Gibson, Colorado
Cliff Honiker, Tennessee
Cynthia King, Utah
John Kyte, DC
Alan Messenger, Texas
Stephen Romano, Idaho

======================================================

The Magnum Opus Project------Its' knowledge will set you free.

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