Hi. I have kn—I’m known amongst my colleagues for digression, but today I’m going to do it first, so it’s a progression. Ah, Diane’s going to do the slides. How do you turn it on? OK.

We’ve been talking about radiation studies and now we’ve also been talking about radiation standards and I think it’s because my mother taught me to read the sides of cans that I started doing this a number of years ago. As a matter of fact, it was in the beginning of the "error process" that I sat down and figured out, OK, what is it that the regulators say about their regulation—and I’m not here to defend it, or even at this point to attack it real hard, because quite frankly it’s in the middle of—of the current debate. But I think it’s important the we disclose what is said, OK.

So, we have an international body that makes recommendations on allowable doses to workers and the public and I must say that they suggest that ah, we figure out a justification for a practice first and then figure that the doses, um are worth while, but in this country we tend to ste—set the standard and if anything needs a standard, well then it must be justified—it must be worthwhile. But in any case, the s—their recommendation—the International Committee on Radio—Radiological Protection—overall is that the public should receive one hundred millirems a year (we hear about this, we’ve been talking about this, it’s one millicevert, it’s the same ah, number in a different unit)—annual dose.

Now, what does that mean? 70 year lifetime. The [itherapy?] says they use a linear, no threshold ah, dose response relationship. I have some criticisms of their so-called linear and so-called no-threshold. Um, there are some aspects that are added. For instance, you’re inevitably using averages, but how you use your averages matters a lot. They always use the standard man, and by the way the standard man cannot reproduce alone—you’ve heard I’m a biologist—I have a big point on that with Alice Stewart’s work, that children and elders are not standard men. They applied the dose rate—does effectiveness factor that we heard about from ah, one of our speakers yesterday—that lowers every thing—risk factor by about a factor of 2. They use a total effective dose equivalent which, um, changes how you calculate a rem and makes it much more clear that it’s like a currency, rather than a standard unit of measure. It’s more like a dollar—it’s worth different amounts in different years, depending on how you calculate it.

Um, and then, finally, none of these units are verifiable. So, knowing all of that, we can still say, "what do they say about their risk [in]sessment?" and they say, that a hundred millirems a year over a 70 year lifetime results in three point 5 fatal cancers for every 1,000 people who are exposed. You just do the division. That comes out to 1 in every 286 people. This is, quote, "the allowable standard," and indeed, is it a tolerable standard? Well, you don’t have 285 healthy people in that group. You’re very likely to have a non-fatal cancer in the same group, plus we have not been able to quantify the numbers of non-cancer health effects, including reproductive impacts and reproductive barriers. And we’ve been talking here about the un—very big unknowns about the genetic impacts.

So, compare this for a moment, just in terms of a bag limit on the population if you will. It’s legal to say we’re going to kill one in 286. I know there’s controversy about whether this is the number we’re killing, but this is what the regulators say they’re doing, and it’s OK. All right?

So then we turn around and look at toxic substances and how they’re regulated. I’m not advocating these standards either. I’m just reporting them. We talked about one in a million as a controversial level in toxics and in other industrial activities. We talk about one in a hundred thousand as a compromise you might make and in some rare instances, one in ten thousand fatal cancers from the population exposed. And here we turn around and we’re talking about one in 286 from one hundred millirems a year. OK.

Now we turn around to the issues that Diane has been talk about in the civilian sector, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, ah, actually implements this and if you go in and add up all the legal allowances under 10CFR20, which are our national radiation standards, you get up to a rem a year as considered legal and allowable, which is ten times higher. That’s one in 28 in a linear, no threshold model.

So, I think right here we can get to the bottom of why people are rejecting the idea that it’s a debate about standards. And I don’t—I mean—these are our standards. When we say that something is acceptable—we hear [Wip?] meets the acceptable levels—we have new standards being written for Yucca Mountain. This is what we’re talking about, already, now today. So, I just want to ah, underscore that again, when we go and give our public input, we talk about the—the exposure of the public, the involuntary exposure, the exposure to future generations, and from our point of view the only acceptable standard is zero.

OK. That was the sermon and the progression. Now I will turn to the veils. Diane said I should have actually worn a veil and done a dance, but you and I know that there has been a single nuclear enterprise on this planet—there has been a veil that has said that there’s the military complex, and the civilian complex, and I want to talk about the ways in which that veil is—are d—is—is even more disappearing. But, I also want to say that my organization and I myself and a lot of the people that I work with are really committed to seeing an end to the entire nuclear age. It’s not enough to talk about one side of this complex or the other. They’re the same thing, and so it’s not only bombs, it’s not only reactors. We have to stop making nuclear bombs, we have to take apart the ones we have and we have to shut down and phase out the nuclear power reactors.

A thousand mil—megawatt reactor generates, makes, 500 pounds of plutonium a year. So, this talk, as I move into plutonium, ah, focus is really about that.

So, here are some of the examples of atomic wastes in the commercial sector—the crossover points. Ah, the liquid waste left from plutonium separation, ah, we have cesium 137 and cobalt 60 that are fission and activation products that are left over from reprocessing, and they’re being used for food irradiation and sewage irradiation and product irradiation. We have Americium 243 that’s used in smoke detectors and I’m putting in this category of waste plutonium from dismantled warheads. That’s what it is—it’s a waste. And it’s now being proposed to be turned into mixed oxide or MOX, or more accurately POX for plutonium oxide fuel for commercial reactors.

Next slide. I also want to point out that the—that the trend is going the other direction as well. We have examples of military applications in the civilian complex. We have proposed production of Tritium in commercial reactors for use in nuclear weapon stockpile and possibly new nuclear weapons. Ah, that’s crossing a very big line that’s never been crossed before and there’s a draft environmental impact statement just out on that for public comment.

We also incorporate depleted uranium from reactor fuel fabrication into conventional arms. We’ve heard about that. And now we have the proposal to use our commercial reactors for surplus plutonium disposition in the form of MOX. And I also want to mention that the civilian regulator may become the external regulator for the weapons complex since NRC is um, moving towards regulating DOE. Next slide.

And, where did NRC and DOE come from? Weren’t they all together one time before? Wasn’t it called the atomic energy commission? And wasn’t it dissolved in the 1970’s because there was such a tight relationship between the regula—you know, promotion and the activity and the regulation of the activity. So, anyway, it just raises a few hairs on my neck. Ah, after it was dissolved it went into [IRDA?] and NRC and then the Department of Energy was f—formed.

These two complexes have appeared to be separate. We have experienced them to be separate, partly because the programs are mandated under different federal s----federal statutes as we go along, subject to different congressional committees and appropriations often, distinct issue areas have developed in the NGO community and—and in government. There’s the energy-enviro people and then there’s the national security disarmament folk, um, peace groups, whatever you want to say—we’ve—we’ve been together, we’ve been separate, we’re identifiably different sometimes. Um, subject to separate regulations—DOE and NRC are not always meeting in the middle because of where is EPA and all that. And for the most part geographically separate—not completely, but for the large part, different communities are affected by these activities.

These separations have, however, formed the cornerstone of the United States being able to say to the rest of the world, and it’s also the non-proliferation treaty to the UN that internationally says to the rest of the world, "well, nuclear power is one thing and nuclear weapons are another." But I think if we look at the events in the last year there’s a diminishing credibility in that statement ever. And certainly, in terms of the environmental and social impacts on countries, um, it’s been a single enterprise in every country around the world. So, we, as the United States—as we move away from having a separation, have to notice that we’re going to be less and less in the position of telling other countries that they should separate their nuclear weapons from their energy programs.

And in reality, it’s been the same corporations all along. We all know GE, we all know Westinghouse, so you know, it’s the case of the e—elephant’s trunk and the elephant’s tail.

Now, I want to talk just briefly about food irradiation. Dr. [Luria?] did a very good job of opening this up yesterday, but I want to add a couple of things to what he said, because this is an example of the weapons waste being turned into a product—cesium 137 was a waste and now it’s being turned into a product, and irradiator—and then, when those, ah—let me tell you what it looks like: They seal them into capsules of various sizes and a large irradiator is nothing more than a big rack of sealed capsules of either cobalt or cesium and generally it is in a pool of water as the shield, and the source is raised up out of the pool of water and zaps whatever comes in front of it and then it’s lowered back down. So at any time that any of those sources have to be replaced or they start leaking this federal high level waste is suddenly going to join the waste stream that Diane described as state authority so-called low-level waste.

Um, so that’s—that’s one of the reasons I pay attention to it, but in the best case scenario, this stuff just leaves the food open for recolonization by bacteria. We heard about the concerns of new substances that are formed in the food that we don’t understand and the possible loss in nutritive value, and the fact we don’t have enough studies on this. What I want to mention in addition is that when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission did the large irradiator rule making, they cited numerous cases of what they called contaminated product that resulted from the fact that the cesium capsules and the cobalt capsules can leak and the cesium particularly is very soluble in water and so instead of just having water and a big source in it, you start having highly radioactive water and a source in it, and you have this thing going up and down.

Well, sometimes it splashes. It’s one thin if those are single use medical supplies. You can go to the warehouse, find them and bring them back. It’s another thing if it’s strawberries that got eaten before you ever found out that it happened. So the way this is justified under our, ah, standard setting is simply to say, well, the food is dispersed in a large enough market that over the average, the average individual is OK. So this practice is justified.

OK. I need to move on. Oh, but I did want to note that they’re talking about many multiple sites for irradiation so this just increases the numbers of opportunities for citizens to be affected by licensed facilities in their area at the 100 to 1000 um, millirem level, and workers to have radioactive jobs.

Um, all right. MOX. This is quite frankly one of the largest programs that the Department of Energy is trying to push forward on and its first out and out collaboration with the civilian nuclear power sector. Um, the problem. What do we do with plutonium from nuclear weapons that have been dismantled. And I want to say that I personally think of streamers and doves and children parading in the streets when I think of nuclear weapons being dismantled. Um, we need to celebrate that—that it’s happening. However, it’s creating some new issues and challenges for all of us to take on together.

Um, there are 50 tons of plutonium that is being declared surplus, some of which is dismantled warheads and some of which is residues from the production of warheads. Um, this is also a bi-lateral situation where Russia has also declared 50 tons surplus. The stated goal is to make the plutonium unavailable for use in another nuclear weapon. Again, this is something I think there’s very wide consensus that that is the goal.

Ah, and interestingly enough, the stan—fuel standard has been arrived at as a way to know whether we’ve met that goal. And I personally appreciate that, being someone who’s very concerned about ah, pushing disposal concepts ahead really fast to places like [Wip?] and Yucca Mountain. I don’t want national security concerns to push those projects. So the fact that we collectively have a different criteria than disposal for the fact that the plutonium is now unavailable for use in nu—another nuclear weapon is extremely important.

So, what is this criteria? It means you make it so highly radioactive that if you try to steal it you’ll get a fatal exposure and so you won’t try and steal it. And you make it really big and heavy and you subject it to all kinds of ah, monitored s—international security protocols and things like that. (I’m simplifying it.) But, basically, ah, I suspect there might be other ways that we could explore making it so irreparably dismal to get that plutonium back that you couldn’t use it. And I think all of this direction is very important.

Um, however, the DOE has decided that the thing to do with it is to fabricate it into experimental, ah, fuel for use in our existing nuclear power reactors in the United States, Russia and by the way, Ukraine, because Russia doesn’t have enough reactors. And perhaps Canada, since that’s a good idea too—we’ll just spread this concept around if Russia doesn’t have enough reactors or U.S. is not compliant in the activist community. Maybe we’ll just send it all to Canada.

However, MOX is not the only option. I’m not going to have time here to focus on immobilization, but I think of it as reprocessing in reverse. The DOE is going to do this with 17 tons out of the 50 tons of ah, surplus t—ah, plutonium. Immobilization is a broad category, but in terms of meeting the spent fuel standard, the idea is to ah, combine the plutonium back with the existing high level waste from the very same tanks that this cesium for food irradiation came out of, and um, sort of reunite it, you know, sort of marry it back into a—a—a highly radioactive form that would have the plutonium in a ceramic form—is what DOE is working on and then surrounded by um, a matrix of glass with the highly radioactive waste.

So, um I need to keep moving here, but this whole program is portrayed as beating swords into plowshares, but it is actually—I’m quoting someone off of e-mail—"turning swords into shrapnel" because of the reactor impacts. And that’s what I want to focus on in just a moment.

First to mention that implementing MOX is going to be a huge industrial program in this country. It would inquire—require much more extensive purification of the plutonium. They put a lot of stuff into the warheads when they made them that’s not necessarily radioactive—it’s more secret that wh—than what’s in a cigarette and has never been put in reactor fuel before, so it will—ah, the industry, the nuclear power industry is going to require very extensive purification, possibly even liquid separations, which are messy and expensive. Ah, they’ll need a new fuel fabrication facility and DOE has pretty much targeted Savannah River site for that. New waste, new worker exposures, new releases. Ah, all of this requires lots of transportation. You’ve got to move the plutonium to the site. There are security risks every time you move it. Possible movement of plutonium oxide power—powder if they decide to do the plutonium processing in Texas and then ship the powder to South Carolina-—very risky business environmentally. It’s a very finely divided material.

Ah, and then finally moving the MOX fuel to the reactors is also a security risk because that plutonium is also very vulnerable in terms of diversion, theft and reuse in weapons. Um, we’ll--we’ll need additional security at reactor sites and lots of tax dollars. Lots.

Next one. Oh, I didn’t see it. Yeah, just an example of how we’re crossing these lines: Here we have plutonium entering the economy as a commodity and the alternate way of looking at it if you go the immobilization route is that plutonium is waste, and we heard yesterday other countries value it at zero in their economies.

I want to focus now, and I’m going to have to move fast, on reactor hazards and waste impacts. Ah, plutonium fuel increases the possibility of a reactor accident. This is experimental fuel. MOX fuel has been used elsewhere in the world, but it wasn’t plutonium 239. So, we have some experience that we can’t even get access to the data, because it’s all considered proprietary from um, the European experience. Um, the existing reactors, as I said, were not designed for plutonium fuel. They’re not doing terribly well with uranium fuel, by the way. The U.S. reactors are aging. They’re aging much more quickly than every expected. They’re—none of them are making it to the 40 year life span that they were um, originally licensed for. And this decreases the margin of safety when they are operated in this aged condition and I don’t have time to tell you all about it, but talk to me if you haven’t heard about that, because it’s very important.

Um, plutonium may tend to accelerate this aging. There’s some controversy about how much, but it’s got harder neutrons and that’s how the aging in the reactor metals is happening—is neutrons, largely—heat, chemistry, lots of things. So, then you get to the physics of plutonium itself. It’s not the same as uranium. The way I describe it is that when uranium is split--and we’re literally talking about something that was here being in several pieces plus neutrons coming out (you’ve probably looked at this in books)—but, different things, when they split, have the characteristic sort of pattern of splitting, OK. And uranium when it splits puts out neutrons in the initial split which is called the [prompt?] neutrons—that’s one. And then two of the fission products that are in high proportion put out another set of neutrons that may be seconds to minutes later. And those are called the delayed neutrons of uranium. And I think of it as like a heart—Booomp-boomp, Booomp-boomp. If you’re a reactor operator and these reactors were designed for uranium fuel, you have control rods that you can use if you have the awareness that there’s a reason to use them and you have the time to do it. Part of what gives you the time to do it before you go prompt critical in what you call a rapid core disassembly, which is what happened at um, Chernobyl, ah, is that—little delay—that gives you seconds to minutes to do something with your reactor core, and that’s the time frame that fuel, um—control rods move in. They move in, you know, not nanoseconds, whereas neutrons do accumulate in nanose—seconds and plutonium only has prompt neutrons, so this is part of why they’re not talking about pure MOX full cores and there’s a lot of qualifying conditions on my concern here. But the point here is to tell you that our reactors and our reactor operators have not been using this fuel and it’s different and it’s going to require different things of them.

And quite frankly, plutonium 239 was chosen because of its ability to go "boom." (Chosen for its ability in bomb, I mean, you know, it’s inherently good for bombs.)

So, next slide. I want to talk briefly about, OK, let’s say we go ahead and do this. We go ahead and put this plutonium fuel in the reactors and there is an opportunity for local reactor communities to get involved in insuring that it doesn’t happen, because these li—reactors will have to be relicensed, license minutes will have to be granted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and we remember, some of us, what a long and tedious process that could be for the nuclear utility industry to try and get a license amendment. So, um, I think that the reactor community is--given the fact that there’s a higher probability of accidents and also the possibility that the ac—impact of the accident could be greater um—have an interest in knowing that.

But I want to talk a little bit about the waste impacts. Irradiated fuel from commercial nuclear power is 95% of the radioactivity of the nuclear age. In the U.S. and worldwide. It’s the mother lode of radioactivity. We’re not talking bulk or volume or any of those things. Its’ already a problem that does not have a solution. And now, we’re talking about doing something that will confound it.

You also heard Diane describe the, ah, issue of putting so-called low-level waste into trenches. Well, if you have plutonium MOX in your reactor, there’s going to be an elevated level—and talking about plutonium, I should really be saying, "and all the actinides," because MOX fuel ups the—the whole end of the spectrum heavier than uranium and their all problematic, it’s just that plutonium has the sexy name and—and all that, so um, we—we focus on it. But, increasing the profile of plutonium and actinides in low-level waste is going to change the profile what we’re dealing with at those sites. Um, we’re also going to have it in the low-level waste processing steps of compaction, incineration, decontamination facilities. All of those have their own waste streams, worker exposures, public exposures. Um, you have more ah, exposure in nuclear service operation, such as nuclear laundries that wash the coveralls for the workers.

And you also now have issues with the irradiated fuel. It’s hotter in temperature and has more radioactivity. It requires cooling for longer and you can put less of it into one of those dry-castes that Marvin was talking about. So, you’re going to have to have more dry-castes at your sites. So, it’s a larger impact at the community level in terms of storage.

Um, and if we have some place to take this waste, we’ll ha—we’ll have to have more shipments because you can have fewer MOX assemblies per shipment.

So, I want to wrap up quoting Bill [Wyda?] from GRACE, ah, Global, ah, Research Action Center for the Environment. He’s an economist and his title of a paper is "Turning Swords into Subsidies." And I think that’s where we have to look here—for why is this happening? What is the big push? Why are we going to take this dangerous step of putting plutonium into reactors that aren’t designed for it when there is an alternative, probably many alternatives that would meet our goal.

So, I need to tell you that the Department of Energy says that it’s going to cost the same amount to do immobilization or to do MOX, but they haven’t added all the externalities and they also haven’t disclosed what the nuclear utilities are going to get by way of compensation. We did hear last week, however, that they’re also planning on having the U.S. taxpayer pay for this program in Russia. So, I would tell you that there’s a hidden goal in this program. It’s the direct tax subsidy to the foundering domestic nuclear utility industry. We have utilities that are aging. There hasn’t been a new reactor ordered in over 25 years. We have utility deregulation that’s going to put competition onto um, these corporations that have had monopolies and a lot of shielding in different kinds of nuclear welfare, and suddenly, we have a program that will have, for the first time ever, a direct check in the mail from Uncle Sam and you and me as a taxpayer to the nuclear utilities for the services of MOX irradiation under a national security program.

So, look at this picture. And I want to leave you with, um, the lists of who is involved. Um, I’ve sort of jumped over the fact that its subsidy to the U.S. utilities but it’s also a huge inclusion of the very corporations from Europe that will not disclose their own operating histories, who we know have terrible environmental histories, and ah, are coming to this country to, again, get these contracts of U.S. tax dollars and they—the first consortium that’s bidding is Duke Engineering, Kojima, Inc. from France, Stone and Webster, and supported by [Bielgo Nucleaire?] from Belgium, Ah, [Framotome-Kojima?] fuel is another French entity, and ah, I actually looked up who NFS is—Nuclear Fuel Services and then, Duke Power and Virginia Power which will make it a nice local DC fight with North [Ana?] being one of the closest reactors to DC considering taking MOX fuel.

Um, the Duke Power reactors are McGuire and [Khatava?] that are being considered. The others are Siemens, Rafion, Battel, with utilities of Washington Public Power Supply System and Pico, based largely in Pennsylvania, but looking to buy reactors far and wide, apparently. And the third group is led by BNFL, but their primary partner, um, Con Ed, has dropped out and I want to finish with that last slide. Oh, that’s it. There is one last slide—there it is. I’m sorry. My mistake.

When Con Ed came forward to sell this program to the world, whoever wanted to listen, they packaged it as the project peace—Plutonium Excess Arms Converted to Electricity. And they were trying to capitalize on the "swords into plowshares" concept. It took ten minute for an activist named Lynn Simms from Portland Oregon to look at that acronym and come up with her version which is Plutonium Economy At Citizen’s Expense. And we have to stop it.