U.S. Response I:  Emergency Funds Are Distributed and Spent Slowly

U.S. officials have failed to allocate large amounts of anti-terrorism funds to state and local authorities, and those governments in turn have often failed to spend their funds quickly or efficiently, according to a Justice Department inspector general report issued yesterday (see GSN, March 6).

The Justice Department’s Office for Domestic Preparedness, the organization responsible for distributing the funds, has not yet awarded $141 million of the $243 million Congress allocated for emergency equipment for state and local governments, the report said, according to the Washington Post.

The money is intended to buy equipment for emergency responders, including personal protective gear for police, firefighters and other related personnel, equipment to detect chemical and biological agents, decontamination equipment and communication devices.

The money “has not been getting out as fast as it needs to.  Once it does, it’s not spent expeditiously,” said Inspector General Glenn Fine.

As of January, state and local governments were still holding onto $65 million of the $102 million that Justice has issued in the last four years, according to the report.

Some city officials said local red tape had delayed spending.  Of the money spent, $870,000 worth of items “would have been unusable in the event of a terrorist attack” because personnel did not have proper training for using equipment, or items were in storage, lost or outdated, the report said.

Justice officials said some delays in awarding money stem from a congressional requirement that state governments submit a plan assessing needs and outlining three-year strategies, according to the Post.  Attorney General John Ashcroft has urged states to complete that process, and 48 states now have been cleared to receive money, the Post reported (Bill Miller, Washington Post, April 9).

“It is imperative that the Department of Justice disburse the funds in a timely manner and that state and local recipients — who are ‘first responders’ in a crisis — use the funds in a timely manner,” Fine said.

Recommendations

The inspector general’s report recommended several steps to ensure money is properly spent:

*         Establish controls to ensure states submit applications quickly and efficiently and are held accountable for using funds quickly;

*         Ensure grantees distribute and maintain equipment and train personnel to operate it;

*         Ensure grantees participate in training exercises to maintain readiness, and

*         Ensure funds awarded to grantees improves their ability to respond to terrorist attacks by developing performance standards in line with the Government Performance Results Act (Jerry Seper, Washington Times, April 9).

More Money on the Way

The Justice Department and state and local officials must solve problems soon, Fine said, because the Bush administration has requested another $770 million for emergency equipment in the fiscal 2003 budget proposal.

The Bush proposal also would move the Office for Domestic Preparedness from the Justice Department to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Miller, Washington Post).

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International Response:  Terrorism Convention Enters Into Force Tomorrow

The International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism will enter into force tomorrow, according to the United Nations.  The convention, following a proposal put forward by France in 1998, criminalizes the collection or provision of funds intended for terrorist activities.

So far, 132 countries have signed the treaty, and 26 have ratified it, more than the 22 necessary for the treaty to enter into force.  Twenty-two of the ratifications took place after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States. 

The convention adds enforcement opportunities to the existing body of terrorism conventions and acknowledges the pivotal role that financing plays in terrorist activities.  It also describes acts of terrorism that cannot, under any circumstances, be considered justifiable.  Furthermore, it requires signing countries to cooperate with other parties to the treaty in investigations and prevention efforts and to prosecute offenders or extradite them to the country where the alleged terrorist acts occurred (U.N. release, April 8).

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U.S. Response II:  Bush Urges Congress to Back Terrorism Insurance

U.S. President George W. Bush yesterday called on Congress to assist terrorism insurers, according to the Wall Street Journal.  Although legislators have been considering the issue for months, they have been unable to reach an agreement (see GSN, April 2).

Bush said the lack of terrorism insurance, which began Jan. 1 when many insurers curtailed terrorism coverage in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, is hurting the economy (see GSN, Feb. 28).

Lawmakers have been debating ways to provide government backup for insurers and reinsurers who, after Sept. 11, decided they might not be able to accept the costs of future terrorist attacks and therefore raised prices, reduced coverage or stopped offering terrorism insurance (see GSN, April 8).

The House of Representatives passed a bill late last year that would provide government coverage for claims above a certain amount (see GSN, Nov. 30, 2001).  Senate Republicans and Democrats, however, have remained divided.

Lawsuit liability is one of the main sticking points, the Journal reported.  Senate Republican leaders have said any bill must have strong limits on the ability of terrorist attack victims to sue companies with property involved in an attack.  Democrats have opposed such limits out of concern they would be a step toward tort reform, according to the Journal.

The White House and Senate Democrats have expressed interest in finding a compromise, such as consolidating claims in a single federal court with some limits on lawsuits, the Journal reported.

Consequences

The insurance industry has predicted severe consequences if Congress does not back up terrorism insurance, but any serious impact on the economy is not yet easily apparent, according to the Journal.  Some U.S. officials and insurance industry representatives, however, say that the effects will be more noticeable and serious with time if lawmakers do not act.

“On the surface it looks like business as usual,” said Robert Hartwig, chief economist at the Insurance Information Institute.  “There is a creeping cumulative crisis that’s getting worse day by day as policies expire and are renewed with no or limited terror coverage.”

The White House has collected evidence of municipalities and property owners who have been unable to obtain adequate terrorism insurance after many policies came due at the beginning of the year.

One example is the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority, which has only been able to obtain $150 million in terrorism insurance to cover bridges and tunnels valued at $1.5 billion (Michael Schroeder, Wall Street Journal, April 9).

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NPT:  Preparatory Meeting Opens With Criticism of United States

By Jim Wurst
Global Security Newswire

UNITED NATIONS — Parties to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty began a meeting yesterday reminding the nuclear powers that they made “an unequivocal undertaking” two years ago to work toward the elimination of their nuclear weapons.  In the view of many, the United States in particular has failed to make any progress on those commitments (see GSN, April 5).

For its part, the United States downplayed the commitment and focused on risks posed by the proliferation of nuclear weapons to “outlaw nations” and terrorists.

Speaking for the New Agenda coalition, Ambassador Mahmoud Mubarak of Egypt said, “we reaffirm that any presumption of the indefinite possession of nuclear weapons by the nuclear weapon states is incompatible with the integrity and sustainability of the nuclear nonproliferation regime and with the broader goal of the maintenance of international peace and security.”  The New Agenda is a coalition of seven moderate countries from the North and South that has been promoting a phased plan for nuclear disarmament for several years.  The other New Agenda countries are Brazil, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa and Sweden.

“We remain concerned that the commitment to diminish the role of nuclear weapons in security policies and defense doctrines has yet to materialize,” Mubarak said.  ”This lack of progress is inconsistent with the unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear weapon states to achieve the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals.  Furthermore, we are deeply concerned about emerging approaches to the future role of nuclear weapons as a part of new security strategies.”

This was a reference to the new U.S. Nuclear Posture Review that envisions the indefinite retention of nuclear weapons and an increased role for them in strategic planning (see GSN, March 25).  This review, plus other actions of the Bush administration such as withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, were cited by delegates as incompatible with the 2000 consensus to make “systematic and progressive efforts” to eliminate nuclear weapons (see GSN Dec. 13, 2001).

Calling the NPT “the bedrock of the global effort to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons,” U.S. Ambassador Norman Wulf said, “the United States generally agrees with the conclusions of the 2000 NPT Review Conference and will contribute to their implementation.”  Citing recent unilateral and bilateral initiatives with Russia, Wulf said, “the United States is implementing a new concept of deterrence — one that is no longer based solely on the threat of nuclear retaliation.”

Wulf said the new U.S. policies mean “a reduced reliance on nuclear weapons, and an increased emphasis on the role of advanced conventional forces, active and passive defenses, intelligence capabilities, and a revitalized defense infrastructure.”  The United States “will reduce its operationally deployed strategic nuclear weapons to a level of between 1,700 and 2,200 over the next decade,” he added.  The United States and Russia currently have approximately 6,000 strategic warheads each.

The NPT is the most widely adhered-to arms control treaty, with only Cuba, India, Israel and Pakistan outside of the regime.  The treaty is a deal struck between the five nuclear weapon states  — the United Kingdom, China, France, Russia and the United States — and the non-nuclear countries by which the non-nuclear states renounced the nuclear option and the nuclear states promised to work toward the elimination of their weapons.  Every five years, the parties hold a review conference.  In 2000, in order to achieve a consensus outcome, the nuclear states agreed to 13 steps leading to the elimination of their nuclear arsenals.

The cornerstone to the agreement was the “unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear weapon states to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals.”  Other steps include the entry into force of the comprehensive test ban treaty, reductions in long-range and short-range nuclear weapons incorporating principles of irreversibility and transparency and “a diminishing role for nuclear weapons in security policy.”

Speaking for the nonaligned countries, Ambassador Makmur Widodo of Indonesia said, “we expect that this undertaking be demonstrated without delay through an accelerated process of negotiations and through the full implementation of the 13 practical steps to advance systematically and progressively towards a nuclear-weapon-free world as agreed to in 2000 … Very little progress has, however, been made to this effect.”

According to Wulf, “the spread of nuclear weapons to additional states not only increases the risk of nuclear war among nations, but also increases the risk of nuclear terrorism … Nations seeking nuclear weapons who also harbor terrorists represent a particularly severe threat to the civilized world.”

Other countries made the link between terrorism and nuclear weapons, but took the argument a step further.  “It stands to reason that the best way to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists and countries of concern is to eliminate them entirely,” said Ambassador Tim Caughley of New Zealand.

This two-week preparatory meeting is the first of three leading up to a review conference for the NPT in 2005.

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U.S.-Russia:  Senate Democrats, Allies Urge “Irreversible” Warhead Cuts

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — As talks on a U.S.-Russian nuclear arms agreement appear to be in the final stages, Senate Democrats and U.S. allies are urging the Bush administration to negotiate a legally binding deal with irreversible cuts (see GSN, April 4).

In a letter last week to U.S. President George W. Bush, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.), chairman of the committee’s Strategic Subcommittee, urged Bush to negotiate verifiable and irreversible nuclear warhead reductions through a legally binding agreement.

“We are concerned that our keeping thousands of retired warheads in reserve would exacerbate the danger of nuclear proliferation and terrorism because it would almost certainly lead Russia to doing the same,” the senators wrote.

U.S. and Russian negotiators are aiming for signing an agreement at the scheduled May summit between Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Russia.  The administration has indicated it favors storing thousands of warheads that it plans to deactivate, keeping them available for possible reintroduction into the operational force at a later date (see GSN, March 25).

 “To reduce the risk of nuclear proliferation and terrorism and to increase mutual security and predictability, we urge you to work for an agreement with Russia to remove, dismantle and eliminate the nonoperational nuclear warheads from launchers, and to include a comprehensive verification system,” the senators wrote.

The letter also urged an exchange of detailed information on nuclear strategic and nonstrategic holdings, saying Russia previously had indicated a willingness to do so.

EU Joins Chorus for Binding Agreement

Meanwhile, speaking on behalf of the European Union, Spain’s ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament Carlos Miranda issued a similar statement yesterday in New York at a preparatory committee meeting for the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty 2005 review conference (see related GSN story, today).

Applauding bilateral negotiations as an “important step,” Miranda said any disarmament measures should be “swiftly embodied into a legally binding instrument with provisions ensuring irreversibility, verification and transparency.”

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India:  Officials Considering Exporting Nuclear Power Technology

India could export nuclear power plants or components to other countries, atomic energy program officials said Friday, according to the Hindu newspaper.

“At this moment, our concentration is on the domestic program, but for those countries where the grids are weak … [a nuclear power plant] offers a good choice,” said Indian Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Anil Kakodkar, in response to questions at the Kaiga generating station in the state of Karnataka.

The Indian 220-megawatt nuclear plant is an item with potential for export to countries in need of additional power, Kadodkar said (R.K. Radhakrishnan, Hindu, April 6 in FBIS-NES, April 8).

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Russia:  U.S. Officials Verify Nuclear Safety at Plutonium Production Site

U.S. officials checking the nuclear safety of a plutonim complex in Western Russia have said they are satisfied, representatives from the Russian facility said, according to a report yesterday from ITAR-Tass news agency (see GSN, March 29).

As part of an agreement between Russia and the United States, U.S. Energy Department officials checked the Mining and Chemical Combine in the former closed nuclear city of Zheleznogorsk to guarantee that the production process for weapon grade plutonium is safe, facility representatives said.

The officials verified that all the plutonium produced at the complex, which provides energy for a large town, is packed in the facility’s storehouse.  They did not find any radioactive leaks, ITAR-Tass reported (ITAR-Tass/BBC Monitoring/European Internet Network, April 8).

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Japan:  China Criticizes Ozawa’s Claims

China yesterday criticized statements made by the leader of Japan’s opposition Liberal Democratic Party, who said that Japan has enough plutonium to make thousands of nuclear warheads (see GSN, April 8).

The remarks made by Japanese legislator Ichiro Ozawa were “provocative” and ran against the wishes of both the Chinese and Japanese people, said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue.

“I think it’s a provocative remark.  It’s a typical reflection of the old Cold War mentality,” Zhang said, adding that this year is the 30^th anniversary of normalized relations between China and Japan.  “On such an occasion, these kind of irresponsible remarks go against the aspirations of the (Japanese and Chinese) people for peace and development and the desire of these two peoples to be friendly with each other for generations” (Agence France-Presse, April 9).

Ozawa said his comments were meant to support stronger ties between Japan and China (Reuters/Yahoo.com, April 9).  A high-ranking Japanese official yesterday reiterated the country’s nuclear weapon-free policy.

“Our nation’s policy since World War II is not to hold any nuclear weapons,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda told reporters in Tokyo.  “There will be no changes to the fact that we faithfully abide by the policy and that we wish all nuclear weapons will disappear from the world” (Agence France-Press, April 8).

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U.S. Testing:  Simulator Capabilities Large and Growing

More details have emerged regarding the four-month-long simulation of a nuclear explosion completed earlier this year, InformationWeek reported yesterday (see GSN, March 11).

U.S. researchers worked for seven months to prepare and revise codes prior to running the simulation on the ASCI White supercomputer, according to the weekly.  The simulation, which processed 35 times the amount of information available in the Library of Congress, ran for 6.6 million “CPU hours” — equivalent to running a high-powered home computer for 750 years, InformationWeek reported.

To find out how well the simulation worked, scientists analyzed data on pressure, temperature and other physical traits of the simulated blast and compared it to information collected from an underground nuclear detonation.

U.S. scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory are installing an even faster supercomputer than the one that processed the simulation (see GSN, April 4).  The current computer, called ASCI White, processes 12 teraflops, or one million computations per second, but a 30-teraflop supercomputer should be ready by early next year (George Hulme, InformationWeek, April 8).

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U.S. Response:  Bioterror Could Be Made “Impossible,” Expert Says

By Greg Seigle
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The United States could make it “impossible” for biological agents to be used as effective weapons of terror if the country spends $10 billion to $30 billion a year to revamp its ailing public health system, one of the nation’s leading biological defense experts told Global Security Newswire yesterday.

Tara O’Toole, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, said infectious diseases will probably never be eradicated, but their use as weapons of mass destruction could be virtually eliminated if the United States invests sufficient resources into the public health sector in the next two or three decades.

“If we figure out enough counters to the threats [so] that it would be impossible to use a biological weapon as a weapon of mass lethality,” O’Toole said during a wide-ranging interview.

“Twenty years from now, [if terrorists] have a disease that can kill everybody, I’m going to be able to take that disease the first time it hits, diagnose it, take it apart, and figure out the cure and the vaccine within 24 hours,” she said.

Such drastic and unprecedented improvements to both public health agencies and health care providers could only result if President George W. Bush implements a national defense policy that places biological defense as a top priority, injecting large amounts of cash that would still only be a fraction of budgets given to the Defense Department and homeland security efforts, O’Toole said.

“We can do this.  We are America.  We are the best in bioresearch,” O’Toole said.  “We have enormous advantages in terms of talent and infrastructure.”

The $2.2 billion the United States is providing for biological defense this year is deceptively low funding, mainly because $1 billion of those funds are earmarked for diluting and creating more smallpox vaccine, O’Toole said.

Once that $1 billion for vaccines is lopped off, only $700 million is going to the nation’s 5,000 hospitals — funds that need to be divided among the 50 states, she said.

“It sounds like a lot of money but it’s nothing compared to the need,” O’Toole said.

“We’ve got the Department of Defense Secretary [Donald Rumsfeld] saying that what he worries most about is bioterrorism.  Then the next word is that we’re spending $700 million for bioterrorism preparedness?  Let’s get in the same ballpark,” she said.

“The increase in the [Defense] budget this year that Bush is asking for is $48 billion,” she added.  “Not only that, we’ve got to come from a standing start.  This is not a budget that’s been nourished throughout the Cold War to some degree of minimal competency.  This is public health.  It has been starved for the past decades.  It doesn’t have the fundamental talent that the military has been able to attract.”

Attracting “the best and brightest” minds into the field of biological defense is one of O’Toole’s main goals.

A recent American Hospital Association report said it would cost $12 billion for all U.S. hospitals to achieve the “rudimentary capability” to handle a biological weapons attack.

Another study in Maryland after a high-rise fire found that all of the state’s hospitals combined could provide only 100 ventilators on a given day.

“Seven hundred million dollars is not a huge amount of money.  It sounds like an enormous amount of money in terms of public health.  [But] $10 million would go very quickly in Maryland,” O’Toole said.

Because 36 states are currently mired in a recession and have hiring freezes, states such as Maryland are simply shuffling resources from one area to another, O’Toole said.

The United States, she said, needs to get “the laws changed so you can hire people through more svelte, less agonizing routes … there have to be new conduits for bringing in the talents.”

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Anthrax:  Thousands of Suspects Possible, Law Enforcement Official Says

There could be “thousands” of potential suspects in the FBI “Amerithrax” investigation into last fall’s anthrax attacks, many more than previously believed, a senior law enforcement official said yesterday (see GSN, April 8).

A recent government analysis of the anthrax spores found in a letter mailed to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) indicates that the spores were more sophisticated than any samples previously seen.  The analysis has led investigators to examine the laboratories capable of producing such spores, of which there could be hundreds, according to the FBI.

The investigation into who is responsible for last fall’s anthrax attacks is still centered within the United States, although investigators have not ruled out the involvement of foreign scientists or laboratories, said federal authorities.  They added that they do not expect the investigation to be completed anytime soon (Kevin Johnson, USA Today, April 9).

The FBI, so far, has few leads and little evidence to work with, according to U.S. News & World Report.

Less than a gram of spores was recovered from the Leahy letter.  FBI agents have used a list of 80 questions in their conversations with 5,000 “persons of interest,” including 600 people with specific scientific knowledge, according to U.S. News.  The FBI also has doubled the reward offered in the case to $2.5 million in an attempt to generate more tips (Chitra Ragavan, U.S. News & World Report, April 15).

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International Response:  U.N. Panel Concludes Round of Talks

By Jim Wurst

Global Security Newswire

UNITED NATIONS — A U.N. panel of experts studying missile proliferation issues on Friday concluded the second of three scheduled sessions.  The General Assembly decided in 2000 that the panel should develop “a comprehensive approach to missiles, in a balanced and non-discriminatory manner.”

“It is a little bit premature [as to] what kind recommendations we will we make,” said the panel’s chairman, Ambassador Antonio Guerreiro of Brazil.  ”The problem is that we have norms relating to weapons of mass destruction [such as conventions banning chemical and biological weapons] that follow a certain approach.  Missiles are different because they are not weapons, they are delivery means of weapons.”

Of this second session, Guerreiro told UN Wire, “everyone is engaged in this whole exercise, of course there are different views.  Some feel there should be robust recommendations, other feel we must be more modest.”

“We are not only talking about a nonproliferation regime, there are certain members of the panel that put priority on nonproliferation whereas other members think the problem is not so much nonproliferation but the refinement and accumulation of [missile technology] and missile defense,” Guerreiro said.  “There are certain norms that a number of countries abide by, and they have been fairly successful,” he added.

Those norms, most notably the Missile Technology Control Regime, are viewed by some countries with fledgling missile programs as discriminatory attempts to control access to technology.  Some of those countries, such as Iran, have experts on the panel.  Since “the technology is nearly the same,” Guerreiro said, “what we on the panel have to do is concentrate on the question of missiles and not necessary satellite launch vehicles.”

“It is premature to say where the consensus will lie,” he added.

The panel is composed of nations with advanced as well as developing missile and space launch capabilities, including the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, France, Germany, Japan, China, Israel, Iran, Egypt, India, Pakistan and South Korea.  North Korea was invited to provide an expert but declined.  The first meeting took place in August 2001 and the third and final meeting will be in July.  The panel’s report is scheduled to be presented to the General Assembly by October.

The panel was authorized by the General Assembly in November 2000 on the basis of a resolution introduced by Iran.  Ninety-seven nations voted in favor of the resolution and none opposed it, but 60 abstained.  This was an unusually divisive vote for a resolution that requested the establishment of a study group without making any political judgment.  Because the abstentions included all the major Northern military powers, the vote was a reflection of the basic divide on this issue:  the Northern states suspect the more developed Southern states of wanting to build long-range weapons systems and the South suspects the North of denying them access to legitimate scientific knowledge.

The dilemma of dual-use technology — know-how with both civilian and military applications — is at the core of the problem.  Guerreiro said at one level dual-use technology “is a fairly easy issue to tackle.  We all accept the notion that access to space is a right that every state has, but there should be procedures that guarantee that the technology used is not diverted to military means.”  However, since this “is about intentions, not technology,” he said, “it is a question of perception as to what kind of threat a space program presents.  It is a decision for national governments to make.  I don’t think the panel will come to any conclusion on this.”

The panel has decided not to hear from nongovernmental experts.  That would be a decision for the General Assembly, Guerreiro said.  ”That’s not the job of the expert group,” he said.  At least one paper is being circulated by a team of experts from the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University, the Western States Legal Foundation in the United States, and the International Network of Engineers and Scientists Against Proliferation in Germany.

Called Beyond Missile Defense, the paper proposes creating a ballistic missile framework agreement that would precede negotiations for “a truly comprehensive regime strictly controlling and eliminating ballistic missiles. … States with advanced, long-range missile programs like the United States would have to stop further development of ballistic missiles and begin reducing them. … In exchange, all other states would agree not to develop or acquire ballistic missiles.”

The initial framework agreement would include a ban on tests of ballistic missiles and anti-missile programs, a pledge not to deploy weapons in space and the creation of an international verification system.  The authors admit this is not likely to happen in the near future, but argue that a discussion of this proposal would provide “a different perspective” on the arms race and would “help break the current deadlock in nuclear arms reduction efforts.”

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Nuclear Waste:  Capitol Hill Takes on Yucca Mountain

By Mike Nartker
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn and the state’s congressional delegation today attacked plans to build a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, as the battle over the site moves into Congress (see GSN, April 8).

At a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol, Guinn said he vetoed the site yesterday on behalf of the residents of Nevada and the more than 120 million people that live near planned waste shipment routes.  The decision to build the repository at Yucca Mountain is based on bad science and bad policy, he said.

“We know for sure it is bad public policy,” Guinn said.

With Guinn’s veto of the Yucca Mountain site — the first by a governor over a presidential action — the decision whether to build a repository at the site goes to Congress, which can overturn the veto by a simple majority in both houses.  If it wishes to reverse Guinn’s move, Congress must act within “90 days of continuous session” following the veto, according to the law creating the veto mechanism.  The veto will force Congress to deal with the Yucca Mountain issue in an open and public debate, Guinn said.

“We may be small as a state, but we’re politically potent,” he said.

Uphill Climb

Nevada officials assembled at the press conference all agreed that it will not be easy to defeat the Yucca Mountain plan in Congress.

The fight in the Senate will be difficult, said Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who has led the anti-Yucca Mountain effort.  Public and constituency pressure, however, could sway senators to oppose the plan, he said.

“Nuclear waste is not a problem for Nevadans.  It’s a problem for all Americans,” Reid said.  “Once people know about the dangers of nuclear waste, they don’t want it going through their backyards.”

It is fiscally irresponsible to build a waste repository at Yucca Mountain, said Senator John Ensign (R-Nev.).  The plan would cost more than all of the U.S. aircraft carriers combined, he said, adding that it is “a multibillion dollar boondoggle.”  Ensign plans to encourage debate in Senate steering committees, the senator said.

Guinn said there will be a “tremendous uphill fight” in the House of Representatives, but in the Senate he hopes to add to the three Republicans and 32 Democrats who opposed the plan the last time senators were able to vote on the issue (see GSN, March 19).

Representative Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.) said she will be working in the House to gain support for defeating the plan.

“We will do everything … to defend the state of Nevada and the people we represent, Berkley said.

Berkley said she plans to hold hearings in the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on the safety and security of waste shipments to Yucca Mountain (see GSN, March 14).  She also said she will meet tonight with House Whip officials to develop strategies to gain votes in the House.

“We will do everything we can to help our two senators … fight Yucca Mountain in the Senate,” Berkley said.

Taking the Mountain to the Courts

A parallel anti-Yucca Mountain effort is running in the U.S. legal system, Guinn said (see GSN, Feb. 26).

“We think our court case is very, very strong,” he said.

One lawsuit filed by Nevada claims the Energy Department changed the site suitability rules to avoid addressing flaws at the Yucca Mountain site, Guinn said in his veto announcement.  The lawsuit alleges that the department changed the rules after determining that Yucca Mountain was not geologically safe — as previously required — without notifying Congress, according to Guinn.

The department then declared that Yucca Mountain is a suitable site for a waste repository under the revised rules, which do not account for geology, Guinn said as he delivered his veto to House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and Senate President Pro Tempore Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.).

“To Nevadans, we are like passengers sitting on the runway in a brand new experimental aircraft for 17 hours while mechanics crawl all over the plane inspecting it.  After this enormously long wait, the mechanics finally determine the plane is unfit to fly,” Guinn said in his statement.  “At the same time, bureaucrats come on the loudspeakers:  ‘Not to worry folks.  We’ve just changed the flight fitness rules, and the plane will be taking off in 17 seconds.’”

“Needless to say that’s a plane none of us would dare dream of flying,” he said.  “But that is exactly what DOE has done with Yucca Mountain.”

Is There a Better Plan?

A better plan to deal with spent nuclear fuel would be to place it in dry cask storage at U.S. nuclear power plants, rather than accruing the risks involved in shipment, Guinn said.  Spent fuel rods kept in dry cask storage would be safe for 100 years, he said.  Within that time, alternatives would probably be developed, Guinn added.

With the science and funding available for this problem, “we can come up with a better solution,” he said.

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