Abstract
Yes, in my backyard
Those who follow nuclear waste news may have recently experienced a sense of déjá vu: A small tribe of Goshute Indians wants to build a storage facility on its reservation in Utah to temporarily house thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel.
The plan angers other Goshutes and state politicians and has sparked both lawsuits and legislation aimed at blocking its progress, at the same time raising questions of tribal sovereignty rights.
Back in the early 1990s, the Mescalero Apaches wanted to build a temporary high-level nuclear waste repository at the foot of a mountain on their reservation in south-central New Mexico. The tribe became interested in the project through a federal program intended to find a community to voluntarily store spent reactor fuel.
When the feds abandoned the plan, the Mescaleros, still hoping to cash in on the nuclear waste business, turned to utility companies to negotiate a private deal.
Incensed by the Mescaleros' plan, New Mexico's anti-nuclear crowd threatened lawsuits, got legislation passed, and challenged tribal sovereignty rights, all to block the site. But in the end, it wasn't politics or protests that derailed the Mescalero waste train—it was the discovery of a fault line under the proposed site.
Now a similar drama is playing out over a very different reservation.
A sign marks the Skull Valley Goshute reservation in Utah, where some members of the tribe want to store spent nuclear fuel.
After dropping plans for the Mescalero facility, the utilities turned to another tribe that had shown interest in the old federal program, the Skull Valley Goshutes.
There are just 112 Skull Valley Goshute Indians, and only about two dozen of them live on the 18,000-acre reservation in Utah, about 70 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. Their land is surrounded by two hazardous waste incinerators, a hazardous waste landfill, and a low-level radioactive waste dump, and it lies within 10 miles of Dugway Proving Ground, where the military once tested biological weapons. A two-pump gas station-cum-convenience store is the reservation's sole business. (The Mescalero reservation, on the other hand, is a nearly 500,000-acre plot where the Apaches operate a luxury hotel, ski resort, casino, and more, and tourism is a major part of its economy.)
Goshute tribal executives maintain that a high-level radioactive waste site would breathe much-needed life into the reservation's economy, but opponents within the community say the tribal council never had their permission to make a deal that they feel would destroy the tribe's heritage.
That deal, a 40-year lease agreement with a utility consortium called Private Fuel Storage (pfs), was inked in late 1996. The following year, pfs applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to operate a site capable of housing 40,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel in above-ground, dry-storage casks. Anti-storage Goshutes hope they can nip pfs's license application in the bud with their most recent lawsuit against the Interior Department and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, alleging that the pfs-Goshute lease was illegally approved.
The whole idea of a reservation-based site smacks of environmental racism to many opponents, who say the tribe was singled out because they are Native Americans—never mind that the tribe's executive council itself is pushing the project.
The council's top man, Chairman Leon Bear, levels his own allegations of racism against those who oppose the pfs-Goshute partnership on the grounds that it supposedly violates Native American environmental sensibilities.
“Just because we are Indians, why are they stereotyping us with the environmental thing?” Bear told Nuclear Engineering International.
It's no secret that the state actively opposes a high-level waste depot. “We don't want [spent fuel] here, and we will continue to use every legal, environmental, legislative, and political tool available to ban nuclear fuel rods from this state,” said Gov. Mike Leavitt.
Pfs and tribal leaders have cried foul, suing the state for enacting six laws that they claim are unconstitutional and infringe on the tribe's sovereign rights, among other things.
One of the anti-storage laws requires a multi-agency task force to study how to boost the reservation's economic development without resorting to nuclear waste.
The nrc's ruling on the pfs license is not expected until next year.
Bioterror: the game
On May 4 an outbreak of “Pox” was announced at Chicago's newly opened, state-of-the-art 911 emergency facility near the city's downtown Loop. Uniformed “agents” scuttled about with hand-held video devices interlinked through a dedicated radio frequency.
But the agents weren't from the Centers for Disease Control or the FBI. They were all 8- to 13-year-old boys, selected by the Hasbro toy company to participate in the launch of a new video game. As the young agents took their seats in the high-security room, a Hasbro representative, dressed in a white lab coat, started a video describing a fictional outbreak scenario.
“We should have left them alone,” the video announced. But when government scientists injected nanobots into a sample of alien DNA that had hitched a ride to Earth on a meteor, it activated the “Pox supervirus.”
The world's only defense: adolescent gamers.
Since early April, Hasbro has been “training” 1,500 boys from the Chicago area to be Pox secret agents. They were identified as “trendsetters” through a telemarketing campaign. Criteria included gaming experience, proximity to selected toy retailers (including Toys “R” Us, Wal-Mart, and FAO Schwarz), and something Hasbro representatives called an “alpha dog” personality.
Once selected, each kid was mailed 10 Pox game units, which they were to dole out to their best friends at school—a seeding method Hasbro called “viral marketing.”
In the game, each player creates his or her own Pox infector using an arsenal of body parts. The object is to create the strongest infector, defeat others in battle, and then harvest their powers and build new infectors.
The units—called Pox containment units, or PCUs—exchange game data via radio signal to battle other PCUs up to 30 feet away. Once two or more units come into range of each other, they can be set to battle automatically. At Pox's rollout, more than 100 PCUs were engaged simultaneously in a cacophony of beeps, pings, and squawks. Play can be conducted through walls and floors, even between cars. When the smoke clears, kids find out if their super bug is still in one piece or if it has been sucked into their opponent's playing device for dissection.
Pox was introduced at Chicago's 911 center in May.
“The fun is that you can play against other Pox units in a stealth-like way, so frequently the other player doesn't even know where the challenge is coming from,” said marketing director Matt Collins.
But when asked what inspired him to design a game where kids are essentially playing with a bioweapon of their own creation, game designer Peter Kullgren got a little squeamish himself. “It's not a virus,” he said emphatically, “but an alien bug, a microscopic alien invader.”
“Would it by another name be called a super-virus?” I asked.
“No,” he replied, “this is not a virus.”
“But the video just called it a supervirus …”
“Next question, please.”
So there seems to be a little confusion about Pox: Is it a virus or just a very dangerous microscopic space bug with battle-ready DNA? Either way, be ready. According to a public memo from Hasbro, this “legion of DNA infec-tors” is set to take over the universe.
Hasbro will release the game nationwide in November, just in time for a Christmas outbreak.
Move over, Superman, I've got X-ray vision too
Everyone would like to be like Superman. But the police and the military would especially like Superman's X-ray vision, so they could see through walls or pinpoint the exact spot to dig up the dirt.
It now appears that stealthy new hi-tech methods are going to make that dream come true.
When it comes to searching underground, Australian scientists have developed a “sub-surface radar,” which they demonstrated at the Hannover Trade Fair in Germany in April (Eurekalert.org, April 24). According to Tony Farmer, a researcher with csiRO, Australia's national science agency, the technology can be used to find not only land mines but many other “very small objects, devices, and wires located inside walls, beneath the ground, or under road surfaces.” A prototype hand-held version, called the Siro-Pulse, is apparently ready to go.
Not to be outdone, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed something they call a “radar flashlight” that reveals the exact location of a human being on the other side of a wall—even one that is as thick as eight inches (United Press International, April 17).
The radar flashlight uses “ultra-wide band” or uwb waves, which are said to interfere with some data transmissions, and will thus need to win a seal of approval from the Federal Communications Commission before it can be employed. Three years ago the fcc granted permission to a company called Time Domain to let a few police departments try out an earlier device. Now, one of the device's developers, Georgia Tech researcher Gene Grenek-er, says he hopes the product—which should be priced in the $1,000-$1,500 range—will go on the market some time in the next year.
Sub-surface radar finds: Left, fine wires embedded in a wall; right, concrete reinforcing rods.
The pistol-handled radar flashlight doesn't even need to be placed against a wall, says Greneker, who is now calibrating the device, which can detect respiration and other tiny movements even when mounted on a tripod as far as 20 feet away. Upi adds that
defense contractor Raytheon is reportedly developing a similar system that will extend the range out to 100 feet.
American Civil Liberties Union Associate Director Barry Steinhardt believes that giving law enforcement such superhuman powers is dangerous. The police should not be able to use radars or thermal imaging to spy on the public unless they have obtained a warrant or shown probable cause, he says; they're essentially “a high-tech strip search.”
Meanwhile, Mistral Security of Bethesda, Maryland, has come up with another X-ray vision item that is sure to arouse a few civil liberties concerns as well. Mistral is offering “See-Through,” a spray-on product the company claims it will sell only to law enforcement agencies. When sprayed on an envelope, See-Through renders it temporarily transparent, making the contents “as easy to read as a postcard,” according to the December 16, 2000 New Scientist.
Company spokesman Bob Schlagel describes See-Through as a “non-conductive, non-toxic, environmentally safe liquid.” After 10 to 15 minutes, says Schlagel, its use is undetectable. No trace remains on the envelope—”no watermark, no evidence at all.”
In a 5-4 ruling in Kyllo v. United States on June 11, the Supreme Court expressed the view that a warrant was required when collecting evidence from thermal imaging (it had been used to detect hot spots in a marijuana-growing household). As law enforcement agencies adopt these other “non-intrusive” methods of surveillance, the Supreme Court may find their warrantless use equally unacceptable.
Science on center stage
In a recent enterview with a British daily, the Independent, Michael Frayn, author of Copenhagen, the highly acclaimed drama now playing on Broadway, lamented the fact that most playwrights avoid science. “I can't see why more writers aren't interested in science,” he said, “because it's such a suggestive area.” (Copenhagen concerns the mysterious 1941 meeting between Danish physicist Nils Bohr and German physicist Werner Heisenberg.)
In fact, more writers now seem to share Frayn's sentiment. If the recent crop of science-based plays is any sign, quarks, experiments, and mathematical equations have become hot topics on the stage.
Proof, by David Auburn, won both this year's Pulitzer and Tony awards for best new drama. The play, which premiered Off Broadway early last year, is about a mathematically inclined daughter coming to terms with the death of her mathematician father who was famous for his ability to solve complicated proofs. Wrote one reviewer in the New York Times, “Without any baffling erudition…the play presents mathematicians as both blessed and bedeviled by their gift for abstraction that ties them achingly to one another and separates them.”
In Brief
Science in action
In early April, children from the Dugway Elementary School took advantage of a rare opportunity—a field trip to Utah's Dugway Proving Ground, where the army tested biological and chemical weapons. After hands-on demonstrations of high-tech gadgets including infrared imagers and weather computers, the 8-and 9-year-olds declared the place “cooler by far” than the zoo. Trip planners regarded the children as too young to understand what the equipment was used for, though, so they decided not to mention the facility's activities involving anthrax, nerve gas, and other dangerous substances (Salt Lake Tribune, April 5).
End of an era
The British Flying Saucer Bureau, a private group that once claimed 1,500 members worldwide, has closed down. Denis Plunkett, a retired civil servant who, with his father, founded the group in 1953, says he is just as interested in ufos as ever, but there is too little action to keep others involved. At one time, says Plunkett, there were as many as 30 ufo sightings reported every week, but sightings are a rarity these days. Plunkett believes that increases in past sightings correlated closely with rises in international tension. On the other hand, he says, it is also possible that alien visitors have simply completed their survey of Earth and moved on (Times of London, April 23).
Try handcuffs next
British intelligence agents have been losing an average of 51 laptop computers a year since 1997 (Wired News, April 17). Now the Ministry of Defence has announced plans to buy 15,000 thief-proof briefcases to protect the machines, which often hold national secrets. These new Bond-esque devices, which cost about $1,400 each, can be opened only by code, include a tracking device, and will automatically erase the laptop's hard drive if forced open. Of course, there's nothing to stop agents from losing the briefcase.
Politically correct, part 1
In the interest of a cleaner environment, lead has been removed from paint and de-added from gasoline. But now the army's getting the lead out, too. By 2005, says the army, it will replace all its 5.56 millimeter ammunition, now made of lead, with new bullets made of tungsten-tin or tungsten-nylon composite (Dallas Morning News, March 27). For training purposes, the army fires more than 200 million rounds each year.
Politically correct, part 2
In a nod to Native American sensitivities, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has decided to stop referring to the bunkers where it conducts criticality experiments as “kivas”—the local Pueblo Indian word for the group's sacred worship sites (Albuquerque Journal, January 4). After complaints from local Pueblo leaders, lab director John Browne wrote to Red Eagle Rael, the Picuris Pueblo governor, explaining that the lab would drop the term. But Browne also insisted that its use had merely “reflected the scientists' recognition of the importance within the scientific culture of these facilities.”
Making a splash
Maybe California coast dwellers could ease their energy crisis by taking a nod from the determined Scots, who have finally developed a wave-power machine that works. Earlier efforts, including the “Osprey,” which was installed near Dounreay in 1995 and sank almost immediately after an Atlantic storm, have all failed. But a new system dubbed the “Limpet,” developed by Wavegen, began feeding electricity to the British energy grid last November (The Futurist, May/June).
Trouble in paradise
Controversy has dogged Viliumas Malinaukas, a former collective-farm boss, who has constructed a park in Lithuania known as “Stalin World.” The attractions consist mainly of giant statues of former Eastern bloc heroes, including half a dozen Lenins and various Stalins and Marxes that were removed from their once-prominent perches in Soviet cities (Mother Jones, May/June). Malinaukas insists that the installation is anti-communist, but many of his neighbors think otherwise.
Noted in passing
The air force has given the Energy Department a three-year extension to study Yucca Mountain as the site of a nuclear waste repository. That's four years less than last time—and at least 250,000 years short of the lease it would need if nuclear waste is actually buried there…. To help cope with California's energy crisis, the Defense Department is considering buying electricity from a wind farm next door to Edwards Air Force Base…. The European Commission has referred France to the Court of Justice, claiming that it has failed to respect a Euratom directive requiring plans to inform the public in case of radiological emergency… . The Tooth Fairy Project wants to test baby teeth from Miami, hoping to demonstrate that two Florida nuclear power plants are releasing substantial amounts of strontium 90. If you have no teeth to donate, the project will take money instead. Project managers say it costs about $50 to analyze each tooth.
Also winning attention and applause is the drama QED by Peter Parnell, which opened in Los Angeles in March. The play, featuring Alan Alda in the leading role, is about the life of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. According to Physics Today, “Phone calls, office visits, and reminiscences weave a brisk, colorful tapestry of Feynman's life and personality—from the atomic bomb to quarks to picking locks to investigating the Challenger explosion … and from his personal life to the analytical way in which he approached his own cancer.”
Mary-Louise Parker, who stars in Proof, took the Tony award for best actress.
Physicists play central roles in another Off Broadway play. The Louis Slotin Sonata, by Paul Mullin, recounts the events that led to Slotin's 1946 death during an experiment at Los Alamos National Laboratory. According to the Times, several historical figures make brief appearances to “animate Slotin's ruminations”: Albert Einstein repeats his famous quote, “God does not play dice with the universe,” and Robert Op-penheimer quotes from the Bhagavad Gita after the first atomic bomb test, “I am become death, shatter er of worlds.”
Chemistry is also represented in the spate of science-based plays. Oxygen, by chemists Carl Djerassi and Roald Hoffman, is about two fictional episodes in the history of chemistry: In one episode, set in eighteenth-century Sweden, several famous chemists try to answer a question posed by King Gustav III, who asks: “Who created oxygen?” In the other episode, which is set in the present, the Nobel committee for chemistry discusses creating a “Retro-Nobel Prize” as a way of celebrating the first Nobel Prize in 1901. The discussion eventually leads the committee to question the claims made by famous chemists about the discoverer of oxygen. (For a review of Djerassi's earlier play, An Immaculate Misconception, see “The Real Mystery Science Theater,” November/December 1999 Bulletin.)
Don't know much about history
Following President George W. Bush's May 1 speech outlining his desire to deploy an expansive missile defense system, proponents rushed to his support with a variety of historically inaccurate claims— leaving the rest of us to ask exactly how much history we may be doomed to repeat.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in a same-day interview with Brit Hume on the Fox News Channel, asserted that U.S. forces have been attcacked twice with ballistic missiles. “[In 1996] in Saudi Arabia we lost 24 Americans to a Scud ballistic missile, and during the [1990] Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.”
Wrong in both cases. It is true that a Scud missile struck U.S. barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, during the Gulf War in February 1991—but not during Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. But it is troubling that head of defense Rumsfeld did not know or did not remember that the June 1996 explosion at the Khobar Towers, which killed 19 U.S. personnel and injured hundreds more, was the result of a truck bomb, not a missile attack.
That same evening, in a discussion on the News-Hour with Jim Lehrer on PBS, Keith Payne, president of an independent conservative policy group, the National Institute for Public Policy, responded to critics' arguments that deploying missile defenses would simply encourage adversaries to deploy greater numbers of offensive weapons. Payne called this argument “a theory that's been around for 30 years' time and history shows is wrong.” Arizona Republican Sen. John Kyi used the same line of reasoning the next day in usa Today: “This argument was proved wrong during the Cold War, and there is no reason to believe it's valid today.”
A most curious claim. After all, the United States responded to a Soviet anti-ballistic missile system in the mid-1960s by developing and deploying large numbers of multi-warhead missiles. And when the United States began working on a defensive system in the late 1960s, the Soviets in turn deployed larger numbers of multi-warhead missiles. In fact, at every key juncture in the Soviet-American competition, each side repeatedly reacted to the other's latest move by developing new offensive or defensive systems—or both. When China says it will respond to a U.S. missile defense system by deploying additional weapons, it is following a time-honored tradition.
According to a May 4 Wall Street Journal editorial, the “1972 abm Treaty allowed us to build one missile-defense installation, but Congress chose not to” build one.
Ah, were that it were so. Congress actually authorized the construction of the 15-site “Safeguard” defensive system in 1969, but the plan was cut back to a single site after the ABM Treaty was signed. The system, built at Nekoma, North Dakota, at a cost in today's dollars of more than $23 billion, became operational on October 1, 1975.
“I told you we needed to devote more energy to resolving conflicts in the workplace.”
May 1: Before his speech on missile defense, President Bush talks with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld
Meanwhile, the Soviets deployed multiple-warhead missiles, which essentially nullified Safeguard, and Congress terminated the system six weeks after it became operational. Donald Rumsfeld, in his first tour of duty as secretary of defense, carried out the death sentence.
The Journal added that the ABM Treaty was “based in the theory that if both sides are defenseless against missile bombardment, neither will launch first, triggering a nuclear counterstrike.” But the basis for the abm Treaty was not to codify mutual vulnerability and preserve deterrence. That vulnerability—the essence of deterrence— pre-dates the abm Treaty and, in any event, is fact, not theory. The treaty's rationale was to prevent the even more dangerous world that would result if each side sought to counter the other's defenses by amassing ever greater numbers of offensive weapons.
Both countries knew that as their defensive systems grew ever more sophisticated, the opposing side would counter by building an ever-larger arsenal. Both rejected one possible solution—doing away with their nuclear arsenal. Instead, the abm Treaty was designed to keep costs—like those projected for Bush's national missile defense— from spiraling out of control.
Finally, in his syndicated column in the May 11 Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer ridiculed Dick Gephardt's charge that the president's proposal “is jeopardizing an arms control framework that has served this nation and the world well for decades.” Wrote Krauthammer, “The 1970s and the 1980s, the heyday of arms control, were a time of hair-trigger nuclear tension. We went to Defcon III in October 1973, just a year after the signing of the salt i and abm treaties, the alleged cornerstones of strategic stability.”
A possibly disingenuous assertion? After all, the story of the 1973 worldwide alert of U.S. military forces is well documented. Krauthammer surely knows the alert was a political act ordered by Secretary of State/National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger to send a signal to the Soviet Union not to intervene in the Arab-Israeli War.
There may be compelling reasons for deploying a missile shield. But it is appalling to see those who should know better erasing the historical slate in their eagerness to triumph in debate.
Wanted: Executive Director
Peace Action and the Peace Action Education Fund are seeking candidates for the position of Executive Director, and they invite both applications and nominations. Although there is no fixed deadline, the organization would like to fill the position in an expeditious manner.
Questions should be directed to Tracy Moavero at the Peace Action Education Fund (202-862-9740, x3004 or
1819 H Street NW, Suite 420 Washington, DC 20006-3603
Ph. 202-862-9740; Fax 202-862-9762; www.peace-action.org