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U.S. nuclear fuel reprocessing initiative

Department of Energy Research Shows Technology Does Not Reduce Risks of Nuclear Proliferation and Terrorism

Background

The Bush administration requested $250 million in its fiscal 2007 budget as a first installment for a program to "reprocess" spent fuel from nuclear power reactors. Spent fuel is intensely radioactive, and reprocessing is a complex chemical operation that separates plutonium from those elements in spent fuel that make it highly radioactive. At that point the plutonium can be used to make new reactor fuel or nuclear weapons. For this reason, there has been a long-standing concern that reprocessing facilities anywhere would be potential sources for terrorists seeking the materials required to make nuclear weapons, and that such facilities could ease the path for nations beginning nuclear weapons programs. These concerns led the United States to abandon its reprocessing program in the 1970s.

Nuclear reprocessing: dangerous, dirty, and expensive

Why extracting plutonium from spent nuclear reactor fuel is a bad idea

Background:

The Bush administration is requesting a FY2008 budget of $405 million for its major new nuclear energy initiative, the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), which involves "reprocessing" the used (or "spent") fuel from nuclear power reactors. Reprocessing separates plutonium and uranium from other nuclear waste contained in spent nuclear fuel. The separated plutonium can be used to fuel reactors, but also to make nuclear weapons. Nearly three decades ago, the United States decided on non-proliferation grounds not to reprocess spent fuel from U.S. power reactors, but instead to directly dispose of it in a deep underground geologic repository where it would remain isolated from the environment for at least tens of thousands of years.

Last throes of Cheney's credibility

Americans frustrated with the Democratic congressional leaders for dithering over Iraq should never forget who actually drove us into the Iraqi quagmire. Even those Democrats who voted for the president's war resolution in 2002 did so only after the president repeatedly promised -- with the deepest insincerity -- that he would only invade Iraq as a "last resort."

            Responsibility for that lie and many others rests squarely with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who have spent nearly four years, thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars to create catastrophe. Today every policy alternative, including a phased withdrawal, is likely to impose costly consequences on us, on the Iraqis and on the world.

            So perhaps the Democrats deserve more than a month or two to determine how best to extricate our troops from that complex and perilous trap.

Testimony for impeachment hearing

FOR THE WASHINGTON STATE SENATE HEARING CALLING FOR THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES TO INVESTIGATE AND CONSIDER HEARINGS ON EVIDENCE THAT COULD LEAD TO THE IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH AND VICE-PRESIDENT RICHARD B. CHENEY

MARCH 1, 2007

The persecution of Sami Al-Arian

One of the first big show trials here in the post-9/11 homeland was of a Muslim professor from Florida, now 49, Sami al-Arian. Pro-Israel hawks had resented this computer professor at the University of South Florida long before Atta and the hijackers flew their planes into the World Trade Center towers, because they saw al-Arian, a Palestinian born in Kuwait of parents kicked out of their homeland in 1948, as an effective agitator here for the Palestinian cause.

            As John Sugg, a fine journalist based in Tampa who's followed al-Arian's tribulations for years, wrote in the spring of 2006: "When was al-Arian important? More than a decade ago, when Israel's Likudniks in the United States, such as [Steven] Emerson, were working feverishly to undermine the Oslo peace process. No Arab voice could be tolerated, and al-Arian was vigorously trying to communicate with our government and its leaders. He was being successful, making speeches to intelligence and military commanders at MacDill AFB's Central Command, inviting the FBI and other officials to attend meetings of his groups. People were beginning to listen."

Hold the mushrooms

Wow, the weapons heavies had to cut and run. A sense of enlightened self-interest - the same stuff that legendary community organizer Saul Alinsky was preaching in Chicago's Back-of-the-Yards neighborhood six decades ago - enabled a bunch of little guys out West to stare down the future of nuclear warfare, and win.

This unprecedented development must be savored. Divine Strake, the simulated nuclear blast the Defense Threat Reduction Agency was initially planning to set off nine months ago at the Nevada Test Site near Las Vegas - which would have raised a 10,000-foot mushroom cloud of god-knows-what - has been scrapped for good. After several postponements and a round of power-point presentations at various locations downwind of the test site that did nothing but fuel people's outrage, it ain't gonna happen.

Support World War II

Tell Your Representative to Support HRes 121! Rep. Michael Honda (D-CA) has reintroduced his resolution on "Protecting the Human Rights of Comfort Women" House Resolution 121 denounces Japan's sexual enslavement of Asian and Pacific Island women during World War II and demands that the Japanese government apologize and accept historical responsibility. Urge your representative to co-sponsor this resolution, and to support it should it come to a vote. The sexual slavery system was widely practiced by the Japanese military in countries it occupied during World War II.

February 20 marked the 65th anniversary of Japan's invasion of then Portuguese Timor in 1942. Approximately 40,000 East Timorese were killed during the three-year Japanese occupation, and about one thousand Timorese women were enslaved by the Japanese military, of whom at least thirteen are still alive.

In a recent statement, the Japan Coalition for East Timor called on their government to extend an "official apology to the victims as soon as possible" and should consult with the victims on compensation.

Only nonviolence will end the war

On March 17, a huge mass of people will gather at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., and march from there to the Pentagon for the cause of impeachment and peace.  http://www.impeach07.org

A handful of pro-war people, some volunteer and some probably paid to be there, will stage a counter-demonstration.  This relatively tiny pro-death contingent will garner 50 percent of the media coverage if those on the side of peace do everything right.  If a single demonstrator for peace turns violent in any way, that story will take up far more than 50 percent of the news, and that news will hurt the cause of peace and justice.

The sham of nuke power & Patrick Moore

Vermont, like too many other places with nuke reactors, was recently disgraced by an industry-sponsored visit from Patrick Moore, who claims to be a "founder" of Greenpeace, and who is out selling nuclear power as a "green" technology.

The two claims are roughly equal in the baldness of their falsehood.

But the impacts of the lies about Vermont Yankee---like so many other reactors---are far more serious. Vermont is now at a crossroads in its energy and environmental future. The reactor is old and infirm. Every day it operates heightens the odds on a major accident.

In a world beset by terror, there is no more vulnerable target than an aged reactor like Vermont Yankee. Its core is laden with builtup radiation accumulated over the decades. Its environs are stacked with supremely radioactive spent fuel. Its elderly core and containment are among the most fragile that exist.

MARCH 1st is INTERNATIONAL DEATH PENALTY ABOLITION DAY

Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (CUADP) Celebrating 160 Years Without Death Penalty
With judicial, legislative or executive moratoriums on executions in place in at least eight states, March 1st, 2007, International Death Penalty Abolition Day, brings with it not only a celebration of the past but an indicator of the future. The death penalty in the United States is on its way out.

Executions have been suspended, literally, from coast to coast, as Florida and California grapple with the question of how to prevent botched lethal injection executions. Other states have joined them in suspending executions: Arkansas, Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina and Tennessee. Indeed, more than one third of the nation's approximately 3,350 people on death rows across the U.S. are in states where a moratorium exists on carrying out the death penalty.

Abolition Day 2007 is the 160th anniversary of the date in 1847 when the State of Michigan officially became the first English-speaking territory in the world to abolish the death penalty.

FOR A LISTING OF SOME OF THE EVENTS SCHEDULED ACROSS THE UNITED

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