Nuclear Safety

Nuclear power in Russia poses a growing danger to human safety because of radiation leaks, thefts of uranium, ignorance of security regulations and shortages of funds to bury hazardous waste, a government watchdog agency reported Tuesday. In its first survey as an independent body with enhanced powers, the Federal Nuclear and Radiation Safety Oversight Committee counted 20,000 safety violations in 1993--nearly four for each of the 5,500 inspections it made.

When federal regulators begin an exhaustive three-day inspection Wednesday at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, their task will be to determine whether one of the nation's most powerful nuclear plants is safe. But the all-out, all-systems testing, done every six years, takes on greater significance amid concerns about Y2K and whether Southern California's only nuclear generating plant is up to the challenge.

The long-troubled project to clean up radioactive waste in Hanford, Wash., has come under attack from another senior manager, the third to assert that top executives are ignoring serious problems in the plant's design. Donna Busche, the manager of environmental and nuclear safety for San Francisco-based URS Corp., alleged in a lawsuit filed Tuesday that executives at the $13.4-billion project attempted to suppress her warnings and were working to fire her. Busche, a nuclear engineer and health physicist, alleged that pressure to meet deadlines led the company to retaliate against her for insisting on stringent safety practices at the former nuclear weapons complex.

Over the last three years, two U.S. nuclear weapons experts have quietly crisscrossed the globe, racing to secure bomb-grade uranium before terrorists can lay their hands on a single kilogram. Andrew Bieniawski, 40, a boyish-looking immigrant from South Africa, has led the effort by the National Nuclear Security Administration, slogging from reactor to reactor trying to persuade foreign scientists and government officials to give up their highly enriched uranium fuel.

Japan, West Germany and Italy vowed today to raise the issue of nuclear safety at the Tokyo summit despite concerns by the United States that the Soviet atomic disaster will overshadow terrorism at the meetings. The annual summits began in 1975 as an economic forum, but this year's session is taking place during a time of intense worldwide concern over terrorism and the Soviet nuclear plant disaster.

The Soviet Union will allow international atomic energy experts to inspect its Chernobyl-type nuclear reactors for safety, a top Soviet nuclear expert said Friday. The Chernobyl-type reactors account for about half the nuclear power in the Soviet Union. The Soviets announced their decision to open their RBMK graphite-moderated, water-cooled reactors for a safety review at a weeklong international conference here on nuclear safety.

The Bush Administration has no effective safety policy for dismantling thousands of warheads and shrinking the U.S. atomic weapons complex, two top nuclear safety experts told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. Former Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman John Ahearne and Harold Lewis, a California physics professor and a member of the NRC Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards since 1979, said the department has "shown no movement" toward adopting many safety recommendations.

The head of the U.N.'s atomic agency said Monday that the brewing crisis at Japan's reactors in the wake of the country's devastating earthquake and tsunami should lead officials around the world to reassess the international nuclear framework. "The agency's role in nuclear safety may need to be reexamined, along with the role of our safety standards," Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in a briefing to the agency's governing board. "It is already clear that arrangements for putting international nuclear experts in touch with each other quickly during a crisis need to be improved.