• Diablo Canyon Nuclear Fuel Storage License Granted
  
• Texas Bird Flu Keeps All U.S. Poultry Out of Europe
  
• Ohio River Basin Conservation Gets $146 Million Boost
  
• EPA Proposes to Take Love Canal Off Superfund List
  
• Monsanto, Pharmacia to Assess Kanawha River Dioxins
  
• Laser Measures Particulate Emissions On Board Diesel Car
  
• Creation of Artificial Prions Key to Mad Cow Disease
  
• Wyoming Elk Eat Lichen and Die
  

Diablo Canyon Nuclear Fuel Storage License Granted

The license was issued Monday despite a judicial challenge to the Commission’s favorable ruling on PG&E's application pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit brought by Mothers for Peace and the Sierra Club.

PG&E intends to transfer used nuclear reactor fuel that has partially cooled from spent fuel pools at the Diablo Canyon plant into dry casks.

The new spent fuel storage installation will provide sufficient additional interim spent fuel storage capacity to support the continued operation of the plant’s two reactors until the current operating licenses expire. The license for Unit 1 expires September 2021 and the Unit 2 license expires April 2025.

The installation will employ a version of the HI-STORM 100 dry-cask storage system, designed by Holtec International, Inc., and previously approved by the NRC. The system includes a steel canister that can hold up to 32 spent fuel assemblies, an overpack of concrete and steel to hold the canister and provide additional shielding against radiation, and a transfer cask used to move the loaded canisters from the plant’s fuel-handling building to the storage site.

The Diablo Canyon installation can accommodate up to 140 storage casks anchored to seven concrete storage pads, the NRC explained.

The agency has also issued a Safety Evaluation Report for the proposed spent fuel storage installation. The report summarizes the NRC staff’s analyses of potential effects on the installation from a wide range of natural and man-made hazards, such as flooding, lightning, fire, earthquakes, and explosions. The report describes the NRC staff’s conclusions that the storage installation proposed by PG&E conforms with statutory and regulatory requirements and will provide adequate protection of public health, safety and the environment.

PG&E applied for the license in December 2001. In addition to safety reviews and an environmental assessment by the NRC staff, the agency offered an opportunity for interested persons to request a formal adjudicatory hearing on the application. Several local individuals, agencies and citizen groups petitioned to participate in such a hearing.

The NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board held several sessions in California to review the petitions, including one in March 2003 to hear statements from members of the public. Ultimately, the Board found in favor of the applicant and in August authorized issuance of the license. That ruling was appealed to the Commission, which upheld it in October.

An appeal of that decision was filed in December 2003. The plaintiffs contend that by refusing to hold a hearing on whether the environmental impacts of terrorist attacks and other acts of malice or insanity against the proposed fuel storage installation should be addressed in an Environmental Impact Statement, and by refusing to take measures to improve the security of the entire Diablo Canyon site before approving a license for the facility, the NRC violated the Atomic Energy Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act; and abused its discretion.

The Diablo Canyon independent spent fuel storage installation license, technical specifications, and Safety Evaluation Report will be available through the NRC’s ADAMS document management system at: http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams/web-based.html, with accession number ML040780107. For assistance in using ADAMS, contact the agency’s Public Document Room at 301-415-4737 or 1-800-397-4209.

For more information about dry-cask storage of spent nuclear fuel, see the NRC’s Fact Sheet, at: http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/dry-cask-storage.html.

Texas Bird Flu Keeps All U.S. Poultry Out of Europe

Ohio River Basin Conservation Gets $146 Million Boost

"This program will improve western Pennsylvania's surface water quality, groundwater quality and wildlife habitat in a 16 county area," Veneman said. Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, Senator Arlen Specter and Congresswoman Melissa Hart were at the signing ceremony in Hookstown with state and local officials.

CREP is a voluntary program that pays participants to implement conservation practices on environmentally sensitive land. In return, participants receive annual rental payments paid on a per-acre basis, cost-share assistance and other financial incentives.

CREP combines the Conservation Reserve Program with state programs to meet state and national environmental objectives. CREP partnerships with states, tribal governments and private groups are intended to provide a coordinated approach to address conservation issues.

The Ohio River is formed at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers in Pittsburgh, and one-third of the state lies within the river's basin. Planting grasses, trees and other vegetation along 65,000 targeted acres of cropland and marginal pastureland will help restore and protect wetlands, highly erodible land and riparian areas along the basin.

The Ohio River Basin CREP is expected to reduce sediment, nitrogen and phosphorous entering the basin, which will also help address the Gulf of Mexico's hypoxia zone issues. Hypoxia, the loss of oxygen, occurs in Gulf waters when excess nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorous, accumulate and cause algae to flourish. Algae depletes the oxygen, essentially causing dead zones.

The improved water quality will create habitat for declining grassland, riparian and wetland dependent plant and animal species.

The total program cost over a 15 year period is estimated at $146 million, with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) contributing $99 million and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania funding $47 million. Throughout this period, participants will receive incentive payments and cost-share assistance for installing approved conservation practices.

The USDA will also provide annual rental payments for the life of the contract. Pennsylvania will offer cost-share assistance, technical assistance to plan approved conservation practices and in-kind services to implement the practices.

Signup for the Pennsylvania CREP will begin April 19 and continues until enrollment goals are attained or through December 31, 2007, whichever comes first. Land enrolled in the program will remain under contract for a period of 10 to 15 years, as specified in the contract.

Producers can obtain more information from the Farm Service Agency online at: http://www.fsa.usda.gov/dafp/cepd/default.htm.

While in Hookstown, Veneman also released the interim final rule for Conservation Innovation Grants and announced that $15 million will be available to fund selected grant proposals.

The grants will fund projects targeting innovative on-the-ground conservation, including pilot projects and field demonstrations. Project proposals may address areas such as market based pollution credit trading, agricultural conservation systems, carbon sequestration and reduction of applied nutrients, Veneman suggested.

"This program provides a great opportunity to promote conservation technologies and stimulate innovative approaches to environmental enhancement and protection on working lands," Veneman said. "Farmers and ranchers will benefit by having new technologies to protect the environment and comply with federal, state and local regulations."

Information about Conservation Innovation Grants is available at: http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/programs/cig

EPA Proposes to Take Love Canal Off Superfund List

The EPA says cleanup work at the Love Canal and two other Superfund sites in Niagara County, New York is complete.

"This is a landmark day for Niagara County," said Jane Kenny, EPA's regional administrator."We've cleaned up half the Superfund sites in the county, including the well-known Love Canal, and have completed construction needed for long-term cleanups on the other half."

"By taking the Love Canal site off the Superfund list, we will mark a turning point for the nation," continued Administrator Kenny. "This was the site that really started Superfund."

The 70 acre Love Canal site encompasses a hazardous waste landfill at which chemical waste products were disposed of from 1942 to 1952. In 1953, the original 16 acre hazardous waste landfill was covered, and a school and more than 200 homes were built nearby.

Residents reported odors and residues as early as the 1960s; studies in the 1970s showed that numerous toxic chemicals were migrating from the landfill and contaminating nearby waterways.

In 1978 and 1980, President Jimmy Carter declared two separate environmental emergencies and, as a result, some 950 families were evacuated from a 10 block area surrounding the canal. The Emergency Declaration Area included neighborhoods adjacent to the site covering 350 acres.

In 1980, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), also known as Superfund, which addresses abandoned hazardous waste sites, was passed largely due to issues related to the Love Canal.

Today, 40 acres at Love Canal are covered by a synthetic liner and clay cap and surrounded by a barrier drainage system. Contamination from the site is also controlled by a leachate collection and treatment facility.

Neighborhoods to the west and north of the canal are being revitalized, with more than 200 formerly boarded-up homes renovated and sold to new owners, and 10 newly constructed apartment buildings. The area east of the canal has also been sold for light industrial or commercial redevelopment.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, a New York Democrat, said in a statement, "While Love Canal marked the beginning of the Superfund, its successful cleanup should, by no means, mark its demise. We still have a long way to go."

Lois Gibbs, a former Love Canal resident who spearheaded the 1978 community drive to demand a cleanup, said, "Nothing is different from what it was five years ago except that the EPA needs to look good."

Gibbs organized her neighbors, developed the strategies and methods to assess the impacts of toxic wastes on their health, and challenged corporate and government policies on the dumping of hazardous materials. Gibbs now heads the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, an organization that works with communities facing environmental problems.

The other two sites the EPA wants to remove from the list are the adjacent Hooker-102nd Street Landfill site which is bordered by the Niagara River, south of the LaSalle Expressway and the Love Canal site in the city of Niagara Falls.

The former 22 acre landfill is owned by Occidental Chemical Corporation, formerly Hooker Chemical, and the Olin Chemical Corporation. From 1943 to 1971, the landfill accepted chemical waste products. Over time, contamination from the landfill leached into the soil and ground water. Occidental and Olin installed a synthetic cap covered by clay over the landfill to prevent contamination in storm water runoff. They also installed a system to collect and treat leachate and a slurry wall, which keeps liquids from running into the river.

All cleanup and containment work was completed in 2000, and long term operation and maintenance of the landfill is being conducted by the companies with oversight by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

The third site, the Niagara County Refuse site, is a former 65 acre municipal landfill just north of the Niagara River, which accepted municipal and industrial waste from 1968-1976.

The site was covered with soil and clay when it was closed in 1976, but over time, the cap wore away in spots and storm water runoff and leachate became contaminated. EPA began studying the site in 1987 and a group of 14 responsible parties, including Niagara County municipalities, formed a working group to finish investigating the site and clean it up.

The responsible parties installed a new landfill cap that vents landfill gases, and constructed a clay perimeter barrier wall and leachate collection and treatment system. Long term operation and maintenance of the site is being conducted by the responsible parties, and is overseen by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

The public comment period on EPA's proposal to delete these sites ends on April 16. Members of the public interested in obtaining copies of the notice or a detailed site description can contact the RCRA/Superfund Hotline at 1-800-424-9346 or 703-412-9810.

Monsanto, Pharmacia to Assess Kanawha River Dioxins

The companies entered into an administrative consent order with the United States Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday. Under the order, Monsanto and Pharmacia will investigate dioxin in a portion of the river that stretches from the confluence of the Kanawha and the Coal rivers to the Winfield Dam, a distance of 14 miles. This will include evaluating safe and practical methods to address the contamination.

EPA and the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) will oversee this investigation. EPA Regional Administrator Donald Welsh said the assessment work will provide the EPA and the state with the necessary information to determine what needs to be done with contamination resulting from past manufacturing.

West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection's Cabinet Secretary Stephanie Timmermeyer said, "This assessment is a positive step toward addressing contamination in the Kanawha River. Monsanto and Pharmacia's signatures on the consent order lays the groundwork for cleanup of a problem that has persisted far too long."

Within 45 days of the order, Monsanto and Pharmacia must submit a work plan to the EPA describing how the site investigation will be conducted. Upon EPA approval, the companies will conduct the evaluation and analysis required by the order in accordance with the plan, which is expected to include sediment, river and fish tissue samples.

The EPA will then determine whether cleanup of the river is necessary and technically feasible, and will compare the available cleanup technologies to determine which is most likely to be effective.

The Kanawha riverbed sediments are contaminated by dioxins from the manufacture of the herbicide 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid - commonly called 2,4,5-T - which was banned for use in 1984.

The chemical 2,4,5-T was manufactured at the Nitro facility from 1948 to 1969.

Since 1985, a West Virginia fish advisory has been in effect, warning against eating fish caught in the Kanawha River downstream of the I-64 bridge in Dunbar, West Virginia, because of elevated dioxin levels in fish-tissue samples. In 1998, the Kanawha and Pocatalico rivers and Armour Creek were placed on West Virginia's list of impaired water bodies.

Laser Measures Particulate Emissions On Board Diesel Car

While on-board measurements of gaseous emissions are routine, real-time particulate measurements have been more elusive, yet are essential for validating federal emissions guidelines for vehicle compliance.

Pete Witze, an engineer in the Combustion Research Facility's engine combustion department, said the most notable result during the recent tests was obtained during the coasting descent.

"Although the vehicle speed and engine rpm were reasonably steady for the period from 470 to 600 seconds, the particulate emissions suggest that fuel injection cycled on and off intermittently," said Witze. The researchers believe the ideal fueling strategy would be to turn off injection for the entire descent, but the vehicle is equipped with a catalyst that needs to be kept at its operating temperature.

The ability to measure on-board particulate tailpipe emissions is of growing environmental interest because of the desire to validate current U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) vehicle certification procedures.

These procedures, which have been the industry standard for more than 30 years, measure emissions using a chassis dynamometer and specify engine speed to be applied during testing.

Because such tests do not replicate variables such as grade changes and weather encountered under actual driving conditions, the automotive industry expects dynamometer emissions testing to be supplemented with on-road measurements in the future.

Witze collaborated with Artium Technologies, Chevron Oronite, and the National Research Council (NRC) of Canada to demonstrate the feasibility of obtaining on-board measurements of vehicle particulate emissions using laser induced incandescence (LII) technology.

LII is a non-intrusive diagnostic technology that can perform real-time measurements of particulate emissions produced by internal combustion engines.

The researchers developed a portable version of LII instrumentation that was applied during this recent trial.

During the past decade, CRF and NRC researchers honed the LII technique, discovered in the 1970s. Natural Resources Canada has secured an important temperature measurement patent that is key to the current measurement capability, the researchers say.

In conducting the tests, Artium's commercially available LII instrument and ancillary equipment were placed in the trunk and on one side of the rear seat of a 2002 Volkswagen Jetta with automatic transmission and a turbocharged direct-injection diesel engine. An on-board diagnostics scan tool interface was used to access the vehicle and engine speeds for recording while the vehicle was driven on a test route in the Bay Area's Livermore Valley in northern California.

These measurements were then time-matched with the LII measurements to obtain a synchronized data set correlating time-resolved particulate emissions with a variety of vehicle operating conditions that included city driving, freeway driving with entrance-acceleration and hill ascent, and coasting descent on a rural road.

Witze said another unique aspect of the LII measurement technique is that, unlike other systems, it does not require an operator in order to conduct the tests. For this and other reasons, he said engine manufacturers have proven to be "extremely interested" in LII.

Creation of Artificial Prions Key to Mad Cow Disease

The agent behind mad cow disease, formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is not a bacteria or a virus, it is a misfolded protein called a prion.

Prion forming proteins begin as normal cellular components. But they possess the innate ability to alter their three-dimensional structure, which changes their function and makes them almost impossible to destroy.

Once prions have taken their misfolded shape, they are capable of growing, replicating, and being passed on to daughter cells, but their mechanisms and processes have not been well understood.

Now, Lev Osherovich working out of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco has identified the amino acid sequences that allow prions to aggregate and replicate - and thereby pass through generations of cells.

Osherovich and his colleagues have proven this by designing an artificial yeast prion that does not exist in nature. Their work is published online in the April issue of the Public Library of Science Biology.

By creating artificial hybrid prions, Osherovich and colleagues showed that the two discrete elements of prion forming domains are portable and work together regardless of their origins.

The authors suggest that other artificial prions could be used as a model system to study different types of sequences, such as those found in the human prion protein responsible for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob's disease or the misshapen plaques of proteins that contribute to Alzheimer's disease.

Prions grow by inducing normal proteins to alter their shape and adhere to an initial aggregate seed.

These growing masses are then thought to divide with the help of what Osherovich calls "chaperones," cellular proteins that aid in protein folding and transport, resulting in smaller prion particles called propagons.

The propagons are then distributed to both mother and daughter cells during division, thereby infecting the next generation of cells.

Osherovich and colleagues confirmed what others have seen, namely that an area rich in glutamine and asparagine was responsible for the aggregation and growth of prions - acting like a patch of Velcro that locks the misshapen proteins together.

They went on to find that a short stretch of peptide repeats was required for the inheritance of prions - the proper division of prion masses and subsequent distribution of propagons during cell division.

The authors suggest that "oligopeptide repeats function as a secure binding location for chaperone proteins, which are necessary for heritability, and thus infectiousness, of prions."

The entire study is available online by clicking here.

Wyoming Elk Eat Lichen and Die

"We had lichen on the list of toxic plants that our veterinarians were investigating," said WGFD spokesperson Tom Reed. "We were faintly optimistic that this may have been the cause, but didn’t want to get our hopes up."

Tests on the weekend revealed that the lichen was indeed the cause of the affliction that had taken down 295 elk in a month. On February 8, two cow elk were discovered in the desert about 15 miles southwest of Rawlins that could not rise and run when approached by agency personnel.

As field crews searched the area, the number of sick elk increased to nearly 300, scattered over a 50 square mile area of high desert in and around the department’s Daley Ranch wildlife habitat area.

All showed the same symptoms - inability to rise from the ground, while remaining alert and vocal. Elk that were not found and euthanized by agency personnel died a slow, stressful death from starvation or dehydration.

Scientists found parmelia in the stomachs of afflicted elk, starting an exhaustive chain of investigation. That effort was borne out this weekend, when captive elk that had been on a diet of parmelia went down with the same symptoms, said Dr. Terry Kreeger, a veterinarian with the department.

Parmelia produces an acid that may break down muscle tissue, causing the elk to lose strength, said Dr. Walt Cook, who has been working on this incident non-stop since it was discovered more than a month ago. Cook and colleagues at the Wyoming State Veterinary Laboratory were instrumental in narrowing down the laundry list of possible causes, but more work will need to be done in coming weeks.

"We are going to need to do further necropsy work to explore the exact physiology behind this," said Cook.

Additionally, officials are going to try to learn more about the lichen itself and why, or if, it accumulated inordinately high amounts of acid this year.

"There are a lot of factors we’ll need to look at," said Reed. "Do elk eat this lichen in normal years? If so, why hasn’t this happened before? Does a long history of drought weigh in somehow? If so, what are our management options in the future? These are all questions we are going to try to answer in the coming months."

Healthy elk that were wintering on the Daley Ranch southwest of here are now following the receding snow line back toward the Sierra Madre mountains, and three cows in that herd are wearing radio collars so biologists can learn more about this elk population.

"Elk don’t normally winter down on the Daley unit where they ate the lichen," said Reed. "But for whatever reason, this year they moved in there. Elk are incredibly adaptable, tough animals. They’ll get by on thin rations and they’ll make do somehow. But this year, nearly 300 of them paid the price for that adaptability."

No other animals including horses, cattle, antelope, deer or scavengers in the area were affected.