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Environment

Government Concentrates

July 4, 2005 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 83, Issue 27

International fusion project to be built in France

Cadarache, France, was selected last week to be the site for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project. The announcement was made in Moscow by ministers representing the six ITER parties--China, Japan, the European Union, Russia, South Korea, and the U.S. Japan and France had been in competition for the $5 billion construction project. Although Japan lost its bid, it increased its share of construction and operation contracts and will be given first choice to become home to a second-generation demonstration reactor should that occur. ITER's goal is to demonstrate a self-sustaining fusion reaction in a power-plant-like environment that could lead to commercial nuclear fusion power plants by the turn of the century, said Raymond L. Orbach, head of the Department of Energy's Office of Science. The project has been discussed for 20 years, and hammering out construction details will add another year, Orbach said, predicting that construction will take until 2014 and experimentation will consume 20 more years. The cost to run experiments will bring the total to be spent at Cadarache to at least $12 billion, with the EU paying 50% and the other countries providing 10% each. The U.S. portion of the project will be run by the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

 

U.S. to resume making plutonium-238

Claiming that its supply will be gone in five years, the Department of Energy is slated to resume production of plutonium-238 as an energy source for spy satellites and spacecraft. This radioactive isotope is not used for nuclear weapons, but its slow, nearly infinite release of heat during decay makes it a useful source of electricity to power spacecraft and satellites. It is highly lethal, and ingestion of a very small amount can be fatal. According to a department spokesman, the decision to resume production is final, but a decision on whether to consolidate all production activities at Idaho National Laboratory is to be made by Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman later this year. Plutonium-238 was last produced in the mid-1990s at the department's Savannah River weapons reactor in South Carolina. Since then, the department has used existing stocks for national security activities and supplies from Russia, which can only be used for NASA programs.

 

Global trade in pharmaceuticals expanding fast

International trade in pharmaceutical products grew at an average rate of 23% per year between 2000 and 2003, the World Trade Organization says in a report released on June 30. Trade in pharmaceuticals expanded more than twice as fast as trade in chemicals and four times as fast as trade in manufactured goods for those four years. According to the report, $200 billion worth of pharmaceuticals were traded in 2003, compared with $594 billion in all other chemical products and $5.4 trillion in manufactured goods. WTO attributes the rising trade in pharmaceuticals to increased demand, mergers and acquisitions that concentrated production, and elimination of tariffs on pharmaceuticals.

 

Mad cow finding changes testing protocol

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Credit: USDA PHOTO
Credit: USDA PHOTO

The Department of Agriculture is changing its method of testing for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)--mad cow disease--after finding the first U.S.-born case. A 12-year-old Texas cow slaughtered at a pet-food factory in Texas last November initially tested positive for BSE with the BioRad rapid assay, but USDA's lab in Ames, Iowa, reported that the sample was negative in an immunohistochemistry (IHC) assay. USDA's Inspector General's Office then had the sample sent to a testing laboratory in Weybridge, England, which is regarded as the world's best. There, the sample tested positive with both the Western blot and IHC tests, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns confirmed on June 24. As a result of the conflicting test results, USDA will change its testing protocol, Johanns said. Samples found positive for BSE with the BioRad assay will be subjected to both the Western blot and IHC assays. European countries and Japan already use both assays on samples that test positive for BSE in rapid screening. Johanns stressed that U.S. beef is safe. The department has tested about 380,000 cattle since December 2003, when the first case was found in a Canadian-born animal, and has detected only one case. Consumers Union, however, is highly critical of USDA's BSE surveillance program, and it urges USDA to test all animals over 20 months of age.

Court upholds most of EPA air rule

A federal appeals court on June 24 upheld most of a Bush Administration air pollution regulation that was contested by 14 states and several environmental groups. That rule, issued at the end of 2002, relaxes some air pollution control requirements, known as New Source Review, for facilities that modernize older industrial plants. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld technical parts of the regulation that govern how EPA determines whether air pollution increases after a facility is upgraded. The court also agreed with a contested part of the rule that allows a modified facility to avoid installing air pollution control equipment under certain conditions. Meanwhile, the court threw out part of the regulation that allows companies to upgrade plants without buying new pollution controls if the facilities had emission-reducing devices installed in the past decade. It also vacated another portion of the regulation that exempts companies from installing modern emission controls if they carry out projects that curb releases of some pollutants but increase others. The court also found that EPA had not sufficiently explained why the regulation exempts companies from keeping certain pollution records if they believe their plant upgrades would not increase emissions.

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