Dear Editor:

It’s amazing how and to what South Africa’s prosperity is channeled. APPALLING. The rich get richer and the poor die. The slowness in which the government is closing the gap is such that nothing is visibly being done after 10 years have past.
As the saying goes clean your house first. Come on!

Johan Bontes
Netherlands

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Dear Madam/Sir,

I would like to comment a few issues in your article on the closure of the Bulgarian nuclear power units 3 and 4 in Kozloduy at the end of the year.

You write that the Kozloduy blocks 5 and 6 are safe. This is not true. No nuclear power station can be considered completely safe - according to recent studies not even the most modern designs can withstand terrorist attack or large scale human failure. True is that the VVER 1000/320 blocks meet higher safety standards than the to be closed VVER 440/230 blocks.
But also true is that the VVER 1000/320 design did not receive operation licence in Germany, when this country was confronted with two of these blocks under construction during the German unification. The German reactor safety authorities found a catalogue of safety related problems with this design. This was confirmed in the end of the 1990s when they were asked to analyse the safety of the Temelin NPP in the Czech Republic. All this is one of the most important reasons why Bulgaria refrained from choosing this type for its proposed new NPP project in Belene. I also want to remind of the fact that March 1st of this year, Kozloduy block 5 experienced a severe incident where 22 regulation rods out of 60 failed to function.

You furthermore fail to mention in your article that Bulgaria and the countries around it knew already for many years about the upcoming closing date of Kozloduy 3 and 4. The capacity of Kozloduy 3 and 4 was already replaced by upgrades and new capacity over the last 5 years. These were the reason why Bulgaria could start exporting energy in the first place.

All involved countries, including Greece (!), belong furthermore to the top energy wasters in Europe. Instead of investing in more energy efficiency, these countries - and especially Bulgaria - continued counting on “softness” on the side of the EU - hoping that nuclear safety would not be considered important.

While mentioning the attempt from the pro-nuclear Geoffrey van Orden to slip in a sentence in the Bulgarian progress report for the EU to be “flexible” concerning Kozloduy and the attempts of a MEP coming from the nuclear industry, Romana Cizelj, and her pro-nuclear colleague Edit Herczog to call for extension of Kozloduy 3 and 4s life time, you fail to mention that closure of Kozloduy 3 and 4 is part of the EU Accession Treaty. This means that in case “flexibility” would be discussed, the EU Accession Treaty of Bulgaria would have to be re-opened. This requires consensus amongst the EU 25 - with several countries already having made clear they would veto such a re-opening. Van Orden’s attempt has to come under a European Parliament vote yet, but even when the EP would support the sentence, it would have no influence on the closure. This was already admitted by Mr. van Orden himself. These attempts are nothing more than PR stunts to push a dying industry.

The final conclusion is that the region has as such sufficient capacity to meet its energy needs. The Kozloduy 3,4 closure is abused to cover up management failures in planning and grid operation throughout the region, as well as for the attempts to blow life into a “nuclear renaissance”.

The region is on an important cross-roads. It can either choose to cling to outdated inefficient centralised and dirty technologies as coal and nuclear or it can start the development of highly efficient decentralised technologies, focussing on energy efficiency and the development of renewable resources as sun, wind, biomass, water and geo-thermal energy. The urgency of
climate change and security of supply point clearly into the latter direction.

With regards,

Jan Haverkamp
consultant for WISE Czech Republic
consultant on nuclear energy issues in Central and Eastern Europe for Greenpeace

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Dear Moyiga,

It was wonderful reading this article. Interesting to see other people’s views and how they experience poverty in South Africa. It’s a very sad thing and the statistics are scary.

Just wanted to thank you for making me part of this article and thank you for writing the article. This way, maybe people will wake up to the reality.

Yours
Laura de Lange

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Dear Editor:

Thank you for the excellent story covering how the situation really is in Iraq. Unfortunately here in the United States we only hear spot pieces on our national news broadcasts. I’m afraid without access to the Internet the vast majority of our populace remain deaf, dumb, and blind to the dire conditions in which the Iraqi people are forced to scratch out their lives.

Please keep up your valiant reporting. Some of us understand and are outraged as we vainly attempt to draw attention to the effects of war, any war, on the innocents.

Sincerely,
R. Prince
Tennessee, USA

*****

To the Editor:

Your Nov. 9 story, “Bechtel Departure Removes More Illusions,” falsely claims that Bechtel “is leaving [Iraq] without completing most of the tasks it set out to do.”

If the authors had contacted Bechtel before writing their story, they would have learned that we completed 97 of the 99 job orders assigned to us by the U.S. Agency for International Development. We left Iraq when our contract expired.

Our accomplishments included: dredging Iraq’s only deepwater port at Umm Qasr, so grain and other relief supplies could enter the country; repairing transportation infrastructure, including Baghdad and Basrah airports and three major bridges critical to traffic flow throughout Iraq; increasing power generation capacity by more than 1,200 megawatts; restoring or building new water and sewage treatment plants capable of serving millions of people; renovating more than 1,200 schools and 52 primary health clinics; and restoring essential telecommunications facilities between Iraq’s major cities and within Baghdad.

In addition, Bechtel provided more than 600,000 hours of training to Iraqis in operations, maintenance, information technology, and other areas to support the sustainable operation of these facilities in the future.

Millions of Iraqis today are drinking cleaner water, attending school, or earning a living because of jobs that Bechtel performed for USAID, with the help of more than 40,000 Iraqi workers.

Sincerely,
Jonathan Marshall
Media Relations Manager
Bechtel Corporation

Response from Dahr Jamail, IPS correspondent in Iraq:

The claims which Bechtel makes now, like those in the past, simply do not stand up to scrutiny. For example, this writer conducted an in-depth study into water treatment system rehabilitation projects under the responsibility of Bechtel, which can be read in depth here:

http://www.citizen.org/documents/bechteliniraq.pdf

This study alone found that Bechtel, despite claims made later, had simply not fulfilled contractual obigations. Similar investigations done by other journlalists, particularly regarding claims Bechtel made regarding their work done on schools in Iraq, have found the same result-that what Bechtel was doing in Iraq and what they were claiming simply did not match.

The fantastic claims made by Bechtel upon their recent announcement of leaving Iraq can easily be confirmed by contacting Iraqis living in the areas affected. For example, call any Iraqi in Baghdad today and ask them about the claim made by Bechtel, “essential telecommunications facilities between Iraq’s major cities and within Baghdad” have been restored.

As co-author, I stand behind the piece.

Best regards,
Dahr Jamail

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