The Other Press Nov. 27, 1986. Page 3 Bringing Chernobyl home to Washington VANCOUVER (CUP) - An aging nuclear reactor 300 kilometers south of the B.C. border at Han- ford, Washington could - become the world’s next Chernobyl, according to a Portland activist. “The reactor is 23 years old and the graphite core is warped and_ aging,” + says Joanne Oleksiak, di- rector of the Hanford Clearinghouse. “It has valves that are so worn away that they look like rusted out scrap met- al,” she said. “There is se- rious concern that this could result in an accident similar to the one at Cher- nobyl.” Oleksiak said the Han- ford reactor has a graphite core, like the one which VANCOUVER (CUP) - The University of British Columbia has published a report that couches .a demand for greater provincial support in So- cial Credit jargon. The report, entitled | “UBC: Engine of Recov- ery”, promotes the f university’s ability _—to make it’s teaching and re- search activities pay off - it states, for example, that 53. companies have re- cently applied research developed at the institu- tion. Report is written in the language of Socred rheto- ric, using entrepreneurial buzz-words such as “de- velop, competitive, tech- nology and growth”. In a section dealing with VANCOUVER (CUP) of the University of linked products, Council president Sim- on Seshadri said the prop- osed boycott was beyond the mandate of the stu- dent government — even _issues, stop next year. The motion § to O’Keefe and Rothmans required a two-thirds majority to pass, defeated 23-13 at a Nov. 5 meeting. burned and damaged the fuel rods at the Chernobyl facility April 26. And be- cause of fuel failures, the plant has been shut down six times since January, she said. Experts at a May 19 fed- eral hearing in Portland criticized both the reactor’s graphite core and metallic uranium fuel as making the plant potentially more danger- ous than its Soviet coun- terpart. Another major worry was the plant’s confine- ment structure, designed to withstand pressure of only 5 pounds per square inch, while the Chernobyl facility was made to with- stand more than 25, and American commercial slashed salaries, pro- grams, and facilities, UBC announced it “has met the challenge of restraint.” Nevertheless, the un- derlying message is one of criticism - graphs outlin- ing the decline in the B.C. government funding of universitiesaccompany a request for better provin- cial support. UBC president David Strangway said the report aims to: show why the university is worth fund- ing in the first place. “T think we’ve done a lot of talking about funding but I don’t think we've talked about why universities are impor- tant,” he said. Some of the report’s im- portant _ points, which document the problem of UBC drinking - The student council British Columbia has voted against a boycott of South African- but will give students an opportunity to reverse the decision early selling Carling products, which was Canadian student unions, including those at Simon _ Fraser University and the uni- versities of Victoria, though other reactors commonly call for 60. An. additional strain on the reactor, said Oleksiak, was its modification in 1980 to produce weapons grade plutonium. And in the period from January 1985 to June 1986 there were, 16 “unusual occurences” at the N reac- tor. In november 1985, for example, a set of bolts attached to valves in the plant’s primary cooling system came loose, rattled through the reactor and were never found. Oleksiak said the N-re- actor was one of three plants still operating, the last of nine older reactors designed for plutonium production at the 570 square mile Hanford nu- provincial funding at UBC include: _ - from 1983-84 to 1985- 86, operating grants to B.C. universities were cut by nearly: 10° per. cent, countering the American _ trend creased grants; - between 1970-71 and 1986-87, provincial | oper- ating grants to B.C. uni- versities declined from 6.7 per cent of total provincial expenditure to only 2.8 per cent; - tuition fees at UBC are among the highest in the to in- country; - faculty salaries at UBC, once among _ the highest in Canada, now rank 18th among Canadi- an universities. North | clear reservation, located near the junction of the Yakima and Columbia rivers in southeastern Washington. The complex manufac- tured the plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb and more than 60 per cent of the nation’s plutonium since then, she said. Oleksiak has __ docu- mented a number of other accidents at the Hanford complex, including the release of plutonium oxide in 1984 and the leak of more than 1,500,500 litres of radioactive fluid during a single spill in the plutonium-uranium sep- aration process in_ the 1970's. Oleksiak said Hanford still seems the. favored choice in the current se- lection of a dump site for more than 70,000 tonnes .of nuclear waste, al- though the combination of waste storage and plu- tonium processing _facili- ties is a deadly one. “One parallel occured in the Urals in the Soviet Un- ion in 1958, when _ there was a huge explosion in- volving plutonium process- ing facilities and radioac- tive waste storage. We don’t know a lot about that accident, but we do know that the plutonium processing plant was built as a copy, pipe by pipe, of the extraction plant at Hanford,” she said. UBC teaching Socred-speak n only ii in second year ps M te weet wk a a aparthied beer Alberta and Ottawa, have already banned the sale of South African products. Michael Moeti, a member of Students for a Free Southern Africa, was appalled by the vote. “They took no account of the outside world,” Moeti said. “They seem more _—— pre-occupied _—in how it would hurt them- selves.” Currently sales of Car- ling. products in the coun- cil-run pubs account for $270,000 annually, or 30 per cent of all bar revenue. Students will vote on the issue in a referendum coinciding with council elections Jan. 28-30. At the same meeting, council passed a_ seperate motion condemning ap- artheid, then tabled a de- cision to send $500 to South Africa, through the International Defence and Aid Fund which helps political prisoners and their families. _in student “provi _ John n Again Moeti criticized council. “What is $500 going to do when you prop up a company (like Carling),” he said. “It’s an insult to the oppressed in South Africa”.