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MR. LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer in Washington.
MR. MacNeil: And I'm Robert MacNeil in New York. After tonight's News Summary, Charles Krause reports from Moscow on the Clinton- Yeltsin summit. We examine the first pictures from the restored Hubble Space Telescope, then a look at the marriage of medicine and interactive television, and Tom Bearden has a report on the growing problem of nuclear waste disposal.NEWS SUMMARY
MR. MacNeil: Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin began their two-day summit in Moscow today. it was President Clinton's first visit to the Kremlin. He was greeted in St. George's Hall by his Russian counterpart. The two men spent much of the day in private talks. U.S. officials said Yeltsin pledged to continue economic reforms that would, in his words, make life better for the Russian people. There were reports the two men may sign an accord tomorrow to stop aiming nuclear missiles at each other's country. We'll have much more on the President's day right after the News Summary. There was new opposition in Ukraine's parliament to an agreement to give up that country's nuclear weapons. Ukrainian President Kravchuk is to sign that accord in Moscow tomorrow with Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin. Parliament must ratify the agreement but even moderate legislatures today voiced objections, saying they still have not been informed about it. The agreement calls for the dismantling of all Ukraine's 1800 nuclear warheads currently the world's third largest nuclear arsenal. Jim.
MR. LEHRER: Detroit's deputy police chief said today arrest warrants have been issued in Oregon in the attack on Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan. Kerrigan was struck in the knee with a metal bar last Thursday as she left the ice after a practice session in Detroit. The attack prevented her from competing in the U.S. national championships. A police spokesman in Portland, Oregon, said one of the suspects was Sean Eckhardt, the body guard for Kerrigan's main U.S. skating rival Tony Harding. Other officials said two or more people could be arrested in the case later today.
MR. MacNeil: Defense Sec. Aspin said today that the so-called "risk rule" which prevents women from serving in many combat positions will be lifted as of October 1st. Aspin said women would still not serve in ground units which engaged the enemy with weapons or were exposed to hostile fire or have a high probability of direct physical contact with the enemy. He spoke about the new rules at a Pentagon news conference.
LES ASPIN, Secretary of Defense: I think we've made historic progress in opening up opportunities for women in all of the services. Expanding the roles for women in the military is the right thing to do, and it's also the smart thing to do. It allows us to assign the most qualified individual to each military job which is very, very important and what we really will rely on is the high quality of our personnel as the keystone to the effectiveness of the United States military in a new era.
MR. MacNeil: Women have already begun to serve in combat aircraft and aboard navy combat ships. The Clinton administration today New York State Police Superintendent Thomas Constantine to head the Drug Enforcement Agency. Constantine is a 31 year police veteran. He told an audience of DEA employees that drugs and violence were degrading our society to a degree he would have thought unfathomable when he began his career. His nomination must be approved by the Senate.
MR. LEHRER: NASA officials said today their Hubble troubles were over. They released new pictures from the space telescope which was repaired by shuttle astronauts last month. Before the fix-it mission, the $1.6 billion telescope and was taking blurry photos of deep space. Today's photos of the same area showed a marked improvement. We'll have more on this story later in the program.
MR. MacNeil: In economic news, the government reported consumer prices last year posted their smallest increase in seven years. The Labor Department said inflation at the consumer level was just 2.7 percent for all of 1993. That followed a similar moderate increase the year before. Prices were held down by a drop in energy costs. In another report, retail sales were up .8 of a percent in December, spurred by sales of big ticket items like cars. Retail sales increased 6.2 percent for the year. GTE, the nation's largest local phone company, today announced plans to lay off 17,000 workers over the next three years. That represents about 10 percent of its work force. The company also plans to reduce customer service in regional network centers around the country from nearly 200 to just 13. The company said it was taking the action to adapt to technology changes and new competition.
MR. LEHRER: A Ring Ling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey circus train derailed today in Central Florida. One person was killed, fourteen injured. One person was reported still missing. The 59-car train jumped the tracks near Lakeland, Florida, on a trip from St. Petersburg to Orlando. On board were about 200 circus performers and staff, also dozens of animals, including elephants, horses, lions, and bears. A circus official said none of the animals were in the affected cars. The derailment occurred in heavy fog. Federal investigators were sent to the scene to determine the cause. And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to the summit in Russia, the rebirth of Hubble, and reports about long distance medicine, and nuclear waste storage. FOCUS - SUMMIT SUMMARY
MR. MacNeil: First tonight, the Clinton-Yeltsin summit. President Clinton is making his first trip to Moscow since his visit as a college student which was briefly the subject of controversy during the last presidential campaign. For Mr. Clinton, the first full day of summiteering mixed sightseeing with official business. Correspondent Charles Krause has our report.
MR. KRAUSE: The summit opened this morning with a warm reception at the Kremlin. Seven months after their last meeting in Tokyo, President Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin seemed genuinely pleased to see one another. ["Star Spangled Banner" in background] The opening formalities were kept deliberately brief. The President then spent nearly an hour and a half alone with only interpreters and note takers. Afterwards, as the two Presidents toured the Kremlin, U.S. officials described Yeltsin as confident, in charge, on top of his job, and committed to continuing the economic reform program the U.S. favors but that's caused such a political backlash in Russia. After the walk, there was a second meeting in the Kremlin dedicated solely to economic issues. [bell ringing] President Clinton then left the Kremlin and made several unscheduled stops in Moscow, including one at a Russian Orthodox Church that was closed by Stalin and used as a public restroom. At the church, he lit a candle in memory of his mother.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: It was very moving, and the Christmas season is still going on. And the priest took me to the site where people can pray for their relatives.
MR. KRAUSE: The President also stopped at a bakery and at a fish and meat store in Central Moscow, where he talked with Russian shoppers.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: I just finished a long meeting with your president, talking about how we can work together to make life better for the working people of the country, for ordinary citizens. That's the best way to guarantee freedom.
MR. KRAUSE: Shortly after the President's informal comments, Sec. of State Warren Christopher and Treasury Sec. Lloyd Bentsen provided a more formal assessment of the summit so far. Both men were clearly relieved that Yeltsin told them today he's still committed to economic reform.
WARREN CHRISTOPHER, Secretary of State: It's reassuring to be back here in the presence of the Russian leaders and find them undeterred by any events, indeed, redoubling their efforts to move forward with the reform process both on the economic side and on the political side, and very important to me, on a foreign policy side.
LLOYD BENTSEN, Secretary of Treasury: President Clinton assured President Yeltsin of the strong support the West has for the reforms that are being made, and we do not want this momentum to slow. President Clinton also agreed with President Yeltsin that more attention has to be paid to easing some of the hardships that we've heard about. We talked about finding ways to cut back on the red tape and to get some of this aid and support to them faster.
MR. KRAUSE: Christopher was then asked a two-part question about the political strength of nationalists and communists opposed to Yeltsin's reform program and whether their strength would prevent Russia from accepting NATO's offer of military cooperation, called Partnership for Peace.
SEC. CHRISTOPHER: We got a very positive response from the Russians, both the President -- from President Yeltsin and myself from Foreign Minister Kozyrev on the Partnership for Peace. I think it's up to the Russian government to formally respond to the invitation which they'll soon be receiving. On the second point, I don't have any sense at all other than that President Yeltsin is firmly in control. He was definitely in charge of the bilateral meeting on economics today, seemed, as Mark said, very much on top of his game.
MR. KRAUSE: Late in the day, the president hosted a reception at the American ambassador's residence for some 200 politicians and opinion leaders, a reception which it was rumored that Russian nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky might try to crash. Zhirinovsky was deliberately not invited to the reception because of his anti- western and anti-semitic views. During his talk, the President made a clear reference to Zhirinovsky's growing political strength and the danger which the U.S. believes he and his followers pose to Russia's future.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: The oldest of society's demons plague us still. The hatreds of people from one another based on their race, their ethnic group, their religion, even the piece of ground they happened to have been born on.
MR. KRAUSE: Tonight the Presidents continue their talks over dinner at President Yeltsin's dacha outside Moscow. It was understood the subject tonight would be foreign affairs and nuclear issues. According to White House sources, there is a possibility the summit will end tomorrow with a historic de-targeting agreement by which the U.S. and Russia would no longer target their nuclear missiles one at the other.
MR. MacNeil: Also tomorrow, Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin will hold a joint news conference. FOCUS - CLEAR VISION
MR. LEHRER: Now, the dramatic comeback of the Hubble Space Telescope. Once ridiculed as a very expensive failure, it was pronounced not only alive and well today but also a hugesuccess. We'll hear from the head of NASA and one of the scientists involved in the turnaround right after this backgrounder by Kwame Holman.
MR. HOLMAN: For more than a week in December, the shuttle Endeavour sent back to earth spectacular pictures from space as two alternating pairs of spacewalking astronauts went about their work on the Hubble Telescope. Even NASA veterans could not help being impressed by the sight.
UNIDENTIFIED NASA OFFICIAL: Those two gentlemen in the end of that armor are having the view of their lives right now, looking over the top of the top of the scope down at the earth.
MR. HOLMAN: The astronauts often appeared to be engaged in a cosmic ballet as they soared more than 300 miles above the earth. But it was science, not art, that drove their mission, specifically correcting manufacturing flaws and defects that had impaired the usefulness of the $1.6 billion telescope and seriously embarrassed NASA. There were five space walks in all. All achieved their objectives. On the first two space walks the astronauts replaced gyroscopes used to control the telescope and solar panels that power it. One panel had to be jettisoned into space after it refused to roll up for the return trip to earth. On the third space walk, what's called the wide-field camera was replaced. It contains mirrors engineered to compensate for a defect in the Hubble's 7.8 foot primary mirror. The fault had prevented the original camera from producing sharp images of very faint objects. Space walk four was for one of the most important jobs, the installation of a unit containing a set of special lenses intended to work much like ordinary eye glasses and correct the Hubble's defective vision. The final space walk turned out to be the most trying. As with all of the walks, the work was painstaking, resembling auto repair in slow motion. The astronauts were forced to pry loose the solar panel arms by hand when they would not descend by themselves. The panels later were slowly unfurled as the Hubble glided above the earth, still anchored in the shuttle cargo bay. Their repairs completed, the shuttle astronauts working inside the cockpit released the 43- foot telescope back into orbit. It gently glided away, and NASA soon verified that the Hubble was operating on its own power, responding to all of their commands. That was December 13th, but it was not until several days later that the first images came back to earth, arriving first at the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns-Hopkins University in Baltimore. The reaction of project scientists said it all. And it was not until today that NASA made public the reason for the scientists' excitement, an even better than expected improvement in the Hubble's operation.
JOHN TRAUGER, Jet Propulsion Laboratory: This is a star seen from the ground, and we're going to keep the resolution and the size of the field fixed. If we were, in fact, looking in real time, we'd see this thing dancing around to some extent because of the atmospheric it's seeing. It is the atmosphere which is causing the blurring that we see there. Next, we move directly to what we saw with Pic 1 on orbit, on the same star, on the same field. Now, following the servicing mission, we have this image, the same field.
CHRISTOPHER BURROWS, Space Telescope Science Institute: This is a stellar nursery where a whole bunch of new stars have been formed within the last 2 million years. From the ground, you can't really see what's going on in the core though, and the sort of thing that you can do with the space telescope is find outexactly what's happening in a crowded region like this where from the ground our vision is so distorted that we can't make out individual objects. Indeed, for a long time the central object there was thought to be a single star. We now go to the Pic-2 view of the same field. It's -- believe it or not -- the same field, almost unrecognizable. Okay. They're blinking it back and forth. You can perhaps see the central cluster which has now been resolved into literally thousands of separate stars. There are about 3,000 separate stars resolved there and around it we have the nebulas being ionized by these very, very hot stars which are emitting millions of times the light that you get from the sun.
DUCCIO MACCHETTO, European Space Agency: What you're seeing now is early data taken with the same subject camera and heavily DEC involved, that is to say we put all of the software-power at work to get the most of the images we could, and what you're seeing is all of the result of that software work. If we can go on to the new data, this is totally raw material. We haven't done anything in the software, other than just put it on the screen, and you can immediately see the difference in the details that we cannot distinguish in this picture.
MR. HOLMAN: At their news conference today outside Washington, NASA officials said it would be years before they knew whether all of their plans for the telescope could be carried out. But their pride at the success of their repair mission was clear.
JOHN TRAUGER, Jet Propulsion Laboratory: The thing that is almost magical is that it turns -- it's been turning out just the way we predicted. Maybe the most surprising thing is that there have been no surprises.
MR. LEHRER: John Trauger is with us now to add to his talk about magic and surprises and science. He's a jet propulsion laboratory astronomer and the principle investigator for the wide field and planetary camera of the Hubble. He is joined by Dan Goldin, the head of NASA. Mr. Goldin, how important is this day to NASA?
MR. GOLDIN: It's a very important day. We did something. We said we would do it. We carried it out. And you know we did very difficult things. This is one of the most difficult challenges we've faced since going to the moon. I'm so proud of this team of over a thousand people that pulled off a difficult task.
MR. LEHRER: When those astronauts finished their work on December 13th, what was the level of confidence within NASA that they had, in fact, fixed -- I mean, they accomplished their mission, but did you know then that you were going to get these pictures that you've ended up getting?
MR. GOLDIN: We had a high confidence, but in the past we would just speak before we had results, so this time we said, let's wait, do a thorough analysis, understand what we have, and then do it. But deep in my heart, I knew we were going to be successful.
MR. LEHRER: Mr. Goldin, the, the great success grew out of a great problem, a great failure. Now in the process, have you all identified what caused the problem in the first place and are relatively sure of yourselves that this kind of thing will not happen again, the kind of miscalculations and everything that caused this thing to go wrong to begin with?
MR. GOLDIN: We corrected a number of process problems. We don't have technical problems. We have communication problems among human beings. We built a very strong team, and we brought in a tremendous peer review. We've brought in outsiders as part of our process. We had 18 independent reviews by the world's experts, the worst kind of pressure is peer review pressure, not pressure from your bosses. We brought in the national resources. NASA for a while had been too introspective, trying to do it by itself. Now we're reaching out. But let me tell you something. We're on the cutting edge. We do very difficult things. And I'd like to sit here and tell the nation everything we're going to do is going to be a success, but if we do that, we'll be a failure. We do bold, difficult things, and we will have failures in the future, and we'll pick ourselves up, and we'll fix it, and march on. We've been a bold nation, and we've never been afraid of doing the difficult, and that's the message of today. We failed, but we fixed it, and on to the future, and that's the message I want our children to get. Don't be afraid of doing difficult things. We, adults, are going to do. You too could do it.
MR. LEHRER: Mr. Trauger, speaking of what was fixed today, from a science -- we know -- Mr. Goldin didn't have to tell us -- we know how important this was to NASA as an institution and the government of the United States, what happened. How important is it to science?
MR. TRAUGER: Well, I think at last we have a telescope which is above the earth's atmosphere, above the blurring effects of the earth's atmosphere, which is fully functional, fully ready to do the science it was designed to do. Up until now we've been doing something not quite exactly what we wanted to do because the telescope had the flaw. We've done unique science, but now it's time to go do what we intended to do first.
MR. LEHRER: Is there any way that you can translate the differences between doing it with a flaw before and now doing it without the flaw in terms that I might understand?
MR. TRAUGER: Well, it's a surprising -- let's see if we can do this -- the, the shape of the -- of star images, for example, was somewhat unusual, not what you're used to it. Part of it, 10 percent of the star light, would become part of the very high resolution, sharp image. But 90 percent of the light was blurred around it, so that although there was certainly some information which indicated detail that we could not see from the earth, it was very difficult to do high sensitivity and the very difficult problems.
MR. LEHRER: Now you can get the full 100 percent?
MR. TRAUGER: The full 100 percent.
MR. LEHRER: All right, but there was a step in there -- in other words, from the ground you say you'd get 10 percent. Hubble, before it was fixed, how much of it would you get?
MR. TRAUGER: Well, that's exactly what I'm describing.
MR. LEHRER: In other words, there was no improvement over ground the way Hubble was before it was fixed.
MR. TRAUGER: I'm sorry. The -- going all the way back to ground - -
MR. LEHRER: Sure.
MR. TRAUGER: -- from the ground, we always must look through the atmosphere. The atmosphere is shimmering, stars twinkle. Above the earth's atmosphere, everything is steady. There is no twinkling. And stars are rock solid. If you're going to have a telescope which works at the physical limit of what a telescope the size of the Hubble telescope could do, we know that we can sharpen things up, concentrate the light in a star by factors of 10 or so, you can see much deeper, see much detail in much more distant objects.
MR. LEHRER: Now, now that you can do that, what can we expect the next news conference and the next news conference and the next revelation from NASA and from your laboratory and other scientists -- hey, look what we just found, look what we just saw.
MR. TRAUGER: Well, there are hundreds of applications for this telescope, and it is a telescope that's going to be used by the entire science community. There are over 150 proposals which have been peer reviewed and are about to begin with a very diverse set of programs, science programs, ranging all the way from --
MR. LEHRER: Give me an example.
MR. TRAUGER: Well, for example, the most distant objects, let's say, galaxy clusters, quasars, what is the structure, what is the setting within which a quasar appears, what does the galaxy that surrounds it look like, for example, one of the examples which we gave today was a very distant galaxy, much more distant, about a factor of 10 more distant, that we could see detail which allows us to see the kinds of stars and the kind of markers within them that can tell us accurately how distant that galaxy is. What it allows us to do if we can see detail of this sort to a greater depth, it allows us to explore a greater volume of space in any given thing that we might want to do.
MR. LEHRER: And is this considered in the jargon -- this is basic science, is it not? This is not anything that's going to lead, is it, Mr. Goldin, to any kind of practical thing for us on earth?
MR. GOLDIN: You know, when electricity was invented, we didn't know that we'd have light bulbs. Science is a funny thing. You have to as a society reach out and do things without saying what the application is because you don't know what you're going to find, but let me say at the very basics, every human being looks up at the sky. The Aborigines in Australia, our ancestors looked up at the sky, and they wanted to understand where is humans' place in the universe and how did it form. This is the most basic of needs that we're going to satisfy, and as we could reach out to the very edge of our universe, it helped satisfy that need, but in the process, we are using very, very advanced technology. These fixes not only fix the mirror, but we have the most modern of electronics. This is a 1994 telescope, not a 1970 telescope. In the process of building these new electronics, we learn. In the process of understanding basic physics, of thermonuclear reactions that are taking place in the cosmos, we learn. We learn about how elements combine. We learn how solar systems form. And this helps us understand better our own environment on planet Earth. So we're finding out about electricity but maybe there will be a light bulb.
MR. LEHRER: Mr. Trauger, in Kwame Holman's piece, we showed you and some others gathered around, looking at something and cheering when the picture came up. What were you looking at? You weren't looking at what the ordinary person would think was a telescope lens. What were you looking at?
MR. TRAUGER: Well, we were looking at the monitor which was showing us an image.
MR. LEHRER: A television monitor.
MR. TRAUGER: That's right. That's the way the data arrive at us. The data are all recorded by electronic imaging sensors and telemetered down to the ground. Later, we see them on a monitor.
MR. LEHRER: You don't see them in raw firm looking through an eye piece, like you do with a normal telescope?
MR. TRAUGER: That's right. A computer basically sequences everything. The telescope goes off autonomously, does it observation, sends the data to you, and you --
MR. LEHRER: And you essentially do the scientific, fancy equivalent of rolling tape, is that what you're doing?
MR. TRAUGER: Exactly.
MR. LEHRER: Yeah. And the people you say who are now lined up, the 150 or so proposals to use this, are these governmental agencies? Are these private scientists? Are these university people? Or what -- give us some feel for who these folks are.
MR. TRAUGER: Well, these are research astronomers of all, all types, in the United States and in Europe.
MR. LEHRER: Looking for what?
MR. TRAUGER: Looking for -- well, there are many people who, for example, who are very interested in the origins of the solar system who would be looking at the planets and the, the comets, for example, and people who are interested in the, maybe the larger picture, cosmology, distant galaxies, the evolution of galaxies, the most distant objects, and everything in-between, stellar populations, the way stars form, the way in which star clusters form, what they look like. One of the clusters that you, in fact, saw today was a very young cluster. It had --
MR. LEHRER: Which is number what?
MR. TRAUGER: Three.
MR. LEHRER: No. 3. Let's put No. 3 up. We showed that a while ago with, with Kwame's piece.
MR. TRAUGER: Yes.
MR. LEHRER: But explain what we're looking at there.
MR. TRAUGER: Well, you see in the inset, in the small, small center there a, a cluster of stars. There are at least 3,000 stars in that cluster. You can't see it too clearly in that replication. Many of them are very young, less than maybe a few million years old, which is young by stellar standards. This is -- this looks like a, a collection of stars formed all very much near the same time. And we'd like to see and understand what the population of stars that occurs is. There's all kinds of stars, and here's a whole collection of stars that clearly were born all at the same time.
MR. LEHRER: And you're going to be able to tell that by just looking at these pictures? You don't have to go up there and take a piece of it or any of that? I mean, is that possible, just by looking at these things?
MR. TRAUGER: Well, I think astronomy is a very sporting science. You know, you simply can't do it. You have to sit and look at long distance and try to figure it out from here, except, the only exception perhaps is planetary astronomy, in which case we can actually go out and touch.
MR. LEHRER: Well, as an astronomer, this must be an astounding thing for you and your colleagues, right?
MR. TRAUGER: I think it's nothing less than a revolution. I mean, we knew we had all the expectations three years ago. They were thwarted; they were delayed; but now I think the way is clear. The thing is clearly fixed.
MR. LEHRER: Do you -- do you have any personal thing out there that you want to know about that you're going to look for?
MR. TRAUGER: Well, my, my main interest has always been in the solar system, in the origin of the planets, and what they say about the way planets form.
MR. LEHRER: What's the big question in your mind? What would you like to know that you don't know that maybe Hubble can tell you?
MR. TRAUGER: Well, I think ultimately just as Dan Goldin said, I would have almost said the same thing. I think we are here. We are here on the earth. We don't know the origins of things. We want to understand the setting and the origins, and I think the only - - one very good way to do that, every time there has been an advance in astronomy, it has widened our perspective, allowed us to see the setting, the uniqueness of the earth anew. And somehow it always comes home to me it says a lot more about us as individuals and life on earth.
MR. LEHRER: And Mr. Goldin, you see a series of, of revelations as a result of Hubble over the next months and years, or now to the end of -- I guess you'll never get all the answers, is that right?
MR. GOLDIN: No. I'd like to say we'd get all the answers. We will have revelations. I don't know what they'll be, but that's the nature of science. We as a society spend so much time trying to survive; we have to spend time reaching out and understanding where we came from and satisfying our basic thirst for knowledge. You know we have to eat; we have to sleep; but we need intellectual nourishment. And that intellectual nourishment will help lead to new things, new forms of power generation. As I said, thermonuclear reactions are going on all around us.
MR. LEHRER: And they -- they, of course, formed some of these stars, did they not?
MR. GOLDIN: This is the furnace.
MR. LEHRER: My limited knowledge on this.
MR. GOLDIN: This is the furnace that forms all the things in our universe. When you look at a star, you're looking at a thermonuclear reaction taking place. And who knows fifty years or a hundred years or two hundred years from now what an astronomer might bring back to a plasma physicist, who will bring to a power company. We don't know what we don't know, but the exciting thing is America is going to the edge, and we want to know. These are the examples we set for our children.
MR. LEHRER: All right. Well, gentlemen, congratulations and thank you both very much.
MR. MacNeil: Still ahead on the NewsHour, dialing for doctors and nuclear waste disposal. FOCUS - TELEMEDICINE
MR. MacNeil: Next tonight, medicine and the information highway. Two goals of the Clinton health care reform are universal coverage for all Americans and at an affordable cost. Some doctors in Texas have found a way to save money and time and see more patients through the help of interactive TV. Tony Burden of Houston Public Television, KUHT, reports.
DR. JACK MONCRIEF, Nephrologist: [talking to patient on monitor] That ought to gradually heal. I would not put bandages on it.
MR. BURDEN: There never used to be enough hours in the day for Dr. Jack Moncrief to see all of the patients who needed his attention, but that was before he began practicing telemedicine. Moncrief is a kidney specialist whose experimentation let to the development of keratin neo-dialysis as an alternative treatment for patients whose kidneys are failing. Several years ago, he began experimenting with interactive video as a way to see more patients without sacrificing the quality of their care. Using high quality fiberoptic phone lines, Moncrief's office in Austin is now linked to four rural clinics in Central Texas.
WOMAN ON MONITOR: Can you see that three-corner tear?
DR. JACK MONCRIEF: Yes. I sure can.
DR. JACK MONCRIEF: I am communicating with the dialysis unit in Giddings, Texas, which is 55 miles from my office. There are ten or twelve patients presently undergoing dialysis in this artificial kidney unit. I am getting ready to see each patient individually so that the patient and I communicate directly while they're actually undergoing dialysis. This prevents me from having to drive down there, wait, see this group of patients, and then wait for the next group of patients to come on, which would ordinarily take about seven hours. I can do it all in about an hour. So it saves me six hours a day from the travel and my capacity to not only see the patient on a continuous basis while he was undergoing dialysis, but in the case of an emergency, I'm sitting right there with my television camera ready to go.
DR. JACK MONCRIEF: [talking to patient] How are you doing on dialysis today?
PATIENT: I'm doing fine. I have a little gas is all.
DR. JACK MONCRIEF: I see. When did that gas come on?
PATIENT: It's been there all the time.
DR. JACK MONCRIEF: It's there all the time?
MR. BURDEN: Since dialysis puts a strain on the circulatory system, Dr. Moncrief is always on the alert for heart problems.
DR. JACK MONCRIEF: [talking to patient] So sometimes it goes up into your chest and up into your shoulder? Does it ever go into your arm?
MR. BURDEN: Moncrief watches as the patient describes the pain.
DR. JACK MONCRIEF: Are you having that discomfort right now?
PATIENT: Yes.
DR. JACK MONCRIEF: Is his blood pressure stable?
NURSE: It was 172 over 80.
DR. JACK MONCRIEF: Okay. Let's give him a sublingual nitroglycerin right now and see if he gets relief of that symptom.
NURSE: Okay.
MR. BURDEN: After a few minutes, the nitroglycerin has taken effect and the chest pains have subsided.
DR. JACK MONCRIEF: Are you getting any relief of that discomfort with that thing under your tongue? It's getting better?
PATIENT: Yes.
DR. JACK MONCRIEF: Getting better. Okay.
DR. JACK MONCRIEF: As you can see, that was a critical piece of information that I would not have gotten over the telephone. I only got that by looking at his face and listening to his description and having him put his hands on his chest. Only after he brought his hand up from his abdomen up into his chest was I able to recognize that we weren't talking about abdominal pain, we were talking about chest pain. And that's a very critical thing. That's how people die of myocardial infarctions or heart attacks when they're really having -- think they're having indigestion. Almost every patient describes their heart attack as indigestion.
MR. BURDEN: The communications network that links Dr. Moncrief and other specialists with remote clinics was set up by the Texas Telemedicine Project to assess its potential. In the past three years, nearly 2,000 patients have been seen via the TTP telemedicine system. According to their evaluation, the technology produced a savings of up to 22 percent over traditional health care delivery methods.
DR. JACK MONCRIEF: In my particular case, it means that I can do in one hour what would ordinarily take me seven hours to do. That's a substantial cost saving. It is very expensive to get in a car and drive to Giddings, so, yes, I think it has the capacity to be a cost saving measure. It has a more of a capacity to increase quality of care. I have been making rounds in the same dialysis unit in person for about 12 years. For the last three years I have made rounds in the dialysis unit through interactive video. I know personally that I am absolutely capable of making the same kinds of diagnoses through interactive video, and I would say that I can do it as well and sometimes even better, because I am there more. With interactive video, I am actually present more than I was in person.
MR. BURDEN: This new availability of highly specialized medical care may prove to be the salvation of small, rural communities like Giddings. Three years ago, the town's hospital was so far in debt it was forced to close. More and more patients were bypassing the facility, preferring to take their complaints to the numerous specialists and medical centers in Austin, a little over an hour away. It was one of nearly 300 rural hospitals that shut down in Texas over the past five years.
DR. JACK MONCRIEF: What interactive video does is it allows the small communities to bring a battalion of specialists into contact with the patient so that the quality of medical care to the patient is improved. Now, what that does is that that again confirms the patient's confidence in that he is receiving the same quality of medicine in his rural community as he would if drove past the rural hospital.
MR. BURDEN: Thirty years ago, when America's manned space program first got off the ground, we were suddenly faced with the problem of providing highly specialized medical care to our astronauts in space.
DR. ROGER BILLICA, Flight Surgeon, Johnson Space Center: It's the same sort of issue that we're seeing here on earth with getting access to health care in remote locations where sometimes it's tough getting all of the medically trained resources, the personnel, the staff, in those areas, and you can get the health care you need by using telemedicine and assistance and consultation at some other location. So the analog of space is an excellent analog, an excellent training and development ground for some of the issues we're having to deal with here on earth and how we provide health care.
MR. BURDEN: Dr. Roger Billica is the flight surgeon at the Johnson Space Center, where the technology for telemedicine is constantly being improved. This past fall, the space program took a giant step for telemedicine. September 9th, on a flight that was largely ignored in anticipation of the Hubble repair mission, the astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery deployed the first of a new generation of satellites. They're called ACTS, or Advanced Communications Technology Satellites. They have the potential to revolutionize communications here on earth. ACTS satellites will be a key element in the information superhighway of the future, allowing, for example, cellular phone communications from any point on earth, or direct satellite to home broadcasts of high-definition television. Offering 20 times the communication speed of traditional satellites, ACTS will eventually be able to transmit high resolution, real time video between any two points on the planet at a reasonable cost and without massive satellite dishes. For telemedicine, these satellites have the potential to turn a promising technology into an important health care alternative.
DR. ROGER BILLICA: Just as the world is turning into a global community with regards to economics, with regards to communications and all these sorts of issues that we're seeing happen, that the same thing is going to happen eventually with health care to some extent. A sharing of resources, a sharing of knowledge, a sharing of information and training that can take place using telemedicine is certainly in the picture for the future. And I think we're going to start to see that happen now.
MR. BURDEN: One of telemedicine's most enthusiastic proponents is Dr. Michael DeBakey. The pioneer of cardiovascular surgery is also one of the pioneers of telemedicine.
DR. MICHAEL DeBAKEY, Cardiologist: Well, in the early '60s when we put up the first satellite, they celebrated by doing certain things, so they asked me if I would be willing to do, to do an operation which would be transmitted to Switzerland. And I think that's the first I'd say intercontinental transmission of telemedicine.
MR. BURDEN: Since that early day, DeBakey has remained interested in the potential of telemedicine, and with the new satellites and other recent advances in technology, he says that potential is about to be realized.
DR. MICHAEL DeBAKEY: Well, it's going to enhance medical care tremendously. It's going to make medical care more readily available, more understandable by the public, more appreciative by the public, and by the physicians, themselves, certainly. It's just going to increase and improve the standard of medical practice tremendously, perhaps more than anything we have available today.
MR. BURDEN: DeBakey has been one of the trail blazers that's made American medicine the envy of the rest of the world. He sees telemedicine as a way to make the same level of health care available in every country. He's contracted with the Raytheon Corporation to build the world's first satellite-based telemedical facility at the Texas Medical Center.
DR. MICHAEL DeBAKEY: The potentials are tremendous. Anywhere the imagination can lead you, that's the potential. I can visualize, ultimately, virtually every physician having a linkage with telemedicine in his office or in his home. And the time may come when this linkage may extend to the general public.
MR. BURDEN: Across the country, cable companies and phone systems are already gearing up for the new interactive technology. The day may not be far away when medical care is as close as our television.
DR. JACK MONCRIEF: [talking to patient on monitor] Can you make a fist? FOCUS - DUMP WE MUST?
MR. LEHRER: Finally tonight, what to do with nuclear waste. After a seven-year study, the federal government wants to put it in a permanent storage facility at a place called Yucca Mountain in Nevada. It's still a long way from happening. Tom Bearden reports.
MR. BEARDEN: Each one of the country's 110 nuclear power stations has a room like this one at the Prairie Island plant near Minneapolis, a 40-foot deep pool of water where spent nuclear fuel is stored. It's called spent because it will no longer support a chain reaction to generate electricity. The material is still highly radioactive, however. The water and thick walls provide shielding. The problem is that many of the pools are running out of space. Jim Howard is the chairman of Northern States Power, which owns Prairie Island.
JIM HOWARD, CEO, Northern States Power: In about 1995, we are simply going to run out of space inside the plant, and the proposal is to store this fuel, temporarily, outside the plant in large steel containers.
MR. BEARDEN: Northern States obtained state permits to build this storage pad outside the plant but then ran into a storm of opposition from people concerned that the fuel was a health threat. After a lengthy legal battle, a state court said the final decision was up to the Minnesota legislature, which is expected to decide by February.
JIM HOWARD: If we don't get permission from the state legislature, what that means is that Prairie Island would ultimately shut down well ahead of its useful life, and that would drive the cost of energy up not only for our customers; it would drive the cost of energy up for people throughout that entire upper Midwest region, a variety of other states, and so forth.
MR. BEARDEN: Many utility companies are facing the same dilemma. More and more waste is generated every day but determined citizen opposition makes new on-site storage unlikely. It's not as if no one realized getting rid of nuclear waste would be a problem. The federal government has been collecting money from utility customers since the mid 1980s to pay for a permanent disposal site.
JIM HOWARD: The customers have been paying a mill per kilowatt hour of energy produced, and since we started to do that across the country there's been over almost $8 billion paid into this.
MR. BEARDEN: The Department of Energy, DOE, has spent some $3 billion of that money studying this bone-dry ridge in the Nevada Desert as a potentialfinal resting place for a projected 70,000 tons of spent fuel. Yucca Mountain is a nearly solid block of volcanic rock on DOE's nuclear weapons test site about 80 miles Northwest of Las Vegas. The idea is to place steel casks containing the waste deep underground to isolate the material from the environment for 10,000 years. Since the study began in 1987, it's been bombarded with criticism. Early on, some scientists said the site wasn't suitable because of geologically recent volcanic activity. Others said the region was vulnerable to earthquakes. More recently, the criticisms have focused on the lengthy and growing delays in studying Yucca Mountain. Originally, the repository was supposed to begin accepting waste in 1998. DOE's latest projection says it can't open until at least 2010, 12 years late. The General Accounting Office says even that's too optimistic, that it'll take five to thirteen years longer than that. So what has DOE been doing for the last decade? For one, they've been drilling thousands of core samples to investigate the interior structure of the mountain. The built a large warehouse to store them all, and there's room for thousands more.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: [talking to others in room] It really doesn't look like it would be eat up by the --
MR. BEARDEN: But about half a billion dollars' worth of samples are worthless for repository licensing because the agency didn't keep track of them when scientists examined them and now can't document precisely where they came from. Most of the 3 billion spent so far has gone into scientific reports. Hundreds of them line the shelves in the DOE reading room in Las Vegas. The amount of paper may be impressive, but very little of it deals with actual studies of the mountain. Most of the reports are preliminary studies on how to do the main study, management and regulatory documents. The centerpiece of all this is the 6,000-page SCP, the Site Characterization Plan. It's the blueprint for DOE's complex plan to determine if the mountain is suitable for a repository. By one estimate, it contains 27,000 requirements that must be met before repository construction can begin. Retired Air Force General Tom Hall thinks the document and thus the whole site survey is worthless. Hall was hired by one of DOE's contractors to evaluate the test program at Yucca Mountain.
GEN. TOM HALL, Air Force [Ret.]: We wrote about a nine-page memo and a lengthy briefing that basically says that the test evaluation process was extremely flawed, that it was being, that it broke down at the outset, at the very beginning. You need to know what the question is if you trying to answer before you start developing a test. We were saying we don't even know what the questions are and yet we spent eight years, nine years, and spent well over a billion dollars, and we still don't even have the questions formulated.
MR. BEARDEN: Yucca Mountain scientists questioned Hall's credentials, despite the fact that he ran the Air Force's $170 million air-to-air missile test program. Dr. Jeremy Boak is chief of the project's technical analysis branch.
DR. JEREMY BOAK, Yucca Mountain Scientist: To me, it's a little disingenuous to give a lot of credence to someone who does not have a scientific background, who does not have practice, who has not practiced in the scientific fields, and say that these people are wasting your money. And it is, of course, an attack on their technical credibility, to say that they're doing studies that are totally useless.
MR. BEARDEN: But several independent oversight agencies have echoed Hall's criticism. In 1993, the General Accounting Office reported DOE spent only about 22 percent of the project's budget for actual field studies. The rest went for overhead and infrastructure. Dr. Michael Voegele, the project's technical and management support manager, disputes GAO's numbers.
DR. MICHAEL VOEGELE, Yucca Mountain Scientist: If you look at the money which is being spent for testing, environmental programs, field operation support, training, quality assurance, you're looking at 75, or 80 or 90 percent of that being spent in direct productive work. You couldn't do the work that you're doing in the field without that support with it, and so maybe the overhead function is more like 20 percent, rather than the 50 percent or more that's been suggested.
MR. BEARDEN: GAO's report went on to say that DOE wasn't asking Congress for enough money to even keep on its own timetable. General Hall believes those running the project are not only guilty of bad management but of dishonesty. He says his study of project documents turned up evidence of criminal activity on the part of some DOE managers and their contractors.
GEN. HALL: Here is the test management plan signed by the DOE official.
MR. BEARDEN: Gen. Hall says numerous documents show that a deputy project manager repeatedly approved expensive studies proposed by a contractor employee, a person with whom he is living. In 1992, Hall put those charges in writing to Adm. James Watkins, Secretary of Energy under the Bush administration. The Inspector General's Office declined our request for an on-camera interview. The agency did release this statement which said Hall's allegations are being taken seriously and are still under investigation. Yet, 13 days earlier, the IG told Nevada's nuclear waste project office it planned no further action on Hall's allegations. When asked about the apparent confliction, the Inspector General wrote a clarifying letter which repeated their earlier statement to the NewsHour. As for the deputy project manager Hall is accusing, he wrote his supervisor a letter saying he found the charges extremely offensive and denied even having the authority to assign tasks to his friend. Gen. Hall alleges there is another, even larger case of conflict of interest on the Yucca Mountain project. TRW Corporation is the management and operations contractor for Yucca Mountain. They are running the current scientific study that will determine whether a repository can be built in the mountain. Gen. Hall says his analysis of project documents shows TRW would also manage the construction of the repository and, therefore, have a huge financial stake in finding Yucca Mountain suitable. Dr. Daniel Dreyfus heads the DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management. He oversees the entire waste disposal program. He says nobody knows who will get the contract to build the repository.
DR. DANIEL DREYFUS, Civilian Radioactive Waste Management: And I'm not predicting it won't be TRW or that it will be, but I don't -- I think anybody who assumes that TRW is going to build the repository is making an assumption of something we haven't done yet.
MR. BEARDEN: Dreyfus adds that it won't be the DOE who decides to build or not anyway. That decision will be made independently by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. General Hall accuses project managers of one more fundamental dishonesty. He says the SCP'S flow charts don't allow for the possibility of a "not suitable" decision. He believes that proves the government has deliberately designed the studies to reach the conclusion they want, build the dump at Yucca Mountain.
GEN. HALL: I hate to sound so cynical but after over a year on the project and a year watching it from the outside, I am convinced that it's all by design.
MR. BEARDEN: Project scientist Dr. Michael Voegele.
DR. VOEGELE: There is no foregone conclusion either in the SCP or to my knowledge within the DOE program that you can build the site at Yucca, a repository at Yucca Mountain. I know of no information that would suggest that it was a foregone conclusion that this is the site.
MR. BEARDEN: State officials have also long maintained that Congress has a political stake in finding Yucca Mountain suitable, and that DOE's actions show the agency knows where its bread is buttered. Nevada Governor Bob Miller.
GOV. BILL MILLER, [D] Nevada: It's like a steamship that's going full bore, and they don't care if the dock is there or not. I mean, they don't know where else to go, so they're going to go right in, even if it's a dry dock. There's so much monetary investment, and it's such a simple political solution, since most of the waste is generated elsewhere, and it's easy to sell to constituents in other parts of the country that it should go in the desert.
MR. BEARDEN: State officials point to this tunnel now being bored into the mountain as further proof that DOE intends to find Yucca Mountain suitable. DOE says it's a research shaft to evaluate the interior structure of the rock, and they've purchased a huge drilling machine to extend it some five miles. But Nevada officials say it's exactly the same size and in exactly the same place as the proposed entrance to the repository.
DR. DANIEL DREYFUS: So what is contended now is some sort of a devious notion that we're going to build a repository. I reject that. I just don't believe that's the case. In my book, I know I speak for the secretary and I'm pretty sure I speak for my employees, we're looking to see if it works. If it doesn't work, that's going to be the decision that will be announced by the Department.
MR. BEARDEN: While the rhetoric flies, the waste piles up. The federal government has a contractual obligation to start accepting the spent fuel in 1998, and it will have no place to put it. So what will DOE do?
DR. DANIEL DREYFUS: There's an option of dry storage everywhere, and there's nothing that difficult about it that makes it impossible to do it at Prairie Island or anywhere else.
MR. BEARDEN: Except the politics of states.
DR. DANIEL DREYFUS: Politics is another issue. 17 percent of our energy is nuclear. In some states it gets well up into 50 percent, and it's simply not possible to, to shut that down.
MR. BEARDEN: Most observers believe the utilities will go to court in 1998 to try to force the government to live up to the contract. In the meantime, the continued operation of the reactors running out of storage space remains a very big, unanswered question. RECAP
MR. MacNeil: Again, the main stories of this Thursday, Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin began a two-day summit in Moscow. U.S. officials said Yeltsin pledged not to give in to pressure to abandon tough reforms. Police in Detroit said arrest warrants had been issued in Oregon in connection with the attack on figure skater Nancy Kerrigan. Police in Portland, Oregon, said a bodyguard for rival skater Tonya Harding was one of the suspects. And in Los Angeles, this evening, a mistrial was declared in the murder trial of Eric Menendez. Jurors said they were hopelessly deadlocked after 19 days of deliberation. Eric and his brother, Lyle, standaccused of the 1989 murder of their parents at their Beverly Hills mansion. Good night, Jim.
MR. LEHRER: Good night, Robin. We'll see you tomorrow night with a Clinton-Yeltsin summit wrap-up and Mark Shields, among other things and people. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you, and good night.
Series
The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour
Producing Organization
NewsHour Productions
Contributing Organization
NewsHour Productions (Washington, District of Columbia)
AAPB ID
cpb-aacip/507-vd6nz81n5f
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Description
Episode Description
This episode's headline: Summit Summary; Clear Vision; Telemedicine; Dump We Must?. The guests include JOHN TRAUGER, Hubble Astronomer; DANIEL GOLDIN, NASA Administrator; CORRESPONDENTS: TONY BURDEN; CHARLES KRAUSE; KWAME HOLMAN; TOM BEARDEN. Byline: In New York: ROBERT MacNeil; In Washington: JAMES LEHRER
Date
1994-01-13
Asset type
Episode
Topics
Women
Technology
Film and Television
Sports
Energy
Science
Military Forces and Armaments
Politics and Government
Rights
Copyright NewsHour Productions, LLC. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode)
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Duration
00:59:43
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Credits
Producing Organization: NewsHour Productions
AAPB Contributor Holdings
NewsHour Productions
Identifier: 4841 (Show Code)
Format: Betacam
Generation: Master
Duration: 1:00:00;00
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Citations
Chicago: “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” 1994-01-13, NewsHour Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed March 28, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-507-vd6nz81n5f.
MLA: “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.” 1994-01-13. NewsHour Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. March 28, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-507-vd6nz81n5f>.
APA: The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Boston, MA: NewsHour Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-507-vd6nz81n5f