The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

MR. LEHRER: Good evening. Leading the news this Thursday, George Bush chose Adm. James Watkins to be his Energy Secretary, William Bennett to be drug czar, and a new government report said it will cost $81 billion to modernize the nation's nuclear weapons plants. We'll have the details in our News Summary in a moment. Robin.

MR. MacNeil: After the News Summary we have excerpts from the George Bush news conference, then a discussion of the Department of Energy Report on nuclear weapons plants with Sen. John Glenn and Asst. Energy Sec. Troy Wade, next a report from Houston on the way radio is making a comeback, and finally a documentary look at some aboriginal art in Australia. NEWS SUMMARY

MR. LEHRER: All of the top jobs in the Bush administration are now taken. The President-elect filled the last two this afternoon. He chose former Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. James Watkins, to be Energy Secretary and former Education William Bennett to fill the new cabinet level drug czar position. Watkins, who also headed a Reagan commission on AIDS, said safe nuclear energy was a priority. He said environment and nuclear energy objectives can be made compatible.

ADM. JAMES WATKINS, Sec. of Energy Nominee: I reject the stamp of mutual exclusivity that some would arbitrarily assign to them. I have confidence after I've managed to get my feet on the ground in the position of Energy Secretary I can help find that desired and balanced formula wherein safety is never subverted, environment is adequately protected, and national security and other energy objectives are achieved in harmony with each other.

MR. LEHRER: Watkins and Bennett joined their fellow cabinet level appointees for a dress rehearsal cabinet level meeting later in the afternoon attended by President-elect Bush and Vice President- elect Quayle. Mr. Bush told reporters he planned to give his cabinet some advice, including, think big, challenge the system, adhere to high ethical standards and forget about kiss and tell books. Meanwhile, the outgoing President was given a farewell by the U.S. armed forces. Mr. Reagan was honored in a ceremony in a giant hangar at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. It featured bands, a military review and a display of some of the military hardware acquired during the Reagan years. Robin.

MR. MacNeil: It will take $81 billion to modernize the nation's nuclear weapons plants over the next 20 years. That estimate was made in a long awaited White House report made public today. In it, the administration also addressed the controversial issue of contamination at a number of reactors. It recommended stopping production at four of the most troubled facilities in Colorado, Washington State and Ohio.

MR. LEHRER: The Federal Aviation Administration has ordered a wiring check on 300 Boeing 737's. The order to the nations airlines told them to look for possible faulty wiring in the engine warning systems. The checks followed speculation that such a problem led the pilot of a British Midland Airline 737 to switch off the wrong engine Sunday. The plane crashed, killing 44 people. One of its two engines had caught fire; the other had been shut down. The FAA order applies only to 737's with engines similar to those on the British plane. The FAA said the inspections can be done quickly, causing no interruptions in air traffic.

MR. MacNeil: There was more factional in Southern Lebanon as rival Moslem militias battled for control. It came as Israeli jets pounded Palestinians' target in the area. We have a report by Roderick Pratt of Worldwide Television News.

RODERICK PRATT: It was the second time in 13 hours that Israeli war planes crossed into Southern Lebanon to attack Palestinian guerrillas. The target was the base of Abu Nidal, an extremist blamed for several attacks against Israel. The Israeli army didn't say whether the raid was successful, only that they had had no casualties. A short distance away, the families of the Amal fighters denounced the Hezbollah. The two rival sects have been locked in combat for several days. The village of Jabar was still smouldering from a concerted attack on Thursday by the Amal who were forced back under heavy fire. At least 140 people have been killed in the latest round of fighting which broke out on New Year's Eve. The stakes are high. Both groups want to control Lebanon's Shiite community which numbers 1 million, making it the country's largest sect. The pro Iranian Hezbollah want an Islamic state along the lines of Ayatollah Khomeini's. The less religious Amal want a more secular government with power shared among Christians and Moslems.

MR. MacNeil: In Washington, the State Department announced today that the United States is changing its quota system to allow more Soviet refugees to settle here. State Department Spokesman Charles Redman said the number of Soviet missions would increase from 18,000 to 25,000 in 1989. He said the new space would be created by cutting the number of places reserved for people from Indochina. Redman said the change was due to a huge backlog of applications from would be Soviet emigrants. At the same time, he said the Vietnamese Government was not issuing many exit visas for its people.

MR. LEHRER: The government of Helmut Kohl conceded officially today that West German companies may have helped Libya build the plant the United States says makes chemical weapons. A government spokesman in Bonne said an investigation is underway to determine if the company's violated any export laws. Kohl and other officials had maintained until today that there was no evidence of such involvement. Libyan Leader Moammar Gadhafi has said the new plant will make only medicine, not chemical weapons; the U.S. claims otherwise. In another development, the official Libyan news service said its government will turn over the body of a U.S. pilot missing from the 1986 bombing raid on Libya. The report said the remains will be given to a Vatican representative. A spokesman for the Vatican confirmed that story. The Associated Press said the body is believed to be that of Air Force Capt. Paul Lawrence.

MR. MacNeil: Finally in the news, an extraordinary story of survival; six men were pulled alive from the ruins of a nine story building thirty-five days after last month's earthquake in Armenia. The men were rescued in the City of Lenninikan on Wednesday and survived by eating canned food stored in the building's basement. Today one of the survivors described the ordeal to reporters. He said that on the day of the quake he and five of his neighbors had gone down to the cellar to bring up some heavy jugs. He said, "It was there we heard a strange roar and thought war had broken out.". Apart from only one broken hand, doctors said the men are in good condition. According to official figures, the quake killed 25,000 and left a million homeless. One lingering problem is the plight of the many orphaned children. Ian Glover James of Independent Television News has an update report.

IAN GLOVER JAMES: High in the Caucusus Mountains, above the Armenian resort of Savain, this sanatorium is caring for a special group of children. A month after the disaster which killed 25,000 Armenians, the youngest survivors play happily in the snow. Yet, behind the laughter is a fear of unseen psychological damage to a generation from the earthquake cities. They survived the rubble but now even low flying planes makes them tremble. Every child in this group has lost a mother or father in the ruins of Lenninikan and Spitak. It will take months of rehabilitation here before they join the 1/2 million Armenians rebuilding another life with what's left of their families. Yet, some don't even have that good fortune. Manukian, who's 10, was buried for two days under the rubble of his school. He saw his teacher and classmates killed. Both his parents are also dead, but Manukian doesn't know that yet, believing his mother is still alive in another hospital. These brothers were buried for 14 hours when their home collapsed. Their mother died clutching their twin brothers and a baby sister who all died with her. Their father is alive, but he's lost both legs and both hands, one of the forty amputations this doctor conducted in two days non-stop work after the earthquake. Relatives dug the brothers out. Gorak, who's eight, was trapped with three dead bodies. These children have survived the earthquake, but thousands more in Armenia are still being sought by desperate families.

MR. MacNeil: That's our News Summary. Still ahead on the Newshour, excerpts from the Bush news conference, upgrading the nuclear weapons plants, a radio revival, and a new attempt at some very old art. FOCUS - TAKING QUESTIONS

MR. MacNeil: First tonight, President-elect George Bush discusses his cabinet appointments. As we reported, Bush filled the last two cabinet posts today, naming retired Adm. James Watkins to be energy secretary and former Education Secretary William Bennett to coordinate the nation's fight against drugs. After the announcements, Mr. Bush talked with the press and here are excerpts.

REPORTER: Mr. Vice President, you offered the drug post to Sen. DiConcini, obviously or apparently with bipartisan interest involved. Bill Bennett hasn't concealed his interest in partisan politics. Have you asked him to renounce his interest in politics and can you demonstrate that it's truly going to be a bipartisan position?

PRESIDENT-ELECT BUSH: He'd have to work with both sides of the Hill but I'm not going to ask him to renounce that vim and that vigor and that determination that made him a howling success in President Reagan's administration as the Secretary of Education. I don't like to think that fighting drugs is a Republican problem or a Democrat problem, and I think the members of the Congress that I've talked to would agree with that. And he will approach this as a national problem. He's not going in there to ask some guy in the police department if he's a Republican or a Democrat or some interdiction officer what their politics are or somebody on the Hill whether we ought to have a Democratic policy.

REPORTER: Mr. President-elect, can you tell us or give us an idea of why it took so long to choose an energy secretary.

PRESIDENT-ELECT BUSH: I don't think it's taken so long. Please look at history, average everything out. I think we've done very very well. I have viewed this. I've gone back and forth a little bit on it between the question that Will asked here, oil and gas and nuclear or nuclear and oil and gas, but I, I think I properly concluded because of the problems that I'm being asked about here today that the top of that agency be in the hands of somebody with considerable experience in the nuclear field. So that took a little longer than perhaps if I'd been able to sort that out in my mind a little earlier, maybe we'd have moved a little more quickly. I'm not sure if I'd have said to Jim Watkins a month ago would he do this because I just talked to him about his wonderful ambitions about doing more in the field of helping kids. He'd just come out of the success of this AIDS report a few months before that, so maybe I in waiting, in trying to solve this problem after some of the other cabinet, maybe I just lucked into something good. Yes, ma'am.

REPORTER: Your first international trip will be to Emperor Hirohito's funeral. Can you say anything to allay the concerns of criticism of some of the allied leaders?

PRESIDENT-ELECT BUSH: I know I'm doing the right thing to represent the United States of America at this funeral. Obviously as one who has served in the Pacific theater long ago in that war, if you'd have suggested to me in September 2nd, get this date now, September 2, 1944, that I would be representing the United States at this event, why I would have found that a little hard to believe, but we have a strong relationship with Japan. The emperor has conducted himself in that job with tremendous dignity from the day he went to see MacArthur there in Tokyo, and the war ended, that set a tone for recovery that built into friendship and our relationship is strong, and what I am symbolizing is not the past, but the present and the future by going there.

REPORTER: We were told that you're going to be meeting with your full cabinet later this afternoon to give them their marching orders. What are you going to tell them?

PRESIDENT-ELECT BUSH: Just a minute. [Pulling out List] I'm going to tell them to think big, I'm going to challenge the system, I'm going to tell them to, as each one as demonstrated, to adhere to the highest ethical standards. I'm going to tell them I don't like kiss and tell books. I'm not going to censor it, but I'm going to tell them what I think. This may come as a surprise to some. I'd rather see their name on the record than insidiously leaked to somebody, be on the record as much as possible. It's better for your profession and certainly better for mine. I don't mind differences being aired. I want them to be frank. I want them to fight hard for their position and then after I make the call, I'd like to have the feeling that they'd be able to support the President, talk to them a little about personnel. You guys don't have to come to the meetings now. Tell them to work with Congress. We're going to have some fights with Congress but we're not going to approach it as though we're dealing with the enemy whatever party they're from, whatever philosophical bent the member of Congress adheres to. I'm going to tell them that I welcome their suggestions as to how Barbara and I can enhance their work, have a nice house over there and a lot of ways to hopefully be helpful from that side, from the East wing side of things.

MR. MacNeil: President-elect George Bush speaking at a Washington newsconference this afternoon. FOCUS - FINANCING FISSION

MR. LEHRER: The future of this country's nuclear weapons plants is next tonight. The White House released a long awaited report today that said it will cost $81 billion to modernize and clean up 15 of the plants. It recommends closing down four others. Energy Department Official Troy Wade and Sen. John Glenn are with us for separate interviews to explain and to react to the report. We will hear from them right after this report by Tom Bearden on one of the most troubled of all the plants, one called Savannah River that has been shut down already since last April.

TOM BEARDEN: The DuPont Company began building reactors to make materials for nuclear weapons production in South Carolina in the fifties. The reactors have gotten old despite constant upgrades in maintenance. Over the years, they've been forced to shut them down one by one, some temporarily, others permanently. Last fall, DuPont tried to restart one of them. Something went wrong. DuPont calls it an incident, but critics say it came close to being a serious incident. Francis Close-Hart runs a public interest group called the Energy Research Foundation in Columbia, South Carolina.

FRANCIS CLOSE-HART, Energy Research Foundation: They didn't know what was going wrong. They continued to add to the power of the reactor which is the wrong thing to do. They were just lucky that the reactor didn't go out of control.

MR. BEARDEN: A subsequent Department of Energy investigation and a Congressional hearing turned up internal DuPont memos that revealed there had been some 30 so-called incidents at Savannah River over the years, incidents that DuPont reactor safety expert Dave Ward downplays.

DAVID WARD, Nuclear Safety Expert: The Congressman doing the questioning revealed this document as if it was some sort of a new secret document that had just been turned up when in fact, it was a document that had been written back in 1985. It was part of our continuing process to evaluate and study our operating experience to make sure that incidents that we have don't turn into accidents, things that have real consequence. None of those incidents had any consequence as far as radiological damage to the public health and safety or to worker health and safety. In fact, none of them even came close. And because of that I think in another industry all of those incidents would have been regarded as rather trivial.

FRANCIS CLOSE-HART: Well, I certainly don't agree with that and neither does the Department of Energy and their top safety, environmental safety and health people who have all said that there were serious problems there, that these incidents were very serious ones. I know that there are people at DuPont who were still saying that there was no problem but they are in a tiny minority.

MR. BEARDEN: After the restart incident last fall, DOE shut down the last reactor, but the Department says some of them will have to eventually be put back in service, because in the short-term Savannah River reactors are the only ones capable of producing a vital bomb component called tritium. Tritium is a form of hydrogen. When added to the plutonium in a warhead, it enhances the efficiency of a nuclear reaction. Its major benefit is that it allows weapons makers to use far smaller quantities of plutonium, shrinking the size and the weight of the weapon. But tritium decays fairly quickly, at the rate of about 5 1/2 percent per year. If it isn't replenished regularly, the bomb won't go off.

DAVE WARD, Nuclear Safety Expert: We're the only facility that can produce and process tritium. We also have a capability for producing, a unique capability for producing a variety of other isotopes, for military and other purposes.

MR. BEARDEN: So it's a critical link in the chain of nuclear weapons production?

DAVE WARD: I believe it is, yes.

MR. BEARDEN: Indispensable?

DAVE WARD: Certainly indispensable if we're going to maintain a stockpile of nuclear weapons, including tritium.

MR. BEARDEN: With Savannah River shut down, the Department of Energy says it will run out of tritium this summer, forcing the cannibalization of older bombs to keep more important weapons functional. DOE wants to operate the old reactors until they can be replaced, but new reactors will cost billions and opposition to restarting the old ones is growing. DuPont's contract to run Savannah River expires in a few weeks. Ward says DOE is taking advantage of that to turn DuPont into scapegoat, hoping that will make it easier to get Congress to approve funding for new reactors.

DAVE WARD, Nuclear Safety Expert: There's been an illusion of a safety crisis created and I think that serves the political purposes, you know, primarily of those who have to make these difficult decisions and maybe that's hard ball politics. I think it stinks.

MR. BEARDEN: There is no crisis?

DAVE WARD: There's no safety crisis, absolutely not.

FRANCIS CLOSE-HART, Energy Research Foundation: I certainly don't believe that they are creating an artificial crisis. I believe there is a serious substantive crisis at these facilities, however, DOE has seemed rather suddenly to be very willing to talk about it more openly to release more information suddenly than they have been in the past, and I think that at SRP at least you've got a whipping boy, you've got DuPont who's leaving, so it's kind of convenient to look over your shoulder and say, well, this was DuPont's fault, and I do believe that suddenly they're coming to realize that they're going to have to spend these tremendous amounts of money.

MR. LEHRER: The Department of Energy says it will cost at least $300 million to restart the reactors at Savannah River. Today's report also recommended building two new plants to reduce nuclear fuel and one of them at the Savannah River site. Four of the department's other troubled sites marked for shutdown are Hanford in Washington State, Rocky Flats in Colorado, and the Fernald and Mound Plants in Ohio. With us now to explain all the recommendations is Troy Wade, Asst. Secretary for Defense Programs at the Department of Energy. He joins us tonight from Denver.

MR. LEHRER: First, Mr. Secretary, are you using DuPont as a whipping boy in the Savannah River project situation?

TROY WADE, Department of Energy: No, I don't believe that's the case at all. I think the fact that the contract change over comes at a time when we're trying to upgrade these reactors to today's standards is more coincidence than anything else and we are not using DuPont as a whipping boy.

MR. LEHRER: Why were the four chosen to be shut down? What went into the decision?

MR. WADE: You mean the four plants and the modernization standard.

MR. LEHRER: The four plants and the modernization. Yeah, I'm switching from Savannah River to the other plant, to the study, itself.

MR. WADE: Well, I'm going to have to answer that one by one. It is really not accurate to say they were chosen to be shut down. In the case in Ohio, the Fernald plant, the mission has changed, it has come to an end, and consistent with the direction we were given by the President, it's in the best national interest to close out of production in that plant. In the case of the Mound facility --

MR. LEHRER: That's also in Ohio.

MR. WADE: That's in Ohio -- the report recommends that the plutonium operations at that facility be located elsewhere in the complex, and the plutonium operations at Mound and the entire Rocky Flats complex are looked at not because they are unacceptable or unsafe or bad facilities, but simply because in the long haul, largely because of encroachment, it is better to move the hazardous operations somewhere else.

MR. LEHRER: What about the one at -- the Hanford plant in the State of Washington?

MR. WADE: Hanford is much like Fernald. The mission has changed. As you recall, we shut down the remaining reactor at Hanford last year, the end reactor. Over the next several years we will reprocess and recover the plutonium from fuel generated by the Hanford reactor. We will then no longer have a production mission for Hanford. We will then switch to a clean up and waste mission at Hanford.

MR. LEHRER: Now this $81 billion that the report says is going to have to be spent, what's it going to be spent on in general terms?

MR. WADE: Well, you need to break the $81 billion into two pieces. There is actually about 50 of that associated with what we call the modernization, the things that we really need to do to put the nuclear weapons complex into the condition it needs to be in in the decade of the next century in the year 2010. It means upgrading several of our existing facilities. It means consolidating the facilities we've talked about before and it means building some new things, such as new production reactor capacity to replace the Savannah River reactors, to build a new isotope separation plant to recover plutonium and it provides the money to do these in a manner that meets every current day safety and environmental standard.

MR. LEHRER: If that money is not spent, that 50 billion on modernization, what would be the result?

MR. WADE: Well, Jim, I think we're seeing a good example of that at Savannah River. Most of the facilities that we operate are 40 years old. Almost everything was built, at least begun as part of the Manhattan engineering district. They're suffering from neglect. They were neglected in the decade of the seventies and they're just getting old, and I think what's happened at Savannah River is a good example of that. To protect the nuclear deterrent, we need to get in and give this nation a new, smaller, more productive nuclear weapons complex that will serve the nation out into the next century and that's what the report recommends. It is a road map to do that.

MR. LEHRER: Does your report fix blame as to who's responsible or what was responsible for allowing this to get to this sad situation?

MR. WADE: It does not do that. I would say that no one can be singled out to blame. Certainly the administration, the DOE and its predecessor agencies owns a little bit of it. I think Congress owns some of it in that they didn't fund some of the things they should, but the report doesn't address that. It says, all right, starting from where we are now, what steps do we need to take to get to where we want to be in the year 2010, and I think it is quite a good report. I believe Congress will be pleased with what they see.

MR. LEHRER: The other money in addition to the 50 billion for modernization is for clean up and that will be to clean up the various safety problems and environmental problems that exist throughout the system, is that right?

MR. WADE: It will begin to clean up those things. It will begin to address the highest priority items and you're just right, such things as some of the uranium spills at the Fernald plant that are so important to Sen. Glenn, the problems with high nuclear waste tanks at Richland, at the Hanford reservation, that $30 billion will address over the 21 year period in question what we believe are the most critical of the restoration problems that exist in the complex today.

MR. LEHRER: Mr. Secretary, do you have the feeling that the DOE, the Department of Energy, is now on top of the situation, that if your report's recommendations are adopted both for modernization and clean up that the system will work?

MR. WADE: I'm not sure I would say that I think we're on top. I think we have a better handle on the situation than we have had perhaps ever, certainly in many many years. We know precisely the point from which we are departing. We've had a major effort involving people both in government and out this past year to put together this report and I think it is as good an accumulation of data, as good a road map as one could possibly come up with.

MR. LEHRER: Did you at all make any effort to coordinate what you were recommending with what the needs of the government may be in the nuclear weapon area, particularly in this area of arms control?

MR. WADE: Well, indeed, we did, sir. A very large portion of the report deals with the requirements as we and the Defense Department see them out through the year 2010 so the report is requirements driven and requirements oriented. And we have done the best job that we can and we have taken into consideration arms initiatives in looking at what the nuclear deterrent really needed to be in the year 2010 and then sized the complex to those requirements.

MR. LEHRER: Mr. Secretary, thank you very much. Robin.

MR. MacNeil: We turn now to John Glenn, the Democrat from Ohio and Chairman of the Senate Government Affairs Committee. Sen. Glenn recently commissioned his own clean up report from the Department of Energy and has been closely watching developments in this area. He joins us from Columbus, Ohio. Senator, do you think the Department of Energy is now on top of this problem?

SEN. JOHN GLENN, [D] Ohio: I think the Department of Energy is on top of it, but I think the numbers are all wrong. What has happened here recently has been a big battle between the people in the Department of Energy to whom I'm very complimentary for their efforts, Troy Wade, Dick Silgado, and Secretary of Energy Herrington who have been on top of this thing and gave us testimony last summer about the amounts of money needed to do some of these things. Now what we find now is a battle that has gone on for the last several weeks between them and the Office of Management and Budget as to what would be put into the new budget, and that's where this $81 billion figure comes in. I find those, the figures inadequate completely. I wished that the figures we talked about and that they gave in testimony last summer were the ones that had come out in this budget. I'd feel much better about it.

MR. MacNeil: How inadequate -- let's break them down as Mr. Wade just did -- first of all on the modernizing of the plant, roughly $50 billion over 20 years, how inadequate is that in your view?

SEN. GLENN: I think that one is probably, that one is an adequate figure, but when you get over into environment, safety and health, the ES&H factors, when you get into clean up costs, then it gets into a whole different ball game. For instance, out of that 81 billion that is being looked at by some people in the news media today as being all that's going to be required, it's just a beginning, 59 billion for the modernization -- 52 billion for modernization, 29 billion for environment, safety and health, and clean up. Now last summer of course we had figures that indicated just the clean up over this 20 year period was going to be as much as 65 billion, just a base program to comply with existing environmental law was going to be 700 million a year; over a 20 year period that's another 14 billion. How we deal with some of the waste matters are not brought up in the report at all, high level waste, transuranic, low level, 45 billion for that. You can come up with figures that are closer to 200 billion or over if you put all those figures that we had testimony on last summer. Roughly, the figures that OMB put in the budget, and I think over DOE's objection, because DOE wanted higher numbers, I believe, we'd have to check on that, but the DOE's numbers would have permitted an adequate job to be done. Their figures that came out in the budget though are about 1/4 what DOE testified they needed and about 1/6 of what the General Accounting Office said they thought was enough to do the job. So we have some big variations in the amount of money here that we think is necessary.

MR. MacNeil: So are you saying that this report is a victim of the concern over the budget deficit?

SEN. GLENN: Oh, I don't think there's any doubt about that whatsoever, because we had testimony last August that goes into much detail on this and they testified then to the higher figures and now I know that the figure between OMB and DOE was being contested back and forth. It was finally sent to the White House for a final decision and that decision came out the way it did. I think the $81 billion figure, it's a start. It's only that. The real bill, if we're to include clean up with this, is going to be far higher than that for the long-term.

MR. MacNeil: So will you be pushing the Bush administration to raise the ante on this?

SEN. GLENN: Absolutely, and President-elect Bush to his credit during the campaign pledged that he wanted to see this whole thing cleaned up. We see this is where the rubber meets the road right here. We either have to have the money to really start this and do the right job, or we're not going to get it done. Let me add one other thing. We can't take these sites, maybe orphan sites, maybe something like Fernald and maybe we can't justify keeping it open. I haven't seen the classified version of the report yet, but if we can't, we can't walk off and say we leave that aquifer level contaminated, we leave much of that material right there on sight. We have to clean these places up whether they're going to be used in the future or not.

MR. MacNeil: What do you say to the man from DuPont you heard in our tape piece before who said an illusion of a safety crisis has been created to serve the political needs of certain decision makers?

SEN. GLENN: I don't think that's the case at all and I don't think anyone is trying to make a scapegoat out of anyone. Perhaps there should have, as Troy said, maybe there should have been more oversight over the past twenty-five years. You can point fingers at Congress or the DOE as predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission -- you can point lots of fingers but the facts are nobody's trying to make a scapegoat out of anyone down there now. When some of the nuclear scientists went down there to look and see after what happened last fall, whether it was safe or not, they came back and used words in their reporting back to Congress and to the Department of Energy, they used words like it was "appalling" what they found. They were appalled at the attitude down there. They were appalled at the procedures being used at a plant when you're trying to run the power up on a plant, is not reacting right, and you keep adding more power, instead of shutting down to see what's wrong. They used another term, it was cavalier attitude. Now these are nuclear scientist who are accustomed to dealing in this field and they were appalled when they came back so I don't think anyone is being asked to be made a scapegoat in this. There have been a lot of things that have fallen in the crack through the years. The thing now is not to point fingers as much as it is to really get on top of this thing and make it safe. We need this. I back the system, back the weapons system completely, as far as our need for tritium, and I would hope even the production capacity for plutonium if we need it in the future, but we can't do that at the expense of safety and health matters and of clean up. That's what got us into this mess to begin with. We all sat around saying the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming, have to have more plutonium, got to get those weapons out there, and we all supported that, but in the veil of secrecy surrounding that, we let all these safety and health and these pollution matters and polluting aquifer levels and air and the radioactivity, we let that not be taken care of when we said what are we going to do with that, we said, put it in a pit out there behind the plant someplace, just put it out there, and you can't do that anymore.

MR. MacNeil: Looking at the proportion with roughly nearly twice as much going into modernizing the production facility as is going into clean up, is the priority still wrong? I'll just address the question of does the country really need to produce that much plutonium at a time when the administration has been working and presumably the Bush people will be to conclude a START Treaty which would cut all nuclear, long range nuclear weapons in half?

SEN. GLENN: Well, that will be the push in Congress I'm sure by a lot of people this year saying we're underway now with arms control, what do we need with more production? Well, perhaps it was our productive capacity in this field that led the Soviets into thinking they'd better talk seriously about arms control. So I don't really think that we can just say we don't need any more of this capacity at all. The thing on tritium is particularly critical because that has a half life of about twelve and a half years and if we don't have that, then our weapons systems start going downhill, and over a period of time if we really ran out of tritium, we would, in effect, be doing unilateral disarmament, regardless of what the Soviets would be doing, and we don't want to get ourselves into that posture at all.

MR. MacNeil: Well, Sen. Glenn, thank you very much for joining us we have to leave it there.

SEN. GLENN: Thank you.

MR. MacNeil: Jim.

MR. LEHRER: Still to come on the Newshour tonight, a report from Houston about the return of the radio, and aboriginal art from Australia. FOCUS - RADIO DAYS

MR. LEHRER: Next a return to those golden days of yesteryear when radio was king. Yesteryear is now because radio, that thing supposedly killed by television, is alive and once again doing very very well. It's a story told by Betty Ann Bowser of public station KUHT Houston.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Houston Radio Station KILT is hot. It's No. 1 during morning drive time. It delivers to advertisers what they want, customers, and much of the time, people, listen to KILT more than to any country station in the market. All that could be why its owners recently sold the property for nearly five times what they paid for it. Dickie Rosenfeld is KIT's General Manager.

DICKIE ROSENFELD, General Manager, KILT Radio: Their $7 1/2 million investment was worth $37 million.

MS. BOWSER: This station --

DICKIE ROSENFELD: This station.

MS. BOWSER: -- sold last year for $37 million.

DICKIE ROSENFELD: That's right. Cash.

MS. BOWSER: It's happening all over the country, radio stations going for record prices. Recently a radio station in Los Angeles sold for $79 million. The other two record sales are here in Texas. That's a far cry from the 1970s when the average price paid for a radio station was a mere $322,000. But in the 1980s, buying and selling radio stations took off, making it a $1 1/2 billion business. In the first six months of 1988, one out of ten radio stations changed hands. Total sales for just that six months alone was $3 billion. End of the year figures are not yet available. Even the old timers like Monty Lang can't believe it. He manages a Houston station that sold recently for $65 million.

MONTY LANG, General Manager, KMJO Radio: I used to read what friends of mine were paying for radio stations and I'd shake my head and say how are they going to pay this off, how are they going to do it, and they're all successful.

MS. BOWSER: Like almost every radio station in the country today, Lang's KMJQ targets a specific audience. In this case, it is the young black male listening KMJQ goes after.

MONTY LANG: Well, I think the radio business is much like magazines. If you've ever gone through a magazine stand, there are magazines for teens, preteens, 13 year olds, men who like girls, men who like sports, women who like fashion. So the specific radio stations are serving a segment of the market. They're serving a particular base.

MS. BOWSER: Because radio stations target a specific kind of listener, the medium has been highly successful with advertisers. Mel Karmazin is president of a broadcast company that recently paid $82 million for a Dallas radio station. He spoke with reporter Suzanne Allard in New York.

MEL KARMAZIN, President, Infinity Broadcasting: Advertisers find radio particularly attractive largely because it gets results for them. It brings people into their car dealers. It brings them into their department store. It gets them customers and it sells product.

MS. BOWSER: Advertising research shows that industrywide revenues hit $4 billion in 1987 and in 1988 they were up another 8 percent. The Motel 6 Company poured thousands of dollars into radio advertising in 1987 for the first time in an attempt to reach their target audience, motorists traveling with their radios on, people about to make a decision on where to spend the night. [Motel 6 Radio Commercial]

MS. BOWSER: The company's president is Joe McCarthy.

JOE McCARTHY, President, Motel Six: Well, we had a five year history of declining occupancy as a company and the year in which we invested all of this money in radio advertising, 1987, our occupancy not only stopped the downward curve but increased six full percentage points, which is a dramatic increase for any lodging company.

MS. BOWSER: With results like that, it is no wonder revenues are up, making radio properties even more attractive to investors.

MEL KARMAZIN: I truly believe that by 1989 there will be a transaction fora radio station in excess of $100 million.

BETTY ANN BOWSER, KUHT-TV: In every major radio market, the AM and FM bands are full. There is simply no more room for new frequencies, so if you want to own a radio station you've got to buy one that's already there and under the 1984 deregulation of the industry by the Federal Communications Commission that's a lot easier to do now. Ed Shane is a nationally recognized radio consultant.

ED SHANE, Radio Consultant: The fact that the Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, allowed radio companies to own more stations, they used to be limited to seven, now they can own twelve, that has made the radio stations much more valuable properties, because there's a finite number of radio stations. There are 10,387 radio stations, including the public stations.

MS. BOWSER: And the Commission did something else. It said an owner no longer had to keep a radio property for three years before selling it, setting up some good old fashioned horse trading and allowing owners to flip their investments. Ron Chapman recently watched his station change hands twice in one day. He's been the No. 1 morning man in Dallas for 20 years.

RON CHAPMAN, Disc Jockey: Radio stations have now become real estate properties. In real estate, there is a term called flipping which means you buy it and in the same transaction you sell it to somebody else for a higher price and you can buy it this hour, sell it the next hour. And if you've got a higher bidder, sell it, no problem.

MS. BOWSER: And Chapman thinks that has potential for abuse.

RON CHAPMAN: It puts us in the same commodity as a supermarket or a department store, a car dealership, any business, and I think that as hurt radio because you now are not dealing so much with broadcasters as you are with speculators, and consequently, the profit motive is more than the broadcast motive.

MS. BOWSER: Chapman and others worry that investors will be more concerned with commercials than with programming. His boss, Mel Karmazin, says you've got to run a radio station like a business.

MEL KARMAZIN, President, Infinity Broadcasting: In the case of KVIL, we borrow $82 million, we pay $8 million, and the profits of KVIL are in excess of that, so that we're able to pay off the station and have a little bit left over for our shareholders.

MS. BOWSER: Ironically one of the reasons for radio's golden age is the trials and tribulations of the industry's stepsister, television.

SPOKESMAN: I don't think there's any question that the fragmentation of television is helping radio, and it's because people are looking for something to be satisfied with on television as the networks change their schedules, as the writers' strike kept people away from television for a while, they're looking for something. They'll find it on cable. They'll find it on public television, but they're also going to radio.

MEL KARMAZIN: I think that the radio industry should give a big award to the person that discovered the remote control device for television. I think one of the things that's happening is that advertisers are realizing that people are not watching their commercials as much. People used to criticize radio that when the commercial came on in the car people would push their button and change channels. Now what happens when a television commercial comes on, everyone's putting on PBS.

MS. BOWSER: Whether country, rock or talk radio, listeners seem to find their niche. In any given week, 98 percent of the population will hear radio somewhere. Surprisingly, that percentage hasn't changed substantially over the years. What has changed is radio, itself.

ED SHANE, Radio Consultant: It's not like the old days when people sat at the radio and listened to every word. They use it more like we use the electric lights. An electric light with a fader on it will give you a nice warm glow or a beautiful bright light. Radio can do the same thing. People are using radio in different ways now. They watch television while they listen to the radio. They work while they listen to the radio. So it's changed so much that not every word is paid attention to but the overall broadcast day or the overall broadcast hour is a thing unto itself.

MS. BOWSER: Studies show that overall network television viewership is down and there is no research to indicate those viewers will be coming back. Meanwhile, radio is in a golden age and basking in the glow. FOCUS - ART NOUVEAU?

MR. MacNeil: Finally tonight a look at a brand new ancient art form. Australian aborigines are said to have the world's oldest continuous tradition of visual art. Their cave paintings for example date back at least 30,000 years, twice as old as the cave paintings of France. But another form of their art was only recently discovered by Westerners and has undergone rapid evolution. We have a report by Arts Correspondent Joanna Simon.

JOANNA SIMON: If you are puzzled by this sight, you are not alone. These are two aboriginal artists about to create a sand painting, a highly unusual event outside the Central Australian desert. Normally, along with dozens of other artists, they would work day and night for several weeks on a gigantic designs, sometimes spanning several acres. But on a recent visit to New York City, Michael Nelson Jakamarra and Billy Stockman Japaljarri had to improvise, working over a weekend with three tons of Brooklyn sand. Their demonstration was part of an exhibit organized by the Asia Society, the first major exhibit of aboriginal art ever to leave Australia. Despite a history of at least 30,000 years, the outside world has had virtually no exposure to aboriginal art. It's being touted by the Asia society as the world's oldest traditional art form and yet, it's also one of the newest. It was only in the early 1970s that acrylic paint was introduced to the aborigines. This finally made it possible to turn sand paintings into permanent works of art. For Michael Nelson Jakamarra, it opened up a whole new world.

MICHAEL NELSON JAKAMARRA: I think it's more better to use acrylic.

MS. SIMON: Why?

MICHAEL NELSON JAKAMARRA: Because it's more brighter and it doesn't rub off, which is really good for us now. In the past nobody, European people never knew about it overseas, but now our works are spreading out now.

MS. SIMON: Jakamarra is considered one of the most talented of all aboriginal artists by both his fellow artists and the critics. One of his paintings was chosen for the cover of the exhibit catalogue.

ANDREW PEKARIK, Asia Society: This is one of my favorite of all the aboriginal paintings I've seen --

MS. SIMON: Andrew Pekarik is director of the Asia Society Galleries.

ANDREW PEKARIK, Asia Society: And when I saw this painting, I was sold on the idea of aboriginal acrylic painting, particularly I think in this area around here, this very complex dotting immediately spoke to me, iridescence, sparkling, the way the light catches the drops of dew in the morning, and what I learned as I got more involved in the subject was that underneath these paintings is this incredibly complex, intellectual, religious, social structure of meaning.

MS. SIMON: At the heart of aboriginal art is a profound spirituality. Aborigines believe that all of Australia is a grand sacred site and that it is their duty to tell the story of the ancestral beings who created it. The paintings depict what they call dreamings. Anthropologist Chris Anderson explains the term.

CHRIS ANDERSON, South Australian Museum: It refers to a time in the past when the earth was created and formed as it is today. There's a basic set of designs which include concentric circles, semi-circles, straight lines, meanders, and so on, and these are brought together in particular forms, particular clusters, to portray certain dreamings.

MS. SIMON: One example of this can be seen in the work of Clifford Possum Japaljarri. Fellow artist Christopher Hodges explains.

CHRISTOPHER HODGES: And these two men are sitting and they say let's go hunting but this man, he takes off, and this man chases. You can see his footprints and they run around the bushes and they run around and around and around and they chase and then finally, this is the same story, and it continues on that canvas, the footsteps come inside and one man catches the other man and hits him in the head with a tomahawk and kills him. This is a place called Red Hill.

MS. SIMON: Why did he kill him?

CHRISTOPHER HODGES: That's the dreaming.

MS. SIMON: Aborigines inherit certain dreamings as their birthrights. These ancestral totems are received from their fathers and subsequently passed on to their children. But dreamings are more than just family histories. They're a moral and spiritual guide. Since aborigines have no written language, all that is known about their heritage and their beliefs is contained in their art. The key to understanding the paintings is taught in initiation ceremonies. This painting depicts the process. On one level each concentric circle represents a sacred site where initiation occurs, but there's also another level of meaning.

SPOKESMAN: If you look at it more closely, you will see that, in fact, these divide into two groups. There are the large circles and there are the smaller circles. These are the old men teaching the young men. It gives you a good idea of the level of symbolic abstraction that's present in these paintings.

MS. SIMON: Michael, where did you learn how to paint?

MICHAEL NELSON JAKAMARRA: We're taught by our grandfather from our father and uncle. That's the reason I taught -- from there, from that day, I knew it.

BILLY STOCKMAN JAPALJARRI: We've been taught -- or learning all that, same like high school. [Through Interpreter] We have to go through a big ceremony which is something like high school. We have been through the big ceremony to learn the aboriginal law which is the beginning. The oldest ones, we have to do it ourselves now, because or old people, our grandfathers, have all passed away.

MS. SIMON: But it's not just aborigine men who become artists. Women are also taught to paint. Like the men, women inherit their dreamings from their fathers. It then becomes their obligation to past and future generations to portray these stories in their art and these are the only stories they are allowed to paint. There are aspects of aboriginal paintings that are so secret they cannot be discussed with the unitiated. A fact we discovered when we asked Jakamarra about the religious significance of the dots in his painting.

MICHAEL NELSON JAKAMARRA: The dots, it's really most important for all aboriginal people in Australia, it means most important price, but it means for all initiated people only.

MS. SIMON: Nor could he explain the meaning of this painting called Old Man Dreaming At Yumari. In general, it describes the punishment meted out to a man who has had sexual relations with his mother-in-law, but as the exhibit catalogue notes, most of the details are restricted information.

ANDREW PEKARIK, Asia Society: The sense of knowledge having a secret core is very strong. It comes about as one pays the price of suffering to learn more about the secrets of the dreaming.

MS. SIMON: Most of the New York critics gave this exhibit rave reviews, but Jakamarra and Japaljarri didn't let the acclaim go to their heads. With just a few days to sight see on their first trip to New York, top priority was a trip to the Central Park Zoo to see the curious sight of animals in captivity. Still, there was work to be done. Their paintings had given Jakamarra and Japaljarri the opportunity to travel to show their art. But the source of this new found success was sand painting, a ritual with a prescribed ending. On that weekend in New York, they had made a connection with their ancestors and with nature. It was sacred and secret and powerful. And while the acrylic paintings could hang in galleries and be sold to collectors, the sand painting had to be destroyed. That's the aboriginal law. That's the dreaming.

MR. MacNeil: That aboriginal art show just closed in New York, but will be opening at the University of Chicago on January 26th and moving on to Los Angeles in May. RECAP

MR. LEHRER: Again, the major stories of this Thursday, President- elect Bush filled the last two jobs in his administration. He chose former Chief of Naval Operations James Watkins to be energy secretary and former Education Secretary William Bennett to fill the new cabinet level drug czar post and a new White House report said it would cost $81 billion to modernize the nation's nuclear weapons plants, but on the Newshour a while ago, Sen. John Glenn said as much as $200 billion would be needed to clean up contamination from the nation's nuclear weapons plants. Good night, Robin.

MR. MacNeil: Good night, Jim. That's the Newshour tonight and we'll be back tomorrow night. I'm Robert MacNeil. Good night.