Wrecking the Earth: Fracking has grave radiation risks few talk about

by Christopher Busby, who is an expert on the health effects of ionizing radiation and Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk.

RT - August 28, 2013


Environmentalists point to various dangerous consequences of using fracking technology, but none can be compared to the issue of radiation exposure and radioactive contamination of the development areas it poses.

UK government plans to use fracking technology in populated areas of the country recently drew hundreds of people to the streets in protests. Protesters pointed to the dangerous example of the US, the worldwide leader in fracking, where hydraulic fracturing (which consumes vast amounts of water) led to areas of Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and Wyoming facing a dire water crisis.

Fracking involves toxic chemicals being lowered into kilometer-deep holes drilled in the ground to isolate gas and oil from shale. The toxic chemicals can then float into lakes and rivers or contaminate the ground. Also, fracking produces a disproportionate amount of waste, including radioactive water, which then has to be dumped somewhere.

The key to fracking

Uranium is the key element to fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, to use its proper name. In the real-world version of Phineas Fogg’s “Eighty Days Around the World,” burning the ship’s masts and furniture to make steam, governments are now encouraging the oil and gas merchants to blast their way deep into the Earth to squeeze the last ounce of oil and gas from that poor creature. But there will be a terrible revenge. Locked up in the strata into which they pump the pressurized process water, to fracture and thus create the huge surface area sponge which will yield up its cargo of gas and oil, is a monstrous amount of natural uranium and its deadly daughter Radium-226. And vast amounts of the radioactive alpha emitting gas Radon-222, and its own daughters Bismuth 214, Lead-210 and the alpha emitter Polonium-210. Remember Polonium-210? That was the material used when a few millionths of a gram poisoned ex-Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko.

Deep down in the earth, there is a lot of radioactivity, which is safe enough, so long as it is not brought up to the surface. The technical term is NORM (Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material). When it is brought to the surface it becomes Technologically Enhanced, or TENORM, and it is a serious health problem near oil wells and gas production sites. It is in the production water, in the oil, in the gas, around the production sites, the groundwater, in the pipes and tanks – and in your kitchen.

The easy oil and gas deposits are those where there are subterranean reservoirs, and the oil and gas can obtained by drilling into the reservoir and then pumping down water to displace the oil back up the drill pipe. These are now running out, or are owned by people who control the flow and the price. But there are many other deposits, where the resource is spread throughout the rock, like water in a sponge. Fracking comprises any method employed to break up the solid rock, shale or sandstone to provide channels that allow the oil or gas in the strata to more easily be pumped to the surface. Fracking is not a new idea, but there are some new technologies being employed that make it easy to obtain gas economically from such hitherto unassailable rock sources. For reasons which I will outline, this development has some worrying aspects.

The gas or oil will not normally be available because it is trapped in and interspersed through solid rock. To get it out you have to drill horizontally along the solid organic clay material, the shale, (or whatever oil-bearing rock type is there) and then break that unto small pieces in various ways so that the gas or oil can be pushed by the water you pump in back to the well pipe and up to the surface. The methods of breaking up the rock and holding the subsequent channels apart vary; put together they are “fracking”.

The shale strata are between 1,000 and 8,000 feet deep. Owing the weight of rock above, the pressure on the rocks in the gas bearing strata at these depths is enormous. The drill has to pass a tube (the “gun”) along the stratum for as long a length as possible and then this has to become perforated along its length with holes that allow the gas or oil to get into the tube and up to the surface.

Historically difficult. But technology has come to the rescue in the manifestation of specially designed explosives called “shaped charges.” These are cone-shaped dense metal explosive devices that send the explosive energy in an enormously powerful directed jet of metal atoms that act as a drill and melt the rock or shale along the length of the jet. This creates a radially distributed set of channels along and around the length of the drill tube, in the shape of a bottle-cleaning brush. Once this is done, water containing a whole range of acids and chemical additives is injected under immense pressure and this is followed up by small balls and sand or grit, termed “proppant” like the pit props in a mine, to hold the channels formed open. The extreme pressure pushes the weight of the upper layers of rock upwards and releases the tension in the strata where the gas is trapped. It has been noticed that the effect of all this on geophysical stability of the local deep earth results in small earth tremors and shocks, noticed by people living nearby. But the real cause of these tremors may be more sinister.

Nuclear implications

The metal which was formerly employed for the shaped charge head or “gun” was copper. This creates a pressure of 300,000 atmospheres which pushes the rock aside by plastic deformation. But in 1984 a US patent (US 4441428) was filed by one Thomas Wilson, entitled “Conical Shaped Charge Liner of Depleted Uranium.” The patent begins: “this invention relates to a novel blasting device especially adapted for drilling oil and gas wells.” Wilson records that DU is 5-times as efficient as copper in terms of the length of the jetted hole, creating a pressure of 600,000 atmospheres. Because of the uranium’s greater chemical reactivity it actually creates new chemical compounds with the material in the rock (and the oil and gas).

The DU cuts through the rock like butter, just as the military versions of this technology, which we believe has been fitted to missiles can cut through concrete reinforced bunkers. The multiple-shaped charge explosions will certainly shake the ground. The earth tremors and earthquakes are then not so hard to explain. Where do the process water acids, chemical compounds end up? At the surface? In the local aquifer? In the local rivers? Yes. But where to the DU nanoparticles from the shaped charge end up? Perhaps the mix of process water and chemicals spilled at the surface. Perhaps in the oil or in the gas. In your kitchen? No one looks, but someone should, since we know from the Iraq wars what these things can do to human health.

In case you might think this is all scaremongering, academic and unrelated to fracking, another patent was filed more recently in 2011 (US Patent 20110000669) by Halliburton (think: oil, gas, armaments, missiles, Dick Cheney) entitled “Perforating gun assembly and method for controlling wellbore pressure during perforating”. The patent specifically refers to Depleted Uranium.

So not only is there a lot of natural radioactive material surfacing in the gas or oil stream, and the production water, there is the possibility also a lot of unnatural radioactivity coming up from the DU shaped charges. And besides the fact that Depleted Uranium is the most efficient of these shaped charge metals, let’s not forget the attraction to the US nuclear industry of a way of getting rid of its vast stocks of Depleted Uranium, or even natural Uranium, or even nuclear waste. I mean, who is going to look at the radioactivity in the process water? It will be radioactive from the Radium and Radon daughters anyway. You would need to carry out some sophisticated analysis to see if it contained any nasty man-made radionuclides, especially DU nanoparticles. Who will do that?

Fracking contamination

The issue of natural radioactivity and fracking gas was raised by my friend, Marvin Resnikoff, who was an expert on the NORM cases. He has examined the fracking situation in relation to the exploitation of the Marcellus Shale gas, New York State. He pointed out that there were two critical issues. There is the concentration of Radium-226 in the rock. Then there is the length of time it takes for the gas to get to the kitchen.

Radon has a half-life of about four days, and so if the gas takes a short time to get from the well production site to the consumer, then levels in the kitchen can be significant. He calculated that there would be between 1,000 and 30,000 extra lung cancers in New York State from such an exposure. And that no one in environmental protection agencies had paid any attention to this issue.

This is certainly of concern, but there are other issues. The process water (and chemicals) certainly contaminates the areas around the gas production machinery. In a recent court case I was involved with in Louisiana there was a gas distribution plant that was scarily radioactive, and the land around it was also radioactive. I also studied oil well production areas in a Kentucky court case. The process water dissolves Radium-226 and this precipitates as scale on the pipes and tanks and is left on the ground near the wellheads and distribution facilities. The transfer pipes are radioactive. One of the worst radionuclides left behind is the Radon daughter Lead-210 which has a longish half-life (22 years) and builds up in these situations as a fine dust. It gets into the gas stream as nanoparticles and I believe it remains in the gas stream. It decays to Bismuth-210 which immediately decays to the alpha emitter Polonium-210 with a half-life of 138 days.

Fracking will increase the amount of Radon in the extracted gas. Why? Because of the high surface area created by smashing up the rock. In the simple gas or oil well there is a big cavern. The radon seeps out of the wall which has a surface area equal to that of the cavern wall. But in the case of the fracked strata, the surface area out of which the Radon can seep is enormously enhanced. So a faster Radon transfer can occur.

Burning our ship

So I conclude that fracking carries with it some serious health issues relating to radiation exposure and local contamination, issues which, as Marvin Resnikoff points out in his articles, have not been addressed properly (or at all) by the environmental impact statements published by the operators, or by the Environmental Protection Agency in the USA. The well heads and distribution areas will become radioactively contaminated. Isolated wells along the south coast of England, the Texas-ification of Sussex being encouraged by Prime Minister David Cameron, will not be like windmills. The contamination from the process water will get into the groundwater and drinking water. And let’s not forget the Depleted Uranium.

I don’t want to be all negative: oil and gas are valuable resources, and techniques for increasing availability have to be applauded, even if examined with more caution than they have been. But let’s finish by stepping back from all of this and asking what it’s for. The short answer, of course, is that it’s for money and cheaper energy, security, independence in energy terms from remote suppliers. But we know what it’s really for. It is the necessary fuel for the continuing economic system, the market-forces-driven, short-attention-span, continued global extravaganza of manufacturing, working, buying and selling that life has now become. Of course this can’t last since (fracking or not) the fossil fuel (and other fuels) will eventually run out, and/or the limited biosphere will die off from the toxic waste products of the activity, something that is currently happening at a frightening rate. But fracking will buy them more time.

Nuclear Fiddling, While Los Alamos Burns (2 articles)

 (I've read people downplaying the dangers of Fukushima--"It's not that bad," say they. And I've read some of the same people downplaying the Fort Calhoun emergency with the same "It's not that bad." Los Alamos: 30,000 barrels of plutonium waste... the largest wildfire in New Mexico  histor...the two are less than 30 miles from one another, and the fire has breached the perimeter of the facility. Is this that bad? I'm afraid we have no idea how bad it will be.--jef) 

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Nukes, Fire and Secrecy
Burning the Truth at Los Alamos
By CAROL MILLER

The week began with news of the explosive growth of a fire bearing down on the town of Los Alamos. As of late Monday, Las Conchas fire is moving through the Jemez mountains towards the mesas and canyons of the community of Los Alamos. A photo of the hospital circulating online shows it edged by a wall of fire. We can only hope the community is spared from destruction, especially since it has never fully recovered from the trauma of the 2000 Cerro Grande fire.

Even if the outcome ultimately is a best-case scenario — a disaster averted — June 27, 2011 was day one of another major nuclear scare for New Mexico. It is difficult to write an about a situation that is changing minute by minute.

However, having been through this before, I will assume until proven wrong, that when Los Alamos burns, the first victim is the truth. Second, information will come in bits and pieces. It takes research and analysis to get at the whole truth.

For example, the official Los Alamos website reported that a fire that jumped the road into Technical Area 49, stating: "Emergency officials say the Las Conchas fire, which had burned to the southern edge of New Mexico State Route 4 at the Lab's southwest boundary, crossed the road to the north early this afternoon … About one acre burned and the Lab has detected no off-site releases of contamination."

Does that careful wording mean that releases were detected on-site and if so will anyone tell the public what the releases were? That phrasing sent me looking for information about TA 49 to learn the kinds of contamination it holds.

The site had been used years ago for underground experiments approved by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. Although the tests ended in the 1960s, TA 49 has a long paper trail documenting decades of leaks, ground water contamination by plutonium, and multiple failed efforts to stop the contamination and remediate the site. Six areas within TA 49 are designated Potential Release Sites (PRSs). A 2003 study states that on-site contamination levels at TA 49 are 40 kg of plutonium, 93 kg of uranium- 235, 170 kg of uranium-238, 11 kg of beryllium, and possibly more than 90,000 kg of lead; all toxic and very harmful to human health.

Threats from fire in Los Alamos are not just radiologic. In addition to sites contaminated by radiation, toxic chemical and heavy metal waste sites also dot the weapons compound.

Despite the number of toxic locations, Gov. Martinez joined the chorus of people saying that all hazardous materials are safe. That is just not true. She may have been assured of the safety of the small category of highly toxic radioactive elements referred to collectively as "special nuclear materials." These special nuclear materials are plutonium, uranium-233, and uranium-235. Special nuclear materials (SNM) are the guts of nuclear bombs. 

We have to hope the fire does not reach Technical Area 55, Area G, a dump filled with tens of thousands of 55 gallon drums of nuclear waste mostly just sitting on the ground. After the Cerro Grande fire in 2000 finally died and the public was allowed back into Los Alamos, I observed that only the two-lane road had kept the fire from reaching the dump. The fire last time was too close to Area G for comfort.

If the fire heads that way, it will take the perfect combination of luck and skill by our emergency responders to again protect Area G from fire. In recognition of our gratitude to the responders, we need to assure that every best practice of preventive and protective health be provided to them, including personal protective equipment.

If fire enters the bomb plant itself, more protection should be provided, including but not limited to radiation-monitoring badges, on-site laundry, as well as appropriate screening and follow-up based on actual individual exposure, and good record keeping for long term follow-up.

The failure to protect the health and safety of emergency responders during the Cerro Grande fire must not be repeated. 

Formerly a national "laboratory," the lead operator is Bechtel, a for-profit corporate octopus with tentacles around the world. Bechtel was awarded the management of Los Alamos in 2005 with the former operator the University of California demoted to a junior partner role. A nuclear bomb facility in a dangerous wildfire zone is too risky.

As we see over and over again, it is not possible to out-engineer Mother Nature. We have to once and for all finally just say no to nukes.

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The Fire This Time
By DARWIN BOND-GRAHAM

On May 4, 2000 a controlled burn on Cerro Grande Mountain, deep in the Bandelier National Monument, escaped control of the US Forest Service. The flames would rage across New Mexico's highlands for over one month until contained. It would take another month to fully extinguish. Hundreds of homes were burned to cinders, most in the city of Los Alamos, and final damage estimates were in the $1 billion range.

The Cerro Grande fire was an expansive conflagration by any standard, but what set it apart from other super-fires of the last decade was that it burned through a highly secretive government facility, the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

LANL is not just any government lab. LANL is the epicenter of the US nuclear weapons program. It is the home base of the weaponeers, the thousands of Department of Energy employees and subcontractors who have tethered their careers, livelihoods, and identities to the atom bomb's continuing role in American foreign, and domestic policy. In this respect LANL is the brain trust (or moral pit, if you prefer) of US nuclearism. LANL is also now the center of US plutonium manufacturing for nuclear weapons; the Lab is host to billion dollar factories dedicated to storing, milling (one could even say supplicating to) this most deadly material. Expansions are underway.

More generally, LANL is one of the most secretive and militaristic institutions in America. Many New Mexicans complain about the Lab as a colonizing force. Communities in its most immediate sphere of influence, the Espanola Valley, suffer from the exorbitant political influence it wields over the entire state's affairs, and the negative economic impact it bestows. The problems are deeply cultural and psychological even; the poor towns and counties downwind and downstream of LANL are among the poorest in the nation, with the highest rates of heroin and methamphetamine addiction, suffering epidemic violence, and disturbing instances of suicide, especially among the young. Living in the shadow of the lab (on clear days it's easy to spot LANL's buildings, and even one of its massive nuclear waste dumps from downtown Santa Fe), New Mexicans have long feared catastrophe.

So when the Cerro Grande fire, incinerating pine and juniper trees like match sticks, crossed onto LANL property eleven years ago and torched over 100 lab buildings, many assumed the worst. The disastrous potential then was enormous. Spread across 43 square miles, LANL is made up of dozens of "technical areas." Many of these technical areas were the sites of toxic and radioactive experimentation throughout the Cold War, and deadly materials are scattered about the lab's soil, concentrated in the canyons by runoff, and bioaccumulated in some vegetation.

When news broke that Cerro Grande was torching Lab property, burning buildings to the ground, downwind communities such as San Ildefonso and Santa Clara Peublos, and Santa Fe panicked, assuming that radioactive and toxic fallout were headed toward them in volatile clouds of ash and smoke. Worse still was the fear that one of LANL's nuclear waste dumps, such as Area G, might be blazing, lifting huge concentrations of radioactivity in the atmosphere.

At the time my organization (which I did not yet serve on the board of), the Los Alamos Study Group, chartered a plane and made several flights over the Lab and fire areas. Like the rest of the community, the news media, and even the Department of Energy itself, we were being kept in the dark about what was going on at the Lab. The Lab's hierarchy, then a management team of men appointed by the University of California's Board of Regents, kept as much of the disaster a secret as possible. It was impossible to know if the worst was occurring.

New Mexico and the nation escaped the worst then. The fire certainly did have numerous ecological and health consequences for New Mexico, but the fears of mass radioactive contamination have since proven unfounded according to many scientific studies. Of course some locals vehemently counter these same studies with tales of cancers and birth defects among their family, and their farm animals, and note that the researchers who have "proven" no significant exposure from the fire event were on the payroll of the lab. True enough, and we will never really know all of what happened, and what costs we bear from it. Such is the nature of the technoscientific age of "progress" and poison we are steeped in.

In the end though, Cerro Grande, for all its feel of catastrophism, proved a bullet mostly dodged. The Lab vowed in Boy Scout fashion to be prepared and built a $21 million Emergency Operations Center out of which to coordinate future responses to fires and, after 9-11, other kinds of "unforseen" events.

Yet here we are again, in 2011 with a raging wildfire, this one already 50% larger than Cerro Grande, still growing, and moving faster, according to veteran firefighters. It's being called the Las Conchas fire. It too temporarily breached LANL property, although having not yet burned any Lab buildings, and has caused the company town of Los Alamos, where many of the Lab's weaponeers live, to evacuate.

It would be a mistake, however, to again fixate on the most immediate images of catastrophe this blaze conjures. The fears are so great, especially in the wake of the tsunami that has caused meltdowns at several of Japan's nuclear reactors, and the predictable and deplorable actions of that government and the giant Tokyo Electric Power Company in keeping the extensiveness of that radiological disaster secret. Even so, the likelihood that Las Conchas will rupture nuclear waste drums stored at Area G, or send up deadly plumes of legacy radioactive wastes from contaminated soils and plants is slim.

All this is not to say that Las Conchas isn't a disaster, or that severe dangers don't lurk in the flames. In fact it's much worse than any of this fixation on possible radioactive contamination implies. The Las Conchas fire is a major disaster tucked into a larger and unfolding world-shattering catastrophe. It is among a cohort of wildfires that may be phasing in a new ecology in the American West, one without forests. The scientific literature is overflowing with studies of the current impacts of rising average temperatures and reduced precipitation on forests lands. 

Future models forecasting the effects of such trends have been run countless times with different data sets. While there are a range of findings, the majority point toward greatly increased stresses upon western North American forests due to climate change. There are even detailed studies, nearly all of them, indicating that climatic changes will increase the number and severity of fire events beyond the parameters reconstructed through paleodendrological evidence. Wildfires are likely be the punctual culmination of various stresses, in one quick moment transforming forests into deserts where trees may never again grow in any great numbers.

As Chip Ward has written about the recent Wallow Fire in Arizona:

"These past few years, mega-fires in the West have become ever more routine. Though their estimates and measurements may vary, the experts who study these phenomena all agree that wildfires today are bigger, last longer and are more frequent. A big fire used to burn perhaps 30 square miles. Today, wildfires regularly scorch 150-square-mile areas. Global warming, global weirding, climate change--whatever you prefer to call it--is not just happening in some distant, melting Arctic land out of a storybook. It is not just burning up far-away Russia. It's here now. The seas have warmed, ice caps are melting and the old reliable ocean currents and atmospheric jet streams are jumping their tracks."

It is such a terrible irony that the fire that symbolizes the future of western North America blazes on the edge of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In recent years, especially under Obama, LANL has seen its budget grow quickly, fueling a construction boom of nuclear weapons capital projects. Billions of dollars worth of construction is taking place within a lab site known as the "Pajarito Corridor". The biggest project, around which all else revolves, is the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Project (CMRR), a boorishly descriptive yet also magniloquent name for a nuclear weapons factory that is designed to boost the lab's manufacturing capacity for bomb pits, the small spheres of plutonium metal that make a nuclear weapon go boom.

Last year there was some news of the Obama administration's pact with Senate Republicans to spend upwards of $180 billion on new nuclear weapons infrastructure far into the future. LANL's capital projects are the costliest single component of this larger portfolio of American nuclear militarism. The CMRR itself will cost over $6 billion when all is said and done. Alone the CMRR is the biggest construction project in New Mexico's history excepting perhaps the highways system. All together the construction boom at LANL might rival even that.

New Mexico is burning. The southwest is burning. It's not just the Las Conchas fire. There have reportedly been 1000 fires around the state in the last year. There are upwards of 40 major fires burning across New Mexico right now. Las Conchas probably just became the biggest fire in New Mexico's history.

While building nuclear weapons might not quite be fiddling, you get the idea. While America burns, its leaders are busy pouring scarce money and manpower into nuclear weapons. The fire in New Mexico is both symbolic and literal in this sense.

Earlier this year New Mexico's senior Senator Jeff Bingaman proudly announced to his constituents how the federal budget his party crafted would boost public lands, and environmental projects in the state. For public lands? $28 million in projects including, $8.8 million to replace the old and unsafe lighting and electrical system in Carlsbad Caverns National Park; $3.5 million for operations at the Valles Caldera National Preserve (which is now burning in the Las Conchas fire), and; $3.4 million to purchase the 5,000-acre Miranda Canyon property adjacent to the Carson National Forest in Taos County.

Bravo Jeff.

LANL's budget for 2011 exceeds $2 billion. They're building a fence around LANL's plutonium factory that alone will cost hundreds of millions. While the feds spend chump change to make pretend investments in our dying public lands, replacing light bulbs at Carlsbad Caverns and such, they're pumping billions into a bomb factory in the high desert.

Non-Proliferation Efforts

47 nations at US nuke summit agree to four years of non-proliferation efforts

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

A 47-nation summit in Washington agreed Tuesday to lock up the world's most vulnerable nuclear materials within four years to prevent terrorists from setting off a global "catastrophe."

The unprecedented gathering met the challenge posed by President Barack Obama, who said the world was littered with poorly guarded fissile material that militant groups could use to build a horrific weapon.

"We welcome and join President Obama's call to secure all vulnerable nuclear material in four years, as we work together to enhance nuclear security," the leaders said in a joint communique due to be released shortly and seen by AFP.

They outlined voluntary, yet only partly defined measures to combat nuclear trafficking, including sharing information and detection, forensics and law enforcement expertise.

The leaders said they "recognize the need for cooperation among states to effectively prevent and respond to incidents of illicit nuclear trafficking."

They also underlined that the "essential role" in combating nuclear proliferation rests with the UN watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Increased security must "not infringe upon the rights of states to develop and utilize nuclear energy for peaceful purposes and technology," summit participants said.

Hosting the largest summit in the United States in over six decades, Obama pressed China to back UN sanctions on Iran over its controversial nuclear program.

Amid mixed signals from Beijing, Chinese President Hu Jintao told the summit that Beijing "firmly" opposes atomic weapons proliferation, while backing civilian uses.

On what are commonly referred to as loose nukes, Obama pressed his guests "not simply to talk, but to act."
"Nuclear materials that could be sold or stolen and fashioned into a nuclear weapon exist in dozens of nations," Obama said.

He said radioactive material as small as an apple was enough to kill thousands of people.

"Terrorist networks such as Al-Qaeda have tried to acquire the material for a nuclear weapon, and if they ever succeed, they would surely use it," the president said.

"It would be a catastrophe for the world -- causing extraordinary loss of life, and striking a major blow at global peace and stability."

Mexico gave Obama's initiative a boost by agreeing to give up weapons-grade uranium. Ex-Soviet Ukraine and Canada made similar pledges on Monday after Chile's earlier moves.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced plans to spend up to 2.5 billion dollars to dispose of plutonium from its massive defense program.

Russia and the United States also signed a new protocol pledging to complete the disposal of 34 tonnes of excess weapons-grade plutonium each, enough to make 17,000 weapons.

In parallel with the drive against loose nukes, Obama used the summit to drum up support on the US drive to slap a fourth round of UN sanctions against Iran over its nuclear drive.

Washington accuses Tehran of seeking to produce nuclear weapons, but Iran insists it is only pursuing civilian nuclear power.

Obama discussed the sanctions with Hu, a crucial partner since China, a big economic partner of Iran, has veto power in the UN Security Council.

China's foreign ministry meanwhile reaffirmed its long-held skepticism about the need for sanctions, saying that "pressure and sanctions cannot fundamentally solve" the standoff.

But the White House was optimistic about chances of getting China on board.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who backs sanctions, said she was "very hopeful."

Obama also met with the leaders of Brazil and Turkey, both non-permanent members of the UN Security Council reluctant to support sanctions.

In his address to the summit, Hu gave few clues, saying China opposed nuclear weapons proliferation, while also underlining that China backs "the equal right of all countries to the peaceful use of nuclear energy."

The New York Times reported that Obama was offering to help China maintain steady fuel deliveries if sanctions against Iran led to a disruption of oil supplies.

Iran defiantly said it was organizing its own nuclear conference to be held in Tehran on Saturday and Sunday with foreign ministers from 15 countries.

A manual on securing stocks of separated plutonium and weapons grade uranium, as well as advice on how to dispose of the dangerous materials, was issued at the end of the Washington summit.

However, all the steps are voluntary and the plan for accomplishing the four-year plan remains sketchy.