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Do You Need a Government Agency to Fly Into Space?; New Proposal to Weed Out Spam E-Mails; Sneak Peak at Upcoming Videogames

Aired May 11, 2003 - 17:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, HOST: Today on NEXT@CNN for this Mother's Day, Sunday, May 11, we'll talk with some contestants in a new race for space. Folks who say you don't need a government agency to send people into space.
We'll explore a novel proposal for weeding out all that e-mail spam, a plan that would hit spammers in the pocket book.

And video game lovers, heads up. Later in the show, we're going to give you a sneak peek at some upcoming hot titles. Get those joysticks ready.

But first, more tornadoes ripped through the Midwest overnight, continuing what the National Weather Service says is likely the most intense week of tornado activity in the U.S. since record keeping began in the 1950s. Strong tornadoes swept across parts of Illinois, Missouri and Kentucky. And these are pictures from South Pekin, Illinois, about 10 miles south of Peoria. The tornado that hit there damaged as many as 100 homes and injured nearly two-dozen people.

And in Kentucky, property damage was extensive in areas south and east of Louisville. Roofs were ripped off, and cars tossed around and trailers even knocked off their foundations. So is the end finally in sight for the twister outbreak?

Joining us now with some answers is Arch Kennedy. Arch, what's the very latest.

ARCH KENNEDY, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Yes, Fredricka, we're going to breathe a sigh of relief across much of the east by tomorrow, as this system finally is going to pick up some northeast speed and move on off into the Atlantic. Now, we are dealing with severe weather for the evening. And we're looking at places in the northeast, specifically New York State, Pennsylvania, and also the deep south, Georgia, parts of southern Alabama looking at some severe thunderstorms.

Now, I want to zoom in a little closer and show you what's going on presently. We don't have any tornado warnings to report, but right now a watch box still in effect for a lot of central New York State. This includes the Syracuse area toward Binghamton, and you can see a lot of these strong storms that continue to push their way toward the north.

Also the south, we're looking at severe weather, severe thunderstorm watch in effect for parts of southern Alabama and Georgia. We're looking at the potential for large hail, damaging winds and a lot of heavy rain here. All right, the severe weather threat greatest across the northeast. The system, again, moving across the Great Lakes, eventually through the Northeast tomorrow. Areas shaded in red where we're looking at the possibility of tornadoes as well as damaging winds and large hail. Again, you look at some intense lightning.

Where is it going? The system moving off the Northeast tomorrow. That means improving conditions, still lingering rain toward the northeast, but much of the eastern half of the country will be calming down. Why are we getting this? Why did we see this whole week of ten days of severe weather? A real big trough in the west started picking up these impulses through the plain states. This is the pattern we saw for about a ten-day period. This ridge now flattening out, and we'll see a calmer pattern across the country -- Fredricka.

WHITFIELD: All right, thanks a lot, Arch.

Emergency teams in Seattle and Chicago will face some of their worst nightmares tomorrow and Tuesday. Fortunately, they'll be coping with simulated disasters.

But as Jeanne Meserve reports, the exercise could save lives if a real crisis comes along.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JEANNE MESERVE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Right here at 3:00 Monday afternoon a dirty bomb will detonate spewing radioactivity. On Tuesday, hospitals in Chicago will start to see an influx of victims of pneumonic plague. None of it will be real.

TOM RIDGE, HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY: Let me be very, very clear. This is a simulation. This is a test. This is an exercise.

MESERVE: Like red teaming exercises conducted by the military, Topoff 2, as the exercise is called, will involve an enemy, in this case a terrorist group called GLODO, probing to expose weaknesses.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They are a fantastic way to identify gaps, friction points, areas of concern that haven't been fully addressed.

MESERVE: The last topoff exercise certainly did. It simulated a radiological attack in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and a biological attack in Denver, Colorado.

RIDGE: The lessons they learned with regard to Topoff 1 in Denver, Colorado in public health, in the pharmaceutical stockpile and the distribution mechanism affected policy and, frankly, affected what HHS and Center for Disease Control did. So there are lessons to be learned that can be applied across the country.

MESERVE: Another exercise "Dark Winter" simulated a small pox epidemic and its aftermath. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't know if you just heard that. That was a shot fired. There's another one.

MESERVE: Jerome Howard played the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

JEROME HOWARD, HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES: It was a real struggle because we only had 16 million doses of small pox vaccine available. And one of the huge challenges we had was deciding who got vaccinated. We rapidly ran out of vaccine.

MESERVE: The concrete result, the government now has enough vaccine to cover the entire country.

(on camera): Because of precooked scenarios and watered down after action reports, not every lesson that could be learned has been learned from previous exercises. With a price tag of $16 million, some homeland security officials say this one has the potential to be either a real boon to homeland security or a real boondoggle.

Jeanne Meserve, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WHITFIELD: There is a whole lot more still to come at NEXT@CNN. We'll introduce you to a brand new species researchers have just discovered. And what about spammers clogging up your in box? We'll explore one possible solution to the junk e-mail wrangle.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

WHITFIELD: Well, taking a look at some NEXT news headlines. Scientists have found a new species of jellyfish that has arms rather than tentacles. It's reddish and a yard wide, hence the name big red. They found 23 of the creatures off the San Francisco area, and Hawaii, Japan and Mexico. That's about all scientists know about big red so far. They don't know what it eats, how it reproduces or even if the samples rather they found are male or female.

Well, it had to happen, the famous e-mail scam usually known as the Nigerian letter has appeared in a new form the Iraqi letter, of course. Well, in the classic version of this con game, a person claiming to be a Nigerian official offers millions in exchange for your help in getting his money out of the country. Of course, all you need to do is send him your bank account number. Well, in the updated version the writer says he's a brother of the girlfriend of Saddam Hussein's son Uday. Don't fall for it.

Well, how many junk e-mails like that Iraqi letter clog your in box every day? 20, 30? Maybe even 100? Well, aren't you ready to pull your hair out? You're not alone. Here's CNN's Bruce Burkhardt.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BRUCE BURKHARDT, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Lose weight, find love, regrow hair, add three inches to your credit report, or something like that. It seems a quaint, outdated notion that you originally signed up for e-mail to get messages from people you know about things you actually care about. Enter spam. Not the nutritional product. The junk e-mail clogging private mailboxes and big computer networks. Bad taste, more filling. And in the past few months growing by leaps and bounds.

In a federal court case in Buffalo, New York this week, the Internet service provider Earthlink won a $16 million judgment against a spammer accused of sending more than three quarters of a billion unwanted e-mails in a single year by a phony Earthlink addresses. AOL Time Warner, parent of CNN estimates that 75 percent of its incoming e-mail traffic is spam these days. And the Federal Trade Commission says two-thirds of spam e-mail contains demonstrably false claims. Then there are the most more personal e-mails. Lots of women and a few men would like to show me all of their pictures. Then there's this one. A spam e-mail about spam. A spam-it-yourself kit for $129. Spam, spam and more spam.

Many of the come-ons are the electronic age versions of snake-oil pitches, but unlike junk mail that you get in your mailbox, electronic spam is virtually cost free to the sender. Its defenders say it's constitutionally protected free speech, but for most recipients, it's time to put e-mail spam back in the can. Dream vacation, huh.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WHITFIELD: Well, what to do about the rising tide of unsolicited bulk e-mail, our next guest has a novel suggestion or two. Make spammers pay to send it.

Joining us now is Declan McCullagh, Cnet news.com's Washington correspondent. Declan, you say spam is not a technological or a legal problem but it's an economic one. What do you mean?

DECLAN MCCULLAGH, CNET NEWS.COM: That's exactly right. Spam is a problem because the right people aren't paying for it. We are paying to receive spam. We pay for our dialup, or DSL or cable model accounts, and we get spammed. What we need to do is have something similar to the physical world, where if someone wants to send us a piece of junk mail through the postal system, they're actually going to have to put maybe ten cents, 20 cents on that envelope. And so, we need to find a way to charge spammers and shift the costs from the recipients. Because I know I waste a lot of time deleting spam back to the sender where it belongs.

WHITFIELD: Well, who sets that up?

MCCULLAGH: Well, it is going to take -- this is not something that's going to happen overnight but it's something that desperately needs to happen. We need to find a way to start charging spammers micropayments. We're going to have to have some sort of an electronic guard dog that guards our e-mail inboxes and says, hey, if you want to reach me, give me a five-cent deposit. And if it's not a spammer, if it's legitimate e-mail, I have never talked to you before, I will return it. But that would quickly bankrupt spammers. It would make it uneconomical for them to send out millions or billions of spam messages.

WHITFIELD: Well, good luck. That sounds like that may take some time before that could ever happen. How about the Federal Trade Commission? What can they do, if anything?

MCCULLAGH: Well, the FTC does have the power to go after -- that is file lawsuits against spam that's fraudulent, deceptive, that kind of stuff. And they have taken some steps, but it's not enough and it can't be enough. Half of spam now comes from overseas. Even if we got rid of all U.S. spammers in the next minute, spam is doubling every few months. We'll be back to where we are right now in a few months. And that's unacceptable. So, we need to find a way to go after overseas spammers. That's why laws won't work, or at least aren't the entirety of the solution. So we need some way to make them pay either in cash or, this is a nice idea called hash cash that I have written about, that would make their computers do some arbitrarily complex math calculation that might take five seconds or so, if they actually want to get past your electronic guard dog. That would also make it economical for them to send spam.

WHITFIELD: So, here's another potential tool. Challenge response software. What is that? Is it sort of like a firewall, in effect, but works to kind of combat or net some of this spam?

MCCULLAGH: What it does it divides your inbox into two different lists. The first is known senders, your friends, your family, people you sent mail to. And lets them get past this electronic guard dog without challenge. But if you've never sent mail to me before and I have some challenge response software, my guard dog is going to reply and say, click on this link or answer this question if you want to get by my guard dog and into my e-mail inbox. The question could be something like what color is an orange? Something that a human could answer without a problem, but a computer couldn't. Or at least a computer couldn't without some real serious artificial intelligence that we don't have.

WHITFIELD: If only we had something like that for the telephones for solicitors Declan. All right. Good to see you.

Well, still to come at NEXT@CNN, is North Korea really processing plutonium for nuclear weapons? We'll see what clues an expert can find in images of the Korean nuclear complex, when we come right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

WHITFIELD: What would we do without that velcro? Tensions continue to run high over just what the North Koreans may be doing at the Pyongyang nuclear site, north the capital city of Pyongyang. The catch phrase of the crisis is plutonium reprocessing. But what does that mean? And what about it has the U.S. so concerned?

Miles O'Brien got to the bottom of those questions when he spoke with an expert, David Albright, earlier this week.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) MILES O'BRIEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): So how big is the nuclear threat in North Korea? A question a lot of us has been asking of late. It is a question also the Bush administration is trying to answer. Part of the reason there's increasing concern about North Korea has to do with this idea of reprocessing and creating plutonium. But what is this process? And why would it be seen as a threat? And how could the west possibly defect it.

Joining me to sort through a lot of this information is David Albright. He is a physicist and president of the Institute for Science and International Security or, much easier, ISIS in Washington. Mr. Albright, good to have you with us again.

DAVID ALBRIGHT, INST. FOR SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY: Good to be here.

O'BRIEN: All right, big picture first of all, as we - I want to get into the map here and move in on the location that has been the focus of so much attention, Pyongyang. Is that, as best we know, really the only place that the North Koreans have focused their attention on creating fizzle materials, nuclear materials?

ALBRIGHT: Well, in terms of making plutonium, that's the only site that we know of. There's another site, which is unknown, where they're preparing to make another fissile material called highly enriched uranium. And that's at the heart of this controversy. But, again, the United states does not know where that is.

O'BRIEN: All right, let's give people the lay of the land. This is Pyongyang, and this imagery which comes to us from space imaging. And as we zoom in on this five-megawatt reactor, I want to ask one thing first of all. This reactor here that produces five megawatts of electricity, how much electricity really is that?

ALBRIGHT: It's a very small amount. It feeds a local grid. It's not significant. It's certainly not the reason the reactor was built. The reactor was built by North Korea to make plutonium that could be used in nuclear weapons, and to recover costs and derive some of the benefit of the heat generated by the reactor, it produces electricity.

O'BRIEN: All right, I've highlighted the reactor here. Right next to it is the place where the reprocessing occurs, is that correct? Or is that in the other facility?

ALBRIGHT: No, that's another. That's where the irradiated fuel that comes out of the reactor after a few years and that's stored there. It has to be protected ...

O'BRIEN: So, fuel rods.

ALBRIGHT: Yes, fuel rods. And it's where the plutonium is.

O'BRIEN: All right. And let me just show you one thing. I want to give you a sense of how the west is able to determine if this facility is up and running. We have an image which was captured. And I am going to overlay it. Look on the right-hand part of your screen. It's from March 8. And as you can see there, that cooling tower suddenly has some steam coming from it. What does that tell you, David Albright? I'll toggle back and forth as you talk about it.

ALBRIGHT: What that says is they're trying to eject heat from the reactor. The reactor's on, producing heat and that they're trying to get rid of it.

O'BRIEN: So, in theory, what's happening there is they're creating the building blocks for plutonium because essentially what you do is you have to have fission to create plutonium?

ALBRIGHT: That's right. And so, there is neutrons produced in the fissioning. Those neutrons strike some other uranium, atoms. And then that becomes plutonium.

O'BRIEN: All right, we are going about a mile away as the crow flies. The same facility to the reprocessing plant that I jumped the gun on. And this long building here is the focus of a lot of attention. What goes on inside this building?

ALBRIGHT: Well, when you have the irradiated fuel -- the plutonium exists in there in a very diluted form. So, what you want to do is basically find a way to get the plutonium out of all this other uranium, this radioactive material that has been produced by the fissioning of uranium. So, basically, it's a very elaborate chemical dissolving process and separation process, where you end up with some plutonium either in a powder form or perhaps as kind of a metal puck.

O'BRIEN: All right, you know what? Let's show people how it works. We've created an animation here. And I want to just offer up a bit of a disclaimer here. This is symbolic-type animation. We don't know precisely what it looks like there. Obviously, there is no human intelligence on the ground that we would have access to anyway. But to the extent that this shows at least schematically how processes work, we're going to run through it here.

First of all, the point to be made here, David Albright, is that this stuff, once it comes out, these spent fuel rods are real hot, aren't they?

ALBRIGHT: That's right. They're very radioactive. They can be hot. And they are moved from the spent fuel pond to the radiochemical laboratory by truck. And they are moved in in canisters, the fuel is taken out mechanically, remotely, because it's radioactive.

O'BRIEN: And we've shown one rod here. Typically, what they do is take about 20 of them, and they stick them in a vat, just like you see here. What goes on when those rods go in the vat?

ALBRIGHT: Well, the first vat would really dissolve off this. It's a cladding, a metal cladding around the uranium metal fuel. And you would dissolve it off. After that cladding is dissolved off then you would put it into another vat looking similar to this where you would actually dissolve the uranium metal, which contains plutonium. And that would go into a solution. And the you would be trying to separate off the plutonium, from the uranium, from the radioactive byproducts.

O'BRIEN: And while this is going on you create something called krypton 85.

ALBRIGHT: Right.

O'BRIEN: And that krypton 85 is very useful given the fact that there are no inspectors on the ground there in North Korea for the west to monitor what's going on there. Tell us what happens with krypton 85?

ALBRIGHT: Well, Krypton 85 is emitted when the fuel is dissolved. And it's a radioactive material which is inert, it doesn't react with anything. It goes long distance. And it survives in the environment a long time because it's half life is ten years. And so you can actually detect this material at a distance. I would assume that some embassies friendly to us in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea have krypton 85 detection equipment. There may be floating platforms on ships that the United States may deploy. And it's a really solid indicator of reprocessing activity.

O'BRIEN: All right. And, presumably, that knowledge is in the hands of the United States if that krypton 85 exists. Finally the last step in all of this, it goes into sort of a glove box. And, eventually, what happens is it's purified, reprocessed, sifted, if you will, down to these kind of hockey pucks. The idea is to get about 11 pounds worth of plutonium per weapons. Doing the math and all that, how long would it take North Korea to produce a weapon?

ALBRIGHT: Well, you can go another way. But, basically, what these hockey pucks are metal, maybe a kilogram or two kilograms in mass, and that they are then take and purified further, or melted in cast and shaped, and then turned into nuclear weapons components. Now, it typically, with the North Korean plant, is could make about a bomb's worth of plutonium every month from the irradiator fuel.

O'BRIEN: All right, and then just shortly, do you think that's what they are doing right this moment?

ALBRIGHT: It looks like it. It looks like the plant is operating. There's always some uncertainty about that. Krypton 85 has not been defected as far as I know. But I think there is a growing consensus that they're in the early stages of operating the radiochemical laboratory.

O'BRIEN: All right, David Albright. Thanks for explaining all that for us. We appreciate it. It helps us understand quite a bit.

ALBRIGHT: Sure, thank you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

O'BRIEN: A lot more on this topic coming after NEXT@CNN in an hour special on the North Korean nuclear threat. Anderson Cooper hosts "North Korea: The Nuclear Gamble" next, 6:00 p.m. Eastern time. WHITFIELD: But first, don't go away, there's lots more to come right here on NEXT@CNN, including a new race to reach space. We could see a winner in this contest by the end of the year.

That story and more when NEXT returns.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(NEWSBREAK)

WHITFIELD: NEXT@CNN continues right now.

A new space race is emerging. This time, not between two superpower governments but instead among private organizations racing to put a person into space without any government help.

Miles O'Brien returns with a story of a leader of the pack.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

O'BRIEN (voice-over): California's high desert has long been home to shimmering dreams and wild ideas of new ways to fly higher, faster, longer than ever before.

BURT RUTAN, DESIGN AND BUILD VOYAGER: I like to do far out things with airplanes.

O'BRIEN: And no one has pushed the envelope of flight more than Burt Rutan, the legendary airplane designer who build the first plane to fly nonstop around the world on a single tank of gas. Today, Rutan has his sites fixed on sending humans to space.

RUTAN: Roughly three years ago, I decided that I have done enough -- I have done a little bit of testing. I have done a lot of design. I decided that, yes, I think I can pull this off.

O'BRIEN: With funding from a wealthy unnamed investor, his company Scaled Composites designed, built and is now testing a two- ship concept. It recalls Mohabi's (ph) glory days in the '60s when intrepid test pilots flew the X-15 rocket plane to the edge of space.

RUTAN: Well, I'm 6'4", weigh about 230. I wouldn't design it for something that I couldn't get in, right?

O'BRIEN: Rutan's Space Ship One has room for three. How does it feel?

RUTAN: I'll you when we go to space. It certainly has lot of room. This is a bigger ship than we needed to do the research, but I wanted to make the point that something this size, which would give people a nice comfortable cabin, can be done at those costs.

O'BRIEN: Rutan also has his eye on the $10-million x-prize, promised to the first privately funded team to fly three people to the edge of space at 62 miles up, return safely and then do it again within two weeks. Rutan won't say how much his project will cost, but it's probably at least twice the x-prize purse. He says he has other motivations.

RUTAN: If I can be just the inspiration, by carefully and properly and safely showing that it really is cheap to fly people to space, and 20 years from now there are thousands or hundreds at least of different ships that you can buy tickets on.

O'BRIEN: Space Ship One would begin its ride to space latched to the belly of an airplane, or is it a bird, or even two? Whatever. It's called white knight. At 50,000 feet the pair would part company and, as astronaut in training Pete Seybold showed us in this simulator, the rocket would fire, sending the craft almost straight up in about a minute.

RUTAN: They were all floating around completely. We got about 3 1/2 minutes of weightlessness. You can see outside. You'll have a full view of the stars and you will be able to see the earth from space.

O'BRIEN: Space Ship One is designed to renter the atmosphere like a shuttle cock and then glide to a runway landing. It's a deceptively simple approach. Check out mission control on wheels. And except for the state-of-the-art composite structures, none of this technology is even new, much less exotic.

RUTAN: You've got to try something that's nonsense to have a break through. That's why we haven't had any breakthroughs in development of space ships since the 60s, because we don't have the guts to try things that may not work.

O'BRIEN: Burt Rutan has an uncanny way of attaining his own lofty goals. He hopes to be in space by the end of the year, in time to celebrate the centennial of the Wright Brothers first flight, another milestone logged by mavericks who dared to dream.

Miles O'Brien, CNN.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WHITFIELD: Well, joining us from Los Angeles is Rick Tomlinson, the founder of Space Frontier Foundation, and the man who organized the flight of the first space tourist, Dennis Tito. Good to see you.

RICK TOMLINSON, SPACE FRONTIER FOUNDATION: How are you?

WHITFIELD: You helped organize Dennis Tito, as well as Mark Shuttleworth being on the Soyuz. How do you compare the private ventures now with those?

TOMLINSON: Well, first I'll say I didn't really have any involvement in the Shuttleworth, but it was the beginning of a trend with Dennis. Those people flew for a week and paid tens of millions of dollars to do so. The vehicles that we're looking at here are going to take you up for a few minutes for a few hundred thousand or maybe 100 thousand. But, again, what we're doing here is really unleashing market forces. Those people flew on basically government vehicles to a government facility, which is incredible expensive to do. So Once we see these new vehicles starting to fly, we're going to see competition, prices are going to come down. And the ability to go and stay is going to go up.

WHITFIELD: And those trying to be competitive, we saw Burt Rutan, his venture. And we saw that his organization really just might not be the only private organization, as you said. It will be getting competitive. Who else is out there?

TOMLINSON: Absolutely. Right across the street is a little outfit called X Corp. Their just very excellent firm. Then there is Pioneer Rocket Plane. Armadillo Aerospace, which is being funded by John Carmack, who created the games Quake and Doom. A fellow Elan Musk, who created Pay Pal, building a rocket right here in Los Angeles. There are lots of different firms that are looking to this potential market, people who have really given up on the government space program and said, we're going to do it ourselves.

WHITFIELD: Well, the government's space program doesn't seem like it's going away. But we talk about the competition. Are these private ventures really giving NASA a run for its money?

TOMLINSON: It would be great if they were. There's a weird contrast where NASA's building something called the orbital space plan, where they are going to drop $10 billion or so. And as you just heard, these vehicles are being built for a few tens of millions. What we'd really like to see is NASA, let's say, open up the transportation of the space station a competition from these guys and let them go at it. I bet the prices would plummet. And we would see hotels in space, all kinds of great things happening.

WHITFIELD: All right, you see it being a very crowded field within perhaps the next 20 years then?

TOMLINSON: You know, I think that's what's going to happen. I think we are going to see a lot of different vehicles, a lot of different firms, a lot of competition. And, again, it's like high definition television. It starts expensive and the prices start to drop. And I think we are going to start seeing that in space fairly quickly.

WHITFIELD: All right, Rick Tomlinson, thank you very much. Good to see you.

TOMLINSON: Thank you.

WHITFIELD: Well, coming up, next, another space story. We'll show you the launch of a rocket designed to do something that's never been done before.

Also ahead, veterans exposed to radiation from nuclear tests get another chance for compensation.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

WHITFIELD: Right now in Waco, Texas a memorial service is under way for a killer tornado, the tenth most lethal in U.S history, that devastated the downtown area of this city. Fifty years ago today, also on a mother's day, May 11 1953, 113 people died.

Taking a look at other stories making news on the science tech beat this week. Japan launched a spacecraft that is supposed to collect samples from an asteroid and bring them back to earth. The unmanned Muses-C probe was carried into space on an M-5 rocket on Friday. If it succeeds, it will be the first spacecraft to make a round trip to an asteroid.

A rare celestial event this week. The planet Mercury passed between earth and the sun on Wednesday. Viewed through eye protecting filters, it looked like a tiny dot crawling across the sun. Well, this lineup of mercury, earth and the sun will only happen 14 times this century.

NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency held a ribbon cutting ceremony on Wednesday to publicize a new energy source at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The center is now using landfill gas for energy, the first federal facility to do so. Methane gas travels five miles by pipeline from the landfill to the boilers at Goddard. NASA says the project will save taxpayers $3.5 million over the next ten years.

Africa has its first cloned animal. It's a Holstein calf unveiled today, or Wednesday rather, at an animal reproduction facility northwest of Johannesburg. The heifer was cloned from a single cell taken from the ear of a champion milk cow. Scientists say the calf is healthy and her markings are almost identical to those of the donor cow.

This week, a scientific panel said the government was vastly underestimating how much radiation troops were exposed to during U.S. nuclear tests in the '40s, '50s and '60s. It's prompted the veterans administration to reopen the cases of some 18,000 who had been refused compensation for their ailments.

Kathleen Koch has the story.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Three, two, one, fire.

KATHLEEN KOCH, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Nuclear test blast submitting deadly radiation watched during the 40s, 50s and 60s by nearly 400,000 service men. Ken Kendall was an army corporal stationed in the Nevada desert.

KEN KENDALL, NEVADA TEST SITE VETERAN: When the explosions would go off, the shockwave come towards us. We could watch it come across the desert floor. And as it went underneath our feet, if is like an earthquake going underneath our feet. And it was raised in a cloud of dust four to five feet up in the air.

KOCH: Some developed cancers and were compensated, but many others were turned down because the military said their exposure was too low to have caused their illnesses. Now, a scientific panel has found the Pentagon underestimated the amount of radiation many of the servicemen received.

JOHN TILL, NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL: For example, was it gamma exposure? In those cases, it might be a factor of two or three too low. Neutrons maybe three to five too low. In the case of inhalation which would have only affected a small number of the veterans, the doses could be underestimated by factors of ten to 100.

KOCH: The study insists the correct levels would still be too low to cause most cancers, but other experts say the inhalation cases are serious.

ARJUN MAKIHIJANI, INST. FOR ENERGY & ENV. RESEARCH: The doses are ten or 100 times higher and the uncertainties are that big that those exposures would often be comparable or in the same range as received by many Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors.

KOCH: Veterans attorneys charge the government underestimated to avoid paying damages.

DAVID CYNAMON, ATTORNEY: We believe it's deliberate. It's hard to see how it could be otherwise.

KOCH: But the report blames the low estimates on the fact that many servicemen didn't wear or weren't given film badges that registered their exposure. And questionable assumptions were made about where the men were and for how long. The veterans administration says it will not re-examine the cases of 18,000 veterans that had been denied compensation. But it's unclear how many are still alive.

VICE ADM. DAN COOPER, V.A. UNDER SECRETARY: All of that takes time, a little bit cumbersome. But the fact is, as we do it, we'll be looking specifically at the veteran, what can we do? If we can make sure that he gets the advantage of the doubt.

KOCH: Kendall, who has chronic skin problems he believes were caused by radiation exposure says veterans deserve at least that.

KENDALL: I love my country. I think it's the greatest country in the world, but we have been used and lied to.

KOCH: Kathleen Koch, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WHITFIELD: Still to come, what will your kids be asking for come Christmas time? No doubt some clues will come out at the video game industry's annual extravaganza set for next week. And we'll have a preview coming up next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

WHITFIELD: This is one rare rock, billions of years old from outer space. It's among a handful of meteorites that we have actually have a clue where it came from. Usually when a rock flies in from outer space, it burns up before it ever hits the ground. And if it does land it's rarely found. This meteorite is different. Recovered after thousands of people in Europe spotted the fireball streaking across the night sky last April. It was tracked by instruments. Scientists figured it has the same orbit as another rare meteorite that was observed falling to earth back in April 1959.

Reporting in the journal "Nature," researchers were amazed to find two rocks 43 years apart with the same orbit. From the orbit they determined these rocks came from an area in space where possibly millions of other asteroids may be lurking. The concern that a bigger rock could one day make a similar trek, slam into earth with more devastating results. This recently discovered meteorite weighs about four pounds, and is thought to be a piece of a much larger asteroid that was around at the birth of our solar system about 4.5 billion years ago.

I bet you wish you were one of the 60,000 people set to gather for the electronic entertainment expo E3. It's the annual showcase for the multibillion dollar video game industry opening tomorrow in Los Angeles.

Chris Morris is a columnist for CNNmoney.com and joins us from L.A. with a preview on what's hot out there.

CHRIS MORRIS, CNNMONEY.COM COLUMNIST: It's going to be one heck of a show, Fredricka. We've got a lot of new things coming out this year. Why don't we start talking about some of the trends that we're going to be seeing in the industry itself. What we're going to be hearing a lot about this year are mobile games, things that you can play on your cell phone. That's a trend that was supposed to have been the next big thing, and so far it hasn't really taken off like everyone expected it to. But, hopefully, this year, you are going to see a little bit more progress in that.

WHITFIELD: What makes it different this go round?

MORRIS: Well, what makes a difference this go round is we're a little bit later into the cycle. People have had a little bit of time to actually work on these and improve them. And maybe this time around we're going to see a little bit more.

WHITFIELD: And even games on your PDAs, right?

MORRIS: You can do games on your PDAs, exactly. There's a company called Tap Wave, which is founded by the people who started Palm Pilot, or started Palm. They're going to be introducing a new system called Helix. That is going to be out probably toward the end of the year or so.

WHITFIELD: Almost sounds to me, Chris, that these are games for adults, not for the kids. I don't know too many kids who have PDAs. Of course, we do know a lot of kids do have cell phones, but these sound like grown-up games.

MORRIS: They are. They really are grown-up games. Here's the interesting thing about that, is these are games that -- these are systems that are going to cost probably somewhere around $300 or so, as opposed to $100 for a game boy advance.

WHITFIELD: All right, so these are expensive toys. And you have to wonder with this bad economy, or at least a questionable economy, is it at all affecting this gaming industry?

MORRIS: You know, you'd think that it would. It's a lot of money to spend. Even a Playstation 2 is $200 right now. That's probably going to go down before the end of the year. But games themselves are 50 bucks a pop. That's a lot of money.

WHITFIELD: Yes, it is.

MORRIS: But that said, the industry has been growing on a constant basis. In the U.S., last year, $10.3 billion. Worldwide, we're looking at $30 billion. The reason for that is, if you go to the movie or something like that, it's 10 bucks to get in, another 10 bucks for popcorn and a drink, maybe some candy. There you've already spent half of what you spent on a video game. It lasts for two hours. With a game, you've got 40, 50, 60 hours of entertainment there.

WHITFIELD: All right, let's talk specifically about some of the ooh, ahh games, Madden being one of them. What's that all about? A football game.

MORRIS: Madden is one of the biggest football games out there right now. It's published by a company called Electronic Arts. It sold 25 million copies last year, something around that number. I'm sorry, I don't have the specifics with me. This is the one to beat in the sporting industry. There are a lot of people who tried to come in and do sports games. They have not been able to hold a candle to Madden.

WHITFIELD: Oh, my, gosh. And I used to get excited over those little Atari tennis-type games. It has gotten so sophisticated. I haven't gotten into this. But what is the Sims 2 all about? I don't even know what Sims one is. I'm that unhip

MORRIS: That's OK. The Sims, itself, is the most popular PC game that has ever come out. The Simms 2 is the follow-up. Simms itself sold 24 million. I'm sorry Madden was 5 million. But Sims has sold 24 million copies. This follow-up, Sims 2, should be out late next year, maybe even 2005.

WHITFIELD: Oh, my, gosh. Look at that. So, I remember the old Mario games. What's new? It's got a new twist now?

MORRIS: Mario is back again. That is the most familiar character in the gaming industry. What you're seeing here is a game called Mario cart. This is the second or third incantation of this. Essentially, it's a racing game. It's a party game that you can play with your friends, and just have a good time with it.

WHITFIELD: Wow. You think this E3 just might be a hit, and so might this new technology, or at least these new games?

MORRIS. I think, yes. We're going to see a lot of innovation this year. There are a lot of big games that we don't have here. There is Doom 3, which is a first person shooter. That franchise has made over $100 million since it launched about ten years ago. You're going to be seeing some other follow-ups, a game called Half Life. You're going to see a Grand Rizmo (ph), which is an auto racing game. It's just as realistic as what you saw with Madden there.

WHITFIELD: Well, so often they're ...

MORRIS: So, a lot of big titles.

WHITFIELD: Yes, so often, there's this shroud of secrecy going into E3. We got a little peek of Madden, and Sims 2 and even Mario. But maybe we could take a quick peek by kind of stepping back into time a little bit and seeing what the old Mario looked like, and maybe you can draw some comparisons.

MORRIS: He's held up pretty well.

WHITFIELD: Oh, my, gosh.

MORRIS: I believe this is Mario 64, to be honest. I don't remember, it's been so long. But the thing about Mario is he's made by one of the real experts in the gaming industry. And this is a man who knows how to make games. Really the trick is, easy to learn, but difficult to master. And that's what Mario's appeal has been all these years.

WHITFIELD: Boy, and now that you see the new stuff, the old stuff looks so antiquated and monotonous, almost.

MORRIS: It does in some ways. But I'll tell you, it's got a lot of replay value. You can go back and play these games, and they're just as fun as they used to be.

WHITFIELD: All right, Chris Morris, good to see you. Thanks very much. Have fun at E3.

MORRIS: Thanks.

WHITFIELD: Well, that's all we have time for right now. But here we go. But before we go, here's a peek at what's coming up next week.

We'll take you inside the Matrix reloaded for a look at the loads of special effects crammed into the sci-fi sequel. That and much more coming up next week. I hope you will join us.

Coming up next at 6:00 p.m. Eastern time, a special hour "North Korea: The Nuclear Gamble," hosted by Anderson Cooper. Following that is "CNN LIVE SUNDAY" at 7:00 Eastern time. And "PEOPLE IN THE NEWS" at 7:30 Eastern with a profile of the elusive Osama bin Laden. Don't go away. News headlines, right after this.

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Proposal to Weed Out Spam E-Mails; Sneak Peak at Upcoming Videogames>


Aired May 11, 2003 - 17:00   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, HOST: Today on NEXT@CNN for this Mother's Day, Sunday, May 11, we'll talk with some contestants in a new race for space. Folks who say you don't need a government agency to send people into space.
We'll explore a novel proposal for weeding out all that e-mail spam, a plan that would hit spammers in the pocket book.

And video game lovers, heads up. Later in the show, we're going to give you a sneak peek at some upcoming hot titles. Get those joysticks ready.

But first, more tornadoes ripped through the Midwest overnight, continuing what the National Weather Service says is likely the most intense week of tornado activity in the U.S. since record keeping began in the 1950s. Strong tornadoes swept across parts of Illinois, Missouri and Kentucky. And these are pictures from South Pekin, Illinois, about 10 miles south of Peoria. The tornado that hit there damaged as many as 100 homes and injured nearly two-dozen people.

And in Kentucky, property damage was extensive in areas south and east of Louisville. Roofs were ripped off, and cars tossed around and trailers even knocked off their foundations. So is the end finally in sight for the twister outbreak?

Joining us now with some answers is Arch Kennedy. Arch, what's the very latest.

ARCH KENNEDY, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Yes, Fredricka, we're going to breathe a sigh of relief across much of the east by tomorrow, as this system finally is going to pick up some northeast speed and move on off into the Atlantic. Now, we are dealing with severe weather for the evening. And we're looking at places in the northeast, specifically New York State, Pennsylvania, and also the deep south, Georgia, parts of southern Alabama looking at some severe thunderstorms.

Now, I want to zoom in a little closer and show you what's going on presently. We don't have any tornado warnings to report, but right now a watch box still in effect for a lot of central New York State. This includes the Syracuse area toward Binghamton, and you can see a lot of these strong storms that continue to push their way toward the north.

Also the south, we're looking at severe weather, severe thunderstorm watch in effect for parts of southern Alabama and Georgia. We're looking at the potential for large hail, damaging winds and a lot of heavy rain here. All right, the severe weather threat greatest across the northeast. The system, again, moving across the Great Lakes, eventually through the Northeast tomorrow. Areas shaded in red where we're looking at the possibility of tornadoes as well as damaging winds and large hail. Again, you look at some intense lightning.

Where is it going? The system moving off the Northeast tomorrow. That means improving conditions, still lingering rain toward the northeast, but much of the eastern half of the country will be calming down. Why are we getting this? Why did we see this whole week of ten days of severe weather? A real big trough in the west started picking up these impulses through the plain states. This is the pattern we saw for about a ten-day period. This ridge now flattening out, and we'll see a calmer pattern across the country -- Fredricka.

WHITFIELD: All right, thanks a lot, Arch.

Emergency teams in Seattle and Chicago will face some of their worst nightmares tomorrow and Tuesday. Fortunately, they'll be coping with simulated disasters.

But as Jeanne Meserve reports, the exercise could save lives if a real crisis comes along.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JEANNE MESERVE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Right here at 3:00 Monday afternoon a dirty bomb will detonate spewing radioactivity. On Tuesday, hospitals in Chicago will start to see an influx of victims of pneumonic plague. None of it will be real.

TOM RIDGE, HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY: Let me be very, very clear. This is a simulation. This is a test. This is an exercise.

MESERVE: Like red teaming exercises conducted by the military, Topoff 2, as the exercise is called, will involve an enemy, in this case a terrorist group called GLODO, probing to expose weaknesses.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They are a fantastic way to identify gaps, friction points, areas of concern that haven't been fully addressed.

MESERVE: The last topoff exercise certainly did. It simulated a radiological attack in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and a biological attack in Denver, Colorado.

RIDGE: The lessons they learned with regard to Topoff 1 in Denver, Colorado in public health, in the pharmaceutical stockpile and the distribution mechanism affected policy and, frankly, affected what HHS and Center for Disease Control did. So there are lessons to be learned that can be applied across the country.

MESERVE: Another exercise "Dark Winter" simulated a small pox epidemic and its aftermath. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't know if you just heard that. That was a shot fired. There's another one.

MESERVE: Jerome Howard played the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

JEROME HOWARD, HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES: It was a real struggle because we only had 16 million doses of small pox vaccine available. And one of the huge challenges we had was deciding who got vaccinated. We rapidly ran out of vaccine.

MESERVE: The concrete result, the government now has enough vaccine to cover the entire country.

(on camera): Because of precooked scenarios and watered down after action reports, not every lesson that could be learned has been learned from previous exercises. With a price tag of $16 million, some homeland security officials say this one has the potential to be either a real boon to homeland security or a real boondoggle.

Jeanne Meserve, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WHITFIELD: There is a whole lot more still to come at NEXT@CNN. We'll introduce you to a brand new species researchers have just discovered. And what about spammers clogging up your in box? We'll explore one possible solution to the junk e-mail wrangle.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

WHITFIELD: Well, taking a look at some NEXT news headlines. Scientists have found a new species of jellyfish that has arms rather than tentacles. It's reddish and a yard wide, hence the name big red. They found 23 of the creatures off the San Francisco area, and Hawaii, Japan and Mexico. That's about all scientists know about big red so far. They don't know what it eats, how it reproduces or even if the samples rather they found are male or female.

Well, it had to happen, the famous e-mail scam usually known as the Nigerian letter has appeared in a new form the Iraqi letter, of course. Well, in the classic version of this con game, a person claiming to be a Nigerian official offers millions in exchange for your help in getting his money out of the country. Of course, all you need to do is send him your bank account number. Well, in the updated version the writer says he's a brother of the girlfriend of Saddam Hussein's son Uday. Don't fall for it.

Well, how many junk e-mails like that Iraqi letter clog your in box every day? 20, 30? Maybe even 100? Well, aren't you ready to pull your hair out? You're not alone. Here's CNN's Bruce Burkhardt.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BRUCE BURKHARDT, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Lose weight, find love, regrow hair, add three inches to your credit report, or something like that. It seems a quaint, outdated notion that you originally signed up for e-mail to get messages from people you know about things you actually care about. Enter spam. Not the nutritional product. The junk e-mail clogging private mailboxes and big computer networks. Bad taste, more filling. And in the past few months growing by leaps and bounds.

In a federal court case in Buffalo, New York this week, the Internet service provider Earthlink won a $16 million judgment against a spammer accused of sending more than three quarters of a billion unwanted e-mails in a single year by a phony Earthlink addresses. AOL Time Warner, parent of CNN estimates that 75 percent of its incoming e-mail traffic is spam these days. And the Federal Trade Commission says two-thirds of spam e-mail contains demonstrably false claims. Then there are the most more personal e-mails. Lots of women and a few men would like to show me all of their pictures. Then there's this one. A spam e-mail about spam. A spam-it-yourself kit for $129. Spam, spam and more spam.

Many of the come-ons are the electronic age versions of snake-oil pitches, but unlike junk mail that you get in your mailbox, electronic spam is virtually cost free to the sender. Its defenders say it's constitutionally protected free speech, but for most recipients, it's time to put e-mail spam back in the can. Dream vacation, huh.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WHITFIELD: Well, what to do about the rising tide of unsolicited bulk e-mail, our next guest has a novel suggestion or two. Make spammers pay to send it.

Joining us now is Declan McCullagh, Cnet news.com's Washington correspondent. Declan, you say spam is not a technological or a legal problem but it's an economic one. What do you mean?

DECLAN MCCULLAGH, CNET NEWS.COM: That's exactly right. Spam is a problem because the right people aren't paying for it. We are paying to receive spam. We pay for our dialup, or DSL or cable model accounts, and we get spammed. What we need to do is have something similar to the physical world, where if someone wants to send us a piece of junk mail through the postal system, they're actually going to have to put maybe ten cents, 20 cents on that envelope. And so, we need to find a way to charge spammers and shift the costs from the recipients. Because I know I waste a lot of time deleting spam back to the sender where it belongs.

WHITFIELD: Well, who sets that up?

MCCULLAGH: Well, it is going to take -- this is not something that's going to happen overnight but it's something that desperately needs to happen. We need to find a way to start charging spammers micropayments. We're going to have to have some sort of an electronic guard dog that guards our e-mail inboxes and says, hey, if you want to reach me, give me a five-cent deposit. And if it's not a spammer, if it's legitimate e-mail, I have never talked to you before, I will return it. But that would quickly bankrupt spammers. It would make it uneconomical for them to send out millions or billions of spam messages.

WHITFIELD: Well, good luck. That sounds like that may take some time before that could ever happen. How about the Federal Trade Commission? What can they do, if anything?

MCCULLAGH: Well, the FTC does have the power to go after -- that is file lawsuits against spam that's fraudulent, deceptive, that kind of stuff. And they have taken some steps, but it's not enough and it can't be enough. Half of spam now comes from overseas. Even if we got rid of all U.S. spammers in the next minute, spam is doubling every few months. We'll be back to where we are right now in a few months. And that's unacceptable. So, we need to find a way to go after overseas spammers. That's why laws won't work, or at least aren't the entirety of the solution. So we need some way to make them pay either in cash or, this is a nice idea called hash cash that I have written about, that would make their computers do some arbitrarily complex math calculation that might take five seconds or so, if they actually want to get past your electronic guard dog. That would also make it economical for them to send spam.

WHITFIELD: So, here's another potential tool. Challenge response software. What is that? Is it sort of like a firewall, in effect, but works to kind of combat or net some of this spam?

MCCULLAGH: What it does it divides your inbox into two different lists. The first is known senders, your friends, your family, people you sent mail to. And lets them get past this electronic guard dog without challenge. But if you've never sent mail to me before and I have some challenge response software, my guard dog is going to reply and say, click on this link or answer this question if you want to get by my guard dog and into my e-mail inbox. The question could be something like what color is an orange? Something that a human could answer without a problem, but a computer couldn't. Or at least a computer couldn't without some real serious artificial intelligence that we don't have.

WHITFIELD: If only we had something like that for the telephones for solicitors Declan. All right. Good to see you.

Well, still to come at NEXT@CNN, is North Korea really processing plutonium for nuclear weapons? We'll see what clues an expert can find in images of the Korean nuclear complex, when we come right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

WHITFIELD: What would we do without that velcro? Tensions continue to run high over just what the North Koreans may be doing at the Pyongyang nuclear site, north the capital city of Pyongyang. The catch phrase of the crisis is plutonium reprocessing. But what does that mean? And what about it has the U.S. so concerned?

Miles O'Brien got to the bottom of those questions when he spoke with an expert, David Albright, earlier this week.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) MILES O'BRIEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): So how big is the nuclear threat in North Korea? A question a lot of us has been asking of late. It is a question also the Bush administration is trying to answer. Part of the reason there's increasing concern about North Korea has to do with this idea of reprocessing and creating plutonium. But what is this process? And why would it be seen as a threat? And how could the west possibly defect it.

Joining me to sort through a lot of this information is David Albright. He is a physicist and president of the Institute for Science and International Security or, much easier, ISIS in Washington. Mr. Albright, good to have you with us again.

DAVID ALBRIGHT, INST. FOR SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY: Good to be here.

O'BRIEN: All right, big picture first of all, as we - I want to get into the map here and move in on the location that has been the focus of so much attention, Pyongyang. Is that, as best we know, really the only place that the North Koreans have focused their attention on creating fizzle materials, nuclear materials?

ALBRIGHT: Well, in terms of making plutonium, that's the only site that we know of. There's another site, which is unknown, where they're preparing to make another fissile material called highly enriched uranium. And that's at the heart of this controversy. But, again, the United states does not know where that is.

O'BRIEN: All right, let's give people the lay of the land. This is Pyongyang, and this imagery which comes to us from space imaging. And as we zoom in on this five-megawatt reactor, I want to ask one thing first of all. This reactor here that produces five megawatts of electricity, how much electricity really is that?

ALBRIGHT: It's a very small amount. It feeds a local grid. It's not significant. It's certainly not the reason the reactor was built. The reactor was built by North Korea to make plutonium that could be used in nuclear weapons, and to recover costs and derive some of the benefit of the heat generated by the reactor, it produces electricity.

O'BRIEN: All right, I've highlighted the reactor here. Right next to it is the place where the reprocessing occurs, is that correct? Or is that in the other facility?

ALBRIGHT: No, that's another. That's where the irradiated fuel that comes out of the reactor after a few years and that's stored there. It has to be protected ...

O'BRIEN: So, fuel rods.

ALBRIGHT: Yes, fuel rods. And it's where the plutonium is.

O'BRIEN: All right. And let me just show you one thing. I want to give you a sense of how the west is able to determine if this facility is up and running. We have an image which was captured. And I am going to overlay it. Look on the right-hand part of your screen. It's from March 8. And as you can see there, that cooling tower suddenly has some steam coming from it. What does that tell you, David Albright? I'll toggle back and forth as you talk about it.

ALBRIGHT: What that says is they're trying to eject heat from the reactor. The reactor's on, producing heat and that they're trying to get rid of it.

O'BRIEN: So, in theory, what's happening there is they're creating the building blocks for plutonium because essentially what you do is you have to have fission to create plutonium?

ALBRIGHT: That's right. And so, there is neutrons produced in the fissioning. Those neutrons strike some other uranium, atoms. And then that becomes plutonium.

O'BRIEN: All right, we are going about a mile away as the crow flies. The same facility to the reprocessing plant that I jumped the gun on. And this long building here is the focus of a lot of attention. What goes on inside this building?

ALBRIGHT: Well, when you have the irradiated fuel -- the plutonium exists in there in a very diluted form. So, what you want to do is basically find a way to get the plutonium out of all this other uranium, this radioactive material that has been produced by the fissioning of uranium. So, basically, it's a very elaborate chemical dissolving process and separation process, where you end up with some plutonium either in a powder form or perhaps as kind of a metal puck.

O'BRIEN: All right, you know what? Let's show people how it works. We've created an animation here. And I want to just offer up a bit of a disclaimer here. This is symbolic-type animation. We don't know precisely what it looks like there. Obviously, there is no human intelligence on the ground that we would have access to anyway. But to the extent that this shows at least schematically how processes work, we're going to run through it here.

First of all, the point to be made here, David Albright, is that this stuff, once it comes out, these spent fuel rods are real hot, aren't they?

ALBRIGHT: That's right. They're very radioactive. They can be hot. And they are moved from the spent fuel pond to the radiochemical laboratory by truck. And they are moved in in canisters, the fuel is taken out mechanically, remotely, because it's radioactive.

O'BRIEN: And we've shown one rod here. Typically, what they do is take about 20 of them, and they stick them in a vat, just like you see here. What goes on when those rods go in the vat?

ALBRIGHT: Well, the first vat would really dissolve off this. It's a cladding, a metal cladding around the uranium metal fuel. And you would dissolve it off. After that cladding is dissolved off then you would put it into another vat looking similar to this where you would actually dissolve the uranium metal, which contains plutonium. And that would go into a solution. And the you would be trying to separate off the plutonium, from the uranium, from the radioactive byproducts.

O'BRIEN: And while this is going on you create something called krypton 85.

ALBRIGHT: Right.

O'BRIEN: And that krypton 85 is very useful given the fact that there are no inspectors on the ground there in North Korea for the west to monitor what's going on there. Tell us what happens with krypton 85?

ALBRIGHT: Well, Krypton 85 is emitted when the fuel is dissolved. And it's a radioactive material which is inert, it doesn't react with anything. It goes long distance. And it survives in the environment a long time because it's half life is ten years. And so you can actually detect this material at a distance. I would assume that some embassies friendly to us in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea have krypton 85 detection equipment. There may be floating platforms on ships that the United States may deploy. And it's a really solid indicator of reprocessing activity.

O'BRIEN: All right. And, presumably, that knowledge is in the hands of the United States if that krypton 85 exists. Finally the last step in all of this, it goes into sort of a glove box. And, eventually, what happens is it's purified, reprocessed, sifted, if you will, down to these kind of hockey pucks. The idea is to get about 11 pounds worth of plutonium per weapons. Doing the math and all that, how long would it take North Korea to produce a weapon?

ALBRIGHT: Well, you can go another way. But, basically, what these hockey pucks are metal, maybe a kilogram or two kilograms in mass, and that they are then take and purified further, or melted in cast and shaped, and then turned into nuclear weapons components. Now, it typically, with the North Korean plant, is could make about a bomb's worth of plutonium every month from the irradiator fuel.

O'BRIEN: All right, and then just shortly, do you think that's what they are doing right this moment?

ALBRIGHT: It looks like it. It looks like the plant is operating. There's always some uncertainty about that. Krypton 85 has not been defected as far as I know. But I think there is a growing consensus that they're in the early stages of operating the radiochemical laboratory.

O'BRIEN: All right, David Albright. Thanks for explaining all that for us. We appreciate it. It helps us understand quite a bit.

ALBRIGHT: Sure, thank you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

O'BRIEN: A lot more on this topic coming after NEXT@CNN in an hour special on the North Korean nuclear threat. Anderson Cooper hosts "North Korea: The Nuclear Gamble" next, 6:00 p.m. Eastern time. WHITFIELD: But first, don't go away, there's lots more to come right here on NEXT@CNN, including a new race to reach space. We could see a winner in this contest by the end of the year.

That story and more when NEXT returns.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(NEWSBREAK)

WHITFIELD: NEXT@CNN continues right now.

A new space race is emerging. This time, not between two superpower governments but instead among private organizations racing to put a person into space without any government help.

Miles O'Brien returns with a story of a leader of the pack.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

O'BRIEN (voice-over): California's high desert has long been home to shimmering dreams and wild ideas of new ways to fly higher, faster, longer than ever before.

BURT RUTAN, DESIGN AND BUILD VOYAGER: I like to do far out things with airplanes.

O'BRIEN: And no one has pushed the envelope of flight more than Burt Rutan, the legendary airplane designer who build the first plane to fly nonstop around the world on a single tank of gas. Today, Rutan has his sites fixed on sending humans to space.

RUTAN: Roughly three years ago, I decided that I have done enough -- I have done a little bit of testing. I have done a lot of design. I decided that, yes, I think I can pull this off.

O'BRIEN: With funding from a wealthy unnamed investor, his company Scaled Composites designed, built and is now testing a two- ship concept. It recalls Mohabi's (ph) glory days in the '60s when intrepid test pilots flew the X-15 rocket plane to the edge of space.

RUTAN: Well, I'm 6'4", weigh about 230. I wouldn't design it for something that I couldn't get in, right?

O'BRIEN: Rutan's Space Ship One has room for three. How does it feel?

RUTAN: I'll you when we go to space. It certainly has lot of room. This is a bigger ship than we needed to do the research, but I wanted to make the point that something this size, which would give people a nice comfortable cabin, can be done at those costs.

O'BRIEN: Rutan also has his eye on the $10-million x-prize, promised to the first privately funded team to fly three people to the edge of space at 62 miles up, return safely and then do it again within two weeks. Rutan won't say how much his project will cost, but it's probably at least twice the x-prize purse. He says he has other motivations.

RUTAN: If I can be just the inspiration, by carefully and properly and safely showing that it really is cheap to fly people to space, and 20 years from now there are thousands or hundreds at least of different ships that you can buy tickets on.

O'BRIEN: Space Ship One would begin its ride to space latched to the belly of an airplane, or is it a bird, or even two? Whatever. It's called white knight. At 50,000 feet the pair would part company and, as astronaut in training Pete Seybold showed us in this simulator, the rocket would fire, sending the craft almost straight up in about a minute.

RUTAN: They were all floating around completely. We got about 3 1/2 minutes of weightlessness. You can see outside. You'll have a full view of the stars and you will be able to see the earth from space.

O'BRIEN: Space Ship One is designed to renter the atmosphere like a shuttle cock and then glide to a runway landing. It's a deceptively simple approach. Check out mission control on wheels. And except for the state-of-the-art composite structures, none of this technology is even new, much less exotic.

RUTAN: You've got to try something that's nonsense to have a break through. That's why we haven't had any breakthroughs in development of space ships since the 60s, because we don't have the guts to try things that may not work.

O'BRIEN: Burt Rutan has an uncanny way of attaining his own lofty goals. He hopes to be in space by the end of the year, in time to celebrate the centennial of the Wright Brothers first flight, another milestone logged by mavericks who dared to dream.

Miles O'Brien, CNN.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WHITFIELD: Well, joining us from Los Angeles is Rick Tomlinson, the founder of Space Frontier Foundation, and the man who organized the flight of the first space tourist, Dennis Tito. Good to see you.

RICK TOMLINSON, SPACE FRONTIER FOUNDATION: How are you?

WHITFIELD: You helped organize Dennis Tito, as well as Mark Shuttleworth being on the Soyuz. How do you compare the private ventures now with those?

TOMLINSON: Well, first I'll say I didn't really have any involvement in the Shuttleworth, but it was the beginning of a trend with Dennis. Those people flew for a week and paid tens of millions of dollars to do so. The vehicles that we're looking at here are going to take you up for a few minutes for a few hundred thousand or maybe 100 thousand. But, again, what we're doing here is really unleashing market forces. Those people flew on basically government vehicles to a government facility, which is incredible expensive to do. So Once we see these new vehicles starting to fly, we're going to see competition, prices are going to come down. And the ability to go and stay is going to go up.

WHITFIELD: And those trying to be competitive, we saw Burt Rutan, his venture. And we saw that his organization really just might not be the only private organization, as you said. It will be getting competitive. Who else is out there?

TOMLINSON: Absolutely. Right across the street is a little outfit called X Corp. Their just very excellent firm. Then there is Pioneer Rocket Plane. Armadillo Aerospace, which is being funded by John Carmack, who created the games Quake and Doom. A fellow Elan Musk, who created Pay Pal, building a rocket right here in Los Angeles. There are lots of different firms that are looking to this potential market, people who have really given up on the government space program and said, we're going to do it ourselves.

WHITFIELD: Well, the government's space program doesn't seem like it's going away. But we talk about the competition. Are these private ventures really giving NASA a run for its money?

TOMLINSON: It would be great if they were. There's a weird contrast where NASA's building something called the orbital space plan, where they are going to drop $10 billion or so. And as you just heard, these vehicles are being built for a few tens of millions. What we'd really like to see is NASA, let's say, open up the transportation of the space station a competition from these guys and let them go at it. I bet the prices would plummet. And we would see hotels in space, all kinds of great things happening.

WHITFIELD: All right, you see it being a very crowded field within perhaps the next 20 years then?

TOMLINSON: You know, I think that's what's going to happen. I think we are going to see a lot of different vehicles, a lot of different firms, a lot of competition. And, again, it's like high definition television. It starts expensive and the prices start to drop. And I think we are going to start seeing that in space fairly quickly.

WHITFIELD: All right, Rick Tomlinson, thank you very much. Good to see you.

TOMLINSON: Thank you.

WHITFIELD: Well, coming up, next, another space story. We'll show you the launch of a rocket designed to do something that's never been done before.

Also ahead, veterans exposed to radiation from nuclear tests get another chance for compensation.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

WHITFIELD: Right now in Waco, Texas a memorial service is under way for a killer tornado, the tenth most lethal in U.S history, that devastated the downtown area of this city. Fifty years ago today, also on a mother's day, May 11 1953, 113 people died.

Taking a look at other stories making news on the science tech beat this week. Japan launched a spacecraft that is supposed to collect samples from an asteroid and bring them back to earth. The unmanned Muses-C probe was carried into space on an M-5 rocket on Friday. If it succeeds, it will be the first spacecraft to make a round trip to an asteroid.

A rare celestial event this week. The planet Mercury passed between earth and the sun on Wednesday. Viewed through eye protecting filters, it looked like a tiny dot crawling across the sun. Well, this lineup of mercury, earth and the sun will only happen 14 times this century.

NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency held a ribbon cutting ceremony on Wednesday to publicize a new energy source at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The center is now using landfill gas for energy, the first federal facility to do so. Methane gas travels five miles by pipeline from the landfill to the boilers at Goddard. NASA says the project will save taxpayers $3.5 million over the next ten years.

Africa has its first cloned animal. It's a Holstein calf unveiled today, or Wednesday rather, at an animal reproduction facility northwest of Johannesburg. The heifer was cloned from a single cell taken from the ear of a champion milk cow. Scientists say the calf is healthy and her markings are almost identical to those of the donor cow.

This week, a scientific panel said the government was vastly underestimating how much radiation troops were exposed to during U.S. nuclear tests in the '40s, '50s and '60s. It's prompted the veterans administration to reopen the cases of some 18,000 who had been refused compensation for their ailments.

Kathleen Koch has the story.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Three, two, one, fire.

KATHLEEN KOCH, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Nuclear test blast submitting deadly radiation watched during the 40s, 50s and 60s by nearly 400,000 service men. Ken Kendall was an army corporal stationed in the Nevada desert.

KEN KENDALL, NEVADA TEST SITE VETERAN: When the explosions would go off, the shockwave come towards us. We could watch it come across the desert floor. And as it went underneath our feet, if is like an earthquake going underneath our feet. And it was raised in a cloud of dust four to five feet up in the air.

KOCH: Some developed cancers and were compensated, but many others were turned down because the military said their exposure was too low to have caused their illnesses. Now, a scientific panel has found the Pentagon underestimated the amount of radiation many of the servicemen received.

JOHN TILL, NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL: For example, was it gamma exposure? In those cases, it might be a factor of two or three too low. Neutrons maybe three to five too low. In the case of inhalation which would have only affected a small number of the veterans, the doses could be underestimated by factors of ten to 100.

KOCH: The study insists the correct levels would still be too low to cause most cancers, but other experts say the inhalation cases are serious.

ARJUN MAKIHIJANI, INST. FOR ENERGY & ENV. RESEARCH: The doses are ten or 100 times higher and the uncertainties are that big that those exposures would often be comparable or in the same range as received by many Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors.

KOCH: Veterans attorneys charge the government underestimated to avoid paying damages.

DAVID CYNAMON, ATTORNEY: We believe it's deliberate. It's hard to see how it could be otherwise.

KOCH: But the report blames the low estimates on the fact that many servicemen didn't wear or weren't given film badges that registered their exposure. And questionable assumptions were made about where the men were and for how long. The veterans administration says it will not re-examine the cases of 18,000 veterans that had been denied compensation. But it's unclear how many are still alive.

VICE ADM. DAN COOPER, V.A. UNDER SECRETARY: All of that takes time, a little bit cumbersome. But the fact is, as we do it, we'll be looking specifically at the veteran, what can we do? If we can make sure that he gets the advantage of the doubt.

KOCH: Kendall, who has chronic skin problems he believes were caused by radiation exposure says veterans deserve at least that.

KENDALL: I love my country. I think it's the greatest country in the world, but we have been used and lied to.

KOCH: Kathleen Koch, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WHITFIELD: Still to come, what will your kids be asking for come Christmas time? No doubt some clues will come out at the video game industry's annual extravaganza set for next week. And we'll have a preview coming up next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

WHITFIELD: This is one rare rock, billions of years old from outer space. It's among a handful of meteorites that we have actually have a clue where it came from. Usually when a rock flies in from outer space, it burns up before it ever hits the ground. And if it does land it's rarely found. This meteorite is different. Recovered after thousands of people in Europe spotted the fireball streaking across the night sky last April. It was tracked by instruments. Scientists figured it has the same orbit as another rare meteorite that was observed falling to earth back in April 1959.

Reporting in the journal "Nature," researchers were amazed to find two rocks 43 years apart with the same orbit. From the orbit they determined these rocks came from an area in space where possibly millions of other asteroids may be lurking. The concern that a bigger rock could one day make a similar trek, slam into earth with more devastating results. This recently discovered meteorite weighs about four pounds, and is thought to be a piece of a much larger asteroid that was around at the birth of our solar system about 4.5 billion years ago.

I bet you wish you were one of the 60,000 people set to gather for the electronic entertainment expo E3. It's the annual showcase for the multibillion dollar video game industry opening tomorrow in Los Angeles.

Chris Morris is a columnist for CNNmoney.com and joins us from L.A. with a preview on what's hot out there.

CHRIS MORRIS, CNNMONEY.COM COLUMNIST: It's going to be one heck of a show, Fredricka. We've got a lot of new things coming out this year. Why don't we start talking about some of the trends that we're going to be seeing in the industry itself. What we're going to be hearing a lot about this year are mobile games, things that you can play on your cell phone. That's a trend that was supposed to have been the next big thing, and so far it hasn't really taken off like everyone expected it to. But, hopefully, this year, you are going to see a little bit more progress in that.

WHITFIELD: What makes it different this go round?

MORRIS: Well, what makes a difference this go round is we're a little bit later into the cycle. People have had a little bit of time to actually work on these and improve them. And maybe this time around we're going to see a little bit more.

WHITFIELD: And even games on your PDAs, right?

MORRIS: You can do games on your PDAs, exactly. There's a company called Tap Wave, which is founded by the people who started Palm Pilot, or started Palm. They're going to be introducing a new system called Helix. That is going to be out probably toward the end of the year or so.

WHITFIELD: Almost sounds to me, Chris, that these are games for adults, not for the kids. I don't know too many kids who have PDAs. Of course, we do know a lot of kids do have cell phones, but these sound like grown-up games.

MORRIS: They are. They really are grown-up games. Here's the interesting thing about that, is these are games that -- these are systems that are going to cost probably somewhere around $300 or so, as opposed to $100 for a game boy advance.

WHITFIELD: All right, so these are expensive toys. And you have to wonder with this bad economy, or at least a questionable economy, is it at all affecting this gaming industry?

MORRIS: You know, you'd think that it would. It's a lot of money to spend. Even a Playstation 2 is $200 right now. That's probably going to go down before the end of the year. But games themselves are 50 bucks a pop. That's a lot of money.

WHITFIELD: Yes, it is.

MORRIS: But that said, the industry has been growing on a constant basis. In the U.S., last year, $10.3 billion. Worldwide, we're looking at $30 billion. The reason for that is, if you go to the movie or something like that, it's 10 bucks to get in, another 10 bucks for popcorn and a drink, maybe some candy. There you've already spent half of what you spent on a video game. It lasts for two hours. With a game, you've got 40, 50, 60 hours of entertainment there.

WHITFIELD: All right, let's talk specifically about some of the ooh, ahh games, Madden being one of them. What's that all about? A football game.

MORRIS: Madden is one of the biggest football games out there right now. It's published by a company called Electronic Arts. It sold 25 million copies last year, something around that number. I'm sorry, I don't have the specifics with me. This is the one to beat in the sporting industry. There are a lot of people who tried to come in and do sports games. They have not been able to hold a candle to Madden.

WHITFIELD: Oh, my, gosh. And I used to get excited over those little Atari tennis-type games. It has gotten so sophisticated. I haven't gotten into this. But what is the Sims 2 all about? I don't even know what Sims one is. I'm that unhip

MORRIS: That's OK. The Sims, itself, is the most popular PC game that has ever come out. The Simms 2 is the follow-up. Simms itself sold 24 million. I'm sorry Madden was 5 million. But Sims has sold 24 million copies. This follow-up, Sims 2, should be out late next year, maybe even 2005.

WHITFIELD: Oh, my, gosh. Look at that. So, I remember the old Mario games. What's new? It's got a new twist now?

MORRIS: Mario is back again. That is the most familiar character in the gaming industry. What you're seeing here is a game called Mario cart. This is the second or third incantation of this. Essentially, it's a racing game. It's a party game that you can play with your friends, and just have a good time with it.

WHITFIELD: Wow. You think this E3 just might be a hit, and so might this new technology, or at least these new games?

MORRIS. I think, yes. We're going to see a lot of innovation this year. There are a lot of big games that we don't have here. There is Doom 3, which is a first person shooter. That franchise has made over $100 million since it launched about ten years ago. You're going to be seeing some other follow-ups, a game called Half Life. You're going to see a Grand Rizmo (ph), which is an auto racing game. It's just as realistic as what you saw with Madden there.

WHITFIELD: Well, so often they're ...

MORRIS: So, a lot of big titles.

WHITFIELD: Yes, so often, there's this shroud of secrecy going into E3. We got a little peek of Madden, and Sims 2 and even Mario. But maybe we could take a quick peek by kind of stepping back into time a little bit and seeing what the old Mario looked like, and maybe you can draw some comparisons.

MORRIS: He's held up pretty well.

WHITFIELD: Oh, my, gosh.

MORRIS: I believe this is Mario 64, to be honest. I don't remember, it's been so long. But the thing about Mario is he's made by one of the real experts in the gaming industry. And this is a man who knows how to make games. Really the trick is, easy to learn, but difficult to master. And that's what Mario's appeal has been all these years.

WHITFIELD: Boy, and now that you see the new stuff, the old stuff looks so antiquated and monotonous, almost.

MORRIS: It does in some ways. But I'll tell you, it's got a lot of replay value. You can go back and play these games, and they're just as fun as they used to be.

WHITFIELD: All right, Chris Morris, good to see you. Thanks very much. Have fun at E3.

MORRIS: Thanks.

WHITFIELD: Well, that's all we have time for right now. But here we go. But before we go, here's a peek at what's coming up next week.

We'll take you inside the Matrix reloaded for a look at the loads of special effects crammed into the sci-fi sequel. That and much more coming up next week. I hope you will join us.

Coming up next at 6:00 p.m. Eastern time, a special hour "North Korea: The Nuclear Gamble," hosted by Anderson Cooper. Following that is "CNN LIVE SUNDAY" at 7:00 Eastern time. And "PEOPLE IN THE NEWS" at 7:30 Eastern with a profile of the elusive Osama bin Laden. Don't go away. News headlines, right after this.

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