WASHINGTON – When Mitt Romney speaks to an agreement on the Conservatives here Friday, he faces a potentially fatal political obstacle: his past embrace of a health insurance mandate, as his Republican friends who now scoff at as “Obamacare.

“I like mandates. The mandates work, “he said, when seeking the presidency of speech 2008.Such thrilled many conservatives, and affects the former Massachusetts governor likely 2012 bid for the Republican candidate for president. It is among the candidates best known, better funded and better organized potential, but he is haunted by the shadow health care.

As governor, Romney signed legislation in 2006 requiring most people in Massachusetts to obtain health insurance. He has repeatedly said that while states should have the option to impose such mandates, Washington shouldn’t.

The Massachusetts law is widely considered the model for the national health care program – and its requirement that most people obtain health coverage by 2014 – which President Barack Obama signed into law last year. Fierce opposition to it has become a strong rallying point for Republicans.

Romney will speak Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. The audience will hear from a parade of potential GOP presidential candidates over three days, and they warn that Romney better have a good explanation for his health care record.

“The health care plan he supported in Massachusetts is eerily similar to Obamacare,” said Ed Failor, the president of Iowans for Tax Relief, a conservative group.

Romney’s speech is one of the gathering’s most anticipated. His 2008 White House bid failed, in no small part because he couldn’t convince the conservatives who dominate the GOP electorate that he was truly one of them, on issues such as abortion and gay rights.

Since then, he’s traveled the nation to champion their causes, donating his money and time to their campaigns. He’s among the most popular potential candidates in national polls on the still-evolving 2012 GOP presidential field, as well as the narrow leader in cash on hand. But lurking behind all that is the health care problem.

“If you want a liberal albatross to put around Romney’s neck, this is it,” said Thomas Whalen, an associate professor of social science at Boston University.

Romney’s camp didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Nate Gunderson, who manages MittRomneyCentral.com, a website that promotes the candidate, acknowledges, “This is a problem, but we’ll be trying to correct the record.” Their point of emphasis: Romney favors allowing states to determine what’s best for their residents, and opposes Washington telling them what to do.

It’s uncertain how this states’ rights argument will play among conservatives.

Whalen calls the states’ rights argument the “Jefferson Davis approach, which is somewhat idiotic.”

Romney tries to nuance his stand on the mandate. In January 2008, during a New Hampshire Republican debate, he defended the health care mandate in his state. But, he added, “I would not mandate at the federal level that every state do what we do.”

Last week, he told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that the federal law on health services “is a song very bad law.”However, he added, “I will not apologize for the rights of states to develop plans on a bipartisan basis to believe that help your people,” said Romney.

The environmental group Greenpeace filed a grievance with the German legitimate Court against the initiatives taken by the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel, to extend the life of the oldest nuclear plants in the country in September.

“Everyone has the right to life and physical integrity,” Greenpeace said in a declaration on its website, adding that these rights are “necessary by law, the executive and the courts.”

The group said the government had decided to extend the life of German nuclear power plants to serve commercial interests, but not wanting to endanger the safety of citizens living near the factories.

Green peace’s 73-page case file, which was handed in to the Karlsruhe court on Thursday in cooperation with residents’ groups living near the nuclear plants, argues that the nuclear sites were inadequately protected against plane crashes and that safe nuclear waste disposal was not yet possible.

“The continued operation of the old reactors is highly dangerous, and the safe disposal of nuclear waste is not in sight,” said Greenpeace nuclear expert Heinz Smital.

Widespread opposition

Opposition parties from five German states also plan to complain to the constitutional court on the grounds that the lifespan extension of the country’s nuclear plants did not have the approval of parliament’s upper chamber, the Bundesrat.

The governing coalition lost its majority in the Bundesrat mid last year, though it still has a majority in the Bundestag, or lower house.

Merkel said in favor of prolonged use of plants to meet energy demand in the user of the stronger European Union. His supporters say that more use of nuclear energy could also reduce emissions of greenhouse gases responsible for global warming.

Germany, 17 nuclear power plants accounted for about 23 percent of total electricity production last year, when coal and natural gas, consisting of a total of 55 percent.

Coalition of Merkel’s center-right to repeal the law under the coalition of center-left former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has seen the closure of all nuclear power plants in Germany, 2020.

Hanufa Bibi stoops in a worn sari and mismatched flip-flops to work the hand pump on her backyard well. Spurts of clear water wash grains of rice from her hands, but she can never get them clean.

Thick black warts tattoo her palms and fingers, the result of drinking arsenic-laced well water for years. It’s a legacy that new research has linked to 1 in 5 deaths among those exposed inBangladesh – an impoverished country where up to half of its 150 million people have guzzled tainted groundwater.

The World Health Organization has called it “the largest mass poisoning of a population in history,” as countless new wells continue to be dug here daily without testing the water for toxins.

“The magnitude of the arsenic problem is 50 times worse thanChernobyl,” said Richard Wilson, president of the nonprofitArsenic Foundation and a physics professor emeritus at Harvard University who was not involved in the study. “But it doesn’t have 50 times the attention paid to it.”

The issue surfaced about two decades ago, after some 10 million shallow hand-pump wells like Bibi’s were sunk across the country in the 1970s with money from international donors.

The wells were meant to provide clean drinking water to help prevent deadly waterborne diseases, such as cholera. But they unintentionally tapped into arsenic deposits in the ground, releasing the odorless, colorless and tasteless toxin into water used for drinking and cooking. Arsenic has been linked to cancers, liver ailments, skin diseases, heart problems and other health issues.

The new research, funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and published online June 19 inThe Lancet medical journal, is the first to examine how drinking arsenic-contaminated water over time shaves years off lives.

For the nearly 12,000 people followed over 10 years in the country’s Araihazar region east of the capital, researchers found that even low doses of arsenic in drinking water could increase the chances of early death. The study also found that damage on all levels appears to be permanent.

“It’s similar to tobacco smoking. Once you smoke for 20 years and then you stop smoking, your risk of getting tobacco-induced cancer over the next decade will still be high,” co-author Habibul Ahsan from the University of Chicago’s Center for Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention said by phone. “Even if, say, for some miracle all the individuals are provided arsenic-free water from tomorrow, these people will also be at a higher risk of dying for many years to come.”

More than 75 percent of those studied drank arsenic-contaminated water above WHO’s recommended safe limits. About a quarter of deaths from chronic illnesses and a fifth of the total 407 adult deaths were attributed to arsenic.