Yucca Mountain News Clips
Monday, April 14, 2003
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Pahrump Valley Times
April 11, 2003
Commission to see action early, often
By Mark Waite, Reporter
In eight timed items, each spaced 15 minutes apart Tuesday morning, Nye County Commissioners will hear a presentation on Yucca Mountain and con-sider funding school district capital projects, a covered-load ordinance, limiting conditional use permits to six months, acquiring the Calvada "eye," reducing building permit fees 10 percent, and creating a county health department.
Five nuisance complaints, a list of 15 timed items up to 2:45 p.m. and a lunchtime tour of the Pahrump Community Li-brary are included on a packed Nye County Com-mission agenda. The meet-ing begins at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday at the Bob Ruud Community Center.
U.S. Department of Energy Institutional Affairs Specialist Bob Lupton will present a normally routine, annual report on the Yucca Mountain project at 9:15 a.m. In a later un-timed item, commissioners will vote on a tentative agree-ment with DOE over $53.7 million in PETT funds over the next five years.
Nye County School District officials will make a request for capital project money at 9:45 a.m. Given the choice of playground equipment at all the ele-mentary schools or a new high school track, Superin-tendent William "Rob" Roberts chose the latter at a February commission meeting.
Four items related to problems with septic tank failures will be heard at 1:30 p.m.: a proposed amendment to the Tri-Core Planning Team agreement, the group preparing the master plan, authorizing their consultants to conduct soil investigations; a re-quirement for an engineer's certification on percolation tests; a discussion on repairing failed septic sys-tems and enforcing a Ne-vada Administrative Code over approving applications to construct a septic system before issuing building permits.
The five nuisance com-plaints are scheduled for 2 p.m.
A system for evaluating Nye County Manager Dave Chavez will be discussed at 2:30 p.m. In an un-timed item, the commission will consider modifying his employment agreement mandating a 90-day notification if he has any plans to ter-minate his relationship with the county.
The acquisition of equipment for the Pahrump Val-ley Fire-Rescue Service will be considered. Commis-sioners will discuss the results of a special joint meet-ing with the Pahrump Town Board over fire, ambulance and other town matters. That meeting occurs at 6 p.m. Monday evening at the community center.
In court matters, com-missioners will consider continuing the month-to-month lease of the district court offices at the Calvada duck pond, designating $15,000 for the drug court program for 2003 and pur-chasing office equipment for the drug court.
Sheriff Tony DeMeo has a request to go out for bids on a mobile sheriff's office sub-station; providing merit pay increases to certain em-ployees; purchasing an explosive detection dog; and hiring an employee at step five of the pay scale.
The awarding of a public defender's contract is on the agenda. There will be a monthly report on compliance with accountant Dan McArthur's audit sugges-tions. Commissioners will debate returning unused funds from the State Emergency Response Commis-sion. Miracle Horse Rescue Inc. has a proposal to care for horses in pending court cases.
The planning department has two un-timed items: A parcel map improvement agreement for roads, water and sewer lines at Moun-tain Falls and an extension of time to complete road improvements requested by builder Ron Murphy.
Road work is back on the agenda, the Pahrump Dairy would be reimbursed for chip seal preparations on Lola Lane under one item; commissioners will vote on awarding a 2003 chip-seal contract for Pahrump and whether to seek bids for repairing roads in Amar-gosa Valley and Beatty.
©Pahrump Valley Times 2003
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Pahrump Valley Times
April 11, 2003
Firm asks residents to answer the call
By Mark Waite, Reporter
Survey: Random calls will help shape master plan
When someone calls from a polling company late this month or early next, con-sultants from the Tri-Core Planning Team hope Pahrump residents don't hang up.
Employees of Research and Polling Inc., an Albu-querque-based company, will attempt to interview 400 Pahrump residents over the phone for a survey to be used in drawing up a mas-ter plan for Pahrump.
Karen Marcotte, a principal partner in Consensus Planning, a company contracted to do the commu-nity outreach for the mas-ter plan, was optimistic surveyors will get cooperation from Pahrump resi-dents, despite having to answer possibly up to 60 questions.
"They note at the begin-ning that they're doing a community opinion survey and it's not a sales call. They know right away it's for the master plan update for Pahrump. If they get the call it will be identified right away as the survey for the master plan," Marcotte said.
"The polling experts that we're working with have determined that a 60-question survey is sort of the longest that we can use and we'll probably be issuing something pretty close to that. They typically can be completed in under 20 minutes because some of the questions are pretty short and basic," she said.
Surveyors will ask resi-dents if they have time to answer the questions and if not, if it's more convenient to call back at another time, Marcotte said. "They usually have good luck with getting people on the phone because they are willing to accommodate a person's schedule."
Surveyors don't want to leak a list of questions in advance, because they want spontaneous answers where respondents can't consult with each other, Marcotte said.
The company will use computer-generated ran-dom phone numbers, that will be cross checked against a map of Pahrump Valley to make sure each geographic area is repre-sented, Marcotte said. Sur-veyors will call at various times of day, but not early in the morning or late at night, she said.
"We're very excited about it because it's another method to understand what Pahrumpians think. We hear from the actively en-gaged citizens who come to public meetings, or serve on committees, or go to an open house, but it's hard to hear from people who don't go to those meetings," Mar-cotte said.
Besides multiple choice or yes and no questions, the survey will include some open-ended questions, re-sponses to those will be transcribed and included in the report, she said.
Consensus Planning has scheduled a second open house on the master plan, set for noon to 7 p.m. April 30 at the Pahrump Com-munity Center. Residents may offer their input on issues including air quality, transportation, infrastructure, community character, economic development, recreation and natural re-sources. During the first master plan open house, participants were asked to put green, yellow or red dots to show their rejection, support or qualified support on various issues.
Walt Kuver, a member of the steering committee, a nine-member panel of Pahrump residents appointed to help with the master plan, said there are also plans to hold three neighborhood meetings, sometime in May. The plan is to meet with residents in the northern part of Pahrump Valley at Rose-mary Clarke Middle School, with residents from the southern part at Hafen Elementary School, and with those living in the cen-tral area at the community center.
Marcotte has also em-phasized the need to in-volve youths in the master plan. She suggested meeting with students at local schools the morning of April 29 and the afternoon of May 1.
Marcotte said the first open house was an indication Pahrump residents are in agreement about many issues. She noted residents have a desire for more community facilities but not a desire to raise taxes. While that informal survey on the walls of the community center noted Pahrump residents opposed more medium to high-density housing, they wanted more senior housing, she said.
During a steering com-mittee meeting March 5, Marcotte said questions on which there was some dis-sention at the first open house, like whether Pahrump should have a valley wide municipal water system, would be good candidates for questions in a phone survey. While peo-ple want economic growth, there were mixed feelings about an airport, she said.
"This will help us toward devising goals in the plan," Marcotte said.
The questions in the survey will be based on issues raised in Pahrump, she said.
Results of the survey will be broken down into age of the respondents, the num-ber of years they have lived in the valley and other demographic information.
Steering committee members in early March debated whether to hold a phone survey or send out a survey in the mail or in-serted in the newspaper. Mailing a survey would allow the more concerned residents to be heard.
Tim Hafen, a steering committee member, said he'd like to see a more sta-tistically correct survey.
"The best way you're go-ing to contact people in Pahrump is by phone," said steering committee member Mike Meads.
Marcotte said the plan-ners will hear from more politically involved people anyway at the meetings.
At the time, she told steering committee mem-bers the survey, "is not going to be very long, it's go-ing to try to pick just the most critical issues."
At a March 27 steering committee meeting, Marcotte hinted at some of the questions her company would like answered. If residents want to limit growth, do they want to do it by limiting what residents can do with their property, limiting the number of building permits issued or other solutions?
"Some people say they don't want growth but they don't want any restrictions," Marcotte said. Lim-its on growth could raise home prices for their chil-dren, she said.
Meads, the co-owner of Classic Homes, an active builder in Pahrump Valley, said when it comes to regulating growth, the proper zoning could be calculated to allow a maximum num-ber of people in a certain area. "I don't even see that being an issue," he said.
Steering committee meet-ings give hints of the com-plexity of drawing up a master plan. Cary Jubinski reported her sub-group on recreation was researching the number of parks per population in Pahrump and mapping out the number of property owners with horses in the valley.
Seb Johnson, a horse owner, predicted committee members will find four times the number of horses they expected in Pahrump. He suggested keeping Pahrump a semirural, equestrian community, with horse trails as well as side-walks.
Kuver said his land use sub-group will be dealing with issues like an airport, a possible Yucca Mountain railroad through the valley and an industrial park. A natural resources sub-group will deal with whether there will be enough water for sustain-able development, he said.
While the Tri-Core Plan-ning Team said it would be a 20-month process to com-plete the $1.3 million master plan, which was approved by the Nye County Commission in December, aspects of the plan will be completed earlier, in phases. Kuver said the land use goals and objectives for the plan are scheduled to be submitted in July.
In a related item, Nye County Commissioners April 1 approved a $12,000 addition to the agreement with Tri-Core for the pub-lishing of a newsletter on the master plan. Marcotte wrote to commissioners, there are already 400 people interested in being on the mailing list. She said it would be cheaper than set-ting up a web site and would keep people informed on the progress. Ten news-letters will be sent out dur-ing the master planning process, about every six to seven weeks.
©Pahrump Valley Times 2003
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The Tennessean
April 12, 2003
Low-level waste transport not regulated by state
By RUSS OATES
Associated Press
The truck carrying uranium hexafluoride that overturned in Roane County was just one of hundreds of shipments of radioactive waste traveling on Tennessee roads each year.
Most of those shipments are classified as low-level waste, as were the five containers that overturned Thursday on Interstate 40 near Harriman. No one was injured in the accident and none of the radioactive material was released, federal and state emergency officials said.
Low-level waste, which includes material from hospitals and nuclear plants, is not escorted or tracked by the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency, officials said.
''There's no way to know where all the radiological material is being transported,'' said Elgan Usrey, who oversees radiological waste transportation for TEMA.
All carriers, however, must follow packaging rules outlined by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Those whose containers pass a series of tests receive a certificate from NRC.
''This material, from a radiological standpoint, is not particularly dangerous,'' said NRC spokesman Ken Clark. ''That's because it has not been irradiated.''
David Bennett, executive vice president of Tri-State Motor Transit Co., which owned the truck that overturned Thursday, said carriers get an ''ongoing permit'' from the federal government to haul low-level waste.
Trucks, however, must carry the appropriate placards identifying what they are hauling, he said.
When high-level waste is transported, particularly spent nuclear fuel from reactors, TEMA is notified no fewer than 10 days in advance, Usrey said. The material receives a state escort, is tracked its entire time and is limited to interstate highways, he said.
TEMA spokesman Kurt Pickering said the number of shipments escorted by the agency is ''about 15 or so a year.''
Federal and state officials said radioactive materials have been transported for years in the United States without radiation releases.
Despite those assurances, transportation safety issues have hindered the government's plan to put a permanent radioactive waste storage site at Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert.
''The risks of transportation have to be weighed against the benefits of getting it to its intended destination,'' Lisa Gue, an energy analyst with the Washington-based consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.
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Las Vegas SUN
Sunday, April 13, 2003
Columnist Benjamin Grove: Reid, Chu hug, then slug it out over dump
Benjamin Grove covers Washington, D.C., for the Sun. He can be reached at grove@lasvegassun.com or (202) 662-7245.
Only in the strange and wonderful world of Congress would Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and his Yucca Mountain foe, Margaret Chu, share a hug.
The unusual moment unfolded last week in that warmest and fuzziest of settings: a Senate budget hearing. It's that time of year again when lawmakers scour budget requests made by federal departments for the next fiscal year. Cabinet secretaries and federal project managers spent the last few weeks trudging up to Capitol Hill to justify -- and beg for -- their multibillion-dollar requests.
So it was that Chu came before the 13-member Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the Yucca Mountain budget.
As it happens, the top Democrat on that panel is Reid, which means the Department of Energy's Yucca project chief was in the position of requesting money from the project's most powerful enemy.
Before the hearing started, Chu chatted quietly with panel chairman Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and the two shared a brief hug. Reid, standing nearby, joked with Chu, "Where's my hug?"
Chu obliged, and those gathered in the hearing room joined the two in a good laugh.
The irony was hard to miss. Everyone knows that when it comes to the Yucca Mountain budget, Reid does not embrace Chu's department. He batters it. Every year in quiet negotiations with fellow senators, the wheeling-and-dealing No. 2 Senate Democrat arranges to slash funding for the nuclear waste repository, forcing Yucca managers to scramble to trim expenses and delay work.
Moments after their hug, Reid was grilling Chu with some tough questions. Among them: How can you possibly keep the project on schedule, given past budget cuts?
But Chu promised she could, and she vowed to stick to an aggressive timetable to submit an application for a Yucca construction license by December 2004.
Project managers are considering various near-term cost-saving measures, Chu said in an interview later. She confirmed that one possibility is the delay of a $1 billion rail spur in Nevada.
The schedule is "extremely tight," and delaying the whole project any further would be costly, Chu said.
Chu and her fellow project managers face a lot of challenges: the license application, three or four years of Nuclear Regulatory Commission scrutiny and a fight in federal court with the state of Nevada later this year.
But the most immediate battle for Chu -- and the battle that likely will continue to intensify more and more each year -- is the fight over money. That conflict has taken on a new urgency now that the site has been officially designated by President Bush and approved by Congress.
After two decades of site research and annual budgets in the $300 million to $400 million range, Chu plans to start asking Congress for much bigger pots of money every year as construction and waste-transportation planning advance. Yucca budget requests could soar beyond $1 billion by 2005.
Chu warned that there was no way to keep the $58 billion project on its current timeline if Congress did not approve her $591 million for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. She is still reeling from a $134 million cut in 2003 spending. Chu needs the money to finish the license application and begin work on a waste-shipping plan, she told the panel.
Chu has friends on the money committees, notably Domenici and Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho. But Reid has no intention of allowing Chu to reap full funding for next year or any year. "We'll do that at the right time," Reid said, in an interview, of his plan of attack for Chu's $591 million request.
Reid had scoffed at Chu's contention that there was hope to keep the project running on time.
The senator said people are going to wonder how Chu could possibly keep Yucca on a 2010 timetable and "get everything done correctly and properly," given decades of budget cuts.
"All of us will want to know what you did wrong or not at all," Reid told Chu at the budget hearing.
Later, a reporter asked Chu if Reid was a good hugger. She chuckled and said that he was.
But it is a mighty cold embrace, and Chu knows that better than anyone.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
April 13, 2003
In Response: Yucca and the rurals: It isn't Clark that will bear the burden
It isn't Clark that will bear the burden
By Ben Viljoen
Special To The Review-Journal
I have been serving the citizens of Esmeralda County as a county commissioner since 1996. In all of that time I have never seen Robert Loux, director of the Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency, at a commission meeting or had any discussion with him concerning any issue related to Yucca Mountain. His office has never asked the Esmeralda County board for its input into the state's nuclear waste agenda.
Consequently, I was surprised to read a commentary by Mr. Loux in the March 23 Review-Journal that implies he is at all familiar with our policy concerning Yucca Mountain.
Mr. Loux accuses Esmeralda, Lincoln and Nye counties of conspiring with the nuclear industry to negotiate for benefits from Yucca Mountain. Mr. Loux never made an attempt to contact me to verify his facts, so it's understandable that they are inaccurate and his assumptions unfounded. I feel compelled to make an equally public statement in response because the news media is the only forum Mr. Loux will use to communicate with the rural counties.
The nuclear industry has never directly or indirectly influenced a single action by the Esmeralda County Commission. On the contrary, the board relies on a Citizens Advisory Council, comprised entirely of Esmeralda County residents, to recommend Yucca Mountain policy. For the past 12 years, this group has kept close watch on all scientific, political and legal developments at Yucca Mountain. The council meets in public forum to discuss findings and analyze their impact on Esmeralda County.
The Esmeralda County Commission and the Citizens Advisory Council have developed a policy over time that we hope will help in securing both the safety of our citizens and the economy of our communities if our county is chosen as the primary corridor for high-level shipments to Yucca Mountain.
Residents of our communities have approached me on many occasions with great concern that Nevada has not developed a contingency plan to protect them in the event that we are forced to accept Yucca Mountain. They are very aware that Esmeralda County will bear a far greater burden than Clark or Washoe counties because our governor will never allow the waste to be shipped near a major population center. The rural counties will, by default, be forced to accept the burden of funneling waste to Yucca Mountain so that urban communities, which are better equipped to handle it, can be spared the inconvenience.
Mr. Loux seems very confident that Nevada will stop Yucca Mountain in the end. I really wish that in the past 20 years of fighting the federal government on this issue, Nevada had won a single battle. Unfortunately, our track record in the courts and at the political level has been abysmal despite years of claims by Mr. Loux that the big victory is just around the corner.
I feel that to continue fighting without a contingency plan which addresses the "what if" scenario is not only irresponsible, but also unlawful. County governments are required by law to prepare for and respond to all local emergencies. Esmeralda County has and will continue to fulfill this role with the sole objective of protecting its citizens.
Ben Viljoen is chairman of the Esmeralda County Commission.
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State of Nevada
Agency for Nuclear Projects
www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/
nwpo@nuc.state.nv.us
775-687-3744
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