Yucca Mountain News Clips
Tuesday, May 20, 2003
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Wall Street Journal
May 20, 2003

Carlsbad Is Ready for Second Nuclear Site

City That Has Underground Waste Dump Raises Its Hand for Plant to Rebuild Triggers

By John J. Fialka
Carlsbad, N.M.

IN AN AGE when neighborhoods fight wider roads and bigger power lines and cities reject messy industries, the philosophy here is different. It could be summed up as: Yes! In our backyard! During the 1980s, the issue for Carlsbad was the world's first underground nuclear-waste dump. Other potential sites-many of them better situated and equipped than this remote desert town (pop. 25,000)-raised political objections to the project, but Carlsbad went after it. Since its completion in 1988, the dump has employed 25% of the city's work force, according to Mayor Bob Forrest. Now city officials are eyeing a bigger prize: the U.S. Department of Energy's projected "Modern Pit Facility," a factory to rebuild the plutonium triggers for thermonuclear weapons. That could bring in three times as much money as the nuclear-waste dump. As Mayor Forrest, a cheery, backslapping tire-store owner, puts it, it would be a "good fit" for Carlsbad.

Different Point of View

The local attitude is far different at other potential sites for the nuclear facility. No one spoke in favor of the project at a hearing in Las Vegas. Officials at Los Alamos, N.M., were cool to the idea. Anti-nuclear activists in South Carolina's Aiken County, home to the federal Savannah River Site, turned that hearing into a shouting match. At Amarillo, Texas, site of the federal Pantex plant, some witnesses said nuclear debris might poi-son the region's main acquifer.

It all makes Mayor Forrest, former captain of the "Cavemen," the local high school football team, feel that he's calling the plays for a team that will score again. "You probably think we're nuts," he says, grinning to a visitor. When the DOE held hearings in Carlsbad, there were 60 witnesses, and only two spoke out against the weapons project. The facility would cost the federal government between $2 billion and $4 billion. "I'll tell you this," says George Dunagan, the head of a local real-estate firm. "If l didn't think it would be safe, I'd have been at those hearings run with more technological expertise, than DOE's old nuclear-trigger plant, which created a massive radioactive mess at Rocky Flats, Colo. The facility, in Denver's suburbs, is now being carefully dismantled. Colorado politicians want it gone.

Buried in Salt of Earth

Most of the Rocky Flats debris, from workers' plutonium-tainted clothing to contaminated building : rubble, was sealed in barrels and trucked here to the underground dump, which DOE calls the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. At the plant, waste is unloaded, inspected and then stacked in long tunnels dug into a deep salt formation. The theory is that within a few years the salt will collapse on the waste, pinning it harmlessly under-ground for thousands of years..

In the early 1980s, only about 30% of Carlsbad's citizens were in favor of the plant, Mr. Dunagan, the real-estate firm head recalls. But after they watched DOE ended. It helped that the nuclear-waste dump brought in hundreds of highly paid technicians and some DOE scientists as permanent residents, says Mr. Dunagan, whose firm sold many of them homes.

Since its early" days, Carlsbad's economic story has been about "slow growth." The city's saving grace has been, as one local author puts it, a "knack for self-promotion." It started as an agricultural town called Eddy. In 1899, hoping its mineral springs would attract tourists, Eddy changed its name to Carlsbad, after the luxurious Karlsbad spa in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The waters drew some tourists, but more came in the 1920s after the National Park Service opened nearby Carlsbad Caverns, where the lure was the daily migrations of Mexican free-tailed bats in the caves. In the 1930s, mining companies began selling potash, an ingredient for fertilizer, found in the area's. salt deposits.

By the 1970s, however, Canadian mines had taken much of Carlsbad's pot-bad Caverns. When politicians around Lyons, Kan., DOE's preferred site for the underground nuclear dump, began to ex-press doubts about the project, Carlsbad officials saw opportunity.

Chasing `Atomic Pork'

"This changed the face of our little old town," says Mayor Forrest. It took 10 years of political battles and lawsuits to open the plant, including many hearings in Santa Fe, the. state capital, where people accused Carlsbad of chasing "atomic pork," he recalls.

Recently, Mayor Forrest and local business people have hired a Washington lobbyist to help Carlsbad win the plant to make nuclear triggers, softball-size parts made of plutonium that ignite hydrogen bombs. DOE is scheduled to decide whether to build it and where to put it next year.

"Sept. 11 has made it a different world," the mayor says. "There is more acceptance of nuclear weapons. People realize if they're going to be built, we might as well build them here."

The plant would produce as many as 125 triggers a year, taking those from old bombs, melting them down, removing impurities that accumulate with aging and then recasting them to make new ones. It would create as many as 1,000 jobs and open in 2020-about the time that the nu-clear dump is scheduled to close.

"Some people refer to it as a nuclear bomb factory. Frankly that's what it is," explains David Giuliani, managing editor of the local paper, the Current-Argus. But, he says, most citizens are willing to accept the risks. "Unlike other areas, we have a very, very strong consensus here."

That seems true, if you disregard the activities of Gene Harbaugh, a retired Presbyterian minister who has organized a half-dozen people to oppose the facility on moral grounds. That's been tough going, he concedes.

"For lots of people in churches here, patriotism and bombs are all tied in a package with God. We don't believe that." In the past five years, Carlsbad has begun to draw a stream of new tourists, many of them experts and planners from Europe and Asia who want to see the nuclear-waste dump. They usually stop by to chat with the mayor. "One thing they ask," he says, "is how did you sell this to the public?"

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Twin Cities Business Journal
May 19, 2003

House approves nuclear storage

The Minnesota House on Monday approved the creation of additional storage space for spent nuclear fuel at Xcel Energy Inc.'s nuclear power plant at Prairie Island near Red Wing. The vote was 81-51.

With the vote, the House followed the example of the Senate, which last week voted to allow more nuclear waste in special storage facilities near the plant.

A 1994 law capped the number of storage casks at the plant at 17 with the expectation that by the time local storage ran out, a national nuclear fuel dump would have been approved and ready to accept any overflow. But the national site, at Yucca Mountain, Nev., won't be ready until at least 2010.

The approved bill allows Xcel to store all waste at the Prairie Island site until Xcel's operating license runs out in 2014.

In exchange for the relaxed storage rules, Xcel has to contribute $16 million per year to a fund that supports renewable energy research and applications.

Members of the House and Senate hope to quickly reconcile both versions of the storage bill and send the bill to the governor's desk soon.

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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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