Yucca Mountain News Clips
Monday, June 2, 2003
---------------------------
Reno Gazette-Journal
June 01, 2003
Your Turn: Nuclear power will benefit environment
By Per Peterson
The U.S. Senate will soon consider the Energy Policy Act of 2003, which includes loan guarantees to cover half of the cost of six new nuclear power plants, and a small hydrogen demonstration reactor. If approved, U.S. utilities will likely order new nuclear power plants. Until now, no utility has wanted to be first to find out whether the new regulatory system can prevent the construction delays — and resulting interest payments — that bankrupted utilities in the 1980s. The Energy Policy Act would flip this equation over, making it more desirable to be first utility to order a plant, not the last.
Does this involve risk to taxpayers? Not much. Because the act requires that utilities put 50 percent of their own capital at risk, no utility will build a plant unless a sound business plan exists. We can be quantitative. Right now, utilities would spend $1,200 per kilowatt nuclear capacity, if future natural gas prices would average $2.50 for each million BTU. Utilities would spend $1,600 per kilowatt if the future average gas price were $4. Recently, gas prices have been up in the range of $7 in some parts of the country, and General Electric has said it will bid a fixed-price, fixed-construction-period nuclear plant, the type it has already built successfully in Japan, for under $1,400 per kilowatt. There exists, right now, a real business case for new nuclear power plant orders.
The act also provides support to demonstrate nuclear production of hydrogen using high-temperature chemical processes. Right now, our nation converts natural gas equivalent of 50 large nuclear plants to produce hydrogen — to crack and clean heavy crude oil — to make our gasoline. By using substantially more hydrogen, to also break up the toxic benzene in our gasoline into simpler nontoxic molecules, then as much as 15 percent to 25 percent of the energy in gasoline could come from hydrogen. Thus nuclear hydrogen could cut at least 15percent to 25 percent off of our nation´s crude oil consumption, and up to 100 percent if our national effort to develop hydrogen fuel cells proves successful.
As a staunch environmentalist, why do I strongly favor the nuclear portion of this act? It´s simple: With Year 2000 technology, wind power takes 1,000 pounds of steel, and comparable amounts of other construction materials, for each kilowatt of power it produces. If you want a reality check, ask any energy advocate how much steel they need. With Year 1970 nuclear technology, running right now at 103 nuclear plants in the United States, nuclear takes 90 pounds of steel. Not only is the cost of nuclear construction materials much lower, but also we don´t force our environment to absorb the insults of producing that extra 910 pounds.
For Nevada, significant new nuclear construction would have a major impact. Right now, it appears that Yucca Mountain will be licensed to hold a maximum of 60 tons of spent fuel per acre. Because at most 2,000 acres can likely be developed at Yucca, then our current 103 reactors alone, during their likely lifetimes, will fill this site. A decision to build a significant number of new plants will thus force another national decision — to either to find and license a second repository, or to develop and deploy waste transmutation technology that will burn up most of the heavy, long-lived radioactive elements in spent fuel, so the residual waste from nuclear energy will have a hundred or a thousand times lower long-term radiotoxicity. I think that the second approach is best, both for Nevada and for the world.
Per Peterson is a 1982 graduate of the University of Nevada, Reno. He is a professor and chair of the department of nuclear engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.
---------------------------
E4engineering
June 02, 2003
Nuclear fallout
By Julia Pierce and Helen Knight
The world is facing a new tidal wave of radioactive waste as developing nations launch nuclear programmes with no hope of dealing with their byproducts.
Just days after western governments finally concluded an agreement to pay for clean-up operations at the world's biggest waste dumping ground - the Barents Sea, around north-west Russia - fears are growing that the inability of even advanced nuclear economies to deal with the problem heralds disaster in countries such as India, South Africa, North Korea and Taiwan.
Nuclear power offers the only realistic means of reducing global carbon dioxide emissions in the near future. Europe and the US are investigating some techniques for reducing the radioactivity of nuclear waste, but given the scale of the global problem this is likely to be too little too late.
Western governments continue to 'stockpile' waste until another solution is found, and now a growing number of experts say that the controversy currently surrounding waste disposal is only the tip of the iceberg as civil and military nuclear programmes proliferate around the world.
The situation in the Barents Sea, which thanks to its role as a dumping ground for the Soviet Northern Fleet's old submarines and 14,000 cubic metres of radioactive material is the largest repository of nuclear waste in the world, offers a chilling glimpse of the consequences of failure to address the issue. Foreign ministers from the EU, Norway and the US signed an agreement in Stockholm last week to allocate funds for decommissioning the submarines and cleaning up the area.
The Multilateral Nuclear Environmental Programme for Russia (MNEPR) agreement, which will allow funds to be released for a number of clean-up projects, was signed in time for next week's G8 Summit at Evian, France, where the issue is expected to be discussed. The MNEPR agreement will pave the way for e40m of EU money to be released to begin tackling a priority list of 16 nuclear waste-management projects on the northwest Kola Peninsula.
Environmental groups have long argued that Russian nuclear submarines pose a serious threat to Europe, particularly to fishing areas in the Arctic Waters. Some fear the submarines, which still contain spent nuclear fuel in their reactors, are also a potential target for terrorist groups and rogue states.
While the US funded the decommissioning of many strategic submarines during the 1990s on the grounds that their long-range nuclear weapons could pose a security threat to the country, around 100 vessels from the Northern and Pacific Fleets are still languishing in docks.
The huge environmental problem stems from the Soviet era, when regulations surrounding the storage of radioactive waste were far from strict, said John Large, head of nuclear safety consulting engineers Large & Associates and leader of the team that assessed the nuclear and weapons hazards aboard the sunken Kursk submarine.
Unlike the UK, which insists that radioactive waste be stored in special packaging designed to be placed in a repository, the Soviet Union had no such standards and made no distinction between lightly contaminated and heavily radioactive material, said Large.
'The military were under-funded and had very little manpower to look after the waste, so they just threw it away. There are six or seven submarines that were sunk off the nuclear test island of Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic, in which they put additional radioactive fuel just to get rid of it. The Lenin icebreaker had a serious accident in the 1970s, and they simply took the reactor section out of the boat, which is about 20m x 10m, and sunk it,' he said.
The western donors are likely to have to fund new technology to replace the ageing Russian equipment, the creation of new infrastructure such as fuel loading points, and a clean-up of certain hotspots along the Kola Peninsula believed to have been contaminated by the waste.
Nuclear engineering consultancy RWE Nukem is already involved in clean-up projects in the Russian northwest, acting as project manager for the DTI's Former Soviet Union Nuclear Legacy Programme. The programme, which includes nuclear submarine decommissioning projects, is the UK's contribution to the G8's Global Partnership, for which it plans to commit up to £460m over the next decade.
But while the situation in Russia is dire - and likely to worsen following a law passed in 2001 allowing radioactive materials to be imported into the country - the West has no cause to feel complacent. Despite its contribution to the Russian nuclear clean-up, the UK has yet to decommission a single of its own Royal Navy submarines.
The Ministry of Defence's preferred option is to remove the fuel and reactors and store them initially at Sellafield, while the radioactive reactor compartments would then be cut out in sections and stored on land. The site for this storage is currently the subject of a consultation process, but is expected to be Devonport near Plymouth, as it is the only licensed site with enough space to store the 27 submarines due to be decommissioned.
'The UK and the rest of Europe hasn't solved its own radioactive waste problems, so I think it's a bit unfair practising on the Russians,' said Large. 'Quite frankly some of the inland MoD sites are a disgrace, and the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority should sort out the mess at Dounreay. It had to abandon a shaft it has up there and give it over to private contractors to sort out the mess.'
In the US, the world's most prolific nuclear economy, a bill currently before the Senate is seeking funds to build several new plants. Yet problems with finding a long-term solution for waste disposal have dogged successive administrations. The country is now attempting to build its first geologic repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. But the state has raised concerns that the site lies above an aquifer supplying water to many desert residents and is on or near 32 geological faults.
While the site hopes to begin accepting waste in 2010, legal challenges by local residents and even the state itself are likely to delay this, meaning the current practice of storing radioactive materials at power plants will have to continue.'High-level waste constitutes the murky underbelly of attempts to promote nuclear power as an emissions-free power source,' said Lisa Gue, a senior energy analyst for US consumer group Public Citizen. 'You can't guarantee that the site will not leak over the next 10,000 years - it's a period that exceeds recorded history.'
Waste transport is also a problem. 'Moving waste across 47 states in the US could risk hijack or sabotage by terrorists, with local emergency services being ill-equipped to deal with it,' said Gue. She warns that if the western world is unable to cope developing countries will face severe problems. 'In the third world this risk will be multiplied,' she said. 'One solution put forward by our government is to make details of shipments secret, but that's hardly democratic. Nevada has less influence than other states, hence the fact that it was chosen for the repository.'
With countries such as the UK and US struggling over the waste issue, the growing number of emerging civil and military nuclear programmes around the world seem destined to encounter significant problems. An early example is Taiwan, where the state-owned Taipower was sold nuclear reactors by the US without any technology to deal with the waste produced. Faced with stockpiles of radioactive materials the company simply began dumping low and mid-level waste on Orchid Island off the country's south coast.
The World Bank has labelled nuclear plants 'large white elephants', claiming that cost projections for building facilities are usually substantially underestimated and often fail to take waste disposal, decommissioning and environmental costs into account.Despite this, developing nations such as South Africa see nuclear power as a solution to their energy needs. South Africa's coal reserves, though extensive, are in remote areas and produce only low-grade coal, leading to energy supply problems across the country.
Now local electricity firm Eskom wants to build a pebble bed nuclear reactor in Koeberg near Cape Town, to meet the country's power demands. The city's authorities have protested that thefacility will produce around 800 tonnesof high-level waste over its lifetime, with no choice but to store it at the plant.
Iran's first reactor, being built by the Russians near the Persian Gulf city of Bushehr, is due to be ready for the loading of fuel by the end of this year. It is feared that the development of nuclear weapons by countries such as North Korea will encourage others in the region to follow suit, increasing the threat of an environmental disaster.
India's nuclear weapons programme has already caused environmental problems. The country's Candu reactors - the rights for which India bought from Canada claiming they were for peaceful means and promptly used them to develop its first atomic bomb - have been rife with problems, including reported radiation leaks.
According to many, even the most cursory audit of the international nuclear scene should set alarm bells ringing and push radioactive waste management up the agenda. 'This is an absolute disaster environmentally,' said Large.
'The health consequences of this stuff are tremendous. If there areradio-isotopes with half-lives of 24,000 years in the environment, how do you demobilise them? These are the problems they didn't think about when they started.'
Falling through the system
A spate of incidents in which highly radioactive material has been misplaced by operators has done little to strengthen the nuclear industry's case that it is a 'clean' power source.
Despite claiming to have one of the most tightly regulated nuclear industries in the world, the US power industry has suffered a number of embarrassing mishaps.
In November 2000 the Millstone nuclear power plant in Connecticut reported that it had 'lost' two spent fuel rods. A subsequent investigation concluded that they were cut into segments in 1979 and shipped to a low-level radioactive waste facility with other irradiated hardware some time between March 1985 and December 1992. Their final resting-place is still unknown.
The US Environmental Protection Agency says at least 26 incidents involving accidental melting of radioactive material have occurred since 1983. This is worrying, as materials with low-level contamination may be recycled under government licence. Once inspected and certified, the authorities claim the substances are safe to be dumped in landfill or converted into industrial materials which may eventually be used to make household items. Monitoring is stringent, but the accidental release of a contaminated batch would be a disaster.
A serious incident involving accidental combination of low and high-level waste has already occurred in the Taiwan. In the early 1980s material contaminated with Cobalt-60 was used in the construction of buildings in the capital, Taipei. The situation was not made public until 1992. More than 100 buildings, including office buildings, homes and schools, were confirmed to be contaminated by radiation. Inhabitants have since reported abnormally high levels of thyroid disease.
In March last year a highly radioactive caesium rod was discovered in Taiwan in a pile of non-radioactive metal scraps on a truck at a steel foundry that operates a melting furnace. The rod was emitting radiation at levels over 270 times the amount recommended by the International Commission on Radiation Protection. Officials admitted they did not know its origin.
Who wants to be the world's nuclear dustbin?
Countries using nuclear power are ethically and legally bound to take care of the disposal of their own waste materials. Some have argued that building an international repository for high-level waste would be safer and more economical. However, these plans have so far met with failure.
In 1999 Pangea Resources said it wished to ship spent fuel and other contaminated waste from commercial reactors around the world, except the US, for long-term storage at a £5bn centre in the Australian outback.
The site would use a dedicated port and rail link to accept 75,000 tonnes of waste over a 40-year period, a capacity similar to that of Yucca Mountain in the US. It could also extend its service to accept material from weapons disposal if necessary.
The Perth-based firm was created by a consortium of nuclear industry operators including the UK's BNFL, Swiss firm NAGRA and Canadians EHL.
Pangea's researchers had identified Australia, southern Africa, Argentina and western China as being geologically suitable, with Australia favoured owing to its political stability and on economic, technological and legal grounds. The ideal site lay in a basin between central Western Australia and northern South Australia.
But despite international pressure to accept the repository Western Australia's parliament passed legislation making it illegal to dispose of foreign waste in the state without specific parliamentary approval. Alternative sites were examined, but the plans were eventually dropped. A spokesman for BNFL said the company was no longer pursuing the proposal as it was not believed to be a viable commercial prospect.
Now, focus for a repository has shifted to Russia. The country has said it plans to accept spent fuel for long-term storage from a variety of European and Asian countries in order to raise the billions of dollars needed to finance the clean-up of existing contaminated nuclear zones. But environmental groups such as Greenpeace have attacked the plans, accusing the Russian Duma of prostituting itself to the nuclear industry.
---------------------------
Salt Lake Trib
June 02, 2003
Let 'em Keep It
Utah may owe Minnesota a debt of gratitude.
The Minnesota Legislature has passed a bill allowing Xcel Energy to store more radioactive waste from its nuclear power plant reactors at its site. Xcel is the driving force behind the eight-member Private Fuel Storage consortium, the group that is pushing a parking lot on the Goshute Reservation of Utah's Skull Valley for 4,000 storage casks to hold highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel.
The legislation, which the Minnesota governor is expected to sign, should give Xcel enough storage space to last until its operating license expires in 2014. There is also some indication that the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, which will decide all future waste issues, would be open to even more on-site storage for Xcel.
What this all means for Utah is that the Skull Valley storage site in Tooele County may not be necessary. The federal government's permanent nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada is expected to open in 2010, though delays are possible. If Xcel can store its waste on site until 2014, and possibly beyond, there are no good reasons to ship it to Utah for interim storage.
In contrast, there is at least one good reason not to store the waste at Skull Valley, located just three miles from the Utah Test and Training Range. The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board ruled in March that the risk of a fighter jet en route to the training range crashing into the planned above-ground storage casks at Skull Valley was too great to support licensing of the PFS facility.
PFS wants the Skull Valley site as a way station for 44,000 metric tons of highly radioactive waste -- essentially all of the spent fuel rods generated by commercial reactor operators since the beginning of the nuclear industry -- until it can be moved to Yucca Mountain. PFS has argued that centralized storage at Skull Valley is economical and would simplify the job of regulators who now oversee about 72 storage sites, including on-site storage at commercial power plants.
That argument is bolstered by a federal law which has collected fees since 1982 from nuclear waste producers for a permanent storage facility the Feds were supposed to have built by 1998. Yucca Mountain is supposed to fulfill that obligation.
But Skull Valley is not required by federal law, nor is it necessary for nuclear fuel storage. Many reactors have successful on-site storage programs and Minnesota has relieved the pressure on the lead company in the PFS conglomerate to move its waste by raising the cap on storage casks at its site.
The next step is for the state of Utah to get serious about economic development for the impoverished 121-member Goshute band. The Goshutes stand to profit handsomely from PFS, but at a risk that is too high for both its members and other Utahns.
---------------------------
Minneapolis Star Tribune
June 01, 2003
Xcel Energy says no new power plants are now necessary
Mike Kaszuba
Xcel Energy said Saturday that it will recommend that plans to build two fossil-fuel plants be abandoned now that the company has received legislative approval to store additional nuclear waste at its Prairie Island power plant.
Spokesman Paul Adelmann said the legislative approval "eliminates the contingency and the need that we had anticipated." He said the utility will formally ask the state Public Utilities Commission "that the docket on the issue be closed."
During the just-completed legislative session, Xcel had said it would need to build two fossil-fuel plants if its request to store more waste at Prairie Island was not granted. Gov. Tim Pawlenty signed a bill that would allow waste storage at Prairie Island until licenses for the two reactors expire in 2013 and 2014.
The St. Paul Pioneer Press had reported that an Xcel spokesman said Friday that the utility might push for the new plants even with the Legislature's Prairie Island decision. Adelmann said he could not explain the difference between the company's comments on Friday and Saturday.
The Pioneer Press account included criticism of Xcel from a legislator, an analyst with the Public Utilities Commission and an environmental advocate, who reacted to the report that the utility might still try to push for new plants near Mankato and Rosemount.
Adelmann, however, said Saturday that the utility intends to ask the commission to close the file on the new plants. "Our intention is not to move forward" with the new plants, he said. "It's going to be up to the PUC to determine the final outcome."
Phyllis Reha, a PUC commissioner, said the agency will probably follow Xcel's recommendation. "I don't see why we would have to build any new plants, period, let alone coal-fired plants," she said. "The PUC -- I don't think any of us want to see any more power plants that aren't needed."
Reha said that, because of the legislative action, she expects Xcel to drop its push for the new plants.
State Sen. Ellen Anderson, DFL-St. Paul, chairwoman of the Senate Commerce and Utilities Committee, said Saturday that Xcel's latest comment that it will not move forward with the new plants "makes a lot more sense." Reacting to the initial report that Xcel might still push for the new plants, she had said that the utility had "totally misled" the Legislature.
Mike Kaszuba is at mkaszuba@startribune.com.
---------------------------
Las Vegas SUN
June 1, 2003
Columnist Jeff German: Exposing Yucca problems tough task
Jeff German's column appears Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays in the Sun. Reach him at german@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4067.
JOE CARSON, a well-known Department of Energy whistle-blower, has some advice for any of his colleagues looking to expose safety problems at Yucca Mountain.
"If you can live with yourself looking the other way," he said, "look the other way."
That's not what Nevada Sens. Harry Reid and John Ensign want to hear as they struggle to get Yucca Mountain whistle-blowers to expose the troubles within the high-level nuclear waste project, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
But it's the reality the senators face in Nevada's battle to prove that Yucca Mountain is unsafe to store the nation's deadly nuclear waste.
The DOE simply has become too good at making life miserable for those who try to expose wrongdoing with its ranks -- something Carson knows all too well.
Reid and Ensign got a taste of the difficulties in bringing forward DOE whistle-blowers at last Wednesday's hearing in Las Vegas on concerns about whether the DOE can assure Americans that Yucca Mountain is a suitable dumpsite.
Two Yucca Mountain employees who had raised concerns about the DOE's quality assurance program, Donald Harris and Robert Clark, backed out of the hearing at last minute after the DOE discouraged their testimony.
Their reluctance to testify did not surprise the 49-year-old Carson -- a professional engineer who has been battling the DOE for more than 11 years since blowing the whistle on safety violations at the agency's nuclear research laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
Carson, who has his own website that calls for more DOE accountability, telephoned me from Oak Ridge after last Wednesday's column on the Yucca Mountain hearing to offer his take on what lies ahead for anyone willing to take on the DOE.
"Your life and your liberty are not in jeopardy, but everything else of value to you is, including your professional and personal reputation," he said.
Then there's the worst part: The problems the whistle-blower brings to light rarely get fixed.
Instead of addressing the concerns, Carson said, the DOE, like many federal agencies, tries to discredit the employee stepping forward. In Carson's case, the DOE spread false rumors about him in the workplace, isolated him in a small windowless office, stripped him of his ability to conduct safety inspections and tried to take away his security clearance so that he could be fired.
Carson still works at the Oak Ridge facility, but he said he's in a dead-end job with no real responsibilities. His career with the government, for all intents and purposes, ended 11 years ago when he first spoke out.
He is an example of why there is very little incentive for Yucca Mountain whistle-blowers to step forward within the DOE and why Reid and Ensign have a such a tough road ahead of them in this fight.
The challenge is to find people like Carson who won't look the other way.
Late in the week there was some encouraging news from Margaret Chu, who oversees the Yucca Mountain project for the DOE. Chu informed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has the responsibility of licensing the project, that she was taking steps to make employees feel free to raise safety concerns without threats of harassment and retaliation.
But it remains to be seen whether Chu is serious or doing this for show to help the NRC speed up the licensing process. Everyone on Team Nevada still believes the fix is in at the NRC, whether the dumpsite is safe or not.
If Chu wants to prove her sincerity, however, she'll let Yucca Mountain whistle-blowers like Donald Harris and Robert Clark talk freely to Congress -- and then pat them on the back.
---------------------------
Las Vegas SUN
June 1, 2003
Editorial: More Yucca bombshells raise alarm
LAS VEGAS SUN
Weekend Edition: June 1, 2003
A U.S. Senate hearing last week in Las Vegas, co-chaired by Sens. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and John Ensign, R-Nev., only intensified fears over the construction taking place at Yucca Mountain. Among the witnesses were experts from the General Accounting Office, which is the investigative arm of Congress, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their testimony was chilling. Just as chilling was the absence of two witnesses, Yucca employees who had separately raised quality-assurance alarms with their supervisors. Each had claimed their actions were greeted with disciplinary retaliation. A main reason for the hearing was to get their stories on record and allow the senators to ask them questions. But neither attended, inviting an accusation from Reid that the two were being muzzled by the Energy Department, the site's primary contractor.
Congress has selected the mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as the burial site for at least 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste from the nation's commercial reactors. A worst-case scenario for Yucca is that the Energy Department and its subcontractors will gloss over recommended precautions and take shortcuts during its construction. The environmental damage, which would include contaminated air and groundwater, cannot be overestimated in that scenario. In our view even a best-case scenario, where all of the known science would be applied and workmanship would be top-notch, still carries too much risk for the project to be viable.
Unfortunately, work continues with the blessings of Congress and President Bush. Given the deadliness of nuclear waste, and the mountain's proximity to Las Vegas -- the country's fastest-growing area -- at a bare minimum the project should be proceeding with the utmost caution and with the ultimate attention to quality control. Last week's hearing offered evidence to the contrary.
Robin Nazzaro, the GAO's director of Natural Resources and Environment, testified that the Energy Department has been unsuccessful in addressing "recurring quality assurance problems." She said new problems have been identified since the Energy Department issued an improvement plan last year. She cited criticisms of the quality of work at Yucca that have been expressed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the agency charged with determining if Yucca Mountain should be licensed. She said the Energy Department has developed strategies to resolve only 77 of the 293 key technical issues that must be resolved in the construction process. "As we see these recurring problems (the Energy Department) doesn't seem to be able to correct them," Nazzaro testified.
Also testifying were Allison Macfarlane, senior research associate with MIT's Security Studies Program, and William Belke, a retired NRC official who served on-site at Yucca. Macfarlane criticized the Energy Department for not allowing its scientific studies of Yucca to be reviewed by scientists outside of the department. In fact, she testified, the Energy Department is pressuring outside scientists to not challenge its Yucca findings. Many scientists, she said, fear retaliation if they do. She cited the effects of water seeping onto the waste's burial casks as one critical area that has not been properly analyzed either by the Energy Department or by independent scientists. She said the changing temperature inside Yucca Mountain and the radiation could cause groundwater to hasten the casks' corrosion rate. Belke confirmed that Yucca employees, such as the two who stayed away from the hearing, indeed face official retaliation.
On Thursday, a day after the hearing, Margaret Chu, the Energy Department's national nuclear waste director, announced a plan to improve the environment for employees and to do a better job of ensuring quality work. After all that came out in just a rather small hearing, her plan is hardly comforting. It certainly should not dissuade the Senate from holding a larger, much more formal hearing. We think the nation should hear what we heard.
---------------------------
KRNV
May 31, 2003
Yucca Mountain chief says workers' concerns will be heard
The top Yucca Mountain administrator said she'll encourage workers to raise concerns at the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump site.
Margaret Chu's letter outlining the plans was sent Thursday to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
A day earlier, Senators Harry Reid and John Ensign held a special Senate subcommittee hearing in Las Vegas to air complaints about safety issues and whistleblower intimidation at Yucca Mountain. The senators alleged that project managers dissuaded two witnesses from testifying.
In another development, a federal court has cleared the way for the Energy Department to hire a new law firm for the Yucca Mountain project. The firm is expected to help the department prepare a license application for the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles from Las Vegas.
---------------------------
Deseret News
May 31, 2003
Utah's GOP gets poor grades
Public interest being ignored, group says
By Jake Parkinson
Deseret News staff writer
Not surprisingly, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group says Utah's Republican congressional delegation voted for the public interest less than 10 percent of the time, while Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, received a higher 71 percent ranking.
PIRG's Congressional Scorecard for U.S. Senators and Representatives compared lawmakers' voting records on more than 20 different issues from March 2001 to February 2003, including drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Clean Air Act and the storage of nuclear wastes in Yucca Mountain.
Sens. Bob Bennett and Orrin Hatch, both Utah Republicans, were said to have voted for the public interest 10 percent of the time. Rep. Chris Cannon, R-Utah, received a lower mark of 5 percent.
Cannon's spokeswoman, Meghan Riding, said voters will notice Republican delegates all scored poorly and will quickly realize the source of the rankings.
"We all have the same goals of protecting air and water, but we have different methods of doing that," Riding said. Cannon didn't vote on regulations that would have shut down power plants across the country, but he did vote for the Healthy Forests Initiative, which provides for thinning of forests to prevent large catastrophic forest fires.
"That will do more to protect the environment than many of the things listed on PIRG's scorecard," Riding said.
Matheson's spokeswoman, Alyson Heyrend, said Matheson doesn't put a lot of stock in scorecards either.
"Before he casts his vote, he is looking at the merit of each individual issue and how it will affect the people of Utah," Heyrend said. "There have been many issues we have disagreed on with this group."
PIRG plans to distribute the individual congressional scorecards to hundreds of thousands of Utah households.
"These scorecards are an important tool to educate the public about the voting records of their elected officials and to help citizens hold those officials accountable," said PIRG campaign director Vanessa Pierce in a written statement.
Overall, 166 members of the House or Senate scored 80 percent and above, of whom 34 scored 100 percent. One-hundred-fifty members of either chamber had scores at 10 percent or lower, with 67 members scoring 0 percent.
---------------------------
Las Vegas SUN
May 30, 2003
Brief news stories from Las Vegas
Yucca Mountain
LAS VEGAS (AP) - The top Yucca Mountain administrator said she'll encourage workers to raise concerns at the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump site.
Margaret Chu, head of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, also included plans for management shifts, "corrective actions," more attention to procedures and more worker accountability in a five-page letter sent Thursday to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
It came a day after Sens. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and John Ensign, R-Nev., convened a special Senate subcommittee hearing in Las Vegas to air complaints about safety issues and alleged whistleblower intimidation at Yucca Mountain. The senators charged that project managers dissuaded two witnesses from testifying.
Also Wednesday, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, cleared the way for the Energy Department to hire a new law firm for the Yucca Mountain project.
The firm is expected to help the department prepare a license application for the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles from Las Vegas.
---------------------------
Las Vegas Review Journal
May 30, 2003
Nuclear waste site in Utah rejected
But scaled-back plan can be resubmitted
By Robert Gehrke
The Associated Press
ROCKVILLE, Md. -- The government on Thursday rejected a bid for a scaled-back plan for a nuclear waste dump in the Utah desert southwest of Salt Lake City, but said the proposal can be resubmitted.
The Atomic Safety Licensing Board said the request was not filed properly. The three-judge panel said Private Fuel Storage could try again, and that their effort would be expedited.
PFS attorneys told the board the scaled-down site would decrease the chances of a jet fighter crashing into the facility, a possibility that concerned Utah officials and was deemed too great a risk by the board.
The waste site would be under the flight pattern for the nation's largest military training range.
The smaller facility would have 336 casks with 2 1/2-foot-thick concrete and steel walls. Initially, PFS had proposed storing 4,000 casks containing 40,000 metric tons of radioactive waste.
In March, the board blocked that proposal, saying the risk of a crash at the storage facility was four times higher than the one-in-1 million chance that it deemed acceptable.
Thursday, the three-judge board held the hearing to determine whether to issue the conditional license for the smaller storage site. The board said that instead of an appeal of the March decision, the smaller site would have to be filed as an amended petition.
Attorneys for Utah argued that a new plan would allow PFS to get its foot in the door and eventually fulfill its original proposal.
The Air Force flies thousands of training missions each year over the sprawling Utah Test and Training Range near the Skull Valley Goshute reservation.
Proposing a smaller facility makes it less likely the storage site would be hit in a plane crash, bringing the calculated risk to a level the licensing board said would be acceptable.
PFS has appealed the board's March decision to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and is seeking to convince the board that the concrete casks could withstand an F-16 crash.
PFS, a consortium of eight electric utilities, wants to store the waste at a temporary storage facility on the Skull Valley Goshute reservation until a permanent dump can be built at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
The Skull Valley Band of Goshutes, an impoverished tribe whose reservation is in the barren desert 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, sought the economic benefits of the project and signed a deal with PFS to pursue the plan.
The reservation is tucked among a low-level nuclear waste dump, a chemical weapons incinerator and storehouse, an Army chemical and biological testing range and an Air Force bombing range.
---------------------------
State of Nevada
Agency for Nuclear Projects
www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/
nwpo@nuc.state.nv.us
775-687-3744
---------------------------