Yucca Mountain News Clips
Friday, August 1, 2003
---------------------------
Las Vegas SUN
August 01, 2003
Senate energy bill could mean more nuke waste in Nev.
By Suzanne Struglinski
<suzanne@lasvegassun.com>
Las Vegas SUN
WASHINGTON -- Incentives for renewable energy production approved in the Senate energy bill Thursday night could bode well for Nevada, but a push for more nuclear power development could eventually translate into more waste coming into the state.
The energy bill was identical to one approved last year that was killed in a conference committee. The bill, passed by the House in April, now heads again to conference committee in September.
Sens. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev, voted in favor of the bill passed Thursday night.
Many of the bill's programs and policies still hang in the balance, since Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., chairman of Senate Energy and Natural Resources, has vowed to include controversial provisions into the conference report.
For renewable energy, the bill included Reid's language that provides tax credits for renewable resources such as wind, solar, biomass and geothermal power. Reid said the language would create jobs in the states while providing a "steady, reliable energy supply."
"We have limitless renewable resources in Nevada, and these tax incentives will make Nevada the proving ground of renewable energy," Reid said.
Approving last year's bill also resurrected a provision that could mandate that electricity suppliers generate 10 percent of power from renewable resources by 2020.
Meanwhile, the bill excluded federal loan guarantees for new nuclear power reactors, but reauthorizes the Price-Anderson Act, a federal insurance programs for nuclear reactors, until 2012 and funds some nuclear research and development programs.
A new nuclear reactor has not been built for decades and the legislation did not spell out what would happen to spent fuel produced by the new facilities, should they be built.
Plans for a federal nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, would hold 77,000 metric tons of spent fuel. About 46,000 tons of waste slated to go to the mountain sit now sits in storage at commercial nuclear power plants and Energy Department facilities. If all goes according to the department's plan, the site will begin accepting waste in 2010, but the country's 103 reactors will still be producing waste at about 2,000 tons each year.
The department anticipates submitting a license to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in December 2004. The commission has three years, and up to an additional 12 months with congressional approval, to determine if it can authorize construction.
Ensign spokesman Jack Finn said he was pleased with the bill Thursday night since some of the major nuclear components, the loan guarantee and permanent reauthorization of the insurance program, were not included.
Although since Domenici said he will reinsert those provisions, Finn said he will be watching the bill and take steps at the right time to make sure they are not included.
Reid spokeswoman Tessa Hafen noted that the bill does not put any more or less pressure on opening the mountain, nor does it even mention the site.
---------------------------
Las Vegas Review-Journal
August 01, 2003
Storage site up in air
Maneuverings hold up nuclear waste dump plans in Utah
By Paul Foy
The Associated Press
SALT LAKE CITY -- A federal licensing board is pushing off a final decision on a troubled application for a nuclear waste dump at an American Indian reservation in Utah's west desert.
The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board said Thursday it would be unable to finish a review of the Skull Valley project by year's end and will establish a new timetable.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Energy said it was looking at a long-shot alternative for storage of spent fuel rods in northern Utah.
Operators of both sites have offered to take the spent fuel piling up at nuclear power plants across the country until a permanent repository can open at Yucca Mountain in Southern Nevada.
In a memo signed Thursday, Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Chairman Michael Farrar said the Skull Valley review got bogged down in tardy briefings from Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of nuclear power plants that missed a June 30 deadline.
Private Fuel Storage was given until July 21 to file its final briefing challenging the board's finding that the risk of military flights makes Skull Valley too dangerous for a storage site.
That delay will extend the time Utah gets to rebut the briefings, Farrar said. He plans to set a new timetable Aug. 12.
Utah is fighting the deal made with Goshute tribal Chairman Leon Bear for storage of 40,000 metric tons of fuel rods on the reservation, which is sovereign but needs federal approval to accept radioactive waste.
For years, Bill Peterson has been lobbying the Energy Department to consider his unfunded plan, and he's finally got their attention.
The department is giving his 300-year plan for storage and uranium recycling a technical review, Birdie Hamilton-Ray, director of the contracts management division, said Wednesday.
Peterson is lining up scientific advisers for a project about 100 miles northwest of Salt Lake City.
---------------------------
Las Vegas Mercury
July 31, 2003
Quick and Dirty: A notebook of news and politics
Power outrage
This week, the U.S. Senate is debating an energy bill favored by President Bush that would give more than $19 billion in tax breaks and subsidies and another $14 to $16 billion in construction loan guarantees to the nuclear industry--subsidizing and encouraging the construction of new nuclear power reactors, in other words. There's also a permanent liability cap in case of a nuclear power accident, says J.J. Straight, who became the local Sierra Club chapter's conservation organizer in May.
The Sierra Club is part of the Save Our Environment campaign, a coalition of the nation's (and world's, in some cases) major environmental groups that is crying wildfire against the energy package in television ads across the country this week.
Here in Nevada, the ads are pointedly Yucca: "More nuclear power means more nuclear waste, and that means more pressure to make Yucca Mountain the nation's nuclear waste dump...a move President Bush supports."
The coalition, which proposes we turn to safer and more sustainable power technologies, says each new reactor may create "20 to 30 tons of high-level nuclear waste annually."
"So, we're subsidizing these huge energy outfits," which in turn will be sending more nuclear waste to Nevada, says Straight.
Now, that ain't right.--HW
---------------------------
Westerly Sun
July 31, 2003
Federal Officials Review Potential Terrorist Targets
By Phoebe Hall - The Sun Staff
NEW LONDON - Digging their heels into the deck of a U.S. Coast Guard vessel, Rep. Rob Simmons, R-2nd, and federal officials took a high-speed boat tour of the Thames River and Long Island Sound Wednesday to view potential terrorist targets in what Simmons called "one of the highest threat areas in the country."
Simmons, Department of Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Gordon England, and Federal Emergency Management Agency Regional Director Daniel A. Craig reviewed southeastern Connecticut's many security concerns between the Groton Submarine Base and Millstone Nuclear Power Plant.
"This is an opportunity to actually see the area in more detail -- from a seaman's point of view," said England, who had previously served as Secretary of the Navy.
In addition to briefing England on the area's various assets, Simmons hoped the visit would improve communication between Washington and local first responders and increase security funding for everything from Electric Boat and Pfizer to the Amtrak line and commuter ferries.
So far, eastern Connecticut first responders - mostly firefighters and affiliated police departments and ambulance corps - have received $3.5 million in grants and loans from the federal government this year.
"This tour is meant to show off the potential targets to get more funding to protect them," said Simmons, adding, "I want more money."
After boarding the Coast Guard vessel at Station New London and donning orange life vests, Simmons pointed out several areas of concern along the Thames River. The boat then sped to Millstone, where it idled briefly as Simmons told England that the plant currently stores more than 20 years of spent fuel rods.
"It's located right here on the water," Simmons said as several recreational boats cruised through the bay. He said the controversial nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada should be opened as soon as possible so Millstone can get rid of its spent rods.
"This was never planned for long-term storage," he said.
Motoring back up the Thames, the vessel paused again under the Gold Star highway and Amtrak bridges. If terrorists disrupted these, they would effectively "cut the line" between Boston and New York, Simmons said.
After the hour-long voyage, about three dozen elected officials and emergency personnel from across eastern Connecticut attended a forum on Homeland Security funding at the Coast Guard Academy, where England said local communities are "the first line of defense" against terrorism.
"Nobody dials 202 (the Washington area code) in an emergency," England said.
Homeland Security has allocated $4.4 billion in grants for municipalities since March, and President Bush has asked for $3.5 billion more in the next budget, England said. States have 45 days after receiving the funds to pass them along to their towns and cities.
"Money is flowing," England said.
But several members of the audience expressed skepticism about the funding. A Coventry, Conn., official said his police department had gotten personal protective equipment through the grants, but his officers couldn't use it because the town doesn't have the money to pay overtime to train them.
Craig acknowledged that overtime funding "has become a big issue nationwide."
Other officials wanted incentives for volunteers who they said are worn down by the demands of this heightened security time. City of Groton Mayor Dennis L. Popp wondered if the federal government would reimburse his taxpayers for the $1 million in security upgrades to his municipal water system, which supplies EB and Pfizer.
But England said freedom from terrorism doesn't come free of charge.
"The costs will be passed on to the people, in rates or taxes," he said. "This is what our society pays to be a free nation."
---------------------------
Provo Daily Herald
July 31, 2003
Storage casks are the weakest link
The Daily Herald on Wednesday, July 30
One of the weakest links, if not the weakest, in the nuclear storage plan is the strength of the casks in which the spent fuel rods will be shipped and stored.
If a cask isn't strong enough to protect its cargo en route to a depository, it won't matter how secure the final storage place is.
Private Fuel Storage, the Minnesota-based consortium that is seeking to construct a nuclear waste storage depot on the Skull Valley Goshute reservation, is arguing that the casks can withstand an F-16 fighter jet crash or even a conventional missile strike.
The Atomic Safety Licensing Board rejected PFS's application because the storage facility would lie beneath the flight path for Hill Air Force Base. Fighters follow the path to target ranges in the desert. The feds said the risk of a fighter crashing into the facility and rupturing the casks is too great to allow the project to proceed.
At the same time, Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials are looking into the durability of the fuel casks, while Gov. Mike Leavitt is pressing the safety issue in his fight to keep the material out of Utah.
The public deserves real answers. Are the casks truly safe? Have the risks increased since Sept. 11?
The last tests conducted on casks occurred 20 years ago and only dealt with traffic accidents, drops and a half-hour exposure to fire. And that was for a cask that is no longer in use today.
The problem of relying on outdated studies, especially in the area of public safety, speaks for itself. Even when current, a study may fail to take all relevant factors into account.
When the World Trade Center's twin towers were constructed, for example, engineers said the buildings could withstand a hit from a jet airliner. They reiterated this claim in 1993, when terrorists tried to topple the buildings with a truck bomb in the underground parking garage. The bomb created a three-story-deep crater, but the buildings still stood.
The problem is that while the engineers' conclusion may have been accurate at the time, it didn't account for future technology or unorthodox terrorist scenarios. In the early 1970s, when the towers were built, the largest airliner in service was the Boeing 707, and engineers figured that if one hit the WTC, it would most likely happen on the final approach to New York airports -- slow and with nearly empty fuel tanks.
No one thought that a much larger aircraft, loaded with enough fuel for a transcontinental flight, would be plowed into the buildings deliberately at high speed.
The same concern might be raised in the case of nuclear fuel casks. The state of Nevada, in its own study, reported that today's casks for shipping and storage have a layer of less than 5 inches of stainless steel and depleted uranium to protect the fuel rods. The next generation of casks will have between 6 and 11 inches of metal around the cargo.
That's not all that reassuring. Today's portable anti-tank weapons, such as a TOW or Milan missile, can punch holes through 40 inches of armor plating; a shaped explosive charge weighing as little as 2 pounds can penetrate 20-40 inches of steel.
All terrorists would need to do to turn a fuel container into a dirty bomb is breach it as a shipment passes through a city. High concentrations of radiation would be released, with all the resulting dangers of radiation sickness, cancer and death. Such an event would wreak havoc economically, especially if it shut down, say, downtown Salt Lake City or the Las Vegas Strip.
Just look at how the collapse of the World Trade Center's skyscrapers knocked the stock market off its feet for awhile. And there was no radioactive material involved in that attack.
The federal government's Yucca Mountain plan calls for 90,000 shipments of nuclear waste across the country -- 90 percent of which will pass through Utah. It's not a question of whether an accident or attack will happen. It's just a matter of when.
If Private Fuel Storage and the NRC want to convince the American public that the casks are safe, they must conduct new, real-world tests. Inflict a force on a cask that would be expected in an F-16 crash. Take a cask out to a target range and see what happens when it is hit with a bomb or a cruise missile. Blast them with anti-tank missiles and artillery shells. In short, do whatever it takes, and then some, to prove the case.
If a cask breaks down, then the government needs to find a better way of dealing with the material, such as reprocessing it or storing it where it was made. Either of those steps would be more acceptable than putting countless Americans at risk of an accident or terrorist attack.
---------------------------
State of Nevada
Agency for Nuclear Projects
www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/
nwpo@nuc.state.nv.us
775-687-3744
---------------------------