Yucca Mountain News Clips
Wednesday, September 3, 2003
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Today's Sunbeam
Wednesday, September 03, 2003
S.J. lawmakers say no to GOP energy bill
By BILL CAHIR
Washington Bureau
Last of two parts
Money talks. Right?
Well, maybe.
U.S. Rep. Frank LoBiondo has received $28,000 over the past five years from Public Service Enterprise Group, the parent company for PSE&G and PSEG Nuclear. U.S. Rep. Robert Andrews collected $11,000 from the Newark-based company over the same period.
That may sound like a lot of dough.
But it's hard to say that LoBiondo, R-2nd Dist., or Andrews, D-1st Dist., fit squarely into the pocket of the New Jersey power industry.
Both lawmakers voted against H.R. 6, the House Republican energy legislation.
Rob Geist, spokesman for LoBiondo, said the Vineland Republican would not support any legislation that would open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration. As long as the House GOP keeps that provision in the bill, Geist said, LoBiondo will continue to object.
Andrews himself said that the $11,000 he received from Public Service Enterprise Group amounted to less than 1 percent of the money he raised over the 1997-2002 period.
He dismissed the idea that PSEG or any other company could buy influence with him or with any other House lawmaker with such contributions. "If you're asking about influence, it really has none," Andrews said.
PSEG gives up to $60,000 to members of Congress each year, but that sum pales in comparison to the amounts given my other energy companies.
The Southern Company, the top donor among utilities, gave $1.91 million in the 2001-02 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The firm is lobbying Congress to repeal the Public Utility Holding Company Act so that it can expand into new fields of business and sell power outside of the South.
The National Rural Electric Cooperative ranks second, having given $1.34 million to federal causes. Exelon Corp., a nuclear power company, ranks third, having given $1.28 million. The Nuclear Energy Institute placed 14th by giving another $468,000.
FirstEnergy, a company that serves New Jersey customers through Central Jersey Power & Light, came in sixth, giving $1.04 million. Public Service Enterprise Group and its subsidiaries did not crack the top 20.
Only one New Jersey lawmaker, U.S. Rep. Mike Ferguson, R-7th Dist., stands in a strong position to collect lots of money from utilities.
Ferguson, a sophomore in Congress, earlier this year won a spot on the Energy and Commerce Committee, a panel that drafts utility legislation. The power companies noticed. FirstEnergy gave $5,000 to Ferguson's campaign committee on June 18.
Public Service Enterprise Group had its top legislative issues before Congress last year: PSEG Nuclear, a subsidiary of the Newark holding company, owns and operates the Salem and Hope Creek Nuclear Generating Station in Lower Alloways Creek. PSEG Nuclear company additionally owns a share of the Peach Bottom nuclear generating station in Delta, Pa.
Emma Byrne, top lobbyist for PSEG, takes a strong interest nuclear policy, and urges lawmakers to open the Yucca Mountain repository to spent nuclear fuel rods from New Jersey.
"Last year, we were very active on Yucca," Byrne said. "We wanted to find everyone we could to tell them about how important it was for the federal government to keeps its promise ... and create a repository for spent fuel."
Congress passed legislation to designate Yucca Mountain as the sole storage facility for nuclear waste; LoBiondo and Andrews supported the bill.
Opening the site will take several additional years of study, planning and construction.
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Las Vegas Review Journal
September 02, 2003
Nuclear Waste Repository: Yucca Mountain already having effect on tribes
American Indians waiting for U.S. government to give them voice
By Keith Rogers
Review-Journal
Like a giant snake slithering westward, Yucca Mountain zigzags for nearly 20 miles across the remote terrain of southern Nye County.
On one side, a band of white rock separates its belly from its back, midway to the top of its 5,000-foot crest. It is alive and moving in American Indian lore.
Deep inside it, a 5-mile tunnel loops through layers of volcanic rock that someday, possibly as soon as seven years, will lead to a maze of smaller tunnels destined to become the final resting place for the nation's most deadly nuclear waste.
The ridge, said Joe Kennedy, 36, of the Timbisha tribe, "is a very sacred mountain to Shoshones" and should not be used for burial of highly radioactive spent fuel from U.S. nuclear power reactors.
Until last week, Kennedy had never been to this place where his father, John, 84, hunted rabbits and roamed the high desert. The area is about 40 miles northeast of where his grandfather, Joe, helped build Scotty's Castle, in Death Valley, Calif. And it's in the same area where his great grandfather, Palmetto Fred, lived off the land on what is now the Nevada Test Site.
Because of their proximity to Yucca Mountain, the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe and the Duckwater Shoshone Tribe near Ely filed requests last year with the Interior Department seeking affected Indian tribe status.
The designation, similar to that afforded Nevada and counties around the mountain, would give the several hundred members of these tribes a voice in matters concerning the project and funding for independent oversight of it.
In November, the National Congress of American Indians passed a resolution urging Interior Secretary Gale Norton to grant affected status to the tribes who submitted petitions.
But after more than 14 months, the Interior Department has not acted on their requests, casting doubt in the mind of Kennedy and other American Indians that they will be treated fairly as the congressionally approved project enters the licensing phase late next year. That's when the Department of Energy is expected to complete a license application for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to review.
"I think it's outrageous," Kennedy said last week about the Interior Department's lack of response. "We are very close to Yucca Mountain, and our waters come from there."
An Interior Department spokesman for Indian Affairs, Dan DuBray, said his agency hasn't decided whether to favor or oppose the petitions by the two Shoshone tribes. It's unclear whether, or when, a decision will be made.
"It has not been resolved," he said by telephone Thursday. "The timetable has not been set. There is no legal requirement for any certain amount of time to elapse."
His response came as tribal representatives were wrapping up the Native American Forum on Nuclear Waste, which included a tour of Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The gathering drew members of tribes from Nevada, California and as far away as Minnesota. It was co-sponsored by the Western Shoshone National Council, the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe and the Seventh Generation Fund, an organization based in Arcata, Calif., that is supported in part by the Ford Foundation. The fund gives grants to tribes for environmental justice campaigns and protection of sacred, American Indian lands.
At times, the tour turned in to a debate over the merits of the science about entombing the waste for at least 10,000 years.
The government's guide, engineer Patrick Rowe, went to great lengths to explain all of the safeguards that had been incorporated into the repository's design, one that he said would be flexible to accommodate the heat given off by the decaying waste.
Those on the tour were not convinced and challenged his remark -- "We'll be studying the site indefinitely" -- to mean that the scientific work had not been completed before Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and President Bush recommended the site to Congress last year.
Inside the tunnel, Kami Sue Miller of the Moapa Band of Paiutes, remarked, "It doesn't look sturdy to me."
Rowe later acknowledged that, "We know these tunnels are going to collapse over time," but the waste packages will still be isolated.
Christopher Peters of the Yurok tribe, who is president and chief executive officer of the Seventh Generation Fund, said the planned repository will affect tribes nationwide, particularly as 77,000 tons of spent fuel assemblies and highly radioactive defense wastes are hauled to the mountain by trains and trucks.
"The impact area is going to be multistate, multigenerational," he said.
But what puzzled many of the tribal representatives and environmentalists who accompanied them on the tour is why a formal record of decision wasn't issued when the Energy Department released its final environmental impact statement for the proposed repository.
The answer was not immediately available, said a spokesman for the Office of Repository Development, Allen Benson, who suggested they put the question in writing to the energy secretary.
Peters wondered how the impact statement became final without full consideration of the tribes who regard Yucca Mountain as "a powerful place. ... To tear out its core and replace it with toxicity has got to have an impact," he said.
As for the issue of affected status designation, Benson said that if the planned repository were located within a reservation, which it is not, then the secretary of Energy could grant affected status to tribes.
"If the site is not on a reservation, a tribe can apply to the secretary of Interior based on substantial, adverse impacts to treaty rights," he said.
Ian Zabarte, secretary of state for the Western Shoshone National Council who helped the tribes file their petitions, said the key words are "treaty rights," specifically, those which he believes were never relinquished under the 1863 Ruby Valley Treaty.
The Ruby Valley Treaty is an eight-part pact between Western Shoshones and the federal government that was negotiated by Nye County's namesake, James W. Nye, a federal commissioner at the time who was governor of the Nevada Territory.
It came in the midst of Indian wars and authorized a reservation for the Western Shoshones. The treaty provided several routes of travel through Shoshone country, but it never relinquished control of the land to the U.S. government. As compensation, the Shoshones were given $5,000 worth of cattle and goods for 20 years.
In 1966, government lawyers sought to extinguish Western Shoshone title to more than 22 million acres of land in Nevada. Thirteen years later, the Western Shoshones were awarded $26 million for the government's taking of the land.
Then in 1985, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the United States owned the land and that claims under the treaty had been extinguished and compensated with the money earning interest in a trust account. In July the account stood at $142 million, awaiting distribution among 6,500 Western Shoshones.
The Senate Indian Affairs Committee approved the bill to distribute the funds in July, causing celebration among some Western Shoshone who want the money but dismay among tribal members who fear their land will never be returned.
"I think we recognize the position of the Supreme Court," said DuBray, the Interior Department spokesman.
Because of the federal government's historical relationship with tribes in Nevada, some in the Indian community, such as Gloria Wilson Shearer, a Paiute from Caliente, are skeptical.
"In my mind, we're going to lose, but I don't want to give up," Shearer said.
She recalled the bitterness she felt in 1998 when she found out that a U.S. Forest Service crew had mistakenly razed Lost Cabin, a landmark built by her grandfather, who provided food and supplies to miners south of the Spring Mountains.
"It seems like that damned government can come in and do whatever they want," she said. Winnona La Duke, a member of the Objibwe Tribe in Minnesota who twice ran for U.S. vice president and directs the Honor the Earth Foundation, said the Bush administration is in denial about its nuclear energy policy.
"The government doesn't want to talk about the impact and doesn't want to talk about trust and responsibility," she said outside the forum at the Las Vegas Paiute Colony in Las Vegas.
Burying nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain is "a bad idea," she said. "The solution is, if the tub is overflowing, you should turn off the faucet. If you don't, Yucca Mountain enables a withering industry to resuscitate itself."
Zabarte contends the Ruby Valley Treaty has standing in the petitions. The bottom line, in his view, is that the federal government is violating the Western Shoshones' due process because the repository, if built, will take away the beneficial use of their property.
"You soften them up for 50 years of nuclear weapons testing, then you steal their land," he said. "It's not about science. It's politics. It's about how people treat other people. We're being violated. It hurts. That's the issue here."
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Today's Sunbeam
September 02, 2003
Electricity-generating utilities are learning to power politics
By Bill Cahir
Washington Bureau
Did you ever believe Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett might own the transmission lines providing electricity to your home?
It could happen.
Electricity-generating utilities gave $20.9 million to federal candidates and campaigns for 2002, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. What did utilities hope to achieve by showering federal lawmakers with nearly $21 million?
They want lawmakers to repeal the 1935 Public Utility Holding Company Act, says Beverly L. Perry, senior vice president for government relations at Pepco Holdings, Inc., the parent company of Conectiv and Atlantic City Electric Company.
The Depression-era law in question blocks individuals -- such as investment bankers, foreigners, Warren Buffett and so on -- from buying, paying for the installation of and operating electricity
Today, only utilities or government agencies can own the lines. A person who wants to invest in utility operations must purchase stock in a publicly traded company.
Repealing the Holding Co. Act "would allow outside investors to invest in utility infrastructure," Perry said, touting the change as a good thing.
Individual investors would help finance improvements to the electricity grid and enable utilities deliver more power to consumers and businesses, according to this view.
Given the meltdown 2000-02 meltdown of the stock market, utilities ought to be required to stick to their knitting, maintain reliable electricity markets and forego the temptation to invest their available cash in other fields of business, says Mark Cooper, director of research at the Consumer Federation of America.
"Every time we have amended PUCHA to allow more activities, consumers have been hurt," Cooper said.
If utilities were to lose money by speculating in the stock market, conceivably they would try to recover their cash by increasing consumers' electricity bills, critics warn.
Both the House and Senate energy bills, subject of conference talks, would repeal the Public Utility Holding Company Act. Democrats have not made the any defense of the 1935 law. Cooper hopes they will.
FirstEnergy Corp. of Akron, Ohio, counts Jersey Central Power & Light among its subsidiaries;
Public Service Enterprise Group of Newark counts Public Service Electric & Gas and PSEG Nuclear among its divisions;
Pepco Holdings, based in Washington, D.C., has merged with Conectiv and through Conectiv owns the Atlantic City Electric Company; and
Consolidated Edison, Inc., owns Orange and Rockland Utilities, and through that company it own the Rockland Electric Company.
Utilities not only want to give individuals the power to invest in transmission lines.
They also want Congress to authorize the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to override the not-in-my-back-yard (NIMBY) phenomenon.
Congress must give to FERC the authority to determine where new power lines are to be built, utilities claim. The commission should have the muscle to quash state and local resistance related to the sites where towers are built and lines are hung, utility lobbyists say.
The Edison Electric Institute, a lobby group for utilities, has called for lawmakers to approve provisions that would strip from states the power to control where power lines are located.
Giving that power to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission would help the federal government eliminate "interstate congestion areas," or logjams that prevent utilities from selling power in high-demand areas, according to EEI.
"Nobody wants these lines in their back yard or in their town or on their property or across their farms or across state parks. It is a major issue," Perry said.
Not all lawmakers are convinced.
The House-passed energy bill, H.R. 6, would give FERC control over the location of new power lines. But U.S. Rep. Robert Andrews, who voted against the House bill, said Congress should not give FERC such a blank check.
"I'm in favor of some reconsideration of the state-federal relationship, but I don't think the feds should be able to completely override local health and environmental concerns ... That would be a serious mistake," said Andrews, D-1st Dist.
Emma Byrne, director of communications and government relations for the Public Service Enterprise Group, says her company has not lobbied heavily about the repeal of PUHCA or about locating new power lines areas where people object to them.
Byrne says her Newark-based company -- which includes PSE&G -- has urged members of Congress to allow regional transmission organizations to sell power across state lines, and to open a federally sanctioned Yucca Mountain repository for spent nuclear fuel.
The PJM Interconnection, an existing regional transmission organization or RTO, is based in Valley Forge, Pa. It manages the sale of electricity on the wholesale or spot market in Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia. The PJM Interconnection constitutes a model of what the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission wants to encourage nationwide.
PSEG, according to Byrne, wants to ensure that the new federal energy legislation takes no step that would be harmful to the work of RTOs, the regional transmission of electricity and the wholesale transmission of power across states lines.
"Do no damage -- do no harm-- to the system that is the national model" for regional sale and service, Byrne said. "Don't hurt a system that's working."
Cooper, of the Consumer Federation of America, criticizes the drive towards even wider electricity deregulation. The recent blackout that affected 50 million people, he claims, demonstrates that the power transmission grid was not designed to carry huge regional transfers of power from one state or country to the next.
"What they ought to do is stick to their knitting and get back to reliability only," Cooper said.
Tomorrow: Politicians find the utility companies generous when it comes to campaign donations.
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Toledo Blade
September 02, 2003
Nuclear waste may go through area sooner
By Tom Henry
Blade Staff Writer
Spent nuclear fuel from the Northeast could be moving through northern Ohio sooner than expected, possibly by 2006.
That´s if a consortium representing FirstEnergy Corp. and seven other utilities gets Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval to move the highly radioactive waste to a Native American reservation in Utah.
The consortium, Private Fuel Storage LLC, hopes to convince the NRC´s safety and atomic licensing board this fall that a contractor has designed adequate casks for use at a reservation owned by the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians.
The industry group will try to show the odds of those casks being struck by military aircraft and subsequently breaking apart are less than one in a million. The NRC considers those odds inconsequential, consortium spokesman Sue Martin said.
The reservation is southwest of Salt Lake City, in Tooele County near Skull Valley, Utah. The military uses Skull Valley as a driveway to its test and training area on the other side of a mountain range. "It´s considered military airspace. While they don´t do tests and maneuvers in Skull Valley, it is a driveway," Ms. Martin said.
The licensing board expressed some concerns with Private Fuel Storage´s computation after a hearing last summer. The upcoming hearing will give the consortium another chance to justify its numbers, Ms. Martin said.
If the board rules in favor, the request would go to the full NRC to review for license consideration. The consortium has an agreement with the tribe for a 20-year lease with an option for a 20-year extension. It could have the facility developed in 18 to 24 months, she said.
"Early 2006 is now the best-case scenario," Ms. Martin said. Terms of the deal with the Utah tribe, including payments it would receive, have been kept confidential, she said.
Davis-Besse is one of several nuclear plants that were so cramped for space in the 1990s that they moved some of the spent fuel from their indoor storage pool into outdoor storage vaults. Before FirstEnergy Corp.´s acquisition of Toledo Edison Co., the plant´s former owner spent more than $5 million to develop the outdoor vaults at Davis-Besse.
The nationwide space crunch stems from the federal government´s failure to live up to its obligation to begin taking the waste in January, 1998. The U.S. Department of Energy isn´t expected to have its burial site, Nevada´s Yucca Mountain, developed until 2010, and quite possibly later, given numerous setbacks over the years.
The consortium was formed because of concerns that the waste-disposal debate could drag on, causing many more plants - including Detroit Edison Co.´s Fermi II nuclear plant - to store waste outdoors.
FirstEnergy gave the consortium an undisclosed amount of seed money to help get the effort started with the Utah tribe in 1997 but has had little involvement since, company spokesman Richard Wilkins said.
Mr. Wilkins said that´s because FirstEnergy, shortly after taking over Davis-Besse, reracked the plant´s spent fuel pool in a manner to free up enough space to store waste generated there through the end of the plant´s operating license, which expires in 2017. The utility will have to look at other options if it succeeds in getting a 20-year license extension from the NRC, Mr. Wilkins said.
Although the consortium is representing eight utilities, it is essentially making a case for the whole nuclear industry. Waste stored at the Utah site would not be limited to the eight consortium members, Ms. Martin said.
"The whole concept here is that the utilities can´t absolutely count on when Yucca Mountain will take their spent fuel," she said.
The Utah reservation is at least the second Native American reservation where a consortium of utilities has tried to store spent fuel. Several years ago, a different consortium was negotiating with the Mescalero Apaches in New Mexico, but the proposed deal fell through. Davis-Besse was involved in those negotiations as well.
The latest process hit another potential snag recently when the NRC´s Office of Inspector General decided to investigate the agency´s oversight performance. The inspector general´s office is reviewing quality assurance of the cask fabrication in light of complaints brought to its attention by a whistleblower, spokesman George Mulley said.
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Economist
September 01, 2003
Not on my doorstep, thanks
While the West fears that Iran and North Korea are diverting their nuclear-power programmes to nefarious ends, it has a growing worry about its own nuclear stations: what to do with their radioactive waste
SINCE the accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania in 1979, no nuclear-power generator has been built in America. But the nuclear industry is now more optimistic than at any time since then of making a comeback. Even before last month´s huge power failure across much of America and Canada, President George Bush was pushing Congress to pass an energy bill that included incentives for building new nuclear-power stations. A version of the bill including subsidies of up to $10 billion to build nuclear stations was dropped by the Senate a fortnight before the big blackout. But a final version, including some nuclear subsidies, is likely to pass soon. With Congress returning from its summer break this week, its two houses are expected shortly to form a committee to iron out their differences on the issue.
Proponents of a nuclear-power revival argue that America, indeed the world, needs more generating capacity but without increasing its dependence on fossil fuels. Nuclear power provides a fifth of America´s electricity, compared with about a third of Japan´s and Germany´s, and more than three-quarters of France´s. Accidents such as the one at Three Mile Island and, seven years later, the much more serious one at Chernobyl in Ukraine, are not the only reason why the construction of nuclear stations has almost stopped in rich countries. Privatisation and liberalisation of energy markets have exposed the full costs of a technology that was once expected to deliver “electricity too cheap to meter’, including the enormous cost of dismantling nuclear stations at the end of their lives and disposing of the radioactive wastes they produce.
America, Britain and Australia all have plans to create national repositories for nuclear waste. But all are facing fierce opposition from locals at the chosen locations. In America, the Department of Energy has chosen Yucca Mountain, Nevada, as the site of a national dump for nuclear waste, which is currently scattered across sites in 43 states. But the plan is opposed by the local Western Shoshone and Paiute Indians, and Nevada´s state government has gone to court to try to stop it. (Unlike their Nevadan brethren, the Goshute Indians in Utah are supporting a plan to build a temporary store for used nuclear-fuel rods on their Skull Valley reservation.) Australia´s federal government is also facing battles with the state governments of South Australia and Western Australia over plans for national low- and intermediate-level waste dumps on their territory.
Since the September 11th attacks on America, fears have grown that besides the danger of leaks from inadequate nuclear storage facilities, they could be the target of terrorist attacks. A recent study by scientists from Massachussetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University concluded that nuclear power was a viable long-term option. But it also said the industry´s prospects were limited by, among other things, the unresolved issue of how to store waste safely.
Whereas most countries with nuclear generators simply store their used fuel rods—at the power station, if no longer-term repository has been agreed—Britain and France recycle, or “reprocess’, their rods, thereby reducing the amount of high-level waste produced. Reprocessing plants such as Britain´s, at Sellafield in Cumbria, extract the remaining uranium, and the plutonium that is a useable product of the nuclear reactions in the rods, to make fresh fuel. When the nuclear industry first got going, reprocessing seemed sensible because natural uranium was thought to be scarce. But it has turned out to be so abundant that the economic case for reprocessing is now in doubt. Last month, the Guardian revealed plans to wind down the Thorp reprocessing plant at Sellafield, which recycles fuel sent from as far away as Japan. Its state-owned operator, BNFL, issued a half-hearted rebuttal.
With reprocessing looking like being wound down in Britain, the amount of high-level waste in need of a safe, permanent store is likely to rise faster than it is now. The decommissioning of Britain´s first generation of nuclear-power stations, which were built in the 1950s and 1960s, has begun, creating large amounts of intermediate- and low-level waste. Britain already has a national dump for most of its low-level nuclear waste, at Drigg near Sellafield. But it is filling up faster than expected and the government´s advisory body on radioactive waste recently called for a start to be made on alternative means of disposal.
Britain´s search for a suitable dump for intermediate-level waste, in impervious rocks deep underground, began in the late 1980s. A site—again, close to Sellafield—was identified in the early 1990s, but in 1997 the outgoing Conservative government dropped the proposal. The current Labour government´s plan is to come up with a proposal of its own by perhaps 2006. Since there is, for now, somewhere to put the low-level waste, the most pressing problem is what to do with the intermediate-level waste, which is produced in very large volumes. High-level waste is produced in much smaller amounts but generates a lot of heat (due to its continuing nuclear decay). The current plan is to encapsulate the high-level stuff in glass and store it above ground for 50 years—in the hope that a long-term solution to the problem has been found by then.
Scientists are seeking ways of either destroying radioactive wastes or putting them where they can do no harm. Last month, New Scientist reported that a team led by Ken Ledingham of Strathclyde University in Glasgow was experimenting with a giant laser that zaps the radioactive waste, making it decay in minutes rather than millions of years. And in the August issue of Geology, Fergus Gibb of Sheffield University and colleagues announced that experiments had demonstrated the viability of a scheme to drop high-level waste into deep boreholes in granite. The rock surrounding the waste would melt and eventually re-solidify, encasing the material in an impervious and inaccessible “coffin’.
Years of further research are needed before such ideas can be put into action. In the mean time, the cost of handling radioactive waste means that—even if a heavy “carbon tax’ on fossil fuels were introduced in rich countries—nuclear-power plants would probably not be economically viable without public subsidies.
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Washington Post
September 1, 2003
New at the Top : John A. Christian
Position: Chief operating officer, BNFL Inc., an environmental cleanup company
Career highlights: Vice president of decommissioning and decontamination, BNFL Inc.; vice president, nuclear operations, IT Corp.; vice president, nuclear services, OHM Remediation Services Corp.; chief operating officer, Rust Federal Services Inc.
Age: 46
Education: BSE, biomedical engineering, Duke University; ME, industrial and systems engineering, University of Florida.
Personal: Lives in McLean with wife, Mary Beth, and their sons John, 22; Bryan, 18; Mark, 13; Daniel, 8.
What regulatory changes have had the biggest impact on the industry? The most significant development is the recent federal legislation enabling the completion of the Yucca Mountain facility, the long-term storage depository for spent nuclear fuel. Prior to this administration the completion of the facility was not authorized or funded. It will be able to receive spent nuclear fuel from all over the country. We are involved in the treatment, preparation and the transport of spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste.
How has your past experience prepared you for this position? My background is entirely in nuclear facility operations and nuclear cleanup project operations. I've been doing this for 24 years. I've cleaned up over 150 sites that involved treatment of waste, decommissioning facilities and the termination of regulatory licenses. I have a broad base in the industry both commercially and federally, which I can bring to bear.
What will be your biggest challenge? My biggest challenge will be helping BNFL continue its growth in the U.S. marketplace. The company started operations here in 1990 and we had excellent success in growing market share in the '90s, but because of changes in the market conditions and troubled projects, our market share has flattened out. Two of my key objectives are the safe and effective completion of existing contracts and continuing to win new work at a rate that results in continued growth for the company.
What kinds of market changes are you referring to? What's happened most recently is the Department of Energy has conducted what they refer to as a "top to bottom review," a thorough review of all the contracts to find innovative ways to accelerate cleanup and to reduce costs. As a result of that review, the Department of Energy is challenging its contractors to come up with new and innovative ways to complete projects at a reduced cost. Those changes will afford significant opportunities to contractors like BNFL to bring a results-oriented approach to these projects and help meet the Department of Energy's needs.
What do you see in the future for this industry? The future of the industry is very good. The Department of Energy has over $400 billion to spend over the next 50 years to clean up the nuclear weapons complex. In addition, there are 103 operating nuclear power plants, and while the decommissioning of those plants has been significantly postponed due to licensing extensions, they will eventually shut down and have to be decommissioned. A company like BNFL will be in a prime position to assist the owners in decommissioning the retired nuclear power plants; however, that market is still a number of years off.
Andrea Caumont
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New York Times
August 30, 2003
Steward of a Department He Once Sought to Scrap
By Katharine Q. Seelye
WASHINGTON, Aug. 30 — When Spencer Abraham was a senator from Michigan, he had one big idea for the Department of Energy. Abolish it.
Today he is the secretary of energy, overseeing the department's 100,000 employees and contractors and its $22 billion budget. And he is leading the investigation, along with his Canadian counterpart, to figure out what caused the biggest power shutdown in American history on Aug. 14 and how to prevent such a failure from happening again.
His new role as detective thrusts Mr. Abraham to the forefront of a complicated technical issue with intense political undercurrents.
He was considered for the cabinet as a consolation prize after he lost re-election to the Senate, and his first choice was transportation. Energy is considered one of the least desirable cabinet posts. The department's portfolio is highly diverse, its issues are mind-numbingly technical, energy-related news is almost always bad and the secretary has little regulatory authority.
"I love this job," Mr. Abraham said the other day as a small military plane flew him to Columbus, Ohio, and Detroit for meetings on the blackout. "But when something goes wrong, it's always my fault. If the price of gas goes over $1.50, it's my fault. But the second it goes down, it was somehow `the markets' that brought it down."
Until the blackout, Mr. Abraham had been one of the less visible members of President Bush's cabinet. Even that day, he was in London.
But as the power failure cascaded across the Midwest, Northeast and Canada, Mr. Abraham issued emergency orders to activate the Cross Sound cable connecting Long Island and Connecticut to protect the system when power returned. He caught the first plane back to Washington in the morning, visited with Northeast governors in Albany and made the rounds of the television talk shows.
Mr. Abraham, 51, is the first to admit that he is no Enrico Fermi.
Outside his office is a picture of Fermi, the Nobel physicist, standing in front of a blackboard showing off a complicated equation. Mr. Abraham laughed during a recent interview as he described a fantasy: having his own picture taken in a lab coat in front of a blackboard showing off something simpler, like 7 + 11 = 18, then hanging this picture next to that of Fermi, with the slogan "The Department of Energy: The tradition lives on."
Such self-deprecation has earned this Harvard-trained lawyer a reputation for collegiality, both inside the administration and out. Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, said that Mr. Abraham was "a very quick study" and that his people skills had made him "one of the primary channels for getting some improvement in our relations with the Russians" on nonproliferation issues.
Talking nukes with the Russians is just one piece of the sprawling energy empire. Mr. Abraham is also responsible for maintaining the nuclear stockpile, cleaning up billions of dollars worth of nuclear waste and developing the nuclear waste site at Yucca Mountain, Nev., which he said was his biggest challenge so far. "Yucca was bigger than the Manhattan Project," he said.
But pinpointing the cause of the blackout and preventing another are now his priorities — and could cost $50 billion over 30 years.
A national discussion of the subject will begin this Wednesday, when Mr. Abraham is to testify before Congress. Already, some Democrats are challenging his department's authority to conduct the investigation and are calling for independent reviews.
Representative John D. Dingell of Michigan, former chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said he was "apprehensive that the administration was taking over the whole investigation." He said the public had been "burned" by the administration over the secret development of its energy policy, which "raised questions about their trustworthiness."
"Once burned, twice alert," said Mr. Dingell, a Democrat.
Like most Michigan officials, Mr. Abraham is intertwined with the automotive industry. The son of an auto worker and the owner of two Chrysler minivans, he was the No. 1 recipient of campaign contributions from the automotive industry in 2000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. But even Democrats who may find Mr. Abraham too cozy with industry also find him smart and easy to work with.
"We've had a good relationship with him," said Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, the ranking Democrat on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
Senator Bingaman said the fact that Mr. Abraham represented industry was little cause for alarm in an administration that tilts that way on its own.
"It's not as though Secretary Abraham is causing the administration to take positions they wouldn't otherwise be taking," Mr. Bingaman said. "None of them want anything significant to be done about fuel efficiency."
That pro-industry approach, set at the top and carried out agreeably by Mr. Abraham, has led to criticism that the administration has not put in effect a coherent energy policy, despite controlling both houses of Congress.
"We have an electric supply grid and an oil supply system that is more insecure and more unreliable today than it was two and a half years ago," said Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, a watchdog group.
Contrary to the administration's goals, he said, oil imports keep going up, as does the price of natural gas. He also faulted the administration for continuing to promote nuclear power, despite the numerous obstacles, especially financing, and for giving only lip service to renewable forms of energy.
Mr. Abraham said the administration's energy bill, which would promote new energy supplies, would address many of these concerns and also help prevent future blackouts, although it was written long before the Aug. 14 failure.
While he is obviously preoccupied by the blackout, he shows more excitement over the possibilities of transforming the nation from what he calls a carbon economy to a hydrogen economy.
"Instead of incremental improvements in renewable ideas or existing fossil projects, what we're trying to do is to take a really significant, game-changing leap forward and introduce hydrogen and fusion as major sources of 21st-century energy production," he said.
Mr. Abraham comes to these subjects with the enthusiasm of a convert, having stayed away from Bunsen burners in his youth and majored in college in political science.
At age 30, he became chairman of the Michigan Republican Party Committee, then served as deputy chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle before being elected to the Senate in 1993.
He proved a reliable conservative vote, advocating tax cuts and opposing abortion. He also used his brief Senate career to champion a cause that put him at odds with many in his party.
The grandson of Lebanese immigrants, he supported immigration at a time when his colleagues were cracking down on illegal immigrants and trying to reduce the number of legal immigrants. He staved off those proposed restrictions, then led the movement to raise the number of entry visas for high-tech foreign workers.
Mr. Abraham lost his Senate seat in 2000 to Debbie Stabenow, by one percentage point. She had portrayed him as the captive of big business, saying, "My opponent calls himself the workhorse; the question is, who is he working for?"
After he lost, Mr. Abraham seemed like an obvious choice for secretary of transportation. But according to a Congressional aide who watched the process unfold, he was caught in a political web.
Because of the closeness of the 2000 presidential election, the Bush administration wanted a Democrat in the cabinet and had its eye on a former senator, J. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana, for energy secretary. But Mr. Johnston said no.
The administration turned to another Democrat, Norman Y. Mineta, who had been President Bill Clinton's secretary of commerce. But Mr. Mineta, who had been chairman of the transportation committee while in the House, wanted transportation, and as a Democrat, he had more leverage than Mr. Abraham had. That left energy for Mr. Abraham.
"Spence got the booby prize," the aide said.
The awkward thing was that Mr. Abraham had supported legislation to dismantle the department, saying it had too many ill-fitting parts and "no core mission."
But by the time of his confirmation hearings in January 2001, he had a change of heart.
"I can assure the committee," he said then, "that I no longer support this legislation and its various components."
He remains slightly sheepish about his earlier stance but says he has imposed some order on the department. "We have a clearer mission today," he said, "and the department is now a much more effective place to do business."
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Pahrump Valley Times
August 29, 2003
The inevitable YMP
He works in Virginia but Joe Egan is making a good living off of Nevada and Utah as he fights Yucca Mountain and the private fuel storage initiative.
So far he has made $4 million from our state coffers to fight a scientific project in the courts, not to mention the lawsuits are being heard in Washington, D.C., and that is where the decisions were made to recommend Yucca Mountain as the nation's repository. With our state budget crisis, I think $4 million could have been spent better, like in Nevada; there's a novel idea.
I've seen him at press conferences and other events and don't get me wrong, he's a sharp lawyer with impressive credentials. But, even if, and that is a big if, the state wins one of the lawsuits come October it doesn't stop the project; it just delays the inevitable, and that is a key strategy of the state - delay, delay, delay. A repository at Yucca Mountain is inevitable.
I say let's allow our country's national policy play itself out, and let's see what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) rules in the independent rigorous licensing hearings. The decision needs to be made by independent scientific experts and that is what the NRC is.
Let's see what happens in October. When the lawsuits fail, maybe then our state's approach to Yucca Mountain will change.
Bill Vasconi
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Pahrump Valley Times
August 29, 2003
Scramble is on to beat tardy bell
Flurry Of Activity to Greet Start of New School Year
By Henry Brean
PVT
Down to its final six days before the start of classes, the Nye County School District was a flurry of activity Wednesday.
The last-minute preparations for the start of classes on Tuesday included everything from maintenance work to job interviews.
In the morning, Supt. Rob Roberts met with about 20 new teachers during an orientation session at the district office. Meanwhile, next door, work crews scrambled to set up a modular classroom that was moved to Manse Elementary School from Pahrump Valley High.
The preparations also continued at the high school's new ninth grade academy, which will open Tuesday to about 300 freshmen in the old middle school building just east of PVHS.
Elsewhere, preparations took on a more traditional feel. At J.G. Johnson Elementary, teachers wandered in and out, sometimes with their own children in tow, while they got their classrooms set up for the coming year. But arguably the busiest staff members Wednesday, and for the last several weeks, have been school secretaries, who spent the waning hours of summer break registering students, answering questions and shuffling papers.
But what wasn't so clear during the final week before the 2003-04 school year was just how many students the district was preparing for. Asst. Supt. Rod Pekarek said he has no idea what sort of enrollment figures the district will see on Tuesday because its impossible to predict how many new students there will be or accurately gauge how many existing students will return. "You never know who isn't coming back," Pekarek said. "Sometimes the requests for transcripts will give you some idea, but those usually don't come in until the parents register their kids somewhere else."
The only enrollment figure that counts, of course, is the one recorded on Sept. 26, the official count day that will determine the district's per-student funding from the state's Distributive School Account (DSA).
The news that day could be good, for a change, judging by the final enrollment figures from last year. For the first time in recent memory, the district finished the year with more students than it started with, and its final total of 5,347 was up 274 from the end of the 2002-03 school year. When it comes to DSA, more students mean more money.
And the district hopes to have a full complement of teachers and support enough staff to serve those students by then.
As of Wednesday, Pekarek said the district had cut its list of vacancies in half to 13, 11 of them classroom teaching positions. Principals continued to interview candidates this week.
Also busy Wednesday was the staff at the district's transportation office. In mid July, the district mailed out 3,790 applications for bus service, and the forms were also distributed to parents as they registered their children at district schools.
As of Wednesday night, roughly 1,800 to 1,900 applications had been returned, according to district Transportation Director Cameron McRae. Last year, an average of 2,200 students rode the bus to and from school each day.
In other words, bus drivers can expect to pick up a significant number of children next week who have not applied to ride the bus.
"We're ready to handle a 2,200-student-a-day average," McRae said. "We're ready to go."
The district will start the year with the same number of regular bus routes as last year - 62 countywide, including 21 elementary routes, 17 middle school routes and nine high school routes in Pahrump. The only additional bus route this year is a sixth special education bus in Pahrump, McRae said.
Bus drivers, starting with the most senior, got to choose their routes Wednesday afternoon.
During his introduction, Roberts welcomed the group of new teachers to what he called "the largest geographic school district in the lower 48 states." To cover the county's 18,000 square miles, the district employs roughly 700 full-time and part-time employees and runs school buses that total more than 1 million miles a year, Roberts said.
Nye County also has "a Yucca Mountain and an Area 51," he added with a grin. "So you can add that to your résumés."
The group of new teachers includes several transplants from North Dakota and at least two with roots in Memphis, Tenn. It also features one product of the Nye County School District - 1998 Beatty High School Rolayne McClure will teach English in Round Mountain - and at least one person who is moving into a teaching position from another job with the district. At least five of the new teachers aren't new to the area at all; they have lived and worked here for at least five years.
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Findlaw
August 29, 2003
GAO's Final Energy Task Force Report Reveals that the Vice President Made A False Statement to Congress
By John W. Dean
This month, the General Accounting Office (GAO) - the investigative and auditing arm of Congress - issued a report that contains some startling revelations. Though they are couched in very polite language, they are bombshells nonetheless.
The report - entitled "Energy Task Force: Process Used to Develop the National Energy Policy" - and its accompanying Chronology strongly imply that the Administration has, in effect, been paying off its heavy-hitting energy industry contributors. It also very strongly implies that Vice President Dick Cheney lied to Congress.
The Background: How Cheney Stonewalled GAO
In a sense, this story begins during the close 2000 Presidential election, when energy industry special interests were big-dollar contributors to the Bush-Cheney campaign. (In 2004's re-election campaign, they will doubtless be called upon once again.)
After he was elected - and very much beholden to those contributors - Bush put Cheney in charge of developing the National Energy Policy. To do so, Cheney convened an Energy Task Force. (Details about the Task Force can be found in my prior column.)
Cheney's selection alone was ominous: He had headed Halliburton, just the kind of big-dollar Republican energy industry contributor that had helped Bush-Cheney win the election in the first place.
The Energy Task Force might have operated in absolute secrecy, were it not for GAO. GAO is a nonpartisan agency with statutory authority to investigate "all matters related to the receipt, disbursement, and use of public money," so that it can judge the expenditures and effectiveness of public programs, and report to Congress on what it finds.
To fulfill its statutory responsibility, GAO sought documents from Vice-President Cheney relating to Energy Task Force expenditures. But in a literally unprecedented move, the White House said no.
Amazingly, it did so without even bothering to claim that the documents sought were covered by executive privilege. It simply refused.
On August 2, 2001, Vice President Cheney sent a letter - personally signed by him - to Congress demanding, in essence, that it get the Comptroller off his back. In the letter, he claimed that his staff had already provided "documents responsive to the Comptroller General's inquiry concerning the costs associated with the [Energy task force's] work." As I will explain later, this turned out to be a lie.
In the end, GAO had to go to court to try to get the documents to which it plainly was entitled. On December 9, 2002, GAO lost in court - though, as I argued in a prior column, the decision was incorrect.
Then, on February 9, 2003, the Comptroller General announced GAO's decision not to appeal. He said he feared that another adverse decision would cause the agency to lose even more power, more permanently. Several news accounts suggest that it was the Republican leadership of Congress that stopped the appeal.
This August's Report Reveals Cheney Lied About Providing Responsive Documents
Then this August's Report was issued. It was not the thorough, comprehensive Report GAO wanted it to be. (Indeed, GAO's Comptroller General has stressed that "the Vice President's persistent denial of access to" records "precluded GAO from fully achieving our objectives and substantially limited our analysis.") But it is enough to shock, and disturb, the reader.
The Report shows that Cheney's claim to Congress, in the August 2, 2001 letter, that responsive documents were provided to GAO, was plainly false.
According to the Report, Cheney provided GAO with 77 pages of "documents retrieved from the files of the Office of the Vice President responsive to" GAO's inquiry regarding the Energy Task Force's "receipt, disbursement, and use of public funds."
To any lawyer, a mere 77-page document production seems suspiciously slim - especially when it is meant to represent information from a group of people on a fairly broad topic. Surely there were more documents that were not turned over.
Moreover, it turned out, as the Report reveals, that the documents that were turned over were useless: "The materials were virtually impossible to analyze, as they consisted, for example, of pages with dollar amounts but no indication of the nature or purpose of the expenditure." They were further described as "predominantly reimbursement requests, assorted telephone bills and random items, such as the executive director's credit card receipt for pizza."
In sum, the incomplete document production was not only nonresponsive - it was insulting. So the GAO pressed for responsive documents numerous times in different ways: letters, telephone exchanges and meetings.
Perhaps the most pointed of these was a July 18, 2001 letter from the Comptroller to the Vice President. It noted that GAO had "been given 77 pages of miscellaneous records purporting to relate to these direct and indirect costs. Because the relevance of these records is unclear, we continue to request all records responsive to our request, including any records that clarify the nature and purpose of the costs." (Emphasis added.)
Cheney's False Statement About the Responsive Documents Was Plainly Intentional
Despite receiving this letter, Cheney still claimed to Congress, a few weeks later, on August 2, that responsive documents had been produced.
Of course, Cheney is a busy man. Yet there can be no question as to whether he was aware of the July 18, 2001 letter from the Comptroller complaining about the 77 pages of documents' being unresponsive: He even attached it to his own August 2 letter to Congress, as part of a chronology. And again, he personally signed that August 2 letter.
Nor can there be any question that Cheney knows what it means to produce responsive documents - and not to do so. In the same paragraph of the August 2 letter in which he claims he was responsive to the Energy Task Force request, he makes a lesser claim with respect to another GAO request - stating that there, he had merely "provided substantial responses." (Emphasis added.)
Plainly, Cheney knows the difference between being responsive; offering a substantial response; and sending insulting non-responsive materials, featuring unexplained phone bills, columns of unidentified figures, and a pizza receipt.
Thus, Cheney's claim to have produced responsive documents was a false statement and, all evidence suggests, an intentional one. That means it is also a criminal offense - a false statement to Congress. (In a previous column, I discussed the false statements statute and its application.)
GAO's Polite Tone Belies The Shocking Evidence Its Report Offers
The straight arrows at GAO were no doubt horrified that the Vice President of the United States, who is the Constitutional presiding officer of the U.S. Senate, would deliberately mislead the Congress with such blatant misinformation.
Being nonpartisan, they refrained from accusing the Vice President of this crime. But as their Report shows, they included evidence that makes the crime evident for all to see. They also provided evidence of what the motive for the crime was.
The Report quietly - but tellingly - notes that the Vice President's team "solicited input from, or received information and advice from nonfederal energy stakeholders, principally petroleum, coal, nuclear, natural gas, and electricity industry representatives and lobbyists." (Emphasis added.)
In other words, if the Vice President is not trying to cover up the fact that he met with big energy interests - including past contributors - and allowed them a large role in settling our nation's energy policy, why all the secrecy ? That is what other observers have suspected - and what has been rumored from the beginning. Thanks to Cheney's obfuscation, we still can't know for certain. Yet thanks to GAO, we do now know for certain that he lied to Congress to cover up something, and there is little doubt in my mind as to what he is hiding.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
August 28, 2003
Nevada officials prepare anti-Yucca legal strategy
Lawyers, consultants choose best arguments for defeating nuke dump
By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau
LEESBURG, Va. -- At a conference center outside Washington D.C., Nevada-hired attorneys, state officials and technical experts on Tuesday began forming legal presentations against the Yucca Mountain Project.
For three days this week, Nevada advisers planned to dissect four major cases the state has filed in federal court to challenge the proposed nuclear waste repository. The participants are identifying points to stress during oral arguments and anticipating counterattacks by government attorneys when the case is heard in federal appeals court.
"We have an agenda of all the legal arguments that have been presented in the respective briefs of both sides," Attorney General Brian Sandoval said. "We have to wean those down to the point we get the biggest bang in our presentation."
Gathered behind closed doors at the Lansdowne Resort in suburban Virginia, Sandoval, state nuclear projects director Bob Loux and 18 lawyers and state-hired science consultants began by discussing the state's defense against procedural points that Justice and Energy department attorneys have raised in legal briefs, Sandoval said.
From there the officials were scheduled to plot presentations in the state's lawsuits against the Environmental Protection Agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Energy Department.
Each of the lawsuits charges the federal agencies with procedural shortcomings and federal law violations in setting the stage for President Bush's February 2002 recommendation of Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, for burial of 77,000 tons of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel and waste from government installations.
A fourth lawsuit charges the government violated Nevada's rights under the U.S. Constitution when it singled out Yucca Mountain for a repository over the veto of Gov. Kenny Guinn.
Sandoval declined to discuss details of the state's preparations when interviewed during a break in the meeting.
The planning session was scheduled when the state was expecting to appear Oct. 3 before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
But the court postponed the hearings, after reclassifying the Yucca cases as a "complex" matter that will allow both sides more time to make presentations before the judges.
"I think that will be beneficial for the state given the complexity of the issues involved," Sandoval said.
Last month, Sandoval reactivated his license to practice law in Washington D.C., anticipating some part in the state's presentations. He said his role in the courtroom has yet to be determined. But noting all the state's major attorneys are from out-of-state, "I think its important to have a Nevada presence" before the judges.
Nevada leaders have approved paying up to $4 million to Egan, Fitzpatrick and Malsch, a suburban Washington firm that has assembled a legal and technical team to represent the state in court and in license hearings before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Firm president Joseph Egan sat at the head of the conference table on Tuesday. Among others present were constitutional expert Charles Cooper, former Nuclear Regulatory Commission member Victor Gilinsky, former top NRC attorneys Martin Malsch and William Briggs, and California environmental attorney Antonio Rossman.
Sandoval said he believed $4 million is money well spent on legal advisers. "We have put together the strongest possible legal team," he said. "It's worth in my opinion every penny. We are finally getting to a forum where Nevada can be heard. We cannot leave anything on the table."
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Las Vegas SUN
August 28, 2003
DOE lists Yucca dump as one of its priorities
By Suzanne Struglinski
<suzanne@lasvegassun.com>
Las Vegas SUN
WASHINGTON -- Opening the Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste dump by 2010 remains one of the Energy Department's top goals for the next 25 years, according to a draft of its 2003 Strategic Plan made public earlier this month.
Licensing and building the permanent repository for nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, would help the department's goal of "providing for the permanent disposal of the nation's high-level radioactive waste," the plan says.
But it notes certain budget limits, regulatory requirements and possible litigation, among other items, could affect the project's completion.
"The industry is very happy DOE is putting the priority where we think it belongs -- opening Yucca Mountain by the target date," Mitch Singer, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a nuclear power trade group, said.
He said if the department meets the 2004 license application deadline and eveything else follows the schedule, it could open on time.
"It's certainly doable," he said.
But an opponent of the repository disagreed with the priority.
"It's crazy that they want to do such a favor for the commercial nuclear power industry when there's so many things they need to do for the American people," said Judy Treichel, director of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force.
She noted the aging electricity transmission system responsible for the East Coast blackout earlier this month as a prime example of a task that needs attention more.
The state has a case pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is a combination of several legal claims -- including a constitutional challenge -- made against the site.
Congress approved the site last year, and the Energy Department is now working on its license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which it anticipates it will submit in December 2004. If approved, the license could be issued as early as 2008.
The new plan also calls for the energy secretary to report to the president and Congress between 2007 and 2010 on the need for a second repository, which is required under the federal law. Yucca now has a 77,000-ton limit of waste.
As of 2001 about 40,000 tons of spent fuel sat at commerical power reactors, Singer said. Reactors generate about 2,000 tons of waste each year, so at least 60,000 tons of waste will be waiting for permanent storage in 2010. In addition, the federal government will have 7,000 tons of waste that will require storage.
The department will also develop a transportation infrastructure to ship the nuclear material to Nevada from about 72 sites in 33 states by 2010.
The department's other goals include maintaining the nuclear weapons stockpile, using a diverse supply of energy resources and speeding up the cleanup of former nuclear weapons construction and testing sites.
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Las Vegas SUN
August 28, 2003
Editorial: The silent treatment
Las Vegas SUN
Increasingly groups and individuals from all across the political spectrum have criticized President Bush's anti-terrorism legislation, enacted shortly after 9-11, for provisions they say undermine civil liberties. On Tuesday Attorney General John Ashcroft, as part of his nationwide tour to defend the Patriot Act, touted the law in a Las Vegas speech before members of law enforcement.
We've generally supported the Patriot Act, but Ashcroft's appearance here was pathetic. He refused to take questions from local newspaper reporters, instead opting for brief one-on-one interviews with local television reporters that didn't allow for in-depth questions about the controversial law. This stage-managed event, complete with American flags as a backdrop for Ashcroft's speech, was blatant manipulation of the media. Ashcroft is afraid to address legitimate questions many people have about the Patriot Act -- and this fear was clearly evident by his hiding behind a choreographed event. We expected more courage from the nation's top law enforcement official.
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Las Vegas Mercury
August 28, 2003
Cover Story: Big Brother powwow
Public left out in rain during PATRIOT Act performance
By Heidi Walters
I don't know when I'm going to stop dreaming. I guess I had hoped, after U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft's road-polished speech Tuesday morning in Las Vegas to a roomful of local cops in which he spun a golden cocoon around the USA PATRIOT Act, that the cops would be excited afterward and ready for a collegiate discussion in the lobby with reporters. For, against--I didn't care, I just wanted some response from the people who are charged with enforcing this act, and who were Ashcroft's chosen audience (the presentation was closed to the public).
It was the least I could ask, after--along with other print media--being excluded from the post-speech news conference with Ashcroft to which only TV reporters were invited. No Q&A for the pesky print crowd.
But in an impressive mass of green, white and blue uniforms, the state, federal, county and city cops, along with the local U.S. attorney's office's large dark-suited contingent, flowed quickly out the doors of the conference room in the Lloyd D. George Federal Courthouse. One North Las Vegas policewoman, responding to a plea for an interview, said she had to get back to work--which apparently doesn't involve interfacing with citizens. A group of S.W.A.T.-green-clad Metro cops standing outside the building said I'd have to follow protocol and call their communications office if I wanted "to get a soundbite."
I said I wanted more, I wanted to talk to individual officers fresh from the presentation--which Ashcroft has been delivering repeatedly on his whirlwind tour around the country. I wanted to know if they're on board with this act, and if they have any qualms about roving wiretaps or sneak-and-peeks or searching their neighbors' library records and book-buying habits or bypassing "probable cause" for searches or detaining people for days without charging them. Surely they must know that in some communities in this country, law enforcement agencies are balking at having to, under the act, become extensions of the feds and snoop broadly on people if asked. I also wanted to know if, in light of recent major intelligence bloopers committed by our Washington team, they actually trust that they'll be getting good guidance from these guys.
The Metro officers apologized for not talking, but said they sit behind desks and weren't the ones who'd take part in any PATRIOT Act-related investigations anyway.
Inside the building, waiting for his chief, Nye County Assistant Sheriff Rick Marshall, in charge of administrative services, was amiable to an interview but said he wasn't "familiar enough" with the PATRIOT Act to comment on Ashcroft's speech.
I was starting to wonder just who Ashcroft was talking to when he said, "In the days after Sept. 11, we vowed to do everything within the law to prevent additional attacks. We talked to individuals like you: law enforcement officers, investigators and prosecutors. We asked you what tools you needed to preserve life and liberty."
The only interview nabbed, in the end, was with new Nye County Sheriff Tony DeMeo. DeMeo was involved in investigating the first World Trade Center attack, in 1993--his team, from Jersey City, found the second bomb. He said he's not worried about the PATRIOT Act and said Ashcroft's speech was simply a clarification of the act.
"Some people think it's a trampling of their rights," DeMeo said. "I don't think so. I just think it gives us an opportunity to fight a covert war. The judicial process is still in place. It's not a shotgun approach. Investigations are very focused. É This is a war. As police officers, we're used to fighting a different type of war. Now, we are soldiers, we're part of protecting Americans. So our duties have expanded. It's something we have to do."
DeMeo took his cue directly from Ashcroft, who moments before had exhorted his audience with smoldering praise: "You are the doers. You are the soldiers on the ground and in the trenches who put your lives on the line to defend Americans' lives and liberties." In essence, this is true, especially in the context of the Sept. 11 heroics displayed by police and firefighters. But the military allusions...
DeMeo said the fact that the Nevada Test Site, the Tonopah Test Range and the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump site are in Nye County gives him a sense of extra diligence in terms of security. He also said the act "is supported throughout the country," apparently missing the irony of his words. If everyone's for the act, then why did Ashcroft feel the need to travel the country pumping it up?
The American Civil Liberties Union and others concerned about the expanded surveillance capabilities in the act suggest that Ashcroft's roadshow is a political stunt to woo the swing states where Democrats could take hold. (The fact Ashcroft came to Nevada must mean we're a player.) And if this is the case, the ACLU questions such use of taxpayer money. And, suggest critics, the road show might be intended to calm the dissent that's been festering and spreading across the United States and even in Congress in reaction to some of the more egregious aspects of the act. (More than 150 communities, including three states--Hawaii, Vermont and Alaska--have passed resolutions to uphold their citizens' civil liberties and, in some cases, to not assist federal law enforcement in investigations that violate those liberties.) So, it's time to rally the armed troops--er, local cops.
Except Ashcroft's speech was more like a commercial: On the lectern was a banner with www.lifeandliberty.gov printed on it, and several times Ashcroft announced the DOJ's website on the PATRIOT Act and other security measures. And his speech, delivered in a reasonable tone, had just the right mix of jingoistic war talk and righteousness tempered with poignant memory blips of the devastations of 9/11. Perhaps the essence was this: "The information-sharing that the PATRIOT Act allows has enhanced our capabilities of our terrorism task force to protect local communities. And this has allowed federal, state and local law enforcement officers to create a seamless anti-terror team with international law enforcement and intelligence agencies." Or this: "Those who challenge this long-standing, constitutional capacity to defend America would force us to tip off the terrorist" who could then blow something up.
But for those challengers standing outside the federal building in the rain, holding their protest press conference, perhaps the real essence of Ashcroft's speech was this: "To address all of the issues surrounding the PATRIOT Act would require more time than you have, and than I have."
Of course, he meant that very moment. But the fact that the presentation was closed to the public, was directed at officers who know as little about it now as many of the Congress members did when they passed it in the panic after 9/11, and that none of the attendees wanted to talk about it afterward, throws up a pretty solid wall of noncommunication. And that's just the opposite of what the PATRIOT Act purports to do.--Heidi Walters
For an overview of why some people are worried about the PATRIOT Act and other post-9/11 activity, a good place to start is at www.aclu.org.
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Las Vegas Mercury
August 28, 2003
Editor's Note: The vision thing
Las Vegas today has just about everything a major city can offer, and I don't just mean things like star-studded concerts and namebrand shopping. What I'm thinking about is the community's increasingly well-rounded cultural and political landscape. For example, Las Vegas has a very active and effective chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. It also has a wide range of social and political organizations, from the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, representing lefty causes, to the Sierra Club, defending the environment, to Citizen Alert, still fighting the good fight against Yucca Mountain.
And yet, Las Vegas, population nearing 1.5 million, still lacks an activist group dedicated to the dominant and over-arching issue facing Las Vegas--growth. To be sure, a few organizations pay attention to growth-related issues. The Sierra Club is concerned about air quality. PLAN lobbies on behalf of sufficient funding for schools and social services. Citizen Alert recently has taken an interest in water conservation.
But no organized, energized, outspoken group exists that wants to stop growth, slow it down or, at least, represent the idea of growth occurring according to a logical regional plan. The vacuum on this issue has, for years, frustrated local reporters seeking a little balance in their stories. For example, a few weeks ago Mercury news editor Heidi Walters wrote a cover story about water, raising the important point that while government officials urge us to conserve, the water saved by yanking out our lawns will simply be diverted to fuel continued development across the valley. Heidi couldn't find any activists to say it's time to stop or slow the growth here.
Plenty of people in Las Vegas believe that's what we should do--individuals scattered across the valley whose voices are most often heard at office watercoolers or, once in a while, in the letters to the daily papers. But they never have jelled into an organization that could have a strong voice and perhaps make a difference on this crucial issue.
This kind of an organization, let's call it Residents for Sensible Growth, could sink its teeth into all kinds of local issues, taking a proactive approach rather than the spontaneous, shortlived neighborhood uprisings that typify growth-related disputes in Las Vegas. Just imagine the possibilities. A few recent dust-ups come to mind:
¥ Last week, the Las Vegas City Council voted unanimously to approve zoning for a high school next to the Gilcrease orchard in the northwest valley. Many area residents were opposed to the high school, on grounds that it could end up destroying one of the last vestiges of agriculture in the valley.
Opposition to the high school was spirited, but it came late in the game and lacked organizational weight. A group committed to growth issues might have identified this issue months before it came up for a vote, thoroughly researched the situation, proposed alternate sites and lobbied the school district and city leaders to protect Gilcrease. It might have launched an initiative to protect the orchard long before the school issue came up.
¥ Earlier this summer, residents living in a Rural Neighborhood Preservation zone in the south valley protested a plan to build condominiums in the zone. They were unsuccessful. County commissioners said the RNP zone had lost its integrity (by their doing, of course) and condos and the like were the neighborhood's inevitable future.
Maybe with a more organized group on their side, the residents might have had more success in making the case to protect their ranch estate lifestyle. Maybe Residents for Sensible Growth would have already lobbied for measures to strengthen the RNP designation to prevent future zoning conflicts. As it was, the residents were overwhelmed by a County Commission seemingly hellbent on paving every last inch of unincorporated acreage.
¥ Jim Rhodes' bid to build a master-planned community on Blue Diamond Hill adjacent to Red Rock Canyon was an example of organized opposition having a positive effect. Opponents to the development benefited from the fact that the issue centered on Red Rock Canyon, which already has a strong nucleus of activists. Those activists, veterans of political battle, joined forces with the vocal and united Blue Diamond villagers to present a compelling case to protect the hill. Politicians listened, in large part because the opposition was so organized that it could make trouble for them in the next election cycle if they didn't.
No-growth, slow-growth and sensible-growth advocates are scattered across the valley, unconnected and diffused, with no mechanism to get together. When localized growth issues come up, neighborhood residents must hastily organize and usually lack financial resources, political acumen and, most frustratingly, time. They have lots of anger and enthusiasm but little influence--and when their fight is over, they disband, cynical about their ability to fight city hall. This is the underlying reason why Las Vegas developers get pretty much whatever they want, with just a handful of notable exceptions in recent years. They employ land planners, engineers, lawyers and lobbyists who speak the political language, knowing just what to say and how to say it. The imbalance is even more pronounced on regional growth and planning issues, where the public's voice is rarely if ever heard, allowing pro-growth policies to be cemented into place.
Las Vegas always has been a growth-obsessed town. Its economy has depended on it from the start. That's not going to change anytime soon--and, from my standpoint, stopping growth is not the right play. But if those who see the value of slower and smarter growth could just get together, maybe some of the ill effects of our rampant expansion could be tempered.
Geoff Schumacher
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KVBC
August 27, 2003
Nevada officials are meeting today with lawyers in Washington, D-C, to discuss the state's case against a planned nuclear repository at Yucca Mountain. The group will be meeting for Wednesday and Thursday to review arguments against the site located about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The case had been scheduled to go before the U-S Court of Appeals in Washington, D-C, in early October. The court decided to reclassify the case as ``complex'' and postponed oral arguments. Among those attending the meeting is Nevada Attorney General Brian Sandoval.
Under the ``complex'' classification, cases may be allowed several hours of argument time as opposed to the usual 10 or 15 minutes permitted. The court has consolidated several cases that challenge, among other things, safety standards, site guidelines and the approval process for the proposed repository.
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Las Vegas SUN
August 27, 2003
More scenarios of terrorism and nuclear waste
In your Aug. 19 editorial, "Nuke reports serve only as a pacifier," you stated that several destructive scenarios haven't even been tested, yet the federal government is saying that transportation of nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain will be safe.
Absent from your editorial was any mention of another obvious destructive scenario -- the car, van or truck bomb.
Ask the people of Oklahoma City if a van packed with common fertilizer and fuel could be detonated alongside something like a concrete structure, truck trailer or rail car. Ask if the resulting blast could be devastating. Ask the survivors of the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Murrah Federal Building if it is possible to unleash unfathomable, diabolical wrath upon innocent people using something besides missiles and airliners, which you mentioned. Ask the families of the 168 people who were killed in the blast if it is possible to vaporize something as solid as a building, truck or rail car. Ask them if it could happen.
Then ask yourself if transporting nuclear waste over our highways and rail lines is really as safe as its proponents are telling us it is. Let alone al-Qaida; nuclear waste rolling through our cities and towns is not even safe from our home-grown terrorists. Maybe it would have been safe in 1957, but not post Sept. 11.
As the tears well up in my eyes thinking about those innocents lost to terrorism, I must ask: Can history be repeated? Will we allow it to be?
William Simmons Holladay, Utah
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Pahrump Valley Times
August 27, 2003
County out of commission?
I was reading Mark Waite's accounts of the Aug. 19 Nye County Commissioners meeting late Thursday afternoon while helping put the newspaper to bed when I was reminded of Abbott and Costello's classic "Who's on first?" routine.
What?
Like most of you, almost everything I know involving the commission is what I read in the Pahrump Valley Times. Having done so since the new board members took their respective seats in January, I get the sense Nye is a county without leadership.
There is no voice among the five that stands out, and resolutions to problems have become few and far between.
Before we begin, let's make a few disclosures. I've known each of the five for years, before any of them ever took office.
I respect each of them and believe they are ethical and have good intentions. Before writing this column I didn't attempt to contact Chairman Henry Neth, Vice Chairwoman Joni Eastley, or members Patricia Cox, Candice Trummell, or Midge Carver.
However honorable these commissioners might be does not compensate for the fact they simply cannot get along.
They disagree on everything from Yucca Mountain oversight to which consultant should be hired to lobby for Nye in the nation's capital.
After the three newcomers have spent eight months on the job, you'd think the board would be more adept at building consensus.
Candidly, I miss the days of Cameron McRae and the late Dick Carver. Those two never liked one another but at least they knew how to conduct themselves in public.
But McRae and Carver spent 12 and 14 years of their lives as commissioners, respectively, and that kind of experience is hard to replace.
Conversely, Neth and Eastley are in their third year in office, while Cox, Trummell and Midge Carver have a combined 24 months.
And there you have it; Dick Carver and McRae spent more time sitting in traffic then the five we have now have spent at their public posts.
Trummell has emerged as the most confrontational commissioner, and one wonders who is counseling her on the finer points of political etiquette.
God love her for rattling cages, but let us hope she learns a few realities - like in order to be an effective leader one must learn to work across the aisle - before one of those cages falls on her head. Still, you have to love Trummell's passion and idealism.
Cox has become the cheerleader and is starting to come into her own. Now if she could just learn to focus her attention on what she perceives as the five most pressing issues in Nye County instead of attempting to fix all 1.67 million problems at once.
As the lone male on the commission, you have to give Neth credit for holding his own. Those Provenza women have trained him well. As chairman, Neth has been assigned the role of leader, and he does try his best.
What he needs to do is find even more time to dedicate to his political duties, time that takes him away from his professional obligations and his family. The best public servants are those willing to make the sacrifice.
Eastley is well prepared and considers every citizen in the county as her constituency. Since she represents Tonopah, Beatty, Amargosa Valley and a portion of northern Pahrump, Eastley is probably right to consider herself the people's commissioner.
Unfortunately, it is that very demographic that will doom her. How could she ever be an advocate for her district when the people who fill it are as diverse as, well, urban retirees and hard rock miners?
Midge Carver is in the same bind. Her district stretches from Smoky Valley and all parts north of Tonopah to a section of northern Pahrump.
Carver rarely speaks and holds her cards closer to her vest than she does her heart. This tells me one thing: Midge Carver may be the brains of the bunch.
Several weeks ago in a conversation with Pahrump resident Betty Ambriz, we discussed the new county commission. It was just days after former County Manager Dave Chavez was canned.
Ambriz questioned the wisdom of getting rid of Chavez, but she's seen the movie before. "New brooms sweep clean," she said.
Yes, they do, Betty. But sometimes they raise more dust than they're worth. Most people won't wait too long for them to break in.
Who's on first?
What?
Write to Doug McMurdo at dmcmurdo@pvtimes.com.
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Salt Lake Tribune
August 27, 2003
Goshutes, N-consortium face off with state
By Judy Fahys
Salt Lake Tribune
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- They always have said that Utah laws intended to block high-level nuclear waste storage on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian reservation are unconstitutional.
On Tuesday, the tiny Goshute band and a consortium of big nuclear-power companies urged a federal appeals court to agree.
However, attorneys for the state pressed the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to not only overturn a lower court's constitutionality ruling, but also to reject the federal government's authority to license the Utah waste facility.
The appeals judges devoted an hour Tuesday to debating the reasoning presented by both sides during oral arguments, which were held at New Mexico U.S. District Courthouse instead of the appeals court's usual home in Denver.
At Utah's request, the three-judge panel is trying to decide whether to uphold U.S. District Judge Tena Campbell's ruling last summer that five state laws intended to block the waste facility are unconstitutional.
"They asked tough questions of both sides," said Thomas R. Lee, a Brigham Young University law professor who faced the judges on behalf of the state.
"We feel we had a full and fair opportunity to address most of the key issues in this complex and multifaceted litigation," said Tim Vollmann, an attorney for the 118-member Goshute band.
Tuesday's oral arguments stem from a case filed more than two years ago, after the state Legislature passed a law outlawing a high-level nuclear waste site in Utah and promising severe penalties against anyone doing business with such a facility. The nuclear-company consortium, called Private Fuel Storage, and the Goshutes filed the case jointly.
Since 1996, they have planned a 100-acre, open-air parking lot for reactor waste awaiting permanent disposal, presumably in the proposed underground national repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev. The storage site would be big enough to hold 44,000 tons of dangerously radioactive waste stored in steel and concrete containers.
The consortium and the band say that the state laws violated their right under federal law to pursue a license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And, because the federal government is almost exclusively empowered to regulate nuclear storage, transportation and disposal, the state laws were pre-empted, the project proponents contend.
Campbell sided with them in July 2002, ignoring the state's insistence that it is not state but federal laws that are a problem.
Lawyers for Utah contend that Congress never authorized the NRC to license a facility like the one proposed for the Goshute reservation. They say there is nothing wrong with the state trying to stop an "unlawful" project -- the waste facility now being considered for a federal license.
Flanked by Utah Special Assistant Attorney General Monte Stewart, Lee, who is the son of former U.S. Solicitor General Rex E. Lee, also told the appeals judges that project proponents do not have the legal right to challenge Utah laws because they, in effect, have no legal right to the license they are seeking. And he suggested no harm has been done to the project because the NRC has not granted a license at this point.
This same argument is being made in a separate case now proceeding through Wash- ington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals. That case challenges the NRC's own rulings last year that the agency does have the right to license the PFS-Goshute facility.
The U.S. Justice Department also weighed in Tuesday on the Utah-law case, saying the proper forum to talk about the "lawfulness" of the NRC license is in the Washington, D.C., case.
Based on the questions the judges asked both sides, it was hard to tell which way they might be leaning.
For instance, Judge Michael McConnell, who is also a University of Utah law professor, probed the consortium's lawyers about the possibility that a state sometimes has the right to enact laws that trump federal ones. He pointed to a ruling on a California state law that blocked construction of new nuclear power plants, facilities regulated by the federal government.
The appeals judges also questioned the state about what it intended by passage of the laws, which were enacted in 1998, 1999 and 2001. The PFS and Goshute attorneys said the laws were openly aimed at killing their project.
While the Goshutes and PFS described the tactics as outrageous, the state insisted on its right to protect citizens from any harm the facility might pose.
So, if the federal government paved the way for the facility to be built over Utah's objections, the state law imposed a 75 percent yearly "transaction fee" on contracts related to the facility, a $5 million license application fee and, among other requirements, a bond of an estimated $2 billion to cover any unfunded liability in the case of an accident.
"That is, I think, beyond chilling," said PFS attorney Val R. Antczak, suggesting the message was anyone who tried such a project in Utah would be crazy.
Added Vollmann: "This has had a lasting impact on the band. They have been planning on radioactive waste storage."
fahys@sltrib.com
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Las Vegas SUN
August 26, 2003
GAO: Cheney Denied Papers on Energy Panel
By Siobhan McDonough
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) - Congressional investigators say they were unable to determine how much the White House's energy policy was influenced by the oil industry because they were denied documents by Vice President Dick Cheney about his energy task force.
Investigators also came up short trying to find out how much money various agencies spent on creating the national energy policy, a General Accounting Office report released Monday said.
The unwillingness of Cheney's office to turn over records and other information "precluded us from fully achieving our objectives" and limited its analysis, the GAO said.
The GAO unsuccessfully sued the vice president last year to release information.
The Energy and Interior departments and the Environmental Protection Agency reviewed the GAO's report before it was released and chose not to comment. The vice president's office declined to look at it, the GAO said.
The National Energy Policy Development Group, chaired by Cheney, was formed by President Bush in January 2001 to develop a national energy policy.
The task force submitted its final report in May 2001. Congress is now considering the energy-related legislative proposals.
The GAO said the task force's report was the "product of a centralized, topdown, short-term, and labor-intensive process that involved the efforts of several hundred federal employees government wide."
In the few months between the start of the energy task force and its presentation of the final report, the vice president, some Cabinet-level and other senior administration officials and support staff controlled most of the report's development, according to the GAO.
They met frequently with energy industry representatives and only on a limited basis with scholars and environmentalists, the GAO said. The extent to which any of these meetings or information obtained from the energy industry influenced policy can't be determined, based on limited information made available to the GAO, the report said.
Two Democratic presidential candidates, Sens. John Kerry of Massachusetts and Bob Graham of Florida, on Tuesday criticized the administration for failing to release the energy task force documents and called on Cheney to produce the records.
"As gas prices reach historic levels and the nation's energy infrastructure is pushed beyond its limits, the Bush administration has decided their energy policy will be of the special interests, by the special interests and for the special interests," Kerry said in a statement.
Said Graham: "If the Bush-Cheney team has nothing to hide, then why are they hiding documents? There can be only one answer - they don't want the American people to know just how much influence the big oil companies have over U.S. energy policy."
Last December, a federal judge rebuffed congressional efforts to gather information about meetings that Cheney's energy task force held with industry executives and lobbyists while formulating the administration's energy plan.
The judge said the lawsuit filed by Comptroller General David Walker against the vice president was an unprecedented act that raised serious separation-of-powers issues between the executive and legislative branches of government. The comptroller general runs the GAO.
Some Democratic congressmen requested information in the spring of 2001 about which industry executives and lobbyists the Cheney task force was meeting with in creating the Bush administration's energy plan.
The Cheney energy plan called for expanded oil and gas drilling on public land and easing regulatory barriers to building nuclear power plants. Among the proposals: drilling in the Arctic wildlife refuge and possibly reviving nuclear fuel reprocessing, which was abandoned in the 1970s as a nuclear proliferation threat.
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On the Net:
General Accounting Office: http://www.gao.gov
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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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