Yucca Mountain News Clips - Thursday, August 19, 2004

Yucca Mountain News Clips
Thursday, August 19, 2004
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
August 19, 2004

U.S. Senate

By Erin Neff
Review-Journal

Republicans will decide which of six men will have the dubious distinction of running against Sen. Harry Reid, the state's most powerful and well-financed Democrat, who already has garnered plenty of GOP support for re-election to his fourth-term.

Robert "Bob" Brown will be first on the ballot.

He filed for office in Carson City using his Florida driver's license. Brown said that although he lives in Florida, he's "looking for a place right now in Nevada," and opposes Reid as someone who votes "lock-step with Democrats."

Asked to name Nevada's top issues, he cited West Nile Virus, terrorism and "the three shipments of nuclear waste being brought to Yucca Mountain each week under the cover of darkness."

Candidates for federal office can reside anywhere in the United States. Brown would have to move to Nevada if he's elected.

Royle Melton is a fourth-generation Nevadan whose father was a well-known newspaperman in Reno.

He served as a legislative aide to Republican U.S. Sens. Chic Hecht and Paul Laxalt in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s, worked as an attorney with the Legislative Counsel Bureau and spent a decade as project attorney for the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.

"We're squandering our heritage and the principles our country was founded on," said Melton, who is more critical of the Bush administration than of Reid. "I think we're killing the country with deficits."

A Mormon, he is against abortion and gay marriage. He would not renew the Patriot Act, would repeal the Bush tax cuts and work to secure Social Security funding for future generations without embarking on individual investment accounts.

Melton, a Reno resident who works in Fallon, said he is skeptical of the war in Iraq.

Poliak, the candidate formerly known as Carlo Poliak, works each day to turn talk on his garbage truck from sex and sports to politics.

Poliak was orphaned in his native Croatia after Allied bombing in World War II killed his parents. He was adopted by a U.S. Army officer and brought to California, where he finished high school and did stints in college and in the Army.

The former Democrat has run for office at least six times, including a 1999 bid for mayor of Las Vegas.

Poliak would pull troops out of Iraq, would "address deficits" and restore overtime pay. He supports abortion only in cases of rape and incest or to preserve a woman's life.

He said he doesn't agree with gay marriage but believes it is not government's role to legislate the issue.

Cherie Tilley played high school football with Vice President Dick Cheney in Casper, Wyo., and said he has a special "in" with the White House on his plans for Nevada.

Tilley, who lives in Spring Valley, Elko County, wants to benefit from Yucca Mountain by taking $30 billion from the nuclear waste repository project, building a reprocessing plant and selling waste to run new power plants he would build in six rural counties.

A tunnel excavator by trade, he also would purchase water rights from British Columbia and pipe the West's most coveted resource south.

"This is the whole picture plan," Tilley said.

A Mormon, he opposes gay marriage and abortion unless a woman's life is in danger. He supports the Bush tax cuts and the war in Iraq but thinks Medicare reform should permit re-importation of drugs from Canada.

Kenneth Wegner is a disabled Persian Gulf War Army veteran who wants to bring 125,000 troops stationed in Europe and Asia back to the United States to guard the Mexican border.

He calls himself "an independent Republican" and believes the Bush administration is "wrong on steel tariffs, wrong on the war and wrong on illegal immigrants."

"We need an Ellis Island West on the Western border," Wegner, a Las Vegas resident, said. "We should say, if you're free of disease and want to be a citizen, OK. If you're just here to rape our country, go on welfare and get your kids free lunch, go away."

Wegner believes the tax cuts should be repealed for wealthy Americans, and he proposes a 2 percent national sales tax and an 8 percent flat income tax.

Although last on the ballot, Richard Ziser considers himself the best chance to defeat Reid.

He has spent much of the year trying to convince others that his leadership of the ballot initiative banning gay marriage in the state's constitution has given him the base, and the strength on current issues, needed to win.

"It doesn't matter what side of the marriage issue you were on, it's judges making that decision now," Ziser said. "We need good judges, like the kinds Harry Reid worked to block, not activist judges."

Ziser, who lives in Las Vegas, won wide support for the marriage initiative in both 2000 and 2002. He finished third in a 1998 bid for a spot on the Clark County School Board.

Ziser would make the tax cuts permanent, says the war in Iraq was justified and said if the Bush administration wants renewal of the Patriot Act, he probably would support it.

He said he thinks that the government should be able to negotiate for lower drug prices, that Nevada should negotiate for benefits from Yucca Mountain and that younger Americans should be able to invest their Social Security accounts.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
August 19, 2004

1st Congressional District

By Erin Neff
Review-Journal

Rep. Shelley Berkley faces two opponents from her own party and three challengers from across the aisle as she vies for her fourth term.

Berkley, D-Nev., contends she deserves to be re-elected because of her focus on constituent services and her efforts to help small businesses and veterans in Las Vegas.

Her two Democratic opponents criticize her for supporting the war in Iraq and the Patriot Act. The Republicans vying to challenge her in the general election have a more conservative approach to national issues.

Berkley said, given what she knows now, she would not have supported the war and would not vote to extend the Patriot Act as it is written. She said she also would work to change the Medicare reform law, and she remains one of the House's most hawkish Democrats when it comes to issues affecting Israel.

"Had I known that there was no weapons of mass destruction, that there was no way Iraq could acquire nuclear weaponry within six months or two years, and that the ties to al-Qaida were manufactured, I do no think anybody in Congress would have voted for the war," Berkley said. "The intelligence was not only faulty, it was wildly inaccurate."

Brian Kral, a progressive Democrat who has collected petitions to repeal the Patriot Act at the local level, said he has a hard time accepting Berkley's answers.

"Maybe I'm just in the race to prick the balloon of political hypocrisy," he said. "But Iraq is the central political issue of this time, and it's too important a position to say you were duped on it."

Ann Reynolds, a follower of Democratic presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, said she is running for the 1st Congressional District seat because she wants to be able to influence Berkley's decisions.

"She's a strong proponent of the war, and she's an absolute warmonger on Israel," Reynolds said. "To say that (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon is a wonderful person is ridiculous. Ariel Sharon is just as bad as (Palestinian National Authority President Yasser) Arafat."

On the Republican side, Lewis Byer said he spends "about 18 hours a day monitoring the situation in Iraq" while tuned to CNN. He made an unsuccessful bid for Clark County treasurer in 2002 and canceled a scheduled interview for this voter's guide.

In a paid political advertisement in the May 27 edition of the Review-Journal, Byer offered voters an apology for some of his past activities. "I gambled, drank alcohol, worked in a topless, bottomless club, smoked marijuana, drove hookers around in a 1971 green Ford Pinto, took hookers home and a host of other activities that I should not have done."

Russ Mickelson is a retired Air Force pilot and a retired Department of Defense employee who said he doesn't have anything bad to say about Berkley; he just sees issues through a more conservative lens.

"The Air Force was good training," said Mickelson, who is on the executive board of the Clark County GOP. "You get in the habit of wanting to make a difference and you get to do interesting jobs."

He supports making the Bush administration tax cuts permanent, would renew the Patriot Act in its entirety and believes the war in Iraq was justified and necessary.

Francisco Tamez, a part-time umpire who originally came to Las Vegas in the 1980s to bet sports, turns heads when he walks into a room despite combing his Mohawk down.

He was shocked no major candidate emerged to challenge Berkley and believes he's a likeable standard-bearer for the Republican Party in the race. He vows to make permanent the Bush tax cuts, renew the Patriot Act and "let the economy grow its way out of the deficits."

"My campaign has yet to manifest itself," Tamez said. "It's a Don Quixote activity now, but after I win the primary, my name recognition will improve."

Winners of the Democratic and Republican primaries will face Libertarian Jim Duensing in November's general election.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
August 19, 2004

2nd Congressional District

By Ed Vogel
Review-Journal Capital Bureau

Two little-known Pahrump residents face off in the Democratic primary for the unenviable right to challenge four-term Republican Rep. Jim Gibbons in the the 2nd Congressional District race.

Although David Bennett and Angie Cochran share the burgeoning rural town as their home, their political viewpoints are widely divergent.

Cochran thinks the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository would be good for Nevada.

Bennett opposes it.

Bennett supports John Kerry for president.

Cochran thinks Kerry would be better than President Bush, but she isn't happy about the choice.

"I'm a Democrat, but I think people in Nye County would benefit from Yucca Mountain," Cochran said.

"It may cost me votes; but we are going to get it anyway, and we might as well get benefits."

"We need to judge whether Yucca Mountain is acceptable on sound science," Bennett said.

"The sound science isn't there. None of the people I talk to want it."

Both oppose the war in Iraq.

"Bush went to Iraq when our trouble was with al-Qaida and terrorists," Cochran said. "That's like, we have trouble with people in Carson City and we attack Mexico."

"I oppose the war, but support our troops," Bennett said. "I don't think the American public or Congress had all the information we needed before we went to war."

Both concede their chances of upsetting Gibbons in the November general election are slim or none.

"Nobody wants to donate to your campaign," Bennett said.

"I am definitely the underdog. I am in this for the long haul. Name recognition is the biggest thing in political races. I will have name recognition in two years, and I may try for the Senate."

"Most people think he is immovable," Cochran said of the Republican incumbent. Republicans outnumber Democrats by almost 50,000 registered voters in the district.

Independent American Janine Hansen and Libertarian Brendan Trainor also will be candidates on the general election ballot.

Cochran was born in Mexico City, but has lived in Nevada for 40 years, the last 14 in Pahrump. She is emphatic about minorities receiving no special rights.

"People should learn English," she said. "I am an American. I think it is an abomination to classify people in different races, as whites or Hispanics."

Bennett is a New Yorker who moved to Pahrump 2 1/2 years ago. For him, the congressional race is his first stab at public office.

Cochran was defeated in past attempts for the Pahrump Town Board and the Nye County Commission.

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Reno Gazette-Journal
August 18, 2004

Your turn: Anti-nuclear sentiment lacking in logic

America is being hijacked. The greatest hoax in the history of our country is the idea that nuclear energy cannot be safely handled. This “idea’ has been fed to our public for almost 50 years and paid for mostly by the oil, gas, and coal industries, both domestic and foreign. Oil money is helping support the terrorist groups that want to destroy America.

Many of our politicians who accept money from the hydrocarbon groups vote against subjects that in effect will kill the construction of future nuclear electric power plants. When you look at the great value to our society of nuclear plants and look at the successful history of our more than 100 operating plants, providing about 20 percent of our electricity, there is no logic to being against them.

Let´s review why nuclear power is so important:

1. We must become, as much as possible, self-sufficient in the area of energy. As yet, no other practical sources of large amounts of energy are available to us.

2. Nuclear electric power plants can provide us with the needed energy at less than one half the present costs. Think how much better our factories will be able to compete with foreign companies.

3. Very low electric costs will initiate the use of electric cars, trains, and mass transportation systems with a great reduction in air pollution. Automobiles will go through a great evolution to become more and more acceptable.

4. Reduction of oil purchases will help reduce our large balance of payment deficits.

5. Our home heating costs are high because large amounts of natural gas are being used to create electricity.

6. Low electric costs may make it practical to pump water from areas of over supply to areas needing water (irrigation, reclaiming wet lands, reforestation, forest fire suppression, flood control, etc.).

7. Nuclear plants do not cause air pollution. Their use will let plants and animals live healthier lives and reduce human health costs.

8. Nuclear plants will greatly extend the life of hydrocarbon products for future use.

9. Waste heat from nuclear plants near the ocean, will permit the distillation of sea water to produce fresh water, a very growing need.

The best scientists and nuclear engineers the government can get assure us that they can safely store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. A reprocessing plant is a needed attachment to the system to allow reduction of the waste product volume to about five percent of present volume and make Yucca Mountain good for hundreds of years of storage.

The opposition to nuclear plants and Yucca Mountain is mostly an attempt by the hydrocarbon industries to protect their “turf’ and in so doing, deny us all of the great values that will be derived from “going nuclear.’

The construction of these plants should be made by the utility companies so that the great reduction in costs will benefit the customers and not private companies.

Art Johnston, a Reno resident, is a mechanical engineer who worked in the oil industry and was superintendent of technical services with Pan American World Airways at the nuclear rocket test site in Nevada for five years.

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Lahontan Valley News
August 19, 2004

Where will Kerry send nuclear waste?

Editor:

Senator Kerry vows to protect Nevada against the storage of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. This is the message Nevadans want to hear. I would like now to hear what Mr. Kerry's plan is for this waste.

There are 49 other states that think this storage facility is a fine idea - the "not in my backyard" scenario. Where and what is Mr. Kerry telling the people of those other places he plans to send the waste to? I imagine it is a safe assumption he does not intend the waste to go to Massachusetts.

Does anyone know of his alternate plan and location of the new site? France maybe? This seems like a promise made during an election year. Maybe Mr. Kerry will be "against it before he is for it."

J.M. Morgan
Fallon

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Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board
August 19, 2004

[Federal Register: August 19, 2004 (Volume 69, Number 160)]
[Notices]
[Page 51494-51495]
From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
[DOCID:fr19au04-83]

NUCLEAR WASTE TECHNICAL REVIEW BOARD

September 20, 2004--Las Vegas, Nevada: The U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board Will Meet With the Department of Energy (DOE) and Interested Parties To Discuss the Processes Used To Develop and Review the DOE's Total System Performance Assessment of the Proposed Yucca Mountain Repository Site

Pursuant to its authority under section 5051 of Public Law 100-203, Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 1987, the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board will meet in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Monday, September 20, 2004. The primary focus of the meeting will be an overview of the purpose, scope, methodology, criteria, and modeling of the Department of Energy's (DOE) Total System Performance Assessment (TSPA) of the Yucca Mountain site. Other issues pertinent to a proposed repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada are scheduled to be discussed, including repository design and DOE activities related to seismic issues. The meeting

[[Page 51495]]

will be open to the public, and opportunities for public comment will be provided. The Board is charged by Congress with reviewing the technical and scientific validity of activities undertaken by the DOE related to nuclear waste disposal as stipulated in the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 1987.

The meeting is scheduled to begin at 8 a.m. and to continue until approximately 5:30 p.m. It will be held at the Atrium Suites Hotel (formerly the Crowne Plaza Hotel); 4255 South Paradise Road; Las Vegas, NV 89109; (tel.) 702-369-4400; (fax) 702-369-3770.

The meeting will begin with DOE program and project updates for fiscal year 2005. The updates will be followed by discussions of the repository design that the DOE intends to carry forward in a Yucca Mountain license application and of activities that the DOE is undertaking related to seismic issues. After lunch, the focus will be on the DOE's TSPA for a Yucca Mountain repository. The DOE will begin the session with presentations on the purpose and scope of TSPA; regulatory requirements related to TSPA; the approach and methodology used to conduct the TSPA; and the development of TSPA models, including changes from the last TSPA. Following these presentations, representatives from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) have been invited to comment on the TSPA process and criteria from the NRC's perspective. The Electric Power Research Institute also has been asked to present the latest version of its TSPA. Changes may be made to this tentative meeting agenda. A final agenda detailing meeting times, topics, and participants will be available approximately one week before the meeting date. Copies of the meeting agenda can be requested by telephone or obtained from the Board's Web site at http://www.nwtrb.gov.

Time will be set aside at the end of the day on Monday for public comments. Those wanting to speak are encouraged to sign the ``Public Comment Register'' at the check-in table. A time limit may have to be set on individual remarks, but written comments of any length may be submitted for the record. Interested parties also will have the opportunity to submit questions in writing to the Board. As time permits, submitted questions relevant to the discussion may be asked by Board members.

Transcripts of the meetings will be available on the Board's Web site, by e-mail, on computer disk, and on a library-loan basis in paper format from Davonya Barnes of the Board's staff, beginning on October 18, 2004.

A block of rooms has been reserved at the Atrium Suites Hotel for meeting participants. When making a reservation, please state that you are attending the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board meeting. Reservations should be made by September 3, 2004, to ensure receiving the meeting rate.

For more information, contact Karyn Severson, NWTRB External Affairs; 2300 Clarendon Boulevard; Suite 1300; Arlington, VA 22201-3367; (tel.) 703-235-4473; (fax) 703-235-4495.

Dated: August 11, 2004.
Karyn D. Severson,
Director, External Affairs, Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board.
[FR Doc. 04-19015 Filed 8-18-04; 8:45 am]

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
August 18, 2004

Scientists propose using train, fire to test nuclear casks

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Government scientists hope to show the durability of nuclear waste shipping casks by ramming one with a speeding train, then engulfing it in fire, according to a proposal made public Thursday.

Engineers at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission propose to stage a demonstration in which a locomotive pulling an undetermined number of railcars will crash into a derailed spent nuclear fuel container laying across the tracks.

The container then would be placed in a pit and swallowed by a "fully engulfing" fire for 30 minutes, according to the proposal.

While it has been suggested that the crash take place at 75 mph, NRC staffers said the test speed has not yet been determined.

Agency officials say they hope the crash and burn test will build public confidence in the government's ability to ship nuclear waste to a proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.

The safety of a Yucca Mountain shipping campaign will rest largely on the ability of 18-foot long steel canisters to contain rods of highly radioactive spent fuels pellets, government and industry officials say.

"The test proposed will demonstrate the robustness of a certified spent fuel transportation cask in the event of an accident involving a fully engulfing fire," Luis Reyes, NRC executive director for operations, said in a July 27 memo to agency commissioners who must sign off on the test.

A consultant for the state of Nevada dismissed the proposed test, saying it will serve more for show than for substance.

"The impact scenario is totally inadequate, and the fire scenario is totally inadequate," said Robert Halstead, a Wisconsin-based transportation authority. "They have designed a test for which they know for sure the cask can't fail, and they think that will enhance public confidence."

NRC officials could not be reached for comment. Nevada officials are preparing legal challenges to segments of the Yucca Mountain transportation plan.

Nevada-paid experts and several watchdog organizations had lobbied the NRC for rigorous testing to determine how much a cask could be stressed before breaking. But the agency has said that conducting such testing would be unrealistic.

Under the NRC proposal, the 150-ton shipping container would be outfitted with instrumentation to measure the effects of the crash and fire. Information gleaned would be used to validate NRC safety requirements that now are based largely on computer calculations and scale-model tests.

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Pahrump Valley Times
August 18, 2004

Bush defends stance on Yucca Mountain

By Scott Lindlaw
The Associated Press

LAS VEGAS - President Bush on Thursday defended his decision to use Nevada's Yucca Mountain as the nation's high-level nuclear waste dump, an unpopular move in a swing state that he won four years ago.

"I said I would make a decision based upon science, not politics. I said I would listen to the scientists, those involved with determining whether or not this project could move forward in a safe manner and that's exactly what I did," Bush told supporters in Las Vegas.

Bush accused Democratic Sen. John Kerry of pandering to Nevada voters by playing both sides of the issue, part of a broader effort to cast the Massachusetts senator as someone who bends to the political winds.

"He says he's strongly against Yucca here in Nevada, but he voted for it several times," Bush claimed.

That is not exactly true.

Each time Kerry has faced the simple choice of voting whether or not to send waste to Yucca Mountain, he has voted against it. But he has voted for some measures that had provisions to allow nuclear dumps there. Some 16 years ago, Kerry voted for an overall budget bill that included a provision favoring putting the nuclear waste in Nevada.

Kerry, who campaigned in California on Thursday, visited Las Vegas earlier last week, and said that Bush broke a campaign promise to ensure science and not politics determined his decision whether to ship waste to Yucca Mountain.

Dozens of scientific studies remain incomplete and a recent federal appeals court ruling raised questions about whether the waste repository will be built, or at least meet its target of 2010 to begin operation.

Bush said he was pleased to "allow this process to be appealed to the courts and to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission."

"I will stand by the decision of the courts and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission," Bush said.

Bush's visit to Nevada was his second in two months. Though Nevada has only five electoral votes - a tiny slice of the 270 needed to win the presidency - it has become a hotly contested prize in an election that is so close.

A poll of likely Nevada voters in late July showed the race essentially tied.

From Nevada, Bush jetted to Santa Monica, Calif., for a Republican National Committee fundraiser, his 12th visit to California. He has not been there in five months, a measure of the pessimism in Bush's camp about winning California's 55 electoral votes.

While in California, the president and the first lady stopped by former first lady Nancy Reagan's home in the Bel-Air section of Los Angeles, where Mrs. Reagan said she fully supports Bush's re-election. After meeting with her for about an hour, the three emerged from the house and the president told reporters that he and Mrs. Bush were "honored to pay our respects." Former President Reagan died in June.

"I'm so glad you came," said Mrs. Reagan, who later issued a statement expressing "my hope that everyone will join" in supporting Bush's campaign. The president and Mrs. Reagan did not discuss their disagreement over Bush's restrictions on stem cell research, which the former first lady opposes. They took no questions from reporters.

Recent polls show Kerry holds a lead of about 11 percentage points in California, despite Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger's victory in last year's gubernatorial recall election. Schwarzenegger was introducing Laura Bush at Thursday night's fundraiser.

Kerry also campaigned in Southern California on Thursday, saying Bush's tax cuts failed to spur job creation.

Bush defended the tax cuts in his speech at a Las Vegas union hall, which was packed with hundreds of Republican supporters.

"All I ask is to be careful about all of this talk about taxing the rich," Bush said. "The so-called rich hire accountants and lawyers to maybe not pay as much. And therefore in order to meet all of these promises, guess who ends up getting stuck with the bill? The working people."

It was Bush's latest attempt to court a friendly labor union, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. Most labor unions lean strongly Democratic.

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Pahrump Valley Times
August 18, 2004

Ducking behind a name

Dennis Myers

River Citizen: You are in Ioway.

Professor Harold Hill: Ioway. Well, at least now I know how to pronounce it. I always thought you folks preferred Iowuh.

Second River Citizen: We do.

Hill: Well, he just said Ioway.

Second: We say it now and then, but we don't like anybody else to.

Presidential candidates may be forgiven if they're wishing Nevadans were a little more like Iowans.

In fact, some Nevadans may be wishing for a little less attention, not just to the pronunciation of the states name, but to the name itself. If the states had been numbered instead of named, we might be focusing on matters of greater moment.

In 1987 the Nevada Legislature commissioned a major study of the state tax structure to be delivered in 1988. It soon dawned on some people that this meant the study would be pitched right into the middle of the election campaign, with candidates forced to comment on its findings and discuss tax policy. That's the last thing lobbyists and legislative leaders want - they prefer to keep tax discussions within the walls of the legislative building in odd-numbered years.

So with a wink, the two firms doing the study asked for an extension of time for delivery of the report until after the '88 election. An interim legislative committee had to approve the extension of time and to make sure the approval got little attention, the legislative staff put a decoy on the agenda to distract the press - new legislative chairs costing, as I recall, $900. Journalists went for the bait and approval of the delay ended up at the bottom of stories on the legislative committee meeting. The important story got ignored in favor of a novelty story.

That's what stories about Nevada's name are doing - providing a decoy.

Acting University of Nevada Chancellor James Rogers created a stir about the use of the name "Nevada" to refer to the Reno campus, generating news stories and letters to the editor about the silly "issue." (In Reno, virtually everyone refers to the campus as UNR. Only a tiny group of boosters call it Nevada.) Imagine if all that ink and energy had been devoted to scrutinizing the troubled university system and Rogers himself.

In the presidential race we've had three rounds of stories about Nevada's name. Last Nov. 25 in a Las Vegas speech, George Bush pronounced Nevada as ne-vaw-duh, the way it's pronounced most places. Locally, of course, the middle syllable is pronounced with a flat A as in "act." This kind of pronunciation happens all the time, but in this case Bush became the subject of stories published all over the country. This happened because a local story was rewritten by the Associated Press and sent national. Soon everyone from the New York Times to bloggers were discussing it.

The San Francisco Chronicle covered Bush's mispronunciation in a story that spelled "mispronunce." A satirist portrayed Bush promoting Ebonics education. Reporters and bloggers trying to explain the local pronunciation compared that middle A to glad, matter, vacuum, and "ack, like Bill the Cat." Numerous people quoted Ira Gershwin ("You say tomay-to/I say tomaw-to") though they tended to attribute it to Fred Astaire.

Anyway, after that first round, there was another spate of stories about Bush's corrected pronunciation at his next Nevada visit on June 18. Since his mispronunciation had been news, his newly correct pronunciation now also was news. And then there was another round of stories when John Kerry was in Las Vegas to mispronounce Nevada (and also "Yucca," though no one outside the nuclear power industry seems bothered by abuse of that name).

Through all this, I kept remembering something Richard Nixon said at his famous 1962 "last news conference" about the newspapers he imagined opposed him: "... If they're against a candidate, give him the shaft - but also ... put one lonely reporter on the campaign who will report what the candidate says now and then."

We have heard a lot about the candidates' pronunciation but except for Yucca Mountain, we have heard nothing from journalists about the candidates stances on national issues affecting Nevada. What has George Bush's record on grazing fees been over the last four years? What does John Kerry think about the Mining Law of 1872? The Clinton administration had a powerful impact on growth in Nevada through its stand on water transfers - where would Kerry and Bush administrations land on the issue? Imagine if all the ink and airtime expended on pronunciation had been spent instead on issues.

There's an episode of "Seinfeld" in which Elaine breaks up with a guy because of his punctuation. Nevada journalism is showing about the same depth.

Myers is a veteran capital reporter. His column, "Against the Grain," appears here on Wednesdays.

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Las Vegas City Life
August 18, 2004

Glowing receptions

Friends and foes of Kerry and Bush finally heard both candidates speak about Yucca Mountain

By Ryan Slattery

"These people are very angry," observes Colin Sherrod, who is dressed in a white paper Hazmat-like jumpsuit. He lifts the hood to expose his face, flush red and covered in sweat. Sherrod then stops, takes a deep breath and a giant swig from a bottle of water, and continues. "God, in order to get a protest this size, you really have to do something horrible. They're pissed."

So was he. The 23-year-old made the trip from Fort Worth, Texas to Las Vegas last week, not to gamble or party in our ultra lounges, but to stand in the baking desert sun on one of the hottest days of the year. He shouted at a president who was two blocks away in an air conditioned hall and couldn't hear him.

President Bush never saw any of the angry protesters. His motorcade whisked him to and from the rally through a back route, and when Air Force One appeared in the sky headed for California, the protesters shouted "coward."

It was well over 100 degrees by 10 a.m. when hundreds of demonstrators kicked it into full gear, circling the street and chanting, "Three more months; help is on the way" and "Hell no, we won't glow," referring to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump.

Somewhere in the crowd of Bush haters was Mr. B, carrying a sign with a map of Texas and a star near Crawford, the president's hometown. It read: "Amber Alert: Village Idiot is Missing."

There was little love in Las Vegas outside the carpenters union training center during Bush's brief Aug. 12 visit to Southern Nevada, which came on the heels of democratic presidential nominee John Kerry's two-day stay here. Earlier in the week Kerry spoke at a middle school, held a public rally at the Thomas & Mack Center attracting somewhere in the neighborhood of 12,000 people and addressed seniors in Henderson. Meanwhile, Vice President Dick Cheney was in Elko on Saturday.

Those who did hear the protesters' shouts were police officers. Metro staffed the event with 70 officers. Also hearing them were "the chosen ones," as one demonstrator dubbed the 1,300 people invited to hear Bush speak.

Rally attendees leaving the president's speech were subjected to verbal attacks from anti-Bush protesters who shouted insults at everyone from old ladies to a group of Boy Scouts. Police escorted some Bush supporters to their cars, and one Republican taunted the crowd by putting four fingers in the air to signify a second term for Bush. A Kerry supporter responded with his own salute to Bush -- a single finger.

The big issue was nuke waste. A topic hardly, if ever, discussed by either candidate outside of Nevada. It's an issue some think may swing the state's five electoral votes in favor of Kerry, who said he would kill the project and veto any legislation that would weaken radiation standards.

"Not on my watch," the Democrat told supporters. "And I'll tell you what else. If they try to change the standards on radiation at the EPA and they send it to my desk. Veto pen. Gone. Out."

Meanwhile, at his own rally, Bush accused Kerry of trying to turn Yucca Mountain into a "political poker chip." The president then defended his decision to send 77,000 tons of nuclear waste here, denying claims that he ever promised Nevadans anything different.

"When I campaigned here in this state, I said I would make a decision based upon science, not politics. I said that I would listen to the scientists, those involved with determining whether or not this project could move forward in a safe manner and that's exactly what I did," Bush said. "I listened to the people who know the facts, and know the science and made a decision."

What followed was a barrage of statements and attacks from Democrat and Republican spinmeisters and politicians, accusing Kerry of flip-flopping and calling Bush a liar.

From U.S. Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.) came this nugget: "Bush made it crystal clear that despite Nevada's objections, he is going to do what he said he we would do all along, and that is to bury Nevada in nuclear waste. Nevadans know better than to believe the president when he claims that science says Yucca Mountain is safe. That is just another lie meant to distort the fact that he approved moving forward on the dump knowing that hundreds of key technical and scientific questions remained unanswered."

Steve Schmidt, a Bush-Cheney campaign spokesman, accused Kerry of telling "voters what they want to hear," and South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham issued this statement.

"John Kerry's action would destroy over two decades of work on a national repository to provide secure, long-term storage of nuclear waste materials. We don't appreciate him trying to pull the rug out from under us."

Then there was the rather mixed message of U.S. Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.), who adamantly opposes the dump. Through a Bush-Cheney official, an Ensign statement read, "The Kerry-Edwards ticket was for Yucca Mountain before they were against it, and Nevadans should not be fooled by election-year pandering." However, on Jon Ralston's "Face to Face," Ensign admitted that Kerry's vision for Yucca is better than President Bush's.

But will the winner of the November election really have much say in what happens? Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the EPA health standard, which requires the repository be able to safely contain harmful radioactive materials for 10,000 years, disregarded recommendations from a 1995 National Academy of Sciences study that the standard be hundreds of thousands of years, leaving the project in a limbo.

The Energy Department now has three options: to rework the safety standard and extend the time period (the least likely to happen); appeal the decision; or ask Congress to approve the 10,000-year standard as the adequate time frame.

Bush said this: "I will allow this process to be appealed to the courts and to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and I will stand by the decision."

Ryan Slattery is a local freelance writer.

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Union Leader
August 18, 2004

Jonah Goldberg: Nothing could be safer than Yucca, Nev.

By Jonah Goldberg

IT WAS H.L. Mencken who said of Truman´s 1948 campaign, “If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, Harry Truman would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer´s expense.’ As John Kerry continues to talk tough on foreign policy, his promise to block the Yucca Mountain Project shows that he´s running as a Truman Democrat on domestic policy, too.

Yucca Mountain, Nev., is the intended resting place of roughly 77,000 metric tons of deadly nuclear waste, which is currently strewn across the country like socks and beer cans in a frat house. The goal is to put the stuff in a single, safe location. Nevadans like the idea, except for the part that involves keeping it in their state.

In 2000, President Bush promised them he wouldn´t support the Yucca Mountain Project unless science said it was safe. Kerry says Bush broke that promise when the President okayed Yucca in 2002 — even though Kerry himself has voted in favor of procedural measures that advanced the project. Kerry responds that his only “substantive vote’ in favor of the Yucca Mountain repository was in 1987, and it simply authorized further study of the most studied parcel of land in the known universe.

“We were presuming at that point in time, though, that they were going to do a safe analysis,’ Kerry told Nevada journalists last week. “My opposition has been on the basis of the analysis that has come back,’ Kerry said.

Now, I´ve been to Yucca Mountain and interviewed the scientists there and read quite a few of the studies. And, frankly, I have no idea what Kerry is talking about. Yucca Mountain is indisputably the safest conceivable installation for nuclear waste in America — and, quite probably, on the planet. If terrorists wanted to, say, crash a 747 into Yucca Mountain, they´d pretty much have to get past Nellis Air Force Base, where the Air Force practices blowing things up. It´s also the home of the Air Warfare Center and the Air Force Weapons School. It is where the Thunderbirds practice and the site of the International combat-training exercise known as “Red Flag.’ Yucca Mountain also abuts the highly secure Nevada Test Site where we´ve blown up a kajillion atomic bombs.

Oh, and I should add that even if the terrorist-seized plane got through and smacked the repository head-on, it wouldn´t even rattle the canisters under thousands of feet of Yucca Mountain rock. In fact, a direct nuclear strike would mean next to nothing in terms of safety.

But hey, even in the hugely unlikely scenario — and I really mean hugely unlikely — that some nuclear material did get out, it would still be in the middle of a godforsaken desert. Even what little groundwater there is there — on the edge of Death Valley — is self-contained.

Anyway, I could go on, but the science on this issue is so settled that no one really disputes it. That´s one reason why we´ve heard so much hyperbole in recent years about how dangerous it would be to transport the waste to Yucca Mountain. Once the waste is there, it´s not going to bother anybody.

The fear-mongering over these so-called “mobile Chernobyls’ is bogus too. The containers can withstand virtually any imaginable attack. In tests, they even drop the things from way up high onto steel spikes and nothing happens. There have been more than 3,000 nuclear waste transports since 1964 without a single release.

Besides, if the fear is that terrorists can get their hands on this material, why is it preferable to keep the ingredients for dirty bombs at countless unguarded, disparate sites around the country? Even if transport is risky, isn´t leaving this junk scattered across the country riskier? Kerry has criticized the administration for not acting fast enough to collect and secure nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union; why does he want to prolong the process here at home?

Now, you might have heard that a recent court ruling dealt Yucca supporters and the Bush administration a setback. Indeed, that´s probably the science Kerry is referring to when he says the Yucca plan is flawed, since pretty much all of the other scientific and legal questions have been resolved.

Well, the issue here is whether Yucca Mountain can be guaranteed to be safe to the “public’ — residing in the facility´s immediate vicinity — for only the next 10,000 years or for the next 300,000 years. Yucca opponents say 10,000 years is too short. Some perspective: Humans switched from hunter-gatherers some 6,000 to 8,000 years ago. Also, if we come up with better science in the next, say, 300 years, we can simply go into Yucca Mountain and pull the junk out. Or if the creators of Star Trek are right, we can beam it out.

John Kerry likes to say that the future doesn´t belong to fear. OK, but why make America less safe today for fear that in 10,000 years the desert near Death Valley might be slightly more dangerous than a chest X-ray?

Jonah Goldberg´s e-mail address is JonahsColumn@aol.com.

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Pantagraph
August 18, 2004

Pantagraph Editorial

Kerry is playing politics with nuclear waste issue

If anyone is playing politics with where to locate the nation's nuclear waste depository, it's Democratic presidential contender John Kerry.

During a swing through Las Vegas, Kerry accused President Bush of violating a 2000 campaign promise to let science, not politics, determine whether Yucca Mountain in Nevada would be used to store used nuclear fuel.

Then Kerry promised, "When John Kerry is president, there is going to be no nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. Period." That sure sounds like letting politics, not science, dictate the nuclear waste site.

Yucca Mountain was selected after 20 years of scientific and technical study. In 2002, Congress approved Yucca Mountain over the objections of Nevada -- more than four years after the federal government was to begin accepting nuclear waste and take responsibility for its storage.

Meanwhile, consumers of nuclear-generated electricity have been paying into the congressionally mandated Nuclear Waste Fund for creation and operation of the not-yet-existing storage facility. The balance in that fund was $14 billion as of last November.

It's primary purpose lately has been to make the government's budget deficit look better than it really is.

Those same consumers -- many of them from Illinois -- are, in effect, paying twice because, until the federal repository is in operation, waste must be stored at nuclear plant sites. That includes the Clinton nuclear power plant.

Even if there are no further glitches related to construction, transportation or a pending lawsuit filed by the state of Nevada, Yucca Mountain is not projected to begin operation until 2010.

It took five years from when Congress directed the Energy Department to study only Yucca (after five potential sites were identified) until Congress approved Yucca.

But Kerry isn't suggesting going back to one of the other four sites. He thinks waste should remain in temporary storage throughout the United States while the National Academy of Sciences studies not just what to do with American nuclear waste but how the world should handle nuclear waste and storage.

Remember, under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, the federal government was supposed to take responsibility for disposal of U.S. civilian nuclear waste by Jan. 31, 1998. That makes Illinois' overtime budget session look like the fast track.

We don't even need to get into the debate over whether Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, did or didn't vote for proceeding with the Yucca Mountain site.

The key debate is what Kerry intends to do now. Period.

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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
August 18, 2004

Editorial: Kerry's mistake / Threatening to scuttle nuclear storage is bad policy

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

It was never going to be easy to win approval for a national repository for nuclear waste, but the issue seemed settled when the U.S. Congress voted in 2002 to go with Yucca Mountain in Nevada and President Bush supported the idea. But now Democrat presidential hopeful John Kerry threatens to overthrow this hard-won agreement if he is elected.

It may be good politics for Mr. Kerry, but what he promises is bad public policy. Although environmental concerns seem to drive some Americans to a reflexively anti-nuclear stand, anybody thoughtfully worried about fossil fuels and global warming can appreciate that nuclear power has its place in energy policy. There are dangers, of course, but they can be successfully mitigated.

What is unacceptable is to allow nuclear waste to be stored permanently at individual plants across the country, including in Pennsylvania -- indeed, in an age of terrorism fears it is absolute folly. With the industry producing about 2,000 tons of commercial waste a year, it is simply not a sensible plan for the future to leave it on site. The waste can be moved safely and the job needs to be done.

Those truths are behind the political consensus that emerged on Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, after years of discussion. The site has been studied almost to death and the prevailing scientific verdict is that it would make the best site for a permanent nuclear waste site.

Now Mr. Kerry promises to block Yucca Mountain as the repository and, if he succeeds, this part of the nation's energy policy will be back to square one. Not surprisingly, this is a highly popular stand in Nevada, but critics can fairly say -- as with so much with Sen. Kerry -- that he has not always been on the same side. Although he voted against the 2002 legislation, other votes of his can be counted on the other side, including a major one in 1987 that the locals remember as the "Screw Nevada" bill.

Mr. Bush's own stand on this issue is suspect because residents of Nevada had understood him to be sympathetic to their concerns as a candidate, only to reverse himself once in office. Mr. Bush won Nevada narrowly in 2000, and the state's five Electoral College votes this time could tip a close election.

Last week Mr. Kerry told a town meeting in Nevada that this "is not just a Nevada issue." He got that much right. The approval of the Yucca Mountain site -- for which Mr. Kerry offers no alternative -- will make for sane national policy. To confound these plans at this stage is political mischief.

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Pulse of the Twin Cities
August 18, 2004

Battling the Big Shots and Winning

by Jim Hightower

For those who sit around whining that the Powers That Be are just too powerful, so there´s no use even bothering with battling the bastards––take note and take heart in not one, not two, but three big court victories by grassroots battlers.

First is a coalition of environmental and citizen groups in the West Virginia area that has been battling the coal industry giants. For years, these groups have been trying to stop the industry from using a devastating, disgusting, and just plain dumb mining practice called “mountaintop removal.’ Instead of tunneling into the mountains to get at the coal, the corporations simply blow up the top third of the mountains, shove the rubble into valleys and streams below, then scoop out the coal. Not only is this unbelievably destructive, but, thanks to the coalition´s determined push, a federal judge has now ruled that the permitting process that rubber stamps this abomination is illegal.

Next, a never-say-die coalition of environmental groups and Nevada officials have stunned the nuclear power giants who had concocted a cockamamie scheme to bury all of America´s high-level nuclear waste in Nevada´s Yucca Mountain. The cockamamie part is that this is an earthquake zone, the standards for protecting the public from long-term radiation leaks are absurdly inadequate, and the hot stuff would be hauled for years on trucks and trains running right through our population centers. Now a federal appeals court has ruled in favor of the coalition, at least slowing this corporate rush to nuclear-powered insanity.

Third, a coalition of community radio broadcasters and citizen groups took on the media giants that had gotten lapdog regulators to allow the giants to grow ever larger, shrinking media competition, diversity, and our democracy. But now, a federal appeals court has ruled against the media Goliaths––in favor of the local Davids.

These battles are far from over, but grassroots forces are winning! To connect with all three of these fights, go to my website, jimhightower.com.

“Court Sets Back Federal Project On Atom Waste: Site´s Safety Over Eons Is Focus of Decision.’ The New York Times, July 10.

“FCC Media giants lose in court ruling in expansion case.’ Austin American-Statesman, June 29.

“Federal Judge Rejects U.S. Application Process for Mountaintop Mining: The Army Corps of Engineers is told its permits violate the Clean Water Act.’ The New York Times, July 9.

Jim Hightower is the best-selling author of "Let's Stop Beating Around the Bush," on sale July 19 from Viking Press.

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York Daily Record
August 18, 2004

Exelon gets refund

The government will pay $80 million toward the storage of the company's spent fuel.

By Sean Adkins

The U.S. Department of Justice and Exelon Corp. have reached a settlement that will shift $80 million in reimbursements to the utility to cover spent fuel storage costs.

Each year, Exelon will submit vouchers to the Department of Justice, which will pay for all incurred costs to house and protect the spent fuel, said Craig Nesbit, spokesman for the utility.

The spent fuel in question is stored in large, white, Thermos-style dry casks and kept on power plant pad sites behind razor wire and in view of motion detectors.

Exelon's Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station has 21 casks; Dresden in Illinois has 21 casks; and Oyster Creek in New Jersey has eight casks.

Should a national repository at Yucca Mountain open by 2010 and the U.S. Department of Energy start to ship dry casks, Exelon believes its total gross reimbursement will be about $300 million.

A path to settlement

The road to Exelon's settlement has been long and winding.

In 1982, each nuclear utility signed a standard contract known as the Nuclear Waste Policy Act that required the DOE to take control of the spent fuel starting Jan. 31, 1998.

"That date has passed," Nesbit said. "And no site is ready."

The act directed the DOE to start looking for a permanent repository site, such as the one now under investigation at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. For their part, the utilities and customers started the Nuclear Waste Fund to pay for the repository expenses, Nesbit said.

Since 1993, the fund has collected $24 billion with about $7 billion already spent to follow through with tests and studies at Yucca Mountain.

In the late 1990s, it became clear that the DOE would not meet its national repository deadline and utilities would have to make other arrangements.

Exelon invested millions to build onsite concrete pads, buy dry casks and pay for special equipment to move the large storage containers, Nesbit said.

In 1998, Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station officials and the DOE worked out a deal in which the power plant would stop putting money toward the Nuclear Waste Fund.

Instead, the DOE would give the plant credit toward the fund and the power station would use otherwise earmarked cash to pay for its own storage fees.

Other utilities around the country challenged the agreement and claimed that national money could not be used to fund a private pad site.

A federal court upheld the challenge in 2002 and Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station once again contributed cash to the Nuclear Waste Fund.

Later that year, both the DOE and Exelon began to negotiate a new agreement. And last week, both parties agreed that all Exelon sites with nuclear waste storage issues — including Peach Bottom — would be reimbursed by the government.

"We're pleased with the result," said Chris Crane, Exelon Nuclear's president and chief nuclear officer. "It resolves the litigation between parties, it eliminates a financial uncertainty for both Exelon and DOE, and it allows the government to meet its legal obligations to a sixth of the nation's nuclear power plants."

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Tri-City Herald
August 17, 2004

Kerry's stand on Yucca is that of a candidate

John Kerry's opposition to Yucca Mountain is about the convenience of candidacy.

Earlier this month, the Democratic presidential contender tried to win votes in the battleground state of Nevada by promising, if elected, to stop a national nuclear waste dump there.

His campaign said he would keep spent fuel rods and other atomic wastes scattered at current sites, with better security, while convening a National Academy of Sciences panel to work out a safer long-term plan.

It's hard to fathom what is left for the National Academy to study. The federal government has spent $8 billion studying where to put the nuclear dump. Most of that money has gone to Yucca Mountain, which has been under review as a possible federal repository since 1978.

Construction of the repository is key to fulfilling the federal government's commitment to clean up Cold War nuclear production sites such as Hanford and to ensuring that spent nuclear fuel from commercial power plants is stored as safely as possible.

Kerry himself has voted to allow the Yucca project to proceed in the past, but now apparently finds opposition an easy way to win over voters in a swing state.

Perhaps he should take another look at his map. The other states Kerry is courting are depending on Yucca to provide a safe place for nuclear waste. Here in Washington, a key state, Hanford tank wastes and Energy Northwest's spent nuclear fuel are destined for Yucca.

Stopping Yucca doesn't make the waste go away. It just ensures that it stays put, spread out across the country in more vulnerable conditions.

Kerry's opponent, President Bush, also once tried to score political points on Yucca. During the 2000 campaign, Bush vowed to veto any plan to temporarily store waste at Yucca, stopping just short of complete opposition to the project.

At the time, Bush was the Texas governor and more accustomed to looking out for a state's interests than juggling federal solutions. Once elected, Bush approved Yucca as a permanent storage site.

If Kerry is elected, he, too, might learn that issues like Yucca are what separate a state leader from a national one, and that what is said on the campaign trail doesn't always prove to be the right answer once the election is over.

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Niagara Falls Reporter
August 16, 2004

Mountain Views: Yucca Mountain may Swing Nevada from The Red Column to The Blue

By John Hanchette

OLEAN -- It will be interesting to learn how one science-related element of the presidential election campaign plays out in Western New York, and whether a snap-answer remark made by Democratic candidate John Kerry last week more than half a nation away can turn into a local hot-button issue that hurts President Bush in this region.

Political experts expect Kerry to take New York state due to overwhelming Democratic support in New York City, but a regional glow-in-the-dark issue that is quietly ignored because of its lack of any popular resolution has surfaced in the 2004 presidential fray. The problem is what to do with immense quantities of nuclear waste buried about 25 miles up the road from here in the Town of Ashford at the West Valley Demonstration Project.

Much of the nuclear waste -- spent fuel left over from nuclear power plants that have since been shut down -- was supposed to be buried deep under Yucca Mountain about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas in Nevada in a controversial $58 billion project that would seal off in one place similar substances from 111 radioactive sites around the nation. The mountain would eventually sit atop 77,000 tons of spent fuel from research labs, nuclear power plants, and reactors on Navy submarines and other ships. It would be buried 1,000 feet deep.

George W. Bush, in the 2000 campaign, vowed he would oppose the Yucca Mountain site unless scientists showed him it was environmentally safe. Nevada voters, who heavily oppose situating the rest of the nation's nuclear garbage in their wide-open spaces, narrowly carried the state and its five electoral votes for Bush -- largely on the strength of that promise.

Dubya was in office slightly more than a year when he quietly reversed field and designated Yucca Mountain the ultimate repository for dangerous nuclear waste now stored at more than 100 sites across the country, including West Valley. He said science showed it safe, even though many scientists disagreed. Nevada residents, including Republican leaders, howled. Legal motions ensued. A federal court a few months ago ruled the federal government had not set adequate standards to prevent radioactive leaks far into the future. Bush shrugged it off and said he would let the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or court appeals decide the matter -- which seems headed for the Supreme Court.

A week ago, Kerry was fielding questions in a Las Vegas library appearance when a woman asked him about the topic.

He said, "With John Kerry as president, there is going to be no nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, period." Later, he lit into Bush for "recklessness and arrogance" in approving the site while safety and health issues are still unsettled. Bush hustled to Las Vegas two days later to explain his decision and accuse Kerry (and his running mate John Edwards) of flip-flopping after voting in favor of Yucca Mountain in several Senate votes. The Kerry campaign retorted those votes were either procedural or involved broader general funding, and that the Massachusetts senator voted no on the principal Yucca storage legislation.

Department of Energy studies show about 50 million Americans in 45 states live within a half-mile of planned highway and train routes to be used for transportation of nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain.

The flap poses a problem for Western New York Republican leaders. They don't want to hurt President Bush's chances in a swing state where even five electoral votes could decide the national contest -- even if it means keeping mum about a health issue that many constituents in this region consider vital. To praise the permanent storage site and the White House decision might cheese off enough Nevadans to lose a close election.

At the same time, some local GOP honchos are on the record lauding Yucca Mountain as the solution to a vexing regional headache and could gain local political favor by reiterating that stance. Rep. Tom Reynolds, the regional GOP congressman currently most concerned with West Valley, when Yucca Mountain was approved in 2002, said, "Moving nuclear waste from temporary, stationary sites such as West Valley to a permanent repository will make us less susceptible to terrorist attacks, and will clear that waste away from many sites that are near major cities and waterways." Attempts to reach him on the Kerry comment were futile.

Indeed, West Valley has been the target of bad circumstance and ill luck ever since it was designated more than 40 years ago as a "temporary" repository for nuclear waste. Federal energy authorities had quietly scheduled in mid-September of 2001 a transcontinental train shipment of 125 highly radioactive nuclear fuel assemblies from West Valley through 10 states to an Idaho dump site. A few days before, on Sept. 11, terrorist hijackers attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The Department of Energy postponed the removal due to fear the train would make a vulnerable terrorist target.

In July of last year, the DOE quietly shipped by train the 125 irradiated fuel rod bundles from West Valley over 2,360 miles of railroad to the Idaho site without informing local health officials or first responders -- or the public -- in any of the communities along the route. The seven-car train left Ashford shortly after midnight. Again, the DOE chiefs said concern for national security prompted the silence.

West Valley was closed in 1972 as a reprocessing facility for spent fuel from civilian and military nuclear reactors, but not before 5 million gallons of liquid radioactive wastes were discharged into on-site tributaries of Cattaraugus Creek. The Department of Energy took over the 3,345-acre site in 1981 and was vexed with so much subsequent radioactive leakage that at one point federal scientists considered stabilizing porous ground sites with highly absorbent kitty litter. Currently, liquid high-level radioactive wastes are captured and stabilized in special glass canisters.

The overall disposal problem of this nightmare substance that was a half-century ago hailed as the salvation of human power needs was nicely put recently by Carol Mongerson, co-founder of the activist West Valley Coalition on Nuclear Waste.

"There's no place that isn't somebody's backyard," she said.
---
John Hanchette, a professor of journalism at St. Bonaventure University, is a former editor of the Niagara Gazette and a Pulitzer Prize-winning national correspondent. He was a founding editor of USA Today and was recently named by Gannett as one of the Top 10 reporters of the past 25 years. He can be contacted via e-mail at Hanchette6@aol.com.

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National Review
August 16, 2004

Yucca Fear Mongering

John Kerry´s junk-science politics

Jonah Goldberg

It was H. L. Mencken who said of Truman's 1948 campaign, "If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, Harry Truman would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer's expense."

As John Kerry continues to talk tough on foreign policy, his promise to block the Yucca Mountain Project shows that he's running as a Truman Democrat on domestic policy, too.

Yucca Mountain, Nevada is the intended resting place of roughly 77,000 metric tons of deadly nuclear waste, which is currently strewn across the country like socks and beer cans in a frat house. The goal is to put the stuff in a single, safe location. Nevadans like the idea, except for the part that involves keeping it in their state.

In 2000, President Bush promised them he wouldn't support the Yucca Mountain Project unless science said it was safe. Kerry says Bush broke that promise when the president okayed Yucca in 2002 — even though Kerry himself has voted in favor of procedural measures that advanced the project. Kerry responds that his only "substantive vote" in favor of the Yucca Mountain repository was in 1987, and it simply authorized further study of the most studied parcel of land in the known universe.

"We were presuming at that point in time, though, that they were going to do a safe analysis," Kerry told Nevada journalists last week. "My opposition has been on the basis of the analysis that has come back," Kerry said.

Now, I've been to Yucca Mountain and interviewed the scientists there and read quite a few of the studies. And, frankly, I have no idea what Kerry is talking about. Yucca Mountain is indisputably the safest conceivable installation for nuclear waste in America — and, quite probably, on the planet. If terrorists wanted to, say, crash a 747 into Yucca Mountain, they'd pretty much have to get past the Nellis Air Force base, where the Air Force practices blowing things up. It's also the home of the Air Warfare Center and the Air Force Weapons School. It is where the Thunderbirds practice and the site of the International combat-training exercise known as "Red Flag." Yucca Mountain also abuts the highly secure Nevada Test Site where we've blown up a kajillion atomic bombs.

Oh, and I should add that even if the terrorist-seized plane got through and smacked the repository head-on, it wouldn't even rattle the canisters under thousands of feet of Yucca Mountain rock. In fact, a direct nuclear strike would mean next to nothing in terms of safety.

Anyway, I could go on, but the science on this issue is so settled that no one really disputes it. That's one reason why we've heard so much hyperbole in recent years about how dangerous it would be to transport the waste to Yucca Mountain. Once the waste is there, it's not going to bother anybody.

The fear mongering over these so-called "mobile Chernobyls" is bogus too. The containers can withstand virtually any imaginable attack. In tests, they even drop the things from way up high onto steel spikes and nothing happens. There have been more than 3,000 nuclear waste transports since 1964 without a single release.

Besides, if the fear is that terrorists can get their hands on this material, why is it preferable to keep the ingredients for dirty bombs at countless unguarded, disparate sites around the country? Even if transport is risky, isn't leaving this junk scattered across the country riskier? Kerry has criticized the administration for not acting fast enough to collect and secure nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union, why does he want to prolong the process here at home?

Now, you might have heard that a recent court ruling dealt Yucca supporters and the Bush administration a setback. Indeed, that's probably the science Kerry is referring to when he says the Yucca plan is flawed, since pretty much all of the other scientific and legal questions have been resolved.

Well, the issue here is whether or not Yucca Mountain can be guaranteed to be safe to the "public" — residing in the facility's immediate vicinity — for only the next 10,000 years or for the next 300,000 years. Yucca opponents say 10,000 years is too short. Some perspective: Humans switched from hunter-gatherers some 6,000 to 8,000 years ago. Also, if we come up with better science in the next, say, 300 years, we can simply go into Yucca Mountain and pull the junk out. Or if the creators of Star Trek are right, we can beam it out.

John Kerry likes to say that the future doesn't belong to fear. O.K., but why make America less safe today out of fear that in 10,000 years the desert near Death Valley might be slightly more dangerous than a chest X-ray?

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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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