Yucca Mountain News Clips
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
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Las Vegas SUN
September 22, 2004
Nevada's plea for grant to oversee Yucca denied
By Benjamin Grove
<grove@lasvegassun.com>
Sun Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has rejected Nevada's request for a $13.75 million grant to oversee Yucca Mountain, a blow to the state's effort to act as watchdog of the federal project.
The state relies largely on federal money, mostly from Congress, to help pay its legal and research bills in its long-standing effort to kill the nuclear waste dump project.
This year, for the first time, Nevada requested oversight money from the NRC, which will be responsible for licensing and regulating Yucca. Nevada's top Yucca Mountain watchdog Bob Loux and the state's top Yucca attorney Joe Egan went to the NRC to request money in July.
But in a lengthy ruling delivered to the state Tuesday the NRC rejected the request, on the basis of "applicable statutes, regulations, Commission precedent and the agency's available funds."
The state was hoping to use that money for an array of oversight work, including about $2 million to continue analysis of the repository performance and $1.8 million to continue study of how waste containers might corrode in the repository.
Now the state may have to scramble to keep its Yucca oversight projects going because federal money from Congress is drying up, Loux said.
In past years Nevada and nine counties have received several million dollars annually from Congress for Yucca oversight. The state requested $5 million from Congress last year, but received only $1 million.
"We have some dwindling resources," said Loux, executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Projects Office. The office has enough money to keep it running through the end of the year, he said.
Loux said he may ask the Nevada Legislature for as much as $1 million for next year.
Congress has not specifically set aside any money for Nevada Yucca oversight for next year as lawmakers are still working out the details of a final Yucca budget. The House approved $131 million, far less than the White House requested, with none of that money specifically earmarked for Nevada; the Senate has not acted.
The Department of Energy project is aimed at constructing a national nuclear waste repository under the mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The project has entered an important phase as the Energy Department plans to submit an application for a license to construct the underground repository by the end of the year.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
September 22, 2004
Nevada loses nuclear waste grant
NRC rejection of $13.75 million request threatens efforts to fight Yucca Mountain Project
By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Nevada has been turned down for a $13.75 million nuclear waste grant, potentially threatening the state's legal and science campaigns against the Yucca Mountain Project, an official said Tuesday.
After learning the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had rejected the application, the state's nuclear waste manager said he may seek $1 million in supplemental funds from the state Board of Examiners and the Legislature later this year to stay afloat.
"I guess we're going to sit tight and see what happens, and then make a decision whether to go to the Legislature or not," said Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.
"We can limp along here for now," Loux said. "We're probably OK until November or December."
Loux said the impact is difficult to measure because the Energy Department also is facing uncertainties due to a budget impasse in Congress and a legal ruling this summer that invalidated a key radiation safety standard.
DOE delays on the Yucca project could buy time for the state until Congress acts or federal courts hear a pending lawsuit that seeks additional government funding, Loux said.
The state already had instructed contract scientists to slow their work.
Additionally, Loux said Clark County may be asked to contribute about $150,000 for ongoing research on projects involving waste container corrosion and possible volcano impacts at the repository site.
The financial setback comes when the state needs additional money the most. It has increased spending on lawyers, technical experts and research to prepare for Yucca Mountain license hearings before the NRC.
State officials had projected they would spend about $10 million a year for the next four years or more to mount an aggressive challenge.
The state recently renewed a $6 million contract with Egan, Fitzpatrick, Malsch & Cynkar, of McLean, Va., to represent the state during Yucca licensing, an amount that also funds major technical consultants.
To finance its repository research, Nevada has relied on an appropriation from Congress each year. But lawmakers allocated only $1 million for 2004, about 80 percent less than the state requested.
No money has yet been set aside for 2005.
The NRC turned down Nevada's grant request in a 43-page opinion issued Thursday that was received by the state Tuesday.
The agency said federal laws restricted its ability to give Nevada the money it sought. Even if the request could be honored, the grant would have forced cutbacks in other programs, it said.
Nevada Attorney General Brian Sandoval sued the Energy Department on March 17 for more government funding. That case is scheduled to be heard by a federal judge panel in Washington on Jan. 10.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
September 22, 2004
Plan to change radiation standard angers group
By Keith Rogers
Review-Journal
Upset with an Environmental Protection Agency official's comment that the agency intends to quickly develop a new radiation standard for the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, a statewide environmental group sent a letter to President Bush Tuesday demanding that he direct the EPA to "back off."
"This latest ploy by your Administration shows total disregard for the people of our state," reads the letter from Peggy Maze Johnson, executive director of the group, Citizen Alert.
The letter references Jeffrey Holmstead, chief of EPA's air and radiation programs, who said Monday the agency is working quickly to develop a standard despite court rulings expressing doubt that standards could be met. He said it would be possible to have a new standard by early next year.
In July, a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. ruled the EPA failed to follow a recommendation of the National Academy of Sciences that radiation safety standards should protect the public for hundreds of thousands of years, well beyond the 10,000-year guideline the EPA adopted for the repository site, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
"We ask, 'What standard?' The Yucca Mountain Project has had years to try to get this right. By what stretch of the imagination can we believe that it will get done by early next year. Based on what kind of science?" Maze Johnson wrote.
"Yucca Mountain is a flawed project. Nuclear waste is the deadliest substance known to humankind. Before you put it on the roads, railways and waterways of this country to get it to Nevada, you must base your decision on 'sound science' as you promised Nevadans in 2000."
John Kerry's campaign issued a statement saying the EPA move "is further evidence of how the Bush Administration is actively defying science and threatening Nevadans' future to push this project through."
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Salt Lake Tribune
September 22, 2004
Nuclear disposal
If they have to change the rules - again - to permanently bury radioactive waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain, it would be far better to bury the Yucca Mountain plan instead. Permanently.
The longer Yucca Mountain roams the land as the undead, the more attractive is the stop-gap plan to store some of the nastiest stuff on Earth on the Goshute Skull Valley reservation 50 miles from Salt Lake City.
If, that is, you can call a facility that might last 100 years a stop-gap.
Utah officials have been largely supportive of Yucca Mountain, the plan to permanently store radioactive waste in an underground facility near Las Vegas. With that project either in business or very nearly so, there would be less pressure to bring the waste to Utah, for now or forever.
But if Yucca remains just over the horizon, with neither an operating license nor a stake through its heart, storage in Utah becomes more likely, not less. If Yucca Mountain truly dies, so, probably, will the Goshute plan.
Nevada politicians, armed with the clout that comes with representing a political swing state, wantYucca Mountain abandoned. Instead, they reasonably say, we should find a de-centralized solution, maybe long-term storage on the site of each waste generator, until a proper final resolution is found.
But the nuclear industry wants the waste removed from sites in 39 states ASAP. It's not only to pass off the cost of storage, but also to make any future nuclear power plants less distasteful to communities, communities that might balk if they knew that permanent on-site storage were part of the deal.
The latest, perhaps fatal, blow to Yucca Mountain was a July appeals court finding that the government was not following its own rules for the proposed final resting place for 77,000 tons of nuclear waste.
Congress had ordered that a 1995 National Academy of Sciences study be written into Yucca's rules. The Environmental Protection Agency said it had done so, finding that the facility could safely contain radioactivity for the next 10,000 years.
But the court read the NAS report to mean that the facilitymust be up to containing radiation for upwards of 300,000 years. That's widely thought to be a standard Yucca Mountain can't meet.
EPA boss Mike Leavitt is considering asking Congress for a more attainable target. Congressional willingness to keep the project alive is waning, though, and the current administration has too little credibility when it comes to making policy based on accurate science.
The good news is that now, rather than being pitted against one another, Utah and Nevada canwork together to end the gridlock and send the whole thing back to the drawing board.
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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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