Yucca Mountain News Clips - Thursday, October 14, 2004

Yucca Mountain News Clips
Thursday, October 14, 2004
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Findlaw
October 14, 2004

The Yucca Mountain Radioactive Waste Site Controversy:

The Role A Recent Federal Appellate Decision In The Controversy May Play in the Presidential Election

By Jamison Colburn

In their series of debates, the candidates have explored a number of legal issues of consequence in the upcoming election. But one such issue still lies dormant under a ridge in the Nevada desert.

The issue is Yucca Mountain. For Nevadans, it's visceral: When the dust finally settles, the repository will likely house over 70,000 metric tons of highly radioactive waste. Nevada - with five electoral college votes - doesn't want that waste. Indeed, Nevadans feel a strong antipathy toward anyone even remotely responsible for Yucca. In 2000, for instance, then-Governor Bush used the issue to beat then-Vice President Gore in that states.

Unfortunately for President Bush, it is now possible that Senator Kerry will best him in Nevada using the very same issue. Las Vegas -- the fastest growing city in America -- gains 5,000 new residents every month and, of course, contains the "gaming" lobby - one of the most powerful in the country. And recent decisions regarding Yucca Mountain from the U.S. Court Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit have, as I discuss below, added some fuel to the fire of this controversy.

But should Yucca Mountain really be laid at the President's door? This train started rolling 22 years ago and it has taken almost $4 billion to keep it chugging through five presidential elections since.

It may be just bad luck that President Bush - like would-be President Gore - before him - has assumed this legacy. After all, the entity originally responsible for Yucca Mountain was Congress. And the reason twenty-two years have passed since Congress acted, may have much more to do with the truth about administrative agencies, than with any of the individual Presidents who have served during that time.

Nevertheless, a recent federal court ruling finding that the Bush EPA underestimated Yucca Mountain's risks may well influence the election - for this ruling may tend to further enrage Nevadans, adding to their ongoing anger over Yucca Mountain.

The NWPA: What This 1982 Law Required of Three Administrative Agencies

The Yucca Mountain story begins in 1982. That year, in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA), Congress "federalized" the disposal of high-level radioactive waste - ensuring it would be exclusively under federal power.

The NWPA charged three federal agencies -- the Department of Energy (DOE), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) -- with designing, building, and administering a single centralized repository for such waste. The idea was that the repository would replace the current system: on-site storage of waste at the more than 100 nuclear power generating facilities nationwide.

The NWPA charged the three agencies with find the right "remote location" for the waste repository. The hope was that putting the waste in a single place would minimize the possibilities of sabotage or terrorism--or indeed, releases of any kind--and make the waste easier to manage.

Each of the three agencies was given different responsibilities with respect to Yucca Mountain. EPA was to write "general" standards for the containment structures in order to prevent releases. NRC was to license the facility, as it was designed and proposed by DOE. And DOE was to administer the facility long-term.

How would the site be selected? Under the NWPA, DOE was to nominate five candidate sites; study those sites in cooperation with NRC; and then narrow the list to three. This short list was then to be presented to the President - with detailed characterizations of each site.

Then, with the President's approval, the final selection was to be presented to Congress, with the opportunity given to the unlucky State to "disapprove." But this so-called disapproval could be overridden by a joint resolution of Congress.

The Agencies Bog Down in Analysis - and Congress Intervenes

It made sense for the NWPA to require all this analysis of candidate sites by the three different bureaucracies. The technical expertise of one administrative agency could check that of the others.

And since the ultimate choice was going to be a sacrifice on the part of one state, it was important that the decision be made responsibly. In the event of containment breach, the site - and part of the state - would surely be consigned to environmental oblivion.

Unfortunately, as has been true of most carefully-done environmental impact assessments, the analysis became bogged down and pricey. It took three years just for EPA to write basic containment standards for the eventual site. Meanwhile, DOE and NRC foundered in their attempt to identify 5 uniquely suitable sites.

By 1987, the waste was still piling up at the dispersed facilities, many of them near major cities. And that is still true today. That means that some 160 million people in 39 states live within 75 miles of a facility.

In light of this reality, Congress grew weary of the selection process it had created, and simply picked a site: Yucca Mountain, an old weapons test site owned by the government. Favoring the selection of the site were the fact that it was located almost 100 miles from the nearest city; the fact that Nevada was not a highly populated state; and the fact that the federal government owned 87% of the land in the state.

More Analysis - This Time, Focused Solely on Yucca Mountain

In the 1992 Energy Policy Act, Congress ordered the three agencies to focus their full attention on this site and to devise the safest storage structure feasible there.

To ensure their success, Congress charged an independent panel of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) with analyzing Yucca Mountain. And, Congress required that the containment standards eventually created be "consistent with and based upon" NAS's findings.

Analyzing Yucca took much of the next decade. Working through its contingencies produced a detailed knowledge of Yucca Mountain and its probable futures. The design was tweaked accordingly.

Nevada Clashes with Congress and the Administration over Yucca Mountain

In 2002, the Bush administration finally presented a formal "approval" of the site to Congress: The approval opined that looking out 10,000 years into the future, the risks were acceptable.

Unsurprisingly, Nevada disagreed. But the Congress vetoed Nevada's "disapproval." The veto was enacted into law in the way ordinarily legislation is - its passage was bicameral; and it was presented to and signed by the President, who chose not to veto the veto. (Thus, none of the problems raised by other "legislative vetoes," such as the one at issue in the Supreme Court's decision in INS v. Chadha, arose.) In addition, it was within Congress power, for it pertained to federal realty governed by the Property Clause.

D.C's Federal Appellate Court Rules on Yucca Mountain-Related Challenges

In September, the D.C. Circuit, denying rehearing, rejected a slew of challenges to the EPA's containment standards and DOE's environmental impact statement. However--and significantly - it also found that the EPA had violated the Energy Policy Act's mandate to write rules "based upon and consistent with" the 1995 NAS findings for Yucca.

The court pointed out that the NAS had found that there was no scientific reason to limit the timeframe of risk analyses to 10,000 years. Yet EPA had done just that.

EPA's choice to limit its rules to the next 10,000 years was defensible for several reasons - for example, because predictions so far into the future are extremely speculative. Nevertheless, the court found that this limitation was unacceptable.

For one thing, the court noted, Yucca's "peak risk"--the point at which the atomic decay will have progressed to a stage where radioactive emissions are the highest--might not even occur in the first 10,000 years! So the EPA's limiting its analysis to the next 10,000 years might well ignore the "peak risk" of the site.

Accordingly, the court held that the Bush EPA's standards were not "based upon and consistent with" the NAS study. It seems, then, that the EPA will have to go back and re-perform the analysis behind its rules - this time, taking into account a far longer timeframe. Only then, will the EPA end up with rules the court will deem consistent with the NAS study.

It is possible that the EPA will take this issue up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Whether or not it does so, as I have noted above, the issue may play a role in the election. At this point, a ruling that his EPA did not take into account all of Yucca Mountain's risks was the last thing President Bush needed when attempting to persuade Nevadans to give him their votes.

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KRNV
October 14, 2004

Attorney General says Yucca meeting was illegal

A group of elected officials from rural Nevada violated state open-meeting law when they met behind closed doors to talk about a rail corridor to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site.

The state attorney general determined that the Central Nevada Community Protection Working Group is a public body and has to hold meetings in public.

The group of officials from Lincoln, Esmeralda and Nye counties and the city of Caliente is agreeing to go back and reconsider anything talked about in closed session -- and hold future meetings in public.

That'll avoid a full-scale criminal investigation.

The panel was formed last year at the suggestion of the Department of Energy.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal

Letter: Presidential power

To the editor:

Nevadans must not underestimate the power of the president in deciding the fate of the Yucca Mountain Project.

The president has significant influence over budget priorities. Without money, the project would wither on the vine. The Department of Energy must have the green light from the president before applying for any license to operate a Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. If scientific concerns are raised, the president can decide whether to heed or ignore them. Lastly, as we so clearly saw in 2000 when President Clinton prevented Congress from shipping nuclear waste to the Nevada Test Site for interim storage, the president has veto power.

That makes the major differences between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry on the issue of Yucca Mountain all the more relevant. President Bush is determined to ship nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain by the end of the decade, regardless of the safety issues, violating his own promise to heed the advice of scientists. Sen. Kerry has spent more than a decade working alongside the Nevada delegation to block the Yucca Mountain Project, and he has said in no uncertain terms that he would use all of his power as president to stop the project from happening.

John Marchese
Henderson

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Las Vegas Mercury
October 14, 2004

Enough is enough

28 good reasons to boot Bush from office

Compiled by Newt Briggs and Andrew Kiraly

Illustrations by F. Andrew Taylor

Anyone who saw the first presidential debate Sept. 30 knows President Bush's mantra well: It's hard work! It's hard work! It's hard work! Yes, destroying America is hard work.

Sadly, it's not hard work uncovering what a terrible president Bush has been. He's made the air dirtier. He's lost a million jobs. In education, he's left millions of children behind. He started an unjustifiable war that has plunged the nation into debt and will breed future generations of terrorists. He gave seniors the finger with Medicare "reform" and signed off on an energy bill crafted by industry cronies. And he believes siting a high-level nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain is based on sound science.

The list goes on--and now it's all available below, in handy, bulleted form. As a service and a plea to undecided voters, the Mercury compiled a list of the Bush adminstration's worst offenses, from social services to the economy to the environment to the war in Iraq. If you're an undecided voter, we hope this helps you make up your mind. If you're a hard-headed cynic who still believes there's no difference between the parties, we hope this convinces you otherwise. And if you weren't planning to vote in the first place, we hope this lights a fire under your feet. Four more years of Bush is four too many.

We're not the only ones who think so. Heck, Bush himself summed up his adminstration best at an Aug. 4 bill signing in Washington, in one of his more telling Bushisms: "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

Environment

• Remember clean air? Yeah, that clear, odorless stuff that feels really good to breathe. Bush and his cronies put it one step closer to being a thing of the past when they relaxed a host of clean air enforcement rules, according to the Washington Post. The "New Source Review" rule changes, announced in June 2002, essentially make older, polluting power plants immune from lawsuits and spare them from installing pricey anti-pollution equipment originally mandated by the 1970 Clean Air Act. Sen. James Jeffords, I-Vt., called the rollback "a victory for outdated polluting power plants and a devastating defeat for public health and our environment." It's enough to make you consider a boycott of breathing.

• Let's get it straight: The greenhouse effect is just a liberal conspiracy intended to sell sunscreen and discourage people from burning tires in their back yard. That's why the Bush administration deleted several major passages from a 2003 EPA report on the state of the environment--including the phrase, "Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment." The administration also added qualifying words like "potentially" and "may" where no qualifications were needed. The changes, says a 2003 story in the Guardian, prompted the EPA to remove "the entire global warming section to avoid including information that was not scientifically credible."

• Who needs biodiversity when we've got cheap gas and hardwood floors? At least that seems to be the attitude of President Bush, who has protected only 26 animal species under the Endangered Species Act of 1973 during his four-year term. Compare that with his father, who protected 228 species, and President Clinton, who protected 527 species over two terms, and it's clear that the current administration will take the lobbyist over the spotted owl and the marbled murrelet any day.

• "Wish that I was on old rocky top/ Down in the Tennessee hills/ Ain't no smoggy smoke on rocky top/ Ain't no telephone bills." Oh, wait, did I say "rocky top"? I meant "atomized plateau" created by miners blasting for coal hidden beneath the lush peaks of Appalachia. The process--dubbed "mountaintop removal"--was effectively banned in 1999 after more than 700 miles of mountain streams were buried by debris, but thanks to the Bush administration, it's once again booming.

• Trees are cool. They're a great background for nature pics, help make oxygen and stop floods. They're also fun to climb and serve as, like, little condominium complexes for wildlife and shit. So why does the Bush administration hate trees? According to a March 2003 article in the Washington Post, the Bush administration denied wilderness protection to millions of acres of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. Critics and environmentalists said the closely watched decision dramatically increases logging in the old-growth Tongass, which contains nearly 30 percent of the world's unlogged coastal temperate rain forest. The ruling affects 4 percent of the forest's 16.8 million acres, or about 676,000 acres. At least we'll always have the Rainforest Cafe!

• Bush just loves them photo ops of him fishin', ranchin' and roughin' it, but the Skull and Bones alum is a city boy at heart: The Bush administration has made vulnerable to development millions of acres of wilderness--thanks to an Interior Department decision to limit Bureau of Land Management lands eligible for protection to 23 million acres nationwide. According to an April 2003 Associated Press story, the Interior Department also told Congress it intended to stop reviewing Western land holdings for new wilderness protection and would withdraw 3 million acres in Utah from protected status. Alas, yet another reason for the don't-litter Indian to cry.

Foreign policy

• Bush believes in the sanctity of life, all right--so much that he's withheld $34 million for the U.N. Population Fund to show his distaste for what it said were "coercive abortions" taking place in China. Long pressured by anti-abortion groups and conservative lawmakers, the Bush administration denied the U.N. $34 million, about 12.5 percent of the U.N.'s Population Fund budget. U.N. officials said holding back the money could hurt their prospects of preventing 800,000 abortions and the deaths of 4,700 mothers and 77,000 children. A small price to pay for affirming the sanctity of life, don't you think?

• Bush targeting the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11 was probably the one right thing he did--too bad he doesn't want to clean up the mess he's left behind. According to a February 2003 BBC News article, the Bush administration did not request any money in its budget for humanitarian and reconstruction aid for Afghanistan. Congress finally scraped up about $300 billion for the war-wracked country--$300 million? With a military budget zipping into the stratospheric billions, that should be enough to buy each Afghani a pack of Chiclets and a Gameboy.

• Reagan had "Star Wars." Will George Bush be the star of the Empire Strikes Back? CNN reported in December 2001 that President Bush pulled out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Cold War agreement that specifically banned testing and deployment of a ballistic missile defense system. Proponents of the treaty decried the message this sent to the rest of the world, while others pointed out that, ahem, just three months earlier terrorists took down the Twin Towers using airliners, not missiles. Hope that thing is good against hijacked domestic flights!

• In a world that's fat-free, low-calorie and Atkins-friendly, it's only logical that we should have a Low-Yield Cold War. According to a February 2003 article in the Washington Post, Bush is seeking to revive a program focused on building low-yield nuclear weapons. What exactly are low-yield nukes? Call them Death and Destruction Lite, designed to penetrate bunkers and detonate underground, thereby reducing nasty fallout. It's still lame, though. Even George Bush Sr. had eliminated low-yield nukes as part of an international accord to reduce nuke proliferation overseas. Hm. Low-yield nukes plus a doctrine of pre-emptive war. Hello, international community. You want some of this, bitchez?!

Civil liberties

• The Bush boys have led an assault on open government unlike anything since the darkest days of the Nixon era. On Day One in office, Mr. Bush reversed efforts by the Clinton administration to provide more access to government records. Since then, the number of documents and files deemed "classified" or "sensitive" has blossomed, even ancient records for which there is no plausible reason for secrecy. An embarrassing memo leaked from the Justice Department confirms that the enlightened John Ashcroft advised federal agencies to place whatever administrative obstacles they can to prevent Freedom of Information Act requests from being honored.

At the same time, citizen access to government information has withered, government's access to information about us has exploded. An extension to the PATRIOT Act was signed into law on a Saturday, and on the same day that Saddam Hussein was captured. Needless to say, it didn't get much coverage. It allowed federal lawmen to seize business records from entities such as banks or casinos without a warrant. (Las Vegas was targeted, of course.)

• Remember those bygone days when every patch of dirt from sea to shining sea was considered a free speech zone, a place where the First Amendment was still considered the law of the land? Bush and Ashcroft have now given us a new definition of the term, and if we don't like it, we can all just shut the hell up. Whenever Bush travels to a U.S. city, teams of Secret Service agents precede him and inform local police that they must establish "free speech" or "protest" zones where people opposed to Bush's policies must be penned up. Invariably, these zones are far removed from anywhere the president himself will visit, so he doesn't have to be exposed to opinions different from his own. In St. Petersburg, Fla., for instance, two elderly grandmothers who dared to hold up tiny signs expressing oppositon to Bush were arrested. Hundreds of other arrests have occurrred all over the nation. Anyone who carries a pro-Bush sign is allowed upfront seating at presidential events. Free speech still applies to them.

Education

• Americans are so dumb. All this time we could have been profiting on our children's educations, but we've just been sitting by letting the government run our schools. Now, thanks to the president's No Child Left Behind Act, corporations are taking over schools in record numbers, and with a lot of cost-cutting and accountability, they'll probably eventually be almost as good as the schools they replaced. A recent national study revealed that the test scores of children in charter schools were significantly lower than those of children at regular public schools. Then again, maybe President Bush is right and those childrens really am as smart as the kids in publick school.

Special interests

• So your eyes are bleeding and your feet have swollen into pus-filled flesh balloons, what do you want the drug companies to do about it? According to a July article in the New York Times, the Bush administration has been going to court to block lawsuits by consumers who say they've been injured by prescription drugs. Apparently, the administration believes that drug companies should not be liable for consumer injuries if their products have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Did we mention that the drug industry has dispensed more than $50 million in campaign contributions during the last four years--the vast majority of it to Republicans?

• Former oilman Dick Cheney was placed in charge of energy policy early in the Bush term. He presided over a hush-hush gathering of energy experts, all of whom were executives at the largest energy companies in the world--Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Nukes. Not a single environmentalist was allowed to participate in the study, and when Cheney emerged from under his self-imposed Cone of Silence, it surprised no one when he announced the results of the gabfest would be tax breaks for energy companies. Despite lawsuits and public pressure, Cheney would not reveal anything about what went on inside the energy meetings. One interesting document has surfaced, however. It is a two-page chart titlted "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfields." It identified 63 oil companies from 30 countries and specified which companies were interested in which Iraqi oil fields. This, of course, was well before the invasion of Iraq, which, as we all know, had nothing to do with oil.

• No, the cows aren't literally mad, but maybe they should be. When a case of mad cow disease surfaced in Washington state last year, federal regulators proposed sharp restrictions on what could be included in animal feed, but after intense lobbying by the cattle and feed industries, the Bush administration put the kibosh on any potential legislative changes. Shortly afterward, the National Cattleman's Beef Association broke with its nonpartisan tradition and endorsed Bush for re-election.

The economy

• Millions of Americans depend on overtime to make extra money. But thanks to the Bush administration, more than 8 million Americans are now ineligible for overtime. According to a June 2003 CNNMoney.com story, liberal think tank the Economic Policy Institute scrutinized the Labor Department proposal to change OT criteria and found it would affect 2.5 million salaried employees and 5.5 million hourly employees. The proposal, which went into effect without congressional approval, will screw those employees in another way, too, the study notes. "Once employers are not required to pay for overtime work, they will schedule more of it," the study said. Now, please place bloody stump of nose back on grindstone. The management thanks you.

• One way of getting a general sense of the nation's economic health is to look at how many people have been laid off. Thanks to the Bush White House, the Labor Department program that tracked such information has been quietly squelched, according to San Francisco Chronicle columnist David Lazarus. In a January 2003 column, he reported that the program tracking mass layoffs by U.S. companies was killed by the administration in order to more easily hype a rosy economic picture. According to the bureau's final monthly report covering November 2002, U.S. companies laid off more than 240,000 workers. Lazarus write that the Labor Department made no mention of ending the program, save for one short blurb buried in a November 2002 press release.

• Liberals, liberals, liberals. Tax and spend. Tax and spend. $2 trillion! Or so goes Bush's standard campaign grouse, which conveniently fails to mention that his own economic plan will cost "well in excess of $3 trillion over a decade," according to a Sept. 14 story in the Washington Post. The bloated expenses come from the war in Iraq, his proposed changes to Social Security system and tax cuts, which are expected to "reduce government revenue by about $1 trillion over 10 years." Now that's fiscal conservatism!

• I mean, seriously, what's up with math? It thinks it's, like, so smart with its objectivity and indisputable numerical evidence. Why can't it just be a team player and go along when President Bush insists that the tax cut was really aimed at working-class Americans? According to The State of Working America 2004-2005, a lengthy report issued in September by the Economic Policy Institute: "For households in the top 1 percent of the income scale, the full tax savings from the cuts that were made from 2001 to 2003 was about $67,000; for middle-income families, the cuts amounted to just under $600; and for the lowest 20 percent, the savings was $61." The net result was to redistribute income up the income scale, transferring 0.8 percent of all after-tax household income from the bottom 99 percent to the top 1 percent.

• Judging by the last two debates, President Bush can't help but slobber over the job figures from the last 13 months: "1.9 million jobs, yeah, definitely 1.9 million jobs." What he fails to mention is that the economy is still down a total of 821,000 jobs, according to an Oct. 9 article on Dick Cheney's favorite website, factcheck.org. If, as most experts predict, the economy does not pick up those jobs by January 2005, Bush will be the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net loss in jobs during his term. That's bad, definitely, definitely bad.

Nevada

• Thank--gasp!--goodness for President Bush's Clear--wheeze!--Skies Act. As the U.S. Public Interest Research Group reports, smog levels in the Las Vegas metropolitan area exceeded the EPA's eight-hour health standard 27 times in 2003, earning the city 18th place on the agency's list of major U.S. cities with the worst smog pollution. That's bad news for anyone still dependent on lungs to breathe--particularly the 33,500 children in Las Vegas who suffer from asthma. For those with healthy respiratory systems, it just means an increased risk of lung cancer and a few extra phlegm-filled hacks in the morning. Hrrrackkk! Thwip! That's one small goober for man, one giant goober for mankind.

• Damn, neighbor, do I smell mesquite? Thanks to President Bush's generous 2003 tax cut, the average Nevadan had an extra $244 last year to spend on a grill, two shares of Google stock or any of the fine products offered in the Sharper Image catalog. By comparison, the wealthiest 1 percent of Nevadans had $43,079 to spend on, say, a Hummer H2 or a college education. No, that's not mesquite you smell; that's the smoky delicious scent of unprecedented income inequality.

• Ah, those two little words that make our heart gurgle with bile: Yucca Mountain. Don't get us started: Bush's record on the proposed nuclear waste dump is filled with lies, distortions and broken promises, capped by his official recommendation in 2002 of the site as the nation's nuclear trash bin--despite a General Accounting Office report finding 300 problems with the repository design, despite the objections of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, despite a U.S. Appeals Court ruling that the administration's Yucca plans failed to meet National Academy of Science safety standards--despite, well, science. This from man who wrote to Gov. Kenny Guinn in 2002 that the "best science must prevail in the designation of any high-level nuclear waste repository."

Random acts of cruelty

• If the government ends up awarding a multibillion-dollar defense contract to Totally Evil Enterprises Inc., you can thank Bush. In December 2001, the Bush administration junked a rule that would deny federal contracts to companies violating labor, environmental and consumer-protection laws, according the Washington Post. The rule, put in effect by the Clinton adminstration, pressured federal contracting officers to take into account credible evidence of industry wrongdoing when considering doling out government contracts. Rolling back the rule was decried by labor groups such as the AFL-CIO, while those in favor of trashing it said it would put procurement officials in charge of judging whether a company a violate the law. Yeah, why bother with ethics and shit?

• The Bush administration appreciates the sanctity of life--and if that life is one of unmitigated pain, torment and debasement, um, sorry, dude, all I can do is kick the morphine drip up a notch. The long arm of Attorney General John Ashcroft reached across the country to block Oregon's landmark assisted-suicide law, according to a November 2001 article in the Washington Post. Oregon's law, the Death With Dignity Act, mind you, was approved by that state's voters in 1994 and 1997 referenda. At least 70 terminally ill people have committed assisted suicide since passage of the act. Gee, if only Ashcroft had intervened sooner, those 70 people could have been still with us, suffering untold pains and degradation--all while affirming the miracle of life.

• "My administration worked with the Congress to create the Department of Homeland Security." Yeah, and Al Gore invented the Internet. Although President Bush has used the department to curtail personal liberties and manipulate public sentiment, he opposed its creation for nine months after Sept. 11, 2001--largely because it was proposed by Democrats. As Jonathan Chait wrote in The New Republic, "Bush's record on homeland security ought to be considered a scandal. Yet, not only is it not a scandal, it's not even a story."

• When the president needed someone to head up the FDA's Advisory Committee on Reproductive Health Drugs, he chose Dr. W. David Hager. This committee makes important decisions about what drugs should be used in obstetrics, gynecology, hormone therapy and contraception programs. Why was Dr. Hager selected? Perhaps because of his groundbreaking medical text, As Jesus Cared for Women, which blends biblical accounts of how Jesus healed sick women with case files from the good doc's own patient list. Dr. Hager isn't exactly in the mainstream of reproductive science since in his own practice he refuses to prescribe contraceptives to unmarried women. He's pro-life, you see.

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Las Vegas Mercury
October 14, 2004

Editor's Note: The case for Kerry

Surely it comes as no surprise that this column, and this newspaper generally, support Sen. John Kerry for president. It was clear to us back in January 2001--the paper's first-ever edition hit the streets just two weeks before the inauguration--that George W. Bush's election was a harbinger of bad things to come. We were right, though we claim no great prescience on that point.

President Bush has been wrong on almost every issue over the past 3 1/2 years. As our cover story points out, it's hardly just Bush's mishandling of Iraq that has polarized the nation and the world. Sometimes, his wrongness has nothing to do with the basic differences between conservatives and liberals. Scads of prominent conservatives in recent months have endorsed Kerry because they are so alarmed and disappointed by Bush and his policies.

I won't try to summarize the entire case for Kerry. Kerry has presented his positions admirably in the first two debates, and I simply don't have space to delve into the fine points of foreign and domestic policy. Instead, I will highlight three key issues that, I hope, will help convince the few remaining undecided voters to mark their ballots for Kerry.

The economy

The U.S. economy is in bad shape. It's not entirely Bush's fault. With the bursting of the dotcom bubble, the economy was already going south before he took office, and 9/11, also not Bush's fault, sunk us into recession. The problem is that Bush has not done anything to try to fix it except hand his rich friends a hefty tax break.

The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times both have been publishing in-depth articles profiling the shrinking middle class and the reduced sense of employment security among working Americans. Good jobs are being shipped overseas, incomes aren't keeping pace with inflation, costs of living are rising and retirement prospects are declining. The L.A. Times outlines the situation:

"A broad array of protections that families once depended on to shield them from economic turmoil--stable jobs, widely available health coverage, guaranteed pensions, short unemployment spells, long-lasting unemployment benefits and well-funded job training programs--have been scaled back or have vanished altogether."

Bush unapologetically supports these trends, arguing that people are better off relying on themselves to get through rough times. Easy for him to say, of course. He's been rich and comfortable his entire life--never once worrying about being laid off or hit with a catastrophic medical bill.

Kerry has enjoyed a similarly charmed life, but it's clear he better understands the challenges faced by the middle class. While he has not proposed anything so dramatic or compelling as FDR's New Deal, Kerry wants to deter companies from outsourcing jobs overseas and he wants many more Americans to have access to affordable health care. He actually would try to make life a little better for regular people.

Telling the truth

After Kerry returned from Vietnam, he told a Senate committee in 1971 that many U.S. soldiers were committing atrocities in Southeast Asia--that the My Lai Massacre was not an isolated case. Bush allies, such as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, claim that Kerry lied about the conduct of his fellow soldiers. But military records kept in the National Archives--and recently declassified--back up Kerry's assertions.

The Village Voice, in a Sept. 22 cover story by Nicholas Turse, reveals an extensive record of barbaric acts against the Vietnamese people, including rape of children, cutting off of arms, ears and fingers, decapitations, electrical torture and random shooting of civilians.

The point, besides refuting the ridiculous Swift Boat Veterans, is that Kerry has an unusual habit, for a politician, of telling the truth. In 1971, Kerry put his neck on the line to tell the American people the truth about what was happening in Vietnam. It was a courageous move that gave the antiwar movement much-needed credibility. Thirty-four years later, Kerry is accusing President Bush of not telling the American people the truth about Iraq, and he's right again.

Yucca Mountain

A recent Las Vegas Sun/KLAS Channel 8/KNPR poll indicates that while a large majority of Nevadans remains opposed to Yucca Mountain, they don't think it's a particularly important issue in the presidential race. I agree--to an extent. This election is important on a national and international scale. The issues at stake are much more pressing than where the nation's nuclear waste will be stored.

However, the fact that President Bush blatantly lied about his intentions regarding Yucca Mountain should tilt undecided voters in Kerry's favor. Kerry has an excellent environmental record and has vowed repeatedly and without equivocation that he would kill the Yucca Mountain project. This shows a commitment to Nevada's well-being that Bush would never make.

It's worth noting, too, that Kerry is a strong advocate of renewable energy. If the nation were to expand its research and use of solar, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources, Nevada--with its sunny climate and wide open spaces--would be a primary beneficiary in terms of investment and jobs. Bush, by contrast, supports fossil fuels that pollute our skies and reinforce our troublesome and precarious dependence on foreign oil.

Vote for Kerry. Unlike Bush, he has your best interests at heart.

--Geoff Schumacher

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Las Vegas City Life
October 14, 2004

Crimes against nature

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says President Bush's attack on the environment is killing us

By Heidi Walters

Well, we already knew this, but it bears repeating, especially following the impassioned speech by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Oct. 7 at UNLV: Mercury is bad, bad news. It's poisoning our women, damaging our children's brains and rendering most of the nation's fresh-water fisheries unfishable. And, the level of mercury -- which is spewed from coal-fired power plants such as the particularly toxic one down in Laughlin -- is on the rise in fish, in our air and in us.

We can blame George W. Bush for that -- and a Yucca-dumpload of other environmental catastrophes that are a direct result of the president and his cronies. This includes violently quick rollbacks of 30 years worth of progressive environmental legislation that Americans insisted on. So charges RFK Jr.

Kennedy is touring college campuses to spread alarm about the Bush administration's evil-doing, as detailed in his new book, Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy.

He's no lightweight on the subject: Aside from professing and advising at the Environmental Litigation Clinic at Pace University, Kennedy is senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, president of the Waterkeeper Alliance and chief prosecuting attorney for Riverkeeper.

The book, which reads like Kennedy speaks -- fast, factual, eloquent and outraged -- details the plundering in chapters like "The Mess in Texas," "Back to the Dark Ages," "Science Fiction" and (our favorite) "What Liberal Media?"

Kennedy said his book is not about Democrats attacking a Republican administration, but "about the impact of excessive corporate power on the environment." He said he has had a generous reception from many Republican groups across the country, people who've seen their livelihoods and landscapes ruined by corporate takeovers.

"I am more afraid of the corporate farm than I am of Osama bin Laden," he said he told a roomful of farmers in North Carolina. "I got a standing ovation."

The president, Kennedy said, "has engineered a stealth attack [on the environment] using Orwellian rhetoric" to bamboozle the public. He said Bush has stripped away forest protections, assaulted the Endangered Species Act and employed "biostitutes" (scientists who will write nice reports that, for instance, say there is no global warming) to further his agenda.

Furthermore, Kennedy said Bush lied to Nevadans about using sound science to decide whether to dump high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. He thinks the stuff needs to be dry-casked and stored where it is.

Kennedy writes in his book that Bush "refused to renew an environmental tax on oil and chemical companies, [so the] Superfund went bankrupt." Bush also has spurned the Clean Water Act and gutted the Clean Air Act, and then offered such sleights-of-hand as the Clear Skies Initiative that in fact enables dirty power plants to continue to poison our air, water and bodies with mercury and other toxins.

"That amendment alone kills 30,000 Americans every single year," said Kennedy.

And the list of assaults goes on.

In his book, Kennedy writes that Bush's cabinet has "more CEOs than any in history. Most come from the energy, extractive and manufacturing sectors that rely on giant subsidies and create the worst pollution."

Kennedy said he's not against putting business-savvy people in government. And he is not against free-market capitalism.

"The domination of business by government is communism," said Kennedy. "The domination of government by business is fascism. And we have to walk that fine line in between" to a free-market economy.

Alas, it's going to be an arduous walk. "Corporations don't want free markets and democracy," Kennedy said. "They want profits. And they like to privatize the commons. They want to plunder the commons. The shared assets that we own as a community -- they're stealing them."

And then they're making the public pay for them to do it. "You show me a polluter, I'll show you a subsidy," he said.

"They're selling out all the things that make us Americans, and to me that is so tragic."

As actress and environmentalist Julia Louis-Dreyfus (of Seinfeld) said when she introduced Kennedy on Thursday, we can "vote on Nov. 2. Vote, vote, vote, vote. Become a defender of saving this

planet."

Heidi Walters is a former CityLife senior staff writer and a local freelance journalist. She can be reached at hjowalters@yahoo.com.

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Deseret News
October 14, 2004

Nuclear waste transit safe?

Federal officials say it will be, but activist doubtful

By Joe Bauman
Deseret Morning News

An activist worries about terrorist attacks on high-level nuclear shipments to a federal repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., a program that may begin in 2010.

But federal officials say the shipments will be safe.

Meanwhile, uncertainty about budgetary matters has left some shipment details unresolved, according to Gary Lanthrum, director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of National Transportation.

The setting for the discussions was a meeting of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board's Transportation Planning Panel. The federal board convened the two-day meeting Wednesday in the Sheraton City Center Hotel, 150 W. 500 South.

The session comes about three months after the U.S. Court of Appeals struck down all challenges to the selection of Yucca Mountain as the site of the first national long-term repository for high-level nuclear waste. It's also about one month after settlement of a suit by Union Pacific Railroad concerning use of rail lines to move the material, according to Lanthrum.

That was the first suit to be settled, among a number that are pending with railroads. Some suits have been going on for 20 years, he said.

"These shipments are not something the railroads can turn down," Lanthrum told the panel. "If we're compliant (with safety regulations), they have to accept them."

Spent fuel rods and other dangerously radioactive waste are expected to be shipped from utilities and federal storage areas throughout the country. According to the DOE, shipments should begin in 2010.

Jason Groenewold, director of the Health Environment Alliance of Utah (HEAL), Salt Lake City, said whether railroads or highways are used to move the material, "about 90 percent of the shipments are expected to come through Utah."

He cited federal figures that if the material traveled mostly by rail, 95 percent would go through Utah; if by truck, the figure drops to 87 percent. When the Deseret Morning News attended the board's morning session on Wednesday, the board's focus was strongly on rail transport.

HEAL is concerned about "the security issue of moving nuclear waste across the country," Groenewold told the paper. He called the shipments "mobile dirty bombs."

"And how do we ensure that terrorists won't sabotage a shipment?" he asked.

If an accident were to occur, about 80 percent of Utah's population lives within five miles of the transportation belt, Groenewold said. He worried about health impacts to the public and emergency responders, as well as the temporary shutdown of ordinary transportation.

During a break, the paper asked Lanthrum about safety concerns. He replied that the DOE believes shipments will be safe because the country is already safely shipping such material.

Allen Benson, DOE spokesman who is in Salt Lake City for the meetings, said about 3,000 shipments of spent fuel have been sent around the United States by utilities over the years. This radioactive material was moved safely a cumulative distance of about 1.7 million miles, he said.

The rate of shipments is expected to increase once the repository opens.

The DOE budget request for planning, design and other activities regarding transportation is $880 million per year for the fiscal year that started Oct. 1.

But the budget for planning transportation of nuclear fuel to Yucca Mountain has not been passed. Instead, Congress has passed a "continuing resolution" budget item based on last year's funding level, $577 million per year.

The resolution ends Nov. 20. By midnight that date, Congress must pass another resolution or the final budget or face a funding crisis.

Benson said the House of Representatives came up with a much lower figure than the agency sought: only $131 million for the fiscal year. The Senate has yet to act. Once the Senate passes a budget, the two chambers must work out a final figure.

How much money is available will affect how planning proceeds, according to Lanthrum.

Some materials destined for the repository are of "off-normal size" and would not fit into the typical safety cask. If funding is limited, special-size shipment containers may not be available because it's more efficient to spend the money on methods that guarantee more material will be moved.

E-mail: bau@desnews.com

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Salt Lake Tribune
October 14, 2004

West states in dark on moving N-waste

Governors say: During a time of terrorism, secrecy about transporting hot material is unacceptable

By Patty Henetz
The Salt Lake Tribune

Utah and Nevada are at the end of the funnel for the tens of thousands of rail and truck shipments of nuclear waste heading for the proposed Yucca Mountain and Private Fuel Storage (PFS) disposal sites.

Along with other Western states, they would like to know how the PFS and the U.S. Department of Energy plan to move and monitor the deadly material.

But Congress has balked at funding the Yucca Mountain project, leaving DOE's transportation plans in limbo. And PFS, a consortium of seven utilities whose nuclear power plants are running out of on-site storage for spent fuel rods, has yet to divulge how it plans to ship the material.

In a time of heightened fear of terror attacks, such uncertainty and secrecy is unacceptable, a Western governors' organization told federal officials Wednesday.

"We are reluctant stewards of nuclear waste in the West," said Tim Holeman, representing the Western Interstate Energy Board. "But we are united in our commitment to safe transportation."

Pointing to likely maps of train and truck routes, Holeman noted that the waste from nuclear power plants would traverse 45 states, 700 counties and 50 Indian reservations on its way to Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. More than 11 million people live within a half-mile of a potential highway route, he said.

Preliminarystudy shows the states most likely to see most of the waste pass through their population centers are Nevada, Utah and Arizona, followed by Nebraska, Wyoming and Colorado.

"This is a Western issue, not just a Nevada issue," Holeman told members of the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board during a meeting in Salt Lake City.

The DOE, by law, was to open a permanent nuclear waste repository by 1998. Now the deadline is 2010.

Meanwhile, DOE has not yet decided on how rail lines might be used to transport up to 3,000 metric tons of waste per year. There would have to be 300 miles of track laid between existing rails and the Yucca Mountain site, "one of the biggest rail projects envisioned in the last 100 years," Holeman said.

Not all of the nuclear reactor sites have access to rail, so the transportation plan will have to include barges and trucks.

Gary Lanthrum, director of DOE's transportation program, said Congress' unwillingness to include Yucca funding in its omnibus spending bill may ultimately force the restructuring of Yucca's whole work plan. If Congress does not appropriate the money for the Nevada rail component next year, he said, the 2010 deadline would be missed.

Western governors are demanding that DOE develop with the states and tribes a comprehensivetransportation plan that addresses the safety of the shipping casks and a review of terrorism and sabotage risks.

The governors also say that no private storage facility for nuclear waste shall be located in a state without the written consent of the governor. "PFS is a big concern to us," Holeman said.

Skull Valley Band of Goshutes chairman Leon Bear in 1997 signed a lease with PFS to allow the company to store up to 44,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel on Goshute land 45 miles west of Salt Lake City. The containers would sit on concrete pads spread across 100 acres before being sent to Yucca, proponents said.

The proposal must be approved by the U.S.Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

A PFS representative was scheduled to testify before the review board today.

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KSL
October 14, 2004

Walker Warns Utah Could Be Stuck with Nuclear Waste

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- Governor Olene Walker says there's something wrong with a temporary nuclear waste storage site that takes shipments before the government can designate a final burial site.

Walker says the proposed storage site at Skull Valley Indian Reservation could doom the state to a life sentence of harboring spent nuclear fuel rods. And Utah doesn't have any nuclear power plants.

Walker made those statements today before the US Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, which has been meeting at a Salt Lake City hotel.

A businessman behind the plans to open the waste storage site says Utah is in a position to help the country deal with a national problem.

Private Fuel Storage CEO John Parkyn says the company is taking all kinds of precautions to make sure Utah residents won't be harmed by transporting or storing the waste.

The site is meant to be temporary -- until the federal government can open a permanent nuclear-waste dump at Nevada's Yucca Mountain.

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Charleston Post Courier
October 14, 2004

Progress on nuclear waste site

South Carolina should welcome approval of a nuclear waste cleanup plan by a House-Senate conference committee last week. The plan, advanced by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., provides adequate safeguards and oversight for the project, and relies on the practical experience already gained on two similar cleanup projects at SRS.

Highly radioactive waste from two tanks at SRS already have been removed and stabilized for eventual storage in the interior of Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Concrete and grout were poured into the tanks, thereby stabilizing the waste residue that couldn't be safely removed and diluting it so that it no longer qualifies as high-level waste.

The remaining 49 tanks, containing more than 35 million gallons of waste, will undergo the same process under the scrutiny of state environmental officials. Meanwhile, the National Academy of Sciences will review the plan in preparation for the cleanup to determine if it meets requisite safety standards. The process already has been reviewed and found to be safe by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.

Critics have opposed the plan because it does not take care of 100 percent of the radioactive waste in the storage tanks. It does have the benefit, however, of actually getting virtually all of the waste removed, treated for permanent storage and eventually taken off site. As Sen. Graham observed, "Tank cleanup efforts at the site have been at a virtual standstill."

He estimates that the cleanup plan will put the waste removal more than two decades ahead of schedule.

"It's long past time we get the cleanup efforts moving forward again to protect our environment," Sen. Graham said. "Every day we delay just increases the risk to the local community and the Savannah River that these tanks, some of them 50 years old, will leak and create even greater problems down the road."

The plan has been endorsed by Gov. Mark Sanford, the state Department of Health and Environmental Control, Attorney General Henry McMaster, the Aiken County legislative delegation and other local officials. Its approval by conference committee, as part of the Defense Appropriations bill, virtually ensures congressional passage.

The plan has been opposed by officials from Washington state and Idaho and some environmental organizations, who object to what they view as a weakening of cleanup standards and the federal responsibility for managing radioactive waste. Hanford, in Washington state, has an even larger volume of high-level waste in storage than SRS.

South Carolina has opted for a practical and expedient solution over the possibility of a perfect cleanup plan perhaps decades hence. The safeguards and oversight required are sufficient to the long-overdue task. Eventually, the project may point the way for the management of other waste sites that currently are on hold.

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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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