Yucca Mountain News Clips
Monday, November 22, 2004
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Las Vegas SUN
November 22, 2004
DOE to miss its Yucca deadline
Officials unclear when license application will be submitted
By Suzanne Struglinski
<suzanne@lasvegassun.com>
Sun Washington Bureau
ROCKVILLE, Md. -- The Energy Department will not file the Yucca Mountain project's license application next month as planned, said Margaret Chu, the department official who oversees the project.
It was the first time the department has said it will not meet its goal of turning in the application by the end of 2004.
Chu, the director of the civilian radioactive waste program, said the department is "revising our original intent," by not submitting the application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. She did not give a specific reason for the delay.
Chu did not specify when the department plans to turn in the application.
"We do not expect long delays," Chu said at a management meeting between the Energy Department and Nuclear Regulatory Commission today at the commission's headquarters. She said the department hopes to have an tentative new schedule by the next quarterly management meeting.
The department said it has a draft of the application done.
W. John Arthur, the deputy director of the department's Las Vegas-based Office of Repository Development, told the commission staff that a lot of progress has been made on the application but not enough to meet next month's deadline.
"We do not believe the delay will be significant," Arthur said. "We'll take no more time than is absolutely required."
Arthur said department staff has been reviewing each page of the application's draft. It is "technically sound and adequate" but needs more transparency, readability and consistency throughout the document.
The department sent documents to back up its license application to the NRC earlier this year, but an NRC licensing board found the information inadequate. The commission will not put a license application on its docket until six months after the backup information is certified.
Arthur said the department could recertify its material on the License Support Network, a database of documents supporting technical aspects of the project, by spring 2005.
C. William Reamer, director of the commission's High Level Waste Repository Safety Division, asked Chu if the department would not be handing in the application by the end of 2004. Chu said it would not.
Reamer later asked the department to put in writing any new decisions that are made on the schedule, especially if they are made before the next meeting, so that those involved are aware of them.
Meanwhile, the department is trying to figure out how to allocate the $577 million earmarked for the project by Congress over the weekend.
This is the same level it received in 2004 but $303 million less than the department's request for 2005.
Chu said it will take some time to study how the decrease from its request will affect the program and the department is already planning its budget request for 2006.
"We have reached a point where historical levels of funding no longer work," she said.
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Las Vegas SUN
November 22, 2004
Reid adviser granted limited role on NRC
By Benjamin Grove
<grove@lasvegassun.com>
Sun Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- A top aide to Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., will take a seat on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission but with significantly limited power to block Yucca Mountain, under a deal struck in Congress during the weekend.
Reid has battled for about a year to win Senate approval for one of his top advisers, physicist Greg Jaczko.
Yucca advocates in Congress opposed the nomination, figuring that Jaczko would thwart the project.
The appointment to the commission is important to Nevada because it would give the state a voice on the agency panel responsible for licensing and regulating Yucca, the Energy Department project proposal to construct a high-level nuclear waste repository under construction 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The department aims to open Yucca as early as 2010, but it must first win approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The department had planned to submit an application to the commission for a license to construct the underground facility to the NRC by year's end so the commission could begin reviewing it, a process that would likely take several years.
Jaczko will be limited in his power to take a critical approach to the proposed nuclear waste repository project under an unusual compromise forged by Reid, White House officials and Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and a leading Yucca advocate in the Senate.
Jaczko will have to recuse himself from all Yucca Mountain matters for the first year of his two-year appointment, according to the agreement. That point has long been part of ongoing deal-making over Jaczko's appointment, Reid spokeswoman Tessa Hafen said.
"It was all part of the negotiations and compromises," she said.
Further, Jaczko likely will be limited to a two-year stint. White House officials assured Domenici that Bush would not renominate Jaczko, Domenici spokeswoman Marnie Funk said. Most appointments to the five-member NRC are for five years.
"We made it clear that a nominee as controversial as Greg Jaczko will not be confirmed by the Senate for the sake of political expedience regardless of the pressure exerted by his advocate, Sen. Reid," Domenici said in a statement.
Domenici added, "I hope we have ensured the impartiality and fairness of the NRC."
In two years, Reid plans to use his powers as Democratic leader to fight to get Jaczko more time on the commission, Hafen said.
Despite the limits on Jaczko's nomination, the deal on the nomination was still a good one, Hafen said.
"It allows Greg to to do good work on the NRC and prove that he is fair and objective," she said.
It is not immediately clear just how much opposition Jaczko could mount, even behind the scenes, against the project with limited power during a limited term.
"It just shows how much power the nuclear power industry has," said Kevin Kamps, nuclear waste specialist with the anti-Yucca group Nuclear Information and Resource Service, who has long argued the industry has powerful friends in Congress. "They can set the terms for the commissioners that oversee them."
A spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the leading industry lobby group, today said he could not comment on Jaczko's nomination.
Nominees to federal posts, including the NRC, must be approved by the Senate.
President Bush nominated Jaczko in February under a deal made with Reid to drop his hold on other nominees, including opposition to Environmental Protection Agency administrator nominee Mike Leavitt, who was confirmed to that post.
Under the deal reached during the weekend, Reid agreed to release a hold he had placed on another slate of nominations to federal posts. Domenici said Reid had been holding 172 nominations "hostage" in an effort to win approval for Jaczko.
Senate Republicans wanted a Republican named to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and a number of senators wanted full congressional hearings on any nominees before confirmation to full five-year posts.
As part of the agreement, Jaczko and Republican nominee Albert H. Konetzni will serve for two years to fill the two empty seats on the five-member panel. President Bush likely will make the appointments under special rules during January, a Domenici aide said.
Jaczko likely would begin serving immediately after Bush's appointment, Hafen said.
Jaczko is a scientist with the experience necessary for the job, Reid said in a statement. He will be an "independent" voice on the commission, Reid said.
"Greg understands and cares deeply about nuclear safety issues, and he will put the welfare of the American public above everything else," Reid said.
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Reno Gazette-Journal
November 22, 2004
Letters to the Editor for Nov. 22, 2004
Voters don´t care about Yucca, Tahoe
I have decided to join the majority of Nevadans who do not care about Yucca Mountain or Lake Tahoe.
Oh, but you say the recent survey shows that 67 percent of Nevadans still want to fight Yucca? Then why did they vote for the worst environmental president in history, who also lied to all of us about Yucca and Lake Tahoe?
You get what you deserve when you vote. Now, stop complaining and live with your decision.
James Turnage, Sun Valley
Certainly Nevadans who voted for President Bush could still oppose making Nevada the nation´s dump site for nuclear waste. Both Sen. Kerry and Sen. Reid made that TV commercial saying that if Kerry were elected he would shut down Yucca Mountain. The commercial would have been more convincing if one of them had come out and said what Kerry´s plan for nuclear waste was.
For the good of the nation and Nevada, is it possible that Sen. Reid could prevail on Sen. Kerry to tell what his disposal plan is? As the Senate minority leader, I should think that Sen. Reid is now in a position to do this.
William H. Silcox, Incline Village
Quit wasting money on Yucca Mt. fight
We in Nevada accept hypocrisy and politics dancing hand in hand; it´s a state legacy. With this election, though, certain Nevadans have pumped hypocrisy to a level previously unimaginable.
What´s not astonishing about an article titled “Nevadans still oppose Yucca dump’ [Nov. 6]? Ladies and gentlemen, is there anything mysterious about the recent presidential election vote? You vote for a Republican platform and get served just that. I am dumbfounded to hear that our attorney general, who fought tooth and nail to elect President Bush, plans to spend almost $2 million to fight the Yucca Mountain nuclear dump. Get a clue, people: You voted in Bush, so Nevada gets the dump: The deal is done.
Let´s take the two million bucks and use it to help the disenfranchised — those further marginalized by the election of George W. Money would be far better spent supporting programs for kids and families, for the food bank and the homeless shelter, for reducing the number of suicide and cancer victims, and for legal aid to domestic violence victims. Shouldn´t the attorney general be more concerned about helping deserving causes in Nevada than tilting at windmills in the great losing battle he helped procure?
Paul F. Starrs, Reno
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Energy Pulse
November 22, 2004
The Business Electric: Unfinished Business at DOE
Arthur O'Donnell, Editorial Director, Energy Central
Dateline: Washington, D.C. No one in this constantly speculating town was surprised when Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham joined the exodus from the recently re-elected Bush administration. For the general public, Abraham's departure seemed overshadowed by the shuffle at State, in which Colin Power gave up his chair to Condi Rice. For Beltway energy insiders, it was clear that Abraham was more than ready to leave as soon as a replacement can be named.
He goes out with a record, of sorts, as the longest tenured Secretary of Energy since the department was created. After looking over Abraham's recent travel and speechmaking schedule on the DOE Web site, I can understand completely his desire to stay closer to home for a little while to watch his young children grow before they stop recognizing him.
Without missing a beat, the chattering classes among lobbyists and media were tossing out possibilities for a replacement and guessing what it would mean for future energy policies. The possible promotion of assistant secretary Kyle McSlarrow would be the smoothest transition, some said, maintaining the status quo of having energy policy directives begin at the White House for faithful execution by federal functionaries.
Others suggested that a higher-profile name, such as former senators J. Bennett Johnston (D-LA), or John Breaux (D-LA), would be in keeping with the tradition at DOE of offering employment to the underemployed in return for some political traction. In this case, further cementing relations with the Senate just in time for another round of energy bill formulation, with an appointee most friendly to oil and gas interests. There´s also the symbolic outreach of putting a Democrat in the cabinet.
Then there´s the possibility that Bush will turn to Tom Kuhn, currently president of the Edison Electric Institute. While there´s been no direct overture from the White House at this point, those in the know say, Kuhn might take the position, if offered, purely out of loyalty to his long-time friend and despite a rather substantial hit to income. But it certainly would be novel to have DOE headed by someone who represents the electric power business rather than someone tied to fuels.
Or, it could be someone that no one has even considered. That´s always a possibility when it´s political payback time on the Potomac.
In Abraham´s November 14 letter of resignation, he thanked the President for the opportunity to serve and expressed optimism that “a much needed energy legislation will finally be passed’ in the upcoming 109th Congress. He also pointed to a list of accomplishments since coming on board in 2001, including development of “the first comprehensive energy plan in over a decade, and implementing 90 percent of its recommendations.’
The “mission accomplished’ list might be considered like its War in Iraq correlate, still a work-in-progress: putting DOE research funding to development of hydrogen and FutureGen (clean coal) technologies; continuing the clean-up of former weapons manufacturing facilities; pressing ahead with nuclear waste disposal at Yucca Mountain; and accelerating nuclear non-proliferation activities with Russia. Not mentioned in the letter, but frequently cited in the secretary´s speeches are DOE´s commitments to encouraging a next generation of nuclear power and continued work on fusion reactors, along with its practical day-to-day approach to energy efficiency and renewable power markets.
I also like to point out that well before the August 2003 blackout, DOE had already identified the reliability threat posed by under-funded power and gas delivery infrastructure and had a plan on the table for fixing the holes.
While Abraham has been criticized in some quarters for the failure of the Bush administration to get anything like a comprehensive energy bill through Congress, the more knowledgeable observers I´ve spoken with here say that it´s unfair to blame DOE for what has been an impossible situation. Besides, with the original terms of an energy plan dictated by Vice President Dick Cheney´s secret society, there was little that DOE could do to influence outcome besides being a cheerleader for the home team.
To its credit, the Department under Abraham has continued to do what it does best, focus its resources on research and technologies development. In a recent speech, Abraham—who did not enter the job with an energy pedigree—said that the agency ore appropriately should be called the department of Energy, Science and Technology. “The Department is not just about electricity and windmills and gas stations,’ he said. “The department is actually all about science.’
To my mind DOE is also about -- or should be about -- liaison between the federal government and state and local efforts to better manage our energy use and delivery systems. And as a bridge between government and industries that produce, deliver and consume energy in all its forms.
I think the record of the agency under Abraham is quite mixed in this regard, and certainly for some key, if less influential–than-before-the-election lawmakers, DOE´s adamancy on siting Yucca Mountain outweighs most of the positive things it has done. Other hold lingering resentments for a DOE roll-back of air-conditioning efficiency standards that have forced states like California to continue setting their own preferred levels of appliance efficiency attainment.
There´s always something of a tug-of-war between the federal agencies and the Congressional committees that hold the appropriations purse strings and confirmation power over Presidential appointments. We´re seeing a silly impasse right now that holds up the confirmation of FERC appointee SueDean Kelly because of Yucca Mountain—an issue that has absolutely nothing to do with Kelly´s job.
There also appears to be some hang-up in finalizing the FY05 Energy and Water appropriations bill during the lame duck session of Congress currently playing in Washington. Whatever the issue, it puts DOE´s budget on hold long past the start of the fiscal year, last October 1 (certainly it´s not the only federal agency budget currently on ice).
In one of my many interviews here in town this week, my attention was drawn to one aspect of the energy appropriations bill that might seem minor, if not inconsequential. The issue is continued funding for DOE´s Office of Energy Assurance (OEA), a $22 million per year effort to provide states and local energy agencies with the tools they need to provide emergency response and system security.
Attorney Jeff Genzer, a partner in the firm of Duncan, Weinberg, Genzer & Pembroke, and outside counsel to the National Association of State Energy Officials (NASEO), described the importance of having adequate resources for energy emergency preparedness. “From an energy policy maker´s standpoint, it doesn´t matter whether the cause for the pipeline going out is a terrorist strike, a hurricane or human error,’ he said. “We still have to deal with an energy situation that is severe.’
Another form of preparedness is to try to head off the impacts of expected high prices for heating fuels this coming winter. The most recent estimate from the Energy information Administration is that heating oil prices were going up 37 percent this winter. “That´s a significant increase. Those kinds of situations affect real people very quickly,’ Genzer said. “Congress needs to act. We see significant problems: the fact of increasing price volatility, the fact of increasing dependence on oil from foreign sources, we don´t have sufficient fuel diversity…moves up toward greater volatility. People on lower incomes feel that more acutely. Our delivery system is antiquated, out infrastructure is inadequate and we really need as a country to focus on our energy emergency preparedness, our energy security and our fuel diversity.’
The need for price volatility protection has caused a coalition of Northeast and Midwestern states to seek up to $600 million in additional low-income home energy assistance program (LIHEAP) funding for the coming year. LIHEAP is not a DOE program, but comes under the Health and Human Services Department.
Late last month, NASEO delivered letters to the relevant House and Senate committees that are considering the Energy & Water Bill, almost pleading for reauthorization of OEA´s budget. “Good planning by public and private sectors . . . makes the difference between fast response and crisis in the return of normal service for users of electricity, natural gas, gasoline, propane and heating oil,’ wrote Sara Ward, chair of NASEO.
Given that fact that it represents just 0.1 percent of DOE´s nearly $25 billion annual budget, a $22 million project is not much money, but OEA has become the key liaison between federal and state energy actions. NASEO has credited OEA in the pat year with:
Creating a secure national emergency communications network among state assurance experts, to share high level information an during emergency situations;
Helping transform outdated emergency plans into comprehensive energy assurance plans;
Working on emergency transportation fuels allocation plans and waivers on environmental requirements and driver hours;
Conducting the first national assurance exercises in 10 years.
“A modest federal investment in these efforts would show a great return in preventing disruptions to our energy system and in the form of improved recovery from potential disruptions should they occur,’ Ward wrote.
The Bottom Line: Too often, when we look at the work of a huge agency like the Department of Energy, we focus exclusively on the big guy (or gal) at the top, the cutting-edge technology or the most controversial initiatives. In its day-to-day activities, though, DOE is most effective in a thousand smaller projects that support and extend more localized efforts.
Truthfully, if I had the budget authority, I´d switch the $350 million annual appropriation now devoted to hydrogen research over to state emergency plans and subsidies for low-income homes´ utility bills. But I don´t and, really, neither do Spencer Abraham or his successors. Most important is for whoever heads DOE to keep pressing for the realistic programs that deal with real people´s needs. That´s an energy policy I can support wholeheartedly.
Arthur O´Donnell is Energy Central´s Editorial Director. The Business Electric is found exclusively on Energy Central.
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Capitol Hill Blue
November 22, 2004
Congress Passes 'Thanksgiving Turkey' Spending Bill
By Staff and Wire Reports
Congress Saturday passed a $388 billion package financing government programs in this fiscal year after days of battling over spending cuts and priorities for programs including foreign aid, energy and a presidential yacht.
The Senate voted 65-30 for the legislation late on Saturday but a last minute snag means it will not be sent to President Bush for several days for signing into law.
It is one of the last pieces of work for the 108th Congress although lawmakers could return to finish a spy agency overhaul before the end of the year.
The House of Representatives passed the spending bill 344-51 earlier on Saturday. But will return on Wednesday to correct part of it that would have allowed lawmakers access to Americans' income tax returns, and that vote will clear the way for Bush's signature.
To fit into limits demanded by Bush as part of his effort to trim the record budget deficit, Republicans agreed to make an across-the-board cut in spending levels backed earlier by the House and Senate, provoking anger among some lawmakers.
"It's been a terrible bill to handle," said outgoing Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican.
Some last minute increases were allowed for favored White House projects like NASA space programs.
Democrats fumed that Republican leaders had cut crucial funding for education, health and the environment.
Democratic Rep. David Obey, from Wisconsin, called the bill a "Thanksgiving Turkey" which he said was "totally inadequate to meet the nation's needs."
Although lawmakers found common ground during the 108th Congress on tax breaks for companies and families there was also plenty of election-year gridlock.
Partisan fighting continued on Saturday as Democrats raged over a Republican-introduced measure in the spending bill making it easier for hospitals to refuse to provide abortions or abortion counseling.
"This provision is nothing more than a payoff to the religious right," said Lynn Woolsey, a California Democrat.
The spending bill wraps together 9 bills that Congress failed to pass before the election, financing most government agencies in the 2005 fiscal year that started Oct. 1.
The bill sets aside $23 billion for the Department of Energy while foreign aid programs will get $19.4 billion. Those were increases from 2004 but less than Bush requested. The bill funding the Departments of Transportation and Treasury will get $89.9 billion, less than last year and Bush's request.
The Bush administration threatened to veto the massive bill if the cost of its programs pushed spending for all 13 bills above an $821.9 billion limit.
In a victory for the White House, lawmakers agreed to open up some government agency jobs to the private sector.
The bill also dropped language that would have challenged new Bush rules on overtime and travel to Cuba and to extend milk subsidies for small dairy farmers.
On another tricky issue, the compromise bill included $577 million in funding for a nuclear waste site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada but dropped language that would reclassify fees paid into the Nuclear Waste Fund.
The bill also included a measure to make Mexican trucks operating in the United States safer. And it added $403 million dollars to ease the crisis in Sudan.
But it cut $1 billion from Bush's $2.5 billion request for the Millennium Challenge Account, a new program to encourage economic and political reforms in poor countries. Advocacy groups were disappointed with the level of funding for the Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS.
The NASA space agency, a priority of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, found a last minute boost to $16.2 billion, an increase of $822 million over last year's levels.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
November 21, 2004
Yucca Mountain adviser to Reid to get NRC post
Accord paves way for Senate to fill other high-level federal positions
By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he reached an agreement with the White House that will enable his Yucca Mountain adviser, Gregory Jaczko, to be named early next year to the commission that regulates the nuclear power industry.
The deal broke an impasse over the nomination of Jaczko to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It also allowed the Senate to confirm dozens of others to high-ranking federal posts before it adjourns early today.
"I am pleased we were able to reach a deal that places a strong, independent voice on the NRC while ensuring that nearly a hundred other federal posts will be promptly filled," Reid said in a statement.
Bush will appoint Jaczko to the NRC using his executive powers, Reid said. The appointment will be valid for two years, aides said.
The commitment was conveyed by White House officials including chief of staff Andrew Card, according to Reid's aides.
The five-member Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulates handling of nuclear materials and nuclear waste, and will have a large say in whether the government proceeds to develop a radioactive waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The Senate had been deadlocked on the appointment of Jaczko, 34. In turn, Reid had blocked Senate action on dozens of other federal nominees proposed by President Bush, including ambassadors and high-level executives for the Agriculture, Education, Commerce, Interior, Justice, Labor and Energy departments.
A group of Republican senators and the nuclear power industry fought Jaczko's nomination.
They contended he likely would become an automatic vote against the Yucca Mountain project because of his association with Reid, who is a leading critic of the repository.
Jaczko, a physicist, is Reid's principal adviser on nuclear waste and the Yucca project.
Reid said Jaczko "understands and cares deeply about nuclear safety issues, and will put the welfare of the American public above everything else."
Bypassing Senate opposition, Reid said White House officials promised that Bush would place Jaczko on the NRC early next year by recess appointment, an executive power that a president can exercise to fill federal vacancies, usually when Congress is not in session.
During Jaczko's two-year term on the NRC, the board is expected to begin its review of the Energy Department application to build the Yucca Mountain repository.
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Provo Daily Herald
November 21, 2004
Dances with Discontent
N.S. Nokkentved
Daily Herald
Only the quiet matches the vastness of Skull Valley. An echo would die of loneliness out here.
In the distance, tawny grasses streaked with reddish-brown rise to meet dark pine trees dotting the mountains on the far side of this sparsely populated valley, maybe 10 miles across.
Clouds and sun play hide and seek with the 11,000-foot Deseret Peak and the Onaqui Mountains that rise east of the 17,460-acre Goshute Reservation, about 52 miles due west of American Fork and Lehi.
"There's a lot of serenity here, that's why I chose to live here," Margene Bullcreek said, standing in front of her white frame house. A group of towering cottonwoods shade its green shingled roof.
She chose to raise her four children here to teach them tribal traditions and values, "to teach them who we are as Native Americans," said the 58-year-old tribal member. A small brown and white female dog followed her down the gravel drive.
From her house, the broad valley dips down to the west and rises again several miles away to meet the Cedar Mountains that line the west side of Skull Valley.
The tranquility of the valley and the small reservation village belies the turmoil that simmers just below the surface here over a proposal to store some of the most dangerous waste in the country.
For 15 years, the Goshutes of Skull Valley have danced around the idea of leasing part of their reservation for a temporary storage site for highly radioactive spent fuel from commercial power reactors.
On Dec. 27, 1996, the tribe's executive committee signed a lease with Minnesota-based Private Fuel Storage LLC, a consortium of eight private utility companies, to lease a corner of the reservation for an undisclosed amount.
Tribal member Sammy Blackbear, who opposes the deal, has said in news reports that the tribe is getting more than $1 million per year, and he has said it will get $48 million for the lease.
Tooele County has signed a contract to support the project and will get $5,000 per month until the site opens. After that, it will get payments totalling $90 to $300 million depending on the scope of the operation.
That's quite a disparity, considering that the reservation is taking all the risk, Blackbear said.
The tribe's executive committee comprises the chairman, vice chairman and secretary. The tribe has about 120 members, only 24 of whom live on the reservation. The rest have left the reservation for jobs in Salt Lake City or other parts of the state.
The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission is set to rule in January on the remaining safety concern -- the consequences of a potential airplane crash -- standing in the way of issuing a license for the storage site.
But long before the waste has started to arrive, it is already destroying the tribe, Bullcreek said. The money offered by the utilities may enrich the tribe's coffers, but it would bankrupt the tribe culturally and threaten members' health and the land, she said.
The tribe's traditional values that Bullcreek hopes to pass on to her three grandchildren and one great-grandchild are linked to the land, the birds and animals, and the spiritual part of the earth, the places where people go to pray.
"I can just walk out there and talk to myself," she said, gesturing over a barbed wire fence toward the area where the proposed waste storage site would be built.
Bullcreek doesn't object to economic development, but she and several other tribal members are not willing to trade traditions and values for the money and jobs the waste would bring.
Others, including tribal chairman Leon Bear, see the waste storage site as a way to pull the reservation and tribal members out of enduring poverty, and to buy self-determination.
Rift zone
The disagreement over the waste storage proposal has grown rancorous. A deep fissure has split the tribe and led to accusations of fraud and treason, suits and countersuits and federal indictments against several tribal leaders.
Bullcreek's own nieces support the waste storage proposal.
Bear and the tribe have sued three banks.
Bullcreek has sued Bear.
Utah and the tribe sued the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Tribal members sued Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, and then Interior Secretary Gale Norton.
Some of these case have been combined, others dismissed and some still are pending.
And the federal government has indicted Bear on charges of embezzling and tax evasion, and three other tribal members on charges of theft and bank fraud.
Underlying the disagreements lies a fundamental challenge to the legitimate authority of tribal leadership. It started with a resolution to recall Bear in 1994 partly in response to his administration's interest in bringing a nuclear waste storage site to Skull Valley.
Bullcreek and other opponents of the project contend Bear and his fellow executive council members did not have the authority to sign the lease contract, said Paul EchoHawk, a Pocatello, Idaho, attorney who represents Bullcreek and other waste opponents.
"We believe that the Leon Bear administration is not the properly elected authority," he said.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs, which oversees American Indian reservation governments, however, has rejected the recall resolutions and elections that ousted Bear as chairman.
Because of the disputes, Bear's opponents have asked the BIA to supervise a tribal election. The agency will accept the outcome of an election only if all sides agree to hold the election, and Bear and his supporters have not agreed, EchoHawk said.
Blackbear has said that about one third of the membership opposes the project, one third is undecided and one third supports Bear and the project.
But the BIA typically doesn't get involved in tribal disputes or elections.
"We pretty much leave that up to the tribe," said Chet Mills, superintendent of the Uinta Ouray Agency in Fort Duchesne, which has jurisdiction over the Skull Valley Reservation.
If an election outcome were challenged, the BIA would investigate whether the election was conducted according to tribe policy and proper procedure, Mills said. If it doesn't meet those criteria, the BIA would not accept the outcome.
Bullcreek and her opposition group, Ohngo Gaudedah Devia, have appealed the dispute to the Interior Board of Indian Appeals, accusing the BIA of inaction.
Money disputes
Opponents also argue that payments from PFS have been shared with Bear's supporters and denied to those who oppose the project.
"He's a thief," Bullcreek said. He is selling the tribe's sovereignty to PFS and keeping the profits for himself and his supporters, she said.
Bear has denied the allegation.
The issue has been brought up to the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is reviewing PFS's license application. The board asked for a financial disclosure but was overruled by the commission, EchoHawk said.
The opponents plan to appeal the ruling but have to wait until the commission decides to issue a license.
Bear has not responded to repeated requests for an interview,
The details of the contract are secret, but the tribe has been reimbursed for expenses incurred during studies for the project, said Scott York, a Salt Lake City attorney who represents the tribal leadership.
Already, money is coming to the reservation.
In the reservation village, a new road winds past a new baseball field and light brown, steel-sided tribal community center. Nearby, three new manufactured homes have been set down on foundations in bare dirt.
The village also includes several vintage mobile homes and trailers, and a few frame houses like Bullcreek's.
Nearby, the litter of past agricultural endeavors, a sort of history of farm machinery development, lies rusting in the grass and sagebrush. But it is benign compared with the waste that would be visible across the valley, four or five miles from Bullcreek's house -- waste that will remain lethal for at least 10,000 years.
Still, the waste site would help bring housing and the possibility of jobs, and perhaps a medical clinic, York said. That would provide an incentive for tribal members to move back to the reservation.
The closest medical facilities available are in Dugway and Tooele. For a federal Indian Health Services hospital, however, residents have to go all the way to Fort Duchesne, 250 miles away.
Secret lease
Some tribal members accuse Bear of signing the lease without first bringing it to the tribal general council, comprising the 73 adult members of the Skull Valley Band.
"None of us has seen the contract," Bullcreek said.
But typically, sovereign or not, the BIA would not approve such a lease if the tribe had not approved a resolution adopting the agreement or giving the tribal executive committee the authority to sign the agreement with PFS.
And the BIA would have to approve any such lease. In fact, the BIA's final approval of the lease is contingent upon a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
EchoHawk and Bullcreek dispute assertions that the general council has approved the lease.
"We don't want to sign anything that will commit us to something that we think is wrong," Bullcreek said.
Blackbear has said he thought the general council gave permission to study the project, not to sign a lease. The executive committee signed a lease for 20 years with an option for 20 more, a total of 40 years. He asserts that reservation leases are legally limited to seven years.
York, however, said the tribe's general council approved the lease contract -- the council comprises all the tribe's adult members. Individual tribal members would not be involved in negotiation with PFS, but they would have given leaders the authority to negotiate in their behalf.
"The executive committee is supposed to follow through and take care of the details," York said. "They are the last ones who want to put a problem in their backyard."
Tribal leaders traveled the world to see how other countries who rely on nuclear power have dealt with the waste, and how others handle dry storage facilities for spent fuel. They compared what they learned to how PFS proposes to handle waste at the reservation, York said.
Spent reactor fuel consists of ceramic pellets, slightly larger than a pencil eraser, encased in metal tubes, about 12 feet long and tough enough to withstand the heat and pressure of a nuclear reactor core. These fuel rods are contained inside a steel canister, which, in turn, is transported inside a shipping cask that blocks the intense radiation emitted by the byproducts of a nuclear reaction.
Properly shielded, the material can be transported safely. The concern for public safety would be in the event of an accident. With the shielding breached, the radiation levels would be lethal to anyone who tried to approach.
The waste can't explode, however, and only under rare and extreme conditions could radioactive material be spread by an accident, transportation experts say.
Some of the waste would come by rail through Utah Valley.
Federal officials have carefully considered safety, environmental and transportation concerns, York said.
PFS proposes to store up to 44,000 tons of highly radioactive spent reactor fuel in 4,000 upright concrete and steel casks on concrete pads at the site. The consortium filed a license application with the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission in June 1997.
Tribal representatives saw the PFS proposal as low risk with a high return, he said. The lease covers 820 acres for 20 years with a 20 year renewal option.
Because reservation lands are considered sovereign, the tribe can deal directly with the federal government and PFS and bypass the political opposition by the state of Utah, York said.
He dismisses what he calls paternal concern that masquarades as outrage over environmental racism, which is used only by opponents as an argument against the project. Tribal members are perfectly capable of making decisions for themselves, York said.
"I don't feel like they're being taken advantage of," he said. "It's not like anyone pushed this on the tribe."
The tribe's decision certainly was not unanimous, York said. And members have a right to try to persuade others to their position. But once the group has made a decision, the rest have to respect the majority vote, he said.
Utah officials objected to the application over concerns about the financial backing of the project, transportation safety issues and the possibility that the site would not be temporary once the waste arrived.
But the project has moved forward despite the best efforts of the state.
The dissent by Bullcreek and others, however, was fueled by former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt's opposition and his now-famous reply, "Over my dead body," to the proposal to bring high level radioactive waste to Utah, York said.
The dissent is funded by the state, which in 1997 established the office of High Level Nuclear Waste Storage Opposition within the Department of Environmental Quality, he said. The state has spent more than $3 million on its opposition campaign.
Federal charges
The leadership dispute extended to include control of the tribe's finances.
In a contested election in September 2001, tribal members elected Miranda Moon chairwoman, Sammy Blackbear vice-chairman and Miranda Wash tribal secretary.
Bear refused to step down, and the BIA did not recognize the validity of the election. Still, the new claimants to tribal leadership tried to wrest control of the tribe's bank accounts, citing an effort to keep control out of Bear's hands.
On Dec. 17, 2003, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Moon, Blackbear, Wash and their attorney, Duncan Steadman, on one count each of theft from the tribe, and five counts each of bank fraud.
Claiming to be duly elected tribal leaders, Moon, Blackbear and Wash attempted to withdraw money from a tribal account and establish a new account.
Bank fraud can bring up to 30 years in prison and up to a $1 million fine. Their case is pending.
Bear was facing troubles of his own. He, too, was indicted on two counts of theft from the tribe, one count of theft from a program receiving federal funds, and three counts of tax fraud.
The indictment accuses Bear of embezzling $161,000, and of claiming on his federal income tax returns to be unemployed during three years when he earned more than $63,000 in two of those years, and more than $67,000 in the third.
The indictment notes that Bear earns $4,300 per month as tribal chairman head of the tribe's economic development office. In addition, Bear reimbursed himself for expenses and paid himself a stipend as compensation for travel on behalf of the tribe.
In January, Bear pleaded innocent to the federal charges that could bring up to 30 years in prison and $1.5 million in fines. The outcome still is pending.
A clash of values
Bullcreek's opposition to the waste site is seen as a threat to economic development and to tribal leaders' greed, she said. She has been accused of treason and has been threatened with expulsion from the tribe, Bullcreek said.
She grew up on the reservation. She points to a field where her grandfather raised a garden, the family kept sheep. Her father used to tell creation stories in the evenings.
She went to school in Dugway, had to walk a mile down to the main road to catch the bus to school. Children from the village still go to school in Dugway, but now the bus comes up the road to the village to pick them up.
She admits it's hard to make a living on the reservation. It's a long way to drive to Salt Lake City for a job. Since a rocket motor test facility closed in 1998, the only business on the reservation is the Pony Express Station -- two gas pumps and convenience store -- along State Route 199.
And as modern life tempts young people, it becomes harder to hold on to tribal traditions, ceremonies and other things Bullcreek holds sacred.
Without those traditions and ceremonies, however, "this will turn into a waste site," she said sweeping her arm across the vast open landscape that surrounds the village.
She doesn't want to move somewhere else, away from where her loved ones are buried.
Bullcreek favors relying on high-tech development to bring jobs and prosperity to the reservation, instead of a deadly radioactive waste storage site that seems at odds with tribal ways and spiritual values.
The power plants that produced the waste are thousands of miles from the reservation, she laments.
"It's not up to a small tribe to save the nation," to solve the nuclear energy industry's waste problem, she said.
She is concerned about radioactive contamination if the waste leaks. The entire community would be affected, not just those who supported the project and the tribal leadership, she said.
PFS is in a hurry to establish the site because some members are running out of room to store exhausted fuel at their reactors. The country still hasn't solved the nuclear waste disposal issue. Nevada is contesting the safety of the proposed disposal site at Yucca Mountain for the nation's highly radioactive waste.
And now the nuclear power industry and the federal government want to build more power plants, Bullcreek said.
"If it's not safe to store at Yucca, why should it be here?" she asks.
N.S. Nokkentved can be reached at 344-2930 or at nnokkentved@heraldextra.com.
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Arizona Republic
November 21, 2004
Top Dem real Westerner
New Senate player sparks interest
Billy House and Mary Jo Pitzl
The Arizona Republic
WASHINGTON - A politically cagey senator who's a Westerner through and through takes over the reins of minority leader when the U.S. Senate returns here in January, leading some to suggest he could be exactly what the ailing Democratic Party needs.
Nevada Sen. Harry Reid's ascension to the top Senate Democrat job may not only bring more congressional focus on issues of particular importance to the Southwest and Mountain states, but could also project a whole new face of Democratic leadership, political analysts say.
"When Harry Reid first ran for Congress, he ran on the slogan 'Harry Reid - independent like Nevada,' " recalls Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University whose specialty is Congress. "And that's really the kind of guy he is." advertisement
"It's a trait Easterners admire in some Western lawmakers - like (Sen. John) McCain in Arizona," adds Baker. "And I think it may take a Westerner like Reid to really be able to recast Democrat issues to make Democrats more palatable to Westerners, in places like Nevada and Arizona."
For the past six years, Reid, 64, has been in the No. 2 post of Democratic whip, his bespectacled and unassuming image often seen on C-Span directing the Senate floor activities of his party. The soft-spoken Mormon has carried out those duties in workmanlike fashion, shunning fiery oratory or self-promotion.
But after the Nov. 2 defeats of both Sen. John Kerry and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, Reid moved swiftly to lock up support to become Daschle's successor, leaving him the most powerful elected Democrat in the nation at a time when the party is struggling to redefine itself.
Knows Western issues
Reid, say friends and foes, brings to his new job as Senate minority leader a personal background and understanding of issues important to Arizona and the West, ranging from future water needs to land management policies that balance rapid growth with conservation.
In what has become the dominant issue in his home state of Nevada, Reid has gained high marks from environmentalists for being the most vocal opponent of building a nuclear waste depository at Yucca Mountain, roughly 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The issue is also important to Arizonans, a state through which some of the material may have to be transported.
In part, Reid expects to use his new position to "see issues that matter more to the West take a more prominent role in Congress," says a Reid spokeswoman, Shannon Eagan.
"I've known Sen. Reid for the better part of my life; we've been friends for years," said Sig Rogich, a Republican strategist from Nevada. "When the needs of the West come up, he won't have to study them. I think it's beneficial to have him in that position - not just for Nevada, but Arizona, New Mexico, Idaho, Utah."
But how far Reid can really go toward bring more Western issues to the forefront in the Senate's is arguable. Democrats lost three other Senate seats in addition to Daschle's on Election Day, dropping its total in the 100-seat Senate to 45.
And as the minority party, the role of Democrats in the Senate "is not to set the agenda," says Jerry Taylor, director of Natural Resources Study at the Washington D.C.-based Cato Institute, an influential public policy think tank.
Rags to riches
Reid, in a news conference last week spoke of his rags-to-riches rise from a tiny gold-mining hamlet in the southern tip of Nevada called Searchlight that he says should show kids now in school: "If I can make it, anyone can."
"It's true that I was raised in a house that had no indoor toilet, had no hot water. My dad worked real hard as a miner, and my mom worked very hard," said Reid, who recalled attending a two-room elementary school.
"My parents were uneducated.... We had no social standing even in Searchlight. We had no religion. We had absolutely no money," he added.
Reid had to leave Searchlight, which had no high school, to attend one in Henderson, a larger town 40 miles away. When he graduated, local businessmen took up a collection to send him to college. Later, he attended George Washington University Law School, working nights supporting his young family as a Capitol Hill police officer. He served in the Nevada state Assembly and by 1970, at the age of 30, became the youngest lieutenant governor in Nevada history. That success was tempered, however, by the suicide of his father in 1972, back at home in Searchlight.
In 1977, Reid was appointed chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission, a post in which he served for five years. He would go on to serve in the U.S. House for two terms before being elected to the Senate in 1986.
Even though Reid won't necessarily make for a charismatic TV presence when called upon by his party to respond to the president's annual State of the Union addresses or other leadership activities, he declared, "I'm not an untested vessel."
"I have been in the Senate for 18 years. I've served for six years as Senator Daschle's assistant. And I think my record speaks for itself on the Senate floor.... I always would rather dance than fight. But I know how to fight," Reid said.
Shrewd operator
In fact, Reid is highly regarded as a shrewd operator who has mastered the Senate's arcane rules and who, in terms of the Democratic Senate legislative initiatives, strategies and mechanics, "will make the trains run on time," Taylor said.
Reid can be expected to be less confrontational that Daschle's "in-your-face" style, said Rogich.
And there are a list of positions Reid takes at odds with the majority of his party.
He opposes abortion, opposes banning assault weapons, and has been a staunch defender of the mining industry, upsetting environmentalists when he opposed tighter regulations on Western mine owners to pay royalties on minerals taken from federally owned lands. He also voted for Bush's tax cuts, and also voted to authorize the use of force against Iraq in October 2002.
But Rogich and others say Republicans would be making a mistake if they doubted Reid's Democratic loyalty and eagerness to battle over issues, even if he does prefer consensus building to political rancor. Beneath that soft-spoken persona, they say, lies a steely spine and a hard-as-nails approach to politics.
Position has limits
Others underscore that being minority leader has it's limits, though.
Cecil Andrus, a former Idaho governor and U.S. secretary of the Interior, said Reid does have a strong understanding of Western issues that have served him well in the Senate. But for all of Reid's sensitivity and experience, Democrat Andrus doesn't think Western issues will fare better in Congress due to Reid's new position.
"It's not Harry's fault. The Republicans have such a dominance that they're going to run amok," said Andus while attending a conference in Boise on forest health.
For instance, Reid filibustered against a Healthy Forest Restoration Act, which was President Bush's approach to addressing the nation's overgrown forests. But he ultimately joined the Senate majority in passing the legislation last fall.
Prof. James Burchfield, associate dean of the College of Forestry and Conservation at the University of Montana, echoed Andrus' doubts.
However, Burchfield said that Western communities themselves are finding a lot to agree upon regarding such things as the West's overgrown forests, and that "perhaps Congress will take its lead from these communities." Having a Westerner in such a prominent post might help, he said.
Expanding Dems' base
Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., said in a conference call with reporters after the Nov. 2 elections that Reid's ascension could also help the Democratic Party expand its base.
"With changing demographics, I think the West is the place Democrats should turn their attention to," she said.
She added: "I'm convinced he's the logical choice at this moment."
Reach the reporter at billy.house@arizonarepublic.com or at 1 (202) 906-8136.
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Lexington Herald Leader
November 21, 2004
Spending Bill
What the government will cost in 2005
Overall bill: For the 2005 federal budget year that began Oct. 1, finances departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Justice, Labor, State, Transportation, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs. Also covers scores of other agencies, foreign aid and Congress's own operations.
Cost: $388 billion. That is 2 percent less than the same programs got last year. Domestic programs covered by the legislation got about a 1 percent increase. To stay within that price tag, as President Bush insisted, all programs in bill will be cut by at least 0.8 percent, with some being cut deeper. (Figures below do not include effects of those across-the-board cuts.)
Programs: Education for disabled $11.8 billion, $600 million over 2004 and $400 million below President Bush's request; NASA $16.2 billion, $500 million over 2004 and same as Bush's request; combating AIDS and other diseases in Africa and other poor nations $2.9 billion, $100 million over Bush; aid to state and local law enforcement agencies $1.3 billion, $90 million less than last year; veterans health care $30.3 billion, $1.9 billion over last year and $1.2 billion more than Bush; $577 million to continue preparing nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., $303 million below Bush.
Legislative provisions: Extends airlines' war and terrorism risk insurance for a year; more leeway for some health-care providers and insurers to not provide or cover abortions.
Provisions not included in the bill: Blocking new administration restrictions on overtime pay; curbing Bush's ability to contract out federal jobs to private companies; liberalizing trade with Cuba; repealing mandatory food labeling showing country of origin.
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Barre Montpelier Times Argus
November 21, 2004
Yankee studies 'dry cask' storage
By Susan Smallheer
Staff Writer
Entergy Nuclear is rapidly running out of storage space for its high-level radioactive fuel at Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon. Under current power production levels, it would run out of space in late 2008. But if it gets approval to boost power production by 20 percent, it will run out of space 18 months earlier, in early 2007.
ROWE, Mass. - The two rows of 10-foot-tall concrete silos look rather benign. But they are surrounded by a chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire and guarded by men armed with assault weapons.
The 16 bunkers contain high-level nuclear waste that will remain deadly for at least 10,000 years.
Inside the silos are stainless steel canisters containing irradiated nuclear fuel whose temperature can reach 400 degrees. But the nuclear fuel is protected by three inches of steel and 21 inches of reinforced concrete. The Yankee Rowe nuclear power plant, located about a half-mile from the Vermont border, has been shut down since 1992. Its owners decided it was cheaper to pull the plug than to fix its deteriorating safety components.
The 185-megawatt plant was the first reactor built in New England and only the third in the country. Now it is one of the first to be dismantled. Its spent nuclear fuel is now stored in what the nuclear industry calls "temporary dry cask storage."
Instead of being kept cool in the bottom of a giant watery pool, the old irradiated fuel is taken out, dried with nitrogen gas, sealed with helium gas in stainless steel containers and put inside vertical concrete bunkers. How long they will stay in the bunkers, no one knows.
Two dozen nuclear plants across the country are building such waste storage sites because the U.S. Department of Energy failed to meet a 1998 deadline to start shipping spent fuel to a long-term nuclear waste storage facility, such as the one proposed at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
Vermont Yankee is expected to run out of storage space in 2008 or early 2007, depending on whether it gets permission to boost power production by 20 percent.
And there's the open question of whether Vermont Yankee will continue running beyond 2012, when its current 40-year federal license expires.
Entergy will apply to the 2005 Legislature and to the state Public Service Board, for permission to build a facility that was never supposed to be needed.
And while nuclear critics and opponents usually support removing the old, highly radioactive fuel from what they consider to be vulnerable fuel pools inside the reactors, they raise questions about increased radiation or "nuclear shine" coming from the small silos and possible increased public exposure.
And they ask publicly just what "temporary" really means in the nuclear world.
Old nuclear fuel was never supposed to be kept on site when plants such as Vermont Yankee and Yankee Rowe were built in the 1960s and '70s. The federal government was supposed to take it away, either for reprocessing or safe storage.
Reprocessing was stopped by President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s as a way of halting the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Since then, used fuel has been piling up at the nation's 104 commercial nuclear reactors.
State authority
Entergy Nuclear bought Vermont Yankee from its New England utility owners in 2002, and at the time the corporation believed it wasn't necessary to obtain permission from the Legislature to build the waste facility.
Ordinarily, the company would only seek permission from the Public Service Board for the project. But a legal opinion from the attorney general's office earlier this year, sought by Senate President pro tempore Peter Welch, D-Windsor, to clarify the dispute changed all that.
The May opinion stated that the 1977 law dealing with the disposal of high-level radioactive waste only exempted "Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Corp.," and said that entity would not have to get state permission again to store waste. But the law made no mention of any potential future owner.
An ill-fated attempt last year by Entergy Nuclear to get the now infamous "four little words" amendment tacked onto a budget bill in the closing days of the 2004 Legislature was ultimately withdrawn.
Those four little words, "its successors or assigns," would have exempted Entergy Nuclear from the state law.
Brian Cosgrove, spokesman for Entergy Nuclear, said Friday that Entergy didn't agree with the interpretation of the 1977 law. But he said the company decided to seek clarification directly from the Legislature rather than fight the matter in court.
Cosgrove said Entergy believes that the 1977 exemption applies to the Vermont Yankee site, not just the old Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Corp., which is now just a business office.
"The intent of the original legislation was to cover the site," Cosgrove said. "And we believe the legislative process is the best place to begin. What's really at stake here is the power contract, which runs through 2012."
Without on-site storage of its old nuclear fuel, Yankee will have to shut down four years early. And with it will go its power contracts with Central Vermont Public Service and Green Mountain Power.
Together, Vermont Yankee provides one-third of all the electricity used in Vermont, Cosgrove said.
"This issue has broader implications than just dry cask storage," he said.
If the Legislature accepts the attorney general's interpretation, Yankee faces a detailed review spelled out in the 1977 legislation.
Entergy is now launching a substantial public relations campaign to win support for the facility.
To that end, it took some southern Vermont legislators, some Vernon town and state officials, media and others on a tour of the Rowe site last week. The intent was to demonstrate how one nuclear reactor handles its high-level waste.
Yankee Rowe has substantially less spent fuel to store, about one-third the amount Vermont Yankee currently has in Vernon. The Yankee Rowe casks are smaller and contain less fuel.
Vermont Yankee plans to use a different design, a cask that would hold more fuel. It is planning at least 36 casks, according to Vermont Yankee spokesman Robert Williams. Engineers are still working on the final design.
Legislative review
Welch, a longtime state senator, said he envisions a detailed examination of Vermont Yankee, its practices and its role in Vermont's energy future this winter.
"This is a critical issue," he said.
"We came within an eyelash of having that power taken away from us," said the Hartland Democrat, referring to the Entergy amendment.
"It is going to be a major issue for the Legislature," Welch said. "It's a very serious issue. It has to be treated in a very serious way. I anticipate comprehensive detailed hearings about what the questions are surrounding Vermont Yankee - not just dry cask, but the other questions about Vermont's energy future.
"It's one of the biggest shortcomings of the Douglas administration," he said. "It simply doesn't have an energy policy."
Welch said he expects Sen. Roderick Gander, D-Windham, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, whose district includes Vermont Yankee, to play a leading role in the review. Welch said two Senate committees, Finance and Natural Resources and Energy, also will play critical roles.
He said many Vermonters have questions about the power boost at the plant, as well as any license extension of Vermont Yankee, whose current license expires in 2012.
David O'Brien, commissioner of the Department of Public Service, said the 1977 law spells out a specific review procedure. He said the Legislature must approve the storage of spent fuel in the new facility before the matter can go to the Public Service Board for a technical review.
O'Brien said that as a result, the Douglas administration won't take a stand on the issue of dry cask storage, because its role is much different under the 1977 law.
"The issue of legislative review has to be resolved," he said.
The 1977 law really lays out a semi-judicial role for the Legislature, he said.
"It's pretty clear that the Legislature at the time wanted to limit the number of parties who would have radioactive fuel stored in the state," O'Brien said.
"There was a fear that Vermont could be host for fuel storage, for other parties," he said. "That's why this statute is as thorough as it is. I didn't think they contemplated a change in ownership."
Until the issue is resolved, he said, his department is part of the "investigative process," providing supporting information to the Legislature.
The Public Service Board, which hears rate cases and similar cases, also will review the project but only after the Legislature, he said.
Raymond Shadis, senior technical adviser for the New England Coalition, an anti-nuclear group, said there were positive aspects to dry cask storage.
"No one wants dry cask storage that will enable the company simply to make more waste," Shadis said. "You don't want the company to walk away from it, and leave it as a problem for the state."
The facility, by nature of its open design, is vulnerable to someone with explosives.
He discounted nuclear industry tests done several years ago, that showed the casks can survive a series of calamities.
"There's a different set of vulnerabilities, explosives, ballistics, they are vulnerable to terrorists," he said. "One wants to make sure there's protections, not just the NRC-type 'wishful thinking' protections," he said.
The casks do emit radiation, he said. An earthen berm was built around the dry cask storage facility at Maine Yankee nuclear power plant to help absorb the radiation, he said.
- Contact Susan Smallheer at susan.smallheer@rutlandherald.com.
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Roanoke Times
November 21, 2004
Send the waste to Yucca Mountain
J. Winston Porter
Porter is president of the Waste Policy Center in Leesburg.
Here in Virginia, 1,875 metric tons of used nuclear fuel has accumulated at the North Anna and Surry nuclear power plant sites. Wouldn't everyone be better off if we could store all that nuclear waste a half-mile deep in a solid geologic formation that hasn't shifted for 50,000 years?
It exists - beneath Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert.
Yucca Mountain was a significant issue in the presidential campaign. President Bush was in favor of it. Sen. John Kerry spoke against using Yucca Mountain.
Yucca Mountain is so remote that a nearby area was used as a test site for nuclear weapons. It is arid and desolate, with no sign of civilization for miles. Within a decade, 77,000 metric tons of nuclear waste from 131 sites around the nation - sites both for nuclear power plants and for defense nuclear installations - are scheduled to be shipped to Yucca Mountain, sealed in reinforced steel containers and stored in tunnels deep inside the mountain.
Congress designated Yucca Mountain as the site for a national waste repository in 1987. Since then, teams of geologists, hydrologists and other scientists have descended on the rocky peak, making it the most researched piece of land anywhere on the planet.
In 2002, President Bush approved an Energy Department recommendation to proceed with waste disposal at Yucca Mountain, and Congress concurred. By the end of this year, the department expects to submit an application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to construct the repository. If all goes according toplan, the first shipments of used nuclear fuel would begin by rail, but not until at least 2010.
Those opposed to the Yucca Mountain repository prefer the status quo. That means leaving all the used fuel rods where they are, indefinitely. Critics maintain that it would be safer to continue storing the nuclear waste at sites in 39 states, many near cities and lakes and rivers.
But these facilities - principally engineered water pools - were not designed for permanent storage, and thus require significant outlays for maintenance and security. A panel of the National Academy of Sciences determined that placing the waste in a deep-underground repository would be much safer than storing it indefinitely at scores of sites around the country.
We are, it should be noted, experienced in transporting used nuclear fuel. Over the past 40 years, about 3,000 shipments of used nuclear fuel have been completed in this country without a major accident that resulted in any release of radiation. Other countries have also been shipping nuclear waste safely.
By opposing Yucca Mountain, anti-nuclear groups have been trying to prevent the operation of nuclear power plants that provide 20 percent of the nation's electricity without depending on foreign nations for fuel or polluting the atmosphere. To those groups, stopping Yucca Mountain is more important that protecting our energy security.
This would leave us with very few options. We can continue to store the used nuclear fuel at nuclear power plant sites and build steel casks to hold additional used fuel rods once the water pools reach capacity. In fact, so-called dry casks already are being used at many nuclear plant sites.
A more responsible approach is to complete the job at Yucca Mountain. Congress must make clear that we will not abandon Yucca Mountain to the tender mercies of anti-nuclear groups, and must provide the funds needed to complete the project without further delay.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
November 20, 2004
Bill means Yucca stays alive but won't thrive
By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Lawmakers agreed Friday to spend $577 million on Yucca Mountain in the next year, enough to keep the nuclear waste project alive but with millions less than the Energy Department had requested.
The spending level probably will force the department to re-evaluate segments of the repository program. DOE had asked Congress to spend $880 million, tripling spending for nuclear waste transportation.
DOE spokesman Joe Davis said the department would comment on the Yucca budget when it becomes final. The funding was inserted into a $388 billion government-wide spending bill that Congress was working to complete this weekend.
The department might choose to juggle its priorities, said Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.
DOE efforts to pursue a repository license have been complicated by a federal appeals court ruling in July that invalidated a 10,000-year radiation safety standard. Also, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission board has ordered DOE to recertify an electronic document database before a license application can be submitted.
"Without the ability to have the license application go forward, they probably will be able to spend some of that money on transportation that they would not have done otherwise," Loux said, including studies of a potential railroad through rural Nevada to the repository complex.
Senior lawmakers who set 2005 spending on energy and water programs compromised on $577 million for Yucca Mountain, the same amount approved last year.
Negotiators declined to add provisions to reclassify a portion of the Yucca Mountain construction fund so that Congress could appropriate larger sums.
Congress also did not address the appeals court ruling.
Aides to Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., said this week that the White House had asked Congress to reinstate the 10,000-year radiation standard voided by the court, a move that would clear a major obstacle for DOE to gain a license.
Officials at the White House Office of Management and Budget denied that any such request had been made.
Efforts to obtain documentation for such a request were unsuccessful. Some congressional officials said it might have been conveyed verbally.
Critics of the Yucca program said a White House request to reinstate the radiation standards would call into question President Bush's comments in Nevada during an Aug. 12 campaign visit that he would abide by court decisions on the project.
Supporters of the program, including officials at the Nuclear Energy Institute, said they would defend attempts to involve Congress. They said the court's ruling specifically left open the possibility that lawmakers might choose to revisit the radiation standard.
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Las Vegas SUN
November 19, 2004
Lawmakers agree on $577 million to keep Yucca Mountain alive
By H. Josef Hebert
Associated Press
Lawmakers agree on $577 million to keep Yucca Mountain alive
WASHINGTON (AP) - Lawmakers agreed Friday to provide enough money to keep alive plans for a nuclear waste dump in Nevada, but they put off trying to resolve a dispute over radiation protection that could doom the project if not resolved.
The compromise limits funding for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste program to $577 million this fiscal year, the same as last year but about two-thirds of the $880 million the Energy Department had said it needed to keep the program on track.
The House had approved only $179 million for the project planned for the Nevada desert 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, an amount that would have essentially shut the program down.
Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee dealing with Yucca Mountain, worked out a compromise with his House counterpart, Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, to come up with more money and keep the program going as part of an omnibus budget package.
Congressional leaders hoped to pass the $388 billion spending measure, covering most federal agencies, by Saturday.
While given enough money keep it operating, the Yucca Mountain project faces numerous thorny problems that must be resolved next year. Already a planned 2010 opening of the waste site is growing increasingly unlikely, say program supporters in Congress and the Bush administration.
A federal court ruled this year that the facility's proposed radiation standards failed to follow National Academy of Sciences recommendations as required by Congress. The Environmental Protection Agency has been trying to rework its standards to meet the court's objection.
The White House tried to get language into the budget legislation that would have ended the requirement that EPA follow the Academy's recommendations. But Republicans backed away from the issue both because they feared it would doom the spending compromise and because of the vehement opposition from Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.
Reid, a staunch opponent of the waste site who will be the Senate's Democratic leader next year, vowed to fight any legislative provision changing the radiation requirements.
The Energy Department had hoped to submit a license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by the end of the year and to develop a transportation plan for moving waste to the site beginning in 2010.
The Yucca Mountain repository, dug into a volcanic ridge near the Nevada Test Site, is being built to hold 70,000 tons of used commercial reactor fuel and high-level defense waste that has been accumulating at sites in 39 states.
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On the Net:
Yucca Mountain project: http://www.ymp.gov
Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management: http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste
Nuclear Regulatory Commission: http://www.nrc.gov
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Reno Gazette-Journal
November 19, 2004
Yucca Mountain funding stays flat
Doug Abrahms
Gannett News Service
WASHINGTON — Congress agreed Friday to fund Yucca Mountain at the same level as last year, providing the nuclear waste project with enough money to continue but not as much as the Bush administration sought.
The White House wanted $880 million for Yucca Mountain, but only received $577 million as the project is expected to start moving through the permit process at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission next month.
“The number is half of what they wanted,’ said Tessa Hafen, spokeswoman for U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., who opposes the project. “It will slow it down.’
But the funding will keep alive the nuclear waste project, which lies about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas and will hold nuclear waste from atomic power plants and government facilities.
The funding will be included in a $388 billion spending bill for much of the government.
Nevada lawmakers also beat back attempts to take control of Yucca Mountain´s funding away from Congress by giving the Energy Department direct access to the nuclear waste fund, which currently holds about $15 billion. Homeowners and other electric ratepayers have paid into the fund for decades to build a nuclear waste repository, but Congress must agree to spend that money each year.
Officials at the Energy Department did not respond Friday to a request for comment.
Nevada´s lawmakers made such an issue over Yucca Mountain funding that it held up next year´s energy and water spending bill. After the House originally approved only $179 million for Yucca Mountain, GOP leaders compromised on $577 million just as Congress was wrapping up this year´s spending bills to fund the government for the current fiscal year.
“We knew this was as good as we could do. It was a battle to hold it to $577 million,’ said U.S. Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev.
Limited funding is only one of many issues that still confront Yucca Mountain. The Energy Department was handed a setback this summer when a federal appeals court ruled the radiation standard for the project must be changed to better follow guidelines set by the National Academies of Science.
The Energy Department maintains that it will file its license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by year´s end, and that nuclear waste will start moving to Nevada by 2010, although many critics say that date is optimistic.
U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Reno, might vote against the massive spending bill to fund most of the government because he opposes any money for Yucca Mountain, spokeswoman Amy Spanbauer said.
“We shouldn´t continue to spend millions upon millions of dollars on the wrong site and a misguided answer to our nuclear waste problem,’ she said. “This is a huge issue for the people in Nevada.’
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Washington Times
November 20, 2004
Yucca's energy role
Over the foreseeable future, increasing nuclear energy's role in electricity generation would be the most environmentally friendly way of addressing concerns about global warming and the health effects of burning fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and natural gas. Unlike electricity generated by these carbon-based fuels, the burning of which constitutes the primary source of the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, nuclear-generated electricity emits no greenhouse gases. Moreover, an energy policy emphasizing a significantly increased role for nuclear power represents sound geopolitical strategy. It would prevent America from becoming as dependent in the near future upon potentially unstable foreign sources for natural gas as it is dependent today upon the Middle East for its growing demand for imported oil.
Throughout the recent campaign, President Bush extolled the benefits of expanding nuclear power. Particularly noteworthy was his success in winning for the second time the five crucial electoral votes of Nevada, a battleground state in which the nuclear issue could not have offered a more striking difference between the two candidates.
Pivotal to an increased role for nuclear power is Yucca Mountain. The designated repository for nuclear waste, Yucca Mountain is located 90 miles from Las Vegas in the Nevada desert. In 2002, Mr. Bush approved Yucca for that purpose, and on Nov. 2, he prevailed again. That isn't to say that Nevadans overwhelmingly endorsed the president's position. Rather, he took a bold stand on a highly politicized issue and lived to pursue its implementation.
Despite the fact that no nuclear power plants have been ordered since the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, Mr. Bush nonetheless endorsed increasing their number. With 45,000 tons of nuclear waste waiting to be transferred to a permanent storage facility, now is the time to move forward on Yucca Mountain. And it is time to pursue the next generation of nuclear power plants.
In recent years, the fuel of choice for new electric-power plants has been natural gas, which burns more cleanly than other carbon fuels (but far less cleanly than nuclear power). The United States, however, could soon become dependent for its natural-gas needs on foreign sources beyond Canada. In ascending order, the countries controlling the largest reserves of natural gas are the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia, which is trying to cartelize the market. For both environmental and national-security needs, nuclear power represents a win-win option.
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Knight-Ridder
November 20, 2004
Spending bill did not include some key items
By James Kuhnhenn
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - As important to what was in a massive spending bill approved by Congress Saturday - $388 billion for domestic programs - is what didn't get in.
House and Senate negotiators eliminated:
-Language that would have restricted the Bush administration's attempts to privatize more federal jobs. President Bush had threatened to veto the bill if such restriction were included.
-Provisions, passed in the House and Senate, that would have eased travel restrictions to Cuba.
-A proposal to do away with country-of-origin labels for many foods.
President Bush himself didn't get everything he wanted.
His education spending proposal came up short, growing by less than 2 percent. His request for $2.5 billion in foreign aid to developing countries that move toward democracy got cut by $1 billion.
The White House also wanted additional money for Yucca Mountain, the proposed site for the disposal of nuclear waste. But the negotiators simply met last year's allotment of $577 million to avoid a fight with opponents of the waste site proposal.
The legislation covered spending for the Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services. It also covered a slew of energy and water projects, and, according to an analysis by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a fiscal watchdog group, 11,700 special spending provisions totaling nearly $15.8 billion.
Those include:
-$250,000 to the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tenn.
-$4.9 million to renovate bath houses at Hot Springs, Ark.
-$25,000 for a banana factory for an after school program in Bethlehem, Penn.
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Deseret News
November 20, 2004
Bishop says Reid killed nuke-waste strategy
By Jerry Spangler
Deseret Morning News
WASHINGTON — Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., was openly displeased when Utah's two Republican senators sided with the White House's plan to ship the nation's stockpile of high-level nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain northwest of Las Vegas — especially after Nevada had supported Utah's opposition to identical wastes.
But would Reid, in retribution, torpedo a Utah plan to block the same wastes from going to Goshute tribal lands in Tooele County?
"Not technically, but yeah, Harry Reid killed it," said Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, the sponsor of the legislation he said is needed to ensure the viability of the Utah Test and Training Range and Hill Air Force Base. "He just got somebody else to do it."
Reid, the newly elected Democratic leader in the Senate, vigorously denied the allegation that he intervened last month to block a rider to the Defense Reauthorization Act that would have designated the Bureau of Land Management lands around Skull Valley as wilderness, potentially blocking the construction of a rail spur needed to transport the waste to tribal lands.
"It's just not true," said Reid spokeswoman Tessa Hafen. "It's absolutely not true. It has nothing to do with (retribution for the Utah senators' votes on) Yucca Mountain."
Reid was not on the conference committee and in no position to directly influence the final language of the bill, Hafen said.
But he did oppose the legislation because he said it was bad policy to designate wilderness — something created by Congress under a law that clearly states it is to be open to the public — and then turn the management of the wilderness over to the U.S. Air Force, as Bishop's legislation specified.
"The Air Force would have the discretion to change the rules on access; and that is just bad wilderness policy," Hafen said.
She maintains Reid is opposed to the transportation of waste on the nation's roads and rails, whether it is to Utah or to Nevada. And in that sense, he supports Utah's fight to keep the waste out of the Beehive State.
So if Reid didn't kill Bishop's legislation, then who did? Hafen said Nevada's other senator, Republican John Ensign, "worked really hard to kill it."
"He took it up for Harry Reid," Bishop said. "The entire goal of the Nevada delegation is to find anything that is an alternative to Yucca Mountain. If Utah is on the table, then Yucca Mountain is less viable."
Ensign's office did not return calls.
Meanwhile, the Yucca Mountain project remains Congress' preferred nuclear waste repository. In a compromise Friday lawmakers budgeted $577 million this fiscal year for Yucca Mountain, the same amount as last year but about a third less than the Energy Department said was required to keep the nuclear waste storage program on track.
A Democratic staff member familiar with the Utah wilderness negotiations pointed fingers at still others in Congress.
"Harry Reid didn't need to have the bill killed because it had plenty of opposition from others on both sides of the aisle," the staffer said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Truth be told, it was (Sen. John) Warner who killed it."
Warner, a Republican from Virginia and the chairman of Armed Services Committee, whose daughter works for an environmental group, was a member of the House-Senate conference committee working out differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill. The irony is that Utah's environmental organizations supported the legislation.
Also opposing the bill was Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.
Warner's office did not return calls, and the Levin staff member who dealt with the issue was out of the office and unavailable for comment.
One House aide pointed out that both Michigan and Virginia are home to nuclear power plants in dire need of a place to store tons of spent nuclear fuel rods, which would explain why Warner and Levin would join together to kill the legislation.
"And never underestimate the nuclear power lobby back here," she said.
Three nuclear power plants in Michigan are owned by a company that is part of Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of mostly Eastern nuclear power utilities that have a contract with the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes to store 40,000 tons of nuclear waste in above-ground canisters on tribal lands about 70 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.
No Virginia plants are listed on the roster of PFS facilities.
Utah's Republican Sens. Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett lobbied their Senate colleagues long and hard to leave the wilderness language in the bill, but to no avail.
The fact Hatch and Bennett could not sway even their Republican colleagues was seen by one House insider as "troubling," perhaps an indication that lawmakers from Eastern states with nuclear power plants are quietly supporting the Goshute proposal as a "fallback" in the event Yucca Mountain is delayed or canceled.
The Utah site would be "temporary" storage inasmuch as the contract is for 20 years with an option for a 20-year renewal. But Utah officials have been fighting the proposal, fearing that temporary storage would become permanent and citing a litany of environmental and public health concerns.
Blocking PFS through the wilderness designation was only one aspect of the legislation, Bishop said. More importantly, it was designed to protect the Utah Test and Training Range west of Hill Air Force Base.
An above-ground nuclear waste facility would be located in the direct flight path of fighter jets.
"If they had proposed a site anywhere else, it would not have nearly the significance for the future of UTTR and Hill," Bishop said. "Building it where they want to puts Dugway (Proving Ground) at risk, and it makes one-third of the test and training range unusable. It is very much a military issue."
With another round of hearings slated on the closure of additional military bases, Bishop said the viability of the range is critical to making the argument that Hill is essential to the Air Force's live-fire training.
"Hill Air Force Base is a national asset that cannot be understated," he said. "And storing nuclear waste in above-ground canisters is not the way to protect it from encroachment."
Bishop said the bill is dead for this year but he will try the legislation again next year.
- E-mail: spang@desnews.com
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Las Vegas SUN
November 19, 2004
Spending bill includes $577 million for Yucca
Reid aide nominated for nuke commission
By Suzanne Struglinski
<suzanne@lasvegassun.com>
Sun Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Congressional leaders, scrambling to finalize a massive spending bill, agreed on a Yucca Mountain budget after a long night of meetings, ending much political wrangling and behind-the-scenes negotiations.
The nuclear waste project budget for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1 would be $577 million, the same budget as the last fiscal year, said Tessa Hafen, spokeswoman for Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.
The Energy and Water Spending bill is finalized and there is little chance the number would change. The bill does not contain any proposed change to the Environmental Protection Agency's radiation standard.
At the center of the Yucca deal-making were Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., a leading pro-Yucca lawmaker, and Reid, who has long battled Yucca and was elected this week to lead the Senate Democrats.
The Energy Department asked for $880 million, and after a fight over how to fund it, the House only approved $131 million. The Energy Department, which is trying to submit its license application for Yucca Mountain to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by the end of the year, has not said how the final budget will affect the project.
Hafen said the $577 million is not ideal for Reid, but when starting at an almost $1 billion request, it is almost half of the amount the department wanted.
Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, agreed to small across-the-board cuts for all other projects to make up the money needed to fund the Yucca projet, Hafen said.
Back-room debate over Yucca took a leading role this week in a lame-duck session of Congress. Lawmakers have been working feverishly to finalize a $388 billion budget bill for federal agencies and domestic programs, and Yucca was one of a handful of important sticking points.
Reid tried as he does every year to slice the budget. Domenici fought to maintain at least the same level of funding as last year.
Lawmakers are trying to get work done by this evening or Saturday before they leave the Capitol until the new session starts in January.
The giant measure contains extra money for priorities such as veterans and the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan, and likely thousands of projects for lawmakers' home districts.
But the legislation was largely defined by Bush's demands for curbs on domestic spending, with only modest increases for favorites such as education and cuts for some of the president's own initiatives.
"Everybody took hits," said House Appropriations Committee Chairman Bill Young, R-Fla., a chief author of the measure. "There will be members who aren't totally satisfied, but we were committed to stay within the budget number."
In other news, it was unclear today where Reid's nomination to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission -- one of Reid's top aides, Greg Jaczko -- stood. The commission ultimately would license and regulate Yucca. Domenici and other pro-Yucca lawmakers oppose the nomination.
Reid was working to include Jaczko in a large nominations package under negotiation. The package could contain up to 100 different people awaiting confirmation including nominees for federal judgeships, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, assistant U.S. attorney and other federal positions. Reid has a hold on a number of those nominations, although not judges.
Hafen said Reid is determined to get Jaczko on the commission, so if Domenici wants to hold his nomination up he will bring down the entire nominations package.
"Sen. Reid is very serious about that," Hafen said.
Reid will lift his hold on other nominees as long as Jaczko is in the package, so the ball will be in Domenici's court, Hafen said.
Domenici spokesman Chris Gallegos said he did not know where the situation stood earlier today.
The debate on Jaczko's nomination was held up largely this year by Republicans who said they wanted to consider a Republican nominee and they would wait to move both together.
On Monday the White House nominated Albert Henry Konetzni Jr. of New York for a spot on the commission.
Konetzni retired as a Navy vice admiral in July after 38 years, according to the White House. He was a nuclear submariner.
He served as deputy commander of the U.S. Fleet Forces Command and U.S. Atlantic Fleet. He received his bachelor's degree from the United States Naval Academy and his master's degree from George Washington University, according to the White House nomination announcement issued Monday.
Mitch Singer, spokesman for the pro-Yucca Nuclear Energy Institute, said the group would prefer both Jaczko and Konetzni go through the appropriate hearing process, rather than be pushed through during the final hours of a lame-duck session.
"This thing needs to go through a full confirmation," Singer said. "We'd rather see them not rush it."
The Nuclear Energy Institute and some senators oppose Jaczko's nomination because they see him as possibly biased due to his past work in Reid's office against the proposed nuclear waste storage site planned for Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
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Reno Gazette-Journal
November 19, 2004
Letters to the Editor for Nov. 19, 2004
Nuclear plant waste won´t be ‘recycled´
The headline “Experts discuss recycling spent nuclear fuel,’ from the Nov. 10 RGJ is misleading.
When you take your bottles to the recycle center, they are crushed and the glass is reforged. The material is used again; that is recycling. However, once the atom is split, the nuclear fuel is used. There is no recycling here.
What is being discussed is called reprocessing with a nuclear transmutation aspect attached. To use the word recycle gives the process a “green’ connotation that it does not deserve. The existing reprocessing method is very dirty and is the major problem with radioactive contamination at the Department of Energy´s Hanford Reservation with on the order of 50 million gallons of highly radioactive waste left over from reprocessing.
As long as we split the atom, there will be highly radioactive fission products to deal with. The plutonium (and other fissile nuclei) created in a nuclear reactor can be extracted from the waste, but this is not recycling. Most of the waste is uranium 238 that is mildly radioactive and a heavy metal toxin, which would be expelled as a waste product still requiring “disposal.’
John Hadder, Reno
Your article about how scientists want to handle spent nuclear fuel uses two very different terms interchangeably: reprocessing and recycling.
Reprocessing refers to the separation of plutonium from spent nuclear fuel. The United States has had a long-standing policy to not reprocess due to serious proliferation risks and environmental concerns. Yet, the Bush administration is attempting to fund the research and development of this polluting and dangerous process.
In contrast, recycling — a term co-opted by the nuclear industry — refers to a plan that would involve selling materials contaminated with radioactivity, such as metal and plastic, to recyclers and manufacturers, who could then use those materials to make consumer products such as utensils, cookware, bicycles and telephones. This forces radiation exposure on the public without its knowledge or consent, and increases public health risks. By dumping the nuclear-waste problem on the public, rather than spending money to clean it up, companies can remove themselves from any liability of the dangers of nuclear waste.
Neither process would alleviate the problems with Yucca Mountain. As long as our 103 nuclear reactors continue to churn out nuclear waste, we will always be faced with the same dilemma: what to do with our nuclear waste.
Wenonah Hauter
Director, Energy Program, Public Citizen, Washington, D.C.
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Guardian
November 19, 2004
$388B Spending Bill May Face Votes Soon
By Alan Fram
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - Lawmakers and White House budget bargainers whittled their differences to a handful, fueling hopes Congress can speed an overdue $388 billion bill to President Bush that finances most federal agencies.
The giant measure, which may be ready for votes by late Friday, bears extra money for priorities like veterans and the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan, and likely thousands of projects for lawmakers' home districts.
But it was largely colored by Bush's demands for curbs on domestic spending, with only modest increases for favorites like education and cuts for some of the president's own initiatives.
The same budget pressures that squeezed the spending bill forced Republicans to push another measure through Congress late Thursday that will raise the government's debt limit by $800 billion. That would bring to $2.23 trillion the total borrowing increases Bush has needed in his four years in the White House - more than all the debt the country accumulated from its founding through 1986.
The new federal borrowing cap would be $8.18 trillion. The House approved the increase by a mostly party-line 208-204 vote, a day after it won Senate passage. Its passage was not in doubt because the alternative was a jarring federal default, but it was nonetheless a battlefield for partisan finger-pointing.
``I understand there's been an election, I understand you won and I commend you for it,'' said Rep. Charles Stenholm, D-Texas, who was defeated last month after a 26-year career as one his party's most stalwart deficit hawks. ``But that also means you have the responsibility for your actions'' because the GOP controls the White House and Capitol Hill.
Democrats said GOP tax cuts were the problem and that the measure should have been accompanied by a revival of a requirement that the budget be cut to pay for any tax cuts or spending increases. Republicans said Democratic cries for fiscal responsibility contrasted with their frequent calls for higher spending.
``There's nothing like a reformed lady of the evening,'' said Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind.
In a written statement aimed at reassuring the financial markets that federal borrowing would be unimpeded, the White House said Bush would sign the legislation by Monday.
``The president commends the Congress for passing the debt limit increase. Passage of this legislation was important to protect the full faith and credit of the United States,'' the statement said.
The debt-limit vote and the progress on the spending bill came with lawmakers eager to end their lame duck session by the weekend. Leaders also hope to approve an overhaul of intelligence agencies before departing.
The spending bill contains $14.8 billion for programs for low-income students, 2.5 percent more than last year. Biomedical research by the National Institutes of Health would grow 2 percent to $28.4 billion, well below the robust boosts it won in recent years.
Veterans' health care would grow to $30.3 billion, $1.9 billion over last year but less than veterans groups wanted. Aid for refugees in Sudan would be $404 million, including $93 million to be transferred from Iraq reconstruction money that is being spent at a snail's pace.
But the bill would cut grants for local water improvements and research supported by the National Science Foundation, and hold the federal subsidy for Amtrak to $1.2 billion, the same as this year.
Ending one lingering dispute, lawmakers agreed to $577 million, the same as last year, to continue developing a nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, one lawmaker said.
Late problems included an effort by some legislators to curb Bush's plan to contract out federal jobs to private businesses, as well as a plan to pay for some of the bill's increases by cutting unspent defense funds.
Spending-bill bargainers also sorted through a stack of policy changes that lawmakers and lobbyists were trying to shove into one of the last measures Congress will approve this year.
Congressional aides said they believed a milk subsidy extension sought by Midwesterners and an effort to repeal required country-of-origin labels for meat would not make the final bill. Also thwarted was a drive to ease rules designed to protect endangered species from pesticides, the aides said.
The spending measure, covering the government budget year that started Oct. 1, is an amalgamation of nine separate bills financing all federal agencies except the Pentagon and the Homeland Security Department.
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New York Times
November 19, 2004
Congressional Leaders Work on Compatible Spending Bill
By Edmund L. Andrews
WASHINGTON, Nov. 18 - Working behind closed doors, House and Senate leaders struggled Thursday to resolve differences on a $388 billion spending bill that would squeeze dozens of domestic programs and favor a few.
Under pressure to show progress in reducing the budget deficit, White House officials threatened that President Bush would veto any measure that exceeded the spending limits set earlier this year. But they also warned lawmakers not to shortchange some of Mr. Bush's priorities, like his plan for preliminary work on a mission to Mars.
"The president's senior advisers would recommend that he veto any bill that exceeds the agreed-upon spending limits" or that uses "unacceptable budgetary devices" to disguise the true level of spending, wrote Joshua B. Bolten, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.
The much-delayed bill lumps together nine individual spending bills that Congress failed to pass during its regular session, mainly because of bruising tug-of-wars in a year when discretionary spending outside of defense and domestic security has essentially been frozen.
Mr. Bush has yet to veto a single spending bill, and federal spending has soared since he took office, but the administration is under increasingly intense pressure to show a tougher hand on spending cuts.
House Republican aides said that they had narrowed most of their major differences with the White House and that the remaining battles were mostly about individual programs rather than overall spending levels.
The total spending package at issue now is still about $4 billion higher than White House officials wanted. Lawmakers would pay for that by imposing an across-the-board budget cut of three-quarters of a percent on the agencies being financed.
As negotiators worked into the evening on Thursday, they continued to wrestle over spending on President Bush's Millennium Challenge program, which provides grants to impoverished nations, as well as over financing for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. But they did add in energy programs, including $800 million for the nuclear waste disposal site planned for Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
Lawmakers also stripped out a provision, passed by the Senate and House, that would have blocked the Labor Department from enforcing new rules on overtime pay. Labor unions and many other groups complained that the new rules deny overtime pay for millions of workers, especially in white-collar jobs, but the administration insisted the old rules were outdated and fostered litigation.
Over all, the bills would increase domestic discretionary spending, not including military and domestic security, about 2 percent this year. After adjusting for inflation, that would translate to a freeze on spending with cuts in many areas.
With money tight, Congressional Republican leaders have been in a tug-of-war with the Bush administration over which programs would get any increases at all.
President Bush had sought $16.2 billion for NASA, but House and Senate lawmakers originally wanted to provide about $1 billion less. By Thursday, aides on the House Appropriations Committee said the bill would provide about $15.9 billion.
The House voted 208 to 204 late Thursday night to increase the federal debt ceiling by $800 billion, enough to allow the federal government to keep borrowing for about another year at its current pace.
Coming one day after the Senate passed an identical measure, the vote will prevent the federal government from running out of cash and allow it to proceed with its next scheduled sale of Treasury securities on Monday.
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Guardian
November 18, 2004
House Ready to Send Bush Debt-Limit Hike
By Alan Fram
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - Democrats accused Republicans of disastrous economic policies as Congress moved Thursday toward shipping President Bush an $800 billion increase in the federal borrowing limit.
The House prepared to vote final approval for the boost as White House and bipartisan congressional bargainers moved to the verge of agreement on a year-end spending package expected to total $388 billion. Negotiators said just a handful of issues remained unresolved, and a package might be ready for votes by late Friday.
With the government facing imminent default because it has depleted its authority to borrow money, the debt limit bill would pump up its borrowing cap to $8.18 trillion. That is 70 percent the size of the entire U.S. economy, and more than $2.4 trillion higher than the debt Bush inherited upon taking office in 2001.
``Our great-great-great-great-grandkids are going to pay it back with interest, to China and the others who are financing our government and our spendthrift ways,'' Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., argued during House debate.
Rep. Thomas Reynolds, R-N.Y., countered: ``We can demagogue it. We can keep putting on all sorts of messages to feel good or draw political lines. ... But the reality is, we keep screwing around with this thing, we're going to shut the government down.''
Lawmakers hope to end their postelection session, which began Tuesday, by passing both the spending and debt-limit measures and possibly an intelligence agency overhaul by this weekend.
Negotiators spent Thursday clearing away final disputes on the massive spending bill. They agreed to $577 million, the same as last year, to continue developing a nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, one lawmaker said.
Remaining problems included an effort by some legislators to curb Bush's plan to contract out federal jobs to private businesses, as well as a plan to pay for some of the bill's increases by cutting unspent defense funds.
The bill would grant increases to priorities like veterans' health care and the FBI, and will probably contain thousands of home-district projects.
Hewing to Bush's demands to curb domestic spending, it also would cut grants for local water improvements and research supported by the National Science Foundation, while holding the federal subsidy for Amtrak to $1.2 billion, the same as this year.
Aid to help refugees in Sudan's war-torn Darfur province would be $404 million, including $93 million to be transferred from Iraq reconstruction money that is being spent at a snail's pace.
Spending-bill bargainers also sorted through a stack of policy changes that lawmakers and lobbyists were trying to shove into one of the last measures Congress will approve this year.
Congressional aides said they believed a milk subsidy extension sought by midwesterners and an effort to repeal required country-of-origin labels for meat would not make the final bill. Also thwarted was a drive to ease rules designed to protect endangered species from pesticides, the aides said.
The spending measure, covering the government budget year that started Oct. 1, is an amalgamation of nine separate bills financing all federal agencies except the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security. Republicans put off the legislation until after the election because of fights over spending levels and legislative riders.
The GOP-led Senate approved the debt limit increase on Wednesday, 52-44, almost strictly along party lines.
The fight over raising the debt limit has become a staple of the Bush years, which will have now seen three such increases and two consecutive record annual deficits.
The government reached the current $7.38 trillion cap last month, paying its bills since with investments from a civil service retirement account, which it plans to repay. Even so, Republican leaders postponed the showdown vote until after the election, realizing Democrats would use the issue to highlight the red ink of the Bush years.
``This issue is easy to demagogue'' and vote against, said Rep. David Dreier, R-Calif. ``But it's not the right thing to do.''
Democrats blame Bush's tax cuts and a GOP refusal to require budget savings to pay for tax reductions or spending increases.
``I am not going to ratify a policy that I believe is going to drive this country to the brink of ruin,'' said Rep. Charles Stenholm, D-Texas, a longtime deficit hawk who conceded that his opposition to tax cuts contributed to his defeat on Election Day.
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The Nation
November 18, 2004
Why Bush Scored in Nevada
by Sasha Abramsky
(December 6, 2004 issue)
Nevada went for Bush, but it shouldn't have.
No, I don't mean that its voting machines were rigged, or that Republicans engaged in widespread voter intimidation. What I mean is that on most big-ticket issues--on the sorts of issues that, historically, elections turn on--most Nevadans disagreed more with the national Republican Party than they did with the Democrats. On what is arguably the single biggest issue facing the state, the opening of a vast nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, a statewide survey conducted by the Office of the Governor's Agency for Nuclear Projects in the run-up to the election showed that 77 percent were opposed to the project, which is supported by Bush but opposed by Kerry. Knocking on doors, canvassers also found strong unease about the direction of the war in Iraq, the state of the economy and job security--the critical "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" litmus test posited by no less a conservative icon than Ronald Reagan. They also expressed concern about Bush's water distribution policies in the arid West, about recent judicial rulings encroaching on Native American tribal sovereignty--a big issue in Nevada--about Bush's proposals on Social Security, the lack of affordable healthcare, the price of gasoline and so on.
Yet on election day, George W. Bush won Nevada by 21,567 votes--mirroring the nation, the split was 51 percent to 48 percent. This was just slightly slimmer than the 21,597 edge Bush enjoyed four years earlier.
"The worst part is not comprehending the other side," says Sheila Leslie, a liberal State Assemblywoman from the northern city of Reno. "I've talked to many, many people who voted for that man, and I still don't understand it. They agree he's wrong on Iraq, tax cuts, the environment, and they still voted for him. The tipping point, they can't seem to articulate. They didn't line up the policies of the President with their own personal views, because if they'd done so they would have voted for John Kerry. It was a gut vote, not an intellectual one. It makes no sense. It wasn't a rational vote."
Indeed, many Nevadans who voted for Bush turned around and supported Democrats in other races. Sheila Leslie's share of the vote went from 53 percent in 2002 to 63 percent this time around. In the Washoe County area, of which Reno makes up the major part, Democrats picked up two State Assembly seats, helping to insure that the State Assembly stayed in Democratic hands and balancing a Republican State Senate and a moderate Republican governor (who used to be a Democrat), Kenny Guinn. Democrat Harry Reid--soon to become Nevada's first Senate minority leader--was comfortably re-elected (though Reid made sure to ally himself with the gun lobby and the mining interests, and appealed to culturally conservative Bush voters with his anti-choice stand). And a state minimum-wage initiative passed overwhelmingly. Moreover, legislators who had supported Governor Guinn's move to raise $900 million in taxes in 2003 as an emergency measure to keep the state's schools open were mostly re-elected--despite harsh campaigns against them by right-wing Republicans and conservative media outlets.
Strategists on both sides point to cultural issues as a crucial factor in Kerry's defeat. "The economy, taxes, healthcare, that was lower down the list," says Earlene Forsythe, chair of the Nevada GOP and a longtime Washoe County resident. "The number-one issue was morals." Number two, according to Forsythe, was terrorism. AP exit poll data actually suggested a slightly more complex scenario: Fully one-quarter of voters said terrorism was their number-one concern, and 88 percent of these voters supported Bush. Number two was Iraq--and the voters who cited that as their top issue broke solidly for Kerry. But number three, beating out the economy and taxes, was morals, and three-quarters of those voters chose Bush. Forsythe says the Republicans identified and targeted two key new-voter blocs in Nevada: the "moral moms" and the "security moms." "They felt safer with Homeland Security with Bush at the head," Forsythe explains. "He promised to bring it to the terrorists and keep it away from our homeland. So they trusted him."
Analysts on the Democratic side agree that many voters were primarily motivated by these concerns, although they are less certain about why. "Whenever a group of people will vote for a President, put a man in power and do that against their own self-interest, their economic self-interest..." begins Richard "Skip" Daly, business manager of the Laborers, Hod Carriers, Cement Workers and Miners Local Union 169, before stopping and rewording his thought. He tries again: "They voted for a Republican who's got the biggest deficit spending ever; they voted against all of their self-interest. And the issue that came out in exit polling was 'we voted on the moral values.' What that says to me is, these people believe it's more important than their family's well-being that we don't have abortion. And, to me, that is an intolerance that we have not experienced in this country since we put into insignificance the Ku Klux Klan."
With five Electoral College votes, Nevada was one of the key swing states of the desert West. Much of the pro-Kerry effort was focused on the state's second city, Reno, nestled in a high desert bowl, surrounded by mountains that, by the time of the election, were thickly blanketed in snow.
Almost every week, from early September onward, hundreds of volunteers--mobilized by trade unions, by grassroots organizations such as America Coming Together and MoveOn.org, and by the Democratic Party itself--turned out to canvass the town. They reminded people at the door that 86,000 Nevadans had lost their health insurance since Bush came into office, that workers were losing overtime pay because of new laws rammed through by Bush's Congressional allies; they talked to Latino immigrants about deportations, detention without trial and other rollbacks of the rights of migrants; talked to Native Americans at the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony about tribal sovereignty. The week before the election, it seemed that half of Northern California's activists had decamped across the rugged Sierra Nevada, driving I-80 over the winter-wonderland landscape of the Lake Tahoe area, 7,000 feet above sea level, down into the old casino-lined streets of downtown Reno and out into the desert suburbs, to put on one last great push for John Kerry.
Reno was bombarded with an unprecedented number of TV and radio political ads. Kerry came to speak before a crowd of 12,000 people, Edwards visited, Teresa Heinz Kerry visited, Elizabeth Edwards came to the county three times, Bush came twice (the first President to campaign in Reno since Reagan, in 1984, says Forsythe) and Laura Bush and Dick Cheney each dropped in three times.
The Kerry campaign's Nevada strategy was to shore up the Democratic majority in Clark County, home to Las Vegas and to about two-thirds of the state's population, and to tamp down the Republican majority in Washoe County, home to roughly 20 percent of the state's population. It didn't work. When the votes were tallied, the Democrats had managed to narrow Bush's margin in Washoe County to 4 percent, down from 9 percent in 2000; but that achievement was diluted by the fact that 67 percent of Washoe County's registered voters came out to vote, a lower percentage than in any other county in the state--thus numerically diminishing the signficance of Kerry's percentage gains there. And the strategy failed entirely in Las Vegas. In Clark County Kerry did win, but only by 26,000 votes, out of a total of over half a million cast, nowhere near enough to cancel out the conservative bent of the rest of the state.
This was particularly disappointing given that the county had nearly 44,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans. Indeed, according to an article by John Judis, posted on the online version of The New Republic in August, in the first eight months of 2004 Democrats picked up a net gain over the Republicans of more than 15,000 new registered voters in Clark County, much of it due to the registration of Latino migrants. One Latino group alone, Voices for Working Families, claimed to have registered 23,324 new voters by late September.
But after all was said and done, on election day Latino voters, in particular, appeared to respond to the Republican Party's conservative "morals" message--as large numbers of Latinos also did in Reno, according to both Democratic and GOP strategists there. Before the election, newspapers reported that Republican strategists thought they would need 40 percent of the Latino vote to win. AP exit poll data suggest they hit that target.
After the election, local Republicans were gleeful that their focus on "values" had paid off. "The Republicans embraced family values and morals, which is what this race was all about," Washoe County Republican Central Committee spokesman Bob Larkin argues. "The liberal portion of the Democratic Party was ostracizing Latinos because of their family values, and the Republican Party was embracing them." The GOP's Forsythe also believes this issue won it for Bush in Nevada. "We were able to get the Christian vote out," she says proudly. "The people from the churches. We went fishing where the fishes are. We targeted precincts. 'Moral moms' wanted to get back to family values. They're not antigay, but they're anti-gay marriage. That was very important to them--and abortion."
Catholic churches like Little Flower, in southwest Reno, had targeted Latino voters with pamphlets and sermons on abortion and gay marriage. Canvassers in Latino neighborhoods found that especially among men, these were bedrock issues--far more so than was the case in white communities in Reno, where more people were concerned about terrorism and Iraq, and where the Republicans concentrated more on pushing the fear buttons. "We would knock on a door where the woman is the citizen," says Tahis Castro, a 61-year-old, originally from Costa Rica, and a longtime organizer with the Culinary Workers Union. "And the husband, who is not a citizen, comes up and asks, 'Is he supporting gay marriage between man and man, and woman and woman?" The Republicans saturated the two Spanish-language TV stations, Univision and Azteca America, with ads on terrorism and taxes--but even more so on "values" and religion.
By contrast, on the English-language stations, the infamous wolves ad ran more frequently than ads about "values." Anti-Kerry spots also ran--on the Karl Rove principle of shoring up your own weak spots by attacking your opponent's strong suits--accusing Kerry of flip-flopping on Yucca Mountain, leaving unsaid the fact that Bush was strongly in favor of the dump.
On election day Spanish radio ads warned those who hadn't yet cast ballots about the moral carnage that would result from a Kerry victory. And GOP precinct organizers worked their lists, feeding off an unprecedented statewide effort that involved more than 2 million mail drops and more than 200,000 volunteer phone calls, and using PalmPilots to e-mail back to local HQ the names of likely Republican voters who hadn't yet voted, who needed to be prodded to turn out as the day wore on.
Castro says that union canvassers tried to hammer home the message that the election was about "jobs, overtime, healthcare, education for Latinos and respect on the job." Yet it appears that a substantial minority of union members didn't respond. In 2000 fully 49 percent of union members who voted in Nevada favored Bush. The data for 2004 is not yet fully available, although exit polls suggested 43 percent union support for Bush in Nevada, consistent with the nationwide figure for this year's election.
At the same time, outside Nevada's urban centers, in the sparsely populated, non-unionized rural counties, Bush consolidated his support, apparently defeating Kerry on "morals," especially among the Mormon communities of eastern Nevada, and also on wedge issues of more concern to Western Goldwater/McCain Republicans. Hunters and sportsmen, fired up by a strongly pro-Second Amendment speech delivered by Cheney in the conservative community of Elko and buoyed by the Republican Party's leafleting of Nevada's gun shops, came out against the Democrats' gun-control policies--policies that some Western progressives say must now change. The Democrats, says Bob Fulkerson, director of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada (who took time off from his non-partisan job to campaign for the Democrats) should say something "about the sanctity of the right to keep and bear arms. In the West, it's part of what we're about. It kills us with labor unions here. I'll bet a hundred dollars that the labor voters who voted for Bush did so on guns. They're hunters and love their guns."
The mining industry--and, the county results suggest, many mine workers--reacted against Kerry's calls for stricter environmental standards and antipollution measures. And ranchers came out against "big government"--which the Democrats are seen here to be creatures of. "The Bureau of Land Management in rural Nevada is like Satan," explains 74-year-old Nevada historian Jim Hulse, professor emeritus at the University of Nevada in Reno and author of books such as The Silver State, over a coffee in his house west of downtown. "BLM people are not at all welcome in their efforts to manage the range lands or restrict off-road usage. They're anathema to rural Nevada." In counties defined by mining and ranching, Bush got two to three times as many votes as Kerry.
These disparate groups, when added to the much larger urban vote totals from Las Vegas and Reno, proved numerically strong enough to keep Nevada red.
Three days after the election I headed to Reno and parked myself in the gaudy Circus Circus casino-hotel--one of only two fully unionized casinos in the city--for four days, in a twelfth-floor room looking out across the gridlike streets to the snowy slopes beyond. The casinos were in full swing, and the video arcades at Circus Circus--with games-of-the-times like Target Terror--were jammed, as were the bars, strip clubs and instant-wedding chapels around town. As I listened to conversations, hardly anybody seemed to be talking politics. Reno must be a particularly galling town for obsessive political types to live in; it is, after all, where people come to deliberately block out the "real world," the world of politics and wars (the Falluja offensive was just getting under way) and economic uncertainties, behind a great canopy of blinking, twitching neon pizazz.
There was an irony in talking with residents about the electoral victory of moral fundamentalism while garrisoned in a junior version of Sin City, surrounded by casinos and bars and topless cabarets, by porno booths and, in the desert counties outside town, legalized brothels. Quite clearly, these sin palaces were not about to go out of business anytime soon. In fact, the economic elite of northe