Yucca Mountain News Clips
Saturday, June 18, 2005
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Deseret News
June 18, 2005
Goshute nuclear plan flayed
About 50 in House sign letter opposing storage
By Jerry Spangler
Deseret Morning News
WASHINGTON — More than four dozen Democratic House members have signed a letter written by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, urging the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to reject a license application by Private Fuel Storage to store spent nuclear fuel on Goshute tribal lands in Utah's Tooele County.
Kucinich, who is still seeking co-signers for the letter to be sent next week, called the proposal "unjust, extremely dangerous and unnecessary. The history of exploitation and racism carried out towards Native Americans by the U.S. government is well documented, and we must not relive it."
Among the signers is Rep. Shelley Berkley, a Nevada Democrat who is joining the PFS fight even though many in the Utah delegation have been lukewarm in supporting Nevada's opposition to a permanent spent-fuel waste dump at Yucca Mountain.
None of the three Utah members of the House had seen the letter as of Friday, but all were supportive.
"I applaud him for what he's doing," said Scott Parker, spokesman for Rep. Bishop, R-Utah. He added the Utah delegation has sent its fair share of letters to the NRC asking for the same thing.
Charles Isom, spokesman for Rep. Chris Cannon, R-Utah, said Cannon hasn't seen the letter but has signed similar letters by the delegation in the past.
The staff of Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, is reviewing the letter. The congressman had not yet seen it.
Kucinich, one of the few presidential candidates to campaign in Utah during the past election, said it "is unjust for the United States to target a destitute and vulnerable Native American tribe" and that the Skull Valley band of Goshutes possesses an "inextricable spiritual attachment to the land they inhabit, and many tribal members say it is all they have left."
Despite the opposition voices of Kucinich and the others, the NRC is widely expected to ratify the recommendation of the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) to grant PFS a license to store up to 40,000 tons of nuclear waste for up to 40 years at the site about 70 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. Utah officials, who have been fighting the proposal during the licensing process, recently lost another round before the ASLB to reconsider its earlier ruling.
A consortium of nuclear power utilities that makes up PFS could begin shipments of spent fuel to Utah within another year or so, depending on the result of the state's inevitable court challenges to the license.
Kucinich echoed what others critics, including Utah officials, have said for years.
"This proposal is a safety risk to all Americans along the transportation routes to the proposed facility," he wrote. "Transporting casks cross-country creates the possibility of a potentially catastrophic radioactivity release due to an accident or terrorist attack."
The letter says that nuclear waste could be a primary terrorist target and that handling and transportation of nuclear waste increases the likelihood of accidents.
"Transportation routes proposed by rail, road and barge could pass through as many as 44 states and the District of Columbia, putting the waste within half a mile of 50 million people," he said. "Transportation of such high volumes of nuclear waste would put virtually every part of the country at risk."
Kucinich also said dry casks like the ones that would be used in Skull Valley are an unproven technology and have had problems with hairline fractures, explosions due to chemical reactions and welding failures.
"There is no good reason to construct this facility, but there are many reasons to oppose it. PFS' proposal is dangerous to Americans, violates the rights of the Skull Valley band of Goshutes and is not in our national interest," he wrote.
E-mail: spang@desnews.com
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St. George Daily Spectrum
June 18, 2005
Senate panel OKs nuke bomb study
Matheson says he will battle against $4 million for 'bunker buster' work
By Dennis Camire
Our Capitol Bureau
WASHINGTON - Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, said Friday that he would continue to fight a Senate panel's move to pay for a study of a nuclear "bunker buster" weapon.
The Senate Appropriations Committee approved $4 million for the Air Force to study a small nuclear weapon designed to penetrate deep underground to destroy enemy bunkers. It's included in a $31.2 billion spending bill for the nation's energy and water programs.
The House approved its $29.7 billion energy and water bill May 24 but for the second year in a row did not include money for the weapon's study.
Matheson said his top reason for wanting to fight against the $4 million study of the "bunker buster" was the potential that it could lead to testing the new weapons in Nevada.
"We have a long history of that testing having created health problems and cancer deaths in Utah and other states," he said. "The government lied before about it, and I don't trust it now."
The congressman also said he was concerned that the Pentagon was wasting money on new weapons systems that would never be used.
"We ought to be spending money to develop new weaponry and innovations that would be used in the actual field of battle," he said. "I'm not convinced that we would ever want to use one of these ('bunker buster') weapons."
A National Academies of Science report in May concluded that the use of such a weapon in an urban area could cause up to a million civilian casualties, even if design problems could be overcome.
Matheson said there was a bipartisan group led by Rep. David L. Hobson, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, fighting to keep the bunker buster study from being done.
Hobson has been an outspoken opponent of the bunker buster for years and was successful in keeping it from being funded last year, Matheson said.
"The House made it clear that emphasizing 'bunker busters' threatens public support for maintaining the deterrence value of our nation's nuclear stockpile in a way that threatens national security," Matheson said. "I support that conclusion."
Matheson said he would continue to press for removal of the bunker buster money when House and Senate negotiators meet to work out the differences between their respective chambers' versions of the bill.
Other funding in the Senate version of the bill includes $577 million for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository and $339 million for a mixed oxide fabrication facility to turn spent nuclear fuel and plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons into fuel for nuclear reactors.
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Los Angeles Times
June 18, 2005
Letter To The Editor
Nuclear Energy: Risks and Rewards
Re "Nuclear Waste Outpaces Solutions," June 12: During the two-year period, 1991-93, I was responsible for the engineering design of upgrade modifications at the Dresden nuclear station in Morris, Ill., featured in your article. At the time, on-site storage of spent nuclear fuel had already become a critical problem. The failure of the Department of Energy to move forward with the Yucca Mountain waste depository in Nevada since then has only exacerbated this problem.
It certainly is poor policy to let nuclear waste accumulate in casks at nuclear power plants, but it is much more dangerous to curtail the use of nuclear energy. Our energy options are so limited by the prospect of global warming that we must use all the non-greenhouse-gas-emitting technologies we can, and nuclear has been the most successful. With 20% of our electricity coming from nuclear in the U.S., it is only outpaced by coal-burning. Given the risks of thick-walled, reinforced-concrete casks compared to disastrous climate change, I'll take nuclear power any day.
Arthur Sanders
Los Angeles
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Bloomington Pantagraph
June 18, 2005
Pantagraph Editorial
Illinoisans have lot at stake in Yucca Mountain dispute
Residents of Central Illinois are affected by an uncooperative U.S. Geological Survey scientist who may have abdicated his responsibilities to the public in a search for a permanent burial site for spent nuclear fuel.
Scientist Joseph Hevesi has been supoenaed to appear before a House subcommittee on June 29 because he has refused to cooperate with investigators. E-mails he wrote to fellow scientists between 1998 and 2000 that questioned Yucca Mountain scientific reports were uncovered and publicly revealed this spring by the U.S. Energy Department.
There are widely varied interpretations of his e-mails that have brought 22 years and more than $7 billion worth of testing, at electric users' expense, to a virtual standstill at Yucca Mountain, the site chosen as the best in the United States for long-range storage of spent nuclear fuel.
The e-mails suggest quality assurance testing was not done as required in trying to determine whether water seeping into or flowing through the mountain less than 100 miles from Las Vegas would allow special metal casks to corrode and allow radioactive waste to escape.
Yucca Mountain advocates label Hevesi as a disgruntled employee who was pressured because of budget and time constraints. And some have pointed the finger at Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid, who has led efforts to cut Yucca Mountain funding since the state was unsuccessful in stopping the U.S. government from designating the mountain as the official nuclear repository.
Opponents call Hevesi's e-mails the "smoking gun" that proves Yucca Mountain is not a safe storage place.
The official storage place is supposed to provide safe storage for nuclear waste for 10,000 years -- based on scientific assumptions that no one can prove and for which no one will ever be held accountable.
If years of fraudulent documentation by Hevesi and other scientists has helped lead the United States to this point with Yucca Mountain, it's understandable why the scientist has to be subpoenaed and has been uncooperative.
What's really criminal is that this revelation causes even more delay in moving spent nuclear fuel from more than 130 temporary facilities in 39 states, including Illinois, to a permanent repository. The temporary sites include the Clinton Nuclear Power Plant. Temporary storage could also become a problem at nuclear reactors in Joliet, Rockford, Morris, LaSalle and the Quad Cities.
About half of the electricity produced in Illinois is from nuclear power.
And Illinoisans whose electricity is produced from nuclear power have been paying a monthly fee on their electric bills since 1983 to help finance development of a permanent U.S. nuclear disposal site. More than $2 billion of the $22 billion collected nationally thus far has come from Illinois residents.
So Illinois should have more than a passing interest in what happens as a result of testimony by Hevesi and other scientists working at Yucca Mountain.
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Cincinnati Enquirer
June 18, 2005
Nuclear 'waste' is valuable resource
Your voice: G. Ivan Maldonado
Nearly 25 years after Congress called for construction of an underground nuclear waste repository, many Americans still don't comprehend that the "waste" is worth a fortune.
The highly radioactive material that's usually called waste, stored at sites around the country in preparation for shipment to the repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, is actually used nuclear fuel. It contains uranium and plutonium that can be extracted to make new reactor fuel for generating electricity.
It's an enormously valuable energy source that should be recycled, which would extend nuclear resources and reduce the costs of disposal and nuclear power. This would help nuclear power to meet the nation's increasing need for clean energy.
There's nothing new about nuclear recycling: It's precisely what France, Germany, Belgium, Great Britain and Japan have been doing for many years.
A House Appropriations Committee has directed the Department of Energy to accelerate a program that could lead to reprocessing of used nuclear fuel within a few years.
Reprocessing also reduces the volume of nuclear waste to one-fifth its size, and reduces its toxicity. Indeed, it eliminates most of the waste from nuclear power generation. Instead of having to build another repository, there would be enough space in the Yucca Mountain facility to hold waste from nuclear power plants as well as from the U.S. defense program. Tens of billions of dollars would be saved.
Reprocessing would need to be done differently than in the past. U.S. reprocessing work was halted in 1977 when President Jimmy Carter declared that the extraction of plutonium could lead to nuclear weapons proliferation. But researchers believe that the technology can be made proliferation-proof. Besides, the decision to halt U.S. reprocessing has not deterred rogue countries from seeking to establish nuclear arsenals.
The opportunity to expand the use of nuclear power through reprocessing is a better and far more workable approach for achieving energy security than disposing used nuclear fuel as if it were waste. The effort in Congress to lift the ban makes sense: increase funding on research to make it proliferation-proof; don't hamper the expansion of nuclear power in the process; adjust future policy in response to technical progress.
Dr. G. Ivan Maldonado is an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical, Industrial and Nuclear Engineering at the University of Cincinnati.
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State of Nevada
Agency for Nuclear Projects
www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/
nwpo@nuc.state.nv.us
775-687-3744
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