Yucca Mountain News Clips
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
June 28, 2005
YUCCA MOUNTAIN FUNDS: Bill offers counties greater freedom
Senate plan would limit DOE controls on how money to monitor project is spent
By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Congress is moving to limit the Energy Department's controls on millions of dollars that the government sends to Nevada counties each year to monitor Yucca Mountain.
Under a Senate bill set for a vote this summer, county officials no longer would be required to submit work plans for DOE review and approval before receiving their annual funding.
The work plan reviews have irked some local government managers who say the counties should be given more independence. They chafe over delays in receiving grant money and work plan corrections directed by DOE reviewers.
"It is not the best use of everyone's time to go through an exercise of working and reworking a document that is pretty detailed," said Irene Navis, Clark County nuclear waste planning director.
The process is not so troubling to some other observers. Nye County Commission chairwoman Candice Trummell said the reviews can be useful to steer county leaders clear of inadvertent misspending and safeguard against audits.
The money involved is shared by Nye County, eight other Nevada counties and Inyo County in California. The other counties are contiguous to Nye, where the Yucca repository is being planned. This year the counties are getting $8 million, while next year's budget calls for $8.5 million.
As the host county, Nye County's portion is close to $3 million, while the other jurisdictions receive smaller sums. Clark County gets about $1.6 million for Yucca Mountain oversight.
With the Energy Department now preparing to seek a license for a nuclear waste repository at the Yucca site, key senators concluded that the DOE-county relationship poses potential conflicts and needs to change.
The DOE work plan reviews are "inconsistent with its role as a license applicant" because the counties probably will oppose the DOE at repository hearings before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, according to the Senate legislation.
The measure calls for the DOE to adopt an more informal "advise and consent" role in working with the local governments on their spending.
The directive was requested by Nevada county leaders and was inserted by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., into a report that accompanies the Senate's fiscal 2006 spending bill for the Energy Department.
"The whole point of oversight is to maintain an independent review," Reid said in a prepared statement.
"Additionally, DOE and most likely all of the county governments will be legal adversaries on the Yucca Mountain project."
As the Yucca project evolved over the years, it fell to the Energy Department to distribute the county funding appropriated by Congress and to ensure that it was being spent according to rules set by the 1982 nuclear waste law and annual budget bills.
Energy Department spokesman Allen Benson would not comment on the Senate bill. Benson said DOE officials "try to be as cooperative as they can be" in working with the local governments.
"They need the money to do their job, and our job is to make sure they spend it in accordance with the Nuclear Waste Policy Act," Benson said.
"You try to work things out amicably."
Nevada counties will not have free rein if the legislation becomes law. Their spending still would be subject to audits by the Energy Department and the department's inspector general.
A 2003 audit challenged $2.08 million in Nye County spending for 2001 and 2002, and $1.13 million spent by Lincoln County. The audit also questioned $132,296 spent by Clark County.
Federal law allows the county governments to use federal money to hire consultants to evaluate the repository's local impacts, to monitor DOE science work and to communicate with residents about the project.
The counties cannot spend federal money on lobbying or lawsuits or to seek allies against the project, but they can use the money to participate in upcoming license hearings.
Trummel said the audits have been more troublesome than the work plan reviews. Inspectors have adopted "overly strict" interpretations of the spending rules, she said.
"Nobody wants waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayer dollars," Trummell said.
"The basic consensus of the (counties) is that we need to have more independence with our oversight, but I am personally more concerned with what that means in terms of auditing."
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
June 28, 2005
Nevadans' legislation aims to help protect DOE whistle-blowers
By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Energy Department workers who report wrongdoing could have more muscle to fight retaliation under a bill the Senate is expected to pass today.
Senate leaders incorporated whistle-blower provisions into the energy policy bill late last week. The Senate Energy Committee made a copy of the amendment public Monday.
The amendment would allow DOE whistle-blowers to take their claims to federal court if the Labor Department does not act within 180 days on complaints of harassment or job reprisal for reporting safety violations or other problems.
The legislation was sponsored by Nevada's senators. They have said their interest dates to 2003 when they had difficulty persuading Yucca Mountain workers to testify at a hearing about flaws in the nuclear waste program.
The amendment broadens protections that Congress earlier made available to financial industry workers who report investment scams, said Tom Devine, legal director for the Government Accountability Project, a group that works with whistle-blowers.
Devine said a 180-day deadline could cause quick action on retaliation claims that emerge from the Energy Department.
"The Labor Department process is not designed for high-stakes public policy controversies like the things that could take place at a nuclear weapons facility," Devine said.
"Often, whistle-blower cases can drag out for two or three years, and that deters workers from coming forward," said Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. "Our legislation provides workers with the peace of mind that there will be consequences if a case is not resolved quickly or fairly."
"This is a fundamental right and especially important when it comes to something as serious as the work being done at the DOE," said Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev.
Versions of the energy bill contain differing whistle-blower sections. Devine said Congress is expected to continue negotiating whistle-blower provisions in conference committee.
Besides the Nevadans' amendment, the Senate bill contains whistle-blower language covering nuclear plant workers that is sponsored by Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., Devine said.
The energy bill that passed the House this spring would prohibit the government from reimbursing DOE contractors who lose whistle-blower cases, Devine said.
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UK Business Weekly
June 28, 2005
US calls on TWI help for nuclear waste work
By Lautaro Vargas
The success of the US Government´s $58 billion high-level nuclear waste disposal programme could depend upon the ability of Cambridge-based TWI to apply its unique welding expertise to storage canisters destined for the volcanic tuff rock of Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
The US Department of Energy (DOE) is looking for an efficient technique capable of sealing its waste-carrying canisters for thousands of years and has contracted TWI for an undisclosed amount to adapt its advanced electron beam welding for the Yucca Mountain Project (YMP).
TWI was chosen to work along with its US partner, United Defense LP Corporate Technology Center (CTC), following a solicitation by the DOE and will explore the application of Reduced Pres-sure Electron Beam Welding (RPEBW) to waste package final closure welds.
It is the first phase of a three-step project that will further develop and optimise the RPEBW process, culminating in the application of the technique using robots deep in the heart of the Yucca Mountain.
Head of power at TWI, Brian Cane, said: “The canisters are several metres tall and one to two metres in diameter and have to remain underground, sealed and intact for 100,000 years. It will all be done using a fully automated robotic approach.’
TWI´s priority is to ensure that it is able to automatically produce the welds under robotic conditions. If selected for phase two it will apply the technique to a reduced-scale model and finally move on to a full-scale underground automated weld process for phase three.
RPEBW is based on electron beam welding technology but eliminates the need for a high vacuum environment by using local seals and pumping.
Through work with DOE´s Office of Civilian Radioacitive Waste Management and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, the CTC-TWI team has already demonstrated the cost saving and productivity potential of RPEBW over the alternative, gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW).
This is a view borne out by the DOE, which in 2001 formed a special peer review panel to examine the long-term performance of waste package materials being considered for use in the proposed Yucca Mountain repository.
In 2002, the Waste Package Materials Perform-ance Peer Review Panel concluded that the closure weld and its postweld processing was “critical’ to the Yucca Mountain Project (YMP) goal to insure that nuclear waste storage canisters would survive their design lifetime in the emplacement environment.
At the time of the panel´s report, closure welds used “off-the-shelf’ GTAW techniques. Described as reliable and well proven, the technique was found to have the drawback of requiring multiple weld passes and hours of welding time to complete, increasing the potential for a number of weld defects.
The panel concluded that a robust weld monitoring system must be in place and a repair welding procedure had to be developed. It suggested that there was potential in electron beam welding because it eliminated the need for a weld joint and can be conducted in a single pass, thus reducing the weld time significantly.
Yucca Mountain is seen as an ideal site for storage of the spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste currently stored at 126 sites across the US due to the area´s dry climate, remoteness, stable geology, deep water table, and closed water basin. It is located in a remote desert on federally protected land within the boundaries of the Nevada Test Site in Nye County, Nevada, where more than 900 nuclear weapons tests have been conducted.
TWI is also working in Sweden on welding techniques for high-level nuclear waste where the technique is more advanced because of its decision to use pure copper canisters to be deposited deep in granite mountains.
The US is using a different material to suit the geology of the Yucca Mountain, which is made of tuff rock, formed millions of years ago by a series of explosive volcanic eruptions that compressed large am-ounts of ash and other materials.
Cane is sceptical of the UK and other countries´ efforts to clean up high-level redioactive waste. He said: “The US, Sweden and now Finland are the only countries taking repositories seriously. Others talk about it, but these are the only ones that are actually doing something about it.
“There are lots looking at short-term storage, 100 years, but that´s just passing the legacy on to the next generation.’
TWI has also announced the award of a two year EU Craft Project for development of in-service robotic inspection methods for nuclear applications, known as Rimini. The project has a total value of Euros 1.96m.
Working with large enterprises and several SMEs, TWI will address the drawbacks of existing inspection methods notably: time consuming manual intervention requiring operators to work in radiation hazardous areas.
Developments will inc-lude new and novel inspection methods that can speed up inspection times, improve defect detectability and reduce operator exposure whilst working inside reactor containments.
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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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