Yucca Mountain News Clips
Sunday, July 10, 2005
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Las Vegas SUN
July 10, 2005
Letter: Yucca, energy bill should infuriate all Nevadans
Nevadans have a healthy mistrust of the federal government, largely because of the political campaign that's been ongoing since 1987 to force upon us a scientifically unsound nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain. More than 30 other states were eliminated as potential sites almost immediately because of political expediency. Nevada was picked because it was politically weak.
One would think that after unkept presidential campaign promises in 2000 and 2004 that Gov. Kenny Guinn and other Nevada Republicans would be outraged at President Bush and the Energy Department over the recent allegations of scientific deceit at Yucca Mountain. Instead, Nevada's court victory regarding the mountain's radiation standar, and the Energy Department's incriminating e-mails are pretty much being ignored. The Energy Department is proceeding on Yucca Mountain as if nothing has happened.
Where is the outrage from Nevadans on this issue? The state's residents should be expressing their concern to President Bush and to Congress.
It is disgusting that the energy bill nearing completion in Congress would subsidize new nuclear power plants. Of course, taxpayers will bear the potentially huge risk imposed by the Price-Anderson Act, which limits the liability of nuclear power producers in the event of a catastrophe.
Why not use all subsidy money to promote green energy sources, such as wind, solar, geothermal, biomass and hydrogen, which are safer, do not produce toxic waste and are technologically possible today?
Frank Perna
Buffalo News
July 10, 2005
Last week in Congress
How our representatives voted
WASHINGTON - Here are the recent votes of Western New York's four members of the House of Representatives and the state's two U.S. senators on major legislation in Congress. A "Y" means the member voted for the measure; an "N" means the member voted against the measure; an "A" means the member did not vote.
HOUSE
There were no key votes in the House last week; it is adjourned until Monday.
SENATE
While the Senate was adjourned last week due to the Fourth of July holiday, there were two key votes before it adjourned July 1.
Energy and Water Development Appropriations Act for Fiscal 2006 - The Senate on July 1 rejected an amendment by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that would have eliminated funding for nuclear "bunker-buster" bomb research and earmarked that $4 million to reduce the deficit.
Proponents argued that the nuclear bunker buster would spew tons of radioactive debris above ground. In addition, proponents argued that the Senate should follow the lead of the House, where funding of the research was removed from the appropriations bills. Opponents argued that the funding was for feasibility research only.
The vote was 43 yeas to 53 nays.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D, Y; Sen. Charles E. Schumer, Y.
Energy and Water Development Appropriations Act for Fiscal 2006 - The Senate on July 1 passed a bill allocating $31.2 billion for the Department of Energy and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Included in the $25 billion for energy issues are funds for research and development in nuclear energy and renewable energy. The bill also allocates funds for the nuclear storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, environmental cleanup and the nuclear stockpile stewardship.
The vote was 92 yeas to 3 nays.
Clinton, Y; Schumer, Y.
Information for this column is supplied by Targeted News Service.
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Charlotte Observer
July 10, 2005
The Case For
Framatome ANP made its bet on a nuclear revival at the beginning of this year, when it created a new unit to market and design the next generation of U.S. nuclear plants.The key for Framatome was how much additional electricity utilities are projecting they'll need during the next decade, said Ray Ganthner, the head of the 50-person new nuclear plant team that does engineering work in Charlotte.
Framatome, as it competes against powerhouses Westinghouse and General Electric, is making the pitch that its new generation of nuclear plants will be safer and easier to maintain. The changes range from the big -- building a second wall strong enough to protect against a plane crash -- to the small -- equipping monitoring stations with digital displays.
The new design can't be compared with the old Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, said Ganthner. The Framatome architecture uses a different technology for nuclear fuel to boil water into steam to spin generators and create electricity.
Another selling point is the cost. Nuclear power has become the cheapest to make, costing 1.68 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared with 5.87 for natural gas and 1.92 for coal. One kilowatt-hour is enough juice to power 1,000 homes for an hour.
The price of nuclear fuel has stayed relatively constant, unlike the wildly swinging price of natural gas. And it doesn't emit carbon dioxide, which is linked to global warming.
The nuclear industry has undergone such an image overhaul that Tom Weir no longer hears jokes at cocktail parties about his first job at Three Mile Island.
"I hear big executives saying how nuclear plants are making money," said Weir, a Framatome ANP senior vice president.
And if a utility wants to build a nuclear plant, it will have to start now. The licensing and construction processes can take up to a decade.
The Case Against
"The whole idea of a nuclear resurgence is completely absurd," said Michele Boyd, the legislative director for the energy program of Public Citizen, one of 300 lobbying groups that has banded in opposition to nuclear subsidies.
"You've got a couple of consortiums of wealthy companies looking for help to pay for the applications. ... It's a push and a shove by the administration and Congress."
The groups are lobbying on Capitol Hill to strip all the nuclear incentives from the energy bill, though they admit they face a steep hill. Public Citizen says the Senate's version will give $10 billion in subsidies and tax breaks to the nuclear industry.
The better alternative, they argue, is to pursue conservation. Utilities could upgrade transmission lines to lose less electricity along their paths. The government could require more energy-efficient appliances, they argue. By using less electricity, Americans can make the existing supply last longer.
Nuclear reactors also produce nuclear waste, which currently has no place to go. Nuclear plants have been storing their radioactive waste themselves as political leaders argue whether Yucca Mountain in Nevada should be the federal holding place for all the country's waste.
When Donna Lisenby, the Catawba Riverkeeper, first heard Duke Power was considering building a new nuclear plant, she was lunching with utility officials at Mama Ricotta's on Kings Drive. She said she choked on a piece of the chicken pesto wrap.
She doesn't think the Catawba, already stretched by about two dozen power plants, could handle another. A nuclear plant would create so much heat in the river that it would likely damage the environment and kill fish, she said.
If Duke is going to do it, she told the utility officials, "the George Bush administration is the right time to try."
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Baltimore Sun
July 10, 2005
Looking forward
Tuesday: Nuclear Regulatory Commission holds arguments in Rockville, Md., and may issue an order on the Yucca Mountain license application.
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KRNV
July 08, 2005
Las Vegas
Bechtel SAIC changing chiefs on Yucca Mountain project
The company running the federal government's Yucca Mountain project is changing chiefs.
Bechtel SAIC says John Mitchell will leave as president and general manager August 12th. He'll be replaced by Ted Feigenbaum, who most recently headed the Maine Yankee Atomic Power Company.
Mitchell told employees in an e-mail this week that he's getting a new assignment from parent company Bechtel National Incorporated.
A Bechtel spokesman characterizes Mitchell's departure as a routine management shift. He says it's not related to delays that caused the Energy Department to postpone a license application for a national nuclear waste repository at the Nevada site.
Mitchell was appointed head of the Yucca Mountain contract in December 2002.
Information from: Las Vegas Review-Journal, http://www.lvrj.com
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
July 08, 2005
New leader named at Yucca firm
By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Bechtel SAIC, the company operating the Yucca Mountain Project for the federal government, disclosed a change in top leadership Thursday.
John Mitchell will leave as president and general manager on Aug. 12, a company spokesman confirmed. He will be succeeded by Ted Feigenbaum, who most recently headed the Maine Yankee Atomic Power Co.
In an e-mail to employees this week, Mitchell said he will receive a new assignment from parent company Bechtel National Inc. His departure from the nuclear waste program first was reported by Platts Nuclear Publications, an energy newsletter group.
Mitchell's departure was not related to delays that caused the Energy Department to postpone its license application to build a spent nuclear fuel repository at the Nevada site, Bechtel SAIC spokesman Jason Bohne said.
Bechtel National customarily moves its managers every two or three years, Bohne said. Mitchell was appointed head of the Yucca Mountain contract in December 2002, when the program shifted focus to preparing a comprehensive license application.
"That puts him in the time span to move," Bohne said. "John accomplished what Bechtel wanted to accomplish."
Besides heading Maine Yankee, Feigenbaum oversaw operations at the nuclear plant in Seabrook, N.H., from 1992 to 2002. He also held senior positions at the New Hampshire Yankee nuclear utility.
Feigenbaum, who was in Las Vegas for meetings this week, was hired because of his experience running nuclear facilities regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Bohne said. The Yucca project is headed into similar waters when its license application is considered by the NRC.
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Pahrump Valley Times
July 8, 2005
Rename it the Clark County Legislature
Doug McMurdo
As a rule I always put myself in the other guy's shoes before I write this column. I want to be fair but I also want to be honest - and whoever said being fair meant kissing ass?
The truth is what it is, and that leads us to Assemblyman Rod Sherer's shattering announcement he was leaving Pahrump for, literally and figuratively, greener pastures.
I knew I was going to write about Rod in this space the second I learned he would resign from the Nevada Legislature.
As I slipped into his shoes and wiggled my toes I went for a stroll to see the world through his eyes.
Eventually I came to the same crossroads Rod mentioned in Wednesday's front-page report on his midterm resignation.
One road led to upper management and a bigger house in a part of Utah that experiences all four seasons. The other road heads straight to Carson City where it rolls straight into the saber-toothed chops of a hungry giant dragon known by locals as the Nevada-Clark County Legislature.
I suddenly realized soon-to-be former Assemblyman Rod Sherer made the only choice he could, and for all the right reasons - for his family.
I believe Rod was sincerely torn over the decision, but I would not have been so conflicted. In fact, I would have sold my house by now, and not just for my family - but also for my sanity after three years spent getting stabbed in the back by thugs wearing business attire.
When one man represents an area of Nevada roughly the size of the state of Indiana at the same time a majority of his peers speak for a neighborhood in Las Vegas, life can be treacherous.
Blame it on that pesky Constitution and its doctrine of one person, one vote. Clark County has the people; it is only right Clark County has the power. The concept is known as equal representation.
This is why, after the 2000 census, Nye County commission districts were realigned to reflect growth in Pahrump. Throughout the prior decade Pahrump was home to two of five commission districts, which resulted in a laundry list of 2-3 votes, all to the detriment of the people of this valley. All that changed and today three districts are completely in Pahrump and the remaining two have at least a portion of Pahrump residents as part of the overall constituency.
Sherer - and every other rural lawmaker, no matter how long tenured, respected or powerful - could never get much done for the folks living outside of Clark County. The playing field, while constitutionally sound and therefore uninfringeable, has become grotesquely tilted in favor of the extreme southern portion of the state.
If Nevada politics get much more unbalanced Reno might slither down the map like a California mudslide. The Silver State is a seesaw and Vegas is the fattest kid on the playground.
Last week I read in the Las Vegas Review-Journal that there was a Rural Nevada Conference or something like that in Minden. Nobody invited me. You'd think being the managing editor of the Pahrump Valley Times and the Tonopah Times-Bonanza & Goldfield News would qualify me for media credentials.
Anyway, Speaker of the Assembly Richard Perkins, D-Henderson, was quoted as saying rural Nevada didn't do so well in this most recent session.
Duh. Nice way to break the ice with the folks who could help you move into the governor's mansion, Speaker Perkins, but why didn't you tell them you played a key role in the session's outcome?
The comments evoked images of the Big Bad Wolf consoling Mother Pig after he ate two of her three little children.
Rural Nevada has to become that third little pig and build a house of bricks. We'll never get anywhere in the Legislature; Clark County's appetite is far too voracious. The odds are insurmountable and Clark will continue to huff and puff until Lake Mead dries like a sun-bleached bone.
What we can do, in the meantime, is control state and federal offices. Remember, President Bush lost to contender John Kerry in Clark County but he won everywhere else in Nevada - and he took the state.
What we need to find are universal candidates. Men and women who understand rural Nevada's diverse needs and have the compassion and the political savvy to see to it those needs are met.
We need a governor who feels our pain, a secretary of state who is a stickler for compliance with election laws, a treasurer who knows how to invest our money. We need an attorney general who cracks down on open meeting law violators.
We need members of Congress who will fight for rural Nevada in its never-ending battle over federal lands and access thereto. We need sound science, not politics, to guide every decision on the Yucca Mountain repository.
If the commissioners of Nye, Esmeralda, Mineral, Lincoln and Churchill counties - Sherer's Indiana-size District 36 - decide they must appoint a replacement for him before next year's election, as state law allows, then let that process be the first step in unifying rural Nevada.
Find those total package candidates that can build overwhelming consensus. Forge alliances, develop relationships, and level that playing field. If we don't bind ourselves together, the Rod Sherers of Nevada's cow counties will continue to find greener pastures.
He will be missed.
Write to Doug McMurdo at dmcmurdo@pvtimes.com.
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Pahrump Valley Times
July 8, 2005
Letter: Haste, waste
The Department of Energy wanted to know what the people of Pahrump thought about their plans for Yucca Mountain so the day of their meeting at the Pahrump firehouse they advertised it on the Las Vegas television stations. Nothing on the local channels or the in town newspapers.
At the meeting, with all the tap dancing going on, it was as if Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and Gene Kelly had all been resurrected. They act like this $111 billion debacle is a done deal. I guess it's because our leader in D.C. keeps telling us how great France is doing with their nuclear power plants. What he hasn't said is that France is re-cycling their waste. Not burying it in a hole in the ground for some future generation to figure out what to do with it, hoping that in the mean time it hasn't polluted the water table for the whole southwest.
They didn't want you to know that we have been shipping waste to France for re-cycling, then buying it back as fuel rods for our reactors. They didn't want to hear that we could do the same thing and create jobs for Americans. God knows we need them. (Must not be the same God that talks to George Bush.) They said that there wasn't any money for recycling, but they don't seem to have a problem building a plant to manufacture the storage casks or perhaps the railroad that they will need to transport the waste.
The Department of Energy has forgotten its logo, it's not the Department of Nuclear Energy. The Pahrump Valley, with a little help from the government could be energy efficient with all the sunshine and wind. We don't need nuclear power. Oh yeah, we don't have any nukes in Nevada, just the garbage from the rest of the country. Senator Reid wants to erect wind turbine farms, the same as they have in other states. If any of you have seen the movie Sahara, the solar collecting plant in the desert could be in Pahrump. The government doesn't seem to want free energy. I remember when nuclear energy was going to be so cheap it would solve the problems for the whole nation. The only thing that was solved was how to make politicians rich on oil.
Richard A. Brown
Editor's note: The meeting was advertised in the Pahrump Valley Times.
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Tri-City Herald
July 08, 2005
Mock canister passes the test
Annette Cary
Herald staff writer
When an air horn blasted across the Hanford 300 Area on Thursday morning, eyes turned to a canister with 7,000 pounds of mock waste dangling 23 feet above the ground.
That was the signal that it was about to crash to the ground below.
At stake was a way to save millions of taxpayer dollars to operate Hanford's huge vitrification plant being built to turn some of the nuclear reservation's worst radioactive waste into a stable glass form.
Department of Energy contractor Bechtel National knows it can safely move and store the glassified waste in a canister with a 3/8 inch thick stainless steel wall.
But engineers there have been working to create a durable canister with a wall about 1/8 inch thick. That would allow each canister to hold 4 percent more waste.
"It's actually a very small change, but over the life (of the project) it's a huge change," said Bechtel engineer James Berkey.
The vitrification plant must treat all the high-level radioactive and hazardous chemical waste that began accumulating in Hanford's 177 underground tanks during World War II when the site made the first plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program.
That waste is expected to fill about 9,500 canisters -- if the thick-walled version is used. But if the thin-walled canister proves safe, it would reduce the amount of canisters needed by about 500.
Since the vitrification plant is expected to fill about 480 canisters a year with glassified waste, that means a year of operations at the plant could be eliminated.
"It pays big dividends in operations cost and long-term management," said John Eschenberg, project manager for DOE's Hanford Office of River Protection.
Not only would fewer canisters need to be filled with glass but also fewer would need to be shipped to the nation's high-level waste repository, likely Yucca Mountain, Nev., and less space would be needed in the repository.
By Thursday morning, the thin-walled container had passed every test but one.
When it was filled with simulated waste, it had remained perfectly straight, rather than curling like a banana. The welds had proved strong. Temperature probes had shown that the glass which is poured in hot and then cooled would likely be durable. Thermal imaging had shown that the canister could be filled to the required 95 percent level.
The last test would be whether it could be dropped 23 feet to the ground -- with about the same momentum of a medium-sized car going 55 miles per hour -- without even the tiniest of cracks.
Such thin-walled containers have been used elsewhere in the United States to hold glassified waste. But they've been only about 10 feet long, not the 14.7 feet of the Hanford design.
The drop was the show. But the real test will come today or early next week as Pacific Northwest National Laboratory performs leak tests on the canister. It will encase the container in a balloon of helium, then use a vacuum system to pull helium into any cracks in the canister. Helium is used because it has smaller molecules than oxygen.
There really could be no bad outcome, said Walter Tamosaitis, a Washington Group International subcontract research and technology manager for the Bechtel project. The thick-walled version would work; this one would be better, he said.
The project is a bright spot for the $5.8 billion vitrification plant, which has run into construction problems over the last six months as a new earthquake study showed the design standard for key buildings might not be adequate. Construction has slowed, and DOE is working on a new cost estimate that is expected to be significantly higher.
But DOE and Bechtel continue to look ahead.
"This is the end result of all the work that goes on here," said U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., who came to watch the drop. The canister will be needed for the very last step at the vitrification plant, pouring molten glass and waste into a permanent container to harden.
The canister to be tested Thursday was manufactured in Seattle. It was filled with glass in Maryland. The top was welded shut in South Carolina.
"It has traveled over 6,000 miles," Tamosaitis said. "I assure you the last fraction of an inch will be the hardest."
Bechtel set up bleachers for a view of that last inch. At one end gathered the engineers who had worked out the design. At the other end sat invited guests, like Hastings and state Reps. Shirley Hankins and Larry Haler.
"This is a first of a kind test," Tamosaitis said. "No one, I assure you, in the world has watched a test like this."
First workers pulled away the ropes tied from the ground to the canister where it hang suspended from a crane.
The air horn blasted. And 7,000 pounds came crashing to the test pad.
It bounced once. It bounced twice. And it gave a last little hop before swaying for several seconds upright on the pad.
The drop was clean. No damage was obvious.
Engineers laughed and clapped.
"Congratulations," one person yelled.
"In my opinion, that looks good," Tamosaitis said.
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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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