Yucca Mountain News Clips
Thursday, July 21, 2005
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Las Vegas SUN
July 21, 2005

Deadline on Yucca documents is Friday

Sun Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department has until Friday to deliver Yucca Mountain project documents to the House Government Reform Committee under a subpoena delivered Wednesday by Chairman Tom Davis.

Davis, R-Va., sent the subpoena at the recommendation of Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., who is conducting an investigation into possible falsified documents at the proposed nuclear repository, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Porter had been requesting documents since April, but the department did not deliver them by a deadline he set for 4 p.m. Monday.

The subpoena lists 10 different sets of records, including employee records and the draft license application.

"The department has made every effort to provide the information the congressman has requested while ensuring that the documents are handled in a way that does not impair the department's ability to carry out its responsibility under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act," said department spokesman Craig Stevens.

"The department's lawyers are currently reviewing the subpoena," he said.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
July 21, 2005

YUCCA MOUNTAIN: Another official to leave project

Subpoenas in e-mail issue signed, sent to Energy Department

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department's licensing director for Yucca Mountain has resigned, the second senior manager to leave the nuclear waste project in the past month, DOE officials confirmed Wednesday.

Joseph Ziegler submitted his resignation last week citing personal reasons, DOE spokesman Allen Benson said. His last day is July 26, employees were told in an e-mail.

Ziegler, who worked in Las Vegas, was director of license application and strategy, the office responsible for preparing licensing materials to be filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in support of DOE's request to build a Nevada nuclear waste repository.

Yucca license preparations have been marked by delays, however, that have postponed an anticipated application date from last December until this December and possibly later.

At an hearing before NRC administrative judges on Tuesday, an attorney for DOE said the department may need even more time, perhaps up to six months, to reformat sets of electronic documents to a required standard for a licensing database.

In a follow-up Wednesday, however, DOE attorney Donald Irwin said the department is still working out a schedule and he could not pinpoint possible delays.

Ziegler's departure from Yucca Mountain comes two weeks after the announced transfer of John Mitchell, the president of the project's operating company Bechtel SAIC. Bechtel said it routinely transfers managers after two or three years.

Benson maintained the turnover among senior managers does not signal Yucca Mountain is in turmoil.

"People at that level move and there's nothing unusual about that," Benson said. "Joe Ziegler was here about five years or so and after five years of a rather intense amount of work, that is not unusual."

Bob Loux, a Yucca Mountain critic and executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, shrugged at Ziegler's departure.

"My sense of things is that they are so far away from having an actual license application that it doesn't even matter," Loux said. "They will probably just have someone else take his place."

Meanwhile Wednesday in Congress, a House committee chairman followed through on a threat to subpoena Yucca Mountain documents held by the Energy Department.

Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., signed subpoena documents that were issued to Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman.

The subpoenas order DOE to deliver by Friday 10 categories of documents including personnel and research records of scientists tied to e-mail messages that suggest quality assurance documentation may have been falsified.

Also subpoenaed were communications between DOE and its contractor, and a copy of a draft repository license application.

Davis is chairman of the House Government Reform Committee. A federal worker subcommittee headed by Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., is conducting an investigation of the e-mails.

Porter said the subpoenaed documents "are just one more piece, an integral part of getting information. Unfortunately we're having to force (DOE) to hand them over."

The Energy Department was reviewing the subpoena, spokesman Craig Stevens said. DOE officials say they have resisted because of the likelihood Porter would publicize documents that could threaten repository licensing.

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New York Times
July 21, 2005

House Panel Issues Subpoena Tied to Nuclear Waste Plan

By Matthew L. Wald

WASHINGTON, July 20 - The House subcommittee that is investigating falsification of research at the government project to bury nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada issued a subpoena to the Energy Department on Wednesday.

In their effort to clarify whether the falsification made the work unreliable, Congressional staff members said they were seeking more technical studies, as well as organizational charts and lists of acronyms. In a dispute that has lasted more than three months, the Energy Department has resisted, and department officials have complained about the committee's earlier release of e-mail messages detailing the falsifications.

In those e-mail messages government workers talked about manipulating their work to meet quality-assurance standards.

Representative Jon Porter, Republican of Nevada, who is chairman of the Subcommittee on the Federal Work Force of the Government Reform Committee, said in a statement, "I will not be deterred by the lack of responsiveness, and remain committed to pursuing and finishing what we began, a thorough and complete investigation of the safety behind the Yucca Mountain project."

A spokesman for the Energy Department, Craig Stevens, said the department had offered to let committee members see the documents, but not to have copies.

"All the documents, everything the chairman has asked for, has been here for him to come down and seek, as well as any member of the committee or staff, to view and take notes on," Mr. Stevens said.

He noted that the department was eight blocks from Capitol Hill.

In a letter to the committee, the department's acting general counsel, Eric J. Fygi, said that the Energy Department would eventually submit much of the material requested to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, to apply for a license, but that it could be subject to attorney-client privilege. A department spokesman said the decision about what could be made public was up to the regulatory commission.

But at the regulatory commission, a spokeswoman, Sue Gagner, said the initial decision to keep material secret would come from the Energy Department. The department could make a list of documents it did not want to disclose, Ms. Gagner said, and if some party to the licensing hearings, like the State of Nevada, wanted to see them, the issue would be decided by regulatory commission hearing officer.

Mr. Stevens of the Energy Department then said that the department wanted to assure the confidentiality of whistle-blowers who had made accusations under promise of anonymity.

He added, "The department has made every effort to provide the information the congressman has requested while ensuring that the documents are handled in a way that does not impair the department's ability to carry out its responsibility under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act."

The Yucca Mountain repository is already far behind schedule; it was supposed to begin accepting waste in 1998 but seems unlikely to do so for many years.

This is a financial problem for the Energy Department because it signed contracts with the companies that run nuclear reactors, promising to take the wastes in exchange for a payment for each kilowatt-hour generated in a reactor.

Now the reactor owners are suing for billions of dollars. But the department is not yet ready to file an application for a license to operate the repository.

The heart of the issue is government calculations about how fast radioactive material would dissolve into rainwater, percolate through the rock and then travel outside the boundaries of the repository, which is about 100 miles from Las Vegas.

Under the system set up by Congress to develop a burial place for radioactive waste, the Energy Department is supposed to conduct a scientific study and then apply to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license, and persuade the commission that the rate of travel is slow enough so that no one will be exposed to illegal amounts of radiation during the period when regulations apply.

The government has spent more than $6 billion looking for a place to bury nuclear waste.

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KVBC
July 21, 2005

Are There Alternatives To The Yucca Mountain Project?

It's being called a bad idea that's only gotten worse over the years. That's how one man sums up the Yucca Mountain Project. Victor Gilinsky is a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He's now helping Nevada fight the Nuclear Waste Repository. As News 3's Mitch Truswell reports, despite the 8 billion dollars spent on Yucca Mountain so far, Gilinsky still sees many problems with it.

"They've resisted any independent look at this, they're doing this all in house completely." That's one of

Victor Gilinsky's main complaints about the Yucca Mountain project. Not enough science and too much effort by the department of energy to just get the project done.

"If they resist an independent look, how can you have any confidence in what they do?"

Even though radioactive waste would be encapsulated in multiple layers of metal, and put in casks, not everyone is convinced. What we don't know is how these containers will hold up over hundreds or thousands of years. Will they corrode or leak? That's why DOE has suggested putting in a drip shield. It's a barrier to keep water from getting to the containers, limiting the possibility of corrosion and leaks. Gilinsky says the drip shield could come years after waste arrives at Yucca Mountain.

"They're not putting in the drip shield when they put in the waste. They're talking about putting in the drip shield at the time the repository is closed. That could be 300 years from now."

There's another concern. Gilinsky wonders how the tunnels, which provide access to the repository site, will hold up far into the future.

"The idea that they're gonna have these trolleys running around 200 or 300 years from now putting in the drip shield, that's just pie in the sky, it's ridiculous."

Concerns about the project also come from former DOE employees. Gilinksy claims a former DOE undersecretary told him Yucca Mountain was a terrible site and full of problems. The undersecretary never expressed that opinion until after leaving the agency.

"I think the feeling is among knowledgeable people, sympathetic to nuclear power, this is a poor choice."

So what would Gilinsky do with the waste, instead of burying it at Yucca Mountain? He says if the DOE is so confident in their containers which will hold the radioactive waste, those containers should be used to contain the waste where it is right now, at hundreds of sites, including nuclear power plants, around the country. That also means the waste won't have to be transported though cities and towns across the country.

The Department of Energy expects to submit its application for a license sometime in 2006. The DOE originally hoped to submit that license request in December of last year.

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Nuclear Engineering
July 21, 2005

House panel subpoenas DoE over Yucca

The House subcommittee on the Federal Work Force that is investigating data falsification at Yucca Mountain has issued a subpoena to the Department of Energy (DoE) for documents relating to the scandal.

In an attempt to determine whether the falsification made the work unreliable, the subcommittee is seeking more technical studies in the face of DoE resistance. The subpoena followed a missed deadline set by the subcommittee chair, Nevada Representative Jon Porter, for the department to hand over documents including personnel records of scientists on the project, organisational charts and research details.

The department had previously offered to let committee members see the documents, but following the release of controversial emails, the DoE is refusing to release copies of the documents. A spokesman is quoted as saying: ''The department has made every effort to provide the information while ensuring that the documents are handled in a way that does not impair the department's ability to carry out its responsibility under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act.''

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Deseret News
July 21, 2005

Bennett prevails on N-waste wording

Committee scraps federal role in Utah's Skull Valley fight

By Jerry Spangler
Deseret Morning News

WASHINGTON — At the insistence of Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, a Senate appropriations committee has stripped language from a House bill that would have directed government attorneys to fight Utah's attempt to keep high-level nuclear waste out of the state.

"The federal government should not be in the business of mounting legal challenges for a privately owned company," Bennett said. "The language passed by the House specifying shipments of nuclear waste to Skull Valley is in direct conflict with administration policy and something I was happy to eliminate from the Senate bill."

The Senate Appropriations Committee on Transportation — of which Bennett is a member — removed authorization language specifying that the Department of Transportation's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Admin- istration was authorized to hire two attorneys "to support the legal challenges regarding shipments of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste to Skull Valley, Utah."

Utah's two senators and Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. interpreted the language to mean the government was charting a course of supporting Private Fuel Storage, the private consortium of nuclear power utilities that wants to store up to 40,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel on Goshute tribal lands southwest of Salt Lake City.

Last week, Huntsman issued a terse statement saying he was shocked and dismayed by a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives to allocate federal funding to address anticipated "legal challenges" that might be brought by the State of Utah.

"The federal government should not be funding the litigation expenses of a privately owned, for-profit enterprise in its efforts to force spent nuclear fuel on a state that doesn't want it," Huntsman said. "This is public policy at its worst and represents a dramatic departure from previous statements made by congressional leaders."

On Tuesday, members of Utah's congressional delegation said they were still trying to determine who in the House requested the language, which slipped through unnoticed by Utah's three representatives.

Fingers were pointing at the Bush administration and the Office of Management and Budget. But both Bennett and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said Tuesday they had received separate assurances from White House officials that the language is a mistake and should not be taken as White House support of PFS.

Bennett said Office of Management and Budget Director Josh Boltento confirmed the Bush administration's support for Utah's efforts to block the waste and assured him the language would not resurface in conference committee discussions to resolve differences between the House and Senate versions of the transportation bill.

The Senate Appropriations Committee is scheduled to act on the bill today.

Hatch said White House Chief of Staff Andy Card assured him the language in the bill requesting funding for staff positions to review and possibly defend waste transit plans was not what the administration intended and that it would not be in the final bill.

"I remain firmly opposed to any shipment of spent nuclear fuel to the state of Utah and appreciate the administration's recognition that the PFS proposal to do so is contrary to the nation's nuclear waste policy," Bennett said.

Bennett has added language to the Senate's version stating the committee "denies funding for new positions to administer activities related to shipment of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste to a private interim storage facility."

The House language runs counter to assurances by former Secretary of Interior Spencer Abraham, who wrote a letter to Utah officials pledging that no federal funds would be expended on the PFS proposal.

The move is seen by some in the Utah delegation as a stealth maneuver by PFS supporters similar to an unsuccessful attempt by opponent Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, who last year quietly tried to insert language in a defense bill that would have designated lands around the PFS site as wilderness, thereby blocking the construction of a rail spur needed to transport the waste.

Bishop's efforts were blocked during a conference committee resolution of the bill by Republican senators who were opposed to adding new language during the negotiation process. Bishop is attempting the same legislation this year, but is doing so openly and much earlier in the process.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is poised to grant PFS a license to store spent nuclear fuel in above-ground casks for up to 40 years in what is seen as temporary storage pending the completion of a permanent site at Yucca Mountain, Nev. The earliest that delay-plagued site could open is 2012.

Officials are trying to resolve court setbacks that ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to revisit radiation standards used to design the facility. Investigations are also under way into allegations that government scientists falsified data related to water studies at Yucca Mountain.

Utah's two senators are holding hope in a letter from eight of nine members of the PFS coalition that they will not proceed with PFS as long as Yucca Mountain is open for business.

E-mail: spang@desnews.com

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Las Vegas SUN
July 20, 2005

DOE: Yucca document collection facing another delay

By Suzanne Struglinski
<suzanne@lasvegassun.com>
Sun Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- During arguments made before a Nuclear Regulatory Commission panel on Tuesday, lawyers for the Energy Department said that the department's final document collection for the Yucca Mountain project may be delayed for up to another six months.

This morning, however, attorney Donald Irwin said the department is still working out its timeline.

"I don't want to speculate" about a possible delay, said Irwin, a lawyer with the Richmond, Va., law firm Hunton & Williams hired by the Energy Department.

Irwin's statements came during a conference call this morning with Nevada's lawyers, the Nuclear Energy Institute's lawyers and commission staff.

Irwin said the department has decided to follow the Atomic Safety Licensing Board's format for documents that will go on the License Support Newtork, a database of Yucca Mountain project documents.

He said he would know more about the schedule by Aug. 1, when the department must make its monthly update with the board on its timeline.

The department wanted to finalize its collection in August, but its attorneys said Tuesday that certain rules set by a panel of the Atomic Safety Licensing Board about how documents must be formatted will make them miss that self-imposed deadline.

But Irwin said during the conference call that nothing has changed the department's end-of-August goal.

"There is nothing that requires a change to that," he said.

At the hearing, Nevada's attorneys said they would be making numerous procedural challenges once the department finalized its collection because it was not following formatting rules on certain documents.

Joe Egan, an attorney who represents Nevada, who was at Tuesday's hearing said the Energy Department attorneys took a 15-minute break and then came back to say the department would not meet its certification schedule if it had to go back to redo those documents.

"It was pretty amazing, they had been sticking to that August date for so long," Egan said.

Commission regulations require the documents collection to be finished six months before it can start formal proceedings on the proposed nuclear waste repository's license application. The department tried to finish the collection last year, but Nevada objected to it, saying it was incomplete.

The NRC agreed and the Energy Department has been reworking it.

In January the NRC ordered the department, the state and interest groups to find common ground on how to handle millions of pages of documents required for the License Support Network, an electronic database of Yucca documents.

The board could issue its final ruling soon on which documents can be left out of the database collection because they are privileged and what has to go into the database.

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KVBC
July 20, 2005

Potentially Damaging Yucca Mountain Information Subpoenaed By Congressman Jon Porter

Information that could add fuel to the fight against Yucca Mountain is being subpoenaed from the energy department. A house subcommittee, led by Nevada Congressman Jon Porter, wants a lot of information, including potentially falsified research at the site.

Porter had asked that the information be handed over voluntarily, but the Department of Energy missed Porter's deadline Monday. Victor Gilinsky, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, who's now working to stop Yucca Mountain, says there are serious problems with the proposed dump.

Part two of his interview with Mitch Truswell was supposed to air Tuesday, but because of the President's speech last night, we will run that special report tonight on News 3 at 6.

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Salt Lake Tribune
July 20, 2005

Senate rebuffs plan to hire lawyers to handle PFS cases

By Robert Gehrke
The Salt Lake Tribune

WASHINGTON - Senators on Tuesday blocked a Transportation Department plan to hire two new lawyers to handle lawsuits over shipments of high-level nuclear waste to the proposed Private Fuel Storage dump in Utah, as Utah's senators were assured by top Bush administration officials they would not revive the proposal.

Sen. Bob Bennett, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, had language stripped from a House-passed transportation bill Tuesday that would have allowed the department to hire the attorneys “to support legal challenges’ over shipments of nuclear material to the private storage facility on the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes Indian reservation.

“The federal government should not be in the business of mounting legal challenges for a privately owned company,’ Bennett said.

Robert Johnson, a spokesman for the Department of Transportation admitted the language in the House bill was poorly worded.

"The intentions were good. We wanted to make sure we had the staff available to enforce the regulations," Johnson said. "The problem is the language, as it was written, didn't say that. . . . We're glad it's not going to pass as its written because it was not one of our finer moments."

Johnson said the department would like to work with the Utah senators to try to get back to the original intent and make sure the department gets the staff it needs - in this year's bill, if possible - to ensure any shipments of waste are transported safely.

The language in a report accompanying the House bill noted that the department requested four positions “to support the legal challenges regarding shipments of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste to Skull Valley, Utah,’ and approved two of the slots. Each would cost about $100,000.

The Utah senators' concern was that the new Transportation Department attorneys would be used to fight any challenges

Utah may mount for plans to ship the waste to the state.

The state has said it will go to court if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission grants a license to Private Fuel Storage. The consortium of electric utilities is seeking to store 44,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel on the Skull Valley reservation 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City until a permanent repository is opened, likely at Yucca Mountain, Nev.

The NRC decision could come by the end of the summer, although PFS has said that shipments are not expected to begin until 2007, at the earliest.

Sen. Orrin Hatch spoke with White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card on Tuesday and said he was assured the language that was included in the House bill was not what the administration intended and would not be in the final bill.

Likewise, Bennett said he was assured by White House Office of Management and Budget Director Josh Bolten that the administration supports Utah's efforts to block the waste from coming to the state, and that the administration would not try to resurrect the language before the bill becomes law.

In addition to striking the language, Bennett added a provision in the subcommittee denying “funding for new positions to administer activities related to shipment of spent nuclear fuel and high-level nuclear waste to a private interim storage facility.’

The full appropriations committee will act on the subcommittee bill Thursday.

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KSL Radio
July 20, 2005

Senators Reject Transportation Department Plan

Senators have blocked the Transportation Department's plan to hire two new lawyers to handle lawsuits over shipments of nuclear waste to a proposed Utah site.

SALT LAKE CITY (KSL News Services) -- Senators have blocked the Transportation Department's plan to hire two new lawyers to handle lawsuits over shipments of nuclear waste to a proposed Utah site.

Utah Senator Bob Bennett told The Salt Lake Tribune that language was stripped from a transportation bill yesterday that would allow the department to hire the attorneys. Bennett say the federal government should not be in the business of mounting legal challenges for a privately owned company.

The shipments of high-level waste would go to the proposed Private Fuel Storage on the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes Indian reservation.

Private Fuel Storage plans to store 44-thousand tons of high-level waste in steel and concrete casks on the reservation until a permanent dump opens, presumably at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

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Middletown Press
July 20, 2005

Connecticut Yankee vows to keep public informed status of waste

Josh Mrozinski
Middletown Press Staff

MIDDLETOWN -- The Community Decommissioning Advisory Committee, or CDAC, agreed on Tuesday to start talking about its future role and make-up after Labor Day.

The committee first started meeting in 1998 when the decommissioning of Connecticut Yankee nuclear power plant in Haddam Neck first started. CDAC meets quarterly.

Hugh Curley, CDAC chairman, said that a new committee would likely be formed to give public updates on the status of the nuclear waste stored at a pad three-quarters of a mile from the Connecticut Yankee plant.

In March, Connecticut Yankee brought the last cask of radioactive material to the pad. Long-range plans call for the 43 casks of spent-fuel and reactor vessel metal to be moved to a federal nuclear waste disposal site planned for Yucca Mountain, Nev. at an undetermined date.

Decommissioning was 77.6 percent complete as of June 30, a Connecticut Yankee employee reported at Tuesday´s meeting.

Joe Bourassa, nuclear safety and regulatory affairs director, said 400 plant personnel are involved in the project at this time.

"We should see that number decrease as the year goes on," Bourassa said.

Preparation for the eventual demolition of the containment dome is set to begin later this week, Bourassa said. The actual demolition is scheduled for next year. Demolition of the plant´s turbine.

With the waste transfer complete, Connecticut Yankee is demolishing the plant´s buildings.

A total of 335 million pounds of construction debris will be removed from the site by the project´s end, which is scheduled for 2006. Bourassa said approximately 159 million pounds of construction debris had been shipped as of July 2.

Connecticut Yankee is transporting radioactive debris to facilities in Tennessee, Utah and South Carolina and non-radioactive debris to a facility in Bozrah.

A truck spilled approximately two tons of low-level radioactive soil onto a Virginia highway during a recent shipment, Bourassa reported.

The truck reportedly overturned when it tried to avoid another vehicle that made an illegal U-turn.

The spilled-waste was removed, Bourassa said.

To contact Josh Mrozinski, call (860) 347-3331, ext. 222 or e-mail jmrozinski@middletownpress.com

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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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