Yucca Mountain News Clips
Thursday, August 4, 2005
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Las Vegas SUN
August 04, 2005
DOE: Nevada misspent Yucca oversight funds
By Suzanne Struglinski
<suzanne@lasvegassun.com>
Sun Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Clark County misspent about $163,000 in federal funds earmarked for Yucca Mountain oversight, according to an Energy Department inspector general office report released today.
Clark County officials strongly deny misspending money and plan to appeal.
The report audited the spending of the Yucca oversight money by Nevada's state government as well as by Nye, Lincoln and Clark counties and identified $1.2 million in "questionable costs." Prior reports also found misuse of the money, and the auditors are again recommending that the Energy Department exercise more control over how the money is spent.
The latest audit says the state and local governments "continued to use oversight funds for activities either unrelated to the Yucca Mountain project or specifically prohibited by the applicable Appropriations Act."
Under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the federal law that guides the plans to build a nuclear waste repository at Yucca, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada and local governments can get federal money to monitor government work.
In fiscal year 2003 and 2004, the Energy Department allocated a total of $14.5 million for the state government and 10 local governments, including Clark County.
The inspector general's office found:
•••
Clark County incorrectly spent more than $163,000, including $87,000 to hire contractors to monitor federal legislation and meet with federal officials and $70,000 to prepare a "visioning report" for Indian Springs. Clark County also misspent some of the federal money for work on Nevada Test Site-related issues, to attend conferences and buy office supplies for other programs. The county has paid back $960 so far.
"While the Act allows Clark County to provide information regarding activities of the State of Nevada, Secretary of Energy or Nuclear Regulatory Commission, meetings and discussions with other federal officials were not permitted oversight activities," according to the report.
•••
The state improperly spent more than $81,000 to pay for attorney costs, Nevada Test Site activities, tours of Yucca with non-Nevada residents and "excessive conference costs." The report noted that the state paid back $74,000 of the "erroneous expenditures."
•••
Nye County inappropriately spent about $720,000 and Lincoln County incorrectly used more than $211,000.
Clark County officials strongly disagree with the report. They plan to appeal to the Energy Department's Yucca Mountain program office.
"We are disappointed by the report," said Irene Navis, planning manager for the county's nuclear waste division. "We absolutely welcome scrutiny because we are using federal dollars. But we believe the results are incorrect as they relate to Clark County."
Navis noted that the Energy Department had approved as appropriate all the expenditures that were questioned in the report.
Navis said the county can prove that it did not use money for any activities that are banned under federal law, such as lobbying, forming coalitions and outreach outside the state.
"The bottom line is that we are not violating any federal laws," she said.
She also noted that the last time there was a review for the 2001 and 2002 fiscal years, the inspector general's office questioned $177,000 in expenses, but after county appeal that figure was reduced to just $38,000.
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Las Vegas SUN
August 04, 2005
Plane crash risks left out of Yucca Mountain plan, NRC staff says
By Erica Werner
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Energy Department left out risk factors related to potential airplane crashes and hazards at the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump in planning for the project, nuclear regulatory staff told the agency in a memo released Thursday.
The department undercounted the number of Air Force plane crashes at the site in Nevada during the 1990s, and discounted the possibility of jettisoned ordnance, birds hitting planes and cruise missile testing at the Nevada Test Site, the memo by Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff said.
The Energy Department also made an unsupported assumption that airplanes that malfunction outside the no-fly zone would never enter the zone and crash into the dump, the memo said.
The memo relates to aircraft failures and problems, as opposed to potential terrorist attacks, at the proposed dump site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. It was written as part of the consultation between the Energy Department and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as the department prepares a license application to operate the dump.
An accompanying cover letter says the NRC has concluded its review of aircraft hazard issues at Yucca Mountain, but that the issues outlined in the memo remain unresolved.
"DOE should note that it may need to address some or all of these items in a potential (license application), depending on the final aircraft hazard analysis approach used," says the letter signed by Lawrence E. Kokajko, deputy director of the division of high-level waste repository safety at the NRC's Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards.
Energy Department spokesman Craig Stevens emphasized that the NRC had closed its review of the issue.
"This letter shows that we are one step closer to meeting the needs and concerns of the NRC," Stevens said. "After fully reviewing this letter the department will work with the NRC and provide them with enough information to fully allay their concerns."
Yucca Mountain is planned as an underground repository for 77,000 tons of the nation's nuclear waste. Delays have pushed back the planned license application date to next spring at the earliest.
---On the Net:
Nuclear Regulatory Commission: http://www.nrc.gov/
Energy Department's Yucca Mountain site: http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/
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Western Skies
August 04, 2005
Commentary: Uranium Mining
ERIC WHITNEY: Given the history of nuclear development in the West, not everyone is convinced that re-opening uranium mines in Colorado is such a good idea. Rhonda Claridge lives in San Miguel county, upstream of the town of Uravan.
RHONDA CLARIDGE: Uravan, in Southern Colorado, was once a bustling uranium mill town in the West End of our county. There, unbeknownst to employees, uranium ore was covertly transformed into green sludge and used in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now Uravan is a deserted cleanup site, too hazardous for residence. Chainlink fencing encloses ponds full of radioactive salts. In the surrounding hills, thorium still laces the ground where cattle graze, and tailings heaped outside of open pit uranium mines continue to leach runoff into the San Miguel River, like open sores.
So it was with some consternation that I learned recently about the resurgence of uranium mining in the West End. After twenty years of dormancy, new owners of the Cotter Corporation have been granted a permit to mine uranium in San Miguel County. Apparently, there's a sudden demand for yellowcake, a three-hundred percent price jump. The President says, "It is time for this country to start building nuclear power plants again." Industry spokespeople at the Uranium Expo held in Grand Junction last month said we're on the precipice of "the Third Uranium Boom." "The sky is the limit," they touted, urging investment. Even some environmentalists support a resurgence of nuclear power as the only antidote to global warming. After all, nuclear energy does not involve burning fossil fuels; it's clean.
But to say that nuclear energy is clean is to use one of those oversimplified, fuzzy euphemisms. It's true that we'd solve the problem of fossil fuel emissions, but then we'd increase the problem of what to do with radioactive waste and the risk of a nuclear meltdown, two reasons why building nuclear power plants was phased out by the 1980s. As my neighbor put it when I mentioned the renewed interest in uranium, "Didn't we learn anything the last time?"
Industry pundits say we have. As one geologist states, the atomic power business has seen "a continual evolution of design and safety for thirty years." Yet if one examines the record of the Cotter Corporation, the same old problems persist. The Cotter Corporation is an affiliate of General Atomics, whose recent attempt to import 10 million pounds of radioactive soil from New Jersey and to store it at Cañon City has been forestalled by the Colorado legislature. Why? Because radioactive waste is not safe, nor is there yet any viable design to dispose of it. Hence, the controversy over depositing radioactive waste in Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The Cotter Corporation has accumulated one-hundred-forty violations of environmental and public health regulations, since its operations began in 1959, most recently because a mill employee ingested uranium when a pipeline broke at the Cañon City mill. And since General Atomics manufactures weapons, will depleted uranium from Colorado be used in weapons and expose our troops to radioactive dust, which happened in the first Gulf War? As for the risk of a meltdown, the fact that a simple failure of communication nearly caused one at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island, doesn't give one faith that it couldn't happen today.
"To err is human," the saying goes.
That the Bush administration "has ordered the national laboratories to begin research on new nuclear weapons designs and to prepare the underground test sites in Nevada for nuclear tests if necessary in the future" is equally disconcerting.
The fact is that nuclear energy is not the only option. Besides solar, wind, and hydropower, there is Jimmy Carter's seemingly forgotten suggestion: energy conservation. I believe with the right leadership, America can come up with solutions that don't cause more problems.
WHITNEY: Rhonda Claridge is a writer and professor of English who lives in San Miguel County.
That wraps up this edition of Western Skies, Stephen Raher is our associate producer, Delaney Utterback handles the information technology. I'm Eric Whitney, thanks for tuning in.
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Las Vegas SUN
August 03, 2005
Report: EPA should update nuke levels for drinking water
By Benjamin Grove
<grove@lasvegassun.com>
Sun Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- The Environmental Protection Agency should revise its 29-year-old standard for radioactive materials in drinking water, according to a report released today that could have implications for the Nevada Test Site and the nuclear dump planned for Yucca Mountain.
In general, the nation's drinking water is safe from radioactive contamination, said the report's author, Arjun Makhijani, president of the Maryland-based Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, and a critic of Yucca Mountain.
But radioactive materials could endanger water sources near former government nuclear weapons facilities, including groundwater near the Nevada Test Site, Makhijani said.
"I'm worried about some very specific sites," Makhijani said.
Other water sources at risk include the Savannah River running between South Carolina and Georgia, the Snake River Plain Aquifer in Southern Idaho and the Columbia River in Washington.
The Nevada Test Site was the site of above- and below-ground testing for four decades, ending in 1992. Makhijani said he was concerned about plutonium that was dispersed during testing, especially in the 1950s and 1960s.
The federal drinking water standard for allowable levels of materials like plutonium-239, an atomic bomb ingredient, is too lax, Makhijani said. The report recommends that the EPA set a standard that is 100 times more strict, especially as the government continues clean-up efforts at former nuclear weapon sites.
Clean-up efforts include enclosing radioactive waste, including plutonium, in tanks, but the waste is still left near vital water sources, Makhijani said.
Makhijani also recommends that the stricter standard be applied to the proposed underground nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.
Nevada officials have said Yucca cannot meet current standards limiting the release of radiation into the environment. Waste that would be permanently stored in casks in the repository tunnels would contain long-lived radionuclides like plutonium and neptunium that could ultimately seep into groundwater if the repository fails in the future, said Joe Egan, a lawyer for the state on Yucca issues.
Makhijani's recommendation "would make for a standard that is much more difficult for the Department of Energy to meet over the long term," Egan said.
An EPA spokesman said that the agency reviews its standard every six years.
"Unless someone has significant information not previously available, there is not a compelling case to change the rule," EPA spokesman Dale Kemery said.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
August 03, 2005
Group: Water standard for radioactivity unsafe
Nevada officials ponder report's implications for planned Yucca Mountain waste site
By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- The government is underestimating the health risks from the presence of radioactive particles in drinking water, an environmental science group said in a report it plans to release today.
Nevada officials who have seen the report said it could focus new attention on the safety of groundwater near the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.
Advances in science have clarified the dangers of long-lived radioactive particles like plutonium and neptunium that could travel in water where the government conducted atomic bomb activities, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research said.
Such particles concentrate in the bones and deliver doses far higher than previously estimated, according to the institute's analysis.
The institute urged the Environmental Protection Agency to set new standards that the group said would protect human health better.
The present EPA standard for plutonium in drinking water, 15 picocuries per liter, is one hundred times too high, said Arjun Makhijani, institute president and report author. The standard was set in 1976, he said.
Makhijani said Tuesday that public water supplies are not in danger.
Even with tougher standards, "public water systems are not at present contaminated at or near the requested (maximum limit)," the study said.
The more practical effect of the new standards, Makhijani said, would be to guide the Energy Department's cleanup of former nuclear weapons sites.
The study recommended that the department pay for a set of baseline water samples drawn near sites that have plutonium waste or soil contamination.
The sites could include the Savannah River, which divides Georgia and South Carolina, the Columbia River in Washington and Oregon, and the Snake River aquifer in southern Idaho.
Makhijani urged the EPA to use his recommendations in a review of drinking water standards scheduled for next year. The agency did not respond to a request for comment on the report.
Groundwater standards for the proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain are based on the EPA's safety levels for drinking water, Nevada officials said Tuesday.
If the EPA were to adopt a tighter drinking water standard for radioactive particles, "it could make it harder for the repository to meet the standard over the long term," said Joe Egan, the state's nuclear waste lawyer.
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NucNews
August 01, 2005
Yucca Mountain QA 101
by Kristi Hodges
When it comes to what quality assurance (QA) is and/or isn't, the experts are the last ones consulted. So it's been left to well-meaning laymen to interpret the subtleties of a seemingly complex profession - it's no surprise that most get it wrong. To read that Yucca's QA organization has failed to improve quality is like screeching fingernails across a chalk board to those in the QA profession. Someone needs to give QA 101 training; someone needs to set the record straight. Considering the silence of the current leaders of my profession, I'll give it my best shot - it's certainly not rocket science.
When a building fails an inspection, it's because a building code violation has occurred. It's not a building code problem, as the building code is not the problem. The problem is that someone failed to perform work to requirements of the city building code. Therefore, work must be redone in order for the building to pass inspection.
Likewise, when a work activity fails a QA audit, it's because one or more QA requirements were violated. It's not a QA problem, as QA is not the problem. The problem is that someone failed to perform work to the requirements established in the QA Program. Therefore, work must be corrected in order to close the deficiency documents and pass the next audit.
In early 2001, when significant QA deficiencies recurred, new terminology slipped into the Yucca Mountain dialogue. For dubious reasons, violations of QA requirements were restated as QA problems. Although resisted by the QA organization, the mere repetition of the fallacy created a perception that couldn't be shaken. It wasn't long before failures in QA implementation were being attributed to the QA organization. And not long after that the DOE QA Director was removed, which is another story altogether.
To attribute QA violations to the QA organization would be the same as attributing building code violations to building inspectors. We've all heard of shooting the messenger, but rarely has the messenger been blamed for the shooting.
Welcome to our world.
Upon the news that Yucca Mountain had QA problems, those on the Yucca reporting beat took the "QA is the problem" bait and ran with it. With the heat placed on the QA overseers, QA circumventors appeared to be home free. But soon the project became embroiled in controversy over QA whistleblowers - every problem became a QA problem, every report a QA document, and every worker a QA worker. "It's the QA stupid!"
So what did DOE do?
To fix the alleged QA problems, a new QA Director was appointed to "get QA out of the spotlight." Subsequent changes to reduce the QA organization's oversight role were referred to as "QA improvements." But three years down the road and another QA Director has tried and failed to fix QA.
As Bill Belke, the former NRC on-site representative, once said in regard to the QA organization, "Why fix what's not broken?" That since has been updated to there's no fixing what's been broken.
But if the experts had been consulted, they would have explained that QA auditors, like inspectors, don't do the work; they make sure work is done correctly. And QA Directors don't direct the work; they direct the oversight of the work. One can change the composition and leadership of the QA organization, and identify deficiencies all day long, but only those responsible for doing the work can improve the quality of the work. This simple concept has somehow eluded comprehension of even the best of reporters (and DOE managers).
But I digress.
The QA 101 student must first learn the basics:
- There are workers and overseers of work;
- Scientists and engineers are workers;
- QA auditors are overseers;
- Workers implement QA requirements;
- QA auditors assess implementation of QA requirements;
- Workers prepare technical reports; and
- QA auditors prepare audit reports.
To get right what most get wrong, next learn the lingo:
Quality Assurance vs. Quality Control (QC):
Although often used interchangeably, there are differences between QA and QC. QA aims to assure that quality is built into work; QC aims to confirm that quality was built into work. QA has auditors; QC has inspectors. QA auditors evaluate implementation and effectiveness of processes used to complete work; QC inspectors evaluate completed work for conformance to specifications & drawings. Hint: The QA Director at Yucca Mountain is not a QC Manager.
QA Organization vs. QA Implementation:
Like all organizations, QA organizations have problems, but QA problems are not necessarily QA organization problems. Most QA problems are in implementation of QA requirements. Therefore, it's important, when writing an article or speaking as a member of Congress, to articulate whether the perceived problem is with the QA organization or those responsible for quality, which would be the workers and their management.
QA Document vs. Technical Document:
QA organizations prepare lots of documents, e.g., audit reports, deficiency documents, procedures, and requirement interpretations. However, QA organizations don't produce technical documents; those are prepared by scientists and engineers. Note that the infiltration studies at the center of the USGS e-mail kerfuffle were not conducted by QA workers. Also note that QA workers conducted an audit in January 2000, which is why most of the substantive issues related to the USGS e-mails were previously identified and corrected. Hint: There still is "no technical smoking gun." Sorry Jon.
QA Independence vs. Organizational Conflict of Interest:
Beware of those that tout their independence, as they are only as independent as the ones signing their paychecks. For instance, most "independent" investigators are hired by those with an agenda; therefore, most "independent" investigation reports are written before the investigation has started - the only independence being from reality as they think we're actually buying their baloney.
But QA auditors are required to be independent. In other words, they can have no personal involvement in producing the work subject to audit - that would be a conflict of interest. However, there are conflicts of interest and there are organizational conflicts of interest (OCI). One can be independent of the work and still violate federal OCI regulations, which preclude personnel, including QA auditors, from overseeing their company's work on behalf of the government. Hint: DOE cannot take credit for its prime contractor, BSC's, internal QA audits. What were they thinking?
QA Auditor vs. QA Whistleblower:
When auditors identify deficiencies they are not whistleblowing; they are doing their jobs. When auditors are retaliated against and removed from their positions for identifying deficiencies there is a good chance that they will become whistleblowers. There are plenty of faux whistleblowers with slick attorneys extorting money from vulnerable nuclear projects, but there are also legitimate whistleblowers that never in a million years wanted to be in their situations. Note: Bogus whistleblowers have been hitting Las Vegas jackpots off Yucca Mountain at the expense of the American taxpayer - details to come.
Kristi Hodges, a Senior Quality Assurance Specialist and 15-year YMP employee, was instrumental in facilitating whistleblower legislation introduced by the Nevada Senators, which was amended to the 2005 Energy Bill. She is currently championing efforts to expose and preclude whistleblower fraud. Contact at khodges850@aol.com
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Pahrump Valley Times
August 3, 2005
Yucca application at least six months away
Most Recent Target Date Changed from December to March in Latest Licensing Setback Experienced by Energy Department
By Erica Werner
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - The Energy Department likely will not submit its license application to build Yucca Mountain until March 2006 at the earliest, several months later than the most recent target date, according to an updated project timeline first reported in last week's Pahrump Valley Times.
The Energy Department plans to update a Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing board on the timeline this week. An Energy Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity so as not to interfere with the licensing process, disclosed the timeline to The Associated Press.
Under Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules, the Energy Department cannot submit its license application to build the nuclear waste dump until it publicly releases background documents for the application. DOE must certify, six months before submitting the license application, that all relevant documents have been disclosed through a Web-based Licensing Support Network that can be viewed by the public at www.lsnnet.gov/
Under the updated timeline, the certification would not happen until September or later, the official said. That would make March 2006 the earliest date DOE could submit its license application.
DOE had hoped to submit the license application last December, and it certified in June 2004 that it had made the background documents available as required. That certification was rejected as inadequate by a Nuclear Regulatory Commission board.
After that setback, DOE said it would aim for this December. That date has now slipped as well.
The Energy Department official said no new date has been set. The official emphasized that the department's priority is to ensure that this time, the certification passes muster. To that end, a two-step process has been established that would involve review of the certification by a department manager and an outside team.
The official said the Energy Department has completed 85 percent to 90 percent of the work of entering the millions of relevant documents into the Licensing Support Network.
Yucca Mountain, planned for Nye County less than an hour's drive northeast of Pahrump and less than 20 miles north and east of Amargosa Valley and Beatty, respectively, has been beset by a series of problems, including an appeals court's rejection last year of the government's proposed radiation safety standard for the dump. This spring, internal e-mails became known suggesting government workers on the project had falsified data.
The Environmental Protection Agency is still developing a new radiation standard, and the contents of the e-mails are under review, though DOE has concluded preliminarily that the scientific basis for the project remains sound.
Yucca Mountain is meant to hold 77,000 metric tons of nuclear waste for 10,000 years and beyond.
Doug McMurdo contributed to this report.
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Pahrump Valley Times
August 3, 2005
Letter: Do the math
Much appreciation goes to the staff and contributors of the Pahrump Valley Times, for refreshing readers on civics matters they should have learned in middle school, or high school at least. I refer to the "right of eminent domain," of course.
We all know government - at every level - has the right to "take private property" when it serves the best interests of the population. We all know, but perhaps members of our state Legislature do not read the PVT. Okay, fellas, you fought a good battle for the past 30 years, but the end result is a foregone conclusion. The feds hold the trump card. It's called "eminent domain." They also own the judges, called the Supreme Court, and the referees who will decide what is in the best interest of the public, called the United States Congress.
The only people benefiting from all these legal proceedings and "environmental impact studies" are the "attorneys at law," on both sides of the issue. If every man, woman, and child in the state of Nevada contributes but $1 for these legal proceedings, you have roughly $2.3 million to present your case.
I think we have actually contributed much, much more and the wrangling continues!
If every man, woman, and child in the remaining 49 states spends only 10-cents to present their case, the federal government has $29.2 million to present its case. (Pop data from www.factmonster.com) Can you do third grade arithmetic? In other words, the opposition can spend 10 times more than the state of Nevada, without making a dent in private pocketbooks.
Instead of waging a battle Nevada cannot win, why not do something fully within your authority? That would certainly be a novel approach, wouldn't it?
1. All new hires at (the Yucca Mountain project) must have been a resident of Nye County for at least 180 days.
2. All containers stored at YMP must be inspected by the State of Nevada for $25 per inspection.
3. Containers must be re-certified at least every five years for $25 per certification. (Heck! Some residents pay more than that for yearly smog checks, and smog may or may not be a serious hazard!)
4. The list can go on, legislatures are good at imposing restrictions.
The Congress will certainly find storage of nuclear waste at YMP is in the best interests of 292 million citizens, while it may not be in the best interest of the 2.3 million residents of Nevada (fewer than 1 percent of the nation's population!), and decidedly not in the best interests of the 50,000 residents of Nye County most directly affected! The right of the federal government to exercise "eminent domain" is a reality, not a fiction.
Nevada does not contribute significant amounts of nuclear waste, but the citizens you were elected to represent have a right to inspect and regulate the activities, which will assuredly impact state residents. It's time for the remainder of the nation's citizens to reach into those "deep pockets" and pay for the cost of dumping their trash in our state and county.
W. E. Lopez
Crystal
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Pahrump Valley Times
August 3, 2005
Public Works ain't working so good in Pahrump
Bob Little
It appears discussion of the longer-term ramifications of the ever-growing government monopoly over our lives should have begun long ago. As more and more evidence continues to surface of official abuse of tax and spend authority, bureaucracies across the country are in a scramble and cover mode like never before. Much like the clues to a well-written murder mystery, item after item on public budgets are only now being shown to harbor long-term consequences far beyond anything the legislative bodies empowered to produce them thought possible.
Whether its the $9 billion shortfall in municipal retirement programs in California or the $2.3 billion recent discovery in southern Nevada of a shortfall in funding for emergency services health benefits, the vast expanse of unfunded mandates now being exposed are presenting a clear and present danger for all to see. So why do people continue to ignore or make excuses for public policies and behavior they should now know will only cause grief and hardship in the future?
One only has to look at the recent near bankruptcy of Lyon County in north central Nevada and the recently announced department of taxation mandatory oversight of White Pine County affairs. In each case the cost of government grew far beyond the ability of the local economies to pay the bills and no manner of tax increase was available or prudent to solve the problem.
Nye County has been very lucky over the past decade because Payments Equal to Taxes (PETT) funds provided by the federal government, supposedly for its use of Yucca Mountain to eventually store the nation's high-level radioactive waste, has kept them from the fate of Lyon and White Pine. But this "tax" being paid is in all reality nothing more than an entitlement bestowed by the feds that can be just as easily ended. And if those who oppose Yucca Mountain are successful, it will be.
Over the last four or five years, these funds have been used to augment schools, parks and fire services said to be in vital need of funds. They were also misused to the benefit of a few with the Calvada sales office purchase. One of the largest single beneficiaries has been the Department of public works in pursuing the chip-seal program of road surfacing.
On the surface, this program is very difficult to argue with. In a few short years, many gravel roads were replaced by ones with a smooth hard surface that did reduce the amount of dust in the air. But a great many infrastructure issues were not met and, now that the money has been spent, will never be unless residents pony up big.
When and if the county budget is released for public review, it will be shown that nearly 50 percent of all tax revenues received for construction and maintenance of roads is spent on salaries and benefits in the public works department. As several of the laws passed by the Legislature specifically prohibit spending the funds generated on salaries, one can only assume these salaries are paid for out of general revenues.
The problem is that outside the Vineyards subdivision not one full road has been constructed with the necessary curbs, gutters and hopefully sidewalks. The result is bar ditches and county-owned frontage easements over which property owners have no control. Weeds, wild shrubs and even mesquite trees grow within these boundaries that cause flooding during most rains, and the road department is hapless.
Of course, if you own property, want to develop your lot and have a driveway constructed through this dead zone you must pay for the privilege of a road access permit. In more instances than should be allowed, the fee is paid but no inspection prior to or during construction is made, leaving the owner with total liability in spite of the fees paid.
When asked about such issues the standard government reply is received, lack of staffing to do the job. This may or may not be the case as the payroll for public works was nearly $3 million annually. With that kind of funding, perhaps an in-depth cost benefit review might be needed. Especially since the county wants to have public works assume the inspection of homes under the building permit system.
One of the best things Nye County did when adopting the building permit system was to go outside government and hire a professional inspection company to handle that function. Granting a few early mistakes, over the last six years the building inspection program has produced tremendous results - and money as well.
The greed of the public sector is now ready to step up to the plate and assume responsibility for construction inspection. Regardless of any of the potential arguments to the contrary, money is the one and only issue. But the consequence of giving this function to those who cannot perform driveway installation inspections is ludicrous. It will not benefit the general population but will provide the county a perceived need to hire more employees and create a long-term tax implication they obviously do not understand.
Once the build-out of Pahrump is complete, and please don't let anyone fool you into believing we can ever become the next Las Vegas, all of the current revenue streams being set up and used will disappear. All that will be left is the unfunded liability of employees and their benefit packages and a larger government monopoly.
Little writes from Pahrump.
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The State
August 03, 2005
S.C. delegates tout SRS
New nuclear power plants could find homes in Aiken
By Aaron Gould Sheinin
Staff Writer
AIKEN — The organization that hopes to build the nation´s first nuclear power plants in 30 years toured the Savannah River Site on Tuesday, cheered on by elected officials who see a boon for the state´s economy.
NuStart Energy — a consortium of power companies — was in Aiken as part of its visits to six potential sites from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean.
“The community and elected leader support is overwhelming,’ said Gary Miller, manager of license renewal for Progress Energy, one of the companies behind NuStart.
But it will take more than community support for SRS to land what could be a $1 billion project with 250-400 permanent, high-paying jobs.
The group also will consider:
• The site itself — its topography, seismic potential, water sources
• Other financial means of support, specifically job-creation and tax incentives offered by local and state governments.
NuStart wants to pick its sites in September, Miller said. It is operating under a federal grant essentially to be nuclear guinea pigs for new federal regulations governing construction of reactors.
The organization will choose two sites and develop plans and designs for placing a reactor on each. NuStart then will work with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to secure federal licenses for the plants´ construction.
Then, Miller said, NuStart hopes “some member company or some third party will actually go out and secure the capital and build that plant.’
While a site being licensed does not guarantee the plant´s construction and its economic development windfall, Miller said, the group “wants to maximize the odds the reactors will be built.’
Members of South Carolina´s congressional delegation were on hand Tuesday to try to tip the odds in SRS´ favor.
SRS and Aiken County understand what nuclear power means for the country, said U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett, a Republican from Westminster whose district includes SRS.
“It´s important not only for our economy,’ he said, “but for our national security.’
Barrett produced a letter of support for the project signed by every member of the congressional delegation, as well as U.S. Rep. Charlie Norwood, a Republican from the Georgia side of the Savannah River.
South Carolina already is home to seven nuclear reactors and gets 50 percent of its electrical power from those plants, Barrett said.
U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, a Republican from Springdale, said SRS already has not only the community support necessary, but also the security.
“Other sites can´t have the level of security we already have in place,’ Wilson said.
Because of SRS´ history as the nation´s nuclear bomb builder, he said, security is tight.
But some environmentalists fear there is still a danger to building a new nuclear plant: what to do with radioactive waste created by nuclear reactors.
Barrett agreed that issue must be addressed. The proposed federal high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada is years behind on its construction schedule. And Barrett said estimates are that when it opens, it will reach capacity in just 10 years.
Reach Gould Sheinin at (803) 771-8658 or asheinin@thestate.com
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The State
August 03, 2005
Group tours SRS to see about nuclear power plant
Associated Press
AIKEN, S.C. - Officials from a group of power companies seeking federal permission to build the nation's first nuclear power plant in three decades toured the Savannah River Site to see if it should be built there.
Officials from NuStart, a consortium of 11 power companies, are being courted by officials and communities who want the group to pick their backyard for what could be a $1 billion project that would create up to 400 jobs.
NuStart officials are considering topography, seismic potential and water sources as well as job creation and tax incentives.
The group is visiting six sites and wants to pick two to develop plans and designs for a reactor on each site. The group is considering sites in six states: Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, Maryland and New York.
"The community and elected leader support is overwhelming," said Gary Miller, manager of license renewal for Progress Energy, one of the companies behind NuStart.
NuStart wants to pick sites in September, Miller said. NuStart then will work with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to secure federal licenses for the plants' construction. NuStart then hopes a company will build the plant, Miller said.
Members of South Carolina's congressional delegation were on hand Tuesday to show support. SRS and Aiken County understand what nuclear power means for the country, said U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett, R-S.C., whose district includes SRS.
"It's important not only for our economy," he said, "but for our national security."
Barrett had a letter of support signed by every member of the state's congressional delegation, as well as U.S. Rep. Charlie Norwood, a Republican from Georgia near SRS.
South Carolina already is home to seven nuclear reactors, where it gets 50 percent of its electrical power, Barrett said.
U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., said SRS already has not only the community support necessary, but also the security.
"Other sites can't have the level of security we already have in place," Wilson said.
Some environmentalists are concerned about radioactive waste that would be created by building a new nuclear plant.
Barrett agreed that issue must be addressed.
The proposed federal high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada is years behind schedule. And Barrett said estimates are that when it opens, it will reach capacity in just 10 years.
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Tri-City Herald
August 02, 2005
DOE unlikely to meet Hanford cleanup goal
By Annette Cary, Herald staff writer
The Department of Energy has little chance of meeting its commitment to save $50 billion on cleanup of the Hanford nuclear reservation and other sites under its accelerated cleanup plan, according to a Government Accountability Office report requested by Congress.
DOE announced the accelerated cleanup program in 2002, saying it would reduce costs by $50 billion, shorten the cleanup schedule by 35 years and reduce risks to health and the environment. The largest cost savings is to occur at Hanford, where plutonium was produced for the nation's nuclear weapons program for more than 40 years.
Progress has been made nationwide in the initial years of accelerated cleanup, and several projects are ahead of schedule, the GAO said.
But three of the most challenging and costly cleanup projects have fallen behind schedule, the report said. They include disposing of plutonium-contaminated waste, disposing of high-level and other radioactive waste in huge underground tanks and closing the tanks. Savings on tank wastes at Hanford and sites in Idaho and South Carolina were to account for almost $30 billion of DOE's estimated savings.
DOE estimated that nearly all of its savings from getting cleanup finished sooner would come from projects at those three major sites.
"However, DOE is behind schedule in some of its cleanup activities at these sites and cost estimates for completing the work are rising," the GAO report said.
DOE has fallen behind on treating 88 million gallons of waste in tanks at the three sites. At Hanford, construction and engineering problems at a $5.8 billion vitrification plant to turn tank waste into glass logs for permanent disposal could delay the start of vitrification by several years.
DOE also had planned to have 13 of the 241 tanks at the three sites closed by now but has finished work on only two.
DOE also is behind on plans to ship 142,000 cubic meters of transuranic waste, often waste such as tools or laboratory equipment contaminated with plutonium, to a permanent repository in New Mexico. That delay largely is due to problems in Idaho, the report said.
While getting work done faster was to account for 42 percent of savings, DOE estimated new and improved technologies would account for 29 percent of the cleanup savings. But the GAO questioned whether that was realistic.
For instance, at Hanford plans call for using a new technology to treat a portion of the low-activity radioactive waste stored in underground tanks. But the technology likely to be picked, mixing waste with soil and turning it into large blocks of glass, has not been fully tested, and the cost for operating the bulk vitrification technology is unknown, the GAO said.
New contracting strategies were to account for 10 percent of the cleanup savings. That included the awarding of major new contracts at Hanford to replace expiring contracts held by Fluor Hanford and CH2M Hill Hanford Group through fiscal year 2006. But auditors already have concluded it is not appropriate to assume cost reductions from future contracts at Hanford since those reductions are "neither probable nor susceptible of reasonable estimates," the GAO report said, quoting auditors.
Nine percent of the savings were to come from revising cleanup agreements with state and federal regulators. But regulators have resisted revisions that would have accounted for at least 75 percent of those savings, according to GAO.
That includes a plan to classify some of Hanford's tank waste as transuranic, allowing it to be shipped to a federal repository in New Mexico rather than turning it to glass at a greater cost. However, in late 2004, the head of the New Mexico Environment Department said the state would not accept the tank waste at the New Mexico repository, the GAO said.
In addition, DOE has had problems in projects not considered in the accelerated cleanup plan, such as delays in shipping plutonium from Hanford and other sites to a consolidated storage area for the nation. Since terrorism acts of 9/11, sites that were expecting to be rid of their plutonium this year are having to increase security for it. If plutonium remains at Hanford long term, costs of storing and protecting it could amount to more than $2 billion, the report said.
A delay in opening a repository for high level waste at Yucca Mountain, Nev., also will increase DOE costs, the report said. A five-year delay would increase costs at Hanford and the Idaho and South Carolina sites by $720 million, the report said.
DOE's successes toward accelerated cleanup typically were in areas where technologies and processes were well established, the report said. For example, nuclear sites have disposed of 181,606 more cubic meters than scheduled of low level radioactive waste, such as contaminated soil, the report said.
It praised DOE for nearly completing packaging uranium and plutonium, including plutonium left at the Plutonium Finishing Plant at Hanford. It was "a highly dangerous activity due to the potential for a nuclear accident or worker exposure," the report said.
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Las Vegas SUN
August 01, 2005
Yucca licensing application facing another delay
By Suzanne Struglinski
<suzanne@lasvegassun.com>
Sun Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- The license application for the Yucca Mountain nuclear dump may not be filed until March 2006, if not later, pushing the dump further behind schedule.
The Energy Department today is expected to submit an updated Yucca Mountain schedule to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. An Atomic Safety Licensing Board judge ordered the department to file monthly status reports starting June 1.
Department spokesman Craig Stevens said there is no set timeline or a specific date as to when the department will submit the application for the proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. There are a lot of pre-licensing matters that need to be resolved first, he said.
"The process is going to drive the schedule now," Stevens said. "I wouldn't even talk dates at this point."
Stevens said department staff will go over everything meticulously before turning in the application. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman has insisted the application and the document collection be in top shape so the department can try to avoid additional obstacles and delays down the road, Stevens said.
A department official disclosed the new March 2006 target date for the license application to the Associated Press on Sunday, but that estimate is based on when it would finalize its document collection.
The department aimed to submit the application by December 2004, but legal and financial complications forced it to miss that deadline.
Submitting the license application by March 2006 could be difficult as well. Several outstanding issues need to be resolved before the department could complete the license application or finalize its document collection with the commission.
Under commission rules, it cannot docket the project's application until six months after the department publicly releases all its background documents that support their research. The department must finalize its collection through the Licensing Support Network, a document database that can be accessed by the public.
The department has been giving thousands of documents to the commission to put into the database since earlier this year, but the Atomic Safety Licensing Board is still considering how specific documents must be labeled and loaded into the network.
Until the board issues its document guidelines, it is unclear what exactly needs to be put into the database in certain categories such as employee concern files and those deemed as confidential under the attorney-client privilege.
Department lawyers said July 20 that the department would comply with the board's format for the documents. The department wanted to finalize its documents database by the end of this month, but under the updated timeline, it would not do so until September or later.
A September certification would push the license application submission to at least March, but department lawyers have also told the board they may go beyond that six-month period before turning in the application.
In addition to outstanding specifics on the documents, the Environmental Protection Agency may not issue a new proposed radiation standard until September.
The EPA needs to set a new standard for the proposed nuclear waste repository because a federal court threw out the 10,000-year radiation protection standard last year.
EPA spokesman John Millett said he can provide no update on the standard's progress beyond saying the agency is working in it.
Once the proposed standard is announced, it will be at least several months before it is finalized. There will be a minimum of 90 days for a public comment period before a final rule is issued.
Some Yucca supporters say that depending on what the EPA proposes, the department could file a license application with the 10,000-year protection standard as a base and then update it later as necessary. But Yucca critics, who want to see a stronger protection standard in place, say the department may need to go back to square one with its documentation.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
August 01, 2005
Yucca Mountain facing new delay
License application date pushed back
By Erica Werner
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department probably will not submit its license application to build Yucca Mountain until March 2006 at the earliest, several months later than the most recent target date, according to an updated project timeline.
The Energy Department plans to update a Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing board on the timeline this week. An Energy Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity so as not to interfere with the licensing process, disclosed the timeline.
Under NRC rules, the Energy Department cannot submit its license application to build the nuclear waste repository until it publicly releases background documents for the application.
DOE must certify, six months before submitting the license application, that relevant documents have been disclosed through Web-based Licensing Support Network, which can be seen by the public at http://www.lsnnet.gov.
Under the updated timeline, the certification would not happen until September or later, the official said. That would make March 2006 the earliest date DOE could submit its license application.
DOE had hoped to submit the license application in December, and it certified in June 2004 that it had made the background documents available as required. That certification was rejected as inadequate by an NRC board.
After that setback, DOE said it would aim for this December. That date has slipped as well.
The Energy Department official said no new date has been set. The official said the department's priority is to ensure that this time, the certification passes muster.
The official said the Energy Department has completed 85 percent to 90 percent of the work of entering the millions of relevant documents into the Licensing Support Network.
Yucca Mountain, planned for 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, has been beset by several problems, including an appeals court's rejection last year of the government's proposed radiation safety standard for the repository. This spring, internal e-mails became known suggesting government workers had falsified data.
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KVBC
August 01, 2005
Another Setback For The Yucca Mountain Project
There's been another delay for the Yucca Mountain project. The Energy Department says it won't submit its license application to operate Yucca Mountain until March 2006.
That's several months later than the most recent target date. The Department of Energy plans to notify the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on the new timeline this week.
Under the Commission's rules, the Energy Department cannot submit an application for six months after it publicly releases background documents on the project. Those in charge say that might not happen until September or later.
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New Yorker
August 01, 2005
Minority Retort
How a pro-gun, anti-abortion Nevadan leads the Senate´s Democrats.
By Elsa Walsh
About twenty minutes before President Bush announced that John G. Roberts, Jr., was his choice to replace Sandra Day O´Connor on the Supreme Court, he telephoned Harry Reid, of Nevada, the Senate Minority Leader. As Reid recalls the brief conversation, Bush said, “This guy is really smart, and you´ll like him.’ Reid replied, “I hope so,’ and added that, during the search, he had enjoyed working with the White House legal counsel, Harriet Miers. (A few days earlier, Reid had met with Miers and had suggested ways to avoid a divisive confirmation process.) Mentioning her name, Reid said, was a signal—his way of telling Bush, “Thanks for not giving us any of these crazies.’ Or, as he put it a little later, the President “didn´t give us somebody who people like me were jumping up and down screaming the first time the name was uttered.’
Reid has been the Democrats´ leader in the Senate for six months. He is sixty-five, a trim man with short, graying hair and slightly stooped shoulders, and not someone who appears likely to jump up and down screaming. When we met last week in his Capitol office, it was clear that the Roberts nomination had come as a relief. “There were lots of people we didn´t want, and I made sure he knew what those names were,’ Reid said, and mentioned the federal judges Edith Jones and Janice Rogers Brown, among others. “I think the President submitted someone who he thinks won´t be much trouble.’ Nonetheless, Reid was reserving judgment until the F.B.I. investigation and the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings were completed. “Roberts is not a slam dunk,’ he said. “I´m just keeping, as some have heard me say, my powder dry until we find out what the deal is.’ And yet he couldn´t quite conceal his pleasure.
The day after Bush made his choice public, Roberts went to Capitol Hill to meet with some of the senators who will eventually be asked to vote on his confirmation. Reid, who is a former trial lawyer, spent thirty minutes with Roberts. One thing he asked him was how he felt about Supreme Court precedents—in particular, on what grounds they might be overturned. “Precedent is so important to me in the law,’ Reid told him.
Roberts, Reid recalled, said, “ ‘Oh, on the Supreme Court you can change precedent only if there´s this and this,´ and he was rattling them off. I hope I didn´t act surprised, but I´d never heard anything like that before.’ Roberts, in Reid´s view, left no doubt that he would be very reluctant to overturn precedents. To do so, Roberts had said, the Court would first have to consider a series of objective criteria, two of which stood out: whether a precedent fostered stability in the nation; and the extent to which society had come to rely on an earlier ruling, even a dubious one. “I thought it would be more of a weaselly answer than that, but he said you have to meet all these standards before you can change a precedent,’ Reid said. Roberts´s view of precedent is likely to be an important issue during the upcoming confirmation hearings. Earl Maltz, a conservative and a professor at the Rutgers University School of Law at Camden, says that what Roberts told Reid could be “very significant,’ because it runs counter to the “originalist’ approach of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, who believe that the Constitution should be strictly interpreted, according to the original intent of the Founding Fathers; on that premise, some previously decided cases, including Roe v. Wade, would be ripe for overturning. “The Constitution is not a living organism,’ Scalia has said.
The other important part of their conversation, as Reid recounted it, had to do with an environmental case that Roberts had successfully argued before the Supreme Court in 2002—“one of the biggest environmental victories in decades,’ Reid said. As a private attorney, Roberts had represented the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, which had been sued for imposing a building moratorium in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. Under questioning by the Justices, Roberts had cited the potential for “irreparable harm’ to the lake, and at one point said, “A temporary ban on development doesn´t render property valueless.’ The environment is one of Reid´s causes, and what impressed Reid was that Roberts´s argument had been reasoned, not doctrinaire—“He based it on the facts.’ Reid felt that the case demonstrated Roberts´s ability to grasp both sides of a debate.
Reid more than once compared Roberts to Justice David Souter, who was appointed by the first President Bush, in 1990, and today is widely detested by conservatives because he frequently sides with the more liberal Justices. Souter and Reid are friendly. “He´s my favorite man on the Court,’ Reid said. “I think he´s such a wonderful man, and he believes in precedent. That´s all he´s doing. He´s just following the law.’ Reid smiled, and continued, “If somebody is a real lawyer and not a Clarence Thomas or Edith Jones, who is there not to be a judge but to be a legislator, it gives us some hope, and so, if he is approved, I would hope he would turn out like Souter or somebody like that.’ There is, to be sure, little in Roberts´s early record to suggest that he is anything but a conservative. A Washington Post report last week, for instance, quoted documents suggesting that Roberts had been an aggressive advocate of Ronald Reagan´s agenda when he served as a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith.
Reid, though, believes that Bush chose Roberts in a moment of political weakness. Two months earlier, the Democrats had been successful in beating back the so-called “nuclear option’—Senator Trent Lott´s infelicitous name for the Republican attempt to change long-standing Senate rules on the filibuster. That issue had occupied the Senate for months, and for good reason: Republicans have a ten-vote advantage in the hundred-member Senate, but it requires sixty votes to stop a filibuster; the Republican leadership wanted to change that to a simple majority of fifty-one votes, which would have made it almost impossible for the Democrats to block a controversial Supreme Court nomination. “I don´t want to stick my finger in his eye, at this stage,’ Reid said, speaking of Bush. “I´m trying, in a nice way, to say I think everyone´s experience here with the nuclear option has made everyone, including the President, more cautious about judges, because, as it turned out, we spent a third of the Senate´s time so far this year basically on it.’ The filibuster issue was finally resolved by means of a complex bargain worked out by a group of centrist Republicans and Democrats, who became known as the Gang of Fourteen. In the end, the filibuster was preserved. The result was widely seen as a victory for Reid and a setback for his counterpart, Majority Leader Bill Frist, of Tennessee.
After that, Reid said, Bush “just didn´t need another fight.’ He added, “He´s had plenty.’ He pointed to a drop in Bush´s approval rating, and cited a recent Wall Street Journal / NBC News poll in which only forty-one per cent of the respondents said they believed that Bush was honest and straightforward. Reid attributed the President´s declining popularity to bad news from Iraq, the investigation into whether his key political adviser, Karl Rove, leaked the name of an undercover C.I.A. agent, and his proposal, now faltering, to privatize part of Social Security. “He´s always been king of the hill,’ Reid said. “His numbers have been good, but they´re not good now.’ Reid also thought that Bush had come to have a different view of him. “I just don´t think he estimated me at all—under or over.’ Now, Reid said, “I think he understands me a little bit more than he used to.’
This spring, I went to see Reid in Nevada, which he has represented in Washington since 1983, in the House of Representatives for two terms and, since 1987, in the Senate. Outside his home state, or the orbit of the United States Capitol, though, he is not widely known. During one stop, Reid called around the country to some committed Democratic donors. In two out of three calls, he had to identify himself several times before the recipient figured out who he was. “This is Harry Reid.’ Pause. “I´m a U.S. senator.’ Pause. “Harry Reid. I´m the Senate Minority Leader. Harry R-E-I-D.’ When he hung up, he turned to me and said, “I guess I´m not too well known in that household.’
In Nevada, a state where the federal government owns nearly ninety per cent of the land and politics can be incestuous, Reid´s power and influence are widespread. He was embarrassed two years ago when a Los Angeles Times story revealed that one of his sons and his son-in-law had lobbied in Washington for “companies, trade groups and municipalities seeking Reid´s help in the Senate.’ Over the previous four years, the newspaper reported, these efforts, supported by Reid, brought more than two million dollars in business to firms that employed family members. At the time, Reid´s four sons, ranging in age from thirty to forty-two, worked for Nevada´s largest law firm, Lionel Sawyer & Collins. The story noted that the Howard Hughes Corporation alone “paid $300,000 to the tiny Washington consulting firm of [Reid´s] son-in-law Steven Barringer to push a provision allowing the company to acquire 998 acres of federal land ripe for development’ in the Las Vegas metropolitan area. When I asked Reid about the L.A. Times story, he pointed out that his son-in-law had been a lobbyist before his daughter married him. Susan McCue, Reid´s chief of staff, said in an e-mail that when the newspaper started making inquiries “Senator Reid (and I) agreed that we needed to put up a wall between any family members lobbying and this office for the sake of appearances, even if they´re working on issues that benefit Nevada.’ Soon after he was interviewed by L.A. Times reporters, Reid banned relatives from lobbying his office.
Reid seems, at first, an unlikely choice for party leader in the Senate, especially given the tradition of men like Lyndon Johnson, whose method of leadership was to cajole and threaten his colleagues. Reid doesn´t have the sort of domineering personality that L.B.J. had; in fact, despite an occasionally quick temper, he can seem almost shy. But, if Reid is no Johnson, he has, unlike his immediate predecessor, Tom Daschle, of South Dakota, or Frist, been able to keep his party largely united. That is due, in part, to his attentiveness; he is in constant contact with colleagues, and even reserves a pocket in his suit for their written requests. Susan McCue says that Reid is always assessing a person´s vulnerabilities in order to “disarm, to endear, to threaten, but most of all to instill fear.’ And Reid has made it plain that there are consequences for stepping out of line. Without Reid´s approval, Senator Byron Dorgan, of North Dakota, who was making a bid to chair the Democratic National Committee, announced that he had Reid´s support. Reid—a friend of Dorgan´s—promptly and publicly withdrew his backing.
Like L.B.J. and other Southwestern politicians, such as Barry Goldwater, Reid has a habit of using language that his critics say is inappropriate for a Senate leader. “I think Senator Reid often says what we´re all thinking but perhaps are afraid to say,’ Senator Edward Kennedy says. Reid has called Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, a “political hack,’ said that Clarence Thomas was an “embarrassment,’ and labelled Bush a “loser’ and a “liar.’ He surprised the Democratic operative Jim Johnson, who was conducting John Kerry´s search for a running mate, by sharply criticizing a long list of potential candidates, including John Edwards.
In public presentations, Reid is sometimes barely audible, which forces his spokesman to stand very close to him to hear what he says. In his haste to finish a speech, he sometimes mangles the text, and he is not much liked by television—he suffers from a certain charisma gap. When I asked him one day which former Senate leader he most admired, he mentioned Mike Mansfield, of Montana, who was the Majority Leader from 1961 to 1977. “He hated going on programs like ‘Meet the Press,´ and he was so bad they eventually hated having him on,’ he said. Yet the aversion to television also works to Reid´s advantage. As former Senator John Breaux, Democrat of Louisiana, says, “It´s easier for an elected official like Harry to be more trusted and accepted by his colleagues if they don´t think that he´s out in front trying to do it for the media.’
To most politicians, this kind of anonymity would be torment. But Reid is not aspiring to be the face of the Democratic Party, or even its voice. “I know my limitations,’ he said, and added, “I haven´t gotten where I am by my good looks, my athletic ability, my great brain, my oratorical skills.’ Reid is a Mormon, and differs with most of his Democratic colleagues on social issues. He is opposed to abortion, gay marriage, and gun control, and supports the death penalty. He voted for both Persian Gulf wars. At a time when the White House and Congress are controlled by Republicans, Reid´s essential role is defensive—to hold the line for his party when the Bush agenda threatens to trample what Democrats most value. And, despite his relative anonymity, Reid has certainly been noticed by conservatives. When the Senate finally reached a deal on the filibuster, James Dobson, the ultraconservative chairman of Focus on the Family, delivered a backhanded compliment to Reid. “This Senate agreement represents a complete bailout and betrayal by a cabal of Republicans and a great victory for united Democrats,’ Dobson said.
When Reid talks to constituents, he likes to single out staffers for particular praise. He told a group of Las Vegas businessmen that Susan McCue was one of ten children and that “she worked like a dog to get through college.’ McCue, who is thirty-nine, and has worked intermittently for Reid since 1990, rolled her eyes at Reid´s description. When Reid speaks about Bush, his tone changes; he has called Bush “King George,’ and in Las Vegas he told a group of community activists that the President´s view was “If you´re poor it´s your fault. Go out and be part of America´s success. Go out and get a job and be rich.’ And he added, “I wish it were so.’ When I asked McCue about this apparent class sensitivity, she said, “It´s not resentment on Reid´s part. But he knows they’—Reid and Bush—“are from different sides of the track.’ She urged me to visit Searchlight, Nevada, where Reid was born and has a home—a place that does double duty as a political backdrop, evoking the authentic Old West.
Seven years ago, Reid wrote a history of his home town, “Searchlight: The Camp That Didn´t Fail,’ published by the University of Nevada, in which he observed, “There are no permanent towns that survive on mining alone. When the tide goes out, when the boom is over, the debris is all that is left. . . . When the town fades, those with money, talent, and initiative generally depart quickly, leaving behind the diehards, the outcasts, the mavericks, or those too old or too sick to move on.’ Today in Searchlight, which is about a mile long, one can see the two-room cinder-block schoolhouse that Reid attended, a small casino on the main street, and a McDonald´s. Almost all the houses are double-wide mobile homes, with no landscaping.
There were about two hundred people left in the town when Reid was born, in 1939, the third of four sons of Harry Reid, Sr., a gold miner with an elementary-school education, and his wife, Inez, who did laundry for some of the local bordellos, which were by then the town´s primary business. Reid´s boyhood home was built out of scavenged railroad ties; it had no indoor toilet and no hot water. There were no telephones in Searchlight until the nineteen-fifties. When Reid´s younger brother, Larry, broke a leg in a bicycle accident, the leg was never set. “We didn´t go to doctors in those days unless it was a matter of life and death,’ Reid said. “And he just lay there. It was so painful, and you couldn´t touch the bed. And that´s the way it just was for several days.’ (Larry and another brother are retired; the third, an alcoholic, died in 1977.) Reid´s parents drank and his father often got into brawls. “He didn´t like people coming around and wouldn´t let us answer the door even if we were home,’ Reid said. When he could no longer work, because of silicosis, a miner´s cough, Reid´s father stopped drinking, but at the age of fifty-eight he committed suicide, with a gunshot to the head. “He was always depressed,’ Reid said, adding that his father´s depression was evident to him only in hindsight. “We always joke that Dad sobered up and killed himself.’ His mother tacked to the wall a blue pillowcase with gold fringe and a message of perseverance that originated with Franklin Delano Roosevelt: “We can. We will. We must.’
Because the school in Searchlight went only up to eighth grade, every week Reid hitchhiked forty miles to Henderson, a factory town, where he boarded with relatives while he went to the public high school. “I always knew I wanted to get out of there,’ he said of Searchlight. “I knew that from the time I was a little kid.’ In Henderson, Reid met Landra Gould, the woman whom he eventually married. Reid said that Gould´s parents, who were Jewish, liked him until they realized how serious the couple was—“They wanted their daughter to marry a Jewish boy’—and tried to end the relationship. Her father, Landra Reid told me, “would tear up Harry´s letters, hang up the phone on him. They had a fight in the front yard.’ Reid has said that the fight ended when he knocked his future father-in-law, a chiropractor, to the ground. Landra says, “I remember a lot of yelling and pushing.’ In 1959, when Harry was twenty and Landra was nineteen, they eloped. After a honeymoon dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Las Vegas, Landra called home to report the news; within days, she got a letter from her parents saying that, despite their misgivings, their daughter´s happiness came first. Reid now wears his father-in-law´s ring.
In Henderson, Reid also met Donal (Mike) O´Callaghan, who arrived at the high school to teach government and boxing. O´Callaghan, who had lost a leg in the Korean War and was just ten years older than Reid, became a hero to Reid after he faced down a school bully. Reid, a catcher on the school´s championship baseball team and a guard on the football team, learned to box from O´Callaghan, who helped him win a partial athletic scholarship to a junior college in Utah and later helped pay his way through law school. O´Callaghan, like Reid, had larger ambitions: in the seventies, he served two terms as governor of Nevada, and he went on to become the executive editor of the Las Vegas Sun and a sometime columnist for the paper. When he died, last year, Reid eulogized him as the best friend he had ever had. McCue told me that the only time she ever saw Reid cry was at the news of O´Callaghan´s death.
While Harry was in college, he and Landra converted to Mormonism. “The thing that was so impressive to me—in addition to the spiritual aspects that I´d never experienced before—was the emphasis on family,’ Reid said. “The biggest jump for me,’ Landra Reid said, “was to try to understand the connection between Judaism and the Old Testament and the New Testament, and how to make any sense of how Christianity fit into it.’ She added, “Before we got married, we had talked about it and decided we were not going to let religion divide us after what we´d been through. If we found something, we were going to find it together.’ Until both of her parents died, Harry Reid said, the family observed the Jewish holidays. “My two oldest children have great affection for things Jewish, and my three younger children are aware of their mother´s lineage, and all of them are very proud of the fact that they are eligible for Israeli citizenship.’ On the doorway of their house in Searchlight, the Reids have a mezuzah.
The Reids´ house, a Mediterranean-style two-bedroom home that faces the open desert, is situated on a hundred acres at the end of a long dirt road. They had it built four years ago, after living for years in a double-wide. Reid´s friend Jay Brown, a Las Vegas lawyer and a Brooklyn native, said, “You should have seen the trailer,’ and complained that simply getting there ruined the tires of his car. Reid is a former marathoner—he ran twelve races before an injury and then a fall sidelined him. Now he takes an hour-long walk each morning, often with Landra, whose presence appears to put him in a lighter mood.
The Reids took me on a tour of the house, which is decorated in a Western mining motif, including a gate from one of the town´s mines that hangs on a wall in the entry hall. Next to it is an abstract oil painting of Martin Luther King, Jr. Reid showed me his high-school yearbook; when he was sixteen, his nickname was Pinky. A painting of what appeared to be a mountain man with a white scraggly beard caught my attention. “That´s my brother Larry,’ he said.“He still looks that way.’ He pointed to a skeletal structure in the distance, the remains of one of the mines where his father worked.
As George W. Bush has learned, Harry Reid does not ignore slights. “I believe in vengeance,’ he once told a reporter. In May, he began a commencement address at George Washington University Law School by saying that the last time he had set foot on the campus was January, 1964—the year he graduated from the school. “I´ve been holding a grudge,’ he said. Law school was difficult. “We managed to get by, but just barely,’ he said. At one point, while Landra was pregnant with their second child and he was working six days a week as a Capitol police officer, the transmission of their car, a 1954 Buick Special, broke down. He was desperate. “No car,’ he continued. “No way to get to work. Too many bills.’ When he approached a dean for help, he recalled, the dean said, “ ‘Why don´t you just quit law school?´ I don´t remember exactly what I thought he would say, but that was not it,’ he said. “Since that day, I´ve harbored ill will toward this school.’
Reid told the graduates that he regretted his pettiness, but it´s fair to say that payback has been a factor in his career. When I asked what got him interested in politics, he had a one-word reply: “Rudeness.’ He explained that not long after he returned to Henderson to practice law, a client, a doctor, had asked him to accompany him to an administrative hearing at a hospital. “As we walked in, the chairman of the board of trustees said, ‘We don´t need lawyers here. We do what we want to do,´ ’ Reid recalled. “It was just so rude. I wasn´t there to say anything. I was there just to watch. As a result of how rude he was, I decided to run for the hospital board.’ He was elected in 1966, and not long afterward, he said, “we got him’—the administrator—“fired.’ Soon, Reid decided that he could accomplish more in the state assembly, and in 1968 he announced his candidacy. This time, he went after the telephone company. “Service was so bad then, and they were dumb enough to respond to me,’ Reid has said. “So I had an issue.’ Reid served in the assembly for only two years, but he acquired a reputation as a consumer advocate, and he still holds the Nevada record for introducing the most bills in a session.
In 1970, Reid was barely thirty, and preparing for another state run, when it was suggested that he enter the lieutenant governor´s race. His good friend Mike O´Callaghan was running for governor as a Democrat—a long-shot candidacy—and Reid decided to run, he says, “within fifteen minutes.’ His law partners gave him a party, and, as Reid tells it, “one of the local columnists wrote that I must be supported by Howard Hughes—otherwise how could I have a big party like that. Howard Hughes had just come to town. Of course it wasn´t true, but who was I to deny that he was helping me?’
Reid believes that the pseudo-Hughes connection may have frightened off challengers, and both O´Callaghan and Reid, running separately, won. But success, he says, made him overconfident. Reid had been lieutenant governor for four years when Senator Alan Bible announced his retirement. “I was a shoo-in,’ Reid says. “Everything was in my favor. But I was young and impulsive and I attacked everybody. Every day, we would get up and find out who we were going to attack that day.’ His pollster was Pat Cadell, who went on to work for Jimmy Carter´s Presidential campaign in 1976. Cadell assured him that he couldn´t lose. “I showed him,’ Reid says. “I lost by six hundred and twenty-four votes,’ to Paul Laxalt. When friends told him that such reverses always turn out for the best, he said, “I wanted to kick them in the shins.’
In 1977, O´Callaghan appointed him to the chairmanship of the Nevada Gaming Commission, which oversees casinos, and that was an experience that made his other work look easy. Before Reid took the job, O´Callaghan introduced him to the outgoing chairman, Peter Echeverria. “Pete was telling us, ‘I´ve had people out here watching me, these gangsters,´ and he said, ‘I think they´ve tapped my phone,´ ’ Reid recalled. “I thought he was making all this stuff up. It just didn´t make sense. I had no concept of the Mob. It meant nothing to me.’ There had been a decrease in Mob activity, but organized crime was again investing in Las Vegas, and for four years Reid confronted wiseguys like Tony (the Ant) Spilotro, who had been sent to Las Vegas by a Chicago branch of La Cosa Nostra, “the Outfit,’ and was known for killing his victims by squeezing their heads in a vise. In 1979, Reid barred Spilotro from all casinos.
In July of 1978, a man named Jack Gordon, who was later married to LaToya Jackson, offered Reid twelve thousand dollars to approve two new, carnival-like gaming devices for casino use. Reid reported the attempted bribe to the F.B.I. and arranged a meeting with Gordon in his office. By agreement, F.B.I. agents burst in to arrest Gordon at the point where Reid asked, “Is this the money?’ Although he was taking part in a sting, Reid was unable to control his temper; the videotape shows him getting up from his chair and saying, “You son of a bitch, you tried to bribe me!’ and attempting to choke Gordon, before startled agents pulled him off. “I was so angry with him for thinking he could bribe me,’ Reid said, explaining his theatrical outburst. Gordon was convicted in federal court in 1979 and sentenced to six months in prison.
One day in 1981, Landra Reid noticed that the family station wagon was not running properly, and she discovered a cable under the hood and “something’ sticking out of the gas tank. Police found a device that would have exploded had it been correctly grounded. Reid always blamed Gordon for the bomb, and the incident frightened his family—by then there were five children, four sons and a daughter—so that for a year they started the car by remote control. Gordon died in April, at the age of sixty-six, and his connection to the bombing attempt was never proved. McCue, Reid´s chief of staff, says that the episode changed Reid. Whatever the issue, she says, his approach is always “No one is going to kill me over this.’
When Reid´s Gaming Commission appointment expired, in 1981, he went back to private practice. He was at work on a liability lawsuit stemming from the M-G-M Grand fire, the 1980 blaze in which eighty-four people died, when Nevada was given another seat in the House of Representatives. Reid ran as a New Democrat, in a state that was tilting Republican. “Part of it, I´m sure, was my narrow loss in the Senate race, and it was also to show people I could make a comeback,’ Reid said of his desire to run. He won the election and went to Washington in 1983.
After visiting Searchlight, Reid and I drove to Las Vegas, fifty-five miles away, through the Mojave Desert. On the drive, he talked about his relationship with Bush, whom he regularly disparages; there appears to be no chance that Reid and Bush will duplicate the unusually friendly relationship that Ronald Reagan had with Thomas P. (Tip) O´Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House, or even the businesslike partnership between Speaker Sam Rayburn and President Eisenhower. At an appearance at the Doris Hancock Elementary School, in Las Vegas, which some of his children attended, Reid began by talking about how his life had become more pressured since he´d become Minority Leader, but he was soon asked about Bush. “I didn´t come here to beat up on President Bush,’ he said. “But I have served three Republican Presidents. President Reagan—I cared a great deal for him, and he got most of what he wanted. If you disagreed with him, he did not hold it against you.’ He went on, “President Bush No. 1 is such a nice person. Some of my most prized possessions are the three letters he wrote me. But this President is totally different. He takes after his mother. It´s either his way or no way. It´s very, very difficult.’ Even Reid seemed surprised by the depth of his reaction. “I´m sorry to give you this report on President Bush,’ he said, “but that´s how I feel.’
Reid had been head of the school P.T.A., and the parents of some of his children´s friends were in the audience. One was the mother of a college roommate of one of his sons. Like Reid, she is an observant Mormon and they were old friends; but she was a Republican and clearly upset that Reid did not support Bush, especially on the partial privatization of Social Security. Later, she told me that she had voted for Reid in every election except the last one. “He became too liberal,’ she said. “I love his wife, but I feel he´s left a lot of his beliefs behind.’ While we were talking, Reid approached and she told him that one of her son´s friends, a professional football player, had been at the White House on Valentine´s Day. “They said Bush was so nice,’ she said. Reid raised his eyebrows.
What happened between him and Bush? Their first meetings, right after Bush´s 2000 election, were cordial enough, Reid told me. “He was an extremely personable man—the kind of guy you´d like to go to a ballgame with.’ But, he went on, “I have a lot of history now that I didn´t have then. First of all, he started out on a real bad foot with me because of Yucca Mountain’—a site a hundred miles northwest of Las Vegas, which the federal government wants to use as long-term storage for tens of thousands of tons of radioactive waste. Al Gore opposed this plan in the 2000 campaign, and Bush seemed to oppose it as well, promising that he would base any decision on “sound science.’ Reid believed Bush, but, he said, “my belief was short-lived.’ Barely a year into his first term, Bush approved the project, and Reid accused him of lying: “I thought he had misled the people of Nevada on nuclear waste.’ Of calling Bush a liar, Reid said, “If somebody doesn´t tell the truth, how else would you describe it? I guess I could have said he didn´t tell the truth.’ Reid said that, in a private meeting in the Oval Office in February, 2002, he told Bush, “You sold out on this.’ The Wall Street Journal later reported the Yucca Mountain decision as the “biggest defeat’ of Reid´s career, but added, “The fact that the campaign went on for so long is testimony to Mr. Reid´s formidable persuasive powers—a gift that still could put him in line to be his party´s next leader.’
The moment came on November 3, 2004, the day after the election. Tom Daschle had just lost his Senate race in South Dakota, becoming the first Senate leader in half a century to be defeated, and the Republicans had picked up five other seats being vacated by Democrats. Reid, who, as the Democrats´ Minority Whip since 1998, had been Daschle´s No. 2, had assiduously attended to his colleagues´ needs, monitoring legislation on the Senate floor while earning a reputation as trustworthy. By 11 a.m., Reid had the votes he needed. Neither Bush, who had been unsure of his own victory until early that morning, nor Reid, who had spent much of the night on the phone, had slept much. Bush called Reid in Nevada, and, Reid recalled, “he said, ‘This is a new term for me. I´m not running for anything ever again and I want to work with you again.´ ’ Reid was pleased, and reported the conversation to his staff. “He had a significant majority in both the House and the Senate, and I thought he would work with us to try to get things done, that we could agree on,’ he said.
Reid has not been particularly tough on Bush´s appointments so far. He voted to confirm Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State and even announced that he would probably support Scalia as Chief Justice if William Rehnquist retired and Bush wanted him. He didn´t push for a filibuster against Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General, despite the opposition of all eight Democrats on the Judiciary Committee. Yet, on February 7th, the Republican National Committee attacked Reid´s record on its Web site, citing the Los Angeles Times story on his family, in which Reid was accused of voting for legislation that benefitted his sons and son-in-law. (One passage quoted on the R.N.C. Web site said, “So pervasive are the ties among Reid, members of his family and Nevada´s leading industries and institutions that it´s difficult to find a significant field in which such a relationship does not exist.’) On the Senate floor, Reid denounced the story as “scurrilous’ and rebuked the President. Coincidentally, Bush had invited the Reids to dinner at the White House that night, along with three other senators and their wives. Reid initially thought about not going, but decided that “it would be too easy for them for me just not to go.’ Still, it was clear that he and Landra were angry. Reid recalled that Bush said, “You know, I didn´t have anything to do with that. I don´t know what they do.’ Reid wasn´t mollified. The next day, he reminded reporters of Bush´s campaign pledge to be a “uniter.’ “I´m beginning to think those statements were just absolutely false,’ he said.
There is no longer anything about Reid´s family on the R.N.C. Web site. The offending lines were removed on orders from Karl Rove. According to Rove, following the dinner Bush told him to tell Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the R.N.C., to “never mention Reid´s family again.’ When I asked Reid about this, he said he was aware that the section had been deleted, but not of Bush´s role. “That´s nice of him,’ he said.
Reid said that relations with Bush got worse in April, during the filibuster dispute, at a breakfast meeting in the White House between Bush and the congressional leadership. Reid said that he appealed to Bush to stay out of the fight, telling him, “I hope you´re going to help us on this nuclear option.’ The President, he said, “was very direct and blunt: ‘I have nothing to do with this. This is your business. It´s not mine.´ ’ Reid thought that would remove one powerful obstacle. But, within days, Vice-President Dick Cheney announced that, as acting president of the Senate, he would provide the tie-breaking vote if it was needed to change the rule. Bush, Reid said, had pulled a “halfback´s stutter step’—a fake—on him. “He was just trying, it appears to me, to mislead me. He just wasn´t telling me the truth at that breakfast meeting. No question about it. He could have said to me, ‘What you´ve done is wrong and I´m going to do everything I can to get it exercised. I want all my judges.´ But he didn´t.’ Reid paused. “Just tell me what I have to work with. Don´t mislead me. How do I say this—because I don´t want to appear holier than thou—but relationships are built on trust, and that´s the problem that I´m having with the White House today. It´s that I don´t think they want to establish trust with me.’ Reid paused again and shrugged. “I´m not important to them. They can just go around me.’ He sounded weary, but then his voice strengthened. “He´s not a dictator. He´s a President. And he has the same power that I do. He individually may have more power. But his branch of government has no more power than mine.’
About a month later, at a point when negotiations on resolving the filibuster issue seemed to have stalled, Reid made his only phone call on the issue to the White House—to Rove. “This thing should be worked out,’ Reid said he told Rove. “It´s craziness.’ At the time, Bush had re-submitted the names of seven appellate-court nominees whom Senate Democrats had previously blocked, using the filibuster tactic. “We let this continue to go on, twenty years from now, if either of us is still alive, we´re going to look back and be ashamed of what we allowed to happen,’ Rove said. He said that harsh attacks were driving out possible nominees who were leery of the confirmation process. “I get it,’ Reid responded. He told Rove that he had been trying for years to improve the process, and added, “I´m just trying to find a way out of this.’
For Rove, the most painful example was Miguel Estrada, who had worked in the Solicitor General´s office, and who was Bush´s first appellate-court nominee, in 2001. Estrada withdrew his name twenty-eight months after being nominated. During the confirmation struggle, Estrada´s wife miscarried; in November, 2004, she died, of an overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills. The death was ruled accidental by the medical examiner. Rove said that Mrs. Estrada had been traumatized by the nastiness of the process. Reid told Rove that he empathized with Estrada, but said that the Republicans´ treatment of President Clinton´s nominees—more than sixty were never voted on by the Judiciary Committee—had created victims, too. Rove, according to Reid, replied, “We need to sit down and talk about this,’ adding that the ugliness of the confirmation process had reached a new low.
Rove recalls that the conversation was mostly about making a deal on the judicial nominees. According to Rove, Reid said, “They´re all unqualified, but you can pick the one you want,’ and eventually it got to two. At one point, Rove asked Reid, “If they´re unworthy, why are you letting us have any?’ And he said, “Harry, it´s like you´re asking us to pick one of our children and kill them.’ He said that Reid kept jumping around with the numbers: “It was a nutty conversation.’ For Reid at this point, the individual nominees were a secondary issue. “I didn´t like the judges,’ he said later, “but there was a principle higher than any of those men or women’—the preservation of the Senate filibuster rule. When the discussion ended in an impasse, Reid was disappointed, but he said, “I wasn´t owed anything, that´s for sure.’
Reid had always regarded a full Senate vote on the “nuclear option’ as a gamble. Frist appeared to hold the advantage; with Cheney in the wings, he needed only fifty senators to make the rules change, while Reid needed to persuade six Republicans to cross over. And although Reid thought that he had those six votes, he was certain only of four. “Each day, I started losing people,’ he recalled. By May 23rd, the day before the scheduled vote, Reid believed that neither he nor Frist really knew for sure who had the votes, and when the seven Democrats in the Gang of Fourteen told Reid that they were ready to make a deal with the Republicans he acquiesced. “I thought we might have the six votes, but I wasn´t positive, and I wasn´t willing to take the chance. He’—Frist—“didn´t know that he had the votes, but he was willing to take the chance.’ In the final compromise, three of the seven Bush judicial choices that Reid and Rove had discussed were approved by the Senate, and it was simultaneously agreed that senators could filibuster a nominee “under extraordinary circumstances’—somewhat vague language that has yet to be tested. For the Democrats, though, the agreement preserved the power to block a Bush Supreme Court choice.
Standing before reporters, Reid, who had worked behind the scenes for this result, looked euphoric. Frist, who appeared later, looked glum—understandably, some observers thought. Frist had staked a lot on the issue; he has said that he plans to retire from the Senate in 2006, and it is believed that he may seek the Presidency. “I was not a party to that agreement nor was the Republican leadership,’ Frist said. “Now we move into a new and uncertain phase.’ The Senate that Frist purportedly led had suddenly been taken over by a bipartisan group beyond his reach. And, for Reid and others, it is not a stretch to see the connection between the filibuster compromise and the relatively noncontroversial nomination of John G. Roberts.
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Jacksonville Daily News
August 01, 2005
Energy bill isn't coherent solution
You know the saying - even a blind squirrel can come up with an acorn once in a while, right?So there are probably at least a few items in Congress' latest stab at an energy bill we can support. A few. But taken as a package, the 1,725-page monstrosity is a massive disappointment, going light on the regulatory relief that would help clear the way to more energy self-sufficiency and heavy on handouts, subsidies and mandates.
It's more of the same, in other words, and will do little to boost energy self-reliance or curb high prices. We're in trouble when the most innovative and daring idea included in the bill is an extension of daylight-saving time. No energy bill would be better than this energy bill, in our view.
Top House and Senate negotiators say it is a bipartisan triumph, calling it "the most comprehensive energy bill in the last 30 to 40 years." Comprehensive, perhaps. But effective? Probably not.
"Everyone agreed to try to find a way to make the bill possible in a very short amount of time," said Texas Rep. Joe Barton, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee. But when everyone in Washington agrees on a bill, we get nervous. Such unanimity often comes at a price - the buying-off of every potential stakeholder.
It's already being panned by both sides of the political spectrum. "It's the Tour de Big Oil," quipped a representative of one green group. "Exxon is wearing the yellow jersey."
Added Jerry Taylor, a spokesman for the libertarian Cato Institute: "The bill is larded with subsidies, tax preferences and miscellaneous handouts to an energy industry that - with prices this high - are in no need of taxpayer assistance."
The bill will include nearly $12 billion in energy industry tax breaks, royalty relief and other "incentives," according to reports. That's nearly double the $6.7 billion in giveaways recommended by the president, but don't expect a veto. This is a bi-partisan spending binge.
The media focus a lot on tax breaks for oil and gas. And these even drew rebukes from the administration. "The oil and gas companies don't need incentives with oil and gas prices being what they are today," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said. But the "alternative energy" industry has its snout buried deep in the trough, too. Renewable energy receives $3.158 billion. Alternative vehicles and fuels get $1.259 billion. Efficiency and conservation incentives total $1.369 billion.
None of these inducements to production or conservation would be needed if Washington would place the emphasis on clearing away the regulatory burdens, drilling moratoria, price controls and existing tax giveaways that hold down the energy sector and distort the market. We would prefer that the market, rather than pork-fed politicians and Washington lobbyists, pick energy winners and losers.
But this bill moves us in the opposite direction, toward top-down planning and corporate-welfare giveaways.
There are a few good things in the package. There are provisions that will help enhance the reliability of, and spur investment in, the nation's antiquated electricity grid, for instance. Another provision might help bring more uniformity to how federal agencies handle permitting for companies wanting to drill or mine on federal lands, modestly reducing the uncertainties and hassles they face. But there's little more in the way of regulatory relief or reform. And it's replete with half-steps in the right direction.
The new law grants the federal government a stronger hand in the siting of liquefied natural gas terminals, a number of which have been delayed or derailed due to state or local opposition. This will probably improve the nation's ability to keep pace with the growing demand for natural gas - even as it deepens our dependence on imports. The bill also orders a comprehensive survey of offshore oil and gas fields - which becomes an academic exercise unless the country is also prepared to lift drilling moratoria off much of the east and west coasts and areas of the Gulf of Mexico. And that is still vigorously opposed by coastal states.
Lawmakers also approved $2 billion in risk insurance for the nuclear power industry, to help spur the building of a new generation of reactors. But the continuing impasse over the long-term waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain, Nev., leaves a cloud hanging over the industry's future. And the bill does nothing to resolve the problem.
This bill, in short, represents the worst kind of kitchen-sink legislating, resulting in a murky soup of disparate scraps and half-measures that shouldn't be confused with a coherent energy policy.
This is a hold-your-nose-and-vote-"yes" bill with only one purpose - to convince the gullible that Washington cares.
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Forbes
August 01, 2005
Nuclear Energy
Hanford's Sludge Becomes Glass
Christopher Helman
Barring further delays, the Department of Energy and Bechtel National should complete construction on their $7 billion-plus nuclear waste plant in Hanford sometime in the next decade. Then the DOE can finally begin the 20-year process of turning 53 million gallons of ultra-radioactive sludge into steel-encased blocks of glass (see: "Waste Mismanagement").
The most deadly components of the waste, including radioactive isotopes of strontium, cesium and technetium, were formed as by-products of nuclear fission in Hanford's nine uranium-fueled reactors. The purpose of the reactions was to produce plutonium for nuclear warheads.
To separate the valuable plutonium from other by-products, the slugs of spent uranium fuel were dissolved in nitric acid and chemically filtered. Once the plutonium was removed the rest was dumped in the 177 sludge tanks. These tanks now contain 200 million curies of radiation and constitute roughly half of the nation's highest-level nuclear waste.
When the plant begins operating, the sludge will flow through a mile of double-walled, concrete-shielded pipelines from its underground tanks to the pretreatment building. To ease the flow, operators will ultimately add 100 million gallons of water to the material.
Pretreatment will be the largest structure in the complex—12 stories tall and 500,000 square feet with a reinforced concrete pad 10 feet thick. There, the first stop for all that muck is the "black cell" area, where 275-ton stainless steel vessels surrounded by steel-reinforced concrete walls 6 feet thick receive the waste. This area has some of the most robust engineering of the entire complex. Once the plant is operational, the black cells will become so highly radioactive that no person will ever be allowed to set foot there.
Overall, the building will boast 51 major stainless steel vessels with liquid capacity of 4 million gallons. Waste will move from vessel to vessel, with filters and chemical precipitation processes used to separate high-level solid waste from lower-level liquid waste. The process will have to be continually adjusted: No two sludge tanks contain the same toxic stew.
Then it's time to make glass. The two waste streams will flow to either the high-level waste building or to the low-activity waste building. In either case, the waste is pumped into a holding vat where glass ingredients such as silica, zinc oxide and aluminum silicate are mixed in. The resulting slurries are then injected into melters designed with technology from Duratek (nasdaq: DRTK - news - people ), a $300 million sales public company, which specializes in radioactive waste management. Duratek has built a half-dozen melters across the country, including one currently vitrifying millions of gallons of waste at the Savannah River site in South Carolina.
The size of a two-car garage, the melters receive the slurry and zap it with 600 kilowatt current of electricity from nickel-based alloy electrodes, heating it to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Mixed up with hot-air bubblers, the brew is poured into stainless steel canisters—1,500 a year. The high-level waste canisters are 2 feet in diameter and 14.5 feet long; once filled, they will weigh 4 tons. Ultimately, the Department of Energy expects to produce 10,000 high-level waste canisters and thousands more low-level ones. The low-level canisters will be buried in the desert at Hanford, where their radioactivity will decay to safe levels in several hundred years. The high-level canisters will go to a geologic depository, such as Yucca Mountain, if it ever opens. For thousands of years, they will remain radioactive enough to kill a person on contact.
On the strength of its designs for the feds, Duratek has tentatively won a contract with Russia for a melter to treat plutonium-laced sludge. It's also in the running for a $60 million melter in China and another in Israel, all to treat plutonium waste. But none will be as big as Hanford. Says Duratek's chief melter engineer Mark Clements, "If we win the Chinese contract we'll have that melter built, operating and even decommissioned before Hanford's vitrification gets under way." No doubt.
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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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