Yucca Mountain News Clips - Friday, September 23, 2005

Yucca Mountain News Clips
Friday, September 23, 2005
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
September 23, 2005

Nevada wins Yucca ruling

DOE told it must release draft copy of license application

By Keith Rogers
Review-Journal

Chalk one up for the Nevada lawyers fighting the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

A three-judge panel for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ruled Thursday that the Department of Energy must release a draft copy of the license application that it intends to submit for the NRC to review.

The panel, chaired by administrative Judge Thomas S. Moore, concluded that DOE's 2004 draft license application "is documentary material and is a circulated draft ... not protected by any deliberative process privilege."

The ruling gives more leverage to Nevada officials and other opponents of DOE's plans to build a maze of tunnels inside Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, to entomb 77,000 tons of the nation's spent nuclear fuel and highly radioactive defense wastes.

Having access to a draft before the final license application is submitted means that state attorneys will be able to preview the direction DOE is heading with its design for the below-ground repository and above-ground staging facilities. It also will give them insights on how DOE plans to meet the Environmental Protection Agency's two-tiered, 1 million-year radiation safety standard.

The panel ordered DOE to make the draft document available on the Licensing Support Network "no later than the time it makes its initial certification."

An attempt by DOE to begin certification of the Web-based Licensing Support Network was shot down this summer by the NRC's Pre-License Application Presiding Officer Board.

State Nuclear Projects Agency chief Bob Loux and the state's lead nuclear waste lawyer, Joe Egan, could not be reached for comment late Thursday.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman's press secretary, Craig Stevens, read a prepared statement that said, "Department lawyers are currently reviewing the document. Once that review is completed, the department will assess its options and go from there."

Similarly, NRC spokesman David McIntyre wrote in an e-mail that "we have only just received the ruling and cannot comment until we've had a chance to give it a thorough review."

DOE had planned to submit a license application last year but since has decided not to set a target date for the submission.

The repository, once targeted to open in 2010, is not expected to be ready until 2012 at the earliest, barring any delays in the NRC's license review or from legal actions.

Stephens Washington Bureau Chief Steve Tetreault contributed to this report.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
September 23, 2005

Hatch weighs Yucca stance

With Skull Valley in play, Utah senator keeps options open

By Jennifer Talhelm
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- Days after Utah Sen. Bob Bennett joined Nevada Sen. Harry Reid in saying the nation should not store its nuclear waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch said he might be willing to work with Reid too.

At the moment, however, he said he's going to continue to lobby the Bush administration and try legislation, noting that is the best bet to keep nuclear waste from being stored in Utah's Skull Valley.

"This is a continuing dialogue and I'm going to continue to talk" to the White House, Hatch said at a news conference Thursday. The White House and several federal agencies still could agree to block the proposed site in Utah, and he wants to keep those options open.

But he added that he'd consider anything, "including, if I have to, aligning with Senator Reid. But frankly I don't see how he's going to help us to solve this problem under the current circumstances. But I'm open."

In the ongoing chess match between Utah and Nevada over proposed nuclear storage options, Hatch has the next move.

A temporary nuclear waste storage facility proposed for the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation got an OK from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission earlier this month. Private Fuel Storage, a group of utilities, wants to store 44,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel at the site, about 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, until a permanent repository could be built at Yucca Mountain.

The two states' senators have butted heads over the issue in the past. Hatch and Bennett, both Republicans, supported Yucca because it could mean the Skull Valley site wouldn't open.

Bennett changed all that on Tuesday when he said on the Senate floor that he was wrong in voting for Yucca Mountain.

The move isolated Hatch.

He planned to introduce a bill this week that would establish a moratorium to prevent storage of spent nuclear fuel on nonfederal, off-site facilities. On Thursday, he added that he too questions whether Yucca Mountain should be built.

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Las Vegas SUN
September 23, 2005

Geologist: Nevada at risk for major quake

Fault lines could affect Yucca dump

By J. Craig Anderson
Las Vegas Sun

Floods, tremors, volcanoes and radioactivity may terrify the average citizen, but to a group of geologists meeting this week in Las Vegas for a conference, they are the spice of life.

"Nevada has gold, earthquakes, water and nuclear waste -- what more could you want?" Nevada State Geologist Jonathan Price said jokingly to an audience of about 150 during Wednesday's opening session of the 48th annual Conference of the Association of Engineering Geologists, which runs through Monday at the Flamingo.

Price began the conference with an overview of the state's various geologic hazards before he launched into a detailed explanation of the proposed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain and how conditions under the earth's surface there could cause radioactive contamination to escape.

Of all the state's geologic hazards, earthquakes pose the greatest risk to residents, with seismic hazard data pointing to the south and west as the most unstable regions.

Carson City is comparable to Los Angeles or San Francisco when it comes to the likelihood of earthquakes, he said.

The Las Vegas area is less prone to earth-shattering seismic activity, but the cost in human lives could be far greater than in Carson City if a major quake does occur.

"The risk might be higher because there's a lot more population at risk," Price said.

A Federal Emergency Management Agency study based on 2000 census data indicates a 10 to 20 percent chance that a major earthquake -- 5.9 or greater on the Richter scale -- will hit within striking distance of Las Vegas during the next 50 years.

A conservative estimate of the economic damage is $3 billion to $8 billion, based on the FEMA study. A stronger earthquake of 6.9 on the Richter scale or more could do as much as $25 billion in damage. Price said because the area's population has grown so rapidly during the past five years, the FEMA estimates may not be high enough.

It is difficult to predict how some hotels would hold up during a serious earthquake because of their unusual designs, he said. Still, Price wasn't sure if the FEMA estimates specifically took into consideration the valley's abundance of casino resorts.

The reason Nevada is so prone to earthquakes is that two tectonic plates -- slowly shifting land masses that make up the continents -- are sliding in different directions along the state's western border.

The plates don't slide smoothly. They tend to lock into place until enough pressure builds to snap them apart, thus causing an earthquake.

Nevada is actually moving away from Utah, "and not just philosophically," Price said, adding that the movement adds about 1 1/2 new acres of land to the Silver State each year.

Price then turned to the subject of Yucca Mountain, the site chosen by Congress in 1987 as the future repository for the nation's most radioactive nuclear waste.

Federally mandated research on the location "really brings to bear quite a bit of geological issues," he said, such as fracturing of the earth that could result from nearby fault lines.

Price said there is evidence that, over thousands of years, rainwater could seep down to the storage area. The containers that hold the waste will corrode eventually, and contaminated water could find its way back into natural springs and wells from which people drink.

"The concern is how much groundwater will flow through those faults," he said.

A string of small, relatively young volcanoes in the region also could have an impact on the containment of nuclear waste by facilitating shifts in the underground rock, Price added.

Price said social and political factors tend to outweigh geotechnical ones when it comes to the placement of waste dump sites because geologists face so many uncertainties when it comes to predicting the odds of a disaster.

"Our job as scientists often becomes narrowing down the uncertainties so that rational decisions can be made," he said.

Scott Ball, chairman of the association's Southwest section, said the conference's purpose is to give engineering geologists -- who often do consulting on large construction projects such as tunnels, pipelines and dams -- new ideas, investigative techniques and approaches.

He said Nevada's geology is a good subject for such a conference.

"It's a great place," Ball said. "There's a lot of things here that other people don't necessarily run into."

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Las Vegas SUN
September 22, 2005

NRC orders Energy Department to turn over draft Yucca document

By Ken Ritter
Associated Press

LAS VEGAS (AP) - Key weaknesses in the Yucca Mountain project should be revealed in a draft license application that a Nuclear Regulatory Commission panel ordered the Energy Department to make public, a lawyer for Nevada said Thursday.

This will help the state's case," said Joe Egan, a Vienna, Va.-based lawyer leading the state's fight against burying the nation's nuclear waste in Nevada. He called the order by a panel of three NRC administrative judges another in a string of setbacks for the project.

Energy Department spokesman Craig Stevens downplayed the 53-page order, and said department lawyers had not decided whether to appeal to the full Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

"The department has been forthcoming and open on this entire project," Stevens said from Washington, D.C.

He compared the draft license application to a college term paper being checked for spelling and syntax before being handed in, and said it would have become public anyway once it was submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

"We believe the science is sound, but we're going to check the work," Stevens said.

The Energy Department has spent more than 20 years developing its plan to entomb 77,000 tons of the nation's most radioactive commercial, industrial and military waste in tunnels beneath Yucca Mountain, an ancient volcanic ridge 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The plan relies on meeting an Environmental Protection Agency radiation safety standard that is being rewritten after a federal appeals court invalidated the proposed limit in July 2004.

The court said a 10,000-year radiation limit set by the EPA was too short.

The EPA last month proposed two-tiered Yucca Mountain radiation rules. The new standard would apply for 1 million years, but allow more radioactivity to be released.

Egan said he suspects the license application also is being rewritten, but that the draft will show the Energy Department knows it cannot meet safety standards once the repository waste begins emitting peak doses of radioactivity.

"My guess is the computer models all showed them violating the EPA limit after 10,000 years," he said.

The Energy Department must meet the EPA standard in its license application. Project officials originally expected to submit the finished document in December 2004, but in recent months have said only that they expect to submit the application to the NRC later this year.

The program also has been slowed by budget shortages and investigations of e-mails exchanged between project scientists discussing possible falsification of scientific data.

---On the Net:

Yucca Mountain project: http://www.ymp.gov

Environmental Protection Agency: http://www.epa.gov

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Las Vegas SUN
September 22, 2005

Yucca Mountain workers face layoffs

By Benjamin Grove
<grove@lasvegassun.com>
Sun Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Budget cuts may force Yucca Mountain worker layoffs, the program's top contractor said.

The Energy Department, which manages the proposed nuclear waste repository project, two weeks ago informed top contractor Bechtel SAIC that it likely was facing a 30 percent budget cut, Bechtel spokesman Jason Bohne said today. The notice came in the form of an "interim budget planning guidance," a document the department sends the contractor every year so Bechtel can plan its expenditures.

Bechtel in mid-October will present the Energy Department with an answer -- specific estimates of what the proposed cut would translate to in numbers of laid-off workers, as well as the type of work that would have to be delayed, Bohne said.

Bechtel has about 1,400 workers. It's likely that "pretty close" to 30 percent of workers could face layoffs, he said.

"A 30 percent cut in the budget doesn't necessarily mean a 30 percent cut in the workforce, but you can't cut 30 percent and not have and impact on the workforce," he said.

Workers will be notified within "weeks" if they are to be laid off, Bohne said. It would more likely be a "matter of months" before they are actually laid off the job, he said.

Congress approved $571 million for Yucca Mountain for the current fiscal year. Bechtel received about $325 million, Bohne said.

President Bush proposed $651 million for Yucca in the next fiscal year, but Yucca budgets often are trimmed in Congress, due largely to the negotiating of Yucca foe Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who also sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Yucca has long suffered delays and budget setbacks. The program is under increasing scrutiny in Congress. This week, Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, withdrew long-time support for Yucca, saying he no longer supported the plan to ship the nation's most radioactive waste across the country for permanent burial in tunnels under the Nevada desert ridge.

Energy Department spokesman Allen Benson said it's possible the department could impose a smaller cut on Bechtel. He said department managers proposed the 30 percent cut to Bechtel as a "planning exercise" to force Bechtel and the department to review work priorities.

"It's an evaluation of what we are doing and a question of should we be doing it," Benson said.

It's not clear how the budget cut would affect Yucca's schedule, Bohne said. The next Yucca milestone is the Energy Department's submission of an application for a license to construct the repository. Energy Department officials had said they were aiming to submit the application early next year.

But the department's acting Yucca chief Paul Golan last week announced that the department was focused more on quality work than following a strict timetable.

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Las Vegas SUN
September 23, 2005

Hotter, drier years in store for LV, study says

By Launce Rake
<lrake@lasvegassun.com>
Las Vegas Sun

Las Vegas hit its highest average temperature in recorded history in the summer of 2005, but expect more of the same over the next, say, several hundred thousand years.

And it won't just be hotter. It will be drier too, climatologists are warning.

That's bad news for Las Vegas and the West, which is already dealing with dwindling water supplies to sustain a growing population. The weather report has long-term implications for public policy issues ranging from Yucca Mountain to regional water use.

The Rocky Mountain Climate Organization, a Louisville, Colo.-based nonprofit group that includes government agencies, businesses, farmers and ranchers and environmental groups in the West, released a study Wednesday that said temperatures are already rising and mountain snow packs are shrinking, and that the impacts will be greater in the West.

By the end of the century, temperatures could go up 3 to 10 degrees compared to 1990.

For the Colorado River basin, snow packs could shrink by 24 percent over the next 35 years, and by 30 percent by 2069, the organization's report said.

Snow packs in the Rocky Mountains are the critical source of water to the Colorado River, which supplies 90 percent of Las Vegas' supply. The river also is a key component of the supply for 23 million Californians and a huge agricultural industry in California and Arizona.

The report from the Colorado coalition came out the same day that a scientist reported similar conclusions in Las Vegas to an advisory committee to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Matthew Huber, a climatologist with Purdue University's Climate Change Research Center in Indiana, told the five-member Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste that multiple and increasingly detailed models of the long-term pattern indicates that the Southwest will be hotter.

Both the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization and Huber said the basis of the unpleasantly sunny projections is human-caused climate change from the burning of fossil fuels, or in popular terms, global warming.

While some observers continue to insist that global warming because of human activity is an unproven theory, a growing consensus of scientists believe the phenomenon is real and weather patterns over the last two decades match the theoretical expectations.

The models show that not all parts of the world will heat up equally. While the ice sheets over the North and South poles will disappear, the West and the desert Southwest could be disproportionately affected.

"It's going to be a lot hotter here," Huber said.

The advisory committee is charged with advising the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on the licensing of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump proposed for 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The committee is holding three days of meetings in Las Vegas this week, which included Huber's presentation.

Those who were looking for climate change to threaten the federal effort to put a radioactive waste dump in Nevada did not get a boost from Huber. While some parts of the West will likely experience more rain, especially with summer monsoons, models show that those monsoons are not likely to fall on Yucca Mountain, he said.

The models are not cut-and-dried, Huber said. One possible outcome of global climate change could be "a permanent El Nino," the periodic concentration of warmer-than-usual water in the equatorial eastern Pacific Ocean.

"That could lead to a substantial increase in precipitation, although nothing that has not been considered in these reports," Huber said, referring to analyses prepared by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and other government agencies on the Yucca Mountain issue.

A worst-case scenario, at least from the perspective of the 80,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste potentially buried in Yucca Mountain, would be a Southwest that is turned into a subtropical rainforest. The last time the Southwest had such a climate was about 54 million years ago during the early Eocene period, Huber said.

The critical element that will impact future climate for hundreds of thousands of years will be the amount of carbon dioxide in the air produced by burning fossil fuels, he said. The gas builds up in the atmosphere and through the "greenhouse effect" warms the planet. Shrinking ice packs and dwindling winter snow cover further accelerate the warming process, he said.

The carbon dioxide buildup is working in unison with the Earth's orbital mechanics to make for a hotter world, he said. Those who were looking for a global cooling because of the orbital mechanics are going to be disappointed.

A new ice age, or period of glaciation, will not happen for at least 500,000 years or so, he said. Huber said those looking for some way to reverse the process will probably be disappointed.

"There are no known negative feedbacks in the system," he said of global warming.

Huber said the models that are being produced, and which back up the warnings of global warning, are not just matching what would be expected, but the same models can be extrapolated to past climate events. They work then, too, indicating that the science is valid.

"At a very basic level, we understand climate and what causes it to change," he said.

Huber said the Energy Department has failed to include new, detailed climate models as it has planned the Yucca Mountain dump.

Abe Van Luik, an Energy Department senior policy advisor on the Yucca project, disputed Huber's statement. He said that not only had the agency considered global climate change in preparation of the environmental impact statement for the project, but that the agency had included a much wetter environment.

"It is in the EIS," Van Luik said.

However, Van Luik told the advisory committee that the Energy Department also may want to look at the new models in more detail as it moves forward with its effort to win licensing approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The issue of climate change will stay on the public-policy agency for Las Vegas this week. The Southern Nevada Water Authority, the Desert Research Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council, a national environmental group, are sponsoring a meeting today and Friday to consider "Urban Water Supplies and Climate Change in the West."

J.C. Davis, a Water Authority spokesman, said the studies by the Rocky Mountains group and other scientists are not definitive.

"While it (climate change in the West) is an important issue, there certainly is not consensus in the scientific community over what this data means," Davis said. "We're not endorsing or disputing what the findings are, but we can't at this point accept that any particular numbers are accurate."

The possible impact to water flows in the Colorado River cannot be ignored, however. Davis said the issue has helped push the Water Authority's efforts both to conserve the existing supplies of the resource and to seek new supplies from wells and rivers in rural Nevada.

"We've been looking to reduce our reliance on the Colorado (River) for a while because of the legal and physical constraints on our allocation," Davis said. "But if in fact there is a climate change that has an impact on flows in the Colorado, that is something that is going to affect the lone city on the river."

Las Vegas, the only major city on the 1,500 mile river basin, receives an annual allocation of 300,000 acre-feet. California takes 4.4 million acre-feet from the river annually to contribute to the supply for 23 million people.

Water agencies using the river are increasingly concerned that five years of drought, rather than being an anomaly, is closer to what will be the new normal for the Colorado River basin.

Nevada, California and five other states are now in negotiations to recommend ways to share cuts if the river continues to be hit by drought. Already, Lake Powell and Lake Mead together have about half of the supply that the reservoirs held less than a decade ago.

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Pahrump Valley Times
September 23, 2005

'Caliente Corridor' discussed in Goldfield

Energy Department, Other Officials Push for Preferred Rail Route to Yucca Project

By Heidi J. Bertolino
Special to The PVT

The long-anticipated meeting between the Department of Energy's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management and Esmeralda and Nye county residents was a mellow one on Sept 13 - despite rumblings the federal officials would be "rode out of town on a rail."

The Department was in Goldfield with Bureau of Land Management and state employees to explain and collect comments on the draft environmental assessment on the Caliente Corridor, otherwise known as the proposed rail route that would be used to transport the nation's high-level radioactive waste to Yucca Mountain.

The final document is in support of a proposed land order that would protect the proposed 308,600 acres of public land for 10-20 years from surface disturbance and new mining claims. The mile-wide corridor is being considered for the construction of a railroad to haul spent nuclear fuel from Caliente to the Yucca Mountain Repository near Amargosa Valley.

The withdrawal is necessary so the Energy Department can study the corridor and choose a final route for the proposed railroad.

Yucca Mountain, BLM and state representatives outnumbered the public in attendance at any given time. Residents who asked serious questions related to the proposed railroad, not addressed in the draft environmental assessment, were told their worries would be answered in the Rail Alignment Environmental Impact Statement, which has yet to be released.

According to representatives from the various offices, the comments collected in written and verbal form will be collected and assessed for preparation of the final environmental assessment. Currently, the department has until the end of December until its temporary withdrawal expires. When the final document is prepared it will be issued to the Department of the Interior, which manages the Bureau of Land Management.

Then the assistant secretary can issue a federal land order for withdrawal of the public lands from 10-20 years. According to the draft, the DOE would prefer a 10-year withdrawal, as opposed to the previously sought-after 20-year withdrawal.

According to the document, livestock grazing and existing valid mining claims will not be affected, nor would recreation. The document said all of the department's activities in the corridor, during the 10-20 year withdrawal period would be considered "casual use," such as surveying and mapping and would not disturb any of the cultural, historic or natural resources in the mile-wide corridor.

Only new and future mining claims and surface disturbance will not be allowed under the land order, if it is issued.

Allen Benson, manager of Communications for the Office of Repository Development, said the Rail Alignment EIS would draw a much bigger crowd than the discussion on Tuesday. He said the process that includes the assessment of the land withdrawal is exactly like it would be if a highway was being built. He also said the rail impact statement would address the actual route of the proposed railroad within that mile-wide corridor, and the possible ramifications to the environment and citizens nearby. The current assessment only addresses the ramifications of the department's "casual use" of the land.

According to Benson the information brought forth in the Rail Alignment EIS would produce a record of decision. When the final route for the train is designated, the department can then apply for a railroad right-of-way, which includes 200-feet off the centerline of the track, and not the mile-wide corridor that could be withdrawn.

It is expected that when the formal right-of-way is issued the land order would become unnecessary. The department expects to complete all preliminary work in the mile-wide corridor in 10 years.

Esmeralda County Commissioners and Nye County Commissioners took turns asking questions and relating information to the representatives present. Esmeralda County Commissioner Bill Kirby sat down with Benson and reminded him the commissioners had signed a resolution that requested the DOE look at an alternative route, not currently listed, in Esmeralda County.

The commission's proposed route is more westerly, and according to officials would not impact the Goldfield Mining District to the degree it might if the railroad is built in the current corridor. Benson said the DOE would have to apply for a land withdrawal of that proposed stretch if it wanted to seriously consider the land.

The commission's suggested westerly route is supposedly addressed in the upcoming rail alignment impact statement but has yet to be withdrawn for study and surveying. Benson said the contents of the draft statement for the rail alignment would not be ready until at least spring of 2006.

The Caliente Corridor travels through large portions of Lincoln and Nye counties and barely turns into and then out of Esmeralda County. Among the alternatives is one route that will butt up against the Esmeralda County line, without entering the county. If the department chooses this route it would leave Esmeralda County out of the current three-county stake holder's financial pie. With the exception of Caliente, the community of Goldfield sits the closest to the proposed rail route at four miles. Esmeralda County is also the least prepared to respond to a large-scale emergency. Beatty is also within 10 miles of the corridor and proposed railroad.

Written comments on the draft environmental assessment for the Caliente Corridor land withdrawal can be sent to Mr. Lee Bishop, Office of National Transportation, Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, U.S. Department of Energy, 1551 Hillshire Drive, M/S 011, Las Vegas, NV 89134 or faxed to 1-800-967-0739 until Tuesday's deadline.

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Pahrump Valley Times
September 23, 2005

By the book

Amargosa Library has History at Your Fingers

By Robin Flinchum
Special to The PVT

AMARGOSA VALLEY - The plain, heavy black ring binders on the reference shelf at the Amargosa Valley library don't look like much. On the outside, there is little to recommend them except simple labels such as "Lee," or "Inyo County." But on the inside this collection of notebooks is bursting with the panoramic experience of early Death Valley history.

Within those plain black covers, fortunes are made and lost in the forbidding desert, men die under its relentless sun and women revel in its wide-open freedom. Gold, silver, and borax draw adventurers from all over the world, many of who will be changed forever by their time in Death Valley.

The stories in those binders, gleaned from 15 years of historical research in Death Valley by former National Park Service Ranger and Amargosa Valley resident Kari Coughlin, are too numerous to count. They come from a variety of historical newspapers, oral histories, and other sources Coughlin encountered in her search for the human story of this desert region. And now that Coughlin has donated some 34 such notebooks to the Amargosa Valley Library, these stories are readily available to the public.

"The information in those notebooks is amazing," said Library Director Jean Adams. "It would take you forever, years, to find this stuff. There are articles from Goldfield and Rhyolite and lots of other places. There is a whole binder on prospectors and miners."

When Coughlin, who helped in the founding of historical preservation projects including the Friends of Rhyolite and the Manzanar Visitors Center, recently made the decision to relocate to Florida, she donated the majority of her Death Valley collection of books and research material to the Amargosa Valley Library. The very small facility, already packed to the rafters with books, was nevertheless thrilled to receive the collection, said Adams. In fact, Adams said, the library plans to build special shelves to support it.

The small, rural library houses an impressive collection of more than 14,000 books, videos, DVDs and audiotapes in a 2,000-square-foot facility. "I'm constantly weeding books," Adams said, because any new addition usually requires that something older be removed for lack of storage space. For that reason Adams said she wasn't able to accept all of the approximately 40 history books also donated by Coughlin, but was excited to add the ones she did.

"We added many of the Nevada history books to our Nevada collection, and some California history books, too," Adams said.

The remote location of the library doesn't discourage local patrons, Adams said. Though Amargosa Valley is a widely spread-out community, the library is one of its central points and also offers computer and Internet access, as well as copy and fax services. Adams is even a notary public.

Currently, she said, some 755 people hold user cards for her facility, though not all are active. That's a lot of readers for a town with an estimated population of a little more than 1,300. The small local schools don't have their own libraries and students come to the Amargosa Library, open six days a week, to study and do their reading.

The library is also a repository for many official Yucca Mountain documents, Adams said, making their local collection quite unique. "Not many places have the kinds of documents we do," Adams said.

Coughlin's research collection is also a one-of-a-kind resource for researchers or students looking for primary source material about the people who inhabited Death Valley and the various mining camps surrounding it during the boom days.

But while Adams said she was pleased to receive the fruits of Coughlin's research labors, she was sorry to see Coughlin leave the Death Valley area, where she was well known for her efforts to preserve local history. Coughlin also served on the board of directors of the Amargosa Library for the past two years and was the director of the Shoshone Museum and Death Valley Chamber of Commerce until last April. "We're losing someone really good in our community," Adams said.

Meanwhile, Adams added that the Amargosa Valley Library is always in need of volunteers to help with various chores around the small facility, which includes a colorfully decorated and well-stocked children's reading room. "In a library you are just never caught up," Adams said. Between the checking in and checking out, weeding of books, cleaning and maintenance and administrative chores, Adams said she and her small part time staff keep very busy. "Sometimes it's a real zoo around here," she joked, "but we work hard to respond to the needs of our patrons."

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Deseret News
September 23, 2005

Burying 'spent fuel' is a waste

I can only say "bravo" for the new stand that Sen. Bennett has taken with respect to the of spent nuclear fuel. He was quoted as saying, "It makes sense for (nuclear) waste to be stored on site and to be shipped to a reprocessing center."

I have known for many years that the proper nuclear energy program is a Complete Nuclear Energy Program. This includes reprocessing spent fuel and sending the fuel component to fuel fabrication plants to be used in fuel for breeder reactors. I have always thought it was a horrible waste of our natural resources to consider this "spent fuel" as waste and propose permanently burying it in a deep geological repository. If Utah's politicians and news media had put all the money and effort expended in the ill-advised fight to oppose the private fuel-storage license into support of the Complete Nuclear Energy Program, there would have been no reason for a temporary storage site.

Blaine N. Howard
Health Physicist (retired)
Hyrum

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Provo Daily Herald
September 23, 2005

Hatch introduces nuke waste bill

N.S. Nokkentved
Daily Herald

Just days after Utah's junior senator made a U-turn on nuclear waste, U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, introduced legislation that would block any radioactive waste from coming to a private facility in Utah.

Much of the waste going to that facility would roll through Utah County.

U.S. Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, who long has supported a proposed federal waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., Tuesday dropped his support for that beleaguered project, which would hold the nation's commercial spent reactor fuel.

Though Hatch has introduced a nuclear waste bill, Bennett instead expressed support for Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada, who plans to introduce legislation that would turn over responsibility for the spent fuel to the Energy Department, keeping the waste at reactor sites while the country rethinks its nuclear waste policy.

But Reid can't help Utah, Hatch says. Joining Reid would alienate the Bush administration and others who are in a position to block a proposed private spent fuel storage facility on the Goshute Indian Reservation in Skull Valley.

Less than two weeks ago, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the license for the project that could bring 44,000 tons of spent fuel to Utah.

Bennett has long justified his support for Yucca Mountain by saying it would block the need for Skull Valley. But his change on Yucca Mountain was no sudden decision in response to the NRC approval of the Skull Valley project, he said in a telephone interview Thursday.

At the time of the NRC's Sept. 9 decision, he was working on a new position on Yucca Mountain but had not yet finished his analysis. So he released the statement he has used routinely for several years.

"It's probably not the right statement anymore," he said.

In the aftermath of passing the energy bill and after the August recess, Bennett began to reconsider his position. Discussions with U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-New Mexico, a staunch supporter of nuclear energy, and with staff, led him to realize that Yucca Mountain is doomed.

It was time to rethink the nation's nuclear waste policy and to consider alternatives, Bennett said.

Bennett and Hatch both oppose Skull Valley, as do most Utah officials.

Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., borrowing a tactic from former Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus, who closed that state's borders to nuclear waste shipments in 1988, threatened to stand on the railroad tracks himself to block any train bringing waste to Utah.

The project, proposed by the Minnesota-based Private Fuel Storage LLC, still needs the approval of the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Indian Affairs -- agencies under the authority of the administration.

The BLM, however, may be blocked from approving a right of way for the project by a 6-year-old provision slipped into the 2000 defense authorization bill. The rider prevents the BLM from amending its land-use plans.

And the BIA still must approve the lease agreement between the Goshutes and PFS.

Hatch was planning to introduce his legislation anyway, but Bennett's announcement made Hatch's bill timely, spokesman Peter Carr said Wednesday.

The bill would block shipments to the Skull Valley site, and it calls for study of alternatives such as reprocessing, storing the waste on site, and storing the waste at existing Department of Energy sites, Hatch said.

Bennett also joins Hatch is support of a return to reprocessing, which involves extracting still usable uranium and plutonium from spent fuel and using it to make new reactor fuel. About 94 percent of the weight of spent fuel is uranium and plutonium. The rest, however, is still highly radioactive.

The country turned its back on reprocessing in the late 1970s. Then-President Jimmy Carter banned reprocessing because it made available tons of weapons-grade plutonium -- only about 22 pounds are needed to make a bomb. Though reinstituted by the Reagan administration, reprocessing was never embraced by the nuclear industry because of its high cost, and raw uranium ore was cheap.

Today's critics note that reprocessing still would be more expensive than fresh uranium, and it wouldn't eliminate the need for a high-level waste disposal site.

N.S. Nokkentved can be reached at 344-2930 or at nnokkentved@heraldextra.com.

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Salt Lake Tribune
September 23, 2005

YUCCA MOUNTAIN: Bob Bennett's right to throw in with Nevada

Neighbors in need

Salt Lake Tribune

Welcome to the fight, senator.

Bob Bennett's decision to throw in with our neighbors in Nevada and oppose efforts to entomb the nation's most dangerous nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain is the right thing to do. It's the right thing for Nevada, it's the right thing for Utah and it's the right thing for the West.

Why? Because it doesn't make sense to risk an accident transporting the stuff through as many as 43 different states to a central repository somewhere, whether it's Yucca Mountain or the dry-cask parking lot proposed for the Goshute Reservation in Utah's Skull Valley.

If dry-cask storage is as safe as the nuclear industry claims, then it can be used to keep the stuff temporarily at the reactor sites where it is now.

Over the long term, it makes more sense to reprocess and recycle the spent fuel rods to produce more energy. President Carter issued a directive in 1978 to outlaw commercial reprocessing out of fear that plutonium and enriched uranium produced during recycling could fall into enemy hands for weapons. But a new process separates fissionable materials from the waste, but not from each other, so no weapons-grade material results.

True, there still would be waste, but it would be dangerous for hundreds of years, not the thousands of years for the material that is proposed for burial or parking now. Plus, the volumes of waste from recycling would be much smaller.

We've been arguing since 1997 that Utah should join Nevada in the effort to get this done right. However, Utah's two U.S. senators, Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett, have taken the view that if the waste could be dumped on Nevada, Utah would be in the clear because interim storage on the Goshute Reservation would no longer be attractive. In 2002, they both voted to overrule the Nevada governor's veto of the Yucca Mountain project.

However, Bennett reversed course this week. He has come to the realization that the engineering challenges (geological, hydrological and metallurgical) to permanent storage at Yucca Mountain probably will not be overcome. There also is a new theological factor. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced this month that it opposes the PFS plan for Utah, which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved.

Utah's members of the U.S. House all have come around, too. That leaves Hatch as the only outlier.

How about it, Orrin?

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Salt Lake Tribune
September 23, 2005

Hatch takes heat over Yucca stance

Join us: The governor says it's time to support Utah's position rather than the White House's

By Robert Gehrke
The Salt Lake Tribune

Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. is criticizing Sen. Orrin Hatch's refusal to join members of Congress from Utah and Nevada in fighting to keep nuclear waste out of both of those states.

"It's ill-advised," Huntsman said Thursday. "It would be nice to be able to speak with some sense of unanimity as a state and a delegation, as I believe Nevada is doing, on something as important as this."

Through a spokesman, Hatch declined to respond to the governor's criticism Thursday.

Huntsman commented about his fellow Republican a day after Hatch reiterated his

support for the White House's nuclear waste strategy.

The senator insisted that working with the Bush administration is the only way to scuttle plans to store nuclear waste on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian reservation in Utah, and that it hurts the state's cause to "kick them in the teeth."

The governor sees it differently.

"I do believe that as we come together with one voice and one mind that there are some things legislatively that we can accomplish with the help of our friends in Nevada," Huntsman said Thursday in his monthly KUED news conference. "That's only possible if we come together in a unified way. And that's something that I have encouraged, and I will continue to encourage."

Utah's senior senator clings to his view, despite it conflicting with the rest of Utah's congressional delegation, including Sen. Bob Bennett, who publicly renounced his earlier support for Yucca Mountain, saying it is clear the waste dump will never be built.

Instead, Bennett and other members of Utah's delegation have embraced a proposal by Nevada Sen. Harry Reid to store the reactor waste at the power plants that produced it and find

ways to reprocess and reuse the material.

Such an approach would make it unnecessary to ship the waste to either Yucca Mountain or the Skull Valley site, where a group of electric utilities known as Private Fuel Storage proposes storing 44,000 tons of waste above ground in steel casks.

Hatch has drafted a bill that would impose a moratorium on shipping waste to a private storage site such as Skull Valley. Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, has not introduced any legislation to make his plan a reality, although Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., is sponsoring such a bill in the House.

"After eight years of trying it his way, it's time for Hatch to join Team Utah," said Vanessa Pierce of Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah. "He should know we're stronger united than we are divided."

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved a license for the PFS facility, although other obstacles remain, including winning Interior Department approval of the lease with the Skull Valley tribe and a right-of-way for a rail line to ship waste to the site.

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Standard-Examiner
September 23, 2005

By Jennifer Talhelm
The Associated Press

Senator hopes to keep nuclear waste out of Skull Valley

At the moment, however, he's going to continue to lobby the Bush administration and try legislation. He says that is the best bet to keep nuclear waste from being stored in Utah's Skull Valley.

"This is a continuing dialogue and I'm going to continue to talk" to the White House, Hatch said Thursday. The White House and several federal agencies still could agree to block the proposed site in Utah, and he wants to keep those options open.

In the ongoing chess match between Utah and Nevada over proposed nuclear storage options, Hatch has the next move.

The two states' senators have butted heads over the issue in the past. Hatch and Bennett, both Republicans, supported Yucca because it could mean the Skull Valley site wouldn't open. They have blamed Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, for blocking their efforts to thwart the Skull Valley storage site.

Bennett changed all that on Tuesday when he said on the Senate floor that he was wrong in voting for Yucca Mountain. He said he would join Reid in supporting storage of nuclear waste at the sites where it is generated.

The move isolated Hatch, who said afterward that he was going to continue to work on all options to keep the waste out of Utah. He planned to introduce a bill this week that would establish a moratorium to prevent storage of spent nuclear fuel on nonfederal, offsite facilities.

On Thursday, he added that he too questions whether Yucca Mountain should be built.

"We had to vote for it or it would have been stuck in Utah," he said. "I certainly don't believe we should do Utah Skull Valley. I think the material ought to be kept in place, and it ought to be reprocessed in place or at a Department of Energy reprocessing site."

Michael S. Lee, chief counsel for Gov. Jon Huntsman, has said Utah will take a three-pronged approach to fight the NRC decision, taking their objections to federal court, to Congress and to federal agencies.

Utah officials contend the Skull Valley facility would be too close to a major population center and that the risk of a jet fighter from Hill Air Force Base crashing into the storage casks is too great.

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Standard-Examiner
September 23, 2005

Bennett's about-face

It does not happen very often that a U.S. senator or congressional representative changes his or her mind. On those rare occasions when reversals are made, more often than not, it is done in the dark of night during a protracted legislative battle, and they attempt to do so with as little public notice as possible.

Credit Utah's Sen. Bob Bennett for having the guts to stand on the floor of the U.S. Senate, in the daylight, and proclaim his change of heart for everyone to see and hear.

Bennett says he now has come to believe that a federal plan to store, permanently, high-level nuclear waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain "does not make sense and we need to move in some future direction."

It is a complete about-face: Three years ago, he and Sen. Orrin Hatch voted to continue building the Yucca Mountain facility. Their votes put them at odds with the Nevada delegation -- and most notably that state's Sen. Harry Reid, the chamber's minority leader, who subsequently refused to help Utah block a proposed "temporary" nuclear-waste site in Skull Valley, less than 50 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.

Now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has given the go-ahead for the Skull Valley storage site. Bennett has seen the light because the writing is on the wall, in day-glow paint, for all to see: The only dominoes left to fall before Utah gets the waste are a Bureau of Land Management lease to build a rail spur into the Skull Valley site, and a Bureau of Indian Affairs approval of a lease between Private Fuel Storage (PFS) and the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes tribe; PFS is the consortium of nuclear-power utilities with the fuel, and the Goshutes own the land on which PFS wants to build the storage site.

Bennett figures it's better to band with Reid and present a united front in the hopes of stopping shipments of waste from traveling west. It's a wise strategy, we think.

Hatch, however, has not followed suit. On Wednesday, the day after Bennett's remarkable turnaround, Hatch reiterated his support for the Bush administration's determination to make Yucca the nation's permanent nuclear-waste repository. He says a coalition with Reid can't help Utah, but that the administration could drive a stake through the heart of the Skull Valley proposal.

Cynics might surmise that Hatch and Bennett have contrived an artful scheme to play both ends of the court. This way, Utah's kissing up to Nevada and the White House. We're unconvinced they are that devious, but the effect of their opposing public views has the same result: There's a senator from Utah on each team.

Again, we are impressed with Bennett's willingness to change his mind given changing circumstances. We hope his teaming with Reid puts a win in Utah's column against the PFS plan. If Hatch wins, it still means thousands of shipments of nuclear waste streaming through Utah on the way to Nevada. As such, we're rooting for Bennett's team.

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KUTV
September 22, 2005

Hatch Talking With White House Over Nuclear Dump

WASHINGTON Days after Utah Sen. Bob Bennett joined Nevada Sen. Harry Reid in saying the nation should not store its nuclear waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch says he might be willing to work with Reid too.

At the moment, however, he's going to continue to lobby the Bush administration and try legislation. He says that is the best bet to keep nuclear waste from being stored in Utah's Skull Valley.

``This is a continuing dialogue and I'm going to continue to talk'' to the White House, Hatch said at a news conference Thursday. The White House and several federal agencies still could agree to block the proposed site in Utah, and he wants to keep those options open.

But he added that he'd consider anything, ``including, if I have to, aligning with Senator Reid. But frankly I don't see how he's going to help us to solve this problem under the current circumstances. But I'm open.''

In the ongoing chess match between Utah and Nevada over proposed nuclear storage options, Hatch has the next move.

The move isolated Hatch, who said afterward that he was going to continue to work on all options to keep the waste out of Utah.

He planned to introduce a bill this week that would establish a moratorium to prevent storage of spent nuclear fuel on nonfederal, offsite facilities.

On Thursday, he added that he too questions whether Yucca Mountain should be built.

``We had to vote for it or it would have been stuck in Utah,'' he said. ``I certainly don't believe we should do Utah Skull Valley. I think the material ought to be kept in place, and it ought to be reprocessed in place or at a Department of Energy reprocessing site.''

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Daily Princetonian
September 23, 2005

Labs fuse efforts with federal grant

Viola Huang
Princetonian Staff Writer

The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), in collaboration with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, was recently awarded a grant of $10 million from the federal government to be given over a five-year period.

The grant is part of the Department of Energy's Simulation of Wave Interactions with Magnetohydrodynamics (SWIM) project, which aims to create computer simulations that can correctly model the movements of plasma and subsequently facilitate the development of fusion energy.

"The goal of the [simulations] is to understand how radio waves affect plasma motion and how that motion affects the radio waves, so that we can use the process most effectively for driving current while keeping plasma in [a] magnetic field," said astrophysics professor Robert Goldston, director of the PPPL.

The effect of radio waves and the motion of the plasma, which were previously studied independently, are brought together by the collaboration of the University and ORNL.

"If you fire radio waves into fusion fuel, you can heat and control [the fuel] in various ways," Goldston explained. "ORNL is arguably the world leader in the calculation of how radio waves shine into fusion fuels. We are arguably the world leaders on calculations of how plasmas move around."

The goal, he said, is to take the most advanced codes that calculate two different aspects of what goes on in fusion plasmas and determine how the two interact.

Ideas ignited

The idea for the SWIM project stemmed from a lobbying effort that called for the government to devote resources to computer simulation of advanced fusion technology.

Astrophysics professor Steve Jardin, the principal research physicist at the PPPL, was part of a subcommittee put together by a high-level advisory committee of the fusion energy division of the Department of Energy. The group met a few years ago to come up with recommendations of how to increase the use of computer simulation in fusion.

"The Department of Energy wanted to launch a large-scale fusion simulation project at $20 million a year to put together all of the isolated computer models of different aspects of a fusion plasma and produce a totally integrated model," Jardin said.

He compared the idea to the aircraft industry where, in the past, wind tunnels were used to test small plane models. Careful measurements of drag and lift could be taken to help the engineers make the necessary modifications.

"Now we don't have to do that because computer programs are so good that we have numerical wind tunnels where you can input the exact shape of an airplane and the computer program can very accurately model lift and drag," Jardin said. "A fusion plasma is something like the air, just a lot more complicated because of a strong magnetic field and all of the plasma effects. We've developed through the years a lot of computer programs that are very similar in spirit to wind tunnels that use a lot more computational physics."

Based on the recommendations of the subcommittee, the Department of Energy put together a competition to award the SWIM grant. The joint PPPL and ORNL proposal, one of four applications, was ultimately successful.

Cost of research

Jardin said he believes the PPPL and ORNL won the grant because the members of the proposal were the most qualified, some of them being the actual authors of the major component codes they are now going to couple together.

"For one thing, we are very enthusiastic about it, and I think that big labs like Princeton and Oak Ridge have the resources to make this thing a success," he added.

Money from the grant will add to PPPL's $70 million research endowment. Though $2 million per year is a significant sum, the PPPL was hoping for closer to $5 million per year, Jardin said.

"It's really because of budgets," Jardin said. "The government's fusion program budget is way down from what it used to be and probably what it should be. Our friends in the Department of Energy are trying hard to make ends meet."

Fusion, one of the focuses of the PPPL, has many advantages as an energy source.

It produces no carbon dioxide, a plus for those worried about the effects of global warming, and generates less radiation than current fission power plants do.

"In a fission plant, when you operate for 30 years, the core will be radioactive afterwards for 10,000 years. Now they're planning on burying the used core at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which is angering the residents. Fusion doesn't have anything like that," Jardin said.

Fusion also has no potential weapons fallout, since there is no possible way to make an atomic bomb out of a fusion plant.

Goldston said the PPPL grant will have a significant effect, both on ongoing experiments at a smaller scale and on the massive International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project that is to be built in France.

PPPL and ORNL are heading the project office for the United States, which has already contributed 10 percent of the $1 billion estimated cost of the ITER project.

The ITER project spawned from a deal made 20 years ago between former President Ronald Reagan and former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev with the ultimate goal of making a prototype fusion reactor that will generate 500 million watts of fusion power.

"The five years they've laid out is a reasonable time period for us to get to that point," Goldston said. "This being science, you never really finish anything. Newton thought he figured out gravity, then Einstein came. At the end we will have a computational tool that will allow us to do things we couldn't before, like finishing ITER. But we'll keep going afterwards. It's not just building for five years and using it on ITER. We'll keep identifying new scientific issues and going back to modify."

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Lynchburg News and Advance
September 23, 2005

A new venture toward more nuclear power

AREVA´s announcement last week of a joint venture with a Baltimore-based electricity supplier comes as good news on two fronts - the future of nuclear energy for the nation and the addition of jobs down the road for the Lynchburg area.

The joint venture with Constellation Energy would put AREVA on the path to building new nuclear plants in the United States. Known as UniStar Nuclear, the new company will offer a “one-stop shop’ for utilities interested in building new nuclear plants, according to Mike Wallace, executive vice president of Constellation Energy.

Reflecting the France-based AREVA´s international presence in the nuclear energy field, the nuclear reactors would be designed in the United States based on AREVA´s European pressurized water reactor. One plant is under construction in Finland and another will be built in France. UniStar Nuclear hopes to sell at least four such plants to U.S. utilities.

Tom Christopher, chief executive officer of AREVA, said those sales could come as early as 2008 “and we will be ready.’ Construction on the new plants could begin as early as 2010 with operation beginning by 2015.

The new energy policy bill approved in August by Congress gave a fresh start to nuclear power in the United States with a series of loans and tax credits to utilities that turn to nuclear reactors to generate their power.

Part of AREVA´s work now is upgrading and maintaining some of the 104 nuclear power plants operating in this country.

Some 200 engineers at the firm are now working on converting the European reactor design to American specifications. They will then seek approval of the design from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees the nuclear industry at the federal level.

In terms of new jobs here, the firm plans to hire another 200 engineers next year to work here and in Charlotte, N.C., along with another 100 in 2007. Christopher said earlier this year that a contract to build a new plant would mean a $2 billion to $3 billion investment in AREVA, including $400 million to $500 million worth of work subcontracted to local manufacturers.

Building a new nuclear plant hinges on the NRC´s approval of the plant´s design and finding a utility that wants to build it.

As Matt Busse of The News & Advance reported last week, AREVA and the other firms associated with UniStar Nuclear are not alone in the nuclear power industry. They have competition from Atlanta-based GE Energy and Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse Electric, both of which have designed their own “next generation’ nuclear plants.

Fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal), the dominant energy today, are being rapidly exhausted, and are the cause of wide scale environmental pollution, while nuclear and renewable energies are much cleaner. Experts say nuclear fuels have no global effect, produce relatively small amounts of waste and, since they don´t produce emissions similar to oil and coal, don´t affect the planet´s climate. Further, proponents of nuclear energy say, if well managed, it is sustainable for the long term.

No new nuclear power plant has been ordered in the United States since 1973 and interest soured after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania in 1979. That reactor was designed in Lynchburg by Babcock and Wilcox, which eventually gave way to AREVA.

Disposal of waste from nuclear power plants is one factor that has kept a damper on increasing the number of such plants across the United States. The U.S. Department of Energy, the Bush administration and Congress are pushing a plan to dispose of the nuclear waste in tunnels under Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

The people of Nevada have opposed the plan. In the meantime, nuclear waste is currently being stored in temporary facilities scattered across 39 states.

Nuclear energy for electricity, nonetheless, has to be the way of the future for more Americans. With oil prices hovering at $70 a barrel and rising, America may not have any choice.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
September 22, 2005

Workers on Yucca project face layoffs

By Keith Rogers
Review-Journal

Contractors for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project are bracing for possible layoffs in anticipation of budget cuts that could be as much as 30 percent, government and company sources confirmed Wednesday.

A spokesman for Bechtel SAIC Co., the prime contractor for the project, said the company's 1,400 employees were notified by President and General Manager Ted Feigenbaum that the Department of Energy had sent out "planning guidance" memos that will lead to final decisions in October.

"I'm not sure reductions are avoidable, and the employees know that," Bechtel spokesman Jason Bohne said.

He said contractors were asked to analyze how a 25 percent to 30 percent funding reduction would affect the project and its schedule for submitting a license application for the planned repository for review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Asked if the impacts would include layoffs, Bohne said, "My guess is it's going to have to."

If that's the case, the project to entomb 77,000 tons of the nation's spent nuclear fuel and highly radioactive waste in the mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, would face another setback.

DOE officials already have delayed submitting the license application that was expected last year and that now has no target date.

The repository, once touted to open in 2010, is not expected to be ready until 2012 at the earliest, barring any delays that could result from the license review and from legal actions.

Allen Benson, a spokesman for the department's Office of Repository Development in Las Vegas, said contractors were sent internal guidance documents last week as part of an annual review. This time, Paul Golan, acting director of DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, "is demanding a high level of analysis to make sure everything is necessary," Benson said.

"There's nothing unusual going on here," he said, noting later that "this is give and take, and also allows DOE flexibility to put dollars where we think we need them."

Benson said the memos "simply instruct the contractors what they should be looking at for the coming year and come back to us with what their plans are."

Bohne said Bechtel was asked to look at where money is allocated for activities that are priorities.

"They basically gave us a priority list that says this stuff has to happen. The letter says they will give us opportunities to request funding. ... The letter doesn't say reduce the work force," Bohne said.

This year, the Yucca Mountain Project operated with a $573 million budget, of which Bechtel received about $325 million. The company's five-year contract for the project expires in March but can be renewed.

Congress has not set a Yucca Mountain budget level for the 2006 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. The Bush administration has requested $651 million, but lawmakers are not expected to pass an Energy Department appropriation bill until later this fall.

Benson said it's possible the project could operate under a continuing resolution for the entire year.

Besides Bechtel SAIC, its subcontractors and affiliates at the national laboratories, there are 33 more contractors whose employees total about 600. Most of those contracts are for technical, support and administrative services. They include one to Opportunity Village for custodial services.

DOE employees on the project account for roughly another 100 workers.

"Everybody gets different guidance depending on what their function is," Benson said.

Confirmation of DOE's internal financial planning guidance instructions to contractors comes a week after officials at the U.S. Geological Survey said they were told to expect an 89 percent reduction next year in work it does for the Yucca Mountain Project. At the time, USGS officials speculated the cutbacks would result in layoffs and drive the agency off the project.

The USGS supplies scientists to the Energy Department for research and monitoring tasks and has conducted nuclear waste studies at the site since 1979.

Benson on Wednesday wouldn't respond to questions about any possible link between the proposed USGS budget cuts and e-mails that USGS scientists wrote between 1998 and 2000 expressing frustration with the project and discussing falsifying quality assurance documentation of their work.

He has said, however, that the USGS wasn't being singled out. Instead, all parties on the Yucca Mountain Project team are undergoing the same scrutiny.

Stephens Washington Bureau Chief Steve Tetreault contributed to this report.

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Las Vegas SUN
September 22, 2005

Editorial: Better late than never

Las Vegas Sun

Sen. Robert Bennett has been a reliable supporter of the nuclear power industry, including backing the controversial construction of a high-level nuclear waste dump in Nevada. While Bennett says that he still believes in the value of nuclear power, the Republican senator from Utah has made a major break with the industry. In a speech on the Senate floor this week, Bennett said that he now opposes storing nuclear waste in Nevada. "However much the idea of a single repository may have made sense some decades ago, it's now clear that it does not make sense and we need to move in some future direction," he said. Bennett said he will team up with Nevada's congressional delegation, which is supporting efforts in Congress that would allow nuclear waste to be stored on site where it is generated. That would remove the option of shipping the waste thousands of mile s cross-country to Nevada's Yucca Mountain, which has been hobbled by regulatory and legal issues that could prevent it fro! m ever opening.

Bennett's epiphany undoubtedly occurred on Sept. 9 when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the construction of a temporary above-ground nuclear waste repository on Indian tribal land about 45 miles away from Salt Lake City. The specter of 44,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste, in what the nuclear power industry has said would be a staging area to eventually ship man's deadliest waste to Nevada, finally made Bennett see the light.

Ironically, in 2002 the Bush White House secured votes in favor of Yucca Mountain from Bennett and Utah's other senator, Orrin Hatch, with the guarantee that the administration would work to stop a temporary dump from happening there. Apparently, Bush's word to Utah's senators was just as good as the promise he made to Nevadans in 2000, when he pledged that "sound science" would guide him on Yucca Mountain. Shortly after being sworn in as president, Bush pushed approval of the Yucca Mountain project through Congress -- despite nearly 300 unanswered scientific questions about Yucca Mountain's suitability. It's also worth noting today that, in light of real doubts about Yucca Mountain ever opening, residents of Utah fear that their state could be a fallback option for the federal government, transforming the temporary dump into a permanent one.

Of course, Bennett's opposition to Yucca Mountain would have been more welcome three years ago, when Nevada had the best opportunity to forever block Yucca Mountain. But rather than dwelling on the past, we hope that Bennett's change of heart results in others finding the courage to oppose Yucca Mountain, too. In particular, it would be encouraging to see the seeds of opposition take root among all Western members of Congress, especially since the West tends to be Washington's choice as a dumping ground for the nation's hazardous wastes.

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Deseret News
September 22, 2005

Hatch's bill aims to block nuclear waste

Measure would keep shipments out of Utah — but not Nevada

By Jerry D. Spangler and Joe Bauman
Deseret Morning News

WASHINGTON — Sen. Orrin Hatch plans to reintroduce legislation today to block the shipment of nuclear waste to a private storage facility in Utah and has asked fellow Sen. Bob Bennett to be a co-sponsor.

Hatch, unlike Bennett and other members of the Utah congressional delegation and the governor, has refused to support a bill that would ban shipments of spent nuclear fuel rods through the West. Such a measure would block both the proposed Yucca Mountain permanent repository in Nevada and the temporary Private Fuel Storage repository planned for Skull Valley in Utah's Tooele County.

Bennett, who on Tuesday announced he was breaking ranks with Hatch, President Bush and other supporters of Yucca Mountain, said he is considering Hatch's request.

Coloring Bennett's decision will be his support for a nuclear waste plan proposed by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. Reid and Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., are calling for leaving the spent fuel rods at nuclear power plants and eventually reprocessing them.

Hatch, R-Utah, made it clear he does not support that position.

The Bush administration "strongly supports Yucca Mountain. So if I join with Sen. Reid right now, that would alienate the administration and others who can help us the most right now," he said.

"We need to keep our options open," Hatch added Wednesday on the Doug Wright show, broadcast by KSL Radio. "Sen. Reid wants us to close off one of the only options open."

When Wright asked him when Utah could expect help from the administration, he replied, "Well, we have to give them a chance." Now that the PFS licensing has been ordered by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an independent board, the matter becomes more of a political issue, he indicated.

Hatch's legislation calls on the secretary of energy to conduct a study into storage of spent nuclear fuel at Department of Energy sites around the country and into whether the federal government should take ownership of the wastes now being stored at more than 100 nuclear power plants.

The measure, which was introduced earlier this year as an amendment to the Energy Bill but was not voted on, also calls on DOE to conduct a study into the development of facilities to reprocess nuclear waste.

At the core of the legislation is a provision that "no spent nuclear fuel or related high-level material shall be deposited into, or transported to, a non-federally-owned, off-site facility."

That is a direct shot at Private Fuel Storage, the consortium of utilities that wants to store up to 44,000 tons of spent fuel on Goshute tribal lands in Tooele County. PFS has secured the approval of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Because the PFS facility is privately owned and operated, it would be not be allowed to ship waste or store it in Utah, according to Hatch's language.

But because Yucca Mountain is a federal facility, it would not be affected.

Hatch defended his support for Yucca Mountain, saying he did not want to "kick the administration in the teeth right now when they're for Yucca Mountain."

And unlike Bennett, he does not believe opponents of Yucca Mountain can carry the day.

"Sen. Reid can't deliver. And that's the problem," Hatch said.

Hatch said he thinks it's important for him to "hold tough and keep working, not give up." He said he is making headway with the White House, Department of Energy, Department of the Interior, Congress and even some members of the nuclear industry in working against Skull Valley.

Like the rest of the Utah delegation, Hatch said he also supports reprocessing and leaving the waste on site, or at DOE facilities.

But the waste issue is politically difficult, he said, adding the administration is "committed to Yucca Mountain." Hatch said he has had "innumerable meetings with top-level people" on the matter and will continue to have more.

"We will do everything under the sun to stop it," he added, speaking of PFS.

Jason Groenewold, director of the anti-nuclear group Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, said that eight years into the fight against the PFS repository, "it's good to see specific legislation being introduced to block nuclear waste storage in Skull Valley."

Groenewold hoped Hatch would consider joining the rest of the Utah congressional delegation and the Nevada delegation in opposing the Yucca Mountain site by "saying the West should not be the nation's nuclear waste dumping ground."

E-mail: spang@desnews.com; bau@desnews.com

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Salt Lake Tribune
September 22, 2005

Hatch is sticking with White House on Yucca

Opposed: Huntsman Jr., Bennett, Matheson and Bishop align with Sen. Reid

By Robert Gehrke
The Salt Lake Tribune

Although it isolates him from Utah's governor and the rest of the congressional delegation, Sen. Orrin Hatch says he'll stick with the Bush administration in its effort to store nuclear waste in Nevada.

He argues that remains the best bet to keep nuclear waste out of Utah's Skull Valley.

"The future of Skull Valley is largely in the hands of the administration right now, so I don't believe kicking them in the teeth is in our best interest," Hatch said Wednesday. "It's the only real hope I see right now, because [Nevada Sen.] Harry Reid can't help us."

Hatch's comments cemented his position a day after Utah Sen. Bob Bennett said that he erred in backing the White House push to bury the waste beneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada and endorsed Reid's proposal to leave the nuclear material at the reactors that produced it.

Reid's plan, if it succeeds, would block a nuclear dump in Nevada and an effort by Private Fuel Storage to build a temporary storage site on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation, 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.

Hatch plans to introduce a bill today that would declare a moratorium on shipping nuclear waste to private storage sites such as Skull Valley. But it would leave open the door to Yucca Mountain.

Efforts to store 77,000 tons of nuclear waste beneath Yucca Mountain are mired in legal and regulatory challenges and are years behind schedule. Until Yucca is built, PFS proposes storing 44,000 tons of waste above ground in steel casks on the Skull Valley Goshute Reservation.

In 2002, Hatch and Bennett voted with the Bush administration to build Yucca Mountain after meeting with White House officials and being given assurances the federal government would not reimburse PFS for costs associated with its project. PFS, however, said it never planned to seek any such compensation.

Members of Utah's delegation have said Reid was angered by the vote and has opposed Utah's efforts

to block the PFS site out of spite for the Utah senators.

"I do not feel good about Yucca Mountain, either," Hatch said, "but anybody who doesn't think Bob [Bennett] and I should've voted for Yucca Mountain just doesn't know the facts because we would have become the sole target here."

Bennett said Tuesday that his vote for Yucca Mountain was based on good intentions, but that he made a mistake and he now believes the waste dump will never be built. He endorsed Reid's plan to keep the used nuclear fuel at reactors and reprocess it.

Bennett joined a growing chorus of Utahns, including Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., Rep. Rob Bishop and Rep. Jim Matheson, who have embraced Reid's proposal. Rep. Chris Cannon also has warmed to the idea.

"I'm not going to second-guess my colleagues, but one of us has to stay neutral on this and hopefully give the administration enough ammunition to resolve this process," Hatch said.

Indeed, the Bush administration could intervene at several points to stop the PFS site: by vetoing a lease agreement between PFS and the tribe; by refusing to grant a right-of-way for a rail line to the site; or through Energy Department or Homeland Security actions.

"Our only chance of getting rid of this is with the administration. It isn't with the Senate. It isn't with Harry," Hatch said.

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Standard-Examiner
September 21, 2005

At a Glance

Rep. Bishop backs plan to keep nuclear waste where it is

Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, has thrown his support behind a plan advocated by Nevada lawmakers to keep high-level nuclear waste at its current location -- stored on-site at nuclear power plants -- until a better plan or new recycling technology is developed.

Sen. Bob Bennet, R-Utah, made it clear Tuesday that he has joined Nevada lawmakers in opposing storage of the nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in that state.

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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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