Yucca Mountain News Clips
Thursday, October 20, 2005
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Las Vegas SUN
October 20, 2005
Reid argues to cut funds
Sun Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is quietly arguing that this is another good year to slash Yucca Mountain funding, given massive spending on Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq.
Yucca budget talks come as congressional leaders are looking for cuts that could offset Katrina and Iraq spending. The Yucca discussions may be coming to a head in back-room negotiations as a House-Senate conference committee works to finalize the annual energy and water appropriations bill by the end of the month.
Details of the Yucca budget are being hammered out mostly by Reid, D-Nev.; Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M.; Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio; and Rep. Pete Visclosky, D-Ind., the top Republicans and Democrats on the energy and water subcommittees of the Appropriations Committees.
The House approved $661 million for Yucca in the 2006 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1. The Senate approved $577 million.
Reid works to slash the Yucca budget every year, but his aides declined to say how much he was seeking to cut this year. Domenici spokesman Chris Gallegos declined to comment.
"Yucca Mountain is losing favor (in Congress)," Reid told reporters on Tuesday. "It's a boondoggle, and there's no need for it."
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Las Vegas SUN
October 20, 2005
Long Yucca fight frustrates both side
By Suzanne Struglinski <suzanne@lasvegassun.com>
Sun Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- When people talk about Yucca Mountain and geological time, they're not necessarily talking about rocks. They just as well could be describing the protracted, yearslong debate over the federal government's proposal to put the nation's nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The government's plan for Yucca has moved extraordinarily slowly in the face of ceaseless bickering between, on one side, Nevada officials and environmentalists, and on the other, the Energy Department and the nuclear industry.
It's a fight that has frustrated both sides.
Nevada officials continually say the Energy Department does not play by the rules -- an argument made again in federal court Tuesday. On the other side, nuclear utilities wonder why, in 2005, a nuclear waste repository that was supposed to open in 1998 still is being debated rather than used.
The repository is scheduled to open by 2010, but that is a long shot. Some believe the Energy Department will be lucky to get a license application reviewed by then in a process where nothing is simple and nothing is without controversy.
"The most frustrating thing is the deference the government gets on what clearly are reckless things," said attorney Joe Egan, who represents Nevada on Yucca issues. "This type of behavior would not be tolerated in the corporate climate."
Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's advocacy group and a top Yucca supporter, is just as frustrated over finding itself still waiting for a repository promised 20 years ago.
"The most frustrating thing overall is the failure of the Department of Energy to have submitted a license application as planned," NEI attorney Mike Bauser said. "It is dif.cult to identify one single thing that would cure the ongoing delay." Every energy budget in Congress, public comment at an agency or federal court case drag out the process even longer, with no end in sight.
That's not necessarily bad for "Every day that it is delayed, is another day in our favor," said Peggy Maze Johnson, executive director of Citizen Alert, which opposes the repository. Johnson said the longer the project takes, the more her organization and other anti-Yucca groups can strengthen opposition to the repository, especially in other states.
"These delays are going to help us," Johnson said. "We've been able to shoot (the proponents) down at every single turn."
Calling Nevada's arguments valid, not simply a delaying tactic, Johnson describes the proposed radiation protection standard as "horrific" and terms the transportation plans "outrageous."
Each argument against the site, whether Nevada ultimately prevails or not, drags the Energy Department further away from a license application. And no application means no waste in Nevada -- for now.
On Tuesday, Egan argued before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia against the Energy Department's plan to put a rail line through Caliente and on to Yucca Mountain.
Nevada wants the court to force the Energy Department to go back and prepare a new environmental impact statement on its transportation plan with the Surface Transportation Board at the table. The board automatically brings more scrutiny to the process, Egan said.
If the court rules in Nevada's favor, the department may have to go back to the transportation drawing board on a shipping plan already riddled with uncertainties.
Another battle front was the subject of a hearing last Thursday at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, where a three-judge panel is trying to determine how the public can access certain Energy Department documents. While Nevada's attorneys want access to as much information as possible, the department wants to protect data that it says should be kept confidential, such as details about nuclear fuel used by the Navy.
The department's attorneys have been filing monthly reports since March on the project's status. October's report, like the others, did not give a specific date for submitting the license application.
Judge Thomas Moore, one of the three judges, said he wants better reports estimating the project's progress, including specific dates for submitting the application.
"Events are linked to other events, and it's hard to draw absolute straight lines to a day on the calendar," attorney Don Irwin, who represents the department, said.
While the lengthy debate and delays can be viewed as battle victories for Nevada, in the end, the state might not win the war.
David Blee, managing director for the Forrestal Group, an energy consulting firm in Washington, said it will be difficult for one state to "thwart" the will of Congress and the president.
"They have a tendency to claim the sky is falling a number of times or that they have a smoking gun, but that hasn't been the case," said Blee, who is part of the U.S. Transport Council that supports the site.
"As far as the politics, it's like a chess game -- they are constantly moving their pieces," Blee said. "Anyone who plays chess knows it take a lot of patience."
Suzanne Struglinski can be reached at (202) 662-7245 or at suzanne@lasvegassun.com.
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Las Vegas SUN
October 20, 2005
EPA values public opinion
By Suzanne Struglinski <suzanne@lasvegassun.com>
Sun Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- When Environmental Protection Agency officials say they listen to every comment raised in the public hearings about the Yucca Mountain radiation standard, they mean it.
The last time the agency proposed a radiation standard it took two years to take public comment, respond and issue the final rule.
During the 90-day public comment period, the agency received 69 written comments and heard from 28 speakers at hearings in Washington, Las Vegas, Amargosa Valley and Kansas City, Mo. The EPA continued to accept comments after that, though.
The agency released a 220-page report specifically outlining the government responses to comments it received.
However, that rule was overturned by a federal appeals court.
Last week the EPA, which issued the revised rule Aug. 22, finished its series of public hearings. People can still respond in writing until Nov. 21.
According to the EPA's "e-docket," a Web site that contain all the documents related to the proposed radiation standard, about 90 public comments have been received so far.
Suzanne Struglinski can be reached at (202) 662-7245 or by e-mail at suzanne @ lasvegassun.com.
Comments welcome
To comment on the EPA's proposed radiation standard for Yucca Mountain, you can e-mail a-and-r-docket@epa.gov and specify "to the attention of Docket ID No. OAR-2005-0083."
Comments can be mailed to EPA Docket Center (EPA/DC), Air and Radiation Docket, Environmental Protection Agency, EPA West, Mail Code 6102T, 1200 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20460. Attention Docket ID No. OAR-2005-0083.
The agency does not have to consider comments received after Nov. 21, but can do so at its discretion.
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Taxpayers for Common Sense
October 19, 2005
The WasteBasket: A Weekly Bulletin on Government Waste
Bechtel Bonanza
Sometimes, it´s very hard to tell who our government officials are working for. With high-paid jobs in the private sector only a phone call away, some of our federal bureaucrats seem less fixated on public service than they are on giving huge payouts to big contractors, so to as ensure a golden parachute when they leave their government post.
Last month, the Department of Energy´s (DOE) Inspector General released an audit of the department´s Yucca activities which found that the DOE gave Bechtel SAIC, one of the nation´s largest contractors, $4 million in bonuses that the company flat out didn´t deserve. Despite Bechtel´s sloppy work, which included botched data, incomplete documents, and unacceptable final products, the DOE went to great lengths to make sure Bechtel got a fat paycheck.
Maybe we´re old-fashioned, but we´re from the school of thought that says you should only get a bonus when you´ve kicked butt and gone above the call of duty for your employer.
Bechtel was hired in 2001 by the DOE´s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management to manage the Yucca Mountain project, a massive planned nuclear waste repository that has been riddled with technical and financial problems from day one. Bechtel was given a not-so-modest fee of $3.2 billion for this five-year contract, which was loaded with performance incentives.
Bechtel´s work on the Yucca project has been shoddy at best, according to the new audit. The company fell behind schedule on a lot of its work, failed to consistently produce material that was up to the DOE´s standards, and provided data that was inconsistent and sometimes just plain wrong.
In the normal business world, poor performance means poor compensation – no company in its right mind would give big bonuses to an employee who didn´t meet expectations. But in the government, things run a bit differently: the DOE, which is awash in a steady stream of hard-earned taxpayer cash, can spend like a drunken sailor without fear of a fiscal hangover. So instead of withholding bonuses from Bechtel for poor management, the DOE bent the rules. When Bechtel failed to produce an internet-based Licensing Support Network, which would have earned them a $2 million bonus, the DOE found a way to redistribute that bonus so that Bechtel got it anyway. This sleight-of-hand was not only a wrong, it also violated the terms of the contract.
Bechtel, the company that brought you Boston's Big Dig, a notoriously over-budget and severely delayed transportation project, is an old pro at squeezing taxpayer dollars out of government contracts. But the company wouldn´t have been able to score such big bonuses if it weren´t for the help of the DOE, which seemed all too happy to oblige. Sometimes the relationship between federal agencies and the companies whose contracts they manage is too close for comfort.
With the U.S. now engaged in a massive rebuilding effort – an undertaking being carried out largely by big contractors with some very high-powered lobbyists – we need to make sure that this doesn´t happen in the Gulf Coast. Our tax dollars aren´t the only thing at stake.
For more information, contact Keith Ashdown at (202)-546-8500 ext. 110 or keith@taxpayer.net
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Christian Science Monitor
October 20, 2005
Extreme makeover for a nuclear factory
The Monitor's View
Quick. Name a huge - and hugely important - federal government project completed decades ahead of time and billions of dollars under cost estimates. Stumped? Here's a hint. It involves the first cleanup of an idled US nuclear weapons facility.
In 1994, a study by the Department of Energy (DOE) estimated it would take 60 years and $37 billion to clean up and demolish the Denver area's Rocky Flats site, a veritable city of government buildings that produced plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons.
But last week, in a rare development that holds lessons for the DOE's 38 nuclear weapons facilities, the contractor hired in 1995 to scrub Rocky Flats said the job was done. The 800 buildings had been demolished, the contaminated soil and plutonium removed to guarded storage sites. Time: 10 years. Cost: less than $7 billion.
The DOE, the Environmental Protection Agency, and state officials still must verify that the site - which will be turned into a wildlife refuge - meets their safety standards.
Because the stakeholders have been working closely together, it's unlikely something major will turn up. Even if it did, though, the project, run by Kaiser-Hill Co., still deserves high praise for the innovations that brought it to an early and cost- effective conclusion - and aided the world's nonproliferation effort.
Initially, progress was excruciatingly slow, relations with the various players contentious, and Kaiser-Hill received enforcement actions for safety violations. But frustration prompted changes in approach, and the project turned around.
When Kaiser-Hill renegotiated its contract in 2000, for instance, the DOE agreed to an unusual incentive package - eventually more than $500 million and well worth it - to finish early (by December 2006) and under budget. Kaiser-Hill passed the incentive all the way down to hourly workers. Penalties for safety infractions discouraged shoddy work.
Congress, tired of inertia, also tried something new. It guaranteed stable funding for the life of the contract. No more waiting for dollars each year.
Kaiser-Hill opted for complete transparency. It made all of its data available to state regulators and community groups, and it talked regularly with them. That restored trust.
It also involved workers in planning, and encouraged technical innovation. That resulted in a new way of handling huge equipment - decontaminating it to low-level radioactive waste standards, then spraying it with a hardening goop that became its own shipping container. A month-long process of cutting up equipment shrank to a day-long one.
It would be a relief if a "Rocky Flats" model could be repeated in the nuclear power industry, stymied by waste-disposal issues. That's unlikely, though. For one thing, commercial nuclear power doesn't have the luxury of DOE facilities to accept its spent fuel rods. Alas, the industry is still waiting for permanent storage below Nevada's Yucca Mountain.
But those cleaning up other DOE nuclear weapons sites, such as the difficult one in Hanford, Wa., can learn from Rocky Flats.
While much about Rocky Flats was unique, surely flexibility, transparency, incentives, and innovation can cross state lines.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
October 19, 2005
Nevada says DOE cut corners
Judges hear state's latest bid to stop Yucca project
By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- An attorney for Nevada on Tuesday set out to persuade a panel of federal judges that the Department of Energy cut corners in its initial planning to ship nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain.
In the state's latest bid to stop the proposed waste repository, attorney Joseph Egan argued DOE violated environmental law by neglecting to perform adequate studies of how it would move radioactive spent fuel through Nevada if it could not build a railroad to the site in time.
Egan, the state's chief nuclear waste lawyer, also said DOE exceeded its authority by selecting a 318-mile rail corridor from Caliente to the site in April 2004 without involving the Surface Transportation Board. The board is a federal agency with specific responsibility and expertise on railroads.
"It's like somebody trying to site an airport without the FAA," Egan said in remarks before three judges sitting at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
Justice Department attorney John Bryson defended the Energy Department, saying it followed "fully established procedures" when it set out to devise a Yucca Mountain transportation strategy.
Bryson said the state's objections were not sufficient to merit tossing out DOE's work to date for shipping 77,000 tons of spent power plant fuel and government nuclear waste to the Yucca site, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The attorneys appeared before U.S. Circuit Judges Harry T. Edwards, Karen LeCraft Henderson and A. Raymond Randolph, who posed few questions during a 30-minute hearing.
Nevada Attorney General Brian Sandoval accompanied Egan, in what might have been his final court appearance as the state's chief law officer and legal representative. The U.S. Senate was expected to complete Sandoval's confirmation to U.S. district judge in the coming days.
"I didn't hear any questions that were critical of Nevada's position," Sandoval said after the hearing. "We always had been waiting for Yucca Mountain to get into a legal position, where we have had victories that have exposed the government's inability to follow the law."
The state has filed nine lawsuits involving Yucca Mountain since the repository plan began forming its current shape in 2001. The government has prevailed on some consequential issues, while the state won a July 2004 ruling involving radiation safety standards that have caused delays in the program.
Facing a variety of legal and technical challenges, the Energy Department has abandoned 1998 and 2010 planned repository openings. While a ruling against the government in the latest case might not kill the Yucca project, Nevada officials maintain it could cause DOE to reconsider ambitious construction of a Nevada railroad and lead to even further delays.
During his presentation, Egan said DOE performed merely a "back of the envelope" assessment of a plan to load nuclear waste into truck casks at power plants, then ship them on trains to Nevada, where they would be transferred onto tractor-trailers for a final travel leg to Yucca Mountain.
The department said it may employ that method for the first half-dozen years of repository operations if a railroad cannot be built on time.
Egan said the plan raises a host of safety issues "unconsidered by DOE."
Bryson said DOE studied the plan previously and was not required to perform an extensive new review given the relatively short period the truck-rail strategy might be employed.
"DOE's evaluation of impacts were reviewed under the rule of reason," he said. "They did not present a greatly different environmental landscape."
Egan also accused DOE of acting coy about its intentions for a Nevada rail line so as not to trigger early involvement by the Surface Transportation Board. The board would gain jurisdiction if the Yucca Mountain railroad were declared a "common carrier" that would be utilized by Nevada shippers.
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San Diego Union Tribune
October 18, 2005
Nevada, federal government face off over Yucca rail plan
By Erica Werner
Associated Press
WASHINGTON – An attorney for Nevada told a federal appeals court Tuesday that the Energy Department should be forced to redo its plan for shipping nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain, contending the agency overstepped its authority and violated environmental rules.
Among other problems, attorney Joe Egan said the Energy Department neglected to consult with the federal Surface Transportation Board before settling on its plan use trains to move nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
"This is like someone trying to site an airport without involving the FAA," Egan told a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
A government attorney disagreed.
"This is an objection that was not made by Nevada or anybody else during the administrative process," Justice Department attorney John A. Bryson told the judges during oral arguments.
"The DOE's determination that it would be the lead agency is undoubtedly correct," Bryson said.
At least one judge appeared sympathetic to Nevada's arguments.
The Surface Transportation Board, tasked by Congress with jurisdiction over railroad issues, "would certainly have special expertise," Judge Harry T. Edwards told Bryson.
At issue in the litigation – one of several challenges Nevada is pursuing against the waste dump project – is the Energy Department's plan to rely mostly on rail to transport 77,000 tons of commercial spent fuel and high-level defense waste to Yucca Mountain. The waste would travel by train to Caliente in southeastern Nevada and then to Yucca Mountain over a proposed 318-mile rail line.
Some 3,500 rail shipments would be required, as well as 1,100 truck shipments from sites that don't have capacity to handle the larger and heavier rail casks.
DOE estimates shipping waste by rail for 24 years, and – in an element contested by Nevada – says that could include a six-year interim plan while the rail line is completed. The interim plan would entail shipping waste to Nevada by rail, then loading it on trucks for the trip the rest of the way to Yucca Mountain.
Egan argued Tuesday that the government proposed the interim plan without the necessary environmental analysis. But the government said the interim plan doesn't constitute a substantial enough change to need a supplemental environmental report.
The government also contended that the Surface Transportation Board only would need to be involved if the Energy Department decides to operate the new rail line as a "common carrier" open to nonnuclear shipments, as opposed to a private, dedicated railway. DOE says that decision hasn't been made.
Egan argued that the agreement the agency has reached with Union Pacific Railroad indicates DOE already has decided to treat the rail line as a common carrier, but Bryson said he was wrong.
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New Mexico Business Weekly
October 18, 2005
Albuquerque company wins five-year WIPP contract
Clay Holtzman
NMBW Staff
John Hart & Associates of Albuquerque has been awarded a five-year contract worth more than $600,000 to help the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad meet its environmental re-certification standards.
Company owner John Hart says his 12-employee firm will use a complex modeling system, developed at Albuquerque's Sandia National Laboratories, to simulate the long-term behavior of the depository, which contains low level plutonium generated by U.S. defense-related programs.
Hart, who has worked for various entities on the WIPP facility and its certification processes for more than 20 years, says he was notified Monday that his firm had been awarded the contract.
"This contract really represents a continuation of work we've been doing for a long time," Hart says.
Hart started his company in 1992 and since then has worked with WIPP on its application for its original environmental certification process as well as its re-certification process application that was submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency two years ago. That application was deemed complete last month, but is still under review by the EPA, Hart says.
According to law, WIPP must apply to the EPA every five years for the re-certification of the facility that was designed to safely house radioactive materials for 10,000 years.
WIPP, based in Carlsbad, opened in March of 1999.
John Hart & Associates, which employs regulatory compliance specialists and environmental engineers, also has performed work with Nevada's Yucca Mountain site where both spent fuel rods from commercial nuclear reactors and high level waste from Department of Energy (DOE) programs are stored.
Hart's contract, awarded by the DOE, is worth $611,688 over five years.
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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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