Yucca Mountain News Clips
Tuesday, November 1, 2005
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Science Magazine
November 01, 2005
Proof of Safety at Yucca Mountain
Luther J.Carter and Thomas H. Pigford
see: http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/news2005/pdf/science051021.pdf
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Las Vegas SUN
November 01, 2005
New Nevada attorney general replaces wife in top agency post
By Brendan Riley
Associated Press
CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) - Nevada Attorney General George Chanos signed his oath of office on Tuesday - and promptly named a replacement for his wife, state Consumer Advocate Adriana Escobar Chanos, whose agency is within his new office.
Chanos, 47, taking over from fellow Republican Brian Sandoval who was sworn in Monday as a new U.S. District Court judge, named Senior Deputy Attorney General Eric Witkoski as the new consumer advocate.
Chanos signed his oath in Las Vegas and faxed a copy to Gov. Kenny Guinn. A formal swearing-in ceremony is scheduled for Wednesday, also in Las Vegas. Chanos also plans to be in Reno and Carson City on Friday, to meet with staffers there.
In replacing his wife as consumer advocate, Chanos thanked her for doing a good job in her 10 months on the job. He added Witkoski "has some big shoes to fill, but I'm confident he's up for the challenge."
When he was picked in September by Guinn to replace Sandoval, Chanos said his wife would resign from her post which is within the attorney general's office but has a separate budget and is a four-year term appointment.
At the time, Chanos said there wasn't any conflict, but she'd leave the post "to avoid the appearance of one."
While he serves the remaining 14 months of Sandoval's state term, Chanos also will launch his bid for a full four-year term. In the 2006 elections, he'll face Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, who has the support of many top Democrats including U.S. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, former Sen. Richard Bryan, former Gov. Bob Miller and former Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa.
Chanos grew up in Las Vegas, graduated from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and later worked for former U.S. Sen. Paul Laxalt in Washington, D.C. He graduated from the University of San Diego School of Law in 1985 and practiced law in San Diego until opening a law office with his wife in Las Vegas in 1995.
In his law practice, Chanos has focused on business litigation and also has represented the Clark County Republican Party as well as the state GOP.
He said his first priority is to complete a "needs assessment" to determine how various state agencies feel about the legal representation they're getting from the attorney general's office, and what improvements are needed.
Chanos also has said he'd "absolutely" enforce the state's open meeting laws, and continue the state's long-running legal battle against federal efforts to operate a high-level nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in southern Nevada.
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Las Vegas SUN
October 31, 2005
Nevada official sworn in as federal judge
By Brendan Riley
Associated Press
CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) - Nevada Attorney General Brian Sandoval was sworn in Monday as a U.S. District Court judge, after submitting his resignation as the state's chief prosecutor to Gov. Kenny Guinn.
Guinn immediately appointed Las Vegas attorney George Chanos to complete the remaining 14 months of Sandoval's term as attorney general. Chanos was to be sworn in on Tuesday, and go through a formal ceremony on Wednesday. Both those events will be in Las Vegas.
A former state assemblyman, chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission and the first Hispanic elected statewide in Nevada, Sandoval, 42, assumed a federal court seat in Reno being vacated by U.S. District Judge Howard McKibben, who's going on senior status.
Sandoval, a Republican, was elected attorney general in 2002. He was recommended for the judicial post by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and also was backed by Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev. President Bush nominated him in March, and he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate last week.
Guinn said Chanos, 47, who plans to seek a full four-year term in 2006, has 20 years of law experience and "brings a distinguished record of accomplishment as a business litigator to the position of attorney general." He also has done legal work for the Republican Party at state and Clark County levels.
While getting the appointment to the rest of Sandoval's term should give Chanos an edge over other candidates in the 2006 elections, he won't get a free ride. Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto also is running, and she has the support of many top Democrats including U.S. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, former Sen. Richard Bryan, former Gov. Bob Miller and former Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa.
Chanos said that following his formal swearing-in on Wednesday, he plans to spend Friday in northern Nevada, meeting with the staff of both the Carson City and Reno offices of the attorney general.
His first priority is to complete a "needs assessment" to determine how various state agencies feel about the legal representation they're getting from the attorney general's office, and what improvements are needed.
Chanos also has said he'd "absolutely" enforce the state's open meeting laws, work to preserve access to public information and press for "integrity in government and the need for transparency and accountability."
Another main goal will be to continue the state's long-running legal battle against the federal government's efforts to operate a high-level nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in southern Nevada, Chanos said.
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Reno Gazette Journal
November 01, 2005
Pay attention to the end game
Terri Choate
I turned on Fox News last Friday just at the moment reporters were running out of the federal court house where indictments were filed against Vice President Cheney´s chief of staff, Scooter Libby. “Running’ is a kindness. Several seemed, more accurately, to waddle quickly. Apparently, investigative journalism doesn´t develop physical fitness.
On the other hand, Fox´s lovely Megyn Kendall looked incredibly composed outside the courthouse as she reported on the charges, even while flipping through the 20-page document. Kendall, incidentally, is legally blonde—and perhaps even naturally so.
These have been several whirlwind weeks for political junkies, who are, fortunately for our GDP, a minority of the population. First, there was the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court: “Too old looking,’ I thought, forgetting Ruth Bader Ginsberg. And who was it that commented her being approved of by Senators Chuck Shumer and Harry Reid was “the kiss of death?’ In the end, I was sorry Miers withdrew without testing the Senate´s ability to grill a woman—and without testing its collective capacity to understand how Miers´ expertise in business law might have added to the court´s intelligence on many of the cases reaching its docket.
Independent of that bruhaha, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma (R) posed for one of those old-time, Virgina City-style, “Wanted Dead or Alive’ posters, with the latter state of being scratched out. By a vote of 15 for and 82 against, his proposal to defund $452 million for the construction of a bridge to a town in Alaska with a population of 50 ($4.46 million per) and another between Anchorage and a wetlands populated only by non-homo sapiens was shot down by our elected mainstream.
Coburn´s plan was to offset expenses for the rebuilding of a major route across Lake Ponchartrain into New Orleans that was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. He would also have offset the rebuild by cutting from the federal budget $500,000 for a sculpture park in Seattle. Personally, I´ve got to support him on that call. I haven´t seen the plans for the sculpture, but the kiss of death for that project is being supported by the astute and intelligent Senator Patty Murray.
Nevertheless, I´ve got to oppose the good Senator´s attempt to scratch an animal facility in Westerly, Rhode Island ($200,000). I know Westerly. Well, actually, I don´t know Westerly; I know only my favorite Aunt May´s former house in Westerly where I learned to dig up onions from a neighbor´s plot and eat them whole with my cousin Tim, surreptitiously, but, oddly enough, still discovered and humorously indicted for the same by Aunt May.
Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and I can´t actually remember if I lied to my aunt about the onion business that she discovered as she gave Tim and me good night kisses.
But back to the budget. Senator Coburn, according to Knight Ridder/Tribune business news, is joined in his parsimony by Republican Senators John McCain (Arizona), Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint (South Carolina), Sam Brownback (Kansas), John Sununu (New Hampshire), and Nevada´s own John Ensign.
On the other hand, Nevada´s own Harry Reid opposes: he listened, along with House Democatic leader Nancy Pelosi, as Vincent Wilson, a New Orleans contractor, proclaimed, “We will not settle for crumbs.’ That reminds me of one of my mother´s famous sayings: “Beggars can´t be choosers;’ but surely she didn´t mean to be heartless to a hurricane entrepreneur.
I remember last March, Senator Reid pointed out the federal budget in our ever so secular nation is a moral document: He told how a group of ministers, meeting in Las Vegas, shared with him the story of a poor man named Lazarus who lived outside the gates of a rich man and was ignored, but then the rich man went to Hell and Lazarus received a ticket to Heaven. This left me feeling better about not being rich, and almost grateful to the government for taxing the berichness out of me, in addition to wondering what stayed in Vegas.
Of course I jest. Senator Reid—in fact the entire Nevada congressional delegation—is happy to defund the Yucca Mountain project after millions and millions and millions have flowed into the state for it. The sacrifices the few other congressional porkbusters would make in their own districts pale beside this. Waste not, haplessly comes to my mind, but want for generated power to fire the U.S. economy and heat U.S. homes through the freezing winters of global warming. That´s common sense?
And speaking of common sense, I´m puzzling over how it became a crime to lie about a non-crime (presuming, of course, there was a lie)? Never was I spanked for denying that I never hit one of my sisters. I´m confused over that double negative thing. Minus one times minus five is positive five. I deny I didn´t do a non-crime becomes five counts of misrepresentation and perjury? Go figure.
Yet finally, what´s roiling me in the wakes of what I´ve still got to believe are indiscriminate natural disasters and purposeful human carnage in Iraq and around the world is the blinders we wear in looking at the end game. Let´s take education, for example. That´s a public role just about everyone supports—often more reverently than national defense. What´s the end game when students graduate from high school ill-prepared for employment or college?
In 1993, Philadelphia philanthropist Walter Annenberg gave $500 million to several school districts around the country. Writing a “My Turn’ column in Newsweek, Evan Keliher, a 30-year teaching veteran of the Detroit school district, said, “I´ve never claimed to be a psychic, but I did predict...[the money] would fail to make any difference in the quality of public education. Regrettably, I was right.’
Reporters quizzed Theodore Sizer, former dean of Harvard Graduate School of Education and director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, about positive results from grant money. He couldn´t think of one in the 15 years of his experience. The Wall St. Journal on Friday quoted Arthur Levine, president of Columbia University´s Teachers College, saying graduate education programs were “‘inadequate and appalling´ ...and call[ing] for the abolition of the Ed.D degree.’ Of course, his own students and the education establishment were appalled to hear the programs suffer from “lax admissions standards, weak faculties and inappropriate degree requirements....’
Teacher Keliher recommends forgetting education fads and going back to three-part, tried and true (since Euclid) teaching: a teacher, a chalkboard and a room full of willing students. I asked my community college classes for comment, and there was universal cynicism about the room full of willing students. So far, they´ve settled on only two means to achieve these: a teacher who makes the study “interesting’ and “relevant’ and more classroom discipline.
Nevertheless, many of them are not at all sure either relevance or discipline would have improved their high school attentiveness. Almost all, on the other hand, are at college to gain the skills or degree needed to get a better job. That leads me to believe a dose of reality might be the key. Let´s give all disgruntled 16-year-olds a year off from school, a year in which they support themselves—or two or three years, whatever it takes to be tired of a “dead end’ job and examine the result for their lives.
And let´s look at the results in Iraq: two successful elections, a constitution, the beginnings of democratic aspiration, and a genocide trial—and, yes, 2,000 American military deaths—before deciding to pull out by Christmas (errrr, the “Happy Holidays!’) season.
Let´s look at the results of relief as we pour millions (mostly not offset) into the hurricane doughnut hole so we might, just might, catch and eliminate the worthless and fund only the sensible. I can´t get the picture out of my mind of South Floridians who didn´t evacuate for Wilma driving up in SUVs to receive supplies of water they hadn´t stockpiled in advance, and MREs, all the while complaining of delays.
Can you imagine the liability if any of these folk get food poisoning? That could be the next tobacco lawsuit.
Pay attention to the end game.
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Las Vegas SUN
November 01, 2005
BLM blocking Skull Valley nuclear waste project
By Paul Foy
Associated Press
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - A federal Bureau of Land Management official said Tuesday he was refusing to give the agency's approval for a rail spur for a nuclear waste stockyard in Utah's west desert.
The utilities backing the project say they might resort to trucking the waste on a state highway, but the BLM official in charge said his agency had the power to veto that, too.
"We're not able to bring anything to conclusion on their behalf," Glenn A. Carpenter, field manager for the bureau's Salt Lake district, told The Associated Press.
The BLM's refusal is one of a series of bureaucratic obstacles erected by the state's congressional delegation to stop Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of out-of-state utilities that won approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in September to build the way-station for nuclear waste.
The Skull Valley band of Goshute Indians signed a lucrative contract to take the radioactive waste from other states' nuclear-powered utilities.
The utilities call it a temporary solution pending a resolution of the troubled federal project at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, but Utah politicians fear it will become a permanent repository.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said the Bureau of Land Management's refusal to cooperate is a sign that the Bush administration is "on our side." In a statement issued Tuesday, Hatch said the agency has "jammed" the license authorized but not yet issued by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The stockpiling of 44,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel would take place about 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.
"This is one of many administrative and legal hurdles we are raising that PFS has to clear for Skull Valley to ever become a reality," Hatch said.
In an interview, Carpenter said the BLM cannot make a decision to authorize the construction of a Skull Valley rail line over government land because of restrictions Rep. Jim Hansen, R-Utah, wrote into a 2000 defense appropriations bill.
Hansen's provision blocked the bureau from changing a land-use plan to grant a right of way across government land for the rail line. The Bureau of Land Management can't act until the Pentagon studies how proposed wilderness areas for Utah's west desert might affect operations at the Utah Test and Training Range. The Pentagon is nowhere near starting the study.
Private Fuel Storage Chairman and Chief Executive Officer John Parkyn has said he might be able to get around the problem by shipping the waste by truck, but Carpenter said that was no certain bet.
Two-lane State Route 196 is not wide enough to accommodate trucks hauling the steel casks holding the nuclear waste, he said, and the Bureau of Land Management would have to grant a new right of way for any widening project. The state isn't likely to back road reconstruction for a project it's vigorously opposing.
In the end, the Hasting's Cutoff, a route used by the ill-fated Donner Party in 1846, could defeat Private Fuel Storage's proposal.
Carpenter said the reworked tracks of Hasting's Cutoff and subsequent Lincoln Highway are historic Skull Valley assets that could be damaged by a rail spur crossing them to Indian reservation.
Even if the bureau had authority to change its land-use plan for Skull Valley, Carpenter hinted it would be hesitant to endanger "an old route that remains traveled to this day, worn in the landscape by subsequent travel."
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Boston Globe
November 01, 2005
Manhattan Projects for everyone!
By Alex Beam
Globe Columnist
Last month, high-profile, high-tech highbrows Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy penned a New York Times op-ed essay calling for ''a new Manhattan Project" to develop scientific defenses against biological viral threats, natural or human made. Flirting with the memory of the original Manhattan Project, the authors fretted that the publicly available 1918 influenza genome constitutes a ''weapon of mass destruction." Much hand-wringing ensued.
The Times op-ed pages provide a fertile breeding ground for would-be Manhattan Projects, perhaps understandably, as the newspaper is in Manhattan. Last year, columnist Thomas Friedman called for ''a grand China-U.S. Manhattan Project -- a crash program to jointly develop clean alternative energies, bringing together China's best scientists and its ability to force pilot projects, with America's best brains, technology and money." Friedman also advocated an M.P. ''to develop a hydrogen-based energy economy."
Let a thousand Manhattan Projects bloom!
Friedman's M.P.s should not be confused with US Senator Bill Frist's call this summer for a similar-sounding ''Manhattan Project for the 21st Century" to bolster our country's bioterrorism defenses. Senator Frist has since moved on to his personal Manhattan Project, trying to explain away what might be insider trading in the stock of a company his family controls.
It could be argued that one Manhattan Project -- the super-secret, maximally funded World War II push to develop the atom bomb for America -- was quite enough. Instead, it has become the advocate's favorite metaphor for throwing an unholy amount of money at whatever cause he or she deems to be of paramount importance, right now.
Examples given: the ''three-phase architectural plan for secure worldwide data sharing" referenced in a Network World article about a National Security Agency proposal to improve the security of commercial software. Contributors to the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation have proposed on its website an M.P. ''to develop our power for collective vitality, wisdom and evolution. In the same way that the power of the atom existed for time immemorial, this collective human power already exists deep within our individual and collective selves."
Pols have been carpet-bombing us with the Manhattan Project meme in calling for US energy independence from foreign fossil fuel suppliers. In several important campaign speeches, John Kerry said last year ''a new Manhattan Project" devoted to commercializing renewable energy sources ''will be central to my presidency."
But that wasn't the only M.P. that Kerry proposed during the 2004 campaign.
According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Kerry, while juggling Nevada's political hot potato -- the proposed nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain -- called for ''a new Manhattan Project" to deal with nuclear waste. One presidency can't have too many Manhattan Projects, I always say.
In 2003, Gary Crossen, a lawyer and a member of the Needham School Committee, wrote in the Globe that ''we should look to Washington for an educational Manhattan Project of sorts -- a focused, well-financed effort to insure that every local community has the plan in place and the resources required to meet the challenge." Like Bill Frist, Crossen now has his own, personal Manhattan Project: combating the aftershocks of a searing Board of Bar Overseers report that accused him and two other lawyers of bringing ''shame and disrepute" on the legal profession. (Crossen has called the judgment ''gravely and fundamentally flawed.")
Sooner or later, everyone champions their own personal M.P. In 1990, oilman T. Boone Pickens called for a new Manhattan Project to convert 2 1/2 million government vehicles from gasoline to natural gas. At the time, he was the chief executive of Mesa Limited Partnership, one of the nation's largest independent gas producers. A few years ago, the president of Hitco Carbon Composites, speaking at the industry's carbon fiber conference, challenged the public and private sectors to join a new Manhattan Project to ''embrace the new products and technologies, including carbon fiber composites and high performance silica insulation as building materials to protect our people and institutions." Well, yes.
What would be my own Manhattan Project? I suppose becoming a better person would be a worthwhile goal. Splitting the atom looks easy by comparison.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.
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Fort Wayne Journal Gazette
October 31, 2005
Regulations killed nuclear power
Mike Sylvester
I spent six years as a reactor operator on a nuclear submarine in the U.S. Navy. I spent another two years as an equipment operator in a civilian nuclear power plant in Nebraska.
I strongly believe that nuclear power is a good source of energy and is safe. The nuclear power industry has been nearly destroyed by the U.S. government and its excessive regulations. The regulations are so oppressive that I decided to make a career change in 1998. I do not think we will ever complete a new nuclear power plant in the U.S.
The government has undermined nuclear power in two ways:
•Excessive government regulation. The nuclear power plant I worked at, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Station, is a perfect example. In 1978, before the accident at Three Mile Island, the plant employed about 80 people, mostly equipment operators and security guards. The plant was operated in a safe and efficient manner.
Today, the plant employs about 550 people. The plant makes the same amount of power today that it did in 1978; it just costs a whole lot more to produce that power. The plant hired about 470 people to comply with government regulations after Three Mile Island.
•Dealing with nuclear waste in the form of spent fuel rods. These fuel rods are radioactive and must be safely disposed of. The U.S. government taxes all U.S. consumers of nuclear power and collects enough money to finance and build a disposal facility. The Nuclear Waste Fund was created in 1982. One-tenth of a cent was charged for each kilowatt of electricity produced at a nuclear power plant. By 1992 the government had collected enough tax revenue to build a state-of-the-art disposal facility. Eventually, due to pressure from the utility industry, the government finally agreed to build the facility by Jan. 31, 1998, at Yucca Mountain.
Yucca Mountain was not completed in 1998 and about 60 lawsuits were filed by the utility industry and various states against the federal government for breach of contract. It is estimated these lawsuits could cost the federal government, i.e., taxpayers, as much as $50 billion.
In 2001 the Department of Energy completed a cost study and determined it would cost $4.5 billion to build the Yucca Mountain facility. Today, The Nuclear Waste Fund has almost $16 billion. This fund is currently used by Congress to offset a small portion of the annual budget deficit. The nuclear waste disposal facility at Yucca Mountain is nowhere near completion; in fact, Department of Energy officials openly question whether the facility will be completed by 2010, 12 years after the promised completion date.
Because the disposal facility is not operational, nuclear power plants have been forced to store their own spent fuel rods at their own cost.
President Bush wants to spur the growth of nuclear power plants. I am all for nuclear power; that being said, Bush´s proposal makes no sense. In fact, it will waste billions of dollars. The new energy bill provides almost $6.5 billion of subsidies and direct spending to nuclear power generation companies to persuade them to build new nuclear power plants. This is absurd. I would suggest the Department of Energy finish Yucca Mountain before it gets involved in building new nuclear power plants.
If we want nuclear power plants built, we need to minimize government regulation. A new nuclear power plant has not been started since 1973 because of excessive government regulation. The free market should dictate which power generation companies succeed and which ones fail – not the government.
We have experience with failed nuclear power plants right here in Indiana. Public Service Indiana proposed the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in 1973 with an estimated cost of $700 million. Construction on the plant began in 1977, and expenses quickly doubled to about $1.4 billion. In 1984 the project was halted and the plant was abandoned. This failed project cost the state of Indiana $2.8 billion.
Mike Sylvester is chairman of the Libertarian Party of Allen County. He wrote this for The Journal Gazette.
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Azom
October 31, 2005
Recycling Aims to Reduce Growing U.S Inventory of Stored Spent Nuclear Fuel
Hoping to reduce the nation's growing inventory of stored spent nuclear fuel, a group of nuclear engineering faculty, scientists and students from Big Ten universities, the University of Chicago and the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory will develop innovative nuclear fuel cycles that will recycle and dispose of this high-level radioactive material.
The group will base its studies in the Center for Advanced Nuclear Fuel-Cycles (CANF), a new initiative housed at Argonne. Co-directors at Argonne and the University of Wisconsin-Madison will lead the center. The project also will provide valuable educational experience for the next generation of scientists and engineers.
Nuclear fuel used in current reactors has enormous available energy. As the fuel is used to produce electricity, only a fraction of this available energy is consumed, generating a small quantity of high-level radioactive waste within the solid fuel.
Currently, most spent nuclear fuel is stored temporarily in secure, specially designed pools at commercial reactors around the country, or in leak-tight steel casks housed in above-ground concrete vaults. When space is full, the fuel could end up at a commercial temporary-storage facility in Utah, or perhaps at the proposed Yucca Mountain high-level waste repository.
But these storage options are short-term approaches to dealing with the back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle, says Michael Corradini, a UW-Madison professor of engineering physics and the center's co-director. "We hope to develop a 'sustainable' fuel cycle-that is, an efficient, cost-effective way to reuse current spent nuclear fuel and minimize its byproducts," he says. "Advanced nuclear fuel cycles can be recycled as a source of available energy as demand for uranium increases."
Some countries, including Japan and France, currently reprocess their spent nuclear fuel using a process known as PUREX (plutonium and uranium recovery by extraction). The CANF team will seek to improve upon these separation and recycling processes. "The major difference is that we are looking for ways to successfully extract specific radioactive species for separate uses and separate disposal," says Corradini.
The researchers will tackle the problem in a number of ways. One initiative will use sophisticated computer models to perform comprehensive simulations to predict key physics processes. The group will collaborate with the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science to apply those tools to the nuclear fuel cycle. In addition, scientists will develop flexible fuel forms, unique materials and advanced chemical separation processes, enabling them to establish a fuel supply system that minimizes waste and the risk of proliferation.
A reduced proliferation risk is just one of the benefits of advanced nuclear fuel cycles, says Phillip Finck, deputy associate laboratory director at Argonne and the center's co-director. "They can significantly shorten the needed isolation time and reduce the amount of high-level waste housed in any repository," he says. "Ultimately, this should reduce the cost of the Yucca Mountain repository and may preclude the need for additional waste repositories."
http://www.wisc.edu/
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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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