Yucca Mountain News Clips
Thursday, November 10, 2005
---------------------------
Congresswoman Shelley Berkley
November 9, 2005
Yucca Budget Cut Shows Growing Lack of Support in Congress for Failed Dump Project
New Provisions Will Protect Funds for State, Local Scientific Oversight of DOE
(Washington, DC -- November 9, 2005) Congresswoman Shelley Berkley today said that the latest cut to the Yucca Mountain budget is another sign of the growing lack of support in Congress for moving ahead on the controversial nuclear garbage dump. The House version of the FY 2006 Energy and Water Development Appropriations bill, which was passed this afternoon, includes $450 million for Yucca Mountain -- $200 million less than the President´s budget request for this year, and $120 million less than last year´s funding level.
"I am appalled that Congress would even waste one more cent on this colossal failure known as Yucca Mountain, but I am pleased that we at least succeeded in cutting the budget again this year,’ said Berkley. “This vote shows that the rest of Congress is finally waking up to what we have been saying in Nevada all along - that Yucca Mountain is too dangerous and too expensive to ever go forward. We should be spending these dollars on securing nuclear waste at the plants where it was produced and on research into waste alternatives that will not endanger the lives of millions of Americans. The battle to stop nuclear waste from being sent to Nevada is not over, but this budget cut is another victory in our fight against becoming the nation´s radioactive garbage dump,’ said Berkley, who has sponsored legislation that would end all funding for the Yucca Mountain Project.
Berkley noted that the House package, which she opposed, also contains more than $10 million in funding for oversight by the State of Nevada, Clark County and other so-called Affected Units of Local Government. Legislative language included in the bill will protect the ability of communities affected by Yucca Mountain to conduct independent scientific oversight on DOE work to win approval for the dump. In the past, DOE has targeted local funding in a harassment campaign aimed at those communities opposed to the dump and their local leaders.
"DOE has attempted to bully and harass local officials involved in independent oversight on scientific work at Yucca Mountain. These oversight activities are 100% legal, but year after year, DOE has tried to intimidate those Nevadans involved in this effort. This bill now makes it clear that DOE needs to abide by the law, and not interfere with oversight money allocated to counties and other local units of government,’ said Berkley.
---------------------------
Las Vegas SUN
November 10, 2005
Yucca's new boss facing a moving target
Senators to probe Sproat's nomination
By Suzanne Struglinski <suzanne@lasvegassun.com>
Sun Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- It may not matter much if White House nominee Edward Sproat knows little about the Yucca Mountain project he will potentially inherit. The program has possibly changed more in the last month than it has in the past two decades.
Sproat, a former executive at Exelon, the country's largest nuclear power utility, who now runs an energy consulting firm, will face the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee today for a hearing on his nomination to take over the Energy Department's office of civilian radioactive waste management.
If confirmed by the Senate, Sproat would take over a program in flux and face challenges not seen by his predecessors.
He told the Sun in September that he was "John Q. Public" on his overall perception and knowledge of plans at Yucca. He said he was hoping to be educated quickly on the proposed repository.
But the department may be waiting for its own education as well.
"DOE will be unable to estimate realistically when the license application will be submitted," attorney Michael Shebelskie, who represents the Energy Department, wrote in a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last week.
The department is reworking the project and officials say they want to simplify it.
There is also increased talk in Washington of reprocessing or recycling nuclear waste. This would not eliminate the need for Yucca Mountain but would change the type of waste it would store.
Acting director Paul Golan sent a memo to all top Yucca officials assigning them new tasks to get this new version of the project off the ground.
This is a complete shift from where the program was a year ago.
Around this time last year, the Energy Department was working relentlessly to turn in a license application for the Yucca Mountain project by Dec. 31, 2004.
It was not until Nov. 22 that Margaret Chu, then the director of department's civilian radioactive waste office that oversees Yucca, admitted it would not be turning in an application.
Now, the department will not even talk about dates. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman and Golan have transformed the project from being based on a schedule to one focusing on quality work. Golan has made this statement publicly and the department's spokesman sticks to the same line.
If Sproat is confirmed, Golan is likely to stay on as the principal deputy secretary and maintain this new plan.
"I think that this is so screwed up, it doesn't matter who is in charge," said Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects. "DOE has got to be the most incompetent agency in the federal government."
Sproat would be the sixth director confirmed by the Senate to lead the program. Other officials, including Lake Barrett, sometimes referred to as the "grandfather" of the program, served only as acting directors and were not formally approved by Congress.
The department created the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management in 1983. Eight Energy Department secretaries have held office since its creation.
Suzanne Struglinski can be reached at (202) 662-7245 or at suzanne@lasvegassun.com.
---------------------------
Las Vegas Review-Journal
November 10, 2005
Yucca loses vote on funding
House OKs plan to reduce budget
By Andrew Taylor
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON -- The House voted Wednesday to cut the budget for the troubled Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump well below this year's level and President Bush's request.
At the same time, lawmakers again rejected Bush's proposal to curb spending on water projects undertaken by the Army Corps of Engineers. But the president fared much better on his plans to send astronauts to Mars.
Advertisement
The moves came as the House adopted, by a 399-17 vote, a final House-Senate compromise on a $30.5 billion energy and water spending bill for the budget year that began Oct. 1.
Reflecting tight budget times, the bill is $750 million below this year's levels.
In rapid succession, the House adopted a second $57.9 billion compromise measure funding the budgets for the departments of Commerce, Justice and State, awarding a $260 million budget increase to NASA, funding Bush's plan to send astronauts back to the Moon and on to Mars.
The Commerce, Justice and State bill passed by a 397-19 vote. The programs funded by the bill would receive a 3 percent increase over 2005 funding levels. The FBI won a 10 percent budget increase but state and local governments would receive a 10 percent cut in law enforcement grants. Bush had sought far deeper cuts.
Negotiators on that measure also killed a House provision to block the FBI from routinely gaining access under the Patriot Act to library materials and bookstore sales. But a renewal of the Patriot Act before year's end is likely to achieve the same purpose.
The Yucca nuclear waste repository would be funded at $450 million for the 2006 budget year, $127 million below the level for each of the past two years.
Bill negotiators also ditched a controversial House plan to supplement Yucca with interim storage sites for nuclear waste.
The final figure was also less than the House and the Senate passed during earlier debates. More delays in the oft-delayed project caused lawmakers to curb Yucca Mountain's budget.
Those cuts helped free up funds for the Corps of Engineers, which received $5.6 billion, $1 billion above Bush's request. That includes $8 million requested by Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., for the Corps to design a plan to bring south Louisiana up to Category Five hurricane protection.
---------------------------
Nevada Appeal
November 9, 2005
Could nuke waste policy be turning around?
Nevada Appeal editorial board
It seems hard to believe, but Congress may finally be turning away from the dead-end strategy of storing nuclear waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain and toward the far more sensical approach of figuring out how to recycle the waste into something useful.
Such a shift in thinking would range far beyond the environmental concerns of Nevadans, since it would reverse the philosophy guiding U.S. policy since Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were in the White House. Yucca Mountain storage has been studied for two decades, at a cost of billions of dollars, because of worries that recycling nuclear waste would contribute to proliferation of radioactive materials used in bombs.
Times have changed since then - though not necessarily for the better, when it comes to nuclear proliferation. Terrorism and the threat of rogue nations joining the nuclear ranks remain great risks.
Nuclear waste continues to pile up an plants across the country, compounding the security risks. But the notion of storing it in one "safe" underground facility - by shipping it across the country every day from dozens of sites in hundreds of trucks and rail cars - is a shortsighted solution. In fact, it's no solution at all.
That's why we're encouraged by a 2006 nuclear-waste budget that includes $50 million for spent-fuel recycling. Of that, $20 million is for communities to compete to host a recycling plant, and $30 million is for research.
It's still a paltry sum in comparison with the $450 million for the year for Yucca Mountain. Yet it's a step in the right direction.
The goal of the United States and every nation producing nuclear power must be to reduce the amount of waste, and the best way to do that is find safe and economical ways to recycle it into practical uses.
When the budget priorities are reversed - $50 million for storage, $450 million for recycling - we'll know U.S. nuclear policy is on a sensible track.
---------------------------
KLAS-TV
November 9, 2005
Shoshone Tribe Will Try Again to Stop Yucca Waste Dump
An Indian tribe will try again to get a federal judge to stop plans for a national nuclear waste dump in Nevada based on the Ruby Valley Treaty of 1863 after its initial lawsuit was dismissed, a lawyer for the tribe said Wednesday.
The Western Shoshone National Council will appeal a ruling that the U.S. government had sovereign immunity from the tribe's lawsuit, the Las Vegas federal court lacked jurisdiction, and the case was premature because the Yucca Mountain project has not been built, said Robert Hager, a Reno-based lawyer who represents the tribe.
"The U.S. government has spent $8 billion and hollowed out a sacred mountain, yet the court found that the government's actions are still merely 'hypothetical,"' said Hager, who received notice of U.S. District Judge Philip Pro's ruling this week.
A spokeswoman for the Justice Department, which had argued the government's case, declined immediate comment.
An Energy Department official in Las Vegas said Yucca Mountain project administrators welcomed the ruling.
It came two days after congressional lawmakers agreed to slash the 2006 budget for development of the repository to $450 million from $577 million -- just the latest in a series of setbacks that have included a required court-ordered rewrite of radiation safety standards and an investigation into possible falsification of scientific data.
The tribe filed suit March 4, citing the Ruby Valley Treaty of 1863. Tribal members said the treaty allows only specified uses of Western Shoshone ancestral lands -- including settlements, mining, ranching, agriculture, railroads, roads and communication routes. They maintained that entombing 77,000 tons of the nation's most radioactive nuclear waste was not among the approved uses.
The same judge in May declined the tribe's request for an injunction to stop the federal government from applying to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for an operating license and from planning a railroad line across Nevada to reach the $58 billion repository.
In his ruling filed Nov. 1, Pro rejected outright the tribe's contention that it had standing to sue the government because the two parties were equal signatories to the 1863 treaty. The treaty recognized vast stretches of territory in present-day Nevada, California, Utah and Idaho as Western Shoshone tribal land.
However, an Indian Claims Commission decided in 1946 that the tribe lost the land through "gradual encroachment."
The date for opening the Yucca Mountain project 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas has been pushed back from 2010 to 2012 or later after the Energy Department postponed submitting an application for an operating license to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
"The challenged actions in this case are not final because the decision-making process regarding whether Yucca Mountain will become a nuclear repository is not completed," the judge said. "Additionally, (the Energy Department) has not completed its decision-making process regarding methods for transporting waste to Yucca Mountain, should it be licensed."
The Western Shoshone say they will ask the judge to reconsider. If he won't, they plan to go to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
---------------------------
Reno Gazette-Journal
November 10, 2005
Reid says funds have been secured for Walker River Basin projects
Appropriations agreement reached in conference; most funding included in $70 million earmarked for UNR ag and natural resources center to work on research, restoration and education activities in basin.
Keith Trout MVN
U.S. Senator Harry Reid announced Monday he had secured hundreds of millions of dollars for Nevada, including $95 million for water- and agriculture-related projects within the Walker River Basin.
The funding is included in the Energy and Water Appropriations bill. Different versions of the bill had passed the Senate and House early this year and were reconciled at a committee meeting Monday. The bill now goes back to both houses for final passage, which is expected later this week.
The Energy and Water Development Appropriations Act of 2006 (HR 2419) was sent to conference committee after the two houses couldn´t reach agreement, as the Senate amended the original House of Representatives bill and the House didn´t agree with the amendment.
Reid´s release noted he´d secured nearly $400 million for energy efficiency, Homeland Security and flood control projects as well as research projects for Nevada´s higher education system.
Sen. Reid also announced in the release he was successful in slashing the Yucca Mountain budget to $450 million, after previously the Department of Energy said it would need $1.2 billion to help keep the project on track.
Reid said the “Nevada projects funded in this legislation will help America become more energy independent, increase economic development, protect vital water resources in the state and fund top research within the university.’
Reid announced the Energy and Water bill would release $95 million of previously approved funding for agriculture and water projects in the Walker River Basin, after he, Sen. John Ensign and Congressman Jim Gibbons had been working to release the funding. It passed as part of the 2002 Farm Bill when Sen. Reid included $200 million for conservation projects at places like Walker Lake.
The HR 2419 ‘committee of conference on the disagreeing votes of the two Houses on the amendment of the Senate to the bill´ was ordered last month and met Monday.
According to the Congressional record of that meeting, the committee “having met, after full and free conference, have agreed to recommend and do recommend to their respective Houses’ a resolution. That included “that the House recede from is disagreement to the amendment of the Senate, and agree to the same with an amendment,’ which still included the $95 million intended for the Walker River Basin area.
Section 108 of that bill (under Bureau of Reclamation, Water and Related Resources) reads:
“(a)(1) Using amounts made available under section 2507 of the Farm and Security Rural Investment Act of 2002 (43 U.S.C. 2211 note; Public Law 107-171), the Secretary shall provide not more than $70,000,000 to the University of Nevada—
“(A) to acquire from willing sellers land, water appurtenant to the land, and related interests in the Walker River Basin, Nevada; and
“(B) to establish and administer an agricultural and natural resources center, the mission of which shall be to undertake research, restoration, and educational activities in the Walker River Basin relating to—
(i) innovative agricultural water conservation; (ii) cooperative programs for environmental restoration; (iii) fish and wildlife habitat restoration; and (iv) wild horse and burro research and adoption marketing.
“(2) In acquiring interests under paragraph (1)(A), the University of Nevada shall make acquisitions that the University determines are the most beneficial to—
“(A) the establishment and operation of the agricultural and natural resources research center authorized under paragraph (1)(B); and
“(B) environmental restoration in the Walker River Basin.
Paragraph (b)(1) says from the 2002 Farm Bill “the Secretary shall provide not more than $10,000,000 for a water lease and purchase program for the Walker River Paiute Tribe.
“(2) Water acquired under paragraph (1) shall be-
(A) acquired only from willing sellers; (B) designed to maximize water conveyances to Walker Lake; and (C) located only within the Walker River Paiute Indian Reservation.
Other funding listed in Section 200 of that bill, also from the Farm Bill, includes: “the Secretary, acting through the Commissioner of Reclamation, shall provide—
“(1) $10,000,000 for tamarisk eradication, riparian area restoration, and channel restoration efforts within the Walker River Basin that are designed to enhance water delivery to Walker Lake, with priority given to activities that are expected to result in the greatest increased water flows to Walker Lake; and
“(2) $5,000,000 to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, the Walker River Paiute Tribe, and the Nevada Division of Wildlife to undertake activities, to be coordinated by the Director of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, to complete the design and implementation of the Western Inland Trout Initiative and Fishery Improvements in the State of Nevada with an emphasis on the Walker River Basin
It concludes under subsection (d): “For each day after June 30, 2006, on which the Bureau of Reclamation fails to comply with subsections (a), (b), and (c), the total amount made available for salaries and expenses of the Bureau of Reclamation shall be reduced by $100,000 per day.
---------------------------
ENS
November 10, 2005
U.S. Will Remove 200 Tons of Uranium from Weapons Stockpile
WASHINGTON, DC, November 10, 2005 (ENS) - U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman announced Monday that the Department of Energy´s (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration will remove up to 200 metric tons of highly enriched uranium from further use as fissile material in U.S. nuclear weapons and prepare this material for other uses. Secretary Bodman revealed the new policy while addressing the 2005 Carnegie International Nonproliferation Conference in Washington, DC.
The decision addresses the highly enriched uranium that becomes available when nuclear weapons are dismantled and from reductions in the nuclear weapons stockpile as directed by President George W. Bush in May 2004.
The 200 metric tons is the largest amount of special nuclear material to be removed from the stockpile in the history of the nuclear weapons program, Bodman said.
“The President´s decision to reduce the nuclear weapons stockpile by nearly half - to the smallest size since the Eisenhower administration - enables us to dispose of a significant amount of weapons-grade uranium,’ Bodman said. “This is material that will never again be a part of a nuclear weapon.’
As the highly enriched uranium (HEU) is withdrawn over the next few decades, Bodman said about 160 metric tons will be provided for use in naval ship power propulsion, postponing the need for construction of a new uranium high enrichment facility for at least 50 years.
U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman addresses participants in the Carnegie International Nonproliferation Conference. (Photo by Kaveh Sardari courtesy Sardari Group)
About 20 metric tons will be down-blended to low enriched uranium (LEU) for eventual use in civilian nuclear power reactors, research reactors or related research. Down-blending this material will eliminate its potential usefulness to terrorists, said Bodman.
Approximately 20 metric tons will be reserved for space and research reactors that currently use HEU, pending development of fuels that would enable the conversion to LEU fuel cores.
HEU is stored at the National Nuclear Security Administration´s Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Bodman said the Energy Department is expediting construction of a facility that will permit the consolidation of all HEU at Y-12 in a modern, highly secure building.
"The need for peaceful nuclear power all over the globe has never been more apparent … while at the same time, the proliferation threat posed by nuclear materials and technology has never been more grave," Bodman told the conference.
Rapid global economic growth means a parallel growth in worldwide energy demand. "The world will need much more energy in the coming decades," said Bodman. "The Energy Information Administration estimates perhaps as much as 50 percent more by 2025, with more than half of that growth coming in the world´s emerging economies."
In Bodman's view, the answer is nuclear power. "Nuclear energy is manifestly safe," he said. "It is clean. It is efficient and affordable. And it produces no greenhouse gases, which has to be a consideration at a time when concerns about greenhouse gas emissions drive the global public policy debates."
One of the 103 U.S. nuclear power plants, Turkey Point is located on Biscayne Bay, 24 miles south of Miami, Florida. (Photo courtesy FPL)
Bodman said the Bush administration believes that nuclear power will play an enlarged role to meet the global demand. "Our government has taken a number of dramatic steps recently that are setting the stage for an expansion of nuclear power," Bodman said.
The energy secretary made no mention of the nuclear waste disposal problem that has left 77,000 tons of spent fuel from reactors and high radioactive waste from nuclear weapons production without a permanent disposal site. While the Bush administration has approved a site at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, it is stalled and is now being redesigned before a license application can be made.
Described as an annual nuclear reality check, the Carnegie International Nonproliferation Conference attracted 750 policymakers, experts, academics, journalists and students from around the world.
They heard presentations on the Iranian stalemate, the challenge of negotiating with North Korea, how to prevent catastrophic terrorism, the implications of the nuclear deal with India, the history of the nuclear age, prospects for outer space security, and reforming the nuclear fuel supply.
Fresh from receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace, International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei proposed four "yardsticks" against which to gauge performance in the world's efforts to curb nuclear proliferation and advance arms control.
Director General Mohamed ElBaradei of Egypt is 2005 Nobel Peace Laureate.(Photo by Kaveh Sardari courtesy Sardari Group
The yardsticks are effectiveness of nuclear verification, control of sensitive nuclear technology, protection of nuclear material, and compliance with commitments not to proliferate.
In an effort to "stay ahead of the game" in nuclear verification, Dr. ElBaradei said the IAEA is exploring innovative technologies for detecting undeclared nuclear facilities and activities.
He called for the establishment of a mechanism under which countries systematically share information with the IAEA on the export of sensitive nuclear material and technology.
Dr. ElBaradei commended the countries that are converting their research reactors from highly enriched uranium to low enriched uranium and returning the HEU to the country of origin, an effort that receives the support of the IAEA, Russia and the United States.
"Seven such transfers of fresh fuel back to Russia have been made since 2002, and we are continuing to work on arrangements for the repatriation of spent research reactor fuel of Russian origin," he said.
The fourth yardstick measures performance in complying with non-proliferation and arms-control commitments. For compliance to be effective, it must be backed by credible mechanisms to deal with cases of non-compliance, said Dr. ElBaradei.
The potential for being referred to the UN Security Council has acted as an inducement for compliance in some cases, but North Korea's referrals to the Council in 1992 and again in 2003, resulted in little to no action.
B-52H bomber with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles (Photo courtesy U.S. Navy)
To be effective, ElBaradei said, the Security Council "must be ready at all times" to cope with emerging threats to international peace and security.
At the same time, he said, confidence in nuclear disarmament commitments would be enhanced if nuclear-weapon states were to reduce the strategic role currently given to nuclear weapons.
A good beginning would be to move away from the Cold War status of maintaining these weapons on hair-trigger alert. ElBaradei pointed out that, to date, "we have not even begun to consider an approach that could replace nuclear deterrence."
Alexei Arbatov of Russia, Director of the Center for International Security at the Institute for World Economy and International Relations, is a scholar in residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center. From 1993 until 2003, Dr. Arbatov served as a Deputy Chairman of the Defence Committee of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation.
His remarks to conference delegates were critical of the Bush administration. Four decades of US-Soviet and then US-Russian bilateral negotiations and agreements on nuclear disarmament were swept away after George W. Bush came to power in the United States, he said.
Dr. Alexei Arbatov of Russia is a commissioner on the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. Early next year, the Commission will present proposals aimed at the greatest possible reduction of the dangers of weapons of mass destruction. (Photo courtesy WMDC)
"The new U.S. administration rejected any new strategic offensive arms treaty, claiming that termination of Cold War confrontation era and movement of the two countries towards strategic partnership made arms control irrelevant. Each country was supposed to independently shape its own nuclear policy and program of nuclear force development, proceeding from its own conceptions of national security," Arbatov said.
While the START I treaty between the United States and Russia remains in effect through 2008, the negotiated START II and START III treaties never progressed.
In Russia, he said, "this position was perceived with suspicion and displeasure. It was concluded that while being aware of the critical condition of the Russian defense complex and its inability of sustaining the nuclear forces at the level of the START I, and even START II treaties, Washington decided to decisively tip the strategic nuclear balance between Russia and the United States and become the only nuclear superpower which would be beyond the reach for any other country of the world."
"The point is," said Arbatov, "that it was not arms control that was a legacy of Cold War, but rather mutual nuclear deterrence relationship between the U.S. and the Russia, while arms control was just an instrument to stabilize this relationship at lower levels of forces and ensure predictability. Doing away with arms control could in no way lead to abandoning mutual nuclear deterrence, but rather would make it less stable, regulated and predictable with negative strategic, political and economic consequences."
The Russian concluded that the improved political relations between his country and the United States "should not make arms control irrelevant – rather they should open the way to more radical agreements as an instrument for facilitating still better security relationship and liberate it from reliance on mutual destruction."
Arbatov said he would like to see "a new mode of strategic relationship, which is not based on mutual nuclear deterrence and assured destruction capability."
---------------------------
Chemical & Engineering News
November 10, 2005
Energy Spending Set For 2006
Lawmakers cut funding for Yucca Mountain and begin spent nuclear fuel recycling program
Glenn Hess
House and Senate conferees have cleared the way for passage of a fiscal 2006 spending bill that includes $24.3 billion for the Department of Energy, $76.5 million above the amount requested by the White House, but $129 million less than the enacted fiscal 2005 level.
Funding is set at $500 million for the planned nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, $77 million below last year´s level. The proposed facility is designed to store up to 77,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste. But the project is behind schedule and will not meet DOE´s 2010 target date for opening.
Spent nuclear fuel is now stored at 129 sites around the country. Language is included in the bill directing DOE to launch a spent nuclear fuel recycling program and to set up a competition to determine if there are communities or states that want to host an interim recycling reprocessing facility.
The bill provides $6.19 billion for DOE´s Office of Environmental Management—which oversees the cleanup of nuclear weapons production sites—and $3.63 billion for the department´s Office of Science, including $290 million for domestic fusion research.
---------------------------
Provo Daily Herald
November 10, 2005
Utah takes nuclear waste issue to court
The Daily Herald
State officials are asking a federal appeals court to overturn the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's recent approval of a license for a highly radioactive waste storage site in Utah.
The NRC approved a license in September for Minnesota-based Private Fuel Storage LLC, a consortium of utilities, to build a storage site on the Goshute Indian Reservation in Skull Valley for
up to 44,000 tons of spent fuel from commercial power reactors across the country. The area is about 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.
In documents filed Tuesday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, attorneys outlined the state's legal objections to the NRC's rulings. The state argues that the NRC decision was arbitrary and capricious, in violation of the law, and it asks the court to withdraw the approval of the license.
Gov. Jon M. Huntsman, Jr., has vowed to stop at nothing to keep spent nuclear fuel out of Utah.
"We're just going to keep fighting as hard as we can until it's dead," Huntsman's general counsel, Mike Lee, told the Associated Press Wednesday.
"With each passing month, we are expanding our efforts to oppose the PFS plan" Huntsman said in a prepared statement Tuesday. "We are urging Congress, the Bush administration, and the courts not to let PFS force us to accept nuclear waste that we didn't produce, we don't want, and shouldn't have to take."
Though approved, the license has not yet been issued to PFS. Once it is, PFS still must obtain approval of two additional federal agencies.
The process has been through eight years of scrutiny and public comment, and the company has followed the law in presenting its proposal and through the licensing process, PFS head John Parkyn has said.
Utah's appeal was expected -- "the state has been contesting the Private Fuel Storage project since we filed our application nearly nine years ago," Bruce Whitehead, a spokesman for and public affairs consultant to the utility consortium, told the AP.
"All along we have encouraged the state of Utah to do what they need to do in protesting this project because we have always said, 'If it's not deemed to be safe, then it won't be built."'
"But we have passed every criteria, every test, put up by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. We have proven all of our points along the way. Our opposition really has yet to prove their points."
The waste storage site would be on sovereign Indian land, over which the state has no regulatory authority. So far, the state has lost every challenge to the proposal.
In addition, Nevada Democrat Sen. Harry Reid has dropped his opposition to a wilderness proposal that some say would block a railroad spur from the Union Pacific Railroad mainline to the proposed waste site in Skull Valley.
"While I continue to have concerns about the Cedar Mountain wilderness proposal, of even greater concern is the threat posed by deadly nuclear waste," Reid said in a news release.
Reid, who has long opposed a federal waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., has been pushing a proposal to leave spent fuel at sites where it is generated.
---------------------------
Guardian
November 10, 2005
Utah Asks Court to Reject Nuclear Dump
By Paul Foy
Associated Press Writer
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - Utah asked a federal appeals court on Wednesday to overturn the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's approval of a nuclear waste storage site in the state's western desert.
The petition, filed by lawyers in Washington, D.C., challenges a license authorized but not yet issued by the commission. It allows a group of nuclear-power utilities to stockpile 44,000 tons of spent fuel rods at the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation, about 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.
Gov. Jon Huntsman directed lawyers to file the petition, which was filed at the District of Columbia U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
``We're just going to keep fighting as hard as we can until it's dead,'' the governor's general counsel, Mike Lee, said Wednesday.
The commission authorized the license in September for Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of utilities, rejecting Utah's arguments that the site was too dangerous.
Lee said the petition asserts the commission underestimated the risk of a fighter jet crashing into the site and releasing radiation. Hill Air Force Base uses Skull Valley as a flight path to a training range in Utah's western desert.
Utah's petition also argues that Private Fuel Storage plans to keep spent nuclear fuel rods in welded steel casks that won't be accepted for storage at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, where the Energy Department is working to open a federal repository for nuclear waste. Private Fuel Storage plans to use Skull Valley as a temporary way station for nuclear waste pending work at Yucca Mountain.
``All along we have encouraged the state of Utah to do what they need to do in protesting this project because we have always said, 'If it's not deemed to be safe, then it won't be built,''' said Bruce Whitehead, a spokesman for the utility consortium.
``But we have passed every criteria, every test, put up by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. We have proven all of our points along the way. Our opposition really has yet to prove their points.''
Huntsman has vowed to ``stop at nothing'' to keep the nuclear waste out of Utah.
``We are urging Congress, the Bush administration, and the courts not to let PFS force us to accept nuclear waste that we didn't produce, we don't want and shouldn't have to take,'' Huntsman said.
Lee said Utah wasn't asking for a court injunction because even if the NRC issues the license, Private Fuel Storage won't immediately be able to deliver any waste to Skull Valley.
The Bureau of Land Management is refusing to grant a right of way for a rail spur that would carry the waste across government land to the reservation.
---------------------------
Science Daily
November 09, 2005
Battle over Utah nuclear storage plan
WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 (UPI) -- An attempt to stop a nuclear storage plan in Utah now has bipartisan support after Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., joined the effort.
Utah nuclear waste site a hot issue (November 2, 2005) -- A proposed nuclear waste storage site in Utah has hit another roadblock as the state's senior U.S. senator weighs in on the issue. Sen. Orrin ... > full story
Britain may increase nuke arsenal (November 2, 2005) -- Britain's Defense secretary says the country needs to maintain its stock of nuclear weapons as a deterrent and possibly should expand its ... > full story
Japan to join non-proliferation program (October 24, 2005) -- Japan plans to join a U.S.-proposed program that would prevent the proliferation of nuclear-related technologies, an official said. Japan's ... > full story
EU to offer nuclear carrot to Iran (July 28, 2005) -- The European Union is ready to provide Iran with a steady supply of nuclear fuel for civil use if Tehran guarantees to freeze its nuclear enrichment ... > full story
U.N. nuclear group to toughen 1980 treaty (July 4, 2005) -- Eighty delegates to the International Atomic Energy Agency began five days of meetings in Vienna Monday to strengthen a 1980 nuclear safety ... > full story
The complicated effort to stop a nuclear storage site at the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes Indian reservation revolves around creating a wilderness protection area around it, the Salt Lake Tribune reports.
That designation would prohibit any railroad tracks from being put in the area, thus stopping any spent nuclear fuel shipments from entering it that way.
The designation was included in a Defense Department policy bill likely to pass the Senate after Reid pulled out his objection.
This wouldn't necessarily end the nuclear storage plan though, as the company contracted to carry the plan out said they would just move the fuel in a less safe way, via trucks.
The deal between Reid and the Utah congressional delegation also adds some more politics to nuclear storage policy.
Sen. Bob Bennet, R-Utah, said he now joins Reid in opposing a plan to permanently store spent nuclear fuel in Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
That plan is heavily favored by the Bush administration.
---------------------------
LA Weekly
November 10, 2005
Green to the Core? — Part 1
How I tried to stop worrying and love nuclear power
By Judith Lewis
Nothing in life is to be feared; it is only to be understood.
—Marie Curie
A rock, glittery gold and slate colored, has been placed on a table next to a chip of old Fiestaware and a Big Ben clock inside a brightly lit classroom at Southern California Edison´s San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, the power plant whose twin containment domes define the coastline below San Clemente. Ray Golden, a spokesperson who conducts plant tours for schoolchildren, foreign diplomats and anyone else he can interest in the magic of nuclear fission, is telling me how radiation — in the form of the clock´s glow-in-the-dark radium or uranium oxide that gives the plate its deep reddish-orange hue — has been used for nearly a century in manufactured goods. But it´s the rock, a roughly elliptical piece of solid uranium ore, small enough to fit in my hand but able to throw off radioactive particles as it slowly decays into unstable thorium, radium and, eventually, lead, that attracts me. And when Golden turns his back to write some diagrams on the classroom´s whiteboard, I quickly pick up the rock, cradling it in one hand. Small doses of alpha, beta and even penetrating gamma rays begin to bombard my skin, and I savor the transmutation of elements happening under my very nose. Just about 10 seconds pass before I put the rock back where I got it, unnoticed by Golden.
In practical terms, the chunk of ore is no more dangerous than any other stone I might have held. Still, when Golden runs a pale green plastic box, a dosimeter, across the surface of the rock to measure its radioactivity, the machine emits high-pitched beeps with each pass — sometimes slowly, like a moderate pulse, other times in rapid succession like a jammed letter on an old computer keyboard. Each beep represents 200 counts per minute; 2,000 counts makes a millirem, which is atomic science´s metric for absorbed radiation. Holding the rock for 10 seconds, I may have absorbed a millirem of radiation in various forms, which is not so bad: The average person gets about 360 millirems a year just from the radiation that beams down from the sun and occurs naturally in the Earth´s rocks and soil; mile-high Denver residents get nearly twice that. It would take much more to hurt me.
“Fifty-thousand millirems would cause a slight change on your body chemistry,’ Golden explains. “Five hundred thousand, if you got it in a few hours, would bring on burns, vomiting, sickness, hair loss and, for about half the population, death.’
It would be impossible to get that kind of dose from a rock even 100 times the size of this one, and relatively easy to avoid getting any dose at all. Although it usually takes lead or concrete to block gamma radiation, the rock is so small and its gamma rays so weak that it´s mostly sending out alpha and beta particles, and when Golden places a piece of paper between the rock and the dosimeter, the beeping fades. A sheet of Plexiglas stops the beeping altogether.
Even plutonium, one of the world´s most toxic materials, emits only alpha particles, which can be blocked by paper, a thin sheet of aluminum or even your skin. “As long as you don´t ingest or inhale [them],’ Golden says, “alpha particles can´t hurt you.’ Or, in the words of Elena Filatova, the intrepid Ukrainian motorcyclist who documented Chernobyl´s dead zone in photographs, “You can play billiard balls with pure plutonium. Just don´t swallow it by mistake.’
Like every magical property of nature that man has harnessed, radiation, Golden insists, is neither good nor bad. But what about nuclear power? Is it good or bad for the Earth? Neither? Five years ago, few of us would have bothered to ask. You were either for or, more likely, against nukes — if you thought about them at all.
But nuclear energy is seeping back into our public consciousness here in 2005, which may go down in history as the year in which global warming went from debunkable theory to indisputable fact for a significant part of the population, not simply because of our record-breaking hurricane season or the record-high temperatures in many cities around the world, but the reality that we regularly wake up to find evidence in our mainstream newspapers of an ecology gone awry due to warming seas and blistering droughts — disappearing cold-water plankton and starving seabirds in the Shetland Islands, the Russian ship that sailed to the North Pole in August without the aid of an icebreaker, the sudden disappearance of certain butterfly species in Baja. In light of these conditions, almost anything seems better than burning more coal, which for every megawatt of power blasts a ton of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the skies. This is one reason why nuclear has reemerged as a viable source of energy for new power plants — not just among George W. Bush and his business buddies (who like the idea of more nuclear and more coal), but even among futurists, environmentalists and Democrats in the U.S. Senate, from quasi-Republican Joe Lieberman to new hope Barack Obama.
“Nuclear power is the only green solution,’ began a spring 2004 editorial in London´s Independent by James Lovelock, the progenitor of the Gaia theory of the Earth as a self-correcting, self-regenerating organism. “We cannot continue drawing energy from fossil fuels, and there is no chance that the renewables, wind, tide and water power can provide enough energy and in time . . . we do not have 50 years.’
Stewart Brand, the visionary founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, followed Lovelock this year in Technology Review: “The only technology ready to fill the gap and stop the carbon dioxide loading of the atmosphere is nuclear power,’ he wrote. “The industry is mature, with a half-century of experience and ever improved engineering behind it.’
Later came Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace (although he quit the group a decade ago), the recently deceased Reverend Hugh Montefiore of Friends of the Earth in England and Fred Krupp, the notoriously well-paid head of Environmental Defense, who stopped short of endorsing new plants but conceded that “we all should have an open mind’ about nuclear power.
At first I was tempted to treat these statements as curiosities, extreme positions meant to stir controversy. But all this year I´ve met serious environmentalists, from Randy Udall of the Aspen-based Community Office for Resource Efficiency to a Bay Area friend who runs an energy efficiency company, who share Krupp´s “open mind’ sentiment. Even Jared Diamond, author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail, recently made his support for nuclear power explicit when he appeared with Brand before an audience in San Francisco. Is it possible that we have come to this: a choice between a catastrophic warming trend and the most feared energy source on earth?
Back in the learning laboratory at San Onofre, where I´ve come on my own open-minded journey to test my assumptions about nuclear power, Golden holds up a small vial of yellow powder: uranium oxide, or yellowcake uranium, milled and refined — the substance at the heart of the current CIA leak investigation. Before its atoms´ energy can be harnessed, uranium oxide has to be enriched, by centrifuge or by being turned into a gas and passed through a series of membranes, a process called “gaseous diffusion.’ Uranium comes out of the ground only .7 percent uranium-235 (or U-235); fueling a light-water reactor like San Onofre´s requires a concentration of 4.7 percent U-235. Using a mock-up of a reactor core that stands at the front of the room — a contraption that looks like the inside of a miniature pipe organ — Golden demonstrates how uranium pellets the size of baby fingertips fill the core´s 236 zirconium tubes, which are then bundled together in a fuel assembly.
The few times I´ve seen the stout, easygoing Golden at public meetings and on this tour, his face has had the look of a perennial mild sunburn, and his reddish-blond hair always looks bleached by the sun. He has worked in public relations for the nuclear industry 23 of his 45 years on Earth — his own nuclear half-life. He accuses the nuclear industry of “falling down on the job’ by keeping so many secrets about its world, and holds that if the American public, like the more nuclear-friendly French, knew all the facts — what happens when atoms split, how unstable nuclides decay, how uranium is enriched and waste is transported — nuclear energy might be more popular with the American public. “Most Americans think they know about radiation because of Chernobyl, science fiction or the three-eyed fish in The Simpsons,’ he says. “So as a country, we are phobic about radiation.’
Of course, the U-235 that fuels San Onofre is highly fissile: When one of its atoms absorbs an extra neutron, its nucleus splits and forms other nuclides, including radioactive versions of strontium, cesium and iodine, along with plutonium. It also lets loose more neutrons to hit other U-235 atoms, provoking a chain reaction of fission events. Fission generates heat, which in a light-water reactor turns water into steam. Maintaining the right balance of fission events — keeping the reactor at a “critical’ state — is a tricky process. If too many neutrons fly around splitting atoms, the core gets too hot, in which case operators insert control rods made of boron and silver into the fuel assembly to slow or stop the chain reaction and avert a meltdown. If it doesn´t stay hot enough, the core loses power, provoking a different set of events that can lead to an equally disastrous loss of control. If the reactor drifts in either direction, or if for some reason the core loses too much water — which cools the core at the same rate it transfers heat — a partial or complete meltdown could result. In the early days of nuclear power, many people feared that once a meltdown was in process, it would continue to melt through the Earth´s core from North America all the way to China: the “China Syndrome’ of the movie´s title.
On the face of it, nuclear power seems like a lot of trouble just for a little steam to run a few turbines to produce a few thousand megawatts of electricity. The Rocky Mountain Institute´s Amory Lovins, a steadfastly anti-nuclear advocate of conservation and green power, has likened nuclear power to cutting butter with a chain saw. But the flip side of that excess is nuclear´s other great advantage: how small a uranium pellet it takes to power the world. The fission of one uranium atom releases 200 million electron volts of energy.
“Our core is only a 12-foot cube,’ Golden says, “yet it powers 1.2 million homes for four years before you ever need to refuel.’ The trillions of fissile atoms in one tiny uranium pellet yield enough energy to replace 150 gallons of gas, 1,780 pounds of coal, 16,000 cubic feet of natural gas and two and a half tons of wood. And they do so without adding an ounce of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. It is widely accepted that one nuclear power plant spares the atmosphere the emissions of 93 million cars.
When the pellets have been depleted down to 1 percent U-235, specially trained plant workers replace them with fresh fuel. Some other countries, France and England among them, take this waste and reprocess it, separating out the remaining U-235, as well as the plutonium, cesium and other useful nuclides, reducing the remaining waste by 75 percent. In the U.S., the spent fuel rods go into storage pools on site until they´ve cooled enough to be moved into dry-cask storage.
And that´s the problem. Like everyone in the nuclear industry, Golden is acutely aware that no such dry-cask storage for those fuel rods exists. The spent fuel at San Onofre has been sitting in its cooling pools since the first refueling of Unit 1 in the early 1970s.
“It´s an issue,’ admits Golden. The U.S. had two reprocessing facilities, one in West Valley New York that operated for only a short time and another in Morris, Illinois, that never actually recycled any fuel. Both were shut down when Presidents Ford and Carter declared moratoriums on the technology out of concern for proliferation. The country´s only candidate for long-term storage of high-level nuclear waste, which includes spent fuel rods, is a five-mile-long tunnel bored through the rock at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, an endeavor that has been fought at every turn by the state of Nevada. The Department of Energy has missed its contractual deadline for receiving commercial high-level waste by more than seven years. Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric, which owns the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant near San Luis Obispo, have sued to recover costs of storing the fuel themselves. This past spring, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report warning that the spent-fuel cooling pools have been inadequately protected and could be targets for terrorists.
If the matter of where to put nuclear waste makes reasonable people uncomfortable about the continuing use of nuclear energy, the prospect of a nuclear accident has turned many others more hysterically against it. The history of commercial nuclear power in the United States is full of mishaps — the 1959 meltdown of the Sodium Reactor Experiment in Santa Susana, 30 miles north of downtown L.A.; the 1975 control room fire at Browns´ Ferry in Athens, Alabama, and, more recently a significant cooling system leak at the Davis Besse plant in Ohio. The most famous of those accidents, the partial meltdown in 1979 at Three Mile Island, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, has been blamed for turning the American public against nuclear reactors for good, even though the electricity market had already begun to cool toward a technology that simply cost too much to start up. Whatever remnant of pro-nuclear public sentiment remained was finally erased shortly after April 25, 1986, when the graphite core of Chernobyl Unit 4 in then-Soviet Ukraine caught fire while workers were testing the reactor to see whether its safety systems could run without backup power. Thirty-one people died as a direct result, and a cloud of poison gas drifted across Ukraine, Belarus and much of Europe, contaminating the soil for millennia to come. The surrounding area was dubbed “the Red Forest’ after its irradiated pine trees turned a deep red.
But nuclear´s proponents argue that by all accounts, the Soviet RBMK reactor at Chernobyl was a backward design with no containment and large amounts of flammable graphite; poorly trained operators were executing a flawed experiment in running the reactor on its own power when it got so hot they could no longer control it. Accidents in the United States have so far simply not amounted to much: It´s useful to remember that no one died at Three Mile Island — at least not officially. And, while opinions of the incident´s effects differ, no one has proved that any radioactivity that might have escaped into the atmosphere during the meltdown endangered anyone´s health.
California´s two remaining nuclear plants have, by industry standards, stellar safety records — in part, some say, because the state´s powerful cadre of anti-nuclear activists has ridden herd on them since they were built, forcing state and local authorities to police every misstep — but also because they have been well run by large public utilities that, at least until the deregulation of California´s electricity market, had the resources to prioritize safety. “Every day we manage complacency,’ says Golden. “Every day we re-dedicate ourselves to safety. Every employee here who complains has their complaint taken seriously, even if it´s just about the food in the cafeteria. We want everyone to feel comfortable blowing the whistle if they have to.’
The plant´s record is not spotless: In 1980, the Nuclear Regulatory Commssion, the federal agency charged with monitoring plant safety, fined Southern California Edison $100,000 after 66 workers received higher-than-acceptable doses of radiation while fixing leaky steam tubes; four years later, Edison paid the same fine after some fuel rods disintegrated during refueling. Unit 1 was shutdown for good in 1992 when its cracks cost too much to fix, and in 2001, an electrical fire on Unit 3 forced a four-month shutdown of that reactor. Just this summer, a plant worker failed a breathalyzer test and spent 30 days in rehab.
But most of San Onofre´s safety violations are far more ordinary. Outside the building that houses the reactor itself is a sign registering the number of days since a such an event occurred. The day I visit, the sign says it´s been 28 days since the last incident.
“What happened?’ I ask Golden.
He points to a short flight of stairs.
“Someone tripped,’ he tells me, “and broke his ankle. A compound fracture.’
“It´s all lies.’ Dr. Helen Caldicott throws back her red-streaked blond bob, flashes her blue eyes — really, she does — and stares across the table at me as if she´s about throw a punch. “They say they´re clean, do they? Nuclear power plants? Well, let me tell you: Millions of curies of radioactive gases are released in an unregulated way every year from nuclear power plants. And isotopes into the water. And we haven´t even talked about the radioactive waste.’ (A curie, by the way, differs from a rem in how it measures radiation — by the activity of the material instead of the absorbed dose. One curie is the amount of radiation given off by one gram of radium. The 12 radium dots on the old Big Ben dial at San Onofre emit three one-thousandths of a curie of radiation.)
Stewart Brand, whom Caldicott has not heard of, “doesn´t know what he´s talking about.’ James Lovelock, “to use a crude Australian expression, has his head . . . somewhere. He doesn´t know what he´s talking about; I really resent him.’ And Fred Krupp of Environmental Defense Fund, his fence-sitting on nuclear notwithstanding? “He´s really a front for the nuclear industry. They all have fronts. So in order to do your reporting well, you have to investigate who these people are, and what connections they have, and if they´re biologists or not. And if they´re not, just discount what they say.’
It´s true that almost all of Caldicott´s fellow firebrands who have come out in favor of nuclear power have some ties to the energy industry, be they financial or merely philosophical: Brand´s Global Business Network, for instance, secures funding via corporate members who pay $40,000 a year for a suite of services; among them are nuclear-power providers PG&E, Southern California Edison and Duke Power. GBN co-founder Peter Schwartz, who co-authored a pro-nuclear article in Wired magazine last winter, was once head of scenario planning at Royal Dutch Shell. And Lovelock serves as an informal adviser to the French-based Association des Ecologistes Pour le Nucléaire (Environmentalists for Nuclear).
Yet while Krupp earns a controversial salary — over $300,000 a year according to tax records available on EDF´s Web site — there´s no evidence that he´s a “front’ for anybody. He is not, however, a biologist, a physician or a geneticist, but a lawyer. Which means, spits Caldicott, he lacks all qualifications to opine about nuclear energy. “You might as well unleash him into the operating theaters and let him operate on patients. It´s as serious as that.’
On a furnace-hot day in late May outside a San Pedro theater, Caldicott awaits her turn to rally opponents of liquefied-natural-gas terminals in Long Beach. For the occasion, she is dressed in a buttonless blue suit with a fluiddrape that emphasizes the fact that she almost never stops moving. Her elegant hands flail, she shifts in her chair, she shakes her head in exasperation. Her perpetual apoplexy is charming, even lovable, but not quite likeable — a distinction I hadn´t thought to make before I met her. Like a televangelist, she expects personal admissions of sin and shame in her presence; I make sure to tell her I traveled here by public transportation, then foolishly add that I´m grateful for the air-conditioning in city buses. “But you´ve got no right to run air-conditioning,’ she chides. “You´re pouring HCFCs into the atmosphere. You shouldn´t do it.’
Throughout most of the 1970s and ´80s, the Australian-born Caldicott was the center of the international anti-nuclear vortex. She wrote books, fought off the French effort to conduct atmospheric testing in the South Pacific, linked arms with Australian uranium miners who were dying of lung cancer. She has been lauded for her precisely targeted fury, but also ridiculed for her seemingly nuttier pronouncements. In the wake of the accident at Three Mile Island, Caldicott asserted that Hershey´s chocolate, made from the milk of cows that graze near the Pennsylvania plant, had been tainted with strontium-90. “We don´t know the ground measurements where the cows graze because they kept that secret,’ she admits. “But I´ve been saying it for years: Don´t eat Hershey´s chocolates. They haven´t sued me. You shouldn´t eat them.’
These days, Caldicott spends 50 percent of her time raising funds for the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, a D.C.-based nonprofit dedicated to “creating consensus for a nuclear-free future.’ She opposes nuclear technology in all its forms — from nuclear weapons to fission-generated electricity, it´s all the same to her. “The nuclear industry,’ she says, “is a cancer industry. Nuclear power is going to induce millions of cases of cancer, particularly in children who are so radiosensitive. And it causes genetic disease, not just in humans but in other creatures. So it´s an evil industry, medically speaking.’
I remark that several credible nuclear-safety advocates I have interviewed so far, including Rochelle Becker of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, Michael Marriott of the Nuclear Information Resource Service (NIRS) and Dave Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists, have declined to make any proclamations about the health risks of living near nuclear power plants; the studies, say all three, are just not complete. Caldicott glares at me. “There are many studies. If they don´t know they should know. They´ve got no right not to know. Around Sellafield in Britain, which is also a reprocessing plant and a nuclear reactor, there are large clusters of cancers there. There are clusters of cancers in Wales, on the Irish Sea, which is the most polluted sea in the world, polluted by Sellafield.
“In fact,’ she says agitatedly, “the literature is replete with malignancy in people who live near reactors. But because of the latent period of carcinogenesis, the incubation time for cancer is five to six years. You have to wait for a while and do a decent epidemiological study to assess what´s going on.’
In 1991, the National Cancer Institute in the U.S. conducted what might be considered a “decent epidemiological study’ of deaths from 16 types of cancer, including leukemia, in 107 U.S. counties “containing or closely adjacent to 62 nuclear facilities,’ all of which had been built before 1982. The survey compared cancer death rates before and after the facilities went online with similar data in 292 counties without nuclear facilities. After four years of research, the team of epidemiologists found no general increased risk of death from cancer near nuclear facilities. In some counties, the relative risk for childhood leukemia from birth through 9 years dropped a statistically insignificant few hundredths of a point after the startup of a local nuclear facility. The areas surrounding four facilities, including San Onofre, showed significantly lower rates for leukemia in teenagers compared with the rest of the country. A University of Pittsburgh study of the area within a five-mile radius of Three Mile Island showed no statistically significant increase in cancer rates 20 years after the accident at the reactor in 1979. What´s more, neither soil nor air samples in the area around Three Mile Island have been kept from the public. According to the Carter-era EPA, close to 10 percent of some 800 milk samples from local dairy farms the month after the accident showed trace amounts of radioactive contamination. But the highest concentration was still 40 times less than what showed up in milk after the fallout from Chinese nuclear testing in October 1976 that passed across the United States.
None of which placates Caldicott. “If you look at my book, Nuclear Madness, I cite many studies. But they´re not government studies, because the government doesn´t do the studies. A, they´re difficult to do. You have to wait until people actually die, and there´s a mobile population. B, it´s expensive — you have to do autopsies on all of them, and C, you have to compare them to an unexposed group, and D they don´t want to find out.’
At this point, I can only gaze across the table with a quizzical smile as Caldicott, in all her fired-up glory, rants on about all the things Americans “have no right’ to do — drive cars, farm large tracts of land, spew 25 percent of the world´s carbon dioxide. “This country,’ she says, “is quite obscene.’ As an activist, she is magnificent. Inside the theater, she gives a speech so vivacious and funny no one seems to mind that she doesn´t have much to say about liquefied natural gas.
But she won´t talk about children with asthma in the shadow of Tennessee´s coal-firedpower plants, or whether hurricanes have grown more intense because the climate is changing, or whether it´s possible to engineer safer models of nuclear reactors.
“Listen to me,’ she says. “You´re trying to balance both sides on this, and you can´t. There are no two sides to this issue. It´s like having a factory full of polio virus. And when the virus reproduces it makes heat and you turn the steam into electricity. But, by the way, millions of people might get polio. It´s exactly the same thing.
“Promise me you´ll read my book Nuclear Madness before you write your article, okay? Promise me? Because then you won´t be confused anymore. Then you´ll know.’
Look, you don´t want to go out and build a plant, spend all the money, and have the license jerked at the last minute. [Laughter.] Nobody´s going to spend money if that´s the case.
—George W. Bush, speaking at the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant, June 22, 2005
No new orders for nuclear plants have been submitted in the U.S. since 1974, and none have been built since 1985. This is in part due to the accident at Three Mile Island, which happened 12 days after the popular movie The China Syndrome hit the theaters, and in part because of economics — many of the early plans were “turnkey’ operations, so named because the manufacturer — General Electric, Westinghouse or Bechtel — paid for their construction (all the utility had to do was “turn the key’). When subsidies for new reactors disappeared, so did plans to build them.
Nevertheless, nuclear fission still generates a full fifth of the country´s power. And to replace that energy with the other most readily available source, coal-fired power, would add 600 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year. But either we replace it or lose it, because those 103 light-water reactors are fast closing in on the end of their natural lives. Thirty-two of the original licenses the Atomic Energy Commission (later the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or NRC) granted to nuclear plants have already expired and been renewed; applications are pending on another 16, and many more will run out in the next 20 years, including licenses granted to the 2,200-megawatt San Onofre Units 2 and 3 and the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, whose two reactors power some 2 million homes. Like many other aging plants around the country, both San Onofre and Diablo Canyon will require extensive repairs to continue operating to the end of their licensing periods: Southern California Edison claims that the tubes in San Onofre´s steam generators are up to 11 percent cracked (the NRC allows 21 percent cracking before replacement) and has set the regulatory gears in motion to replace them for nearly $700 million; Pacific Gas & Electric already has preliminary approval from the California Public Utilities Commission to repair Diablo Canyon.
But it isn´t enough to repair the old plants. “Without new construction,’ explains the Department of Energy´s Rebecca Smith-Kevern at a workshop at the California Energy Commission during the second week in August, “nuclear capacity will fall off rapidly in the mid 2030s and be nonexistent by 2056.’ If that happens, she warns, “the crucial challenge of capping and ultimately reducing U.S. and world greenhouse gas emissions would be considerably more difficult.’
Eleven countries around the world are now constructing 30 nuclear power reactors, including India and China, which has plans for, literally, dozens more in the next half century — not necessarily to save the planet but because oil won´t last forever. Uranium, by contrast, is abundant, inexpensive and not controlled by any cartel.
The Department of Energy´s “Nuclear Power 2010’ program aims to jump-start the process of building new reactors — to explore new sites, speed the regulatory process and streamline licensing. At the August workshop, Smith-Kevern unveils a raft of new reactor designs — “evolutionary, not revolutionary’ reactors, such as GE´s “simplified boiling water reactor,’ and Westinghouse´s “advanced passive’ pressurized water reactor. Next in line are the “Generation IV’ technologies, such as gas-cooled fast reactors, lead-cooled reactors and molten-salt reactors. All reduce waste, have the potential to burn existing waste and produce economically competitive electricity, says Smith-Kevern, at 1.5 cents per kilowatt hour (electricity from coal-fired plants costs just over 2 cents per kilowatt hour; gas-fired electricity runs upward of 3 cents a kilowatt hour, according to the Utility Data Institute). They feature passive safety systems — controls that kick in without operator action — and address proliferation concerns by never separating plutonium from the waste.
With the help of the new energy bill President Bush signed August 8, nuclear ambitionsmay actually have a prayer. Bipartisan efforts on nuclear power´s behalf secured benefits for the industry ranging from generous tax credits for new nuclear generation to a 15-year extension of the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries IndemnityAct — a controversial 1957 law limiting the industry´s liability in the event of major accident. The energy bill also directs the NRC and the DOE to develop a strategy for licensing a “Next Generation’ nuclear reactor that will produce hydrogen for transportation. The first Next Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP) is scheduled to be online at the DOE´s Idaho National Laboratory by 2021.
One of the more popular Next Generation designs is the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR), a compact gas-cooled reactor with fuel assemblies the size of tennis balls filled with pellets of 10 percent U-235. Westinghouse plans to pitch a PBMR to the U.S. this year; South Africa´s Eskom Energy already has PBMRs in development. Unlike light-water reactors that use water and steam, the PBMR cools its core and drives its turbines with pressurized helium. Because the reactor´s 400,000 “pebbles’ are fed into the reactor core little by little, a meltdown, at least in the conventional sense, is almost impossible. The PBMR is thought to be so safe, in fact, that it doesn´t require the four-foot-thick concrete containment building common to light-water reactors. Neo-nuclear environmentalists consider it a significant improvement in safety. Stewart Brand wrote last spring that “problematic early reactors like the ones at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl can be supplanted by new, smaller-scale, meltdown-proof reactors like the ones that use the pebble-bed design.’
“It has some good features,’ says Dave Lochbaum at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Studies have shown that even if a [PBMR] cooling line breaks, it won´t melt down.
I´ve come to Lochbaum, who works out of a tiny, barely ventilated office in Washington, D.C., because he has a reputation among anti-nuclear activists and industry advocates alike for limiting his assertions to what he knows to be true. And his organization is as nervous about climate change as it is about the perils of nuclear power plants.
“By not using water you´ve significantly reduced the amount of low-level waste you generate,’ Lochbaum says, and then pauses. “On the other hand, there is no free lunch. While it may not melt down, it could catch on fire. The pebble bed is like the Chernobyl reactor in that it uses an awful lot of graphite. None of our reactors operating in the United States use graphite in the core. Graphite´s just carbon. If the carbon catches on fire, it´s pretty hard to put out. It´s particularly hard if you´re using airflow to cool the reactor, which the pebble bed does. If you have a fire and you stop the airflow, you also stop the heat removal. So you may stop the fire and start the meltdown.
“You may not be able to get ‘fireproof´ and ‘meltdown proof,´’ Lochbaum says. “You may have to pick one or the other.’
Which one is worse?
“I don´t know,’ he says. “The Three Mile Island accident was a meltdown. It released a lot of radioactivity into the environment. We´ve never been sure how much. Chernobyl was a fire. Smoke carried the radioactivity into the environment. I guess they´re pretty much the same.’
There´s one other problem with the pebble-bed reactor, one that´s less a safety issue than a logistical one: “Because the pebble-bed doesn´t have the same power density, or octane rating, as our current plants do, it generates about 10 times as much spent fuel for the same amount of electricity.’ In other words, 10 times the waste.
It is another unnaturally hot spring day when I visit Lochbaum, who cools his office with a small fan. The son of a nuclear engineer, Lochbaum worked in the nuclear industry for 14 years before the owner of Pennsylvania´s Susquehanna Nuclear Generating Station ignored his warning about a potentially deadly design flaw in the plant´s spent-fuel pools. Frustrated, Lochbaum submitted a lengthy report to the NRC, from which he received no response. Only much later, when another plant owner, concerned about the same problem at his plant, requested the report, did Lochbaum learn that in his haste to submit the report, he´d made one-sided copies of two-sided pages: Every other page was blank. “It´s evidence to me that the NRC never actually read my report,’ he says.
Lochbaum eventually went to Congress with his concerns, where safety improvements were mandated for Susquehanna and other plants with the same issue. He worked in the industry for three more years before joining the Union of Concerned Scientists in 1996.
Lochbaum describes himself, and UCS, as “neither for nor against nuclear power — we´re just safety advocates, and we´re concerned about global warming, too.’ But he is clearly not optimistic about nuclear energy´s future. It´s not so much the technology itself; Lochbaum believes it can be made to work, and made to work safely. But as the electricity market around the country becomes increasingly deregulated and competitive, plant owners have more cause to put profit above reliability and safety. And the NRC is not working the way it´s supposed to: According to a 2003 report by the NRC´s inspector general and the Government Accountability Office, 47 percent of NRC employees don´t feel comfortable raising safety issues. “We get more calls from NRC employees than from employees of all the plants combined,’ says Lochbaum.
He shows me a “bathtub curve’ diagram from UCS´ literature: All the major accidents associated with nuclear power happened toward the beginning of each light-water reactor´s break-in phase, on the left-hand slope of the chart´s curve. “Our concern now is that all our nuclear power plants are in the wear-out phase,’ he says. Lochbaum points to the right-hand, upward slope of the tub. “Left unchecked, we´ll start putting names on this side.’
Thank you most of all for nuclear power, which is yet to cause a single, proven fatality, at least in this country.
—Homer Simpson, saying grace in the Simpsons episode “Oh, Brother Where Are Thou’
---------------------------
LA Weekly
November 10, 2005
Green to the Core? — Part 2
By Judith Lewis
“I really believe that people go to work at that plant saying I have a huge responsibility to make sure this plant is safe,’ says Rochelle Becker, the tireless executive director of the San Diego–based Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility. “But you can be running that plant with the best of intentions and the best of employees, and guess what? Nature bats last.’ In recent years, Becker, a small woman with a slightly turned-up nose and straight, light-brown-to-graying hair pulled back in a ponytail, has focused almost all of her energy fighting the impending re-licensing of California´s two remaining nuclear power plants on the grounds that no safe solution exists for long-term storage of nuclear waste.
Becker has read the National Academy of Sciences report on those storage pools and, like that report´s authors, she worries about terrorist attacks. But she worries as much about a 7.5-magnitude earthquake on the Hosgri Fault, which runs two and a half miles from Diablo Canyon´s door. She admits that an earthquake of such power has never hit that fault, but neither had a storm surge sufficient to submerge New Orleans ever hit the Gulf Coast. Geological time, like radioactive decay, is not measured in the tens of years, but in hundreds and thousands. “Earthquakes,’ she says, ’don´t happen in 30-year time frames.’
Both plants have been built to withstand, as PG&E´s literature puts it, “the largest earthquake deemed credible from the nearest earthquake fault.’ The utility employs a full staff of seismic experts to assess the risk from nearby faults. Becker doesn´t care. “How many structures fell in the Northridge earthquake that were supposed to have been seismically sound? Freeway overpasses, buildings, all kinds of things. Look at where San Onofre is compared to the ocean. It´s pretty much right there. What happens if the coast shifts? And what happens if an earthquake hits at one of those plants while they´re moving fuel into the pools? Worst-case scenario: The fuel rods could come in contact with each other, initiating a chain reaction and subsequently starting a fire.’
Cancer deaths from such an accident could soar into the five digits. And if it doesn´t kill you, rest assured your beach house will be rendered worthless, says Becker. “Oceanfront property,’ she says, “will be pretty darn cheap.’
Diablo Canyon´s spent-fuel pools will reach capacity in 2006, which is why PG&E has plans to institute on-site dry-cask storage at its facility, a decision Becker prefers to trucking waste across California. In March of 2004, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission granted PG&E a 20-year license to begin storing spent fuel in steel canisters packed in concrete and steel and anchored to concrete pads. There was only one problem: The license didn´t say anything about protecting the storage facility against a terrorist attack. The Sierra Club and Mothers for Peace, with the backing of California Attorney General Bill Lockyear, have appealed the NRC´s approval in the Ninth Circuit Court.
But if both nuclear plants shut down when their licenses run out, how will California meet its energy needs without compounding global warming?
Becker gave her official answer to the California Energy Commission at a Sacramento workshop: “Four thousand megawatts is a considerable amount of energy,’ she said, “but we don´t believe it´s substantial. Hundreds of millions of California´s dollars have gone into a hole in the Nevada desert called Yucca Mountain. If the same investment in dollars were made in renewable, we would go from being the laughingstock to a leader in renewable energy.’
Then again, she tells me over lunch one day, “I don´t really feel like it´s up to me to address how we replace that power. I do feel like it´s up to me to be questioning how much radioactive waste California wants to store on our earthquake-active coast. For years, we have been talking about these as energy-generation plants. All they do is produce energy. We´re acting like we don´t have over 6,000 tons of radioactive waste sitting on our coast. Well, we do. And there´s 200 more tons every year.’
Even storage facilities for low-level waste have begun to tighten restrictions: Barnwell, South Carolina, will close its doors to out-of-region waste as of 2008; Richland, Washington, already has.
“So when does California go, ‘This is enough´’ asks Becker. “Why aren´t we making the Department of Energy, the NRC, the federal government deal with these problems like they promised? And why do we continue to produce more waste when we haven´t solved the problem of what we´ve got?’
The answer to some of Becker´s questions can be found about 100 miles north of Las Vegas at Yucca Mountain in the bleak expanse of Nye County, Nevada. Should it seem for any reason an inappropriate place to deposit several generations of America´s atomic detritus, Department of Energy spokesman Allen Benson is here to convince you otherwise. In his arsenal of evidence is the fact that Yucca Mountain gets only seven inches of rainfall a year and that the area surrounding the proposed repository is chronically underpopulated, on the edge of the Nevada Test Site, where atomic scientists working for the U.S. government sat at perilously close range while their mystical ordnance exploded 1,500 feet over the desert. If that isn´t enough, consider this: “Nye County,’ observes Benson, “is shaped like a mushroom cloud.’
It is impossible not to be awestruck by the sheer scale of the Yucca Mountain project, by the five-mile horseshoe-shaped tunnel that has been drilled through the mountain, by the railroad that runs through that tunnel, by the 450-foot-long drill that made that tunnel, the “Yucca Mucker’ that still stands at the tunnel´s far end, because it´s too expensive to move.
“If you know anyone who´s interested, it´s for sale,’ Benson says, staring up at the beast-like machine. “$10 million.’
“But it needs some work,’ I offer.
Benson laughs. “It needs some work. It´s only got five miles on it, though.’
Inside the tunnel, thousands of note cards litter the cavern´s rock walls, engraved with the names of prominent scientists from Los Alamos, Sandia and Livermore laboratories — scientists who have taken samples of Yucca Mountain´s volcanic rockfor independent analysis of its density, its mineral content and, most of all, its porosity: Water is the thing that defines whether a nuclear waste storage facility will withstand the test of time and weather.
It´s unfortunate, then, that on the day I take Benson´s tour, with two other journalists and a geologist named John Hartley, the desert is bursting with greenness fed by unusually plentiful spring rains. I expected Yucca Mountain to be dry and barren; instead, it´s a stunning stretch of high Western desert. It seems a heartbreaking place for a waste dump.
“Get this straight,’ says Benson. “We don´t dump anything. And that really is important if you´re going to report on this. It is not dumped. It is disposed of in a scientific and responsible manner to protect public health and safety.’ But can´t that science change? What happens if global warming gives Yucca Mountain annual monsoons?
“First of all, we´re dealing with solid material,’ says Benson, “in specially designed canisters, in an engineered facility designed to enhance the natural geology. You´ve probably heard talk in some quarters that the mountain itself was supposed to protect the canisters. That´s not true.’ The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, says Benson, clearly indicates that engineered facilities would be used in conjunction with natural geology to protect against radiation exposure. “So we´re following the law very clearly here, very precisely.’
Benson has cause to be defensive: Nevada Senator Harry Reid calls it a “dump’ nearly every time he mentions it; Shelley Berkley, the local congresswoman, calls it a “fiscal black hole.’ This week Congress slashed the project´s funding by $127 million. Eight billion dollars have so far gone into the project, which was last scheduled to open in 1998. Victor Gilinsky, who formerly served on the NRC, has blasted DOE management for shrouding the project in secrecy. “It´s hard to have confidence in an agency that acts in such a secretive way.’ Last winter, a series of e-mails exchanged by employees of the U.S. Geological Survey who worked on the project suggested that research on the site had not been as meticulous as it could have been, and in some cases may have been falsified.
“We´re not talking about the e-mails,’ Benson reminded us more than once. “The e-mails are part of an ongoing investigation, and we´re not going to do anything to compromise that investigation.’
After a few hours at Yucca Mountain, it becomes clear why, despite a desperate need for a solution to the nuclear waste problem (there is already enough waste in temporary storage to fill it), the site has not opened: No one is absolutely sure what will happen if it does. If all the regulatory hurdles are cleared, if Nevada loses its political battle and Yucca Mountain´s license — which Benson says will be measured in “linear feet,’ not pages — is finally approved, the waste that goes into it will last for hundreds of thousands, even millions of years. “We don´t know what will happen in 10,000 years,’ Benson admits. “Will people speak English? There probably won´t be a United States.’ He talks about the difficulty of establishing a warning system that will matter to creatures of the future, who likely won´t read our signs. But the very idea that such a system is possible seems absurd. In early August, the EPA proposed upgrading its 10,000-year safety standard for radiation exposure to humans near Yucca Mountain to 1 million years. As if the EPA will be around in 1 million years to enforce it.
People in the nuclear industry, including San Onofre´s Ray Golden, respond to the problem of nuclear waste by advocating reprocessing. It sounds like a good idea to me, too, so I ask Dave Lochbaum about it.
“On paper, it sounds good,’ he says. “Everybody likes recycling. But we´ve tried reprocessing three times in this country and we´re 0 for 3.’
Why?
“General Electric spent a lot of money on a reprocessing facility in Morris, Illinois. They got it finished, but they never could get it to work. Once Ford and Carter issued nonproliferation executive orders, [closing] it was less face loss than admitting it didn´t work.’
“So why,’ I want to know, “don´t we just bring a bunch of French guys over here to show us how?’
“Well,’ Lochbaum hesitates, “the French don´t really follow our safety rules. I´m not sure that technology could be licensed in the United States unless we just waived our existing regulations. We have a little bit more concern about effluent. I´m not going to say the French are ‘no blood no foul,´ but they´re not quite as concerned about effluents as we are. They tend to believe more in ‘the solution to pollution is dilution.´ They have high releases, but they figure it´s going into the North Sea or the English Channel. That´s a big ocean. So there are certain beaches on the North Seawhere you can get a suntan at night.’ Indeed, according to Britain´s Environmental Protection Agency, concentrations of technetium-99, an isotope produced in reprocessing, were four times higher in the coastal waters of Belgium and the Netherlands down-plumefrom France´s Cap de la Hague reprocessing plant.
Shortly after I return from Yucca Mountain, I look over a map I got from Rochelle Becker showing my office in Los Angeles, just 4.7 miles away from the nearest nuclear waste transport route, along which waste would travel on its way from Diablo Canyon to Yucca Mountain. I find myself mentally running through the process of loading cats in their carriers, dogs on their leashes and cherished belongings unboxed in the car — and planning escape routes. The 101 freeway out of Hollywood would be jammed; the 5 freeway in either direction would be worse. I think of all those drivers stuck on the highways out of Houston, fleeing Hurricane Rita.
“It would most likely evolve over days, not hours,’ says Ray Golden of a nuclear accident. He takes me into the war room at San Onofre, a high-ceiling barracks filled with long tables lined with telephones. The phones have assignments: FEMA sits here, the local sheriff there, the plant manager over there. The NRC has a spot, too. “Yeah, they´d be here bossing us around,’ says Golden, as though he´d rather handle any emergency by himself, with his trusted co-workers. As though he could.
As my nuclear anxiety accelerates, I finish Caldicott´s Nuclear Madness: What You Can Do. I find in it Caldicott´s gloss narratives of nuclear energy´s accidents and horrors, a fairly familiar litany of the disasters that have happened and others that probably will. But I also find in the book a comprehensive summary of all the radioactive substances that have already been released into the environment — information I first learned from the federal EPA´s Web site: A fine dust of plutonium-239, discovered in 1941 but kept secret as a national security threat until seven years later, has accumulated over the world like a toxic blanket. Writes Caldicott more specifically: “Five metric tons were thinly dispersed over the Earth as a result of nuclear bomb testing, satellite re-entries and burnups, effluents from nuclear reprocessing plants, accidental fires, explosions, spills and leakages.’ One-millionth of a gram is enough to cause cancer. And as far as living organisms on the Earth are concerned, plutonium is forever. It has a half-life of just under 25,000 years.
As Caldicott points out, it can´t even be destroyed. “Plutonium does not simply vanish at the death of a contaminated organism. If, for example, someone were to die of a lung cancer induced by plutonium, and were then cremated, contaminated smoke might carry plutonium particles into someone else´s lungs.’ Caldicott wrote the book in the same voice with which she speaks, and as I read I pictured her staring me down. This time, I take her seriously.
To produce enough electricity to keep Yonkers going for a year, a light-water nuclear reactor would make, as a by-product, just about enough plutonium to obliterate Yonkers.
— John McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy, 1974.
There are, at this point, many persuasive arguments against nuclear power. Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute can show you graphs and charts proving it produces less energy for the dollar than wind or solar could, if anyone would implement renewables on a large scale. Wall Street analysts complain that even the current energy bill´s generous subsidies for nuclear energy are not sufficient to spur investment. No one knows what to do with the waste. And while its essential generation may be free of toxic air emissions we associate with smog and greenhouse gas, the process of mining and enriching its most fundamental element — uranium — huffs an astonishing load of Earth-destroying chemicals into the air. Caldicott had warned me of this, but I didn´t believe her until I saw the data on the EPA´s Toxic Release Inventory for 2003: The two gaseous diffusion plants at Paducah, Kentucky, and Portsmouth, Ohio, pour almost 10 times the amount of CFC-114 — an ozone-destroying gas banned under the Montreal Protocol — as all other sources in the United States combined.
But the most disturbing thing about nuclear power is that fission of any kind, for bombs or watts, creates toxic elements that would not otherwise exist. According to the U.K.´s National Radiological Protection Board, cesium-137 fallout from the Chernobyl accident will likely contribute to 1,000 additional cancers over the next 70 years among the population of Western Europe. Strontium-90, chemically similar to calcium, settles in bones and blood, triggering bone cancer and leukemia. It is perhaps not surprising that cancer clusters can´t be found in the immediate vicinity of nuclear power facilities: According to the EPA, strontium-90 has been so thoroughly dispersed into the atmosphere it is “almost impossible to avoid.’ It has been found in milk and children´s baby teeth since the late 1950s, most recently by Dr. Jay Gould and a team of researchers in their 2000 study, “Strontium-90 in Deciduous Teeth as a Factor in Early Childhood Cancer,’ which reported higher strontium-90 concentrations downwind of certain nuclear power plants.
It is not far-fetched at all, then, to imagine that it also turns up in Hershey´s chocolate.
Thinking in 10,000-year terms is new to us. We have a long way to go to comprehend even the size of the subject of very long-term responsibility.
—Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility — The Idea Behind the World´s Slowest Computer
In 1966, a young Stewart Brand dropped LSD, sat on the top of a building in San Francisco and observed the curvature of the earth. That led him to a campaign of buttons and bumper stickers demanding an answer to the question, “Why haven´t we seen a picture of the Whole Earth yet?’ A few years later, an Apollo mission shot a vision of the Earth from space fully lit by the sun — the famous “Blue Marble’ — and Brand launched the Whole Earth Catalog with the image as his logo. In some respects he was the original techno-environmentalist: The founder, in 1985 of the Whole Earth ´Lectronic Link (the WELL), a force behind Wired magazine, a philosopher who brought together the nature lovers — the “romantics’ in Brand´s view — with the scientists.
It was a surprise to many, and dismaying to some, when Brand granted nuclear power an honored place in the world´s energy portfolio. In the months since his article “Environmental Heresies’ was published in MIT´s Technology Review, many have tried to persuade him otherwise. Clean-energy expert Joseph Romm tried to convince him that the nuclear industry would do just fine without his support — it´s renewables that need his backing. Environmental journalist Mark Hertsgaard wrote a pointed editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle accusing Brand of being, among other things, naive about nuclear power´s economics. Random bloggers have accused him of shortsightedness — a potent irony, as one of Brand´s affiliations these days is with the Long Now Foundation, which he co-founded with Danny Hillis to promote long-term thinking (among their projects is a clock that measures time in millennial increments). But Brand has held firm. The reason: Nothing — no reactor meltdown, no waste-storage conundrum, no fine dust of plutonium spread around the globe will cause as much damage to the Earth as the carbon-induced changing of the climate.
“Amory Lovins bent my ear hard with how the economics don´t work,’ Brand tells me over the phone from his office in San Francisco. “And indeed, the economics are problematic, but Amory has not done the economics on climate change.’ Even if a nuclear disaster occurs, Brand says it won´t be as bad as losing every coastline to global tsunamis.
“A fair question you could put to one of your concerned scientists would be, How many Chernobyls equals one abrupt climate change?’ says Brand. “A climate change where we have warmer and warmer oceans and deeper and deeper waters, where Florida goes under, and Bangladesh goes under, and we have more and more New Orleans–type events every year? A climate change where the Gulf Stream turns off, and not only Europe but the whole world gets much colder, drier and windier, and the Earth then drops its carrying capacity by 20 or 40 percent?
“And what,’ Brand continues, “if you can engineer out any Chernobyl at all?’
If there´s a lot Brand hasn´t worked out — he didn´t, for instance, know the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor produced so much waste — no matter; Brand has enormous faith in future engineering and human invention.
“It may well be true about the pebble bed and waste,’ he allows. “But then, okay, back to the old drawing board! That´s exactly the kind of debate about these designs one would like to see in public. I would like to see Greens engaging in it. Let´s bear down and say this or that or this other thing is a problem. Maybe we should be pushing ‘generation five´ nuclear technology — if we even know what it is. What you want is the back and forth instead of one side yelling ‘yes´ and the other side yelling ‘no.´ In the meantime, we can start building some stuff, bearing in mind that the worst nuclear disaster is still a lot better than the worst climate disaster that rachets us into a world we can´t come back from.’
As for the waste that so worries Rochelle Becker, that´s easy, says Brand: Open Yucca Mountain for business. It doesn´t have to be perfect forever, because in time, we´ll figure out a better solution. “I think it´s a swell place to park this stuff for a 100 years while we think about what to do with it. A lot of engineers think we´ll send robots back in a few decades to use what will then be high-grade ore.’
The way Brand sees it, the problem with Yucca Mountain is that the U.S. government has been trying to figure out how to store nuclear waste safely for 10,000 years. “And that´s a very expensive, irrelevant question,’ he says. “The Canadians asked a different question — what do we do with it right now? They got the Indians involved, who told them seven generations is not a bad time frame. Seven times 25 is 175 — so we have responsibility for this thing for 175 years. After that, it is fair to say that it is the next generation´s problem. Let them deal with it.’
Bequeathing subsequent generations nuclear waste is “way, way different than losing species you can´t get back. This is passing on an engineering problem to future generations. And that is fair to do.’
But how does that square with the express philosophy of long-term thought, of the millennial clock?
“When we went to Yucca Mountain, we took a member of our Long Now board,’ says Brand. “And we found ourselves fascinated by the pathology of Yucca Mountain and the billions they were spending to study it. They were doing what we were promoting — they were thinking long term. They were thinking ‘Let´s have an absolute bulletproof determination of all that will happen in 10,000 years and develop an engineering solution for all those problems.´
“But this,’ Brand continues, “was a case in which thinking in 10,000-year terms was a mistake.’ He laughs. “I really liked it, because up until then we thought 10,000-years-plus is a good way to think about everything, but it isn´t. In this case, it created more problems than solutions. It was very bracing for us to learn that.’
But will nuclear power save us from the fate Brand warns about? And just how many nuclear reactors would it take to make an appreciable difference in the carbon collecting in the atmosphere? In 2002, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research did that math and concluded that it would take 2,000 nuclear reactors producing 1,000 megawatts of power to make a dent in carbon emissions from coal-fired plants. At the United Nations, a multinational panel on climate change suggested reversing the carbon trend would require an average of 75 new nuclear reactors every year for the next century. By some estimates, the Earth will run out of uranium before we´d reach that capacity for nuclear generation.
Brand, of course, dismisses such estimates as based on old technology and backward data. And this is no time to wring our hands about future uranium supplies and the release of toxic isotopes. We need to stop climate change now.
“Chernobyl was local,’ insists Brand. “It put a lot of crap into the atmosphere, and people downwind are in bad shape. But climate change is pretty damn universal and inescapable. It´s not like we´re going to go somewhere else.’
Most of the world, he argues, will be uninhabitable — not just for humans but for every other species adapted to the seasons as we know them. And perhaps that´s where Brand wins: While climate change has already begun to endanger a diverse range of Earth-bound plants and animals, the consequences of widespread nuclear contamination matter most for humans.
The evidence can be found in Chernobyl´s “exclusion zone,’ an area 10 kilometers out from the scene of the 1986 fire. A few people have returned to Chernobyl, to the abandoned town of Pripyat and to the formerly Red Forest on the outskirts of the town and reactor, but the exclusion zone remains off-limits to humans, and will remain so for as long as we can imagine. But here´s the twist: In the absence of human impact, the land has reverted to one of the most robust wildlife refuges in the world. According to a report by geneticists Robert J. Baker and Ronald K. Chesser of Texas Tech University, who have conducted 12 research expeditions to the site, moose, roe deer, foxes and river otters frolic within the exclusion zone; 30 kilometers out live wolves, eagles and the endangered black stork. “Diversity of flowers and other plants in the highly radioactive regions is impressive,’ wrote Baker, “and equals that observed in protected habitats outside the zone.’
Upon his return from the expedition, a government official asked Baker to report on the accident´s consequences to the ecosystem. Baker told him that “the net ecological impact has been positive.’
“How it could be possible that the worst nuclear power plant accident in history, releasing between 100 and 200 million curies of radiation into the environment, could produce positive ecological consequences?’ the official wanted to know.
“The answer was simple,’ the men concluded. “Humans have evacuated the contaminated zone.’ It´s not that radiation hasn´t harmed the animals — the mice in the freakishly abundant new wilderness show profound genetic mutations — it´s just that “the benefit of excluding humans from this highly contaminated ecosystem appears to outweigh significantly any negative cost associated with Chernobyl radiation.’
Nuclear power may change the world after all.
---------------------------
LaCrosse Tribune
November 10, 2005
Meeting set on nuclear storage transportation
By Reid Magney
La Crosse Tribune
Antinuclear activists are planning a public meeting Saturday at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse to discuss nuclear waste transportation.
“This is about the very real possibility of high-level nuclear waste being transported on the railroad tracks through the middle of De Soto or on I-90 through La Crosse, Rochester or Winona County,’ said Guy Wolf of rural Stoddard, Wis., one of the organizers.
At issue are plans by Private Fuel Storage Inc., headquartered in La Crosse at Dairyland Power Co., to open a temporary nuclear waste storage facility in Utah on land owned by the Goshute Indian tribe. The conference is being sponsored by UW-L´s Native American Student Association.
PFS is a consortium of utilities with nuclear power plants, including Dairyland and Xcel Energy. The idea is to create an interim storage site until the federal government can gain approval on its Yucca Mountain storage facility.
John Parkyn, chairman of PFS, said any transportation of nuclear waste is several years away and will only be done by trains, not trucks.
In September, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved a permit to PFS for the Utah site. Parkyn said the U.S. Department of Transportation has a separate process to allow moving the nuclear waste, which will involve local communities.
It´s unclear whether Dairyland will use PFS to store waste as it decommissions its Genoa reactor in coming years. At a recent public meeting in De Soto, Dairyland officials said they haven´t decided whether to ship waste to Utah or store it in dry casks in Genoa.
Wolf said the activists´ goal is to “convince Dairyland Power (and) Xcel to choose a different course of action.’
If you go
WHAT: Radioactive Waste and Public Safety: Municipalities, Counties and Tribal Governments
WHERE: University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Cartwright Center, 1725 La Crosse St.
WHEN: 1 to 5 p.m. Saturday
WHO: Speakers will include:
Margene Bullcreek, a member of the Goshute tribe.
Bob Halstead, transportation adviser to Nevada´s Agency for Nuclear Projects.
Kevin Kamps, a nuclear waste transport specialist with the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Washington D.C.
John LaForge, co-director of Wisconsin-based Nukewatch, an environmental action group.
Oscar Shirani, an Exelon Corp. employee and whistle-blower on the Holtec nuclear waste cask design.
Alfred Meyer of Physicians for Social Responsibility´s Wisconsin chapter.
More Info: Call (608)785-8838, or see www.uwlax.edu/native
Reid Magney can be reached at (608) 791-8211 or rmagney@lacrossetribune.com
---------------------------
Asbury Park Press
November 10, 2005
Congresswoman Shelley Berkley (D-NV
Nuclear power use helps cushion natural gas price hike
By Letty Goodman Lutzker
In our blindness to the importance of abundant energy for our hugely productive economic engine, we have stumbled into an era of unnecessarily high energy costs. It is some comfort to reflect that we would be in a lot worse shape economically without nuclear power, now that the price of natural gas is going through the roof.
Contrary to the incorrect popular wisdom, the cost of producing electricity from nuclear power is less than one-third the cost of obtaining power from plants fueled with natural gas. Since half of the electricity in New Jersey is nuclear-generated — a larger percentage than in any other state in the Northeast except Vermont — we are at least somewhat better positioned than many of our fellow U.S. citizens to withstand the shock of soaring natural gas prices.
Nationally, however, natural gas has become the preferred fuel for electricity generation. It provides nearly 20 percent of the nation's electricity, as does nuclear, but going forward more than 95 percent of the additional electric-power capacity being planned or brought online uses natural gas for fuel. This increased demand, competing with the use of natural gas for home heating and industrial processes, is driving up the price of this commodity.
Everybody is aware that millions of homeowners will be shocked, even devastated, by the rise in home heating costs this winter. Fewer know of the debilitating effects of the natural gas crisis on our industrial economy.
The price of natural gas, which supplies a quarter of the energy used by Americans, has jumped sevenfold in just the last five years. The United States now has the highest natural gas prices in the world. Many Americans are unaware that many U.S. industries — chemical, aluminum, plastics, iron and steel, and food processing companies — use large amounts of gas in their processes and, as they find it more difficult to compete with countries that have cheaper supplies, are beginning to move their facilities abroad.
According to the American Chemical Council, in the last three years, 36 percent of the U.S. fertilizer industry, which depends on natural gas, has been shut down or mothballed. Last year alone, chemical companies closed 70 facilities in the United States, and have tagged at least 40 more for shutdown. Of the 120 chemical plants being built around the world with price tags of $1 billion or more, only one is in the United States. This trend can only become worse unless the public and its political leaders wake up.
For all its advantages as a relatively clean solution to our air pollution problems, natural gas cannot by itself meet the nation's needs for economic growth and environmental objectives. America needs a diverse and flexible supply of energy if we are to avoid further competitive disadvantages, with the potential for increased movement of jobs overseas and layoffs and economic stagnation here.
We should be exploiting all energy sources available to us, especially those for which we have large domestic supplies. The natural gas crisis could have been prevented, and now must be addressed on these fronts:
We must utilize for electricity production those fuels which have little other utility, and which we have in abundance. This means expanding our nuclear electricity capability, which requires immediate licensing and construction of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, and proceeding rapidly with a streamlined process for licensing new plants to provide clean, reliable, affordable electricity. We should also exploit clean coal electricity production where possible as well.
We must overcome the vociferous and destructive opposition to extracting the huge domestic supplies of natural gas in this country, especially those in less environmentally vulnerable areas than the Gulf of Mexico.
Our nation's economic strength and security require dependable access to bulk energy and the wise allocation of energy sources to the processes they suit best. Using natural gas for electricity production, for which we have other viable options, diverts a valuable resource from uses for which it is better suited and for which there is at present no good substitute.
Dr. Letty Goodman Lutzker is chief of nuclear medicine at the St. Barnabas Medical Center, Livingston.
---------------------------
State of Nevada
Agency for Nuclear Projects
www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/
nwpo@nuc.state.nv.us
775-687-3744
---------------------------