Yucca Mountain News Clips
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
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Nevada Observer
November 15, 2005
Yucca Restructuring, Again, Or, Back To The Future DOE Style
by Bob Loux
It is no surprise that Nevada officials reacted with skepticism to the U.S. Department of Energy´s October 25th announcement of a fundamental change in the design for a Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository system. For those of us who have been associated with the DOE repository program for the two decades or more, DOE restructurings, reassessments, and reorganizations are nothing new. Ideas come and go, the organizational chart changes, the game of organizational ‘musical chairs´ starts and stops, but the fundamental problems and flaws with Yucca Mountain are never dealt with. And for good reason. To do so would mean admitting that Yucca is a bad site for a geologic repository for high-level radioactive waste.
October´s announcement of the next best DOE idea is no exception. Paul Golan, the DOE Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management´s current acting director, revealed that DOE was moving ahead to hire a contractor to implement a plan to operate the Yucca Mountain repository as a “clean’ or non-contaminated facility. Golan proposes to do this by eliminating spent fuel handling facilities at the repository and using only “standardized’ canisters where radioactive waste would be loaded into the containers at the point of origin (i.e., at nuclear power plants), and then stored, transported and disposed of without having to reopen the packaging.
Problem is, this “new idea’ has been floated before – back in 1992 as the “Multiple Purpose Canister (MPC) initiative – and it was rejected then as being too costly and too logistically difficult to implement. To be fair, the proposal made some sense 13 years ago, when most utilities were still storing spent fuel in water filled pools where it could be moved, relatively easily, into sealed canisters and from there into MPCs for dry storage, transport and disposal. Today, however, a significant percentage of nuclear utility companies are already storing spent fuel in dry storage installations using a variety of sealed storage systems, none of which are compatible with Golan “standardized’ canister idea.
What´s really going on here is a desperate attempt by DOE to cover up just how scientifically, legally, and morally bankrupt the Yucca Mountain program is. Things are so bad that DOE has had to resort to the fiction of a major restructuring of the repository system design this late in the game - at a time when the Department is supposed to be in last phase of preparing its license application to NRC, something that DOE has now been forced to place on indefinite hold.
It is instructive to note that all this is taking place in the context of an emerging major – some would say quantum – shift in Congress´ approach to federal nuclear waste policy. The 2006 Energy and Water Appropriation Act, for the first time, combined deep cuts in the Yucca project with new appropriations for building reprocessing capabilities. Rumors are persistent that a landmark agreement is in the works between two key legislators – Nevada´s Senator Harry Reid and New Mexico´s Senator Pete Dominici, that would fundamentally revamp national nuclear waste policy, focusing on reprocessing, waste reduction, and interim storage while deemphasizing Yucca Mountain.
At the very least, the changes Mr. Golan is proposing will add many months and perhaps years to the timetable for submittal of DOE´s Yucca Mountain license application and will likely require new environmental documentation both for the repository and for the proposed HLW transportation system.
The bottom line: Yucca Mountain is still Yucca Mountain. You can try to dress it up with all sorts of diversionary restructurings, but the site remains a porous, fractured and entirely unsuitable repository location that cannot pass muster in the NRC licensing arena.
There is, nevertheless, a certain irony in watching the array of Yucca Mountain “fixes’ over the years come full circle. In honor of this new, “new’ approach, perhaps it would be appropriate, for now, to rename Yucca, the ‘Golan Heights´.
(Mr. Loux is the Director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects)
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Nevada Observer
November 15, 2005
Opinion:
Yucca Mountain: The Counting Has Begun As Congress Slowly Turns
The Concept Of Recycling All That Nuclear Waste Into Useable Fuel
by Johnny Gunn
One by one it seems many in Congress are seeing the reality known as the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository for what it is; a disaster. Many such as Utah Senator Robert Bennett (D) have been saying for some time that the answer isn't to transport thousands of tons of the most dangerous radioactive waste across the country and bury it under a Nevada mountain. Bennett called for the change in an impassioned speech before his peers saying keep the spent nuclear fuel at the power plants and begin the process of recycling.
He used as an example the fact we have been working to recycle the military nuclear product recovered from Soviet Union warheads. If we can do it for military grade nuclear debris we can do it for power plant waste was what he promoted.
Bennett has picked up some help recently. Nevada Congresswoman Shelley Berkley (D) is calling for recycling, and on November 8 U.S. Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), the top ranked democrat in the senate, has decided to join the battle as well. Reid has been opposed to Yucca Mountain virtually from the first, but it's believed that this is the first time he has come out in favor recycling the waste.
The change came about from pure politics, but it is a positive change. Reid announced that he will drop his opposition to a provision that would create a new wilderness area near the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation in Utah. The wilderness designation could potentially prevent the opening of a nuclear waste storage facility on the reservation, something Utah's elected leaders have fiercely opposed.
The Senator said that after a recent conversation with Utah's Senator Bennett he agreed to set aside his concerns in order to help the efforts of Bennett and other state officials to prevent the nuclear site from opening. "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 believes the Nevada plans at Yucca Mountain "continue to be delayed indefinitely, putting that project in jeopardy."
Reid believes in "a more realistic approach to solving the nation's nuclear waste storage problems by leaving the waste at the sites where it is generated." Reid has hinted that legislation to that effect could be introduced soon.
Bennett and Reid along with many other members of congress may be getting some help from an unexpected source. Edward Sproat has been picked by President George W. Bush to oversee the Yucca project as head of the Energy Department's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management. During his confirmation hearings in Washington Sproat voiced a desire to see more recycling of spent fuel waste.
Sproat said he believed the original intent of the nuclear industry and its regulators was to recycle the waste. He believed that was the primary prospect back in the 1960s. He said he believes recycling makes perfectly good sense.
While the budget for Yucca Mountain has been reduced by congressional action at least $50 million has been set aside for continued study of recycling. When one looks at the alternative, that is more waste being developed every year than Yucca can hold, never mind what's on the ground is already more than the repository is designed to hold, all being transported through mega-population centers just to sit on the ground and possibly contaminate future generations, recycling is the only answer.
The Department of Energy has continued to postpone attempts at licensing; there is no date on the books for the process to begin. DOE has attempted to change the rules for storage of nuclear waste more than once. DOE has changed transportation plans from railroad to truck, back to railroad, and now railroad and truck.
When all else fails in their grasping for an argument over storage, DOE usually plays the terrorist card saying having high level nuclear waste stored all over the country is too dangerous. Terrorists might steal some bomb grade material. Hundreds of trains and trucks moving the high level waste isn't dangerous?
If recycling is good enough for weapons grade nuclear material it certainly should be good enough for the high level waste coming from energy plants. More plants are coming on line all the time, more plants are being designed regularly, and if there is a fuel source such as recycled nuclear waste available, it looks like more than one question has been answered.
The Nuclear Energy industry forced this horrible concept on the American public because if taxpayers could pay for transportation and storage of the waste, so much the better. DOE and the NRC must start working with each other for betterment of nuclear energy, not force its will on a population that simply doesn't want Yucca Mountain. It's bad science, it was a bad idea then, it's a bad idea today.
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Environment News Service
November 15, 2005
Congressional Approval of Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Denounced
WASHINGTON, DC, November 15, 2005 (ENS) - Conservation and scientific groups Monday condemned provisions of the FY 06 Energy and Water Appropriations bill that set aside $130 million for nuclear fuel reprocessing projects, saying the projects increase the risk that terrorists could acquire plutonium and use it to make a nuclear bomb.
The Senate passed the bill's conference report on Monday, adding its approval to that of the House and sending the bill to President George W. Bush for his signature.
The nuclear fuel reprocessing "will compromise efforts to keep dangerous nuclear technology out of unsafe hands, and substantially increase the flow of nuclear waste for which there is no established means of disposal," warned the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
The measure provides $50 million for a pilot program of advanced plutonium separation technology, and $80 million to continue spent fuel reprocessing research under the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative.
“Congress is taking a giant step backward by advancing spent nuclear fuel reprocessing programs. This is just a bad idea for a whole list of reasons,’ said Dr. Thomas Cochran, Director of NRDC´s Nuclear Program.
“These projects threaten our national security, our public health and our safety. And they are wildly expensive. This funding would be better spent finding safer sites for deep geologic disposal with strict, protective public health standards.’
The Bush administration had approved deep geologic storage of spent nuclear fuel at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, but the repository has been plagued by a series of setbacks, most recently a complete design retooling, as well as an investigation into the falsification of scientific data by government scientists working on the project.
The Union of Concerned Scientists also is critical of the planned reprocessing.
"Reprocessing separates plutonium in spent fuel from the remaining radioactive waste. Because separated plutonium can be used in nuclear weapons and is highly vulnerable to theft, this plan will greatly increase the risk that terrorists or hostile states will acquire nuclear weapon materials," the Union of Concerned Scientists said.
"The United States needs to take a giant step back from this brink," said Dr. Lisbeth Gronlund, co-director and senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists' Global Security Program. "Separating plutonium from spent fuel is not a solution to the nuclear waste problem and would increase the risk that terrorists could acquire plutonium and use it to make a nuclear weapon."
Congressional appropriators claim that reprocessing is needed because of "uncertainties" in the Yucca Mountain plan. But the critics argue that separating plutonium will not avoid the need for geologic repositories to store the remaining radioactive wastes that result from reprocessing spent fuel.
"Reprocessing only amplifies the safety, security, economic and proliferation risks of nuclear waste disposal," said Dr. Edwin Lyman, senior staff scientist at UCS. "A much better approach is to continue to store spent fuel on site in hardened casks with improved security against terrorist attack. This would give the United States plenty of time to seek a truly workable and safe solution to its nuclear waste problems."
If the U.S. were to reprocess the roughly 50,000 metric tons of spent fuel that it has generated to date, it would produce about 500 metric tons of separated plutonium, enough for tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and an attractive target for terrorists.
Although reprocessing supporters claim that the U.S. would be able to promptly use all the separated plutonium in new reactor fuel, this is not supported by the experience of other countries that have reprocessed spent fuel, where well over 200 metric tons of separated plutonium have accumulated.
The Energy Department estimated in 1999 that it would cost taxpayers $280 billion to reprocess all U.S. spent fuel and reuse the plutonium in fresh fuel called mixed oxide (MOX) because it mixes the oxides of uranium and plutonium.
The same appropriations bill earmarked funds for the start up of the first MOX fuel fabrication facility in the United States to be built at the federal government's Savannah River Site by a private consortium that includes Duke Energy and the French state-owned nuclear services firm Cogema.
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Las Vegas SUN
November 15, 2005
Editorial: Standing up to criticism
Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn named one of nation's top five governors by Time magazine for weathering the ire of conservative political base
Las Vegas Sun
Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn has been named one of the nation's top five governors by Time magazine in part because of his $830 million tax hike in 2003 that angered fellow Republicans and launched a brief recall campaign against him.
In its Web editions Sunday, Time called Guinn's controversial tax increase "a realistic step to shore up the overstretched budget of the nation's fastest-growing state," adding that his overall approval rating of almost 60 percent shows Guinn has the leadership skills to pull off what for most would have been political suicide.
Raising taxes brought Guinn considerable criticism from many right-wing Republicans in the Nevada Legislature. The Wall Street Journal's far-right editorial page in 2003 went so far as to call Guinn the nation's worst Republican governor. The criticism from the radical right couldn't have been more off-base and was devoid of reality.
Guinn, a fiscal conservative who is entering the last year of his second and final term, took office in 1999 at the end of a 10-year-period in which Nevada's population increased 66 percent, to almost 2 million residents. Despite that growth, Guinn first re-organized the state government by cutting 800 positions, freezing another 1,600 and opposing proposals that would have created 3,000 new state jobs.
Time also noted Guinn's efforts to broaden the state government's revenue base beyond tourism-driven sales tax and gaming. Those two sources provide two-thirds of the state's income, a concentration that nearly proved disastrous when the state's economy plunged after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. The slowdown resulted in a budget deficit approaching $1 billion.
Other achievements mentioned by Time include Guinn's fight against the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, his Millennium Scholarship program for helping high school graduates pay for college and privatizing the state's workers' compensation program.
Critics told Time that Guinn has fallen short of his desire to improve health care and has failed to find long-term funding for some initiatives, such as the Millennium Scholarships. But, as Time noted, he did have the guts to stand up to the right-wing base in his own political party and made some far-reaching decisions based on what was best for Nevada. We hope future governors display the same kind of leadership.
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KVVU
November 15, 2005
Yucca Mountain Podcast is Music to Nevadans' Ears?
Clark County is taking advantage of new Internet technology most often reserved for downloading music on popular players known as "iPods." Clark County's Nuclear Waste Program becomes apparently the first government entity in Nevada to use the latest technology with a public information twist.
The Yucca Mountain Podcast is an online informational audio program. Unlike some traditional media, Podcasts are conveniently played on demand - people can download them and play them in their favorite MP3 player whenever and wherever they want.
To access the inaugural Yucca Mountain Podcast program, visit online at: http://www.accessclarkcounty.com/comprehensive_planning/YuccaMountainPodcast.htm, or just go to the Clark County home page and click on the podcast link.
The Yucca Mountain Podcast was created by the Comprehensive Planning Department's Nuclear Waste Program to help inform Nevada residents about Clark County's oversight activities of the Yucca Mountain Project, the proposed national high-level nuclear waste repository.
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Guardian
November 15, 2005
House-Senate Freeze Education Spending
By Andrew Taylor
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - Federal aid for education would be frozen under a bill emerging from House-Senate negotiations. Aid for special education would increase by less than 1 percent while programs funded under President Bush's No Child Left Behind program would be cut by more than 3 percent.
To avoid cutting more deeply into education, medical training and Pell Grants, lawmakers are reluctantly giving up about $1 billion worth of home state projects from a sweeping bill funding education, labor and health and human services programs.
The bill remained in negotiations after House-Senate talks Monday night. But the spending levels in the measure, which flow from Bush's budget, as endorsed by Congress, are so low that the lead Senate negotiator, moderate Republican Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, called them ``scandalous'' and said he may vote against the bill.
``It's that bad,'' Specter said.
A bill financing energy and water projects got a friendlier reception Monday as the Senate approved a big cut for the budget for the troubled Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump while adding $1 billion over Bush's budget for Army Corps of Engineers water and flood control projects.
The $450 million Yucca Mountain budget - down $127 million from each of the last two years - is included in a final bill funding energy and water programs for the 2006 budget year, which cleared the Senate by an 84-4 vote.
House-Senate negotiators also approved money for veterans programs, including $2.5 billion above Bush's original budget for Veterans Affairs medical care, where costs are rapidly spiraling beyond earlier estimates.
The outcome of talks on a bill funding a broad array of social programs within the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services and Education is less clear. The removal thousands of local projects is certain to prove unpopular.
Without hometown projects, lawmakers wary about cutting from No Child Left Behind and other programs have little incentive to vote for the bill, and House GOP leaders are likely to face a big struggle getting it passed before stopgap spending authority expires Friday.
Lawmakers are trying to wrap up work on the 11 spending bills, comprising approximately one-third of the federal budget, that Congress passes each year. After years of consistent increases, the overall budget for domestic agencies - with the exception of the Homeland Security Department - is essentially frozen or even slightly below last year's levels.
Six of the 11 spending bills have passed Congress, and lawmakers hope to complete action on the remaining domestic bills by Friday.
A $453 billion defense bill, though nearly complete, is being held in reserve despite protests from the Pentagon. GOP leaders may use the politically unstoppable bill to carry other legislative freight.
The White House, working with House GOP leaders, has forced the Senate to give up on a series of budget tricks it used to add funding. The Senate has had to relent on plans to transfer $7 billion from defense to domestic programs.
Senators also abandoned more than $3 billion made available through an accounting gimmick for programs including health research, medical training and heating subsidies for the poor. That move came during talks on the labor, health and education measure, which provides $143 billion in funding for programs at lawmakers' discretion.
Without the extra cash, lawmakers were unable to fulfill funding promises made under the No Child Left Behind education law, whose programs would be cut by 3 percent from the previous fiscal year. Research funding for the National Institutes of Health would be virtually frozen after years of double-digit increases.
All told, programs funded by the education and health bill faced a $1.4 billion cut over last year's levels once extra costs to implement the new Medicare prescription drug benefit are factored in.
Delays in the Yucca Mountain project caused lawmakers to curb the budget for the nuclear waste site. Those cuts helped free up funds for the Corps of Engineers, which received $5.4 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 boost south Louisiana's hurricane protection.
The bill also kills off a program to study development of a ``bunker buster'' nuclear warhead, ending a three-year battle between the Pentagon and lawmakers opposed to the project.
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Chemical & Engineering News
November 15, 2005
Utah Fights Nuclear Waste Storage In Court
State files lawsuit to keep the federal government from approving a private waste facility
Glenn Hess
Utah officials are asking a federal court of appeals to review the Nuclear Regulatory Commission´s (NRC) recent decision to issue an operating license to a private consortium of utilities to build a temporary above-ground facility to store spent nuclear fuel.
The state filed a lawsuit on Nov. 8 in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that seeks to overturn NRC´s authorization for Private Fuel Storage LLC (PFS) to build and operate a facility to store approximately 40,000 tons of radioactive waste in Skull Valley, Utah, about 50 miles west of Salt Lake City.
Utah Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. has vowed to keep spent nuclear fuel out of his state. “With each passing month, we are expanding our efforts to oppose the PFS plan,’ he remarks. “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.’
Although PFS has yet to obtain a license from NRC, the commission voted 3–1 in September to authorize the facility. The waste would be stored at the site until a permanent disposal facility is completed at Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, or elsewhere, which is not expected until at least 2012.
However, if NRC proceeds with issuing a license, it will be years before spent nuclear fuel could be stored in Utah. After obtaining a license from NRC, the consortium must still obtain administrative approval from two other federal agencies, including the Interior Department´s Bureau of Land Management, which has raised concerns about the proposed project´s transportation plan. PFS wants to ship waste to Utah by train over public lands.
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KTLA5
November 15, 2005
From the Los Angeles Times
Q&A Bruce Babbitt
Alarmed by 'Cycle of Anti-Environmentalism'
By Frank Clifford
Times Staff Writer
The environment has never faced greater political peril in America than it does today, says former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.
"History, however, instructs us that the trajectory of environmental protection is moving ever upward over time, even as the trend line occasionally breaks downward," Babbitt asserts in his new book "Cities in the Wilderness."
A Democrat, Babbitt ran the Interior Department for eight years under President Clinton, who in Babbitt's words "protected more acres of land and water than any of his predecessors." If parts of that legacy are in jeopardy now, as Babbitt says they are, he remains confident that the public, in time, will again demand that the federal government play a stronger role in protecting natural resources.
In his book, he examines the conservation record of the Clinton era. One failure he highlights was his inability to marshal public support for a plan to ease the threat of catastrophic flooding on the lower Mississippi River. The plan would have required removing some levees on the upper Mississippi, allowing the river to overflow its banks in undeveloped areas, thus reducing downstream flows and the potential for disaster in places such as New Orleans.
Among the successes, Babbitt cites his partnership with the Republican administration of former California Gov. Pete Wilson to design a program, dubbed CalFed, to put an end to the political wars that have raged over management of the state's largest source of fresh water — the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
But Babbitt now says the future of that program, which tries to balance the water needs of the region's environment, agriculture and cities, is in jeopardy.
Today, Babbitt describes himself as a "free agent," dividing his time between the World Wildlife Fund, of which he is a director, and various nonprofit groups working on conservation issues ranging from the Amazon Basin to the Pacific Northwest.
Question: Critics of the Bush administration fear that much of America's legacy of environmental laws and protections is under assault. Do you agree?
Answer: We are in the worst down cycle of anti-environmentalism in the history of conservation. It's really quite striking. In this administration, they presented a friendly face of consensus-building beneath which the systematic destruction of the environmental consensus is actually without parallel.
Q. There are efforts in play in Congress to weaken both the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, laws that protect wildlife and open space and give people the right to object to developments that will change their own environments. Are they in jeopardy?
A: It's hanging in the balance right now. Congress is hell-bent on destroying environmental laws. The administration is egging them on.
Q: In your book, you say the Clinton administration preserved as much land as Teddy Roosevelt. Is that part of the Clinton legacy in jeopardy?
A: The striking thing to me is the degree to which they have been tampering with the national park system. That really is, if you will, an indication — nothing is sacred to this administration. Typically, national parks have been absolutely inviolable.
The Republicans come to office saying they were going to improve the national parks.
This latest park policy that was put out was simply a broad attempt to commercialize the parks, to alter the basic philosophy of the national parks which has been in effect since 1890.
Q: So far, voters don't seem to have expressed much outrage. How do you explain that, given that most public opinion polls consistently say people want more, not less, protection?
A: The environmental issues have been swept up in this tide of anti-government rhetoric. The prevailing mood of the electorate is intensely anti-Washington. And that has given the Congress the space, and the administration the space, to do things.
Q: You write that the purpose of your book is to show how we can protect natural and cultural landscapes and watersheds through stronger federal leadership in land-use planning. What are the prospects for that kind of leadership?
A: It's not going to happen in this Congress. It's not going to happen in this administration but I'm confident that the time will come. I see these cycles in American history, and I'm convinced that before too long, this sort of nihilistic, destructive set of policies is going to yield to public pressure for a more constructive vision.
Q: One place where the federal government has the opportunity almost to start from scratch with land-use planning is on the Gulf Coast and in southern Louisiana. Is there any evidence that the federal government is leading that effort?
A: No. In my judgment, the lack of leadership here is a national disgrace. Congress is busy using Katrina as a pretext to cut food stamps and Medicaid rather than dealing with the issue. The president says it's a local issue. It's not just a local issue. It's a national issue that involves the management of the Mississippi River, which the federal government has been doing for 50 years, which involves the management of offshore oil and gas, which has undermined the integrity of the wetlands. Now, those issues can't be dealt with by the mayor of New Orleans. It's going to have to have national leadership to say, "What are we going to do about the infrastructure issues? What are we going to do about sea level rise?" Louisiana has got 5 million people; 2 1/2 million live less than 3 feet above sea level down in that delta country. And the consensus for sea-level rise is now between 2 and 3 feet. Those are big scare problems, and we've had zero national leadership.
Q: No natural resource is more critical to so many Californians as the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. You helped set up a process involving both the state and federal governments to apportion delta water to all of its competing interests. Is that process working?
A: We have to make it work. There is no alternative. Now the fact is that the administration has not kept its half of the bargain. As you know, the state has done a better job than the federal government in the funding of the partnership to make that work, but there's not much energy on either side now. If that all comes apart, we're just going to be back in World War III over California water. We've got a consensus that is workable, but it's going to cost money.
Q: What does the administration need to do to hold up its end of the bargain?
A: It needs to do two things. One is to provide some leadership to the federal agencies, that's the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Army Corps of Engineers. Two is to carry out the terms of the agreement and to enforce the regulations and provide the funding that is necessary. You've got to do all of those things and move forward with the feasibility studies for more surface [water] storage. That's part of the bargain, and we ought to move forward with it. It's not going fast enough.
Q: What about Sacramento's role?
A: The funding is slacking off. The funding, in the early years, came from the bond issues. That's just about exhausted…. Neither the Legislature nor the government has come up with a permanent funding source. Political leadership has to come from political leaders, and it's lacking on both sides. Sen. Dianne Feinstein has remained a champion in Washington, but she hasn't gotten much help.
Q. Didn't it surprise some people a few years ago when you went to work for a law firm representing development interests at the Ahmanson Ranch and the Hearst Ranch in California and the proposed Yucca Mountain storage site for radioactive waste in Nevada?
A: I've always been pro-development. We live in a world that is so polarized that there doesn't seem to be any middle space — if you're an environmentalist, you must oppose everything. That doesn't describe me. It never has. I believe that nuclear power is the lesser [evil] of the only two alternatives that are on the table right now. One is to fry this planet with continuing use and burning of fossil fuels, and the other is to try to make nuclear power work. That's been my position since 1978, when I served on the Three Mile Island commission. I've endured a lot of hassle over it, but that's my judgment. We've got to get away from fossil fuels fast, or this planet, as we know it, is not going to exist.
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State of Nevada
Agency for Nuclear Projects
www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/
nwpo@nuc.state.nv.us
775-687-3744
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