Yucca Mountain News Clips
Monday, December 5, 2005
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Nevada Observer
December 1, 2005
Letters We Get
Mr. Gunn,
Please find attached a letter from Paul Golan, in response to Bob Loux's article in the Observer. I would request that his response receive the same prominent placement as Mr. Loux's and be printed in its entirety. While Mr. Golan's letter is in response to Mr. Loux's, it is more informative on the facts and is less argumentative than Mr. Loux's "Feature Article".
Thanks, Craig Stevens Press Secretary U.S. Department of Energy 202.586.4940
__________
December 1, 2005
Editor The Nevada Observer
To the Editor:
The following is provided in response to the November 15, 2005 article written by Bob Loux, “Yucca Restructuring, Again, Or, Back to the Future DOE Style.’
Mr. Loux is correct when he says that the canister concept is not new and had been looked at in 1992 as the Multiple Purpose Canister initiative. But he is incorrect when he says that “it was rejected then as being too costly and too logistically difficult to implement.’ According to a report prepared by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in 1997, the canister concept was both technically and economically feasible. The State of Nevada also expressed its support for the disposable canister in 1990 when it said, “OCRWM should also aggressively investigate the concept of storage/ transport/ disposal casks (the so-called “universal cask’) using generic disposal site criteria.’ The State believed then that use of dual purpose casks should be considered “as soon as possible.’
Many in the nuclear power industry view the clean/canister approach not only as a credible plan, but an improvement to Yucca Mountain operations. Since only a small percent of the spent nuclear fuel backlog has been packaged, we are clearly at a point where this approach makes sense. Additionally, the plan to eliminate the majority of bare spent nuclear fuel handling at Yucca Mountain represents a positive step forward. Worker risk will be significantly reduced as they face less contamination and a less complex fuel handling process prior to disposal.
Mr. Loux poses a good question about the timing of the clean/canister approach when the Department should be preparing a license application to the NRC. If we were committed to a path rather than an objective, Mr. Loux´s concern would be valid. But we should remember our objective. Senator John Kerry said, “Nuclear power can play an essential role in providing affordable energy while reducing the risk of climate change.’ Today, nuclear power accounts for 20 percent of America´s electricity production, providing 5 hours per day of electricity to every home and business in the country. Nuclear power has proven to be clean, reliable, and safe, and does not require daily replenishment from tankers coming across the oceans from foreign lands to keep the fossil fuel generating stations fed. While nuclear power is an emission-free energy source during power production, it does leave a waste product that must be dealt with. Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1982 and Congress approved the Yucca Mountain Repository for development in 2002. As we prepare our License Application for Yucca Mountain, if the clean/canister approach is approved, it will result in a better design and will make our operations safer, simpler, and more reliable. If it makes technical and economic sense, why wouldn´t we choose such path forward?
Lastly, I am a career Federal servant and was asked to work on the Yucca Mountain project by the Secretary of Energy. He has made his expectations clear in that we are going to do this right and I am taking steps that focus on quality and safety. While I understand Mr. Loux´s position against the project, I find it in very bad form to go after me when he said it would be “appropriate, for now, to rename Yucca, the ‘Golan Heights.´’ For that, I think Mr. Loux owes me an apology and a commitment to stick to the issues.
Sincerely, Paul Golan Acting Director Civilian Radioactive Waste Management U.S. Department of Energy
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Platts
December 03, 2005
Yucca Mountain application appears unlikely to go to NRC in FY-06
Washington (Platts)--2Dec2005
The Dept of Energy's defense of a repository license application is not a spending priority for the civilian nuclear waste program in fiscal-year 2006, but the preparation of an application will be, a move that suggests the department will not send an application to NRC this fiscal year, which ends Sept 30, 2006.
In response to questions from Platts, DOE spokesman Allen Benson listed priorities for the program's $450-mil budget as "full investments in science and technology, full investments in preparing a license application [for a repository with minimal fuel handling], and full investments in improving safety infrastructure." The allocation for FY-06, which began Oct 1, is 30% below the administration's budget request and 20% below its FY-05 level.
"Clearly, we're not where we wanted to be...especially in terms of not being in a license-defense mode," Benson said. The repository planned for Yucca Mountain, Nevada, will be the disposal facility for thousands of metric tons of utility spent nuclear fuel.
Separately, DOE told an NRC licensing board in a Dec 1 status report that contractor Bechtel SAIC Co has not yet completed a report detailing program changes needed to develop and implement a new cradle-to-grave canister system that would minimize repository fuel handling requirements.
It added that DOE was unlikely to complete its review of that report, once received, during first quarter of calendar year 2006. "Any time thereafter required to revise the license application will depend on the nature and extent of the modifications," the report stated.
--Elaine Hiruo, elaine_hiruo@platts.com
For more information, take a trial to Platts Nucleonics Week at http://nucweek.platts.com.
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Arms Control Today
December 05, 2005
Congress Cuts Nuclear Bunker Buster Again
Wade Boese
Congress and the Bush administration differed sharply this year over the future direction of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex.
For the second consecutive year, lawmakers denied the Department of Energy´s request to explore modifying a nuclear warhead to penetrate deeper underground before detonating. They also restricted administration plans to make nuclear warheads more durable, rebuffed an effort to construct a new facility to build plutonium cores for nuclear weapons, denied a request to shorten the time needed to conduct a nuclear weapons test, and pushed for faster warhead dismantlement work.
Led by Rep. David Hobson (R-Ohio), legislators last year eliminated funding for the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP), which is also known as a bunker buster because of its intended mission to destroy targets buried deep underground. The administration sought to revive funding for studying the weapon as part of its fiscal year 2006 budget request, asking for $4 million for the Energy Department and $4.5 million for the Air Force to study the weapon. (See ACT, March 2005.)
Hobson, who chairs the House Appropriations Energy and Water Development Subcommittee, again spearheaded opposition to the nuclear bunker buster and prevailed. Congress in November passed a $30.5 billion energy and water appropriations bill that contains no Energy Department funding for RNEP as part of the $6.4 billion assigned to nuclear weapons activities. The president signed the bill into law Nov. 19.
Lawmakers have yet to finalize the defense appropriations bill, which includes the Air Force portion of the study, and Hobson is not certain about what the final RNEP outcome will be. “I have to watch in the defense bill to try and make sure they don´t go around me,’ Hobson was quoted as saying in The Columbus Dispatch Nov. 13. The Ohio paper further quoted Hobson as declaring, “I don´t think [the Pentagon has] given up,’ based on a meeting he had with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
The Senate earlier this year supported funding the Energy Department´s RNEP efforts, setting up a showdown with Hobson and the House, which had allocated nothing for the project. But Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), who chairs the Senate Appropriations Energy and Water Development Subcommittee, announced Oct. 25 that the funding would be zeroed out because the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) had dropped the request. “The NNSA indicated that this research should evolve around more conventional weapons rather than…nuclear devices,’ Domenici stated.
An excerpt of the statement sent to Domenici by the NNSA, which is the Energy Department´s semi-autonomous agency responsible for the nuclear stockpile, differs from the senator´s description of it. The NNSA stated that, as information gleaned from planned RNEP activities would be “valuable in the development of conventional earth penetrators, the [d]epartment supports renaming the program.’ Nevertheless, now there is no Energy Department program because of Hobson and Domenici.
Congress also axed the administration´s $7.7 million request to move forward on a Modern Pit Facility to build new plutonium cores for nuclear warheads. The administration contends that, because plutonium degrades over time, the United States needs eventually to resume mass production of these cores to keep warheads in good working order. However, Hobson has questioned the administration´s underlying assumptions about how fast plutonium degrades and how many new warhead cores need to be produced for a shrinking arsenal.
Currently, the United States possesses roughly 10,000 warheads, but the administration announced in June 2004 its intention to cut this stockpile “almost in half.’ (See ACT, July/August 2004.) Lawmakers are urging the administration to accelerate this work. They boosted the administration´s request for warhead dismantlement by $25 million up to $60 million and, citing “the importance of an aggressive warhead dismantlement program,’ instructed NNSA to provide a report by March 1, 2006, on increasing the U.S. “dismantlement capacity.’
The administration´s program to make warheads easier to maintain and last longer by replacing their parts with new components enjoyed similar support. Indeed, Congress almost tripled the administration´s Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) request of $9 million—the funding level approved last year—to $25 million.
But lawmakers are not granting the program free rein. Concerned that too many changes might result in a radically different warhead that could prompt calls for testing to prove that it would function properly, the Senate and House directed that “any weapon design work done under the RRW program must stay within the military requirements of the existing deployed stockpile and…the design parameters validated by past nuclear tests.’ The United States last conducted a nuclear test in 1992.
Despite assurances that it has no plans to conduct a nuclear test, the Bush administration has been seeking to reduce the amount of time needed to resume nuclear testing to 18 months in case a technical problem impairs existing warheads or a new threat emerges. Lawmakers rebuffed this effort, ordering that the current test-readiness posture of 24 months be maintained.
Departing from long-standing U.S. policy, Congress, again spurred by Hobson, approved $50 million to launch a spent nuclear fuel reprocessing initiative with the aim of starting construction on at least one advanced nonmilitary reprocessing facility beginning in fiscal year 2010. This involves separating plutonium and uranium from some other radioactive wastes found in spent reactor fuel so they can be used again as new fuel.
Although France currently reprocesses spent civilian reactor fuel and Japan has an ambitious plan of its own, the United States essentially abandoned commercial reprocessing in the 1970s as too expensive and too dangerous because it produced surplus nuclear bomb-ready material that could fall into the wrong hands. Instead, Washington decided to mothball spent nuclear fuel in huge geological repositories, the first of which is supposed to be at Nevada´s Yucca Mountain. However, legal and political battles have forestalled the opening of this repository
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KSL-TV
December 05, 2005
Supreme Court Turns Down Utah's Appeal on Nuke Waste
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- The U.S. Supreme Court refused Monday to take up an appeal filed by Utah to restore a set of laws blocking a nuclear waste repository at the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation.
The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals nullified the laws last year, saying Utah didn't have authority to regulate nuclear waste. Utah appealed to the Supreme Court, but on Monday it refused to get involved, listing the case among others it was refusing to hear, without comment.
Utah still is fighting in court. Last month, the state asked the District of Columbia U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn a September decision granting approval for the repository by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The state contends the Nuclear Regulatory Commission underestimated the risk of a fighter jet crashing into upright steel casks and releasing radiation at a site about 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. Hill Air Force Base uses Skull Valley as a flight path to a training range in Utah's western desert.
Gov. Jon Huntsman says he's sparing no effort to block the dump in the courts, in Congress with a plan to designate a Skull Valley wilderness area and with the help of federal agencies overseeing the tribe and government land in Utah.
The case the Supreme Court refused to hear Monday turned on a series of state laws enacted from 1998 to 2001 that would have prohibited the transportation or storage of spent fuel rods in Utah. The 10th Circuit in Denver and a lower court said those laws trespassed on federal authority and struck them down.
As planned, utilities would send up to 4,000 casks filled with depleted nuclear fuel -- about 10 million rods -- to the Skull Valley storage pad until the federal government can open a national repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain.
The waste would be shipped over rail lines, mostly from nuclear reactors east of the Mississippi. Utah has no nuclear power plants.
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Greensboro News Record
December 05, 2005
N.C. could be key in nuclear comeback
By Elyse Ashburn
Staff Writer
GREENSBORO
The last U.S. nuclear reactor was approved when the Berlin Wall was firmly in place, abortion had just been legalized in the United States and women were still burning their bras.
But the power source that seems more "Cold War" than "War on Terror" is poised for a comeback -- and North Carolina, possibly even the Piedmont Triad, is at the forefront of the movement.
In the past 12 months, six utilities have told the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission that they might build nuclear power plants.
And two, Duke Power and Progress Energy, have said that they're looking at sites in North Carolina. Progress doesn't operate in the Piedmont Triad.
Duke Power does, and it owns at least two properties -- in Davidson and Davie counties -- that fit the basic criteria the company has set for housing nuclear reactors. The two sites, which adjoin each other, are about 40 miles southwest of Greensboro.
Duke says it is considering about a dozen sites across its coverage area in North and South Carolina for a nuclear plant. The company isn't divulging which sites are being considered, only that it will announce its plans by Jan. 1.
And the Charlotte-based company is considering options other than building nuclear plants It could expand its coal-fired plants or buy electricity from the wholesale market.
But coal-fired plants are a tricky option, especially in North Carolina, because of new limits on smog-forming emissions like those produced by burning coal.
Duke already has begun preparing a construction and operating license for a nuclear plant, and many energy experts say it's just a matter of time before one of the major U.S. utilities commits to new nuclear power.
"My belief -- and the belief of a lot of people in the industry -- is that somebody is going to take that next step and commission a new reactor," Mitchell Singer, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington, said. "It's more than just a gut feeling. There's definitely a consensus."
Nuclear industry officials say that the new reactors will be safer than the ones in operation today, and they point out that no one in the United States has died after any nuclear-reactor incident.
The United States did have a near-miss in 2002, when workers at the Davis-Besse nuclear plant outside Toledo, Ohio, discovered a football-sized hole in the reactor vessel. The problem had been missed by Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors.
"Depending on who you ask, we were three months to a year and a half away from a Three Mile Island type event, at the least," said Edwin Lyman, a nuclear specialist and senior staff scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists. The Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania suffered a core meltdown in 1979.
And while new reactors may be safer, experts widely agree that the first companies to build those new reactors would be taking on a greater risk than those that follow.
"If you're talking about a first-of-a-kind anything, even a car, these are very complex systems, and there are going to be things you didn't understand," Lyman said. "You just hope they don't rise to the level of a real problem."
Still, utilities are poised to act. That consensus has grown over the past year as utilities searched for new ways to meet ballooning power demand.
Natural-gas power plants were the darlings of the 1990s, but as natural gas prices remain high, they've lost their luster. Not to mention, natural-gas plants can't provide the kind of so-called "baseload power" needed to meet projected demand.
The U.S. population has grown by almost 20 percent in the past 15 years. Our houses are bigger -- averaging more than 2,300 square feet -- and fewer people are living in each one. We have more gadgets, more appliances and more big-screen televisions.
And those trends are expected to continue -- which add up to a big demand for electricity. In fact, the U.S. Department of Energy expects electricity sales to increase by about 50 percent between now and 2025.
That increase could be even more dramatic in high-growth states such as North Carolina. Duke Power and Progress Energy, formerly known as Carolina Power & Light, each add between 30,000 and 40,000 new customers each year in the Carolinas.
In the face of increasingly stringent regulations on plant emissions, like the N.C. Clean Smokestacks Act, utilities are looking to nuclear power to meet demand.
Nuclear plants, unlike coal-fired plants, do not produce greenhouse gases, which cause smog and contribute to global warming.
"Nuclear has no impact other than waste," said Paul Turinsky, head of the nuclear engineering department at N.C. State.
But the issue of what to do with spent fuel, or nuclear waste as it's commonly called, is unresolved. The government has planned for it to be stored in Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but the project has been repeatedly delayed, and most nuclear plants are storing spent fuel on-site.
Many think tanks, advocacy groups, and a growing number of businesses think conservation, not new nukes, should be the wave of the future. Wal-Mart, for instance, announced an initiative last month to dramatically decrease its energy consumption over the next 20 years.
"It's really important over the next few months that we have some public debate on these issues," said Jim Warren, executive director of advocacy group N.C. Waste Awareness and Reduction Network.
In many ways, the Triad is already at the center of that fledgling debate.
One statewide environmental group's annual meeting, held in Mocksville last month, focused almost entirely on the issue of a nuclear revival in North Carolina.
Mocksville is near the two Duke properties in the Piedmont Triad -- about 1,600 acres in Davidson County and 1,700 acres in Davie County, both on the Yadkin River. Both sites were purchased in the 1970s as potential sites for power plants.
In the late 1970s, the company considered building three nuclear reactors on the Davie County site, and did initial environmental studies, before scrapping its plans in the early 1980s.
Duke officials say they abandoned plans for the plant because electricity demand fell short of their estimates, but opposition groups say public outcry played a role.
As speculation mounts that the Davie site is being considered again, groups like Clean Water for North Carolina and Citizens Against Perkins (the Davie property is commonly referred to as the Perkins site) are publicly opposing a nuclear plant.
Clean Water members don't think the Yadkin River has enough water to safely meet the cooling needs of a nuclear plant, and its members also are concerned about the effect of low-level radiological releases -- not to mention the potential for a catastrophic event.
The group is pushing for alternatives like conservation and renewable energy. "Conservation is the only truly clean way to improve energy effectively," said Hope Taylor Guevara, executive director of Clean Water.
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National Forum
December 05, 2005
Nuclear power: no solution to climate change
By Jim Green -
2005 has seen the Federal Government reverse its position on climate change, accepting that its impact is severe and serious, and that fast action is imperative.
But the government has diverted attention away from real solutions and Australia´s poor performance on curbing emissions by insisting that Australia consider domestic nuclear power generation. In short, the government proposes something which is currently illegal, inordinately expensive, relying on government-subsidised capital investments and too slow to respond to the immediate challenge of climate change. Now Brendan Nelson and Ian Macfarlane (science and industry and resources ministers) want to waste more time and money on a high level inquiry into the feasibility of a nuclear power industry in Australia.
The nuclear debate has been based on a false claim: that nuclear power is “greenhouse-free’. Significant emissions are produced at every stage of the nuclear fuel cycle - nuclear power can only reduce greenhouse gas emissions in comparison with fossil fuels, rather than renewable energy sources and energy efficiency. As a method of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, nuclear power is further limited because it is used almost exclusively for electricity generation, which is responsible for less than one third of global greenhouse gas emissions. A doubling of nuclear power output by 2050 would only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about five per cent - less than one tenth of the reductions required to stabilise atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases.
Nuclear power relies on an exhaustible energy source. High-grade, low-cost uranium ores are limited and will be exhausted in about 50 years at the current rate of consumption. The estimated total of all conventional uranium reserves is thought to be sufficient for about 200 years at the current rate of consumption. But in a scenario of nuclear expansion, these reserves will be depleted more rapidly. Most of the Earth's uranium is found in very poor grade ores, and recovery of uranium from these ores is likely to be considerably more greenhouse intensive.
And to this problem we must add the risk of accidents at nuclear plants; routine releases of radioactive gases and liquids, the intractable problem of nuclear waste and risks of terrorism and sabotage.
Safety concerns at reactors are not limited to the ex-Soviet states. For example, the Japanese nuclear power industry has been in turmoil since revelations in August 2002 of 29 cases of false reporting on the inspections of cracks in numerous reactors. There have also been a number of serious accidents, some of them fatal, at nuclear reactors and other nuclear facilities in Japan in the past decade.
Commercial pressures and inadequate regulation have clearly played some part in the flawed safety standards in Japan. Such pressures are by no means unique to Japan; they will intensify if liberalisation of electricity markets proceeds.
Furthermore, there´s another hazard associated with nuclear power expansion on a global scale and it´s of such concern that alone it must lead to a rejection of the nuclear proposal. As the government plans to increase Australian uranium exports, it´s time we considered the established pattern of “peaceful’ nuclear facilities being used for nuclear weapons research and production.
The proliferation problem is profound:
• of the 60 countries which have built nuclear power or research reactors, over 20 are known to have used their “peaceful’ nuclear facilities for covert weapons research and or production;
• four or five countries have produced nuclear arsenals under cover of a “peaceful’ nuclear program - Israel, India, South Africa, Pakistan, and possibly North Korea. Others have come close - most notably Iraq from the 1970s until the 1991 Gulf War;
• nuclear power programs also provide pools of expertise for weapons programs in the five major nuclear weapons states - the US, Russia, the UK, France and China. These five countries account for almost 60 per cent of global nuclear power output;
• the “peaceful’ nuclear power industry has produced sufficient plutonium to produce about 160,000 nuclear weapons, each with a yield similar to the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If 99 per cent of this plutonium is indefinitely safeguarded against military use - a monumental challenge - the remaining plutonium would suffice to produce 1,600 nuclear weapons. Australian uranium has resulted in the production of over 78 tonnes of plutonium - sufficient for about 7,800 nuclear weapons, and
• the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has considered a scenario involving a ten-fold increase in nuclear power over this century and calculated that this could produce 50,000 - 100,000 tonnes of plutonium. The IPCC concluded that the security threat would be "colossal".
• The International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) safeguards system still suffers from flaws and limitations despite improvements over the past decade. Statements from the IAEA and US President George W. Bush about the need to limit the spread of enrichment and reprocessing technology and to establish multinational control over sensitive nuclear facilities, are an effective acknowledgement of the limitations of the international non-proliferation system.
The NPT enshrines an “inalienable right’ of member states to all “civil’ nuclear technologies, including dual-use technologies with both peaceful and military capabilities. In other words, the NPT enshrines the “right’ to develop a nuclear weapons threshold or breakout capability.
Nuclear smuggling - much of it from civil nuclear programs - presents a significant challenge. The IAEA's Illicit Trafficking Database records over 650 confirmed incidents of trafficking in nuclear or other radioactive materials since 1993. In 2004 alone, almost 100 such incidents occurred. Smuggling can potentially provide fissile material for nuclear weapons or a wider range of radioactive materials for use in “dirty bombs’.
Civil nuclear plants are potentially attractive targets for terrorist attacks because of the importance of the electricity supply system in many societies, the large radioactive inventories in many facilities and of the potential or actual use of “civil’ nuclear facilities for weapons research or production.
The problem of radioactive waste management is nowhere near resolution. Not a single repository exists anywhere in the world for the disposal of high-level waste from nuclear power. Only a few countries - such as Finland, Sweden and the US - have identified potential sites for a high-level waste repository.
The legal limit for the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain in the US is less than the projected output of high-level waste from the reactors currently operating in the US. If global nuclear output was increased three-fold, new repository storage capacity equal to the legal limit for Yucca Mountain would have to be created somewhere in the world every three to four years. With a ten-fold increase in nuclear power, new repository storage capacity equal to the legal limit for Yucca Mountain would have to be created somewhere in the world every single year.
Whatever Bob Hawke might think on the matter, attempts to establish international repositories are likely to be as unpopular and unsuccessful as Pangea Resources´ bid to win support for such a repository in Australia. Pangea abandoned its proposal in 2002.
Synroc - the ceramic waste immobilisation technology developed in Australia - seems destined to be a permanently “promising’ technology. As even nuclear advocate Leslie Kemeny concedes, Synroc "... showed great early promise but so far its international marketing and commercialisation agendas have failed".
Enough of the bad news: renewable energy, mostly hydroelectricity, already supplies 19 per cent of world electricity, compared to nuclear's 16 per cent. The share of renewables is increasing, while nuclear's share is decreasing. Wind power and solar power are growing by 20-30 per cent every year. In 2004, renewable energy added nearly three times as much net generating capacity as nuclear power. (In Australia, only 8 per cent of electricity is from renewable energy - down from 10 per cent in 1999.)
The biggest gains are to be made in the field of energy efficiency. Energy experts have projected that adopting a national energy efficiency target could reduce the need for investment in new power stations by between 2,500 - 5,000 MW by 2017 in Australia (equal to about 2-5 large nuclear power stations). The energy efficiency investments would pay for themselves in reduced bills before a nuclear power station could generate a single unit of electricity.
The Australian Ministerial Council on Energy has identified that energy consumption in the manufacturing, commercial and residential sectors could be reduced by 20-30 per cent with the adoption of current commercially available technologies with an average payback of four years.
A July 2002 study by The Australia Institute (pdf file 139KB) maps out a plan to achieve a 60 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in Australia by 2050. The study envisages widespread energy efficiency measures, a major expansion of wind power, modest growth of hydroelectricity, significant use of biomass and niche applications for solar photovoltaic electricity.
And in 2004, the Clean Energy Future Group - which comprises renewable energy companies and the Worldwide Fund for Nature - produced a report which details how major greenhouse gas emissions reductions can be achieved. It finds that Australia can meet our energy needs and halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2040 using a range of commercially-proven fuels and technologies. The study envisages the following energy mix by 2040: natural gas providing 30 per cent; biomass from agriculture and plantation forestry residues, 26 per cent; wind, 20 per cent; photovoltaic and solar thermal systems, 5 per cent; hydroelectricity, 7 per cent; while coal and petroleum continue to play a minor role in electricity generation.
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Las Vegas SUN
December 04, 2005
Critics tackle a mountain of comments on Yucca
By Benjamin Grove
<grove@lasvegassun.com>
Las Vegas Sun
WASHINGTON -- Yucca Mountain has been the focus of controversies big and small . Call the latest Commentgate. At issue: Just how many public comments were submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency about its draft radiation standard for the proposednuclear waste repository?
The EPA is reviewing the comments before making the proposed standard final . The agency had posted 186 comments as of Friday (the comment d is over). But several Yucca activists say there are far more than that.
Five of the comments are marked as "mass comment campaigns" organized by anti-Yucca groups including Citizen Alert in Nevada and the Washington-based Nuclear Information and Resource Service, in which people signed identical postcards and e-mails. A total of 2,259 people took part in the campaigns. Citizen Alert leader Peggy Maze Johnson said the EPA should count each as an individual comment even if they are identical, which would mean an overwhelming majority of the comments opposed the standard.
Another controversy: The EPA had posted the public comments on its Web site until last weekend when the posts suddenly disappeared, prompting Yucca critics to wonder if their criticisms had been trashed already.
Conspiracy? No, the EPA said. Just bureaucracy.
The comments were moved to a government documents clearing house at www.regulations.gov. But the comments last week were not easily found. Users must navigate a complex search and they must know to type in the Yucca docket ID number -- OAR-2005-0083 -- into the Web sites search engine.
"Its just nuts," Johnson said.
"They dont make it easy to be an informed or concerned citizen."
An EPA spokeswoman apologized for moving the comments without notice and for the comments being so hard to find. "Sometimes there are a few glitches in the system," spokeswoman Suzanne Ackerman said.
The Politics of Iraq
The House returns to Washington this week after a Thanksgiving recess amid heightened political tensions over Iraq (the Senate is due back next week). As expected, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., continued to trade barbs with Republicans during the holiday break. After a widely anticipated Bush speech at the Naval Academy last week, Reid said the president had "missed an opportunity to lay out a real strategy for success in Iraq that will bring our troops safely home."
The Republican National Committees research department fired an e-mail about Reid to reporters under the heading "Senator Sieve." It contained the words of conservative columnist John Fund who blasted Reid for telling a Nevada television news program that he had been informed that Osama bin Laden was killed in the Pakistan earthquake.
"Heres hoping al-Qaida figures arent soon appearing on Al Jazeera television chortling about the clueless Mr. Reid," Fund wrote.
Reids PR Machine
As an extension of Reids communications war room efforts, Senate Democrats have primed their public relations operation in advance of a muchanticipated roll-out of a sweeping new party agenda expected in January, Roll Call reported. The plan includes a new media booking effort to get more Senate Democrats on radio and cable television talk shows to compete with Republicans, the Capitol Hill newspaper reported. Democratic leaders are keeping careful notes about who appears and who doesnt -- 32 senators appeared on 175 cable shows and 73 radio programs between Oct. 3 and Nov. 18, aides to Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., told Roll Call.
There is overt pressure to join the effort: Democratic senators at a weekly party lunch are subjected to a "highlight" video of senators who best delivered the party message in speeches and interviews that week.
Waste Reprocessing Concerns
Some prominent scientists and public policy experts are shocked that some members of Congress are giddy over the prospects of "reprocessing," or recycling, nuclear waste. Congress this year set aside $50 million to research the controversial technology that removes plutonium from waste and could reduce the toxicity of waste bound for Yucca Mountain.
The process has not been used in this country largely because of fears of whether the plutonium could fall into the hands of terrorists. Some experts outside Congress say there is no reason to pursue the technology. Last week a three-member panel at a Federation of American Scientists conference in Washington said reprocessing is expensive, unnecessary, and undermines U.S. efforts to reduce proliferation of nuclear material.
The government is going to have a difficult time telling other countries not to reprocess if it kickstarts its own program, said Steve Fetter, dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.
It would be "catastrophic" to U.S. nonproliferation policy, agreed Frank N. von Hippel, co-director of the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University. "It certainly doesnt make economic sense," he added.
Reprocessing is being wrongly viewed by some as a solution to the "political problem" that is Yucca Mountain, said Ernest Moniz, head of the Physics Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also added that there was no "technical pressure" to put waste underground at Yucca, just political pressure. The panel members generally agreed that storing waste at above-ground interim waste sites was a good waste solution.
Benjamin Grove can be reached at (202) 662-7436 or at grove@lasvegassun.com.
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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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