Yucca Mountain News Clips
Sunday, December 18, 2005
---------------------------
Salt Lake Tribune
December 18, 2005
Utah gains ally in nuclear waste fight
Cedar Mountain: Heavy lobbying wins vital support for the wilderness area
By Robert Gehrke
The Salt Lake Tribune
WASHINGTON - As late as Thursday afternoon, the prognosis was grim for Utah's bid to create a wilderness area at Cedar Mountain aimed at preventing a nuclear waste storage site in the state.
Nevada Republican Sen. John Ensign was dead set against it and refused to budge. Without some give on his end, the measure would once again go down in defeat, as it had repeatedly since 2000.
But in a series of meetings Thursday, culminating in a private conference between Ensign and Utah Republicans Sen. Orrin Hatch and Rep. Rob Bishop, the Nevada senator relented. Ensign was finally convinced that the Utah delegation would work with Nevada to find alternatives to storing waste beneath Yucca Mountain, Nev., where the federal government wants to create a permanent disposal facility that is adamantly opposed by the state of Nevada.
The deal allowed Utah to land its most significant legislative blow to date against Private Fuel Storage's plan to store 44,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation for as long at 40 years, although a spokeswoman for PFS says the consortium can simply truck the waste down the highway to Skull Valley.
Approval of the wilderness measure was the culmination of a year of intensive politicking by the state's delegation, backed by GOP Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., environmental groups, House leaders and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
Backers say the wilderness provision also preserves the Air Force's access to the Utah Test and Training Range, which could have been impeded if nuclear waste were placed in the flight path of fighter jets.
"We have protected the airspace around the range, we have put a big crimp in this plan, but we haven't finished the process, and we've done wilderness the right way," Bishop said.
The Cedar Mountain Wilderness proposal had passed the House with little opposition in the past, only to be stymied in the Senate. When Bishop introduced the House bill again in April, Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, said he expected it to fail in the Senate again.
But Friday, Bennett said there was "a different atmosphere over here" in the Senate, in part because of a push for nuclear power that changed attitudes about finding different solutions to the waste issue as a way of breaking the current stalemate.
It also was due in part to overtures from Huntsman and Bennett to Reid, who had fought the Cedar Mountain wilderness bill in the past, angered by the Utah senators' support of Yucca. Leavitt on Yucca???
"We reached out to a number of folks and found, at least on the Senate side, a new willingness to address issues that in previous congresses we couldn't move across the goal line," said Bennett.
On Labor Day, Huntsman met with Reid in his Capitol office, making one in a series of overtures to the senator by offering to work with Reid in opposing plans to store nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain.
In the following days, Bennett also approached Reid, offering to reverse his support for Yucca Mountain and endorsing Reid's plan to store the nuclear waste near the reactors that generated it.
A few weeks later, Bennett stood on the floor of the Senate, making an extraordinary public admission that he erred in his Yucca vote. He was followed by the rest of the Utah delegation excepting Hatch, who said it would be wrong to kick the Bush administration in the teeth.
On Nov. 8, Reid issued a statement saying he no longer opposed the Cedar Mountain proposal. In fact, Reid had been quietly working behind the scenes at that point, trying to sway Ensign and the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Michigan Sen. Carl Levin.
The Reid statement came just as the Senate began debating the defense bill and the Utah delegation was intensifying its lobbying effort, focusing mainly on Levin and Sen. John Warner, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Warner, R-Va., was a key piece of the puzzle. With the House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., and top Democrat on the committee, Missouri Rep. Ike Skelton, on board, and Reid making the case to Levin, Warner was the last crucial piece. Support from three of the so-called "Big Four" would assure Cedar Mountain's passage.
Arrangements were made for Warner's daughter, who works for an environmental group, to weigh in with her father in support of the measure. Bennett and Hatch made repeated overtures to the senator.
In mid-November, Bennett again approached Warner on the Senate floor after a vote. Warner seemed almost exasperated with Bennett's repeated requests, and told his Utah colleague that he would "help us in every way he could," Bennett said.
But then about a week later, a Friday evening, things began to unravel for Utah.
Warner's support had evaporated, caving to the opposition from Ensign, and Reid's work to bring Levin on board slid backwards. That made winning over Ensign the key to success.
The delegation hit the panic button. Huntsman wiped out his schedule and flew to Washington.
Pressure was put on the House members to stand tough against the senators and not back down on Cedar Mountain.
Compromise language was drafted to try to win back Warner and appease Ensign, but the Nevada senator was standing firm.
Bennett had written to the Air Force earlier, hoping an endorsement from Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne might help the cause. Hatch called White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card on Dec. 5 to expedite the letter, which was sent to the Utah senators and Warner and Levin the next day.
"That letter was a key letter that opened the door for us to win on this," Hatch said.
In it, Wynne said the Cedar Mountain wilderness would not create new restrictions on the Air Force's use of the Utah Test and Training Range, near the Skull Valley reservation, and that the bill would address the Air Force's concerns about the PFS plan.
The letter bolstered the state's argument that a bill that essentially creates wilderness and restricts use of BLM lands, also had a military component and belonged in the defense bill.
In the last two weeks of the House and Senate meetings, the status of the Cedar Mountain language changed hourly. It was in, then out, then partly in, then all out. Most of the signs from the conference made the outcome appear bleak, but Utah members of Congress said they would keep fighting.
The one advantage they had was that a fight between the White House and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., over his effort to ban torture of captives dragged out negotiations on the defense bill for more than two weeks, a stroke of luck that gave Utah delegates time to press their case.
But when McCain and the White House struck a deal Thursday, there was new urgency to get Cedar Mountain resolved before it was cast aside. Hatch and Ensign had a series of discussions.
The breakthrough was reached late Thursday, in a meeting in Hatch's Capitol hideaway office. Hatch wouldn't discuss what prompted Ensign to change his mind.
Ensign's spokesman, Jack Finn, said, "We have the Utah delegation's commitment to working with us to finding alternatives to Yucca Mountain on nuclear waste storage and we're very happy to have that ally."
Despite the dramatic, and once improbable victory, Bishop said the PFS proposal is by no means buried.
"We have put a big nail in the coffin but it's not dead yet," Bishop said. "We still must dedicate ourselves to working forward to make sure we kill it once and forever."
---------------------------
North County Times
December 18, 2005
Peak oil piques energy concern
Denis Devine
Staff Writer
The high natural gas prices on most Americans' minds this winter may be the least of our worries when it comes to energy. What if oil itself, the lubricant and fuel that keeps our entire industrialized world running, is running out?
I spent a few days recently among some of the sharper editorial writers in the country listening to people with high-voltage expertise in energy. This gathering hosted by the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism at the University of Maryland convinced me that not only do I need to know much more about our nation's energy outlook ---- you do, too. Because when it comes to paying for energy, the choices awaiting us promise only to get tougher.
Coastal drilling coming
How much, for instance, are we willing to pay to keep our ocean horizons free from oil derricks or wind farms? Those old platforms off Santa Barbara helped launch (and somehow survived) the environmental movement, but a perennial push to make more of them gushed onto Capitol Hill this year. Industry ambitions to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge may get the most ink and airtime, but offshore drilling is much closer to home for Californians. The Republicans running Congress retreated from their recent effort to open the outer continental shelf to new oil exploration, but it was only a temporary victory for those who value unspoiled ocean vistas.
"We need to drill in the outer continental shelf because that's where the oil is," John Felmy, chief economist for the American Petroleum Institute, told the assembled editorialists.
Echoing Felmy's vision of inevitable offshore drilling was Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, who offered the seminar's rosiest outlook for the United States' energy future. Matthew Simmons, an investment banker whose well-researched pessimism about the abundance of Mideast oil reserves has rocked the energy industry, sung a similar tune.
Hearing otherwise conflicting voices agree that new rigs off California's coast is a matter of when, not if, helped drive home the urgency of the coming oil scarcity.
Scaling the peak
We've long known that oil is a finite resource. But with the modern world so deeply indebted to the amazing energy captured in "black gold," our society has failed to prepare for a post-oil economy. Sure, you hear occasional sputters about "renewable energy alternatives" and that "hydrogen economy" hype of some years back, but no alternative fuel source is yet prepared ---- or even close to ready ---- to pick up the slack should the world's oil wells begin to run dry, or at least dry up faster than new reserves can be found. But that's exactly what a growing cadre of oil geologists say is beginning to happen.
They use a geological term ---- "peak oil" ---- to describe the historical moment when the world's oil production stops growing and begins to decline. The United States reached its peak oil production in 1970. Since then, we've been relying on an increasing tide of imported oil to meet demand that has increased an average of about 1.7 percent per year for the last two decades.
But at some point, those foreign wells ---- mostly in the Middle East ---- will start to run dry as well. Oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia, which has 22 percent of the world's known reserves, say that peak won't come for decades. Optimistic oil-industry analysts say technology advances could push that date even further into the future. Today's high prices should spur conservation among consumers, this viewpoint holds, plus more exploration and production from oil companies and OPEC nations.
Saudi estimates questioned
Yet many experts are issuing far more pessimistic forecasts for future oil production. Their books ---- with provocative titles like "Twilight in the Desert," "Beyond Oil," "The Coming Oil Crisis," and "Out of Gas" ---- are proliferating as their views gain wider acceptance within academic, industry and government circles. These peak-oil predicters, including some of the world's most respected petroleum geologists, say that global oil production is at or will soon reach the point at which reservoirs can't produce increasing quantities of oil, and the impending scramble for the world's most important resource will severely test the global economy and world peace. To these Cassandras, it may be too late to invest in renewable energy replacements or some miracle new energy source to stave off global disaster. Where optimists see a commodity controlled by markets, pessimists point to geological limits on the amount of oil available to us.
Simmons, who advised President Bush's 2000 presidential campaign on energy policy, has catalyzed the debate over peak oil with his rigorous and highly skeptical analysis of Saudi Arabia's estimated 260 billion barrels of proven reserves. Just how much oil actually lies beneath Saudi soil is among the world's most closely held state secrets, but Simmons isn't content to take the Saudi royal family's word.
"It's the world's most incredible illusion, that the Middle East has a limitless supply of oil," Simmons said.
Instead, Simmons' research into long-overlooked engineering reports revealed that Saudi oil fields probably don't contain the vast reserves of recoverable oil that the kingdom would have the world believe ---- a charge the Saudis scoff at. But no giant oil fields have been discovered lately that compare to the reservoirs the Saudis have been tapping for decades; the Houston Chronicle recently reported that 2005 will finish as the worst year for oil exploration success in the history of the industry.
Another seminar speaker, Ronald R. Cooke of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, put it this way: "Drilling more does not help; world consumption now exceeds new discoveries by more than 2 to 1."
Prices won't retreat
What could this mean for the United States? The seminar's dizzying array of experts offered a range of predictions, many of them dire. Simmons, for instance, thinks that we'll be looking back on $60 and $70 per barrel oil prices the way we now reflect longingly on the $3 per barrel common in the 1960s.
Nor do natural gas prices figure to return to the low levels of the 1990s. As more electricity-generating plants that burn natural gas have come on line, they've eliminated the summer off-season that traditionally allowed prices to retreat after the highs of winter. While China and India have emerged as real competitors for global oil supplies, so has much of the world begun bidding against us for squeezed natural gas supplies ---- compounding the U.S.' difficulty in making up the hurricane-driven shortfall earlier this year.
Investment in new oil exploration and refineries has lagged too long. Historically volatile energy prices have scared off venture capitalists, and U.S. oil companies sank their profits into buying up their rivals in mergers, not digging new wells or building new refineries. Simmons figures we are somewhere between two to four decades behind in investing for a stable energy future. The cost to catch up, he said, could run to the trillions.
"Someone will have to belly up to the bar to spend somewhere between $16 trillion and much more, two to three times that," he said. "We need to urgently figure out how to reinvest and remodel our energy infrastructure."
Conservation conversion
We will also have to get serious about conservation. I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry when Secretary Bodman's staffers handed out the Energy Department's bold new initiative: a pamphlet of energy-saving tips of the kind that SDG&E has been mailing its customers for years. But this represented a measure of progress for an administration whose No. 2, Dick Cheney, famously said conservation "may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy." That was in spring 2001, as we Californians were setting records for energy conservation under the gun of rolling blackouts.
Efficiency advocate Kateri Callahan, president of the Alliance to Save Energy, touted a host of promising signals she says indicate that our nation is coming around to conservation. Producers of insulation, which energy savers recommend be wrapped around hot water heaters and stuffed into attics, can't keep up with demand and are rationing their products to vendors, she said.
Callahan may have offered the most favorable assessment of the energy bill President Bush signed in August. The bill came in for a shellacking from almost all of the seminar's speakers, but Callahan noted the high priority it gave to energy efficiency. Callahan predicted that the bill's standards for appliance efficiency could save 10 percent of the expected U.S. energy demand by 2020 if Congress doled out the necessary dough.
And there's the rub. Even the best elements of the much-maligned energy bill won't do much if Congress doesn't pony up the cash. It's not just conservation programs that have gotten short shrift: One of the bill's most popular changes ---- approval to double the size of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, a lifeline for poor folks unable to pay skyrocketing natural gas and home-heating oil bills ---- means little until Congress comes up with the cash.
Alternatives
Conservation alone won't be able to meet U.S. energy demand as oil discoveries fall increasingly behind consumption. Rushing to fill that yawning gap are a variety of alternatives that appeal to very different constituencies and promise to fill different needs: "unconventional" oil sources, like oil or tar sands and oil shale; nuclear power, like that generated at San Onofre; and renewable energy sources like wind, solar, geothermal and biomass.
Oil fuels so much of modern life ---- everything from agricultural fertilizers to plastics to home heating ---- that it's as easy to take for granted as air. But it will be hardest to replace in transportation, so the global oil industry is rapidly turning to unconventional sources for more of the same petroleum.
The upside is that our ally Canada is the "Saudi Arabia of tar sands," while the United States boasts the world's richest known reserves of oil shale within its borders. The downside is that it takes a lot of energy to extract the energy locked within these deposits. What's more, the extraction is terrible for the environment ---- oil production from tar sands in Canada has created a toxic soup that is stored in big ponds held in check by the world's largest earthen dam.
Expansion at nuclear plants
For the rest of the energy picture, we have far more alternatives at our disposal.
The Bush administration is bullish on nuclear power helping meet rising demand for electricity. The August energy bill backed nukes in a big way, authorizing loan guarantees for up to six new nuclear power plants. That tracks with Energy Department estimates released Monday that call for at least six new reactors to be built after 2014. Analysts at the seminar said they expected a "new nuclear initiative" to be announced by the Bush administration in January. Bodman was already selling nuclear power as the best way for us to keep up with electricity demand that is expected to rise 50 percent over the next 20 years.
"We need nuclear power; in my opinion, it's the only way to do it," said the energy secretary.
But while the federal government has fallen back in love with nuclear power, local communities haven't. So if your community is lucky/unlucky enough to already have a nuclear power plant nearby, expect that plant to expand its capacity.
Just Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission gave the green-light to Southern California Edison to replace aging steam generators at the San Onofre facility. Such repairs and upgrades at existing nuclear plants are the path of least NIMBY resistance.
Joseph Kelliher, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said as much when he cited statistics that he said showed community resistance to a nuclear plant drops after the plant has been operating for a decade.
"Adding units at existing sites is a solution to overcoming public opposition," Kelliher said.
How to store the accumulating toxic waste, with the permanent storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada still a distant and controversial goal, is still a path with much resistance.
Renewing hope
Most everyone looking at our growing need for electricity is energized by renewable power sources ---- wind, solar and the like. But even their most enthusiastic supporters don't pretend that their preferred alternative is close to ready to pick up the slack after "peak oil." A lot of research and development still must be done to make energy from renewable sources faintly approximate efficiency of the power-packed petroleum modern society relies on.
Secretary Bodman's "favorite" renewable energy source ---- solar power ---- is also popular in sunny Southern California. Solar got a boost on Tuesday when California's Public Utilities Commission proposed more than $3 billion in consumer rebates to slap photovoltaic panels on more than 1 million homes, businesses and public buildings over the next 11 years. If it sounds familiar, the PUC's California Solar Initiative is Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Million Solar Roofs Initiative reborn. Backers hope this version survives the challenge from construction unions that sank the governor's bill in the Legislature.
Wind is perhaps the most promising of the renewable sources, yielding the most energy compared to the energy invested in production. To our south, the Kumeyaay tribe on the Campo reservation is expected to bring an $80 million wind project on line any day now that could power 50,000 homes in San Diego County. Providing such wind power is also one of the power points Sempra Energy, SDG&E's parent company, is using to sell the public on the new Sunrise Powerlink transmission line it wants to string through the eastern flank of North County.
Trouble on the horizon
But will it be enough? Or are we getting serious about alternative energy sources too late to save us from economic collapse? I don't know; colleagues who have weathered more energy scares and doomsday scenarios don't seem half as perturbed.
After the seminar, I briefly returned home to the south shore of Long Island, N.Y. The local utility, Long Island Power Authority, wants to erect 33 windmills between three and six miles offshore Jones Beach. Friends who even now are braving the frigid surf are mobilizing to squash the project, which they believe will ruin the aesthetic value of a still somehow gorgeous coastline. Another wind-power project proposed for Nantucket Sound has met similar opposition ---- noted environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote a scathing op-ed in Friday's New York Times.
If we are nearing peak oil, and energy prices continue to skyrocket, will this concern for aesthetics seem as quaint as the $3 barrel of oil? The same question holds true on this coast: How long will California's resistance to offshore oil drilling withstand triple-digit oil prices?
Michael C. Moore, a member of the California Energy Commission during the energy crisis of 2000-2001, recalled at the seminar that the supply-strapped state relied on coal-fired power plants to make up our electricity shortfall. In only three and four hours of operation, those plants exceeded their air quality permits for an entire year, he said.
If another energy crisis comes, will our environmental concerns go up in smoke again?
Contact staff writer Denis Devine at (760) 740-5415 or ddevine@nctimes.com.
---------------------------
Miami Herald
December 18, 2005
NUCLEAR POWER
Power and peril
FPL and the rest of the nuclear power industry are running out of room to store radioactive waste, while critics fret about risk of attacks or accidents.BY CURTIS MORGANcmorgan@herald.com
Every 18 months, Florida Power & Light engineers load fresh fuel into one of the twin nuclear reactors at Turkey Point.
What they take out is the problematic byproduct of making electricity by splitting atoms -- some 30 tons of metal rods packed with uranium pellets, depleted fuel that will remain lethally radioactive for eons.
It is the world's most hazardous waste, and FPL, along with the nation's nuclear power industry, is running out of room to store it.
Deep pools of water where waste has been stored for three decades are nearly full at both Turkey Point, along south Biscayne Bay, and FPL's St. Lucie County plant, on Hutchinson Island.
With a national disposal site in Nevada a decade overdue and so mired in controversy that it may never be built, FPL either has to find new storage or shut down the reactors that power more than a million homes.
So, as early as next year at St. Lucie and by 2007 at Turkey Point, FPL will start to load waste into thick concrete and steel canisters called dry casks, which are used at 30 other plants around the nation.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the nuclear power industry call the casks a safe solution to waste that nobody wants -- at least until a permanent facility is approved, somewhere, someday.
''Dry cask storage is not only viable, but proven,'' said Robert Tomonto, an engineer supervisor at Turkey Point.
Nuclear critics acknowledge that the new system may be an upgrade over brimming storage pools. But they question their vulnerability to terrorist attacks or plant accidents. More broadly, they fear that Turkey Point and other plants will wind up as permanent dumps for ever-expanding stockpiles, ratcheting up risk factors to surrounding communities.
Eventually, FPL projects that Turkey Point could have as many as 54 casks -- each resembling a 20-foot-tall concrete thermos -- on the grounds. St. Lucie, with larger reactors and different fuel rods, could need more than twice as many.
''It's not a good place to keep it there, and it's not a good idea to move it around,'' said Mark Oncavage, a longtime anti-nuclear activist with the Sierra Club in Miami. ``It's an entire failure mode of what to do with nuclear waste, and it's a big bucket of worms.''
TURKEY POINT'S ORIGIN
Turkey Point, Florida's oldest nuclear power plant, went on line in 1972. St. Lucie cranked up in 1976.
Like most plants, they were never intended to hold decades' worth of what the industry prefers to call ''spent'' fuel. They were designed in an era when the federal government envisioned recycling depleted uranium, a plan abandoned over high costs and environmental concerns in 1977.
Instead, the U.S. Energy Department agreed in 1982 to build a federal repository. The site, deep under Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert, was supposed to open in 1998 but has been embroiled in lawsuits, political controversy and scientific debates. Ground has yet to be broken.
As a result, Turkey Point's fuel pools, 40 feet deep but otherwise not much bigger than the average backyard swimming pool, are filled with old fuel rods dating back to when the Miami Dolphins were winning Super Bowls.
Both FPL plants hold large volumes of what the government calls ''high-level'' radioactive waste -- about 2,000 tons between them, roughly 2 percent of the national total. FPL projects that the waste from Turkey Point's two reactors will run out of space in the storage pools in 2010 and 2012, St. Lucie's two reactors by 2007 and 2010.
In April, a National Academy of Sciences panel released a largely classified report echoing many activists' concerns and calling for evaluating waste storage nationwide.
Critics say the waste poses a number of potential threats. Small amounts of it could be used to create ''dirty bombs'' and spread low levels of radiation. Accidental radiation releases also could taint groundwater, a particular concern in South Florida.
But the single biggest worry is the vulnerability of pools to an attack or accident that could drain the demineralized water cooling the hot material, allowing heat to spike enough to ignite the fuel rods.
Under a worst-case scenario, such a ''cladding fire'' could release enough radioactivity to contaminate miles of surrounding environment and kill or sicken thousands, said David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists, which monitors the industry.
''Many spent-fuel pools have eight, nine times as much fuel as whatever is in the reactor at one time,'' Lochbaum said. ``It can still get hot enough to either melt down or catch on fire if compromised.''
Rachel Scott, nuclear communications manager for FPL, said critics dramatically overstate risks and ignore an unblemished record of waste storage.
Cooling pools, with concrete and steel walls five feet thick, are equipped with multiple water-pumping systems and are protected by intense security, she said.
''There has never been an issue with the safety of the fuel pools,'' she said.
FPL engineers say there also should be no safety concerns with dry casks. Though stored outside, they'll be arrayed in the most heavily guarded zones at both plants.
FPL also intends to use the dry casks to handle only the oldest, least radioactive fuel now in the pools. The transfer of the rods takes place underwater, preventing radiation releases, FPL engineers said.
Terry Jones, Turkey Point's site vice president, described the casks, which weigh about 100 tons each -- unloaded -- as tough enough to endure anything from hurricanes to collisions with locomotives.
''They've dropped these from railroad cars onto steel beams and they haven't failed,'' he said.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission considers them safe to hold waste for nearly a century, said David McIntyre, an agency spokesman in Washington.
More than 700 dry casks already are in use around the country, some for 20 years, and the NRC projects that most of the nation's 63 reactor sites will be using them within a decade.
NEW RISKS?
Lochbaum and other critics say they also pose new security risks. The Los Angeles Times, for example, reported this year that a government test showed that a shoulder-fired missile could crack open a cask.
''These things are just parked in the open air in plain sight, and they're concentrated in one location like bowling pins,'' said Kevin Kamps, a nuclear waste specialist with the activist group Nuclear Information and Resource Service in Washington.
Kamps' group, which advocates phasing out nuclear power, doesn't see any good choices.
''We're pulled in different directions on this,'' he said.
Nuclear power proponents defend the casks for short-term use but say they want a long-term solution somewhere.
The industry blames fear-mongering by anti-nuke activists and federal foot-dragging and continues to support Yucca as a sound site.
For a dormant nuclear power industry re-energized by spiraling oil costs and support from the Bush administration to expand, resolving the waste issue could prove crucial.
''One of the favorite strategies of the anti-nuclear movement is trying to block the industry's progress by trying to get us to choke on our waste,'' said Rod McCullum, a senior project manager with the Nuclear Energy Institute. ``The bottom line is it's safe where it is now.''
Utilities, including FPL, have filed 66 lawsuits against the federal government for failing to open the Nevada dump, and are demanding billions they have already paid for its construction -- money from a tenth-of-a-cent surcharge per kilowatt hour collected from consumers.
The NRC's most optimistic projection for opening Yucca is 2010, but few expect that.
Even if Yucca does open, it will take years to move waste, and plants already have more on site than the depository can handle. Given that reality, the industry already has put together a second, also controversial, option -- a massive private dump.
INDIAN RESERVATION
In September, the NRC issued a license to a consortium of utilities, including FPL, to store as many as 4,000 casks on the reservation of the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians, a poor tribe whose sparsely populated site is about 40 miles west of Salt Lake City.
Scott said FPL is evaluating whether it may eventually transfer waste casks there. The move would be more expensive than on-site storage and raise some of the same hot-button issues that have stalled Yucca. Activists also oppose the Utah site and the risk of transporting nuclear material across the county.
Either way, it's clear that the stockpiles at Turkey Point and St. Lucie won't be shrinking anytime soon.
---------------------------
Augusta Chronicle
December 18, 2005
Site wants waste shipped away, but where will it go?
By Josh Gelinas
South Carolina Bureau Chief
There are 49 tanks at Savannah River Site filled with liquid waste so radioactive that direct human contact would prove deadly.
It is among the most contaminated substances in the world, and some of it has been sitting idle at SRS for half a century.
Before month's end, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is expected to rule on a Department of Energy plan to leave lower-level tank wastes on site, allowing the agency to rid the tanks of nuclear sludge gathered over decades of Cold War weapons production.
The milestone order is expected to close more than two years of indecision over how the Energy Department will proceed. It is the result of federal legislation passed in 2004 that basically gave the DOE power to classify waste, usurping a federal lawsuit that tried to stop officials from leaving some leftovers at the nuclear reservation.
With the NRC's blessing, officials say they're optimistic about meeting state deadlines to have many of the tanks emptied by 2022.
"Our ability to meet the time line is directly proportional to our getting approval under the legislation," said Will Davis, a manager over liquid waste for Washington Savannah River Co., the private contractor that runs SRS.
There are other, less-contaminated radioactive by-products at the site that will be shipped away. Still others will be buried there.
The DOE plans to rid the site of Cold War waste by 2025. When it reaches its goals will depend, in large part, on decisions and steps it is taking right now.
The most serious threat is the site's lethal nuclear trash.
"The No. 1 risk to human health is in the high-level waste tanks," said Perry Holcomb, who formerly worked at SRS and now serves on its Citizens Advisory Board, which monitors site activities.
Site officials are performing a juggling act of sorts as they try to empty the tanks and process other high-level hazards at the site, a cycle that inevitably produces more waste.
Time also is a factor because some tanks are in worse shape than others. State officials are monitoring 22 labeled "noncompliant" because they lack a sufficient secondary leak containment system. There are 13 that have a history of leakage.
Though tank levels are dropped below leak sites, other complications have surfaced.
Officials learned recently that construction will be delayed by two years until 2011 on a key cleanup component - a facility called the Salt Waste Processing Facility that would separate high- and low-level wastes from one another.
It's not clear how much the delay could slow the cleaning process - high-level waste that contains large amounts of the radioactivity can be removed and pumped to the Defense Waste Processing Facility in the meantime.
"We're not certain what the implications are," said Shelly Sheritt, a federal facilities liaison with the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, who works directly with SRS officials toward cleaning up the site.
There are Two Facilities at SRS that generated the site's waste. They're called H- and F-Canyon, respectively.
The massive facilities turned depleted and enriched uranium from six nuclear reactors at the site into plutonium or fuel for nuclear reactors. The giant factories were tasked with separating plutonium and enriched uranium from dirty-fission by-products such as cesium and strontium, which amounts to nuclear trash.
The plutonium made its way to nuclear weapons; nuclear fuel made its way to reactors. The waste was siphoned into the tanks that officials are now trying to close.
Today, F-Canyon is being decommissioned, a coup for cleanup officials. H-Canyon, meanwhile, remains active.
Congress and DOE have to decide how to handle 36 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel at SRS, some that was created there and other quantities that were shipped there from around the world. One alternative is reprocessing, or recycling, the fuel through H-Canyon.
The potential problem is that by doing so, additional waste is pumped into the tanks.
"That's what DOE is looking at right now - how to proceed with these," said Rick Ford, a spokesman for the agency at SRS.
Another option is shipping the fuel as-is to the Yucca Mountain geological repository in Nevada, where high-level waste from the site's tanks is destined.
That leads to a potentially larger issue.
Nevada officials went to court and successfully forced the Environmental Protection Agency to extend the projected amount of time Yucca Mountain will remain safe from 10,000 years to 1 million years. Federal funding to the site also has to decrease.
Those are complications with the potential for far-reaching impact at SRS.
"We are hugely dependent on Yucca Mountain being successful," said Bob McQuinn, the deputy chief closure officer for Washington over waste cleanup at SRS.
"Yucca Mountain defined how classification would work," he said, referring to the glass canisters that store high-level tank waste are supposed to be shipped there.
Time is Running Out for the DOE to accomplish some of its existing goals.
The Energy Department plans to start shipping the canisters to Yucca Mountain in 2012, according to the SRS End State Vision document it issued in July.
The document, which outlines how the site will deal with its wastes and hazards into the future, highlights just how much SRS plans to lean on the proposed burial ground. There is no backup burial site listed in the document.
It also states that a portion of spent nuclear fuel will go to Yucca Mountain, in addition to an unspecified amount of plutonium.
And even though the EPA is working to appease Nevada, a political battle looms.
U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, a top-ranking Nevada Democrat, plans to introduce legislation proposing to leave nuclear waste where it sits at DOE and commercial power sites across the country, said Tessa Hafen, a spokeswoman for Mr. Reid. It's safer, she said, than shipping potentially dangerous materials that could fall into the wrong hands or spill en route to the repository.
The selection of Yucca Mountain was an arbitrary process, as was the science used to calculate radioactivity rates in the future, Ms. Hafen said.
"It was a political choice, and Nevada didn't have the powerful senators that we do today," she said.
If it comes down to a political face-off, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., says Mr. Reid lacks the muscle. It was Mr. Graham who shepherded the 2004 Defense Authorization Act through Congress that allowed DOE to classify tank waste in a way that allows them to bury some on site.
He argues that Mr. Reid will be outgunned by the many politicians who represent states that want to ship waste to Yucca.
"If it is not opened in the next decade, we as a nation will have a serious problem," Mr. Graham said.
"We spent billions of dollars on Yucca Mountain. It's now time to use the place."
Some, including Mr. Holcomb, contend that any safety projections thousands of years into the future contain a great deal of uncertainty.
Safety projections for lower-level wastes that will be left at SRS look 10,000 years into the future, a figure that was accepted by the NRC before the Nevada lawsuit. That span is twice as long as mankind's recorded history, the EPA points out.
Without Yucca, the alternative is most likely long-term waste storage at SRS.
Officials want most high-level hazards from the Cold War out of the site by 2020, a goal that ambitiously pre-empts even state deadlines, according to the SRS End State Vision.
There's nothing in the document that spells out what would happen without Yucca.
The oldest of the site's waste tanks are being emptied first to avoid additional leaks. But if Yucca or another repository isn't opened, storage could become an issue.
There is an existing facility that can store 2,500 canisters that contain high-level tank waste after it has been turned into glass, and a second facility with equal capacity is set to open in January.
But the site filled its 2,000th canister with glass at the end of November, and is on pace to fill both storage facilities in eight to 10 years, said Marshall Miller, a chief engineer who works at the site's glass-waste facility. Overall, the site is supposed to fill 5,500 canisters with waste, and that doesn't include potential waste from the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel.
The storage facilities, where the steel canisters are lowered into the ground, are adequate for "at least 50 years," Mr. Miller said. But "it's called an interim storage facility," he added.
Answers to Questions about plutonium storage at SRS also remain murky.
There are an estimated 50 tons of excess across the country, and at least 34 tons of weapons-grade plutonium are destined for SRS from other DOE sites, which will be converted into fuel for commercial nuclear reactors.
But there are 13 more tons at or coming to SRS that aren't clean enough for the conversion process, called mixed-oxide fuel fabrication, or MOX. The site's End State Vision lists no remedy.
There is, however, $10 million set aside in the SRS budget for the study and design of a facility that could package the excess for eventual storage at Yucca, Mr. Ford said.
Still, construction on MOX isn't set to begin until May 2006, and a separate facility that will prepare plutonium for the process also must be constructed. How much of the deadly material already has been shipped to SRS is classified, though a federal report released in July shows that there have been talks about consolidating all of the country's excess plutonium at SRS.
The report, produced by the Government Accountability Office, has fanned concerns that SRS would become a long- term storage facility if the MOX program or Yucca falls through. Aiken County filed a lawsuit earlier this year asking the DOE to stop receiving shipments of plutonium until plans were clarified.
The agency has yet to respond to the suit. But according to a DOE letter in the GAO's report, there is a committee studying the consolidation of plutonium in one place.
"To improve security and reduce costs, DOE plans to establish enough storage capacity in the event it decides to consolidate its non-pit plutonium for interim storage until it can be permanently disposed of in a geologic repository at Yucca Mountain," the report states.
A spokesman at DOE's headquarters in Washington said no decision had been reached on whether to consolidate plutonium at any DOE location.
Mr. Ford said SRS was not authorized to receive any plutonium unsuitable for MOX.
"Is there enough space available? The answer is yes," he said.
There are Risks associated with storing plutonium for the long term at SRS, the GAO report states, namely that canisters that store the material are safe for a "minimum of 50 years" and that current monitoring methods must be improved. It also lists the need for increased security, as plutonium is a terrorist target.
Arjun Makhijani, a scientist with the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research who monitors the nuclear industry, cautioned that if South Carolina is truly concerned about storing hazardous materials, it "ought to advocate a backup, second-level repository" other than Yucca Mountain.
"Right now, the recourse is that it will be at Savannah River forever," he said.
In some respects, the DOE and the nation as a whole are wading into uncharted waters. Projections for plutonium storage and Yucca Mountain alike are based on scientific calculations, not experience.
The nuclear age only came to fruition during the 1950s. And as one observer put it, "we've never stored plutonium for 50 years before."
The DOE's focus has slowly shifted since the Cold War between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union, which unofficially ended in the early 1990s without a shot fired from either side.
The last nuclear reactor at SRS that helped create plutonium was deactivated in 1992. In 2000, the DOE created its Environmental Management Division.
Today, F-Canyon is slowly being dismantled. Recently a yellow crane with a mechanized claw at its end could be seen tearing down a facility adjacent to the canyon that used to produce reactor fuel for naval vessels.
Barrels of low-level wastes, protective suits and materials that came in contact with radioactive materials, are being shipped out of the facility.
Some items will be sent to a burial ground in New Mexico. Less-contaminated items will be buried at SRS.
It's important, some say, that the site has moved ahead to rid itself of lower-level wastes, even if questions remain about more-hazardous quantities.
Although environmentalists remain critical of the DOE's overall attempts to clean up the Cold War legacy, others are more optimistic.
"The emphasis was production of weapons-grade material," said Dave Swale, the vice president of BNG America Savannah River Corp., which handles low-level solid waste.
"The waste was put on one side to be dealt with later," he said. "Now we're dealing with it."
Reach Josh Gelinas at (803) 648-1395, ext. 110, or josh.gelinas@augustachronicle.com.
---------------------------
Washington Post
December 18, 2005
Bush's Fumbles Spur New Talk of Oversight on Hill
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
After a series of embarrassing disclosures, Congress is reconsidering its relatively lenient oversight of the Bush administration.
Lawmakers have been caught by surprise by several recent reports, including the existence of secret U.S. prisons abroad, the CIA's detention overseas of innocent foreign nationals, and, last week, the discovery that the military has been engaged in domestic spying. After five years in which the GOP-controlled House and Senate undertook few investigations into the administration's activities, the legislative branch has begun to complain about being in the dark.
On Friday, after learning that the National Security Agency was eavesdropping on conversations in the United States, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said that the activity was "wrong and it can't be condoned at all," and that his committee "can undertake oversight on it."
That same day, the House approved a resolution that would direct the administration to provide House and Senate intelligence committees with classified reports on the secret U.S. prisons overseas.
Democrats have long complained about a dearth of congressional investigations into Bush administration activities, but their criticism has been gaining validation from others after the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, problems in Iraq and ethical lapses.
Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, said this fall that "the people's representatives over on the Hill in that other branch of government have truly abandoned their oversight responsibilities [on national security] and have let things atrophy to the point that if we don't do something about it, it's going to get even more dangerous than it already is."
In an interview last week, Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, said "it's a fair comment" that the GOP-controlled Congress has done insufficient oversight and "ought to be" doing more.
"Republican Congresses tend to overinvestigate Democratic administrations and underinvestigate their own," said Davis, who added that he has tried to pick up some of the slack with his committee. "I get concerned we lose our separation of powers when one party controls both branches."
Democrats on the committee said the panel issued 1,052 subpoenas to probe alleged misconduct by the Clinton administration and the Democratic Party between 1997 and 2002, at a cost of more than $35 million. By contrast, the committee under Davis has issued three subpoenas to the Bush administration, two to the Energy Department over nuclear waste disposal at Yucca Mountain, and one last week to the Defense Department over Katrina documents.
Some experts on Congress say that the legislative branch has shed much of its oversight authority because of a combination of aggressive actions by the Bush administration, acquiescence by congressional leaders, and political demands that keep lawmakers out of Washington more than before.
"I do not think you can argue today that Congress is a coequal branch of government; it is not," said Lee H. Hamilton, president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman and vice chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, told reporters this month: "It has basically lost the war-making power. The real debates on budget occur not in Congress but in the Office of Management and Budget. . . . When you come into session Tuesday afternoon and leave Thursday afternoon, you simply do not have time for oversight or deliberation."
Last week, Democrats in the House denounced their GOP counterparts for failing to pursue investigations. Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, criticized Chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) for his handling of an inquiry into former committee member Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.), who resigned after acknowledging he took bribes. Hoekstra's decision to proceed with existing committee staff without the House counsel or inspector general "threatens to compromise our ability to conduct a thorough, expeditious and bipartisan investigation," she said.
Democrats demanded that Davis, who heads the select committee investigating the Katrina response, issue subpoenas to get e-mails and communications of White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. and three other White House officials. "Congress will never understand why the federal response failed unless we obtain access to the e-mails and communications of Andrew Card and other senior White House officials," committee Democrats wrote Davis.
Last month, House Democrats tried to pass a measure criticizing the GOP for a "refusal to conduct oversight" of the Iraq war. In the Senate, Democrats forced the chamber into a closed session to embarrass Republicans for foot-dragging on an inquiry into the alleged manipulation of Iraq intelligence.
"The House has absolutely zero oversight. They just don't engage in that," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) said in an interview last week.
Specifically, Democrats list 14 areas where the GOP majority has "failed to investigate" the administration, including the role of senior officials in the abuse of detainees; leaking the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame; the role of Vice President Cheney's office in awarding contracts to Cheney's former employer, Halliburton; the White House's withholding from Congress the cost of a Medicare prescription drug plan; the administration's relationship with Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi; and the influence of corporate interests on energy policy, environmental regulation and tobacco policy.
Meanwhile, the House ethics committee has not opened a new case or launched an investigation in the past 12 months, despite outside investigations involving, among others, Cunningham and former lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
In most cases, Republicans have said that Democrats are motivated by partisanship rather than fact-finding. After Democrats forced the closed Senate session last month over the slow pace of the inquiry into alleged manipulation of Iraq intelligence, Majority Leader Bill Frist (Tenn.) railed: "They have no conviction. They have no principles. They have no ideas. This is a pure stunt."
Among the most visible oversight battles is Davis's Katrina inquiry, which most Democrats have boycotted as a "sham." Davis said he would "bet my reputation" that the committee will disprove doubts.
At times, Davis has been irritated by administration intransigence. At a hearing last month, he condemned the "lack of production of documents from various executive branch offices" and warned: "We're not going to be stonewalled here."
Democrats, who have tried to get Davis to subpoena the White House for Katrina documents, are not impressed. "Republicans have made a mockery of oversight," said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.), the committee's ranking Democrat. "There was nothing too small to be investigated in the Clinton administration and there's nothing so big that it can't be ignored in the Bush administration."
Davis said his reluctance to issue a subpoena is practical. The select committee faces a Feb. 15 deadline, and a subpoena -- even if approved, as required, by the entire House -- would be tied up in court by the administration until the committee's writ had expired. Issuing a subpoena would do nothing "except embarrass" the White House -- which Davis has not ruled out doing. "As of right now, I'm not satisfied" with White House cooperation, he said.
Davis said his Government Reform Committee has investigated the administration's handling of bioterrorism defenses and preparing for avian influenza and held four hearings on Halliburton's contracts -- after the House Armed Services Committee refused to do so. Similarly, Davis called hearings on the administration's policy on mad cow disease after Agriculture Committee Chairman Robert W. Goodlatte (R-Va.) declined.
"They said it would embarrass the administration," Davis said.
---------------------------
NEI
December 15, 2005
Troubled by "Take Title"
I've mentioned in a previous post my interest and background working in used fuel management. So it was with rising concern that I read yesterday an article in the Las Vegas Sun about a bill that was expected to be introduced in Congress regarding the future of Yucca Mountain. Benjamin Grove reported
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and Sen. John Ensign are expected today to unveil long-anticipated legislation that formally proposes their alternative to Yucca Mountain -- leaving waste at the nuclear power plants that produced it.
Now that the bill has been introduced, more information was released today in this article for the Las Vegas Review Journal. The "take-title" scenario would mean that the Department of Energy would take ownership of used nuclear fuel but would leave at the power plant sites rather than continue with the plan of moving it to a repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
I'm disappointed by this proposal.
First, as an engineer, I'm dismayed because it doesn't make sense. The consensus in the international scientific community is that the best option for high level waste is placement in a deep geologic repository. Yucca Mountain has undergone 20 years of exhaustive study to prove its suitability. And while I'm optimistic that the US will develop advanced recycling technologies that will optimize the fuel cycle and reduce the volume of high level waste, recyclying will not obviate the need for a repository. Therefore, there is no logical reason to delay opening Yucca Mountain and abdicate our responsibility to our children and grandchildren.
Second, I'm frustrated as a ratepayer and taxpayer. The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act stipulated that nuclear operators pay into the Nuclear Waste Fund at a rate of $0.001 per kW-hr produced. In return, the federal government would use that money to begin removing fuel from the sites by 1998. Since the government has defaulted on that requirement, utilities are forced to pay for continued storage on site. Of course, that cost shows up in my electric bill as well.
In reality, we ratepayers are already paying twice. And now, according to this article in the Las Vegas Review Journal, money for this proposal would come from the Nuclear Waste Fund. So, not only would this proposal not meet the requirements of the law, it would mean that we will continue to pay twice for the foreseeable future.
The problem with solving the used fuel issue isn't technical and it isn't economics. It's purely political.
---------------------------
NEI
December 16, 2005
Troubled by "Take Title," Part Two
In addition to my concern about the "take title" portion of the bill introduced by Senator Harry Reid I'm disturbed by the proposal to amend the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to require utilities to transfer nuclear fuel from cooling pools into storage casks within six years.
As reported in this article of the Salt Lake Tribune.
Such a proposal clearly stems from a lack of understanding about how used fuel is managed at nuclear power plants.
First, both fuel pools and dry cask storage are robust and safe. After 9/11, the NRC re-evaluated them and concluded that a similar attack would not have a negative effect on public health and safety. Therefore, utilities should be allowed to choose the storage option that is best for their site.
After fuel reprocessing was halted in 1979, many new plants were built with larger pools to handle most, if not all, of the used fuel for the lifetime of the plant. These operators should be allowed to continue on that course without incurring the unnecessary costs of licensing, building, and operating an Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation (ISFSI).
Furthermore, plants that already have, or plan to have, ISFSIs should not be constrained by an arbitrary time limit for pool storage. Heck, some licensed designs currently in use require a minimum of seven years of pool storage before placement in a cask. The time limit is based primarily on heat load. And even for designs that allow earlier placement, it is optimal to have a mix of "old, cold" and "young hot" in any one cask. To constrain the ability of utilities to optimize (heat load, dose to operators, etc) their fuel loading would be unnecessarily costly and foolish.
---------------------------
Deseret News
December 17, 2005
Hatch says his Yucca opposition helps Utah
By Suzanne Struglinski
Deseret Morning News
WASHINGTON — It's four against one in Utah's congressional delegation when it comes to Yucca Mountain, but Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, believes his reluctance to go against the proposed nuclear waste repository in Nevada has kept the Bush White House on Utah's side in fighting Private Fuel Storage.
Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, was selected as a site for permanent storage of nuclear waste. PFS wants to temporarily store such waste in Utah's Goshute Indian reservation in Tooele County's Skull Valley. Both proposals have generated extreme controversy.
"I stick with the administration, which is ultimately the only way to kill this (PFS) project," Hatch said in an interview.
As the five congressional members stood shoulder to shoulder at a press conference Friday announcing the latest turn in the fight against the proposed nuclear waste site planned for Skull Valley, each acknowledged the others' efforts in getting the job done. Hatch praised his colleagues' work but also focused on help from the White House.
"We need to get continued support of this administration to put this issue to bed with regard to Skull Valley once and for all," Hatch said.
House and Senate negotiators approved Rep. Rob Bishop's Cedar Mountain Wilderness Area in the 2006 National Defense Authorization bill. Although the bill still awaits final passage, the Utah Republican is confident it will make it through. The wilderness designation would rob PFS of a preferred site for a rail line to carry waste to the Tooele site.
The House approved Cedar Mountain earlier this year, but it took intense lobbying and a day-by-day effort to convince lawmakers to keep it in. Hatch said the White House sent people to the Hill to discuss the eventual compromise, something that he thinks would not have happened if he opposed Yucca.
In September, Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, made a Senate floor speech withdrawing his support for the proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Hatch and Bennett had voted to move the project forward in 2002.
But Hatch did not withdraw his support, and he says that by sticking with Yucca, which the administration strongly supports, he has been able to get help that will make a difference in the fight against PFS.
"I have never felt good about having to vote for Yucca Mountain, except I understand we need Yucca Mountain," Hatch said in an interview this week.
Bennett's Yucca opposition aligned him with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who strongly opposes Yucca. This also brought him Reid's power to convince Democrats to vote with Utah. Meanwhile, Hatch stuck with the White House, drawing a distinction between the delegation that Hatch says is not going to hurt.
"I decided that I had to work the other side, in spite of criticisms, because if we ever failed just because we were on one side, with one approach, all of us would rue the day," Hatch said.
Hatch said Air Force Secretary Michael Wynn would not have written a letter last week acknowledging that the Cedar Mountain Wilderness Area would help protect the training range, which is operated by Hill Air Force base, had he not worked with the administration.
"That letter was the key letter that opened the door," Hatch said. "Without the administration, this would not have happened. It's very, very difficult to resolve these kinds of issues because there are all kinds of interests and interest groups."
Hatch said the Bureau of Land Management's decision last week to reopen the public comment period on the proposed right-of-way for the PFS rail would not have happened without the administration's support.
When Hatch also announced last week that Xcel Energy was putting a hold on its funding for PFS and Southern Company announced it was dropping its support completely, Hatch emphasized the administration helped bring those moves about, but he would not go into details how. He said his current seniority and his expected future role in the Senate are important in his arguments for the companies to drop out of the PFS plan.
"They know this is important to me, and I am important to them," Hatch said in an interview.
Hatch has taken the lead on working with the companies because he is slated to be Senate Finance Committee Chairman in 2008, if re-elected in 2006 and if the Republicans keep a majority in the Senate. The committee would handle any type of tax that might be imposed on power companies.
Rep. Chris Cannon, R-Utah, said taxes are a big deal to power companies because other costs are fixed and they are running at 110 percent of their capacity.
Hatch said "Reid's side" is covered by the rest of the delegation and his tenure in the Senate will only help him.
"The only way to kill this project is through the administration," Hatch said in an interview.
But Bennett said nothing has changed with the administration since his Yucca switch.
"I have not received a single comment from the administration since I gave my speech," Bennett said. "They have not made any indication whatsoever that they were in any way unhappy."
Bennett said his alliance with Reid helped the language geared to create Cedar Mountain Wilderness Area to remain in the defense bill. He said the language would always pass the House but would never make it in the Senate.
"We've now come to a different time in the Senate, it's a different atmosphere over here," Bennett said.
He emphasized there was a new willingness on behalf of other states to work on this issue. A growing sentiment among some that nuclear waste should be stored where it is created may fuel some rethinking.
E-mail: suzanne@desnews.com
---------------------------
Salt Lake Tribune
December 17, 2005
Utah scores in nuke-dump fight
Skull Valley: The bill would stop a rail line to a proposed nuclear storage site
Wilderness: The bill blocking a rail line to the PFS site clears key panel leaders
By Robert Gehrke
The Salt Lake Tribune
WASHINGTON - Utah's congressional delegation achieved a significant, hard-fought victory Friday in its effort to block a nuclear waste storage site in the state, winning approval of a wilderness area aimed at blocking a rail line that would deliver the waste.
The Cedar Mountain wilderness language was approved by leaders of the House and Senate armed services committees after a weeks-long push by Utah members of Congress who were aided by Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., environmental groups and Nevada Democratic Sen. Harry Reid.
The creation of the 100,000-acre wilderness area would prevent the preferred route for a rail line to the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, where a group of electric utilities known as Private Fuel Storage has won a license to store 44,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste from nuclear power plants until a permanent home is built in Yucca Mountain, Nev.
"It does not take all their potential routes away . . . but it has slowed down the process and made that more difficult to accomplish," said Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah. "We have put a big nail in the coffin, but it's not dead yet and we must dedicate ourselves to working forward to make sure this is killed once and forever."
Backers of the wilderness also say it assures the Air Force will be able to continue to use the Utah Test and Training Range. There was concern that jets would not be able to fly over the waste site to the range, limiting its usefulness.
"This is a significant impediment for Private Fuel Storage's plan to store spent nuclear fuel in Skull Valley and Governor Huntsman is very happy about it," said Mike Lee, counsel to the governor.
PFS has said the wilderness area would not block construction of the site, but would only force the consortium to rely on the riskier option of trucking the waste on the two-lane Skull Valley highway.
"We do have another transportation option. It is not our preferred option, but nevertheless, we can carry spent fuel safely on Skull Valley Road if that's the way the Utah delegation insists it be done," said Sue Martin, PFS spokeswoman. "If we do it that way, it will be done safely."
But changing plans could create headaches for PFS. Bishop said the alternate routes are not "as efficient, effective or easy as the rail spur that was proposed."
"Those roads would be immensely expensive and difficult to do," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. "It would be very expensive and there would be lots of litigation if they want to use that road."
The wilderness language was adopted as part of a broader Defense Department policy bill after the leaders of the House and Senate armed services committees wrapped up differences in the final version of the bill.
Both the House and Senate must give final approval to the bill and it must be signed by the president, but those actions almost certain to happen.
The wilderness legislation appeared to be dead as recently as Thursday.
Nevada Sen. John Ensign, a member of the Senate group negotiating the bill, was steadfastly opposed to it, in part because of ill feelings from Hatch and Sen. Bob Bennett's votes in 2002 supporting construction of Yucca Mountain.
But Hatch, Bishop and Ensign met Thursday in Hatch's office in the Capitol and came to an agreement on the provision. Neither Hatch nor Bishop would say what made Ensign change his mind.
Ensign's spokesman, Jack Finn, said that Ensign "came away convinced that, in the Utah delegation, Nevada has an ally in exploring viable alternatives to the nuclear waste storage issue."
The final language included in the defense bill is actually a somewhat watered-down compromise Bishop's original bill that passed the House. It creates a wilderness area but, unlike the original version, would not impose other restrictions on the use of the federal land surrounding the reservation.
Also, it would leave in place a provision requiring the Air Force to report on how nuclear waste storage might impede the military's use of the Utah Test and Training Range, adjacent to the reservation, before the Bureau of Land Management can approve a rail line to the reservation.
With the wilderness in place, Bishop's original language would have lifted the Air Force's obligation. That would have given the BLM the ability to change its management plan for the area, something it can't currently do.
The inclusion of the Cedar Mountain language marks the culmination of a bid five years ago by Rep. Jim Hansen, who has since retired, to slip wilderness language into the bill.
The Hansen version was opposed by environmental groups, who said it was watered down and would not protect the land, and was blocked by Democrats.
Since then, the Utah members have tried several times to pass Cedar Mountain wilderness legislation as part of the PFS fight. This time, after months of negotiation, Bishop had the backing of environmental groups, who fought for the measure. If it wins final approval as expected, the Cedar Mountain area would be the first wilderness created in Utah since 1984.
"This legislation accomplishes something that's never been done before in Utah - unanimous agreement on a Utah wilderness proposal that truly protects Utah's deserving wilderness," Scott Groene, executive director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said in a statement. "This kind of wilderness agreement was made possible by the years of work that Utah wilderness activists have poured into protecting Utah's redrock country and deserts."
---------------------------
San Diego Union Tribune
December 17, 2005
Wilderness to surround, block proposed nuke waste dump included in key bill
By Jennifer Talhelm
Associated Press
WASHINGTON – A plan to try to prevent development of a temporary nuclear waste storage site with a federal wilderness area designation is now all but a done deal, Utah's congressional lawmakers said Friday.
The agreement, included during negotiations on a defense bill, adds one more roadblock for the proposed facility.
Private Fuel Storage, a group of utilities, wants to store 44,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel above ground on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation, about 50 miles southwest of Salt Lake City near the Utah Test and Training Range. Utah officials vehemently oppose the plan.
In a deal that was years in the making and wrapped up Thursday, Utah lawmakers persuaded senators to add the wilderness provision to an annual defense bill. It would create the 100,000-acre Cedar Mountain Wilderness on the eastern edge of the Great Salt Lake Desert, protecting the Utah Test and Training Range from encroachment and adding one more obstacle for the proposed facility.
Although the site can still be accessed by other routes, the wilderness area would block a rail spur the company hoped to use to deliver waste.
"We have eliminated the preferred route," said Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, who sponsored the measure in the House. "We have put a big nail in the coffin, but it's not dead yet."
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in September authorized a license for Private Fuel Storage, adding urgency to Utah's attempts to stop the proposal.
At a news conference Friday, the five members of the state's delegation promised to keep working to stop the storage site from being developed. They would not elaborate on their plans.
"The Skull Valley project is never going to be built as far as I'm concerned," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. "This is a great step forward."
But Sue Martin, a spokeswoman for Private Fuel Storage, said the company doesn't plan to give up. Nuclear waste could still be brought into the area by rail, then transferred to trucks and delivered to the storage site by a road. But that's a less desirable choice, she said, because the route goes through a more populated area.
"If that's what the Utah delegation wants us to do, then that's what we'll do," she said.
The defense bill is still being finalized, but it is expected to pass the House and Senate and be signed by the president.
In addition to the wilderness designation, other barriers to opening the waste storage facility are already in place:
– The Bureau of Land Management can't amend any land-use plans – needed to approve rights of way to access the site – until the Defense Department studies how wilderness areas on the Utah Test and Training Range affect training readiness. The wilderness designation announced Friday would not affect this requirement.
– The BLM has promised to seek further public comment about the waste proposal as it considers rights of way to the site, also opening up the possibility that the agency will block access.
– Four of the eight members of utilities' group have suspended their funding for the project, primarily because it no longer meets their needs.
The wilderness area was first proposed by former Rep. Jim Hansen. The proposal originally created a ban on rights of way in the area, essentially creating a moat around the Goshute reservation. That provision was removed from the final wilderness language.
The final compromise was reached when Nevada's Sen. John Ensign, a Republican, agreed to stop blocking the wilderness proposal, said his spokesman, Jack Finn.
The storage site is intended to be temporary, pending the opening of a permanent repository in Nevada's Yucca Mountain.
The Nevada and Utah delegations have long butted heads because Utah officials supported Yucca, while Nevada's oppose it. Utah Sen. Robert Bennett, a Republican, changed the dynamic this fall by announcing on the Senate floor that he was reversing his position on Yucca.
Finn said Ensign wanted to reach an agreement with Utah's officials. "It's important to have as many allies as possible in our efforts to finding alternatives to transporting nuclear waste out West," Finn said.
Associated Press Writer Erica Werner contributed to this article.
---------------------------
State of Nevada
Agency for Nuclear Projects
www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/
nwpo@nuc.state.nv.us
775-687-3744
---------------------------