Yucca Mountain News Clips
Monday, December 19, 2005
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Las Vegas SUN
December 19, 2005

Damages in store for nuke utilities

Industry sues over the government's failure to open Yucca

By Benjamin Grove
<grove@lasvegassun.com>
Sun Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Next month marks another depressing anniversary for the nation's nuclear power plants: Eight years that the government has not lived up to its promise to construct Yucca Mountain by 1998.

But lawyers for the nation's nuclear utilities say 2006 could be the year they begin reaping billions of dollars in lawsuit damages from the federal government -- spell that taxpayers -- over the broken contract.

"In the majority, if not all, the cases I would expect that the utilities will get significant damages," said Jay Silberg, a Washington lawyer with Shaw Pittman, who is involved with 19 of the 60 lawsuits that utilities have filed against the government since 1998.

Congress had promised a grand opening of a permanent high-level waste repository for the nation's nuclear plants at Yucca by Jan. 31, 1998. But the day came and went as delays continued to plague the proposed dump program.

Energy Department officials now say Yucca could open by 2012, but critics contend Yucca is bogged down indefinitely in a legal, technical and regulatory morass.

Meanwhile, nuclear utilities -- specifically, their electricity customers -- have continued to pay for Yucca. The industry paid for much of the $8 billion invested in Yucca so far, and much of the nearly $18 billion that currently sits in a national nuclear waste fund established to pay for the underground repository.

The utilities say the government's failure to open Yucca forces them to pay to store their highly radioactive waste twice -- at their plants, and at Yucca -- with no return on the investment.

And the radioactive garbage is still piling up. Nuclear power plants in the past five decades have accumulated roughly 62,000 tons of spent fuel from their reactors, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade industry group.

Plants were designed with waste cooling pools to store the material until the government came for it. But many of the pools are full, and plants have had to construct outdoor, above-ground "dry cask" storage facilities for the overflow.

So the industry sued -- 60 lawsuits filed by 57 utilities in 33 states that operate many of the nation's 103 operating nuclear reactors and some decommissioned ones.

It has been a years-long slog through the federal courts, as judges waded through arcane legal issues and the technical specifics of each case.

Three trials involving five utilities -- Yankee Atomic Electric Co., Maine Yankee Atomic Power Co., Connecticut Yankee Atomic Power Co., the Sacramento Municipal Utility District and Tennessee Valley Authority -- have concluded, but judges are not expected to rule until next year, lawyers said.

Another big trial involving Southern Co. is near completion. And four other trials are set to begin in 2006.

The combined "three Yankees" case was tried in the summer of 2004, but the utilities are still waiting for a judge's decision, said the utilities' attorney, Jerry Stouck.

"I expect decisions in the next few months, and if we're right, we're going to see some big numbers coming out of these cases," Stouck said.

The Yankee utilities sought roughly $100 million each for damages through 2002. The courts have effectively ruled that utilities can only collect damages up through the date of the case. So the utilities plan to continue going back to court seeking more money until Yucca is constructed, the lawyers said.

"Look, the DOE is not performing," Stouck said. "The utilities had to build all these storage facilities -- to me it is a no-brainer. Of course there are going to be damages. At some point, the DOE is going to have to start paying. But until the courts rule, they aren't going to be rushing for the checkbook."

So far, only one utility, Exelon Corp., has reached a settlement with the Justice Department. Exelon in August 2004 won $300 million for waste storage costs for its 17 nuclear reactors, for the period from 1998 to 2010.

Settlement talks between other utilities and the Justice Department are under way, but government sources would not comment on their status.

Nevada officials have suggested that there is a way out of holding taxpayers liable for waste storage, at least in future years -- by using the money from the waste fund to pay plants for on-site storage.

In effect, Nevada lawmakers last week introduced a bill aimed at accomplishing that goal. The legislation directs the Energy Department to take ownership of the waste as it sits in dry-cask storage at the plants, paid for with money from the waste fund.

But that legislation is a long way from being approved, and the Energy Department has reiterated its commitment to constructing Yucca Mountain.

So the lawsuits steam ahead, with industry estimates of total liability to the government as high as $56 billion or more. (Yucca itself was estimated to cost $58 billion.)

That figure is wildly exaggerated, Energy Department officials say. The department estimates damages at just $2 billion to $3 billion, a spokesman said.

"Whatever it is," utility lawyer Silberg said, "it's not chump change."

Benjamin Grove can be reached at (202) 662-7436 or at grove@ lasvegassun.com.

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Las Vegas SUN
December 19, 2005

Flashpoint

By Jon Ralston
<ralston@vegas.com>
Las Vegas Sun

If anyone thinks that the new effort by Sens. Harry Reid and John Ensign to slow down Yucca Mountain will slow down the federal imperative, you are ignoring history. Just this week in California, federal regulators told a town hall meeting that they would not be affected by the proposal for on-site storage. The gathering occurred in San Luis Obispo, which had the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant nearby. According to the San Luis Obispo Tribune, officials from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission assured the locals that an above-ground storage facility was "not a tenable solution" in the long term. A former mayor who attended fretted about leakage from casks. Sound familiar?

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Las Vegas SUN
December 19, 2005

Reid calls GOP-led Congress `most corrupt' ever, criticizes Frist

Associated Press

LAS VEGAS (AP) - Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid assailed the Republican-led Congress for what he called its ethical and institutional failings.

"I believe this is the most corrupt Congress in the history of this country," Reid, D-Nev., said in an interview published in Sunday's Las Vegas Review-Journal.

"Not only corrupt ethically, but corrupt in not having institutional respect for what our founding fathers established ... Whatever the White House wants, they try to deliver," Reid said.

Reid also criticized Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, suggesting he's a rubber-stamp for the Bush administration.

"I like Bill Frist as a person. The problem is you can't have the leader of the Senate chosen by the White House," Reid said.

"When he got this job, he had had limited experience on the Senate floor. And he was leaving. He had term-limited himself. So he has no institutional integrity ... He doesn't feel as strongly about the Senate. He does whatever the White House wants him to do," Reid added.

Frist spokeswoman Amy Call declined to comment.

Ron Bonjean, communications director for House Speaker Dennis Hastert, cited sweeping budget and defense agreements announced Sunday by congressional leaders.

"The Senate minority leader's lack of actual ideas and a positive agenda has caused him to go haywire with negative partisan statements to try to distract from the amazing accomplishments of this Congress," Bonjean said.

Caught in a recent wave of ethics investigations and indictments are Frist, R-Tenn.; former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas; and Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Administration Committee. All have denied any wrongdoing.

Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., resigned after pleading guilty to taking $2.4 million in bribes in exchange for steering government work to defense contractors.

But several Democrats figure prominently in Justice Department inquiries. The investigation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff could take down lawmakers from both parties as well as members of the administration.

The only regret Reid acknowledged about his first year as minority leader was calling President Bush a loser in a May speech to a class of Las Vegas students. He later issued an apology.

"I felt that I made a mistake, and I tried to rectify it as quickly as I could in calling the president a loser because it was to the wrong audience and it was just the wrong thing," Reid told the Review-Journal.

"It was a bunch of high school kids and I felt real bad about that. That was not good," he added.

Reid, who suffered a ministroke in August, said he's not worried about a relapse and the only lifestyle change he has made is that he goes to bed a half-hour earlier.

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Waste News
December 19, 2005

Nevada senators sponsor legislation combating Yucca Mountain

Dec. 19 -- Nevada´s two senators have introduced legislation aimed at derailing construction of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in their state.

Sens. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and John Ensign, R-Nev., introduced a measure Dec. 14 that would mandate nuclear waste be stored on-site where it is produced and require the federal government to take responsibility for maintaining and monitoring the waste.

For more than two decades, the federal government has been planning to build a central storage site in the Nevada desert for spent fuel from the nation´s nuclear reactors. But the project has run into technical and budgetary problems, and opponents are expressing concerns about the safety of storing the waste in Nevada as well as shipping it across country.

``The Yucca Mountain project is never going to open,´´ said Sen. Reid, the Democratic leader of the Senate. ``It is time we put the safety of this country first and approach the storage of nuclear waste in a way that is productive and realistic.´´

Storing waste on site would be the safest means of dealing with the spent fuel, while allowing nuclear power plants to continue operating, he said.

``What we are proposing today represents the safest and most responsible course of action available for storing nuclear waste,´´ Sen. Ensign said.

The legislation, if approved, would require nuclear power companies to store waste on-site in dry cask storage containers. The containers could hold the waste for at lease 100 years, according to proponents of the plan.

Companion legislation was introduced in the House by Reps. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, and Jim Gibbons, R-Nev.

The Bush administration argues that a permanent, central storage site that is easy to monitor is the safest means of storing high-level nuclear waste rather than having storage sites spread across the country. The nuclear industry also opposes on-site storage and favors a central storage site.

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Salt Lake Tribune
December 19, 2005

Nuclear Waste: Harry Reid's bill provides temporary storage

For years, Utahns have argued that spent nuclear fuel rods should be stored in the back yards of reactors rather in our back yard. Now that Nevada's Sen. Harry Reid has written a bill that would change U.S. policy so that these wastes would be stored at reactor sites, the congressional delegations of Utah and Nevada need to round up support for the idea elsewhere in the West.

Because, whether they know it or not, all westerners share the prospect of being neighbors of the nation's nuclear dump.

True, Nevada and Utah are the ones on the hot seat now, Nevada because of the permanent disposal site under construction at Yucca Mountain and Utah because of the interim storage site proposed for the Skull Valley reservation of the Goshutes in Tooele County. But the geological problems that have surfaced at Yucca Mountain suggest that it may never be a suitable place for permanent disposal, and without it, the construction of the giant dry cask parking lot in Tooele County makes no sense, either.

If Yucca Mountain fails to pass technical muster, and the nation's leaders begin to look for a new location for permanent disposal, you can bet your last sawbuck that they will cast their eyes somewhere else in the arid West. Suddenly that hot seat could become a whole lot more crowded.

For that matter, the whole notion of permanent disposal, at least as it was envisioned nearly 25 years ago, should be re-examined. One virtue of Reid's bill is that it would provide for interim storage in dry casks on the reactor sites while that re-examination takes place.

That debate centers on whether it would be better to reprocess the waste so that it could be used again as reactor fuel. That would vastly reduce the volume of waste, but reprocessing entails risks of its own, including the production of weapons-grade plutonium. The status quo avoids that.

In any case, under Reid's bill, the federal government would take legal custody of the existing stored waste, relieving that burden from the public utilities which operate nuclear power plants. It was a consortium of those utilities that proposed the Private Fuel Storage project in Utah as a temporary parking lot for the waste - if 20 to 40 years can be called temporary - until it could be shipped at some future date to Yucca Mountain for permanent disposal.

If that future never comes, Reid's bill provides on-site storage while the nation looks for a better solution.

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Atlanta Business Chronicle
December 19, 2005

Nuclear fuel missing

Southern Co. can't find radioactive material

Justin Rubner
Staff Writer

One day last May, workers at Southern Co.'s nuclear power plant near Baxley, Ga., made a disturbing discovery: 68 inches of dangerous used nuclear fuel rods were missing.

An "exhaustive search" during the seven months since has failed to find the missing parts of rods, tubes a little wider than a pencil and as long as 14 feet. Fuel rods are placed in "assemblies" and then placed in reactors to generate energy.

Southern Co. (NYSE: SO) on Nov. 10 disclosed publicly that the nuclear material was missing from its Edwin I. Hatch Nuclear Plant. Officials of Southern Co.'s nuclear power subsidiary, Southern Nuclear Operating Co., had been scheduled to hold a public meeting with Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials in Atlanta on Dec. 15 to discuss the issue. But that meeting was canceled and has been postponed indefinitely so the company can further search for the material.

Officials at Southern Co. have said the possibility of theft is "not plausible" and that there is no threat to public health or safety. Nonetheless, the NRC is watching the matter closely.

"We want to know what happened and see that it doesn't happen again," said NRC spokesman Ken Clark.

Search continues

Southern Nuclear officials say the missing material might be somewhere in the plant's used fuel-storage pools or it could have been inadvertently shipped to a storage facility for less dangerous nuclear waste in Barnwell, S.C.

About 30 Plant Hatch employees are conducting a search of paper and computer records as well as video recorded by robotic cameras inside the plant's two 40-foot deep Olympic-sized pools, said Southern Nuclear spokesman Steve Higginbottom. The facility in Barnwell, however, is not being searched, he said.

Southern Nuclear CEO Barnie Beasley has been "very involved" with the search, Higginbottom said, and Southern Co. CEO David Ratcliffe is aware of the search but has not had a "hands-on role."

In addition to examining millions of inches of nuclear waste, the team also is interviewing current and former employees who have worked there since the 1980s, Higginbottom said. Plus, Southern Nuclear has commissioned Marietta-based GE Energy to assist. (The plant is powered by two GE Energy boiling water reactors.)

"You want to get another set of expert eyes, especially when you're dealing with small pieces," Higginbottom said. He added that the amount of missing inventory could go up or down during the process.

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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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