Yucca Mountain News Clips - Thursday, December 29, 2005

Yucca Mountain News Clips
Thursday, December 29, 2005
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Las Vegas SUN
December 29, 2005

BLM sets aside corridor for study of Yucca Mountain rail route

Associated Press

LAS VEGAS (AP) - A swath of land across Nevada has been set aside for the Energy Department to study as a route for building a railroad to haul highly radioactive waste to a national nuclear waste dump, Bureau of Land Management officials said Thursday.

The restrictions imposed this week won't limit most current uses of the mile-wide, 319-mile long corridor between Caliente near the Utah line and the planned nuclear repository at Yucca Mountain, said Dennis Samuelson, a BLM realty specialist in Reno.

"You're probably not going to see anything on the ground, no stakes or anything," Samuelson said Thursday. "People can recreate and hunt in the area."

The designation grants the Energy Department access to the 308,600 acres of property to study rail alignments to the Yucca Mountain site, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. There is no rail line to the site that Congress and President Bush picked in 2002 to entomb 77,000 tons of radioactive commercial, industrial and military waste now stored in 39 states.

Problems at the Yucca Mountain dump have delayed the projected opening date by years, and it's now not expected until after 2012.

Project officials recently increased cost estimates for building the railroad from $880 million to $2 billion.

A two-year temporary land withdrawal had been set to expire Thursday along the route dubbed the Caliente Corridor. The new order extends it for 10 years and can be renewed.

The land withdrawal prevents new mining claims and deters the BLM from selling the property. Current valid mining claims, grazing rights, water rights and public access to the land should not be affected, Samuelson said.

The Energy Department said in August that its studies would consist mostly of photographing topography and conducting land surveys.

Nevada state officials and other repository critics contend that Energy Department activities will hurt property values, the local economy, and archaeological and cultural features.

"We are still contending the selection of the corridor itself was illegal and that BLM dropped the ball in not requiring a more thorough environmental impact statement," said Joe Strolin, an administrator with the state's Agency for Nuclear Projects.

Attorneys for the state have sued the government over the Energy Department's rail plan. A three-judge federal court panel heard oral arguments in the case in October, and a ruling is expected early next year.

The land order was signed Dec. 21 in Washington by Mark Limbaugh, Interior Department assistant secretary for water and science. It became effective when it was published Wednesday in the Federal Register.

---On the Net:

Yucca Mountain project: http://www.ymp.gov

Nevada's Agency for Nuclear Projects: http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste

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Las Vegas SUN
December 29, 2005

If at first you don't succeed, try a new bill

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

WASHINGTON -- Every January, Capitol Hill explodes with good intentions. Lawmakers set lofty goals, bills are introduced -- more than 6,000 of them in 2005.

Most die a quiet death. Like Chicago Cubs fans, lawmakers are left to muse, "Maybe next year."

So it was with a number of Nevada issues this year. Others were resolved. Here's a look back, and forward to next year, at the bigger issues:

VA Hospital

Congress this year approved spending $199 million to cover much of the cost of building a veterans medical complex in North Las Vegas.

The complex at Pecos Road and the Las Vegas Beltway is to include an outpatient clinic, 90 hospital beds and 120 nursing home beds. The opening will be delayed, however, from the original 2009 date, possibly as long as two years.

The total price also is expected to rise to $305 million, about $40 million higher than the original estimates, the VA said. "It's being affected by the booming market in Las Vegas and materials and labor rates," said spokeswoman Karen Fedele.

Yucca E-mail Scandal

Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., plans to re-energize an investigation into an e-mail controversy roiling the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository program.

Porter said he will hold another hearing of the government reform subcommittee, which he chairs, late next month, after the General Accountability Office releases a follow-up report on the issue.

Nevada lawmakers say a batch of e-mails by Yucca Mountain workers suggest that quality assurance documents had been falsified. But Energy Department officials say the e-mails are not conclusive.

Expect the e-mail hullabaloo to survive as long as Nevada officials fight the repository (two decades and counting). It likely won't slow the program, but other problems could, including a 22 percent budget cut expected to trim the Yucca Mountain workforce next year. Even better for Nevada opponents of the dump site are rumblings that Congress will adopt a new strategy for solving the nation's nuclear waste woes.

Waste Storage Bill

Sens. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and John Ensign, R-Nev., spent the year collecting support for legislation that could kill Yucca Mountain by requiring power plants to continue to store their own nuclear waste. Utah Republicans Orrin Hatch and Robert Bennett have joined them. (Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., has been pushing a similar bill in the House for years.)

The legislation, introduced this month, is a long-shot. But it could become part of a broader discussion in Congress about whether to continue pursuing "geologic" storage for the nation's most radioactive waste -- a hole under Yucca -- or to turn to above-ground temporary storage, or some other alternative.

That debate, though unlikely to directly scuttle Yucca Mountain storage, could play into the state's delay-and-distract strategy. Reid still says the dump will never be built. But many in Congress and the Bush administration will not walk away from an $8 billion investment.

Heliport

Residents of neighborhoods under the flight paths of 33,000 annual Hoover Dam and Grand Canyon helicopter tours, based at McCarran International Airport, say the choppers have hovered like noisy gnats for years.

Congress approved legislation to transfer 229 acres of Bureau of Land Management property near Sloan, roughly 20 miles south of Las Vegas, to Clark County for the new pads.

Studies are now under way on methods of getting water to the site, which is no easy task.

Bush's Nevada Money Grab

President Bush drew the wrath of Nevada lawmakers early this year when he proposed that profits from public land sales be diverted from Nevada to the U.S. Treasury. The proceeds -- well over $2 billion so far -- are generated by auctions of federal land in Clark County. The money stays in Nevada for land, water and school programs. Bush proposed taking 70 percent, but Nevada lawmakers quashed that idea in Congress.

Bush may want a second go-round. The Interior Department reportedly may include the proposal in its budget for fiscal 2007.

Boxing Commission KO'd

Congress went another round in a 10-year effort to reform boxing (bills passed in 1996 and 2000), this time trying to create a three-member federal boxing commission within the Commerce Department. Proponents said it would help restore integrity to the troubled sport, bring some order to varying state rules and better protect fighters. Nevada House lawmakers supported the bill.

But the House shot it down last month. Critics said it amounted to unwarranted government interference.

Splitting the 9th Circuit

Ensign and other conservatives for years have advocated splitting up the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The San Francisco-based court -- the largest of the 11 circuits -- is too big, too back-logged and too liberal, critics say. It handles cases from nine Western states.

Ensign backed a plan to split the 9th Circuit, creating a 12th Circuit Court of Appeals for Nevada, Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington.

The bill's Senate opponents blocked the bill this year, but the debate isn't going away.

Ensign's Telecom Reform

Ensign unveiled legislation to address rapid growth and change in the telecommunications industry by deregulating some segments of it.

Consumer groups said the bill could lead to fewer service choices and higher bills. Ensign strongly disagrees, but acknowledged that the bill likely will be redrafted and considered as just one part of a telecom reform debate next year.

Bikinis and Bins

Sometimes a lawmaker will champion obscure but sexy issues.

Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., introduced a bill this year to amend immigration rules to allow more foreign fashion models to work in this country. (The Washington Post's Style section noted that the bill's champion is a 41-year-old bachelor: "What a guy!")

Ensign pushed a bill about airport security checkpoint bins. It directed the Transportation Security Administration to begin testing a new multi-compartment bin, so passengers don't have to dump their shoes, laptops and carry-ons in multiple bins. Ensign figured fewer bins could save screeners time viewing and stacking them.

Hunting and Fishing

Nevada can freely give preference to Nevadans when it issues hunting and fishing licenses, thanks to legislation by Nevada lawmakers. Legislation approved this year clarifies federal law so that the state is now protected to continue giving preference to in-state residents.

Nevada granted 18,800 tags for big game hunting this year, 89 percent of them going to residents.

Terrorism Insurance

Casinos and developers in Nevada nervously eyed the calendar this month until lawmakers approved a two-year extension of federal terrorism insurance, which was to expire Dec. 31. The legislation, enacted after 9/11, will help cover insurance costs in catastrophic cases.

Sept. 11 made terrorism insurance difficult to obtain. The renewal reduces the burden on taxpayers by boosting insurer deductables.

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

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National Center for Public Policy Research
December 28, 2005

Advantages of Nuclear Power - A Debate

Those interested in energy development, energy independence, clean energy and/or global warming may be interested in a debate about the advantages and feasibility of nuclear energy ongoing presently in Scientific American and the Chicago Sun-Times.

Writing in the December Scientific American (go here for a pdf of the article sent to me by the authors), physicists William Hannun, Gerald Marsh and George Stanford say the U.S. is missing out on a global trend as as more people worldwide are realizing nuclear power "may be the most environmentally-friendly way to generate large amounts of electricity."

Furthermore, they write:

If developed sensibly, nuclear power could be truly sustainable and essentially inexhaustible and could operate without contributing to climate change. In particular, a relatively new form of nuclear technology could overcome the principal drawbacks of current methods - namely, worries about reactor accidents, the potential for diversion of nuclear fuel into highly destructive weapons, the management of dangerous, long-lived radioactive waste, and the depletion of global reserves of economically available uranium.

After public policy consultant Tom Randall described key aspects of the Hannum/Marsh/Stanford thesis in a piece for the Chicago Sun-Times, Edwin Lyman, senior staff scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote to the paper with a contrary view. Marsh and Stanford then responded.

Addendum: John Rennie, editor-in-chief of Scientific American, writes about the Hannum/Marsh/Stanford article on the Scientific American blog here.

Referenced:

http://www.nationalcenter.org/NuclearFastReactorsST120805.pdf

http://www.nationalcenter.org/NuclearFastReactorsST121605.pdf

http://www.nationalcenter.org/NuclearFastReactorsST121905.pdf

http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=a_new_breed_of_nuclear_reactors&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

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Free Internet Press
December 29, 2005

Will Old Technology Solve Nuclear Waste Problem?

Posted by Intellpuke

Decades ago, scientists and engineers thought it would be easy enough to deal with the radioactive waste from nuclear power plants: sort out and save the small portion that was reusable, and put the rest in a hole in the ground.

It did not work out that way. Reprocessing the waste proved to be both expensive and risky: the main material being scavenged, plutonium, is a nuclear bomb fuel.

And that hole in the ground - the proposed Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada - is years behind schedule, bogged down in politics and environmental disputes. Even if it opens, it will be far too small for the amount of waste that is being generated.

So last month, Congress voted $50 million for the Energy Department to explore a new kind of reprocessing, one that would reuse a much larger fraction of the waste.

The idea is extremely ambitious. It would require perfecting not only a new method of reprocessing, but also a new class of reactors to burn the salvaged material. Still, proponents said it would have two great advantages: It would mean that Yucca Mountain would be big enough to accommodate the waste that could not be recycled. And it would make Yucca easier to open, because the material still to be buried would generate less heat in the centuries to come.

"Reprocessing, or processing spent fuel before it's put in the repository, is a very good way to buy time," said Roger W. Gale, a former Energy Department official who is now an electricity consultant. "It's a fail-safe in case we continue to have problems with Yucca Mountain."

Many experts are skeptical that the new strategy, which would involve separating the components of spent fuel and putting the salvaged material in reactors using higher-energy neutrons, will work.

Another former Energy Department official, Robert Alvarez, noted that the idea of reprocessing had been around for at least 40 years, each time with a different rationale.

"Once, it was part of breeder program," Alvarez said, referring to a scheme to use reactors to make more nuclear fuel than the reactor consumed. "Then it became a proliferation thing," with supporters reasoning that such a system would safely consume materials that could be used for a bomb.

"And now it's a waste-management thing," he said. "But the whole problem is they're pouring money into something that's cutting-edge for the late 1960's."

Some scientists argue that recycling is essential. At a recent Washington forum on nuclear waste and its possible uses, Phillip J. Finck, deputy associate director of the Argonne National Laboratory, an Energy Department complex, said that by 2010, long before Yucca Mountain can open (if, indeed, it ever does), the United States would have more than the 70,000 metric tons of fuel that will fit there.

Moreover, Finck argued, without recycled fuel, the world will have to rely on finite reserves of uranium.

At the forum, sponsored by the Foundation for Nuclear Studies of Washington, Ernest J. Moniz, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former under secretary of energy, said that if the world built enough reactors to provide energy without contributing to global warming, a new Yucca Mountain would be needed every three and a half years.

But Professor Moniz and others expressed caution about reprocessing. Frank N. von Hippel, a physicist at Princeton, said that a new generation of reactors would cost tens of billions of dollars and that it would be a long time before it was clear that reprocessed fuel was needed.

The fuel to be reprocessed would be too radioactive to move very far; hence the idea was that the reprocessing plant would be adjacent to the reactor. Ivan Oelrich, vice president of the Federation of American Scientists, said that building scores of new reactors, with a reprocessing plant adjacent, was unlikely, and that while opening Yucca would be hard, switching to this kind of reprocessing was "trading one difficult political problem for an impossible problem."

Still, concern over global warming and the increase in natural gas prices have given hope to nuclear advocates, who want new waste techniques as well as new reactors.

The reprocessing strategy is subtle - to extract more use out of used fuel and to reduce the heat created by waste that cannot be recycled and still has to be buried.

The heat is not a problem in the first few decades, when a repository could be left open for ventilation. The harder time is the next 1,500 years, when heat would be given off by longer-lived radioactive materials, mostly a category called actinides, and also the isotopes that are created as those actinides go through radioactive decay.

Heat, not volume or weight, determines the physical capacity of Yucca or any other underground repository, because designers want to keep the repository below the boiling point of water.

Above the boiling point, the resulting steam could damage the containers and possibly the rock as well.

Reprocessing means chopping up nuclear fuel and separating the ingredients, uranium that was not used in the reactor and other elements that were created in the reactor and could be used as fuel, including plutonium and neptunium.

Gulf Oil tried to do that in the early 60's in West Valley, in upstate New York, but dropped it as uneconomical, leaving the taxpayers with a cleanup bill of more than $1 billion.

At that plant, and at plants still operated in Britain and France, the plutonium is recovered by chemical separation. The new plan is for "electrometallurgical" reprocessing, in which giant electrodes are inserted in a mix of waste components, somewhat like electroplating.

The salvaged materials include uranium 235, the isotope used in bombs, which splits easily, and uranium 238, which makes up more than 99 percent of uranium in nature but is harder to split.

One use of uranium 238 in a reactor is as a "fertile" material that can absorb stray neutrons and become plutonium 239, which can be used in reactors and bombs.

Existing reactors split the uranium using "thermal" neutrons. The new ones would use "fast" neutrons, which travel thousands of times as fast.

The current generation of American power reactors uses water to slow the neutrons to the speed optimal for splitting uranium 235.

The water also carries off the heat, which is used to make electricity. Fast neutrons, in contrast, have enough energy to split uranium 238. But to make use of them, reactors would need a heat transfer fluid that does not slow down the neutrons, probably molten sodium.

The water-based reactors are kept under high pressure to keep the water from boiling. A sodium reactor could run with the sodium at atmospheric pressure. At some point, the sodium has to be run through a heat exchanger, a cluster of thin-walled metal tubes, to give off its energy to ordinary water, which turns to steam and spins a turbine for electricity. And if there is a leak and the sodium and water come into contact, the sodium burns.

There are other problems. Plutonium and neptunium are potential bomb fuels; the risk that they might be illicitly diverted, or that other countries might follow the United States' example and build their own reprocessing centers, led two presidents, Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter, to block General Electric from opening a reprocessing center in Morris, Ill.

Further, the companies that run reactors are showing no interest in new kinds of reactors and little interest in plutonium.

When the Energy Department decided to get rid of some surplus weapons-type plutonium by turning it into nuclear fuel, no utilities would take it, even at no charge.

The Tennessee Valley Authority finally agreed to take the fuel. It described the transaction as selling the government "irradiation services."

Intellpuke: "I'm still convinced that the best way to eliminate the problem of nuclear waste is at the source - eliminating nuclear power. New York Times reporter Matthew L. Wald provided an excellent and understandable report on a very complex subject. You can read this article in context, here.

Referenced:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/science/27nuke.html

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KLAS-TV
December 29, 2005

Matt Adams
Chief Photojournalist

(video) Atomic License Plates

A license plate that commemorates the contributions made by the nevada test site isnow on sale... But approval for the new plate wasn t easy to get.

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Deseret News
December 29, 2005

U.S. nears OK of Yucca rail

Move shows why Utah lawmakers badly want wilds area approval

By Suzanne Struglinski
Deseret Morning News

WASHINGTON — The Energy Department moved a step closer Wednesday to getting the public land it needs to build a railroad that would take nuclear waste across Nevada to Yucca Mountain, illustrating why Utah lawmakers wanted Congress to approve the Cedar Mountain Wilderness Area so badly.

The Bureau of Land Management withdrew about 308,600 acres of land in the state from sale, surface entry or mining claims for 10 years, according to a notice in Wednesday's Federal Register. This will allow the Energy Department to study a mile-wide corridor to decide where it can build a rail line to the proposed federal nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The bureau would still need to grant the department a right-of-way to actually construct a railroad, but Wednesday's announcement allows the department to prepare an environmental impact statement studying how building a railroad would affect the land there. Grazing permits, public access and other current uses of the land would not be affected but no new permits will be allowed.

Highlighting the intent of the Utah wilderness legislation, Wednesday's notice specifically prohibits certain wilderness study areas in Nevada from the withdrawal. Once officially designated, the land included in the Cedar Mountain Wilderness Area would have more protection than if it were just regular BLM land. This 100,000-acre area, which is awaiting the president's signature, would include land where Private Fuel Storage wants to build its own rail line to move spent nuclear fuel rods to Goshute Indian land in Tooele County.

PFS, a consortium of utilities with nuclear fueled power plants, wants to store 40,000 ton of nuclear waste on Goshute land until it can be moved to Yucca Mountain, which is eight years overdue in opening.

The lawmakers say the wilderness designation virtually eliminates PFS rail option, although the consortium is not so sure yet.

PFS can still move nuclear waste to the site via truck, but the congressional delegation says it is working on a plan to stop that as well.

The Energy Department first requested the Nevada land withdrawal in 2003, just a few days after announcing it preferred the Caliente corridor if it were to move waste via train. It originally wanted the land to study for 20 years but then opted for 10 years instead.

Dennis Samuelson, a real estate specialist with BLM in Reno, Nev., said the department completed an environmental assessment that found no impacts would occur if the BLM approved the withdrawal. BLM will base its decision on its environmental study, specifically looking at the railroad, although other agencies are involved with that study too.

Nevada is waiting for the outcome of a federal court case argued in Washington in October. Attorney Joe Egan, who handles Yucca issues for the state, argued that the department did not follow environmental laws properly when it made the decision to move waste via train.

E-mail: suzanne@desnews.com

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Scientific American
December 28, 2005

Posted by John Rennie

A New Breed of Nuclear Reactors?

Does the world need a new kind of nuclear reactor? Does it want one? Those are the questions Matthew Wald addressed in his New York Times article (Dec. 27) about the proposal by some scientists to resuscitate the idea of breeder reactors, ones based on an electrorefining process for stripping the degraded fission products from nuclear waste and leaving the still-usable uranium and plutonium in a more concentrated form. Readers may recognize this as the technology that William H. Hannum, Gerald E. Marsh and George S. Stanford of Argonne National Laboratory described in their December Scientific American article, "Smarter Use of Nuclear Waste."

That article focused primarily on the "how it would work" aspects of the technology, while also laying out the rationale for it. Briefly, here's the pitch: If we're to produce adequate energy for the future while curbing global warming, we might need to rely more on nuclear fission. But conventional fission plants have two liabilities. First, they leave behind 95 percent of the fissionable energy in their fuel. Second, as a consequence of the first, their voluminous wastes are highly radioactive for thousands of years. A new type of breeder reactor, however, could make more efficient use of the fuel and reduce the waste stream to a more manageable level. Moreover, unlike older breeder reactors, the new ones would not be attractive to terrorists or rogue states seeking plutonium for bombs.

Here's one description from Hannum et al. of the new reactors:

A safer, more sustainable nuclear power cycle could be based on the advanced liquid metal reactor (ALMR) design developed in the 1980s by researchers at Argonne National Laboratory. Like all atomic power plants, an ALMR-based system would use nuclear chain reactions in the core to produce the heat needed to generate electricity.

Current commercial nuclear plants feature thermal reactors, which rely on relatively slow moving neutrons to propagate chain reactions in uranium and plutonium fuel. An ALMR-based system, in contrast, would use fast-moving (energetic) neutrons, which permits all the uranium and heavier atoms to be consumed, thereby allowing vastly more of the fuel's energy to be captured. In the near term, the new reactor would burn fuel made by recycling spent fuel from thermal reactors.

In most thermal reactor designs, water floods the core to slow (moderate) neutrons and keep it cool. The ALMR, however, employs a pool of circulating liquid sodium as the coolant. Engineers chose sodium because it does not slow down fast neutrons substantially and because it conducts heat very well, which improves the efficiency of heat delivery to the electric generation facility.

A fast reactor would work like this: Nuclear fire burning in the core would heat the radioactive liquid sodium running through it. Some of the heated sodium would be pumped into an intermediate heat exchanger, where it would transfer its thermal energy to nonradioactive liquid sodium running through adjacent but separate pipes and into a secondary sodium loop. The nonradioactive sodium would in turn bring heat to a final heat exchanger/steam generator, where steam would be created in adjacent water-filled pipes. The hot, high-pressure steam would then be used to turn steam turbines that would drive electricity-producing generators.

As they noted, the electrorefining method associated with fueling these reactors could also be used to process some of the existing mountains of radioactive fission waste.

The key to pyrometallurgical recycling of nuclear fuel is the electrorefining procedure. This process removes the true waste, the fission products, from the uranium, plutonium and the other actinides (heavy radioactive elements) in the spent fuel. The actinides are kept mixed with the plutonium so it cannot be used directly in weapons.

Spent fuel from today's thermal reactors (uranium and plutonium oxide) would first undergo oxide reduction to convert it to metal, whereas spent metallic uranium and plutonium fuel from fast reactors would go straight to the electrorefiner. Electrorefining resembles electroplating: spent fuel attached to an anode would be suspended in a chemical bath; then electric current would plate out uranium and other actinides on the cathode. The extracted elements would next be sent to the cathode processor to remove residual salts and cadmium from refining. Finally, the remaining uranium and actinides would be cast into fresh fuel rods, and the salts and cadmium would be recycled.

Sounds nifty, no? Hannum et al. expound on the virtues of the system at greater length in the rest of their article, which I recommend for a fuller sense of the argument.

Yet there are counterarguments to all this, as Wald reports. He cites physicist Frank von Hippel as saying that "a new generation of reactors would cost tens of billions of dollars and that it would be a long time before it was clear that reprocessed fuel was needed." (Von Hippel has an article in the upcoming February Scientific American about the need to better safeguard civilian reactors from would-be nuclear terrorists.) And then there's this:

Ivan Oelrich, vice president of the Federation of American Scientists, said that building scores of new reactors, with a reprocessing plant adjacent, was unlikely, and that while opening Yucca would be hard, switching to this kind of reprocessing was "trading one difficult political problem for an impossible problem."

The most damning points for the technology's prospects might be the ones at the very end of Wald's article:

Further, the companies that run reactors are showing no interest in new kinds of reactors and little interest in plutonium.

When the Energy Department decided to get rid of some surplus weapons-type plutonium by turning it into nuclear fuel, no utilities would take it, even at no charge.

Still, the idea has its proponents--in particular, Rep. David Hobson (R-Ohio), the chairman of the House's Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee. He led the push for Congress's allocation of $50 million to investigate the new reactors and reprocessing facilities.

Many months ago, when Hannum et al. proposed their article to Scientific American, the other editors and I debated whether to invite it. Was it realistic to suggest that a new nuclear fission technology might contribute significantly to the world's energy future when the technical and economic forces freighted against it seemed so daunting? Might this not be just another in a long series of attempts by nuclear power enthusiasts to draw attention to their favorite technology? The argument that eventually prevailed was that, for better or worse, these fast-neutron reactors and electrorefining ideas did seem to be getting taken seriously by some physicists and policymakers, and as such, it was worth making sure that our readers were fully aware of them.

Where this technology goes from here is anyone's guess.

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Patriot-News
December 28, 2005

Editorial:

Proper Storage

Existing nuclear wastes require secure location at Yucca facility

If you are planning to store something as hazardous as highly radioactive nuclear spent fuel rods for literally tens of thousands of years, you better get it right. But the long-running saga surrounding the nation's still-far-from-finished nuclear waste repository, Yucca Mountain in Nevada, is getting old and the single most serious impediment to the building of new nuclear plants in this country.

Many of us wouldn't mind if no additional nuclear power plants were ever built, but the reality is that it may become necessary to do so to maintain modern society in the future in the face of mounting concerns with climate change and petroleum shortages.

But it would be the height of irresponsibility to permit the building of new atomic power generators while nuclear waste continues to pile up around the country, posing potential public safety and security hazards. More than 50,000 tons of some of the most lethal materials ever concocted by man are in temporary storage at 104 nuclear reactors in 33 states. In some cases, the waste is stored under water in spent-fuel cooling pools, as is the case at Three Mile Island's Unit 1. But increasingly as the pools fill up, the fuel is being placed in concrete and steel dry casks elsewhere on site. All of these storage methods are intended to be temporary until a permanent waste repository is available.

It was back in 1957, when the peaceful use of nuclear power was well under way, that the National Academy of Sciences recommended the geologic disposal of nuclear wastes. In the 1960s, the building of nuclear plants took off and by 1979 Yucca Mountain, located near the Nevada nuclear test site and 100 miles from Las Vegas, had been identified as a promising storage site. With passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1982, the search began for a permanent repository, starting with nine sites in six states. By 1985, the search had narrowed down to three sites and in 1987 Yucca Mountain was singled out for additional study.

More than 20 years of study have gone into the Yucca Mountain project, prompting scientists who have worked on it to call it the most analyzed expanse of land on the planet. Both President Bush and Congress have given their blessing, and yet, as recently as early this month Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman told a group of editorial writers that it would be "well into the next decade before it's done." He blamed litigation for slowing the effort but he said work on the project continues.

The wastes would be stored nearly 1,000 feet below the top of Yucca Mountain in permanent containers put in position along 75 miles of tunnels, using a rail system for movement. The facility is intended to store the wastes for the tens of thousands of years that they will continue to pose a radioactive hazard. While different concerns have been raised about the project and its ability to safely retain the wastes over such a long period of time, no one to our knowledge has offered a better alternative.

There isn't any question that the nation's stockpiles of highly radioactive nuclear waste would be safer in a single storage area rather than scattered among 72 nuclear power stations. Whether America builds another nuclear plant or not, these wastes need proper permanent storage.

Opening Yucca Mountain for business is a matter of urgent national security, and as such it needs to be switched from the slow track to nowhere to the fast track to completion. Or do we first have to suffer through a terrorist attack on a nuclear plant's vulnerable spent-fuel storage area and the consequent radioactive contamination?

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UPI
December 27, 2005

Washington proposes nuclear reprocessing

WASHINGTON, Dec. 27 (UPI) -- Radioactive waste reprocessing from U.S. nuclear power plants, which has never worked in the United States, is being proposed in Washington.

Congress earmarked $50 million last month for the Energy Department to explore a new kind of reprocessing, one that would reuse a much larger fraction of the waste than had been attempted in the past, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

However, there are still questions if Yucca Mountain will be opened as a disposal site and Ernest J. Moniz, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that if the world built enough reactors to provide energy without contributing to global warming, a new Yucca Mountain would be needed every 3.5 years.

The only U.S. nuclear reprocessing plant built in the 1960s in West Valley, N.Y., left U.S. taxpayers with a cleanup bill of more than $2 billion.

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New York Times
December 27, 2005

Scientists Try to Resolve Nuclear Problem With an Old Technology Made New Again

By Matthew L. Wald

Correction Appended

WASHINGTON, Dec. 25 - Decades ago, scientists and engineers thought it would be easy enough to deal with the radioactive waste from nuclear power plants: sort out and save the small portion that was reusable, and put the rest in a hole in the ground.

It did not work out that way. Reprocessing the waste proved to be both expensive and risky: the main material being scavenged, plutonium, is a nuclear bomb fuel.

So last month, Congress voted $50 million for the Energy Department to explore a new kind of reprocessing, one that would reuse a much larger fraction of the waste.

Many experts are skeptical that the new strategy, which would involve separating the components of spent fuel and putting the salvaged material in reactors using higher-energy neutrons, will work.

Another former Energy Department official, Robert Alvarez, noted that the idea of reprocessing had been around for at least 40 years, each time with a different rationale.

"Once, it was part of breeder program," Mr. Alvarez said, referring to a scheme to use reactors to make more nuclear fuel than the reactor consumed. "Then it became a proliferation thing," with supporters reasoning that such a system would safely consume materials that could be used for a bomb.

"And now it's a waste-management thing," he said. "But the whole problem is they're pouring money into something that's cutting-edge for the late 1960's."

Moreover, Mr. Finck argued, without recycled fuel, the world will have to rely on finite reserves of uranium.

Still, concern over global warming and the increase in natural gas prices have given hope to nuclear advocates, who want new waste techniques as well as new reactors.

The reprocessing strategy is subtle - to extract more use out of used fuel and to reduce the heat created by waste that cannot be recycled and still has to be buried.

Heat, not volume or weight, determines the physical capacity of Yucca or any other underground repository, because designers want to keep the repository below the boiling point of water.

Above the boiling point, the resulting steam could damage the containers and possibly the rock as well.

Gulf Oil tried to do that in the early 60's in West Valley, in upstate New York, but dropped it as uneconomical, leaving the taxpayers with a cleanup bill of more than $1 billion.

The salvaged materials include uranium 235, the isotope used in bombs, which splits easily, and uranium 238, which makes up more than 99 percent of uranium in nature but is harder to split.

One use of uranium 238 in a reactor is as a "fertile" material that can absorb stray neutrons and become plutonium 239, which can be used in reactors and bombs.

But existing reactors split the uranium using "thermal" neutrons. The new ones would use "fast" neutrons, which travel thousands of times as fast.

The current generation of American power reactors uses water to slow the neutrons to the speed optimal for splitting uranium 235.

Further, the companies that run reactors are showing no interest in new kinds of reactors and little interest in plutonium.

When the Energy Department decided to get rid of some surplus weapons-type plutonium by turning it into nuclear fuel, no utilities would take it, even at no charge.

The Tennessee Valley Authority finally agreed to take the fuel. It described the transaction as selling the government "irradiation services."

Correction: Dec. 29, 2005, Wednesday:

An article in Science Times on Tuesday about new efforts to reprocess nuclear waste misidentified the oil company that operated a reprocessing plant in West Valley, N.Y., in the 1960's and 70's. It was Getty Oil, not Gulf.

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The Oklahoman
December 27, 2005

Nuclear power: Government must lead the push

Oklahoman Editorial

Even if you don't believe pessimistic projections on how much oil is left for the world to use, what comes after oil must be on the minds of the nation's policy-makers. Talk to the experts, and only those holding extreme environmental positions think America's energy future can be secure without expanded use of nuclear power.

Some think oil production will peak in the next 10 to 15 years. Others think the point at which production begins to decline won't be reached for three, four or five decades. Even so, political uncertainty associated with a number of oil-producing countries makes U.S. dependence on imports risky for its economy and national security.

At a recent Knight Center for Specialized Journalism conference at the University of Maryland, U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said the only way for America to meet its future energy needs is by expanding nuclear power's role.

Currently, nuclear accounts for about 20 percent of electricity generation. The U.S. has 104 commercial plants in operation across the country. None is located in Oklahoma. Of those, more than half were built before 1978. Existing facilities have been expanded, but no new plants have been built in this country in 30 years.

Here's the rub: Just to maintain nuclear's current 20 percent share of electrical generation, 25 to 33 new plants will be needed by 2025, energy department officials say. Even more will be needed to increase nuclear's role.

Nuclear power has unique hurdles. New reactors cost billions of dollars to build. Spent fuel has to be properly contained and stored. As importantly, public perceptions must be modified. While government can't address all of these concerns alone, it can point the way and help create a more conducive climate for nuclear expansion.

For example, a few years ago the government created "Nuclear Power 2010," under which government and private industry work together on site location and regulatory processes to prompt new nuclear construction.

On the waste issue, the government's plan to entomb radioactive materials at Yucca Mountain, Nev., is being tied up by lawsuits. Bodman said the facility probably won't come on line until well into the next decade.

It points to the need for a coordinated leadership approach on nuclear that will reassure the private markets and enable investment, as well as convince more Americans that nuclear is a safe and practical resource for the future -- something a number of European countries already have figured out.

America has the technology, and the demand for a greater nuclear role is coming. What's needed is government's push to help it come to pass.

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Patriot-News
December 27, 2005

Three Mile Island

Piles of nuclear waste worry officials

By Garry Lenton
Of The Patriot-News

In a concrete building at Three Mile Island, tons of used nuclear fuel waits at the bottom of a 45-foot deep pool for shipment to a permanent storage site.

The fuel, one of the most hazardous materials on earth, has been piling up here since the plant went online in September 1974. It will likely wait another decade, at least, before it can be moved.

More than 50,000 tons of highly radioactive waste that could contaminate hundreds of square miles if released sits in pools or in concrete casks at 72 nuclear sites in 33 states because there is nowhere to send it.

The federal government was supposed to build a permanent dump for the radioactive waste generated by commercial nuclear power plants such as TMI but has failed to do so. Each year adds 3,000 tons to the pile.

The Department of Energy, which is responsible for disposing of the spent fuel, planned to open a dump site in Nevada's Yucca Mountain in 1998. But legal challenges, cost overruns and strong political opposition have slowed the project to a crawl. Some industry watchers predict that it will be decades before the site opens, if at all.

Though there is no imminent health risk from storing nuclear waste at the plants, not having a national storage site poses problems for consumers, the nuclear industry and national security.

"We're concerned," said Dave Allard, the director of the Radiation Control Program within the state Department of Environmental Protection's Bureau of Radiation Protection. "It's just not a desirable situation. We'd prefer if there was some permanent or temporary storage facility."

The DEP is concerned about what will happen decades from now if no national dump has opened. Fuel storage systems at nuclear plants were not designed for long-term use. Most have run out of space in the pools and are storing the fuel assemblies in concrete casks above ground.

Rich Janati, the chief of the DEP's Division of Nuclear Safety, wonders what will happen if a plant is decommissioned before a national site opens. The waste will have to be monitored, but how vigilant will the monitors be?

"That's what the real concern will be to us," he said.

An expensive problem:

Within the next five years, nearly three-quarters of the 104 nuclear reactors will be storing their spent fuel in concrete casks. While that is not a safety problem, it is costly.

A dry cask system costs about $20 million to $30 million to start and $5 million to $7 million a year for the casks and storage, said Adam Levin, the director of spent fuel and decommissioning strategy for Exelon Nuclear, which owns 10 nuclear plants, including TMI, Peach Bottom and Limerick in Pennsylvania.

The Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group, estimates that plant owners will pay $11 billion for nuclear waste storage by 2015. All or part of that cost will be passed on to customers. The payments are in addition to $750 million paid by plant owners each year to a trust fund created to pay the cost of developing Yucca Mountain, said Steven Kraft, the director of used nuclear fuel for the institute.

"The government promised the country that this stuff would start moving to Yucca in 1998," he said. "Now it is not making any announcements about when they are going to move fuel."

The Energy Department has been battling environmentalists, nuclear power opponents and the state of Nevada in its quest to develop the site. Still, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham told members of Congress in 2004 that he was confident the site will be approved and can accept waste by 2010.

Few believe that.

The DEP's Janati noted that the license review for the dump required by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission could take up to 10 years. The Energy Department plans to submit the license application next year, which would push the opening date to 2016.

At Exelon, planners are considering 2015 the earliest possible opening date for Yucca.

A security threat:

From a platform above TMI's fuel pool, Howard Crawford, a reactor engineer manager for AmerGen, the plant operator, watches as a robotic crane guides a bundle of fuel rods into a storage rack. There are 1,039 of the bundles, known as fuel assemblies, submerged in the crystalline water. Some glow a light purple, an effect caused by the radiation reacting with electrons in the water.

It takes 23 feet of water to shield Crawford and his crew from the intense radiation that would otherwise make it impossible for them to work.

The radiation makes the pool buildings and its contents a security threat, according to the National Academy of Sciences. In April, the NAS reported that fuel pool buildings were not as well protected from terrorist attacks as the reactor buildings, even though they store more radioactivity.

Any attack that caused the water to drain from the pool could result in a meltdown or a fire that could release large amounts of radiation. The risk is greatest at boiling water reactors such as Peach Bottom, where the pools are above ground. Three Mile Island is a pressurized water reactor, and its fuel pool is at ground level.

"We're talking about six-foot-thick re-inforced concrete," Levin said. "It will be very difficult for anyone to do any serious damage to them.

"[Still], it's better to put all your eggs in one basket and carefully watch that basket."

"Yucca Mountain would be a huge improvement in safety," said David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists. But Yucca is expected to accept only 3,000 tons of waste a year. At that rate, it would take more than 16 years just to pick up the backlog.

"Had we known 20 years ago that Yucca wouldn't be available today, it is likely that the security of the spent fuel pools would be better today than it is," he said.

Garry Lenton: 255-8264 or glenton@patriot-news.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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