Yucca Mountain News Clips - Sunday, February 12, 2006

Yucca Mountain News Clips
Sunday, February 12, 2006
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Las Vegas SUN
February 12, 2006

Yucca in need of repair after nine years

Critics question facility's viability

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

WASHINGTON - Yucca Mountain research facilities - from ground supports to railroad tracks - need repairs after just nine years of use, leaving critics wondering how the Energy Department could store nuclear waste there for thousands of years.

As part of a $544 million Yucca budget proposal for 2007, Energy Department officials this week asked Congress for money for repairs at Yucca. That included $9 million to restore the 5-mile, nine-year-old, U-shaped exploratory tunnel where researchers have been studying the mountain, department officials said.

The work includes planned improvements to a 6-foot wide ventilation shaft that runs the length of the tunnel. The department also wants to buy fire detection and alarm systems, which had never been installed in the tunnel.

The $9 million request also includes grouting work on aging ground supports in the tunnel, as well as work to shore up the rail car system that ferries workers and visitors in and out. Rail cars that creep at top speeds of 10 mph have gone off the tracks because the rails are not stable, Energy Department spokesman Allen Benson said. No one has been injured in the derailments, he said.

Yucca managers also aim to upgrade the Yucca lighting system and level a south portal ramp.

"Everything in there is old," Benson said. "This is a safety issue."

Other work plans reflect the department's confidence that Yucca is a permanent government project, despite critics who doubt the repository will ever be licensed, much less constructed.

The Yucca budget proposal includes a $21 million request to replace shabby single-wide trailers at Yucca's north portal with permanent structures. The new buildings would include a new operations center, a craft shop, a warehouse, and a fueling station.

A separate budget request - Benson could not say how much exactly - has been made for a second year of work on a fire station.

The next nearest station is 45 minutes away in Mercury, Benson said.

Benson again stressed that the new facilities were needed for the safety of Yucca workers.

Yucca critics have long argued that the proposed $60 billion repository could not safely isolate high-level nuclear waste and prevent it from seeping into the environment. Yucca foes question how the government plans to maintain what would be a complex system of tunnels under the mountain.

"Yucca Mountain isn't tunnels - it's a mine," longtime Yucca critic Sally Devlin said. "Mines fall apart. It's damp. It's rock. There's nothing they can do to support it forever. And they're going to put this hot stuff in there - are they nuts?"

Outspoken Yucca critic Peggy Maze Johnson last visited Yucca two years ago and doesn't plan to return soon.

"When you look up and see loose rock being held up by chicken wire - absolutely not did I feel safe in there," she said.

The department has been studying Yucca Mountain, roughly 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, for years. Officials have said they plan to open it by 2012 as a burial ground for the nation's most radioactive waste, although critics say that is unlikely and predict it may never open.

Before construction could start on the repository's underground tunnels, the department must first obtain a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which could take years.

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

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Las Vegas SUN
February 12, 2006

Terror threat not weighed in assessing nuke waste shipments

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

WASHINGTON - The National Academy of Sciences did not thoroughly consider the threat of terrorism as it studied the risks involved in shipping nuclear waste from around the U.S. to Yucca Mountain.

The study, partially funded by an affiliate of the nuclear power industry, concluded that the shipments would be safe. But the 292-page report noted that terrorism risks had not been fully considered because some researchers on the 16-member study panel did not have the security clearances required for access to classified government briefings.

Yucca critics have long said that the threat of terrorist attack made a massive waste-shipping campaign dangerous. Nevada officials said the new report does nothing to ease those concerns because the panel did not explore the risk of terrorism, even though the state has been asking the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to review the issue since 1999.

"It's certainly needed," Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency director Bob Loux said. "And it's something we've been asking for for a long time."

The study was paid for by federal agencies and, in part, by an affiliate of the nuclear power industry. The Academy of Sciences panel recommended that a separate committee, free of government or industry connections, now conduct a separate study of terrorism risks.

The new study should examine potential threats, the ability of waste containers to hold up to "malevolent acts," and security measures to protect shipments, the panel said.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission last week celebrated a milestone: the 50th anniversary of its public documents room, feted for providing the public with "fast and accurate responses" to inquiries as part of its mission as an "open and transparent" regulator.

The documents room "has given the American public a window" into the agency, an NRC press release trumpeted.

But on the special birthday, it was hard to miss an irony: four days earlier the NRC had denied Nevada's plea to obtain a Yucca Mountain document the state has long fought to make public.

The Energy Department's Yucca license application is the mother of all Yucca documents - essentially a request for NRC permission to begin construction on the repository, which is opposed by most Nevadans. Department officials have had a draft completed for several years, but they say Nevada can't see it until the final version is submitted months - even years - from now.

The document is, in effect, a detailed justification of the department's long-held assertion that waste would safely be stored at Yucca.

So the public has a right to see it, Nevada officials argue.

A unit of the NRC, the Pre-License Application Presiding Officer Board, had granted Nevada's request. But NRC and DOE staffers objected on technical grounds, appealing to the five-member commission.

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

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Las Vegas SUN
February 12, 2006

Energy Department seeks control of land near Yucca

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

The Pentagon wants to take a close look at an Energy Department proposal to take control of land near Yucca Mountain that is currently managed by the Air Force and other federal agencies.

Energy officials confirmed last week that legislation they are preparing to send to Congress would grant the agency control of 147,000 acres near Yucca Mountain. Of that land, 24,000 acres are managed by the Air Force, 45,000 acres by the Bureau of Land Management and 78,000 acres (of the Nevada Test Site) by the National Nuclear Security Administration.

Pentagon officials in recent years have been increasingly concerned about development encroaching on Nellis Air Force Base training and testing grounds. And Air Force officials in the past have expressed concern about Yucca waste-shipping routes limiting their training - so they are likely to raise an eyebrow at an Energy request to claim 24,000 acres of the Nellis range.

Energy Department officials aren't saying precisely which 147,000 acres they want, or whether the proposal would affect Nellis training. They won't even say if they have talked this over with the Air Force. It's premature to talk specifics, Energy spokesman Craig Stevens said.

Nellis, with 12,000 square miles of airspace northwest of Las Vegas, is one of the nation's top jet fighter training grounds, home to the Air Warfare Center and Red Flag combat training exercises. A Nellis spokesman referred questions to the Pentagon.

Pentagon Air Force spokeswoman Shirley Curry last week said she couldn't find an Air Force official familiar with the land withdrawal proposal.

"I think we would have to see something in writing in order to respond," Curry said. Her interest was piqued. "As soon as you get that information, I'd really like to see it."

Benjamin Grove can be reached at (202) 662-7436.

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Deseret News
February 12, 2006

Utah's latest wilds area not just about scenery

Move will keep nuclear waste out of Skull Valley

By Paul Foy
Associated Press

SKULL VALLEY — The dry, rounded ridges of the Cedar Mountain Wilderness Area stretch north-south for about 55 miles, framing this barren valley with its sagebrush and parched grass.

The Cedar range opens to the west on desolate salt flats, where the Air Force has sprayed nerve gas and drops ordnance on a Rhode Island-sized bombing range, and where much of the nation's industrial waste gets entombed for disposal.

Of all the spectacular and wild places in Utah worthy of protection as wilderness, the Cedars never ranked high on anyone's list. Yet, after rejecting wilderness proposals for more than two decades, Utah's congressional delegation united behind this site.

"Whether it's the most pristine or spectacular wilderness — well, it doesn't rank up there," admitted U.S. Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, the prime sponsor of the wilderness measure signed by President Bush on Jan. 6.

But more than scenery was on the mind of Utah's congressional delegation. The restrictions of the Wilderness Act of 1964, intended to forever preserve virgin wilderness in a natural state, will make it impractical for a tribe of 121 Goshute Indians to accept nuclear waste for storage on their tiny patch of Skull Valley.

The Wilderness Act forbids development, and the new wilderness cuts off the only practical route for a rail spur delivering heavy steel casks of spent fuel rods to the Goshute reservation.

"We're just a small Indian tribe that makes Utah cringe," said tribal Chief Leon Bear, who professed no opinion about the state's new wilderness area.

Bear in 1996 signed a multimillion-dollar contract with Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of nuclear-powered utilities looking to unload 40,000 tons of spent uranium fuel rods with a half-life of 10,000 years on his reservation.

Now, Bear shrugs off the wilderness as the consortium's problem, not his.

If the designation wasn't strictly about wilderness preservation, advocates don't care, said Kevin Mueller, executive director of the Utah Wilderness Congress.

While it was not the top priority of preservationists, it was on their wish list — and they didn't even have to fight for it. In fact, they got more than they wanted — a 100,000-acre wilderness instead of 62,100 acres in their original proposal for the Cedar mountain range.

"Obscurity doesn't discredit the place. It's wild," Ray Bloxham, a field inventory specialist for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said on a tour of the Cedar Mountains, just an hour's drive west of Salt Lake City.

The alliance has spent decades trying to protect millions of acres of redrock canyons in southern Utah that fall outside wilderness areas, but that doesn't mean it will overlook a desert range closer to Salt Lake City where some 200 wild horses roam.

Wilderness activists are applauding Bishop, a second-term congressman, and say they look forward to forging more wilderness bills with the state's delegation, which has de facto veto power over any effort in Congress to establish more wilderness in Utah.

Bishop also praised the collaborative effort but said it was "premature to conclude" Utah would welcome more wilderness designations, traditionally a hated symbol here of federal control. Utah has the fewest acres of wilderness of any Western state, and the last purely Utah wilderness bill passed in 1984.

But if there's one thing Utah politicians like less than wilderness, it's an open-air nuclear-waste dump in a state that has no nuclear power plants of its own.

"It's quite interesting they would go that far — to make a wilderness area just to keep out a few spent fuel rods and snub the poor old Goshutes," said Claude Parkinson, 76, who leads tours at the nearby Donner-Reed Pioneer Museum.

The utility partners say the Skull Valley storage is temporary until the federal government can open a national repository for spent fuel at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, but try telling that to state leaders.

"The Goliaths were supposed to roll right over us and win," Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. said in an address last month to the Legislature, celebrating a wilderness bill that "not only makes it extremely difficult for anyone to bring spent nuclear fuel into Skull Valley, it also preserves the integrity of the Utah Test and Training Range."

The Air Force uses Skull Valley as a flight path to the bombing range, and Utah earlier tried to argue that the odds of a jet crashing into a stainless steel cask and releasing radiation made the project too risky.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission rejected that argument and authorized a license for Private Fuel Storage last September. Utah is asking a federal appeals court to overturn the decision, but Bishop said Utah's biggest ace is the wilderness area and its barrier to rail transport.

Private Fuel Storage chief John Parkyn has said he might be able to off-load the canisters from a main Union-Pacific line for trucking, but that option is fraught with problems.

Glenn Carpenter, a field manager for the Bureau of Land Management, said his agency was unlikely to yield more land. And Utah is even less likely to widen the shoulderless, two-lane state road to accommodate flatbed trucks and their oversized loads.

The BLM has opened public comment on whether to grant Private Fuel Storage a right of way into Skull Valley. A decision isn't expected for months.

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Logan Herald Journal
February 12, 2006

Hatch heart-to-heart

By Adam Benson

Senator brings ideas, hopes to Cache Valley

Orrin Hatch´s ties to Cache Valley run deep. His wife, Elaine, was born and raised in Newton and his brother-in-law earned an engineering degree from Utah State University.

He also calls USU men´s basketball coach Stew Morrill “the best basketball coach in the whole state outside of Jerry Sloan.’

But the Republican U.S. Senator from Utah returned to the region with a clear message for boosters Friday night as the keynote speaker at the Cache County Republicans´ annual Lincoln Day Dinner: President Bush is steering the country in the right direction.

“Our president has had the guts to take on terrorists all over the world,’ said Hatch, who called Bush´s nominations of Samuel Alito and John Roberts to the Supreme Court two of the “most important things’ of his administration.

The five-term veteran lawmaker also went on the offensive, slamming his Democratic colleagues for their “vicious’ partisan politics and praising Bush as a man who “hasn´t forgotten about God.’

In the roughly half hour he spent addressing the hundreds of people in attendance — including Lt. Gov. Gary Herbert, U.S. Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, and Cache Valley´s company of state lawmakers — Hatch earned six rounds of applause and two standing ovations.

“This is a state that´s just beginning to shine,’ said Hatch. “We´re going to keep making sure that our light helps our country to remain free.’

The 71-year-old Hatch sat down with The Herald Journal for a wide-ranging interview before taking the dais.

Q: What is it like for you to be back in Cache Valley? You have a lot of ties here.

A: I love Cache Valley. It´s a beautiful place. We just have so many friends, it´s just a beautiful place and we love being here. When I go to Newton, I usually walk up to the Newton Dam every time. That´s a long walk.

Q: There´s a lot of legislation moving through the state Legislature, but Utah is lucky enough to have a $1 billion surplus right now. How economically healthy is Utah compared to the deficits that are occurring on nearly every level of government?

A: Our unemployment rate is down, and we´ve got a lot of businesses coming in. We´ve worked very hard to help do that and of course, Utah is really, really going well. Our GDP here is very good. It´s a well-run state, we´ve got a lot going for us, and it´s just the beginning. If we can develop our resources like the tar sands and oil shale in Eastern Utah that´s going to make Utah pretty wealthy. We just have so many natural resources and we found tremendous oil reserves down there in Sanpete and Sevier counties, maybe as much as four billion barrels. Who knows? But it´s very sweet crude and it´s good stuff.

Then you add the educational base down through the Wasatch Front from Utah State to Weber State to the University of Utah and BYU and all the state schools in between. We´re providing a software valley that is equivalent to San Jose and Massachusetts and elsewhere. We´ve got brilliant people working in these areas. We don´t want to take it for granted.

Q: People in Cache Valley sometimes feel a little bit forgotten by their state legislators who aren´t from here. I know people in Utah kind of feel that way about their presence in Washington.

A: I don´t think so. I think most people realize they´re pretty well represented in Washington. We have a good delegation and we work well together. We don´t let many Utah issues go unaddressed.

Q: I know a big one for you has been Skull Valley down on the Utah-Nevada border with your friend, U.S. Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev). How do you see that playing out?

A: We were able in the final negotiations between Congressman Bishop, myself and (GOP Sen. John) Ensign from Nevada to get the wilderness language that closed off the rail spur (Cedar Mountain) in the north part. Now what we´ve got to do is get people to write into the Bureau of Land Management.

The rest of the delegation has gone with Harry Reid on being against Yucca Mountain, but I´ve made it very clear that somebody has to stick with the administration. Had I not stuck with the administration, we probably wouldn´t have solved what we´ve solved up to now.

But now, we´ve got to work to try and pull the companies out of PFS (Private Fuel Storage, L.L.C — the company hoping to build a high level nuclear waste storage facility on the Skull Valley Band of the Goshute Indian Reservation). I´ve got three or maybe four who are rethinking it. They want to work with me because I´m going to be chairman of the (Senate) Finance Committee. I believe in the end we´re going to be able to win on that. If we don´t win, you´re talking about 40 years of having that stuff transported in and out of Utah, and we´re just not going to put up with that.

Q: President Bush on Friday again defended his warrantless eavesdropping program conducted by the National Security Agency. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales recently spoke with the Senate Intelligence Committee about it, and some people from your party have come out and questioned the program´s legality. What are your thoughts?

A: I can´t talk about the program, but I know a lot about it. What they´re doing is one of the most highly classified matters in the country today. Let´s be honest about it: Most people in this country want the president to do what he can to protect us, and I think if you look at what´s going on, most people would support this type of research.

All of us in Congress are concerned that there ought to be some way of checking the power of the executive branch, just like the other two branches have to be checked. We´re working on how we might do that. The administration has come a long way … they appeared before the House Intelligence Committee and gave them a lot of knowledge about what´s going on.

The way the president did this, it isn´t near as inconsiderate as some people thought. Not only did they decide they had to do this, but they put 45-day limits so they would have to re-up the program every time. They disclosed to the FISA Court´s chief judge, they kept the eight top leaders in Congress aware of it.

In addition, they came up to the House and Senate Intelligence Committee and have given us tremendous background information on this as of this week.

Q: Are you going to be hearing more testimony from senior administration officials on the program?

A: Yes. They will continue to inform us about what´s going on, but let´s be clear. The leaks of this information have resulted in severe damage in our country´s ability to collect intelligence from terrorists. It has alerted them, and some estimate that intelligence gathering has dropped off a dramatic percentage after these leaks. Whoever has done this ought to be prosecuted.

Q: You´re with the president then in that this information shouldn´t have been disclosed to the media and the public?

A: That´s absolutely correct. The people who did that did our intelligence gathering a tremendous disservice, and all I can say is that the president did what he could under the circumstances. The argument is this: The Congress passed an authorized use of military force. The president has to do what it takes to protect our country from terrorists, and he got that authority directly from Congress. It´s a much more broad authority than just a war powers resolution, which is usually one sentence.

On top of that, the president has what at least five Circuit Court of Appeals have called “an inherent power to protect our homeland.’ He has acted within the law as the law sits today. He has inherent authority to conduct warrantless surveillance so long as that surveillance is reasonable. There´s a stand-off between the Congress and the executive branch about just how far his powers go. Many of us believe that he is not out of line to have used his inherent powers. However, we are concerned that the Intelligence Committee should be informed, and that there should be some checks on this type of power. We can´t protect the American people without the warrantless surveillance that´s been done.

Q: You mentioned the Supreme Court. Between Judge Samuel Alito and John Roberts, where is the Supreme Court going to be headed in the next decade or so?

A: Nobody knows. We don´t know how people are going to react once they get on the court.

Q: Are they both the right people for the job?

A: Oh, you bet. They are tremendous people. You will no longer have people just off the top of their heads deciding to make laws from the bench. That´s why liberals want liberal justices on there, because they will make laws from the bench that the legislators could never get through.

That´s not the role of judges. Judges are to interpret the laws made by those elected to make them. I don´t think you´ll see either of those justices making the laws.

There will be some disappointed conservatives who are just as bad as the disappointed liberals who want the judges now to make laws that are conservative. I don´t think you´re going to find these two justices are going to do that, because they know the role of judging.

If judges don´t have parameters, the Constitution doesn´t mean anything.

Q: In the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal and the allegations against U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, I´m wondering your thoughts on the mid-term elections on 2006, and if you think the Republicans have taken a public relations hit.

A: The Jack Abramoff situation is a scandal. Nobody can justify the activities he was doing, but to blame all lobbyists in Washington for what he did would be absolutely wrong. Many of the lobbyists in town are people with great skill and great ability who are honest.

There´s been so much bad publicity about that — as there should be — that Congress now is re-looking at all the ethics rules. In all honesty, individuals from both parties got a lot of money from Jack Abramoff and his affiliates. To blame one party over another is just ridiculous. Abramoff broke existing law and admits it.

Q: What about the ethics allegations against Rep. DeLay?

A: Rep. DeLay is innocent until proven guilty, and that prosecutor (Travis County, Texas, District Attorney Ronald Earle) is one of the sleaziest in the history of this country. He did this to (Republican U.S. Senator) Kay Bailey Hutchison, and put her through hell trying to get her to lose her Senate seat and then the minute she won he dismissed the charges.

In the case of DeLay, I can´t judge all that. All I can say is that they hate DeLay because he´s a hard-charging Republican. But I wouldn´t trust that prosecutor as far as you could throw him.

Q: Hillary Clinton´s name keeps coming up from the Democrats about the 2008 presidential election. What are your thoughts on Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and his chances of securing the Republican nomination or at least being a a force for Republicans to at least think about?

A: Right now, Hillary Clinton is probably their number one choice, but I don´t think in the end she´ll be their choice. They´ve got some other potentially very good nominees like (former Virginia Gov. John) Warner, who ran the state pretty well. You´ve got (Iowa Gov. Tom) Vilsack and (New Mexico Gov. Bill) Richardson. Kerry wants to run again, and so does Edwards. They´ve got a plethora on their side and on our side, we do too.

If (current Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice came up, I think she´d blow people away. (Senate Majority Leader) Bill Frist, George Allen, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, George Pataki. I´ll just say this as a matter of fact: Mitt Romney has more management ability than any potential candidate on either side. He is one of the best managers in the country. He took over Massachusetts, which is an extremely liberal state with a totally dominant Democratic Legislature and turned a $3 billion deficit into a $1 billion surplus in just the few years he´s been in there.

The day I announced for president, I was on “Larry King Live’ and he said “senator, how are you going to do it? Eighteen percent of the American people will not vote for a Mormon under any circumstances.’ I found that to be true, but I think I helped break down some of those barriers. Mitt, I think, can overcome that.

I believe that if it came down to Mitt showing that he can do the job better than anybody else, I think he can make it.

Q: You´re seeking another term in office. Why?

A: The reason is there are so many things I can do that I´m not sure anyone else can, and I´m on the right committees to do them. Within the next few years, I´ll be chairman or ranking on the Senate Finance Committee, which is the most powerful committee in the country.

We couldn´t have a senator in the next three years who´d be able to do what I´ll be in a position to. At the same time I become chairman of the Finance Committee, (Utah Republican Sen.) Bob Bennett will become chairman of the Banking Committee, so Utah will have two chairmen on the two most powerful money committees in Congress.

Q: Do you think we´ll be seeing some kind of concrete exit strategy regarding the war in Iraq coming out of the White House or Washington?

A: I said when we went into this war that we needed to take this fight to them overseas, not on our land and so far, that´s worked very well.

In the case of Iraq, I said it would take at least 10 years. I was hoping I was wrong, and I personally think I very well might be wrong. But as you can see, it´s a completely different culture from ours. We need to finish that job, but we are winning.

The insurgency seems to be running into a lot of difficulty. First of all, they are not as well trained as they used to be. We´ve killed or captured a lot of them. We´ve put a big scare into Syria, from which a lot of these insurgents are coming, and we´ve put a lot of pressure on Iran, which is the biggest financier of terrorists in the world.

The problem is, we have weak nations in the U.N. who won´t stand up the way they should. It took us 10 years to formulate and do our Constitution. They´ve got theirs in a much shorter period of time. The question is, will they be able to follow through with a representative form of government? The answer to that is, we hope. It´s an uphill battle, and it always has been. We can´t lose our nerve.

E-mail: bensona@hjnews.com

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San Francisco Chronicle
February 12, 2006

Nuclear moves to front burner

Bush push for energy reactors may not get much heat from former foes of atomic power

David R. Baker
Chronicle Staff Writer

Nuclear power, long shunned by the public, stands poised for a comeback.

Credit a strange mix of politics and environmental desperation.

President Bush wants nuclear power to feed America's growing hunger for energy. He has promised tax incentives to companies that build atomic plants, promoted the technology abroad and pushed research into recycling nuclear fuel. His State of the Union address cited nuclear energy in the same breath as wind farms and solar arrays -- saying all three will change the way the country powers its homes and offices.

At the same time, the nuclear industry has found allies among its most determined former foes -- environmentalists.

Increasingly alarmed by global warming, some environmentalists have embraced the technology they once fought, seeing it as a way to provide large amounts of energy without spewing greenhouse gases into the air.

"There's no way that solar panels or windmills can do it themselves," said Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace who now runs an energy consulting firm and works with nuclear industry groups.

For the companies that build and operate nuclear plants, the change could hardly be more dramatic.

The partial meltdown at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island in 1979 hardened American public opinion against nuclear power. After the 1986 explosion at Ukraine's Chernobyl plant, the industry's future looked bleak.

Now, prompted by renewed government interest, energy companies are planning new reactors and plants for the first time in three decades. Three companies have submitted applications with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and eight other projects are under development.

But a nuclear renaissance is far from certain.

Without federal subsidies, skeptics contend, nuclear plants will remain more expensive than conventional plants burning coal and natural gas. The threat of a terrorist attack -- not a factor during the industry's last building boom -- now makes atomic plants look like targets.

Finally, despite years of wrangling, the nation has yet to open its long-planned, long-term nuclear waste storage site at Nevada's Yucca Mountain.

In other words, one of the main issues that killed the country's enthusiasm for nuclear power decades ago -- the question of what to do with radioactive waste -- is still unsolved. Existing plants, such as Diablo Canyon on California's Central Coast, store their spent fuel on the premises, to the dismay of neighbors.

"We have to accept that there's a permanent repository 16 miles from my house," said Morgan Rafferty of Arroyo Grande (San Luis Obispo County) and a member of the Mothers for Peace activist group. Then again, Rafferty doesn't much like the idea of transporting nuclear waste, either.

"Can you imaging trains going through the San Fernando Valley or L.A.?" she said. "There's nobody we dislike enough to send it through their neighborhood."

Without a long-term storage site, any revival in the nuclear industry probably won't reach California.

State law forbids new atomic plants until the waste question has been answered. The utilities that run California's two existing nuclear plants don't expect that to change. They are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into refurbishing their plants and may try to renew their operating licenses. But they don't anticipate building.

"You'd have to first have a legislative initiative to change the rules," said Ray Golden, spokesman for Southern California Edison at the company's San Onofre nuclear plant, in San Diego County. "Right now, it would be a very, very tough thing to put forth."

Despite decades out of the public eye, nuclear power never disappeared. America's 103 operating reactors provide roughly 20 percent of our electricity. The proportion in other countries is even higher. In France, it tops 78 percent.

The industry's supporters cite two big advantages nuclear power holds over other sources of energy. Unlike electrical plants running on coal, natural gas or oil, nuclear facilities don't churn out carbon dioxide, considered the main culprit behind global warming. And unlike solar arrays or wind farms, they can run at any time, in any weather.

With global energy demand expected to double in the next 50 years, supporters say, the world needs nuclear plants.

"Anyone that fairly looks at this question, whether you're from the energy side of the debate or the environmental side of the debate, concludes that nuclear power must play a significant role in meeting this dramatic growth in energy demand," said Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell, in a news conference last week.

The administration has initiated an effort to create a new generation of nuclear plants here and abroad. Bush's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, announced last week, would research ways to recycle nuclear fuel and cut waste. It also would provide fuel to other countries that agree not to build their own uranium enrichment facilities.

In addition, last year's federal energy legislation included tax credits and loan guarantees designed to kick-start nuclear plant construction. Each owner of the next five or six plants built, for example, can receive up to $125 million per year in tax credits.

Some companies are already in line.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is reviewing applications from three companies -- Dominion, Exelon and Entergy -- to build new reactors. All three projects would be built next to existing plants, one in Clinton, Ill., one in Grand Gulf, Miss., and one in North Anna, Va.

Dominion's project in Virginia could win approval later this year, while decisions on the other two proposals are expected next year.

Other businesses are mulling sites scattered throughout the South and the East, from Louisiana to New York. No projects have been proposed west of the Rocky Mountains, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute trade group.

Critics, however, doubt any construction boom will last.

Without government incentives, they say, nuclear power remains too expensive. A 2003 study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, estimated that electricity from a new nuclear plant would cost roughly 60 percent more than power from a coal plant and 20 percent more than energy from a natural gas plant. The study, which argued in favor of nuclear power, cited cost as one of the technology's biggest obstacles.

"It's largely been because of economics that there haven't been any successful orders in the last 30 years," said Thomas Cochran, director of the nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Companies will take advantage of the new tax incentives, he said, but will probably balk at building once those incentives disappear.

"Instead of 103 (reactors), we may have 109," Cochran said. "These decisions are made in boardrooms, and they're based on the bottom line."

Most analysts, however, expect the companies that own the nation's existing reactors to keep them running as long as possible.

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. will spend $706 million over the next three years to replace steam generators at Diablo Canyon. The project, fiercely opposed by some residents, has been approved by state energy regulators but still needs permission from San Luis Obispo County officials.

The San Francisco company has not yet decided whether to seek an extension of the plant's operating license, which will expire in 2025. But PG&E has proposed spending $19 million in ratepayer money on a relicensing feasibility study. State energy regulators must approve the request.

"We're taking that step to try to determine whether it makes sense to seek relicensing," said PG&E spokesman Jeff Lewis.

Despite the federal government incentives, PG&E has no plans for another California reactor, Lewis said, citing state law.

"It's not really an option," he said.

New nukes

Power companies are considering 13 locations for 11 new nuclear plants.

Potential site and company:

1. Clinton, Ill.: Exelon

2. Nine Mile Point, N.Y.: UniStar

3. Calvert Cliffs, Md.: UniStar

4. North Anna, Va.: Dominion

5. Harris, N.C.: Progress Energy

6. Summer, N.C.: South Carolina Electric & Gas

7. Savannah River site, S.C.: South Carolina Electric & Gas

8. Vogtle, Ga.: Southern Co.

9. Crystal River, Fla.: Progress Energy

10. Bellefonte Ala.: NuStart

11. Grand Gulf, Miss.: NuStart (Entergy)

12. River Bend, La.: Entergy

13. Either in North Carolina or South Carolina: Duke

Gus D'Angelo / The Chronicle

E-mail David R. Baker at dbaker@sfchronicle.com.

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San Francisco Chronicle
February 12, 2006

Nuclear power plans surge ahead

14 new plants set to go online in 10 states over next 20 years

Stewart M. Powell, Judy Holland, Hearst Newspapers

Washington -- The nation's nuclear power industry, buoyed by support from President Bush and the Republican-led Congress, says it is charging ahead with plans to build the largest number of new generating plants in 20 years.

Despite a streamlined licensing process and new federal financial incentives, the first new plant won't produce electricity until 2014 at the earliest.

A total of 14 new plants are planned in as many as 10 states. There are already 103 plants at 64 sites in 34 states.

"We just have to be patient," says Mitch Singer, of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the trade association for the nuclear power industry.

"Companies are gearing up a decade in advance so that the additional electricity production we need will come on line by the time it's needed."

Industry estimates suggest as many as 10 nuclear power plants could be under construction by 2012, thanks to streamlined regulations, tolerance for the environmental impact of new plants and financial support on Wall Street. The last time that many plants were under way was in the 1980s, according to Adrian Heymer, the Nuclear Energy Institute's senior director of new plant deployment.

Bush reiterated support for nuclear power in his State of the Union address last week, saying that nuclear energy should meet 50 percent of the nation's electricity requirements by 2025.

Nuclear power currently accounts for 20 percent of the nation's electricity requirement, second only to coal-fired plants.

Bush added in remarks in Minnesota on Feb. 2: "If you're worried about the environment, which I am, it seems like to make sense that we use nuclear power. It's renewable and it's clean."

Bush's support, coupled with growing public concern over greenhouse emissions, fluctuating prices for natural gas and oil and unreliable access to energy supplies in the Persian Gulf and Russia, have changed the political calculus for nuclear power.

Nine companies, many taking advantage of financial incentives provided by White House-backed energy legislation enacted by Congress in August, have launched preliminary efforts to win Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval to build and operate nuclear power plants.

The licensing process could cost companies $50 million per application to the NRC, which finances much of its operations from fees paid by applicants. The last new nuclear power plant, located at Watts Barr, Tenn., started producing electricity in 1996.

Singer says the industry expects the NRC to approve the first wave of licenses for new plants by 2010 with the first plants producing electricity by 2014. The five members on the NRC were nominated by Bush and confirmed by the Republican-led Senate -- including three commissioners who served during the Clinton administration and were nominated for additional terms by Bush.

New financial incentives adopted by Congress and signed into law by Bush are "going a long way to encouraging the industry, the electric utilities and Wall Street to take a good look at moving ahead with new plants," Singer says.

The incentives include 20-year renewal of the Price-Anderson Act providing immediate, no-fault insurance coverage for victims of any nuclear reactor accident; federal loan guarantees of up to 80 percent of the estimated $1.5 billion construction cost of each plant; eight years' worth of tax credits for the first 6,000 megawatts of electricity generation capacity from new plants; and up to $500 million in standby coverage to help cover the costs of any delays for construction or start up that are beyond the owners' control.

The nuclear power industry also is moving ahead because it sees the federal government making progress with plans to dispose of radioactive waste generated by nuclear power plants. The government has designed a specially built underground storage site at Yucca Mountain, Nev., for radioactive waste generated by electricity production.

The material is currently stored at the 64 sites across the country where nuclear power plants are operating.

"The industry sees progress on disposal -- otherwise companies would not be taking the steps they are taking right now to build new plants," Singer said.

The nine companies -- Dominion, NuStart, Entergy, Southern Co., Progress Energy, Duke, South Carolina Electric & Gas, Exelon and UniStar -- have started the process to locate 14 nuclear power plants at sites in as many as 10 states. The potential locations include: North Anna, Va.; Bellefonte, Ala.; Grand Gulf, Miss.; River Bend, La.; Vogtle, Ga.; Harris, N.C., sites to be determined in Florida, South Carolina and North Carolina; Clinton, Ill.; and either Calvert Cliffs, Md., or Nine Mile Point, N.Y.

Many of the new plants would be located adjacent to existing plants.

The Bush administration also is supporting the nuclear industry's drive to win 20-year license renewals for many of the 103 plants. Plants routinely receive an initial operating license for 40 years, followed by at least one 20-year renewal. Additional renewals are theoretically possible, subject to safety regulations.

Thirty-nine of the nation's plants have already filed for 20-year license renewals or are expected to file license renewal applications in the next six years. Thirty-nine other plants already have obtained 20-year extensions to their initial 40-year licenses.

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Arizona Republic
February 12, 2006

Nuclear industry plans ad push for plants

Support sought for future sites

John J. Fialka
Wall Street Journal

WASHINGTON - The nation's nuclear-power industry is set to roll out a multiyear advertising campaign to build public support for a generation of new plants and federal policies needed to help them succeed.

The campaign, based around a theme of "nuclear renaissance," is timed to support President Bush's nuclear-energy initiative. The plan would sponsor research in technology to safely reprocess spent nuclear fuel so that long-term storage space for waste might be reduced.

"We want to build a broader base of bipartisan support, both in Washington and across the country," said Scott Peterson, a vice president of the Nuclear Energy Institute. The trade group represents owners of the 103 nuclear-power plants that provide 20 percent of the nation's electricity. advertisement

The main goal of the ad campaign is to bolster public support for as many as four proposals for nuclear plants that are expected to enter the licensing process at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission next year.

No nuclear plant has been proposed in the United States since the 1970s.

In Washington, the industry will push Bush-administration proposals to move nuclear waste from storage near power plants to Yucca Mountain in Nevada or to alternative sites on government land. Companies wanting to build plants will have to show there is adequate storage space for the waste they will generate.

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Las Vegas SUN
February 11, 2006

Editorial: Report is no endorsement

Troubling questions about a science panel's findings on nuclear waste transportation

This week a panel of the National Academy of Sciences issued a report that asserted high-level nuclear waste can be shipped safely. While the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear power industry's lobbying arm, jumped on the report's conclusion, not everything in it was favorable to the industry.

The National Academy of Sciences panel noted that significant amounts of radiation could be released if a shipment were to be engulfed in a sustained and intense fire. That should hardly be comforting to the tens of millions of people who live along rail routes or highways where nuclear waste would be shipped if Nevada's Yucca Mountain ever were approved to permanently store 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste.

It certainly won't be of comfort to those who remember the fiery derailment of a 60-car freight train in Baltimore in 2001. One of the cars that ruptured was carrying thousands of gallons of hydrochloric acid. The fire, which sometimes reached temperatures as high as 1,500 degrees, lasted for six days. Imagine if that had been high-level nuclear waste.

The National Academy of Sciences panel found that there should be more real-world testing of the containers under extreme conditions. But the panel added that there was no need to test the containers to the point of destruction. In light of just how lethal this cargo would be, it makes absolutely no sense not to put these containers through the most severe tests possible.

In addition, it was alarming that the National Academy of Sciences panel said it was unable to gauge the risks that terrorist attacks would pose to these shipments because it could not gain access to classified information. In a post-9/11 world, there is no way to come to a final conclusion about the safety of nuclear waste shipments without factoring in terrorism. We are glad that the panel did recommend an independent investigation of the risks that terrorism poses - an investigation that doesn't have industry or government conflicts.

In our view, this report's conclusions aren't comforting at all. If anything, it reinforces our belief that nuclear waste should be left safely on site, where it is produced, until scientists figure out a way to render it safely. Why take needless risks with man's deadliest waste?

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Las Vegas SUN
February 11, 2006

Letter: First, let's study nuclear plants already in use

The Bush administration's salesmen are trying to convince us that reprocessing, or recycling, spent-fuel rods will cut down on nuclear waste.

To get Americans to agree to construction of new nuclear power plants, the administration knows it has to present a plan to reduce radioactive waste. The Bush plan calls for extraction of the usable 10 percent in each fuel rod.

England recycles and has been doing it for 40 years at its THORP facility at Sellafield. Here's a quote from Sellafield working paper 5:2001: "The volume of radioactive waste is 189 times greater when reprocessed at THORP than it would be if the spent fuel is stored as waste on shore."

France has been reprocessing since the 1960s at its Cap de la Hague facility in Normandy. An official publication just issued from its high-level nuclear waste site at Bure, 100 miles east of Paris, says 5,000 acres are needed to bury its waste. The country has about half the number of U.S. reactors but needs five times the space designed for burial at Yucca Mountain. The French have 58 reactors, while America has had 106.

The best way to determine if reprocessing indeed reduces the volume of nuclear waste is to investigate the records of the two facilities that have been doing it for nearly half a century, not listening to the administration's sales force.

Ron Bourgoin
Rocky Mount, N.C.

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All Headline News
February 11, 2006

Safely Transporting Radioactive Spent Fuel Still Problematic

Andrea Moore - All Headline News Staff Reporter

Washington, D.C. (AHN) - Questions about safety remain about methods planned for transporting radioactive spent fuel from nuclear power reactors, including the possible event of a sustained, hot fire, a review panel of the US National Academy of Sciences has concluded.

Such fires have occurred in at least two cases where trains of petroleum-filled tanker cars burned for days before being controlled. The only way to minimize that risk for now, the panel concludes, is to make sure petroleum-carrying trains never get close to nuclear waste trains, but more research should be done on the effects of such fires on the nuclear casks.

The report released in Washington, D.C., found there are "no fundamental technical barriers" to safe transportation, but that a number of "serious challenges" remain.

Assuming no new plants are built, disposing of fuel from the US's 112 operating plants will require a two-decade-long program of daily shipments, and more planning needs to be done for managing this massive operation, the report says.

The report assessed the adequacy of planning for every kind of accident scenario, but not the potential for deliberate acts such as terrorist attacks. To evaluate that aspect, it says, would require creation of a new committee with full access to classified materials.

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Casper Star Tribune
February 11, 2006

Wilderness plan comes with underlying goal

PAUL FOY

SKULL VALLEY, Utah -- The dry, rounded ridges of the Cedar Mountain Wilderness Area stretch north-south for about 55 miles, framing this barren valley with its sagebrush and parched grass.

"Whether it's the most pristine or spectacular wilderness -- well, it doesn't rank up there," admitted U.S. Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, the prime sponsor of the wilderness measure signed by President Bush on Jan. 6.

The Wilderness Act forbids development, and the new wilderness cuts off the only practical route for a rail spur delivering heavy steel casks of spent fuel rods to the Goshute reservation.

"We're just a small Indian tribe that makes Utah cringe," said tribal Chief Leon Bear, who professed no opinion about the state's new wilderness area.

Now, Bear shrugs off the wilderness as the consortium's problem, not his.

If the designation wasn't strictly about wilderness preservation, advocates don't care, said Kevin Mueller, executive director of the Utah Wilderness Congress.

While it was not the top priority of preservationists, it was on their wish list -- and they didn't even have to fight for it. In fact, they got more than they wanted -- a 100,000-acre wilderness instead of 62,100 acres in their original proposal for the Cedar mountain range.

"Obscurity doesn't discredit the place. It's wild," Ray Bloxham, a field inventory specialist for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said on a tour of the Cedar mountains, just an hour's drive west of Salt Lake City.

But if there's one thing Utah politicians like less than wilderness, it's an open-air nuclear-waste dump in a state that has no nuclear power plants of its own.

"It's quite interesting they would go that far -- to make a wilderness area just to keep out a few spent fuel rods and snub the poor old Goshutes," said Claude Parkinson, 76, who leads tours at the nearby Donner-Reed Pioneer Museum.

"The Goliaths were supposed to roll right over us and win," Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman said in an address last month to the Legislature, celebrating a wilderness bill that "not only makes it extremely difficult for anyone to bring spent nuclear fuel into Skull Valley, it also preserves the integrity of the Utah Test and Training Range."

Private Fuel Storage chief John Parkyn has said he might be able to off-load the canisters from a main Union-Pacific line for trucking, but that option is fraught with problems.

The BLM has opened public comment on whether to grant Private Fuel Storage a right of way into Skull Valley. A decision isn't expected for months.

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Los Alamos Monitor
February 11, 2006

Nuclear energy revival gains steam in U.S.

ROGER SNODGRASS
roger@lamonitor.com
Monitor Assistant Editor

If all goes well, a leading national authority on nuclear energy said a renaissance in nuclear energy production is within reach.

Richard Meserve, president of the Carnegie Institute and former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said he supported the effort but was mindful of potential challenges ahead. He spoke at a Director's Colloquium in the Physics Auditorium at Los Alamos National Laboratory on Thursday.

"The barriers are being and can be overcome," he said.

Nuclear power has managed to contribute about 20 percent of the nation's growing electricity supply, despite the fact that no new nuclear power plants have been built since 1973, according to the Energy Information Agency.

The reason is that existing plants have become more efficient while lowering operating costs and generating electricity at increasingly higher levels of capacity.

But the 103 operating nuclear power plants in the U.S. won't last forever, Meserve said. Over the next three decades, as plants age and permits expire and as electricity needs grow, the cheapest source of power on the grid was doomed to fade out.

Meserve co-chaired a Department of Energy task force that recommended government assistance to help industry revive the nuclear energy program, particularly in sharing the start-up costs for new designs and streamlining the application process.

Many of those recommendations were codified in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, signed into law in August.

The incentives and simplified permits have already stimulated a number of new prospects. None of them has filed yet, Meserve said, but assuming that they do, and if NRC can process them adequately, and nothing else bad happens, the country could see another dozen nuclear plants within a decade.

Mounting concerns over greenhouse gasses from fossil fuel generating plants along with a growing awareness of the nation's vulnerability in energy security have overtaken the safety fears that dominated the issue in the wake of the Three-Mile Island incident in Pennsylvania in March 1979, followed by the Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union in April 1986.

Meserve said polls now find 60-75 percent of Americans generally support nuclear power, but that support may not be held firmly enough that it could survive a Chernobyl-like disaster.

"If there is an Achilles heel in all this," he said, it is the risk of an international incident that would once again block pursuit of the nuclear option.

Promoting international systems for nuclear safety, he said, is one of his personal priorities and why he is serving as the chairman of the international nuclear safety group for the International Atomic Energy Agency.

New power plants are most likely to be sited on or near existing sites, where familiarity, established trust and economic self-interest will help overcome resistance from the anti-nuclear resistance, he said.

He emphasized, "The NRC must be seen as a competent and open regulator, that is, not in the pocket of the nuclear energy industry."

Meserve discussed the delays in building the high-level nuclear waste depository at Yucca Mountain, but considers the problem of storing the spent fuel from nuclear power plants to be solvable, aided by the next generation fast reactors and reprocessing options that will lower proliferation risks.

"We ought to proceed anyway," Meserve said, adding it is another one of those technical issues that is not beyond the human capacity to solve.

"We don't have a crisis. We don't need an answer tomorrow," he said.

A report by the National Academies of Sciences issued Thursday concluded, "There are no fundamental barriers to the safe transport of nuclear fuel and high-level waste in the United States."

Meserve, the indispensable expert, chaired the nuclear and radiation studies board on that review committee as well. The committee's conclusion on a piece of the picture, reflected his own assessment of the whole - that there are no insurmountable obstacles.

He was asked a question from the audience about whether the short-term persistence of fossil fuel emissions in the atmosphere, should outweigh the very long term - millennial -presence of radioactive waste in the environment,

The effort to return to nuclear power is essential, he said, because we know what to do.

"The climate change problem, we don't even know how to deal with yet," he said.

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Charleston Post Courier
February 11, 2006

S.C. utilities settle lawsuit over waste

Nuclear waste storage deal gives them $9M

By Kyle Stock
The Post and Courier

Scana Corp. and Santee Cooper, the electric utilities that serve the bulk of South Carolina, have settled a lawsuit with the federal government over nuclear waste disposal and are moving forward on a plan to build two new nuclear power plants next to a similar facility that the utilities co-own in Jenkinsville.

In January 2004, the utilities sued the U.S. Department of Energy over its failure to cart off the companies' nuclear waste per a 1983 agreement. The power companies have paid the government close to $8 million a year since the early 1980s under the stipulation that the government would accept their spent radioactive fuel rods in 1998. But the DOE's plan to store the fuel at Yucca Mountain, Nev., has been tied up in lawsuits and the radioactive waste is still stored at the utilities' Jenksinville plant.

At the end of December, the government agreed to pay the utilities $9 million to compensate them for the cost of storing the fuel. It is the second such settlement, although about 50 other utilities filed similar suits, collectively seeking $56 billion from the government.

To date, utilities have paid the Energy Department $26.6 billion to clean up their waste, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry-funded lobbying group. Four S.C. nuclear plants ran out of storage space for waste by 1990. Scana and Santee Cooper built facilities big enough to handle their waste until 2018.

"I don't know if I would look at it in terms of good or bad," said Steve Byrne, Scana's chief nuclear officer. "I'm pleased we got a settlement. ... I'm pleased that we were able to avoid going to court."

The settlement closes an ugly debate just in time for Scana and Santee Cooper to move forward on plans to build a new nuclear power plant. The utilities said Friday that they will seek federal approval to put two new radioactive towers near the V.C. Summer plant that they opened in Jenkinsville in 1983.

The Midlands site is a feasible spot for a nuclear generator because it already has a skilled work force, a training center and a transmission network. The Savannah River Site near Aiken was high on the list of possibilities, but it would not have offered as much "synergy," said SCE&G President Neville Lorick. "We would save both time and money, and that would mean a lower overall cost for our customers versus other locations," Lorick said.

Utility executives said they won't commit to build the plant for a few years, but right now nuclear power is "an extremely competitive" option compared to coal- and natural-gas-fired turbines. A federal license would also allow the utilities to build a second nuclear plant at any time in the 20 years after it is issued.

The announcement was met with criticism by Public Citizen, a Washington, D.C.-based consumer watchdog. The nonprofit group said a nuclear power plant ultimately would be a drain on taxpayers because of the government incentives it would draw. Public Citizen also said a nuclear facility would be a threat to public health and security.

Utilities and the Bush administration, however, have pushed to build nuclear power plants, because they do not run on expensive and volatile fossil fuels and they produce less airborne pollution.

Scana and Santee Cooper also said Friday that they favor a reactor by Westinghouse, one of three companies designing new nuclear hardware that is billed as much safer than the equipment available when the industry was poisoned by meltdowns in Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. The new-generation reactors are easier to operate and maintain, because they have fewer valves, pumps and pipes.

Santee Cooper and Scana filed a letter of intent with the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Dec. 6. A few weeks ago they started preparations to win a federal permit for a nuclear plant, a process that takes at least three years. The utilities have hired a contractor to help prepare their application. If all goes as planned, Scana and Santee Cooper will submit their application in the third quarter of 2007, win approval and start construction in 2010 and throw the switch on a new plant by 2015.

Both companies said they will need the plant to meet surging demand. Santee Cooper will crank up new coal turbines in 2007 and 2009, but it will have to buy power from other utilities in 2011 if growth continues at the current rate. Scana, which boosted its generating capacity 17 percent with a new plant in May 2004, has a little more cushion.

It does not need a sizable chunk of new electricity until 2015, according to Byrne.

The new plant would cost close to $2 billion and generate about 1,100 megawatts of electricity per hour, enough to power some 715,000 homes. The seven nuclear towers in South Carolina provide about 56 percent of the power generated in the state, a share second only to Vermont.

Reach Kyle Stock at 937-5763 or kstock@postandcourier.com.

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Indianapolis Star
February 11, 2006

Energy sector unsure how to tackle woes

Natural gas prices are high, power grid is old and emissions troubles continue

By Lynn J. Cook
Houston Chronicle

HOUSTON -- Americans use electricity for everything from computers to can openers, and the country's voracious appetite for energy shows no signs of being sated.

Yet the American power industry is plagued with a trifecta of problems -- from high natural gas prices to a balkanized transmission grid and those problematic carbon dioxide emissions.

No clear-cut, easy answers are at hand, according to industry experts attending an energy conference this week in Houston.

"Today is as foggy as it's ever been in our industry," James E. Rogers, Cinergy Corp.'s chairman and chief executive, told attendees at the Cambridge Energy Research Associates' conference.

The one solution echoed again and again by executives and CERA analysts was investment in infrastructure, from poles and wires to new nuclear power plants.

"We've got to get the investment climate right, now," said Lawrence Makovich, managing director of CERA's Global Power Group.

CERA released a study on Thursday warning that the power sector's level of investment to meet future demand is dangerously low.

"The electric power industry's preoccupation with passing through its biggest single-year fuel increases in history is creating a strong chance that U.S. power markets will not be able to successfully address resource adequacy, resulting in power shortages in some areas of the country within the next five years," said Makovich.

Costs for the fuels for power plant generation, such as coal and natural gas, now account for one-third of the cost of producing electricity. Fuel costs increased from $68 billion in 2004 to $90 billion in 2005, according to CERA.

Makovich pushed the concept of "hybrid companies" that diversify the kinds of fuels they use to generate power.

"Unfortunately, we do not see a large number of companies following this sort of sound strategic process," he said.

In fact, a recent CERA survey of top power company executives says a significant number of them misinterpret or just ignore information they should be carefully considering when planning for expansion.

So what power generation fix will be financed in the future?

Alex Urquhart, president and CEO of GE Energy Financial Services, sees billions being spent on mostly coal-fired plants, with natural gas, nuclear power and renewables thrown in.

Dynegy's power plant portfolio, for example, includes many coal-fired generators -- a point of which CEO Bruce Williamson is proud. Williamson said he's not interested in Dynegy owning nuclear power plants, but Makovich insists the public perception surrounding them is changing for the better.

Walter Higgins, chairman and CEO of Sierra Pacific Resources, the fastest-growing utility in the country thanks to Nevada's swelling population and economy, said no nuclear plant will ever be built in his state. But he also said consumers -- both individuals and small businesses -- repeatedly ask him why new nuclear power isn't being built in the face of such high natural gas prices.

"People seem to think it's 'safe enough' even if they don't like it," he said, adding that before any new construction could go forward, spent fuel disposal at Yucca Mountain would have to be addressed.

Cinergy's Rogers is more skeptical.

"Policy-makers and companies are embracing it, but there are still so many questions, and Yucca Mountain is just one," he said. "Public opinion turned on a dime after Three Mile Island. When you start actually permitting . . . and turning dirt in a specific neighborhood on one of these things, then we'll find out if public opinion has changed."

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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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