Yucca Mountain News Clips - Monday, February 20, 2006

Yucca Mountain News Clips
Monday, February 20, 2006
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Las Vegas SUN
February 20, 2006

Flashpoint for Feb. 20, 2006

By Jon Ralston <ralston@vegas.com>

Las Vegas Sun

If Pavlov wanted an affirmation of his theories, all he'd need to listen for is the salivating of the Nevada hounds after an Energy Department news release. First to yap about the latest "all's well at Yucca" report was Rep. Jon Porter using pretty mild adjectives such as "unfortunate" and "haphazard." Next up was Rep. Jim Gibbons, who barked about "an insult to the people of Nevada." Then came a snarling Rep. Shelley Berkley, who lamented the DOE's attempt to "paint a happy face on the sad state of affairs." Last but not least, Sens. John Ensign and Harry Reid with a joint woofer using words such as "laughable" and "absurd." Oh, when they call the DOE's name, they salivate like a Pavlovian dog.

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Reno Gazette-Journal
February 19, 2006

Miss Nevada told truth on repository

Wow! Miss Nevada, Crystal Wosik of Las Vegas, really tells it like it is. She says what every politician who endorses Yucca Mountain as a radioactive waste depository is, in effect, saying. But she says it straight out.

You must remember the boy who pointed out that the emperor had no clothes on. Everyone could see the truth but the boy came right out and said it, "The emperor is naked!"

I certainly admire and respect her candor. She may be too brave, but she isn't stupid.

Marcia Thomas
Reno

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Environment News Service
February 20, 2006

Bush Would Export Nuclear Fuel, Power Plants to Developing Nations

WASHINGTON, DC, February 20, 2006 (ENS) - Nuclear power is the primary focus of his plan to wean the United States off fossil fuels and give developing countries the electricity they need, President George W. Bush said in his radio address to the nation on Saturday. The President's plan would divide nations into two classes - nuclear fuel supplier nations and user nations.

In President Bush's view, nuclear power is "safe and clean" and it generates "large amounts of low-cost electricity without emitting air pollution or greenhouse gases."

The President acknowledged two problems with the expansion of nuclear power. "We must dispose of nuclear waste safely," he said, "and we must keep nuclear technology and material out of the hands of terrorist networks and terrorist states."

President Bush proposes to solve these problems with a new plan called the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership announced with his Fiscal Year 2007 budget earlier this month.

"Under this partnership," the President said Saturday, "America will work with nations that have advanced civilian nuclear energy programs, such as France, Japan, and Russia."

"Together, we will develop and deploy innovative, advanced reactors and new methods to recycle spent nuclear fuel. This will allow us to produce more energy, while dramatically reducing the amount of nuclear waste and eliminating the nuclear byproducts that unstable regimes or terrorists could use to make weapons."

The Bush administration's Fiscal Year 2007 budget includes $250 million to launch this plan as part of the administration's overall $632 million request for the Office of Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology to spend on nuclear technology research, development, and infrastructure.

The United States has not built a new nuclear power plant since the 1970s, said the President in his radio address, pointing out that France has built 58 nuclear power plants during that time period and now gets about 78 percent of its electricity from nuclear power.

Yet, while no new plants has been built during that time, the United States has had five new nuclear plants come on-line since 1990. The most recent is the Watts Bar 1 nuclear reactor located between Chattanooga and Knoxville and operated by the federal government's Tennessee Valley Authority, which came on-line February 7, 1996.

Still, President Bush is determined to encourage the nuclear industry to build more power plants, saying, "Our goal is to start the construction of new nuclear power plants by the end of this decade."

The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership includes five elements that are projected to meet the energy needs of the United States - building a new generation of nuclear power plants in the United States, developing and deploying new nuclear recycling technologies, managing and storing spent nuclear fuel in the United States, designing Advance Burner Reactors that would produce energy from recycled nuclear fuel, and enhancing resistance to nuclear proliferation.

Two elements of the plan are aimed at giving nuclear power to developing nations. The United States and partners would establish a fuel services program for developing nations, and in addition, the nuclear fuel supplier nations would develop and construct what the President calls "small scale reactors" designed for the needs of developing countries.

"As these technologies are developed," the President said Saturday, "we will work with our partners to help developing countries meet their growing energy needs by providing them with small scale reactors that will be secure and cost-effective. We will also ensure that these developing nations have a reliable nuclear fuel supply."

"In exchange," he said, "these countries would agree to use nuclear power only for civilian purposes and forego uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities that can be used to develop nuclear weapons."

Today, light water reactors dominate the commercial use of nuclear power, geared to large national markets with big electricity grids.

Countries with smaller grids and less well-developed technical infrastructures that now burn fossil fuels could use a different, smaller, reactor design, the Bush administration believes.

These smaller reactors could incorporate fuel designs that offer very long-life fuel loads that might last the entire life of the reactor so that refueling is not needed, the U.S. Energy Department explains on its Global Nuclear Energy Partnership website.

The smaller reactors might have remote monitoring, physical protection against sabotage and other terrorist acts, standardized designs in the 50 to 350 MWe range, potential for district heating and potable water production, fully passive safety systems, simple operation that requires minimal in-country nuclear infrastructure, use of as much existing licensed or certified technology as possible, and use of advanced manufacturing techniques.

Today, there are no fully developed or installed reactors that have all these features, the U.S. Energy Department acknowledges.

Under the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership plan an international fuel services consortium of “fuel supplier nations’ would choose to operate both nuclear power plants and fuel production and handling facilities. They would provide "reliable" fuel services to “user nations’ that choose only to operate nuclear power plants.

Under a cradle-to-grave nuclear fuel leasing approach, fuel supplier nations would provide fresh fuel to conventional nuclear power plants located in user nations, typically by enriching uranium.

These conventional nuclear power plants could be either existing or next generation power reactors or the new, small scale reactors envisioned under the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.

Used fuel would be returned to a fuel supplier nation and recycled using a process that does not result in separated plutonium, the Energy Department says. The recycled fuel would then be used in advanced burner reactors in fuel supplier nations.

The advanced burner reactors do not yet exist either. These fast reactors would consume transuranic elements - plutonium and other long-lived radioactive material with atomic numbers higher than uranium - while extracting their energy.

Here, the word burn does not mean incinerate or combust, the Energy Department explains, it means to transmute or convert transuranics into shorter-lived isotopes.

Fast reactors have been demonstrated, but their use as burners requires further testing and such a test reactor, about one-tenth the size of a current nuclear plant, might be operational around 2014, under the Bush plan.

In the second phase, the Department of Energy would demonstrate a first-of-a-kind advanced burner reactor standard plant, operational by about 2023. This plant would have about the same capacity as current nuclear power plants.

Under all strategies and scenarios for the future of nuclear power, the United States will need a permanent geologic repository to deal with radioactive wastes resulting from the operation of nuclear power plants, the Energy Department says.

But if the transuranic elements in spent nuclear fuel are consumed, not disposed of as waste, there would be a smaller volume of waste to handle. Then, the Bush administration reasons, "the planned geologic repository site at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, has the technical capability to accommodate all the used U.S. commercial nuclear fuel that has been or will be generated by U.S. nuclear power plants over their lifetimes."

If the Bush administration establishes nuclear fuel reprocessing the new policy would overturn a 30-year ban on the technology. Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1977 promised that the United States would not reprocess spent nuclear fuel.

The challenge, says the Department of Energy (DOE), stems from the fact that certain technologies used to separate out plutonium from used fuel, could be used to produce material for a nuclear weapon.

To develop more proliferation-resistant separation processes, the Bush administration says the U.S and its international partners would conduct an engineering scale demonstration of a process that would separate the usable components in spent commercial fuel from its waste components, without separating pure plutonium.

The new technology known as UREX, for URanium EXtraction, was developed by the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. This chemical separation process produces a mix of plutonium and uranium, which can be recycled to fuel reactors.

Once the technology is demonstrated, these nuclear fuel recycling plants would only be located in countries that are “fuel supplier nations,’ thus reducing the proliferation risk, the Bush administration proposes.

But the Union of Concerned Scientists says that the Department of Energy's own research contradicts the administration's premise that "proliferation-resistant" technology would make plutonium inaccessible and undesirable to terrorists and states pursuing nuclear weapons.

Dr. Edwin Lyman, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists points to the work of Dr. E.D. Collins from DOE's Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative, and Dr. Bruce Goodwin of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

"It clearly demonstrates that the administration's new reprocessing program will pose a serious risk that terrorists could acquire the material needed to make a nuclear weapon from a U.S. facility," Lyman on February 9.

"The safest thing to do with plutonium is to leave it in spent fuel since it is kept in large, heavy casks and is fatally radioactive," said Dr. Lyman. "Experts agree that no reprocessing technology developed or proposed to date is proliferation-proof."

Currently, there are four operating nuclear reprocessing plants in the world - COGEMA's in La Hague, France; Mayak in Russia; Thorp at Sellafield in the UK, and Tokai, in Ibaraki, Japan. The United States built one at West Valley, New York, which operated from 1966 to 1972 but was shut down when it could not keep pace with stricter regulations.

Concerned that the Bush plan for reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel would not be sufficient to prevent theft by terrorists, while the plutonium mix that results from these technologies could be used to make a nuclear weapon, 28 groups sent a letter late last month to all 535 Members of Congress urging opposition to the reprocessing proposal.

In addition, nuclear fuel reprocessing would be "extremely expensive," said the groups, which include Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS).

They quote a 1996 report by the National Academy of Sciences, that estimates the costs of reprocessing and transmutation of irradiated fuel that has already been discharged by existing U.S. reactors as “easily could be more than $100 billion’ in 1996 dollars.

Most important, the groups warned Congress, "Reprocessing poses a serious risk to the global non-proliferation regime."

"Such a proposal," they wrote, "would promote an ineffective 'Do as we say not as we do' approach, undermining U.S. credibility on non-proliferation."

Mary Olson, of the NIRS Campaign to Stop Reprocessing, said, "The existing nuclear reactors around the globe are already sitting-duck terrorist targets. Separating plutonium from nuclear power waste fuel — as reprocessing does — simply sets up new and inviting opportunities for terrorists to seize fissile, bomb-capable materials."

"Support for a reprocessing program makes a mockery of statements coming out of this administration that protecting the American people from terrorism is paramount," Olson said. "Instead, it will put more Americans in harm's way."

In the United States, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 established the Nuclear Power 2010 program, a joint government-industry cost-shared plan to identify sites for new nuclear power plants, and streamlined regulations for siting, constructing and operating new nuclear plants.

The Bush FY 2007 budget seeks $54 million for the Nuclear Power 2010 program. Under this program, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman told the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources February 9, a new nuclear power plant constructed by the private sector could be in operation by 2014.

The technology focus of the Nuclear Power 2010 program is on advanced light water reactor designs.

The new regulatory system would allow industry to apply for Early Site Permits that pre-qualify a site for potential nuclear power plants and then for combined Construction and Operation Licenses to build and operate new, advanced plants with fewer regulations than the previous generation of nuclear power plants had to meet.

The first three Early Site Permits are planned to be issued in 2007, potentially leading to the first Construction and Operation License submittal from industry in 2007-2008 and the first power company decision to proceed with construction by 2010.

The Energy Information Administration projects that over the next 25 years, demand for electricity in the United States will grow by over 40 percent.

The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership is online at: http://www.gnep.energy.gov/

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Reno Gazette-Journal
February 19, 2006

Bush's nuclear energy plans don't sway Yucca foes

David Jacobs

Opponents of the proposed Yucca Mountain repository are encouraged by President Bush's call Saturday for a new approach to reprocessing nuclear waste, but some doubts remain.

"The Bush administration is trying to take the magnifying glass off the current failures with the repository project," said Robert Halstead, a consultant for Nevada that is fighting the Yucca project. "I think, frankly, it's just an effort to take people's attention off the terrible shape that they're in with Yucca Mountain itself."

In his weekly radio address Saturday, Bush said that as the U.S. and other nations build more nuclear power plants, "we must dispose of nuclear waste safely."

This includes efforts toward developing and deploying "innovative, advanced reactors and new methods to recycle spent nuclear fuel," the president said.

"This will allow us to produce more energy, while dramatically reducing the amount of nuclear waste and eliminating the nuclear byproducts that unstable regimes or terrorists could use to make weapons," Bush said.

Jack Finn, spokesman for U.S. Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said Saturday that Ensign "certainly supports the use of nuclear power.

"We just need to find a way to dispose of the waste without taking it to Yucca Mountain," Finn added.

Ensign and Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada have introduced legislation to force the U.S. Department of Energy to take possession of nuclear-waste material where it's produced, Finn said.

"Hopefully, through emerging technology like reprocessing, we will be able to store it on-site as opposed to having to find a single repository," Finn added.

Nevadans likely will hear more about Bush's plans in the coming days. The Bush administration is kicking off what is dubbed "energy week" with numerous visits planned by the president and his staff across the U.S.

It's not known whether Bush eventually will stop in the Silver State in his effort to end what he calls America's addiction to oil.

"I don't know what the president's plans are," Finn said.

Halstead's initial reaction is that the administration is doing "anything they can do to make nuclear power look good and the nuclear-waste issue look like it is solved."

Halstead, who describes himself as "a green, pro-nuclear person" said technology the administration proposes both for reactors and reprocessing is "way, way off."

"Certainly, even with a Manhattan Project, it could not be commercialized in 10 years. It's more likely a 20-to-30-year horizon."

Deploying the technologies -- that some consider "a totally pie-in-the sky approach to this" -- also will be expensive, with estimates of $50 billion to $250 billion, Halstead said.

"What is more likely is that the additional reactors that would be built in the U.S. will simply be larger, more advanced versions of the pressurized-water reactor and boiling-water reactor technology that we have now that will in fact continue to produce the same kind of waste that we produce now," he predicts.

Halstead notes the scrutiny will intensify as the U.S. nears a time when a second nuclear-waste repository -- in the East -- might be needed.

"That is really, really going to complicate the debate at the national level about Yucca Mountain and about waste disposal," Halstead said.

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Las Vegas SUN
February 19, 2006

Hafen set to launch campaign for Congress

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

WASHINGTON - Tessa Hafen, former press secretary for Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., on Monday will formally launch her campaign to unseat Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev.

She will make the announcement at Gordon McCaw Elementary School in Henderson, which she attended. Hafen, 29, is expected to be flanked by Reid, Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., and her father, long-time Henderson City Councilman Andy Hafen. The venue also was chosen to draw a distinction between Hafen and her opponent: Hafen is a third-generation Nevadan. Porter was born in Iowa.

Voters in Congressional District 3, which is nearly evenly split between registered Democrats and Republicans, can expect Porter's campaign to stress the second-term congressman's political experience, which dates back 20 years to his days as a Boulder City Councilman. Hafen's political experience mostly has come as a Reid aide. Observers say Hafen will have difficulty separating herself from herself politically from Reid while relying on his well-oiled campaign money machine.

She faces a proven winner in Porter, a careful politician with nearly $1 million cash on hand. Porter has a competing event at the same time as Hafen's campaign kickoff. Porter will be at Sunrise Hospital to unveil his "Federal Family Health Information Technology Act," a bill aimed at creating electronic health records for 8 million federal employees.

The Porter event was planned months in advance so the timing was coincidental, Porter spokesman T.J. Crawford said.

President Bush this week will play traveling salesman, pitching his ambitious proposal to make America a leader in a global resurgence in nuclear power. Bush's Saturday radio address focused on new energy technologies and he touted his Global Nuclear Energy Partnership plan.

The plan includes a call for the nation to recycle the spent nuclear fuel waste from nuclear power reactors. Critics say that developing the reprocessing technology is unnecessary and far too costly. They also say it creates a nuclear weapons proliferation risk because the process separates plutonium out of the waste, which in the wrong hands could be used for a weapon.

Reprocessing has implications for the proposed nuclear waste repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain because it could reduce the toxicity of waste bound for burial there, advocates say.

Bush is likely to push for new energy technologies and a nuclear power resurgence at several other Bush events this week, including stops in Milwaukee; Auburn Hills, Mich.; and Golden, Colo.

The trade group that acts as a top cheerleader for Yucca Mountain in the next month or so will launch its largest public relations campaign ever to tout nuclear power, and secondarily, the proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.

The Washington-based Nuclear Energy Institute's outreach blitz coincides with the Bush administration's advocacy for nuclear power expansion worldwide. NEI envisions 15 to 20 new U.S. plants operating - with an equal number under construction - by 2030. The nation currently has 103 operating nuclear reactors.

To build support nationwide for expanding nuclear power, NEI has embarked on its broadest campaign yet, designed to create a large pro-nuclear coalition. To that end it is seeking out organizations of all kinds, from seniors groups to health-related organizations and even environmental advocates - traditionally, the staunchest foes of nuclear power.

NEI is also planning advertising to tout the benefits of nuclear power - principally, that it creates no greenhouse gas emissions like fossil fuel-burning electric plants.

The campaign also will try to debunk what nuclear industry officials say are lingering myths - that nuclear power is unsafe, too expensive to develop and that there is no solution to the waste problem, NEI spokesman Scott Peterson said.

NEI has long said the solution to that problem - highly radioactive spent fuel piling up at nuclear power plants nationwide - is to bury it at Yucca.

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

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Washington Post
February 19, 2006

President Bush's new nuclear energy initiative is supposed to help cure America's "addiction to oil" by redesigning a taboo technology, originally used to obtain plutonium for bombs, to reuse spent nuclear fuel.

Unlike past reprocessing methods, the administration says, the new technique would make it prohibitively difficult for would-be proliferators to extract weapons-grade plutonium from spent fuel, and it would drastically reduce the volume of radioactive waste to be stored at repositories such as Nevada's Yucca Mountain.

The result, Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman said early this month, would be increased use of nuclear power, reduced oil consumption and fewer hydrocarbon emissions, "making the world a better, cleaner and safer place to live."

If it works. Both supporters and opponents of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership agreed that although it marks a radical change in U.S. nuclear energy policy, it also relies on unproven technologies that will take decades to mature, and it does not guarantee success.

Bodman, in congressional testimony last week, acknowledged that the $250 million requested for the program this year will be used to design a test reprocessing plant so that Bush over "the next two or three years" can make "a go or no-go decision as to whether this is something that makes sense."

But one problem with this calculation, opponents say, is that even a toe-wetting start-up requires that the United States reverse nearly 30 years of opposition to reprocessing at a time of increasing concern about weapons programs in North Korea, Iran and other nations. That "is the wrong signal to send," said Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, which opposes reprocessing.

Also, Lyman and others challenged the administration's view that the new technology does not produce "proliferation proof" plutonium, and suggested that would-be proliferators would almost certainly find new ways to handle the spent fuel by the time the new system is ready.

Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell acknowledged these concerns but noted that the U.S. refusal to reprocess spent fuel has been a stance "that virtually no one [else] followed." The world "has moved on without us," he added, and a new technology that makes it harder to obtain plutonium "will make the United States a leader rather than a spectator."

Still, there are other misgivings. Experts in both science and industry doubt that the plan could meet what Sell called an "admittedly aggressive time schedule" to have commercial reprocessing up and running by 2025.

If development drags on, these experts say, reprocessing would have little immediate effect on nuclear waste storage. Meanwhile, the government will be spending billions of dollars developing a fuel that probably will be too expensive to buy in the foreseeable future, except with a government subsidy.

"I'm not dogmatic -- the claims may not ultimately be wrong," said Richard K. Lester, a nuclear scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "But on the time scale that's going to matter, it's very difficult to come close to achieving the objectives that have been set."

Reprocessing technology was first developed by the United States in the 1950s as a way to obtain plutonium for nuclear warheads, but President Jimmy Carter banned it in 1977 because of proliferation concerns. President Ronald Reagan rescinded the ban in 1981, but even then, reprocessing was so expensive and technologically daunting that no U.S. power company ever sought to develop it.

France, Japan, Russia, India and the United Kingdom do reprocess commercially, and all use the old U.S. technology, called purex, which derives plutonium oxide from spent fuel and then combines it with uranium to create a mixed-oxide fuel, called MOX, that can be used in some power plants. MOX is much more expensive than the uranium fuel in conventional reactors.

The conventional plants, which include all 103 nuclear generators currently operating in the United States, use "once through" fuel rods in a controlled reaction to produce steam that drives turbine generators. The rods are replaced every 18 to 24 months, and the spent fuel -- about 2,000 metric tons annually -- is put into temporary storage on the reactor sites.

Eventually, the spent fuel is supposed to go to Yucca Mountain, which will open, at the earliest, in 2012. By that time, the industry will have 70,000 metric tons of spent fuel waiting to ship to it.

"We need to solve a couple of big problems," said Phillip J. Finck, deputy associate director for applied science technology and national security at Argonne National Laboratory. "We have to deal with the waste and destroy plutonium."

The new technology, as described by Finck in a telephone interview, begins with a new reprocessing technique called urex-plus, which, like purex, dissolves spent fuel rods in a bath of nitric acid. The used fuel rods are composed of uranium, plutonium, heavy radioactive metals called "transuranics" and lighter radioactive elements known as "fission products."

Unlike purex, which separates out the plutonium, urex-plus leaves the plutonium and transuranics mixed together, making the resulting product unsuitable for weapons and much more difficult to handle for anyone trying to build a bomb.

The new fuel would be used in a "fast reactor," where neutrons move about much more energetically than in conventional reactors, breaking down the long-lived transuranics into lighter fission products with shorter half-lives.

The spent fuel from the fast reactor would then be reprocessed using another new technology known as "pyroprocessing," which separates the fuel by dissolving it in molten salt and running an electric current through it. The fuel could be recycled several times until the long-lived transuranics all but disappear.

If successful, the new reprocessing method would replace purex, the stockpile of civilian plutonium would stop growing, and the whole cycle would become much more proliferation resistant, Finck said. Also, he added, Yucca Mountain's storage capacity "would increase by a factor of 100." Instead of filling up by 2030, or earlier, the repository would last beyond the end of the century.

That is if the new reprocessing system is ready by 2025. Steven Kraft, senior director of used fuel management for the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry policy group, voiced doubts: "This is a matter of developing future technologies, and those technologies are 50 to 60 years away."

Kraft endorsed Bush's plan as a worthy long-range goal, but nonproliferation advocates said impurities in reprocessed plutonium are not likely to dissuade would-be proliferators from stealing it.

Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, an energy think tank, said: "You can get a one-kiloton explosion with impure plutonium, and if you're a terrorist the most important thing is to have the capability. Such a blast would be the equivalent of 1,000 tons of dynamite. "You don't care whether you destroy the tip of Manhattan or the whole island," he said.

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GEO
February 19, 2006

US to build more atomic energy plants by the end of this decade: Bush

WASHINGTON: President George W. Bush, seeking to boost support for plans to break America's ``addiction'' to fossil fuels, said the U.S. must prevent terrorist states from developing atomic weapons and expand its own nuclear power capacity.

``We will develop and deploy innovative, advanced reactors and new methods to recycle spent nuclear fuel,'' Bush said in his weekly radio broadcast. ``This will allow us to produce more energy, while dramatically reducing the amount of nuclear waste and eliminating the nuclear byproducts that unstable regimes or terrorists could use to make weapons.''

The radio address begins a series of public speeches Bush plans in the coming week to put energy market changes on his domestic agenda this year. Oil prices are up 26 percent from a year ago, crimping consumer budgets and threatening to slow an economy in its fifth year of expansion.

Reversing a 29-year-old government policy, Bush proposes reprocessing the waste produced by nuclear reactors in the U.S. and other nations. The administration requested $250 million in the budget released earlier this month for development of a process to reduce and recycle radioactive waste. The process would foster expansion of nuclear power in the U.S. by reducing by 80 percent the amount of waste sent to the storage site in Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

Plutonium extracted from spent nuclear fuel under today's reprocessing techniques can be used in weapons, and concern about the spread of such material caused President Jimmy Carter in 1977 to scuttle funding for nuclear reprocessing.

``We must dispose of nuclear waste safely and we must keep nuclear technology and material out of the hands of terrorist networks and terrorist states,'' Bush said.

Bush's plans to expand nuclear power come at a time when his administration is pressuring Iran to halt its fledgling nuclear development program. Iranian officials say the country's nuclear program is to produce energy for civilian use, while the U.S., the U.K., France and Germany say they suspect Iran's program is aimed at developing nuclear weapons.

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Congressman Jon Porter
February 17, 2006

Press Release

Porter Responds to DOE Technical Impact Report

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Third District Congressman Jon Porter released the following statement in response to the Department of Energy´s technical impact report, which was made public earlier this afternoon:

“Today´s report should come as a surprise to no one, as it´s been proven time and time again that the Department of Energy will do anything and everything to justify the Yucca Mountain Project. The unfortunate part is that DOE officials always seem to forget that their haphazard justifications and explanations could affect the safety of millions of Americans.

“My investigation into the Yucca Mountain Project as Chairman of the Federal Workforce and Agency Organization Subcommittee has yielded significant evidence which points to a severely flawed quality assurance process. Based on these flaws, considering any part of the Project´s justification as ‘sound science´ is absurd and an affront to Nevadans.

“If safety truly is DOE´s number one concern, their best course of action would be to scrap the entire Yucca Mountain Project.’

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Congressman Jim Gibbons
February 17, 2006

Gibbons Blasts Latest DOE Report on Yucca Mountain Science

This report just shows DOE has no credibility when it comes to sound science’

WASHINGTON, DC -- U.S. Congressman Jim Gibbons (R-Nev.) issued the following statement regarding the Department of Energy´s report, released today, entitled: “Evaluation of Technical Impact on the Yucca Mountain Project Technical Basis Resulting From Issues Raised by E-mails of Former Project Participants.’

“This report is an insult to the people of Nevada. This report just shows that the DOE has no credibility when it comes to sound science.

“The emails sent between federal workers indicated disturbing flaws and pressure to make their science match a desired outcome, namely proving the safety of Yucca Mountain. Today´s report in no way addresses this apparent breach of scientific integrity.

“Additionally, the DOE is saying in this report that they validate their science based on the idea that it is ‘consistent with similar results for arid regions of the Western United States´ in general. So based on DOE logic, we could build the nuclear repository in any arid region in the West because the scientific models are similar? The truth is the DOE just doesn´t want to take the time to prove their science is sound or take the chance that their studies will prove what we have been saying all along…that Yucca Mountain is not a safe or suitable repository for nuclear waste.’

Congressman Gibbons also applauded the ongoing efforts of Congressman Jon Porter (R-Nev.) in trying to investigate the alleged falsification of scientific data on the Yucca Mountain Project through the House Government Reform Committee.

For more information, contact:
Amy Maier
Communications Director
Congressman Jim Gibbons
Phone: 202-225-6155
FAX: 202-225-5679
URL: http://wwwc.house.gov/gibbons/press_contact.asp

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
February 18, 2006

Yucca science data endorsed

New Bush administration report describes project work as 'strong,' 'valid'

By Samantha Young
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration issued a report Friday backing the scientific data behind Yucca Mountain, almost a year after the Energy Department disclosed that government scientists might have fabricated their work on the project.

Paul Golan, acting director of the department's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, said an internal examination found the science at Yucca Mountain to be "strong" and "valid."

But the computer work relating to water and climate studies failed to meet department standards and is being redone by the Sandia National Laboratories, he said.

"Despite the fact that the science is consistent, our quality assurance requirements were not met, which is a requirement for submitting a license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission," Golan said. "We find it best to just replace this work."

In March, the Energy and Interior departments revealed that several U.S. Geological Survey hydrologists had exchanged e-mails discussing possible falsification of quality assurance documents on water infiltration research.

The e-mails -- written between May 18, 1998, and March 20, 2000 -- by two to three USGS scientists said that dates and names on the project had been made up and that "fudge factors" were used to meet quality assurance requirements.

The disclosure led to the launching of several investigations by the Department of Energy and audits by the inspectors general of the Interior and Energy departments.

It was a setback for an already delayed program undergoing a redesign for new canisters that government scientists said would better hold nuclear waste in the mountain 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

In their probe, Energy Department investigators sampled more than 10 million e-mails, expanding their search to messages through 2004, according to the 144-page report.

The report concluded that the science used to determine the ranges of rainfall seepage into Yucca Mountain mirrored that of similar water studies by other scientists in the region. Water at the site eventually could corrode the waste canisters and potentially spread radiation to sources of drinking water, critics say.

Ultimately, the 2002 decision by then-Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham to recommend Yucca Mountain as a permanent repository for 77,000 tons of spent fuel rested on sound science, investigators found.

Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency chief Bob Loux questioned the credibility of an internal report. "I don't think it's any secret that DOE has not been objective in their investigation of Yucca Mountain," Loux said. "The science itself has always been questioned."

Nevada lawmakers said administration officials have failed to address the root problems of the project, which now lacks a timetable or cost estimate.

"The DOE, which failed to prevent the falsification of scientific data on Yucca Mountain projects in the first place, now wants to us to believe that the falsifications made no difference in the quality of the work. That's absurd," Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said in a prepared statement.

Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said the report was a "misguided attempt by the DOE to gloss over mismanagement and incompetence."

At a nuclear power industry conference earlier this week, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman acknowledged problems with the work USGS scientists had done at Yucca.

Golan said the violations rested in the Quality Assurance program, a protocol requiring scientists and engineers to record and document their research, computer modeling and field reports so that they can be verified and confirmed as part of repository safety licensing.

Scientists at the Department of Energy's Sandia laboratories have been recoding the data since September, Golan said. The review is expected to take several more months, and independent experts also will check the work. "It's very important we go about this in a deliberate way," Golan said.

Golan estimated that the recoding would cost taxpayers between several hundred thousand dollars to several million dollars. He declined to say how long the e-mail investigation has held up the project or when the government would submit its license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Agency.

Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., chairman of the Federal Workforce and Agency Organization Subcommittee, said his panel's investigation has found evidence of a "severely flawed quality assurance process."

And he has subpoenaed the Energy Department to hand over its 5,000-page draft license application for Yucca Mountain, which critics say would shed more light on the department's research. The department has not complied.

Golan said the department is conducting a separate investigation into its quality assurance program, which critics for years have questioned.

Investigators are reviewing thousands more e-mails and employee complaints in response to a November audit by the department's inspector general. The complaints claimed that the investigation into the USGS e-mails was too narrow.

Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., said the Department of Energy should redo its scientific work. "The e-mails sent between federal workers indicated disturbing flaws and pressure to make their science match a desired outcome, namely proving the safety of Yucca Mountain," he said. "Today's report in no way addresses this apparent breach of scientific integrity."

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said the report "does not close the book on the inexcusable behavior of USGS employees who admitted in their own e-mails that they cut corners, faked their work and broke the rules."

The Interior Department is investigating the conduct of the employees.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
February 18, 2006

Letter: We're the good guys

To the editor:

I am writing in response to your Feb. 9 editorial blasting the alleged harassment of the family of Miss Nevada Crystal Wosik as the work of "environmental extremists." I would never condone such hurtful and offensive behavior, and I feel it is not genuine to lump the work that Citizen Alert does with radical groups of any political leaning.

During the interview portion of the Miss America Pageant last month, Ms. Wosik made statements in support of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository located northwest of Las Vegas. Subsequently, Ms. Wosik's family claimed they were being harassed by people who oppose the repository.

When I was called by a Review-Journal reporter and asked what I thought about the alleged harassment of Ms. Wosik, I was appalled. I raised the possibility that the "tip" this reporter received might be from a Yucca Mountain supporter trying to drum up sympathy, and that I did not believe people who were against Yucca Mountain would do such a thing. Not once did I say anything about environmentalists not engaging in that type of behavior.

Let me be clear: Opponents of Yucca Mountain come from all walks of life, including men and women, young and old, religious and irreligious, Democrats, Republicans, independent Americans, environmentalists and even non-environmentalists.

I have heard about groups on both sides of the political spectrum that engage in radical behavior. But Citizen Alert would never condone such awfully destructive and hurtful behavior.

Finally, the idea that support for Yucca Mountain is, in your words, "a view not uncommon among Southern Nevadans," is unsubstantiated by the facts. Nevadans and our entire congressional delegation remain adamantly opposed to a project that would seriously affect our economy, public health and environment.

Let's move beyond this petty infighting and continue to oppose the Yucca Mountain Project -- a view not uncommon among Nevadans.

Peggy Maze Johnson
Las Vegas

The Writer is Executive Director of Citizen Alert.

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Nuclear Engineering
February 18, 2006

Waste transport is safe says National Academies

The US National Academies has concluded that the transportation of spent nuclear fuel is safe in a new report, Going the Distance? The Safe Transport of Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Radioactive Waste in the United States.

The report´s principal finding is that there are “no fundamental technical barriers to the safe transport of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste in the United States." Shipment of spent fuel by rail or truck is “a low-radiological-risk activity with manageable safety, health, and environmental consequences when conducted in strict adherence to existing regulations.’

The report also concluded: “The radiological risks associated with the transportation of spent fuel and high-level waste are well understood and are generally low.’

Although the National Academies did not assess security risks of spent fuel transportation, it recommended that an independent assessment of security issues be conducted.

The study was sponsored by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Energy, the Department of Transportation, the Electric Power Research Institute, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Cooperative Highway Research Programme.

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Bloomberg
February 18, 2006

Bush to Expand U.S. Nuclear Power, Prevent Weapon Proliferation

President George W. Bush, seeking to boost support for plans to break America's ``addiction'' to fossil fuels, said the U.S. must prevent terrorist states from developing atomic weapons and expand its own nuclear power capacity.

Iran

``We must dispose of nuclear waste safely and we must keep nuclear technology and material out of the hands of terrorist networks and terrorist states,'' Bush said.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who took office in August 2005, was criticized by world leaders last year for declaring the Nazi Holocaust of World War II, in which millions of Jews were killed, to be a ``myth.'' Ahmadinejad also has said Israel should be ``wiped off the map.''

Developing Nations

Bush said the U.S. will work with countries that have ``advanced civilian'' nuclear energy programs, such as France, Japan and Russia, to develop new nuclear technologies and provide developing nations with small-scale reactors and a reliable nuclear fuel supply.

Developing countries would, in exchange, ``agree to use nuclear power only for civilian purposes and forego uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities that can be used to develop nuclear weapons,'' Bush said.

In his State of the Union address to Congress Jan. 31, Bush said the U.S. needs to break an ``addiction'' to oil and seek a 75 percent reduction in oil imports from the Middle East by 2025. His 2007 budget proposal seeks funding for development in energy from hydrogen fuel cells, coal, solar power and wind, as well as money to advance the use of fuel additives made from corn and farm waste.

The U.S. needs to wean itself from foreign oil to ensure that the nation's economy, the world's largest at $12 trillion, doesn't lose its dominance as countries such as India and China compete for natural resources.

``Our nation will continue to lead the world in innovation and technology,'' Bush said today. ``By building a global partnership to spread the benefits of nuclear power, we'll create a safer, cleaner and more prosperous world for future generations.''

To contact the reporter on this story:
Brendan Murray in Washington
brmurray@bloomberg.net

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New York Times
February 18, 2006

A Shift Based on Science and Politics

By Matthew L. Wald

WASHINGTON, Feb. 17 — As a naval officer, Jimmy Carter helped design nuclear reactors for submarines. But as president, Mr. Carter banned the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel to extract material that would be useful in reactors and bombs. Thirty years later, President Bush has proposed a new version of reprocessing.

The reversal can be traced mainly to uneven progress in technology over the last three decades, and to a lesser extent to political and economic factors.

Today, it is much less expensive to manufacture uranium for nuclear weapons, reducing the likelihood that a country with weapons ambitions would reprocess spent fuel for that purpose. And the failure to find an acceptable way to dispose of the fuel after use — including burying it — has made reprocessing look better by comparison.

Recently the Energy Department admitted that it no longer had any schedule or cost estimate for the planned spent-fuel repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, and that without reprocessing, it would soon have to find a second repository site.

In one way, it seems counterintuitive that the United States is considering reprocessing now, when the number of reactors has been growing slowly, compared with the Carter era, when experts expected hundreds of reactors to be built. Back then, uranium was expensive and thought to be scarce, and demand was growing. Mr. Carter's suspension precluded the production of potentially cheaper fuel.

On the other hand, by reintroducing reprocessing, President Bush is trying to develop a different source of fuel for reactors when the uranium they use is plentiful.

Nuclear advocates say, though, that hundreds of new reactors will eventually be built, and that there is no reason to deny the world the value of resources that are locked in spent fuel for fear of weapons proliferation, since reprocessed fuel is no longer the easiest route to a bomb.

"A key part of the logic behind the U.S. decision to forgo reprocessing is now perversely incorrect," said Per F. Peterson, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

It is still possible to make a bomb from reprocessed material from civilian power plants — the United States did it on an experimental basis decades ago. But as the current argument with Iran shows, the preferred route is to make bomb material from virgin uranium, because the technology that enriches the uranium for use in a bomb has advanced so much faster than the technology for disposing of spent fuel.

There are other reasons for the shift, too, including ideology. President Carter, who had been an engineering officer in Adm. Hyman G. Rickover's nuclear submarine program, had a decidedly modest view of what nuclear technology could accomplish. But President Bush's approach to energy, ranging from fuel cells to ethanol to a new generation of nuclear reactors and reprocessing factories, is highly optimistic.

The energy secretary, Samuel W. Bodman, told a Senate committee last week that the administration's solution to energy problems was "transformational technologies."

There are also political problems that favor radical approaches like a new reprocessing plan. While the Bush administration has slogged toward preparing to ask for a license to open a waste repository at Yucca Mountain, the 20-year-old law under which it is looking to open a site has a far more onerous task.

The administration will soon be required to tell Congress what it is doing about finding a site for the next repository, which must go in the eastern United States. If there is no other solution, like reprocessing, the administration could find itself at the beginning of the next presidential primary season scouting out the granite formations of New Hampshire as waste burial sites. (The Energy Department actually looked there in the 1980's.)

Hence the move to the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, announced as part of the administration's budget. Under the program, countries that already have enrichment technology would lease reactor fuel to countries that lack production means. The producing country would take back the fuel after it was used.

This would mean that countries like Iran could have reactors without fuel technology. Countries that already have nuclear weapons or, like Japan, do not want them would reuse the plutonium and other nuclear fuels for civilian purposes and reduce the volume of waste.

That is not to say the plan is feasible. Turning ideas about nuclear physics into commercially viable technology is notoriously difficult.

When the Bush budget was released, Clay Sell, the deputy energy secretary, was asked what price uranium would have to reach before a recycled product could compete. He had no answer except to say that the value of reducing the waste's volume and toxicity should be figured in.

The commercial industry applauds the Bush administration's support for new reactors that are modifications of the current designs, but is silent on new reprocessing plants and a new generation of reactors that would use reprocessed material. Congress has not embraced reprocessing, either.

"If the raw material is still cheaper, nobody buys the recycled product," said a federal energy official, who insisted on anonymity because he did not want to hurt his ties with the White House. "Why would you want to pay more for fuel?"

The global partnership, the official said, is not impossible, but "it's not something that is going to be driven by the industry."

It is also opposed by some experts in nuclear proliferation, who say America's 30-year pledge not to take bomb-usable plutonium out of spent fuel has made it harder for other countries to do that.

But the plan still appeals to people who put faith in technology. Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico and chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, spoke warmly of the idea. He said it would help the United States regain leadership in the nuclear field.

President Carter, he said, had stopped reprocessing on the theory that others would follow, but Britain and France still reprocess, and Japan wants to. "We stopped, and the world didn't," Mr. Domenici said.

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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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