Yucca Mountain News Clips
Thursday, March 30, 2006
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Las Vegas SUN
March 30, 2006
Key senator pushes Bush administration on Yucca Mountain bill
By Erica Werner
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) - A key senator said Thursday that he'll likely introduce his own bill if the Bush administration doesn't soon unveil much-anticipated legislation to smooth development of a national nuclear waste dump in Nevada.
Senate Energy Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M., said he's repeatedly offered to carry the administration bill, which has been promised for months. The legislation is expected to guarantee a source of funding for the Yucca Mountain project and address other problems that have hampered development of a permanent, underground repository for highly radioactive waste.
"We must see what it is," Domenici said at a hearing of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on energy and water, which he chairs. "If something doesn't arrive soon, I will very likely introduce my own bill," his written testimony said.
After the hearing Domenici refused to say what might be in his bill. Other proposals said to be under consideration for the administration's legislation would withdraw public land around the property to create a permanent site for the dump 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas and expand its capacity beyond 77,000 tons.
Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said in early March that the bill would be done within the month.
Yucca Mountain was approved by Congress in 2002 to hold the nation's nuclear waste but has been delayed by political opposition - including from home-state Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. - controversies over quality controls and a court-ordered rewrite of radiation protection standards. It's now not expected to open until after 2012, and some lawmakers are increasingly irritated over the delays.
Paul Golan, acting director of the Energy Department office that oversees Yucca Mountain, declined after the hearing to offer more details on timing or content of the bill.
Domenici also said that given the delays, the administration's 2007 budget request for Yucca Mountain - $544 million - was too high. But he said he'd push to meet the administration's $250 million request for a program to resume commercial nuclear fuel reprocessing. Some House members have voiced concerns that reprocessing might shift the focus away from storage at Yucca Mountain.
Reid said at the hearing that the Energy Department should accept that the dump project isn't going forward and instead focus on keeping nuclear waste in dry casks at the reactor sites where it's now collecting. He and Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., have offered legislation to do that.
"It is time we addressed the problem at hand - the safe storage of spent nuclear fuel - and stopped pouring taxpayers' money down the drain on a project that could endanger all of our citizens," said Reid, the top Democrat on the spending subcommittee.
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Reno News & Review
March 30, 2006
United States on trial
Shoshone tribes hauled the United States before a United Nations panel and won
By Dennis Myers
A judicial panel of the United Nations has issued a ruling supporting the Western Shoshone against the United States government.
The ruling called on the United States to freeze disputed land issues in their tracks and enter into negotiations with the tribes instead of continuing to rely on a half-century old Indian Claims Commission decision.
What that ruling means is uncertain, particularly since the only way to enforce it is to rely on the government to fulfill its obligations under international law.
"It's groundbreaking in terms of the relief that this committee granted," said Reno attorney Robert Hager, who argued the case in Switzerland before the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.Hager represented Western Shoshone National Council, the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe (in the Death Valley region), the Winnemucca Indian Colony and the Yomba Shoshone in California.
The U.S. government didn't participate in the case, telling the committee that the fast-track procedure the U.N. committee used was not appropriate and that the committee was not the proper forum for the case.
The case had its roots in the arrival of whites in the West, but its more recent origins date back to the post-World War II years when the U.S. Congress, made uncomfortable by analogies between the Third Reich's treatment of the Jews and U.S. treatment of Native Americans, established the Indian Claims Commission. The commission was supposed to go back through history and satisfy the injustices that tribes had endured through U.S. history. Over a period of 33 years, it dispensed a half-billion dollars in settlements.
The Western Shoshone Nation entered its claim based on the Ruby Valley Treaty signed on Oct. 1, 1863, which recognized the boundaries of Nation territory--60 million acres in four states--and limited non-tribal use of that territory. The Claims Commission, in a process that the Shoshone said failed to provide due process of law, recognized that the way of life of the tribe had been disrupted by "the acquisition, disposition or taking of their lands by the United States" and provided compensation for the tribe's loss of land instead of returning the land.
More than once, the United States has tried to pay the award to tribal members, most recently through a bill sponsored by U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, but it has met resistance from members of the tribe, some of whom declined to cash the checks. Some of the land is now heavily developed by non-native people, but a lot of it is not.
The U.N. panel chose to handle the case on an expedited basis, over the objections of the U.S. government, because it believed that some of the land was threatened by "transfer to multinational extractive industries and energy developers ... reinvigorated federal efforts to open a nuclear waste repository at the Yucca Mountain; the alleged use of explosives and open pit gold mining activities on Mont [Mount] Tenabo and Horse Canyon; and the alleged issuance of geothermal energy leases at, or near, host springs, and the processing of further applications to that end." Another reason for the fast-track process, the panel said, was the "conduct and/or planning of all such activities without consultation with and despite protests of the Western Shoshone people." It also expressed concern about renewed nuclear testing on the disputed land.
The Associated Press in Geneva reported that the U.N. body had "said it had evidence the U.S. government was working with industry to ride roughshod over the rights of an American Indian tribe," but that's not what the decision said. It reported such allegations and, in the absence of a defense by the U.S. government, acted on the assumption that the allegations were true.
The decision read, "Under its early warning and urgent action procedure, the Committee considered the situation of the Western Shoshone indigenous peoples in the United States and urged the State party [the United States] to take immediate action to initiate a dialogue with the representatives of the Western Shoshone peoples; to freeze any plans to privatize Western Shoshone ancestral lands for transfer to multinational extractive industries and energy developer[s]; and to desist from all activities or plans concerning the ancestral lands of Western Shoshone or in relation to their natural resources, which were being carried out without consultation with and despite protests of the Western Shoshone peoples."
International law is a nebulous concept that often seems to be applied only against small nations by large ones. Those large nations have a history of ignoring findings against themselves while insisting on rigid enforcement of rulings that favor them. The U.S. government, for instance, refused to abide by a 1986 World Court ruling that said the United States acted illegally by trying to overthrow the government of Nicaragua (as in the tribal case, the United States said the Court lacked jurisdiction). But the United States was quick to turn to the World Court in 1979 for an order for the release of U.S. embassy employees held by Iran.
In this case, Hager says, "The United States is a party to the agreement ... guaranteeing the protection of human rights. ... And so, having made the promise to be bound by the human rights rules that are enforced by the decisions of those organizations, we would hope that the United States would fulfill its obligation, make good on its promise."
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CounterPunch
March 30, 2006
Nukes for a Profit
Privatizing the Apocalypse
By Frida Berrigan
Started as the super-secret "Project Y" in 1943, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has long been the keystone institution of the American nuclear-weapons producing complex. It was the birthplace of Fat Man and Little Boy, the two nuclear bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Last year, the University of California, which has managed the lab for the Department of Energy since its inception, decided to put Los Alamos on the auction block. In December 2005, construction giant Bechtel won a $553 million yearly management contract to run the sprawling complex, which employs more than 13,000 people and has an estimated $2.2 billion annual budget.
"Privatization" has been in the news ever since George W. Bush became president. His administration has radically reduced the size of government, turning over to private companies critical governmental functions involving prisons, schools, water, welfare, Medicare, and utilities as well as war-fighting, and is always pushing for more of the same. Outside of Washington, the pitfalls of privatization are on permanent display in Iraq, where companies like Halliburton have reaped billions in contracts. Performing jobs once carried out by members of the military -- from base building and mail delivery to food service -- they have bilked the government while undermining the safety of American forces by providing substandard services and products. Halliburton has been joined by a cottage industry of military-support companies responsible for everything from transportation to interrogation. On the war front, private companies are ubiquitous, increasingly indispensable, and largely unregulated -- a lethal combination.
Now, the long arm of privatization is reaching deep into an almost unimaginable place at the heart of the national security apparatus --- the laboratory where scientists learned to harness the power of the atom more than 60 years ago and created weapons of apocalyptic proportions.
Profane Problem or Prolific Profit?
Nuclear weapons are many things to many people -- the sword of Damocles or the guarantor of American global supremacy, the royal path to the apocalypse or atoms for peace. But in each notion, they are treated as idols -- jealously-guarded, shrouded in code, surrounded by sacred secrecy. That is changing.
Private companies have long played a role in the nuclear complex, but it's been a peripheral one. For example, Kaiser-Hill, a remediation company, is cleaning up radioactive waste at Rocky Flats, the Denver, Colorado complex that manufactured nuclear weapons. At Idaho Falls, another company, CH2M, is mopping up the mess left behind after the construction of 52 nuclear reactors. BWX and Honeywell formed a new company along with Bechtel to manage and operate the Pantex Plant in Texas which assembled nuclear weapons throughout the Cold War. At least ten different subcontractors are involved in managing the Hanford nuclear complex. But the famed nuclear laboratories, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia -- where the high priests of nuclear physics are free to explore the outer realms of their craft -- have long been above prosaic bottom-line or board-room considerations. Until this year, that is.
At Los Alamos, the University of California has already been replaced by a "limited liability corporation," says Tyler Przybylek of the Department of Energy's Evaluation Board; and, more generally, the writing is on the containment wall. Nuclear laboratories are no longer to be intellectual institutions devoted to science but part of a corporate-business model where research, design, and ultimately the weapons themselves will become products to be marketed. The new dress code will be suits and ties, not lab coats and safety glasses. Under Bechtel, new management will lead to a "tightly structured organization" that will "drive efficiency," predicts John Browne, who directed the lab at Los Alamos from 1997-2003. "If there is a product the government wants," he concludes, "they will necessarily be focused on that. A lot more money will be at stake."
Los Alamos was the first to go. Now, the management contract for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is on the auction block as well.
Bechtel's Boondoggles
Many say strong corporate oversight will correct a legacy of embarrassing missteps at Los Alamos. The keystone of the nuclear complex, it has been dogged by missing classified computer disks, cost overruns on its expensive new projects, and an outspoken cadre of scientists who found their voice on LANL: The Real Story, a blog where once deferential employees blew off steam and exposed lapses in lab management.
The idea is that, under private management, this legacy of money wasted and dreams deferred can do an abrupt u-turn. But the question is: Can Bechtel (or any other private military contractor) usher in a new era of nuclear responsibility? Pete Domenici, Republican Senator and Chairman of the powerful Energy and Water Committee, thinks so. In January, he claimed that "this great lab will thrive under the management team led by Bechtel."
But a look at Bechtel's record might not inspire others to Domenici's confidence. The California-based construction giant has a long history of big projects, big promises, bigger budgets and even bigger failures.
In Boston, Bechtel was put in charge of the "Big Dig," the reconstruction of Interstate 93 beneath the city. In 1985, the price tag for the project was estimated at about $2.5 billion. Now, it is a whopping $14.6 billion (or $1.8 billion a mile), making it the most expensive stretch of highway in the world. Near San Diego, citizens are still paying the bills for cost over-runs at a nuclear power plant where Bechtel installed one of the reactors backwards.
In 2003, Bechtel took this winning track record to Baghdad, where it blew billions in a string of unfinished projects and unfathomable errors. The company reaped tens of millions of dollars in contracts to repair Iraq's schools, for example, but an independent report found that many of the schools Bechtel claimed to have completely refitted, "haven't been touched," and a number of schools remained "in shambles." One "repaired" school was found by inspectors be overflowing with "unflushed sewage."
Bechtel also has a $1.03 billion contract to oversee important aspects of Iraq's infrastructure reconstruction, including water and sewage. Despite many promises, startling numbers of Iraqi families continue to lack access to clean water, according to information gathered by independent journalist Dahr Jamail. The company made providing potable water to southern Iraq one of its top priorities, promising delivery within the first 60 days of the program. One year later, rising epidemics of water-borne illnesses like cholera, kidney stones and diarrhea pointed to the failure of Bechtel's mission.
Outside of its ill-fated reconstruction contracts in Iraq, Bechtel is not known as a large military contractor, but the company has been quietly moving into the nuclear arena. It helped build a missile-defense site in the South Pacific, runs the Nevada Test Site where the United States once performed hundreds of above-and underground nuclear tests. Bechtel is also the "environmental manager" at the Oak Ridge National Lab, which stores highly-enriched uranium, and is carrying out design work at the Yucca Mountain repository where the plan to store 77,000 tons of nuclear waste has environmentalists and community activists up in arms.
At Washington State's Hanford Waste Treatment Plant, Bechtel is working on technology to turn nuclear waste into glass. But the estimated costs of building the facility to do that have doubled in one year to about $10 billion while the completion date slipped from 2011 to 2017. Members of Congress have proposed that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission take over management of the project from Bechtel because of its cost overruns and delays.
Proliferation's New Meaning
Given this track record, it's hard to make the case that Bechtel assumes the helm at Los Alamos out of an altruistic, even patriotic, desire to impose clean, lean corporate management on a complacent institution long overfed at the public trough. The question remains: Why this urge to privatize the apocalypse?
To answer that question, you have to begin with the post-Cold War quest of the nuclear laboratories for a new identity and raison d'être. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the loss of the other superpower as a nuclear twin and target, and an international shift in favor of nuclear disarmament sent Los Alamos and the whole U.S. nuclear complex into existential crisis: Who are we? What is our role? What do we do now that nuclear weapons have no obvious role in a world of, at best, medium-sized military enemies? Throughout the Clinton years, these questions multiplied while the nuclear arsenal remained relatively stable. More recently, with a lot of fancy footwork, a few friends in Congress, and the ear of a White House eager to be known for something other than the Long War on global terrorism, the labs finally came up with a winning solution that has Bechtel and other military contractors seeing dollar signs.
They found their salvation in a few lines of the Nuclear Posture Review, released in January 2002, where the Bush administration asserted: "The need is clear for a revitalized nuclear weapons complex that will be able, if directed, to design, develop, manufacture, and certify new warheads in response to new national requirements; and maintain readiness to resume underground testing if required."
There's gold in that there sentence. During the Cold War, spending on nuclear weapons averaged $4.2 billion a year (in current dollars). Almost two decades after the "nuclear animosity" between the two great superpowers ended, the United States is spending one-and-a-half times the Cold War average on nuclear weapons. In 2001, the weapons-activities budget of the Department of Energy, which oversees the nuclear weapons complex through its "semi-autonomous" National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), totaled $5.19 billion; and a "revitalized nuclear weapons complex," ready to "design, develop, manufacture, and certify new warheads," means a more than billion-dollar jump in spending to $6.4 billion by fiscal year 2006.
And that's just the beginning. The NNSA's five-year "National Security Plan" calls for annual increases to reach $7.76 billion by 2009. David Hobson, Republican congressional representative from Ohio, calls this kind of budgeting "the ultimate white-collar welfare," saying that the weapons complex can be "viewed as a jobs program for PhDs."
He's right. That's a lot of money for a few labs and a few thousand scientists. And private military contractors large and small are all over it.
Entering Acronym Land
To justify this huge jump in spending, the nuclear laboratories have cooked up plans for an alphabet soup of projects as part of the SSMP, scientists are pushing -- to mention just a few of the acronyms on the table right now -- ASCC, MESA, the RRWP, the ICFHY campaign and the RNEP.
In the interest of not putting everyone to sleep, we can take a closer look at just a few of the Bush administration's proliferating nuclear projects. Under the umbrella of Stockpile Stewardship Management (SSMP), scientists are working to safeguard the stockpile of nuclear weapons and materials so it is not ravaged by time and neglect. The Reliable Replacement Warhead Program (RRWP) will exchange existing warheads for more "reliable" (read: more powerful) ones. There are plans underway to develop the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) and other "useable" new nuclear weapons supposedly to meet new threats by new enemies -- "rogue states" like Iran -- in future preemptive anti-proliferation wars. Under each of these programs are many other acronym-heavy, cash-rich programs that seem to lead nowhere -- except toward further nuclear proliferation.
The Inertial Confinement Fusion and High Yield Campaign is just one of the more outlandish and expensive of these projects. It proposes using lasers to replicate what happens inside an actual nuclear explosion in weapons labs. Sounds simple enough, right? The Nuclear Ignition Facility -- where the lasers will do their work -- is the single largest project in the NNSA budget and, according to analyst Christopher Paine, "quite possibly the most expensive experimental facility ever built." The Department of Energy projects $3.5 billion in costs for this alone, but the independent environmental group, the National Resources Defense Council, puts the figure higher yet -- at $5.32 billion -- and that money will be spent before anyone can even demonstrate that the system works.
The Age of Nuclear Terror?
Do nuclear weapons have a role in the "Age of Terror" -- other than as potential weapons for terrorist groups? In a new and ever-shifting environment of emerging regional powers and wars that transcend national boundaries, the Bush administration is taking a have-it-both-ways approach: It is pushing aggressive non-proliferation policies for chosen enemy nations and embracing a policy of accelerated nuclear proliferation for itself. How much harder will it be in the future to dissuade other powers from building nuclear weapons when the American nuclear industry and its weapons labs have switched even more fully into private mode and the profit-motive is increasingly at stake in global nuclear planning? These and many other questions unfortunately remain unasked. Yet, a new era of nuclear weapons for profit threatens to turn Armageddon into a paying operation.
During the height of the Cold War, when competition between the nuclear laboratories seemed to rival the superpower stand-off, a Lawrence Livermore scientist posted a sign that read: "Remember, the Soviets are the Competition, Los Alamos is the Enemy."
In a new era of potential corporate antagonism over apocalyptic weaponry, will there be a sign at the Bechtel-run nuclear lab emblazoned with: "Remember, the Terrorists are the Competition, Lockheed Martin is the Enemy"?
Frida Berrigan is a Senior Research Associate at the World Policy Institute's Arms Trade Resource Center. Her primary research areas with the project include nuclear-weapons policy, war profiteering and corporate crimes, weapons sales to areas of conflict, and military-training programs. She is the author of a number of Institute reports, most recently Weapons at War 2005: Promoting Freedom or Fueling Conflict. She can be reached at: berrigaf@newschool.edu
This essay originally appeared on Tomdispatch
Copyright 2006 Frida Berrigan
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
March 29, 2006
Group urges action on waste
Yucca Mountain backers want deliveries started during construction
By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- A coalition that supports Yucca Mountain called Tuesday for Congress to allow the Energy Department to start placing high-level nuclear waste at the Nevada site while a repository for the material is being built.
Federal law prohibits the department from setting up temporary storage in Nevada for nuclear spent fuel at the same time that Yucca Mountain is being prepared for repository development.
But members of a pro-Yucca lobbying group said the law should be changed to speed shipments of radioactive material to Nevada and away from power plants in other states where it is being kept outdoors in casks.
"We are way behind already," said LeRoy Koppendrayer, a member of the Minnesota Public Service Commission. "There is money and material out there that is standing on pads aging and cooling long enough that it could have already been shipped."
At a news conference, repository supporters promoted policy changes they hope the Bush administration will embrace in a nuclear waste bill being negotiated between the Energy Department and White House officials.
The group includes representatives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, nuclear waste transportation companies, power companies and utility commissioners and attorneys general from states where nuclear power is generated and nuclear waste is created.
Charles Pray, nuclear waste adviser to the governor of Maine, said repository designs have included "aging pads" where nuclear waste would be "cooled" before being inserted into Yucca Mountain.
The Energy Department should be allowed to build pads and move spent fuel onto them to allow a head start, Pray said. Even then, several years could pass before such a plan could be practical, he said.
"We are advocating that fuel be accepted at Yucca before the actual operation of facilities," Pray said.
The Energy Department has not announced new timelines for the repository, which is already eight years behind schedule.
Many experts think it could be ready to accept waste by 2015 or 2020.
Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, said pro-repository groups are engaged in wishful thinking because time is running short for Congress to debate a nuclear waste bill this year.
"The whole outlook for them is very bleak," Loux said. "I don't know what tree they are barking up. DOE hasn't even produced a bill yet."
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
March 29, 2006
Letter:
Offensive cartoon
To the editor:
I take strong exception to the Jim Day editorial cartoon that appeared in Sunday's edition of the Review-Journal. This cartoon, regarding the Yucca Mountain Project Web site, specifically, the "Youth Zone" section, provides your readers with a libelous view of our Web site and of our intentions. To even intimate what the cartoon does is contemptible.
There are 2,000 Nevadans who work on this project. These are good, hard-working and honest people. They do not deserve to be painted by a libelous and insulting brush by people who do not support this project.
Your paper owes an apology to the people of this project for the allegation, the insult and the incredibly poor judgment.
Paul M. Golan
Washington, D.C.
The Writer is Acting Director of The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management.
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Las Vegas SUN
March 28, 2006
Pro-Yucca group presses for legislative fix to move dump forward
By Erica Werner
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) - State officials, electric utilities and others who support building a nuclear waste dump in Nevada called Tuesday for the Bush administration and Congress to support comprehensive legislation to move the project forward.
The Yucca Mountain Task Force expressed support for several proposals reportedly being considered for inclusion in a bill expected soon from the Energy Department:
-Dedicating a special fund to ensure adequate spending for the Yucca Mountain project;
-Withdrawing public land around the property to create a permanent site for the dump;
-Allowing more nuclear waste into the dump than the 77,000 tons now planned;
-Allowing interim storage of nuclear waste at the Yucca Mountain site before it's put in the underground dump.
The Energy Department has not disclosed final details of the expected legislation. Department spokesman Craig Stevens said Tuesday that possible proposals include the land withdrawal, a funding fix and interim storage. He said Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman hopes the bill will be sent to Congress soon. Bodman in early March said he hoped the bill would be done "within the month."
"If we don't have a bill, nothing gets done. People are anxious for this," said David A. Wright, co-chairman of the Yucca Mountain Task Force and a commissioner on the South Carolina Public Service Commission.
The legislation is supposed to clear a path for completing Yucca Mountain and solve some of the problems that have hampered development of the underground nuclear waste dump 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The administration has tried in past budget proposals to dedicate money in the Nuclear Waste Fund for construction of the waste dump, but Congress has not gone along. The fund was created in 1982 specifically to pay for development of Yucca Mountain, and the money comes from an assessment on users of electricity generated by nuclear reactors. But lawmakers traditionally have used the nuclear waste fund to offset other spending and to help narrow the federal deficit.
The long-delayed nuclear waste dump has cost $9 billion so far but remains years away from opening. Energy Department officials had most recently set 2012 as the projected opening date but have backed off that goal. The original target was 1998.
More than 50,000 tons of nuclear wastes destined for the dump is waiting at 72 sites around the country, mostly at commercial power plants.
---On the Net:
Yucca Mountain project: http://www.ymp.gov
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Las Vegas SUN
March 28, 2006
Feds dump Bechtel for Nevada Test Site management contract
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Energy Department on Tuesday picked a corporate group led by Northrop Grumman to manage the Nevada Test Site, rejecting a bid from Bechtel Corp., which has held the contract for 10 years.
A spokesman for DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration declined to say why National Security Technologies, LLC, was chosen over Bechtel for the five-year contract worth $500 million per year. The site is a 1,375-square-mile area where nuclear weapons used to be tested and is now used for testing conventional weapons, emergency response training and other purposes.
"Procurement regulations prevent us from commenting about the details of the selection process. NNSA's Source Evaluation Board evaluated several strong proposals and the source selection official made his selection based on their evaluation," spokesman Bryan Wilkes said.
"The offerers were evaluated on the merits of their proposals," he said.
National Security Technologies, LLC, or NSTec, is made up of Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman, AECOM, CH2M Hill and Nuclear Fuel Services.
San Francisco-based Bechtel also is a contractor at the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump and at Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington. It teamed with the University of California in December to win the contract to manage Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Although Yucca Mountain and Hanford have experienced problems and delays on Bechtel's watch, there have been no major public questions raised about the company's management of the Nevada Test Site.
A spokesman for Bechtel Nevada did not immediately return a call for comment. Bechtel's current contract expires Dec. 31, 2006.
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All American Patriots
March 29, 2006
New NIRS Report Challenges All U.S. Radioactive Waste Policies
March 28, 2006 -- A new report from Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) finds that all of the stated U.S. radioactive waste policies have failed, and/or hold no potential for success. The group recommended—as it did 12 years ago—that an independent Blue-Ribbon Commission be established to start from ground zero and establish new, workable, scientifically-defensible radioactive waste policies. Had the U.S. done this 12 years ago, about seven billion dollars would have been saved that have been spent on a pyrrhic effort to open the proposed and unsuitable Yucca Mountain, Nevada nuclear waste dump.
The report also dismisses reprocessing—currently a cause celebre among the Bush administration and a few of its Congressional backers—as a radioactive waste management approach. Reprocessing would not only not solve the radioactive waste problem, it would lead to new dangers to the environment and public health and to increased risk of nuclear weapons proliferation.
Said lead author Kevin Kamps of NIRS, “The U.S. has no better idea of what to do with high-level atomic waste than it did 20 years ago; given current circumstances, it will have no better idea 20 years from now. Shipping wastes through 45 states and the District of Columbia to bury it in a leaky volcanic earthquake zone doesn´t make sense, neither does setting up a parking lot for defective radioactive waste casks. What is needed is a complete re-evaluation of our radioactive waste programs, and that needs to be done before construction of any more nuclear reactors is even considered.’
The new report, titled “Radioactive Wreck: The Unfolding Disasters of U.S. Irradiated Nuclear Fuel Policies,’ also argues that the proposed Private Fuel Storage waste dump on the Skull Valley Goshutes Indian Reservation in Utah is both unworkable and environmentally racist, that no full-scale, physical testing of radioactive waste transport canisters is planned, that radioactive waste fuel pools at existing reactors pose numerous safety and security problems, while dry cask storage at nuclear reactor sites does not work as well as it is supposed to and is vulnerable to terrorist attacks as well as accidents.
The Bush administration is expected to propose legislation in the near future to attempt to salvage its failed radioactive waste policies by expanding the legal limit on the amount of waste Yucca Mountain could accept, seeking a new “interim’ storage program to alleviate the stress on nuclear utilities holding their own waste causes them, taking the Yucca Mountain program off-budget in order to get around the Congressional appropriations process and oversight of the bungled program, and likely other provisions. Many of these measures have been attempted before, and rejected by Congress and/or former President Clinton´s veto pen.
The expected introduction of the bill, and the Bush administration´s recent GNEP (Global Nuclear Energy Partnership) program only reinforce the report´s conclusions that U.S. radioactive waste policy is in complete disarray, with no workable or scientifically-sound options being presented to the public.
The NIRS report, published in NIRS´ publication The Nuclear Monitor, is available at: http://www.nirs.org/mononline/nm643.pdf
Source: NIRS
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Reuters
March 29, 2006
New nuclear reactor plans raise questions
By Leonard Anderson
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The U.S. nuclear power industry is planning to build new reactors to produce cleaner electricity and reduce dependence on more expensive natural gas, raising questions about the safety of new plants.
U.S. President George W. Bush has urged development of atomic power for more energy security, and big electric utilities like Duke Energy Corp., Southern Co., and Progress Energy have announced preliminary plans to develop reactors in Virginia, the Carolinas and elsewhere.
The Union of Concerned Scientists, a nuclear watchdog, aims to ensure that new reactors will not possess design flaws that must be corrected after they go into service, David Lochbaum, director of nuclear safety at UCS, said in an interview on Tuesday.
The Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group, anticipates utilities will build 12 to 15 new nuclear plants by 2015 to join the current 103 power reactors. A new 1,000-megawatt reactor may cost from $1.5 billion to $3 billion. One megawatt provides power for about 800 homes.
The last nuclear plant built in the United States was Ameren's Callaway station in Missouri, which was licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1973 and began operations in 1984, according to the NEI.
The Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979 and the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in 1986 heightened safety fears and effectively halted new reactor construction in the U.S.
RADIATION EXPOSURE
Lochbaum of UCS questions whether ventilation systems at new plants built adjacent to existing reactors could protect control room operators from a radiation leak in an accident.
"New reactors are designed to be safer than existing plants but when you build next to a reactor there is a potential for a bigger radioactive cloud. You have to build a stronger ventilation system," Lochbaum said.
Radiation exposure could sideline plant operators and harm control room equipment. "You can't put the plant on autopilot," he said.
Six new reactor designs have been developed by three companies -- Westinghouse Electric Co., owned by British Nuclear Fuels Plc; General Electric Co.; and Areva Inc., a U.S. subsidiary of French state-owned Areva.
Cooling water systems for the new reactors, security to repel attacks, earthquake safety standards, and more nuclear waste to dispose of are other issues that need to be examined but none is a "show stopper at this point," Lochbaum said. "The details need to be worked out."
Adrian Heymer, senior director of new plant deployment at NEI, said the current fleet of reactors "is operating safely and NRC oversight will continue. There should not be large new requirements but regulators will expect the new designs to be safer than existing designs."
They will include more advanced systems to cool a reactor in the event of a breakdown and more high-technology control rooms where operators can run and monitor plant operations from computer terminals instead of relying on physical switches and manual inspections, Heymer said.
New designs also may lengthen the schedules to refuel reactors to once every 36 months from the current industry standard of 18 to 24 months, producing more revenues for utility operators.
Where to store highly radioactive waste fuel rods and where to find qualified workers also must be answered, Heymer said.
Opposition to the federal Yucca Mountain underground waste dump in Nevada could delay storing waste there until 2020, and a shortage of skilled nuclear plant craft workers like pipe fitters, welders and quality control specialists could worsen.
"We are concerned. Half of the plant work force is retiring in the next 10 years," he said.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
March 28, 2006
YUCCA MOUNTAIN: Scientists tout technology, research
Waste repository project might use advances
By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Spray-on metal coatings that could resist corrosion for half of the cost of expensive alloys. Time-saving electron beam welding that could seal canisters in a single pass. Longer-lasting disc blades that might be able to cut through 2,000 feet of rock before wearing out.
New technologies and research paid for by the Department of Energy for Yucca Mountain show promise for researching the proposed Nevada nuclear waste site and for saving millions of dollars, said scientists taking part in the studies.
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Much of the work being conducted in science incubators are in the early phases and could take years to explore. But DOE officials said fruit-bearing elements could be incorporated into the waste repository designs.
"The benefits are potentially enormous as far as performance and cost standpoints," said John Wengle, director of the Office of Science and Technology.
Wengle and other DOE officials and research team leaders delivered presentations Thursday at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which would conduct license hearings for the repository.
Some of the participants said research could allow DOE to hone repository safety calculations or fill gaps in research.
No one discussed what might happen if research turned up potential showstoppers for the project.
Researchers gathered by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are taking a new thrust at the physical characteristics of Yucca Mountain and how water might seep through its cracks and fissures into repository storage areas.
"Our work is really a demonstration that Yucca Mountain site is a real good site for disposal of nuclear waste," said Bo Bodvarsson, director of the earth sciences division at the lab. "This portfolio is going to help us demonstrate a significant increase in repository performance."
But as work proceeds, the Energy Department is drawing questions as to whether the follow-up research might complicate licensing for the repository, which would be built on studies the department conducted over the past 20 years.
How does DOE plan to integrate new features into a complex undertaking that faces scrupulous review, DOE officials were asked at the session by NRC staff and members of an NRC advisory commission.
"Clearly there is much more to the story than we have heard so far," said Lawrence Kokajko, deputy director of the high-level waste repository safety division in the NRC's Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards.
Bob Loux, a repository critic, said, "It seems to me there is a huge disconnect between the science program and the Yucca project.
"If they are developing good ideas in science, they ought to have bought enough time to incorporate those into the program. Otherwise why do it?" Loux, director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, said in a telephone interview.
The Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management is spending $21.3 million on Yucca follow-up work this year that is spread among the national laboratories and universities.
The University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the University of Nevada, Reno, Nye County and Nevada-based Desert Research Institute are among the groups receiving funding.
Besides the earth science studies, topics include understanding how waste-bearing containers will corrode and how spent fuel will behave once it is placed in the repository and starts to decay.
"We are developing a community of experts who will address issues unknown at the moment but will inevitably arise as the project moves forward," said Rodney Ewing, a nuclear engineering professor at the University of Michigan.
"At the end of the day, if you are telling a story out to hundreds of thousands of years, the credibility of the storyteller is important," Ewing said.
DOE and the Defense Department are teaming up on development of iron-based amorphous metal coatings that are said to be corrosion-resistant, DOE official Jef Walker said.
The iron-based coating material could be bought for $8 a pound and sprayed onto waste containers, while costs for a nickel-based alloy are double that or more, Walker said.
DOE's design calls for placing alloy sleeves on waste packages entering the mountain.
Walker declined to estimate how much money might be saved but said the amount was "substantial, possibly staggering."
Similar metal coatings could be applied on tunnel boring machines to reduce wear and tear on cutting tool, Walker said. The cutting discs now must be replaced after slicing through 500 feet of rock.
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Nevada Appeal
March 28, 2006
Feds continue to bully Nevada over Yucca
The U.S. Department of Energy is demonstrating once again that it sees Nevada as an opponent in its headlong quest to complete the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository.
And that's just another way of saying that the feds don't care about the concerns of state residents who would have to live next to 77,000 tons of nuclear waste.
The agency's first step in changing that perception would be to turn over an application for the repository that was completed in 2004 by contractors seeking a license to open the dump.
But the agency has refused repeated requests from Nevada's highest officials. Yucca critics suspect the document could show the site would be unsafe after 10,000 years. The feds say that information is protected by legal privilege.
Their argument ignores a far more important privilege, that of Nevada's citizens to know everything about the project that they may be forced to live with, especially since it was prepared on the public's dime.
Now Nevada is going to court again, wasting time and money to obtain something that the public needs to know.
Not that the feds will care ... they've made a practice of wasting millions of dollars at Yucca Mountain.
The feds are also considering the state's request that it release the results of investigations into whether scientists at the site broke laws. More than a year ago, the state learned of the allegations that scientists falsified data that may have helped persuade President Bush and Congress to approve the Yucca Mountain site in 2002.
It's commendable that the state is taking on the U.S. Department of Energy once again. But it's troubling that the federal government continues to snub its nose at the state.
And, unfortunately, it makes you wonder what else they may be hiding.
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Las Vegas SUN
March 27, 2006
Republican candidates for governor disavow Guinn tax increase
By Ryan Nakashima
Associated Press
LAS VEGAS (AP) - Republican gubernatorial candidates distanced themselves Monday from GOP Gov. Kenny Guinn and said they would never repeat his 2003 tax increase, the largest in state history.
Rep. Jim Gibbons, Lt. Gov. Lorraine Hunt and state Sen. Bob Beers all disavowed the tax package, which raised more than $833 million over two years. At Guinn's urging, the state later gave taxpayers back $300 million in vehicle registration rebates after the tax increase helped create a big surplus.
Hunt called the tax increase "disastrous," while Beers, who opposed the increase in the legislature as an assemblyman, said: "I actually lived through this nightmare."
When asked what he would do differently than Guinn, Gibbons replied: "First of all, I would never have raised your taxes."
The three candidates appeared at a luncheon forum hosted by the Republican Jewish Coalition at The Venetian casino hotel.
Guinn is prohibited by state law from seeking a third term in 2006, leaving the field open heading into November's general election. Henderson Mayor Jim Gibson and state Sen. Dina Titus are seeking the Democratic nomination.
On Monday the GOP candidates offered differing proposals on the hotly debated topic of illegal immigration.
Beers proposed denying welfare and the state's Millennium Scholarships to illegal immigrants.
Gibbons and Hunt proposed ways of documenting illegal workers to ensure they pay taxes and eventually earn legal status.
All opposed a proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, and each expressed concerns about introducing a statewide property tax cap such as California's Proposition 13. The landmark 1978 voter initiative has been blamed for causing massive funding cuts to the state's public education system.
Hunt appealed to Republicans to support whichever candidate won the primary, and the three candidates were mostly civil during the forum moderated by radio talk show host Alan Stock.
"Whoever wins the primary, please get behind her, or him, and let's put a Republican in the mansion," Hunt said.
However, Beers kept up his criticism of Gibbons, who is considered the front-runner to win the August primary. Beers said Gibbons supported extending collective bargaining rights from local to state government employees such as prison guards, which would inflate the cost of government.
"I have voted in the past against extending that unfair set of rights to state employees," Beers said. "U.S. Rep. Gibbons has come out in favor of doing just that and has been endorsed by the union he promised that to."
Gibbons did not respond directly.
Afterward, Gibbons spokesman Robert Uithoven said the congressman did not favor such rights for all state employees, but told the Nevada Corrections Association he would support collective bargaining for the group if it could win legislative approval.
"It was just a question brought up in that particular meeting with that particular group," Uithoven said.
Beers also promoted his Tax and Spending Control initiative, which would amend the state constitution to cap state and local government spending to the rate of inflation plus population growth.
Gibbons and Hunt have opposed the proposal but vowed to be fiscally conservative.
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New York Times
March 27, 2006
Sparing No Expense to Hear a Nuclear Waste Disposal Case
By Matthew L. Wald
BETHESDA, Md., March 24 — It is a hearing room where, quite possibly, nobody will ever signal the "aha" moment of argument by waving a piece of paper, or brandish a highlighter to isolate a crucial fact. If it goes as planned, in fact, it will have hardly any paper at all.
It is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's new computerized courtroom, built in anticipation of a marathon hearing on the question of burying nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Congress gave the commission up to four years to hear the case, although it could take longer.
Along with the technical challenge of showing the mountain to be a safe place to put waste for hundreds of thousands of years, the various participants in this case — the commission staff, the Energy Department, the state of Nevada, local governments, Indian tribes and probably some environmental groups, and the lawyers representing them — also face the challenge of keeping straight all the studies, testimony, evidence and other details. At times, there may be three sets of administrative law judges working concurrently.
The chief administrative law judge of the commission, which is supposed to rule on a license application, had visions of lawyers groping for some fact and saying, "just a moment, your honor," then turning to a mountain of documents to find the relevant one and disappearing for minutes or hours.
So the commission set up a high-tech alternative: two linked, computerized courtrooms — one on the second floor of its office complex here and one in Las Vegas — that will let lawyers and others involved in the hearing search millions of pages of records almost instantly, calling them to their own screen or those of other participants.
"As a practical matter, they will still bring paper," said G. Paul Bollwerk III, the commission's chief administrative law judge, who oversees the judges who rule on license applications. "But if it's a lot less paper, it's a positive step for everybody."
Supplied by Nortel Government Solutions, an American subsidiary of the big Canadian networking company, the system has cost about $6.2 million since work started in 2001. The Yucca Mountain hearings are not expected to start until 2008, if then.
The hearing room here, built in 1994, has space for 3 judges, up to 6 witnesses, up to 9 other participants (including lawyers and commission staff members), a court reporter and 50 spectators. The Las Vegas version is bigger, with seats for about 30 participants and 400 spectators.
Each participant has a microphone that is keyed to a voice-activated video system. When someone starts talking, a small ceiling-mounted camera automatically pans to that spot and zooms in, and the speaker's image appears on computer screens visible to everyone in the room and in the other courtroom as well.
But the screens show more than just video; they also carry subtitles, like those on closed-caption television, entered by the court reporter and displayed immediately. That text is searchable, with a keyboard and mouse on each desk, and on playback, shows the audio and video. If the search results include evidence that has been annotated — say, a map or a chart that a previous witness has used a mouse to "draw" on — that, too, will pop up to the screen, complete with annotations.
In a back room nearby, a bank of computer servers will hold the data and testimony and record the proceedings. It will be backed up by a home-style digital video recorder that can be used to replay recent passages of testimony the way a court reporter would read back a transcript.
The archived materials will be available not only in the courtroom but also, with a password, over the Web.
Everything will be recorded except for information on safeguards, like that related to sabotage, diversion of weapons materials and similar topics. The system also allows instant messaging among participants, although in this installation it is limited to the judges and their clerks, and those messages are not archived.
If the judges call the lawyers for a bench conference, a "white noise" generator drowns out the conversation.
The system provides most of what the commission would need to Webcast its sessions, a prospect under discussion.
Nortel executives say that various other courtroom systems offer some features of the one they built for the commission, but that theirs is the first to tie everything together, including integration of video images with transcripts.
Other government agencies use teleconferencing. The National Transportation Safety Board has a computer system that allows hearing officers and staff members to trade instant messages during proceedings, so that its personnel can send an electronic whisper to an investigator who is deposing a witness, suggesting another line of questioning. But the commission's new digital courtroom, thus far unused except in tests, is more automated and is capable of handling proceedings in multiple locations.
The next trick being worked on, according to Andrew Welkie, the commission's project manager, is a portable version that could be set up easily in hotel conference rooms, for reactor licensing cases or other matters.
This is not the nuclear commission's first foray into high-tech proceedings. In January 1996, officials tried out a combination of videoconferencing and Web conferencing; for that test, the chairwoman of the commission and others had to walk across a six-lane road outside their headquarters to a Kinko's in a strip mall across the street.
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FedNews
March 27, 2006
Yucca Mountain Requires Stricter Management
The Department of Energy must tighten its quality assurance mechanisms at Yucca Mountain, according to a recent Government Accountability Office investigation.
DOE began the Yucca Mountain Project in 1978 to study if and how the nation´s entire spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste could be stored in one place. The Department is currently seeking a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to construct a nuclear waste repository at the Yucca Mountain facility, approximately 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
“Because quality assurance plays a key role in ensuring that the information DOE uses to support its license application is of high quality and fully defensible, problems in this area raise concerns about delays to DOE´s submission and NRC´s review of the license application,’ wrote Jim Wells, GAO´s director of Natural Resources and Environment, in a letter to Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev. Porter chairs the House Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce and Agency Organization.
Wells specifically cited three areas of concern.
Last year, DOE contractors discovered multiple e-mails in which a United States Geological Survey employee at the facility indicated that he had fabricated documentation of his work. DOE is currently engaged in “extensive efforts to restore confidence in scientific documents’, but has approximately 14 million more project e-mails to investigate.
DOE also faces quality assurance challenges in resolving design control problems associated with its requirements management processes, which ensure that high-level plans and regulatory requirements are incorporated into specific engineering details.
“Significant’ personnel and project changes initiated in October of last year have also created a “potential for confusion’ over roles and responsibilities, said Wells.
In order to ensure that the facility has adequate management control, GAO recommended the Yucca Mountain management:
* Reassess the coverage that management tools provide for the areas of concern
* Base future management tools on projectwide analysis, unless compelling reasons for a lesser scope exist
* Establish quality guidelines for trend evaluation reports to ensure sound analysis when reporting problems for management´s attention
* To the extent practicable, make analyses and indicators of performance consistent over time so trends and progress can be accurately identified
* Focus the management tools´ rating categories on the significance of the monitored condition, not on a judgment of the need for management action
The 59-page letter can be found at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d06313.pdf.
More information about the Yucca Mountain Project can be found at http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/ymp/index.shtml.
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Washington Technology
March 27, 2006
Yucca Mountain battle will be fought in digital court
By Doug Beizer
Deep bookshelves curve behind the lawyers´ tables in a courtroom at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Rockville, Md. Crammed onto the shelves are thousands of paper documents generated over the course of complex hearings before the commission. They contain the details of proposals such as licensing a new reactor and building a waste repository.
The mounds of paper were expected to grow significantly over the next few years, as adjudication moved forward on the Energy Department´s license application for a commercial nuclear-reactor waste-storage facility at Nevada´s Yucca Mountain.
The proceeding, which Congress mandated to last three to four years, likely will be one of the largest and most complex administrative hearings in U.S. history, NRC officials said.
To better manage data that would derive from the Yucca hearings as well as the commission´s regular proceedings, NRC officials built two digital courtrooms for the agency´s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel.
“Our hearings typically have three judges and three or more parties,’ said Andrew Welkie, Digital Data Management System project manger for NRC. “The documentation was printed for each case and all participants: attorneys, witnesses, NRC staff. It was stacks and stacks of paper.’
Nortel Government Solutions Inc. of Fairfax, Va., was the prime contractor and systems integrator for the project. ExhibitOne Corp. and Media Edge Inc. supplied hardware, software and integration services.
Media Edge, Linthicum, Md., focused on Internet multimedia solutions, and ExhibitOne of Phoenix provided audiovisual technologies.
The NRC´s cases generally are complex and require that administrative law judges, NRC staff and other participants have quick access to volumes of documents. Most cases involve those seeking licenses and those, such as environmental groups and localities, opposing the granting of those licenses.
The new digital courtrooms in Rockville and Las Vegas eliminate the headaches of dealing with paper records by providing electronic evidence presentation, digital audio and video transcripts, and electronic capture and display of evidence.
“The digital data management system was designed and developed to handle the Yucca Mountain proceeding,’ Welkie said. “The Department of Energy wants to build a waste facility there, and we have this three- to four-year congressional mandate to issue a decision.’
The Yucca hearings are expected to generate 50,000 documents.
Everything introduced in the hearing room, whether computer-based, audio, video or physical, is recorded electronically and goes to a set of servers. Because the hearing room is digital, people off-site can submit documents over the Web or testify via videoconference.
A key aspect of the system is its fully searchable audio and visual transcripts. As a hearing is being transcribed, the transcription is married to the video to enable searches to find a specific point in the recording.
The system´s Web interface displays the transcript in one window and next to it in another window, the corresponding video. The set-up makes it easy to scan the transcript and find a specific spot to start running the corresponding video.
“What makes this system unique is it has taken known technologies and integrated them into one system,’ Welkie said. “If you walk into a federal courthouse, you´re going to see video monitors, cameras, microphones and computers. And we have the database, which is also out there in courthouses. But making that database available in the hearing room is something a little different than other courts are doing.’
The system is built on Plumtree´s portal technology, which integrates all the other technology, said Paul Gwaltney, digital data management system program manager for Nortel Government Solutions. Plumtree is now part of BEA Systems Inc. of San Jose, Calif.
“We used the portal and created custom code to handle a lot of the hearing functions within the hearing room, such as witness management, document management and other things,’ Gwaltney said.
All authorized participants get a user name and password and can log into the system from anywhere with an Internet connection.
In the courtroom, each seat has a workstation. Because all documents and evidence are filed before the hearing, from the moment the hearing begins, the judge as well as the participants can simultaneously pull up any document, annotate it and reintroduce it as a new piece of evidence.
“For example, if an expert witness draws arrows on a map, that can be re-entered as evidence,’ Gwaltney said.
The licensing board panel´s chief administrative law judge since 1999, G. Paul Bollwerk has been with the agency since 1989. While the NRC has been successful in moving cases through its system, slow, antiquated methods are still in use, he said.
“We have someone stamping all the paper documents to put them into the record,’ Bollwerk said.
“With this system, we can do all that electronically and save a lot of time. It may not seem like it, but we can probably save 15 percent to 25 percent of that time doing it electronically.’
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Salt Lake Tribune
March 27, 2006
When pigs fly: Skull Valley nuke dump still safety folly
Private Fuel Storage is still trying to wangle a way to park all of the nation's spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors in huge casks on a giant concrete pad in Skull Valley. But no matter how it tries to apply rouge to this hog, its offer to the federal Energy Department to store the waste temporarily until a permanent site can be prepared still fails the safety test.
As the Union of Concerned Scientists has pointed out, “the proposal is imprudent from both a safety and financial perspective because it entails the added risks and costs from transporting spent fuel twice as often as necessary.’
In other words, it doesn't make sense to transport the stuff first to Skull Valley for temporary storage and then again to a permanent repository, whether or not that ends up being Yucca Mountain, Nev.
It makes more sense to store the spent fuel at the reactor sites until a permanent repository opens, then transport it once to that burial plot.
Even if the United States were to decide to reprocess the spent fuel for subsequent re-use, as is currently being discussed, it would be folly to send it all to a central interim storage site in Utah, then pack it off somewhere else for reprocessing.
Besides, about 25 reactors out of 70 across the nation already use dry-cask storage on site, the same technology that would be used in Utah, to
contain excess spent fuel assemblies.
None of this has deterred PFS from making a pitch to a congressional subcommittee to sell space at its Skull Valley parking lot to the federal government for interim storage.
A bit of background: Under contracts with electric utilities, the Energy Department was supposed to take the spent nuclear fuel off the utilities' hands in 1998. But the federal government can't because its proposed permanent site - Yucca Mountain - isn't ready, and maybe never will be. That has exposed Uncle Sam to billions of dollars in potential legal damages.
But the answer to the dilemma is not PFS. Rather, the Energy Department should take title to the stuff and pay the utilities to store it in dry casks at the reactor sites.
Moving it to Skull Valley would only expose millions of Utahns and other Americans to unnecessary transport risks.
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Augusta Chronicle
March 26, 2006
Foreign presence common for SRS
By Josh Gelinas
South Carolina Bureau Chief
AIKEN - In the secretive days of the Cold War, the U.S. went to great lengths to keep the rest of the world from the factories that built its bombs.
That has changed.
Today, foreign corporations work freely at Department of Energy installations that still handle materials once used to build the world's most dangerous weapons. That includes Savannah River Site, where companies with ties to Britain and France have been working for years.
Both countries are considered U.S. allies, but that might not explain entirely how they obtained work while Congress threatened to block a company like Dubai Ports World, a firm based in United Arab Emirates, when it was considered to secure major U.S. seaports.
Critics point out that American subsidiaries of British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. and AREVA, a French-based energy company, have both employed former high level Energy Department officials, perhaps giving them unfair access to U.S. nuclear markets.
AREVA grabbed a big name earlier this month, when it named Spencer Abraham, federal energy secretary from 2001 until 2005, the chairman of one of its boards of directors.
"You've got to ask, 'What were they doing when they were in public service?'" said Craig Holman, who monitors campaign finance issues for Public Citizen, a watchdog group in Washington D.C.
When asked, company officials said AREVA or one of its subsidiaries won two Energy Department contracts while Mr. Abraham served as secretary.
In 2003, COGEMA Inc., an AREVA subsidiary, and the U.S.-based Bechtel company won a $29.7 million, 4-year contract to design material handling systems at the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste burial site in Nevada.
That same year, Transnuclear Inc., another company affiliated with AREVA, was awarded a contract worth $16 million at the Energy Department's Hanford site in Washington.
Industry observers say it's necessary for foreign companies to employ people like Mr. Abraham to learn about the U.S. system. They defend the use of foreign companies, which they say are filling gaps in the nation's nuclear market that domestic companies can't.
If that's the case, some say, the U.S. is guilty of a double standard. The Dubai Ports World deal, which was halted in part because 9-11 hijackers reportedly lived in United Arab Emirates, was capable of doing the job, they argue.
"They (the French and British) may be an ally today. They may not be an ally tomorrow," said Bob Alvarez, who was a senior policy adviser to the energy secretary from 1993 until 1999.
Mr. Alvarez and others say Mr. Abraham's appointment to an AREVA board comes at especially opportune time for the company.
The Energy Department under President Bush, who appointed Mr. Abraham, has trumpeted the expansion of nuclear energy, an area of expertise for AREVA, which markets its reactors in the United States.
The department also announced plans this year to potentially spend billions of dollars on the recycling of spent nuclear fuel, a process the U.S. abandoned 30 years ago because some feared the radioactive materials could fall into the wrong hands. It's another area of expertise for AREVA.
Mr. Abraham isn't the only former federal energy official the company has brought on board. UniStar Nuclear, which is pushing AREVA reactors in the states, recently named two former Energy Department leaders and two former Nuclear Regulatory Commission members to its advisory board, according to The Energy Daily, a trade publication.
"These people have known agendas and known access to the current administration, and therefore they give AREVA access and ability to influence policy, making it virtually impossible for the public to have any input or say," said Michelle Boyd, a legislative director with Public Citizen.
AREVA is no stranger to the United States. It has business at 40 locations in 20 states, according to company documents. It also has offices in Aiken and owns COGEMA, the French subsidiary that is designing a plutonium conversion plant at SRS.
Mr. Abraham was not immediately available to comment, but Penny Phelps, a spokeswoman for the company's U.S. subsidiary, said it would rely on Mr. Abraham's in-depth knowledge. By law he can't have contact with the Energy Department for two years, she pointed out.
"We're very comfortable about how he is going to give use information based on his experience," she said.
Washington Savannah River Co., which manages SRS for the Energy Department, hasn't made a habit of hiring former managers with the federal agency, said Jack Herrmann, the vice president of corporate communications for Washington Group International, Washington Savannah River Co.'s parent company.
The company doesn't need to, he said, because it has been working at the nation's nuclear weapons complexes since they were built.
"We've been in the business," he said. "We know the history."
Foreign companies hire those with knowledge of the U.S. system to catch up on the learning curve, Mr. Herrmann said.
Coincidence or not, the Energy Department is interested in the technology AREVA has to offer. The company has been building reactors while the U.S. hasn't permitted a new nuclear power plant in three decades.
British Nuclear Fuels also showed up at a good time. The company's jump into the U.S. market coincided with the Cold War's end about 1990, when the Energy Department was looking for help cleaning up nuclear waste.
At that time, DOE was urging U.S. companies that ran its sites to seek qualified partners from around the world.
Westinghouse, owned by Washington Group International, asked an American subsidiary of British Nuclear Fuels to join its management team in the 1990s.
"The fact is, there aren't a lot of companies who can do it," said Will Callicott, a spokesman for Washington Savannah River Co.
Reach Josh Gelinas at (803) 648-1395, ext. 110, or josh.gelinas@augustachronicle.com.
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State of Nevada
Agency for Nuclear Projects
www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/
nwpo@nuc.state.nv.us
775-687-3744
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