Yucca Mountain News Clips
Sunday, April 23, 2006
---------------------------
Las Vegas SUN
April 23, 2006
Jon Ralston on the awkward position in which Bush's visit puts the state GOP
The most powerful man on the planet is coming to town Monday, and I couldn't feel more compassion for his hosts - Rep. Jon Porter and the state GOP.
Porter and the Republicans are opening their house, aka The Venetian, to President Bush in the way that a bank might welcome a deposit from a dictator who has committed serial human rights abuses. They want the money. But they really don't desire the guilt by association.
Many Republican candidates this year will not invite into their districts a president drowning in the worst approval ratings since approval ratings have been measured for White House occupants. Here in Nevada, national pollster Peter Hart recently found that 52 percent of Nevadans have a negative view of Bush and only 39 percent have a positive view of the president. Bush doesn't have coattails; he has cement shoes.
I understand why the state party needs to embrace the president. He is, after all, a Republican. He is, after all, the president. And, after all, the state GOP is broke.
Porter, though, is far from penniless. He has $1.3 million in his bank account and really doesn't need much help from Bush to outpace Democratic challenger Tessa Hafen, who is a million behind. So the benefits from the money the president brings in are negligible at best, especially since there are a whole lot of Democrats in Porter's divided district who really don't like Bush.
But the detriment to the Porter campaign probably is minimal from being so closely associated with the president as the administration convulses with staff changes and historians begin to muse if he is the worst president ever.
The congressman may be fortunate that no one much cares about the Yucca Mountain issue anymore. Nevadans have heard it all in the last two decades, and it never seems to cut much as a political issue.
No one has yet seen any benefit from pointing out that Bush has been the most actively hostile president on the nuclear waste dump, lying about it during his first campaign, stringing along the compliant Nevada GOP elected elite after he became president and then affixing his name to the legislation that could ensure Yucca Mountain would one day be filled with waste.
Other presidents may have been guilty of benign neglect, including Bill Clinton, who did nothing to stop the permanent dump project. But no president has ever treated the state so badly, patronizing his putative allies and disregarding any real scientific findings.
In fact, even beyond Yucca Mountain, it's hard not to conclude that Bush simply takes Nevada for granted since he has won twice here and the state has received nothing in return. The latest example, of course, is his administration's snub of Las Vegas when it comes to Homeland Security funding, which is something people should care about even more than the dump.
Yet Porter and the state GOP remain willing to welcome him to Las Vegas where the Democrats will concoct some lame, predictable protest and the media will fawn over the great man visiting our little state. And the congressman will do his best to embrace Bush while distancing himself at the same time - perhaps he will tell us they "agree to disagree" on Yucca Mountain? Where have we heard that before?
The hypocrisy is redolent. Porter and the other GOP folks expressed their outrage 10 days ago when Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman came to town and they attacked him for signing off on the new legislation to accelerate the dump's opening. Reality check: Who proposed that bill, and who is Bodman's boss?
What's more, the man being feted Monday is the same man who Porter will be obliquely lambasting just a day later when he uses that federal subcommittee he heads for a dog and pony show to get publicity and hammer the Energy Department for "mismanagement and quality assurance weaknesses at Yucca Mountain." Again I ask: Who is ultimately responsible for the DOE?
But perhaps I am wrong about all of this, perhaps there will be no discomfort at all Monday, perhaps Porter will step up dramatically on stage and say to Bush:
"Mr. President, as much as we might be honored to have you here, I must ask you to explain to my fellow Nevadans how you could have done what you have done to this state. Please, sir, you must answer for your actions."
Or perhaps another Republican official, such as Sen. John Ensign, will do so. Or, perhaps, they will do what most politicians seeking re-election do in such situations:
Take the money and run.
Jon Ralston hosts the news discussion program "Face to Face With Jon Ralston" on Las Vegas ONE and also publishes the daily e-mail newsletter "RalstonFlash.com." His column for the Las Vegas Sun appears Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Ralston can be reached at 870-7997 or at ralston@vegas.com.
---------------------------
San Luis Obispo Tribune
April 23, 2006
How Diablo could be safer
For an estimated $50 million to $100 million, the nuclear plant could move radioactive waste sooner
By David Sneed
dsneed@thetribunenews.com
Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant could lower the amount of highly radioactive waste stored in pools and reduce the possibility of a fire that would release catastrophic amounts of radiation into the county, respected scientists say.
But federal regulators and officials at Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which owns Diablo, say the densely loaded pools are safe and unloading them would be costly and unnecessary.
The disagreement puts the plant north of Avila Beach in the midst of a long debate in the nuclear industry — what to do with spent fuel.
Spent fuel is one of the most hazardous materials known to man. Direct exposure to its intense radiation would kill a person within minutes, and it stays dangerous for tens of thousands of years.
Storage pools at Diablo Canyon and other plants across the nation now contain five times the number of spent fuel assemblies they were designed to handle.
Concerns about terrorism and uncertainty over the future of a national facility to store nuclear waste have prompted a push by experts, activists and some legislators to move spent fuel from the pools after six years and place them in above-ground dry casks, which many experts consider a safer storage method.
Dangerous stockpile
A 2005 study requested by Congress raised questions about the vulnerability of the nation´s growing stockpile of highly radioactive waste, which is scattered at 103 commercial nuclear reactors in 31 states across the nation.
"The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks raised the possibility of a new kind of threat to commercial power plants and spent fuel storage: premeditated, carefully planned, high impact attacks by terrorists to damage these facilities for the purpose of releasing radiation into the environment and spreading fear and panic among civilian populations," concluded the study by the National Academy of Sciences´ Board of Radioactive Waste Management, which advises Congress on nuclear waste matters.
The densely packed spent fuel pools are the result of repeated delays in opening a national underground storage repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
Nuclear plants were built with the assumption that spent fuel would be either reprocessed into fresh fuel or shipped off to Yucca Mountain soon after it spent the mandatory five years cooling in the pools.
Neither of those has come to fruition, and just two years after Diablo opened, the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved PG&E´s request to replace the original in-pool fuel storage racks, which can hold 270 assemblies, with ones that can hold 1,324 assemblies.
The use of such high-density storage racks soon became an industrywide trend, and some scientists and nuclear power critics began to wonder what would happen if a powerful earthquake or other catastrophic event caused the water —which circulates around the spent fuel to keep it cool, blocks radiation and protects plant workers — to drain out.
A frightening possibility emerged: Within several hours of losing its cooling water, the newest and hottest assemblies in the pool could heat up and begin to burn, spreading fire to the rest of the assemblies.
Since spent fuel pools are outside of a nuclear plant´s containment domes, there would be little to stop the spread of the resulting clouds of radioactive steam and smoke. The radiation could spread hundreds of miles, the National Academy of Sciences report states.
The pools also contain much larger amounts of radioactive material than a reactor, said David Lochbaum, a nuclear scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a liberal-leaning organization often critical of the nuclear industry.
"The reactor is better protected than the spent fuel pools," Lochbaum said. "It might be that spent fuel is a more attractive target for our enemies than the reactor itself."
Assessing the risk
The NRC´s stance is that the possibility of a terrorist attack or earthquake damaging the spent fuel pools to the point that they would lose their water is so low that it does not justify requiring utilities to go to the time and expense of reducing them to their low- density loading.
Diablo´s pools are sunk below ground level and lined with six feet of concrete and steel, which would make draining them very difficult, said Jearl Strickland, Diablo Canyon´s spent fuel manager. Plus, PG&E officials and federal regulators say, a fire in a drained pool would take hours to develop, giving plant workers time to take corrective action.
Four months ago, in response to the report, the NRC directed plant operators to arrange the fuel assemblies into a safer configuration, among other measures that remain secret for security reasons.
The other factor is expense.
Along with many other plants, Diablo Canyon already is constructing an aboveground dry cask storage facility in anticipation of the day that the denser racks, too, become full.
The $118 million installation will hold as many as 138 casks, with each cask containing 32 assemblies — enough to store all the spent fuel Diablo Canyon will produce through 2025, when its operating license ends.
But if plants were forced to accelerate the transfer from the pools to the dry casks, Diablo and other plants with dry cask facilities already under construction would have to go back and redesign them.
The NRC estimates the cost to utilities of accelerating transfer of spent fuel from the pools to dry casks at $3.5 billion to $7 billion nationwide. Estimates vary of how much it would cost Diablo Canyon. Nuclear safety expert Gordon Thompson, who has consulted for the nuclear watchdog group San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace, has put the price at $50 million. Strickland estimates the cost would be closer to $100 million.
By comparison, the utility plans to spend more than $700 million to replace the plant´s eight steam generators and $141 million to replace the tops of the reactors, paid for through rate increases.
That work coupled with the recent replacement of Diablo Canyon´s low-pressure turbines brings the total price of equipment replacements at the power plant to $1 billion over a decade.
What the critics think
The National Academy of Sciences report stops short of recommending that spent fuel pools be returned to their low-density configuration. Such decisions need to be based on cost-benefit considerations by the NRC and the nuclear industry, the report said.
But nuclear power watchdog groups — including the Union of Concerned Scientists, San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace and the San Luis Obispo-based Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility — believe it is worth the expense.
"There is no excuse for failing to take this extremely feasible and affordable step to protect the public from the potentially disastrous effects of a successful attack on a spent fuel pool," said Morgan Rafferty, Mothers for Peace activist.
They consider dry casks to be a safer storage option because it divides a plant´s spent fuel stockpile into smaller groups and encases the assemblies individually in strong steel-and-concrete cylinders.
The casks at Diablo will be bolted to an open-air concrete pad behind the plant. Local environmental groups unsuccessfully urged PG&E to disperse the casks at several locations and protect them with earthen berms to make them a less attractive terrorist target.
"Even if you go with the cheapest thing — which is a concrete pad — that is a better solution than filled pools, by leaps and bounds," Lochbaum said.
A long-term problem
One thing about storage of spent fuel at Diablo Canyon is certain. It is a problem that will confront San Luis Obispo County residents for decades to come.
Staunch opposition to the Yucca Mountain project by Nevada lawmakers, coupled with questions about its safety and scientific viability, leave the future of the facility in serious doubt.
"The Yucca Mountain project is never going to open," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada has vowed.
Lawmakers in Utah similarly oppose a proposal to build a temporary nuclear storage facility on an American Indian reservation about 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. Congressmen and senators from those two states introduced a bill in December that would require all spent-fuel assemblies to be transferred to dry casks within six years.
The Spent Nuclear Fuel On-Site Storage Security Act of 2005 is part of an overall effort to require the federal Department of Energy to take ownership of and manage all of the on-site dry cask storage facilities at individual nuclear plants. It also calls for compensating utilities for transferring the fuel to dry storage with money now earmarked for the Yucca Mountain facility.
The bill has been referred for consideration to committees in both the Senate and House of Representatives.
How spent fuel pools could be safer
Recommendations from a six-month review of the safety of spent fuel pools at commercial nuclear power plants by a panel of scientists with the National Academy of Sciences:
1. The NRC should do more analysis of vulnerabilities of spent fuel pools and make recommendations to correct them.
NRC and nuclear industry officials say this is being done.
2. Two measures to improve spent fuel pool safety should be promptly implemented. They are:
• Reconfiguring the fuel in the pools in a checkerboard fashion so that newer, hotter fuel is surrounded by older, cooler fuel.
The NRC has adopted this recommendation and Diablo Canyon has implemented it.
• Installing a water spray system that would be able to cool the fuel even if the pool or overlying building is severely damaged.
NRC and nuclear industry officials say sprinklers are unnecessary because there are other ways to refill the pools. No such sprinklers have been installed at Diablo Canyon.
David Sneed can be reached at 781-7930.
---------------------------
Toronto Star
April 23, 2006
Nuclear power: A comeback story
Governments everywhere are suddenly in love with nukes again.
What gives?
Kurt Kleiner
Special to The Star
When Premier Dalton McGuinty last week suggested Ontario needs new nuclear power plants to provide clean, cheap energy for the future, he didn't talk about "our friend the atom," but his statement still caused an odd sense of déjà vu.
For many of us, optimism about nuclear energy carries the whiff of faded 1950s futurism, of a World of Tomorrow where citizens in silver jumpsuits would drive along elevated skyways and vacation in undersea cities.
In the decades after World War II, eager governments bankrolled the creation of a civilian nuclear industry. But optimism about nuclear power evaporated after the Three Mile Island accident and, more notably, the horrific explosion at Chernobyl that occurred 20 years ago next Wednesday.
Now it turns out that while most of us were looking the other way, nuclear power has once again become the energy source of the future.
Ontario's new interest in the nuclear option puts it smack in the middle of what looks like a global comeback for a power source that many thought was finished.
Of course, nuclear power never really went away. In Ontario, 16 reactors supply almost half of the province's electricity.
Worldwide, more than 400 reactors generate 2,560 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity every year, about 17 per cent of all electricity generated.
But until just a few years ago, nuclear capacity was flat or decreasing, as old nuclear units were decommissioned with no plans to replace them.
Now, however, the U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that worldwide nuclear generation capacity will jump from 361 gigawatts to 422 gigawatts by 2025.
McGuinty's speech last Wednesday hinted that Ontario would add to those numbers. Although the premier admitted that nuclear power has its problems, he seems to be setting the stage for accepting an Ontario Power Authority recommendation that the province spend $40 billion and build 12 new nuclear reactors.
The original promise of nuclear power was that it would be plentiful, cheap and pollution-free.
The U.S. nuclear weapons program had proven that a few pounds of uranium could generate astonishing amounts of power. Harnessing that power for civilian ends seemed to be just a matter of getting the technology right.
That early optimism faded. Although nuclear plants generated the promised electricity, they did it at a much higher cost than expected.
Once they were up and running, they could generate fairly cheap electricity, but because they were so expensive to build in the first place, the total cost of the electricity over the lifetime of the plant ended up being higher than for plants powered by coal, oil or natural gas.
Although the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents played a role, much of the resistance to building new plants has been simply economic, as utilities and investors shied away from what seemed like a risky business.
The number of new plants being planned now shows that something has changed in the past few years.
The biggest growth in nuclear power will be in China, which has vowed to build 25 to 35 new reactors by 2020.
Companies are already trying to get in line for the contracts. In February, Toshiba Corp. agreed to pay $5.4 billion for nuclear-power-plant manufacturer Westinghouse Electric Co., largely because of its expertise in making the kind of reactors favoured by the Chinese.
In the United States, which hasn't built a new nuclear plant since 1978, nine utilities have started the licensing process that would allow them to build between 15 and 26 new nuclear plants over the next 10 years.
`The economics of nuclear power is 90 per cent policy and 10 per cent wishful thinking'
Daniel M. Kammen
Physicist
So what has changed? One factor in nuclear power's favour is that it doesn't require fossil fuels. Not only does that make it less likely that countries will have to fight one another for scarce coal, oil and natural gas a few years in the future, it also means nuclear plants don't produce carbon emissions that contribute to global warming.
The idea of nuclear power as a "green" energy source seems odd, after decades of opposition from environmentalists. But with global warming shaping up as the greatest environmental danger, nuclear power's lack of greenhouse emissions is definitely a benefit. If all of the nuclear plants in the world were to be replaced with fossil fuel plants tomorrow, annual carbon emissions would rise by 2 billion tonnes.
Of course, radioactive waste is nuclear power's environmental Achilles heel, since it remains dangerous for centuries and no one is quite sure what to do with it.
The only solution anyone has thought of is to bury it in a deep hole and hope there are no leaks for a few thousand years. Years of controversy over the planned nuclear waste facility at Yucca Mountain, Nev., show that nothing is easy when it comes to disposing of nuclear waste.
The economic argument for and against nuclear power is a more complicated one.
Probably the most authoritative recent study was a 2003 report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology titled The Future of Nuclear Power. The report concluded that, taking all costs into account, electricity generated by nuclear plants was the most expensive — half again as expensive as coal, and 20 per cent more expensive than natural gas.
But the authors also suggested that nuclear power could become more affordable with new plant designs that can be built more quickly and require less downtime for maintenance.
Nuclear power will look even more affordable, the authors said, if governments impose a carbon emissions tax.
A tax of $200 (U.S.) per tonne of carbon would make nuclear power the cheapest form of energy, they say.
Not everyone is convinced that the nuclear power comeback will materialize.
"I don't think there's going to be this huge renaissance," says Thomas B. Cochran, director of the nuclear program for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a U.S. environmental group.
Cochran thinks the renewed interest in nuclear power in the U.S., at least, is spurred by a recent energy bill that promised more tax breaks and loan guarantees for the first new plants to be built.
He thinks many of the proposed U.S. plants will never materialize, and that China will slow down its proposed nuclear program when the costs become more apparent.
Daniel M. Kammen, a Berkeley physicist who studies energy policy, says it's hard to untangle the cost of nuclear power, largely because it is so heavily subsidized by governments.
"The economics of nuclear power is 90 per cent policy and 10 per cent wishful thinking," Kammen says. "Nuclear is shrouded in its own internal economic analysis that other technologies don't need to deal with."
Nevertheless, if governments such as Canada, the U.S. and China continue to push for nuclear energy, plants will be built, whatever the economic realities.
In 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his "Atoms for Peace" speech before the United Nations General Assembly, calling for a global effort to harness nuclear energy.
"Who can doubt," he said, "if the entire body of the world's scientists and engineers had adequate amounts of fissionable material with which to test and develop their ideas, that this capability would rapidly be transformed into universal, efficient and economic usage."
Despite 50 years of trying since then, many still doubt whether nuclear power is necessary or desirable. But for now, it looks like the world is willing to give it one more shot.
-Kurt Kleiner is a Toronto-based science writer.
---------------------------
Congressman Jon Porter
April 20, 2006
Porter Subcommittee to Hold Yucca Mountain Hearing - Updated GAO report will be scrutinized
WASHINGTON, D.C. – On Tuesday, April 25 at 2 PM, Third District Congressman Jon Porter will hold a Federal Workforce and Agency Organization Subcommittee hearing to examine an updated Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on mismanagement and quality assurance weaknesses at Yucca Mountain. Porter, Subcommittee Chairman and the driving force behind the ongoing Yucca Mountain Project investigation, asked GAO to update the report in April of 2005.
The report, entitled “Quality Assurance at DOE´s (Department of Energy) Planned Nuclear Waste Repository Needs Increased Management Attention,’ highlights concerns surrounding the proposed nuclear waste repository.
The report states that “DOE cannot be certain that its efforts to improve the implementation of its quality assurance requirements have been effective because it adopted management tools that did not target existing management concerns and did not track progress with significant and recurring problems. Although DOE announced, in 2004, that it was making a commitment to continuous quality assurance improvement…its adopted management tools have not been effective for this purpose.’ The report concludes that “Before DOE submits a license application, its aggressive ‘new path forward´ effort faces substantial quality assurance and other challenges.’
The hearing comes on the heels of Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman´s first visit to Yucca Mountain since being confirmed as Energy Secretary in January of 2005. In recent months, Bodman has said that the Yucca Mountain Project has been poorly managed and is “broken.’
Porter has extended invitations to Nevada Representatives Jim Gibbons and Shelley Berkley to join him on the dais at the hearing. Nevada Senators John Ensign and Harry Reid have been invited to testify as witnesses.
A complete copy of the GAO report, which was released on March 23, is available at www.house.gov/porter.
WITNESSES:
Paul M. Golan, Acting Director, Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, United States Department of Energy
Gregory Friedman, Inspector General, United States Department of Energy
Margaret Federline, Deputy Director, Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Jim Wells, Director, Natural Resources and Environment, United States Government Accountability Office
WHEN:
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
2 PM EST
WHERE:
Rayburn House Office Building, Room 2154
---------------------------
Deseret News
April 22, 2006
Alliance's ad urges nuclear waste opposition
Letter makes plea for Utahns to contact the BLM
By Zack Van Eyck
Deseret Morning News
The Alliance for Unity, a group consisting of some influential Utahns, made a public plea Friday for residents of the Beehive State to oppose the potential storage of high-level nuclear waste here and in Nevada.
The group took advertising space in Friday's edition of both the Deseret Morning News and the Salt Lake Tribune to publish a letter calling on all Utahns to "protect our image as a beautiful, healthy, safe state."
"If we value our economic future and the health of our children," the letter stated, "we must not become the nation's nuclear garbage dump."
The group said it is concerned both about the proposal by Private Fuel Storage (PFS) to temporarily store spent nuclear fuel rods on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian reservation in Tooele County, and the possible transportation through Utah of the high-level nuclear waste headed for a proposed permanent storage site in Yucca Mountain, Nev.
"Skull Valley is only 50 miles, upwind, from one million people along the Wasatch Front," the letter noted. "The possibilities for accidents, or acts of terrorist sabotage, put the health, safety and well-being of all Utahns at unacceptable risk."
The Alliance, according to its position paper, is a group of Utah civic, religious and business leaders seeking to "foster the common good in the state." Its members include Jon M. Huntsman Sr. (father of Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.), Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, Elder M. Russell Ballard of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, University of Utah President Michael K. Young, Deseret Morning News Editor and Chief Operating Officer John Hughes and MediaNews Group Inc. President Dean Singleton, all of whom signed the letter.
One aim of the letter is to encourage Utahns to write the federal Bureau of Land Management by May 8 to oppose an application by PFS for permission to construct a rail line to move the spent rods to the reservation, or to build a transfer station on BLM land and then move the waste via trucks.
"We hope Utahns will write Pam Schuller (of the BLM's Salt Lake City office) or e-mail her (Pam_Schuller@BLM.gov) and we hope they talk to their elected representatives, because we don't need this in Utah," said Alexander B. Morrison, the alliance's executive director and an emeritus general authority of the LDS Church.
"I hope it has some impact," Morrison said of the advertisement, "because the Alliance for Unity feels quite strongly that we don't want this extremely dangerous high-level stuff ending up in Utah or being transported through the state.
"We don't want it in the Skull Valley reservation, nor do we want it to traverse the state on its way to Yucca Mountain."
Morrison said the group does not plan to place additional ads or purchase any other form of advertising prior to the May 8 deadline.
"This is our expression," he said of the letter. "We're not going to go beyond what we've said in this ad."
The letter is also signed by Wells Fargo Bank Chairman Emeritus Spencer F. Eccles, former Utah first lady Norma Matheson, community activists Robert "Archie" Archuletta and Pamela J. Atkinson, Zions Bancorp. President Harris H. Simmons and others.
Any letters to the BLM, the group said, should be addressed to: Pam Schuller, BLM Salt Lake Field Office, 2370 S. 2300 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84119.
-E-mail: zman@desnews.com
---------------------------
Pahrump Valley Times
April 21, 2006
$100 Million in Repairs
Upgrades needed at Yucca
Old Buildings Need Some Attention to be Useful Again
WASHINGTON - The Energy Department is planning about $100 million in repairs, new buildings and roads, a fire station and other improvements at the site of planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump, a department official said Wednesday.
The planned upgrades - to facilities used by the 225 full-time employees who work at the dump site 50 miles northwest of Pahrump, 20 miles east of Beatty and north of Amargosa Valley, respectively - are needed to repair equipment and buildings that have fallen into disrepair or were never completed because of budget shortages, said Scott Wade, director of DOE's office of repository development in Las Vegas.
As the opening date of the project has been delayed, structures intended to be temporary have remained in use longer than planned, he said.
``We lack some of the basic emergency response capabilities, fire and such,'' Wade told a meeting of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's advisory committee on nuclear waste.
``Decisions were made not to complete some of the original design for those onsite structures,'' Wade said. ``It was probably poor decisions that were made.''
A fire in February burned down a trailer at the dump entrance - one of about 120 temporary structures in place, Wade told committee members. The fire, caused by a heating system malfunction, occurred during a weekend and had burned out by the time workers found it, but it underscored the need for better emergency response.
The closest fire engine is 45 minutes away, in Mercury.
In a presentation to the advisory committee, Wade outlined plans to:
€improve underground systems in the eight miles of tunnels at the dump site, including better fire detection and lighting systems;
€build a new guard house at the start of the road to Yucca Mountain;
€add a new or better access road;
€construct permanent warehouses to replace temporary structures;
€improve power generation, communications, and cement production facilities;
€build a fire station that can house a six-person crew, at a cost of $4 million to $8 million.
He said the underground plans already have been approved but some of the aboveground work needs environmental reviews. Some $45 million in the 2006 budget could go to the plans.
If the Energy Department gets a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build the dump, new facilities will be required to support construction of the dump itself.
DOE plans to apply for the NRC license in 2008 and hopes to open the dump by 2020 _ two decades late. Yucca Mountain is supposed to hold 77,000 tons or more of nuclear waste.
---------------------------
NEI Nuclear Notes
April 20, 2006
EPRI Study: Yucca Mountain Could Hold Up to Nine Times Design Capacity
The Electric Power Research Institute, known in the industry as EPRI, presented a study yesterday that said that the planned used fuel repository at Yucca Mountain could hold as much as 628,000 tons of used nuclear fuel if the project were expanded and re-designed.
From the Las Vegas Review-Journal:
A reconfigured repository would dwarf the current legal limit of 77,000 tons. The study assumes the repository area could be doubled, and that storage tunnels could be grouped or carved into multiple levels of the mountain.
The Yucca study is being performed by the Electric Power Research Institute, the research arm of the utility industry. A preliminary draft is expected to be published in May while analysts continue to delve into the topic, said John Kessler, the institute's high level waste manager.
Kessler told the NRC panel that researchers were conservative in their modeling, and assumed a "hot temperature" repository design, the same being considered by the Energy Department for Yucca Mountain.
DOE already has conducted limited studies on repository expansion, Kessler said. The department's environmental study for Yucca examined a 120,000 ton repository limit.
"We are not starting with a blank slate," Kessler said. "We think there is a good chunk of information available."
As you might imagine, officials in Nevada are already attacking the report:
Marty Malsch, an attorney who represents the state of Nevada in nuclear waste matters, said the capacities detailed in the presentation would position Yucca Mountain "to hold all the nuclear waste in the world."
Malsch questioned whether an expanded repository could comply with the federal nuclear waste law, principally requirements that limit the amount of decaying nuclear materials allowed to seep into groundwater.
I talked with NEI's Yucca Mountain point person, Steve Kraft, and he told me that this response was "typical of the hyperbole we see from Nevada. Nothing about that was said or discussed. He just related the lower end of EPRI's range with the amount of used fuel in storage world wide and drew an incorrect conclusion that supports Nevada's views."
Steve also noticed another factual inaccuracy in the article:
Per Peterson, a nuclear engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said he is skeptical of tiered designs for Yucca Mountain, as well as expanding the repository to a large capacity.
"DOE will be lucky to get together a baseline application for a 60 metric ton per acre repository for submission to NRC by 2008, and while there are maps showing up to 4,200 acres (at the site), only a tiny fraction of this area has been characterized to the level needed to verify that it is suitable for repository use."
Here's what Steve told me about that:
"[H]e incorrectly assumes that Yucca is licensed and then never altered. This is not the case -- the NRC regulation specifically calls for amendments as new information is learned and presented to NRC. There never was an intent for DOE to include the higher capacity numbers in the original License Application, but to deal with the a capacity change in the future."
With new legislation on the Hill, you can expect plenty more on this topic in the days and weeks to come. Stay tuned.
Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Power, Used Fuel, Energy, Reprocessing, Technology, Electricity, Yucca Mountain
posted by Eric McErlain
---------------------------
Las Vegas SUN
April 20, 2006
Indian tribe, downwinders ask court to stop Nevada desert blast
By Ken Ritter
Associated Press
LAS VEGAS (AP) - Members of an Indian tribe and two nuclear fallout "downwinders" are asking a federal court to halt plans for a huge non-nuclear explosion that is expected to generate a mushroom cloud over the Nevada desert in June.
"This is a worst nightmare come true for downwinders," said Robert Hager, a Reno-based lawyer representing four members of the Nevada-based Western Shoshone tribe and two residents of Utah.
He said the June 2 detonation of a 700-ton ammonium nitrate and fuel oil bomb at the Nevada Test Site would kick up radioactive fallout left from nuclear weapons tests conducted from 1951 to 1992.
Test site and federal officials have said the blast, some 280 times larger than the ammonium nitrate and fuel oil bomb that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, should not disturb surface contamination at the Test Site.
The 21-page request for a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction predicts a 10,000-foot mushroom cloud, and calls the blast a "clear and present danger" to the health of people living to the east, or downwind of the vast Nevada Test Site.
The document names as defendants Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Linton Brooks and James Tegnelia, the directors of two federal agencies planning the test.
Defense Department, National Nuclear Security Administration and Defense Threat Reduction Agency officials each declined comment Thursday, saying they had not immediately seen the court documents submitted to U.S. District Court in Las Vegas.
The court filing claims the test, dubbed "Divine Strake," would irreparably desecrate land the Western Shoshone tribe has never acknowledged turning over to the U.S.
The two "downwinder" plaintiffs, Peter Litster and Stephen Erickson, live in Salt Lake City, Utah, Hager said.
Thomas Wasson and Sharon Wasson, two of the four members of the Winnemucca Indian Colony of northern Nevada, live in Susanville, Calif. Plaintiff Judy Rojo lives in Winnemucca and Elverine Castro lives in Los Angeles, Hager said.
The Defense Threat Reduction Agency has said the blast will help design a weapon to penetrate hardened and deeply buried targets.
The National Nuclear Security Administration, which operates the vast Nevada Test Site north of Las Vegas, has said the Divine Strake explosion will be at least 1 1/2 miles from the nearest underground nuclear test, and three miles from the nearest ground-zero areas of known radioactive contamination from aboveground tests.
The long-term effect of radioactive fallout from atmospheric nuclear tests in the 1950s and early 1960s has long been debated.
Studies have produced conflicting conclusions as to whether fallout caused increased incidences of particular types of cancer in the residents living downwind in parts of Nevada, Utah and Arizona.
The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990 provides for compassionate payments to downwinders who contracted certain cancers and other serious diseases.
---------------------------
WCCO
April 21, 2006
Project Energy: The Future Of Nuclear Power
Don Shelby
Reporting
(WCCO) On a clear spring morning, there is little to see at the Prairie Island Nuclear Power Plant near Red Wing, Minn. No toxic clouds of smoke. Only occasional puffs of water vapor.
The Prairie Island plant and another up the Mississippi River at Monticello supply a third of Minnesota's electricity. That helps Xcel Energy rely less on coal than other utilities.
"Fortunately in Minnesota, we have a portfolio, as you well know," Xcel CEO Richard Kelly said. "So we do have nuclear power, and we do have a very large wind component."
A report prepared for the military by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers calls plants such as Prairie Island and Monticello "arguably our most reliable source of electricity." They have "the environmental advantage of no air pollution and no greenhouse gas emissions."
But nuclear power has not always been discussed in such friendly environmental terms. Nearly 30 years ago, protesters marched across the country and in Minnesota chanting "no nukes" and demanding an end to nuclear power.
"The industry knows it's not needed," a protester told a crowd in 1979. "They have a surplus of electricity already in their power pool that can service the cities and the surrounding area. That in fact, when Prairie Island is operating, it sells power out of state."
An accident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island triggered the protests. For five tense days that spring, engineers tried to diagnose the problem and debated whether to order evacuations.
"The radiation levels at the site boundary are really only a tenth of the general emergency levels where we normally get concerned," a utility official told the media back then.
But the plant was not operating normally. The risk of a meltdown was real. While plant officials said not to worry, Pennsylvania state officials told people to get out of town.
Even though no one was killed or injured, Three Mile Island dealt a serious blow to nuclear energy. Today there are new plants on the drawing board, but they have yet to be built. Experts say the accident and the protests are not the only reason why that is the case.
"Wall Street is afraid about putting themselves at financial risk, because we don't yet really know what to do with the nuclear waste," said J. Draken Hamilton of Minnesotans for an Energy Efficient Economy.
Outside Prairie Island and other nuclear power plants, large steel casks hold radioactive nuclear waste. Xcel and other utilities want to store it in Nevada's Yucca Mountain. Heavy opposition has stalled that plan. In the meantime, Xcel wants permission to store more casks at its Monticello plant.
Other countries are moving ahead despite the storage problems. France, with little access to fossil fuels, gets 78 percent of its electricity from nuclear power. Russia and the Ukraine, 20 years after the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident, continue to build new reactors. So do North Korea and Iran, but world leaders worry their true purpose is to build nuclear weapons.
The risk of a terrorist attack in this country could ultimately slow the production of more reactors. The same government report that praises the reliability of nuclear power also warns it comes at "the cost of increased environmental and security risks."
Hamilton says it is time to renew old debates.
"I think once we get serious about fighting global warming, what we do is open up a big debate about what are the lower carbon sources of energy we need to transform society," Hamilton said. "Nuclear may or may not be one of them, but we need to start that debate in order to see."
For the time being, Xcel Energy is seeking permits to operate both the Prairie Island and Monticello nuclear power plants well into the future.
---------------------------
Asbury Park Press
April 21, 2006
Topic of The Day: Nuclear waste
Recycle spent fuel
It's evident that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will grant Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station its 20-year operating license extension. Continued improvements must be made.
The nuclear power industry is the only energy-producing technology that takes responsibility for all of its wastes. Nuclear energy is far more cost-effective and produces a very small amount of waste compared to fossil-fuel electrical generation.
One issue of great concern is the storage of the highest level of radiological waste, the spent fuel rods. They are stored at Oyster Creek as well as at every nuclear reactor in the country. Although permanent storage is planned by the U.S. government at Yucca Mountain, Nev., protest and other delays could postpone its anticipated 2012 opening.
The radioactivity of all nuclear waste decays with time. This waste has what is called a half-life, the time it takes for half of its radioactive atoms to decay. After 40 to 50 years, the spent fuel rod assembly's radioactivity has fallen to only one thousandth of the radioactive isotopes that are processed. They should be treated as a valuable fuel source.
In France, China, Japan, India, Russia, Germany and the United Kingdom, they recover and recycle spent fuel into new, usable fuel rods, reducing the volume of nuclear waste by introducing less new uranium. In America, it should be mandated that spent fuel rods be reprocessed before encapsulated in Pyrex glass and stainless steel containers and considered unequivocally waste. A facility can be constructed at Oyster Creek and at many of the nuclear reactors throughout the United States to achieve this goal of reprocessing, thus reducing the amount of spent fuel to be transported to Yucca Mountain.
It would behoove the federal government to help fund such an effort. We seem to be falling behind in the world of technology and with our infrastructure. If you're not the lead dog, the view is always the same.
John McKelvey
Brick
---------------------------
Poughkeepsie Journal
April 21, 2006
More nukes or no nukes? State's energy future is under debate
By Jay Gallagher
Journal Albany bureau
ALBANY — As the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster approaches and the cost of oil and gas continues to escalate, the idea of building a new nuclear plant in New York has resurfaced.
Although there are no immediate plans to start construction, officials in Oswego County have said they would welcome a new plant, and energy planners are wondering if a technology once thought dead is the best answer to meet the state's growing appetite for electricity.
However, despite what looks like potential shortages of power downstate within a few years, the idea of nuclear power, at least downstate, is still radioactive to many people, including the front-runner in the gubernatorial election.
On April 25 and 26, 1986, a nuclear power plant in Chernobyl in the Soviet Union (now the Ukraine) exploded, killing 30 people and injuring hundreds. It was the worst nuclear-power-plant accident in history.
Even by then, however, planning new nukes, once seen as the ideal way to generate clean, cheap power, had ceased in the United States. The key event was a malfunction of the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania on March 28, 1979, when a small amount of radiation was released into the atmosphere.
In New York, the darkest period for the technology was in December 1986, when Gov. Mario Cuomo decided not to allow a newly built, $5.3 billion nuclear plant in Shoreham, Suffolk County, to open because there seemed to be no safe way to evacuate the bottle of Long Island with the cork of New York City blocking the only land exit.
Now New York is still home to the oldest operating nuclear plant in the country, Nine Mile Point 1, which opened in 1969 in Scriba, along Lake Ontario in Oswego County. The Ginna plant in the town of Ontario, Wayne County, opened the next year. There are four other nuclear plants in New York — two more along Lake Ontario in Oswego County and two in Buchanan, Westchester County.
Together, the plants provide about 30 percent of the electricity New Yorkers use — far above the national average of 20 percent.
There is little disagreement that the state is going to need more electricity as soon as 2008. But the fuel future plants might use, where they will be located and how the power they produce will be transmitted to customers are all issues of sharp contention.
Oswego County is more than willing to be home to a fourth nuclear plant.
"We would welcome the development of another nuclear plant in the county," County Administrator Stephen Lyman said, pointing to the jobs and tax revenue that the existing plants provide. When asked about safety, he said "The plants we have now are operated safely, and have been for 30 years."
Indian Point pessimism
The view isn't so sanguine 250 miles away in Westchester County, where some people feel strongly the two plants in Buchanan should close because of safety concerns.
"I cannot address energy without describing another environmental imperative — the need to close the Indian Point power plant," Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said in a speech last month. Spitzer is the front-runner in this year's gubernatorial election.
The plants have been plagued by safety problems, most recently the leakage of some radiation into ground water.
But then Spitzer hit on the conundrum that foes of the plants now operating find themselves: what to replace them with.
"Of course this can only happen when we are certain that there is adequate replacement power, since we cannot simply take 2,000 megawatts out of the grid," he said, referring to the amount of power it takes to run 2 million homes. His answer: make it easier to build new plants and step up efficiency and conservation measures.
But what fuel should such new plants use? The answer for the last decade or so in New York has been natural gas - clean and relatively cheap. But now supplies are getting tight, prices are rising and pipelines difficult to build.
"It's extremely difficult if not impossible to site new facilities to bring more natural gas into New York," said Pat Curran, president of the state Energy Association, a utility-trade group.
Wind farms have opened and more are proposed, but they can't generate power in nearly the volume needed.
Is the time ripe for nuclear power again? Possibly, industry officials say.
"When you look at both the safety and economic performance of the existing plants (there are 103 operating in the country now), a heightened concern with the environment and the need for fuel diversity," nuclear power looks attractive, said Marilyn Kray, president of NuStart, a utility-industry consortium that plans to submit applications to build new nuclear plants in Alabama and Mississippi to the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2007.
The firm caused a stir in Oswego last year when it announced that the county was one of the sites it was considering. But it backed out after one of the firms that makes up the consortium, Constellation Energy, decided to reserve the site for itself for a potential new plant.
A Constellation spokeswoman said that the company joined a different consortium that may try to build a plant with a different nuclear technology than the one NuStart is interested in.
Kray said the new nuclear plants are smaller, cheaper, safer and easier to maintain than the ones built in the '60s and '70s.
Still, the core issues that have blocked new nuclear plants in the past remain.
"How to dispose of spent fuel remains a very large obstacle to new plants," she said. The problem is the fuel stays radioactive indefinitely, and there is no central place yet for it to be stored. So most is on the grounds of the plants.
Industry officials consider a federal plan to store it inside Yucca Mountain in Nevada technically sound, but opposition from people who live there so far have blocked the idea.
---------------------------
State of Nevada
Agency for Nuclear Projects
www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/
nwpo@nuc.state.nv.us
775-687-3744
---------------------------