Yucca Mountain News Clips
Saturday, May 13, 2006
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New York Times
May 13, 2006

Editorial

The Greening of Nuclear Power

Not so many years ago, nuclear energy was a hobgoblin to environmentalists, who feared the potential for catastrophic accidents and long-term radiation contamination. But this is a new era, dominated by fears of tight energy supplies and global warming. Suddenly nuclear power is looking better.

The nuclear industry recently trotted out two new leaders of its campaign to encourage the building of new reactors. They are Christie Whitman, the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace. This campaign is the latest sign that nuclear power is getting a more welcome reception from some environmentalists who have moved on to bigger worries.

True, most environmental organizations remain adamantly opposed to any expansion of nuclear power and instead look to conservation and renewable energy to get us out of the fossil fuel age. But when the ecologist James Lovelock — creator of the Gaia hypothesis, which holds that Earth and all its organisms behave as if they were a single living system — urges his colleagues to drop their "wrongheaded opposition" to nuclear energy, it is clear that fissures are developing.

There is good reason to give nuclear power a fresh look. It can diversify our sources of energy with a fuel — uranium — that is both abundant and inexpensive. More important, nuclear energy can replace fossil-fuel power plants for generating electricity, reducing the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute heavily to global warming. That could be important in large developing economies like China's and India's, which would otherwise rely heavily on burning large quantities of dirty coal and oil.

But nuclear power should not be given a free pass in our frantic quest for energy and environmental security. Making any real dent in carbon emissions could require building many hundreds or even thousands of new nuclear plants around the world in coming decades, a hugely ambitious undertaking fraught with challenges.

As nuclear expertise and technologies spread around the world, so does the risk that they might be used to make bombs. Unfortunately, the Bush administration erred badly when it signed a nuclear pact with India that would undercut the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the cornerstone of international efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. That misguided deal needs to be repudiated by the Senate. We can only hope that it does not undercut a more promising administration plan to keep the most dangerous fuel-making technologies out of circulation by supplying developing nations with uranium and taking the spent fuel rods back.

There remains the unsolved problem of what to do with the radioactive waste generated by nuclear plants. Many people are unwilling to see a resurgence in nuclear power without some assurance that the spent fuel can be handled safely. The Energy Department's repeated setbacks in efforts to open an underground waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada do not inspire confidence, but there is no reason why the spent fuel rods can't be stored safely at surface sites for the next 50 to 100 years.

More problematic is the administration's long-term solution for waste disposal. It wants to recycle the spent fuel in a new generation of advanced reactors that would use technologies that don't yet exist, following a timetable that many experts think unrealistic. Its current approach is apt to be costly and would leave dangerous plutonium more accessible to terrorists.

Nuclear power has a good safety record in this country, and its costs, despite the high initial expense of building the plants, are looking more reasonable now that fossil fuel prices are soaring. How much impact it could really have in slowing carbon emissions has yet to be spelled out, but there is no doubt that nuclear power could serve as a useful bridge to even greener sources of energy.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
May 12, 2006

Yucca funding advances

House panel OKs request but slashes nuclear waste reprocessing plan

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- A House panel taking the first step in setting 2007 spending for the Energy Department granted President Bush's budget request for Yucca Mountain on Thursday but cut back on the president's plan for nuclear waste reprocessing.

The action by the energy and water subcommittee was the first test of congressional sentiment for the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, or GNEP.

The Bush administration has proposed to develop advanced technology to "recycle" spent nuclear fuel to draw more energy from it and to fit more waste into the Yucca repository that it plans to build in Southern Nevada.

But Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, the subcommittee chairman, said he was not convinced that Congress should move aggressively to put money behind GNEP, which could cost at least $4 billion over the next decade for initial studies and test plants.

"I have serious policy, technical and financial reservations about the GNEP proposal," Hobson said.

"I think we are jumping too fast into this program," he said. "We are putting all our eggs in one basket. I am concerned about that."

The bill written by Hobson and approved by the subcommittee would grant $150 million for initial GNEP spending in 2007. Bush had requested $250 million.

"I don't want to just kill the program because I think there are some technology things in there we ought to take a look at," Hobson said.

The subcommittee's action is the first step in an appropriations process that will wind through the summer and into the fall. The House is expected to take further votes on GNEP, while the Senate will write a corresponding bill. A final bill will be negotiated later this year.

On Yucca Mountain, the House panel appropriated $544.5 million, the amount requested by the Bush administration to continue forming a repository license application, pursue construction of a rail line across rural Nevada and make repairs at the study site 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The subcommittee added $30 million to be spent if Congress agrees to authorize the storage of nuclear waste at temporary sites while project work continues at Yucca Mountain.

Hobson is a proponent of interim storage. He said it would allow the Energy Department to avoid $500 million a year in accumulating legal and liability costs and take possession of waste now being kept at power plants.

"I'm trying to move this country forward on nuclear energy, and I don't think we can do it without having interim above-ground nuclear storage facilities," Hobson said.

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., a Yucca Mountain opponent, criticized the panel's support for the repository. Its budget customarily is reduced in the Senate.

"Chairman Hobson can call for more spending on Yucca Mountain until he is blue in the face, but I predict that at the end of the day, funding for this project will be slashed once again," Berkley said.

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Living on the Earth
May 12, 2006

Nuclear Renaissance

GELLERMAN: From the Jennifer and Ted Stanley Studios in Somerville, Massachusetts, this is Living on Earth. I'm Bruce Gellerman, sitting in for Steve Curwood. Coming up, a founder of Greenpeace sees the light – and it's powered by nuclear energy.

But first: There are 103 nuclear plants operating in the United States. And they generate about 20 percent of the nation's electricity. There were plans for a lot more nuclear plants. Then in 1979 the meltdown of a reactor at Three Mile Island put the kibosh on the industry. But now, like a phoenix, nuclear power is rising out of the ashes. Concerns over the burning of fossil fuels and global warming and the rising price of energy are setting the stage for a nuclear power renascence.

Mary O'Driscoll, a senior reporter for Environment and Energy Daily says the industry has big plans.

O'DRISCOLL: Oh boy, they do. (laughs) They do. The goal is to make nuclear the premier source of power generation, but it's a very difficult, very politically difficult, very expensive process to get that done.

GELLERMAN: There hasn't been a nuclear power plant built in the United States in nearly 30 years. Despite past difficulties, utilities are taking steps to build no less than 16 new nuclear power plants over the next decade. Mary Olsen, with the Nuclear Information and Research Service, says three-quarters of the plants will be located in the south.

OLSEN: And, indeed, the southeast is the nuclear heartland of the United States because of the number not only of reactors, but fuel factories, nuclear bomb factories, and all the supporting facilities. And this is already a disproportionate impact on low-income and minority communities in the United States.

GELLERMAN: But recent public opinion polls suggest 56 percent of Americans now favor nuclear power. And many people who once said "not in our backyard" now say, "put it in the front." So, when Duke Power just announced plans to build two new reactors in South Carolina, Jim Cooke, head of the Cherokee County Chamber of Commerce, set out the welcome mat.

COOKE: It is huge news. We were just keeping our fingers crossed. We didn't want to say, 'we knew they were looking at several different sites.'

GELLERMAN: Duke chose Cherokee County, population 54,000. The textile mills and peach industries are long gone. Unemployment hovers near eight percent and Jim Cooke says just building the new reactors would put a thousand people to work.

COOKE: The number of jobs that they bring in during construction, and those types of folks coming in, will bring a lot of money in. And tax-wise it'll be a windfall for our county. I don't even think we realize the economic impact that it's going to have here yet.

GELLERMAN: To sweeten the deal, Cherokee County is cutting Duke Power's property taxes on the proposed 2,000-acre site in half. The company already runs a natural gas-powered plant nearby and seven nuclear reactors around the state.

COOKE: Duke power has been a great corporate citizen here. They're a good company and they're not just gonna come in here and go away.

GELLERMAN: Actually, once Duke did come to the county with plans to build a nuclear plant. And it did go away.

COOKE: We got our hopes up earlier, back in the – whoo, wow, I was in the service – probably the 80's. They were gonna build here on this exact site. Matter of fact, there's an old reactor that they had started and then, for different political and economic reasons, you know, boom, Duke Power pulled out of it. And they sold it to this fella in North Carolina, and he ran a film company and actually made a few films down there...if you recall the film "The Abyss."

[SOUNDS OF A HELLICOPTER]

MAN: That there is a bottomless pit, baby. Two and a half miles straight down.

GELLERMAN: The filmmaker of "The Abyss" flooded the unfinished reactor containment vessel and used it for the underwater scenes. Ironically, the movie deals with recovering a sunken nuclear submarine.

MAN: Whatever happens, it's up to us.

MAN 2: That guy scares me more than anything that's down there.

GELLERMAN: The site is now a rusting shambles. The cost to build and abandon the reactor: $600 million. But Duke spokesman Tim Petite says times and attitudes have changed and the old Cherokee site is the perfect place to build a nuclear power plant.

PETITE: Well, right now we're estimating that'll be somewhere between four and six billion dollars, the initial investment in these.

GELLERMAN: Lot of money.

PETITE: It is a lot of money. These are, you know, very large capital investments just like any large generating station is. But again, as you look at the life of that plant, the fuel costs associated with nuclear is much less than the other generation, and so it pays benefits to the company, the shareholders and the customers over the long-term.

GELLERMAN: To jumpstart the nation's stagnate nuclear industry, the federal government is providing $13 billion in incentives and subsidies. If there is an accident the utilities liability is largely covered. The licensing process has also been streamlined, and taxpayers will pay half the $47 million application fee. Anti-nuclear activist Mary Olsen says the money is just a down payment on the trillions of dollars nuclear power will eventually cost.

OLSEN: Nuclear power is not cost-effective or competitive. The only way to build new reactors is put tax dollars into it. What if we put trillions of dollars into wind, efficiency and solar? Couldn't we do it faster? I bet we could.

GELLERMAN: One issue is slowing down the renaissance in nuclear power is radioactive waste. Right now there are 50,000 tons of spent fuel rods at power plants around the nation. The controversial federal repository that was supposed to store reactor waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada is billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.

To speed things up, the Bush administration has proposed streamlining the licensing process and lifting the cap on the amount of radioactive waste that can be buried at Yucca. Still, energy reporter Mary O'Driscoll says waste remains the industry's Achilles heel.

O'DRISCOLL: They are paying to store nuclear waste on spent fuel onsite which does not make them happy, doesn't make their shareholders happy, doesn't make their rate payers happy. A lot of members of Congress aren't happy. And so it's a very difficult situation to resolve, and the feeling is that until you resolve, finally, the Yucca Mountain situation and get it operating and make sure it's operating, that the future of nuclear power in the United States is really going to be questionable.

PETITE: Well, certainly that's something we're taking a look at. We'll follow that very closely.

GELLERMAN: Again, Tim Petite from Duke Power.

PETITE: We want to see a lot of progress made on that front. And before we decide to go forward with building additional nuclear plants we'll certainly be evaluating the storage of the fuel before that decision is made.

GELLERMAN: Petite says that decision could be made in a year...maybe two.

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NEI
May 11, 2006

Continuing The Myths and Facts Debate

A letter to the editor in this morning's edition of the San Jose Mercury News taking issue with my op-ed that appeared in the paper earlier this week:

Nowhere in Eric McErlain's entire opinion piece was any mention of the most troublesome aspect of nuclear power: what to do with the toxic waste (Op-ed, May 8). Preoccupied with global warming and other potential threats, we have lost sight of the real radioactive material seeping into the groundwater in Hanford, Wash., and the inconclusive debate about Nevada as a nuclear dump.

Certainly the costs of fossil fuels are great. But we cannot conduct an intelligent debate about energy sources until we include the poisonous waste products from nuclear power plants, which must be secured and contained for hundreds of years.

I have a couple of points before we get to the heart of Ms. Erickson's question.

I hope Ms. Erickson knows that I didn't deliberately ignore the issue of nuclear waste, what we think is more properly termed "used nuclear fuel". Though the Mercury-News was kind enough to accept my piece, it did come with a 650-word limit, meaning that there were only so many questions we could address.

Second, it's patently unfair and deceptive to include Yucca Mountain and Hanford in the same sentence. The waste left over at Hanford was not produced by commercial nuclear reactor operations, but is rather is the result of nuclear weapons production.

The used nuclear fuel that the industry believes could be safely stored at a deep geologic repository at Yucca Mountain is first stored in a used fuel pool for cooling, and then removed and placed in dry cask storage -- a process completely unrelated with what's happening at Hanford. For more on used nuclear fuel and dry cask storage, click here.

Finally, I think it's important to address this section of Ms. Erickson's letter directly:

Certainly the costs of fossil fuels are great. But we cannot conduct an intelligent debate about energy sources until we include the poisonous waste products from nuclear power plants, which must be secured and contained for hundreds of years.

Indeed, this is correct, used nuclear fuel currently does need to be "secured and contained". However, it's important to point out that unlike fossil plants that burn coal and natural gas, nuclear power plants must account for 100 percent of their waste products.

Meanwhile, coal and natural gas plants are free to emit NOx, SOx and Carbon without having to account for the cost to our environment. By foreclosing the possibility of new nuclear build, Ms. Erickson would force California and other states to rely more heavily on gas and coal-fired electric generation (for a look at the pipeline of power plant construction in California, click here). For more on an EU study on the external costs of energy, including a shocking statistic on the external costs of fossil fuels, click here.

Now to the heart of Ms. Erickson's question, Yucca Mountain. I'd suggest reading a speech our CEO Skip Bowman gave at MIT earlier this year that specifically addresses the concerns about used nuclear fuel:

The final concern I want to address—the real elephant in the room—what about used fuel? What are our plans and policies?

People who are opposed to nuclear energy say that “we don´t know what we´re going to do with the high-level radioactive waste.’

In truth, we do know what we´re going to do with it.

We´re going to follow the course recommended for decades by independent scientific organizations around the world, including our own National Academy of Sciences.

We´re going to isolate this material deep underground in stable geological formations, in a dry environment, remote from people.

We have just such a place, at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

In 2002, a presidential finding and bipartisan affirmation by both houses of Congress determined that the Yucca Mountain site was suitable for long-term isolation of used nuclear fuel. Those steps cleared the way for the Department of Energy to start developing the application necessary to obtain an NRC license to build and operate the facility.

The determination in 2002 that Yucca Mountain was a suitable site was based on 20 years and $6 billion of scientific investigation.

The technical and scientific work included excavation of an underground laboratory at Yucca Mountain to evaluate how the geologic formation responds to certain operating conditions.

Nothing has emerged so far during the scientific investigation that would disqualify the Yucca Mountain site in any way.

In my discussions with people about used nuclear fuel management, I find many who believe that the Department of Energy is simply going to bury the used nuclear fuel at Yucca Mountain and walk away, trusting in the site´s natural geological characteristics and the engineered safety features of the containers to contain the waste by-products.

That´s not the plan, and it never has been the plan.

This facility will remain open and closely monitored for 100 to 300 years. The law requires an unspecified period of retrievability. NRC regulations require an ongoing confirmatory R&D program to verify the original assumptions based on new data and scientific development. And the Department of Energy´s Final Environmental Impact Statement describes this plan.

This period of monitoring, retrievability and confirmatory R&D should create confidence among the citizens of Nevada, and among all our nation´s citizens, that the repository is performing as designed, that public safety is assured and that the environment is protected. If there ever is a problem, the waste packages can be removed, and the problem corrected.

Extended monitoring and the ability to retrieve the casks also will allow us to recover the energy content in the fuel if it becomes cost-effective to do so, or if we choose to reprocess used fuel in order to reduce the volume and toxicity of the waste.

In the end, we believe the difficulties with Yucca Mountain are purely political, and have nothing to do with science. For more, I'd suggest that anyone who is interested should keep an eye on a hearing on Yucca Mountain scheduled for May 16 by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

UPDATE: My colleague, Lisa Stiles-Shell, who actually wrote her Masters thesis at M.I.T. on the fuel at Hanford, offers the following:

Commercial power reactor fuel and Hanford spent fuel are completely different in design, function, and condition. Because of these differences (cladding, fuel form, storage conditions) Hanford fuel is much more challenging to stabilize than commercial fuel.

And finally, for the statement that NEI made on the Nuclear Fuel Management and Disposal Act back on April 5, which NEI described as a "very positive step," click here.

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The State
May 12, 2006

Simpson: INL not threatened by cuts to nuclear reprocessing plan

Christopher Smith
Associated Press

BOISE, Idaho - The Idaho National Laboratory won't be hurt by planned cuts to President Bush's proposal to build new plants to reprocess spent nuclear fuel from commercial power reactors, Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, said Friday.

Simpson and other members of a House panel that holds the pursestrings to the Department of Energy's budget voted Thursday to cut the Bush administration's request of $250 million for the program by nearly $100 million.

The measure now goes to the House floor for a vote and will be reconciled with a Senate version of the fiscal 2007 spending plan, but it's not likely that lawmakers will restore the money. As the national laboratory for nuclear energy, INL is the lead federal research site for developing nuclear fuel recycling technologies.

Simpson said while members of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development support nuclear fuel reprocessing, they were concerned over a lack of details in the DOE plan and the agency's proposal to pay for it by cutting environmental cleanup at federal nuclear sites.

"When you throw in a $250 million new program, the money has to come out of somewhere else and there was a lot being taken out of cleanup, which we put back in," Simpson said Friday in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C. "I've heard they may be requesting upwards of $800 million next year for this and I want to know if that's additional new money or if it will come at the expense of other programs. We cannot afford to forego clean up at Idaho, Hanford (in Washington state) or Savannah River (in South Carolina)."

Simpson said congressional budget writers still favor INL as the lead research site for nuclear energy programs, as evidenced by the committee's vote Thursday to recommend $20 million for the construction of four new facilities at the Idaho site, along with $8 million to support ongoing upgrades to the Advanced Test Reactor, $9 million for consolidation of the plutonium "space battery" program at INL and a boost of $32 million to the Idaho Cleanup Project, which is working to remove radioactive waste from above the Snake River aquifer.

The $20 million appropriation for two new labs, a warehouse and engineering building would mean some researchers will no longer have to work inside a converted supermarket near the Idaho Falls headquarters of the site, Simpson said.

"If we are going to have the leading nuclear energy lab in the world, you can't expect the best scientists to come there and operate out of an old grocery store window," Simpson said. "We are moving toward making this a world-class research facility."

Last month, Assistant Secretary of Interior Dennis Spurgeon visited INL and said the eastern Idaho site would be "my right arm" in developing technology for recycling radioactive material from commercial reactors into new fuel rods and creating nuclear waste that decays to safe levels of radioactivity at a faster rate.

But the chairman of the energy appropriations subcommittee, Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, said he has "serious policy, technical and financial reservations" about the so-called Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) proposed by the Bush administration.

Nuclear fuel reprocessing was abandoned by the U.S. under a 1977 presidential directive out of concern it would proliferate nuclear weapons. But it has gained renewed interest as a way to reduce the amount of nuclear dump space needed for high-level waste at the planned Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada.

Critics of reprocessing say the technology has never delivered on the promises of smaller volumes of shorter-lived radioactive waste nor diminished the risk of weapons-grade nuclear materials being created from civilian sources.

"This pork barrel is packed with funny numbers and phony technical promises, making the political footing a bit slippery," the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C., said in a statement.

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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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