Yucca Mountain News Clips
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
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Senator John Ensign
May 16, 2006
Ensign: Domenici Remarks Cast Further Doubt on Yucca Project
Washington, D.C. – Senator John Ensign released the following statement today in reaction to comments by Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Pete Domenici (R-NM) that new recycling technology should be pursued because of Yucca Mountain´s problems and delays.
“Delays, questionable science, fraud and mismanagement have brought the misguided Yucca Mountain project to the point that its most enthusiastic supporters are beginning to doubt it will ever become reality,’ Ensign said. “When the Chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee starts talking openly about recycling technology, it´s a day for Yucca opponents to celebrate. I´m encouraged by the Chairman´s embrace of recycling technology and look forward to working with him on it.’
Following a committee oversight hearing on Yucca Mountain, Senator Domenici said that delays in the Yucca Mountain project should be used to explore new recycling technologies.
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Platts
May 16, 2006
US won't use Yucca Mountain to store unrecycled waste: Domenici
Washington (Platts)--16May2006
The United States will not store unrecycled spent nuclear fuel at the proposed Yucca Mountain, Nevada, repository and must instead work to develop recycling and interim storage plans, Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Pete Domenici said Tuesday.
Speaking at a hearing on Yucca Mountain legislation, the New Mexico Republican said it would be difficult to craft a bill addressing problems that will take so long to solve. But he said reprocessing and interim storage programs will have to be in place before the Nevada repository is opened, and estimated that it could take the country 25 years to develop the programs. The senator said a short-term solution is to leave the waste at reactor sites, where it is currently stored.
"We are not going to be putting the spent fuel rods in Yucca Mountain to me it is quite obvious," Domenici said. "We are kind of kidding ourselves but we don't want to give up" on building the repository.
Domenici, who is developing his own legislation after introducing earlier this year an administration proposal at the White House's request, said Nevada will likely not object to Yucca Mountain after the waste has been recycled. He said the administration's bill falls short because it doesn't present a complete solution to the nuclear waste problem.
"Confusion is rampant, time frames are all out of whack and the administration's bill has a big vacuum in it because it does not address interim storage," Domenici said. He added that the licensing process envisioned by the Department of Energy in the administration bill "may not be relevant" because of the different characteristics of waste that would be stored there once waste is recycled.
---Dan Whitten, daniel_whitten@platts.com
For similar news, take a trial to Platts Inside Energy at http://insideenergy.platts.com.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
May 17, 2006
Senators snap over mixed messages on Yucca project
By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- There are remaining technical questions about the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, but the Department of Energy is making progress on them, a science expert said.
No way, insisted an official for the state of Nevada. DOE "is bogged down in a morass of technical, legal and managerial problems, and it is unrealistic to imagine the project can pull itself out."
Meanwhile, an Energy Department executive said more time is needed for a project redesign. But at the same time, DOE is setting up a task force to study the need for a second repository since the first one is projected to be full almost as soon as it might open.
The widely divergent messages aired at a congressional hearing on Tuesday finally caused several senators to snap in frustration and issue some of the sharpest criticism to date over delays at Yucca Mountain. One senator said he will step up efforts to reshape the repository program to reflect a new emphasis on waste reprocessing.
"Confusion is rampant; time frames are all out of whack," said Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Domenici said he called the hearing to assess progress "or lack of progress" at the Nevada site.
Many lawmakers thought Yucca Mountain was settled when Congress voted for the site in 2002. "Except we now find this is not the case at all," Domenici said, as the Energy Department has faced legal and quality assurance setbacks and undertook a redesign last fall.
"I'm not here to pour water on anybody's parade but at what point do we think we need to look at something else" while Yucca Mountain "spins its wheels," asked Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C.
The Energy Department has not issued a revised Yucca schedule yet, with experts saying it could be 2015 or 2020 before nuclear waste might be accepted at the site.
"In terms of why this is so hard, the simple fact is this has never been done anyplace anywhere around the world" with the safety requirements DOE must meet, said Paul Golan, acting director of DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management.
Golan said delay was partly due to DOE redirecting toward a design that would use a single canister style to ship, store and dispose of nuclear waste. Golan said the change would simplify fuel handling and make it safer.
But Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., noted DOE abandoned a similar multipurpose canister a decade ago. And Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., a repository advocate, charged DOE "has dragged its feet from the beginning."
"Congress has an obligation to get the job done and we don't need bureaucrats to get in the way constantly," Bunning said. "Changing from one canister to another? Using that excuse to say we are going to start over? Give me a break ... and now we are talking about a second repository? Do you know how foolish that looks to the American people?"
Bunning also blamed Nevada for delays, saying DOE has taken extra time "to ensure the people of Nevada are as safe as possible. It would be more productive for all of us to work with DOE to complete this project as safely and quickly as possible."
Bob Loux, director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, rejected the advice. He said Kentucky would react the same as Nevada in fighting what it considers an unsafe endeavor. "Flogging Nevada certainly isn't the answer," Loux said afterward.
Loux contended Yucca Mountain was found to be flawed around 1995 but the government moved forward anyway while covering up problems.
"DOE decided to compensate for the bad site with better packaging," Loux said.
The Bush administration has asked Congress to pass a bill that would speed repository licensing and groundwork in Nevada.
But Domenici said that approach is outdated. He said he will reshape the bill to reflect the Department of Energy's new push into nuclear waste reprocessing, which could alter the form and reduce the radiotoxicity of the waste shipped into the mountain if development is successful.
"It is going to be clear we will not be putting spent fuel rods into Yucca Mountain," Domenici said.
Domenici said the bill also contained a "big vacuum" in that it does not allow waste to be removed from power plants and stored at temporary locations while work continues in Nevada. Golan said DOE is open to the idea of temporary storage if Congress authorizes interim sites.
The Energy Department got an endorsement from John Garrick, chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, a panel of independent science experts.
The board "believes that the DOE has made meaningful progress over the last year," Garrick testified. Although the group has questioned DOE's grasp of certain geology and corrosion matters, "The board believes that the technical work is doable."
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National Journal
May 17, 2006
Yucca Plan Hits Another Snag, Domenici Sees Long Delay
By Darren Goode
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Domenici said Tuesday that Congress might need to restructure the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository project because there is no plan to recycle a growing number of spent fuel rods that would otherwise be stored there.
Such a move would mean further delay for a project that is already behind schedule, even as Congress and the Bush administration are starting to think about the need for a second waste-storage site.
"I think I'm telling you that everything is delayed for a long time," Domenici said. "Confusion is rampant. Timelines are all out of whack."
Following his committee's hearing on the status of the stalled project, Domenici said it has "become quite clear we're not going to be putting the spent fuel rods in Yucca Mountain. I think we're going to have to put recycling in the legislative process that involves Yucca Mountain."
Domenici does not want to put spent nuclear fuel rods at the Nevada site because only about 5 percent of their energy has been used when they come out of a reactor. "Recycling is ultimately responsible for what kind of repository we need," Domenici said. "It will certainly be a different Yucca Mountain than we have been talking about."
This could mean trying to combine the Bush administration's new Global Nuclear Energy Partnership program, which aims to expand global nuclear energy production and the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, and the Yucca project, Domenici said. He said there is time to do this without further delaying the Yucca project because it is already moving slowly.
Congress approved Yucca Mountain as the site of the repository in 2002 but the Energy Department has not yet applied for an operating license. Department officials say they will announce a schedule this summer for submitting that application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The Energy Department last month sent Congress a long-awaited plan to modify and expedite completion of the repository, including lifting the current statutory limit on the amount of waste that could be stored there, expediting federal licensing and environmental reviews and withdrawing land around the site from public use.
While Domenici is a big supporter of the global partnership, it has been criticized by Democrats and other Republicans as too far reaching and expensive. Critics also say it might offset nuclear nonproliferation efforts.
The House Appropriations Committee today is marking up a FY07 Energy and Water spending bill that undercuts the administration's $250 million initial request for the global partnership by $96 million. Still. Domenici pledged to "fully fund it and ... see if I can look around and find more money."
While recycling spent nuclear fuel would ideally reduce the amount of waste needed to be stored at Yucca, there is growing interest in establishing a second national repository, even as the Yucca project remains stalled.
The Energy Department estimates more than 100.000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel will be generated by existing reactors and is advocating that the 70.000 metric ton cap at Yucca be loosened.
Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., calculated that the United States will reach that limit by 2010. "What's next?" Burr asked at the hearing. "At what point do we collectively ... look at this and say we've got to think about something else."
Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., blamed both the Energy Department and EPA for dragging their feet. "We're to the limit of what we can even put in," Bunning said. "And now you're talking about a second repository? Do you know how foolish that looks to the American public?"
Paul Golan, acting director of the Energy Department's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste, told reporters after the hearing that he assembled a task force Monday to make an initial report in July about selecting a second site.
Waste is stored at more than 120 temporary locations in 39 states. The House FY07 Energy and Water spending bill includes $30 million for interim storage on top of the $544.5 million the Bush administration has requested for the Yucca project next year.
Golan told the Energy and Natural Resources Committee Tuesday that "the department continues to have an open mind on interim storage."
But he also said the administration lacks the authorization to proceed with an interim storage plan.
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E&E Daily
May 17, 2006
NUCLEAR POWER: Domenici delivers new message on future of Yucca Mountain
Mary O'Driscoll
E&E Daily senior reporter
This story builds on a version that first appeared in yesterday's E&ENews PM.
The chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee dropped the equivalent of a bomb on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository yesterday when he said the site will never receive spent nuclear fuel rods.
Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) said lengthy project delays at the Nevada site will require fitting the repository into the Bush administration's ambitious Global Nuclear Energy Partnership waste reprocessing and recycling program. Domenici told reporters nuclear utilities likely will have to store their used fuel on-site "for quite some time" before either some interim storage plan begins or GNEP recycling plants are operating.
The time frame, he said, "might be longer" than what the utilities had intended for using on-site used fuel storage facilities.
On the issue of GNEP, which House energy appropriators last week cut by $100 million from the proposed $250 million fiscal year 2007 budget, Domenici said he intends to "fully fund" and possibly add more money for the controversial program.
"I want to see if I can look around" for more GNEP funding, said Domenici, who also chairs the Senate Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee.
The outcome of the GNEP program over the next 24 months, he added, "is going to determine what kind of an ultimate repository we need."
Clearly, he added, "we are not going to be putting spent fuel rods in Yucca Mountain. To me, that quite obviously won't work."
That talk immediately raised speculation that he could be opening the door to funding GNEP with the nuclear waste trust fund, the multibillion-dollar pot of money created by assessments on ratepayers of nuclear utilities for building the Yucca Mountain repository.
But he acknowledged that would require work to change the law regarding interim storage of nuclear waste. Though DOE offered legislation last month to jump-start the Yucca Mountain process, it omitted any mention of interim storage. Domenici called that "a big vacuum" in the bill.
Reid: No victory
Domenici is an enthusiastic backer of both GNEP and Yucca Mountain and frequently spars with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, over the levels of funding for the repository. But he said extensive delays at Yucca Mountain are forcing a reassessment. Originally set to open in 1998, Congress gave final approval for the site in 2002, and Nevada will be challenging every aspect of the program from here on out.
Congress and DOE, Domenici said, "must reconcile Yucca Mountain and GNEP [and] take advantage of the unavoidable delays to pursue the new recycling technology that will increase capacity at Yucca Mountain." The recycled waste, which would be stored at Yucca Mountain, has less volume and radioactivity and therefore more of it can be stored in the underground caverns.
Reid welcomed Domenici's remarks, saying in an interview yesterday that of anyone, Domenici "understands how much things cost, and he's a realist."
But Reid would not claim victory on Yucca Mountain just yet.
"In Yucca Mountain, there are no victories," he said. "I'm happy this is happening, but we will keep on fighting. We will keep our guard up and see what happens."
Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) called Domenici "ahead of a lot of senators. He's been going in that direction for some time.
"This is a very important person to be saying these things," Ensign said.
When asked about Domenici's comments, Paul Golan, acting director of DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, noted that DOE will spend $2 billion to $3 billion through 2010 in payments to utilities that successfully sued the department for its failure to take the waste as it had promised in 1998. He said the department would continue to work on the Yucca program but also would talk to Domenici and other lawmakers on issues such as interim storage.
Redesign questions
DOE this summer will release new redesigns of the repository and the multiple-use casks into which the waste would be placed for transport and storage. Also expected is a new schedule for filing its license application for the repository, but DOE is not expected to file with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission before 2008.
But Bob Loux, director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Waste Projects, testified at yesterday's hearing that a recent statement by DOE officials at a meeting of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board revealed the department will not have a final design ready for its casks for another six years.
That, Loux said, means that DOE should not be filing its license application until it gets the final cask design. That could put off the license application to 2012, which in turn could further put off the opening date for the repository.
"It's inconceivable that they could submit a license application before then," he told reporters after the hearing, signaling it is one key area that Nevada could use in its legal fight against the repository.
Golan countered that was "one person's opinion, not my opinion," and added that the department could file its application beforehand and amend it when the cask design is complete.
Lawmakers blame Nevada
Loux felt the wrath of lawmakers who complained about Nevada's continuous fight against the repository. Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) and Larry Craig (R-Idaho) took turns bashing Nevada for not working with DOE to improve the project, a stance that Loux did not deny -- and indeed emphasized when he said the state would challenge DOE's fitness to file the license application.
"We're not doing anything your state wouldn't do," Loux told Bunning after the senator accused state officials of causing the delays through legal and regulatory challenges to the program.
"Unfortunately, you're wrong," Bunning replied, adding that when Kentucky was approached to host Energy Department programs, it "didn't resist" and now is home of one Superfund site for which the state will be responsible forever.
Craig, whose home state of Idaho now houses much of the defense-related wastes that would head to Yucca Mountain once it opens, hit Loux for calling DOE an "out of control agency," calling it "bad rhetoric." DOE and NRC "are probably the most controlled agencies we have," he added.
He also blamed Nevada and its congressional delegation for delays at the site, and for working to keep Yucca Mountain from opening. "We will work around you," Craig said, calling the repository the "safest [repository] ever designed by man."
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KLAS-TV
May 16, 2006
Temporary Storage For Nation's Nuclear Waste Debated
Nevada is getting criticism on it's fight against Yucca Mountain's nuclear waste repository.
There are so many legal challenges to the project that the underground storage of nuclear waste won't happen until at least 2010, and some senators say that is because Nevada does not have the best interests of the country in mind.
The Bush Administration says it is willing to store nuclear power plant waste somewhere other than Yucca Mountain temporarily but needs congressional approval to do so.
An official from the Department of Energy told a senate panel Tuesday that $30 million has been included in a House appropriations bill for examining temporary storage of some of the waste pending the completion of the Nevada facility.
The DoE it expects to have a timetable for its license application for the nuclear waste repository sometime this summer and says it will take whatever steps necessary to ensure that the application is based on sound science.
Also present at the hearing, were senators in support of Yucca Mountain who expressed frustration over how long it's taking to resolve the issues with the project.
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Pahrump Valley Times
May 17, 2006
Commission approves fix for roadway flooding
By Phillip Gomez
PVT
Dahlia Street behind Wal-Mart is at long last going to get the standing rainwater drained from the pavement.
The road project, approved Monday by the Nye County Board of Commissioners, is scheduled to go to bid, with work to start in four to six weeks.
The goal is to eliminate the flooding problem on Dahlia in a second phase of the project initiated in August of last year. The total cost is $168,400.
About 33 percent of the project's cost is slated to come from PETT funds. PETT is the Payments Equal to Taxes that Nye County derives from the federal Department of Energy for hosting the proposed Yucca Mountain repository on county land.
Phase I of the project saw the paving of West Street and Yellowhand Avenue in September 2005. In Phase II, the road grade in the vicinity of China Wok Buffet is slated to be raised by 3 or 4 percent along 510 feet of roadway, in order to allow the water to drain, according to Pahrump Road Supervisor Dave Fanning.
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Las Vegas SUN
May 17, 2006
Hecht upset will live forever in state lore
By Ed Koch
<koch@lasvegassun.com>
Las Vegas Sun
On the night in November 1982 that he pulled off what some analysts consider the biggest upset in Nevada political history, U.S. Senator-elect Chic Hecht turned to his longtime friend and campaign strategist Art Marshall.
"I didn't win," Marshall recalls Hecht saying, "Howard Cannon lost."
Marshall, now a member of the Nevada Gaming Commission, remembered his friend Tuesday, the day after Hecht died from complications of prostate cancer at age 77: "Chic Hecht understood. He was pretty astute - a smart guy, but never a grandstander."
While such a victory might have catapulted the longtime downtown clothier and former state senator to a long career on Capitol Hill, he was handily defeated six years later when Democrats fielded a strong candidate and made political hay from one national publication labeling Republican Hecht among the least effective members of Congress.
Still, his remarkable defeat of Cannon, then the Senate's seventh ranking member, will long live in Nevada election lore.
"Chic's victory was the most significant upset I ever witnessed," longtime local political analyst Sig Rogich said Tuesday. "But the timing was perfect for Chic to win. The stars lined up for him in that election."
Cannon carried the double burden of championing an unpopular cause - the return of the Panama Canal to Panama - and voter distrust: His name had come up in connection with a Teamsters scandal. Despite those and other factors, Hecht's victory was stunning.
"It turns out that Hecht's greatest accomplishment is the fact that he got elected," Nevada historian and political analyst Michael Green said. "And to do so, he ran a brilliant campaign."
Hecht surrounded himself with an all-star lineup of political movers and shakers, either working on his campaign or advising him.
In addition to Marshall, they included: former Ronald Reagan adviser Jude Wanniski, who coined the term "supply-side economics"; former presidential aide Lyn Nofziger; longtime Las Vegas Mayor Oran Gragson; noted California political ad man Ken Rietz; and former Nevada Lt. Gov. Ed Fike. Ex-Gaming Control Board member Glen Mauldin became Hecht's state campaign chief.
Hecht also garnered strong support from Republican U.S. Sen. Paul Laxalt of Nevada. And President Reagan made two trips to the state, which analysts at the time credited as a key to victory.
Hecht had intentionally entered what would be a five-man GOP primary just before the filing deadline, keeping a low profile until the final three weeks, when he spent $400,000 on a late media blitz to win the Republican nomination.
He eschewed campaign buttons, signs and billboards, raising money through a relentless telephone campaign. He used the proceeds to fund effective radio, TV and newspaper ads, and direct mailers, spending $505,000 more in the general election.
He also avoided speech-making - he had a lisp - or interviews with reporters. He had the smallest campaign headquarters in Las Vegas for a major office seeker and didn't even open an office in Reno or Carson City. Instead, he regularly toured small Nevada counties where he believed he could get an edge over Cannon.
When the votes were tallied, Hecht had out-polled Cannon by 5,657 votes.
It would be his biggest political achievement.
Once on Capitol Hill, Hecht offered no significant legislation. And he was timid on the nuclear waste issue. "Until all the cards are on the table in regard to the proposed Yucca Mountain site, I will not join those voices of opposition and dissent," he said in 1984.
That statement came at a time when most local and state political figures, including U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and then-Gov. Richard Bryan, were trying to shut down the site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas before the first tunnel could be dug.
Rogich said that he doesn't believe the nuclear waste issue did Hecht in, but acknowledges it may have cost Hecht some votes in 1988. The reason Hecht lost the re-election bid, Rogich said, was more about who challenged him.
"Chic Hecht simply ran into a buzz saw," Rogich said. "The Democratic Party had united behind Dick Bryan."
Bryan beat Hecht by just over 14,200 votes, and served two terms before leaving the Senate.
Marshall, a Democrat, believes Hecht leaves a legacy in state politics: "He showed that in Nevada you can get elected if you are the right guy at the right time, regardless of your party."
Ed Koch can be reached at 259-4090 or at koch@lasvegassun.com.
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Deseret News
May 17, 2006
Proposals could let nuclear wastes in Utah
No decisions made as senators weigh options
By Suzanne Struglinski
Deseret Morning News
WASHINGTON — Utah could see a few forms of nuclear waste come to the state if plans discussed at a Senate hearing Tuesday move ahead.
Approval of a federal interim storage facility for commercial nuclear fuel could move fuel rods to the Private Fuel Storage site on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian reservation — and a plan to recycle nuclear waste could make additional waste eligible to be stored at EnergySolutions' facilities.
Neither idea has been approved nor given money to proceed just yet, but Congress has options to make either proposal work.
At a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing Tuesday, Paul Golan, the government's top Yucca Mountain official, said "the department continues to have an open mind on interim storage."
He said the department does not believe it has the authority under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 — the law that guides the government's plan to store nuclear waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas — to move ahead with interim storage, but if Congress allowed it, the department would be open to the discussion.
"Interim storage is less important than moving Yucca Mountain forward, but we understand that the commercial utilities are running in to a storage situation." Golan said.
Storage problems are what led several utilities to develop plans to make their own interim facility known as Private Fuel Storage in Tooele County. Yucca was supposed to open in 1998, but legal, technical and financial problems have delayed it year after year.
PFS is looking for interested utilities to help construct the site now that it has its license approved. It also still needs approval from the Bureau of Land Management to build a transfer facility for waste brought in by truck. Utah's congressional delegation blocked a potential railroad on public land by including the starting point in a Wilderness Area designed to protect the Utah Test and Training Range.
The department is supposed to release a new schedule for Yucca in the summer, Golan said. That will give utilities an estimated opening date so they will know how much longer they will have to store waste at the nuclear power plants — or look at other options.
Golan would not name a specific location on where an interim site would go.
"That's a question that I think will involve a public dialogue," Golan said.
If Congress approved interim storage, PFS would not instantly become the interim storage site. But because it has a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license to store commercial spent fuel, it could be an attractive location — even with the transportation obstacles it faces.
"As it is the only licensed facility in the nation, it creates the very real possibility that high-level waste could be sent to Utah," said Vanessa Pierce, program director at the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah.
PFS spokeswoman Sue Martin said if the federal government wanted to become a customer and move waste to the site, "we are willing." Chairman John Parkyn sent a letter to Congress earlier this year outlining that option, but the consortium has received no formal response, she said.
"We are a strong supporter of a change to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act that would allow interim storage," she said, although she was not sure what the recent discussion on interim storage means for PFS.
The House Energy and Water Development spending bill, which includes the Yucca budget, contains $30 million for an interim storage site if Congress allowed the department to create one. The bill is before the House Appropriations Committee today and then will await a floor vote.
Congress could create the interim option as part of a multipart Yucca Mountain bill created by the administration that would affect the project in a number of ways if passed.
At Tuesday's hearing, Committee Chairman Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., who introduced the Senate's version of the bill, said it does not address interim storage and said he would work to find "common ground to answer the spent fuel question."
Domenici has been a champion of interim storage in the past, even writing in a book he wrote on nuclear power in 2004 that he would revive a push for interim storage.
He said nuclear waste could stay at nuclear power plants for decades longer, because the country "will need a completely different Yucca Mountain" to store waste generated from reprocessing rather than as it is today.
"We are not going to be putting spent fuel rods in Yucca Mountain," he said.
Domenici, who is also the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee that writes the Senate's version of the energy spending bill, said he will fully fund the administration's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership and "look for more" dollars to support the reprocessing proposal, nicknamed GNEP. The administration asked for $250 million for the effort, but the House spending bill only includes $150 million for it.
"We've got to recycle," he said.
The administration has stressed that a reprocessing plan would not eliminate the need for Yucca but could change what is put in there.
But Pierce said "reprocessing only repackages nuclear waste, it doesn't eliminate nuclear waste."
She said a federal reprocessing plan could create waste that could be put in EnergySolutions' facilities, although the exact type and classification of it is still debatable.
"No one wants to be honest about what a boondoggle reprocessing is," she said.
E-mail: suzanne@desnews.com
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Waterbury Republican American
May 17, 2006
Industry ready to fuel nuclear-power rebirth, NAM head says
By Tom Henry
Former Michigan Gov. John Engler is expected to help pump a little more life into America's nuclear industry on Thursday when he delivers a pitch for more nuclear plants on behalf of the nation's manufacturing sector.
Engler, now president and chief executive officer of the Washington-based National Association of Manufacturers, is to address more than 350 executives, including those from the nation's largest utilities, in San Francisco.
The event is the annual conference of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's chief lobbyist group on Capitol Hill.
Engler is being courted for an obvious reason: To help the nuclear industry make a comeback.
The industry has been struggling to overcome the stigma of the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island Unit 2 reactor in Pennsylvania in 1979; this year's 20th anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster near Kiev, Ukraine, and the near-rupture of the Davis-Besse nuclear reactor head 30 miles east of Toledo, Ohio, in 2002.
Engler's support is the latest sign in the campaign to revive the nuclear industry.
On April 24, NEI announced the formation of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition to ramp up its message. The coalition has 50 charter member organizations, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Engler's group and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
A significant tandem will serve as co-chairs: Christine Todd Whitman, the former New Jersey governor and the first U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator under the current President Bush, and Patrick Moore, a Greenpeace co-founder who has gained attention for pursuing more nuclear power as a means of addressing global warming.
Contrary to what many people think, nuclear power didn't become stagnant because of post-Three Mile Island regulations. Even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is quick to point out that Wall Street had a bigger influence. The construction era came to a halt because projects came in millions of dollars over budget.
Such fears haven't discouraged Whitman. "Our country's significant energy needs keep growing. We must diversify our energy sources to meet these needs," she said.
Moore said nuclear power has proven itself "an environmentally sound and safe energy choice." He advocates doubling America's nuclear-energy production to curb greenhouse gases.
David Garman, a U.S. Department of Energy undersecretary, has said nuclear power is such a sensitive issue that many public utility boards won't put discussion about a new plant on their agenda because it hurts their company stock, he said.
Nuclear provides 20 percent of the nation's electricity and is second to coal, which produces half. Coal-fired power plants are the largest source of greenhouse gases.
The nuclear industry also still has to overcome its biggest hurdle: waste disposal. Nevada's Yucca Mountain has crossed many regulatory hurdles to become the federal radioactive waste disposal site, but is still years away from being developed.
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Wall Street Journal
May 17, 2006
Waste Disposal Lights Up Nuclear Debate
Spain Encounters Stiff Opposition From Environmentalists to Above-Ground Storage Plan
By Keith Johnson
Madrid
Nuclear Energy Is back in fashion around the world, thanks to high oil prices, soaring electricity demand and restrictions on emissions of greenhouse gases from traditional power generation.
But there is a lingering problem on which the debate hinges: No one knows what to do with tons of radioactive waste generated by the reactors.
Spain hopes to solve the problem by storing dangerous waste above ground, rather than deep under the earth or temporarily inside nuclear reactors. Spain and a growing number of countries studying above-ground storage facilities are encountering stiff opposition from environmental groups, who fear it will leave radioactive waste exposed to disruptions such as natural disasters or terrorism.
Other nations that are considering additional nuclear capacity face big bills or indecision. The U.S. has spent about $20 billion carving out an underground storage facility beneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Though the facility isn't operational yet, existing waste in the U.S. will already stretch it almost to capacity. France, which gets almost 80% of its electricity from nuclear reactors, spent the past 15 years studying where to put high-level waste before reaching a decision this year—to spend another 15 years studying it. In Japan, authorities favor reprocessing spent uranium fuel rods, a costly and inefficient process, partly as a way to skirt public "not in my backyard" sentiment.
Spain says its proposed above-ground storage can isolate uranium rods for more than a century. At an estimated cost of about €5 billion, or roughly $6.5 billion, in today's currency values over the first 60 years of its life, the facility offers a cheaper and more feasible alternative to longer-term storage facilities like Yucca Mountain. It could pave the way for an expansion of Spain's fleet of nuclear-power reactors, which provides about a quarter of the country's electricity.
Spain's waste effort, recently approved by the Spanish Parliament, faces tough scrutiny. Because the facility is engineered to guarantee radiation containment for a century, an upcoming generation could face the thorny question of what to do with the waste. Meanwhile, environmental groups like Greenpeace and Ecologists in Action argue that a centralized storage facility will be vulnerable and increase the risk of accidents as authorities shuttle waste cross-country on special trains.
"There is no technical solution to the waste problem. The only things being proposed are Band-Aid ideas," says Carlos Bravo, director of nuclear issues at the Spanish arm of Greenpeace, which opposes nuclear power.
James Curtiss, a former commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission who says he is watching Spain's progress, says such criticisms mark a shift in the world-wide debate from reactor safety to storage safety. "Instead of physically scaling the reactors, environmentalists have taken to assaulting waste-storage proposals," said Mr. Curtiss, now a partner with Winston & Strawn in Washington who works on licensing nuclear facilities. '
Nuclear power has been a contentious issue in Spain, where power demand has surged and a governmental commission called this month to reduce the country's demand on foreign energy supplies. Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who in his campaign pledged to phase out nuclear energy, may spell out as soon as tomorrow his government's plans for nuclear energy.
The technology needed to store high-level waste has existed for years, says Alejandro Pino, president of Empresa Nacional de Residuos Radioactivos SA, or Enresa, the public company that manages all of Spain's radioactive waste and spearheaded the new project. "But there was never the political will to do something about it until now." he says, citing high oil prices and strict emissions caps under the Kyoto treaty on greenhouse-gas emissions.
Uranium-fuel rods, which power reactors, need to be replaced every few years. Such high-level waste stays radioactive for tens of thousands of years. Currently, most spent fuel rods in the U.S and Europe are temporarily stored in pools inside reactors. In the U.S. and Finland, authorities think the best solution is to eventually seal off the waste deep underground.
Spain says its solution is cheaper and allows technicians to monitor and retrieve the waste if needed. While the facilities could serve as secure storage for more than a century, their design specifications can't guarantee it for much longer than that. The Spanish design draws on similar above-ground facilities in Switzerland and the Netherlands, as well as years of expertise gleaned from Spain's low-level waste facility near Cordoba.
Although the Bush administration is considering an above-ground temporary storage facility, the industry is still betting on deep geological storage as the eventual solution. Mr. Pino argues that insistence is a white elephant. "Surface storage buys you 100 years and leaves you money to explore other solutions," he says.
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Las Vegas SUN
May 16, 2006
Temporary nuclear waste storage may be sought due to Yucca delays
By H. Josef Hebert
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration says it is willing to store temporarily nuclear power plant waste somewhere other than the delayed Yucca Mountain project in Nevada but needs congressional approval to do so.
Paul Golan, the Energy Department official in charge of the project, said the department "continues to have an open mind about interim storage" of the thousands of tons of used reactor fuel now kept at nuclear power plants in 31 states.
Golan noted at a Senate hearing Tuesday that $30 million has been included in a House appropriations bill for examining temporary acceptance of some of the waste, pending the completion of the Nevada facility.
The nuclear industry and government officials have talked of putting some of the waste at federal facilities run by the Energy Department as part of its nuclear weapons program.
Golan, talking to reporters after he testified before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, decline to suggest an interim site, saying that's a decision "that's going to have to involve a public dialogue."
The federal government is obligated under contractual agreement with individual utilities to take the used reactor fuel. A federal storage site was to have been available by 1998.
The Yucca Mountain facility, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, won't meet a 2010 completion target and is years behind schedule. Golan declined to give a completion date or even a target of when the department will submit a license for the waste dump to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
A schedule and strategy for a license application will be made this summer, he said.
Even if the dump opened in 2010 - which had been the target up until a few years ago - the government could be liable for $2 billion to $3 billion in damages "and the liability will grow" for any additional delays, Golan said.
Several senators were sharply critical of the long delays in the Yucca facility, which was given a final go-ahead by Congress in 2002.
Utilities have paid $18 billion into a nuclear waste fund in anticipation the government would take the waste, Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., complained, "and there still isn't a canister in the ground."
Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., blamed Nevada officials - who have vigorously fought the Yucca project in court and in Congress - for the delays and directed his criticism at Robert Loux, head of the state agency that has spearheaded the fight against the waste dump.
"Flogging Nevada certainly isn't the answer," Loux later told reporters. "I believe any state would do the same thing" if asked to accept the nation's nuclear waste.
Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., the committee's chairman and among the biggest boosters of nuclear power in Congress, suggested the Yucca design may already be outdated and irrelevant in light of the administration's desire to return to reprocessing nuclear fuel.
"Confusion is rampant and the time frames are all out of whack," said Domenici.
If fuel reprocessing - or recycling, as Domenici and the administration prefer to call it - becomes reality, "we will need a completely different Yucca Mountain," he said.
If fuel is recycled, a repository no longer will have to hold complete fuel rods, including the isotopes that will remain dangerous for a million years. Instead it will be used to dispose of material that will lose its radioactivity in a few hundred years.
The administration plan for Yucca at this time assumes no design change to accommodate reprocessing, said Golan, even as he acknowledged that the proposed facility - which is being designed to hold 77,000 tons of waste - will fall short of what will be needed.
The Energy Department has begun making preliminary assessments about a second repository. Golan said there are more than 50,000 tons of used reactor fuel at power plants today and that amount will double during the lifetime of the operating reactors.
Nevada long has argued that it has no confidence the Energy Department will develop a safe and environmentally protective waste repository.
Golan said there is "a strong international scientific consensus that the best and safest option for dealing with this waste is geologic isolation" and that the volcanic ridge at Yucca Mountain is suitable for such a repository.
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Reuters
May 16, 2006
Lawmakers fret over Yucca waste dump delays
By Chris Baltimore
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A key GOP lawmaker warned on Tuesday that the opening of a nuclear waste dump in the Nevada desert that is already 10 years behind schedule may be further delayed because the U.S. government has no plans to recycle waste from 103 nuclear power plants.
Republican Pete Domenici, chairman of the Senate Energy Committee and a vocal nuclear industry proponent, complained at a hearing that "confusion is rampant. Timeframes are all out of whack."
The administration wants to store about 132,000 tons (120,000 metric tons) of nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain, an underground waste dump about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. But the project is still plagued by scientific foul-ups and political stonewalling. Congress approved Yucca Mountain as the site for the nation's radioactive waste in 2002, but the Energy Department has yet to publish a schedule for opening it.
Energy Department officials told Domenici's panel that they plan to unveil a schedule for sending a building application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission this summer.
But Domenici said the Bush administration's legislative proposal to speed up Yucca Mountain "has a big vacuum in it" because it does not address what will happen to the waste while Yucca Mountain makes its way through the many regulatory and legal steps that remain.
Spent fuel from the nation's nuclear plants -- which supply about 20 percent of U.S. electricity -- is piling up, with over 50,000 tons (45,500 metric tons) of it stored at over 120 temporary locations in 39 states.
Domenici also said he favors a legislative plan to recycle nuclear waste instead of putting fuel rods from nuclear reactors into Yucca Mountain.
"I think we're going to have to put recycling into the legislative process that involves Yucca Mountain," Domenici told reporters. "I think I'm telling you that everything is delayed a long time."
Domenici opposes storage of spent fuel rods because only about 5 percent of their available energy is spent when they are removed, his spokeswoman said.
The Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's lobbying group, said the government should meet its obligation to store the industry's waste.
Some nuclear operators have sued the Energy Department for failing to meet its obligation to begin accepting waste in 1998, and liability will be up to $3 billion through 2010 for failing to open Yucca Mountain on schedule, according to Justice Department estimates.
Paul Golan, acting director of the Energy Department's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, said the administration lacks the authority to proceed with an interim storage plan while it waits for Yucca to get built.
Meanwhile, the Energy Department has already begun a process to select a second repository as required by law, even though Yucca Mountain is far from complete. Golan said he assembled a selection team on Monday, which will make an initial report in July.
Sen. Jim Bunning, Kentucky Republican, said Yucca Mountain will be virtually full from the waste that is waiting to be shipped there.
"Give me a break - that is not even feasible," Bunning told Golan. "Now you're talking about a second repository. Do you know how foolish that looks to the American people?"
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
May 16, 2006
Hecht, former U.S. senator, dies in LV
His defeat of Howard Cannon in 1982 might be biggest political upset in Nevada history
By Ed Vogel
Review-Journal
Former U.S. Sen. Chic Hecht, a Las Vegas ladies' clothing store owner whose congenial personality propelled him to a 1982 Senate victory in perhaps the biggest political upset in Nevada history, died Monday afternoon from prostate cancer complications. He was 77.
Hecht had been hospitalized at Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center for nearly three weeks. For much of that time, his wife, Gail, and daughters Leslie and Lori were at his side.
Arrangements for a private family funeral are pending. A public memorial celebration of his life will be conducted in a few weeks.
A humble man who refused to take personally insults from political opponents, Republican Hecht served in the U.S. Senate from 1983 to 1989 and was the U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas from 1989 to 1994. He served in the state Senate from 1967 to 1975, including two years as Senate minority leader.
During his political career, he led the move that lifted the 55 mph speed limit and also worked with President Reagan to persuade the Soviet Union to lift restrictions on the emigration of Jews.
Hecht, who spoke with a lisp, exhibited none of the slickness of the powerful people who usually inhabit the halls of Congress.
"He was a humble guy, a genuine guy," said former Rep. Barbara Vucanovich, R-Nev. "People always underestimated Chic. He was very proud of his heritage, very proud of his family and very involved in raising his daughters."
Former Sen. Paul Laxalt, R-Nev., called Hecht "one of the gutsiest politicians" he ever knew.
"Regardless of how the political winds might be blowing, Chic staunchly defended his cherished ideas," Laxalt said. "His basic philosophy could be summed up in an old truism I often heard him quote: 'Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he'll eat for life.' "
"Chic was very shrewd, an extraordinarily successful businessmen who had real political insights," added former U.S. Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev., who defeated Hecht in the 1988 Senate race but remained friends with him for life. "He was a very gracious guy."
U.S. District Judge Philip Pro, whom Hecht nominated to the bench in 1986, said he was a man who lacked pretense and never uttered a negative work about anyone.
"He always had a smile," Pro said. "What you saw was what you got. He was very kind to everyone."
The Wall Street Journal once dubbed Hecht a "walking gaffe machine" for his malapropisms, such as referring to the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear repository as a "nuclear suppository" shortly after his election to the Senate in 1982.
He also infuriated U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., in 1989 when he said he would welcome an appointment to the ambassadorship of the Bahamas, noting, "I love golf and they have a lot of nice golf courses and good fishing."
But his enthusiasm and candor also led to Hecht's popularity. He once said Nevadans appreciated him because he "didn't make a lot of promises or give all the slick political answers."
No Jew in Nevada ever held as high a political office as did Hecht. His defeat of 24-year Senate veteran Howard Cannon, D-Nev., was described by state Archivist Guy Rocha as the biggest upset in Nevada politics.
Polls had shown Cannon with a 13 percentage point lead two weeks before the 1982 election.
Cannon had been weakened because of a bitter primary campaign against Jim Santini, because he had backed turning the Panama Canal over to Panama and because had been mentioned in a Teamsters' trucking scandal.
"Only in America could this happen," Hecht said after that victory. "Put that down. That's what makes America great."
Hecht made similar comments on July 12, 1988, after Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., saved his life by performing the Heimlich maneuver to dislodge a slice of apple stuck in his throat.
He had been eating in a Senate lunch room and stumbled into the hallway gasping for air when Kerry stepped off an elevator and immediately saw he could not breathe.
"This says something about America," Hecht said. "That's the difference between America and another country. He's targeted me as the No. 1 (to defeat), yet he saves my life."
Every year Hecht would call Kerry on the anniversary of that incident and thank him for saving his life. He also contributed $2,000 to Kerry's unsuccessful candidacy for the presidency in 2004.
Despite political differences, Bryan said as state lawmakers he and Hecht would drive to Carson City at the beginning of legislative sessions and then drive home at the end.
When Bryan announced he would retire from the U.S. Senate in 2002, he said the first call he received was from Hecht, inviting him to dinner in Las Vegas.
U.S. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., noted he served with Hecht both in the Legislature and in the U.S. Senate.
"We represented different parties, but we always had a very good relationship," Reid said. "Chic had a wonderful family and he had a great career in business and politics."
Although politicians and Hecht himself joked about his operating Chic Hecht's Women's Apparel at 413 Fremont St., next door to his father's business, he became a multi-millionaire businessman.
He served on the board of directors of Nevada State Bank for 20 years and in 1980 became a partner in Sam's Town. He also opened Sam's Town Western Emporium clothing store.
Boyd Gaming Chairman Bill Boyd said he was a close friend of Hecht who last saw him just before he went into the hospital. The two owned property together, and Hecht had served on the gaming company's board of directors. Hecht was one of the original stockholders of Boyd Gaming.
Hecht's death is a "big loss to our community," Boyd said.
Born Jacob Hecht on Nov. 30, 1928, in Cape Giradeau, Mo., Hecht received a bachelor of science degree in retailing from Washington University in St. Louis in 1949.
He received the nickname "Chic" (pronounced "chick") about a week after his birth. A relative thought the baby should get into movies and needed a Hollywood name. Hecht remarked during a political campaign that he had "spent about a quarter million dollars" on store advertising so that he would be known as Chic.
Soon after graduation, he was drafted into the Army and served as an intelligence officer in Berlin during the Korean War. Hecht knew Russian and some German and often worked undercover for the predecessor agency of the Central Intelligence Agency behind the Iron Curtain.
"He was extremely bright and loyal," said Francine Pulliam, who managed Hecht's real estate investments and began working for him when he opened the clothing store in 1953. It is remarkable, she said, "when someone can be a spy for a year behind the lines in Germany and be a Jew."
Hecht was named to the Army Intelligence Hall of Fame in 1988.
Hecht was a favorite of Reagan, according to Laxalt, having supported him over Richard Nixon at the 1968 Republican convention. As president, Reagan would campaign for Hecht in Nevada in 1982 and 1988.
Nevada Gaming Commissioner Art Marshall said his friend deserves some credit for concessions made by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on Jews emigrating.
According to Marshall, Reagan gave a copy of Hecht's request for concessions to Gorbachev when they met at a summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986.
"He was a politician whose only agenda was the people he represented," Marshall said. "He was a totally honest man."
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Centre Daily Times
May 16, 2006
Eyes on I-99 future
Long-term effects of cleanup plan studied
By Mike Joseph
mjoseph@centredaily.com
PATTON TOWNSHIP -- Scientists and laymen alike Monday sought assurances from state officials that the effects of a proposed acid-rock drainage cleanup at Skytop will indeed be long-lasting without thrusting the water contamination problem into the laps of their grandchildren.
"What about this material?" Huston Township resident Nancy Bachman, a retired school teacher who grew up in the Bald Eagle Valley, told state road builders and environmental regulators. "How good is it and how long is it going to last? Are we going to have to do this all over again?"
"It's an extremely important problem," added Penn State hydrogeologist Richard Parizek, a longtime presidential appointee to the 11-member U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, which provides technical oversight of activities associated with isolation of high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel at Yucca Mountain, Nev.
"I just want to get it right," Parizek said. "Save our taxpayers money and let us get on with our lives."
The meeting between state officials and the public at the Park Forest Middle School came at a Department of Environmental Protection hearing on the Transportation Department's $14 million plan to treat acid-bearing rocks that will remain at the Interstate 99 construction site five miles west of State College.
PennDOT in 2003 unearthed massive amounts of pyrite-laced sandstone -- enough to fill a train stretching from here to Harrisburg -- and has been trying to decide what to do with it ever since. When exposed to air and water, pyrite creates metal-dissolving sulfuric acid and can devastate streams and ground water.
PennDOT plans to truck two thirds of its pyritic rocks, about a million tons, to a Worth Township disposal site and treat the rest in place.
Tucker Ferguson, the PennDOT central-office official overseeing cleanup plans, told about 100 people in Monday night's audience that PennDOT will cover mountainside cut faces and pyritic fill areas with rain-proof covers, anchored by cables, and pump acidic drainage through a pipe over the Skytop crest to a 100,000-gallon storage tank in Huston Township.
From the storage tank, the drainage would be trucked out of the area for treatment until PennDOT has enough flow-pattern information to decide how big a treatment plant to build. "We're not really sure of the amount of water we're going to get," Ferguson said.
Parizek told PennDOT it should instead consider a more passive system so the state will not have to spend so much -- the other part of the plan costs about $26 million -- to truck rocks to a disposal site three miles away. He said the plan to pump water indefinitely could lead to the abandonment of needed mechanical repairs and pump replacement if doing so turned too costly in the future.
Ground water flows need to be mapped so that a French drain -- an underground passageway for water -- can be dug to capture and convey drainage to a passive treatment system on the Bald Eagle Creek side of Skytop. He said modern drilling techniques can cut a downward slanting borehole a thousand feet or more underground to greatly reduce the need to maintain pumping equipment above ground.
"Use gravity," Parizek said. "The rock is going to be here long after we're all dead. Use the geology and hydrology that God gave us and minimize long-term costs. ... You want passive -- you want a passive system. This gets rid of that problem forever."
PennDOT's Ferguson told Parizek he would consider the idea, and Ferguson repeated that commitment after the meeting. "I think we want to meet with him and talk about all of these issues," Ferguson said.
Some approved of PennDOT's plan. Wilhelm Kogelmann, president of Alpine Equipment Corp. of State College, a company that provides heavy-duty excavating services, said the "the basic system is sound and fine."
Patton Township manager Doug Erickson agreed. He said during a break in the meeting that long-term monitoring will be required but added: "It seems like they've got it under control."
DEP officials said they will accept written comments on their plan for Skytop until May 31.
Mike Joseph can be reached at 235-3910.
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Las Vegas SUN
May 15, 2006
Chic Hecht, former U.S. Senator from Nevada, dies
By Brendan Riley
Associated Press
CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) - Chic Hecht, a conservative Republican known as much for his verbal miscues as his upset victory over a powerful Democratic incumbent in a 1982 U.S. Senate race, died from cancer Monday in a Las Vegas hospital. He was 77.
Hecht's death was confirmed by longtime family friend Francine Pulliam. Hecht, who had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a year ago, had been unconscious for most of the past three weeks since he was hospitalized, Pulliam said.
Contacted at his home in early April shortly before he was hospitalized, Hecht spoke frankly about his deteriorating health.
"I'm hanging in there," he said at the time.
Hecht was praised by former U.S. Sen. Paul Laxalt, R-Nev., who described him as "one of the gutsiest politicians I've ever encountered."
Laxalt recalled thinking that Hecht was "half crazy" when the one-time Las Vegas clothing store owner ran for a state Senate seat in a heavily Democratic district in 1966.
Hecht won that race, and when he decided to challenge U.S. Sen. Howard Cannon, D-Nev., in 1982, Laxalt recalled thinking, "Chic, you're really on a kamikaze mission this time."
"Yet he proved all the doubters wrong once again and shocked the political world by winning by some 6,000 votes," Laxalt said. Hecht was helped to the narrow victory after Cannon was caught up in a Teamsters union scandal.
Hecht served one term in the Senate, and was defeated by Democrat Dick Bryan in his unsuccessful bid for a second term. After that, he served for five years as the U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas, before returning to private business.
While in the Senate, Hecht became known for his verbal slips, once referring to the proposed nuclear waste repository that the federal government wants to open at Nevada's Yucca Mountain as a "nuclear suppository."
Hecht served on the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee and was chairman of the Housing and Urban Affairs subcommittee. He also served on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the Select Committee on Intelligence, which oversees intelligence-gathering activities of federal agencies.
Born Mayer Jacob Hecht in Cape Girardeau, Mo., Hecht was known since childhood as Chic, a nickname given him by an uncle.
After graduation from Washington University in St. Louis in 1949, Hecht served in Europe as an Army counterintelligence agent in Berlin in 1952 and 1953.
Soon afterward, Hecht moved to Nevada, where he became a prominent and wealthy businessman. He is survived by his wife, Gail, and two daughters, Lori and Leslie. Memorial arrangements were pending.
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Register-Guard
May 15, 2006
Safety Drills In Progress
An OSU lab tests scale models of reactor designs for future viability
By Greg Bolt
The Register-Guard
CORVALLIS - It's a lead pipe cinch that the first new nuclear power plant in a generation won't be built in Oregon. Its design, though, may owe a lot to work being done here.
In a nondescript lab building on the Oregon State University campus sits a confusion of pipes and tanks packed into a large room behind an imposing control panel.
It is a one-quarter-scale working model of a new generation of nuclear power plants, based on what's called a "passively safe" design.
It does not have a reactor core and does not generate electricity; instead, water is heated electrically to the same temperature it would reach in a nuclear core.
From there, the model acts just like a full-sized version, moving the water along the same pathways and allowing every pump, valve and pipe joint to be subjected to a long script of simulated disasters.
Oregon State has developed something of a specialty testing the safety of new reactor designs.
With a second scale model built and plans for a third, OSU has staked out a national reputation as a leader in the field.
"Our specialty is safety. We've kind of become the Consumer Products Safety Commission for the nuclear industry," said Jose Reyes Jr., head of the department of nuclear engineering at OSU. "That puts us in a very unique position relative to other universities."
Thanks to the testing done at OSU, a plant design known as the Westinghouse AP-1000 and the smaller AP-600 have both received design certification from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. That will streamline the siting and licensing process for any utility that decides to build one, something that could happen sooner than many think.
"It's not a question so much will they be built, but when," Reyes said.
Indeed, applications already have been submitted that could result in more than a dozen new nuclear plants, most of which could use the AP-1000 design.
Thanks to changes in the siting and licensing process meant to encourage new investment in nuclear energy, the coming decade could see hundreds of megawatts of electricity pouring into the grid from new nuclear plants to be built in the South and Midwest.
"The upshot is that right now five utilities look to build 15 to 19 new (nuclear) facilities in the U.S. in the next five to 10 years," Reyes said.
Environmental plus
Nuclear energy has a couple of things going for it now that weren't much of an issue when the current generation of plants was built in the 1970s and '80s.
For one thing, nuclear doesn't produce greenhouse gases, something that has caused even some environmental groups to speak cautiously about a nuclear future.
And even though the Arab oil embargo still was on people's minds in that earlier era, the need for energy independence - not to mention relief from the skyrocketing cost of oil and natural gas - has given new urgency to the need for a clean and reliable domestic energy source.
But it's unlikely that those factors alone would have re-opened the door for nuclear power.
The new designs, which engineers tout as being "walk-away safe," have helped chip away at the lingering fears left by the accidents at Three Mile Island, Penn., and Chernobyl in the former Soviet republic of Ukraine.
"Walk-away safe" means that even in an accident, a plant operator could walk off and the reactor would cool itself without human intervention.
That's the idea behind passively safe design, which uses the natural forces of gravity and/or convection to ensure an adequate flow of water to cool the core should it overheat.
And the new designs are much simpler.
Even with the baffling maze of pipes in OSU's scale model, the system uses 80 percent less piping, 50 percent fewer valves and 35 percent fewer pumps than existing nuclear plants.
"It's a major simplification of the design, which makes it less expensive, more reliable and safer than previous designs," Reyes said. "It's a much better way to do it."
"Bad things can still happen"
Still, it's not as though nuclear energy is being welcomed back with open arms.
Many environmental organizations remain adamantly opposed to atomic energy, and even those who see it as a potential source of abundant electricity without the global warming pollution of coal and natural gas aren't sold on it yet.
Long-lived radioactive waste remains a problem, and the future of the long-delayed national waste repository at Yucca Mountain remains in doubt. Possible terrorist attacks have added a new threat.
Even so, those aren't the main worries for some scientists.
David Lochbaum, a former nuclear plant engineer who now directs the Nuclear Safety Project for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the biggest problems come from just the day-to-day operation of a nuclear power plant.
"The AP-600 and AP-1000 are safer than today's reactors, but they're not inherently safe," he said. "Even forgetting the security and waste issues, very bad things can still happen."
That's because once a plant is built, it's up to the operator to ensure that the people who run it day in and day out have the skills and training to do it properly, and the owner has the commitment to maintain it properly.
He likened it to comparing a Yugo to a Volvo:
"It's not really the car that determines the safety; it's the driver," he said. "If you put a bad driver in the best car in the world, I don't necessarily want to be on the sidewalk when it goes by."
Still, he acknowledged that the new designs are an improvement and said there's little doubt a safe reactor can be built.
advertisement Lochbaum said he remains skeptical but not adamantly opposed to the new designs.
"If somebody were to start building an AP-1000 tomorrow, we're not going to chain ourselves to the fence," he said.
Pursuit of simplicity
Reyes said passively safe design eliminates most of the chances for operator error. And he said new advances in fuel rod reprocessing could drastically reduce radioactive waste without creating pure plutonium as a byproduct.
Such advances would eliminate the primary fear of reprocessing - that it would create large stockpiles of weapons-grade plutonium that would be challenging to guard and eventually could find its way into nuclear weapons.
And OSU is working on a new type of reactor that could be even safer and simpler. Working with the Idaho National Laboratory and Nextant-Bechtel Corp., OSU has built a one-third-scale model of a modular reactor called the Multi-Application Small Light Water Reactor.
The reactor would be in a self-contained, sealed module about 60 feet long and 6 feet wide, capable of being built at a secure facility and then sent by rail to its destination.
It would never be opened or refueled on site and could operate continuously for five years with each unit producing about 50 megawatts.
The modules would be installed at a power plant in water-filled, below-ground silos that would provide built-in safety against accidents. When the reactor fuel is exhausted, they could be shipped back to the manufacturer for refueling or retirement.
"It's going to be hard to beat this design," Reyes said. "It's absolutely awesome."
All of this work at OSU has left the school in a position to be a major player in the next wave of nuclear development. Reyes said enrollment in the nuclear engineering program has doubled in the past four years to 150 students, and he expects it to reach 200 in another year or two.
The United States has 104 operating nuclear plants, where the average age of engineers is 52. Not only will those engineers be retiring soon, Reyes said, but the NRC also is looking to hire 300 additional people in the next 18 months to handle all of the application reviews on its docket.
"Every one of our graduating seniors and graduate students this year will get multiple job offers," he said. "There's a big demand right now."
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Concord Monitor
May 15, 2006
My Turn
Nukes: dirty, dangerous and expensive
By Dan Haines
For the Monitor
I write in response to William Klapproth's May 6 Monitor letter. He portrays construction of nuclear power plants as the answer to our growing need for electricity, an answer that will also satisfy the needs of a healthy and sustainable world. But he misrepresents the position of those opposed, as well as some important consequences of nuclear energy.
Nuclear power is neither green nor affordable.
It's an industry propped up by federal tax subsidies and rejected by private investment and insurance companies. It takes at least 10 years and billions of dollars to construct a plant.
No other industry has come with such environmental and human harm as the nuclear industry. The nuclear industry is messy. Creating nuclear power is not a process free of carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases.
One must mine uranium, the raw material of nuclear fuel, from the ground. This takes incredible amounts of diesel fuel and leaves vast stretches of land and water radioactive. Uranium is a finite, nonrenewable resource. According to the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, if the United States should run on nuclear energy alone, all the uranium in the world would be used up in 20 years.
Uranium enrichment, turning the mined uranium into fuel for nuclear reactors, takes a tremendous amount of electricity. The first enrichment facility was built in Oak Ridge, Tenn., so that its appetite for electricity could be met by the many coal and hydroelectric plants in the area.
Cooling the reactor in a nuclear plant releases tons of water into the atmosphere. H2O is a greenhouse, or heat-trapping, gas. Cooling also requires a coolant. In the United States, this coolant is cholorofluorocarbon-114, also known as Freon.
Freon is a heat-trapping chemical that is to be phased out in accordance with the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act. National emissions of Freon fell 60 percent between 1991 and 2002. However, the emissions from nuclear power plants have hardly fallen at all.
Then there is the nuclear waste: thousands of tons of poisonous, radioactive nuclear waste that will be here past our grandchildren's grandchildren's lifetimes. Uranium's half-life is measured in the millions of years.
If the Yucca Mountain facility ever opens for business, we have enough spent fuel to fill it already. Nuclear waste is a huge problem for which we lack a humane or realistic solution.
It is deceptive to portray nuclear energy as the only option apart from building more coal plants to satisfy our growing energy needs. A healthy and affordable solution to this and the impending oil crisis can start with harmless and immediate ways of generating electricity, such as wind turbines or photovoltaic energy, the direct transformation of sunlight into electricity.
The energy solution of the future will certainly come with conservation and efficiency at its center, joined by a portfolio of energy sources, renewable and nonrenewable. Nuclear energy is not one of them.
(Dan Haines lives in Contoocook.)
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Toledo Blade
May 14, 2006
Industry ready to fuel nuclear power rebirth
But is the U.S. willing to embrace a comeback?
By Tom Henry
Blade Staff Writer
Former Michigan Gov. John Engler is expected to help pump a little more life into America´s nuclear industry this Thursday when he delivers a pitch in San Francisco for more nuclear plants on behalf of the nation´s manufacturing sector.
Mr. Engler, now president and chief executive officer of the Washington-based National Association of Manufacturers, is to address more than 350 executives, including those from the nation´s largest utilities, in the ballroom of the Fairmont San Francisco after taped video remarks by President Bush are aired that morning.
The event, called the Nuclear Energy Assembly, is the annual conference of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry´s chief lobbyist group on Capitol Hill. An NEI spokesman confirmed that it is paying to have Mr. Engler flown out to deliver the speech.
He´s being courted for an obvious reason: To help the nuclear industry make a comeback.
The industry has been struggling to overcome the stigma of the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island Unit 2 reactor in Pennsylvania in 1979; this year´s 20th anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster near Kiev, Ukraine, and the near-rupture of the Davis-Besse nuclear reactor head 30 miles east of Toledo in 2002. The latter resulted in a $28 million fine Jan. 20 against FirstEnergy Corp., the largest in U.S. nuclear history, and federal indictments of three former employees whose cases may go to trial in Toledo this fall.
Mr. Engler´s support — albeit a small part of the big picture — is the latest sign the campaign to revive the nuclear industry might just be getting some momentum.
Less than three weeks ago, on April 24, the NEI announced the formation of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition (CASEnergy) to ramp up its message. The coalition, funded by the NEI, has 50 charter member organizations, including Detroit Edison´s parent, DTE Energy; the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; Mr. Engler´s group, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. FirstEnergy is not on the list.
The significance of the CASEnergy announcement was the tandem who will serve as co-chairs: Christine Todd Whitman, a former New Jersey governor and the first U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator to serve under Mr. Bush, and Patrick Moore, a Greenpeace co-founder who has gained attention for his aggressive pursuit of more nuclear power as a means of addressing global warming.
Engler pushing need for nuclear energy
Mr. Engler declined to be interviewed about his upcoming speech. But his association´s Web site shows it will be at least the fourth he will have delivered about the general need for more energy since April 11.
The San Francisco speech will be Mr. Engler´s first devoted exclusively to nuclear power on behalf of the National Association of Manufacturers, said his spokesman, Hank Cox, who provided a couple of snippets from past speeches that reveal Mr. Engler´s fundamental position.
“The public is displaying a renewed willingness to consider nuclear power,’ Mr. Engler said during an April 26 speech in Montgomery, Ala.
On Nov. 15, 2005, while addressing a Rockwell Automation audience in St. Louis, Mr. Engler said nuclear energy “holds great promise as a clean, safe, unlimited source of power for our nation.’
“We already produce one quarter of the world´s nuclear power,’ he said. “We can do more.’
Yes, America can produce more nuclear power. This nation invented it. But does it want to produce more?
Costs, rather than rules, halted nuclear growth
Contrary to what many people think, nuclear power didn´t become stagnant because of post-Three Mile Island regulations.
Even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — an agency rooted in promoting nuclear power itself back when it began as the Atomic Energy Commission — is quick to point out that Wall Street had a bigger influence.
The last application to build a nuclear plant was submitted to the NRC months before the Three Mile Island accident. The construction era came to a halt because projects came in millions of dollars over budget.
David Garman, a U.S. Department of Energy under secretary, has said that nuclear power is such a sensitive issue that many public utility boards know better than to put a discussion about new plant construction on their agenda. Doing so hurts their company stock, he said.
Such fears haven´t discouraged Ms. Whitman or Mr. Moore.
“Our country´s significant energy needs keep growing. We must diversify our energy sources to meet these needs,’ Ms. Whitman said. Mr. Moore said nuclear power has proven itself “an environmentally sound and safe energy choice.’ He advocates doubling America´s nuclear energy production to curb greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
Nuclear provides 20 percent of the nation´s electricity and is second to coal, which produces half. Coal-fired power plants also are the largest source of greenhouse gases.
Nuclear has its ownenvironmental hurdles
While nuclear plants themselves release no greenhouse gases, the process of enriching uranium for their reactor fuel rods requires huge draws from the nation´s energy grid. Critics such as Dr. Helen
Caldicott of the Physicians for Social Responsibility, a 1985 nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, have told The Blade that the industry´s claim of being emissions-free is misleading because electricity from coal-fired power plants invariably is used to enrich the uranium.
The nuclear industry also still has to overcome its biggest hurdle: Waste disposal. Spent reactor fuel rods are the only material in civilian hands classified as high-level radioactive waste. Nevada´s
Yucca Mountain has crossed many of the regulatory hurdles to become the federal disposal site. But it is still years away from being developed, if it ever is.
Mr. Moore left Greenpeace in 1986. His old group pre-empted the announcement about his pairing with Ms. Whitman by issuing a report that alleges America has had 200 “near-misses’ since the Chernobyl explosion. The 2002 incident at Davis-Besse was ranked No. 1.
Jim Riccio, Greenpeace´s nuclear policy analyst in Washington, said the industry´s safety record is far from stellar, despite fewer documented injuries compared to some other major industries. He said high-end construction and maintenance costs for new nuclear plants will continue to be the greatest deterrent.
“For the first time in history, nuclear plants have to be competitive, and they´re not,’ Mr. Riccio said. He said deregulation does not allow state public service commissions to pass along construction costs to ratepayers as the agencies did in the past.
The NEI refutes such claims. On Sept. 8, its senior director of business and environmental policy, Richard Myers, told the World Nuclear Association that the industry will prevail because it has “worked to peel apart systematically the risks and business issues that exist at each stage of project development..’
Mr. Bush and his allies, including U.S. Rep. George Voinovich (R., Ohio), continue to play key roles. Mr. Voinovich has co-sponsored and helped push for legislation aimed at rejuvenating the nuclear industry, including the reauthorization of the 1957 Price-Anderson
Act that put a cap on a utility´s liability in the event of anaccident. Through his position on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Mr. Voinovich has been a proponent of streamlining regulations and in bringing back retired NRC employees at full pay as consultants to help the agency maintain some of its institutional knowledge.
Edward McGaffigan, a Democrat and one of five NRC board members, acknowledged some of the agency´s shortcomings as a government watchdog. He said it learned a hard lesson from — and was embarrassed by — the Davis-Besse debacle.
“I think [the public] knows that if we screw up, that´ll be the end of the nuclear renaissance,’ he said.
Contact Tom Henry at:thenry@theblade.comor 419-724-6079.
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Center for Research on Globalization
May 14, 2006
Bush challenges hundreds of laws
President cites powers of his office
by Charlie Savage,
WASHINGTON -- President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.
Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ''whistle-blower" protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research.
Legal scholars say the scope and aggression of Bush's assertions that he can bypass laws represent a concerted effort to expand his power at the expense of Congress, upsetting the balance between the branches of government. The Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty ''to take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to ''execute" a law he believes is unconstitutional.
Former administration officials contend that just because Bush reserves the right to disobey a law does not mean he is not enforcing it: In many cases, he is simply asserting his belief that a certain requirement encroaches on presidential power.
But with the disclosure of Bush's domestic spying program, in which he ignored a law requiring warrants to tap the phones of Americans, many legal specialists say Bush is hardly reluctant to bypass laws he believes he has the constitutional authority to override.
Far more than any predecessor, Bush has been aggressive about declaring his right to ignore vast swaths of laws -- many of which he says infringe on power he believes the Constitution assigns to him alone as the head of the executive branch or the commander in chief of the military.
Many legal scholars say they believe that Bush's theory about his own powers goes too far and that he is seizing for himself some of the law-making role of Congress and the Constitution-interpreting role of the courts.
Phillip Cooper, a Portland State University law professor who has studied the executive power claims Bush made during his first term, said Bush and his legal team have spent the past five years quietly working to concentrate ever more governmental power into the White House.
''There is no question that this administration has been involved in a very carefully thought-out, systematic process of expanding presidential power at the expense of the other branches of government," Cooper said. ''This is really big, very expansive, and very significant."
For the first five years of Bush's presidency, his legal claims attracted little attention in Congress or the media. Then, twice in recent months, Bush drew scrutiny after challenging new laws: a torture ban and a requirement that he give detailed reports to Congress about how he is using the Patriot Act.
Bush administration spokesmen declined to make White House or Justice Department attorneys available to discuss any of Bush's challenges to the laws he has signed.
Instead, they referred a Globe reporter to their response to questions about Bush's position that he could ignore provisions of the Patriot Act. They said at the time that Bush was following a practice that has ''been used for several administrations" and that ''the president will faithfully execute the law in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution."
But the words ''in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution" are the catch, legal scholars say, because Bush is according himself the ultimate interpretation of the Constitution. And he is quietly exercising that authority to a degree that is unprecedented in US history.
Bush is the first president in modern history who has never vetoed a bill, giving Congress no chance to override his judgments. Instead, he has signed every bill that reached his desk, often inviting the legislation's sponsors to signing ceremonies at which he lavishes praise upon their work.
Then, after the media and the lawmakers have left the White House, Bush quietly files ''signing statements" -- official documents in which a president lays out his legal interpretation of a bill for the federal bureaucracy to follow when implementing the new law. The statements are recorded in the federal register.
In his signing statements, Bush has repeatedly asserted that the Constitution gives him the right to ignore numerous sections of the bills -- sometimes including provisions that were the subject of negotiations with Congress in order to get lawmakers to pass the bill. He has appended such statements to more than one of every 10 bills he has signed.
''He agrees to a compromise with members of Congress, and all of them are there for a public bill-signing ceremony, but then he takes back those compromises -- and more often than not, without the Congress or the press or the public knowing what has happened," said Christopher Kelley, a Miami University of Ohio political science professor who studies executive power.
Military link
Many of the laws Bush said he can bypass -- including the torture ban -- involve the military.
The Constitution grants Congress the power to create armies, to declare war, to make rules for captured enemies, and ''to make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces." But, citing his role as commander in chief, Bush says he can ignore any act of Congress that seeks to regulate the military.
On at least four occasions while Bush has been president, Congress has passed laws forbidding US troops from engaging in combat in Colombia, where the US military is advising the government in its struggle against narcotics-funded Marxist rebels.
After signing each bill, Bush declared in his signing statement that he did not have to obey any of the Colombia restrictions because he is commander in chief.
Bush has also said he can bypass laws requiring him to tell Congress before diverting money from an authorized program in order to start a secret operation, such as the ''black sites" where suspected terrorists are secretly imprisoned.
Congress has also twice passed laws forbidding the military from using intelligence that was not ''lawfully collected," including any information on Americans that was gathered in violation of the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches.
Congress first passed this provision in August 2004, when Bush's warrantless domestic spying program was still a secret, and passed it again after the program's existence was disclosed in December 2005.
On both occasions, Bush declared in signing statements that only he, as commander in chief, could decide whether such intelligence can be used by the military.
In October 2004, five months after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in Iraq came to light, Congress passed a series of new rules and regulations for military prisons. Bush signed the provisions into law, then said he could ignore them all. One provision made clear that military lawyers can give their commanders independent advice on such issues as what would constitute torture. But Bush declared that military lawyers could not contradict his administration's lawyers.
Other provisions required the Pentagon to retrain military prison guards on the requirements for humane treatment of detainees under the Geneva Conventions, to perform background checks on civilian contractors in Iraq, and to ban such contractors from performing ''security, intelligence, law enforcement, and criminal justice functions." Bush reserved the right to ignore any of the requirements.
The new law also created the position of inspector general for Iraq. But Bush wrote in his signing statement that the inspector ''shall refrain" from investigating any intelligence or national security matter, or any crime the Pentagon says it prefers to investigate for itself.
Bush had placed similar limits on an inspector general position created by Congress in November 2003 for the initial stage of the US occupation of Iraq. The earlier law also empowered the inspector to notify Congress if a US official refused to cooperate. Bush said the inspector could not give any information to Congress without permission from the administration.
Oversight questioned
Many laws Bush has asserted he can bypass involve requirements to give information about government activity to congressional oversight committees.
In December 2004, Congress passed an intelligence bill requiring the Justice Department to tell them how often, and in what situations, the FBI was using special national security wiretaps on US soil. The law also required the Justice Department to give oversight committees copies of administration memos outlining any new interpretations of domestic-spying laws. And it contained 11 other requirements for reports about such issues as civil liberties, security clearances, border security, and counternarcotics efforts.
After signing the bill, Bush issued a signing statement saying he could withhold all the information sought by Congress.
Likewise, when Congress passed the law creating the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, it said oversight committees must be given information about vulnerabilities at chemical plants and the screening of checked bags at airports.
It also said Congress must be shown unaltered reports about problems with visa services prepared by a new immigration ombudsman. Bush asserted the right to withhold the information and alter the reports.
On several other occasions, Bush contended he could nullify laws creating ''whistle-blower" job protections for federal employees that would stop any attempt to fire them as punishment for telling a member of Congress about possible government wrongdoing.
When Congress passed a massive energy package in August, for example, it strengthened whistle-blower protections for employees at the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The provision was included because lawmakers feared that Bush appointees were intimidating nuclear specialists so they would not testify about safety issues related to a planned nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada -- a facility the administration supported, but both Republicans and Democrats from Nevada opposed.
When Bush signed the energy bill, he issued a signing statement declaring that the executive branch could ignore the whistle-blower protections.
Bush's statement did more than send a threatening message to federal energy specialists inclined to raise concerns with Congress; it also raised the possibility that Bush would not feel bound to obey similar whistle-blower laws that were on the books before he became president. His domestic spying program, for example, violated a surveillance law enacted 23 years before he took office.
David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive-power issues, said Bush has cast a cloud over ''the whole idea that there is a rule of law," because no one can be certain of which laws Bush thinks are valid and which he thinks he can ignore.
''Where you have a president who is willing to declare vast quantities of the legislation that is passed during his term unconstitutional, it implies that he also thinks a very significant amount of the other laws that were already on the books before he became president are also unconstitutional," Golove said.
Defying Supreme Court
Bush has also challenged statutes in which Congress gave certain executive branch officials the power to act independently of the president. The Supreme Court has repeatedly endorsed the power of Congress to make such arrangements. For example, the court has upheld laws creating special prosecutors free of Justice Department oversight and insulating the board of the Federal Trade Commission from political interference.
Nonetheless, Bush has said in his signing statements that the Constitution lets him control any executive official, no matter what a statute passed by Congress might say.
In November 2002, for example, Congress, seeking to generate independent statistics about student performance, passed a law setting up an educational research institute to conduct studies and publish reports ''without the approval" of the Secretary of Education. Bush, however, decreed that the institute's director would be ''subject to the supervision and direction of the secretary of education."
Similarly, the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld affirmative-action programs, as long as they do not include quotas. Most recently, in 2003, the court upheld a race-conscious university admissions program over the strong objections of Bush, who argued that such programs should be struck down as unconstitutional.
Yet despite the court's rulings, Bush has taken exception at least nine times to provisions that seek to ensure that minorities are represented among recipients of government jobs, contracts, and grants. Each time, he singled out the provisions, declaring that he would construe them ''in a manner consistent with" the Constitution's guarantee of ''equal protection" to all -- which some legal scholars say amounts to an argument that the affirmative-action provisions represent reverse discrimination against whites.
Golove said that to the extent Bush is interpreting the Constitution in defiance of the Supreme Court's precedents, he threatens to ''overturn the existing structures of constitutional law."
A president who ignores the court, backed by a Congress that is unwilling to challenge him, Golove said, can make the Constitution simply ''disappear."
Common practice in '80s
Though Bush has gone further than any previous president, his actions are not unprecedented.
Since the early 19th century, American presidents have occasionally signed a large bill while declaring that they would not enforce a specific provision they believed was unconstitutional. On rare occasions, historians say, presidents also issued signing statements interpreting a law and explaining any concerns about it.
But it was not until the mid-1980s, midway through the tenure of President Reagan, that it became common for the president to issue signing statements. The change came about after then-Attorney General Edwin Meese decided that signing statements could be used to increase the power of the president.
When interpreting an ambiguous law, courts often look at the statute's legislative history, debate and testimony, to see what Congress intended it to mean. Meese realized that recording what the president thought the law meant in a signing statement might increase a president's influence over future court rulings.
Under Meese's direction in 1986, a young Justice Department lawyer named Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote a strategy memo about signing statements. It came to light in late 2005, after Bush named Alito to the Supreme Court.
In the memo, Alito predicted that Congress would resent the president's attempt to grab some of its power by seizing ''the last word on questions of interpretation." He suggested that Reagan's legal team should ''concentrate on points of true ambiguity, rather than issuing interpretations that may seem to conflict with those of Congress."
Reagan's successors continued this practice. George H.W. Bush challenged 232 statutes over four years in office, and Bill Clinton objected to 140 laws over his eight years, according to Kelley, the Miami University of Ohio professor.
Many of the challenges involved longstanding legal ambiguities and points of conflict between the president and Congress.
Throughout the past two decades, for example, each president -- including the current one -- has objected to provisions requiring him to get permission from a congressional committee before taking action. The Supreme Court made clear in 1983 that only the full Congress can direct the executive branch to do things, but lawmakers have continued writing laws giving congressional committees such a role.
Still, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton used the presidential veto instead of the signing statement if they had a serious problem with a bill, giving Congress a chance to override their decisions.
But the current President Bush has abandoned the veto entirely, as well as any semblance of the political caution that Alito counseled back in 1986. In just five years, Bush has challenged more than 750 new laws, by far a record for any president, while becoming the first president since Thomas Jefferson to stay so long in office without issuing a veto.
''What we haven't seen until this administration is the sheer number of objections that are being raised on every bill passed through the White House," said Kelley, who has studied presidential signing statements through history. ''That is what is staggering. The numbers are well out of the norm from any previous administration."
Exaggerated fears?
Some administration defenders say that concerns about Bush's signing statements are overblown. Bush's signing statements, they say, should be seen as little more than political chest-thumping by administration lawyers who are dedicated to protecting presidential prerogatives.
Defenders say the fact that Bush is reserving the right to disobey the laws does not necessarily mean he has gone on to disobey them.
Indeed, in some cases, the administration has ended up following laws that Bush said he could bypass. For example, citing his power to ''withhold information" in September 2002, Bush declared that he could ignore a law requiring the State Department to list the number of overseas deaths of US citizens in foreign countries. Nevertheless, the department has still put the list on its website.
Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who until last year oversaw the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel for the administration, said the statements do not change the law; they just let people know how the president is interpreting it.
''Nobody reads them," said Goldsmith. ''They have no significance. Nothing in the world changes by the publication of a signing statement. The statements merely serve as public notice about how the administration is interpreting the law. Criticism of this practice is surprising, since the usual complaint is that the administration is too secretive in its legal interpretations."
But Cooper, the Portland State University professor who has studied Bush's first-term signing statements, said the documents are being read closely by one key group of people: the bureaucrats who are charged with implementing new laws.
Lower-level officials will follow the president's instructions even when his understanding of a law conflicts with the clear intent of Congress, crafting policies that may endure long after Bush leaves office, Cooper said.
''Years down the road, people will not understand why the policy doesn't look like the legislation," he said.
And in many cases, critics contend, there is no way to know whether the administration is violating laws -- or merely preserving the right to do so.
Many of the laws Bush has challenged involve national security, where it is almost impossible to verify what the government is doing. And since the disclosure of Bush's domestic spying program, many people have expressed alarm about his sweeping claims of the authority to violate laws.
In January, after the Globe first wrote about Bush's contention that he could disobey the torture ban, three Republicans who were the bill's principal sponsors in the Senate -- John McCain of Arizona, John W. Warner of Virginia, and Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina -- all publicly rebuked the president.
''We believe the president understands Congress's intent in passing, by very large majorities, legislation governing the treatment of detainees," McCain and Warner said in a joint statement. ''The Congress declined when asked by administration officials to include a presidential waiver of the restrictions included in our legislation."
Added Graham: ''I do not believe that any political figure in the country has the ability to set aside any . . . law of armed conflict that we have adopted or treaties that we have ratified."
And in March, when the Globe first wrote about Bush's contention that he could ignore the oversight provisions of the Patriot Act, several Democrats lodged complaints.
Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, accused Bush of trying to ''cherry-pick the laws he decides he wants to follow."
And Representatives Jane Harman of California and John Conyers Jr. of Michigan -- the ranking Democrats on the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees, respectively -- sent a letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales demanding that Bush rescind his claim and abide by the law.
''Many members who supported the final law did so based upon the guarantee of additional reporting and oversight," they wrote. ''The administration cannot, after the fact, unilaterally repeal provisions of the law implementing such oversight. . . . Once the president signs a bill, he and all of us are bound by it."
Lack of court review
Such political fallout from Congress is likely to be the only check on Bush's claims, legal specialists said.
The courts have little chance of reviewing Bush's assertions, especially in the secret realm of national security matters.
''There can't be judicial review if nobody knows about it," said Neil Kinkopf, a Georgia State law professor who was a Justice Department official in the Clinton administration. ''And if they avoid judicial review, they avoid having their constitutional theories rebuked."
Without court involvement, only Congress can check a president who goes too far. But Bush's fellow Republicans control both chambers, and they have shown limited interest in launching the kind of oversight that could damage their party.
''The president is daring Congress to act against his positions, and they're not taking action because they don't want to appear to be too critical of the president, given that their own fortunes are tied to his because they are all Republicans," said Jack Beermann, a Boston University law professor. ''Oversight gets much reduced in a situation where the president and Congress are controlled by the same party."
Said Golove, the New York University law professor: ''Bush has essentially said that 'We're the executive branch and we're going to carry this law out as we please, and if Congress wants to impeach us, go ahead and try it.' "
Bruce Fein, a deputy attorney general in the Reagan administration, said the American system of government relies upon the leaders of each branch ''to exercise some self-restraint." But Bush has declared himself the sole judge of his own powers, he said, and then ruled for himself every time.
''This is an attempt by the president to have the final word on his own constitutional powers, which eliminates the checks and balances that keep the country a democracy," Fein said. ''There is no way for an independent judiciary to check his assertions of power, and Congress isn't doing it, either. So this is moving us toward an unlimited executive power."
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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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