Yucca Mountain News Clips
Sunday, May 21, 2006
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OregonLive
May 21, 2006

The real Trojan cooling-tower symbol

As PGE implodes its nuclear-power edifice, the nation and region suffer a policy paralysis

Maybe there is no avoiding the efforts by various people to find great symbolism in today's planned destruction of the cooling tower at the mothballed Trojan nuclear power plant.

If you're against nuclear power, we suppose the symbolism works either way. If PGE, Trojan's owner, had decided to let the 499-foot tower stand, it could have been a monument to the limits of technology or some such. Of course, you could draw the same symbolism out of imploding the thing.

If you're for nuclear power, you could find some symbolism along the lines of comparing the cooling tower to the smokestacks of the leading alternative to a nuclear future -- a greenhouse-gas-producing, coal-fired future. And then maybe implosion could have . . . well, maybe you're ahead of us on this.

The destruction of the tower needs to take place in order for the decommissioning of the site and its eventual conversion to some other use. Given Trojan's troubled history, it would be great to be able just to say good riddance.

But that's impossible, because the biggest decommissioning step is yet to be taken -- finding a home for the radioactive waste that now is stored on the plant site. As news reports have pointed out, nobody thinks moving the waste material will take place anytime in the next couple of decades.

Talk about symbolic.

Almost nothing in the nuclear power business in the United States happens quickly or without a maximum of political, scientific and legal friction. The waste products at Trojan are no exception. They can't be moved because there is no place for them to go.

In 2002, Congress selected Yucca Mountain in Nevada, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as the national repository for about 132,000 tons of nuclear waste. But as late as last week, the U.S. Senate was holding hearings about the lack of progress on preparing the site to accept nuclear material. Progress has been delayed by legal wrangling and scientific arguments.

In the meantime, 50,000 tons of nuclear waste sits at 120 temporary locations in 39 states.

The poor track record for nuclear power in the Northwest is well known, thus strategic power planning tends to revolve around conservation and renewable energy such as wind. These strategies may work well in an economic backwater, but in a region that seeks to grow and develop economically, sooner or later we're going to have to do better than that.

The wider paralysis on nuclear power has both direct and indirect costs.

The Justice Department, for example, estimates the government's legal liability will be up to $3 billion if Yucca Mountain doesn't open by 2010. That date seems unlikely, to say the least.

As bad as that may be, the indirect cost is greater. Nuclear power now supplies about 20 percent of the nation's electricity. Given the real problems with greenhouse-gas emissions from coal-fired power plants and the foolishness of using petroleum fuel to produce electricity, the United States must decide on its policies about power production and find a way to pursue them.

If nuclear is to be part of the mix -- and much of the world believes that it must -- then the United States must move beyond paralysis.

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Pahrump Valley Times
May 19, 2006

County works to fill jobs

By Phillip Gomez
PVT

Nye County suddenly finds itself with a lot of vacancies at the top of its totem pole.

Two county commissioners from Pahrump, after serving one term each, have put in notice that they will not be running for re-election this fall.

Two top adminstrators - the county manager and the comptroller - were fired recently for improprieties, and the director of the county's Yucca Mountain project office resigned recently after being appointed in February.

And that's not all. In the case of the budget director, no one apparently wants the job or has the qualifications to do it.

In March 2005, Budget Director Charlie Rodewald retired after several stormy months battling publicly with the Nye County Commission over the county budget. Then, in September, Lester Kerr was hired to replace Rodewald.

Kerr had just resigned last summer from his position as comptroller of White Pine County, when the Nevada Department of Taxation stepped in to take over administration of that county for having insufficient funds in its coffers.

Kerr lasted only a few months before he quietly resigned as Nye's budget director, for "mutually agreed" upon reasons.

More recently, the Ely Times reported that the Nevada Department of Taxation told the newspaper that an audit conducted by an independent firm found that White Pine County's severe financial emergency had been brought about by a lack of "managerial oversight."

According to the report, the comptroller's office had not adequately tracked and documented financial transactions over the previous fiscal year. The audit report also found that journal entries for the county's finances were not reviewed and approved by anyone other than the person who had made them.

The audit report pointed to Kerr's office as the source of the errors.

The ending balance for White Pine County's general fund in June 2005 was an estimated $144,000 in the red, the Times reported.

The commissioners and the treasurer were "not fully appraised of the financial situation blowing up in front of them" until it was too late, said Mike Griffin of the Department of Taxation.

A similar scenario took place in March in Nye County when ex-County Manager Michael Maher failed to report to commissioners on the state of the county budget, after allegedly receiving a warning letter eight months earlier from the Department of Taxation informing him the county was overspent and that financial irregularities by the commissioners had taken place.

Maher and Comptroller Marie Owens were summarily fired by the Board of Commissioners.

Now, Nye County Human Resources Director Danelle Shamrell, fairly new herself to her job, reports that she received a whopping 68 inquiries for the vacant county manager position.

In the past, the county has had difficulty finding qualified people for top positions who would agree to live in the county.

Shamrell said that her office had received 31 formal applications for the county manager job, along with 19 resumes. The vacancy closed last Friday.

"It will take a little more time than the standard position," she said of filling the vacancy. That's because of Nevada's strict open meeting law mandating transparency in government proceedings.

The Board of Commissioners has appointed a committee to develop the criteria for screening the selection of the next county manager. But the interviewing of candidates will be put on a published agenda and conducted at a public meeting, Shamrell said. The county manager position, unlike the other, lower-level county vacancies, is subject to Nevada's open meeting law.

Shamrell also reported that she received 13 inquiries about the open comptroller position, including two applications and six resumes. The vacancy also closed last Friday.

For the director of the nuclear waste repository project office, Shamrell said she has received 10 inquiries, but the vacancy doesn't close until May 31.

Dale Hammermeister was appointed to the job in February, after a vacancy of more than a year. But Hammermeister recently announced he was resigning to take a new job for which he will be relocating.

For the vacant budget director position, only one inquiry was received, Shamrell said. That vacancy closes today.

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Coastal Post
May 20, 2006

Privatizing The Apocalypse-Bechtel To Run US Nuke Labs

By Frida Berrigan

Started as the super-secret "Project Y" in 1943, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has long been the keystone institution of the American nuclear-weapons producing complex. It was the birthplace of Fat Man and Little Boy, the two nuclear bombs the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Last year, the University of California, which has managed the lab for the Department of Energy since its inception, decided to put Los Alamos on the auction block. In December 2005, construction giant Bechtel won a $553 million yearly management contract to run the sprawling complex, which employs more than 13,000 people and has an estimated $2.2 billion annual budget.

"Privatization" has been in the news ever since George W. Bush became president. His administration has radically reduced the size of government, turning over to private companies critical governmental functions involving prisons, schools, water, welfare, Medicare, and utilities as well as war-fighting, and is always pushing for more of the same. Outside of Washington, the pitfalls of privatization are on permanent display in Iraq, where companies like Halliburton have reaped billions in contracts. Performing jobs once carried out by members of the military -- from base building and mail delivery to food service -- they have bilked the government while undermining the safety of American forces by providing substandard services and products. Halliburton has been joined by a cottage industry of military-support companies responsible for everything from transportation to interrogation. On the war front, private companies are ubiquitous, increasingly indispensable, and largely unregulated -- a lethal combination.

Now, the long arm of privatization is reaching deep into an almost unimaginable place at the heart of the national security apparatus --- the laboratory where scientists learned to harness the power of the atom more than 60 years ago and created weapons of apocalyptic proportions.

Profane Problem or Prolific Profit?

Nuclear weapons are many things to many people -- the sword of Damocles or the guarantor of American global supremacy, the royal path to the apocalypse or atoms for peace. But in each notion, they are treated as idols -- jealously-guarded, shrouded in code, surrounded by sacred secrecy. That is changing.

Private companies have long played a role in the nuclear complex, but it's been a peripheral one. For example, Kaiser-Hill, a remediation company, is cleaning up radioactive waste at Rocky Flats, the Denver, Colorado complex that manufactured nuclear weapons. At Idaho Falls, another company, CH2M, is mopping up the mess left behind after the construction of 52 nuclear reactors. BWX and Honeywell formed a new company along with Bechtel to manage and operate the Pantex Plant in Texas which assembled nuclear weapons throughout the Cold War. At least ten different subcontractors are involved in managing the Hanford nuclear complex. But the famed nuclear laboratories, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia -- where the high priests of nuclear physics are free to explore the outer realms of their craft -- have long been above prosaic bottom-line or board-room considerations. Until this year, that is.

At Los Alamos, the University of California has already been replaced by a "limited liability corporation," says Tyler Przybylek of the Department of Energy's Evaluation Board; and, more generally, the writing is on the containment wall. Nuclear laboratories are no longer to be intellectual institutions devoted to science but part of a corporate-business model where research, design, and ultimately the weapons themselves will become products to be marketed. The new dress code will be suits and ties, not lab coats and safety glasses. Under Bechtel, new management will lead to a "tightly structured organization" that will "drive efficiency," predicts John Browne, who directed the lab at Los Alamos from 1997-2003. "If there is a product the government wants," he concludes, "they will necessarily be focused on that. A lot more money will be at stake."

Los Alamos was the first to go. Now, the management contract for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is on the auction block as well.

Bechtel's Boondoggles

Many say strong corporate oversight will correct a legacy of embarrassing missteps at Los Alamos. The keystone of the nuclear complex, it has been dogged by missing classified computer disks, cost overruns on its expensive new projects, and an outspoken cadre of scientists who found their voice on LANL: The Real Story, a blog where once deferential employees blew off steam and exposed lapses in lab management.

The idea is that, under private management, this legacy of money wasted and dreams deferred can do an abrupt u-turn. But the question is: Can Bechtel (or any other private military contractor) usher in a new era of nuclear responsibility? Pete Domenici, Republican Senator and Chairman of the powerful Energy and Water Committee, thinks so. In January, he claimed that "this great lab will thrive under the management team led by Bechtel."

But a look at Bechtel's record might not inspire others to Domenici's confidence. The California-based construction giant has a long history of big projects, big promises, bigger budgets and even bigger failures.

In Boston, Bechtel was put in charge of the "Big Dig," the reconstruction of Interstate 93 beneath the city. In 1985, the price tag for the project was estimated at about $2.5 billion. Now, it is a whopping $14.6 billion (or $1.8 billion a mile), making it the most expensive stretch of highway in the world. Near San Diego, citizens are still paying the bills for cost over-runs at a nuclear power plant where Bechtel installed one of the reactors backwards.

In 2003, Bechtel took this winning track record to Baghdad, where it blew billions in a string of unfinished projects and unfathomable errors. The company reaped tens of millions of dollars in contracts to repair Iraq's schools, for example, but an independent report found that many of the schools Bechtel claimed to have completely refitted, "haven't been touched," and a number of schools remained "in shambles." One "repaired" school was found by inspectors be overflowing with "unflushed sewage."

Bechtel also has a $1.03 billion contract to oversee important aspects of Iraq's infrastructure reconstruction, including water and sewage. Despite many promises, startling numbers of Iraqi families continue to lack access to clean water, according to information gathered by independent journalist Dahr Jamail. The company made providing potable water to southern Iraq one of its top priorities, promising delivery within the first 60 days of the program. One year later, rising epidemics of water-borne illnesses like cholera, kidney stones and diarrhea pointed to the failure of Bechtel's mission.

Outside of its ill-fated reconstruction contracts in Iraq, Bechtel is not known as a large military contractor, but the company has been quietly moving into the nuclear arena. It helped build a missile-defense site in the South Pacific, runs the Nevada Test Site where the United States once performed hundreds of above-and underground nuclear tests. Bechtel is also the "environmental manager" at the Oak Ridge National Lab, which stores highly-enriched uranium, and is carrying out design work at the Yucca Mountain repository where the plan to store 77,000 tons of nuclear waste has environmentalists and community activists up in arms.

At Washington State's Hanford Waste Treatment Plant, Bechtel is working on technology to turn nuclear waste into glass. But the estimated costs of building the facility to do that have doubled in one year to about $10 billion while the completion date slipped from 2011 to 2017. Members of Congress have proposed that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission take over management of the project from Bechtel because of its cost overruns and delays.

Proliferation's New Meaning

Given this track record, it's hard to make the case that Bechtel assumes the helm at Los Alamos out of an altruistic, even patriotic, desire to impose clean, lean corporate management on a complacent institution long overfed at the public trough. The question remains: Why this urge to privatize the apocalypse?

To answer that question, you have to begin with the post-Cold War quest of the nuclear laboratories for a new identity and raison d'être. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the loss of the other superpower as a nuclear twin and target, and an international shift in favor of nuclear disarmament sent Los Alamos and the whole U.S. nuclear complex into existential crisis: Who are we? What is our role? What do we do now that nuclear weapons have no obvious role in a world of, at best, medium-sized military enemies? Throughout the Clinton years, these questions multiplied while the nuclear arsenal remained relatively stable. More recently, with a lot of fancy footwork, a few friends in Congress, and the ear of a White House eager to be known for something other than the Long War on global terrorism, the labs finally came up with a winning solution that has Bechtel and other military contractors seeing dollar signs.

They found their salvation in a few lines of the Nuclear Posture Review, released in January 2002, where the Bush administration asserted: "The need is clear for a revitalized nuclear weapons complex that will be able, if directed, to design, develop, manufacture, and certify new warheads in response to new national requirements; and maintain readiness to resume underground testing if required."

There's gold in that there sentence. During the Cold War, spending on nuclear weapons averaged $4.2 billion a year (in current dollars). Almost two decades after the "nuclear animosity" between the two great superpowers ended, the United States is spending one-and-a-half times the Cold War average on nuclear weapons. In 2001, the weapons-activities budget of the Department of Energy, which oversees the nuclear weapons complex through its "semi-autonomous" National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), totaled $5.19 billion; and a "revitalized nuclear weapons complex," ready to "design, develop, manufacture, and certify new warheads," means a more than billion-dollar jump in spending to $6.4 billion by fiscal year 2006.

And that's just the beginning. The NNSA's five-year "National Security Plan" calls for annual increases to reach $7.76 billion by 2009. David Hobson, Republican congressional representative from Ohio, calls this kind of budgeting "the ultimate white-collar welfare," saying that the weapons complex can be "viewed as a jobs program for PhDs."

He's right. That's a lot of money for a few labs and a few thousand scientists. And private military contractors large and small are all over it.

Entering Acronym Land

To justify this huge jump in spending, the nuclear laboratories have cooked up plans for an alphabet soup of projects as part of the SSMP, scientists are pushing -- to mention just a few of the acronyms on the table right now -- ASCC, MESA, the RRWP, the ICFHY campaign and the RNEP.

In the interest of not putting everyone to sleep, we can take a closer look at just a few of the Bush administration's proliferating nuclear projects. Under the umbrella of Stockpile Stewardship Management (SSMP), scientists are working to safeguard the stockpile of nuclear weapons and materials so it is not ravaged by time and neglect. The Reliable Replacement Warhead Program (RRWP) will exchange existing warheads for more "reliable" (read: more powerful) ones. There are plans underway to develop the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) and other "useable" new nuclear weapons supposedly to meet new threats by new enemies -- "rogue states" like Iran -- in future preemptive anti-proliferation wars. Under each of these programs are many other acronym-heavy, cash-rich programs that seem to lead nowhere -- except toward further nuclear proliferation.

The Inertial Confinement Fusion and High Yield Campaign is just one of the more outlandish and expensive of these projects. It proposes using lasers to replicate what happens inside an actual nuclear explosion in weapons labs. Sounds simple enough, right? The Nuclear Ignition Facility -- where the lasers will do their work -- is the single largest project in the NNSA budget and, according to analyst Christopher Paine, "quite possibly the most expensive experimental facility ever built." The Department of Energy projects $3.5 billion in costs for this alone, but the independent environmental group, the National Resources Defense Council, puts the figure higher yet -- at $5.32 billion -- and that money will be spent before anyone can even demonstrate that the system works.

The Age of Nuclear Terror?

Do nuclear weapons have a role in the "Age of Terror" -- other than as potential weapons for terrorist groups? In a new and ever-shifting environment of emerging regional powers and wars that transcend national boundaries, the Bush administration is taking a have-it-both-ways approach: It is pushing aggressive non-proliferation policies for chosen enemy nations and embracing a policy of accelerated nuclear proliferation for itself. How much harder will it be in the future to dissuade other powers from building nuclear weapons when the American nuclear industry and its weapons labs have switched even more fully into private mode and the profit-motive is increasingly at stake in global nuclear planning? These and many other questions unfortunately remain unasked. Yet, a new era of nuclear weapons for profit threatens to turn Armageddon into a paying operation.

During the height of the Cold War, when competition between the nuclear laboratories seemed to rival the superpower stand-off, a Lawrence Livermore scientist posted a sign that read: "Remember, the Soviets are the Competition, Los Alamos is the Enemy."

In a new era of potential corporate antagonism over apocalyptic weaponry, will there be a sign at the Bechtel-run nuclear lab emblazoned with: "Remember, the Terrorists are the Competition, Lockheed Martin is the Enemy"?

Frida Berrigan (berrigaf@newschool.edu) is a Senior Research Associate at the World Policy Institute's Arms Trade Resource Center. Her primary research areas with the project include nuclear-weapons policy, war profiteering and corporate crimes, weapons sales to areas of conflict, and military-training programs. She is the author of a number of Institute reports, most recently "Weapons at War 2005: Promoting Freedom or Fueling Conflict."

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Contra Costa Times
May 19, 2006

Nuclear energy officials see hope for industry

Bush says he aims for new facilities to be built by the end of the decade; but radioactive waste disposal remains a problem

By Rick Jurgens
Contra Costa Times

SAN FRANCISCO - About 400 nuclear energy executives gathered on Nob Hill on Thursday to talk shop and revel in the revival of their long-dormant industry.

"Nuclear power is a key part of a clean, secure energy future," President George Bush said in a videotaped message to the conferees, who operate, build and sell fuel or equipment to nuclear power plants. Some even dared to say what only recently seemed unthinkable: Maybe someday new nuclear power plants might be built in California.

"It's a conversation that as a state and a community we ought to have," Tom King, chief executive of the utility unit of PG&E Corp., said in an interview.

But it won't be easy, King acknowledged earlier, as he chaired the opening session of the annual meeting of the Washington-based Nuclear Energy Institute.

California does not yet have the "social acceptance" needed for the growth of nuclear power, he said.

The industry also faces a huge unsolved problem: what to do with the radioactive waste that remains the expensive and unavoidable byproduct of nuclear-fueled electricity generators that seem otherwise tantalizingly free of pollution.

Plans to create a waste dump deep in the earth at Yucca Mountain in Nevada have bogged down in the face of fierce resistance from state officials. Technology that recycles fuel has raised concerns about diversion of materials to make nuclear weapons. The Bush administration has pledged to push ahead on both approaches.

During the 1950s, supporters touted newly developed nuclear technology as an almost magical answer to questions about the energy future of America and the world. A building boom ensued.

But in 1979, the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania brought the American nuclear industry to a jolting halt. Although the Nuclear Regulatory Commission resumed issuing licenses for new plants a year later, a fatal disaster at the Soviet nuclear plant in Chernobyl jumped into the headlines in 1986, raising further doubts about the safety of nuclear.

Cost overruns and falling power prices also put much of the industry in a financial squeeze. "The predecessors of my company were nearly destroyed by their nuclear investments," said John Rowe, the chief executive of Exelon Corp.

The industry never fully regained its previous momentum: The NRC issued only four new licenses during the 1990s, and none since the 1,165-megawatt facility near Spring City, Tenn., that the Tennessee Valley Authority fired up in 1996.

But recently, soaring prices for natural gas and scientists' warnings that global warming is being driven by emissions from plants that burn coal and other fossil fuels sparked a renewed interest in nuclear.

Once-shunned nuclear advocates have found new friends, according to Clay Sells, Bush's deputy secretary of energy. "Pillars of the environmental community and leaders of the left side of American politics are realizing that nuclear has to play a role," he said in an interview prior to addressing the conference.

Old friends also have helped. The Energy Act signed into law last year by President Bush boosted nuclear developers with more than $12 billion in subsidies. It also extended for 20 years a federal program that limits operators' accident liability and offered new guarantees of loan repayments and against project delays caused by lawsuits or federal regulators.

Utilities and other power sellers are currently drawing up plans for as many as 20 new reactors, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute.

Administration officials at the event urged the attendees to use the remainder of Bush's term to remove obstacles to future growth of the industry. And Bush himself set this goal: "America will start building nuclear power plants again by the end of this decade."

King, the PG&E executive, said that the utility would be willing to step forward to suggest that California look once again at the possibility of new nuclear construction. California already gets about 15 percent of its power from a nuclear plant in Arizona and two instate nuclear plants, including PG&E's 2,174-megawatt Diablo Canyon facility.

But state law forbids the licensing of any new nuclear plant until there is a place to permanently dispose its waste.

"Even if (the federal government) licenses Yucca Mountain, and gets that up and operating, that facility itself is already full," said Claudia Chandler, a spokeswoman for the state Energy Commission. That's because waste from existing nuclear plants will take up all the available capacity, she said.

And skepticism remains.

Rick Jurgens covers energy and business. Reach him at 925-943-8088 or rjurgens@cctimes.com.

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Seattle Times
May 19, 2006

Vestige of region's nuclear designs to be imploded Sunday morning

By Jonathan Martin
Seattle Times staff reporter

RAINIER, Ore. — The Trojan Nuclear Plant's cooling tower took a year to build and cost more than $10 million.

Its concrete and steel weigh as much as an aircraft carrier, and its crown of strobe lights, 499 feet up, has been a landmark for generations of drivers passing by on Interstate 5.

On Sunday morning, it will come down in about 10 seconds. The implosion is scheduled for 7 a.m.

A ton and a half of explosives have been plugged into 3,250 holes and connected by a lattice of yellow blasting cord, making the dirt-gray tower look as if it's covered by a tattered lace doily.

If all goes as planned, the tower will crumple like an aluminum can.

When the demolition contractor — the same firm that brought down the Kingdome — is done, the tower will be a 15-foot-high pile of rubble.

For friends and foes of Oregon's only nuclear-power plant, the rumble and dust on Sunday will symbolize the Northwest's failed nuclear experiment. Trojan was once billed as the model for 20 nuclear plants to be built in the Northwest. The financial collapse of Washington's nuclear-plant builder — famously known as "Whoops" — ended all that; just one working plant, at Richland, is left. Two partially finished plants at Satsop are now part of a business park.

Trojan went online in 1976 and in its heyday cranked out enough power to light Portland. It held sway over the region's imagination and is believed to be an inspiration for the Springfield plant in Portland native Matt Groening's TV series, "The Simpsons."

But Trojan was plagued by engineering, mechanical and political problems.

The cooling tower, a massive steam chimney, was never contaminated by radiation. The rest of the site was certified as safe and radiation-free last year. What's left of Trojan is being dismantled and cannibalized for its steel.

The only debate now is where to catch the spectacular demolition. Portland General Electric, Trojan's majority owner, hopes people watch it on TV. Interstate 5, the Columbia River and surrounding airspace will be closed Sunday morning.

Anti-nuclear activist Lloyd Marbet, who was arrested several times at the plant's gates, plans to defy PGE again and watch in person with other former protesters. "I thought leaving the tower up would be a good reminder to the kind of arrogance that a utility or business can get into with a technology that is not proven."

Protests and leaks

Perched on a rocky outcrop of the Columbia River, Trojan fed the Bonneville power grid for 3,300 days. Its training control room was used in scenes in the classic nuclear-disaster film "The China Syndrome."

The plant temporarily shut down in 1978 when PGE realized it had been built on an earthquake fault. It was shut down again when cracks in the steam tubes were detected just four years into the plant's life.

Radioactive compounds were later detected in the Columbia River and a pond on the site, although not at unsafe levels. Both are now popular fishing spots.

The environmental problems galvanized opposition, leading to three unsuccessful ballot initiatives in Oregon to force closure. Six days after winning the last election, in 1992, PGE shut down Trojan because of more radioactive leaks. The utility decided it would cost more to replace it than to shutter the plant for good.

Decommissioning has cost more than $400 million, nearly equal to the original construction bill. The plant's reactor core was gingerly barged upriver and buried at Hanford in 1999. Thirty-four spent nuclear fuel rods remain at Trojan in 17-foot-tall steel-lined casks. The rods will stay put until they can be moved to Nevada's Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste dump — when it opens.

David Lochbaum, of the nuclear-safety group Union of Concerned Scientists, said he fears the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has inadequate security to protect the spent fuel rods. But the casks themselves are safe, he said.

"I wouldn't have any qualms at all about visiting the site," he said of Trojan.

Living in the shadow

The small town of Rainier welcomed Trojan. Its elegant City Hall and Victorian homes, sprouting from hillsides sloping above the Columbia River, attest to past fortunes made from timber and fishing.

Trojan's cooling tower was incorporated into the city seal, and residents — an estimated one in three of whom worked at the plant — came to ignore the evacuation-warning sirens and Geiger counters mounted on poles around town.

"You wouldn't see people in Rainier protesting" at Trojan, said Jerry Cole, Rainier's mayor.

Trojan's 1,200 jobs swelled the tax base and helped fund local schools. When 1,000 more temporary workers arrived most years to switch fuel rods, local merchants called it "Christmas in the spring."

After Trojan closed, an electric power plant was built nearby and a dry-wall manufacturer moved in.

The Trojan site now has what locals affectionately call the "glow-in-the-dark park." It's the fishing hole where radioactivity was found back in the 1980s.

One day last week, Len Waggoner fished for rainbow trout at Trojan Park, an elegant ripple of grass and birch trees that is just outside the plant's gates, literally in the shadow of the tower.

Waggoner joked that the fish there were not "Blinkies" — the three-eyed fish caught by Bart Simpson at a cartoon pond that looks very similar to the Trojan pond. As for the cooling tower, "it's an icon, but the community will be glad to see it gone," he said. "This is not a memory of a great product."

Resident Tony Hyde is also glad to see it go. The Columbia County commissioner plans to get up at 3 a.m. Sunday to get a good seat to watch the implosion. He also hopes to see Trojan become a state park.

"It's the whole plowshares-from-gun-barrels philosophy," Hyde said. "Let's make the most out of this."

Cole has another idea. "Who knows, maybe we'll see another cooling tower there."

Nuclear-power return?

His idea is not as far-fetched as it may sound.

At least three energy firms have applications pending with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for plants on the East Coast and in the South, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute. A co-founder of Greenpeace recently came out in favor of nuclear power. Congress included $600 million in nuclear-power-plant subsidies and loan-default guarantees in last year's energy bill.

Jack Riggs, a former energy official in the Clinton administration, said high fossil-fuel costs and concern about global warming are softening resistance. If Congress passes a "carbon cap" on energy emissions, nuclear power could return within 10 years, he said.

"I think there is still less than a 50-50 shot, but five to 10 years ago I would say none at all," said Riggs, an energy expert at the nonpartisan Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C.

"The climate-change concern has changed that, and the high price of natural gas."

Energy Northwest, Washington Public Power Supply System's successor, is not opposed to nuclear power but is looking at other types of generation first, spokesman Brad Peck said.

"What may seem unacceptable today may seem very acceptable in the future, if your options change," he said. "I think attitudes toward nuclear power are changing."

Jonathan Martin: 206-464-2605 or jmartin@seattletimes.com

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Hilton Head Island Packet
May 19, 2006

House committee nixes $368M budget for SRS project

By Dalia Naamani-Goldman
Special to The Packet

WASHINGTON -- The House Appropriations Committee eliminated the entire $368 million construction budget for a controversial plutonium-processing plant at the Savannah River Site on Wednesday, jeopardizing the project scheduled to break ground in October.

But lawmakers from South Carolina say they're not worried that the committee action could kill the plan to transform surplus weapons-grade plutonium into reactor fuel for nuclear energy at the 310-square-mile site near Aiken.

Emily Lawrimore, a spokeswoman for Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., said he "continues to work with other members from South Carolina and Georgia to restore this critical funding."

Before the vote, Wilson said the White House supports efforts to reduce weapons-grade nuclear materials, adding, "with the president's support, we have a chance."

Asked whether Wilson planned to attempt to restore the funds when the bill is debated in the House, Lawrimore declined comment.

On May 5, the Senate Armed Services Committee authorized full funding for the project. Wilson is counting on approval by the full Senate and that the project then will survive intact in the conference committee negotiations to reconcile differences between the House and Senate bills.

South Carolina's Republican senators, Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint, support the project. DeMint's spokesman Wesley Denton said his boss is working to make sure the Savannah site is "taken care of" in the Senate.

Graham said the program is "vital to our national security and we will continue to work together to ensure it is adequately funded. The citizens of South Carolina, along with the Savannah River Site workforce, should be proud of the role we are playing in making the world a safer place."

Officials from the National Nuclear Security Administration, an arm of the U.S. Department of Energy, said it is premature to discuss the project's demise.

"It is still early in the congressional process, and we will continue working with Congress to fully fund the budget request," said spokesman Bryan Wilkes.

The project has been controversial in the South Carolina legislature, where some have voiced concern about amassing stockpiles of nuclear material in the state.

Before the committee vote Wednesday, John Scofield, spokesman for chairman Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., said some lawmakers are concerned that the price tag for the project has more than tripled.

Originally, the Government Accountability Office estimated the project's total cost at $1 billion, but Scofield said that has ballooned to $3.5 billion.

"There's a potential boondoggle in the making, and we're not going to put taxpayers on the hook," he said. "We think it's prudent to take a pause here and ask the DOE to go back to the drawing board."

In 2000 the United States and Russia signed an agreement for each to eliminate 34 metric tons of plutonium and recycle it into mixed-oxide fuel, commonly referred to as MOX. Savannah River is the only MOX site in the country. Nuclear waste produced once the plutonium is processed would be transported to the federal nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

Preparation for construction of the plutonium processing plant has been under way for a year and completion is expected in September, said Jim Giusti, an Energy Department spokesman.

Construction would be finished in 2015, and it would take an additional five years to complete the processing of the 34 metric tons of plutonium, according to the NNSA. The Savannah site already has some plutonium stocks shipped from Rocky Flats, Colo., that will be stored until the facility is completed, the NNSA said.

The Energy Department is continuing to move forward with the project and hasn't found any "issues," said Wilkes, the NNSA spokesman. "There are no cost overruns because we're in the planning phase. We have enough money to begin construction."

Recent developments have caused some lawmakers to question the necessity of such a large facility.

Russia has dragged its feet on the nonproliferation agreement, relieving the United States of its responsibility to abide by the program, Scofield said. "Since the Russians have walked away from the deal, it makes funding this large construction project not necessary. We don't want construction to start on this deal."

Last week, the House voted to allow the United States to separate its program from Russia's and continue the project at the Savannah River Site. Although the Appropriations Committee action eliminated funding for the project, Wilkes said, "We intend to live up to our international agreements, and we expect the Russians to live up to theirs."

Dalia Naamani-Goldman is a reporter with Medill News Service in Washington.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
May 18, 2006

Panel trims nuclear waste spending

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Lawmakers took another bite out of the Bush administration's plan to reprocess nuclear waste on Wednesday, cutting an additional $30 million from the president's budget request for the initiative.

The House Appropriations Committee reduced spending on the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, or GNEP, to $120 million for the 2007 fiscal year, less than half what President Bush requested.

The president's original budget of $250 million was first cut to $150 million by a subcommittee last week.

The additional $30 million in savings was redirected by an amendment into programs that help low-income families make their homes more energy-efficient. The move came as the committee approved an annual spending bill for the Department of Energy.

Committee leaders said the Department of Energy failed to provide enough details about the costs, schedules and development plans for GNEP, as well as what kinds of waste that reprocessing would produce.

The Bush administration has proposed advanced research and development of facilities where spent nuclear fuel might be "recycled" for further use, while its waste products could be smaller in volume and less toxic for burial at the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada.

GNEP critics say the reprocessing being considered by the Bush administration is unaffordable and unreliable. The Natural Resources Defense Council estimated costs likely to mount to $30 billion to $40 billion over 15 years while the promise of the technology is far from certain.

The House action is likely to set up a GNEP conflict in coming months when the Senate takes up Energy Department spending.

Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., a committee chairman and GNEP proponent, said this week he plans to allocate all the money the president requested, "and look to see if I can find some more."

The energy spending bill also contained $544.5 million to continue development of a nuclear waste repository at Yucca.

The committee added $30 million for the Department of Energy to begin selecting one or more temporary waste storage sites while work continues at Yucca. The money would not be spent until Congress passed a follow-up bill authorizing DOE to set up interim storage.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
May 18, 2006

Nuclear agency nominee testifies

Job would require decisions on repository

By Alison Vekshin
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- A Bush administration official with Yucca Mountain ties came one step closer to becoming the next chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission after breezing through a Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday.

Dale Klein fielded questions from a Senate panel considering him for a post that would make him a key player in licensing the proposed nuclear waste repository.

Yucca Mountain came up only once during the hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Sen. James Jeffords, I-Vt., asked Klein about "adding new expertise to the commission that it has not traditionally had" to process a license application.

"Any time you have a regulatory body like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it's certainly important to have a very technically qualified staff to be able to review and evaluate the issues both for Yucca Mountain or for reactor safety," Klein told Jeffords. "If confirmed, I would hope that the NRC would be able to respond to a timely application with the right qualified individuals."

Repository foes say Klein could not be impartial in considering a license for Yucca Mountain because he took part in a pro-Yucca advertising campaign 15 years ago in Nevada.

Klein appeared in a series of television ads produced by the American Nuclear Energy Council that began airing in October 1991 as part of the "Nevada Initiative."

Sens. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and John Ensign, R-Nev., have said they will reserve judgment until they talk with Klein.

A former associate dean in the College of Engineering at the University of Texas, Klein is the assistant to the secretary of defense for nuclear, biological and chemical programs.

Klein would become chairman of the five-member Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has 3,300 employees and a $760 million budget.

Klein testitifed, "The challenges ahead for the NRC are substantial: dealing with the impending wave of applications for new reactors, overseeing their construction, and simultaneously ensuring the existing plants receive the high standard of regulatory oversight set by the NRC is extremely important."

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., the committee's chairman, said when the panel votes on Klein's nomination it also will decide on the nominations of NRC Commissioners Gregory Jaczko and Peter Lyons, serving under appointments that expire at year's end.

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Deseret News
May 18, 2006

House panel OKs option of private nuclear waste facility

By Suzanne Struglinski
Deseret Morning News

WASHINGTON — The Energy Department can consider a private facility for temporarily storing nuclear waste before the federal repository at Yucca Mountain is ready to receive it, the House Appropriations Committee decided Wednesday.

That means Private Fuel Storage, a nuclear waste storage site in Tooele County, could be an option for interim nuclear waste storage if Congress allows the Energy Department to go ahead with temporary storage.

The committee approved the $30 billion energy and water spending bill and its accompanying report, which slammed the Energy Department's progress — or lack thereof — on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage project in Nevada. The report said the committee would accept any further delay in the Yucca project "only if it accompanied interim storage beginning this decade."

The report said the department needs to address the problems of accumulating fuel at commercial nuclear reactors and the government's growing liability for the waste awaiting permanent storage. It included $30 million for interim waste storage if Congress would authorize the department to move ahead with it.

"The only constructive way to address these problems in the near term is for the department actually to begin to move spent fuel away from commercial reactor site and into some version of interim storage," the report said. "These interim storage sites may be located on DOE property, but the department should also investigate the availability of other federal and private sites."

PFS officials are being cautious in their assessment of recent talk on interim storage. Spokeswoman Sue Martin said the consortium would be willing to work with the DOE.

But this week's debate is different from the smaller debate that took place on interim storage last year. House Appropriations Energy and Water Development Chairman David Hobson, R-Ohio, told Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, during a floor debate a year ago, "I do not see any reason for the secretary to consider making a private site or a site on tribal land into a DOE site for interim storage. My intent is for the secretary to evaluate storage options at existing DOE sites."

Bishop and the rest of the Utah House delegation sent a letter to Hobson last month reminding him of the statement.

Utah's congressional delegation and the state government strongly opposed any plan to bring nuclear waste in Utah for storage. Beyond transportation risks associated with taking waste through the state, once waste is brought to Utah the fear is it would stay there permanently.

Private Fuel Storage, a licensed nuclear waste storage site on Goshute Indian Reservation land in Tooele County, has asked the Energy Department to pay to move commercial spent fuel to the site and is still talking with utilities to see if any would be interested in helping finance the project. Several original investors backed out last year and the site still faces transportation obstacles.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman has repeatedly said that PFS is not part of the department's overall strategy for handling nuclear waste. It is not clear if an approval by Congress to go ahead with interim storage could change that strategy.

The Energy Department was supposed to take nuclear power plant waste in 1998 and put it into the Yucca Mountain repository planned for 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Nuclear power users pay a fee for their electricity that goes into a special fund designed specifically to pay for the storage site.

But Yucca remains far from finished so the nuclear utilities have sued the department for the delay. The department estimates that every year Yucca is delayed beyond its subsequent 2010 opening date, it will cost the federal government $1 billion per year "with a conservative estimate of $500 million in legal liability and $500 million to monitor and guard defense spent fuel and high level radioactive waste at DOE sites," according to the report.

Hobson said after Wednesday's meeting that the department should put out a request for proposals and see who would be interested in storing the waste. The request could be for interim storage itself or for part of the administration's new plan to reprocess used nuclear fuel through the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.

Hobson stressed that he wants any interim storage program to be integrated with a reprocessing effort.

"In this committee's view, if any site refuses to provide interim storage as needed to support the operation of an integrated recycling facility, at whatever scale, then that site should be eliminated from all further consideration under GNEP," according to the report.

The committee approved an amendment offered by Rep. Peter Visclosky, D-Ohio, that slashed an additional $30 million from GNEP and put it toward funding for energy conservation and weatherization activities. The administration asked for $250 million to fund GNEP activities. The bill originally contained $150 million, but that amendment dropped it to $120 million.

E-mail: suzanne@desnews.com

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Deseret News
May 18, 2006

PFS site - but no transport? Spent-fuel trucks may be too big for Skull Valley road

By Joe Bauman
Deseret Morning News

"Humongous" slow-moving trucks weighing 225 tons would haul casks of highly radioactive fuel, hogging the narrow Skull Valley road in Tooele County, if the Private Fuel Storage facility is built.

That was the word from Denise Chancellor, assistant Utah attorney general, Wednesday while briefing the Legislature's Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment Interim Committee.

Legislators viewed schematics prepared by the Utah Department of Transportation, showing the size of the trucks, each of which would haul a load of 10 metric tons from a rail unloading facility near I-80 to the PFS plant on the Goshute Indian Reservation in Skull Valley, 26 miles away.

Most of the weight would consist of the heavy protective transportation cask housing spent fuel rods.

Originally, PFS planned to build a spur rail line from the Union Pacific railroad track to its site. But Congress moved to block that by designating the Cedar Mountain Wilderness Area, effectively barring a rail-hauling option. So PFS would have to haul the waste by truck from the railroad to the storage site.

One truck "will take up basically all of the road," she said.

The schematic showed a truck straddling the road's center line to avoid driving at the edge of the pavement.

The route, U-196, is in "sad shape," Chancellor added. Varying from 20 to 22 feet across, often without a shoulder, it is a main thoroughfare to Dugway Proving Ground. It is also an escape route that would be used if an accident happened at the Army's chemical weapons incinerator, located near Stockton, Tooele County.

PFS is licensed to haul casks that weigh 10 metric tons. The trucks would have up to 100 tires, and the vehicles are only a few inches shorter than an overpass they would need to clear.

It's unprecedented for so much of the highly radioactive spent fuel rods, up to 40,000 tons, to be stored in one place, she said.

Should PFS become a reality, nuclear waste will be shipped by rail through Salt Lake City en route to Tooele County, she said. About 697,000 Utahns live within five miles of the route.

The casks would be unloaded and placed on trucks at an intermodal transfer facility to be built about where the frontage road meets I-80.

Trucks would be between 150 and 180 feet long and 12 feet wide, according to the state's official comments on PFS's application to build a route from U-196 to the site. The project is expected to generate rail shipments of up to 4,000 casks of spent nuclear fuel.

"The anticipated interstate cask shipping rate is expected to be 100-200 casks per year, consisting of one to three casks per shipment. The heavy haul shipping rate along Skull Valley Road could be as high as six round trips per week or 312 trips per year.

Chancellor said the proposed Yucca Mountain permanent repository for such fuel can hold 70,000 metric tons of high-level waste, with 3,000 metric tons set aside for military waste and the rest from power companies. Already, the country's waste amounts to 60,000 metric tons with 2,000 metric tons generated annually.

By 2046, she said, 115,000 metric tons will have accumulated, based on existing nuclear reactors. The state would like to see this waste stored at the reactor sites in dry casks like those planned for PFS, until the country comes up with a permanent solution.

The stated purpose of PFS is to serve as a temporary facility to house waste until a permanent site is built. But Rep. Roger E. Barrus, R-Centerville, the committee's co-chairman, said that with so much waste piling up, nobody should be fooled into thinking PFS really would be temporary.

"It's a no-brainer," he said.

Meanwhile, Pam Schuller, the BLM planning coordinator who has been tallying comments on the right-of-way issue, said Tuesday that the count is still progressing. The last time a figure was released after the end of the public comment period on May 8, the number of statements counted was 4,300.

"I'm still getting some in the mail," Schuller told the Deseret Morning News. Some are postmarked before the end of the comment period, some after. She is weeding out those that cannot be considered.

The count is complicated because some people were so anxious to comment that the same person would send an e-mail, fax and letter. As far as the BLM is concerned, "that's one comment, not three." Others might hit the e-mail "send" button six times.

Schuller added, "I'm still pulling duplicates."

E-mail: bau@desnews.com

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U.S. Newswire
May 18, 2006

U.S. 'Must Start Building Nuclear Power Plants,' President Bush Tells Industry Executives

To: National Desk

Contact: Nuclear Energy Institute, 202-739-8000 or 703-644-8805 (after-hours)

SAN FRANCISCO, May 18 /U.S. Newswire/ -- President George W. Bush said the nation "must start building nuclear power plants" in a videotaped address to the nation's nuclear energy industry leaders here today.

"There is a growing consensus that nuclear power is a key part of a clean, secure energy future," Bush told 435 industry executives convened at the Nuclear Energy Institute's (NEI) annual conference. "To maintain our economic leadership and strengthen our energy security, America must start building nuclear power plants."

The United States is entering "a time of great progress," Bush said. He voiced optimism that greater use of nuclear energy will help the nation during this era.

"Our economy is creating new jobs. It is also creating new demands for energy ... By expanding our use of nuclear power, we can make our energy supply more reliable, our environment cleaner and our nation more secure for future generations."

Bush last June became the first sitting U.S. president to visit a nuclear plant in 26 years when he delivered an energy policy speech at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear station in Maryland.

During his five-minute address, he identified several steps that his administration has taken to encourage greater use of nuclear energy. These include:

-- Launching the Department of Energy's Nuclear Power 2010 initiative - an industry-government, cost-sharing program to test the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's new licensing process for new nuclear plants.

-- Proposing federal legislation, now under consideration by Congress, to advance DOE's nuclear waste management program, including provisions "to move forward with licensing, construction and operation" of the planned geologic repository for used nuclear fuel at Yucca Mountain, Nev.

-- Signing into law the Energy Policy Act of 2005, a measure that includes technology-neutral loan guarantees for clean-air energy sources, production tax credits for a limited number of new nuclear plants, and limited "standby support" insurance to counter the business risk of delays in new plant construction that are beyond the control of electric utilities.

Over the past year, 10 companies have announced plans to file license applications with the NRC for as many as 20 new nuclear power plants. "I'm optimistic about the future of nuclear energy," Bush said. "Your industry has come a long way in recent decades, and I'm confident that even greater progress lies ahead."

The president's call for new nuclear plants is a challenge that the industry is well-positioned to meet, said NEI's Chairman Anthony F. Earley Jr., chairman and CEO of DTE Energy.

Earley noted that nuclear energy's attributes of producing large amounts of clean, affordable and reliable electricity on a continual basis make it unique. "Other sources of electricity have one or two of these attributes, but only nuclear plants have all three. That is what makes nuclear energy a unique value proposition, and that is why so many people, of so many different persuasions, can find a place in our tent," Earley said.

Earley identified the business and political conditions that bode well for new nuclear plants, including:

-- Industry-average production costs of 1.7 cents per kilowatt-hour remain the lowest among all forms of energy except for hydroelectric facilities and represent a 33 percent decline over the past 10 years.

-- Capacity factors-a measure of efficiency-averaged about 90 percent for the fifth year in a row.

-- The industry produced 782 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2005, the second-highest ever.

The industry also is enjoying broad public support as evidenced by recent polls showing 75 percent approval for new nuclear plants in general and nearly 80 percent approval from people living within a 10 mile radius of current plants. Support also is coming from public officials.

"Who would have guessed that states and local communities would be competing among themselves, offering companies incentives to build new nuclear capacity?" Earley said.

Earley cautioned that the industry's hard-earned trust cannot be taken for granted and the industry "must anticipate potential challenges to our systems and components" and have a plan to deal with them.

The theme was echoed by NEI President and CEO Frank L. "Skip" Bowman. Bowman told the assembly's record-high number of attendees that the nuclear provisions in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 afforded the industry a framework to undertake the substantial capital investments necessary to construct new nuclear power plants, but the implementation of these provisions is a road not-yet- traveled.

"These are complex programs and initiatives...and the heavy lifting is still ahead of us," he said. "We have several more months of analysis and negotiation ahead of us on implementation of last year's energy legislation, but I believe we will succeed in obtaining workable implementing regulations," he said.

Bowman also pointed out that the industry must diligently work with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to streamline regulatory processes in anticipation of the submittal of numerous license applications for new plants over the next few years.

"This is a substantial burden on NRC and industry resources and places a high premium on efficiency on both sides," Bowman said. "Success may require innovative approaches on both sides and new ways of doing business."

Bowman expressed confidence that, even with challenges ahead, the industry can successfully help meet society's future energy needs by educating people who remain skeptical but open minded about nuclear power.

"Our industry raises many complex issues, but we can help lift the veil and build understanding by simply telling the truth," he said. "We have the facts, and the facts are on our side."

John Engler, president and CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers, told attendees during a 20-minute speech that NAM's 12,000 member companies strongly support nuclear energy as part of a diverse energy mix.

"We strongly support at the National Association of Manufacturers diversifying and expanding power generation in the United States. We believe nuclear energy will be a key component of the future energy landscape," Engler said. "If we don't act to address our nation's energy needs in the short- and the medium- and the long-term, the economic consequences will be devastating."

-- The Nuclear Energy Institute is the nuclear energy industry's policy organization. This news release and additional information about nuclear energy are available on NEI's Internet site at http://www.nei.org.

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NewsBlaze
May 18, 2006

Remarks Prepared for Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you here today. I hope I speak for many of you in this room when I tell you that I am excited. I am excited about the prospects for nuclear power in this country and abroad.

This is a time of remarkable opportunity for the American nuclear power industry.

How we act to take advantage of this opportunity-more specifically, how the industry players respond to this opportunity-will have enormous consequences for the American energy sector, for our economy, for our national security, and indeed for the entire world for generations to come.

That is why President Bush, Secretary Bodman, and the rest of us at the Department of Energy are doing everything we can to support and encourage the expansion of safe, emissions-free nuclear power.

That commitment is most recently evidenced by the successful establishment and confirmation of a new Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy at the Department of Energy-the first time the head of nuclear energy at DOE has held that rank in 14 years.

I don't think Dennis Spurgeon needs an introduction to this crowd, but if you'll bear with me for a moment, I'd like to take this opportunity to brag about what I consider to be one of the Department's best acquisitions in years.

From his service with the U.S. Navy, to his time with the Atomic Energy Commission, and of course his distinguished work in the nuclear industry, Dennis has proven himself to be a talented manager and an enthusiastic advocate for nuclear power.

The Secretary and I are pleased to bring an individual of his talent to DOE, and I know you will find him to be an energetic and helpful voice in the Administration.

You heard the President outline his agenda for increased nuclear power a few moments ago.

I'd like to elaborate on his vision by speaking to the three key elements of this Administration's nuclear power policy agenda. We want to do three things:

1. Create an environment where new nuclear power plants will be built here in the U.S. as soon as possible.

2. License Yucca Mountain and move spent fuel.

3. Develop the advanced recycling technologies that will be necessary to a growing nuclear sector, and reorder the global nuclear enterprise to develop and implement a global fuel leasing and assurances regime...this is our proposed Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.

All three objectives are complimentary and necessary to the others.

But let me go back to the first point (and an essential first step to any real nuclear future)-this Administration's commitment to the construction of new nuclear plants.

Over the past few years, this Administration has sought to shape an environment more conducive to new nuclear plant construction.

In principle, we have worked to remove various barriers preventing new plants from being built here in the U.S. For example, we are meeting our goals under the $1.1 billion Nuclear Power 2010 program, including having made good progress on Early Site Permitting and our successful work leading toward certified, standardized, plant designs.

With the President's signature on last year's long-awaited Energy Policy Act, several other barriers were eliminated, and new incentives provided:

The bill extended The Price Anderson indemnity program through 2025

The bill made available federal risk insurance to the first six new nuclear plants. (In fact, just last week our Department issued the interim final rule that establishes the two-step process for obtaining this insurance.)

And the bill made available production tax credits and loan guarantees to further lessen the financial risk the first few movers may be exposed to.

With these efforts, we believe we have gone a long towards creating an environment where new nuclear power plants will be built here in the U.S. as soon as possible. That is step one, and it was an important one.

This brings me to the second element of the Administration's nuclear power policy agenda-licensing Yucca Mountain and moving spent fuel as soon as possible.

This Administration is committed to doing just that, and has recently submitted to Congress legislation to enable us to fully implement the 2002 decision to build a repository at Yucca Mountain.

We have proposed in the legislation to eliminate the current statutory 70,000 metric ton cap on disposal capacity in order to allow maximum use of the mountain's technical capacity, while continuing to provide for the safe isolation of the nation's entire commercial spent nuclear fuel inventory.

We also propose a more streamlined NRC licensing process and for initiation of infrastructure activities-including safety and other upgrades to enable earlier start-up of operations.

Additional provisions are designed to consolidate duplicative environmental reviews, and reform the funding stream to ensure that the money from nuclear ratepayers goes directly to the project.

We have made significant improvements to the program during the last year. And we are developing a licensing approach that we will be able to pursue with high confidence of success. We have within our ability to pass the Yucca Mountain legislation and have the project on a success path before this Administration is over. We must succeed.

This brings me to the third element of the Administration's nuclear power policy agenda: Our proposal to develop the advanced recycling technologies that will be necessary to a growing nuclear sector, and reorder the global nuclear enterprise to develop and implement a global fuel leasing and assurances regime...this is our proposed Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.

The President has stated a policy goal of promoting a great expansion of nuclear power-here in the United States, as I have discussed-but also around the world. The reasons for this are obvious. The Department of Energy projects total world energy demand to more than double by 2050. Looking only at electricity demand, projections indicate an increase of over 75% in global electricity consumption in the next two decades.

Nuclear power is the only mature technology of significant potential to provide large amounts of completely emissions-free base load power to meet this need.... resulting in significant benefits for clean development, reducing world greenhouse gas intensities, pollution abatement, and the security that comes from greater energy diversity.

But nuclear power, with all of its potential for mankind, carries with it two enduring challenges: (1) what do we do with the increasing amounts of spent nuclear fuel? and (2) how can we prevent the proliferation of fuel cycle technologies that can lead to weaponization?

The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership seeks to address and minimize those two challenges by developing technologies to recycle the spent fuel in a more proliferation resistant manner and by supporting a reordering of the global nuclear enterprise to encourage the leasing of fuel from fuel cycle states in a way that presents strong commercial incentives against new states building their own enrichment and reprocessing capabilities.

The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership is really about identifying the policies, developing the technologies, and building the international regimes that would manage and promote a dramatic growth in nuclear generation in a way that enhances our waste management and non-proliferation objectives.

Regarding our policy on spent nuclear fuel, the United States stopped old-form reprocessing in the 1970's, principally because it could be used to produce pure plutonium.

But the rest of the major nuclear economies (France, the United Kingdom, Russia, Japan, and others) continued on without us. We now have a world-wide buildup of nearly 250 metric tons of separated plutonium, vast amounts of spent fuel, and we risk the continued spread of fuel cycle technology.

In 1982, when our current Nuclear Waste Policy Act was first enacted, and in 1987 when it was significantly amended, the prospects for new nuclear generation where such that we could avoid a reconsideration of our government's decision to abandon recycling of spent fuel. But today, with good prospects for new builds, and an even greater need for new builds, we must rethink the wisdom of our current once-thru spent fuel policy. We must move to recycling.

We still need Yucca Mountain. And Yucca Mountain is the best location in the US for a permanent geologic repository. But the capacity of YM as currently configured will be oversubscribed by 2010.

Think about this, if nuclear power remains only at only 20% of U.S. electricity generation over the course of the century, we will have to build the equivalent of 9 Yucca Mountains.

This Administration believes the wiser course is to recycle the used fuel coming out of the reactors, reducing its quantity and radiotoxicity so that only one Yucca Mountain will likely be required.

To be successful in this endeavor we seek to develop and demonstrate the key enabling technologies in partnership with other nations that possess the full elements of the fuel cycle. We will seek to:

Greatly accelerate our work in the research, development and demonstration of advanced recycling.

Pursue the R&D that will allow us to produce and qualify actinide-based fuel.

And demonstrate at engineering scale an advanced burner reactor to extract the energy potential out of recycled fuel, while reducing the radiotoxicity of the waste in repeated cycles.

But we will also seek to work with those nations to establish a Reliable Fuel Services Framework under which fuel supplier nations would choose to operate both nuclear power plants and fuel production and handling facilities, while providing reliable fuel services to user nations that choose to operate only the nuclear power plants themselves.

In exchange for the assured fuel supplies on attractive commercial terms, the user nations would have to agree to suspend any investments in enrichment or reprocessing.

Other crucial elements of GNEP include R&D on the use of small reactors worldwide, particularly in the developing world, and the development and promotion of advanced safeguards and best practices.

In conclusion, we are proposing that the United States lead the transformation to a new, safer and more secure approach to nuclear energy...an approach that brings the benefits of nuclear energy to the world while reducing vulnerabilities from proliferation and nuclear waste.

We are in a stronger position to shape the future if we are a part of it.

Of course challenges remain in demonstrating the GNEP technologies. But without bold action, the world will have more plutonium, more spent fuel, more proliferation, more carbon and less energy at home and abroad.

In closing, nuclear power is not a silver bullet, but it is part of a broader energy strategy that when combined with advancements in energy efficiency, clean coal, carbon sequestration, and renewables, can and will make a difference in the security, environmental, and energy challenges we face.

Now most of the words in this speech have been dedicated to what the government is doing. I think that is an appropriate topic for a speech from me. But I know, as you know, that it is really not the government that has brought us to the doorstep of the nuclear renaissance. More than anything, the safety and operational record of the industry over the last decade have put nuclear power back on the table.

And it will not be the government that will make the nuclear renaissance happen. We have our role-to shape the playing field, provide regulatory certainty, meet our spent fuel obligations, and pursue the R&D and international arrangements to shape a more rational nuclear future. But it is you...it is you - the industry...the investors...the builders. Only you have the power to really make it happen.

The President, Secretary Bodman, and I have only 977 days left to build momentum for the energy policy course I have outlined here today. It is in the national interest, and I believe, in the industry interest.

Let me conclude by congratulating you for holding this important conference. I think history will bear out the importance of this time.

Thank you for your attention, and for the invitation to share my thoughts with you this morning.

Source: U.S. Department of Energy
judythpiazza@gmail.com

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Open Democracy
May 18, 2006

Nuclear-waste politics

Rob Edwards

The short-term attention-span of politicians works against the long-term environmental thinking the issue of nuclear waste needs, says Rob Edwards.

It's the timescales that are so daunting. Take plutonium-239, for instance, created by nuclear reactors with a half-life of 24,100 years. A sizeable lump is going to take hundreds of thousands of years to decay.

Looking backwards, that takes us somewhere before the dawn of humankind. Looking forwards, we are into the realms of science fiction. Put the problem to a politician with a tenure of five years or less, and it's easy to see what will happen – nothing.

That, in brutal summary, is nuclear-waste policy in most countries. The nuclear industry's creation of radioactive wastes - so dangerous that they've got to be isolated from the environment for unimaginable reaches of time - inevitably produces political paralysis.

Hence the United States´s twenty-three-year-old plan to dispose of spent fuel from reactors at the heart of Yucca mountain in the Nevada desert has been delayed by fierce political and legal opposition. Progress has not been helped by a scientific scandal over the falsifying of geological data.

Japan is looking at possible sites but does not expect to open a repository before 2035. A European Union proposal that nuclear-waste sites should be operational by 2018 had to be ditched because most member-states haven't a hope of meeting such a deadline.

Even the two most advanced countries – Sweden and Finland – are still more than a decade away from actually putting any radioactive waste down a hole. Sweden is hoping to choose a site in 2011 and open it by 2017, while tunnels are being blasted at Olkiluoto near Turku in Finland with the aim of having a repository in 2020.

But the paralysis is most obvious in one of the countries that first let the nuclear genie out of the bottle – the United Kingdom. More than fifty-five years after military reactors at Windscale in Cumbria first started producing waste, it is still in temporary stores with no final disposal in sight.

The "deep disposal" solution

The nuclear-waste problem was first highlighted in Britain by the royal commission on environmental pollution in 1976. "It would be morally wrong to commit future generations to the consequences of fission power on a massive scale," it said, "unless it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that at least one method exists for the safe isolation of these wastes for the indefinite future."

Since then three separate government programmes aimed at finding sites where waste could be buried have been abandoned – in 1981, 1987 and 1997. The last two attempts, both of which were rejected in the run-up to general elections, were masterminded by the nuclear industry radioactive waste executive (Nirex).

Despite this, Nirex has survived. In 2005 it ended more than two decades as a creature of the nuclear industry by annexing itself to government. But it remains wedded to what it calls its "deep disposal concept" – the idea that the UK's nuclear waste will, sooner or later, end up in a hole in the ground.

Recent revelations suggest that Nirex may have been somewhat over-enthusiastic in its pursuit of this goal. In 2004 it was trying to work out its approach to a new body set up by the government to recommend disposal options for the UK's 470,000 cubic metres of waste – the committee on radioactive waste management (CoRWM).

A draft media and public affairs strategy from that year, released to Greenpeace under the freedom of information act, has been posted on the anti-nuclear website, nuclearspin.org. It revealed that Nirex was considering exerting "third party pressure" to win CoRWM round to the idea of deep disposal.

The strategy listed more than sixty "suggested targets" including leading politicians in London and Edinburgh, political advisers, councillors and journalists. Oral briefings with key figures would enable Nirex "to engage in a more candid dialogue about CoRWM", it said.

But it was with government departments that Nirex had "experienced the greatest amount of frustration", the strategy disclosed. Civil servants were accused of "viewing Nirex as a 'problem' and seeking to keep us wrapped up". So, it argued, "heavy political pressure needs to be brought to bear".

Worse, Nirex was advised by a consultant, Allan Rogers, to "enlist" politicians sympathetic to its cause and to "isolate" those who were hostile. "We have to be sure that opinion leaders are carefully recruited and groomed", he said.

The aim was to convince "target groups" that deep underground disposal was the best way forward "otherwise there can be no future development of the nuclear industry", Rogers argued.

Although Nirex claims it didn't use these tactics, three years on it seems to have won the argument, raising questions over whether it warped the process. With only one dissenter, CoRWM has now issued draft recommendations in favour of deep disposal.

As a result the government will be left with little option other than to restart the search for a disposal site. In other words, after three decades of discussions and investigations, British policy is exactly back where it began.

The British prime minister, Tony Blair, will try and use CoRWM's final report, expected in July, to help clear the way for a new nuclear-power programme. But this would be an abuse, with even the committee's chairman, Gordon MacKerron, stressing that its recommendations should not be seen as a "green light" for building new reactors.

So far no one in government looks likely to draw the obvious conclusion, which applies worldwide. As there is still no solution to the problem of nuclear waste, there should be no new nuclear-power programme. What was "morally wrong" for the royal commission in 1976 is still morally wrong in 2006.

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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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