Yucca Mountain News Clips
Thursday, June 22, 2006
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
June 22, 2006

Official: States should withhold money for Yucca

Adviser to Maine governor says DOE has already broken nuclear waste contracts

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- States that are growing frustrated over delays at Yucca Mountain should consider withholding millions of dollars that utility ratepayers contribute each year into the project's construction fund, the safety adviser to the governor of Maine said in a speech Wednesday to a nuclear waste conference.

The nuclear waste fund has now raised $28 billion but only about $8 billion has been approved by Congress to be spent on the repository project managed by the Department of Energy.

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A bill that would change the accounting so that Congress might find it easier to appropriate larger sums has been stalled.

In the meantime, states that draw electricity from nuclear power plants are conveying consumer fees -- about $750 million a year -- to the federal government for nuclear waste disposal.

Illinois has contributed $3.4 billion since the fund was established in the early 1980s, and 11 other states have contributed $1 billion or more, according to conference participants.

"The states should withhold the money," said Charles Pray, nuclear safety adviser to Maine Gov. John Baldacci.

Officials in Maine are seeking the removal of nuclear waste in the form of 1,434 spent fuel assemblies stored at the decommissioned Maine Yankee Atomic Power plant in Wicasset.

"There may be some legal stallers who say that can't be done," Pray said.

"Some utilities will say that would violate their contracts. But the DOE has already broken contracts" by failing to have a waste repository opened by an agreed upon 1998 date.

No new date has been set for repository operations.

Pray's speech opened a two-day meeting of the U.S. Transport Council, a coalition of companies focused on nuclear waste shipping issues.

Pray urged participants to step up lobbying Congress.

"It is a question of political will," Pray said.

"Congress has been insulated but if we can get them to focus on this issue it would be surprising what could get done."

In a luncheon speech, Brew Barron, chief nuclear officer of Duke Energy, which operates nuclear plants in North Carolina and South Carolina, urged "patience and a sense of realism."

"There is understandable frustration amongst ratepayers and regulators and utilities that have put a lot of money into the waste fund, and there can be a tendency to say let's just get (nuclear waste) off our sites," Barron said.

"But just moving it off the sites without creating certainty of where the waste is going to go and how it is going to get there is not success. We have to keep our eye on the ball."

"We are talking about isolating waste for thousands and thousands of years," Barron said.

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PR Newswire
June 22, 2006

BLET Convention Update: Delegates Warned of Radioactive Rail Shipments

LAS VEGAS, June 22 /PRNewswire/ -- Delegates attending the BLET's First Quadrennial Convention were warned of the dangers of transporting spent nuclear waste and discussed ways of ensuring their safety as well as the safety of the general public.

Scott Palmer, the BLET's Oregon State Legislative Board Chairman, alerted the delegates about the serious threat of transporting spent nuclear fuel by rail and the possible threat of radiation poisoning.

Palmer, who has studied the issue in depth, advised the delegates that rail workers do not receive proper training to handle spent nuclear fuel and do not receive the same protections that are afforded other nuclear industry workers. In addition, there are no plans to record, monitor or track rail worker exposure levels.

"It's our goal to not only track but to lower exposure levels and to keep them as low as possible," Palmer said. "Right now, no carrier even has a program that will protect pregnant workers from radiation. If you show up to work, you cannot turn down a shipment of radioactive material. Rail is the way they're going to move it."

The general public should be concerned as well, Palmer said. "Right now, there are no requirements for safe parking areas," Palmer said. "Right now, these trains could be parked across from elementary schools or hospitals."

The Department of Energy is embarking upon a 50 year shipment plan to transport spent nuclear fuel, which will begin in the next few years.

Palmer represents the BLET on a Department of Energy working group to determine policies for shipping nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain. The BLET is the only labor organization participating in the group. Other participants include the DOE, Department of Transportation, and the Association of American Railroads.

The BLET is a division of the Teamsters Rail Conference.

SOURCE Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET)

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San Antonio Express
June 22, 2006

Nuke plant expansion sought

Anton Caputo
Express-News Staff Writer

BAY CITY — The company that co-owns the South Texas Project nuclear power plant wants to double its size with a $5.2 billion expansion.

Saying the move is driven by the state's population boom and the generous nuclear incentives included in last year's federal energy bill, officials with New Jersey-based NRG Energy announced the massive project at the power plant Wednesday morning to a group of local and state officials.

The announcement prompted cries of protest from some advocacy groups around the state who question the safety of nuclear energy, but those assembled at the plant heralded the news as an economic blessing.

"Announcements like this demonstrate that the investment market in Texas supports multibillion-dollar risks," said Paul Hudson, chairman of the Public Utility Commission of Texas.

The plant's current two units, which began operating in 1988 and 1989, produce 2,500 megawatts of electricity, enough to power more than 1 million homes. The new units, which could be online by 2014 and 2015, will more than double that capacity by adding more than 2,700 megawatts.

San Antonio's CPS Energy owns 40 percent of the existing South Texas Project, and Austin Energy owns 16 percent. Officials with NRG, which owns the remaining 44 percent, said they would like the two utilities to partner in the new units, but neither utility would commit Wednesday.

"We'll have to evaluate if more nuclear energy is affordable and if it's compatible with our fuels diversification program," said Jim Nesrsta, CPS Energy's director of nuclear oversight.

Nuclear power currently makes up about a third of CPS' energy production. That's a major reason its rates are the lowest of any of the 10 largest U.S. cities, CPS spokesman Bob McCullough added.

There are 103 nuclear power reactors in the United States producing about 20 percent of the country's electricity. The last nuclear plant was licensed in 1978, the year before the Three Mile Island disaster, but didn't open until 1987.

The South Texas Project is one of two nuclear power facilities in Texas. The other, Comanche Peak, is in Somervell County about 80 miles southwest of downtown Dallas.

Hudson said 16 companies around the country have expressed interest in opening 25 new nuclear plants. But he described NRG's proposal as unprecedented because it presented a "risk only to the shareholders, and not to ratepayers in the state."

The nuclear incentives in the 2005 federal energy bill include federally backed loan guarantees and a risk insurance policy to hedge against construction delays due to regulatory changes or litigation. They also include a production tax credit that NRG regional President Steven Winn said could save the company "in the low hundreds of millions of dollars per year."

It's likely that NRG Energy, like other power companies interested in new nuclear plants, "are groping for balance of some kind," said David Freyman, vice president at the energy consulting firm Barnes & Click in Dallas. They want to spread their investments in coal, natural gas, renewable sources and, now, nuclear.

And NRG Energy and others want to gauge public response to new nukes.

"Congress has loosened the licensing rules a bit, and some are putting their toes in the water," Freyman said. "They know it'll be a long process, no matter what happens, but I'm not sure anybody has the guts to go through a full-blown licensing process."

Although the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl have faded for many, "there's so much emotion tied up in the whole thing. They need everybody on their side, and that means starting with a low-level PR and education effort."

The company plans to spend roughly $100 million over the next two years on permit application alone, said NRG President and CEO David Crane.

Crane heavily praised the environmental benefits of nuclear power, pointing out it doesn't create the smog-producing pollutants or global warming gases emitted by coal-fired power plants.

"We as an industry need to recognize that the 800-pound environmental gorilla in the room is carbon emissions and their impact on global warming," he said.

To illustrate his point, Crane said that the power produced by the four units at the South Texas nuclear plant would create 40 million tons of carbon emissions each year if produced by conventional coal-fired power plants.

"That amount of carbon emissions exceeds the total annual carbon emissions of Bulgaria," Crane added. "I say to each of you, if on this one site in Matagorda County, Texas, we have the opportunity to save a Bulgaria of carbon emissions each year, then we need to commit ourselves to make it happen."

Despite the potential benefits, environmental advocacy groups blistered at the proposal.

"Nuclear power has proven to be too costly and too risky," said Tom Smith of Public Citizen's Austin office. "The industry can't generate electricity without billions of dollars in subsidies."

Smith was quick to point to the contentious history of the two existing units as an indication of what could occur with the two proposed units.

When the first one finally opened in1988, it was eight years behind schedule and carried a price tag that ballooned $4.5 billion over initial projections. Five years later, after setting records for productivity and reliability, the facility sat idle for a year amid a barrage of problems with federal regulators who found fault with plant maintenance, engineering and management.

The construction delays and management problems also gave rise to lengthy litigation against original contractor Brown and Root and managing partner Houston Lighting & Power that was not resolved until the mid-1990s.

Luke Metzger of Environment Texas voiced many of the same concerns as Smith.

"This is just too dangerous," he said. "Still to this day, we don't have a good way to treat the waste."

The South Texas Project stores spent nuclear fuel on-site in concrete and stainless steel containment pools. It plans to store the waste from its new units in the same way until the federal government creates a permanent disposal facility.

A National Academy of Sciences report released least year questioned whether the industry fully understood all the safety and security concerns involved in storing a large amount of spent nuclear fuel on-site.

South Texas Project President Joe Sheppard said there is capacity to store the spent fuel on-site for the life of the plant and beyond and insisted the setup was safe and secure. He did say, however, that the permanent solution was for the federal government to create a repository, such as the controversial facility proposed for Yucca Mountain, Nev.

acaputo@express-news.net

Twice the power

Current plant: Two reactors opened in 1988 and 1989 produce 2,500 megawatts of electricity, enough to power more than 1 million homes.

Location: 12,220-acre site near Bay City.

Owners: CPS Energy, 40 percent; Austin Energy, the city of Austin, 16 percent; NRG Energy, 44 percent

Proposed expansion: Two reactors, which could be online by 2014 and 2015, would produce more than 2,700 megawatts. CPS Energy and Austin haven't committed to the expansion.

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Tallahassee Democrat
June 22, 2006

Letter: Another view of Yucca Mountain

Re: "Yucca holds a key to clean energy" (column, June 20).

Gregory Choppin erroneously links the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site in Nevada with the ability of the nation and the nuclear power industry to move ahead with siting and constructing new nuclear power plants.

Constraints on new generating facilities have to do with the economics of nuclear power and the public's perceptions (rightly or wrongly) of this energy source. Spent nuclear fuel is, as Mr. Choppin points out, already being safely and securely stored on-site at reactor locations. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has determined that such storage is safe for the next hundred years or more.

Yucca Mountain, on the other hand is far from a safe and suitable disposal site. It is riddled with fractures and earthquake faults; water moves through it very rapidly; and waste that is there cannot be isolated from people and the environment for the long time period required.

The absolute worst thing for the nuclear industry in this country would be to push ahead with Yucca, knowing the site is unsuitable and dangerous. Instead of focusing on the failed Yucca Mountain project, Mr. Choppin and other nuclear power advocates should be promoting safe, at-reactor dry storage as a way to buy time for finding scientifically sound and credible solutions to the spent fuel problem. Yucca Mountain is not, and will never be, that solution.

Joseph Strolin
Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects
jstrolin@nuc.state.nv.us

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Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal
June 22, 2006

Tribal leader pushes for nuclear waste clean-up

Officials of the Prairie Island Indian Community urged lawmakers to push legislation to clean up an Xcel Energy Inc. nuclear waste storage site near Yucca Mountain.

Bennett participated in the Yucca Mountain Task Force press conference in Washington D.C. today.

Prairie Island is the closest community in the country to a nuclear waste site, about 600 yards away from tribe members' homes. The tribe said it has been fighting to have the waste removed since 1994, when the state allowed Minneapolis-based Xcel (NYSE: XEL) to store waste there. The site includes 20 above-ground, dry-cask storage units of radioactive nuclear waste.

Yucca Mountain, Nev., had been the proposed site for a national waste-storage facility. But its prospects are unclear.

The Prairie Island Indian Community is located about 50 miles southeast of the Twin Cities near Red Wing and Hastings, Minn.

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Las Vegas SUN
June 20, 2006

Brief news stories from Las Vegas
Associated Press

LAS VEGAS (AP) - Yucca Mountain managers have cut 19 vehicles from the project motor fleet after auditors found up to $9.1 million wasted a year on cars, trucks, minibuses and work vans.

An audit published in May by the Energy Department inspector general found about one in five vehicles was underused based on mileage or hours on the road. Auditors examined the use of 75 Yucca Mountain project vehicles in 2004, and questioned the use of 15 of them.

At the much larger Nevada Test Site, auditors reviewed 191 vehicles in 2004, and found 20 percent of them also underused. Test site officials disagreed with the audit. A follow-up is due this month.

The Energy Department requires its laboratories and project sites to monitor vehicle use and reassign or dispose of those that are underused.

Auditors concluded the underutilization rate departmentwide was about 28 percent.

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Salt Lake City Weekly
June 21, 2006

Costly Nukes

Local governments could face a hefty bill should nuclear power-plant waste come to Utah.

by Ted McDonough

Becoming home to nuclear-fuel waste can carry a huge price tag for state and city governments as local emergency crews take on the responsibility of guarding waste shipments and protecting residents.

Even in the best case, where trainloads of spent fuel are shipped without problem, the cost of monitoring the shipments and gearing up for a potential emergency could be in the billions.

That warning comes from Nevada where a consultant projects it will cost $385 million to prepare for shipments to the proposed national nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain. For Nevada´s Clark County alone, the projected cost totals $2.5 billion by the time the last shipment arrives 24 years later.

Steve Erickson of the Utah-based Citizens Education Project (CEP) points to the Nevada numbers as a harbinger of Utah´s costs should Private Fuel Storage (PFS) succeed in locating a site for nuclear-power leftovers—billed as “temporary’ until Yucca Mountain comes online—on the Skull Valley Goshute reservation.

PFS has pledged to pay Tooele County, where the waste ultimately would land, but other areas could incur emergency costs as well. Before casks of spent nuclear fuel reach the proposed storage site, they would travel by rail from points as diverse as Florida and California. Shipments would arrive in Utah on rail lines from the north, pass near Ogden and through Salt Lake City near the Gateway development, then head west to Tooele County and the Skull Valley reservation, about 50 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.

As part of Nevada´s fight against nuclear shipments, the consulting firm Urban Environmental Research (UER) examined the potential costs of training and equipping police and fire crews for some Nevada cities along the train route to Yucca Mountain.

Sheila Conway, company principal, said few local police and fire agencies are trained or equipped to deal with a possible nuclear accident. Getting cities ready means purchasing radiation detectors and training emergency crews. Then there´s the cost of getting on the terrorist radar screen. “Nuclear waste shipments are moving targets,’ she said.

Dealing with a potential terrorist threat would mean building an advanced emergency operations center, adding communications equipment to monitor shipments and developing the intelligence capability of local law enforcement.

Utah hasn´t performed similar studies, according to Dianne Nielson, head of Utah´s Department of Environmental Quality and Denise Chancellor, the assistant state attorney general heading up Utah´s opposition to PFS. The Salt Lake Chamber has considered a study, said Natalie Gochnour, vice president of the chamber, which came out against PFS complaining the stigma of the project could harm the business climate.

Erickson said Utah´s costs aren´t likely to be as high as those calculated for Nevada, given the larger scale of the Yucca Mountain project. But Utah is sure to face similar issues, he said.

“And at this point, no one seems to have any idea who would pay for it,’ he said. “Local taxpayers will have to eat the costs one way or another.’

Bruce Whitehead, a PFS spokesman, called predictions of economic doom absurd. Spent fuel will be shipped in concrete and steel casks tested to withstand impacts at highway speeds.

PFS will provide security guards along the entire route, he said. And the company will pay local governments and lend its own employees to help with training.

There will be additional money for local governments that cooperate, Whitehead said. PFS won´t have to pay taxes, being located on an Indian reservation, he said. But PFS already is giving Tooele County $4,500 per month and has inked contracts with Tooele County and the Goshutes worth potentially hundreds of millions.

If Utah state officials would talk to PFS, the company is happy to offer the state a “rather healthy’ payment as well, he said.

Whitehead said any costs not covered by PFS will be paid for by the federal government.

That´s unlikely, said UER´s Conway. The federal Department of Energy plans to give local governments training grants in advance of nuclear shipments, but Conway said the money won´t cover equipment and the DOE is talking about $200,000 per impacted state.

“That won´t come close to covering the costs,’ she said.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
19 vehicles removed from Yucca fleet

Audit found 20 percent of inventory underused

By Maria Hegstad
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Officials at Yucca Mountain took 19 federal vehicles out of its fleet after auditors determined that 20 percent of the project's inventory was underused, according to an inspection report.

The Energy Department is wasting as much as $9.1 million annually by holding onto cars, trucks, minibuses and work vans that are considered underused based on their mileage or hours they are on the road, according to an audit published in May by the department's inspector general.

Auditors examined 75 vehicles used by the Yucca Mountain Project in 2004, and questioned the use of 15 of them.

At the Nevada Test Site, auditors reviewed 191 vehicles in 2004, and found 20 percent of them also to be underused. Test site officials disagreed with the audit.

The Energy Department requires its laboratories and project sites to monitor vehicle use and reassign or dispose of those that are underused, or to justify keeping them around. They are used for jobs at the sites or to transport employees to and from their work areas.

Auditors concluded the underutilization rate departmentwide was about 28 percent.

Yucca Mountain managers accepted the findings and reduced their fleet by 19 sedans and four-wheel drive trucks, spokesman Allen Benson said. They were either sold or transferred to other government agencies, he said.

Benson said Yucca Mountain officials are not allowed to take vehicles home or use them for nonwork errands. Many are for offroad use.

"If you have a government car you have it for official use only," he said.

Authorities at the test site disagreed with the audit in part because its data was two years old, spokesman Darwin Morgan said.

The test site is unique among Department of Energy reservations because of its vast sprawl and remoteness 65 miles from Las Vegas, he said.

Most of the test site employees travel there by bus. Once onsite, they must travel widely, Morgan said. The test site maintains a fleet of 1,044 vehicles, a mix of trucks, SUVs, vans, sedans, and special purpose vehicles, he said.

"The manager overseeing the program constantly keeps an eye on the fleet," he said. "The less money you spend with vehicles, (more can go) to other areas."

The test site performs its own reviews, Morgan said.

An internal study in the first three months of 2006 determined 5 percent of test site vehicles were underused. As a result, site contractor Bechtel Nevada was instructed to reduce that to less than 1 percent by June, he said. Another review will be performed at the end of June.

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Tallahassee Democrat
June 20, 2006

Yucca holds a key to clean energy

By Gregory R. Choppin

My View

Nuclear power is back in the spotlight.

A few weeks ago, Great Britain became the latest country to set the stage for a new generation of nuclear power plants. In a speech, Prime Minister Tony Blair urged the continued use of nuclear power as part of a much-needed change in energy policy.

Construction of new nuclear plants is under way in a number of countries, including Japan, China, India, Korea and Finland. Canada and France, among others, plan to build or refurbish nuclear plants within the next five years.

And several European counties - including Germany, Sweden, Spain and Switzerland - are re-evaluating plans to phase out nuclear power.

In the United States, there are many signs of renewed interest in nuclear power. Three-quarters of the 103 nuclear power plants in the U.S. have obtained 20-year license extensions or plan to do so. There are initial plans, by several consortia of utilities and individual companies, to build between 15 and 20 new nuclear plants. Florida utilities are showing great interest in increasing nuclear-power capacity. Some local communities are competing with each other, offering companies incentives to site the plants in their areas.

Much of the reason for this nuclear renaissance is that, unlike coal, oil and natural gas, nuclear power does not emit any global-warming gases. However, nuclear is not the only clean energy source that can help us reduce our impact on the world's environment. Renewable sources - solar, wind, biomass and geothermal, along with improvements in energy efficiency - are also extremely important. And their contribution is steadily growing. They are not yet capable of providing the large amounts of economic power around the clock, which we get from nuclear energy. But their roles are expanding, and they are important in Florida and nationally.

Both nuclear power and renewable energy sources have been promoted in federal energy policies, through a series of economic incentives to energy producers, because of their critical importance to the environment. Unfortunately, Congress has been reluctant to take one of the steps necessary to assure a growing contribution of nuclear power - the licensing and construction of the Yucca Mountain waste repository in Nevada. Used nuclear fuel is being stored safely and securely at nuclear power plants, but these plants cannot be permanent repositories.

Congress must act to move the repository forward. Yucca has not received adequate funding, even though more than enough money is being collected from electric power users by the government specifically for that purpose. Congress should correct that, and correct a few technicalities - such as an artificial limit on the amount of used fuel that the repository can hold - to allow Yucca to become a reality.

We can't afford to gamble with something as important as electricity reliability and environmental quality. Now is the time to move ahead with nuclear power, if we are to have clean and affordable energy in the years ahead. Our energy security - and that of the world - depends on it.

Gregory R. Choppin is the R.O. Lawton distinguished professor of chemistry at Florida State University. Contact him at choppin@chem.fsu.edu.

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American Enterprise
June 20, 2006

Lessons of the Nuclear Age

By William Tucker

The North Koreans are likely to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile this week that has the range to hit the West Coast. This means Kim Jong Il and company now have something to do with the dozen-or-so nuclear weapons they have built.

And so, for perhaps the first time since Stalin achieved nuclear armaments in 1947, the United States is confronting the ultimate weapon in the hands of a psychopath. Will the North Koreans use their newfound status to drop a bomb on Seattle or San Francisco? I wouldn´t bet against it. They have nothing to lose. Most Americans could go their whole lives without giving North Korea a second thought, but North Koreans (in their press, at least) are obsessed with the United States and imagine themselves in a one-on-one battle of Armageddon.

North Korea wants to take on America for the same reason that Mark David Chapman decided to kill John Lennon and Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy. They were nobodies who wanted to attack a somebody. Just engaging us hugely inflates their ego. Will they eventually launch one of their missiles against us? I wouldn´t bet against it. Both Hinckley and Oswald found their targets. And of course al-Qaeda accomplished the same thing on September 11th.

As we contemplate what to do about this flyspeck attack, it´s worth pausing a moment to draw a few lessons about the nuclear age.

Let´s start with the age-old question of whether we should have dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are still people who argue it was all unnecessary and that we should have detonated the bomb at a remote location or refrained from using it altogether. The question is interesting is because North Korea probably wouldn´t even exist if we had completed construction of the bomb a month sooner.

In February 1945, we had invaded Iwo Jima, an eight-square-mile island defended by 21,000 Japanese soldiers. Within 750 miles of Tokyo, it put us within bombing range for the first time. The Japanese had vowed to fight to the last man and they did. 18,000 died—along with 6,800 U.S. Marines. Only 200 Japanese soldiers surrendered.

On April 1, 180,000 soldiers and marines invaded Okinawa, a much larger and more heavily defended island, backed by the U.S. Navy. 12,000 Americans died, including 5,000 sailors, the highest total of any American naval engagement in history. 70,000 Japanese soldiers lost their lives and another 150,000 civilians died, many of whom killed themselves and their families in order to avoid capture by the Americans.

Now we faced the task of invading the Japanese mainland, an island nation of 145,000 square miles defended by 70 million people, all vowing to fight to the end.

The German surrender on April 29 left both American and Russian forces free to move to the Pacific. The Soviets were not even at war with Japan but President Roosevelt had enlisted Stalin´s support at Yalta. When Roosevelt died on April 12, President Harry Truman continued the strategy. Stalin moved troops to the Manchurian border, where a considerable portion of the Japanese army was stationed.

As Truman became aware of the Manhattan Project, however, he began to hedge the agreement. By July, when the Big Four met at Potsdam, Stalin was already reneging on agreements to restore autonomy to Poland and Czechoslovakia and Truman was becoming wary. When news of the successful test at Los Alamos reached him in the middle of the conference, Truman changed his approach and told Stalin he might not be needed.

The atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, each killing between 75,000 and 90,000 people. The March 9 firebombing of Tokyo had killed 120,000 but because the raid was conducted with conventional weapons, it had little impact on the Japanese will to fight. When Truman promised to wipe every Japanese city off the map, however, the Emperor was persuaded to surrender. (Actually we had no more bombs left in our arsenal and it would have taken weeks to build another.)

The Soviet Union entered the war on August 9, the day the second bomb was dropped. Japan surrendered the next day but Soviet troops rushed into Manchuria anyway to seize territory. By August 12 they had reached Seoul and threatened to engulf the entire peninsula. Given half an hour to draw up an agreement dividing Korea into occupation zones, General Charles F. Bonesteel, head of the army´s policy section, picked the 38th parallel as a dividing line. Four days later, Stalin agreed. That is how North Korea was born.

The division soon cost America 54,000 lives during the Korean War and Stalin´s annexation has long outlived the Soviet Union. But it could have been worse. Without Hiroshima and Nagasaki we probably would have lost 500,000 more American lives and ended up with North and South Japan.

So how did North Korea get the bomb? That´s an interesting story as well. The science of building nuclear weapons is not all that difficult but it does pose an engineering challenge. Natural uranium contains two isotopes, U-235 and U-238. Both are “radioactive’ in that they are slow breaking down, but only U-235 is “fissile,’ meaning it will split in two, releasing an enormous amount of energy, when it absorbs a neutron. Originally there were equal amounts of the two isotopes, but over geological history U-235 has broken down faster so that it now constitutes only .7 percent of the natural ore. To get to bomb-grade material, these isotopes must be separated until the ore is “enriched’ to 90 percent U-235.

Uranium enrichment is an incredibly laborious process. Because the isotopes are chemically identical, they must be separated on the basis of their miniscule difference in weight—three neutrons. The best method is through centrifuges but it takes a solid year of twirling the uranium before bomb-grade levels can be approached. The Iranians may be getting close but there is reason for skepticism.

The faster way to build a bomb is through plutonium. When U-238 is exposed to neutrons, some of the atoms will absorb two neutrons and move two places up the periodic table to become plutonium-239, which is almost twice as fissionable as U-235. The Manhattan Project undertook both uranium enrichment and plutonium production, but plutonium proved much more practical. All Russian and American bombs were made with it.

Nuclear power plants run on fuel rods that are enriched to only 3 percent U-235. After two years of operation, however, about 1-2 percent of the U-238 has been transformed into plutonium. This plutonium can be extracted to use as a reactor fuel or a bomb, or it can be left in place. The extreme radioactivity and the difficulty of performing chemical separation make it highly unlikely that anyone outside an industrial country could ever build a bomb from a power plant.

Nonetheless, in 1976, President Jimmy Carter called off the recycling of fuel rods from nuclear power plants on the grounds that extracted plutonium might end up in the hands of terrorists. As a result, spent fuel has piled up at reactors all over the country while the futile effort to dispose of it at Yucca Mountain continues. With recycling, 95 percent of the fuel rod can be reprocessed and the problem of “nuclear waste’ disappears.

Meanwhile, countries around the world have not paid the slightest attention to our fatuous plan to bury our own plutonium. They have simply manufactured their own. China built its own bomb from a homegrown reactor in 1966. India extracted plutonium from a donated Canadian reactor and exploded a bomb in 1974. Israel built its own bomb in the 1970s and then passed the technology on to South Africa. Pakistan seems to have picked up some stray plutonium from Russia and passed it on to several countries.

North Korea began a nuclear program in the 1980s with a Soviet-supplied graphite reactor—the kind the Soviets had at Chernobyl, designed for extracting plutonium. In 1989 the Koreans closed down the reactor for 70 days—sufficient time, American intelligence calculated, to extract 12 kilograms of plutonium, enough for two bombs. They also started fooling around with uranium enrichment. With concerns mounting, President Bill Clinton sent the same Jimmy Carter to North Korea in 1994 to try to halt the effort. Carter returned with a pledge from the North Koreans that they would give up building a bomb in exchange for hundreds of thousands of tons of fuel oil plus two light-water nuclear reactors. By 2000, however, it was clear that the North Koreans had continued their experimentation and in 2005 they announced a nuclear weapon. They are now believed to have about a dozen.

What are the lessons here? First, it was the height of naivete to think that by abstaining from plutonium recycling we could prevent other nations from developing nuclear weapons. It´s like saying that by giving up matches we can persuade Brazilians against burning their rainforests. Other countries have gone right ahead developing their own nuclear programs while we are stuck with trainloads of nuclear “waste.’

Second, we´re probably going to have to do something about North Korea. Ignoring the rogue nation is like ignoring al-Qaeda in the 1990s. David Frum has suggested a naval blockade. Daniel Kennelly wants an “amiable divorce’ from South Korea to free our hand. One way or another, no one is going to solve this problem for us and it makes no sense to wait until the North Koreans decide to lob a missile onto the Microsoft campus.

Finally, we should take off our blinders and realize we are living in the nuclear age. There is a widespread public sentiment to ignore reality and believe the nuclear genie can be put back in the bottle. Less than a year ago, Discover ran an article entitled “The End of the Plutonium Age,’ which opined that, with the aging of our own nuclear arsenal, perhaps the era of nuclear weapons could soon be forgotten.

Unfortunately, the North Koreans don´t seem inclined to go along. They may be insignificant and paranoid, but as Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley, and Nedjelko Cabrinovic (assassin of the Archduke Ferdinand) all proved, such insignificant paranoids can change history.

William Tucker is a weekly columnist for The American Enterprise Online.

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Las Vegas Business Press
June 19, 2006

'Dream team' coming to test site

By Ian Mylchreest
Business Press

The Nevada Test site had seemingly lost its purpose as nuclear weaponry was wound back after the Cold War, but the War on Terror may be giving it a new lease on life. At least that's the plan that National Security Technologies LLC pitched to the National Nuclear Security Administration.

And after the agency thought about the question for a year, it decided last March that the test site should have a new operator. The winner, whose name has already been shortened to NSTec, is a consortium of companies that President and General Manager Stephen Younger thinks will add significant value to both the test site and Southern Nevada.

The consortium will take over July 1 and is managed by Northrop Grumman and includes AECOM, CH2M Hill and Nuclear Fuel Services.

The new company won the contract over Bechtel because it offered to do much more than operate the site as it had been previously as the "roads and commodes" contract. Younger would not name names, but said a couple of projects would be announced shortly after NSTec moves in.

NSTec is "the dream team" of defense and engineering expertise that will give the test site a new mission, Younger said. Bechtel had been a "fine and professional operation," he noted, but the government was attracted by NSTec's plans to develop the site as the testing ground for homeland security.

RELIABILITY AN ISSUE

That will involve small nuclear explosions in both labs and in the underground testing chambers at the site. Some of those tests hark back to the site's original mission of testing nuclear weapons. Reliability continues to be an issue, said Younger, because they had been in storage longer than had originally been planned.

Younger thinks the new-look site will carry out both a homeland security mission as well as bringing new business opportunities westward from the northern Virginia suburbs outside Washington, D.C., where most of the new companies focusing on national security are located.

And that's the additional benefit that won NSTec the contract. Only the test site can provide labs to test new equipment designed to detect bombs and other dangerous substances. Younger expects that port security equipment, for example, will be tested and refined at the site.

He also said the new emphasis at the test site should bring regional offices to Las Vegas for a number of high-tech companies that work on national security issues. They will be working on testing detection and surveillance equipment, which, Younger says, can only be tested at the site. He also said that companies specializing in environmental clean-up and hazardous materials will be making their presence felt in Las Vegas and at the site.

SIMULATIONS

It also provides a training ground for public safety personnel to practice their antiterrorism skills. "Last week, there was a group of New York City police," he said, "who were put into buildings filled with smoke and had to find the radioactive sources." That kind of simulation is important, Younger said, for responding to the proverbial suitcase bomb or a "dirty bomb" that uses conventional explosives to spread nuclear material.

The new broom also plans to remove a layer or two of bureaucracy. "It's a blank sheet of paper, and after 10 years of so you need to reform some internal processes," Younger said.

Younger was director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency from 2001 to 2004 and has worked in senior positions at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The contract is valued at approximately $500 million annually and will run for five years initially and could be extended for another five depending on performance. Under the contract, NSTec will operate the test site and satellite facilities in North Las Vegas at Nellis Air Force Base; at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, D.C.; in Los Alamos, N.M.; Livermore and Santa Barbara, Calif.

Bechtel's work for Yucca Mountain is unaffected by the decision on the test site contract.

imylchreest@lvbusinesspress.com | 702-871-6780 x319

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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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