Yucca Mountain News Clips
Sunday, July 9, 2006
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Las Vegas SUN
July 09, 2006

Brian Greenspun remembers Clinton's advice about Reid and Yucca Mountain that really paid off

President Bill Clinton was right about Harry Reid.

Way back in 1998, when Harry Reid was running for re-election to the U.S. Senate, I happened upon an exclusive interview with the president in which he said that if Harry Reid were not re-elected, Nevada was certain to get the Yucca Mountain dump.

I ran that story on the front page of the Las Vegas Sun - believing that if the president of the United States said the dump was coming our way without Harry Reid in the Senate to stop it, that was big news in Nevada - much to the chagrin of Harry's opponents and a few "experts" on journalistic ethics. Harry won his re-election bid, as usual not by very much, and the rest has been a very interesting history in the making.

I recount this story because it cannot be lost on any Nevadan just how prescient the president was eight years ago. Presidents come and go, but a good U.S. senator, who continues to rack up seniority and other IOUs along the way, is worth his weight in gold to the constituents he represents. Nowhere is this more true than in the Silver State because I believe our senior senator has just scored a knockout punch on the only foe Nevada has faced that could knock us flat on our backs.

We have water issues - we live in a desert. We have air quality concerns - we live in a bowl. We have traffic problems - we invite more cars into town than we have roads for them to travel or places for them to park. And we have all kinds of growth challenges - we encourage people to move here who don't come with a commitment to better our community from Day One.

But each of these "showstoppers" can be overcome. Whether it be a technological fix or a financial one, there is nothing out there that should stop Southern Nevada from growing its way to the top of the most favorable-city-to-live-in list and staying there for many years to come.

Except for just one thing. Yucca Mountain. You see, high-level nuclear waste has a way of stopping people in their tracks. Nobody wants it in their back yards, and everybody has wanted it in ours.

That is a lethal dose of reality in a city that makes a living based on tourism. One accident, one spill, one bad headline heard around the world and the people stop coming. Especially when there are so many other places to go for people who want to eat, shop, gamble and enjoy themselves.

Ever since Congress and, later, President George W. Bush, decided that only Nevada should be singled out for the honor of hosting the nation's radioactive garbage, Harry has been on the case. But it wasn't until he became minority leader of the U.S. Senate, it wasn't until he had earned enough respect from his powerful Senate colleagues, and it wasn't until he built up the kind of seniority in the Senate that made him a force to be reckoned with, that he was able to do what so far has been the impossible.

Ever since Congress decided that Las Vegans should bear the brunt of our nation's woefully lacking nuclear power plan, we have been on a delay-of-game tactic in the hopes of putting enough time and space between the political decision to destroy Las Vegas for the benefit of the rest of America and the reality of Yucca Mountain actually opening. So far, our congressional delegation and our state leadership (at least most of them) have put the inevitable off for more than 20 years.

Now word comes that Sen. Reid has reached an understanding with the top Senate dog for nuclear power, Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico, which will buy us another 15 to 20 years. And the likelihood is now that Yucca Mountain will never happen.

As Sun Washington Bureau reporter Lisa Mascaro noted in a June 29 story, Sen. Reid believes the plan to build temporary nuclear waste sites across the nation is certain to create strong opposition from those states involved, causing them to agree with Nevada that the waste should be kept at the nuclear power plants.

"You can have all the requirements you want to move the waste, but as we learned from Yucca Mountain, people aren't simply willing to have it moved," Reid said.

Only Harry Reid could have pulled this off, which means that Bill Clinton was right and all those folks who find the oddest reasons for bashing Sen. Reid are wrong.

Either wrong or just wrong-headed. Because there is nothing more important to Las Vegas than doing everything we can do to keep this tourism engine humming. That means thousands upon tens of thousands of new jobs, hundreds of thousands of new residents, and millions and billions of dollars of financial benefits that will be shared by the people who live and work in our community.

Like all compromises in government, the solution isn't perfect. Reid will have to stick around in the Senate for many years to make sure this thing doesn't unravel.

Nevadans can do their part by making sure he moves from minority to majority leader in a very short time and that we refuse to pay attention to people who say they are on our side but who are clearly not. Sometimes they look and sound like former Nevada governors and sometimes they take the guise of smooth political salesmanship. But, always, they have as their goal to remove good men like Harry Reid from political office.

I don't know if Yucca Mountain is dead for sure. We will have to wait a couple more decades to find out. But I do know that one of the most respected scientific journals from MIT said that a proper scientific answer will resolve the radioactive waste issue within the next generation. That's right, science not politics will rule the day.

I also know that Nevadans owe an eternal debt of gratitude for the determination and skill that Sen. Harry Reid has brought to the Senate on our behalf.

President Clinton was right. Without Harry in the U.S. Senate, we would have already been up to here in radioactive waste. But with the good senator, it looks like we have our future back. The one full of hope and promise that is the dream of every Nevada parent.

Brian Greenspun is editor of the Las Vegas Sun.

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Tulsa World
July 09, 2006

Nuclear power

By Ken Neal
Editorial Pages Editor

Around the globe, plants are proven efficient, cost-effective and safe

The price of a barrel of crude oil hit $75.19 on the New York Mercantile Exchange last week. Meanwhile, 103 nuclear generating plants on 65 sites in 31 states produced 20 percent of the nation's electric power at a fifth of the cost of oil-fired generators.

The big debate in oil circles is the one as old as the business: How much oil and gas is there and how soon will mankind use it all?

Experts argue that, but there are certainties about fossil fuel. First, rising worldwide demand means more competition for oil and gas and therefore higher prices. The $75 oil prices brought with it predictions of $3 per gallon gasoline, for example.

The end of oil will come some day, so "alternate" fuels are the buzz words. Make alcohol from corn; revise engines to be able to burn it; make farmers (and Archer Daniels Midland) rich. Wind power. Solar power. Both sound good but are not likely to produce the concentrations of electricity needed.

Back on the nuclear ranch.

Here are a few figures from the Nuclear Energy Institute, admittedly the publication arm of the industry.

As of June, there were 442 nuclear electricity-generating

plants in 30 countries with 27 more under construction in 11 countries.

The nuclear plant at Palo Verde, Ariz., produces more electricity than any other plant in the U.S. It alone generates more power than all solar and wind plants in the U.S. combined.

Nuclear plants are more reliable than electricity generating plants run on other fuels. Nuclear plants produced about 90 percent of their capacity in 2005. Coal-fired plants, by comparison, produced about 73 percent of their capacity.

Cost to operate comparison:

Nuclear: 1.72 cents per kilowatt hour.

Coal: 2.21 cents per KWH.

Oil: 8.09 cents per KWH.

Natural Gas: 7.51 cents per KWH.

Bogus numbers? Not likely. It costs more to build a nuclear plant than conventionally-fueled plants. But over the life of those facilities, nuclear operations are preferred.

That does not take into account that nuclear power plants do not pollute. The Institute (and President George W. Bush) estimate that nuclear generating plants in the U.S. kept 700 million metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the air annually, an amount equal to the emissions of 136 million passenger cars.

Because of the damage that all fossil fuels cause the environment, some environmentalists are looking anew at nuclear power. Massive stripping of land to get at coal and oil shale as well as the problems of burning fossil fuel put the nukes in a new light.

Safety will, of course, be the objection to nuclear. The nuclear protesters can be expected to trot out the Halloween masks and predictions of doomsday. But the objections are largely emotional, not based on fact.

A nuclear plant is perhaps the safest workplace in the world. If you live next door to a nuclear plant, you are apt to get the same radiation that you would get from an airline flight from New York to Los Angeles.

You'd have to live next door to a plant for 2,000 years to equal the radiation you get from one medical X-ray.

The largest source of manmade radiation, by the way, is from medical institutions. Virtually all hospitals have at least one nuclear radiation unit. Nuclear power is used in a variety of medical diagnostics and treatments.

The bugaboo of nuclear power is disposal of the used pellets that are being held in "pools" at plants scattered across the country. The pellets are in lead-lined vaults with as much as 18 inches of concrete in the walls.

From the start of nuclear generating plants in the late 1950s, storage at the plants (or munitions facilities) were considered temporary. Ultimately, the used nuclear fuel will be stored at Yucca Mountain, Nev., in geologically stable caves. Although it will take thousands of years for used fuel to be "safe," scientists hope to develop reactors that can "burn" it in "breeder" reactors.

It would be nice if the storage question didn't exist. But it does. Is it safer to leave spent nuclear fuel stacked at locations in 31 states, or put it all in one place? There are citizens who claim nuclear plants cause cancer. But then there are citizens who swear that magnetic fields cause disease; some who claim that cell phones cause brain damage.

More than 65 years after the first experimental reactor lighted four light bulbs, nuclear power has yet to have been proved to cause disease. Yeah, there was the Chernobyl disaster, but that is like refusing to build barns because someone burned one down.

In the U.S., the notorious Three Mile Island nuclear accident proved, if nothing else, that an American designed facility can withstand virtually every mistake that can be made and still be safe. And compared to today's plants, Three Mile Island is an antique.

Alternate fuels?

Look no farther than nuclear power.

Ken Neal 581-8330
ken.neal@tulsaworld.com

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China Daily
July 09, 2006

Nuclear waste a challenge in Asia

Associated Press

With royal tombs and a history dating back 1,000 years to the Shilla Kingdom, Gyeongju is a cradle of Korean civilization. But it's about to get a tomb of a different type.

A hillside bunker overlooking the Sea of Japan is to become one of Asia's first permanent nuclear dump sites, ending South Korea's 19-year quest to deal with low- and medium-level waste such as contaminated clothing and old parts from its 20 nuclear power plants.

It's costing the government nearly US$320 million in subsidies to the town of 300,000 for voting to accept the dump, and it doesn't even begin to address the country's real problem, 6,500 tons of spent nuclear fuel with hundreds of thousands of years to live and nowhere to go.

As Asia goes nuclear in a big way to feed its appetite for energy, environmentalists are warning that the growing stockpiles could either be stolen by terrorists and used to make a bomb, or end up polluting the environment.

The nuclear industry says a permanent solution will eventually be found and that the waste issue will not slow the growth of nuclear power in Asia. Temporary sites, they said, are safe.

But only the United States and Finland have come up with permanent sites, and the one at Yucca Mountain in Nevada is years behind schedule and mired in legal disputes.

One solution is to recycle spent fuel by extracting its plutonium and combining it with uranium. But the plutonium is weapons-grade and could fall into terrorist hands, warns the US-based Union of Concerned Scientists.

Australia, has no nuclear plants but has struggled for 15 years to find a permanent site for low-level nuclear waste from its medical, industrial and research facilities.

It settled in 2004 on three potential sites in the Northern Territory, which is home to Aborigine communities as well as world-famous Ayers Rock, or Uluru. Authorities expect to choose a final site by 2007 and open it in 2011.

"People are outraged," said Michaela Stubbs of Friends of the Earth Australia.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
July 08, 2006

MIT geologist finds fault with Yucca assessment

Researcher says project rife with uncertainty

By Sandra Chereb
The Associated Press

RENO -- A geologist who spent a decade researching, compiling and editing a book of scientific analyses of the Yucca Mountain project said the Energy Department's assessment lacks sufficient geological input and is fraught with uncertainty.

"Yucca Mountain is a complex site geologically," Allison Macfarlane told the Nevada Commission on Nuclear Projects at a meeting Friday.

"This is a very uncertain endeavor, and we shouldn't be rushing into it."

Macfarlane and Rodney Ewing, a professor at the University of Michigan, co-edited the book, "Uncertainty Underground; Yucca Mountain and the Nation's High-Level Nuclear Waste."

"It really is all based on geology," Macfarlane said. "It was surprising and alarming to us that there wasn't more geologic input. It's really important, it's essential, that enough people in the policy arena grasp these issues to make decisions."

Some of the 23 scientific papers in the anthology focus on regional climate change over a period longer than recorded human history and raise questions about whether water seeping through the site will, over tens of thousands of years, dissolve canisters encasing spent nuclear reactor fuel and leach radioactivity into groundwater.

Others focus on whether computerized DOE performance models are accurate and adequate, and whether the site could resume volcanic activity.

"The scientific community will review the book. We will not review the book," said Allen Benson, spokesman for the Energy Department and the Yucca Mountain project in Las Vegas.

"There's a lot of good work in that book," Benson said. "But we have spent several billion dollars and more than 20 years of intensive scientific research, which resulted in ... Congress designating Yucca Mountain for development as the repository."

He said the DOE intends to demonstrate in its license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission "that we can protect the public health and safety."

"It's not a question of taking our word for it," Benson added.

Macfarlane, 42, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher, said she's not opposed to geologic repositories to dispose of spent nuclear fuel piling up at reactors and government facilities in 39 states.

"But it's not clear Yucca Mountain is the right location," she said, "especially when you extend it out 1 million years. You have to be willing to live with a lot of uncertainty."

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency revamped its radiation safety standard to cover 1 million years after a federal court in Washington, D.C., rejected an earlier 10,000-year standard.

Aside from concerns over earthquakes and groundwater levels and movement, Macfarlane said the DOE's assessment doesn't take into account global warming.

The DOE, she said, looked at the last 400,000 years to predict future climate changes.

"But what they didn't do is include the potential effect of climate change by accumulation of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, over the next couple hundred of years."

Macfarlane said current carbon dioxide levels in the Yucca Mountain region are around 380 parts per million. Preindustrial levels were in the 200s.

By 2100, she predicted, "we could easily see numbers in the 1,000s," something that hasn't occurred in 50 million years.

"And that is highly alarming," Macfarlane said, adding that long ago, "we were a lot wetter and a lot hotter everywhere."

Associated Press writer Ken Ritter in Las Vegas contributed to this report.

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San Luis Obispo Tribune
July 08, 2006

Injunction sought against Diablo project

Opponents of dry cask storage want work stopped until a court-ordered assessment of terrorism risks is made

By Bob Cuddy
bcuddy@thetribunenews.com

Mothers for Peace and other local groups have asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to halt work on a dry cask storage facility at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.

The groups are seeking an injunction to stop the construction until the NRC completes an environmental impact statement assessing the risks of a terrorist attack on the facility, as ordered last month by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

It´s unclear how long the environmental study will take.

Pacific Gas & Electric, which owns and operates the plant, reiterated Friday that the ruling doesn´t affect operation of the plant and won´t delay construction of the dry cask storage facility, which has begun.

PG&E is building the project in phases and will fill storage casks as needed.

The dry cask facility is being built to store used but still highly radioactive fuel assemblies pulled out of the power plant. The spent fuel pools inside the plant are nearing capacity, and the proposed federal repository intended for used fuel, Yucca Mountain in Nevada, is facing strong political opposition. Whether it will ever open is in question.

"We don´t want them to be building this thing and then finding out that it´s not safe (against terrorist attack)," Jill ZaMek of Mothers for Peace said Friday of the dry cask storage.

The Sierra Club´s Santa Lucia chapter and former county Supervisor Peg Pinard have joined Mothers for Peace in the injunction effort.

The groups have asked the NRC to threaten PG&E with denial of a new permit if it continues to build the dry cask facility before the court-ordered review process has finished.

The NRC couldn´t be reached for comment Friday.

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Washington Post
July 8, 2006

Asia Going Nuclear Amid Rising Oil Prices

By Michael Casey
The Associated Press

ULSAN, South Korea -- Led by fast-growing China and India, Asia is going nuclear in a big way to feed its ravenous appetite for energy.

The strains of economic growth are already showing. Energy shortages have forced Chinese factories to scale back production, and farmers in India often have power for only half the day. Both countries say their future growth is at risk unless they diversify their energy mix.

So does South Korea, where Yoon Ho-taek scans a construction site the size of 10 football fields in the southeastern city of Ulsan, points to what looks like a partly built amphitheater, and declares: "The future of nuclear power is bright."

South Korea, the world's second biggest coal importer and third biggest oil importer, already depends on nuclear reactors for 40 percent of its power and is talking of increasing that to 60 percent by 2035.

Yoon's company, Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power, is building four reactors and plans four more by 2017. Two of them are 1,000-megawatt reactors going up in Ulsan, lighting as many as 2.4 million homes in South Korea's industrial heartland.

Along with homemade reactors, Asia's plans hold out the promise of a bonanza for American companies such as Westinghouse Electric Co. and General Electric Co. which already have a strong presence in the region. Westinghouse has helped build 14 nuclear plants in South Korea and provided technology for almost half of Japan's 55 nuclear units. GE, meanwhile, has helped build 36 reactors in Japan, India and Taiwan.

"We expect Asia to become a leader in the use of commercial nuclear power," Timothy Collier, president of Westinghouse Korea, told The Associated Press. Asia needs a reliable electricity source, he says, and "Nuclear offers the opportunity to do that free of the dependence on oil."

Eighteen reactors _ about 70 percent of the world's total under construction _ are going up in Asia, and another 77 are planned or proposed, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.

Japan depends on nuclear plants for a third of its power and plans to double its nuclear capacity by 2050. Australia wants to build its first plant, and Indonesia has vowed to go nuclear, even though it's vulnerable to earthquakes, floods and landslides.

According to the World Nuclear Association, a group that promotes nuclear energy, China plans to increase its nuclear capacity from 6.6 gigawatts to 40 gigawatts by 2020 with the addition of 30 nuclear plants, mostly in heavily populated, industrialized coastal regions where demand and pollution levels are highest.

India intends to go from just under 3 gigawatts to 20 gigawatts by 2020 with the addition of 31 plants, mostly in the west where much of its heavy industry lies.

India's nuclear industry received a boost in March after it signed a civilian nuclear pact with the U.S. Under the deal awaiting Congressional approval, the United States will give India nuclear technology and fuel in return for India's permission for international inspections and safeguards at 14 reactors.

"Nuclear power has to play an increasing role in our electricity generation plans," Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told Parliament last year.

"Our desire is to attain energy security to enable us to leapfrog stages of economic development obtained at the least possible cost," he said.

Greenpeace, the environmental movement, continues to lead the charge against nuclear power, warning that Asian countries about to embrace the atom need to think hard about the potential consequences.

No country in Asia has a permanent site for the estimated 40,000 tons of toxic spent fuel produced so far, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, which opponents say could become a target for terrorists or end up polluting the groundwater. There is also the fear that nuclear power could become a cover for countries with weapons ambitions such as North Korea.

"We think nuclear energy is inherently unsafe," said Gerd Leipold, executive director of Greenpeace International. "You have the waste problems. You have the accident problems. For all of these reasons, we think countries should invest in renewable energy and energy efficiency."

Many of the biggest concerns revolve around Indonesia, which has said that it will build its first reactor by 2015 on Java _ the same island where an earthquake killed more than 5,700 people in May, and where the Mount Merapi volcano is threatening to erupt.

The announcement prompted a warning from the Australian Institute in Canberra that "Although the risks of a major (nuclear) accident are very low, a cloud of radiation blowing over northern Australia would pose a severe danger to public safety."

But with oil prices spiking, and fossil fuel emissions being blamed for global warming, the allure of atomic power is growing worldwide, and the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl which set back the industry for a generation are receding from the forefront of public memory.

The United States and Russia are reviving long-dormant nuclear plans while France, which gets 80 percent of its power from nuclear plants, is a leader of the industry's renaissance.

Every 1,000 megawatt reactor, the NEI says, saves 7.9 million barrels of oil or 3.4 million tons of coal a year and eliminates 34,000 tons of polluting sulfur dioxide and 11,000 tons of nitrogen oxide.

China's energy supply leans heavily on coal, says Andy White, president of GE's nuclear division, told AP. "They realize if they are going to play a senior role in the world's economy, they have to do something about the environment ... I think nuclear is the key answer to their portfolio."

Twenty nuclear power plants dot the South Korean countryside and what public reaction there is tends to be mixed. In the 1990s residents demonstrated against the Yonggwang Nuclear Power plant on the southwest coast and vendors still complain they have difficulty marketing their fish and vegetables because of the plant's stigma.

But the area is poor, and some residents say they're more annoyed that it wasn't chosen last year for a permanent nuclear waste site since that would have brought in millions of dollars in government aid.

"Some people are concerned about the dangerous effects of nuclear power," said Kim Byoung-Kwon, a taxi driver. "But to meet our power needs, we need nuclear power. I've got no problem with the plant being near my village. It's become like any other building."

Asia's biggest problem isn't new reactors, but what to do with the spent fuel.

It took South Korea 19 years just to find a burial site for low-level waste such as contaminated clothing and spare reactor parts, and it still has nowhere to dump its 6,500 tons of fuel.

Taiwan, which has three plants and is building a fourth, has been thwarted at every turn in finding a long-term solution for its waste. First it tried North Korea and the Marshall Islands but was blocked by protests. Taiwan has stored 100,000 barrels of nuclear waste on a tiny island but protests from aboriginal group are forcing it move the waste to another site, as yet unchosen, by 2013.

"After nearly 50 years of the nuclear power experiment, nobody has demonstrated a solution to this problem. In the absence of a viable solution, expanding the rate of waste production is just irresponsible," professor Ian Lowe of Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, wrote in a September report released by a coalition of Australian environmental groups.

Britain, France, Russia and Japan have opted for fuel reprocessing, which can extract plutonium and combine it with uranium to create oxide fuel, or MOX. But the extracted plutonium can be weaponized and is therefore vulnerable to theft for misuse, warns the Union of Concerned Scientists, a U.S. advocacy group.

In Asia, nuclear reactors seem to have their biggest problems in Japan. Nuclear power has always been a tough sell in the only country ever hit by an atomic bomb, and opposition has grown following a series of deadly accidents and shutdowns.

A 1999 reprocessing plant accident outside Tokyo killed two workers and exposed hundreds to radioactivity, while in 2004 five workers were killed at a plant in western Japan in the country's worst nuclear plant accident.

Safety problems have also left its nuclear fuel-cycle program in a shambles. The country's first experimental fast-breeder reactor, Monju, was shut down after more than a ton of volatile liquid sodium leaked from its cooling system in 1995.

"The Japanese public is extremely sensitive toward radioactive materials and there is no doubt that they are very concerned about the incidents," Kyoto University professor Hajimu Yamana said.

"Since any accident of this nature is creepy from the public's perspective, it is only natural that such accidents will undermine the public's support for nuclear power."

---On the Net:

World Nuclear Association: http://www.world-nuclear.org

International Atomic Energy Agency: http://www.iaea.org

Union of Concerned Scientists: http://www.ucsusa.org

Greenpeace International: http://www.greenpeace.org/international

---Associated Press writers Hiroko Tabuchi and Kana Inagaki in Tokyo, Walker Li in Beijing and Stephan Grauwels in Taipei, Taiwan, contributed to this report.

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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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