Yucca Mountain News Clips
Sunday, September 17, 2006
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Las Vegas SUN
September 17, 2006
Looking In On: Washington
By Lisa Mascaro
<lisa.mascaro@lasvegassun.com>
Las Vegas Sun
Frustrations over Yucca erupt in Congress
WASHINGTON - National security and border security continued to take center stage on Capitol Hill last week, but just outside of the limelight the debate raged over Yucca Mountain.
The House and Senate held back-to-back committee hearings on nuclear energy issues, drawing more than a dozen witnesses and producing inches-thick stacks of expert testimony on the coming nuclear renaissance.
With Yucca Mountain now nearly 20 years behind schedule, frustrations are mounting on Capitol Hill and in the nuclear industry to move forward with the proposed nuclear waste repository or find ways to store spent nuclear fuel at interim sites .
The House committees made it clear they see little support for a vast network of interim sites nationwide, as proposed in the Senate with the backing of Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.
The debate is complicated by Bush's pursuit of waste recycling, a process halted in this country in the 1970s because of nuclear proliferation concerns, but now enjoying support .
But Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico believes that recycling holds the key to the problem in part because the waste could be reused and made less toxic before it is buried in Yucca Mountain, expanding the repository's capacity.
"Spent fuel rods aren't going to Yucca Mountain," Domenici said following a hearing of the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations subcommittee. "Everybody knows that ."
With just weeks left in the session, and competing bills making their way through Congress, observers are doubtful of a new nuclear-waste policy emerging this year.
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Las Vegas SUN
September 17, 2006
Porter vs. Hafen
Can Porter put distance between himself and Bush?
Can Hafen convince voters that not being Porter is good?
By Tony Cook
Las Vegas Sun
In October 2003, U.S. Rep. Jon Porter voted in favor of giving U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan a $1,500 bonus.
But that was before aides to Republican Majority Whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo., talked to the Nevada Republican.
Minutes later - on the House floor - Porter switched his vote, producing a 213-213 tie, effectively killing the measure.
Porter's flip-flop prevented Democrats, who had proposed the salary bonus, from getting any credit for supporting the troops. Porter said later that he switched after learning of other benefits for troops already in the legislation. But it was no secret that GOP leaders wanted the measure dead.
The vote is illustrative of how Porter has operated in his 3 1/2 years in Washington . That same year, he supported President Bush's agenda 98 percent of the time, according to a Congressional Quarterly study of House votes.
In short, Porter has been a good GOP foot soldier, reliable in a pinch.
But times have changed since the legislator's freshman term.
Bush has fallen out of favor and his approval ratings have dropped to some of their lowest points as the war in Iraq drags on.
The Republican-led Congress, meanwhile, has been rocked by scandals. Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, resigned after an indictment on charges that he conspired to funnel tens of thousands of dollars in illegal corporate money into campaigns. And some Republicans in Congress, such as Bob Ney of Ohio, have been tainted by the scandal involving Jack Abramoff, the megalobbyist who pleaded guilty in January to corrupting public officials and ripping off his clients.
In other words, it's not an especially good time to have an "R" next to your name on the ballot.
"It's a question of how much of an independent Porter can portray himself as. How do I avoid guilt by association?" said David Wasserman, who analyzes House races at the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.
While Porter has been in Congress long enough to have a record to defend, his challenger in Nevada's 3rd Congressional District, Tessa Hafen, is an unknown.
Even so, some assumptions can be drawn. Her entire adult life since college has been spent working as press secretary for Sen. Harry Reid, and, so far in her campaign, she hasn't cited a single issue where she departs from her mentor, the Democratic leader in the U.S. Senate.
With a campaign war chest about a third the size of Porter's, it will be a challenge for Hafen to become known in the five weeks before early voting begins. But she may not need to offer a fully formed image to voters because Hafen's best campaign argument is: I'm not Porter.
In that sense, the race boils down to a referendum on Jon Porter and, by extension, President Bush and the Republican leadership in Washington.
At its core, the 3rd District race is not a question of whether voters want Hafen or Porter. It's more a question of whether they want Porter and Bush, and if they don't, are they willing to entrust the office to a 30-year-old neophyte looking to start her climb on the political ladder not at city council or some other local post, but rather on one of the loftiest rungs, in Congress?
"In a neutral election cycle, Porter wouldn't have much trouble defeating Hafen," said Nathan Gonzales, political editor of the Rothenberg Political Report in Washington . "The president is the shadow looming over this."
Porter, 51, came to Nevada in 1977, after dropping out of Briar Cliff College in Iowa, where he had been studying to become a Catholic priest. He never graduated from college.
While raising a family, he became an insurance agent and earned a Boulder City Council seat in 1983, where he served for 10 years, four as mayor. He also served in the state Senate for eight years, during which he lost a congressional bid against Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., in 2000.
But Porter came back in 2002 and won Nevada's new 3rd District, a pinwheel-shaped district that includes most of Clark County and is split evenly between Democrats and Republicans.
Since then, he has toed the GOP line consistently, voting with party leadership about 90 percent of the time over the past three years, according to Congressional Quarterly.
Perhaps the most notorious instance came when Porter voted to change the rules for House Republicans when news of DeLay's potential legal troubles broke.
With Porter's support, Republicans dropped their rule that called for members to give up leadership posts if they are indicted. But after a public outcry, Porter, who has accepted $25,000 in contributions from DeLay and his political action committee, joined other Republicans in voting to reinstate the rule, forcing DeLay to step down.
"My position was someone is innocent until proven guilty," he said. Asked why, given that, he then voted to reinstate the rule, Porter said: "We felt we wanted to remain consistent in our approach."
Porter often is portrayed as a nice guy unwilling to offend. As mayor of Boulder City, he once crossed the political aisle to host a fundraiser at his home for Reid.
But in January, he broke ranks with the rest of Nevada's congressional delegation in the name of partisanship when he attacked Reid for not returning money from those with ties to Abramoff. Other Nevadans in Washington, including Rep. Jim Gibbons and Sen. John Ensign, refused to comment on the topic.
But for all his willingness to help Bush and his party, Porter seems to get little in return.
Those who know his Washington, D.C., life the best - his fellow Republicans on the Hill - passed him up for a seat on the prestigious Ways and Means Committee, where all tax legislation originates, despite lobbying from the gaming industry for him to get the choice assignment.
"Most freshman and sophomore members don't get seats on those committees," said Porter, who was in his second term at the time.
But those viewed as up-and-comers often do. Ensign, for example, earned a seat on the committee as a new House member in 1994.
"I never found him to be an intellectual," a former Washington aide who asked not to be identified said of Porter. "Never once did I hear him articulate a proposal."
"I never knew what he stood for. He never really gives his positions on any of the real important topics of the day. Yucca Mountain, yeah, but in Nevada, who wouldn't oppose Yucca Mountain?"
Even on Yucca Mountain, one of the most important issues to Southern Nevada, Porter also failed to receive what he wants - this time from Bush.
Last year, Porter used his position as chairman of the House Government Reform Committee's Federal Workforce and Agency Organization subcommittee to subpoena documents - thought to reveal safety problems with the project - from the Bush administration.
Anything but complete opposition to the proposed federal nuclear waste repository is political suicide in Nevada; so Porter's break from his usual support of the president is no surprise.
More surprising is that 13 months later, several of the most important documents requested in the subpoena still have not been turned over. In fact, Bush was bucking Porter's subpoena even as he flew into Las Vegas last April to raise money - $400,000 worth - for Porter's re-election campaign.
Such a public display of alignment with Bush - even as the president plummets in the polls - probably will not help Porter this year.
His record of flip-flopping gives Porter something else to explain to voters.
In addition to switching his votes on the bonuses for soldiers and on the DeLay issue, Porter also has shifted his stance on another hot-button subject: illegal immigration.
Porter voted for a House bill approved last year that would crack down on illegal immigrants and those who support them. The House bill would require building a 700-mile fence along the Mexico border, make it a felony to assist a person entering the country illegally, increase the maximum fine for employers of illegal immigrants from $10,000 to $40,000 per violation and make illegal presence in the country a felony.
Earlier this year, though, Porter advocated the approach outlined by Bush, which includes a guest-worker program and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who clear a set of hurdles.
Porter said the plan all along was to pass a tough border-protection act in the House and then compromise with a Senate bill, which more closely resembled Bush's plan.
"The arrangement was for both houses to do border security, and the Senate to do a guest-worker program, and then bring them together," Porter said in May.
House Republican leaders, however, are standing by the House bill.
Now, Porter seems to be shifting his stance on the issue again. He said this week that border security is again his top priority, but added: "I support looking at options at some point for the 12 million people living in the shadows ¦ But there needs to be penalties for those who break the law."
Porter's tendency to vote the party line may be a problem as he tries to convince voters that he puts Nevada ahead of his party and Bush.
The question is whether that will be enough to push Hafen - whose record is a blank slate - over the top.
"If it's not about Bush, they are not winning this district," said Chuck Todd, editor of The Hotline, a non partisan political newsletter in Washington. "If it's about Bush, then it's keeping them in the game."
Aware of that, Porter is trying to distance himself from the president, by, among other things, touting his Yucca subpoena and the fact that he voted against Bush's wishes in favor of expanding federal spending on embryonic stem cell research. Porter's recent TV advertisement underlines the message with the slogan: "The independence to do what's right; the experience to get it done."
With the campaign season now in full swing, it's telling that no visits from Bush or members of his administration to Southern Nevada are scheduled between now and Election Day.
"I've always done what's best for Nevada," Porter said. "It's not about Washington, D.C. It's about Nevada."
For her part, Hafen not only must convince voters to fire Porter but give them a reason to vote for her.
Last week, Hafen sat in the dining room of her parent's Henderson home as Bush began his televised speech on the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Her family scrambled to make sure they were recording the talk.
"Public office and politics have always been a way of life for us," said Hafen, daughter of 19-year Henderson City Councilman Andy Hafen and the oldest of six children.
With eight years of experience on Capitol Hill - what she calls "on-the-ground training" - Hafen is hardly a novice when it comes to politics, even though this is her first run for elective office. So to voters, she is new.
"She needs to become a credible alternative to Porter," Gonzales said. "Even if voters are mad at the president, they are not just going to vote for any name on the ballot. They have to have some reason. She's done spin for years now. Now she's got to spin her own credentials."
Hafen believes that she has given voters reasons to vote for her, not just to replace Porter.
Hafen wants to fire Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for mishandling the war in Iraq and supports a timetable for redeploying American troops in Iraq.
She also differs from Porter on health care issues. She supports legalizing the importation of drugs from Canada and allowing the government to negotiate with drug makers for lower prices. She also wants to close the gap in Medicare coverage that forces some people to pay full price for expensive drugs.
A conservative Democrat on social issues, she supports a federal amendment banning gay marriage and opposes abortion except in cases of rape, incest and where the mother's life or health are at risk.
Hafen has criticized Porter for supporting Bush's energy plan, which gave billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks to oil companies even as gasoline prices skyrocketed and oil companies recorded all-time high profits. Porter said the bill provided incentives - not giveaways - to oil companies to encourage them to find additional resources and open more refineries in the United States.
Hafen favors a plan that would promote hybrid vehicles, increase fuel economy standards and encourage states to invest in renewable resources such as sun, wind and geothermal energy.
"Over the past four months, I have laid out my priorities for voters to see," she said.
Even so, her chances on Nov. 7 likely hinge more on what voters have seen of Porter.
- As of July, Greenspun family members and Greenspun Corporation executives had contributed $13,800 to Hafen's campaign and $1,000 to Porter's. The Greenspun family owns the Las Vegas Sun.
--Tony Cook can be reached at 259-2320 or at tony.cook@lasvegassun.com.
Reno Gazette-Journal
September 10, 2006
Bill Richardson's Yucca Mountain dance
As with each of the past decade's energy secretaries, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson had a rocky relationship with Nevada while he served in the Clinton administration. One guess why? Yucca Mountain. It will be interesting to see how (or whether) he addresses the issue as he campaigns in the Silver State for gubernatorial contender Dina Titus tomorrow. Richardson is widely expected to seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2008 and is the latest in a string of hopefuls to begin the pilgrimage through the new early caucus state on Titus's behalf. You can bet that Titus's detractors will bring up Richardson's involvement in the nuclear waste dump project.
Richardson is also the Democrat with the most Yucca Mountain baggage to deal with. Under his tenure as head of the Department of Energy, the nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain progressed past several milestones. While he was secretary, Richardson approved the $3.1 billion contract with Bechtel for work on the project and the DOE issued a controversial report validating Yucca Mountain's suitability for the project. But Richardson was spared from making the final recommendation on the site. (That was left to the Bush administration.) Although the project progressed under Richardson, he hasn't exactly been a Yucca cheerleader. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal's Tony Batt, Richardson had a solid record voting against the project while he was a member of Congress. As energy secretary, Richardson demanded an inspector general's investigation when questions arose over whether the DOE's scientific study was designed to sell the project to Congress. Richardson also backed President Clinton's veto of a bill that would have approved Yucca Mountain as the temporary storage site for nuclear waste.
--Anjeanette Damon
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Monroe News
September 17, 2006
DTE chief urges feds to take nuclear plant waste
Charles Slat
DTE Energy's boss urged a Congressional subcommittee Wednesday to remove as soon as possible spent atomic fuel now piling up at the nation's 103 nuclear plants.
"The industry's top priority is for the federal government to meet its statutory and contractual obligation to move used fuel away from operating and decommissioned reactor sites," said Anthony Earley Jr., DTE's chairman and chief executive officer. "Further delays in federal movement of used nuclear fuel and defense waste products will only add to utility damage claims."
Mr. Earley testified before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality in his role as chairman of the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group. He spoke in support of House Resolution 5360, a Bush administration proposal that would facilitate management of used nuclear fuel.
The highly radioactive spent fuel is being stored at various nuclear facilities until the federal government creates a central long-term storage facility at Yucca Mountain, Nev. Various utilities have sued the federal government for not meeting a contractual obligation in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to take custody of the nuclear fuel by 1998.
Mr. Earley also suggested that one or two central interim storage sites be created near the Yucca Mountain facility and that the capacity of the Yucca Mountain facility be increased from its planned 70,000 metric ton limit.
"To realize fully the benefits that nuclear power offers, the country must resolve outstanding issues related to the ultimate disposal of used nuclear fuel," Mr. Earley told legislators. "A viable used fuel management strategy is necessary to retain long-term public confidence in operating existing nuclear power plants and in building new nuclear power plants to meet our nation's growing electricity needs, and to fuel our economic growth."
DTE is studying the possibility of building a new nuclear plant at the site of its 1,130-megawatt Fermi nuclear plant near Newport. Other utility companies around the nation also are pondering new nuclear plant construction, but continued doubts about waste disposal could sidetrack those plans, he suggested.
Mr. Earley told the subcommittee that other legislation proposing that fuel now stored in water-filled spent-fuel pools at nuclear plants be moved immediately to storage in casks at each site wasn't a good idea and could cost the industry and its customers $800 million over five years.
Some utilities already have opted for cask storage because their fuel pools have reached capacity. At the Fermi plant, 746 tons of spent fuel have accumulated in the plant's fuel pool. But the utility is studying the option of cask storage when the pool reaches capacity, which could be in 2010.
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Virginian Pilot
September 17, 2006
Development along coasts lies in geologist's cross hairs
By Scott Harper
MACHIPONGO - "If I were king of Virginia, you'd all move back," said Orrin H. Pilkey, the Duke University geologist, author and lightning rod for controversy when the subject of coastal development comes up.
By "moving back," Pilkey was referring to his long-held desire to keep hotels, condos, roads, seawalls and other man-made structures away from beaches and shorelines - to move them back, so nature is unencumbered.
Many in the audience at Pilkey's recent talk on Virginia's Eastern Shore probably live on the Chesapeake Bay, a creek or a coastal bay. Waterfront property is everywhere on the Shore, and developers are gobbling it up.
The crowd went silent at Pilkey's stark suggestion. He smiled.
"But, I'm not the king," he said, "so don't worry."
Pilkey came to Machipongo, a small community in Northampton County, at the request of the Barrier Island Center, a museum off U.S. 13 dedicated to the famed geologist's favorite land feature.
He signed copies of his latest book, "A Celebration of the World's Barrier Islands," mingled with museum guests at a wine-and-cheese reception Thursday night, then gave a talk.
Unlike most other barrier islands in the United States and the Western Hemisphere, Virginia's chain of wind-blown islands off the Eastern Shore are "uniquely undisturbed," Pilkey said, "true national treasures, allowed to move as they wish, as nature intended."
He lamented that new inlets connecting the ocean and the sound on North Carolina's Outer Banks were closed by repair crews after Hurricane Isabel in 2003. He said Hatteras Village should have been left isolated since "that was just barrier islands being barrier islands."
Pilkey also unleashed some trademark barbs. He called seawalls "evil," ridiculed the Army Corps of Engineers as "stupid" and "destructive," and portrayed coastal engineers who design the waterfront structures he loathes as "deceitful" and "pretty despicable."
Corps officials in Norfolk declined to respond to Pilkey's attacks, but said the seawall they helped to design and build at Virginia Beach's Oceanfront saved an estimated $100 million in damages from Hurricane Isabel. The storm-protection system, from Rudee Inlet to 89th Street, has cost about $147 million to construct and should be finished in 2008, officials said.
In an interview, Pilkey recalled how he once consulted years ago, as a coastal engineer, for a project the Audubon Society wanted to build. He endorsed a plan that, as he described, was "not environmentally sensitive, even though I kind of said it was."
"I was with one of my students at the time and we were driving back home," Pilkey recalled, "and he asked me, 'Is there a difference in lying to the Audubon Society and lying to a developer?' After that, I never consulted again. Instead, I write op-ed pieces and yell a lot."
Pilkey, a professor emeritus and director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Duke, is 71 years old, wears a hearing aid but continues to travel the globe, write, research and lobby governments. He toured Mozambique's barrier islands last year and intends to lead a research trip to Siberia and Alaska next year.
Pilkey said he will publish another book in December, on the fallibility and silliness of government feasibility studies. It's tentatively titled "Useless Arithmetic."
He chuckled about one chapter, in which the U.S. Department of Energy is supposed to assess whether the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site, near Las Vegas, can safely operate for the next 300,000 years.
"That's longer than human history, " he said. "How in the world can anyone say they can predict what will happen in the next 300,000 years? "
In 24 books, numerous articles and speeches, Pilkey has ruffled professional feathers for years with his criticism of beachfront development trends, especially in Western countries, that he describes as basically putting "wealthy people and rich tourists as close to the water as possible."
His critics - and there are many - respond that Pilkey oversimplifies a complex science and recommends remedies that are politically and economically impossible.
How, for example, would Virginia Beach pick up and move its entire resort strip, so the beach would be free to migrate and move in a natural state? Or, how could Virginia Beach simply stand aside and allow storms and rising sea level to simply wash away the Oceanfront's hotels, shops and homes?
Scott Hardaway, a coastal geologist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, who knows and has worked with Pilkey, said, "Orrin's a geologist and he looks at these issues in the long term, over thousands, millions of years."
"Most people, on the other hand, can't look beyond the next day, the next month."
The key to protecting barrier islands, Pilkey and Hardaway agree, is controlling what and who can develop on them - or, having an environmental group such as The Nature Conservancy own them, as is the case with Virginia's coastal islands.
Without outright ownership, local governments often cannot stand up to the power, politics and money of developers, Pilkey said, noting how the Outer Banks continue to expand and grow despite repeated warnings from scientists.
Pilkey does not criticize beach nourishment as a solution for protecting shorelines. But he sides with the Bush administration in its drive to end federal funding for such replenishment work, popular in Virginia Beach and Norfolk, saying local governments should foot the bill through hotel fees or city taxes.
In his talk Thursday night, Pilkey said a model for his vision of shoreline management occurred decades ago on Hog Island, in Virginia's barrier chain.
After severe storms in 1933 and 1938 swamped the island and its 300 residents, homes were salvaged, people moved to the Eastern Shore mainland, and the rest was left to a rising sea.
"You did it right," he told the audience. "Unfortunately, my view isn't exactly proving popular, especially when high-rise condos are involved."
--Reach Scott Harper at (757) 446-2340 or scott.harper@pilotonline.com.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
September 16, 2006
Editorial: Frank talk on Yucca Mountain
Quality plagued project just a PR ploy to advance the nuclear power industry
On Tuesday, the new director of the Yucca Mountain Project told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that he's in charge of a troubled operation.
Yucca Mountain suffers from "a quality problem in terms of the culture and people and how they view their responsibilities for quality," said Ward Sproat. "The organization has not developed in my opinion in a way that allows it today to be an appropriate and adequate licensee to advance and operate Yucca Mountain. ... It is time to get this program up to today's standards."
Considering that the Department of Energy hopes to ask the NRC in a little less than two years for its license to run the nuclear waste repository -- located about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas -- it's obvious Mr. Sproat has a tall order in front of him.
Nevertheless, Mr. Sproat's candidness is certainly appreciated. As is the frank talk from nuclear industry chief Admiral Frank "Skip" Bowman.
Just a day after Mr. Sproat's comments, Mr. Bowman -- president of the Nuclear Energy Institute -- told Congress that the multibillion-dollar Yucca Mountain Project is essentially just a giant public relations operation.
"There's absolutely no technical reason, no reason for health and safety, to change what we are doing now" with nuclear waste -- which is stored on-site at commercial reactors -- Mr. Bowman said. "But there is a big reason that goes to the public perception of confidence in where we are going, whether we have a plan, and that is what we are hearing."
So, to sum up the comments from Mr. Sproat and Mr. Bowman: We have a massive government project plagued by quality problems whose primary purpose is to spin the American public into accepting the need for more nuclear power plants.
Tell us again why Nevadans aren't operating in the public interest when they agitate against Yucca Mountain?
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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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