Yucca Mountain News Clips - Thursday, September 21, 2006

Yucca Mountain News Clips
Thursday, September 21, 2006
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Las Vegas SUN
September 21, 2006

Industry group floating bill to speed opening of Yucca Mountain

Associated Press

LAS VEGAS (AP) - An industry lobbying group has unveiled a plan in Washington to speed the opening of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada.

Draft legislation by the Nuclear Energy Institute would allow interim storage of spent radioactive waste at the site and provide millions of dollars to Nevada if the state drops opposition to the project.

Copies of the proposed bill were distributed Wednesday to industry officials and to select Capitol Hill staff members who handle energy issues.

The idea was rejected by Nevada officials who said Nevada was not interested in compensation for accepting nuclear waste.

"We've said no before. We haven't changed our mind," said state nuclear projects director Bob Loux, who called the proposal a last-gasp attempt to move a stalled project forward. "We're not interested at any price."

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., called the proposal "an amazing nuclear industry wish list of everything up to and including the kitchen sink," while Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., said he thought the pro-repository trade group was "feeling desperate."

With Congress unlikely to pass a Yucca Mountain bill during the remainder of this year's session, a Nuclear Energy Institute official said the trade group was staking out a position for when lawmakers return in January for the final two years of President Bush's term.

"The president has been a strong friend of nuclear, and we would certainly like to see legislation advance under his administration," Michael Bauser, NEI associate general counsel, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Bauser said the proposed bill "represents an overview of what we see as the more important issues" facing the repository 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The NEI proposal would pay Nevada $25 million a year during planning and construction of an interim storage site while the Energy Department works through delays in opening a permanent repository. Payments would increase to $50 million while the temporary storage site was open.

Among other provisions, the Nuclear Energy Institute proposal also would set a 10,000 year compliance period for radiation safety at the site, reversing a 2004 federal court ruling that ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to set a 1 million year safety standard.

Nuclear waste is currently stored at commercial nuclear power plants in 31 states.

The Energy Department signed contracts with utilities to begin moving the waste to a permanent repository in 1998. Bush and Congress picked the Yucca Mountain site in 2002. But progress has been slowed by budgetary constraints and safety concerns.

The project would entomb 77,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel in casks wheeled on rails into tunnels some 1,000 feet below the mountain. The Energy Department now plans to submit a licensing application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in mid-2008 and open the repository in 2017.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
September 21, 2006

Yucca Mountain: Nuclear industry makes offer

State would get millions for temporary storage

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- A new bid to "fix Yucca Mountain" took shape on Wednesday when nuclear industry officials unveiled a broad plan to speed the repository, including offering Nevada millions of dollars in a new deal to accept high level radioactive waste.

Written as a draft bill for Congress to consider, the Nuclear Energy Institute proposal would establish interim storage at Yucca Mountain for spent nuclear fuel while the Department of Energy tries to work through delays on a permanent repository.

The proposed benefits for Nevada to host a temporary nuclear waste site would be $25 million a year until it opens, $50 million upon arrival of the first waste shipment, and $50 million annually until the site is closed, presumably upon completion of a comprehensive repository nearby.

Among other provisions, the Nuclear Energy Institute proposal also would set a 10,000 year compliance period for radiation safety at the site, reversing a 2004 federal court ruling that ordered the safety period to be set for thousands of years longer.

The proposed bill drew little immediate interest on Capitol Hill but garnered a strong reaction from Nevadans.

Bob Loux, director of the state Agency for Nuclear Projects, said Nevada "is not interested" in nuclear waste at any price.

The NEI proposal "is an amazing nuclear industry wish list of everything up to and including the kitchen sink," said Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev. "We are taking this very seriously."

Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., said the pro-repository trade group "is feeling desperate. They have been talking about this for some months. I am not surprised."

With Congress unlikely to pass a Yucca Mountain bill during the remainder of this year's session, authors at the Nuclear Energy Institute said the trade group was staking out a position for when lawmakers return in January for the final two years of industry-friendly President Bush's term.

"The president has been a strong friend of nuclear, and we would certainly like to see legislation advance under his administration rather than an unknown who may be better or may be worse," said Michael Bauser, NEI associate general counsel.

Bauser said the proposed bill "represents an overview of what we see as the more important issues" facing the repository project.

Copies of the proposed bill were distributed Wednesday to industry officials and to select staff members on Capitol Hill who handle energy issues. Immediate reaction in Congress was subdued.

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, had not examined it, spokeswoman Lisa Miller said.

"Maybe this is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow; maybe it's the chamber pot," Miller said. "We haven't looked inside yet."

A copy of the proposal was sent to the Department of Energy, where spokesman Craig Stevens declined to comment on the specifics.

Much in the 28-page draft echoes a Bush administration bill on which House and Senate panels held hearings this summer but generally is considered dormant.

Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, is expected to introduce a separate Yucca Mountain bill before Congress adjourns next week, but it was unclear what would be in it.

The Nuclear Energy Institute bill includes elements of the Bush bill expediting repository licensing, withdrawing 147,000 acres of public land at the Yucca site, removing the repository's 77,000-ton nuclear waste cap, and broadening federal powers on repository-related transportation, water claims and toxic materials management.

While containing all that, the Nuclear Energy Institute plan goes further in several areas:

• It directs the energy secretary to establish a temporary nuclear waste site at Yucca Mountain, where spent fuel would sit in canisters on "aging pads" awaiting completion of the permanent repository. The bill calls for the interim site to have a minimum capacity of 40,000 metric tons of radioactive spent fuel.

A site application would need to be filed within a year, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would be given 18 months to issue a final decision. DOE could begin building a temporary repository as soon as it applies for a license.

The Energy Department also could consider other volunteer sites for interim waste storage.

• Nevada or any volunteer site would be offered payments for hosting the temporary repository.

• It pushes the Energy Department to file a repository license application by Dec. 31, 2007, six months faster than DOE has proposed.

• The bill sets a 10,000 year compliance period for the Department of Energy to show the repository, estimated to open in 2017, would not leak radioactive contaminants into the groundwater.

A federal appeals court in 2004 rejected the 10,000 year standard, ruling that it needed to be rewritten and consistent with recommendations that the compliance period should cover time frames where corroded waste could yield peak doses of radiation.

"This has even less of a chance of passing than the administration's proposal," said Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. "This bill just further demonstrates the need for Democrats to regain control of the House so we can put an end to the ongoing flow of bad Yucca Mountain proposals."

Nuclear Energy Institute attorneys are drafting another bill that would further revise Yucca Mountain licensing, Bauser said. The measure would initiate an "adaptive staging" approach in which the repository would be licensed in three steps.

The National Academy of Sciences in 2003 said it might make it easier for the Energy Department to incorporate health and safety improvements as time goes on.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
September 21, 2006

NEVADA TEST SITE: DOE accused of lying

Pair question radiation exposure data

By Keith Rogers
Review-Journal

A former Nevada Test Site worker and the widow of one of his colleagues told a federal advisory panel this week that they were lied to and deceived by the government's handling of their compensation claims.

"Either the government lied to us when they told us how abused and harmed we had been, or the government is lying to us now when they are denying our claims. In either event, we have been lied to, and we are angry," John Funk, a carpenter who installed bulkheads in nuclear test tunnels, said in his written testimony to the panel Tuesday night.

Similarly, Dorothy Clayton, whose husband, Glenn, died in 1999 after a bout with five different cancers, showed the panel discrepancies in his radiation exposure history at the test site.

The actual film badge cards she obtained from Department of Energy records "showed a lot more (radiation exposure) than they were admitting to," Clayton said Wednesday.

She said the panel members "were shocked. They wanted a copy of the records."

Even though she has since received $150,000 in compensation, "there's a lot of widows whose husbands worked in the very same areas and got the same exposure my husband got. He wasn't out there alone," Clayton said.

She had come to Las Vegas from Nashville, Tenn., to support survivors who have been denied compensation.

"It makes them really distrustful of the DOE. How can you trust them? It means the information coming out of DOE is incorrect according to the records that we have," Clayton said.

Funk, afflicted with bone marrow cancer, asked the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health to consider the combined effects of exposure to chemicals and radioactive materials and to drop the current 250-day requirement for working at the test site to qualify for $150,000 in compensation plus medical expenses.

Funk has been denied compensation by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. The board advises the institute on dose reconstruction and nuclear workers' cancer issues.

"For the workers at Amchitka Island (Alaska), there is no 250-day requirement in the legislation. Can anyone explain to me why that is fair to our Nevada workers?" asked Funk, who represents a group of former workers known as Atomic Veterans and Victims of Nevada.

Special exposure status was given to former Amchitka nuclear workers in legislation, meaning they aren't required to have their doses reconstructed to qualify for compensation. Instead, they only have to show they contracted cancers linked to radioactive materials and worked at one of the three underground nuclear tests at Amchitka.

Nevada Test Site workers stand to receive "special exposure cohort" status for above-ground nuclear tests from 1951 to 1962, if they worked at the test site for at least 250 days.

However, most of the nuclear tests at the test site, 828 tests, were conducted below-ground from 1963 to 1992. Claims for those tests aren't covered by the special status.

Paul Ziemer, the board's chairman, said he couldn't comment specifically on the apparent disparity between workers in Alaska and Nevada but noted that many have said it's unfair.

"We understand there are political aspects to how the legislation was passed. ... That's the way it came to us from Congress," Ziemer said during a break in Wednesday's session at a Las Vegas hotel.

Wednesday night, Funk told the board that many records that could be useful in proving claims by former tunnel workers and their survivors were disposed of in a landfill at the test site in late 1997, three years before the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program took effect.

Earlier Wednesday, panel member Robert Presley, who chairs the Nevada Test Site working group, said some exposure and industrial hygiene and safety records are probably missing from throughout the nation's nuclear weapons complex.

"There have been campaigns over the last 40 years that we don't need these records so let's get rid of them. We didn't think we'd need them 30 years later," Presley said during a break.

"Yeah, there could have been records that were taken out and dumped."

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
September 20, 2006

Letter: Yucca problems aside, we need nuke power

To the editor:

In your Sept. 16 editorial, "Frank talk on Yucca Mountain," you concluded that the primary purpose of the Yucca Mountain Project "is to spin the American public into accepting the need for more nuclear power plants." You based your conclusion, in part, on congressional testimony by a spokesman from the Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington, D.C. While your conclusion may be partially correct, it is difficult to understand how any member of the public could fail to comprehend the need for more nuclear power.

Warnings on global warming from a broad spectrum of scientists from around the world have reached a fevered pitch. Most recent was a warning based on the rate of ice melting at the poles. Scientists tell us that we might have as little as a decade to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions from our continued burning of fossil fuels.

Certainly these international scientists are not basing their conclusions on a desire to advance the nuclear cause in the United States.

Also, our continued over-reliance on imported oil from Middle East countries -- many of whom would like to destroy us -- places our future and that of our children in jeopardy. We have already fought several wars in countries where we have oil interests and traded our blood for their oil.

The more oil we import, the more accelerated will be Iran's atomic weapons development. Is there anyone who doubts what Iran will do with atomic weapons?

Without additional nuclear power plants, our nation will be forced to continue to generate harmful levels of greenhouse gases; prevented from moving away from a petrol-powered transportation infrastructure to an electric-powered one; and possibly engaged in more wars to protect our oil and economic interests.

If the Nuclear Energy Institute can contribute toward a broader public understanding of our present precarious position, then I say more power to them.

Dan Kane
Las Vegas

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
September 19, 2006

Editorial: Identifying 'absolute corruption'

But the Department of Energy fails to act

Count Kristi Hodges among the casualties of so-called "sound science" at the Yucca Mountain Project. For years she toiled as a quality assurance auditor, scrutinizing data compiled to justify the federal government's planned nuclear waste repository northwest of Las Vegas. Last month, she quit.

More than four years ago, she forwarded a complaint to the U.S. Department of Energy's inspector general, the purportedly independent, investigative arm of the federal agency. Ms. Hodges outlined falsified and suppressed certification documents. She also detailed the removal of two quality assurance leaders who uncovered faulty computer modeling that produced flawed data -- and flawed scientific conclusions -- about the suitability of the repository site.

Ms. Hodges' findings raised serious questions about the integrity of a project that had, to that point, cost $7 billion over almost two decades. In June 2002, the Review-Journal requested a copy of the report from the inspector general through the Freedom of Information Act.

The years passed. The Department of Energy refused to publicly acknowledge the allegations. Ms. Hodges went about her business, wondering what became of her exhaustive effort to bring accuracy and a modicum of accountability to the project.

"What I was identifying was absolute corruption in the (employee) concerns program, the management of the project and its continual attacks and retaliation on the quality assurance organization that was identifying deficiencies one right after another," she said Thursday.

In the meantime, other auditors were removed from their jobs after uncovering quality control flaws. The Energy Department issued a stop work order on the project. Congressional hearings were held after e-mail messages revealed a U.S. Geological Survey worker might have fabricated his quality assurance data. Still, no official word on the complaint.

So last month, Ms. Hodges put in her notice of resignation.

Coincidentally, about a week after it became clear Ms. Hodges' employment with the project was at its end, the inspector general's office finally complied with the newspaper's request by delivering a jumbled, heavily redacted copy of the complaint -- and word that no investigation resulted from the complaint.

Instead, the inspector general's office boiled down hundreds of pages to a "two or three page" summary, according to spokeswoman Marilyn Richardson, and forwarded that summary to the very people targeted by the complaint.

"I wanted somebody who was independent to look at this, and they sent it back to somebody who knew darn well where it came from," a furious Ms. Hodges said.

These actions are consistent with the project's operating philosophy. Since the day in 1987 when Congress singled out Nevada for repository studies, leaving no alternative sites under consideration, the "science" of Yucca Mountain has been geared toward keeping the shovels turning.

The Department of Energy has no excuse for sweeping Ms. Hodges' complaint under the rug, nor for ignoring the Review-Journal's request for public information for more than four years. If Yucca Mountain Project officials hope to ever build enough political support to open their repository, they're going to have to show some respect to the people who pay their bills.

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StockInterview
September 19, 2006

Congress Needs to Wake Up To Nuclear Waste Disposal

Yucca Mountain Delays Put 39 States at Risk

Over the past 24 years, each time your house or business consumed a nuclear-generated kilowatt-hour of electricity, you were billed – by mandate of the U.S. government – one-tenth of one penny to pay for the storage of nuclear waste. And those pennies add up. Since 1982, the Nuclear Waste Fund has grown to more than $28 billion. The plan back then was to safely dispose of the nuclear waste left over after providing 20 percent of the nation’s electricity through nuclear energy. Instead, like a ticking time bomb, about 40,000 metric tons of spent fuel rods are chilling out in 141 concrete cooling ponds never intended for long-term use. Many are within a few dozen miles of large cities, such as New York, Philadelphia, Washington and Miami.

Now, at least nine states are heating up over the localized nuclear waste issue. On September 13th, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan joined state attorneys general in California, Connecticut, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Vermont and Wisconsin in calling on Congress to reject legislation enabling the federal government to designate nuclear waste storage facilities in all states with nuclear power plants, superceding objections by the state’s governor or state and local zoning and environmental laws.

The endless merry-go-round of deciding upon a final resting place for nuclear waste has been studied for more than two decades, has cost taxpayers more than $9 billion and has actually been solved. Unless of course, you are talking about an ideal solution which is required to be as satisfactory for up to one million years from now as it might be some 10,000 years into the future. That appears to be the most recent verdict – let’s keep nuclear waste in temporary storage scattered across geologically challenged locations, some near major cities, for decades to come, because a minority of environmentalists are “uncomfortable” with a well-studied, scientifically satisfactory centralized disposal site in a remote location. Instead of moving forward with a site, which will reportedly store the waste safely for 10,000 years (and probably up to 80,000 years), the environmental lobby would prefer a toxic risk for tens of millions of Americans from ‘overcrowded’ temporary storage sites. They would like to stall matters until scientists can prove a centralized storage site can survive all potential abuse for up to one million years.

Unfortunately, even if Congress acts in early 2007, the best-case scenario for a centralized nuclear waste repository brings us to 2017. And that would require quite a few politicians and bureaucrats coming to their senses. While they haggle over whether the nuclear waste can be safely stored for 10,000 years (which a number of scientific studies confirm that it can), or whether the waste site must store the spent nuclear fuel for one million years, electricity consumers are annually paying $1 billion for temporary storage.

The amount of nuclear waste accumulating since U.S. utilities began powering our homes with nuclear energy comes to about 54,000 metric tons over the past forty years. To put this in perspective, it would take up the size of a football field with a depth of less than 10 yards. Nuclear energy does not generate carbon dioxide emissions. By contrast, the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere through fossil fuels is enormous. According to one of the world’s leading environmental scientists, James Lovelock, who recently authored “The Revenge of Gaia” (Basic Books, 2006), one could freeze the annual carbon dioxide emissions and create a mountain one mile high and twelve miles in circumference. And that’s each year. Using the same yardstick since the 1960s, we would have 40 such mountains of carbon dioxide, but one small football field of nuclear waste.

After passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) chose nine locations in six states as potential permanent repository sites. The DOE whittled this list down to five sites after various technical studies and environmental assessments. After intensive scientific study, the DOE chose its finalists: Yucca Mountain, Nevada, Deaf Smith County, Texas and Hanford, Washington. Following lengthy environmental studies of all three sites, Congress amended the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1987 and designated Yucca Mountain to be studied as the final destination for nuclear waste.

“We’ve been studying Yucca Mountain for 22 years,” Steven Kraft told us during a recent telephone interview. Mr. Kraft is mechanical engineer who serves as the senior director for Used Fuel Management at the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), and was part of the Recovery Team following the Three Mile Island accident in March 1979. “It is the most studied piece of real estate on the face of the earth. There isn’t anything we don’t know about it.”

Why didn’t they pick someplace far away like Mongolia, Siberia or Greenland? “You’re making the assumption that somehow the remoteness of a location makes it okay,” Kraft responded. “You’re talking about places where there are geologic instabilities or the geology is very difficult to understand.” There are also proposals suggesting ice sheet disposal, deep ocean disposal, or simply blasting the waste into outer space. “Yucca Mountain meets all of the requirements, and I can’t think of a better site,” Kraft explained. “They have an awful good rock body down there that has withstood a lot of scientific scrutiny. It is by happenstance of geology they have a good location.”

And what is the key to geology? “What makes Yucca Mountain such a good site is, in the formation below the repository, are naturally occurring zeolites,” Kraft pointed out. Water softeners rely upon zeolites as ion-exchange beds. “Zeolites strip out a lot of the radionuclides and belays the flow of water,’ he explained. “By the time you get to the accessible environment, the dose rate stays well below EPA standards.”

No location is perfect. Even if all nuclear power plants were turned off today, more than 108 million pounds of nuclear waste would require disposition. You can’t burn nuclear fuel pellets. Nuclear waste is not flammable; it is too weak to explode. Each year, the nation’s 103 reactors produce another 2,000 metric tons of waste. It has to end up somewhere. The Yucca Mountain area is geologically stable. The last volcanic eruption – a small one – occurred 80,000 years ago. About 12 to 15 million years ago, large eruptions north of Yucca Mountain laid down the sturdy bedrock which formed this mountain.

The Yucca Mountain area only receives about seven inches of rainfall per year. Ninety percent runs off the side of the mountain ridge and mostly evaporates or is absorbed by vegetation. The proposed repository is 1000 feet underground. And the site is 1000 feet above the water table. Rainwater seeping through rock fractures is negligible and would likely be trapped inside the mountain.

Within the first 1,000 years, about 99 percent of the radioactivity in the reactor fuel will have dissipated through the natural process of radioactive decay. For those who believe the nuclear waste will be dumped in some hole in the ground – as some fanatical environmentalists falsely compared this to a landfill disposal – think again. The Department of Energy designed rust-resistant canisters lined with titanium drip shield to prevent water entry. A new alloy for these canisters was created in 1987 called Alloy 22, which is a blend of nickel, chromium and other corrosive-resistant metals.

In one DOE simulation, it was found the waste canisters wouldn’t begin to rust for about 80,000 years. Kraft told us, “From the presentations at the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board meetings, the amount of time that the metal is actually subjected to the corrosive environment is actually far less in terms of hundreds of years.” And who’s to say how much technology will advance over the next 10,000 or 80,000 years? Imagine for a moment how much technology has changed our lives over the past one hundred years, let alone over the previous 10,000 years. The fact is we will all be long dead before a single drop of moisture ever rusts one of those canisters. And so will the next 2000 generations of our great grandchildren.

As a result of the geological and man-made barriers, scientific reports demonstrate the largest expected annual radiation dose near Yucca Mountain would be 0.1 millirem. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) set an annual 15-millirem limit. The EPA’s dosage is about one-half what most of us get from cosmic rays every year. A chest x-ray gives you a much higher dose. Occupational standards for workers at nuclear power plants are ten times higher. Clearly, both science and logical rationale are being ignored when politicians and environmentalists dream up such “Twilight Zone” guidelines for Yucca Mountain. When the EPA standard of one million years was proposed, based upon a 1995 National Academy of Science study, it was “unprecedented worldwide,” Kraft said.

Is Transporting the Nuclear Waste to Yucca Mountain Safe?

Critics worry about the dangers of transporting nuclear waste from local sites to Yucca Mountain. They seem to overlook an important fact. During the past 30 years, more than 3000 shipments have traveled across the United States over 1.6 million highway and rail miles without a single radioactive episode. Used nuclear fuel has been safely shipped tens of thousands of times outside the United States. Environmentalists would have already pounced had there been an accident involving radioactive releases.

The DOE estimates about 175 used fuel shipments will travel to Yucca Mountain each year for 24 years, transporting between 300 and 500 containers. Numerous tests performed by Sandia National Laboratories to “destroy” the canisters demonstrated the ruggedness of the containers. Crashing trucks into concrete barriers at 65 mph, trains broadsiding the trucks at 80 mph and engulfing the trucks and canisters at crispy temperatures failed to destroy the canisters. “To get a certificate from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), they have to pass very severe accident tests,” Kraft explained. “My guess is that, at this point, it will be fundamentally rail shipments with limited trucking, but we had to analyze both.”

Fear of terrorists? “Before September 11, 2001, these (nuclear storage facilities) were the most secure, heavily guarded industrial sites there were,” Kraft told us. “And they have only gotten even more protected. We have increased the number of guards, the stand-off distance from the gate, and other things I can’t talk about because of the nature of the information. We do have very good terrorist protection.”

But what about on the open road? The DOE hope to construct a 300-mile railroad spur to connect the nation’s existing rail system to Yucca Mountain. In an August 2006 Fact Sheet, the NEI writes, “The shipments are heavily guarded. Travel routes and times for shipment are not publicly available; transport vehicles are equipped with devices to prevent unauthorized movement; and satellites track shipments constantly.” Sandia National Laboratories also simulated a terrorist attack using a weapon 30 times more powerful than a shoulder-fired, anti-tank missile. The result? The weapon made only a quarter-inch hole, which the NRC estimated would release only about one-third of an ounce of radioactive material, a minute amount of radiation posing no risk beyond the immediate vicinity, and would be easy to clean up.

U.S. Left Behind in the Nuclear Renaissance?

In 1982, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, amending in 1987, levied a tax on consumers for electricity generated by nuclear power, and set a 1998 deadline to begin accepting used fuel. The U.S. government defaulted. “1998 has come and gone,” said Kraft. “It’s almost nine years later and 50 utilities are suing. Lawsuits are in the multiple, multiple billions of dollars.” One wonders if the federal government will actually honor this obligation. “No one is being helped by this,” Kraft complained. The DOE has settled with Exelon and a few others to repay their interim storage costs. Utilities have been paying about $750 million per year since 1982. For example, Illinois consumers have paid $3.5 billion since the inception of the Nuclear Waste Fund; Pennsylvania consumers have paid $2.4 billion.

“There are a lot of places that want to build new nuclear plants,” Kraft pointed out. “There are about 30 on the boards right now.” But a lot of the communities are asking, “Wait a minute, we still have the spent fuel from the other reactor, when is all that stuff going to leave the site?”

Kraft explained, “What the communities are not asking for is an actual functioning disposal system, but a believable sustainable plan for getting there. At the moment, the DOE program does not look terribly sustainable to these communities. In each case that wants a facility, the community is making it very clear ‘we want to know what the plans are for moving the nuclear waste offsite.’ We have to be able to answer those questions.”

He is earnest about moving Yucca Mountain into the operational stage. “I’ve been waking up for the past 30 years wanting to solve this problem,” Kraft told us. “The person that has to wake up is Congress.”

In a September 13th press release, the NEI wrote, “To meet a projected increase in electricity demand of 45 percent by 2030, 12 companies or groups of companies are developing federal construction and operating license applications, and four companies already have filed applications for early site permits with the NRC.” The first wave of those nuclear power plants could be ready for commercial operation in the 2014 to 2015 time frame.

In a nutshell, U.S. consumers would be in a no-win situation in the absence of nuclear power. More than 70 percent of the electricity which comes from energy sources that do not bring about greenhouse gases or are linked to smog and acid rain comes from nuclear energy. The rest comes from renewables, especially hydroelectric power. “By shutting down 20 percent of our electricity doesn’t make sense for this country,” Kraft argued. “It’s not something the average ordinary homeowner is going to want to have happen.”

And the fate of the emerging nuclear revival, or the nuclear renaissance, hangs by the decisions Congress must soon make in honoring the government’s obligation as the ultimate stewards of the nuclear waste. “We capture all our waste,” said Kraft. “We store it all, we know where it is, we got it numbered and we treat it with great respect.” Ironically, with the ongoing renaissance in uranium mining in the United States, if there were no reversal by Congress, the yellowcake would end up in Asia or elsewhere to fuel their galloping nuclear energy programs.

In 2002, after more than 60 public hearings were held in Nevada, then-Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham certified that Yucca Mountain meets the site selection requirements. Both house of Congress approved the Yucca Mountain site in July 2002. “Yucca Mountain is an approved project as far as Congress and the President are concerned,” concluded Kraft. “And now we have the license application to complete, get it through the NRC, and start building it.” Approval for Yucca Mountain came after one of the most extensive scientific investigations in U.S. history. The NRC review may take up to three years.

The remaining stumbling block appears to be the 1995 report by the National Academy of Sciences, and adopted by the EPA, demanding a million-year guarantee of safety at Yucca Mountain. This came about while Yucca Mountain was passing every scientific test for the original 10,000-year safeguard. Congress can remedy this absurdity with legislation relieving this EPA standard. In other words, it is time to get realistic. Otherwise, the nuclear waste remains in limbo, chilling out in the cooling ponds or dry casket storage instead of the Yucca Mountain tunnels.

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Chicago Sun Times
September 18, 2006

Not enough done about nuclear waste

By Barclay Jones

Is America finally coming to grips with our nuclear waste problem? In terms of developing a long-term repository and getting it approved, the answer is yes. But in terms of Washington politics, the answer is still a resounding ''no.''

The Department of Energy has spent $7 billion and more than two decades of scientific study to research and test an underground repository at Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert. The department plans to apply next year to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to develop and operate the repository. Because nuclear power produces no greenhouse gas emissions and is crucial in the battle against global warming, many scientists around the country say we cannot afford any further delays in completing the waste repository.

But in Washington, at least until recently, nuclear waste has remained just another subject for pork-barrel politics. Though usually referred to as nuclear waste, this highly radioactive material actually is used fuel from the fission process, which contains valuable nuclear materials that could be reprocessed at a factory and used again in nuclear power plants to produce electricity. If this spent fuel is recycled, as the Bush administration has proposed, it would reduce the volume and toxicity of nuclear wastes. But the wastes would still need to be permanently stored in the Yucca Mountain repository.

Few people know it, but the federal government has responsibility for the spent fuel at nuclear power plants. And we pay for it, through a tax on the electricity we use from nuclear power plants -- which amounts to about 20 percent of all the electric power in the country. That tax provides about $750 million a year to fund the government's nuclear power waste program, including Yucca Mountain. And that would be more than enough to get the job done.

But to Congress, that's just another $750 million that it can play with. So instead of letting the money go to where, by law, it is designated, Congress has been limiting its appropriations to the Yucca Mountain project to a small fraction of that amount. And the rest has just been going up in smoke, in the massive pork-barrel programs that Congress has been passing.

The problems are urgent. Engineered water pools for spent fuel at the sites of many nuclear power plants -- which were designed years ago for temporary storage -- are running out of space. Some of the storage pools are located on fragile ground near rivers and lakes or on water tables. DOE says 161 million Americans live within 75 miles of one of the sites. Though nuclear utilities are using concrete-and-steel dry casks to store an increasing share of the spent fuel, several states have imposed a ban on additional storage. Meanwhile, the utilities have filed multiple lawsuits against DOE, based on its failure to begin taking possession of spent fuel in 1998, as required by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982.

Thus, at a time when many utilities recognize that more nuclear power plants are needed to meet the nation's increasing demand for electricity and replace fossil-fuel plants that emit global warming gases, America must have better government management of the Yucca Mountain project and responsible funding mechanisms that are immune to budgetary chicanery.

About 54,000 metric tons of spent fuel is stored at nuclear plant sites in 39 states, including more than 6,000 metric tons in Illinois. Since 1982, utilities have contributed more than $24.9 billion to the Nuclear Waste Fund for nuclear waste management, and continue to funnel money into the fund each year, but only $9 billion has been spent on the project. The rest has been diverted to other programs, leaving the Yucca Mountain project badly underfunded and delaying its scheduled completion until 2017.

There is a better way to allocate money for the repository. The administration has promoted the useful reform of having Congress appropriate for the Yucca Mountain project the full amount of money paid into the Waste Fund each year, so that it would not be limited by discretionary spending caps.

Several legislative initiatives being considered in Congress would ensure predictable funding for the Yucca Mountain project, clarify some of the legal and licensing issues the project faces, remove some of the project's uncertainties, and authorize construction of one or two interim storage facilities that can hold spent fuel until the Yucca Mountain repository opens. While mechanisms to achieve these goals are still being debated, the enactment of such provisions would clearly help create a less political process for storing our nation's spent fuel.

Barclay Jones is professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Best Syndication
September 19, 2006

Will Yucca Mountain Ever Hold Nuclear Waste?

Submitted by JamesFinch

A Mountain Which Can Solve the Current Waste Disposal Issue

Inside Alloy 22 Engineered Barrier Canisters

Is Transporting the Nuclear Waste to Yucca Mountain Safe?

U.S. Left Behind in the Nuclear Renaissance?

By James Finch

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UPI
September 19, 2006

Analysis: Nuclear waste safe on site
By Ben Lando
UPI Energy Correspondent

WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 (UPI) -- The head of the U.S. nuclear industry's policy organization says there's nothing wrong with keeping nuclear waste at nuclear plants, except it will undercut the high-level of support nuclear power is now experiencing.

Adm. Frank L. "Skip" Bowman, U.S. Navy, retired, president and chief executive officer of the Nuclear Energy Institute, said storing highly radioactive nuclear waste at the plants, where it was produced, poses no threat.

"Leaving used fuel exactly where it is right now ... is perfectly safe," Bowman said Monday at a Defense Department program on energy policy.

Still, he is in favor or a more progressive approach to storing the 2,000 metric tons of byproduct produced at the 103 civilian nuclear plants across the country each year in a geologic repository and, until that opens, at interim sites.

Bowman spoke to industry, government and military officials, and others interested in "Energy: A Conversation About Our National Addiction," a monthly speaking series on various energy topics hosted by the Naval Postgraduate School's Cebrowski Institute.

There are about 54,000 metric tons of nuclear waste cooling or being stored now, an amount growing not only in size but in importance in the debate over nuclear power in the United States.

By late next year, the first of what could be applications for about 27 new nuclear reactors are expected to be submitted to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (no new nuclear plant has been approved since 1978 and none have come online since 1996).

Alan Beamon, director of coal and electrical power forecasting at the Energy Information Administration, the U.S. Energy Department's data arm, said an annual prediction made late last year that U.S. nuclear capacity will increase by 9,000 megawatts by 2030 -- 6,000 megawatts from new reactors -- is probably too low an estimate (a fresh forecast will be released soon).

What to do with the waste is a question seen as a costly roadblock to adding more nuclear power to the U.S. energy feed -- four hearings on aspects of the issue were held last week by four different congressional subcommittees.

"It is clear to me that our nuclear energy strategy must not only address new plants, but must solve the waste problem as well," said Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., at a hearing Thursday. The chairman of the Senate Energy and Commerce Committee is one of Congress' most pro-nuclear advocates.

Although Congress in 1954 took ownership over nuclear waste produced at U.S. plants, eventually deciding it should be stored deep within Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, the waste is far from heading there.

After 20 years and $10 billion later the U.S. Energy Department, fighting legal challenges and internal incompetence, has yet to apply to the NRC to open the site. A timeline recently set to open Yucca Mountain by 2017 is somewhat of a new joke in Washington -- especially after Edward Sproat, director of the Energy Department's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, told a House subcommittee last week the timeline is "the best achievable, not most probable."

While the NEI's Bowman is "not Yucca or bust," he says it should be opened -- and remain open indefinitely -- and viewed as an ever-evolving repository for nuclear waste, improving as new technology is applied, including innovations in storage and reprocessing.

In the meantime, interim storage sites should be set up, but not using the same method used to choose Yucca Mountain. "No more picking a state and forcing it down somebody's throat," said Bowman, adding states could see it as an economic boon and wouldn't put up the fight Nevada has. (Nevada's congressional delegation and its state government oppose Yucca Mountain as is, fighting it in the court system, legislative and bureaucratic process, a battle Bowman said anyone in their position would wage.)

Still, keeping the waste at the nuclear plants -- whether temporarily or permanently -- is a safe option, Bowman said. But it's not viable for the industry.

A survey by Bisconti Research Inc., conducted for NEI in May, found 68 percent of the public "favors" nuclear energy (the survey had a 3 percent margin of error), an approval rating Bowman said would erode if there was no plan to move the nuclear waste.

(A study conducted in July by Deloitte & Touche USA LLP, however, found only 49 percent of the public "favor" nuclear power and only two-thirds of those support a new plant within 20 miles of where they live. It had a 3.1 percent margin of error.)

Gilbert Brown, director and professor at University of Massachusetts Lowell's Nuclear Engineering Program, also thinks on-site storage of nuclear waste is safe, but the waste issue isn't a business blocker for new nuclear plants.

"It's not going to hamstring the industry in any greater or lesser way than it already does," Brown told United Press International. "I don't view it as a show stopper."

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Easy Bourse
September 19, 2006

US Nuclear Waste Problem Divides Lawmakers

By Maya Jackson Randall
Dow Jones Newswires

WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- The road to consensus on a national nuclear waste policy will be complicated, as the U.S. House and Senate appear committed to separate ideas about how to resolve the problem.

The Bush administration and Republican lawmakers want to expand nuclear power generation, touting it as an answer to concerns about global warming and the country's dependence on foreign oil. New nuclear power development got a boost last year when Congress approved a massive energy bill that included a host of nuclear power incentives.

For the first time in decades, companies are now preparing to build about 30 new nuclear reactors. The first applications could be filed with regulators in the next few years and new plants could be operating by 2015.

But to get to the nuclear renaissance they envision, policy-makers will need to figure out what to do with the spent, highly radioactive waste produced by nuclear power plants.

Lawmakers this year have introduced various proposals for dealing with the nation's nuclear waste. One plan calls for speeding up development of an underground repository in Nevada, while another would require the federal government to store the waste at sites across the country. A third would revive programs to recycle the spent fuel.

"Fix Yucca" Solution Members of a House energy panel have their sights set on ending the delay in opening Yucca Mountain, the nation's designated nuclear waste repository in Nevada. Despite active opposition from Nevada officials and problems that have emerged in the program, several members of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on energy and air quality favor a plan by the U.S. Department of Energy to open Yucca in 11 years as the nation's permanent nuclear waste dump.

DOE officials recently announced a new goal to open Yucca in 2017, but said they wouldn't be able to meet it if Congress didn't pass a "fix-Yucca" bill the department submitted in April.

The DOE bill would remove a statutory 70,000 metric-ton cap on the amount of waste that can be stored at Yucca, allowing the federal government to store more waste at the site. It also would make 147,000 acres of land surrounding the waste dump off-limits to the public, among other things.

Energy Department officials say the legislative package will remove legal and regulatory barriers that would help smooth out its process toward filing an application and winning a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the Yucca project.

"I'm going to do everything I can to help you be successful in meeting that schedule," Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, told a DOE official at a recent hearing.

However, Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., who leads two important Senate committees focused on nuclear policy and funding, has already suggested that DOE's 2017 timeline is too ambitious and that the department's legislation is flawed.

Domenici said he plans to introduce his own Yucca-related bill in September, but doesn't expect any major action until next year.

Interim Solution Domenici also has introduced a separate proposal that would require the nation's nuclear waste to be stored at temporary sites across the country. Spent nuclear fuel - currently stored on-site at electricity companies' nuclear reactors - would be kept at dozens of federal sites nationwide until it could be safely recycled and reused. The unusable waste could be stored at Yucca Mountain, which Domenici said he sees as a long-term solution for storing defense and spent nuclear fuel.

Domenici pitched the plan as a way to fulfill the government's obligation to accept spent fuel. Utilities have sued the DOE to recover the extra costs of on-site storage associated with delays in the Yucca project, which was originally scheduled to be operational in 1989.

If Congress approves Domenici's proposal, the secretary of energy would have nine months to designate sites as nuclear waste consolidation sites. The sites would be licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to operate up to 25 years.

"We've got to have a solution to waste disposal," Domenici said. "We can't sit around and say it's too big. To say it's too big is crazy. I believe we should focus on interim storage."

Domenici's plan is included in a pending Senate appropriations bill to fund DOE programs. The proposal is backed by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who is strongly opposed to storing the nation's waste in Nevada.

Some House lawmakers have questioned whether the temporary storage proposal is an attempt to kill the Yucca Mountain project. Bush administration officials say the government doesn't have the financial resources or staffing to manage a large-scale interim storage program while also preparing a Yucca Mountain application to be submitted to the NRC.

State officials also oppose Domenici's interim waste plan over worries it would delay work on the Yucca Mountain repository.

"I see little to be gained by that approach," said Georgia Public Service Commission Chairman Stan Wise at a congressional hearing last week.

Domenici's plan was also bashed by members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee subcommittee on energy and air quality. "Building interim storage facilities in as many as 31 states is not something that I support," said Barton. "I don't think the House will support it."

Finding Compromise Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, who heads the House Appropriations subcommittee on energy and water development, is holding out hope for a compromise on various nuclear waste proposals.

Hobson and Domenici are the key negotiators charged with hashing out differences between two bills that would outline funding for the DOE for fiscal year 2007. Domenici's temporary storage plan is included in the Senate's version of the DOE appropriations bill. The bill has yet to pass the Senate.

The House, in its appropriations bill, has approved a much more limited temporary storage plan. It would only require DOE to designate a few federal waste storage sites and it hasn't stirred up as many concerns about delaying efforts on the Yucca Mountain project.

Both appropriations bills include a separate Bush administration proposal for a nuclear waste recycling program, with different levels of funding. The program would support development of spent nuclear fuel processing that would produce fuels that could be reused in special reactors to produce electricity. The program, called Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, also aims to reduce the toxicity and amount of nuclear waste stored long term at Yucca Mountain.

The Senate DOE appropriations bill would fund the partnership program with the full $250 million the Bush Administration requested. The House bill would provide only $120 million for the program.

"We have disagreements about spending, but our goals are the same," said Hobson, referring to the various nuclear waste proposals that will need to be reconciled for a final appropriations bill.

Domenici is less optimistic about a compromise. Inadequate funds could hold up passage of nuclear energy-related spending bills, he said.

"We don't have enough," Domenici told reporters, criticizing the Bush administration's fiscal year 2007 budget proposal.

Domenici also pointed out that the DOE appropriations bill has yet to be approved by the full Senate. "We're just worried about when we're going to get a shot on the (Senate) floor," he said.

By Maya Jackson Randall
Dow Jones Newswires
202-862-9263
Maya.Jackson-Randall@dowjones.com

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Gainesville Times
September 19, 2006

Letter: Coal can harm environment more than nuclear waste

The letter from Adele Kushner in the Sept. 9 Times requires clarification.

The amount of heat emitted to the environment as a result of condensing steam back into water in a steam-electric power plant is not a function of whether the plant is fueled by coal or uranium. Both are equally responsible in this regard. This can be virtually eliminated by condensing the steam via cooling towers. Many coal-fired and nuclear plants employ this technology in order to protect the environment from this heat pollution.

Coal plants emit huge amounts of heat to the atmosphere by virtue of flue gases. Nuclear plants emit no such flue gas heat, so coal plants are the offender in global warming, not nuclear plants.

Ms. Kushner suggests that nuclear plants are not a reliable source of electricity. Twenty percent of the electricity generated in the United States comes from nuclear plants. Most of the 100-plus nuclear plants in the country are available to operate at full load more than 90 percent of the time, thus they are highly reliable. This may be confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency Power Reactor Information System Database at www.iaea.org, which provides such data for every nuclear plant in the world.

Coal plants produce hundreds of millions of tons of toxic waste each year. Radioactive waste from nuclear plants is small in comparison; all the waste from all the nuclear plants operating in the United State for the last 40-plus years could be stacked on a football field less than 30 feet high.

This nuclear waste will either be buried safely under Yucca Mountain in Nevada, or it will be reprocessed into harmless materials as it is in the other 340-plus nuclear plants in more than 30 other countries around the world.

William D. Rezak
Gainesville

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
September 18, 2006

Yucca project auditor ignored

2002 complaints went nowhere

By Keith Rogers
Review-Journal

Three years before e-mails revealed that federal geologists discussed falsifying documents at the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project, a worker alerted the Department of Energy inspector general's office to what she described as similar quality assurance problems stemming from corruption in management.

The bulk of the complaint was sent in early 2002 in five Federal Express mailings from Kristi Hodges, a lead auditor for the project's quality assurance contractor. She lodged her initial complaint to the inspector general's hot line in writing on Oct. 15, 2001.

She wrote hundreds of pages in those six mailings about certification documents that were falsified and suppressed and about supervisors who were wrongfully fired or transferred. But the IG's office never publicly acknowledged the matter until the agency responded last month to a Freedom of Information Act appeal by the Review-Journal.

An official said the inspector general's office decided not to investigate the complaint and instead referred it to the agency that was the subject of the complaint.

After reviewing the 146-page response, Hodges said the handling of her complaint is akin to "sending the fox to investigate the hen house."

"They could never investigate themselves. They quashed it all," she said in one of several recent interviews.

Hodges said she was assured by an IG representative in February 2002 that the information in her complaint would not be shared with the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management because some of its managers were subject to the complaint and would have a conflict of interest if they reviewed it.

The waste management office oversees the Yucca Mountain Project.

Hodges said that promise was broken and she blamed the IG's office for making her a "target for retribution."

"I wanted somebody who was independent to look at this, and they sent it back to somebody who knew darn well where it came from," she said.

A comparison of the inspector general's Freedom of Information Act response with documents previously obtained by the Review-Journal from other sources shows much of the information from Hodges' six-binder complaint was out of sequence and left ambiguous.

The heavily redacted documents came four years after the Review-Journal's initial request was filed in June 2002. The documents were delivered Aug. 17, about a week after Hodges gave notice she was leaving the project, and about the same time the assistant inspector general who answered the appeal, Alfred K. Walter, retired.

"It may be totally unrelated but it's curious," Hodges said.

Hodges said she was infuriated by the IG's handling of her complaint. A spokeswoman for the IG's headquarters office, Marilyn Richardson, acknowledged that a "two or three page" summary of the complaint was referred to the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, which took no action on it.

The summary didn't disclose Hodges' identity, Richardson said. But Hodges said her anonymity was compromised.

"Maybe they didn't put my name in writing, but you know doggone well they talked to each other. The question is, 'Why would they send it back there?' It's word games."

Richardson said the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management never sent a response back to the inspector general's office regarding Hodges' complaint.

She said the lag in providing Hodges' documents that were sought four years ago under the Review-Journal's Freedom of Information Act request was a matter of priorities and heavy workload in the inspector general's office.

"At the time ... we had a substantial caseload. Basically we prioritized it and put it in the queue to process it because we had a significant backlog of cases pending," Richardson said Thursday.

In 2003, an inspector general spokeswoman had assured the Review-Journal that the request would be processed "as expeditiously as possible."

Richardson's comments came two days after the director of the Yucca Mountain Project, Ward Sproat, said the effort to complete a licensing application for entombing the nation's highly radioactive waste and used fuel in the ridge, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, "suffers from a quality problem in terms of the culture and people and how they view their responsibilities for quality."

The effort was rocked last year with the disclosure that hydrologists working for the U.S. Geological Survey swapped e-mails suggesting that quality assurance documentation had been falsified. The documentation is needed to support scientific studies on climate and water infiltration to pass a licensing review.

Sproat told staff members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which will review the license application, that the quality mind-set problem "is broader than the narrow pocket of the USGS," a point similar to those made four years ago in Hodges' complaint that was never investigated.

In her unredacted complaint, Hodges told the inspector general that two former quality assurance leaders who uncovered problems in the program, Jim Mattimoe and Robert Clark, had been removed.

They had revealed deficiencies in computer modeling, software and data that afflicted the project as scientists raced to meet deadlines. In the rush, some of the so-called "technical products" -- the models and analyses on which the scientists' conclusions hinge -- were flawed because they lacked defensible evidence that data were collected by qualified personnel using appropriate equipment.

Clark, the project's former director of quality assurance, urged that corrective measures be taken, but he was transferred and told to "take one for the project."

Mattimoe, formerly the manager of a contractor staff that audited the project's science and engineering, was fired in 2001 after he made allegations of wrongdoing and corruption to Lake Barrett. At the time, Barrett was in charge of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management.

"Since the removal of the QA Leaders (Mattimoe and Clark) there has been an ongoing battle to reduce the independent oversight," Hodges wrote in her fourth mailing.

In the same mailing, she noted that "Mr. Mattimoe has been terminated without cause, after presenting evidence of wrongdoing" by a program manager.

Mattimoe later filed a wrongful termination complaint against Navarro Research and Engineering that resulted in Labor Department officials ordering Navarro to reinstate him, expunge his personnel file and reimburse him for his costs.

Hodges said steps could have been taken years ago to resolve the Yucca Mountain Project's quality issues, and millions of dollars in settlement costs and attorney fees could have been avoided, had the inspector general pursued her complaint.

The Department of Energy's office of inspector general needs to be investigated, she said. "They showed their lack of independence. ... This (the inspector general process) doesn't work. This is the problem with government. There is no independence."

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
September 18, 2006

Political Notebook: No Yucca nightmares for ex-energy chief

New Mexico governor among first Democratic candidates visiting since Nevada's caucus change

By Molly Ball
Review-Journal

If there's any two-word phrase that makes many Nevadans shudder, it's "energy secretary."

That's why some were wondering whether New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson would have a hard time when he came to stump in the Silver State last week. Richardson, a Democrat considered a possible presidential contender, was energy secretary under President Clinton for two years.

With Nevada the new site of an early 2008 Democratic caucus, potential candidates, who've already started to stream through town, know they'll be asked about their stance on the proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, administered by the federal Energy Department.

The Yucca project didn't start under Richardson, but it didn't stop, either. But Richardson in an interview said he acted to stall the project, which he said he has always opposed.

"I'm the one who made sure it didn't happen during my tenure," he said. "I basically stated that, because of the water issue and other deficiencies, it shouldn't happen. My record is good on that. I ordered an investigation into the effort to speed it up."

Richardson added jocularly, "No, you can get me on a lot of things, but you can't get me on that." Asked what he could be gotten on, he replied, "Nothing."

CARTER FILLS IN FOR CARTER

Also headlining in Las Vegas last week was former President Jimmy Carter, who flew in to attend to his ailing son, U.S. Senate challenger Jack Carter. The former president filled in for the Democratic candidate at some campaign events.

In the years since he left office, Jimmy Carter has become a renowned international diplomat, earning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

In an interview last week, the peacemaker was asked what he would do about two of the stickiest international situations, the war in Iraq and Israel's recent altercation with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Carter said he would "get the government in Iraq to ask us to leave in a certain period of time, I would say maximum within a year, and have them handle their own problem. Then I would convene a global conference of people possibly crucial to the future of Iraq -- the Arab states, the (European Union), Japan and others -- and say, 'What can we do to give these people what they haven't had in five years?'

"They still don't have electricity. They still don't have sewage. They still don't have running water. The schools are not functioning. The whole place is a disaster. A lot of the violence in Iraq, I believe, is because of the animosity created by American troops being there."

Carter also was strongly critical of American policy on Israel and again recommended convening a summit.

"The main thing we need to do is get the United States reinvolved in the process," he said. "This is the first time since Israel became a nation that our country is not avidly trying to bring Israel and her neighbors together in a peace effort. There is no effort at all now being made, and there has not been a single international conference between Israel and her neighbors in the last five years with the United States acting as a broker."

Asked whether that approach constituted negotiating with terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas, the Palestinian group that won a majority in recent elections, Carter said, "You have to negotiate with the people that are causing the problem. As a matter of fact, yes, we need to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority and the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization).

"The PLO is not controlled by Hamas or anyone else," he added. "The United States has still not been willing to let the PLO under Mahmoud Abbas negotiate with Israel for five years. You can't just keep subjecting an entire people, the Palestinians, and not permitting them to have an honest broker or opportunity for peace and justice and expect the violence to decrease."

President Carter will be back next week to campaign for his son.

REID LEADS IN NEWS RELEASES

For the first seven months of this year, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada cranked out 488 news releases, more than any other senator, according to National Journal.

Reid's closest competitor was Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., who issued 435 news releases on her Web site, including 28 in one day.

Clinton and three other senators who cracked the top 10 are running for re-election this year.

Figures were not available on Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., but he was not listed among the top 10, which included five Democrats and five Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., ranked seventh with 308.

Overall, the Senate produced 13,069 news releases, or an average of 131 per senator.

Reid spokesman Jon Summers said it makes sense Reid would send more news releases than other senators because of his leadership position.

"Senator Reid will continue to send news releases as he deems necessary to communicate with Nevada residents and promote Democratic priorities in the Senate," Summers said.

Summers is one of Reid's nine communications staffers.

TREASURER HOPEFUL HAS IDEAS

Kate Marshall, Democratic nominee for state treasurer, has unveiled a seven-point plan she said would improve the treasurer's office.

Marshall said she would implement electronic money transfers, replacing the state's current method of transporting cash by armored car; try to negotiate lower service fees with credit card companies, which she said cost the state $3 million a year for the Department of Motor Vehicles alone; use online auctions to sell off the state's unclaimed property; improve the Unclaimed Properties Division's Web site, which she said is cumbersome; review all the office's contracts and agreements to see what could be done more cost effectively; and use unclaimed assets to issue bonds that would be used for academic research grants.

Marshall also said she would work with the Legislature to ensure the Millennium Scholarship is protected.

The last item is particularly politicized.

Marshall said she believes applicants for the scholarship should provide Social Security numbers, viewed as a way to keep it out of the hands of illegal immigrants. Current Treasurer Brian Krolicki, a Republican, proposed such a change unsuccessfully.

Marshall also said she would consider raising the required grade-point average or instituting a means test to further limit recipients of the scholarship, which many believe is causing high-school grade inflation that lets less-qualified students get a free ride.

ADULT FILM STAR PARTIES ON

Remember Melody Damayo? Also known as Mimi Miyagi, the former adult film star ran for Nevada governor as a Republican.

Damayo managed to parlay her dubious celebrity into plenty of headlines but just 1 percent of the vote, a total of 1,651 votes statewide.

Damayo said she was a Republican because she believed in, among other things, "freedom to party." So perhaps it shouldn't be too surprising that she's switched to a party that's perhaps the most pro-freedom.

According to Clark County election records, Damayo is now a registered Libertarian.

Stephens Washington Bureau writer Tony Batt contributed to this report. Contact political reporter Molly Ball at 387-2919 or MBall@reviewjournal.com.

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Nevada Appeal
September 18, 2006

Yucca repository: dead or alive?

By Guy W. Farmer

Depending upon whom you listen to, the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository is still viable, or it’s on life support. Personally, I side with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Republican Gov. Kenny Guinn on this one: The highly toxic federal project is more dead than alive and no amount of lobbying by the powerful Nuclear Energy Institute is likely to revive it.

The nuclear energy lobby, which throws money around like it’s going out of style, fired the latest shot in the ongoing Yucca Mountain War last week with an op-ed piece by Institute lobbyist Marvin Fertel, who assured us that “the repository will open and it will be safe.” Oh sure, and the moon is made of Swiss cheese.

“There is no question that the Yucca Mountain project has experienced some challenges,” (like falsified e-mails between scientists), Fertel acknowledged; “however, work to facilitate its opening is ongoing.” But just barely. I’m betting the repository, originally scheduled to open by 2010, will never open and that the U.S. Energy Department (DOE) will be forced to find some other way to dispose of nearly 80,000 tons of deadly nuclear waste, or to seriously consider other alternatives such as reprocessing.

Fertel used the insulting bribery argument that Nevadans should embrace the Yucca Mountain project (although 70 percent of us oppose it) because we’ll be showered with federal largesse. “By opposing the repository at every turn, the state’s chief executive (Guinn) is risking enormous economic opportunity for the state ...” Fertel wrote. His argument reminds me of how ex-President Clinton’s apologists tried to excuse his serial philandering by claiming that his female accusers surfaced only after someone dragged $100 bills through trailer parks. Please! We’re not that stupid, or venal.

In August, Gov. Guinn wrote that “Yucca Mountain finally, and deservedly, appears to be headed toward the trash bin of history” and called the fatally flawed project “the latest in a long series of DOE boondoggles ... based on bad science, bad law and bad public policy.” The governor noted that Congress is finally shifting its focus from Yucca Mountain “to the concept of interim storage, either at existing reactor locations (there are none in Nevada) or at regional ‘consolidation and preparation’ facilities.” And Senate Energy Committee Chairman Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) said the project should be put on the “back burner.” I agree but it shouldn’t be put on the back burner; it should be killed once and for all, and be given a decent burial (no pun intended).
As Gov. Guinn observed in his recent op-ed piece, “Nevadans can be justifiably proud of how the state has pulled together to bring this dangerous, ill-advised and unnecessary project to a standstill ... It has been Nevada’s strong and unyielding opposition over the past two decades that has prevented an out-of-control federal bureaucracy from making a mistake of unprecedented proportions.” You tell ’em, Governor!

Nevada politicians of every political persuasion — Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives alike — joined together to fight the nuclear waste project shortly after Congress passed the so-called “Screw Nevada Bill” in 1987, designating Yucca Mountain as the only site in the nation to be studied as the future toxic dump site. “Thanks but no thanks,” Nevada’s elected representatives replied. “Put it somewhere else, preferably in a state that generates nuclear waste.”

Fortunately, Nevada has much more political clout in Washington today than it did 20 years ago and the election of Gov. Guinn 1998 and the elevation of Sen. Reid to Minority Leader in 2004 energized the bipartisan opposition to Yucca Mountain. By now, I’m confident that the Yucca Mountain dump will never open as long as Harry Reid and John Ensign remain in the Senate. I’d also note that GOP gubernatorial candidate, Congressman Jim Gibbons, strongly opposes the project but I don’t know where Democratic candidate Dina Titus stands on this important issue.

President Bush betrayed Nevada in 2002 when he sided with his nuclear energy industry friends (and campaign contributors) by approving the Yucca Mountain dump despite promising two years earlier that he would base his decision on “sound science.” But Yucca Mountain has never been about sound science; instead, it’s always been about politics and keeping big campaign contributors happy. So highly paid nuclear energy lobbyist Marvin Fertel is blowing smoke when he tells us how safe the toxic waste dump will be. Remember that he lives all the way across the country in Washington, D.C.

In 1987, politicians could get away with supporting the troubled project on grounds that “Nevada is a desert and no one lives there.” They can’t use that line these days, however, because Nevada is now a key swing state in national elections and nearby Las Vegas is the fastest-growing city in the nation. Meanwhile, today’s politicians have learned that Las Vegas casino moguls also contribute to political campaigns.

Late last year, the new director of DOE’s Yucca Mountain project, Edward “Ward” Sproat, said the country should move toward the recycling of nuclear waste and away from the burial of such waste. His statement came after Congress slashed the project’s annual appropriation from $577 million to $450 million, a 22 percent budget cut (Bush had requested $650 million). So it’s apparent that Yucca Mountain is on life support no matter what kind of propaganda the powerful nuclear energy lobby tries to sell us here in the Silver State. We aren’t buying, and never will.

• Guy W. Farmer, a semi-retired journalist and former U.S. diplomat, resides in Carson City.

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US News & World Report
September 18, 2006

Some in House suspicious of Senate nuclear waste bill

By Bret Schulte

Legislators in both chambers are saying they want to give nuclear power a new boost in the American energy market, but rival legislation on what to do with rapidly accruing nuclear waste has left some members of the House questioning the intentions of their counterparts in the Senate.

Members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee are expressing opposition to a Senate bill that would open interim storage sites for nuclear waste across the country while Nevada's Yucca Mountain repository continues to be derailed by poor planning, cost overruns, and fierce opposition by Nevadans, including Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. Many House leaders suspect the Senate proposal is meant to further undercut the project.

"We should not allow pursuit of interim storage to block Yucca Mountain," said Rep. Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat and ranking member of the subcommittee on energy and air quality, in a hearing yesterday. House members say that in order for nuclear power to expand, a permanent home for nuclear waste is necessary. Rep. Gene Green, a Texas Democrat, tells U.S. News that the Senate bill, which would devote money and agency oversight to interim storage sites, is a masked attempt to kill the Yucca Mountain project for good.

"If you can't kill it straight up, you can kill it by taking away resources," Green said. "I know if I opposed Yucca Mountain, I would be very creative, and this looks like a very creative way to delay and divert resources from Yucca Mountain."

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SUU Journal
September 18, 2006

BLM denies nuke haul

Samantha Arnold

The Bureau of Land Management has denied Private Fuel Storage the right to transport high-level nuclear waste to Skull Valley, according to a Sept. 7 press release.

Because the Skull Valley site is so close to the Utah Test and Training Range, the transportation and storage of nuclear waste "would have put Utahns on a collision course with a catastrophe," said Sen. Orrin Hatch in the press release.

The entire Utah delegation has been working toward the restriction of nuclear waste being brought into Utah for years, according to the press release.

The press release also reported that in an effort led by Congressman Rob Bishop in December 2005, the Utah congressional delegation passed legislation that blocked the attempts to build a rail spur on federal lands near the Goshute reservation. This helped prevent the nuclear waste storage facility from being built.

In 2002, Sen. Bob Bennett received a letter from Energy Secretary Spence Abraham saying that federal funds would not be used to facilitate PFS and that PFS was not part of the national spent nuclear fuel storage strategy, according to the press release.

That year, Bennett and Hatch worked to get a commitment from nearly every CEO in the nuclear industry to not use the PFS site past the licensing phase as long as Yucca Mountain was still being used, according to the press release.

Mike Empey, Southern Utah field representative for Congressman Jim Matheson, who has been involved with the attempts to prohibit nuclear waste transportation in Utah since his election in 2000, said the congressman feels relieved at the news that federal officials refused to sign off on the PFS storage plan.

"He is very, very hopeful that this is the end of it," he said.

Hatch's press release also reported that although there is still talk that the PFS plan may have a comeback, Hatch said that speculation was "hogwash."

Now that there is no lease for PFS to store the fuel or no permission to transport it, "PFS is left without a leg to stand on," he said in his press release.

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Hilton Head Island Packet
September 18, 2006

Letter: Nuclear power viable alternative

The Island Packet missed a splendid opportunity to help solve the greenhouse gas problem in the Sept. 5 column by Ms. Kathleen Parker. The column is correct in pointing out we need more electric generating plants, and the new ones should produce lowered or no greenhouse gases. The problem is the column did not include nuclear power plants that produce electrical energy and only spent fuel with no greenhouse emissions.

Coal-fired electric generating plants produce carbon dioxide from the burning of the carbon in coal. There is no alternative to the carbon dioxide if coal, oil or natural gas is used. The only way we now know to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions is to extract it from the stack gasses to make "seltzer water" for storage in old salt mines in Louisiana. The question is how long will the seltzer water keep its fizz?

Nuclear electrical power generating plants emit no carbon dioxide or other gases. The only output is electric energy and spent fuel. Yucca Mountain has been designated the storage location for all of the spent fuel from nuclear power plants. There is a problem of long time safety, similar to the seltzer water problem from coal-fired plants. There is a good solution: Build 105 nuclear power generating plants and continue storing the spent fuel at the nuclear power plants instead of Yucca Mountain. The spent fuel can be recycled into new fuel when the political situations in Iran and North Korea are solved.

Alexander D. Kline
Bluffton

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Raw Story
September 18, 2006

Nearly 30 new US nuclear plants planned, official says

Deutsche Presse Agentur

Washington- US utilities plan to build nearly 30 new nuclear power plants over the next decade, and the first firm announcement is likely by early 2008, a US official said Monday. President George W Bush is pushing nuclear power as a major alternative to US dependence on imported oil, part of a global rebound for the technology since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

In addition to new plants, half of existing US electricity reactors are expected to have their licences renewed for 20 years, US Senator Pete Domenici told a hearing in Washington.

"US utilities are developing the detailed plans to build a new generation of nuclear power plants," US Assistant Secretary of Energy Dennis Spurgeon told the Senate hearing, which is considering funding for US government civilian nuclear energy programmes.

"Almost 30 new nuclear power plants are in the planning process for construction beginning over the next decade," Spurgeon said.

Overall, 130 nuclear power plants are under construction or planned around the world, including in China, India and Russia, Spurgeon said.

Experts told the hearing that the US should move ahead with plans for a national nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in the western state of Nevada to replace storage sites for spent nuclear fuel currently scattered around the country.

The underground storage site, under discussion since the late 1970s, is slated to open in 2017 at the earliest.

Bush has sought to speed progress on Yucca Mountain. He also has authorized research into new nuclear reprocessing technologies.

The United States abandoned reprocessing of nuclear fuel in the 1970s because it produces material that could be used in nuclear weapons. But scientists believe new technologies could allow reprocessing of nuclear waste without producing plutonium.

Spurgeon said the US Energy Department has put out feelers to US and foreign companies that offer nuclear fuel recycling technology and was "very encouraged" by the initial response.

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NewsBlaze
September 18, 2006

International Atomic Energy Agency - General Session

Thank you Director General ElBaradei.

Congratulations to Mr. Abdul Samad Minty on your election as President of this, the 50th IAEA General Conference.

President George W. Bush sends a letter wishing us a productive conference.

Let me draw from his message:

"My Administration has announced a bold new proposal called the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. We will work with countries to meet their growing energy needs, dispose of waste safely, advance nonproliferation, and keep nuclear technology out of the hands of terrorist networks and terrorist states.

"We will encourage reliable access to nuclear fuel for countries that agree to forego uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities. Together, we can ensure that cheap, safe, and clean nuclear energy and its benefits are enjoyed by all who are in compliance with their nonproliferation obligations."

Let me take this opportunity to highlight some of our recent nonproliferation successes.

Through close cooperation between Russia and the U.S., we have strengthened the security for hundreds of metric tons of weapons-usable materials in Russia and we are on track to finish that work by the end of 2008. We have down-blended more than 250 metric tons of Russian highly enriched uranium and sold it as commercial fuel. And we continue with plans to eliminate surplus U.S. and Russian plutonium.

To build on these efforts, the United States and Russia recently announced a new Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism. This initiative provides the means to prevent terrorists and their sponsors from acquiring nuclear weapons, the most serious threat facing the world today.

The initiative builds on UN Security Council Resolution 1540, the recently amended Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Materials and Facilities, the Additional Protocol, and related instruments. We urge full implementation of these measures to control proliferation and to secure the safe expansion of nuclear energy use worldwide.

In addition, through President Bush's Global Threat Reduction Initiative, we recently partnered with Russia and the IAEA to secure and return highly enriched uranium and other at-risk materials from Serbia, Bulgaria, Libya, Uzbekistan, Latvia, the Czech Republic, Poland, and elsewhere.

These materials would have been enough to arm nine nuclear weapons and numerous "dirty bombs." This should spur us to redouble our efforts to secure nuclear and radiological material, and further expand our cooperative work in nuclear non-proliferation.

But the immense power contained in just a few pounds of enriched uranium can also produce an incredible amount of clean and abundant energy. Like many powerful forces man has harnessed throughout history, such as the flow of a great river, or the spark of an open flame - nuclear power can be turned to chaos and destruction or it can be employed to immeasurable benefit.

We are all familiar with the projections for greatly increased demand for energy of all types around the world. In particular, on my visit to Iraq earlier this summer I saw for myself how critical electricity is to trade and commerce, education, even healthcare.

The world still relies primarily on coal, natural gas, and oil to generate electrical power. But nuclear energy provides a host of benefits fossil fuels cannot match.

I believe that nuclear power will increasingly become the electricity-generator of choice if we act wisely and decisively today.

To realize the full benefits of nuclear power, four basic conditions must be met:

First, nuclear power must be cost-competitive. Our Congress has enacted legislation providing financing, tax, insurance, and licensing incentives for utilities to construct new facilities in the United States. Some 27 new reactors - the first since 1978 - are now in various stages of planning and design.

Second, nuclear waste and spent fuel must be responsibly managed. Our Department is pushing aggressively to open the Yucca Mountain Repository by 2017. We also welcome progress of other nations, such as Sweden and Finland, that are pursuing geologic repositories.

Third, nuclear power must be safe. The nuclear safety record over the last twenty years has been outstanding. Simply put, it must stay this way.

And fourth, we must maintain the firmest safeguards over nuclear materials. Expansion of nuclear power must not result in additional states acquiring nuclear weapons.

We can achieve these goals, but it will not be easy.

To guide our efforts over the coming years, the United States has proposed the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, or "GNEP", announced by President Bush in January.

GNEP will complement the proposal announced earlier this year by President Putin to establish international nuclear fuel service centers, starting with one in Russia.

Both of these plans, as well as ideas put forward by the IAEA, share the same goal: to facilitate the global expansion of nuclear power to meet growing energy demands, limit carbon emissions, and reduce proliferation dangers.

The avenue that the United States has proposed, in the form of GNEP, is to develop and deploy advanced technologies for recycling spent nuclear fuel that do not result in separated plutonium.

Our aim is to work with others in developing advanced, proliferation resistant nuclear power reactors appropriate for the power grids and needs of developing economies.

Most critically, we hope to work with partners among both nuclear supplier and recipient states to provide reliable fuel services on a competitive basis worldwide, by assuring the supply and return of spent fuel for recycling to nations that agree not to pursue enrichment and reprocessing capabilities.

Whatever the difference between the various proposals for the future of nuclear power, they are minor compared to what they have in common:

We all agree that an international framework for an assured fuel supply is critical to meeting the world's energy needs and advancing our nonproliferation goals. That is why we welcome the Director General's special event on "Assurances of Supply and Nonproliferation" beginning tomorrow.

Former United States President Ronald Reagan was fond of saying, "There is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit."

That is the approach we hope to take.

The United States intends to work with the IAEA and all other willing partners to create a framework for reliable fuel guarantees at fair market rates and for the storage, transport, and processing of spent fuel.

We would also work with the IAEA to promote dialogue between suppliers and recipients, foster acceptance of technological advances, and help countries build the skills necessary to use nuclear energy effectively.

We seek mutually beneficial agreements with other like-minded nations-both large and small-that share our vision of responsible, expanded use of nuclear energy.

During the Cold War, smaller nation's often found their energy supply held hostage to the tactical maneuvering of larger powers.

Unfortunately, we continue to see some of this even today.

An assured fuel supply - whether brokered by the IAEA or supplier states - would considerably increase the energy independence, and thus political and strategic independence, of all nations, particularly smaller ones.

An important first step is the proposed multilateral mechanism for reliable supply introduced to the IAEA Board of Governors by the United States, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands.

We urge the quick adoption of this mechanism.

Of course, there are still obstacles to the safe expansion of nuclear power. The defiance and violations of Iran and North Korea, and risks of catastrophic nuclear terror, must be addressed.

But despite these persistent challenges we are making good progress on nonproliferation, such as the developments in securing and returning Russian-origin HEU that I mentioned earlier.

Cooperation with Russia has improved the security of our nations and the world. Yet we cannot stop there. All states must act decisively and responsibly to prevent proliferation and thwart terrorists bent on nuclear or radiological violence.

In the fifty years since the IAEA was founded, the world has seen great progress in the expansion of peaceful nuclear power, while also keeping the nuclear peace. But in my view, this was simply a prelude to the next fifty years, which I believe will be the real "Nuclear Age."

Through continued progress in science and technology, we can further improve the safety and security of nuclear reactors, while also solving the challenge of waste disposal.

But only through a genuine global partnership ... one that benefits the world's economies and the environment ... and one that limits proliferation risks... will we realize the Atoms for Peace vision that this organization was founded to pursue.

Thank you.

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

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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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