Yucca Mountain News Clips
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
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UPI
October 03, 2006
Analysis: Nuke waste bill could set course
By BEN LANDO
UPI Energy Correspondent
WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 (UPI) -- Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., has introduced legislation to fix a troubled nuclear waste repository project, setting schedules for transporting defense and civilian material to Nevada as well as a policy for interim storage and recycling.
While Domenici's bill is unlikely to move forward in this Congress, he hopes it will start the discussion in the next Congress on an issue the nuclear industry says is necessary to solve before new nuclear plants come online, and fulfills an obligation by the federal government to take control of nuclear waste.
And though the bill aims at clearing procedural and bureaucratic hurdles in opening Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, which the government has designated as the final resting place of the tens of thousands of highly radioactive nuclear byproducts, opponents say the legislation is no match for the unsound science of the plan.
Bob Loux, executive director of Nevada's Agency for Nuclear Projects, rejected the bill's premise that the long-delayed project could be worked out. He called the legislation, and others that have been introduced recently, "largely irrelevant," especially before this Congress and said it isn't going to get a serious look by his agency -- at the forefront of Nevada's fight against Yucca -- until next Congress.
While Domenici formally introduced the Nuclear Waste Acceleration to Yucca bill -- or NU-WAY -- on the Senate floor last Wednesday, its architects briefed reporters earlier that morning in a conference room in Domenici's office.
Domenici's bill would put under the U.S. Energy Department's jurisdiction 147,000 acres of land around Yucca Mountain controlled by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the Air Force or Nevada Test Site, as well as land needed for the rail system to transport the waste from 131 sites around the country to Yucca Mountain.
Right now there is 13,300 metric tons of nuclear byproduct being stored by the Defense Department at a handful of locations and 54,000 metric tons of civilian nuclear waste at both active and shuttered power plants. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission estimates an additional 2,000 metric tons of waste is currently produced each year.
The NRC says it expects applications for up to 30 new reactors soon that, when or if they are approved and come online, will increase that production.
The Energy Department's schedule for Yucca, if there are no legal, procedural or structural stumbling blocks along the way -- and in all likelihood there will be -- puts opening day at 2017. (Nevada alone has numerous pending legal challenges.)
There will be enough nuclear waste produced to fill the repository in a year-and-a-half, however, so the Domenici bill also removes the 70,000 metric ton cap and calls for the NRC to set a new limit.
Under the bill, defense waste can begin its travels to the site when the NRC approves an above-ground storage facility at the repository site, planned for 2010. Civilian spent fuel can make its way there when the NRC issues a construction permit for the Yucca site itself -- 2011 at the earliest (both before the NRC has given final approval to store waste).
This changes the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which outlaws moving nuclear waste until a repository is actually licensed and allows defense waste to be moved to Nevada.
The Energy Department has tripped over its feet on the project numerous times and its latest estimate is to have an application into the NRC by 2008 -- 10 years after a repository was supposed to open.
Domenici says he hopes the bill is approved along with other interim storage and recycling plans, including one in an Energy and Water appropriations bill establishing storage sites within the state that generated the nuclear waste. Domenici is also keen on the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership that, in part, would place a huge emphasis on recycling technology in an effort to thin out the amount of waste to be eventually stored at a repository. It gives the energy secretary authority to decide what waste can be recycled and sent instead to interim storage or, if it's built, a recycling plant, and which waste cannot be recycled and heads straight to Yucca.
"The three pieces of the fuel cycle that I have discussed today -- interim storage, GNEP and Yucca Mountain," Domenici said on the Senate floor, "will establish a comprehensive program that will provide confidence that our nation's nuclear waste will be managed safely both for current and future reactors."
Michelle Boyd, legislative director of Public Citizen's Energy Program, in a news statement, called the bill a waste of "billions of taxpayer dollars" -- about $10 billion over the past 20 years, the Energy Department estimates -- "on the flawed Yucca Mountain site, on a dangerous scheme to reprocess nuclear waste and on unnecessary away-from-reactor interim storage."
She also said that to have a plan that centers on the Yucca Mountain project, without it being approved by the NRC, biases the regulatory process.
The Nuclear Energy Institute, the leading industry trade group, has praised Domenici's bill to address an issue first placed on Congress' desk in the 1950s.
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Pioneer Press
Why resurrecting nuclear power would be a step backward
By Jeremy Rifkin
Suddenly, nuclear power is in vogue. At the G-8 summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a far-reaching agreement to cooperate in the rapid expansion of nuclear energy worldwide and called on other countries to join them. It was the latest in a series of high-profile initiatives by the White House to promote nuclear power. Bush argues that the future energy security of the United States and the world will depend on increasing reliance on nuclear energy.
A technology that for years suffered ignominiously in scientific purgatory has been resurrected. Its virtues have been heralded by the likes of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, famed scientist Sir James Lovelock and even a few renegade environmental activists. The nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 and the horrific meltdown at Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union in 1986 have become distant memories. Now, facing rising costs of oil on world markets and real-time global warming, nuclear technology has been given a public relations face-lift and is touted, by some, as the energy of choice in a post-oil era. However, before we let our enthusiasm run away from us, we ought to take a sober look at the consequences of re-nuclearizing the world.
First, nuclear power is unaffordable. With a minimum price tag of $2 billion each, new-generation nuclear power plants are 50 percent more expensive than putting coal-fired power plants online, and they are far more expensive than new gas-fired power plants. The cost of doubling nuclear power's share of U.S. electricity generation — which produces 20 percent of our electricity — could exceed half a trillion dollars. In a country facing record consumer and government debt, where is the money going to come from? Consumers would pay the price in terms of higher taxes to support government subsidies and higher electricity bills.
Second, 60 years into the nuclear era, our scientists still don't know how to safely transport, dispose of or store nuclear waste. Spent nuclear rods are piling up all over the world. In the United States, the federal government spent more than $8 billion and 20 years building what was supposed to be an airtight, underground burial tomb dug deep into Yucca Mountain in Nevada to hold radioactive material. The vault was designed to be leak-free for 10,000 years. Unfortunately, the Environmental Protection Agency concedes that the underground storage facility will leak.
Third, according to a study conducted by the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2001, known uranium resources could fail to meet demand, possibly as early as 2026. Of course, new deposits could be discovered, and it is possible technological breakthroughs could reduce uranium requirements, but that remains speculative.
Fourth, building hundreds of nuclear power plants in an era of spreading Islamic terrorism seems insane. On the one hand, the United States, the European Union and much of the world is frightened by the mere possibility that just one country — Iran — might use enriched uranium from its nuclear power plants for a nuclear bomb. On the other hand, many of the same governments are eager to spread nuclear power plants around the world, placing them in every nook and cranny. This means uranium and spent nuclear waste in transit everywhere and piling up in makeshift facilities, often close to heavily populated urban areas.
Nuclear power plants are the ultimate soft target for terrorist attacks. On Nov. 8, 2005, the Australian government arrested 18 suspected Islamic terrorists who were allegedly plotting to blow up Australia's only nuclear power plant. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission found that more than half of the nuclear power plants in this country failed to prevent a simulated attack on their facilities. We should all be very worried.
Finally, nuclear power represents the kind of highly centralized, clunky technology of a bygone era. In an age when distributed technologies are undermining hierarchies, decentralizing power and giving rise to networks and open-source economic models, nuclear power seems old-fashioned and obsolete. To a great extent, nuclear power was a Cold War creation. It represented massive concentration of power and reflected the geopolitics of a post-World War II era. Today, however, new technologies are giving people the tools they need to become active participants in an interconnected world. Nuclear power, by contrast, is elite power, controlled by the few. Its resurrection would be a step backward.
Instead, we should pursue an aggressive effort to bring the full range of decentralized renewable technologies online: solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and biomass. And we should establish a hydrogen storage infrastructure to ensure a steady, uninterrupted supply of power for our electricity needs and for transportation.
Our common energy future lies with the sun, not with uranium.
Jeremy Rifkin is author of "The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the World Wide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth." He wrote this piece for the Los Angeles Times.
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Hampton Union
October 03, 2006
Plant off-line for refueling outage
By Susan Morse
smorse@seacoastonline.com
SEABROOK -- FPL Energy Seabrook Station shut down at 12:01 a.m. Sunday for its 11th refueling outage.
The nuclear power plant is not releasing how long the facility will be off-line, because of the industry being deregulated and Seabrook Station now in the competitive market as a merchant plant, according to spokesman Al Griffith.
The outage is planned, he said, and all normal activities are being conducted for the refueling by an estimated 1,300 contractors on site.
The last refueling took place in April 2005.
The plant last shut down over Labor Day weekend, because of an issue with a diesel generator, which required maintenance, he said.
During the outage, the fuel rod assemblies containing uranium pellets are removed from the reactor and replaced.
Spent fuel rod assemblies are initially placed in wet storage for cooling for a planned period of five years. Because of the delay in the federal government opening a dry storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, spent fuel pools are filling to capacity.
Seabrook's pool will be full by 2009, according to information given by Griffith this summer.
FPL Energy Seabrook Station and other power plants in the FPL nuclear fleet plan to build dry storage on site, Griffith said. Construction is expected to begin next year and the dry storage operational by 2008.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
October 02, 2006
Scientists ponder future of Yucca Mountain dust
Predictions made on repository performance
By Keith Rogers
Review-Journal
Scientists huddled in Las Vegas last week to discuss what could happen hundreds or thousands of years after dust settles on Yucca Mountain's nuclear waste containers.
While there is still much work to do, consultants to federal agencies found that corrosion on waste containers stemming from dust and water infiltrating the volcanic-rock ridge won't be significant for tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years.
State consultants, however, who examined 2,000-year-old mud brick ovens and 3,500-year-old tunnel deposits in Egypt's harsh desert environment say there's not enough accurate data for computer models to make such predictions. In essence, scientists for Nevada contend their federal counterparts are making too many assumptions on how ideal conditions are going to be.
"What we have is garbage going in ... and garbage going out," said Maury Morgenstein, geologist and president of Geosciences Management Institute Inc., a Nevada contractor, referring to the data on which the government is basing its conclusions.
To make predictions on how the planned repository, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, will perform in the future in light of NRC guidelines, the scientists are attempting to answer a number of questions.
Will ingredients in the dust such as salts of chloride, nitrate, sodium and potassium, mix with water vapor to form substances in sufficient amount that corrode the metal-alloy shell surrounding the steel-encased packages of deadly, used nuclear fuel?
What role will heat generated by the decaying waste play in the process and will nitrate, for example, slow down the corrosion rate?
The answers will weigh in the NRC's review of the repository's design when the Department of Energy submits a license application that's expected before June 30, 2008.
Lietai Yang, a senior research engineer for the Center for Nuclear Waste Regulatory Analyses in San Antonio, said his team's work shows the potential for dust mixtures corroding the protective, nickel-chromium Alloy-22 shell around the disposal containers could be higher than once thought above 320 degrees Fahrenheit. That temperature for the waste container will occur first about a century after the repository is loaded, the doors are shut and the ventilation fans are turned off.
The temperature will continue to rise for another few centuries then drop back to 320 degrees with dust corrosion occurring during that period of several hundred years, followed by brine corrosion up to several thousand years.
In the dust phase, the corrosion rate is 10 times higher than it is as a vapor, Yang said.
John Walton, a civil engineering professor at the University of Texas-El Paso and consultant to Nye County, noted that the dust samples that scientists are studying might not be representative of those in the future.
His conclusion: "The corrosion environment is dynamic, periodic and poorly understood."
After showing slides of a trip to El Hibeth, Egypt, Morgenstein said, "I don't think the question is what does dust look like now, the question really is what will dust look like in the future?"
Chris Kouts, director of the Office of Waste Management for the Department of Energy's civilian radioactive waste branch in Washington, said vendors soon will be asked to submit designs for the waste-package system and canisters that will be sealed at reactor sites with spent fuel assemblies inside them.
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The NewStandard
October 02, 2006
Senators Move to Rush Yucca Nuke Dump
by Catherine Komp
With no long-term solution for the US nuclear waste problem in sight, activists prefer reinforced, on-site storage rather than distant, centralized dumping.
Oct. 2 – Critics of congressional proposals to address the mounting problem of storing radioactive nuclear waste say lawmakers are ignoring science and jeopardizing public health and safety by proposing to push nuclear waste onto a controversial Nevada site that remains far from approval.
Before Congress adjourned last week, Senator Pete Domenici (R–New Mexico) introduced the "Nuclear Waste Acceleration to Yucca" bill, which would permit disposal of nuclear fuel at Yucca Mountain as early as 2010.
Critics see Domenici's move as an attempt to skirt the established process for waste-storage approval, which they have managed to stall, citing environmental and safety concerns. "[I]t is not a site that can be licensed given reasonable standards for health and public safety," said Michele Boyd, legislative counsel with Public Citizen.
Domenici's bill, co-sponsored by Senator Larry Craig (R–Idaho), would also amend the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act – the bill requiring the US government to start disposing of waste by 1998 – to eliminate the cap on the amount of waste that can be stored at Yucca Mountain. Currently, the statutory limit is 70,000 metric tons of high-level radioactive waste for the first permanent nuclear storage facility built in the United States.
According to the Department of Energy (DOE), 53,440 metric tons of reactor and "defense-related" radioactive waste is currently awaiting a permanent storage solution. The agency estimates that amount will rise to 119,000 metric tons by 2035.
Another provision in the bill would permit the DOE to move spent fuel to Yucca Mountain and begin construction on the waste facility before the site is licensed as a permanent repository by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
"This bill does all these things to put pressure on opening up Yucca Mountain when the basic science of the program is really questionable," Boyd told The NewStandard.
The Yucca Mountain site has been mired in controversy since Congress approved it in 2002. Critics have questioned the government's scientific analysis of the site after the DOE released official e-mails suggesting US Geological Survey scientists were falsifying and manipulating data to move the project forward. Last December, the Department suspended some of the safety and engineering work contractor Bechtel was conducting on the site after whistleblowers revealed the company was engaging in questionable scientific analysis.
Domenici, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, is also under fire for a provision he attached to the FY 2007 Energy and Water Appropriations Bill that would create interim storage sites, also called Consolidation and Preparation (CAP) facilities, for nuclear waste in dozens of states.
A coalition of ten state attorneys general sent a letter to Domenici and co-sponsor Harry Reid (D–Nevada), lambasting the proposal. Their missive said the bill would give the DOE "fast-tracked" and "unchecked power" to stick their states with unwanted waste sites. A TNS analysis of the provision confirms it would authorize the DOE to designate sites for storage of nuclear waste in each of the 31 states that house nuclear reactors "in consultation with" state governors.
Senator Reid, an opponent of the Yucca Mountain site, is supporting Domenici's interim storage site proposal as a way to keep the waste out of Nevada.
Ann Alexander, environmental counsel to Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, said the provision is unclear about states' prerogative to influence such plans. Madigan told TNS that the bill's "silence" on the topic of states' sovereignty constitutes its "real danger." She noted that the legislation empowers the DOE to choose federal or purchased property and establish a site.
Alexander said the provision could trump residential zoning laws or state environmental regulations.
"If there were some endangered or threatened species, it's not all clear under this law that the restrictions that would apply when such a species is present on a site would in any way prevent construction" of a waste site," she said.
Alexander said they do not take a position on sending waste to Yucca Mountain "except to say that the law does require that a long-term repository be found" by the federal government.
State leaders also criticize the short timetable for choosing interim sites – only nine months – and the unaddressed dangers of transporting radioactive waste, including accidents and the potential for terrorist attacks.
"The proposal would, given its truncated time frame, effectively require that shipments commence before any of these issues are sufficiently evaluated," wrote the Attorneys General. "The proposal does not contain even basic measures to address the major transportation-safety issues entailed in moving nuclear waste, such as emergency-response preparation, accident prevention, security and public education."
Critics also accuse Domenici of hindering public debate about the controversial proposal by attaching it to an appropriations bill that offers no opportunity for public hearings or input.
Public-interest groups also suggest the push for interim storage and to move waste quickly to Yucca Mountain is driven by the nuclear power industry. They argue that if the government creates a "solution" for the industry's waste, companies can speed up the licensing process for new nuclear-power plants. Congress and the Bush Administration, a strong proponent of nuclear power, have authorized billions of dollars in subsidies for the nuclear industry in recent energy appropriations bills.
But without a long-term solution for disposing of nuclear waste, groups say, the government should not be facilitating the generation of more nuclear waste. Boyd with Public Citizen, an organization that advocates for the phase-out of nuclear power, says right now the focus should be on protecting the public from the health, safety and security threats posed by storage of nuclear waste at current sites.
Boyd said the investigations and audits following the allegedly flawed and manipulated data from government scientists and contractors has prolonged finding a long-term solution, adding that the decision to establish Yucca Mountain as a repository was a "political decision, not a scientific one."
"These principles for safeguarding nuclear waste… are not a permanent solution for the waste," said Boyd. "But what we are saying is it's addressing the real problem, and the real problem is security."
Public Citizen and more than 100 public-interest and environmental groups are advocating for "hardened, on-site storage," or HOSS, at current reactors, in which waste is stored in highly reinforced dry casks. The coalition presented a proposal to the House Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality last month that calls for better protection and placement for pools of spent nuclear fuel, more funding to monitor and review sites and a prohibition against reprocessing nuclear waste.
Though no states have yet endorsed HOSS, several members of Congress have voiced their support of this method of storing waste, which advocates say is the best way to secure the radioactive material against accidents and attacks. Congress members Edward Markey (D–Massachusetts), Maurice Hinchey (D–New York) and Eliot Engel (D–New York) are urging Congress and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to issue mandates requiring HOSS at the 103 reactor sites across the country.
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UNLV Rebel Yell
October 02, 2006
Nuclear waste discussed
Brian Ahern
In a dimly lit, sparsely populated conference hall in the Clark County Library on Thursday, the Southern Nevada Chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) held its monthly meeting. With less than ten people in attendance the audience may have been small, but the ideas presented and the assertions made were far from modest.
Peggy Maze Johnson, Executive Director of Citizen Alert, was the night's guest speaker and the tone of the evening quickly became focused on nuclear power, waste and alternative sources of energy.
Citizen Alert is an organization focused on uniting Nevada to overcome environmental and public health threats faced by the state.
"I don't think you can be against the Yucca Mountain project without being against nuclear power altogether," Johnson said.
She continued, saying that many of the common perceptions supporting nuclear power are not true.
"We were being led down this little path," Johnson said. "Nuclear power is not clean and it is not safe."
Johnson then placed nuclear power plants in her sights.
"If we're going to say that we can't have nuclear waste, then we have to say that we can't have nuclear power plants," Johnson said. The Three Mile Island and Chernobyl disasters were used as examples of the inherent problems involved with nuclear energy and power plants. "We want to build more and more of these things, but we don't even know how to build them."
For Johnson, too much is being done to develop nuclear energy, while renewable sources of energy such as solar and wind power are being largely underdeveloped. She criticized UNLV, acknowledging UNLV's increasing presence in the field of nuclear energy research and grants from the federal government.
"The university needs to start looking more at renewables, not reprocessing of nuclear waste," Johnson said.
Although Johnson was speaking at a NOW event, very little of what she said addressed the agenda of her audience directly. The scattered attention she did give to the interests of the group came in the form of generalities.
"I believe that it's women who are looking beyond our generation," Johnson said.
As with most speeches given close to elections, the night soon turned political. "It's not an endorsement," Johnson said, "but Dina (Titus) has been the only Nevada politician for years who has been a paid member of Citizen Alert ... she is at the forefront of renewable resources."
As her speech came toward its end, Johnson reminded her audience what was at stake and what they needed to do.
"This is war folks," Johnson said, urging those in attendance to take part in her crusade. "We have to be extremely vigilant."
After the speech, the few attendees gathered around a table exhibiting merchandise for Democratic candidates running for a Nevada office in the quickly-approaching election. They handled stickers, buttons and t-shirts while NOW chapter president Jeri Ivens gazed around the room.
"Next time I'll bring coffee and donuts," she said.
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San Luis Obispo Tribune
October 02, 2006
Gov. signs Blakeslee's energy bill
Asks state to examine future of nuclear power
David Sneed
dsneed@thetribunenews.com
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed a bill by Assemblyman Sam Blakeslee that requires the state to examine the future of nuclear power.
The bill is the first legislative action by the state on nuclear power in 20 years. It requires that the state Energy Commission look at the cost to the state of the federal government’s failure to open an underground nuclear storage facility at Yucca Mountain as well as develop strategies to replace Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant’s electricity if it were lost due to a catastrophic earthquake.
Blakeslee, R-San Luis Obispo, said the bill is "critical to ensure that the people of our state – and most importantly those who live in nuclear communities like mine – do not bear potentially significant impacts that may result from unfunded long-term storage."
Pacific Gas and Electric is building an aboveground storage facility for Diablo Canyon’s nuclear waste.
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KARE 11
October 02, 2006
Commission approves Xcel's nuclear waste plan for Monticello
In contrast to stormy meetings of the past on nuclear waste issues, it took less than an hour at a quiet gathering of state regulators for Xcel Energy Inc. to win approval for expanded storage of spent fuel at its Monticello plant.
Unless lawmakers intervene early next year, Thursday's decision will become final in June, authorizing Xcel to store highly radioactive nuclear waste in above-ground containers outside its Monticello nuclear plant.
The decision was made before a smattering of lobbyists, utility executives and environmental watchdogs, a far cry from the noisy hearings and protests of 1994 and 2003 when Xcel sought to expand storage at its other nuclear plant, Prairie Island.
One difference is that this time, the decision was made by the PUC instead of the Legislature. In 2003, lawmakers handed off conditional authority for such issues to the commission, which otherwise regulates electric, natural gas and telephone service. Critics said the PUC was a less challenging arena than the Legislature.
Xcel wants to store waste in up to 30 steel-and-concrete containers as part of its application for a 20-year license extension at Monticello, northwest of the Twin Cities. Xcel plans to start building the storage area next summer, and to begin filling the containers in 2008.
The Minneapolis-based utility said keeping the plant open is the best option for supplying low-priced electricity and for avoiding air pollution from burning coal or natural gas. Monticello's radioactive waste will stay there until well after a permanent repository, proposed for Yucca Mountain, Nev., becomes available.
"Under any scenario, it's going to be a substantial amount of time before all the spent fuel could be moved," said Jim Alders, Xcel's manager of regulatory projects.
Beth Goodpaster, an attorney with the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, lamented the lack of discussion about the long-term hazards of nuclear waste.
One PUC member, former state Rep. Tom Pugh, suggested that legislators might take up the issue next winter. But another, former state Rep. LeRoy Koppendrayer, stressed the industry's safety record. He said endorsing Xcel's plan was the correct decision.
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Inter Press Service
October 02, 2006
Politics: Indo-US Nuclear Deal Hits Doldrums
Praful Bidwai
NEW DELHI, Oct 2 (IPS) - The controversial United States-India "civilian nuclear cooperation" agreement met with a major setback over the weekend when the Senate formally went into recess without voting for a bill which would have granted the President George W. Bush the necessary powers to enable the deal to be implemented.
The Indian government has been rattled by this development and is pinning its hopes on a brief session of the Congress in mid-November, when it reconvenes after elections to be held on Nov.7 to the entire House of Representatives and one-third of all seats in the Senate.
Both the Bush administration and the Indian government had invested a great deal of effort into lobbying for a quick passage of the Bill (number S.3709) through the Senate. The House has already passed a broadly similar legislation. The two chambers are later meant to reconcile the two legislations and produce a single unified law.
This law would implicitly recognise India as a nuclear weapons-state and permit civilian nuclear commerce with it although India has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1970 and has become a nuclear power in violation of it.
However, the Senate bill first ran into numerous procedural complications and then got tied up with extraneous or unrelated agendas of some Senators.
For instance, Senate minority leader Harry Reid of the Democratic Party moved an amendment that would prevent all spent fuel coming to his native Nevada state for storage at the Yucca Mountain Repository. This would presumably include fuel burned in reactors supplied to India by the U.S. or from plants which use materials traded under the India-U.S. nuclear cooperation deal.
On Saturday, the Democrats listed as many as 19 amendments to Bill S.3709 and rejected a proposal by Senate majority leader Bill Frist to have the Bill passed in its present form through a "unanimous consent" procedure, with the promise of some changes to be considered and discussed later.
Although the Democrats agreed to accord a high priority to the Bill in the "lame duck" Senate session coming up after November 13, there is no guarantee that it will really be taken up for vote. The Democrats are expected to do better than the Republicans in the Senate elections and may not allow the new chamber to be convened till January.
"All this is bad news for the deal", M.V. Ramana, an independent nuclear affairs expert based at Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development, Bangalore told IPS. "But it's not terrible news. There is still a good chance that the Senate resolution will eventually go through. But there is now a higher probability that more and more new conditions will be imposed, which limit the degree of cooperation permitted under the deal or demand special assurances from India, which are not reciprocally sought from the U.S."
If the deal cannot be approved by the present Congress, it will once again have to go through the entire process of drafting of separate resolutions for the two chambers of the new Congress and of securing agreement on them all over.
The more the number of conditions imposed on the deal, the more it will differ in content from the original agreements signed between Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in Jul. 2005 and in Mar. 2006.
"It's clear that the fate of the nuclear deal now depends on the arcane processes and parochial concerns that mark U.S. domestic politics, rather than on the dynamics of the burgeoning India-United States strategic relationship," argues Achin Vanaik, professor of international relations and global policies at Delhi University. "Various Senators' preferences and sectional interests will influence the way the agreement is shaped. The initiative is no longer in India's hands."
The Indian government is particularly disappointed and nervous at the weekend's result because it had made a strong pitch for the deal through its top diplomat and special envoy Shyam Saran, and more recently, through Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee.
Last week in the U.S., Mukherjee met various members of the India Caucus in Congress, as well as the Zionist group, the American Jewish Committee, and influential representatives of the Indian-American community.
U.S. business groups, in particular the defence industry lobby and nuclear power equipment manufacturers, have also been strongly pitching in for the nuclear deal, according to Subrata Ghoshroy of the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Centre for International Studies in the U.S. He calls the deal a "triumph of the business lobby". But the triumph has not yet been fully accomplished.
Had the Senate vote gone through before the recess, India would have been in an advantageous position at consultations which are due later this month in the Nuclear Suppliers' Group. The deal must be approved by the 45-member NSG before it becomes effective. The International Atomic Energy Agency too must clear it.
There may be some opposition in the NSG to the agreement from the Nordic states, Ireland and New Zealand. China too is known to be uncomfortable with it, but is keeping its cards close to its chest.
Besides this uncertainty, and problems likely to be caused by a shift in the balance of power between the Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress, the deal faces two obstacles: one in America, the other in India.
First, the Senate draft resolution explicitly prohibits the "export or re-export to India of any equipment, materials, or technology related to the enrichment of uranium, the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel or the production of heavy water." But the Indian nuclear lobby is extremely keen on the "right" to reprocess spent fuel from power reactors, whether imported or domestic, so that it can extract plutonium from it.
India has drawn up super-ambitious plans to produce 275,000 Mw of power (or more than double the Indian power generation capacity today from all sources combined) by the mid-21st century. This presumes the use of fast-breeders reactors based on the reprocessing of spent fuel.
India's Atomic Energy Commission chairman is on the record as saying that he won't accept a deal which does not allow spent fuel reprocessing.
It is not clear how the Bush and Singh government will crack this nut. Their difficulties will grow if the Democrats emerge stronger in Congress in the November elections. In that case, the influence of the traditional non-proliferation lobby will grow in the U.S., and the deal's passage will bear its impress.
The domestic Indian obstacle is the political opposition, especially the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, which rejects any shift away from the "goalposts" set by the original Jul. 2005 agreement.
It will try to hold the Singh government down to its earlier commitments, which call for "full" unconditional nuclear cooperation. This is likely to narrow the government's room for manoeuvre and compromise.
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Las Vegas SUN
October 01, 2006
Hal Rothman registers disgust with underhanded tactics by the NEI
The Nuclear Energy Institute is at it again. Nevada should pass a law declaring the NEI a terrorist entity, much as the U.S. government does with Islamic organizations, for its latest attempt to thwart the will of the citizenry with an end run to place hazardous waste in the Silver State without consulting us.
Make no mistake. This insidious bunch is trying to push its camel nose underneath our tent and I guarantee that they hope you are distracted. It is dirty pool, no doubt.
Just before the election, when a nongovernmental lobbying entity like NEI can be assured its generosity to incumbents in both parties will diminish any congressional resistance to its shenanigans, they are floating a bill that would permit the temporary storage of nuclear waste in Nevada.
The Nuclear Energy Institute has to date been ineffectual. Sure it bought a few of our lamest politicians and an occasional newsman in an effort to sway public opinion. These efforts failed, testimony to the good sense of Nevada's people.
A few months ago, I declared that our persistent opposition to Yucca Mountain had finally helped to turn the corner in the battle against that project. At the same time, I cautioned that we would see many attempts to sneak nuclear waste into the state. Some efforts would be above ground; others would be downright deceitful.
This one is despicable. It attempts to buy the state for a paltry $25 million a year, essentially for giving up our sovereignty and integrity. That is roughly $20 for every man, woman and child in Nevada.
Let us briefly review. In fiscal year ending June 2006, Nevada collected a little more than $1 billion in sales tax. The gaming tax netted another $838 million. That is about two thirds of the state's revenue. We are no penny ante operation these days.
Even if we were inclined to pursue such a solution, the offer is insulting. It is warm spit in the face of the state, a fundamental miscalculation that will serve to stiffen our resolve to defeat this beast. They are not only trying to go around us, but they are also trying to do it on the cheap.
So much for the argument that we should negotiate for benefits. It is now clear that negotiations would be fruitless. As anyone in Las Vegas well knows, a lowball offer out of the gate is a signal of a lack of respect. I don't know about you, but I never deal with people who don't respect my point of view.
Until I moved to Nevada some 15 years ago, I had little sympathy for states' rights arguments. I saw states' rights as a backward-looking philosophy, one that carried the baggage of the South in the Civil War and, even worse, was laden with the stench of the opposition to civil rights.
My time in the Silver State has softened my view. The egregious conduct of the federal government in Nevada, first with above-ground nuclear testing, then with the travesty of the Screw Nevada bill in 1987 that authorized Yucca Mountain, and finally with the deceitful and likely illegal running of the project, it has become hard to defend national power against that of the state.
Congress has a pretty firm rule: You don't put anything in somebody else's state without checking with them. It is more than courtesy. That means they don't do the same to you.
I don't recall anyone from the Nuclear Energy Institute ever asking us what we thought about interim storage. I deeply resent their conduct in this case, for it is not only underhanded but also offensive. This is an effort to make Nevada the nation's dump through the back door.
A few years ago, I participated in a conference about nuclear waste. I have the habit of referring to Yucca Mountain as a "dump." One of the other presenters chastised me. He said it was a repository. I countered that it was a dump, a really expensive one, but a dump nonetheless.
The Nuclear Energy Institute could do well to remember my little exchange. No end runs and no back-door entry. A state must have the power to control its destiny, especially in the case of a craven assault by a lobbying group.
--Hal Rothman is a history professor at UNLV. His column for the Las Vegas Sun appears Sunday.
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Las Vegas SUN
October 01, 2006
Brian Greenspun on a Day of Atonement for our leaders
For the sin which we have committed against Thee ...
Tonight is the beginning of the holiest day of the year for the Jewish people. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, lasts until sundown Monday night. For the 24-hour period, Jews around the world will fast, refrain from work of any kind and spend their night and day in their synagogues, praying to God for forgiveness for all of their sins that were committed in the prior year.
For some, all 24 hours are needed to atone, and for others more time may be necessary. But, for most of us, at least we like to think about it this way, just a few minutes are all that is needed to make things right. Nevertheless, we spend the time reflecting, contemplating and considering how we have lived our lives and, more important, how we want to live our lives.
This Yom Kippur is a little different because I believe that each of us, Jew and non-Jew, should be considering how we have spent this last year as citizens of the greatest country on Earth. For we have not done our best - or anything close to our best.
Consider the latest news about Bob Woodward's new book in which he claims that President George W. Bush turned either a blind eye or a deaf ear to the pleas of his experts that we did not have enough troops in Iraq to react to the insurgents who - as history has already proved - were poised to make American and Iraqi lives a living hell.
It got so bad, we are told, that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and then-National Security Adviser Condi Rice weren't talking to each other. That the president of the United States had to tell Rummy to return the lady's phone calls should give every American the kind of glimpse into the Bush administration's dysfunctionality over this war to shake whatever confidence we have left that the Bush White House has a clue what it is doing.
Tonight, we will be asking God to forgive us for the sin of arrogance, for being stiff-necked at times when we should be welcoming other ideas and viewpoints. In atoning for my own sins I will not be able to keep myself from asking for forgiveness for the kind of arrogance and stiff-necked refusal to consider any ideas but their own that is now so clearly evident of the Bush administration.
The benefit of the doubt with which the American people have been so generous in giving this president's wartime adventures the thumbs up has all but disappeared in light of Woodward's well-documented accusations. The truth is that arrogance is responsible for the mess we are in. Not bad luck, not bad planning and not just bad people - but the arrogance of an administration that refused to listen.
I suppose we can forget about the sin of violence, but what about the sin of being weak-willed? For this we can blame our leaders on the Democratic side of the aisle. There is little doubt that President Bush was going to war with Iraq whether the people wanted it or not. But it was up to the Democrats and, yes, other like-minded Americans, to express their own leadership on this issue.
But, because they were branded as unpatriotic by the arrogant bunch, they turned tail and ran away from the kind of debate that would have called to account the shortcomings of the administration and which would have shed serious light on the mistakes of willful people who have gotten us into this unsolvable mess.
Do you think we have been xenophobic? What about showing zeal for bad causes? Anyone want to fess up?
There is plenty of blame to go around, so no one escapes the need to atone for the kind of sins that don't just hurt people's feelings. These sins have hurt, maimed and killed thousands of U.S. servicemen and women and civilians as well.
And what about that blowup that we have all seen President Bill Clinton have during an interview with Chris Wallace? That was the first time I have heard any Democrat or any well-known American, for that matter, take on the Bush administration and its mouthpieces for manipulating the media's coverage of the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
Even in the face of overwhelming odds designed to shut us up and shut us down, those of us who disagree with our leadership - on whatever issue we have at the time - are just as sinful in the eyes of God as those who run roughshod over us in the name of national security. This country was founded and has survived because our citizens have been unafraid of shouting back at injustice, ineptitude and insensitivity to the plight of those less fortunate.
What happened that made us bite our tongues for so long?
And now the latest news from the Senate is that Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Pete Domenici finally showed his colors by introducing a bill that will change dramatically the rules regarding Yucca Mountain. For as long as the Screw Nevada bill has been on the books, it was a matter of law that Nevada would never be a site for the temporary storage of high-level nuclear waste.
Domenici is trying to change all that by taking the nuke waste issue out of the budget, off the books and out of the consciousness of human beings who are used to people doing nutty things but not such blatantly nasty things.
The cynicism surrounding the Yucca Mountain project - not to mention the lies and deceit - is enough to force all of us before our maker to seek forgiveness for even allowing these people to exist in positions of leadership.
I suppose I could go on and on, but I think you get the picture. In the end, the right people are going to atone because we are the ones - the people with the weak voices, the people who are willing to accept what government tells us is true even when our hearts and minds say it isn't so, and the people who know that Woodward is right but who don't want to admit it for fear that we would also have to admit how wrong we have been to trust the folks in Washington - who have to live with the heartache.
The only caveat is that the people who need to atone are not just the Jewish people whose day it is to do such things. No, we have an entire country full of people who should be seeking forgiveness.
To do less is to accept that which has turned out so wrong and will continue to be, so long as arrogance and a weak will continue to define our leaders in Washington.
Contemplate that all day tomorrow and you, too, will hunger for a taste of something better.
--Brian Greenspun is editor of the Las Vegas Sun.
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Las Vegas SUN
October 01, 2006
Ensign in the driver's seat
The most relaxed Republican running for office this election surely must be our junior senator
By Michael J. Mishak
Las Vegas Sun
He's a GOP incumbent in an election year when many of his fellow Republicans wish they could erase the "R" next to their name on the ballot.
He has been one of the most ardent supporters of the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq. He accepted - and later returned - campaign contributions from disgraced megalobbyist Jack Abramoff. At a time when many Republicans are doing their best to distance themselves from the White House, he has to defend a record of backing President Bush's agenda 96 percent of the time from 2001 to 2005, according to Congressional Quarterly figures.
And to top it all off, he's running against an opponent with a famous political name - and a father who just happened to have occupied the White House for four years.
Add it all up, and if it weren't for the fact that his hair is already that color, you'd have to say Campaign '06 would be enough to turn U.S. Sen. John Ensign's hair gray.
But despite a record and political circumstances that would seem to have him firmly in Democrats' cross hairs, the Silver State's junior senator is sleeping very well this campaign season.
At least partly, Ensign has his Democratic opponent, Jack Carter, to thank for that.
Carter, the oldest son of former President Jimmy Carter, generated a buzz when he announced his candidacy last fall, mostly because of his family name, but his campaign has since fizzled. What little momentum he had coming off a summer tour of rural Nevada died earlier this month when he contracted severe colitis, forcing him off the campaign trail for three weeks.
In short, a month before early voting begins, Carter remains a challenger in name more than in fact, with some polls showing him facing a sizable double-digit deficit.
While his strategy - making the race a referendum on Bush and the Republican leadership in Washington - is shaping up to be a winning one elsewhere, few have actually heard Carter make his case.
"National Democrats would like to include Nevada in that tier of races they need to win to retake the Senate," said Nathan Gonzales, political editor of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report. "But they realize it's not really in play."
For his part, Ensign is simply following the old rule of politics: Ignore your opponent. In fact, his campaign ads - in rotation since Labor Day - put a positive spin on his legislative record and showcase his background as a veterinarian, without mentioning Carter's name, of course.
Carter adviser Terry O'Connell insists the campaign will turn primarily on retail politicking over the next few weeks leading up to the first of three televised debates with Ensign on Oct. 15. On the advice of former President Bill Clinton, a frequent visitor to Las Vegas, Carter has been heavily targeting rural Nevada.
"It depends more on having the last word than spending a lot of money to compete with (Ensign) on the first and middle words," O'Connell said.
In other words, Carter doesn't have the cash to have many of his words - first, last or middle - reach voters.
That is made clear by the hand-drawn signs in Carter's cramped campaign office that read "Plead for Pledges" and "Beg for Dollars."
As of July 26, the end of the last federal campaign finance reporting period, Carter had $380,000 cash on hand compared to Ensign's $3.2 million.
Even Carter himself has tightened the purse strings. At his office, he boasted recently about feeding four people for $8.08 at the local Costco. "You even get a free Coke," he said.
For Carter, getting his message out - fast - is critical.
"It's getting late," said Jennifer Duffy, who analyzes Senate races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report in Washington. "We're at the point in an election cycle where it's all about TV. Unless it's on TV, it doesn't happen."
While linking Ensign to Bush is Carter's best chance of winning, he has yet to define himself as a credible alternative, Rothenberg's Gonzales said.
"Having the right message matters, but the messenger matters as well," Gonzales said. "At this point, I don't know if people see this race as an even choice between two equal candidates."
Perhaps that will change in the coming weeks though, as the former president hits the campaign trail to stump for his son. The free media that accompanies those events will give Jack Carter's campaign a much-needed boost.
Indeed, when the elder Carter was in town last month to visit his sick son in the hospital, an impromptu appearance at a Hispanic rally produced a priceless publicity jolt.
Despite Carter's famous name, his father's fundraising ability and anti-Bush backlash, Ensign is still an easy lock for re-election, said Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. "I just don't see it happening for Carter," Sabato said. "It would have to be 1994-plus in reverse for Ensign to lose," he added, referring to the GOP's lopsided win in that year's congressional races. (Ensign got his start in Washington in 1994, narrowly winning election to the House in that year's "Republican Revolution" to represent Nevada's 1st Congressional District.)
David Damore, a UNLV political scientist, agrees. "It's really tough to beat an incumbent, even in a year that's looking good for Democrats," he said.
Despite his voting record, Ensign is not seen as a close Bush ally, and thus not vulnerable, Damore said.
Republicans portray Ensign - a former casino manager whose stepfather, Michael Ensign, was chairman and chief executive of Mandalay Resort Group until last year - as his own man. They point to his record as a fierce fiscal conservative, which at times has led to showdowns with both the Republican leadership and the Bush administration.
In 2004, Ensign was one of only four Republicans who voted against passing an $820 billion spending bill, written mainly by GOP leaders and the White House, that would have ended a bitterly fought budget debate. Before that, he voted with most Democrats and against almost all Republicans to keep a filibuster of the bill alive.
In 2003, Ensign was one of nine Senate Republicans to oppose Bush's landmark Medicare prescription drug plan, saying that its cost over 10 years would far exceed the $400 billion price tag cited by its authors.
"Ensign has done a good job in the last six years defining himself as an individual," said Steve Wark, former chairman of the state Republican Party and a prominent political consultant. "He's established his bona fides and protected himself from being labeled an administration lap dog."
Still, he has voted with party leadership 91 percent of the time from 2001-2005, according to Congressional Quarterly. And that loyalty has been rewarded. If re-elected, Ensign is lined up to become chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the high-profile political arm of the Senate GOP.
It confirms his status as a rising Republican star. But while the post would raise Ensign's national visibility, it carries big risks. Republicans will be defending 21 seats in 2008, compared to only 12 Democrats who will be up for re-election.
"It's a position you take when you're trying to build good will," said Cook's Duffy.
For some, the position has been a fast track into top-tier leadership. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., chairman of the committee during the 1998 and 2000 election cycles, is expected to become the Senate's Republican leader next year with the retirement of current leader Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee, who also once held the post.
Asked about his overwhelming support for Bush's agenda, Ensign said: "The president doesn't even take a position on the vast majority of bills up here. It's a made-up number."
He says he has shown his independence on a number of important issues, not the least of which is Yucca Mountain, where he has opposed the administration's plan to build a nuclear waste dump in Nevada. He voted against Bush's prescription drug bill, fought to preserve the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act and opposed the initial $20 billion grant package to rebuild Iraq, instead unsuccessfully pushing for half of that package to be structured as a loan.
Ensign also opposed the Senate immigration bill earlier this year, which included a guest-worker program and a path to citizenship for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants living in the United States, both provisions favored by Bush.
"The bottom line is that I try to do what's right back here," Ensign said.
In doing so, he consistently has shown his conservative stripes. In 2005, the National Journal, in its annual ranking, rated Ensign as more conservative than 82 percent of his Senate colleagues on key votes that year. He opposes embryonic stem cell research and authored legislation - which was passed by the Senate but stalled when House and Senate leaders could not reconcile different versions of the bill - to make it a federal crime to help a minor escape parental notification laws by crossing state lines to obtain an abortion.
He has pushed to split up the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals - the rulings of which, he argues, are too liberal - and last week supported a Bush plan that permits harsh interrogation tactics for terrorism suspects.
Despite his obvious partisan differences with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Ensign has forged a nonaggression pact with Nevada's senior senator that has benefited both. While Reid publicly stands behind Carter, for example, some say he is hampered from lending his all-out support by his relationship with Ensign.
The arrangement, Ensign argues, has produced "a synergistic relationship that works well for our state."
Carter dismisses the talk, noting that Reid has contributed $10,000 to his campaign, given the campaign access to his staff and returned phone calls personally. "I don't have any problem with Harry's level of support," he said. "Harry and I will have the same kind of relationship when I'm elected."
After careers in law, agribusiness and commodities, Carter, 59, is running for political office for the first time in his life. He and his wife, Elizabeth, moved to Nevada from Bermuda in 2002. She wanted to escape the humidity, Carter quips, and both of them wanted to be closer to their children.
He rebuffs the often-leveled charge that he's a carpetbagger, saying that his short state residency is not an issue. "If the guy I'm running against went to Washington and voted for the administration 96 percent of the time, he might as well be from Texas," Carter said.
Carter describes himself as just a businessman who became outraged at the direction of American foreign policy and deficit spending.
"I'm really pissed off at these guys because of what they're doing to the way I think my country ought to run," he said. "And it's across the spectrum. It's fiscal irresponsibility in the course of a war that's got my compatriots at risk."
The war in Iraq, he said, is the most visible example of the Bush administration's failed policies. And Congress, he said, has failed to hold the executive branch accountable.
"The Constitution created three branches of government," Carter said. "I believe in all three of them. My opponent only believes in one - and it ain't the one that he's in."
Carter said U.S. forces should lean on the Iraqi government by setting a timetable for troop redeployment. Under his plan, American troops would begin to withdraw from Iraq to another position in the region within three to four months as part of a "quick-response" team that could respond to local flare-ups.
He also differs from Ensign on immigration. He supports the Senate bill, which includes a path to citizenship for those living in the U.S. illegally, something Ensign adamantly opposes.
On energy issues, Carter would eliminate all government subsidies for the oil and gas industries, instead directing those dollars to research alternatives, including renewable sources such as sun, wind and geothermal energy.
In the end, Carter is hanging his candidacy on his opponent.
His message: I'm not John Ensign.
"Voters may not know me at all," Carter said. "What I need to be is out there, available to tell them that I'm not that way. I don't belong to anybody."
As of July, the Greenspun family, owners of the Sun, and Greenspun Corporation executives had contributed $7,500 to Ensign's campaign and $1,250 to Carter's campaign.
--Michael J. Mishak can be reached at 259-2347 or at michael.mishak@lasvegassun.com.
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Pahrump Valley Times
September 30, 2006
Not Just Idle Musing
Is Nye County prepared for future?
Region Must Give Serious Thought to Future Energy Sources
Most of us have wondered at one time or another about the past. We may ask, "Why did things turn out the way they did?" Looking at history, we can ask, "Why did history turn out the way it did?"
There are basically two schools of thought for tackling that question. At one extreme is the idea that history is little more than an endless and more or less meaningless sequence of occurrences, best summarized by the saying, "History is just one damn thing after another."
The human saga, this viewpoint would have us believe, is essentially a collection of more or less random occurrences that are not really understandable in any larger sense. Attempts to understand the forces that might drive history the way gravity, say, controls the motion of the planets, are seen as amounting to little more than construction of sand castles -- fun to build and look at, but nothing more.
At the other extreme is a view of history that says human life and thus history are natural phenomena, fully a part of the natural world. As such, history is understandable in terms of both the natural laws and processes that underlie other aspects of the natural world, including stars, planets, plants, and animals, and also in terms of principles that apply uniquely to human history.
This view assumes that history is a part of nature and that, like nature, history can be understood through science -- that there is a science of history. While very few historians have taken this approach, and in one degree or another subscribe to the "one damn thing" school, my bias lies with the science perspective. I believe that it is possible to develop a science of history.
(There is a third perspective that believes human events and thus history are subject to influence by God or the gods. This view is outside my area of expertise.)
One of the first historians to talk about a science of history was Brooks Adams, a member of the famous Adams clan from America's revolutionary times. Brooks Adams presented his ideas on the science of history in his book "The Laws of Civilization and Its Decay," published in 1895.
Adams' view of human history emphasized physical energy, fear, greed and economics as major forces that helped shape history. For Adams, energy was key. In the foreword to the second edition of his book, published in 1896, Adams wrote, "The theory proposed is based upon the accepted scientific principle that the law of force and energy is of universal application in nature, and that animal life is one of the outlets through which solar energy is dissipated. Starting from this fundamental proposition, the first deduction is, that, as human societies are forms of animal life, these societies must differ among themselves in energy, in proportion as nature has endowed them, more or less abundantly, with energetic material ... Probably the velocity of the social movement of any community is proportionate to its energy and mass."
Looking back, Adams doesn't appear to have had much influence on his own or subsequent generations of historians. Most historians continued to write history as if it were "one damn thing after another," forever focusing on the actions of the rich, famous, and powerful, and attributing psychological causes to the flow of history. But I take my hat off to Adams for the effort he made.
In 1943, Leslie White, an anthropologist from the University of Michigan, published an article titled "Energy and the Evolution of Culture." Essentially, White's theories picked up where Adams' left off. White said energy is the driver of history and determines how societies and cultures rise and fall.
According to Leslie White, culture grows and history is on the upswing as per capita energy consumption expressed through technology increases. The increase in per capita consumption of energy is the basis of the development of human society over the past 10,000 years.
Brooks Adams ascertained, and Leslie White clearly understood, that when a society or a civilization loses its energy source, and that source is not replaced with an equivalent or better one, there can be no escape from cultural and historical decay -- what I call deconstruction. When a society loses its energy source, it sheds many of its original characteristics and morphs into a simpler form, less elaborate and elegant.
It is much the same with a plant that shrivels when removed from sunshine or an animal that becomes weak and sick when not fed -- they deconstruct. Modest energy loss produces contraction; extreme loss causes death of the society. History is filled with examples of civilizations that ceased to exist: Sumer in Mesopotamia, Mohenjo Daro on the Indus River in Pakistan, the Greeks, the Romans, the Incas, the Mayans -- the list goes on and on.
Now, this is not just idle musing. Adams and White's energy theory is applicable to understanding Nye County's past and future. Moreover, it allows us to say something about the future of Nevada and our American civilization.
Until World War II, Nye County's economy was based largely on the extraction of gold and silver. In Adams' and White's terms, the precious metals mined in Nye County were exchangeable for energy or products whose production required the expenditure of energy -- fuel (gasoline and coal), food, automobiles, etc. This import of energy into Nye County led to the development of Nye County communities such as Belmont, Tonopah, Beatty, Rhyolite and Round Mountain, and Goldfield in Esmeralda County.
Food grown locally was another important energy source. When precious metals ran out, less energy flowed into the county, the communities deconstructed. Some shrank dramatically, becoming shadows of their former selves -- for instance, Belmont, following the discovery of Tonopah, and Tonopah, in turn, after World War II -- or they died, as Rhyolite did after 1911.
Taking advantage of restrictive laws elsewhere in the United States, in 1931 the state of Nevada legalized gambling and easy divorce. This led to tourism, which served the same function as gold and silver mining in former times -- it brought energy into the state in the form of money and new residents. This inflow of energy led to the development of Las Vegas and, on a smaller scale, Reno.
The creation of the Nevada Test Site in 1949 by the federal government created many good jobs in Nye County and became, in effect, another pipeline through which energy flowed into the area. Las Vegas's amazing growth has propelled Pahrump's rise, bringing further energy into Nye County.
But the question is, how sustainable are current energy relationships, especially in light of predicted shortages of fossil fuels (oil and natural gas) in the next 10 to 30 years? (The United States currently gets about 40 percent of its total energy from petroleum and approximately 22 percent each from gas and coal.) Unless replaced by nuclear and renewable energy, significant shortfalls of oil and gas supplies have the potential to lead to the deconstruction of the American civilization.
And what about global warming? That is a big wild card, and no one has a good grasp of its potential impact on our way of life. Of course, global warming is related to the burning of fossil fuels.
When we understand the fundamental role that energy plays in sustaining a society, it is clear that Nevadans, and in particular Nye County residents, must give serious thought to these matters. If and when oil and gas supplies falter, and I believe they will, alternative energy sources, in the Adams-White sense, need to be already in place or waiting in the wings. If not, deconstruction will begin. It will be up to each county, or perhaps region, in Nevada to come up with its own adaptation plan.
There might, of course, be serious competition among jurisdictions from both within and outside the state for the most lucrative opportunities. Yucca Mountain and nuclear power production are strong cards in Nye County's hand if played right. But others might well play these cards also, and will likely try.
The people I talk to say there isn't much time -- perhaps as little as 10 years -- before the shoe begins to seriously pinch. Maybe they're wrong. But do we want to take a chance and find ourselves in the position of the old prospector who missed his opportunity for a better life because, upon hearing the news of the big silver strike in central Nevada in 1900, he took his sweet time in getting there?
By the time he arrived in Tonopah, all the good mine sites had been staked out.
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Salt Lake Tribune
September 30, 2006
Facility CEO says planned site not 'dead'
Nuclear waste storage in Skull Valley
By Judy Fahys
The Salt Lake Tribune
John D. Parkyn bristles at the word "dead" to describe the nuclear waste storage site his business consortium planned for the Skull Valley of the Goshutes Reservation.
But he would not say outright Friday whether Private Fuel Storage will go to court to overturn two Interior Department rulings earlier this month that appear to have killed the project.
Politics has derailed the project for now, Parkyn said in a telephone interview. And, he said, meetings between U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, a former GOP senator and Idaho governor, effectively undermined the lease the group of eight utilities had forged with the Skull Valley Goshutes a decade ago and blocked the license PFS received in February after nine years of review.
"There's no question why [the lease] was reversed," said Parkyn, PFS chairman and chief executive officer. "The question is, do you sit back and stand for that [political interference in a policy decision]."
Utah led opposition to the site, spending millions of dollars and years in court and at regulatory proceedings trying to stop it. Wilderness advocates joined forces with Republican Congressmen Jim Hansen and Rob Bishop to foil the consortium's preferred transportation plan, and those Skull Valley members who were targeted by tribal leaders for opposing the nuclear waste petitioned regulators and the courts against the site.
Hatch, who stepped up his efforts against the waste storage in the past year, denied Friday that the two rulings by the Interior Department Sept. 7 were politically driven. One, from the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, invalidated the lease between PFS and the American Indian tribe, and the other blocked the transportation of waste to the site.
The senator said in a statement that the Interior Department decisions were very clear, solidly grounded in fact, and "speak for themselves."
"Fighting the PFS project is my top priority, and it's no secret that I used every opportunity I could to press the issue and get the bureaucracy moving," said Hatch, who is seeking re-election for a sixth term in the Senate in November. "But the substance supported us. We had a compelling case, and we made it."
Project plans called for using about 100 acres of Skull Valley to park up to 44,000 tons of spent reactor fuel until permanent disposal is developed for waste piling up at 72 locations throughout the nation.
Parkyn agreed Friday that if the decisions are not overturned, the project cannot go forward. But PFS faces no deadline for filing a court appeal of the Interior Department decisions, he noted.
Nonetheless, he expected consortium members and the tribe to determine their next step in a matter of months. He would not say if legal issues or financial reasons - including a lack of support from the eight member companies - were delaying a decision.
"It's obvious that to build the facility at that location you have to challenge the lease reversal," he said.
Parkyn told an industry newsletter, the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Monitor, that the nation needs a facility like his to deal with waste if it goes forward with the Bush administration's ambitious plans for new nuclear plants.
"Time is really on our side," he told the publication. "If the industry is really serious about new [nuclear] plants, then they have to be serious about PFS."
Parkyn pointed out that waste is accumulating in 31 states. Meanwhile, the long-promised federal disposal site at Yucca Mountain, Nev., sees continued delays and Eastern governors oppose a federal plan to create dozens of new interim storage sites in less than three years.
"If the country is willing to deal with political obstruction [by Hatch] or does it want the waste everywhere?" Parkyn said.
"We [at PFS] do have the solution. It's licensed."
fahys@sltrib.com
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Chicago Tribune
September 30, 2006
Exelon eyes Texas plant
Nuclear power push revs up; paperwork keeps `option open'
By Robert Manor
Tribune staff reporter
Exelon Corp. announced Friday that it is taking steps toward possibly building a large nuclear generating plant somewhere in Texas, adding its name to a growing list of companies seeking to revive atomic energy.
Chicago-based Exelon has not decided whether it will construct a nuclear plant in Texas, but it will make the filings with federal nuclear regulators that would allow it to build in the future if the company chooses to, Exelon Nuclear President Chris Crane said.
"It's committing to keeping the option open," he said. "It doesn't commit us to build."
Exelon joins 14 other companies or consortia that have expressed strong interest in building new nuclear plants, nearly all to be located in southern states where power demand is growing rapidly.
Illinois is not a contender for any of the new plants, although Chicago-based Exelon has taken some preliminary steps to retain the option of adding a reactor at its existing plant in Clinton.
Nuclear power was for years regarded as in decline. The last plant licensed won NRC permission to operate in 1978.
The partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, along with financial troubles in building the plants and technical problems in operating them, made it appear that nuclear energy was not an option for the future.
But the surge of interest in nuclear energy stems partly from the 2005 federal energy bill, which contained subsidies and guarantees aimed at increasing the nation's fleet of 103 power reactors. Numbers vary, but some analysts say the bill offers $13 billion to jump-start construction of new plants.
Crane said his company will apply in 2008 to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to build and operate a plant in Texas. The applications are extremely time-consuming to prepare. The NRC estimates it will then take about 3 1/2 years to decide whether to approve the license.
But Crane said several conditions must be met before Exelon will start construction some time in the next decade.
He said the issue of how to dispose of spent nuclear fuel must be resolved or Exelon will not build.
The nation's growing inventory of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel was to have been stored in tunnels deep inside Yucca Mountain in Nevada beginning in 1998. But fierce opposition from legislators in Nevada, along with numerous technical problems, have delayed the project. It is unclear when, or if, Yucca Mountain will ever open, and many thousands of tons of waste are stored at nuclear plants across the country.
Earlier this month Crane's boss, Exelon CEO John Rowe, reiterated his pledge not to build another nuclear plant until the storage issue is solved.
Crane also said the company will evaluate the financial viability of the plant before deciding to build.
Demand for electricity is growing rapidly in Texas, and the state is highly dependent on generation from natural gas, which is expensive.
An efficiently run nuclear plant produces power cheaply, and if Exelon were to build two reactors with a total output of 3,000 megawatts, it would add substantially to Texas' power supply. But the long lead time between now and starting construction means the financial picture could change.
Exelon said it is evaluating eight sites in Texas, which it declined to identify.
But wherever the company lands, it wants to be welcome. Crane said Exelon will not build in a community where it is not welcome.
"We want to go where the neighbors would support the plant," he said.
Some in Texas don't want their electricity to come from nuclear fission.
"We now have five other nuclear plants to be built here in Texas," said Karen Hadden, executive director of the Sustained Energy and Economic Development Coalition in Austin. "We will be organizing to oppose those plants."
One financial analyst said that despite the government backing, Wall Street may be wary of financing new nuclear plants. The plants built in the 1970s and 1980s ran into many billions of dollars in cost overruns.
"There is the perception that there is a fair amount of risk," said Mark Sadeghian, an equity analyst with Morningstar. "No one has financed one of these projects recently."
Exelon said current estimates to build a nuclear plant run to about $3 billion.
But backers of nuclear power are optimistic that many of the plants proposed will eventually help meet the nation's increasing demand for power.
"We believe there will be a whole wave of new plants being built with the orders coming at the end of the decade," said Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group.
Backers of nuclear power say a new generation of reactors will be cheaper to build than older models and contain better engineering for safe operation.
New designs include passive safety measures, meaning that they activate when needed with little chance of failure. For example, emergency water flows via gravity in the new designs. Older models pump emergency water, making an equipment failure possible.
Exelon said it is considering reactor designs by Westinghouse and General Electric. They would produce about 1,500 megawatts each, substantially more than the output from the nation's highest capacity reactors, which produce less than 1,200 megawatts.
Major utilities are looking at building nuclear plants. Entergy, for example, is interested in building one plant at River Bend, La., and another with a consortium of other utilities in Grand Gulf, Miss.
Duke Energy Corp., meanwhile, is looking at the idea of new nuclear plants in Oconee County, S.C., and Davie County, N.C.
Nuclear critics say the industry is going overboard, and point to nuclear power's troubled past.
"It's really a relapse more than a renaissance" for nuclear energy, said Paul Gunter, director of the reactor watchdog project for the Nuclear Information and Research Service. "Their ambitions border on megawatts to megalomania."
If any company can build a new nuclear plant, it is probably Exelon. In recent years it has earned a reputation for efficiently operating its nuclear fleet. It is the largest nuclear operator in the country with 17 reactors at 10 plants in Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
It also operates and holds part-ownership of four reactors with partner Public Service Enterprise Group of New Jersey, and operates but does not own PSEG's fifth reactor.
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Las Vegas SUN
September 29, 2006
Editorial: Domenici as Jekyll & Hyde
On nuclear waste storage, New Mexico's Republican senator is both friend and foe
As a Republican, Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico is ideologically opposed to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada's top Democrat. Yet Domenici has said Reid is his closest friend in the Senate. Maybe this is why, on the issue of Yucca Mountain, Domenici is pushing two bills - one that would irreparably harm Nevada and incense Reid and one that would greatly serve Nevada and please Reid.
In June Reid and Domenici held a joint press conference to announce a stunning agreement. They said they had been working secretly for a year on a plan that would send high-level nuclear waste to federally operated interim storage sites within states that have nuclear power plants.
Domenici said the plan would take some of the pressure off the Energy Department and allow it to make steady progress on its plan to open a permanent nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Domenici also said the lack of even an interim plan for nuclear waste was holding up construction of new nuclear power plants.
Reid said the plan would spare Nevada from becoming an interim storage site. Also, Reid said, the plan would surely be protested by the affected states, gaining more support for Nevada's position that the waste should remain where it is, safely stored at the nuclear power plants. Additionally, Reid said their interim plan would cover the next 25 years or so, giving Nevada more time to convince the country and the federal government that Yucca Mountain is a scientifically unsound project.
While the two senators each had his own reasons for supporting the interim plan, at least they were in agreement and Nevada seemed protected for a long time.
This week, however, Domenici introduced another bill in the Senate, one that would send all of the country's nuclear waste - whether generated at nuclear weapons plants or nuclear power plants - to a temporary, above-ground storage site at Yucca Mountain. Under the bill, the waste would begin moving to Nevada in 2010.
One point of Domenici's bill is to support the pro-Yucca Mountain argument, transparent as it may be, that nuclear waste stored at power plants is an inviting target for terrorists. So, thousands of trucks carrying the waste cross-country to Nevada for the next 25 years wouldn't be?
With his latest proposal, Domenici is trying to change the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, and amendments made in 1987, that protect Nevada from temporary storage while it is being studied as the sole site for permanent storage. Already there have been many changes to the original nuclear waste legislation that have weakened safety standards at Yucca Mountain. How much more must Nevada endure?
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Los Angeles Times
September 29, 2006
Nuclear Energy: Still a Bad Idea
Solar power is a better investment than a dated technology that's too expensive and dangerous.
By Jeremy Rifkin
Jeremy Rifkin is the author of "The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the World Wide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth."
September 29, 2006
Suddenly, Nuclear power is in vogue. At the G-8 summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, President Bush and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin announced a far-reaching agreement to cooperate in the rapid expansion of nuclear energy worldwide and called on other countries to join them. It was the latest in a series of high-profile initiatives by the White House to promote nuclear power. Bush argues that the future energy security of the United States and the world will depend on increasing reliance on nuclear energy.
A technology that for years suffered ignominiously in scientific purgatory has been resurrected. Its virtues have been heralded by the likes of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the famed scientist Sir James Lovelock and even a few renegade environmental activists. The nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 and the horrific meltdown at Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union in 1986 have become distant memories. Now, facing rising costs of oil on world markets and real-time global warming, nuclear technology has been given a public relations face-lift and is touted, by some, as the energy of choice in a post-oil era. However, before we let our enthusiasm run away from us, we ought to take a sober look at the consequences of re-nuclearizing the world.
First, nuclear power is unaffordable. With a minimum price tag of $2 billion each, new-generation nuclear power plants are 50% more expensive than putting coal-fired power plants online, and they are far more expensive than new gas-fired power plants. The cost of doubling nuclear power's share of U.S. electricity generation — which currently produces 20% of our electricity — could exceed half a trillion dollars. In a country facing record consumer and government debt, where is the money going to come from? Consumers would pay the price in terms of higher taxes to support government subsidies and higher electricity bills.
Second, 60 years into the nuclear era, our scientists still don't know how to safely transport, dispose of or store nuclear waste. Spent nuclear rods are piling up all over the world. In the United States, the federal government spent more than $8 billion and 20 years building what was supposed to be an airtight, underground burial tomb dug deep into Yucca Mountain in Nevada to hold radioactive material. The vault was designed to be leak-free for 10,000 years. Unfortunately, the Environmental Protection Agency concedes that the underground storage facility will leak.
Third, according to a study conducted by the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2001, known uranium resources could fail to meet demand, possibly as early as 2026. Of course, new deposits could be discovered, and it is possible that new technological breakthroughs could reduce uranium requirements, but that remains purely speculative.
Fourth, building hundreds of nuclear power plants in an era of spreading Islamic terrorism seems insane. On the one hand the United States, the European Union and much of the world is frightened by the mere possibility that just one country — Iran — might use enriched uranium from its nuclear power plants for a nuclear bomb. On the other hand, many of the same governments are eager to spread nuclear power plants around the world, placing them in every nook and cranny of the planet. This means uranium and spent nuclear waste in transit everywhere and piling up in makeshift facilities, often close to heavily populated urban areas.
Nuclear power plants are the ultimate soft target for terrorist attacks. On Nov. 8, 2005, the Australian government arrested 18 suspected Islamic terrorists who were allegedly plotting to blow up Australia's only nuclear power plant. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission found that more than half of the nuclear power plants in this country failed to prevent a simulated attack on their facilities. We should all be very worried.
Finally, nuclear power represents the kind of highly centralized, clunky technology of a bygone era. In an age when distributed technologies are undermining hierarchies, decentralizing power and giving rise to networks and open-source economic models, nuclear power seems strangely old-fashioned and obsolete. To a great extent, nuclear power was a Cold War creation. It represented massive concentration of power and reflected the geopolitics of a post-World War II era. Today, however, new technologies are giving people the tools they need to become active participants in an interconnected world. Nuclear power, by contrast, is elite power, controlled by the few. Its resurrection would be a step backward.
Instead, we should pursue an aggressive effort to bring the full range of decentralized renewable technologies online: solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and biomass. And we should establish a hydrogen storage infrastructure to ensure a steady, uninterrupted supply of power for our electricity needs and for transportation.
Our common energy future lies with the sun, not with uranium.
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Easy Bourse
September 29, 2006
Update: Exelon May Build New Nuclear Plant In Texas
NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- Exelon Corp. (EXC), the largest nuclear power plant operator in the U.S., said Friday it plans to submit a license to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build a nuclear plant in Texas.
Chicago-based Exelon hasn't yet chosen a specific site for the facility, nor has it decided whether it will actually build a new reactor. The decision rests on the outcome of the Yucca Mountain nuclear fuel disposal project, public reaction to the plan for a new plant and financial considerations, Exelon said.
The Yucca Mountain project, which has been embroiled in political wrangling for over 20 years, would permanently store spent nuclear fuel in an underground facility in the Nevada desert.
The proposed plant would be Exelon's first nuclear facility in Texas. The company selected Texas as a potential new reactor site because the state is expecting a surge in electricity demand over the next 20 years and because Exelon owns natural gas-fired plants in the state.
Exelon said it plans to apply for a combined operating and construction license in 2008 and sees the cost of developing the license at $30 million. The new plant, if built, would incorporate new technology that would include heightened safety features and allow for less costly operation.
The company hasn't yet developed cost estimates for the proposed plant.
In a climate of rising fossil-fuel prices and growing electricity demand, Exelon is one of several energy companies that have announced tentative plans to build new nuclear generation. NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said that as of Sept. 14, the NRC had received notice of companies' intentions to file 19 combined operating licenses for new plants, corresponding to 28 new reactors.
Exelon's 17 nuclear reactors, which produce about 17,000 megawatts of electricity, represent roughly 20% of the U.S. nuclear industry's generation capacity. The desire to acquire more nuclear generation was the main impetus behind Exelon's failed attempt to acquire New Jersey's Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. (PEG). That deal was scuttled in early September by the New Jersey regulator's demands for greater concessions from the companies.
Exelon's shares recently fell 41 cents to $60.89. The stock reached a 52-week high of $61.98 on Wednesday.
--By Christine Buurma and Ruth Mantell, Dow Jones Newswires; 201-938-2061; christine.buurma@dowjones.com
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Minnesota Public Radio
September 29, 2006
Minnesota regulators approve additional storage for nuclear power plant
by Tim Post
Minnesota Public Radio
Xcel Energy officials say they need additional temporary storage to keep operating their nuclear power plant at Monticello. One Minnesota environmental advocacy group wants state officials to push the energy company to plan for a longer term a storage solution for its toxic waste.
Collegeville, Minn. — Xcel's Monticello nuclear power plant opened in the early 1970s. The plant stores spent radioactive fuel from 35 years of operation in water-filled pools at the facility's main building.
But now the power company needs more room to store that radioactive waste. The solution, according to Xcel's Jim Alders, is to build a three-acre above ground site where spent dry nuclear fuel could be stored in metal casks.
"The containers are large 20-ton containers that are sealed by welding. Those containers are then brought out to the storage facility, and placed in large concrete vaults with reinforced concrete walls three to four feet thick," Alders said.
Two guarded perimeters would surround the $55 million dollar project. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or NRC, maintains this kind of storage is secure from terrorist attacks, and safe for the environment. The company's Prairie Island nuclear power plant has used similar above ground storage for the past decade.
Both Prairie Island and the Monticello plant plan to eventually send spent fuel to a proposed federal government nuclear waste site. The Department of Energy hopes to store waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain.
But there's been numerous delays, and now government officials say it'll be 2017 before Yucca Mountain can accept radioactive waste. Alders says in the meantime power plants are seeking short term local solutions.
"There's nearly 30 of these dry storage facilities around the country at nuclear power plant sites. The Department of Energy hasn't moved along as quickly as everyone had hoped. As the result power plants around the country are having to add additional spent fuel storage on their sites," Alders said.
Alders is confident that within a few decades the government will be able to store all of the nation's nuclear waste. For that reason Xcel considers its above ground storage plan as only temporary. Some environmental advocates, like Beth Goodpaster see that as wishful thinking. "The likelihood is that this waste is here to stay. Are we proposing a storage solution that's consistent with that? I think the answer honestly has to be no," Goodpaster said.
Goodpaster, who is with Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, worries the federal government won't come up with a national storage plan anytime soon. She's also concerned that if a storage facility opens up it'll be filled almost immediatly, and won't have space for any nuclear waste from Minnesota.
"We can either decide this stuff is permanent, this stuff is toxic, we need to figure out how we're going to live with it. Or we need to decide we don't want to live with it on a permanent basis and we need to stop creating it," Goodpaster said.
While the PUC has given its stamp of approval to the plan, lawmakers could still weigh in on the issue in the upcoming legislative session. Goodpaster hopes lawmakers take that opportunity to ask serious questions about Xcel's long term nuclear waste storage plans.
Xcel officials say if everything goes as planned, they'll start building the facility in the summer of 2006, and start storing radioactive waste there in 2008.
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Pioneer Press
Quiet hearing OKs nuke storage
Decision final in June unless legislators act
By Dennis Lien
Pioneer Press
Minnesota's big nuclear-waste decisions used to be made in noisy legislative chambers in front of placard-carrying protesters.
On Thursday, the latest one was settled in a quiet room before a smattering of lobbyists, utility executives and environmental watchdogs.
In less than an hour, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission unanimously approved Xcel Energy's request to store highly radioactive nuclear waste in up to 30 above-ground containers outside its Monticello, Minn., nuclear power plant. Unless lawmakers intervene early next year, the decision will be final in June, enabling Xcel to start building a storage area next summer and to begin moving nuclear waste into the containers in 2008.
The decision, which came eight months after Xcel sought the extra room, had none of the rancor that accompanied similar ones in 1994 and 2003. Then, angry protesters argued unsuccessfully against giving Xcel's other nuclear plant, at Prairie Island, more storage capacity.
In the 2003 bill, conditional authority was handed off to the commission, which otherwise regulates electric, natural gas and telephone service. Critics argued it was done because that path was a less challenging one than the Legislature.
Saying they'd put in a good deal of study, the commissioners quickly endorsed Xcel's request Thursday.
One commissioner, former state Rep. Tom Pugh, suggested legislators might take up the issue next winter. But another, former state Rep. LeRoy Koppendrayer, stressed the nuclear power industry's safety record and said endorsing Xcel's request was the correct decision.
"It's the longest-lived decision that will ever be made in this room,'' said Michael Noble, executive director of Fresh Energy, an energy-policy group formerly called Minnesotans for an Energy-Efficient Economy.
The decision follows a recommendation last month from an administrative law judge to give Minneapolis-based Xcel the extra capacity.
Xcel wants to store waste in as many as 30 steel and concrete containers as part of its application for a 20-year license extension at Monticello. It contends more storage is key to extending the life of the plant, located about 50 miles northwest of St. Paul.
The utility said keeping the plant open is the best option for supplying low-priced electricity and for avoiding air pollution from plants that burn coal or natural gas. It said no other good option provides a comparable level of clean, reliable and low-cost power.
Monticello's spent fuel will stay there until well after a federal repository, proposed for Yucca Mountain, Nev., becomes available.
"Under any scenario, it's going to be a substantial amount of time before all the spent fuel could be moved,'' said Jim Alders, Xcel's manager of regulatory projects.
Beth Goodpaster, a lawyer for the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, lamented the lack of discussion about the long-term hazards of nuclear waste.
"There was no attention to the nuclear waste that is produced and that we will have to deal with in perpetuity,'' Goodpaster said.
Fresh Energy and MCEA were among several groups that questioned the health, safety and environmental effects of storing spent fuel in the casks.
Dennis Lien can be reached at dlien@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5588.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
September 29, 2006
U.S.-India nuke treaty hits snags
By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Yucca Mountain amendments are complicating Senate debate on a nuclear cooperation agreement between the United States and India.
A bill carrying out the agreement would allow U.S. companies to sell nuclear reactors and nuclear fuel to India for the first time in decades while requiring the South Asian nation to work with the United States on nonproliferation matters.
Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., supports the bill but is trying to add an amendment requiring an affirmative vote from Congress in the event that spent fuel from India might be shipped or stored in the United States.
The government has designated Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a repository site for U.S. nuclear waste. Bush administration officials have said the Nevada site may someday play a role in the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, an international fuel reprocessing initiative.
Reid's amendment irked Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, when it surfaced last week, Senate aides said.
Craig proposed a counter-amendment directing the Energy Secretary to start shipping nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain "as soon as practicable."
Both amendments were on a schedule for debate proposed Tuesday by Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. Amendments from Sens. Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., also were announced.
But the India bill was put on the back burner when Frist and Reid, the Senate minority leader, could not agree on a schedule for the bill. Reid said the bill probably will be considered after the election.
Reid said his amendment is the same as one that was put on the India bill in the House by Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev. The provision was accepted by the Bush administration, according to Richard Urey, Berkley chief of staff.
A second Reid amendment would require an annual report to Congress on how India manages its nuclear waste.
According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, India has generated 5,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel in its reactors.
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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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