Yucca Mountain News Clips
Thursday, November 9, 2006
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Las Vegas SUN
November 08, 2006

Nevada senator rises to top leadership slot

By Brendan Riley
Associated Press

CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) - Even before a key race was decided, Democratic Nevada Sen. Harry Reid told reporters Wednesday he was certain he would emerge as the U.S. Senate majority leader and promised to deliver major benefits for his home state.

While Republican Sen. George Allen of Virginia wouldn't concede his loss, Reid said, "It doesn't matter whether he concedes." He said elections experts have looked closely at the contest and don't see any other outcome than Allen being replaced by Democrat Jim Webb.

The Associated Press called the race for Webb late Wednesday. The resulting 51-49 edge for Democrats, who count two independents among their ranks, means there's no need for the shared-leadership structure that that developed after the 2000 elections left the Senate evenly divided.

But Reid said he wants a "partnership" with Republicans and doesn't foresee Democrats turning vindictive now that they're in control - although there will be a different tone in Congress with both the House and Senate now under Democratic control.

"The Senate is going to be run in a different manner and the House is going to be run in a different manner - and I think the president got the message," Reid said during a telephone press conference.

Asked to list potential benefits to Nevada now that he's in line for the top job in the Senate, Reid said he'll oppose future funding for the federal government's proposed nuclear waste dump northwest of Las Vegas. That project already has cost about $9 billion but is years away from completion.

Reid said he viewed the project as dead anyway, given the many delays it has faced, adding, "There's not much to kill." But he said any new funding plans for the dump would be "cut back significantly for sure" while alternatives, such as dry-cask storage elsewhere, would be pursued.

Reid also said that while Republicans held onto two of Nevada's three House seats and one of its two Senate seats on Tuesday, Democratic congressional victories elsewhere in the West bodes well for the region.

"There's some wind blowing out there, winds of change," Reid added.

On national issues, Reid said the election showed that the U.S. strategy in Iraq must be changed. He also said he'll push for "significant" ethics reform legislation that will ensure "more transparency in government," and also "make sure that Social Security is not tampered with."

Reid also said he has urged President Bush to host a bipartisan Iraq summit that would focus on changes in the administration's war policies.

"Elections have consequences," Reid said, adding that bipartisanship and compromise are the keys now that GOP lawmakers have lost their grip on Congress.

Reid became the Senate's Democratic minority leader in 2004, after serving as the Democrats' second-in-command. In 2001, he helped encourage the departure of Sen. James Jeffords, I-Vt., from the GOP, which gave Democrats Senate control for a year-and-a-half.

Reid worked his way through college, then law school in Washington as a Capitol Hill cop. He returned to Nevada as an attorney and started climbing the ranks in state politics, serving as lieutenant governor and Gaming Commission chairman before winning a seat in the House and later in the Senate.

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Reno Gazette Journal
November 09, 2006

Reid assured he'll become majority head

Diana Marrero
dmarrero@gns.gannett.com

WASHINGTON -- Election officials were still counting ballots in Virginia on Wednesday. But Harry Reid of Nevada was not about to wait for an official recount in the state's razor-tight Senate race to declare that Democrats were again in control of the Senate.

"The Senate is going to be run in a different manner," he said. "The House is going to be run in a different manner."

The Nevada lawmaker, who is set to become Senate majority leader with a win in Virginia, said he was in a "good mood" the day after midterm elections, in which Democrats wrested control of the House from Republicans and were on the brink of seizing the Senate.

The outcome in Virginia's Senate race will determine whether Reid gets to change his title from minority leader to majority leader.

Democrat James Webb led Republican incumbent George Allen by a tiny margin. But Allen has declined to concede. A possible recount could take weeks.

"Frankly, it doesn't matter whether he concedes or not," Reid said. "It's our race."

Even without Virginia, Democrats won enough seats in the Senate on Tuesday to ensure at least a 50-50 split.

One thing is clear: Democrats will have more of a say next year as they pursue their congressional agenda.

With Democrats in control of possibly both the House and the Senate, Reid says he wants to focus on changing course in Iraq, improving the nation's health care system and ensuring college access for all Americans.

He also wants lawmakers to turn their attention to issues of retirement security, energy independence and economic prosperity.

"The rich are getting richer the poor are getting poorer," he said. "After 10 years we can at least raise the minimum wage."

As majority leader, Reid would also be in a better position to prevent funding for a nuclear waste site in Yucca Mountain.

"I'm going to continue doing the same thing, not only doing good things for Nevada but stopping bad things from happening to Nevada," he said.

Reid predicted he would have a good working relationship with Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who is expected to lead Senate Republicans next year.

"I want to work with them to get things done," he said. "We want to be part of a Congress that accomplishes something."

Reid has been waiting for this moment for a long time, he said, anxiously flipping pages of the calendar as each day brought Democrats closer to Nov. 7.

"I counted down the days," he said. "There was a lot of anxiety."

On Tuesday, Reid stayed up late watching election results at a Washington hotel where Democrats had gathered to celebrate just blocks from the Capitol.

Reid grew more and more excited as the results came in from states in which tight Senate races had swung in Democrats' favor: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Missouri.

"The elation that I felt," he said, "I'm not sure I can describe it."

As the Senate's most powerful Democrat, Reid has proved his political savvy by leading the charge against Republican legislation to reform the country's Social Security system and the estate tax.

He was also at the forefront of Democrats' efforts to briefly shut down the Senate last year to protest against the slow pace of an investigation into prewar intelligence on Iraq.

"All of these things were efforts that could never have been accomplished if we weren't unified as a caucus," said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. "(Reid) is a determined individual."

In his two decades in the Senate, Reid has distinguished himself as a masterful tactician who knows how to use Senate rules to his party's advantage. The former boxer has led the Democrats in the Senate since 2005.

"He can demonstrate extremely sharp elbows," said Jennifer Duffy, a Senate analyst for the Cook Political report. "At the same time, he's a good strategist. He knows how the Senate works."

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Pahrump Valley Times
November 09, 2006

Sparse turnout reviews 'Mina' rail alternative

By Mark Waite
PVT

AMARGOSA VALLEY -- George Younghans certainly didn't plan on a rail line carrying high-level nuclear waste passing by his ranch when he invested in 180 acres in Oasis Valley back in 1981.

But a rail line to Yucca Mountain may go right by his property, regardless of the corridor chosen: the Caliente from southeastern Nevada or the Mina alternative, from Hawthorne.

"They want to put the rail line within one mile of my house. I've given them inputs twice previous. They came out to the ranch and interviewed me," Younghans said.

But Younghans said he hasn't received any word about whether the U.S. Department of Energy will accept his recommendation to relocate the rail line five miles farther east, to keep it farther from his ranch. That would put it near the border of the Nellis Air Force Training Range.

"I moved up there for peace and tranquility and they want to put it by my front door," he said.

Younghans was more concerned about the noise and disruption from the rail line than nuclear accidents. Younghans said he supported the nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site, which was for the country's defense, but he was less enthusiastic about it becoming the dumping ground for the nation's nuclear waste.

Oasis Valley is a few miles north of Beatty. So Younghans was walking around the DOE open house at the LongStreet Casino Wednesday evening to talk with the various experts on hand. He also left his comments with a stenographer.

The open house was rather sparsely attended. A visit there an hour after it began showed more officials on hand -- standing next to the easels with the displays on the rail route and the new method of handling the waste -- than local residents.

Allen Benson, director of the Office of External Affairs for the U.S. Department of Energy, said 43 people signed in, of which 12 gave comments, as the open house neared an end.

Younghans could have some reason to be optimistic that he may convince the DOE to change the route. The Mina route only became feasible when the Walker Lake Paiute River tribe agreed to drop its objections last May. It would be shorter than the Caliente route. Also, two alternatives were outlined for the Mina route through Esmeralda County, one going right through Silver Peak, the other looping eastward closer to Tonopah.

The first proposed route came so close to Silver Peak, Nancy Boland, an Esmeralda County commissioner, couldn't fit her thumb in the map to get a measurement of the scale of miles between the rail route and the town center. The route would go between the center and the evaporation ponds for the lithium mine.

Boland said she'll have to survey her constituents to see what their feeling is about a rail line going right through Silver Peak. "I want to make sure everybody is going to be safe," Boland said.

Boland had concerns about noise, visual factors, the rail line crossing a school bus route, and then there's the concern about whether the rail line will scare off any potential businesses.

"There isn't enough detail. I don't know how wide the rights-of-way are going to be," Boland said.

The Esmeralda County Commission voted on a resolution for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to dispose of lands identified in the Tonopah Resource Management Plan in 1979, Boland said. Now some of those sites the county hoped to obtain for private development, like Blair Junction and Miller's Landing, are being considered for the Mina route.

"The way I look at it, if people spent so much time looking at one spot, I think we're going to be stuck with it," Boland said.

Doc McNeely, a former Yucca Mountain employee and tour guide, said he felt confident enough the repository would be secure. He bought property down-gradient in Amargosa Valley.

Richard Nelson, senior project manager for BEC Environmental, hired by Nye County, asked a question long on the minds of local officials in Nevada: Why don't they extend the line to Jean or somewhere else on the I-15 corridor so it could be a dual-purpose route?

"They say it's an economic advantage to us," Nelson said, referring to the DOE. It would be easier, he said, for the DOE to schedule shipments if the rail line arrived from two directions.

Nelson also had concerns over whether the DOE would decide to ship nuclear waste by road. "We got enough traffic on the road without a lot of heavy haul trucks out there," he said.

Benson said the DOE wasn't required to hold a scoping meeting at all on the supplemental environmental impact statement detailing the new method of shipping casks. It was only required to hold one public hearing on the Mina route, but chose to have hearings in Amargosa Valley, Goldfield, Hawthorne and Washington, D.C., among other places.

"Have we missed anything? That's what we're asking people to tell us," Benson said. "If people are dissatisfied, that's a fair comment. Tell us about it."

Half of the open house dealt with the new method of transporting the casks of nuclear waste. Instead of transferring the waste at Yucca Mountain from a transport cask into a storage cask, the same cask used in shipping the waste will be buried in the mountain. "The concept is to minimize bare fuel handling," Benson said.

The Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, in a written statement, said the changes to the EIS were major, yet the DOE was "attempting to shirk its responsibilities and limiting public and stakeholder involvement by establishing truncated and unrealistic comment deadlines."

The state agency requested the comment period be extended 90 days and that meetings be held at six additional sites in Nevada.

Lee Bishop, DOE document manager for the rail alignment EIS, said the Walker River Paiute tribe agreed only to a study of the Mina route; it hasn't agreed to construction through the reservation. The route proposes a detour to the east around the main reservation town of Schurz.

Bishop was asked about requests by local officials to allow the rail line to be used by private businesses, not just the nuclear waste shipments. "Shared use is an option we are studying in the EIS," he said.

But he rolled his eyes when asked if it was politically possible to hook up to rail lines on the I-15 corridor.

The notice in the Federal Register states the open house format used at the LongStreet Casino provides for one-on-one discussions with DOE representatives rather than the public hearing format.

Comments on the supplemental EIS and the Mina rail route will be accepted until Nov. 27. Comments may be addressed to: Jane Summerson, EIS Document Manager, Regulatory Authority Office, Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, U.S. Department of Energy, 1551 Hillshire Dr., M/S 010, Las Vegas, NV. 89134. The fax number is 1-800-967-0739. The e-mail address is >www.ocrwm.doe.gov

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KTNV
November 09, 2006

Nevada senator rises to top leadership slot

CARSON CITY Democratic Nevada Senator Harry Reid says he's certain to emerge as Senate majority leader even though a key race remains uncalled Wednesday _ and getting the top job will have major benefits for his home state.

While Republican Senator George Allen of Virginia wouldn't concede his loss, Reid says, "It doesn't matter whether he concedes." He said elections experts have looked closely at the contest and don't see any other outcome than Allen being replaced by Democrat Jim Webb.

The resulting 51-49 edge for Democrats, who count two independents among their ranks, means there's no need for the shared-leadership structure that that developed after the 2000 elections left the Senate evenly divided.

But Reid said he wants a "partnership" with Republicans and doesn't foresee Democrats turning vindictive now that they're in control _ although there will be a different tone in Congress with both the House and Senate now under Democratic control.

Asked to list potential benefits to Nevada now that he's in line for the top job in the Senate, Reid said he'll oppose future funding for the federal government's proposed nuclear waste dump northwest of Las Vegas. That project already has cost about nine (b) billion dollars but is years away from completion.

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Discovery News
November 08, 2006

Yucca Mountain Volcanoes Misjudged

Larry O'Hanlon
Discovery News

A rather common sort of small volcano cluster found near the proposed high level nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain may be lying about its eruption history, says a government volcanologist who is trying to help pin down the volcanic risk of the region.

A closer look at the "scoria cone" volcanoes at Crater Flat in southern Nevada, as well as some other others in the area, has revealed that these little volcanoes can actually lose portions of their crater-like eruption cones and float away on their own lava. That creates what appears to be several volcanoes and eruptions where there might only be one true volcano and only one eruption.

Besides faking additional mouths for lava to flow from, the cones can also pour out lava in different directions at different stages of the same eruption — which has also led earlier geologists to mistake one eruption event for many stretching over millennia.

"The assumption was that they had to be different ages," said volcanologist Greg Valentine of Los Alamos National Laboratory, regarding the black lava beds flanking the crater-like cones. Valentine’s re-examination of the scoria cones appears in the November issue of the Bulletin of the Geological Society of America.

The problem with the Crater Flat cones, like others that erupted dark, basalt lavas, is that they are hard to date directly using standard radiometric techniques, Valentine explains.

Normally researchers would measure the proportion of potassium to argon in the rocks to determine how long the rocks had been solid. Potassium decays and becomes argon at a reliable pace over millions of years.

But basalt lava contains very little potassium to start with. That magnifies the margin of error for radiometric dating to the point that it’s essentially worthless on craters like these, which are less than a million years old and could have had eruptions separated by a few years or by millennia.

This has forced geologists to try and sort out the ages of lava cones and lava beds by indirect signs — like how weathered they appear to be. But all that gets pretty tricky, especially when you can’t even assume the cones from which the lava erupts are originals.

"Periodically chunks of cone will break away and raft away," said Valentine, describing similar modern eruptions in Mexico and Iceland. Then another cone can grow — to make it even more complicated. It’s reasonable to assume that the same thing could have happened at Crater Flat as well, he said.

The bottom line, says Valentine, is that the Crater Flat volcanoes each might represent individual eruptions that lasted years – at most. There’s no good reason to believe they are products of ten times more eruptions over thousands of years, as some previous geologists have argued.

"It comes right down to how many eruptions per million years," said volcanologist Michael Sheridan of the State University of New York at Buffalo. Sheridan is on the scientific panel charged with determining the volcanic hazards at Yucca Mountain.

"It’s the million-dollar-a-day question," Sheridan said. "It’s about time someone did this."

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NewMatilda
Nuclear Debate: Part One: The Plan

By: Julie Macken

In September 2005, the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, used his Condor Laucke lecture to declare that the death toll from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 was just 50 people.

Four months later, George W Bush, used his State of the Union address to launch his Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.

Three months after this, on 15 May 2006, Prime Minister John Howard announced from Washington that it was time for Australians to debate the role of nuclear fuel here.

And finally — hot on the heels of the Stern Report — last Saturday, Howard told the Queensland Liberal Party’s annual convention in Brisbane that ‘nuclear power is potentially the cleanest and greenest of them all.’ He added:

We would be foolish from a national interest point of view, with our vast reserves of uranium, to say that we are not going to consider nuclear power — not even going to look at it; we are going to say no to it before the debate even starts … I believe that the world’s attitudes toward nuclear power are changing and I believe that Australian attitudes towards nuclear power are changing.

So what is going on? Why after 10 years, would Howard suddenly appear to get the ‘vision’ about nuclear power? And what, if anything, connects the speeches of Downer and Bush to the demand by the Prime Minister for a nuclear debate?

The short answer is, a lot has been going on behind the scenes, and it is not John Howard who suddenly got the nuclear vision, but his friend George W Bush.

The man who connects all three politicians is Dr John White, chairman of the Federal Government’s Uranium Industry Framework (UIF) and head of the Australian waste company, Global Renewables.

White is like an old alchemist, he believes everything can be re-used, re-cycled or transformed — including nuclear waste. Four days after the Prime Minister used his doorstop interview in Washington to tell waiting journalists that Australians needed a nuclear debate, I spoke to White in his capacity as head of the UIF.

He had just flown across the Pacific, leaving behind his wintry home town of Melbourne to land in a balmy Texan evening. Because he was a man interested in waste, I began by asking if he was in the US to visit the beleaguered Yucca Mountain nuclear repository in Nevada. He could neither confirm nor deny that, but he did say that, as head of the UIF, it was part of his brief to see what the rest of world was doing with their waste.

Then, without further prompting, he launched into a long explanation of what he and his colleagues had planned for Australia. And when he finished he said:

If we agree to do this for America, we will never again have to put young Australians in the line of fire. We will never have to prove our loyalty to the US by sending our soldiers to fight in their wars, because a project like this would settle the question of our loyalty once and for all.

We had that conversation six months ago. The project he referred to is now well-advanced and more ambitious than anything previously seen in Australia. It has been developed by an international consortium of nuclear experts, US think-tanks and businessmen. And, with the Howard Government’s Review of Uranium Mining and Processing and Nuclear Energy in Australia due to report back within the next few weeks, it is a good bet that White’s proposition will be woven through the panel’s recommendations.

The proposal — one that White and his colleagues have already spent $45 million of their own money developing — is the creation of the Australian Nuclear Fuel Leasing (ANFL) company, which will be headed by White, and which will facilitate and manage the enrichment, fabrication, leasing, transport and storage of 15 to 20 per cent of the world’s nuclear fuel needs.

Not only will it be an Australian company — with International Atomic Energy Agency and UN oversight — it will use Australia’s uranium reserves. And all the nuclear fuel rods leased to other countries will be returned to Australia and stored here forever.

As White has stressed, this is not just strategically imperative, it also extremely lucrative. He estimates that by charging around $3000 a kilogram for the leased nuclear fuel packages, and targeting a market of around 2000 tonnes of fabricated fuel per year, Australia stands to make over $6 billion per year for providing this service.

The reason it would be so financially beneficial for Australia is because, according to White, ‘We have the most stable geology in the world.’

I’m not sure if White knows it, but that was why the Russians located their nuclear power plant at Chernobyl — it was allegedly the most stable geology in the world. And of course, the Russian people had no say in whether they had nuclear power plants in their towns, nor were they informed about the full spectrum of risk posed by this form of power generation.

The comparisons are unsettling. The scope of White’s proposal and the fact that it has progressed so far without any public scrutiny or comment in a democracy like Australia is quite extraordinary.

Unbeknown to the Australian public, the four principle directors of the ANFL have been hard at work for many years. Aside from White, they are: David Pentz, Daniel Poneman and Michael Simpson.

Pentz is probably best known as the US chairman of Pangea Resources, the company that in 1999 sought to establish an international high-level nuclear waste dump in outback Western Australia. Poneman is a Principal of the US-based Scowcroft Group who, from 1993 until 1996, served as Special Assistant to US President Bill Clinton and Senior Director for Non-proliferation and Export Controls at the National Security Council. And finally, Simpson was Business Development Director of Britain Nuclear Fuels plc (BNFL) until 2003. While at BNFL, Simpson spoke publicly about the possibility of Russia becoming a giant in the spent nuclear fuel reprocessing market and hinted that BNFL might be interested in a partnership with Russia.

The best way to understand how this nuclear fuel leasing cycle would be run, and what it would mean to ordinary Australians is to look at the submission made by the ANFL to the Federal Government’s nuclear energy review on 18 August, 2006.

Essentially the plan is this: ANFL will get the uranium from BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam mine in South Australia. They will contract Japan or Germany to enrich and fabricate it — although with the world currently over-supplied in enrichment by 20 to 30 per cent, this will not be necessary for some years. They will microchip every last gram of fissile material so that it can be tracked anywhere in the world, and then lease the nuclear rods to China and India — and any other country the US considers too risky to manage their own nuclear enrichment industry.

When the rods have been spent, they will be left to cool briefly for a year or two before shipping them back to Darwin by sea while they’re still ‘hot’ — apparently shipping the rods while they are still radioactive reduces the chances of the material falling into unfriendly hands. They will put them on the Darwin to Adelaide railway line and transport the rods back to South Australia. Once there, the rods can stay in cooling ponds for another 30 years, before being stored forever in the Australian outback.

Coincidentally, this deal would also help the Adelaide-Darwin rail link which is owned by Serco Asia Pacific, a leader in the management and transport of the UK’s nuclear waste.

In conversation with me, White argued the strategic advantages to the ANFL plan, but he also tackled the issue from a security, environmental and then moral point of view, asking:

How can we justify being the world’s largest exporter of uranium, while taking no responsibility for its waste? Global warming is an enormous issue. How can we justify doing nothing to ensure future generations have a stable climate to grow up in? With the world’s most stable geology in the world, one of the most stable democracies in the world, we are in a position to offer the international community a safe solution to their nuclear waste problem. How can we walk away from that?

But this debate is not a simple narrative of right or wrong action — as we shall see next week in Nuclear Debate Part Two: The Problems.

--Julie Macken is a former journalist with the Australian Financial Review. She is now writing a series of books on Australian business, hope and the possibility of political change in Australia.

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Ely Daily Times
November 06, 2006

DOE adds Yucca meeting in Reno

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department added a public meeting in Reno later this month to discuss new designs for a Yucca Mountain repository and a possible Northern Nevada railroad corridor for nuclear waste.

The department on Tuesday also extended the official public comment period on both matters until Dec. 12, a 15-day extension.

The DOE announcement fell short of what the state of Nevada and activist groups had requested as the government embarks on a round of environmental impact studies for the proposed changes.

Besides Reno, state officials had sought meetings in cities across Northern Nevada, and also in Sacramento, Calif., and Salt Lake City, areas could be affected by rail shipments of nuclear waste along the so-called "Mina corridor" that the DOE is preparing to study.

Under the Mina route proposal, the nuclear waste would travel south near or through the small towns of Winnemucca, Silver Springs, Hawthorne, Mina, Goldfield and Amargosa Valley and then northeast to the repository.

The state plans to register growing irritation over the department's schedule for the Yucca Mountain "scoping" meetings and their format, said Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.

"Certainly this is not enough," Loux said. "DOE is making a deliberate attempt to reduce the affected public from any effective involvement in the process.

"There are thousands of people in the Interstate 80 corridor where the bulk of shipments would be coming through who don't know what is going on," Loux said.

The added hearing in Reno coupled with the extra time for Nevadans to comment at public meetings or on the www.ocrwm.doe.gov Web site "provides the public with sufficient opportunity to provide us comments," DOE spokesman Allen Benson said.

DOE was required only to hold a single public meeting, Benson said. "So clearly we are going beyond what was required," he said.

The additional meeting will be Nov. 27 at the University of Nevada, Reno. Nuclear waste could travel through the downtown of that city under a scenario DOE plans to examine, according to activists.

The Energy Department has scheduled a scoping meeting from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. today in Amargosa Valley at the Longstreet, state Route 373.

Another meeting is scheduled for the same time Thursday in Las Vegas at the Cashman Center, 850 Las Vegas Blvd. North.

Meetings also will be held next week in Caliente, Goldfield, Hawthorne and Fallon.

At the sessions, information about new repository designs and maps of the proposed Mina route will be presented on poster boards, with project officials on hand to answer questions. Members of the public will be able to register comments to official recorders at the sites.

But Loux said the format is not informative based on comments he heard from people who attended an initial meeting in Washington on Monday.

He said the DOE and contractor officials gave conflicting answers to questions about repository blueprints and the status of multipurpose canisters DOE plans to employ to ship and store the radioactive waste.

"All in all, this whole process is really a disaster," Loux said.

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Times Daily
November 06, 2006

Nuclear future

NRC expects flood of plant applications

By Dennis Sherer
Staff Writer

In the 1970s, utilities throughout the country rushed to build nuclear-powered generating plants, creating tens of thousands of jobs for construction workers, engineers and skilled laborers.

After a nuclear accident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island generating plant in 1979, most utilities scaled back plans for new reactors. Instead of nuclear energy, utilities returned to using coal and natural gas to power new generating plants.

In 1996, when the Tennessee Valley Authority began producing electricity at its Watts Bar nuclear plant near Knoxville, Tenn., it marked the end of the nuke plant building boom. No new nuclear plants have been completed in the United States since.

A decade later, a new rush to build nuclear-powered generating plants looms on the horizon.

Dale Klein, director of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, predicts the agency will experience a groundswell of applications for licenses to construct new nuclear plants as the nation's utilities scramble to produce enough electricity to meet the needs of the its ever-growing population.

"We do have 14 different entities that have expressed an interest in almost 30 new reactors, so it should be an interesting and exciting time over the next five years," Klein said.

About 90,000 people will be needed between 2007 and 2011 to build and operate those plants, Klein said.

Many of the new nuclear plants will be built in the Southeast. Klein said Southern Co. wants to expand its Vogtle nuclear plant near Waynesboro, Ga. Entergy plans to expand its Grand Gulf Station nuclear plant near Vicksburg, Miss.

The Tennessee Valley Authority is considering expanding its nuclear fleet, which includes Browns Ferry in Alabama and Watts Bar and Sequoyah in Tennessee.

Jack Bailey, TVA's vice president of nuclear generation development, said the federal utility is considering completing the Unit 2 reactor at Watts Bar. Construction of the reactor was stopped in 1985 when TVA temporarily shut down its nuclear program over safety concerns.

A decision on the fate of Watts Bar Unit 2 is expected within the coming year.

TVA is also mulling a proposal to become part of a joint venture known as the NuStart Energy Development Consortium, and build a new generation of nuclear plants near Scottsboro. The two-reactor plant would be built at the site of TVA's uncompleted Bellefonte nuclear plant where construction was halted in 1988 over cost concerns.

Bailey said a decision on the Bellefonte project could be made by 2009. Construction could be completed by 2016.

Adding three nuclear reactors to its generation portfolio is only one of several possibilities TVA is considering for boosting its power output to keep pace with economic growth in the Tennessee Valley, Bailey said.

If TVA opts to complete Watts Bar Unit 2 and build a new nuclear plant at the Bellefonte site, it could create thousands of jobs for Shoals residents, said David Freeze, president of the Shoals Area Labor Council. He said many Shoals residents worked at Watts Bar and Bellefonte during the initial construction projects.

"I rode from Rogersville every day to work at Bellefonte myself. A lot of people from the Shoals worked on that project," Freeze said.

Resurgence in nuclear plant construction anywhere in the country would create jobs for skilled crafts workers from the Shoals, he said. "We go to where the jobs are. It doesn't matter where they are."

Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists, scoffs at the predictions of a nuclear power plant construction boom that will create thousands of new jobs.

"The economics just aren't there to build new reactors without huge subsidies from the federal government," he said.

The Washington, D.C.-based organization advocates using rigorous scientific analysis, innovative thinking and community advocacy to build a cleaner, healthier environment.

Instead of a building boom, Lyman suspects the government might subsidize the construction of as many of six new nuclear plants in hopes of jumpstarting the nuclear power industry. "We might see a handful of new plants constructed over the next couple of decades."

Instead of touting new nuclear plants, Lyman said federal officials should focus their attention on finding a long-term solution for storing radioactive waste from existing reactors.

Many nuclear plants across the country, including Browns Ferry, have run out of storage space for radioactive wastes inside the plant and have begun storing them outside in concrete and steel containers.

Plans to create a national nuclear waste repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain continue to spark controversy. Klein expects the Department of Energy will submit an application to build the repository in 2008.

Even if the Nevada facility is allowed to open, it is not expected to solve the nation's nuclear waste disposal woes. During a visit to Browns Ferry in 2005, then-NRC Director Nils J. Diaz said there is already more radioactive waste being stored at nuclear plants around the country than the repository could handle.

Klein does not see the lack of storage capacity at Yucca Mountain as a roadblock to building new reactors. He said new technologies being used in other countries would allow the United States to build new nuclear plants even if the Yucca Mountain repository doesn't open.

Klein said some countries, including France and Japan, recycle used nuclear fuel from power plants. He said the same technology could be used in the United States.

Lyman is concerned any plants built in the United States that recycle spent nuclear fuel rods will be little more than places to store radioactive wastes away from the reactor where they were created. He said Department of Energy requirements for such plants require them to have the ability to store radioactive wastes for 50 to 100 years.

Lyman said it's irresponsible for the NRC to consider allowing new reactors to be built before a way to dispose of radioactive waste is developed.

Dennis Sherer can be reached at 740-5746 or dennis.sherer@timesdaily.com.

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Washington Post
November 06, 2006

Local Contract

Nortel Unit to Support Federal Digital Courtrooms

By Roseanne Gerin
Special to The Washington Post

Nortel Government Solutions Inc. won a four-year, $7.7 million contract from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to operate and maintain the commission's digital courtroom systems. Nortel and its teammates built the systems under another contract earlier this year.

The two digital courtrooms, located in Las Vegas and Rockville, will help the NRC's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel deliberate on cases involving nuclear regulatory licenses. The massive amount of complicated data involved in deciding these cases is made more manageable by the digital systems, which electronically capture and display evidence and prepare digital and audio transcripts.

The digital courtrooms will handle routine cases as well as complicated ones such as the hearing involving the controversial nuclear reactor waste storage facility at Nevada's Yucca Mountain.

The Fairfax-based company also will furnish support for the agency's hearings, application development and testing.

Nortel's teammates MediaEdge, Levare Inc. and ExhibitOne Corp. will provide hardware, software and integration services. MediaEdge will provide multimedia technologies. Levare is a software company specializing in court calendar and scheduling software. ExhibitOne provides audiovisual technologies.

The Yucca Mountain hearing, involving the proposed site of most of the United States' radioactive waste, could be one of the largest administrative court cases in U.S. history, according to Nortel. The digital courtroom system will store and provide electronic access to millions of pages of evidence and thousands of hours of testimony. The hearing, mandated by Congress, is expected to last three to four years.

"These showcase systems integrate everything into one multimedia system with real-time access to information for all participants," said Chuck Saffell, chief executive of Nortel Government Solutions, in a statement.

Nortel Government Solutions is a unit of Nortel Networks Corp. of Ontario, Canada.

Roseanne Gerin is a staff writer with Washington Technology. For information on this and other contracts, go tohttp://www.washingtontechnology.com.

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North Lake Tahoe Bonanza
November 05, 2006

DOE adds Yucca Mountain info session amid state complaints

LAS VEGAS (AP)

The federal Energy Department on Tuesday scheduled another public meeting on revised plans for a radioactive waste dump in Nevada, while state officials and anti-nuclear advocates complained a first meeting was not informative.

"There was not enough detail to offer an intelligent comment," Martin Malsch, a Vienna, Va.-based lawyer who represents Nevada, said of a meeting Monday in Washington, D.C. "Nobody could have a way to know whether they would be affected or not."

An Energy Department spokesman called the meetings "listening sessions," to collect comments for environmental studies on waste-handling at Yucca Mountain and building a railroad to the site through Lyon, Mineral and Esmeralda counties.

"If someone believes there is not enough information, they should make that one of the comments," said Allen Benson, Energy Department and Yucca Mountain project spokesman in Las Vegas. "We believe we are providing adequate and sufficient information for people to give the kind of input we need to complete these environmental assessments."

Meetings were set this week in Amargosa Valley and Las Vegas, followed by sessions later this month in Caliente, Goldfield, Hawthorne, Fallon. A Nov. 27 meeting has been added in Reno.

The environmental reports are due out next year, Benson said.

Kevin Kamps, spokesman for the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group, complained that information at the Washington meeting was "scattered."

"We can't talk to each other, we can't hear from each other about concerns," Kamps told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. "It think it is by design."

The Energy Department announced earlier this month it was reconsidering building a rail line through western Nevada to Yucca site, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The north-south route dubbed the Mina Corridor had been studied in the 1990s but shelved after the Walker River Paiute Indians refused access to their reservation. The tribe reconsidered this year.

The Energy Department had said it favored plans to build a longer east-west rail line from Caliente, near the Utah border, across rural Nevada to the nuclear dump site. The cost of the so-called Caliente Corridor route has been estimated at $2 billion. There currently is no rail line to the Yucca site, which Congress and the Bush administration picked in 2002 as the place to entomb 77,000 tons of radioactive waste now being stored at nuclear reactors in 39 states. The project has been stalled by funding shortfalls and questions about quality control during site selection.

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KLAS-TV
November 04, 2006

Yucca Mountain: 10,000 Year Warning

Mark Sayre
Investigative Reporter

What will Southern Nevada be like in 10,000? Will the English language exist? And what about our very civilization, will it still be around?

These are questions the Department of Energy is considering as it works on a long-term warning plan for Yucca Mountain some 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The federal government wants to turn this barren desert into the nation's repository for high-level nuclear waste. No matter where you fall on the politics, the scientific facts don't change. Spent nuclear fuel will be dangerous for centuries.

So how do we warn future civilizations? Joshua Abbey, founder of the non-profit Desert Space Foundation, says, "The primary assumption is that language, as we know it, won't exist."

Abbey heads the non-profit arts and education group. It sponsored a competition in 2002 where artists and graphic designers from around the world were asked to submit their best concepts for long-term warnings.

Abbey continues, "So, I think when we look back at how communication and language has evolved we see that the most earliest forms of communication were symbols."

The Department of Energy is formally working on the project. Scientists say it is critical to convey that Yucca Mountain is not a "place of honor," no "highly-esteemed deed" is commemorated here and "nothing of value" is here.

Dr. Paul Scholmeier of the UNLV Philosophy Department says, "I doubt that any conventional symbols would last." Scholmeier believes the key to a successful warning may lie in the physical form of the humans that are creating it. "Perhaps human biology won't change in 10,000 years. At least the pace of evolution is sufficiently slow that that might be a reasonable assumption to make. So, in that case I would try to pick a symbol that would somehow cause a very visceral reaction."

Some key concepts DOE scientists say are critical:

1. The physical materials used should have 'little value," so the markers themselves are not stolen.

2. It should be "non-linguistic" so it is not rooted in any particular culture or language.

3. The markers should convey a sense of "danger, foreboding, and dread."

Some of the official concepts include a "spikefield," a "landscape of thorns," "menacing earthworks" and even "forbidding blocks." Whether from the minds of scientists or artists the long-term challenge is daunting.

Joshua Abbey says, "It's like a graveyard. I mean they are burying nuclear waste. So these symbols in a way are like tombstones."

The winning design in the art competition is called "Blue Yucca Ridge." The idea is to genetically engineer a plant that will change colors with underlying radiation.

The long-term warning plan is going to be an official part of the Department of Energy's application to open and operate Yucca Mountain. Politics aside, it will ultimately be up to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to give Yucca Mountain the go-ahead.

Send your comments to Investigative Reporter Mark Sayre at msayre@klastv.com

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Green Bay Press Gazette
November 04, 2006

Madison Weekly

Nuclear plant visit

A special state committee on nuclear power will travel to Nevada in December to tour the proposed Yucca Mountain Repository.

The committee, chaired by Rep. Phil Montgomery, R-Ashwaubenon, will meet Dec. 5 in Nye County, Nev. An optional tour of a solar power facility will take place the day before in Boulder City, Nev.

Members of the public wishing to attend the Yucca Mountain tour with the committee must make and pay for their own travel arrangements to Nevada.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
November 03, 2006

Nuclear Waste Dump: 46 attend meeting on Yucca Mountain

Energy Department officials listen, explain plans

By Keith Rogers
Review-Journal

When Jenna Morton moved to Las Vegas from Chicago four years ago, she "was blissfully unaware" of the government's plans to put the nation's nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain, even though much of what is destined to be entombed there will come from Illinois.

On Thursday, as a mother, resident, nightclub partner and board member of the environmental group, Citizen Alert, she went to the Cashman Center to see the Energy Department's exhibits on the nuclear disposal project and to express concerns about the dangers she sees in it.

"I feel like I have to listen to what they say and then ask more questions," Morton said before reading a statement to a court reporter at the department's second Nevada scoping meeting in as many days.

What she learned is that Yucca Mountain Project officials are relying in part on probabilities that an accident involving deadly, radioactive spent fuel assemblies encased in metal canisters won't happen along the transportation roads and railways, some that come within a half-mile of where her children go to school and her properties at the Palms.

"That probability is a science that deals with chance. There is always a chance," she said. "And a chance is always too much for me and my children."

In her written comment to Energy Department officials, she concluded: "So, in your EIS (environmental impact statement) if you find that my infant daughter Petra's health and well-being is being placed in one iota of jeopardy, you must come to the conclusion that this project is environmentally unsound and unacceptable."

Midway through the three-hour scoping meeting, 46 people had signed in to view posters and maps and hear 23 Energy Department and contractor personnel explain what they mean.

By the end of the meeting, project spokesman Allen Benson said eight had offered comments for the record, which is five less than those who gave statements to stenographers Wednesday night in Amargosa Valley, the community closest to Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The purpose of the scoping meetings was to get the public's assessment of what issues need to be addressed in impact statements that will be released next year for transport, aging and disposal canisters and the so-called Mina rail corridor. The corridor, being considered along with one from Caliente, would involve constructing a 300-mile rail line on an old rail bed approaching Yucca Mountain from the north.

Robert List, a Nuclear Energy Institute consultant and a former Nevada governor, described the Las Vegas scoping meeting as "a good healthy opportunity for people to come in and get a lot of detail."

"The whole purpose of these scoping meetings is to get suggestions and advice on what needs to be addressed in environmental impact statements," List said Thursday.

Jacob Paz, an industrial hygienist, wondered why project officials have not paid much attention to recent scientific reports on adverse consequences from the combined effects of nuclear waste and toxic metals that will be used as engineered barriers to try to contain the radioactive remnants hundreds of thousands of years in the future.

Paz said he also wonders what will happen to workers boring more than 50 miles of tunnels to entomb the waste in volcanic rock that has ingredients known to cause chronic and sometimes deadly lung ailments.

Irene Navis, planning manager for Clark County's Nuclear Waste Division, said the county could be saddled with a $3 billion bill to cover expenses for having emergency personnel on hand should an accident occur in one of the many thousands of shipments that would come to Nevada by roads and rails.

"It will cost us $385 million to get ready for the first shipment," Navis said.

Earlier, Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Shelley Berkley, both D-Nev., criticized the Bush administration for allowing the Yucca Mountain plans to proceed over the state's objections and despite questionable science they said President Bush ignored when he endorsed the project in 2002.

Berkley said the underlying purpose of the meetings is a "backhanded way" to make the planned, above-ground storage pads at Yucca Mountain an illegal interim storage site.

Reid said the "radioactive road show" was "an absolute waste of time."

"Nuclear waste will never be transported to Yucca Mountain. ... On-site storage is what will happen to all this nuclear waste for a number of reasons, not the least of which it is so much cheaper. Number two, it's so much safer."

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Pahrump Valley Times
November 03, 2006

Lack of detail about Yucca is a concern

Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Department of Energy Monday began explaining proposed changes to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site. But activists and representatives for Nevada grumbled that few details were available at a public meeting.

Energy Department organizers called the event a listening session as they begin environmental impact studies of the proposals. After an hour, 46 people had signed in, mostly professionals representing interest groups, federal agencies, members of Congress and potential contractors.

The department is embarking on new designs for waste-handling facilities at Yucca Mountain and on a study of a possible railroad path that would carry radioactive waste through counties in western Nevada.

Information on new designs for waste canisters and blueprints of the above-ground parts of the tunnel repository were on poster boards, with presenters standing nearby to answer questions.

The same format is to be used in public meetings scheduled in Nevada over the next two weeks. More of them will focus on the proposed Mina railroad corridor across Northern Nevada and through Lyon, Mineral and Esmeralda counties.

Critics of the Yucca program said the agency's presentation was unhelpful.

"There was not enough detail to offer an intelligent comment," said Marty Malsch, an attorney for the state. "Nobody could have a way to know whether they would be affected or not."

The information "is all scattered," said Kevin Kamps, nuclear waste specialist at the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. "We can't talk to each other, we can't hear from each other about concerns. I think it is by design."

Michele Boyd, legislative director of the Public Citizen energy program, said how the Energy Department proposed to load nuclear waste at reactors using new multi-purpose canisters was unclear.

"The pictures were completely useless," Boyd said.

Others defended what some called the low-key format and said it was designed to encourage citizens to ask questions and offer suggestions out of the spotlight. Formal public hearings will be held after the draft studies are completed, they said.

"This lets the department talk one-on-one with the public and answer questions and learn better what the concerns are," said Jane Summerson, DOE document manager for one of the impact studies.

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KOLO
November 03, 2006

Yucca Mountain

Northern Nevada Could See Nuke Waste Shipments

Special Report

Ed Pearce

Imagine high-level nuclear waste rolling along the train trench in downtown. That could be a reality if a Northern Nevada Indian Tribe okays the federal government's plan and we might not be able to do much about it.

The struggle over Yucca Mountain has always been about more than the mountain and the proposal to store the nation's most toxic waste there. It's also been about getting that waste to the mountain.

The transport of spent fuel rods from the nation's nuclear power plants potentially impacts thousands of communities, but none more than those here in Nevada. If the repository is opened, all of the nation's high-level nuclear waste will pass through some communities in our state, but which. Initially the Department of Energy looked at 10 potential routes through Nevada.

Two appeared likely: the Caliente corridor, bringing waste into the state from its southeastern border to the town of Caliente on existing rail lines then on new track skirting the northern border of the Nevada Test Site and south to Yucca Mountain. And the Mina corridor using the Union Pacific line along the I-80 corridor through northern Nevada and an existing spur south to Mina, laying 200 miles of new track to Yucca Mountain.

But between the main line and Mina the track runs through the Walker River Paiute Indian Reservation. In fact, beginning here at Wabuska to just north of Walker Lake the tribe owns the line, and with that ownership, effective veto power over the route.

In 1991 the tribe told the DOE it would not allow nuclear waste to be transported across the reservation effectively closing the door on the Mina corridor. Lately, however, the tribe has opened that door just slightly.

In a letter to the DOE this past spring, tribal chairman Gena Williams said the tribe would be willing to open talks under certain conditions. With the Caliente corridor facing huge engineering and budgeting problems, the DOE took the northern route off the shelf. The transportation route is suddenly no longer just a southern Nevada concern.

That means the nation's nuclear waste would travel through northern Nevada towns like Elko and Winnemucca, and yes, right through downtown Reno's railroad trench.

But for any of that to happen, the tribe has to agree and there are reasons for them to at least consider that answer. No one from the tribal government was available for an on-camera interview, but Chairman Williams told us it's primarily a matter of public safety that's prompted the tribe to take another look. The existing rail line cuts right through the center of the reservation's community of Schurz. Virtually the only traffic on that line right now are shipments to and from the Army Ammunition Depot at Hawthorne. Schurz also sits astride Highway 95, the main truck route between here and southern Nevada. It's elementary school is sited near the intersection of 95 and 95A. In return for agreeing to reopen talks with the DOE, the tribe wants the rail track routed north of town and assurance no nuclear waste would be transported by truck through their town.

But that decision would mean thousands of shipments through other northern Nevada towns including Reno. The state opposes the dump itself and feels there's no safe route, but it may find its argument undercut by the tribal government's own concerns.

Bob Loux believes that's an intentional plan by the DOE. It's put this idea on the fast track, scheduling just 45 days for public comment. And until just a few days ago, the only scheduled public hearings in northern Nevada were one in Hawthorne on the 14th and one in Fallon, which isn't even on the route on the 15th. The state asked for more hearings. The DOE responded by adding one for Reno on the 27th.

That still leaves a lot of people in northern Nevada with little opportunity to weigh in on this idea before it moves into the Environmental Impact Stage. That part of the story tomorrow.

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Business Gazette
November 03, 2006

Spinoff could revive energy merger

Shedding BGE would allow Constellation deal to proceed without regulators’ approval

by Kevin J. Shay
Staff Writer

Constellation Energy Group might try to revive its aborted merger with Florida energy giant FPL Group — or pursue one with another company — by spinning off its regulated utility, Baltimore Gas & Electric Co.

That way, Constellation would be free to merge its wholesale business without state regulators’ approval.

It’s a ‘‘key question,” says the company’s CEO, chairman and president, Mayo A. Shattuck III.

‘‘We’ve always been forthright about the way in which we look at all of our assets in terms of our strategic options, and I suspect we have some [options] with BGE,” Shattuck said during a conference call last week. ‘‘There are a lot of things we have to sort out with respect to [Senate Bill 1].”

That bill, which was passed by the General Assembly in June, will help put in context how BGE fits into Constellation, he said.

In calling off their potential $12.4 billion merger with FPL of Juno Beach, Fla., last week, Constellation officials said state regulators were not clear enough on what would be needed to complete the union.

If Constellation does spin off BGE to get around regulators, it will be doing ratepayers a great disservice, said Johanna Neumann, a policy advocate for the Maryland Public Interest Research Group in Baltimore.

‘‘One reason they said they wanted to do the merger was to create more value for ratepayers. But if they cut and run, it would be clear they were doing this merger because there is a lot of money to be made for top executives,” Neumann said.

Shattuck and other Constellation executives had stood to make about $73 million in bonuses, stock options and other benefits if the merger was completed, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this year.

Looking forward, the state’s regulatory environment for utilities would soon smooth out, Shattuck said in the conference call.

‘‘We will restore ourselves to a normal regulatory regime once the politics subside,” he said. ‘‘But there are some aspects to the legislation that give BGE more flexibility, particularly with respect to procurement, and I think we want to put all these things into perspective before we make any types of decisions.”

Shattuck added that BGE is a ‘‘very solid franchise” that has been ‘‘very important” to Constellation. ‘‘I’m sure we will be very thoughtful about how important it is as an integrated part of this company as we look at all of our strategic options going forward,” he said.

Constellation, which through BGE has a service territory that extends beyond the Baltimore area to parts of Montgomery, Prince George’s, Carroll and Calvert counties, gets the bulk of its revenue from its energy trading business, selling energy nationwide to users. Through the first nine months of 2006, Constellation’s non-regulated revenues accounted for about 84 percent of the total, or $12.4 billion out of $14.7 billion in total sales, according to its third-quarter report.

By contrast, the non-regulated revenues of Allegheny Energy of Greensburg, Pa., which serves Frederick County, parts of Montgomery and Carroll counties and western Maryland, account for about 48 percent of its business. But that doesn’t mean that all of that energy is unregulated, said David Neurohr, an Allegheny spokesman.

‘‘Those entities sell the electricity they generate into regulated markets,” he said. ‘‘So to call about half of our revenues unregulated is not a fair assessment.”

Constellation reported a 75 percent increase in third-quarter net income to $324.4 million over a year ago.

Constellation also reported spending $12.4 million in merger-related costs during the first nine months of 2006. But the company expects to recover $5 million by the end of the year, primarily due to tax benefits on merger expenses that were previously not tax-deductible.

Other energy companies saw substantial increases in third-quarter earnings. That included 209 percent to $110.2 million for Allegheny; and 55 percent to $524 million for FPL Group.

Going nuclear

Constellation received a boost in its nuclear capacities — which company officials hope to grow further — this week when the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission renewed operating licenses for two units that a subsidiary mostly owns at the Nine Mile Point plant in New York. The 20-year renewals will allow one reactor to run until 2029 and the other until 2046.

The NRC had been reviewing the renewal request for more than two years. Constellation Generation Group owns all of one unit and 82 percent of the other.

Constellation hopes to be among the first companies to be licensed to build a new nuclear plant in about three decades. The company has a heavier emphasis on nuclear energy than most in the industry, with about 50 percent of its electricity generated through nuclear power. The national average is 20 percent, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute of Washington, D.C.

Last year, Constellation and Areva, a Bethesda nuclear energy services subsidiary of French energy giant Areva Group, formed a joint venture, UniStar Nuclear of Annapolis, to build new facilities. Among the sites UniStar is considering for new plants are Calvert Cliffs in southern Maryland, where Constellation already owns two reactors, and Nine Mile Point.

In August, Calvert County commissioners approved property tax breaks worth about $300 million over 15 years to Constellation if the company builds a new unit at the Lusby plant. The expansion is expected to add about 400 new, permanent jobs and more than 3,000 construction jobs during the five-year construction phase, said Danita Boonchaisri, a spokeswoman for the Calvert County Department of Economic Development.

‘‘Constellation is the largest taxpayer in the county,” she said. ‘‘Calvert Cliffs now contributes about $15.5 million in taxes annually to the county, and this expansion would result in much more new tax revenue.”

One unresolved issue in the industry is what to do with the reactors’ highly radioactive waste. Plants such as Calvert Cliffs now store the waste onsite in pools or in concrete and steel casks.

The U.S. Department of Energy has approved a plan to store the nation’s spent fuel at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but officials estimate the earliest that site will receive waste is 2017. U.S. Sen. Peter Domenici (R-N.M.) has filed legislation to open interim storage sites much sooner than 2017 in the 34 states with either operating or shutdown reactors, which includes Maryland.

That proposal alarms some. The opening of such dumps would not improve public safety or security of the waste, said Kevin Kamps, a radioactive waste specialist with the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a Takoma Park organization.

‘‘That would initiate unprecedented numbers of waste shipments on the roads, rails and waterways that would be vulnerable to accidents or attacks,” he said.

One area that should be looked at in dealing with nuclear waste is recycling, according to a recent study by the Boston Consulting Group completed for Areva. Facilities owned by Areva Group in France have recycled nuclear waste for decades.

Officials with Constellation and Calvert County said the Maryland nuclear facility has a strong safety record. The NRC gave Calvert Cliffs high marks during its annual inspection earlier this year. Inspectors cited a concern in early 2004 when a relay in a steam valve failed in the second reactor, but officials addressed that problem to the NRC’s satisfaction by last year.

‘‘It’s been a good neighbor to our residents,” Boonchaisri said. ‘‘I’m not aware of any problems that people around here have had.”

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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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