Yucca Mountain News Clips
Thursday, June 28, 2007
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Pahrump Valley Times
June 28, 2007

Nuke director sees Yucca Mtn. as safe

By Mark Waite
PVT

Politicians can argue about whether the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository should be built, but Lewis Darrell Lacy Jr., newly appointed director of the Nye County Nuclear Waste Repository Office takes a pragmatic attitude to the issue.

"There's a lot of expectation in most of the country that Yucca Mountain will move forward. I know there's a lot of people in the State of Nevada that don't like having it here. I don't know if that really matters. I haven't heard anyone mention another site," Lacy said.

The transplant from Houston, who goes by Darrell, was selected over 15 applicants by Nye County Manager Ron Williams. County commissioners ratified his selection May 21.

Lacy was a former assistant county attorney for Harris County, Texas. He supervised engineers out of the Houston office of ERIN Engineering and Research, working on risk assessments, operations and maintenance on utility plants, including nuclear power plants.

While Lacy has experience in oil and gas, working for companies like Lyondell Petrochemical, he said the price of oil is going to keep going up, making nuclear power a more attractive option.

"I think that as a country in the world that nuclear energy is going to get more popular again. I mean the last 20, 30 years there hasn't been much interest in nuclear because we had really cheap oil. But the cheap oil is behind us, I think," Lacy said.

What to do with the nuclear waste has been described in trade publications as "the Achilles Heel" of the industry. Many people in the nuclear industry feel there needs to be a total life cycle look at nuclear power, which will include reprocessing, he said. That could extend the life of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, which may fill up quickly with the 70,000 tons of high-level radioactive material.

Commissioners recently deferred taking a stance on the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership until Lacy can make a recommendation. The GNEP is a plan to recycle nuclear waste at facilities on-site. One of the nuclear waste reprocessing technologies could generate electricity, Lacy said, but Yucca Mountain opponents at the state level and the Nevada congressional delegation don't want county officials to support such a reprocessing plant at Yucca Mountain for fear it would spur on the project.

The cost of raw uranium increased several fold over the last two years, making reprocessing nuclear waste look more attractive as well, Lacy said. He added, "I think there's a strong chance that the materials going to Yucca Mountain will be economically viable for reprocessing."

He added, "I think the state of Nevada and the folks in this area need to understand there's quite a few other states that have nuclear power and nuclear waste and they all expect it to go here. If it does come here, our role is to try to make the best of it -- protect the citizens of Nye County by mitigating the impacts."

Besides the transportation of nuclear waste, the construction of the project will mean a lot of trucks on area roads hauling construction material, he said.

Some Nye County officials see the possibility of some positive economic spin-offs if the nuclear waste repository is built.

"We have a much better chance of influencing that if we're sitting at the table, negotiating with them, than if we're just sitting outside saying, 'No, no, no.' We have a really great relationship with the DOE at this time. They understand that Nye County as the site county has some expectations," Lacy said. "They're currently paying considerable amounts of money to maintain this office as well as the PETT funds that go to Nye County."

The DOE recently closed down Yucca Mountain information offices in Beatty and Las Vegas, but maintains one on Postal Road in Pahrump. A recent letter to the editor expressing concerns about the transportation of radioactive material through Pahrump indicates a need for more communication on the subject, Lacy said.

"The education and outreach is something I think that's important to us so the people of Nye County understand what the impacts might be," Lacy said. "The problem is some people here think Yucca Mountain is open and accepting waste, and it's not. It's still a study, and scientific work is going on to ensure the safety and well-being of the people around it."

The DOE is expected to submit the license application for Yucca Mountain next summer, Lacy said. Much of the testing and scientific work by the DOE is over, and the actual repository site has undergone employee cutbacks, he said.

Nye County undertakes its own investigations of the project. Much of that work involves studies of the hydrology, trying to determine where leaking radioactive material might leak out and which direction it would go. Lacy's job includes oversight of the consultants.

"If the repository works as designed, there will never be anything get in the water table, much less migrate off-site. But is anything fail-safe when you start looking at a million years down the road? That's what's tough," Lacy said.

He added, "I haven't seen anything today that tells me it's not safe. The scientists that we have on staff and working for me, none of them are too concerned either."

Tracer tests indicate the water flows are very slow, Lacy said. He noted the Nevada Test Site has been nearby for 50 years, actually putting radioactive material into the environment. Nothing has left the test site from those experiments, Lacy said.

"I think Chicago has more nuclear plants within a close distance than any other major city," Lacy said. "You go ask people in Chicago about nuclear power, they probably don't have any huge issues with it."

The water studies of Yucca Mountain will continue, the nuclear waste repository office will also continue monitoring Yucca Mountain as long as the project is operational, Lacy said.

"A lot of our concerns have already been listened to and incorporated but we will be making some comments for the license application. I'm sure the state will as well and any other interested parties."

Yucca Mountain has been called the most studied piece of real estate in the world. Nye County is also researching impacts from the influx of people and trucks, emergency response needs and other spin-offs from the project.

"My job description doesn't include economic development but it does include trying to mitigate the impacts of what the repository will cause onto Nye County, and with those jobs coming here there are things that Nye County can do to best deal with them," Lacy said.

The Mina rail route, which would transport the nuclear waste south through western Nevada to Yucca Mountain, is now a non-preferred route due to opposition of the Walker River Paiute tribe. But Lacy said, "I don't think you could say it's totally off the table yet.

"Once the decision is made to build (Yucca Mountain) I think there will be a lot of activity on the rail line because the DOE has expectations of using the rail line to bring in construction materials and assist with the build of the site," Lacy said.

The expectation is the license to construct could be issued in 2013, he said. The DOE doesn't appear to be totally averse to having the railroad used for multiple purposes, Lacy said.

"There's the potential for some benefits to Nye County if there is a rail line there," he said.

The nuclear waste director job has been vacant since Les Bradshaw resigned in March 2004, except for a period from February to May 2006 when Dale Hammermeister was in charge. Lacy said Dave Swanson did a good job running the office during the interim.

Lacy said of his new position: "It is a very steep learning curve, but I'm enjoying it."

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Houston Chronicle
June 28, 2007

Exelon Picks 2 Nuclear Power Plant Sites

The Associated Press

NEW YORK — Exelon Corp., a Chicago-based power company, said on Thursday it has chosen two sites in Texas where it may build a new nuclear power plant.

The move marks another step in the U.S. power industry's effort to bring online a new nuclear plant, which hasn't occurred since the Tennessee Valley Authority began operating a new reactor at its Watts Bar plant in 1996. Nuclear power is increasingly seen as a way to meet rising electricity demand in the U.S. without producing carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas, and other kinds of air pollution.

The company's favored site is in Matagorda County in southeastern Texas along the Gulf of Mexico, Exelon said. It encompasses 1,250 acres about 20 miles south of Collegeport, Texas, the company said.

Exelon's secondary site is farther inland in Victoria County on an 11,500 acre site.

Exelon is one of several companies that have said they want to build nuclear plants in Texas. The others are NRG Energy Inc. and TXU Corp. Power suppliers believe the state's residents are more accepting of nuclear power development; Texas' high-priced power markets mean nuclear power plants will earn large margins on their output.

"Nuclear energy is safe and clean and has a low operating cost," said Exelon vice president Tom O'Neill in a statement. "That's why we believe nuclear energy is a key part of Texas' future energy mix, because of its inherent environmental and energy independence benefits."

Exelon said it hasn't made a final decision about whether to build a new plant. The decision depends on whether Exelon believes the public will accept a new plant, the viability of new nuclear technology and the availability of a place to dispose of new nuclear fuel.

Exelon's chief executive, John Rowe, has previously said that he would be wary of building a new plant without a place to put the fuel. Negotiations have stalled to create storage facility in Nevada's Yucca mountain for all the nation's spent nuclear power plant fuel.

Exelon said it expects to submit an application for the plant's operating license to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in November 2008. The commission last issued a new plant license over 25 years ago.

Shares of Exelon fell 30 cents, or 0.4 percent, to close at $72.10 Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange.

--Reader Comments

RonBallew wrote:

No nukes please. Nuclear power plants are radioactive! Nuclear power plants vent radioactive steam. Radiation kills people and other living things. There is no place to store the radioactive fuel rods after they are used. They will be radioactive forever.

Nuclear power plants hire young people and burn them up (expose them to their lifetime maximum radiation dosage working on the plant) and then fire them.

When nuclear power plants have accidents and vent radiation they do not warn the public. If you are downwind from a nuclear power plant you may find out years later that you were exposed to radiation. Radiation causes cancer and kills people.

You don't want any nuclear power plants in your neighborhood, or in your state. If you have to build one, put it upwind many states away from Texas.

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Free Lance-Star
June 28, 2007

Letter: Lake Anna poses no problems to visitors

I was disappointed that The Free Lance-Star chose to be flippant in a June 21 front-page blurb ["Ease summer boredom with trip to the lake"], which said that Lake Anna is "a cool place to go, despite its proximity to nuclear reactors."

If we are ever going to solve the global-warming problem, nuclear reactors will have to be a large component of the solution.

Nuclear power is safe and economical; the only thing holding it back is public opinion, and comments like the one on the front page do not help.

Nuclear power is clean and nonpolluting; thus the reactors at Lake Anna pose no problems to visitors to the lake. In fact, visitors to the lake are more endangered by exposure to the sun than they are by the reactors.

The usual comeback of the anti-nuke people is that we do not have a solution to the waste-disposal problem. This is not quite accurate.

Both France and Japan get the majority of their electricity from nuclear power, and they dispose of their waste. We have technical solutions also, but they are not politically popular.

Because engineers can't guarantee that spent fuel containers stored at Yucca Mountain in Nevada won't leak in 10,000 years, some people don't want to take the chance and store waste there. If we don't do something about global warming, civilization won't last that long!

Charles D. Morgan
Spotsylvania

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Detroit Free Press
June 28, 2007

Groups file appeal over safety of radioactive waste storage at Palisades

By James Prichard
Associated Press

GRAND RAPIDS — Two nuclear energy watchdog groups have filed an action with a federal appeals court that says the storage pads where spent nuclear fuel is kept at the Palisades Nuclear Plant violate earthquake-safety regulations established by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The 3-foot-thick concrete pads rest upon loose sand amid the dunes of the Lake Michigan shoreline in western Van Buren County’s Covert Township, about 55 miles southwest of Grand Rapids. Some containers of spent, irradiated nuclear fuel sit 150 yards from the water, the organizations said Thursday in a joint written statement.

Palisades’ two pads now hold more than 30 concrete-and-steel casks, each of which weighs about 150 tons when fully loaded with nuclear fuel rod assemblies.

The groups — Nuclear Information and Resource Service and Don’t Waste Michigan — want the plant closed and turned to the federal courts for relief after exhausting all administrative remedies at the NRC, they said. They filed the appeal June 15 in Washington and are represented in court by attorney Terry Lodge of Toledo, Ohio.

“Underwater submersion could lead to inadvertent nuclear chain reactions in the fissile materials still present in the wastes,” said Kevin Kamps, a nuclear-waste specialist at NIRS. “Burial under sand could cause the wastes to dangerously overheat. Either way, a disastrous radioactivity release could result.”

Mark Savage, a spokesman for plant owner Entergy Corp., said Palisades’ spent nuclear fuel is being properly stored at the site.

“Palisades has been in the past — and continues to be — in full compliance with all federal regulations and requirements associated with the dry-fuel storage facility, he said. “Our dry fuel storage containers are monitored daily and are in a safe condition, and Palisades will continue to store its used fuel until the federal government takes ownership of it for storage at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.”

In April, Entergy, a New Orleans-based utility holding company, completed its $380 million purchase of the plant from Consumers Energy Co., a subsidiary of Jackson-based CMS Energy Corp. Under the terms of the sales agreement, Entergy will sell 100 percent of the 798-megawatt plant’s output to Consumers for 15 years.

Palisades has been producing power commercially since December 1971.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
June 27, 2007

YUCCA MOUNTAIN: Waste site request cut

Senate panel slashes nuclear repository's 2008 budget by $50 million

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- A Senate subcommittee voted Tuesday to cut $50 million from Yucca Mountain spending in 2008, but its chairman said the Department of Energy still should be able to meet the project's goals for the coming year.

The $444.5 million Yucca Mountain budget proposed by the energy and water appropriations subcommittee amounts to a 10 percent slash in the Bush administration request for the fiscal year that begins Oct 1.

Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., said the panel "tried to get as close as we could" to the request while setting aside some savings for other needs in a $32 billion bill that also funds a variety of DOE, Bureau of Reclamation and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers programs.

On the Yucca Mountain Project, "we took a look at the president's request and talked to the folks about what was necessary," said Dorgan, who became chairman earlier this year.

The bill "provides sufficient funding for (the Department of Energy) to continue down the road to licensing," Dorgan said. "We cut about 50 million, that leaves them with a fairly substantial amount of money."

The action on Tuesday further shaped the 2008 budget bill for Yucca Mountain, the site 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas that is planned to be the nation's repository for highly radioactive nuclear waste.

The budget bill faces further Senate votes, and also must be reconciled later this year with a House energy spending bill.

The House bill fully funds Yucca Mountain, suggesting the final budget may be relatively close to the DOE request unless opponents like Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., force deeper cuts before final passage.

A leading critic of the "nuclear dump," Reid served as a chairman and also a ranking Democrat on the energy and water subcommittee until this year when he became Senate Majority leader and left the Appropriations Committee. He maintains influence over Yucca matters although it was not clear what input he had on the new spending bill.

Reid said the bill will serve the purpose of further crippling the project. Yucca Mountain spending has been cut by a cumulative $715 million in the past six years, including a $50 million cut last year.

The declining budgets have been forcing the Energy Department to postpone work on key segments, close public outreach offices and restrict access to the site.

Project director Ward Sproat testified to Congress earlier this year that the Energy Department would need full funding to keep the program on a "best case" schedule to begin accepting waste before 2020.

The department has set a June 30, 2008 deadline to file a repository license application.

"The Energy Department has said that any cut would be fatal to the dump so I am glad that we were able to cut funding by another $50 million," Reid said. "It is clear that our cuts are working and that the proposed dump will never be built."

Energy Department officials said they would not discuss budget implications. "We look forward to working with Congress to ensure full funding," spokesman Allen Benson said.

Other Yucca critics said they were hoping for a deeper cut.

"It certainly is disappointing from our standpoint. We would have liked to have seen the numbers quite a bit lower if not eliminated entirely," said Bob Loux, director of Nevada's nuclear waste office.

"I am disappointed. Any money that is spent on Yucca Mountain is a waste," said Kevin Kamps, a nuclear waste specialist with the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, an advocacy group.

Pro-repository lobbyists and officials said they were pleasantly surprised. Rumors in the spring hinted at slim funding for Yucca, prompting the Nuclear Energy Institute and others to launch a lobbying push.

"This is going to be a haircut, which is better than a scalping or a crew cut, let's put it that way," said David Blee, a consultant to several pro-Yucca groups.

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CounterPunch
June 27, 2007

Nukes Kill; Here's How

16 Dirty Secrets About Nuclear Power

By Russell D. Hoffman

1) Isn't France almost entirely dependent on nuclear power?

Sure, they have something between 70% and 80% nuke-generated electricity (the exact figure depends on who you ask). It's NOT particularly CHEAP for the French, by the way, and THAT should tell you something. But more to the point, COULD they have gone with renewables and still achieved their electricity goals (and their rates would now be vastly cheaper)? Certainly!

From wave power off the coast of Brittany to in-stream and small-scale hydro in the French Alps and the Pyrennes (and five other mountain regions in France), and bio-fuels, sunshine, and wind everywhere, and lousy conservation standards to begin with, there is no question France could get along without nukes entirely, as could anyone else. France has used extraordinary measures to stop the so-called "anti-nuclear" (I call it the Pro-DNA) viewpoint from being heard. And one more point: AREVA, France's nuke power company, is even more secretive than our nuke mega-corporations, and their nukes have had serious problems which could have, with a little different luck, resulted in meltdowns. And AREVA buys up wind power and other clean energy companies all over the world, yet remain focused on nuclear!

2) Don't nuclear submarines prove the technology works?

Even if every nuclear submarine worked perfectly (they don't), the spent fuel from nuclear subs and other military nuclear vessels adds about 30% to the world's nuclear waste stream. The United States has launched nearly 200 nuclear submarines, but the reactors actually charge batteries, which power electrical motors, the same as on the old diesel subs. Staying submerged for months at a time, while theoretically possible, is seldom done and of little practical value in today's military threat scenarios.

Whenever we lose a nuke-powered sub (and it's happened twice to us, and about half a dozen times to the Russians) we lose the reactors and their radioactive fuel, to be dispersed into the waters. The Kursk's reactors were reportedly recovered (though undoubtedly, the highly radioactive cooling fluid was dispersed), but I don't think ANY other lost sub reactors have been recovered. Plus, Russia has hundreds of rusting subs that are releasing radioactive and other poisons into the oceans and will do so at ever-increasing rates unless WE somehow force the Russians to clean them up and remove them from the water. Russia's already proven they won't do it themselves.

Plus, at least in America, ex-nuke-submariners think they are ENTITLED to a job in a civilian nuke plant when they quit the service after securing a pension and life-time health benefits (such as they are) from the Navy. And there is good reason to believe the scuttlebutt that is rampant about ex-nuke-submariners dying of brain tumors and the like at MUCH higher rates than the rest of the population. THAT is their true sacrifice, but their promotion of nuclear power is by far the most damaging thing they have done (considering, for example, that they have never launched a single nuclear weapon at an enemy (thank goodness)).

3) Nukes are getting safer all the time, aren't they?

Actually, they are getting LESS safe. They are getting older, and the crews that run them didn't build them and haven't looked at the original plans even once in their lives. Any specific nuclear power plant is way too complex for any one person to understand, and their training is too specific, anyway. So one "expert" really just knows a piece of the puzzle, and leans on other experts to "solve" the whole puzzle for humanity, and excuse their own dirty part of the whole dirty job. Thus they convince themselves that nukes are safe and low levels of radiation might even be (in their opinion) GOOD FOR YOU. The old nuke power plants are rusting, becoming more and more embrittled, and parts that have lasted for 30+ years (and were designed to last only 20) are failing left and right. The companies all have a "replace on failure" policy for most components, since it would be impossible to guess what's going to break next. And as for future possible generations of new reactors, they have their own problems INCLUDING unexpectedly rapid embrittlement of the cladding for the radioactive fuel pellets, which could lead to the very catastrophic failures they CLAIM can't happen. AND the new reactors are no better protected from terrorism than the old ones -- a fact of life, but then, so are TSUNAMIS and they are IGNORED, as well (yes, some coastal reactors have sea walls, but they are pitifully small).

4) Can't nuclear power solve the problem of Global Warming?

No. First of all, nuclear power doesn't produce MUCH of our energy mix. Only about 7% of America's energy usage is from nukes, if even that (it depends, of course, on how you measure it). The "20%" figure you might often hear is the percentage of ELECTRICITY nuclear produces, but electricity is a relatively small portion of our total energy usage.

Second of all, the global warming problem is (finally) considered IMMINENT. But no workable plan for building new nuclear power plants can possibly contribute more than a small percentage of the needed energy. The plants are too big, the lead time too long, the difficulties of siting them away from population centers and then running high-power lines, all doom the technology even if numerous OTHER important reasons are IGNORED!

Third, and most damaging, is that when you take into account: Caring for the nuclear waste afterwards; Caring for cancer victims; The energy needed to mine the uranium; The energy needed to clean up after an accident; All the other costs; Nuclear simply doesn't produce ANY net energy for the country! Not one watt!

So how can it solve the global warming problem?

5) What exactly IS radiation and how does it harm us?

Every element in the universe is made of atoms, and every atom is made of protons and neutrons in the core, then lots of empty space, with the tiny little electrons spinning around the outer edges. The number of protons determines what element something is. Except for hydrogen, which has a lone proton and can have zero neutrons, there are one or more neutrons in the core of each atom. Every element can have several different numbers of neutrons (called different isotopes of an element), but as long as the number of protons stays the same, it's the same element -- with the same chemical and biological behavior as any other atom of that element. All elements above and including element 86 have NO possible stable number of neutrons in their core, meaning, all isotopes of these elements are radioactive. Element 43, which doesn't exist naturally on Earth, also has no stable isotopes.

Unstable atoms decay, which means they break down into a stable isotope of some element, or into another unstable isotope of some element. For any particular atom, there is no way to predict WHEN it will decay, but for large aggregates of the same isotope of the same element, the decay rates of the whole group are approximately predictable. The "half-life" is defined as the amount of time it takes for half the atoms to decay, in repeated tests of carefully measured, pure samples of an isotope. It is important to understand that the OTHER half of the sample will then take the SAME amount of time for HALF of THOSE atoms to decay. Thus, after about 20 half-lives, still about a millionth of the radioactive isotope will remain, along with a dirty little rainbow of daughter products, each decaying their way around the periodic table, in big and small leaps, stopping only when they become stable elements such as lead.

The moment of decay is of particular interest, because various particles and / or rays shoot out from the decaying atom, damaging other atoms. For example, a NEW electron can be ejected from the core of an atom, simultaneously changing one of the core's neutrons into a proton and converting the atom into the next element UP in the Periodic Table of the Elements. (For example, converting an radioactive isotope of hydrogen (element 1) that has two neutrons and one proton, into a stable isotope of helium (element 2) with one neutron and two protons.) The ejected NEW electron may be traveling as much as ~95% the speed of light when it is ejected. It is called a beta particle (sometimes it's called a beta ray). Another type of radioactive decay shoots off TWO protons and TWO neutrons in one clump -- which is called an alpha particle (sometimes it's called an alpha ray) and is ejected with as much as ~5% the speed of light. Still other types of radioactive decays shoot off high energy photons, which are called gamma rays or x-rays. Some radioactive decays shoot off gamma rays along with beta particles or alpha particles.

It is mainly the shooting particles or energy rays that do the damage to biological systems. Your body is made of highly complex molecules -- in fact, the truest wonder of life is that it is so very, very complex. The most complex molecule known, the biggest, most intricate, most amazing molecule of all (a triple crown of molecular development) is YOUR DNA, and you have trillions of copies of it, and EACH ONE needs to remain exactly the same as all the others. No easy trick with RADIATION around! But it's not just your DNA that needs to be protected. Each of the 50,000+ DIFFERENT kinds of molecules your body manufactures for its own use all need to be protected, too. Many of the molecules your body makes are thousands of individual atoms in size, and if any ONE of those atoms is damaged, the molecule is ruined. Information -- perhaps vital information -- is lost.

Radioactive decays are thousands of times STRONGER than the CHEMICAL and ELECTRICAL BONDS which hold your body's various molecular structures together. When a radioactive decay occurs it can destroy thousands of proteins your body carefully created, or it can damage the RNA -- the creators of those proteins -- or it can damage a copy of the DNA chain itself.

It is now absolutely certain and well-known that radiation causes cancer, leukemia, heart disease, birth defects, and thousands of other ailments. Recently, even some official regulatory bodies have accepted the theory that there is NO THRESHOLD below which radiation is not damaging and CANNOT cause "health effects."

But the RATE of health effects in the population, and the degree to which a general degradation of YOUR body should be considered a problem (even if it doesn't kill you outright) is the subject of cover-ups, lies, debates, pseudo-debates, and a thousand other tricks, trials, and tribulations.

6) Won't Yucca Mountain solve the nuclear waste problem?

Or couldn't we just rocket it to the sun? No, neither solution is adequate. Yucca Mountain is a scientific boondoggle AND at least 15 to 20 years away if it ever opens. The problem is simple to state, but very hard to solve: How can you build a device which will successfully contain something for millions of years, when the thing you wish to contain can destroy any container you build to contain it? Radioactive decays destroy steel, diamond, gold, glass, every alloy known or conceived by physicists and chemists, and -- of course -- radioactive decays destroy all biological systems.

The rocket solution is STILL brought up TIME AND AGAIN by otherwise-sane "rocket scientists" and their promoters. But it's a lousy idea because rockets fail WAY too often, including because of prior rocket failure's high-speed, microscopic, deadly SPACE DEBRIS in Near Earth Orbit, which the waste would have to successfully pass through. Also, there is WAY too much nuclear waste to expect much of it to get "up there" safely before a truly catastrophic accident occurs, not "vaporizing" (as in "rendering harmless through the process of incineration") but "particle-izing" the waste ("going particulate" is the actual technical expression). Why does such a lousy idea keep coming up then? Because rationally, all OTHER choices have ALSO failed to pass scientific muster.

Besides, Yucca Mountain, even if built would not be nearly big enough for all the waste we will generate in the coming decades, it's barely going to be big enough to hold the current amount we already have!

7) Science will surely cure cancer some day, and isn't that the main danger from radiation?

First of all: DON'T bet YOUR life that science will cure cancer any time soon! Most "progress" has been in identifying cancers early, and identifying environmental risks you CAN individually address. Many laws, in fact, which PURPORT to protect us from CARCINOGENS specifically exclude the regulation of RADIOACTIVE carcinogenic substances!

There are thousands of different kinds of cancers that have been identified and further sub-categories are being discovered all the time. Cancer research is alive and well (and needs more funding). But its successes have been few.

Second of all, cancer ISN'T the only disease radiation CAUSES or ENHANCES, because radiation causes the random destruction of your body's sub-cellular structure, and the creation of thousands -- or even hundreds of thousands -- of "free radicals" with EVERY atomic breakdown. Understanding how radiation impacts cells is closer to the root of the problem than merely declaring that radiation causes specific cancers, such as "thyroid cancer" and then handing out KI (Potassium Iodide) after an accident. Science isn't anywhere near solving any of the THOUSANDS of diseases associated with free radical creation in your body.

DNA damage to multiple (future) generations is a bigger threat to civilization than the combined radiation-induced threats from cancer, heart disease, leukemia, and every other radiation-induced ailment combined! And there is no pill that protects your fetus. Mothers and fathers of the world MUST understand this: Radiation sickens, weakens, and kills YOUR babies! It makes them less like you, and it makes them like you less.

8) Doesn't the nuclear industry protect humans from all its radioactive waste?

NO THEY DON'T! Tritium, for instance, is routinely released from ALL operating nuclear power plants. Some kinds of nuke plants release 20 times (or more) more than other types. Is it ALL okay? Not at all. Tritium standards are absurdly lax. For example, in America the Environmental Protection Agency standard for drinking water is 20,000 picoCuries of tritium per liter. But if you drank water at this level consistently (and you might be doing so right now and not even know it), the water portion of YOUR body would also reach this level, and your body will silently experience tens of thousands of ADDITIONAL radioactive decays every second of your life, above and beyond all your OTHER EXPOSURES. These additional radioactive decays will EACH create thousands of "free-radicals" (which can damage your DNA) or they might damage your DNA directly. Sounds bad? Of course it is -- but the EPA basically feels that it's bad ONLY above 20,000 picoCuries per liter and PERFECTLY OKAY below that! A more realistic figure, that would probably merely bring the protection standard in line with that of other chemical assaults we must invariably put up with (engine fumes, coal power plant fumes (see below) etc.), might be 50 picoCuries per liter -- or maybe 5.

But 20,000 picoCuries per liter of drinking water is just ABSURDLY HIGH and allows U.S. nuclear power plants to release about 1,000 Curies of tritium each year, on average. Any year they release more is forgiven and averaged into prior years, if possible, or future years, if prior releases exceeded even the standard "forgiveness" rate. Get it? No matter what they release, it's simply duly noted (but the information is seldom released to the public) and the regulatory toadies forgive the nuclear industry for their trespass into YOUR life.

9) Isn't our other choice coal, and isn't that even worse?

Coal is pretty bad stuff -- and there's 500 years' worth in the earth, laying around the planet waiting to be mined, whereas there is probably less than FIFTY years' worth of uranium!

Coal plants emit Uranium and Thorium -- radioactive heavy metals -- into the atmosphere in quantities MUCH greater than a properly operating nuclear power plant does. BUT -- and this is a BIG, BIG, BUT -- they DON'T create or release FISSION PRODUCTS in comparable quantities. Fission products -- the daughter elements of atomic decay -- include cesium, strontium, and a deadly rainbow of other radioactive elements, which are created when the radioactive fuel is "burned" in the reactor. These elements get into biological systems in a way that heavy metals generally don't do (although heavy metals are very bad). Fission products BIOACCUMULATE in plants and animals which we then eat. Many fission products are chemically similar to elements that are essential for life. Therefore our bodies readily absorb fission products at specific sites such as our thyroids, gonads, bone marrow, and other organs.

Additionally, a coal-fired power plant will never be the target of a serious terrorist who is intent on doing the most harm for his or her "investment." A coal-fired plant will not leave extremely toxic waste -- the word "extremely" being key here. A coal-fired plant creates waste, and it is unhealthy -- both the part which is released into the atmosphere AND the part that isn't. BUT these waste streams pale in comparison to a nuclear power plant's. As proof, just consider what the major fear is from coal, according to all the politicians in Washington these days, and everyone else besides: CARBON DIOXIDE! NOT the heavy metals or even the URANIUM that is also released by coal-fired power plants! In truth, it would be GOOD to reduce ALL emissions from coal plants. But hasn't CARBON SEQUESTRATION been proven to work -- its ONLY REAL PROBLEM is that it REDUCES THE EFFICIENCY of the coal plant -- so you burn MORE coal to get the SAME POWER OUTPUT?

Or is there ANOTHER CHOICE? You bet there is! Solar energy works. Wind power WORKS. Wave energy, tide energy, in-stream river power (no dams) -- these ALL work. Yes, I would rather see a hundred coal plants be built than the 30 or so nukes that could produce the same electrical output, BUT those are NOT the real choices.

10) Don't some people say that a little radiation might actually be GOOD for you?

Hmmm... WHO have you been picking this stuff up from? Ask yourself that. The only people I've ever found who actually believe that the debris from, for example, a 1963 NASA nuclear space probe, which dispersed plutonium all over the world, is like a VITAMIN to our bodies are invariably directly associated with USING RADIOACTIVE SUBSTANCES IN THEIR WORK. In other words, their jobs depend on the public believing that low levels of radiation is probably HARMLESS, and may even actually be GOOD for you.

In reality, NO level of radiation is beneficial and all medical radiation is given after a supposedly careful cost-benefit analysis has been done for the patient. In other words, the risk of getting cancer from a USELESS and UNNECESSARY CT scan is utterly unfair: That same risk from a CT SCAN that resulted from a proper initial diagnosis, is fair, regardless of whether a tumor is actually found in any individual case.

When your regular dentist uses their x-ray equipment as part of your regular check-up, that's considered a "fair use." (I would argue that the equipment is much more ionizing than it needs to be.) But when the dentist sends you to another expert, and that expert takes NEW x-rays of the same tooth, from the same angle, rather than using your dentist's original x-rays, that's an UNFAIR use, but it happens ALL THE TIME.

Some people get cancer because of dental x-rays, but it's considered okay, not because dentists pretend it doesn't happen (though some do, in fact, do that), but because the dentists believe that, for the population at large, the benefits outweigh the dangers.

But what if low-level radiation (LLR) is significantly WORSE than calculated by the "experts," who, invariably, base their guestimates of the danger on faulty HIROSHIMA and NAGASAKI bomb studies of people who have been called the "healthy survivors" by more realistic observers?

(Note: Males in the northern hemisphere are said to piss out about a million atoms of plutonium every DAY of their LIVES, mostly Pu-238 (with a half-life of about 87.75 years), just from that one 1963 NASA space probe accident (let alone all the other poisons we must ingest). The chance of getting bladder cancer is about one in 30 for American men (it's about one in 90 for American women). Some portion of that is undoubtedly due to radioactive poisons.)

11) Aren't we desperate for energy?

Yes, we ABSOLUTELY are desperate for energy. CLEAN energy.

Every study ever done has shown that as populations get more and cheaper, CLEANER energy, they achieve an improvement in living standards "across the board." Death rates go down, disease rates go down, birth rates even go down -- as babies live to age five and beyond, families tend to have LESS children, not MORE! Cheap, clean energy allows the FREE EXCHANGE OF IDEAS via the Internet and cheap exchange of goods via every other transportation method. As living standards go up, the environmental degradation that occurs per human life goes DOWN because people don't, for example, have to burn down trees for cooking or for heat when electric stoves and heaters powered by renewable energy are available instead. The environmental benefits continue to increase as the available cheap, clean energy increases, until / unless the society reaches a certain "critical" level of affluence and misbehavior, and does not properly REGULATE itself (such as by having gas-powered lawn trimming devices, when electric, renewable-energy-powered devices could be used instead.)

PROPER energy regulation IS the key to success! But you can't have proper regulation if government dishonestly, ignorantly, and stubbornly supports nuclear power, against all logic and reason.

12) What about reprocessing? Can't we just "recycle" the waste?

Reprocessing is nothing like recycling aluminum cans!! It's a filthy process that Jimmy Carter banned when he was president, and it should STAY banned. It involves grinding up hot, poisonous nuclear reactor cores and spilling a little at every step. The process gobbles up enormous amounts of energy, and uses up enormous amounts of chemicals that are spilled into the environment along with many of the "fission products" which "poison" the reactor cores. What they want is the mainly unspent U-235, and a few other isotopes of Uranium and Plutonium, especially Pu-239. What they DON'T want is a rainbow of radioactive isotopes of every element in the Periodic Table -- but it's what they've got. So, France, which currently reprocesses reactor cores, pours enormous amounts of radioactive and chemical waste into the North Sea (as do several other countries) and that waste is then spread throughout the planet. THAT's their idea of "reprocessing" nuclear waste, and they want to bring this awful concept to America in the form of something called GNEP, which stands for Global Nuclear Energy Partnership because America will be the cesspool of the planet, accepting nuclear waste from anywhere. (Transported, usually, by boats, which will sometimes be lost at sea -- guaranteed.)

But the WORST thing about reprocessing the "waste" from nuclear reactors is that you can ALSO separate out some isotopes which can be used in DIRTY BOMBS, and in -- you guessed it -- ATOMIC BOMBS.

13) Are nuclear power plants responsible for nuclear weapons proliferation?

One can start with the simple fact that WITHOUT NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS, THERE WOULD BE NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS. Hydrogen bombs all use tritium in addition to plutonium and / or uranium, and both the plutonium and the tritium always come from nuclear power plants. Tritium has a half-life of about 12.3 years. You need to keep making more tritium or, after a batch has decayed to too low a grade to be useful, you have to remove it from your nuclear warhead and re-isolate the tritium isotopes you have left over. But you won't be able to refuel as many warheads as before, if you aren't making more tritium.

The main plutonium isotope needed for nuclear bombs is Pu-239, which is ONLY created in nuclear reactors. If you don't isolate it from other plutonium isotopes, it's pretty much USELESS as bomb-making material. If you let it decay for a few years, it ALSO becomes useless as bomb-making material until it has been reprocessed.

So if you want to remove nuclear weapons from the face of the earth, you MUST shut down the reprocessing plants, which are enormous and dirty death-machines which specialize in Weapons of Mass Destruction, AND the nuclear power plants, where many of the raw materials that can be turned into nuclear weapons are made.

14) Why does the industry keep going, if it's SO bad?

I dunno. Why DOES murder-for-hire keep happening, since it's SO bad? Why does war keep happening?

The nuclear industry relies on lies and obfuscations to hide its true effect on humanity from curious or prying eyes. ANYONE who begins to understand the truth is immediately labeled an "activist" even if they base every comment they ever make on scientific principles which the pro-nukers cannot and WILL NOT ANSWER. People who are labeled "activists" are soon kicked out of their jobs, so that they can no longer be considered experts who are current in the field. They are ridiculed, and destroyed financially.

The "debate" over nuclear power -- the one a democratic people SHOULD have had -- NEVER HAPPENED, and next thing we knew, there were more than 100 operating nuclear power plants in America alone. One that was gutted by fire more than 30 years ago, on March 22, 1975 (and nearly melted down, but didn't, or you would know its name) was reconstructed and restarted recently (June 2007). How? Because the Tennessee Valley Authority, which owns the Browns Ferry site, is as corrupt an organization as you will find on the face of the earth.

What keeps the industry going is government contracts, government subsidies, government insurance, and tax breaks. The government feeds BILLIONS into the industry, financing the "research and development" of new reactor designs, and the training the commercial reactor operators through the military reactor program. Research reactor institutes are often controlled jointly by the industry and by the government. It's self-perpetuating.

But the biggest break the industry gets is, of course, the fact that if you or your children or loved ones get cancer or leukemia, it COULD be due to anything, NO MATTER HOW CLOSE you live to a reactor, and no matter how many people around you SEEM to be dying as well. To make matters worse, after a meltdown, most people with reactor-caused illnesses will never be paid a red cent by any insurance company, the reactor owners or operators, or any local, state or federal entity. Check your homeowner's insurance policy if you have one. Reactor accidents are specifically excluded! And you need look no further than the nuclear industry's under-funded, federally-mandated minimalist insurance policy known as The Price-Anderson Act to KNOW that no citizen will be paid their due if they survive after an accident. You'll get fractions of a penny on the dollar if you live to collect anything at all. You'll be called stupid for living so close to a reactor, or paranoid for thinking that accident "X" miles away caused YOUR cancer. "X" could be a little as 11 miles or less!

15) Is the threat from terrorism real?

YES, IT'S REAL. There have been NUMEROUS threats from terrorists against OUR nuclear power plants. Books by scientists, written more than 30 years ago, which were ignored then and are ignored now, warned America of the threat. The threat is worse now: The militants are at least as determined as ever, the targets contain MORE radioactive materials than ever, the populations around the reactors are vastly greater, and the explosive power and penetrating power of the weapons that might be used are both SIGNIFICANTLY greater. But the reactors are the same, only older!

A half-dozen armed guards per reactor won't stop ANY determined foe. Similarly, the Transportation Security Administration is incapable of guarding the skies completely, especially from RENTED BUSINESS JETS which could be easily hijacked and flown into a reactor or its spent fuel, with devastating results.

The Pentagon does NOT patrol the airspace above each reactor and even if it did, they couldn't stop the wide variety of incoming flying objects that can exist -- missiles, small and large planes, etc.. They can't stop boat-launched small nuclear weapons attacks against our coastal reactors. They couldn't stop 9-11; not even close.

The military has NOT built anti-aircraft missile embankments around the nuclear power plants or even established permanent "no-fly" zones around the plants. And even if they did, it probably wouldn't help against a determined, 9-11 "inspired" foe.

Shutting the reactors down permanently improves the survivability significantly. Nothing else makes any sense at all.

16) Are people who oppose nuclear power simply opposed to ALL technology?

No usually, and not in this case. Most of them are just like everyone else. They like baseball, they want their car to be first off the line at the light, they like rock and roll music.

But there is ONE big difference: They've studied up on some of the issues presented here. So they've decided -- on their own -- that nuclear power is a silent killer, and that its corporate and government proponents are liars, cheats, scoundrels, and -- yes -- murderers.

But that is no reason to hate "technology." Nuclear technology is generally 50-year old, has-been stuff anyway. Renewable energy is where all the exciting, great work is being done these days. In fact, most people who oppose nuclear technology think that GOOD technology can and MUST enrich and lengthen our lives.

The author of THIS document has been a computer programmer for more than 25 years. He has programmed everything from lasers to classroom lessons, robots, mice, and joysticks. It's easy to label someone "anti-" and figure they just have an ax to grind. But the reality can be quite different. The author considers himself not only "pro-technology" but "pro-DNA," instead of the more common phraseology: "anti-nuclear." The term pro-DNA is correct because the damage to our DNA is the most dangerous thing we have to deal with regarding radioactive poisons in our midst. DNA damage is also among the hardest problems to detect. This essay is a demand for scientific, humanitarian, democratic and financial JUSTICE, nothing more, nothing less.

--Russell D. Hoffman, a computer programmer in Carlsbad, California, has written extensively about nuclear power. His essays have been translated into several different languages and published in more than a dozen countries. He can be reached at: rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com

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Washington Post
June 27, 2007

Leaving No Tracks

By Jo Becker and Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writers

Sue Ellen Wooldridge, the 19th-ranking Interior Department official, arrived at her desk in Room 6140 a few months after Inauguration Day 2001. A phone message awaited her.

"This is Dick Cheney," said the man on her voice mail, Wooldridge recalled in an interview. "I understand you are the person handling this Klamath situation. Please call me at -- hmm, I guess I don't know my own number. I'm over at the White House."

Wooldridge wrote off the message as a prank. It was not. Cheney had reached far down the chain of command, on so unexpected a point of vice presidential concern, because he had spotted a political threat arriving on Wooldridge's desk.

In Oregon, a battleground state that the Bush-Cheney ticket had lost by less than half of 1 percent, drought-stricken farmers and ranchers were about to be cut off from the irrigation water that kept their cropland and pastures green. Federal biologists said the Endangered Species Act left the government no choice: The survival of two imperiled species of fish was at stake.

Law and science seemed to be on the side of the fish. Then the vice president stepped in.

First Cheney looked for a way around the law, aides said. Next he set in motion a process to challenge the science protecting the fish, according to a former Oregon congressman who lobbied for the farmers.

Because of Cheney's intervention, the government reversed itself and let the water flow in time to save the 2002 growing season, declaring that there was no threat to the fish. What followed was the largest fish kill the West had ever seen, with tens of thousands of salmon rotting on the banks of the Klamath River.

Characteristically, Cheney left no tracks.

The Klamath case is one of many in which the vice president took on a decisive role to undercut long-standing environmental regulations for the benefit of business.

By combining unwavering ideological positions -- such as the priority of economic interests over protected fish -- with a deep practical knowledge of the federal bureaucracy, Cheney has made an indelible mark on the administration's approach to everything from air and water quality to the preservation of national parks and forests.

It was Cheney's insistence on easing air pollution controls, not the personal reasons she cited at the time, that led Christine Todd Whitman to resign as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, she said in an interview that provides the most detailed account so far of her departure.

The vice president also pushed to make Nevada's Yucca Mountain the nation's repository for nuclear and radioactive waste, aides said, a victory for the nuclear power industry over those with long-standing safety concerns. And his office was a powerful force behind the White House's decision to rewrite a Clinton-era land-protection measure that put nearly a third of the national forests off limits to logging, mining and most development, former Cheney staff members said.

Cheney's pro-business drive to ease regulations, however, has often set the administration on a collision course with the judicial branch.

The administration, for example, is appealing the order of a federal judge who reinstated the forest protections after she ruled that officials didn't adequately study the environmental consequences of giving states more development authority.

And in April, the Supreme Court rejected two other policies closely associated with Cheney. It rebuffed the effort, ongoing since Whitman's resignation, to loosen some rules under the Clean Air Act. The court also rebuked the administration for not regulating greenhouse gases associated with global warming, issuing its ruling less than two months after Cheney declared that "conflicting viewpoints" remain about the extent of the human contribution to the problem.

In the latter case, Cheney made his environmental views clear in public. But with some notable exceptions, he generally has preferred to operate with stealth, aided by loyalists who owe him for their careers.

When the vice president got wind of a petition to list the cutthroat trout in Yellowstone National Park as a protected species, his office turned to one of his former congressional aides.

The aide, Paul Hoffman, landed his job as deputy assistant interior secretary for fish and wildlife after Cheney recommended him. In an interview, Hoffman said the vice president knew that listing the cutthroat trout would harm the recreational fishing industry in his home state of Wyoming and that he "followed the issue closely." In 2001 and again in 2006, Hoffman's agency declined to list the trout as threatened.

Hoffman also was well positioned to help his former boss with what Cheney aides said was one of the vice president's pet peeves: the Clinton-era ban on snowmobiling in national parks. "He impressed upon us that so many people enjoyed snowmobiling in the Tetons," former Cheney aide Ron Christie said.

With Cheney's encouragement, the administration lifted the ban in 2002, and Hoffman followed up in 2005 by writing a proposal to fundamentally change the way national parks are managed. That plan, which would have emphasized recreational use over conservation, attracted so much opposition from park managers and the public that the Interior Department withdrew it. Still, the Bush administration continues to press for expanded snowmobile access, despite numerous studies showing that the vehicles harm the parks' environment and polls showing majority support for the ban.

Hoffman, now in another job at the Interior Department, said Cheney never told him what to do on either issue -- he didn't have to.

"His genius," Hoffman said, is that "he builds networks and puts the right people in the right places, and then trusts them to make well-informed decisions that comport with his overall vision."

'Political Ramifications'

Robert F. Smith had grown desperate by the time he turned to the vice president for help.

The former Republican congressman from Oregon represented farmers in the Klamath basin who had relied on a government-operated complex of dams and canals built almost a century ago along the Oregon-California border to irrigate nearly a quarter-million acres of arid land.

In April 2001, with the region gripped by the worst drought in memory, the spigot was shut off.

Studies by the federal government's scientists concluded unequivocally that diverting water would harm two federally protected species of fish, violating the Endangered Species Act of 1973. The Bureau of Reclamation was forced to declare that farmers must go without in order to maintain higher water levels so that two types of suckerfish in Upper Klamath Lake and the coho salmon that spawn in the Klamath River could survive the dry spell.

Farmers and their families, furious and fearing for their livelihoods, formed a symbolic 10,000-person bucket brigade. Then they took saws and blowtorches to dam gates, clashing with U.S. marshals as water streamed into the canals that fed their withering fields, before the government stopped the flow again.

What they didn't know was that the vice president was already on the case.

Smith had served with Cheney on the House Interior Committee in the 1980s, and the former congressman said he turned to the vice president because he knew him as a man of the West who didn't take kindly to federal bureaucrats meddling with private use of public land. "He saw, as every other person did, what a ridiculous disaster shutting off the water was," Smith said.

Cheney recognized, even before the shut-off and long before others at the White House, that what "at first blush didn't seem like a big deal" had "a lot of political ramifications," said Dylan Glenn, a former aide to President Bush.

Bush and Cheney couldn't afford to anger thousands of solidly Republican farmers and ranchers during the midterm elections and beyond. The case also was rapidly becoming a test for conservatives nationwide of the administration's commitment to fixing what they saw as an imbalance between conservation and economics.

"What does the law say?" Christie, the former aide, recalled the vice president asking. "Isn't there some way around it?"

Next, Cheney called Wooldridge, who was then deputy chief of staff to Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton and the woman handling the Klamath situation.

Aides praise Cheney's habit of reaching down to officials who are best informed on a subject he is tackling. But the effect of his calls often leads those mid-level officials scrambling to do what they presume to be his bidding.

That's what happened when a mortified Wooldridge finally returned the vice president's call, after receiving a tart follow-up inquiry from one of his aides. Cheney, she said, "was coming from the perspective that the farmers had to be able to farm -- that was his concern. The fact that the vice president was interested meant that everyone paid attention."

Cheney made sure that attention did not wander. He had Wooldridge brief his staff weekly and, Smith said, he also called the interior secretary directly.

"For months and months, at almost every briefing it was 'Sir, here's where we stand on the Klamath basin,'" recalled Christie, who is now a lobbyist. "His hands-on involvement, it's safe to say, elevated the issue."

'Let the Water Flow'

There was, as it happened, an established exemption to the Endangered Species Act.

A rarely invoked panel of seven Cabinet officials, known informally as the "God Squad," is empowered by the statute to determine that economic hardship outweighs the benefit of protecting threatened wildlife. But after discussing the option with Smith, Cheney rejected that course. He had another idea, one that would not put the administration on record as advocating the extinction of endangered or threatened species.

The thing to do, Cheney told Smith, was to get science on the side of the farmers. And the way to do that was to ask the National Academy of Sciences to scrutinize the work of the federal biologists who wanted to protect the fish.

Smith said he told Cheney that he thought that was a roll of the dice. Academy panels are independently appointed, receive no payment and must reach a conclusion that can withstand peer review.

"It worried me that these are individuals who are unreachable," Smith said of the academy members. But Cheney was firm, expressing no such concerns about the result. "He felt we had to match the science."

Smith also wasn't sure that the Klamath case -- "a small place in a small corner of the country" -- would meet the science academy's rigorous internal process for deciding what to study. Cheney took care of that. "He called them and said, 'Please look at this, it's important,'" Smith said. "Everyone just went flying at it."

William Kearney, a spokesman for the National Academies, said he was unaware of any direct contact from Cheney on the matter. The official request came from the Interior Department, he said.

It was Norton who announced the review, and it was Bush and his political adviser Karl Rove who traveled to Oregon in February 2002 to assure farmers that they had the administration's support. A month later, Cheney got what he wanted when the science academy delivered a preliminary report finding "no substantial scientific foundation" to justify withholding water from the farmers.

There was not enough clear evidence that proposed higher lake levels would benefit suckerfish, the report found. And it hypothesized that the practice of releasing warm lake water into the river during spawning season might do more harm than good to the coho, which thrive in lower temperatures. [Read the report.]

Norton flew to Klamath Falls in March to open the head gate as farmers chanted "Let the water flow!" And seizing on the report's draft findings, the Bureau of Reclamation immediately submitted a new decade-long plan to give the farmers their full share of water.

When the lead biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service team critiqued the science academy's report in a draft opinion objecting to the plan, the critique was edited out by superiors and his objections were overruled, he said. The biologist, Michael Kelly, who has since quit the federal agency, said in a whistle-blower claim that it was clear to him that "someone at a higher level" had ordered his agency to endorse the proposal regardless of the consequences to the fish.

Months later, the first of an estimated 77,000 dead salmon began washing up on the banks of the warm, slow-moving river. Not only were threatened coho dying -- so were chinook salmon, the staple of commercial fishing in Oregon and Northern California. State and federal biologists soon concluded that the diversion of water to farms was at least partly responsible.

Fishermen filed lawsuits and courts ruled that the new irrigation plan violated the Endangered Species Act. Echoing Kelly's objections, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit observed that the 10-year plan wouldn't provide enough water for the fish until year nine. By then, the 2005 opinion said, "all the water in the world" could not save the fish, "for there will be none to protect." In March 2006, a federal judge prohibited the government from diverting water for agricultural use whenever water levels dropped beneath a certain point.

Last summer, the federal government declared a "commercial fishery failure" on the West Coast after several years of poor chinook returns virtually shut down the industry, opening the way for Congress to approve more than $60 million in disaster aid to help fishermen recover their losses. That came on top of the $15 million that the government has paid Klamath farmers since 2002 not to farm, in order to reduce demand.

The science academy panel, in its final report, acknowledged that its draft report was "controversial," but it stood by its conclusions. Instead of focusing on the irrigation spigot, it recommended broad and expensive changes to improve fish habitat. [Read the final report]

"The farmers were grateful for our decision, but we made the decision based on the scientific outcome," said the panel chairman, William Lewis, a biologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "It just so happened the outcome favored the farmers."

But J.B. Ruhl, another member of the panel and a Florida State University law professor who specializes in endangered species cases, said the Bureau of Reclamation went "too far," making judgments that were not backed up by the academy's draft report. "The approach they took was inviting criticism," Ruhl said, "and I didn't think it was supported by our recommendations."

'More Pro-Industry'

Whitman, then head of the EPA, was on vacation with her family in Colorado when her cellphone rang. The vice president was on the line, and he was clearly irked.

Why was the agency dragging its feet on easing pollution rules for aging power and oil refinery plants?, Cheney wanted to know. An industry that had contributed heavily to the Bush-Cheney campaign was clamoring for change, and the vice president told Whitman that she "hadn't moved it fast enough," she recalled.

Whitman protested, warning Cheney that the administration had to proceed cautiously. It was August 2001, just seven months into the first term. We need to "document this according to the books," she said she told him, "so we don't look like we are ramrodding something through. Because it's going to court."

But the vice president's main concern was getting it done fast, she said, and "doing it in a way that didn't hamper industry."

At issue was a provision of the Clean Air Act known as the New Source Review, which requires older plants that belch millions of tons of smog and soot each year to install modern pollution controls when they are refurbished in a way that increases emissions.

Industry officials complained to the White House that even when they had merely performed routine maintenance and repairs, the Clinton administration hit them with violations and multimillion-dollar lawsuits. Cheney's energy task force ordered the EPA to reconsider the rule.

Whitman had already gone several rounds with the vice president over the issue.

She and Cheney first got to know each other in one of the Nixon administration's anti-poverty agencies, working under Donald H. Rumsfeld. When Cheney offered her the job in the Bush administration, the former New Jersey governor marveled at how far both had come. But as with Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill, another longtime friend who owed his Cabinet post to Cheney, Whitman's differences with the vice president would lead to her departure.

Sitting through Cheney's task force meetings, Whitman had been stunned by what she viewed as an unquestioned belief that EPA's regulations were primarily to blame for keeping companies from building new power plants. "I was upset, mad, offended that there seemed to be so much head-nodding around the table," she said.

Whitman said she had to fight "tooth and nail" to prevent Cheney's task force from handing over the job of reforming the New Source Review to the Energy Department, a battle she said she won only after appealing to White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. This was an environmental issue with major implications for air quality and health, she believed, and it shouldn't be driven by a task force primarily concerned with increasing production.

Whitman agreed that the exception for routine maintenance and repair needed to be clarified, but not in a way that undercut the ongoing Clinton-era lawsuits -- many of which had merit, she said.

Cheney listened to her arguments, and as usual didn't say much. Whitman said she also met with the president to "explain my concerns" and to offer an alternative.

She wanted to work a political trade with industry -- eliminating the New Source Review in return for support of Bush's 2002 "Clear Skies" initiative, which outlined a market-based approach to reducing emissions over time. But Clear Skies went nowhere. "There was never any follow-up," Whitman said, and moreover, there was no reason for industry to embrace even a modest pollution control initiative when the vice president was pushing to change the rules for nothing.

She decided to go back to Bush one last time. It was a crapshoot -- the EPA administrator had already been rolled by Cheney when the president reversed himself on a campaign promise to limit carbon dioxide emissions linked to global warming -- so she came armed with a political argument.

Whitman said she plunked down two sets of folders filled with news clips. This one, she said, pointing to a stack about 2-1/2 inches thick, contained articles, mostly negative, about the administration's controversial proposal to suspend tough new standards governing arsenic in drinking water. And this one, she said as she pointed to a pile four or five times as thick, are the articles about the rules on aging power plants and refineries -- and the administration hadn't even done anything yet.

"If you think arsenic was bad," she recalled telling Bush, "look at what has already been written about this."

But Whitman left the meeting with the feeling that "the decision had already been made." Cheney had a clear mandate from the president on all things energy-related, she said, and while she could take her case directly to Bush, "you leave and the vice president's still there. So together, they would then shape policy."

What happened next was "a perfect example" of that, she said.

The EPA sent rule revisions to White House officials. The read-back was that they weren't happy and "wanted something that would be more pro-industry," she said.

The end result, which she said was written at the direction of the White House and announced in August 2003, vastly broadened the definition of routine maintenance. It allowed some of the nation's dirtiest plants to make major modifications without installing costly new pollution controls.

By that time, Whitman had already announced her resignation, saying she wanted to spend more time with her family. But the real reason, she said, was the new rule.

"I just couldn't sign it," she said. "The president has a right to have an administrator who could defend it, and I just couldn't."

A federal appeals court has since found that the rule change violated the Clean Air Act. In their ruling, the judges said that the administration had redefined the law in a way that could be valid "only in a Humpty-Dumpty world."

--Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

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St. Cloud Times
June 27, 2007

Your turn: Nuclear power is what U.S. needs

By Rolf Westgard, Deerwood

As the last in the line of hopper cars approached, my car count reached 103, not quite as many as usual. Each of those cars holds 100 tons of Wyoming coal. That's 10,000 tons in that train, headed for a big coal-fired electric plant somewhere east.

A typical 1,000-megawatt plant needs to burn that whole train load every day. I think of the 1,000 tons of ash and the carbon dioxide that plant emits every day, plus all the pollution produced from mining and transporting the coal.

As the crossing gate opens, I start across the tracks. Farm machines dot the nearby southern Minnesota landscape, indicating the start of corn planting. In the distance, there's one of those big distilleries producing ethyl alcohol (ethanol) from our Minnesota corn. We could use cleaner and renewable ethanol to fire boilers and run a 1,000-megawatt electric utility. But you would need about 2.5 million gallons/day of ethanol. That's a million bushel pile of corn per day.

I glance down at a book on the seat beside me. A 1,000-megawatt nuclear power plant consumes only about 7-8 pounds of uranium 235 per day. That much U-235 would make a block of material the size of that book. I look at that huge departing train, and then I imagine that giant corn pile. My little book of U-235 seems even smaller.

Why aren't we in the U.S. building more nuclear plants? Nuclear energy is environmentally superior. Nuclear energy doesn't emit CO2 or particulates, no ground level ozone, and no acid rain. There are 435 nuclear reactors operating in 30 countries. Thirty more are under construction with many others in the planning stage. We have 103 nuclear power plants in the United States that provide cost-competitive electricity to millions. But we have none under construction.

Three fears, all exaggerated, dominate our thinking: fear of accidents such as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl; radiation from spent fuel storage; and the theft of weapons grade nuclear material to make a weapon.

As to accidents, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that nuclear plants average 0.34 accidents per 200,000 worker hours versus 2.3 accidents for all U.S. industry.

Three Mile Island is our one serious accident. It had no deaths or serious injuries, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The defective instrument design that contributed to its operator error has been corrected in our other facilities.

Radiation release to the public at Three Mile Island was trivial. Russia's Chernobyl was far more serious, caused by a fundamental reactor design defect called positive void coefficient not present in Western reactors.

Europe and Asia simplify spent fuel storage by separating the 3 percent that is radioactive and blending that into glass cylinders. They reprocess the remaining 97 percent to increase fuel life, and use geologic storage for the radioactive glass cylinders. This process works because the most radioactive isotopes such as Iodine-131 decay to 1 percent of original radioactivity in days or months. Long lived isotopes such as Iodine-129 and Technetium-99 are millions of times less radioactive than Iodine-131.

Our policy of storing all spent fuel without reprocessing started in the days of cheap uranium oxide and the expectation of a facility such as Yucca Mountain for storage. The continuing delay at Yucca Mountain is not from geology, but from politics.

As to the loss of fissionable material, which might be used in a nuclear weapon, it hasn't happened from the hundreds of plants in operation for decades. Power generation in the very common light water reactors does produce hundreds of kilograms of weapon-useful plutonium. But during operations, that plutonium quickly acquires too many neutrons to be weapons useful.

To have bomb-ready plutonium, the fuel rods have to be removed after just a few months of operation, a very complex process easily detected by inspectors. The latest nuclear power technology will be essential as we deal with the issues of increasing pollution from hydrocarbons and our growing dependence on imported oil, imported liquid natural gas and not so clean coal.

This is the opinion of Rolf Westgard, a portfolio manager who focuses on investments in the oil and gas industry. He is a member of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists and a regular speaker to civic groups on peak oil and alternate energy.

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Las Vegas SUN
June 26, 2007

Senate spending panel wants $50 million less for Yucca Mountain

By Erica Werner
Associated Press Writer

Senate spending panel wants $50 million less for Yucca Mountain

WASHINGTON (AP) - A Senate spending panel proposed Tuesday spending $444 million on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump in 2008 - $50 million less than President Bush and a House panel want.

The House Appropriations Committee met Bush's 2008 budget request of $494.5 million for Yucca Mountain, and the spending bill it's part of is awaiting passage by the full House.

The House last week soundly defeated an effort by Nevada Reps. Shelley Berkley, Jon Porter and Dean Heller to cut the 2008 Yucca Mountain budget by $200 million.

The Senate Appropriations Committee's energy and water subcommittee approved the $444 million figure Tuesday, and the full Senate Appropriations Committee is expected to vote on it Thursday.

If the House and Senate arrive at different numbers, the discrepancy would have to be resolved in a House-Senate conference committee before passage of a final spending bill.

In past years Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., was the top Democrat on the energy and water panel and used the position to pare the budget for the nuclear waste dump that the federal government is trying to build 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas over the objection of Nevada officials.

Reid gave up the position this year when he became Senate majority leader, handing the gavel to Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D.

The budget Congress approved for Yucca Mountain in 2007 was $444.5 million - $100 million less than Bush's request for the year, which project managers complained could lead to yet more delays on the troubled project.

The dump was funded at $450 million in 2006 and $577 million in 2004 and 2005.

Originally targeted to open in 1998, the earliest opening date for Yucca Mountain is now 2017, though the Energy Department has said 2021 is more likely.

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Los Angeles Daily News
June 26, 2007

Nuclear power expansion stalled

By Steve Lawrence

SACRAMENTO - The failure of the federal government to open a storage site for radioactive waste means any chance to expand nuclear power in California is more than a decade away, according to a draft report prepared for the state Energy Commission.

The report by MRW & Associates, an Oakland-based consulting firm that specializes in power market issues, said the U.S. Department of Energy was supposed to open the Yucca Mountain storage facility in Nevada by 1998.

"However, nearly 10 years after the deadline, a repository at Yucca Mountain is still more than a decade away from being opened, and the opening date continues to slip," the report states.

The Department of Energy said last year the storage site could be opened as early as March 2017 but that a more realistic date was September 2020, according to the MRW report. Earlier this year, the department pushed those predictions back another year.

A California law passed in 1976 prohibits construction of nuclear plants until the Energy Commission concludes that the federal government has found a proven way to store or reprocess spent nuclear plant fuel.

The MRW report comes as the commission opened two days of hearings Monday on the status of nuclear power. Information from the hearings will be used to prepare a report to the governor and Legislature on how to address the state's energy needs.

The state currently has two operating nuclear plants, San Onofre and Diablo Canyon. California utilities also own 27 percent of the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in Arizona.

Nuclear plants supplied nearly 13 percent of the state's electricity last year, and supporters tout expansion of nuclear power as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and combat global warming.

But a long-term method to deal with the waste from nuclear plants remains elusive.

California has more than 2,400 tons of radioactive waste stored at active and decommissioned nuclear plants, and the spent fuel continues to accumulate, said Robert Weisenmiller, executive vice president of MRW.

Eric Knox, an official with the Department of Energy's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, said he remains optimistic that Yucca Mountain will be opened despite the delays.

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San Luis Obispo Tribune
June 26, 2007

Yucca Mountain

Plans for new nuclear storage facility still up in the air

The site could open as early as 2017, but Nevada officials are resistant

By David Sneed
dsneed@thetribunenews.com

California electricity customers have paid $1 billion to the federal government to permanently store high-level radioactive waste, but the fate of a proposed storage facility at Yucca Mountain remains uncertain.

Federal officials and nuclear power representatives told the California Energy Commission on Monday that the underground repository will open someday. But Nevada officials do not want the facility built in their state, and scientists continue to question whether the facility can safely store nuclear waste for thousands of years.

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. is building an aboveground storage facility at Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant because pools now being used to store the plant’s highly radioactive used uranium are nearly full.

Diablo Canyon—as well as the nation’s other nuclear power plants — was designed with the assumption that spent fuel would only be stored on site for several years before being either reprocessed into new fuel or shipped to a centralized federal storage depot.

The Energy Commission is holding two days of hearings this week in Sacramento concerning the status and future of nuclear power in the state.

Energy commissioners told the U.S. Department of Energy, which is building the Yucca Mountain facility, that they are angry over repeated delays in the project and have little confidence it will ever open.

In contrast, Eric Knox with the Energy Department’s radioactive waste office told the commission he’s never been more confident about the future of Yucca Mountain. The earliest the facility could open is 2017. But it is likely to be delayed to 2020.

“Between 2017 and 2020, it’s something that will become a reality,” Knox said.

The nuclear industry maintains that there is no scientific reason not to open Yucca Mountain. The only thing lacking is the political will.

“Because it must be done, it will be done,” said Alan Hanson, an executive with Areva, a company that manufactures nuclear waste storage casks.

Bob Loux with Nevada’s Yucca Mountain office was much less optimistic about the future of the storage facility. Nevada elected officials, including U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, have vowed to stop the project.

“The prospects (of Yucca opening) are very dim,” Loux said.

Allison Macfarlane, a nuclear waste storage specialist with George Mason University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the commission that Yucca Mountain is a less-than-ideal location for storing nuclear waste.

Yucca Mountain’s chief appeal is its isolated location 60 miles from Las Vegas.

Yucca Mountain is problematic because the area is seismically and volcanically active. The atmosphere inside the storage tunnels would soon become corrosive to the storage casks because of humidity and oxidizing minerals in the soil, Macfarlane said.

“There are plenty of other sites in the country that are reasonable,” she said.

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Las Vegas SUN
June 24, 2007

Editorial: Bye, bye Johnny

Energy Department pushes for Yucca canisters; House axes funding of project's promotion

Last week the Energy Department announced general design requirements for canisters to carry high-level nuclear waste to Nevada for burial in the proposed, but not yet approved, Yucca Mountain repository - just one day before the House voted to kill the project's cartoon mascot.

A story by the Associated Press on Tuesday says the transportation, aging and disposal canisters - or TADS - are to be 15 1/2 to 17 1/2 feet long and weigh no more than 54 1/4 tons each. About 7,500 of the canisters would be needed to store the 77,000 tons of nuclear waste that the federal government wants to ship by rail to Nevada.

Yucca Mountain was originally set to open in 1998, but the federal government's failure to heed scientific evidence that such storage would be unsafe is one of the reasons that has prevented the Energy Department from acquiring a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license to open it. The agency intends to apply for the license next year, and the soonest it could open - if at all - is 2017.

Energy Department officials told AP that they intend to go forward with the license application even if final designs for the TADS canisters aren't ready.

We wonder how federal regulators can seriously consider the application if the Energy Department cannot show exactly how the canisters will work.

And it seems agency officials will have to do their explaining without their ill-conceived "Yucca Johnny" campaign. The House cut Yucca Johnny's funding Wednesday.

It's about time Johnny took a hike. For more than a year, the Energy Department has used the cartoon character on its Youth Zone Web site to tell children why it's OK - good, even - that the federal government wants to bury 77,000 tons of nuclear poison in Nevada.

Of course, burying Yucca Johnny only takes care of one of the characters in this farce.

President Bush, fulfilling his role as "Yucca Georgie," visited an Alabama nuclear power plant on Thursday and said that the United States needs to increase its use of nuclear power and build three plants a year starting in 2015 - even though more than 50,000 tons of nuclear waste already has piled up around the country, and the government has made no serious plans for storing it. The Yucca Mountain proposal, like its departed cartoon mascot, is little more than fiction and propaganda.

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Midland Reporter-Telegram
June 24, 2007

Going underground for a greenhouse gas solution

Houston Chronicle

DAYTON -- While world leaders made pledges to cut greenhouse gases at the recent G8 Summit in Germany, Sue Hovorka was in the backwoods of East Texas working to help them keep those promises.

For more than 10 hours during the summit, the University of Texas geologist, her colleague Tip Meckel and a team from the company Praxair toiled in the heat and haze, using sensitive gas-detection equipment around a pair of inactive oil wellheads.

Their goal: to find even the slightest hint that the carbon dioxide they injected 4,000 feet underground two years ago had made it to the surface at the heavily wooded site near the Trinity River.

Known as the Frio Brine Project, the site is on the leading edge of Department of Energy-funded studies looking into carbon sequestration, the process of injecting CO2 -- a byproduct of burning fossil fuels -- deep into the ground.

Carbon capture and storage could be part of the solution to global warming, which many climatologists attribute at least partly to a greenhouse effect that occurs when carbon dioxide and other gases trap heat in the atmosphere.

The hope is that CO2 can be stripped from the emissions of power plants and other users of fossil fuels, shipped by pipeline and injected deep underground into old oil and natural gas fields or brine formations.

The idea may seem simple, particularly because companies have been injecting CO2 into the ground to force oil and natural gas out of hard-to-reach formations for decades.

But no one has tried to keep so much CO2 in storage, particularly the millions of tons that would need to be injected to keep up with annual CO2 emissions. The U.S. generates about 6 billion tons of CO2 per year from all sources, according to the Department of Energy.

Not easy, and not cheap

Experts say it also isn't going to be easy or cheap.

The notion of putting power plant byproducts deep underground may sound a bit like the controversial Yucca Mountain, Nev., storage site for spent nuclear fuel. But Hovorka said the two aren't anything alike.

CO2 isn't considered a toxic or hazardous substance like uranium, she said. And once CO2 is injected into a formation, like the brine reservoir near Dayton, it is hard to get it back out.

About 20 percent of it dissolves in the brine, creating a weak acid much like what puts the fizz in a carbonated soda. The rest is trapped in the sand and rock of the formation through a process called phase trapping, Hovorka said. It's a process similar to a sponge soaking up a fluid, except that it's much harder to wring the gas back out.

"It's like getting grease on your tie," Hovorka said. "You can't just rinse it out with water. You have to use another chemical to separate it."

During the tests researchers found traces of CO2 in the soil around the wellheads, but after hours of testing they determined it came from a tiny leak in the wellhead.

Avoiding aquifers

A more likely hazard from CO2 injection would be if the salty water it displaces in the brine were pushed into a fresh water aquifer that was being used for drinking water, Hovorka said. That can be avoided by using brine formations that aren't near drinking water sources.

Finding such formations shouldn't be hard. Between brine formations like the one Hovorka is working with and oil and gas reservoirs, there may be capacity for as much as 500 billion tons of CO2 storage in the U.S., according to studies done by the University of Texas' Bureau of Economic Geology. South Texas alone has capacity to store an estimated 171 billion metric tons of CO2.

Hovorka and Meckel hope to take their work to the next level this fall. That's when they will begin working with Denbury Resources to inject 1 million tons of CO2, or roughly the annual output of a coal-fired power plant, into an underground formation in Mississippi.

The technology for carbon capture and storage already exists, and in some instances has been used for decades, said Mark Morey, a director at Cambridge Energy Research Associates. But it can add a lot of cost to a project.

The greatest cost in the process is carbon capture, or removing the CO2 from the fuel of a power plant before it is burned or from the exhaust afterwards. Morey says a typical coal plant can cost between $50 and $60 per megawatt hour to build and operate, but adding the capacity to capture the CO2 can add an additional $25 to $30 per megawatt hour, he says.

The cost of transporting and storing the CO2 underground would be $10 to $15 per megawatt hour, Morey said, but that's assuming the pipeline and storage infrastructure were already in place. For companies to invest in such systems there would have to be an economic incentive, such as a tax on carbon emissions greater than the cost of capture and storage.

Even if the penalties for emitting CO2 were high enough to convince companies to capture it, a number of serious legal liabilities also would keep companies from rushing into the storage business, said Tim Bradley, head of Kinder Morgan's CO2 business.

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Washington Post
June 24, 2007

A Good Chance to Be Taken for a Ride

By Marc Fisher

E xtending Metro to Dulles Airport is like adding a room to your house: The price and timetable you get going into the project bear only a tangential relationship to reality. Along the way, you'll have to give up on those gold-standard materials. No matter how hard and fast the deal you thought you had with the contractor, somehow you'll end up with a different price -- and different means higher.

But when you pick your contractor, you will certainly shy away from the guy you know was involved in massive cost overruns on your friend's basement. That's where Virginia and you part ways: To design Metro's extension from Falls Church to the airport, the state hired a consortium headed by Bechtel Corp., the company that managed perhaps the biggest construction fiasco in American history, Boston's Big Dig.

The cost of the Big Dig -- a two-mile underground highway, bridge and tunnel through a dense, historic chunk of downtown Boston -- skyrocketed from $4 billion to $14 billion over two decades. The Massachusetts inspector general concluded that Bechtel, one of the world's largest engineering firms and the builder of everything from the Hoover Dam to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage facility, "failed to inform the state legislature of the true cost of the Big Dig." And a Boston Globe investigation found that Bechtel failed to detect major flaws in construction, signed off on error-filled designs and was responsible for more than $1 billion in cost overruns.

Even after the seemingly endless project was completed last year, Bechtel's troubles mounted. The tunnels sprang leaks and a concrete ceiling panel fell, crushing a woman on her way to the airport.

Bechtel executives dispute the state and newspaper reports and defend the quality of their work, but the question stands: Why would Virginia turn to this company to handle Dulles rail, and what guarantees are there for taxpayers and drivers on the Dulles Toll Road -- the two groups who will pay the biggest chunk of the bill -- that costs won't soar as they did in Boston?

"It's our money, but how much leverage do we have moving forward?" asks Fairfax County Supervisor Linda Q. Smyth (D-Providence), one of only two "no" votes in last week's approval of an elevated route through Tysons Corner (she preferred to tunnel under the highly congested area). "There are contingencies and penalties, and it's a pretty tight contract, but it's not that different from the one they had for the Big Dig."

Yes, it is, says Sam Carnaggio, the state's project director for the Metro extension. "Believe me, I'm concerned about any contractor that was involved in something like that," he says. "Bechtel was certainly part of a project that went out of control. But there's a lot of blame there that belongs with the state."

The real test, Smyth says, is how closely the government will supervise Bechtel's work. Carnaggio agrees and says Virginia will examine every invoice Bechtel submits and conduct inspections to make sure the reported work is really done.

Smyth doesn't believe Bechtel should have been disqualified because of the Boston mess -- after all, the company handled contracts on the $700 million Springfield Mixing Bowl, which is on schedule -- but she's concerned that Virginia didn't look closely enough at what went wrong in Massachusetts.

And she worries that history is repeating itself as state officials and their chosen contractors produce artificially low estimates to impress federal transit authorities.

Carnaggio says it's true that Virginia pushed Bechtel to lower its estimates. He says that the process is not intended to hide the true costs but rather to eliminate amenities that the state can't afford. So while the original plan was to build the rail line 85 feet below ground between the Tysons I and Tysons II shopping malls, then on down Route 7, that tunnel now will be only 40 feet below the surface and will be three-eighths of a mile rather than seven-eights of a mile, and the rest will be elevated. "We narrowed pedestrian bridges and took out some stairs and got the costs down," he says.

Carnaggio concedes that the price of rail to Dulles, now estimated at $5.1 billon, has jumped several times and could go higher. "The price is as fixed as any construction project can be," he says. "Some choices won't be made until 2010; for example, we don't want to fix prices for the stations before then because costs for materials could change, up or down."

That's the nature of construction, he says. "Things can happen. We just have to watch closely."

Especially when the contractor is somebody who is fresh from a project that went historically out of control.

--E-mail:marcfisher@washpost.com

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Aspen Daily News
June 23, 2007

Don't buy the nuclear sales pitch

Letter to the Editor

Concerning Janelle Penisten's June 20 letter titled "Nuclear solutions," let's start with Janelle's very last statement about Patrick Moore.

Moore is not a founder or co-founder of Greenpeace. Founders don't put in job applications. As a former GP staff person, I would like to add that Moore and his behavior in the late 1970s wreaked havoc on Greenpeace the movement vs. GP the non-profit. Moore has had nothing to do with environmental issues for over 15 years. He's been using the last 15 years to promote the logging industry and other polluters. The idea that the nuclear industry would hold up such a flagrant example is astounding. One of the real founders of Greenpeace called him a Judas!

For anyone with their eyes open, short sales pieces by paid industry spokespeople that have millions of federal pork to spend promoting a plan to get billions more from us, please, if there was ever a time not to trust someone, it is the nuclear industry, during George "let's make a deal on Iraq's oil" Bush's administration.

In Feb 1984, Forbes magazine called the nuclear industry the largest financial disaster in U.S. history.

The big picture on nuclear power includes the ugly truth that nuclear power and weapons are linked at the hip, and enjoys second to none subsidies that go back over 50 years.

You wouldn't know it unless you live in Nevada, that the plan to dump high level waste at Yucca Mountain is facing opposition from both parties there. You wouldn't know it that when Bush promised not to let Yucca Mountain go ahead unless there was good science that proved its safety. With that promise George Bush won the 2000 election and Nevada's electoral votes were enough to make the difference in who would be president.

Somebody's campaign promise didn't last more than a couple of months, resulting in now Senate Majority leader Harry Reid calling Mr. Bush a liar when Bush let Yucca Mountain go ahead. Today, Reid and Nevada's scientific team have all but killed Yucca Mountain, even though Bush and DOE is doing everything in their power to push ahead. Nevada's big fat NO isn't going away! Its about property values not NIMBYISM!

Whether it's proliferation issues, the environment, economics, health issues from the fuel cycle side of the issue, you won't be hearing about these critical concerns outside of quick sound bites. What will Janelle say about the 100,000 nuclear workers currently demanding help with their cancer and poor health? What about the hidden subsidies of the last 50 years? What about the bigotry of blocking Iran from nuclear power?

If the Council on Foreign Relations in April or the June report in the Congressional Quarterly detailing the serious drawbacks don't get spread around, people may start to believe the hype. Take a second closer look at the sales job tactics of Janelle's letter. The nuclear industry wants you to allow the federal government to subsidize private companies to build a new generation of experimental reactors. What will the real cost be? Once they get a hook on your wallet, we all know what a blank check is! The first time around they said it was gonna be too cheap to meter. In 1966, California's Diablo Canyon was estimated to cost just over $350 million to build two reactors. Twenty years later the construction costs totaled $5.8 billion, with an additional $7 billion in financing costs. The utility got every penny of those costs from the government and ratepayers, plus a profit. The result? California's rates nearly doubled over a six-year period.

Where's the government sponsored forums or town hall meetings to help get you up to speed on the complex legal, economic and environmental issues involved? There will be no deate when the corporate media is one of the biggest investors in nuclear power. NBC is owned by General Electric, the second largest nuclear contractor in the U.S. The day we see Amory Lovins or other spokespeople given more than a minute or two by NBC, CBS, FOX, CNN or even NPR to lay out the problems and alternatives to one of the most complex energy issues this country faces, will be a rare day indeed.

Meanwhile the nuclear industry spends millions of dollars to pay people like Janelle in to promote nuclear power.

Please, don't buy her blithe sales pitch!

Roger Herried
San Francisco, California

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Portland Press Herald
June 17, 2007

Maine repeats nuclear waste-site error

In a Nevada official's view, Maine officials are examples of myopic political leadership that derailed national policy.

Robert Loux

— CARSON CITY, Nev. — Last month, Charles Pray, Maine's nuclear safety adviser, spoke to local Nevada government officials at a workshop on nuclear waste transportation in Las Vegas. Pray threatened that if Nevada did not immediately cut a deal with the federal government on the proposed Yucca Mountain dump site for spent nuclear reactor fuel and other high-level nuclear waste, the state would be forced to take the waste in the future anyway, without compensation.

While Pray was making his appearance in Las Vegas, Maine's congressional delegation and the Maine Legislature were putting the finishing touches on, respectively, a letter and a joint legislative resolution. Both urged Congress to enact legislation that would fast-track the movement of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste to the proposed Nevada site.

Such a fast move would bypass important health, safety and environmental laws and regulations, and run roughshod over the rights of the state of Nevada and its citizens.

These actions by Maine's legislative and executive branches --and Pray's appearance in Las Vegas -- are remarkable examples of how myopic and self-serving political leadership has derailed the federal nuclear waste program.

The current stalemate began 21 years ago, when Maine itself was in the crosshairs of the federal government's search for high-level nuclear waste disposal sites. The U.S. Department of Energy had just identified potential sites for an eastern nuclear dump, including sites within the state's Sebago Lake and Bottle Lake regions.

Cries of foul play and outrage from Maine's governor and elected officials could be heard from sea to shining sea.

Subsequently, Maine was part of a concerted effort that derailed the objective, science-based site selection process established by the original Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 and replaced it five years later with the blatantly political designation of Nevada's Yucca Mountain as the only location to be studied for a national nuke dump site.

Now, as they say, the chickens are coming home to roost. Because Yucca was singled out for political reasons, with little thought given to the fundamental and un-fixable technical and scientific deficiencies of the site, there is today virtually no chance the Nevada site can be licensed as a nuclear waste repository.

In addition, Nevada's political vulnerability in the 1980s that made it such an attractive scapegoat has been transformed over the ensuing two decades into a position of significant political clout.

Once a political weakling with just one seat in the House of Representatives and two newly elected senators, Nevada now has three members of Congress as well as the majority leader of the U.S. Senate. As the fastest-growing state in the union for much of the past two decades and now a major player in presidential candidate selection, Nevada stands to gain even more influence in Congress and in the national political arena during the coming years.

The old saying that those who refuse to learn from the past are bound to repeat it is surely relevant to the course of action Pray and others in Maine are promoting. The last time Congress acted in a knee-jerk fashion trying to "fix" the country's nuclear waste program, it set in motion a chain of events that led directly to the current sorry state of affairs.

By acting out of political expediency -- i.e., the need in 1987 to mollify Eastern states like Maine in the run-up to the 1988 elections by letting them... off the hook with respect to potential nuclear waste sites within their borders -- Congress left the nation with just one fatally flawed alternative, Nevada's Yucca Mountain.

If Maine and the other states that successfully ganged up on Nevada two decades ago had, instead, insisted that the federal government adhere to the scientifically based and objective siting process set up in the original nuclear waste legislation, it is more than likely the country would today have a national solution to the problem of spent fuel and high-level radioactive waste.

By urging Congress to again seek a political rather than scientific "fix" to the crippled nuclear waste program, Maine and other pro-Yucca parties are repeating the mistake made in 1987. The only way the country will reach a workable solution to the nuclear waste problem is through a federal program based on sound science and objective decision-making.

Moreover, the political landscape has changed. The policy of involuntary site selection was wrong to begin with, and now the political realities in Nevada dictate that forced siting must be abandoned.

There is simply no way forward while Yucca Mountain remains the focus of the nation's nuclear waste program.

— Special to the Telegram

--About the Author: Robert Loux is executive director of the Nevada Governor's Office Agency for Nuclear Projects and has been closely involved with the Yucca Mountain project and the federal nuclear waste program since the early 1980s.

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Pahrump Valley Times
June 22, 2007

Heller asks for removal of $202 million

WASHINGTON - The House of Representatives voted to fund the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in the Energy and Water Appropriations bill for fiscal year 2008 (H.R. 2641) June 20, despite an attempt by Rep.'s Jon Porter (R-Henderson), Dean Heller (R-Carson City) and Shelley Berkley (D- Las Vegas) to remove $202 million in Yucca Mountain construction funding from the legislation.

The amendment was defeated by a vote of 80 to 351.

Heller said the amendment "would strike the funding for the proposed Yucca Mountain site, and help end this enormous financial disaster for the taxpayers and for Nevada."

He said Nevada has been wrestling with the Yucca Mountain project for decades. "The federal government has spent billions of dollars, and we are frankly almost no closer today to opening this site than we were years ago. As has been stated by my Nevada colleagues, over the past 20 years the proposed site has suffered from gross mismanagement, faulty science and research, and contract mismanagement," he said.

Heller said he and his colleagues are not against safer concepts, "like dry-cask storage."

He said both senators, the governor and the House delegation are united in opposition to Yucca Mountain.

"That should send a very clear message to us here in the House about the opposition in Nevada," Heller said.

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Pahrump Valley Times
June 22, 2007

House takes swipe at 'Yucca Johnny'

Berkley Compares Web Site Aimed at Youth to 'Joe Camel' Come-On

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON --The House on Wednesday took a swipe at "Yucca Mountain Johnny" and other parts of a Department of Energy Web site about radioactive waste aimed at teaching students.

Johnny is a cartoon hard hat miner on the Web portal.

By voice vote, lawmakers directed DOE to put him out of business and shut down the "Yucca Mountain Youth Zone," where the animated icon stands sentry.

The House accepted an amendment by Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., who charged the youth-oriented site conveys a "pro-nuclear" viewpoint and presents an unbalanced view of the proposed Nevada nuclear repository.

The site is www.ocrwm.doe.gov/youth/index.shtml.

Berkley argued the site neglects to point out the dangers posed by nuclear waste and geologic flaws, like threats from earthquakes and volcanoes, that Nevada leaders believe should disqualify the Yucca site.

"The Department of Energy should not be in the business of propaganda and trying to persuade schoolchildren that storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain is OK," Berkley said.

"Yucca Mountain Johnny is like Joe Camel was to cigarettes," Berkley added, referring to the once-ubiquitous cartoon pitch-camel who was dropped by the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company in 1997 under pressure from Congress and health groups.

Defending the site, Energy Department spokeswoman Megan Barnett said the Yucca Mountain youth zone drew 20,000 page views from January through May.

Barnett said the site has been valued by "students and adults around the globe on nuclear physics, geology, engineering and complex science. We intend to keep this educational tool available and we look forward to working with Congress on this issue."

The Yucca site contains games and activities, suggested curricula for teachers, and discussions about "the nuclear waste problem" and how science is utilized to find "solutions."

Aimed at students of varying grade levels, the entry pages link to more detailed science discussions deeper within the site.

The Web site is among dwindling "public outreach" elements of the Yucca program, which has been squeezed by declining budgets. Public tours of the Yucca site 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas have been curtailed, and the Energy Department this spring closed the Yucca Mountain Project Science Center on Meadows Lane in Las Vegas.

Berkley went after the Web site last year but lost a 271-147 vote after Republican committee leaders came to Yucca Mountain Johnny's defense.

This year, the chairman of the House Energy and Water Subcommittee is a Democrat, Peter Visclosky of Indiana, who accepted Berkley's amendment without debate.

The amendment was added to a fiscal 2008 spending bill for the Energy Department. The Senate also will debate the bill, with final decisions expected later this year on the bill and the fate of Yucca Mountain Johnny.

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Pahrump Valley Times
June 22, 2007

Back then

20 years ago this week:

Plans by the U.S. Department of Energy to conduct intensive studies of Yucca Mountain's suitability as a high-level nuclear dump have been delayed. The announcement was made by Sen. Chic Hecht. The DOE, apparently responding to a protest letter written earlier by Hecht, told the senator it wouldn't conduct the test at Yucca Mountain before holding similar probes at the other two potential high-waste sites in Washington and Texas.

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NEI Nuclear Notes
June 22, 2007

Strong Bipartisan Support Shown For Yucca Mountain Repository

Congress sent another strong signal yesterday that the deep geologic repository planned at Yucca Mountain, Nev. is a vital component of our national used nuclear fuel management policy.

Congressman Jon Porter (R-NV), proposed an amendment that would have cut funding for the Yucca Mountain program previously approved by the House Committee on Appropriations. However, his bid to slash over $200 million from the project was met with resounding opposition.

In a sizable margin that represented large numbers of both Democrats and Republicans, the proposed amendment failed with just 80 in favor and 351 opposed.

That reflects an increase in support for the project over previous House votes regarding the used nuclear fuel repository. When the House voted to select Yucca Mountain as the site for the program in 2002, there were 306 votes in support and 117 against. Last year, another amendment which would have restricted activity at the site also failed, 271-147.

According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Porter said in response to the outcome, “This is proof that Yucca Mountain is alive and well.”

In a statement released by the Office of Civilian and Radioactive Waste Management, Director Ward Sproat said, “Yucca Mountain is critical to the nation’s current and future energy and national security needs.”

The Senate has not yet cast any votes this session regarding the program funding.

--Posted by Trish Conrad

--3 reader comments:

Anonymous said...

The EPA safety standard for Yucca Mountain requires that the DOE prove that the repository will protect ground water for the next one million years. Thus it is fascinating to learn that the DOE just had to purchase a system to clean up naturally occuring arsenic in the ground water at Yucca Mountain, because it already does not meet EPA safety standards:

http://www.wateronline.com/content/news/article.asp?DocID=%7B9A2B28FD-29AB-471F-BAAB-DFE6B54A3A7D%7D&Bucket=Supplier+News&VNETCOOKIE=NO

It's good that we are making sure that the Yucca Mountain repository will be safe for hundreds of thousands of years. But anti-Yucca Mountain activists need to get a reality check, because they are diverting attention from the really important things that we should be working on, such as cutting back the air pollution from coal and getting control of carbon dioxide emissions.

10:50 PM

yucca insider said...

It's been a shameful week for Nevada's Congressional delegation. Three have uttered flat-out falsehoods (I won't say lies...) on the floor of Congress.

As recorded by Congressional Quarterly:

Shelley Berkley alleged Yucca Mountain would pollute the groundwater of the entire southwest. False, and physically impossible.

Jon Porter said his committee last year found "thousands of emails" showing falsified science at Yucca Mountain. False. DOE self-identified 14 e-mails that implied frustration with quality assurance documentation. Two independent investigations found no science was "falsified."

And in his own news release, Harry Reid said DOE was "stealing water" from Nevada to conduct borehole drilling at the site of planned surface facilities at Yucca Mountain. False. The program had permission from the Nevada state engineer.

What else are they getting wrong?

12:11 PM

don kosloff said...

They proabablay can't spell "Oklo".

6:38 PM

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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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