Yucca Mountain News Clips - Thursday, July 26, 2007

Yucca Mountain News Clips
Thursday, July 26, 2007
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
July 26, 2007

Government challenges order halting water use at Yucca site

By Keith Rogers
Review-Journal

The other shoe dropped Wednesday in the squabble between the federal government and Nevada over using the state's water for drill rigs at the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site.

Justice Department attorneys on behalf of the Department of Energy filed an emergency motion in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas seeking to block State Engineer Tracy Taylor's June 1 cease-and-desist order, which was reinstated Friday.

"The state engineer's application of Nevada water law stands as an obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of the full purposes and objectives of Congress with respect to DOE's ongoing work at the Yucca Mountain site," reads the court papers that were filed at the close of business Wednesday by Acting Assistant Attorney General Ronald Tenpas and Stephen Bartell, attorney for the Justice Department's Natural Resources Section in Washington, D.C.

The 45-page document concludes that the federal government is not trying to undermine Nevada's water permit process.

"However, in this particular instance, the state is using the water permit process to attempt to veto a federal project," reads the motion submitted to U.S. District Judge Roger Hunt. "Such action is contrary to law and, if allowed to continue, will not only stand as an obstacle to congressional intent, but will also place great hardship on the United States."

Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency, said nothing in the complaint was unexpected.

Loux said state attorneys will probably file an answer to the motion early next week that will be followed by a court hearing.

"We believe that DOE under federal law, after the site recommendation, is not allowed to collect any more data," Loux said, noting that the Department of Energy's Yucca Mountain Project officials understood "that collecting data is unreasonable."

The state engineer's cease-and-desist order had been on hold since June 12 until Friday, when the federal government rejected his demand that the water not be used to drill bore holes to extract soil-and-rock samples because the data-collection project is not in the state's interest.

The seismic or "geotechnical" information is needed for licensing surface facilities where the government plans to temporarily store the nation's spent nuclear fuel and radioactive defense waste to cool it and sort it before entombing it in the mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"The drilling program has been developed to provide geotechnical information for building design and to provide additional data for confirmation of previously developed seismic response spectra," the Justice Department attorneys wrote.

They said the Department of Energy "has scheduled this work to be completed before November 2007."

DOE officials have deferred comment on the matter to Keith Saxe, assistant chief of the Justice Department's Natural Resources Section. He has refused to say whether drilling has been conducted at the site since Friday, when the state engineer's cease-and-desist order was back in place.

The water is needed to cool and lubricate drill bits and create mud for samples.

Nevada officials have contended that the site characterization process ended in 2002, when it was recommended to President Bush. Five months later, on July 23, 2002, Bush signed legislation overriding then-Gov. Kenny Guinn's veto of the project.

In December 2002, the state and the Department of Energy entered into an agreement approved by Hunt that allowed DOE officials to use a limited amount of water at the site for showers, restroom facilities, dust suppression and emergencies such as fires.

Taylor issued the cease-and-desist order after state officials learned that DOE workers were using Nevada's water for purposes outside of the court-approved agreement.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
July 26, 2007

Republican senator challenges Clinton's opposition to Yucca

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Hillary Clinton's commitment to fight Yucca Mountain was challenged Wednesday by a Republican senator who said the Democratic presidential candidate was a no-show for two nuclear waste hearings her committee had last year.

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., sought to poke a hole in Clinton's promise that she would "not go forward" with the proposed Nevada nuclear waste repository if she is elected.

When Clinton had a chance to take part in Environment and Public Works hearings on the repository, "she was missing in action," said Inhofe, a Yucca backer and the committee's chairman at the time.

Clinton's campaign issued a rebuttal in which it said her absences were because of "important Senate business on behalf of her constituents, and issues of national importance."

Hilarie Grey, a spokeswoman, insisted that Clinton being elsewhere was not a sign that she is inattentive on the issue. Clinton has advertised herself to Nevada voters as perhaps the strongest Yucca critic among the candidates.

"Senator Clinton's record shows she is a consistent and vocal opponent of making Yucca Mountain the nation's nuclear waste repository," Grey said.

The dustup shows how the candidates continue to view Yucca Mountain as a cutting issue in Nevada, perhaps more so now that the state is hosting early presidential caucuses in January, said Eric Herzik, professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Inhofe's charge "may cause Clinton some embarrassment but it is not going to hurt her in the polls," Herzik said.

The episode comes in the wake of Clinton's remarks on Friday calling for new Senate hearings to focus on Yucca Mountain health and safety, and for the Energy Department to shelve its repository licensing preparations.

In a teleconference with Nevada reporters, Clinton, a frontrunner in state polls, repeated her promise that she "will not go forward" with the Yucca project if she is elected president in November 2008.

Inhofe questioned Clinton's call for Senate action. He said she did not attend a committee hearing on Yucca Mountain on March 1, 2006, and a subcommittee hearing on nuclear waste on Sept. 14.

In a statement, Inhofe said he took exception to a Clinton comment to reporters that the Republicans when they ran Congress were "not willing to ask the hard questions" about the repository.

"When Senator Clinton had the opportunity to ask 'hard questions' of administration officials about Yucca Mountain, she was missing in action," Inhofe said.

"In fact, Senator Clinton failed to ask any questions because she was absent from the last two EPW hearings on Yucca Mountain," he said.

One of the hearings was by a subcommittee that Clinton did not belong to. But committee members are allowed to attend all meetings, said Marc Morano, a Republican committee aide.

"She could still attend," Morano said. "Either she did not consider it important enough or she was too busy to attend."

Clinton's campaign responded with information on the senator's whereabouts on the days of the hearings.

On March 1, she attended an overlapping hearing on the Ryan White CARE Act, an aid bill for HIV/AIDS patients.

On Sept. 14, Clinton chaired a meeting of the Democratic Steering Committee that involved international women's rights. She then attended a Senate Armed Services Committee closed meeting on military commissions to handle the treatment of enemy combatants.

The environment committee's new chairman, Democrat Barbara Boxer of California, has agreed to Clinton's request to have a Yucca hearing after the Senate's August recess, according to an aide who was cited Tuesday by Energy and Environment Daily, an electronic newsletter.

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., came to Clinton's defense, saying the New York senator's opposition to the repository "has been pretty consistent through the years and she has made very public statements against putting nuclear waste in Nevada."

"More than that I would not expect from anyone, and it is certainly more than Senator Inhofe has ever done for Nevada," said Berkley, who has not declared a preference among Democrats running for president.

But Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., said Clinton was being "disingenuous" by criticizing Republicans on the Yucca issue when opposition to the repository has been bipartisan, at least in Nevada.

Democrats now run Congress, and if Clinton wanted to kill Yucca Mountain, "she could do it now. She could start that movement now if she were serious about it."

"I am eagerly awaiting the new Democratic Congress to not fund Yucca Mountain and to kill the project," Porter said.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said through a spokesman that Inhofe's charge "is yet another desperate move by people looking to turn Nevada into a nuclear dumping ground."

Like Berkley, Reid has not yet backed a presidential candidate.

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Las Vegas Review Journal
July 26, 2007

Gibbons' stance on Yucca perplexing

Lawmakers say caving on water issues is not good

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Consensus eluded Nevada lawmakers Thursday on how or whether to respond to unorthodox Yucca Mountain strategy moves that Gov. Jim Gibbons has taken this month.

For the most part, the state's five members of Congress try to stay on the same page as elected state leaders in Carson City when it comes to the proposed nuclear waste repository.

Following a short delegation meeting, the federal representatives again stressed their opposition to the project. But as to the governor's strategy, they were scattered in their responses.

Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., said Gibbons should be given the benefit of the doubt after he proposed that the Department of Energy be allowed to extract water at the Yucca site for an additional 30 days even though he concluded DOE had violated of a state order prohibiting the drilling.

The governor has not explained his decision, which seemed at odds with Nevada's customary approach that takes the hardest line possible in efforts to kill the Yucca project.

Gibbons' decision reportedly was made against the advice of state Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto and of Bob Loux, the director of the Agency for Nuclear Projects.

Sen. Harry Reid and Shelley Berkley, both D-Nev., were critical of the decision at the time, while Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said he didn't understand it.

Reid called it "the biggest gift DOE has received since I have been in Washington."

Former Sen. Richard Bryan on Friday called for a meeting between the governor and the congressional group to air out the matter and reunite state leaders. Otherwise, Bryan said, he feared Nevada's resolve against the repository would be questioned.

It did not appear such a meeting would occur soon, judging from lawmakers' comments on Wednesday.

Talking with reporters as the lawmakers sat in Reid's office, Porter said Gibbons has fought Yucca Mountain "his whole career. He may be privy to information in that particular situation with his legal counsel."

"Time will tell but I think we should give him the benefit," Porter said.

"Well, you give him the benefit," Reid told Porter.

"This was the first negative thing I have ever said about Jim Gibbons," Reid added, referring to his criticism of the governor's water decision.

"I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of, and it set us back a long way," Berkley said. "All I know is that his decision makes it difficult for us to do our jobs" against Yucca.

Ensign said the issue may be "water under the bridge at this point."

He noted that the Energy Department rejected Gibbons' offer in favor of seeking broader water rights, and the matter was headed to the courts.

Ensign said leaders were re-emphasizing their opposition to the repository to send a message the state intends to continue fighting the project.

Rep. Dean Heller, R-Nev., did not take part in the exchange.

Gibbons' spokeswoman could not be reached Wednesday night by phone or e-mail.

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Las Vegas SUN
July 26, 2007

Feds challenge Nevada order on nuclear dump site water

LAS VEGAS (AP) - Justice Department lawyers have filed an emergency motion in U.S. District Court, challenging a Nevada order against using state water for drill rigs at the federal government's planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump.

The lawyers, representing the Department of Energy, moved Wednesday to block state Engineer Tracy Taylor's June 1 cease-and-desist order, which was reinstated Friday.

The 45-page document says the federal government isn't trying to undermine Nevada's water permit process and believes Taylor's order is illegal.

Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency, said nothing in the complaint was unexpected. He said state attorneys probably will file an answer to the motion early next week that will be followed by a court hearing.

Taylor issued the cease-and-desist order after state officials learned that DOE workers were using Nevada's water for purposes outside of the court-approved agreement.

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Reno N&R
July 26, 2007

Breach in the wall

Nevada’s governor gives federal officials a leg up on making Yucca Mountain a dump site

By Dennis Myers
dennism@newsreview.com

One of Nevada's top elected officials has broken away from the state's traditional united front on the proposed dump for high-level nuclear wastes at Yucca Mountain in Nye County.

Over the objection of other state officials, Gov. Jim Gibbons approved a decision by the state water engineer to allow federal use of state water for U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) test drilling at the Yucca site.

Gibbons concurrently appointed a supporter of the dump to the Nevada Nuclear Projects Commission.

Under the terms of a court-approved agreement, DOE is permitted to use state water only for flushing toilets, fire suppression and dust control. But the state says its water is being used in the drilling process to cool drill bits and for other purposes.

State Engineer Tracy Taylor issued a cease-and-desist order against DOE but also allowed the agency to continue the practice for a month, a decision Gibbons endorsed.

The water decision was glossed over in a news release issued by the governor's press office. That release began, "An outspoken critic of the use of Yucca Mountain as a dump site for the nation's nuclear waste, Governor Jim Gibbons today announced his support of the state water engineer's decision to ask the U.S. Department of Energy to suspend their unauthorized use of Nevada water for drilling at Yucca Mountain."

The release contained a statement quoting Gibbons himself: "The DOE's continued mismanagement and lack of quality control measures at the high-risk Yucca Mountain project has earned a zero confidence grade in the minds of Nevadans. The unauthorized use of water for drilling is further evidence that the DOE continues to rush it to completion regardless of Nevada's rights and concerns."

Like a term paper whose author is uncertain of its merits and binds it in a fancy cover, the release had the Gibbons quote in boldface and italics. Nowhere in the release was it reported that Gibbons had overridden advice from the state attorney general and other officials to personally allow the water use.

The Gibbons news release was initially successful in spinning the story his way. One media entity, KRNV News in Reno, even posted the release on its Web site as a news story, word for word and without attribution to the governor's press office. MSNBC then picked it up off KRNV's site and posted it as a national "news story."

That success held until the news reached D.C.

U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, the Democratic floor leader in the Senate, issued a statement.

"I'm incredibly disappointed," he said. "This is the biggest gift the DOE has received since I've been in Washington, and I'm shocked that it was delivered by the administration of a former Nevada congressman. The letter from the State's Division of Water Resources to the DOE lays out every reason the DOE should cease and desist. Yet, at the same time, the State gave the DOE the green light to move forward on this project, while the entire Nevada congressional delegation continues to fight to prevent Nevada from becoming the nation's nuclear dumping ground."

Two days later, U.S. Rep. Shelley Berkley of Clark County joined in.

"Denying the Department of Energy access to water for work at Yucca Mountain is one of the strongest weapons Nevada has in its fight to prevent our state from becoming a nuclear garbage dump," she said. "I urge Governor Gibbons to reconsider allowing DOE to tap Nevada water resources so work at Yucca Mountain can continue, even if only for a limited time. The Energy Department should not be able to use one single drop of Nevada water to further President Bush's goal of dumping toxic nuclear waste 90 minutes outside Las Vegas."

The use of water for drilling purposes at Yucca Mountain is a sensitive subject with a history extending back four governorships. Gov. Richard Bryan's administration resisted federal use of state water during the 1980s, a stance continued under governors Robert Miller and Kenny Guinn.

Gibbons' replacement of state nuclear projects commissioner Michon Mackedon of Churchill County with Nye County Commissioner Joni Eastley also drew fire. Mackedon was noted for bringing wide knowledge of the historical behavior of DOE and its predecessor agencies—particularly the Atomic Energy Commission—to the Nevada Nuclear Projects Commission's deliberations, and she was also considered an opponent of the Yucca dump.

Eastley is a supporter of dumping at Yucca. On Dec. 29, 2003, she and Nye/Esmeralda Economic Development Authority member Trish Rippie toured Northern Nevada touting the supposed benefits of the dump. In an appearance on Nevada Newsmakers, they said Nye County, by dropping "aggressive neutrality" toward the dump, was able to receive large sums of money ("Nye comes calling," Jan. 15, 2004). Critics said the county was entitled to the money as a matter of law as funding for planning to deal with impacts from the Yucca project.

On another occasion, Eastley told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, "The people in this community [Tonopah] are very patriotic, and they're proud of the fact that they had something to do with developing the storage facility for this waste."

As criticism of Gibbons grew as a result of the water decision and the Eastley appointment, he dumped Eastley.

"This position on the Nuclear Project Commission requires a representative who shares the primary sentiment of Nevada's residents and my administration's views on the Yucca Mountain Project," Gibbons said in a prepared statement.

He also said he specifically wants someone on the commission who hails from Nye County.

"It is my intention to have representation from Nye County and to ensure that this person can work with commission on our ongoing efforts to defeat the Yucca Mountain Project."

That in itself is of concern to Yucca opponents because Nye County has always been considered a weak link that federal officials like to use to undercut the overall state stance. In 1987, after Nye officials had begun playing footsie with federal energy officials on the dump, the Nevada Legislature carved a new county out around Yucca Mountain, removing the dumpsite from Nye County. The sponsor of "Bullfrog County," Assemblymember Paul May, said his specific intent was to punish Nye County officials by denying them the federal benefits that will eventually accrue to the host county of the dump. The new county was later abolished by the courts.

If there was positive Yucca news for Gibbons in the dispute, it was that Nevada's three Republican congressmembers—John Ensign, Dean Heller and Jon Porter—held their fire after he allowed the water use. But an aide to one of them said they were puzzled by Gibbons' handling of the issue, particularly at a time when Porter and Heller were joined by Berkley to try to cut $200 million from the Yucca budget.

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Nuclear Engineering
July 26, 2007

US energy spending bill passed

The US house of representatives has approved the fiscal 2008 Energy and Water Development Appropriations bill.

Passed with a 312-112 vote, the bill provides over three billion dollars to address global climate change from the total $30.3 billion

The bulk of the funding, $25.243 billion, goes to the Department of Energy, up $1.150 billion on 2007 and $480 million above the President’s request.

Reducing dependence on foreign oil will receive $1.9 billion, $638 million above the President’s request and $400 million above 2007.

Nuclear energy will get $639.2 million, $232.5 million above the President’s request and $324.5 million above 2007, including funding for a Next Generation Nuclear Power Plant at the Idaho National Lab. Yucca Mountain will also receive $494.5 million, $48.8 million above 2007, matching the administration’s request for nuclear waste disposal. However, funding for the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) will be cut to $120 million, $285 million below the President’s request and $47.5 million below 2007 for the initiative to reprocess spent nuclear fuel and burn long-lived radioactive materials. Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MOX) will get $167.8 million, a cut of $263.5 million below the President’s request and $115.1 million below 2007 because the Administration asked for more than could be spent in 2008 and last year’s funds are sufficient to continue construction.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
July 25, 2007

State officials renew charge against DOE

Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Nevada officials have renewed a charge that the Department of Energy plans to withhold key Yucca Mountain documents from the state's scrutiny.

Lawyers for the state filed a complaint Monday at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

It is part of a simmering dispute over how much technical information about the proposed nuclear waste repository DOE is required to make public and when.

The Energy Department has posted 3.4 million documents to a public Internet database for Yucca Mountain.

But Nevada officials said the department is legally required to post "all documentary material" before it files a repository license application.

State lawyers said in the complaint that DOE has announced it does not plan to post its major repository performance assessment, nor the modeling reports that are its building blocks.

The complaint was sent to a three-person administrative law panel at the NRC. The panel is refereeing early fights leading up to DOE's filing of a license application due next summer.

DOE officials have said the information would be properly made available when the license is submitted. The Energy Department will file a formal response to the state's charge by August 3, a spokesman said.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
July 25, 2007

Editorial: A Yucca counteroffer

When one boondoggle begets another, think creatively

Ranking the worst government boondoggles in modern American history is a daunting task. So many public-sector failures. So much taxpayer money wasted.

Certainly, federal agriculture policy has a huge lead on the field, with hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies buying the citizenry nothing but more expensive food. Untold billions of dollars have been poured into a national missile defense system despite the fact that plenty of scientists have doubts it could ever work as intended. Then there's the upstart filly in the horse race, the ethanol industry, fueled by protectionist tariffs, arbitrary congressional mandates and, yes, those handouts to farmers.

But near the front of the pack, galloping stride for stride with Boston's bungled "Big Dig" underground freeway system, is the Yucca Mountain Project.

Over the past two decades, about $8 billion has been poured into the planned high-level nuclear waste repository. Bogus scientific modeling, ever-shifting environmental standards and a whole lot of digging about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas haven't gotten the Department of Energy much closer to opening the facility. In a best-case scenario, the repository might be able to begin accepting waste shipments a decade from now, assuming federal regulators ever give revised safeguards the green light.

And no one has a handle on just how the nuclear energy industry will move thousands of tons of spent fuel to Southern Nevada. The idea with the most traction at this point is a dedicated rail line from Caliente through rural Nevada.

But a draft document that outlines railroad cost estimates reveals the proposed 319-mile track is a boondoggle in its own right. The report, which was circulated among state and local officials last week, says the rail line will likely cost nearly $3.2 billion -- $10 million per mile. Bob Halstead, a transportation consultant for the state, says that guess is probably low.

Costs will continue to grow the longer groundbreaking is delayed. Work probably won't begin on the line before 2010, assuming Congress agrees to fund it.

But why would lawmakers support such an expense when the future of the repository itself is in doubt? Building a dedicated, $3 billion rail line for a dying project makes Alaska's proposed "Bridge to Nowhere" seem useful -- and a bargain to boot.

Mr. Halstead notes that such pressures could prompt the Department of Energy to abandon the rail project and reconsider shipping waste by truck. Which would put the state in an interesting position.

Nevadans have long opposed the shipment of nuclear waste from out-of-state commercial reactors. And only a minority of Nevadans have expressed a desire to negotiate with the nuclear energy industry and the federal government for benefits in exchange for dropping their opposition.

Recall that last year, the Nuclear Energy Institute proposed paying the state $25 million per year to accept waste shipments, then $50 million per year once the first shipment arrived. It was an insulting first offer -- one that made Nevada even less willing to bargain.

But the Las Vegas Valley's highways need billions of dollars worth of improvements over the next decade, and the state has no way to pay for them. If the state is ever going to make a counteroffer to the Nuclear Energy Institute and the Department of Energy, this should be it: Scrap the rail line and give Nevada $4 billion to upgrade existing highways and build new ones.

That way, when the Yucca Mountain site finally closes, filled with nothing but cobwebs, we'd have something to show for it beyond an empty tunnel in the side of a ridge.

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Pahrump Valley Times
July 25, 2007

State Nuke Agency

Eastley invited in, then ushered out

Governor Cites Disagreement over Yucca Project

By Mark Smith and Mark Waite
PVT

Nye County Commissioner Joni Eastley had barely agreed to respond to an invitation to submit her name for membership on the state Agency for Nuclear Projects before it was, in short order, accepted and then rejected.

Gov. Jim Gibbons announced last week that the available place on the agency, which is supervised by the Nuclear Projects Commission, demands "a representative who shares the primary sentiment of Nevada's residents and my administration's views on the Yucca Mountain Project."

In other words, someone who is opposed to it.

Eastley has made no secret of her support for the project but pointed out Monday that she had never tried to force her way onto the agency, which advises the governor and legislature on developing state nuclear policies.

Eastley said she was nudged toward applying for the position, reportedly to replace Vice Chairman Michon Mackedon, by a representative of Gibbons' own office.

Eastley did not wish to identify the individual who suggested -- more than once, she said -- that she ought to submit her resume.

She said the representative called her about a month ago and then "contacted me several times" in pursuing the matter.

Eastley submitted her resume, was notified that it had been approved, and then, July 18, got a call from Carson City in which she was told her appointment would be canceled.

According to Bob Laux, who directs the agency, Gibbons planned to rescind Eastley's appointment but she resigned instead.

"They said, 'We didn't know you supported Yucca Mountain,'" Eastley said, "and I said, 'You never asked me.' I was asked to apply -- I didn't push my way in.

"I was asked to apply several times. I was asked several times to apply for the opening, and I was asked to resign."

Melissa Subhotin, a spokeswoman for the governor, said Gibbons has always appreciated Eastley's work for Nye County. "However," she added, "we did feel that at this time it would be prudent to put somebody in that position who shared the views of a majority of the state regarding Yucca Mountain."

Whatever the governor's point of view, Eastley said it is her opinion that a diversity of views might have been worthwhile.

Laux said that all members of the agency are opposed to the Yucca project.

Subhotin said that "we do try to reflect the views of the community and their interests ... After we had several discussions about this, we felt this would be the most appropriate position."

Eastley recalled that she had actually received her official certification as an appointee before she received the July 18 call through which she was asked to step back.

Eastley said she is neither ashamed nor embarrassed in the aftermath.

Gibbons' office indicated strongly that it wishes to have a Nye County representative on the agency.

Laux suggested Nye County support for Yucca remains beyond the pale. "It's certainly not the position the state has," he said. "We don't believe it will ever happen. We have a little bit of a difference with Nye County."

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Pahrump Valley Times
July 25, 2007

Debate Get-Together

Clinton backers activate campaign in Pahrump

Visit by The Candidate Herself Seen as Possible

By Mark Smith
PVT

Susan Jones-Davis got involved for a relatively straightforward reason -- she has a van that seats eight.

Earlier this year a friend, Sue Woodall, recruited her to take a crowd from Pahrump to Las Vegas to see presidential candidate and former First Lady Hillary Clinton speak; now she's the captain for Precinct 26 and a determined partisan for the would-be Democratic nominee for the nation's executive office.

Monday afternoon she and husband Jim welcomed a dozen and a half Democrats to their North End home to watch Clinton and those she will face in the 2008 primaries and caucuses conduct a nationally televised debate from Charleston. S.C.

Not ordinarily a get-out-in-front campaigner in the political arena, Jones-Davis said Clinton won her over. "I want her so bad, I'm willing to put my shyness aside," she said.

She said the darkest hours shared by the candidate for former President Bill Clinton had a lot to do with her support. As their marriage and his presidency were put under the stress of the Monica Lewinsky incident and impeachment in the Senate, she said, "She held herself up and still stood by him and their vows. I respect her for standing by her husband."

Hilarie Grey, a campaign communication director, was also on hand, along with regional field director Victoria Ruan and field organizer Tim Laughlin.

Grey said the debate offered the opportunity to get voters together and talk and share concerns. "People are really looking for change," she said as the guests shared a variety of snacks and the big-screen television focused on CNN's Anderson Cooper, who moderated the debate among more than a half-dozen hopefuls.

Admitting that the first-ever caucus in the state early next year will require an educational component, Grey said campaign activists are eager to get going and lay the groundwork.

She added that there is every likelihood that local enthusiasts will have the chance to actually meet and greet their candidate.

"I'd say there's a good chance that she'll be here," she said of Clinton, "and soon."

Grey said the Clinton campaign believes Nevada is emblematic of concerns shared by Far West voters, ranging from its independent (some would say Libertarian) streak to concerns over resources under pressure, the relative strength of organized labor and the question of nuclear storage as epitomized by the Yucca Mountain Project (which Clinton opposes).

Jim Davis, a former gold miner and oilfield worker, said he has consistently voted Republican in the past, but not now, not "after the shambles were in, each year degrading."

He sees Clinton as a strong, sincere woman. "If anyone can handle it, she ought to be able to," he said. He added that even though George W. Bush will be out of office in less than two years, he senses outright fear among many voters.

Bob Parker is a Democrat but admitted he hasn't decided on a candidate quite yet. Aside from an interest in Clinton, he added, "I love (Delaware Sen.) Joe Biden. He's my kind of guy." He also put in a good word for former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards.

Seeing activism on the presidential campaign front this early surprised Parker, but he's enthusiastic about what he sees as a crop of strong candidates. Not only are there some good hopefuls, he joked, but there are likely some good cabinet secretaries among them as well.

Jones-Davis admitted burnout may become a concern, with candidates pounding the trail toward the White House for month after month. When she calls prospective voters, she said, "People say it's a little early."

But not too early for her living room to be packed as the debate unfolds.

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Pahrump Valley Times
July 25, 2007

County flicks off funding for park lights

By Christina Eichelkraut
PVT

Some of the town's parks could be left in the dark for a while now that the Nye County commissioners have voted to rescind previously approved funding to upgrade and add lighting to Petrack and Honeysuckle parks. Funding to work on Blosser Park (which has nothing on it but a portable toilet at the moment) was also rescinded.

Simkins Park is the only town facility that will have some light shed on it since the commissioners approved retaining $291,700 of funding for it.

The plan for the brand-new park is to put in a soccer field as well as some baseball fields.

The funding, a total of $750,000, would have come from left-over Payment Equal to Taxes money (which the county receives from the Department of Energy in lieu of taxes on Yucca Mountain) from last year.

The commissioners had approved the funding for all the projects last month but at their meeting this week rescinded most of it as part of a revision to the PETT funds budgets.

Commissioner Butch Borasky said that "the money's needed more desperately by the county in other areas."

Borasky did not comment about specific areas to which the reallocated money might be directed.

Furthermore, Borasky pointed out that there's already lighting at the parks.

"I don't see the county just changing lighting on a whim," Borasky said.

Pahrump Town Board Chairman Laurayne Murray, however, said that isn't the case.

Murray, who was at the meeting, admitted that it seemed as though the commissioners were under the impression the town was just replacing the lighting.

Actually, the $200,000 to fund lighting for Field C at Petrack Park is not a replacement project but an entirely new field that needs lighting.

"It's a new project and a new field, and is there to meet the demand of the kids who want to play there," Murray said.

The increasing demand on the parks by Pahrump's growing population, and consequently by youth sports organizations such as Little League and the American Youth Soccer Organization, is the main reason the town requested the PETT funds for the lighting.

The town has only one park, Honeysuckle Park on Dandelion Street, with Little League-approved lighting.

However, due to the high desert winds, the Honeysuckle lights are beginning to deteriorate, putting the park at risk of losing its approved status.

Additional lighting, or improvements in existing lighting at the parks, would give youth organizations more time and places to host practices and sporting events.

"We've had to turn parents away, and we've had to turn organizations away," Murray explained. "We need more lighting to facilitate more Little League parks."

A comment was reportedly made at the meeting to the effect that the lights at Honeysuckle Park were only five years old and, as such, don't need to be replaced.

According to Stacy Behnke, Valley Electric Association's public information officer, the lights at Honeysuckle Park were actually installed in 1992.

Another reported comment made was that the town was allocated the funding last year but failed to use it.

Murray said this was due in part to the town's difficulty in securing a bid for what, relatively speaking, many contractors would consider a small job.

Additional funding for Petrack Park would have gone to upgrade the electrical facilities at the park because the facilities cannot accommodate the increasing demands of the Fall Festival and various other activities.

The town did consider using impact fees to fund the lighting projects but later discovered they could not be used for that purpose.

However, there may be a light at the end of the tunnel, or rather on the ball fields.

The town secured a contract with WillDan Engineering Group Inc. to do preliminary engineering work for lighting projects at Simkins and Petrack Parks, including Field C behind the town office.

Town Manager Dave Richards said that once the engineering work is done, the town can ask the county for a PETT fund allocation.

In addition, Richards said the town also has several other options, including possibly using the parks room tax fund or the capital improvements fund.

Although it may be a while before the lights flicker on in those areas, the preliminary projects are not affected by county funding.

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CBS News
July 25, 2007

Reid's No Daschle

By Paul Bedard

(US News) Don't look for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the old Nevada boxing coach, to back down under the GOP's assault. Republicans say he's just plain rude to President Bush when he calls the prez a "liar" and "part of the culture of corruption" like the did Sunday on Face the Nation.

Now, just consider what his spokesman, Jim Manley, told me today: "What the Republicans are trying to do to Senator Reid is what they did to [former Senate Minority Leader] Tom Daschle, and it's not going to work." Recall that the GOP ably attacked Daschle to the point that he lost his seat to Republican John Thune. Today, the Republican National Committee and the Nevada GOP chairwoman issued E-mails to supporters bashing Reid's harsh language when talking about Bush. Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan said that "given the dismal state of Congress under the Democrats' leadership, Sen. Reid's choice of words is unfortunate, but not unexpected. Public confidence in Congress has plummeted to an all-time low of 14 percent. Instead of working to advance the country, Sen. Reid chooses to engage in partisan attacks and reckless rhetoric."

He included an index of other harsh comments Reid has directed at the administration. Also, the state party chairwoman, Sue Lowden, sent an E-mail to state supporters, GOP members, and Republican elected officials nailing Reid.

"Rather than try to raise the level of debate in this country, Harry Reid has once again reverted to the reckless partisan rhetoric that does a disservice to the people of Nevada and the rest of the country."

So will Reid bend? Not likely, says Manley, who issued his own E-mail to me.

"The Republicans announced in this morning's Washington Times that they are eager to change the subject away from Iraq. They will try (and fail) to distract the public by talking about Sen. Reid. The vast majority of Americans support Sen. Reid's efforts to change course in Iraq. Republicans should spend less time and energy protecting the president and more time on protecting our troops and strengthening American security. As for Lowden, she should be more concerned about her party's efforts in-state to make Yucca Mountain a reality, including her own contribution to Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign. McCain is a vocal supporter of turning Nevada into the nation's nuclear dumping ground."

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Energy Digital
July 25, 2007

DOE examines GTCC waste disposal

DOE has announced it will evaluate disposal options for GTCC LLW generated from the decommissioning of nuclear power plants, medical activities and nuclear research.

DOE delivered to the Federal Register this week a Notice of Intent (NOI) to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which will evaluate how and where to safely dispose of Greater than Class C (GTCC) low-level radioactive waste (LLW) that is currently stored at commercial nuclear power plants and other generator sites across the country. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 requires DOE to report to Congress on its evaluation of safe disposal options for this commercial waste.

The NOI includes a list of the preliminary disposal options for analysis in the EIS, describes the inventory of waste to be analyzed, identifies dates and locations of public meetings, and invites public comments on the proposed scope of the EIS.

GTCC waste is commercial LLW generated from activities conducted by Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licensees and stored at sites where it is generated throughout the United States. DOE estimates the total stored and projected quantity nationwide of the GTCC LLW to be 2,600 cubic meters. GTCC LLW is grouped into three general waste types: (1) activated metals, which come from the maintenance and decommissioning of nuclear power plants; (2) radioactive sealed sources that are no longer used, including irradiation of food and medical purposes; and (3) miscellaneous waste, such as contaminated equipment from industrial research and development.

In addition to the GTCC LLW, DOE intends to include in the EIS evaluation certain LLW and transuranic waste that is generated from DOE activities, which may not have an identified disposal path, and has characteristics similar to GTCC LLW. This DOE waste is estimated to be 3,000 cubic meters.

Regulations require that GTCC waste be disposed of in a geologic repository unless alternate proposals for its safe disposal in a NRC licensed facility are approved by the NRC. DOE will evaluate a range of disposal alternatives in preparing the EIS to meet the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act. In addition, DOE will submit a Report to Congress after the final EIS is complete and await Congressional action before making a decision on the disposal alternative or alternatives to be implemented by DOE as required by the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

The EIS will evaluate a range of disposal methods and locations that include: (1) geologic disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and the proposed Yucca Mountain Repository; (2) enhanced near-surface disposal at the Hanford Site, Idaho National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Nevada Test Site, Oak Ridge Reservation, Savannah River Site, Waste Isolation Pilot Plant vicinity, or a generic commercial location; and (3) intermediate depth borehole disposal at the same locations identified in (2). The EIS will consider these alternatives individually and in combination.

DOE invites public review and comment on the proposed scope of the EIS and other information presented in the NOI during a 60-day comment period, which begins on Monday, July 23, 2007. Comments are on September 21, 2007. All comments received during the public scoping period will be considered in preparing the GTCC EIS.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
July 24, 2007

Hauling plans sought

DOE seeks proposals to ship nuclear waste

By Keith Rogers
Review-Journal

The Department of Energy played a card in its strategy to haul highly radioactive waste across the nation to Yucca Mountain with a Federal Register notice Monday seeking comments on public safety training and planning grants for states and American Indian tribes.

The notice offers planning grants of up to $200,000 and training grants of up to $100,000 annually to affected states and tribes. Both are subject to congressional appropriations.

Highly radioactive defense wastes and spent nuclear fuel from commercial power reactors are stored at 121 locations in 39 states. That means all but a handful of the contiguous 48 states as well as tribes in them could be affected by DOE's plans to ship nuclear waste by trucks and trains to Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Eligible states and tribes could receive financial assistance up to four years before waste shipments begin and each year after they begin.

The notice came five years to the day after President Bush signed legislation overriding then-Gov. Kenny Guinn's veto of the Yucca Mountain Project.

Bob Loux, executive director of Nevada's Agency for Nuclear Projects and a longtime critic of the federal government's Yucca Mountain effort, said he can't envision any of the waste being transported until 2017 at the earliest.

"I don't think this means anything other than them showing they've got progress going. It's 12 years away and they haven't got a license application filed yet," Loux said.

Gary Lanthrum, director of DOE's logistics management office for the project, said, in a written statement, "Preparations for the safe transportation of waste are an important step towards opening Yucca Mountain as the nation's first permanent repository for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste.

"DOE has a long history of safely shipping transuranic and other wastes for disposal, and this training will build on these procedures to prepare safety officials in these jurisdictions," Lanthrum said.

On Friday, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., who is running for president, called for hearings on government plans to push the Yucca Mountain Project forward without a radiation safety standard from the Environmental Protection Agency.

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Blacktown Sun
July 25, 2007

No future in nuclear power

Have you noticed that John Howard has been banging on about nuclear energy ever since he returned from visiting George Bush?

Australians now learn that plans are afoot for us to co-operate with the U.S. on the development of a nuclear energy industry. We are to understand that this is in the interest of climate change.

What other deals has Howard made with the thug Bush?

In his move to take control of Aboriginal settlements in the Northern Territory, Howard stipulated that it will no longer be necessary to get a permit in order to enter an Aboriginal settlement. Is this a cunning ruse so that mining companies will have easy access to Aboriginal land? This move could also clear the way for the U.S. to use the Northern Territory as a nuclear waste dump, keeping in mind that the U.S. government is meeting resistance to dumping its nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain in the U.S. State of Nevada.

Howard is reported to have said that Australia would not be taking other countries nuclear waste. And we all know just how relliable Howard's word is.

Global warming presents us with many problems. Nuclear power will create insurmountable problems. Cancers, weapons of mass destruction and birth defects are only some of them. Clearly, nuclear power is not the solution to global warming.

Jean Lopez
Blacktown

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
July 24, 2007

Railroad cost estimates for Yucca top $3 billion

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- The cost of building a government railroad across rural Nevada to carry nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain has grown beyond $3 billion and is climbing with groundbreaking still several years away, according to new estimates.

The Department of Energy has set $3.155 billion as the latest price tag to run rail about 319 miles from Caliente in eastern Nevada to the Yucca site in Nye County, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Previously, a cost estimate disclosed in December 2005 was $2 billion.

The numbers underscore the growing cost of the proposed Nevada nuclear waste complex, and the likely challenges facing the Energy Department to secure funding from Congress for the undertaking.

"I think this is going to be a big pill to swallow on Capitol Hill," said Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.

"This goes to show the longer things get delayed, the more expensive it will be for the rising costs of concrete and steel," Loux said. "But also that this is a more difficult job than they thought before."

The Energy Department in March estimated that repository construction and transportation, and initial operations at the site, would cost $27 billion. The department has not updated broader and longer range "life cycle" costs, which were at $57.6 billion in 2001.

The government still is at least several years away from breaking ground for a railroad and for waste-handling buildings beyond the five-mile long wide-mouth exploratory tunnel and study facilities at the site already.

Project director Ward Sproat, at a meeting Friday with Nevada county officials, said railroad groundbreaking likely will be delayed beyond 2009, according to several meeting participants.

Sproat told them that he was not sure if the rail project would have the funding to start by then, officials said. DOE has routinely steered money from Yucca transportation segments to complete a license application that is considered to be a more pressing priority.

A 54-page draft national transportation document containing the new railroad cost estimates was circulated last week among state and local officials, potential repository vendors and other stakeholders.

DOE spokesman Allen Benson said the new dollar amounts for a Nevada railroad are based on "a better understanding of the cost of facilities, understanding there was a lot more work done on (the plan) and we have had a better look at the costs."

"As we come closer to construction, we will have to update the costs," Benson said. "This is where we are at this point."

The rail cost estimates include features such as an equipment yard, maintenance facilities, a train control center and sidings to connect the line to existing track in Caliente, according to the DOE transportation document.

Bob Halstead, a transportation consultant under contract to the state of Nevada, said DOE's estimate still might be low.

"Not knowing what went into these numbers but having done detailed cost exercises and having revisited the numbers to adjust them, I would say these DOE numbers seem credible but they still might be too low. The high number could be $3.6 billion or $3.7 billion," Halstead said.

Halstead also said that as the rail costs continue to grow, DOE might come under pressure from trucking companies to abandon rail and ship nuclear waste to the Yucca site by truck as a more economical choice.

That scenario would open a host of new controversies, though, as the most likely truck routes would traverse the populated Las Vegas Valley, he said.

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Las Vegas SUN
July 24, 2007

Editorial: Nuclear wasted

Federal government uses Gibbons' Yucca Mountain actions against Nevada

Go v. Jim Gibbons arrogantly dismissed wise advice on the state's battle to stop federal plans to put a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain and now is seeing it bite Nevada.

State officials say the Energy Department has been illegally using water for a drilling project at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Doing so violates a 2003 court-ordered agreement on water use, said State Engineer Tracy Taylor, Nevada's water czar.

However, instead of holding a firm line and immediately telling federal officials to stop, Gibbons decided to let the illegal water grab go on for 30 more days so workers at Yucca Mountain could wrap up the project.

On Friday an attorney for the Energy Department called Nevada's position "unacceptable" and argued that by allowing 30 days of water use, the state "implicitly recognizes" that the Energy Department has a legitimate need for the water.

As reported by Jeff German in the Las Vegas Sun last week, Gibbons met with other state officials involved in the Yucca fight and ignored their advice. With the Energy Department clearly in the wrong, they urged him to come down hard on the Energy Department, but Gibbons reminded all present that he was a lawyer and geologist. He gave the Energy Department room to maneuver and ammunition against the state.

He has clearly shown his ignorance on the issue, having, for example, to rescind an appointment last week to the Nevada Commission on Nuclear Projects after it was learned he had named a dump supporter to the panel.

The only good news on Yucca Mountain last week came from Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., a presidential candidate who showed a keen understanding of the issue. She called for congressional hearings on Yucca Mountain because of the flawed work and Bush administration's handling of it, and she said if she is elected she will stop the project.

That is the type of strong message that Nevada's governor should send to Washington. Gibbons' message, one of implicit conciliation, is unacceptable.

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ThomasNet Industrial
July 24, 2007

Nuclear Waste in Nevada to Wait
By Fred White

Having faced stiff opposition since its inception, the national Yucca Mountain Repository, an underground storage facility for nuclear waste in Nevada, won’t open for at least a decade.

In the early days of nuclear energy, dealing with radioactive waste seemed like an afterthought, and a stickling point, of the industry and its well-wishers. It soon became clear that not too many people wanted it in “their backyards.” As a result, the waste has remained near the nuclear power plants that produce it. Many people, including scientists at the National Academy of Science, had recommended a single, safe and well-protected place for it.

The U.S. stopped reprocessing nuclear fuel during the late 1970s by order of President Jimmy Carter, who wanted to curtail the availability of the weapons-grade material produced by the process. This decision turned what had been a resource back into a waste product, and “made the lack of a viable long-term disposal strategy for radioactive waste even more apparent,” according to a Carnegie Mellon University paper:

A 1987 Congressional amendment to the Nuclear Waste Repository Act of 1982 mandated consideration of only one location, Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. Since the act required that the [Department of Energy] DOE establish a permanent repository, the elimination of all other sites from review meant that Yucca Mountain was named as the location before the feasibility studies and environmental assessments had been completed. As might be expected, this situation has bred major litigation as well as significant opposition from forces in the state of Nevada.

The waste is currently stored at individual plants, awaiting permanent transfer to the national Yucca Mountain Repository in Nevada. But Yucca Mountain has faced stiff opposition and won’t open for at least a decade.

The DOE has announced plans to open the Yucca Mountain facility in Nevada as the nation’s permanent underground storage facility for radioactive nuclear waste by 2017, when the facility is expected to begin accepting nuclear waste.

This date assumes full necessary funding is provided, there are no litigation delays, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) completes review of the License Application within three years of submission, and the NRC finds that the DOE has the necessary nuclear quality and safety culture.

Polls indicate that a notable number of Nevadans are against the repository. Although about 15 percent of Las Vegas’ electricity for over two million people is supplied by the Palo Verde nuclear station in Arizona and about half the waste will be from America’s manufacture of nuclear weapons, a two-thirds’ majority of state residents still feel it is unfair for their state to have to store nuclear waste when there are no nuclear power plants in Nevada.

No one lives at Yucca Mountain, according to the project’s Web site, which says, “The closest year-round housing is about 14 miles south of the site… .”

One of the fears of water users in the Western U.S is leakage of radioactive particles from the Yucca Mountain site. In the West, water is precious, and perhaps with droughty weather, getting more so.

According to Eureka County’s Board of Commissioners and the DOE, the waste will be encased in a multilayer stainless steel and nickel alloy package covered by titanium drip shields that function also as rock shields.

Plans are for the nuclear waste to be shipped to the site by rail and/or truck in robust containers approved by the NRC. The transport of spent fuel in Europe and Asia is routine with few safety or security issues. Globally, train, truck and ship have already transported over 70,000 MTU (metric tons of uranium) of spent fuel.

In 2002, the Yucca Mountain Repository Project completed its site characterization activities. Also that year, Congress and the President approved the development of a geologic repository at Yucca Mountain. These approvals were based on two extensive scientific reports: the Yucca Mountain Science and Engineering Report, which describes the science and engineering completed during site characterization activities; and the Yucca Mountain Site Suitability Evaluation, which describes the information that supported the Secretary of Energy’s evaluation of whether Yucca Mountain is a suitable site for a repository.

In March 2006, the majority staff of U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works issued a 25-page paper called Yucca Mountain: The Most Studied Real Estate on the Planet. The conclusions:

• Extensive studies consistently show Yucca Mountain to be a sound site for nuclear waste disposal.

• The cost of not moving forward is extremely high.

• Nuclear waste disposal capability is an environmental imperative.

• Nuclear waste disposal capability supports national security.

• Demand for new nuclear plants also demands disposal capability.

Last month a Senate subcommittee voted to cut $50 million from Yucca Mountain spending in 2008, but its chairman said the DOE still should be able to meet the project’s goals for the coming year, reported The Las Vegas Review-Journal.

The House bill will fully fund Yucca Mountain, suggesting the final budget may be relatively close to the DOE request unless opponents force deeper cuts before final passage.

The $444.5 million Yucca Mountain budget proposed by the energy and water appropriations subcommittee amounts to a 10 percent slash in the current administration's request for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. The cost to continue storing nuclear waste at their respective plants is estimated to be anywhere from $200 billion to $400 billion.

Resources:

-The Western New York Nuclear Service Center (The West Valley Site)
New York State Energy Research and Development Authority

-Radioactive Waste Management: An Environmental History Lesson for Engineers (and Others)
by M. Joshua Silverman
Carnegie Mellon University History Department

-Eureka County Yucca Mountain Information Office Nuclear Waste Update
by Abby Johnson and Sarah Walker, Winter 2007

-SNWA's Water Efficient Technologies Program Surpasses 1 Billion Gallons Saved
Southern Nevada Water Authority, May 8, 2007

-YUCCA MOUNTAIN: Waste site request cut
by Steve Tetreault
The Las Vegas Review-Journal, June 27, 2007

-Nevada Study Shows Yucca Mountain Project Will Cost Much More than Storing Nuclear Waste at Existing Reactor Sites
Office of the Governor Agency for Nuclear Projects, Feb. 8, 2007

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KLAS-TV
July 23, 2007

Newest Fight Over Yucca Mountain Concerns Water

The newest fight over the Yucca Mountain waste repository concerns water.

President George Bush named the site 90 miles north of Las Vegas as the storage place for all of the nation's nuclear waste.

The state of Nevada has been fighting the Department of Energy in an effort to end the project.

The state engineer reinstated a cease and desist order on the use of the state's water to drill into the mountain for the repository.

The DOE filed their appeal Monday to be able to keep drilling so the repository can open in 2017.

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Environment News Service
July 24, 2007

AmeriScan: July 23, 2007

Clinton Urges Congressional Hearings on Yucca Mountain

WASHINGTON, DC, July 23, 2007 (ENS) - Senator Hillary Clinton of New York Friday called for congressional hearings on Yucca Mountain, the proposed geologic repository for the nation's nuclear waste about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada.

The Democratic presidential hopeful says she wants the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, on which she serves, to pressure the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to adopt clear radiation standards that would ensure public health and safety.

She also called on the Department of Energy to halt the project until the EPA takes action.

"There has been a great deal of confusion and stonewalling by the administration to finding appropriate, scientifically based information," Clinton said. "We need to get this information on the record and do everything we can to lay the groundwork to make it clear that we will not proceed with Yucca Mountain."

If elected president, Clinton said, she would "not go forward" with the project, which has been approved by Congress and the Bush administration.

The entire Nevada Congressional delegation is opposed to the repository.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Wednesday that an earthquake off the coast of Japan that caused the leak of radioactive water from the world's largest nuclear power plant is "yet another reason the State of Nevada cannot give up the fight against Yucca Mountain."

"The Yucca Mountain site is located on and adjacent to 33 faults, and is seismically active today. An incident like the one at the Japanese reactor would be a nightmare scenario at Yucca where several thousand times the amount of nuclear materials in Japan could be exposed."

"Instead of being released into the ocean, however, the radioactive material would be released into Nevada's ground water," said Reid.

"Under the current proposal, Yucca Mountain would contain all the nuclear waste generated from more than 100 nuclear reactors. A similar accident at Yucca Mountain would jeopardize the health and safety two million people living in Southern Nevada," Reid said.

In the past, Clinton has said she would refuse to fund Yucca Mountain.

"I've long opposed using Yucca as a site for nuclear waste," she said in March. "Yucca mountain is not a suitable place for long-term storage of our nuclear waste. There are too many unanswered questions about both the geology of the site and integrity of the science done to support the decision to store waste there."

"It's past time to start exploring alternatives to Yucca mountain, because we need to find a safe, secure long-term waste storage solution. As President, I would work with the scientific community to address this problem and come up with alternative solutions," Clinton said.

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Council on Foreign Relations
July 24, 2007

Japan Quake Tests Nuclear Nerves

Toni Johnson

Japanese officials agreed to work with UN inspectors after a powerful earthquake shut down the country’s largest nuclear plant (Reuters) and raised fresh concerns about its nuclear sector (IHT). The earthquake caused radioactive spills and other problems reportedly compounded by employee error. “All fifty-five (Japanese nuclear plants) have this kind of vulnerability,” a Kobe University seismologist told USA Today.

The incident follows last year’s order from a judge to shut down Japan’s second-largest plant because it was not earthquake ready. A series of other high-profile nuclear accidents (BBC), including in 1999 and 2004 (CNN), create a growing quandary for Japan—the world’s third-largest consumer of nuclear power behind the United States and France. Environmental advocates were quick to assert that the latest incident means nuclear power is unsafe (IPS).

Japan is not the only country in the world that has built nuclear power plants on or near fault lines. The Philippine government pays $155,000 a day in interest on a nuclear facility never put into operation because it was built near major fault lines (AFP). Energy-starved Armenia continues to run its Metsamor nuclear plant despite a nearby fault line and the safety concerns of European Union and U.S. officials. A 1988 quake in the region killed twenty-five thousand people. In the United States, two watchdog groups want to close a Michigan nuclear plant, which they believe fails to adhere to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s earthquake safety regulations for waste handling (AP). Concerns about earthquakes also threaten U.S. plans to build a nuclear waste repository (Las Vegas Sun) in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.

After the devastating quake in the city of Bam in late 2003, Iranian democracy activist Haydar Akbari questioned the sensibility of building a nuclear power plant in Iran’s city of Bushehr, which was destroyed by earthquakes (SFChron) in 1877, 1911, and 1962. A UPI article says a nuclear accident in Iran could prove devastating to the Gulf region and the world’s oil markets. Iranian officials and the German company that designed the plant—which the United States opposes over weapons-development fears—say it can resist up to a 7.2 magnitude earthquake.

Nuclear power safety has come a long way since the 1986 Chernobyl accident, experts say. In fact, plants in many countries have withstood significant earthquakes. The World Nuclear Association estimates 20 percent of the more than four hundred nuclear reactors worldwide operate in areas of significant seismic activity. Currently, seventy new power reactors are in the planning stages of construction, primarily in Asian countries with fast-growing economies and rapidly rising electricity demand. Another 150 have been proposed—some because greenhouse-gas constraints on coal power have renewed interest in nuclear power in Europe and North America. It is not clear how many of these planned sites are located near fault lines.

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Bangkok Post
July 24, 2007

Editorial: N-option needs careful thought

The earthquake that struck central Japan on Monday, July 16, may have also struck a blow to plans to ramp up construction of nuclear power plants worldwide. At the very least, it should have driven home the message that any plant to be constructed near a fault line must be built to withstand the strongest tremors.

After the 6.8 quake on July 16, there were initial reports that only a transformer had been damaged at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant in Niigata prefecture, with no release of radioactive materials to the environment. But as time went on, the reports grew more serious. It is now known that almost 400 gallons of highly toxic waste spilled into the Japanese Sea, a major fishing area, and that a ''small amount'' of Cobalt 60 and other cancer-causing radioactive contaminants escaped into the air.

It has since been disclosed that this plant and others nearby built by the same company were constructed to withstand only a 6.5 earthquake, which is a bit perplexing, given Japan's history of violent earthquakes. At this time it appears that the release of the radioactive materials, while alarming, does not pose a threat to humans.

It must be pointed out that several other nuclear reactors in the area suffered no damage, and also that on the whole the nuclear power industry, which includes around 440 generators worldwide, has proven remarkably accident-free, notwithstanding Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and a not-so-small list of lesser incidents.

However, the potential scale of the damage from an accident of Chernobyl proportions or greater makes it imperative that safety requirements err on the side of caution, particularly in earthquake-prone areas. The whole of Japan, of course, is such an area. There are 55 reactors in Japan, and almost all of them are on or near major fault lines. Some, but obviously not all, are built to withstand an 8.5 earthquake, which is considered the maximum magnitude which might be encountered. There are, of course, rare earthquakes on record which have been more powerful.

In the US, there are nuclear power plants in California located on or near known faults, and also in the mid-West region. It has been pointed out that the proposed repository for nuclear waste material at Yucca Mountain in Nevada lies on a fault line. The nuclear reactor being constructed near the Iranian city of Bushehr is near an active fault.

Probably no one knows for sure how many existing nuclear plants are on or nearby known fault lines. What's more, new fault lines are being discovered all the time. In fact, an analysis of the seismic data from the July 16 quake shows that the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, previously thought to be near a fault, is apparently directly on top of an extension of the fault.

Because of widespread public fears for the safety of nuclear power, it was not long ago an industry that seemed to have little future almost anywhere outside of Japan and France. Under the rationale that nuclear reactors don't produce greenhouse gases, a number of countries, including the US, China, Russia and England, are now planning to embark on an unprecedented and tremendously expensive building spree to make nuclear plants account for a large percentage of their energy production.

Thailand's Energy Planning and Policy Office also has plans to build a nuclear reactor in the coming years.

Nuclear power does have some significant advantages: it is a virtually inexhaustible power source, it emits no carbon dioxide and, for countries like Japan without hydrocarbon reserves, it offers an alternative to importing fuels at ever-increasing prices. But in deciding on what energy policy course to take, we should not forget the risk of accidents due to natural forces, which, besides earthquakes, includes an increased risk of catastrophic flooding in some areas due to climate change. And this must be considered alongside other risks such as terrorism, equipment malfunction and human error, and the seemingly insurmountable problem of safely storing large amounts of radioactive waste materials that will be highly dangerous for several hundred thousand years.

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Reno Gazette-Journal
July 23, 2007

Mixed messages, ambivalence on Yucca policy not acceptable
Editorial

A successful anti-Yucca Mountain policy calls for an unambiguous and united front, whether it concerns water, construction or transportation plans, or opinions about the potential utility to one county of a facility to store high-level nuclear waste in the state.

As far as most people knew, officials in Carson City and at state agencies, and members of the Washington delegation, including Gov. Jim Gibbons during the 10 years he was in Congress, were unanimous. Opposing the U.S. Department of Energy plan to store the nation's nuclear waste in the Nevada desert has been a statewide priority since the beginning. It should remain so.

The years-long opposition campaign has been one of lobbying, unearthing faulty science and uncovering fraud. Engineering problems went to court and transportation routes were rebuffed. Now, two puzzling events emerge.

The governor made a decision that would allow the federal government to use state water to conduct ground studies at the dump. And a Nye County appointee to the Nuclear Projects Commission wasn't as opposed to the dump as would be expected.

Fortunately, the appointee's soft spot for Yucca Mountain came to light. (It isn't a "dump," she said, but a "resource"; it is "absolutely going forward, so we might as well plan accordingly.") She wisely resigned.

That bit of business was handled, but then there is the problem of the feds' unauthorized use of state water.

A 2003 court agreement limited the Energy Department's water usage, and consistent with it, the state water engineer issued a cease-and-desist order in June. Later, however, the stay was lifted to let the DOE continue drilling for the next month, while two phases of a drilling project are completed. Information gathered from the drilling could be used to advance Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing. The DOE's actions comprise a total affront.

If water is to be used for any purpose, it should be to keep the feds from accumulating information to support licensing. And the actions of officials who declare their opposition should be clear and should not waffle.

Officials in Nye County, where Yucca Mountain is located, may be "proud ... of having something to do with developing the storage facility," but the prevailing opinion statewide is that it is not wanted in Nevada and should not be transported through Nevada. The court order should have been enough to keep the DOE out of the state's water affairs. Lifting a stay weakens the policy and opens the door to further violations. The governor's hand in these events says the state is ambivalent about Yucca Mountain and sends the message that resistance depends on who sits in the Governor's Mansion.

Mixed messages are not acceptable. That Nevadans will not break ranks is the only message that DOE officials should hear.

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Comment: Gibbons Doesn't Want the Dump Sun Jul 22, 2007 6:45 pm

Governor Gibbons wasn't siding with the DOE or the nuclear industry when he supported the decision of the State Engineer to allow water use for scientific drilling at Yucca Mountain for only 30 more days.

One can argue that the State Engineer and the Governor were protecting the interests of a small Nevada-based drilling contractor who would have lost money, and probably would have had to lay-off Nevada workers, if the drilling program was curtailed due to the State Engineer cutting off water use for the project.

The Nevada-based drilling company probably bid on the job for a given number of drill holes to be completed over a specified period of time. It's likely that the contractor invested in equipment to be able to perform under the contract. It's also likely that they would have had to hire additional Nevada-based staff to do the job.

While Governor Gibbons does not support Yucca Mountain, he probably felt it necessary to support the State Engineer's decision to extend the DOE another 30 days to complete the drilling. If fact, Governor Gibbons did the right thing in helping a small Nevada business to complete a contract. Why should a Nevada-based business get punished for being in the middle of the Yucca Mountain dispute?

Before criticizing the Governor, everyone should keep in mind that the extension is only for 30 days to complete the current drilling phase. I think the recent diatribe against Governor Gibbons by Senator Reid was completely uncalled for.

I think the Governor and the State Engineer should be commended for doing what they could to protect a Nevada-based small business from financial harm from having been in the middle of the Yucca Mountain dispute.

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Reader Comment: Sun Jul 22, 2007 8:37 am

I don't trust the governor. He has shown himself to be dishonest and willing to take money from special interests and willing to sell his vote.

Gov Fibby may be taking money under the table from the nuke industry to get the dump built in NV. What else would make him change his mind?

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CNNMoney
July 23, 2007

Going nuclear

The industry is gearing up to build its first new plants in decades. But are we comfortable with that? Join Fortune's David Whitford on a road trip into America's nuclear future.

By David Whitford, Fortune editor-at-large

(Fortune Magazine) -- "We were at heightened security - we were at red," recalls Al Griffith, spokesman for the utility that owns the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant in New Hampshire.

I'm standing with Griffith on a lawn of plastic grass (real stuff doesn't grow here?) inside the "owner-controlled area" at Seabrook, the outermost of three security zones. It's a glorious late-spring afternoon. Blue sky, scudding clouds, wind whipping across the tidal flats. Griffith is wearing wrap-around Nike sunglasses and a white polo shirt featuring Seabrook's flying-duck logo. Nice tan on this guy. I follow his gaze past coiled strands of concertina wire, beyond a black-windowed BRE (bullet-resistant enclosure) on stilts, to the salt marsh, which serves as a natural buffer between the reactor complex and the New Hampshire resort town of Hampton Beach.

A Texas company in Sudan

Europe's fattest cats

It was a Friday night, Griffith continues: March 21, 2003. One day after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The whole country was on red alert. In Seabrook fog lay heavy on the marsh. Just before 9 P.M., something out there, something deep in the darkness, triggered the "perimeter intruder detection system." At nearly the same moment, on the opposite side of the 900-acre complex, an unfamiliar vehicle approached a checkpoint. When armed guards waved the vehicle down, the driver suddenly reversed direction. Plant security, confronting what it now believed to be a simultaneous incursion by two unidentified intruders, tripped the alarm and declared a "security event." Local police sealed the exits. The armed heavies from the Seacoast Emergency Response Team arrived in force. "It was craziness," says Griffith, who was out drinking with friends that night when his pager went off. "Total lockdown." Griffith, besieged by media calls, didn't sleep for three days.

Four years later the identity of the marsh intruder remains a mystery, although authorities have narrowed the list of suspects. It was a "heron or turkey or some damn thing," says Griffith. And the occupants of the suspicious vehicle? Two skittish underage kids on a beer run who somehow missed the turnoff to DeMoulas Market Basket, then panicked and fled.

Listening to Griffith's story, I'm not sure whether I should feel reassured or alarmed. What I do know is that 54 years after President Eisenhower envisioned a future in which the awesome power of the atom would "serve the needs rather than the fears of mankind," a lot of us are still spooked. Griffith's own mother is so unnerved by what her son does for a living that she refuses to set foot inside the plant, which, by the way, has a visitor center, a nature trail, and a museum frequented by schoolchildren.

"We have found in demographic studies that particularly older Americans - they associate nuclear, the 'N word,' with explosion, with bombs, with war," says Griffith. "It's a difficult branding issue." The July 16 earthquake in Japan, which caused a fire at the largest nuclear-power complex in the world, tipped over barrels of contaminated material, and spilled hundreds of gallons of low-level radioactive water into the sea, reminded us that it's not just branding - the product has flaws.

Factor in all that, plus the daunting economics of nuclear power and the still-unsolved puzzle of how to safely dispose of nuclear waste, and you begin to understand why it's been more than three decades since the last successful attempt to license and build a nuclear power plant in the U.S. got underway.

It may surprise you to know that nuclear power has stayed with us all these years, stubbornly clinging to about a 20% share of U.S. electricity generation - about the same as natural gas but lagging far behind coal at 50%. (Globally, nukes have a 16% market share.) And while no new plants have come online since 1996 (construction began on that one in 1973), suddenly we're hearing lots of talk about a nuclear revival - or "renaissance," as the boosters call it. In June, Dale Klein, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), told a fired-up gathering of industry leaders in Atlanta that he's expecting applications for 27 new reactors over the next two years. "There is no serious opposition," says Tony Earley, CEO of Detroit's DTE Energy (Charts, Fortune 500), which hopes to file at least one of those applications. "This train is moving."

A lot of the push is coming from the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which is stuffed with generous subsidies for nuclear power and other alternatives to fossil fuels. Among them: billions of dollars in tax credits, loan guarantees, and insurance to cover licensing delays. Big corporations know which way the political wind is blowing. Texas power utility TXU (Charts, Fortune 500) won support from environmentalists for a $32 billion buyout deal in February in part by scrapping plans to build a fleet of coal-fired generating plants and pledging instead to build as many as five jumbo nuclear plants. GE (Charts, Fortune 500) and Hitachi, meanwhile, have created a multibillion-dollar partnership to build reactors, betting not only on power-hungry Asia but also on new thinking in the U.S. "It's hard to believe simultaneously in energy security and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions without believing in nuclear power," GE CEO Jeff Immelt told reporters in July. "It's just intellectually dishonest."

Probably the earliest a new reactor could come online in the U.S. is 2015, and even that seems optimistic. There is plenty of opposition, despite what Earley says. And anything could happen over the next decade or so to knock the train off its track. A terrorist attack on a nuclear facility anywhere in the world would halt all progress overnight. So would another Chernobyl. But right now the momentum is swinging nuclear's way. Among the many green-light factors: rising natural-gas prices; soaring electricity demand; the looming prospect of a carbon tax; a new, streamlined regulatory process; and growing acceptance by environmentalists that nuclear energy, which emits no greenhouse gases, could have a vital role in saving the planet.

This developing story has continental sweep, a huge cast of characters, multiple moving parts. So much of what we think we know we haven't reexamined in years. If we're going to try to reconcile nuclear power's cloudy past with the industry's bright vision of the future, we need to see for ourselves. Road trip, anyone?

Pausing now at a stoplight on Highway 1 as I'm leaving the Seabrook plant, I consult the GPS, turn the wheel of my little SUV toward the setting sun, and go. Already I have lots of questions. Who has the skill and know-how to build all those new plants? Where will we put them? How are we going to pay for them? Is the technology really safe? What about the waste? I'm just getting started. Two weeks, I figure this'll take. Seven thousand zigzaggy miles through America's nuclear past, present, and future. The most important lesson I will learn: Things are not always as we remember them.

How bad was Three Mile Island?

I'm on the river road south of Middletown, Pa., when I come upon a handsome blue historical marker commemorating "the nation's worst commercial nuclear accident." (You haven't lived until you've beheld a roadside monument to an event that occurred during your lifetime.) Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station is right there across the road, the iconic towers rising from a fern-shaped island in the Susquehanna River. Reminds me of the first time I saw the Eiffel Tower. Similar hyperboloid sweep, but that's not what's so striking. It's the weirdness - the sudden, disorienting displacement of a familiar mental image, derived from 1,000 pictures, by the thing itself.

Those towers carry a lot of symbolic weight, almost none of it appropriate. There's nothing specifically nuclear about them, for one thing. They're just cooling towers. A lot of coal-fired electricity plants use the same technology. That engine roar coming from the towers that sounds like a giant waterfall? That's all it is, water falling: 200,000 gallons per minute at about 110 degrees Fahrenheit, but not radioactive. And that's just water vapor coming out of the tops, of course, not poisonous smoke.

What's more, the towers played no part in the accident, even if they did wind up on the cover of Time. That whole drama began and ended several hundred feet away inside the Unit 2 containment building - starting before dawn on March 28, 1979, and unfolding over several days - and yes, it was undeniably scary and bad. There was an explosion inside the building, a partial meltdown of the reactor core, purposeful venting of radioactive gases, and a voluntary evacuation covering five square miles. The PR was inept, inflaming public fears. (Strange but true: The China Syndrome was playing in first-run theaters that week. As the tension builds, a nuclear engineer tells Jane Fonda that a meltdown could render an area "the size of Pennsylvania" uninhabitable.)

The cleanup took 14 years and cost $1 billion. Unit 1, while undamaged, did not reopen until 1986. Unit 2 is a sarcophagus, still highly radioactive, sealed tight until somebody figures out what to do about the remnants of hot fuel scattered around the basement of the containment building.

But guess what? No one died at Three Mile Island. No one even got hurt. Hard evidence simply does not exist that any living thing, animal or vegetable, was significantly harmed by the small amount of radiation released during the accident. Even in the most extreme cases, the exposure was less than anyone living in the area receives from natural sources. Eric Epstein, head of the citizen's group Three Mile Island Alert, whom I met for lunch at Kuppy's Diner in nearby Middletown, is certainly no fan of nuclear power, which he describes as a "very expensive economic adventure" and an "economic boondoggle." "They're still married to hubris," Epstein rails. "They can't get past their own arrogance." So where does Epstein live? Twelve miles from the plant. "I like the area," he says, shrugging his shoulders. "I encourage people to move here."

The other thing you can't pin on Three Mile Island is the blame (or credit, depending on your point of view) for halting the expansion of nuclear power in the U.S. In 1974, President Nixon predicted we'd have 1,000 commercial nuclear reactors operating by the end of the century. Not even close. No more than 250 were ever ordered, only 170 filed for permits, just 130 opened, and 104 remain. What happened? Construction delays, cost overruns, high interest rates, systemic safety issues, a whole lot of no-nukes protesters, and a surprising dropoff in electricity demand, all of which predate 1979. Three Mile Island didn't kill the nuclear dream. It was just another nail in the coffin.

Can the industry be trusted?

On to Washington. David Lochbaum is a respected critic. He was smitten at an early age by the magic of the atom. He has thrilling childhood memories of visiting the world's first nuclear aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise, in the shipyard at Newport News, Va., and hearing about all the cool peacetime projects that his dad was working on at Westinghouse, like plutonium-powered artificial hearts and floating nuclear power plants. None of those projects came to fruition, but no matter. "It seemed nuclear had a lot of promise," says Lochbaum. "I wanted to follow that up."

Trained as a nuclear engineer, Lochbaum spent 17 years working in nuclear power plants across the South. What finally ruined it for him, he says, was the industry's lackadaisical attitude toward safety. When his bosses didn't respond to his concerns, he went to the NRC. When the NRC failed to act, he took the issue to Congress as a whistleblower, and in 1996 he crossed over to the other side, becoming director of the Nuclear Safety Project with the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in Washington, D.C. I met him in his cramped office on H Street, working well past dark one Thursday evening. Behind his desk is an old wall map labeled "Nuclear Power Reactor Sites in the United States - March 1979." Still largely accurate, I can't help but notice.

Lochbaum says he'd never have taken this job if UCS were an abolitionist outfit, but unlike Greenpeace, for instance, UCS is not opposed to the idea of nuclear power. Its concerns are more practical: that we'll ask too much of nuclear and it will fail to deliver for any number of reasons - political protests, disappointing technology, terrorism. UCS's bottom line: We should focus society's resources on renewables, conservation, and efficiency, not nuclear.

Especially, Lochbaum would argue, given the nuclear industry's propensity to screw up. Lochbaum said something to a reporter in June 2001 that he thinks "in hindsight was probably bad judgment." But it was clearly revealing. The question had to do with plant security - how a terrorist might cause trouble. "Buy a comfortable chair," Lochbaum riffed. "Buy a big-screen TV. Buy plenty of snacks and beverages. Sit back and watch sports while the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the nuclear industry undermine safety until they cause an accident." In other words, Lochbaum says, "it's not the antinukes, it's not an overzealous regulator that's been the industry's worst nightmare - it's themselves." While he believes most plants are run "very well" (Lochbaum's favorite nuclear operator is Dominion (Charts, Fortune 500), with two plants in Virginia and one each in Connecticut and Wisconsin), he sees a "widening gap between the haves and have-nots." His suggestion: more regulation and more enforcement.

Can we build them fast enough?

Next day, right around the corner at the Nuclear Energy Institute, I ask the industry's chief lobbyist, Alex Flint, what he thinks of Lochbaum's prescription. Good for the industry? Flint, who wears an impressive power suit and a bright-yellow tie, peers at me through thin-rimmed glasses for several long seconds. "My guys have over $100 billion worth of capital tied up in nuclear plants," he says finally. "They're concerned about the vagaries of overzealous regulators." He goes on: "We're going to submit combined operating and licensing applications at the end of this year for a number of plants. We estimate it'll take 42 months to get through the licensing process. We estimate it'll take us 40 months after we get the license to bring a plant online and actually start getting revenue." The only way that works, he says, is with a "broad base of support for nuclear power where we don't care who is in office one year or any other year. The industry has a time line that's longer than most politicians' time lines."

In fact, that consensus may already exist, thanks to the complex politics of global warming. Flint doesn't line up with environmentalists on every issue, but on climate change he's a true believer. ("I won't let my wife buy a beach house because I don't believe the water level will stay where it is until I get the mortgage paid off. That's my personal view.") So if Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton want to talk about nuclear power as a solution to global warming, Flint is happy to have that conversation.

Bottom line: Flint, who was majority staff director for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee when the Republicans were in control, says the last time he tried to count the hard-core antinukers in Congress, "I couldn't get to 20." Even Al Gore is wavering. Gore pointedly ignored nuclear power when he addressed ways to reduce carbon emissions in his film, An Inconvenient Truth, but in March he told a House committee hearing, "I'm not an absolutist in being opposed to nuclear. I think it's likely to play some role."

Flint knows that nuclear power all by itself can't solve the climate crisis. The industry will be hard-pressed to simply preserve its global market share as electricity production booms over the next half-century, much less steal share from fossil fuels. In the U.S. alone, according to a new study by the Council on Foreign Relations, given the age of the existing nuclear fleet, "the replacement rate would be on the order of one new reactor every four to five months over the next 40 years." This in an industry that's been dormant for 30 years, at a time when commodity prices for steel and concrete are soaring, and when qualified welders are almost as hard to find as nuclear engineers.

"I get very frustrated with people who say it takes too many nuclear plants to solve our climate problems," says Flint. "It takes a lot fewer nuclear plants than it does other technologies." Any way you look at it, he says, the investment required to meet the projected growth in demand for electricity in the U.S. is on the order of $750 billion to $1 trillion. "So the greatest issue for me is, How is that investment going to be made? Is it going to be made in coal, gas, nuclear, wind, solar? Yes, it takes a lot of nuclear power plants, but it takes a lot of anything."

What's the worst that could happen?

Turns out we had a near miss not long ago in the Midwest. I leave D.C., heading west and north, up through West Virginia and into western Pennsylvania, over the spine of the Appalachians. PENNSYLVANIA PRESENTS THE FUTURE OF COAL, the billboard says, CLEAN, GREEN ENERGY. And here and there, up on the ridgelines, stand small clusters of wind turbines, like scouts in an advancing army. Next day I arrive in Oak Harbor, Ohio, then head for the shoreline of Lake Erie. At the turnoff to Turtle Creek Marina I pull over by the side of the road and just sit for a while, staring at the cooling tower that looms above the Happy Hooker bait shop.

Unless you live around here, or in Toledo, 30 miles west, or possibly in Cleveland or Detroit, both less than 90 miles away, the name Davis-Besse may not mean anything to you. That's just lucky. During a refueling outage at Davis-Besse in 2002, employees discovered a "large cavity" about the size of a football in the head of the pressurized vessel that houses the reactor core. The cause of the cavity was later traced to leaks in nozzles that penetrate the interior of the vessel head. The water in the nozzles was slightly acidic. When it evaporated, it left behind boric acid, which over time ate through the 6 1/2-inch-thick carbon-steel head all the way down to 1/4-inch-thick stainless-steel cladding. As the hole widened, the internal pressure on the cladding intensified.

Scientists at Oak Ridge National Lab have since determined that if the plant had continued operating, the cladding ultimately would have burst. (Plant owner FirstEnergy (Charts, Fortune 500) says it would have found the leak in time to take "appropriate steps.") Had the cladding burst, the core would probably have suffered a meltdown, releasing about the same amount of radioactivity as at Three Mile Island - only this time it would not have been contained. "They came very close to an accident that would have been much worse than Three Mile Island and not as bad as Chernobyl," says Lochbaum. "You don't ever want to be in a place where those are your bookends."

Both the leakage and its corrosive effects were known issues. The industry committed in 1989 to investigate such leaks. Yet somehow Davis-Besse escaped detection until it was almost too late. What's more, in April 2000 an NRC inspector was handed a truly ugly photograph of the Davis-Besse reactor vessel head covered in acidic crud. No one saw it again until after the accident. The episode cost the utility company around $600 million.

Can the no-nukes movement regroup?

Sunday afternoon in Bexley, Ohio, east of Columbus. I'm standing on a quiet, tree-canopied street at the top of Harvey Wasserman's driveway, waiting for him to come outside, meanwhile reading the bumper stickers on his cars: BUSH LIED, PEOPLE DIED; CELEBRATE DIVERSITY; THE DEATH PENALTY IS DEAD WRONG. Makes sense. Three decades ago Wasserman was a leader in the Clamshell Alliance, the grassroots movement that delayed the opening of the Unit 1 Seabrook nuclear reactor for many years while making sure Unit 2 was never completed. Today, it happens, is the 30th anniversary of a landmark Clamshell victory - the release of 550 demonstrators who had spent two weeks locked up in New Hampshire armories. It was a huge win for the burgeoning movement. Wasserman was at Seabrook that day, handling communications with the press. Now he's a college professor, an author, a father of five daughters, and a Volvo driver living in the suburbs, but the fire still burns.

"I was present at the creation of the antinuclear movement," Wasserman tells me by way of introduction, once we're settled at a picnic table. "I actually coined the phrase 'No nukes.' It came through my typewriter." His opposition to nukes has not wavered since he was living on a Massachusetts commune in 1973 ("All those stories you've heard about hippie farms are true"), helping lead his first successful protest. "Not safe," he says now, "not economical, not green, not a solution to global warming." He gleefully searches for another phrase. "We have been trying for 30 years to drive a stake through the heart of this industry, but it doesn't seem to have one!"

In his book Solartopia!, Wasserman envisions a clean-energy future in which all our energy needs are satisfied by solar, wind, hydro, and biofuels. "If we put our minds to it, we could have all of that before they bring the next nuke online," he says. "The finances are going in the opposite direction of the nuclear power industry. Where do you find on Wall Street people lining up to invest in nuclear plants? No one can simultaneously argue for a free-market economy and for nuclear power. You can't! You cannot do nuclear power without massive federal subsidies. It's just not going to happen."

Before I leave, Wasserman has one more point to make: "I do intend to make it as difficult for them as possible. I will tell you that the antinuclear network is very much intact. It's a geezer battalion - I'm 61." He is silent for a moment, remembering. "In '77, I was 31. It was just so much fun. Some people are actually looking forward to doing it again. Those of us who can still walk will be back in droves, with our kids. This is not going to be a walk in the park for these guys."

Who will build them if they come?

Follow the Ohio River in the direction the current flows, all the way to the toe of Indiana, through Evansville and into tiny Mount Vernon, past the Civil War statue on the village square (a Union soldier; across the river he'd be a Reb) and out the other side of town, and you come to BWXT's Mount Vernon facility, the only factory in America that can still build large-scale nuclear components.

GE and Westinghouse used to do a lot of that kind of work too, building complex reactor vessels from massive forgings born in the steel mills of eastern Pennsylvania and shipping them worldwide. Both have since shed their nuclear manufacturing divisions and today focus on design. That leaves BWXT, and in time it will have to go to Japan Steel Works for its forgings.

When the bottom fell out of the market in 1978, the Mount Vernon plant went from employing 1,400 people to a ghost factory, ultimately allowing its coveted "N" security stamp - required for nuclear work - to expire. It got the stamp back a year ago, and already things are picking up. Right now Mount Vernon is working on two 60-ton replacement reactor heads for PG&E's Diablo Canyon facility in California. Plant manager Michael Keene and his boss Rod Woolsey, VP of the nuclear division, take me on a tightlipped tour of the factory floor, refusing to say much about the gleaming steel reactor vessels - some as big as circus elephants, others more like whales - I observe along the way. "Government" is all I can get out of them. Workers circulate on bicycles. No hardhats, which seems odd. Until I grasp that if anything in this pantheon topples, it will flatten my whole body, not just my head.

Back in D.C., BWXT lobbyists are working hard to juice the order flow, angling for legislation that would open up foreign markets to U.S. manufacturers and pushing for someone to stand up on the national stage and articulate a thrilling goal say, 30 new nuclear plants by 2030. Pointing out that much of the domestic nuclear industry is down to at most a single supplier for every major type of component, they're also asking for tax credits to train new workers and tax incentives on capital improvements. "If we can't do this type of blue-collar work," BWXT's chief lobbyist, Craig Hansen, told me, "we might as well throw our hands up and say we are no longer a manufacturing country." His pointed warning: "We may exchange one form of energy dependence for another form of energy dependence."

What will happen in an emergency?

I'm following another river road, this one tracking the Mississippi near Hahnville, La., 20 miles west of New Orleans in what used to be rice and sugarcane country. Now it's an industrial zone. There's a big Union Carbide chemical plant in Hahnville, and right next door, a nuclear plant, Entergy's Waterford 3 reactor, and outside Waterford 3, a hair-raising public-information billboard, headlined WHAT WILL HAPPEN IN AN EMERGENCY AT WATERFORD 3?

"If there is a problem, state and parish officials will decide how severe it is. Most problems will not affect you. If the experts decide there is a serious emergency, however, you may have to protect yourself. Stay as calm as you can. You will have some time to take the needed steps. Remember that nuclear plants do not explode.

"Do not use your telephone. Do not call or go to your children's school. Cover your nose and mouth with a handkerchief or other cloth. Close the windows and doors if you are in a building or car.

"What if you are told to SHELTER IN PLACE? Go inside your house or some other building. Stay inside until your radio or TV says you can leave safely. Keep your pets inside.

"What if you are told to evacuate? Get your family together and prepare to leave. Pack only what you will need most."

Reading that, my heart goes out to Ann Jupiter, who has lived in the shadow of Waterford 3 since it was built in 1985. "It's always scary," she told me when I stopped to visit. "When it ain't doing nothing, it's scary."

What's it really like inside a nuclear power plant?

More than halfway through my journey now, crossing Texas today from Bay City on the gulf to the New Mexico border, I'm thinking about all the nuclear plants I've seen so far - a total of 14 reactors in nine states - and what I've learned.

I've learned that nuclear power is concentrated along the Eastern Seaboard but that Illinois has more nuclear plants (11) and generates more nuclear power (nearly 95 million megawatt-hours) than any other state.

I've learned that nuclear plants are almost always off someplace by themselves, which makes sense. People don't want to live next to one if they can help it. Animals don't care, though. In fact, animals find a lot to like wherever there's a nuclear plant, starting with the absence of human beings. Plus nuclear plants don't make a lot of noise. They don't poison the air with dirty smokestacks, the way coal plants do. They don't kill birds, the way wind turbines sometimes do. No wonder so many nuclear plants are surrounded by nature preserves.

I've learned that the inside of a nuclear plant is all cramped corridors and shiny floors and exposed pipes. That you have to wear earplugs in the turbine room and a hardhat almost everywhere, but that the earplugs go in your pocket and the hardhat comes off when you and your escort knock on the control room door and ask permission to enter. Nothing dangling - that's the rule in the control room - and nothing that might fall off our head and trip a switch that's better left untripped.

I've learned about the etymology of SCRAM, an acronym reportedly coined by Enrico Fermi, who presided over the world's first nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago on Dec. 2, 1942. Fermi stationed a colleague, Norman Hillberry, next to the rope used to raise and lower the control rods, with an ax. Hillberry's job, if called upon, was to chop the rope with a single swing, immediately halting the reaction. Hillberry's title, the story goes, was Safety Control Rod Ax Man. I didn't see any axmen in the control rooms I visited, but I saw plenty of red SCRAM switches - same thing. Sometimes they're labeled "RX Trip." Give one a 45-degree clockwise yank, and the control rods plunge into the core and the reactor shuts down in seconds.

I've learned that since Three Mile Island, every nuclear plant in America has at least two inspectors from the NRC onsite at all times. They have the best passes available, offering free run of the plant, anytime, anywhere. And since Three Mile Island, I've also learned, every control room operator spends a week in training and testing at regular intervals in a customized simulator room, identical in every detail to the control room where the operator works.

I've learned that a nuclear plant is like a refrigerator it hums along pretty well all by itself, with minimal human intervention, except when you have to shut it down. Then you have a lot of work to do. I've learned that spent fuel rods are stored in 40 feet of water; that while a fuel-rod pool room is technically an RCA (radiation-controlled area), you can walk right up to the edge of the pool and look down in there and gaze upon the fuel rods in their honeycomb tombs, hot and glowing from the radiation still in them, and not worry about getting sick. But if you were to tumble into the pool and dive down to the bottom and touch one, you'd never make it back to the surface.

Will we have to rely on a foreign source of fuel?

I arrive around lunchtime in tiny Eunice, N.M.? Pretty bleak, this place, at least to my Eastern eyes: all pump jacks and natural-gas lines, otherwise not so much as a bump on the landscape. "It's good when it's good" is how Brenda Brooks from nearby Hobbs assesses the local economy, "and it's really bad when it's really bad." Which helps explain Brooks' new job. She's director of communications and community affairs for Urenco, a European consortium that's building the first advanced fuel-enrichment plant in the U.S., just 4 1/2 miles east of Eunice. The hope in the U.S. is that the new factory will help lessen our reliance on foreign sources of enriched uranium, much of which now comes from Russia. The hope in Eunice is that it will bring a measure of economic stability to the region, once it's up and running in 2009 and employing 300 people. Already, says Brooks, there are hundreds of construction workers on site, most of them living in overstuffed trailer parks in Eunice and Hobbs. Community resistance was minimal, but Urenco was taking no chances. The company flew community leaders to the Netherlands to see an identical plant that has been operating safely for years. "There's a day care across the street, and there's nobody running around with four legs and horns growing out of their forehead," says Brooks. "It's all cool."

Where will we store the waste?

The Yucca Mountain tour starts here in Las Vegas, at the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management. "There is a billion or two dollars' worth of science studies, but there's no nuclear waste out there," says Allen Benson, publicity director. Benson has been here 11 years, so he has given this rap a few times before. Says there's room at Yucca Mountain for "70,000 metric tons" of nuclear waste. (Which tells you something right away. It tells you that the origins of this hoary federal program date all the way back to that hopeful period when it seemed possible that Americans might be persuaded to convert to metric weights and measures. He means 77,000 regular tons.) "Whatever happens with nuclear power, nuclear renaissance, what have you," says Benson, "we currently have about 55,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel already, which something has to be done with." Absolute best-case scenario: Waste starts arriving in 2017. "That means everything occurs as we need, we get the appropriations we need - but it does not account for litigation. There will be litigation. We have no illusions about that." Nye County, the vast chunk of desert mountainscape that encompasses not only Yucca Mountain but also a former nuclear bomb test site, is not the issue. Nye County has been cashing Energy Department tax-equivalency checks for years - in 2007 it got $11.25 million, or about one-third of its operating budget. But nine other counties are contiguous to Nye including Las Vegas County - and the law says they all get their say. Already the NRC has built a dedicated facility in Las Vegas, out near the airport, just to host the hearings. Those get underway late next year.

The costs so far are staggering: About $9 billion since the inception of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1983. But that's just the beginning. What Benson calls the "total system life-cycle cost" - covering final regulatory approval, complete construction, the transport of radioactive waste to the site, and the storing of said waste in such a way that all interested parties are satisfied that it won't be disturbed for at least 10,000 years - that total stands at $58.5 billion. "We're working on a revised total-cost analysis," says Benson. "It will be higher." Yucca was supposed to begin receiving waste in 1998. When that didn't happen, the utilities were forced to make other plans. Existing spent fuel pools, like the ones I've seen, are at about 80% of capacity and projected to reach 100% by 2015. The next option is what's known as dry cask storage - basically, burying the spent fuel rods onsite. And Plan B, if Yucca Mountain never gets approval to begin receiving waste? There is no Plan B.

The drive to Yucca Mountain from Las Vegas in the Energy Department van takes about two hours. We park at the north entrance to the tunnel, don hardhats, and poke our heads inside. It's U-shaped, I'm told, and five miles long, but we venture just far enough to escape the heat. According to the plans, one day this tunnel will be the path down which sealed canisters of radioactive waste travel to their final resting place 1,000 feet below the ridgeline of the mountain. Construction of the tombs, however, has yet to begin, pending licensing approval. Other than testing, all progress at Yucca has been stalled since 1997.

What can a convert teach us?

Stewart Brand is a greenie from way back. Creator of the Whole Earth Catalog in his hippie days. Taught a generation about organic farming and composting toilets and how to live off the land. His house is a tugboat in San Francisco Bay, but his office is in a flowery, forested nook in Sausalito, Calif. Brand greets me all dressed in black, right down to his sandals - that's his style. White hair, what's left of it. Blue-gray eyes. A reading chair in the corner of his office and a grandfather clock. Many shelves of books, meticulously organized. Knows right where to find the ones he wants, pulls them out while we talk, drops them on the table, thunk.

"What did you think of Yucca Mountain?" he wants to know. Weird, I say. Dickensian. Probably doomed.

"Depending on how you count it, somewhere between $6 billion and $13 billion has been thrown down that rat hole," he says, and for that he blames ... himself. "Me and my fellow environmentalists," he means, "who said you've gotta prove that this is absolutely, perfectly safe for 10,000 years. You can't do scenarios for 10,000 years - everything flies apart. One hundred fifty or 200 years from now, humanity will either be pretty much unrecognizable, hovering around in terms of communication and starting to speciate new kinds of Homo sapiens, or if not that, we'll be back in the Stone Age, in which case a bit of radiation in Nevada is the least of our problems. So the whole thing, I think - not entirely intentionally - was set up as a self-defeating proposition."

There are alternatives. Brand got involved a couple of years ago with Canada's national debate on what to do about its nuclear waste. The solution Canada came up with? Rather than stash it for 10,000 years, put it away for 175 years, specifically seven generations. "Basically put it there while we think about it," says Brand. "See what other options come along. Each new generation of nuclear reactor is safer and cheaper and smaller and smarter than the previous one, and that will probably continue. Likewise whatever we might want to do with the spent fuel." Brand, if you haven't figured it out, is a convert. Or in his words, a "mild nuclear proponent." For Brand, the only real issue is global warming. And nuclear power, he believes, may be our best option. "From coal you get carbon dioxide. Billions of tons of carbon dioxide. The difference in consequence is enormous. In the context of carbon dioxide, suddenly spent fuel looks pretty good."

Brave nuke world?

The end of my journey brings me all the way back to the beginning, to the Idaho National Laboratory in southern Idaho. It was here, on Dec. 20, 1951, that Walter Zinn, a veteran of the Manhattan Project, fired up Experimental Breeder Reactor-1 and illuminated a string of four 75-watt light bulbs; the next day he lit the whole building. That was the first time atomic power had ever been used to generate electricity. Today EBR-1 is a tourist attraction. Not a very popular one - only about 5,000 visitors a year - but here it is, the original reactor vessel (you can stand on the head; it was decommissioned in 1964), the control room (retro, of course, but so are the new ones), and a string of replacement bulbs the tour guide assures me look just like the originals. High on the wall behind the reactor, preserved behind glass, are the chalk signatures of the 17 scientists and one janitor who were present that day. Afterward one of the scientists, Reid Cameron, climbed back up the ladder and sketched a crude illustration to go with the list of names, something he thought emblematic of their achievement. I can't make it out at first. Some kind of wild-eyed creature whose breath is the wind. Turns out it's the devil.

Over the years Idaho Lab scientists have designed and built 52 test reactors. Three are operational today, including the largest test reactor in the world. The mood at the lab these days is more hopeful than it's been in decades. Phil Hildebrandt, who's working on so-called Generation IV reactors - far-off technology that's safer, more reliable, and more versatile (with potential applications in the coming hydrogen economy) than anything that's out there today - says, "This is not unlike what we did 55 years ago with the Shippingport reactor in Pennsylvania. It's where government and the commercial world partner to develop things that are difficult for the commercial world to develop by itself."

Kathryn McCarthy, 45, a staff scientist at the lab since 1991, would be happy just to see one new plant built before she retires. "I'm sort of from that generation where we haven't done anything real," she says. "I've done lot of things on paper, a lot of testing. But to actually see that move to the next step and have a plant come online would be a huge deal, it really would."

Flying home that night, I'm thinking about what I've learned. I'm remembering what Stewart Brand said when I left him in Sausalito. Two important things. To his old friends in the antinuke movement, "Don't let up for a minute. Keep bearing down. But take in hand the other things that need to happen besides solar and wind and biofuels to actually get ahead of a problem that is already far ahead of us." And to his old enemies? "I'm sorry. I was wrong, you were right. I'm sorry."

Research Associate
Patricia Neering

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MIT News
July 23, 2007

Americans warming to nuclear power - MIT survey

Anne Trafton
News Office

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Americans' icy attitudes toward nuclear power are beginning to thaw, according to a new survey from MIT. The report also found a U.S. public increasingly unhappy with oil and more willing to develop alternative energy sources like wind and solar.

Moreover, the national survey of 1,200 Americans' opinions on different types of energy indicated growing concern about global warming -- but an apparent reluctance to pay to fight it.

Professor Stephen Ansolabehere, the MIT political scientist who conducted the survey through Knowledge Networks, a consumer information company, said he hopes that tracking Americans' attitudes toward energy will help policy-makers decide how to chart the United States' energy future.

"We're trying to understand what public policy in the U.S. should do to encourage new kinds of energy development or different patterns of energy consumption," Ansolabehere said.

The report, "Public Attitudes Toward America's Energy Options: Insights for Nuclear Energy," was recently published by MIT's Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems. Ansolabehere conducted a similar survey in 2002 as part of the MIT study, "The Future of Nuclear Power."

In the five years since the last survey, public preferences have remained fairly stable, but the percentage of people who want to increase nuclear power use has grown from 28 percent to 35 percent. That increase in popularity is likely due to concern over global warming caused by carbon emissions from fossil fuels, Ansolabehere said.

The Bush administration has been pushing to expand nuclear power, which doesn't produce carbon dioxide, but Americans are still concerned about storing nuclear waste. Nearly 40 percent oppose the proposed storage site at Yucca Mountain, Nev., and only 28 percent agree that "nuclear waste could be stored safely for long periods of time."

Because of those concerns, "getting the public behind a serious expansion of nuclear power in the U.S. is going to be difficult," Ansolabehere said.

While Americans have some doubts about nuclear power, they are more opposed to oil, which has dipped below nuclear as the least popular fuel source. In the 2007 survey, 74 percent wanted to decrease oil use, compared to 56 percent in 2002.

"People have really turned on oil in a big way," said Ansolabehere, a trend he attributes to rising prices and growing concern over the United States' oil dependency.

"People say, if not for our oil dependency, we wouldn't be in Iraq," Ansolabehere. Also, rising prices at the gas pump provide a daily reminder of the high cost of oil.

Not surprisingly, cost is one of the primary factors that people consider when making their energy choices, along with perceived environmental harm. Coal, which is seen as cheap but harmful, is unpopular.

The survey shows that people have an accurate idea of how much oil, gas, coal and nuclear power cost, but they tend to underestimate the costs of alternative sources like wind and solar.

Ansolabehere found that people strongly favor using more wind and solar power, until they are told that they are more expensive than traditional energy sources.

"People have a sense that wind and solar are a solution for now, as opposed to a solution for the future," he said.

The survey also found that even though concern over global warming has been rising in the past five years, that doesn't translate to a willingness to pay to combat the problem.

When people are asked how much more they would pay for their electricity to counteract global warming, the average answer is $10 more on their monthly electric bill. The amount needed would likely be closer to $25, Ansolabehere said.

That shortfall can be partly explained by the difficulty of visualizing the impacts of global warming, he said.

"It's something that will affect not this generation, and not the next generation, but the generation after that," he said. "Willingness to pay is going to be a big obstacle."

Ansolabehere said he also suspects that many people don't associate electricity generation with burning of fossil fuels, because the generation process is so removed from the home.

As people learn more about different types of energy and the costs and benefits of each one, it will be informative to see how their views change, said Ansolabehere, who plans to re-do the energy survey every few years.

The report was funded by MIT's Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems.

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MSNBC
July 23, 2007

Oh-Eight (D): Yucca Mountain Politics

BIDEN:

New York Post gossip columnist Liz Smith is smitten with Biden. “If I had ever met Sen. Biden, I'd have given him a big hug; he's so handsome, and the best foreign-policy expert in the Senate. He'd make a great Hillary running mate.”

CLINTON:

Here’s the latest Washington Post/ABC poll, which has Clinton with a double-digit lead over Obama. While we're skeptical of declaring anything about this primary campaign before Labor Day, one can't help but notice the progress Clinton is making in every poll that's been released over the last month. This latest national poll only reaffirms her frontrunner position. The lone downside? It will make the eventual closing of the gap over the next few months seem newsier than perhaps it is.

Come on, did you really think that MoDo was NOT going to weigh on the gender fight between Clinton and Edwards? Still, we'll admit, we expected something a bit saltier.

Since so many in the media made a big deal out of the fact that a woman lost the presidential race in France earlier this year, does that mean we'll see the same level of coverage of India's historic election of a woman?

More evidence that Clinton is using her Senate seat to help her presidential bid? She's calling for congressional hearings on Yucca. That should be popular among Nevada Democrats -- and frankly all of Nevadans should she become the nominee.

Here's what Nevada political guru Jon Ralston wrote in his Friday evening "Flash" about Clinton's call for hearings: "I'm as cynical as anyone on Yucca, but those are some of the strongest words any candidate has ever made on the dump. Call it pandering. Call it smart politics. But she is on the record