Yucca Mountain News Clips
Friday, November 16, 2007
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
November 15, 2007

Yucca engineer defends design of nuclear dump

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- The Yucca Mountain chief engineer on Wednesday defended the Department of Energy's level of design for the radioactive waste site, saying the project does not need to map "the last nut or bolt" to show it is safe.

Critics have seized on comments by DOE officials that designs for the proposed Nevada repository for used nuclear fuel will be 35 percent to 40 percent complete when DOE applies for a construction license in summer 2008.

The repository would be built about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto has asked the Senate environment committee to prevent DOE from filing an application "that does not contain final designs for all the proposed Yucca Mountain facilities."

Speaking to a Nuclear Regulatory Commission advisory board Wednesday, DOE official Paul Harrington said the department is forming blueprints to a level where the repository's safety can be judged, and it would not add anything to go further at this time.

Harrington, director of the Office of Chief Engineer on the Nevada project, said DOE has not detailed "all the warehouses, the administration building, the parking lots, the heavy equipment maintenance facility, but 100 percent design represents that."

Many parts of the site and the details of how they might be built "have no bearing on identification of what the facility is or what its operating basis for a safety case is," Harrington said in response to a question on the matter.

NRC officials also have expressed surprise at DOE's comments about Yucca blueprints, and have asked for an explanation. Harrington said officials from the agencies will discuss the issue at a management meeting in December.

Cortez Masto asked Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., to take action on the design matter. Boxer, the chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has not said how she plans to respond.

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Las Vegas SUN
November 15, 2007

Editorial: More than neon and slots

Nevada offers presidential candidates a cross section of America's concerns and issues

Democrats have pushed Nevada into political prominence, moving the state's caucus to January and making Nevada among the first in the nation to weigh in on a presidential nominee.

Tonight Democratic presidential candidates will have a chance to address some of the key issues facing the country in a debate at UNLV's Cox Pavilion. National pundits may fall back on casino cliches or Elvis jokes, but Nevada is a perfect setting for a national debate. The state is a microcosm of America. The proposed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain may be seen as a signature issue in Nevada, but Nevadans are more than single-issue voters.

For example:

* War in Iraq. Nevadans are troubled by the Bush administration's inept handling of the war and have a personal interest - Nevada is home to two prominent bases, Nellis Air Force Base and Naval Air Station Fallon, and thousands of members of the military.

* Terrorism. Some of the 9/11 hijackers spent time here, and there is legitimate concern about the Strip being a terrorist target. As well, McCarran International Airport is one of the busiest in the nation, with more than 46 million people a year traveling through it, making transportation safety a paramount issue.

* Water. Nevada is grappling with how to bring water to a rapidly growing population. As states in the Southeast are trying to come to terms with a drought, officials in Nevada have worked with other states and the federal government for years to deal with drought in the Colorado River basin.

* Energy. Nevada's opposition to Yucca Mountain goes to the heart of a broader debate on nuclear power and the nation's energy policy. Nevada is well-positioned to become a national leader in sustainable energy, with a solar plant in Boulder City and plenty of potential for wind, geothermal and more solar power production.

* Economy. Although the state's economy has been fairly vibrant, it is largely dependent on tourism, which fluctuates with the national economy. As the economy softens, Nevada may feel the pinch. The state is already the epicenter of the housing crisis with one of every 185 homes in foreclosure, the nation's highest rate.

With Democrats eyeing an opportunity to take the White House, they are wise to focus on Nevada, because what matters to Nevadans matters to America.

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Reno Gazette-Journal
November 15, 2007

Nevada readies for Dem debate

Anjeanette Damon

LAS VEGAS -- The lights are hung. The camera angles are set. The campaign signs are posted. And Nevada voters are on standby.

All systems are go for the first presidential candidate debate in Nevada's history, scheduled at 5 p.m today.

The Democratic Party's seven leading candidates will take the stage at Cox Pavilion at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas for the two-hour debate broadcast live on CNN.

Here is a look at some of the last-minute scenes that played out Wednesday as the campaigns, the campus and CNN wrapped up weeks of planning:

The campus: Students milling around UNLV on Wednesday took little notice of the preparations under way for a debate expected to draw national and international coverage.

"I knew it was coming, but I haven't heard a lot of people talking about it," anthropology major Miriam Girard said as she waited for a shuttle to take her to class Wednesday morning.

Girard, already a solid supporter of U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, said she's "got so many qualifications it's unreal."

But she said she hopes the candidates take the chance to talk about better funding for student loans and dealing with increasing interest rates.

Civil engineering major Jesus Campuzano said the university could have done a better job publicizing the event. By the time he heard about it, it was too late to get tickets, he said.

He wants to hear the candidates talk about the minimum wage (he wants to see it increased some, but not too much) and slowing the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository project.

David Tonelli, UNLV spokesman, said the university worked to ensure students were involved in the debate. Many were offered tickets to the hall and an on-campus watch party.

"Students aren't passive observers, but they have actually been involved," he said.

A lucky few were picked as stand-ins for CNN to use to set camera angles, Tonelli said.

The Cox Pavilion: CNN crews finished installing a set that stretches nearly as high as a one-story building. The work took several days.

Security is high. Banks of metal detectors outside the pavilion screen the 1,000-

member audience and the nearly 300 credentialed media.

The Democratic Party has spent the past two weeks vetting the general public who received tickets to the debate.

"We've made sure that any general public who receives tickets are Democrats," state party spokeswoman Kirsten Searer said. "We had to gather their personal information for Secret Service."

Audience members for a special 100-person "red zone" received a more detailed vetting. During the second hour of the debate, undecided Nevada voters in the red zone will be able to question the candidates.

CNN officials did not release identities of the voters selected to be potential questioners, culled from various organizations involved in voter turnout, such as the Culinary Union, the Parent Teacher Association and the AARP.

"We're vetting them to make sure they are who they say they are, and that they don't work for any campaign," said David Bohrman, CNN Washington Bureau chief.

The campaigns: Political observers said the debate could be a turning point in the lead up to Nevada's Jan. 19 presidential caucus, prompting voters to tune in the race.

"People are really beginning to see that it is almost time to make up their minds," Bohrman said. "Instead of just being a spectator, they're starting to listen so that they can cast their vote."

Nevada campaign workers aren't letting the opportunity go by to grab voters' attention. Giant signs are being constructed. Heavy equipment is being rented.

The Clinton campaign has hired a bagpiper to lead a procession of supporters from their headquarters to the debate hall.

The John Edwards campaign has built 6-foot high letters spelling E-D-W-A-R-D-S and signed up Desperate Housewives star James Denton to mingle with supporters outside of the hall.

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KLAS-TV
November 15, 2007

National HAZMAT Conference Held in Las Vegas

Edward Lawrence

The people around the nation who deal with the most dangerous substances are here in Clark County. First responders, fire fighters, local homeland security, and government representatives converged at the Tuscany Hotel for a national HAZMAT conference.

Clark County commissioned a study to see the impact of adding nuclear shipments to Yucca Mountain in the valley. The study tracked what kind of hazardous materials and how much travel here in Las Vegas by rail and by truck.

Everyone who has seen the study was surprised at the sheer volume of dangerous material on the roads.

The stuff inside one truck could kill if the driver crashed, breaking open the tanker. It's just as deadly as the gas in a rail car. Recent near disasters opened some eyes in Las Vegas.

On Aug. 29, a runaway tank car full of deadly chlorine raced within a quarter of a mile of the Las Vegas Strip. Clark County HAZMAT experts say a crash, cracking the tank, releasing the gas could kill everyone outside within a half-mile radius.

On Nov. 1, a truck full of diesel fuel hit debris on Interstate 15, near the Spaghetti Bowl, cracking the tank. Two miles later, the driver realized it had been ruptured. The spill caused six accidents and seriously injured one person.

Both incidents could have been worse. The new HAZMAT flow study shows how lucky we have been.

Sheila Conway, Urban and Rural Research Managing Partner said, "Some of the nastiest materials known to man are coming through here every day now."

Sheila Conway actually did the study for the county. She found that Clark County has just 19-percent of the highways in the state, but 64-percent of the hazardous material in Nevada travels though here -- mostly on Interstate 15.

We are talking about 753 truck loads carrying about 8,000 tons a day of potentially deadly materials on our roads each year.

"That congestion, coupled with the growth we are experiencing, is a potential prescription for disaster," said Conway.

Conway says rail schedules are predictable raising another concern, especially since nuclear waste the government wants to store at a Yucca Mountain repository would take the track next to the Strip.

"To add this type of material, when you know the schedule which makes it more vulnerable to a terrorist attack," said Conway.

Las Vegas lawmakers cannot ban HAZMAT shipments by federal law, so we are stuck with this growing issue.

What's worse is the trucks carry poisonous gasses, military bombs, other explosives, even infectious substances -- and 42 other types of material which could kill a lot of people very quickly.

Clark County Nuclear Planning Manager Irene Navis says an accident on Interstate 15 behind the mega-hotels where a container breaks could cripple the Las Vegas tourism.

"When I am next to a tanker, I usually move. I know that if I see certain placards on a vehicle, I usually move out of the way," said Navis.

As dangerous as that may be, Navis says what's on the railroads may be worse.

"The quantity is higher on rail because you can ship more, but the frequency, because of smaller quantities at a time, is going to be truck," said Navis.

The chance of an accident on the highways may be greater. But an incident on the railroad could cause more deaths because amount being hauled. Rail safety records have been improving over the past 10 years. Accidents are down. Still, all it would take is one time to cause a major problem.

Each shipment is supposed to be labeled. Sometimes the driver forgets. Regardless, 71-percent of the dangerous stuff just travels through Las Vegas.

Twice a week, Kelley Kirk drives his 18-wheeler between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. "I have hauled everything from cattle to explosives."

He sees the accidents congestion can cause. It just takes one crash with a truck carrying something needing a warning to change our luck in Las Vegas.

This kind of study has not been done in the past decade. Meanwhile, the conference started Monday morning and will go until Thursday. It's called the HAZMAT Explo.

It highlights the importance of knowing how to handle what materials come through a community. It also deals with weapons of mass destruction and homeland security issues.

All of the people at the conference from Virginia to Missouri to Nevada need to plan for the worst, because HAZMAT accidents can be some of the deadliest.

"A lot of folks come back with tools they can use right in the workplace, with tools they can use Monday morning," said Carolyn Levering, Clark County Emergency Management Planning Manager.

Eight hundred people attended the conference.

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KLAS-TV
November 15, 2007

Nuclear Agency Gets Sparkling New Building in Las Vegas

Edward Lawrence

In a shiny new building, employees at the government agency deciding if a nuclear waste dump in Nevada gets a license to open waits for the application.

Eyewitness News looks in depth at the Nuclear Regulatory agency's new hearing room in their new building in Las Vegas and why the federal agency says it's not wasted tax dollars.

As shiny as a new bank and as secure as a federal courthouse, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's building will be the sight of a showdown 20 years in the making.

Although Eyewitness News could not get an exact figure, the building cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. It's just another example of waste according to Nevada's elected leaders.

Senator John Ensign (R) said, "The politics of Yucca Mountain, the science of Yucca Mountain being very questionable, I believe we are pouring money down a large rat hole in the state of Nevada."

A spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not agree. The NRC, as it's called, will decide if a Yucca Mountain repository gets a license to accept nuclear waste.

David McIntyre justifies the expense saying the hearings should be in Las Vegas. "The board wants to make it as easy as possible for various parties to participate in the hearing."

Former Governor Bob List agrees. He's on the payroll of a nuclear lobby group that supports the Yucca Mountain repository.

Fmr. Gov. Bob List, with the Nuclear Energy Institute, said, "It's very important for our state that we have these hearings here in Nevada and that everybody be able to have a seat at the table."

The NRC has a full time staff working there. Eventually the building will be a West Coast satellite where hearings for new nuclear power plants are heard. That's because there are now dozens of government employees looking for something to do.

They are in a $25 million to $30 million taxpayer funded building waiting on an application that has been delayed and delayed and delayed by more than a decade sending the total cost of the nuclear waste project from $80 million to $77 billion.

During the first hearing on Dec. 5, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will decide if the data the Department of Energy is using to support a nuclear waste dump in Nevada is complete enough to move forward to licensing.

In 2004, the state made the same challenge and won, which delayed the project three years.

The DOE wants to submit a license application by June of 2008.

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Dow Jones Newswires
November 15, 2007

US Senate Panel Queries Future Of Bush Nuclear Waste Program

Ian Talley

WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- The future of the U.S. government's ambitious global nuclear waste program became more uncertain Wednesday as a key Senate panel considered the plan's economic viability and security.

President George W. Bush's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, or GNEP, is central to the administration's strategy to spur a nuclear renaissance in the U.S. and around the world. Opponents say, however, that it will cost tax payers billions more to fund and could increase the risk of proliferation rather that secure non-proliferation.

The GNEP program, for which Congress has refused to provide the short-term funding the Energy Department has requested, was again subject to scrutiny Wednesday, this time by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The administration wanted nearly $395 million for the program this year, but is getting $167 million, and similar shortfalls are expected in next year's budget.

Late last month, the National Academy of Sciences published a report recommending that GNEP shouldn't be allowed to move forward because it believed the Department of Energy was too aggressively encouraging a specific reprocessing technology.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., chairman of the senate energy panel and a proponent of nuclear power, pointed to the Academy's recommendation and said the hearing fueled caution about allowing the GNEP program to proceed.

Dennis Spurgeon, the Department of Energy's assistant secretary for nuclear energy, defended the administration's plan and said that finding a commercially viable technology to reprocess spent nuclear fuel was "urgently" needed.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has started to receive a flood of applications for new nuclear plants - more than two dozen are expected in the next two years, but Spurgeon said an estimated 300 new plants would be required by the middle of the century "to make any kind of dent in (carbon dioxide) avoidance."

"It is paramount that leaders in this country seek to resolve the issues that inhibit the expansion of nuclear power, including providing a durable and credible nuclear waste disposition path," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman wrote in a Nov. 9 letter to the National Academy.

Besides funding research and development for re-processing uranium, the GNEP plan also aims to create an international system for civilian nuclear power that's ostensibly designed to meet growing energy demand while curtailing proliferation of material that could be used for nuclear weapons. Under the strategy outlined by Bodman, non-fuel cycle states would be able to develop civil nuclear power, but not have access to enriched technology and fuel that could be used for nuclear weapons programs. Under the U.S. plan, the five nuclear majors would agree to distribution controls and management of plutonium fuel and reactor technology. GNEP, therefore, would allow the U.S. and participating nations to form a cartel to influence international nuclear policy and technology.

In the U.S., nuclear power has gained political standing in recent months and years - even among politicians that have previously opposed it - given that it doesn't emit greenhouse gases thought to cause global warming and could potentially offset a significant portion of the U.S. reliance on energy imports.

How to handle the fuel waste, which can remain dangerously radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, has remained elusive, however.

A proposal to store the waste from existing nuclear power plants - not including the waste from any new plants - underground in Yucca Mountain, Nev., has practically stalled. Mounting opposition for storage there from Democrat lawmakers only increase the possibility that the project, already many-years delayed and billions over-budget, will move ahead. Nuclear utilities have been paying a fee into a fund to help pay for waste disposal.

Reprocessing, Spurgeon argued, could potentially cut the time that the waste is radioactively dangerous to just several hundred years, however, and is anxious to fund research and development into the technology.

But opponents of the administration's GNEP research and development program say it focuses on one particular type of reprocessing technology too aggressively, before it's been proven to be secure and commercially viable.

Peter Orszag, Director of the Congressional Budget Office, told the committee reprocessing would cost an estimated 25% more than storing the fuel, or around $ 5 billion more annually for just the current amount of nuclear waste produced by power plants in the U.S.

Matthew Bunn, a senior research associate and atomic energy expert at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, said not only would reprocessing spent fuel cost more than Yucca Mountain storage, but it also increased the risk for proliferation. Bunn testified before the Senate committee that states with the new reprocessing technology "would gain experience, infrastructure, and materials that would allow them to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons more rapidly and less cost."

"All of the spent fuel processing approaches proposed for GNEP pose higher, not lower, proliferation risks than are posed by not processing the spent fuel at all," Bunn said.

Earlier this month, the DOE awarded four contracts to study the feasibility of using recycled nuclear power plant fuel in advanced-technology reactors, including to a consortium led by French nuclear power plant supplier Areva ( CEI.FR) and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (7011.TO).

Spurgeon said the DOE was considering establishing a government corporation to carry out GNEP activities.

"That is one of the structures we are looking at that might be able to do that in a way that is self-funded, and not require an annual appropriation," he said.

Bunn said he wasn't opposed to research and development of reprocessing. "But what closes off all options and locks us into technology, is rushing to build commercial facilities now," he said.

Instead of disposal at Yucca Mountain, many senators are instead calling for continuing the practice of storing nuclear waste in dry casks on-site at nuclear power plants. The head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Dale Klein, last month told reporters that he believed dry cask storage was a safe solution.

Nuclear waste could be dry-cask stored, Bunn said, until commercially viable technology is developed that closes the half-life cycle radioactivity of the material.

-By Ian Talley, Dow Jones Newswires; 202 862-9285; ian.talley@dowjones.com

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Heritage Foundation
November 15, 2007

Competitive Nuclear Energy Investment: Avoiding Past Policy Mistakes

by Jack Spencer

Backgrounder #2086

Nuclear power is a proven, safe, affordable, and environmentally friendly alternative to fossil fuels. It can generate massive quantities of electricity with almost no atmospheric emissions and can offset Amer­ica's growing dependence on foreign energy sources. The French have used it to minimize their dependence on foreign energy, and at one time the United States was on the path to do the same.

However, the commercial nuclear energy industry in the U.S. is no longer thriving. Investors hesitate to embrace nuclear power fully, despite significant regu­latory relief and economic incentives.

This reluctance is not due to any inherent flaw in the economics of nuclear power or some unavoidable risk. Instead, investors are reacting to the historic role that federal, state, and local governments have played both in encouraging growth in the industry and in bringing on its demise. Investors doubt that federal, state, and local governments will allow nuclear energy to flourish in the long term. They have already lost bil­lions of dollars because of bad public policy.

The United States once led the world in commer­cial nuclear technology. Indeed, the world's leading nuclear companies continue to rely on American technologies. However, in the 1970s and 1980s, federal, state, and local governments nearly regu­lated the U.S. commercial nuclear industry out of existence. U.S. companies responded by reallocating their assets, consolidating or selling their commer­cial nuclear capabilities to foreign companies in pro-nuclear countries.

This paper reviews how overregulation largely destroyed the nuclear industry and why it remains an obstacle to investment in the industry. This dynamic must be understood and mitigated before the true economics of nuclear power can be har­nessed for the benefit of the American people.

Private Investors in U.S. Industry

Private investors have a key role to play in rees­tablishing America's nuclear industry. The industry is no longer owned or supported by the govern­ment, although the Energy Policy Act of 2005 does provide some incentives to utilities. In general, pri­vate investors provide the capital and take the risks necessary to develop the nuclear industry. The gov­ernment's role should be to ensure safety and allow the industry--just like any other--to compete and flourish in open markets.

The heavy regulatory burden imposed on the nuclear industry creates enduring uncertainties about the future of nuclear power in the United States. While a strong public commitment does provide some near-term certainty, it still is accom­panied by regulatory and investment uncertainty. This does little for the long-term planning inher­ent in nuclear energy, which results in higher risk assessments for America's energy companies.

Investors are right to be wary. Anti-nuclear activists have already exploited the authority of public institutions to strangle the industry. Now these same public institutions must be trusted to craft good public policy that reestablishes the con­fidence necessary to invite investment back into America's nuclear industry. To be successful, the new policies must create an industry that does not depend on the government. They must mitigate the risks of overregulation but allow for adequate over­sight while preventing activists from hijacking the regulatory process.

Dependence and Vulnerability

The federal government heavily promoted nuclear power throughout the industry's rise in the 1950s and 1960s. The government essentially picked nuclear energy as a winner to supply America's energy needs. This public commitment attracted significant private investment during the industry's growth phase. Investors made decisions based on, among other variables, an expectation that the government would not suddenly turn against nuclear power.

The United States spent decades encouraging the private sector to invest in peaceful nuclear energy. This effort began with the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, which gave industry easy access to nuclear technology that was originally developed for national security reasons, and included the creation of follow-on public-private partnerships such as the 1955 Power Demonstration Reactor Program. The federal government worked with industry on a host of military, civil, and commercial projects throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Under the aus­pices of the Atomic Energy Commission in the exec­utive branch and the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in Congress, the government provided lucrative guaranteed contracts and other subsidies that protected investments and assured private-sec­tor access to the latest nuclear technology.[1]

The peaceful use of the atom, it was claimed, was the answer to future energy woes because it would produce electricity that, among other advantages, was "too cheap to meter."[2] The U.S. Navy's desire to expand nuclear propulsion in its fleet also heavily influenced growth in the private sector. Although direct subsidies, such as rapid tax amortization and funding for reactor construction, stopped in the late 1960s, entities within Congress and the executive branch continued to promote nuclear power with indirect support, such as market guarantees and access to technology.[3]

Private investment followed Washington's lead. In cooperation with the federal government, the private sector expanded capacity and capabilities and developed the necessary technology. Public policy effectively harnessed the power of the private sector to advance national objectives. The result was the emergence of a world-class nuclear industry.

However, the nuclear industry's success was due largely to public policy designed to promote its growth. Although the industry grew, it became overly dependent on government. This left it vul­nerable to shifts in public policy. When policy shifted toward outright opposition as the activist community convinced America's political left that nuclear power was dangerous, the industry predict­ably failed as investors cut their losses and moved capital to opportunities that were perceived as less threatened by increasing regulatory volatility.

Anti-nuclear activists understood that they could kill the industry by turning public opinion--and therefore a democratic government--against nuclear power. This process began in the early 1970s. Although other factors such as rising interest rates, recession, and economic chaos caused by the oil crisis contributed to the nuclear industry's deterioration, the growing regulatory burden was paramount.

Activists Gone Wild

Anti-nuclear groups used both legal intervention and civil disobedience to impede construction of new nuclear power plants and hamper the opera­tions of existing units. They legally challenged 73 percent of the nuclear license applications filed between 1970 and 1972 and formed a group called Consolidated National Interveners for the specific purpose of disrupting hearings of the Atomic Energy Commission.

Much of the anti-nuclear litigation of the 1970s was encouraged by factions within the govern­ment.[4] Today, activist organizations determined to force the closure of nuclear power plants, such as Mothers for Peace, continue to use the legal process to harass the nuclear energy industry.

Activists went well beyond simply challenging nuclear power in the courts. On numerous occasions, demonstrators occupied construction sites, causing delays. For instance, in May 1977, the Clamshell Alli­ance led a protest that resulted in the arrest of more than 1,400 people for trespassing at the Seabrook plant site in New Hampshire.[5] In California, the Aba­lone Alliance adopted similar tactics and frequently blocked the gates of the Diablo Canyon power plant.[6]

A watershed victory for the anti-nuclear move­ment occurred in 1971 when a federal appeals court ruled that the construction and operating permits for a nuclear power plant violated the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. As a result, util­ities were required to hold public hearings before obtaining a permit to start a project.[7] This decision created a major opening in the process that anti-nuclear activists could exploit.

Changing the Economics of Nuclear Power

The public-private relationship worked until nuclear power began to fall out of favor with public officials in the early 1970s. This, in part, led to bureaucratic restructuring in the legislative and executive branches.

In Congress, the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy was disbanded, and oversight responsi­bility for nuclear activities was transferred to multiple committees. This led to decentralized oversight and a weakening of nuclear policy in Congress. It also provided additional avenues for anti-nuclear lobbyists to influence Congress.

In the executive branch, the Atomic Energy Commission, which both advocated for and oversaw the nation's nuclear activities, was replaced by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which was given the sole function of reg­ulating the nuclear industry.

In addition, the role of the judiciary cannot be overemphasized. Congress's loss of enthusiasm for nuclear energy led to more aggressive regulation, and because jurisdiction over nuclear issues was divided among multiple committees, there was no unified congressional direction. The result was an expansion of costly and often unnecessary rules.

In June 2006, the NRC listed over 80 sources of regulation,[8] including over 1,300 pages of laws, treaties, statutes, authorizations, executive orders, and other documents. In addition to obvious legis­lative efforts, such at the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974, nuclear activities in the United States must comply with the Inspector General Act, the Clean Air Act of 1977, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1972, and the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, to name a few of the other applicable laws.

This created numerous opportunities for anti-nuclear groups to file noncompliance suits. Whether or not the groups' concerns were legitimate, regu­lators often responded with additional mandates, which were very easy to establish. A regulator could compel a change in plant design simply by deciding that it would add substantially to public health or safety. The problem was that NRC stat­utes did not define "substantial." Because the interpretation of NRC regulations was left to the discretion of individual NRC technical reviewers, each license application would often result in its own unique requirements.[9]

This inconsistency increased costs, further sour­ing Congress on nuclear power and leading to an endless spiral of legislation, regulation, and still more added costs. Between 1975 and 1983, 430 suits were brought against the NRC, leading to 2,349 proposed rules and regulations--each of which required an industry response.[10] The addi­tional and unexpected controls created industry­wide uncertainty and raised questions about the long-term economics of nuclear power. They also drove up capital costs.[11]

This was all done by the NRC without adequate information. The NRC recognized as early as 1974 that it was issuing regulations without sufficient risk assessment training or cost considerations. It did not even have a program to train employees in how to conduct a review using NRC guidance.[12] Yet the commission continued to issue regulation after regulation.

At the same time, state and local governments expanded their oversight functions. States often claimed jurisdiction over construction and opera­tions permits as well as environmental regulation. For example, while the Federal Water Pollution Control Act as amended by the Clean Water Act of 1977, the Clean Air Act, and the Solid Waste Dis­posal Act mandated that states enforce minimal fed­eral environmental standards, many states chose to adopt additional regulations.[13] Environmental stan­dards that varied from jurisdiction to jurisdiction imposed additional costs and opened additional avenues for anti-nuclear activists to exploit.

Today, many states exercise significant authority over the location and construction of nuclear reac­tors. Some jurisdictions have outright moratoria on new nuclear construction. For example, California prevents further construction of nuclear power plants until both the California Energy Commission and the federal government approve a method of disposing of nuclear waste. Most states that limit construction of nuclear plants use some variation of this theme.[14] Public commissions and referenda can impose additional restrictions.

The shifting regulatory environment gave rise to additional reviews from numerous public institu­tions. Once permits were obtained, additional design changes were often mandated--even during construction. This inefficient and time-consuming process increased the time required to build a nuclear power plant by 42 percent (from 86 months to 122 months) between 1966 and 1970. From 1974 to 1984, the average construction delay was nearly 40 months, and between 1956 and 1979, the average construction permit review time increased fourfold. The average time required to bring a plant on line from the order date increased from three years to 13 years during a similar time period.[15] This significantly increased both the cost of a plant and the risks to the investors financing these projects. In addition, as the need for electricity increased, lengthy delays further undermined pub­lic confidence in the viability of nuclear power.

During the 1970s, regulatory mandates also dras­tically increased the quantity of materials required to build a plant. Steel requirements increased by 41 percent, concrete by 27 percent, piping by 50 per­cent, and electrical cable by 36 percent. Even though experience demonstrated that these increases were unnecessary to maintain safe operations, regulatory relief never followed.[16] In some instances, builders even added safety features that were not mandated in hopes of avoiding further stoppages.

As more inspections and inspectors were required, delays often resulted from inadequate reg­ulatory manpower. Workers had to spend inordi­nate amounts of time waiting for inspections rather than building the project. The oft-changing con­struction specifications also led to mistakes, which created further delays.

Even after construction was complete, delays often continued. Delaying plant completion could cost up to $1 million per day.[17] Stories of costly and unnecessary delays litter the history of U.S. nuclear power. Plants such as the Shoreham nuclear plant on Long Island were completely built but never used because extremists succeeded in scaring the public and political leaders.

From 1981 to 1988, operations and mainte­nance costs increased by 80 percent, and 30 to 60 percent of this increase was the direct result of NRC regulation.[18] High interest rates during the 1970s meant that long delays significantly increased project costs as rising interest payments drove up the cost of capital. High inflation drove up the costs of materials. Furthermore, plants were sometimes completed and ready to start producing electricity but were not allowed to begin operations for one regulatory reason or another. This prevented finan­ciers from collecting on their investment. These higher costs were passed on to investors as invest­ment losses and to consumers in higher electricity rates. Neither could be sustained over time when other alternatives, such as natural gas, existed.

Overregulation Leads to a Declining Industry

Overall, regulation increased the cost of con­structing a nuclear power plant fourfold.[19] Such cost escalation would have been justified if it had been rooted in scientific and technical analysis. Regrettably, it was largely a function of anti-nuclear activism, agenda-driven politicians, activist regula­tors, and unsubstantiated public fear. A total of $70 billion was added to the cost of nuclear reactors constructed by 1988, and this cost was passed on to the ratepayers. Prior to 1981, electricity cost an average of approximately $600 per kilowatt hour. After 1981, electricity cost two to six times that rate,[20] which means that either consumers paid significantly more or utilities incurred losses if they did not charge market prices. Neither circumstance was sustainable.

The U.S. government even banned entire com­mercial technologies outright. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter dealt the U.S. nuclear industry one of its greatest setbacks by issuing Presidential Directive 8 (PD-8), [21] which forbids reprocessing (recycling) nuclear fuel in the United States. "Closing the fuel cycle," the term used to describe the recycling of spent nuclear fuel, allows used fuel to be recycled and used again. Regrettably, PD-8 has effectively been U.S. policy ever since. As a result, nuclear fuel is run through U.S. reactors only once, wasting a valuable resource and producing unnecessary amounts of high-level nuclear waste.

Recycling spent nuclear fuel would help the U.S. and the world to reduce the volume of high-level nuclear waste and recover vast amounts of energy that remain in "spent" nuclear fuel even after it has gone through a reactor. Currently, only about 5 per­cent of the energy is used per volume of fuel. The U.S. does not recycle nuclear fuel, but France, Great Britain, China, and Russia are safely using recycling technology.

With recycling in place, the reemergence of nuclear energy in the U.S. could finally move away from relying so heavily on the proposed Yucca Mountain repository. It would allow for a more rea­sonable "mixed" approach to nuclear waste, which would likely include some combination of perma­nent geological storage in Yucca Mountain, interim storage, recycling, and new technologies.

However, establishing economically viable com­mercial recycling in the U.S. will not be easy. Carter's unilateral ban had a chilling effect on the domestic nuclear industry, forcing domestic nuclear suppliers to discontinue their activities at the cost of hun­dreds of millions of dollars. One industry group invested approximately $500 million in a project that never became operational.[22] Another major company spent $64 million on a facility that never opened.[23] This technology has since been trans­ferred overseas and is being used safely by other countries, such as France and Japan.

With overregulation driving up the cost of nuclear power and the government unilaterally banning critical commercial technologies, the U.S. nuclear industry all but died. From the early 1950s through 1974, 231 nuclear power plants were ordered. Another 15 were ordered by 1977.[24] How­ever, no new orders have been placed since 1977, although some of plants ordered by 1977 have since become operational.

Not only did orders stop, but previously ordered plants were cancelled. Of the 246 plants ordered in the U.S., only 104 operate today. Some were never built, others were shut down early, and con­struction was stopped on many after substantial investments had been made. The result was billions of dollars in losses. For example, the Cherokee plant in South Carolina was cancelled in 1982 after over $600 million had been invested. In 1983, a group of three utilities cancelled the Zimmer plant in Ohio after investing $1.8 billion.[25] In total, $30 billion was spent on nuclear plants that were never completed,[26] which is more than the value of most of the companies that are considering new plant orders.

The result is that the United States is no longer a technology leader and does not receive the full ben­efits of nuclear power as it searches for environmen­tally friendly, affordable, and accessible sources of energy to meet future energy needs. Conversely, other nations are well positioned to lead the global resurgence in peaceful nuclear power.

This is not to say that the United States should build its nuclear industry according to the French or Russian models, which rely on state ownership and controlled markets. Like the old U.S. nuclear industry, this approach creates an industry that relies on government support for long-term suc­cess. The pitfalls of this approach were aptly dem­onstrated during the 2007 French election when the possibility that nuclear skeptic Ségolène Royal would be elected president of France raised fears about the future of the French nuclear industry.

The Effect on Ratepayers

The near death of the U.S. nuclear energy indus­try has harmed both investors and consumers. First, ratepayers eventually pay for the increased costs of generating electricity. More important, by removing nuclear energy from America's energy portfolio, anti-nuclear activists have limited the choices avail­able to America's energy producers and consumers. Limiting choice has two inevitable results: higher prices and lower quality.

Without nuclear energy as an option and with coal being frowned upon, utilities started moving toward natural gas power plants. This growing reli­ance on natural gas has caused electricity prices to follow the volatility of natural gas prices. As demand for natural gas has increased, prices have become even more volatile.

Perhaps more ominously, it positions the United States to increase its reliance on foreign energy significantly. Today, America's energy dependence is largely a function of foreign petro­leum and the transportation sector. The nation gets only about 2 percent of its electricity from oil-fired plants. However, the growing U.S. depen­dence on natural gas is beginning to exceed domestic supply. This has resulted in increasing natural gas imports. Importing energy is not nec­essarily a problem if those resources are coming from stable, friendly countries, but foreign natural gas reserves are located largely in many of the same, less predictable countries that have large petroleum reserves.

Regulation Today

Congress and the Administration have cleared many of the regulatory hurdles to new nuclear plant construction. For example, the Energy Policy Act of 1992 allows utilities to combine their con­struction and operations licenses,[27] which should streamline much of the regulatory process. The problem is that no one has tried the procedure yet. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 added billions of dollars in regulatory protection for new nuclear plant construction.[28] These provisions should mit­igate much of the government-induced risk in the near term. Finally, in 2007, the NRC issued a new rule that will allow some pre-licensing of site prep­aration activities.[29]

While these efforts are important first steps, they do not provide for long-term predictability. Instead, they provide confidence that a small number of plants will be built over the next few years. Industry is responding with investments to prepare for meet­ing that demand. However, realizing the many ben­efits of nuclear power will require a much broader expansion of the nuclear energy industry. Changing the nation's energy profile will require infrastructure investments on par with what took place during the industry's prime.

Conclusion

The history of civilian nuclear energy in the United States reveals the dangers of overt govern­ment promotion of or opposition to any particular technology or industry. When public opinion and government policy shifted against nuclear power, the industry was ill-prepared to survive, investors lost billions, and ratepayers suffered.

The role and potential of nuclear power in the United States are too important to allow it to fall vic­tim to the same mistakes again. Investors must be assured that nuclear power will be allowed to stand or fall on its own merits. While federal, state, and local governments will have a role to play, especially in building confidence with investors, the best long-term subsidy that they could give the industry is the freedom to succeed.

--Jack Spencer is Research Fellow in Nuclear Energy in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

[1]Lee Clarke, "The Origins of Nuclear Power: A Case of Institutional Conflict," Social Problems, Vol. 32, No. 5 (June 1985), p. 476.

[2]"Abundant Power from Atom Seen: It Will Be Too Cheap for Our Children to Meter, Strauss Tells Science Writers," The New York Times, September 17, 1954, p. 5.

[3]Clarke, "The Origins of Nuclear Power," p. 479.

[4]Elizabeth H. Boyle, "Political Frames and Legal Activity: The Case of Nuclear Power in Four Countries," Law & Society Review, Vol. 32, No. 3 (1998), pp. 149 and 151.

[5]Steven E. Barkan, "Strategic, Tactical and Organizational Dilemmas of the Protest Movement Against Nuclear Power," Social Problems, Vol. 27, No. 1 (October 1979), p. 24.

[6]Energy Net, "The Abalone Alliance Story," at www.energy-net.org/01NUKE/AA.HTM (November 2, 2007).

[7]Elliot Blair Smith, "Nuclear Utilities Redefine One Word to Bulldoze for New Plants," Bloomberg.com, September 25, 2007, at www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20670001&refer=home&sid=ag_TpOMlk0Xw (October 1, 2007).

[8]U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Nuclear Regulatory Legislation: 109th Congress, Vol. 1, No. 7, Rev. 1, 2nd Sess., and Vol. 2, 1st Sess., June 2006, at www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/nuregs/staff/sr0980 (October 29, 2007).

[9]U.S. General Accounting Office, Nuclear Powerplant Licensing: Need for Additional Improvements, EMD-78-29, April 27, 1978, p. 14, at http://archive.gao.gov/f0902b/105656.pdf.

[10]Magali Delmas and Bruce Heiman, "Government Credible Commitment to the French and American Nuclear Power Industries," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Summer 2001), p. 447.

[11]For a full analysis of this phenomenon, see ibid., pp. 433-546.

[12]U.S. General Accounting Office, Nuclear Powerplant Licensing, pp. 17-21.

[13]U.S. General Accounting Office, Electric Power: Contemporary Issues and the Federal Role in Oversight and Regulation, EMD- 82-8, December 21, 1981, p. 28, at http://archive.gao.gov/d47t13/117098.pdf.

[14]For a state-by-state analysis of state nuclear policy, see E. Michael Blake, "Where New Reactors Can (and Can't) Be Built," Nuclear News, November 2006, pp. 23-25.

[15]Delmas and Heiman, "Government Credible Commitment," pp. 450-551.

[16]Bernard L. Cohen, The Nuclear Energy Option (New York: Plenum Press, 1990), Chap. 9, at www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html (October 10, 2007).

[17]Ibid.

[18]Delmas and Heiman, "Government Credible Commitment," p. 454.

[19]Cohen, The Nuclear Energy Option, Chap. 9.

[20]Christian Joppke, "Decentralization of Control in U.S. Nuclear Energy Policy," Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 107, No. 4 (Winter 1992-1993), pp. 719-720.

[21]Jimmy Carter, "Nuclear Non-Proliferation Policy," Presidential Directive NSC-8, March 24, 1977, at www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/pd/pd08.pdf (November 2, 2007).

[22]Nuclear Energy Institute, "Plutonium and Uranium Reprocessing," acamedia, January 2003, at www.acamedia.info/politics/nonproliferation/references/nei_2003.htm (October 9, 2007).

[23]U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information, "Plutonium Recovery from Spent Fuel Reprocessing by Nuclear Fuel Services at West Valley New York," February 1996, at www.osti.gov/opennet/document/purecov/nfsrepo.html#ZZ6 (October 9, 2007).

[24]Delmas and Heiman, "Government Credible Commitment," pp. 433-546.

[25]Darryl E. J. Gurley, "Nuclear Power Plant Cancellations: Sunk Costs and Utility Stock Returns," Quarterly Journal of Business and Economics, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Winter 1990), at www.allbusiness.com/public-administration/administration-economic-programs/114347-1.html (October 2, 2007).

[26]Joppke, "Decentralization of Control in U.S. Nuclear Energy Policy," p. 719.

[27]Energy Policy Act of 1992, Public Law 102-486, Sec. 2801.

[28]Energy Policy Act of 1992, Public Law 109-58, Title VI.

[29]Smith, "Nuclear Utilities Redefine One Word to Bulldoze for New Plants."

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Greenpeace UK
November 15, 2007

When is a solution not a solution?

As Gordon Brown grapples with the question of whether to push the nuclear button and give the green light to a fleet of new reactors in the UK, we keep on hearing from those rum coves in the industry about how they now have a solution, or more accurately a "management strategy", for dealing with all the tonnes of lethal radioactive waste nuclear reactors produce. This state-of-the-art solution comes in the shape of the rather grandly titled "deep geological repository". To you and me this roughly translates as "a deep hole in the ground", a massive underground dump wherein our toxic legacy will be buried, back filled and then it's goodnight Vienna.

But, as with a great many things in this debate, things are not quite as they seem…

Even putting aside the fact that Sellafield, the prime site for the UK's nuclear waste dump, is probably not even geologically suitable to house one, the model repository that the UK is looking to emulate has suddenly run into rather choppy waters. For the last few years our friends over the pond have been busily preparing a waste dump at a place called Yucca Mountain, a vast and eerily beautiful tract of hilly desert in Nevada that is home to the odd rattlesnake and a few vagrant coyotes. The whole project will cost around $60bn and could store up to 70,000 tonnes of highly radioactive waste once it opens in 2017. It has been held in the highest esteem by the UK for some time, so much so that the government sees it as the blueprint for our own waste dump.

It's a bit of bad news, then, that Yucca Mountain is in fact probably a rather bad place to build a repository for nuclear waste after all. According to a recent story, it's emerged that the dump is, in fact, located on a seismic fault line. Earthquake central, if you will. Now this really oughtn't be that surprising, given Nevada is the 3rd most geologically unstable state in the USA, but it's thrown construction plans a little out of kilter. Unsurprising really, given that even the thought of a huge earthquake tearing apart 70 odd thousand tonnes of radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel is enough to make Radioactive Man blanche. As the report notes, "the most expensive public works project in the US" is now "in disarray". The chief of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects was a little agog with the US Department of Energy's apparent inability to spot this particular fly in their nuclear ointment. "It certainly looks like DoE has encountered a surprise out there, and it certainly speaks to the fact they haven't done the technical work they should have done years ago," he said with a straight face. Now even US-Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is talking about "what the available scientific evidence makes clear: Yucca Mountain is not a safe place to store spent fuel from our nation’s nuclear reactors."

I dread to think what poor Yucca Mountain Johnny makes of it all.

The simple fact is that there is no safe solution to dealing with radioactive waste because it can remain harmful for hundreds of thousands of years. Burying it deep underground knowing that could in all likelihood leak back into the environment isn’t a very responsible answer to a legacy that we have to deal with now. The least worst environmental option is the store the nuclear waste that we've already produced on-site, in a secure and robust facility where it can be monitored or retrieved if necessary. And then make a decision not produce any more of the stuff. Leaving an environmental time-bomb underground for future generations is not the answer, especially when the plans for waste dumps around the world are so criminally cack-handed.

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Huffington Post
November 15, 2007

King Coal's Mountain Redoubt

Carl Pope

Las Vegas, NV -- At first blush, Nevada appears an unlikely choice for the coal industry to make its last stand in the mountain West. Coal is one of the few minerals the Silver State doesn't produce. Nevada enjoys America's biggest geothermal resource, ranks in the top five for solar, and has enormous wind reserves. By rights it should be a renewable energy powerhouse. Its legislature just passed a strong renewable electricity mandate, and the state is leading the nation with its legislation to set the first efficiency standards for light bulbs. Indeed, a new report by Environment America (formerly US PIRG) lauded Nevada as one of America's "rising stars", along with Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Wisconsin. I am in Las Vegas today to thank Governor Gibbons and the legislature for precisely this leadership.

But when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid came out a couple of weeks ago against three new coal-fired power plants proposed for the state, and called for a global moratorium on new coal, the Barons of Black decided to make their stand here, launching a major media campaign and tapping into the deep relationship of Sierra Pacific Power, the biggest utility, with the state's business establishment.

The good news is, Nevadans are fighting back. This week saw the Nevada Clean Energy Coalition, a grassroots movement strongly supported by the Sierra Club, hit the airwaves with radio spots (click to listen), and a very cool, Nevada-style billboard right outside the convention hall where the presidential candidates will be debating tonight.

It's now clear that coal plants are being sold to the American people like sub-prime mortgages. All the insiders know their economics will shift dramatically in a few years when Congress finally deals with global warming, and the utilities building these plants are making sure that it is ordinary customers, not their shareholders, who get stuck with unaffordable energy costs when the piper finally has to be paid. The Nevada projects, specifically, provide that any upgrades required to deal with carbon emissions will have to be paid for by ratepayers. So, the utilities really don't care if coal pencils out; King Coal just wants guaranteed markets for a product which is otherwise about to become uncompetitive.

Nevada's neighbors have figured this out (it's the last state west of the Continental Divide that has an open door for coal), and Nevadans have been here before. When the rest of the country didn't want to handle nuclear waste, they thought Nevada would simply see it as another form of gambling and proposed developing Yucca Mountain as a dumping ground. They were wrong then, and I'm betting they're wrong with this strategy of dumping the West's next coal rush on a state that doesn't need it.

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Los Angeles Times
November 15, 2007

Nevada not feeling the campaign love

Though caucuses are in two months, candidate visits to the state have been few.

Scott Martelle

PAHRUMP, NEV. -- With the Nevada caucuses just over two months away, Mom's Diner would seem to be the perfect spot for a presidential candidate to stop and mingle for the TV cameras.

There are four booths, seven tables, country music on the radio and a welcome mat hanging on a bright yellow wall that reads, "Well butter my butt, call me a biscuit -- look who's here."

Unfortunately for diner owner Tracie Oien, no one who is running for president has been here.

More vexing for Oien, a Republican, is the fact that no GOP presidential candidate has shown up to campaign in this conservative enclave an hour north of Las Vegas -- but three Democratic contenders have.

All of this has Oien concerned that the Jan. 19 caucuses could turn out to be a bust, and that the state could go to the Democrats in the 2008 general election.

"It's really galling me," Oien said during a lull between the breakfast and lunch crowds. "As angry as people are with the president, you'd think the Republicans would be pushing [their candidates]. But it seems like they're laying back in the weeds."

When the Nevada Democratic and Republican parties decided to move their caucuses to Jan. 19, they gambled that the major presidential contenders would have to campaign in the West, where voters were believed to be concerned about such regional issues as water rights, management of federal lands and a proposal to bury nuclear waste beneath Yucca Mountain.

But it hasn't worked out that way. Polls show that Nevadans are most concerned about the same problems as the rest of the country -- the war in Iraq, healthcare, national security and immigration reform.

And even with today's Democratic debate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas -- the third Democratic forum in the state; the GOP has held none -- candidate visits have been few compared with other sanctioned early-voting states. According to the Washington Post's Campaign Tracker, candidates have visited Nevada 162 times this year, compared with Iowa's 1,654, New Hampshire's 806 and South Carolina's 349.

And in delegate- and cash-rich California, candidates have visited 297 times, and the state doesn't vote until Feb. 5.

Still, the Democratic candidates have been paying more attention to Nevada than the Republicans, including campaigning in the Republican-dominated "rurals" like Nye County.

Among the Democrats, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut have each visited Pahrump once. Clinton has opened a headquarters just north of town, and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama's campaign is to open one this weekend.

A planned campaign stop here next week by Rep. Ron Paul of Texas would be the first by a GOP hopeful, despite the party's 9,200-to-7,600 lead in Nye County registrations. And none have offices here.

That could help explain the results of a CNN poll released Wednesday in which 68% of likely Democratic Nevada caucus-goers said moving the nominating contest to Jan. 19 was good for the state, compared with 49% of their GOP counterparts.

The same poll showed Clinton with 51% support among Democrats, with Obama, her closest rival, at 23% -- a lead that University of Nevada, Las Vegas, political analyst David Damore said could sap even more interest from the caucuses.

"If Hillary continues her momentum in the state, I don't think [the caucuses will] be that competitive," Damore said. "That may depress turnout."

Republican candidates are ignoring Nevada while trying to establish their social conservative credentials in places like South Carolina, Damore said. He agreed with Oien that what happens here over the next two months could set the stage for who wins Nevada's electoral votes next November.

Yet interest in the caucuses is so low that the state AARP recently canceled an issues-oriented survey because pollsters couldn't find enough AARP members who said they were "absolutely certain" they would take part in the caucuses.

Kate Mucci, who co-hosts a cable news show, said: "I don't think people realize the importance of the caucus in picking who we have to vote for. People are so caught up in functioning day to day."

No one has offered a threshold for the caucuses' success or failure, but both parties have recently been downplaying their expectations. But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters this week that he still believed 100,000 Democrats would show up for the caucuses, holding to an estimate that most Democrats here have dropped.

State Democratic communications director Kirsten Searer said the party expected 30,000 to 40,000, in line with Iowa's turnout for its first caucus in the 1970s.

Republicans say they are equally hopeful, arguing that just because hopefuls have spent little time here doesn't mean they won't campaign in places like Pahrump in the future.

"Mitt Romney just put a staffer up there," said state GOP executive director Zachary Moyle. "They're going to get Ron Paul up there next week, and once Ron Paul is there . . . Romney and the other candidates [will] start filtering their way out."

Chuck Muth, a conservative blogger and strategist from Carson City, who helped persuade state Republican leaders to join the Democrats in holding caucuses on Jan. 19, stands by the decision to move the date up.

"If candidate attention in Nevada with the Jan. 19 date is light, I believe it would have been nonexistent had they stuck with Feb. 7," Muth said.

scott.martelle@latimes.com

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The Nation
November 15, 2007

Debating Downwind in Nevada

Tonight in Las Vegas--a town best known for slots, boxing, and spectacle--the Democratic presidential hopefuls gather for one of the final pre-primary debates.

The Democratic Party moved the Nevada caucus up on the 2008 election calendar--third after Iowa and New Hampshire--to allow for a greater range of regional diversity in early voting than in the past. (South Carolina was also awarded an early primary spot). One issue that won't be debated in Iowa or New Hampshire but will loom large in the Silver State is Yucca Mountain.

Watch for each candidate to oppose Yucca Mountain and the disastrous plan to ship our nation's nuclear waste thousands of miles by road and rail to be buried in an area with a record of earthquake activity.

Lurking behind those two words is an important living nuclear history in the state which deserves attention. Between 1951 and 1992, 928 above-ground and below-ground nuclear tests were conducted at the Nevada Test Site, just miles from where the candidates will be debating in Las Vegas. Initially, the public was assured "there is no danger" and urged to "participate in a moment of history" by watching the tests.

But, in fact, people downwind of the tests--downwinders--continue to suffer and die from the lethal fallout they were exposed to. Exposed, a new play by downwinder Mary Dickson, examines the Utah playwright's own struggle with thyroid cancer and her sister's death from lupus at the age of 46. It uses transcripts of hearings to explore similar experiences of other victims who became sick, and lost friends and loved ones. The government denied any link to radiation. The play spans fifty years, and downwinders keep "cancer charts" chronicling the afflictions of their neighbors. It also addresses the Bush Administration's proposed Divine Strake in 2007--a subnuclear test blast--and the downwinders' organizing efforts that helped to defeat it. The play ends with the reading of the names of downwinders who have died, and new names are added after each show.

We cannot forget this living history. As Dickson told me, "Understanding the full extent of that reckless human experiment should inform any decision on both the development of new nuclear weapons and the illusory promise of nuclear power. Without that understanding, politicians will be too easily swayed to consider mini nukes and bunker busters as strategically viable weapons in the 'war on terror'--just as they will too readily embrace nuclear power as a solution to global warming. The development of any new nuclear weapons inevitably opens the door to resumed testing in Nevada and leads to the destabilizing proliferation of nukes--both of which are a disastrous course that only put us more at risk. Nuclear power is an illusory solution to climate change--one propagated by the nuclear industry, which still cannot answer the vexing question of what to do with the dangerous waste it generates. Until the waste can be addressed, nuclear power is neither a viable nor a responsible option."

This living history is nowhere to be found at the Las Vegas' taxpayer-funded Atomic Testing Museum. The exhibits excise the stories of nuclear testing victims--instead celebrating nuclear weapons as "safe, patriotic and just plain fun." As the New York Times wrote, "the history of testing, as told [in the museum], is largely the history of its justification."

That living history, as told by Dickson, should inform voters in this election as the Bush Administration and its allies (and too many Democrats) look to create a new generation of usable nuclear weapons. It should inform us as Big Nuclear ignores the "serious issues of nuclear plant safety, security against sabotage and terrorist attack and waste disposal" in promoting new plants. And it should inspire participation in renewed anti-nuclear activism as the nuclear industry lobbies for new subsidies for its self-proclaimed "nuclear renaissance."

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New West
November 15, 2007

Western State Electoral Votes Clacking The Dem Abacus

Clinton, Obama Seek Their Inner West Leading up to Nevada Debate

By Nathaniel Hoffman

It’s tough to picture any of them in boots and a hat. Scary even. But Democratic presidential hopefuls including frontrunners Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have put time and money into the mountain states, particularly Nevada, in this Groundhog’s Day of a primary season.

And when they descend on Denver next August for the Democratic National Convention, perhaps we will get to see them in fleece, a Nalgene bottle clipped to their belts, titanium hiking polls at the ready.

“How cool would it be to do a party at REI?” asks Arizona’s Democratic Party Chief Maria Weeg, who is headed to the Democratic debate tonight in Las Vegas.

Weeg has visited Denver twice to scout hotels for the convention. She says it’s not news that Democrats are looking Westward in this election cycle. Democratic activists have long eyed the Western states as a potential “hotbed of new Democratic politics,” Weeg said.

Having the convention in Colorado and an early primary in Nevada has raised the importance of the Mountain West among the Democratic campaigns.

“They recognize that there are potential gains in the West,” said Democratic political consultant Jim Duffy, who works in Washington D.C.

While most Western states have seen little active Democratic campaigning during the primary season, outside of Nevada, Colorado and Arizona, some of the less populous, but growing states could be important destinations in the general election.

“I really don’t see from a timing perspective that the Western states will get as much attention as I think they will get in the general election,” Duffy said.

Still, Western Democrats will help decide whether Clinton can escape her “wife of Bill” baggage and Obama can surmount his newbie status.

“If the Democratic nominee is Obama or Hillary Clinton I don’t think that’s particularly helpful for the Democrats to carry Montana because neither of them seem to match well with the West,” said Bob Brown, senior fellow at the University of Montana’s Center for the Rocky Mountain West in Missoula.

Brown, a lifelong Montana Republican, said Democrats do have some compelling national issues going for them in ’08 – immigration, Iraq, the budget deficit – but they need the right candidate to make a dent in western states.

“Most voters in Montana would assume they wouldn’t know a single thing about Montana,” Brown said of the two frontrunners.

But in presidential races, Western voters, especially the party faithful, often have more national than regional concerns at heart.

“She’s the frontrunner, she’s a Clinton,” University of Nevada Reno political scientist Eric Herzik has told me. “The same factors that make her the frontrunner nationally… I don’t know that activists in the Democratic party in Nevada locally are any different from activists in the Democratic party nationally.”

In Nevada, two and a half western issues are at play: immigration, Yucca Mountain and something to do with water, Herzik said.

“If you’re looking at issues, the Republican primary in Nevada is more interesting,” Herzik said. “The Democrats are more interesting over personalities.”

Western Democrats used to drive national issues, but that was a while ago, says Pat Williams, a retired nine-term Montana congressman and now, like Brown, a senior fellow at the Center for the Rocky Mountain West.

“We are now in the transition time when the West is regaining, reclaiming national policy recognition,” Williams said.

The transition is driven – in part – by several new policy groups he has helped found, including the Missoula center.

“Even with Idaho and Utah in it, polling, policy polling in the eight states of the Rocky Mountain West shows this to be one of the most progressive policy regions in America,” Williams said.

Both Clinton and Obama have a chance in the West if they hit the right stride, he said.

“What Westerners are going to like about Hillary when they get a close look is that she is tougher than any of the guys,” Williams said. “She doesn’t abide insults easily, nor foolishness.”

He should know. The New York senator has chewed him out twice, once when she was First Lady and he tried to rush her failed health care package to a vote.

Williams said Obama, on the other hand, has a Reagan-like hope about him that could give him clout in the West.

“If he can figure a way to talk to Westerners about hope he’ll hit a chord because this is tomorrow country,” Williams said.

Obama’s recent aggressiveness in campaigning against Clinton is helping him in Western states, he added.

Western states have plenty of experience electing women, and though the African American vote is not strong in the West, Obama is not seen as a classic African American candidate, Williams said.

“He is an inspirational figure to a lot of people and a lot of people in Nevada are very, very curious about him,” said David Cohen, Obama’s deputy state director in Nevada.

Earlier this year, at an Obama event in Boise, many regular folks – not just activist Democrats or even "new Dems” – described Obama as “fresh” and “refreshing.” Obama has since opened an office in Boise and sent a campaign worker to staff it.

Though the figures are low, Obama has picked up more campaign cash than Clinton in six of the eight Mountain states, according to third quarter campaign finance reports. And he has out raised Clinton by almost $300,000 in the Western states with a very strong bankroll in Colorado.

Clinton, however, has pulled in a good deal of cash in Nevada – almost $300,000 more than Obama. And Nevada is where both campaigns are focusing much energy on the Jan. 19 caucus. The Democratic candidates debate on Thursday in Las Vegas that could prove to be a watershed campaign event.

The Clinton campaign is the best political organization Nevada has ever had, according to Rory Reid, Clinton’s Western issues advisor and chairman of her campaign in Nevada.

Several other western political watchers noted the breadth and aggressiveness of the Clinton operation in Nevada.

“I don’t think that there is any question that Nevada is the key to unlocking the Mountain West for the Democratic party,” Reid told me in an interview earlier this year.

Reid, a Clark County commissioner and son of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, said that Clinton has pulled together groups of African American, Hispanic and Asian American voters in Nevada including some key endorsements.

Obama officials believe these groups are comprised of soft voters, that the polls are flawed and that Obama supporters will represent the grassroots at caucus meetings.

But Clinton leads recent polls in Nevada by a large margin, with up to 51 percent of likely caucus goers giving her the nod. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards is running second and Obama third.

Party activists in other states, including Williams in Montana, are still waiting for calls from the candidates. Some Democrats are already worrying that a Hillary Clinton nomination will whip up such a GOP furor that it will cost the party local support in their conservative western states and may hurt candidates lower down on the ticket.

Republican candidates out raised Democrats in the West by almost $3 million so far this year.

While Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico are in play for Democrats this election, Arizona is on the table and Montana could swing. Democrats in Idaho, Utah and Wyoming don’t expect much attention, save a photo op at Sun Valley.

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson should have an edge in the West – he is the leading candidate in his own state, and the top Democratic fundraiser in the Rockies – but he lags in national polls and has said he will spend his time building support in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Both Clinton and Obama seem to think their time has come.

“I believe that this is her moment in history,” Clinton strategist Rory Reid said.

And Cohen on Obama: “He’s talking about the right things for this moment in history.”

That’s a lot of talk about history in Pat Williams’ “Tomorrow Country.”

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New York Times
November 15, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

What Happens in Vegas ...

By Gail Collins

I’m sure you are excited about the big presidential candidate debate tonight. Nothing in the previous 25 dramatic clashes of the political titans this season can come close to it. Although we did like that moment when Dennis Kucinich revealed that he had spied a U.F.O. at Shirley MacLaine’s house.

This time, it’s the Democrats — and Hillary Against the World! Everybody is talking about how, as Bill Clinton himself said last week: “Those boys have been getting tough on her lately.” Two thoughts on that matter.

1) Who do you expect them to pile on? Mike Gravel?

2) We have never had anything approaching a female presidential front-runner before. For much of our history, women were prohibited from even speaking in public. The first woman to run for president in this country, Victoria Woodhull, almost got castrated for her uppityness. The first woman to run for a major political party presidential nomination, Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, was reduced to handing out her muffin recipe in New Hampshire.

All of which is to say that Clinton doesn’t deserve any special sympathy as the political alpha dogs come after her, but give us a minute to adjust here, will you?

Tonight’s debate will be held in Nevada, which was designated one of the four extra-special-first-in-the-nation-to-vote states at some point when our attention was obviously riveted on game show finales. This is a great honor, which appears to have done Nevada no good whatsoever. No candidate has moved his family to Nevada and enrolled the kids in school, like Chris Dodd did in Iowa. The people of Nevada do not wander around bragging, the way they do in New Hampshire, that they were treated to breakfast by Rudy Giuliani and had a prayer meeting with Mike Huckabee after Mitt Romney visited their workplace and watched them inspect widgets.

All Nevada wants out of the deal, as far as I can tell, is to stop the government from putting used radioactive waste into Yucca Mountain. Too bad for what sounded like a pretty sensible idea to meet a pressing problem, yet little enough to ask from a first-in-the-nation state. At least they aren’t demanding that we make gasoline out of used poker chips.

By the way, the position of the top three Democratic candidates on putting spent nuclear fuel inside Yucca Mountain are as follows:

Obama: No.

Clinton: Absolutely, positively, I-will-chain-myself-to-the-foothills no.

Edwards: The fact that I once voted yes should not be interpreted as anything but a no. And do not call this waffling. There is only one waffler in this pack, and I don’t even like the way she dresses.

Something weird is going on with John Edwards, who was cheerfulness incarnate when four years ago he was the moderate-Southerner-who-can-speak-to-the-Reagan-Democrats. Then he morphed into a sorrowful populist who thought we should vote for him because he cared the most about the poor. Now he’s running around like a rabid gerbil, telling people he should be president because he’s the angriest. Soon, he’s going to run out of adjectives to embody.

Hillary has been having a rough couple of weeks. The campaign even got into trouble for prompting a college student to ask Clinton about global warming. If this is the worst thing her staff is up to, perhaps they could use their surplus time to collect canned goods for the poor. The candidates have already been to about a million talk-with-voters gatherings in Iowa and New Hampshire, and in 999,999 of them, a college student has gotten up and asked about global warming. College students do not generally care about Social Security or health care because they don’t really think they’re ever going to get old or sick. But they do expect to get warmed, and they do not need prompting to ask about it at every opportunity.

The challenge for Clinton in tonight’s debate on CNN will be to prove that she can talk the straight talk. It’s a tricky business. How do you unwaffle? (“Wolf, you know how I said I wanted a study commission on Social Security? I should have mentioned that I intend to stack the commission with people who will come back with a recommendation to raise taxes. And those driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants? I was just being polite when I said the idea sounded reasonable. Really, I hate it. Hate it. Hate it. Hate it.”)

The only thing harder than unwaffling is being a mean unifier. Barack Obama sells himself as the new post-millennial candidate who hates petty partisanship. (So ’90s!) That makes it a little tough to go out on debate day and try to kneecap his opponent.

The best thing that’s happened to Hillary recently was the news that John McCain had laughed when a supporter asked: “How do we beat the bitch?” Excellent way to rally hitherto uncommitted women to the Clinton cause, unidentified supporter! Maybe Hillary will get lucky again tonight and John Edwards will try to bite her on the ankle.

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New York Times
November 15, 2007

The Early Word: Democrats in Vegas

By Ariel Alexovich

Las Vegas, that city of dreams and heartbreak, takes center stage tonight as it hosts the Democratic presidential candidates at a debate on the University of Nevada-Las Vegas campus. Hillary Rodham Clinton may be seeking redemption after poor reviews of her performance at the last debate, and her top rivals John Edwards and Barack Obama likely will continue to direct their most pointed attacks toward her.

The Times’s Patrick Healy writes that “the last debate began a new level of intensity in the Democratic contest.”

Advisers said in interviews that Mrs. Clinton had not been prepared for the onslaught at the Oct. 30 debate, and would be far more ready for incoming fire in Las Vegas. She has been preparing to point out inconsistencies in Mr. Edwards’s and Mr. Obama’s positions, and to give yes-or-no answers to convey forthrightness.

The Washington Post says right now “the race is more fluid than it has been in months.”

Clinton encountered her first string of perceived stumbles on the trail, starting with her rivals’ assertions that hedged answers in their Oct. 30 debate in Philadelphia suggested a lack of forthrightness. This was followed by negative reviews of her campaign’s complaints about “piling on” at the debate, reports that aides had planted questions at an Iowa event, and widespread praise for Obama’s speech at a party fundraiser in Des Moines on Saturday.

The second big story coming out of Nevada today is, well, Nevada. The Silver State scored a major coup in securing the third-in-the-nation primary, but candidates of both parties have been spending by far less time and money there than in Iowa, New Hampshire – even South Carolina. The Washington Post writes that it’s is still up in the air whether placing the primary in Nevada was a worthwhile effort.

When Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid lobbied the Democratic National Committee to award his home state an early date, he argued that it would be an ideal proving ground, testing the Democratic field’s appeal to large populations of Hispanics and veterans and to more union households than other early states (the best-organized voters here, members of the Culinary Workers Union, work in the casinos along the Las Vegas Strip).

In 2004, when the Nevada caucuses took place in mid-February, 9,000 people participated. That marked a record-shattering turnout; fewer than 1,000 people attended caucuses four years earlier. But the volume overwhelmed the state’s 17 meeting sites and resulted in long delays. Iowa, by comparison, operates about 2,000 caucus locations.

Giving Nevada a pivotal primary slot shows that the parties acknowledge that voters in the fast growing so-called “Sun Belt” are a priority, and they were thought to have special concerns, writes the Los Angeles Times.

When the Nevada Democratic and Republican parties decided to move their caucuses to Jan. 19, they gambled that the major presidential contenders would have to campaign in the West, where voters were believed to be concerned about such regional issues as water rights, management of federal lands and a proposal to bury nuclear waste beneath Yucca Mountain.

But it hasn’t worked out that way. Polls show that Nevadans are most concerned about the same problems as the rest of the country — the war in Iraq, healthcare, national security and immigration reform.

The Las Vegas Sun has the details on the local residents who’ll get a chance to pose questions to the candidates during the second hour of the debate.

Immediately following the debate, the seven participating candidates will head to the Clark County Democratic Party’s Jefferson Jackson Dinner at the Paris Hotel. There, they’ll meet up with fellow candidate Mike Gravel, a former Alaska senator who didn’t meet the fund-raising minimum to speak at the debate. At the J.J. event, the contenders will lay out their cases directly to Nevadans, reports the Las Vegas Review Journal.

The eight candidates will each have seven minutes to address the hundreds of party activists, most of whom will be precinct captains in the January caucuses. While the debate is aimed at a national audience, the Jefferson Jackson dinner plays to a local one and could be the candidates’ best chance to win over caucus voters in the county that is home to three-quarters of the state’s Democrats.

Shifting gears, to the Republican field, David D. Kirkpatrick of The Times writes that Mr. Romney’s faith deepened in the 1960s while on his two-year religious mission in France and when he was an undergraduate at Brigham Young University.

He left for France a 19-year-old freshman at Stanford, a sheltered child of privilege full of ideas about how to shake up the French mission. He could be goofy, quoting Sylvester the Cat this way — “Sutherickin Schatash! It’s humiliatin’!” — in letters to friends. He was considered the free spirit of his crowd, the one who sneaked off to movies (discouraged for missionaries) and ate coq au vin (controversial because of his church’s prohibition on alcohol). He was a half-hearted Mormon whose beliefs, as he recalled recently, were “based on pretty thin tissue.”

The Washington Post used a rare interview with Rudy Giuliani pal Tony Carbonetti to take on the larger issue of one of the former New York mayor’s most prominent values: loyalty.

Admirers offer up his loyalty as a sign of character; his relationships, they say, are genuine, not simply expedient. But detractors are more likely to say it is blatant cronyism that has led Giuliani into dangerous waters — most painfully through his association with Bernard Kerik.

The nation’s Catholic bishops say abortion is an “intrinsic evil,” but their new guide to voting and citizenship leaves the possibility for supporting a candidate like Mr. Giuliani, who is a Catholic and an abortion rights supporter.

Abortion is among a few evils greater than others, the document asserts. But it also concedes that Catholics face difficult decisions when voting and in some cases might be able to vote for those who support abortion rights or stem cell research. “There may be times when a Catholic who rejects a candidate’s unacceptable position may decide to vote for that candidate for other morally grave reasons,” the document says.

Seven Republicans and six Democratic candidates have signed on to participate in the Des Moines Register debates next month. Mr. Giuliani is said to be considering the invitation. The G.O.P. event is Dec. 12, and the Democrats will face off Dec. 13.

Campaign trail roundup:

* Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama and Bill Richardson participate in a CNN debate in Las Vegas at 8 p.m. E.S.T.

* Mike Gravel holds an alternate debate at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas.

* Democratic candidates attend the Clark County Jefferson Jackson Dinner at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas.

* Mitt Romney holds fund-raisers in Redlands, San Marino and Montecito, Calif., and holds an economic “Ask Mitt Anything” event in Burbank, Calif.

* John McCain holds a news conference in Sacramento.

* Mike Huckabee holds a fund-raiser in Bellevue, Wash. He also tours the Microsoft Corporation’s campus in Redmond, Wash.

* John Edwards visits Harrie’s Bagelmania in Las Vegas, NV.

* Rudy Giuliani meets with the press in Tampa and makes remarks to voters in The Villages, Fla.

* Joe Biden will attend a campaign event at the Biden for President Nevada Headquarters.

* Fred D. Thompson holds a town hall meeting at JP Morgan Chase in New York and attends a fund-raiser in Darien, Conn.

* Ron Paul addresses the Republican Chief of Staff Association in Washington.

* Tom Tancredo attends a reception in Manchester, N.H., and a house party in Nashua.

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Washington Post
November 15, 2007

The Silver State's Golden Opportunity

Diverse Early-Voting Battleground Set to Play Host to Democratic Forum

By Shailagh Murray

The Democratic debate in Las Vegas tonight will provide a rare moment in the spotlight for Nevada, a state that entered the election cycle expecting to enjoy a boost in stature but has struggled to draw attention from both presidential candidates and potential caucus-goers.

Democrats installed Nevada in the third slot on the primary calendar to try to add diversity to their list of early-voting states, but the caucus organization remains a work in progress. The state party is holding mock caucuses, or "mockuses," to educate participants, and it has boosted voter registration to record levels. But even the Democratic candidates are not sure what to expect on Jan. 19.

When Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid lobbied the Democratic National Committee to award his home state an early date, he argued that it would be an ideal proving ground, testing the Democratic field's appeal to large populations of Hispanics and veterans and to more union households than other early states (the best-organized voters here, members of the Culinary Workers Union, work in the casinos along the Las Vegas Strip).

In 2004, when the Nevada caucuses took place in mid-February, 9,000 people participated. That marked a record-shattering turnout; fewer than 1,000 people attended caucuses four years earlier. But the volume overwhelmed the state's 17 meeting sites and resulted in long delays. Iowa, by comparison, operates about 2,000 caucus locations.

Although the state has logged fewer candidate visits than South Carolina, which holds its Democratic contest 10 days later, on Jan. 29, Democrats have carefully worked back channels to win key support. One of the state's most powerful Democrats, public-relations guru Billy Vassiliadis, is backing Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.). And while Reid is neutral, his son Rory, the Clark County Commission chairman, serves as Nevada campaign chairman for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.).

Reid has projected that 100,000 Democrats will show up on caucus day, but Kirsten Searer, a spokeswoman for the Nevada Democratic Party, said the party is aiming for 40,000 to 50,000, representing 10 to 15 percent of eligible voters. Democratic registration has risen by 13,000 voters in the past year, surpassing the Republican total for the first time in decades.

The most frequent Democratic visitor is New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who has logged 44 events in the state. The stakes tonight are especially high for Richardson, who is counting on a strong showing in Nevada to keep his candidacy alive until the big Feb. 5 showdown.

Tonight's debate is expected to focus on such Western issues as renewable energy, water resources and immigration, but Nevada is more than just the West -- it's a gambling mecca and one of the rare locales in which whether to legalize prostitution is a serious policy question. As the University of Nevada at Las Vegas prepared for political theater, much of the buzz around town involved O.J. Simpson's preliminary hearing on armed-robbery and kidnapping charges.

"Nevadans know this is their time to make their voices heard," said Jon Summers, Reid's Nevada spokesman. "They clearly understand that the state will be a major force in determining who the Democratic nominee will be."

Despite booming growth that has turned Nevada into a Florida of the desert, its political culture remains strictly small-town, with a handful of power brokers, union bosses and niche national concerns -- such as whether to dump nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain -- dominating the conversation.

The local flavor could creep into tonight's debate. A group of undecided caucus-goers, dubbed "the Silver State's Secret 100" by local reporters, will be seated in front of the stage, primed to ask questions of the candidates.

Tonight's event could also sway the outcome of the state's most important political prize, the endorsement by the 60,000-member Culinary Workers Union, expected to be announced Dec. 2. Union officials have held at least 16 meetings with Democratic candidates, and the union boasted on its Web site that "The road to victory in the Nevada Caucus is going to go through us!"

Another target for the candidates is Nevada's large population of veterans, already the third-largest in the country and one of the fastest-growing. The state party's outreach efforts include preparing scores of care packages for Nevada residents serving in Iraq.

"Right now, it's about getting them involved," said Elliot Anderson, chairman of the party's veterans committee. "As we get closer, then we'll engage them in the caucus."

"Democrats have done really well in the West in recent years, and we believe that if a presidential candidate can win in Nevada, he or she can win the general election," Searer said.

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Washington Post
November 15, 2007

Reid's Tips On A Night in Vegas

It's debate day in the Silver State, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has a few tips for the seven Democratic presidential candidates who square off tonight in Las Vegas.

For starters, don't put all your eggs in the Culinary Union's basket. Sure, it represents 60,000 casino workers and all Democrats are vying for its endorsement. And it is the biggest, best organized group in the state. But Reid cautioned that this year, without Democratic turnout expected to soar, one support base won't be enough.

"What if no one gets the endorsement? What if they decide to stay neutral?" Reid said. "My point being, that's not the answer. The answer is, who has the best ground operation? There's a lot of support of unions already for different candidates. This is a competitive race. Of course the culinary is important, but it's not going determine who's going to win or lose."

Other groups worth courting include the state's large veterans population, along with different minority groups -- Nevada is far more diverse than Iowa or New Hampshire. Along with large Hispanic and African American populations, "we have the fastest growing Asian American population in America," Reid boasted. Another faction with political sway: the local environmental movement, which crusades against sprawl and to prevent Yucca Mountain from becoming the nation's nuclear waste dump.

For Reid, securing the No. 3 slot on the Democratic nominating calendar may be one of his biggest political coups. "I've worked very hard to get the caucus and I'm excited that it's here," he said. But it's also a crucial test market for Democrats as they seek to build a national majority.

"If you want to win the presidency, you've got to win it in the West. And the road to winning the presidency in the west is through Nevada," Reid said.

What does that mean? "It means tourism, it means public lands, it means water, it means minerals, and it means other policies that every other community in America faces. We in the West have the same issues that you have in the East. We have big cities, we have traffic problems."

Nevada also has a few casinos, and right now the odds-on favorite to win the state is Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who holds a commanding lead in recent polls. Reid's son, Rory, is chairing her Nevada campaign. As the chairman of the Clark County C0mmission, the younger Reid may be the most powerful local Democrat in the state, perhaps a successor to his father some day.

But the elder Reid said he'll stay on the sidelines for the duration. "I wish he hadn't gotten involved, but he did," Reid said of his son. "But that's all you can read into it. The fact is, he's 40 years old and I can't tell him what to do."

--Shailagh Murray

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Denver Post
November 15, 2007

Show us what you know about the West, Dems

Tonight's Democratic debate is a chance for the candidates to let Western voters know they're paying attention to our issues.

By The Denver Post

Democratic presidential candidates will take the stage tonight in Las Vegas to tout their knowledge of Western issues like water, the environment and illegal immigration.

We just hope it isn't the only time they address the critical issues that we in the West care about before next August's Democratic National Convention in Denver.

Even though we've heard time and again that the road to the White House runs through the West — Hillary Clinton uttered it just last month — none of the candidates are speaking to the issues of the West.

The nationally televised debate is being hosted in Nevada because the state will be the first in the West to hold its Democratic caucus on Jan. 19. But with numerous states rushing to hold early primaries, Nevada's caucus could get lost somewhere between the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3 and the New Hampshire primary on Jan. 22 (although New Hampshire might change the date).

We fear once the debate is over, the candidates will bolt back to Iowa and New Hampshire and Western issues will stay here in flyover country. Even New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson is shifting campaign staff to Iowa.

Still, states like Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada, with the help of East Coast retirees and California transplants, are collectively becoming an election battleground that the candidates ought not ignore. Tonight's debate is a good opportunity for Western voters to parse the candidates and their messages.

Energy is a critical issue and we would like to hear the candidates outline a national energy policy that's comfortable with extractive industries but also embraces the endless possibilities of renewables.

In addition, we want to hear about their ideas for nuclear power and the long-delayed Yucca Mountain project to bury some of the most highly radioactive material there.

Candidates Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards all have wavered on the issue of nuclear storage versus expansion of nuclear power to deal with the nation's energy needs. Richardson voted for the dump when he was in Congress and headed the Energy Department, which is building it, but now says he opposes the storage project as unsafe.

Water and regional water sharing are also highly controversial issues that the candidates need to wade into. We in the arid West are faced with chronic water shortages and, with the population increasing, neighboring rivalries for that water. Future scarcity will only worsen the problem.

Of course, illegal immigration is an issue candidates have addressed in other debates and it's obviously more than a Western issue. But the Rocky Mountain states have been heavily impacted and the next president will need to overhaul our flawed system.

We're glad the Democrats have ventured West, and to paraphrase Ross Perot, we're all ears.

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Virginia Tech Collegiate Times
November 15, 2007

Letter: Nuclear energy story contains inaccuracies

I want to point out several inaccurate statements published in the Collegiate Times story, "Reconsidering a switch from solar to nuclear power," (CT, Nov. 9) concerning last week's Choices and Challenges forum on nuclear power.

The most egregious errors in the article include: The notion that the resurgence of nuclear power results from the desire to replace oil as an energy source. Nuclear power plants produce electricity. Since conventional power plants use little oil to generate electricity (only 1.6 percent of the fuel mix in 2006), nuclear power would play only a small role in displacing oil consumed in the United States.

Rather, nuclear fuel would replace a much greater amount of coal and natural gas as raw materials, which together are used to generate about 69 percent of the nation's electricity. Much of nuclear power's appeal today stems from the drive to produce electricity without the release of greenhouse gases (as occurs when burning these traditional fuels).

Another error is the assertion that the U.S. "currently derives 49 percent of its energy from coal…" As noted in my presentation, this number refers to the percentage of electrical energy that comes from the combustion of coal — not total energy.

Only about 23 percent of all energy consumed in the U.S. draws on coal. The nation burns oil to meet about 40 percent of its total energy demand. Moreover, it imports 60 percent of its petroleum needs — a fact that has huge security and economic implications.

The claim that "Bush proposed in 2002 that (nuclear) waste be stored in Yucca Mountain." The issue of how to dispose of nuclear waste has been studied for decades, and the Department of Energy began examining Yucca Mountain as a waste repository in 1978. As noted in my talk, Congress passed a law in 1982 to establish a waste repository, and President Bush made the final decision in 2002 to select (not propose) Yucca Mountain as the preferred waste site.

Finally, a third error is the idea that the main use of recycled atomic waste in France consists of making nuclear weapons.

I noted that nuclear fuel reprocessing yields materials that power plants can use for further production of electricity, though some of the spent fuel can also be employed in nuclear weapons.

I further pointed out that President Carter terminated the American project for reprocessing used nuclear fuel in 1977 because he feared that some of it could be obtained by unfriendly nations for making atomic weapons. (For the same reason,

American policy makers today remain anxious about construction of nuclear power plants in North Korea and Iran.) But I never suggested that the French nuclear plants churned out plutonium for use primarily in nuclear weapons. In fact, the French recycle a huge proportion of the spent fuel into material that they use to produce more electricity.

As the Choices and Challenges forum demonstrated, even "experts" have serious and legitimate differences about how to interpret the facts relating to nuclear power. But it is important that the public debate draws on accurate information reported by the news media.

Richard Hirsh
Professor, Department of History
Director, Consortium on Energy Restructuring

Comments:

Posted by: Rod Adams at 4:24 am

Professor Hirsh has made some statements that are correct on a first order, but he has not dug deeply enough to find that there are second order complexities in the energy market in general and the electricity market in particular. Nuclear power has made an important contribution already towards reducing America's dependence on imported oil. In 1970, before nuclear power's share of the electricity market grew beyond 1%, oil was used for about 17% of the electricity generation. That occurred mainly in New England and in Florida where ships kept delivery costs from foreign sources low. As he stated in his opinion piece, the situation today is that the US electricity market has essentially been weaned from oil and nuclear power has replaced its market share - nuclear is now about 19-20% of US electricity. Nuclear can make additional contributions because oil is still burned in furnaces for heat; that use can easily be replaced by using electric heat. I live in an all electric home whose winter heating cost was quite low when it was supplied by a system consisting of coal and nuclear generation under cost of service regulation. As soon as the regulations were removed and the cost was allowed to float up to the market price as determined by natural gas, our heating cost doubled. Nuclear also has proven uses in ship propulsion. The US congress has directed the Navy to go back and study nuclear for ships in addition to aircraft carriers and submarines; the studies show that the costs are a wash once oil prices exceed about $85 per barrel. Commercial ships, built to less military specific standards, could be extremely competitive with nuclear power plants since oil is the main source of baseload power at sea. Otherwise, I think Professor Hirsh's points are spot on.

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Washington Post
November 14, 2007

Nevada struggles to gain clout with early 2008 vote

By John Whitesides
Political Correspondent
Reuters

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) - The state of Nevada hoped to gain political clout and spotlight Western issues by bringing forward contests to choose 2008 presidential candidates, but so far attention has been as spare as the desert landscape.

While White House contenders shower ads, appearances and staff on the traditional campaign kick-off states of Iowa and New Hampshire, Nevada officials have seen long stretches of time with few candidate visits and have struggled to ratchet up voter interest.

"The race just hasn't been engaged here yet," said David Damore, a political analyst at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. "In terms of attracting candidates and national media attention, it has not fulfilled expectations."

That could begin to change on Thursday, when Democratic presidential candidates gather in the gambling center of Las Vegas for a debate that will be the state's first big campaign event.

Nevada's January 19 contest is expected to be the third in the state-by-state race to pick the parties' nominees for the November 2008 election. Iowa kicks it off on January 3 and New Hampshire is likely to go next on January 8.

The national Democratic Party moved Nevada up in the pecking order to highlight Western issues, build on the party's recent election victories in the western Rocky Mountain states and expose candidates to a more diverse electorate. Nevada Republicans moved earlier this year to hold their contest on the same day.

Democrats hope to take advantage of a growing Hispanic population in Nevada, which also has big and influential labor unions, including the Culinary Workers Union representing casino employees.

But candidates have not flocked to the state, and regional issues have not topped the agenda when they do. By last week, the Democratic contenders combined had made 50 visits to Nevada in 2007, compared to 178 to Iowa and 153 to New Hampshire, according to a tally by the Hotline political Web site.

The entire Republican field had made just nine visits to Nevada. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who leads national polls in the Republican race, made his first visit last week.

Western issues like mining, land use and water rights remain secondary items, and Democratic agreement on opposition to the nuclear waste repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain has limited debate on that topic.

State officials in both parties say the political tempo will pick up between the New Hampshire and Nevada voting.

'NOTHING TO SOMETHING'

"We've gone from nothing to something," said Hans Gullickson, caucus director for the Nevada Republican Party. "Nevada has always been neglected except for its money when it comes to presidential politics, but that is changing."

Gullickson and Jill Derby, the state Democratic chairwoman, said the event was helping them build for the 2008 election, when Nevada again will be a swing state. In 2004, President George W. Bush narrowly beat Democrat John Kerry in Nevada.

"This is an extraordinary party-building operation," Derby said. "We will come out of this with an organization unlike anything we've had before -- we'll be a transformed party."

Ironically, the compressed nominating calendar has probably hurt Nevada, as candidates focus on Iowa and New Hampshire in a belief they will set the stage for later contests.

"We believe the Nevada caucuses will be deeply impacted by what happens in Iowa and New Hampshire," Illinois Sen. Barack Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe said in a message to supporters this week.

Other factors have hurt too, political analysts say, including the state's lack of political experience.

Low turnout in earlier Nevada caucuses -- in 2004 only 9,000 people, less than 1 percent of eligible voters, gathered in groups to pick delegates to the national nominating conventions -- makes it tough for campaigns to identify supporters.

"In Iowa and New Hampshire, the whole thing is institutionalized. Everyone knows where to go, who to talk to, what corn field to stand in. Here, the main attractions don't even have any voters in them," Damore said, referring to the state's casinos packed with visiting tourists.

Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, ahead in national polls, holds a big lead in Nevada over Obama and former Sen. John Edwards. Bill Richardson, governor of New Mexico, lingers in the single digits despite being the only Western candidate and Hispanic in the Democratic race.

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, the prime force behind the state's move into political prime time, rejected suggestions it was not a smash success.

"We feel very comfortable that what is happening in Nevada is good," Reid said, adding the lack of racial diversity in Iowa and New Hampshire made them unsuitable campaign tests.

(Editing by Lori Santos and David Storey)

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Boston Globe
November 14, 2007

For candidates roving US, energy stance is fraught with risks

Region to region, priorities conflict

By Susan Milligan
Globe Staff

LAS VEGAS - John Edwards voted for making Nevada's Yucca Mountain a nuclear waste repository, but now he opposes it. Bill Richardson allowed the Yucca project to proceed when he was Bill Clinton's energy secretary, but now says he opposes it as a waste dump. Hillary Clinton several times voted against bills expanding the amount of ethanol required in gasoline, but now wants the government to help pay for the biofuel that is so important to Iowans.

Energy policy, presidential candidates in both parties agree, is a critical national priority. But the regional special interests involved in energy use, production, and waste disposal have created political problems for the presidential contenders as they woo voters across the country.

Question the role of ethanol as a cure-all gasoline additive when campaigning in Iowa? A candidate might as well drop out of the race instead, because ethanol comes from corn, which comes from Iowa, which will hold caucuses Jan. 3.

Decrying the siting of Yucca Mountain as a place to store the nation's nuclear waste goes over well with Nevadans, who are set to hold early caucuses Jan. 19. But in South Carolina - where Republicans will hold a primary the same day and the Democrats, the following week - voters don't like the idea of shelving Yucca, because that's where they want to send their nuclear waste.

Now, presidential candidates who serve in the Senate are preparing to vote later this fall on whether to increase fuel economy standards, which could alienate auto company unions and executives in Michigan, an early primary state.

Environmental activists and energy industry officials say they'd like more clarity from the presidential candidates on a national energy policy - even if it means alienating voters in some states.

"Democrats and Republicans are generally saying the same thing about energy policy, that global warming is an issue and we need to be energy-independent," said Frank Maisano, a veteran lobbyist for the energy industry. "Once you start talking about specifics . . . that's where people get gun-shy. That's why we don't get much substance on energy in presidential races."

Blease Graham, a political science professor at the University of South Carolina, said candidates who oppose Yucca Mountain could face trouble in the Palmetto State, where nuclear power provides a higher proportion of electricity supplied than any other state.

"I suppose candidates, in running campaigns, are assessing [political] risks, thinking, 'If I say this, I've got 70 percent-plus here,' as opposed to actually developing a policy and courageously telling these various groups, 'Here's where I stand,' " Graham said.

The Yucca Mountain matter is even more politically loaded this campaign season, because Nevada has moved up its caucuses, raising the influence of the state in the presidential nomination process. Democratic candidates are likely to face questions about Yucca when they meet in Las Vegas for a nationally televised debate tomorrow night. And the West is emerging as a key general election battleground, further increasing Nevada's importance.

"It's a very major issue for Nevadans. I think the message is, don't come to Nevada unless you're willing to address it," said Lydia Ball, regional representative of the Sierra Club in Nevada.

more stories like thisGOP candidates have been largely silent on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, but Democrats have overwhelmingly been critical of the idea.

Edwards, a Democratic former US senator from North Carolina, voted in 2000 and again in 2002 to advance the plan to put a national nuclear waste facility at Yucca Mountain, which is in rural Nevada. But last month, Edwards - who is hoping his prolabor credentials will result in a strong showing in Nevada, where unions are politically powerful - said he is now against the idea.

Edwards said he had become convinced that the Yucca Mountain facility could contaminate the ground water. Further, he said, transportation of nuclear waste to Nevada presents a national security threat during "a time of terrorism."

Richardson, now governor of New Mexico, also was content to let Yucca Mountain advance as a nuclear waste site when he was energy secretary. But while campaigning in Nevada, Richardson said he now favors opening Yucca Mountain as a national laboratory, instead of as a dump for the country's nuclear waste.

In Iowa, the energy test comes down to one word: ethanol. And Clinton, a New York Democrat who voted against ethanol early in her Senate career, sought to mend fences with Iowans last week, saying she now supports the product.

"I voted on behalf of my constituents," Clinton said in Iowa, explaining that the cost of transporting the product to New York would be burdensome to Empire State residents. But now that New York has ethanol plants, "I happily support corn ethanol, all forms of ethanol, research for cellulosic ethanol, biodiesel," she said.

Environmentalists are wary of ethanol because of the land use and energy required to produce it, said Nick Berning of Friends of the Earth.

One issue that has virtually united the Democratic candidates is raising the average level of fuel economy for cars and trucks. All support the 35 miles-per-gallon standard set in the Senate energy bill, which is likely to come before the full Congress early next month. And many, including Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, have advocated going beyond that standard.

Republicans - except Senator John McCain of Arizona, who supports higher fuel standards - have barely mentioned the issue.

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Las Vegas SUN
November 13, 2007

Editorial: Governor slights Yucca fight

Since taking office in January, Gibbons has acted soft on nuclear waste burial here

What once was a top priority for Nevada's governors - fighting a Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository - now seems much less of a priority under the administration of Gov. Jim Gibbons.

The latest example involves his order last month, in response to falling tax revenue, that most state agencies develop plans for cutting their budgets by 5 percent.

He failed to exempt the state agency responsible for defending Nevada from the dangerous federal plan to bury nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The governor's slight of this agency could not have come at a worse time. In the years before Gibbons took office, Nevada scored several legal and scientific victories against the Yucca proposal. The state is poised to win this fight, but it has one more hurdle.

The Energy Department, which oversees the project, has budgeted since 2004 $154 million for work by two large law firms. They are helping to prepare the application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to open a Yucca repository.

With the application scheduled to be submitted in June, now is the time that Nevada needs to rev up its efforts, and not falter in the end game. The state budgeted about $4 million to continue its legal fight over the next two years, an already miniscule amount that would lose $200,000 if Gibbons' proposed cuts come to pass.

Given the absolutely critical need for Nevada to ultimately prevail against the federal government, Gibbbons' failure to exempt the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects from any cuts is inexcusable.

This isn't the first time Gibbons has turned away from the Yucca fight. On Oct. 31 a U.S. Senate committee held a hearing on Yucca Mountain for the purpose of demanding answers from a recalcitrant Energy Department. After receiving an invitation to testify after making a stink about not being formally invited, Gibbons failed to show.

The next day, Gibbons was a headliner at an event in Las Vegas co-sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce - a champion of the dump. And earlier this year, Gibbons appointed a pro-Yucca activist from Nye County to the state Nuclear Projects Commission, which has always led Nevada's opposition to the dump. The appointment was withdrawn after a public outcry.

Gibbons likes to make such statements as, "I still think we're going to kick their (the Energy Department) butts. I don't care how many lawyers they have."

But for his words to have any meaning at all in the deadly serious fight against a Yucca dump, they have to be accompanied by corresponding actions.

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Las Vegas SUN
November 13, 2007

Democrats' anti-Yucca Mountain stances complicated by records

By Kathleen Hennessey
Associated Press Writer

LAS VEGAS (AP) - The leading Democratic presidential candidates are united on the government's Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage plan: They'd scrap it.

Their vigorous opposition to the project reflects Nevada's importance as one of a handful of states that will lead off voting in January for the Democratic and Republican nominations. Few local issues are as unpopular with Nevadans as the waste dump.

The Democrats have just one problem - their records keep getting in the way. Front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton has created suspicion in some corners of the anti-Yucca lobby because she's refused to rule out expansion of nuclear power as a solution to the nation's energy woes and has received campaign contributions from the nuclear industry. Barack Obama, whose home state of Illinois has more nuclear plants than any other, also has received substantial contributions from the industry and wants to leave nuclear power on the table.

John Edwards, when he was a North Carolina senator, voted twice to open the dump and once against it. Bill Richardson once ran the Energy Department, which is building the dump, and voted for it when he was a New Mexico congressman.

The dump, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, was supposed to open in 1998, but scientific controversies, lawsuits and money shortages have delayed it. Its opening is now projected for no earlier than 2020 and its cost has climbed to an estimated $77 billion.

The issue has been almost invisible on the Republican side of the race despite GOP plans to hold their presidential caucuses in Nevada on Jan. 19, the same day as Democrats.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has not given a clear answer on his position, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has said he will not rule out continuing work at Yucca Mountain, and Arizona Sen. John McCain has stuck to his support for the dump. Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson voted in favor of the project while in Congress, but has not commented recently.

The GOP has generally been more willing than Democrats to increase the nation's share of electricity generated from nuclear power. The lack of a waste disposal site is a key obstacle to expansion.

Here's a look at the top Democrats' records on Yucca Mountain:

- Clinton:

The New York senator recently used her seat on the Environment and Public Works Committee to call the first oversight hearing on the dump since Democrats took control of Congress.

Clinton voted against a 2002 attempt to override Nevada's rejection of the facility. She's promised to cut funding for the project if elected president.

At a South Carolina town hall in February, Clinton expressed concerns about waste disposal but noted that "nuclear power has to be a part of our energy solution."

Clinton has accepted thousands in contributions from the nuclear industry, including nearly $80,000 in this election from employees and a PAC of NRG Energy Inc., the first company to file an application for a new nuclear power plant in the United States since before the Three Mile Island accident.

Critics see a contradiction in Clinton's opposition to a facility to store nuclear waste, but not to expansion of nuclear power, which would generate more waste.

Clinton has said she does not believe the debate over the project is a referendum on nuclear energy.

She also has to struggle with her husband's record. She has described former President Bill Clinton as putting the project on life-support.

"You know, when my husband was president he vetoed a measure to try to push this forward, contrary to a lot of the questions that were being raised," Clinton told reporters recently. "That was toward the end of his administration and when the Bush administration came in, it revived it and gave it new life and kept it going."

The bill President Clinton vetoed would have opened an interim nuclear repository in Nevada, but did not slow the development of the permanent site.

"I would say that the project was advancing more during the Clinton years financially than at any other time," said former Nevada Gov. Bob List, a Republican, now a consultant for the Nuclear Energy Institute and an advocate for the repository. "They poured billions into it and didn't slow it down one bit."

- Obama:

He has said he's opposed to Yucca Mountain, and has called for the facility's closure.

Illinois' nuclear industry, which has thousands of tons of waste at its facilities awaiting opening of Yucca Mountain, has long backed Obama. Executives and employees of Exelon Corp., the Chicago-based energy giant and nuclear plant operator, have contributed more than $200,000 to Obama campaigns since 2004, according to PoliticalMoneyLine.com.

Obama has said he believes nuclear energy should remain on the table.

Obama also raised eyebrows when he chose Federico Pena, who was energy secretary before Richardson, as his surrogate on the issue. At his departure from the Energy Department, Pena took credit for "meeting milestones" toward opening the site.

- Edwards:

The former 2004 vice presidential nominee's has a mixed record on the issue.

After he was selected as Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry's running mate, Edwards announced he would defer to Kerry's anti-Yucca position and promised Nevada Sen. Harry Reid he would fight the project.

The former North Carolina senator has said he was trying to protect his constituents by supporting the dump in Nevada.

"We had an issue in North Carolina where they were going to start storing nuclear waste in North Carolina unless we had some other place for the nuclear waste," Edwards said on his first stop in Nevada as a presidential candidate. But looking at the project from a "national perspective" it doesn't work, he added.

Edwards now says faulty science was used to support the Yucca Mountain project, and he doesn't believe nuclear energy is a safe energy source.

- Richardson:

Richardson, the New Mexico governor, has the most tangled record on nuclear waste disposal.

As a New Mexico congressman, he voted in favor of the 1987 measure that designated Yucca Mountain as the sole dump site to be studied by the federal government.

Richardson had not raised the issue on the stump or in statements until it was cited in news stories. He now says he's always opposed the project, which he believes would be unsafe.

"Nevada should say no, I've always said no," Richardson told reporters during an early campaign stop in the state.

Richardson explains his House vote as support for other funding items in the bill. He has said he voted against the project "five or six" other times, though his campaign could cite only two.

Richardson's claims of constant opposition also are not supported by his tenure as head of the Department of Energy.

Under Richardson, Yucca Mountain continued to receive fund