Yucca Mountain News Clips - Friday, February 29, 2008

Yucca Mountain News Clips
Friday, February 29, 2008
---------------------------

Las Vegas Review-Journal
February 29, 2008

DOE nuke waste priorities criticized

'We are not going to have Yucca,' GOP lawmaker says

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman was scolded Thursday by a House Republican who said the Department of Energy is "ignoring political realities" by pressing ahead at Yucca Mountain in the face of forceful opposition from Nevada.

The comments from Rep. David Hobson of Ohio at a DOE budget hearing were another sign of shifts on Capitol Hill among lawmakers who have advocated completing the proposed nuclear waste repository 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Hobson, former chairman of the House energy and water subcommittee, in recent years has grown to advocate shipping waste from commercial plants to a few interim storage sites while the Yucca project continues on a slow path.

That way, he has said, the government can cut its losses from lawsuits from utilities who have sued over decade-long delays in taking the radioactive material off their hands. DOE officials project damage costs to taxpayers will be at least $7 billion and probably billions more.

When Bodman came before the energy and water subcommittee to talk about the DOE's new budget that includes $494.7 million for the Nevada project, Hobson said he continues to be disappointed with the department's performance on nuclear waste issues.

"The nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain is still on life support, and the department is ignoring the political realities in the Senate and in the state of Nevada that can and will block any progress on the repository," Hobson said. The Senate reference was to Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., who has cut funding and tried to block the project at every turn.

"The department refuses to look seriously at alternatives for dealing with spent fuel," Hobson said. "Meanwhile, spent fuel continues to accumulate at reactor sites around the country and the multi-billion dollar liability against the federal government grows larger every day."

At one point in the hearing, Bodman was talking about radioactive waste being cleaned up at a former government nuclear weapons site. He declared, "That is why we need Yucca Mountain."

Hobson interjected, "We are not going to have Yucca Mountain."

Bodman told the panel that DOE plans to apply for a repository construction license, and hopes the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will find the application complete enough to add to its docket of comprehensive safety reviews.

With the Bush administration nearing the end of its term, "we would like to get all of that done on our watch," Bodman said.

---------------------------

Huntington Herald Dispatch
February 29, 2008

Lawmakers consider easing requirements for nuclear power plants

The Associated Press

FRANKFORT, Ky. — As nuclear power looks for a comeback, the state General Assembly is considering plans that would ease requirements for building new plants in Kentucky.

A proposal before the Senate would lift a current state requirement that there be a permanent nuclear waste storage facility before a plant could be built in Kentucky. Sen. Bob Leeper, a sponsor of the bill, says changing the law could get companies looking to build a new nuclear plant interested in Kentucky.

“The bill would allow them to at least put Kentucky on the map,” Leeper, I-Paducah, told a Senate panel considering the measure on Thursday.

Currently, state law says a nuclear power plant may only be certified in the Bluegrass state if there is a working radioactive waste disposal operation in existence — or will be by the time the plant opens.

Leeper’s proposal would remove that restriction which has, in effect, created a moratorium on nuclear power plants from being built in the state. There are no permanent waste storage facilities in the U.S.

The federal government has been planning to store high-level radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, since the early 1980s. Whether that proposed facility ever opens remains uncertain.

---------------------------

Winona Daily News
February 29, 2008

Wisconsin considers lifting ban on nuclear power plants

MADISON, Wis. — Wisconsin lawmakers are debating whether to lift the state’s 25-year moratorium on new nuclear power plants, with backers arguing it will shore up the energy supply and combat global warming.

Backed by business groups, the Republican-controlled Assembly is advancing a bill that would allow the Public Service Commission to again consider plans to build nuclear power plants.

The plan would repeal a 1983 law that outlaws the construction of such plants unless they are shown to save ratepayers money and a federal repository for nuclear waste is operating. The law, enacted after the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident, has essentially acted as a ban.

The plan will not become law this session given opposition by Democrats who control the Senate and Gov. Jim Doyle. But approval in the Assembly would be significant and escalate a debate over the safety of nuclear power and the best ways to provide energy for Wisconsin residents.

Supporters say nuclear power is already among the most reliable sources of electricity for the state, pointing to the Kewaunee and Point Beach reactors, and is critical as energy use is growing. They say it is more efficient to produce than energy from coal and better for the environment since it does not give off gases that contribute to global warming.

“Especially given the growing concern about climate change, Wisconsin will need the option of new nuclear in the years ahead,” Brian Rude of the Dairyland Power Cooperative, which owns a closed nuclear reactor in Genoa, Wis., said in testimony to lawmakers.

In addition to repealing the moratorium, Assembly bills would require the state to lobby for a federal repository for nuclear waste and investigate how it will meet its future energy needs when the Point Beach and Kewaunee reactors are set to stop operating in 2033.

The Wisconsin Citizens Utilities Board, which represents residential ratepayers, urged lawmakers to reject all three bills, saying the best approach for Wisconsin’s energy future is conserving and developing renewable sources.

And environmental groups say the state would be irresponsible to change the law without a clear plan to dispose of the toxic waste the plants create. A federal plan to store the waste in Yucca Mountain in Nevada remains several years away despite years of study.

Critics warn Wisconsin’s embrace of nuclear power could resurrect a long-ago discarded plan to store the waste in northern Wisconsin. Supporters call that a scare tactic.

Senate Majority Leader Russ Decker, D-Weston, said the bill won’t get a hearing in the Senate, let alone pass.

“I don’t see a great public groundswell for nuclear energy,” Decker told reporters on Thursday.
.

---------------------------

Platts
February 28, 2008

US Senate committee now divided over nuclear waste policy

Washington (Platts)--27Feb2008

Reflecting uncertainty over the US Department of Energy's proposed nuclear waste repository in Nevada, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Wednesday said there is "no longer a consensus" among its members over government policy for disposing of spent fuel from nuclear power plants.

A statement on the Bush administration's fiscal 2009 budget request signed by the committee's chairman, Democrat Jeff Bingaman, and ranking Republican, Pete Domenici, said most of the panel's members look forward to the construction of new nuclear power plants in the US, but differ over options for disposing of the reactors' waste.

"Most of our members support the administration's goal of promoting the licensing of new nuclear power plants, and its Nuclear Power 2010 and Generation IV programs supporting that goal," the statement, called "views and estimates," said. "There is, however, no longer a consensus among our members on nuclear waste policy."

The DOE program to establish a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada has been reeling since Congress cut its fiscal 2008 budget by $108 million, forcing officials to plan for 500 layoffs. The department has said the cut will cause it to miss a June target for seeking a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license to build and operate the repository.

"Some of us continue to support the department's longstanding and statutorily directed efforts to license the Yucca Mountain geologic waste repository, and the administration's request for funds necessary for this purpose," the committee said. "Others, in light of the continuing difficulties in obtaining funding for the Yucca Mountain program, support new approaches to storage and treatment of spent nuclear fuel, including the use of recycling technologies."

Other committee members oppose the administration's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, which envisions recycling spent fuel as a means of promoting nuclear energy globally with less need for waste disposal, the committee said.

The uncertainty over nuclear was policy on the committee is a relatively recent development, the panel's Democratic spokesman, Bill Wicker, said. "On Senate Energy, there has always been a broad, general consensus on nuclear waste, a consensus that this year no longer exists," he said.

---------------------------

Las Vegas Review-Journal
February 28, 2008

Letters: Trust Yucca science on earthquakes

To the editor:

Contrary to your Friday editorial on the earthquake near Wells, the Department of Energy does not expect any resident of Nevada to "just trust" the department on the safety of the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

That said, you should trust the decades of scientific research done by America's leading national laboratories, as well as work performed by the Nevada Seismological Laboratory at the University of Nevada, Reno.

We share the concern about earthquakes. We live here, too.

Construction of the repository cannot begin until and unless the Nuclear Regulatory Commission authorizes construction. Later this year, the department plans to submit its license application for construction authorization to the commission. The NRC will conduct an independent, rigorous and thorough review and provide ample opportunity for Nevada and other interested parties to challenge the information in the application. The NRC will authorize the Yucca Mountain repository to go forward only if it determines the data and analyses in the application are correct, supported by sound science and demonstrate compliance with all applicable safety requirements, including the radiological protection standards established by the Environmental Protection Agency.

I invite your readers to learn more at www.earthquake.usgs.gov or the Nevada Seismology Lab's Yucca Mountain frequently-asked-questions page at www.seismo.unr.edu/htdocs/ym-faq.html.

Russ Dyer
Las Vegas
The Writer is a Chief Scientist with the U.S. Department of Energy's Yucca Mountain Project.

---------------------------

Pahrump Valley Times
February 28, 2008

NEI courts volunteers for interim storage

Institute Recognizes Shift on Nuclear Storage

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- With uncertainties swirling around the proposed Nevada radioactive waste site, the nuclear industry has mounted a campaign to court communities that might be willing to host interim storage of its used fuel.

Officials with the Nuclear Energy Institute are meeting with governors, state legislators and other elected leaders, including those in states where nuclear waste has sat for years at decommissioned power plants, NEI executive Marshall Cohen said Friday.

Talks are moving forward with two or three communities, and more sites are expected to show interest, said Cohen, NEI senior director for state and local government affairs.

Cohen did not identify the communities during a presentation, but said some were among the 11 sites that at one time volunteered to host a nuclear waste reprocessing plant for the government. Those were in New Mexico, Washington, Idaho, Illinois, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio and South Carolina.

In the next month or so, he said, NEI will guide local leaders on a nuclear plant tour focused on showing them how utilities are keeping spent fuel stored on above ground pads and in steel and concrete casks, similar to how an interim storage site would be configured.

"We are going to take them to interim storage, to walk around it, touch it, taste it, talk to the people who run it," Cohen said.

After that, "If they still want to talk and get serious, then we can start looking at putting things on the table.

"We can have a serious dialogue with them from the industry's perspective and perhaps by the end of 2008 we might have a couple communities willing to stand up."

Cohen spoke at a conference of the Energy Communities Alliance, local governments that interact with Department of Energy laboratories and former weapons plants.

The NEI campaign underscores the industry's determination to show progress on removing spent fuel from reactor sites, an issue that could slow the proclaimed "renaissance" of new nuclear power plant construction.

It also reflects the industry's shift on the much delayed Yucca Mountain Project.

Where once burial in the proposed Nevada repository was held up as the solution for thousands of tons of spent fuel piling up in reinforced containers outside reactors, now NEI advocates a broader policy that also includes advancing nuclear fuel processing and interim storage.

"What we are willing to do is put an entire industry behind the effort," Cohen said of locating volunteers to hold onto nuclear waste until it can be moved to Yucca Mountain or to a reprocessing plant.

If NEI can recruit one or more volunteer sites, "It can be very very helpful in the long run for the utilities to be able to answer the inevitable question, 'What about the waste?'" Cohen said. "We can say short term we have a path to interim storage and long term we are going to have other things happen in the country."

Energy Department leaders have discouraged talk of interim nuclear waste storage, where potential hosts are expected run into a gantlet of legal, technical and political challenges like those that confronted the consortium that tried to establish a storage site on the Goshute Indian reservation in Utah.

Ward Sproat, director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, has testified to Congress that by the time a temporary storage site is located, licensed, built and opened for business, Yucca Mountain would be close to finished anyway.

"They are much better judges of the timetable than us but we think it makes sense to move on this," Cohen said in response on Friday.

---------------------------

Kansas City Star
February 28, 2008

Nuclear power regaining its luster

By David Klepper
The Star’s Topeka correspondent

TOPEKA | Kansas State University nuclear engineer Ken Shultis began studying nuclear power more than 40 years ago. Since then, he saw nuclear’s once-bright promise dim.

Three Mile Island. “The China Syndrome.” Chernobyl.

Now, with the nation concerned about coal and climate change and with renewable energy so far unable to meet America’s thirst for energy, Shultis has reason to be optimistic.

“Presently, there’s a resurgence,” Shultis told Kansas lawmakers at a recent hearing.

China plans to build two new nuclear plants every year for 15 years, Shultis said. Nations like France continue to derive most of their energy from nuclear power, even recycling old nuclear fuel for future use.

Meanwhile, aging U.S. plants — like Kansas’ own Wolf Creek — are seeking federal permission to operate into the middle of the century.

And for the first time in years, utility companies want to build new plants, or expand old ones.

In Missouri, AmerenUE is considering adding a second reactor to its Callaway Nuclear Generating Station, the state’s only nuclear plant.

“Times change. Politics change. Right now, the trend is toward reducing carbon emissions, so that gives a big advantage to nuclear,” said AmerenUE spokesman Mike Cleary.

Across the U.S., utility companies requested permits for four new or expanded plants last year; 15 additional applications are expected this year.

Cleary said the utility hasn’t decided yet whether to build a second reactor but is completing an application with the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Those applications, which require detailed feasibility reports, can cost tens of millions of dollars, Cleary said, an indication of just how seriously the utility is considering a new reactor.

“The reason for that is all the concern about carbon emissions,” he said.

Many Kansas lawmakers say it’s time the state begins encouraging construction of a second nuclear plant. They’re pushing a bill this year to allow utility companies to recoup the cost of feasibility studies for a new plant.

Last year, lawmakers passed a 10-year property tax exemption for any power company that builds a second plant near the Wolf Creek Generating Station, near Burlington, Kan.

Nuclear plants aren’t cheap. It takes as long as 15 years to conduct studies, get permits and build one. And they cost $6 billion to $9 billion.

But once they’re built, nuclear plants come without the carbon emissions that make coal and natural gas unpalatable to many. And they’re cheap to operate, producing electricity at almost half the price of the next most affordable and practical source, coal.

“We can’t wait any longer,” said Sen. Roger Reitz, a Manhattan Republican. “We’ve lost so much time already. Energy is going to cost us a fortune in the future, and nuclear must be on the table.”

But nuclear power’s opponents haven’t gone away. Critics like the Sierra Club note that while nuclear plants themselves emit very little pollution, there’s always the risk of a meltdown, a terrorist incident or the accidental radioactive leak.

And despite years of wrangling, there’s still no approved plan for the permanent storage of high-grade radioactive nuclear waste. Plants like Callaway and Wolf Creek store it on premises.

Federal authorities had hoped to bury waste at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain starting in 1998, but the proposal has been delayed repeatedly. It could be 2020 before the facility receives its first shipment, if ever.

--To reach David Klepper, call 785-354-1388 or send e-mail to dklepper@kcstar.com.

---------------------------

Green Bay Press Gazette
February 28, 2008

State considers allowing new nuclear plants

By Ryan J. Foley
The Associated Press

MADISON — Wisconsin lawmakers are debating whether to lift the state’s 25-year moratorium on new nuclear power plants, with backers arguing it will shore up the energy supply and combat global warming.

Backed by business groups, the Republican-controlled Assembly is advancing a bill that would allow the Public Service Commission to again consider plans to build nuclear power plants.

Environmental groups say the state would be irresponsible to change the law without a clear plan to dispose of the toxic waste the plants create. A federal plan to store the waste in Yucca Mountain in Nevada remains several years away despite years of study.

Critics warn Wisconsin’s embrace of nuclear power could resurrect a long-ago discarded plan to store the waste in northern Wisconsin. Supporters call that a scare tactic.

Senate Majority Leader Russ Decker, D-Weston, said the bill won’t get a hearing in the Senate, let alone pass.

“I don’t see a great public groundswell for nuclear energy,” Decker told reporters today.

---------------------------

Las Vegas Review-Journal
February 27, 2008

Nevada told to take Yucca Mountain money

State official counters no such federal funding exists

By Ed Vogel
Review-Journal Capital Bureau

RENO -- Nuclear waste can be safely stored in Yucca Mountain and the state should consider negotiating for financial benefits in exchange for accepting the long-delayed nuclear repository, a member of Gov. Jim Gibbons' transition team and former Reagan administration security official said Tuesday.

Ty Cobb told a gathering of Reno business and political leaders that some money from a $27.1 billion national fund to construct the repository could be given to the state.

"The money is there," said Cobb, a former Army colonel, National Security Council and CIA operative. "The monetary benefits are there and warrant a reappraisal of the state stance."

But Bob Loux, director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, responded that no money is available for Nevada. He said the latest estimates are that the repository, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, will cost more than $100 billion if it is ever built, and taxpayers will end up paying for half of that.

He said one-third of the workers at the site have been laid off and Congress has limited funds. He said both Democratic presidential candidates want to scrap the project.

Loux said the state could have claimed $10 million a year for accepting the dump, but that offer expired long ago.

He said every poll for decades has shown overwhelming citizen opposition to the repository. Loux has voiced the state viewpoint against the dump for every governor since 1984.

While Nevada state government revenues have fallen short of projections by $565 million because of a weakened economy, Gibbons remains opposed to the repository, Loux said in an interview last week.

Before the presentation, University of Nevada, Reno professor John Scire and Cobb released a position paper asking the state to "undertake a neutral, unbiased assessment" of the repository.

They argued that a new appraisal would find that waste can be safely transported by armed guards to the Nevada site. Waste stored in Yucca Mountain would be far more secure from terrorists than continuing to store it at 73 nuclear power plants around the country, they concluded.

Cobb, who is the father of Assemblyman Ty Cobb, R-Reno, even said that an earthquake along the lines of the one that struck Wells last week would not penetrate the waste in casks buried beneath Yucca Mountain.

And he said Illinois has drawn $3 billion and Pennsylvania $2 billion out of the nuclear waste fund.

"And Nevada? The state government hasn't drawn a red cent? The rationale is that should Nevada begin to negotiate for a slice of this funding, it would compromise its 'No Repository Here' stance," he said.

Loux said Cobb was mistaken and had actually cited what Illinois and Pennsylvania ratepayers paid into the waste fund.

"No state has ever drawn money out of the waste fund," Loux said.

But in an interview after the meeting, Cobb even said the power generating states "want to pay us."

Loux questioned whether a Yucca Mountain repository ever could be safe. He said the Energy Department has been called "incompetent" by the Congressional Government Accounting Office.

All 127 nuclear facilities constructed by the DOE have leaked, and cleanup costs the government $500 million a year, he said.

But Scire called Loux's comments "propaganda" and contended DOE inherited facilities in which sloppy work was conducted by the Department of Defense.

Despite joining Cobb in preparing the position statement, Scire said he did not care whether the repository is ever completed.

He said the waste can remain for now outside nuclear plants and eventually be reprocessed.

---------------------------

Las Vegas Review-Journal
February 27, 2008

Gibbons opts to stay neutral

McCain praised, but not endorsed by Nevada leader

By Tony Batt
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Gov. Jim Gibbons stopped short of endorsing John McCain as the Republican presidential nominee on Tuesday even though Republicans in Nevada's congressional delegation have vowed to support the Arizona senator.

"There are still people out there who are very passionate about Mike Huckabee, and I don't want to tell them that their vote, their ideas and their enthusiasm for the electoral process is not important," said Gibbons, who was wrapping up a visit to Washington after attending the annual conference of the National Governors Association over the weekend.

Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., endorsed McCain on Feb. 15.

The other two Republicans in Nevada's congressional delegation -- Reps. Dean Heller and Jon Porter -- said Tuesday they endorse McCain as the GOP presidential nominee.

Gibbons praised McCain and predicted he would be a formidable candidate in November in Nevada.

"I think, in Nevada, John McCain is going to do very well because of our growing, large veterans population. People like John McCain because of his leadership, his fiscal conservative policies when it comes to pork barrel spending on the federal side of things," Gibbons said.

Gibbons said his choice for McCain's vice presidential running mate would be former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who won the Republican caucus in Nevada last month.

Gibbons, who is a Mormon, said he was appalled by the media's coverage of Romney's Mormon faith.

"The media demonized the (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) religion as if it were some sort of a cult," he said.

The governor acknowledged he is "very concerned" about the surge in Democratic voter registration in Nevada due to the party's presidential caucus.

There now are 44,676 more Democrats than Republicans in the state, according to a Feb. 20 report by the secretary of state.

"We're kind of behind the eight ball as Republicans. We need to catch up," Gibbons said.

Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that federal officials were investigating allegations that Gibbons accepted more than $110,000 in gifts and payments from businessman Warren Trepp in exchange for legislation by Gibbons when he served in the House.

During this trip, Gibbons said he was not going to meet with Washington lawyers defending him against the bribery allegations.

The governor also said he remains "absolutely" opposed to a proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain despite allowing the Department of Energy to use Nevada water to explore the site.

Gibbons, 63, also said he has made the decision to run for a second term as governor in 2010, and does not plan to ever return to Congress.

--Contact Stephens Washington Bureau writer Tony Batt at tbatt@stephensmedia.com or (202) 783-1760.

Gentleman's Quarterly
February 27, 2008

MELTDOWN

What went wrong with nuclear power? How did the cleanest, cheapest solution to our oil dependence become the stuff of apocalyptic nightmares? Where does the myth end and the truth begin?

By Wil S. Hylton
Photograph by Edward Burtynsky

What went wrong with nuclear power? How did the cleanest, cheapest solution to our oil dependence become the stuff of apocalyptic nightmares? Where does the myth end and the truth begin?

On the morning of March 28, 1979, just after 4 a.m., a pair of workers on the graveyard shift at Three Mile Island nuclear plant noticed something odd: The filters for the system’s cooling water had spontaneously shut down.

This was troubling, but far from catastrophic. Although the flow of water is essential to a nuclear plant—it keeps the radioactive fuel from overheating—TMI had been designed to handle just this type of problem. In the event of a filter shutdown, a bypass valve was engineered to open automatically, sending water around the obstruction and directly into the plant.

Unfortunately, at TMI that morning, no sooner had the filters broken than the bypass valve broke, too.

As the supply of coolant came to a stop, the plant’s internal temperature began to soar. Luckily, TMI had been designed to handle this problem, too. Within minutes, a second emergency valve popped open, venting the excess heat and steam into the containment facility.

Unfortunately, ten seconds later, that valve broke, too—staying open long after the pressure was reduced, and allowing steam and water to continue flooding out of the plant.

Now TMI was in a double bind. On the one hand, the supply of fresh water had stopped; on the other, the plant’s existing water was quickly flowing out. It was only a matter of time before the plant would be completely drained, and the uranium inside, exposed to the open air, would begin to burn furiously, becoming impossible to control, a condition known to the industry as “meltdown,” in which, like a slow-motion nuclear bomb, the walls of the plant would incinerate and collapse, and a black cloud of radioactive poison would alight above the eastern seaboard.

There was only one glimmer of hope: the plant’s operators, who had decades of experience and, with quick action, could almost certainly slow the damage—either by pumping additional water into the plant from another source, or by closing the open valve.

Unfortunately, the operators did neither.

Inside the plant’s cavernous control room, they stood before a seven-foot-high instrument panel, crammed with hundreds of -dials, gauges, and meters, many of which were erupting with alarm sirens and flashing lights, but none of them had any idea what it meant. As the minutes turned into hours, and the plant’s internal temperature soared above 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, then 1,500 degrees, with water levels plummeting and the prospect of meltdown becoming more likely by the second, the confused operators did nothing to improve the situation. In fact, they made it worse. When one of the plant’s emergency systems began replacing water at a rate of nearly a thousand gallons per minute—which probably would have stemmed the crisis—operators turned the pumps off. Then, for reasons that are difficult to comprehend, they shut down the plant’s circulating pumps, preventing the cool water still inside the building from reaching the superheated core.

It would be another two hours before the morning shift arrived and stopped the leak.

By then, it was too late: The temperature inside the reactor had risen to more than 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat had caused the top half of the radioactive chamber to collapse on itself. The uranium fuel had melted into a lake of radioactive liquid. The zirconium skin around that fuel had evaporated into a broth of volatile gases, including a giant cloud of hydrogen that would soon explode into a fiery ball. And the nation, still asleep in the early-morning hours, was spiraling into the worst nuclear accident in its history, a cataclysm of fear and public mistrust that would consume the airwaves and charge the political dialogue for months; that would bring white-suited emergency-response crews to the site and would summon the president of the United States to visit in a pair of bright yellow protective booties, ordering a full investigation; that would take ten years and a billion dollars to clean up, would destroy the nation’s faith in atomic technology, and would bring the hope and promise of nuclear power—promoted since the 1950s as a clean and plentiful source of energy that would be “too cheap to meter”—to a grinding, glowing, terrified halt.

*****

Today, the cooling towers at Three Mile Island still loom above the rolling Pennsylvania landscape like four giant spacecraft descending upon the American pastoral. At nearly 400 feet tall and made of enough concrete, it is said, to pave a four-lane highway to Baltimore, they dominate the view in almost every direction: As you head north along the Susquehanna River, they blot out the afternoon sun; going south toward the local airport, they seem to barricade the end of the road; even looking up to the sky, the thick black high-tension wires and streams of manufactured clouds that spew from the still-working portion of the plant turn the sky into an ugly industrial stew. Standing on the far shore of the river and looking over at TMI, one can easily understand why opponents of nuclear power so often distribute pictures of the plant, a stark visual shorthand for an industry run amok.

Up close, however, the feeling can be different. One morning last February, I stood on the banks of Three Mile Island with the plant’s longtime spokesman, Ralph DeSantis, gazing up at the towers from below. Despite their ominous appearance, they had an almost elegant function: Their only purpose, it turned out, was to create an immense chimney where warm water could fall through the air, cooling as it went. From the ground, we could actually see this happening. Peeking through a series of slanted baffles at the base of the towers, we could peer into the open chamber, where thousands of gallons of water cascaded down the sides. The sound was deafening, like a massive waterfall.

“Overwhelming, isn’t it?” DeSantis shouted over the noise. “Believe it or not, that structure holding the baffles is made of redwood. When the water hits each baffle on the way down, it gets broken up into beads, which helps it cool.” He pointed to a building not far away. “And that’s where the circulating pumps are. The pipes are six feet in diameter! It’s a plumber’s nightmare.”

Like many of the nation’s nuclear workers, DeSantis was a local boy. He had left for college in the 1970s but soon found himself back home and bored, struggling to impart the nuances of civics to schoolkids who could barely read. By early 1979, he had quit teaching for a security job at TMI, but just a few weeks later, when the plant melted down and news crews came swarming, DeSantis jumped at the chance to be part of something bigger. He offered to help with public relations, and within days he was ushering public officials and news celebrities around the site, brushing shoulders with people like Andrea -Mitchell and Diane Sawyer. In the thirty years since, his profile at the nation’s most notorious power plant has led to countless job offers in the PR world, but DeSantis has been happy to stay, becoming a kind of institution at TMI, a model of loyalty in an environment with no greater currency. As we walked from the cooling towers toward the reactor and then throughout the TMI complex, he had the air of a jolly small-town mayor, calling out to nearly everyone we passed and stopping to chat with more than a few.

Even so, as we crossed the plant’s expansive grounds, it was difficult to ignore the presence of danger around us—or anyway, the heightened and elaborate defenses against it. Since September 11, the nation’s 104 nuclear plants have become an object of much attention from homeland-security experts and terrorists alike, and security has skyrocketed, at a cost of more than $1.5 billion so far. TMI was no exception. Where only a few years ago employees could practically drive to the front door and park for the day, the parking lot had been Hail Mary’d several hundred yards away, and the long walk between had been repopulated with a series of three-foot-thick concrete walls—reinforced by two-inch-diameter rods of steel—and surrounded by skeins of razor wire, bulletproof sniper towers, and militarized sentries armed with machine guns. “It’s almost like a canal system of locks and dams,” DeSantis explained as we stepped into what looked like an oversize dog kennel. “When one gate is open, the other is closed. While the person is detained, we can do inspections and explosives detection, and if there’s any problem, there’s a Patriot Gate that rises out of the ground on both sides, which is just as strong as the concrete.” Even the concrete has been tested for impact: A video that circulates among TMI employees shows a pickup truck plowing into the plant’s outermost barrier and collapsing like an accordion. The barrier remains unblemished.

When we reached the entrance to the plant’s guard station, DeSantis and I surrendered our driver’s licenses in exchange for radiation monitors to hang around our necks, crossed another gauntlet of security locks enclosed in bulletproof glass, stepped into a machine called a Puffer, which blew air across our bodies and sniffed it for explosives residue, and then passed through a threshold of metal detectors before emerging into a courtyard filled with yet more razor wire and paramilitary guards, where, on the far side, we finally reached the door to the plant itself.

The inside was like nowhere else in the world. It is tempting to say that if you were to wake up inside, without ever having seen a power plant, you would know instantly where you were. Pipes the diameter of a Volkswagen bus and painted in glossy primary colors stretched along the walls and the ceiling, springing into the room at ninety-degree elbows before shooting upward to the floor above or down to the one below. Hoses the size of anacondas coiled their way around corners and over door headers, and stop valves that looked like nautical steering wheels were strapped to the walls with tags to identify them. Everything was polished and reflective under bright lights, and the air seemed to shiver from the pipes’ vibrations. It was like being trapped inside a giant air conditioner.

We climbed an open metal staircase that stretched between the pipes and machinery and followed catwalks to look around. Virtually everything around us related to water: tanks so enormous that the curve of the cylinder was nearly imperceptible, filters capable of purifying thousands of gallons at once. If the Hollywood depiction of a nuclear plant involves zones of exposure and pervasive risk, where workers live in fear of radiation—think The China Syndrome or Silkwood—life inside a real power plant was startling proof of what actually drives a nuclear plant: water. Except for the presence of uranium in a single room, the rest of a nuclear compound is essentially a giant steam engine, with three circuits of water doing virtually all the work.

The first of these water circuits, known as the primary, is the only one that actually touches radioactive fuel. In the earliest stage of the process, this water is channeled through a series of tall, thin tubes of uranium known as fuel rods, which are extremely hot from their natural decay process. It takes only a few seconds for the heat from the uranium to make the water hot, too. Once the water reaches 212 degrees, it must be pressurized to avoid boiling; at 600 degrees, under 2,000 pounds of pressure per square inch, it is ready to be pumped into the next stage of the process, known as the steam generator.

Here, the superheated primary water is brought into contact with a secondary circuit of cooler water. Since the pipes of the two circuits are allowed to touch but the water inside them is not, only the heat can be transferred, and none of the radioactivity. As the secondary circuit absorbs this heat, it boils into steam, which is piped into a series of giant fan blades known as turbines. The force of the steam blowing through those fans causes the blades to spin. If Three Mile Island were a steamboat, this would be the final result—the spinning fans would rotate a paddle wheel and push the boat across the water. Instead, at a power plant, the spinning motion is used to rotate a giant coil of wire inside a magnetic field, creating a current of loose electrons.

Presto: nuclear power.

All that remains is to cool the water and start over. For this, a third circuit of water is pumped into the plant directly from the Susquehanna River, absorbing heat and then flowing back outside to the cooling towers and into the river below. Since, at least in theory, this water never comes into contact with anything inside the plant except its own pipes, the warm water returning to the river should be no more or less polluted than when it was first pumped out. Likewise, the evaporative clouds billowing from the tops of the cooling towers, which appear so grimy in photographs, are actually no different from the clouds forming naturally above the river. In fact, those billowing clouds, which even some nuclear workers casually refer to as “smoke” or “steam,” are actually neither. Like a man’s breath on a cold day, they’re mostly water vapor and tend to fade or even disappear in warm weather. True steam, by comparison, is the more sophisticated substance—entirely gaseous and devoid of humidity—that powers a plant’s turbines, and this almost never stops blowing, especially at TMI. Over the past ten years, the plant has become famous for its constancy, setting records for continuous operation. The latest, among more than 250 similar reactors worldwide, was 689 days without pause or fail.

What all this amounts to, in a typical year, is about 7.2 million megawatt hours of electricity, or enough to satisfy the needs of 800,000 homes. By way of comparison, to produce the same amount of electricity, a coal-fired power plant would have to incinerate more than 3 million metric tons of fuel, producing 500 pounds of carbon dioxide per second, as well as 1,200 pounds of ash per minute and 750 pounds of sulfur dioxide every five minutes. Looking at the cooling towers with that in mind, where a smokestack would be at any of the nation’s 600 coal plants, it is easy to appreciate the lure of nuclear power: The carbon footprint of a nuclear plant is precisely…nothing.

After a tour through the rest of the plant—including the control room, where -operations are monitored twenty-four hours a day, and the turbine chamber, where the eighteen-foot turbines spinning at 2,000 rpm generate a dizzy, strangely exhilarating high—DeSantis took me outside for a peek at the rest of the island.

Although the TMI plant occupies less than half of Three Mile Island itself, for security reasons the entire landmass is kept under armed guard, creating a de facto wildlife preserve around the facility of about 400 acres. As we entered this small wilderness, the transition from extreme industry to -extreme nature was instantaneous. If the popular image of Three Mile Island has become a Guernica of toxic devastation, the island itself was a bucolic rebuttal: Redbud trees and sycamores abounded among stands of native switchgrass, and plumes of second-year mullein stood as stiff and straight as uranium fuel rods. The sound of the river was punctuated only by the songs of birds. “We had osprey nesting here two years ago,” DeSantis said, “and there’s a pair of peregrine falcons nesting by the reactor building right now—I understand it’s one of only ten nesting pairs in Pennsylvania. It’s cool when you see them teaching their babies to fly. We also get Canadian geese and foxes and deer, and some of the local ornithologists think the bald eagles are going to nest soon, too—they’re already around.”

To DeSantis, there was nothing improbable about any of this, finding a wildlife sanctuary on the site of the nation’s worst nuclear meltdown. The accident, for him, was a long-distant nightmare, an aberration, dwarfed and marginalized by three decades of clean, safe power without a single accident. “I wish I could bring more people here to see for themselves,” he said. “Sometimes we bring reporters, but they only want to talk about the accident. They only care what happened thirty years ago.”

DeSantis looked mystified.

*****

To understand why TMI still resonates so powerfully in American life, and our public policy, it’s helpful to separate the accident’s impact into two distinct categories: the -radiological fallout, and the psychological.

How much fallout was there?

From a radiological standpoint, the impact is somewhat easier to measure. Radiation is counted in units called millirems. Because the earth is warmed by the largest nuclear reactor of all—the sun—virtually all of us are exposed to a certain baseline of millirems each year, depending on where we live. At higher elevations, like Denver, the sun is closer, and citizens receive about 180 millirems per year; at lower elevations, like Delaware, residents receive only 20 or 30. Building materials can also make a difference: Because of the presence of -elements like radon in many rocks, people who live in brick or stone houses tend to receive 50 or 100 millirems more each year than people who live in wooden houses. Region also has an impact. In areas rich with coal, residents absorb about 100 millirems annually from the ground; in northeastern Washington State, residents get about 1,500 millirems from local minerals; in certain parts of India, as much as 3,000 millirems per year may come from the ground. A cigarette smoker gets about 1,300 millirems per year, mostly from the presence of the radioactive isotope polonium-210, which is found in tobacco (and, recently, in the autopsy reports of Russian spies). Back home in Washington, D.C., Dick Cheney gets about 100 millirems every year from his pacemaker. Every time you go in for a dental X-ray, you get 5. Chest X-ray: 15. PET scan: 650. In fact, just by being alive, you generate a little radiation of your own, and most people absorb about 40 millirems each year from themselves.

At Three Mile Island, according to a 1980 inquiry by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the maximum level of radiation that anybody within a fifty-mile radius could have received from the accident was about 100 millirems—the equivalent of moving to Colorado for a year, or into a brick house for two. According to another study, by the Pennsylvania Departments of Health and Environmental Resources, among 721 locals tested, not a single one showed radiation exposure above normal. A similar study by the state’s Department of Agriculture found no significant trace of radiation in the local fish, water, or dairy products, which tend to register minute impurities. And a study released in 2000 by the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh found that, twenty-one years after the accident, there was still no evidence of “any -measurable impact” on public health.

Given the extreme scale of the meltdown at TMI—including an explosion of hydrogen, the liquefaction of radioactive uranium, and the release of a plume of radioactive gas into the air outside—it is reasonable to conclude that the lesson of Three Mile Island is not merely a matter of what went wrong at the plant but also an example of what went right. For so many people and so many systems to fail so spectacularly all at once, without any measurable effect on public health, may be the last, best proof that a system is working.

Still, for nearly thirty years, the psychological fallout from TMI has metastasized into something much more difficult to measure or explain. In the aftermath of the meltdown, the number of Americans who support nuclear-power plants has dropped from a high of 70 percent before the -accident to around 40 percent, and today one in ten people would like to eliminate the nation’s fleet of nuclear plants entirely. What drives this opposition, in many cases, is the conflation of magnitude with probability. That is, when people worry about nuclear power, what they worry about is the scale of an accident, not the likelihood. In this regard, nuclear power is just the opposite of the nation’s coal-fired plants, where harm to the environment is both ruinous and certain but comfortingly slow. It may take decades or even centuries for the effects of particle soot, acid rain, and global warming to claim a million lives. By contrast, the nightmare scenario with nuclear power is decades of cheap, plentiful, pollution-free energy—followed by a sudden meltdown that wipes out a city. For most people, the reality that coal-based pollutants like mercury and sulfur dioxide are killing us every day—taking as many as 24,000 lives per year, according to nonpartisan researchers (that’s a Chernobyl disaster every eleven hours), while nuclear plants have never claimed an American life—is beside the point. The image of a city disappearing in a nuclear haze, however improbable it may be, trumps everything else. Many people, according to polls, not only oppose building new nuclear plants; they oppose the ones we already have. Unfortunately, since nuclear energy currently makes up about 20 percent of the nation’s electrical supply, in order to eliminate it, the rest of the nation’s power suppliers would have to amplify their own production by 25 percent of existing levels. Since that’s not possible for most current renewables—like wind, solar, and hydroelectric farms, which are already maxed out—the real cost of eliminating today’s nuclear-power supply would be an immediate 30 percent increase in the nation’s coal, gas, and oil plants. That’s 30 percent more sulfur dioxide, mercury, and nitrogen oxide in the air than we’re emitting today. Also, since those plants make up nearly 40 percent of the nation’s total carbon dioxide output, that means an instantaneous, and permanent, 12 percent rise in carbon emissions. If only the GNP did so well.

Since the accident at TMI, even this dubious trade-off has been widely promoted by nuclear opponents, and not only on our side of the Atlantic. In Europe—especially after Chernobyl—one could almost hear the brakes squealing in the nuclear industry. Within months, the Italian government had begun to phase out nuclear energy; Germany, which has historically produced about 30 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants, began a two-decade melee over the industry, which resulted in a 2000 decision to eliminate it entirely; and Switzerland, Spain, Holland, and Austria have all followed a similar path—even while fast-growing Asian countries like China and India have moved in exactly the opposite direction, rushing to build nuclear plants, with nearly a dozen currently under construction. By 2020, China hopes to quadruple its nuclear-power output.

This has yielded strange ironies between the nations running from nuclear power and those running to it. Without nuclear plants, for example, Germany will no longer be able to meet its own energy needs, and it plans to import a growing chunk each year from France, which remains one of the last European nations to embrace nuclear power and currently produces nearly 80 percent of its total electricity that way. (Providing France, incidentally, with the cleanest air in Europe, the lowest electrical costs, and the greatest percentage of electrical independence, not to mention $4 billion a year in electrical exports.) That means for every ten megawatts of power that Germany plans to purchase from France in the coming years, eight megawatts will be coming from the very technology that requires Germany to import power in the first place.

A similar case exists in the American West. For political reasons, the state of Nevada (home of the dirtiest coal plant in the country, according to a recent report by the Environmental Integrity Project) opposes almost everything with the word nuclear in it. But with the rapid growth of Las Vegas in recent years, the state is unable to generate its own power and currently imports as much as 15 percent of its electricity from California and Arizona. Of course, since they produce 14 percent and 23 percent of their power at nuclear plants, respectively, that means Nevada, which likes to proclaim itself “nuclear-free,” actually gets a considerable amount of its power from nuclear plants, too—but at markup prices that profit California and Arizona.

At the federal level, U.S. policy has never mirrored the European retreat from nuclear power, and the Bush administration has actually been as enthusiastic about nuclear energy as it is about every other form of energy. Even so, over the past thirty years, the U.S. government has not issued a single license to build a new nuclear plant. There are two reasons for this. One is that public -opposition has made the development process prohibitively expensive for the industry. In the aftermath of TMI, a number of legal challenges were initiated against plants under construction, and many companies simply abandoned their unfinished projects. Within five years of TMI, some fifty reactors had been scrapped, many of them after billions of dollars’ investment.

But an even bigger challenge to the industry’s development may be the one at the other end of the nuclear process: not the cost of building new plants but the cost of storing old waste.

Since the development of nuclear power in the 1950s, the storage of waste has always been a priority of the federal government. Nuclear waste, after all, is even more dangerous than nuclear fuel, so politicians on both sides of the aisle have long agreed that it is in the national interest to store it safely. And for the past thirty years, Congress has worked to do so, researching the options for a national repository and then, over the past fifteen years, building a multibillion-dollar facility deep in the Nevada desert, more than a thousand feet underground, at a site called Yucca Mountain.

But so far, not a gram of waste has ever been sent there. That’s because the people of Nevada, by a large majority, believe the repository should be in somebody else’s backyard and have thrown up legal challenges at every stage of the site’s development. With the ascension of Nevada’s Harry Reid to the position of Senate Majority Leader in 2006, the state’s quest to block Yucca Mountain seems more likely than ever to succeed. Although development continues, progress is glacial, and Congress has been, to put it mildly, slow to grant approvals. As recently as January of this year, congressional budget cuts forced the repository to fire nearly all its on-site employees, scaling back to a mostly administrative operation. When I asked Senator Reid what would happen to the repository in the coming years, he minced no words. “It will never happen,” he said flatly.

What this means for the nation’s 132 million pounds of radioactive waste is not hard to predict. In politics, as in most things, there is no such thing as a nondecision, and the failure to open Yucca Mountain is an implicit decision to keep the waste where it sits today: dispersed among 121 sites in thirty-nine states, including the nation’s 104 nuclear-power plants—all in temporary facilities. Unfortunately, because each of those plants must be located near a large supply of coolant water, that means fifty years of radioactive waste—growing by about 2,000 metric tons every year—is currently being housed in places like the Indian Point Energy Center, less than twenty-five miles upstream from New York City on the banks of the Hudson River. The irony is that almost nobody on either side of the nuclear debate, not even some of Yucca Mountain’s most ardent critics, actually believes that storing waste at the power plants—dispersed, exposed, with watershed to urban areas—is anywhere near as safe as Yucca Mountain for the long term. Yet there it remains, while Yucca Mountain, deep in the Amargosa Desert, sits empty.

In photos, the twenty-five mile ridgeline of Yucca Mountain appears vast and sprawling, but in person the mountain is an unimpressive sight, more like an oversize anthill than any of the real peaks that surround it. Slumped along the California border about a hundred miles northwest of Las Vegas, the 1,200-foot “mountain” is officially part of the mysterious Nevada Test Site, which abuts the even more mysterious Area 51, but technically the repository is managed not by the military but by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy. After $10 billion in development costs and thirty years of observation, it is safe to say that Yucca Mountain has become the most expensive, examined, and—so far, anyway—useless hunk of rock on earth.

To get there, I flew into Las Vegas and joined a team of DOE scientists for the two-hour drive across the desert, led by the former chief scientist for Yucca Mountain, a stout man in his sixties named Michael Voegele, with a jutting jaw and floppy chocolate bangs that fell into his eyes. Voegele was a repository in his own right—full of a stupendous range of arcane minutiae about the project, some of it fascinating, some of it otherwise, and most of which he managed to pack into a rhapsodic soliloquy as we made the drive. “In the early 1930s…,” he began, and for the next two hours, while the other DOE scientists and I listened in some combination of thrall and disbelief, he held forth on the nonpublic history of the Nevada Test Site, the chemical intricacies of uranium fission, the legal nuances of the 1982 Waste Policy Act, and the latest concepts in plate-tectonic theory, pausing only briefly to glance out the window and mutter things like, “Now, if you look out there for a minute, you can see Creech Air Force Base, where they steer the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles flying over Iraq and Afghanistan.…”

Voegele had been a principal at Yucca since its inception and was as enthusiastic about the project’s merits as he was encyclopedic on its history. In the late 1970s, when power plants had begun pressuring the federal government to retrieve and store the waste in their temporary facilities, Congress assigned nine groups to study the options, and Voegele was on the team to research Yucca. With a doctorate in geological engineering and a background in chemistry, he soon came to believe that Yucca Mountain possessed a variety of chemical and physical properties that made it an ideal site for waste disposal. The mountain was nearly half a mile above the water table and more than a hundred miles from any populous area. The layers of rock in the mountain formed a natural shield from most rainfall, Voegele believed, and the composition of that rock created a natural filtration system for the small amount of water that did creep in. Since water is thought to be the most likely way for radiation to escape a repository, these properties would prove essential to Yucca Mountain’s viability.

By the end of 1987, Voegele’s proposal for the mountain had made it through two rounds of cuts by the Department of Energy—from nine options to five, and then down to three—when a lame-duck session of Congress brought the search to an abrupt end, passing a bill titled the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987 but known locally as the “Screw Nevada bill,” which just happened to say in fine print that the other two sites would no longer be considered.

“It was obviously political,” Voegele conceded as we barreled across the desert. “The other two sites were Texas and Washington, and they had a lot more horsepower than Nevada. The story goes that the Speaker of the House, Jim Wright, who was from Texas, walked into the office of the Majority Leader, Tom Foley, who was from Washington, and they just looked at each other, and Foley said, ‘It’s Nevada, isn’t it?’ ” Voegele laughed and shrugged. “But coincidentally, I think DOE’s technical information was leaning toward Yucca Mountain anyway. The site in Washington was below one of the largest aquifers in the Northwest, which drains into the Columbia River, and the Texas site was right below the Ogallala Aquifer, which is the largest aquifer in the United States.”

As we pulled up to the Air Force checkpoint, Voegele’s voice began to trail off, and we passed through the gate into the Nevada Test Site, which looked almost identical to the desert we had been crossing outside—brown, dry, littered with creosote and blackbrush—except for the presence of massive experimental structures scattered about, like the 1,500-foot-tall BREN Tower standing alone in the distance, measuring the effects of radiation from precisely the altitude of the Hiroshima bombing.

Several miles in, we reached the base of Yucca and steered the truck up a long ridgeline until we crested to a 360-degree view of the desert. We stepped out, and Voegele threw his arms wide in the shadowless midday sun. “This piece of rock is twelve and a half million years old,” he said to no one in particular. In the distance, we could see the tallest point in the contiguous United States, Mount Whitney to the northwest, and to the southwest, the Funeral Mountains perched above the nation’s lowest point, Death Valley. Scattered in between, on the desert floor, volcanic cinder cones sat like rounded black pyramids.

“The tunnels are 1,200 feet below where you’re standing right now,” Voegele said. “The water table is a thousand feet below that. Everything else is layered rock.”

Exactly how those layers of rock might or might not protect the repository from rainfall is what geologists at the DOE and the Nevada government spend most of their time debating. What is clear is that the rock consists of four principal layers, which alternate between a hard and relatively brittle material known as welded tuff and a sponge-like material known as nonwelded tuff. Proponents of Yucca, like Voegele, find in these layers an almost divine confluence of desirable traits. On the surface, where we stood, the harder material cloaks the mountain, shedding most rainfall down the sides and into the surrounding plains. The water that does seep into the cracks, advocates say, would have to travel 300 feet through fissures in a layer called Tiva Canyon, saturate a hundred feet of the softer rock, and then continue through fissures in another several hundred feet of hard rock known as Topopah Spring in order to reach the repository. Even then, to be dangerous, that water would first have to penetrate the metal canisters that are molded around the waste, become irradiated, continue down through several hundred more feet of hard rock, and fill yet another layer of spongy rock known as Calico Hills, before finally reaching the water table, where it might, depending on whose data you believe, either surface a century later in the middle of Death Valley, or else not at all. Also, since the spongy layers of Yucca Mountain happen to be rich in minerals known as zeolites, which are known to neutralize radioactivity, the mountain’s advocates tend to speak with an eerie certainty (some might say religious fervor) about the intelligent design at Yucca Mountain. “All the stars aligned for Yucca Mountain,” Voegele said. “Here’s what it comes down to: Even if the water gets through all the physical barriers, the zeolites would absorb 99.9995 percent of the radionuclides. We know that. The other .0005 percent is what the debate is about.”

Opponents of the repository, of course, tell a different story. For one thing, they don’t believe that the mountain will repel water. But even more important, they say, Yucca Mountain sits on top of a seismic fault. Even if the mountain were some rain-defying wonder of the world, a minor earthquake could change that very quickly. As we stood on the mountain’s summit, it was easy to appreciate this point of view. In addition to the cinder cones peppering the valley floor, a testimony to previous volcanic activity, the geology directly under our feet—Yucca Mountain itself—was actually made of compressed volcanic ash. That’s what welded and nonwelded tuff are. When I asked the head of Nevada’s Agency for Nuclear Projects, Bob Loux, about this somewhat unsettling fact, he was quiet for a moment, searching for diplomatic language. Instead, he said this: “We have zero trust in the DOE. We believe they’re entirely incompetent. Most people might be surprised that they would claim there is no risk of volcanoes and earthquakes on a seismic fault. But in Nevada, we’re used to hearing things like that. They used to tell us that there were no risks from nuclear-weapons testing. Well, of course there were. A lot of people got sick and died. My dad was a career DOE employee at the Nevada Test Site, and I can tell you that the culture of the DOE is all about downplaying risks. They are flagrant about it. When my dad was working for them, it caused a lot of problems between us. My mom used to have to step in and say, ‘Knock this shit off.’ But after my dad retired, he came up to me and said, ‘You know what? Everything you’re saying about these guys is right.’ ”

In the absence of agreement between the state and the DOE, Congress has asked the Environmental Protection Agency to arbitrate, and in 2001 the EPA released a set of standards for Yucca Mountain: Until otherwise directed, DOE scientists must assume that the state’s concerns are valid and still be able to prove that an earthquake or a volcano under Yucca Mountain would not release more than a certain level of radiation into the atmosphere. That level, according to the EPA guidelines, must be a maximum of 15 millirems per year for the first 10,000 years, and for the period between 10,000 years and a million years, the standard rises to 350 millirems per year. To put it another way, for twice the duration of recorded history and five times as long as the Christian era, a person living on top of Yucca Mountain during an earthquake can only receive as much radiation as a single chest X-ray, and a person living there a million years in the future—that is, in the year 1002008—can only get about half of what the average Seattleite gets today.

If that seems impossibly stringent, Voegele noted, it’s a sign that you don’t work for the state of Nevada. As we loaded back into the truck and headed down to explore the tunnels, he pointed out that the state’s advocates, like Loux, still believe the standard is too easy.

“They used to say, ‘How can you assume a honking big earthquake won’t hurt anything?’ ” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “Well, we don’t. We can’t! We have to assume a 6 on the Richter scale, and we’ve been able to demonstrate that it’s safe. So now they’re saying, ‘Well, it shouldn’t be 350 millirems, it should be 15 millirems for the whole million years.’ ” He snorted. “When you start asking for proof of what’s going to happen in a million years, you’re not a serious scientist.”

We rounded a bend into the parking lot for the tunnels, and the scale of the mountain seemed to magnify suddenly. From the summit, Yucca had been dwarfed in the shadow of Mount Whitney and the vast emptiness of the Amargosa Desert, but here at the portal it became cathedralesque, its mouth yawning thirty feet high against a sheer gray cliff, with massive ventilation hoses spilling from the top and a set of railroad tracks plunging into the darkness. As we walked down an elevated gangplank into the cavern, a fifteen-mile-per-hour headwind blew past us, the work of colossal ventilating machines sucking radon gas from the ground. The tunnel stretched endlessly into the distance, a perfect cylindrical void created by a twenty-five-foot-diameter drill known as a Tunnel Boring Machine, which the DOE engineers had literally hitched up and driven five miles through the mountain. Along the sides of the tunnel, circular steel ribs braced the walls every ten feet, giving the passage a skeletal feel, like the inside of a paper dragon.

“This is Alcove 5,” Voegele said as we turned off the main hallway into a shallow cavity. “When waste is brought into the repository, it’s going to be hot. So we conducted tests in here to see how the heat would affect the rock. We raised the temperature above 400 degrees—much higher than the boiling point of water—and kept it there for four years.” In other regions of the mountain, scientists took samples of the rock and exposed them to massive radiation, pressure, fractures, chemical baths, and sonic explosions, meeting the EPA standard—in simulations the agency found sufficient to certify—every time. “You are not going to find another site which can withstand this kind of scrutiny,” Voegele said.

Not all the mountain’s opponents dispute these results on scientific grounds; just as often, their objection rests on a simpler and more resolute fact: No matter what the experiments show, nothing can guarantee how real waste might behave inside the mountain.

This, of course, is undeniable. Yet it is also a standard by which any repository would be ruled out, since experiments and simulations are the only way to evaluate any site. But most of Yucca Mountain’s prominent critics, like Reid and Loux, insist they do support a repository…as long as it’s somewhere else. All of which begs the question: Where? In any location, the storage of radioactive waste must entail at least a small measure of risk, and the search for a solution without that risk—a perfect option—can obscure the options that are merely good, or good enough. The great can be the enemy of the good.

As we drove back toward Las Vegas, Voegele was mostly silent, but when we crested the final hill above the city, he spoke up. “There is an ethical dilemma at Yucca Mountain,” he admitted. “When Jimmy Carter was president, he said that our generation created this waste and we shouldn’t push it to future generations. That’s a very noble thing to say. But the fact is, we have to be careful how we interpret that. We have taken that to mean that Yucca Mountain has to last forever—we can’t expect future generations to fix anything or improve anything, ever. Well, that’s the wrong way to look at it. We should do the best we can right now, but no matter what we do, future generations will be able to change things at Yucca Mountain, they will have more knowledge and experience than we do, and they will probably want to change the system we create. They can do any number of things. They can move the material somewhere else; they can store it in a different way; they can change its chemical composition or reduce the radioactivity with methods we don’t know about. But right now, we don’t have any better options. We can’t leave this waste at the power plants forever. And we’re not going to find another repository without running into the same problems we have now. The bottom line is, Yucca Mountain is the best option we have. If we don’t use it, I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

*****

One of the things we’re not doing is recycling. In other countries, this is known as “reprocessing” fuel, and it is neither complicated nor particularly expensive. It has, however, been illegal in this country for most of the past three decades.

The science of reprocessing is fairly simple. When uranium fuel is removed from a power plant, it is classified as waste, but there is still a tremendous amount of nuclear material inside. The reason the fuel must be removed from the plant is not because it has spent all of its potential but because, along the way, it has generated a variety of dangerous by-products, like cesium and strontium, which are far more radioactive than uranium itself. After a while, these elements would become so prevalent, and so volatile, that it would not be safe to keep them inside the plant, so the fuel rod must be removed.

But cesium and strontium aren’t the only by-products of nuclear power. There is also the element plutonium. And plutonium, as it happens, is a very useful by-product—capable of powering a nuclear plant just like uranium. In fact, by the time a fuel rod is typically removed from a power plant, most of its uranium is spent, and its power is coming from the plutonium. Yet once the fuel rod is decommissioned, that plutonium is locked away with the cesium and strontium. Simply by extracting the plutonium and putting it back into the reactor, a power plant could generate thousands of megawatt hours of additional power.

This is not just theoretical. In England, for example, virtually every speck of waste that comes out of the nation’s nineteen nuclear reactors is harvested for plutonium and then put back to use. The process has been so effective that the British actually began accepting waste from other countries, like Japan and Switzerland, extracting their plutonium and then shipping it back to be burned. In Japan, the results have been so lucrative that the government is opening its own reprocessing facility. Likewise, in Germany, where nuclear power is being phased out by the government, those plants still in service not only can reprocess their waste; until very recently, they were required to. And last year, the French government renewed its commitment to reprocessing as well.

If the U.S. nuclear industry were simply to join these countries, the benefits would be instantaneous. First, since every gram of “waste” currently waiting for Yucca Mountain contains at least some plutonium, the decision to harvest that waste could instantly eliminate the 132-million-pound backlog waiting for Yucca to open. With the stroke of a pen, virtually every gram of the nation’s spent fuel could be moved from the “waste” column into the “fuel” column. Perhaps even more important, the energy recovered from that “waste” would provide a windfall of power: hundreds of millions of megawatt hours, or enough to meet the entire country’s electrical needs for years.

Why is the United States determined not to reprocess fuel, choosing instead to put thousands of pounds of plutonium into a scrap heap? The answer, like so many things in the nuclear debate, has more to do with fear than reason. The decision to ban reprocessing, it turns out, emerged in the 1970s from a concern that plutonium, which can also be used to make a nuclear bomb, might be difficult to keep away from terrorists. What seems not to have registered is the reality that the U.S. government already sits on thousands of pounds of military plutonium, which it has guarded without incident at least since the Nagasaki bombing of August 1945. In fact, the government currently sits on so much plutonium that it is preparing to reduce its stockpile by…giving it to nuclear-power plants for fuel. The fact that those plants already own enough plutonium to fire their plants for years, and that using their own plutonium would save them millions of dollars in waste-storage costs, providing untold wattage of electrical power even while eliminating the backlog for Yucca Mountain, gets lost in the shuffle because, well, plutonium is scary and we shouldn’t keep it around. Even though we already do.

This is not to say that reprocessing would render Yucca Mountain completely obsolete. Even after the waste is reprocessed and the plutonium removed, all the other by-products like cesium and strontium must still be stored for the long term. Countries that reprocess fuel have not yet found an ideal way to do this, encountering many of the same storage problems the U.S. faces at Yucca Mountain. But at least in those countries the “waste” really is waste, whereas the American “waste” is wasteful in itself—and raises a special conundrum all its own: By the year 2012, the volume of “waste” in line for Yucca Mountain will exceed the available space inside Yucca Mountain. As Michael Voegele told me when I visited, “Yucca Mountain will be full the day she opens. Every space is already accounted for.”

*****

As the nuclear puzzle continues to challenge us, many of these policies are on track to collide, creating second- and third-generation problems. Without new nuclear plants, for example, the American power supply will not simply remain as it is; as time passes and nuclear plants grow older, we will have to choose between extending licenses to those plants, far beyond their intended life expectancy, or else closing them and increasing our dependence on fossil fuels. Similarly, without a long-term repository for our waste, we must prepare for the reality that our temporary facilities, scattered among those aging power plants, are growing older, too—increasing the likelihood of a waste-related leak or spill, and then, even greater public fear of the plants. Finally, without the option to recycle our waste, we must continue to harvest new uranium from the ground, but the volume of uranium deposits in the United States is dwindling, and a series of ill-considered policies over the past twenty years have all but wiped out the American uranium miner. In mines from the Colorado Plateau to the Wyoming plains, I repeatedly found miners struggling with the government’s decision in the early 1990s to buy Soviet uranium and liquidate its own stockpile, which flooded the market (already struggling after TMI and a post–Cold War ebb in weapons spending) and drove nearly every American uranium company out of business. Today most of the world’s biggest known uranium reserves are in Canada, Australia, and…Kazakhstan. As one American uranium miner told me when I visited his floundering operation on the Gulf Coast, “It would be a shame to wean ourselves from foreign oil, only to become dependent on foreign uranium.”

At the same time, the stalemate at Yucca Mountain is quickly compounding: Over the past decade, a host of nuclear companies have lost faith in the project and have begun filing lawsuits against the federal government, asking to be compensated for the cost of storing their own waste. Some of those companies have already received millions of dollars in settlement fees, and over the next decade, other suits may result in hundreds of millions of dollars more—creating a somewhat bizarre contradiction for taxpayers, who are on the one hand paying millions of dollars to build Yucca Mountain and, at the same time, paying millions of dollars not to.

And yet, like so much of the nuclear-policy debate, none of this reflects on the potential of nuclear technology itself.

It reflects on us.

When the United States is determined not to recycle fuel, we pay for that policy every day in rising utility bills, yet most of us neither know nor care about the massive untapped energy source hidden in our pile of “waste.”

When Harry Reid insists on radiation limits at Yucca Mountain that make the repository impossible to open, most of us nod in silent agreement, yet the risk becomes immeasurably higher for more than half of all Americans, who live within fifty miles of a plant, their water supply flowing past toxic waste every day.

When a meltdown like Three Mile Island scares us blind, creating an apocalyptic mythology about what happened there, we pay for our superstitions with sulfur fumes, global warming, and acid rain—our suicide pact with coal.

And when we fail to consider each of these issues with reason instead of fear, when we fail to make the tough comparison between nuclear power, with its potential for disaster, and coal plants, with their guarantee of it, this isn’t a reflection that we have no choices but that we refuse to make them.

It may be, more than anything else, an example of democracy working and failing at the same time.

--Wil S. Hylton is a GQ correspondent.

---------------------------

NEI Nuclear Notes
February 27, 2008

GQ's Nuclear "Meltdown"

In the March 2008 issue of Gentlemen's Quarterly, Wyl S. Hylton wrote a great, balanced piece on the current state of the nuclear industry. His main topics centered around the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania and Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Below are some highlights (bold edits are mine).

On Three Mile Island:

Over the past ten years, the plant [Three Mile Island] has become famous for its constancy, setting records for continuous operation. The latest, among more than 250 similar reactors worldwide, was 689 days without pause or fail.

...

On Yucca Mountain:

After $10 billion in development costs and thirty years of observation, it is safe to say that Yucca Mountain has become the most expensive, examined, and—so far, anyway—useless hunk of rock on earth.

...

On nuclear:

Without new nuclear plants, for example, the American power supply will not simply remain as it is; as time passes and nuclear plants grow older, we will have to choose between extending licenses to those plants, far beyond their intended life expectancy, or else closing them and increasing our dependence on fossil fuels.

...

It may be, more than anything else, an example of democracy working and failing at the same time.

---------------------------

Waco Tribune Herald
February 27, 2008

Editorial: Time to round up nuclear waste

The International Atomic Energy Agency has launched a worldwide effort to track stolen, lost or otherwise unprotected nuclear materials.

“Nuclear terrorism is a global threat, not local or regional,” said IAEA official Anita Nilsson.

While the United States is one of 30 countries working with the IAEA to track down and trace radioactive materials internationally, this nation has a disgraceful record of tracking and protecting its own nuclear wastes.

Across the United States nuclear wastes are piling up, often with inadequate protection to the public from leaks and spills, much less from terrorists who could use them to construct radioactive dirty bombs.

Scientists and health experts have been warning since World War II that the United States needs to develop a safe, well-guarded repository for the nuclear waste that keeps piling up month after month and year after year.

With 104 nuclear plants operating in the United States and more on the drawing board, some experts believe that Americans have less to fear from a failure at a nuclear power plant than from the inability of elected officials to control and protect nuclear wastes.

Each nuclear reactor produces roughly 20 tons of nuclear wastes annually.

Without a decision to establish a nuclear repository, wastes from nuclear power plants are housed in temporary shelters in more than 100 locations in 39 states, reports The New York Times.

After a nationwide search by a panel of nuclear scientists, geologists, military experts and others, a decision was made to build a centralized storage facility for nuclear wastes in Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

The government has spent more than $11 billion developing the Yucca Mountain repository only to see the project stall for more than two decades due mainly to political resistance.

Not only do these wastes pile up from spent fuel at U.S. nuclear power plants. Additional nuclear waste comes from research laboratories, hospitals and more.

The federal government was scheduled to start accepting nuclear waste from the nation’s nuclear reactors more than a decade ago.

As the material continues to sit at reactor locations, it is expected that taxpayers will have to pay utilities up to $11 billion from court orders and settlements for the government’s failure to accept the nuclear waste.

Congress and the White House finally need to make a decision to track, control and protect this nation’s nuclear waste in a centralized location.

---------------------------

Popular Mechanics
February 27, 2008

Florida Outage Aside, New Plants Pave Clean Road for Nuke Power

Reactor switch problems cut power across an entire state this week, but the big picture for nuclear power is increasingly safe, cheap and efficient.

By Joanna Borns

The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) just offered its annual outlook for the future of nuclear power, and it’s optimistic—partly of necessity. Today’s 104 nuclear power plants generate about 20 percent of electricity in the United States. Due to rising energy demand and aging infrastructure, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission predicts that industry will need to build 50 new reactors to continue producing the same proportion of the country’s power over the next 30 years.

Most of these plants have gotten past the glint-in-the-eye stage: Thirty-one reactors, representing 17 power companies and consortia, are somewhere in the application process—though NEI predicts only four to eight of those will be in commercial operation by 2016. By that time, pressure for an affordable, clean source of energy could inspire a second wave of applications. “Coal with carbon sequestration looks more like 20 years away than 15,” says John Rowe, CEO of Exelon, the largest nuclear power provider in the United States. “Wind and solar are still more expensive than nuclear.”

The latest designs for proposed plants are smaller, cheaper and more efficient than reactors of the past. Progress Energy recently filed applications for the right to build four new reactors in North Carolina and Florida. CEO William Johnson says the company chose between three Generation III and III+ designs before deciding on the Westinghouse AP1000 pictured above. (Current plants operating in the United States are all Generation II.) The AP1000, a Gen III+ pressurized water reactor, requires fewer pumps, motors and valves and 80 percent less safety-related piping than earlier versions. Yet it also includes new safety features. For example, no operator action or diesel generator is required to shut down the reactor in case of an accident. “New reactor designs are like car engines: They’ve become more cost effective and require less maintenance with fewer moving parts,” Johnson says.

Safer, more streamlined plants carry a hefty price tag on the front end—about $4 billion each. But it’s anticipated that they will produce electricity at $70 to $80 per megawatt-hour, a figure competitive with projected coal and gas prices. That’s assuming the supply of uranium for fuel remains steady. Though uranium is an element relatively common in the Earth’s crust, its price has recently been rising. Jerry Grandey, CEO of Cameco, the world’s largest producer of uranium, predicts new deposits will be discovered within five years. He points out: “There are 400 companies looking for the next generation of deposits.”

Of course, no discussion of the future of nuclear would be complete without a nod to the radioactive elephant in the room. The U.S. creates about 2000 metric tons of high-level nuclear waste each year—and about 58,000 metric tons have so far piled up in 122 temporary storage facilities in 39 states. Each new reactor will add about 20 tons of waste per year, which costs about $2 million to store. Though the U.S. Department of Energy’s Yucca Mountain storage facility in Nevada is slated to house about 77,000 tons of waste, budget cutbacks and safety concerns put the repository 20 years behind schedule—and indefinitely on hold.

Countries such as France, the United Kingdom, Japan and Russia use a process called Plutonium Uranium Recovery by Extraction, or Purex, to recycle nuclear waste. The U.S. stopped recycling waste as part of non-proliferation policy because the Purex process creates weapons-grade plutonium. Instead, officials in the nuclear industry look to new recycling methods that treat spent nuclear fuel as a resource. (Used rods contain 90 percent of their energy content.) Still in the research phase, these methods would create less waste while binding the plutonium to other chemicals so it is no longer desirable for use in weapons.

---------------------------

Bangor Daily News
February 27, 2008

Mainers still paying for N-plant

By Mal Leary
Capitol News Service

AUGUSTA, Maine - More than a decade after Maine Yankee stopped generating power, Mainers are still paying for storage of the nuclear waste generated at the plant - and will likely continue doing so for years to come.

"The average customer uses 500 kilowatts a month and [is] paying about 50 cents a month" for the storage, said Richard Davies, the state’s public advocate. "You pay that month in and month out with 600,000 customers in the state of Maine over the last 30 years or so — it adds up to some pretty serious money."

As of the end of 2007, Mainers had paid more than $189 million for the disposal of nuclear waste generated by Maine Yankee and by other nuclear plants that have supplied power to Maine, such as Vermont Yankee.

But, Davies said, none of the waste has been stored in a permanent waste facility as required by federal law. He said nuclear waste is scattered across the country at relatively small interim facilities — like the one at the former Maine Yankee site in Wiscasset — that are expensive to operate.

Davies noted that several utilities, including Maine Yankee, have sued the federal government for not taking possession of the waste. The utilities have won a number of judgments requiring that they be paid for storing the waste after the 1998 deadline when the federal government was supposed to have taken responsibility for it.

"In essence, ratepayers are paying twice," Davies said. "We are paying for something that was gone years ago that has not generated electricity in over a decade, but we are still paying for the cost of the waste products they left behind."

Davies said what is equally frustrating is that Mainers are likely to continue to pay for decades to come with the federal nuclear waste depository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada now estimated not to be completed until 2020 at the earliest. The facility has already cost $11 billion.

"And once it is completed, that does not mean all the waste will be shipped at once for Maine," he said. "The plan is to ship a few casks from each of the interim waste sites to Yucca Mountain every year, so it will take years to complete the process. The estimate is 2037 at the earliest."

Maine Yankee was a 900-megawatt reactor that generated about 119 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity from 1972 through 1996. The plant was the state’s largest generator of electricity. It was permanently shut down in August 1997.

Members of the state’s congressional delegation say it is unlikely the federal government will speed up the process of taking over the waste even though it is likely to cost taxpayers billions of dollars.

Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe said Congress does not appropriate the payments the government makes to the utilities as a result of the court cases. Those payments have totaled about $342 million so far but are expected to reach $7 billion before Yucca Mountain is operational. A law passed during the Carter administration makes the payments an obligation of the federal government and must be paid by the Treasury without further action by Congress.

"I think there would be more attention [paid] to the issue if Congress were appropriating this money every year," Snowe said. "There is a risk in storing this waste in so many different sites across the country."

Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who serves on the Homeland Security Committee, agrees that having nuclear waste stored at 122 sites in 39 states is a national security issue. She said language she wrote in the omnibus budget bill directs the Department of Energy to develop a plan for some larger-capacity interim sites to improve security of the waste.

"We should be consolidating where we store the waste instead of having it spread all over the country," she said.

Democratic Rep. Michael Michaud of the 2nd District said it is very important that the permanent waste site at Yucca Mountain be completed so that waste from Maine Yankee and other interim storage sites can be moved.

"I think people will be very upset when they realize they are still paying for something that they are not getting any benefit from," he said.

Democratic Rep. Tom Allen of the 1st District said there have been far too many delays in building the Yucca Mountain facility. He said that while he understands why it is unpopular in Nevada, it is the best site for a permanent storage facility.

"I think we need a new president before this issue gets addressed," he said.

---------------------------

Kennebec Journal
February 27, 2008

Letter: Nuclear energy not viable power option for Maine

Larry Davis (letters, Feb. 17) suggests that we turn to nuclear power here in Maine to lower energy costs.

According to a recent article in the New York Times, the average nuclear reactor generates 20 tons of waste per year. Currently, in 39 states, nuclear waste is camping out in 122 "temporary" waste sites such as Wiscasset. The federal government was supposed to -- by the year 1998 -- transfer all nuclear waste to a permanent burial site at Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas.

This site, where nuclear waste was to be stored for one million years, has not been built, because of legal, managerial and potential geological problems. The projected date for its construction was changed to 2017, but that date is unrealistic, as the permit for its creation has not been obtained.

The Energy Department is now attempting to determine whether the waste can be processed in a way as to recover useable components, but as of yet, such a process is not feasible, as no such facility exists.

Consequently, nuclear energy is not a viable option. Solar, wind and tidal power are all safer technologies. If we do not think these alternatives are pretty, then we should drastically lower our standard of living. If, after conservation measures, we still need to increase our energy supply, then we should avoid power production that produces toxic waste.

Why continue to poison the planet for cheap electricity to run our hair dryers, microwave ovens and televisions?

Susan E. Melcher
Manchester

---------------------------

Waco Tribune Herald
February 26, 2008