Yucca Mountain News Clips
Friday, April 25, 2008
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
April 24, 2008
DOE's complaint against Nevada dismissed
By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Nevada won a Yucca Mountain ruling at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Wednesday.
A three-judge panel voted 2-1 to dismiss a Department of Energy complaint that state officials were withholding documents from a licensing database for the proposed nuclear waste repository.
DOE lawyers said they found it hard to believe that after opposing the Yucca project for more than a decade the state produced fewer than 4,800 memos, studies, reports and other key documents for upcoming license hearings.
Administrative judges Alan Rosenthal and Thomas Moore ruled DOE presented no solid evidence to back the claim.
The Energy Department had posted 3 million documents to the database, called the Licensing Support Network. But the two judges said the rules for Nevada are different. The state may not identify key documents it needs to share until it decides what legal challenges it will file, and that has not yet occurred, they said.
Judge Alex Karlin dissented. He said state officials were being disingenuous and "legally incorrect" in how they interpreted the rules for document production.
The ruling all but completed one early segment of Yucca Mountain proceedings before the NRC. The judicial panel has been refereeing the development of the document database that must be in place before the Energy Department can file for a repository license.
Also Wednesday, the state lobbed another criticism at the Energy Department as part of its campaign opposing the Yucca project.
Bob Loux, director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, said the state can find no evidence that DOE has a plan to remove nuclear waste from Yucca Mountain if necessary. Federal law requires Yucca to remain open for some period of years in case of emergencies or if it became advisable to pull material out for whatever reason.
Loux urged NRC chairman Dale Klein in a letter to make sure DOE explains how it will maintain the tunnel train that will carry waste canisters inside the mountain, and how it plans to monitor waste canisters for corrosion in the meantime.
DOE spokeswoman Gayle Fisher said there is a removal plan and it will be discussed in the department's upcoming license application. DOE officials have said they envision sealing the repository after 100-300 years.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
April 24, 2008
Plan seeks temporary sites for nuclear waste storage
Senator: Spent fuel should be reprocessed
By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- A bill that has been prepared in the Senate envisions two temporary storage sites for nuclear waste -- one in the East and one in the West -- as a precursor to recycling highly radioactive reactor fuel rather than sending it to Yucca Mountain.
Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., told reporters Wednesday he soon will introduce a bill that would redirect the nation's nuclear waste management strategy.
"We have been working at (Yucca Mountain) for 15 to 16 years, and we are nowhere," Domenici said, referring to the site 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The bill would not end the Yucca Mountain program but could change its mission.
With eight months remaining in an election-year session, Congress completing such a far-reaching bill this year might be a long shot, but it could set the table for debate next year.
Congress passed legislation in 1982 to pursue underground disposal of highly radioactive material, but delays in carrying out that strategy have prompted the nuclear industry and some like-minded lawmakers to pursue other choices.
The new bill would authorize the Department of Energy to enter into contracts with private groups to store nuclear waste at two interim sites while reprocessing plants were licensed and built to pull more energy from used nuclear fuel rods.
Communities would qualify for federal benefits as incentives to accept the waste and store it in above-ground casks.
As for reprocessing factories, the government and private industry would split 50-50 the costs for designs and licensing, and the private partner would pay for construction.
A Domenici aide said the bill will call for a "single-digit" percentage to be redirected from a $20 billion Yucca Mountain construction account into the reprocessing initiative.
Communities hosting the reprocessing plants would not be offered federal incentives because jobs and other economic benefits would accrue from construction and operations, the senator's aide said.
Domenici said he assumes Yucca Mountain will continue to be funded at low levels as the Energy Department pursues a construction license.
Domenici is retiring this year and said several other senators have expressed interest in pursuing the proposal after he leaves.
The Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's trade association, has launched efforts to recruit host sites to store nuclear waste.
If spent fuel were diverted into reprocessing, Domenici has said previously, Yucca Mountain could wind up the destination for nuclear waste generated by the military that cannot be reprocessed. He said waste emerging from reprocessing would be less toxic and could be stored in underground salt formations like those found in New Mexico.
Domenici said he outlined his thinking several months ago to Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., a foe of Yucca Mountain and the Senate majority leader.
"Sen. Reid appreciates Sen. Domenici's efforts to look for alternatives to Yucca," Reid spokesman Jon Summers said in an e-mail. But, he said, to win Reid's support, "any plan to deal with the nation's nuclear waste must kill the dump altogether."
Domenici said if support existed in Congress to stop funding the Yucca program, "we could shut that faucet off."
But, he said, "a lot of Republicans think Yucca is great. I don't know why it is great. You put the stuff in, you have to take it all out (to be reprocessed), and you have to build two more if that is your repository, so why not do reprocessing?"
At the rate that nuclear waste is being generated by utilities, Yucca Mountain might reach its 70,000 metric ton capacity before or soon after it can be built.
The Energy Department is preparing a report on whether more repositories would be needed or whether the Yucca repository might be expanded.
--Contact Stephens Washington Bureau Chief Steve Tetreault at stetreault@stephensmedia.com or 202-783-1760.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
April 24, 2008
CENSUS REPORT: Nevada last in federal spending per capita
Ranking extends long-standing trend
By Sean Whaley
Review-Journal Capital Bureau
CARSON CITY -- Nevada came in dead last in federal largess in fiscal year 2006 at $5,852 per capita, a new Census report released Wednesday showed.
The spending in Nevada compares to $16,263 in the top-ranked state of Louisiana.
The high spending for Louisiana and Mississippi, at $14,516, probably has to do with post-Hurricane Katrina aid. The two states are also among the nation's poorest.
Reasons for Nevada being a donor state in terms of federal funding might have more to do with 87 percent of the land being in federal control and the state's rapid population growth rather than the ability of the congressional delegation to bring home the bucks.
A Tax Foundation report released last year showed Nevada received only 73 cents in federal spending for every dollar that its residents paid in federal income taxes, based on 2004 numbers. Foundation officials cited the federal ownership issue as one reason for Nevada's ranking, along with a high per capita income.
Other reasons cited for Nevada's ranking include a low rate of obtaining federal grant funding and the fact that federal funds often come in the form of retiree benefits that states cannot control.
The ranking is not new. Nevada has typically come in at the low end of the states for various reasons, officials said.
Jon Summers, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said federal grants often require matching state and local funds that are not always available.
"It's another reason why Senator Reid fights hard to get funding specifically for Nevada projects," said Summers, who noted that the report dates to before Reid's ascension as majority leader. "Recognizing that Nevada tends to be closer to the bottom of the list, the senator works to get Congress to direct funds for programs important to our state."
Matt Leffingwell, a spokesman for Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., said the funding formula for disbursement of federal dollars has not kept pace with Nevada's population growth.
"Congressman Porter has consistently worked to ensure that Nevada receives federal monies through the appropriations process and other legislative means," Leffingwell said.
David Cherry, communications director for Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said Nevada does not have large numbers of the types of populations that generate increased federal dollars, such as those with higher poverty levels.
If special appropriations to states, called earmarks, were curtailed, it would eliminate one way Nevada can improve that disparity, Cherry said.
Berkley has fought to bring federal dollars to Nevada for various projects, but a potential source of additional revenue, supporting creation of a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, is one she never will back, Cherry said.
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Nevada Appeal
April 24, 2008
NRC panel rules against DOE on nuclear dump data issue
Bonanza News Service
LAS VEGAS — A Nuclear Regulatory Commission panel dismissed an Energy Department complaint that that state officials improperly withheld documents from a licensing database for the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.
Two of three panel judges said Wednesday the Energy Department did not provide evidence that the 4,800 memos, studies and reports the state has submitted to a document database were too few.
The Energy Department has posted 3 million documents to the same database, called the Licensing Support Network.
The panel has been refereeing disputes over development of the database that must be in place before the Energy Department can ask the full commission for a repository license.
Project officials say they intend to submit a license application by June 30.
Also Wednesday, the state said it could find no evidence the Energy Department has a plan to remove nuclear waste from Yucca Mountain if necessary.
Federal law requires Yucca to remain open for some period of years in case of emergencies or if it became advisable to pull material out.
A project spokeswoman says a removal plan will be part of the department’s upcoming license application.
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The Nation
April 24, 2008
What Nuclear Renaissance?
By Christian Parenti
If you listen to the rhetoric, nuclear power is back. Smashing atoms will replace burning carbon-based coal, gas and oil. In the face of a disaster movie-like future of runaway climate change--bringing drought, floods, famine and social breakdown--carbon-free nukes are cast as the deus ex machina to save us at the last minute.
Even a few greens support nuclear power--most famously James Lovelock, father of the Gaia theory. In the popular press, discussion of nuclear energy is dominated by its boosters, thanks in part to sophisticated industry PR.
In an effort to jump-start a "nuclear renaissance," the Bush Administration has pushed one package of subsidies after another. For the past two years a program of federal loan guarantees has sat waiting for utilities to build nukes. Last year's appropriations bill set the total amount on offer at $18.5 billion. And now the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill is gaining momentum and will likely accrue amendments that will offer yet more money.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) expects up to thirty applications to be filed to build atomic plants; five or six of those proposals are moving through the complicated multi-stage process. But no new atomic power stations have been fully licensed or have broken ground. And two newly proposed projects have just been shelved.
The fact is, nuclear power has not recovered from the crisis that hit it three decades ago with the reactor fire at Browns Ferry, Alabama, in 1975 and the meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979. Then came what seemed to be the coup de grâce: Chernobyl in 1986. The last nuclear power plant ordered by a US utility, the TVA's Watts Bar 1, began construction in 1973 and took twenty-three years to complete. Nuclear power has been in steady decline worldwide since 1984, with almost as many plants canceled as completed since then.
All of which raises the question: why is the much-storied "nuclear renaissance" so slow to get rolling? Who is holding up the show? In a nutshell, blame Warren Buffett and the banks--they won't put up the cash.
"Wall street doesn't like nuclear power," says Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. The fundamental fact is that nuclear power is too expensive and risky to attract the necessary commercial investors. Even with vast government subsidies, it is difficult or almost impossible to get proper financing and insurance. The massive federal subsidies on offer will cover up to 80 percent of construction costs of several nuclear power plants in addition to generous production tax credits, as well as risk insurance. But consider this: the average two-reactor nuclear power plant is estimated to cost $10 billion to $18 billion to build. That's before cost overruns, and no US nuclear power plant has ever been delivered on time or on budget.
As Dieter Helm, an Oxford professor and leading economic expert on energy markets, has found, there never has been and never will be a nuclear power program totally dependent on the market.
Sixty years ago, the technology was swathed in manic space-age optimism--its electricity was going to be "too cheap to meter." While that wasn't true, nuclear power did serve a key role in the cold war: spent nuclear fuel rods are refined for weapons-grade plutonium and enriched uranium. That fact aside, rarely has so much money, scientific know-how and raw state power been marshaled to achieve so little. By some estimates, an investment of several hundred billion dollars has led to a US nuke industry of 104 operating plants--about a quarter of the global total--that produces a mere 19 percent of our electricity.
In fact, the sputtering decline of nuclear power has been one of the greatest industrial failures of modern times. In 1985 Forbes called the nuke industry "the largest managerial disaster in history."
Atomic optimism run amok caused the largest municipal bond default in US history. In 1983 Washington Public Power Supply System abandoned three nuke plants in midconstruction. The projects were plagued by massive cost overruns--one infamous section of piping was reinstalled seventeen times, safety inspections were blatantly ignored, incompetent contractors were allowed to continue work and on and on. When the project finally died, unfinished costs had ballooned to $24 billion, and the utility walked away from $2.25 billion worth of bonds.
That project, like many others, drowned in the financial riptides of rising interest rates that were the central feature of the "Volcker recession" of the early '80s. (That was when Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker smashed inflation by jacking the Fed's interest rate from 8 percent in 1979 to more than 16 percent in 1982.) But nukes were also killed by the corruption and incompetence that so often plague large state projects, like Boston's Big Dig, the New Orleans levees, space-based weapons systems and Iraq's reconstruction.
Another reason atomic energy is so expensive is that its accidents are potentially catastrophic, and activists have forced utilities to build in costly double and triple safety systems. Right-wing champions of atom-smashing blame prohibitive costs on neurotic fears and unnecessary safety measures. They have a point in that safety is expensive, but safety is hardly excessive--details on that in a moment.
More important is the fact that nuclear fission is a mind-bogglingly complex process, a sublime, truly Promethean technology. Let's recall: it involves smashing a subatomic particle, a neutron, into an atom of uranium-235 to release energy and more neutrons, which then smash other atoms that release more energy and so on infinitely, except the whole process is controlled and used to boil water, which spins a turbine that generates electricity.
In this nether realm, where industry and science seek to reproduce the process that occurs inside the sun, even basic tasks--like moving the fuel rods, changing spare parts--become complicated, mechanized and expensive. Atom-smashing is to coal power, or a windmill, as a Formula One race-car engine is to the mechanics of a bicycle. Thus, it costs an enormous amount of money.
Worldwide, about twenty nuclear power plants are being built, but most are in Asia and Russia and are closely linked to nuclear weapons programs. Japan and France have large nuke programs, but both countries heavily subsidize their plants, use a single design and built their fleets not to make profits but to ensure some minimum strategic energy independence and, for France, to build an atomic arsenal.
Even if a society were ready to absorb the high costs of nuclear power, it hardly makes the most sense as a tool to quickly combat climate change. These plants take too long to build. A 2004 analysis in Science by Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow, of Princeton University's Carbon Mitigation Initiative, estimates that achieving just one-seventh of the carbon reductions necessary to stabilize atmospheric CO2 at 500 parts per billion would require "building about 700 new 1,000-?megawatt nuclear plants around the world." That represents a huge wave of investment that few seem willing to undertake, and it would require decades to accomplish.
None of this has stopped the Bush Administration and Congress from channeling more money toward nukes. The current push to build nukes began in 2002, when the Administration launched its Nuclear Power 2010 program, which sought to spur construction of at least three major nuclear power plants. Then came the US Energy Policy Act of 2005, which offered three major forms of subsidy. New nuclear power plants could get production tax credits, federal loan guarantees and construction insurance against cost overruns and delays--together worth $18.5 billion.
The notion that nukes make sense and are the version of green preferred by grown-ups is being conjured by a slick PR campaign. The Nuclear Energy Institute--the industry's main trade group--has retained Hill and Knowlton to run a greenwashing campaign.
Part of their strategy involves an advocacy group with the grassroots-sounding name the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition. At the center of the effort are former EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman and former Greenpeace co-founder turned corporate shill Patrick Moore. (Moore is also a huge champion of GMO crops, which are notorious for impoverishing farmers in developing economies and using massive amounts of pesticides.) The industry also places ghostwritten op-eds under the bylines of scientists for hire.
All the major environmental groups oppose nuclear power. But the campaign is having some impact at the grassroots: the online environmental journal Grist found that 54 percent of its readers are ready to give atomic energy a second look; 59 percent of Treehugger.com readers feel the same way. In other words, people who understand climate change are feeling downright desperate.
But even the Oz-like magic of corporate spin, public subsidies and presidential speechifying have their limits. In late December the man whose name is synonymous with sound money turned his back on nuclear power.
Warren Buffett's MidAmerican Nuclear Energy Company scrapped plans to build a plant in Payette, Idaho, because no matter how many times its managers ran the numbers (and they spent $13 million researching it), they found that it simply made no sense from an economic standpoint.
South Carolina Electric and Gas has also suspended its two planned reactors, citing costs as the key factor. But the company says, "We remain very upbeat about the future of nuclear power."
If a nuke plant breaks ground soon, it will likely be NRG Energy's double-reactor plant, set to be erected in South Texas. But that one has also been delayed.
The fact that new nukes make little economic sense does not mean that old nukes are not profitable. In fact, these nightmarishly complex radioactive boondoggles have recently been turned into cash cows. Utilities achieved this remarkable transformation the old-fashioned way--they used socialism.
Beginning in the 1990s, most American energy markets were deregulated one state, one region at a time. In the process many old utilities were broken up into different firms: some generated power, others sold it, still others handled transmission. One of the crucial details of deregulation was allowing utilities to pass on to rate payers the "stranded costs"--the outstanding mortgage payments of their nuclear power plants.
Perhaps the most egregious example of this occurred in California. In 1996 the State Assembly passed legislation--written by utility lobbyists--that allowed Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric to hold rates high as prices dropped nationally. The two utilities were on target to receive $28 billion over four years. This money would pay off the stranded costs of the Diablo Canyon and San Onofre atomic plants. Halfway through the deal the California power crisis hit and deregulation was put on hold--utilities were forced to stop selling off their assets, and third-party speculation in energy markets was halted. But the state floated bonds to mop up the remaining stranded costs.
Similar deals were struck across the country. Once unburdened of old debts, the nuke plants--now having relatively low overhead costs--became valuable assets. A new generation of firms began buying them up. By 2002 ten companies owned seventy of the nation's 104 reactors. Among the big players in this game are Exelon, Entergy and Dominion Resources.
Many of the old plants went for a song. A particularly disturbing example of this is Vermont Yankee, a thirty-five-year-old reactor purchased by Entergy seven years ago for a mere $180 million. That's about half the price it would cost to build an equal-sized coal plant or wind farm.
Now Entergy is trying to run the power station as hard and as long as possible. In 2006 it received approval to increase power output at the plant by 20 percent. This "uprate" means the plant operates with 20 percent more pressure, heat and flow. And in just one year it earned Entergy $100 million in profits. Over the last decade, almost all US nuclear power plants have received uprates, but few match Vermont Yankee's full-throttle, 120 percent capacity.
Just after the uprate, one of Vermont Yankee's twenty-two cooling towers collapsed. That's right--it crumbled and fell over. Entergy officials said the collapse "baffled" them. The plant's spokesman, Rob Williams, admitted that "our inspections were not effective enough." Reached by phone, Gregory Jaczko, a commissioner at the NRC, admitted that the collapse "didn't look good." But he went on to reassure the public that the plant is essentially safe.
Now Entergy is petitioning the NRC to extend its operating license so that it can run the old plant for twenty years longer than was intended. Nationally, forty-eight facilities have had their licenses extended. In fact, despite critics' arguments that aging plants pose serious dangers, no license renewal requests have ever been denied.
"The NRC falls all over itself to facilitate the industry," says Ray Shadis, a consultant who has worked for both environmental groups and on NRC panels and research projects. The Project on Government Oversight and other watchdog groups point to a revolving door between the commission's staff and the nuclear industry. To take just one example, in 2007 former commissioner Jeffrey Merrifield joined the Shaw Group after spending his last months on the commission pushing to ease restrictions for precisely the type of construction activities that were the Shaw Group's specialty.
Diana Sidebotham, an antinuclear activist in Putney, Vermont, twenty miles north of the Vermont Yankee plant, thinks Entergy and the NRC are courting disaster. In 1971 Sidebotham helped found the New England Coalition on Nuclear Pollution, and she has been trying to shut down nuclear plants ever since. Her hillside farm looks out over the ridge lines of the Connecticut River Valley.
"One of these days a plant will blow," says Sidebotham, with just a touch of a genteel but steely New England accent. "And when it does, it will cause a great many deaths and widespread suffering, not to mention extraordinary economic damage."
Accidents do happen. In 2002 the Davis-Besse Nuclear Plant in Ohio was forced to close for two years after inspectors found a football-sized corrosion hole in the reactor's six-inch-thick steel cap. The plant was very close to a major accident. Repairs cost $600 million.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama says he opposes any more relicensing of old nuclear plants. His rival Hillary Clinton has stopped just short of saying that. However, as was reported by the New York Times, Obama has close ties to the nuclear industry, particularly the Illinois-based Exelon, which has contributed at least $227,000 to his campaigns. Two of his top advisers have links to the firm, including his chief strategist, David Axelrod, who was a consultant for Exelon. Obama voted yes on the 2005 Energy bill, which lavished subsidies on oil, coal, ethanol and nukes; Senator Clinton, like almost half the Senate Democrats, voted against it. The Obama campaign says that as President he would not cut nuclear subsidies, only that he would boost subsidies for green power.
Activists like Sidebotham say the real issue is not how to build more nukes but how to handle the old, decrepit plants and their huge stockpiles of radioactive waste. Most of the atomic plants in this country are reaching the end of their life span; seventeen have been decommissioned. And increasingly the question is what to do with the accumulated waste--the extremely radioactive spent fuel rods. This is dangerous stuff. If exposed to air for more than six hours, spent fuel rods spontaneously combust, spewing highly poisonous radioactive isotopes far and wide. This spent fuel will be hot for 10,000 years.
Since 1978 the Energy Department has been studying Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a possible permanent repository for atomic waste. But intense opposition has held up those efforts. In the meantime, the partially burned uranium is stored at the old power plants, in pools of water called "spent fuel pools." Lying near great cities, on crucial river systems, in small rural towns, these pools are potentially a far greater risk than a reactor meltdown. Scenarios for how terrorists might attack and drain them range from driving a truck bomb to crashing an explosive-laden plane into them.
Just after 9/11, when security at nuke plants was supposed to be high, lead pellets started raining down on the containment structure and guard shack at Maine Yankee, in Wiscasset. (The plant has since been decommissioned.) A group of four men in camouflage, armed and intent on killing, had infiltrated into a swamp and were firing weapons from somewhere in the reeds. This "cell" turned out to be four local duck hunters who had no idea they were hitting the power plant.
Their foray against innocent mallards proved just how easy an attack could be. Activists demanded, and got, a safety review, which led to a shockingly blunt NRC document called "Report on Spent Fuel Pool Accident Risk," or NUREG-1738. The report found that containment structures, such as that at Vermont Yankee, "present no substantial obstacle to aircraft penetration." According to the NRC, a fire in the spent fuel pool at a reactor like Vermont Yankee (which stores 488 metric tons of spent fuel) would cause 25,000 fatalities over a distance of 500 miles if evacuation was 95 percent effective. But that evacuation rate would be almost impossible to achieve. The NRC claims to have the threat of terrorism under control, but for reasons of national security it can't explain how. And after 9/11 it admitted, "At this time, we could not exclude the possibility that a jetliner flying into a containment structure could damage the facility and cause a release of radiation that could impact public health."
Humanity's Faustian bargain with atomic power is a story still in its early stages. No one knows how long nuclear facilities will last or what will happen to them during future social upheavals--and there are bound to be a few of those during the next 10,000 years.
This much seems clear: a handful of firms might soak up huge federal subsidies and build one or two overpriced plants. While a new administration might tighten regulations, public safety will continue to be menaced by problems at new as well as older plants. But there will be no massive nuclear renaissance. Talk of such a renaissance, however, helps keep people distracted, their minds off the real project of developing wind, solar, geothermal and tidal kinetics to build a green power grid.
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Albany Times Union
April 24, 2008
Nuclear regulator needs surge of new talent
Chairman of governing body tells RPI students growing industry means plenty of opportunities
By ERIC ANDERSON
Deputy business editor
TROY -- The agency that oversees the nuclear power industry is facing "massive" retirements and is scrambling to recruit as nuclear energy is once again expanding.
But unlike a decade or two ago, "young people today see a real future in nuclear," said Dale E. Klein, who chairs the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Klein visited Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Wednesday morning to talk with nuclear engineering students about the outlook for the industry and its regulators. He was joined by President Shirley Ann Jackson, who once held the NRC post.
"We're not an advocate for or against nuclear power," Klein said. But his agency has a central role in making sure the industry is operated safely and securely.
"RPI has had a long history of nuclear education," said Jackson, who added that the college also is facing a wave of retirements among its nuclear engineering faculty. But in a sign the school sees a bright future for nuclear power, "we're replacing them at a 3-to-2 ratio," she said.
The NRC currently has nine site applications pending for 14 reactors. In one change to reduce the financial risk to utilities, the agency now issues construction and operating permits together, instead of waiting until the multibillion-dollar plants are built to determine whether they'll be allowed to operate. The NRC instead monitors a plant through its construction phase.
It reduces the financial risk to the industry, Klein said.
The NRC oversees 104 reactors that generate electric power, but Klein said that number would have to grow to 150 just to maintain nuclear power's 20 percent share of the overall electricity market over the next 30 years, when overall consumption is expected to increase by 50 percent.
Safety has been a concern in the wake of such accidents as the one at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania nearly 30 years ago, and at Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union in 1986.
Another is what to do with the spent nuclear fuel, which remains radioactive. Klein said governments around the world are looking to dispose of it "geologically," by burying it deep underground.
He expects the U.S. Department of Energy to submit an application for a license to operate a national disposal facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada by June, although the review could take three to four years.
Concerns about growing greenhouse-gas emissions and what they're doing to the environment also have some advocating a greater role for nuclear power, which doesn't emit carbon dioxide and other gases.
"What's driving (plant construction) is an increase in baseload demand and concerns about global warming," Klein said.
"We need a myriad of energy options for the future, and nuclear power is one of them," said Jackson, noting that Klein's talk at RPI comes one day after Earth Day and three days before the Chernobyl accident's anniversary.
Klein also talked about the need for inspectors at the NRC, calling the "tightness of the human supply chain" a concern of utilities and the regulator.
One RPI graduate student, Rian Bahran, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering, said the job market is very strong.
"The industry's hiring like crazy," he said before Klein's speech. But Bahran, who is from Yemen, said he'd like to pursue a public policy role, "where you can have impact."
One place he may look: the International Atomic Energy Agency. He said his technical background will give him the tools to understand whether reactor designs face a risk of meltdown, or whether they're capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium for extraction.
--Eric Anderson can be reached at 454-5323 or by e-mail at eanderson@timesunion.com.
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Brattleboro Reformer
April 24, 2008
VY practices dry cask storage transfer
By Bob Audette
Reformer Staff
BRATTLEBORO -- In 2006, Vermont's Public Service Board approved a dry cask storage facility for spent fuel at Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon. In its decision, the board concluded that without the dry casks, the plant's spent fuel pool would be full by 2008, forcing the reactor to cease operations.
This was unacceptable to the board because it would have meant the loss of "favorably priced power from Vermont Yankee," according to a press release announcing the 2006 decision.
Soon technicians will be removing fuel rod assemblies from the pool and placing them in casks installed on a concrete pad just north of the reactor building. To get ready for the transfer, plant employees are spending the week performing practice runs, simulating the entire process minus the actual movement of spent fuel.
"This is the last major milestone before the dry storage activities this spring and summer," said Rob Williams, spokesman for Yankee. With members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Public Service watching over their shoulders, the employees are demonstrating their expertise in performing the transfer.
There are currently 3,039 fuel assemblies in Yankee's spent fuel pool, with 120 to 132 fuel assemblies being added every 18 months, said Williams.
Each of the five casks on the storage pad holds 68 fuel assemblies and this year's transfers will move 340 assemblies out of the pool and into the dry casks, taking about two weeks per cask, he said.
At that rate Yankee produces spent fuel, five new casks would need to be installed every three years until the federal government takes the waste. Yankee plans another "loading campaign" in 2011, said Williams.
"The dry runs started Monday," said Williams. "Then we'll be looking for any comments or suggestions from the NRC before going ahead with actually moving the spent fuel."
"After a successful meeting with the NRC yesterday, Vermont Yankee engineers and technicians are in the process of simulating the steps involved in moving spent fuel to dry casks, without the actual loading of spent fuel," said Stephen Wark, spokesman for Vermont's Department of Public Service. "The purpose is to carefully go through the steps in their procedures to make sure everything is in place for safe movement of the spent fuel. The NRC will remain onsite and observe this process. DPS will be onsite next week to review the procedures, prior to the actual transfer."
There are six stages to moving spent fuel from the pool adjacent to the plant's boiling water reactor, said Williams.
The first step involves placing a canister called a HI-TRAC, which is an acronym for Holtec International Transfer Cask, into the fuel pool, loading a dummy fuel bundle into the cask before removing it for a decontamination wash down.
Next, technicians seal the canister by welding it after which they perform tests to insure it is leak tight. During the third step, water is removed from the cask, which is filled with helium, an inert gas that is used as a coolant.
Once those steps are finished, the HI-TRAC container is slipped inside a HI-STORM cask, which stands for Holtec International Storage and Transfer Operation Reinforced Module.
Once the cask is loaded into the transfer module, it is removed from the reactor building using a treaded vehicle, which brings the module to the dry cask storage pad. There, the HI-STORM cask is placed on top of the storage container on the pad and the HI-TRAC container is slipped inside and sealed in.
In addition to conducting a dry run of those activities, plant technicians will also perform a "table-top discussion" of what needs to done when it's time to remove the fuel from the dry cask canister for transportation to a federal spent fuel repository, said Williams.
During the simulation and the actual transfer, the reactor will continue operation.
The oldest spent fuel may not be moved first, said Williams, but the waste that is removed for storage must be at least five years old. A pair of overhead cranes in the reactor building will be used to move the casks and the fuel assemblies.
Dry cask storage is necessary because a federal repository for spent fuel at Yucca Mountain in Nevada has not been finished, even though the U.S. government has spent more than $60 billion on its construction.
In a best-case scenario, Yucca Mountain will be ready to accept nuclear waste in 2020, but critics of the plan say it will never be open, pointing to earthquake and water table hazards that might indicate the government has not picked the best spot to store the waste for thousands of years.
Even if the government starts taking the fuel today, it would cost between $3.5 and $7 billion to transport the nearly 55,000 tons that have accumulated since commercial power reactors began operating, according to Victor Gilinsky, a former NRC commissioner.
It would take 38 years and 22,000 shipments to move all the spent fuel to Yucca Mountain, according to Public Citizen, a national non-profit consumer advocacy organization founded in 1971 to represent consumer interests in Congress.
--Bob Audette can be reached at raudette@reformer.com or 802-254-2311, ext. 273.
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State of Nevada
April 23, 2008
Letter to Dale E. Klein, Chairman, NRC, Re: The NRC should not accept DOE's Yucca Mountain Application if it Lacks a Workable Plan for Retrieval of Spent Fuel as Required by Law
The Honorable Dale E. Klein
Chairman
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Washington, DC 20555-0001
SUBJECT: THE NRC SHOULD NOT ACCEPT DOE'S YUCCA MOUNTAIN APPLICATION IF IT LACKS A WORKABLE PLAN FOR RETRIEVAL OF SPENT FUEL AS REQUIRED BY LAW
Dear Chairman Klein:
From the documents released by the Department of Energy a picture is emerging of parts of their forthcoming Yucca Mountain license application. On April 15 I wrote you that the NRC should reject the application because its claimed compliance with the EPA safety standard rests on the highly implausible proposition that one hundred years from now DOE's successors will install thousands of 5-ton titanium drip shields over the waste containers.
That is not, however, the only make-believe element in DOE's expected application that dictates rejection. Unless DOE comes up with something very different from what is contained in its supporting documents, it appears that the Department has no plausible or workable plan, as is required by law, to retrieve spent fuel should it become necessary.
1. To have the capability to retrieve spent fuel long after it has been emplaced in underground tunnels, DOE would have to maintain the tunnels and remotely operated underground railway system, as well as the necessary cameras and sensing systems. There is no realistic DOE plan for such maintenance for years after waste emplacement in the face of a harsh underground environment subject to drift collapse and rock-falls, and in the presence of an intense radiation field. Nor is there a description of a detailed plan for retrieval beyond the assertion that it would simply be the reverse of emplacement. DOE does acknowledge a remote possibility of off-normal retrieval scenarios, but its planning for solutions is lacking in substance.
2. To make an informed decision about retrieval DOE would have to know whether the underground packages are corroding. DOE's own calculations show that hot waste canisters are susceptible to corrosion if water drips on them. DOE has various proposals - as discussed in the November 2004 Performance Confirmation Plan (3.3.4) - for estimating the waste canister corrosion after emplacement. Insofar as we have been able to determine, these proposals are all in the preliminary stage, and none of them involve monitoring corrosion on the actual waste canisters as is specified by the Commission's staff in their Yucca Mountain Review Plan (NUREG 1804). There is not even an indication of how this might be done, as it would require remote microscopic examination of the different parts of the waste canisters deep underground in a difficult environment. Furthermore, it is not only the integrity of the canisters that determines retrievability. Equally important is the integrity of other equipment and services within the repository environment.
3. Most telling of all - DOE is just going through the motions when it comes to a retrieval capability. The Department does not have, at least in any published documents that we are aware of, any decision criteria for waste retrieval.
NRC should not accept a DOE license application that does not take seriously the legal requirement for waste retrieval. In addition to requiring a repository equipment design that allows NRC and Nevada to evaluate whether it might actually work, NRC should demand that the license application include a detailed description of a workable plan for maintenance of the underground transport system so that retrieval would be feasible if necessary; a detailed description of plans for post-emplacement surface corrosion monitoring of the waste canisters themselves to provide the needed data; and specific criteria for triggering waste retrieval. In dealing with new technology and unprecedented circumstances, "we'll come up with something when we get there" is not good enough to protect public health and safety.
Finally, a license application cannot be "complete and accurate in all material respects," 10 C.F.R. § 63.10(a), when one of the fundamental tenets of the repository system is barely paid lip service.
Sincerely,
--/s/--
Robert Loux
Executive Director
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New Republic
April 23, 2008
Where the Nuclear Waste Goes
Brendan Koerner asks, If not Yucca, where? Where do we stash all the nuclear waste? For the time being, metal casks scattered around the country are holding the existing waste, but those casks only last about 100 years, and we need a sturdier, longer-lasting option. So, if Nevada manages to tie up Yucca in lawsuits for all eternity, that leaves us with...
There are several promising techniques in the pipeline, starting with accelerator-driven transmutation of waste, in which proton beams are used to reduce a substance's half-life. ATW is a favorite of Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., who gives it a shout-out on his anti-Yucca Mountain page. But skeptics claim that ATW is far too expensive and laborious, and will never be able to handle anything more than a token amount of waste.
There is also great interest in using microbes to either trap dangerous isotopes in calcite deposits or cleanse uranium from groundwater. And chemists at Northwestern University recently announced that layered metal sulfides show promise for the remediation of certain types of nuclear waste.
While these cleanup techniques are at least several decades away from commercial viability, we already know how to recycle nuclear waste. Nuclear recycling is every bit as controversial as Yucca Mountain, however. Several European nations currently use the PUREX process, in which spent fuel is bathed in nitric acid so that uranium and plutonium can be extracted. But PUREX isn't used in the United States because of its high cost, as well as the perceived risk of weapons proliferation.
Many in the American nuclear-power industry favor the development of UREX+, a recycling process that ostensibly addresses these concerns. The end products could then be used in advanced burner reactors. But UREX+ has plenty of critics (PDF), who contend that the process is neither as clean nor as proliferation-resistant as it's cracked up to be.
Or we could clasp our hands together and pray hard for the onset of nuclear fusion. But, hold on. How does France deal with this problem? French reactors reprocess their spent fuel, which reduces the total volume of waste. (On the downside, doing so creates plutonium and ups the risk of proliferation, while the reprocessing plants have an unfortunate habit of leaking radioactive liquid onto Normandy Beach and into the Channel.) Still, even the fractional amount of waste that remains—a French family of four generates "a glasslike nugget the size of a cigarette lighter" every few decades—adds up, and has to go somewhere.
French people seem to trust nuclear power more than Americans do, and gaze a bit more fondly on their scientists and technocrats. But that doesn't mean they enjoy living near radioactive-waste repositories any more than your average Nevadan. According to this Frontline report, in the late '80s, French people in the countryside grabbed their pitchforks and rioted over a proposal to bury the waste in rural areas. So the government came out and announced that, no, okay, it only wanted to put the waste there temporarily—and would watch over it—rather than bury it for good. That seems to have appeased the rabble for now, but the government's still noodling over a longer-term solution (deep-underground burial looks like the top prospect). Meanwhile, Greenpeace has charged France with fobbing thousands of tons of waste off on countries like Russia—and where it ends up remains murky.
--Bradford Plumer
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Colorado Springs Gazette
April 23, 2008
Letters: Powering The Future
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We must take steps to allow nuclear fuel reprocessing
As a Ph.D. candidate in a radiochemistry program at Washington State University, you can imagine my pleasure in seeing a pro-nuclear column published in my hometown paper ("Scare tactics shouldn't keep us from using nuclear power," Metro, April 20). Barry Noreen hit many highlights of why nuclear power is a perfectly acceptable supplement to our energy needs. In addition, nuclear waste is more manageable than much of the public believes.
In 1978 Jimmy Carter (ironically, a nuclear physicist himself) signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act as a reaction to India's display of nuclear capabilities. The act effectively halted any nuclear reprocessing in the U.S. As a result, the U.S. is currently trying to place waste in Yucca Mountain. Unfortunately, if Yucca Mountain ever opens, the space can already be filled by the nuclear waste we have already generated.
We have to convince our government leaders to remove the act signed by Carter. This would allow us to reprocess and manage our nuclear waste effectively. The primary concern with reprocessing is the manipulation and possible proliferation of plutonium. Ironically, the longer plutonium is recycled in a reactor, the less effective it is for making weapons. The technology exists to make nuclear waste storage a 200-year issue and not a multi-million-year issue.
Since uranium and thorium are present at low levels in coal, a 1,000 megawatt coal-fired power plant can release as much as 5.2 tons of uranium a year and up to 12.8 tons a year of thorium to the environment through its smoke stack under normal operating conditions.
Let your representative know we want to reprocess.
Jenifer Shafer
Pullman, Wash.
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Nuclear energy should be part of electric generation
I am writing to support the use of nuclear energy to meet growing electrical demand in the tri-state region. Nuclear energy has proven to be the most environmentally benign method of generating electricity. It produces no air pollution, no carbon dioxide and the small amount of radioactive waste it produces can be disposed of responsibly. No member of the public has ever been harmed by nuclear energy in the United States, even though it has produced 20 percent of the country's electricity during the past 30 years.
Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, has changed his position regarding nuclear electricity and now strongly supports it, primarily because of its benign impact on the environment. Nuclear energy is concentrated and therefore requires hundreds of times less space than diffuse sources such as solar and wind power.
Uranium miners are healthier and subject to fewer risks than coal miners. Despite these benefits, the expansion of nuclear energy in the United States has been stalled due to strong political opposition and fear-mongering by activists. The facts, however, do not support the activists' position. Other countries, such as France, Japan, Korea and China are committed to maximizing their use of nuclear power to meet their energy needs. Environmentally conscious states such as Colorado should do likewise.
Charles T. Rombough
Manitou Springs
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Chicago Tribune
April 23, 2008
Questions are raised about nuclear fuel storage and dismantling Zion plant
Exelon meets with politicians, activists -- and contractors looking for work
By Lisa Black
Tribune reporter
Community activists concerned about storage of spent fuel at the Nuclear Power Station in Zion want more information from owner Exelon on its plan to have the plant dismantled by a contractor.
A former commissioner with the Waukegan Park District was among about 60 people who attended a presentation by Exelon Nuclear officials last weekend that drew pointed questions.
"I want to be sure we're not being led down a merry path, that there's nothing else they do but store the fuel on that site," said Joan Callahan, 79, on Tuesday.
She opposed the plant's lakefront location before it was built in 1968. The two-reactor facility on 257 acres stopped producing nuclear energy in 1998.
"If I were a terrorist, I would think, hey that's an ideal thing," said Callahan, who fears the spent fuel could contaminate the Chicago area's water supply.
The Illinois Dunesland Preservation Society sponsored the meeting Saturday, which drew an unusual mix of environmentalists, watchdog group members, legislative representatives and contractors seeking work.
"The concerns are not the removal of low radioactive waste but the remaining toxic fuel being so close to the lake," said Paul Kakuris, president of the society.
"They said that they can't move the waste because there are state and federal regulations that prohibit that. We would like to know specifically what those regulations are, and is there any remedy or hearing process to have exceptions made."
Spent nuclear fuel is stored in a cooling pool at the Zion site, where Exelon employs about 50 people for security and operations.
"We're not licensed to remove fuel, and none of our sites are licensed to receive it," said Exelon spokeswoman Krista Lopykinski.
The company proposed accelerating the timetable for dismantling the plant by temporarily turning its license to operate over to EnergySolutions Inc. in Salt Lake City. The company, which specializes in nuclear decommissioning and cleanup, says it can do the job quicker and cheaper than Exelon.
If approved by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, workers would take apart the power plant and transport each piece by rail to its privately owned storage site in Clive, Utah.
But the fuel rods would remain in Zion, using technology that has become commonplace at aging nuclear power plant sites but is criticized by nuclear watchdogs.
Under the proposal, Exelon would lower the used fuel rods into 17-foot-tall cylinders, encapsulated within about 3 feet of concrete. About 80 of the cylinders would be lined up on a fuel storage pad the size of a football field.
The pad would be above ground, more than 400 feet from Lake Michigan, surrounded by berms, fencing and security guards, Exelon officials said. They cannot move the cylinders farther from the lake because of wetlands, Lopykinski said.
David Kraft, director of Chicago-based Nuclear Energy Information Service, which has long been critical of the industry and its oversight, said Exelon could do better by storing the canisters at multiple sites and using a different underground storage method.
"What we're saying is, it's probably not a good idea to line these up like bowling pins under the flight path for O'Hare Airport," Kraft said.
--email: lblack@tribune.com
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Lincoln County News
April 23, 2008
Nuke Removal Dims As Yucca Funds Drop
By Greg Foster
Prospects for removal of 64 canisters filled with high-level nuclear spent fuel from the former Maine Yankee power plant in Wiscasset fade as Congress makes major cuts in funding for a national repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
Maine Yankee spokesman Eric Howes reported the news to the Community Advisory Panel (CAP) on spent nuclear fuel storage and removal, which convened April 16 for the annual session to update members on ongoing tests and prospects for removal of the fuel from the storage installation at the plant site.
"Funding is likely to be flat," he said.
Yucca Mountain was supposed to open by 2017 and begin accepting spent fuel from decommissioning nuclear power plants throughout the United States, but the federal Dept. of Energy (DOE) has no deadline in sight so far and will not have one until there is more certainty about funding for the project, according to Howes.
What is worse, according to Howes, now the federal government is forced to look at a second repository beyond Yucca Mountain, required under the Nuclear Waster Policy Act.
Howes said the Yucca Mountain program faced a significant setback when U.S. Senate majority leader Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada "engineered" a $50 million funding reduction for the fiscal year 2008 budget. The Bush Administration requested $495 million and the House approved $445.5 million, but Congress ended up cutting $390 million from the request as part of the omnibus appropriations bill.
"This has resulted in dozens of layoffs, and work at Yucca Mountain itself has all but ceased," he said. "The DOE's focus continues to be on submitting a high quality license application for Yucca Mountain to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), perhaps by the end of the summer."
Previously, Maine Yankee reported the DOE estimates a 2020 opening of Yucca Mountain could cost the federal government $11 billion.
In response to the news of what Congress was intending to do last December, CAP members Don Hudson and Dan Thompson and state nuclear safety advisor Charles Pray, who serves on the CAP, sent emails to the Maine Congressional delegation. Hudson wrote, "We should not spend any more money on nuclear power without the political will to close the nuclear fuel cycle."
Thompson wrote, "What is before Congress now is not practical. It is not prudent. Therefore, please urge your fellow members of Congress to look at the history, consider the special interests behind the closed-door plan in progress, and keep this cut in funding from happening."
The DOE is expected to issue a report later this year on the need for a second repository as required under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act because there is a 70,000 metric ton uranium cap on storage of high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, according to Howes. He said legislation has been introduced to remove the cap, but unless that occurs, the nation's spent nuclear fuel inventory will exceed Yucca Mountain's current capacity in the next few years.
In view of such dim prospects, Howes believes interest in interim storage options has increased and there is a growing consensus among policymakers that waste at decommissioned reactor sites should have top priority for its removal.
U.S. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Me.) was instrumental in getting wording to that effect in a report included in the omnibus appropriations bill. The report states the DOE should consider consolidation of the waste at an existing DOE site, at one or more existing operating reactor sites, or at a competitively selected interim storage site. It said the department should engage the 11 sites that have volunteered to host high-level nuclear waste facilities as part of the competitive process.
However, Howes said Pray has expressed some concern about the wording in the report. "Taking custody does not in of itself remove the high-level radioactive waste," Pray said. "The DOE could just take over the site and its operation, thus becoming a 'federal site'."
Pray fears that given such language in the report Maine Yankee could conceivably become a storage site or a collective site where waste from other plants could be relocated to Wiscasset, as well as any of the other three closed plants in New England.
The bill report language is only one instance of policymakers focus on waste stored at decommissioned nuclear sites. "Other reports call more specifically for closing out the decommissioned reactor sites," Howes said.
In 2006, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims awarded Maine Yankee $75.8 million in its suit against the federal government for failing to follow through on its promise to provide a national repository by 1998. A decision on the federal government's appeal of the case is expected sometime this year.
Storage installation update
Howes also reported on three incidents at the spent fuel storage facility at the former plant site that he cited as exceptions to its safe operation during the past year. One was the heavy snowstorm April 7, during which the facility had to take compensatory measure to protect the safety of security personnel that met the spirit of security procedures but not the letter. A condition report was filed after notifying the NRC and State of Maine about the "error".
The second incident involved a hunter who illegally fired at a deer from Old Ferry Rd., a public road, on the former ball field on plant land. A neighbor reported the incident out of concern upon discovery that the guardhouse was not manned at the time.
Howes said the guardhouse is manned at Maine Yankee's discretion, and the remotely operated gate is intended to control vehicle access to the site. The neighbor received information regarding that fact, which has been made known at public meetings prior to the incident.
The third incident occurred Nov. 19 following replacement and upgrade of security computers at the storage facility. The work included in putting the new computers in service involved checking over 100 parameters, but during the process, the two security zones were inadvertently bypassed. The facility detected one of the bypassed zones immediately, but did not detect the second for several hours before activating it.
"Maine Yankee is thoroughly analyzing the incident as it did the one in April and is taking steps to help assure there is not a recurrence," Howes said.
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NRC
April 23, 2008
Remarks Prepared for NRC Chairman Dale E. Klein
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
I am always happy to speak before an academic audience, since I consider myself an academic at heart. As a professor, I’m trained to speak in 50-minute increments, but don’t worry, I won’t speak that long today.
I am on leave from the University of Texas and expect to go back there at some point. This transition between university life to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and back again, seems be a fairly common practice for NRC Chairmen, since it also the path taken by President Jackson. Where I work, everyone still refers to her as Chairman Jackson. I should mention that many of the significant changes that have made the NRC a better agency in recent years were things that Shirley introduced, including moving the agency toward a risk-informed and performance-based regulatory approach. The renewed interest in nuclear power that we are witnessing today would not be possible if the NRC did not have a reputation as an effective and responsive regulator. So I am happy to say that I am enjoying the benefits of the changes that she first introduced!
Now, making the NRC a more modern and efficient regulator is one of the responsibilities of the agency’s chairman. But that is not the same as being an advocate for the nuclear energy industry. I am not an advocate for or against commercial nuclear power. My job is the ensure the safety and security of U.S. nuclear power plants and materials. What I would like to do, then, is just share with you some observations, and allow you to draw your own conclusions about the current status of nuclear power in the United States.
The Energy Department’s statistical office estimates that the global demand for electric power generation is expected to rise sharply over the next 20 years. In the United States, electricity demand is expected to increase by 50 percent in the next thirty years. If nuclear power were to maintain its current share of the electricity supply in this country, the industry would need a fleet of about 150 nuclear power plants, with an average output of 1,000 megawatts each. This would entail going from the 104 commercial reactors that are currently operating to a little over 150 nuclear power plants.
It is interesting to note that this would generally be consistent with the original projections that were made in the 1970s, during the first wave of construction, when the industry’s plans were for about 160 plants. Sites were actually laid out and designed with that number in mind. But only two-thirds of those were built for a variety of reasons.
As you may know, that first construction boom ground to halt during the “stagflation” of the late 1970s, when the predicted demand for energy consumption leveled off. In addition, the NRC had only recently been created, and—frankly—was not a very efficient or predictable regulator, in my view. And the only problem people had with “carbon” was that the stuff rubbed off on your fingers when you made “carbon copies” in the typewriter. The prospects for nuclear power did not appear bright.
Today, of course, the situation is very different. Just within the last year, we have seen dramatic changes. A nuclear reactor in Alabama called Brown’s Ferry Unit One that had been sitting idle for decades was finally restarted. Construction at the Watts Bar Unit II reactor in Tennessee is scheduled to resume, after sitting in mothballs since 1988. About half of the current operating reactors have received or are applying for license renewals. We also are expecting applications for several new uranium mining operations; and if the Department of Energy follows through on what it has said, we could be receiving an application for the spent nuclear fuel repository at Yucca Mountain this year. In addition, the first new reactor applications in decades have started coming in.
Now, as I said at the beginning of my remarks, I am not an advocate for or against commercial nuclear power. But from the perspective of ensuring that any expansion in nuclear power proceeds safely and securely, let me outline what I see as the most significant of the possible roadblocks to the so-called Nuclear Renaissance.
There are two main concerns that persistently capture my attention. The first is whether there is sufficient quality assurance and control over the myriad elements that go into building a modern nuclear reactor. Whether it be major components, minor parts supplied by sub-vendors, reactor designs, manpower, software, or other elements—a new reactor today depends on a supply chain that is truly global in scope. And the close scrutiny that regulatory agencies can bring to bear on major manufacturers to assure that quality components are produced does not always apply with the same intensity to the sub-vendors that supply parts and materials to the manufacturers.
According to data compiled by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the number of ASME Nuclear Certificates held worldwide fell from nearly 600 in 1980, to under 200 last year. More strikingly, the decline was due almost entirely to the loss of nuclear certificates among American companies. The number of certificates held by other nations has remained fairly steady—around 100—since 1980, but the number of American certificate holders today is one-fifth of what it was 27 years ago. Some of you may have read the recent article about this in the Wall Street Journal, which I am pleased to note quoted me accurately.
To address this, I have suggested in meetings with regulators from other nations that we establish more extensive channels of communication to share information about any component or equipment that may be substandard, counterfeit, inadequate or inappropriate to a nuclear power plant. Regulatory agencies and industry would benefit from sharing this data under normal circumstances, but it seems to me even more critical during the current worldwide push to build new plants.
A related concern is the tightness of the human supply chain. A report prepared by the nuclear power industry has estimated that roughly 35% of current utility personnel will be eligible for retirement within five years. The situation for government agencies such as NRC, the Department of Energy, and the National Labs is equally dramatic. What makes the situation a matter of long-term concern is that many of the professors who teach nuclear engineering are getting ready to retire—and that is a link in the chain that is difficult to replace quickly. To help address this, Congress has allocated $15 million for the NRC to support scholarships, fellowships, and faculty development at colleges, universities, and trade schools. This a new program for us, and we are looking forward to allocating these grants as effectively as possible.
On this point, let me devote the second half of my speech to something that I think will make President Jackson happy. Any time the head of a large organization comes to campus to give a recruiting pitch—which is what I am about to do—it usually makes the university president happy. So let me tell you a little more about what our agency does, exactly.
Resident Inspectors: In addition the licensing and regulatory activities that we perform at our headquarters in Washington D.C., we maintain a staff of Resident Inspectors, who are the front lines of the NRC’s safety oversight—our boots on the ground, so to speak. These are highly trained staff who have learned the operations of power plants inside and out. They live in the community, work on-site at the reactors, and are on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for operational oversight and emergency response. Their entire job is to help make sure that the nuclear plants to which they are assigned operate safely. At present there are about 135 resident inspectors at 65 nuclear plant sites around the country.
The utilities will probably tell you that they don’t always find the Resident Inspectors convenient, but at the end of the day, they are grateful for the independent judgment and expertise the Resident Inspectors provide. I should add that many of the most senior managers at the NRC served as Resident Inspectors.
Vendor Inspections: A modern nuclear power plant depends on the smooth operations of tens of thousands of parts: pumps, valves, motors, fans, pipes and many other components that may be produced by any number of companies—both private and state-owned—around the world. As I mentioned, these must be of consistently high quality—because even a sub-standard bolt can be a cause of concern. So we have a vendor inspection program that sends people out all over the world, working to ensure that there is consistent high quality in the supply chain. In addition, we have a team that pursues investigations, which can result in criminal sanctions, against people who traffic in fraudulent parts.
Materials: In addition to power plants, our agency licenses the nuclear materials that are used in medical applications. In fields ranging from cardiology, to neurology, oncology, radiology and many more “ologies” I probably don’t even know about—radioactive isotopes are helping people all over the world live better, longer, healthier, and more comfortable lives. But it’s also possible for these materials to be misused, and people can get hurt or killed. Our agency will investigate, usually in cooperation with the authorities in state and local governments, if radioactive materials have been misused.
Similarly, nuclear materials that are used in construction and other industrial applications, to measure the density of soil or the integrity of piping and welds, are sometimes lost or stolen. We help identify and track them down to ensure they don’t fall into the wrong hands, and remain under proper handling and care. Not everyone at the NRC is a desk jockey!
International Programs: When the 104 plants operating in the United States were built, there were really no standardized designs, unlike in France, where most reactors were built from the same blueprints. Today, however, the new plants that are being proposed will be much more standardized. In fact, there is a very concerted effort under way by regulators around the world to work together, share information, and harmonize—as much as possible—the codes and specifications for new plants. So some of our employees are dedicated entirely to maintaining and strengthening our international programs, and working with other regulators across the globe to improve nuclear safety and security. Let me mention that I just returned from a meeting of the Convention on Nuclear Safety in Vienna, Austria—where we delivered what I believe was a very highly-regarded report on nuclear safety standards in the United States
Research: The current crop of reactors in the United States are largely based on what is called “light-water” technology. But we know that the nuclear energy of the future will involve radical technological changes, and our agency needs to develop the expertise to license and regulate the advanced and innovative new reactors and fuel cycle facilities that we anticipate down the road. This will require advanced computer simulation and greater expertise in computer security and cyber threats. In addition, if the United States decides to join the other major nuclear powers of the world and embrace nuclear recycling, the NRC will need additional chemical engineers with a detailed knowledge of reprocessing, actinide chemists, plutonium chemists, and radio-chemists. And nuclear engineers with expertise in transmutation would be required to review fuel recycling facilities. Beyond that, I think that if any of you end up joining the NRC you could conceivably help establish an Office of Fusion Reactors in twenty years. So, in short, if technically complex issues fascinate you—there will hardly be a more interesting place to work over the next few decades than the NRC.
I could go on, but that should give you some idea of the many different things we do.
Let me conclude by saying that the high value we place on the education and technical skills of our employees goes the heart of something both Chairman Jackson and I have tried to achieve at the NRC—which is to make it an effective, credible, and technically serious organization.
Now, I would be happy to take some question.
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Times Daily
April 22, 2008
TVA eyes nuclear waste center
By Trevor Stokes
The Tennessee Valley Authority, along with the U.S. Department of Energy, could announce as early as Monday a plan to develop a nuclear waste recycling center that could demonstrate a technology many experts believe can address the growing problem of spent nuclear waste, according to a Congressional source.
In the agreement, which has yet to be finalized, TVA would explore recycling spent nuclear fuel, common in other countries, but nearly unheard of in the U.S.
Rep. Bud Cramer, D-Ala., did not return a call Friday, and Sen. Jeff Sessions' office said he would withhold comment until the official announcement was made.
"The Department of Energy is working a cooperative arrangement with TVA to share information, but details aren't finalized yet," said Angela Hill, a spokeswoman for the Department of Energy. "This kind of cooperation is consistent with what we've been pursing with the academic, industry and national laboratory in Research and Development to close the nuclear fuel cycle."
TVA spokesman Gil Francis said he didn't know any details about the project since an official announcement hadn't been made.
Essentially, radioactive uranium fuel in nuclear reactors becomes transformed into a mixture of unspent uranium and plutonium waste. A chemical process, called PUREX, can separate the uranium and plutonium from fission byproducts.
France, which derives more than 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear reactors, has been a leader in nuclear fuel recycling for decades. The U.S. does not have regulations in place that control recycling of spent fuel.
Critics of fuel recycling point out that plutonium is used in nuclear weapons, a concern that the radioactive waste could reach the wrong hands.
The cost of recycling the fuel may remain prohibitive. Researchers from Harvard University and the University of Maryland concluded in a 2005 study that using nuclear reactor fuel once in typical reactors would remain significantly cheaper than recycling the waste for "at least the next 50 years, even with substantial growth in nuclear power."
Officials at the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), a policy organization for the nuclear technologies industry, declined to comment until an official announcement was made.
The NEI has advocated for fuel recycling as a way "to reduce the volume, heat and toxicity of nuclear waste and recover useful materials," according to the organization's Web site.
Recycling spent nuclear fuel is not a new concept.
As of 2003, 75,000 metric tons of used nuclear waste has been reprocessed worldwide, according to NEI. Also, each metric ton of used fuel provides as much energy as 100,000 barrels of oil, according to the trade organization.
The nuclear industry has been hit with skyrocketing prices of uranium, one of the central metals used in nuclear reactions, and the question of how to dispose of the toxic waste generated from the nuclear fission process still haunts the industry.
Uranium traded at $7 per pound in 2000, but by 2007, averaged about $100 per pound, according to a Reuters report. Worldwide demand of the resource is only growing as the World Nuclear Organisation recently reported that 33 reactors were under construction with another 94 ordered.
In the U.S., around 30 nuclear reactors are coming on board, including the proposed Bellefonte plant, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute.
The Department of Energy spent billions to develop a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which faces strong opposition.
In the U.S., 55,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste is stored at 100 sites in 39 states.
The U.S. has had a mixed history with nuclear fuel recycling. As early as 1966, the Atomic Energy Commission permitted commercial reprocessing of defense weapon generated waste for a plant near Buffalo, N.Y., according to a 2006 policy paper from the Congressional Research Service.
A decade later, President Gerald Ford denounced recycling of plutonium, the main by product of the nuclear fission reaction "unless there is sound reason to conclude that the world community can effectively overcome the associated risks of proliferation," Ford said.
By 1981, President Ronald Reagan lifted the reprocessing ban, though the moratorium remained in effect throughout the industry.
As early as 2001, President George Bush stated to the National Energy Policy Development Group that the U.S. should consider technologies to "develop reprocessing and fuel treatment technologies that are cleaner, more efficient, less waste intensive, and more proliferation-resistant."
Bush mentioned fuel recycling during his visit in June in commemoration of the restart of one reactor at Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant in Athens.
"We ought to do something about reprocessing," Bush told the audience during his visit. "Congress needs to spend the money in order to do the research. And when we do, we will be able to answer a lot of the charges of our critics that say, what are you going to do with the fuel? Well, here's a good answer: Recycle it, reburn it and reduce the amount of the problem. And that's what the United States needs to be doing."
--Trevor Stokes can be reached at 740-5728 or trevor.stokes@timesdaily.com.
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Tri-City Herald
April 21, 2008
DOE looks at options for treating tank waste at Hanford
By Annette Cary
Plans to treat low-activity radioactive tank waste at Hanford could take a new direction as early as June after an independent panel commissioned by the Department of Energy completes its report.
The panel is looking at multiple options for treating an estimated 50 percent of Hanford's low-activity tank waste that the Hanford vitrification plant will be unprepared to handle as it currently is designed.
The results could mean canceling plans for a pilot plant at Hanford that was planned to allow an early start on treating waste while testing the process. But even without a pilot plant, bulk vitrification could remain an option.
DOE has been focused on adding a supplemental treatment system with the most likely options being to add a bulk vitrification plant or to build a second treatment facility at the main vitrification plant for low-activity waste.
But changes at the main vitrification plant are driving a new look at treatment options. Plans being considered include increasing the capacity of the one low-activity waste treatment facility that already is under construction or starting it years earlier than portions of the plant that will handle high-level radioactive waste.
The $12.3 billion vitrification plant now under construction originally was planned as the first of two plants, said Shirley Olinger, manager of DOE's Hanford Office of River Protection. But in 2003, its design was changed to treat all of Hanford's high level radioactive waste and still treat about half of its low activity radioactive waste, with the rest treated by a less expensive supplemental method such as bulk vitrification.
The waste -- about 53 million gallons left from the past production of plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program -- will be turned into a stable glass form for disposal. The waste will be separated into high-level waste that is planned to be sent as glass logs to the planned repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev.
The low-activity waste will be treated, likely by some form of vitrification, and disposed of at a lined landfill at Hanford at a much lower cost.
Just how much waste the vitrification plant couldn't treat as currently designed is unknown, although 50 percent of the low-activity waste has been used as a rough estimate. If substantial amounts of sodium must be added to the waste as it is separated into high-level and low-activity waste streams, more waste would be created.
But other uncertainties are more positive. Improvements to the melters and glass technology already have boosted the amount of glass the vit plant's Low Activity Waste Facility will be able to treat daily. And DOE is continuing to look for further improvement.
Part of the changing treatment options are the result of uncertainties over how long it will take to treat high level waste. With some estimates that the plant will take much longer to treat high level waste than the planned 18 years, that will allow more years to treat the plant's low-activity waste.
DOE also could start treating the low-activity waste sooner. For almost two years, work shifted at the plant from building facilities to separate and treat high-level waste to work on the plant's Low Activity Waste Facility because of concerns about earthquake safety.
The extra work will allow that Low Activity Waste Facility to be ready as many as five years before the rest of the plant begins operating in 2019. Because the low-activity waste still would need to be separated from the high-level waste before the vit plant's Pretreatment Facility is operating in 2019, an interim pretreatment system would need to be built that could separate some of the less complex tank waste.
CH2M Hill Hanford Group has been directed to start what DOE calls "preconceptual" studies for an interim pretreatment system, which also could be used for bulk vitrification.
DOE broke ground for a bulk vitrification pilot plant in February 2005 with the intention of having a production scale bulk vitrification plant operating between 2011 and 2014. While the main vitrification plant would make glass logs, bulk vit would glassify waste within boxes the size of land-sea shipping containers.
Bulk vitrification was proposed as a way to treat low-activity waste with more flexibility and less expensively than at the main vit plant and as a possible way to reduce some wear on the main plant's melters, which may be damaged by some chemicals in the waste.
In 2005 the cost of the demonstration plant was estimated at $60 million, but DOE already has spent $99 million on the project, Olinger said. It would require $100 million more to complete, she said. The project cost has been driven up in part by the need to add safety features.
With increased costs for the pilot plant and a possible early start to low-activity waste plant providing another way to treat waste before 2019, DOE could decide to drop plans for the pilot plant. Depending on how much low activity waste the main vit plant would be unable to treat, DOE might still decide to proceed with bulk vitrification but look at other ways to test it rather than a full-scale pilot plant.
Each of the options under consideration would have potential advantages, which would have to be weighed against potential disadvantages and cost, Olinger said.
Advantages for pursuing bulk vitrification include added flexibility because DOE could start small and add more operating lines, if needed. But if DOE concludes that a large amount of waste may require supplemental treatment, it might make more sense for DOE to add a second Low Activity Waste Facility to the main plant.
Starting low-activity waste treatment early at the main plant could allow DOE an early start to training operators for the main vit plant. But that option could interfere with efforts to increase the efficiency of the Low Activity Waste Facility, which include not only boosting the productivity of the melters it's now designed to hold but also adding a third melter.
DOE expects some of the uncertainties to be resolved as early as June, when the independent study group could finish its report.
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Greenville News
April 21, 2008
End political fight over nuclear waste site
By Susan Wood and J. Malvyn McKibben
South Carolina has seven nuclear power plants producing 50 to 60 percent of our electricity, and utilities are considering adding four more. Nationwide, there are 104 reactors producing 18 to 20 percent of the nation's electricity, and utilities are considering 32 more.
The reasons for this "nuclear renaissance" are clear. Nuclear power is cleaner, safer and cheaper than its only competitors, coal and natural gas. The nation, and especially the Southeast, needs to produce more clean electricity to support growth, maintain our quality of life and replace aging facilities. The only significant hurdle is the political question of how to manage the used fuel and the eventual radioactive waste.
For 21 years the selected site, Yucca Mountain, Nev., has been drilled, probed, sampled and analyzed by many competent organizations, and their findings have been reviewed by many more competent organizations, producing over a million documents. There is no reasonable doubt the site and the proposed techniques of storage and disposal assure the permanent safety of workers and the public.
So, what's the problem? Anti-nuclear groups mounted a misinformation campaign, convincing a lot of Nevadans that the Yucca Mountain repository would be unsafe and would drive tourists away from Las Vegas. With many citizens against it, most of their elected officials, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, oppose it.
Let's address their issues.
Transportation: Those opposed to the Yucca Mountain repository say there are health risks associated with shipping used fuel to Yucca Mountain. They try to frighten people who live on the railroad and truck routes. And they claim the shipping casks would be easy targets for terrorists.
These scare stories are baseless. A person standing beside a railroad when a used fuel shipment goes by would receive a maximum radiation dose of about 0.00001 millirem. Our harmless daily dose from natural background and medical X-rays is about 1 millirem.
The shipping casks are designed to withstand accidents, and have been shown to withstand likely terrorist attacks.
Volcanic activity: The last volcanic eruption at Yucca Mountain occurred 12 million years ago. Because of tectonic movement, the pool of magma that produced that eruption is no longer under the site, so the chances of a new eruption are about nil. No credible volcanologist is concerned about this.
Earthquakes: Anti-nuclear zealots have claimed geologic faults around Yucca Mountain present an earthquake hazard that could release radioactivity. Many studies have been conducted by seismologists. Their conclusion is that the probability of an earthquake releasing radioactivity is far too low to be considered.
Leakage to groundwater: Some people are concerned that many tens of thousands of years from now, water seeping down from surface rainwater may dissolve or suspend radioactive material, then contaminate some farmer's well. The silly season is upon us.
The soil and rock below the surface of Yucca Mountain are very dry, and have been for millions of years. That is one of the reasons the site was chosen. On average, 7 inches of rain falls on Yucca Mountain annually. Over 95 percent evaporates or is taken up by the scrub bushes. So, less than four-tenths of an inch of rain per year is available to seep downward. It is assumed after many thousands of years some of that water might arrive at the tunnels, corrode/ erode through four metal barriers, dissolve or suspend radioactive material from the ceramic fuel core, seep a thousand more feet to the water table without being absorbed, then finally reach the well of some unsuspecting farmer at the site boundary, 11 miles away. The maximum possible dose of radiation to the farmer was calculated at 2.3 millirem. That is less than we get from a one-way cross-country flight, a chest X-ray or three days of harmless background radiation.
Effects on business: One of the anti-site weapons used is a "study" that concluded many people would not come to Las Vegas if the repository were 100 miles to the northwest.
The U.S. exploded 1,030 nuclear weapons, mainly at the Nevada Test Site, from 1945 to 1992. The plutonium, uranium and long-lived fission products from those tests are still there, in the soil, with no containment. The tourists aren't concerned about that.
It is past time for the petty political bickering and frivolous lawsuits to end.
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North Star Writers Group
April 21, 2008
Energy Policy: Drill, Baby, Drill . . . Or Get Ready For Hell
David Karki
Crude oil hit $114 a barrel this weekend. Gas prices are pushing $4 a gallon, and could well hit $5 by the time Memorial Day and summer driving season arrives. At what point will we finally restore sanity to our national energy policy? Or even have a policy, for that matter?
How much longer will we go on, refusing to acquire the plentiful energy resources under our own land and waters and then sending mountains of money to people who would celebrate our destruction? And on top of that, indulging the liberty-crushing, economy-wrecking pipe dreams of the radical environmentalist crowd in response to a “crisis” that's entirely non-existent?
Sadly, it seems everyone inside the Beltway has gotten knee-walking drunk from the green Kool-Aid chug-a-lug. Even President Bush has come out with a bill to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, if only to stave off a far worse bill authored by Senators Joe Lieberman and John Warner. Never mind that they haven't the slightest idea how to make their absurd requirements become reality. Apparently, they'll just wave the magic wand of government, and poof! We'll just not emit carbon without any reduction in living standards. This is breathtaking hubris, even by the pathetically low standard of U.S. senators.
The only way to get where they would force us to go is to simply deny energy to the citizenry. Sen. Barack Obama has already indicated as much in a recent primary debate, saying that the only way to lower prices is to lower demand. In other words, he'll be a Seinfeldian Energy Nazi: “No energy for you!” (I wonder, is he going to station troops at gas stations and electrical meters on people's homes to ensure no one consumes too much? Just how totalitarian and dictatorial would the enforcement mechanisms have to be?) Liberals believe in “energy independence” all right – independence from energy by not having any.
No technology currently exists to take the place of oil in any substantial way, and if it did it wouldn't need huge government subsidies to prop it up. What's more, we have plenty of oil in ANWR (enough to import none from Saudi Arabia for 20 years), in North Dakota, in the Gulf of Mexico (which Cuba is drilling with China's help, but we won't) and off the Pacific coast. Natural gas, too.
Anyone with an ounce of common sense would realize that, to be energy independent and able to handle inevitable periodic supply disruptions – be that due to hurricanes or hostile vendors – we need to have much more domestic stock and the refinery infrastructure to handle it. And if we're going to have any significant portion of the car fleet go electric, we'll need numerous new power plants to provide that electricity.
Instead, we have supplies so short and refinery infrastructure so crimped that even worthless environmental regulations requiring winter and summer boutique gasoline blends – which force refineries offline each spring to change over – are enough to cause price spikes. And we have outright bans on any new refinery or nuclear power plant construction, so aging older (and dirtier by comparison) coal-fired plants have to keep running. This in a nation that will add another 63 million people worth of energy demand by 2030, and a world where 2.4 billion Chinese and Indians want to stay warm in the winter and drive cars just as much as anyone.
A sensible policy would expedite the accessing of all available domestic supplies of oil and natural gas, build sufficient refinery capacity to withstand any disruption, repeal both the federal gas tax (it only funds pork spending; let states maintain the roads within their respective borders and all of us save 18.4 cents a gallon) and frivolous regulations that only add expense to production while doing nothing for the environment. Then with that new leverage, the oligopoly of OPEC would be forced to cut prices to keep us as customers in some capacity.
And get rid of all ethanol subsidies and mandates, which only act as a food tax that goes for an inefficient boondoggle that would take far more arable land and water to produce than we can possibly spare. (Again, if ethanol can work, it doesn't need the crutch of government.) Nothing is more stupid than a nation tearing up its food supply for a frivolous energy source while vast amounts of the tried-and-true remain untapped and ready to use.
As for electricity, build lots of new nuclear power plants to replace older coal and gas fired ones, as well as to handle supplying the increasing demand that electric cars will inevitably bring. Nuclear power is safe and clean. Even the French get 70-plus percent of their power from nuclear. What little waste is produced can be shot into outer space if people are too irrationally freaked out to have it buried at Yucca Mountain or some such equivalent. (Space being, after all, full of billions of nuclear furnaces called stars.)
We cannot continue down this pie-in-the-sky primrose path, and expect that there will not be severe negative consequences that affect us all for having allowed the radical, blind-to-reality global warming cultists to create policy for a world that only exists in their far-left totalitarian fantasies. At some point we have to demolish the barriers they have created and reclaim what is rightfully ours – and more importantly, what keeps us a free and prosperous people – before it's too late.
If we do not grow a spine and go to war against the radical greenies, we will not be able to recognize our civilization much longer. Sky-high food prices, no energy and no liberty at all – not even to choose what kind of light bulb to put in your lamps. Welcome to enviro-wacko utopia, or, as the rest of us call it, Hell.
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Nevada Appeal
April 20, 2008
There's only toxic waste at the end of the Yucca Mtn. rainbow
Congresswoman Shelley Berkley
The recent op-ed (by Chuck Muth, April 11) calling on Nevadans to embrace nuclear waste was a little like listening to someone talk about living on Mars with no mention of how you get there from planet Earth (Nevada should profit from Yucca gold mine, April 11).
In his piece, Chuck Muth conveniently glosses over the reasons Yucca Mountain is bound to fail both scientifically and because of its $80 billion price tag. He seeks to paint a utopia in which nearly all of Nevada's most pressing economic needs can be met by turning our home into an epicenter for nuclear waste disposal.
Visions of nuclear power plants dotting the Nevada landscape and pipelines to the Pacific are false promises to two of our most pressing needs - clean energy and a steady water supply. And the author fails to acknowledge the myriad of dangers his plan would create, not only for Nevada and the nation, but for global efforts to limit terrorist access to dirty bombs and nuclear weapon-making materials.
The nuclear industry and others have been selling this same tale of overnight riches for decades. They peddle these claims in an attempt to chip away at intense opposition from Nevadans to the dumping of toxic radioactive waste 90 minutes from Las Vegas - our state's largest community and most powerful economic engine. We didn't believe it in the 1980s and '90s and we still aren't buying the idea that this is a new radioactive "Comstock Lode" for the 21st century.
Nevadans know a bad bet when we see one and that is the reason we remain overwhelmingly opposed to Yucca Mountain. Remember, there is no pot of gold at the end of the Yucca Mountain rainbow and no magic wand to wave over toxic radioactive waste that will simply make the dangers disappear.
The reason for Nevada's well- founded opposition to Yucca Mountain is that the proposed repository is designed to fail. Volcanoes and earthquakes have rocked the area around Yucca Mountain in the past and there is every reason to believe these threats will strike again. At the same time, canisters placed inside the mountain will rapidly corrode, allowing radioactive waste to escape and contaminate drinking water supplies for families living near the proposed dump site.
The fact also remains that you cannot reprocess much of the waste the nuclear industry and its allies like President Bush and U.S. Senator John McCain are desperate to ship our way. Defense waste from the U.S. military and the oldest spent nuclear fuel from commercial power plants cannot be reprocessed, leaving Yucca Mountain as the only place on the books slated to store these toxic remnants.
Waste buried in Yucca Mountain will not even hit peak danger levels for 300,000 years, the prime reason a federal court struck down Bush administration radiation standards for failing to protect against deadly releases far into the future.
Appeal readers should also recognize that reprocessing waste does not eliminate the need for a repository under any scenario, leaving Nevada as a prime target today and in the future for efforts to ship waste to Yucca Mountain on a "temporary" basis only to see this fool's gold stay forever.
Such a reprocessing scheme will, however, create dangerous new materials that could be used to build a nuclear weapon. This very real proliferation threat is why reprocessing regimes, such as the one promised by the author as our new road to riches, remain illegal under U.S. law.
In the aftermath of 9/11, Americans remember what this author has clearly forgotten - that terrorists are actively looking for the materials to build a dirty bomb. The thousands of waste shipments required under the Bush-McCain Yucca Mountain plan would each be a potential target for a terrorist strike or accident waiting to happen. A major incident resulting in the release of nuclear waste on our roads or railways will threaten lives and leave communities facing millions in clean-up costs and years of contamination. Decades of these "mobile Chernobyls" will endanger the lives of Nevadans and 50 million other Americans living along designated transportation routes.
Most importantly, there is simply no reason to move this nuclear waste to Nevada. Experts on all sides of the waste issue agree that we can safely store spent fuel in hardened canisters at nuclear power plant sites for the next 100 years. This solution, which is already being used at existing power plants nationwide, avoids the risk of waste shipments and buys our nation the time needed to rethink our failed strategy for dealing with this issue.
Finally, as a member of our Congressional delegation, I can assure Nevadans that we speak with one voice when it comes to expressing our continued opposition to being targeted as the nation's only high-level nuclear waste dump. This opposition also extends to the state and local level, where elected officials from Carson City to Las Vegas and across the Silver State have added their voices to this fight. These public servants continue to speak out because the families they represent have made it abundantly clear that they do not want to see Nevada buried in nuclear waste.
• Congresswoman Shelley Berkley of Las Vegas is in her fifth term as a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
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Kansas City Star
April 20, 2008
Nuclear question returns as nation weighs energy alternatives
Rick Montgomery
Save the polar bear? Go nuclear.
That is one way to beat climate change, or so says the Nuclear Energy Institute. When the industry group posted on its Web site poll results reflecting shifting opinions about nuclear power, it tossed in a picture of a polar bear traipsing across the tundra.
But industry opponents see a more threatening beast in their midst, like a hungry grizzly emerging from the woods after decades of hibernation.
The nuclear question is back. And this time the environmental front is divided — a victim of its own success in sounding alarms about global warming.
Even in Pennsylvania, home to the Three Mile Island fright of 1979, the Democrats competing in Tuesday’s presidential primary have signaled a willingness to consider nuclear power as an alternative to carbon-coughing electric plants fueled by coal.
Few voters have even pressed them on it.
“A whole generation has grown up here knowing nothing about Three Mile Island,” said Judith Johnsrud, an adviser to the Pennsylvania Sierra Club. The plant’s partial meltdown put proposals for new U.S. nuclear reactors on ice for a quarter-century.
Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, who calls herself “agnostic,” or uncommitted, on the issue, blends urgent warnings about shipping and storing radioactive waste with pledges to put the nuclear option on the table.
“We do have to look at it because it doesn’t put greenhouse gases into the air,” she has said.
Similar remarks come from Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, which has the most nuclear reactors of any state. Both candidates have received donations from nuclear companies’ employees.
The office of Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, also a Democrat, recently outlined her views on national energy policy in the wake of rejecting a coal-fired plant’s expansion in western Kansas:
She “recognizes that diversifying our energy portfolio is important … and all options should be considered, including nuclear power.”
President Bush on Wednesday announced a goal of stopping the growth of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions by 2025. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, has proposed billions of dollars worth of tax breaks and federally-backed loans for nuclear development.
Mood has changed
The nuclear industry, which produces most of France’s electricity, faces many unresolved obstacles to its growth in the United States.
Wary insurers and enormous construction costs — roughly $8 billion per reactor — demand federal aid and loan guarantees.
Plans to store waste at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain Repository remain in legal and political limbo. The Energy Department was slated to begin accepting spent fuel there a decade ago.
Still, eight power companies have applied for federal licenses for new reactors. About two dozen sites have been pitched for new nuclear facilities. Currently, 104 reactors provide about 20 percent of the nation’s electricity.
“What’s held us up in the past,” said Derrick Freeman, who directs legislative efforts for the Nuclear Energy Institute, “is that America took on a sour mood about nuclear power after Three Mile Island and the Chernobyl disaster” in the Soviet Union in 1986. The Chernobyl blast directly caused at least 50 deaths, and some areas around the plant remain off-limits.
“That (mood) has changed,” Freeman said.
A few years ago the group Environmental Defense reconsidered its opposition to nuclear energy and now considers it a “low-carbon option.”
While the public remains split, surveys show opposition to nuclear energy is slowly shrinking as concerns about climate change and energy dependency mount.
In a March survey by the Pew Research Center, 48 percent of respondents said they were opposed to “promoting the increased use of nuclear power,” down from 53 percent in 2005.
Last year, a Gallup poll found 50 percent of Americans favored nuclear expansion and 46 percent opposed it. In 2001, the results were flipped: 44 percent favored it and 51 percent were opposed.
Some polls show that support for nuclear power rises or falls with oil prices. That puzzles experts, who note, with rare exception, the two energy sources serve different functions. Nuclear fission makes electricity, powering lamps and TVs. Oil is refined into gasoline and for making petroleum-based products.
“You ask people where energy comes from, and it’s the proverbial switch on the wall,” said Ann Bisconti, who conducts surveys for the nuclear industry. “The public isn’t analyzing these issues in great detail.”
As the industry tries to capitalize on fears of global warming (its lobbyists say the nation has avoided 8 billion metric tons of carbon-dioxide emissions, thanks to nuclear plants), some anti-nuke groups are shifting their case away from the environment and toward economics.
“We’re not foolish enough to blow all our money on nuclear energy” when cheaper alternatives such as solar and wind power exist, said Jim Riccio, a nuclear policy analyst for Greenpeace International.
But Riccio also recognizes the attraction, even among his staff, to nuclear plants over coal-fired ones. For people younger than 35, melting icecaps trump possible meltdowns, he said.
“The kids in my office, what they’re really concerned about is global warming. It’s the Vietnam of their generation,” he said. “But for all the time and money we’d need to commit to more nuclear plants, it may cost us the opportunity to stop global warming.”
Climate change was the stated reason that a Greenpeace co-founder, Patrick Moore, joined nuclear interests and became a co-chairman of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, which receives money from the Nuclear Energy Institute.
Moore now attacks Greenpeace and other nuclear opponents as being “stuck in the ’70s.”
Different threats
In the 1970s, global warming wasn’t a worry. Activists at the time linked nuclear power to the Cold War arms race and mushroom-cloud imagery.
The anti-nuke film “The China Syndrome” topped the box office in March 1979, just weeks before the Three Mile Island accident.
Pumps at the Pennsylvania plant stopped running, and the No. 2 reactor overheated, resulting in the release of some radioactivity. Unlike the deadly and highly toxic explosion at Chernobyl, however, a worst-case scenario was averted at Three Mile Island, and reactors still operate there.
The threats are different for University of Kansas student Brian Sifton, who said he was “certainly open to nuclear.”
A coordinator for the green group KU Environs, Sifton acknowledged his concerns about how the country would handle the extra waste. But he cited a distinction between the “localized” fears of nuclear mishaps and the “globalized” effects of greenhouse gases.
“We’re a much more globalized world today,” and one nation’s gases may alter the planet for lifetimes to come, he said.
“The environmental movement is fractured down the middle on this. … Given everything, unfortunately, I think you have to be open to nuclear.”
Then again, Sifton was only 3 when Three Mile Island became a rallying cry. He doesn’t remember the Chernobyl tragedy, either.
PROS …
•Electricity can be generated without the greenhouse-gas emissions of coal-fired plants.
•No major accidents have occurred at U.S. nuclear plants since the near-meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979.
•Nuclear plants already produce one-fifth of the nation’s electricity.
… AND CONS
•Construction costs and delays in obtaining permits discourage private investment. The last U.S. reactor to open — Tennessee’s Watts Bar, which went on line in 1996 — cost $8 billion and took 23 years to complete.
•What to do with radioactive waste? U.S. storage sites already hold more than 50,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel.
•Terrorists can target plants and storage areas.
--To reach Rick Montgomery, call 816-234-4410 or send e-mail to rmontgomery@kcstar.com.
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Conservative Voice
April 20, 2008
Sitting in the Dark Shivering?
by Jim Kouri
In an excellent opinion piece, Deroy Murdock hits on the absurdity of the liberal-left stranglehold on energy production that will decrease dependence on foreign oil from countries that are far from being our friends.
Throughout his op-ed, Murdock describes the horrors being endured by Americans today, such as: four U.S. airlines going belly-up during this month alone. Frontier declared bankruptcy, but will continue flying. Even worse, Aloha, ATA, and Skybus blamed unaffordable fuel as they grounded their jets. Aloha said sayonara to 1,900 employees, NBC News reports. ATA's demise destroyed 2,200 jobs, while Skybus sacked 450 workers, atop the 80,000 positions lost across the economy as unemployment spiked from 4.8 percent in February to 5.1 in March.
One could make a case that in order to win elections, Democrats want to create these horrible situations by stonewalling any attempts at drilling for oil on American territory, and then pointing their fingers at the greedy oil companies and Republican politicians.Â
Losing these airlines likely will boost plane-ticket prices, which already have climbed alongside fuel bills. "Having ditched complimentary meals, movies, and even pillows on many flights, there is little left for embattled carriers to curtail, as their chief expense goes sky high. What's next? Bring your own seat belt," quips Murdock.
Murdock also points out that:
* Truckers have staged work stoppages to showcase their plight. Typical big-rig drivers who spent $837 to fill 250-gallon fuel tanks a year ago pay $1,189 today -- up 42 percent.
* As of April 14, automobile drivers paid an average of $3.39 per gallon for self-serve gasoline, up 51 cents in 12 months, according to the federal Energy Information Administration.
Yet, once again, faced with this real human suffering, the Democrat-led Congress merely whines about oil companies' "obscene" profits or about the need to conserve energy and they'll make suggestions such as increasing gas taxes.
"This whole situation has been nothing more than manipulation around greed," Rep. Joe Larson (D., Conn.) bellowed at a March 31 House hearing.
Politicians and journalists see the energy crisis as an opportunity to brush off their socialist and Marxist economic plans and present them as viable alternatives to heating up your home.
Murdock writes that Democrats and liberal Republicans in Congress should behave constructively:
* Approve new Alaskan oil drilling already. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge's pertinent parcel covers just 2,000 acres -- a veritable raindrop in the Olympic swimming pool that is Alaska's 365-million-acre territory. ANWR's estimated 10.4 billion barrels could match or replace for 19 years the 1.5 million barrels of Saudi oil that America imports daily.
* ANWR also could equal or provide a substitute for American purchases of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez's oil for 25 years. Interestingly enough, Democrat Rep. Ed Markey (Mass.), who presided over the House's late-March public dunking of top petroleum executives, applauds former Rep. Joe Kennedy's (D., Mass.) program to provide poor people with Venezuela's anti-American heating oil. One year's worth of Chavez's authoritarian charity equals just one day's worth of ANWR's all-American output. Guess which one enjoys the approval of the chairman of the House Energy Independence and Global Warming Committee?
* As for America's 49th state, no one wants to rape Alaska's wilderness. Environmentally friendly techniques direct numerous drill bits sideways, like covert tentacles, from a handful of surface holes. The allegedly fragile caribou seem quite aroused by all this; their Central Arctic Herd has quintupled from 6,000 in 1978 to 32,000 today. Meanwhile, petroleum development hums at Alaska's nearby Prudhoe Bay.
* Deregulate the construction of new oil refineries, something not seen since 1976.
* Halve the gas tax, making the average gallon 9.2 cents cheaper. Congress would have less to spend, but they should tighten their belts anyway.
* To encourage new atomic-power plants, stop debating and start storing radioactive waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain facility. In return, give Silver State residents free electricity.
* If it's too much to drill more offshore oil, at least withdraw more natural gas. At worst, natural gas leaks do not blanket beaches or smother seagulls.
The International Energy Agency's 2007 World Energy Outlook claims that fossil fuels will still generate 82 percent of Earth's energy in 2030, with 9 percent from biomass. "Solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, and other renewable sources will satisfy just 2 percent of demand. Refined petroleum propels vehicles today, and yet oil languishes beneath our sovereign soil, even as Americans go jobless and our republic meanders into recession," writes Murdock.
"Will we finally grow up and harness our resources, or will we childishly weep over imaginary threats to wildlife, dispatch supertankers of cash to the Middle East, and watch our petrodollars sponsor bomb belts and exploding aircraft?" he asks his readers.
"Merely asking this question illustrates how desperately this nation needs adult supervision."
Jim Kouri, CPP is currently fifth vice-president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police and he's a staff writer for the New Media Alliance (thenma.org). In addition, he's the new editor for the House Conservatives Fund's weblog. Kouri also serves as political advisor for Emmy and Golden Globe winning actor Michael Moriarty.Â
--He's former chief at a New York City housing project in Washington Heights nicknamed "Crack City" by reporters covering the drug war in the 1980s. In addition, he served as director of public safety at a New Jersey university and director of security for several major organizations. He's also served on the National Drug Task Force and trained police and security officers throughout the country.  Kouri writes for many police and security magazines including Chief of Police, Police Times, The Narc Officer and others. He's a news writer for TheConservativeVoice.Com and PHXnews.com. He's also a columnist for AmericanDaily.Com, MensNewsDaily.Com, MichNews.Com, and he's syndicated by AXcessNews.Com.  He's appeared as on-air commentator for over 100 TV and radio news and talk shows including Oprah, McLaughlin Report, CNN Headline News, MTV, Fox News, etc. His book Assume The Position is available at Amazon.Com. Kouri's own website is located at http://jimkouri.us
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Waco Tribune Herald
April 19, 2008
Bernard Weinstein: Nuclear is the right choice for Texas
Several Texas utilities are proposing to construct new nuclear power plants to help meet the state’s future electricity needs, estimated by ERCOT to be as much as 48,000 additional megawatts a decade from now.
But some critics of nuclear plants have argued that the state’s future demand for electricity can be satisfied largely through a combination of conservation and renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. This is sheer nonsense.
True, Texas currently produces more than 2,800 megawatts of power from wind farms and another 2,000 megawatts is scheduled to come on line over the next two years. But wind power only works when the wind is blowing and is not a substitute for base- load power production. That means even under the most optimistic assumption of the potential contribution of renewables to the power grid, the state’s utilities will still have to construct dozens of base-load plants in the next several decades.
At present, Texas relies predominantly on natural gas for power generation — about 72 percent of capacity — compared to a national average of 46 percent. Coal accounts for 19 percent of Texas’ capacity while nuclear plants produce only 6 percent of the state’s electricity. Because natural gas prices have tripled over the past several years, electricity costs in Texas are well above the national average and by far the highest in the Sunbelt.
High power costs not only put Texas’ many energy-intensive industries at risk but also burden the state’s large and growing number of low-income households.
If new coal plants are more-or-less off the table for the present, how will Texas produce the needed megawatts to keep the economy humming?
Additional natural gas plants are one solution, though increasing their share of the power mix will propel electricity costs even higher.
Given the current economic and political realities, building new nuclear plants in Texas is the sensible option. Fortunately, favorable public sentiment toward nuclear energy is rising, and even some environmental groups have changed their tune regarding nuclear power.
For example, Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore has come out in support of nuclear energy “as a safe, efficient and environmentally friendly alternative” to fossil fuels that doesn’t emit global-warming gases.
Nuclear is also gaining favor because production costs don’t fluctuate as they do with fossil fuel plants.
As for safety issues, the nuclear industry can point to almost 60 years of commercial operation without a fatal radiation-related accident.
And the industry has transported more than 10,000 used fuel assemblies without incident to temporary storage sites.
Once the U.S. Department of Energy begins accepting nuclear waste at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, the controversy over what to do with high-level waste will finally be over.
To remain competitive, Texas must offer an attractive economic environment and cost structure on all fronts—including utility costs. Thus lower-cost and dependable nuclear generating plants are a sensible choice for a portion of the state’s future power needs.
Adding these plants to the fuel mix will diversify Texas’ energy sources, ensure reliability and help hold down electric power costs in the decades ahead with attendant benefits to current and prospective households and businesses as well as the environment.
--Bernard Weinstein is a professor of applied economics and director of the Center for Economic Development and Research at the University of North Texas in Denton.
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TimesDaily
April 19, 2008
TVA eyes nuclear waste center
By Trevor Stokes
The Tennessee Valley Authority, along with the U.S. Department of Energy, could announce as early as Monday a plan to develop a nuclear waste recycling center that could demonstrate a technology many experts believe can address the growing problem of spent nuclear waste, according to a Congressional source.
In the agreement, which has yet to be finalized, TVA would explore recycling spent nuclear fuel, common in other countries, but nearly unheard of in the U.S.
Rep. Bud Cramer, D-Ala., did not return a call Friday, and Sen. Jeff Sessions' office said he would withhold comment until the official announcement was made.
"The Department of Energy is working a cooperative arrangement with TVA to share information, but details aren't finalized yet," said Angela Hill, a spokeswoman for the Department of Energy. "This kind of cooperation is consistent with what we've been pursing with the academic, industry and national laboratory in Research and Development to close the nuclear fuel cycle."
TVA spokesman Gil Francis said he didn't know any details about the project since an official announcement hadn't been made.
Essentially, radioactive uranium fuel in nuclear reactors becomes transformed into a mixture of unspent uranium and plutonium waste. A chemical process, called PUREX, can separate the uranium and plutonium from fission byproducts.
France, which derives more than 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear reactors, has been a leader in nuclear fuel recycling for decades. The U.S. does not have regulations in place that control recycling of spent fuel.
Critics of fuel recycling point out that plutonium is used in nuclear weapons, a concern that the radioactive waste could reach the wrong hands.
The cost of recycling the fuel may remain prohibitive. Researchers from Harvard University and the University of Maryland concluded in a 2005 study that using nuclear reactor fuel once in typical reactors would remain significantly cheaper than recycling the waste for "at least the next 50 years, even with substantial growth in nuclear power."
Officials at the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), a policy organization for the nuclear technologies industry, declined to comment until an official announcement was made.
The NEI has advocated for fuel recycling as a way "to reduce the volume, heat and toxicity of nuclear waste and recover useful materials," according to the organization's Web site.
Recycling spent nuclear fuel is not a new concept.
As of 2003, 75,000 metric tons of used nuclear waste has been reprocessed worldwide, according to NEI. Also, each metric ton of used fuel provides as much energy as 100,000 barrels of oil, according to the trade organization.
The nuclear industry has been hit with skyrocketing prices of uranium, one of the central metals used in nuclear reactions, and the question of how to dispose of the toxic waste generated from the nuclear fission process still haunts the industry.
Uranium traded at $7 per pound in 2000, but by 2007, averaged about $100 per pound, according to a Reuters report. Worldwide demand of the resource is only growing as the World Nuclear Organisation recently reported that 33 reactors were under construction with another 94 ordered.
In the U.S., around 30 nuclear reactors are coming on board, including the proposed Bellefonte plant, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute.
The Department of Energy spent billions to develop a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which faces strong opposition.
In the U.S., 55,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste is stored at 100 sites in 39 states.
The U.S. has had a mixed history with nuclear fuel recycling. As early as 1966, the Atomic Energy Commission permitted commercial reprocessing of defense weapon generated waste for a plant near Buffalo, N.Y., according to a 2006 policy paper from the Congressional Research Service.
A decade later, President Gerald Ford denounced recycling of plutonium, the main by product of the nuclear fission reaction "unless there is sound reason to conclude that the world community can effectively overcome the associated risks of proliferation," Ford said.
By 1981, President Ronald Reagan lifted the reprocessing ban, though the moratorium remained in effect throughout the industry.
As early as 2001, President George Bush stated to the National Energy Policy Development Group that the U.S. should consider technologies to "develop reprocessing and fuel treatment technologies that are cleaner, more efficient, less waste intensive, and more proliferation-resistant."
Bush mentioned fuel recycling during his visit in June in commemoration of the restart of one reactor at Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant in Athens.
"We ought to do something about reprocessing," Bush told the audience during his visit. "Congress needs to spend the money in order to do the research. And when we do, we will be able to answer a lot of the charges of our critics that say, what are you going to do with the fuel? Well, here's a good answer: Recycle it, reburn it and reduce the amount of the problem. And that's what the United States needs to be doing."
--Trevor Stokes can be reached at 740-5728 or trevor.stokes@timesdaily.com.
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Nevada Appeal
April 18, 2008
Yucca official: Project may not be big enough
Karen Woodmansee
A representative of the United States Department of Energy's Yucca Mountain project admitted that by the time the proposed nuclear waste repository is built, it may not be large enough.
Frank Moussa, supervisor of the DOE's intergovernmental operations department, said the department was working on a final supplemental environmental impact statement and is looking for a secondary repository.
In a presentation updating the progress of the DOE's transportation plans, Moussa said that 63,000 metric tons of high-grade nuclear waste was ready to go into the proposed repository, which was designed to hold 70,000 metric tons.
"We will meet that amount before it is built," he said. "We took a $108 million budget cut and that had a tremendous impact."
Moussa said the DOE will have to look to expand Yucca Mountain or find a second repository location.
He said the budget cuts have limited some of the activities by the project, which has laid off about 500 workers, but by law the DOE still had to continue the work.
Moussa also said that the DOE has not precluded the use of trucks to carry waste, and said interstates 80, 70 and 40 were under consideration, though rail is the "preferred" method to transport the waste.
"We want to start this dialogue ASAP," he said, adding he didn't want to mention truck transport to the commissioners just before it began.
He said a national transportation plan was being prepared and he hoped it would be released in June. He added the plan would not have dates because budget cuts may make dates difficult to meet.
"We are continuing dialogue on routing, but have no specific plan," he said, adding that the department needed to work on the perception of risk for transporting nuclear waste by rail.
Twelve locations in the country will send nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain, he said.
Moussa said the department hoped to get authorization to begin construction on the site in 2011, but expects that to be pushed back to March 2013.
He also said they were hoping to be able to receive waste by 2017, but that also isn't a firm date because of funding issues.
Claire Sinclair, representing the DOE's office of civilian radioactive waste management program, told the commissioners that the Mina Corridor was no longer being considered because of objections by the Paiutes in Mineral County, who have decided not to let the waste pass through their land.
"The preferred route is the Caliente Corridor," she said.
Sinclair also said that Nye County officials are in support of the program as long as the science is corroborated.
"Of all the Nevada counties, Nye is the best county to cooperate because it is the host county," she said.
• Contact reporter Karen Woodmansee at kwoodmansee@nevadaappeal.com or 881-7351.
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Reno Gazette-Journal
April 18, 2008
Commission to hear report on Yucca Mountain project transportation
The Lyon County Board of Commissioners was scheduled to hear a report on the planning process for the Yucca Mountain Project and transportation of nuclear waste at its meeting Thursday.
Gary Lanthrum, the Director of the Office of Logistics Management/National Transportation, will give a presentation on the planning process for the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear repository and the national transportation of nuclear waste, including used of Section 180(c) funds, TAD (transportation, age and disposal) canister use and other issues.
The Office of Logistic Management (OLM) is a division of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM).
The OLM is responsible for designing and developing a safe, secure, efficient and comprehensive transportation system, divided into national transportation and Nevada transportation infrastructure.
It has been preparing a comprehensive national spent fuel transportation plan.
The plan now is for most of the spent nuclear fuel shipments to be conducted in canistered form.
This report is designed to be a follow-up to a presentation and meeting that other OLM officials conducted with commission last year, in which planned rail transportation through parts of Lyon County was a major focus.
The agenda summary for this item says, "The purpose of this interaction is to give Lyon County a point of contact in the National Transportation organization and to personally address any questions that Lyon County may have."
The plan of the Department of Energy is to establish a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, consolidating the storage of spent nuclear fuel from 121 sites around the country into one location, with Yucca Mountain chosen due to its remote location.
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Free Lance-Star
April 18, 2008
Residents: Reactor requires close look
By RUSTY DENNEN
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission should revisit some of the environmental aspects of Dominion's plan for a third reactor at North Anna Power Station.
That was the suggestion of several speakers at a well-attended public information session by the agency Wednesday night at Louisa County High School.
Other speakers--some of them retired Dominion power employees--said another reactor at the plant on Lake Anna would benefit consumers and the community while helping the environment.
The session, part of the final phase of the NRC's review of the project, allowed the public to comment on what should be included in the agency's draft environmental impact statement required for Dominion's combined license application.
Among the 125 at the hearing was Ken Remmers of Bumpass, president of the Waterside Property Owners Association on Lake Anna, and water quality chair of the Lake Anna Citizens Association. He said the NRC should consider significant points not addressed in earlier regulatory reviews on the project.
For example, "A new, fresh look at the cooling process should be performed," he said.
Dominion is proposing a combination wet-dry cooling tower. Remmers said more efficient dry cooling should be favored because there would be far less evaporation.
Dominion originally had proposed using lake water, which cools the existing Units 1 and 2. But it switched to the cooling tower after complaints that more heated water discharge could damage the lake environment.
Dominion says the closed-loop cooling-tower system for Unit 3 will have no significant impact on lake temperatures.
Barbara Crawford, a Louisa resident, expressed concern about highly radioactive spent fuel being stored at the site. A new reactor would add to the fuel piling up in large steel storage casks at the plant.
The government has been planning to store the material at a national repository at Yucca Mountain in southern Nevada, but it's been blocked by a series of legal challenges.
"Yucca Mountain may well never open and therefore the [NRC] needs to study the health and safety ramifications of what will be permanent and long-term storage at North Anna for all three reactors," Crawford said.
Evacuation plans should be reviewed, she said.
"The [plan] is silent concerning the evacuation of the public in the event of an accident or terror attack," Crawford said.
Charles Tribble, a Dominion retiree, attorney and certified public accountant, said nuclear power is important to the economy and well-being of Virginia and the nation.
When he joined Dominion in 1984 the peak load, or greatest demand for electricity was about 10,000 megawatts. That had doubled to about 20,000 megawatts last year.
The projected additional demand for power in Virginia in the next 10 years is 4,000 megawatts, or the equivalent electricity to power 1 million new homes.
"We can't get there with conservation. We need additional generation," he said.
For many of those in attendance, the discussions had a familiar ring.
An environmental impact statement and safety evaluations were prepared in the first stage of the permit process, which ended last fall with the NRC's approval of an early site permit.
A similar process governs the combined license application, though NRC officials said much of the documentation in the initial review will be used this time around.
--Rusty Dennen: 540/374-5431
Email: rdennen@freelancestar.com
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Baltimore Sun
April 18, 2008
Don't dismiss nuclear risks
Maryland must resist Constellation Energy's push to build a new plant at Calvert Cliffs
By Gwen DuBois
With the recent settlement between the state of Maryland and Constellation Energy Group, the power company is once again championing Calvert Cliffs as the site of a new nuclear power plant. This is not a cause for celebration.
On July 13, Constellation submitted the first new application to build a nuclear power plant in the U.S. since Three Mile Island. But the company threatened to go elsewhere if Maryland lawmakers re-established state regulatory control on new power plants.
Fear of a growing energy shortage is leading to calls for more nuclear power plants. What many people are forgetting is that nuclear power is an expensive and risky investment, and there would be little interest in such projects without federal subsidies and incentives, including liability insurance, risk insurance for delays, production tax credits and loan guarantees totaling billions of dollars. In Florida, two proposed new reactors may cost $24 billion, with ratepayers expected to pay during construction. With wind power already more economical than nuclear power, and solar power soon to be, one critic predicts nuclear power plants will be "economically obsolete before they are built."
Nuclear power cannot be brought online on the scale and time frame needed to replace coal. In 2007, 12 of 32 nuclear reactors under construction worldwide had been so for more than 20 years. Moody's estimated that no more than two new nuclear power plants will come online by 2015. In addition to delays in finding suitable sites, dealing with community objections and getting permits, there is now a three-year backup in obtaining the core reactor vessel, which is forged by a single company in Japan.
There is no solution to the problem of nuclear waste, currently totaling 50,000 metric tons. Despite 20 years of study and a $9 billion expense, the repository site at Yucca Mountain is not close to having a permit. Were it to open, it would be full by 2012.
Pro-nuclear advocates tend to ignore the fact that nuclear power is the only energy source that carries the risk of radioactive contamination. This unique safety concern is exacerbated by a degraded safety culture shared by plant owners and by a Nuclear Regulatory Commission that took too long to correct a dangerous erosion problem, which allowed container vessels to leak. The NRC has failed to resolve design flaws in sump pumps at Calvert Cliffs and other plants at risk of clogging in an accident. Moreover, the NRC's inspector general has criticized the agency for failing to document criteria for plant recertification.
A British report last year outlined the growing risk of terrorist action against nuclear power plants. Whether by accident or terrorist event, a meltdown would be catastrophic. The Department of Energy in 1982 estimated that for each reactor at Calvert Cliffs, a meltdown would likely result in 5,600 fatalities, 15,000 peak injuries and 23,000 cancer deaths. It stands to reason that those figures would be greater now, given the growth in population and development of Southern Maryland.
Of course, nuclear power also increases the risk of arms proliferation. The fuels used by the reactors are the fissile materials needed to make nuclear bombs. Uranium enrichment increases the concentration of U-235 from 0.7 percent, as it exists in nature, to 3 percent (low enriched uranium, or LEU), which is used for fuel. Further enrichment to 90 percent (highly enriched uranium, or HEU) is necessary to make bombs like the one detonated over Hiroshima.
Iran was charged with violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty for enriching uranium in secret. (The treaty permits nonnuclear nations to enrich uranium for civilian nuclear energy programs if done transparently.) The same technology is used for production of LEU and HEU, which underscores the contradiction of trying to stop nuclear weapons proliferation at the same time as promoting nuclear energy.
Plutonium is obtained by reprocessing spent nuclear fuel. It is easier to steal because it emits no self-protecting gamma rays, unlike unseparated spent fuel, which is lethal at one meter even 50 years after production. The theft of just a few kilograms is all that is required to produce a bomb like the one detonated over Nagasaki. Currently, there is enough reprocessed plutonium from civilian nuclear power plants worldwide to make 60,000 nuclear bombs. The proliferation risk is staggering, and as nuclear power expands, so does access to weapons-usable material such as enriched uranium and reprocessed plutonium.
Global warming is a worldwide crisis. Coal-fired power plants are a major producer of CO{-2}, and we must find a way to replace them - but not with dangerous nuclear power. As in medicine, when a treatment is associated with rare but serious complications, we choose safer alternatives. Increased energy efficiency, conservation, solar and wind power are the safer alternatives.
--Dr. Gwen DuBois, an internist at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, is a member of Chesapeake Physicians for Social Responsibility. Her e-mail is gdubois@pol.net.
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State of Nevada
Agency for Nuclear Projects
www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/
nwpo@nuc.state.nv.us
775-687-3744
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