Yucca Mountain News Clips - Friday, May 9, 2008

Yucca Mountain News Clips
Friday, May 9, 2008
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
May 08, 2008

Yucca Mountain attorney dies at 53

Egan helped state fight proposed repository

By Steve Tetrault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Joe Egan, the lead attorney for Nevada in its fight against the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, died Wednesday morning at his home in Naples, Fla., a law partner said.

Egan, 53, battled stomach cancer for more than two years. As his condition worsened in recent weeks, the firm he founded in 1994 reorganized to continue its Nevada representation.

"I was saddened to learn the news of Joe's death," Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said in a statement. "He worked hard to help protect Nevada by stopping the construction of the dump at Yucca Mountain.

"His work on behalf of our state will not be forgotten," Reid said. "I extend my sympathy to his family."

Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, said Egan "was a fabulous lawyer and a talented guy, and he will be missed."

Allen Benson, a spokesman for the Department of Energy, said, "We are saddened by this news and extend our deepest sympathy to his family."

Egan's firm, then called Egan and Associates, was hired by the state in 2001. Between then and 2005, it initiated nine lawsuits against the federal government and sought to halt plans to bury high-level nuclear waste at the Yucca Mountain site, 100 miles northwest of Nevada.

A victory in a 2004 lawsuit invalidated a radiation safety standard for the repository. A new standard still has not been finalized, contributing to delays in the Yucca program.

More recently, the firm, now known as Egan, Fitzpatrick & Malsch, has been engaged in administrative debates before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission while preparing for repository license hearings at the agency.

During his illness, Egan over time reduced his public role as the state's advocate in favor of his two legal partners, Martin Malsch and Charles Fitzpatrick. Egan maintained a presence behind the scenes.

Fitzpatrick, who disclosed Egan's death, said a memorial service was being planned for May 22 in Naples. Other details were unavailable.

He leaves his wife, Patty, and two children.

Besides being an attorney, Egan was a former station-certified nuclear reactor engineer with degrees in physics, nuclear engineering and technology and policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned a law degree at Columbia University.

Before founding his firm, Egan was a partner at Shaw Pittman in Washington, D.C., and a senior associate at LeBoeuf Lamb Greene & MacRae in New York City. Both firms specialized in nuclear and public utility law and litigation.

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Claremont Port Side
May 08, 2008

Nuclear Power: Not Yet

By Mike Sciortino

In the last issue of the Port Side, Matthew Zitterman wrote a piece supporting the expansion of nuclear power in the United States. Given the importance of energy production in the United States and the mounting uncertainties surrounding alternatives to fossil fuels, the prospect of increased nuclear power capacity needs to be thoroughly examined. In his article, which you can glance at online, Zitterman cites the numerous benefits to nuclear power, maintaining that technological advances in nuclear reactors virtually eliminates all risks of melt-downs and claims that since the technology is ready, the United States should proceed with nuclear power to lessen our dependence on fossil fuels and mitigate global climate change, because nuclear fission does not emit carbon dioxide.

Nuclear power does represent a viable option for U.S. energy production, but the current political situation simply will not allow it. Zitterman briefly mentions the problem of nuclear waste and rightly believes it could be solved by “adaptive management” solutions in which the waste is temporarily stored until new technologies come along that convince the scientific community to be completely safe in the long, long-term. Now, we’ve arrived at nuclear power’s Achilles’ heel.

Currently, nuclear waste is kept on-site at the 103 reactors in the United States. The problem of what to do with nuclear waste in the long-term remains unsolved and has ultimately inhibited the industry from making any progress over the past three decades. The problem stems from the origins of nuclear power and the blind promotion from the Atomic Energy Commission (now subsumed by the Department of Energy) and nuclear industry interests. The severe public backlash to nuclear energy during the 1970s was a direct result of the hasty, secretive development of nuclear power by these actors, who did not address the thorny issue of nuclear waste until it was too late.

After exogenous factors such as the partial melt-down at Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl, public opinion solidified in opposition to nuclear power. The end of the oil-shocks in the seventies made nuclear power even less desirable as a cheap source of power. During the 1980s, the federal government began to devise plans to permanently store nuclear waste, which culminated in 1982 with the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The NWPA was amended in 1987, selecting Nevada’s Yucca Mountain as the designated site for a permanent geologic repository. Two decades and seven billion dollars later, the repository at Yucca Mountain remains unfilled.

The NWPA set up geologic disposal as the sole approach to nuclear waste in the United States because it represented a technologically feasible, relatively cheap, and fast solution. Representatives close to nuclear industry interests hastily pushed through the legislation. In the end, the states received no decision-making authority. Already hesitant with the site, recent studies have found that water seeps into Yucca Mountain every 1000 years or so, which may deteriorate the casings filled with waste, causing radionuclides (released by waste) to enter the biosphere. The studies have intensified the opposition and bring the entire option of geologic disposal into question. Now facing a stalemate in the courts, the situation between the state of Nevada and the DOE is deadlocked.

If filled, Yucca Mountain will only be able to store nuclear waste for another six years. Then, another solution will need to be found, and according to the NWPA, it will most likely be another geologic repository. Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada) strongly promotes the adoption of adaptive management strategies in which casings of waste can be stored and monitored while the science of nuclear waste management advances. If this option were to take hold, however, it would put the DOE and nuclear industry in an uncomfortable position. Nuclear power may seem cheap now, but the prospect of having to pay for continuous storage and monitoring may heavily affect the balance sheets.

Nuclear waste cannot stay on-site forever. It poses too great a health and security threat in the long-term. A new policy must be devised that defines a clear link between the expansion of nuclear energy and waste management. Public participation will be essential to change the negative perceptions regarding nuclear waste, management especially from communities where there are planned storage facilities. Monitored, retrievable nuclear waste solutions seem like a proper solution, but the political obstacles to achieving such a major departure from current policy will be difficult to overcome. And until we do, let’s keep nuclear power in the rear-view.

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Jewish Daily Forward
May 08, 2008

Let Them Change Light Bulbs

Right Angles

By Noam Neusner

We are told that the earth is overheating and that the burning of fossil fuels and the release of carbons is to blame. We are told that every dollar we spend to import oil props up terrorism-sponsoring and unsavory regimes. We are told that the era of cheap oil is over. We are told that growing biofuels is causing food riots and burning coal is causing hurricanes.

A grim and unappealing picture, but here’s our real problem: When it comes to energy policy and behavior, we are all hypocrites.

Whether we are motivated by fears of global warming, or Arab oil money funding terrorist attacks on Israel, or $75 per tank fill-up prices, our actions in response are minuscule and laughable.

A great percentage of the American public, roughly 70%, believes global warming is real, that it causes unusual weather patterns, and that its cause is the burning and release of carbons into the atmosphere. At least a third is very concerned about it.

That kind of consensus should produce meaningful action, no?

Instead, what we typically get is the soft pabulum of “every little bit helps” — the conservationist culture best represented by the 2007 congressional law that will phase out incandescent light bulbs starting in 2012. The mullahs and princes who rule OPEC charge $120 a barrel, so we change the light bulbs.

If that’s all we ever do in response to the very real threats to our economy, security and environment, then we might as well acknowledge our fecklessness.

Unless we are willing to remove ourselves to pre-industrial societies, far from the machinery, automation, speed, communications and other luxuries we take for granted, we might as well stop complaining about either global warming or high energy prices. These two massive problems won’t be solved by installing more efficient lightbulbs or driving Prius cars.

Nor are the solutions just waiting for us; there is no low hanging fruit. Any meaningful solution will require sacrifices — the question is whose.

Just take nuclear power. Proponents of nuclear power tell us that splitting atoms is a safe and controlled source of cheap energy. But nuclear energy isn’t cheap, and some say it’s not safe. A nuclear plant hasn’t been built in the United States since 1986, and even with massive federal loan guarantees, there is scant interest in fresh projects. Why not? Nuclear waste.

Spent fuel rods require permanent storage in cool, dry and remote places deep in the earth. We happen to have such a place in Nevada; countless studies have been done of Yucca Mountain, and it’s ready to accept shipments.

But Nevada’s citizens — and especially its senior senator, Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid — don’t want the state to become the eternal gardens of the nuke industry. So 50 states have spread nuke waste in far less secure and safe locations — and nuclear power is stalled, and along with it, a good source of clean electricity and a substitute for coal.

That is factionalism run amok, and it is hardly unique. Across a range of energy issues, the power of the minority outrules the needs of the majority.

Corn farmers in Iowa, flush with federal rebates, still demand a hefty tariff on cheap and available Brazilian sugar cane ethanol. Shrimpers and surfers in the Gulf Coast prevent us from getting to oil underneath the outer continental shelf well beyond the coast of Florida.

Suburban environmentalists fight efforts to build liquid natural gas intake ports on the Eastern Seaboard, ports that would allow us to import cheap energy from Trinidad. Community and zoning boards prevent home-owners from putting solar panels on the roofs of their houses. Automakers and their unions fight efforts to require technology that would allow all cars and trucks, at a cost of just $100 per vehicle, to run on a variety of gas-and-biofuel mixes, a sure way to break the power of the OPEC cartel.

Any and all of these steps would go a long way to helping reduce energy costs, improve the prospects for alternative energy technologies and spur new approaches to our energy economy. But they are being held hostage by factions incapable of compromise or simply uninterested in it.

Normally, the market has a way of assigning a cost to personal taste. Don’t like flying with the hoi-polloi and fighting through security? Fine, take a private jet and pay for the privilege. Don’t want to shop at a supermarket where grubby hands molest your vegetables before you buy them? Fine, shop at the upscale market where they wrap the veggies in plastic.

The problem is that energy doesn’t work that way. If environmentalists are willing to spend a few cents more per kilowatt to keep new coal-fired plants from being built, we all have to indulge that luxury. If Iowa farmers don’t want to compete with Brazilian sugar cane, we all have to pay a few extra cents per gallon at the pump.

Soon enough, those pennies add up — and what’s worse, the spirit of factionalism reigns supreme. Every special energy interest needs to be indulged; every tender nerve must be avoided. And so we get light bulb laws, and not much more.

Here is an idea: Let’s do away with the idea of a national energy policy. Let’s do away with the idea of energy regulation altogether. Let everyone decide their own energy policy, and devise their own energy solutions, right down to the decision of whether to put a drilling rig in their front lawn, or whether to band together with the neighbors and use that foreclosed house down the street as a mini-refinery.

Laughable? Yes. But it’s merely taking our current energy policy and extending it to its next logical point: anarchy.

Noam Neusner served as President Bush’s principal economic and domestic policy speechwriter from 2002 to 2004.

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Las Vegas SUN
May 07, 2008

Yucca Mountain attorney dies of stomach cancer

By Mary Manning

Joe Egan, the lead attorney in Nevada’s battle against the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, died today after a long battle with stomach cancer.

The state hired Egan’s firm, Egan, Fitzpatrick & Malsch, in 2001 to represent Nevada before the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission during licensing for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

Egan left his position on Thursday because of his illness. Martin G. Malsch, a 30-year veteran of nuclear law and former acting general counsel of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, took over as lead attorney on the Yucca case.

“On behalf of the state of Nevada, we are deeply saddened by the passing of Joe Egan,” said Bob Loux, executive director of the state Agency for Nuclear Projects. “Our heartfelt condolences go out to Joe’s family, friends and his colleagues at Egan, Fitzpatrick & Malsch. Joe was a gifted and talented man who has provided invaluable service and counsel to Nevada in our ongoing battle to halt the Yucca Mountain Project. We will miss him.”

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
May 07, 2008

Lawyer reduces role in Yucca Mountain fight

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Nevada's lead lawyer in the fight against the Yucca Mountain repository is reducing his role as he battles stomach cancer, his firm announced.

Attorney Joe Egan gradually has taken a less public role in the two years since he was diagnosed with the disease.

Egan, Fitzpatrick & Malsch PLLC announced this week it has designated new titles for the partners in the Nevada nuclear waste case with Egan, 53, who now is serving only as an adviser.

The state of Nevada pays the firm roughly $4 million a year to pay for technical experts and carry out legal strategy with the attorney general against the Department of Energy program to develop a nuclear waste storage site 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Martin Malsch, a former acting general counsel of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, last week became lead licensing counsel for hearings that the NRC will conduct on the repository construction application, according to the firm.

Charles Fitzpatrick, the firm's managing director, became lead litigation counsel.

The firm, which has offices in Washington and in San Antonio, announced it has been adding staff in preparation for the upcoming NRC licensing process. A new senior attorney will be announced soon, Fitzpatrick said.

The state of Nevada, which provides more than half of the firm's business since its hiring in 2001, has been consulted on the changes, said Bob Loux, executive director of the state Agency for Nuclear Projects. "Everything is full speed ahead," Loux said.

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Press and Journal
May 07, 2008

Environment impacted, but how? NRC documents public input for TMI's re-licensing application

by Marlene Lang
Press And Journal Editor

The NRC was both guest and host at the Elks Theatre on May 1, inviting citizens to go on the record about the potential environmental impact of re-licensing Three Mile Island’s Unit 1 nuclear power station for another 20 years.

TMI owner AmerGen Energy Co., LLC submitted an application –1000-plus pages long – to the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission in January. The plant’s operating license will expire on April 19, 2014.

The open meeting in Middletown was part of the NRC’s “scoping” process. Input from interested parties was recorded and will be transcribed to the permanent record as the NRC prepares a required Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) to accompany AmerGen’s license renewal application.

Comments varied, as many spoke in favor of the re-licensing, often focusing on the plant’s economic pluses more than its impact on the environment. Dauphin County commissioner Nick DiFrancesco noted TMI’s benefit to the local economy and reminded those present that a cost-benefit analysis had to be part of the process.

However, DiFrancesco also said that “people here need to know that (the re-licensing) is not just a ‘rubber stamp’ by the NRC.” He added, “We had an incident here,” referring to the accident and radioactive leak in 1979, and said, “that should never, ever be forgotten.”

DiFrancesco added that he is “personally a big fan of nuclear power.”

Others echoed his sentiment. Londonderry Township supervisor Daryl LeHew took the opportunity to say he and his family have been living in TMI’s home municipality for decades. “We lived near the plant while it was being built,” he said. “We’re proud to have it in Londonderry Township.”

LeHew went on the record saying that TMI keeps the township notified of incidents and situations. He pointed to the April 29 incident of a security guard’s inattentiveness, saying the township had been notified of the Tuesday incident the very next day.

LeHew also said that TMI’s investments in the community had “improved life here.” He noted that the Londonderry Township Fire Company received $100,000 from TMI’s benefit golf tournament last year.

He did address the matter of environmental impact, saying he has never seen a negative impact in all the years he has been boating on the river, and has traveled on the island. “Nitrates and phosphates have more impact on the environment here than TMI does,” LeHew said.

Others were clearly more concerned about the plant’s impact on the environment. Andrew Dehoff of the Susquehanna River Basin Commission pointed out that there are more industries on the river now, collectively using more water than when TMI was originally licensed in the 1970s. He asked the NRC to consider that added water use, and to examine usage in light of drought and flood trends.

Michael Helfrich, Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper, and affiliate of the Waterkeepers Alliance, told the NRC he was concerned with the decline in the number of some fish, and with the health of the Susquehanna’s fish, in general. “It is not necessarily related to TMI” he said. He told the NRC that tritium has been reported in local groundwater, and he would like to know the source of it.

Helfrich said he suspects thermal shock zones exist in the river, killing fish due to temperature extremes in winter, as industry outflows are much warmer than the river water. “I’ve found the river at 102 degrees one mile below Peach Bottom,” he said, referring to another Exelon plant downstream, recently re-licensed.

Eric Epstein of TMI-Alert offered no official comments, but said that “recognizing a problem and addressing a problem are not the same.”

Epstein called on the federal government to form a nuclear security force for all power plants. “We need to get over this idea that it’s a private industry,” he said, referring to substantial government subsidies the industry receives.

“The plant’s going to get re-licensed,” Epstein said. “We must make sure that are conditions attached.”

He closed his remarks with a plea to the NRC: “Don’t let anything go unchecked.”

Not all were as gracious as Epstein. Scott Portzline, a security consultant to TMI-Alert, called it “unconscionable” to continue generating more spent fuel that will need to be stored and monitored by future generations. The radioactive waste left behind will be an unbearable burden, he predicted. “Future generations will curse this generation for leaving them with the waste and the bills,” he said.

“The cost of maintaining a dump exceeds the benefits of the electricity generated,” Portzline said.

Presently, there is no permanent repository for the nation’s radioactive waste to be stored long-term, as required by federal legislation passed in 1982.

In 2002, the Bush Administration identified Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the site for a permanent repository, but an application for license to begin building has yet to be submitted to the NRC by the Department of Energy. There has been resistance from the state of Nevada and from Native Americans in the region.

TMI spokesman Ralph DeSantis said there is enough space on Three Mile Island to continue to store the spent fuel from Unit 1 until 2022. Presently, the plant’s radioactive waste is stored in pools inside concrete and lead casks on the island, according to DeSantis. He said the opposition to transporting spent fuel cross-country to Nevada has been “political,” pointing out that other countries have central repositories. According to the DOE, spent fuel would be moved by rail and truck to Yucca Mountain, if the repository is built at the site 90 miles outside Las Vegas.

Comments may be submitted in writing or electronically until May 30. Written comments should be sent to: Chief, Rules and Directives Branch, Division of Administrative Services, Office of Administration, Mailstop T-6D 59, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, D.C. 20555-0001.

Hand-delivered comments my be brought to the NRC at 11545 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Md., between 7:45 and 4:15 on federal workdays. Comments may also be sent by e-mail to ThreeMileIslandEIS@nrc.gov.

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Reuters
May 06, 2008

Nuclear energy heats up US presidential race

By Jeff Mason

INDIANAPOLIS, May 6 (Reuters) - John McCain embraces it. Barack Obama wants to address its flaws. Hillary Clinton is cautious but not opposed.

Nuclear power -- controversial in the United States and throughout much of the world -- is on the agenda of all three U.S. presidential candidates as they seek to diversify the country's energy mix and reduce dependence on foreign oil.

Interviews with top policy advisers to the three White House hopefuls reveal a varied approach to the technology that some observers see as a necessary answer to fighting climate change and others view as expensive and dangerous.

McCain, a Republican senator from Arizona who has wrapped up his party's nomination, is by far the most enthusiastic about the carbon-free fuel source, regularly calling for more nuclear power plants at campaign stops throughout the nation.

"I believe we are not going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and become energy independent ... unless we use nuclear power and use it in great abundance," he said in North Carolina on Monday.

McCain adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin said nuclear power faced an "uneven playing field" from years of political opposition.

"Sen. McCain would eliminate the political obstacles that hinder nuclear power, allow it to compete more effectively, and likely increase its share of the U.S. energy portfolio," he said.

Nuclear energy accounts for about 20 percent of U.S. electricity supply, a figure that could rise if regulations on carbon dioxide emissions are imposed, making greenhouse gas emission-free nuclear plants more attractive.

There are 104 operating nuclear reactors nationwide.

Obama, an Illinois senator and the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, shares McCain's belief that nuclear energy is part of the solution to climate change.

But he opposes new federal subsidies and would work to address concerns about safety and waste storage, senior adviser Jason Grumet said.

"Because of the fact that climate change is a species-challenging dilemma, we don't have the luxury to do anything but try to solve those real problems," associated with nuclear technology, he said.

Clinton, a New York senator, prefers using renewable fuels to fight climate change because of nuclear energy's risks.

"Hillary has real concerns about nuclear power because of the issues around safety, waste disposal and proliferation," policy director Neera Tandem said.

"She opposes new subsidies for nuclear power, but would continue research focused on lowering costs and improving safety."

SOME NUANCE

The key roadblock to new U.S. nuclear plants has been finding a home for nuclear waste. Congress designated Yucca Mountain, 90 miles (145 km) from Las Vegas, to be the nation's waste repository, but the site is years behind schedule and may never open because of powerful opponents like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not issued a new nuclear plant license since the mid 1970s and utility companies have balked for years at constructing new sites because of concerns about plant safety and cost overruns.

Despite signs that trend may be changing, environmental group Greenpeace, which opposes nuclear energy because of the serious problem with waste disposal, does not see an industry renaissance on the horizon, said Jim Riccio, the group's nuclear policy analyst in Washington.

He described the Democrats' positions as nuanced. Clinton's energy platform was "better than the others" because of its focus on nonnuclear sources, though she appeared to change her stances in different states, he said.

Both Democrats had received money from nuclear energy companies: Exelon -- which has the largest nuclear reactor in the United States -- to Obama and Entergy to Clinton, he said.

The industry, meanwhile, welcomed McCain's support and described the Democrats' position as open-minded.

"We're obviously delighted to see Sen. McCain's strong support but that is something that thankfully we've been able to enjoy throughout the Bush administration," said Steve Kerekes of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's main U.S. lobby group. "We would characterize the others as, you know, open-minded on the issue."

The candidates' advisers were less generous in their description of their opponents' positions. McCain criticized both Democrats for their opposition to Yucca Mountain.

"The political opposition to the Yucca Mountain storage facility is harmful to the U.S. interest and the facility should be completed, opened and utilized," McCain adviser Holtz-Eakin said.

Grumet said Obama shared Clinton's concerns about waste and safety but was more committed to working out solutions.

"Sen. Clinton brings attention to what we agree are big problems and says we should focus the attention elsewhere. Sen. Obama sees big challenges and says that because of climate change, we should try like heck to solve them." (Additional reporting by Chris Baltimore and Tim Gaynor; Editing by Deborah Charles and Philip Barbara)

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Reuters
May 06, 2008

FACTBOX-US presidential candidates on nuclear energy

May 6 (Reuters) - Nuclear energy is part of each of the 2008 presidential candidates' energy platforms.

Republican John McCain supports it wholeheartedly, while Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton express reservations.

Below are aspects of each candidate's position on nuclear power as outlined in their energy polices.

MCCAIN, an Arizona senator

- believes the United States can use nuclear power more extensively to reduce its reliance on petroleum imported from unstable regions and unfriendly sources.

- believes that fuel sources that are alternatives to oil should be selected by competitive markets but thinks nuclear power has faced an uneven playing field because of political opposition.

- supports the Yucca Mountain storage facility and believes opposition to it is harmful to U.S. interests.

- is open to advances in technology that permit greater safe reprocessing of spent fuel. He believes improvements in reactor design have reduced concerns over safe operation, but that there must be vigilance in all aspects of operation, transportation of waste, and storage of waste.

OBAMA, an Illinois senator

- believes it is unlikely the United States can achieve its goals to fight climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions without nuclear power.

- wants four issues to be addressed in order for the nuclear energy industry to expand: the rights of the public to information, security of nuclear fuel and waste, waste storage, and proliferation.

- Obama introduced legislation in the U.S. Senate to establish guidelines for tracking, controlling and accounting for spent fuel at nuclear power plants.

- says he will make safeguarding nuclear material both abroad and in the United States a top anti-terrorism priority.

- aims to lead federal efforts to look for a long-term disposal solution. He opposes using Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the nation's main disposal site.

CLINTON, a New York senator

- believes that energy efficiency and renewable sources such as wind and solar energy are better options for addressing global warming and meeting U.S. power needs because of unresolved concerns about the cost of producing nuclear power, the safety of operating plants, waste disposal and nuclear proliferation.

- opposes new subsidies for nuclear power.

- aims to strengthen the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and improve safety and security at nuclear power plants.

- opposes Yucca Mountain and would halt work there; would convene a panel of scientific experts to explore alternatives for disposing of nuclear waste; and continue research, with a focus on lower costs and improving safety. (Reporting by Jeff Mason; Editing by Peter Cooney)

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Grist Magazine
May 06, 2008

Nukes for all

McCain calls for 700+ new nuclear plants costing $4 trillion

Posted by Joseph Romm

"A nuke in every garage" is the GOP nominee's energy and climate plan.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) made a stunning statement on the radio show of climate change denier Glenn Beck this week:

... the French are able to generate 80 percent of their electricity with nuclear power. There's no reason why America shouldn't.

The Wonk Room, which has the audio, writes of the interview, "McCain Seemingly Agrees With Glenn Beck That Solutions To Climate Change Can Be Delayed." That is lame all by itself. But the statement quoted above is even more radical. McCain is repeating his little-noticed uber-Francophile statement from his big April 2007 speech on energy policy, "If France can produce 80 percent of its electricity with nuclear power, why can't we?"

Why can't we? Wrong question, Senator. The right question is, Why would we? Let's do the math.

The U.S. has some one hundred nuclear reactors providing about nearly 100 gigawatts of capacity (see here) and nearly 800,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity, roughly 20 percent of total U.S. power. For the record, France has only 59 reactors, capacity of about 63 gw, generating 550,000 gwh (some of which is exported), covering nearly 80 percent of their usage (see here). (Note to Sen. McCain: France is a much smaller country than ours.)

What would it take for us to be 80 percent nuclear?

We would have to quadruple the number of reactors to 400, which would take decades even if we could somehow return to -- and sustain -- the fastest decadal rate of U.S. nuclear plant construction. But that wouldn't mean just building 300 new nuclear plants, for several reasons.

First, by 2050, almost all of the existing plants would need to be replaced, so that is another hundred to build if we want to hit the 80 percent goal.

And then, since McCain is not a big booster of energy efficiency (his McCain-Lieberman climate bill has no substantive energy efficiency provisions in it at all), we have to deal with some 1.1 percent annual electricity growth, which means we'll need more than 600 nukes in 2050.

Third, McCain wants to switch much of our oil consumption to electricity (a strategy I endorse). As he said in last year's energy policy speech:

I'll work to promote real partnerships between utilities and automakers to accelerate the deployment of plug-in hybrids ... Fifty percent of cars on the road are driven 25 miles a day or less. Affordable battery-powered vehicles that can meet average commuter needs could help us cut oil imports in half.

We import more than 12 million barrels of oil a day. To cut that in half to 6, when EIA projects we will import over 16 in 2030 (see here [PDF]), means replacing far more than 100 billion gallons of gasoline a year with electricity. If 80 percent of that electricity comes from nuclear power, then that is -- very conservatively -- another 100 nukes.

Bottom line

To satisfy McCain's odd desire to be like the French and get 80 percent of our electricity from nuclear power in the coming decades would require building more than 700 (gw-sized) nuclear power plants by mid-century -- more than one a month.

Although we have been unable as a country to agree on even one storage site for our existing nukes' radioactive waste (Yucca Mountain), the McCain plan would require seven such sites -- for a longer discussion of just what 700 gw would entail, see the Keystone Center's 2007 nuclear study discussed at "Nuclear Power No Climate Cure-All."

And remember that the Bush administration just signed a deal permitting all reactor fuel to come from Russia post-2020 (see here). McCain trusts the Russians so much, he wants to exclude them from the G-8 meetings. So, where would we get all our uranium from?

Finally, in October, Moody's Investors Service said "new reactors would cost up to $6,000 per kilowatt of capacity to build" -- I'll be posting a longer review of nuclear costs soon, and suffice it to say, Moody's estimate is not the high end these days. Since $6,000 per kw is $6 billion per gw, 700 gw would require a cost of some $4 trillion, assuming there was no significant cost escalation from production delays and from the serious bottlenecks in the nuclear supply chain -- and not even counting the cost of the uranium.

Dontcha think the country could find a better use for that kind of money in the effort to avoid catastrophic global warming and the harsh consequences of peak oil -- something better than committing this country to an ultimately unsustainable high-cost energy source for the entire 21st Century?

Apparently the GOP nominee thinks the answer is "no." Caveat Emptor!

For my fellow energy realists, I would add that it would take an astonishing effort just to have nuclear power in 2050 provide the same 20 percent of U.S. power it does today -- an outcome I am not inherently opposed to, but I certainly wouldn't devote yet more tens of billions of federal subsidies to, as McCain would, especially given the myriad flaws nuclear power has.

That's why I have little doubt that if we can move beyond the uninformed platitudes of people like McCain and ever really get serious about global warming and peak oil, then the realistic, affordable solution is at hand -- namely energy efficiency to avoid significant load growth, concentrated solar power to replace most coal, and wind power for plug-in charging. And yes, we'll still have some hydro and nukes and combined cycle natural gas turbines and/or cogen in 2050, and possibly even some coal with carbon capture and storage, assuming that industry ever gets serious about that possible solution.

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MWC News
May 06, 2008

Nuclear power is undemocratic

Political Views

By Ace Hoffman

The Unconstitutionality of Nuclear Power Regulation in America

A small group of citizens in California are trying to reclaim their rights -- both those rights taken unconstitutionally by the federal government, and those rights relinquished by their own state agencies to the feds.

Californians are encouraged by recent victories: A Ninth Circuit requirement to take a closer look at terrorism dangers at nuclear power plants, along with several failed attempts by pro-nuclear zealots in the state legislature to overturn a prohibition on new nuclear reactors in California before a nuclear waste solution has been found. Now 60+ years late, the solution will not be arriving any time soon. (Yucca Mountain is a scientific and engineering nightmare, as the author has discussed in numerous prior essays.)

But the old reactors have to be shut down, and every time citizens of California try to bring up the dangers of embrittlement, worker negligence, the accumulation of waste, or even the viability of clean alternatives, they are told that everything related to "safety" is under the jurisdiction of the federal government, and that the state agencies are unable to rule on such matters.

The citizens are getting tired of hearing this malarkey, so I've prepared a little treatise on the history of our loss of rights. It began near the dawn of the nuclear era.

The charter of the Atomic Energy Commission, drafted in 1946, gave the commission sweeping powers, included numerous provisions for "restricted data" which did not have to be given out to the public. The AEC charter included the supervision of nuclear weapons research and development. Originally as many as 80% of the AEC's "research reports" were classified as "restricted data," with public release of such information punishable by death. (1) (One famous AEC study, which predicted that a nuclear power accident could kill 45,000 people and contaminate an area the size of Pennsylvania, was kept secret for seven years. (2)

The Soviet explosion of a hydrogen bomb in 1953 led to America's then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower announcing the "Atoms for Peace" program in December of that year, with its "Swords into Plowshares" stupidity of using nuclear bombs to carve canals, help mine shale oil, remove unwanted mountains, and so on (many sites where these things were attempted remain dangerously radioactive to this day).

In 1954, the U.S. was able to explode its own H-Bomb (with technology now considered quiant), and the Cold War was back on track and more fervent than ever. The Atoms for Peace program's plan to force nuclear power plants down citizens' throats, however, was having trouble getting started.

By that year, one of the original AEC act's draftsmen, James R. Newman, had termed it "an act of socialism in a sea of private enterprise" because it gave the AEC a monopoly on the production and ownership of "fissionable materials." (The 1954 revision would refer instead to "special nuclear material," in order to include "fusibles" as well.) (3)

The 1954 revision, while hotly debated, did little to change the "socialism" (centralized regulation and authority) of the AEC's broad-reaching authority. Public safety was of little concern, the main issues were things like patent rights for inventors, whether the AEC could compete with private industries in building nuclear power generators, what a "fair price" would be for the electricity, and so on (4). Everyone assumed nuclear power was a "go," the only question was how to proceed.

The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 gave the AEC the authority to issue licenses to private companies to build and operate nuclear power plants, while also giving the AEC the twin responsibilities of promoting and regulating those commercial nuclear power companies. The AEC was extremely quick to hand out licenses. (5)

It was during this time that the then-chairman of the AEC, Admiral Lewis Strauss claimed: "It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter." (6)

Others echoed this ridiculous claim. For example, on August 8th, 1955, H. J. Bhabha opened the Geneva Conference (an important international conference on the future of nuclear energy) by proclaiming, this time about fusion power specifically: "I have to predict that a method will be found for liberating fusion energy in a controlled manner within the next two decades. When that happens, the energy problems of the world will truly have been solved forever, for the fuel will be as plentiful as the heavy hydrogen of the oceans." (7)

Fusion power is still a pipe dream of some, and although no fusion reactors exist, well-funded research continues nevertheless. So far, the longest sustained experimental fusion reaction lasted one half second (in 1997), and required half again more power than the 10 Megawatts it produced. (8)

Furthermore, a fusion energy-based economy would require enormous quantities of the extremely hazardous radioactive hydrogen isotope tritium. Even the experiments require enough tritium to pollute hundreds of billions of gallons of water to the maximum permitted EPA contamination levels. (9)

Strauss's dream for fission reactors -- the type still in use today -- of energy "too cheap to meter" had to be abandoned in the face of reality. In its place, and after Bhabha's similar claim for fusion reactors proved equally fanciful, then-AEC chairman Glen Seaborg was forced to proclaim a (slightly) different dream, stating on April 22nd, 1970: "It has long been recognized that nuclear energy's full promise for providing a virtually unlimited energy source for future generations could be realized only through the development and application of the breeder reactors." (10)

Interest in the plutonium-producing breeder reactors was undoubtedly set back by an event on Nov. 29, 1955, when "miscommunication during an experiment led to a partial meltdown of the reactor's core." (11) Other reports put the amount that melted as: "half its fuel rods" (12).

In June 2005, by which time the AEC's dual role of promoting and regulating nuclear power had been recognized as unworkable, and it had long ago been divided into the promotional arm (the Department of Energy) and the regulatory arm (the Nuclear Regulatory Commission), this author snuck into the American Nuclear Society's annual meeting (it costs $700.00 to be a member so you can attend) and heard the then-chairman of the NRC, Nils Diaz, proclaim that "direct energy conversion" is the #1 technological challenge, the key to making nuclear truly useful to mankind, by eliminating "the turbine" and other parts of the typical power plant, nuclear or not. "Think of the benefits that could be applied" he proclaimed. He also stated that 50% of reactor downtime was due to "materials issues." (13)

Diaz's dream (fantasy), like the dreams (fantasies) of Seaborg, Bhabha, Strauss, and others, lacked one thing: A grip on reality.

The reality is that nowhere in the Constitution is there a provision for the taking of an industry, any industry, out of the control of the states, counties, cities, and towns where it will exist and where its impact will be felt, and giving control to a small cadre of industry-tight regulators who are, in fact, charged not just with regulating but with sustaining and even promoting that industry in the face of sound science and economics which both indicate that same industry is poisoning the planet and preventing alternative, clean industries from growing!

Kafkaesque, isn't it?

After the author's local nuclear power plant, San Onofre, dropped a crane 80 feet, the author contacted the national Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), only to discover that OSHA, like the various state agencies, had zero authority over, for example, safe crane operations (or anything else) at nuclear power plants. No other industry is excluded from OSHA's oversight in a similar fashion, and look what happened? San Onofre was operating cranes for years with: Worn-out straps, improper lifting techniques, improper personnel safety procedures, a distinct lack of training, and, when they dropped the rented crane they were moving with their gantry, one worker was almost killed, but in the end, allegedly only soiled his clothes.

About the same time, another old crane's forks suddenly dropped, nearly killing another worker. The NRC pretends that it can be an expert in all things having to do with running a nuclear power plant, but these incidents (and many others) clearly show otherwise. (14)

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution states Congress can support "science," but Congress is charged with promoting the public welfare too (in the first paragraph of Section 8). Congress is, therefore, obligated to support, most of all, the cleanest energy alternatives possible. And yet, consistently, it throws most of its support behind the dirtiest energy source ever devised, one that, in over half a century, has not lived up to a single promise: Atomic power is not reliable, it's not safe, it's not clean, it's not cheap, it's not democratic, and it leaves a legacy for which there is no "scientific" solution -- physical isolation on appropriated American Indian territory (Yucca Mountain) is the current plan, and is completely unworkable.

In May of 1956, the Nuclear Energy Property Insurance Association was organized by 155 "stock property-insurance companies in the United States." Together, they came up with $50 million dollars in property coverage, not nearly enough to get the industry started. Nuclear promoters claimed that the problem was that the nuclear industry was too new for private insurers to realize how safe it was. (15)

The Price Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act, commonly called the Price-Anderson Act, was required to actually convince ANY private companies to build nuclear power plants, because of the financial risks involved (it also took billions of dollars in public financing and several other incentives). Price-Anderson was passed in 1957 as an amendment to the Atomic Energy Act of 1954.

Corporate liability was completely removed, even in the case of carelessness or recklessness. Price Anderson "effectively repealed every citizen's common-law right to sue for damages caused by some one else's negligence." (16)

Price-Anderson was renewed 50 years later -- but proponents could no longer proclaim that the industry was immature. Instead they simply claimed that the potential liability was too much for private insurers to bear, and that therefore Price-Anderson should continue. In other words, the fact that insurance companies, having been given 50 years too look the matter over, still don't want to take on the liability for nuclear power plants meant nothing to the legislators who extended Price-Anderson recently. The "island of socialism in a sea of capitalism" would continue.

This writer suspects that one hidden impetus for the extension of the corrupt Price-Anderson act was a little-known near-catastrophe in 2002 called "Davis-Besse." In that year, a football-sized hole developed in the 7-inch thick Reactor Pressure Vessel Head (RPVH), and the liner, about 3/16ths of an inch thick, was already bulging when the problem was accidentally discovered. The liner had not been designed to withstand reactor pressure without the backing of the RPVH. A rupture would certainly have caused a meltdown, the effects of which would have rivaled Chernobyl in their actual damage and certainly exceeded it in financial cost to the community. (17)

The event is referred to by the NRC as a "learning experience."

But insurance is not the only fraud being perpetrated on America in the name of nuclear energy. Nullifying anti-trust laws for nuclear corporations also was a goal of AEC Chairman Strauss. (18)

As to "states' rights," those were practically obliterated regarding anything having to do with nuclear energy: "The framers of the 1954 law acted on their conviction that the states lacked the experience and technical knowledge to deal effectively and intelligently with atomic energy. They did not intend to exclude the states entirely from participation in atomic energy issues, but they made no effort to define which functions the states might carry out." (19)

The result was that the Federal Government had taken away numerous citizens' and states' rights regarding nuclear power, but that was only half the problem. The states had, for their part, willingly given up those rights, rather than challenge the usurpation of those rights by the Federal Government. (20)

The states' interests regarding nuclear power were generally limited to doing what they felt was necessary to PUSH nuclear power within those states that wanted it. "Agreement States" came to describe states which had made new, specific agreements with the federal government concerning nuclear power. All issues pertaining to "safety" were kept by the Federal government, so that state agencies could not rule on the dangers of nuclear power. On March 26th, 1962, the Commonwealth of Kentucky became the first Agreement State. There are now 35 Agreement States. (21) Undoubtedly, not one of these agreements is a valid legal document.

Citizens who tried to organize themselves, and especially nuclear workers who became whistleblowers, have been harassed and denigrated. Pro-nukers have done everything from trying to convince local police that local pro-DNA activists were "terrorists" (22) to, in one famous case (and possibly others), apparently killing a Kerr-McGee whistleblower by running her off the road while she was on her way to a meeting with a New York Times reporter. She had promised to bring documents which were never found.

Hundreds of reporters have been harassed as well over the years, after questioning the "logic" of nuclear power, or after merely having an "anti-nuclear activist" or even a scientist on their show who said anything critical about nuclear energy. And if given any significant "air time," the local nuclear power plant will always get their spokesliars on-camera as well, even if they have to donate money to a local environmental effort, such as a nearby lagoon mitigation project, to do so.

Other industry tactics to get nuclear power accepted by the masses have included selling the first nuclear plants (such as Oyster Creek in New Jersey, which still runs, although very poorly) at well below cost, in order to make the technology look profitable to other buyers. These later buyers wouldn't get the same contracts and would pay double, triple and worse for their reactors. Business Week described Oyster Creek as the "greatest loss leader in American industry." (23)

The net result of all the legislative maneuvering since 1946 is that citizens are not protected by anyone other than nuclear promoters who bounce from the international nuclear industry to the Federal government and back again. (24)

It's time for states -- and their citizens -- to take back their right to regulate (and shut down) nuclear power from a corrupt federal government, which has been shamelessly lying and promoting this very rotten, failed technology for far too long, despite a plethora of cleaner, safer, and, in the long run, far cheaper alternatives.

--The author, who has studied nuclear issues for nearly 40 years, used a small fraction of his extensive collection of approximately 400 books on nuclear power to prepare this document, plus some online research and some personal experience. Footnotes for source material and quotations used in this article appear below. In some cases I have paraphrased the source material for clarity.

(1) Gould, Jay M. & Goldman, Benjamin A., Deadly Deceit, 1990 p. 72.

(2) The Silent Bomb, Edited by Peter Faulkner, Foreword by Paul R. Ehrlich, 1977, p. 31

(3) Hafstad et al, Scientific American books: Atomic Power, 1948 - 1955, p. 117 - 120

(4) Ibid, p 117 - 128

(5) Grossman, Karl, Power Crazy, 1986, p. 173

(6) Makhijani, Arjun and Saleska, Scott, The Nuclear Power Deception: U.S. Nuclear Mythology from Electricity "too Cheap to Meter" to "Inherently Safe" Reactors, 1999, p. 2

(7) Hughes, Donald J., (Brookhaven National Labs), On Nuclear Energy, 1957 (foreword by Admiral Lewis L. Strauss, then-Chairman, AEC), p 228

(8) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power (as of May 5th, 2008)

(9) For some technical details about the amount of tritium needed, see, for example, Martin Keilhacker, JET Experiments in Deuterium-Tritium, JET Team, Europhysics News November/December 1998, p. 230 - 231

(10) Gofman, John W., Poisoned Power: The Case Against Nuclear Power Plants (forward by Senator Mike Gravel), 1971, p. 323. Note the date of the quote: It's the same day Earth Day was established! (And note that back then, even Dr. Gofman thought "fusion power" might still be a "holy grail" for the nuclear industry!)

(11) Argonne News, The Online Edition of the Lab's Employee Newspaper, (as of May 5th, 2008)

(12) Idaho State University, Radiation Information Network (as of May 5th, 2008)

(13) This author's posted comments about the ANS meeting, available online in NucNews message 22283 (as of May 5th, 2008)

(14) Information about the "Crane Drop Incident" is based on conversations with a worker at the plant, and public information which came out after the incident was reported to the NRC (and the media) by this author. The NRC's main interest turned out to be the name of the worker who told me about the crane drop (which they never got). The dropped crane incident occurred the same day the public spokesperson for the plant proclaimed that "anti-nuclear activists don't understand the laws of physics." Oh, the irony!

(15) Supra, (7), p 211

(16) Ford, Daniel, The Cult of the Atom, 1982, p. 45

(17) There are numerous sources for the approximate thicknesses of these components, as well as for the time that was left before rupture, and for everything else after that. These thicknesses were taken from a private engineering firm's report to the NRC about the accident: (as of May 5th, 2008)

(18) Clarfield, Gerard H. and Wiecek, William M., Nuclear America, Military and Civilian Nuclear Power in the United States, 1940-1980, 1984, p. 272-274

(19) Mazuzan, George T. & Walker, J. Samuel, Controlling the Atom: The Beginnings of Nuclear Regulation, 1946-1962, 1984, p277-278

(20) See my April 26th, 2008 newsletter "[California] Coastal Commission enables a NEW quarter million pounds of High Level Radioactive Waste each year in California!"

(21) NRC web site (as of May 5th, 2008)

(22) Helvarg, David , The War Against the Greens, 1997,p 329

(23) Supra, (16) p. 62 - 63 (The Daniel Ford book contains the Business Week quote.)

(24) See my comments about AREVA in my May 2nd, 2008 newsletter: "Resend: [Hanford] Digest Number 1578 -- Mother Jones should be ashamed. (AREVA ownership correction)" for some examples, but there are many others.

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Las Vegas SUN
May 05, 2008

Attorney in Nevada’s Yucca case is seriously ill

By Mary Manning

The lead attorney representing Nevada in its fight against a nuclear repository at Yucca Mountain has departed because of illness, said Bob Loux, director of the state Agency for Nuclear Projects.

Attorney Joe Egan has battled stomach cancer for more than two years. He is continuing in an advisory role but Martin G. Malsch, a 30-year veteran of nuclear law and former acting general counsel of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, became lead licensing counsel last week.

Egan’s firm, Egan, Fitzpatrick & Malsch, was hired in 2001 by Nevada to represent it before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in licensing proceedings for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

The firm is preparing for a four-year proceeding scheduled to begin when the Energy Department files its Yucca Mountain license application with the commission expected in June.

Nevada has opposed the nuclear waste repository proposed for Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, since the area was named as a potential site in 1983.

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Twin Cities Planet
May 05, 2008

The nuclear option

By Nick Busse

When Minnesotans think of nuclear power, any number of things might come to mind. They might think of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier patrolling the Persian Gulf, or the incidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Others might conjure images of doughnut crumbs spilling from Homer Simpson’s mouth onto the reactor control panel at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant.

But as concern over the impact of climate change moves to the forefront of energy policy, advocates for nuclear energy hope to convey an entirely different picture of the technology: one that paints it green rather than glowing green.

“If you believe that greenhouse gasses are causing global climate change, nuclear is a great option,” said Rep. Joyce Peppin (R-Rogers).

In the past, proposals to expand nuclear power in the state have faced an uphill battle — and they still do. But the tide may be slowly turning.

Although heavily criticized by environmentalists for the radioactive waste it creates, nuclear power produces zero greenhouse gas emissions. Peppin is one of a growing number of legislators who see nuclear energy as a potential compromise between those concerned about global warming and those who worry that regulating greenhouse gasses will hamstring the state’s ability to supply electricity. In fact, Peppin doesn’t see very many other options.

“Some might argue that we should be consuming less, but in reality we’re not. So we need to meet our needs, and there’s only so many options. And nuclear is certainly a viable and safe alternative,” she said.

Peppin, a consistent and vocal supporter of nuclear power, isn’t sure whether she actually believes that greenhouse gas emissions cause climate change — and until recently, her arguments might’ve been ignored by those who do. But as the Legislature tries to grapple with the issue of global warming, all options are being put back on the table, including nuclear power.

On April 17, members of two House committees held a joint hearing on new nuclear plant designs and safety technologies. It was the first in what is expected to be an extensive series of discussions in coming years about the future of nuclear power in Minnesota. Although it wasn’t brought up directly at the meeting, the underlying issue was whether to lift the state’s 12-year-old moratorium on constructing any new nuclear plants.

“I think the movement to remove this ban is clearly gaining ground,” Peppin said.

Ed Garvey, director of the Office of Energy Security, recently came out on behalf of Gov. Tim Pawlenty in support of lifting the moratorium. The Minnesota Climate Change Advisory Group recommended that the state consider adding more nuclear power to its energy portfolio to help reach its carbon reduction goals. The issue has also come up several times in recent floor debates, and key DFL committee chairs in the House have pledged their commitment to hold hearings on the issue.

While even supporters acknowledge that it could be decades before a new nuclear plant would be built in the state — even if the moratorium were lifted tomorrow — it’s clear that the issue isn’t going away anytime soon.

Baseload worries

When it comes to mitigating climate change, renewable energy technologies like solar and wind power are usually the preferred option; however, these technologies have a major drawback: they aren’t very good at supplying what’s called “baseload capacity.”

The term “baseload capacity” refers to the ability to supply electricity constantly, without interruption and regardless of external conditions. Since the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, solar and wind power don’t provide much baseload generation. As a result, most of our energy comes from coal power, which spews an enormous amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In contrast, nuclear plants can generate electricity virtually free of emissions — and unlike most renewable sources, they do provide reliable baseload capacity.

There are currently 104 nuclear power plants operating in the United States. Minnesota has two: one in Monticello and one at Prairie Island, both of them built in the early-1970s and operated by Xcel Energy. Construction of nuclear plants declined rapidly in the 1980s, largely due to safety concerns and still-unresolved problem of what to do with the radioactive waste they produce. As a result, the country has an aging nuclear power industry. Unless more plants are built, nuclear generation in the United States is projected to begin dropping around 2030 and will virtually cease to exist by 2050.

While some might consider that a blessing, it does raise the question of how the United States will meet its growing need for baseload capacity — or even maintain its present levels.

“Baseload is essentially nuclear, hydro or coal. Hydro is tapped out. It’s very difficult to build a coal plant now in any of the states because of concerns over carbon emissions. So what you’re left with, really, is nuclear,” said Richard Reister, the program manager for the U.S. Department of Energy’s “Nuclear Power 2010” initiative.

Big plans, big problems

At the April 17 hearing, Reister and other testifiers described a new generation of nuclear plants that are cleaner, safer, and more efficient than previous power plants. New plant designs were showcased that minimize safety concerns while maximizing power output. But Rep. Phyllis Kahn (DFL-Mpls), an 18-term House member who has been around for many of the previous battles over nuclear energy in the Legislature, isn’t buying it.

“There are no greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear power — that’s completely true. But the question is, ‘Is it better than conservation?’ We haven’t gone to the lengths of what we can do with conservation, so I’m not even interested in looking at that argument until we’ve dealt with the arguments that I’ve said need to be answered up front.”

The arguments against nuclear power, according to Kahn, are many. Above all is the issue of the waste. A plan to open a national spent fuel repository underneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada has been stalled for decades by political controversy and legal challenges, leaving the waste to be stored in various locations around the country. This has raised fears of catastrophic terrorist attacks or other disasters at waste storage sites.

“We never should’ve authorized the first plant until we were sure we could solve the waste problem,” Kahn said.

Moreover, the challenge of disposing of the waste may actually pale in comparison to the financial problems associated with nuclear power. One of the reasons that so few new nuclear plants have been proposed is simply that they’re incredibly expensive to build, and seen as risky investments.

Even with generous federal subsidies and government loans, the capital costs associated with nuclear power are astronomical compared with other energy technologies. Nuclear construction projects are notorious for cost overruns and for not being completed on time. On top of that, no one is certain how much it will cost to decommission and maintain the current generation of nuclear plants once their operational lives expire.

“The whole process from beginning to end really does have to be analyzed to ensure that we understand what all of the costs are, including all the externalities,” said Rep. Bill Hilty (DFL-Finlayson).

Hilty, who chairs the House Energy Finance and Policy Division, is committed to holding a series of legislative discussions on nuclear power in coming years. He remains skeptical, however, about the perceived benefits of nuclear energy, and even questions whether it helps reduce greenhouse gasses once you figure in emissions from uranium drilling and construction of the actual plants.

He also doubts the motives of some of nuclear energy’s supporters. He mentions one particularly vocal group called the Heartland Institute.

“They pretty consistently are publishing articles by people that are skeptical of the existence of, or at least human involvement in, climate change — and at the same time, that they’re promoting nuclear power based on the assumption that we need to curtail carbon emissions. It seems like there might be kind of a logical contradiction,” Hilty said.

James Taylor, a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, was among the testifiers at the April 17 hearing. He expressed particular enthusiasm about a new reactor design by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, and Hilty noted that Taylor “sounded more like he was a representative from Westinghouse than from the Heartland Institute.”

“It didn’t sound too much different for me than selling a used car,” Hilty added.

In any case, Hilty said a thorough and earnest debate on the issue is needed before any action could be taken by the Legislature. He expects the Legislative Electric Energy Task Force and various House and Senate committees to discuss the issue more over the interim as well as future legislative sessions.

“I think it’s an issue that needs to be thoroughly vetted,” he said.

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Huffington Post
May 04, 2008

McCain Calls for 700+ New Nuclear Plants (and 7 Yucca Mountains) Costing $4 Trillion

Joseph Romm

"A nuke in every garage" is the GOP nominee's energy and climate plan.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) made a stunning statement on the radio show of climate change denier Glenn Beck this week:

... the French are able to generate 80% of their electricity with nuclear power. There's no reason why America shouldn't.

The Wonk Room, which has the audio, writes of the interview, " href="http://thinkprogress.org/wonkroom/2008/05/03/mccain-beck-climate-change/">McCain Seemingly Agrees With Glenn Beck That Solutions To Climate Change Can Be Delayed. That is lame all by itself. But the statement quoted above is even more radical. McCain is repeating his little-noticed uber-Francophile statement from his big April 2007 speech on energy policy, "If France can produce 80% of its electricity with nuclear power, why can't we?"

Why can't we? Wrong question, Senator. The right question is -- Why would we? Let's do the math.

The U.S. has some one hundred nuclear reactors providing about nearly 100 Gigawatts of capacity (see here) and nearly 800,000 Gigawatt-hours of electricity, roughly 20% of total U.S. power. For the record, France has only 59 reactors, capacity of about 63 GW, generating 550,000 GW-hr (some of which is exported), covering nearly 80% of their usage (see here). [Note to Sen. McCain: France is a much smaller country than ours.]

What would it take for us to be 80% Nuclear?

First, by 2050, almost all of the existing plants would need to be replaced, so that is another hundred to build if we want to hit the 80% goal.

And then, since McCain is not a big booster of energy efficiency (his McCain-Lieberman climate bill has no substantive energy efficiency provisions in it at all), we have to deal with some 1.1% annual electricity growth, which means we'll need more than 600 nukes in 2050.

Third, McCain wants to switch much of our oil consumption to electricity (a strategy I endorse). As he said in last year's energy policy speech:

I'll work to promote real partnerships between utilities and automakers to accelerate the deployment of plug-in hybrids.... Fifty percent of cars on the road are driven 25 miles a day or less. Affordable battery-powered vehicles that can meet average commuter needs could help us cut oil imports in half.

We import more than 12 million barrels of oil a day. To cut that in half to 6 when EIA projects we will import over 16 in 2030 (see here), means replacing far more than 100 billion gallons of gasoline a year with electricity. If 80% of that electricity comes from nuclear power, then that is -- very conservatively -- another 100 nukes.

Bottom Line: To satisfy McCain's odd desire to be like the French and get 80% of our electricity from nuclear power in the coming decades would require building more than 700 (GW-sized) nuclear power plants by midcentury -- more than one a month.

Although we have been unable as a country to agree on even one storage site for our existing nukes' radioactive waste (Yucca Mountain), the McCain plan would require seven such sites -- for a longer discussion of just what 700 GW would entail, see the Keystone Center's 2007 nuclear study discussed at "Nuclear Power No Climate Cure-All."

Finally, in October, Moody's Investors Service said "new reactors would cost up to $6,000 per kilowatt of capacity to build" -- I'll be posting a longer review of nuclear costs soon, and suffice it to say, Moody's estimate is not the high end these days. Since $6,000 per kw is $6 billion per GW, 700 GW would require a cost of some $4 trillion, assuming there was no significant cost escalation from production delays and from the serious bottlenecks in the nuclear supply chain (see "Look up nuclear bottleneck in the dictionary....") -- and not even counting the cost of the uranium.

Apparently the GOP nominee thinks the answer is "no." Caveat Emptor!

For my fellow energy realists, I would add that it would take an astonishing effort just to have nuclear power in 2050 provide the same 20% of U.S. power it does today -- an outcome I am not inherently opposed to, but I certainly wouldn't devote yet more tens of billions of federal subsidies to, as McCain would, especially given the myriad flaws nuclear power has.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
May 03, 2008

Feds find glitches in Yucca documentation

Quality assurance program continues to encounter snags

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Federal auditors said in a report this week that they spotted a few more glitches in quality assurance procedures for the Yucca Mountain program.

Quality assurance requires meticulous documentation of most every activity of the nuclear waste repository effort so it can be retraced. If problems are discovered, they are run through a system of corrective actions.

Auditors working for the U.S. Department of Energy's inspector general said they identified a study that was not run through quality assurance before being included in four documents related to the repository's expected performance.

While the use of unqualified material is sometimes OK, the auditors determined it was not justified in this case.

In a five-page report issued Thursday, auditors said several other previously identified procedural issues had not been fully resolved.

Ward Sproat, head of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, told inspectors the issues will be reviewed.

In a series of reports over the years, the DOE inspector general and the Government Accountability Office have focused on weaknesses in the Yucca quality assurance program.

DOE managers said fixing the program has been a priority and that it largely has turned around.

The findings in the latest report "are not huge per se, but when you look at the pattern that has been documented it is clear DOE has not instilled in its workers the need for quality controls," said Bob Loux, director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.

In another citation in the latest report, auditors said five questionable safety documents were processed between December 2005 and October 2006, a period when the DOE had put a freeze on while trying to fix quality procedures.

Auditors credited the DOE for spotting the problem first. They said there was no impact because the documents were revised after being run through the new procedures.

--Contact Stephens Washington Bureau Chief Steve Tetreault at stetreault@ stephensmedia.com or 202-783-1760.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
May 03, 2008

State seeks more time for Yucca review

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Nevada officials have requested more time to prepare challenges to the U.S. Department of Energy's license application for a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.

The 30-day period for filing license contentions should be extended to 180 days, attorneys argued in a motion filed this week with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The expected application will top 8,000 pages and include about 100,000 pages of supporting references and associated environmental studies. The application filing is expected next month.

The 30-day clock to challenge the application starts ticking after NRC staff decide to docket the application. That decision would be expected in the fall.

"Reviewing the (license application) will be a monumental task, unlike one that any potential NRC party has ever faced," attorneys said in the motion, filed Monday. "The 30-day period is grossly inadequate."

State officials have estimated they might prepare a record 250 to 500 challenges to the science research and engineering designs for the repository, as well as the Energy Department's program management.

Some challenges probably will be consolidated or dismissed by NRC administrative judges before being heard, attorneys have acknowledged.

Nevada's five-member congressional delegation added its support of the extension request in a letter sent to the NRC on Wednesday, saying more time to review and respond to the mountains of material would be "in the interest of fairness and good public policy."

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Pahrump Valley Times
May 03, 2008

20 years ago this week

Nye County commissioners reviewed plans released by the Department of Energy for possible rail routes to Yucca Mountain.

One route which passed just west of Pahrump along the state line, through Amargosa west of Devil's Hole, through Forty Mile Wash to the site, was supported by the commission. The railway will cost $1 million per mile.

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Baltimore Examiner
May 03, 2008

Demonstrators protest Maryland's new nuclear plant

by Len Lazarick

BALTIMORE (Map, News) - About a dozen anti-nuclear demonstrators Friday took to the streets of downtown Baltimore City to counteract Gov. Martin O’Malley’s endorsement of the construction of a third nuclear reactor at Calvert Cliffs in Maryland.

“There are cheaper, safer alternatives,” said Stephen Soifer, spokesman for the Chesapeake Safe Energy Coalition, which includes the Sierra Club and seven other environmental and anti-nuclear groups.

Soifer, an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work, said, “It’s not a moral imperative” as O’Malley said Thursday when he toured Constellation Energy’s Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant, a major source of Maryland’s electricity.

Radioactive waste from the spent nuclear pellets that fuel the Calvert County plant last 10,000 years, Soifer said.

“It the only power source” that leaves behind such a toxic residue, he said.

Soifer and other demonstrators scoffed at the supposed $4 billion price tag on the new plant that will take about seven years to build.

He and other demonstrators said it would be at least double that amount — if not three and four times that amount based on new plants being built in Europe.

That money could be better spent on wind, solar or ocean sources, Soifer said.

Constellation has not updated its 2005 estimate of $4 billion to $6 billion to build the new reactor because “it’s considered a sensitive number,” said Maureen Brown, company spokesman.

But the final number will be nowhere near as high as the activists project, she said.

Even if the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada is finally approved for nuclear waste disposal, “we need a second and possibly third site,” Soifer said because of the waste accumulated at nuclear plants during the past five decades.

“There isn’t a solution to the nuclear waste issue,” said Dr. Gwen Dubois, a demonstrator and physician at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore City.

In addition to the financial issues, “there’s a problem with safety at the plants,” she said.

The growing stockpile of nuclear waste is a potential source of material for nuclear bombs, Dubois said.

“It’s the same technology” used to enrich uranium, she said.

“We’re making nuclear material ubiquitous.”

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BurlingtonFreePress
May 03, 2008

Speaker draws awareness to nuclear industry

By Sally Pollak
Free Press Staff Writer

In the town where Lorraine Rekmans grew up, Elliot Lake, Ontario, sports teams were called the Radon Daughters and the Elliot Lake Atoms.

Elliot Lake, north of Lake Huron, was built in 1955 as an industry town for uranium mining. A sign at the entrance to the community, with a picture of a nuclear atom, welcomed people to the Uranium Capital of the World.

Rekmans, 44, an environmental activist with an interest in forestry, sees little to celebrate and much to decry in her hometown's legacy of uranium mining. Uranium is used to generate electricity in nuclear power plants.

A First Nation woman, Rekmans says she's witness to the environmental and health effects of uranium mining. She will talk about these issues -- "the environmental and social costs of uranium mining," in her words -- in a series of Vermont lectures. The first talk is at 7 p.m. Tuesday in Burlington with Ian Zabarte from Nevada's Yucca Mountain region.

Rekmans, who now lives in Osgoode, Ontario, just south of Ottawa, is a former journalist who was until recently the national director for the Aboriginal Forestry Association.

As a reporter for the Elliot Lake Standard from 1989 to 1993, Rekmans said she routinely reported on effluent discharges, fish kills, equipment failures and other environment and mining-related events she thought the public should know about.

"Growing up in Elliot Lake, it was frequent that we had effluent discharges into our drinking water," she said. "I had to ask, 'What is this stuff that's getting pumped out of the mine and how is it impacting our environment?' ... That's where I began to shape this awareness about the nuclear industry."

Rekmans is planning a campaign as a Green Party candidate for the Canadian Parliament. As a member of the Serpent River First Nation, she voices particular concern about the impact uranium mining has had on the traditional way of life. Environmental damage has meant loss of land used for hunting, trapping and fishing, Rekmans said.

"How will aboriginal people be compensated for the loss of use of that land?" she said. "It's a sacrificial wasteland."

An important focus now and into the future must be long-term monitoring of the sites to ensure tailings are concealed and contained in the most effective way, she said.

"We want assurances and guarantees that those sites will be managed to the best available technology as time goes on," Rekmans said. "It has to be something that is revisited, monitored and updated periodically as we get more science. We don't just want to sweep it under the rug and forget about it."

Contact Sally Pollak at spollak@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com or 660-1859.

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
May 02, 2008

Task force weighs nuclear power

Group seeks to limit emissions

By Thomas Content
tcontent@journalsentinel.com

Sun Prairie - When it comes to tackling global warming, nuclear power is either part of the solution or something with too many problems of its own.

The state's global warming task force began wrestling with controversial proposals to reduce emissions Thursday, as a utility chief executive and a customer advocate debated whether new nuclear plants should be part of Wisconsin's efforts to reduce emissions linked to a warming planet.

No new nuclear plants have been built in Wisconsin since the 1970s. New plants are being built around the world and companies in the United States have submitted applications for nine new nuclear plants.

The industry is seeing a resurgence because nuclear power generation produces no emissions of carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas.

But nuclear power has long been controversial because of the highly radioactive waste it generates and because of safety and weapons proliferation concerns. Those concerns prompted state lawmakers in the 1980s to enact a moratorium on building nuclear plants that utilities would now like to see overturned.

Larry Weyers, chairman of Integrys Energy Group, said the state's "first and highest priority" to deal with global warming is a massive ramp-up in energy efficiency and conservation. Doing so would reduce both energy use and emissions linked to global warming.

But efficiency and conservation alone don't "take you to the deep cuts that are necessary if we are really going to make a difference on global warming," he said.

Charlie Higley, executive director of the Wisconsin Citizens' Utility Board, said concerns about nuclear power remain high, given Yucca Mountain, the place designated by the federal government to store radioactive waste generated by nuclear plants, won't be open for at least a decade or more.

Higley added that the cost of building new nuclear plants is so high that it wouldn't make sense for the state's electricity ratepayers to absorb the added cost.

Higley called on the state to spend the resources available to it wisely on strategies that will help reduce emissions and create jobs, such as energy efficiency and renewable energy.

State reactors

Paul Meier, director of the University of Wisconsin Energy Institute, agreed that new nuclear plants are expensive. But so are the projected costs for building new coal-fired power plants that would enable the greenhouse gases generated from burning coal to be buried underground. Also, the cost of building wind power projects has escalated in recent years, he added.

Even if Yucca Mountain is allowed to accept spent fuel from nuclear reactors, it's restricted by state law only to accept fuel from existing plants and not new reactors, Meier said.

Current plans call for new reactors to store their spent fuel on the same property as their reactors, as is done at the two Wisconsin reactors in Kewaunee and Manitowoc counties.

The call to allow power companies to build new reactors comes not long after the state's utilities sold their nuclear power plants to out-of-state firms. Wisconsin Public Service Corp., now an Integrys subsidiary, sold the Kewaunee nuclear plant in 2005. The Point Beach plant was sold last year by Wisconsin Energy Corp. of Milwaukee.

The debate over nuclear power came as the task force learned new information Thursday about how difficult the task ahead of the panel is.

To achieve massive reductions sought by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - which proposes cutting global carbon-dioxide emissions by 50% by 2050 - will require even greater cuts by the countries that have released the most greenhouse gases, said John Larsen of the World Resources Institute, a consultant to the task force.

The task force released preliminary figures showing that strategies it is considering would reduce emissions in the state by 16 million tons, or 8% below 2005 levels, by 2020.

Bills to overturn Wisconsin's nuclear moratorium have been proposed in recent years, and one has passed in the Republican-controlled state Assembly. Gov. Jim Doyle has supported the moratorium in the past but has said "everything must be on the table" for the task force.

Gale Klappa, chairman and chief executive of Wisconsin Energy, said it is "imperative" that the state allow the construction of new nuclear plants.

He said Wisconsin's three existing reactors, which produce about 20% of its electricity, all are more than 30 years old.

"Klappa's remarks came after Wisconsin Energy held its annual shareholders' meeting Thursday in Mequon.

--Marino Eccher of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.

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phillyBurbs
May 02, 2008

Are we ready for more nuclear power?

Don’t know why, but that ol’ 80s chestnut popped into my head when I read this Associated Press story about a Three Mile Island nuclear plant security guard’s suspension for “being inattentive.”

That’s PC for sleeping on the job at the site of the nation’s largest nuclear disaster - well, the biggest so far at least.

And don’t go thinking it’s merely an isolated - rather than symbolic and systemic - incident.

Just three months ago a video of sleeping guards at the Peach Bottom nuke plant here in Pennsylvania was played on a New York CBS affiliate. It showed armed workers snoozing against walls, slumped on tabletops or with eyes closed and heads bobbing.

Hey, at least they were armed. That’s actually an improvement over the unarmed National Guard soldiers then-Gov. Mark Schweiker dispatched to guard the state’s nuke plants after 9/11, but I digress.

The Washington Post story about the video carries the subhead, “Sight of Guards Asleep Shakes Industry.”

It should also awaken a pliant and hypnotized public too. America is slowly being lulled into the thought that nuclear power is a safer, greener alternative to burning carbon and adding to global warming.

Like those folks who think CFLs - those funky little fluorescent light bulbs - are the way to go and conveniently forget they contain poisonous mercury, nukes ain’t exactly a wise alternative to save us from higher energy prices and ourselves.

The Patriot-News of Harrisburg reported in 2006 that an Oct. 17, 2005, memo sent to security supervisors from Wackenhut’s head of security at TMI complained that veteran guards at the plant were “informing new hires of all the locations that they can hide and catch a quick nap.”

I’m not saying we have a bunch of slackers guarding tempting terrorist targets while our troops are fighting two wars abroad. In fact, I’m sure the guards are quite industrious.

The Patriot-News cited anonymous sources who said the “inattentiveness could be linked to two factors - long hours and boredom” and documents showed at least one officer had worked at Three Mile Island for 150 hours in a 14-day period.

Wouldn’t you if your direct supervisor pointed out places where you could catch some zzzs while still on the clock?

Oh and by the way, the same thing happened in 2006 at the Limerick nuke plant and the state started finally doing surprise inspections.

That’s three of Pennsylvania’s five nuclear plants. The real question now is why would you ever trust a corporation again with your life after the accident at TMI in 1979?

There is no way in hell these monstrously powerful, expensive - and potentially Chernobolistic - plants should be built without a lengthy approval process, much less fast-tracked.

As the college professor who taught my course on Nuclear Arms back in the ’80s once told me, “Where do you think the Russians are pointing their nuclear missles at us?”

If you guessed at the point on the ground where there’s more fissionable material, go to the head of the class.

Just don’t waste any bombs on Yucca Mountain. The nation’s only permanent repository for nuclear waste still isn’t finished after 10 years of construction so most highly radioactive waste from plants is still being stored on site at the nuke plants.

And just who’s guarding them? Oh, those guys who think its OK to fall asleep on the job.

Since you’ll be up all night pondering that comforting thought, here’s the music video from Blotto to play over and over.

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ZNet
May 02, 2008

What Nuclear Renaissance?

By Christian Parenti
Source: The Nation

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 a process akin to that which 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

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.

Christian Parenti, a frequent contributor to The Nation on international affairs, is the author of The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (New Press).

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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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