Yucca Mountain News Clips
Friday, June 13, 2008
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Nevada Appeal
June 13, 2008
Letters to the editor
Muth’s Yucca musings based on myths
Maybe it’s the rarified air atop his soapbox or perhaps it's the blinding glare of fool’s gold, but once again Chuck Muth has it all wrong on Yucca Mountain (“Welcome to Yucca Mountain Appreciation Month,” June 6).
The fact that the U.S. Department of Energy has submitted a license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is not, as Muth asserts, an indication that new life has been breathed into this moribund project. Rather, it is a last ditch attempt by DOE to forestall the inevitable demise of this ill-conceived federal project.
What DOE has done is foist a fundamentally flawed and incomplete application onto the NRC — in essence punting the Yucca football to the NRC in the hopes that such a move will keep the project alive through the upcoming change of administrations. DOE is also banking on political and industry pressures to force NRC into accepting the application, even though it is blatantly deficient.
Muth’s call for the State of Nevada to sit down and negotiate with the feds over Yucca is laughable. Nevada is probably closer today to killing this disastrous program outright than it has ever been. The Yucca site is still fatally flawed and cannot isolate deadly radioactive waste. There's simply nothing to negotiate.
Muth’s myth that the state is somehow losing out on millions of dollars that can be had for the asking is equally laughable. It is a fiction the nuclear power industry has sought to perpetuate for years in an effort to get Nevada to blink in its opposition. I have been closely involved with the Yucca project for over two decades, and I can tell you Muth’s assertion that the federal government once offered hundreds of millions of dollars to the state is pure fantasy.
In study after study the state undertook in the 80s and 90s, the negative impacts and costs of the Yucca project far outweighed any possible benefits that might accrue. Plus, there has never been any basis for negotiations since the Yucca site itself is wholly unsuitable for a nuclear waste repository.
In reality, support for Yucca is drying up everywhere. In Congress, long time advocates like New Mexico’s Sen. Domenici are abandoning ship. In the industry, there are calls to delink the nuclear renaissance from Yucca and pursue at-reactor and interim storage solutions (using volunteer communities, I might add). And Nevada's Sen. Reid and the congressional delegation are slowly but surely tightening the budgetary noose around the project's neck. The license application will not re-animate this project, and it likely will not even delay the inevitable for very long.
Joseph Strolin
Planning Division Administrator
Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects
Minden
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Reno Gazette-Journal
June 12, 2008
Letter: Make nuclear waste work for our state
Remember when elected officials went to Washington, D.C., to represent the people of the state who sent them?
Nevada's lawmakers continue to blast a plan for a waste repository (not dump) in our state.
I think it should be Reid and Ensign panting for air, not this project. It is not a project whose time has passed; rather it has become a fear-mongering issue for Reid and Ensign.
As much as this project has been scrutinized, they have not proven to me it is not a valuable resource for Nevada. Perhaps our elected officials need as much scrutiny.
Wake up, Nevada. This valuable commodity is here. Work to bring it to our repository. Let it work for this great state.
Bill Strickland
Elko
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Aiken Standard
June 12, 2008
Yucca Mountain a step closer
The country has come a step closer to the opening of Yucca Mountain as a repository for nuclear waste. The Bush Administration submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission an application to build the waste facility in Nevada after 26 years of scientific studies and political ploys. It is about time.
While the rest of the country has sought a solution to the problem of nuclear waste from power reactors, leaders in Nevada have made every effort to keep Yucca Mountain from becoming that site. Numerous studies have shown Yucca Mountain to be an ideal place to store some of the deadliest materials known to man. Federal officials believe that the materials can be safely housed deep inside the mountain with little chance of affecting human health for thousands of years into the future.
Meanwhile nuclear material has been stored in facilities in 39 states that were not designed for long-term storage. If we are looking at having a facility that will ensure safety, the status quo is certainly not the way to go. With nuclear waste dispersed across the country in more than 100 places, there is far greater likelihood that an accident or terrorist incident could occur than if the 40,000 tons of material were secured in one facility.
It is time that Nevada shoulder its share of the burden of nuclear waste storage. Hopefully the NRC will approve the application and allow construction of the waste holding facilities at Yucca Mountain. Our country is already a decade late in having an operational storage site. Further delays will only add to the burden of scores of sites around the country and threaten the health and welfare of residents in those areas.
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Las Vegas SUN
sun editorial:
‘A fool’s errand’
Nuclear waste company rightly pans feds’ faulty plans for Yucca Mountain dump
The Energy Department’s plan to build a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is a “doomed undertaking,” a private waste storage company has declared.
In a newsletter sent to customers and suppliers, Holtec International blasted the proposal and singled out the department’s plan to let casks of nuclear waste cool aboveground for years before interring them in the mountain. The Los Angeles Times reported last week that the casks would sit unanchored. A major earthquake, Holtec said, would send the casks flying, creating a “chaotic melee of bouncing and rolling juggernauts.”
“Pigs will fly before the cask(s) will stay put,” the company added.
Holtec, which is well-known in the industry, had bid for work at Yucca Mountain, proposing a plan it said was safer and would anchor the casks. The department turned the company down, turning instead to the lowest bidder. In other words, the Energy Department put cost ahead of safety, which is not a surprise.
For more than two decades the Energy Department has used shoddy scientific work to try to justify its plans to dump more than 77,000 tons of nuclear waste in Nevada.
Holtec said the safety plans are a “fool’s errand,” which is a fitting description of the entire project. The Energy Department has glossed over serious issues, such as earthquakes, in its zeal to try to defend what is indefensible.
The department was tasked with finding a site that was geologically suitable for containing radiation and ended up with Yucca Mountain, a porous volcanic ridge in an area that is seismically active. More than 30 faults run near or under the site. And last year the department had to scramble to try to modify its plans because it had called for letting casks of nuclear waste sit unsecured above an earthquake fault.
Still, the department has asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for permission to build the dump. The commission should tell the department: When pigs fly ...
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Huffington Post
June 11, 2008
Yucca Casts Short Shadow On Nevada Presidential Politics
Amanda Becker
When presidential candidates stump in Nevada, the proposed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain takes center stage. White House hopefuls and the national media zero in on the potential storage site as the state's most pivotal issue. For Nevadans, however, Yucca is not the top political priority.
"Nevada cares so deeply that Yucca Mountain may decide whether President Bush or Sen. John F. Kerry wins the state's five electoral votes on Tuesday -- and with them, perhaps the presidency," wrote Washington Post reporter Evelyn Nieves in 2004, citing Bush's approval of the site during his first term in office as an obstacle to winning a second.
Yet days after the article appeared, voters in Nevada helped push President George W. Bush one electoral vote past the 270 he needed to remain in the Oval Office.
"The media overstate Yucca," said Eric Britton Herzik, the political science chair at the University of Nevada in Reno. "I've argued that this has been going on since Yucca has been in play, particularly in 2004."
Yucca has been in play for more than two decades now, ever since it made the U.S. Department of Energy's shortlist of possible nuclear waste facilities in 1984. The proposed storage site, just 90 miles from the state's population center in Las Vegas, has become a defining issue for state politicians.
"I don't think that Yucca Mountain, at the presidential level, is the determining factor for people," said Steve Fernlund, president of the Red Rock Democrats, a party organization in the suburbs outside Las Vegas. "I'm guessing the sense is our congressional delegation is really our backstop, if you will, with Yucca Mountain."
Democratic Senator and House Majority Leader Harry Reid recently slashed the funding for the Yucca Mountain project and the state has filed multiple lawsuits in the Washington D.C. Court of Appeals. The maneuvers have been so successful that even if the project were approved today, experts estimate it would be another decade before the site was ready to receive spent nuclear energy.
Nuclear waste might not be on its way to Yucca, but the candidates are still using the project as a talking point when they campaign in the state. Presidential nominees John McCain and Barack Obama are both proponents of nuclear energy, but diverge in opinion when it comes to establishing a permanent repository for nuclear waste.
Sen. Obama has accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from employees of Exelon Corporation, an Illinois-based energy company that controls most of the nuclear reactors in the United States. But Obama has consistently denounced the proposed site at Yucca Mountain as both a senator and presidential nominee and maintains that the country needs to find new solutions for disposing nuclear waste.
Sen. John McCain supported President Bush's approval of the project in 2002 and in the beginning stages of his bid for the White House he furthered his stated stance -- until recently.
During a campaign trip in Denver, Colorado, at the end of May, McCain seemed to back away from Yucca as the ideal storage site during a speech about nuclear energy policy.
"I would seek to establish an international repository for spent nuclear fuel that could collect and safely store materials overseas," McCain said. "It is even possible that such an international center could make it unnecessary to open the proposed spent nuclear fuel storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada."
McCain reiterated support for Yucca shortly after the Denver speech -- and after being accused of backtracking by Sen. Reid.
If McCain runs away from his voting record, he "won't hold his already suspicious, conservative base," Herzik said.
Herzik's polling data shows that about 30 percent of Nevadans don't oppose Yucca, 20 percent support the project, and 20 percent not only oppose the repository but consider it a defining issue.
"For the people for whom Yucca is a to-die for issue, they're not going to vote for a Republican anyway," Herzik said.
The real question for Senators Obama and McCain should be whether focusing on Yucca as Nevada's central issue makes sense as a campaign strategy in a state that pollsters say could go either way.
"I'm not even sure most people know where Yucca Mountain is," said Rick Malone, who moved to Las Vegas 45 years ago and says the economy, not nuclear waste, should be the candidates' top priority.
Success for a presidential hopeful in Nevada could hinge on figuring out how to speak to the concerns of residents throughout the state, not just to the anti-Yucca contingent in Clark County.
"For Democrats, Yucca's a convenient club to use on Republicans," said historian and professor Mike Green. "But Yucca Mountain is just not that important as a national, political issue when people go to the polls in Nevada."
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RealClearPolitics
June 11, 2008
McCain Interview with Peter Cook
Bloomberg
PETER COOK: Senator, thanks for the time. Welcome back to Bloomberg.
SENATOR JOHN McCAIN (R-AZ): Thanks, Peter. It's good to be back with you.
MR. COOK: I want to ask you just from the start here, five months ago until Election Day, as we sit here right now, do you feel like you're the underdog or are you the likely victor here?
SEN. McCAIN: Actually, I think we're doing rather well and we do have a challenge. I would have to say I think I am in some respects the underdog, but one of the problems is, you know, the generic ballot between Democrat and Republican. But overall, I think we're doing very well and getting the message out. And there are stark differences between Senator Obama and myself, and so I'm happy with where we are but I recognize it's going to be a very tough, hard-fought, and I think very close campaign.
MR. COOK: Let's talk about the role the economy is going to play in this campaign. As we sit here today, given the problems, the challenges Americans are facing with the economy, do you think the economy has become more a decisive issue to voters than, say, national security will be?
SEN. MCCAIN: I think it's become the transcendent issue. We don't know how badly Americans are hurting and they are hurting very badly. The issue of national security is an underlying one and will always be there. And we don't know what is going to happen in the world. And because we're succeeding in Iraq with a strategy that Senator Obama adamantly opposed and still doesn't recognize, fails and refuses to recognize the success of, it's kind of moved off the front pages. I can't tell you how happy I am. But we've still got the Iranian threat. We've got our dependency on foreign oil. There is so many things that are affecting America's economy that also have to do with America's security.
MR. COOK: Let me ask you about one of those things.
SEN. MCCAIN: Sure.
MR. COOK: It's energy prices right now. We have seen oil prices roughly double in the last year or so. Since you and I spoke just a few weeks ago, prices up the pump up about 55 cents. Can you explain how that has happened? Is it simply supply and demand? Do you think something else is at work?
SEN. MCCAIN: I think, Peter, from talking from a lot of people that knows - know what goes on inside that there is a certain speculator effect here. And how big that is is a little hard for me to judge, but there should be a thorough and complete investigation of it. But the main problem is that there is a finite supply in the world and it's controlled by a few - by cartels, and therefore as growing demand on that finite supply, we are not keeping up in oil exploitation that is keeping up with demand, but we have a very, very serious problem on our hands.
MR. COOK: Are those countries doing enough to help the United States right now? Saudi Arabia, for example?
SEN. MCCAIN: Of course not. But the lesson here is, is not so much to beat up on them; the lesson is, is to get independence of foreign oil and also eliminate our green or drastically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, also understand that it's a national security issue because some of the money we're sending overseas ends up in the hands of terrorist organizations. So we have to innovative wind, tide, solar - nuclear is a very big aspect of any reduction and dependence on foreign oil. We have to find places to store spent nuclear fuel.
MR. COOK: Let me ask you about that, I was going to ask you about this topic anyway. Last week the Bush administration announced it's going to proceed with its filing, federal filing to open the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada, to store the spent nuclear fuel from around the country inside Yucca Mountain. What are you saying to the people of Nevada about what would happen to that project under a McCain administration?
SEN. MCCAIN: I have gone there and told them that I favor Yucca Mountain because we have to have a place to store the spent nuclear fuel. But we also have to reprocess. There is not enough storage space there. The first thing that goes in is defense-related materials that have to be stored. What about all of the spent nuclear fuel that is sitting around in ponds next to nuclear power plants all over America? That is a national security threat. But we not only have to store but we have to reprocess. The Europeans do.
MR. COOK: The proliferation issue is there. You know, there are a lot of people worried about what that might mean.
SEN. MCCAIN: Somehow the Europeans are able to handle it. By the way, there is also a Russian proposal that we could have a central place for reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, and we could keep up that supply. There is lots of ways to do this. It's a NIMBY problem. It takes about five years to build a nuclear plant - power plant in Europe. It takes 10 years in the United States, by the latest estimates. And we don't know because it's been so long since we've built one. And I believe you're not going to address climate change seriously unless nuclear power is a big part of the equation. But the most urgent issue now is get independent and have our own sources of energy so that we can eliminate that and eliminate this terrible burden on American families that has taken place today.
And by the way, one small thing - why not give them a little holiday from the gas tax? Why not give the guy I encountered that owns three trucks that's paying 24.5 cents a gallon tax on every gallon of diesel fuel that told me that he's about to go broke? Why not give him a little break? I mean, instead of building a bridge in Alaska to an island with 50 people on it, why don't we give him a little break? I still think it was a good idea. Senator Obama called it a gimmick.
MR. COOK: Yeah, let me ask you about tax policy. You disagree with Barack Obama on a range of issues, but taxes sort of front and center right now. I want to get back to your vote back in 2000 against the Bush tax cuts. You said at the time that they weren't linked enough to spending restraints, also that you worried that maybe they were tilted too much towards the wealthy. Have you changed your view on that part of the Bush tax cuts? Do you think they have unnecessarily tilted towards the wealthiest Americans?
SEN. MCCAIN: Oh, I had a significant and substantial tax-cut package of my own. But right along with it was spending restraint. Look, our problem is not with revenues. Our problem is with spending. The size of the federal government has grown astronomically. Discretionary - that's a great word, you know discretionary - spending has grown, my understanding, like 40 percent, something astronomical. We have let spending get completely out of control.
And I predicted at the time that unless we had spending restraints, as we did in 1981 and 1982 when the Reagan tax cuts took effect, that we were going to pay a very heavy price. If we had restrained spending, given the growth of revenues that have resulted from these tax cuts, we'd be celebrating now and talking about more tax cuts. And could I just say, capital gains affects 100 million Americans. Senator Obama wants to raise that tax.
The Social Security tax cap, he wants to raise from 105,000 (dollars) to I think 200,000 (dollars). Do you know how many employers, small-business people that would mean a 12-percent increase in their Social Security tax? I mean, this is just - Senator Obama wants to raise taxes. I want to keep tax cuts in place. And I think that it's important that in a time of real crisis, economic crisis in America, the last thing we want to do is raise people's taxes now.
MR. COOK: Is income inequality a problem in America right now?
SEN. MCCAIN: I believe that income inequality is a problem in America because of the rising costs of health care, and now because we distorted the market, among other things, by having subsidies for ethanol, which I opposed, that Americans are paying a very heavy price. And what we need to do though is not penalize the rich in America. We've been through that drill. What we need to do is help the lower-income people by giving them a simpler, flatter tax code, by getting the price of oil under control - gasoline under control by eliminating dependence on foreign oil, by lowering their taxes, by giving every family in America a doubling from 3,500 to $7,000 dividend for a child in their family. All of those things - a tax break for their family.
MR. COOK: You know, Barack Obama says you can't - you talk about all these tax cuts. But you haven't come up with ways to pay for it. Pork-barrel spending, cutting that out is not enough to foot the bill under John McCain's proposals.
SEN. MCCAIN: First of all, let's stop the pork-barrel spending. Senator Obama has sponsored and been engaged in tens of millions of dollars of pork-barrel spending. If we don't stop that, the American people will never give us credit. I've never asked for a pork-barrel project for my state of Arizona. We can grow the revenue.
But most importantly, we can restrain spending in a broad variety of ways. And with restrained spending and keeping taxes low, we can grow revenues and we can grow this economy. And I can pay for the tax cuts that I envision. And I know that I can, whether it be the phasing out the alternate-minimum tax, which can affect I don't know how many million American families, or whether it is free trade.
And let me just say one word about free trade. One of the most important aspects of our future, and one of the things that's a little bit of a bright spot in our economy now is our exports. Senator Obama wants to unilaterally renegotiate the North American Free-Trade Agreement, a source of incredible wealth for all three countries. And unilaterally renegotiate. And of course, that would have repercussions all over the world. He opposes the Colombia free-trade agreement.
MR. COOK: A lot of Americans support, right now, what Senator Obama's position is on free trade. They think it's doing more harm than good to the U.S. economy. Are you prepared to lose votes and stick to your support for free trade?
SEN. MCCAIN: I've always been prepared to lose votes for what I know is right. And the fact is that I believe in the American worker. I believe the most productive, innovative worker in the world is the American worker, including the agricultural side. And I will open those markets to our goods and services. I'd love to try to negotiate a EU-American free-trade agreement.
But I'd also - what our problem is today is the displaced worker. We've got to have programs for displaced workers that will train and educate and meet the demands of the new jobs, which will be created with green technologies and innovation and the information technology revolution. Present system was designed for the '50s. We've got to go to the community colleges, have them design and implement education and training programs that will work. We can't leave these people behind.
But then, to practice protectionism - look, I've seen the pictures of Mr. Smoot and Mr. Hawley. They sent America from a recession into a deep depression. That is a terrible thought that we would raise the specter of protectionism and cut off our access to markets around the world. That's exactly what Senator Obama wants to do.
MR. COOK: Given your national security experience, are you going to give greater weight, as you consider vice presidential candidates, choices, to someone who has got economic and business experience.
SEN. MCCAIN: The important thing for me in a vice-presidential candidate is someone who shares my principles, my values, and my priorities. As you know, one of the hardest things for any newly elected president is to set priorities. And so that's really primarily and almost solely the criteria that I would use for the selection of a running mate.
MR. COOK: All right, let me just ask you finally - you've challenged Barack Obama to these town halls around the country leading up to the conventions in August and September. He hasn't responded directly back to you. At the end of the day, do you think these things are going to happen? And what will the American people learn as a result from these events?
SEN. MCCAIN: I know that the American people are sick of the spin, the spin rooms, the gotchas, the sound bites, the 527s. One of the oldest forms of democracy is a town hall meeting. And it provides citizens an opportunity to question the candidates in an informal and ad-hoc basis. No prepared speeches, no teleprompters, just responding to the American people. I would be glad to fly anywhere with Senator Obama. This is not an original idea with me. Senator Barry Goldwater and President Clinton had - excuse me - and President Kennedy - Senator Barry Goldwater and President Kennedy had agreed to fly, get on the same plane, and fly around the country. Unfortunately, the tragedy of Dallas intervened.
So I'd love to do that. We could do one a week between now and the Democratic convention.
MR. COOK: Do you think he's going to do it?
SEN. MCCAIN: I don't know. I hope that he will understand that that's the most effective way we can hear - the American people can not only hear our views, but us to hear and listen to them. They think we're not listening in Washington. And you know what, they're right.
MR. COOK: Senator John McCain, thank you very much for your time. Appreciate you joining us here on Bloomberg. Look forward to talking with you again sometime down the road on the campaign trail. With that, Kathleen, we'll send it back to you in New York.
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LAVoice
June 11, 2008
Radioactive Waste Poses a Serious Threat to California
Posted by: Rochelle.Becker
According to a recent LA Times headline, the “Yucca Mountain safety plan is doomed.” If Yucca Mountain is “doomed,” what does this mean for the hundreds of tons of highly radioactive waste located on California’s fragile coast?
An earthquake is the reason cited for Yucca’s doom, therefore, storing this lethal material at Diablo Canyon--two and one-half miles from an active fault capable of a 7.5 magnitude earthquake-- deserves the state’s attention. Los Angeles lies two hundred miles south and less than one hundred miles north of California’s aging nuclear reactors. The San Onofre nuclear reactors south of LA, also are located within 5 miles of an active fault.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licensed the storage casks to hold highly radioactive fuel assemblies at both facilities for twenty years, yet recent statements by NRC Commissioners suggest that radioactive waste will likely remain at reactors sites for up to a hundred years or longer. In 1982, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Confidence Act to remove radioactive material from reactor sites – and we are still awaiting that removal.
Both SCE and PG&E have requested funding for license renewal studies even though their current operating licenses do not expire for fourteen to seventeen years. In 1976 California adopted legislation that prohibits siting new reactors in our state until a demonstrated solution for the permanent storage of highly radioactive waste is in place and approved by our legislature. In hindsight, this prohibition has saved us from stockpiles of radioactive waste throughout our state. Perhaps it is time to amend this legislation to prohibit license renewals at aging reactors for the same reason.
Enough is enough! By 2022-2025, hundreds of casks will be located on California’s seismically active coast. Assuming that a permanent waste repository opens someday, this lethal waste will be transported through Los Angeles County by rail and/or train to get to its new home. Train and truck accidents make our headlines weekly and securing radioactive transport routes will be a nuclear nightmare. Now is the time to investigate options to end this daily production of radioactive waste in our state.
The state legislature mandated a California Energy Commission (CEC) cradle-to-grave analysis of the full costs, benefits and risks of our dependence on aging nuclear reactors on our coast. Unfortunately the state budget only allowed one-fifth of the funding the utilities had requested for their in-house studies of license renewal. It is important to let the CEC and your legislators know this lopsided allocation is not in the state’s best interest.
Now is the time to begin a paradigm shift in our energy plans. Innovative technology and incentives for efficiency programs are not only the most cost-effective source of reducing demand, but could create thousand of new jobs, infrastructure and economic benefits. Renewable, affordable and independent energy sources will create exciting new jobs for the next generation while reducing the poisons created by existing old technologies such as oil, coal and nuclear.
The Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility invites Californians to join our mission to limit the production of highly radioactive waste on our irreplaceable coast to the currently licensed terms. Our children should not be left with the burden of safely securing, storing and paying for radioactive waste that will be left behind long after the last kilowatt is generated. Please join us in demanding a nuclear-free future for California.
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Victoria Advocate
June 11, 2008
Residents concerned, but want more power
By Tara Bozick
PORT LAVACA – Calhoun County residents want more electrical power.
Nuclear may be an option, but residents still have concerns.
On Tuesday, the Conservative Club invited Exelon director of Texas public affairs William A. Scott to answer questions its members and the public may have about nuclear energy.
Exelon Nuclear proposes to build a dual-reactor nuclear plant near McFaddin in Victoria County and is working to “preserve the option to build.”
Indianola resident Bob Platte, 76, wondered how the nuclear company would get rid of its waste, including spent fuel rods.
While the possibility of Yucca Mountain or a long-term storage facility would be an option, the ultimate solution would be recycling the waste, Scott said.
Platte admits with the growing population in Texas, the demand for electricity increases.
“Generally, I think it’s a great opportunity for the area to accept this thing and jump on it,” Platte said. “We need it.”
But he also agreed that the Calhoun County commissioner for Precinct 2 raised a valid point.
Commissioner Vernon Lyssy asked how the wildlife would be affected by a 6,000-acre lake that would serve as a cooling reservoir for the plant. Exelon has an option to buy with the Bob McCan family for 11,500 acres.
Scott responded that Exelon has a team drafting an environmental report for its Nuclear Regulatory Commission license application, which it hopes to submit in September.
Lyssy admitted everyone wants less expensive power and that residents need to become more informed about the nuclear plant.
“We still need to start looking at alternative ways of producing power,” Lyssy said.
President of the Conservative Club Connie Hunt said that Calhoun County as a whole seemed in favor of nuclear energy and that most worried about the safety aspect. But she said she thinks the industry has advanced enough to allay some fears.
“There’s really no guarantee,” she said, noting how trucks already come through the area with chemicals. “You just take the good with the bad.”
Residents wanted to know where the power produced by Exelon would go and where the power lines would be placed, but Scott said Exelon doesn’t make that call. He referred residents to Electric Reliability Council of Texas and AEP.
Electricity is hard to explain in that way, Ercot communications manager Dottie Roark said.
Ercot forecasts show the power supply is good until 2013, but with older plants shutting down, the reserve target will continually decrease without new power generation, leaving a huge gap to fill in 2029, Roark said.
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MinnPost
June 11, 2008
Given carbon-reduction goals, Minnesota begins to reconsider role, risks of nuclear power
By Ron Way
Legislative hearings will be held in early 2009 on whether to lift Minnesota's 16-year ban on building new nuclear power plants, a move spurred by policies to reduce carbon emissions linked to global warming.
Ironically, advocates of carbon-reduction policies are among the harshest critics of nuclear power, and efforts to remove the ban would surely rekindle sharp debate over the safety of producing electricity from plants that send no smoke from their stacks, but have no place to send their radioactive wastes.
"We're entering an era of nuclear relapse," said George Crocker of Lake Elmo, Minn. Crocker, who has opposed nuclear-power development since the 1970s, said he'd welcome hearings so that the multiple concerns over nuclear power could be repeated.
And a leading legislative authority on energy matters, Rep. Bill Hilty, DFL-Finlayson, said hearings on lifting the ban could stimulate broader discussions on the sustainability of energy growth rates.
Looking for a sustainable model
"We need to think about our power needs in terms of finding an economic and social model that's sustainable," Hilty said. "Meantime, the issue of nuclear power isn't going to go away."
Initial discussions of the sensitive issue are likely as early as this Thursday, when the joint legislative Electric Energy Task Force meets in St. Paul to hear carbon-reduction suggestions from the 55-member Minnesota Climate Change Advisory Group (MCCAG) appointed last year by Gov. Tim Pawlenty.
MCCAG has made sweeping recommendations on ways that the state can aggressively reduce carbon emissions as mandated in the 2007 Next Generation Energy Act. Embedded in the group's final report is a recommendation "that the state commission a study on the costs and risks of installing a nuclear power station in Minnesota in the post-2025 period."
However, acting in January on preliminary MCCAG recommendations, the Pawlenty administration went beyond its own advisory group and told legislators that the nuclear power ban should be erased. The policy is consistent with one supported nationally by Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain of Arizona; Pawlenty is one of McCain's national co-chairs.
Some Gore, Franken interest
Al Gore, who won a Nobel Prize for his film about global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth," has suggested that nuclear power should be considered as an alternative to coal-fired power plants. DFL Senate candidate Al Franken has also indicated an interest in nuclear power.
Last week, Edward Garvey, director of the newly created Minnesota Office of Energy Security, reiterated Pawlenty's support for removing the ban on nuclear power.
"It makes sense to talk about this, and the (Electric Energy) task force is a good place to start," said Sen. Steve Dille, R-Dassel, co-author with Sen. Steve Murphy, DFL-Red Wing, of legislation to lift the nuclear ban.
Coincidentally, the 20-member legislative task force was created as one result of impassioned debate in the early '90s over whether to allow added storage of spent — though still highly radioactive — fuel rods at Xcel Energy's 1,000-megawatt Prairie Island nuclear power plant near Red Wing. Xcel also operates the 600-megawatt Monticello nuclear plant, and together the plants produce nearly a quarter of the state's electricity.
Dille is a member of the task force that is co-chaired by Hilty and Sen. Yvonne Prettner Solon of Duluth. Hilty and Prettner Solon also chair House and Senate energy committees.
Bill to lift ban would get hearings
Hilty has told House authors of a measure to lift the nuclear ban, DFL Reps. Tom Huntley of Duluth of Tim Mahoney of St. Paul, that he would hear their bill. Prettner Solon said her committee would honor a request to hear the bill, which Dille said will be made.
Revived interest in nuclear power has been seen in Minnesota and elsewhere as policies advance to reduce emissions of carbon, which is linked to global warming. Most of Minnesota's electricity comes from coal-fired plants, which — along with cars and other vehicles — emit the preponderance of carbon linked to climate change.
Dille said that the carbon-reduction policies have "given legs" to nuclear-power proponents. While nuclear plants have attracted concerns for other reasons, they do not emit carbon.
Already, two events in Minnesota have been directed at carbon-spewing coal plants. One was an order by the Pollution Control Agency for a full environmental review of a proposed ethanol plant near Erskine, Minn., in part because the energy source would be coal. And last week the Public Utilities Commission delayed a decision on granting a certificate of need for transmission lines into Minnesota from the Big Stone II power plant at Millbank, S.D., in key part because the 500-megawatt plant would burn coal.
The two actions, while not finally decided, have signaled that the state is serious about moving ahead to limit carbon emissions.
Regional 'cap and trade' explored
In a related action, Republican Pawlenty and Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, are heading an effort to create a regional "cap and trade" program to set limits on carbon emissions. An initial report on how a program may be structured is due in September.
A similar effort to establish a national carbon-reduction effort advanced to the floor of the U.S. Senate last week, but was derailed by a Republican-led filibuster. It's expected to be revived next year.
Another nuclear-power advocate in the Minnesota Legislature, Sen. Jim Carlson, of Eagan, said that while radioactive-waste storage issues are a concern, "nuclear power will be on of the safest systems that we'll have in the next 100 years or more."
"No one has ever died from nuclear power in this country," Rep. Mahoney said, adding that in the time he's worked in both Prairie Island and Monticello nuclear plants he's accumulated less radioactivity "than one gets from an X-ray or a suntan." Mahoney acknowledged that hearings on lifting the nuclear ban would "open a can of worms," but added that the energy source should be in the mix of alternatives to burning coal for electrical production.
Capacity issues with wind energy
One of the most frequently discussed alternatives is wind energy, and giant windmills continue to spring up along a broad expanse of Buffalo Ridge in southwestern Minnesota to meet a state mandate that a quarter of the state's electricity be generated from renewable sources like wind by 2025.
"There isn't enough capacity from wind," Mahoney said. "And if people want to use their flat-screen TVs and big computers, where do they think the power will come from?"
At least four states — Wisconsin, Illinois, California, and Kentucky — are considering lifting their bans on nuclear power. Several southern U.S. states are moving ahead with plans to build nuclear plants, which currently produce a fifth of the nation's electricity.
Italy recently lifted its 20-year ban on nuclear power, primarily because of limited alternatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Several European countries have turned to nuclear power for similar reasons; France currently produces 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants.
In pointing to the need to consider nuclear power, Huntley referenced an article in Foreign Affairs that said worldwide energy demand will double in 50 years, even with "vigorous conservation."
Resource declines will raise costs, limit growth
But that, Hilty said, is not realistic. Dramatic decreases in energy resources, like that being experienced with oil, will limit growth simply because of equally dramatic cost increases.
He believes that major — and potentially catastrophic, if not managed — energy adjustments will become a social and economic imperative.
That's why Hilty successfully pushed this year for the creation of a legislative energy commission that will replace the Electric Energy Task Force in January.
Hilty said that a scarcity of uranium — the primary fuel of nuclear power plants — already is driving up prices to the extent that building a plant is becoming prohibitively expensive.
Crocker said the timeline to build a nuclear power plant is at least 12 years and that, together with increased costs, has meant that investors won't put their money into nukes.
Indeed, none of the advocates of lifting Minnesota's nuclear power ban is aware that the state's largest utility, Xcel Energy, or any others are even thinking about building a nuclear plant.
In the early '90s, safety was a major complaint against nuclear power. While the issue remains, there are indications that the concern has subsided.
Nearly four decades and no depository
When the Prairie Island plant was built in the 1970s, the Northern States Power Co. (since purchased by Xcel) assured state regulators that a federal depository for spent and radioactive fuel rods would be built. However, multiple federal attempts over nearly four decades to locate a site for such a depository have centered on burying waste under Nevada's Yucca Mountain. But the effort has become seared in a political maelstrom with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, leading the fight against it.
And while the U.S. Department of Energy has submitted an application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to develop the depository at Yucca Mountain, many critics say it will never be built. The site has been under review for 30 years.
All of which means that radioactive wastes must be stored at the site of nuclear plants, and places like Prairie Island and Monticello have run out of room. The last attempt to expand waste storage at Prairie Island met with furious opposition.
Sen. Carlson said he toured the site recently and is satisfied that new methods of waste storage are exceptionally safe.
--Ron Way, a former reporter for several Midwest newspapers, covers the environment and energy issues. He can be reached at rway [at] minnpost [dot] com.
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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
June 11, 2008
Energy initiatives proposed
Task force leaders call for renewable power push, relaxed rules for plants
By Thomas Content
tcontent@journalsentinel.com
Sun Prairie - Wisconsin's ban on nuclear power plants would be relaxed, in conjunction with plans to dramatically boost the state's reliance on wind turbines and other forms of renewable power between now and 2025, under a proposal unveiled Tuesday to members of the state's global warming task force.
A proposal by the two task force leaders - Tia Nelson, executive secretary of the state Board of Commissioners of Public Lands, and Roy Thilly, president and chief executive of Wisconsin Public Power Inc. - calls for the state to generate 25% of its electricity from renewable sources such as wind turbines by 2025. State law now requires that 10% of the electricity from state utilities must come from these sources by 2015, but the proposal would accelerate that mandate by two years.
On one of the most controversial matters before the panel, Nelson and Thilly suggested a compromise that would not overturn the nuclear reactor ban but would modify it to allow utilities to start planning for eventual construction of new reactors.
Wisconsin has two nuclear power plants, in Kewaunee and in Two Rivers, near Manitowoc.
Gone would be the provision that a federal storage site at Yucca Mountain, Nev., must be open before the state's utilities can start the planning process toward building a nuclear plant. The proposal opens the door for reprocessing of nuclear fuel or long-term storage of nuclear waste at nuclear reactors, where the spent nuclear fuel is stored today, Thilly said.
But the changes that would relax the ban would take effect only if the state agrees to the 25% renewable energy proposal and a massive investment in energy efficiency and conservation, which most experts agree is the least expensive way to curb emissions in the near term.
"We want to be clear that efficiency is the first priority," Thilly said.
Tuesday's proposal is designed to help the task force come to a consensus on a set of recommendations that would be forwarded to Gov. Jim Doyle in July, Nelson said.
The proposal "is intended to be compromise, and, as such, it is likely to have something for everyone to like and not to like," Thilly said.
Other proposals include:
• Task force support for a "state and local action plan" to encourage General Motors Corp. to consider building smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles at its Janesville factory rather than close the plant entirely.
• An energy-efficiency retrofit program that would focus on lower-income neighborhoods, as a way to create jobs in the energy-efficiency field and help lower-income residents save on utility bills.
• Endorsement of a national, or Midwest regional cap-and-trade system that would set a firm cap on emissions by power plants, industry and other sectors, and require annual reductions in emissions.
• Support for national vehicle emission standards that would be as stringent as those enacted by the state of California. The California standards were opposed by the Bush administration, and that matter is in litigation.
Compromises made
Under the renewable-energy proposal, the co-chairs also agreed to allow utilities to tap large hydroelectric projects, such as those on the drawing board in Manitoba, to help power companies meet the aggressive 25% goal for 2025.
At the same time, to boost jobs in the renewable energy sector in Wisconsin, the proposal calls for 10% of the state's electricity to come from Wisconsin-based sources - including wind power in the Great Lakes - by 2025.
"This is a very serious and long-term challenge," said Nelson, who said she worked with Thilly to try to come up with recommendations that addressed concerns of different stakeholder groups - including industry, utilities and environmental groups.
"We each made compromises," Nelson said. "If we had done it alone, we might have done it slightly differently."
Groups weigh in
Scott Manley, director of environmental policy for Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, said the business group supports construction of new nuclear plants but is concerned that other policies proposed Tuesday would drive up costs for paper companies and other industries.
It would be more appropriate for the federal government, rather than the state, to enact policies aimed at reducing global warming, he said.
Representatives of several environmental groups and the Forest County Potawatomi raised concerns about the proposal during the task force meeting.
Of particular concern to the Potawatomi, tribal attorney Jeff Crawford said, is the proposal allowing construction of hydroelectric dams in Manitoba, citing opposition of Indian nations in the Canadian province to the big dams.
Bruce Nilles of the Sierra Club said the task force should consider adding a provision that would bar construction of new coal-fired power plants in light of their heavy contribution of emissions of carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas.
Thilly said there is no explicit ban on coal plants, but that is addressed because each utility operating in the state would be required to file plans with state regulators demonstrating how it plans to cut carbon dioxide emissions.
A host of other recommendations weren't discussed Tuesday because the task force has already reached agreement on them.
Those include proposals to boost funding for mass transit, including endorsement of the KRM commuter rail extension from Kenosha to Milwaukee, and extension of Amtrak service from Milwaukee to Madison.
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Toledo Blade
June 11, 2008
Yucca, some day
ALTHOUGH the U.S. Department of Energy has finally submitted an application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, don't expect to waste to be shipped there anytime soon. The application review process alone could take three or four years. After that, the DOE still could face more political maneuvering before - and if - spent nuclear fuel is buried at the site, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Filing the application doesn't mean we are closer to seeing nuclear waste shipped from temporary sites around the country to a permanent site in Nevada. This $10 billion project has been under way for 20 years. The DOE should have filed the application in 1989, or at the latest, in 2004. Obviously, though, those deadlines were missed, and both times it was under the presidencies of Bush I and Bush II.
Now, some say the future of Yucca Mountain depends on who is elected president. But that notion is debunked by the lengthy review process, which could stretch to the end of the next presidential term.
It is true that the presumptive nominees view the issue differently. Republican Sen. John McCain says he would do what's necessary to build the nuclear waste dump, presumably in Nevada. Democratic Sen. Barack Obama believes the federal government should identify a state more willing to become the nation's nuclear storage repository. Nevada is expected to file about 500 contentions against the DOE application. Nevertheless, the issue is complicated because Nevada is seen as a swing state in what is expected to be a close presidential election. We hope neither side puts off or avoids doing the right thing for a handful of electoral votes.
Meanwhile, it's difficult to argue with Senator Obama on one point: He says it could take years before nuclear waste is shipped to Yucca Mountain. He may be right. Numerous details have yet to be resolved, including how the DOE would respond in an emergency.
While all this foot dragging goes on, though, the public is at risk. Some 2,000 tons of commercial waste is produced annually, and the radioactive material is temporarily stored at 121 sites in 39 states. That's unacceptable.
To be sure, we live in an era far different from the era when the first application deadline was set. Now, fears of terrorism demand that things are done differently, efficiently, and safely. That's why it's not just foolish to keep nuclear waste in different places. It's an outrage.
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Lincoln Journal
June 11, 2008
Stuart-Vail: Taking out the garbage
“If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge you might like to buy.” That’s what I thought when I read that the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, has issued a standard for a nuclear waste dump proposed for Nevada, designed to be protective for 10,000 years.
But wait — it gets better: I read further in the story, written by H. Josef Hebert of the Associated Press, published in the Washington Post (June 3): a federal court said that was “inadequate” — the EPA “must establish a standard shown to be protective for up to 1 million years.”
There’s a law — a 1982 law requiring the federal government to accept the spent fuel from commercial power plants. A central “repository” was supposed to be available by 1998. Since 1987, Yucca Mountain has been the only waste site under study, and according to Ken Ritter of Associated Press, writing in Salon.com (June 4), “planning has been beset by delays, funding shortfalls and questions about quality assurance since 2002.”
What a thrill that must give residents of Nevada: “We’re going to build a nuclear waste repository in your state, a bit northwest of Las Vegas, and not far from Death Valley National Park! We’ve drilled a 6- billion dollar tunnel deep into volcanic rock, where we’re going to put the canisters of used reactor fuel from nuclear power plants all over the country.” I can imagine the voters of Nevada, in unison, shouting a “NIMBY” war-cry.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat, has been adamant in rejecting the Bush administration’s fumbling attempts to force Nevada to accept the Yucca Flats waste dump. Governor Jim Gibbons promised to fight it, saying it “threatens the life and safety of the people of Nevada.”
According to Joseph Romm, writing in Salon.com (June 2), “no nuclear plants have been ordered.” “Once touted as ‘too cheap to meter,’ nuclear power simply became “too costly to matter,” (a quote from The Economist in May 2001). He states that nuclear power plant construction costs have gone up 185 percent from 2000 through October of 2007.
More than 100 nuclear reactors have been canceled before operation in the last 20 years, including every plant ordered since the Three Mile Island accident in the late 1970's.
Romm’s essay titled, “Nuclear Bomb,” makes the point that other technologies can deliver more low-carbon power at far less cost. He quotes an MIT study in 2003, “The Future of Nuclear Energy,” as concluding that the prospects for nuclear energy as an option are limited by many “unresolved problems.” Two of these problems are high relative cost and long-term waste management.
Charles Komanoff, an energy policy analyst in New York, gives a comparison of wind power and nuclear reactor subsidies. He says that for the period 1950-1990, reactor subsidies totaled $3.75 billion every year, while wind power subsidies from 1983-2007 totaled the same amount, $3.75 billion, for the entire 25-year period.
On the campaign stump, Sen. John McCain has been heard to say that France gets 80 per cent of its electricity from nuclear plants. That may be true. France also gets spent nuclear fuel from seven other countries, in addition to its own waste. In a report early this year from the Cherbourg peninsula, datelined “Beaumont-Hague, France,” the Associated Press’s Angela Charlton wrote: “Thousands of canisters of highly radioactive waste from the world’s most nuclear-energized nation lie, silent and deadly, beneath this jutting tip of Normandy.”
The story, carried by the Seattle Examiner (Jan. 20), described the waste — the spent fuel, as being in “interim storage,” vitrified into blocks of black glass that will remain dangerous for thousands of years. This stuff is 10 feet underground — more than 7,000 steel canisters, each “about the height of a parking meter.”
There doesn’t seem to be any really safe place to put the garbage, yet nuclear advocates in America continue to press for new construction.
Recycling — reprocessing nuclear waste into new fuel — is being done in France, Russia and Japan. Recycling reduces the volume. But the recycling process produces plutonium, which could be used in nuclear weapons. The United States fears nuclear proliferation, so recycling is banned in this country, leaving us with an enormous radioactive waste problem. Who's going to take out the garbage?
--Rob Stuart-Vail is a regular Lincoln Journal contributor.
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Reno Gazette-Journal
June 10, 2008
Nuclear commission must reject Yucca Mountain application
Catherine Cortez Masto
After years of delays and anticipation, the U.S. Department of Energy submitted its license application for the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on June 3.
Nevada's experts reviewed the license application and quickly concluded that it is neither viable nor complete under applicable NRC regulations. Therefore, I directed our state's legal team to challenge this filing and request that NRC decline to docket it and return it to DOE until such time as the missing information can be provided and the requisite rules and regulations governing a Yucca Mountain license application are fully in place.
The long-anticipated license application, filed at the behest of DOE higher-ups and representatives in the commercial nuclear power industry, represents a continuation of the poor quality work and unsound science that Nevadans have been subjected to for far too many years. Some of the more glaring deficiencies in the fatally deficient application include:
Lack of a final radiation health protection standard against which DOE's proposed repository is to be evaluated. This factor alone is enough to have the application declared premature and immediately rejected.
Lack of final NRC repository licensing regulations.
Absence of a final design for the repository.
Absence of final design information for the multipurpose canister system that is intended to store, transport and dispose of spent fuel.
Reliance on engineered barriers (thousands of titanium drip shields) for meeting health and safety standards that DOE does not intend to install in the repository until 300 years after waste has been emplaced, assuming they can be installed at all given the scarcity of titanium and the staggering costs involved.
DOE continues to try to push this project through without living up to its promise to rely on sound science and protecting the safety of our citizens. Nevadans deserve an honest and more respectful effort from their federal representatives. We didn't get that with this license application. Unfortunately, it appears Nevada once again will not get a fair shake from DOE. Therefore, I will not stand by and acquiesce to a continuing course of conduct that will injure the people of this state.
The license application comes at a time when public distrust of DOE is at an all-time high. Recent surveys undertaken by Clark County and the state show more than two-thirds of Nevadans strongly distrust DOE. After more than 25 years of trying to make Yucca Mountain work by manipulating regulations, covering up flaws and by even falsifying and manipulating data, this clearly deficient license application only serves to reinforce and further deepen the distrust Nevadans have for this project.
DOE appears to have lost touch with the fact that the nation is moving away from Yucca Mountain and toward more realistic and workable solutions. Formerly ardent Yucca supporters like Sen. Pete Domenici and representatives of the nuclear industry are advocating putting Yucca on the back burner in favor of pursuing interim storage, reprocessing and other approaches. Even former Sen. Bennett Johnston, the architect of the 1987 legislation that singled out Yucca Mountain in the first place, has acknowledged that Yucca was a mistake and the nation should be looking for solutions elsewhere.
NRC should reject the license application submitted by DOE, decline to docket it and return it to DOE. Such action on the part of NRC will avoid unnecessary and wasteful expenditures of resources by NRC staff and other potential parties who would otherwise be required to initiate a full review of an enormous license application that is hopelessly incomplete and cannot possibly be the subject of a complete or efficient review.
Nevada is not a wasteland and its state and federal leaders stand united in this historic fight to block development of the proposed high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.
Catherine Cortez Masto is Nevada attorney general.
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Reno Gazette-Journal
June 5, 2008
After 25 years of trying to stop it in its tracks, Nevada officials should celebrate the U.S. Department of Energy's Tuesday filing of a license application for the long-delayed nuclear waste repository in Southern Nevada.
For years, the state has been shooting at a moving target in its opposition to the plan to store tons of waste from nuclear power plants, none of which are in Nevada, under Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Now, however, the burden is on the DOE to prove that it has done all of its homework and that the proposed plan will provide a safe and effective place to store the waste. That waste has been piling up around the country while millions have been spent trying to force the repository on a state that doesn't want it.
It is critical to remember that, despite numerous promises by federal officials, including President George W. Bush, to let the science determine whether Yucca Mountain is an appropriate location for the dump, the decision to concentrate on the Nevada site was wholly political.
The process began with three possible sites. The decision to stop studying sites in New Mexico and Louisiana ostensibly was based on science but, in fact, was made under intense political pressure, primarily from the then-chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, Sen. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana. Johnston's effort to force the DOE to focus on the Nevada site became known as the "Screw Nevada" bill.
Since then, Nevada officials have raised countless questions about the process. Contractors have been caught massaging the data to fit the legal requirements for the license application, and, when the data didn't fit, officials have sought to change the requirements so they do fit.
On Wednesday, with the application for a license finally filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Agency and facing a review that could last three years, the state was able to pinpoint further objections. Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto filed the first challenge, arguing that the application lacks an Environmental Protection Agency radiation standard (a court rejected a previous attempt to use a lower standard), is missing important information about transportation and canister design and has other serious flaws.
So the fight goes on.
Most of this could have been avoided. Congress could have stayed out of the fray and allowed the science to go forward as originally envisioned. More important, Congress could have questioned the original premise of storing the nuclear waste underground and out of sight while the rest of the world was going in a different direction -- mostly toward reprocessing of spent fuel. (Elsewhere on this page, John Scire, adjunct professor of political science at the University of Nevada, offers one alternative to the repository.)
Instead, the federal government -- pressed by the nuclear power industry -- has wasted 20 years and millions of dollars on a project that Nevada officials are determined to keep out of their state.
On Tuesday, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said that the licensing application can "stand up to any challenge anywhere." We shall see.
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E/The Environmental Magazine
June 10, 2008
The Dumping Ground Debate
Reporting by Roddy Scheer
The Bush administration is pushing harder to deposit nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. Last week, it revived efforts to site a central repository for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste in the Nevada range by filing a formal construction license application for review by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman told reporters that the facility can “stand up to any challenge anywhere,” noting that issues of health safety have been a primary concern during the planning process.
According to a law passed in 1982, the federal government is contractually required to accept the spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants and was to have had a central repository ready a decade ago. But efforts have been delayed by Nevada politicians citing public health and safety concerns—particularly long-time Democratic Senator Harry Reid. The Bush administration, long a proponent of nuclear energy, is tired of waiting, and sees getting Yucca Mountain approved as part of its legacy—if it can convince the Nuclear Regulatory Commission first.
Reid thinks the waste ought to stay where it is—currently it is spread out across 121 sites around the country—until a better long-term solution is reached that doesn’t endanger the lives of Nevada residents. He said in a statement that he and other Nevada lawmakers “will continue working ... to kill the dump.”
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EP Magazine
June 10, 2008
County, McCain Express Views on Yucca Mountain
The Clark County (Nev.) Commission will formally renew its opposition to the Yucca Mountain Project and proclaim June 2008 as "Yucca Mountain Awareness Month" at its regularly scheduled board meeting on June 3, according to a press release.
"The Commission's staunch opposition to the repository has been steadfast," said Commission Chair Rory Reid. "We have two decade's worth of scientific, technical, and socioeconomic study with which to provide meaningful input to the licensing process."
The Department of Energy is expected to submit its license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission this month. Clark County intends to actively participate in the upcoming licensing proceeding.
Clark County has opposed the project, intended to store the nation's high-level nuclear waste and spent nuclear fuel at Yucca Mountain, for more than 20 years. The site is located approximately 100 miles from Las Vegas.
In related news, presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain said that there may not be a need for a nuclear waste storage facility.
"I would seek to establish an international repository for spent nuclear fuel that could collect and safely store materials overseas that might otherwise be reprocessed to acquire bomb-grade materials," McCain (R-Ariz.) said in a speech on international nuclear security at the University of Denver.
"It is even possible that such an international center could make it unnecessary to open the proposed spent fuel storage facility at Yucca Mountain," McCain said
Randy Scheunemann, McCain's senior foreign policy adviser, said the idea of an international repository is only practical in Siberia.
McCain's regional spokesman, Jeff Sadosky, said McCain is "just looking at new proposals out there. He believes they have merit and should be looked at because they could potentially alleviate the need for the Yucca Mountain site."
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Nuclear Engineering
June 10, 2008
Yucca application submitted
The US Department of Energy (DoE) has submitted an application to build the country’s first long-term geologic spent fuel repository.
The DoE began studying Yucca Mountain as a potential site for a long-term repository for spent fuel and high-level waste in 1978. Three decades on, on 6 June 2008, it filed a construction application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to build a geologic repository for spent fuel and high-level radioactive waste at the site in the Nevada desert 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The construction licence application runs to 8600 pages backed up by tens of thousands of pages of documentation. The NRC expects the preliminary process of checking over and 'docketing' the application to take until mid autumn, after which work will start on a review including safety analysis and public hearings and expected to involve more than 100 staff and contractors from disciplines including geochemistry, hydrology, climatology, structural geology, volcanology, seismology, health physics, and civil, mechanical, nuclear, mining, materials and geological engineering. The NRC said it anticipates the review to take four years – the statutory three-year review timetable as laid down by the US Congress plus a one-year extension – making construction unlikely to begin before 2013 at the earliest. The US Office for Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM), which will be responsible for building and operating the site, currently identifies 31 March 2017 as the best-achievable startup date for receiving spent fuel.
The US Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 made the DoE responsible for finding a site, building and operating a geologic repository for the country’s spent fuel and high-level radioactive waste. Nine potential sites under consideration in 1983 were subsequently narrowed down to three, and in 1987 Congress directed the DoE to pursue only one of them, Yucca Mountain. The final legislative vote approving the development of a repository at the site was passed by the Senate in 2002.
Work started on an Exploratory Studies Facility at Yucca Mountain in 1993 and by 1998 a five-mile main tunnel with several connected research areas off it plus a 1.7-mile cross drift tunnel had been built to enable detailed site characterisation studies to be performed. The OCRWM estimates that about $9 billion has been spent on Yucca Mountain so far, and the cost for the expected lifecycle of the programme (136 years from 1983 to 2119) to be $58 billion.
Despite the 2002 Senate approval of the site, the future construction of a repository at Yucca Mountain is still subject to the vagaries of the prevailing politics. In January 2008 the site was reduced to running on a skeleton staff after the US government decided to cut its budget for the fourth consecutive year. The state of Nevada has long fought against the project, and continues to do so. Only days after the application was filed, Nevada governor Jim Gibbons said in a press release: “We must continue the fight against this ill-conceived project”. Democratic presidential nominee Barak Obama has gone on record as opposing Yucca Mountain on the grounds of its unsuitability as a site. Republican candidate John McCain has not spoken out against the project but said in May that he would be seeking to establish an international repository for spent nuclear fuel that "could make it unnecessary to open the proposed spent nuclear fuel storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.”
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CaliforniaRepublic
June 10, 2008
Corn, Imported Oil, Nukes, and Global Warming
by Chuck DeVore
Having a healthy suspicion of politicians’ motives and public statements is a good thing in a representative democracy. There is no better example of this than in America’s perennially messed up energy policy, which favors federal subsidies over actual energy generation, and in the process, makes us hostage to foreign oil while hurting the environment at the same time. Case in point: America’s ongoing infatuation with turning corn into fuel while ignoring proven ways of bringing energy to market, such as building nuclear power plants or drilling for more oil and gas.
Congress passed H.R. 6 in July 2005. The Energy Bill was dubbed, “A bill to ensure jobs for our future with secure, affordable, and reliable energy.” The final vote in the U.S. Senate on this lard-loaded bill was 74-26, with Presidential contender Sen. John McCain and both California Senators Boxer and Feinstein voting “nay” while corn-state Senator Barack Obama voted “yea.” What were they voting for? Huge subsidies to U.S. farmers to grow corn and turn it into fuel. Preventing oil and gas drilling both off shore and in Alaska. And, loan guarantees to help revive the nuclear power industry.
During debate on the bill in June, Senators Feinstein, Boxer and Obama voted to send the bill back to the House. Sen. McCain, as McCain is ought to do, stubbornly voted “nay,’ hewing to his principled opposition to pork barrel politics. During the debate, Sen. Boxer summarized the environmental left’s concerns with the bill as it was taking shape, opposing any effort to drill for America’s oil and gas resources offshore, opposing the ability to import liquefied natural gas, and opposing nuclear power. To Boxer’s credit, she expressed skepticism over ethanol’s environmental impact. McCain’s opposition was mainly rooted in corn ethanol’s huge federal subsidies, already totaling well over $40 billion in the 10 years before the 2005 vote in the Senate.
California legislators have gotten into the act as well, introducing multiple bills to increase the use of ethanol, cut greenhouse gas emissions by mandate, and reduce oil production – all in the name of the environment. That many of the bills operate at cross purposes to each other or to federal law is no matter; the appearance of action is more important than outcome in the Alice in Wonderland world of politics.
The benefit of experience has now shown us what uncritical listening to political pressure groups can give us. Corn ethanol has been touted by a phalanx of groups from the right and left, including environmental organizations such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, national security conservatives, and, of course, the farm industry. Corn ethanol’s central promise was that it would enhance “energy security” by reducing oil imports while reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.
The facts of corn ethanol are otherwise. In exchange for what amounts to a whopping $0.51 per gallon subsidy for ethanol blenders (reduced to $0.45 per gallon in the recent Farm Bill), American farmers have produced record amounts of corn. This has resulted in making a fuel that takes more energy to produce than we get out of it, increased food prices around the world, increased use of fossil fuel-based fertilizers and pesticides, and increased greenhouse gas emissions.
How did this happen? To grow more corn, farmers reduced soy bean production, much of which shifted to Brazil. To grow more soy beans, Brazilians cut down rain forest – this, of course, has ruinous implications for greenhouse gas emissions, one of the supposed benefits of turning corn into vehicle fuel.
In addition to being bad environmental policy, corn ethanol subsidies have added misery to the world’s poor. According to U.S. Department of Agriculture, about one-fifth of the big run-up in world food prices has been caused by U.S. corn-ethanol subsidies. International organizations peg food price increases due to corn ethanol much higher, at 40 percent. With food riots in Mexico, Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, and Haiti, our corn ethanol subsidies are dangerously immoral as well as foolish.
Less than a month ago, I had the chance to summarize my opposition to corn ethanol subsidies at an educational symposium. "Energy Alternatives: America's Challenge in the Global Economy" was sponsored by the University of California, Irvine, the Milken Institute, and the New Majority California Energy Task Force on May 13. Speaking on a panel immediately after former governor, and current California State Attorney General Jerry Brown spoke – surprisingly, Brown had favorable words for nuclear power – I boosted modern nuclear power as a way to reduce greenhouse gases and reduce our reliance on imported fossil fuels.
During my talk I warned that not every renewable energy source is helpful in the effort to address global warming, specifically singling out corn ethanol because it is, "…destroying Brazilian rainforest as soybean production has shifted from the U.S., it is also starving people in the third world and causing unrest."
My remarks caused a bit of a stir, causing another panelist, Anne Korin, an energy policy analyst and co-chair of the Set America Free coalition and a director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (IAGS), to strongly defend corn ethanol at the conclusion of the conference. Ms. Korin passionately stated that corn ethanol is not causing a rise in world food prices since American farmers are exporting more grain than ever. She also emphatically disputed the notion that corn ethanol was causing any destruction of the Amazonian rainforest, pointing out that sugar cane is grown outside of the rainforest region in Brazil.
As I previously cited, Anne Korin's first statement regarding food prices is flat wrong according to government officials who track such things. Further, to someone in the third world spending 80 percent of their income on food, any increase in the cost of food is devastating and can push their family into starvation. That U.S. farm and energy policy is abetting this artificial famine is unconscionable.
Ms. Korin's second assertion completely misses the mark. I never linked the destruction of the rainforest in Brazil to sugar cane; rather, I linked it to the U.S. appetite for corn ethanol which has displaced domestic soybean production to nations such as Brazil where they have cut down rainforest to put more land into production. According to a study by the University of Minnesota and the Nature Conservancy published in Science in February, 2008, increased demand for corn ethanol is contributing to the conversion of the Brazilian Amazon into farmland as Brazilian farmers grow the soybeans U.S. farmers used to grow.
If we want more affordable ethanol, the best U.S. policy would be to drop our $0.54 per gallon tariff on ethanol imported from nations such as Brazil where they make ethanol from sugar cane. Sugar cane, by the way, is eight times more efficient at making fuel than corn and it is grown in the southern U.S.
Better yet, we can open up Alaska and our offshore territories to oil and gas drilling. Rather than begging the Saudis to pump more oil we should pump more of our own – sadly, that would require our living in the real world where hard choices have to be made.
Further, we should produce far more clean and affordable electricity, using nuclear power, rather than coal and natural gas. If global warming is the problem many say it is, then nuclear power has to play a major role in its solution since nuclear power makes the most amount of energy for the least amount of greenhouse gas emissions of any source of energy. Fortunately, after some 30 years of effort, the Department of Energy a few days ago finally applied for a license to operate Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a repository for spent nuclear fuel. Too bad we are not yet doing what the French do: recycle nuclear fuel, reducing waste by about 96 percent.
The bottom line is this: we need to base our energy and global greenhouse gas reduction policies on sound science and economics, not simply on what may be good for a few well-placed interest groups. CRO
--Chuck DeVore represents 450,000 people in the California State Assembly in coastal Orange County. He retired from the Army National Guard as a lieutenant colonel. From 1986 to 1988 he was a Reagan White House appointee in the Pentagon. DeVore co-authored China Attacks with Steven Mosher. The book was translated into Chinese for sale in Taiwan. See: www.ChuckDeVore.com.
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Topeka Capital Journal
June 10, 2008
Energy Solutions — Prospects dim
Government leaders seem to have unplugged themselves from creating power policy
The Capital-Journal Editorial Board
Kansans trying to make some sense of the recent battle between the Legislature and Gov. Kathleen Sebelius over the expansion of a coal-fired power plant near Holcomb might find a small measure of comfort in knowing they aren't the only ones struggling with the energy issue.
Just as we have no well-defined energy policy here in Kansas, there appears to be no sense of urgency by a majority in Washington, D.C., to draft a national energy policy.
The U.S. Senate last week voted to work a bill that calls for fighting global warming by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by 18 percent by 2020 and by 66 percent by 2050. By week's end, a filibuster by Republican senators had stalled action on the legislation. The debate and any action will be left to the next Congress and president.
Also last week, the Bush administration filed an application for a construction license for a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
The proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository is the gorilla of all NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) projects. The repository site, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is being designed to hold 77,000 tons of used reactor fuel from nuclear power plants. That fuel now is stored at the power plants that used it.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that Nevada politicians oppose construction of the repository. They contend that the Energy Department hasn't proved the waste can be safely stored there and that it should remain where it is until the best solution is found for dealing with it.
What they're really saying is: Not in Nevada, not ever.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will have three years to review the application. If construction starts anytime soon after that, the underground site still wouldn't be completed until 2020. Meanwhile, nuclear utilities are suing the federal government to recover their waste storage costs incurred because Yucca Mountain wasn't open in 1998 as planned.
That the nuclear waste repository and greenhouse gas measures both face long, hard roads before anything will actually be accomplished — if indeed it ever is — is an indication of just how far we are from anything resembling a national energy policy that can be counted on to meet a growing demand for energy and guide future development.
Supporters of the Senate bill say a "pollution allowance trading system" included in the measure would raise $6.7trillion over 40 years to be used for further development of wind, solar and nuclear power, despite the lack of a waste repository. Opponents of the measure say it's a massive spending bill that will be fueled by tax increases.
The global warming issue and the role of greenhouse gases are still being hotly contested while energy experts contend current wind and solar technologies can't produce sufficient energy to satisfy the country's growing appetite — never mind replacing energy now generated by other sources.
In such an environment, what's really needed is an assessment of the country's energy needs for at least the next several decades and a realistic plan to meet those needs in the safest and most efficient and economical manner.
At this point, it's clear there is no magic source that will meet the country's energy needs. Any realistic, comprehensive plan will have to rely on a mix of power derived from carbon-based fuels, wind and solar technology and, perhaps, even new nuclear plants.
We only hope the next Congress and president are up to the task.
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Knoxville News Sentinel
June 10, 2008
Brass: Nuke waste has to go somewhere
By Larisa Brass
A handful of releases over the past two weeks have pointed to an issue that has gotten a lot of attention lately as power producers across the country get back into the nuclear business: waste.
First, though, some definitions.
There are two major categories of nuclear waste. High-level waste refers to highly radioactive materials produced as the by-product of a nuclear reaction. The high-level waste generated by nuclear power reactors is simply the used, or spent, rods of enriched uranium that fuel the reactor.
The second type of waste, low-level waste, includes items that have become contaminated with radioactive material or have become radioactive through exposure to neutron radiation. At TVA's nuclear reactors, these are items usually associated with work at the nuclear reactors and include clothing, tools, equipment and resins used in the plants' water treatment processes.
Now, to the news.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission late last month issued guidelines regarding on-site storage of low-level waste, because, as of July 1, TVA and other low-level waste producers across the country will begin storing more of that on site when a storage facility in Barnwell, S.C., stops accepting waste from all but three states.
To make things even more complicated, there are three classes of waste - A, B and C - which mark the hazard level of wastes within the low-level category, class A being least hazardous. The Barnwell site accepts classes B and C, and come July 1, TVA will have to store that debris at home.
TVA has long known of the Barnwell closure, and the agency has been in preparation mode, said TVA spokesman John Moulton.
Between 2005 and 2007, TVA's nuclear reactors generated an average of 5,000 cubic feet of all classes of low-level waste per reactor per year, Moulton said. About one-sixth of that waste bore B or C classification and went to Barnwell, he said.
TVA's Browns Ferry in Alabama has enough storage capacity for 18 years' worth of the low-level waste. Its Sequoyah site near Chattanooga has a 45-year capacity and is also storing low-level waste from Watts Bar, which does not have its own storage facilities.
TVA spokesman Craig Beasley, based at Browns Ferry, said the plant for years has been working to reduce the amount of contaminated waste generated in order to have to store as little as possible.
"Nothing goes into the radiologically controlled area that isn't monitored when it goes out," Beasley said. "We have for the longest time said don't take anything into that you don't need to."
Energy Solutions, which handles TVA's class A low-level radioactive waste - mostly trash, clothing, shoe covers etc., according to Moulton - last week announced renewal of its contract with the agency. This waste is packaged by Energy Solutions at its Bear Creek facility in Oak Ridge and then transported to permanent storage in Clive, Utah.
As for high-level radioactive waste, last week the NRC announced the Department of Energy had applied for a permit to build a geological repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
However, given its more than 20-year history of community and political opposition to the project, nobody's holding their breath that the promised resting place for America's highly radioactive leftovers will open anytime soon.
So, who cares about all this nuclear trash anyway?
Well, with a nuclear renaissance under way in response to the cost and limitations of fossil fuels, the price of natural gas and the carbon-laden legacy of coal, the question arises of what to do with all the contaminated remnants of nuclear power generation.
Of particular interest is the high-level waste - TVA and other generators favor reprocessing, and TVA has received $1.4 million from DOE to develop preliminary design for such a facility. But, as demonstrated by Barnwell's closure, low-level waste can pile up, too. Moulton said he knew of no new repositories opening to accept these classes of waste.
It's the classic case of not in my backyard. How about yours?
--Business writer Larisa Brass may be reached at 865-342-6318.
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Minnesota Public Radio
June 10, 2008
Yucca Mountain and the fight over nuclear power
The Bush administration wants to store the nation's nuclear waste at the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada, but opponents are concerned about safety, and the implications for expanding U.S. nuclear power.
Guests
Stephen Power: covers Department of Energy regulatory issues and the environment for the Wall Street Journal.
Jim Riccio: Nuclear policy analyst with Greenpeace.
Steven Kraft: Senior director for used fuel management at the Nuclear Energy Institute.
Listen to program:
http://www.publicradio.org/tools/media/player/news/midmorning/2008/06/09_midmorn1
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Hartford Advocate
June 10, 2008
News Briefs: Rell says Yucca Mountain is the place for the state's nuclear waste
Dan D'Ambrosio
Governor Backs Yucca Mountain
Connecticut is all for storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, a controversial proposal by the U.S. Department of Energy. The agency has applied to build the facility, which must be approved by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The DOE expects that approval process to take about three years, after which it could begin construction on the facility if the application is approved. Gov. M. Jodi Rell said Yucca Mountain is long overdue.
"The federal government has a responsibility—to Connecticut and to the nation—to see to it that these materials are stored safely, for the long term," said Rell.
Rell said Connecticut needs a long-term solution for storing spent fuel rods and other waste from Millstone Nuclear Power Plant in Waterford and from the closed Connecticut Yankee plant in Haddam Neck.
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KXNT
June 09, 2008
Governor Wants Yucca Mountain Meeting
Governor Jim Gibbons wants a meeting of state leaders to discuss the fight against the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository. Gibbons is asking members of Nevada's Congressional delegation, along with state nuclear and legal officials, to take part. The governor says he wants to make sure everyone is "on the same page" in the battle against the government's efforts to store the nation's nuclear waste at the site. Gibbons adds there are too many potential problems at Yucca Mountain, including "groundwater contamination," transportation of radioactive waste and the federal government's "encroachment on state rights." No date has been set for the meeting. Last week, the Department of Energy submitted its Yucca Mountain license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC now has 90 days to decide whether to move forward or reject the application.
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Legal NewsLine
June 09, 2008
Masto to asked to join Yucca Mountain opposition team
by Chris Rizo
CARSON CITY, Nev. (Legal Newsline)-Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto has been asked to participate in a coalition of state officials opposed to the planned nuclear repository at Yucca Mountain.
Republican Gov. Jim Gibbons last week called for a meeting of state officials and Nevada's congressional delegation to coordinate their opposition to the proposed nuclear waste repository in the remote Nevada desert.
"Now that the Department of Energy has submitted its application for Yucca Mountain to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it's essential that we are all on the same page in fighting this project," Gibbons said in a statement.
"We have many talented people objecting to Yucca for a wide variety of reasons. I simply want to be sure that we coordinate our efforts to maximize our chances to defeat this misguided project once and for all," he added.
In an earlier interview with Legal Newsline, Masto outlined her opposition to the Yucca Mountain project.
"There's been no proof that it is safe; there is concern about the health and welfare of the people who live here based on the contamination to the environment," she said. "The majority are opposed to it and rightfully so."
Masto told LNL that the Yucca Mountain project is "a concern for everyone in this state," noting that polls indicate that about 70 percent of Nevadans are opposed to the controversial project.
More recently, Masto said in a statement that the Department of Energy's review of the Yucca Mountain project comes amid "public distrust" of the federal agency.
"After more than 25 years of trying to make Yucca Mountain work by manipulating regulations, covering up flaws, and even falsifying and manipulating data, submission of this fraudulently defective Yucca (License Application) only serves to reinforce and further deepen that distrust," Masto said.
The controversial Yucca Mountain repository is decades behind schedule, causing nuclear waste to pile up at commercial power plants in 39 states, proponents say.
Since Congress finally approved the project in 2002, Nevada officials have tried to block the project, which was originally planned to open in 1996.
In addition to the Democratic attorney general and the state's congressional delegation, the governor has invited Agency for Nuclear Projects Executive Director Bob Loux, Conservation and Natural Resources Director Allen Biaggi, Nevada Division of Environmental Protection Administrator Leo Drozdoff, State Water Engineer Tracy Taylor, Public Safety Director Jerry Hafen and Health and Human Services Director Mike Willden.
--From Legal Newsline: Reach reporter Chris Rizo by e-mail at chrisrizo@legalnewsline.com.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
June 09, 2008
Letter: Let's make a deal
Because it appears inevitable that Yucca Mountain will be used for nuclear waste storage, and because the state is in need of money, why not accept the waste and charge the producers of it through the nose ("DOE files to build Yucca," Wednesday Review-Journal)? That would be better than having it shoved down our throats for nothing.
David Hayes
Las Vegas
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Reno Gazette-Journal
June 09, 2008
Reprocessing would make Yucca Mt. moot
John Anthony Scire
To date Nevada has successfully kept the nuclear waste out of Yucca Mountain. That may end with the election of a new president. Sen. John McCain is not opposed to Yucca Mountain provided that all the regulations are met and due process occurs. Sen. Barack Obama says he is against storing waste at Yucca Mountain, but he also supports nuclear power as a clean alternative to coal-fired plants.
The political reality is that many new nuclear plants are in the works, and the 104 current nuclear plants need to do something with the mountains of waste. Whoever wins will put nuclear waste in Yucca unless we come up with a viable alternative. That is political reality.
Plan A is to put the spent nuclear fuel rods in Yucca. Plan B (Sen. Harry Reid's plan) is to leave it where it is produced at nuclear plants all over the country, many close to or in urban areas.
But Reid's plan is a security nightmare waiting to happen. All it will take is one terrorist to fly an airplane into a pool of water in which the rods are currently being stored and we will have high level waste spread around the area and into the atmosphere.
The solution that I have proposed, and Sen. Pete Domenici has endorsed, is to reprocess the waste, re-use the plutonium and uranium in new fuel rods, and burn up the remaining very long-lived wastes in a fast neutron (aka burner, aka breeder) reactor. I recommend that we use a new reprocessing method, electro-metallurgical reprocessing, to extract the re-usable elements to make mixed oxide (MOX) fuel rods. This is already being done in this country and others to burn up the huge plutonium stocks left over from the Cold War. Electro-metallurgical reprocessing has been done at Idaho National Labs in an engineering-scale facility for the last 12 years with no adverse consequences.
To reduce the distance that spent fuel would have to be shipped, we should set up two centers. One would be in the East, centrally located for the reactors east of the Rockies, and one on the West Coast for the eight reactors in Washington, California and Arizona.
The Western site would be best sited at a current nuclear site such as Idaho National Labs or at the Palos Verdes nuclear power site in Arizona. No waste would ever need to go through Nevada.
Each site would have three structures: an electro-metallurgical separation facility, a MOX fuel rod fabrication facility, and a fast neutron reactor.
Once the cycle is complete, the remaining waste will only be 5 percent of the pre-processing total and will have a half-life of only 30 years, which would only require storage for 300 years. That residual waste could be stored on-site and would not be a viable terrorist target.
The reprocessed fuel would be more expensive than making new fuel from uranium ore. However, if the cost of storage for 10,000 years and Yucca is factored in, Plan C fuel would be much cheaper.
But more important than the cost, Plan C kills off the need for Yucca mountain storage. Yucca Mountain could then be used for what it is ideally suited, as a very large wine cellar.
--John Anthony Scire is adjunct professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno.
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Charleston Post Courier
June 09, 2008
Toward safe nuclear waste disposal
The Bush administration's application for a permit to build the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site should provide momentum for a needed project, which has been stalled by parochial opposition. The need for the disposal site waste will become more apparent as the pressure mounts for new sources of energy.
Unfortunately, the project has a well-placed opponent in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. Sen. Reid has taken a not-in-my-backyard approach and has used his congressional muscle to block its progress. Sen. Reid has described the disposal site as "a dying beast" and has promised to continue cutting its budget in an effort to "drive the final nail in its coffin," The Associated Press reported.
He has been supported by some anti-nuclear groups. But their arguments against nuclear power are faltering with the rising environmental concern over greenhouse gases produced by coal-fired power plants.
Ultimately, the biggest long-term impediment may be a court ruling that could require proof of safe storage for up to a million years, according to the AP. It's hard to fathom how such a long-term goal can be reasonably met. Unless the standard is revised by Congress, it will prove troublesome in the permitting process and in the courts.
Meanwhile, the federal government already is about 10 years beyond its own deadline for providing for a safe waste disposal site for commercial nuclear plants. Currently, the growing volume of waste is being stored on site at numerous locations nationwide.
Some defense-related waste eventually scheduled for relocation to Yucca is at the Savannah River Site in what is termed "temporary" storage. In a recent release, Gov. Mark Sanford referred to that unsettling situation as he cited the importance of building a permanent repository.
"Over the years, South Carolina has become an increasingly large temporary home to nuclear waste, and moving forward on this application is an important part of the federal government keeping promises that have been made to our state over the course of many years," Gov. Sanford said. "We believe Yucca Mountain to be an important part of our nation's future both when it comes to energy policy and security, and we're hopeful that this process will continue without delay."
The absence of a single, safe disposal site is a shortcoming in national security and national energy policy. The interior of a mountain in a desert location is a better solution for radioactive waste than scattered temporary sites across the nation.
Dale Klein, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, promised "an independent, rigorous and thorough examination to determine whether the repository can safely house the nation's high level waste." He stated that the agency's review will be "entirely on technical merits" — a welcome departure from the politics that have nearly derailed the process in recent years.
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Nevada Appeal
June 08, 2008
Why the Yucca application should be rejected
Catherine Cortez Masto
For the Appeal
The United States Department of Energy submitted its license application for the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository to the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission on June 3.
Nevada's experts reviewed the application and quickly concluded that it is neither viable nor complete. Therefore, I directed our state's legal team to request that NRC decline to docket it and return it to DOE until the missing information can be provided and the requisite rules and regulations are fully in place.
The long anticipated license application, filed at the behest of DOE higher-ups and representatives in the commercial nuclear power industry, represents a continuation of the poor quality work and unsound science that Nevadans have been subjected to for far too many years. Some of the more glaring deficiencies include:
*Lack of a final radiation health protection standard against which DOE's proposed repository is to be evaluated. This alone is enough to have the application immediately rejected.
*Lack of final NRC repository licensing regulations.
*Absence of a final design for the repository.
*Absence of final design information for the multipurpose canister system that is intended to store, transport and dispose of spent fuel.
*Reliance on engineered barriers (thousands of titanium drip shields) for meeting health and safety standards that DOE does not intend to install in the repository until 300 years after waste has been emplaced, assuming they can be installed at all given the scarcity of titanium and the staggering costs involved.
DOE continues to try to push this project through without living up to its promise to rely on sound science and protecting the safety of our citizens. Nevadans deserve an honest and more respectful effort from their federal representatives. We didn't get that with this license application. Unfortunately, it appears Nevada will once again not get a fair shake from DOE. Therefore, I will not stand by and acquiesce to a continuing course of conduct that will injure the people of this state.
The license application comes at a time when public distrust of DOE is at an all-time high. Recent surveys undertaken by Clark County and the state show more than two-thirds of Nevadans strongly distrust DOE. After more than 25 years of trying to make Yucca Mountain work by manipulating regulations, covering up flaws, and by even falsifying and manipulating data, this clearly deficient license application only serves to reinforce and further deepen the distrust Nevadans have for this project.
DOE appears to have lost touch with the fact that the nation is moving away from Yucca Mountain and toward more realistic and workable solutions. Formerly ardent Yucca supporters like Sen. Pete Domenici and representatives of the nuclear industry are advocating putting Yucca on the back burner in favor of pursuing interim storage, reprocessing and other approaches. Even former Sen. Bennett Johnston, the architect of the 1987 legislation that singled out Yucca Mountain in the first place, has acknowledged that Yucca was a mistake and the nation should be looking for solutions elsewhere.
NRC should reject the license application submitted by DOE, decline to docket it and return it to DOE. Such action on the part of NRC will avoid unnecessary and wasteful expenditures of resources by NRC staff and other potential parties who would otherwise be required to initiate a full review of an enormous license application that is hopelessly incomplete and cannot possibly be the subject of a complete or efficient review.
Nevada is not a wasteland and its state and federal leaders stand united in this historic fight to block development of the proposed high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.
--Catherine Cortez Masto is the Attorney General for the State of Nevada.
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Las Vegas SUN
June 08, 2008
Letter from Washington:
The indefatigable Harry Reid’s ‘difficult day’
By Lisa Mascaro
Washington — It was a busy week for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, even before Wednesday hit.
Reid leads the Democrats with a slim one-vote majority in an extremely partisan Washington. But on Monday two icons of the Senate were hospitalized, leaving him without beloved colleagues, and votes.
Then, on Tuesday, Nevada’s longstanding fight against Yucca Mountain flared as the federal government filed its much-anticipated application to construct the proposed nuclear waste dump 90 miles north of Las Vegas.
By nightfall Illinois Sen. Barack Obama became his party’s presumed presidential nominee, an epic moment overshadowed when rival Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York delivered a soaring speech without a concession line.
Then Wednesday arrived.
A day like this is a reminder of the skills and stamina, mental and otherwise, needed to run the Senate, which one former leader famously compared to herding cats. It was a very long day.
As the morning’s first coffee was being poured, a release from Reid and other Democratic leaders sat waiting in in-boxes.
Reid announced the presidential primary race was over — a signal shift for the leader who had remained neutral as his senators battled for the nomination. “The voters have spoken,” they wrote, setting a Friday deadline for uncommitted officials to declare their endorsements and unite the party.
As workers filed into the Capitol that morning, Reid went on to meet colleagues at a weekly Senate prayer breakfast.
From there he delivered a speech downtown before the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee, assuring that the Democratic nominee stands “four-square with Israel.”
Back in the Capitol he chatted about Nevada issues with a radio reporter for an interview to be broadcast in Laughlin and other Southern Nevada communities.
He spoke to Obama.
By midday word was circulating that Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, a senator who helps tip the chamber’s balance to Democrats, slammed Obama during a conference call on foreign policy. The Independent Democrat has infuriated his colleagues by supporting presumed Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain. But Reid is wary of punishing a colleague needed to keep the majority.
Then, as the lunch hour came to a close, Wednesday released its fury.
Republicans upstaged Reid’s plan for a debate on global warming by employing a procedural trick to force a full reading of the 491-page bill.
The Senate came to a standstill as a recital of whereas clauses sucked the air from the room.
Republicans said they were protesting a side issue — the lack of judicial nominees moving forward — but Democrats said they were avoiding the climate change debate. Reid was furious, but appeared to keep his cool.
He hosted 70 Nevada visitors at a reception in the Capitol. He gathered Nevada lawmakers to strategize their fight against Yucca Mountain.
He cracked jokes.
Shortly before 10 p.m., as bleary-eyed clerks read the final pages of the bill, Reid (up later than many grandpas his age) announced his revenge.
He stood by the podium and called for a procedural vote.
“People are going to have to take off their pajamas, turn off their TV sets and head for the Capitol,” he announced.
He had had enough.
For more than an hour, senators streamed to the chamber. Reid and the Republican leader mixed it up on the floor, as if they were the ones campaigning for office.
After midnight, as the new day began, Reid finally turned in.
Wednesday was long, but the week was still young. Between then and Friday he would recommit to Lieberman, pull the global warming bill from the floor, congratulate Clinton and endorse Obama.
“Difficult day,” Reid said in closing the chamber as Wednesday became Thursday. “But I have learned, being in the Senate, to put today behind you and move on to tomorrow.”
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Las Vegas SUN
June 08, 2008
‘Unbelievable’ as fiction, but a true life story
Hank Greenspun documentary spans colorful career
By Joe Brown
Hank Greenspun could have been a movie star. A charismatic tough guy, the Brooklyn kid who became a Las Vegas titan had the looks and the moxie and the derring-do, as they used to say. Years ago, Paul Newman talked about playing Greenspun on the big screen. Of today’s actors, perhaps only Alec Baldwin has the heft for the part.
It’s hard to believe no one has made a movie about him before now: “Where I Stand,” a documentary about Greenspun, the controversial, crusading editor and publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, will have its world premiere at this week’s 10th CineVegas film festival.
Calling it a documentary doesn’t do it justice. Moments after the opening credits roll, it turns into an adventure yarn that could give Indiana Jones a run for his money. Constantly surprising, it rips through escapades and indictments, disasters and triumphs, set against a backdrop of Vegas in its infancy, organized crime, nuclear testing, desegregation, Watergate, peace negotiations, Green Valley and Yucca Mountain. The cast includes gangsters and movie stars, sons and daughters. Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. Howard Hughes. Richard Nixon. Joe McCarthy. Shimon Peres. Kirk Kerkorian. Steve Wynn. Rose Marie.
In “Where I Stand,” Greenspun emerges as a “Zelig”-like figure — in Woody Allen’s 1983 film, Zelig is a nebbish who shows up in the background at every major event of the 20th century.
The difference is that Greenspun was a dynamic man who actually did enter some of the most seminal events in history.
“Or caused them,” says his son, Brian Greenspun, laughing.
“The Hank Greenspun story would be unbelievable as fiction,” says Scott Goldstein, who directed the film. “Here’s a guy who is recruited to run arms (to Israel after it became an independent nation) and becomes the largest arms runner, though he had no intention of doing it,” Goldstein says. “The guy is one of the first to publicly confront McCarthy and have the guts to do that before the trials. The guy works deals with Howard Hughes. He goes on and brokers an agreement to end discrimination on the Strip. The guy doesn’t like what’s going on in the world, so what does he do? He starts his own peace process in the ’80s.
“In the film,” Goldstein says, “we hear Hank say, ‘I needed to get a guy with Saudi connections. I had to look no further than the baccarat table at the Sands.’ Quick cut to Adnan Khashoggi. I’ve shown this to some people, who say ‘You’re making this (stuff) up!’?”
“When (Hank Greenspun) wrote his book (also called “Where I Stand”) in the ’60s, I remember some said it was ‘a real life James Bond,’?” says Brian Greenspun, now editor of the paper his father founded in 1950. “That’s how Hank’s life was. It was one episode, one surprise, one adventure after another. There was no cohesiveness to the adventures, they were so disparate. But there clearly was a theme. As they say in the movie — and I love this — ‘he bent the law to follow the straight law of justice.’
“As a family, we always knew that there was a story there. Ten years prior to this, we actually hired some screenwriters and talked to a lot of the big movie companies. We wanted to do a movie about his life. We kept being sent away with ‘Which story do you want told?’ As naive as we were, our answer was, well, we want his life story told. And they said, for the movies, you’ve got to pick one of these. Do you want Israel, do you want McCarthy, do you want (former U.S. Sen. Patrick) McCarran, do you want Watergate? Which one do you want? And we could never separate our father’s life that way.”
After deciding on a documentary approach, executive producer Amy Greenspun (Brian’s daughter and Hank’s granddaughter) brought in Goldstein, whose credits as a writer, producer and director include “L.A. Law,” “Doogie Howser, M.D.” and “The Today Show.” He also created many of the core multimedia exhibits for the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and the New York Tolerance Center.
“The thing that intrigued us about Scott was that he came from a television drama background, so he had that moviemaking flair that you needed for television,” Brian Greenspun says. “Which was completely opposite of what you think about when you think of documentaries. It’s a mixture, it’s a dramatization of real life with the art of television or theater, but there’s nothing fake in it.”
In his career as a journalist, which continued until his death from cancer in 1989, Greenspun often crossed the line between newsman and newsmaker. He used the outspoken clout of his newspaper and his column, “Where I Stand,” to further his purposes, from repudiating Joe McCarthy (who labeled Greenspun “a creature who crawl(ed) from under a rock in New York ... the voice of the Reds in Vegas”) to cleaning up a mobbed-up city, ending segregation on the Strip, and protesting the dumping of nuclear waste in Nevada.
Greenspun’s response to his many critics: “I could care less — Las Vegas was now a better place.”
Happily for Goldstein and his documentary crew, Hank Greenspun lived a well-documented life, leaving columns, news stories and books, filmed appearances, newsreels, photographs and home movies. In the process of doing the legwork of interviewing Greenspun’s contemporaries, Goldstein happened on some unexpected treasures, film footage, documents, diaries and letters that no one in the Greenspun family knew existed.
Still, the director was confronted by a mountain of still photos and words and talking heads. Goldstein applied some cinematic dazzle, taking a stylish, stylized approach to the material, animating still photographs (“the Ken Burns effect”), and burnishing the atmosphere with narration by Anthony Hopkins, well-chosen period songs and an original score by Elik Alvarez and Freddy Sheinfeld, performed by 60 members of the Seattle Philharmonic.
“I wanted to serve this guy in a film as big and as gregarious as he was,” Goldstein says. “I don’t particularly like passive documentaries — the ‘voice of God’ narrator telling you ‘he did this, and then such and such happened.’ I wanted that present tense sense of discovery— you don’t know what’s going to happen with the arms-running, you don’t know what’s going to happen with McCarthy, you don’t know if he’s going to go broke from the fire.”
The finished film holds surprises, even for the “Vegas older-timers,” as Goldstein puts it, who knew Greenspun well.
“Most people who knew my dad knew portions of my dad, but they didn’t know all of it,” Brian Greenspun says. “Because he didn’t talk about it. He just did it.
“Certainly folks who were here in the early ’50s knew the McCarthy and McCarran portions. Others who followed certainly knew the Israeli portions. Nobody knew the Sadat peacemaking story. And very, very few knew the extent of the Watergate story. Even I never knew the (audio) tapes existed relating to my dad and Richard Nixon.”
Now that “Where I Stand” is about to face an audience — a hometown audience — for the first time, Goldstein hopes “somebody’s going to say we’re putting this on the big screen. I would not be surprised if when people see this, they think it’s unbelievable, this has ‘feature’ written all over it, and that somebody will in fact visit this story as a feature. He also wouldn’t mind hearing that Steve Wynn is looking for someone to film his life story.
For the Greenspuns, it wasn’t about making a movie, it was about putting a legacy on film, for the grandchildren and their children.
It grew into something significantly more.
“We realized we had a story here of a modern day hero,” Brian Greenspun says. “This country’s very fearful, especially now. You look at this documentary, and go back to the days of McCarthy, and it’s not a whole lot different. We’re afraid for different reasons now. But there were tinges of McCarthyism in the last five, six, seven years, where people were afraid to open their mouths, were afraid to act for fear of being called unpatriotic. Now there’s an economic fear on top of everything else.
“Whatever your circumstances are that create a fear, you can watch a documentary like this and realize the biggest fear is not doing anything. It’s the fear of action.”
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Nuclear Engineering
June 08, 2008
Yucca application submitted
The US Department of Energy (DoE) has submitted an application to build the country’s first long-term geologic spent fuel repository.
The DoE began studying Yucca Mountain as a potential site for a long-term repository for spent fuel and high-level waste in 1978. Three decades on, on 6 June 2008, it filed a construction application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to build a geologic repository for spent fuel and high-level radioactive waste at the site in the Nevada desert 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The construction licence application runs to 8600 pages backed up by tens of thousands of pages of documentation. The NRC expects the preliminary process of checking over and 'docketing' the application to take until mid autumn, after which work will start on a review including safety analysis and public hearings and expected to involve more than 100 staff and contractors from disciplines including geochemistry, hydrology, climatology, structural geology, volcanology, seismology, health physics, and civil, mechanical, nuclear, mining, materials and geological engineering. The NRC said it anticipates the review to take four years – the statutory three-year review timetable as laid down by the US Congress plus a one-year extension – making construction unlikely to begin before 2013 at the earliest. The US Office for Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM), which will be responsible for building and operating the site, currently identifies 31 March 2017 as the best-achievable startup date for receiving spent fuel.
The US Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 made the DoE responsible for finding a site, building and operating a geologic repository for the country’s spent fuel and high-level radioactive waste. Nine potential sites under consideration in 1983 were subsequently narrowed down to three, and in 1987 Congress directed the DoE to pursue only one of them, Yucca Mountain. The final legislative vote approving the development of a repository at the site was passed by the Senate in 2002.
Work started on an Exploratory Studies Facility at Yucca Mountain in 1993 and by 1998 a five-mile main tunnel with several connected research areas off it plus a 1.7-mile cross drift tunnel had been built to enable detailed site characterisation studies to be performed. The OCRWM estimates that about $9 billion has been spent on Yucca Mountain so far, and the cost for the expected lifecycle of the programme (136 years from 1983 to 2119) to be $58 billion.
Despite the 2002 Senate approval of the site, the future construction of a repository at Yucca Mountain is still subject to the vagaries of the prevailing politics. In January 2008 the site was reduced to running on a skeleton staff after the US government decided to cut its budget for the fourth consecutive year. The state of Nevada has long fought against the project, and continues to do so. Only days after the application was filed, Nevada governor Jim Gibbons said in a press release: “We must continue the fight against this ill-conceived project”. Democratic presidential nominee Barak Obama has gone on record as opposing Yucca Mountain on the grounds of its unsuitability as a site. Republican candidate John McCain has not spoken out against the project but said in May that he would be seeking to establish an international repository for spent nuclear fuel that "could make it unnecessary to open the proposed spent nuclear fuel storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.”
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St. George Daily Spectrum
June 08, 2008
Nuclear dump mess
Proponents of building a nuclear waste storage facility 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas say that the facility will be safe and, in fact, is mandated by law.
Opponents argue that groundwater could be contaminated and that the areas surrounding the mountain and downwind from the facility could be put in danger because of leakage of radioactive materials.
What both can agree on is that the process to create or reject the Yucca Mountain repository has been cumbersome and shows how inefficient government can be.
The latest example came to light after Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman made a bold statement that the application to create the nuclear waste dump would stand up to any and all challenges. That remark prompted Nevada lawmakers to stand up and promise to poke holes in the promises of safety set forth in the application.
They probably will have lots of chances.
For one thing, the application itself is about 8,600 pages long. It is supported by more than 200 other documents and studies. That means at least 10,000 pages have been created with the idea of showing that Yucca Mountain is safe.
Opponents point out, however, that despite all of those pages, the report fails to provide a standard to show how much radiation can leak from the dump without harming people, plants and animals.
That's important because a court already has ruled that the mountain must store the spent fuel rods and other waste from the nation's nuclear power plants for 1 million years. That's an awfully long time for something to go wrong.
How can such an important component be left out? Why did such a crucial piece of information get left out of more than 8,600 pages of materials?
The answer to those questions is that the government either doesn't know or it isn't prepared to fully plan out and prepare for the safety of the Yucca Mountain project.
In either case, that's not good enough.
If the government wants to store 77,000 tons of nuclear waste upwind from Southern Utah and Las Vegas, which has almost 2 million residents, then federal officials should at least be able to answer the most basic safety questions.
The storage facility was supposed to be open by 1998. Now, the best estimate is 2020.
Even that's too soon if our safety can't be assured and if the government can't answer the most basic of questions.
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Chattanooga Times Free Press
June 08, 2008
Thursday’s Chattanooga Transportation Board meeting was so eventful, it required a bathroom break.
DEMS DISAGREE ON NUCLEAR POWER
Former Knox County Clerk Mike Padgett, who is hoping to be U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander’s Democratic opponent in the November Senate race, is big on nuclear energy.
So much that he disagrees with his party’s Senate leader.
Mr. Padgett said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., strongly opposes a nuclear waste site coming to Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. But Mr. Reid is “only one vote,” Mr. Padgett said Friday in remarks to the Southeast Tennessee Political Action Committee.
One of Mr. Padgett’s primary opponents, former Tennessee Democratic Party Chairman Bob Tuke, said officials must be cautious when it comes to nuclear power.
“We can’t build new nuclear facilities until we decide how in the world we’re going to make them safe and get rid of the waste,” Mr. Tuke said. “That would be like building an outhouse and not digging the hole.”
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Oakland Press
June 08, 2008
We can solve energy crisis by building more nuclear plants
By Glenn Gilbert
Of The Oakland Press
Has the moment finally arrived for nuclear power in the United States?
Will the Cubs win the World Series this year, 100 years after their last title?
Believe it or not, both of these momentous events are within the realm of possibility. But today, we are just talking about nuclear energy.
Of course, it has taken $4-per-gallon gasoline to get to this point, but the issue appears headed for some serious debate.
Although just one of the 10 points in U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers's energy independence plan, nuclear power is integral to it.
Rogers, a Brighton Republican whose district includes much of northern Oakland County, aims to have 30 new nuclear plants online as part of his package for the United States to attain energy independence by July 4, 2015. He says that will save 150,000 barrels of oil per day.
The Council on Foreign Relations says that if future "electricity generation is by nuclear power, then a transition to electric and plug-in cars displaces oil. Thus, nuclear power, among other electric-supply options, offers an important long-term pathway to displacing oil as a transportation fuel."
DTE Energy wants to add a generating unit to its Enrico Fermi nuclear facility near Monroe. A 22,000-page application for the multibillion-dollar project is likely to be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by September, according to Ron May, DTE's senior vice president for major enterprise projects. A 40-month review process will follow. It would t