Yucca Mountain News Clips
Thursday, July 3, 2008
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KOLO
July 03, 2008
Federal Board to Consider Yucca Mountain Rail Plan
LAS VEGAS (AP) - The federal Surface Transportation Board says it'll consider a government proposal to build a railroad line to haul nuclear waste across Nevada to the site of the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.
A lawyer representing Nevada tells the Las Vegas Review-Journal the state might appeal.
A three-member rail board panel on June 27th denied state of Nevada contentions that the Energy Department hasn't completed plans to build and operate the 300-plus mile rail line.
Dubbed the "Caliente Corridor," it's being designed to haul spent nuclear fuel from Caliente across Nevada to the Yucca Mountain site, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Panelists say the government can't be expected to provide everything at this point, with the rail line still several years away from operation.
The state contends the Energy Department lacks operating and safety plans and a meaningful analysis of terrorism risks.
The state also challenges the adequacy of environmental material included in the application.
(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
July 03, 2008
ERIN NEFF: Ten minutes with John McCain
After taking a shot at Sen. Barack Obama for "having no plan" during an interview last week, Sen. John McCain clearly showed he should have pointed the criticism inward.
McCain was in town to raise money this past Wednesday, but he included an energy speech at UNLV and a quick chat with supporters at his new office in Henderson.
In a 10-minute interview dominated by discussion of the Yucca Mountain Project, the presumptive Republican nominee showed he's learned a lot in all those years as a nuclear dump proponent.
The problem: He's incapable of evolving on the subject. His environmental plan, if you want to call it that, calls for new coal, gas and nuclear plants and -- apparently -- paying the Russians to reprocess the radioactive waste.
"We're going to build power plants in America, they're going to be coal-fired or natural gas or nuclear," McCain said. "Right now clean coal is not where we want it to be," he added. "To say that I'm not going to do nuclear power because we can't solve the waste problem when the French are doing it is a mistake."
But McCain doesn't really solve the nuclear waste problem. He boasts about his call to spend more money on scientific research into alternative energies, yet doesn't want to stray from the tried-and-true "dump it in Nevada" policy.
He supports reprocessing, but he isn't keen on doing that at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
"My understanding is that the first priority for Yucca Mountain, if it ever opened -- and it's not clear whether it will ever meet the environmental requirements that it's going through both in and out of court -- that it would be the defense nuclear fuel that would have the first priority," McCain said. "So what do you do with all the spent nuclear fuel that's sitting at nuclear power plants all over America? Wait 15, 20 years?" he asked.
Under a McCain administration, assuming the Department of Energy won its licensing fight and court battles with Nevada, Yucca Mountain would be the default plan.
If you believe McCain's assumption about the piles of civilian waste around the country, it wouldn't be sufficient. But McCain had no additional information about the reprocessing plan he calls central to both global warming and nuclear proliferation.
The Russians would have to work with the French, and then McCain said he'd have to negotiate with Vladimir Putin, the former Russian president who floated the idea to him, to figure out how much we're going to pay to export our garbage.
What a win-win.
"Nuclear power plants are a vital part of eliminating greenhouse gas emissions," he said. "(To) people who are against nuclear power, what about what can give our children a damaged planet? That is greenhouse gas emissions. You've got to have nuclear power if you're going to address greenhouse gas emissions."
So his entire plan involves a handshake with Putin and then hands off.
I asked McCain about sports betting and Internet gaming, and whether any Nevada Republicans or gaming industry representatives had approached him about those issues.
"The issue of college betting is not going anywhere. ... The sports betting thing, that was over years ago," he added. "I've faced reality. It's just like with immigration reform. Americans want a secure border."
On Internet gaming, McCain was just off his game. First he tried to back away from his position because he hasn't been involved in it lately. Then he said it was really fellow Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl's deal.
Then he tried to find a Nevada-friendly stance. "The economy is what's hurting the gaming industry in Las Vegas today," McCain said. "It isn't sports betting or Internet gaming."
Yes, but if the gaming industry could make money online, it could help the bottom line when tourists balk at spending thousands to fly here or hundreds to drive here.
"Let me get back to you on it," he said. "I haven't thought about the issue."
He did say he had concerns about Internet gaming originating in foreign countries. Of course, this happens because of U.S. policy and restrictions, but never mind.
McCain also spoke about oversight and making sure the kiddies don't have access.
"I'll call you back," he added.
Could the position be evolving like so many of his others? We'll have to wait and see just how much Nevada is in play, as the election grows nearer.
We know McCain will be back. Maybe he'll have an Internet gaming proposal by then. For the sake of the gaming industry, we'd better hope it's not as deeply thought out as his energy plan.
Then again, maybe the gamers wouldn't mind if offshore meant the Caspian Sea.
As for him calling back, I'll be waiting.
--Contact Erin Neff at (702) 387-2906, or by e-mail at eneff@reviewjournal.com.
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Dowagiac Daily News
July 03, 2008
Watchdogs blast Upton's promotion of nuclear power
Anjel Francisco
TAKOMA PARK, Md. - A fresh examination of the congressional record of Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., reveals a consistent championing of the nuclear industry's financial wish list regardless of safety and security issues that could threaten the wellbeing of Michiganders.
Beyond Nuclear released its new report in response to Cass County's congressman's latest promotion of nuclear power at a press conference held at Cook nuclear power plant in Bridgman
On June 30, Upton unveiled the Clean and Safe Energy (CASEnergy) Coalition's national initiative to construct at least 30 new atomic reactors across the nation.
CASEnergy is a nuclear front group, created and funded by the industry's Washington, D.C., lobby and public relations arm, the Nuclear Energy Institute.
The report - Fred Upton, One of the Nuclear Power Industry's Best Friends in Congress - found that Upton has marched in lockstep with the Bush administration's nuclear power expansion plans, championing such nuclear power industry priorities as the Yucca Mountain dumpsite for high-level radioactive wastes; massive subsidies and tax breaks for construction of new atomic reactors; and a revival of reprocessing that would risk nuclear weapons proliferation overseas.
In addition, Upton has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from electric utilities, the energy/natural resources sector and the nuclear power industry.
The full report, a summary, and supporting documentation can be viewed at http://www.beyondnuclear.org/Subsidies.html under the "Breaking News" section. Kevin Kamps, author of the report, a Kalamazoo native, a board member of Don't Waste Michigan and member of the Great Lakes United Nuclear-Free/Green Energy Task Force said of his findings:
"It's high time for Congressman Upton to work on behalf of the health, safety and pocketbooks of southwest Michigan's residents and taxpayers, rather than the nuclear power industry's bottomless greed. The atomic power subsidies that Upton supports will transfer the huge financial risks from the nuclear power industry onto the backs of hard-working American taxpayers. These billion-dollar giveaways go to an industry that has already enjoyed lavish subsidies at the expense of U.S. taxpayers and ratepayers for the past 50 years.
"The tally to date is at least $500 billion in research and development support, liability coverage in the event of catastrophic radiation releases, high-level radioactive waste management costs and much more."
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Heritage Foundation
July 02, 2008
Let the Market Work
Nick Loris
There is no reason to take in the world’s low-level nuclear waste when we have not figured out what to do with our own.”
Those were the words of Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tn.) during his announcement that he would soon introduce a bill with Senator Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.) that would ban importation of foreign-generated, low-level nuclear waste. The decision to introduce legislation came after EnergySolutions, based in Utah, submitted an application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to import 20,000 tons of low-level waste from Italy.
First, what exactly is low-level waste? The NRC defines it as items that typically have been contaminated with radioactive material such as “shoe covers and clothing, wiping rags, mops, filters, reactor water treatment residues, equipments and tools, luminous dials, medical tubes, swabs, injection needles, syringes, and laboratory animal carcasses and tissues.” There are currently three sites open (one in Utah, one in Washington and one in South Carolina) that receive low-level waste under the proper oversight of the NRC.
The truth is that we do know what we’re doing with our low-level nuclear waste, and we’re doing it right now. It’s handled safely and has been transported all over the United States for years without a problem.
So what’s the problem? Eventual co-sponsor Senator Cardin remarked,
Reserving the capacity at the Utah site for waste generated in our own country, before we import waste from other countries, makes good common sense and good public policy.”
The Senators view this as a problem that the United States could become America’s nuclear waste dump, but they neglect the benefits it has to offer. Clearly, companies see potential profit from foreign-generated, low-level nuclear waste, which results in more jobs and a stimulated economic community. If it is profitable for companies to manage low-level waste, the market will react to meet the demand. Reserving the capacity makes little sense the U.S. has two other available storage sites with the capability to build many more. More restrictions are exactly what this country doesn’t need.
Maybe the Senator confused low-level waste with high-level waste, an easy mistake. The federal government has failed to fulfill its obligations to take title of high-level nuclear waste and has failed to open the geologic repository, Yucca Mountain, by 1998. As a result, utilities have paid billions of dollars in the Nuclear Waste Fund only to see the used nuclear fuel sit on their sites, causing the utilities to bring a lawsuit against the federal government in which ultimately the taxpayers foot the bill.
Now that sounds more reflective of Senator Alexander’s words “We don’t know what to do with our own.” The management of high-level used nuclear fuel in America needs a complete overhaul, a free-market overhaul at that. The Heritage Foundation’s Research Fellow in nuclear energy Jack Spencer outlines an effective way to privatize the management of used nuclear fuel that includes these critical steps:
• Create the legal framework that allows the private sector to price geologic storage as a commodity;
• Empower the private sector to manage used fuel;
• Repeal the 70,000-ton limitation on the Yucca Mountain repository and instead let technology, science, and physical capacity determine the appropriate limit;
• Create a private entity that is representative of but independent from nuclear operators to manage Yucca Mountain;
• Repeal the mil, abolish the Nuclear Waste Fund, and transfer the remaining funds to a private entity to cover the expenses of constructing Yucca Mountain; and
• Limit the federal government’s role to providing oversight, basic research, and development and taking title of spent fuel upon repository decommissioning.
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Wednesday, July 02, 2008: 13:39
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
July 01, 2008
Reid says McCain echoes Bush in talk of Yucca Mountain
By Molly Ball
Review-Journal
Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Monday that Republican presidential candidate John McCain is saying the same things about Yucca Mountain that President Bush once did, and Nevadans should not be fooled.
"That's what George Bush said, remember, and he'd been president for a couple of weeks when he decided science wasn't so important and jammed it down our throat," the Senate majority leader said in an interview.
"John McCain has voted with the proponents of Yucca Mountain every time, without any question," Reid continued. "If he's president, Yucca Mountain would be a reality."
During a campaign stop in Nevada last week, McCain said he would base decisions on the project on science and make sure it met environmental and safety standards. While saying he still supported the proposed nuclear waste repository 100 miles outside Las Vegas, the Arizona senator expressed doubt that it would ever clear regulatory and legal hurdles and actually be built.
"You have to go through the process," McCain said in an interview last week. "In the past history of this country, we have made too many errors that have damaged our environment and people's lives."
Reid said he heard in McCain's words an attempt to have the issue both ways and echoes of the campaign promises of George W. Bush.
During the campaigns of 2000 and 2004, Yucca Mountain was a major point of contention as the candidates campaigned in Nevada. Both times, "sound science" was Bush's trademark as he vowed to move the project forward based on the evidence.
"I believe sound science, and not politics, must prevail in the designation of any high-level nuclear waste repository," Bush wrote in a letter to Nevada's then-Gov. Kenny Guinn dated May 3, 2000. "As President, I would not sign legislation that would send nuclear waste to any proposed site unless it's been deemed scientifically safe. I also believe the federal government must work with the local and state governments that will be affected to address safety and transportation issues."
On Feb. 14, 2002, Bush recommended Yucca as the site for 77,000 tons of radioactive waste based on studies by the Department of Energy.
During the 2004 presidential campaign, Democrat John Kerry highlighted the move, which he called a broken promise. Bush again used "sound science" as his byword to claim that he would only go forward with the project if it was shown to be safe.
Bush narrowly won the state, and his administration has continued to push forward with the repository. To the state of Nevada, which maintains an official position against the project, the promise to adhere to the evidence has not been kept.
"We refer to the (Department of Energy's) kind of science as advocacy science," said Bob Loux, executive director of the state's Nuclear Projects Agency. "That's when you only go about collecting the data and information that makes your case, and ignore other data that suggests the opposite."
Loux noted that the Energy Department recently submitted its license application for the site despite the fact that a court in 2004 threw out proposed health and safety standards. "So we really don't even know what standards Yucca Mountain is supposed to meet," Loux said.
In a Review-Journal poll conducted last month, 52 percent of Nevadans said a candidates' stance on Yucca Mountain would have at least some influence on how they vote.
While Reid accused McCain of softening his rhetoric for political purposes, a McCain campaign spokesman denied the charge.
"That implies that the senator (McCain) has changed his position when he hasn't," Rick Gorka said. "Senator McCain believes that Yucca Mountain is necessary, but he wants to ensure that it's environmentally safe and sound. The senator has always said there is a need for Yucca Mountain, but it needs to be based on sound science."
Gorka charged that it is McCain's opponent, Democrat Barack Obama, who has tried to have it both ways on the issue. Obama has said he would end the project.
Gorka pointed to a massive 2005 energy bill that contained $557 million in funding for Yucca. "When Senator Obama votes for that, it contradicts Obama's message," he said. "You can say you would kill it in an election year, but in 2005 you vote for $557 million to fund it? That is, to me, a glaring change in his position."
Both Nevada senators, Reid and Republican John Ensign, voted for the bill, which Reid had worked to trim by $150 million from the amount Bush originally requested for Yucca.
Obama spokeswoman Shannon Gilson said Obama's vote on the bill did not represent a vote in favor of Yucca Mountain, which he has consistently opposed.
--Contact reporter Molly Ball at mball@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2919.
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Discover Magazine
July 01, 2008
So Much Radioactive Waste, So Little Time
It’s been a big news week for nuclear waste, with most of the attention going to the Department of Energy’s announcement that it has at long last submitted an application to open a nuclear waste repository in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.
After two decades of planning, the application nudges the project a little closer to reality, but there’s a long way to go yet. Nevada officials remain violently opposed to the “nuclear dump,” and lawsuits are inevitable. The Department of Energy says that the repository won’t be ready to open until 2020, at the earliest.
Meanwhile, in a laboratory in Tennessee, the Energy Department is trying to clean up an aging nuclear waste cache left over from the Cold War, only to have its own inspector general declared the waste a “national resource” because of its potential use in cancer treatments.
Best to start with the mountain, and the mountain of paperwork. Yesterday, the government delivered the 8,600-page application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, trying to prove its contention that the storage facility could safely hold the 70,000 metric tons of waste into the indefinite future.
To get the license, the government has to show — with computer models — that the repository won’t leak dangerous amounts of radioactive material into the groundwater over the ages. No decision has been made as to how far into the future this rule must hold true, but the Environmental Protection Agency is considering a proposal that would require compliance 1 million years from now. Some scientists say it could be hard to prove anything that far out reliably [NPR].
In a speech, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman touted nuclear energy’s ability to meet the country’s growing energy demand without pumping out the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, and said that a permanent waste storage facility is critical to the nuclear industry’s hopes to expand.
But Nevada officials say the government’s application is incomplete, and doesn’t make a full account of the dump’s potential health and environmental consequences; they say they’ll ask to have it thrown out immediately.
The notion that the dump would be safe is implausible, said Victor Galinsky, a former NRC commissioner and now a Nevada consultant. The plan hinges on the use of titanium and palladium drip shields to protect waste canisters buried underground from water flowing through Yucca Mountain’s porous rock. The Energy Department plans to install about 11,000 drip shields, each weighing five tons, using robots 100 to 300 years in the future when the repository would be sealed. “It is pie in the sky,” Galinsky said. “These people have lost track of reality” [Los Angeles Times].
While no one seems to want the waste that’s intended for Yucca Mountain (utilities that are storing it temporarily have sued the federal government to get it taken away), the little radioactive deposit in Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has a slightly more desirable sheen.
The material, uranium 233, can be used as fuel in nuclear weapons, and in 2005 Congress ordered the Energy Department to dispose of the dangerous stockpile. But the inspector general’s new report throws a wrench in that plan. Uranium 233 breaks down into two isotopes that could have great potential as cancer treatments, the report notes.
What distinguishes both of these [isotopes] for cancer treatments is that as they decay into new materials, they emit alpha particles. These particles can be superior to the standard form of radiation used to treat cancer, gamma rays, because the rays travel long distances through tissue and damage many cells, while the alpha particles have very short trajectories, and carry relatively huge amounts of energy.
“A single atom delivered to a cancer cell can kill that cell,” said Dr. David A. Scheinberg, chairman of the experimental therapeutics center at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. “Nothing else approaches that” [The New York Times].
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cbs4denver
July 01, 2008
Nuclear Power Could Be Back In Colorado
Good Question: Will Nuclear Power Return To Colorado?
Written by Alan Gionet
DENVER (CBS4) ? Colorado hasn't had a nuclear power plant since Fort St. Vrain was shut down in 1989 and converted to natural gas. Now, there's talk of nuclear power again.
Gov. Bill Ritter was asked about nuclear power on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday and said, "It's going to be part of our future as a country." Ritter then went on to talk about conservation, efficiency and greenhouse gases, but never gave a yes or no to the question of when he'd take a nuclear plant in Colorado. Monday, the Governor's office declined to explain further, but the talk turned to possible nuclear plants.
"We need to move forward with the new generation of nuclear plants because we've had nuclear energy essentially being dormant now for 30 years in the United States of America and we're not going to solve the problem of global warming which is very important to our farmers and ranchers and ski areas here in Colorado unless we move off of fossil fuels," Sen. Ken Salazar told CBS4.
Ken Anderson, executive vice president and general manager of Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association -- an industry consortium that runs power plants like the one in Craig, said they have been talking about it since April. Tri-State is looking at the feasibility of going to nuclear when it builds its next plant in Colorado. Anderson said the plant would be on land Tri-State owns in Holly in Southeast Colorado. He said it's getting more affordable after natural gas has increased from about $6 a 1,000 BTU to nearly $12.
"We know that nuclear becomes viable somewhere around $8 dollar gas, so we're already in the realm of when you think about the capital and all the other things that are associated with nuclear development, it's already in the money," Anderson said.
Anderson said new technology makes it more economical and nuclear has a tiny carbon footprint next to coal fired plants.
But environmentalists are far from thrilled. Matt Garrington, field director for Environment Colorado said, "Well I think the general public still has a problem with nuclear."
Indeed, it does. The nation's long term storage answer of a few years ago, Nevada's Yucca Mountain, is stalled at the very least.
"Frankly we still haven't figured out what to do with nuclear waste," Garrington said.
He also points out that the cost the government pays for that has to be added to the price of going nuclear.
Anderson said the reprocessing of nuclear waste has improved the situation. He cites the handling of nuclear material in Europe, where there are far more nuclear plants than in the U.S.
"What it basically does is allow you to re-use the fuel several times, but in addition to that, the final product is in a much denser than the fuels that we would store today," Anderson said. "You have a lot less to store, you handle it more safely and you don't need as much volume."
But even Anderson says there needs to be movement on the issue before Tri-State would consider a nuclear plant. If so, the association could be looking for approval for a plant in Holly within five years. Construction would put the opening of any such plant at somewhere between 2020 and 2030.
Additional Resources:
Listen to Ken Anderson's interview
http://cbs4denver.com/video/?id=43600@kcnc.dayport.com
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St. Cloud Times
July 01, 2008
Monticello nuclear plant's storage opens
By Kirsti Marohn
kmarohn@stcloudtimes.com
MONTICELLO — Preparations are almost complete for spent fuel to be moved from inside the Monticello nuclear plant to a new storage facility on the plant grounds.
Ten stainless steel canisters arrived from Japan about six weeks ago. They sit on the plant property, wrapped in plastic.
The first canister will be loaded with spent fuel rods and moved sometime between August and October.
The canisters will be placed in side-by-side concrete storage modules that sit on a concrete slab. The area is surrounded by two chain-link fences topped with barbed wire and monitored by cameras and other security devices.
Despite its simple appearance, the storage facility has required detailed planning and meticulous construction, which began a year ago. It will undergo inspections and a practice run supervised by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission before the spent fuel can be moved.
Moving the fuel to above-ground casks will free space in the plant's interior cooling pool, allowing Xcel Energy to continue operating the plant for another 30 years. But the casks also represent the vexing problem posed by the long-term storage of nuclear waste, which remains radioactive for thousands of years.
Moving the fuel
Once the inspections are complete, the process of loading the spent fuel from a 40-foot-deep cooling pool inside the plant will begin. It's a painstakingly slow journey that project manager Mark McKeown has planned each step of the way.
Each canister will be moved to a staging area inside the plant, loaded into a stainless steel transfer cask and set down in the cooling pool using a crane. Each canister can hold 61 spent fuel rods made up of uranium dioxide pellets — not liquid fuel as people commonly envision.
The canisters will be loaded under water, which provides protection from radiation. The 105-ton load will be brought to the surface, surveyed and dried. The canister's two lids will be welded shut, and the transfer cask's lid will be bolted on.
The transfer casks then will be loaded horizontally onto a trailer and towed to the storage area. Once the transfer cask is lined up with the concrete storage module, the door is taken off and a hydraulic ram pushes the canister out of the cask and into the module. The concrete door is sealed, and the transfer cask is taken back inside to be used again.
Xcel built 12 storage modules, but it is licensed to build 30. The company is seeking to expand the plant's capacity by adding new equipment, which means another three to five casks would be necessary, McKeown said.
Ten casks will be filled this year, McKeown said. He hopes the entire loading process will be completed in about 12 weeks.
Once filled, the casks will be included in the plant's security perimeter and will undergo monthly, quarterly and annual inspections.
Xcel spokesman Pat Thompson said the system is a proven technology and safe method of storing spent fuel. The federal government has conducted tests that show the casks can withstand the force of an airliner crash, he said.
McKeown noted that two dozen other utilities use the same storage system.
Twenty-four storage casks have been loaded at Prairie Island, Xcel's other Minnesota nuclear plant near Red Wing, he said.
Long-term problem
There has been little public opposition to the cask storage at Monticello. Environmental groups are struggling with the question of nuclear power because of the pressing concerns over global climate change, said Mary Marrow, attorney with the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy.
Unlike coal and other fossil fuels, nuclear power releases almost no greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.
Still, environmental groups remain concerned about the increasing amount of radioactive waste generated by nuclear facilities, Marrow said.
The casks are meant to be temporary storage until the federal government builds a repository for spent nuclear fuel.
The U.S. Department of Energy filed a license application earlier this month for a facility in Yucca Mountain, Nev.
But that project has been delayed for years, and some question whether it ever will be built.
"I don't see any guarantee that this waste is going anywhere," Marrow said. "What we have, I think, is what we're going to have to deal with for the foreseeable future."
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Progressive Rail Roading
June 30, 2008
STB says no to Nevada, will continue to review the DOE's application to build Yucca Mountain line
The Surface Transportation Board (STB) has denied the state of Nevada's request to reject the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) application to obtain the authority to construct and operate a 300-mile rail line in the state.
The proposed Caliente Line would connect an existing Union Pacific Railroad line near Caliente, Nev., to a proposed geologic repository at Yucca Mountain in the state's Nye County. The DOE would use the line to transport spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste for disposal at the repository and to provide common-carrier rail service to communities along the route.
The STB's decision permits the state to amend its filing, but does not extend a previously established procedural schedule, the board said. Comments on the DOE's application are due to the STB by July 15 and the DOE's reply is due Aug. 29.
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Reno Gazette-Journal
June 30, 2008
Letter: Build a nuclear plant on contaminated soil
We have transmission lines to Southern California from the Boulder Dam area. We have a golden opportunity.
Let's build the largest nuclear power plant in the world on the "off-limits contaminated soil" of the Yucca area, and then let's sell that clean power all over the West and make billions of dollars to solve our budget problems forever!
Larry Turpen
Reno
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Wall Street Journal
June 30, 2008
The Case For and Against Nuclear Power
By Michael Totty
Is nuclear power the answer for a warming planet? Or is it too expensive and dangerous to satisfy future energy needs?
Interest in nuclear power is heating up, as the hunt intensifies for "green" alternatives to fossil fuels like coal and natural gas. Even some environmentalists have come on board, citing the severity of the global-warming threat to explain their embrace of the once-maligned power source.
But the issue is far from settled. Proponents insist that nuclear is a necessary alternative in an energy-constrained world. They say that the economics make sense -- and that the public has a warped image of the safety risks, thanks to Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and "The China Syndrome." Opponents, meanwhile, are convinced that the costs are way too high to justify the safety hazards, as well as the increased risks of proliferation.
Has nuclear's time come? The debate rages on.
NUCLEAR'S THE ANSWER
The argument for nuclear power can be stated pretty simply: We have no choice.
If the world intends to address the threat of global warming and still satisfy its growing appetite for electricity, it needs an ambitious expansion of nuclear power.
Scientists agree that greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide, are building up in the atmosphere and contributing to a gradual increase in global average temperatures. At the same time, making electricity accounts for about a third of U.S. greenhouse emissions, mostly from burning fossil fuels to produce power.
Nuclear power plants, on the other hand, emit virtually no carbon dioxide -- and no sulfur or mercury either. Even when taking into account "full life-cycle emissions" -- including mining of uranium, shipping fuel, constructing plants and managing waste -- nuclear's carbon-dioxide discharges are comparable to the full life-cycle emissions of wind and hydropower and less than solar power.
Nuclear power, of course, isn't the only answer. We need to get more energy from other nonpolluting sources such as solar and wind. Conservation is crucial. So is using technology to make more efficient use of fossil-fuel power.
But we have to be realistic about the limits of these alternatives. As it is, the 104 nuclear power plants in the U.S. generate about a fifth of the nation's energy. Wind accounts for about 1%, and solar even less than that. Any increase in the number of nuclear power plants can help -- even if they won't solve the whole problem.
More important from the standpoint of displacing fossil fuel, nuclear can meet power demand 24 hours a day. Solar and wind can't do that. Nuclear is the only current technology that fits the bill.
The Real Economics
So, what's the case against nuclear power? It boils down to two things: economics and safety.
Neither holds up to scrutiny.
First, economics. Critics argue that the high cost of building and financing a new plant makes nuclear power uneconomical when compared with other sources of power.
But that's misleading on a number of levels. One reason it's so expensive at this point is that no new plant has been started in the U.S. since the last one to begin construction in 1977. Lenders -- uncertain how long any new plant would take because of political and regulatory delays -- are wary of financing the first new ones. So financing costs are unusually high. As we build more, the timing will be more predictable, and financing costs will no doubt come down as lenders become more comfortable.
Loan guarantees and other federal incentives are needed to get us over this hump. They are not permanent subsidies for uneconomical ventures. Instead, they're limited to the first half dozen of plants as a way to reassure investors that regulatory delays won't needlessly hold up construction. It's important to remember that although nuclear energy has been around a while, it's hardly a "mature" industry, as some critics say. Because of the lack of new plants in so many years, nuclear in many ways is more like an emerging technology, and so subsidies make sense to get it going.
It's also true that a shortage of parts and skills is raising the cost of new plants. But if we start building more plants, the number of companies supplying parts will increase to meet the demand, lowering the price.
Most important, nuclear power appears economically uncompetitive primarily because the price of "cheaper" fossil fuels, mainly coal, don't reflect the high cost that carbon emissions pose for the environment. Add those costs, and suddenly, nuclear power will look like a bargain.
That's likely to happen soon. Governments are expected to assign a cost to greenhouse gases, through either a direct tax (based on the carbon content of a fuel) or a so-called cap-and-trade system, which would set a limit on emissions while allowing companies whose discharges are lower than the cap to sell or trade credits to companies whose pollution exceeds the cap.
Suddenly, big carbon polluters like coal-produced electricity are going to look a lot more expensive compared with low-carbon sources -- in particular, nuclear, wind and hydropower.
It's estimated that a carbon "price" of between $25 and $50 a ton makes nuclear power economically competitive with coal. That should be enough to ease investor concerns about utilities that build new nuclear plants.
Even without a carbon tax, rising natural-gas prices are beginning to make nuclear power more competitive. That's true even in some deregulated markets, such as Texas.
NRG Energy Inc., based in Princeton, N.J., has filed an application to build a reactor adjacent to an existing plant in Texas. Though it's too early to know how much the plant will eventually cost -- or even if it ultimately will get built -- high natural-gas prices alone are enough to justify construction, according to NRG.
One other point on cost: Solar and wind advocates say these sources are cheaper than nuclear -- and getting cheaper. But again, even if true, the intermittent nature of these sources make them flawed replacements for carbon-emitting sources. Nuclear is the only clean-energy way to address that gap.
No 'China Syndrome'
Let's turn to the critics' other argument: safety. We're still living in a world whose viewpoints have been warped by the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania and the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl plant in the Ukraine, as well as by the anti-nuclear movie "The China Syndrome."
The truth is that there's little doubt that in the U.S., at least, plants are much safer now than they were in the past. Those accidents led regulators and the industry to bolster safety at U.S. nuclear plants. There are more safety features at the plants, plant personnel are better trained, and reactors have been redesigned so that accidents are far less likely to occur. For instance, every U.S. plant has an on-site control-room simulator where employees can hone their skills and handle simulated emergencies, and plant workers spend one week out of every six in the simulator or in the classroom.
The next generation of plants is designed to be even safer, using fewer pumps and piping and relying more on gravity to move water for cooling the hot nuclear core. This means fewer possible places where equipment failure could cause a serious accident.
And even if a serious accident does occur, U.S. plants are designed to make sure that no radiation is released into the environment. Reactors are contained inside a huge structure of reinforced concrete with walls that are as much as four feet thick; the Chernobyl reactor lacked such a structure.
What's more, you can't look at safety in a vacuum. Consider the hazards of the world's reliance on coal-fired plants: Coal mining world-wide results in several thousand deaths every year, most of them in China, and burning coal is a leading source of mercury in the atmosphere.
Furthermore, look at safety more broadly -- from an environmental perspective. The death and destruction stemming from global warming far exceed what is likely to happen if there is a nuclear accident. And yet, when we talk about safety, we seem to focus only on the risks of nuclear power.
Politics of Disposal
The long-term disposal of nuclear waste is also a problem -- but it's mainly a policy issue, not a technical one.
Most experts agree that the best way to dispose of waste is deep underground, where radioactive materials can be prevented from entering the environment and where it can be guarded against theft or terrorist attack. In the U.S., the Energy Department picked Yucca Mountain in southwestern Nevada for a repository, but political wrangling has so far blocked proceeding with the site, and final approval is considered a long shot. Even if approved, it won't be able to begin accepting waste for a decade or more.
In the meantime, interim storage in deep pools next to nuclear plants is considered sufficiently safe to meet the industry's needs until well into the future. The amount of waste produced is relatively small; all the waste produced so far in the U.S. would only cover a football field about five yards deep. Older, cooler fuel can also be stored for decades in dry casks.
Longer term, advanced fuel recycling and reprocessing can reduce the amount of waste that needs to be stored. While reprocessing wouldn't eliminate the need for a long-term repository, it can reduce the amount, heat and radioactivity of the remaining waste.
Stopping the Spread
Finally, critics say that an expansion of nuclear power will increase the danger that potentially hostile nations will use nuclear material from a power program to develop atomic weapons, or that rogue states or terrorists will steal nuclear material to make bombs.
While nonproliferation is an important consideration, the proliferation problem won't be solved by turning away from nuclear power.
To curtail these risks, governments need to strengthen current international anti-proliferation efforts to, among other things, give the International Atomic Energy Agency more information about a country's nuclear-related activities and IAEA inspectors greater access to suspect locations. Further, current fuel-reprocessing techniques are limited and new processing technologies are being developed to limit the amount and accessibility of weapons-grade materials (by, for instance, producing a form of plutonium that needs further reprocessing before it could be used in bombs).
One final point about security: One of the biggest dangers to our security is from oil nations providing support to anti-U.S. terrorist groups. The faster we can move away from carbon-based energy, the faster we take away that funding source. Nuclear energy offers the fastest and most direct path to that safer future.
NO TO NUCLEAR
Nuclear power isn't a solution to global warming. Rather, global warming is just a convenient rationale for an obsolete energy source that makes no sense when compared to the alternatives.
Sure, nuclear power generates lots of electricity while producing virtually no carbon dioxide. But it still faces the same problems that have stymied the development of new nuclear plants for the past 20 years -- exorbitant costs, the risks of an accident or terrorist attack, the threat of proliferation and the challenge of disposing of nuclear waste.
The cost issue alone will mean that few if any new nuclear power stations will get built in the next few years, at least in the U.S., and any that do will require expensive taxpayer subsidies. Instead of subsidizing the development of new plants that have all these other problems, the U.S. would be better off investing in other ways to meet growing energy demands and reduce carbon-dioxide emissions.
In fact, the sheer number of nuclear plants needed to make a major dent in greenhouse emissions means the industry hasn't a prayer of turning nuclear power into the solution to global warming. One study from last year determined that to make a significant contribution toward stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide, about 21 new 1,000-megawatt plants would have to be built each year for the next 50 years, including those needed to replace existing reactors, all of which are expected to be retired by 2050. That's considerably more than the most ambitious industry growth projections.
Too Expensive
But let's start with the biggest problem with nuclear power: the cost.
While no one knows what a new reactor will cost until one gets built, estimates for new construction continue to rise. Building a new plant could cost as much as $6,000 a kilowatt of generating capacity, up from estimates of about $4,000 a kilowatt just a year ago. FPL Group, of Juno Beach, Fla., estimates that two new reactors planned for southeast Florida would cost between $6 billion and $9 billion each.
Part of the reason for the rising cost estimates is the small number of vendors able to supply critical reactor components, as well as a shortage of engineering and construction skills in the nuclear industry. Perhaps the biggest bottleneck is in the huge reactor vessels that contain a plant's radioactive core. Only one plant in the world is capable of forging the huge vessels in a single piece, and it can produce only a handful of the forgings a year. Though the plant intends to expand capacity in the next couple of years, and China has said it plans to begin making the forgings, this key component is expected to limit development for many years.
The only way to make nuclear power economically competitive would be the imposition of steep "prices" on carbon-emitting power sources. Nobody knows precisely how high those prices would have to go -- there are too many variables to consider. But estimates range as high as $60 a ton of carbon dioxide. This imposes an unacceptably high price on consumers.
More important, though, there are less-costly ways of weaning ourselves off these carbon-emitting energy sources. Even if a high price of carbon makes nuclear economic, the costs of renewable energy such as wind and solar power are cheaper, and getting cheaper all the time. By contrast, nuclear is more expensive, and getting more expensive all the time.
Solving a Problem
And yes, it's true that wind and solar suffer from the problem of not being available 24 hours a day. But new technology is already beginning to solve that problem. And we'd be better off -- from both an economic and safety standpoint -- if we used natural gas to fill in the gaps, rather than nuclear.
Subsidies to the industry distort the financial picture further. In the U.S., Washington assumes liability for any catastrophic damages above $10.5 billion for an accident, and has taken on responsibility for the disposal of nuclear waste. The 1995 federal Energy Policy Act also provides loan guarantees for as much as 80% of the cost of new reactors and additional financial guarantees of up to $2 billion for costs arising from regulatory delays.
The 1995 act saw subsidies as a way to prime the pump of a nuclear-energy revival in the U.S.; increased demand and a stable regulatory environment would ultimately reduce the cost of building new plants. However, the industry for 50 years has shown only a trend toward higher costs, and there's no evidence that subsidies will spur any reduction in those costs.
And besides, if nuclear power is such a great deal, it should be able to stand on its own, and not require such subsidies from the taxpayer. Government subsidies should sponsor research and development into new or emerging energy technologies where prices are already falling and the subsidies can jump-start demand to help further bring down costs. They're inappropriate for mature industries, like nuclear power, where market forces should be allowed to do their work.
The Safety Issue
Cost isn't the only reason an expansion of nuclear power is a bad idea.
The safety of nuclear plants has certainly improved, thanks to changes adopted in the wake of the Three Mile Island accident. But safety problems persist, because the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission isn't adequately enforcing existing safety standards. What's more, countries where nuclear power is likely to expand don't have a strong system for regulating nuclear safety.
The important thing to remember about safety is this: The entire nuclear power industry is vulnerable to the safety standards of its worst performers, because an accident anywhere in the world would stoke another antinuclear backlash among the public and investors.
There's also the question of waste disposal. Proponents of nuclear power say disposal of the industry's waste products is a political problem. That's true. But it doesn't make the problem any less real. California, for instance, won't allow construction of more plants until the waste issue is resolved.
Opposition to a long-term waste repository at Yucca Mountain shows how difficult it will be to come up with a politically acceptable solution. Yucca Mountain has been plagued by questions about the selection process and its suitability as a repository, and even if it is ultimately approved, it won't be available for at least another decade -- and it will be filled to capacity almost immediately. If it isn't approved, any replacement site will face the same opposition from neighbors and local political leaders.
Proliferation Threat
By far the greatest risk is the possibility that an expansion of nuclear power will contribute to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Plants that enrich uranium for power plants can also be used to enrich for bombs; this is the path Iran is suspected of taking in developing a weapons program. An ambitious expansion of nuclear power would require a lot more facilities for enriching uranium, broadening this risk. Facilities for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel for reuse pose the danger that the material can be diverted for weapons.
Expansion of nuclear power in the U.S. doesn't pose a great proliferation risk, but a nuclear renaissance will put a strain on the current anti-proliferation system. Most of the growth world-wide is expected to be in countries -- such as those in the Middle East and Africa -- where a nuclear-energy program could give cover to surreptitious weapons development and create the local expertise in handling and processing nuclear materials.
The dangers of nuclear proliferation would be heightened if a nuclear revival turned to reprocessing of spent fuel to reduce the amount of high-level waste that builds up and to maintain adequate fuel supplies. Reprocessing is a problem because it can produce separated plutonium -- which is easier to steal or divert for weapons production, as North Korea has done, than plutonium contained in highly radioactive fuel. And commercial reprocessing plants produce so much plutonium that keeping track of it all is difficult, making it easier to divert enough for weapons without the loss being detected.
If nuclear power really were able to make a big dent in greenhouse emissions, then it would be worth the time and resources necessary to address all these problems. Instead, though, the magnitude of these difficulties will keep any nuclear renaissance too small to make a difference, and will require expensive government support just to achieve modest gains. Those resources are better spent elsewhere.
--Mr. Totty is a news editor for The Journal Report in San Francisco.
--Write to Michael Totty at michael.totty@wsj.com
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Texas Tribune
June 30, 2008
Earth Talk - nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain, Nevada
Dear EarthTalk: I've heard that there are plans to build a large repository for nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but that plans have been slow and are very controversial. Where is our nuclear waste kept now and what dangers does it pose? -- Miriam Clark, Reno, NV
Plans to store the majority of our nation's spent nuclear fuel and other highly radioactive waste at a central repository underneath Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert 80 miles from Las Vegas were first hatched in the mid-1980s. But the project has languished primarily due to opposition from Nevadans who don't want to import such dangerous materials into their backyard. Critics of the plan also point out that various natural forces such as erosion and earthquakes could render the site unstable and thus unsuitable to store nuclear isotopes that can remain hazardous to humans for hundreds of thousands of years to come.
But the Bush administration is keen to jump-start the project and recently submitted a construction license application to develop the facility-which when completed could hold up to 300 million pounds of nuclear waste-with the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). In announcing the filing, Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman said that the facility being proposed can "stand up to any challenge anywhere," adding that issues of health safety have been a primary concern during the planning process.
But the administration has still not submitted a crucial document declaring how protective the facility will be with regard to radiation leakage. Bush's Environmental Protection Agency concluded that the facility needs to prevent radiation leakage for up to 10,000 years. But a federal judge ruled that to be inadequate and ordered the administration to require protection for up to one million years. The White House argues that the NRC should press on with its review process and that the standard can be settled on later.
Currently, without any central repository, nuclear waste generated in the U.S. is stored at or near one of the 121 facilities across the country where it is generated. Nevadans like Democratic Senator Harry Reid, who has doggedly opposed the Yucca Mountain repository, say it makes more sense to leave such waste where it is than to risk transporting it across the nation's public highways and rail system, during which accidents or even terrorist attacks could expose untold numbers of Americans to radioactivity.
But others say that the current system, or lack thereof, leaves Americans at great risk of radioactive exposure. The non-profit Nuclear Information and Resource Service concluded in a 2007 report that tons of radioactive waste were ending up in landfills and in some cases in consumer products, thanks to loopholes in a 2000 federal ban on recycling metal that had been exposed to radioactivity.
As with all issues surrounding nuclear technology, where and how to dispose of the wastes is complicated. While some environmental leaders now cautiously support development of more nuclear reactors (which are free of fossil fuels) to help stave off climate change, others remain concerned that the risks to human health and the environment are still too high to go down that road. Whether or not the NRC approves plans for Yucca Mountain won't resolve the larger debate, of course, but perhaps the greenlighting of other promising alternative energy sources could ultimately make nuclear power unnecessary altogether.
CONTACTS:
Nuclear Regulatory Commission, www.nrc.gov
Nuclear Information and Resource Service, www.nirs.org.
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Columbia Daily Tribune
June 30, 2008
Nuclear conversion program is a success
By William H. Miller
Nuclear power’s resurgence in the United States is tied to a surprisingly effective program that is helping to make the world a safer place from nuclear weapons.
Known as the "megatons to megawatts" program, it has led to the elimination of huge stockpiles of nuclear-weapons materials, limiting access to these materials by rogue countries and terrorist groups.
Established 15 years ago by the U.S. and Russian governments, the megatons to megawatts accord has a single goal: It calls for the conversion of 500 metric tons of highly enriched, bomb-grade uranium from dismantled Russian nuclear weapons into low-enriched uranium to be used at U.S. nuclear power plants to produce electricity.
The program has succeeded beyond all expectations. To date, 327 metric tons of Russia’s highly enriched uranium has been turned into nuclear fuel for use in U.S. commercial reactors, according to USEC, the corporation that is the agent for the U.S. government in the program. The conversion of that bomb-grade uranium is equivalent to the destruction of nearly 13,100 nuclear warheads that were aimed at obliterating U.S. cities. By 2013, when the program is scheduled to be completed, the equivalent of 20,000 Russian warheads will have been recycled into fuel for U.S. nuclear power plants.
Fifty percent of the fuel used in U.S. nuclear plants to generate electricity comes from Russian nuclear warheads. Use of this converted fuel has extended available uranium supplies and reduced the need to open new uranium mines. As a result, it has made nuclear power more competitive economically and helped to ensure its long-term viability.
This raises an important question: If nuclear fuel can be produced safely from bomb-grade uranium, why not make use of spent fuel stored at nuclear plants throughout the United States? The spent fuel - more than 55,000 metric tons - contains valuable uranium and plutonium that can be chemically reprocessed to produce a mixed-oxide fuel for use in generating more electricity. Such recycling was done in the United States until the mid-1970s, when President Jimmy Carter banned its use on grounds that the process posed a risk of nuclear proliferation. But France and Great Britain went their own ways and have continued to recycle spent fuel. France obtains 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power and sells surplus electricity to neighboring countries. Great Britain is gearing up to build more nuclear plants.
The United States is finally reawakening to the value of spent-fuel recycling. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Global Nuclear Energy Partnership calls for the resumption of recycling in the United States by 2020. Research on improved recycling technologies is under way.
With recycling, nuclear waste would be less of a problem. One repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada would have enough capacity to hold all of the waste from nuclear power plants and the defense program. There would be no need for additional repositories.
If recycling were revived, nations wanting to develop their own nuclear power programs would have access to nuclear fuel produced in the United States and other nations that have uranium enrichment capability, such as Russia, France and Great Britain. Through this international partnership, countries seeking to launch nuclear power programs would have no need to build their own enrichment or recycling facilities, reducing the likelihood of nuclear proliferation.
As former Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, a non-proliferation expert, said recently in regard to the megatons to megawatts program, "Who would have thought this possible in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s or even in the early ’90s? It would have certainly been seen as a mountain too high to climb." But we have climbed the mountain and reduced the risk from nuclear weapons in the world with nuclear power.
--William Miller is a professor with the Nuclear Science & Engineering Institute at the University of Missouri.
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Las Vegas SUN
June 29, 2008
Sun Editorial:
‘Glow train’ goes national
Risks inherent in transporting nuclear waste are documented on The History Channel
‘Glow train’ goes national
A documentary that aired on The History Channel last week gave a national audience a glimpse into the concerns that Nevadans have had for years about the potential dangers of shipping high-level nuclear waste across the country on trains that would roll through hundreds of cities and towns.
Tuesday’s airing of “Mega Disasters: Glow Train Catastrophe,” evaluated the U.S. Energy Department’s plan to ship by railroad some 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste to a proposed repository at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The show examined the frequency and severity of derailments and fiery collisions that have been reported on the nation’s railroads, noting that, on average, some 3,000 incidents involving derailments happen each year.
One of the accidents profiled was the 1996 derailment of a freight train passing through Weyauwega, Wis. Thirty of the 37 derailed cars were carrying highly flammable hazardous materials. The fire burned for two weeks and forced the evacuation of 2,300 people. Federal inspectors say the derailment was caused by a rail that had broken because of a fractured bolt hole.
Richard Brenner, hazardous materials coordinator for the Clark County Fire Department, who appeared on Tuesday’s program, said that if a train carrying high-level nuclear waste derailed in such a manner, “Las Vegas would not be prepared to handle something like that. It would be very difficult for any fire department in the nation to handle something like that.”
His “any fire department in the nation” observation is something History Channel viewers across the country should now be contemplating.
Nevadans have largely been the ones engaged in the fight against the Energy Department’s ill-conceived Yucca Mountain repository and the agency’s equally poor plan for transporting toxic nuclear waste. And “Mega Disasters” didn’t tell most of us anything we haven’t had numerous occasions to hear.
But maybe now residents across the country — not just Nevadans — will be asking the tough questions and telling the federal government that carrying the nation’s high-level nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain on an aging rail system is absurd.
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Las Vegas SUN
June 29, 2008
Lots of answers, all of them wrong
Despite the candidates’ wide-ranging solutions, gas prices are beyond our control
By J. Patrick Coolican
A few weeks ago, state Sen. Dina Titus stood at a gas station and blamed high gas prices on Rep. Jon Porter, whom she’s challenging in the Third Congressional District.
Titus, a Democrat, said Porter had time and again gone along with Bush administration policies that help Big Oil and hurt consumers. She also raised the issue last week in the state Senate, proposing a gas tax holiday, even though economists don’t think such a move would help the situation at all.
Republicans have also gotten into the act, pointing to failed promises by Democrats to address gas prices during the 2006 election.
Here’s what voters need to know about the price of gasoline: Elected officials are better equipped to reduce Earth’s gravitational pull than they are to reduce gas prices. The laws of first-year college economics apply here.
“Anybody who says they can get the price of oil down next year, they don’t know what they’re talking about,” UNLV economist Bill Robinson said.
The rapid growth of the Indian and Chinese economies, which means more cars and thus the need for more oil, has driven up demand. Meanwhile, oil producing countries, most of which are members of a price-fixing cartel, can’t produce much more than they do.
Demand up, supply the same, higher price. There’s no getting around this.
Moreover, the slackening dollar is adding to the upward pressure. When the dollar was strong, foreigners bought it because it was considered a safe investment. Now investors are turning to oil futures.
Politicians refer to this wholly rational behavior as “speculation” and often pretend they can do something about it.
But oil is traded on international markets and can’t be controlled by American regulators.
Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would cut crude oil prices by about 75 cents per barrel by 2025, according to a recent Bush Energy Department report. Oil was trading above $140 last week. So not much help there.
Offshore drilling? That wouldn’t start for three to five years.
Republican nominee Sen. John McCain, who was in Las Vegas last week to promote his energy program, said new drilling would have a “psychological” effect on market players and drive down prices.
Nope.
“There’s no psychological effects in those markets,” Robinson said. And if there is a psychological issue, he said, it’s related to fear of what might happen in the Middle East.
This isn’t to say a rational long-term energy policy isn’t possible and highly desirable, and no doubt it should have been crafted and executed on Sept. 12, 2001.
Both McCain and Democratic nominee Barack Obama, who was also in town last week to talk energy, have some ideas.
McCain would give tax credits for efficient, low-emission vehicles and add to our store of carbon-free nuclear power. (He favors the nuclear dump at Yucca Mountain, assuming it can be proved safe.)
Obama, who in the short term would put cash in middle-class pockets to fill tanks, would invest heavily in solar, wind, geothermal and biomass alternative fuels. (Environmentalists and economists detest his advocacy of corn-based ethanol because it drives up food prices and isn’t energy efficient.)
A smart energy policy is especially important to Nevadans, because we could benefit greatly from a diverse energy menu with our vast stores of wind, solar and geothermal energy. A carbon-free future would also mitigate global warming, which will hit us first, and hit us hard.
Moreover, Nevada is one of the most petrol-dependent places in the country. Las Vegas is dependent on gas to deliver tourists, fresh flowers, liquor, food, everything. We also think public transit is for losers and coastal beatniks.
Carroll Doherty, associate director of the Pew Research Center for the Public and the Press, said gas prices are front and center in voters’ minds. Energy is a top issue for 77 percent of them, compared with 54 percent in 2004. For some, this constitutes a concern about our long-term energy needs, but for many, it means gas prices.
Gas prices over which politicians have no control.
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Las Vegas SUN
June 29, 2008
Quenching Las Vegas’ thirst: Part 5:
‘Owens Valley is the model of what to expect’
As Las Vegas policymakers eye the water beneath Nevada, a scientific debate erupts over the possible effects
By Emily Green
Las Vegas Sun
The raw glory of the Mojave and Great Basin deserts is difficult to imagine from the paved fantasyland of Las Vegas.
As the road wends north of the city, past sun-soaked bluffs into Pahranagat Valley, there is what looks like a river but are in fact four spring-fed lakes running for some 40 miles.
Audubon himself would weep at the birdlife working this watering spot on the Pacific flyway. Bald eagles ride the breezes. Herons skid across the water.
Proceed across huge desert valleys and the land rises. Yucca gives way to pine, the hot desert to cold, Paiute territory to Shoshone.
This is the land of nut gatherers.
Three hours into the drive north from the Las Vegas offices of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, there is no missing the entry to Spring Valley. Farms begin to dot the valley floor, alfalfa fields meld with bright green carpets of greasewood and rabbitbrush.
By the time Wheeler Peak appears, the conifers rival those of the Sierra. In Spring Valley, one type of cedar is thought unique on Earth. There are bats, owls, woodpeckers, rabbits, elk, mountain lions.
Yet throughout the Great Basin Desert, the fecundity persists on the slimmest of margins.
It survives because, after spring thaw, not all of the mountain snowmelt is immediately absorbed by the desert.
Rather, springs, creeks and ponds form, all held above ground by pressure from more water below.
This water below is the Great Basin aquifer, a vast pool dating back to the ice age.
There could be no more enticing prospect for a desert city like Las Vegas than these millions of sleeping gallons.
But if the aquifer is pumped too hard, the system of springs, streams and lakes supporting life above ground could disappear.
At issue, then, was could, and should Las Vegas attempt to get this water.
In considering a pipeline to tap the aquifer, Las Vegas calculated how much water flowed into the valleys of the Great Basin each year, then how much went legally unclaimed.
In 1989, Las Vegas filed applications with the state engineer for what was thought to be the rights to half the available water in Nevada — more than 800,000 acre-feet from some 30 valleys.
When, more than a decade later, the Southern Nevada Water Authority considered how to turn the massive block of claims into real water, the plan was pared down to six key valleys in Clark, Lincoln and White Pine counties, spanning the terrain north of Las Vegas, from hot desert to cold.
This time Las Vegas sought roughly 200,000 acre-feet a year of water, enough to serve a million people.
The pipeline length shrank from more than 1,000 miles to 285 miles.
It could always sprout arteries later.
As a next step, the state engineer would need to hold hearings in which Las Vegas would make its case for the water and protesters would appear with their objections.
The state engineer’s decisions would not come in a single finding. Rather, since 2002, he has been scrutinizing applications valley by valley, or several valleys at a time. Each green light he gives adds water to the pipeline.
One hearing over one valley had make-or-break status for the pipeline plan.
Of the 200,000 acre-feet of water a year sought by Las Vegas, roughly 90,000 acre-feet would ideally come from Spring Valley, one of the basins receiving spring snowmelt from the snow-studded queen of Nevada ranges, Wheeler Peak.
Las Vegas was seeking what it estimated to be all legally unclaimed water in Spring Valley.
The Spring Valley hearing began on Sept. 11, 2006. The two weeks of testimony that followed were most remarkable for what wasn’t said.
• • •
Making the case in 2006 that hot desert Nevada needed the cold desert’s water was not hard. Seventy percent of Nevadans lived in or around Las Vegas.
What was difficult was demonstrating the cold desert had water to spare.
Arguing that it didn’t would be the Princeton-educated eminence grise of American ground water, John Bredehoeft, whose title at the U.S. Geological Survey in the 1970s and ’80s was no less than Regional Hydrologist Responsible for Water Activities in the Eight Western States.
Bredehoeft had been aware of Las Vegas pipeline plan from its inception.
He never liked it.
Bredehoeft was going to appear at the Spring Valley hearing as an expert witness for rural communities protesting the Las Vegas pipeline.
As he explains it, there is no water to spare for Las Vegas without disrupting the equilibrium between water flowing in from snowmelt and water taken out every year by ranchers, plants and animals.
Las Vegas managed to insert itself into this equation because under Nevada water law, only some of the Great Basin’s traditional water users are legally entitled to it.
Towns are, farms are, mines are, but under increasingly antiquated definitions developed in the first half of the last century to do with “beneficial use,” most of the native flora isn’t.
Following this logic, water used by plants such as the cold desert’s signature shrub, greasewood, may be legally diverted hundreds of miles away to Las Vegas.
But by the time Las Vegas was going for greasewood’s share of Spring Valley’s water in 2006, the law of “beneficial use” was at loggerheads with a host of other modern laws protecting the environment.
Greasewood belongs to a class of plants called “phreatophytes,” named because their long roots are capable of reaching deep underground to access the water table.
As Bredehoeft sees it, if Las Vegas sinks its wells and the roots of the phreatophytes continue to chase the descending water table, that means Las Vegas won’t be taking the water from the greasewood but from storage in the aquifer.
“Taking water out of storage,” he says, “is mining.”
Mining ground water is illegal in Nevada.
Mine enough of it and the water table can drop for hundreds of miles around. Springs stop flowing, streams disappear, plants and animals dependent on them die.
So the logic goes: Target the phreatophytes whose water you intend to take, and don’t allow them to compete for water.
Pump hard. Kill them fast. Then let the system return to equilibrium so what water comes in from snowmelt equals what is taken out by Las Vegas pumps, and the water table doesn’t fall inexorably.
But this weeds-for-water logic becomes a problem when greasewood serves an important function above and beyond offering forage to deer and cattle.
Phreatophytes prevent dust storms.
Spring Valley sits at the foot of Mt. Wheeler. In 1986, then-Congressman Harry Reid led Wheeler’s transformation into Great Basin National Park, in no small part because of Spring Valley’s pristine air.
Without a high water table saturating the valley floor and the long roots of phreatophytes anchoring the soil, Spring Valley could become the kind of dust bowl created by Los Angeles after William Mulholland began pumping Owens Lake in 1913.
Once Los Angeles drained the lake in California’s high Sierra, it began taking Owens Valley ground water. By the 1980s, the wasteland created by Los Angeles had given dust a new common name.
The vile mix of fine sand, arsenic and assorted metals billowing out of Owens Valley became the single worst source of “particulate pollution” in the nation, registering at 23 times the level allowed by federal heath standards. It filled local emergency rooms with asthmatic children. It traveled hundreds of miles, clouding three national parks and repeatedly shutting down China Lake Naval Weapons Center.
Owens Valley was not the image the keepers of Nevada’s only national park wanted on their postcards.
Las Vegas found itself putting on two faces.
It was applying to the state engineer of Nevada to seize the greasewood’s share of Spring Valley’s water.
But in 2004, in seeking passage for the pipeline across federal land, Mulroy had gone before the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and promised, “An Owens Valley cannot and will not occur in Nevada.”
• • •
In the 1980s, when ground around wells in the Las Vegas Valley had collapsed in feet, not inches, from pumping, geologist Terry Katzer got an idea.
He was in the Nevada office of the Geological Survey, one of the many western research outposts then overseen by John Bredehoeft.
He asked Bredehoeft: Could Great Basin ground water be moved south to Las Vegas?
Not without mining, Bredehoeft responded.
Katzer declined to speak for this series, but Bredehoeft remembers their relationship at the Geological Survey as strained.
As relations soured, Katzer quit and took the idea for pumping the Great Basin to a more receptive audience: the Las Vegas Valley Water District.
In 1985, Katzer became the district’s director of research and in 1986, he hired Kay Brothers, a hydrologist with a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.
Brothers’ background was helping the petroleum industry comply with environmental regulations. As Katzer’s pipeline plan was set in motion in 1999, this was the skill most needed by Mulroy and her newly formed Southern Nevada Water Authority.
Brothers became Mulroy’s director of resources and by 2002, she was named deputy general manager. Second to Mulroy, Brothers became the face of the pipeline project.
Katzer began working for Brothers, his former assistant.
But in the new administrative setup, if the politics lay with Mulroy and Brothers, the science remained with Katzer and his old network of colleagues out of the Nevada office of the U.S. Geological Survey.
If the Great Basin aquifer were to become a major new water supply for Las Vegas, Brothers and Katzer would need someone capable of modeling the effects of pumping.
Katzer turned to his former boss at the Geological Survey’s Nevada office, hydrogeologist Timothy Durbin. Katzer had been Durbin’s principal assistant. Durbin, in turn, reported to Bredehoeft.
Between the time the pipeline idea first horrified Bredehoeft in the 1980s and the moment that his former No. 2 man in Nevada began recruiting his former No. 1 to work on it in 2001, Bredehoeft had left the federal agency and opened a private hydrology practice.
So had Durbin, who had done some consulting jobs for Katzer and Las Vegas.
Durbin was intrigued by the Katzer plan: Here was a chance to come into a massive new project and design it in a way that you could manage the effects.
If, Durbin wondered, that were possible. And it was a mother of an if.
As Durbin joined Katzer and both men looked over the Las Vegas pipeline plan, Durbin saw exactly what Bredehoeft had tried to warn Katzer about those years earlier.
The plan was fraught with risks.
The Great Basin comprises many valleys. Underlying them, the prehistoric jumble of rock and sand is often so permeable that ground water can flow hundreds of miles from valley to valley.
This meant the effects of pumping one valley could conceivably be felt hundreds of miles away.
They would clearly have to avoid pulling water from the sources feeding the four lakes of the Pahranagat Valley, the Muddy River and other places protected by the U.S. Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife and Nevada environmental programs.
The best target for Las Vegas was the lush and lovely Spring Valley, 100 miles long and roughly 12 miles wide. It not only received the bonanza snowmelt of Wheeler Peak, but the aquifer’s flow also seemed relatively contained there.
But they knew there would be sacrifices:
• Depleting spring flows.
• Denuding hundreds of thousands of acres of federally owned grazing and recreational land of its native flora and fauna.
• Supplanting phreatophytes with the nonnative and invasive cheat grass, which by late spring is so dry it is akin to setting tinder at the feet of Nevada’s fire-prone alpine ranges.
• Sullying air around Great Basin National Park.
• Unseating ranchers who were direct descendants of Nevada’s earliest pioneers.
According to Durbin, after years of arguing with Bredehoeft, Katzer too began to see his point.
“There is no free water.”
But to Durbin’s mind, “Las Vegas was not going to go away.”
He knew he could not create public policy. But he could help inform it.
As a scientist, he would lay out the options and the effects, and then the public could decide whether it was willing to make the sacrifices necessary for Las Vegas to tap Great Basin water.
“It’s a societal issue,” he says. “It’s a value judgment. What’s valuable and what’s not?”
The sacrifices implicit in the plan for rural Nevada were so great, particularly for its watery heart of White Pine County, that Durbin half expected Las Vegas to hold them up as proof that Southern Nevada couldn’t possibly tap this source and Las Vegas instead deserved more Colorado River water.
Except by the close of 2003, the pipeline’s inevitable effects weren’t being used to argue for an alternate source of water.
Instead, as Durbin saw it, in pushing the project forward for an ever-thirstier Las Vegas, the Southern Nevada Water Authority began hiding possible outcomes.
According to Durbin, pressure to downplay and even deny the project’s effects started to come in 2003 in meetings with Paul Taggart, the attorney representing Las Vegas’ claims before the state engineer.
The first glimpse of it involved relatively minor hearings concerning a spangle of wells that Las Vegas wanted to sink in Clark and southern Lincoln counties.
According to Durbin, Taggart wanted him and Katzer to testify “no impacts.”
“Neither of us felt we could do that,” Durbin says.
They sent Taggart a memo laying out a strategy, emphasizing the need to kill off phreatophytes for the Las Vegas pipeline plan.
First, Las Vegas could take the pipeline to relatively uninhabited “dry” valleys of Lincoln County.
This would be stopgap. There weren’t enough greasewood-type plants here whose water they could legally intercept.
They would be mining.
But if they used shallow pumps, Durbin calculated, they could spread out effects in space and time in such a way as to be able to stop pumping short of the point that Las Vegas dried up the White and Muddy rivers and the precious lakes of Pahranagat.
This would buy time to get to the more verdant “wet valleys” of the northern cold desert, where mining wouldn’t be such a worry.
There were plenty of phreatophytes in Spring Valley to part from their water.
Once Las Vegas got into Spring Valley, Katzer and Durbin recommended buying water rights from ranchers willing to sell. This would preempt protests.
Then, they recommended, Las Vegas should pump hard to quickly kill off greasewood communities. With Spring Valley on line, they could then ease up in “dry” Lincoln County in time to spare Pahranagat Valley and the White and Muddy rivers.
Their plan — effects and all — on record within the water authority, Durbin and Katzer worked on the model and pumping strategy throughout 2004 and 2005.
But in the background, news that rural ranchers were mounting a rousing defense for Spring Valley’s water played incessantly in the Las Vegas press.
To quell the uproar, Mulroy and Brothers began arguing to reporters and in public meetings in White Pine County that they could pump Spring Valley — and save the greasewood, save the rabbitbrush, save the meadows, even save the alfalfa and cattle ranches.
In other words, they were pledging to save the very things Katzer and Durbin worked so hard figuring out how and where and when to sacrifice.
As the Spring Valley hearing approached in September 2006, after five years’ work, Durbin’s model was finally ready to simulate pumping for the full 90,000 acre-feet of water being sought by Las Vegas. The result? The level of the water table underlying Spring Valley would drop on the order of 200 feet or more over 75 years.
This would, as Durbin and Katzer had envisioned, indeed kill off Spring Valley’s phreatophytes.
It would also end traditional ranching in the valley.
And with no water saturating the top soil and no roots to anchor it, the parched earth of Spring Valley could indeed become a new Owens Valley.
• • •
In 1989, the Department of Interior agencies that manage most of the land in Nevada — the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs — had been among the most forceful opponents of the original Las Vegas applications.
As the Spring Valley hearing approached in September 2006, Mulroy and Brothers still faced their opposition.
During a prehearing evidence exchange between Las Vegas’ attorneys and the opponents, the U.S. Park Service received Durbin’s model and ran it.
The Park Service hydrologist came up with the same result as Durbin.
This could have been a brutal embarrassment for Mulroy and Brothers, except on the last working day before the Spring Valley hearing began, all four Interior agencies, including the Park Service, withdrew their protests.
Swallowing hard, the Interior agencies instead agreed to take places on committees to monitor the effects of pumping.
Representatives of almost every agency to sign the agreement explained the logic this way: By settling, they were assured some measure of control and could work with Las Vegas toward its much-vaunted goal of little or no damage. But if they protested and lost, they had nothing.
Durbin, the man trained as a scientific adviser to these very Interior agencies, didn’t think monitoring would work.
“I’m going to guess that even with the monitoring, there will be long-running disputes with one side saying, ‘OK, something happened in the mountains. Was it caused by pumping by the Southern Nevada Water Authority, or did a cow drink all the water, or was it low precipitation?’ ” he says.
The agreement between federal agencies and the water authority meant the Park Service’s running of Durbin’s pumping model (and the result being the same finding of a drop of 200 feet or more in the water table), could not be used in the hearing before the state engineer, either.
So, as the Spring Valley hearing commenced, the man with the most damning case against the Las Vegas pumping plan was Timothy Durbin, the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s own expert witness.
• • •
Almost three years after the meetings that prompted their pumping plan memo of 2003, Katzer and Durbin were back consulting with water authority attorney Paul Taggart over how to mount Las Vegas’ case for the all-important Spring Valley hearing.
Taggart would not comment for this story.
However, according to Durbin, he and Terry Katzer again came under pressure from a water authority engineer and Taggart to soft-pedal the project’s effects.
“At that point, Terry was agreeing with me: That’s nonsense,” Durbin says.
Shortly after preparation for the hearing began with Taggart, Durbin got a call from Katzer.
He had just quit.
Katzer was the one who brought the idea of the Las Vegas pipeline to the water authority in the first place, and then hired Durbin.
But Durbin said he could not follow Katzer’s move in quitting.
In five years as a consultant to the Southern Nevada Water Authority, Durbin had accepted what he reckons was roughly $1 million in consulting fees.
The point of retaining him had been to generate a model for the state engineer. He could not betray his client and walk out just before the first key hearing.
That said, relations between him and his client could not have been worse.
Still, Taggart had little option but to put a now-hostile Durbin on the stand.
In a series of smaller hearings leading up to the Spring Valley one in September 2006, the state engineer had demanded modeling.
As Durbin took the stand before the state engineer on Sept. 14, 2006, he had decided that if anyone asked flat out whether he had run his model and what the results were, he would give the answer.
If not, he wouldn’t.
Durbin was not questioned by Taggart, a man guaranteed to make him bristle, but by another attorney for Las Vegas, Michael Van Zandt.
In more than an hour of detailed testimony, Van Zandt led Durbin on a journey through the minutiae of how models are created.
“Identifying data gaps … version two of that model … just an evolution from version one … simulation of faults … efficient equation solvers … meshes for individual compartments …”
“It was stultifying,” says Matt Kenna, a lawyer from the Western Environmental Law Center representing the protesters. “The incredible irrelevant detail.”
Finally, Van Zandt led Durbin home to the single point Las Vegas wanted to land about modeling: The uncertainty of any result that might embarrass it.
Questioned about margins of error, Durbin responded with yet more mind-numbing detail: “The plus standard error of the estimated water level measurements … are plus or minus 50 feet ... 30 percent chance that the estimated ground water levels are more than 50 feet off what the true level would be …”
When at last the state engineer himself asked Durbin how the model could be used to predict the future of the Spring Valley aquifer if pumping began, Durbin brightened and quickly reeled off some simple steps. Van Zandt — seeing where this was going — quickly interjected to the state engineer, “There will be other witnesses who will probably answer that question for you.”
In cross examination, Kenna had no idea of the hostility between Las Vegas’ attorneys and their star witness, or how accommodating Durbin might have been if asked flat out: “Did he run his model and, if so, what was the result?”
Instead, he fished around the margins and hooked more technical gobbledygook.
Why? According to Kenna, “The standard lawyer’s advice is ‘don’t ask the ultimate question.’?” The witness might not answer it.
A week later, the protesting parties brought in the lion.
Bredehoeft took the stand for them.
The former Regional Hydrologist Responsible for Water Activities in the Eight Western States was there to defend modeling.
Whether it be to calculate potential effects of nuclear waste leaking from Yucca Mountain or predict effects of Las Vegas’ pumping of Great Basin ground water, Bredehoeft insisted that modeling was the only tool available to help inform public policy decisions. “That’s it. We don’t have another tool.”
This time Taggart was representing Las Vegas.
Bredehoeft was well aware that Durbin hadn’t given the result of his model, so he let drop that the Park Service had also run it and produced a written a report on the result.
“Objection!” Taggart called. “Those documents are not in evidence and any statements about what the predictions in those models say would be inappropriate.”
The upshot: The Park Service report was also suppressed.
And so predictions by the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s own modeler and the former head of the Nevada office of the U.S. Geological Survey about what the cost to the Great Basin might be from Las Vegas pumping were never entered into evidence.
“I allowed myself to be badly used,” Durbin says. “I’m an adult. I allowed it to happen.”
• • •
It’s April 16, 2007, 3:30 p.m., at the Las Vegas offices of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.
Pat Mulroy halted a conversation in midsentence to reach for a pulsing BlackBerry. As she read the text message, a small smile crossed her face.
Tracy Taylor, Nevada’s state engineer, had just granted the authority somewhat less than half the water it asked for — 40,000 acre-feet a year for 10 years.
In return, the authority would be required to “file an annual report by March 15 of each year detailing the findings of the approved monitoring and mitigation plan.”
After this, and presuming success, the amount could be raised to 60,000 acre-feet a year.
“Now, bear in mind, we’ll be in Lincoln County first,” a briefly triumphant Mulroy explained. “And in the Lincoln County basins, there’s no one. No one!”
She was referring to Cave, Dry Lake and Delamar valleys, three of the four basins that Katzer and Durbin envisioned tiding Las Vegas over until Spring Valley could be aggressively tapped.
By December 2007, the state engineer’s hearing concerning Dry Lake, Cave and Delamar valleys was approaching. Las Vegas was seeking a total of almost 35,000 acre-feet a year.
Attorneys for Mulroy and the protesters were in the by now familiar pretrial ritual of exchanging evidence lists.
Among the scheduled witnesses was Timothy Durbin, except this time he was not testifying for Taggart, Brothers, Mulroy and the water authority, but for the legal team representing the protesters.
Shortly after Christmas, Durbin’s phone began to ring.
The first call had two people on the line: Taggart and an engineer from the water authority. Durbin says they wanted to know whether it was true he was testifying and what he would testify about. “I was pretty guarded there. I don’t trust those people at all.”
The second call, Durbin says, came from Katzer.
“I told him I was feeling uncomfortable with my testimony in the Spring Valley hearing and I thought that the Southern Nevada Water Authority had an obligation to disclose what the impacts were going to be and that was hidden in that hearing.”
The third call came from Mulroy’s deputy. “I told Kay the same thing. Basically Kay said she was she was disappointed but she respected my right to do it.”
On the morning of Feb. 11, 2008, a clearly nervous Durbin again took the stand before the state engineer of Nevada.
“Please come forward and be sworn, Mr. Durbin. Nice to see you again,” a curious hearing officer said.
And so, with Taggart objecting a few times, Durbin more or less recited to the court distillations of the memos that he had sent during the past four years to Taggart and Mulroy about sacrificial choices and the problems of monitoring.
“All that the monitoring and mitigation can do is shift the focus of the impacts ... I believe that their (Southern Nevada Water Authority’s) reliance on monitoring and mitigation is most likely not going to work,” he said.
Las Vegas owed it to the public to discuss what the environmental effects of its Great Basin water were going to really be, he said. “I think that for everybody concerned, including the rate payers in Las Vegas, that it’s better to have that discourse now.”
Protesters braced themselves for a Las Vegas retort to Durbin’s appearance.
There was none.
The strategy all along had been to keep Durbin’s concerns off the record. Now that he’d had his day in court, they were not about to call attention to it.
• • •
Nearly four years after pledging to the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that modern protections make a repeat of Owens Valley impossible, Mulroy maintains the position.
Of Durbin’s work, she says, “It’s just a model!”
Shortly before publication of this series, Mulroy’s information officer dismissed the Durbin-Katzer memo as “recommendations from two consultants to a contract attorney on one potential course of action. That is two bus transfers and a cab ride short of being a policy.”
Brothers has heard the Owens Valley comparison so often for so long that the mere mention of it in an interview for this story made her irate.
“They’re totally different projects,” she snapped. Owens Valley had a large lake. “To even compare them is to be out of date and not understand what a ground water project is versus surface water.”
Also, she noted, William Mulholland and early Los Angeles were not subjected to the modern protections ensured by federal government.
Part of Brothers’ management strategy for Spring Valley involves still-evolving ideas about capturing water that streams off the hills in springtime, then evaporates on hot playas.
Ideally, she’d like to force this into the ground, just as she and Katzer used injection wells to store unused river water in the Las Vegas Valley.
They also might use water purchased from the ranchers to help maintain the phreatophytes.
“I’m not saying that you would never lose a greasewood,” she said, “but I think you would never lose much at all by managing it properly.”
Brothers is confident that if she sat down with Bredehoeft, Durbin and Katzer, they would see her point.
Becoming soothing, she added, “I don’t know that we disagree.”
But on hearing this, the normally shy Durbin retorted, “I hope she’s lying, because otherwise she’s a bad scientist.”
In the early 1980s as then-director of the Geological Survey’s California office, Durbin led modeling teams looking precisely at the effect of Los Angeles’ pumping on Owens Valley phreatophytes.
Removing water from the playas, Durbin said, almost perfectly emulates what Los Angeles did, first draining Owens Lake and then pumping the ground water.
“The Owens Valley is a model of what to expect,” he said.
Moreover, he added, playa water plays a key role in keeping down alkaline dust.
Another key part of Brothers’ strategy is moving pumping around so as to “rest” certain areas.
But to Durbin, this wouldn’t decrease the effect, but make it more diffuse, difficult to track and hard if not impossible to reverse once damage became evident.
“We know from basic physics that in some time or some place the impacts of the pumping will be equal to the volume of the pumping,” Durbin said. “You don’t need a ground water model to make that statement with absolute certainty. It’s simple. If you take water from one place and give it to another, it will be missed at the other end.”
With the pipeline originator and his chosen modeler, Durbin, now gone, among the rank of scientists now reporting to Brothers is a new modeler from the U.S. Geological Survey.
His model, still under construction, will not be able to embarrass them.
It will be used only to contrast predictions against measured effects of actual pumping.
If monitoring wells and models both suggest there are problems, monitoring committees will seek “consensus-based” actions.
Mulroy’s and Brothers’ new team speculates greasewood may do just fine on rainwater that percolates around root zones.
Mulroy and Brothers say they now have extra water to irrigate Spring Valley’s greasewood if necessary and to keep the ranches working, except with more efficient irrigation.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority plans to pump the Great Basin indefinitely.
It will revisit how much it intends to pump, possibly returning some water to White Pine County, only after paying off the pipeline in 75 years.
Unlike the original Katzer-Durbin plan, they do not see the water now being sought from the “dry” valleys of Cave, Dry and Delamar as temporary.
“I don’t think in the lifetime of this project, we’ll affect Pahranagat Springs,” Southern Nevada Water Authority hydrologist Andrew Burns says. “But having said that, we’ll have monitoring of those pumping wells and those areas. If we see effects, we’ll have opportunity to move the pumping around.”
The long and the short of it, Burns concludes, is “we’re going to pump what’s permitted to us.”
• • •
If this were fiction, the story would have a neat ending. But this being about the search for water in Nevada, it doesn’t.
• The Southern Nevada Water Authority hopes to start importing Great Basin ground water in 2015.
• The state engineer’s decision for Cave, Dry Lake and Delamar valleys is expected by October.
• Pretrial hearings over Snake Valley begin in mid-July and a hearing is expected by the end of the year. Because Snake Valley sits on the state line, water will not be able to be taken from the valley until Utah approves it.
• The latest estimate of the pipeline cost is $3.5 billion, eliciting the quip from Ely Daily Times Editor Kent Harper that it would be cheaper for Las Vegans to bathe in Dom Perignon than Great Basin ground water.
• If the Great Basin pipeline project fails, and drought persists on the Colorado River, Las Vegas’ decision to keep building and dare the Department of Interior to let it run dry will probably pay off. Few think that Uncle Sam would cut off a city.
But Las Vegas would have to learn to live within its means — maybe by slowing growth — while searching for alternate sources: building a desalination plant in California or Mexico then exchanging it for more Colorado River water and pursuing more aggressive indoor conservation.
• Whatever the outcome of Mulroy’s pipeline, Nevada Senator Harry Reid says, “you have to recognize what Pat Mulroy’s done with conservation. If she has no other legacy other than what she’s done to conserve water in Southern Nevada, her legacy is very significant.”
• Former Clark County Manager Richard Bunker, the man who groomed Mulroy to become Las Vegas’ water manager, is largely retired.
One of the last jobs this fifth generation Southern Nevadan vows to do for Las Vegas is to represent Mulroy in negotiations for Snake Valley’s water.
When Bunker is finished with the Utah negotiations, he plans to spend as little time in Las Vegas as possible. He devotes most of his time now to his ranch — in Utah.
Las Vegas no longer feels like home, he says.
“It’s too crowded.”
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Daily Camera
June 29, 2008
Butterfield: Nukes: the position ridiculous and the expense damnable
By Anne B. Butterfield
'The nuclear power that we have invariably gotten from the Washington sausage machine demands licenses without an impartial licensing process, public acquiescence without public involvement, spent fuel without a waste repository, multi-billion dollar projects without analysis of alternatives, nearly separated plutonium (per the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership) without adequate safeguards -- in short, a renaissance without masterpieces."
-- Peter A. Bradford, former Commissioner of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and senior utility commissioner. June 2007.
A vocal group of people in Boulder, and columnist Bob Greenlee in particular, have been crying out for a nuclear energy renaissance to stop the flow of carbon emissions now heating our globe. Some of these proponents even rant: "Anyone who doesn't want nuclear energy shows that they aren't serious about climate change."
Nuclear power has no carbon emissions! It's proven, and safe! Uh, well, never mind the oil-intensive efforts of mining and reprocessing uranium, or the chlorofluorocarbons coming out of refinement, or the transport of waste out to Yucca Mountain for burial.
Do we have mad hatters opining on mercury here? Why do conservatives like those at the Heritage Foundation complain about the subsidies going in to renewable energy like wind and solar, but love nuclear energy, which is nothing if not a pathway to socialized energy?
And the costs and subsidies of nuclear energy need to be weighed. The Economist Magazine observed, "Nuclear power, once claimed to be too cheap to meter is now too costly to matter." This riposte came out before the recent cost escalation of power plant construction as cement, steel and copper skyrocketed. Nuclear Engineering International Magazine published construction costs for nuclear plants ranging from $1,400/kw up to $6,000/kw installed.
The electrical power from nukes has been subsidized in recent years between 1-5c per kwh, and in 2005 it was raised to 5-9c per kwh for new plants. These new subsidies (along with loan guarantees that protect the Wall Street investors from construction delays and run ups) still do not entice investors such as Warren Buffet who recently got out of a nuclear project because it did not make economic sense. Buffet likes to invest in true free market scenarios, eschewing industries like the airlines, which are hammered by costs run up by regulation and unions.
Our local Rocky Mountain Institute issued an insightful report, "Forget Nuclear" revealing that what really matters is the most affordable way to displace coal power. Nuclear ranks sixth out of the seven options in the study, the most cost effective ones being end-use efficiency and recovered heat cogeneration. The cheaper modes (wind, gas turbines, cogen etc.) are more quickly deployed than nuclear, also they do not demand the excessive water of nuclear energy. Just last year the drought in the Southeast caused reactors to be shut down temporarily in Alabama and North Carolina for lack of cooling water.
Dr. Marty Hoerling of NOAA has outlined the high likelihood of long range drought afflicting the West as the planet warms. With our sun and wind and great technologies like thermal storage for dispatchable solar power, I don't see how we can justify nuclear here. Some complain that CSP's storage is not proven -- but it's certainly more proven than nuclear waste management.
Peter Bradford says it best: "Those who assert, 'Nuclear energy just may be the energy source that can save our planet from catastrophic climate change,' are inviting us into a dangerous la-la land in which nuclear power will be oversubsidized and underscrutinized while more promising and quicker responses to climate change are neglected."
The RMI study can be read at www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid467.php and a complete report on subsidies can be downloaded from EarthTrack.net.
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Washington Post
June 29, 2008
COUNTDOWN
Poised for a Flip
Chris Cillizza
PLAYERS and PLAYERS
Fewer than five months remain before the November election, and, slowly but surely, the outlines of the national playing field are coming into focus.
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) appears committed to expanding the traditional group of battleground states -- launching his first ad of the general election in 18 states, including 14 that President Bush carried in 2004. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) seems to envision a more traditional playing field, concentrating his advertising on 10 (or so) states including quadrennial battlegrounds such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
It remains to be seen which approach will prevail. But here's a snapshot of the five states most likely to switch from the Democratic column in 2004 to the Republican one in 2008 (or vice versa). No. 1 is the most likely to flip this fall.
5. Michigan (Sen. John Kerry won with 51 percent in 2004): There's a reason that the endorsements of Obama by former senator John Edwards (N.C.) and former vice president Al Gore both happened in Michigan. Obama's campaign knows that its candidate's decision to skip the state's primary (and all of the agitation that ensued from that choice), coupled with the fact that McCain has shown strength in Michigan (witness his 2000 primary victory there), make the Wolverine State a major challenge. For Obama to win, he must run extremely well in Detroit and Ann Arbor and avoid being swamped in the more Republican-friendly territory covered by the 2nd and 3rd Congressional Districts.
4. Ohio (Bush won with 51 percent in 2004): Obama's chance to lock down Ohio went by the boards when Gov. Ted Strickland removed himself from the veepstakes. With Strickland out of the running, it's clear that Obama will have to put in the time to persuade Ohio voters -- particularly the working-class whites who supported Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) in the state's primary -- that he shares their values and concerns. Still, Republicans hit something close to rock bottom in 2006, and it's not clear whether the party can recover before November. National Republican strategists are not optimistic.
3. Nevada (Bush, 51 percent, 2004): The growth in Nevada is largely in and around Las Vegas (Clark County) and tends to favor Democrats, but there remains a substantial conservative vote in the rural reaches. McCain and Obama have made appearances in the state in the past week -- a sign that both believe it is up for grabs. Watch the manner in which Obama and McCain address the issue of Yucca Mountain, the proposed permanent dump site for the nation's nuclear waste, a plan that is strongly opposed by Nevadans. During a stop in the state last week, Obama blasted McCain for his proposal to build a string of nuclear plants, a not-so-subtle attempt to remind voters that he opposes Yucca while McCain supports it.
2. New Mexico (Bush, 50 percent, 2004): Bush's victory in the Land of Enchantment was the first by a Republican presidential candidate since 1988. It looks likely that New Mexico will return to its Democratic roots in 2008. Popular Gov. Bill Richardson is interested in a spot either on the ticket or in an Obama Cabinet and will work hard to make sure the senator from Illinois runs well in his home state. The swing voters in the state are Hispanics; they make up 42 percent of the population and will be heavily sought after by both Obama and McCain.
1. Iowa (Bush, 50 percent, 2004): At the start of the 2008 election, Iowa was widely seen as the truest of tossups: Bush won the state by 10,000 votes of out more than 1.5 million cast in the last presidential election. The emergence of Obama, however, and the centrality of the Hawkeye State in launching his candidacy, has turned the state into the best pickup opportunity in the country for Democrats. The massive amount of money Obama spent to identify, organize and turn out voters in advance of the Jan. 3 caucuses looks to be a good long-term investment heading into the general election. In neither of McCain's presidential primary bids did he run an active campaign in Iowa -- a major disadvantage in the fall.
PLAYERS
Americans United for Change, an issues-oriented liberal organization, is undergoing a bit of a facelift in advance of the November election. Current Executive Director Brad Woodhouse is taking a leave of absence to help run the day-to-day communications at the Democratic National Committee. While Woodhouse's madcap style -- and e-mail precocity -- are irreplaceable, Americans United will use a double-barreled approach in his absence: Caren Benjamin, a former aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), will be assisted in the day-to-day duties by Progressive Strategies, a Democratic consulting firm run by former Clinton aide Mike Lux. Susan McCue, former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.), will serve as a general consultant to the group.
One day: Big brains at the nexus of public policy and politics gather in Colorado for the Aspen Institute's 2008 Ideas Festival. Among the expected attendees are former president Bill Clinton and former Georgia senator Sam Nunn, one of the most-mentioned candidates for the Democratic vice presidential nomination.
16 days: July 15 is the final day for candidates to file for the Senate race in Minnesota. All eyes are on "The Body," a.k.a. Jesse Ventura, a.k.a. the state's former governor. Ventura has played coy about his interest in joining an already high-profile field that includes Sen. Norm Coleman (R) and entertainer Al Franken (D). If Ventura runs, he would almost assuredly affect the final outcome.
EVERYONE'S FAVORITE
Ever wonder what it would be like if the vice presidential sweepstakes was conducted like "Survivor"?
Now we know -- thanks to the Massachusetts-based company Affinnova, which used "evolutionary optimization" to trim down a list of 100 potential veeps to the single strongest candidate for each party.
The winners?
There's just one: retired Gen. Colin Powell.
Powell, who has said countless times that he has no interest in running for office, wound up atop both the Democratic and Republican lists. "Likely voters for both parties in the study indicate Powell's strong leadership and dependability as factors for choosing him first," said a release on the findings.
Rounding out the top five picks for Democrats, in order, were former vice president Al Gore, former representative Dick Gephardt (Mo.), Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and former senator John Edwards (N.C.). On the GOP side, the results for second through fourth place were Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in a virtual dead heat. Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani took fifth.
The findings are the result of a Web-based sample of 2,000 likely voters from June 12 to 17. Participants were presented with three different president-vice president combinations and asked to pick the ticket that most appealed to them. Over time, those tickets not picked dropped off, and the more commonly selected moved up the list. It's Darwinism applied to politics.
Will Obama and McCain heed the evolutionary optimization? Probably not. But maybe they should, as Affinnova has done work for the likes of Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble and Microsoft.
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St. Louis Post-Dispatch
June 29, 2008
Swords to plowshares: nuclear bombs to electricity
By William H. Miller
Nuclear power's resurgence in the United States is tied to a surprisingly effective program that is helping to make the world a safer place from nuclear weapons.
Known as the "megatons to megawatts" program, it has led to the elimination of huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons materials, thus making it much more difficult for rogue countries and terrorist groups to obtain them.
Established 15 years ago by the United States and Russia, the megatons to megawatts accord has a single goal: It calls for the conversion of 500 metric tons of highly enriched, bomb-grade uranium from dismantled Russian nuclear weapons into low-enriched uranium to be used at U.S. nuclear power plants to produce electricity.
The program has succeeded beyond all expectations. To date, 327 metric tons of Russia's highly enriched uranium has been turned into nuclear fuel for use in U.S. commercial reactors, according to USEC Inc., the publicly traded company originally created by the U.S. Department of Energy. USEC is the U.S. government's exclusive agent for the program.
The conversion of that bomb-grade uranium is equivalent to the destruction of nearly 13,100 Russian nuclear warheads aimed at U.S. cities. By 2013, when the program is scheduled to be completed, the equivalent of 20,000 Russian warheads will have been recycled into fuel for U.S. nuclear power plants.
Fifty percent of the fuel used in U.S. nuclear plants to generate electricity comes from Russian nuclear warheads. Use of this converted fuel has extended available uranium supplies and reduced the need to open new uranium mines. As a result, it has made nuclear power more competitive economically and helped to ensure its long-term viability.
This raises an important question: If nuclear fuel can be produced safely from bomb-grade uranium, why not make use of spent fuel being stored at nuclear plants throughout the United States? The spent fuel — more than 55,000 metric tons of it — contains valuable uranium and plutonium that can be reprocessed chemically to produce a mixed-oxide fuel for use in generating more electricity. Such recycling was done in the United States until the mid-1970s, when President Jimmy Carter banned its use on grounds that the process posed a risk of nuclear proliferation.
France and Great Britain, however, have continued to recycle spent fuel. France obtains 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power and sells surplus electricity to neighboring countries. Great Britain is gearing up to build more nuclear plants.
The United States finally is reawakening to the value of spent-fuel recycling. The U.S. Department of Energy's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership calls for the resumption of recycling in the United States by 2020. Research on improved recycling technologies is under way.
With recycling, nuclear waste would be less of a problem. One repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada would have enough capacity to hold all of the waste from nuclear power plants and the defense program. Consequently, there would be no need for additional storage facilities.
If recycling were revived, countries interested in developing their own nuclear power programs would have access to nuclear fuel produced in the United States and other nations that have uranium enrichment capability, such as Russia, France and Great Britain. Through such international partnerships, countries seeking to launch nuclear power programs would have no need to build their own enrichment or recycling facilities. That would reduce the likelihood of nuclear proliferation.
As former Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, a non-proliferation expert, said recently in regard to the megatons to megawatts program, "Who would have thought this possible in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s or even in the early 90s? It would have certainly been seen as a mountain too high to climb."
But we have climbed the mountain and reduced the risk from nuclear weapons in the world with nuclear power.
--William H. Miller is a professor at the Nuclear Science and Engineering Institute at the University of Missouri and at the university's research reactor.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
June 28, 2008
Senator offers alternative for Yucca project
Interim sites in East, West proposed
By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- A new nuclear waste strategy that would partner the government with industry to develop privately owned storage sites and recycling factories was announced on Friday.
Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., unveiled a bill as an alternative to storing 77,000 tons of used nuclear fuel in a long-delayed Yucca Mountain repository.
The bill would not end the Yucca project, but could alter its purpose.
Domenici, considered the Senate's authority on nuclear power, has said the Nevada site could eventually be put to use storing military nuclear waste and other radioactive products that cannot be recycled.
But Domenici has made it clear his goal is for most spent fuel generated by nuclear power plants to be shipped to interim storage pads and eventually run through a reprocessing regime to pull more energy out of them.
"A sustainable nuclear fuel cycle is the key to nuclear energy reaching its full potential," Domenici said in a statement. "I'm pleased to introduce this legislation which takes the first step toward resolving the question of nuclear waste."
Because the bill envisions some role for Yucca Mountain, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he will oppose it and continue to look for ways to kill the project outright.
"This is the more of the same nuclear snake oil that has been peddled before and there is no reason to believe it's going anywhere," added Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev.
Domenici is retiring from Congress this year. His bill was cosponsored by Sens. Jeff Sessions. R-Ala., Mary Landrieu, D-La., and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.
Domenici has touted Sessions as most likely to continue promoting nuclear waste legislation after he retires.
The new bill authorizes the Department of Energy to enter into contracts with private companies to store waste at two interim sites -- one in the East and one in the West -- while reprocessing plants are licensed and built nearby.
Western storage would not be at Yucca Mountain, a Domenici aide said.
Costs would be shared 50-50 to finance engineering and designs and licensing applications for two recycling plants. The bill would divert 5 percent from a $20 billion Yucca Mountain construction fund to explore the possible alternative.
The Secretary of Energy would be authorized to offer benefit payments to communities willing to serve as hosts.
The Domenici bill dovetails with an ongoing community recruitment project by the Nuclear Energy Institute.
NEI president Frank Bowman said the legislation was "pragmatic -- and needed." A surge of interest in nuclear power "necessitates a fresh look at used fuel management policies," he said.
Domenici has touted nuclear waste reprocessing techniques being used in France. Some critics say the French method creates more pollution, and plutonium byproducts that pose proliferation risks.
The Bush administration has attempted to launch a U.S. program involving advanced reprocessing technologies. Some experts say that could be decades away from fulfillment.
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Reno Gazette-Journal
June 28, 2008
Letter: Charge $1 billion fee for nuclear repository
When anything in life is inevitable, always make the best of it. Therefore, agree now to allow the use of Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste repository for an annual service fee of $1 billion per year. Crisis solved.
David J. Eizenhoefer
Reno
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Newsweek
June 28, 2008
The Nuclear Option
Decades of investment in civilian nuclear power puts france in the energy catbird seat.
By Burton Richter
France ranks 10th in the EPI because of its supply of clean energy.
Being poor in oil and coal might once have been considered a disadvantage, but not for France. Forty years ago necessity led Charles de Gaulle to pursue nuclear power aggressively as a chief source of electricity. For years this strategy put France at odds with environmentalists, but climate change and soaring demand for energy have changed all that. Because of its 59 nuclear reactors, which provide fourth fifths of the country's electricity, France now emits only about half the greenhouse gas per unit of GDP of the United States (about the world average), which propels France to near the top of Yale's and Columbia's Environmental Performance Index (EPI). Nuclear power not only helps insulate France from wild fluctuations in energy prices, but it also suggests a way to reduce its dependence on oil for cars, trucks and buses: if and when plug-in hybrid vehicles and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles are ready to replace today's cars, French drivers will be able to tap clean energy from their electrical grid.
The most striking thing about France's happy situation is the difference between its experience in nuclear energy and those of other nations—particularly the United States, whose industry once led the world but is now moribund. What distinguishes France's nuclear program is coherent long-range planning. The French government has laid out where it sees the country's nuclear program heading over the next 50 years, with provisions for the secure disposal of nuclear waste, advanced reactor development and possible fuel shortages. It is a kind of 50-year-long superhighway with various on- and off-ramps that give it the flexibility to handle changing technologies. Other nations would do well to emulate this approach.
France's current plan was begun in the 1990s on the assumption that nuclear power will remain the mainstay of France's electrical generating system for the long term. French planners are also positioning its nuclear industry to take advantage of an expansion in the world's generation of nuclear power, which would greatly increase the demand for new reactors and reactor fuels.
The first consideration in any nuclear plan is how to manage the fuel cycle, from uranium ore to enriched fuel to waste for disposal. In this respect, the French plan is efficient and flexible. The highway starts with a fleet of light-water reactors (LWR), the current workhorse of the industry, initially fueled with enriched uranium, a processed form of natural uranium. When this fuel is used up in a reactor, the by-product contains a significant amount of plutonium, which can be used to make bombs, and stays radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, making it difficult to dispose of safely. Rather than bury it, the French plan is to extract plutonium from the fuel and mix it with unenriched uranium to make a new fuel called MOX, or mixed oxide. Because MOX yields about one third the energy of the original enriched uranium, this step effectively increases the mileage France gets from the original enriched uranium fuel. The leftovers from this process must still be isolated for hundreds of thousands of years, but they don't pose the proliferation hazard that plutonium does.
The French have prepared a geological repository for safely disposing of radioactive waste. Unlike the U.S. repository in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, which has been mired in political opposition, the French repository is approved. The site will be used to store fuel temporarily, with the option to retrieve it at a later date.
By about the middle of the century, if current trends are any indication, a worldwide shortage of uranium may arise. To prevent that possibility, France is now doing the R&D on a new generation of advanced nuclear reactors, called breeders, that can produce new fuel for itself or other reactors. Rather than burying its waste permanently and then facing a fuel shortage, France will be in an enviable position of having a virtually unlimited supply of fuel.
Breeders, of course, are not new. They were first developed 20 years ago in the United States, but shelved for fear that the plutonium they create would cause problems in disposal and proliferation. The breeder technology that France expects to have ready for commercialization in 30 years addresses these concerns. The reactors could be used to destroy the long-lived radioactive components of spent reactor fuel, creating a new way of disposing of this hazardous material more effectively and safely than is now possible. Waste treated by an advanced breeder would need to be buried only for a thousand years, greatly simplifying the safeguards needed in a repository.
Americans tend to see the French as an emotional people. However, on technical matters at least they seem to be considerably more rational. Their long-range nuclear-energy plan was developed with the involvement of their electric utility, the company that builds their nuclear reactors and their CEA (the equivalent of the U.S. Department of Energy). The contrast between how France and the United States handled the controversial issue of nuclear waste is stark. To settle the waste issue, France relied on the Parliamentary Office for Scientific and Technologi