Yucca Mountain News Clips - Thursday, July 24, 2008

Yucca Mountain News Clips
Thursday, July 24, 2008
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
July 23, 2008

Heller backs nuclear power if waste stored on site

By Tony Batt
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Dean Heller, R-Nev., on Tuesday said he supports nuclear energy as long as its highly radioactive waste is stored where it is produced.

Heller said he is not worried that more nuclear power plants could speed the development of a waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, "as long as the waste is left on site."

"So as long as there is on-site waste -- they take care of the waste -- I'm fine with that," Heller said.

Heller was among 11 Republicans, including House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, who traveled last weekend to Colorado and Alaska to inspect facilities that could help boost U.S. energy production.

Noting that his district covers 105,000 square miles, Heller said the trip reinforced his belief that U.S. energy policy should be like a three-legged stool.

The three legs include conservation, renewable energy and additional sources of energy that can be developed in an environmentally safe way.

"If you do one without the other two; you'll fail. If you do two of them without the third, you're going to fail. You have to do all three of them," Heller said.

But Heller said the technology isn't available yet to make renewable energy an option in the near future.

For example, after driving a hydrogen-powered car at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., Heller said he was told the cost of the car is $1 million. He said the price was the same when he drove a hyrdogen-powered car five years ago.

"Renewable energy is critical in the future. We just don't see it moving so quickly, and I think that's why we have to make sure we think about all three (energy sources)," he said.

Heller said he is confident the House would pass legislation to allow off-shore drilling if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., allowed it to come to the floor.

"I think that's why we haven't seen a vote," he said.

Heller also compared oil exploration to mining.

"I think you drill where the oil is," he said. "It's like the mining reform bill. They're trying to tell us where to mine for gold. You don't mine for gold where bureaucrats or some group tells you."

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Reno Gazette-Journal
July 23, 2008

Reid spends some political capital to push for renewable energy

By Erica Werner
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has found a refuge in the nation’s preoccupation with record energy prices.

While the push by President Bush and congressional Republicans for more oil drilling is resonating with voters, the Nevada Democrat is focused on solar and other renewable energy sources, which happen to be more abundant in his home state than almost anywhere else in the country.

At some political risk for the gold miner’s son, Reid also is leading the opposition to new coal-burning power plants planned for Nevada, where unions and the energy-hungry casino industry wield far more political clout than environmentalists. He faces re-election in 2010 in a state up for grabs by both parties.

Reid briefly had the most-watched video on YouTube several weeks ago after the Drudge Report linked to a TV clip of him declaring that “coal makes us sick. ... it’s ruining our world.”

A conservative advocacy group, the American Future Fund, is using the comments in radio ads in Nevada and Washington, D.C., this week that claim, “Reid says ’yes’ to higher energy taxes.”

But Reid sees potential for jobs and economic benefits if he can advance his goal of transforming Nevada into “the Saudi Arabia of geothermal and solar energy.”

“Nevada doesn’t have a whole lot of oil or coal or gas. But it has a whole lot of sun and thermal,” said Karl Gawell, executive director of the Geothermal Energy Association. “Senator Reid is an old-fashioned politician — he watches his constituency. He understands, with geothermal, how big the potential is for the state.”

Nevadans now get about 9 percent of their energy from renewable sources, a number that under state law must rise to 20 percent by 2015.

Many energy experts say the potential is far greater. Despite its relatively small size, Nevada leads the nation in solar and geothermal resources, according to trade groups and government statistics, and has potential for wind energy development. Its fossil fuel stockpiles, by contrast, are negligible.

More renewable energy projects are coming online rapidly. As of early this year Nevada had 40 geothermal projects in development to squeeze energy from hot water and steam drilled from the earth — more than any other state. Agreement is near on a 100-megawatt solar-thermal project to be built by Johnson Controls near Mercury, just inside the Nevada Test Site’s southern boundary, according to Reid’s office.

And late last month Reid officiated at the formal opening of a solar parts manufacturing plant that he lured to Las Vegas.

Reid contends that growth of the renewable energy industry could provide a bonanza of new jobs for Nevada and reduce dependence on fossil fuel, much of it imported from out-of-state.

“It’s too bad that it takes an energy crisis like we’re having to cause a focus on renewables. It’s a situation where we have these gas prices that are sky high, and it is an opportunity,” Reid said in an interview. “Renewables are good for the economy, create lots of jobs and are very good for the environment. That’s a pretty good combination of things.”

In recent weeks Reid might have preferred a little less focus on renewables, a still infant industry which depends in part on $6 billion in tax credits that have stalled in Congress because of a dispute between Democrats and Republicans led by Nevada’s other senator, John Ensign, R-Nev.

Reid pulled a major housing bill from the Senate floor last month after Ensign attached the renewable energy tax package to it, leading Ensign to complain — without naming Reid — that Democratic leaders weren’t committed to renewable energy.

Reid said there was no point in passing the bill because it would fail in the House, where Democrats are insisting that it be paid for with tax increases that Ensign and other Senate conservatives reject. Both senators insist they support the energy tax credits, but the fate of the package is uncertain.

While maintaining their long-standing agreement not to criticize each other in public, the senators also have split ways on the issue of building more coal plants in Nevada, which Ensign supports and Reid opposes.

Though the government projects that coal use will grow to meet rising energy demands in Nevada and around the country, Reid is fighting the state’s leading utility, Sierra Pacific Resources, over its plan to build a new coal plant in eastern Nevada. Two outside companies also are pushing coal plants in the state.

Last year Reid tried to block Sierra Pacific’s plans by slipping language into a must-pass spending bill that would have changed the air quality designation at Great Basin National Park to essentially preclude any coal plants nearby. That gambit failed, and now Reid is pushing legislation that would help finance transmission lines meant to carry electricity produced mostly by renewable energy, potentially excluding coal.

Already, Sierra Pacific pushed back the timeline for its planned $5 billion coal plant at Ely.

Coal, Reid says, is “filthy, it’s dirty stuff.” The best way for the renewable energy industry to grow in Nevada is for coal plants to stay out, he contends.

It’s a point coal advocates dispute. “You’re not going to be able to provide enough power in the short term with renewables,” said Frank Maisano, spokesman for Toquop Energy Project, one of the coal plants trying to come into Nevada. “Las Vegas, Arizona, places like that — they need more power now.”

But Reid’s sticking with renewables. Next month he’s convening a National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas with oilman-turned-renewable energy advocate T. Boone Pickens as a featured speaker. Reid will preview the event Wednesday on a media conference call with another invitee, former President Bill Clinton.

Reid also talks every few days with former Vice President Al Gore, a clean-energy advocate who called last week for producing electricity from all-renewable sources within 10 years.

One low-pollution energy source Reid almost never mentions is nuclear, a sore subject in Nevada, the government’s designated dumping ground for 77 million tons of radioactive wastes from the rest of the nation’s 104 nuclear power reactors. Reid and the state’s other political leaders have worked for years to block construction of the Yucca Mountain nuclear dump 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

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Platts
July 23, 2008

Task force to review Illinois' nuclear power moratorium

Washington (Platts)--22Jul2008

A task force will review Illinois' nuclear power moratorium. The state's General Assembly on July 16 adopted Senate Joint Resolution No. 101 to establish a nuclear power issues task force that will review, in the resolution's words, Illinois' "existing moratorium on new nuclear power generation in the State, looking at the structure and process for new generation, and how nuclear generation can play a role in the future power needs of the State." The task force will also examine issues related to decommissioning; waste storage and disposal, including reprocessing; and "critical security issues such as facility requirements, personnel security requirements and audit programs." The 11-member task force, which has not yet been appointed, is to report its findings to the Assembly by January 1. In February 2007, State Representative JoAnn Osmond introduced legislation, HB 2971, to repeal the state's nuclear moratorium, but the bill is currently "held up" in the House Rules Committee, an Osmond staffer said July 22.

Illinois is one of eight states that ties the construction of new reactors to the availability of a federal facility or technology to dispose of spent fuel.

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Family Security Matters
July 22, 2008

Exclusive: The Anatomy of a Civil Nuclear Reactor

Tom Ordeman, Jr.

Last time, we discussed the basic components of a nuclear reaction, and a few introductory concepts about nuclear history, nuclear reactors, and nuclear weapons. In this installment, we'll explore the basic anatomy of a nuclear reactor, types of civil nuclear reactors, and the nuclear enrichment cycle.

All nuclear reactors are not created equally. Aside from the basic issue of energy output, there are a number of factors that combine to determine a reactor's classification. Reactors can be classified by the type of fuel they use, or by the substance they use to moderate the nuclear reactor. They can be classified by coolant type, or by design generation, fuel phase, or application. Not all reactors are alike; different designs are used for different purposes, and have different capabilities. A detailed description of each and every combination could easily fill a textbook, but all nuclear reactors share basic components in common.

With few exceptions, electricity is produced by generators attached to turbines. When a turbine spins, the attached generator creates usable energy by forcing the interaction of opposing electromagnetic fields. A civil nuclear fission reactor facilitates this by providing the heat for a standard steam power plant. Once the steam reaches optimal conditions, it is then allowed to pass through the turbine from a high pressure area to a low pressure area, spinning the turbine in the process. This process generates electricity. Steam power can use any number of different fuels, such as coal, natural gas, or petroleum - any heat source that can sufficiently heat water into superheated steam. In comparison to these other fuel types, a nuclear reactor is remarkably efficient.

Civil nuclear reactors require fissile material. This material can take several forms. Many reactors use low-enriched Uranium. Low-enriched Uranium consists of fuel rods in which the concentration of U-235 is between three and twenty percent of the total uranium content. This is the minimum U-235 content necessary to create a self-sustaining reaction. This minimum U-235 content requirement is known as critical mass. This is the minimum amount necessary for a continued, controlled chain reaction. This controlled chain reaction produces the heat necessary to heat the water in a pressurized water reactor, which in turn provides the heat for the attached steam turbine system. With the exception of heat-exchanging pipes, in which heat from the nuclear reactor cycle is transferred through proximity with water from the steam system, the two systems operate separately. The radiation from the reactor remains within the reactor vessel, and with proper maintenance and monitoring, radiation is contained entirely within the reactor building.

As complex as a nuclear reactor may seem, it consists of a few simple components: fissile material (usually some type of Uranium), assembled within a reactor vessel and arranged in order to generate a controlled fission reaction used to produce heat. It also includes a cooling infrastructure, a system for altering the position of the fuel rods (for the purpose of controlling the rate of nuclear reactions), and a system for moderating the flow of neutrons caused by the reaction itself.

Various reactor designs use different types of fuel. Some reactors, such as the Canadian Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) reactor type, are actually able of using naturally-occurring Uranium to generate a fission reaction. As mentioned previously, many reactors use fuel rods, bundles, or pebbles composed of enriched Uranium. Some reactors use Plutonium, an element created as a by-product of some Uranium reactors; however, Plutonium is more commonly used in nuclear weapons. Not unlike the differences between diesel and gasoline automobile engines, different fuels necessitate different reactor configurations, and these configurations have different technical properties. In particular, some reactors can create fissile material capable of being used in a nuclear weapon (highly enriched Uranium, or Plutonium), and some can't.

The nuclear enrichment cycle itself begins with mining. Uranium occurs naturally in extremely low concentrations in soil, but is most commonly used from any of a small number of locations in which higher concentrations of Uranium are found. Once the Uranium is mined, it then undergoes a chemical leaching process that produces a concentrated substance known as yellowcake. Yellowcake is radioactive, and its content is between 60 and 70% pure Uranium. This substance then undergoes several chemical processes, after which point it is heated to around 150° Fahrenheit to create Uranium hexafluoride gas. Uranium hexafluoride is highly corrosive and reactive, and requires special handling and specially engineered equipment in order to be safely used. It is at this point that the actual process of enrichment begins.

Although there are multiple enrichment methods, the most common employs centrifuges. In an enrichment centrifuge, the Uranium hexafluoride gas is pumped into the centrifuge vessel, then further heated and spun at high speeds. While the heavier U-238 isotopes collect at the bottom of the centrifuge to form depleted Uranium, the lighter U-235 isotopes are then pumped out of tubes at the top of the centrifuge. Depleted Uranium has various military and civil applications, most notably in armor-piercing ammunition and tank armor; however, its use is controversial, as Uranium exposure is believed by some to cause health problems. This process must be repeated many times in a large assembly of centrifuges known as a cascade in order to produce enriched Uranium, and even more times in order to produce weapons-grade, highly enriched Uranium. This enrichment process is the basis of most civil and military nuclear programs.

--FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Tom Ordeman, Jr. is a technical writer for a major defense contractor in Hampton Roads, Virginia. Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org.

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Arizona Daily Star
July 21, 2008

Opinion

Industry's spotty safety record makes it a questionable solution

The writer is addressing the question, Should Congress authorize construction of nuclear power plants?

By Wayne Madsen

America's twin crises of sky-rocketing energy costs and cat- astrophic climate change effects shouldn't be a convenient excuse to push nuclear power as a viable replacement for coal, oil and natural gas power-generating plants.

The nuclear disaster at the Soviet Union's Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 and the near-disaster at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 are reasons enough to strike nuclear power from the list of acceptable non-fossil and carbon energy sources.

The nuclear power industry has done little to nothing to improve the safety records of its plants. Recently, Vermont's Yankee nuclear power plant, owned by Entergy, experienced a cooling problem that forced it to shut down 50 percent of its power production. That shutdown came after repeated safety violations by the plant and a lack of adequate safety inspections.

The same scenario has played out across the country due to the infiltration of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by nuclear industry boosters and lawyers who have spiked and censored nuclear safety reports by the NRC's technical staff to favor the profits of the nuclear power plant operators over public safety interests.

In 2002, a hole due to corrosion developed in the reactor lid of the Davis-Besse nuclear plant in northwestern Ohio. The plant's operator, FirstEnergy Corp., and the NRC agreed that the reactor lid could have blown open in 60 days had the hole not been found.

The near-catastrophe at the Davis-Besse reactor could have rivaled that of Three Mile Island and the impact on Cleveland and other northern Ohio cities and towns could have been disastrous.

The poor nuclear safety record of America's nuclear power plant operators, especially during the laissez-faire regulatory holiday of the Bush administration, has not stopped GOP presumptive presidential candidate John McCain from waving the nuclear flag.

In 2004, the Palo Verde nuclear plant, 50 miles west of Phoenix, saw two of three units shut down due to radiation leaks from aging equipment. The NRC saw fit to approve continued operation of the faltering plant. In addition, radioactive water was found to have leaked into ground water around Palo Verde. Similar leaks into the water supply have been discovered at the Braidwood nuclear power plant near Chicago. The Union of Concerned Scientists' call for a major investigation of such leaks was ignored.

Nuclear power generation also generates nuclear waste. Currently, there are 55,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel in storage depots around the country awaiting transport through America's cities and small towns to a storage facility in Yucca Mountain in Nevada — despite the opposition of an overwhelming majority of Nevadans.

Nuclear power proponents argue that nuclear energy is a renewable energy source like solar, wind, bio-fuels and hydrogen. However, nuclear energy is neither renewable nor "green." From the uranium mining, processing, conversion and reprocessing phases, as well as spent nuclear fuel disposal, the impact on the environment in the event of an accident can last for hundreds of thousands of years.

The safety of the people of Vermont, northern Ohio, Arizona, Chicago and other parts of the country should not be negotiable by the nuclear power industry lobbyists who roam the halls of Congress.

Germany has nixed the future development of its nuclear power industry and a recent uranium leak into the water supply from a nuclear power plant near Avignon in southern France has all of Europe rethinking nuclear power.

Our Congress should follow the lead of Germany and permanently ban new nuclear power plant construction.

--Wayne Madsen is a contributing writer to the progressive Online Journal, www.onlinejournal.com

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Heartland Institute

Minnesota Legislature Considers Expansion of Nuclear Power

Written By: James M. Taylor
Published In: Environment & Climate News
Publication Date: August 1, 2008

The Minnesota legislature will hold another round of hearings in early 2009 to consider allowing new nuclear power plant construction in the state. The hearings will follow up on sessions held earlier this year, when legislators investigated the latest advances in nuclear power technology.

Minnesota currently has a moratorium on the construction of new nuclear power plants, dating back to the 1990s. According to the law, no nuclear power plants can be built in the state until and unless the federal government opens a centralized storage facility for used nuclear fuel. The federal government's Yucca Mountain storage facility was initially scheduled to be open by now, but political maneuvering has put the facility in limbo.

Hearings Highlighted New Tech

Experts at the March 2008 hearings testified about technological advances in nuclear power that promise even safer and more economical power generation than the state's currently operating nuclear plants. In light of aggressive carbon dioxide reduction mandates recently approved by the state legislature, many analysts view a resurgence of nuclear power as vital to the state meeting its carbon dioxide reduction goals.

State Rep. Bill Hilty (D-Finlayson) chaired the hearings. Hilty has been a vocal opponent of nuclear power in the past, but he now acknowledges growing sentiment to revisit the topic of nuclear plant construction.

"We need to think about our power needs in terms of finding an economic and social model that's sustainable," said Hilty in the June 11 Minnesota Post. "Meantime, the issue of nuclear power isn't going to go away."

Strong Bipartisan Support

Support for nuclear power is growing on both sides of the political aisle. State Reps. Tom Huntley (D-Duluth) and Tim Mahoney (D-St. Paul) and state Sen. Jim Carlson (D-Eagan) are among the most vocal supporters of new nuclear power plant construction.

"No one has ever died from nuclear power in this country," Mahoney told the Minnesota Post for its June 11 story. "There isn't enough capacity from wind. And if people want to use their flat-screen TVs and big computers, where do they think the power will come from?"

Among Republicans, support is equally strong.

"As clean and safe as currently operating nuclear power plants are, today's technology is exponentially more advanced than the technology of the currently operating plants," said state Sen. Mike Jungbauer (R-East Bethel).

Jungbauer, who two years ago authored the first bill designed to end the state's nuclear power moratorium, noted support is increasing for expansion of nuclear power in the state.

"Support is growing, but the funny thing is that the very people who support the moratorium oppose coal. It seems like they prefer to have no power at all, as the state's growing power needs cannot be met without nuclear and coal," said Jungbauer.

--James M. Taylor (taylor@heartland.org) is a senior fellow of The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News.

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NPR
July 21, 2008

Nuclear Power A Thorny Issue For Candidates
by David Kestenbaum

Nuclear power doesn't usually make for an applause line in a stump speech, but it has come up on the campaign trail. Both Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain see it as a way to combat climate change, though they've sometimes chosen their words with care.

Of the two, McCain is the most comfortable with the topic. As a Navy pilot, he landed on aircraft carriers, which today are essentially floating nuclear-powered cities. McCain calls nuclear "one of the cleanest, safest and most reliable energy sources on Earth."

"If we want to arrest global warming, then nuclear energy is a powerful, powerful ally in that cause," he said in a May speech.

McCain's enthusiasm for nuclear has put him in unusual territory for a Republican: He's been praising the French, who generate 80 percent of their power from nuclear.

Obama's position is also somewhat unusual for a Democrat: He thinks nuclear power might be a good idea. The question came up during an early Democratic primary debate.

Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards went first, saying he did not favor nuclear power. Obama went next. "I actually think we should explore nuclear power as part of the mix," he said, before pivoting to solar energy, a much safer topic.

When asked about his position early on by a New Hampshire newspaper, Obama said he was open to the idea if certain problems could be solved. And it was a long list of issues, including safety, waste storage, vulnerability to terrorist attack and concerns about weapons proliferation.

But if those are solvable?

"Why not?" Obama said. "I don't think there is anything we inevitably dislike about nuclear power. We just dislike the fact that it might blow up ... and irradiate us ... and kill us!" His questioners laughed.

But Obama has since polished his response to that question.

Obama's home state of Illinois has more reactors than any state in the country. And he has some ties to the company that operates those reactors.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, employees at Exelon have given Obama more than $180,000 in campaign contributions. Two spokespeople for the company declined requests for an interview, saying a chairman of an electricity distribution company it owns had run an Obama fundraising event.

Obama seems happy to keep his distance as well. He recently used nuclear power to paint McCain in a negative light. After criticizing McCain for wanting to open up more land for oil drilling, Obama added, "That makes about as much sense as his plan to build 45 new nuclear reactors without a plan for the waste, other than put it — guess where? — right here in Nevada, at Yucca Mountain."

Obama, like other Democratic presidential candidates before him, says he's opposed to sending the waste to Nevada.

The waste issue even seems to have gotten to McCain. In the Senate, McCain voted to send waste to Yucca Mountain. But on the campaign trail, he seems to be softening his stand. McCain has proposed building an international repository, primarily to keep used reactor fuel out of the wrong hands, but maybe with a second purpose.

"It is even possible," McCain said, "that such an international center could make it unnecessary to open the proposed spent nuclear fuel storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada."

Eric Herzik, chair of the political science department at the University of Nevada, Reno, says he was surprised to hear McCain say that.

"His voting record is very clear," Herzik said. "He has backed the Yucca Mountain repository and made no apologies for it, until about two months ago, (when) he came to Nevada and kind of gave this mixed signal."

Herzik has studied the politics of nuclear energy for 20 years. And he says whoever is elected won't be able to just talk their way out of the nuclear waste problem. The government has spent billions of dollars researching Yucca Mountain and millions fighting court battles. Finding another site abroad or at home will not be easy and could take decades.

"To say, 'Well, we'll just find some magic beans and plant them in the ground and a repository site will grow where everybody wants it' — we've never been able to find that," Herzik said.

The irony is that for all the trouble nuclear power and waste gives the candidates, Herzik says there's little evidence it actually affects how people vote for the president. He and his colleagues have done some polling, and even in Nevada, when voters are asked to rank nuclear waste with other issues, it comes out at the bottom of the list.

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Wall Street Journal Blogs
July 21, 2008

Good Nukes, Bad Nukes–Or Just Nukes?

Posted by Keith Johnson

Like Edwin Moses at the end of his career, the nuclear power industry has been struggling to overcome one hurdle after another. First it was safety and Three Mile ghosts; then it was waste storage and the Yucca mountain saga. Most recently, skyrocketing costs threaten to kneecap the nuclear revival before it starts.

Now, when the wind should be at the industry’s back with mounting fear of global warming and talk of “zero emissions” electricity, there’s a new hurdle. Actually, it’s an old hurdle roaring back like a recurring nightmare: proliferation.

The setbacks this weekend between the U.S. and Iran over the latter’s nuclear program underscore the pervasive—and scary—connection between civilian nuclear power and weapons of mass destruction. Even India, which already has the bomb, is praying fears of proliferation in the West won’t sink its nascent nuclear revival.

Meanwhile, Middle Eastern countries desperate for power are increasingly turning to nuclear power, despite fears of Al Qaeda and their ilk. Mini-nukes are believed to be especially vulnerable to proliferation fears.

How realistic is the public perception that nuclear energy and nuclear weapons are one and the same?

Indians point out they can already expand their nuclear arsenal, with or without the nuclear power deal with the U.S. Small nuclear reactor makers talk of new fuel mixes that minimize the risk of plutonium enrichment. President Bush’s nuclear plan calls for a return to (expensive) reprocessing of nuclear waste which could render the junk worthless for weapons programs, as Japan has done. The International Atomic Energy Agency says safeguards are the key to a safe renaissance.

Is it time to separate “nuclear energy” from “nuclear weapons,” as Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore has repeatedly insisted? Or in a world bubbling with Al Qaeda types, is that a fool’s errand?

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Las Vegas SUN
July 19, 2008

Letter to the editor:

More domestic drilling won’t help

I’m getting tired of people, like a flock of crows, screeching drill, drill, drill and often blaming Democrats for the prices we’re paying at the pump. It’s time for a reality check.

First, a business analyst recently commenting on Fox News about drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico said it would be eight years before it reached market.

Next thought: Who would do the drilling? Why, none other than the companies that have gas stations on just about every corner. Does anyone think they’ll do the drilling on a cost-plus-expenses basis?

No, they’ll charge the market price, which is driven by speculation. It’s about $140 a barrel now, and who knows how much it will be in eight years. And the Republicans then, just as they do now, will want to offer them tax breaks.

As far as blaming Democrats goes, it should be realized that for decades they have been trying to get legislation to support alternative sources of energy, such as solar, wind and geothermal, as well as trying to get Detroit to produce more fuel-efficient vehicles, only to have these efforts blocked by the Republicans.

As far as nuclear power goes, Nevadans should realize the only way new plants will go online is if they can bury nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, which John McCain supports, 90 miles from here.

Richard J. Mundy
Las Vegas

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Pahrump Valley Times
July 19, 2008

Commission candidates weigh in on development

By Mark Waite
PVT

Only four Nye County Commission candidates showed up to stump at the quarterly Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors meeting at the Bob Ruud Community Center Wednesday.

The Realtors had questions on the candidate's views of the incorporation of Pahrump, interaction between the town and county, their view of Pahrump in the next five years and any assistance in helping Realtors deal with the county planning department.

County Commission District 1 candidate Jeff Bobeck said he moved here from Pennsylvania eight years ago.

"I picked Nevada because it was the free-est state with the possible exception of Alaska, but I like the weather a lot better down here. Six years ago I got involved in politics because I saw my Nevada changing. I saw it becoming less free -- more restrictions, more development, taxes were rising," Bobeck said.

Nye County needs to trim its budget in light of the current economy, Bobeck said, adding the county spends a lot on consultants. He commented in the past eight years Nye County has been "business hostile."

Bobeck said he's not in favor of high-density development. Instead, he said there's a lot of undeveloped land; Pahrump Valley doesn't have to grow in clusters.

Bobeck fielded a question about Utilities Inc. As a flight instructor who hangs out at Calvada Meadows Air Park, he described how the land values of a piece of land with water lines on the west side of the air strip are four times the land values on the east side of the runway. But Utilities Inc. wants $80,000 to extend the line to the other side, Bobeck said.

"If they refuse or are being very difficult in delivering water to these parcels, we need to figure out a way to get them out of the concession for that area so that someone else can deliver water to that area and get things moving," Bobeck said.

Incumbent District 3 Commissioner Gary Hollis, the commission's liaison on nuclear waste, said the public statewide is starting to get a more favorable impression of the Yucca Mountain project.

"Yucca Mountain is a big issue for Nye County because it brings in a lot of money to Nye County. This year, January of '08, we got $11 million from PETT," Hollis said.

PETT refers to the payment equal to taxes for the land value of Yucca Mountain from the U.S. Department of Energy.

"It's because of the people that live outside the county that made it such a political mess and the reason is they couldn't get the money," Hollis said.

He recalled the effort by the state legislature to create Bullfrog County in 1987, surrounding Yucca Mountain, with Carson City the county seat. That would've allowed the state to collect the payments. It was struck down by the Nevada Supreme Court after an objection from Nye County. The court ruled the state couldn't make a separate county within a county, Hollis said.

"It's really good for real estate because 3,800 to 4,800 people are going to be out there building that facility," Hollis said. They will be locating to Pahrump where "mama wants to go to Wal-Mart, daddy wants to go to Home Depot."

The high-level nuclear waste should be recycled into fuel and sold back to the reactors, Hollis said. He added Nye County residents should be entitled to royalties for accepting the nuclear waste, just as Alaska residents receive royalties from oil.

Hollis said no other profession has to disclose as much as real estate agents, noting they will now have to deal with desert tortoise mitigation fees of $325 per acre in certain areas. But he predicted the county's plan would probably be rejected by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. (See related story on page A6.)

Real estate broker Karen Spalding told Hollis members of a Realtor ad-hoc committee realized it was county commissioners who have the power to change the rules, making it easier to get plans approved.

Real estate broker Trish Rippie complained about all the money spent on consultants. Hollis said he's more concerned about consultants he doesn't see appear in front of the county commission.

District 2 county commission candidate Jim Petell said 971 registered voters in his district live in Pahrump, 1,370 in Tonopah, 658 in Beatty and 506 in Amargosa Valley.

A former vocational counselor in Los Angeles, Petell said he moved to Pahrump 14 years ago to find a more economical place to live after a divorce.

Nye County needs to work within budget guidelines, Petell said.

"Part of my platform, besides reforming Nye County government, is establishing some kind of leadership," Petell said. "I've been to meetings for over 10 years, six years constantly."

He said, "This town needs to incorporate to stand on its own two feet and garnish the possible grants and federal assistant it needs to bring infrastructure here to everybody."

District 3 county commission candidate Harley Kulkin said, "If we continue on the road we're on, we're going to see more foreclosures, more homes turning into rentals, more criminal activity in our community. What I want to see happen is to turn that around.

"We need to bring jobs in our community and we can do that by having a plan. This county has no plan."

Kulkin talked about his vision of a theme park on a par with Disneyland. Instead of 55 acres at Disneyland, Kulkin said Pahrump has over 400 acres at the fairgrounds site.

Kulkin said the residents of Nevada's most affluent county, his former home in Douglas County, who should be well educated, chose not to incorporate any communities.

Instead Kulkin advocated dividing Nye County north of Beatty and giving the northern part to Esmeralda County.

"In 1864 Nye County was formed out of Esmeralda County. I think it's time to give some of that back and personally I'd just as soon give them the PETT money and everything," Kulkin said. "We have the potential to go somewhere, be something, because we're so close to Vegas."

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Council Bluffs Daily Nonpareil
July 19, 2008

Saturday's Our View: Money mountain

Every year, year in and year out, American taxpayers are asked to foot the bill for about 7 billion pennies, each of which currently cost us 1.2 cents. Those same taxpayers are helping foot the bill for billions in war costs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, from Washington where they like to "nickel and dime" us to the tune of millions and billions, comes the latest estimate.

Seems as though it's going to cost taxpayers $32 billion more than first thought to open and operate the nation's first nuclear waste dump.

The Bush administration's latest calculation - made public Tuesday - is that the facility will cost over $90 billion. It's the first official estimate since 2001, when the figure was mere $58 billion. The Bush administration does like to play things close to the vest.

Ward Sproat, the Energy Department official in charge of managing the controversial Yucca Mountain repository project in Nevada, disclosed the new number to reporters after a congressional hearing Tuesday.

The estimate includes $9 billion already spent and covers about 100 years of operation until the dump, which is located just 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, one of the nation's fastest growing metropolitan areas, is sealed up forever.

Some of the increase is due to inflation, Sproat said. Also Energy Department officials now expect the dump will hold more radioactive waste than the 77,000 tons initially approved by Congress. Already, some 64,000 tons of radioactive spent fuel rods are stored at commercial reactor sites in 33 states, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute. Most of it is stored in vault-like pools while some has been moved into dry-cask storage, where Nevada lawmakers, who oppose Yucca Mountain, would like it to stay.

Yucca Mountain was originally supposed to open in 1998 but has been beset by lawsuits and political and scientific controversies.

The best-possible opening date is now 2020, Sproat told lawmakers at an Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing. Even that is contingent on a steady money stream, something that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has blocked.

The Energy Department did succeed in submitting a required construction license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last month. The commission has up to four years to decide whether to approve it - but that timeline, too, is dependent on congressionally approved budgets.

When it's all said and done - if, indeed, it ever is - the Yucca Mountain repository will add a new layer of meaning to the old phrase, "There's the right way, the wrong way and the government way."

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Las Vegas SUN
July 18, 2008

Sun editorial:

A nuclear boondoggle

Yucca Mountain project costs now estimated at a whopping $90 billion

If it hasn’t been clear that the cost of building a nuclear waste dump 90 miles from Las Vegas at Yucca Mountain far outweighs any benefit, a congressional hearing Tuesday made it crystal clear.

Ward Sproat, the Energy Department official overseeing the project, told members of Congress that the startup cost of building and initially operating it will be about $90 billion. That’s a significant increase over the last estimate, which put the cost at $58 billion.

Given the Energy Department’s history of failing to meet expectations, it is safe to assume the real cost of the project would be much higher, particularly considering that the federal government still has yet to finalize many of its plans.

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., faced down a passel of nuclear industry hired guns at the hearing and told her colleagues to “keep in mind Yucca Mountain’s bloated price tag, history of chronic delays, failed quality assurance program, and the long list of scientific and technological shortcomings that plague the project.”

The Energy Department has spent $9 billion over more than 20 years trying to prove that Yucca Mountain will work, yet study after study has found the site to be completely unsuitable for holding nuclear waste.

Still the Bush administration and nuclear industry sycophants in Congress continue to push for Yucca Mountain. The nuclear industry says the dump is necessary to ensure the future of nuclear energy, yet waste has been safely stored at nuclear power plants for decades and can certainly stay there for years to come. And that would undoubtedly be cheaper and far less dangerous than hauling the waste across the country and burying it in a porous volcanic ridge.

Unfortunately, the Energy Department seems hellbent on proceeding with a plan that would make hundreds of American communities thoroughfares for deadly radioactive waste.

Congress should put a stop to this pricey boondoggle once and for all.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
July 17, 2008

Letters: Yucca winner

I have been a resident of Nevada for more than 20 years. Like many others, I do not like the idea of a nuclear dump in my backyard. But I wonder where the common sense is of our political leaders. They seem to be trying to do what is popular and not necessarily that which is very practical.

It appears that Yucca Mountain is a "done deal." The only force that can stop it is Congress, and they're not likely to change anything. Most members do not want a nuclear dump in their backyard any more than we do.

So I think that we should accept the inevitable and enjoy the financial rewards that may come with it. The benefit of this negative might create a positive solution to some of our budget problems.

Perhaps we should spend less money fighting this situation and invest in city bypass roads and other necessities that will be needed.

With the provision of proper assets to the Yucca project, it just might turn out to be a winner.

Richard A. Watson
Las Vegas

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Reno Gazette-Journal
July 17, 2008

Correction

A headline Wednesday incorrectly stated an incorrect cost of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump project. The estimated cost is more than $90 billion.

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Democracy Now
July 17, 2008

Amory Lovins: Expanding Nuclear Power Makes Climate Change Worse

There’s one issue that President Bush and presidential hopefuls John McCain and Barack Obama all agree on: expanding the use of nuclear power. We speak with Amory Lovins, the co-founder, chairman and chief scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado, who has been described as “one of the Western world’s most influential energy thinkers.” [includes rush transcript]

Guest:

Amory Lovins, co-founder, chairman and chief scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado.

AMY GOODMAN: There’s one issue President Bush and presidential hopefuls John McCain and Barack Obama all agree on: expanding the use of nuclear power. President Bush addressed nuclear power at a news conference Tuesday and hailed it as a way to reduce American dependence on oil and protect the environment.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: This is just a transition period. I mean, all of us want to get away from reliance upon hydrocarbons, but it’s not going to happen overnight. You know, one of these days, people are going to be using battery technologies in their cars. You’ve heard me say this a lot, and I’m confident it’s going to happen. And, you know, the throwaway line, of course, is that your car won’t have to look like a golf cart. But the question then becomes, where are we going to get electricity? And that’s why I’m a big believer in nuclear power, to be able to make us less dependent on oil and better stewards of the environment. But there is a transition period during the hydrocarbon era, and it hasn’t ended yet, as our people now know. Gasoline prices are high.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is presidential hopefuls Barack Obama, beginning with, though, Senator John McCain, on nuclear power.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: I actually think that we should explore nuclear power as part of the energy mix. There are no silver bullets to this issue. We’ve got to develop solar. I’ve proposed drastically increasing fuel-efficiency standards on cars, an aggressive cap on the amount of greenhouse gases that can be emitted. But we’re going to have to try a series of different approaches.

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: My dear friends, nuclear power must be part of any equation that leads to addressing climate change and also leads to addressing reduction of our dependence on foreign oil. You know, we always love to imitate the French. The French, 80 percent of their electricity in France is generated by nuclear power. We either got to reprocess it or store it.

AMY GOODMAN: Senator John McCain, and before that, Senator Barack Obama.

Well, the debate over nuclear power is back in the news with the admission of Energy Department official Ward Sproat on Tuesday that it would cost taxpayers $90 billion to open and operate the nation’s first nuclear waste dump. Speaking after a congressional hearing, Sproat added the dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada would open only in 2020. It was originally estimated to cost $58 billion and open in 1998.

Well, our next guest has been described as “one of the Western world’s most influential energy thinkers.” He’s also a leading opponent of nuclear power. Amory Lovins is co-founder, chair and chief scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado. He is a consultant physicist, MacArthur Fellow, and recipient of numerous awards, including the Right Livelihood Award. Lovins advised the energy and other industries in countries around the world, including here in the US. He invented the hybrid Hypercar in ’91 and has written twenty-nine books, including Soft Energy Paths, Natural Capitalism, Small Is Profitable, and Winning the Oil Endgame. Amory Lovins joins us here in our firehouse studio.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

AMORY LOVINS: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Well, talk about nuclear power. Why do you feel it’s not an option, given the oil crisis?

AMORY LOVINS: Well, first of all, electricity and oil have essentially nothing to do with each other, and anybody who thinks the contrary is really ignorant about energy. Less than two percent of our electricity is made from oil. Less than two percent of our oil makes electricity. Those numbers are falling. And essentially, all the oil involved is actually the heavy, gooey bottom of the barrel you can’t even make mobility fuels out of anyway.

What nuclear would do is displace coal, our most abundant domestic fuel. And this sounds good for climate, but actually, expanding nuclear makes climate change worse, for a very simple reason. Nuclear is incredibly expensive. The costs have just stood up on end lately. Wall Street Journal recently reported that they’re about two to four times the cost that the industry was talking about just a year ago. And the result of that is that if you buy more nuclear plants, you’re going to get about two to ten times less climate solution per dollar, and you’ll get it about twenty to forty times slower, than if you buy instead the cheaper, faster stuff that is walloping nuclear and coal and gas, all kinds of central plans, in the marketplace. And those competitors are efficient use of electricity and what’s called micropower, which is both renewables, except big hydro, and making electricity and heat together, in fact, recent buildings, which takes about half of the money, fuel and carbon of making them separately, as we normally do.

So, nuclear cannot actually deliver the climate or the security benefits claimed for it. It’s unrelated to oil. And it’s grossly uneconomic, which means the nuclear revival that we often hear about is not actually happening. It’s a very carefully fabricated illusion. And the reason it isn’t happening is there are no buyers. That is, Wall Street is not putting a penny of private capital into the industry, despite 100-plus percent subsidies.

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

AMORY LOVINS: It’s uneconomic. It costs, for example, about three times as much as wind power, which is booming.

Let me give you some numbers about what’s happening in the marketplace, because that’s reality, as far as I’m concerned. I really take markets seriously. 2006, the last full year of data we have, nuclear worldwide added a little bit of capacity, more than all of it from upgrading old plants, because the new ones they built were smaller than the retirements of old plants. So they added 1.4 billion watts. Sounds like a lot. Well, it’s about one big plant’s worth worldwide. That was less than photovoltaics, solar cells added in capacity. It was a tenth what wind power added. It was a thirtieth to a fortieth of what micropower added.

AMY GOODMAN: What’s micropower?

AMORY LOVINS: Again, it’s renewables, other than big hydro, plus co-generating electricity and heat together, usually in industry.

In 2006, micropower, for the first time, produced more electricity worldwide than nuclear did. A sixth of the world’s electricity is now micropower, a third of the new electricity. In a dozen industrial countries, micropower makes anywhere from a sixth to over half of all the electricity elsewhere. This is not a fringe activity anymore.

China, which has the world’s most ambitious nuclear program, by the end of 2006 had seven times that much capacity in distributed renewables, and they were growing it seven times faster. Take a look at 2007, in which the US or Spain or China added more wind capacity than the world added nuclear capacity. The US added more wind capacity last year than we’ve added coal capacity in the past five years put together.

And renewables, other than big hydro, got last year $71 billion of private capital; nuclear, as usual, got zero. It is only bought by central planners with a draw on the public purse. What does this tell you? I mean, what part of the story does anybody who take markets seriously not get?

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, well, the media clearly in this country doesn’t get it, because it is raised over and over again by the candidates. I mean, it seems that Senator McCain has a favorite number: a hundred years in Iraq, also hoping for a hundred more new nuclear power plants. He had said something about, he doesn’t want to lose the knowledge of building, since the last one was built more than thirty years ago; the people are dying who had built it, so we’ve got to rush and build them now.

AMORY LOVINS: Well, you could say that’s already been lost, in the sense that most of a nuclear plant built now in the US, if there were any, would have to be imported, which, by the way, means we buy it in weak US dollars, which is part of the incredible cost escalation we’ve seen. Moody’s latest number is $7,500 a kilowatt. That’s, again, as the Journal said, about two to four times the numbers that were being bandied about just last year by promoters.

AMY GOODMAN: And Barack Obama, while he hasn’t laid out a plan for building, he has a big campaign contributor, Exelon, and has supported the expansion of nuclear power. And, of course, we heard what President Bush has to say.

AMORY LOVINS: Actually, I thought what Senator Obama said was “explore”, which is different. And you will find major environmental groups saying something like “explore” or “consider”, but they will also say very carefully it has to be competitive, it has to be cost-effective. And clearly, that doesn’t even pass the giggle test.

A new nuclear plant, according to Moody’s, would send out electricity for about fifteen cents a kilowatt-hour, which is half, again, as much as the average residential rate. And that doesn’t even account for delivering it to your house. And I think if nuclear plants were built, which I don’t think is likely, you would see incredible rates shock and a big political reaction.

AMY GOODMAN: Environmentalists like Stewart Brand and James Lovelock are pushing nuclear power.

AMORY LOVINS: There are actually four individuals involved in the world who are prominent environmentalists who had that view, and you’ve named two of them.

AMY GOODMAN: Who are the other two?

AMORY LOVINS: Patrick Moore was active in founding Greenpeace back in the ’70s, now works for industry; and Peter Schwartz, who used to be on my board, who used to run group planning for Royal Dutch/Shell, is of the same view. But I can’t think of any others. There are no actual environmental groups who favor nuclear power.

AMY GOODMAN: What is your answer to them, and why have they arrived—these are your old colleagues?

AMORY LOVINS: Well, yeah, a couple of them are old friends. Well, I think they haven’t done their homework. And I keep asking for their analysis and not getting it, because I don’t think they have one. But they somehow form the view that because nuclear doesn’t emit carbon, it must be a good thing. Well, that’s not good enough.

You need a source that doesn’t emit carbon—nuclear emits a little bit in the fuel cycle and in building plants, and so on. But you need one that doesn’t emit carbon and is faster and cheaper than other ways to do the same thing. You see, renewables don’t emit carbon. Efficiency doesn’t emit carbon. Cogeneration based on recovered waste heat you were throwing away anyhow doesn’t emit carbon, because you already paid for the carbon in making the useful part of the heat in industry. And these sources are a great deal cheaper and faster than nuclear. So if climate’s a problem, we need to invest judiciously, not indiscriminately, to get the most solution per dollar, the most solution per year. Otherwise, we’re making things worse.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Amory Lovins. He is co-founder, chair and chief scientist at Rocky Mountain Institute, which is based in Aspen in Colorado?

AMORY LOVINS: Old Snowmass.

AMY GOODMAN: Old Snowmass. Nuclear power is one of the issues that is being posed as an alternative to reliance on foreign fuel, and this is also an issue we addressed yesterday with Naomi Klein on Democracy Now!, the issue of expanding oil drilling, offshore and onshore. You’ve been looking at this.

AMORY LOVINS: Well, we seem to be wanting to drill in all the wrong places. For example, over fifty times as much oil as might be under the Arctic Refuge at very high prices can be saved at very low prices by using the oil efficiently. Also many times faster. So, my wildcatters have been drilling lately in the Detroit formation. That is, making efficient cars is equivalent to finding an all-American Saudi Arabia under Detroit, about eight-and-a-half million barrels a day, inexhaustible, climate-safe and costing about twelve bucks a barrel. Now, altogether, there is about 14 million barrels a day of oil savings, averaging twelve bucks a barrel cost. And we know exactly where the oil is. There’s no doubt that it’s there. It’s under Detroit, Seattle, and so on. That’s out of twenty-or-so million barrels a day we’re using. So if you’re an oil company and you go to the ends of the earth and drill for very expensive oil that might not even be there, wouldn’t it be embarrassing if somebody else meanwhile found all that cheap oil under Detroit? Shouldn’t we drill the most prospective place first?

I’ve tried this formulation lately on the American Association of Petroleum Geologists and the American Petroleum Institute, and they found it pretty persuasive. You know, I’ve worked for major oil companies for about thirty-five years, and they understand how expensive it is to drill for oil. Take the Arctic Refuge as an example. You might think that at today’s oil prices, it would be clearly a great deal to go drill there. Well, it wasn’t before, when oil was in the twenty-odd dollar a barrel range instead of $140. And that’s why the oil companies weren’t interested. Guess what. They’re still not interested. Why not? Well, because their costs of drilling have gone up more than the oil price went up. If you talk to people who run exploration in major oil companies, they’re still not excited about the Arctic Refuge, because practically any other place in the world they could drill would be cheaper and less risky than that extraordinarily remote and hostile environment.

AMY GOODMAN: So why is Bush pushing it?

AMORY LOVINS: Who knows? But it doesn’t make any economic sense. There’s no business case for it. And the real showstopper, interestingly, is national security, which you would think that he and Senator McCain and so on would be concerned about. Jim Woolsey, a not-hostile-to-oil, per se, Oklahoman, former—

AMY GOODMAN: Former CIA director.

AMORY LOVINS: —former CIA director, has actually testified against Arctic Refuge drilling on national security grounds. There’s a very simple reason. There’s only one way to get the oil south: it’s through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which is the most vulnerable part of our energy infrastructure, the biggest terrorist target in our energy infrastructure. It’s what he calls Uncle Sam’s “kick me” sign.

So, think about it. You’ve got an 800-mile pipeline, mostly above ground, mostly accessible by road or by floatplane. And if the flow through it is interrupted in the winter for about a week, 900—well, nine million barrels of hot oil congeals into the world’s largest Chapstick, a big candle. Then you can’t pump it anymore. Could this happen? Well, actually, yes, if certain points on the pipeline, pumping stations and so on, were attacked—

AMY GOODMAN: We’ve got five seconds.

AMORY LOVINS: —or stuff at either end. And has that happened? Well, let’s see. It’s been sabotaged, almost blew itself up on occasion through mismanagement. It’s been incompetently bombed twice. It’s been shot at fifty times. A drunk shut it down with one hole from a rifle bullet. And the scariest thing to me is around Y2K, at the turn of the century, a disgruntled engineer was caught by accident about to blow up three critical points with fourteen bombs he had built and tested.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there. But one answer: have we solved the nuclear waste problem even?

AMORY LOVINS: No, but I’d just come off the wagon on the economics, and then we don’t need to argue about whether it’s safe.

AMY GOODMAN: Amory Lovins, head of Rocky Mountain Institute, thanks for joining us.

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The Examiner
July 17, 2008

Is Nuclear Power A Lousy Investment?

Jay McDonough

I've written a number of posts here about the call for offshore and ANWR oil drilling, the resultant cost neutrality and time constraints of that drilling, and alternative energy development. Invariably, a number of commenters stress the need for nuclear power as a power generator. President Bush, in his news conference yesterday, called for the development of nuclear power for the U.S.

I'm by no means an expert in large scale power generation, but I had this sense that nuclear power was pretty much a lousy business investment. Given the incredible cost of building a nuclear power plant, the cost of running the plant from the operational, safety and national security standpoint, the cost of waste storage (the price tag for Yucca Mountain has just been re-estimated to be $90B) and, ultimately, the cost to dismantle the facility safely after the power plants life (I believe about 35-40 years), I wondered whether there were any utilities prepared to make those investments.

I did some research. In fact, nuclear power plants aren't constructed with private capital and the cost of capacity has increased 2-4x in just the last couple years. Government subsidies and loan guarantees are required before utilities sign on to implement nuclear programs. That should be the first sign the business model is flawed.

In addition to the astronomical cost to construct and manage a nuclear power plant, nuclear power is getting whupped in the market place by alternatives.

In 2006, the worldwide nuclear industry added about 1.4B watts of capacity. Sounds like alot, right? As it turns out, that's about 10% of the windpower capacity added and 2.5% of the micropower (non-hydro renewables + heat/power co-generation) capacity added in 2006.

China, which boasts of a significant investment in nuclear power, has developed 7x more capacity with renewable energy sources and renewable investments are on the order of 7x nuclear.

In 2007, there's been some upgrading of nuclear power capacity but no new construction. In 2007, there's been $71B in new capital invested in renewable energy sources and capacity.

In 2007, the U.S., China and Spain each installed more wind capacity that the rest of the world installed new nuclear capacity.

And in 2007, the U.S added more wind capacity than it had added coal power plant capacity in the last five years. (Data from the Rocky Mountain Institute)

At the end of the day, the winner(s) in the energy production game are the ones that provide the cleanest, safest and least expensive power. Based on the investment patterns of the industry and the resultant capacities, it seems pretty clear; the utilities have made some choices already - and they don't include nuclear generated power.

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KCSG
July 17, 2008

Nuclear Waste

By Rachelle Killpack

Southern Utah's Congressman says spent nuclear fuel should not be transported through Utah on its way to the proposed Yucca Mountain Nuclear storage facility in Southern Nevada.

Representative Jim Matheson says as much as 95-percnt of the waste headed to Yucca mountain would pass through Utah on highways or railroads.

Matheson is a member of a house subcommittee that held a hearing on the Yucca Mountain proposal.

The federal Department of Energy has asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to issue a license for the controversial storage site.

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Modesto Bee
July 17, 2008

Wayne Madsen: Nuclear power not eco-friendly enough to resurrect

America's twin crises of sky-rocketing energy costs and catastrophic climate change effects shouldn't be a convenient excuse to push nuclear power as a viable replacement for coal, oil and natural gas power-generating plants.

The nuclear power industry has done little to nothing to improve the safety records of their plants. Just recently, Vermont's Yankee nuclear power plant, owned by Entergy, experienced a cooling problem that forced it to shut down 50 percent of its power production. That shutdown came after repeated safety violations by the plant and a lack of adequate safety inspections.

The near-catastrophe at the Davis-Besse reactor could have rivaled that of Three Mile Island and the impact on Cleveland and other northern Ohio cities and towns could have been disastrous.

Nuclear power generation also generates nuclear waste. Currently, there are 55,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel in storage depots around the country awaiting transport through America's cities and small towns to a storage facility in Yucca Mountain in Nevada - despite the opposition of an overwhelming majority of Nevadans.

The safety of the people of Vermont, northern Ohio, Arizona, Chicago and other parts of the country should not be negotiable by the nuclear power industry lobbyists who roam the halls of Congress.

Our Congress should follow the lead of Germany and permanently ban new nuclear power plant construction.

--Wayne Madsen is a contributing writer to the progressive Online Journal (www.onlinejournal.com). Readers may write to him c/o National Press Club, Front Desk, 529 14th Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20045.

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Ogle County News
July 17, 2008

Exelon officials tell board about spent fuel storage

By Vinde Wells
Senior Editor

Exelon representatives brought the Ogle County Board up to speed July 15 on their plan for storage of spent fuel at the Byron Nuclear Generating Station.

Communications director Robert Kartheiser said construction has already begun on a dry cask storage system which he said is necessary to the operation of the nuclear plant.

“Without a place to do this (store the spent fuel), we cannot operate our plant,” Kartheiser said.

He said construction is underway on the track for the “crawler”, a large machine which will transfer casks loaded with the spent fuel pellets from inside the reactor building to the outside storage pad several yards away.

Currently, Kartheiser said the spent fuel pellets are stored in containers placed underwater in the fuel pool.

However, he said that storage space is almost full.

“Our plant is running out of space. We need the extra storage next year,” Kartheiser said.

He said dry cask storage is already being used at Exelon’s Quad Cities plant.

The space crunch has come about because a permanent storage facility being built by the federal government at Yucca Mountain, Utah is not yet — and may never be — completed, Kartheiser said.

“Congress promised it would be completed by 1998,” he said. He said opponents of the facility have delayed completion of the project.

Spent fuel can be reprocessed and used again to generate electricity, he said, which would alleviate some storage issues.

However, the U.S. Congress outlawed reprocessing because one its by-products is weapons-grade fuel.

“Congress didn’t believe they wanted utilities doing that,” Kartheiser said.

William Stoermer, Exelon’s governmental affairs manager, said the dry cask storage will consist of a large concrete pad located west of the cooling towers.

The storage pad will hold more than a dozen cylindrical casks with the spent fuel pellets sealed inside.

Stoermer said each cask will be 11 feet in diameter, 16.5 feet tall, and weigh 180 tons. The outside of the cask is steel, lined on the inside with 26 inches of concrete, with a lining of lead inside that.

The casks are made, he said, to withstand fire and heat up to 1,475 degrees, tornadic winds up to 360 mph, and projectiles weighing up to 4,000 pounds.

“The storage pad will be recessed slightly below ground level to prevent a direct hit and are designed to withstand terrorist and other types of attacks,” Stoermer said.

He said the spent fuel pellets from the mid-1980s, when the plant first opened, will be the first to be removed from the fuel pool and placed in the dry casks. The older pellets contain the least radioactivity, he said.

Spent fuel pellets from future refueling outages will go into the fuel pool for several years before being placed into dry casks.

Stoermer said the casks on the storage pad will be monitored.

“It’s a safe and secure process,” he said.

Stoermer said plans call for loading the first cask in 2009.

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Rochelle News Leader
July 17, 2008

Nuclear plant officials share details on spent fuel storage plan

Jennifer Simmons
Staff Writer

OREGON — Members of the Ogle County Board were presented with information from Bob Kartheiser and Bill Stoermer of Byron’s Exelon Nuclear Power Plant at Tuesday’s regular monthly board meeting.

The purpose of the presentation was to inform the board and the community of the plant’s new spent nuclear fuel storage facility currently under construction at the plant.

Kartheiser said the fuel storage project is important since many nuclear power plants, including Byron, are running out of storage capacity in the plant’s existing spent fuel pool.

Fuel for nuclear plants comes in the form of uranium pellets. One fuel pellet, which is approximately the size of a pencil eraser, has the energy of 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas, a ton of coal and 149 gallons of oil. The pellets are loaded into fuel rods and grouped to form fuel assemblies that are inserted into the reactor.

The assemblies are operable for five years. Since the Byron plant began operation in 1985, the spent fuel assemblies have been stored in a fuel pool inside the power plant.

In 1982 the federal government began working on a project at Yucca Mountain, Nev., for a national underground nuclear waste repository where used fuel would be permanently stored. It was originally projected to open in 1998. However, delays have pushed back the opening to 2020.

“Byron’s fuel pool is nearing its capacity,” Kartheiser said. “The only available and approved option for us is to build an interim storage facility at the station until the national repository is ready to accept nuclear waste.” Construction has begun on the storage facility at Byron with plans to have it ready in 2009.

Stoermer explained the type of interim outdoor storage facility that will be utilized at the Byron facility. The Byron Station dry cask spent fuel storage system will be similar to dry cask storage used at numerous other nuclear plants worldwide, including the Exelon Nuclear facility near the Quad Cities.

“We will be using a vertical dry cask storage process at all of our Illinois nuclear power plants,” Stoermer said. At Byron, the process includes lowering a steel cask into the fuel pool, loading 32 spent fuel assemblies into the cask, placing a lid on the cask and, once welded and sealed, removing all water and internal atmosphere from the cask. The entire process is done under water in the plant’s fuel pool.

The cask then goes through a transfer process and the fuel cask is eventually placed inside an outdoor storage cask. This cask is 11 feet in diameter, 16-1/2 feet tall and weighs more than 180 tons when loaded, due to its massive concrete and steel construction. “This process is a very safe, secure, and extremely procedurally controlled evolution,” Stoermer stated.

From there, Stoermer explained that a 90-ton crawler, custom built for the Byron station, moves the cask from the reactor building to the outside storage pad. The crawler travels over an approved path at only about ½-mile per hour. The outdoor storage cask is specifically designed to shield any radiation from the spent fuel that may be present inside the cask. These casks are made with 26 inches of concrete surrounding the outer diameter of the storage cask for additional security and protection. Casks are analytically proven to have no damage if subjected to fire and heat up to 1,475 degrees, tornado winds of up to 360 miles per hour, or objects up to 4,000 pounds and traveling up to 126 miles per hour being projected directly at the cask, according to information Stoermer provided. “These storage casks are among the most rigorously built portable industrial structures in existence,” Stoermer added.

Dry cask storage pad

The outside storage pad used for the casks is currently under construction at the Byron facility. The concrete pad will be 116 feet by 198 feet by 2 feet thick and consists of 1,700 cubic yards of concrete. Each pad will additionally have three feet of highly compacted aggregate under the concrete to provide adequate support for the 180 ton storage casks. Each storage pad can hold eight rows of 12 casks. “Currently, Byron Station is constructing one storage pad,” Stoermer said. “However, there is space for additional pads if needed in the future.”

To help residents get a better understanding of this program as well as basic plant operations, Byron Station employees will host an open house at the site on September 7. Kartheiser added “As part of our outreach program, any civic group or organization that would like more information or presentations about the spent fuel storage project, can call me at 815-406-3554. We want the people of Ogle County to be fully aware of this program and understand that it is a completely safe, secure and highly regulated process.”

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Wall Street Journal Blogs
July 17, 2008

Proliferate! Are Many Small Nuclear Plants the Energy Answer?

Posted by Keith Johnson

Nuclear energy is widely touted as the ultimate big solution to the energy crunch. But now comes an intriguing idea: When it comes to nuclear power, is smaller better?

As the much-ballyhooed nuclear renaissance tries to get into gear, there’s growing interest in so-called “small nuclear” reactors. The idea is that small reactors—varying from a few megawatts to a few hundred megawatts—can sidestep some of the difficulties that threaten to derail the full-sized nuclear revival before it begins.

Small reactors have served military and scientific needs for years, and there are scores of new designs on drawing boards around the world. So far, though, no mini reactor designs have been approved by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission—which has enough on its plate trying to certify mature, well-understood nuclear designs—so it will be years before mini-nukes are part of the energy mix.

But proponents see two big potential selling points. The smaller reactors could be good for energy-intensive industries, like oil and gas, that need a constant and on-site supply of power. Small-nuclear proponents also say the mini-reactors could be an option for isolated parts of the world that don’t have access to regular electricity.

So how would the reactors address the problems bedeviling the nuclear industry these days? Costs are high and rising; safety and waste storage are still unresolved issues (and Yucca Mountain’s pricetag just went to $90 billion); and fears of nuclear proliferation haven’t gone away.

Paradoxically, small reactors could provide “diseconomies” of scale, says one small-nuclear proponent, Rod Adams. More numerous reactors could draw on serial mass-production of components, something the full-sized industry can’t quite do, especially in the U.S. And building smaller machines would get around one of the industry’s biggest bottlenecks—the dearth of big reactor vessel cores, made by just a few companies in the world and which carry a multi-year waiting list.

But if nuclear proliferation is already a concern with 400-odd nuclear reactors around the world, what happens when companies start producing thousands of small reactors for use in isolated areas all over the world? Some manufacturers say different fuel mixes would make the mini reactors less appetizing as a source of potential weapons-grade material. Even so, the spent fuel would be stored at hundreds or thousands of sites around the world—not centrally—which means the “security challenges will be significant,” Energy Tribune says.

As everybody from Al Gore to the King of Saudi Arabia is casting around for new energy solutions, are smaller nukes the answer?

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State of Nevada
Agency for Nuclear Projects
www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/
nwpo@nuc.state.nv.us
775-687-3744
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