Yucca Mountain News Clips - Friday, December 19, 2008

Yucca Mountain News Clips
Friday, December 19, 2008
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CQPolitics
December 18, 2008

Looking to 2010, Senate Leader Reid Hopes to Avoid Daschle’s Fate

By Kathleen Hunter
CQ Staff

As he prepares to seek a fifth Senate term in 2010, Majority Leader Harry Reid is positioning himself to avoid the pitfalls that led to the ouster of the last Senate Democratic leader from a conservative-leaning state.

Reid, of Nevada, is quietly executing a re-election strategy designed to make sure that he does not share the fate that befell Tom Daschle of South Dakota, who in 2004 became the first Senate party leader in more than half a century to lose re-election.

As the leader of an expanded Democratic majority that will be expected to collaborate closely with the Obama White House next year, Reid will have to walk a fine line. He will have to convince Nevadans that his 2004 campaign slogan, “Independent Like Nevada,” still holds true, even though he has been a lightning rod for attacks from Republicans who accuse him of straying from his home-state interests.

Reid handily won re-election four years ago by painting himself as a maverick, even as Republicans succeeded in knocking off Daschle in part by casting him as out of touch with South Dakotans, particularly on issues such as taxes.

Differences With Daschle

Early polls have suggested that Reid may be vulnerable to a Republican challenge, but there are several factors that Reid’s re-election campaign does not share with Daschle’s last race.

Unlike South Dakota in 2004, Nevada has been trending Democratic — President-elect Barack Obama won a 12-point victory there. Also, Reid will run in a midterm election, which generally favors an incumbent, whereas Daschle had to run in a presidential election year with an incumbent Republican president on the ballot.

Reid also has Daschle’s example to learn from, and has been filling his campaign coffers and avoiding political stances that could be construed as too liberal. And unlike Daschle, Reid could find an ally in the White House: Obama achieved greater success in Western states than other recent Democratic presidential candidates.

In a post-election conference call with reporters, Reid said Obama had promised him that he would “focus on the West and how different it is from the rest of the country.”

“Western voters, we all know, reject extreme political ideologies,” Reid added.

Accordingly, Reid is expected to focus on several issues important to his home state.

Reid spokesman Jon Summers said the majority leader’s top priority this year will be passing legislation to finally kill the possibility of establishing the nation’s first long-term nuclear waste repository at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. Summers said Reid has had multiple conversations with Obama about the topic and has found a sympathetic ear.

“Everything that Sen. Reid does in Washington, he does with Nevada in mind,” Summers said.

Reid also plans to keep the Senate focused on energy. He will push early in 2009 for legislation to invest resources in solar, wind and geothermal energy, which Nevada can produce in abundance.

Efforts to boost the state’s economy, particularly its homeowners, will be a priority, as Nevada leads the nation in home foreclosures. Reid’s top Lieutenant, Democratic Whip Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, announced last week that his top priority in the new Congress will be a renewed push to pass legislation allowing bankruptcy judges to alter the terms of problematic mortgages - a measure designed to stem the tide of foreclosures.

Reid also will focus on reaching out to the state’s sizeable Hispanic population, which trended heavily toward Obama this year. Summers said Reid and Obama have discussed moving comprehensive immigration legislation, probably in late 2009.

A public lands bill that Reid backed away from attempting to pass during last month’s lame-duck session also could be back on tap. Public lands and water management are bread-and-butter issues for lawmakers from the West.

Reid, who was endorsed in 2004 by the National Rifle Association and has opposed a ban on assault weapons, also attributes Democrats’ recent Western success in part to candidates’ unabashed support of gun rights.

“We don’t run from it anymore,” Reid said, adding, “Democrats like their weapons.

But Republicans already have Reid in their sights.

John Cornyn of Texas, who will head the National Republican Senatorial Committee in the next election cycle, said the GOP is looking “without exception” to recruit candidates that can pose a strong challenge to Democratic incumbents. Although Cornyn downplayed the suggestion that Reid was a top target, he went on to say that the Nevadan’s role as leader has made him vulnerable.

“There’s an inherent tension between his role here and representing your constituents back home,” Cornyn said. “I do think — from what I’ve seen of his ratings, his poll numbers — he’s got some work to do on his hands, and obviously we’d like to rebuild our party in 2010 and 2012 and win every seat we can.”

Demographic trends work in Reid’s favor. Democratic voter registration has soared, prompted by the Silver State’s unprecedentedly early Jan. 19 Democratic presidential caucuses. Reid, who was instrumental in moving the state’s contest up so that it would actually matter this year, often touts the Democrats’ significant edge in registration and the party infrastructure that was put in place for last month’s election.

As of November, there were 113,645 more registered Democrats than Republicans in Nevada. That’s dramatically different from November 2004, when Republicans held a 3,216-voter edge over Democrats. That year, Reid won by far the most comfortable victory of his Senate career, besting Republican Richard Ziser by 26 percentage points.

Reid caught another break earlier this month when a Clark County grand jury indicted Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki, the only Republican who had announced plans to challenge him. He has called Reid “too liberal and too partisan for Nevada.” Krolicki, who faces four felony charges stemming from allegations that he mishandled state money, has said the indictment is politically motivated and engineered, at least in part, by Reid and his supporters, a charge the majority leader denies.

Another potential GOP challenger, Rep. Jon Porter , lost his own re-election bid last month to Democrat Dina Titus. Rep. Dean Heller and former state Sen. Joe Heck also have been mentioned as possible opponents.

Reid also plans to keep the Senate focused on energy. He will push early in 2009 for legislation to invest resources in solar, wind and geothermal energy, which Nevada can produce in abundance.

“We don’t run from it anymore,” Reid said, adding, “Democrats like their weapons.

But Republicans already have Reid in their sights.

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Las Vegas SUN
December 17, 2008

Waste dump opponents sense victory

By Joe Schoenmann

Despite the eleventh hour push by the Bush administration to advance efforts to make Yucca Mountain the dump for all of the nation’s highly radioactive nuclear waste, that plan is on its last legs, Nevada’s anti-Yucca forces said this week.

“I believe we’re on the threshold of victory,” Richard Bryan, the former U.S. senator and former governor of Nevada, said at Monday’s meeting of the Nevada Nuclear Projects Commission. Bryan is commission chairman.

One reason for his belief: At the end of this week, the state will release its barrage of reasons why Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, should remain free of nuclear waste.

State Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto on Friday is to release the list of hundreds of contentions that will be filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

“These are serious challenges that will demonstrate convincingly the flaws in the Department of Energy’s program,” said Bob Loux, longtime chief of the Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency. “When others outside Nevada see the seriousness of these charges, they will come to the realization that Yucca Mountain can never be licensed.”

The list notes, for example, that the state has demonstrated that the canisters that are to be filled with nuclear waste are vulnerable to corrosion from water and “have no chance of lasting more than a few hundred years.”

The Department of Energy will have 50 days to analyze and respond to the list of contentions; then Nevada has two weeks to respond to that analysis. That’s when the real debate begins.

Loux expects that an administrative law judge’s review of all of this could take up to 12 years.

“It’s a very lengthy process,” he said.

And that’s only if the new president fails to meet Nevada’s expectations.

Loux also told the commission that he has talked with President-elect Barack Obama’s transition people, and everything he “heard indicates (Obama) will keep his word on Yucca Mountain.”

“We have a new president, we have the majority leader. Obama carried Nevada, and he pledged he was going to stop it,” Loux said.

During the campaign, Obama aired a television ad that said: “Barack Obama. Opposes Opening Yucca. He’ll protect our families.”

Another encouraging sign came this month when the Surface Transportation Board, a three-member appointed panel that oversees railroad construction projects, came to Las Vegas to consider whether to allow the Energy Department to build a railroad from Caliente in Eastern Nevada to Yucca Mountain.

And although the hearing was largely regarded as a formality by opponents of the Yucca Mountain dump plan, local officials expressed surprise at the thoughtful, pointed questions the board asked.

Suddenly the hearing seemed like yet another facet of the Yucca debate that might go Nevada’s way.

So, one way or another, Loux said after Monday’s meeting, the Yucca Mountain nuclear dump appears “on its way out and down.”

Sun reporter Phoebe Sweet contributed to this article.

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Las Vegas SUN
December 17, 2008

Sun editorial:

Putting science first

Nomination of Chu as next energy secretary holds promise for Nevada and the nation

President-elect Barack Obama’s announcement Monday that he will nominate Nobel laureate Steven Chu to become the nation’s next energy secretary is welcome news on at least two fronts.

One is that Chu is a scientist who Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is convinced shares Obama’s opposition to a proposed nuclear waste dump in Nevada. Another reason to be enthused about Chu is that with him at the helm, this country can expect more aggressive development and use of environmentally friendly renewable energy resources.

Chu, a physicist who shared the 1997 Nobel Prize for discovering how to cool and trap atoms and molecules with lasers, is intimately familiar with the Energy Department that he would run. As director of the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, Chu called for increased research involving solar energy and biofuels in an effort to reduce the greenhouse gases that have led to global warming.

The New York Times wrote in a Dec. 5 profile of Chu that he “has spoken unenthusiastically” about the proposal for a Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

“He has shown that he can work beyond the confines of a national lab to tackle real-world issues and his expertise will greatly benefit our country,” Reid said of Chu. “Dr. Chu also knows, like most Nevadans, that Yucca Mountain is not a viable solution for dumping and dealing with nuclear waste.”

Reid’s backing is critical because he had said he would not allow the Senate to approve the nomination of an energy secretary who supported a Yucca Mountain dump.

It will be refreshing to have a scientist of Chu’s stature in Obama’s Cabinet. The Bush administration too often treated scientists as second-class citizens and tainted reasonable scientific recommendations with a destructive political agenda that promoted development of fossil fuels and other policies that harmed the environment. That is not likely to be the case with Obama.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
December 17, 2008

Obama's pick for Department of Energy post signed report favoring Yucca Mountain licensing

WASHINGTON — Steven Chu, the federal laboratory director selected this week to lead the Department of Energy, signed onto a nuclear energy report whose recommendations included licensing for a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.

Chu’s signature on the August report, alongside those of nine other high ranking federal science managers, is suggesting to some people that there might be a gap between his thinking on the controversial Nevada project and that of his expected soon-to-be boss, President-elect Barack Obama.

While some Nevada lawmakers have been quick to characterize Chu as no friend of Yucca Mountain, the report indicates there might be more nuance to his position, even if in the end he carries out an Obama campaign pledge to end the project.

“This is pretty disturbing, and he did affix his name to that report,” said Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste watchdog for the Beyond Nuclear energy advocacy group that opposes the Yucca repository.

“If you look at what is in this report and what Obama said on the campaign trail, especially in Nevada, there is a difference,” Kamps said. “My hope is that Barack Obama will be giving direction to his energy secretary.”

When he ran for president, Obama was critical of the Energy Department’s effort to build a nuclear waste complex at the Yucca site, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, and indicated he would end the program and divert funding to investigate other options for managing highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel.

At roughly the same time, the directors of 10 national laboratories including Chu as head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California were forming a position paper on nuclear power that was forwarded to Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman near the end of the summer.

In the eight-page report, the directors said they “strongly believe that nuclear energy must play a significant and growing role in our nation’s — and the world’s — energy portfolio.” It recommended getting maximum use of the current fleet of nuclear plants while immediately deploying advanced light-water reactors to meet growing energy needs.

On nuclear waste, the directors called for a suite of actions, including interim storage of waste either on-site or away from power plants, licensing of the Yucca repository as a long-term measure, and federal funding for development of waste reprocessing and other forward-looking technologies.

“Confidence regarding the disposal of waste is needed before the (federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission) will grant a license for a new plant and before private investors will accept the financial risk of ordering new nuclear plants,” the directors said.

“In the short term this confidence can be achieved by continuing the licensing of a geologic repository at Yucca Mountain and enabling the continued interim storage of used nuclear fuel in dry casks and fuel pools,” the report said.

The issue paper is circulating among energy lobbyists and interest groups looking for clues as to how Chu, a 1997 Nobel Prize winner in physics, might manage nuclear issues as energy secretary.

Whatever Chu signed over the summer, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., remains confident the energy secretary-designate will work to end the repository program as part of the Obama team, Reid spokesman Jon Summers said.

“He spoke with Chu about Yucca Mountain and got a commitment from him the dump won’t become a reality,” Summers said.

“That, combined with the commitment that he got from President-elect Obama, and that combined with his position in the Senate (as majority leader) ... Yucca’s dead,” Summers said.

Chu’s main expertise, touted by Obama when he introduced his pick Monday, has been in research and development of alternative energy technologies and strategies to combat climate change.

Chu has advocated nuclear power as a clean energy source, but like many others has expressed concerns about how its deadly waste can be managed.

The nominee-designate has spoken approvingly of spent fuel reprocessing but has said little specifically about the Yucca Mountain Project, where the Department of Energy wants to store more than 77,000 tons of commercial spent fuel and government-generated nuclear waste in a warren of tunnels 1,000 feet below the mountain’s surface.

An aide for the Obama transition office said Tuesday night that ultimately the incoming president will be calling the shots on Yucca Mountain.

“The president-elect will rely on Dr. Chu for advice, but like all members of his Cabinet, he will be charged with implementing the president-elect’s policies,” spokesman Nick Shapiro said. “And President-elect Obama has been clear throughout the campaign that Yucca Mountain should not and will not move forward.”

Robert Budnitz, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley facility, advised Chu as part of a team from the national labs that shaped drafts of the position paper. The document was finalized by the lab directors themselves, he said.

“He signed it and he didn’t sign it casually,” Budnitz said of Chu. “He read every word of every paragraph of this thing, all eight pages.”

Budnitz said there never appeared to be hesitation among the lab directors to endorse a geologic repository, whether it would be utilized for disposal of used fuel assemblies or as a destination for waste that would remain after fuel is recycled.

“I can say this without fear,” Budnitz said, “All agreed that a geologic repository would be required. The idea that there would never be a geologic repository never occurred to them.”

But Budnitz added he did not recall he and Chu ever having any discussions specifically about Yucca Mountain. Budnitz said he would be at a loss to describe the nominee’s thinking about the project.

Several others involved with the report or familiar with it cautioned against reading into the document. The main author was Adam Cohen, deputy associate director for the Argonne National Laboratory.

Cohen said the report was worded to foster consensus among the directors.

He said, for instance, that the recommendation to continue licensing for Yucca Mountain was not so much an endorsement of the Nevada site as a desire for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to identify and work out kinks in the license process “so you know it can be done and you have the right regulations.”

The laboratory officials “are not here to pass judgment as to whether Yucca Mountain is good, bad or indifferent,” Cohen said. “It is really science based. It never says outright we agree that Yucca Mountain is the best thing since sliced bread.”

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

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
December 17, 2008

Energy pick signed report

Recommendations included Yucca licensing

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Steven Chu, the federal laboratory director selected this week to lead the Department of Energy, signed on to a nuclear energy report whose recommendations included licensing for a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.

Chu's signature on the August report, alongside those of nine other high-ranking federal science managers, is suggesting to some people that there might be a gap between his thinking on the controversial Nevada project and that of his expected soon-to-be boss, President-elect Barack Obama.

"This is pretty disturbing, and he did affix his name to that report," said Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste watchdog for the Beyond Nuclear energy advocacy group that opposes the Yucca repository.

"If you look at what is in this report and what Obama said on the campaign trail, especially in Nevada, there is a difference," Kamps said. "My hope is that Barack Obama will be giving direction to his energy secretary."

When he ran for president, Obama was critical of the Energy Department's effort to build a nuclear waste complex at the Yucca site, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, and indicated he would end the program and divert funding to investigate other options for managing highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel.

In the eight-page report, the directors said they "strongly believe that nuclear energy must play a significant and growing role in our nation's -- and the world's -- energy portfolio." It recommended getting maximum use of the current fleet of nuclear plants while immediately deploying advanced light-water reactors to meet growing energy needs.

"Confidence regarding the disposal of waste is needed before the (federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission) will grant a license for a new plant and before private investors will accept the financial risk of ordering new nuclear plants," the directors said.

"In the short term this confidence can be achieved by continuing the licensing of a geologic repository at Yucca Mountain and enabling the continued interim storage of used nuclear fuel in dry casks and fuel pools," the report said.

The issue paper is circulating among energy lobbyists and interest groups looking for clues as to how Chu, a 1997 Nobel Prize winner in physics, might manage nuclear issues as energy secretary.

"He spoke with Chu about Yucca Mountain and got a commitment from him the dump won't become a reality," Summers said.

"That, combined with the commitment that he got from President-elect Obama, and that combined with his position in the Senate (as majority leader) ... Yucca's dead," Summers said.

Chu's main expertise, touted by Obama when he introduced his pick Monday, has been in research and development of alternative energy technologies and strategies to combat climate change.

Chu has advocated nuclear power as a clean energy source, but like many others has expressed concerns about how its deadly waste can be managed.

An aide for the Obama transition office said Tuesday night that ultimately the incoming president will be calling the shots on Yucca Mountain.

"The president-elect will rely on Dr. Chu for advice, but like all members of his Cabinet, he will be charged with implementing the president-elect's policies," spokesman Nick Shapiro said. "And President-elect Obama has been clear throughout the campaign that Yucca Mountain should not and will not move forward."

"He signed it and he didn't sign it casually," Budnitz said of Chu. "He read every word of every paragraph of this thing, all eight pages."

"I can say this without fear," Budnitz said, "All agreed that a geologic repository would be required. The idea that there would never be a geologic repository never occurred to them."

But Budnitz added he did not recall he and Chu ever having any discussions specifically about Yucca Mountain. Budnitz said he would be at a loss to describe the nominee's thinking about the project.

Several others involved with the report or familiar with it cautioned against reading into the document. The main author was Adam Cohen, deputy associate director for the Argonne National Laboratory.

Cohen said the report was worded to foster consensus among the directors.

He said, for instance, that the recommendation to continue licensing for Yucca Mountain was not so much an endorsement of the Nevada site as a desire for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to identify and work out kinks in the license process "so you know it can be done and you have the right regulations."

The laboratory officials "are not here to pass judgment as to whether Yucca Mountain is good, bad or indifferent," Cohen said. "It is really science based. It never says outright we agree that Yucca Mountain is the best thing since sliced bread."

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

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Albany Times Union
December 17, 2008

Letter: Nuclear power meets needs, creates jobs

Academia's nuclear/energy experts need to come forth and identify the role of nuclear versus wind, solar, coal and gas-fired power plants in meeting our future energy needs. Our economic survival will depend on an adequate and reasonably priced source of electricity. Nuclear power plants can meet that need while at the same time creating needed jobs.

One pound of uranium gives two million times the energy produced from a pound of coal. A lump of uranium can run a city for a week. Long-term storage of radioactive wastes appears to be the politicians' "ace in the hole" for opposing nuclear power plants. When will the study of the Yucca Mountain radioactive storage site in Nevada be concluded? Will Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada and President-elect Barack Obama be supportive of its conclusion?

France produces 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear and has stored the wastes produced over the last 25 years beneath the floor of one room at Le Hague. Does France have better experts or smarter politicians?

Sherwood Davies

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Whitehaven News
December 17, 2008

Company selected for nuke clean-up contract

By David Siddall

URS’ Washington Division, which leads Sellafield’s Nuclear Management Partners, has been selected for a major nuclear clean-up contract in the United States.

The US Department of Energy announced that it has awarded a $3.3 billion contract to manage the liquid waste at the Savannah River Site to Savannah River Remediation, a group led by URS Washington which also includes AREVA, another partner in NMP.

Tom Zarges, president of URS Washington, who also chairs NMP, said: “URS has a long history of supporting the DOE’s environmental management and nuclear operations programmes and has managed many successful projects at the Savannah River Site. The SRR team has an unequalled track record in managing tanks and tank closure in the DOE complex”.

This is the second major contract which URS Washington has won in recent weeks. Last month, the USA-RS partnership, a group led by URS Washington, was awarded a $2.5 billion contract to manage and operate the used nuclear fuel repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

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Senator Harry Reid
December 16, 2008

Reid Statement on Nomination of Dr. Steven Chu to Be Secretary of Energy

Washington, DC – Nevada Senator Harry Reid made the following statement today after President-elect Obama nominated Dr. Steven Chu to be Secretary of Energy:

"Steven Chu is an extremely accomplished scientist and strong choice to lead America into a more energy-independent future. He has shown that he can work beyond the confines of a national lab to tackle real-world issues, and his expertise will greatly benefit our country.

"I have been impressed by his command and understanding of the serious energy and global warming problems we face, which is why I brought him to the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas this summer. I am confident that Dr. Chu will transform the Department of Energy into a smart and progressive weapon against our addiction to oil, making our economy vastly more energy efficient and bringing about a safer future.

"Dr. Chu also knows, like most Nevadans, that Yucca Mountain is not a viable solution for dumping and dealing with nuclear waste.

"I look forward to confirming Dr. Chu as quickly as possible."

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
December 16, 2008

Field narrows to three for nuclear agency chief

By Keith Rogers
Las Vegas Review-Journal

Nevada's Nuclear Projects Commission on Monday narrowed down to three the field of candidates for the post being vacated by embattled agency chief Bob Loux.

The three remaining from a field of five candidates are former Sparks Mayor Bruce Breslow, former State Consumer Advocate Timothy Hay and Keith Tierney, a Reno lawyer who is a former board director of Citizen Alert, a statewide environmental group.

In all, 17 people applied for Loux's job. Six names were presented to the commission that will select three finalists.

Gov. Jim Gibbons will then select one as the next executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects. The agency leads the state's opposition to federal plans for building a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.

Not making the cut Monday were Susan W. Lynch, an agency geologist who heads its technical program, and Fred McElroy, a Reno realty professional and former state director of the Nevada Association of Realtors.

The sixth candidate, Karen Beckley, withdrew her application prior to Monday's meeting.

Loux stepped down Sept. 29 amid controversy that he gave himself and his staff large, unauthorized pay raises. He remains as the agency's chief until Gibbons selects his successor. Loux had been the agency's executive director for 23 years.

Hay and Tierney received six votes each. Breslow received four votes but edged out Lynch who had two votes. Commission member Steve Molasky was absent from the seven-member panel.

Hay told the commission that if he becomes director, he will pursue obtaining title to the Yucca Mountain site, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, to put it in state control because federal plans are expected to hit so many roadblocks under president-elect Barack Obama's administration that the project will probably die for lack of funding.

"I think the end game requires title for the site to be transferred to a state entity, perhaps the Desert Research Institute," Hay said.

Tierney said, "I feel confident that I'm ready, willing and quite able to fulfill obligations of this agency."

Breslow said the Yucca Mountain Project "is not a safe project and doesn't belong anywhere until they (federal scientists) can figure it out."

--Contact reporter Keith Rogers at krogers@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308.

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Reno Gazette-Journal
December 16, 2008

Obama’s pick for energy secretary no friend of Yucca Mountain

RENO, Nev. (AP) — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid praised President-elect Barack Obama’s nominee for U.S. energy secretary on Monday, saying Steven Chu is an ally in the fight against Yucca Mountain who can help lead the country to a more energy-independent future.

Chu, a Nobel-prize winning physicist, is the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a leading advocate of reducing greenhouse gases by developing new energy sources.

He has raised concerns in the past that while the proposed nuclear repository at Yucca Mountain northwest of Las Vegas is planned to be built to standards ensuring safety for 10,000 years, the metal casings holding the waste could fail within 5,000 years.

“Steven Chu is an extremely accomplished scientist and strong choice to lead America into a more energy-independent future,” Reid, D-Nev., said in a statement Monday from Washington D.C.

“He has shown that he can work beyond the confines of a national lab to tackle real-world issues and his expertise will greatly benefit our country,” he said.

“Dr. Chu also knows, like most Nevadans, that Yucca Mountain is not a viable solution for dumping and dealing with nuclear waste.”

Chu said in an interview posted on the Web site of the UC-Berkeley’s NewsCenter on Sept. 30, 2005 that Yucca Mountain would be filled up with waste from all existing civilian and military nuclear operations as soon as it opened its doors.

“So we need three or four Yucca Mountains. Well, we don’t have three or four Yucca Mountains,” Chu said at the time.

“The other thing is that storing the fuel at Yucca Mountain is supposed to be safe for 10,000 years. But the current best estimates — and these are really estimates, the Lab’s in fact — is that the metal casings (containing the waste) will probably fail on a scale of 5,000 years, plus or minus 2,” he said.

“That’s still a long time, and then after that the idea was that the very dense rock, very far away from the water table will contain it, so that by the time it finally leaks down to the water table and gets out the radioactivity will have mostly decayed,” Chu said in the interview.

In a report to Congress last month, the Bush administration said there are no technology constraints to a major expansion of the proposed nuclear waste site in Nevada, calling for possibly tripling the amount of highly radioactive used reactor fuel that could be stored there in manmade underground caverns.

The Energy Department specifically asked that the current capacity limit of 77,000 tons of waste — imposed by Congress in 1987 — be removed to accommodate all of the waste expected to be generated at commercial power plants, many of which are likely to operate for another four decades or more.

Reid said on Monday that in addition to nuclear waste, he has been impressed by Chu’s command and understanding of serious energy and global warming problems facing the world. He said that is why he invited him to the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas this past summer.

“I am confident that Dr. Chu will transform the Department of Energy into a smart and progressive weapon against our addiction to oil, making our economy vastly more energy efficient and bringing about a safer future,” Reid said. “I look forward to confirming Dr. Chu as quickly as possible.”

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Tri-City Herald
December 16, 2008

Energy secretary nominee boon to PNNL

By Annette Cary

Stephen Chu's nomination as energy secretary may be good for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, but how Hanford might fare under his leadership is tougher to predict.

Scientists at national laboratories will "have a distinguished peer at the helm," President-elect Barack Obama said Monday as he formally announced Steven Chu as his pick for energy secretary.

"His appointment should send a signal to all that my administration will value science, we will make decisions based on the facts and we understand that the facts demand bold action," Obama said during a news conference in Chicago.

Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, is the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and is known for his advocacy of developing energy sources that will not add to greenhouse gases.

He will bring an appreciation of the role of the national laboratory system to the Department of Energy, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said in a statement.

"This will be helpful in continuing to ensure that Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has the resources needed to provide high tech jobs in our state and to continue developing pioneering security solutions for our country," she said.

Chu is passionate about several areas in which PNNL has significant expertise and leadership, including finding scientific solutions to combat climate change and creating renewable sources of energy and energy-efficient buildings, PNNL Director Mike Kluse said in a statement.

"We believe the Department of Energy, under Chu's leadership, will continue to turn to PNNL as it increases U.S. energy capacity, reduces dependence on imported oil, prevents and counters terrorism and creates sustainable systems," he said.

Chu listed DOE responsibilities at the news conference as supporting research that will lead to innovation in energy in the private sector, nurturing broad based research that will be essential to the nation's prosperity and providing scientific leadership to minimize the proliferation and use of nuclear weapons.

Murray plans to meet with him in the coming weeks to discuss an additional responsibility, "the legal and moral obligation we have to cleaning up the Hanford nuclear reservation," she said.

"I will be meeting with Dr. Chu to discuss the importance of a robust national budget for (DOE) environmental management that will keep Hanford cleanup on track," she said. "I will also ensure that he knows the importance of coming together with the state to resolve differences over the Tri-Party Agreement so that we meet important cleanup deadlines."

It will be important for a deputy secretary to be named under Chu who understands the importance of Hanford cleanup and the work remaining to be done, said Gary Petersen, TRIDEC vice president of Hanford programs.

Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., said he has had productive relationships with energy secretaries under the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations and expects that to continue with Obama.

Chu's background as a scientist with management experience should serve DOE well, Hastings said in a statement. He said he'll be working with Chu to ensure Hanford cleanup is a top priority and that PNNL has the resources it needs.

The Tri-City Development Council sees both advantages and disadvantages to Chu's nomination.

He is expected to oppose opening a national repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., which has been planned as the disposal site for Hanford's high-level radioactive waste once it has been turned into sturdy glass logs at the vitrification plant under construction.

But Chu supports nuclear energy and reusing spent commercial nuclear fuel, Petersen said. Not only does that bode well for the Tri-Cities, but his push for other clean energies also holds promise here, Petersen said.

The Tri-Cities and the region are "almost a centerpiece for energy," he said. It has production or research being conducted in nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, carbon dioxide sequestration and biofuels.

"Now the trick is to make sure the new secretary of energy recognizes that," he said.

Murray said she would be working in the coming months to ensure that federal investments in creating green jobs will be made in Washington.

Chu faces a difficult task as he balances the need for clean and affordable energy supplies, safeguarding the nation's nuclear stockpile, maintaining the United States as a leader in science and technology and cleaning up Hanford and other Cold War nuclear sites, said Bush's Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman in a statement.

But after working with Chu for four years Bodman has confidence Chu will bring the needed leadership, vision and scientific expertise to the job, he said.

Also Monday, Obama named Carol Browner, Nancy Sutley and Lisa Jackson as his picks for other key energy and environment jobs. Browner, the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, would coordinate White House energy and climate policy; Sutley, deputy mayor for energy and environment in Los Angeles, would be the chairwoman of the White House council on Environmental Quality; and Jackson, a former New Jersey environmental protection commissioner, would be the EPA administrator.

--Annette Cary: 582-1533; acary@tricityherald.com

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KRNV-TV
December 15, 2008

Nuclear projects agency to interview for top position

LAS VEGAS (AP) -- The state agency fighting federal plans for a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain will meet today in Las Vegas to interview five candidates to head the Agency for Nuclear Projects.

Gov. Jim Gibbons will later name the replacement for Bob Loux, who amid criticism for raising salaries for himself and his staff without authorization.

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Las Vegas SUN
December 15, 2008

Finalists selected for nuclear waste job

By Cy Ryan

CARSON CITY – The search for a successor to nuclear waste chief Bob Loux has been narrowed to three Northern Nevadans.

The Nevada Commission on Nuclear Projects has selected former Sparks Mayor Bruce Breslow, former state Consumer Advocate Tim Hay and attorney Keith Tierney as the three names to submit to Gov. Jim Gibbons, who will make the final appointment.

During the 90-minute meeting in Las Vegas, Hay and Tierney received all the votes of the six commissioners present. Breslow, a former TV sports newscaster, got four votes.

Those who did not make the finals were Susan Lynch, who works in the nuclear projects office, and Frederick McElroy, a Realtor.

Loux has resigned the job he has held for 23 years fighting the efforts by the federal government to locate a nuclear dump at Yucca Mountain in Southern Nevada. An audit discovered he gave himself and his staff unauthorized raises from money available from a vacant position.

Loux had an authorized salary of $110,851 last fiscal year but earned $145,718.

Gov. Gibbons has asked state Controller Kim Wallin to withhold the money from the paycheck of Loux who agreed to stay until a replacement is named.

The state Ethics Commission has scheduled a hearing Jan. 8 to determine if Loux violated ethical standards in giving himself and his staff pay raises of more than $195,000 over a period of a few years.

Judy Sheldew, the attorney for Loux, maintains he acted within his authority and submitted the pay raises through the state Budget Office.

--Cy Ryan may be reached at (775) 687-5032 or cy@lasvegassun.com.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
December 15, 2008

Obama picks Nobel Prize winner to head Energy Department

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and one of the nation’s leading science advocates for combating global warming and promoting renewable energy, was announced today as President-elect Barack Obama’s choice to lead the Department of Energy.

Chu, 60, is director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where since 2004 he has focused the California institution on research into biofuels, energy efficiency and conservation, solar energy and other strategies to address climate change.

Obama’s preference for the respected physicist had been an open secret for a week, and was widely reported. The president-elect formally announced the appointment at a news conference in Chicago where he also introduced his picks to fill other key energy and environmental posts in his administration.

Obama said his choice of Chu “should send a signal to all that my administration will value science. We will make decisions based on facts and we understand the facts demand bold action.”

But some lawmakers privately question Chu’s lack of political experience to convert forward-thinking into legislation that can pass Congress and politics that can win support among bureaucrats.

Chu, who was born in St. Louis and grew up in Garden City, N.Y., shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 for developing methods to cool and trap atoms using lasers. He was 49.

Chu is also a professor of physics and molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and former head of the physics department at Stanford University.

He appeared in Las Vegas in August, where he spoke at the National Clean Energy Summit. He told the audience at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas that government research funds could help reduce the cost of photovoltaic cells and help create synthetic yeast to make diesel and jet fuel replacements from biomass.

In other speeches he has declared that coal “is my worst nightmare,” and he was not optimistic that light pollution “clean coal” can be perfected.

Less is known about Chu’s views on the Yucca Mountain Project, one of the major programs managed by DOE and one that Obama criticized during the presidential campaign.

Lynn Yarris, acting head of communications at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said he did not know if Chu has ever taken a public position specifically on the nuclear waste repository that DOE is trying to build at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Along with several other major government science installations, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has participated in Yucca Mountain studies.

Project spokesman Allen Benson said the lab has been associated with Yucca about 20 years, performing investigations on how water travels through the ridge where nuclear waste would be stored.

Benson said “about three” lab employees still work on the project, not necessarily full time, with a current budget of about $1 million a year.

In a 2005 interview posted on a University of California, Berkeley Web site, Chu said nuclear power “absolutely” should be made a bigger part of the nation’s energy mix, where it now supplies 20 percent of electricity.

Chu also has said he supports recycling spent nuclear fuel to reduce its volumes and the toxic lifetimes of its elements.

In the same interview, he pointed out that nuclear fuel stored within canisters is supposed to remain contained within Yucca Mountain for 10,000 years. “But the current best estimates — and these are really estimates, the lab’s in fact — is that the metal casings will probably fail on a scale of 5,000 years, plus or minus 2,” he said.

“That’s still a long time,” Chu said. Dense rock is supposed to further retard the escape of radionuclides, “so that by the time it finally leaks down to the water table and gets out, the radioactivity will have mostly decayed,” he said.

In one possible clue to Chu’s stance on Yucca Mountain, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he supported the nominee, and looked forward to confirming Dr. Chu as quickly as possible.

Reid aides said the senator spoke with Chu last week about “Yucca, climate change and the need to create jobs by developing renewable energy.”

“I am confident that Dr. Chu will transform the Department of Energy into a smart and progressive weapon against our addiction to oil, making our economy vastly more energy efficient and bringing about a safer future,” Reid said. “Dr. Chu also knows, like most Nevadans, that Yucca Mountain is not a viable solution for dumping and dealing with nuclear waste.”

Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said he had a favorable impression of Chu, including the nominee’s support for nuclear fuel recycling.

“That’s what I’ve been talking about for a long time,” Ensign said in an interview Thursday. On other issues, “He’s obviously very into renewables ... so I like that part of him,” Ensign said.

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said Obama “has made a stellar selection” in Chu.

Rep. Dean Heller, R-Nev., said “it remains to be seen” how the Obama administration will deal with Yucca Mountain, “and whether they will be willing to end the project once and for all.”

“Our nation needs a comprehensive energy policy that includes conservation, renewable energy, and developing our own natural resources,” Heller said in a statement. “It is my hope that the new secretary of Energy will work in a bipartisan manner to help solve our nation’s energy problems.”

--Review-Journal writers Molly Ball and John Edwards contributed to this report. Contact Stephens Washington Bureau Chief Steve Tetreault at stetreault@stephensmedia.com or 202-783-1760.

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Reno Gazette-Journal
December 15, 2008

Reprocessing site still would be bad

Robert Alvarez

Recently, some have suggested that Nevadans strike a "deal" with the federal government that would put a nuclear waste reprocessing facility in the state instead of opening the Yucca Mountain site. Don't think for a minute that this would be any better.

The idea behind reprocessing is to recycle the uranium and plutonium used in nuclear reactors. Proponents say that reprocessing used reactor fuel is vital to the growth of nuclear power because it would reduce waste that needs to be disposed deep underground.

Yet behind the glittering rhetoric are several stark facts:

* A reprocessing facility in Nevada would become a dump for the largest, most lethal source of high-heat radioactivity in the United States and possibly the world.

* Reprocessing does not significantly reduce the amount of radioactive waste that has to be buried.

* The cost of nuclear recycling rivals the recent bailout of Wall Street investment banks.

The first major problem with reprocessing is that it doesn't come close to solving the real challenge of nuclear waste. In fact, as a reprocessing facility processes used fuel rods, it releases about 15 thousand times more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear power reactors and generates several dangerous waste streams. Denmark, Norway and Ireland have all sought to close French and English reprocessing facilities because of radioactive waste washing up on their shores. If placed in a crowded area, a few grams of waste would deliver lethal radiation doses in a matter of seconds.

Even the Nuclear Energy Institute agrees that ending the waste issue is a red herring. "Nuclear power plants will always create long-lived waste by-products that require long-term management," NEI President Frank L. Bowman said in 2006.

The second major problem with reprocessing is that it actually makes the proliferation challenge worse. While the plutonium in spent nuclear fuel has potential energy value, it is also a powerful nuclear explosive, requiring extraordinary safeguards and security to prevent theft and diversion. Unlike plutonium bound up in highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel, separated plutonium does not have a significant radiation barrier to prevent theft and bomb-making.

Over the past 50 years, there have been several unsuccessful efforts to use plutonium as a fuel, including two reactor meltdowns in the United States. Currently, about 250 tons of plutonium sits at reprocessing facilities around the world -- enough to fuel more than 40,000 nuclear weapons.

Finally, the third major problem with reprocessing is that the price tag is enormous. In 1996, the National Academy of Sciences found it would cost up to $700 billion in 2008 dollars. Just two years ago, the academy reiterated its findings, saying, "There is no economic justification for going forward with this program at anything approaching a commercial scale."

Waste, proliferation and cost -- three strikes, and reprocessing is out. We are better off investing in renewable energy and conservation, rather than pouring billions of dollars into this costly and very risky endeavor.

--Robert Alvarez is senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies. He was the senior policy adviser to the secretary of energy during the Clinton administration.

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CounterPunch
December 15, 2008

The Half-Life of the Lesser Evil

Dr. Chu's Nuclear Prescription

By Karl Grossman

The reaction from safe-energy advocates is mixed to the proposed appointment of Steven Chu as U.S. energy secretary by President-Elect Barak Obama. Mixed is a charitable response to the prospects of Chu being in charge of the U.S. Department of Energy.

Although he has a keen interest in energy efficiency and solar power and other clean forms of renewable energy, Chu is a staunch advocate of nuclear power.

“Nuclear has to be a necessary part of the portfolio,” declared Chu, the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, at an economic gathering last March in Palo Alto, California organized by Stanford University.” http://news.cnet.com/8301-10787_3-9888608-60.html

“The fear of radiation shouldn’t even enter into this,” he said in comparing nuclear and coal. “Coal is very, very bad.” Chu, a physicist, repeated a claim of nuclear proponents that coal plants produce more radioactivity than nuclear plants—a contention based on coal containing trace amounts of uranium and thorium. But the claim—and Chu—ignore the huge amount of radioactive products created by fission or atom-splitting in nuclear plants, the gaseous ones routinely released, and the many tons that are left, classified as nuclear waste and needing to be isolated, some virtually forever. The claim—and Chu—also ignore the potential of a catastrophic nuclear plant accident discharging much or all of these lethal radioactive fission products into the environment as occurred in the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident, a potential for which there is no comparison with coal.

Moreover, why compare life-threatening nuclear power to dirty coal? Why not compare it to the safe, clean renewable energy technologies that Chu insists he also backs.

To the question put to him in a 2005 interview done by the public relations office at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—“Should fission-based nuclear power plants be made a bigger part of the energy-producing portfolio?”—Chu stated:

“Absolutely. Right now about 20 percent of our power comes from nuclear; there have been no new nuclear plants built since the early 70s. The real rational fears against nuclear power are about the long-term waste problems and [nuclear] proliferation. The technology of separating [used fuel from still-viable fuel] and putting the good stuff back in the reactor can also be used to make bomb material. And then there’s the waste problem: with future nuclear power plants, we’ve got to recycle the waste. Why? Because if you take all the waste we have now from our civilian and military nuclear operations, we’d fill up Yucca Mountain [under consideration as a long-term storage facility for spent nuclear fuel]. So we need three or four Yucca Mountains. Well, we don’t have three or four Yucca Mountains.”

Here Chu shows an understanding of the proliferation problem of nuclear power—that all nuclear plants produce the plutonium from which atomic weapons are made—and reprocessing or separating out parts of nuclear waste allows plutonium to become readily available. But he then repeats the claim of nuclear proponents that “we’ve got to recycle the waste.”

This theory has resulted in radioactive material from nuclear technology being spread—in the name of “recycling” and “reuse”—for such purposes as using radioactive Cesium-137 from reactor waste for food irradiation and depleted uranium for bullets and shells, hardening them but making them radioactive at the same time. In fact, “recycling” and “reuse” of nuclear garbage ends up spreading poisons that cause cancer, genetic damage and other causes of premature death.

Asked in that Lawrence Berkeley interview to respond to the statement that “all of a sudden the risk-benefit equation looks pretty good for nuclear,” Chu said: “Right now, compared to conventional coal, it looks good—what are the lesser of two evils?”

But is this the choice? What about the safe, clean renewable energy technologies?

Although Chu has directed the 4,000-employee Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory into research into solar and biomass and other work in renewable energy technologies since becoming its director in 2004, it’s not as broad in its approach as the Department of Energy’s lone laboratory dedicated to all forms of clean, sustainable energy, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado (with a staff of 1,000).

“He’s trapped in that nuclear mindset,” says Jim Riccio, nuclear policy analyst for Greenpeace USA., of Chu. “He thinks we’re acting on fear, not reason. Why environmentalists oppose nuclear power is reason, not fear. And it is reason, not fear, why we say nuclear power can’t address global warming. In the time frame necessary, it would be prohibitively expensive and drive out the real solutions.” Riccio notes Chu has “backed alternatives” but he is concerned about what room there’ll be for them “in the portfolio” of the Department of Energy because of Chu’s nuclear power attachment.

Similarly, Ralph J. Herbert, professor of environmental studies emeritus at Long Island University and author of books on energy efficiency, speaks of “what’s called ‘opportunity cost’ in economics—that if you spend on one thing, you can’t spend on another. If you put money into solar, wind and other green energy technologies, you can’t at the same time put it into nuclear.” Herbert says there “has to be a vision here, not an accommodation,” and “a full commitment to green energy.”

Paul Gunter, director of the Reactor Oversight Project of Beyond Nuclear, asks whether Chu “can afford to squander his commitment to renewables by pouring all these resources down the nuclear rat hole. You can’t have both worlds—particularly in the economic depression we’re sliding into. We’re at a crossroads and we have to make definitive choices.” Gunter says it’s “time to leave 20th century mistakes” such as nuclear power “behind and commit to renewables.”

“He’s really big on efficiency and renewables,” says Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, of Chu. But he is “looking at nuclear as well. He and President-elect Obama are not anti-nuclear, and not perhaps as versed on it as they should be.” Mariotte has a major concern that “they will accede to demands to fund nuclear power made by Congress”—awash in contributions from the nuclear power industry and with many members loyal to the national nuclear laboratories in their districts.

Nuclear power is largely an outgrowth of some of these early laboratories set up in the Manhattan Project to build atomic bombs during World War II, and their wartime corporate nuclear contractors, notably Westinghouse and General Electric. The Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, then called the Radiation Laboratory, participated in the Manhattan Project. It describes itself as the first national laboratory.

With war’s end, the Manhattan Project became the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1946. It and its component national laboratories built more and bigger atomic weapons—soon the hydrogen bomb—and pushed to further perpetuate the vested interest in atomic technology created during the war by promoting nuclear energy for civilian uses. Among these were nuclear power plants for electric generation, using radioactivity for food irradiation, reactors to power airplanes and spacecraft, using atomic devices for excavation including the creation of harbors by blasting vast holes on land, and so forth.

This establishment is still at it pushing nuclear technology. Indeed, the directors of the national laboratories—including Chu—joined together in August in issuing a statement titled “A Sustainable Energy Future: The Essential Role of Nuclear Energy.”

It said the “directors of the Department of Energy national laboratories strongly believe that nuclear energy must play a significant and growing role in our nation’s—and the world’s—energy portfolio.” The statement signed by Chu also called for the “maximum use of the current ‘fleet’ of operating light-water reactors,” including giving the existing nuclear plants in the U.S. “extensions” on their 40-year operating licenses and permission to “uprate” or increase their power output. The statement further called for building new nuclear plants.

Is there any chance that Chu might be educated about nuclear power? Or will he, going from the directorship of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to the innards of the Department of Energy, become an even stauncher nuclear power advocate. Part of the mission of the department he would head is to promote nuclear power, a mission it took over from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission after it was dismantled and the Department of Energy formed.

There are precedents for change. Admiral Hyman Rickover, the “father” of the U.S. nuclear navy and manager of construction of the first commercial nuclear plant in the U.S., in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, in the end concluded that the world must “outlaw nuclear reactors.”

Rickover, in a farewell address, told a committee of Congress in 1982: “I’ll be philosophical. Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on earth: that is, there was so much radiation on earth you couldn’t have any life—fish or anything. Gradually, about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet and probably in the entire system reduced and made it possible for some for some form of life to begin.”

“Now,” Rickover went on, “when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible…Every time you produce radiation, you produce something that has life, in some cases for billions of years, and I think there the human race is going to wreck itself, and it’s far more important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliminate it.”

Unfortunately, it took Rickover decades to figure it out.

--Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, is the author of Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power, and narrator and host of numerous television programs on atomic energy including the award-winning Three Mile Island Revisited (www.envirovideo.com).

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NEI Nuclear Notes
December 15, 2008

Legends and Facts: Steven Chu on Nuclear Energy

Posted by Mark Flanagan

So how is Steven Chu playing as the purported candidate for Department of Energy secretary? Before we look at the developing narrative, let's remember the lesson of John Ford's movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Here's the question: Did Senator Ransom Stoddard begin his sterling Senatorial career and usher in statehood for Arizona by shooting bad man Liberty Valance? After we learn the truth, a newspaper editor sagely concludes, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." He had in mind the George Washington-cherry tree kind of legend, but it works equally well with, say, the Al Gore-internet kind of legend. Once a legend develops, it can be devilishly hard to shake loose of it. And it can warp the truth rather severely. So let's see what legend is developing around Dr. Chu.

Here's the Wall Street Journal's Keith Johnson buffing a legend that might alarm you a little:

Worried about radioactivity? Coal’s still your bogeyman. Dr. Chu says a typical coal plant emits 100 times more radiation than a nuclear plant, given the flyash emissions of radioactive particles.

That doesn’t mean nuclear power is much better. “The waste and proliferation issues [surrounding nuclear power] still haven’t been completely solved,” he said. A big part of the Department of Energy’s job is to oversee nuclear weapons and waste storage. And the Obama campaign made clear that increased reliance on nuclear power will require finding a “safe” way to dispose of radioactive waste.

We'd say, completely parenthetically, that coal has had an exceptionally bad couple of weeks.

About used nuclear fuel: closing all nuclear plants doesn't forestall having to deal with storage. It's an issue that has to dealt with regardless and without the deep swoons that often accompany the topic.

And one thing Chu doesn't seem to be, it's swoonish. So what about nuclear energy and used fuel? Has Chu addressed these topics at length? In fact, he has, for example in this 2005 interview with UC Berkeley's Bonnie Azab Powell:

Should fission-based nuclear power plants be made a bigger part of the energy-producing portfolio?

Absolutely. Right now about 20 percent of our power comes from nuclear; there have been no new nuclear plants built since the early '70s. The real rational fears against nuclear power are about the long-term waste problem and [nuclear] proliferation. The technology of separating [used fuel from still-viable fuel] and putting the good stuff back in to the reactor can also be used to make bomb material.

And then there's the waste problem: with future nuclear power plants, we've got to recycle the waste. Why? Because if you take all the waste we have now from our civilian and military nuclear operations, we'd fill up Yucca Mountain. ... So we need three or four Yucca Mountains. Well, we don't have three or four Yucca Mountains. The other thing is that storing the fuel at Yucca Mountain is supposed to be safe for 10,000 years. But the current best estimates - and these are really estimates, the Lab's in fact - is that the metal casings [containing the waste] will probably fail on a scale of 5,000 years, plus or minus 2. That's still a long time, and then after that the idea was that the very dense rock, very far away from the water table will contain it, so that by the time it finally leaks down to the water table and gets out the radioactivity will have mostly decayed.

Suppose instead that we can reduce the lifetime of the radioactive waste by a factor of 1,000. So it goes from a couple-hundred-thousand-year problem to a thousand-year problem. At a thousand years, even though that's still a long time, it's in the realm that we can monitor - we don't need Yucca Mountain.

And all of a sudden the risk-benefit equation looks pretty good for nuclear.

Right now, compared to conventional coal, it looks good - what are the lesser of two evils? But if we can reduce the volume and the lifetime of the waste, that would tip it very much against conventional coal.

So that's a pretty good stab at a truth. Absolutely, he says.

While we don't agree with everything Chu says here by a fair margin, he does evince a desire to move theory into practice - a good goal for a government scientist. He also has an theoretician's desire to work with what we know now to get to what we might be able to know given time and research (and, to be crass, money). All good.

Early days, of course - remember, Obama hasn't publicly announced Chu; he's still working through his Health and Human Resources picks right now - so a lot of time to see how things go. But remember: when legend becomes, or threatens to become, fact, fight it with truth - or face Liberty Valance.

Steven Chu. We've rarely seen him other than cheerful in photographs. Should help him navigate the riptides of DOE, we think. And Lee Marvin as Liberty Valance. James Stewart played Senator Stoddard. The movie is highly recommended, though the ending might make you throw your popcorn.

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New York Times Blogs
December 15, 2008

The New Team

As he prepares to take office, President-elect Barack Obama is relying on a small team of advisers who will lead his transition operation and help choose the members of a new Obama administration. Click below for profiles of members — and potential members — of the administration. More coverage of the new team »

Steven Chu--Chosen for: Energy secretary

Brings to the job: Impeccable credentials in science management and as an experimental physicist; he shared the 1997 Nobel prize in physics. Dr. Chu, an Asian-American, would also bring diversity to the cabinet.

Is linked to Mr. Obama: In no obvious way.

In his own words: New houses could be made energy efficient with an investment of an extra $1,000, “but the American consumer would rather have a granite countertop.” (At a lecture in Washington on energy options, June 25, 2008)

Used to work as: Chairman of the physics department at Stanford, and head of the electronics research laboratory at Bell Labs. Since 2004, he has been director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which has 4,000 employees and a budget of about $650 million. The lab is owned by the Energy Department and operated under contract by the University of California; Dr. Chu was chosen for the job by the university but approved by the Energy Department. He shifted the lab’s work more heavily into research into advanced biofuels, artificial photosynthesis and other solar energy research. He has been a vocal proponent of vigorous steps to control greenhouse gas emissions.

Carries as baggage: Little experience inside the Beltway or with the main business of the Energy Department, the manufacture and maintenance of nuclear weapons. He has spoken unenthusiastically about the Energy Department’s plan to create a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas, a program that enjoys Congressional support, but Mr. Obama has also raised doubts about Yucca.

Also known for: With his team at Bell Labs, using six laser beams to create what he called “optical molasses,” a trap for super-cooled atoms. This is the work for which he shared the Nobel Prize.

Biography: Born Feb. 28, 1948, in St. Louis. ... grew up in Garden City, N.Y. ...earned a B.A. in mathematics and a B.S. in physics from the University of Rochester, and a Ph.D in physics from U.C. Berkeley. ... hobbies include bicycling, swimming and cooking. ... married to Jean Chu, a physicist trained at Oxford University. ... has two adult sons from a previous marriage.

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Boston Herald
December 15, 2008

Obama’s pick for energy sec no friend of Yucca Mountain

By Associated Press

RENO, Nev. — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid praised President-elect Barack Obama’s nominee for U.S. energy secretary on Monday, saying Steven Chu is an ally in the fight against Yucca Mountain who can help lead the country to a more energy-independent future.

Chu, a Nobel-prize winning physicist, is the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a leading advocate of reducing greenhouse gases by developing new energy sources.

"Steven Chu is an extremely accomplished scientist and strong choice to lead America into a more energy-independent future," Reid, D-Nev., said in a statement Monday from Washington D.C.

"He has shown that he can work beyond the confines of a national lab to tackle real-world issues and his expertise will greatly benefit our country," he said.

"Dr. Chu also knows, like most Nevadans, that Yucca Mountain is not a viable solution for dumping and dealing with nuclear waste."

"So we need three or four Yucca Mountains. Well, we don’t have three or four Yucca Mountains," Chu said at the time.

"The other thing is that storing the fuel at Yucca Mountain is supposed to be safe for 10,000 years. But the current best estimates — and these are really estimates, the Lab’s in fact — is that the metal casings (containing the waste) will probably fail on a scale of 5,000 years, plus or minus 2," he said.

"That’s still a long time, and then after that the idea was that the very dense rock, very far away from the water table will contain it, so that by the time it finally leaks down to the water table and gets out the radioactivity will have mostly decayed," Chu said in the interview.

"I am confident that Dr. Chu will transform the Department of Energy into a smart and progressive weapon against our addiction to oil, making our economy vastly more energy efficient and bringing about a safer future," Reid said. "I look forward to confirming Dr. Chu as quickly as possible."

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Las Vegas SUN
December 14, 2008

LOOKING IN ON: CARSON CITY:

By Cy Ryan

Five people, including a former mayor and a former consumer advocate, have applied to replace Bob Loux as head of the Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency.

The applicants are: Bruce Breslow, a former TV sports reporter and mayor of Sparks; Timothy Hay, an attorney and former state consumer advocate; Susan Lynch, who works in the nuclear projects office; Frederick McElroy, a Realtor; and Keith Tierney, an attorney.

The Nevada Commission on Nuclear Projects will interview the candidates Monday in Las Vegas. The panel will submit the names of three finalists to Gibbons, who will make the appointment.

Loux is resigning from the post he has held for 23 years after being accused of giving himself and his staff unauthorized raises. He faces a Jan. 8 hearing before the state Ethics Commission on a complaint that he violated state regulations.

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Rutland Herald
December 14, 2008

Yankee likely to be hot topic for lawmakers

Susan Smallheer

MONTPELIER – If you were wondering just how much time the Legislature is likely to devote to the future of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant this coming session, here's one clue: Entergy Nuclear has hired another lobbying firm.

Entergy, the New Orleans-based owner of the plant, has engaged a second well-connected firm, MacLean, Meehan & Rice of Montpelier, in addition to its longtime lobbying group, Morris, DeMag and McCarty Inc., also of Montpelier, to protect its interests in the Legislature this session.

That's because the fate of the plant is likely to be a hot topic for lawmakers come January. The Legislature is gearing up to address a handful of important issues including the safety of the plant; the status of the decommissioning fund for the plant's eventual shut down; and the long-term storage of the plant's high-level radioactive waste.

While lawmakers were originally expected to decide whether to grant a 20-year license extension for the operation of the Vernon reactor in the 2009 session, legislative leaders are now saying 2010 may be the earliest Entergy can expect a decision on Yankee's relicensure.

Legislative leaders are also suggesting that the relicensure decision be issued as a joint resolution of the House and Senate, rather than a traditional bill that could be vetoed by Gov. James Douglas. There is even discussion of a 10-year extension of Vermont Yankee's license to operate, instead of the 20-year authorization Entergy is seeking.

Another indication that Yankee is sure to be front and center this year: The Legislature has already started doing its homework. It held a well-attended pre-session briefing last month for all legislators on Yankee-related issues.

Sen. Virginia Lyons, D-Chittenden, and chairwoman of the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee, said the session included an overview of the New England energy outlook and Entergy's pending application to state and federal authorities for permission to operate another 20 years. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has already given its preliminary approval for the relicensure.

"The entire Legislature is taking a strong interest in this," Lyons said. "There's a deep and abiding interest in the financial risks and there's a deep interest in energy issues. We need to help educate members about all these complex issues."

Questions about the safety of Vermont Yankee have traditionally been raised by residents and legislators from Windham County, where the plant is located. But with reports of recent cooling tower collapses, lapses in oversight and operational management and the structural integrity of aging metal components of the 35-year-old plant, lawmakers in central and northern Vermont have also begun to look at the nuclear facility more critically.

Anti-nuclear activist James Moore, of the Montpelier-based Vermont Public Interest Research Group, said the future of Yankee was the centerpiece of its successful summer canvassing and fundraising efforts. He believes the vote on relicensure of Yankee will have a significant impact on the state's economy and its commitment to the environment.

"It's one of the biggest decisions facing certainly this year's Legislature, one of the biggest decisions this decade: What kind of legacy are we leaving the next generation of Vermonters? Are we going to lock them into 20 years with one of the oldest reactors in the country?" Moore said. "Or are we going to build the kind of electric energy future Vermonters say they want?"

The Legislature has added the issue of high-level radioactive waste to its list of priorities, and it is in the process of hiring a consultant and independent geologist to determine whether the banks of the Connecticut River in Vernon is the best place for the waste.

Last summer, Entergy began to transfer the toxic material into what's known as "dry cask storage," that is giant steel and concrete containers filled with radioactive waste and placed on a concrete pad outside the reactor building. The federal government was supposed to have removed the waste to another location by now according to the original agreements between the state of Vermont and the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Corp., the original owner of Yankee, but the federal nuclear storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada has run into numerous obstacles.

Moore and other anti-nuclear activists will be spending time not only in the Statehouse but at the Public Service Board, where hearings on a new certificate of public good won't start until mid-May, although a preliminary exchange of information is already under way.

Jake Stewart, president of the New England Coalition, the state's oldest anti-nuclear group, said the coalition will focus its efforts on the Public Service Board in the hope that the information it generates there will fuel the debate in the Statehouse.

Lyons and Rep. Tony Klein, D-East Montpelier, chairman of the House Natural Resources and Energy Committee, said they doubted that the issue of Yankee's future would be decided by the 2009 session.

Robert Williams, spokesman for Entergy Nuclear, said the company felt it was "certainly reasonable" to expect a decision by 2009, although he hastened to add that the Legislature needed to educate itself on the matter.

"That kind of delay might start to impact our planning for license renewal-related projects scheduled for upcoming refueling outages," Williams wrote in an e-mail. "As we have said, it is in everyone's best interest that the decision be made without any unnecessary delay. Also, the highly skilled employees who operate and maintain Vermont Yankee deserve a good measure of certainty about their future."

Klein said there is no reason to rush such an important decision.

Slowing up the process is the fact that Entergy Nuclear hasn't reached a new proposed power contract with either Green Mountain Power or Central Vermont Public Service, currently Vermont Yankee's largest customers. The utilities' contracts end in 2012.

Richard Smith, deputy commissioner of the Department of Public Service, said that the Public Service Board had urged Entergy to reach an agreement by Dec. 22, but that appears unlikely.

Smith said that the state's goal is to get the best value for Vermont ratepayers, but he declined to say what the parameters for the deal might be.

Williams said the company is negotiating with the utilities on new contracts, though no deadlines have been set for agreements with either party.

"We are still working with the two state utilities and hope to produce an agreement that meets the needs of all parties in involved," he said.

Klein's skepticism about nuclear power is rooted in his own formative experience: He grew up near a popular amusement park that was converted into the Indian Point nuclear plant outside New York City. His family was critical of the safety of nuclear power, Klein said.

In addition, Klein said, "There are a lot of 'clamshellers' in my district," anti-nuclear protesters who fought the construction of the Seabrook nuclear plant in New Hampshire in the late 1970s.

But Klein has pledged to put his personal feelings aside and get his committee the best information available about Yankee. A year ago, he said, passing a relicensure bill to keep Yankee in operation beyond 2012 would have been a "slam-dunk."

Now sentiment is shifting against Entergy Nuclear, he said, largely because of its continued operational problems, many centered around the plant's cooling towers.

"I believe we should be waiting for the Public Service Board – they claim they can't make a decision before the Legislature makes a decision, but I challenge that," said Klein.

Lyons, Klein and other legislators said it was unclear whether they would handle the relicensure issue through a traditional bill or through joint resolution, which wouldn't require the signature of the governor.

Rep. Shap Smith, D-Morrisville, the Democratic nominee for House Speaker, said the strategy would be decided by House and Senate leadership. At this point, Smith said he does not have an opinion about the future of Yankee.

One key legislator who doesn't have a neutral view is Sen. Peter Shumlin, D-Windham, president pro tempore of the Senate. Shumlin's home district includes Yankee.

Shumlin said he wants a thorough analysis of the best location for Yankee's high-level radioactive waste. Vermonters agreed to host a nuclear plant back in the 1960s, he said, with the promise the waste wouldn't be staying in the state.

That promise has been broken, he said, and Vermont has to evaluate the situation from a scientific point of view. Shumlin said if the plant's toxic waste stays in Vermont for 100 years, he doubts the best place to store it is the banks of the Connecticut River, even if it is in the 100-year floodplain.

Shumlin noted that legislators are about to receive several in-depth studies of Vermont Yankee's reliability and ability to produce power for Vermonters for the next 20 years, but the most critical information about the electrical generation projection – the proposed power contracts – is missing.

Until Entergy Nuclear produces the contracts, he said, legislators can't evaluate the plant's future.

--Contact Susan Smallheer at susan.smallheer@rutlandherald.com.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
December 12, 2008

Obama urged to keep Yucca on track

Nuclear industry officials say no need to rush decision

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Executives for the nuclear industry's lobbying arm said Thursday they have told aides to President-elect Barack Obama that the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository should remain in the nation's energy playbook, and there is no need to rush decisions about the project.

Officials with the Nuclear Energy Institute said at a briefing they weighed in with members of Obama's transition team. Speculation about how Obama will handle nuclear waste issues has been running high since the election.

"We have talked with them. We have no sense what they are going to do," said Marvin Fertel, NEI acting president and chief executive officer.

But Fertel and other industry officials said they are insisting that the proposed repository for nuclear spent fuel should remain a part of the nation's long-range nuclear waste strategy.

The institute also is advocating that used fuel be removed from power plant sites and stored elsewhere in the meantime, and that the government continue researching technologies for recycling the material.

"We believe under all circumstances there has to be a geologic repository, but we are willing to engage with policy-makers of all stripes as to what sort of program they want to construct," said Alex Flint, NEI senior vice president for governmental affairs.

The remarks come against a backdrop of Obama's comments during the presidential campaign that he opposes the Yucca program, and pressure being maintained by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., to ensure the incoming president follows through on a promise to seek alternatives.

Reid, the project's chief opponent in Congress, has said he has discussed Yucca Mountain with Obama since the election and that the program "will bleed hard" in the coming year.

The Washington Post reported Thursday that Obama is going to nominate Steven Chu, a strong advocate of conservation and renewable energy research, to become energy secretary. There has been no official announcement yet.

Chu, who is director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1997. A New York Times profile of Chu said he has spoken unenthusiastically about the Yucca program that would fall under his jurisdiction.

Flint said Yucca Mountain is the "law of the land" under a 1982 statute that authorized the search for a repository to store thousands of tons of defense nuclear waste and spent fuel from utility reactors.

Moves by the Obama administration to halt the program by withdrawing a repository license application that has already been filed at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission could trigger industry lawsuits as a possible violation of that law, he said.

"The program is meritorious and it is the law of the land and it should proceed until the law is changed, and there is no technical reason why it should not proceed," Flint said. "We will comply with the law as it was written until people want to change the law," Flint said. "We think it is incumbent on the administration also to comply with the law until there is a consensus that changes should be made."

Until then, Flint said, "our view is that under all circumstances the license application should be considered by the NRC."

Fertel said there should be no rush to decide on the repository, as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission review is expected to take four years at least.

"They are not building anything out there," he said of the Yucca site 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"The president can make a decision after whatever review he does," Fertel said. "Our advice is to do the review, and if you are going to change the law, then change the law. But do it in a systematic way, don't do precipitous things."

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

Reno Gazette-Journal
December 12, 2008

Energy Department gets needed change

Americans looking for signs of the change promised by President-elect Barack Obama in his Cabinet appointments need look no further than the Department of Energy.

Obama is expected to appoint Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as secretary of the department, which will be on the front lines of the search for new sources of energy in the coming years.

After nearly eight years of Bush administration antipathy to science, Obama's choice of a well-respected scientist (he's a professor of physics and molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley) to a critical Cabinet post is a breath of fresh air.

It could be a particularly important appointment for Nevadans: According to the Associated Press, Chu has shown little support for building the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.

More important, however, is Chu's particular interest in alternative energy sources, which could be an economic boon for Nevada. The Lawrence Berkeley Lab has been a center for research into biofuels and solar energy technology, and Chu has spoken out frequently about the need to replace fossil fuels and to improve energy-efficiency.

In the weeks following his election as president, Obama has frustrated many of his supporters by his appointment of Washington insiders and familiar faces to his Cabinet -- Clinton at State, Gates at Defense, Daschle at Health and Human Services and so on. That shouldn't have come as a surprise: Relying on a Cabinet full of advisers with little experience of Washington would be a recipe for disaster.

However, if there is any Cabinet-level department in need of the change that Obama promised in his presidential campaign, it's the Department of Energy, which spends far too much of its resources promoting nuclear power and not nearly enough looking for ways to end our reliance on fossil fuels. The department's determination to push ahead with the Yucca Mountain repository despite the likelihood that it will never be able to accept the nuclear waste piling up around the nation is just one example.

The Energy Department needs more than new leadership; it needs a new culture. By appointing a scientist who understands the need to develop alternative sources of energy as its head, Obama is bringing the right change at the right time.

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Pahrump Valley Times
December 12, 2008

CCA hopeful for OK of detention center pact

By Mark Waite
PVT

Corrections Corporation of America officials hope Nye County commissioners will approve a development agreement for the federal detention center after a public hearing scheduled for 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, at the Bob Ruud Community Center.

"We have been very, very diligently working with all of the parties in regard to the development agreement and certainly our anticipation is that we will end the meeting with an approved development agreement so we can move forward and relay that information to our customer, who is eager as well to have that finalized," CCA Vice-President of Marketing and Communications Louise Grant said.

"That customer" is the Office of the Federal Detention Trustee which has given CCA 18 months to have the detention center constructed and ready to begin accepting inmates.

"We have been told time and again by our customer, the expectation is we are still on the same time frame," Grant said.

Natasha Metcalf, who manages CCA contract negotiations, has been in frequent discussions with Nye County representatives since the Sept. 16 tabling of the agreement, Grant said.

"We want it to be a positive win-win," she said. When asked whether her company came to agreement on some points raised by Nye County consultant Ira Cotler back in September, she said, "I believe there has been a lot of resolution."

Frank Smith, a field organizer for the Private Corrections Institute, a group opposed to the privatization of correctional facilities, said he will arrive in the area on Saturday. He has arranged to have Donna Como visit Pahrump.

She was in charge of determining American Correctional Association accreditation for CCA when the company had a contract to operate the state women's prison.

During the 8:30 a.m. session commissioners will consider approving 20 contracts totaling $2.9 million to support the county Yucca Mountain oversight program, under the consent agenda in which numerous items can be approved with one motion.

A $42,950 change order in the contract with Mills Construction for the abatement of asbestos pipes in the demolition of the Calvada Eye building is up for approval and an asbestos monitoring agreement with SCS Engineers.

Owners of Paddy's Pub are scheduled to reappear before the Nye County licensing and liquor board at 9 a.m. on a show cause hearing over their liquor license, in a case continued from Feb. 5.

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KTVU
December 12, 2008

Lawrence Berkeley Head Tapped For Energy Secretary

WASHINGTON -- Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who is President-elect Barack Obama's choice for energy secretary, has been a vocal advocate for more research into alternative energy, arguing that a shift away from fossil fuels is essential to combat global warming.

Chu, a Chinese-American who currently is director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, has in recent years campaigned to bring together a cross-section of scientific disciplines to find ways to counter climate change.

If action is not taken now to stop global warming, it may be too late, he argues.

Since 2004, Chu has been director of the Berkeley lab, the oldest of the Energy Department's national laboratories, with its 4,000 employees and a budget of $650 million. The laboratory does only unclassified work and under Chu has been a center of research into biofuels and solar energy technologies. He is a former head of the physics department at Stanford University.

Chu, 60, brings additional diversity to the Obama cabinet.

Born to Chinese parents in St. Louis, he grew up in the Queens borough of New York City. His father, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate and professor of chemical engineering, and mother came to the United States in 1943 and two years later decided to stay because of the political turmoil in China.

One of the country's most renowned scientists, Chu in 1997 shared the Nobel Prize in physics with two other scientists for his research into ways to cool and trap atoms using laser light. By cooling atoms to minus-273 degrees Celsius, they found the movement of atoms can be slowed to a point where they could be trapped and manipulated.

More recently, Chu's scientific interests have centered on energy and finding ways to replace fossil fuels with other energy sources such as biofuels from plants and converting energy from the sun into a fuel. He has spoken frequently about the need to link the physical and biological sciences with engineering to rally independent-thinking scientists in the fight against climate change.

"Steve Chu is a world-class intellectual," said Stanford University environmental scientist Steve Schneider, who knows Chu. "When I heard that name (for energy secretary), I smiled." Schneider said Chu will push hard within the Obama administration for reductions in the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming.

Obama has promised to move quickly on energy issues, including a push for more alternative fuels and to get Congress to address climate change.

Chu frequently has used the bully pulpit in a campaign against global warming and the need for alternative energy and greater energy efficiency. During a lecture last summer in Washington he bemoaned the fact that people too often prefer to spend $1,000 on a granite kitchen counter top instead of improving their home's energy efficiency.

A few years ago he was one of six Nobel Prize-winning scientists who expressed their concern about global warming by sitting against and climbing into a massive tree on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley for a photograph that appeared in a special environmental issue of Vanity Fair magazine.

Despite his broad scientific credentials, Chu has little experience inside Washington or in what occupies much of the Energy Department's business -- maintaining the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons and weapons research. Nor has he had much involvement in nuclear energy. He has shown little support for building a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, one of the major issues facing the department. Obama also has expressed dislike for the Yucca project.

Chu as energy secretary would head a department with a $25 billion budget and 14,000 employees and more than 193,000 contract workers. Two-thirds of its budget involves activities related to nuclear weapons research and maintenance.

Ironically, the department Chu would lead also has been a target of Chinese-American activists who in the late 1990s became incensed over its pursuit of Wen Ho Lee, a Chinese-American computer engineer, over allegations of spying at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Lee was fired and prosecuted for security violations, but has never been charged or linked to spying activities. Eventually a federal judge apologized for the way Lee was treated.

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Tacoma News Tribune
December 12, 2008

No Yucca Mountain, no Hanford cleanup

To understand how the cleanup of Hanford depends on a nuclear waste repository in Nevada, work backward.

Without the repository, there will be no permanent disposal of any of the nation’s intensely radioactive reactor wastes.

Opponents of the Yucca Mountain project talk vaguely of other possibilities, but there are no other possibilities in the real world. Yucca Mountain is more dry and isolated than any realistic alternative, and it’s been studied to death for more than 20 years.

Without permanent burial of reactor wastes, Hanford will be saddled with the radioactivity of 53 million gallons of waste now held in 177 steel tanks on the Eastern Washington reservation near the Tri-Cities.

But that’s just the beginning. The likely alternative to a repository – an alternative now favored by President-elect Barack Obama – is “interim” storage of all commercial nuclear power plant waste at secure federal sites.

Hanford would top the list of secure federal sites. After all, it’s had decades of experience storing reactor waste.

The failure to open a repository at Yucca Mountain could easily bring tens of thousands of tons of additional waste from other states to Washington.

So without Yucca Mountain, Hanford remains radioactive – probably more radioactive, probably permanently.

Obama must be told that Washingtonians wouldn’t like that prospect at all. Washington’s congressional delegation, now overwhelmingly Democratic, must make the Hanford-Yucca connection themselves.

They shouldn’t buy into Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s vendetta against the Nevada project. They shouldn’t join those environmentalists who oppose a repository for specious reasons – in some cases simply to strangle the nuclear power industry by preventing it from disposing of its radioactive byproducts.

Any lawmaker who isn’t fighting for permanent nuclear waste disposal sometime in the foreseeable future simply isn’t fighting for the cleanup of Hanford.

Speaking of specious arguments, one of these is the contention that a Yucca Mountain repository wouldn’t be large enough to handle the nation’s reactor wastes. This claim hinges on the site’s 77,000-ton limit, which indeed is inadequate.

But that’s a statutory limit, not a physical one. It’s a number picked out of thin air by Congress in 1987. Yucca Mountain’s real capacity is more than three times that.

On Tuesday, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman called on Congress to lift the site’s artificial limit, which stands in the way of Hanford’s cleanup.

Yes, it’s a Republican proposal. But it’s one any lawmaker from Washington ought to support.

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Bolingbrook Sun
December 12, 2008

Should we recycle nuclear fuel?

Residents chime in at hearing in Bolingbrook

By Christina Chapman

Just two years ago, Morris was in the running to become a nuclear fuel recycling site.

But a backlash - in evidence at a Bolingbrook hearing Dec. 4 - has the Department of Energy asking Americans if the U.S. should recycle fuel and how it should happen.

The department wanted three facilities: a research lab, a recycling center and a recycling reactor. The reactor would make electricity while destroying the long-lasting radioactive fuel leftovers.

The plan was part of President Bush's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) to increase nuclear energy use.

The facilities would recover about 95 percent of the energy in spent nuclear fuel and shorten the time the radioactive material is dangerous. At some point, the waste would be disposed of in a geologic repository such as Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

But very few people were eager to have a nuclear recycling plant in their backyard, so the DOE took a step back. Since refocusing, the DOE has analyzed the potential environmental impact of recycling fuel and alternatives to doing it. They created an environmental impact statement, which they will finalize before deciding on any action.

Public comment

The DOE is taking public comment before writing the final statement and coming up with a decision. Both are expected in 2009. Area residents spoke at a public hearing Dec. 4 at the Bolingbrook Holiday Inn. Their comments could be part of the final environmental impact statement.

Of the 80 people there, the majority were against recycling the spent nuclear fuel. The recycling process isolates plutonium, which many feared could be used by terrorists. Others feared shipping the radioactive materials could threaten their safety and health.

Ivan Oelrich, of the Federation of American Scientists, said the DOE should learn from France and Britain. Both countries failed at recycling spent fuel, he said, and now have 180 tons of separated plutonium between the two.

"I don't believe GNEP will reach any of its own goals," he said.

Nancy Norton-Ammer, CEO of the Grundy Economic Development Council, commended the DOE.

"We need a strategy to deal with nuclear fuel, much of which is in Grundy County," she said. "Doing nothing is not a solution."

Six options

During the hearing, residents learned about the DOE's six options.

• The first option is to take no action. Nuclear power plants would keep using fuel cells once, storying the spent fuel temporarily and eventually shipping it to a geological repository. This is called a open fuel cycle where no fuel is recycled.

• Another open fuel cycle option is to use thorium fuel, which has a shorter radioactive life, in light water or thermal reactors.

• The final open fuel cycle option uses the fuel we use now, but in a heavy water reactor or a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor. Plants wouldn't have to create enriched uranium, a substance that can be used in weapons.

The other three options involve somehow reusing the spent fuel, which is called closing the fuel cycle.

"The DOE supports closing the fuel cycle," said Andrew Griffith, of the DOE. But a preferred recycling method has not been chosen.

The closed fuel cycle alternatives recycle by separating uranium and other elements. Those elements are then reused to make new fuel for the reactors. The only waste from these alternatives is high-level radioactive waste, which still has to be disposed of in a geological repository.

The three options hinge on what type of reactor is used:

• A thermal reactor (light water reactor).

• A fast reactor.

• A combination of both

The fast reactors to separate the elements have not been developed yet, leaving nay-sayers to claim the expense would be in the billions and could be a waste if the technology does not work. DOE representatives said the environmental impact statement did not analyze cost.

Missed the hearing?

To submit comments to the Department of Energy on whether we should recycle spent nuclear fuel:

* Write to: Mr. Frank Schwartz, U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Energy - NE-5, 1000 Independence Ave., SW, Washington, DC 20585.

* Visit: www.regulations.gov

* Fax: 866-645-7807

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Brattleboro Reformer
December 12, 2008

DOE: Expand Yucca Mountain or plan new site

By Bob Audette
Reformer Staff

BRATTLEBORO - The secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy told the president and Congress on Tuesday that the time is now to act on either expanding a proposed nuclear waste facility in Nevada or developing a second site.

"The Secretary of Energy recommends that Congress act promptly to remove the statutory limit ... and defer a decision regarding the need for a second repository," stated Samuel Bodman.

The facility was authorized by Congress for the storage of 70,000 metric tons of waste, he wrote.

The secretary wrote that the limit set by Congress has nothing to do with the physical characteristics of Yucca Mountain and recommended Congress authorize the proposed facility to hold three to four times the amount it originally approved.

By 2010, wrote the secretary, in a 14-page document presented to the executive and legislative branches of the government, operating nuclear power plants in the United States will have produced more waste than can legally fit into Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev.

Fifty-eight thousand tons of waste was to come from the power plants, while the rest was to come from government reactors and the U.S. Navy, which uses nuclear power to run submarines, aircraft carriers and other ships.

Nuclear waste from operating commercial power plants is accumulating at 2,000 tons a year, according to the document.

The secretary wrote that with 47 of the 104 operating reactors receiving 20-year license extensions, even more waste will be produced.

If Congress doesn't authorize an increase in Yucca Mountain's storage capacity, it must authorize the Department of Energy to look at sites for a second repository. According to DOE documents, it could take up to 28 years to find a location and build a new site.

Looking for a second site has its own challenges, wrote the secretary.

"To reinstate a second repository program could reopen all of the issues about the siting process that took years of congressional effort to resolve prior to passage ... (such as) the role of host states, the number of sites to be characterized, criteria for guidelines, the site recommendation process, voluntary versus directed siting and other matters."

During the original second site process, nine locations were identified -- two in Texas, Utah and Mississippi, and one in Louisiana, Nevada and Washington.

In addition, 25 other states -- including all of those in New England except for Rhode Island -- had sites that had the geologic characteristics necessary for the safe storage of nuclear waste.

The New England states were identified because of their granite formations.

Reprocessing the fuel might be a partial solution to the storage problem, wrote the secretary, but that process creates its own waste that needs to be stored.

Yucca Mountain was supposed to start storing spent fuel by this time, but the opening of the repository has been delayed due to technical, environmental and legal concerns.

Since the federal government has been unable to live up to its promise to start moving the fuel, many owners of nuclear power plants have sued the government to get some of that money back to pay for the storage of spent fuel at locations such as Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon.

The cost of developing Yucca Mountain, transporting and storing the spent fuel has been financed by a one-tenth of one cent per kilowatt hour assessment on all commercial generation of power in the country.

In 2002, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that DOE is not authorized to pay out settlements from the nuclear waste fund moneys. Instead, the department would have to make payments from the U.S. Treasury's Judgment Fund.

The DOE estimates it could cost the judgment fund up to $11 billion to settle the suits. The fund was established by Congress in the 1950s to pay in whole or in part the court judgments and settlement agreements negotiated by the Justice Department on behalf of agencies, as well as certain types of administrative awards.

"Continued deferral of a decision to add that disposal capacity will add to the costs of management at the current sites," he wrote.

--Bob Audette can be reached at raudette@reformer.com, or 802-254-2311, ext. 273.

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Heritage Foundation
December 12, 2008

What Chu Should Do on Nuclear

Author: Nick Loris

So it looks like President-elect Obama is going to name his energy and environment team next week. Among the purported choices is Nobel-winning physicist Steven Chu to lead the Department of Energy. One of the questions on our minds is how will he handle nuclear energy policy.

It is impossible to judge whether he’ll make a good secretary of energy. He certainly has the technical background to know fission from fusion. But knowing the difference between cracking atoms and crashing them does not make a good energy secretary. The job will be to articulate and execute the policy vision set forth by President Obama. It is to be more of a manager and leader than a smarty-pants. After all, the law of comparative advantage says Dr. Chu might be better suited for a lab than the hot seat in the DOE offices.

So where will Dr. Chu come down? We can’t tell. But we won’t hold it against him that he comes from a lab background. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll want DOE to research and develop everything. Surely he’ll want to commercialize things, won’t he? He must know, like all good things, that DOE research programs come to an end,right?

Let’s give him not just the benefit of the doubt, but some priorities that he could start with. (By the way, these recommendations will be part of a more detailed paper we’ll release next week.):

Set an end-game for Nuclear Power 2010 (NP 2010). We are not saying to kill NP2010. The program to help get through the arduous plant permitting and design certification process was needed when it was started. But it’s beginning to drag. Let’s kick it into high gear, get the plants and designs through the bureaucracy by 2010 and call it a victory.

Accelerate Next Generation Nuclear Plant program (NGNP). The Next Generation Nuclear Plant is an important public/private cost-sharing technology development program. This is where the next public-private push should concentrate. The world of high-temperature gas cooled reactors being developed by NGNP are critical to the future of nuclear energy. We need an efficient regulatory process to support this technology’s introduction into the market place—and we need it now.

Stay out of the commercial spent fuel recycling business. The Bush Administration should be lauded for not only bringing nuclear energy back into the energy debate but also for making the role of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel part of that conversation. That said, the Bush plan to construct a national reprocessing facility was not a good idea. Dr. Chu should be thanking his lucky stars that he’s not being handed another bloated DOE construction project. He should ensure that he offers his successor that same dignity by not starting such a project.

Ensure a science-based outcome for Yucca Mountain. President-elect Obama has stated he does not support constructing a spent nuclear fuel repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. He believes that the people of Nevada do not support the project and that its safety has not been scientifically proven. Luckily, deciding such an outcome is neither his nor Dr. Chu’s concern. Instead, they should support the NRC’s efforts to process DOE’s Yucca application and come to its own science-based conclusions.

Transfer responsibility for commercial used fuel management to the private sector. This is the big enchilada, folks. It is not coincidental that the front-end of the fuel cycle and operations are both privately operated and functional. On the other hand, back-end activity (waste management) falls under the purview of the federal government and it is completely dysfunctional. It is time that we change this. On day one, Secretary Chu should announce a major effort to overhaul how the nations manages its spent nuclear fuel.

And for a head start, here is a comprehensive plan on how to do it.
http://www.heritage.org/research/energyandenvironment/bg2149.cfm

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NPR
December 12, 2008

Obama Selects His Environmental Team

Talk of the Nation, December 12, 2008 · Barack Obama revealed his choices for several energy posts this week, including Nobel laureate physicist Steven Chu for energy secretary. Darren Samuelsohn, senior reporter for Greenwire, analyzes the picks and what the appointments may mean for future environmental policy.

Nobel Winner Chu To Land Top Energy Post

by Christopher Joyce

NPR.org, December 10, 2008 · Steven Chu, a renowned physicist and green-energy advocate, has reportedly been tapped by President-elect Barack Obama to run the federal Department of Energy. Chu runs the DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, and he has made climate change the new centerpiece of his career.

Chu's resume contains an item never before seen on a DOE director's CV: a Nobel Prize in physics. Chu, who comes from an immigrant family of scientists, shared the prize with two other physicists in 1997.

His contribution was an ingenious set of experiments that captured atoms in different kinds of "atom traps." He created the traps by firing lasers at right angles to each other. The laser light functioned as a sort of "optical molasses," according to the Nobel committee. Individual atoms slowed down within the laser beams, enough so that scientists could study their inner structure.

Chu did most of that work at AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. He went from there to a research position at Stanford University, then took over the Lawrence Berkeley lab in 2004. He is also a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Lab staff declined to comment on the choice of Chu for DOE. News agencies have cited sources at the Obama transition team as confirming his selection.

A Democratic aide also said Obama has settled on former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Carol Browner for a new position coordinating White House policy on energy, climate and environmental issues.

A Rising Star

Scientists in the energy field have watched Chu's star rise over the past few years as he turned the lab toward research in new forms of low-carbon energy.

"Steve has given the lab clear and innovative direction. He has taken the lab's strength in energy efficiency ... and pushed it along the whole spectrum, from basic to applied science," says Dan Kammen, a physicist and energy analyst at UC, Berkeley.

And having a Nobel laureate running DOE, Kammen adds, "is a neat sign for science."

Chu has turned his attention in the past few years to building financial support for alternative energy research. He helped win half a billion dollars from British Petroleum to fund an Energy Biosciences Institute, which focuses research at several institutions, including his lab, on producing biofuels from plant materials. In fact, some of Chu's earlier work in physics applied techniques similar to atom-trapping to biological materials such as DNA.

Urging Action On Global Warming

Chu has used his reputation to urge action to slow global warming. In a PBS news program last year, he said it was his obligation.

"In the last five or six years," he said, "I was following this as an interested citizen. And it became more and more apparent to me that the dangers, the potential risks of climate change were looking like they were more and more likely, and that ... as a scientist, a responsible scientist, you really have to think of what you can do to help with this problem."

Chu also established the Helios Center within the Berkeley lab, aimed at research on new fuels for transportation. These include making biofuels from biomass, using algae in fermentation tanks to make fuel, and applying solar energy to convert water and carbon dioxide to fuels.

The Coal Question

The Department of Energy is the leading supporter of energy research within the federal government. As director, Chu will have to grapple with powerful supporters of coal, who have backed new DOE research on turning coal into liquid fuel. The department has also dedicated tens of millions of dollars to designing new power plants that capture carbon dioxide from coal before turning it into a gas to make electricity.

Much of coal's future — it currently is used to make about half the country's electricity — depends on research funded by DOE on how to bury that captured carbon dioxide so it won't rise into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming.

A major part of DOE's budget is dedicated to nuclear weapons research and maintaining the military's nuclear arsenal. Among the biggest tasks facing the agency is disposing of nuclear waste from civilian power plants and government weapons labs around the country.

The leading candidate for a dump site, Yucca Mountain in Nevada, has been mired in technical and legal debate for years and is decades behind schedule.

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Nuclear Energy Institute
December 12, 2008

DOE Report Overlooks Benefits of Interim Storage of Used Fuel

WASHINGTON, D.C.— The Department of Energy today released two reports to Congress related to the federal government’s management of used nuclear fuel. The department’s report to the president and the Congress on the need for a second geologic repository is a statutory obligation of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, while its report on the demonstration of the interim storage of spent nuclear fuel responds to the request of a 2008 House Appropriations Committee Report. The Nuclear Energy Institute’s Senior Director for Used Fuel Management, Steven Kraft, made the following remarks today in response to the department’s issuance of the two reports.

“In its interim storage report to Congress, the Department of Energy takes a narrow view of interim storage of used nuclear fuel that misses both the strategic value and the feasibility of central interim storage as part of an integrated management strategy for used fuel.

“The nuclear industry and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission agree that used fuel storage at nuclear plant sites and at independent storage facilities is safe and secure. Such storage would provide the time needed to develop advanced recycling technologies and facilities as well as the geologic repository for material that cannot be recycled, while demonstrating the nation’s ability to begin safe central management and movement of used nuclear fuel.

“In addition, DOE could contract for services at private storage facilities to meet its legal and contractual obligations to take used fuel from commercial reactors, especially those that have been decommissioned.”

The nuclear energy industry believes that there are communities in the United States interested in hosting interim storage facilities and companies that may be interested in building such facilities.

The industry supports a three-pronged, integrated used fuel management strategy: (1) interim storage; (2) research, development and demonstration to recycle nuclear fuel; and (3) development of a permanent disposal facility that is suitable for the final waste form.

In its report on the nation’s need for a second repository for the nation’s used nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste, the nuclear energy industry commends the department for recognizing that the statutory capacity limit of 70,000 metric tons is an arbitrary one, and that the Yucca Mountain repository site could accommodate ‘at least three times’ the amount of fuel allowed under the congressional limit.

“The nuclear industry agrees with the Department of Energy that there is no technical basis for the 70,000 metric ton limit of heavy metal for the nation’s first repository, and encourages the department to pursue legislation that would lift this statutory cap.”

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Politico
December 12, 2008

Energy candidate has foundation ties

By Erika Lovley

Barack Obama’s expected choice for energy secretary, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu, sits on the board of a philanthropist organization that gave environmental grants to an Obama transition team member’s nonprofit organization.

Chu, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, is on the board of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, a nonprofit that gave more than $31.6 million in grants to the Bipartisan Policy Center, another nonprofit that does policy work on energy and the environment, among other issues. Jason Grumet, who has advised Obama on environmental issues, is the center’s founder and president.

A spokesman for the Hewlett Foundation, established by the co-founder of the high-tech giant Hewlett-Packard Company, adamantly denied any connection between Chu and Grumet, except that they both work in the field of environmental science.

And an aide close to the Obama transition said it was likely that Grumet, also an aide, has no role in any personnel decisions.

Chu has been on the Hewlett Foundation’s board since 2003 and has no known connections to Grumet, according the foundation spokesman, Eric Brown.

“It’s a pure coincidence,” Brown said. “The Bipartisan Policy Center has been a longtime recipient, even before Steve came on the board. They’re a large recipient in the energy sector, and we make a lot of grants in this field.”

Chu is an ardent supporter of renewable energy, as is Obama. And they have similar views on global warming. But Chu appears to have some differences with Obama on some energy issues, including his support of the relicensing of Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste disposal site, which Obama opposes.

Grumet was a leading voice on energy and environmental issues during Obama’s presidential campaign and currently sits on the transition policy working group on energy and environment directed by Carol Browner, whom Obama is expected to name to as a top White House post overseeing energy and the environment.

Some of the earlier grant awards were awarded to the National Commission on Energy Policy, the energy policy arm that the Bipartisan Policy Center originated from.

The Hewlett Foundation also awards millions of dollars each year to many other environmental groups, including National Resource Defense Council, Boston Review and the League of Conservation Voters.

Most of the foundation money awarded the Bipartisan Policy Center was marked for climate change policy development and general support of the center.

The center was established by former Senate Majority Leaders Howard Baker (R-Tenn.), Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and George Mitchell (D-Maine) to develop policy on key issues, including energy and the environment.

Brown said the Hewlett Foundation has three board meetings a year where its 13 members award grants. He said grant recipients and award amounts are compiled by staff and submitted to board members, who usually vote on the grant awards in large, broad blocs rather than case by case.

Other board members include venture capitalist James Gaither and Byron Auguste, a managing director at McKinsey & Company.

Chu is one of the few likely top energy and environmental appointees to the new Obama administration who did not serve in the Clinton administration. Browner, for instance, was administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency then.

Nancy Sutley, who’s expected to direct the White House Council on Environmental Quality, recently headed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Gay, Bisexual and Transgender steering committee during her unsuccessful campaign for the Democratic presidential campaign.

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WSJ Blog
December 12, 2008

Nuclear Power: Should the U.S. Emulate France?

Posted by Keith Johnson

The man who might become America’s next energy secretary, Steven Chu, has reservations about nuclear-waste storage. Those are the same reservations President-elect Barack Obama expressed on the campaign trail: Only “safe” nuclear power would be an acceptable addition to the nation’s energy mix, he said.

The questions raised by Steven Chu over nuclear-waste storage, it turns out, are some of the same ones vexing our readers. Hugh Bahar comments:

What does [Dr. Chu] mean “waste and proliferation issues haven’t been completely solved”? All we have to do is follow France, which uses Nuke for 82% of it’s electrical power production. Is Chu saying that the USA can’t do what France can when it comes to making Nuke safe, affordable, non-proliferating, reprocessable and waste-friendly? So Chu is already surrendering to France on the nuclear issue and acknowledging we are inferior to them and unable to at least duplicate thier nuclear success?

As it happens, that was pretty much the heart of a debate this week in Washington between nuclear-power proponent Patrick Moore, co-chair of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, and nuclear-power opponent Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.

The debate boiled down to the question: In its quest for lower-carbon sources of energy, does the U.S. want to become more like France?

Absolutely, said Dr. Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace but now an outspoken nuclear-power supporter. “If France can get 80% of its power from nuclear plants, so can the U.S. Our initial goal should be to double nuclear power in the U.S. [to about 40% of electricity supply] then think about doubling it again.” If zero-emissions power sources are the goal, he said, remember that nuclear power provides 70% of clean power in the U.S., compared with about 5% from renewable energy.

What about the waste problem? “That’s a political, not a technical, problem,” Dr. Moore said, which he says France has solved. “The key is recycling [spent nuclear fuel.] We are 30 years behind France and Japan,” he said.

Dr. Makhijani, a nuclear physicist who’s equally outspoken about nuclear power’s drawbacks, said the last thing the U.S. should do is emulate France.

“They’ve turned the Normandy peninsula into a nuclear-waste repository” against lots of public opposition, he said. (More on that here.) France dumps more than 100 million gallons of radioactive waste into the ocean. Recycling spent fuel just leaves loads of plutonium around, raising nuclear proliferation fears, he added.

Existing U.S. proposals to solve the waste question aren’t any better, he said. “Yucca Mountain is the single worst site that has been investigated” for long-term storage, he said.

The two also went back and forth over some of the other questions vexing nuclear power’s comeback, especially costs. Dr. Makhijani reiterated that “if nuclear power were attractive, Wall Street would be lining up to finance it.” Dr. Moore countered by arguing that, if economics constrain energy choices, it doesn’t make sense to spend 5 to 10 times more on renewable energy like solar power.

But the focus on nuclear waste showed that three decades after Three Mile Island, and after $20 billion has been plowed into Yucca Mountain, the question of what to do with nuclear waste is still right at the heart of nuclear power’s Gordian knot.

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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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