Yucca Mountain News Clips
Friday, January 23, 2009
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
January 22, 2009
Nevadans criticize plan to ship waste
Yucca draft lacks details, officials say
By Keith Rogers
Las Vegas Review-Journal
The Department of Energy's plan for hauling nuclear waste across the nation to a proposed repository at Yucca Mountain is a brush job at best, Nevada officials who are reviewing the document said this week.
"It's really a sad indictment of what little has been accomplished. There was more in the previous draft plan," said Robert Halstead, transportation adviser for the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.
Halstead and other experts met Wednesday with the agency's new chief to discuss how state officials intend to express their concerns about the plan for transporting 77,000 tons of potentially deadly, spent nuclear fuel and highly radioactive waste to entomb it in the volcanic rock ridge, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Bruce Breslow, who replaced Bob Loux this month as the agency's executive director, said the plan is "ripe for us to respond to because it lacks so much specificity."
"There's obviously many, many points that we're going to make comments on that are not detailed here," Breslow said Tuesday in a telephone interview from Carson City.
But a spokesman for DOE's Yucca Mountain Project said the department welcomes those comments and others from the public to help shape the final "National Transportation Plan" into a more detailed document.
"Those are exactly the type of comments we're asking for. The program looks forward to receive those comments, and we'll deal with it," Allen Benson, a DOE spokesman in Las Vegas, said Wednesday.
Halstead said he is concerned about the lack of discussion of the dangerous radioactive nature of spent nuclear fuel and the lack of a requirement that dedicated trains be required for all shipments. "And DOE persists in claiming that rail shipments by general freight are safe," he wrote in an e-mail after the plan was released last week.
The most recent map of "representative rail and truck routes" shows routes from the Pacific Northwest and from Kansas City that would maximize shipments through Las Vegas, Halstead said.
"With the outgoing administration, they wanted to check off things, and they left out some of the controversial things, like cost," he said.
He said the cost of shipping nuclear waste and spent fuel assemblies in what are called "transportation, aging and disposal" canisters probably will be between $10 billion and $20 billion, including some $3 billion to build a rail line from Caliente to Yucca Mountain.
Benson, asked why the plan does not include designated routes, said that shipping will not start until about 2020, and if nuclear regulators grant a license and if construction of the repository is completed, identifying any specific routes would be premature.
"Routing is something we would want to work with the public on," Benson said.
Contact reporter Keith Rogers at krogers@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308.
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Las Vegas SUN
January 22, 2009
Gibbons criticized for downsizing Yucca agency
Democrats say it’s the wrong time to make cuts
By Cy Ryan
CARSON CITY – Democratic lawmakers on Thursday criticized the governor’s plan to cut staff at the state agency responsible for battling the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.
In the budget he unveiled last week, Gov. Jim Gibbons called for staff at the state Nuclear Projects to be cut from seven to two.
Assemblywoman Sheila Leslie, D-Reno, who said the cuts will hamper the fight against Yucca Mountain at a critical point, said "We’re on the verge of winning and now is not the time to slash litigation” money.
The remarks were made during Senate and Assembly money committees hearings on the governor’s budget, which began today. During the morning session, Democratic lawmakers repeated their criticisms of the Gibbons’ slimmed down budget.
State Budget Director Andrew Clinger told the Senate Finance and the Assembly Ways and Means committees that most of the office’s budget is spent on outside contracts, which the staff monitors.
Leslie then asked if two employees could do the work of seven. Clinger answered, “Yes.”
Josh Hicks, chief of staff for the governor, softened the stance somewhat by saying that once newly appointed director Bruce Breslow “gets his arms around” the operation, there may be a need for additional money. Breslow replaces Bob Loux, who resigned amid controversy over raising his and his staff’s salary without authorization.
Leslie said funds for the legal fight in the Attorney General’s office have been cut.
But Hicks said there is $93,000, the same amount the office has this year. He said this was “sufficient” and he quoted U.S. Sen. Harry Reid who believes President Obama will not continue funding Yucca Mountain.
--Cy Ryan may be reached at (775) 687 5032 or cy@lasvegassun.com.
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Reno Gazette-Journal
January 22, 2009
Legislators question Gibbons' staff about budget cut proposals
By Brendan Riley
CARSON CITY (AP) — Skeptical Nevada legislators barraged Gov. Jim Gibbons’ top aides on Thursday with questions about the governor’s $6.2 billion, two-year state spending plan that calls for big cuts in funding for public education and other government programs and services.
The lawmakers repeatedly demanded more details from Gibbons’ budget chief, Andrew Clinger, and his chief of staff, Josh Hicks, at the first of several review meetings scheduled in advance of the Feb. 2 start of the 2009 legislative session.
Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike joined in the questioning about the spending plan, which is more than $2 billion short of what’s needed to maintain government services at current levels and handle increased demand. Gibbons has said repeatedly that in most cases he won’t support tax increases that would meet that need without the deep cuts he has proposed.
Clinger said the budget plan represented “a lot of really tough choices” mandated by the impact of a global economic slump on Nevada’s tourism-dependent economy, such as declining casino and sales taxes and visitor volume and rising jobless claims and payments.
Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford, D-Las Vegas, noted the governor’s plan would temporarily cut pay of state workers, K-12 teachers and state college and university staff by 6 percent, for a savings of more than $435 million, and questioned whether such cuts could face legal challenges.
Assemblywoman Debbie Smith, D-Sparks, added that since teachers have formal contracts setting their pay the pay cut plan “seems like a legal nightmare.”
Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas, told that school superintendents weren’t consulted in advance about the reductions, said some superintendents have said they couldn’t make the cuts because of the contracts or because of the resulting damage to schools.
“They’re concerned it would set education back decades because teachers are already paid so significantly below the national average,” Buckley said, adding that without salary reductions the only option would be school program cuts.
Senate Minority Leader Bill Raggio, R-Reno, asked about a proposed 36 percent cut in the state’s community college and university system budget — including reductions of about 50 percent for the university campuses in Reno and Las Vegas.
“That’s a pretty hefty reduction,” said Raggio, a longtime proponent of a properly funded public education system. “What did the budget office believe was sustainable, what could be justified, that would allow that heavy of a reduction.”
Clinger said higher education has other funding options, such as possible tuition increases, but Buckley said the overall higher education plan from the governor “just won’t work.” She said the universities can’t bank on big tuition increases that might force some students to drop plans for college or shift to out-of-state schools.
Assemblywoman Sheila Leslie, D-Reno, challenged the governor’s proposal to cut staffing for the state’s Nuclear Projects Agency, charged with fighting federal efforts to open a high-level nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, from seven to two employees.
“I’m going to need a lot more explanation before I’m comfortable on that,” Leslie said, noting the state’s long-standing fight against the dump is far from over. She also said funds for lawyers needed to continue the fight would be cut, and that doesn’t seem prudent.
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Fort Worth Weekly
January 21, 2009
Nuclear Fallout
Thought reactors were anachronisms? So did some concerned Glen Rose folks.
By BETTY BRINK
Editor’s note: The writer is a former member of a Comanche Peak opposition group, from which she resigned in the late 1980s.
For almost two decades, folks opposed to splitting atoms to turn on a light bulb have been comforted by nuclear power’s fall from favor as an electric-generating fuel. In 1993, one of the last reactors to come on line in this country was Comanche Peak Unit 2, located about 45 miles southwest of Fort Worth in Somervell County. Its twin, Unit 1, went into operation in 1990. With no new reactor orders from utilities since then, commercial nukes seemed to be headed for extinction as surely as the dinosaurs that roamed the county millions of years ago.
“Were we ever wrong,” said Debbie Harper, with a wry laugh.
She lives in Glen Rose, five miles south of the plant, and is one of the few locals less than enthralled with the neighborhood nuke whose massive concrete domes seem so jarringly out of place among the scrub cedars, limestone mesas, and hardscrabble farmland. But now, if the new owner of the old plant has its way, those weathered gray domes will be joined by two of even greater capacity. In September, Luminant Generation formally applied to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to add two new reactors to the site, more than doubling the plant’s electrical output as well as its growing stockpile of highly radioactive nuclear waste.
“I knew there was a nuclear plant nearby when we moved here 10 years ago,” said Harper, an outspoken advocate of renewable energy sources, which she promotes on her political blog, The Somervell County Salon. “But I thought it would soon be decommissioned and that nuclear, as a power source, was pretty much dead. It’s just too expensive, unsafe, and unnecessary.”
That’s why Harper was caught off guard last June, along with most anti-nuke activists around the state, when Luminant announced plans to expand Comanche Peak at an estimated cost of $20.4 billion. There is, however, a caveat to the utility’s grand plan: The Mitsubishi-designed reactors it has ordered have not been approved by the NRC for use in this country and have not been tested under real-world conditions anywhere, a fact that makes Harper even more nervous.
“What?” she asked. “Are they going to test them on us?”
The NRC assured local residents at a meeting earlier this month in Glen Rose that the reactors wouldn’t be approved without a thorough safety analysis. Mitch Lucas, Luminant’s vice-president of nuclear affairs, said the company is satisfied the reactors are “completely safe.”
Still, the proof of the pudding will arrive only when the plant actually comes on line, longtime nuclear power opponent Lon Burnam pointed out. “If that happens, the people of Somervell County will be the guinea pigs for this new generation of reactors,” he said. “That’s why we have to stop this before it gets off the ground.”
Burnam, a six-term state representative from Fort Worth, will be the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit being planned by a coalition of public interest groups. He is no stranger to such fights. Burnam was a Fort Worth intervener more than 20 years ago in the licensing hearings for the first Comanche Peak reactors, working closely with Juanita Ellis, the tenacious Dallas housewife who became a legend for uncovering such momentous design and construction flaws that then-owner Texas Utilities was ordered by the NRC to redesign and rebuild major portions of the plant, even though it was almost 90 percent finished. Even more humiliating, the utility’s CEO was forced to make a public apology for the company’s massive construction failures. By the time electricity finally began to flow from both units, Comanche Peak had taken 19 years to build and cost $11 billion. It was 10 years overdue and $9 billion over budget, but it was undoubtedly a safer plant.
The battle this time, however, is shaping up differently.
For one thing, environmentalists, many of them veterans of the first battle of Comanche Peak, will have evidence of actual, rather than just theoretical, health effects in the area around the plant: Cancer rates in Hood County, Somervell’s nearest downwind neighbor, have increased significantly since the plant came on line. And other issues will be in play that weren’t germane last time around — like water. In a drought-damaged area of Texas with predictions of more drought to come, the plant’s voracious thirst for water is high on the list of objections.
“We can live without a lot of things,” Harper said. “But we can’t live without water.”
The Comanche Peak plant was built along the banks of Squaw Creek, once a meandering and sometimes shallow tributary of the Brazos River. Squaw Creek was dammed almost 20 years ago to provide a reservoir of cooling water for the plant and as a discharge site for its low-level radioactive wastewater. Those waters leave the plant at temperatures of around 113 degrees, eventually winding up in the Brazos, the longest river in Texas and one of the most magnificent, flowing 840 miles from its origins near Clovis, N. M. to the Gulf of Mexico, interrupted by only four dams along the way.
One of the Brazos’ four dams created Lake Granbury, which supplies water to about 250,000 people in Granbury and about 15 other towns and cities in North Texas. But Lake Granbury is also connected by two pipelines to the Squaw Creek reservoir, because the body of water that keeps Comanche Peak’s reactors from melting down can’t be subject to the vagaries of Texas rainfall patterns. By federal law, the Squaw Creek lake must be maintained at a consistent level.
One pipeline brings water from Granbury to the plant’s reservoir when the levels there drop below a certain limit; the other is used to pump excess water from the Squaw Creek reservoir back to Lake Granbury, 15 miles to the north. Even when drought lowers the water levels in the Brazos and Lake Granbury, the Brazos River Authority must meet its federally mandated charge to keep the Squaw Creek reservoir full.
Luminant’s environmental impact documents show that each of the two existing reactors uses a million gallons of water every minute for the circulating water system that provides cooling. The new, higher- capacity ones will need 1.2 million gallons of coolant water per minute. In order to meet such a huge demand, Luminant will draw 103,717 acre feet per year from Lake Granbury. (An acre foot is the volume of water that would cover one acre to a depth of one foot.) That would be about three-fourths of Lake Granbury’s total storage capacity of 136,823 acre feet, according to the Brazos River Authority.
The water needs of Lake Granbury’s other customers pale beside that of the plant — 2 billion gallons per year in 2006, according to the river authority, versus 33 billion to be used by the expanded plant, drawn from both Squaw Creek and Granbury. And in 2006, a particularly dry year, Lake Granbury couldn’t meet the existing demand. “Many customers had to rely on their wells” that year, according to the river authority’s 2008 planning report.
A river authority spokeswoman said in an e-mail that the agency expects to be able to meet the water needs of the expanded plant and other customers. In July, the agency stated that it would meet increased demand by diverting water from Possum Kingdom Lake to Granbury.
Nor does the plant simply circulate the water through its reservoir and then send it back to Lake Granbury. Luminant’s Lucas estimated that 60 percent of the water from the expanded plant will evaporate into the atmosphere rather than going back to the river.
“That’s an incredible admission,” Harper said. “The next logical question … is, if it evaporates into the sky, will it hover over this area and rain back on Somervell County? No. It is going elsewhere, and it will be lost to the area’s dwindling water sources.”
There are other problems with the plant’s water source and the wildlife it supports. Glen Rose resident Jack Cathey, a conservationist who monitors the wildlife around the plant, told the January gathering that the frogs, fish, and soft-shell turtles of Squaw Creek are disappearing. He said he had measured the temperature of the discharge water, and “it is 104 degrees Fahrenheit as it flows down Squaw Creek on its way to the Brazos.” (Besides being pumped back to Granbury, some of the reservoir’s overflow water is also released to the creek below it, which flows into the Brazos.) His findings should be viewed as an “early warning sign that something is wrong,” he said.
Lucas responded that the two new reactors, which will use a different type of cooling system, will reduce the temperature of the water discharged into the Squaw Creek reservoir to 93 degrees. But the problem may not be the temperatures alone. One of the radioactive byproducts of nuclear fission is tritium, which is being found in increasing amounts in the soils and waters surrounding the plant, according to NRC documents. Tritium is a known carcinogen and is often found in water, from which it goes directly into the soft tissues and organs of living beings exposed to it.
Karen Hadden of Austin, executive director of SEED Coalition (Sustainable Energy and Economic Development) who spoke at the January meeting, said the plant’s need for so much water is unacceptable in an area short on the wet stuff. “Water is going to be a key in this battle,” said the former science teacher. “With water being drawn down from gas drilling and the years of usage for the two reactors here now, this is going to be one of the major issues.”
For artist Suzanne Gentling, who lives five miles south of Glen Rose, water is already the issue. Like most county residents, she depends on a well for water, she said, drawing from the Trinity aquifer, which “is almost gone.”
Gentling said she bought her place in 1990, and the deep well worked fine until 2003, when she had to go deeper. The water table in the area has “dropped 110 feet in 10 years,” she said. “We are already in a water crisis.”
Gentling, who grew up in Fort Worth with her artist brothers, Scott and the late Stuart Gentling, marched to protest construction of a nuclear power plant in Mississippi in the 1970s. She is against the Comanche Peak expansion for other reasons as well — the radioactive waste disposal problem, the exorbitant costs, the failure to consider alternatives. But the possibility of the aquifers drying up or being polluted by radiation is enough to have her marching again, she said.
There will be plenty of places for activists to march in the coming years, if the NRC’s current crop of proposed nuke plants is an indication of things to come. With global warming now accepted as a threat to the planet by many of even the most die-hard naysayers, nuclear power, touted as “clean” by its proponents because it produces no greenhouse gases to speak of, is enjoying something of a renaissance.
As of the first week in January, there were 17 license applications for new or expanded plants pending before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has created an Office of New Reactors to handle the workload. Two applications besides Luminant’s are in Texas: The South Texas nuke plant in Matagorda County, a few years older than Comanche Peak, wants to add two new reactors, and Exelon, one of the largest utilities in the country, wants to build a new twin-reactor plant in Victoria.
Luminant’s license application calls for two 1,700-megawatt reactors designed by Japan’s Mitsubishi Corp. The utility has already increased the generating capacity of the original 1,150 megawatt reactors by 4.5 percent. If the new reactors are built, the combined capacity of the four units would be 5,900 megawatts, enough electricity to run approximately 3.5 million homes, according to the Edison Electric Institute.
Stephen Monarque, project manager for the Office of New Reactors, said Luminant is the only utility asking for permission to use an unapproved reactor design. Monarque told Fort Worth Weekly that NRC rules don’t prevent the company from proposing new reactor designs, “but they do so at their own risk. … They cannot build anything there until this design is approved,” which will take at least three years, he said, “with no guaranteed outcome.”
That uncertainty doesn’t seem to worry Lucas. In spite of Monarque’s caution, the Luminant VP told the Weekly at the meeting in Glen Rose, “We are confident that [the Mitsubishi design] will be approved by the NRC. … It is a pressurized water reactor, like the Westinghouse ones there now, but it has features to make it more reliable and more efficient. I am very sure it will pass the NRC test — otherwise we wouldn’t be doing this.”
Applying for a plant license three years before the reactor design is likely to be approved is a “more efficient way to go,” he said. Is there a plan B, if the NRC gives Mitsubishi a thumbs-down? Lucas didn’t respond.
Even if Luminant gains NRC approval for the design, the new reactors won’t be generating electricity anytime soon. Beyond the three-year reactor vetting period, construction could take 10 years or more, meaning the new units would likely be coming on line about a decade before the current reactors’ 40-year licensing periods end. The new reactors would be licensed for another 40 years.
That scenario of nuclear ad infinitum in Somervell County is one that Burnam suspected years ago.
“We always feared that when Comanche Peak got about halfway through its licensing stage, the utility would try to get the license extended one way or another for another 40 years,” he said. And that very likely means another 40 years of radioactive waste stored there. “Comanche Peak will be a permanent nuke waste dump, just as we [the anti-nuke groups] predicted back in the ’70s,” he said.
Burnam expects to be the lead plaintiff in the planned lawsuit because he lives on Fort Worth’s Near South Side and is within the 50-mile radius zone that the NRC deems vulnerable in case of a nuclear accident. “I didn’t want to start this battle all over again, but it looks like that’s what we are going to have to do,” he said.
At the January meeting, Burnam told the agency that as a legislator he represents more than 150,000 people who are also within the vulnerable zone: his constituents in Fort Worth House District 90.
“This is not just about the residents of Glen Rose,” he said.
Older, grayer, and maybe wiser, but with no lessening of their youthful anti-nuclear sentiments, Burnam and Hadden held an impromptu reunion with other anti-nuke activists from around the state at the Glen Rose meeting. Among them was Mavis Belisle of Dallas and Amarillo, who has monitored the operation of the Pantex nuclear weapons arsenal in the Panhandle for the past 15 years.
While most of the environmental issues discussed that day centered on the waste and water, Burnam raised the issue of cancer. He said that research over the years since the plant opened shows a “vast increase in cancer deaths in the area.”
From 1990 through 2004, the most recent year for which mortality data is available, the Texas Cancer Registry shows that Hood County, which is north of and generally downwind of the plant, has recorded an average cancer mortality rate (deaths per each 100,000 residents) of 219.8 during that period compared to the state rate of 192.7. Rates of both fatal and nonfatal cancers also showed divergence between Hood and the state in general. The rate for Hood, where Granbury is located, was 509.7 per 100,000 residents, compared to 449.2 for the state.
Somervell mortality and incidence rates, on the other hand, were lower than the state’s, coming in at 187.8 and 423 to the state’s 192.7 and 449.2 respectively.
Hood, made up mostly of rural retirement communities and whose major income source is tourism, posted cancer rates even higher than the heavily industrialized and polluted Tarrant County, which had a mortality rate of 215 during those years.
“There was only one major industry introduced into these two counties during this period, and it was Comanche Peak,” Burnam said. He called on the NRC and Luminant to provide a “rational, intelligent environmental impact statement” that will show clearly how many deaths can be expected from the increases in background radiation from an expanded plant, as well as what can be expected in case of a radioactivity accident.
Other speakers asked Glen Rose residents to consider the cost to people in surrounding counties and to the environment during the entire nuclear fuel cycle, from uranium miners in New Mexico (who have some of the highest cancer rates in the nation) to the workers in the fuel processing and assembly plants, to the dangers of transportation and disposal of the waste.
“We who benefit from the electricity are responsible for the full chain of events in this cycle, from the beginning to the end,” Jan Sanders of Dallas said.
Ironically, Harper pointed out, the residents of Somervell and Glen Rose do not get their electricity from the plant. The area is served by co-ops that buy from Texas-New Mexico Power.
Paul Harper, Debbie’s husband and one of the few local dissenters who spoke, talked about nuclear waste. “We take our garbage to the local dump or have it picked up and hauled off somewhere else, yet we keep this radioactive waste here. … And now we want to increase the storage of [this] waste in our county. I don’t think it’s wise to keep increasing this waste without figuring out what to do with it,” he said. “This company needs to figure out a solution to this before our next meeting.”
Voices like his were outnumbered by a “bring ’em on” chorus from most of the folks who were there who live in the county and have seen Somervell go from one of the poorest counties in the state to one of the richest since becoming host to Comanche Peak.
When construction of the nuke plant began in 1976 along the small, meandering Squaw Creek, the county’s economy was based solely on a dwindling agricultural base. But all that changed dramatically that year, when Glen Rose suddenly became a boomtown of well-paid construction workers and nuclear engineers. By the mid-1980s, according to the Texas Handbook Online, the county had nearly $2 billion worth of taxable property and $141 million in annual wages, a whopping 11,000 percent increase since 1975. Annual wages have dropped, as the plant employs only about 100 workers, but the property tax largess is still significant.
“We want this expansion,” Somervell County Judge Walter Maynard said, noting that most of the dissenters were from out of the county. The plant has been a “good neighbor,” he said. Somervell and Hood County commissioners even passed resolutions supporting the expansion — with the help of Jan Caldwell, community relations manager for the nuclear plant, who acknowledged to a Dallas Morning News reporter that she had “helped write some of the resolutions.”
Expanding Comanche Peak is part of Luminant’s push for more “green technology” according to Lucas, who proudly pointed out that Luminant is the largest purchaser of wind power in the state. He touts nuclear as another answer to global warming because it produces minimal amounts of greenhouse gases and reduces the company’s reliance on coal.
Lucas dismisses the waste issue as one that will be “solved by the government,” in spite of the fact that the government has not solved it in 50 years. The utility VP believes the answer lies in reprocessing the waste, creating an endless supply of fuel for more and more nuke plants. It’s an idea that drives anti-nuke activists nuts and one that was rejected by the federal government years ago as too costly and dangerous, because the reprocessed fuel, rich in plutonium, could be used to make nuclear bombs.
Even the area’s congressman, Democrat Chet Edwards, a strong proponent of nuclear energy, is troubled by the waste problem. Harper reported on her blog that Edwards told a public gathering of Glen Rose residents at a local café in 2007 that he believes there should be “a small number of nuclear waste repositories rather than each nuclear site storing its own waste” because of the danger of a terrorist attack.
With no place to go, the high-level waste has been stored at Comanche Peak for 19 years in fuel pools that were designed to hold the stuff in seven-year cycles. At the end of each cycle, according to the plant’s original plans, the fuel would be removed and trucked to a high-level repository for permanent storage, and a new cycle would begin.
But there is still no such place. Yucca Mountain in Nevada is the federal government’s choice for a permanent repository for its millions of tons of highly radioactive wastes now stored at nuke plants and other nuclear facilities around the country. But the site has come under fire from Nevadans who don’t want the nation’s most dangerous waste in their backyard and from Native American tribes in the area who view the mountain as sacred. Geologists have raised serious questions about the area’s seismic stability over the millions of years it will take for the waste to decay. The Department of Energy, which will run the facility if it ever opens, has applied for an operating license from the NRC, but as yet one has not been issued. Last year the U.S. Senate, led by Democratic majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada, an outspoken opponent of the project, cut the energy department’s budget for site evaluations and exploration at Yucca Mountain by $495 million, forcing the contractor, Bechtel, to lay off workers and put the project on standby. At the time Reid told the Associated Press he wouldn’t be happy “until the Yucca Mountain budget is cut to zero.” In August, the DOE announced its “latest revised estimate” is that it will cost $96.2 billion to build the repository, transfer the waste to it, and monitor the site just for the next 150 years.
For those new to this nuclear drama, there is a cautionary tale.
It was 1973, and Texas Utilities announced with great fanfare — and confidence — that their first nuke plant, with its twin reactors, would be open by 1980 at a cost of $779 million.
They couldn’t have been more wrong. The utility and its contractor, Brown & Root of Houston, had no clue just how much damage a then-unknown bookkeeper from one of Dallas’ oldest blue-collar neighborhoods would be able to do to their plans.
By the time the plant’s second reactor finally came on line, it was 1993. The total construction had taken 19 years, and the cost had ballooned to $11 billion. By then, the plant had been completely redesigned, large segments of the containment buildings had been torn out and rebuilt, Brown & Root had been replaced by Bechtel Corporation as construction manager, and a citizen watchdog group had won an unprecedented contract to put its own safety inspectors inside to oversee the plant’s first five years of operation.
And Dallas housewife and part-time bookkeeper Juanita Ellis had become a household name for forcing one of the most powerful utilities in the nation to almost totally rebuild a nearly finished nuclear power plant because of a litany of safety violations and shoddy workmanship that she — and the whistleblowers who flocked to her side — uncovered. A later internal NRC investigation found that its local inspectors had either missed the glaring deficiencies or looked the other way.
Ellis was an unlikely tilter at nukes. When Texas Utilities first announced its intent to go nuclear, she was 38, worked part-time at her husband Jerry’s nursery in Dallas’ Oak Cliff neighborhood, and kept books for her church. The couple had no children.
She had never been involved with the Dallas-Fort Worth area’s small but vocal group of anti-nuclear activists, whose focus before Comanche Peak had been the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal. But Ellis had read about the dangers of a nuclear power plant accident in one of her husband’s gardening magazines, published locally. The author was a Continental Airlines pilot named Bob Pomeroy. Shortly after, she read that her utility company, Dallas Power & Light, would be a partner in the construction of a nuclear power plant. She contacted Pomeroy and, along with four other Dallasites, one of whom was well-known in local government circles as an outspoken socialist, they formed Citizens Associated for Sound Energy, as a vehicle to oppose the plant.
When the six went before the Dallas City Council (which at that time had jurisdiction over Dallas Power & Light) to voice their objections, all hell broke loose. Unknown to the small band of dissidents, the meeting was monitored by the Texas Department of Public Safety. (It was the 1970s, the Cold War was still hot, and those who opposed nuclear power generation in any form were suspect.)
Pomeroy, who spoke for the group, was labeled a “subversive” by the DPS, put under surveillance, and a file kept on his activities. An anonymous letter was sent to the pilot’s company outlining his “anti-nuclear” activities and suggesting that he might fly a plane into the reactors once they were built. Pomeroy was so unnerved by the slimy tactics that he dropped out and moved to Arkansas. (Years later Pomeroy won a lawsuit against the DPS, forcing the agency to apologize and purge his file, which said among other laughable things that he had been seen “with a known Socialist.”)
Ellis wasn’t scared off. She just got mad. She took on the leadership of the group, and by 1979 CASE was a full intervenor in the NRC licensing proceedings. Two public interest groups in Fort Worth, Citizens for Fair Utility Regulation (CFUR) and ACORN, joined the fight.
Legal proceedings were one route taken by opponents. The other was civil disobedience. In 1979 and 1980, a group called the Comanche Peak Life Force, made up of activists from Fort Worth, Dallas, Denton, and Austin, including Belisle, scaled the fence at the construction site in nonviolent protests. Trials were held at the old limestone courthouse in Glen Rose, with the first ending in a hung jury and the second in convictions for more than 50 protesters. Some were put on probation; most were simply fined.
Hearings on the plant’s license were held before the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, whose judges traveled to Fort Worth and Glen Rose to hear testimony. They turned into the longest and at times the nastiest proceedings in the agency’s history. They were also costly to the interveners, who relied on donations to stay in the game. By 1982, CASE was the only one left standing.
Ellis persevered through numerous hearings, along with a number of whistleblowers, most of whom had been fired by Brown & Root or one of its subcontractors after they persisted in reporting construction problems that could endanger the safe operation of the plant. They produced so much damning evidence of safety violations, cover-ups, and illegal firings that by 1986, when the construction was almost done, an ASLB judge ordered the utility back to the drawing board for what would be an almost complete redesign and rebuilding of key structures. Those deficiencies started on day one, according to testimony from workers and engineers and NRC documents, with Brown & Root’s overexcavation of the foundation for the reactor buildings and the company’s subsequent quick fix, which was to throw rock and rubble back into the hole and pour grout around them.
Other irregularities quickly followed: Whole sections of reinforcing steel were left out of the first containment building; the concrete dome of the same building fell off in large chunks because the concrete had been poured in the rain; concrete foundations under the containment buildings and the fuel pool building were poured and left to cure in freezing temperatures, which made the concrete brittle and prone to cracks. Welders testified that the welds on the liners in the fuel pool itself, designed to hold the circulating cooling water that surrounds the highly radioactive spent fuel rods, were defective because they were made under unclean conditions on a surface that was supposed to be “mirror-clean.” And insulation material, used on wiring and as barriers inside the containment and fuel pool buildings to mitigate the spread of a fire, were found to either melt or catch fire under extreme temperatures.
Excessive numbers of vendor welds were found to be defective in prefabricated materials used in other critical safety areas. Pipe-hanger supports, which ensure the stability of hundreds of miles of piping carrying radioactive water under extremely high temperatures as well as coolant water needed in case of an accident, were found to be defective and prone to failure. All had to be replaced. Widespread use of “unqualified mechanical and welding inspectors” was documented. One whistleblower testified that he had been “ordered by every foreman I worked for to make illegal welds when necessary” to get the job done on time. One female welding inspector who worked for Brown & Root said she rejected almost all the welds she inspected, and for that she was soon shuffled off to a small building on site “to sit alone and do nothing but useless paperwork.”
Following her testimony (she was 28 and pregnant at the time), the inspector was badly beaten in the backyard of her mobile home late one summer evening by two unknown men; she suffered multiple bruises, cuts, and broken ribs. She told a reporter later, “I never had any enemies before I agreed to testify” for CASE.
But by 1988, Ellis was exhausted. She had fought the good fight, and while she had not stopped the plant, she believed she had made it safer. TU Electric was by then more than desperate to get its license. In an unprecedented agreement that shocked her longtime supporters and colleagues around the state, Ellis agreed to drop her fight in return for a $10 million settlement from TU and a contract that gave CASE inspectors access to the plant for five years and Ellis a seat on its oversight board. The company’s CEO was forced to publicly admit that the utility had made major and dangerous construction errors that would not have been found had it not been for Ellis and her crews.
Half the $10 million went to CASE and its attorneys and the other $5 million to about a dozen whistleblowers, many of whom had lost their jobs and had been blacklisted in the industry. Ellis said following the settlement that she did it for the whistleblowers, to honor their courage and sacrifice. Those who knew her at the time never doubted her word. Throughout the long hearing process, Ellis continually worried about the workers and their families.
Burnam said that the new fight could use another Juanita Ellis. But it is unlikely it will be the original. Today she still lives with her husband Jerry in the small, 1950s-era frame house in Oak Cliff that once was filled with so many boxes of documents that one reporter dubbed it a “filing cabinet with a bathroom.” Numerous calls left on her answering machine with requests for comment on Luminant’s proposal to add more reactors at Comanche Peak were not returned.
Given the magnitude of the construction deficiencies eventually uncovered, who knows what tragedy might have occurred if Juanita Ellis hadn’t picked up that gardening book back in 1973.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
January 20, 2009
Letters: Pursue criminal charges against Bob Loux
To the editor:
I think someone in the criminal justice system has got Bob Loux's actions all wrong ("State must not fund defense of Loux," Friday editorial).
Criminal theft charges, not ethics charges, should be filed here. Mr. Loux, who directed the state's efforts to halt the Yucca Mountain Project, admitted wrongly putting government funds into his own bank account. If this happened in the private sector, he would have been arrested by now.
Additionally, I think staff members who received wrongful pay raises should, at least, be made an offer they can't refuse: "voluntarily" pay back the ill-gotten gains or face criminal charges, too.
An Ethics Commission investigation would be a waste of taxpayer money.
Phillip Mlynek
Las Vegas
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Gallup Independent
January 20, 2009
Yucca Mountain transportation plan comments sought
By Kathy Helms
Diné Bureau
WINDOW ROCK — Despite President-elect Barack Obama’s opposition to creating a burial ground for nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, the U.S. Department of Energy on Friday released a National Transportation Plan that outlines its current strategy for waste shipments, including a truck route on Interstate Highway 40 through Gallup and the Navajo Nation.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., met with Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden on Jan. 5 regarding Yucca Mountain. “During our conversation, the President-elect reiterated his promise to work with me to prevent the dump from ever being built,” beginning with a deep cut in the current federal budget, Reid said.
Last July, the Department of Energy estimated the price tag for Yucca at $96.2 billion in 2007 dollars, up 67 percent from a 2001 estimate of $57.5 billion.
Approximately $13.5 billion already has been spent on the nuclear waste repository which is estimated to be completed in 2017.
DOE’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management plan implements a system to ship spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste by rail or truck from more than 120 sites across the country. The office is taking comments on its transportation plan through April 30.
Director Ward Sproat said actual shipments are not expected to begin before 2020, but the transportation planning process has begun well in advance to ensure the concerns and input of state, tribal, and local officials as well as other interested stakeholders are taken into account.
In Arizona, Interstate 40 follows Burlington Northern Santa Fe tracks almost all the way across the state, passing near the sacred San Francisco Peaks in Flagstaff, the gateway to the Grand Canyon at Williams, and the Petrified Forest National Park near Holbrook before crossing several Navajo Nation chapters. In New Mexico, I-40 passes through the city of Gallup and one of the busiest Walmarts in the United States, as well as by the Navajo Nation’s newly opened Fire Rock Casino.
Arizona counties affected by rail or highway routes include: Apache, Cochise, Coconino, Maricopa, Mohave, Navajo, Pima, Pinal, Yavapai and Yuma. New Mexico counties include: Bernalillo, Cibola, Dona Ana, Grant, Guadalupe, Hidalgo, Luna, McKinley, Quay, Santa Fe and Torrance.
Because there is a chance that an accident involving a radioactive shipment could occur, emergency response plans will be put in place to handle situations that could arise. The Department of Energy will provide technical and financial assistance for training public safety officials through jurisdictions where the waste is transported.
In May 2006, all eastbound traffic on I-40 was diverted to old Route 66 between Seligman and Ash Fork following a fatal accident in Yavapai County involving a truck carrying radioactive materials. Two tractor-trailer rigs carrying containers of tools and clothing that had been used in nuclear environments collided in Yavapai County while the truck was on its way to a radioactive waste disposal facility.
As early as 1998, when New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson was Secretary of Energy at the time, Navajo President Milton Bluehouse Sr.’s administration expressed concern regarding the shipment of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste through Navajo lands and the ability of the Nation to have adequate emergency response capability in place.
The Nation said it is the responsibility of tribal government officials to choose whether they need to attain a state of radiological emergency preparedness, and if so, they must be provided resources to attain their goals, according to a DOE document.
The Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management intends to offer grants for training and conduct a pilot program involving a limited number of states and tribes after it issues a revised policy. The grants would be subject to available appropriations and the first ones would be issued about four years prior to the beginning of shipments.
In an October 2007 letter to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Obama said billions of dollars have been spent by taxpayers and ratepayers in the construction of Yucca Mountain.
“Legitimate scientific questions have been raised about the safety of storing spent nuclear fuel at this location,” he said, adding that the National Academy of Sciences maintains that peak risks might occur hundreds of thousands of years from now. “Questions also have been raised about the viability of transporting spent nuclear fuel to Nevada from different locations around the country.
“We should select a repository location through a process that develops national consensus and respects state sovereignty, not one in which the federal government cuts off debate and forces one state to accept nuclear waste from other states. The flawed process by which Yucca Mountain was selected now manifests itself as a profoundly expensive endeavor of monumental proportion,” Obama said.
“The selection of Yucca Mountain has failed, the time for debate on this site is over, and it is time to start exploring new alternatives for safe, long-term solutions based on sound science.”
--Information: www.ocrwm.doe.gov
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Docuticker
January 20, 2009
NRC Issues Citizens’ Report Summarizing FY 2008 Performance and Accountability Report
Source: Nuclear Regulatory Commission
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued its FY 2008 Citizens’ Report that provides a summary of the agency’s fiscal year (FY) 2008 Performance and Accountability Report, which was released in November 2008. The Citizens’ Report highlights the agency’s achievements in promoting nuclear safety and security while adhering to the principles of regulatory independence, transparency, and reliability.
…
In FY 2008, under the NRC’s watch, 104 nuclear power plants operated safely and the public remained protected from unnecessary radiation in the use of nuclear materials in medicine, research and industry. To date, the agency is reviewing 17 Combined License applications to build and operate 26 new nuclear power plants. These proposed nuclear power plants, if approved and constructed, would be the first new plants built in more than 30 years. In addition, the NRC began a full technical review of the U.S. Department of Energy’s application to build and operate the nation’s first geologic repository for high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
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High Country News
January 19, 2009
Mountain of doubt
Will the country's only planned nuclear waste dump survive Obama?
When Edward "Ward" Sproat moved into his new office at the U.S. Department of Energy in early 2006, the future of Yucca Mountain looked about as bleak as nuclear winter. The atomic waste storage project, which had never amounted to more than a five-mile-long tunnel through a mountain 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, had already been hammered by lawsuits and starved of funding. Now it was tainted by scandal and absurdity. A series of incriminating e-mails had revealed how some project scientists may have fudged data to meet deadlines; a federal judge had declared the Environmental Protection Agency's 10,000-year safety timeframe inadequate. If Yucca Mountain is to open, the ruling implied, the EPA must protect the area's creatures for as long as nuclear waste remains deadly — perhaps for as long as 1 million years. Even if, as sometimes happens in 1 million years, those creatures will have mutated to survive it.
A tall, genial diplomat with a full head of white hair, Sproat has spent two decades negotiating on behalf of the nuclear energy industry. He frequently goes before audiences, not all of them friendly, to explain the Energy Department's nuclear-waste strategy, which he does with an equanimity seldom seen in bureaucrats. While serving as vice president of PECO Energy before it merged into Illinois nuclear giant Exelon Energy, he brokered a deal to get the government to pay the utility for storing spent fuel at its reactor sites. And he knows from experience that without a solution to the waste problem, the much-touted nuclear power renaissance, with all its guaranteed plant construction loans and tax breaks promised in the 2005 energy bill, is doomed.
Sproat came into his job with a straightforward but Sisyphean task: To make the government's plan for nuclear waste look respectable again. The surest way to do that was to file a long-overdue license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And on June 3, 2008 — five years past deadline, but 27 days before Sproat himself had pledged — the Energy Department filed a document more than 8,600 pages long with the commission's licensing board, requesting permission to begin construction of a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.
Now, the commission has three, possibly four, years to decide whether to grant that license. If it does, whoever holds Sproat's job will submit a second application, asking regulators to approve the actual physical transfer of the waste — a half-century of spent fuel rods from civilian atomic power, plus some military waste — to the facility by train and truck. Its earliest opening date is 2020.
To many observers and proponents of the presumed rebirth of the nuclear power industry, Sproat's accomplishment is a magnificent coup. "He's been fantastic," says Per Peterson, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. "He brought in a kind of pragmatism and competence, and he focused in on the most important thing: to get the license application completed and start the technical review.
"Ward Sproat," Peterson concludes, "is the best thing that's happened to Yucca Mountain in its entire history."
Throughout the summer and fall, while the nuclear industry was still kvelling over Sproat's achievement, another story was unfolding in Nevada, one that could nullify all of Sproat's hard work: Illinois Sen. Barack Obama was plotting to win the state in the presidential election. Key to his strategy was affirming beyond a doubt his opposition to the Yucca Mountain repository.
Seventy-seven percent of Nevada voters object to storing nuclear waste in their state, which has no nuclear reactors of its own. Nevada Democrats generally believe that Al Gore lost the state, and hence the election, in 2000, because he failed to stake out a position on the issue. Four years later, John Kerry also lost, because while he had mostly opposed Yucca Mountain, he had intermittently voted to fund it — a history that played neatly into the Bush campaign's portrait of him as a flip-flopper.
During the primaries, it seemed as though Obama might share Kerry's credibility problem. Obama comes from a densely nuclear-powered state, and Exelon's employees contributed nearly $200,000 to his presidential campaign. Obama confirmed his opposition in letters to local newspapers and to Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, but Hillary Clinton still stirred up so much doubt that at a January rally he felt compelled to blurt, "What part of ‘I'm not for Yucca' do you not understand?"
But by the start of the general election campaign, Nevada believed him. "There was none of this slithering around that we'd had with other politicians, saying ‘Well, I just go along with what sound science says,' " says Judy Treichel, the executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force. "He actually had it on his position statement that Yucca Mountain was not an option." By contrast, Arizona Sen. John McCain had always championed the repository, and yet told a reporter in a televised interview that he didn't want nuclear waste rumbling through Phoenix on its way to Nevada. The Obama campaign saturated the airwaves with McCain's NIMBY blip, and Obama won the state by more than 100,000 votes.
It's hard to know exactly how much Yucca Mountain had to do with his victory. "Obviously, there's never one issue that determines how people are going to vote," says Nevada Rep. Shelley Berkley, a fierce Yucca Mountain opponent. "But I believe there was a strong sense that President-elect Barack Obama presented a clear alternative to John McCain's manic obsession with putting waste in Yucca Mountain."
Sen. Reid has now pronounced Yucca Mountain dead, and Berkley believes he's right. Nick Shapiro, a spokesman for Obama's transition team, confirmed by e-mail that Obama believes "Yucca Mountain should not and will not move forward." But it's unclear exactly how Obama will kill the project, which was written into law back in 1987. Treichel thinks the new administration will cut off the repository's funds; Berkley hopes Obama will pull its license application.
"I have not spoken with Obama regarding the license application," Berkley says. "But I would recommend that the administration take a long, hard look at it and see what can be done."
The disposal of high-level nuclear waste — mostly leftovers from atomic fission, as opposed to "crapped out" clothes and contaminated tools — has dogged the industry since the dawn of the atomic age. Waste from the very first reactor experiment, in 1942, still taints the groundwater near its burial site in a forest outside of Chicago; spent fuel rods — zirconium-alloy tubes stuffed with uranium pellets — wait in watery cooling pools and dry concrete casks at 121 operating and decommissioned reactors in 39 states. There was a time when the U.S. government expected the industry to figure out how to extract more fuel from burned-up pellets, as the French and British do today. But not only has reprocessing proved to be disastrously polluting, it separates out fissionable plutonium — and plutonium can be used to make bombs. Proliferation concerns made nuclear waste disposal the government's problem.
Fearing the collapse of an already faltering industry, Congress in 1982 drew up the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, ordering the Energy Department to open a nuclear waste storage facility within 16 years. But Congress did nothing in that time except select Yucca Mountain as the only location worth studying, delaying until 2002 to give the site final approval and allow the Energy Department to at long last apply for a license. As of December 2006, $13.5 billion from utility bills and taxes has gone into researching the site, and utilities have accumulated some 55,000 metric tons of waste. By 2010, the waste will exceed Yucca Mountain's limit of 70,000 metric tons. (Both Sproat and Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman recently advised lifting that cap instead of finding a second site.)
Doubts about Yucca Mountain's geologic suitability have piled up as well. Six hundred earthquakes have rumbled under Yucca Mountain in the last 20 years, one as great as magnitude 5.6. A panel of scientists put the chances of "igneous disruption" in the ridgeline's ancient field of volcanoes at one in 6,250 over the next 10,000 years — which seems low until you consider that, in most of the United States, the probability of a volcano erupting is zero.
Even the site's chief meteorological selling point — the dryness of the Nevada desert — may no longer play in its favor. For one thing, climates can change: In the winter of 2004 to 2005, enough rain fell in Death Valley, 20 miles to the West, to revive seedbeds that had lain dormant for a century. For another, the absence of water may not be as significant as the presence of air. "Yucca Mountain is an oxidizing environment," says Allison Macfarlane, an associate professor at George Mason University and editor of a book on Yucca Mountain, "and spent nuclear fuel is not stable in the presence of water and oxygen."
The Energy Department has tried to engineer away Yucca Mountain's geological deficiencies, promising to contain the waste in decay-resistant alloy canisters. It's also suggested using robots to install titanium drip shields in 100 years. (The robots have yet to be invented.) But Macfarlane argues that it's far better to encase spent fuel in rock where oxygen can't get to it. The U.S. already stores defense-related radioactive waste one-half-mile deep in 250 million-year-old salt formations at the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, near Carlsbad, N.M. Sweden and Finland both have plans to contain spent fuel rods in copper and bury them in airless crystalline bedrock, 500 meters beneath the surface.
"We have a really big country," says Macfarlane. "We're really lucky. There are lots of places that would be good geologically, and that wouldn't require transporting waste over long distances. We ought to be thinking about sharing the burden among different states, maybe among states that have nuclear power plants."
Whatever her opinion of Yucca Mountain, Macfarlane believes a geologic repository has got to be built, and soon. Even if the U.S. starts reprocessing waste, it will leave behind glass bricks of deadly radionuclides that will need to be squirreled away for good. For the sake of the climate, Macfarlane says, "we don't really want to back away from the 20 percent nuclear power that we have in this country. We need all the help we can get."
All the evidence suggests that Obama agrees with Macfarlane: We need nuclear energy, even if Yucca Mountain isn't the best place to store waste. Obama's pick for Energy secretary, Lawrence Berkeley Lab Director Steven Chu, agrees with him, at least about the first part. Asked in 2005 whether nuclear should be part of the nation's energy mix, Chu answered without hesitation: "Absolutely."
But to maintain that energy mix will require replacing and retrofitting the country's aging fleet of reactors, and to support those efforts without the prospect of Yucca Mountain, the new administration will have to act quickly to locate a waste storage project. That won't be easy. Congress will need to throw out all previous laws regarding nuclear waste disposal and start the site selection process from scratch. The Energy Department will need to tear up decades of contracts with nuclear energy providers and negotiate new terms for temporary storage. Legislators would then set to work investigating sites: Morris, Ill., where the government once experimented with a nuclear waste reprocessing operation? Oak Ridge, Tenn., the once-secret hub of the Manhattan Project? Those states would undoubtedly mount opposition of their own, just as they did in the 1980s, when Congress picked Yucca Mountain out of nine possibilities, not least because the federal government already owns almost 90 percent of Nevada's land.
And not everyone in Nevada would be happy if Yucca Mountain failed. Under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, Nye County, Nev., expects to gain more than $10 million a year from the site, which is within its boundaries, along with a few new jobs. Kevin Phillips, the nuclear-besotted mayor of Caliente in neighboring Lincoln County, has pinned his small town's economic recovery on the construction of the railroad line that would form the final leg in the long transportation chain of waste to Yucca Mountain. "Caliente has always been a railroad town," he told government officials at a meeting in December. "To us it looks like renewal."
Official government agencies say little about whether the president-elect has the authority to stop Yucca Mountain. Energy Department spokesman Allen Benson refused to even speculate. Nick Shapiro wrote in an e-mail that, "We are confident that Dr. Chu shares (Obama's) goals (on Yucca Mountain) and that he will work with the President-elect and Congress to realize them." Sen. Reid, too, has claimed Chu as an ally. In August of 2008, however, Chu was among 10 scientists to sign a document recommending that the licensing review proceed, if only to give short-term confidence to the nuclear industry while scientists come up with better ideas.
Per Peterson argues that progress on the license shouldn't scare anyone; negative evaluation by regulators, in fact, might be the only way to mothball the proposed facility for good. "Anybody who really believes the site is unsuitable shouldn't have any worry about the outcome of an independent scientific review," Peterson says. If Obama interrupts that review to satisfy campaign promises, the president-elect is no better than a climate change-science denier, he says. "Politics needs to be informed by legitimate science."
Yet teasing politics out of nuclear waste disposal might well prove impossible. Yucca Mountain, as New York Times reporter Matthew Wald recently joked to Sproat, "was chosen by some of the best geologists in the U.S. Senate," many of whom were rushing home for Christmas break when they ruled. Even Sproat calls the site selection "a technically informed political decision." Yucca Mountain was born out of politics. It may die from them, too. But if it does, it will be a slow, complicated death.
On Nov. 6, two days after Obama's victory, Sproat went before a small audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., to talk about nuclear waste. The Las Vegas papers later quoted only a snippet of his remarks, in which he admitted that Obama could withdraw the license application; Congresswoman Berkley's office was running with that theme. But Sproat was not really so pessimistic. Halting the Yucca Mountain project "would basically cast the whole process and national strategy into a lot of confusion and uncertainty," he said. Whatever faith Nevada has invested in Obama, Sproat made clear that he has more in the future of their state's repository. And even if Sproat's out of his job by January, he's not giving it up.
"It's going to be licensed and built in my expected lifetime," he said. "I truly believe that. And that's one of the reasons I'm in this job — to make that happen."
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World Nuclear News
January 19, 2009
Transport plan puts Yucca back to 2020
Plans to transport used nuclear fuel to Yucca Mountain repository would not be enacted before 2020, according to a new filing by the US Department of Energy (DoE).
As part of its obligations under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, the DoE is responsible for developing and implementing a system to transport US used nuclear fuel and high-level waste (HLW) from where the material is generated or stored to the proposed Yucca Mountain repository.
The facility was supposed to be complete by 1998, but a multitude of delays have put the earliest operating date at 2017. Now the proposed start of transport to the site in 2020 indicates storage operations would be further delayed.
US nuclear utilities have paid over $25 billion in fees to the government's Nuclear Waste Fund for the DoE to build the Yucca Mountain. Because of the delay, the DoE is liable for nuclear power companies' additional storage costs for the period between 1998 and the start-up of a final storage facility. This liability is currently put at $11 billion, assuming a 2020 starting date.
Transport
The National Transportation Plan, released through the DoE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM), outlines the DoE's current strategy and planning for such a transportation system. It describes the elements of the national transportation system that OCRWM is developing, the phases of that development effort and how OCRWM will collaborate with stakeholders in the development and implementation of that system.
The types and amounts of materials planned to be transported to the repository, the plan says, include 63,000 tonnes of heavy metal (tHM) of commercial used nuclear fuel; 2333 tHM of DoE used fuel (from weapons production reactors, research reactors and certain other reactors) and fuel from US Navy nuclear-powered ships and submarines; and 4667 tHM of DoE HLW resulting from the reprocessing of commercial and DoE used fuel.
The DoE plans to rely on a combination of rail, truck and possibly barge to transport the used fuel and HLW to the repository from 76 sites across the USA. Most of the material will be transported by rail. Rail shipments will be the mode of choice for sites with rail access.
To support the development of the transportation system, DoE has two capital projects: the National Transportation Project and the Nevada Rail Infrastructure Project. The National Transportation Project has responsibility for the acquisition of rail and truck cask systems; design, acquisition, manufacture, testing and acceptance of rolling stock; and development of facilities to maintain and store casks and rolling stock. The Nevada Rail Infrastructure Project has responsibility for the design and construction of a new rail line and associated support facilities within the State of Nevada.
The OCRWM said the transportation system would be developed "in stages that are consistent with waste acceptance schedules and the startup and subsequent operation of the repository." It added, "The transportation infrastructure will continue to expand until full operating capability is achieved."
In a notice of the release of the plan published in the Federal Register, the DoE said that the OCRWM "does not expect actual shipments to begin before 2020, but has started the transportation planning process well in advance to ensure the concerns and input of state, tribal and local officials, as well as other involved and interested parties, are taken into account."
The public has until the end of April in which to submit comments on the plan.
The DoE said, "This plan will be updated as appropriate to reflect progress in the development and implementation of the transportation system, accommodate changes to the waste management system, and incorporate stakeholder and public comments." It added, "OCRWM also anticipates that detailed implementation plans will be developed in the future in collaboration with the stakeholder community."
The USA has been planning the repository for many years. Since 1977, when it ruled that used fuel was to be treated as waste and could not be reprocessed to recover uranium and reduce its volume, the government has had a responsibility to provide final disposal of the fuel in a deep geologic disposal facility. According to the 1982 legislation, the DoE was supposed to start accepting fuel from utilities early in 1998, but its failure to provide a repository on time has meant that the fuel has had to be stored at reactor sites.
Yucca Mountain was approved by Congress and President Bush in 2002 as the site for the USA's first permanent used fuel and HLW geologic repository. At the beginning of June 2008, the DoE submitted a licence application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for the construction of the repository.
The fate of the Yucca Mountain project would be with the next US President. Barack Obama has previously stated that he "believes that Yucca Mountain is not an option" for long-term management of wastes.
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Oil Drum
January 19, 2009
The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Paradigm
This is a guest post by Charles Barton. Charles is a retired counselor who writes the Energy from Thorium blog. His father Dr. Charles Barton, Senior, worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for 28 years. He was a reactor chemist, who worked on the Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) concept for about 2/3 of his ORNL career. Charles Barton, Junior gained his knowledge of the LFTR concept from his familiarity with his father's work. Neither his father nor Mr. Barton will gain financially from the advancement of this idea.
The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Paradigm
Excitement has recently been rising about the possibility of using thorium as a low-carbon way of generating vast amounts of electricity. The use of thorium as a nuclear fuel was extensively studied by Oak Ridge National Laboratory between 1950 and 1976, but was dropped, because unlike uranium-fueled Light Water Reactors (LWRs), it could not generate weapons' grade plutonium. Research on the possible use of thorium as a nuclear fuel has continued around the world since then. Famed Climate Scientist James Hanson, recently spoke of thorium's great promise in material that he submitted to President Elect Obama:
The Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) is a thorium reactor concept that uses a chemically-stable fluoride salt for the medium in which nuclear reactions take place. This fuel form yields flexibility of operation and eliminates the need to fabricate fuel elements. This feature solves most concerns that have prevented thorium from being used in solid-fueled reactors. The fluid fuel in LFTR is also easy to process and to separate useful fission products, both stable and radioactive. LFTR also has the potential to destroy existing nuclear waste.
(The) LFTR(s) operate at low pressure and high temperatures, unlike today’s LWRs. Operation at low pressures alleviates much of the accident risk with LWR. Higher temperatures enable more of the reactor heat to be converted to electricity (50% in LFTR vs 35% in LWR). (The) LFTR (has) the potential to be air-cooled and to use waste heat for desalinating water.
LFTR(s) are 100-300 times more fuel efficient than LWRs. In addition to solving the nuclear waste problem, they can operate for several centuries using only uranium and thorium that has already been mined. Thus they eliminate the criticism that mining for nuclear fuel will use fossil fuels and add to the greenhouse effect.
The Obama campaign, properly in my opinion, opposed the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository. Indeed, there is a far more effective way to use the $25 billion collected from utilities over the past 40 years to deal with waste disposal. This fund should be used to develop fast reactors that consume nuclear waste, and thorium reactors to prevent the creation of new long-lived nuclear waste. By law the federal government must take responsibility for existing spent nuclear fuel, so inaction is not an option. Accelerated development of fast and thorium reactors will allow the US to fulfill its obligations to dispose of the nuclear waste, and open up a source of carbon-free energy that can last centuries, even millennia.
It is commonly assumed that 4th generation nuclear power will not be ready before 2030. That is a safe assumption under "business-as-usual”. However, given high priority it is likely that it could be available sooner. It is specious to argue that R&D on 4th generation nuclear power does not deserve support because energy efficiency and renewable energies may be able to satisfy all United States electrical energy needs. Who stands ready to ensure that energy needs of China and India will be entirely met by efficiency and renewables?
_________
Development of the first large 4 generation nuclear plants may proceed most rapidly if carried out in China or India (or South Korea, which has a significant R&D program), with the full technical cooperation of the United States and/or Europe. Such cooperation would make it much easier to achieve agreements for reducing greenhouse gases.
Uranium-235 is the only fissionable material that is observed in usable amounts in nature. Thus pioneering nuclear physicist like Enrico Fermi and Eugene Wigner had no other choice of but to use U-235 to create their first chain reaction under the bleachers of the University of Chicago’s unused football field.
But Fermi and Wigner knew early on that once a reactor was built, it was possible to create other fissionable substances with the excess neutrons produced by a U-235 chain reaction. Thus if U-238 absorbed a neutron, it became the unstable U-239, which through a two stage nuclear process was transformed into plutonium-239. Plutonium-239 is very fissionable. The physicists also calculated that if thorium-232 was placed inside a reactor and bombarded with neutrons, it would be transformed into U-233. Their calculations also revealed that U-233 was not only fissionable, but had properties that made it in some respects a superior reactor fuel to U-235 and Pu-239.
During World War II, Fermi and Wigner, who were geniuses with active and far ranging minds, collected around themselves a group of brilliant scientists. Fermi, Wigner and their associates began to think about the potential uses of the new energy they were discovering--uses that would improve society rather than destroy it.
The capture of nuclear energy and its transformation into electrical energy became a central focus of discussions among early atomic scientists. They were not sure how long the uranium supply would last, so Fermi proposed that reactors be built that would breed plutonium from U-238. Wigner counted that thorium was several times as plentiful as uranium, and that it could produce an even better nuclear fuel than Pu-239.
The first nuclear era was dominated by uranium technology, a technology that was derived from military applications, and carried with it, rightly or wrongly, the taint of association with nuclear weapons. As it turned out, there was far more uranium available than Fermi or Wigner had originally feared, but other rationales propelled scientific interest in developing thorium fuel cycle reactors. First, Pu-239 was not a good fuel for most reactors. It failed to fission 1/3 of the time when it absorbed a neutron in a conventional Light Water Reactor (LWR). This led to the most difficult part of the problem of nuclear waste. Plutonium made excellent fuel for fast neutron reactors, but the fast neutron reactor that Fermi liked used dangerous liquid sodium as its coolant, and would pose a developmental challenge of enormous proportions.
Advocates of the thorium fuel cycle point to its numerous advantages over the uranium-plutonium fuel cycle. B.D. Kuz’minov, and V.N. Manokhin, of the Russian Federation State Science Centre, Institute of Physics and Power Engineering at Obninsk, write:
Adoption of the thorium fuel cycle would offer the following advantages:
- Increased nuclear fuel resources thanks to the production of 233U from 232Th;
- Significant reduction in demand for the enriched isotope 235U;
- Very low (compared with the uranium-plutonium fuel cycle) production of long-lived radiotoxic wastes, including transuraniums, plutonium and transplutoniums;
- Possibility of accelerating the burnup of plutonium without the need for recycling, i.e. rapid reduction of existing plutonium stocks;
- Higher fuel burnup than in the uranium-plutonium cycle;
- Low excess reactivity of the core with thorium-based fuel, and more favourable temperature and void reactivity coefficients; . . .
Thorium could replace U-238 in conventional LWRs, and could be used to breed new nuclear fuel in specially modified LWRs. This technology was successfully tested in the Shippingport reactor during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.
WASH-1097 remains a good source of information on the thorium fuel cycle. In fact, some major recent studies of the thorium fuel cycle rely heavily on WASH-1097. A recent IAEA report on Thorium appears to have been prepared without overt reliance on WASH-1097.
One of the first things physicists discovered about chain reactions was that slowing the neutrons involved in the process down, promoted the chain reaction. Kirk Sorensen discusses slow or thermal neutrons in one of his early posts.
Under low energy neutron conditions, Th232 can be efficiently converted to U233. The conversion process works like this. Th232 absorbs a neutron and emits a beta ray. A neutron switches to being a proton and the atom is transformed into Protactinium 233. After a period averaging a little less than a month, Pa 233 emits a second beta ray and is transformed into U233. U233 is fissionable, and is a very good reactor fuel. When a U233 atom encounters a low energy neutron, chances are 9 out of 10 that it will fission.
Since U233 produces an average of 2.4 neutrons every time it fissions, this means that each neutron that strikes U233 produces an average of 2.16 new neutrons. If you carefully control those neutrons, one neutron will continue the chain reaction. That leaves an average of 1.16 neutrons to generate new fuel.
Unfortunately the fuel generation process cannot work with 100% efficiency. The leftover U-234 that was produced when U-233 absorbed a neutron and did not fission will sometimes absorb another neutron and become U-235. Xenon-135, an isotope that that is often produced after U-233 splits, is far more likely to capture neutrons than U233 or Th232. This makes Xenon-135 a fission poison. Because Xenon in a reactor builds up during a chain reaction, it tends to slow the nuclear process as the chain reaction continues. The presence of Xenon creates a control problem inside a reactor. Xenon also steals neutrons needed for the generation of new fuel.
In conventional reactors that use solid fuel, Xenon is trapped inside the fuel, but in a fluid fuel Xenon is easy to remove because it is what is called a noble gas. A noble gas does not bond chemically with other substances, and can be bubbled out of fluids where it has been trapped. Getting Xenon 135 out of a reactor core makes generating new U233 from Th232 a whole lot easier.
It is possible to bring about 1.08 neutrons into the thorium change process for every U-233 atom that splits. This means that reactors that use a thorium fuel cycle are not going to produce an excess of U-233, but if carefully designed, they can produce enough U233 that burnt U233 can be easily replaced. Thus a well designed thorium cycle reactor will generate its own fuel indefinitely.
Research continues on a thorium cycle LWR fuel that would allow for the breeding of thorium in LWRs. There is however a problem which makes the LWR a less than ideal breeding environment for thorium. Elisabeth Huffer, Hervé Nifenecker, and Sylvain David note:
Fission products are much more efficient in poisoning slow neutron reactors than fast neutron reactors. Thus, to maintain a low doubling time, neutron capture in the fission products and other elements of the structure and coolant have to be minimized.
India has only a small uranium supply, but an enormous thorium reserve. Millions of tons of thorium ore lie on the surface of Indian beaches, waiting to be scooped up by front loaders and hauled away to potential thorium reactors for a song. (For those of you who are interested in the EROEI concept, the EROEI for the recovery of thorium from Indian beaches would be almost unbelievably high, and the energy extracted could power the Indian economy for thousands of years, potentially making India the richest nation in the world.)
India has for 50 years been following a plan to gradually switch from uranium to thorium cycle reactors. That plan is expected to finally come to fruition by the end of the next decade. At that point India will begin the rapid construction of a fleet of thorium fuel cycle reactors.
A commercial business, Thorium Power, Limited, continues research based on the Shippingport Reactor experiment. Thorium Power plans to offer a thorium cycle based nuclear fuel with a starting charge of enriched U-235 for modified LWRs. Thorium Power has sponsored Throium fuel research at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, and a Russian VVER has been used to conduct thorium cycle fuel experiments.
Research on thorium cycle liquid fuel reactors is ongoing world-wide. The best-known effort is being performed in Grenoble, France at the Laboratoire de Physique Subatomique et de Cosmologie. The Reactor Physics Group there is the only one in the world that has the resources and backing needed to actually develop a fluid core thorium cycle reactor that can be commercialized. In terms of organization size, the Thorium Molten Salt Reactor research group is much smaller than would be required to sustain a full-scale rapid development of thorium cycle reactor technology. The LPSC group thus is working in a business as usual time frame, and has no urgent motivation to do otherwise. After all, 80% of French electricity already comes from nuclear power plants.
Thorium fuel cycle research is also being carried on in the Netherlands, Japan, the Czech Republic. There is also presently a small-scale effort in the United States.
Thorium is extremely abundant in the earth's crust, which appears to contain somewhere around 120 trillion tons of it. In addition to 12% thorium monazite sands, found on Indian beaches and in other places, economically recoverable thorium is found virtually everywhere. For example, large-scale recovery of thorium from granite rocks is economically feasible with a very favorable EROEI. Significant recoverable amounts of thorium are present in mine tailings. These include the tailings of ancient tin mines, rare earth mine tailings, phosphate mine tailings and uranium mine tailings. In addition to the thorium present in mine tailings and in surface monazite sands, burning coal at the average 1000 MWe power plant produces about 13 tons of thorium per year. That thorium is recoverable from the power plant’s waste ash pile.
One ton of thorium will produce nearly 1 GW of electricity for a year in an efficient thorium cycle reactor. Thus current coal energy technology throws away over 10 times the energy it produces as electricity. This is not the result of poor thermodynamic efficiency; it is the result of a failure to recognize and use the energy value of thorium. The amount of thorium present in surface mining coal waste is enormous and would provide all the power human society needs for thousands of years, without resorting to any special mining for thorium, or the use of any other form or energy recovery.
Little attention is paid to the presence of thorium in mine tailings. In fact it would largely be passed over in silence except that radioactive gases from thorium are a health hazard for miners and ore processing workers.
Thorium is present in phosphate fertilizers because fertilizer manufactures do not wish to pay the recovery price prior to distribution. Gypsum present in phosphate tailings is unusable in construction because of the presence of radioactive gasses associated with the thorium that is also present in the gypsum. Finally organic farmers use phosphate tailings to enrich their soil. This has the unfortunate side effect of releasing thorium into surface and subsurface waters, as well as leading to the potential contamination of organic crops with thorium and its various radioactive daughter products. Thus the waste of thorium present in phosphate tailings has environmental consequences.
The world’s real thorium reserve is enormous, but also hugely underestimated. For example the USGS reports that the United States has a thorium reserve of 160,000 tons, with another 300,000 tons of possible thorium reserve. But Alex Gabbard estimates a reserve of over 300,000 tons of recoverable thorium in coal ash associated with power production in the United States alone.
In 1969, WASH-1097 noted a report that had presented to President Johnson that estimated the United States thorium reserve at 3 billion tons that could be recovered for the price of $500 a pound – perhaps $3000 today. Lest this sound like an enormous amount of money to pay for thorium, consider that one pound of thorium contains the energy equivalent of 20 tons of coal, which would sell on the spot market for in mid-January for around $1500. The price of coal has been somewhat depressed by the economic down turn. Last year coal sold on the spot market for as much as $300 a ton, yielding a price for 20 tons of coal of $6000. How long would 3 billion tons last the United States? If all of the energy used in the United States were derived from thorium for the next two million years, there would be still several hundred thousand years of thorium left that could be recovered for the equivalent of $3000 a pound in January 2009 dollars.
Nor would exhausting the USAEC’s 1969 estimated thorium reserve exhaust the American thorium supply. Even at average concentrations in the earth’s rocks, thorium can be recovered with a good EROEI, without making the cost of electricity impossibly expensive.
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KLAS-TV
January 17, 2009
Governor Proposes Big Cuts in State of the State Address
Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons said he was elected on a platform of no new taxes, and he intends to keep that pledge. In his State of the State address, Gibbons said he tried to spare the neediest Nevadans from cuts in social services, but he wants to slash the pay of teachers and other state employees.
Reaction from Democrats and educators was swift and angry.
What was heard and what was read were very different for the state of our state. Governor Gibbons made his case, but his budget tells a different story. A night for redemption and unity instead turned into another chance for partisan politics and legalese.
Gibbons painted the grim picture of the economic reality, "When the nation and, indeed the world, are in economic turmoil, Nevada is also shaken by the tremors."
Yet the speech and his plans don't match up in every case. Gibbons spoke strongly against higher taxes, "I will not raise taxes today on people and businesses that are already struggling to get through these times, jeopardizing our state's growth and prosperity tomorrow."
Yet, at no point did Gibbons mention he actually did propose a new tax increase, by including the 3-percent room tax bump approved by voters. To him, it's not a tax increase, "I'm glad you brought that up, because that is a proposal by the people of the State of Nevada. I will not stand in the way of the voices and the vote of the people of Nevada."
Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley and Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford blasted the governor's plans.
"This is not the answer. This budget is not the answer," said Horsford.
Nowhere in the speech did Gibbons talk about reducing the fight against Yucca Mountain -- millions of dollars lost. Also missing were the 375 layoffs for state employees. Gibbons wants to cut UNLV by 51-percent. Again, that was nowhere in the speech.
Not the way to go for Buckley, "The American reality today feels much different that the American dream."
Yet the controversial 6-percent pay cut for state workers was given center stage, "The largest budget item in our state is personnel costs. And we simply cannot afford to keep payroll costs at their current level, much less increase them."
Buckley and Horsford say the plan might be dead already.
"We've done it for far too long. Enough is enough. We need to stop and draw the line somewhere, and I just don't think that proposal is going to go very far," said Horsford.
As a solution, the Democrats want to take away tax breaks in many industries. That plan is still under wraps.
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KLAS-TV
January 16, 2009
State Leaders Stunned by Proposed Budget Cuts
A day after the State of the State address, agencies are reeling, state employees are worried and lawmakers are bracing for a big battle. But the governor's speech didn't include many of the controversial proposals people will be fighting over this session.
It's not that the governor was hiding the painful cuts. They were all right there for everyone to see in his budget, he just didn't want to talk about them.
The mood in Carson City wasn't positive. A lot of people are trying to stay upbeat and keep a light heart, but the cuts are so deep and the shortfall is so large, the sheer reality of it is sobering, tough stuff.
The governor talked tough on taxes and vowed once again not to raise them. Instead, he proposed the 3-percent room tax increase approved by voters. He said it was the will of the people, so he's off the hook.
He also spoke about avoiding massive layoffs, yet he did cut 375 jobs. Again, none of that was in his speech.
He wants to slash $7 million from the fight against Yucca Mountain, all but stopping the fight.
He included nearly $100 million in stimulus money from the federal government. It's a lofty hope, but that bill hasn't even passed Congress yet, a long way to go before it could ever make it back here to Nevada.
And finally, that massive 6-percent pay cut, called temporary, lawmakers on both sides say it has little chance of passing.
On the flight back from Reno, there was a large group of state workers from prisons and other departments. This was supposed to be their annual prison escape weekend -- a party in Las Vegas filled with scavenger hunts and strong beverages. Instead, it was a lot of talk and mixed emotions about the pay cuts.
"It is a hard thing to take, but it's still better than not having a job, and that's what's going to happen if they don't do this 6-percent," said part-time state worker Bennie McGuiness.
"We've done this trip to Vegas over Martin Luther King for 16 years and if we all, as state workers, have to take a 6-percent cut, probably won't be back next year," said Reva Roundtree with the prisons payroll department.
The women also mobbed State Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford after they got off the plane together. He and other Democrats have vowed to fight these cuts. The Legislative Session begins on February 2, 2009, but the Dems plan on tackling this budget next Thursday.
The governor's office says there are few other options; it's either make these cuts now or have major layoffs or worse.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
January 16, 2009
Reid, Ensign seek more Yucca cuts
By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Wednesday he has no hesitation about arranging a new round of deep budget cuts in the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project, even as they might displace more Nevadans during a recession.
"Yucca Mountain is not a jobs program," Reid said. "Yucca Mountain is a safety issue for the people of this country. We are not going to be deterred from where we think the Yucca Mountain waste should go. It should stay where it is," at power plants in other states.
"Yucca Mountain is a symbol of everything bad about government waste," Reid said in answer to questions at the end of a meeting among the five members of the state's congressional delegation, the first since Congress reconvened last week.
Reid and Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said they would renew efforts to obtain job displacement assistance for employees of the Department of Energy and its contractors who might be threatened in the coming months as Congress takes up bills expected to reduce spending on the Yucca project, which has offices in Las Vegas.
"There is going to have to be some mitigation for the employees," Ensign said. "You cannot just cut the thing off and lay people off. We will work on that."
On another Yucca Mountain topic, Ensign said fellow Republican leaders in Nevada who have been calling for the state to rethink its official opposition to the project were making "a big mistake."
"At this time when we have the best chance of killing Yucca Mountain once and for all, we should not be divided as a state," Ensign said. "The vast majority of people in the state are against Yucca Mountain. We are working in tireless fashion to kill this thing and we should not be showing any cracks in the armor."
About 60 members of the Nevada Republican Central Committee toured Yucca Mountain on Dec. 12. Afterwards several suggested the state should consider negotiating for government benefits in exchange for toning down its opposition.
--Contact Stephens Washington Bureau Chief Steve Tetreault at stetreault@ stephensmedia.com or 202-783-1760.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
January 16, 2009
Gibbons states his case for drastic cuts
Governor: Families, businesses 'stretched to their breaking point'
By Molly Ball and Ed Vogel
Las Vegas Review-Journal
CARSON CITY -- In a grim State of the State address, Gov. Jim Gibbons Thursday pitched his budget not as a set of drastic cuts, but as the state's only route back to prosperity, which he said could not be achieved through higher taxes.
"As governor, I must, first and foremost, look at the economic situation of our people in order to determine that our state government does not pile on and make our citizens' problems worse," Gibbons said. "Nevada government should meet the needs of the people; people should not meet the needs of Nevada government."
The Republican governor's biennial address, delivered in the Assembly chambers in the state Capitol, sought to explain the difficult choices presented in his two-year budget, also unveiled Thursday.
The budget relies on a mix of massive cuts, especially to higher education, and new sources of revenue, including a tax increase on hotel rooms, to cope with a huge drop in state coffers.
The cuts will be painful and controversial. But they are necessary, Gibbons said, to avoid higher taxes that would burden the population.
"Many of Nevada's families and businesses are being stretched to their breaking point and making remarkable sacrifices in the face of the most difficult economic downturn of our lifetimes," Gibbons said. "Ladies and gentlemen, I will not ask these businesses and individuals to pay more when they have less."
In a 55-minute speech heavy on anti-tax themes, Gibbons did not mention the $292 million tax increase contained in the budget. He made only a passing allusion to the tax money he would redirect from Clark and Washoe counties to help the state meet its obligations.
While defending the cuts in the budget, which Gibbons incorrectly described as $2.2 billion lower than his previous budget, the governor emphasized the state services that will be sustained. (The budget is $2.4 billion less than the amount that would have been required to maintain current service levels, but only $633 million less than the budget Gibbons signed in 2007.)
Gibbons stressed that the budget he is presenting protects property tax rebates for seniors, juvenile justice and child welfare programs, the Millennium Scholarship, and all-day kindergarten in at-risk schools.
The amount cut from the state's higher education system -- $473 million, including salaries and benefits -- "will bring challenges to the system," Gibbons said. But 14 percent of the state's budget still would go to higher education under his proposal, he said, while the national average is 11 percent.
DEMOCRATIC RESPONSE
Democrats who control the state Legislature reacted angrily to Gibbons' proposals and vowed to chart a different course to craft a final state budget during the legislative session that begins Feb. 2.
In her televised response to Gibbons' speech, Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas, called the proposed cuts "drastic."
In an economy like today's, she said, "We must focus on preserving our state's services that are truly necessary."
Buckley said Gibbons is talking about cutting per-pupil spending for grade-school students by 7 percent; potentially cutting money to the state's two major universities, UNLV and UNR, by half; cutting retired teachers off health insurance; and eliminating the state office that fights the proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.
Not all those changes were specified in the budget information released by Gibbons Thursday; lawmakers said the figures came from the Legislature's fiscal analysts.
"Is this the direction we want to go as a state?" Buckley asked. "... Does it make sense to cut education further? Does it make sense to close the doors of opportunity for our children to attend our universities? Do we want to overcrowd our emergency rooms with the mentally ill again because we shut mental health clinics?"
Most legislative observers take for granted that the Legislature will refuse to go along with most of the cuts the governor proposed and will, in the end, look for new tax revenue to support a bigger budget.
Buckley, who is thought to be a potential gubernatorial contender in 2010, didn't go into specifics of how she would prevent "Draconian cuts to education and public safety," but she said legislators now will begin "a thorough, detailed review" of Gibbons' proposals and come up with better ideas.
Stark realities
Gibbons' speech Thursday gave a rundown of the stark realities that led to this situation. Tourism has declined as people have cut back discretionary spending. The credit crisis has halted construction projects. Mining of copper and other materials has even declined, Gibbons claimed, though he did not mention that the price of gold, the No. 1 product of Nevada mines, has climbed.
Unemployment in Nevada, once lower than the rest of the country, has doubled in the last year and is now above the national average. Last year, 42,000 Nevadans lost jobs, while others lost wages, hours and benefits.
Buckley and others say the fiscal crisis the recession has created for the state proves that the whole tax structure Nevada relies on -- which includes no across-the-board individual or business income taxes -- needs to be overhauled to provide more stability.
Gibbons explicitly rejected that argument.
"Our existing tax system brought us record job growth and prosperity for decades," he said. "And quite frankly, I have yet to see an example of any state that has a tax system that brings growth during good times and remains stable during downturns."
Gibbons' main argument against tax reform was that any new taxes would hurt the already wounded economy further.
In explaining his proposed 6 percent cut in state salaries, Gibbons said it was a way to avoid "massive layoffs." Budget Director Andrew Clinger said earlier that without the cut, 9,000 to 11,000 state workers might have been let go.
Gibbons noted that he is taking the same salary cut and promised to restore salary levels when possible.
In addition to the Spending and Government Efficiency, or SAGE, Commission that Gibbons created to recommend ways to trim state government, he said he will propose a permanent Sunset Commission to continually examine the use of government funds.
The governor noted that the state has faced "major economic challenges" in the past, though the examples he cited would be little comfort to anyone born since the 1930s.
"Nevada faced worse problems during the mining depression of the 1880s and '90s and during the Great Depression," Gibbons said.
During his speech, it was mostly Republican lawmakers who applauded. The Assembly Republicans, who make up just 14 of the lower chamber's 42 members, issued a statement saying they "appreciate that the Governor was able to develop a balanced budget in these very difficult times for our state."
Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford, D-Las Vegas, said it was "unfathomable" that Gibbons is proposing such extreme higher education cuts.
In a news conference following the State of the State address, Horsford and Buckley said legislators did not plan to abide by much of the governor's proposed financial framework.
"Mark my words, there will be significant changes," Buckley said.
Legislators will begin next Thursday to review Gibbons' budget proposals and set spending priorities. Buckley said they hope by May 1 to have determined where changes can be made and how much revenue Nevada needs.
Gibbons, in a news conference later, disputed Democrats' claim that his budget would eliminate the state agency devoted to fighting Yucca Mountain. Though its staff would be reduced to two and transferred into Gibbons' office in the Capitol, the Nuclear Projects Agency would still get $6.9 million per year, Gibbons said.
Asked why he is backing the room tax increase when he says taxes hurt the economy, Gibbons said he was following the wishes of the people of Clark and Washoe counties, who approved such an increase in an advisory question on the November election ballot.
Senate Minority Leader Bill Raggio, R-Reno, the state's longest-serving lawmaker and a longtime advocate of the state's higher education system, did not attend the State of the State as his wife was undergoing surgery in Las Vegas.
"I am not committing to any of these deep cuts," said Raggio, who watched the speech on television. "The salary cuts will be difficult to get any support for."
--Contact reporter Molly Ball at mball@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2919. Contact Capital Bureau Chief Ed Vogel at evogel@reviewjournal.com or 775-687-3901
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
January 16, 2009
STATE OF THE STATE: Education takes hit in Gibbons' budget proposal
6 percent pay cut for state workers also part of plan
By Molly Ball, Ed Vogel and Richard Lake
Las Vegas Review-Journal
CARSON CITY -- Higher education faced the biggest cuts Thursday in Gov. Jim Gibbons' budget proposal, which sought to bridge a huge revenue gap in the coming two years.
Of the $633 million Gibbons proposed cutting from the level budgeted in the previous two-year cycle, $473 million, 75 percent, was to come from the university system.
"I would blow my brains out if I thought this was going through," said Jim Rogers, the state higher education system's outspoken chancellor.
As expected, the governor's budget also included a 6 percent cut in state worker salaries, including those of teachers, and an increase of 3 percentage points in the hotel room tax in Clark and Washoe counties.
Gibbons' two-year general budget plan of $6.2 billion is about 9 percent less than the $6.8 billion budget approved two years ago by the Legislature. That spending never materialized, however, as tax revenues have declined because of the poor economy, including a 9.1 percent projected tax loss during the current year.
The governor and legislators cut general fund spending by $1.5 billion during 2008.
This is the first time in more than three decades that a proposed operating budget hasn't been larger than the previous biennium's, with gains in recent years averaging 15 to 20 percent.
Gibbons' chief of staff, Josh Hicks, said the governor had no choice at a time when Nevada tax revenue has been shrinking. Nevada faces one of the severest revenue shortfalls among the 50 states, he said.
To cover an estimated $2.3 billion gap between the amount of money needed to run state government at its current level and the amount of revenue coming in, Gibbons also proposes cutting state worker health insurance benefits, taking $79 million in tax money from Clark and Washoe county governments and closing rural health clinics.
His budget proposal relies on $108 million the state hopes will be coming from a federal economic stimulus bill that has not yet passed in Congress.
BIG HIT, BIG SURPRISE
But the biggest surprise, in the budget plan was the $473 million higher education cut. While $69 million was to come from salary cuts, and an additional $28 million from the health benefit reduction, the governor's plan didn't specify how the other $376 million would be trimmed from the university and college system.
The medical school, the law school, the dental school, the state college system, the Desert Research Institute, athletics, student services, graduate assistants and scholarships all could be scuttled, and the savings still wouldn't add up to $473 million, according to figures in the university system's operating budget.
The $473 million represents a decrease of more than one-third from the amount budgeted for higher education in the previous biennial budget.
"This is wrong. It is fundamentally wrong," said Michael Wixom, chairman of the Board of Regents. "It is wrong for my children. It is wrong for my grandchildren. It is wrong for the future of this state. It is wrong for the people of this state. It is wrong. It is wrong on every possible level."
Wixom, a Republican, is normally soft-spoken and calm. But he was clearly agitated Thursday, saying the proposed cuts would require "dismantling the entire system."
The massive scale of the proposed cuts took nearly everyone by surprise. Gibbons earlier had asked all state agencies to submit budgets with 14 percent cuts.
As part of efforts to cut costs, UNLV announced Thursday that it is offering buyouts to its classified staff, a move similar to buyouts offered to professional staff last year. About 140 people are eligible.
"I'm in a state of shock. The figure is so large," Nasser Daneshvary, a UNLV professor of economics and the president of the faculty senate, said of Gibbons' proposed budget.
Daneshvary said such devastating cuts would drive away faculty, from the young and promising to the old and established.
Rogers, who has often feuded publicly with the governor over higher education funding, said he does not think the Legislature will support Gibbons' plan. The chancellor has letters from 54 of the 63 legislators promising support for higher education, he said.
"The governor is irrelevant," Rogers said.
Legislators will not accept such drastic cuts, he said.
Hicks said Gibbons thinks the higher education system should be more self-funding. The regents can increase tuition if they want more money, he said.
PAY CUTS VERSUS LAYOFFS
To keep general fund services at the levels anticipated two years ago, the state would need $8 billion in revenue, said Budget Director Andrew Clinger, about one-third more than the $5.8 billion that is available, according to the latest projections.
The 6 percent pay cut that Gibbons is proposing for state employees comes on top of the elimination of merit and step increases. Public employee and teacher unions have objected to those proposals and contend they would not be legal because they would violate negotiated contracts.
Clark County Schools Superintendent Walt Rulffes thinks the School District would not be in the legal position to cut employees' salaries by 6 percent. The salary cuts, in essence, are a cut in services, Rulffes said.
"It has to come out of programs," he said.
Although the superintendent said the proposed salary cuts probably were unlawful, he also said he has fought too hard to increase teachers' pay to see it cut.
"It's an outrageous proposal," Rulffes said. "I will fight to maintain teachers' salaries. We certainly don't want to be stepping backwards now.
"We look now to the Legislature to right this proposal by the governor. I think the Legislature will head it off."
Gibbons has said the pay cut is an alternative to massive layoffs. Even with the pay reductions, 375 state employees stand to lose their jobs.
Under the proposed cut in health benefits, the state would pay 75 percent of its employees' premiums, down from 90 percent, Clinger said.
Retired state employees would see their health care subsidy reduced, and it would be terminated when they reach age 65.
Meanwhile, Gibbons plans to introduce a bill providing that employees hired after July 1 of this year would not participate in the Public Employees Retirement System, the state's pension plan.
Hicks said that a typical state worker makes about $50,000 per year. Under the budget plan, that typical employee would lose $3,000 in pay, while paying more than $1,000 a year more for health insurance.
CULTURE, MENTAL HEALTH, PRISON CUTS
The only agency hit harder, proportionally, than the higher education system under Gibbons' plan is the Department of Cultural Affairs, slated for a nearly 40 percent cut. Agency officials said that would require museums to cut operations to four days a week.
Another agency Gibbons proposes cutting back is the Nuclear Projects Agency, which recently has come under fire because former director Bob Loux gave employees and himself unauthorized salary increases.
Gibbons' plan calls for cutting the five-member office to two and putting those employees within the governor's office in the Capitol.
Gibbons' proposals would see the closure of eight mental health clinics out of 20 in rural counties and the Nevada State Prison. The proposals would cap at 25,000 the number of children enrolled in Nevada Check Up, which provides health care for poor children.
Mike Willden, director of the state Department of Health and Human Services, estimated that as many as 55,000 children in Nevada are eligible for the program.
REVENUE SOLUTIONS
Although cuts cover most of the budget gap, part of it is made up in revenue increases. Gibbons has long campaigned on his opposition to new taxes, but he has said he makes an exception for increases supported by voters.
Thus, Gibbons' budget includes a tax increase that would raise an estimated $292 million over the biennium. The 3-point increase in the hotel room tax was approved in November by Clark and Washoe county voters.
Gibbons also proposes requiring casinos to pay taxes up front on the markers they issue, which would generate an estimated $31 million. Currently, the tax is not paid until the markers are repaid.
PROPOSAL REACTION
Another source of revenue in Gibbons' proposals, the $79 million in property tax revenue he plans to take away from Clark and Washoe, already was drawing local officials' wrath Thursday.
Clark County Commission Chairman Rory Reid, a Democrat who is considering running against Gibbons in 2010, issued a statement calling the plan "shortsighted and irresponsible."
"Clark County is a partner with the state in providing services to the citizens most in need, whether they are jobless, homeless, or abused and neglected," Reid said. "The governor is simply avoiding making the tough decisions. Instead, he is trying to pass these difficult choices on to local governments."
Commissioner Lawrence Weekly said he worried that diverting money from the general fund could hurt those who need the county's services the most. But he also thinks the county should help the financially strapped state any way it can.
"It's our state, and we all need to do whatever we can to help our state," Weekly said. "Everybody is going to have to pitch in."
Commissioner Tom Collins argued that the state is trying to have it both ways by limiting the county's property taxes and then siphoning its revenue.
"If the Legislature and state will remove the cap on property taxes, I will share with them," Collins said. "They can't tie our hands and come dipping in the pot."
Dennis Mallory, chief of staff of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 4041, called the cuts to state workers crippling and said they would affect everyone who does business with the state, not just employees and their families.
"We can't provide services when our caseloads are twice as large as before," Mallory said. "What are our employees going to do? Ask for public assistance? I guess the alternative is we work until we die."
--Review-Journal writers James Haug and Scott Wyland contributed to this report. Contact reporter Molly Ball at mball@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2919. Contact Capital Bureau Chief Ed Vogel at evogel@reviewjournal.com or 775-687-3901. Contact reporter Richard Lake at rlake@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0307.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
January 16, 2009
Editorial: State must not fund defense of Loux
Why should taxpayers be on the hook for more money?
In September, Bob Loux, executive director of the state's Nuclear Waste Project Office -- the outfit charged with blocking federal plans to build a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain -- resigned from office.
Mr. Loux quit after it turned out he'd overspent his state-approved budget by awarding unauthorized 16 percent raises to himself and members of his staff -- raises that also had the effect of increasing the state pensions they could expect.
The Associated Press reported that on Sept. 9, Mr. Loux "apologized to the lawmakers' Interim Finance Committee for giving himself and other agency staffers unauthorized pay increases of up to 16 percent."
Mr. Loux "didn't report the pay increases to the governor and instead signed the paperwork needed to authorize the higher pay," The AP reported.
According to statute, "It is unlawful for any state officer, commissioner, head of any state department or other employee, whether elected or appointed, to expend more money than the sum specifically appropriated by law for any such office, commission or department. ... Every officer of the State of Nevada, elective or appointive, who violates any of the provisions of this section shall be guilty of malfeasance in office."
Mr. Loux admitted to the finance committee that he both overspent his budget and approved the unauthorized pay increases. "I take full responsibility for all of these errors," Mr. Loux said. "They were done by me."
Four months later -- this past Tuesday -- Republican Gov. Jim Gibbons and Democratic state Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto clashed on the issue of whether Ms. Cortez Masto's office should pick up the costs ($20,000, to date) for a private attorney to represent Mr. Loux before the state Ethics Commission.
Ms. Masto said state law requires her office to provide the representation for a state department head -- even a former department head -- unless there's a clear finding that Mr. Loux shouldn't enjoy that benefit. Gov. Gibbons said he believes the legal assistance should be withdrawn.
The contrast with Ms. Cortez Masto's treatment of Republican Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki may be instructive. Mr. Krolicki is also charged with having improperly handled state funds -- for a state college scholarship program -- while Mr. Krolicki served as state treasurer. None of the scholarship money actually went missing -- not a penny -- and no one has charged Mr. Krolicki (unlike Mr. Loux) with trying to enrich himself with those funds. Yet Ms. Masto is prosecuting Mr. Krolicki at the same time she proposes financing Mr. Loux's defense.
The provision for legal representation funded by the attorney general's office is supposed to protect executive officers from being personally bankrupted by lawsuits challenging actions they took in the normal conduct of their duties.
But was Mr. Loux's hijacking of extra taxpayer money to give himself and his buddies unauthorized raises during a recession part of the "normal conduct of Mr. Loux's duties"?
Mr. Loux's apology may fall short of a guilty plea to criminality, but if anything, Ms. Cortez Masto's office should be investigating Mr. Loux's actions, not defending him.
Why should the taxpayers be funding the defense of a man who has already admitted mis-allocating taxpayer dollars to his own benefit?
The governor has this one right.
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Nevada Appeal
January 16, 2009
STATE: Democrats to review budget thoroughly
By Geoff Dornan
Nevada Appeal Capitol Bureau
Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas, Thursday promised a thorough review of the real impacts of budget cuts proposed by Gov. Jim Gibbons.
She said that review and analysis would “examine our spending priorities and decide what we cannot cut without devastating impacts on the lives of Nevadans.”
She said lawmakers will “adjust revenue to fund essential services,” including by re-evaluating tax incentives that have been given to certain businesses for years “and end those that do not make sense.”
Buckley promised an overhaul of the state’s financial structure “so that we are not considering draconian cuts to education and public safety every time the economy tanks.”
She said lawmakers “will commit ourselves to finding meaningful solutions that, at the very least, do not send our state careening backwards and, at best, create a road map for future stability and progress.”
She was joined by Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford, D-Las Vegas, who said the state must balance its budget, but in a way that protects critical services.
“This budget is not the answer,” he said. “We need solutions that will work for the state of Nevada.”
He said he was disappointed at the lack of detail in the speech.
Buckley charged that the hidden parts of the budget include a 7 percent cut in public school funding, serious cuts in payments to doctors and hospitals, cuts to mental health clinics and cutting off retired teachers and state employees from health insurance subsidies. The cuts to hospital reimbursement rates, she said, could force two rural hospitals to close.
She protested the reduction of staff in the Nuclear Projects office from eight to two and the elimination of legal defense funding just as the federal government begins the licensing process for Yucca Mountain.
But Gibbons said after his speech that there is $6.9 million in legal defense funding in each year of his budget.
“We are not giving up the fight against Yucca Mountain,” he said.
Democrats agreed with Chancellor Jim Rogers that the proposed 36 percent cuts to higher education would destroy the system. Buckley said those cuts aren’t across the board, that community college campuses are protected.
She said that means the cut at UNLV would be 52 percent of the campus general fund budget and the cut at UNR 47 percent.
Both said at that point the state might just as well shut the schools.
The Republican Caucus, on the other hand, issued a statement supporting the governor’s tough stance on raising taxes while saying they were pleased Health and Human Services cuts were avoided and that K-12 education funding was reduced only a bit.
Buckley charged that while per-pupil funding was reduced only slightly, other cuts to public school budgets result in more than $300 million in overall reductions, which she said is unacceptable.
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Reno Gazette-Journal
January 16, 2009
Gibbons proposes massive cuts in education to balance lean budget
By Anjeanette Damon
adamon@rgj.com
In his second State of the State address, Gov. Jim Gibbons sought Thursday to build the case against raising taxes in a severe economic downturn, proposing instead to dramatically cut higher education and reduce pay for teachers and state workers.
Gibbons' $6.2 billion proposed budget is $630 million less than the one he put forward two years ago when the economy was sound. But he managed to piece together nearly $500 billion in new revenue by taking money from the state's two largest counties and including a voter-approved room tax increase in his budget.
In his nearly hourlong speech, Gibbons' put forward only one new proposal: a Sunset Commission to ferret out duplication in government services.
Instead, he devoted much of his address to detailing the travails of the struggling state economy and arguing against solving the budget problem with new taxes not approved by voters.
"The simple fact is that higher taxes kill economic growth and job creation," Gibbons said.
He only briefly described the substantial cuts he proposes for government services.
"I believe this budget provides a fair and responsible solution that balances the need to provide vital services with the need to reduce our spending to the level our state can afford," Gibbons said.
Within minutes of his conclusion, Democratic legislative leaders declared his budget is "not the answer" for the state's future and vowed to substantially rework it when lawmakers convene next month.
"Mark my words, there will be significant changes," Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas, said after accusing Gibbons of failing to be upfront about the severity of the cuts he is proposing.
Democrats said they would block such substantial cuts to higher education and the salary cuts.
"We might just as well close the campuses down," Buckley said of Gibbons' proposed cuts to the university system.
Republicans, now in the minority in both houses, gave Gibbons' speech a somewhat lukewarm reception, calling his budget a good starting point.
"I thought he made the case for keeping people employed," said state Sen. Randolph Townsend, R-Reno. "The cuts, of course, are dramatic. They affect almost every element of state government, but I'm not sure what choice he would have had without a $2 billion tax increase.
"At the end of the day, you're still going to have a huge gap, which means at that point, we're going to have to look at all options."
Assembly Republicans said they were pleased Gibbons did not make deeper cuts to the social safety net or kindergarten through 12th-grade education.
In cutting state spending, Gibbons said he put a priority on protecting the state's needy from diminished services and keeping the state's kindergarten through 12th-grade education system strong.
"I will not unfairly balance this budget on the backs of those in our society who can least afford to shoulder the burden," he said.
Gibbons' budget proposes about a 4 percent increase in the state's largest department, Health and Human Services, which spends heavily on the state's social safety net.
But key programs for the poor, such as health insurance for low-income children, have been cut or capped and Medicaid payments to hospitals would be 10 percent lower than two years ago.
Democrats contend the reduced Medicaid payments would force at least two rural hospitals to close.
Gibbons' budget also relies on $109 million of federal stimulus funds that might not arrive.
In addition to cutting state workers' and teachers' salaries, Gibbons would require them to pay a larger share of their insurance premiums and lose some retirement benefits.
The move would help him avoid mass layoffs, he said.
The budget would reduce the state work force by about
6 percent, including about 375 layoffs, and eliminate 1,052 vacant positions.
In his speech, Gibbons offered little defense for cutting more than a third of the university system's budget, his plan's most dramatic cut, saying only that taxpayers would continue to subsidize a slightly higher percentage of the university funding than the national average.
Gibbons refuted Democrats' contention that he is abandoning the state's fight against Yucca Mountain by gutting the office in charge of coordinating it and declining the attorney general's request for legal funding. He said he still has $7 million in the budget to fight the nuclear waste dump.
Gibbons scoffed at the idea of being able to create a tax structure that remains stable during economic downturns, the centerpiece of Buckley's upcoming legislative agenda.
"For those who suggest that we need a new tax system, I would ask them to show me a state that has what some call a more dependable, diversified tax system and that is not having the same kinds of revenue problems that we have," he said.
But state Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford, D-Las Vegas, said Gibbons never declared Nevada's tax structure to be sound.
"There's a lot of reading between the lines in his speech," he said.
With the dire state of the Nevada economy dominating much of his speech, Gibbons tried to end on a positive note, saying the state's renewable energy potential could help see it out of the recession.
"Northern Nevada is our geothermal capital and southern Nevada is our solar capital and everywhere in between we can harness our wind resources," he said. "Our opportunities in this area are endless."
The language marked a turn from his last speech, which emphasized coal more than renewable energy.
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Sarasota Herald-Tribune
January 16, 2009
Politics has delayed plans for nuclear waste disposal
A. David Rossin
Regarding the Herald-Tribune editorial of Dec. 29, "Nuclear power's missing link": Without a doubt, nuclear waste disposal is the political Achilles heel of nuclear power.
The editorial says we have no "approved site" and that progress is "virtually paralyzed." In fact, progress over the last few years has been significant. The formal application for a license to operate the Yucca Mountain, Nevada, repository was submitted in December and accepted for review. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission estimates three years of study and public hearings before the application can officially be approved.
California and Nevada have filed not challenges, as the editorial said, but contentions. Most are old, familiar and standard for such tactics. As the editorial notes, they may not stop Yucca Mountain, but are likely to slow its already glacial pace. And that, of course, plus getting media attention, is their purpose.
The editorial charges, "It is foolhardy to push farther out on a limb without a viable strategy to permanently store or reduce the waste." The strategy has been established for decades, but neither the nuclear industry nor the Herald-Tribune Editorial Board will know for sure if it is viable until the NRC review is completed.
Plans to permanently store and reduce the waste were developed before the first commercial nuclear power plants were licensed to operate (1960). Extensive research on the design requirements for storage facilities was part of every year's Atomic Energy Commission budget. Congress appropriated the funds and approved the programs. Several proposed sites had the characteristics necessary for safe permanent storage. Electricity ratepayers started paying one-tenth of a cent for every nuclear kilowatt-hour we used.
Nuclear power became a litmus test for environmental activists. Some said they were worried about waste, but they would not take the time to study the evidence or dare to believe the scientists and engineers who were working on it.
Jimmy Carter, responding to entreaties of activists, issued a policy statement on April 7, 1977, less than 100 days in office. It killed plans to reprocess used nuclear fuel, reclaim the plutonium which could be recycled into new fuel and package the radioactive waste for permanent disposal.
The Carter people demanded that used fuel assemblies be buried permanently. Not only would that throw away a huge supply of fuel, but the plutonium left in the fuel has a half-life of 24,000 years. As a radiation threat, plutonium is trivial. Its radiation is stopped by a sheet of paper. At no point in the safety design of the repository does either the radiation or the heat from plutonium have the slightest impact.
But in public relations, plutonium (called the most toxic material known to man, though it is not) became a hot-button issue, and the repository suddenly had to be guaranteed for 10,000 years.
Finally, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982. That set the specific course and limited the options for nuclear designers. Yucca Mountain was selected. The nearest human settlement is Pahrump, about 60 miles away (which at the time had a gas station, a 7-11, a motel with a restaurant and slot machines and a brothel in a trailer).
Nevada had been supported heavily by government spending on nuclear weapons development and testing programs. More than 100 atomic bombs had been exploded below the desert sands, to say nothing of the many nuclear tests in the Nevada skies before atmospheric tests were banned by President Kennedy. Nevadans were not babes in the woods.
Sen. Harry Reid and several other Nevada politicians built their careers on opposing Yucca Mountain. But now is the time that President-elect Ba-rack Obama is asking us all, as Kennedy did, to put our country first, not our selfish political issues. On Jan. 7, Reid met with Obama and then announced that the waste plan will be cut significantly in the 2009 budget and the request for 2010 will contain "little if anything at all."
France's successful nuclear program is based on the American policy before Carter. When Carter told the premier of France that he was going to ban the reprocessing of used nuclear fuel in the U. S., France tripled the planned size of its reprocessing facility. It operates safely and cleanly today.
The U. S., which once led the world in nuclear power development, is a trailing outsider. The technology is the same. The difference comes from people and political opportunism instead of leadership.
--A. David Rossin is a former assistant secretary for nuclear energy at the U.S. Department of Energy. He is now a consultant on nuclear power safety, materials, energy policy and nonproliferation. He lives in University Park.
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NRC
January 16, 2009
NRC Creates Three Boards to Consider Contentions in Yucca Mountain Hearing
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel has established three boards to consider admissibility of contentions in the adjudicatory hearing over the geologic high-level nuclear waste repository proposed for Yucca Mountain, Nev.
Each board consists of three judges, two with legal expertise and one with technical expertise. Combined, the boards will consider and rule upon the admissibility of approximately 320 proposed contentions filed by 12 petitioners. These boards will consider only the standing of the petitioners and the admissibility of the contentions; additional boards will be established to rule on any contentions that are admitted for a hearing.
Procedures for the standing and admissibility phase of the hearing were set out in an ASLB order issued today. Petitioners will file their pleadings, responses and replies with all three boards, which will then allocate the contentions for consideration. The boards expect to hold oral arguments on standing and admissibility sometime this spring at the NRC’s Las Vegas Hearing Facility.
The Department of Energy submitted its application for the Yucca Mountain repository on June 3, 2008. The NRC staff docketed the application Sept. 8. A notice of opportunity to request a hearing was published in the Federal Register on Oct. 22, with petitions filed in December.
Petitioners include the states of Nevada and California, several Nevada counties, and Native American tribal groups. Two other Nevada counties filed requests to participate as interested government bodies.
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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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