Yucca Mountain News Clips
Friday, March 13, 2009
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KXNT
March 12, 2009

Reid, Ensign Propose Nuke Waste Panel

Nevada Senators Harry Reid and John Ensign have introduced a bill to establish a national commission on nuclear waste management. The bill comes after the Obama Administration recently said that Nevada's Yucca Mountain is no longer a viable option for storing the nation's nuclear waste and spent fuel. Under the legislation, the commission will have two years to study alternative methods of dealing with nuclear waste, and report back to Congress at the end of that period.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
March 12, 2009

Chu promises to develop Yucca alternative quickly

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Wednesday that he expects to move quickly to develop an alternative to nuclear waste storage at Yucca Mountain, with plans to convene a special commission that would report back to him by year's end.

Chu said a blue ribbon panel should be in place "in less than a month" as he is "beginning to have discussions with people and recommendations as to who should be on it."

At a hearing of the Senate Budget Committee, Chu said the commission will examine advances in nuclear waste management that have occurred over the years that the Department of Energy has focused on the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada.

Their commission's goal will be to recommend to President Barack Obama a new strategy for managing thousands of tons of highly radioactive spent fuel now stored at commercial power plants.

It also will be charged with recommending how to handle forms of nuclear waste generated by the government's weapons programs over the years and spent fuel from naval reactors.

The commission "ideally would come to me with a report this year and then we will take it from there," Chu said after the hearing.

In talking to reporters, Chu defended the Obama administration's decision to continue moving forward with the DOE's construction license application for Yucca Mountain even as the president has declared the site unsuitable.

Chu said it is "prudent" for the Energy Department to continue responding to an ongoing Nuclear Regulatory Commission's license review, particularly on the 1 million year radiation safety standards that have caused much debate among scientists and regulators.

"It would be very important to understand just from that point alone what it is the regulatory agency will demand of the Department of Energy," he said.

Chu would not say whether he would support storing nuclear waste underground at a site other than Yucca Mountain, saying he did not want to get in front of the blue ribbon commission.

He also did not say whether the commission would be asked to examine the current Yucca Mountain program, or whether the site could play a role in waste reprocessing or other options.

The energy secretary moved to respond to the most ardent Yucca Mountain critics who say they fear the Energy Department's repository effort cannot be declared truly ended until the license application is withdrawn.

"Going back to what the president has said, and I support, Yucca Mountain is not on the table," Chu said.

As Obama had declared he plans to cut funding dramatically for the Yucca Mountain repository, Chu in appearances before Congress this month has been pressured to discuss what the administration has in mind as a fallback.

Chu has indicated the study commission would play a big role in coming up with a Plan B, but he could not say Wednesday how big the panel would be or who might serve on it.

Several Republicans on the budget committee urged Chu to act quickly or risk discouraging the growth of nuclear power as a part of the nation's energy portfolio.

"Although I am very discouraged with the decision we have seen (on Yucca Mountain), we need to be very aggressive in finding a path forward," said Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho.

Likewise, Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., said the lack of a waste disposal plan could hamper licensing of new nuclear power plants.

"I don't want to debate Yucca because I accept the fact that Yucca may not be viable," Gregg said.

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

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Las Vegas SUN
March 12, 2009

Lawmakers push alternative to Yucca Mtn

The Associated Press

With the federal government backing away from a nuclear waste dump in Nevada, the state's two senators say a national commission should be created that would study alternatives to Yucca Mountain.

The senators, Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid and Republican John Ensign, say the commission would have two years to examine alternatives for long-term nuclear waste disposal. The two introduced a bill Thursday that would create such a commission.

The commission will consider having the federal government take title to nuclear waste, but another option will be chartering a federal corporation to manage it. The trade group representing the nuclear industry also has argued for a new study panel but has warned that unilaterally abandoning the Yucca Mountain project would lead to lawsuits.

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Federal Times
March 12, 2009

Energy secretary affirms commitment to nuclear power

By Tim Kauffman

Energy Secretary Steven Chu told lawmakers Wednesday that the Obama administration is committed to using every energy source at its disposal, including nuclear power, to help reduce carbon emissions and wean the nation off foreign sources of oil.

Members of the Senate Budget Committee questioned Chu about the administration’s commitment to expanding nuclear energy, citing a lack of affirmative statements from President Barack Obama and other administration officials. In addition, $50 billion in loans to fund nuclear power plants was stripped from the stimulus package Congress passed last month, raising additional concerns from lawmakers.

But Chu largely allayed those concerns, stating unequivocally that the administration supports building additional power plants to generate additional nuclear energy. Nuclear power accounts for 20 percent of the energy used in the U.S.

“I believe that nuclear power is an essential part of our energy mix,” Chu said.

Thirty-one power plants are pending construction in the U.S. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which issues the licenses for new plants, is working to approve two generic designs for new plants that should help expedite the licensing of site-specific plants, Chu said.

In addition, Chu said he is assembling a blue-ribbon panel to develop a long-range strategy for disposing of radioactive waste generated from nuclear plants. The Obama administration’s 2010 budget cuts funding for a repository at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.

Pending a permanent solution to the waste issue, Chu said waste from new plants could be contained on site in steel containers using what’s known as the dry cask storage method.

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Indian Country Today
March 12, 2009

Obama Cabinet members make energy commitments to tribes

By Rob Capriccioso

WASHINGTON – Members of President Barack Obama’s Cabinet impressed tribal attendees of the National Congress of American Indians winter session, held in early March. Several top administrators promised to improve and assist tribes in developing energy resources, while strengthening federal and tribal relations.

In sum, addresses were given by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and White House Director of Intergovernmental Affairs Cecelia Munoz.

Chu seemed to make the biggest impression, given the desires of many tribes to benefit from energy initiatives, including renewable developments, planned for by the Obama administration.

The secretary promised to fully empower a tribal office in the energy department and to hold a summit this year on energy issues that affect Indian country. The most recent such summit was held in 1994.

“It is important for policy makers to hear tribal leader’s concerns,” Chu said in a speech given March 3. “It is the obligation of the department to include American Indians and Alaska Natives in the decision making process. Indian country must have a seat at the table. The challenges are great, but the possibilities are greater.”

Chu further said he supports energy tax production credits for tribes and wants the federal government to move faster on cleaning up atomic energy sites on or near reservations.

His remarks were met by a large round of applause.

Mark Macarro, chairman of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, said Chu’s remarks were refreshing, especially given the limited attention to tribal issues from the Bush administration during the previous eight years.

“I think this bodes well for the kinds of things we are hoping will be beneficial for Indian country.”

Keeping in line with Chu’s promises, Salazar told tribal leaders that his department will assist tribes in their efforts to harness solar and wind energy, as well as in exploring geothermal resources for economic development.

“We must make sure Native American communities are participants and beneficiaries of the new virtual energy revolution. As we move forward, Indian country should not be left behind.”

In a later speech the same day, Salazar spoke to the Council of Energy Resource Tribes summit on Native energy development. He noted that tribal lands have major resources for renewable energy as well as rich sources of conventional fossil fuels.

“Indian country offers some of the premier wind energy sites in the United States. I look forward to exploring with tribes the potential for wind, geothermal, biomass and solar energy development that exists on those lands.”

The Office of Indian Energy and Economic Development has identified 77 reservations that possess commercial-scale wind resources and the ability to support viable wind-based economies. Forty of these are in states that have enacted policies requiring utilities to purchase a percentage of their power from renewable sources.

Jackson discussed a few key energy and environmental issues at the NCAI meeting as well. She said it is important that tribal communities affected by environmental degradation are heard from.

She elaborated in an interview with Indian Country Today after her speech that President Obama is against a proposed nuclear waste storage site in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, which some Western tribes have opposed for spiritual and health reasons.

She said the EPA should be “first and foremost” in assisting tribal leaders in understanding the possible health impacts from mining and other polluting sources near reservations.

Jackson noted, too, that tribal leaders have long been concerned that the EPA’s tribal division is located within its water division.

“It’s time to move the location of that office to give it more of a crosscutting role in the agency. It’s something that I intend to address very soon. I am certainly willing to move it. I think that the most important question is where it moves to, and that’s a decision that I would like to make once we have our full staff in place.”

Jackson also pledged to hold a summit with tribes in the fall that will focus on improving tribal programs and agency responses to climate change.

Beyond energy and the environment, Munoz assured attendees that the Obama administration will work with tribes on a government-to-government basis.

“It’s a time of great promises and extraordinary challenges. You know what works and doesn’t work in your own community. We look forward to working with tribal leaders and NCAI to hear your concerns.”

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Mother Nature Network
March 12, 2009

Is nuclear finally off the table?

Chu says no it's not (as he scraps Yucca Mountain).

Karl Burkart

It's not looking good for the nuclear industry. Last month, the $50 billion earmark for nuclear energy was removed from Obama's stimulus bill. And today Yucca Mountain, the problematic nuclear waste containment facility that was supposed to finally legitimate the viability of nuclear energy, just had its plug pulled by Steven Chu, head of the D.O.E.

Chu tried to assure jittery senators in the Senate Budget Committee that "Nuclear is going to be part of our energy future," but many were skeptical. A quiet and growing consensus seems to be emerging among energy experts, cleantech investors and the general public that nuclear just does not seem to add up.

When asked about the future of nuclear energy this week at the ECO:nomics summit, Matt C. Rogers stated that nuclear was taken off the table because it didn't meet the key criterion of the stimulus bill -- to get projects underway and create jobs in the next 18 months. That doesn't mean there won't be appropriations for nuclear in the upcoming energy bill, but the focus will likely be on creating "next-gen" nuclear which by some estimates is at least 10 years away from deployment.

Why the slowdown? I wish I could say it is because nuclear's many disconcerting ramifications (both political and environmental) have suddenly become clear. But in reality, the real reason is financial.

Today, NPR hosted a great panel of nuclear experts including Dr. Per Peterson of UC Berkeley and Dan Hirsch of the Committee to Bridge the Gap (Martin Sheen video below). While they presented different viewpoints (Peterson pro, Hirsch con) they both agreed that the nuclear is not yet ready for prime time. Despite 67 years of development, the costs for nuclear have gone up and "no one's buying."

The permitting process alone for a nuclear plant takes years, and there is no such thing as a standardized "kit of parts" which would allow for rapid deployment of the technology. Add to that the scarcity of some key reactor components, one of which is manufactured by a single plant in Japan that according to rumor has a several year back log (driven significantly by demand in China).

Then there is the massive waste problem. There was notably a $6 billion earmark for nuclear waste cleanup in the Stimulus bill, but Chu made it clear that a key to nuclear's viability is "closing the fuel cycle" -- something which has yet to be accomplished in a way that does not fan the fires of nuclear proliferation. That means "downcycling" the waste into a substance that is safe for reuse and subsequent disposal.

Peterson points to the success of France in recycling its nuclear waste into a second generation plutonium substance. But Hirsch points out this type of recycling is extremely expensive and results in weapons-grade product. And if you think the NPT (non proliferation treaty) is going to protect us form the distribution of plutonium, you only have to look to Iran which is part of the NPT.

Peterson then went into the classic coal versus nuclear argument. Coal is responsible for approximately 65,000 deaths per year related while Chernobyl only caused 20,000 casualties. By this creepy calculus, you could have "a couple Chernobyl's per year" (yes I'm actually quoting him) and still be ahead of coal.

Hirsch said this is a false set of choices, and it is exactly where the nuclear industry wants us to go -- into a logic where the (slightly) lesser of two evils. And if you get a $40-$45 price on carbon (according to a recent congressional study), then suddenly nuclear will start making economic sense. This is why the cap and trade system is the greatest hope for the nuclear industry (and my greatest fear).

But as Hirsch says, we only have a very small window to solve global warming. Why would we invest our precious time and money on ANY technology (especially one that has so many unsolved problems) knowing that it relies upon a finite resource -- coal, gas, oil, uranium -- when you could invest in a technology that makes use of fee, infinite and safe resources -- solar, wind, geothermal.

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Mother Nature Network
March 12, 2009

EIA: Nuclear power 101

With renewed momentum but no plans to store its waste, American nuclear energy sits in limbo.

By Robynne Boyd

Nuclear energy is a radioactive topic. Depending whom you talk to, it's either a clean, sustainable fuel source providing ample homespun electricity, or an expensive, dirty and dangerous gamble as outdated as the Cold War. This debate's roots run deep, having electrified conversation since the nuclear-energy boom of the 1970s, when most of America's nuclear plants rose from the gravel and began churning out power for the growing population. The average nuclear reactor produces enough electricity each year to power 740,000 households (equivalent to 13.7 million barrels of oil).

While no new nuclear plants have been licensed to be built in the United States for about 30 years, the country's 66 existing plants, and their 104 reactors, continue to generate about 19 percent of its electricity. Many of these reactors are now reaching the end of their 40-year licensing agreements, and the era of global warming and fickle gas prices is leading a new generation to reconsider nuclear energy. In response, many power-plant operators are requesting 20-year license renewals and completing applications for new plants. Here's a quick 101 on nuclear energy, to help inform your debate.

How does nuclear power work?

A nuclear power plant works in much the same was as any power plant: It burns fuel to produce heat. The heat is transformed into steam, which rotates the blades of a turbine. This movement is converted into electricity and sent to homes and businesses via high-voltage wires. The only difference with nuclear energy is that the fuel is uranium (as opposed to coal or petroleum), and the heat originates from fission — the process of splitting a uranium atom.

During fission, a neutron (part of an atom's nucleus that has no charge) hits a uranium atom, causing it to divide in two and release a cloud of radiation and heat. More neutrons are also released, which then split more uranium atoms, triggering a chain reaction of energy production. This process occurs inside the plant's reactor, which is submerged in water. The water turns to steam as fission occurs.

What is uranium and where does it come from?

Uranium is a common metal found all over the globe. But the type used in nuclear power plants — U-235 — is much more rare. After it's extracted from the Earth's crust, U-235 is processed into fuel capsules and placed end-to-end in a fuel rod inside the nuclear reactor.

Do all nuclear reactors work the same way?

Two types of reactors are used in the United States: boiling-water reactors and pressurized-water reactors. The latter are more common (the country has 35 boiling-water reactors and 69 pressurized-water reactors) since they use a simpler design and are thus considered safer.

In a boiling-water reactor, the water surrounding the reactor core boils and turns to steam as the uranium atoms split. In a pressurized-water reactor, the steam is generated in a separate piece of equipment, called the steam generator. The water in the reactor core is kept under pressure until it reaches the steam generator, where it then boils and turns to gas. The unused steam travels into a condenser where it liquefies and is pumped back to the reactor vessel.

How much does it cost?

The cost of building a nuclear power plant varies widely, but a 2008 study indicated it's risen significantly in recent years, about 130 percent since 2000. A new plant may cost somewhere between $6 billion and $8 billion to build — a price heavily subsidized by the federal government.

What are the environmental concerns?

Global warming has been the major impetus behind nuclear energy's renaissance. Since nuclear power doesn't release CO2 during the generation process, many people consider it "clean." According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, geothermal energy is the only form of electricity production that has a lower carbon footprint than nuclear. There are, however, carbon emissions associated with mining uranium and building each plant.

Low carbon emissions give nuclear energy an outwardly "green" appearance, yet the intractable problem of how to dispose of its radioactive waste continues to tarnish its image. Exhausted fuel rods contain radioactive material that can take thousands of years to become inert. Only temporary storage for these rods exists; they're placed inside pools of water or steel or concrete containers at hundreds of sites around the country. The U.S. Department of Energy had planned since 1987 to store radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain, a ridge of volcanic rock about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, but controversy has loomed ever since, due largely to the waste's long-term radioactivity. The Obama administration may have driven the final nail into Yucca's coffin in early March, when it cut its funding — reigniting the debate over what to do with radioactive waste.

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Washington Times
March 12, 2009

Editorial: Obama nukes nuclear storage

For more than two decades, the Congress, the president and the sprawling federal bureaucracy have worked to find a safe place to store the waste of nuclear reactors. Yucca Mountain, a remote formation in the deserts of Nevada, was the chosen site. Now President Obama, bowing to the demands of a fraction of anti-nuclear activists, has thrown 22 years of hard work up in the air.

Here's the back story. Republicans and Democrats have long agreed on a process to select a site and store the nation's radioactive wastes. Congress passed legislation that all but assured that Yucca Mountain in Nevada would be the site of the nation's nuclear waste storage in 1987 and voted decisively to store nuclear waste at the site in 2002. As a result, some $13.5 billion of tax dollars and 22 years of effort were spent with the settled understanding that Yucca Mountain became the sole focus of plans for storing radioactive waste.

Now, in what seems like a flare of adolescent temper, the Obama administration said forget it. All funding for the site has been cut in the 2010 budget except for a pittance to handle administrative paperwork. The new energy secretary, Steven Chu, told a Senate hearing the site is no longer an option.

The Obama administration released no alternative plans to move and store the nation's radioactive wastes - leaving no alternative to the status quo. So nearly 60,000 tons of used reactor fuel, accumulated over decades of power generation, will remain stored at commercial nuclear power plants. The nation's 104 commercial power reactors create 2,000 more tons of spent fuel per year, which is being held in pools and aboveground concrete containers at reactor sites.

Though the federal government is obligated by law to accept the spent fuel, it generally does not. Which brings up the obvious question: Is Mr. Obama living up to the law by taking the action he did? We will leave that to finer legal minds than ours, but it is an issue worth examining.

It is true that Yucca Mountain, or any site, is a 10,000-year decision due to the radioactive life of uranium. Any storage decision must be made carefully, as geological conditions change over millennia. While Nevada, home of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, ranks third among states in seismic activity, the U.S. Department of Energy has concluded that seismic and tectonic effects will not significantly affect storage at Yucca Mountain. An engineered barrier system would provide substantial protection from any water seepage.

"We've spent billions of dollars and many years preparing for Yucca Mountain to be our nation's waste site," Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Alaska Republican, said recently. "Closing Yucca Mountain sends an unmistakable signal to nuclear developers that they might not have a place to store their waste, making them less willing to develop new facilities."

And sadly that may be exactly the intent of this administration. Is the Obama administration so stuck in the 1970s "China Syndrome" mentality that it cannot see the environmental benefits and energy independence offered by the next genration of nuclear power - which is also lavishly funded in the same budget that cuts off funding to Yucca Mountain storage? Or is it more likely that the president is still acting like a senator and trying to satisfy every competing interest group that appears before him?

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Hanford News
March 12, 2009

Energy Secretary Chu plans Hanford visit

By Annette Cary

Energy Secretary Steven Chu is planning a visit to Hanford, he told Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., at a Senate Budget Committee hearing Wednesday.

"You'll be hearing from us very shortly," he said when Murray invited him to visit.

The trip also might include a look at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland.

Murray, the second-ranking Democrat on the committee, used the hearing to question Chu about Hanford, PNNL and hydropower.

Chu also discussed the future of nuclear power under questioning from other committee members about the fiscal 2010 budget.

Chu said he's anticipating future stable cleanup budgets for DOE cleanup sites. He also will be turning his attention to spending environmental cleanup money as wisely as possible, in response to past cost overruns, he said.

That means taking steps to make sure projects are better managed by DOE and by project managers at cleanup sites, he said.

"The Department of Energy has a legal and moral obligation to clean up the Cold War legacy," Chu said.

He argued within the administration for substantial funding for DOE cleanup money in the Economic Recovery Act. That's expected to result in a one-time boost in Hanford money of about $2 billion over the next few years.

"We're working at trying to deploy those funds as quickly as possible," he said.

Murray told Chu he also would benefit from seeing the work being done at PNNL, and she listed the lab's diverse capabilities in chemistry, energy and homeland security and its national user facility, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory.

In his opening remarks, Chu said President Obama has set a goal of doubling federal investing in the basic sciences.

To support that, the 2010 budget proposal includes substantially increased support for the DOE Office of Science, including money for climate science and energy research. It also would increase spending to develop technology to detect and deter nuclear smuggling.

"I do have a soft spot for the national laboratory system," Chu said.

Murray said she was heartened to also see $40 million in the 2009 budget for hydropower research.

"Hydropower is one of the cleanest sources of renewable energy we have," Chu said, adding he's interested in using hydropower for energy storage that will be needed as renewable energy grows.

Wind or solar power, which may not be steadily produced because of weather conditions, can be used to pump water back above dams so it can be used later to generate hydropower.

The Obama administration's stand on nuclear energy came up repeatedly during the hearing.

"Nuclear is going to be part of our energy future," Chu said.

He favors closing the nuclear fuel cycle, or reusing nuclear power plant fuel which now is used just once in the United States.

"We do not know how to do it in its present form," Chu said. "I'm worried about its proliferation potential."

But in the long term, reusing nuclear fuel could greatly reduce nuclear waste by burning long-lived actinides, he said.

"That's why we have to take a fresh look at the nuclear waste repository as well," Chu said. "It's all part of research into making nuclear recycling a reality."

The Obama administration has opposed using Yucca Mountain, Nev., as a national repository for used fuel.

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Harrisonburg Daily News Record
March 12, 2009

Editorial:

Obama Wrong On Yucca Mountain Posted 2009-03-12

The nuclear-energy industry in America has been dealt a succession of paper cuts, little nicks here and there that must have its leaders concerned about its imminent future.

But President Obama’s recent decision to rescind funding for the waste repository at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain may prove the unkindest cut of all.

Yucca was supposed to start accepting radioactive waste from the nation’s 104 nuclear reactors nearly 11 years ago. It has yet to do so, despite a staggering outlay of $7.7 billion toward that end. So instead of storing this material in a cavernous lock-box miles from nowhere, the waste is secured in 121 above-ground sites the nation over.

Mr. Obama did not merely pull the fiscal plug on Yucca. He offered no alternative. So what does this tell the nuclear industry? Essentially that its day as a producer of clean, efficient energy may be receding.

Granted, the president is wedded — and thoughtlessly so — to undeveloped alternative energy sources (wind, solar, etc.). These sources may have potential in the future, but nuclear energy is the cleanest energy available now and used safely in other parts of the world. It must not be discounted.

So, on Yucca Mountain, wrong decision, wrong message.

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Las Vegas SUN
March 11, 2009

About that Yucca Mountain property…

By Lisa Mascaro

WASHINGTON -- South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint may have started it when he told the Sun the now-doomed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump is “probably going to end up a giant wine cellar.”

Now the jokes are flying, Politico reports this morning, as the nation comes to terms with a future without the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump now that President Barack Obama has said he will seriously cut funds for the project.

Stanford professor and Nobel-prize winning physicist Burton Richter suggests a Tunnel of Love-type attraction in the Nevada desert: “Yucca would give you five miles of tunnel – that’s some serious necking,” he told the paper.

Other suggestions, according to Politico:

“Maybe they can put the Obama Presidential Library down there,” quipped Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform.

“Maybe we can put Rush Limbaugh in there,” said Elliott Negin, spokesman for the Union of Concerned Scientists. “I don’t think it will contain him though. He’s such a force.”

Nevada’s lawmakers gave the paper a few more serious scenarios -- Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley suggested covering the desert in solar panels, while Republican Sen. John Ensign mused about an underground research lab or renewable energy facility.

The prospect of a Yucca-less future continues to play out in the national press.

National Public Radio aired a piece this morning, and the Los Angeles Times today took a look at what to do with the nuclear waste piled up in Illinois – home to more waste than most other states.

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Mesquite Local News
March 11, 2009

Council Races Through Short Meeting

By Morris Workman

If you blinked, you probably missed it.

Tuesday’s City Council meeting was over in less than 30 minutes thanks in part to an empty agenda and an absence of any controversial topics.

The 15-item agenda became even shorter when two minor items were pulled and another item was left blank on the agenda.

The council also heard a report from associate planner John Willis on the city’s Environmental Planning activities, including the city’s participation in the Yucca Mountain Advisory Committee, participation in the Regional Open Space and Trails Workgroup which affects the Las Vegas Valley, and a river restoration project being done behind the Hughes Middle School with the Partners In Conservation group.

Tuesday’s meeting ended at 5:30 p.m.

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Pahrump Valley Times
March 11, 2009

DOE applies to drill wells along rail route

State Nuke Director Says Plan Doesn't Make Sense

By Mark Waite
PVT

The U.S. Department of Energy submitted 116 applications to the Nevada Division of Water Resources to drill 103 wells along the route of the proposed Caliente railroad to Yucca Mountain.

Allen Benson, director of the DOE office of external affairs, said the applications were turned in before the change of administration in Washington, D.C. President Barack Obama's administration cut the budget for the Yucca Mountain program by $100 million to $288 million and has discussed finding alternatives to a nuclear repository at Yucca Mountain.

The applications were dated Jan. 20 on the Nevada Division of Water Resources Web site, Obama's inauguration day.

"There may be some changes from the perspective of this administration," Benson said, not wanting to get into details about the rail line.

"Our mission right now is to support the license application and to answer questions from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission," Benson said.

The NRC has begun hearings on the DOE application to construct Yucca Mountain which are proceeding ahead.

The Caliente railroad would be 320 miles, meaning a well would be constructed roughly every couple miles.

While Benson downplayed the applications, Jason King, acting state engineer for the Nevada Division of Water Resources, said, "They haven't been withdrawn so we're at least processing them through the publication period."

The DOE would use 6,000 acre feet of water from all the wells combined. They are to be used to compact the rail bed. King said the water rights would go away after the railroad is built except for 13 applications for permanent use along the proposed rail route.

One acre foot of water is enough to fill an acre of land a foot deep, roughly 320,000 gallons or enough for two families of five for a year.

The applications cover 18 different hydrographic basins, King said.

When asked whether his office would deny the requests, King said, "We can't make a predetermination on these applications."

But he referred to past decisions that denied DOE use of water for test drills at Yucca Mountain as a guide.

"We've already ruled on Yucca Mountain and the water for Yucca Mountain so they'll go through publication, we'll see what kind of protests we get," King said. "One of the criteria is whether it's in the public interest to determine whether these applications will go forward."

Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency Director Bruce Breslow told the Las Vegas Review-Journal the state will protest the water applications.

"With the president's clear message that he does not plan to move forward with the Yucca Mountain project, we feel these applications do not make sense," Breslow said.

Well locations wre published in the legal notices in the newspaper the last two Fridays. They include locations ranging from 10.5 miles southeast of Goldfield, down to within 3.5 miles northeast of Beatty.

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AP Google
March 11, 2009

Chu: Nuclear must be part of energy mix

By H. Josef Hebert

WASHINGTON (AP) — Energy Secretary Steven Chu sought Wednesday to assure skeptical senators that the Obama administration supports continued development of nuclear energy, even as it backs away from building a nuclear waste dump in Nevada.

"Nuclear is going to be part of our energy future. It has to be," Chu told members of the Senate Budget Committee at a hearing in which a half dozen senators, Republicans and Democrats, raised concerns about the administration's support for nuclear power.

Each time Chu gave a similar assurance, even as he reiterated that the administration has every intention of pulling the plug on a proposed nuclear waste site at Yucca Mountain.

"You can see the reason for some of the skepticism," Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., told Chu.

"I don't want to save Yucca. I accept the fact that may not be viable," said Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the committee's ranking Republican. However, he said he was concerned about the administration's degree of support for building new reactors.

Chu said he is ready to act on loan guarantees for the first group of new reactors and plans on "moving very aggressively to getting the money out the door." Congress in 2005 authorized $18.5 billion in loan guarantees for new reactors, but none of the applications has yet to be approved.

Still, Chu said the administration is determined to move in a new direction on how to deal with the thousands of tons of waste in the form of used reactor fuel now being kept at power plants.

Chu said the material can be kept safely "for decades" at reactor sites. And he said he hopes to have a recommendation from a special panel on alternatives to Yucca Mountain and long-term nuclear waste disposal before the end of the year. He said he will soon name members to the planned panel.

"I believe in nuclear power as a central part of our energy mix. It provides clean, busload electricity," Chu told the hearing.

Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, nevertheless, said he was worried about "subtle signals that raise concern" about the administration's support of nuclear energy, particularly its opposition to endorsing reprocessing of nuclear waste.

"Closing the fuel cycle is something we want to do," replied Chu, referring to future reprocessing of waste so it can be recycled.

But Chu said more research is needed because current methods of reprocessing used in Japan and Europe raise concerns about nuclear proliferation because they produce pure plutonium.

Obama's proposed budget calls for eliminating funding for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, except for money needed to respond to questions from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on a Yucca license application the Bush administration submitted last year.

Chu dismissed suggestions that the license application be withdrawn. He said the application process could provide an insight as to what the NRC will require of a future nuclear waste strategy.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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AFP Google
March 11, 2009

Obama's energy chief announces nuclear waste panel

WASHINGTON (AFP) — US Energy Secretary Steven Chu backed a new generation of nuclear power Wednesday, and said a panel of experts would report back this year on the best long-term storage of radioactive waste.

The Nobel laureate scientist, chosen by President Barack Obama to lead an ambitious drive for renewable energy, said nuclear power was also an "essential part of our energy mix" along with cleaner coal and carbon capture.

Chu said he was convening a "blue-ribbon panel" of experts to "develop a long-term strategy that must include the waste disposal plan," after Obama's budget ruled out a proposed national repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain.

"I don't want to suggest what this blue-ribbon panel might determine but let me stress this will be done this year," he told a Senate budget committee hearing on the energy proposals in Obama's 3.55-trillion-dollar budget.

Chu said nuclear power, which currently generates 20 percent of US energy, must take its place alongside clean technologies such as wind and solar to wean the United States off foreign oil and fight climate change.

He encountered criticism from Republican senators after the Obama administration stripped 50 billion dollars in loans for new nuclear power plants from a 787-billion-dollar economic stimulus plan.

Chu said federal loans worth 18.5 billion dollars were still available, while stressing that the government's Nuclear Regulatory Commission rather than the Department of Energy approves licenses for new nuclear plants.

He said the DoE and NRC, however, are working together to offer a simpler licensing process for next-generation reactors under development by Westinghouse Electric, part of Japan's Toshiba Corp., and General Electric.

In the meantime, Chu said "I don't think the NRC should be limiting that or putting the licensing on hold" for applications for 31 nuclear plants now pending, despite the lack of a long-term national waste facility.

He said that so-called dry cask storage at individual nuclear plants, "which can be safe for decades," was sufficient for now while the panel of experts investigates the long-term options.

Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved.

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Reuters
March 11, 2009

U.S. Energy Dept to set up panel on nuclear waste

By Ayesha Rascoe

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said on Wednesday the department will establish a "blue ribbon" panel to develop a comprehensive plan this year to handle the disposal of radioactive wastes from nuclear power plants.

"I believe nuclear power is an essential part of our energy mix," Chu said at a hearing before the Senate Budget Committee. "It provides the clean base load generation of electricity."

The panel Chu plans to form would be responsible for creating a long-term U.S. nuclear strategy that would include permanent disposal of nuclear wastes. He said he hopes the panel will have a proposal available sometime this year.

U.S. President Barack Obama's budget plan, if approved, would put the brakes on the long-delayed proposed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

Nuclear waste is currently stored at 121 temporary sites in 39 states across the country.

With Yucca Mountain shelved, lawmakers at the hearing pressed Chu on the administration's commitment to nuclear power and questioned whether any new nuclear plants could be licensed before a permanent waste disposal plan is established.

Chu said he did not believe scrapping the Yucca Mountain site would cause the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to delay licensing for nuclear plants because there are interim storage options available for wastes.

Separately, Chu reiterated that the United States must support the creation of technology that will mitigate the carbon emissions from coal.

"We have to develop clean coal technologies because India and China will not turn their back on coal," Chu said.

(Editing by Christian Wiessner)

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Los Angeles Times
March 11, 2009

Obama budget puts nuclear waste on hold

His move to kill the Yucca Mountain project in Nevada renews nagging questions about what should be done with the radioactive waste steadily accumulating in 35 states.

By Michael Hawthorne

Reporting from Chicago -- In a pool of water just a football field away from Lake Michigan, about 1,000 tons of highly radioactive fuel from the scuttled Zion Nuclear Power Station are waiting for someplace else to spend a few thousand years.

The wait just got longer. A lot longer.

President Obama's proposed budget all but kills the Yucca Mountain project, the controversial Nevada site where the U.S. nuclear industry's spent fuel rods were to spend eternity. There are no other plans in the works, so for now the waste will remain next to Zion and 103 other reactors scattered across the country.

Obama has said there are too many questions about whether storing waste at Yucca Mountain is safe. His decision fulfills a campaign promise, but it also renews nagging questions about what should be done with the radioactive waste steadily accumulating in 35 states.

During his confirmation hearings, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the waste could safely remain at nuclear plants while another plan is worked out. Reversing course from previous administrations satisfies critics in Nevada, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, but triggers another round of political maneuvering and regional bickering in Congress.

"We are drifting toward a permanent policy of keeping extremely toxic waste next to the Great Lakes, and that cannot stand," said U.S. Rep. Mark Steven Kirk (R-Ill.), who echoed industry officials in calling for an independent panel of scientists and engineers to find a solution. Obama, too, is calling for more study.

More than 57,000 tons of spent fuel rods already are stored next to reactors, just a few yards from containment buildings where they once generated nuclear-heated steam to drive massive electrical turbines.

The lack of a permanent solution poses a serious challenge to the industry's plans to build more than 30 new reactors. Existing nuclear plants produce 2,000 tons of the long-lived waste each year, most of which is moved into pools of chilled water that allow the spent -- but still highly lethal -- uranium-235 to slowly and safely decay. Uranium-235 has a half-life of nearly 704 million years -- meaning that half its atoms will decay in that time.

But containment pools never were intended to store all of the spent fuel that a reactor creates. The idea was that the cool water would stabilize the enriched uranium until it could be sent to a reprocessing plant or stored in a centralized location.

Instead, it keeps piling up. Although industry officials insist the waste is safely stored in fenced-off buildings lined with concrete and lead, there are concerns that a leak or a terrorist attack could create an environmental catastrophe. Many of the nation's nuclear plants are close to highly populated areas or next to bodies of water.

As power companies run out of space in their containment pools, they increasingly are storing the waste above ground in concrete and metal casks.

"We continue to ask the federal government to provide a clear solution for what the long-term storage of spent fuel will be," said Marshall Murphy, spokesman for Exelon Nuclear, the owner of all seven nuclear plants in Illinois.

Until now, the solution was Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, which Congress chose in the late 1980s as a permanent repository. Federal officials spent the last two decades -- and billions of dollars -- preparing to bury spent fuel in a series of fortified tunnels drilled into the mountain.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission still plans to hold hearings about Yucca Mountain, but without further funding the project will be a very expensive hole in the ground.

The repository's apparent demise is part science and part politics. Recent studies have shown that water flows through the mountain much faster than previously thought, which raises concerns that radioactive leaks could contaminate drinking water.

Industry critics say the government's inability to come up with a permanent burial ground for highly radioactive waste is another reason the U.S. should wean itself from nuclear power.

"President Obama made the absolutely correct decision," said Dave Kraft, director of the Nuclear Energy Information Service, an industry watchdog. "Unfortunately for the nation, it comes about 15 years and $10 billion too late."

--mhawthorne@tribune.com

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Politico
March 11, 2009

Yukking it up over Yucca Mountain

By Erika Lovley

It’s a very popular destination.

First was the Bridge to Nowhere, then came the Road to Nowhere. And now, with the release of President Barack Obama’s 2010 budget proposal, there’s the Tunnel to Nowhere.

This time, though, nowhere is in Nevada, not Alaska. It’s about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, deep inside Yucca Mountain, where over the past 20-plus years the federal government has spent about $10 billion studying and digging a tunnel as part of the nation’s first nuclear waste repository. But since Obama’s budget eliminates most funding for the proposed facility, what’s left is a $10 billion hole in the ground.

And boy, are they having a great time with the Yucca jokes.

“Maybe they can put the Obama Presidential Library down there,” quipped Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform.

“They could turn it into a giant Tunnel of Love,” said Burton Richter, a Stanford professor and Nobel Prize-winning physicist. “When I was a kid, you could take your girlfriend floating down the Tunnel of Love and do some necking, as we called it. Yucca would give you five miles of tunnel — that’s some serious necking.”

“Maybe we can put Rush Limbaugh in there,” said Elliott Negin, spokesman for the Union of Concerned Scientists. “I don’t think it will contain him though. He’s such a force.”

Despite the levity, the Yucca Mountain facility, located deep in the desert on the federal government’s Nevada Test Site, was planned to deal with a very serious problem — what to do with the spent nuclear fuel rods and solidified high-level radioactive waste from America’s nuclear power and defense industries. Those deadly byproducts are now stored in more than 120 temporary waste storage sites scattered in 39 states across the country; Yucca Mountain, which originally was supposed to open in 1998, was meant to be the first long-term, national solution.

“After over 20 years of research and billions of dollars of carefully planned and reviewed scientific fieldwork, the Department of Energy has found that a repository at Yucca Mountain brings together the location, natural barriers and design elements most likely to protect the health and safety of the public, including those Americans living in the immediate vicinity, now and long into the future,” according to a background statement by the Energy Department.

But Obama has moved to cut funding for the controversial project.

“Obama has emphasized that nuclear waste storage [at Yucca] is not an option, so his budget is a reflection of that,” said Energy Department spokeswoman Stephanie Mueller.

In a 2007 letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), 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.”

Among the problems Obama cited were long-term safety risks, security concerns associated with shipping nuclear waste to the site, opposition by most Nevada leaders and the likelihood that the project would fall further behind schedule and cost billions more to complete.

“Among the possible alternatives that should be considered are finding another state willing to serve as a permanent national repository or creating regional storage repositories,” Obama’s letter said.

The state of the economy also made the Yucca project a tempting target for Obama’s budget ax. The Energy Department projects that the cost for finishing the site and operating it from 1983 to 2133 will total $96 billion.

But supporters of the Yucca Mountain project say it is a viable solution to the nation’s nuclear waste dilemma. In congressional testimony last fall, Ward Sproat, then-director of the Energy Department’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, said that “for each year beyond 2017 that the repository’s opening is delayed, the department estimates that U.S. taxpayers’ potential liability to contract holders who have paid into the Nuclear Waste Fund will increase by approximately $500 million.”

That’s the sort of argument that appeals to anti-tax watchdog Norquist, who is also concerned about stunting the nuclear energy industry.

“Just because we have a new president doesn’t mean we restart and rethink all of the projects from the last 25 years,” he said. “This is childish. The administration has not thought this through.”

But none of the main agencies or interests groups involved in the Yucca facility have any idea what to do with it.

“It’s the closest I’ve ever been to nowhere in this country,” said Eliot Brenner, spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “You can turn 360 degrees and see nothing man-made. It gives you a creepy feeling of being absolutely alone.”

Much of the Nevada delegation has been so focused on shutting down the Yucca project that brainstorming alternative uses never came to the forefront, aides say. Even Reid, who has fought the project since he arrived in Congress in 1987, hasn’t a clue what to do with the five-mile tunnel.

“I think people have either been on the side of building the dump or killing the dump,” said one Senate aide familiar with the debate. “I don’t think anyone’s been thinking about what we do with this hill. I think that’s something everyone assumed we’d figure out after the fact.”

Some Nevada lawmakers have signaled they are open to suggestions.

“No idea is a bad idea, as long as it doesn’t include deadly nuclear waste,” said Republican Sen. John Ensign. “Yucca Mountain could be home to an underground research lab or a renewable energy facility if there is potential.”

Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley’s thought: Plaster the area around the tunnel with solar energy panels. But transmitting the power to the places that need it, such as Las Vegas, would be a challenge.

Meanwhile, the site continues to spawn a cottage industry of Yucca yuks.

“She’s called it a boondoggle, a waste, a dinosaur whose days are numbered, a dying beast,” said David Cherry, Berkley’s spokesman. “She’s said the first train carrying nuclear waste into the mountain will have to run over her body.”

The Marine Corps has used giant mountain caves to store everything from cots to ammunition, so perhaps it would be interested in a little real estate in the Nevada desert?

“Other than Osama bin Laden, I don’t think we have anything hidden away in a cave,” said Pentagon spokesman Brian Whitman. “Just kidding.”

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Washington Examiner
March 11, 2009

Laying waste to reason on Yucca Mountain

By Jay Ambrose
Examiner Columnist

Yucca Mountain’s use as a nuclear waste depository for the nation may be dead, which means any pretense that President Barack Obama is a pragmatic, reasonable, principled politician genuinely interested in giving America a promising energy future should also be dead.

His budget would eliminate funding for this Nevada site that has been called “the most studied piece of real estate in the world,” thereby rendering the expansion of non-polluting, dependable, improved nuclear energy production more problematic in meeting the ever-growing electricity needs of our country.

For more than two decades, some observers note, engineers and scientists of various stripes have tested and then retested the area, and then tested it once again, consuming something like $8 billion in the process and finding it about as safe as any place in America could conceivably be.

And that’s before you add in two other pacifying factors.

The first of these is that the government could store the 57,700 tons of material now existing and the additional waste being produced in a manner that would make it easy to remove over the next 300 years if there should be any hint whatsoever of anything going badly wrong.

The next factor, it has been maintained, is that the storage there could be an important first step for the recycling of much of the waste in plants availing themselves of new, developing technology that could vastly minimize the creation of any waste that could not again be recycled.

The opposition to Yucca has come in part from certain anti-modernist, superstitiously biased environmentalists out to bludgeon nuclear power prospects with any excuse even remotely available.

Perhaps more important than that, however, has been the resistance to Yucca use from Nevadans prone to believe the worst about their possible endangerment and who surer than anything don’t want this nationally needed depository in their backyard.

So when a candidate named Obama campaigns there in caucus season, it should not surprise anyone that he makes a stupid stop-Yucca promise to gain votes. Then there is this other political matter: Harry Reid.

Reid, a Nevada Democrat and Senate Majority Leader, is said to face a tough reelection campaign in 2010, and this Obama favor should help his cause, just as another collegial gift did – a multi-billion dollar, super-speed train advance in the stimulus package that just might be employed to fund a link between Las Vegas and Disneyland.

A major problem with this political razzmatazz – and a fact that makes all the arguments against Yucca shrivel into total, utter meaninglessness even if one otherwise took them seriously – is what would happen if the funding is cut off.

For many years, the waste would remain scattered across the country in some 100 ad hoc sites indisputably less protected and safe than at Yucca, as well as being hugely expensive for utility companies and their customers.

And all of this from the great Saint Obama, who simultaneously preaches the virtues of wind farms that would consume hundreds of square miles of land for windmills to produce as much power as one nuclear plant, that would be just as expensive, that would provide only limited, intermittent power requiring supplemental power from other sources and that would also require costly new grids for long-distance transmission?

Isn’t this the same Obama who is also plotting an inefficient cap-and-trade carbon tax that could further imperil the economy and dig still more money out of the pockets of consumers even as we are being told that calm, cool, responsible rationality has finally assumed the nation’s highest office?

Some of us figure that last proposition is due for discard.

Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: Speaktojay@aol.com.

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KIFI Idaho Falls
March 11, 2009

Chu Confirms INL Role In Future Nuclear Efforts

Press Release

Washington, DC - Idaho Senator Mike Crapo won a commitment from Energy Secretary Steven Chu Thursday that the Idaho National Laboratory will play an ongoing role in advancing nuclear research that could change the way the nation handles not only future technology but the disposal of waste products.  Crapo told Secretary Chu he was disappointed that funding for nuclear initiatives and for the Yucca Mountain Repository has been cut back in President Obama's FY 2010 budget.

"Are you and the Administration committed to properly funding these R&D activities?" Crapo asked Chu during a hearing today before the Senate Budget Committee on the President's budget.

"The simple answer is yes...I have a record of saying that nuclear has to be part of our energy mix in this century," Chu responded.

Crapo noted Chu praised nuclear power as "essential" to the nation's energy policy during his tenure as head of the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory.  Chu told Crapo he envisions an accelerated schedule to recycle more nuclear materials and that the INL would play a leading role in the research to accomplish that effort.

Crapo said he was "very discouraged" in the President's decision to cut funding for the Yucca Mountain Repository because the federal government has signed a court agreement with the State of Idaho to remove high-level nuclear waste stored in Idaho to a new location by 2035.  Yucca was slated to take much of the waste but Chu is now proposing the increased use of dry cask storage for spent waste around the country.

"That's not going to help Idaho," Crapo said.  "If you are going to shift from Yucca Mountain, we may be looking at a long time frame before you come up with the next option."

"It is my understanding that by 2035 it should be ready to ship out," Chu responded, citing the work of a blue-ribbon committee that will study the issue this year. "This will be done this year, and then we can move in a way that would not take as long as the previous experiences."

Chu and Crapo agreed that work at the Idaho National Laboratory would be part of finding a solution to the waste issue.  Crapo also called on Chu to support tax credits and federal loan guarantees for nuclear power initiatives.

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Chicago Tribune
March 11, 2009

Nuclear power plants being revived worldwide

But what to do with radioactive waste remains an issue

By Laurie Goering
Tribune correspondent

STOCKHOLM—A year after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, amid panic worldwide about the safety of nuclear energy, Sweden voted to ban construction of new nuclear power plants and phase out its existing ones.

Now, like many countries across Europe, it is changing its mind. Last month, the government proposed allowing the construction of new reactors to replace the country's aging ones, which provide nearly half the nation's electricity.

Swedes have made their peace with nuclear plants, not only because memories have faded and safety records improved after 30 years, but also because reactors are seen as one of the few options available to nations wanting to rapidly slash greenhouse gas emissions.

"People shout about wind power, but it's only providing 2 percent" of Sweden's electricity, said Ake Hjort, a Swedish energy engineer. "To replace one nuclear plant you need 5,000 to 6,000 windmills. For us, it's not a question of wind power or nuclear power but the proper mix."

evival, even among some of its toughest critics. And some nations where green movements once railed against nukes now are at the forefront of finding solutions to lingering problems such as long-term storage of radioactive waste.

The United States, which has more than 100 working reactors—the world's largest number—has 32 new plants either planned or proposed. China, in an effort to cut air pollution from coal plants and feed huge new demand for power, is building 11 reactors and laying plans for nearly 100 more.

Europe, which has focused on building renewable-energy capacity to cut greenhouse gas emissions, now acknowledges that meeting its tough targets will be nearly impossible without new nuclear plants.

"It's the only large-scale … technology we have for zero emission power," said Ian Cronshaw, head of energy diversification for the Paris-based International Energy Agency.

Enthusiasm for nuclear power is coming from some remarkable quarters. Italy, which shut down its last two nuclear plants after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, now plans to build eight to 10 new reactors to cut its heavy reliance on imported energy. Finland and Sweden are well on their way to building long-term nuclear waste storage.

Even oil-producing nations such as Venezuela and the United Arab Emirates are among more than 40 new nations interested in acquiring nuclear power.

The two energy giants, like Russia, "want to sell their oil and gas at nice prices to people hooked on it and not use too much domestically," said Steve Kidd, director of strategy and research for the World Nuclear Association, a London-based nuclear power lobbying group.

President Barack Obama, while promising to "safely harness nuclear power" for the U.S. energy mix, has so far shown more enthusiasm for renewable power than nuclear plants. On Thursday, his energy secretary also confirmed that a 27-year effort to build a national nuclear waste depository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada is being abandoned.

But Britain's government, which five years ago held a similarly skeptical view of nuclear power, "today realizes renewables can't do everything," Kidd said. With production from Britain's aging gas fields dropping about 8 percent a year, the country now plans to use up to six new reactors to make up some of the shortfall, Cronshaw said.

Whether the more than 370 reactors proposed or planned worldwide are ever built remains in considerable doubt, nuclear experts say. Nuclear power plants are more expensive than most fossil-fuel alternatives, and finding financing for them will prove difficult as the world grapples with widespread recession.

Long-term storage of nuclear waste also remains a serious problem. Finland and Sweden, the only countries in the world closing in on a long-term solution for high-level nuclear waste, plan to put theirs in underground bedrock tunnels but are still grappling with issues of the long-term security of the material, which will remain radioactive for a hundred thousand years.

France manages its own nuclear waste problem in part by reprocessing spent fuel, which produces new usable uranium but also, controversially, the plutonium needed for nuclear weapons.

--lgoering@tribune.com

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Chicago Tribune
March 11, 2009

Nuclear waste has no place to go

Obama budget kills Nevada storage site for used radioactive fuel rods piling up near power plants

By Michael Hawthorne

In a pool of water just a football field away from Lake Michigan, about 1,000 tons of highly radioactive fuel from the scuttled Zion Nuclear Power Station is waiting for someplace else to spend a few thousand years.

The wait just got longer.

President Barack Obama's proposed budget all but kills the Yucca Mountain project, the controversial site where the U.S. nuclear industry's spent fuel rods were supposed to end up in permanent storage deep below the Nevada desert. There are no other plans in the works, meaning the waste for now will remain next to Zion and 104 other reactors scattered across the country.

Obama has said too many questions remain about whether storing waste at Yucca Mountain is safe, and his decision fulfills a campaign promise. But it also renews nagging questions about what to do with the radioactive waste steadily accumulating in 35 states.

With seven nuclear plant sites, Illinois relies more heavily on nuclear power and has a larger stockpile of spent fuel than any other state. Besides Zion near Lake Michigan, plants storing waste are sited along the Illinois, Rock and Mississippi Rivers.

Customers of ComEd and other nuclear utilities have shelled out $10 billion to develop the Yucca Mountain site in spare-change-size charges tacked on to electric bills. Most of that money will have been wasted, and experts forecast that billions more will be spent on damage suits from utilities that counted on the federal government to come up with a burial ground.

Reversing course from previous administrations satisfies critics in Nevada, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, but triggers another round of maneuvering and regional bickering in Congress.

"We are drifting toward a permanent policy of keeping extremely toxic waste next to the Great Lakes, and that cannot stand," said U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.).

More than 57,000 tons of spent fuel rods already are stored next to reactors, just a few yards away from containment buildings where they once generated nuclear-heated steam to drive massive electrical turbines. More than 7,100 tons are stored in Illinois, including at the Zion facility in Chicago's northern suburbs.

The lack of a permanent solution poses a serious challenge to the industry's plans to build more than 30 new reactors. Existing nuclear plants already produce 2,000 tons of the long-lived waste each year, most of which is moved into pools of chilled water that allow the spent—but still highly lethal—uranium-235 to slowly and safely decay.

But containment pools never were intended to store all of the spent fuel that a reactor creates. The idea was that the cool water would stabilize the enriched uranium until it could be sent to a reprocessing plant or stored in a centralized location.

Instead it keeps piling up. And though industry officials insist the waste is safely stored in fenced-off buildings lined with concrete and lead, concerns remain that a leak or a terrorist attack could create an environmental catastrophe.

As power companies run out of space in their containment pools, they increasingly are storing the waste above ground in concrete and metal casks; the Zion plant's spent fuel rods eventually are to be moved into casks a little farther away from Lake Michigan.

"We continue to ask the federal government to provide a clear solution for what the long-term storage of spent fuel will be," said Marshall Murphy, spokesman for Exelon Nuclear, which owns Illinois' plants.

Until now, the solution was Yucca Mountain, a dusty mountain of volcanic rock about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas that Congress chose in the late 1980s as a permanent repository. Federal officials spent the last two decades—and billions of dollars—preparing to bury spent fuel in a series of fortified tunnels drilled into the mountain.

Without further funding the project will wind up as a very expensive hole in the ground.

The repository's apparent demise is part science and part politics. Recent studies have shown that water flows through the mountain much faster than previously thought, raising concerns that radioactive leaks could contaminate drinking water supplies. More than anything else, though, the project is opposed by two powerful politicians: Reid and Obama, who is calling for more study to find a better solution.

Chicago-based Exelon Corp., the parent company of ComEd and Exelon Nuclear, is seeking to extend the life of its reactors, most of which were built in the 1970s. It also wants to build a new reactor at the Clinton Power Station south of Bloomington. Company officials have said that won't be possible without an alternative to Yucca.

--mhawthorne@tribune.com

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Michigan Messenger
March 11, 2009

Fermi 3 opposition takes legal action to block new nuclear reactor

By Eartha Jane Melzer

A coalition of environmental groups is asking federal regulators to put the brakes on the proposed expansion of the Fermi nuclear power plant in Monroe County on the grounds that it is unnecessary and poses threats to the environment and human health.

Beyond Nuclear, Citizens for Alternatives to Chemical Contamination, Citizens Environment Alliance of Southwestern Ontario, Don’t Waste Michigan and the Sierra Club, are all representing locals who live within 50 miles of Fermi and therefore have legal standing to intervene in the reactor permitting process.

According to Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Scott Burnell, the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, a panel of administrative law judges, will determine whether the groups’ contentions should be introduced as part of the hearing on the permit. There is one operational nuclear reactor at the electricity-generating complex in Monroe County’s Frenchtown Township, known as Fermi 2. Fermi 1 shut down in 1972.

Among the coalition’s 14 objections is that DTE Energy, the power company that is seeking a permit to build the Fermi 3 reactor, has failed to adequately consider the impact of cumulative toxic discharges into Lake Erie and the Great Lakes system.

The reactor’s use of Lake Erie water for cooling as well as planned and permitted and unplanned releases of radionuclides into the lake will damage fish and degrade the Great Lakes basin, which already hosts 33 licensed nuclear reactors, critics argue.

And spent fuel from the plant will be kept on site — perhaps forever, since the Obama administration has withdrawn support for the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage facility in Nevada. The presence of nuclear waste so close to the water supply for tens of million of people represents a threat to security and the environment, the groups contend.

The coalition says that the emergency response planning for the plant is inadequate and that the five Jefferson district schools within a five-mile radius of the plant do not have adequate buses to evacuate students in the event of an emergency.

Michigan Messenger reporting spurs action by coalition and state health officials

In discussion of concerns about potential human health effects, the anti-Fermi coalition included two Michigan Messenger dispatches in its filing with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

Michigan Messenger has been the only news outlet to report on new studies that warn of a possible link between increases in cancer and operations at Fermi.

In November, Michigan Messenger reported that Professor Janette Sherman of Western Michigan University  had published a study that found an increase in childhood leukemia deaths near older nuclear reactors.

In January, Michigan Messenger reported on an analysis, by Joseph Mangano of the Radiation and Public Health Project, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data on cancer deaths among young people in Monroe County. Mangano found that Monroe cancer rates had increased dramatically since operations began at Fermi 2 and he urged public health officials to investigate.

In February, in response to a request by Michigan Messenger, the Vital Records Division of the Michigan Department of Community Health generated a report on cancer trends among young people in Monroe County. With the help of epidemiologists from the University of Michigan, Michigan State and Western Michigan University, a Michigan Messenger analysis noted that the cancer rate among people under 25 in Monroe County appears to have grown at three times the rate of the state as a whole between 1996 and 2005.

Also, following Michigan Messenger reports on concerns about elevated cancer rates in Monroe County, the Michigan Department of Community Health this week agreed to investigate cancer patterns there.

Environmental epidemiologist Robert Wahl of the department’s Environmental Health Division explained that while the state compiles data from clinicians on cancer cases in the state it does not have the resources to evaluate that data for trends and relies on citizens to alert the department when worrying cancer trends appear.

Wahl said he would use Michigan Messenger’s reporting on Monroe County cancer rates as a starting point for analysis of cancer trends there.

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MonroeNews
March 11, 2009

Groups file opposition to Fermi 3

by Charles Slat

A coalition of citizen groups is asking federal regulators to reject DTE Energy's plans to build a new Fermi 3 nuclear power plant, contending that it would pose a range of threats to public health and the environment.

The groups have filed 14 contentions with the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, seeking to intervene in the licensing process and claiming that a new plant would pose "radioactive, toxic and thermal impacts on Lake Erie's vulnerable western basin."

DTE Energy, which already operates the Fermi 2 reactor near Newport, is considering building a Fermi 3 plant at the same site, using a new and as-yet unapproved design.

"For starters, this plant is not needed and we're prepared to demonstrate that," said Michael Keegan of Monroe, a member of Don't Waste Michigan, one of the groups opposing the project. "We have national experts and former NRC commissioners - some of the nation's best minds - who helped compile this document.

"The proposed Fermi 3 would represent another half-century of safety and security risks for the Great Lakes shoreline," he said. "Many concerned local residents don't want to play yet another round of radioactive Russian roulette."

The groups say that the environmental impacts of the proposed plant have not been determined adequately and the government probably should determine the plant's environmental impact on a regional basis rather than just the local impact.

Other contentions are that there is no good way to dispose of the radioactive wastes and fuel the plant generates and that the design of the plant DTE is considering should have been approved before the licensing process began.

DTE filed an application for a federal license to build and operate the plant late last year. It said it has not committed to building the plant but met a deadline that would make it eligible for federal incentives if it decided to proceed.

It has been operating the present Fermi 2 nuclear plant since January, 1988.

The idea alternately has been hailed as a potential boon to the economy, a job-creator and a way to meet future energy needs and condemned as a threat to safety and the environment and an unwarranted burden on electric customers.

The environmental coalition met a federal deadline this week for filing arguments with the NRC. If the federal Atomic Safety Licensing Board (ASLB) finds the arguments have merit, the coalition would be granted intervener status and hearings would be held on the claims.

NRC officials said Tuesday they weren't sure when the agency might begin reviewing the environmental groups' contentions regarding the Fermi 3 plant. "It takes a couple of months, usually, for the ASLB to make a decision," said Victoria Mytling, an NRC spokeswoman.

"It's a very loaded game," Mr. Keegan said. "The ASLB has a high hurdle and evidentiary evidence has to be presented up front, and we've done that. We have a multitude of experts to speak on our behalf."

The coalition includes Beyond Nuclear, Citizens for Alternatives to Chemical Contamination, Citizens Environment Alliance of Southwestern Ontario, Don't Waste Michigan, and the Sierra Club.

The coalition said it objected to Fermi 3's radioactive, toxic, and thermal impacts "especially considering the cumulative damage already occurring in the Great Lakes due to the presence of 33 operating atomic reactors, and dozens of additional coal fired power plants."

"Efficiency and renewable, such as solar and wind, could readily replace the dirty, dangerous and expensive Fermi 3 proposal," said Terry Lodge, the Toledo-based legal counsel to the coalition. "And they could do so much more cleanly, safely, and affordably."

"As Fermi 2's storage pool is full to the gills, and vulnerable to accident or attack, Detroit Edison proposes to generate yet more radioactive waste it doesn't know what to do with," said Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear, a national watchdog group in Takoma Park, Md. "With President Obama indicating the end of the Yucca Mountain dumpsite proposal in Nevada, forever deadly radioactive wastes generated by Fermi 2 and 3 would continue to pile up on the Lake Erie shoreline with nowhere to go," he added.

"Taxpayers and ratepayers should not be forced to further subsidize the already heavily subsidized nuclear power and coal industries," said Ed McArdle of the Sierra Club. "We believe the electricity from Fermi 3 will not even be needed."

Many of the contentions cite a lack of sufficient information on which to base a licensing decision.

"These are all unanswered questions and they're not giving answers. They're just saying give us the green light," Mr. Keegan said. "This Fermi 3 plant is not going to get out of the blocks."

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
March 10, 2009

Group would study alternatives to Yucca

Other ideas have not been studied, Reid says

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Harry Reid said Monday he is working to form a study group to come up with alternatives to burying nuclear waste at the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada.

"I am going to have a blue-ribbon panel to take a look at that," the Nevada Democrat said in a meeting with reporters.

He did not give details other than he expected the group would be given a year to report its findings.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu in recent appearances has endorsed the idea of forming a commission to take stock of the nation's nuclear waste management practices. President Barack Obama has declared he opposes storing radioactive material at Yucca Mountain but has not advanced any alternatives.

The Nuclear Energy Institute, the government relations arm of the nuclear industry, also has suggested a commission as a way to form a "Plan B" if Obama follows through on his policy.

Other possible ideas "haven't been studied at all; that is one of the problems," Reid said.

The Obama administration in documents last month said the president's 2010 budget to Congress will contain funding to keep a Yucca Mountain construction application alive before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission but otherwise will "devise a new strategy towards nuclear waste disposal."

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Nevada Appeal
March 10, 2009

Yucca Mountain fades as an option

By Catherine Cortez Masto

Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said this week the proposed Yucca Mountain site is no longer an option for storing highly radioactive nuclear waste. For the first time in the 20-year battle against the proposed Yucca Mountain waste repository, Nevada is in a favorable position to stop the project once and for all.

Nevada has a friend in the White House. President Obama has proposed drastic budget cuts for the program and has expressed his commitment to find better alternatives for addressing the nuclear waste problem.

The federal government is finally being realistic and respectful of the scientific findings concerning the site. While I am optimistic that we will see the demise of the project, we cannot relax our efforts until a comprehensive, binding decision is reached.

In the meantime, the administrative proceedings continue to move forward.

The Department of Energy has filed a license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Nevada has responded with its own serious legal contentions. My office is committed to meeting our state’s current obligations in the NRC licensing process and in pending litigation before the federal courts.

Yucca Mountain is geologically too fractured and volatile to contain nuclear waste no matter how the repository is engineered, how many titanium drip shields are emplaced, or how the waste is ultimately encased.

The 77,000 metric tons of stockpiled nuclear waste would have to travel over thousands of miles from its locations at over 100 nuclear power plants around the country. Proponents tell us nuclear waste transport is safe. The truth is the Yucca transportation effort will be unprecedented and fraught with ill-considered risks to population centers throughout the nation.

Until a final decision is reached terminating the Yucca Mountain project, we should not let ourselves be distracted from our responsibility to our state and future generations of Nevadans. Nor should we be distracted by false hopes of minimal monetary benefits that are no longer viable under federal law.

My office will hold the Department of Energy to the requirements of the law. Now more than ever, Nevada is poised to stop the Yucca Mountain beast once and for all. Until that time, we must continue to rise to the challenge.

• Catherine Cortez Masto is the attorney general for Nevada.

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Nevada Appeal
March 10, 2009

Who now will step up to take nuclear waste?

Our opinion

Now that President Obama has put Yucca Mountain on the shelf, it’s time to call the bluff of the project’s supporters in Congress.

The need remains for a long-term solution to storage (or reprocessing) of dangerous, high-level radioactive waste. Congress still is on the hook legally for the promises it made decades ago to the nuclear-power industry.

In the interest of fairness — something Nevada never received in the selection of Yucca Mountain as the proposed site for nuclear storage — this would be a good time to rethink and reopen the process of determining the best means of dealing with radioactive waste.

Would we be wasting the $13 billion already spent at Yucca Mountain? No, because much of the research remains valid. Science has, indeed, progressed since the studies began in 1978.

For one thing, the focus of the engineering at Yucca Mountain changed significantly when it was shown that geologic faults and potential seepage into groundwater meant that underground vaults in the Nevada desert weren’t necessarily the ideal place to put material that could remain dangerous for hundreds of years.

Instead of designing for Yucca Mountain, the engineers designed despite Yucca Mountain. If they are correct, the casks should be able survive just about anywhere.

That would include Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina, Alaska and Illinois — places whose members of Congress over the years have thought the Yucca Mountain proposal was a swell idea. If the representatives of those states, or others, are convinced by the sound science that led President Bush to give the go-ahead in 2002, then they should be prepared to offer up sites in their own states for study on the suitability of nuclear storage.

At the same time, they can begin to calculate rail routes from the dozens of temporary storage sites around the country through the communities in their states that will lead to the newly proposed sites.

They also can explain to the communities and industries around those proposed sites why having nuclear waste stored near them would be a good thing, and why it is their duty — as several have suggested it is for Nevadans — to set aside petty NIMBY concerns and help solve a problem for their country.

We look forward to seeing those representatives step up to offer their own states as nuclear repositories. Who will be first in line?

Let us know

What should be done to fulfill the nation’s need to store or reprocess

high-level radioactive waste? Send us your thoughts about the matter.

Letters intended for publication must bear the writer’s name, signature, address and phone number. They should be no more than 350 words. The Appeal reserves the right to edit them. Letters also may appear on the Appeal’s Web site.

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Scientific American
March 10, 2009

Loose nukes: Would earthquakes around Yucca Mountain make it unsafe to hold nuclear waste?

By Adam Hadhazy

The generation-long debate surrounding the dumping of the nation’s radioactive nuclear waste under Nevada’s Yucca Mountain may finally be drawing to a close. As ScientificAmerican.com reported yesterday, the plan to turn the mountain – some 100 miles (160 kilometers) from Las Vegas – into a nuclear repository appears to be dead in the water: President Obama’s proposed 2010 budget removes major funding needed to complete the project – and it faces opposition from powerful Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, who doesn't want the country's spent nuclear fuel dumped in his state.

Critics of the plan charge, among other things, that the site might not be the securest of spots to store radioactive materials given the potential of earthquakes in the area. After all, they note, Nevada is the third-most seismically active state in the U.S.

But is there really cause for concern?

"There is an earthquake hazard around Yucca Mountain that’s greater than, say, the northeastern United States, but much less than that faced by Los Angeles or San Francisco," says John Anderson, director of the Nevada Seismological Lab (NSL) based at the University of Nevada, Reno. The lab has monitored the Yucca Mountain region since 1992 when it received a grant from the Department of Energy (DOE) to help ascertain the site’s suitability as a nuclear waste graveyard.

The hazard of earthquakes stems from faults that scientists have detected around Yucca Mountain, Anderson says. Faults are fractures in the Earth’s rocky crust that allow movement between two masses of stone. When this slippage happens abruptly, presto, you’ve got an earthquake. Typically the longer a fault, the more earthquake potential it carries. For example, the infamous San Andreas fault that can produce devastating earthquakes of magnitude eight or nine on the Richter scale runs about 800 miles (1300 kilometers) under much of California's western shoreline.

The tectonics in southern Nevada where Yucca Mountain is located pale in comparison. “Hazard analyses of the faults close to Yucca Mountain indicate they could not produce more than a seven [on the Richter scale],” says Anderson. A seven can still do significant damage and qualifies as a major earthquake, though such a quake falls far short of, say, the apocalyptic magnitude 9.1 to 9.3 that triggered the Asian tsunami in 2004.

Tiny quakes near Yucca Mountain often shake things up a bit, however: NSL records about 10 micro-earthquakes of less than magnitude two or so daily within a 30 mile (50 kilometer) range of the once-slated nuclear repository, according to the lab’s website. Though it may look more alarming than it really is, check out this map (PDF) peppered with circles representing earthquakes recorded between 1992 and 2006 around Yucca Mountain by the NSL.

The only sizable quake that shook the region in recent history registered a magnitude 5.7, substantially damaging DOE buildings in the vicinity but not the fledging facilities at Yucca back in 1992. People who have worked in the Yucca environs, including at the Nevada Test Site in the desert at the mountain’s edge (where the U.S. detonated over 900 nuclear weapons above and below ground from 1951 to 1992), have reported feeling non-manmade tremors as well.

The DOE says this frequent, if low-level, seismic activity does not pose a threat to potential safe nuclear storage some five miles (eight kilometers) under Yucca Mountain. The DOE says on its Yucca Mountain web page (which remains the same as it was pre-President Obama and his Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who both oppose it as a nuke repository) in a posting that's been there since 2003:

"Experience with earthquakes throughout the world has shown that underground structures can withstand the ground motion generated by earthquakes. And, in actual tests at the Nevada Test Site mine tunnels have withstood ground motion from underground nuclear explosions that are greater than any ground motion anticipated at or near Yucca Mountain. Repository facilities at the surface also can be designed to safely withstand earthquake effects."

In other words, the proposed Yucca Mountain repository could withstand whatever earthquakes Mother Nature might muster – except, perhaps, the shifting of the political ground.

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Maine Public Broadcasting Network
March 10, 2009

Yucca Mountain Decision Raises Nuclear Storage QuestionsBack

By: Keith McKeen

Radioactive waste will remain on the Maine Yankee Nuclear site longer than expected following the decision by the Obama Administration to shelve the long-considered Yucca Mountain site for nuclear waste.  Local and state officials are pondering how that'll affect the community's complete restoration of the property.

More than $13 billion and over 20 years of environmental debate have been expended in preparing the Yucca Mountain's volcanic rock, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, for the storage of nuclear waste.  Patrick Dostie, Maine's Nuclear Safety Advisor says the government's decision means Wiscasset could end up being a de-facto storage site until the issue is resolved.  "Even in the current situation, before the Obama Administration took over we were still talking a number of years, almost, you know, another 10 years before everything would start moving to some degree, providing everything worked out well at the Yucca repository."

Dostie says there are already multiple security threats with the nuclear material stored at over 100 sites across the country.  At the Maine Yankee site, he says there are four waste receptacles with radioactivity rated at a higher level than Maine Yankee's low level landfill should store.  "That is beyond what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's regulation would allow in those types of landfills--what we call low-level waste disposal facilites;  we have what we call greater than Class C waste, and that's basically what those four canisters house at this particular point."

But Dostie assures residents that the life of the storage casks is at least 50 years.  Maine Yankee spokeman Eric Howes says  though the federal government is planning to take a different approach to nuclear waste storage, it's still obligated to pay for its eventual removal.

Maine Yankee and other nuclear facilities already won a suit sgainst the Bush Administration for delaying the nuclear cleanup process. "Every day the fuel remains here, the federal government's financial liability for not fulfilling its commitment increases.  It could be a substantial burden in the years to come."

Members of Maine's congressional delegation are weighing in on the administration's decision.  Republican Senator Susan  Collins says putting Yucca Mountain off limits will not only delay the transfer af waste being stored at the Maine Yankee site, she says it's unfair.  "Because the residents of Maine have paid more than $150 million into a nuclear waste fund with the assurance that the nuclear waste from Maine Yankee would be moved from Maine to a permanent repository."

First District Congresswoman Chellie Pingree says, while the decision is frustrating for Maine residents, it makes a good case against the those who support the resugence of nuclear power as a primary source of energy.  "I think we'd much rather be investing in wind power and other kinds of renewable energy and this shows once again that yet today we still don't have good storage alternatives.  I understand why the people of Nevada don't want it stored in their state, but that was the previous agreement.  And it shows that, you know, people still don't feel comfortable about the storage of nuclear waste."

The Maine Public Advocate's Office says that more than a decade after Maine Yankee stopped generating power, the average Maine household uses about 500  kilowatts a month and is paying about 50 cents a month for nuclear waste storage.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
March 09, 2009

Reid working to form Yucca Mountain Project panel

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Harry Reid said today he is working to form a study group to come up with alternatives to burying nuclear waste at the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada.

"I am going to have a blue ribbon panel to take a look at that," the Nevada Democrat said in a meeting with reporters. He did not give details other than he expected the group would be given a year to report its findings.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu in recent appearances has endorsed the idea of forming a commission to take stock of the nation's nuclear waste management practices. President Barack Obama has declared he opposes storing radioactive material at Yucca Mountain but has not advanced any alternatives.

The Nuclear Energy Institute, the government relations arm of the nuclear industry, also has suggested a commission as a way to form a "Plan B" if Obama follows through on his policy.

Other possible ideas "haven't been studied at all, that is one of the problems," Reid said.

The Obama administration in documents last month said the president's 2010 budget to Congress will contain funding to keep a Yucca Mountain construction application alive before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission but otherwise will "devise a new strategy towards nuclear waste disposal."

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

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Las Vegas SUN
March 09, 2009

One Man’s View:

Hey Pa.: Keep your waste in your own backyard

By Tim O'Callaghan

Today I was trolling the blogs and newspaper web pages when I happened to read this amusing editorial by Denny Bonavita, editor and publisher of McLean Publishing Co. in west-central Pennsylvania, which includes the Courier-Express in DuBois, Pa.

The “Our Opinion” penned by Mr. Bonavita is titled “If Not Yucca, Where?” and starts out by accusing the president of “pandering to Sen. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate.” It then goes on to throw a little mud in Senator Reid’s face by continuing it “further muddies Obama’s credentials as an effective, bipartisan president. But that’s fine.”

OK Denny, so that’s fine. But the president usually doesn’t pander to the Senate leadership, no matter what side of the aisle they lead. It’s usually the other way.

This is where I begin to find his editorial amusing, if not hypocritical, when he makes a few interesting statements such as this beauty:

“We have just one nagging question.

“The federal government is obligated by law to accept the used reactor fuel from 104 commercial power reactors, but as yet it has no place to put it. The spent fuel, growing at the rate of 2,000 tons a year, is being held in pools and above-ground concrete containers at reactor sites.

“What happens to it?”

That’s easy for me to answer with a rhetorical question, such as, “What have you been doing with your garbage for the past 20 years?”

He follows up with, “What happens to us if terrorists steal it? If earthquakes or tornadoes spread it?”

This editorial reminds me of a neighbor I once had who would pick up his dog’s used dog fuel and toss it over his back wall instead of putting it in his own garbage can.

Anyway, I suggest they start shipping those super-duper, train crash-resistant canisters that were proposed for Yucca Mountain to the nuclear power plants around the country. Perhaps they might start with Pennsylvania.

The editorial goes on: “But no state wants to host the long-term storage site. The Nevada site had been vetted by previous administrations, both Republican and Democratic. Yes, Nevada loses.”

Well Denny I’m afraid that’s where you’re wrong. The political game called congressional seniority is how Nevada got screwed in the first place. We elected a dressmaker over Nevada’s second most powerful senator in history, Howard Cannon.

Today, Harry Reid is the most powerful senator ever to represent the people Nevada.

It has taken people such as Harry Reid, John Ensign, Shelley Berkley, Jon Porter and Dean Heller our congressional delegation of the past several years, to get the nuke screw out of our backside. The odds have always been stacked against Nevada, with only three members of the House of Representatives compared to Pennsylvania’s 22 members of the house.

By the way Denny, how many dogs — oops, I meant nuke plants — do you have in your back yard? Nevada has zero!

One last bit of irony. He wrote, “But we have no way to deal with the waste, which can kill us by the millions.”

OK, let me understand this. Nevada has to give a little bit. Therefore, it’s OK if terrorists try to steal 5-ton casks of your garbage from our backyard, and it’s OK if the garbage can kill millions of Nevadans.

For some reason, I fail to see your logic.

Or perhaps I’m just as big a NIMBY as you.

--Tim O’Callaghan, co-publisher of the News, can be reached at 990-2656 or tim.oc@vegas.com. He writes a regular blog at tocomv.blogspot.com.

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AHN
March 09, 2009

At Least 31 Nuclear Reactor Applications With U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission

AHN Staff

Washington, D.C. (AHN) - Despite the controversy surrounding the nuclear repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, the U.S. nuclear power industry may be on a comeback trail based on at least 31 applications for nuclear reactors with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The commission is expected more applications to be filed in the coming days. The bulk of the existing applications are in the Southeast, with the first reactor slated to go online as early as 2015 if it gets the commission's nod.

Those in favor of nuclear power said the okay of pending construction permits to build new reactors in Florida, Alabama and Texas may pave the way to hike demand for nuclear power in California which prohibited the construction of new reactors the late 1970s due to concerns over its waste disposal.

While U.S. President Barack Obama has given other alternative energy sources such as wind and sun power a push, he promised to take another look at nuclear energy. However, he removed the funding for the nuclear repository, which had already used $7.7 billion federal funding over the past few decades.

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Daily Finance
March 09, 2009

Nuclear power: Potential growth engine for U.S. economy

Joseph Lazzaro

The U.S. economy is urgently looking for growth engines, and one such engine the nation should seriously consider is nuclear power.

From a economic perspective, it makes a great deal of the sense for the United States to imitate the French model and build nuclear power plants -- 100 percent publicly funded if necessary -- on a grand scale.

And there are at least three good reasons: 1) energy independence, 2) job creation, and 3) a reduction in the nation's carbon footprint that comes from coal-fired electric plants.

There's a good economic argument that the United States should embark on a plan to build at least 100 nuclear plants above the 34 reactor applications on file at the nation's Nuclear Regulatory Agency, and seek private investment, if investors are game. If not, then the nation should try a private-public partnership, but the government should be prepared to fund a plant at 100 percent should the private sector not be willing to invest in a venture.

France: Liberty, equality, fraternity, fission

Concerned about nuclear waste? The United States has always cited nuclear waste processing as a barrier to nuclear power, but France has had in place an active nuclear reprocessing program at COGEMA La Hague and Tricastin for decades.

Nuclear power never went out of style in France, and for this reason France is well ahead of the United States, and much of the world for that matter, regarding energy self-sufficiency, The New York Times reports. An astounding 77 percent of France's electricity comes from its 58 nuclear power plants, and it is a net exporter of electricity to Europe. The United States has 104 nuclear power plants, which account for only 19.4 percent of its generated electricity, according to U.S. Department of Energy data, according to The Times. (It's worth noting that France launched an ambitious nuclear power program decades ago because the nation does not have any oil nor abundant coal.)

If the United States chooses to not reprocess nuclear waste, it can always store it in Yucca Mountain or at a new storage facility, perhaps in the far reaches of Alaska. Neither is on tap for storage now, but it seems that both should be.

Big Point: In addition to helping achieve energy independence, increasing the U.S.'s barely adequate generating capacity, and decreasing coal emissions, nuclear plant construction and operation will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs -- a new, mini-industry for the U.S. economy. Further, there's much to be learned from France about nuclear power plant construction, but any U.S. improvements could serve as the basis for yet another export technology for the United States.

Economic Analysis: A vast expansion of nuclear generating capacity is compelling on energy independence, job creation, and climate change grounds. The view from here argues that the United States must build as many nuclear power plants as possible to ensure an adequate electric power supply well into the mid-21st century, and to serve as another growth sector for an economy that needs all the new jobs and expanding sectors it can get.

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San Francisco Chronicle
March 09, 2009

Nuclear power industry sees opening for revival

Jim Doyle
Chronicle Staff Writer

(03-08) 17:32 PST -- With the Obama administration staking the nation's energy future on clean sources, the U.S. nuclear power industry aims to make a comeback by building dozens of new reactors that supply plentiful, carbon-free electricity.

But 30 years after the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania led to moratoriums on new plants across the nation, concerns about the cost and safety of nuclear power remain, including what to do with the growing stockpiles of highly radioactive waste from the nation's reactors.

President Obama's campaign pledge to find an alternative to burying the deadly waste at Yucca Mountain, Nev. - and recent votes in Congress to slash funding for the proposed nuclear graveyard 1,000 feet underground - could hobble the industry's hopes of providing a larger share of U.S. energy needs.

Still, industry leaders voice confidence about nuclear power as a clean source of electrical energy that can reduce the nation's reliance on dirty, coal-fired power plants that emit greenhouse gases, cause acid rain and speed climate change.

Applications to build at least 31 nuclear reactors are before the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with more filings expected soon. Many of the projects are in the Southeast, with the first expected to go on line as early as 2015. Nuclear advocates hope eventually to build additional reactors in California.

"I'm aware of 33 or 34 projects in the hopper. I think the prospects are reasonably good. There's demand," said Bill Halsey, a leading expert on nuclear energy at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where scientists have worked on solutions for permanent disposal of high-level radioactive waste.

New reactors

Nuclear power supporters predict that approval of pending construction licenses for new reactors in Florida, Alabama and Texas will raise demand for nuclear power in California, which has banned new reactors since the late 1970s because of concerns over waste disposal.

Obama has emphasized alternative energy sources such as wind and solar power, but also pledged to re-examine nuclear energy.

Officials at the Livermore lab hope to use a fresh infusion of federal funds to refine methods of disposing of or recycling nuclear reactors' spent fuel, which can remain highly toxic for hundreds of thousands of years.

The lab is run by a consortium headed by San Francisco's Bechtel Corp., which also builds nuclear power plants overseas.

Nuclear power opponents include the Sierra Club, the nation's oldest environmental group.

"Our view is that the nuclear industry has yet to demonstrate that they know what to do with the waste they generate," said Carl Pope, the club's executive director, "and they have yet to demonstrate that they can build and operate new reactors with their own money. They have yet to meet the test of the market. So we think it's a very poor investment of public money."

Meanwhile, global warming has prompted some conservationists, such as Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, to conclude that nuclear power will be a crucial energy source in the future.

'Not-so-good options'

"Many people are gritting their teeth and beginning to look at nuclear energy because the problems appear to be more manageable," said Per Peterson, a professor of nuclear engineering at UC Berkeley. "Nuclear energy is the only source that we've found that can directly displace coal for reliable, full-time electrical generation. ... It's the best of a set of not-so-good options."

There are about 440 nuclear power plants operating worldwide, including 104 commercial reactors in the United States. Four reactors are in California - two at Diablo Canyon near San Luis Obispo and two at San Onofre in Southern California. Energy from those plants, plus nuclear power imported from Arizona, accounts for 15 percent of California's electricity supply.

Nuclear reactors supply nearly 20 percent of U.S. electrical energy, and industry advocates say nuclear energy provides about three-quarters of the nation's carbon-free electricity. They also say reactor safety has improved significantly since Three Mile Island's meltdown in 1979.

Under California law, no new nuclear power plants can be built in the state until the industry finds a way to permanently dispose of its waste. Spent fuel rods are currently stored on site at U.S. nuclear plants.

Meanwhile, other nations, including China, are building nuclear reactors at a rapid rate. France, Britain and Japan rely heavily on nuclear power.

Building a reactor costs several billion dollars, which utilities and owner/operators hope to fund through bank loans, rate increases and federal loan guarantees.

In 1987, Congress chose Yucca Mountain as the nation's future repository for spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors. The state of Nevada has opposed the project.

"Over the last 40 years, a very broad scientific consensus has emerged that nuclear waste can be managed safely by a combination of recycle and deep geologic disposal," UC Berkeley's Peterson said. "There's political controversy, but the technical consensus is that the level of isolation will be sufficient to protect long-term public health and the environment."

The Department of Energy has applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build the repository at Yucca Mountain, but funding for the project has been severely cut.

Nuclear waste fee

A recent study by the Congressional Research Service says that it would cost about $100 billion to dispose of the waste from U.S. nuclear reactors and dismantled weapons at the site. But nuclear advocates say these costs are nominal.

"The nuclear waste fee is only about a percent of the value of energy taken out," said Jim Blink, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "Nuclear has such a small amount of waste per unit of energy that we can afford to collect it and dispose of it in a way that's isolated from the biosphere."

Blink and other scientists spent two decades evaluating the suitability of Yucca Mountain as a permanent graveyard for nuclear waste, which currently includes about 60,000 metric tons from civilian reactors plus additional tonnage from the military.

They have done extensive studies of volcanic rock there, built a corrosion testing lab to simulate underground conditions, designed corrosion-resistant dry casks to hold spent fuel rods and used supercomputers to calculate the risks of permanent disposal.

Meanwhile, researchers and engineers are developing the next generation of nuclear reactors that will be capable of recycling spent nuclear fuel, leaving a residue of material whose high-level radioactivity is of shorter duration. Those reactors are not expected to go on line for 20 to 30 years.

--E-mail Jim Doyle at jdoyle@sfchronicle.com.

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Scientific American blog
March 09, 2009

Whatever happened to plans to bury U.S. nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain?

By Adam Hadhazy

Remember the feds' controversial plan to store all of the country's spent nuclear fuel deep inside Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert some 100 miles (160 kilometers) northwest of Las Vegas? Well it looks like that proposed resting place for the country's nuclear waste has apparently been, well, laid to rest.

When President Obama unveiled his budget last month, he essentially eliminated funding to prepare the site as the nation's nuke graveyard. The scant funds still to be allotted, according to the Las Vegas Sun, will just be enough to allow the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)—the body responsible for managing civilian nuke power—to hold planned hearings on licensing the facility’s construction.

Even if the NRC gives the green light to Yucca, the dual opposition of Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–Nev.) likely spell doom for the site. “What happens once we say 'yes' or 'no' is out of our hands,” NRC spokesperson Eliot Brenner told The New York Times. A spokesperson for Energy Secretary Steven Chu recently erased any lingering doubts about the site's future, recently telling Science that her boss has made clear that “Nuclear waste storage at Yucca Mountain is not an option, period.”

Perhaps recognizing this, the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the Washington, D.C.–based trade organization representing the nuclear industry, has not made a big fuss and has instead called for more study of the matter and an independent commission to advise the president. “The results of an independent commission’s strategic assessment of the overall approach to used fuel and defense waste management can provide direction,” Marvin Fertel, president and CEO of NEI, wrote in an op-ed February 27 in The Energy Daily.

The political hot potato has been little more than a money pit since 1987 when Congress and the Department of Energy selected it as the permanent storage facility for up to 70,000 metric tons of waste produced by the nation's nuclear power plants. Taxpayers have subsequently poured nearly $11 billion into the project, including early planning stages—much of it in penalties paid to utilities when the site did not begin accepting shipped waste in 1998 per plan. Closing down the facility before it’s even built, let alone opened may leave the government owing billions of dollars more to utilities who have helped fund its proposed construction, according to The New York Times.

As detailed in ScientificAmerican.com’s recent special report on nuclear power, over its nearly 50-year history, U.S. commercial nuclear reactors have produced some 64,000 metric tons of fuel rods that presently sit in pools of water on-site, cooling for decades, or are sealed up in cement dry casks. While this temporary solution should hold for several decades, finding a long-term plan for storing nuclear power’s dangerous leftovers falls to the energy secretary, who testified before a congressional panel during his confirmation hearing that finding a replacement for Yucca or somehow making it work will take up “a significant part of my time and energy.”

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UPI
March 09, 2009

White House could revive nuke power

WASHINGTON, March 9 (UPI) -- A White House push for clean energy could be a boon for the U.S. nuclear power industry, analysts say.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported Monday that dozens of new reactors could be built to supply plentiful, carbon-free electricity. The industry could be fettered, however, by President Barack Obama's opposition to the planned nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., the newspaper noted.

The Chronicle reported that applications to build at least 31 nuclear reactors are pending before federal regulators, with more filings expected soon.

"I'm aware of 33 or 34 projects in the hopper. I think the prospects are reasonably good. There's demand," said Bill Halsey, an expert on nuclear energy at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

Opponents of building more nuclear power plants include the Sierra Club.

"Our view is that the nuclear industry has yet to demonstrate that they know what to do with the waste they generate," said Carl Pope, the club's executive director, "and they have yet to demonstrate that they can build and operate new reactors with their own money. They have yet to meet the test of the market. So we think it's a very poor investment of public money."

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Minnesota Daily
March 09, 2009

Editorials

A $13 billion failure

The Obama administration slashed funding for Yucca Mountain, while not giving any other plans for nuclear storage.

The Obama administration and Energy Secretary Steven Chu have scrapped almost total funding for Yucca Mountain — the massive nuclear storage facility 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas that has been under construction for years. While almost all the funding was slashed for the facility, no definite plan was put into place, just the announcement that a permanent plan is in the works. This will ultimately leave the responsibility up to the state on negotiating with power companies on where to store the nuclear waste they accumulate. Going back to step one was not necessary, as Yucca Mountain proved sufficient for the storage of nuclear waste.

The Yucca Mountain attributes seemed to make perfect sense when looking for a good site to store this dangerous material. It was remote, was geographically sound, had a deep water table and a very dry climate. In 1987, Congress realized this, and started the massive facility to take on the federal government’s role in housing the material quickly and in a universally and ordered fashion.

But now, the government’s ability to again delay a long-term project to store nuclear waste threatens people everywhere. With the hundreds of new applications pouring in for the construction of potential nuclear power plants in the United States, there is still no universal procedure to store their radioactive waste. Yucca Mountain was a safe alternative that could be finished within a considerable amount of time.

The Obama administration needs to explain exactly why they slashed funding for Yucca Mountain, and what they will do to fix the problem that will never go away. Thirteen billion was wasted at Yucca Mountain; now is the time to effectively spend the next large sum of resources on a project that will help contain nuclear waste.

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WSJM
March 09, 2009

Proos: Abandoning Yucca Mountain Hurts SWM

Andrew Green Reporting

State Representative John Proos today responded to the US Energy Secretary's comments last week which suggested the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage facility in Nevada will not be completed. So far, the government has spent over 13-billion dollars on building the site, which would have been its solution to storing nuclear waste from all over the country. It's been planned for decades...and Proos says that backing away from the idea now is all wrong -- especially for Southwest Michigan:

Congressman Fred Upton also spoke out against the administration's apparent reluctance to complete Yucca Mountain, but has said that he still thinks the project could go through.

--Audio: http://wireready1.wsjm.com/00006_yucca2.mp3

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Courier-Express
March 09, 2009

Our opinion: If not Yucca, where?

Denny Bonavita

OK, so President Obama has decided to write off $8 to $13 billion already spent, and not send the nation's nuclear waste to the Yucca Mountain storage site already mostly built in Nevada.

Pandering to Sen. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, further muddies Obama's credentials as an effective, bipartisan President.

But that's fine.

We have just one nagging question.

The federal government is obligated by law to accept the used reactor fuel from 104 commercial power reactors, but as yet it has no place to put it. The spent fuel, growing at the rate of 2,000 tons a year, is being held in pools and aboveground concrete containers at reactor sites.

What happens to it?

What happens to us if terrorists steal it? If earthquakes or tornadoes spread it?

The current policy is no policy. It is worse than dumb. It is stupid and dangerous.

But no state wants to host the long-term storage site. The Nevada site had been vetted by previous administrations, both Republican and Democratic. Yes, Nevada loses. But sometimes, for the national good, specific areas have to give a bit. That's the essence of a federal system of government.

So if Obama hasn't gotten at least 2,000 tons per year of the high-level radioactive waste disposed of by 2012 - he should be defeated for re-election.

There are alternatives. Reprocessing of spent fuel, as is done in Europe, is an alternative.

But we don't have a decade. We don't even have years.

The nation needs more nuclear power plants to combat environmental pollution and curb our dependence on foreign fuels, both oil and gas.

But we have no way to deal with the waste, which can kill us by the millions.

OK, Mr. President. Yucca Mountain is scrapped.

Now, put up something else that works and is affordable. This year. Or revive the Yucca Mountain plan. Or become just another sad shadow of a political hack.

---------------------------

Brunswick Times Record
March 09, 2009

Yucca Mtn. decision places Maine Yankee nuclear waste disposal plan in limbo

By Seth Koenig

WISCASSET — The wait for radioactive waste to be trucked away from Wiscasset might have gotten longer, as the Obama administration last week canceled a 22-year-old plan to collect and store all of the country's used nuclear reactor fuel at a central Nevada site.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced last week that the president scratched Yucca Mountain — long eyed as the central dumping ground for nearly 60,000 tons of nuclear waste from the nation's 104 commercial power reactors — as an option for storage.

The news comes after $13.5 billion has been spent to develop the site since 1987. At the local level, it adds more uncertainty about the fate of the Maine Yankee site, where 64 casks of nuclear waste await federal relocation.

Patrick Dostie, Maine's nuclear safety inspector, said that of the 64 waste receptacles, four contain greater than Class C waste, meaning the radioactivity is too high for a low-level waste disposal facility. He also said the casks currently have a 20-year license, which could be renewed, and a design life of 50 years.

Chu, in speaking before Congress' Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, said radioactive waste will be left at local storage facilities like that in Wiscasset until the administration comes up with a new strategy to dispose of it.

"We don't yet know what that's going to be," said Eric Howes, spokesman for Maine Yankee, which operated as a nuclear power plant from 1972 to 1997. "What we've been doing is working with our delegation to ensure that, whatever is done, priority is given to shut-down reactors."

In 1982, Congress directed the government to assume responsibility for commercial nuclear waste. Even under the Yucca Mountain plan, the Nevada site was not expected to begin accepting waste until between 2016 and 2020. With the federal government changing direction, local officials are unsure how much more time they'll have to wait for radioactive material to be taken away from Wiscasset.

"The biggest issue is, if nothing is being done to develop a central repository, you get into a situation where, not only here, but other sites around the country become de facto storage sites," said Dostie. "If a geological repository is not in the cards, you're going to have to find some other way to do it.

"That may be fine for (the federal government), but it's not great for us, because of the long-term implications," he continued. "We can't free up the land for development or anything else, because there's something there."

Said Howes: "It's uncertain how the government's going to fulfill their commitment, but as they develop that policy, priority should be given to shut-down plants like Maine Yankee. Our hope is that the priority is given to shut-down plants like Maine Yankee so the fuel can be removed and the site can be used for other purposes."

Calls placed to Wiscasset Town Planner Jeffrey Hinderliter were not returned by press time. Town Manager Arthur Faucher was in a meeting this morning and unavailable for comment.

By Seth Koenig, Times Record Staff

WISCASSET — The wait for radioactive waste to be trucked away from Wiscasset might have gotten longer, as the Obama administration last week canceled a 22-year-old plan to collect and store all of the country's used nuclear reactor fuel at a central Nevada site.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced last week that the president scratched Yucca Mountain — long eyed as the central dumping ground for nearly 60,000 tons of nuclear waste from the nation's 104 commercial power reactors — as an option for storage.

The news comes after $13.5 billion has been spent to develop the site since 1987. At the local level, it adds more uncertainty about the fate of the Maine Yankee site, where 64 casks of nuclear waste await federal relocation.

Patrick Dostie, Maine's nuclear safety inspector, said that of the 64 waste receptacles, four contain greater than Class C waste, meaning the radioactivity is too high for a low-level waste disposal facility. He also said the casks currently have a 20-year license, which could be renewed, and a design life of 50 years.

Chu, in speaking before Congress' Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, said radioactive waste will be left at local storage facilities like that in Wiscasset until the administration comes up with a new strategy to dispose of it.

"We don't yet know what that's going to be," said Eric Howes, spokesman for Maine Yankee, which operated as a nuclear power plant from 1972 to 1997. "What we've been doing is working with our delegation to ensure that, whatever is done, priority is given to shut-down reactors."

In 1982, Congress directed the government to assume responsibility for commercial nuclear waste. Even under the Yucca Mountain plan, the Nevada site was not expected to begin accepting waste until between 2016 and 2020. With the federal government changing direction, local officials are unsure how much more time they'll have to wait for radioactive material to be taken away from Wiscasset.

"The biggest issue is, if nothing is being done to develop a central repository, you get into a situation where, not only here, but other sites around the country become de facto storage sites," said Dostie. "If a geological repository is not in the cards, you're going to have to find some other way to do it.

"That may be fine for (the federal government), but it's not great for us, because of the long-term implications," he continued. "We can't free up the land for development or anything else, because there's something there."

Said Howes: "It's uncertain how the government's going to fulfill their commitment, but as they develop that policy, priority should be given to shut-down plants like Maine Yankee. Our hope is that the priority is given to shut-down plants like Maine Yankee so the fuel can be removed and the site can be used for other purposes."

Calls placed to Wiscasset Town Planner Jeffrey Hinderliter were not returned by press time. Town Manager Arthur Faucher was in a meeting this morning and unavailable for comment.

--Information from The Associated Press was used in this article.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
March 08, 2009

Yucca can be useful

By Ty Cobb
Special To The Review-Journal

It's not often that I find myself in agreement with U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, but on the point of the idiocy of the obsolete concept for long-term storage of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, we seem to share some similar views.

The senator believes the idea of storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain for upward of a million years cannot be done safely, and that the project must be halted. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has come to the same conclusion and has asked for new approaches to the difficult challenge of storing America's nuclear waste.

That's just what I am suggesting. From my perspective, I think it is unnecessary to pursue such an outmoded and economically absurd method of dealing with the waste. I believe that reprocessing and reuse of the waste is the future of our nation's nuclear waste quandary and the best alternative to the Yucca Mountain dump, not sealing it and burying it deep underground in such a manner that it cannot be retrieved.

I think that reprocessing is a much better way to treat the used nuclear material. The government and nuclear industry would reprocess the waste on site to eliminate as much as 90 percent of the material. This process would allow the reuse of this valuable material, interim storage of wastes in place of long-term burial and the creation of a cutting-edge research and development facility at Yucca Mountain.

One area where Sen. Reid and I apparently disagree is on the desire to encourage the cultivation of high-paying jobs here in Nevada. One of the downsides to simply slashing the Yucca Mountain Project budget without alternatives is that Nevada has lost hundreds of high-paying jobs and will lose even more.

Under my plan, in exchange for reprocessing the waste, Nevada would still receive compensation from the $20 billion nuclear waste fund that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act provides for in annual payments and infrastructure improvements. At the same time, the research center could also become a site for the exploration and testing of advanced research and development on energy issues -- a high-tech center that would employ hundreds of scientists and technology experts.

Between constructing and operating the facility and the required transportation systems, medical centers, schools, etc., thousands of jobs would be created. This project could bring billions of dollars in grants, investment and ancillary projects. Nevada would leap to the forefront of energy research, which would also provide the opportunity for new nuclear and renewable energy projects to provide cheap, environmentally friendly energy for Southern Nevada. With reprocessing, we have the potential to create new energy options to offset our reliance on fossil fuels.

I have a bill draft pending that would call for a serious discussion of this proposal. Some die-hards cling to the idea that simply halting the Yucca Mountain Project is our only priority. For them, storing the waste on site -- that is, at some 31 nuclear reactor sites above ground -- represents a safer alternative. For me, that option is simply a terrorist's dream.

I remain optimistic, however, that reason will prevail and the Legislature and the media will welcome the opportunity to engage in an intellectual exchange of views regarding this innovative approach to solving the vexing problems of nuclear waste disposal. If you agree with me, please be sure and let your legislators and media outlets know that you want this proposal discussed and evaluated.

--Assemblyman Ty Cobb (tcobb@asm.state.nv.us), a Republican, represents Reno's District 26.

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Las Vegas SUN
March 08, 2009

Sun Editorial:

McCain shows obstinacy

Arizona senator maintains inane support of nuke waste dump at Yucca Mountain

When Sen. John McCain of Arizona ran last year as the Republican presidential nominee, he made no secret of his desire to turn Yucca Mountain — 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas — into the nation’s dump site for high-level nuclear waste. That was one of the reasons he was pummeled in Nevada’s November general election by Democrat Barack Obama, who now occupies the White House.

Since his defeat, McCain has continued to assume a lead role as a tool of the nuclear power industry. This was evident Thursday when he grilled Energy Secretary Steven Chu at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on support for scientific research.

While arguing that expanded use of nuclear power was necessary to help combat the buildup of greenhouse gases, McCain expressed his displeasure with the Obama administration’s opposition to the Yucca Mountain project and its vow to pursue a new strategy for nuclear waste disposal.

When asked by McCain what was wrong with Yucca Mountain, Chu responded: “I think we can do a better job.” When Chu later confirmed that Yucca Mountain was no longer an option being considered by the administration, McCain whined: “Now we’re going to have spent fuel sitting around in pools all over America.”

But Chu, a Nobel Prize laureate in physics, stood his ground.

He told the senator that the interim storage of waste at reactors through a process known as solidification “is something we can do today.” Chu also said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission “has said we can do it safely.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., was quick to note after the hearing that President Obama and Chu “are holding firm on their commitment to kill the dump.”

In contrast, McCain’s tiresome refusal to give up on Yucca Mountain reflects poorly on Nevadans who supported his presidential candidacy. Those supporters conveniently overlooked the fact that a radioactive dump would pose a lethal hazard to Nevada residents and tourists alike, not to mention the danger caused by transporting waste to this state from reactors throughout the country.

It is time for McCain and like-minded nuclear power advocates to drop their support of the ill-conceived Yucca Mountain project. Instead, they should work with the Obama administration on nuclear waste alternatives that make far more sense.

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Nevada Appeal
March 08, 2009

Obama nails the lid shut on Yucca’s coffin

Guy W. Farmer

President Obama’s Energy Secretary, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dr. Steven Chu, signed a death warrant for the ailing Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump on Thursday when he told senators that the Southern Nevada site is no longer an option for storing the nation’s stockpile of deadly nuclear waste.

In other words, Yucca Mountain is dead.

Chu’s rebuff of the toxic project came in a sharp exchange with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and followed Obama’s decision to slash Yucca costs to “those necessary to answer inquiries from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission while the administration devises a new strategy toward nuclear waste disposal.”

“I’m pleased that President Obama and Secretary Chu are holding firm on their commitment to kill the dump,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who has led the fight against Yucca Mountain.

Carson City’s Republican Congressman, Dean Heller, praised the president for recognizing that “this project is a waste of taxpayer dollars and a threat to the health and safety of all Nevadans.” Amen!

Nevertheless, Yucca Mountain proponents probably won’t give up on their fight to turn our state into the nation’s toxic waste dump. The Reno Gazette-Journal, which downplayed the original budget story in an inside page “news brief,” granted much more space to local public relations consultant Randi Thompson, who argued that the dump is a good deal for Nevada.

“With our state in financial crisis, why does our congressional delegation cut $100 million from Yucca?” she asked.

Like my friends Ty Cobb, Sr. and Chuck Muth, Ms. Thompson thinks that federal largesse could provide a quick fix for Nevada’s budget woes.

“Yucca’s budget, when operational, will be $1.5 billion a year for 30 years,” she wrote.

That reminds me of James Carville’s insulting quip during the Bill Clinton-Paula Jones scandal about dragging $100 bills through trailer parks. Show the rubes the money and they’ll sign on, no matter what. But that’s not going to happen this time.

President Obama, who is taking some well-deserved heat for attempting to redistribute the wealth through a huge federal government economic stimulus package, deserves credit for keeping his campaign promise to shut down Yucca Mountain.

This is a stark contrast to the way former President George W. Bush betrayed the Silver State by approving the toxic project after promising to base his decision on sound science. I apologize for using the phrases “Yucca Mountain” and “sound science” in the same paragraph.

Earlier, I criticized influential Reno political blogger/columnist Ty Cobb Sr., whom I greatly respect. While I continue to oppose Ty’s attempts to keep Yucca Mountain alive, I think his idea of exploring nuclear waste reprocessing is well worth considering. If the French can do it — and they do, quite successfully — why can’t we? Reprocessing nuclear waste at several sites around the country would cut the amount of waste by 95 percent and provide an additional source of alternative energy, which makes sense.

I also join former Nevada Gov. Richard Bryan, who chairs the state’s Nuclear Projects Commission, in questioning Gov. Jim Gibbons’ commitment to the fight against Yucca Mountain. Gibbons, desperate to balance the budget without raising taxes, wants to decimate the staff of our Nuclear Projects Office, which coordinates the battle against the proposed dump.

“I don’t know where the governor is coming from,” said Bryan in a recent Las Vegas Sun interview. “This isn’t the time to be penny-wise and pound-foolish. (Yucca Mountain) is at a very critical stage and Nevada has to be fully prepared,” he added. I agree and urge Gov. Gibbons to speak out against this toxic project in defense of the health and safety of all Nevadans. Speak up, Governor! We deserve to hear from you on this vital issue.

• Guy W. Farmer, of Carson City, has consistently opposed the Yucca Mountain project since he began writing this weekly column in mid-1996.

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Washington Post
March 08, 2009

Yucca Mountain

Mr. Obama defunds the nuclear repository at Yucca Mountain. Now what?

BY STRIPPING the funding for the nuclear repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, President Obama has succeeded in killing the contentious project that remains unfinished 22 years after Congress selected the site. He compounds the error by not offering an alternative. If the president's vision for a clean energy future is to be believed or is to come to fruition, nuclear energy must be a part of the mix, and the safe disposal of its radioactive waste must be given more serious consideration.

The project has burned through $7.7 billion. It was supposed to start accepting spent material from the nation's operating nuclear reactors (now numbering 104) in 1998. Our longstanding support of the Yucca Mountain facility has been grounded in the belief that the center of a desert mountain 1,000 feet underground and more than 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas was an appropriate place for the nation's nuclear waste. Instead, storage is spread over 121 above-ground sites located within 75 miles of more than 161 million people in 39 states.

There's more than a modicum of politics at play in Mr. Obama's decision. The president keeps a campaign promise to shut the site down. By doing so, he pleases Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). And he potentially secures the swing state's place in the blue column; the Silver State hadn't voted for the Democratic presidential nominee since 1996 until it went to Mr. Obama in 2008. That's not to belittle the concerns of Nevadans. There have been worries about radioactive seepage into groundwater. But scientists have long maintained that corrosion wouldn't threaten the integrity of the storage containers for at least 10,000 years.

Now that the Yucca Mountain project is dead the obvious question is: Now what? As a senator in 2007, Mr. Obama suggested in a letter to Mr. Reid and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, "finding another state willing to serve as a permanent national repository . . . ." He also called for redirecting resources to improve the safety and security at plants around the country until a long-term solution is found. Those alternatives, however unlikely the first one is, are more than he offered when he cut off Yucca Mountain's funding.

In the coming weeks, Energy Secretary Steven Chu will announce plans for a meeting with key stakeholders to discuss nuclear waste storage. A report is expected within a year of the meeting. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says the dry cask storage of nuclear waste currently employed is a safe short-term solution. Thankfully, "short-term" in this case is defined in decades. But until the Obama administration comes up with a real alternative, the president's promises that nuclear power will be a part of our clean energy future will remain unkept.

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Charleston Gazette
March 08, 2009

Gary Brown

Nuclear power the answer for W.Va., nation

How can we close the gap between our increasing demand for energy and the dwindling supply of available energy resources, while not contributing to global warming and further devastating our landscape through mountaintop-removal coal mining?

A seemingly obvious part of our long-term energy plan should include safe nuclear power generation. But West Virginia Code bans the construction of nuclear power plants, over concerns about waste disposal, safety and economics.

Early in the current Legislative session, a bill was introduced (SB240, by Sen. Brooks McCabe and others) to repeal this ban. This seems like good public policy, for several reasons.

A half century ago, nuclear power seemed like the obvious choice for electricity generation. Indeed, worldwide more than 400 commercial nuclear reactors have been built and operate today. But following the incidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and at Chernobyl in 1986, plus concerns about radioactive waste disposal, new nuclear power plant construction was put on hold in the United States.

Into this energy void stepped Big Coal. Huge coal-burning power plants were built and cheaper means of mining coal were implemented. First came strip mining and more recently mountaintop-removal (strip mining on steroids), which result in significant ecological damage. In addition, coal cleaning facilities produce huge amounts of waste sludge and its subsequent storage and disposal problems.

Of even greater concern may be the contribution to global warming caused by the combustion of enormous quantities of coal and the resulting rise in our carbon dioxide atmospheric concentration during just the past few decades.

Some argue that the answer to our energy shortage is the implementation of more "green" technologies like solar, wind or hydroelectric. Solar energy certainly has its place, but it only works where the sun shines, like in Arizona or Israel or Saudi Arabia, but unfortunately not much in West Virginia. Wind energy likewise is limited here in the state to only those few scenic ridges where the wind blows consistently. Hydroelectric power generation has essentially maxed out in most of the United States and very little desire exists to dam up any more rivers in West Virginia.

Three barriers exist for implementation of nuclear power. The first is waste disposal. A national waste repository in Yucca Mountain in Nevada has been rejected. It would have been orders of magnitude safer and more secure than the helter-skelter facilities currently used in the 31 states that now have nuclear reactors.

How can we close the gap between our increasing demand for energy and the dwindling supply of available energy resources, while not contributing to global warming and further devastating our landscape through mountaintop-removal coal mining?

A seemingly obvious part of our long-term energy plan should include safe nuclear power generation. But West Virginia Code bans the construction of nuclear power plants, over concerns about waste disposal, safety and economics.

Early in the current Legislative session, a bill was introduced (SB240, by Sen. Brooks McCabe and others) to repeal this ban. This seems like good public policy, for several reasons.

A half century ago, nuclear power seemed like the obvious choice for electricity generation. Indeed, worldwide more than 400 commercial nuclear reactors have been built and operate today. But following the incidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and at Chernobyl in 1986, plus concerns about radioactive waste disposal, new nuclear power plant construction was put on hold in the United States.

Into this energy void stepped Big Coal. Huge coal-burning power plants were built and cheaper means of mining coal were implemented. First came strip mining and more recently mountaintop-removal (strip mining on steroids), which result in significant ecological damage. In addition, coal cleaning facilities produce huge amounts of waste sludge and its subsequent storage and disposal problems.

Of even greater concern may be the contribution to global warming caused by the combustion of enormous quantities of coal and the resulting rise in our carbon dioxide atmospheric concentration during just the past few decades.

Some argue that the answer to our energy shortage is the implementation of more "green" technologies like solar, wind or hydroelectric. Solar energy certainly has its place, but it only works where the sun shines, like in Arizona or Israel or Saudi Arabia, but unfortunately not much in West Virginia. Wind energy likewise is limited here in the state to only those few scenic ridges where the wind blows consistently. Hydroelectric power generation has essentially maxed out in most of the United States and very little desire exists to dam up any more rivers in West Virginia.

Three barriers exist for implementation of nuclear power. The first is waste disposal. A national waste repository in Yucca Mountain in Nevada has been rejected. It would have been orders of magnitude safer and more secure than the helter-skelter facilities currently used in the 31 states that now have nuclear reactors.

Next, the plants must operate economically. Based on recent industry data, average production costs from nuclear reactors in the United States are around 2 cents a kilowatt hour, significantly less than the average residential power cost in West Virginia of 7.5 cents/kwh.

The third and foremost concern is safety.  Several varieties of next-generation nuclear reactors, utilizing "intrinsically safe technology," have been developed and are now being commercialized in other countries. Designed as "fail-safe," they limit the possibility of run-away reactions and the subsequent reactor core melt-down, which occurred at Chernobyl and to a lesser extent at Three Mile Island.

Foremost among these are a variety of "gas-cooled fast reactors," based on technology that not only eliminates the chances for runaway reactions but also consumes almost all of the radioactive fuel, significantly reducing the amount of radioactive waste produced compared to current reactors. Some of these next-generation reactors are also capable of producing large amounts of by-product hydrogen, which can be used in fuel cells to power our next-generation automobiles, for example.

Coal mining is economically and environmentally expensive, because we have to mine so much of it. Millions of tons must be dug up, cleaned and shipped to power plants. Underground mining employs miners, but is among industry leaders in workplace accidental deaths and injuries. Above-ground mining is economical only on an enormous scale, requiring entire mountaintops to be lifted up and piled in adjacent valleys, destroying not only the native forests or farmland but permanently affecting the water quality of nearby streams and rivers.

Cleaning the coal results in huge sludge storage ponds in adjacent valleys filled with of some pretty nasty stuff. These sludge pond dams occasionally fail disastrously, as we saw at Buffalo Creek in 1972 or in the Kentucky sludge-dam failure last October. Disposing of the sludge into nearby underground mines certainly affects the quality of water in the local aquifer and in nearby residential water wells.

Why are we hell-bent on burning up all of our coal anyway? Why not save some of it for later? Coal is a useful raw material for lots of things in addition to combustion. Recent research at WVU and the University of Kentucky shows that coal can be the preferred raw material (compared to oil) for a wide variety of useful carbon products, including carbon fibers and carbon foams, and commodity applications like anodes for aluminum smelters. Ironically, one of the new next-generation nuclear reactor technologies from South Africa is based on "pebble bed modular technology," which utilizes uranium fuel pellets enclosed in carbon graphite spheres which can be made from coal.

Arguments for the current law banning nuclear power plants are akin to saying no to coal-based power plants until we have solved the sludge disposal and the carbon dioxide sequestration issues. Think that one would make it through the Legislature? Senate Bill 240 is at least a start in the right direction toward a more sane long-term overall energy policy.

Brown, a chemical engineer, is vice president of New Carbon LLC, and is the former associate director of research and development and engineering at Union Carbide Technical Center.

Next, the plants must operate economically. Based on recent industry data, average production costs from nuclear reactors in the United States are around 2 cents a kilowatt hour, significantly less than the average residential power cost in West Virginia of 7.5 cents/kwh.

The third and foremost concern is safety.  Several varieties of next-generation nuclear reactors, utilizing "intrinsically safe technology," have been developed and are now being commercialized in other countries. Designed as "fail-safe," they limit the possibility of run-away reactions and the subsequent reactor core melt-down, which occurred at Chernobyl and to a lesser extent at Three Mile Island.

Foremost among these are a variety of "gas-cooled fast reactors," based on technology that not only eliminates the chances for runaway reactions but also consumes almost all of the radioactive fuel, significantly reducing the amount of radioactive waste produced compared to current reactors. Some of these next-generation reactors are also capable of producing large amounts of by-product hydrogen, which can be used in fuel cells to power our next-generation automobiles, for example.

Coal mining is economically and environmentally expensive, because we have to mine so much of it. Millions of tons must be dug up, cleaned and shipped to power plants. Underground mining employs miners, but is among industry leaders in workplace accidental deaths and injuries. Above-ground mining is economical only on an enormous scale, requiring entire mountaintops to be lifted up and piled in adjacent valleys, destroying not only the native forests or farmland but permanently affecting the water quality of nearby streams and rivers.

Cleaning the coal results in huge sludge storage ponds in adjacent valleys filled with of some pretty nasty stuff. These sludge pond dams occasionally fail disastrously, as we saw at Buffalo Creek in 1972 or in the Kentucky sludge-dam failure last October. Disposing of the sludge into nearby underground mines certainly affects the quality of water in the local aquifer and in nearby residential water wells.

Why are we hell-bent on burning up all of our coal anyway? Why not save some of it for later? Coal is a useful raw material for lots of things in addition to combustion. Recent research at WVU and the University of Kentucky shows that coal can be the preferred raw material (compared to oil) for a wide variety of useful carbon products, including carbon fibers and carbon foams, and commodity applications like anodes for aluminum smelters. Ironically, one of the new next-generation nuclear reactor technologies from South Africa is based on "pebble bed modular technology," which utilizes uranium fuel pellets enclosed in carbon graphite spheres which can be made from coal.

Arguments for the current law banning nuclear power plants are akin to saying no to coal-based power plants until we have solved the sludge disposal and the carbon dioxide sequestration issues. Think that one would make it through the Legislature? Senate Bill 240 is at least a start in the right direction toward a more sane long-term overall energy policy.

--Brown, a chemical engineer, is vice president of New Carbon LLC, and is the former associate director of research and development and engineering at Union Carbide Technical Center.

---------------------------

Charleston Post Courier
March 08, 2009

Appalling nuclear-waste action

President Obama's decision to abandon the national nuclear waste disposal site at Yucca Mountain, Nev., is a breathtakingly irresponsible dismissal of a vital project on which billions already have been spent. It extends a security risk at dozens of temporary waste disposal sites around the nation and threatens to cripple the future nuclear development needed to advance national energy independence.

For South Carolina, it raises the likelihood that vast quantities of nuclear waste at Savannah River Site will simply remain there indefinitely. SRS isn't the only place where waste has been piling up, in some instances for decades. Under federal law, the government has a responsibility to develop a safe disposal site for waste generated by commercial reactors, using fees collected from utilities (and, by extension, from consumers). Commercial reactor waste has been stored on site, awaiting the long-delayed completion of the Yucca Mountain project.

The administration's decision to give up on Yucca sends billions already expended on studying and developing it down the drain. It sends the storage issue back to square one. (Columnist Ann McFeatters provides perspective on our Commentary page.)

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has declared himself delighted with the president's decision. For years the Nevada Democrat has led the largely parochial campaign to deny the use of Yucca as a waste repository.

Mr. Obama's turnaround on Yucca should hearten obstructionists everywhere. Keep an issue tied up in Congress and the courts long enough and eventually the political landscape will change.

In this instance, the consequences may be to further restrict the development of new nuclear generating sites needed to improve prospects for America's energy independence. As a result, it will sharply limit the expanded use of a utility that doesn't produce the greenhouse gases associated with global warming. Maybe the highly touted alternative energy sources such as wind and solar can make up the difference, but so far, their contribution has been slight.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., describes the administration's decision as a repudiation of candidate Obama's stated environmental and energy goals, and as a nod to the far left. "It is disingenuous to say you are going to do something about solving the climate change problem and energy independence without nuclear energy," the senator told us Friday.

He added that the termination of the storage project is "an abrogation of promises made to places like South Carolina." SRS has reprocessed tons of defense waste with the expectation that it would ultimately be taken to a permanent disposal site.

The federal government's long-term storage plans for Yucca Mountain recognized the inadequacy of the existing ad hoc storage program. Yucca Mountain's abandonment creates a major quandary for the nation. Congress should repudiate the administration's decision.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
March 07, 2009

Idahoans unhappy with Yucca downsizing

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Federal lawmakers from Idaho are questioning the Obama administration's plans to dramatically scale back the Yucca Mountain Project.

The state's four representatives have asked to meet with Energy Secretary Steven Chu about nuclear waste that now is kept in Idaho but is planned for disposal in the Nevada repository that is still under development.

Idaho is host to more than 300 metric tons of nuclear material that was produced by the military, and 4,400 cubic meters of high level waste that was sent to the state for temporary storage. The Department of Energy is under a 1995 court settlement to remove the material by 2035.

"Deep geologic disposal is the only disposal option for this type of defense waste," the Idaho lawmakers wrote to Chu on Thursday.

"If DOE is not going to continue development of the Yucca Mountain repository we would like you to explain to us how the federal government will maintain its commitment to the state," they said.

The Idaho lawmakers said the 2035 deadline would be at risk if President Barack Obama follows through on a plan to limit spending on the Yucca program in 2010 while the administration devises a new strategy to manage the nation's nuclear waste.

The letter was signed by Sens. Mike Crapo and Jim Risch, both Republicans, Democratic Rep. Walter Minnick and Republican Rep. Mike Simpson.

Obama's decision to seek alternatives to the Yucca Mountain site 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas has been popular with Nevada's elected leaders and many residents. But reaction from the northern neighbor indicates that ending the repository will take much more than just turning out the lights.

While discussion of the site usually focuses on spent nuclear fuel generated by commercial power plants, the repository also is projected for storage of 12,800 metric tons of waste from the production of nuclear warheads, and highly enriched uranium from fuel burned in naval reactors.

At a Senate hearing on Thursday, Risch pressed Chu about Idaho's waste. The energy secretary said DOE "will be looking at this very intensely over the next year."

Risch said afterward it was clear that further meetings were needed.

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

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
March 07, 2009

Couple faces coping with Yucca job loss

Summerlin residents blame Harry Reid

By Keith Rogers
Las Vegas Review-Journal

They live in a nice house in a Summerlin neighborhood with their 17-year-old daughter, Caroline, and a little shaggy dog named Logan.

They have a daughter at Harvard University, and two sons in their early 20s, one in New York and one in Ohio.

John and Christina Pfabe -- pronounced "fabe" -- are Las Vegas parents trying to make ends meet as the economy continues spiraling downward.

But in nine days, he'll lose his job as a nuclear licensing engineer on the Yucca Mountain Project, joining the ranks of some 500 other co-workers for the project's contractor, Bechtel SAIC Co., who will be laid off before the new contractor, USA Repository Services, takes over April 1.

They blame Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., for the layoffs. As Senate majority leader he was the driving force behind lopping $100 million from the project's budget. That left only enough money -- $288 million, if approved -- to support the workers and their task.

They are trying to persuade a Nuclear Regulatory Commission board that the mountain is safe for storing used nuclear waste, and that the project should be granted a license to build what Reid calls "the dump."

"I just want people to know that 500 people are losing their jobs not because of the economy but because of politics," Christina Pfabe said Thursday at their home while Energy Secretary Steven Chu was telling a Senate committee that Yucca Mountain is not an option for entombing the nation's highly radioactive waste.

She said President Barack Obama "inherits this terrible, terrible economic downturn. And that's the first thing on his (Reid's) agenda is to cut jobs in his own state."

Said John Pfabe: "He (Reid) wants to cancel the project by any means whether or not he speaks the truth. For whatever vendetta, for whatever reason why he's bitter, I don't know.

"It's not as though he's fighting some Goliath. He is the Goliath and he is the bitter man at the same time," the 52-year-old licensing specialist said. He emphasized that is his personal opinion and not necessarily the view of his company or the Department of Energy.

"How can just a few people change national policy? Congress mandated this years ago and he's effectively stopping that and denying it and not through the courts and not through any valid safety concerns, but strangling it by budget," he said.

A spokesman for Reid reacted to the Pfabes' criticism, saying in an e-mail Friday that the senator "sympathizes with every Nevadan who has lost their job."

"This is an extremely difficult time for our economy. But every member of Nevada's congressional delegation agrees that the economy should not be the justification for shipping the most toxic substance known to man to Nevada," Reid spokesman Jon Summers said.

Summers added that "most jobs would be temporary until the dump is completed" and few people would monitor the waste as it sits in a maze of tunnels.

He said Reid's focus is investing in renewable energy, such as wind and solar power that will create jobs across the state, not just at one location.

"Yucca Mountain is not about politics. It is about protecting the health and safety of every Nevadan," Summers wrote. "The vast majority of Nevadans have long opposed the dump out of safety concerns" and the effect it could have on tourism and attracting new businesses to the state.

John Pfabe bristles at the word, "dump." Reid, he said, "calls it a dump. Well, gee, if that's a dump, then I guess Congress must be a house of prostitution because they're doing things for votes in return.

"If you look at it, the dump conjures up some idea of a landfill whereas if you look at any of the designs for the repository, they're going to be moving the material in on rail. And if they wanted to they can move it out on rail 50 years later," he said.

Because they are renters, the Pfabes aren't in jeopardy of losing their home. They chose to invest in education instead when they moved here from New York three years ago.

Regardless, John Pfabe said many of his co-workers who will be laid off are homeowners in Summerlin and their job losses will probably translate to more foreclosures -- or at least put more devalued homes on the flooded market. And the job losses, he said, will have a trickle effect on the local economy as families won't be going to the pizzeria, the dentist and the grocery store down the street, not to mention the thousands of square feet of office space used by contractors that will be vacant.

Paul Seidler, senior director in Nevada for the Nuclear Energy Institute, said the 500 job losses and other layoffs on the Yucca Mountain Project will "have a very big impact on the economy of Southern Nevada in a time when we can least afford it."

As for the Pfabes, they still have two college educations to pay for. "We'll have to deplete our savings once again," Christina Pfabe said.

John Pfabe said he had planned on staying on the project at least through the four-year license application review to support the general counsel on technical matters and discovery during hearings.

Instead, he said, "I'm looking for work. Where? The continental United States sounds good. I'll have to do a long-distance commute and eventually move the family."

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

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Los Angeles Times
March 07, 2009

The paradox of Harry Reid's position

The majority leader may be the most powerful Democrat in the U.S. Senate and in Nevada history. But his clout has made him a top target for Republicans nationwide.

By Mark Z. Barabak

Reporting from Carson City, Nev. -- When Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid came home recently to address the Nevada Legislature, a small but vocal band of Republican protesters gathered at the state Capitol. They waved signs, razzed Democrats and marched outside.

But the group fell silent when asked the chances of ousting Reid at the polls next year. "It's going to be tough," demonstrator Carol Howell, 65, finally said.

Inside, Reid illustrated one reason why. Speaking to a bipartisan group of lawmakers, he touted hundreds of millions of dollars headed for Nevada under the economic stimulus legislation he helped push through Congress.

"There's so much good stuff in there that wouldn't have been there but for me," Reid said in an interview beforehand. "And I don't mean to say that in any boastful manner. That's just the way it is."

Reid may be the most powerful Democrat in the U.S. Senate (and, arguably, in Nevada history). His clout, as he showed, is quantifiable. But Reid's political strength creates a paradox: His power and prominence have turned him into one of the top targets for Republicans nationwide, who are eager to topple him the way they ousted the Senate's last Democratic leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota.

In January, the Republican Party launched its first TV ad of the 2010 campaign, a 30-second spot that aired in Reno and attacked "super-spending partisan Harry Reid." Across the country, conservative groups have formed with the express purpose of denying the Senate leader a fifth term.

Now Republicans just need to find a serious candidate to face Reid, a task that has proved difficult -- surprisingly so, given his middling poll ratings, a history of combustible comments (despite his starchy demeanor) and his notable lack of warmth or charisma.

"You can't beat somebody with nobody," said Chuck Muth, a GOP strategist in Carson City. "His degree of vulnerability depends entirely on the quality of the Republican opposition."

Like Daschle, Reid hails from a heavily rural state with a strong conservative bent. A teetotaling Mormon still wed to his high school girlfriend, Reid, 69, is a relative moderate compared with many fellow Democrats. He opposes legal abortion and most gun control measures, sponsored a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning, and voted for both wars in Iraq. (He has since become a fierce critic of the second.) But his leadership role in Washington -- mainly as one of President George W. Bush's chief antagonists -- cast Reid in a far more liberal light than his voting record might suggest.

He insists that the Daschle comparison only goes so far, and many in his home state agree. In a feat of epic political engineering, Reid has helped transform Nevada over the last few years from a GOP stronghold to a state that overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama in November and where Democrats outnumber Republicans by a healthy 100,000-plus voters. (Last year's caucuses, pushed forward on the presidential calendar at Reid's behest, were a wildly successful recruiting and organizing tool.)

More significantly, Reid has taken a scythe to the opposition, lopping off two of his likely challengers before they could position themselves to run; Rep. Jon Porter and state Sen. Joe Heck both lost reelection bids in 2008, with Reid operatives playing a key role. A third challenger, Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki, was indicted in December by the state's Democratic attorney general just days after expressing an interest in taking on Reid.

The senator denies any involvement in the fraud case, but the timing only enhanced his intimidating reputation, giving others pause about entering the race.

"Harry Reid plays hardball," said Eric Herzik, who heads the political science department at the University of Nevada, Reno. "He's more feared than he's loved."

Indeed, passion is not a word readily associated with the dour, silver-haired senator. Standing before a group of bankers at a resort casino in Las Vegas, Reid was swallowed up by the cavernous ballroom, his low monotone difficult to make out even with the help of amplification. His remarks -- on the stimulus, his parents' hard times during the Depression, a Bruce Springsteen song -- meandered, and his delivery suggested nothing so much as a man slowly working his way through a bowl of gruel.

But when he speaks, he often refers to his importance back in Washington. "As I was coming into Mandalay Bay, I received a phone call from the president on Air Force One," he tells the bankers, hours before Obama announced he was sending more troops to Afghanistan.

Speaking to reporters after his Carson City speech, Reid mentions "conversations I had this morning" with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Energy Secretary Steven Chu. He tells a Reno TV station of a chat with White House Budget Director Peter R. Orszag and promises that "Yucca Mountain's gone." Days later, the administration unveiled a budget that effectively killed the nuclear waste dump, which Nevada has fought for decades.

"You may not agree with certain things that he has to say from a partisan standpoint. But as a Nevadan you should realize that it would just be foolish to say no to having the majority leader as our senator," said Sig Rogich, the dean of Nevada Republican strategists and Reid's longtime friend. (The relationship endures even though Rogich ran the campaign for Reid's opponent in 1986, when he first won his Senate seat.)

Occasionally, Reid's comments draw less-flattering notice. He called Bush a liar and a loser -- apologizing for the latter -- dismissed then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan as a political hack, asserted the war in Iraq was lost and, in one pungent observation, commented on the summer scent of visitors to Washington. "Because of the heat and high humidity, you could literally smell the tourists coming into the Capitol," he said at the dedication of a new visitors center. "It may be descriptive but it's true."

Muth relishes the prospect of rehashing those comments in campaign mailers. But first, Republicans need a viable candidate, and they can't count on much help from the beleaguered state GOP.

Torn by years of internal feuding, the state party is headed, nominally, by the unpopular Gov. Jim Gibbons, who may be the most politically endangered chief executive in the country. "If you're playing the odds, it may be wiser to take on a very damaged Republican governor in a Republican primary than to go up against Harry Reid," Muth said.

The senator, displaying a mix of cockiness and caution, invites national Republicans to spend their money in Nevada, believing it will divert resources from other, possibly more competitive races. But having lost his first try for the Senate by 624 votes (in 1974) and won reelection by as few as 428 votes (in 1998), Reid insists he takes nothing for granted.

"I was overconfident and underprepared," he said of his 1998 squeaker. "That will never happen again."

--mark.barabak@latimes.com

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New York Times
March 07, 2009

Future Dim for Nuclear Waste Repository

By Matthew L. Wald

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s proposed budget cuts off most money for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project, a decision that fulfills a campaign promise and wins the president political points in Nevada — but raises new questions about what to do with radioactive waste from the nation’s nuclear power plants.

The decision could cost the federal government additional billions in payments to the utility industry, and if it holds up, it would mean that most of the $10.4 billion spent since 1983 to find a place to put nuclear waste was wasted.

A final decision to abandon the repository would leave the nation with no solution to a problem it has struggled with for half a century.

Lawyers are predicting tens of billions of dollars in damage suits from utilities that must pay to store their wastes instead of having the government bury them, with the figure rising by about a half-billion dollars for each year of additional delay.

The courts have already awarded the companies about $1 billion, because the government signed contracts obligating it to begin taking the waste in 1998, but seems unlikely to do so for years. The nuclear industry says it may demand the return of the $22 billion that it has paid to the Energy Department to establish a repository, but that the government has not yet spent.

The spent fuel that emerges from nuclear power plants has been accumulating for decades in steel-lined pools or giant steel-and-concrete casks near the reactors.

Yucca Mountain, a ridge of volcanic rock about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, has been the leading candidate site for a repository since the 1980s. But it was not selected by any scientific process of elimination; it was selected from a list in 1987 by Congress, which declared it dry and remote enough.

Scientific concerns have since emerged, including the realization that water flows through Yucca Mountain a lot faster than initially believed. That raises the prospect that the nuclear waste would leach over time, polluting the water table. The scientific merit of the site has not been established by independent judges.

Nevada has fought the project bitterly in court and in Congress. The ascension of Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, as Senate majority leader, and President Obama’s campaign promise to stop the Yucca Mountain depository and look for alternatives may finally settle the question.

In fact, the political wind is blowing so strongly against using Yucca Mountain that the nuclear industry’s trade association is not opposing Mr. Obama head-on. Instead, in response to his budget proposal, it called for creation of an independent panel to study how the government should meet its “legal and moral obligation” to take the waste. Mr. Obama himself is calling for more study.

Mr. Reid does not appear to have the votes to kill the Yucca Mountain depository entirely, because many members of Congress want to stick with the consensus they achieved two decades ago to bury the waste there. If Congress changes the law that designates Yucca Mountain as the prime candidate, said Edward F. Sproat III, who was the Energy Department official in charge of the depository project for the last two and a half years of the Bush administration, “everybody knows their state is going to be back in play.”

The site’s suitability is supposed to be established in hearings by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which must decide whether to license the repository. Now, the Obama administration is proposing to provide only enough money that project officials can answer questions from the hearings. Eliot Brenner, a commission spokesman, said the hearings would proceed.

“What happens once we say yes or no is out of our hands,” Mr. Brenner said.

Opponents of nuclear power contend that the nation’s failure to find a permanent repository for the waste is a reason to shut down nuclear reactors and forget about building more.

Abandonment of the Yucca Mountain depository would be a blow for the nuclear industry, which is hoping to begin work on new reactors for the first time in 30 years.

If the commission does not issue its decision until the next administration, that could keep Yucca Mountain viable.

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KNDO/KNDU
March 07, 2009

Yucca Mountain Repository Funding Cut

KENNEWICK, Wash--  Call it a bump in the road for nuclear clean-up.  At least for now.  After years of pumping billions of dollars into the Yucca Mountain Repository site, President Obama has said no more, in part because of safety concerns.

"To go back now and try and say each of the states and each of the locations need to handle their own waste right now is not a good decision," says Gary Petersen, vice president of TRIDEC.  Petersen says no national repository for nuclear waste could end up costing us big bucks.

"Tremendously costly, I can't put a number on it but it's in the billions," he says.

Obama hasn't ruled out the Yucca Mountain site.  But for now, his administration will spend its time figuring out an alternative.

Erik Olds works for the Department of Energy and also works closely with the vitrification plant.  Plans are still underway to open the doors to the plant in 2019, with or without a repository.

"We'll continue construction of the vit plant and there should be no effect on our plans to complete construction of the Vitrification Plant," says Olds.

But with nowhere to put the waste, what's the next step?

"Part of the plan always was to have some sort of interim storage facility, sometimes called lag storage on sight, so we have the capability to store material on sight," adds Old.

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Tacoma News Tribune
March 07, 2009

HANFORD: Senators silent on nuke waste defeat

Allen MacDougall
Puyallup

Re: “Reid 1; Hanford 0 in Obama’s budget” (editorial, 3-4).

Where is the surprise? President Obama is now paying back Sen. Harry Reid for his political support. Obama is giving the U.S. taxpayers more than $1 trillion in bills that will be hard, if not impossible, to pay.

More than $10 billion has been spent on the Yucca Mountain repository. I concede that it is not a perfect location, but a perfect location only exists in fantasyland.

And did anyone notice that there is not a word from Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell? They know that in the world of Washington, D.C., politics, this was a fight that they could not win. This shows that they want to “get along.”

This was a fight they should have fought, because it was for the people of the state that elected them.

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Tri-City Herald
March 07, 2009

DOE to review waste removal options at Hanford

By Annette Cary

The Department of Energy will prepare a report this year on the future of high-level radioactive waste, new Energy Secretary Steven Chu said.

That should give the Mid-Columbia a better idea of the future of Hanford's worst radioactive waste, now stored in underground tanks.

Chu was grilled this week at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing by Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, after saying that Yucca Mountain, Nev., will not be used as the nation's repository for high-level radioactive waste.

The nation's used fuel from power production and Department of Energy high-level waste, including Hanford's, is required to go to a national waste repository. Yucca Mountain was the only site that was being developed for high-level waste.

The Idaho National Laboratory also has waste that would have been sent to Yucca Mountain, Risch said. If it won't be sent to Yucca Mountain, then where will it be sent, Risch asked.

But Chu had few details to offer as Risch repeatedly pressed for more information.

"There are other options we'll have to look at and quite frankly I think there would be better options," Chu said.

However, he'll want to "seek advice of some deeply knowledgeable people."

When Risch asked what those options are, Chu said there could be a mixture of shorter term sites, plus longer term sites and then final disposition.

"I think it will have to be geographically distributed in some way," Chu said. "One location, one site will probably not work."

Those locations have not been identified, he said, but DOE will prepare a report this year.

Hanford expects to start turning its high-level radioactive waste now held in underground tanks into glass logs in 2019 when the vitrification plant opens. The glassified logs are planned to be disposed of off site at a national repository for high-level radioactive waste.

Hanford officials now are looking at where to store the vitrified waste in the short term. The Hanford Advisory Board has warned that DOE needs to have facilities in place to store the glass log for decades, but not permanently, because of delays in opening a national repository for the waste.

DOE is considering retrofitting the Canister Storage Building or constructing a new building for the short-term storage.

Improvements to the Canister Storage Building at Hanford to hold about 880 canisters of waste, or two years' output from the vit plant, would cost about the same as constructing a new building that would hold about 2,000 canisters, according to preliminary estimates. Both could cost roughly $175 million.

The Canister Storage Building could be expanded to make room for about 4,000 additional canisters or the new building could be expanded to hold a total of 12,000 canisters, according to early plans.

DOE has instructed its contractor Washington River Protection Solutions to prepare an up-to-date and more detailed cost estimate on the options.

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KIFI Idaho Falls
March 07, 2009

Yucca Mountain No Longer an Option for INL

By Aman Chabra
Local News 8 Reporter

NEVADA - The Idaho National Laboratory may soon have to find a new place to deposit its nuclear waste.

Yucca Mountain will be losing its funding in October, according to a recent announcement by President Barack Obama regarding the new budget for the fiscal year.

In Nevada has been, among other things, a nuclear waste dump site since 1987.  Over the years, the controversial project has been fought for by the state of Nevada.

The INL isn't sure what their plan of attack will be yet for dumping the nuclear waste.

""I haven't talked to anybody specifically at the INL, the way or the manner or the place in which the nuclear fuel goes for the settlement agreement in Idaho Falls is completely up to the DOE," said Susan Burke, INL Coordinator for the Department of Environmental Quality.

Experts say abandoning the site would be a major blow for the nuclear industry, as they were hoping to begin work on the new reactors for the first time in 30 years.

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Augusta Chronicle
March 07, 2009

SRS might keep nuclear waste

By Rob Pavey

Nuclear waste could remain at Savannah River Site much longer than anticipated under Energy Secretary Stephen Chu's proposal to scrap plans for a permanent repository in Nevada's Yucca Mountain.

Dr. Chu told members of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee this week that new strategies could be developed for nuclear waste, and that a 27-year, $13.5 billion effort to establish the Yucca Mountain project should be abandoned.

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford has supported Yucca Mountain as a means to get high-level nuclear waste out of his state.

"This represents a broken promise to South Carolina and a lot of other states that have been storing a lot of nuclear waste," said Joel Sawyer, Mr. Sanford's communications director.

Yucca Mountain was being designed to accommodate radioactive material stored at 121 temporary sites in 39 states, including SRS, where high-level wastes are encased in glass and stored in steel cylinders that were to eventually be shipped elsewhere.

Jim Giusti, an Energy Department spokesman at SRS, said it is too early to determine what will happen with wastes stored at the site if Yucca Mountain is abandoned.

"We'll be waiting for guidance from Washington on how to proceed," he said. "But I can say that we're going to ensure there is no safety issue with the material we're handling here, whether it be spent fuel in a water basin or a stainless steel canister with glass waste inside."

Mr. Sawyer said it is disappointing that the media didn't fully explore the waste disposal issue in more detail before the election.

"This is a question that should have been asked during the presidential campaign: what would an Obama administration mean for Georgia and South Carolina in terms of keeping promises on nuclear waste?"

Stephanie Mueller, an Energy Department spokeswoman in Washington, said Dr. Chu intends to pull together leading experts in the nuclear waste field later this year to come up with a new plan.

Tom Clements, the southeast nuclear campaign coordinator for Friends of the Earth, noted that Yucca Mountain was being designed to hold 70,000 tons of waste, of which only 10 percent was to be from the Department of Energy, with the remainder originating at commercial nuclear reactors.

"So I'm not sure this development changes anything as far as (SRS) waste because it was always at the bottom of the pecking order," he said.

Dr. Chu's declaration that Yucca Mountain was no longer an option was mirrored in President Obama's proposed budget, which eliminated funds for the project.

Yucca Mountain is 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

--Reach Rob Pavey at 868-1222, ext. 119 or rob.pavey@augustachronicle.com.

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Minneapolis Star Tribune
Nuclear waste looks like it will be in Minnesota awhile

An Xcel Energy official says Obama's move away from Yucca Mountain in Nevada goes against Congress' approval.

By Tom Meersman

Highly radioactive waste will likely accumulate in Minnesota for decades longer than expected because of a new energy policy taking shape in Washington.

President Obama is closing the door on Yucca Mountain, a remote site in Nevada that for more than 20 years has been the nation's only candidate for permanent burial of nuclear waste.

That leaves the waste containers collecting at nuclear plants near Monticello and in Red Wing, with nowhere to go.

"President Obama has been emphatic that storage at Yucca Mountain is not an option, period," said Stephanie Mueller, spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Energy. "His budget reflects that, and funding for the project will be reduced and restricted."

Nuclear utilities including Xcel Energy hoped to ship wastes to Nevada beginning around 2020, but they have seen the opening date postponed many times. The project has encountered high costs, environmental concerns and steadfast opposition from Nevadans, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Terry Pickens, director of nuclear regulatory policy for Xcel, said he's not surprised that the administration wants to drop Yucca Mountain, since Obama promised to do so when he campaigned in Nevada.

However, there may be a fight ahead.

"The administration can't do anything that it wants," Pickens said, noting that Congress endorsed Yucca in 2002. "To undo that, it will take some conscious effort," Pickens said.

Xcel has a large, stainless steel-lined indoor pool and 24 outdoor casks full of radioactive wastes at its Prairie Island plant in Red Wing. The utility can fill five more containers and is seeking state approval for 35 more casks if it gets the OK to extend Prairie Island's license for another 20 years. Xcel also has a waste storage pool at its Monticello plant northwest of the Twin Cities and has loaded 10 of the 30 outdoor canisters permitted there.

Pickens said a change in direction about Yucca Mountain will not cause the utility to shut down its plants or reduce the amount of power they generate. Wastes can be stored safely and securely for several decades if necessary, he said.

Rejecting Yucca Mountain may raise uncertainty about nuclear power just as the industry is promoting its superiority to coal and other fuels that produce global warming emissions. Nuclear trade association leaders suggested an independent panel or commission to reevaluate the waste problem.

The Yucca move should make Minnesota think twice about repealing a moratorium on new nuclear plants that the Legislature passed in 1994, said Steve Morse, executive director of Minnesota Environmental Partnership. Legislators have proposed to lift the prohibition and may discuss the issue later this month.

Morse was a state senator in 1994, when the controversy of additional radioactive waste storage at Prairie Island boiled over at the Legislature. Utility officials assured lawmakers then that the storage would be temporary and that wastes would eventually be shipped to Nevada. "Those projections have always been fantasies," Morse said.

Diane Jensen, one of the environmental leaders active in that debate, said that in some respects, nothing has changed in 15 years.

"There's a saying that nuclear waste tends to stay where you first put it," Jensen said. "It will never be moved because the dangers politically and environmentally are far greater than leaving it where it is."

The Department of Energy has spent more than $10 billion boring a nearly 5-mile tunnel through Yucca Mountain, drilling niches for testing, and it had been conducting hundreds of studies to determine whether wastes can be stored there safely for thousands of years. Last year DOE submitted an application for a construction and operating license for Yucca to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Obama's budget proposal slashes most funds for Yucca, but leaves money for DOE to respond to technical questions as the application is reviewed. Judy Treichel, executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force, said she should be celebrating, but instead finds herself preparing for licensing hearings for Yucca next month. "This thing is a lot harder than it seems to stop," she said.

If Yucca is not an option, she said, the nation still needs a reasonable policy about what to do with more than 60,000 tons of existing waste and more accumulating every day.

"If that means we're going to store them at plants in Minnesota and elsewhere for the next 50 or 100 years, we should have a national policy that says that," she said.

Xcel's Pickens said it may be a good time for the country to take a fresh look at radioactive waste, and discuss the latest technologies that can use nuclear fuel more efficiently and perhaps reduce some of the wastes.

"No matter what we do, you still have some form of radioactive waste that needs to be stored in a repository for some time," he said. "With all the work done on Yucca Mountain, I still think it's the most logical place where it'll end up."

Pickens said a change in direction about Yucca Mountain will not cause the utility to shut down its plants or reduce the amount of power they generate. Wastes can be stored safely and securely for several decades if necessary, he said.

Rejecting Yucca Mountain may raise uncertainty about nuclear power just as the industry is promoting its superiority to coal and other fuels that produce global warming emissions. Nuclear trade association leaders suggested an independent panel or commission to reevaluate the waste problem.

The Yucca move should make Minnesota think twice about repealing a moratorium on new nuclear plants that the Legislature passed in 1994, said Steve Morse, executive director of Minnesota Environmental Partnership. Legislators have proposed to lift the prohibition and may discuss the issue later this month.

Morse was a state senator in 1994, when the controversy of additional radioactive waste storage at Prairie Island boiled over at the Legislature. Utility officials assured lawmakers then that the storage would be temporary and that wastes would eventually be shipped to Nevada. "Those projections have always been fantasies," Morse said.

Diane Jensen, one of the environmental leaders active in that debate, said that in some respects, nothing has changed in 15 years.

"There's a saying that nuclear waste tends to stay where you first put it," Jensen said. "It will never be moved because the dangers politically and environmentally are far greater than leaving it where it is."

The Department of Energy has spent more than $10 billion boring a nearly 5-mile tunnel through Yucca Mountain, drilling niches for testing, and it had been conducting hundreds of studies to determine whether wastes can be stored there safely for thousands of years. Last year DOE submitted an application for a construction and operating license for Yucca to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Obama's budget proposal slashes most funds for Yucca, but leaves money for DOE to respond to technical questions as the application is reviewed. Judy Treichel, executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force, said she should be celebrating, but instead finds herself preparing for licensing hearings for Yucca next month. "This thing is a lot harder than it seems to stop," she said.

If Yucca is not an option, she said, the nation still needs a reasonable policy about what to do with more than 60,000 tons of existing waste and more accumulating every day.

"If that means we're going to store them at plants in Minnesota and elsewhere for the next 50 or 100 years, we should have a national policy that says that," she said.

Xcel's Pickens said it may be a good time for the country to take a fresh look at radioactive waste, and discuss the latest technologies that can use nuclear fuel more efficiently and perhaps reduce some of the wastes.

"No matter what we do, you still have some form of radioactive waste that needs to be stored in a repository for some time," he said. "With all the work done on Yucca Mountain, I still think it's the most logical place where it'll end up."

--Tom Meersman • 612-673-7388

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Senator Harry Reid
March 06, 2009

Reid Statement On Secretary Chu's Remarks

Washington, D.C. – Nevada Senator Harry Reid today made the following statement regarding Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s remarks to a congressional hearing that Yucca Mountain is not an option for nuclear waste storage:

“I am pleased that President Obama and Secretary Chu are holding firm on their commitment to kill the dump. Along with the Obama administration and leaders in industry, I will be working in the coming months to determine the best way to deal with the nation's nuclear waste.”

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Energy Daily
March 05, 2009

Letters to the Editor

I read with great interest Nuclear Energy Institute Chief Executive Officer Marvin Fertel’s article on spent fuel policy ( The Energy Daily, February 7). You will appreciate that Nevada is deeply concerned about how the country will deal with spent nuclear fuel. We don’t have nuclear power plants but the Energy Department selected Nevada’s Yucca Mountain for the country’s repository for commercial nuclear waste, despite the site’s obvious safety deficiencies. We support an independent re-examination of the waste issue because we are confident DOE’s gargantuan and misdirected project cannot withstand independent scrutiny.

The beginning of wisdom on this issue is captured in Fertel’s statement that spent fuel “can be safely and securely stored for an extended period of time,” so we have plenty of time to make a sensible choice. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has in fact judged “dry cask” storage as safe and secure for a hundred years. In time, some form of regional storage of spent fuel will make sense. By then much of the spent fuel will be cooler and easier to handle.

In other words, it’s not so complicated. The trouble is that there are several widespread notions that get in the way of thinking about the subject. First, there is the idea that lack of a waste “solution” is holding up the construction of new nuclear plants. In fact, nuclear plants haven’t been selling in this country because they are extremely expensive. That is why the industry says it needs loan guarantees. I am pleased that NEI does not say, as it used to say, that Yucca Mountain licensing is essential to expansion of U.S. nuclear power. That was just an excuse—the power plants will succeed or fail on their own merits.

Another misleading notion is that a “closed” fuel cycle—reprocessing spent fuel and recycling the extracted plutonium as the French and Japanese do—will simplify waste management. It doesn’t; in fact, it complicates it, and it doesn’t reduce the required repository volume. (Nor is there an energy advantage—the small additional amount extracted during recycle comes at an uneconomic cost). Nevada’s specific concern is that a reprocessing center—there are lobbyists touting such a thing for Yucca Mountain—could become a way of backing into a repository.

Finally, there is the idea that even though Yucca Mountain will not operate, we should still continue its NRC licensing review. I can understand the desire for a “soft landing” for this unfortunate project, but surely there is a less expensive way of doing this. It seems to me the nuclear industry could direct its concern over spent fuel storage in more constructive directions than to threaten the federal government with lawsuits if it pulls Yucca Mountain’s license application.

I want to make clear that Yucca Mountain is not coming to grief merely for political reasons, nor was it repeatedly delayed by legal maneuver. Nor is Nevada shirking a responsibility. If anyone has an obligation to accept the spent fuel, it is the states that extracted the energy from it.

The fundamental problem is that DOE picked a bad site. There was much more dripping water (which promotes corrosion) and it was moving faster toward the human environment than expected, which violated DOE’s own siting criteria.

Instead of abandoning the site, DOE abandoned its criteria and invented what they call a “drip shield”—the name says it all—to protect each waste package. To meet the NRC’s radiation dose standard, DOE’s design requires 11,000 drip shields, each 5 tons of exotic alloy. Without them, DOE’s calculations in its licensing application show the repository would exceed the NRC standard by about a factor of ten.

But, presumably because the shields are so expensive, DOE is putting off installation for at least 100 years (when it may not even be physically possible). In short, DOE is asking for a license on the promise that it, or somebody, will install the crucial drip shields in a 100 years or later. That is a bureaucratic farce that should not continue.

Bruce Breslow
Executive Director
Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
March 06, 2009

Official: Nuclear dump is out

Panel told alternative to Yucca to be sought

By Steve Tetreault and Keith Rogers
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Energy Secretary Steven Chu stood firm Thursday under sharp questioning from Senate Republicans, saying Yucca Mountain no longer is an option to store nuclear waste.

At an energy research hearing, Chu delivered his most direct comments to date that he plans to carry out the wishes of President Barack Obama to find an alternative to the long-delayed plan to build a repository at the Nevada site.

It was Chu's first appearance on Capitol Hill since Obama announced last week his 2010 budget will include money to keep a construction application under review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission but otherwise will "devise a new strategy towards nuclear waste disposal."

The sharpest exchange at the meeting of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee came with Sen. John McCain. The Arizona Republican campaigned for president last year on a platform to follow through with the proposed repository, where the Department of Energy has spent about $10 billion over 26 years of research.

"What's wrong with Yucca Mountain, Dr. Chu?" McCain asked during his turn to question the secretary.

"We have learned a lot more in the last 20-25 years," Chu said.

"I know that," McCain cut in. "What is wrong with Yucca Mountain, Dr. Chu?"

"I think we can do a better job," Chu said.

"Where?" McCain asked.

Chu said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has advised that nuclear waste can be kept at utilities for the time being "without risk to the environment."

Continued storage there or at regional interim locations "is something we can do today," Chu said. "That buys us time to form a comprehensive plan" that could include nuclear fuel recycling, but "we have a couple of decades to figure that one out."

McCain said Obama's policy would set back nuclear power, which he called a "clean" and nonpolluting source.

"So now we are going to have spent nuclear fuel in pools all over America, and we are telling the nuclear power industry we have no way of either reprocessing or storing spent nuclear fuel, and we expect nuclear power to be an integral part of this nation's energy future," he said.

Chu later told senators the Obama administration planned to assemble "an esteemed bunch of people to look at this," including some experts from overseas, with a charge to report back within a year. The idea of a blue ribbon commission has been floated by the nuclear industry, and is picking up support in Congress.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, echoed McCain, complaining the decision to restart on nuclear waste management will leave the nuclear industry "in limbo" as it tries to build more power plants.

"Boy, if I were looking to advance a new nuclear facility, the comments that we are starting the process would be very disconcerting," she said.

Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, asked, if not Yucca Mountain, where does the Energy Department to store high level nuclear waste it is under court order to remove from temporary storage in Idaho by 2035?

"I can tell you that contract is very clear," Risch said.

By law, Yucca Mountain is the option Congress chose for disposal of the nation's used nuclear fuel, which is currently stored at 104 reactor sites in 39 states in pools and above-ground casks.

The Department of Energy has been found liable for damages as a result of failure to have repository operating by 1998. It is settling claims by the utilities totaling hundreds of millions dollars from a taxpayers' judgment fund.

To make Yucca Mountain not an option and abandoning the project administratively "would generate a new wave of lawsuits" that would cost the government billions of dollars, said Paul Seidler, senior director in Nevada for the Nuclear Energy Institute.

"It would take it to a different level. You're talking about damage payments as well as a request for at least $22 billion that's been collected but not spent," Seidler said, referring to ratepayers' fund that the government taps to pay for the project.

Seidler said unless the Nuclear Waste Policy Act is changed, the federal government "has a legal and moral obligation to continue the license application and let the appropriate agencies make recommendation on safety of the site."

Chu's staff has not said if the Department of Energy will rescind the application or its applications for water permits to build a rail line from Caliente to haul nuclear waste to the mountain.

Bruce Breslow, director of Nevada's Nuclear Projects Agency and the state's chief Yucca Mountain opponent, said the state is prepared to go forward with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's review to show dangerous flaws with storing highly radioactive waste in the volcanic-rock ridge, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"As long as the application hearing continues, we will still be battling. We will still be on guard," Breslow said.

"We feel like we can stop the project through all of the issues we have at the NRC hearings, but we welcome a political solution before that."

Nevada lawmakers applauded Chu when word reached them of his comments.

"I am pleased that President Obama and Secretary Chu are holding firm on their commitment to kill the dump," said Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., focused on McCain, whom she said "has been shameless in pushing to turn Nevada into a toxic radioactive garbage dump."

A hearing on contentions with the Energy Department's application raised by Nevada, the Nuclear Energy Institute and other affected parties is scheduled for later this month in Las Vegas.

That will be followed in the fall by technical hearings before a board of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The commission can take up to four years to review the application and determine if the site is safe for storing 77,000 tons of nuclear waste in metal canisters in a maze of tunnels inside the mountain.

--Contact Stephens Washington Bureau Chief Steve Tetreault at stetreault@stephensmedia.com or 202-783-1760. Contact Review-Journal reporter Keith Rogers at krogers@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308.

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Las Vegas SUN
March 06, 2009

IBLV editorial:

Yucca’s time is up

Obama budget slashes dump’s funding

One of the greatest breakthroughs in Nevada’s fight against the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump occurred last week when President Barack Obama announced that his federal budget for the fiscal year beginning in October would wipe out virtually all of the funding for the ill-conceived project.

All that would be left would be enough money for the Energy Department to answer questions related to its license application before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Meantime, the Obama administration plans to devise a new strategy for disposal of nuclear waste.

Although this is not yet a death blow for a hazardous dump that would be only 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, it is certainly close to a knockout punch.

Obama campaigned on a vow that he would do anything within his power to kill the project, and his first budget reflects that commitment. Nevadans owe the president a debt of gratitude, a thought not lost on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who said: “In the future people will say that President Obama kept his promise to the people of Nevada.”

Let’s not forget that no elected official has fought longer or harder against the dump than Reid. He deserves special credit for using his powerful Senate position to slash funding for the dump and to convince Obama that Nevadans would be best served by keeping the high-level waste out of this state.

Left with a lot of explaining to do are a small number of Nevadans, including Nevada Republican Party Chairwoman Sue Lowden, who wanted to sell out the state and host the dump in exchange for federal benefits. They certainly weren’t looking out for the health and welfare of their fellow Nevadans.

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Pahrump Valley Times
March 06, 2009

PETT revenue drops to $8.6M

By Mark Waite
PVT

Nye County commissioners Tuesday quietly renewed a five-year agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy that will provide payment equal to taxes amounting to 3 percent of the Yucca Mountain budget.

A $288 million budget this year, means the county will receive a much smaller $8.6 million payment.

That's almost $3 million less than the original five-year renewal agreement proposed by the DOE, which suggested payments increase $250,000 per year beginning with $11.5 million this year, increasing to $13 million by the 2012-13 fiscal year.

Nye County commissioners in July 2007 rejected that offer.

Commissioners opened the negotiations with an April 13, 2006, letter from Commissioner Gary Hollis, the liaison on nuclear waste, to Paul Golan, prinicipal deputy director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, asking for PETT payments to more than double, to $23 million in the 2007-08 fiscal year, increasing to $29 million by the fifth year of the agreement in 2011-12.

Hollis wrote Golan that communities with nuclear power plants were receiving much more money, the DOE was asking to withdraw 140,000 acres of public land counting the Caliente rail line, and payments weren't keeping pace with land values in Amargosa Valley.

Section 116 of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 requires DOE to grant to the county payments equal to what would have been collected if Yucca Mountain had been subjected to property taxes.

The county has been eligible for the payments since May 28, 1986, the starting date of the Yucca Mountain site characterization by the DOE. Five-year agreements were negotiated in 1994, 1999 and 2003.

In February 2008, commissioners agreed to accept the original DOE offer of payments increasing $250,000 annually starting with $11.5 million and asked that PETT funding be taken out of a line item in the 2008-09 federal appropriations budget. The federal government has gradually reduced the amount of funding for the Yucca Mountain project each of the past three years, from $495 million to $386 million to $288 million.

The latest PETT renewal agreement allows Nye County an additional 2.5 percent of any Yucca Mountain appropriations beyond $300 million.

In February 2008, Rick Spees, an attorney with the Washington, D.C., law firm of Akerman Senterfitt, warned commissioners without a new five-year agreement the county would be at the mercy of whatever number the DOE offered.

Last November commissioners were informed the county would receive 43 percent of its 2008-09 PETT allocation of $11.5 million, or $4.95 million, for six months as part of a continuing resolution funding the federal government until the new Obama administration took office.

There was almost no discussion Tuesday when the five-year agreement was renewed.

Commissioner Joni Eastley only asked whether the Yucca Mountain budget this year was $288 million. She also noted the license agreement for Yucca Mountain is now under review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an indication the project is far from dead.

Darrell Lacy, director of the Nye County Nuclear Waste Project Office, contacted for comment at a Phoenix conference on recycling nuclear fuel, said the prior negotiations were held before he started work for Nye County.

"My understanding was that was the only way DOE was going to go with a five-year agreement," Lacy said. "Sometime there has to be an acknowledgment the funding has been cut in half."

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Platts
March 06, 2009

White House to drop Yucca, use temporary sites

Washington (Platts)--5Mar2009

US Energy Secretary Steven Chu told a Senate panel Thursday that the Obama administration would abandon the federal government's decades-old plan to store spent nuclear fuel at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, and will instead have temporary open-cask storage sites at nuclear plants across the country.

Chu made his remarks in testimony to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which is in the process of writing a broad energy bill.

Asked Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, whether President Barack Obama had taken Yucca off the table, Chu replied by saying "that's true."

"I think the president has been clear--I support his position--that Yucca Mountain is not an option," he said. "I think it's a new administration, a fresh look is really in order."

Although the US has spent many years and nearly $10 billion developing Yucca Mountain, Chu told the panel that the scientific understanding of how geological repositories work has grown substantially in the 25 years since Yucca was selected, adding "we can do a better job."

The secretary said the administration plans this year to assemble a group of experts to determine the best way to reduce the volume of nuclear waste and dispose of it. In the meantime, Chu suggested that spent fuel could continue to be stored safely at reactor sites.

Chu was sharply questioned by panel members, especially McCain, who said the US utility industry would be reluctant to build new nuclear plants if the waste-disposal issue were not resolved.

"Nuclear power has got to be an integral part of America's energy future if we're going to reduce carbon emissions," said McCain.

Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, the senior Republican on the committee, also questioned the wisdom of announcing an end to the Yucca Mountain project before an alternative is in place.

"If I were looking to advance a new nuclear facility, this comment from the administration that we are starting the process...would be very disconcerting," she said.

Murkowski asked Chu to make the speedy resolution of the nuclear waste issue a top priority. Murkowski spokesman Robert Dillon later said the senator, along with other Republicans, will likely introduce amendments to the energy bill that could require the administration to reconsider Yucca Mountain.

The committee is expected to consider the bill and amendments in the last week of March.

--Jean Chemnick, jean_chemnick@platts.com

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American Chronicle
March 06, 2009

Idaho Delegation Questions Chu over Yucca

Energy Secretary asked to uphold plans for waste removal agreement

Washington, DC – Idaho´s Congressional Delegation has written Energy Secretary Steven Chu to express concern over the Obama Administration´s plan to scale back funding for the Yucca Mountain nuclear storage facility in Nevada. Yucca Mountain is slated to be the permanent repository for more than 300 metric tons of nuclear materials produced by the U.S. military and 4,400 cubic meters of high-level waste that was sent to Idaho for temporary storage. Under court-ordered provisions of the 1995 "Batt Agreement," the waste must be removed from Idaho by 2035, but the Obama Administration´s Fiscal Year 2010 budget proposes deep cutbacks in planning for the Department of Energy (DOE) to open Yucca Mountain.

"The language included in the FY 2010 Budget puts this milestone at risk and ensures that Idaho retains the Federal Government´s liabilities for the continued storage of this waste, which is unacceptable," wrote Senators Mike Crapo and Jim Risch and Congressmen Mike Simpson and Walt Minnick. "Deep geologic disposal is the only disposal option for this type of defense waste. If DOE is not going to continue development of the Yucca Mountain facility then we would like you to explain to us how the Federal Government will maintain its commitment to the State and remove this waste out of Idaho by 2035."

Delegation members said they would like to meet with Dr. Chu to discuss the situation further. Crapo noted he will raise the issue with Chu next week during a meeting of the Senate Budget Committee, of which he is a member. Risch questioned Secretary Chu today about the disposal of waste from INL during an Energy Committee hearing. Risch said it was clear by his response that further meetings are needed with the Secretary on the issue. Simpson, who is a member of the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, will also be participating in Department of Energy oversight hearings concerning federal spending in the upcoming weeks. He will be addressing this specific concern with Secretary Chu, along with a number of other oversight issues.

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Bellona
March 06, 2009

US Energy Secretary shuts down Yucca Mountain project decisively at Senate Committee hearing

Energy Secretary Steven Chu Thursday drove the final nail into the coffin of the proposed $96 billion Yucca Mountain storage facility for highly radioactive waste, brushing aside critisism in a tête-à-tête with Republican lawmakers, telling them that “we can do a better job.”

Charles Digges

Chu also told lawmakers that the United States would not consider reversing a 30-year-old policy against reprocessing spent nuclear fuel to combat mounting drums of spent nuclear fuel.

Chu’s remarks come as a relief to many environmentalists, as early analysis of waste storage options available after President Barack Obama scrubbed Yucca from his budget last week indicated he might lean in the direction of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP).

The GNEP is a 21-nation consortium led by Russian and the United States that envisions reprocessing to minimise nuclear waste, while also shipping highly radioactive waste to a handful of nations who would agree to store it – a strategy Bellona strongly opposes.

“I'm glad that United States under Obama is not considering lifting the ban on reprocessing, and will continue to work find a safe geologic spent nuclear fuel repository within the country,” said Nils Bøhmer, Bellona’s nuclear physicist.”

Waste to remain at plants awaiting better option

Instead, Chu, a Nobel Prize-wining physicist, said the Obama administration believes the United States’ nearly 60,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel should remain at nuclear power plants while a new, comprehensive plan for waste disposal is developed, according to a C-SPAN broadcast of the hearing.

The spent fuel, growing at the rate of 2,000 tons a year, now is being held in pools and above-ground concrete containers at reactor sites.

"The nation has already accumulated 60,000 metric tons of spent nuclear waste, and the material is going to have to be isolated from the environment for hundreds and thousands of years," Edwin Lyman, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, told the Christian Science Monitor.

"There's no way to make the waste disappear. No matter what the French say, there's no alternative to having a mined geological repository," he says. The challenge is to find one that is technically and politically acceptable.

A touchy McCain challenges Chu - unsuccessfully

Chu's remarks at the Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on support for scientific research set off a fractious exchanges with Senator John McCain, the Republican from Arizona who lost  the presidency to Obama last year, and underscored that the United States was now on a extraordinarily new tack to deal with its nuclear waste.

McCain’s current defence of Yucca is a direct contradiction of promises he made on the campaign trail in Nevada, where he adopted an anti-Yucca stance in stump speeches.

"What's wrong with Yucca Mountain, Mr. Chu," McCain asked in remarks broadcast from the hearing.

"I think we can do a better job," said Chu.

McCain asked whether it was true that Obama — as well as Chu — view Yucca Mountain as no longer an option.

"That's true," replied Chu.

"Now we're going to have spent fuel sitting around in pools all over America," McCain retorted, and characterised the Obama position on nuclear waste — and its decision to uphold the rejection of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel — as a reflection of the administration's opposition to nuclear energy.

Chu said there were short-term answers other than Yucca, while a long-term solution to dealing with nuclear waste is developed.

"The interim storage of waste (at reactors), the solidification of waste, is something we can do today. The (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) has said we can do it safely," said Chu.

No place for waste

McCain and Alaska’s Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said the decision to dump the Yucca Mountain project posed a threat to expanding nuclear energy in America because the government can no longer give the assurance of waste disposal.

The US government is obligated by law to accept the used reactor fuel from 104 commercial power reactors, but as yet it has no place to put it.

But most Energy Department data as early as 2000 indicated that if Yucca Mountain were to have met its hoped for deadline of 2020, space in the facility had long ago been accounted for, and another Yucca Mountain would have to have been built immediately.

Yucca Mountain, a ridge of volcanic rock 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, has for 27 years been the focus of government plants to build a subterranean repository for high level radioactive waste. Former President George Bush last year submitted construction and licensing application to the NRC.

Siting of Yucca flawed

But the choice of the site as viewed by more contemporary standards, is seen as dramatically flawed. The approach pioneered by Sweden is to take a list of communities who volunteer to host a repository. The list is whittled down to one – but the crucial point is that the community can withdraw from the project at any stage.

But Yucca Mountain was not selected by any scientific or popular process of elimination; it was selected from a list in 1987 by Congress, which declared it dry and remote enough.

Scientific concerns have since emerged, including the realization that water flows through Yucca Mountain much faster than initially believed. That raises the prospect that the nuclear waste would leach over time, polluting the water table. The scientific merit of the site has not been established by independent research and environmental impact studies.

“I would urge the administration to look to Sweden to develop a democratic and transparent process to find a suitable location for the final repository,” said Bellona’s Bøhmer.

As yet, there are no deep geologic repositories for radioactive waste anywhere in the world, but Sweden is getting close to deciding on building one in the towns of Forsmark or Oskarshamn.

Obama's first budget announced a week ago proposes scrapping all spending on Yucca Mountain except for what is needed to answer questions from the NRC on the license application "while the administration devises a new strategy toward nuclear waste disposal" – which balances out to $288 million for the remainder of the fiscal year.

There appear to be no immediate plans by the Energy Department to withdraw the Yucca Mountain license application that Bush put before the NRC because doing so could trigger lawsuits from the nuclear industry. The NRC has up to four years to hold hearings on the application.

Eliot Brenner, an NRC spokesman, said the hearings would proceed.

“What happens once we say yes or no is out of our hands,” Brenner said.

The Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s lobby, has called for a blue ribbon panel to develop a ‘plan B’  to Yucca Mountain in the next 1-2 years.

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Business Insider
March 06, 2009

Shutting Down Yucca Mountain Opens Up Lawsuits

Jay Yarow

For the past 25 years the U.S. has burned through $10.4 billion looking for a home for nuclear waste. We thought we had one in Yucca Mountain, but popular, political and scientific support for that location has crumbled.

In Obama's budget he slashed the funding for the mountain to zero. And now there's no plan for nuclear waste. In addition to the headache of figuring out what to do with the waste, if the measure is approved, the government should prepare itself for a bunch of lawsuits:

NY Times: Lawyers are predicting tens of billions of dollars in damage suits from utilities that must pay to store their wastes instead of having the government bury them, with the figure rising by about a half-billion dollars for each year of additional delay.

The courts have already awarded the companies about $1 billion, because the government signed contracts obligating it to begin taking the waste in 1998, but seems unlikely to do so for years. The nuclear industry says it may demand the return of the $22 billion that it has paid to the Energy Department to establish a repository, but that the government has not yet spent.

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Global Security Newswire
March 06, 2009

U.S. Plan for Nuclear Waste Appears Dead

The Obama administration has publicly shelved a two-decade effort to establish a high-level nuclear waste facility in Nevada, raising the prospect of lawsuits from the nuclear industry and protests from lawmakers in states where the waste is currently stored, according to reports this week (see GSN, Feb. 27).

Officials had already deleted funding for the project -- to create an underground depository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain for the highly radioactive spent fuel from the nation's nuclear reactors -- and yesterday Energy Secretary Steven Chu made clear that the administration preferred other alternatives, the Associated Press reported.

"What's wrong with Yucca Mountain, Mr. Chu?" Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) asked during an Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing.

"I think we can do a better job," Chu replied.

McCain asked if Chu and President Barack Obama considered the Yucca Mountain concept to be dead.

"That's true," Chu said.

"Now we're going to have spent fuel sitting around in pools all over America," McCain responded.

"The interim storage of waste (at reactors), the solidification of waste, is something we can do today. The [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] has said we can do it safely," Chu said (Associated Press/International Herald Tribune, March 5).

Congress crafted a requirement in 1987 to create a storage site at Yucca Mountain, the New York Times reported; the Obama policy could trigger a wave of lawsuits from the nuclear industry, which has funneled billions of dollars to the project. Utilities have argued that a consolidated storage site offers far greater safety and security than keeping the radioactive materials scattered around that nation at power plants.

One former Bush administration official predicted that canceling the Yucca plans could spur a backlash from U.S. lawmakers who prefer not to have the dangerous nuclear materials stored in their districts and states, the Times reported.

"Everybody knows their state is going to be back in play" if the search resumes for a new consolidated waste disposal site, said Edward Sproat, who led the Energy Department's Yucca Mountain program at the end of the Bush administration (Matthew Wald, New York Times, March 6).

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Discover Magazine blog
March 06, 2009

Yucca Mountain Ruled Out for Storing Nuke Waste. Now What?

In a blow to the nuclear power industry, the budget released by President Obama last week eliminates most funding for Yucca Mountain, the Nevada site that for decades has been proposed for the permanent burial of radioactive nuclear waste.

The decision will likely be an expensive one, considering how much money the federal government might end up owing the utility industry, and how much—up to $10.4 billion—has already been spent and will have been wasted on the search for a nuclear waste repository since 1983.  The courts have already awarded the companies about $1 billion, because the government signed contracts obligating it to begin taking the waste in 1998, but seems unlikely to do so for years. The nuclear industry says it may demand the return of the $22 billion that it has paid to the Energy Department to establish a repository, but that the government has not yet spent [The New York Times].

The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act called for the establishment of a permanent, high-level nuclear waste repository. Eight proposed sites were narrowed to three, then to one. Over the strong objections of Nevada’s congressional delegation – and controversy over flawed studies – Congress voted in 1987 to approve Yucca Mountain as the sole candidate for a permanent nuclear waste repository. In 2002, President Bush designated Yucca Mountain as the site, and in June 2008, the Department of Energy submitted its license application [Christian Science Monitor].

There has been fierce opposition to the Yucca Mountain site throughout the decades. In Congress, the battle has been led by Senate majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who celebrates the new decision: “President Obama recognizes that the proposed dump threatens the health and safety of Nevadans and millions of Americans. His commitment to stop this terrible project could not be clearer” [Washington Post]. For now, Energy Secretary Steven Chu says that the nearly 60,000 tons of waste in the form of used reactor fuel can remain at nuclear power plants while a new, comprehensive plan is developed. It was the most definitive signal yet that the government’s attempt to address the commercial nuclear waste problem is veering in a new direction [Star Tribune].

The decision fulfills a campaign promise made by Obama, but offers no hint of what his administration plans to do instead with the country’s existing nuclear waste, or with the approximately 2,000 tons generated each year by nuclear power plants. The Yucca site was designed specifically to handle spent fuel rods from the nation’s 103 nuclear generators…. Keeping the waste at temporary sites is an option in the short term, but experts in the field say it will not serve as a long-term answer for the problem of radioactive waste, which will need to be kept safely stored for at least 1,000 years. Others have advocated reprocessing much of the spent fuel, as is being done in France, but this too is fraught with problems, according to some experts [Washington Post].

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MIT Technology Review
March 06, 2009

Obama Has A New Plan to Stash Nuclear Waste

Energy secretary Steven Chu gives some details about alternatives to the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste site.

By Kevin Bullis

The Obama administration may be drawing up plans to store nuclear waste at multiple sites around the country, instead of in a central depository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

As I noted last week, Obama's budget cuts money to the controversial Yucca Mountain site. Earlier this week, in a U.S. Senate hearing, energy secretary Steven Chu confirmed that the administration no longer considers the site an option. Concerns have been raised about the safety of the site, which apparently was chosen without much careful study. However, the government has an obligation to do something with the waste. The government has collected tens of billions of dollars to create a permanent facility to store waste, one that by law was supposed to be ready by 1998. Instead, utilities have had to pay to store the waste themselves.

Now more details are coming out about what the Obama administration plans to do.

From Energy Washington Week (subscription required):

The Obama administration is crafting an alternative nuclear waste storage program that relies on a mixture of interim and multiple longer-term storage facilities, but no "permanent" waste facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, according to DOE Secretary Steven Chu. The prospects of such a plan--to be developed within a year--raises a host of concerns that states and others are voicing over the legality of such a move and what it means for the multibillion-dollar nuclear-waste fund, say stakeholders . . .

Details of the administration's plan are still forthcoming, but Chu said it would make use of available and new interim storage sites and a process of solidifying waste that he says NRC approves as safe. DOE may pair the interim facilities, which would be scattered throughout states and regions, with multiple longer-term facilities.

According to the Washington Post, "About $7.7 billion has been sunk into the project since its inception."

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National Journal
March 06, 2009

Q&A: Dale Klein

Entering A Nuclear Energy Crossroads

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman On The Yucca Mountain Waste Disposal Site And Iran's Nuclear Capabilities

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission enters the Obama era at an energy crossroads. The president has said he is open to nuclear power, yet his 2010 budget outline [PDF] released on Feb. 26 would halt development of the controversial Yucca Mountain waste storage site in Nevada.

Dale Klein was appointed NRC chairman by President Bush in July 2006 after serving as assistant to the secretary of Defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs. President Obama has not indicated whether he will replace Klein, but if he does, the chairman said he plans to finish his term as one of the other four commissioners. Klein discussed NRC's role in an interview with NationalJournal.com's Amy Harder last month at the agency's headquarters in Rockville, Md. Reflecting back on his time at the Pentagon, the chairman also speculated on the threat presented by Iran's nuclear capabilities, in light of a recent report suggesting the country has enough nuclear fuel to build a bomb.

NJ: In 2007 Obama referred to the NRC as a "moribund agency that needs to be revamped" and that "it's become captive of the industries that it regulates." How do you respond to that criticism?

Klein: I find that a strange statement. I think we are the busiest we've ever been. I think it's a little bit degrading for the men and women who work at the NRC [for Obama] to make a statement like that. It probably just shows a lack of understanding of what we do. For example, we have the license applications for new reactors: 17 for 26 reactors. We have power up-rates. We have license renewal. We have uranium mining. We have enrichment. So, I think we are the busiest we've ever been.... I can tell you from my position as chairman, it is a very dynamic agency.

NJ: Can you comment on whether you're going to stay at your position at the NRC, since it is a presidentially appointed position?

Klein: My term goes until June 30th at midnight 2011, not that I'm counting. The president does have the right to pick the chairman. Historically, Presidents Clinton and [George W.] Bush, when they came in, had existing chairmen in place, and they kept those chairmen. The trend has historically been not to make a change in the chairmanship, and I think one of the reasons for that is regulatory stability. As I've stated before, I hope I'll be based on performance and not other issues that factor in. I think our agency is typically a technical regulator. We are not a political agency.... So I would hope that that would be taken into consideration as the president looks at who he wants in various positions.

NJ: Obama said numerous times throughout the campaign that disposing of nuclear energy in a safe manner will be imperative in nuclear energy's role in this country and that nuclear power is "wrong" and "not working for us right now" because of waste disposal. Do you agree with that assessment?

Klein: In terms of the waste disposal, that's an issue that is more political than technical.... We now have the application from the Department of Energy for Yucca Mountain. And, we're starting our technical review. From our standpoint as a regulator, the stores of spent fuel are safe and secure. It can be done at reactors safely, securely. It is being done today. But I think as a nation we need to look at a long-term, permanent solution. Certainly, Dr. [Steven] Chu, secretary of Energy, will proceed down a path hopefully to resolve that issue. We certainly know that Sen. [Harry] Reid is opposed to Yucca Mountain and that will play in the political arena. Our job as a regulator is to do a technical assessment.

NJ: You have been clear that the NRC does not currently have enough funds to do the proper technical assessment. Can you elaborate on that?

Klein: We have a challenge. We have a mandate by the [Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982] that says the NRC should make our determination of the licenses application in three years. We have one year additional if we need it.... We're currently about $36 million short in our '09 funding from what we needed under the continuing resolution. In our 2010, we may also be short, depending on what occurs on the path back as we formulate that budget. So, what I have told our elected officials, we have a dilemma. We have a time line for which we are required to respond and I don't mind being held accountable as we should be, but we also need the proper funding to make our timely decision.

NJ: If Sen. Reid is successful in cutting funding altogether for Yucca Mountain, what are some other ways to dispose of nuclear waste that are not being done now?

Klein: If you look at other countries that have major nuclear programs, most countries recycle their spent fuel. So certainly that's an option. And Dr. Chu has indicated that we need a systematic approach to the fuel cycle, so I think that's a positive sign. For the near term, we will look at the safety and security, but as the nation moves forward to alternatives like recycling, I have cautioned the Department of Energy to make sure they keep the regulator informed on what their plans are, because if there is a recycling plant, it's very likely that we will license that plant, and so therefore we need to move in parallel with whatever decision the Department of Energy proceeds for the nation.

NJ: If Yucca Mountain is taken off the table, do you think this will this be a setback for nuclear power in this country?

Klein: For the near term, if they step back from Yucca Mountain totally, there will be litigation [because] a lot of utilities have paid a lot of money into the high-level waste fund, so currently there is already litigation occurring where the government is having to pay for the temporary storage at these reactor sites. So I think the immediate concern would be -- if Yucca Mountain is totally withdrawn, for example, then I think a lot of state utility commissions will be very vocal in what happened to the money that their citizens paid for the permanent solution to the waste disposal. Long term, it would be a challenge for us in waste confidence.

NJ: You have said that the future of nuclear power will depend on energy legislation. Can you be more specific about what certain types of legislation -- i.e., carbon tax, cap-and-trade -- will influence the role nuclear power fills?

Klein: There are two areas that legislation will have an impact. One is cap-and-trade, what impact the carbon -- whether it's a tax or cap-and-trade -- will have on the utilities' long-term plans. The other issue that is also important is loan guarantees. The request for the loan guarantees swamped the amount available. There is $18.5 billion available currently in the Energy Policy Act of '05, and the request was about $122 billion. Both of those issues will be of interest to the industry.

NJ: A recent International Atomic Energy Agency report said that Iran has enough nuclear fuel to build a bomb. The report explicitly connects having nuclear fuel with the ability to build a bomb, even though Iran hasn't signaled that's what it's going to do with the fuel. How do you react to reports like this?

Klein: In terms of the uranium program, that is one that is a very difficult situation. If you look at a country's nuclear ambitions, very few countries would start off with needing the fuel enrichment capabilities that Iran is doing. They don't have operating commercial reactors now and there is a surplus availability of fuel on the world market. So, from a technical standpoint, it doesn't make sense that Iran is going so robustly with an enrichment program based on their current demand for fuel. Russia has indicated it would sell it. France has indicated it would sell them fuel. That has been a difficult position technically. Iran has also not been forthcoming with the IAEA with their inspections. All of those raise questions as to what is really the Iranian intent. That makes it a very difficult problem, not only for the United States but for our allies and what should we do and what can we do. I think that story is yet to be told. Hopefully, the IAEA will remain vigorous and really encourage Iran to be forthcoming.

NJ: What is your relationship like with the nuclear industry officials in Iran?

Klein: We have no contact at all.

NJ: Is that normal?

Klein: It is not consistent with other countries. For example, most countries that we deal with we have bilateral agreements and we have what we call the 123 Agreements where we can exchange information. Obviously, there are two countries that stand out that we do not have a relationship with -- North Korea and Iran.

NJ: Have you ever been in contact with either of those countries before?

Klein: No.

NJ: Does that concern you?

Klein: As a regulator, we believe that it's very important for all countries that have commercial power to have a strong, independent regulator. So if I could wave my magic wand and say to those two countries, if they are going to have commercial nuclear power -- North Korea it's not clear, but Iran clearly has -- it's very important that they benefit from the knowledge that regulators have for safe and secure operation. So I believe it would be beneficial to the world that if Iran is going to run commercial nuclear power plants, they do it safely and securely. That is, unfortunately, overwhelmed by their dual-use activities.... You have two issues: The commercial side, where they could benefit from a free open and exchange of how to do it right and do it safe; the other aspect, the dual use, is one that complicates that free flow of information.

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USA Today
March 06, 2009

Obama veers from Bush's environmental course

By Traci Watson
USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Even before George W. Bush can settle into his new house in Dallas, his legacy on the environment is being dismantled by his replacement in the White House.

In less than two months, President Obama has put on hold Bush's plans for power-plant pollution, offshore oil drilling, nuclear waste storage and endangered species.

THE PRESIDENT'S AGENDA: What's been done, what lies ahead

The Obama team has rolled out policies Bush officials delayed, such as requiring higher energy efficiency from appliances.

Such moves have significant impacts and not just on the environment. They could affect electric bills, gas prices and the time it takes to build highways, dams and bridges.

FIND MORE STORIES IN: George W. Bush | Barack Obama | White House | Dallas | Nevada | Environmental Protection Agency | Energy Department | Midwestern | D-Mass | Natural Resources Defense Council | Yucca Mountain | Rep. Ed Markey | Democratic-controlled Congress | Whitman | Edison Electric Institute | Environmental Defense Fund | Clean | Upgrading | Energy Future Coalition | Reid Detchon

For now, the decisions are winning plaudits from green groups — "swift and strong leadership," the Natural Resources Defense Council gushed last month — but experts such as Christopher McGrory Klyza of Middlebury College say the Obama team's hard work is only beginning.

The reversals undertaken "are the easiest things to move quickly on," says Klyza, co-author of a book on presidential environmental policy.

The hard work, such as filling in the details of how Obama will keep his campaign pledge to cut global warming gases 80% by 2050, lies in front of the new administration.

Christie Whitman, Bush's first chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, knows firsthand how hard that work can be, and she says it will be even harder for Obama. The time and political capital Obama will have to expend on the economic crisis will "make it much more complicated" for him to achieve his environmental and energy goals, Whitman says.

"They're hard enough anyway," she says.

Although Obama has the advantage of a Democratic-controlled Congress, party affiliation counts less than regional politics on many of the issues he wants to tackle. Democrats from heavily industrial Midwestern states, for example, are less eager to sign on to legislation to combat global warming.

"Whether they are Republicans or Democrats, they tend to be concerned about economic effects on their own states," says Reid Detchon of the non-partisan Energy Future Coalition, which promotes renewable energy.

In the budget unveiled Feb. 26 and in numerous pronouncements by Cabinet officials, the Obama administration has started to sketch out its environmental platform, but details are in short supply.

For example, the president's budget does not fund the Energy Department's plan to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

The federal government has spent more than 25 years and $13 billion investigating a place to store highly radioactive waste.

Yucca was not likely to open until 2020, despite a 1998 deadline set by Congress for the government to take charge of nuclear waste. Obama's position could further delay finding a final resting place for the radioactive materials piling up at the nation's nuclear plants.

Some experts, such as Robert Alvarez, a top Energy Department official during the Clinton administration, want the government to pick a new site for storing the waste. Alvarez recognizes the political difficulties ahead. "Everybody will just get angry if they learn their backyard might be a candidate site," he says.

The budget assumes passage of a law to curb emissions of the gases responsible for global warming.

Obama wants Congress to pass a bill that would set a strict cap on emissions. Companies would be required to pay the government for the right to emit global warming pollutants.

The budget includes revenue of $646 billion from 2012 to 2019 from such payments. Some of the money would pay for a middle-class income tax cut, some for research on solving global warming.

A wide spectrum of groups — from the Environmental Defense Fund to the Edison Electric Institute, which represents power plants — agree on the need to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, but there is disagreement over how to do it.

Lawmakers, who failed to pass a bill last year, will have to decide how much to cut emissions and how soon.

"This is going to be a very complex piece of legislation," says Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who chairs a House subcommittee key to passage of a global warming bill. "In the end, politics is the art of the possible."

What has been done, what lies ahead on president?s green agenda

USA TODAY'S Traci Watson takes a look at the actions President Obama has taken on key environmental and energy issues — and the hard work yet to be done.

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Union of Concerned Scientists
March 06, 2009

Massive Federal Loan Guarantees for New Nuclear Power Plants Would Put Taxpayers, Ratepayers at Risk

Bailout estimates for failed projects could range from hundreds of billions to more than a trillion

The nuclear power industry is pressuring Congress to dramatically expand federal loan guarantees for building new plants, which would put taxpayers and ratepayers at significant financial risk, according to a report released today by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).

Congress already has authorized $60 billion for loan guarantees in which the federal government would shield utilities and private investment firms from the risk of default on loans for building new electricity generation plants. The Department of Energy (DOE) has allocated $18.5 billion of that money for new nuclear plants over the next few years. Given the average projected cost of building one reactor is currently $9 billion, the industry is clamoring for considerably more. To date, the DOE has received $122 billion in applications for loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants.

The report, "Nuclear Loan Guarantees: Another Taxpayer Bailout Ahead?," recounts the nuclear industry's disastrous financial history and documents the hundreds of billions of dollars taxpayers and ratepayers already have spent to keep the industry afloat. (For more, go to our Nuclear Bailout Report.)

"Taxpayers and ratepayers have been forced to bail out the nuclear power industry twice in the past 30 years, and if Congress gives the industry the massive loan guarantees it wants, we likely will have to cough up hundreds of billions of dollars to do it yet again," said Ellen Vancko, the nuclear energy and climate change project manager at UCS, which commissioned the report. "The industry has gone from promising electricity 'too cheap to meter' to being too costly to consider."

The first bailout occurred after the industry abandoned some 100 plants in the 1970s and 1980s when construction costs skyrocketed and growth in electricity demand slowed. The result was what Forbes magazine in 1985 called "the largest managerial disaster in business history." Taxpayers and ratepayers covered most of the more than $40 billion (in today's dollars) for the abandoned plants, while ratepayers had to pay more than $200 billion to cover cost overruns for plants that were completed.

The second bailout came in the 1990s, when states restructured the electric industry to reduce regulation and increase competition in generation markets. As part of that restructuring, utilities were allowed to charge their ratepayers for "stranded costs"—the difference between the book value of the plants and the lower market value they were worth at the time. As a result, ratepayers were forced to pay more than $40 billion in stranded costs.

Given the industry's record, Wall Street firms have publicly stated that they will not invest in new nuclear power plants without federal loan guarantees. Utility executives also have said they will not place their companies at risk by financing new nuclear plant construction. They would rather place that risk on taxpayers.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates that the average risk of default for a federal loan guarantee for the nuclear industry is 50 percent. UCS's report estimates that the potential risk for guaranteeing nuclear plant construction loans ranges from $360 billion—based on current cost estimates for the 100 new plants needed to replace current plants by 2040—to as much as $1.6 trillion based on 300 plants (with 50 percent higher costs) that some in the industry have proposed building.

"The potential cost of a third public bailout would make the first two look like chump change," said Vancko. "Congress should think twice about pushing the industry to invest in plants that Wall Street and even the industry itself say are too risky to finance on their own."

Before making a commitment to massive federal loan guarantees for new nuclear plants, the report recommends that Congress and the DOE:

* Limit loan guarantees to a small number of new plants to demonstrate the feasibility of new designs and the new federal licensing process.

* Keep the amount dedicated for nuclear plant loan guarantees to the current $18.5 billion.

* Demonstrate that the DOE can adequately manage the loan guarantee program before issuing any guarantees.

* Require companies receiving loan guarantees to agree not to sue the U.S. government over nuclear waste storage costs. (A number of energy companies have sued the federal government for failing to open the Yucca Mountain storage site.)

* Require the nuclear industry to adhere to the same requirements for reducing taxpayer costs and risks applied to other industries that have benefited from government rescue plans, such as the finance and auto industries.

"It is abundantly clear that building new nuclear power plants is far too risky for Wall Street and Pearl Street," Vancko said. "That should send a signal to Congress and taxpayers that they are too risky for Main Street as well."

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Wall Street Journal blog
March 06, 2009

Yucca Mountain: McCain Goes Nuclear on Chu

Stephen Power reports:

Arizona Republican John McCain had a tense exchange with Energy Secretary Steven Chu this week over the Obama administration’s announcement that it intends to sharply scale back funding for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste depository. At a Senate hearing, Mr. McCain complained that the administration’s decision would set back the development of nuclear power in the U.S.

“What’s wrong with Yucca Mountain, Mr. Chu?” Mr. McCain asked at the hearing.

“I think we can do a better job,” Mr. Chu replied.

“We’re going to have spent fuel sitting around in pools all over America,” Mr. McCain said. “To say after 20 years and $9 billion dollars spent on Yucca Mountain that it’s not an option is a remarkable statement . . . It’s clear industry isn’t interested in the construction of nuclear power plants because we have no place to store” nuclear waste.

Mr. Chu said the administration plans to come up with a new plan for storing spent nuclear fuel later this year. “I want to seek the best advice of deeply knowledgeable people,” he said. He cited assurances from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that interim storage of waste at nuclear plants is safe, but was vague about what options the administration sees for long-term storage.

The Yucca Mountain project has been fiercely opposed by Nevada lawmakers, most prominently Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

An explanatory document accompanying Mr. Obama’s budget proposal last week said funding for the project “will be scaled back to those costs necessary to answer inquiries from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, while the Administration devises a new strategy toward nuclear waste disposal.” The NRC is considering an application for the project submitted by the Bush administration in its last year in office.

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Westword
March 06, 2009

Wake-Up Call: Escape from Yucca Mountain

By Patricia Calhoun in Calhoun: Wake-Up Call

A billion here, a billion there -- pretty soon we're talking real money.

To be somewhat precise, $13.5 billion, which is what the federal government has spent in the more than two decades that it's proposed storing nuclear waste in an area known as Yucca Mountain, a volcanic ridge fewer than a hundred miles from Las Vegas. And for just as long, activists have fought the plan.

But yesterday, new Energy Secretary Steven Chu said that the site is no longer an option. Instead, the feds will store the 58,000 tons of waste at power plants while they explore other options -- and any funding for further Yucca Mountain projects has been removed from the budget.

That's good news for environmentalists, good news for new Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar (who won't have to deal with this issue, at least) -- and stunning news for anyone with a memory for numbers. Billions of them.

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KSBY
March 06, 2009

Radioactive waste to be kept above ground at Diablo Canyon

Reported by: Kelly Bush

The Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant will have to keep its radioactive waste in above ground containers, at least for now.

That's because Energy Secretary Steven Chu says the proposed Yucca Mountain storage facility in Nevada is no longer an option.

At a hearing Thursday, Chu said the waste can stay at power plants while the Obama administration comes up with another plan.

Last August PG&E won a lawsuit against the Department of Energy. The court ruled the company should get back more than $200 million it spent on storage while waiting for the Nevada facility to be completed.

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Idaho Statesman
March 06, 2009

Waste issue in limbo again after Yucca decision

The federal government has spent more than two decades and some $7.5 billion studying a national nuclear waste dump in Nevada.

It took the Obama administration six weeks to kill the idea - without a Plan B. This is outrageous and it's grossly unacceptable to Idaho, which is saddled with what seems a never-ending chore of storing wastes that could go someplace else someday.

"Someday" seems awfully far away these days. The White House wants to slash funding for the dump at Yucca Mountain, Nev. As Energy Department spokeswoman Stephanie Mueller told the Washington Post: "Yucca Mountain is not an option, and the budget clearly reflects that."

Which, of course, invites the inevitable question: What is an option?

Idaho Sen. Jim Risch asked Energy Secretary Steven Chu for answers Thursday, and said he received some vague comments about short- and medium-term storage. "They haven't thought this through, in my opinion."

Not good enough. Like the nation's utilities, which are forced to store used yet highly radioactive rods of nuclear fuel at reactor sites, Idaho never bargained for long-term storage. Idaho's inventory comes from a variety of origins - from the Navy's nuclear-powered submarines to the failed Three Mile Island reactor.

It all needs to go. The feds have promised to move it, and will be held to account.

Obama's budget pays off on a campaign promise - to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, a fervent and powerful Yucca Mountain opponent. Yucca Mountain supporters can take their fight to Congress but, as Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo delicately put it Thursday, they will face "big difficulties" in the Senate.

Considering the feds are trying to find a safe place to bury waste for 10,000 years, the dump debate is troublingly shaped by the politics of the moment. In the late 1980s, Nevada accused Congress of thrusting the waste repository on Nevada, by cutting off environmental studies of other sites. After two decades, the politics have reversed.

And not in Idaho's favor.

Idaho Republican Rep. Mike Simpson is willing to look at any new options the administration presents. But, he said Wednesday, it was "stupid" for the White House to rule out Yucca Mountain without a Plan B. It certainly doesn't reflect long-range thinking - or provide reassurance to states and utilities who are unwittingly in the storage business.

Things could be worse for Idaho. The state has a court-enforceable agreement that will require the feds to take Idaho's used reactor fuels by 2035. Twenty-six years sounds like a long time - except that the feds have been talking this issue for nearly as long, and to no avail.

"Our View" is the editorial position of the Idaho Statesman. It is an unsigned opinion expressing the consensus of the Statesman's editorial board.

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KIVI-TV
March 06, 2009

Idaho Delegation Questions Energy Secretary Over Yucca

Washington, DC - Idaho's Congressional Delegation has written Energy Secretary Steven Chu to express concern over the Obama Administration's plan to scale back funding for the Yucca Mountain nuclear storage facility in Nevada.  Yucca Mountain is slated to be the permanent repository for more than 300 metric tons of nuclear materials produced by the U.S. military and 4,400 cubic meters of high-level waste that was sent to Idaho for temporary storage.  Under court-ordered provisions of the 1995 "Batt Agreement," the waste must be removed from Idaho by 2035, but the Obama Administration's Fiscal Year 2010 budget proposes deep cutbacks in planning for the Department of Energy (DOE) to open Yucca Mountain.

"The language included in the FY 2010 Budget puts this milestone at risk and ensures that Idaho retains the Federal Government's liabilities for the continued storage of this waste, which is unacceptable," wrote Senators Mike Crapo and Jim Risch and Congressmen Mike Simpson and Walt Minnick.  "Deep geologic disposal is the only disposal option for this type of defense waste.  If DOE is not going to continue development of the Yucca Mountain facility then we would like you to explain to us how the Federal Government will maintain its commitment to the State and remove this waste out of Idaho by 2035."

Delegation members said they would like to meet with Dr. Chu to discuss the situation further.  Crapo noted he will raise the issue with Chu next week during a meeting of the Senate Budget Committee, of which he is a member.  Risch questioned Secretary Chu today about the disposal of waste from INL during an Energy Committee hearing.  Risch said it was clear by his response that further meetings are needed with the Secretary on the issue.  Simpson, who is a member of the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, will also be participating in Department of Energy oversight hearings concerning federal spending in the upcoming weeks.  He will be addressing this specific concern with Secretary Chu, along with a number of other oversight issues.

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Dallas Morning News blog
March 06, 2009

The anti-carbon president creates a massive road block to nuclear power and carbon reduction

Andrew Smith

President Obama's budget nearly eliminates funding for the planned nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Without a storage facility, spent fuel created at each nuclear plant will stay in "temporary" storage at the plant that created it -- probably for decades to come.

This state of affairs doesn't necessarily prevent the construction of new nuclear plants, but it certainly reduces the odds of such construction -- possibly to the vanishing point. Barring some serious breakthroughs in wind or solar power, the decision also reduces the odds that the nation will reverse -- or even slow -- the growth of carbon dioxide emissions.

Had Obama gone the other way, a $2.4 trillion investment in nuclear plants could have replaced all the nation's carbon generating power plants and created surplus capacity for plug-in hybrids.

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Texas Observer
March 06, 2009

Waste Texas

Why Andrews County is so eager to get dumped on.

Forrest Wilder

ANDREWS–Peggy Pryor grew up the poor daughter of a roughneck, maligned as “oilfield trash,” but she prides herself on having good horse sense. For more than a decade, this feisty West Texas woman has seen something terribly wrong with plans to turn a former ranch near her hometown into the final resting place for massive amounts of radioactive and hazardous waste. Not too many years ago, Pryor could be found raising hell trying to stop the dump. These days, she’s more or less resigned to the inevitable.

“I still protest every once in a while,” she says. But in the end, “I don’t think I did anything other than scream and yell, and cause them to have a little headache.”

The corporation Pryor tried to fight, Waste Control Specialists LLC, owned by Dallas billionaire and major Republican donor Harold Simmons, has spent the last 20 years pulling political, business, and regulatory strings to do what no other company in the nation has been able to do in three decades: license and build a new radioactive waste dump. Waste Control has lobbied successfully for a change in state law to privatize radioactive waste disposal, muscled out more experienced competitors, beaten back environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists, and—perhaps most remarkably—turned the majority of Andrews’ citizens into the dump’s fiercest boosters.

The company now has in hand—a technicality or two notwithstanding—two licenses to bury about 60 million cubic feet of low-level radioactive waste at a site near the Texas-New Mexico line 30 miles west of Andrews. Much of the waste will be radioactive for millions of years; projected profits have been estimated in the billions. Waste Control expects to bury the first canisters of radioactive waste in June. Around 2040, Waste Control will turn the dump over to the state and federal governments to manage for the rest of eternity.

To Pryor and a handful of others in Andrews and Eunice, New Mexico, the town nearest the dump, the whole idea is downright foolish. “When you get a nuclear waste facility, you inherit all of its problems—forever,” she says.

But talk to just about anyone else in Andrews—where a sign at the edge of town greets all comers with “Andrews Loves God, Country, and Supports Free Enterprise”—and the enthusiasm is practically contagious. Environmental organizations have struggled to mount an effective campaign to block Waste Control. When the Sierra Club went looking for locals to file for contested case hearings—the trial-like process for contesting the licensing decision—they were unable to come up with a single resident.

Some in Andrews seem to believe the project is divinely inspired.

“You can get almost religious,” says Darrell Jackson, an Andrews hydrologist and early proponent of Waste Control’s project. “Nobody wants to solve the problem, and what we’ve done in Andrews is say, ‘Look, we’ve got a way to safely dispose of these hazardous wastes so they’ll never bother mankind again.’ ... We think we’re doing a service for the nation and the state.”

The promise of good-paying jobs and economic diversification sweetens the pot.

Andrews sits atop the Permian Basin, a vast bowl of oil-bearing rocks deposited over 250 million years ago. In 1981, Andrews County pumped its 2 billionth barrel. Millions more have come up since. The wealth has funded Republican politicians and excellent schools alike. Ninety percent of the county’s tax base comes from oil and gas production.

Unlike George W. Bush’s Midland, 40 miles away and home to corporate offices and Mercedes dealers, Andrews is made up of people who get their hands dirty. “Andrews is really a working man’s town,” Jackson says. “People here don’t own the oil wells, they work on ’em—they’re the drillers, the pulling unit people, the pumpers.” In this rough and tumble corner of the oil patch, hazards are a fact of life. Men in Andrews often bear the scars—or missing digits—of oilfield accidents. Pryor’s father lost a finger; a childhood neighbor was decapitated. Safety is much improved now, but accidents and deaths still happen. By comparison, handling radioactive waste seems safe.

People here don’t generally use the ‘B’ word out of superstition, but it wasn’t long ago that the oil field was booming. Forward-thinking leaders already see the end of oil.

“We’re trying to get off the oil tit because the bust will come one day,” says Richard Dolgener, the county judge.

The nuclear industry—from radioactive waste to new reactors—offers Andrews an exit strategy, a way to make sure that once the oil’s gone, there’s still a reason to live here. Maybe it’s no great surprise that Andrews and the surrounding area are embracing an industry that other communities—even poorer and more desperate ones—have rejected. “Look around,” said the librarian I struck up a conversation with while scanning microfilm of the Andrews County News. “What else are we gonna do out here?”

Waste Control Specialists settled on Andrews at the invitation of an extraordinary newspaperman and civic activist, James Roberts. Roberts, who died in 1997, was a tireless booster of Andrews in both print and deed. His column, “Drifting Sands,” ran on the front page of the Andrews County News for nearly five decades. The column served as an outlet for Roberts’ combustive and entertaining mix of West Texas folklore, ultraright- wing jeremiads, and plugs for Roberts’ ideas about economically diversifying the oil patch. One of the highest accolades an Andrews resident could receive was a column deeming him or her “a good ‘un.” A frequent “Drifting Sands” topic was the scourge of government interference in business and the hysteria of environmentalists, especially in regard to nuclear power. Once Roberts opined on the healing properties of natural baths containing radioactive material.

“He was a salty old bird,” says Don Ingram, Roberts’ nephew and the current publisher of the newspaper.

Roberts also led the Andrews Industrial Foundation, a nonprofit board composed of local elected officials, religious leaders, and businessmen that critics accuse of functioning as a sort of shadow government. The foundation met privately, raising concerns that it was formed to skirt the state’s open-meeting laws.

“James Roberts had more influence on Andrews and its fabric than any one man,” says hydrologist Jackson. “He was the glue that kind of held it all together.”

Roberts imagined Andrews as a singular place. “The history of Andrews is a 200-year voice [sic] crying in the vastness of open space to be found, to be illuminated by the spotlight of recognition, and to be heard,” he wrote in a published history of the county. Roberts writes of “seven different, distinct waves of white men” who settled Andrews—cattlemen, homesteaders, oil prospectors, Indian killers. “From those who remained sprung a peculiar oneness, a striking cohesiveness, an almost built-in hereditary togetherness not repeated elsewhere in the state.”

Andrews was one of the last frontiers to be settled in Texas. And for good reason. “Thirty miles to water, 10 miles to wood, and 6 inches from hell”—so goes the Depression-era saying, gallows humor recited even now with evident pride. Local legend has it that Shafter Lake, a salty, undrinkable puddle ringed by oil wells outside of town, was formed from the tears of pioneer women stricken by desolation. The Comanche Indians avoided the area, too, at least until Indian hunters drove them off all the good land.

This is no country for old men. The landscape is humbling and unforgiving. Wizened shin oaks and oil pump-jacks bobbing their vaguely equine heads do little to break the vertiginous expanse of red dirt and big sky. It’s all background scenery here, no foreground, a breathtaking nothingness that could drive a tree-hugger stark raving mad with loneliness.

Roberts, dreaming big, saw boundless potential.

In the early ’80s, Roberts and the Industrial Foundation launched an aggressive campaign to bring new industries to town. The roller coaster of the oil markets—big booms followed by bigger busts—was stymieing Andrews’ growth.

The foundation targeted projects that other communities viewed as too controversial or dangerous. The foundation pursued the high-level radioactive waste facility now destined for Yucca Mountain, Nevada; the Superconducting Super Collider, a never-completed, $12 billion boondoggle of a particle accelerator near Dallas; and a state prison. Andrews also bid on an earlier iteration of the low-level radioactive waste dump, when it was to be built by the state.

All those efforts failed. When the Texas oil boom came crashing down in 1986, Andrews was devastated. The oil companies retreated to Midland and Houston. Workers began packing their bags. The tax base shriveled. The need to diversify became more urgent.

Despite the setbacks, Roberts remained convinced that Andrews County was an ideal location for a waste-based empire. The county’s aridity was suited to the project, as was the character of its people.

In the late ’80s, serendipity struck. One of Roberts’ “good ’uns” was the congressman for the area, Kent Hance, who is now chancellor of the Texas Tech System and a major investor in Waste Control. (Hance is also the only person ever to defeat George W. Bush in an election.) Roberts, as owner of a string of papers in Hance’s district, had the congressman’s ear. As luck would have it, one of Hance’s political supporters was Ken Bigham, a Houston businessman flush with cash from the sale of his hazardous waste business. Bigham was in the market for a new project.

“He said, I’d really like to get into the disposal business, but he said I will have to find a place that is a lot more politically conservative than Houston and has a lot less rainfall,” Jackson recalls. “And Hance said, have I got a place for you.”

Roberts and the Andrews Industrial Foundation began laying the groundwork for the project. They paid Texas Tech scientists to study the site and prepared the case for their fellow citizens. In 1993, Roberts made the announcement: Waste Control Specialists was applying for a hazardous waste dump license. The proposed site was “perfect,” he wrote in his column. “There’s no place on Earth where the people know more about, and understand, what’s beneath them than here in Andrews. Where else in this country would you find elementary schools named after the geologic formations underlying the county?”

Waste Control obtained the permit in record time, which Bigham attributed to the overwhelming support of the Andrews community. Another selling point Roberts and Bigham stressed was that the company would be handling only hazardous, not radioactive, waste.

But in 1996, Waste Control announced that the company would expand into radioactive waste treatment and storage. Bigham and Waste Control were hemorrhaging cash and needed new revenue streams. Things had gotten so bad that Hance had tapped Harold Simmons, a man who had gotten fabulously wealthy as a corporate raider in the ’80s, to invest in Waste Control. (“How many people could you find to lose a million a month?” Jackson asks.)

There were other problems. Another waste company, Envirocare of Utah, tried to muscle into Andrews, purchasing property five miles from Waste Control and angling for a hazardous and radioactive waste disposal permit with the state. Waste Control promptly sued Envirocare for $500 million in an antitrust suit. Attorneys for Waste Control subpoenaed Peggy Pryor, the frustrated activist, thinking she was in cahoots with Envirocare. The industrial foundation backed Waste Control, saying its board did not “welcome nor support Envirocare.”

Waste Control prevailed. In 2003, after several failed attempts, the company finally convinced the Texas Legislature, lubricated by campaign contributions and a team of lobbyists, to change state law to allow a private outfit to handle radioactive waste. With that accomplished, Waste Control spent the next five years navigating an environmental and safety review by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality that Waste Control President Rod Baltzer calls “one of the most rigorous reviews in the history of mankind.”

That process is now almost complete. Andrews is on its way to becoming the nation’s preeminent radioactive waste destination. Still, the company is chafing at the limitations imposed by the disposal licenses. (See “Send Us Your Waste”)

http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2979

For Pryor, the idea of letting a for-profit company handle, transport, and bury waste that will remain dangerous for tens of thousands of years is crazy at best. State engineers and geologists largely agree. (See “Good to Glow,” April 4, 2008) They’ve publicly predicted the landfill will contaminate groundwater and pose unacceptable risks to residents. At least three state experts have quit the environmental commission in the past two years to protest what they see as politically motivated fast-tracking of Waste Control’s licenses.

In the close-knit “free enterprise” zone around Andrews, anti-dump activism has been a hard sell. In March 1997, Pryor and a few others formed a group called AWARE to challenge Waste Control’s radioactive gambit. Soon, town elders and Waste Control began targeting the members. Of the approximately 15 people who typically attended AWARE meetings, half were usually Waste Control supporters, according to Richard Simpson, an anti-nuclear activist who moved to Andrews to organize.

Pryor’s outspokenness offended some of her neighbors. People would say to her, “Why don’t you just get up and leave?” Pryor says she would reply, “I’ve lived here 50 years. How long have you lived here?”

When it came time for the state to conduct hearings on the landfill, industrial foundation members used their sway to pack the meetings with Waste Control supporters. School board members called on teachers, hospital management called on their personnel, Roberts called on readers of the newspaper.

At one hearing, the audience of several hundred was asked to stand if they opposed the license. Pryor was the only one in the room to stand. The handful of others in her group were too “scared,” says Melody Pryor, Peggy’s sister. “They physically got ill.”

“Can you imagine how I felt? I was so shocked,” Pryor says. “After it was over, I was so upset and crying. I knew from that first day that it was already decided.”

At another hearing, Pryor overheard Ron Hance, son of Congressman Hance, tell an AWARE member, now deceased, “You need to not tell lies on us.”

The intimidation worked. During an AWARE meeting in 1997, Pryor left to get pizza, and when she got back the rest of the group had voted to disband. Rumors circulated that Peggy was a lesbian. Never married and childless, Pryor had let a hippie-ish, out-of-town activist who called herself Susan Solar stay at her place.

Out-of-town allies felt the heat, too.

“There was more intimidation in Andrews than I’ve ever seen in any place where a radioactive waste site was proposed,” recalls Diane D’Arrigo, the radioactive waste project director for the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, an anti-nuke group.

Carrots were offered, too. D’Arrigo and then-Sierra Club organizer Erin Rogers say that Waste Control principals offered them use of company geologists to help kill the Sierra Blanca project, a failed venture by the state to build and operate its own low-level radioactive waste facility.

Folks in Andrews had a low opinion of the anti-nuclear crowd. “We had protesters come in here from everywhere, idiots, stinkin’ in worn-out tennis shoes,” remembers John Parrish, an agreeably acerbic independent oilman whose gimme cap and worn denim disguises the 3,000 barrels a month that have made him very rich.

It’s not just the town’s elite who have unbridled enthusiasm. When Waste Control has an important hearing, scores of ordinary Andrewsans come to Austin dressed in matching T-shirts to show their support.

Pryor blames Andrews’ history as a company town.

“I was with my daddy when his boss told him who to vote for,” she recalls. The old ways persist. Even now, “The schoolteachers won’t speak out,” Pryor says. “If you speak out at the hospital, you’re ostracized.” Pryor’s dissidence has made her an enemy of the community. “Really, my name is mud,” she says.

An industry highly susceptible to not-in-my-backyard protests could not ask for a better milieu than Andrews. Perhaps that’s why Waste Control isn’t the only nuclear enterprise flocking here.

Louisiana Energy Services, a European-owned company, is building a $1.6 billion uranium enrichment facility a couple hundred yards from Waste Control’s property in Eunice, New Mexico. Attempts by Louisiana Energy to build similar plants in southwestern Louisiana and Tennessee were torched by citizen outcry. An Idaho company is considering a uranium “deconversion” facility in Andrews or nearby Lea County, New Mexico, that would convert depleted uranium—a byproduct of the uranium enrichment process—to a more stable form. Waste Control has discussed burying the deconverted depleted uranium at its site, according to the environment commission in Austin.

A site in New Mexico halfway between Carlsbad and Hobbs was also in consideration to host the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, an ambitious Bush administration program to cull plutonium from spent nuclear fuel for use in nuclear reactors, at least until the Obama administration recently zeroed out the funding.

Finally, a consortium of government entities and nuclear companies plans to build a “next generation,” gas-cooled nuclear reactor somewhere in Andrews County. The concerted rise of these nuclear-related projects has led to a nickname for Eastern New Mexico and West Texas: “the nuclear corridor,” a region primed for the nuclear renaissance.

As closely tied as Andrews and Waste Control are, the closest population center to Waste Control facilities is Eunice, an oil-patch town even smaller and poorer than Andrew. From Eunice, one can see the cranes assembling the Louisiana Energy enrichment plant, and beyond that, just over the state line, mounds of red dirt mark the Waste Control landfills.

Like Andrews, Eunice is filled with nuclear boosters. Perhaps the most enthusiastic is Lynn White, the local newspaper publisher and barber. On an April afternoon, White holds court and cuts hair at his old-fashioned shop on Eunice’s main drag. Louisiana Energy and Waste Control have “total support” in Eunice, he says. “There’s 2,700 people here, and we’ve got one sorehead.” That would be Rose Gardner, the owner of a small flower shop a couple miles down the road, who says she is frustrated that Texas environmental officials have ignored the concerns of people in New Mexico. Of Waste Control, she says, “It’s Eunice’s project; it’s Eunice’s problem; and it will be Eunice’s headache.”

White says Waste Control “bothered” him at first because he didn’t understand what the company was up to. “Ron [Hance] said, ‘What’s it gonna take to get you to support this?’” White asked for more information, and Hance came back with a stack of books “that thick,” White says, holding his hands a foot-and-a-half apart. Years later, Louisiana Energy went a step further. The company flew White and other community leaders from Eunice to the Netherlands to look at a similar uranium enrichment facility. “We came back thrilled to death about it,” White says. “You could have lunch on the floor in any building over there.” He also came back thinking Americans were too uptight about nuclear energy.

The nuclear projects have changed the town for the better, White says, because people take pride that they were picked for such important endeavors. Residents are painting their homes, putting in flowers. “If you meet someone two, three, or four notches above you, you don’t want to look like a yokel,” says White. “You want to put a suit and tie on. That’s what we’re doing—putting a suit and tie on.”

The enthusiasm and unanimity of opinion in Andrews are striking. Mayor Robert Zap believes he knows why. “We’ve lived in isolation out here and if we don’t cooperate and work as a unit we’re in big trouble,” he says. “Who else do we turn to?”

Zap, 80, is one of Andrews’ more unlikely residents. A contemplative, retired Presbyterian minister and trained anthropologist, Zap moved to Andrews 40 years ago and never left. Previously he served as a missionary at an Apache reservation in New Mexico. Zap pronounces “roof” in the Yankee style, betraying his childhood in Chicago, where he claims to have sat on Al Capone’s lap as a boy.

Zap suggests that, “anthropologically speaking,” the Pryor sisters are “very interesting ... I’ve wondered why they felt left out, and it goes back to their family being poor,” he says in a soft, fatherly voice.

“I think that they feel people ought to listen to them and they are more important. And it’s too bad. They’re looking for a cause,” he says.

It’s hard to imagine Zap, in his “Keep Andrews Beautiful” T-shirt, as an apologist for Waste Control—he’s as authentic and sincere as the papoose that hangs on his living room wall, the one he used to carry around his three adopted Apache children. “I realized historically the leadership here have led by being forthright with the people,” he says. “You tell them what’s going on, no surprises, and you get support that way.”

Zap believes that Waste Control has led in just that way. “The spirit of the community was, ‘You have to show us that you’re going to be safe, well-regulated, and there’s a need for what you’re doing.’” The company, he says, did all that.

Doesn’t he worry that something might go wrong? “What do you think about [how] the world is supposed to end by the year 2012?” he asks me. I can’t tell from his straight face if he’s joking. t doesn’t really matter, because his point is that fearing what may happen hundreds or thousands of years from now with radioactive waste is pointless.

“We’re not given over to fear,” he says, “or we would have moved a long time ago.”

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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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