Yucca Mountain News Clips - Friday, March 20, 2009

Yucca Mountain News Clips
Friday, March 20, 2009
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
March 19, 2009

Nuclear Commission: Radioactive waste storage is revised

Agency says power plants can handle material

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is revising its estimates of how long nuclear waste can be kept safely at power-generating facilities as confidence shrinks that the radioactive material ever would be shipped to a Yucca Mountain repository.

The agency could decide this summer that spent nuclear fuel could be stored securely in above-ground concrete and steel casks for at least 120 years, which is 20 years longer than current policy, NRC Chairman Dale Klein said at a Senate hearing Wednesday.

The NRC set forth its proposal last fall, after the Department of Energy sent the agency a construction license application but before the election of President Barack Obama. He opposes the project and has indicated he will take steps to scale it back dramatically.

"We wanted to have a clear understanding of our confidence in the event the Yucca Mountain site is not successful," Klein told members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. "Because of the uncertainty of the (Yucca) license application, we wanted to make sure we were confident there was an option forward to handle the spent fuel."

The NRC's determination on the availability of storage sites for nuclear waste -- the so-called "waste confidence rule" -- is an important part of the process the agency follows to license new nuclear power plants.

Critics of the proposed Yucca Mountain repository, which is planned 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, point to the NRC's conclusions about on-site storage as evidence there is no need to complete the Nevada site if the material can stay where it is for the foreseeable future.

Increasingly, the nuclear power industry has referred to the agency's findings to explain that a failure to build a Yucca repository need not be a show-stopper in licensing new power plants. There is time to come up with other solutions.

Klein testified at a hearing on nuclear issues facing Congress. Also speaking were Marvin Fertel, president and chief executive of the Nuclear Energy Institute, and Tom Cochran, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Fertel told senators the Nuclear Energy Institute is supportive of Yucca Mountain but that setting it aside would not discourage the construction of new plants.

"We will truck through because we can manage (nuclear waste) safely, waste confidence works, the standard contract (for waste disposal) works. We need to be able to plausibly explain to people why it is OK, and it is."

Senators at the hearing asked about the feasibility of nuclear waste reprocessing, and whether Congress should make more loan guarantees available to the industry as it seeks financing for new plants.

As he has in several recent hearings, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., expressed support for the Yucca project, and challenged Klein over the prospect that nuclear waste would remain at sites in 39 states if the Nevada site is not built.

"Spent nuclear fuel sitting in pools and in dry casks at nuclear plants all over America, is that what you are planning on?" McCain asked Klein.

"Yes," Klein responded.

In his testimony, Fertel said that if the Obama administration slows or stops progress at Yucca Mountain, the secretary of energy should reduce the fees that nuclear utilities pay into a special repository construction fund.

The fund, fed by assessments on consumers, contains more than $20 billion; but Congress has limited spending from it. The fee raises about $750 million a year, but Fertel suggested it be scaled back to no more than what Congress decides to spend from year to year.

Cochran urged senators to spend enough money to avoid deep layoffs on the Nevada project, as scientists and engineers will be needed to develop other nuclear waste sites "as the political sun sets" on Yucca Mountain.

The Yucca work force has dropped by more than half over the past three years in the face of budget cuts.

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

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Las Vegas SUN
March 19, 2009

In D.C., a sea change on dump plan

Obama’s opposition reshapes the conversation on nuclear energy

By Lisa Mascaro

Washington — Ever since President Barack Obama promised to significantly scale back the Yucca Mountain budget this year, the question has been a simple one: Now what?

Sometimes the question comes as a genuine line of inquiry about the future of nuclear waste. At other times it is loaded with incredulity.

Either way, Obama’s proposal has caused a phenomenal shift in thinking that would have seemed unbelievable just a few months ago.

Gone are the repeated arguments that federal law requires construction of a nuclear waste storage dump at Yucca Mountain and the extended debates over science and safety. Yes, lawsuits seeking to hold the government accountable for its promise to handle the waste are continuing and many Yucca Mountain supporters say they will fight on. But with Obama saying Yucca Mountain will not be developed on his watch, those long-standing issues seem of less importance.

On Wednesday a Senate energy committee hearing on nuclear power offered a window onto the new day that has arrived in Washington.

“If Yucca Mountain were taken off-line, what’s Plan B?” said Sen. Mark Udall, the Colorado Democrat.

At the witness table, Dale Klein, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, offered the solution that has been before Congress for years. The waste will stay where it now sits, Klein explained. Spent nuclear fuel pellets will be stored safely in containers at utility companies’ nuclear power sites across the nation for the next 100 years or more.

“Dry cast storage is Plan B,” Klein said.

Moments later Sen. John McCain, the former Republican presidential candidate, asked the same question. McCain is a Yucca Mountain project supporter who has been reluctant to let Obama win this battle.

“What are you counting on for an alternative?” McCain said, apparently aware of the answer.

“For the interim, dry cast storage,” Klein said.

“Dry cast storage,” McCain repeated, incredulous. “Spent nuclear fuel sitting in pools at power plants all over America — is that what you’re talking about?”

But even McCain, perhaps the most prominent Yucca Mountain supporter on the Hill, could see the writing on the wall. He fast-forwarded to his point.

“Any national security expert — amateur — would tell you: You need one place to store it, and that’s not going to happen now because the administration has declared that.”

The way the conversation turned was a public reminder that elections matter. Just a few years ago the Bush administration was trying to bolster Yucca Mountain. Bush championed a nuclear energy resurgence as a means of obtaining carbon-free energy.

But the story line in Washington suddenly changed — as if a rail yard worker flipped a switch and the train jumped to a new track.

Obama and Sen. Harry Reid, the majority leader, are seen by many as an essentially unstoppable alliance in killing the Yucca Mountain plan.

On paper, many past supporters of Yucca remain strong backers, despite the project’s fiscal, political and scientific setbacks.

Yet as one Yucca supporter put it Wednesday, it has been no secret where the Yucca debate is going. Even the utility companies had started decoupling the waste issue from efforts to spur a nuclear renaissance, saying they no longer factored Yucca Mountain into their plans to develop new plants.

Klein said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is considering extending on-site storage to as much as 120 years.

“Yucca has been an interesting sort of thing to be out there,” Sen. Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican, said this month. “Hopefully there’s another solution they’re focused on that allows us to use the waste in an appropriate way versus putting it in concrete.”

What the Obama administration plans to do with the spent fuel in the long term remains an unanswered question that makes everyone involved uneasy.

Will a willing host community be chosen for a centralized waste storage site? Will the nation embark on a mission to recycle the waste as other countries do, even though many scientists believe the technology remains decades from being financially viable?

The nuclear industry and its supporters most want an assurance that nuclear revival remains on track. At stake are billions of dollars in federal support.

Karen Harbert, president and chief executive of the Institute for 21st Century Energy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, issued a statement Wednesday saying that “while the Institute supports storing waste at Yucca Mountain as required by law ... the operation of Yucca Mountain is in no way a technical or regulatory prerequisite to the growth of nuclear energy in America.”

Obama’s administration is convening an industry-supported committee to consider disposal options. Reid and Republican Sen. John Ensign have a similar proposal in a bill before Congress.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, the top Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, expressed her frustration Wednesday at the new order.

“So far, this administration has sought to kill Yucca Mountain as a long-term repository for spent nuclear fuel without yet providing alternatives,” she said. Where nuclear stands with the administration, she said, “is a bit of a mystery to me.”

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Lincoln County Record
March 19, 2009

Is the DOE Attempting to Acquire Water for a Dead Issue?

By Theresa Stout
Staff Writer

On January 20, 2009, the Department of Energy (DOE) submitted 116 applications for water. According to the Nevada Division of Water Resources website, these applications are for basins in Lincoln, Nye, and Esmeralda Counties.

Applications filed for water in Lincoln County are from Basin 203 (Panaca Valley), Basin 181 (Dry Lake Valley), Basin 208 (Pahroc Valley), Basin 172 (Garden Valley) and Basin 170 (Penoyer Valley/Sand Spring Valley). There were 36 applications filed for water in Lincoln County. The yield for Basins 198 - 205 totals 25,000 acre feet annually, which is for eight basins. Right now for Basin 203 the active annual duty in acre-feet is 31,335.58. That basin alone is over the 25,000 yield allotted for all eight basins. Most of the applications are for construction purposes and some are for industrial purposes reportedly for the Yucca Mountain Rail Line.

When questioned on the DOE filing for water in an over appropriated basin, spokesman Jon Summers for Senator Reid's office stated in an e-mail March 4, "As the president's budget outline detailed last week, the Yucca Mountain project is no longer an option and the work of determining the best way to deal with the disposal and storage of nuclear waste in this country will begin very soon."

When asked the same question Senator Ensign's office commented, "If the president keeps his word, Yucca Mountain is dead. The State of Nevada has control over our water resources. These applications will have to be reviewed by our State Water Engineer, who has consistently denied water permits for the Yucca Mountain project."

The DOE stated that these applications were filed under the previous (Bush) administration; they were actually filed on President Obama's inauguration day. When questioned by The RECORD, if under the present administration this is a dead issue why are the applications still in the filing process, why have they not withdrawn their applications?, the DOE spokesperson stated they needed to check that before commenting. As of press-time they were still checking.

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Nevada Appeal
March 19, 2009

Sen. Harry Reid: Getting closer to a clean, secure future for Nevada

Hope and optimism seem difficult to come by during these hard economic times, but I feel a good deal of both for Nevada’s future after a couple of major recent announcements.

Both the news of NV Energy’s decision to postpone building a new coal plant near Ely and President Barack Obama’s move to severely slash the budget for the proposed Yucca Mountain dump bring our state much closer to economic security and long-term health. The jobs Nevada needs will come through clean energy.

In making this sound business decision, NV Energy recognizes the future of energy in our state resides in clean renewable energy sources like solar, wind and geothermal. Dirty unstable energy sources pollute our environment and weaken our economic strength as they rise sharply in cost, as coal has in recent years.

The best way to create thousands of good-paying Nevada jobs that cannot be outsourced is through clean energy, and Nevada has a wealth of it. We’ll do it by building transmission lines and generating centers, by maintaining the infrastructure we create to develop and deliver this energy to the country and by employing people to improve the energy efficiency of buildings through weatherization and other improvements.

I obtained billions of dollars for clean energy through the economic recovery package, and many millions will come to Nevada. We can diversify our state’s economy through clean energy and the jobs it brings to all of Nevada. Best of all, these jobs will be in areas of the state that need them most.

In fact, I introduced legislation in Congress to overhaul how energy is delivered in our country. This bill could be the key to getting started on building new transmission lines in Nevada in the near future. Clean energy is not some far-off thought; it is here now and we must seize on our opportunity before other states and countries do the same.

President Obama’s decision to fund Yucca Mountain at an absolutely minimal level in his first budget represents another critical step in ending the proposed nuclear waste dump. There is no mistaking that this is our most significant victory to date in our battle to protect Nevada from becoming the country’s toxic wasteland.

Drawing this fight to a close would allow us to focus fully on our clean energy future. There will be no more calls to discuss unrealistic hypothetical scenarios like mortgaging our health and safety to let America dump its radioactive trash in our backyard.

Nevadans are independent thinkers with a pioneering spirit that demands we step into the future of clean energy. The events of the past month bring us that much closer to taking that step and I could not be more excited about where renewable energy can take our great state.

• Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., is the Senate majority leader.

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Nevada Appeal
March 19, 2009

Tyrus W. Cobb: When in doubt ... form a commission

The first rule in Washington, when faced with a vexing political issue, is to form a commission to study the problem. Thus, “Harry Ensign” have come up with the idea of creating a nine-member commission to devise a plan for the disposition of nuclear waste piling up from reactor sites and defense weapons programs.

The second rule is to know precisely what conclusion you want that commission to arrive at. The last thing any skilled Beltway insider wants to happen is to have a rogue task force that may not be sufficiently attentive to the impetus behind the creation of the commission, and go off on its own.

Then the third rule, obviously, is to select members for that commission who will diligently study the issue at hand, not by searching independently for data, opinions and recommendations, but by following the direction of the professional staff that will guide the deliberations.

Thus we have the proposed National Commission on Management of High Level Radioactive Waste and Spent Nuclear Fuel, an idea that Nevada senators Harry Reid and John Ensign have forwarded to assist in the effort to stop Yucca Mountain from becoming the nation’s repository.

The commission concept is in reality an acknowledgement by the senators that, despite recent statements by President Obama and Energy Secretary Chu that “Yucca is dead,” in fact the repository is limping along. The commission is also a reaction to growing sentiment within Nevada that the state should halt its opposition to the Yucca site.

While the Congressional representation and state officials hold fast to the state’s long-held opposition, polls show public opinion has shifted in favor of either accepting the site, or better, treating Yucca as an interim storage site.

The latter concept, embodied in a bill proposed by Assemblyman Ty Cobb, Jr., (son of this writer) would call on the government and nuclear industry to reprocess the waste on-site, thus eliminating more than 90 percent of it, and construct a state- of-the-art R&D center for advanced research on alternative energy concepts.

If the Nevada delegation really wanted to finish off Yucca as the national repository, it would take two steps. The first would be to demand that Obama and Chu withdraw the license application to open Yucca that has already been sent to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The second would ask Congress to overturn the legislation that designated Yucca as the repository, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. That “Harry Ensign” and our Congressmen have not done so is recognition that they do not have the votes to overturn the governing legislation.

Thus, this commission is born. The nine-member commission would be established according to the “rules” I outlined above. Rather than having a commission convened under the authority of the National Academy of Sciences, or even the Department of Energy, this would be a Congressional commission consisting of five individuals appointed by Sen. Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and another four by the Republican leadership.

No word as to who would staff the commission — the key to what the eventual conclusions will be — but we can surmise that they will be carefully screened for their positions on the nuclear waste disposition issue.

The commission idea hasn’t gotten much support within Congress. In the interim, while Congress dithers, nuclear waste continues to pile up at more than 160 locations. The nuclear industry has coughed a few times and declared this alternative safe for the short term.

What else are they going to say? That it is a terrible alternative compared to storage at a secure desert installation away from population centers? That could cripple the industry and halt nuclear power generation in its tracks. Hence, they are sucking it down and reluctantly endorsing the least-worst alternative.

The citizens of the U.S. and Nevada deserve better than this charade.

• Tyrus W. Cobb served as special assistant to President Ronald Reagan for national security affairs.

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Heartland Institute
March 19, 2009

Yucca Mountain Site Ideal for Spent Nuclear Fuel

Written By: Jay Lehr, Ph.D.

Published In: Environment & Climate News > April 2009
Publication date: 04/01/2009
Publisher: The Heartland Institute

Spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste have been accumulating in the United States for nearly 60 years, when nuclear materials were first used to produce electricity and to develop nuclear weapons. Waste that was planned for disposal at the Yucca Mountain storage facility in Nevada resides instead in temporary storage at 121 sites in 39 states.

After decades of scientific study, it is clear no legitimate safety issues preclude opening Yucca Mountain for the storage of spent nuclear fuel.

Broad Yucca Mountain Support

Congress in 1987 directed the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to study Yucca Mountain, Nevada for the feasibility of constructing a deep underground geologic repository for nuclear waste. DOE made favorable findings regarding the proposed site, and Congress in 2002 approved construction of a permanent nuclear waste repository under Yucca Mountain.

In June 2008 DOE submitted an application to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to construct a repository at Yucca Mountain. With this application the DOE’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management moved forward in meeting its congressionally mandated directive to develop, build, and operate a deep underground facility that will safely isolate spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste for hundreds of thousands of years to come.

The license application is the culmination of more than two decades of expert scientific research and engineering by more than 2,000 scientists and engineers working at government and university laboratories.

No Reuse of Fuel Pellets

Nuclear fuel has been used in 104 nuclear power plants in the United States and nearly 200 of the nation’s nuclear naval vessels. The fuel is solid, in the form of ceramic/uranium pellets the size of a pencil eraser. Commercial nuclear power plants generate electricity through the controlled use of nuclear fission (splitting) inside sealed metal tubes or rods filled with these pellets. The heat released in this process creates steam that drives turbines to generate electricity.

After a few years in a reactor, the uranium pellets in the fuel assembly are no longer efficient for producing electricity. At this point the used, or “spent,” fuel assembly is removed from the reactor and placed in a pool of water to cool.

In most other countries where nuclear power is generated, these fuel rods are chemically reprocessed for additional use. In the United States, however, President Jimmy Carter outlawed this procedure in 1977. Although President Ronald Reagan rescinded Carter’s executive order, no power plants in the nation have initiated such a recycling program.

Thus, without a central disposal site, our 60 years of nuclear waste remains in on-site water pools or sealed above-ground in metal canisters within concrete bunkers.

Ideal Site

The Yucca Mountain site is located in a very dry and remote area of the Mojave Desert in Nye County, Nevada, roughly 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The site is on land controlled by the federal government and isolated from human population and activities.

The mountain itself is formed of nonporous volcanic rock in an area receiving only 7.5 inches of precipitation a year. The water table lies as much as 2,000 feet below the surface and is part of the Death Valley closed-hydrologic system, unconnected to either Las Vegas or any other significant population center.

This means even if radioactive particles were to escape from Yucca Mountain at some time, they would be isolated from any water supplies outside the Death Valley basin.

Moreover, the likelihood of radioactive particles ever reaching even the closed Death Valley hydrologic system is extremely remote. The waste itself would be sealed in strong, redundant, high-technology containment canisters. If radioactive waste were to escape those canisters, thick, impermeable rock layers limit the ability of water to penetrate into, or radioactive particles to escape from, the repository.

Additionally, as already noted, the closed hydrological system water table lies a full 2,000 feet below the surface. With very little water available to start with, the Yucca Mountain repository’s natural features significantly limit the amount of moisture that can infiltrate below its surface. At most locations within the mountain, it would take thousands of years for the small amounts of water that can infiltrate the surface to reach the level of the repository.

In addition, many redundant methods will be engineered into the repository to ensure nothing will ever escape. I’ll outline those measures next month.

--Jay Lehr, Ph.D. (jlehr@heartland.org) is science director of The Heartland Institute.

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Los Angeles Times
March 19, 2009

Editorial

Yucca Mountain on hold

The Obama administration is prudent to put the brakes on the nuclear waste repository in Nevada.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has been called many things during his 22-year Senate career, but the name that sticks when the issue of nuclear power comes up is "NIMBY." That's because Reid has fought tirelessly to block construction of a national nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in his home state. There's a funny thing about his critics, though: Not one of them has ever suggested shipping the country's hazardous radioactive waste to his or her own state or district instead of Nevada.

The usual bleating about Reid's obstructionism and Nevadans' paranoia arose after the release of President Obama's proposed budget, which trims funding for the Yucca Mountain project to the minimum needed to keep the regulatory process involved in its construction alive -- a strong signal that there will be no further work done on the repository during Obama's term in office. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the administration is working on an alternative program that involves multiple interim and long-term waste storage facilities around the country.

When it comes to highly radioactive nuclear waste, pretty much everybody is a NIMBY. Setting aside the factthat scientists have yet to develop the technology to safely store this waste for the thousands of years it takes to decay, there's the fact that it has to be transported to the disposal site -- mostly by train -- creating the opportunity for spills. Even if the nuclear dump isn't in your backyard, the train tracks might be, and the closer you live to the center of it all, the greater the danger. Little wonder that Nevadans aren't excited by the prospect of a glow-in-the-dark desert.

The depressing thing about Yucca Mountain is that for all its flaws, including the discovery that water flows through the mountain faster than previously thought and thus could contaminate nearby areas, it probably still represents the safest place in the country for a nuclear repository. Not only is seismic activity in the rangeminimal, but the mountain is in a remote and desolate region at the edge of a site used in the 1950s for atomic testing. If we can't dump the waste in a nuclear test zone, where can we? That, in a nutshell, is the problem with nuclear power.

Pro-nuclear activists, whose ranks are growing as the nation looks for non-carbon-emitting sources of energy, needn't fret too much about Obama's proposal, which tables but doesn't end the debate about Yucca Mountain. Yet the move probably would delay some pending applications for construction of nuclear plants, and may even stop some. That's all for the good. Nuclear power is much too risky and expensive to be seen as a reasonable solution to climate change.

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POWERnews
March 19, 2009

Sens. Reid and Ensign Propose Commission to Study Yucca Alternatives

Nevada Senators Harry Reid (D) and John Ensign (R) last week introduced a bill to create a national commission to study long-term alternatives to Yucca Mountain for managing nuclear waste in the U.S.

The bill proposes to create a nine-member panel of nongovernmental experts that could come up with a solution to the dilemma of how the nation will manage high-level radioactive waste and spent fuel. The blue ribbon commission would have two years to find alternatives to the underground nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., a project that had been pursued by the Department of Energy for 20 years.

President Obama’s 2010 budget released earlier this month proposed to slash all funding for that project, except for “costs necessary to answer inquiries from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, while the Administration devises a new strategy toward nuclear waste disposal.”

“Now that Yucca is out of the picture, we need to study what our options are to safely and responsibly deal with our nation’s nuclear waste,” Reid said in a statement last week.

Under the bill, the commission would evaluate “potential improvements” in the U.S. approach to high-level nuclear waste and spent fuel management if Yucca Mountain never becomes operational. The group would also assess and report the alternative’s feasibility, cost, risks, legal issues, public health issues, and environmental impact. For example, the panel would examine cost-sharing between the government and private industry, and whether the nuclear waste disposal program should be moved from the DOE to a government corporation.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu on March 5 told the Senate Energy Committee that Yucca Mountain was no longer viewed as an option for storing reactor waste. Instead, he said, the Obama administration believes the nearly 60,000 tons of used reactor fuel can remain at nuclear power plants while a new comprehensive plan is developed.

Nuclear waste is currently located in more than 120 locations in 39 states. For each year beyond 2017 that Yucca Mountain’s opening is delayed, the DOE estimates that U.S. taxpayers’ potential liability to contract holders who have paid into the Nuclear Waste Fund will increase by about $500 million.

“This will be in addition to the estimated current potential liability of approximately $7.0 billion due to the Department’s not beginning removal of spent nuclear fuel in 1998 as required by contract,” Ward Sproat, director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, told the U.S. House of Representatives last year.

--Sources: Las Vegas Review, OCRWM, Senate Energy Committee

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
March 19, 2009

Nuclear power still doesn't make sense

By Bill Christofferson

The nuclear power industry, virtually dormant for decades, is hoping that concerns about global warming will bring its resurgence.

Wisconsin, which has not built a new nuclear reactor since 1974, got a taste of the well-orchestrated pro-nuclear campaign last week at a legislative hearing stacked with nuclear power apologists, including two former critics of nuclear power who now support it as part of a solution to the converging challenges of climate change and energy shortages.

Times have changed, the converts say. One of them, Patrick Moore, who also wrote the March 12 op-ed "Put nuclear energy to work," assured legislators that nuclear power was "one of the safest technologies that has ever been invented by human beings." (Moore is paid by the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, funded by the nuclear industry.)

But some things have not changed since Wisconsin lawmakers wisely adopted a state law in 1983 that forbids any new plants to be built in the state until two requirements are met: 1) There is a federally licensed facility to dispose of high-level radioactive waste from the reactors, and 2) The Public Service Commission makes a finding that nuclear power makes economic sense. The industry's inability to meet those two tests has resulted in a de facto moratorium on new nuclear reactors in Wisconsin, for which we should be thankful.

After more than 50 years of producing the extremely dangerous waste, there is still no safe way to permanently dispose of it. Some of the waste byproducts of generating nuclear power are so dangerous to human health and the environment that the Environmental Protection Agency issued rules last September requiring a disposal site be able to protect the public from radiation released from the waste for up to 1 million years.

A million years. To put that in perspective, 15,000 years ago, Wisconsin was covered by glaciers.

We have no safe way to dispose of the waste, but three commercial reactors in Wisconsin generate more of it every day. It is accumulating, as it has been for three decades, in temporary storage facilities next to the operating reactors, near Lake Michigan, and next to the Mississippi River at a reactor shut down 20 years ago. To build more reactors to produce more dangerous waste while we have no safe means of disposal is lunacy.

Opening Wisconsin to more nuclear plants could have another dangerous side effect: increasing pressure to select our state as the repository for the nation's radioactive waste. In the 1980s, the federal government identified two granite formations in central and northern Wisconsin as potential sites. Wisconsin voters overwhelmingly opposed such a site in a 1983 advisory referendum. If Yucca Mountain does not survive as a federal site, Wisconsin could be targeted again.

Nuclear power has never made economic sense. No new nuclear plants are being built because the economic risks are too high. The most recent evidence was an unsuccessful attempt by nuclear power supporters to include $50 billion in loan guarantees in the federal stimulus bill.

Wisconsin is about to experience a full-scale debate on the subject. The Governor's Task Force on Global Warming has issued recommendations that include easing the restrictions on nuclear power, as part of a package of other changes sought by environmentalists. The skids seem greased for passage, and a major, well-funded sales campaign is being prepared.

Nuclear power makes no more sense today than it did when the law was passed in 1983. Wisconsin must address the climate crisis, but renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies are faster, cheaper, safer and cleaner strategies for reducing greenhouse emissions than nuclear power.

Bill Christofferson of Milwaukee is co-chair of the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice, a statewide coalition of 165 organizations working for social change.

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Michigan Live
March 19, 2009

Michigan overspends for both medicine and electrical power in comparison to Canada

Posted by Paul C. Johnson

In 2002, U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., relied on one campaign ad telling us that on the other side of the Ambassador Bridge, Canadians paid half what we did for medicine and added that we needed to "force" the pharmaceutical industry to lower its prices.

Despite the fascist rhetoric, it didn't happen. Still the senator was elected and reelected. So much for truth in advertising.

But now on a business trip to the other side of the bridge, I read in Toronto's Globe & Mail newspaper that Ontario has 20 nuclear reactors powering 50 percent of the province which has a population of 12 million and there are plans to build more plants.

Michigan has three nuclear power plants with a population of 10 million -- accounting for about a quarter of its electrical power needs and no plans for more plants.

Again, under Democratic leadership the state is going in the wrong direction, erroneously explained away by safety and disposal issues.

Were either unmanageable, would Canada, a nation slavish to its boundless natural resources and beauty, pursue it?

Would France where nuclear power provides 75 percent of its electricity and exports $3 billion a year in power? And France has no Yucca Mountain, yet stores its waste in an area about the size of your living room.

So, before I return to Kalamazoo, I can point to the Ambassador Bridge and say, on the other side, Michiganians needlessly overspend on electrical energy.

We must force our legislators to reduce onerous regulations for lower prices and greater independence. But then, I'm not a senator.

--Paul C. Johnson resides in Kalamazoo.

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Syracuse Post-Standard
March 19, 2009

Weigh all health risks before allowing a new nuke reactor

By Joseph J. Mangano

Just 35 miles northwest of downtown Syracuse is the Nine Mile Point/Fitzpatrick nuclear plant. With three reactors, it is one of the largest plants in the country (only seven have three reactors).

But some believe three reactors are not enough. Constellation Energy - bolstered by the French national nuclear company's recent purchase of nearly half the company -- has proposed a new reactor at the site. If approved, it would be the largest in the United States.

A federal safety review of the proposal will soon be made. It is a sure bet that regulators will declare it risk-free, as they are in the process of rubber-stamping proposals for 30 new reactors across the United States.

Nuclear reactors are harmful. They do not emit greenhouse gases but instead create more than 100 radioactive chemicals, including Iodine-131, which attacks the thyroid gland; Strontium-90, which seeks out the bone; and Cesium-137, which enters muscle. Each causes cancer, and is especially hazardous to infants and children.

Most radioactivity is stored as waste at each plant, and must constantly be cooled with water. The federal proposal to send waste to a final repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada has bogged down and may never open. Nine Mile Point/Fitzpatrick already holds the equivalent of hundreds of Hiroshima bombs of radioactivity; a new reactor would add considerably more.

Any loss of cooling water to a reactor core or waste area, from terrorist attack or mechanical failure, would result in a meltdown. Huge amounts of radioactivity would be released into the air. The Syracuse area could not be evacuated in time, and thousands would suffer and die from radiation poisoning and cancer.

The existing three reactors at Nine Mile Point/Fitzpatrick are aging, their parts are corroding, and they are being run nearly 100 percent of the time -- the nuclear equivalent of running an old car into the ground. The unthinkable horror of a Chernobyl-type meltdown may not be likely, but it is a reality. Moreover, the new, larger reactors would generate more radioactivity than existing ones, and nearly double the casualties from a meltdown.

In addition, local residents may be harmed by reactors, even without a meltdown. Some of the 100-plus chemicals must be routinely released into the air and water as gases and particles. They enter human bodies through breathing and the food chain. Emission levels from Nine Mile Point/Fitzpatrick have historically exceeded most U.S. reactors.

Many factors can cause cancer, but radiation exposure must be considered as one. This potential link should be examined before any decisions are made to build a large, new reactor at Nine Mile Point.

A safer approach to meeting the area's electrical needs would be to develop renewable, non-polluting energy sources. In particular, wind power on land and off Lake Ontario holds great promise for the local area, while preserving the health of its people.

--Joseph J. Mangano is executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, based in New York.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
March 18, 2009

NRC revising its on-site nuclear waste policy

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is revising its estimates of how long nuclear waste can be kept safely at power utilities as confidence shrinks that the radioactive material ever would be shipped to a Yucca Mountain repository.

The NRC set forth its proposal last fall, after the Department of Energy sent the agency a construction license application but before the election of President Barack Obama, who opposes the project and has indicated he will take steps to scale it back dramatically.

“We wanted to have a clear understanding of our confidence in the event the Yucca Mountain site is not successful,” Klein told members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “Because of the uncertainty of the (Yucca) license application, we wanted to make sure we were confident there was an option forward to handle the spent fuel.”

The NRC’s determination on the availability of storage sites for nuclear waste — the so-called “waste confidence rule” — is an important part of the process the agency follows to license new nuclear power plants.

Critics of the proposed Yucca Mountain repository, which is planned 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, point to the NRC’s conclusions about on-site storage as evidence there is no need to complete the Nevada site if the material can stay where it is for the foreseeable future.

Increasingly the nuclear power industry has referred to the agency’s findings to explain that a failure to build a Yucca repository need not be a show-stopper in licensing new power plants. There is time to come up with other solutions.

Fertel told senators that NEI is supportive of Yucca Mountain but that setting it aside would not discourage the construction of new plants.

“We will truck through because we can manage (nuclear waste) safely, waste confidence works, the standard contract (for waste disposal) works,” Fertel said. “We need to be able to plausibly explain to people why it is OK, and it is.”

Senators at the hearing inquired about the feasibility of nuclear waste reprocessing, and whether Congress should make more loan guarantees available to the industry as it seeks financing for new plants.

“Spent nuclear fuel sitting in pools and in dry casks at nuclear plants all over America, is that what you are planning on?” McCain asked Klein.

“Yes,” Klein responded.

In his testimony, Fertel said that if the Obama administration slows or stops progress at Yucca Mountain, the secretary of Energy should reduce the fees that nuclear utilities pay into a special repository construction fund.

The fund, which is fed by assessments on consumers, contains more than $20 billion but Congress has limited spending from it. Currently, the fee raises about $750 million a year, but Fertel suggested it be scaled back to no more than what Congress decides to spend from year to year.

Cochran urged senators to spend enough money to avoid deep layoffs on the Nevada project, as scientists and engineers will be needed to develop other nuclear waste sites “as the political sun sets” on Yucca Mountain.

The Yucca work force has dropped by more than half over the past three years in the face of budget cuts.

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

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Las Vegas SUN
March 18, 2009

Sun editorial:

Yucca Mountain politics

Despite what critics say, science never drove the plan to make Nevada a nuclear dump

There has been a spate of editorials and articles recently whining about President Barack Obama’s decision to kill plans for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

USA Today, for example, published an editorial Tuesday decrying the decision as “political” — noting that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is from Nevada. The newspaper said the decision countered the White House’s belief that “politics should not drive science.”

Similar arguments have been made by others, including The Washington Post, the Washington Times and those in the nuclear power industry. Those who cry politics are either disingenuous or ignorant of the facts: Politics is the reason Yucca Mountain was chosen in the first place.

When Congress decided to create a dump, it decided it wanted a place with geological features that would shield radiation from escaping and ordered a scientific search for the best sites. Yucca Mountain, a porous, volcanic ridge, would not have been at the top of the list. There were many other sites across the country considered, including places in Texas, Washington state, Utah, Louisiana and Mississippi.

In 1985 President Ronald Reagan narrowed the list to Nevada, Washington state and Texas.

Nevada didn’t stand a chance. The vice president and the speaker of the House at the time were from Texas. The then-House majority leader was from Washington state.

A powerful senator from Louisiana provided the political answer, authoring the so-called “Screw Nevada” bill in 1987. The bill named Yucca Mountain as the only site to be considered. Nevada’s small congressional delegation, whose senior senator at the time, Chic Hecht, hadn’t been in office for a full term, was powerless to stop it.

The bill set the government off on an impossible quest: Make science support a political decision. The result has been a waste of more than two decades and nearly $8 billion. President Obama was true to his word. With his decision, science finally ruled the day.

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Nevada Appeal
March 18, 2009

Gibbons says amending Nuclear Projects budget up to lawmakers

By Geoff Dornan
Nevada Appeal Capitol Bureau

Faced with auditors’ recommendations that his proposed Nuclear Projects budget be increased, Gov. Jim Gibbons said Wednesday the decision is up to the Legislature.

Executive branch auditors issued a report recommending Gibbons’ decision to cut the Agency for Nuclear Projects from seven to two positions be revised to four full-time and one part-time positions.

Asked whether he would support that and submit an amended budget, Gibbons said: “It’s not my budget anymore. It’s the Legislature’s budget.”

Gibbons didn’t answer when asked whether he would support the recommendation.

“I submitted our budget at $10 million,” he said. “Now it’s up to the Legislature to determine what changes they want to make to the budget and where they’re going to find the money to do that.”

The auditors recommended adding back three of the cut positions and signing a part-time contract with one other longtime employee who is retiring to ensure that Nuclear Projects can do its job as the Yucca Mountain project moves into the licensing process this year.

Gibbons made clear he is maintaining the position he articulated in a March 16 letter to Assemblyman Morse Arberry, D-Las Vegas, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

He said in that letter: “The Nevada Constitution requires that I propose a balanced budget to the Legislature before the commencement of the regular session, which I did in January of 2009. Once that budget is proposed, it is up to the Legislature to decide whether to accept or modify that budget.”

Chief of Staff Josh Hicks said that doesn’t mean the governor’s office is abdicating its role in building the budget. He said the office will soon present its recommendations on the federal stimulus package and, after the May 1 Economic Forum, recommendations on balancing the budget.

Arberry said in a letter responding to Gibbons this week May 1 was too late in the process.

“Waiting until the final 30 days of the regular legislative session to begin reviewing potential budget adjustments as well as beginning the time consuming task of closing budgets is unrealistic,” Arberry wrote.

--Contact reporter Geoff Dornan at gdornan@nevadaappeal.com or 687-8750.

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North Lake Tahoe Bonanza
March 18, 2009

Letters to the Editor

Nuclear waste not worth it

It appears that, for 30 pieces of silver, Jim Clark wants to make Nevada the nuclear waste dump capital of the world.

- Does he know? There is a vast area in central Russia that will remain uninhabitable indefinitely because of a fire at a large nuclear waste site.

- Does he know? This spent fuel remains hot and must be kept apart from other spent fuel, in small batches, under water to avoid over heating.

- Does he know? Any accident in a facility, on the scale of Yucca, would result in a disaster beyond unimaginable.

- Does he know? Even the best safeguards and technology are not zero risk and when consequences are so dire — not worth it.

Remember the first step towards catastrophe is bringing all the spent fuel together at one site. We can choose to refuse the silver and keep our legacy clean and safe.

For our future let’s support Sens. Harry Reid and Jim Gibbons in our continued fight against Yucca. Now is not the time to relax.

Michael Ray
Incline Village

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WorldChanging
March 18, 2009

Stewart Brand is Rethinking Nuclear

By Lisa Chacón

Monday night Stewart Brand spoke at UC Berkeley on “Rethinking Green.”

He went through the requisite slides on climate, population and energy – but with a few twists. He was involved in the Pentagon-sponsored Abrupt Climate Change report in 2003, “we’re still learning about how weird it can get and how fast it can get weird,” he said as he showed a global minefield of positive feedback loops that could rapidly increase CO2 in the atmosphere. “At what point will the pH of the oceans become too acidic for the phytoplankton to continue sequestering CO2? When will the methane gigaburp out of the permafrost? When will the rainforests wilt and stop storing carbon? We have no idea!” Brand asserts that each one of these events will come as a nasty surprise and will push the urgency around climate response to a new level, forcing us to reconsider technologies that we may not currently favor, such as nuclear power and geo-engineering.

He argued that nuclear power issues are merely design problems – around cost, safety, waste storage and weapons proliferation. To make his case about the safety of nuclear waste transport, he showed a series of crash test videos – waste containers being driven into a cement wall at 120 miles per hour on the back of an eighteen-wheeler, dropped from 50 feet onto a solid concrete block, and burning for ninety minutes in jet fuel at 2000F – all of them surviving without ruptures or leaks.

He claimed that the amount of waste that one American would generate over a lifetime powered solely by nuclear would be the size of a coke can (a very heavy coke can). He believes that waste can be safely stored for two to three decades in Carlsbad’s WIPP or Yucca Mountain, which could buy us some time. He mostly blames Amory Lovins for destroying the potential for nuclear on the basis of cost, but asserted that if the real costs of coal were accounted for, and if carbon caps or taxes were implemented, they would actually be comparable.

Asked about the “black swan” for nuclear, he answered that Chernobyl wasn’t so bad – a lot of radiation released, but only 56 deaths. Brand noted that half a million cancer deaths were predicted after the incident, but recently the UN had found that only four thousand might die a little earlier of cancer, given that one-half to one-third of us will die of cancer at some point anyway.

Brand’s basic message was that coal is far more terrifying than nuclear, because if we don’t stop burning coal immediately, we are cooked for sure. That may be so, but nuclear is far more terrifying than solar, wind and hydro, so isn’t that the comparison we should be making rather than nuclear vs. coal? His final slide showed a nuclear power plant against a blue sky with the sound of a bird chirping. I’m skeptical, but he definitely made me question some of the assumptions underlying my anti-nuclear position.

Ever the iconoclast, Stewart Brand has thrown down the gauntlet within the environmental network by asking us to “rethink green” – and preferably before things start getting weirder, faster.

Brand's new book, Whole Earth Discipline, is scheduled for release in October.

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Lake Country Echo
March 18, 2009

Westgard: Yucca Mountain; politics vs. geology

President Obama is withdrawing funding for Yucca Mountain, a storage site for spent nuclear fuel that sits in the center of a desert mountain, 1,000 feet underground and more than 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Thorough geologic studies showed Yucca Mountain to be an appropriate place for the nation's nuclear waste. Instead, we now have storage spread over 121 above-ground sites located within 75 miles of more than 161 million people in 39 states.

In addition to Yucca Mountain, the nuclear waste problem is manageable for two other fundamental reasons.

First, just 5 percent of the spent fuel is highly radioactive fission products that can be separated by reprocessing as France does. That material is put into glass or ceramic cylinders for long term storage.

The most dangerous radioactive elements in that 5 percent have relatively short half lives. This means they decay into other elements in a matter of months or years. The long-lived products that radiate for thousands of years take their time to decay, and therefore aren't very radioactive, simplifying the storage problem.

Second, the remaining 95 percent of the spent fuel is 94 percent low radiation uranium and 1 percent plutonium, all of which can be reprocessed into new reactor fuel.

The spent fuel storage problem is serious but manageable at Yucca Mountain. The Department of Energy has spent $8 billion to develop Yucca Mountain site. Those funds came from the $22 billion that the nuclear power industry and its customers have paid in for a geologic storage site.

We now have a site at Yucca Mountain, Nev.

The issue there is political, not geologic.

Rolf E. Westgard
Deerwood and St. Paul

(Westgard is a professional member of the Geological Society of America.)

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Courier-Express
March 18, 2009

Here's what I think

Store n-plant waste on sites

An opinion article of March 9 asks, "If Not Yucca, Where?" Yucca Mountain is a failure politically, scientifically and technologically. The selection process was flawed, it is geologically unstable, the technology incomplete, and scientific data falsified. So why throw any more money at it? The Obama Administration is showing political courage in finally starting to put an end to it.

Spent fuel can be stored on-site at the plants. Even the Nuclear Energy Institute agrees that such storage is safe, and has a long track record. It is already a given that spent fuel must remain on-site for at least 5 years in cooling pools before cooling enough to enable movement to another form of storage. Those nuclear operators who are running out of space in the pools have already chosen to build Hardened On-Site Storage. A benefit to this storage is it allows them to keep inventory of the spent fuel for future treatment. The reality of cooling pools flies in the face of the argument that spent fuel must be removed because its presence represents a terrorist threat.

While Europe and Japan are reprocessing spent fuel, this process creates a higher volume of waste in liquid form. There have been numerous leaks of this waste which are contaminating fishing stocks in Scandinavia. Mayak in Russia had been the site of some of the most egregious pollution of river systems, and in Rokkasho in Japan there have been deaths from radiation.

Repeal the NWPA, reimburse the nuclear power companies for their outlay into the Nuclear Waste Fund, accept on-site storage as the workable medium-term solution, change NRC rules to allow communities to veto relicensing and new licensing based on opposition to on-site storage, and focus funding on technology that will neutralize the radioactivity without creating equally toxic waste streams.

Eileen McCabe
Green Party of Utah
Taylorsville, Utah

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Courier-Express
March 18, 2009

Here's what I think

Yucca n-waste site is viable

In 1982, the U.S. Department of Energy signed into law an agreement with nuclear energy companies to build a long-term central storage facility for nuclear waste by 1998. To pay for it, customers who use electricity generated from nuclear power pay a tenth of a cent per kilowatt hour towards the Nuclear Waste Fund. So far, this fund has generated almost $30 billion. Only a third of this fund has gone toward construction and planning of the incomplete Yucca Mountain storage facility; the rest sits in the U.S. Treasury waiting for action. (EDITOR'S NOTE: We'll bet the money itself is not there, but federal IOUs are; Congress has borrowed every possible cent from supposedly separate funds to cover its plunging the country into intolerable debt.)

Meanwhile, inaction by the federal government is costing taxpayers even more. Utility companies are forced to store nuclear waste on site - a costly and dangerous alternative to a central repository. Because the government has now pushed the opening of Yucca Mountain to the year 2020 or beyond, these power plants are running out of room and will eventually have to shut down, eliminating 20 percent of U.S. power production. The government is also paying settlement fees to these utilities for not following through with the promise of Yucca Mountain, and these fees are projected to reach $35 billion. Through its lack of initiative, the government has now hurt the taxpayers in multiple ways, and the recent elimination of funding by the current administration will only make things worse.

If the problem with Yucca Mountain is concern over transportation of nuclear waste, be aware that a shipping cask can survive a direct impact from a runaway train and not be breached. If the problem stems from environmental concerns in Nevada, consider this: the Yucca Mountain site is part of a wasteland in the middle of the desert pock-marked by scores of giant craters created by nuclear weapons testing; not exactly a pristine stretch of land by any means.

David Keith
Brockway

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Las Vegas SUN
March 17, 2009

McCain’s Yucca push

By Lisa Mascaro

WASHINGTON -- Arizona Sen. John McCain continues to stake his claim as the go-to supporter of nuclear energy and Yucca Mountain.

At a Senate energy hearing today, McCain, the former Republican presidential candidate, grilled Interior Secretary Ken Salazar about including nuclear power as part of the renewable energy equation.

President Barack Obama supports nuclear power, but has proposed significantly scaling back funding for the nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in the upcoming fiscal 2010 budget. Congress has consistently reduced funds to study the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, a technology some see as an alternative to storage but others dismiss as decades from fruition.

“You can’t develop nuclear power and energy in this country if you don’t reprocess and you do not use Yucca Mountain as a repository for spent nuclear fuel,” McCain said told the secretary.

“They basically killed nuclear power for the foreseeable future in this country,” McCain said. “I see no way of achieving energy independence….that nuclear power can’t be part of the equation.”

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
March 17, 2009

Alaska senator criticizes Obama nuke waste policy

Murkowski decries stance on Yucca Mountain

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration is sending out mixed signals when it professes support for nuclear energy but then proposes to stop work at the proposed Yucca Mountain storage site for used nuclear fuel, a Republican senator said Monday.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska predicted the Senate will debate nuclear waste when it takes up an energy bill in the spring.

She said she did not know whether any senator will try to reverse President Barack Obama, who has indicated he wants to scale back spending on the Yucca Mountain Project in Nevada while evaluating other ways to manage radioactive material.

"You will see some amendments on the floor as to nuclear and how we deal with the issue of nuclear waste," Murkowski said at a meeting with reporters organized by the Platts Energy news group.

One possible amendment, Murkowski said, could be sponsored by Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. Last year, Sessions was cosponsor of a bill that called for the Department of Energy to contract with private companies to store spent nuclear fuel at temporary sites and eventually recycle the material to extend its use at power plants.

Murkowski is the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. At a hearing earlier this month, she and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., challenged Energy Secretary Steven Chu on Obama's plan to seek alternatives to Yucca Mountain.

On Monday, Murkowski repeated that she was "quite concerned about the signal that was sent" when the Obama administration said it will seek a new strategy for nuclear waste disposal.

"It was just all these things, saying one thing, and then the actions coming out of the administration are going another way," Murkowski said. "That gives me concern. Secretary Chu said that nuclear needs to be part of a solution (to the nation's energy needs). President Obama has suggest the same. But if we leave the issue of disposal hanging, then that lends uncertainty and anything that lends uncertainty is a further delay for the development of nuclear in this country."

Chu has said he plans to appoint an expert commission to evaluate advances in nuclear waste technology since Congress set the nation's current policy of underground storage in 1982.

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

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ClimateChangeCorp
March 17, 2009

The truth about... nuclear waste

Emma Clarke

Nuclear energy is a key part of the new energy plan. But what plans do we have for disposing of the industry's highly toxic waste?

For over 50 years, the world has been generating radioactive waste without any clear idea of what to do with it.

In the UK alone, 365,000 cubic metres of high and intermediate-level radioactive waste will be accumulated from its existing nuclear programme that is coming to the end of its life. And with plans for a new breed of nuclear reactors now under debate, that inventory will only proliferate unless a long-term disposal plan is devised.

That plan is starting to take shape. In January 2008, the UK government came up with a policy to bury its long-lived high-level radioactive waste deep underground based on recommendations by the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM), a UK advisory group.

Most countries with substantial inventories of radioactive materials are following a similar policy. Finland has already begun work on a geological disposal facility for waste from its present and future nuclear reactors. France, Sweden and Japan are in the process of choosing sites.

But with green groups questioning the safety of geological disposal, US president Barack Obama withdrawing funding for a major deep disposal project in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, and most communities still unwilling to host disposal facilities, there is still an enormous amount of political, social and geological engineering to perform before deep disposal facilities become widespread.

And time is running out. Because if governments want to justify proposals for new nuclear reactors, they will be under pressure to prove they are capable of dealing with the waste they already have.

A ‘final’ waste solution

Final disposal facilities would be excavated several hundred of metres underground. In the case of the Finnish Onkalo project (based on the Swedish “KBS3” concept), the spent fuel is encased in a cast iron internal frame and surrounded by thick corrosion-resistant copper canisters. The canisters are then packed with a bentonite clay, with the surrounding bedrock acting as a further barrier.

According to Posiva, the company running the Onkalo facility, safety analyses have demonstrated that it is “likely that there would never be releases from the … repository that would be significant from the standpoint of environmental protection”.

And these studies should offer some comfort, says Dr Ian Farnan from the Department of Earth Sciences at University of Cambridge. “The Fins and the Swedes have done a lot of modelling and most of that is based on some pretty solid science,” he says.

But environmental groups are unconvinced. “It is an environmental time bomb for future generations,” says Nathan Argent, nuclear campaigner for Greenpeace, pointing out that the copper canisters will corrode within 300 years leaving only the bedrock as defence. “There is no way of telling when the radioactive waste will get back into the environment.”

Prof. Gordon MacKerron, director of the Science and Technology Policy Research unit at University of Sussex, and former chair of CoRWM, acknowledges the Scandinavian deep storage technology is not a “zero risk” option. But, he adds, “you have to be careful that the baseline you compare is not zero risk, but the lowest risk that we can reasonably manage.”

“Storing [radioactive waste] at, or close to, the surface is a great deal more risky for the next several hundred years than putting it in a well-engineered geological repository,” he says.

It is also the most practical option, says Robert Pickard, current chair of CoRWM. “The waste sitting at the surface is in containers that have limited lifetimes. It costs many millions of pounds to repackage them, it is a very long process and it puts workers at risk. So the sooner we can sort out a disposal process the better.”

But Greenpeace voices concerns that if future generations come up with a way of neutralising radioactive waste, there would be no way of retrieving it if it was buried deep underground.

Pickard answer is that the burial process should be slow enough to allow science to keep up. “If in 100 or 200 years time someone came up with a way of neutralising it, this material could still be mined,” he says, albeit at a price.

But he is not confident such a scientific breakthrough will take place. “None of the scientists I have spoken to have suggested that a way of neutralising radioactive waste is round the corner,” he says.

Not in my back yard

The most difficult hurdle that deep disposal presents is finding a site that is both geologically secure and also accepted by the local community.

Most governments are unwilling to foist a facility on communities and would prefer they volunteered instead.

Communities in the UK are being offered an added incentive to come forward in the form of a financial reward (to be determined following negotiation between the community and government) to build, for example, hospitals or improved infrastructure.

The invitation has been open since January 2008 but so far only two councils -- Copeland and Allerdale both in West Cumbria -- have expressed interest.

These councils already have a relatively willing community for nuclear having lived alongside the Sellafield facility for decades. The concern now is whether communities with less support for nuclear will come forward.

It is also far from guaranteed that the geology of West Cumbria will be suitable for a repository.

Back in 1997, Nirex – the body set up to develop plans for geological disposal before it was moved to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) – applied for planning permission to build a “rock characterisation facility” to evaluate the suitability of the Sellafield site for disposal of radioactive waste. The application was rejected.

John Dalton, head of communications at the NDA explains that the rejection in 1997 partly came down to a lack of transparency in the site selection process, which they plan to avoid this time around.

Science has also advanced since 1997 to enable a more accurate assessment of the geology, he says. “The geology hasn’t changed, but our interpretation of the data has,” he says.

The British Geological Survey will begin tests of the potential storage sites in the next few months. If the geology is found to be unsuitable, Dalton says plans will not go ahead and other areas in the UK will have to be explored.

“Plan B is to make Plan A work,” says Dalton. “The only way we are going to do that is by working in partnership with local communities. But doing nothing is not a viable option.”

One or two?

It is still unclear how many nuclear waste repositories will be needed in the UK.

The objective – as in all countries considering deep disposal – is to build a repository big enough to store waste from existing as well as new breed reactors.

But waste from the new generation European Pressurised Reactors (EPR), although significantly less in volume (only 10% of the volume of waste from today’s reactors) is also of a higher intensity and heat, so will also require more space for storage.

There is also uncertainty over whether it will be technically possible to co-dispose intermediate-level waste – that is encased in concrete – with the new high-level radioactive waste.

The decision, says Walton, will depend on the geology of the site that is chosen and the volumes of storage available in the rock.

But if two sites are required, costs for geological disposal (currently at £12 billion in the UK) would double.

Democratic challenge

Next up are the political tests that burying waste presents. “You are looking for a policy that will be handed on from government to government for hundreds of years,” says Pickard. “And that is quite a democratic challenge.”

This democratic challenge was laid bare last month when US president Barack Obama effectively pulled the plug on the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository and the $10 billion that had already been invested in it.

In a letter to the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2007, he said there were “significant questions about whether nuclear waste can be safely stored” at the site. Instead, he wanted states to store their own waste in intermediate storage facilities until a “safe, long-term disposal solution … based on sound science” was found.

Until governments can overcome these technical, social, political and ethical concerns of dealing with their legacy waste, the future of nuclear energy remains in the balance.

But even if governments do get deep disposal to work, neither should they let that justify plans to build more reactors, says former CoRWM chair Professor MacKerron. “With legacy waste we have no choice to manage it as best we can. But for future waste we have the possible choice not to create it at all.”

The Facts: Where we are at

Finland, Onkalo

Finland is on track to become the first country to permanently dispose of its nuclear waste. The Onkalo site is being developed by Posiva, a nuclear waste company owned by two Finnish reactor builders.

The first canisters are expected to be buried within 15 years and then finally sealed around 2100.

An estimated 5500 tonnes of spent fuel will be buried from the nation’s four existing reactors and Olkiluoto 3, the first European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) currently under construction.

The cost of the facility is an estimated EUR 3 billion (£2.8 billion), paid entirely by the power companies from a nuclear waste management fund that they have been paying into since the nation’s first reactors were built in the late 1970s. The power companies have raised the money through a small levy on the price of nuclear electricity.

The UK's inventory from the current nuclear programme includes 470,000 cubic metres of higher activity radioactive waste that includes 365,000 cubic metres of high and intermediate-level radioactive waste

In 2006, following a three-year consultation, the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM) released recommendations that the best long-term solution for the disposal of the UK's nuclear waste should be to bury it deep in the ground.

In January 2008, the UK government produced a white paper for nuclear energy that set out its policy for geological disposal. Government is asking for expressions of interest from UK councils for a site. No deadlines have been set.

At the earliest, the first waste would be buried in 30-40 years. Final sealing of the facility would occur 120 years later.

One high-level geological disposal facility would cost an estimated £12 billion, the majority of which will be funded by government. If new reactors are built, energy companies would meet the storage costs for new waste.

But final costs will depend on the geology of the site chosen. Greenpeace believes the price tag could reach £20 billion.

Government’s policy is that before development consents for new nuclear power stations are granted, effective arrangements must exist to manage and dispose of the waste they will produce.

United States

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

In February, US President Barack Obama effectively abandoned the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository by dramatically scaling back funding in his 2010 budget proposal.

The Department of Energy will now establish a "blue ribbon" panel to a develop a long-term U.S. nuclear strategy that would include permanent disposal of nuclear wastes.

A proposal is expected sometime this year.

Elsewhere (source Defra)

In France an underground research laboratory (URL) has been constructed at Bure in the north east, where a geological disposal facility may be sited.

Belgium is researching high-level waste (HLW) disposal in clay at its Mol URL

Sweden runs an international URL project at Äspö and is investigating two potential sites for a disposal facility at which trial disposal could start in 2012

Switzerland is investigating disposal of HLW some 1200m deep in the north of the country

Site selection process is also underway in Germany, Japan and Canada

Nuclear waste glossary

“High-level waste" (HLW) is so radioactive that it generates heat and corrodes all containers. In the UK it accounts for less than 1 percent of the total volume of nuclear waste, but accounts for over 90 percent of the total radioactivity. HLW must be stored above ground for at least 50 years so it can cool before being transported and disposed.

“Intermediate level waste” (ILW) arises mainly from the reprocessing of spent fuel and from general operations and maintenance at nuclear sites. It has lower levels of radioactivity than HLW and produces significantly less heat. Typically, ILW is packaged for disposal by encapsulation in cement in highly-engineered stainless steel drums or in higher-capacity steel or concrete boxes.

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High Country News
March 17, 2009

Changeable weather

by Ray Ring

The West's environmental movement got buffeted by strong late-winter winds, both good and ill.

First, President Barack Obama has targeted the federal government's 22-year-old multibillion-dollar effort to bury nuclear waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain. He vowed to devise "a new strategy" on dealing with nuclear waste, while seeking little money for Yucca Mountain in his 2010 budget proposal, released in late February. Congress will probably go along with that, since the Senate majority leader, Nevada's Harry Reid, also opposes the project.

The bad news within that good news: There is still no place for long-term storage of the 57,700 tons of nuclear waste that are being held in dozens of "temporary" storage sites around the country, plus the 2,000 additional tons that nuclear reactors will produce this year, and the additional tons that'll be produced in 2010, and so on. Back to Square One on solving that problem.

Then, on March 3, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that enviro groups had no "standing" to file suit against a Forest Service "categorical exclusion" rule that boosts salvage logging — meaning that the groups hadn't shown how the rule would harm their members. Lots of technicalities; suffice it to say that the justices split 5-4, with the four liberals saying the groups did indeed have standing to sue.

The ruling will make it "harder to get into the federal courthouse even when (federal agencies') actions are blatantly illegal," says Patti Goldman, an Earthjustice lawyer in Seattle. "It could've been worse," she adds: Enviros can still sue agencies, according to the ruling — it will just be more difficult. So maybe that's bittersweet.

Meanwhile, enviros also got hit by smaller gusts from Western legislatures that meet during February and March. Some are proposing laws that seem like the same-old, same-old. The results won't be final until the sessions end and governors sign (or reject) laws, but a few gusts seem pretty definite:

Montana's Legislature is determined to make it more difficult for the public to challenge coal, oil and other industries' projects for environmental reasons. Those industries already got a big boost in Montana during the 1990s and early 2000s, when previous sessions of the Legislature gutted many longstanding environmental laws.

Montana's pols also want to prevent Indian tribes and enviro groups from adopting surplus bison from Yellowstone National Park. That's rancher power: Cattle folks fear the bison would spread brucellosis to their herds, even though the bison would be tested and certified free of the disease.

"This is the worst legislative attack on (existing) environmental laws I've ever seen, and I've been doing this since 1997," says Jim Jensen, head of the Montana Environmental Information Center.

Idaho's Legislature is also considering laws to make it tougher for wildlife agencies to transplant animals into ranchers' territory. And it passed an anti-regulation measure that says mining companies don't have to clean up pollution that leaks into Idaho's groundwater, as long as the pollution doesn't spread farther than the boundaries of their property.

The Sagebrush Rebellion — the 30-year-old Western movement that rejects federal environmental laws on federal lands — reared its head in Utah. "I am right now proclaiming that this is the beginning of Sagebrush Rebellion number two," Kanab's Rep. Mike Noel said during a February rally on the Utah Capitol's steps, according to the Emery County Progress. Noel vented about "eco-terrorists." Then he introduced a bill that would make it more difficult for enviros to challenge state actions that favor drilling, new power plants and so on.

Symbolic proposals to express state sovereignty over federal law also blew around legislatures in Arizona, Idaho, Washington and Montana. It should be noted that most of these gusts came from Republican pols, with only a few Democrats huffing and puffing along with them.

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USA Today
March 17, 2009

Yucca plan poses 'grave' risk

It’s time to end this boondoggle and find nuclear waste alternative.

By Harry Reid and John Ensign

We applaud President Obama's bold decision to scale back the budget for the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump. Permanently ending the project is right not just for our state but for our entire country.

The peril of storing 70,000 tons of the nation's toxic trash just an hour's drive from Las Vegas rightly worries Nevadans, and all Americans would face a grave threat from this bad idea.

The reasons for ending the taxpayer boondoggle are plentiful: supporting data that relies on flawed science; estimated costs of nearly $100 billion; and the egregious error of burying waste that could, with American innovation, be less dangerous and even be turned into energy.

The Department of Energy's plan to store deadly nuclear waste at Yucca ignores even the most glaring facts, such as the major earthquake fault lines running across the storage site. Many Americans are unaware that DOE concedes that water will flow through the dump, eventually carrying radiation into Nevada's groundwater.

Yucca Mountain, simply put, is bad policy that is wrong for America.

America still needs a scientifically sound and responsible policy to deal with nuclear waste. More taxpayer money dumped into the Yucca Mountain project is more money wasted that could have been invested in securing waste on nuclear plant sites in dry casks, while researching new technologies such as reprocessing. There are solutions.

That is why we are working together and with our colleagues on bipartisan legislation to form a commission exploring alternative approaches. The Obama administration and the nuclear energy industry have expressed support for reviewing our nation's approach to nuclear waste so we will no longer be stuck with the current failed policy.

Forming such a commission would be only a first step away from Yucca Mountain. It's an important and necessary step, though. The effort will require input not only from our nation's foremost authorities on nuclear energy and nuclear waste, but also from policymakers, environmental experts and public health and safety advocates.

The time is now to put Yucca Mountain to rest and work together to deal with nuclear waste concerns while also protecting the health, safety and security of all Americans. We look forward to working with President Obama and all stakeholders in resolving our country's nuclear waste issues.

--Democrat Harry Reid and Republican John Ensign represent Nevada in the U.S. Senate.

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USA Today
March 17, 2009

Our view on nuclear power: Responsibility? Yucca choice squanders $8B investment

Obama’s budget puts politics above science, leaves waste issue unsolved.

We usually applaud politicians who keep their campaign promises, but one we were hoping President Obama would forget was his pledge to end the 22-year effort to build a nuclear waste repository inside remote Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

Like it or not, the nation needs nuclear power as a carbon-free bridge to a future in which wind, solar and other options will power computers and TVs and charge plug-in hybrid cars. It makes sense to dispose of spent nuclear fuel in a single place instead of at more than 100 nuclear plants around the country, where it is now. Yucca was the presumed central location until the president's "new era of responsibility" budget would eliminate virtually all funding. Never mind that environmental objections to the project have long seemed strained and the logic for going forward strong.

Now the government has to find some other way to fulfill its contract with nuclear utilities to take the waste off their hands. Since 1983, the government has levied a fee on every kilowatt hour of nuclear-generated electricity — guess who's been paying that, ratepayers — to finance a national disposal site. The feds have collected about $30 billion and spent almost $8 billion on the Yucca Mountain site. So much for that investment.

During the presidential campaign, candidate Obama said he wanted no new nuclear plants until there was some place to store the waste, a stance that seems ominous now that he's killed off the only central disposal site. When we asked the Energy Department if that means no new nuclear plants until there's a successor to Yucca Mountain, we got a carefully hedged non-answer: "The president remains committed to resolving key issues including nuclear waste, non-proliferation and plant security."

Yucca's demise shouldn't be an excuse to delay new nuclear plants. Storing spent fuel at existing plant sites is a second-best solution, but it's a safe enough stopgap until the nation agrees on a permanent disposal site. Once spent fuel has cooled enough to move, it's typically stored outdoors in steel pods that weigh 100 tons or more, emitting little radiation and virtually impossible to destroy or steal.

The president and the nuclear industry now want a group of experts to convene to decide what to do next. An idea to revisit is reprocessing spent fuel, which President Carter banned out of security concerns that seem much less compelling 30 years later. Reprocessing allows fuel to be re-used and shrinks the ultimate amount of spent fuel — but what's left still has to go somewhere.

One potential site is in New Mexico, which in the past decade has quietly accepted more than 7,000 shipments of radioactive material from the nation's nuclear weapons facilities and buried them in a salt bed almost half a mile below the desert in the southeastern part of the state. By law, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant can't accept spent fuel from nuclear power plants, but some state officials have agitated for a second facility there as a backup for Yucca. It might be an alternative worth pursuing.

Killing Yucca is a big political win for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other Nevada lawmakers who've long opposed the storage site. But that victory empowers not-in-my-backyard politicians in every state to dig in their heels. And, whether it's waste dumps or wind farms or oil refineries or air routes, they do — the national interest be damned.

When Obama lifted the ban on stem cell research last week, his press secretary said the president made it clear that "politics should not drive science." Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened here.

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New West
March 17, 2009

If Not Yucca Mountain, Where?

And if we're still talking about nuclear energy being part of the domestic energy supply solution, shouldn't we figure that out first?

Joan McCarter

I’m not faulting the Obama administration for putting the kibosh on Yucca Mountain as the nation’s nuclear waste dump, which it did in releasing its budget a few weeks ago. The Yucca repository was defunded, which wasn’t a huge surprise, since Obama campaigned in Nevada on that promise.

It also wasn’t a bad idea based on the science of the place. Geologists have learned that water flows through the mountain much faster than was believed when Yucca was settled on as the site. Because of the high volume of water flowing through, the water table in this area just 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas stands a much greater chance of being poisoned than anyone previously knew. Of course, when Yucca was decided upon, back in 1987, science didn’t really play any part of it. The politicians just decided it was “out there” far enough in the desert, and Nevada was weak enough politically, that it might as well go there.

And speaking of politically weak, here’s one of the main problems with the decision to scrap Yucca--what about Idaho?

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 to open Yucca Mountain.

Yucca wasn’t slated to be open until 2020, and it’s highly unlikely now that it will ever be given the clout of Harry Reid and the new evidence about the danger to some of Nevada’s scant water resource. But that means that the state lower on the totem pole is going to be stuck with the “temporary” waste for decades to come. Meanwhile, the stuff just keeps piling up, “accumulating at 122 temporary storage sites in 39 states for more than 20 years. The estimated 53,440 metric tons of radioactive waste accumulated from nuclear power plants would cover a football field 10 feet deep. The military has generated another 22,000 large canisters of nuclear waste.”

Nuclear waste is being “temporarily” stored within 100 yards of Lake Michigan. There’s some 53 million gallons of the stuff essentially on the Columbia River at the Hanford Reservation in Washington state.

It’s being “temporarily” stored at pretty much every nuclear power plant in the nation.

But nearly all of the nuclear power plants in the U.S. have already run out of storage space, because these pools were not designed to be long-term containers and enough room needs to be preserved in case of a crisis such as a meltdown. In the absence of a long-term solution (such as burying the waste deep inside Yucca Mountain), the nuclear industry has turned to so-called dry cask storage....

Some 9,000 metric tons of spent fuel rods are already stored encased in some 900 such casks—the bulk of them stored vertically in concrete casks but some placed horizontally into concrete bunkers. Their makers—companies like New Jersey-based Holtec International and AREVA’s Transnuclear, Inc.—and the NRC maintain that such dry cask storage will last for at least a century, if not longer. “They’ve had an excellent safety record over the past 22 years they’ve been in use,” McIntyre says. “All signs are that they are safe and secure.”

But some environmentalists and other nuclear power critics contend that such dry casks present a tempting target for terrorists and a disaster for the environment if ever breached. In fact, the San Luis Obispo, Calif., chapter of Mothers for Peace has successfully sued the NRC and power utility Pacific Gas & Electric Co.—owners of the Diablo Canyon power plant—for failing to take into account the impact of a potential terrorist strike when assessing the environmental risks of a new, proposed on-site dry cask storage area.

The solution may be one or many interim storage sites, centralized depots where such dry casks could be stored until a permanent repository is opened. Eleven communities in Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, New Mexico, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee and Washington State have expressed an interest in being the host of such a facility, according to NEI. “It should be wherever it can be sited and it should be at a voluntary location,” NEI’s McCullum says. “Anything that is on the way to Yucca Mountain from most of the reactors,” which are in the eastern half of the U.S.

Billions have already been spent trying to prove that the waste should go to Yucca. Billions more will be spent trying to figure out where it goes next, and don’t count on the populations of those eleven communities mentioned above to be clamoring to take it in, not if the reaction in Idaho to the Yucca budget cut is any indication. The stuff isn’t just physically and environmentally toxic. It’s politically deadly, too.

Whatever the ultimate decision for the waste ends up being, two things need to be kept at the fore. First, there’s the reality that there just aren’t many places out there that should house it and therefore bringing more nuclear plants online until we have better technology for dealing with the waste. Second, while it’s going to be damned hard to get away from politics in the final decision-making on siting, that decision has to be guided by science.

And finally, there might be one place they can add to the list of possible sites. There’s an old pig farm in Crawford, Texas that’s no longer serving much purpose, now that the cameras are gone and the brush has all been cleared.

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CleanTechnica
March 17, 2009

Searching for Green Nuclear Waste Disposal

Written by Ariel Schwartz

Yucca Mountain: it’s nice to look at, but green it ain’t. The thought of endless nuclear waste barely contained inside a seismically-active mountain is enough to give anyone the chills. That’s why nuclear design engineer Dean Engelhardt started Permanent RadWaste Solutions, a company that proposes to send nuclear waste to the surface of Earth’s inner core.

According to Engelhardt, waste is contained in a Submarine Transport Vessel (STV)–similar to a nuclear submarine–that travels into a 75-foot deep hole in the sea at a Pacific Ocean subduction fault (earthquake fault at the edge of the continental crust).

The details get a little fuzzy after that, but Engelhardt claims his solution is “permanent, zero maintenance, less expensive, and terrorist proof.” Since the STV moves slowly into the fault, nuclear waste will be rendered harmless by the time it reaches magma. The goal, he says, is not to bring the waste to Earth’s core. It is only to subject it to the increasing pressure of descent for a million years.

It’s a a far-out solution, to say the least, but so far I haven’t seen any better ones.

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Southgate News Herald
March 17, 2009

Frenchtown TWP: Environmental groups oppose third power plant

By Francesca Chilargi

FRENCHTOWN TWP. — An environmental coalition has filed 14 legal contentions with federal regulators against DTE Energy’s plan for a third atomic reactor plant.

The groups contend that the proposed $8 billion to $10 billion Fermi 3 plant would threaten public health and the environment.

The contentions filed last week with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission pertain to DTE’s application for a combined construction and operation license to build another nuclear power plant.

DTE is waiting on formal approval of its application.

Fermi 3 would be built on the same site as DTE’s Fermi 2 facility and the decommissioned Fermi 1 plant.

The proposed plant would be a simplified boiling water reactor built slightly to the southwest of Fermi 2, which is a boiling water reactor.

“It’s just that, environmentally, I think that it’s a big mistake,” said Ed McArdle of Melvindale, a member of the Michigan Chapter of the Sierra Club. “It’s not going to solve global warming and will be super expensive because the technology is inherently dangerous of creating toxic waste for years.”

McArdle, 66, lives less than 25 miles from the site.

Besides the Sierra Club, other groups that filed the contentions against the Fermi 3 plan are Beyond Nuclear, Citizens for Alternatives to Chemical Contamination, Citizens Environment Alliance of Southwestern Ontario and Don’t Waste Michigan.

DTE filed the application in the fall to possibly construct a nuclear plant, said Ron May, senior vice president of major enterprise projects for the energy company.

As part of the process of reviewing DTE’s application, the federal commission gathers input from the public, which is what the legal contentions filed by the groups were, May said.

“While Detroit Edison has not decided to build a new nuclear plant, we believe that nuclear power will be a vital element in meeting Michigan’s longterm environmental, economic and energy goals, he said.

The process of building a nuclear plant is lengthy and could take 10 years from submitting the application to completing construction, said Len Singer, DTE spokesman.

The environmental groups object to the proposed plant’s “radioactive, toxic and thermal impacts on Lake Erie’s vulnerable western basin, especially considering the cumulative damage already occurring in the Great Lakes due to the presence of 33 operational atomic reactors and dozens of additional coalfired power plants.”

Those plants include DTE’s Fermi 2 reactor; the Monroe Power Plant, which is one of the largest coal facilities in the country; and Consumers Energy’s Whiting Coal Plant, the First Davis-Besse atomic reactor and the Bay Shore Power Plant, all on the shallow western basin of Lake Erie, the group said.

May said DTE’s Fermi 2 and its Monroe Power Plant are operating in “full compliance with all environmental, security and safety regulations.”

Those plants’ impact on the air, water and surrounding areas is minimal and they are monitored and regulated, DTE officials said.

“In fact, we are investing $1.7 billion at the Monroe Power Plant to make significant emissions reductions,” May said.

Instead of building another nuclear plant, McArdle suggests reducing the need for electrical power through efficiency and conservation. Through energy efficiency technologies, people don’t have to change their bad habits, he said, adding that using wind, solar power are better routes than coal or nuclear methods.

“So, there’s a way to do this without endangering the life on Earth for millions of years,” McArdle said.

Terry Lodge, legal counsel for the coalition, based in Toledo, Ohio, said efficiency and renewable energy could easily replace “the dirty, dangerous and expensive Fermi 3 proposal.”

But DTE’s focus, May said, is to develop renewable energy resources.

The company recently filed plans with the Michigan Public Service Commission to create wind, solar and other renewable alternatives to meet the state law of using 10 percent renewable energy by 2015, he said.

Additionally, the company has filed plans for a program to assist customers in increasing their energy efficiency this year, May said.

DTE forecasts a 10 percent drop in annual electric demand through 2013, according to its documents to the Michigan Public Service Commission, McArdle said.

In today’s bustling society, “steady, reliable energy” is needed to meet the demand of power at all times, May said.

When the wind does not blow or the sun is not shining, power still will have to be generated, meaning nuclear and other “conventional baseload sources” are required, he said.

“When the economy recovers, we expect demand for electricity to resume its historical upward trend,” May said. “And we believe that nuclear power is the best choice for replacing older fossil-fuel plants, especially with the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to address climate change.”

A partial core-melt accident at the Fermi plant in October 1966 and the dumping of millions of gallons of radioactive-contaminated water in Lake Erie in 1993-4 by Fermi 2, are alarming track records, according to Michael Keegan, a member of Don’t Waste Michigan.

McArdle remembers protesting the restarting of the Fermi 2 plant in 1993 after the serious accident that closed down the plant for a year.

The reactor design of the proposed plant won’t be approved until 2010-11, he said. That concerns him because federal regulators are trying to make a legal determination about the effects of the reactor.

“There are several utilities that have given up on this reactor design, so there must be something wrong with it,” McArdle said.

Neither of the incidents at Fermi 1 and Fermi 2 had any measurable effect on the environment, May said.

However, Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear, a national watchdog group in Takoma Park, Md., said Fermi 2’s storage pool is full and is susceptible to an accident or an attack.

DTE’s plan would produce more radioactive waste that “it doesn’t know what to do with,” Kamps said.

With President Barack Obama indicating that a Yucca Mountain dumpsite proposal in Nevada will be scrapped, the radioactive waste from Fermi 2 and the proposed Fermi 3 would keep piling up on the Lake Erie shoreline with no where to go, environmentalists say.

Radioactive material from spent fuel storage has never been released from any U.S. nuclear plant, May said, adding that there’s no reason to believe that the storage would impact Lake Erie.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission monitors onsite storage of spent fuel that “has proven to be safe and secure at the 103 operating nuclear plants across the United States,” May said

Before DTE could begin construction, it must first go through the Michigan Public Service Commission’s “certificate of necessity” process to determine whether a new nuclear plant is needed.

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Nuclear Engineering
March 16, 2009

Nuclear Energy Institute exec 'disappointed' by US FY09 nuclear budget

Nuclear Energy Institute senior vice president for governmental affairs Alex Flint commented on the US Senate's approved appropriations legislation for the US Federal fiscal year 2009 budget.

“I am disappointed that a number of programs important to the future of nuclear energy in the United States were reduced from the requested funding level. However, it is important to our nation to see that the language for the Department of Energy’s Title XVII loan guarantee program extends the loan guarantee authority for clean-energy technologies indefinitely. Though limited in scope, the $18.5 billion in loan guarantees available for advanced-design nuclear plants will help encourage construction of the first few of the many new nuclear plants that our nation needs to enhance our energy security and help meet the threat of global climate change.

“Federal investment in nuclear energy has proven its worth many times over -- as evidenced by record-high levels of electricity production from power plants that are far and away our nation’s leading carbon-free electricity source. The state of the nation’s economy and concerns about greenhouse gas emissions present a powerful argument that monies invested in nuclear energy programs are monies invested wisely.

“Unfortunately, the Nuclear Power 2010 partnership program that is helping to bring advanced-design nuclear plants to the market saw a reduction of nearly $65 million from the budget request of $241 million. Similarly, DOE’s used nuclear fuel management program, with an appropriation of $288.4 million, now stands $206 million beneath the requested level of $494.7 million. Of that total, only $145 million comes from the federal Nuclear Waste Fund that this year alone will take in more than $750 million from ratepayers for the express purpose of financing this program.

“This diversion of funds from DOE’s used fuel management program is grossly unreasonable, particularly now that DOE has a license application for the Yucca Mountain repository program pending before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The federal government must fulfill its legal responsibility to manage used nuclear fuel. Our belief upon seeing this bill’s disparity between program revenues and expenditures is that Energy Secretary Chu should reduce the fee paid by ratepayers so that annual collections no longer exceed annual expenditures. This seems reasonable given the $22 billion balance in the Nuclear Waste Fund.

“Nuclear energy is our nation’s only expandable large-scale energy source capable of producing electricity around the clock without emitting air pollutants or greenhouse gases. Many policymakers from both parties and from all regions of the country recognize this. We thank them for their support, and stand ready to help them meet the energy and environmental challenges that loom before our nation.”

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U.S. News & World Report
March 16, 2009

Lessons from the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Storage Debate

By Kent Garber

Over the past decade, more than 7,000 shipments of radioactive nuclear waste have been sent, without any problem, to a government repository in the southwestern United States.

This crucial repository is not the ill-fated Yucca Mountain, the Nevada site that has been steeped in controversy since Congress selected it 22 years ago to store the country's civilian nuclear waste. Yucca Mountain, in fact, has gotten so bogged down in legal and political fights that President Barack Obama, in his new budget, is proposing to eliminate almost all of its funding and explore "alternatives," raising serious questions about how the United States will resolve its nuclear waste problems—and, for that matter, whether the nuclear industry will be able to grow in coming decades.

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The functioning repository is located in Carlsbad, N.M., and it may hold some useful answers. Since opening in 1999, it has received more than 60,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste from the country's nuclear defense facilities. Experts say its success offers valuable clues about how Washington can learn from the mistakes made at Yucca Mountain to find a lasting waste solution.

Foremost is the challenge of winning public support. "Any way you look at it, this is a social confidence problem that needs to be addressed," says Charles Powers, a professor of environmental engineering at Vanderbilt University. Advanced technology, government funding, and political backing all will help, he says, but nothing is more important than fostering local support.

As Powers acknowledges, that's easier said than done. Take Yucca Mountain. When Congress picked Yucca in 1987, it did so without the blessing of the state, which quickly sued to stop the project. (It lost.) Ever since, Nevada officials, led by U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, have aggressively opposed storing waste at Yucca. Some argue the site is geologically inadequate. Others warn of falloffs in Las Vegas tourism. And in general, observers say, there's a mentality of victimhood—a sense that the federal government forced this upon the state.

Events at the Carlsbad repository, officially known as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, have gone differently. Starting in the mid-1970s, the original push to put it there came not from Washington but from the local community, which was then heavily engaged in potash mining and concerned about its economic future as mines ran out. Says Roger Nelson of the Department of Energy's Carlsbad Office: "They came to the Atomic Energy Commission at the time and said, 'Hey, we think this is a good idea. We want your waste.' " Though many high-ranking New Mexican politicians opposed the project, support in the southern part of the state was, and remains, strong.

Nor is this an isolated case. "Other countries have found a way to do it," says Rodney Ewing, a nuclear-waste expert at the University of Michigan. "Sweden is a good example. Their approach is, we won't build a repository unless the local community agrees." After nearly 20 years of research and study, Sweden this summer is expected to decide between two possible waste sites. In both regions, more than 75 percent of the residents support it, according to a 2007 poll by SKB, a Swedish company. Experts say that's partly because of an intense public education campaign to inform residents of possible risks and benefits.

Not surprisingly, in many places, support for a waste facility is very low. "Not in my backyard" attitudes are common, even though, as Powers's Vanderbilt colleague David Kosson says, the health risk of living near a high-security, properly built, properly operated storage site is actually low compared to other, less regulated operations. Still, the list of countries that have stopped, delayed, restarted, or abandoned efforts to build repositories because of high costs and public opposition is fairly long.

So proponents are trying to develop new ways to build public support. Powers and Kosson have proposed one idea: consolidating U.S. civilian nuclear waste, now spread out at more than 100 locations, into four "interim" regional storage sites that would hold the waste for up to 90 years. To properly select those sites, they say, the government could offer an incentive—$1 billion, for example—to induce interested communities and inform them about risks. Then, with the waste safely stored for 90 years, the government would have enough time to find a permanent geologic site that's acceptable to a local community, all the while developing technologies that might help reduce additional waste.

Indeed, there are other ways to deal with waste than to put it directly into permanent storage. As Energy Secretary Steven Chu recently told Congress, efforts are underway to develop a new generation of reactors that can burn waste, though they'll most likely need several decades of additional work. Meanwhile, some countries, including France and Japan, reprocess their spent nuclear fuel, a technique that reduces the volume and toxicity of the waste product. The United States does not, thanks to a Cold War-era policy intended to limit nuclear proliferation. (Reprocessing involves separating uranium and plutonium, the latter of which can be used for bombs.)

But these options have a limitation: Neither reprocessing alone nor a bunch of new, advanced reactors can eliminate the need for a permanent underground storage site. "I would say there is no possibility of avoiding geologic repository somewhere, regardless of your fuel cycle," says Ewing. Joonhong Ahn, a nuclear engineering professor at the University of California-Berkeley, agrees: "In any case, you are going to need a geologic repository."

All this leaves the Obama administration and Congress with a difficult decision. By abandoning Yucca Mountain, the administration is essentially walking away from $8 billion of investment and 25 years of research and study, although experts say that as long ago as the early 1990s, there were already serious doubts that the repository would ever be built. For that reason, the nuclear industry's reaction to the administration's decision has been relatively mild.

Fresh off his victory, Reid last week said that he is forming a "blue-ribbon panel" of experts to examine alternatives to Yucca Mountain and expects its findings in about a year. According to most experts, finding a new permanent site could take up to 20 years, maybe longer. This time, the search may be different. Says Ewing: "In the U.S., we've learned that the local community can be very effective if they don't agree."

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Wall Street Journal blog
March 16, 2009

Quake Zone: A Really, Really Deep Storage Solution for Nuclear Waste

By Keith Johnson

Now that Yucca Mountain, the proposed storage site for nuclear waste, is off the table, a host of alternative storage options are surfacing—or resurfacing.

Governments around the world have been struggling to find the best way to store spent nuclear fuel. For two decades, the U.S. was committed to burying it in Yucca Mountain, Nevada. France reprocesses its spent fuel. Other countries, such as Spain, have considered storing the stuff above-ground in sealed concrete containers. If nuclear power is to play a bigger part in the nation’s energy mix, the U.S. needs to find a solution to the long-term storage question.

One old idea making the rounds again is deep, deep geological storage. As in sticking nuclear waste inside the earth’s mantle. The idea is to put spent fuel on tectonic plates, and then send it on a one-way ride on the geological conveyor belt into the earth’s crust, where the waste will be sequestered by massive heat and pressure. Greentech Media takes a look at some of the idea’s latest proponents.

Using the earth’s subduction zones for nuclear storage isn’t a new idea—it’s been floating around for decades. The U.S. Department of Energy briefly had a research office dedicated to sub-sea storage solutions. The problems, though, are both technical and political.

Technically, no one has yet found a reliable way to stick the waste so far down. Fears that colliding continental plates could actually push up waste—rather than push it down—have also long dogged the idea. Additionally, international conventions against dumping any radioactive waste in the ocean is a big roadblock for subsea storage ideas.

Those are the main reasons the British government discarded the idea in 2006, along with other far-out ideas such as sticking nuclear waste in ice or in outer space. The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management found that there’s “no proof of concept” for subduction-zone storage, and there’s “no foreseable change” in international treaties limiting its application.

Still, only so much spent fuel can be stored on site at the country’s nuclear reactors. Sooner or later, the government needs to find a solution to the storage question, or nuclear power’s expansion will be physically constrained. Will the Jules Verne-style solution be the answer?

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Wired News
March 16, 2009

With No Long-Term Solution, Nuclear Pallbearers Bury Waste in America's Backyard

By David Kravets

This summer, dozens of workers at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant in central California will carry out an interment. They'll carefully begin moving 133 tons of spent fuel from temporary cooling ponds into a nuclear necropolis of eight cement-and-steel tombs in a field adjacent to the plant. If all goes according to plan, they won't have to worry about the radioactive detritus for another 100 years.

If all goes according to plan.

The Diablo Canyon storage casks, each weighing about 180 tons and costing more than $1 million each, were authorized by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in its ongoing struggle to deal with the 50,000 metric tons of toxic nuclear waste that's already been produced by the nation's nuclear plants. Structures like these, measuring about 18 feet high, will soon dot the landscape at almost all the nation's more than 104 active and shuttered nuclear reactors — near neighborhoods, streams and oceans in 38 states.

According to the Department of Energy, there is enough spent nuclear waste in the United States to fill a football-field-sized hole 15 feet deep. From a plethora of proposals, scientists and politicians have selected on-site storage as the safest solution for the buildup. But it's a temporary solution. The waste will be fatal to humans and other animals for tens of thousands of years — yet the storage tombs are expected to last only a hundred years.

These scattered nuclear graveyards are emblematic of a failed U.S. nuclear energy policy — a policy that is rarely discussed even as regulators entertain proposals to build roughly 30 new nuclear power plants. This month, President Barack Obama killed a controversial plan to house nuclear waste in a $100 billion facility in Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The move thrilled critics of the 30-year-old plan, but left the U.S. no closer to a practical, long-term solution, even as an additional 30,000 metric tons (.pdf) more of nuclear waste is expected to be generated in the coming decades.

"The reality is we created waste that we don't know what to do with," says Don Hancock, director of the Southwest Research and Information Center, an Albuquerque, New Mexico nuclear think tank. "People are capable of creating problems we don't know how to solve."

Statistics from the National Energy Institute show 63 active and defunct nuclear power reactors have on-site dry-cask storage in the United States. Utilities representing another 52 reactors have casks under construction or in the licensing stage. Critics worry that the plan has the U.S. populating its landscape with dozens of radioactive targets for terrorists. About 160 million Americans already live within 75 miles of temporarily stored nuclear waste.

Scientists from across the globe are searching for something better. Europe, Russia and Japan recycle spent fuel — meaning there is less waste to store. That practice was largely abandoned in the United States, because the process can produce weaponized plutonium, potentially sparking an international outcry. As an alternative, physicists at the University of Texas at Austin propose burning the waste using a fusion-fission hybrid reactor. The technology, they reported (.pdf) in December's Fusion Engineering and Design, would hasten the speed at which the radioactivity of waste decays.

"You would only have to isolate the waste on the order of hundreds of years," researcher Swadesh Mahajan says in an interview. "That's a far, far easier thing to do than thousands of years."

Other proposals involve sealing waste inside the polar ice caps, housing it at the bottom of the ocean. or even rocketing it into space. Each technique comes with its own problems, such as the cost of launching thousands of rockets and the attendant risk of one exploding in the Earth's atmosphere.

"Nuclear power plants were not designed to have the capacity to store waste indefinitely," says Steve Kerekes, a director of the NEI. "The government's policy is, 'We'll work out the details later.'"

For now, on-site storage is becoming a big business. One of the world's leading temporary-storage–facility manufacturers, Holtec International in Pittsburgh, churns out about 100 storage casks a year. Each takes two years to produce and costs about $1 million.

The company now has so-called "dry-cask–storage" contracts with 49 nuclear sites around the world, including Diablo Canyon and the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, which in 1986 released a plume of radiation stretching from its home in the Ukraine to Europe and beyond.

"We have a billion dollar backlog," says company spokeswoman Joy Russell.

Holtec's Hi-Storm 100 System casks are the models being installed at Diablo Canyon. They stand erect about 18 feet high. Their 11-foot diameter is outfitted with two, 1-inch carbon-steel shelves surrounded by about 28 inches of concrete. Within, the spent waste is encased in a half-inch–thick stainless-steel–and–lead canister about 68 inches in diameter and 15 feet long. Before it is welded shut, it is filled with helium, which circulates over the waste naturally by convection.

The convection pushes the heat to the canister's fringes, which are cooled naturally by fresh Pacific Ocean air that seeps in through eight ducts carved into the cement. The ducts are covered with a mesh screen to keep out insects and rodents. The radioactive waste inside smolders at about 600 degrees Fahrenheit.

Russell says the caskets her company produced for Diablo Canyon and elsewhere can withstand a jet crash. A newer version, which sits almost entirely underground, is under development and is even stronger, she says.

That's a good thing. Some scientists believe above-ground, on-site storage is susceptible to terror attacks. Those concerns have spawned a lawsuit opposing the on-site storage plans at Diablo Canyon and elsewhere. Gordon Thompson, director of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies, says a potential terror attack on storage facilities is not far-fetched — a position the physicist shared with the federal appeals court weighing the lawsuit.

"Hidden inside is a extremely hazardous material," says Thompson. "If you look forward 100 years, the threat of an attack is more than theoretical."

The NRC, though, disagrees. In a decision last year the agency calculated the probability of a terror attack on the Diablo Canyon site "that results in a significant radiological event to be very low."

Jane Swanson, a member of San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace, lives about 11 miles from Diablo Canyon. The group — formed to protest the Vietnam War — filed the on-site–storage lawsuit against plant owner Pacific Gas & Electric in 2002. The group hopes the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will block the expected June 1 deployment of storage casks at Diablo Canyon.

"What we would like, the big overall goal, would be us to be responsible as a society and stop generating the radioactive waste," says Swanson.

The United States wasn't supposed to end up pockmarked with nuclear waste.

Decades ago Congress realized that it wasn't a good idea to allow tons of nuclear waste to be kept in the hands of private and public utilities. Beyond the obvious environmental risk, in the wrong hands, the waste could be reprocessed to make nuclear weapons.

So with the adoption of the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, (.pdf) the government promised nuclear operators it would remove their waste to a permanent repository. In exchange, the utilities were required to levy a small customer tax on their power. Those fees now total $16 billion and counting, according to the NEI, the lobby group funded by the U.S. nuclear power industry.

Beginning in June, the Diablo Canyon plant will begin the first phase of its dry-storage campaign. Workers will load eight Holtec casks bolted to hulking slabs of cement. The cost of the operation is $100 million. The NRC has approved another 130 storage casks at Diablo Canyon to idle waste for the life of the plant's 40-year operating permit.

Emily Christensen, a Diablo Canyon spokeswoman, says all the waste will be "safely" stored on site. But the power plant has no idea when the government will make good on its promise and cart away the waste.

"At this time we do not have a date to when that will take place," Christensen says in an e-mail. "However, it is the Department of Energy's responsibility to remove and take ownership of the spent fuel."

With no place to put it, the United States' lack of a viable and permanent storage plan is costing taxpayers billions in legal costs alone. The utilities are successfully suing the government over its broken promise to remove the waste. The monetary awards, already at $1 billion, are likely to balloon to hundreds of billions of dollars to fund on-site waste-storage facilities.

In the United States, where 20 percent of electricity comes from nuclear power, the official solution to the waste crisis has long been a permanent underground storage facility in the Yucca Mountain desert straddling California and Nevada. But after years of scientific discord over the soundness of burying highly radioactive waste hundreds of yards deep into the earth, and concerns about transporting the waste by rail, the Yucca Mountain plan was officially scrapped this month in Obama's proposed 2010 budget.

"The Yucca Mountain program 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," reads Obama's budget document. (.pdf).

That leaves the country with another central nuclear graveyard: the Waste Pilot Isolation Plant in the New Mexico desert near Carlsbad. After confronting issues similar to Yucca Mountain, the underground facility finally won an operating permit a decade ago. Carved out of salt beds, it's permitted to receive tons of radioactive waste stored in 1,000-pound drums from 23 Defense Department sites across the country. But it doesn't have anywhere near the capacity to handle the droppings of America's nuclear plants.

"We're talking about stuff that ought to be isolated for thousands of years," says Jay Silberg, a Washington, D.C., attorney and expert on nuclear power law. "But it will always be the next presidential administration to come up with a plan, and then they'll say: 'We need to study this more.'"

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Salt Lake Tribune
March 16, 2009

Matheson backs post-Yucca nuclear-waste panel

By Thomas Burr
The Salt Lake Tribune

Washington » Now that the idea of storing the nation's nuclear waste under Nevada's Yucca Mountain is essentially dead, Utah Rep. Jim Matheson and his congressional colleagues are looking to study other options for dealing with radioactive leftovers.

President Barack Obama's budget proposal nearly zeroes out funding for the proposed waste-storage site about 100 miles north of Las Vegas, leaving, for the moment, no home for tons of nuclear waste piling up at U.S. nuclear reactors.

"Both the president and I have made clear that Yucca Mountain is not a workable option," Energy Secretary Steven Chu told a congressional committee last week, "and that we will begin a thoughtful dialogue on a better solution for our nuclear-storage waste needs."

More than 90 percent of the waste that would have headed to Yucca would have traveled via trucks or trains through Utah.

Now, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, and his Nevada colleague, John Ensign, a Republican, are pushing for a blue-ribbon panel to find alternatives for managing nuclear waste.

Matheson, who also backs such a panel, said money saved by halting Yucca can shift toward analyzing options for the "enduring question" of what to do with the waste. The Utah Democrat even raised the idea of reprocessing the waste in a way that reduces the amount of material.

"Terminating Yucca Mountain," he said, "gives the scientific community a fresh opportunity to study reprocessing as a way to significantly reduce the amount of waste that must be stored long term."

Chu talked about forming a blue-ribbon commission during his testimony to the Senate Budget Committee.

"The government's decades-long focus on Yucca Mountain has left us barren with very few good proposals for dealing with nuclear waste," Reid said on the Senate floor last week. "Now that President Obama and Secretary Chu have taken Yucca Mountain off the table, we need to begin looking closely at new ideas. We should even dust off some older ones that have been ignored for far too long."

--tburr@sltrib.com

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Atlanta Journal Constitution
March 16, 2009

Radioactive issue: Disposal plan for reactor byproducts appears dead, worrying industry critics, but utilities say they have room to store spent fuel even as they build new reactors.

By Margaret Newkirk

THE STORY SO FAR

> Previously: Georgia Power plans to build two new reactors at its Vogtle nuclear plant in Waynesboro.

> The latest: The Obama administration cut funding for a federal nuclear-waste repository.

> What’s next: A federal task force will reconsider what to do about nuclear waste.

As Georgia Power and other utilities race to build a new generation of nuclear reactors, one of the industry’s steepest challenges has been absent from the official debate.

That challenge just got worse.

Thousands of tons of highly radioactive waste are sitting in enclosed pools and concrete casks in Georgia, waiting for a final resting place.

The nuclear industry still has no place to dispose of its most toxic and long-lived byproduct, the radioactive spent fuel rods nuclear power production leaves behind.

And two weeks ago, the Obama administration all but killed the industry’s sole hope for changing that, cutting funding for a long-delayed federal waste depository under Nevada’s remote Yucca Mountain.

The industry, including Georgia Power’s nuclear affiliate, Southern Nuclear, says Yucca’s demise shouldn’t affect plans to build new reactors.

For now, the waste can stay safely stored at the plants that create it, spokewoman Amoi Geter said: “Southern Nuclear has safe, reliable on-site options to store the used fuel at all of our nuclear plants.”

The industry’s trade group, the Nuclear Energy Institute, said that can continue for decades: “We can safely store it for a century plus more,” NEI spokesman Mitchell Singer said.

Singer said the demise of Yucca might steer the country toward other alternatives, and applauded the Obama administration’s Wednesday announcement of a blue-ribbon task force to study the waste issue.

Nuclear energy’s foes, meanwhile, say the waste issue is the undiscussed elephant in the room as utilities such as Georgia Power pursue dozens of new U.S. reactors for the first time in decades.

“We shouldn’t start producing more waste when we can’t deal with the waste we have,” said Sara Barczak of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

Nuclear waste remains dangerously radioactive for tens of thousands of years, she said: “There’s supposed to be a permanent solution.”

Yucca was to be solution

Until recently, even some of the nuclear industry’s biggest players held that a waste solution should precede new reactors.

“We have to be able to look the public in the eye and say, ‘If we build a plant, here’s where the waste will go,’ ” said John Rowe, CEO of the nation’s biggest nuclear operator, Exelon Corp., in an interview with Fortune magazine in 2006.

At the time, the Yucca repository appeared feasible, even if badly delayed.

Congress made the federal government responsible for nuclear waste disposal in 1982 and designated Yucca Mountain as the repository site in 1987.

The waste would go into tunnels drilled deep under the mountain and stay there for thousands of years. The federal government was to take the waste off the utilities’ hands by 1998. But litigation, politics and environmental concerns intervened.

To date, according to the National Association of Utility Regulators, the federal government has collected $16.5 billion from the nuclear utility industry and its customers to pay for Yucca. Georgia Power customers have paid $678.9 million of that, the company said.

Meanwhile, utilities stored their waste on-site, at 72 locations nationally.

The fuel can be stored safely in deep pools of water and boron, as long as it’s not packed too densely.

As those pools filled up, utilities bought huge concrete casks capable of storing older, cooler nuclear waste on land outside their reactors.

Georgia Power has two nuclear power plants. Plant Vogtle in Waynesboro uses only pools for its waste, while Plant Hatch, near Baxley, uses both pools and casks.

Georgia Power parent Southern Co. was also among eight nuclear utilities that contracted with a Utah Indian tribe for private interim storage of spent fuel. But Southern withdrew from the group in 2005, and the project fell through.

Issue not on the table

What happens next is an open question.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced his blue-ribbon task force Wednesday.

Meanwhile, dozens of new reactors are moving forward, none faster than Georgia Power’s.

A new round of Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing hearings on its reactor plans begins this week in Augusta and Waynesboro, but the spent-fuel disposal issue will not come up.

Opponents can’t raise it, because of a rule the NRC first made in 1984. Called the waste confidence rule, it says the NRC has confidence that a permanent nuclear disposal site would exist by 2025 and that on-site storage will be sufficient in the interim.

But the NRC is considering removing the 2025 date, although it is still expressing confidence a permanent solution will emerge.

But environmentalists remain concerned.

“If anything, there’s less assurance now than a couple of weeks ago,” said Barczak, of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. “It sounds like a punt to me.”

Georgia Power

Georgia Power plans two more reactors at Plant Vogtle, where quantities of sealed nuclear waste are mounting. There are similar situations around the nation.

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WSJM
March 16, 2009

Nuclear Plant Talks Plans

Christine Sagar Reporting

Two major projects are in the planning stages at Bridgman?s Cook Nuclear Power Plant. Cook?s Chief Nuclear Officer Joe Jensen told Rotarians today work will begin later this year on a Dry Cask Storage facility for long term onsite storage of spent nuclear fuel. The project is especially necessary now that the Obama Administration has scrapped the Yucca Mountain permanent storage project in Nevada, according to Jensen. Also in the talking state is a Deep Water Tunnel a couple of miles under Lake Michigan, providing cooling water for Cook?s two existing reactors-and potentially a third someday. That two Billion dollar project would take several years and provide hundreds of jobs. But Jensen says there are many technical and financial questions to answer before it gets a green light from AEP?s board.

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New York Times
March 16, 2009

Low-level waste emerges as hurdle for new nuclear reactors

By Katherine Ling

While President Obama's plan to find alternatives to storing high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Nev., is grabbing headlines, another problem has begun threatening license applications for new reactors.

What can be done with low-level nuclear waste?

There are dwindling places to put low-level nuclear waste -- contaminated resins, filters, wood, paper, plastics, pipes, structural steel and pressure vessels that can be hazardous for up to 500 years. And nuclear-power opponent groups are filing and winning legal fights to force utilities to present disposal plans for low-level waste before they can build a new reactor.

"I'm going to argue low-level waste is a bigger issue than high-level waste right now," Edward Sproat, then-director of the Energy Department's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, warned at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event last fall.

While the nuclear industry is unhappy about Yucca Mountain's impending demise, officials recognize it will not immediately threaten the 17 license applications filed for new reactors. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has determined that spent fuel can be stored on-site for the next century and is reviewing a possible extension of that.

But the low-level waste problem is already affecting reactor applications.

The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy this month won a legal contention from the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board against Southern Nuclear Operating's Vogtle reactor license application for Georgia. The same contention has already been granted in reviews of the Tennessee Valley Authority's Bellefonte application in Alabama; Unistar's Calvert Cliffs, Md., application; and Dominion Power's North Anna application in Virginia.

Advocacy groups plan to similarly contest Progress Energy's Levy County, Fla., application and have already filed against Detroit Edison's Fermi application.

Sara Barczak, program director for the Southern Alliance, said the focus on low-level waste represents a significant shift for regulators and utilities. "I think most people, when they see 'low level,' they say, 'Oh, low level of radioactivity,' but the definition of low level is so broad," she said.

U.S. low-level waste comes from a wide range of places, including hospitals and laboratories, but the greatest -- and most toxic -- volume is produced by the Energy Department and the 104 commercial nuclear reactors.

Toxic for up to 100 years, Class A waste has just three storage options -- sites at Clive, Utah; Richland, Wash.; and Barnwell, S.C. Only Richland and Barnwell accept Class B waste, which is toxic for up to 300 years, and Class C, toxic up to 500 years.

But there is another complication: Barnwell closed its gates to all states but Connecticut, New Jersey and South Carolina last summer. And Richland only accepts waste from 11 states in the Northwest and Rocky Mountain compacts.

That means 36 states with reactors, hospitals and other industry with radioactive materials have no place to send much of their waste.

Short-term fixes

Existing disposal facilities have adequate capacity for most low-level radioactive waste and are accessible to waste generators in the short term, but constraints on the long-term disposal of class B and C wastes have become clear, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office last year.

"The nuclear industry has really been hiding their head in the sand about the waste for all issues," said Michael Mariotte, executive director of the nonprofit Nuclear Information and Resource Service, which opposes nuclear power.

Mariotte said utilities that want to build new reactors have known for 10 years that Barnwell would close but failed to include on-site storage or options for handling low-level radioactive waste in their license applications.

"There is a very clear issue that utilities have to figure out what they are going to do," Mariotte said. "Just from a regulatory standpoint, on the high-level waste, they can point to the waste confidence rule, but they don't have a counterpart for low-level waste."

Utilities have a simple, short-term option, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group. "They are going to have to, they will end up filing plans to store on-site," said Doug Walters, senior director for new plants at NEI.

Walters said most existing nuclear power plants are already considering building on-site storage for low-level waste. Moreover, he said, most of the new reactors would be built on the same sites as current reactors.

But that approach is not that simple, nuclear foes say. It is likely to increase the already hefty cost of building reactors and increase the complaints of regulators and nearby communities that are already upset at the storage of spent fuel rods, Mariotte said.

More dumps?

Another possible solution would involve opening more waste disposal sites. But permitting a dump site for Class B and Class C material is almost as difficult as siting a high-level waste dump.

In 1980, Congress passed a law that made states responsible for disposal of their own wastes, but states were encouraged to form compacts to locate one low-level radioactive waste site for several states. The law also excluded low-level waste from the Interstate Commerce Clause, so shipments across state lines are not allowed unless approved by individual states or compacts.

Since the law passed, the Clive, Utah, facility has been the only waste site created. North Carolina and Nebraska pulled out of compacts after being chosen as disposal sites, and Michigan was expelled by the Midwest compact for failing to site a dump.

There is also little incentive for companies to try to license and develop new low-level waste sites, because nuclear plants, which generate most of that waste, have managed to dramatically reduce their volume and store more on site, according to Todd Lovinger, executive director of the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Forum, a nonprofit that is helping state compacts comply with the low-level waste law.

The low-level waste volume stands to rise somewhat if some new reactors come on line, but not significantly, said Mitch Singer, a spokesman for NEI.

There is currently one low-level dump proposal on the table. Waste Control Specialists LLC is trying to license a new low-level waste dump in Andrews County, Texas.

The proposal is facing a rough ride with regulators and advocacy groups and as a business proposition. Texas is a partner in a two-state compact with Vermont, but there are concerns that a new dump would open to other states with no place to put their wastes. It is also unclear whether a license for Class B or Class C waste storage would be granted.

The Texas location is also over the "precarious, irreplaceable" Ogallala Aquifer, which provides water for eight states in the Great Plains, said Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear.

Legislation

The lack of storage space for low-level radioactive waste has grabbed attention on Capitol Hill.

Lawmakers started getting involved after the operator of the Clive, Utah, Class A storage site filed a license in 2007 to import 20,000 tons of Italian low-level waste.

The Italian waste would take up less than 1 percent of total volume at the EnergySolutions facility, and CEO Steve Creamer promised to limit total foreign imports to 5 percent of the facility.

But Reps. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) and Jim Matheson (D-Utah) say the Italian waste could just be the beginning of the low-level waste influx. They have introduced a bill banning foreign import of low-level radioactive waste unless there is an exemption from the president.

"We are going to run out of waste space here," Gordon told reporters after introducing the bill this session. "Of 104 nuclear power plants in this country, 94 have no other place to go but Utah."

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Las Vegas SUN
March 15, 2009

Sun Editorial:

Keeping up the fight

Despite progress against nuke dump proposal, Nevada should remain vigilant

Now that the Obama administration has followed through with a promise to strip federal funding from a proposed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, many of the project’s ardent supporters have begun throwing in the towel.

The Washington Post, which has supported burying nuclear waste in Nevada, wrote in an editorial last Sunday that “the Yucca Mountain project is dead.” At a Senate Budget Committee hearing Wednesday, ranking Republican Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire said: “I don’t want to save Yucca. I accept the fact that may not be viable.”

The most stunning comment, though, came from Alex Flint, senior vice president for governmental affairs of the Nuclear Energy Institute. Referring to the nuclear waste now stored at reactors, Flint was quoted on National Public Radio Wednesday as saying: “In many ways, we’ve reduced the urgency of a need to find some other solution for this material. We can definitely deal with this material for decades or hundreds of years. It would be ideal to come up with some eventual disposition proposal in this regard, but we have a lot of time to figure that out.”

That makes it sound as though the nuclear power industry admits it has no valid reason to shove the dump down Nevada’s throat, just as we have been saying all along.

There is no denying that the course has shifted in Nevada’s favor ever since President Barack Obama took office. The Obama administration has said it is time to look for alternatives to Yucca Mountain, a point reiterated Wednesday by Energy Secretary Steven Chu in an appearance before the Senate Budget Committee.

On Thursday Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., introduced a bill that would establish a nine-member blue ribbon commission of experts appointed by Congress who would have two years to make recommendations on alternatives to Yucca Mountain for storage and disposal of nuclear waste.

The commission, which would be made up of five Democratic and four Republican appointees, would explore everything from dry cask storage at reactors to reprocessing of the waste and report its findings to Congress. Security issues surrounding temporary storage of the radioactive waste would also be discussed.

As Reid told his colleagues on the Senate floor, the commission “will create a process that will help our nation take a critical step away from the failed Yucca Mountain policy.” The bill also represents a good faith effort to show that Congress will not turn its back on the operators of nuclear power plants and their ratepayers.

“The government’s decades-long focus on Yucca Mountain has left us barren, with very few good proposals for dealing with nuclear waste,” Reid said. “Now that President Obama and Secretary Chu have taken Yucca Mountain off the table, we need to begin looking closely at new ideas. We should even dust off some older ones that have been ignored for far too long.”

It has been an incredibly tumultuous journey for Nevada since 1987, when Congress designated Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as the only place the federal government would study as a potential dump for the nation’s high-level nuclear waste. That designation set up a classic David versus Goliath confrontation, with Nevada and its small congressional delegation playing the underdog against the powerful nuclear energy industry and its supporters in Congress.

From the beginning, though, Nevada has been on the correct side of the argument. The state has effectively made the case that the earthquake-prone mountain is geologically unsafe for the storage of deadly radioactive waste and would place Nevadans in grave danger of catastrophic exposure. The problem of how to safely transport the waste from reactors throughout the nation to Yucca Mountain has never been solved.

By refusing to give up the fight, Nevada persevered and now stands on the brink of victory.

Despite such extraordinary developments, which could made possible only by Reid’s influence as Senate majority leader and Obama’s unwavering commitment to protect Nevadans, it is still premature for the state to celebrate and pronounce Yucca Mountain dead.

Until the Nuclear Regulatory Commission denies the pending Energy Department licensing request to build a permanent dump at Yucca Mountain and until the nuclear power industry abandons its pro-Yucca campaign, Nevada has an obligation to its residents to continue its fight in opposition.

That means the Nevada Legislature should continue to provide the maximum funding necessary to fully operate the state’s Nuclear Projects Agency, which leads the opposition effort. The Legislature also should provide the attorney general’s office with the funding necessary to cover all legal costs associated with that effort.

Now is not the time for Nevada to let its guard down.

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Nevada Appeal
March 15, 2009

Business briefs

Nevada Assemblyman Ty Cobb will also give a special update on the status of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. Admission is $2. RSVP by calling (775) 882-8306 or e-mail to kris@nevadabusinessconnections.com.

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American Chronicle
March 15, 2009

Chu Confirms INL Role in Future Nuclear Efforts

Crapo questions Energy Secretary at Senate Budget Committee hearing

Washington, DC – Idaho Senator Mike Crapo won a commitment from Energy Secretary Steven Chu 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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ScienceAlert
March 15, 2009

Time for the clean nuclear energy option
By Elling Disen

The emerging global energy crisis is not going to be solved by renewables and rationing. At the same time, the so-called ‘Nuclear Renaissance’, in which thousands of conventional water reactors provide a substantial part of the world’s static energy, is running into trouble from shortages of uranium and skilled technologists, and galloping costs.

Even the US appears to be turning away from conventional nuclear energy. Recently Barack Obama’s energy czar Steven Chu rejected Yucca Mountain as the US geological burial site for Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF). The State of California has a law that rules out any new nuclear technology that does not solve the SNF issue. However Senators Harry Reid and Orrin Hatch are pushing for greatly increased R&D into the thorium (Th) option.

What is a thorium molten salt reactor?

Instead of fuel rods boiling water, thorium fuels are mixed in a fluid matrix that acts simultaneously as neutron moderator, cooler and control rod. Most importantly, this salt melt is intrinsically stable meaning that strongly negative reactivity coefficients slow down the rate of the chain reactions when the melt temperature rises. Large amounts of water are not needed for cooling. These invaluable properties mean a thorium reactor is much cheaper to build and can be deployed widely. A worst-case accident scenario in an underground thorium molten salt reactor (TMSR) would have very local consequences and risk releasing very small amounts of radiotoxicity.

The big question is: Why is TMSR technology not already standard? After a very successful five year trial at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, Tennessee, in the late 1960s, molten salt reactors were found to be competitive against fluid metal cooled plutonium breeder reactors.However, the latter also supplied weapons grade fissiles during the Cold War, which was the raison d’etre for US nuclear activities at that time. Molten salt reactors cannot supply weapons-grade plutonium, so the project was terminated. However thorium reactors have another big advantage: they can consume spent fuel from conventional nuclear reactors. Besides producing energy they can help clean up the global nuclear waste problem. With thorium, the big showstoppers for nuclear power – the weapons and waste risks – are turned on their heads. The International Atomic Energy Agency will applaud any country which launches a crash research program into TMSR.

Australia holds enormous amounts of thorium. In a TMSR, 1 tonne of thorium converts into 10 terawatt hours of electricity. At a production cost of 0.03 cents / kWh, a million tones of thorium will produce $300 billion worth of electrical power. No costly enrichment or isotopic processing is needed to prepare the fluid ThF4 fuel.

The waste stream from a thorium reactor is correspondingly small: just 1 ton of fission products (FP) per gigawatt/year of energy produced.

Fission products from a thorium reactor need to be stored for only about1000 years, not the million years as is the case for standard nuclear fuel. Waste from a TMSR is a hundred times less radioactive, less bulky and less costly than today’s nuclear waste.

The TMSR is superior in performance to the two oft-proposed alternatives, rod thoruium reactors and accelerators. Rod thorium reactor technologies are simply not worth it. Accelerators claim so-called subcriticality but this has been debunked since delayed neutrons are a fact of life anyway, making today’s potentially unstable water reactors controllable. CERN tried to sell the French reactor industry on accelerators for ten years without success. In general however, solid fuel rods simply do not breed sustainably

Molten salt reactors are one of the six main options for the so-called Generation IV nuclear technology. Australia has announced plans to join the GenIV. But leadership of the current GenIV poses risks to the the prompt development of TMSRs. Established nuclear interests control the agenda and will try to ensure that no disruptive and competing technology makes it. Today France largely dominates the sparse TMSR GenIV activities and they will certainly not permit a revolutionary alternative to interfere with the worldwide marketing of their inflationary uranium water reactors. Neither would the Russians.

Licensing the TMSR commercially has a few developmental issues to be resolved. Structural alloys must be checked for corrosion. Handling of the fission product waste by way of gas capture, noble metal plateout and vitrification must be ironed out. Compact carbon composite heat exchangers must be joined with the core parts. But these are all minor technical engineering tasks compared to the daunting high temperatures and astronomically-costly reprocessing schemes of other GenIV options. It is estimated that solving these issues for TMSR would require a 5-year crash program costing about a billion Euros.

While that may sound costly, the investment and operation of a thorium reactor will be a fraction of today’s energy megaprojects. TMSRs can be build in tandem and scaled in configurations ranging from 0.1 – 10 GWe. They adapt instantaneously to the load for the same reason as they are intrinsically safe. Their spare heat can be used thermochemically for industry, in particular for the production of ammonia and hydrogen.

Finland, traditionally a non-nuclear state, is in the process of pushing the limits for the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) to 1.6GWe, although this has run into a number of difficulties. A crash research program into the much safer, much cleaner and cheaper thorium molten salt reactor on the same scale could be undertaken if Australia were to team up with other Scandinavian countries like Norway, Sweden and Finland. Indeed, Australia is a very attractive location for a research team of around 50 nuclear engineers to contribute to such an energy solution.

Elling Disen is founder of Thorium ElectroNuclear AB, Sweden.

--More information:
Statements made are supported by independent references found here.
http://www.torium.se/

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West Australian
March 15, 2009

WA ‘ideal’ for nuclear waste

WA would be ideal for the safe storage of nuclear waste as Australia “inevitably” embraces nuclear power, a prominent geologist has claimed.

John de Laeter, a Curtin University professor who has spent much of his career studying geological formations in WA and abroad, said Australia would eventually need to build nuclear reactors, but that he did not see underground nuclear waste storage as dangerous.

“I know this is unpopular but I believe that in WA there are many, many places where you could construct a natural repository,” Professor de Laeter said on Friday after his induction into the WA Science Hall of Fame. “Sooner or later we are going to have a power reactor in Australia — it’s inevitable.”

But Professor de Laeter argued that WA should only handle Australian waste, because shipping it would be too risky.

“I don’t believe we should take other people’s radioactive waste, even though you could make a lot of money out of it. I’m worried about the transport of radioactive waste on ships.”

His comments contrast with the views of WA’s 2008 Scientist of the Year Jorg Imberger, who has argued that WA can make millions by opening its doors to waste from the world’s burgeoning nuclear power industry.

Premier Colin Barnett has dismissed accepting foreign waste, despite lifting the ban on uranium mining.

The move was widely seen as paving the way for uranium exports. But the need to move from fossil fuels meant nuclear power would be on the agenda, Professor de Laeter said.

“I believe we will have nuclear power in this country in the next 10 to 15 years and I believe the way to look after our own nuclear waste is to put it into a natural geological repository.”

He said Australia should choose disposal sites carefully, to avoid similar problems to the US, which hurriedly selected its Yucca Mountain site despite it being prone to earthquakes and volcanic activity.

Professor de Laeter said his own studies of a “natural nuclear reactor” at Oklo, South Africa, where naturally occurring radioactive rocks had remained sealed off for billions of years, showed that such material could be contained safely.

Such scientific expertise would allow Australia to do “a 100 per cent better job than anyone else” at containing harmful waste, he said.

Michael Hopkin

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Platts
March 14, 2009

NRC issues final regulatory requirement for Yucca repository Washington (Platts)--13Mar2009

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued its final regulatory requirements for a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, Friday, bringing the agency's rule in line with the radiation dose standard the US Environmental Protection Agency issued last year.

The NRC rule, which goes into effect April 13, covers the same 1-million-year period, the time after waste has been moved into repository tunnels deep inside Yucca Mountain, as the EPA standard and only addresses changes made in earlier regulations for the post-10,000-year period.

NRC adopted the EPA's revised average dose limit of 100-millirem-a-year on radiation escaping the facility. The revision replaces EPA's earlier proposed 350-mrem-a-year limit for the post-10,000-year period. The NRC left intact the average 15 mrem a year radiation dose limit in the EPA standard for the first 10,000 years after emplacement.

Implementation of this rule will mean that NRC has all of its regulatory requirements in place needed to license the Department of Energy's spent fuel disposal facility. The DOE program's ability to more forward, however, is in doubt after President Barack Obama's administration indicated in a preliminary budget document that the program would only receive enough funds in fiscal 2010, which begins October 1, to answer NRC questions during NRC's licensing review of DOE's application for a Yucca Mountain repository. At the same time, the budget document noted, the US would be developing a new strategy for managing that waste.

The NRC's new rule was published in the Federal Register Friday.

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NEI Nuclear Notes
March 14, 2009

The Dance of the Blue Ribbons

Over the past few days, the Obama administration experienced significant pushback on its decision to scale back the Yucca Mountain project – more, we admit, than we really expected. (Just scroll down to earlier posts – we’ve watched this happen with considerable pleasure.)

Polls, and not just those from NEI, show growing support for nuclear energy – we think NEI can claim some credit for public opinion coming around - and good polls makes supporting nuclear energy easier for even Democratic Congressfolks to do. Consequently, the administration has had to try to provide a fuller explanation, especially to the Senate, of their plans for moving forward. These have been positive developments – so far, so good.

But Congress and the administration still shows reluctance, perhaps it is a hangover from the No Nukes 1980s. Exciting times, those. Thus, rather than act precipitously, we get The Dance of the Blue Ribbons:

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.

Reid often gets cast as the villain in the Yucca Mountain issue – it’s in his state and an article of Nevada political faith is that Yucca Mountain must be opposed – but Reid is actually pro-nuclear. We don’t think he’s anything but sincere here.

And the administration? Stand back, here it comes:

[DOE Secretary Steven] 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.

Well, all right, that’s nine months for DOE and a year for the Senate. While we couldn’t blame you for a little cynicism here – kick-the-can is, after all, a rather old-fashioned game – for a Democratic government, this is a tectonic shift in thinking. If they need some time to do that thinking, fine. We’re pretty sure how this will come out – especially with the climate change conference in Copenhagen happening in the midst of it - so fine.

It’s an alpaca. He lives at Colorado’s Bella Vita Ranch, where they seem to have a lot of blue ribbon winners. Take a gander, if you’d like an alpaca for the kids.

Mark Flanagan

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Hesperia Star
March 14, 2009

Whatever happened to the Hesperia casino?

Five years ago, voters approved a measure that would have brought casino revenue to the city -- now they're just missing the casino

By Beau Yarbrough
Staff Writer

Today, the southwest corner of the intersection of Main Street and Interstate 15 sees a regular flow of traffic from Hesperians and visitors, eager to part with their money. But they're going to the High Desert Gateway shopping center, anchored by a Super Target store.

They're not going to the empty lot next door. Five years ago, the lot was Hesperia's field of dreams. Hesperia city council members said it would pay for more firefighters, police and pave more roads.

On March 2, 2004, more than 14,000 Hesperians turned out to vote on Measure X, which had been promoted as a referendum on a proposed casino to be built at Main Street and Interstate 15 by the Timbisha Shoshone tribe of Death Valley. Fifty-eight percent of voters approved the measure -- which would have had the city accepting revenue from the casino in exchange for providing municipal services -- after a divisive campaign that split the city in two.

But five years later, the only construction on the site is done by field mice.

"I keep hearing things, then I don't hear nothing," said Councilman Ed Pack, the only remaining member of the city council to vote in favor of the Municipal Services Agreement between the tribe and city in August 2003. "Is it dead? No. But it's definitely on life support."

Land swap deal

Both proponents and opponents touted Measure X as a vote on the casino coming to Hesperia, but that decision didn't actually rest with local residents or officials.

"We couldn't guarantee that a casino would open up. We couldn't guarantee that it wouldn't open up," said former councilman Dennis Nowicki, the loudest proponent of the project in 2003 and 2004. "We just wanted to protect the city in the event that it did."

The Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act passed by the United States Senate in 2000 formally laid out the tribe's lands. The law noted there was land in Nevada that was historically part of the tribe's lands, but was now in private hands. The act stated that if the Nevada land couldn't be acquired, another parcel of land could be substituted instead. Casino developer Gary Fears knew just the place: Property at the top of the Cajon Pass, on a stretch of highway that connects Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and the tribe quickly agreed on the Hesperia property.

But Fears' Renaldo Corporation wasn't the only development company courting the tribe, and competing companies wooing different factions of the tribe soon mired the Timbisha Shoshone in a series of leadership battles, including accusations of voter fraud in tribal council elections.

The leadership disputes are "now finally resolved," according to tribal council member Erick Mason.

"The casino project in its current status is on standby as the tribe is currently actively seeking a new development partner that has the financial ability, experience and reputation to make the casino a reality for the tribe and people of Hesperia," Mason said by e-mail. "Both the tribe and people of Hesperia are being negatively affected by the huge losses in our economy. Our ability to help people is in the jobs the casino will create."

What might have been

In March 2004, things looked very different, with a casino expected to open in as little as 18 months after the vote. Had the casino and its hotel opened in September 2005 or soon after, the city of Hesperia might have looked very different today.

"Financially, the city would be considerably better off," said Pack, who estimates the casino might have put $6 million in the city's coffers each year. "There would have been a lot of other development out there. ... Probably have as much business out there as Bear Valley Road and the freeway."

"We'd have a huge impact to our quality of life, as I see it," said Councilwoman Rita Vogler, who opposes the casino project. "There'd be all glitz and glamour out there with all the lights. You'd have people pulling in and pulling out."

"I think that there would have been a strong revenue stream for the city years that would have been able to provide for more police, fire and infrastructure," said Nowicki. "Obviously, it's purely speculative, because it hasn't come to pass, and I don't think that it ever will."

And, of course, it would have had major impacts on the Timbisha Shoshone, especially as most of their tribal lands are within Death Valley National Park, which limits what they can do with their land.

"The tribe is at a major disadvantage in fighting the [proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain] and casino revenue could have been utilized to help our tribes fight against it, as we are out-spent by billions of dollars by the supporters and advocates of the Yucca Mountain Project," Mason said. "The tribe would have the resources to manage our lands and traditional plants and medicines. The tribe would also have the ability to pursue various green energy projects. Tribal housing and jobs are amongst the biggest problems the tribe could be working on, many of our members are displaced and in need of jobs and much needed health care."

The future

"Now, I doubt very much that this project will ever happen," said Nowicki. "Everyone's moved on. ... There'll be some sort of mixed-use commercial, which we do still need out there."

But the Timbisha Shoshone aren't giving up.

"I think as long as somebody envisions possibilities of profit ... there's always possibilities until the land has been consumed with other commercial engagements," said Pastor David Penn, who was the spokesman for Hesperia's religious leaders who were opposed to the project.

"The tribe is confident that it will secure a new development partner soon and get back on track with its commitment to the city of Hesperia and the members of the Timbisha Shoshone tribe," said Mason.

--Beau Yarbrough can be reached at 956-7108 or at beau@hesperiastar.com.

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Daily Telegraph blog
March 14, 2009

Can we all stop whingeing about nuclear waste now?

Stephanie Gutmann

Because there isn't any such thing. As this Wall Street Journal piece by esteemed energy writer William Tucker, (er...also my S.O.) proves:

"...So is this material "waste"? Absolutely not. Ninety-five percent of a spent fuel rod is plain old U-238, the nonfissionable variety that exists in granite tabletops, stone buildings and the coal burned in coal plants to generate electricity. Uranium-238 is 1% of the earth's crust. It could be put right back in the ground where it came from.

Of the remaining 5 per cent of a rod, one-fifth is fissionable U-235 -- which can be recycled as fuel. Another one-fifth is plutonium, also recyclable as fuel. Much of the remaining three-fifths has important uses as medical and industrial isotopes. Forty percent of all medical procedures in this country now involve some form of radioactive isotope, and nuclear medicine is a $4 billion business. Unfortunately, we must import all our tracer material from Canada, because all of our isotopes have been headed for Yucca Mountain.

What remains after all this material has been extracted from spent fuel rods are some isotopes for which no important uses have yet been found, but which can be stored for future retrieval. France, which completely reprocesses its recyclable material, stores all the unused remains -- from 30 years of generating 75 per cent of its electricity from nuclear energy -- beneath the floor of a single room at La Hague."

In other words, don't cry for Yucca Mountain, the huge nuclear by-products storage facility that was just defunded by the Obama administration. This doesn't have to mean the death knell for nuclear. We could do like France and reprocess. Of course that would be assuming the Obama crowd isn't in hock up to its eyeballs to the environmental lobby.....

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Senator Harry Reid
March 13, 2009

Reid & Ensign Propose Commission to Study Alternatives for Managing Nuclear Waste

Now that Yucca Mountain is no longer an option, Nevada Senators Harry Reid and John Ensign today introduced a bill to create a national commission on high level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel to study alternatives for managing nuclear waste in the United States. This follows recent news from the Obama Administration that the nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain is not an option for dealing with our nation's nuclear waste. Under this legislation, the commission will have two years to study the issue and report its findings to Congress.

"I have worked for more than 20 years to help Nevada reach this point in its fight against the Yucca Mountain project," Reid said. "Now that Yucca is out of the picture, we need to study what our options are to safely and responsibly deal with our nation's nuclear waste." To read more about Reid's work to keep Nevadans safe by preventing Yucca Mountain from ever being built please click here.

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Senator Harry Reid
March 13, 2009

Reid Statement On Blue Ribbon Commission To Study Storage And Disposal Of Nuclear Waste

Commission would explore alternatives with Yucca Mountain no longer an option

March 12, 2009

Washington, D.C. –Nevada Senators Harry Reid and John Ensign today introduced a bill to create a national commission on high level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel to study alternatives for managing nuclear waste in the United States. The commission created by this bill would have two years to examine responsible alternatives for dealing with the nuclear waste in the long term.

Below is the statement from Sen. Reid as prepared for delivery on the floor of the U.S. Senate:

“Mr. President, I am pleased to say that we are closing the book on our nation’s failed nuclear waste policy. After decades of fighting the Yucca Mountain project, I can say with confidence that Nevada will not serve as the nation’s nuclear waste dump.

Nevadans and all Americans will be safer and more secure thanks to President Obama’s commitment to finding scientifically sound and responsible solutions to dealing with nuclear waste.

And I am proud to say that I have been working on a new volume in this terribly difficult debate. Bad policy like the Yucca Mountain project is easy to oppose. But it is not always easy to craft better policy.

That is what I am doing with Senator Ensign today – working to replace our failed approach to dealing with nuclear waste with a much better policy. We are unveiling our plan to form a congressional commission to evaluate and make recommendations on alternative approaches to managing nuclear waste.

This is a step that is way past due.

I began opposing the idea of dumping nuclear waste in Nevada when it was first proposed in the early 1980s. I was still a member of the House then, and I continued this fight in the Senate with most Nevadans firmly behind my efforts to kill the project. I have fought against the Yucca Mountain project vigorously, but from the very beginning I was also calling for long-range planning on nuclear waste because it was the right thing to do.

I continued calling for researching alternatives to Yucca in 1995 when I introduced legislation with my close friend and colleague, Senator Dick Bryan, to establish a commission on nuclear waste. Unfortunately, Congress didn’t listen, even though evidence was piling up showing that Yucca Mountain could become a death trap for Nevadans.

The government’s decades-long focus on Yucca Mountain has left us barren with very few good proposals for dealing with nuclear waste. Now that President Obama and Secretary Chu have taken Yucca Mountain off the table, we need to begin looking closely at new ideas. We should even dust off some older ones that have been ignored for far too long.

The legislation we are introducing today forms a temporary commission to review and make recommendations on a wide variety of alternatives to Yucca.

The commission will look at everything from at-reactor dry cask storage to reprocessing. The commission will consider having the federal government take title to nuclear waste, but will also consider chartering a federal corporation to manage nuclear waste.

And very importantly, the commission will consider the security of temporary storage facilities for nuclear waste so we can give assurances to communities near nuclear power plants that their safety will not be compromised.

The cosponsors of this legislation do not all share the same views about nuclear power and we do not share the same views about nuclear waste. For example, I have long said that nuclear waste needs to remain on site where it’s produced until the government has a safe and scientifically sound solution. Others would like to reprocess and reuse nuclear waste in nuclear reactors. And many still feel that some form of permanent disposal is a good solution.

But forming a commission is something the bill’s sponsors and others agree upon because it will create a process that will help our nation take a critical step away from the failed Yucca Mountain policy.

I look forward to continuing working with my colleagues to make sure we take responsible actions necessary to begin addressing nuclear waste.”

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Congresswoman Shelley Berkley
March 13, 2009

Berkley Statement on Creation of Blue Ribbon Panel for Nuclear Waste Alternatives

(March 12, 2009 -- Washington, D.C.) Congresswoman Shelley Berkley today pledged her support for new legislation that will soon be introduced in the Senate and House that will create a blue ribbon commission to study nuclear waste disposal. Creation of the panel will further efforts to permanently end all work related to Yucca Mountain and to redirect billions of dollars in funding to other waste disposal activities.

“The creation of this expert panel is another critical step in eliminating Yucca Mountain because it will provide a solution to this issue that does not include dumping radioactive waste outside Las Vegas,” said Berkley. “This proposal has bipartisan support, including the backing of President Obama, but it will only succeed if Yucca Mountain is 100% off the table and a new process put in place to address existing waste stockpiles, as well as materials from any new reactors. In the meantime, we can secure current waste at existing reactor sites using dry-cask storage. This method, already approved by federal regulators, costs a fraction of Yucca Mountain’s staggering $100 billion price tag and is safe for 100 years, providing ample time for the waste issue to be solved.”

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
March 13, 2009

Nuclear industry to fight Yucca Mountain bill

By Steve Tetreault
Las Vegas Review-Journal

WASHINGTON — A battle line began forming today around a bill that would create an expert commission to evaluate the nation’s nuclear waste policies.

The Nuclear Energy Institute signaled it plans to fight the proposal as it is considered by Congress.

Spokesmen for the nuclear industry trade group questioned whether a commission could be independent when Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., would have the power to appoint two of its members, plus the chairman along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

“NEI provided input to the majority leader’s office ... but this is not the appointment process that we recommended or support,” spokesman John Keeley said. Having Reid and Pelosi appoint a chairman “does not provide the independence that the commission needs to be successful,” he said.

Another NEI official, Steve Kerekes, told the trade publication Nuclear New Build Monitor: “We feel it’s vitally important that it be a nonpartisan panel of experts, and that the chairman be above reproach and recognized as an independent figure.”

A bill introduced Thursday by Reid, the Senate majority leader, and Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., would establish a nine-member panel that would report to Congress in two years.

The commission would be asked to recommend alternatives for managing highly radioactive spent fuel from commercial power plants, and also high-level nuclear waste that was generated by military weapons programs. Those wastes are now kept at sites in 39 states.

The government’s policy has been to place the material in an underground repository under development at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. But President Barack Obama opposes the Yucca site and has indicated he plans to dramatically scale back the project.

The Nevada senators also oppose the Yucca Mountain repository. They said this week the commission would provide the Obama administration with alternatives.

But some in the nuclear industry are troubled that Reid’s intent is for the study panel to take Nevada off the table entirely as it evaluates nuclear waste policies. The government has focused solely on the Yucca site for more than 20 years, spending more than $10 billion on studies.

They point out that Obama plans to allow the Department of Energy to continue participating in repository license hearings at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission while other options are explored.

“It seems to be interesting that the administration would allow the license process to go forward but the majority leader would say that an 'independent’ commission can consider only 49 states,” one industry official said today.

Among the possibilities is keeping nuclear waste stored at present locations indefinitely, moving the material to a centralized site and keeping it there in above-ground canisters, stepping up research into waste recycling techniques, or perhaps digging an underground repository somewhere else.

Reid spokesman Jon Summers defended the study bill, saying the appointment of commissioners will be split among congressional leaders. “The Republicans and Democrats on both sides of both houses are going to be involved in this process,” he said, adding that “expert scientists” will be conducting the study.

Under the bill, Reid would name two members, Pelosi would name two, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky would name two and House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio would name two. Reid and Pelosi jointly would name the chairman.

Summers also said Reid “will continue to work with the administration.” Energy Secretary Steven Chu told a Senate committee this week he was forming a nuclear waste study commission, leading to questions as to whether Reid or the Obama administration would be taking the lead on the matter.

With the Energy Department struggling in recent years to make progress at Yucca Mountain, the Nuclear Energy Institute has downplayed the project’s importance in the industry’s plans to build more power plants. Now NEI policy focuses on other management tools in addition to the underground site.

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., believes that with Obama’s opposition to Yucca Mountain, the site is dead and the nuclear industry needs to get over it, spokesman David Cherry said today.

Opposing the Reid legislation “will not bring Yucca Mountain back from the grave, so if that is the industry’s goal, they have already lost,” Cherry said.

“That tune may not make the nuclear industry happy, but it is sweet music to the ears of Nevada families,” he said.

--Contact Stephens Washington Bureau Chief Steve Tetreault at stetreault@stephensmedia.com or 775-687-3901.