Yucca Mountain News Clips
Friday, July 24, 2009
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Las Vegas SUN
July 23, 2009
Sun editorial:
Why the push on Yucca?
NRC chairman says waste isn’t the most serious safety risk at nuclear power plants
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., this week introduced an amendment to the Defense Department appropriations bill that would make Yucca Mountain home to the military’s high-level nuclear waste.
Graham’s amendment is the latest desperate attempt by Republicans and nuclear power supporters to revive efforts to open a nuclear waste dump 90 miles from Las Vegas. More than two decades in the making, the plans for Yucca Mountain have been reeling in the past few years.
The courts have criticized the plans. The Energy Department has failed to show scientifically that Yucca Mountain — a volcanic ridge — is a safe and suitable site to store 77,000 tons of deadly radioactive waste. And President Barack Obama has joined with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Nevada’s congressional delegation in fighting the plan.
Still, Yucca Mountain proponents are mounting a campaign for the dump. They are trying to convince people that it is safe to haul deadly waste across the country — on highways, through cities and past schools — and dump it underground in an area prone to earthquakes.
The nuclear industry currently stores its waste at reactor sites in either indoor cooling pools or in thick steel-and-concrete casks. However, the industry wants the waste taken off site and says it is too risky to keep it where it is.
Greg Jaczko, the new chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and a former Reid aide, disagrees. In a recent interview with the Associated Press, Jaczko said that when considering “risks at any nuclear plant, spent fuel isn’t the most significant risk that we have.”
He said an NRC study found that safety risks posed by nuclear reactors, although extremely low, are a million times greater than the risk of storing nuclear waste at reactor sites.
If Graham and other Yucca Mountain proponents would take a few minutes to consider the facts, they would see that it is far safer and cheaper to store the spent nuclear waste on site.
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Bloomberg
July 23, 2009
Permanent Nuclear-Waste Site Isn’t Urgent, U.S. Regulator Says
By Tina Seeley
July 23 (Bloomberg) -- Finding a permanent site for spent nuclear fuel in the U.S. isn’t “an urgent problem,” the head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said.
Gregory Jaczko, who took over as chairman of the agency in May, said in an interview that the material can continue to be stored safely for the time being at nuclear power plants.
“Certainly, in the short term it’s not an urgent problem,” Jaczko, 38, said in the interview yesterday at the agency’s headquarters in Rockville, Maryland. “It is an issue we need to be aware of and be diligent about, but it’s not a crisis by any means.”
President Barack Obama disclosed in February budget documents that he was abandoning a 20-year effort to store radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, had sought the demise of the $96 billion project. Jaczko is a former aide to Reid.
The administration is examining ways to handle radioactive waste that the Energy Department says is now spread among more than 120 sites in 39 states.
There are 104 operating commercial reactors in the U.S., and 17 applications have been submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build 26 more reactors. The commission oversees operations at existing reactors, as well as licensing new reactors and regulating waste facilities.
Exelon Corp., owner of the largest fleet of U.S. commercial reactors, and Entergy Corp., with the second-largest, are among companies that have sought commission approval to build new nuclear power plants.
“Probably 100 years” is a short time frame for storing fuel, Jaczko said. “Changes aren’t likely to happen significantly in that period of time with the fuel.”
Chu’s Panel
Energy Secretary Steven Chu has proposed a panel that would look at the problem of nuclear waste and make recommendations for a permanent solution. Chu has sent suggested names for the panel to the White House.
Jaczko said his commission will delay issuing a regulation to change requirements for when spent fuel must be removed from reactor sites. A decision on the rule, known as waste confidence, was supposed to be made by the end of this month, Jaczko said in a July 8 speech.
The existing rule allowed on-site storage of waste with the assumption that the Yucca Mountain site would be accepting the spent fuel by 2025. In October 2008, the commission proposed amending the rule to reflect the possibility that Yucca Mountain may not be open by then. The commission staff has proposed that the rule be changed so that waste could remain on-site for 50 to 60 years after a reactor is permanently shut down.
‘Even Longer Period’
“We might find that it’s an even longer period of time,” Jaczko said.
It is “the number one priority for me here in the short term to get that rule done,” said Jaczko. “It’s a complex rule and we have to make sure we get it right.”
He declined to give a new estimate for when the agency would issue the rule.
Jaczko said it was his responsibility as head of the agency to be sure it has the “regulatory infrastructure in place to deal with whatever options may be presented in the future.”
--To contact the reporter on this story: Tina Seeley in Washington at tseeley@bloomberg.net.
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The Examiner
July 23, 2009
Yucca Mountain: lemonade out of lemons
George Barnette
The great State of Nevada is spiraling down the slope of bad economic conditions. Number one in foreclosures, the economy is rapidly disappearing. Real estate market aside, Nevada is sitting on a huge sack of lemons just waiting to be made into lemonade: the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Depository.
"We don't want nuclear power!!!", the people scream. "It's not safe!!!!" Au contra ire, my faithful readers. Not only is it safe, the people do want it. See links to poll results below. France provides approximately 80 percent of it's power from nukes. ("nuke" is a slang term for many things, including microwave cooking and weapons. For this article, "nuke" is a nuclear generating station. For all you Reid, Pelosi and Obama supporters.)
France recycles it's nuclear waste. It is a good program, although not without problems. There is waste that cannot be recycled, along with other radioactive waste from, say, the medical profession. Thus, we need waste repositories. There is one operating in New Mexico, the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, or WIPP. We now have a new one in Nevada, Yucca Mountain.
Most of us are taxpayers. Your tax money has been used to build Yucca Mountain. It sits empty, embroiled in legal issues and controversy regarding it's use. Senator Harry Reid has taken advantage of nuclear waste unpopularity to nearly stop the project in it's tracks. See links below. Reid is becoming more unpopular as the economy worsens. We now have a ruling triumvirate in power (Reid, Pelosi and Obama), and they are installing their own agenda, which does not include Yucca Mountain. So millions of dollars are sitting in the Nevada desert, unused, idle and wasted. A "sack of lemons", so to speak.
Let's make lemonade out of those lemons. The U.S. could use nuclear power to it's advantage. Nukes would provide safe, clean power with virtually no environmental impact. Environmental extremists do not want anything making electricity except wind and solar. The photo above shows some cooling towers on the horizon. (For you triumvirate supporters, TMI means Three Mile Island. Perhaps you've heard of it.) Pull up some photos of wind farms and solar arrays, and then tell me those are not a blight on the landscape. Environmental extremists want no hydro plants, because of the impact dam building has on the environment. So let's have some nukes. "A nuke in every yard!!", much along the lines of a "chicken in every pot". Small, cookie cutter nukes built without NRC red tape and environmental challenges. Then, send the waste to Yucca Mountain.
Now the lemonade. Nevada can charge immense amounts of money to take and dispose of this waste. So much, in fact, that it could start it's own permanent fund, much like Alaska did with oil revenue funds from the North Slope. This fund, like the one in Alaska, would be untouchable, especially by the state legislature. No salary hikes and increased retirement benefits for the state legislature would come from this fund. Instead, it would pay a dividend every year, like Alaska, to all citizens of Nevada. It could be used to make up budget shortfalls in economic downturns, albeit sparingly. Lastly, if there ever were environmental or clean-up issues, the money would be there.
Well, nukes need vast amounts of water to operate. There probably wouldn't be very many in the desert, mountains or in the Heartland. Using nuclear energy would stop the wealth transfer to foreign governments and oil companies. Although not a believer in man made global warming, eliminating coal and fossil fuel emissions would certainly be a benefit to the environment.
"Well", the people scream, "what about Chernobyl? TMI wasn't so bad, Chernobyl was terrible!!" Yes, it was. However, the Russians and the Ukrainians are probably not the brightest bulbs in the chandelier. Most of their technology in nuclear power and weapons has come from us. They try to tweak and improve on the technology and take shortcuts because the Soviet-era governments had no money. This, coupled with allowing engineers to operate the plant during a test instead of experienced plant operators caused a serious problem.
In closing, there are ways to provide safe, cheap power. There are ways to confine and dispose of waste that would please nearly everyone. There is much money and revenue to be had from the nuclear power industry--jobs, manufacturing, construction--the list is endless. Homer Simpson notwithstanding, America needs to take a serious look at this untapped energy resource.
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TPMCafé
July 23, 2009
Atomic Folly
Perry Mason, Where Are You When We Need You?
Rowell Hoff's Blog
On May 26, 1958, President Eisenhower waved a wand with a little light bulb on the end of it in front of an electric eye, starting up the first commercial reactor, located three hundred miles away at Shippingport, Pennsylvania.
That was as close to it as he wanted to be.
We are told that nuclear power is being used to generate electricity. That is not correct. Nuclear power is being used to boil water, and the resulting steam is being used to generate electricity in variants of the same way it has always been generated. What the enormously expensive nuclear plants do is generate heat in the most dangerous way imaginable, with waste products that are, so far, unmanageable. Conversion of the energy of nuclear fission or fusion directly into usable power would be a new and different kind of process. Perhaps it can be done; maybe people are working on it; but the present system is not it. The present system is a fancy steam engine.
We are told that nuclear plants are pollution-free. On July 9, 2002 Senator Trent Lott, then Senate Minority Leader, said, "Nuclear power is a clean, efficient source. We need to deal with nuclear waste." By "clean" the Senator evidently meant that nuclear plants do not give off air-polluting smoke. Indeed, it is impossible for them to give off air-polluting carbon-based smoke, as they do not burn any carbon-based combustible substance. But clean they are not. They pollute in three ways:
1. Normal emissions. There are emissions from these places and all the other kinds of nuclear manufacturing and storage places. A study states that "...nuclear power accounts for a very small fraction of the radiation experienced by the U. S. population - less than 1.6% of total artificial radiation, and less than 0.3% of all radiation. One source estimates that ... nuclear power plants cause ... roughly ... between 8.3 and 30.2 annual statistical cancer deaths nationally, plus a comparable number of survivable cancers. However, individuals in contact with various segments of the nuclear fuel cycle may have much higher exposure with correspondingly higher effects: the same source notes that nuclear workers bear 99.9% of the risk of fatal cancer from normal nuclear operations."
When the plants have worn-out, broken or defective parts, their more abundant emissions, if "not very dangerous" before, may become quite dangerous. (If they were dangerous before, how much more dangerous?)
In 2003 a big hole was found in the reactor head of the Davis-Beese plant in Toledo--a plant, already well-known for bad safety, belonging to FirstEnergy Corporation, a company that the Government blamed for the infamous blackout of August 2003. Leakage of tritium from Reactor No. 1 of California's San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station was discovered during demolition, long after the reactor had been retired; similar leakage has occurred in at least nine other plants. Numerous plants in the United States and elsewhere are old, worn out, suffering corrosion problems, emission problems, and still permitted to run.
2. Accidents. Inevitably, accidents happen. When a nuclear plant has a catastrophic accident, people die immediately and a lot of people die slowly over years. Many unborn descendents will remain unborn, or be deformed at birth, or have fatal cancers at rates greatly above the rates elsewhere.
Chernobyl is famous for its catastrophic breakdown on April 27, 1986; the eventual toll is still unknown, unknowable. Famous as well is the cover-up of the disaster for more than two weeks by the Soviet army and Government, a cover-up that included failure to inform neighboring countries and failure to evacuate and otherwise protect inhabitants of the region. Even several years later, it is believed, relevant information, such as the amount of radiation actually released, had not been divulged. (Time Magazine, May 18, 1986 and Nov. 13, 1989)
The March 23, 1979 Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania was just barely prevented from getting as completely out of hand as Chernobyl. The data on damage it may have caused to present and future human beings and animals are not yet cleared up. Files were placed behind a stone wall. Quite high State employees were fired, apparently for reporting embarrassing information about the disaster, etc.[1]
In a symposium held in Harrisburg, Pa. on March 26, 2009 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Three Mile Island disaster, Arnie Gunderson, a former nuclear industry executive turned whistle-blower, stated, "I think the numbers on the NRC's [Nuclear Regulatory Commission's] website are off by a factor of 100 to 1,000." Data presented in the symposium by nuclear engineers supported Gunderson's statement.
Besides the few catastrophes or near catastrophes, there are many accidents at "nuclear plants" that do not produce many fatalities, but nevertheless suggest that--industry and Government protestations notwithstanding--the safety of these complicated artifacts is not what one might wish; that, indeed, they are disasters waiting to happen.
The world's largest "nuclear power plant" in Kashiwazaki, Niigata Prefecture, Japan, was damaged in a 6.8 magnitude earthquake on July 16, 2007. Water containing radioactive material leaked into the Sea of Japan; drums containing nuclear waste fell over, many losing their lids, 800 liters of turbine oil leaked from a reactor, and small amounts of radioactive materials were emitted into the atmosphere. Industry spokesmen (who had, on the day of the earthquake, stated that no leaks occurred) claimed that "the emissions, although inadvertent, had been within legal limits."
"Japan has a history of cover-ups and accidents at nuclear power plants..." For example, on December 8, 1995, three tons of liquid sodium coolant spilled from a pipe at the Monju reactor at Tsuruga, 200 miles west of Tokyo, Japan. At a news conference on January 13, 1996, "...officials acknowledged that a video of the accident had been heavily edited before it was given to news media to make the leak appear less serious." (Reuters, Jan. 14, 1996)
And so forth.
3. Waste. These reactors produce tons upon tons of radioactive and otherwise poisonous waste. No satisfactory way to dispose of it has yet been discovered. Typically, the radioactivity in it will last, not a short while, but thousands of years. As Senator Lott said, we certainly need to deal with the waste. Waste from all nuclear installations, including the power plants--radioactive trash of all kinds--is part of an impending disaster. Nobody knows what to do with it, really. Nobody knows how to make it safe. Everywhere it has ever been put, it is causing trouble. The barrels will not last as long as the half-life of the stuff in them; the stuff will leak out, is leaking out.
Barrels of it have been thrown in the deep ocean.[2] Some of the people in charge would like to throw more of them there. Who knows what those substances are doing or will soon do to life on the abyssal plain, to the entire food chain for that matter? For the waste will outlast the barrels by thousands of years.
They bury it in the ground. It gets into the water table. It gets into the water people drink, as it is alleged to have done in Pensacola and Gulf Breeze, Florida.
From 1952 to 1970 the people in charge of the Idaho Nuclear Engineering Laboratory dumped 16 billion gallons of waste into wells that feed directly to the water table. It wasn't even in barrels, didn't have to leak out, already out.[3]
Transport of nuclear waste, as well as other nuclear materials, seems to be handled rather well nowadays. It is different from other types of toxic waste, which are often shipped to and unceremoniously unloaded in countries whose people, it is felt, are not as valuable as Americans and whose governments are willing for a price to let their land be a dump for hazardous, perhaps mortally dangerous garbage. On the contrary, nuclear waste is often shipped for recycling from other countries to the United States, the United Kingdom, France, or Russia. It is shipped all over the United States on the highways and by rail. The containers used are accident-proof; successfully so until now; the difficulty is at the destination..
Most nuclear waste is kept where it was generated or "temporarily" stored somewhere else, waiting for somebody to figure out what to do with it. This is a considerable problem. In Scientific American, June, 1996, Chris G. Whipple wrote: "In the half century of the nuclear age, the U.S. has accumulated some 30,000 metric tons of spent fuel rods from power reactors and another 380,000 cubic meters of high-level radioactive waste, a by-product of producing plutonium for nuclear weapons. None of these materials have found anything more than interim accommodation, despite decades of study and expenditures in the billions of dollars on research, development and storage." That statement was written in 1996. In 2009, only the numbers have changed.
"Currently, only temporary storage areas exist for the disposal of radioactive waste. The U.S. government is working to devise a plan for the safe storage and permanent disposal of nuclear wastes." That statement was written in Environmental News Online in 1999. Ten years later it is still true.
In a September 5, 2001 public hearing of the U.S. Department of Energy, Governor Guinn of Nevada, furious about the U. S. Government's desire to make Yucca Mountain a depository for enormous quantities of nuclear waste, declared the scientific evidence was not complete, yet the DOE had called this meeting to gather public comment on that evidence "prematurely" and over "our reasonable and faithful objections." The Governor remarked that United States Government agencies denied "until just a few years ago" the illness and death their atomic folly caused to thousands of Nevada and Utah citizens. Nevada, it seems, did not want "the most deadly substance on earth" to be buried in the Yucca Mountain site, which would happen, said the Governor, "if the DOE has its way."
In 2003, President Bush signed a joint resolution into law, officially designating Yucca Mountain as the nation's nuclear waste repository site. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) identified 293 technical issues DOE must solve before submitting the license application. The State of Nevada filed major lawsuits against the plan.
On April 6, 2009 the New York Times published an article with dateline March 31, 2009 entitled: "Yucca Mountain Plan for Nuclear Waste Dies."
The people who invented the nuclear power plant for generation of electricity didn't plan for it to be mortally dangerous. They thought it was a pretty good idea and would solve many problems. Unfortunately, it has solved few problems and created new, threatening ones. The response of official people to these problems is not encouraging.
Scientists that prepare reports that mention unusual levels of fatalities, cancers, birth defects, fetal death, anomalous births of farm animals, and so forth, find themselves marginalized, maybe out of a job, their reputations damaged, no funding for their research. Government people and the people in the "nuclear power" business like reports that explain that the danger is minimal or that it does not exist.
For many years U. S. government people and business people (and some science people; for example Dr. Teller) suppressed information contained in their own reports of studies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[4]
They also lied about the harm from exposure to radiation suffered by American servicemen sent into Nagasaki in September, 1945.[5]
They said, continued to say, insisted, that the exposure of 45,000 servicemen ordered to the 1946 "Operation Crossroads" atomic bomb tests in the Marshall Islands was within "allowable limits", and steadfastly refused for many years to admit that the multiple grave ailments many of these men suffered came from that exposure. The servicemen were a few miles from the explosions, were splashed with water from them, could see the bones in their hands when they covered their eyes, were irradiated. Were moved up to where the blasts had occurred. The government's people refused them treatment, but it's a dead issue now, because most of the people affected are dead.[6]
More than 700 nuclear bombs have been tested by the United States since World War II.[7] At least 317 of these were atmospheric tests, 208 of which were in the continental United States.[8] Government people and their hired help insisted that the fallout from these artifacts did not harm the people that it is alleged to have harmed, cause the leukemia, the cancers that it seems to have caused, produce the birth defects and fetal deaths that it is reputed to have produced, create in livestock the anomalous births and strange maladies that it is claimed to have created. Recently they have relented a little on this issue.
In the 1950s, U. S. Army people ordered thousands of their soldiers ever closer to atmospheric nuclear explosions. At first they were placed seven miles from ground zero, then four, then two miles from ground zero. They were ordered to move toward the blast center several hours, two hours, one hour, even immediately after detonation--just to see what would happen to them.[9] Army and Government people refused to admit radiation was the cause of many of these soldiers' multiple grave ailments--radiation that army people had sent the soldiers to absorb!
Their faithful servants were denied both help and comfort.
"People." Not "the Government," not "the Army," not "the Atomic Energy Commission," not "Business." People do this, make these decisions, make these statements, write these letters; people, male and female human beings, mostly male, not some abstract metonymy like "the Government," "the Army," "the VA," "the AEC," "business," etc. They do it because they are told to, or because to do otherwise would be job-threatening, or because it's their duty. Like Eichman. Call them eichmen (occasionally eichwomen). Or because they believe in a "greater good."
Maybe some of them believe what they say.
What's to be done? A few suggestions for people who cause things to be done in the U. S., Russia, Britain, India, China, Japan, Pakistan, Israel, France, Brazil, :Korea, and so on:
Admit the danger.
Stop using fissionable material in large quantities for anything whatever. This is not a frivolous suggestion. Besides the emissions of radiation and besides the danger of meltdowns, nuclear waste is making more and more pieces of the earth irreversibly unsuitable for living creatures. Having proved yourselves unable to solve this problem, you should stop these dangerous activities.
Develop practical fusion technology and find out how to use it to make electricity without hazardous waste--with or without a steam engine.
Develop practical alternate methods that do not use nuclear fission or fusion.
Don't make new kinds of nuclear weapons.
Don't make old kinds of nuclear weapons.
Don't claim that Uranium 238 doesn't do any harm, and stop calling it "depleted uranium" when it's used to make shells, bullets and armor, or made into commercial products. It is uranium. When uranium dust (an inevitable product of the military use of U-238) gets into the human body it makes the body sick. To say that Uranium 238 emits very low levels of gamma radiation is correct; to say this makes it innocuous is disinformation. It is poisonous--a question of biochemistry, not nuclear physics. And as for radiation, once inside the body, the alpha and beta radiation (which, it is quite true, will not pass through paper) have no shield, for they are right there with the cells. There are numerous sources for this information, by both science professionals and journalists; for example, the presentation by Doug Rokke, PhD at the UN-UNESCO International Conference, Athens, May 24-25, 2001, and Dr. Helen Caldicott's article on "Medical Consequences of Depleted Uranium.")
Take proper care of the people your folly has made sick, and compensate the survivors of the dead; do not say that what made them sick was something else, and that you aren't responsible for their problems. And don't put people into this kind of danger. For more than sixty years you have sent your soldiers into places full of radiation and poisonous materials; most recently, because you use uranium to make bullets, shells, and armor that vaporize into poisonous dust, full of U-238.
Don't use cheerful slang for the things made to kill people, things that contaminate earth, sky, and sea. "Nuke," "Boomer," "Star wars," "Bunker-buster," and so on.
Be trustworthy. If you would become trustworthy, after a while you could be trusted and respected without suspension of disbelief. Wouldn't you like that?
[1] Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon with Robert Alvarez and Eleanor Waters, , Killing our Own--the Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation, Chapters 13 and 14 (Published in 1998 as a Delta Book by Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, New York, N.Y. 10017. (The entire book can be downloaded in various formats.)
[2] Ibid.., page 162
[3] Ibid.. Page 139
[4] Ibid.. Chapters 4, 5
[5] Ibid., Chapter 1
[6] Ibid., Chapter 2
[7] Ibid.. p. 7 (Introduction by Dr. Benjamin Spock)
[8] Gallery of U. S. Nuclear Tests: http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/index.html , last updated 6 August, 2001
[9] Ibid., Chapter 3
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AP Google
July 22, 2009
AP Interview: NRC to press ahead with Yucca review
By H. Josef Hebert
WASHINGTON — The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will press ahead with its review of a license for a nuclear waste dump in Nevada, even as the Obama administration has made clear it is abandoning the project, the commission's chairman said Tuesday.
Even so, NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko acknowledged in an interview with The Associated Press that the agency's ability to work on the license application for the Yucca Mountain project could be jeopardized by future budget cuts.
"Right now we have funding for one year at a time. ... Going forward, we'll see what kind of work we'll be able to do with the budget that we get," said Jaczko during a 40-minute interview at NRC headquarters in Rockville, Md., just outside Washington.
Ironically, Jaczko, who was named the commission's chairman in May after four years at the NRC, previously was the science adviser to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada. For years Reid has vowed to kill the proposed Yucca waste dump, which has been the focus of intense controversy in his state for two decades.
While on Reid's staff, Jaczko helped the senator frame arguments against the Yucca dump 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. And even now, Reid has said he wants to halt funding for even the license review.
Jaczko said because of the ongoing NRC review he could not discuss in detail the Yucca license application submitted last year by the Bush administration.
But Jaczko said he's convinced the radioactive waste — actually used reactor fuel — that would go to Yucca Mountain can be maintained safely and securely for decades at commercial power plants in 31 states. The waste could either be submerged in spent-fuel pools or in steel and concrete casks for longer onsite storage.
"When we look at the risks at any nuclear plant, spent fuel isn't the most significant risk that we have," said Jaczko. He cited an NRC study that concluded the safety risks posed by a reactor, although extremely low, is a million times greater than the risks posed by keeping the reactor waste at a power plant.
On other subjects, Jaczko said he wants to reinforce the need to maintain a "safety culture" at the agency and the nuclear industry. He acknowledged some concern about the work load facing the NRC as it considered applications for new reactors, relicensing of existing nuclear power plants and assured the public that plants are being operated safely.
"We've got a lot of things on our plate, making sure we do a good solid safety review whether its with new reactors, license renewals, (or) nuclear material," he said.
Jaczko said he couldn't say when the NRC will approve its first license for a new reactor, only that it won't be this year. The commission has 18 applications for more than two dozen reactors pending at various stages.
He rejected criticism that the licensing process continues to hinder construction of new nuclear power plants as some Republican lawmakers in Congress have charged.
"This is not a simple machine we're building," Jaczko said, referring to approval for a new reactor. "It's not Lincoln Logs that we're dealing with here. We're dealing with a complicated machine."
The five-member commission is down to three members including the chairman. Obama has yet to nominated anyone to fill the two vacancies, but Jaczko said that doesn't bother him for the time being.
Meanwhile, he's settling into the chairman's office at the NRC headquarters — a high-rise building overlooking a busy commercial thoroughfare in suburban Maryland. The office seems Spartan, a bookcase holds loose-leaf binders filled with regulations and other documents, some family and other personal photographs. A bicycle stands in one corner. Diplomas from two universities hang on the wall — a bachelor's in physics and philosophy from Cornell and a doctorate in physics from the University of Wisconsin.
"I've moved in," he reassures a visitor. "I'm just a minimalist when it comes to decorations." About the bike in the corner, Jaczko says he rides it several times a week to work from his home in downtown Washington, 20 miles away. At other times he uses the public Metro. There's a station across the street.
--Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
July 22, 2009
Senator offers Yucca proposal
Amendment to defense bill calls for consideration
By Keith Rogers
Las Vegas Review-Journal
A Republican senator isn't giving up hope that highly radioactive military waste will someday be disposed inside Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
But a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Tuesday such hopes have risen before only to be dashed.
"This isn't the first time Republicans have offered an amendment like this. They're trying to breathe life back into the project," said Reid's spokesman Jon Summers.
An amendment by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., for possible inclusion in the 2010 defense authorization bill, calls for "consideration of Yucca Mountain" for disposing the Defense Department's spent nuclear fuel, special nuclear materials "and other waste arising from the production, storage or maintenance of nuclear weapons" including nuclear weapons components.
Summers noted that similar measures have been proposed in recent energy and climate bills but were never voted on.
"President Obama terminated the project and Senator Reid will continue to leverage his position as Senate majority leader to prevent Yucca supporters from turning Nevada into the nation's nuclear dumping ground," Summers said.
Nevertheless, the NRC is continuing to review the license application that the Department of Energy submitted last year near the end of the Bush administration for constructing a repository at Yucca Mountain.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu wants to gather information from the license review process as a rehearsal for future reviews of disposal sites other than Yucca Mountain. This, Summers noted, is being done while Chu appoints a blue ribbon panel to explore other options for dealing with used fuel from civilian and military nuclear reactors.
Eventually the Yucca Mountain license application will likely be withdrawn, he said.
"At some point when the blue ribbon commission comes back with its findings then we'll have to go back and revisit the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. Again, that's not something that has to be done immediately either. The dump is dead, period," Summers said.
Contact reporter Keith Rogers at krogers @reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308.
WASHINGTON — The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will press ahead with its review of a license for a nuclear waste repository in Nevada, even as the Obama administration has made clear it is abandoning the project, the commission’s chairman said Tuesday.
Even so, NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko acknowledged in an interview that the agency’s ability to work on the license application for the Yucca Mountain project could be jeopardized by future budget cuts.
“Right now we have funding for one year at a time. ... Going forward, we’ll see what kind of work we’ll be able to do with the budget that we get,” said Jaczko at NRC headquarters in Rockville, Md.
Ironically, Jaczko, who was named the commission’s chairman in May after four years at the NRC, previously was the science adviser to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. For years Reid has vowed to kill the proposed Yucca waste project, which has been the focus of intense controversy in his state for two decades.
While on Reid’s staff, Jaczko helped the senator frame arguments against Yucca Mountain. And even now, Reid has said he wants to halt funding for even the license review.
Jaczko said that because of the ongoing NRC review he could not discuss in detail the Yucca license application submitted last year by the Bush administration.
On Monday, Reid said requesting that the Department of Energy withdraw the license application wasn’t in his immediate plans. “I don’t know why we need that,” he told the Review-Journal.
Meanwhile, the leader of Nevada’s opposition, Bruce Breslow, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, expressed concern for the drawn-out schedule for discovery in the licensing hearing process. In an e-mail Tuesday, he wrote that the NRC staff wouldn’t be able to issue a safety evaluation report in time to meet federal guidelines.
“Part of it is because they have issued so many requests for information that the Department of Energy has been unable to fully answer,” Breslow said. “DOE, of course, blames some of it on their lack of funding.”
Jaczko said he’s convinced the radioactive waste — actually used reactor fuel — that would go to Yucca Mountain can be maintained safely and securely for decades at commercial power plants in 31 states. The waste could be submerged in spent-fuel pools or in steel and concrete casks for longer on-site storage.
--The Associated Press
--Las Vegas Review-Journal writer Keith Rogers contributed to this report.
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Forbes
July 22, 2009
Out Of The Labs
New Fuel Source: Nuclear Waste?
Jonathan Fahey, 07.22.09, 06:00 AM EDT
Laboratory advances and the demise of Yucca Mountain have rekindled hopes for nuclear reprocessing in the U.S.
There is a tantalizing amount of energy in all that nuclear waste that was slated to sit in Yucca Mountain for eons. Now that it won't be sitting there, some think it should be used.
All of the electricity used by a typical American in a year can be generated by just three inches of one of the 14-foot rods of uranium dioxide used to power nuclear reactors. Yet when that rod, which has the diameter of a Bic pen, is "spent" and set aside as nuclear waste, less than 10% of the energy in the rod has been turned into electricity.
"Waste is just too gross of a term for it," says Sherrell Greene, director of Nuclear Technology at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "I'm trying to get to the 90% of the fuel in that rod."
It's a difficult thing to do, but these days there's much more incentive to try. This spring the Obama administration effectively ended the long-tortured idea of storing the nation's spent nuclear fuel deep under Yucca Mountain in south-central Nevada. At the same time, the nation seems to be inching toward adding new nuclear reactors, creating more waste that we don't know what to do with. (When Yucca Mountain was conceived, it was assumed that the nuclear reactors in the United States would be shut down as they aged and not replaced.)
There is already a method used by countries like France and Japan to reprocess spent nuclear fuel. It has a long list of nasty problems associated with it, however. It's very expensive--the cost of uranium would have to jump by a factor of six to match the price of reprocessed fuel. Though reprocessing nuclear fuel shrinks the amount of waste, it doesn't eliminate it. And, worst of all, it results in the creation of plutonium, which could be used to make nuclear weapons.
For all of these reasons, the U.S., which invented the process as part of its nuclear weapons program in the 1940s and 1950s then pushed it as a recycling method up until the early 1970s, never built a reprocessing plant and has strongly discouraged other nations from doing so.
But the politics of reprocessing have been heating up. Pro-nuclear energy Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., pushed Energy Secretary Steven Chu on the issue in the spring. McCain and others suggest one big reason new nuclear reactors are not being built is the uncertainty around where the spent fuel is going to go.
In June, the House Science and Technology Committee held a hearing asking experts for suggestions about how reprocessing should be approached. Mark Peters, of Argonne National Laboratory, said that because the U.S. never invested in a big, current-generation reprocessing plant, the country has the opportunity to instead design and build a safer system.
The hope is that researchers can develop a method that extracts the usable portion of the spent fuel without isolating the plutonium. Left behind would be very poisonous nuclear waste, but waste that would degrade in tens of years instead of tens of thousands of years, making the need for very long-term storage less acute.
(When nuclear waste includes extremely radioactive elements, it is said to be "self-protecting"--the gamma rays that it emits would cook a person so fast that it's all but impossible to do something nefarious with it. Plutonium on its own, while very dangerous if inhaled, emits comparatively weak alpha radiation, which can be easily shielded.)
At Oak Ridge, Greene's team last year demonstrated a method by which it removed the uranium and the plutonium together. The team processed just 45 pounds of material, and Greene admits that they are far from proving it can be done on an industrial scale. "But it is now an established fact that we know a new set of processes to produce a new fuel without having to produce plutonium," he says. "It may very well be that it doesn't end up being the best method, but if there is one set of processes to do it, there are others. I'm confident we can find a way to do this."
Argonne National Laboratory has developed a method called pyroprocessing that uses molten salt to separate the materials instead of a water-based approach, like the methods used abroad and at Oak Ridge. Some so-called Generation IV nuclear reactors being researched eliminate the need for reprocessing or include pyroprocessing. And some suggest using nuclear fission to help transform nuclear waste into fuel. (See "Reinventing Nuclear Power.")
Many, though, are adamantly opposed to reprocessing. They argue that though some methods, new and old, do reduce the volume of waste, they actually complicate waste disposal by creating different types of radioactive waste. They also remain extraordinarily expensive. And while methods like the one being explored at Oak Ridge do protect the plutonium slightly, it's not nearly enough to eliminate the threat of proliferation.
"It's an oxymoron to talk about proliferation-resistant reprocessing," says Frank von Hippel, a physicist and professor of public and international affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. "Nobody has a good idea at the moment."
Another critic: John Holdren, Obama's science adviser, who argued against nuclear reprocessing in a 2003 paper.
In the meantime, nuclear waste in the U.S. is being stored at nuclear plants. The spent rods are cooled in pools of water for at least a year and then transferred to thick casks of steel and concrete.
No one seems to think this method is ideal, but both proponents and opponents of reprocessing agree that the method is acceptable for the next few decades. Which may give us time to either come up with better reactors or better reprocessing technologies.
"The vision in this country is that as long as we have nukes, we have an assumption that there will always be nuclear waste so we should learn to deal with it," says Oak Ridge's Greene. "Well, maybe there are other nuclear fuel cycles and reactors and processes that can minimize creation of problem."
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Forbes
July 22, 2009
Comments for:
New Fuel Source: Nuclear Waste?
==Posted by IrRaMan | 07/23/09 07:02 AM EDT
The microbes orange-extremophiles,let them to eat waste. I do not know how now the situation with them,but I know that they eat nuclear waste and the government successfully alleged feared releasing them into nature, but the bacteria is already there in nature. Of course you can spend billions on The fuel reprocessing, I seriously doubt such a need at all. And there is clear and low cost technologies to produce electricity and i do not mean wind and solar.
==Posted by kenkok | 07/22/09 12:15 PM EDT
First, sending nuclear waste into space was studied around 1980. This included using the space shuttle and also a rail gun launched system. The work was done for NASA by Battelle. I was a participant in those studies.
Second, nuclear fuel reprocessing with removal of only the fission products and leaving the uranium, plutonium, and other transuranic elements for recycle as fuel in a fast reactor was also studied in the 1970s. The studies showed that such a fuel recycle process would allow use of all the uranium, plutonium, and other fissionable transuranic as fuel materials. The development of fast reactors would also allow use of all of the stockpiles depleted uranium left over from fuel enrichment activities. Utilization of this material would provide electric power to the US for hundreds of years.
The advantages of this kind of fuel cycle include:
1. Potential weapons materials are never seperated since the output of the reprocessing plant is immediately formed into new fuel material and utilized in energy producing reactors.
2. The primary waste stream from such a system consists only of fission products which with a few exceptions have half-lives of less then 100 years. This means that they only have to be isolated for about 1000 years. This isolation can be done in an engineered structure instead of depending on geology.
3. All of the uranium can be utilized rather then just the U235 which is only 0.7 percent of the uranium as it exists in nature.
The fuel reprocessing processes are discussed in some detail in a newly published Nuclear Engineering Handbook by CRC Press.
==Posted by bglick | 07/22/09 11:15 AM EDT
In the late 60s and early 70s a joint venture constructed a nuclear fuels reprocessing facility adjacent to the government's Savannah River Plant. I was part of the team from the University of Georgia and Emory University measuring existing radiation levels in the flood-plain of Lower Three Run Creek in order to establish a baseline against to monitor for or detect radiation leaks from the new facility. When our study and construction were complete, the joint venture applied to the AEC (Atomic Energy Commission) for an operating license. After much delay and negotiating, as I remember it, the AEC finally offered the joint venture, Allied Gulf Nuclear Services, an operating permit costing either 2 or 6 billion dollars. The facility, which would have used the Purex Process to recycle spent fuel rods, never opened. An existing recycling facility in Ohio was shuttered a few years later.
==Posted by Rmoen | 07/22/09 10:36 AM EDT
Carbon-free nuclear power is the ONLY way the world can retire emission-belching coal generating plants and possibly check global warming. It's that simple. Wind and solar power are not up to the job because they require backup for the 60-70% of the time they are not generating electricity. That backup usually is in the form of fossil fuels--coal or natural gas. As mentioned in the article, if we have scientists address the nuclear waste problem, not politicians, nuclear waste can actually become a resource.
Yucca Mountain was a political solution to a scientific problem. It does not make sense to ship nuclear waste to Nevada when 96 of the 104 reactors are east of the Rockies. Nor does it make sense to store nuclear waste above the surrounding water table in the most recently formed and changing crust on earth. We should consider expanding the existing WIPP disposal site in New Mexico. It is several thousand feet under the earth in a salt deposit that's had no geological activity for a zillion years (or there abouts).
Robert Moen, www.energyplanUSA.com
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GSN
July 22, 2009
NRC Still Plans to Review Yucca Nuclear Waste Site Application
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission plans to review a license authorizing establishment of a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, despite the Obama administration's pledge to kill the project, the Associated Press reported yesterday (see GSN, May 15).
Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko said that money for the license review might not be available in later budgets.
"Right now we have funding for one year at at time. ...Going forward, we'll see what kind of work we'll be able to do with the budget that we get," said Jaczko, former science adviser to Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.), a vehement opponent of the Yucca plan.
Jaczko said it would not be a great cause for concern if nuclear power plants end up having to hold onto the spent reactor fuel that would otherwise be shipped to Yucca Mountain. The plants, which occupy 31 states, could safely store the fuel for decades in secure pools or steel and concrete casks, he added.
"When we look at the risks at any nuclear power plant, spent fuel isn't the most significant risk that we have," he said, noting a study by the commission that found the reactors at a plant pose a small but far larger danger than storage of spent fuel (Josef Hebert, Associated Press/Google News, July 21).
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Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
July 21, 2009
Ginna builds crypt for nuclear waste
Matthew Daneman
Since it first began producing electricity in late 1969, the Robert E. Ginna nuclear power plant has put spent fuel rods — 12-foot long, finger-thick containers of uranium dioxide pellets — into a large, deep pool of water inside the plant.
By later this year, that pool will be full.
So the plant’s owner, Constellation Energy Group, is spending $70 million to build a crypt — a large concrete bunker of a building, with walls thick enough to withstand a passenger jet crashing into it — to hold giant lead-lined barrels filled with that radioactive waste.
Such “dry cask” storage has been used at U.S. nuclear power plants since the 1980s, with the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s view being that it’s one of two safe methods of storing spent fuel, the other being the pools, said NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan.
Currently, 51 nuclear plants around the country, including the James A. FitzPatrick plant in Oswego County and Indian Point in Westchester County, have dry cask storage facilities, according to the NRC.
The above-ground cask storage area on Ginna’s 426-acre property could be permanent for the thousands of years needed while the radioactive waste decays to harmlessness. Or it could be merely temporary if the federal government ever builds its promised nuclear fuel storage facility planned for Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
Congress in 1982 passed legislation saying the federal government would take ownership of the nuclear fuel at the nation’s nuclear plants by 1998.
“It’s fair to call (the lack of such a repository) disappointing, 11 years later,” Ginna spokesman Dave Joslin said.
The Obama administration has proposed elimination of funding for a Yucca Mountain repository, but the House of Representatives earlier this month voted down such a measure.
Fuel rods are used in reactors as a source of heat, turning water into steam, which then turns turbines that power generators. The rods are removed from a nuclear reactor when they are no longer effective at sustaining a chain reaction. But at that point they still are highly radioactive and give off some heat.
Used fuel rods have to spend at least five years in water before they are cool enough, and their radioactivity has decreased enough, for them to be loaded into casks.
When built, Ginna’s dry cask storage operation will start with a mammoth crane to be put next to the plant on a thick concrete pad. It will take fuel rods from the pool inside the plant and lift them into large, lead-lined canisters. Those canisters, after being emptied of any water and welded shut, will then be lifted by crane to the back of a large truck for the slow, careful drive a couple hundred yards away to the storage area. Each one of those loaded canisters will weigh 110 tons, said Robert J. Beske, director of projects for Constellation.
Construction of the storage area is largely complete. Most work now centers on the area for the crane.
The construction is to be complete by April. Two canisters — each holding clusters of 27 to 32 fuel rods — will be loaded into the crypt in 2010, with four more scheduled to move over in 2012, Beske said. Then the plant plans to move rods over every three to four years.
Currently, the cask storage site has room for 10 canisters, and Constellation likely will put in a facility to hold another 10 in about a decade, Beske said. That would be enough storage capacity to hold all the used fuel rods Ginna likely will generate over its total life span, he said.
mdaneman@democratandchronicle.com
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Heritage Foundation
July 20, 2009
Nuclear Waste: Do Not Rule Out Yucca Mountain Just Yet, Says House of Representatives
by Jack Spencer and Nicolas Loris
Energy Secretary Steven Chu recently announced that he is creating a blue-ribbon commission to study long-term solutions for managing nuclear waste in the U.S. Regrettably, prior to the commission even being formed, both Secretary Chu and President Obama stated that the nuclear materials repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, would not be one of the options considered. By taking what could be a perfectly viable waste disposal option off the table, this decision effectively undermined the credibility of the commission before it was even formed.
Fortunately, on July 8, the House Appropriations Committee sent a $33.3 billion energy and water spending bill to the House floor that required the commission to consider Yucca Mountain. On July 17, the full House voted to pass the bill.
While the bill merely states that the commission examines "all" nuclear waste disposal alternatives,[1] the accompanying Appropriations Committee report made very clear that the commission's legitimacy depended on its consideration specifically of Yucca Mountain.[2] The House Appropriations Committee should be commended for keeping Yucca on the table until the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) reaches a scientific consensus one way or the other, and the full House deserves credit for accepting the committee's recommendation.
The Potential Role of Yucca Mountain
In every scenario, a geologic repository is critical to the long-term success of nuclear power in the United States. The reality is that some of the byproducts of nuclear fission will last a long time, necessitating a place where they can be safely stored. Yucca Mountain could be adequate for that purpose.[3]
The current direct deposit scenario--in which spent fuel will be taken directly from the reactor and placed into storage--means that additional Yucca-like repositories will likely be needed to support a significant expansion of U.S. nuclear power. But other scenarios (including reprocessing and recycling spent fuel) could ensure that Yucca alone would be adequate to store America's nuclear waste indefinitely.
The Role of the Blue-Ribbon Commission
The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 set January 31, 1998, as the deadline for the federal government to begin disposing of used fuel. More than a decade after the deadline, the government has still not settled on a policy for how to do it. Instead, nuclear power plants store their waste safely on site. Resolving this issue once and for all is reason enough to establish a commission.
The commission should first make a technical and scientific conclusion about Yucca Mountain's viability based on the data available. If it determines that Yucca is not technically viable, then it should simply defend that conclusion. However, if the commission concludes that Yucca is viable but is not fit for nuclear waste disposal, then it should put forth a detailed recommendation on how to disengage from the program.
The commission should recommend whether the NRC should continue with its review of the Department of Energy's permit application to build the Yucca repository. The Appropriations Committee report correctly states, "It might well be the case that an alternative to Yucca Mountain better meets the requirements of the future strategy, but the [blue ribbon] review does not have scientific integrity without considering Yucca Mountain."[4]
Most importantly, and perhaps most difficult, is that the commission should remain nonpartisan in making its decision. It should remove all political biases, especially toward Yucca Mountain, focus broadly on sound scientific and technical analysis of nuclear waste storage, and explore all options for bureaucratic changes and waste management responsibility.[5]
Put Up or Pay Up
Having sunk nearly $10 billion into Yucca Mountain, the committee report also correctly states that Yucca is "the most studied geology on the planet."[6] It was the information gathered by this research that allowed progress on the project. So while sunk costs should not be the reason to move forward with Yucca, the project should not be abandoned due simply to political pressure. The reality is that billions of ratepayers' (electricity consumers who use nuclear energy) dollars were spent on a scientifically sound project that is falling victim to politics.
If it finds that the Yucca project is technically sound, yet Washington decides to kill the program, then federal government should return that money to the ratepayers. Any disengagement strategy from Yucca Mountain that is politically motivated should include how to repay ratepayers the billions of dollars in sunk costs that have already been invested in Yucca. It should also include a legal analysis of how its conclusions affect the U.S. government's legal obligations to dispose of America's nuclear waste.
If, however, between the commission's conclusion and the NRC's application review, Yucca is determined to be technically unsound, then the costs should be absorbed by the nuclear industry and ratepayers.
Keeping Options Open
In the end, the future of nuclear energy could turn on the decisions of a handful of Washington politicians and bureaucrats. This fact says more about the dangers of government involvement in the nuclear industry than it does about the viability of any particular project.[7]
That is why, regardless of what the commission determines, the problem of nuclear waste management will never be solved until the government gets out of the nuclear waste business. But until then, the Senate should follow the House's lead and ensure that Secretary Chu's blue-ribbon commission on nuclear waste be compelled to consider all waste disposition alternatives, including Yucca Mountain.
Jack Spencer is Research Fellow in Nuclear Energy and Nicolas D. Loris is a Research Assistant in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
[1]U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Rules, "Text of the Bill as Ordered Reported," p. 34, at http://www.rules.house.gov/111/LegText/
111_energy_txt.pdf (July 17, 2009).
[2]Energy and Water Development Appropriations Bill, 2010, H. Rep. 111-203, 111th Cong., 1st Sess., July 2009, pp. 82-83, at http://www.rules.house
.gov/111/CommJurRpt/111_energywater_rpt.pdf (July 17, 2009).
[3]Jack Spencer and Nicolas Loris, "Yucca Mountain Remains Critical to Spent Nuclear Fuel Management," Heritage Foundation WebMemo No. 2131, May 1, 2008, at http://www.heritage.org/Research/EnergyandEnvironment/
bg2131.cfm.
[4]Ben Geman and Katie Howell, "House Appropriators Burn the Midnight Oil on DOE Spending Bill," Energy & Environment, July 8, 2009 (July 13, 2009).
[5]Jack Spencer, "Secretary Chu's Blue Ribbon Commission on Nuclear Waste," Heritage Foundation WebMemo No. 2383, April 6, 2009, at http://www.heritage.org/Research/EnergyandEnvironment/wm2382.cfm.
[6]Geman and Howell, "House Appropriators Burn the Midnight Oil."
[7]Jack Spencer, "A Free-Market Approach to Managing Used Nuclear Fuel," Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 2149, June 23, 2008, at http://www.heritage.org/Research/EnergyandEnvironment/bg2149.cfm.
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Scientific American
July 20, 2009
Is There a Place for Nuclear Waste?
Yucca Mountain was supposed to be the answer to the U.S.'s nuclear waste problem, but after 22 years and $9 billion, that vision is dead. Now, some say that doing nothing in the near term may be the smartest solution
By Matthew L. Wald
Key Concepts:
* The Obama administration has effectively canceled the plan to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.
* Spent fuel will for the foreseeable future continue to be stored on-site at 131 locations around the country.
* The end of Yucca means that all options for waste disposal are now in play, including recycling, use in advanced reactors and burial at other sites.
Two weeks after President Barack Obama pulled the plug on Yucca Mountain, the site near Las Vegas where the federal government has been trying for 22 years to open a repository for nuclear waste, geochemist James L. Conca came to Washington, D.C., with an idea in his pocket.
Conca has been assigned by the state of New Mexico to monitor the environment around a different federal nuclear dump, one used for defense-related plutonium, and where others see problems, he sees opportunity.
The long battles over nuclear waste have produced much study and argument, epic legal wrangling and one mass-produced souvenir: a plastic bag labeled “Permian Age Rock Salt” that holds clear hunks of crystal mined from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant 2,150 feet under the Chihuahuan Desert outside of Carlsbad, N. M. Conca, director of the Carlsbad Environmental Monitoring and Research Center at New Mexico State University, delights in giving away the little bags, telling recipients to hold the crystals up to the sunlight and peer through the translucent salt as if they were candling an egg.
Inside the chunks are little bubbles of water—what geologists call inclusions—that have been trapped for 225 million years, traces of a long-gone sea. They look a bit like bubbles trapped in Jell-O. Inclusions indicate how fast water, the vector for spreading waste, can move through the rock; in this case, Conca says, the timeline is encouraging. The salt naturally creeps in to close any cracks, so the water remains trapped. “Permeability is not just very low but zero,” he says. When it comes to a place to put something that will be hazardous for a million years—the wastes that were to go to Yucca, for example—“you couldn’t engineer something this good,” he observes.
Conca’s position is not shared by the elected leaders of New Mexico—if it were, the arguing would be over by now. But it is an indication that while the problem of nuclear waste remains unsolved, there are a number of reasonable candidate solutions. Some, like Carlsbad, resemble Yucca in kind if not location—find a quiet area and bury the stuff. Others rely on increasingly complex recycling schemes. But until elected officials implement an alternative plan—a process, if Yucca is any guide, that could take decades—the waste will languish at 131 storage sites around the country.
The Collapse
This delay may not be an entirely bad thing. So far, at least, the interim waste being stored on-site at power plants is well inventoried and managed. It does not cascade from storage lagoons, as a billion gallons of toxic coal wastes did from a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant in December 2008. And unlike carbon dioxide, it does not disperse into the atmosphere to be counted in worrisome parts per million, an index of climate sickness akin to the white blood cell count of an infected patient. It does, however, accumulate and linger, in some cases longer than the reactor that produced it. The waste debate has gone on so long that there are now 10 “orphan” sites, radioactive mausoleums where the power plant is gone but the waste remains.
“Waste” might not be quite the right word; technically, the term for the bulk of the material to be buried is “spent nuclear fuel.” The civilian stuff starts out as a fuel assembly—a bundle of thin-walled metal tubes, each filled with ceramic pellets of uranium oxide the size of pencil erasers. In the absence of free neutrons, this uranium is extremely stable. Power plant technicians handle the fresh fuel wearing nothing more than white gloves—and the gloves are for the protection of the fuel, not the workers.
After it arrives on site, the fuel is lowered into the outermost regions of a circular reactor vessel, which is sealed up and run for one to two years. Then the vessel is opened, the innermost, oldest fuel is removed, and the younger fuel moved toward the center. Usually a given fuel assembly will stay in the vessel for three cycles, which can last a total of anywhere from three to six years.
When a fuel assembly comes out, highly radioactive fission products such as strontium 90 and cesium 137 are generating tens of kilowatts of heat. If the assembly were cooled merely by air, the metal surrounding the nuclear material would melt; it might even burn. So the assemblies are kept submerged in a spent-fuel pool, a steel-lined concrete pool with water so clean that a drop of tap water would pollute it. These fission products burn hot but relatively quickly. Their half-life—the time it takes for half the material to transmute into more stable elements and release radiation—is measured in mere years. Heat production falls by 99 percent in the first year. It falls by another factor of five by the time the fuel is five years old and by another 40 percent by year 10.
After a few years the rods no longer need to be stored in water. They are transferred into steel sleeves, then drained, dried, pumped full of an inert gas and sealed. The sleeves are loaded into giant concrete casks and put into on-site storage near the reactor. Inside its concrete-and-steel silo, the fuel produces so little heat that it can be cooled by the natural circulation of air.
The long-term challenge is dealing with the actinides, materials created when uranium absorbs a neutron but refuses to split apart. These elements have half-lives in the hundreds of thousands of years. The Department of Energy originally set out to demonstrate that Yucca was safe for 10,000 years, yet it acknowledged that peak radiation releases would come after about 300,000 years. Opponents seized on that disparity, and in 2004 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that the DOE had to demonstrate that the waste could be stored safely for one million years.
Yucca was never the leading candidate from a scientific point of view. A volcanic structure, it became the leading candidate when it was chosen in 1987 by the best geologists in the U.S. Senate. Before politicians stepped in, aiming to speed up the selection process and also to guarantee that the waste would not go anywhere else, Yucca was on a list of possible locations, along with sites in Texas and Washington State. The DOE and its predecessor agency put these sites on the list for their scientific promise and partly for reasons of convenience—in the case of Yucca Mountain, the federal government already owned the place, and it was adjacent to a nuclear weapons test site.
Yucca fell out of the running for pretty much the same reason: politics. In 1987 the speaker of the House was a Texan, Jim Wright, and so was the vice president, George H. W. Bush. The House majority leader was Tom Foley of Washington State, and Harry Reid was a first-term senator from Nevada. Washington State and Texas dropped off the list. Now Reid is the majority leader, and the president won Nevada’s four electoral votes partly by promising a new look at nuclear waste. The politics of geology has changed.
A purely scientific evaluation of competing geologies might find a better choice. “Salt is nice, in some senses, from a geologic perspective,” says Allison M. Macfarlane, a geochemist and assistant professor of environmental science and policy at George Mason University and a frequently mentioned candidate for a vacant seat on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But if the salt is heated, the watery inclusions mobilize and flow toward the heat, she points out, so burying spent fuel there would require waiting until the hot waste products cool down a bit—somewhere around the second half of this century.
Macfarlane helped to organize a conference called “Toward a Plan B for U.S. High-Level Nuclear Waste Disposal” in July 2007, an event that mostly demonstrated that there was no plan B. The U.S. could find another solution, though, she says, if it used a more open, fair process for choosing sites—in other words, if it took the choice away from the politicians.
Plan B
It was never supposed to come to this. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 specified that utilities had to pay into a government-administered Nuclear Waste Trust Fund a tenth of a cent for every kilowatt-hour of energy their reactors generated. The government, in turn, agreed to find a place to bury the waste. The DOE forced the utilities to sign contracts and promised to begin taking deliveries in January 1998.
Before President Obama submitted his 2010 budget, cutting funding for Yucca Mountain to a perfunctory $197 million, the official opening date was scheduled for 2017. And the department estimated that as of that date, it was liable for damages of $7 billion to the utilities, possibly the world’s largest late fee. The price rises by $500 million every additional year of delay. If the science and engineering can come together, a fix is worth a lot of money.
Another possible solution revisits a decision made over three decades ago. By volume, about 95.6 percent of the spent fuel that comes out of a reactor is the same uranium oxide in the original fuel. The rest of the spent fuel is made of hot fission products (3.4 percent) and long-lived actinides such as plutonium (1 percent). At the start of the nuclear age, the plan was to recycle the uranium and plutonium into new fuel, discarding only the short-lived fission products. In theory, this would reduce the volume of waste by up to 90 percent. But President Gerald Ford banned recycling in 1976, and his successor, President Jimmy Carter, a former officer in the nuclear navy, concurred. The reason they gave was proliferation risk—the plutonium could also be used for bombs, so the reprocessing technology would be risky in Third World hands. (The economics have also been unfavorable.)
With the Ford decision, the U.S. committed itself to an “open” fuel cycle, meaning that the fuel would make a one-way trip—cradle to grave—as opposed to a “closed” cycle, where much of the fuel would have made a second or third pass through the reactor. It also made questions over waste a perennial part of the nuclear conversation. Various proposals have been floated over the years. Some have advocated shooting the stuff into space (a challenge, given its weight and the less-than-perfect success rate of launch vehicles). Others have suggested burying the waste at the borders of geologic plates and letting it slide over the eons back into the earth’s mantle.
Instead it is filling up spent-fuel pools and then being shifted into dry casks, the steel-lined concrete silos. Although dry-cask storage might seem like a precarious and accidental solution, there is much to recommend it. Barring an accident such as dropping the sleeve on the racks of fuel in the pool, not much can go wrong. A terrorist attack could conceivably breach a cask, but the material inside is still a solid and is unlikely to go far. A terrorist group with a few rocket-propelled grenades and the talent to aim them well could find far more devastating targets than dry casks.
Storage space is also not an immediate concern. “There is enough capacity on our existing nuclear plants, if not for the rest of the century, then for a good portion of it,” says Revis James, director of the Energy Technology Assessment Center at the Electric Power Research Institute, a utility consortium based in Palo Alto, Calif. “You could survive with aboveground storage for quite a while.” Moreover, he says, “we’re talking about a volume of waste that in the greater scheme of things is pretty small.” (According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, a 1,000-megawatt reactor produces about 33 tons a year of spent fuel—enough to fill the bed of a large pickup truck.) As we face the threat of global warming, it would be a mistake to dismiss nuclear energy—an energy source that produces no greenhouse gases—on the basis of waste, he argues.
In addition, waste is a changing thing. The longer it is held in interim storage, the more material decays and the easier it is to deal with. While existing federal law sets the capacity of Yucca in terms of tons of waste, the real limit is heat. If the fuel is hot enough and packed closely enough to boil the groundwater, it will create steam that can fracture the rock, increasing the speed with which waste can eventually escape. The older the fuel, the lower the heat output and the smaller the repository required. (Or rather the smaller the number of repositories required—by 2017 the U.S. will already have accumulated far more nuclear waste than Yucca was legally supposed to take.)
As a result, dry-cask storage has shifted from its original role as a short-term solution to a viable medium-term solution. Existing reactors operate under a “waste confidence” doctrine, which says that while there is no repository now, there is “reasonable assurance” that there will be one by 2025. With that position now untenable, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s staff has drafted new language, saying that the waste can be stored in casks for decades at reactors with no environmental effect, until burial is available. The change should make it easier to construct new reactors even in the absence of a long-term plan for the waste they will produce.
Not everyone is so sanguine. Arjun Makhijani, president of the antinuclear group Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, filed dissenting language with the commission earlier this year. He argued that it is irresponsible to assume that acceptable burial sites will one day become available. “A scientific explanation of the term ‘reasonable assurance’ requires either physical proof that such a [long-term storage] facility exists,” he wrote, or firm evidence that one could be built using existing technology. Yet there is no validated model of any facility that proves that the waste is highly likely to stay isolated for hundreds of thousands of years, he says.
Others object to long-term storage on the surface. Certainly the nuclear power industry would like the government to put the waste underground, out of sight and out of mind. Keeping the stuff on the surface also means kicking the ball down the road for future generations. “I think it’s a cop-out,” Macfarlane says “I think we need to work toward a solution.” Surface storage means institutional control, she says: “We have no guarantee what the government is going to be 100 years from now or if there’s going to be one.”
Accelerated Breakdown
There is another alternative: hurrying up the decay chain. Although nuclear recycling facilities of the kind rejected by the U.S. in the 1970s can recycle only the plutonium in spent fuel, plutonium is just one of a dozen or so long-lived actinides. A broader solution is industrial-grade transubstantiation: using a new kind of reactor to break down the actinides [see “Smarter Use of Nuclear Waste,” by William H. Hannum, Gerald E. Marsh and George S. Stanford; Scientific American, December 2005].
General Electric is promoting a “fast reactor” that breaks up actinides with high-energy neutrons—the same subatomic particles that sustain the chain reactions in the current generation of reactors, only moving at a much higher speed. “It reduces volume on the order of 90 percent and cuts the half-life to less than 1,000 years instead of hundreds of thousands of years,” says Lisa Price, GE Hitachi Global’s senior vice president of nuclear fuel. “That can change the characteristics of what the long-term disposal site ultimately has to be.” (The calculation assumes reuse of the recovered uranium, too—something that is very difficult in conventional reactors.)
But this solution requires one new fast reactor for every three or four now running to process the spent fuel, a tough challenge at a time when the industry is having trouble simply resuming construction of the kind of reactor it built 30 years ago. One of the main arguments against such reactors is cost—a fast reactor is cooled by molten sodium rather than water, and the advanced design is estimated to cost anywhere from $1 billion to $2 billion more per reactor than a similarly sized conventional reactor [see “Rethinking Nuclear Fuel Recycling,” by Frank N. von Hippel; Scientific American, May 2008]. Democrats in Congress blocked most funding for fast reactors late in the Bush administration, and President Obama does not favor them.
Finally, Yucca could always come back. “Thirty-nine states have high-level waste—either civilian spent nuclear fuel or Navy spent nuclear fuel or defense program high-level waste,” says Edward F. Sproat III, who was the DOE official in charge of the Yucca project for the last two and a half years of the Bush administration. The waste is “all destined to go to Yucca, and there’s no other place to send it.” He and others argue that President Obama and Senator Reid have the political power to block funding but not to change the 1987 amendment to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act that targets Yucca exclusively. And if Congress debates where else to put it, he says, “everybody knows their state is going to be back in play.”
Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "What Now for Nuclear Waste?"
--Matthew L. Wald is a reporter for the New York Times, where he has covered energy topics since 1979. His most recent article for Scientific American was "The Power of Renewables" in the March issue.
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Las Vegas SUN
July 19, 2009
Letter from Washington:
Despite Obama’s opposition, Congress tangles over Yucca
By Lisa Mascaro
Washington — President Barack Obama’s plan to terminate the Yucca Mountain project has not stopped pro-dump lawmakers from trying to resurrect the nuclear waste repository north of Las Vegas.
No fewer than six amendments to the House Energy and Water Appropriations bill were offered last week by Republicans to keep Yucca Mountain alive. They sought to restore funding Obama slashed or prevent a shutdown. One Republican measure sought to cut Yucca funding altogether — to force the issue and prove a point that the dump still has support.
None survived.
However, what did remain intact is a single sentence in the accompanying bill report that worries the dump’s foes.
The language attaches a condition to the $5 million Obama is seeking to establish a commission that would look into alternatives to the dump in the desert.
It reads: “The Committee makes the $5 million for the Blue Ribbon Commission available provided that Yucca Mountain is considered in the review.”
The whole point of the commission is to consider alternatives to Yucca Mountain, not to breathe new life into the nuclear waste dump plan.
The commission was the brainchild of Nevada’s senators, Harry Reid and John Ensign, and was meant to answer what comes next after Yucca Mountain is shut down.
Bruce Breslow, executive director of Nevada’s Nuclear Projects Agency, which is fighting the dump, called the report language “a masterful attaching of strings … that would hurt Nevada.”
Breslow thinks the troubling language should give Nevada’s lawmakers pause. But he also expects the line will not survive in the final bill in the Senate.
Nevada’s Democratic lawmakers in the House supported the spending bill, even with the loathsome line.
A spokesman for Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley said the language is nonbinding and likely to be withdrawn. “It’s one last gasp on the part of the people who want nuclear waste to go to Nevada,” the spokesman said.
Democratic Rep. Dina Titus is confident the commission will decide against storing waste in Nevada, her spokesman said. Republican Rep. Dean Heller joined half of his Republican colleagues in voting against the bill.
Under the bill, the Energy Department would receive the $196.8 million Obama requested for the Yucca Mountain project in fiscal 2010 — a minimal amount to allow the licensing process to continue before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Obama has pledged to end Yucca Mountain, but skeptics who oppose the waste repository worry that the administration is playing with fire by providing enough funding to continue the review. Many think the review is proceeding to prevent industry lawsuits.
As the bill heads to the Senate, it offers a reminder of the power the small state of Nevada wields with Reid as the majority leader.
Yucca Mountain was approved in 1987, Reid’s first year in the Senate. As Reid’s profile rose, he engineered budget cuts that have crippled the project. This year is no different.
Yucca’s supporters in Nevada despise Reid for this role. But its opponents rely on Reid’s prowess as their last line of defense.
Although the Senate version allows Obama’s request to proceed, Reid has slashed $24 million from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, limiting its ability to process the Yucca Mountain license. That’s about a 13 percent reduction.
As for the House language insisting that Obama’s new commission include Yucca Mountain, Reid’s office calls it irrelevant.
Even the Nuclear Energy Institute, the main industry lobby, seemed less interested in studying Yucca Mountain than studying something else. “Our greater concern is DOE getting on with the formation … of the panel so the nation can determine the path forward.”
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Tampa Tribune
July 19, 2009
Nuclear - the renewable with power
By Jack Ohanian
Cooler heads are prevailing in the debate about the future of nuclear energy. In energy policy circles, there is a growing sense that the climate challenge has fundamentally improved the prospects for nuclear energy in the United States.
Although no new plants are under construction and insufficient progress has been made on the waste issue, nuclear energy is now part of the dialogue on energy policy. Bill Reilly, chairman emeritus of the World Wildlife Fund and former administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said recently that clean-energy legislation probably will not pass in the Senate without support for nuclear energy.
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee recently approved clean-energy legislation that recognizes the significant role that nuclear energy plays as the nation's single, largest source of low-carbon electricity. The measure also calls for the federal government to fulfill its obligation to manage spent nuclear fuel and high-level nuclear waste.
Although it was difficult to understand the administration's justification for ending the Yucca Mountain project, where nuclear waste was to be disposed, its decision in no way halts the progress of nuclear energy. Within five years, nearly every nuclear plant in this country will have dry-cask storage for spent fuel, enabling utilities to move the spent fuel from storage pools to the concrete-and-steel casks. The casks are within the plants' security perimeter. As an interim solution, the casks are safe, capable of holding the spent fuel for several hundred years if necessary. But a permanent repository needs to be built, at the same time recycling technology is implemented to significantly reduce the volume of waste that needs to go into the repository.
In other words, nuclear energy's challenges remain the same, but climate change concerns have significantly improved its prospects.
Seventeen utilities have filed applications with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build 26 plants, including two north of Crystal River in Levy County. And it is a good thing this is happening because we are going to need more nuclear-generated electricity despite all the conversation you hear about alternative energy taking up the slack and replacing "base-load" power plants.
Although electricity consumption has leveled off as a result of the economic crisis, the need for electricity is expected to rebound after the economy gets back on track. In the future, we will be looking at a different energy market. A decline in electricity reserve margins is likely, and Florida, for example, could become vulnerable to power shortages. In order to avoid that scenario and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, we need to move forward with the construction of nuclear plants, along with solar energy and improvements in energy efficiency.
If we hope to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to acceptable levels, we will need to build 50 to 100 nuclear plants in the United States by midcentury.
Meeting this challenge will require action by Congress on three fronts. First, nuclear energy needs to be included in a renewable energy standard that is part of carbon cap-and-trade legislation.
This standard would require states to obtain 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2021. Not to include nuclear energy - the source of nearly 75 percent of the nation's carbon-free energy - in this standard would be absurd.
Second, increase government loan guarantees to help reduce the cost of interest on private loans for nuclear plant construction.
Seventeen utilities are seeking $122 billion in loan guarantees from the U.S. Department of Energy, but only $18.5 billion is available to build nuclear plants. That is enough for four or five new plants at most.
And third, establish a clean energy bank to provide an assured source of funding for advanced energy technologies, including nuclear energy. The existing loan guarantee program is critically important, but it is too limited in scope. And because loan guarantees are subject to extensions and annual appropriations by Congress, and have been allowed to lapse in the past, they lack the certainty that medium- to long-term debt financing requires. A clean energy bank, on the other hand, would facilitate the flow of private capital into nuclear projects that are on the drawing board today.
There is no other sustainable option for reducing the risk of climate change. We have the technology, the know-how and the ingenuity. What we need is the political will to make sure nuclear energy plays a central role in the battle against global warming.
Jack Ohanian is professor emeritus of nuclear and radiological engineering at the University of Florida.
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Nevada Appeal
July 18, 2009
Past Pages
By Sue Ballew
20 Years Ago
Yucca Mountain is not suited to house the nuclear waste dump. According to Nuclear Regulator Commission scientists there is a potential of volcanic activity.
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Pahrump Valley Times
July 18, 2009
Back Then
20 years ago
With evidence that "recent" volcanic activity had taken place in the general area, Sen. Harry Reid announced that the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository project "is dead."
Geologist John Trapp reported that, "strictly on the volcano issues," Yucca Mountain would have a hard time gaining a license.
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Congresswoman Shelley Berkley
July 17, 2009
Berkley Statement on Yucca Mountain and Nuclear Waste Liability Costs
(July 16, 2009 -- Washington, D.C.) Congresswoman Shelley Berkley today released the following statement in response to a House Budget Committee hearing on the liability to taxpayers from America’s high-level nuclear waste program, including the failed Yucca Mountain dump.
“By refusing to end its quest for Yucca Mountain, the nuclear industry is forcing Americans to pay twice for managing its radioactive garbage. Ratepayers are funding work on this failed $100 billion dinosaur in the Nevada desert and taxpayers are footing the bill to keep current waste in on-site storage.
“Waste from reactors can be safely stored in dry-cask storage at current locations for the next 100 years. Meanwhile the nuclear industry continues to press lawsuits seeking to collect billions in damages from taxpayers via the U.S. Treasury.
“Ending Yucca Mountain now will allow us to begin addressing this liability merry-go-round, including the settlement of existing breach of contract suits.
“President Obama has pledged to form a blue ribbon panel that will examine real solutions to the issue of safely managing nuclear waste. The nuclear industry and its supporters should embrace this new path forward and stop blocking an end to more wasteful spending on efforts to turn Nevada into a radioactive garbage dump.”
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AP Google
July 17, 2009
Panel gives huge boost to high-speed rail projects
By Andrew Taylor
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama's high-speed rail initiative would get an enormous boost under a spending bill that a House committee approved Friday.
Obama sought $1 billion for construction of a high-speed system and other intercity rail lines, which would come on top of $8 billion provided in the economic stimulus bill in February.
The House Appropriations Committee decided to provide $4 billion, part of a $123 billion measure covering transportation and housing programs.
Rep. John Olver, D-Mass., said the earlier money had generated about $70 billion in grant requests for high-speed rail projects.
Democrats turned back a GOP effort to take $3 billion of the rail money and deposit it in the Highway Trust Fund, which is expected to go broke next month.
The measure also gives the money-losing Amtrak passenger railroad a $1.5 billion subsidy.
The troubled rail system in the nation's capital would receive $150 million to make repairs and replace rail cars. The system has long-overdue maintenance needs and is struggling to recover after a crash that killed nine people.
The measure also would increase spending by more than 40 percent on a much-criticized program that subsidizes rural air travel. The $175 million for the Essential Air Service would help entice small airlines to fly unprofitable routes; the flights are often nearly empty.
Housing programs would also receive a generous boost, including $27 billion for the Section 8 program to finance housing vouchers for 3.4 million people. That's a 10 percent increase.
The free-spending culture of the committee was on display as well.
Rep. Tom Latham, R-Iowa, identified almost $800 million worth of budget savings by lowering subsidies in the housing program that guarantees reverse mortgages for older people. Latham proposed slightly lowering the amounts of the federally insured mortgages to eliminate the need for the subsidies.
Democrats embraced the idea. But rather than returning the savings to taxpayers, they instead used the money to add to the Section 8 program.
The panel then approved a huge measure covering labor, health and education programs. The $730.5 billion measure combines $163.4 billion in discretionary spending — the amount over which the panel has direct control — with $567 billion for federal benefit programs. Those mainly are Medicare and Medicaid.
The measure would provide an $11.2 billion, or 7 percent, increase for discretionary programs such as federal grants to school districts, health research, community health centers, substance abuse programs and heating subsidies for the poor.
There would be a $200 increase so the maximum Pell Grant would rise to $5,550.
In the full House, lawmakers on a 320-97 vote passed a $33.3 billion measure covering energy programs and water projects. The measure fulfills a campaign promise by Obama to close the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste facility in Nevada, which was 25 years and $13.5 billion in the making.
But it would leave the country without a long-term solution for storing highly radioactive waste from nuclear power plants.
That bipartisan measure has money for everything from clean energy research to restoring oyster beds in the Chesapeake Bay.
Unlike virtually every other spending bill moving through Congress for the upcoming budget year that begins Oct. 1, the measure essentially freezes spending for the programs covered by it. Most of the other spending bills contain spending increases far exceeding inflation.
--On the Net:
House Appropriations Committee:
http://appropriations.house.gov/
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State of Nevada
Agency for Nuclear Projects
www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/
nwpo@nuc.state.nv.us
775-687-3744
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