Yucca Mountain News Clips - Friday, September 4, 2009

Yucca Mountain News Clips
Friday, September 4, 2009
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Ely Daily Times
September 03, 2009

Solar power plant may fill void of jobs lost at Yucca Mountain

By John G. Edwards
Stephens Media

A German company's plan to build a $1 billion solar thermal power plant in the Amargosa Valley 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas stirred controversy at a meeting Monday night.

Some of the about 70 attendees at a Bureau of Land Management meeting at the Centennial Hills YMCA said they feared the project would deplete underground reservoirs. Many who objected to water consumption plans, however, favor the Amargosa Farm Road Solar Project and want it designed to use less water.

Solar Millennium, the German power plant developer, wants to build a pair of solar power plants with wet cooling, because it is more efficient than dry cooling.

The company proposes to use curved gas panels to focus the heat of the sun. The heat would make steam to spin turbines and generate a total of 484 million watts of electricity, some of which NV Energy is expected to buy.

The project would provide up to 1,600 jobs during construction and 180 permanent maintenance and operation jobs.

Assemblyman Ed Goedhart, R-Amargosa, called the solar power project a good alternative to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal repository, which he opposed.

Water for the solar plant would be diverted from alfalfa farms and would not increase the amount of water pulled from underground reservoirs, Goedhart said.

Goedhart said the level of water in his well wasn't dropping. Goedhart rejected statements to the contrary from Amargosa resident George Tucker, who cited studies.

Judy Bundorf said she worried that drawing water for the power project would affect the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, an uncommon desert oasis where 24 unique plants and animals live, including the pupfish.

Erin DeLee argued that the project could help the economically struggling residents and school children.

"The kids don't have any money," she said. "There's nothing out there for the kids at all."

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UNLV Rebel Yell
September 03, 2009

‘N’ word scare: the role of nuclear energy

by Afan Tarar

Foreign oil dependency leaves U.S. vulnerable

America’s dependence on foreign oil for energy is by far one of its biggest weaknesses.

The U.S. is the world’s largest importer of oil and this dependence does not look to be decreasing anytime soon.

President Barack Obama has decided to tackle the country’s health crisis (an effort I fully support), but I think that energy independence should be another primary issue on his agenda. Green energy and more importantly, nuclear energy, is a cost-effective way for the U.S. to finally gain energy independence.

The U.S. is already trailing the European Union in terms of being energy efficient.

If we hope to remain a world leader in terms of technological innovation, we must be the leader in developing green technologies, as they are the wave of the future.

This will allow us to hold a dominant position when it comes to developing and sharing this technology with the rest of the world.

The green movement will create jobs for Americans, as new technologies will require more research and development, along with more people who will set up, install and educate.

Economic prosperity isn’t the only reason we must gain energy independence. The most important reason is national security.

Many of my Republican peers promote digging in states like Alaska and using domestic oil, but I think we need to do our best to get rid of oil altogether. And there is no way that we can do this without going nuclear.

Nuclear energy can save us from unwillingly relying on unfriendly foreign nations and what’s better is that green energy can pay for itself in the long run.

The start-up costs will be high, as they are with any new technology, but ultimately the progress will benefit the environment as well as our economy.

The only problem nuclear energy presents is the issue of storage, which is exactly why the government must get involved — to a degree — and provide monetary assistance to research and development programs, which focus on safe storage and decreasing nuclear waste.

I know there are many who vehemently oppose using places like Yucca Mountain as storage sites for nuclear waste, but merely opposing the idea without providing alternatives does not help.

Americans are too afraid of the word “nuclear.” They need to embrace it as one of the most viable and practical alternatives to oil.

I know that many of you are thinking that using wind turbines, dams and hydrogen fuel cells are alternatives to using nuclear fuel. Wind energy is definitely a good idea, but its range and scope is limited and it’s the same case with dams. Those two alone cannot possibly power the country.

As far as hydrogen fuel cells are concerned, many people don’t realize something about this miracle cure: You need to use a lot of energy to make one of them. Also, one of the best ways to make a hydrogen fuel cell is through nuclear power.

The government should promote the green energy industry by creating more incentives and pushing for energy reform.

I know the Obama administration is entangled in the health care debate and the last thing they need on their plates is another controversial issue, but energy reform is absolutely crucial and the government needs to deal with this concern sooner rather than later.

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Law.com
September 03, 2009

Commentary: Federal Shift on Nuclear Waste Leaves Utilities With No Clear Direction

Christopher F. Tierney and Patrick M. Jensen

On the eve of what many in the commercial power industry are calling a "nuclear renaissance," commercial nuclear power plants still face uncertainty from the U.S. Department of Energy as to what individual nuclear utilities are to do with their spent (or used) nuclear fuel. Having already missed its own legislatively mandated deadline to begin acceptance and long-term storage of SNF, the federal government recently caused further confusion when it announced that it will pursue alternatives to geologic storage, including reprocessing (or recycling) of SNF.

This ongoing lack of guidance or action on the part of the federal government continues to require commercial nuclear power plant owners across the country to build facilities to store SNF on their plant sites. In addition to having to bear the significant costs of onsite storage, the absence of a national strategy for the ultimate disposition of SNF has hindered utilities’ progress toward developing a new generation of nuclear plants. Of course, this uncertainty complicates decision-making at a time when demand for abundant, emission-free, competitively priced energy has become, for many, an urgent national concern.

During the 1960s and ‘70s, most commercial nuclear power plants in the United States were designed with the expectation that SNF would be reprocessed, thereby enabling most of it to be reinserted into the reactor core to generate additional electricity. However, due to concerns related to the production of weapons-grade nuclear material as a by-product of reprocessing and proliferation, President Jimmy Carter prohibited reprocessing more than 30 years ago. By the time President Ronald Reagan reversed that decision, the reprocessing option was all but dead in the U.S.

As a result, the DOE -- as mandated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1982 (pdf) -- entered into a standard contract with plant owners by which they would pay the DOE one mil (or one-tenth of a cent for each kilowatt-hour of electricity generated) in return for a guarantee that the government would begin collecting SNF from nuclear power plants by January 1998 and assume full responsibility for its disposition.

The 1998 deadline came and went with the DOE making little progress on licensing and constructing the necessary facilities for handling and storing SNF. In fact, it was only last year -- nearly 10 years after the pick-up deadline -- that the DOE filed an application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to seek design approval for an SNF national repository sited at Yucca Mountain, Nev.

In the meantime, individual nuclear plants had no choice but to implement their own solutions for safely storing SNF. Many expanded the storage capacity of the pools of water originally designed to store relatively small amounts of SNF while it "cooled" from use in the reactor over several years before the SNF was taken away for reprocessing. While the expansion of these pools was a short-term solution for many, it became clear that the DOE was not going to be able to implement a plan to accept SNF before the pools reached the limits of expansion.

The growing need for a longer-term solution led many nuclear power generators to adopt dry-storage technology, whereby SNF could be removed from the pools after the cooling period and stored in heavily shielded vaults or casks that would be kept in high-security facilities on-site. These facilities are commonly known as independent spent fuel storage installations, or ISFSIs. Implementation of dry storage ISFSIs first began in the late 1990s, but is now a growing standard in the nuclear power industry. After all, commercial nuclear plant owners had to develop a solution to the SNF problem on their own or shut down their plants. The billions of dollars in lost revenue and/or increased costs to replace that capacity made the decision relatively obvious -- build on-site dry storage.

That is not to say implementing dry storage is inexpensive. The Nuclear Energy Institute estimates that it can cost between $10 million and $20 million to build an ISFSI and make the associated plant modifications necessary for the dry storage process, with an additional $5 million to $7 million needed annually to operate and store the SNF that is continuously generated. As of November 2008, the NRC reports that 50 plants have built onsite ISFSIs to store their SNF until the DOE comes to take it away. Dry storage alone has cost the industry an estimated $2.5 billion. But the nuclear power industry has not been sitting on the sidelines watching these costs escalate. Instead, many have pursued damage claims in court against the DOE for its nonperformance, with about 60 active cases to date.

These court cases do not appear to be going away any time soon. The courts have ruled that DOE, because of its delay, has partially breached its contracts with nuclear plant operators and that DOE remains liable to take the SNF. Thus, utilities are limited to seeking damages that have already been incurred, up through the date of trial. Damages going forward -- the amount of which being uncertain because of the unknown timing of DOE’s future performance -- may be pursued in a subsequent round of litigation.

While the litigation is very time-consuming and expensive, the DOE has not been particularly eager to settle these cases and has enforced strict terms. In fact, only a handful of utilities have reached settlement agreements with the DOE and those that have are often motivated simply by the time value of money (i.e., the litigation track is lengthy and, so far, utilities have not been successful in arguing legal entitlement to financing costs associated with the nominal damages incurred).

While nuclear plant owners want to be reimbursed by DOE for costs to store SNF on-site, their primary objective remains for the DOE to begin removing it from their plant sites. Despite the fact that the license application for the Yucca Mountain repository has finally been filed, President Barack Obama eliminated all DOE funding for the ongoing development of the program except to support the license application process. Meanwhile, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu is looking for alternatives to storing SNF in a national repository, a departure from the plan that has been in place for over the past two decades. Whether this means a return to the reprocessing approach to nuclear waste has yet to be determined.

What is certain is that progress toward Yucca Mountain is floundering at best. While the current administration says it hopes to gain valuable insight into the technological possibilities for long-term storage as part of the NRC license application process, there may be more practical concerns in play. For example, if the administration were to also effectively terminate the NRC licensing process, the dozens of partial breach utility damage claims may quickly evolve to become total breach claims. Under this scenario, the federal government may become liable today for past damages, projected future damages, and/or returning the tens of billions of dollars in fees that the utilities have been paying to DOE since 1983.

It appears for now that the DOE is content to modestly fund the Yucca Mountain application process and simultaneously deal with the various plaintiff nuclear plant owners incrementally in court while it explores other alternatives for handling SNF. But this approach, with the burden it places on utilities, has not gone without notice in Congress. Some are calling on the DOE to refund the fees it has collected under the standard contracts. Others are pushing for continued development of Yucca Mountain.

So where does this leave the commercial nuclear power industry, including both existing plants and those yet to be built? Until further direction is provided by the DOE, the most practical solution is to continue to build and expand on-site ISFSIs with an aim to track and document any and all associated costs in preparation for recovering those costs in litigation. The more unified the industry is in pursuing reimbursement of those costs through a now well-established litigation path, the more likely DOE will finally act or provide clear direction. With this new direction, stakeholders involved in new nuclear plant development will be less encumbered and, hopefully, a settlement structure and process will emerge that will obviate the need for the significant expense and distraction of continued litigation.

Christopher F. Tierney is vice president and treasurer of The Kenrich Group. Patrick M. Jensen is a managing consultant of The Kenrich Group. Both are based in Washington, D.C. Their consulting work has focused on financial, accounting, economic and damages matters in areas including the electric power industry.

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State Journal
September 03, 2009

Attempts to Overturn Nuclear Bans Fail in Six States

West Virginia is not the only state that declined to overturn a ban on nuclear power this year.

Story by Pam Kasey

As the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission considers licensing applications for new nuclear generation in 14 states, attempts to overturn explicit or effective bans failed in six other states in 2009, according to the nonprofit Nuclear Information and Resource Service.

"Things will be even tougher for their state lobbyists in 2010 now that the freeze on Yucca Mountain has taken long-term waste disposal off the table," said NIRS Executive Director Michael Mariotte.

The last new nuclear power generation unit to be ordered in the U.S. was in 1978, just before the partial core meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979.

Since that time, first California and then about a dozen states passed laws that outright or effectively banned new nuclear generation.

West Virginia's law is titled a ban in the state code, but functions as an effective ban -- that is, it sets conditions that could, in theory, be met.

Less difficult conditions in the 1996 Ban on Construction of Nuclear Power Plants, include economic feasibility for ratepayers and compliance with environmental laws.

More difficult is the provision about waste.

The code requires at least 24 months' prior operation of a national facility "which safely, successfully and permanently disposes of any and all radioactive wastes associated with operating any such nuclear power plant, nuclear factory or nuclear electric power generating plant."

That condition has never been met.

And because the federal government withdrew its support for the Yucca Mountain facility earlier this year, there is no process in place for it ever to be met.

Senate Bill 240, introduced in West Virginia's 2009 regular legislative session, aimed to repeal the ban on nuclear generation in the state.

Lead sponsor Sen. Brooks McCabe, D-Kanawha, was unavailable for this story, but co-sponsor Sen. Dan Foster, D-Kanawha, explained his support for the repeal.

"I feel that we have to look at every conceivable alternative of energy generation," Foster said.

"The big problem has been how you dispose of the waste, and the new plants are able to reutilize as fuel much of what used to be considered waste," he said.

"The plants that would be built 10,15, 20 years from now in the state, my guess is that the technology would be vastly different from what it was, and the waste issue would be different. I don't see that there's a need for (a national storage facility) in the future."

Fellow SB 240 co-sponsor Sen. Don Caruth, R-Mercer, still would like to see a storage solution, "preferably in some place outside of West Virginia."

But he, too, wants an open discussion of all possible energy sources.

"As the cost of energy, the cost of heating your home or the cost of energy as a factor of operating your business, increases, people are going to become, I think, more interested on a personal basis or on a business basis in what we can do to defray those costs," Caruth said.

"So I don't think it's radical for us in the Legislature to begin to attempt to study all of those different possibilities."

Caruth added that he is an advocate for coal and gas and opposes a cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases and other policy measures that would reduce the use of fossil fuels.

Also in the Legislature in 2009, nuclear energy was included in, and then removed from, the state's alternative and renewable energy portfolio standard as an "alternative energy resource."

That standard went into effect July 1 without the inclusion of nuclear energy.

According to the NIRS, attempts to overturn nuclear bans failed in five other states in 2009: Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

But Foster does not see SB 240 as having failed. He said the bill was introduced mainly to provoke committee discussion about nuclear power, and he feels it fulfilled that purpose.

And he said he would support any future attempt to repeal West Virginia's ban.

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
September 03, 2009

Editorial

Shortsighted policy

Looking at alternatives for long-term nuclear waste disposal makes sense. Gutting funding for the Yucca Mountain depository site doesn't.

Late last month, workers at the Kewaunee nuclear power plant in northeastern Wisconsin began storing radioactive waste in casks on the grounds of the reactor, a short distance from the shores of Lake Michigan. They had finally run out of storage space inside the plant.

That's not a reason for panic - a larger Wisconsin nuclear plant, Point Beach, has been storing its spent fuel in dry casks since the late 1990s - but it does serve as a reminder of the lack of a coherent national policy on nuclear power and waste and of the need to develop one.

The nation did have a policy of storing the waste at a site in Nevada, but years of foot-dragging and opposition slowed progress on the Yucca Mountain site. And this year, the Obama administration gutted funding for the project even as a licensing procedure for the waste facility continues to move forward.

That policy could be a mistake if it serves to discourage the use of nuclear power plants, which could serve as a reliable alternative to coal-fired plants that contribute to climate change.

The president has made it clear that the Yucca facility won't happen during his watch. Instead, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said he would appoint a commission to investigate a variety of alternatives for long-term nuclear waste disposal. In the meantime, Chu told Congress this year, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said storing the spent fuel at reactor sites is safe.

The president wants to start over, even after years of debate and even after billions have been spent on developing the Yucca Mountain site. Wisconsin electricity customers alone have paid more than $344 million over the years to the federal government to help pay for the Yucca Mountain project, according to Nuclear Energy Institute data.

As part of its review of options for nuclear waste, the federal Energy Department will explore the possibility of recycling nuclear fuel so it can be reused by nuclear plants, Chu told Congress this year. But even using recycled nuclear fuel still will result in some waste that will have to be put somewhere. And the technology could take decades to develop. It seems that a long-term permanent storage facility still will be needed.

Investigating alternatives for long-term nuclear waste disposal makes sense, especially as new technologies become available. But removing the Yucca Mountain site from the discussion seems shortsighted.

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Idaho Statesman
September 02, 2009

Our View: Reactor research in Idaho could stall

Idaho's stake in the Yucca Mountain debate is obvious - and mounting. Used nuclear reactor fuel remains stored at the Idaho National Laboratory west of Idaho Falls. Much of it comes from the U.S. Navy's nuclear-powered submarines and warships.

While the feds haggle over Yucca Mountain - a proposed nuclear waste burial site in the parched and austere desert about 100 miles from Las Vegas - the Navy waste can continue to come to Idaho. A 1995 agreement with the state of Idaho allows the Navy to make an average of 20 waste shipments to Idaho each year.

The Obama administration plans to scrap Yucca Mountain, after two decades and $7.5 billion of study, without so much as a Plan B. That's unacceptable for Idaho - and not only because of the waste storage questions. Idaho's stake in the Yucca Mountain debate goes beyond even that.

Obama's shortsighted policy also threatens the future of nuclear power research, which has serious implications for Idaho.

In addition to serving as home to nuclear waste from the Navy and other origins, the INL is the Department of Energy's lead lab for nuclear energy research.

While the Obama administration has been slashing funding for Yucca Mountain, the House in July plowed $272.4 million into "Generation IV" reactor research for 2009-10, including $245 million for the Next Generation Nuclear Plant project headquartered at INL. The Senate has approved $143 million for Generation IV, a figure that still exceeds the White House request.

Talk about a disconnect. Congress wants the federal government to perform its appropriate role in research - by helping to create a safe and nimble nuclear reactor design that can be sized to meet industrial needs. But even the Next Generation Nuclear Plant creates waste, pellets of used reactor fuel. This is exactly the kind of high-level waste that would go to a repository such as Yucca Mountain - the dump Obama wants to shut down before it ever opens.

For nuclear power's opponents, waste storage has long been their ace-in-the-hole argument. As long as long-lived waste is scattered in temporary storage all over the country - at federal sites such as INL and commercial reactor sites - they can argue that it is unwise and cost-prohibitive to build new reactors. They can even argue that, as long as the waste storage issue is in limbo, it makes no sense to research promising ideas such as the Next Generation Nuclear Plant.

Ultimately, Idaho stands a reasonably good chance of getting rid of its waste, with or without Yucca Mountain. The agreement that allows continued Navy shipments also requires the Energy Department to clear waste out of Idaho by 2035. If need be, Idaho could go to federal court to force compliance with the agreement.

But Idaho is on no such footing when it advocates for reactor research. This is wholly subject to political whim. By killing Yucca Mountain, Obama could essentially kill reactor research at sites such as INL - to the detriment of the state and the nation.

"Our View" is the editorial position of the Idaho Statesman. It is an unsigned opinion expressing the consensus of the Statesman's editorial board.

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Idaho Statesman
September 02, 2009

Tomorrow's opinions today: Another reason Idaho needs Yucca Mountain to open

Idaho stands a reasonably good chance of getting rid of its nuclear waste, even if the Yucca Mountain repository never opens.

An agreement that allows continued U.S. Navy waste shipments into Idaho also requires the Energy Department to clear waste out of Idaho by 2035. If need be, Idaho could go to federal court to force compliance with the agreement.

But promising nuclear reactor research in Idaho is wholly subject to political whim. By killing Yucca Mountain, President Obama could essentially kill reactor research at sites such as INL — to the detriment of the state and the nation.

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San Antonio Express
September 02, 2009

Nuke waste storage is the snake in the room

Scott Stroud

When visitors traipse through the two nuclear power plants at Bay City, the spent fuel pool is as sure a stop as the Alamo is on the Gray Line Tour.

A ladder emerges, and visitors are encouraged to climb it. And so they ascend, one by one, and peer into a 26 x 52-foot pool.

The pool — less than a third the dimensions of an Olympic-sized swimming pool, although it's deeper — contains used, radioactive uranium rods, stored beneath 20 feet of water. You can't see much from the top of the ladder, but the message is clear enough:

See how small it is?

In doing so, however, visitors peer into one of the deepest issues surrounding nuclear expansion — what to do with material that will stay extremely hazardous, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, for tens of thousands of years.

It's a challenge the plant's operators, and those who want to build two new nuclear plants there, say has been settled to their satisfaction.

“We're in a very good position down there to manage the waste at the site,” David Crane, CEO of NRG Energy, one of the partners in the proposed South Texas Project expansion, said this week.

NRG would continue to store spent fuel in the pool, then convert it to dry storage. That involves encasing it in concrete on-site. Adding two plants would increase the amount stored, but plant officials say they can do it safely.

Federal officials believe underground storage is the best long-term way to handle spent fuel. But a plan to ship it to Yucca Mountain in Nevada has stalled, perhaps because the Senate majority leader is a Nevadan.

So on-site storage is the fallback position. Officials at the South Texas Project and CPS Energy would like to reprocess waste, extracting from it usable fuel to produce more energy. The federal government outlawed that some years ago, partly because reprocessed fuel creates a highly radioactive, sludgelike residue that poses new disposal challenges, but that debate could be revived in the new push toward nuclear.

In any case, Congress essentially promised a storage solution with passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1983 — though a quarter-century of wrangling hasn't produced one yet.

Opponents of the expansion, meanwhile, think spent fuel ought to loom larger in the debate.

“I call nuclear waste ‘the boa constrictor that is sleeping in the corner of the baby's nursery,'” said former City Councilwoman Patti Radle. “You can't believe it is going to stay asleep forever. There is no safe place to permanently store this very toxic waste.”

It's probably worth noting that the snake has been asleep for two decades, apparently well-managed by its handlers. But the city's decision likely won't hinge on spent fuel for other, more political reasons.

First, expansion likely will occur with or without us, so San Antonio walking away won't eradicate the threat. And second, most local officials see cost as a bigger obstacle. They've judged the risk worth taking.

That's a call we might regret if disaster happens. At the moment, however, it doesn't seem destined to blow up the deal.

jstroud@express-news.net

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Business Insider
September 02, 2009

Shaw Group spent $380K lobbying government in 2Q

WASHINGTON (AP) — Engineering and construction contractor Shaw Group Inc. spent $380,000 lobbying in the second quarter on an energy and water spending bill, and more, according to a recent disclosure form.

The Baton Rouge, La.-based company spent $300,000 during the year-ago period for lobbying work, and $330,000 in the first quarter.

Shaw Group lobbied on Yucca Mountain, a proposed site for a nuclear waste repository, clean energy and commercial nuclear power, according to the form filed July 17 with the House clerk's office.

Besides Congress, the company lobbied the Energy Department during the April-June period.

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About
September 01, 2009

Wanted: A Nuclear Waste Solution to Replace Yucca Mountain

By Larry West

President Barack Obama’s decision to abandon the proposal to develop Yucca Mountain as a repository for high-level nuclear waste has left the United States with “status quo” as the only current alternative plan for nuclear-waste storage and disposal.

Essentially, that means the waste has to stay put, right where it was created and is now stored—at more than 100 nuclear reactors nationwide, plus current and former nuclear weapons production facilities and military bases with nuclear-powered ships. That situation is causing concern among many politicians and their constituents as well as officials in the nuclear energy and nuclear weapons industries, according to a report by McClatchy Newspapers.

"We don't want to become a long-term repository without even having a discussion," said Gary Petersen of the Tri-City Industrial Development Council, near Hanford, Wash., in an interview with reporter Les Blumenthal of McClatchy. "All of this waste is supposed to be going to Yucca. Without Yucca, everyone in the weapons complex has a problem."

When Obama pulled the plug on Yucca Mountain back in February—fulfilling a campaign pledge—he promised to set up a federal commission to study the problem and develop a new nuclear-waste plan. So far, that commission has not been appointed.

Here is the problem:

1.There is a lot of radioactive nuclear waste temporarily stored at sites all over the country.

2.Leaving nuclear waste in place and transporting it to some central and supposedly secure location both pose public safety and national security risks.

3.Nuclear waste can remain toxic, and potentially lethal, for 100,000 years or more (roughly equivalent to the length of time between the emergence of modern Homo sapiens and today), and no one knows whether we can safely store radioactive waste for that long.

4.America is not going to stop producing nuclear energy and nuclear weapons; both are considered far too important to our national security.

5.Nobody wants the waste, making nuclear-waste disposal one of the most controversial NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) issues in history.

There are already about 63,000 tons of used radioactive fuel at 104 operating U.S. nuclear power plants; it is currently stored either underwater or in so-called “dry storage.” Waste from nuclear weapons production, dating back to World War II, is an even bigger problem. It is currently stored at 16 federal sites in 13 states, although most of it is at Hanford in Washington state, the Idaho National Laboratory and Savannah River in South Carolina.

Quoting from the McClatchy article:

“At Hanford alone, there are 53 million gallons of highly radioactive liquid waste, 2,100 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and nearly 2,000 capsules containing radioactive cesium and strontium.

“The biggest concern has been the liquid waste, stored in aging and occasionally leaking underground tanks. Current plans call for the waste to be vitrified, or solidified into glass-like logs, and shipped to Yucca Mountain. The logs would be encapsulated in two-foot diameter, 14.5-foot-long stainless steel containers that would weigh about four tons each. The waste treatment plant would generate about 480 glass logs a year and somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 by the time the last of the waste is processed.

“The waste treatment plant is scheduled to start producing glass logs in 2019. Yucca was scheduled to open sometime after 2020.”

Yucca Mountain probably isn’t the answer—it was always more of a political solution than a scientific one—but neither is “business as usual” with no effective backup plan. If Obama wants to eliminate one alternative for handling America’s nuclear waste, then he needs to move aggressively to develop another, more workable solution.

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Tacoma News Tribune
September 01, 2009

Obama’s Plan B for nuke waste: Hanford

Washington doesn’t have the geology to store high-level nuclear wastes. Too much groundwater; too much risk of radioactivity spreading into aquifers and the Columbia River.

Such was the verdict of the scientists and policymakers who rejected Hanford as a nuclear waste dump more than 20 years ago. But President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are fast reversing that verdict.

Their goal is to kill a planned permanent nuclear waste repository in Nevada, not create one in Washington. But it’s the same difference.

Hanford , the nuclear reservation in Eastern Washington, is already saddled with thousands of tons of intensely radioactive reactor-core byproducts. All of it was supposed to be buried in bone-dry caves under Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. Terminate the Yucca Mountain project, and you eliminate what was supposed to be the destination of Washington’s reactor wastes as well as wastes from more than 100 other reactor complexes across the United States.

As McClatchy Newspapers’ Les Blumenthal reported Monday, the Obama administration has no Plan B for Yucca Mountain.

Its “backup plan” consists of appointing a commission to mull things over and propose a new dump location sometime down the road – though the commission would be explicitly forbidden from reconsidering Nevada. No one has been appointed to this commission, but no matter: It’s all about political backside-covering in the first place.

History suggests that the loss of Yucca Mountain will effectively seal Hanford’s fate as a long-term host for deadly waste that has no business being there.

The federal government first started scouting for a disposal site in the 1950s. Hanford’s geology was studied for almost 20 years before it was ruled out. Yucca Mountain has been studied since 1983, at a cost – to electrical ratepayers – of more than $10 billion.

Yucca Mountain is isolated, arid, secure and well above the water table. As a repository, it may be as close to ideal as exists on the planet. If the most promising option in sight can be tossed out so cavalierly, for such transparently political reasons, by an administration that claims to exalt science over politics, there’s no reason to believe the next candidate site would survive either.

In any case, it would probably take another 25 or 30 years to bring a new candidate as far along as Yucca Mountain is now.

And Washington has already been storing the federal government’s reactor wastes for 65 years, since the Manhattan Project first started producing plutonium at Hanford during World War II. That’s more than a quarter of the United States’ entire existence.

Now the Obama administration has chosen to junk decades of geological studies and run away from the whole dilemma of high-level nuclear storage. That means the status quo is, in effect, Plan B. If this political sellout stands, Washington may need a new nickname. How about “The Hottest State in America”?

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The Examiner
September 01, 2009

Will support for Cap-and-Trade energy tax melt away? It's costly, but won't help the environment

Hans Bader

People aren’t willing to pay much to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases to fight global warming, according to a Washington Post-ABC News Poll. 52 percent said they would support a law that “significantly lowered greenhouse gas emissions” — but only if it cost them less than $10 a month. Only 39 percent said they would support such a law if it cost them $25 a month — which is vastly less than it would actually cost.

In the name of cutting greenhouse gases, the House passed a cap-and-trade carbon tax scheme backed by the Obama Administration in June. But the bill won’t cut greenhouse gas emissions much even in the U.S. One reason is that the bill was larded up with corporate welfare. 85 percent of its carbon allowances were given away to special interests free of charge, thanks to lobbying that turned the bill into an orgy of corporate welfare.

The bill also contains environmentally-harmful provisions, such as massive ethanol subsidies, which will result in “damage to water supplies, soil health and air quality.” Ethanol subsidies have resulted in forests being destroyed in the Third World, and caused famines that have killed countless people in the world's poorest countries.

Worse, the cap-and-trade tax will cost much, much more than $25 a month — with politically connected businesses like GE profiting at the expense of the taxpayer, as the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney has chronicled in story after story. Carney calls the bill a “hidden bailout” for GE and other well-connected businesses.

Capping emissions through taxes and regulations isn’t cheap — Obama himself told the San Francisco Chronicle that under his cap-and-trade tax to fight global warming, Americans’ electricity bills would “skyrocket,” and coal power plants that now provide much of the nation’s energy would go “bankrupt.” There’s no free lunch (except for the politically-connected businesses that are backing the bill, and will be able to hike consumer prices as a result).

Under the bill, the average household will pay about $248 more a month, say economists, about ten times more than voters said they were unwilling to pay in the Post-ABC News poll. Electricity bills alone will rise by more than $30 a month, utilities will rise by $69 a month, and other consumer goods will also become more expensive, because energy is part of the cost of almost everything we buy.

Even the researchers backing the bill say it will have a tiny effect on global warming by the year 2050 — “much less than one degree.” But it will cost the economy $7.4 trillion, destroying much of our industrial base.

So it’s all pain and no gain, something reinforced by the bill’s poor drafting and politically-motivated giveaways — and the fact that most greenhouse gas emissions occur outside the U.S. and beyond the reach of U.S. cap-and-trade taxes. In fact, the bill could actually increase pollution by driving smokestack industries overseas to places like India and China, where they would avoid not only costly greenhouse gas regulations, but also American law’s restrictions on traditional pollutants like sulfur dioxide that were restricted because of their dangerousness long before global warming even became an issue. (China has restrictions on auto emissions, but its restrictions on industrial pollution are minimal and poorly unenforced, leading to vast amounts of smog and acid rain).

Meanwhile, the Administration is undermining alternative energy, which doesn’t give off greenhouse gases. Obama is killing a state-of-the-art nuclear waste facility at Yucca Mountain after billions of taxpayer dollars had already been spent preparing it for use. Doing that foolishly puts taxpayers on the hook for up to $100 billion in payments to nuclear power plant owners under government contracts. The killing of the facility will make it more difficult to dispose of nuclear waste from existing power plants, and harder to construct new nuclear power plants to generate badly-needed energy.

The Obama Administration is also doing nothing to use federal law to preempt state and local barriers to alternative energy. Wind and solar power continue to be blocked by people who say “Not in My Backyard.” California’s liberal Senators oppose developing solar power in the barren Mohave Desert, where virtually no one lives, wanting to keep it in its pristine state. But if solar panels can’t be put there, where plants and animals are sparse, where on Earth can they be put? The Kennedy family long blocked a wind power facility near Cape Code, worrying that it would interfere with their view of the oceean.

Rather than doing anything constructive about this, the Obama Administration is opposing preemption that would reduce the arbitrary power and prerogatives of local bureaucrats and trial lawyers. For ideological reasons, it issued an “anti-preemption” rule on May 20 that will undercut federal policies like developing alternative energy. The federal government should be using its power under the Commerce Clause to override parochial regulations that interfere with alternative energy projects and refineries.

One of Obama’s own economic advisers admits that the cap-and-trade energy-rationing scheme backed by the “Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats” would “have a trivially small effect on global warming while imposing substantial costs on all American households. And to get political support in key states, the legislation would abandon the auctioning of permits in favor of giving permits to selected corporations.”

Obama adviser Martin Feldstein notes that “the Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that the resulting increases in consumer prices” from capping the amount of carbon dioxide energy users can emit “would raise the cost of living of a typical household by $1,600 a year,” a figure that “would rise significantly” from year to year.

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TheNewsTribune
August 31, 2009

Lawmakers warn of de facto nuclear dumping

Politics: With facilities already in place, Hanford, others might get waste

Erika Bolstad and Les Blumenthal

WASHINGTON – It is among the most toxic substances on earth: 28,000 metric tons of highly radioactive waste left over from the building of the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal.

And as the administration and the leader of the Senate move to close down a proposed repository for it in Nevada, the Idaho National Laboratory, along with the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, could become the de facto dump sites for years.

After spending $10 billion to $12 billion studying a dump site at Yucca Mountain outside of Las Vegas, President Barack Obama is fulfilling a campaign promise by killing it. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada also stands to benefit as he faces a difficult re-election fight next year.

But local leaders and lawmakers from the sites where the waste is now stored are not happy.

“We’re all concerned,” said Jared Fuhriman, the mayor of Idaho Falls, the largest city near INL. “Where are we going to store the waste that we have? How many millions and millions of dollars has been spent, of taxpayer dollars, and now all the sudden, there doesn’t seem to be any future for it? We’re going to have to store them somewhere.”

Fuhriman was echoed by Gary Petersen of the Tri-City Industrial Development Council, near the Hanford nuclear reservation.

“We don’t want to become a long-term repository without even having a discussion about it,” Petersen said.

Idaho’s governor and congressional delegation have weighed in as well, saying they’ll do whatever is in their power to force the Department of Energy to remove all nuclear waste from the state by a court-approved deadline of 2035.

“Without a permanent location to safely store nuclear waste, the role of nuclear energy as a component in our nation’s energy portfolio will be severely affected,” said Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho.

If Yucca is closed, a search for a new site for a national repository likely would start with the 31 states on the original list of potential locations. In addition to Washington and Idaho, the states in which the possible sites are located include Texas, Georgia, Mississippi and Pennsylvania.

Scrapping Yucca Mountain also could have national security ramifications. The Navy would have no place to permanently store the used reactor fuel that has powered its aircraft carriers and submarines.

“There is a national security dimension to the problem, as an eventual disposal site is absolutely critical to the handling of spent fuel from Defense Department weapons,” said Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Belfair, a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee whose district includes the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, which potentially could become a temporary storage site.

--Les Blumenthal: 202-383-0008, lblumenthal@mcclatchydc.com

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Poder360
August 31, 2009

FPL’s “dark” business

As storage of nuclear waste continues to pose concern across the country, an FPL land use change at Turkey Point raises questions about potential safety and environmental risks

By Siobhan Morrissey

If all goes according to plan, Florida Power & Light later this year will begin building a storage facility for nuclear waste more than two stories above ground at the Turkey Point nuclear power plant. Under the plan, the company would house in dry storage 16 cubic feet of radioactive waste—the equivalent of some 2 million pounds accumulated since the first reactor fired up in 1972.

Plans for the dry cask storage facility have sparked controversy because the project has not been aired at public hearings. Instead, the project was moved along quickly and quietly, with the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) granting certification on May 18, roughly six weeks after receiving FPL’s application and without an opportunity for public input. Without fanfare, the approval slipped the notice of interested parties such as the Sierra Club, the Tropical Audubon Society and Clean Water Action. Miami-Dade County officials and environmentalists maintain the utility company and the regulatory agency did an end run to avoid public scrutiny.

“Yes, absolutely,” the county wanted a public hearing and a chance to review the “unusual use” project, Assistant Miami-Dade County Attorney John McInnis told PODER. “We take the position they had to have the zoning in place before the dry cask storage was approved by DEP.”

Marc LaFerrier, director of the county’s Planning and Zoning Department, spelled out his position in a May 14 letter to Michael Halpin, who oversees DEP’s Siting Coordination Office: “The proposed activity does require permitting and zoning authorization by Miami-Dade County.” Four days later, Halpin disregarded LaFerrier’s concerns and approved certification for the dry storage facility.

“It looks to me as if the local government is definitely being phased out of this,” said Jon Mills, a former Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives who now teaches law at the University of Florida.

Not so, says FPL spokesman Tom Veenstra. The utility is simply following the dictates of the U.S. DEP, he says, explaining, “Whatever the process they have, that is the process we have to follow.” DEP officials maintain they followed Florida law, which in some instances allows projects to go forward without a public hearing.

[Time is of the essence]

The timing of the dry storage certification came just a month before FPL submitted another proposal to double its nuclear capacity, which if approved would make Turkey Point the largest nuclear power plant in the country. In addition to adding two new nuclear reactors to the two already existing at the plant, the plan calls for the possibility of swapping land with Everglades National Park for the purpose of installing transmission lines that would run through the eastern edge of the park and carry 500 kilovolts of power atop 140-foot-tall towers that would be visible to visitors in popular tourist areas such as Shark Valley and Chekika.

Those plans are spelled out in great detail in six binders that when stacked one atop each other measure two feet thick. By comparison, the plan for the dry storage facility arrived at DEP as a two-page letter with two one-page attachments—one a photograph showing an aerial view of the power plant, the other an artist’s rendering of a cylindrical cask containing nuclear waste being deposited into a storage module. Former Turkey Point Vice President William Jefferson mentions in his April 3 letter to DEP that the facility would be built on six acres and 18.3 feet above ground. Other than that, no site plans or details of the paving and draining system were provided for state and county officials to review before signing off on the project.

Jefferson left FPL suddenly in early August “to pursue other opportunities.” But his tenure at FPL was marked by a series of events that brought bad publicity to Turkey Point, including an incident in 2006 in which a disgruntled worker drilled a hole in a pipe at the plant, costing $6 million that the utility sought to collect from consumers. Another employee, David Hoffman, Turkey Point’s former top nuclear operator, allegedly resigned due to unsafe operating conditions at the plant—something FPL vigorously denies. According to The Miami Herald, Hoffman’s complaints about the plant came to light after FPL sued him, demanding the return of a bonus.

[The nuclear storage race]

Currently, FPL places the spent nuclear fuel onsite in wet storage structures that resemble cavernous, stainless-steel-lined swimming pools. But it’s getting crowded in the pools, so the utility is resorting to dry cask storage.

“They’re simply running out of room in the spent fuel pools for the current two [reactor] units,” says Roger Hannah, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “You never want to get below a certain point [of capacity]. You have to start several years in advance.”

It’s a problem nuclear power plants across the country face, notes FPL spokesman Dick Winn. The Department of Energy had planned to create a central repository for the nation’s nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada more than a decade ago, but environmentalists and local residents successfully fought that. Last summer, an application for the Yucca Mountain site was filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), but there is no funding earmarked for the project. Despite this, Hannah remains optimistic: “The NRC still has the expectation that at some point there will be a permanent repository.”

But don’t count on Yucca Mountain being the panacea to end on-site nuclear storage issues, warns Kevin Kamps, a nuclear waste specialist at the Nuclear Information & Resource Service in Washington, D.C. According to an affidavit Kamps provided in 2004 regarding the proposed dry storage facility at the Millstone nuclear plant in Connecticut, Yucca Mountain has a legal capacity of 63,000 metric tons of commercial high-level nuclear waste. At that time, he said, 45,000 metric tons had already been produced in this country and waste was increasing at a rate of 2,000 metric tons a year.

“Thus, even if Yucca were opened in 2010, it would already be full, only the wastes would still have to be transported there,” Kamps stated.

The majority of nuclear power plants nationwide use some sort of dry storage. To date, 55 sites around the country, including FPL’s St. Lucie plant, use dry storage.

[environmental and Safety concerns]

“Due to planned space constraints in the pools, we expect construction on the dry storage facility to take place in 2009 and 2010 with fuel storage beginning in 2011,” Winn told PODER in an email. Dry storage, he says, consists of stainless steel canisters measuring 16 by 6 feet that are then placed horizontally into concrete modules that provide a steel and concrete barrier roughly two to four feet thick.

“The facility is specially designed and tested to meet all NRC design requirements including protection from extreme natural events such as high winds and flooding associated with hurricanes, storm surges, flooding, tornadoes, fires and earthquakes,” Winn wrote. “The facility itself will be heavily secured and include multiple layers of protection, including perimeter fencing, radiation monitoring, a vehicle barrier system, a high-tech perimeter intrusion detection system, continuous surveillance, and regular security patrols.”

In the 20 years that dry storage has been in use in the United States, there has never been a radiation leak, Hannah says. However, environmentalists raise the concern that the potential exists for sabotage or just plain human error.

One such incident occurred at the Prairie Island power plant in Red Wing, Minnesota on May 13, 1995 where a crane that removes the cast from the wet storage facility malfunctioned and was suspended in mid-air for 16 hours in the wet pool.

[Kamps detailed the incident in his affidavit]

“Over 120 tons of metal storage cask and irradiated fuel assemblies dangled precariously above the reactor’s pool... This dangling [crane] risked dropping back into the pool, damaging irradiated fuel stored there, or punching a hole in the pool leading to a loss of coolant accident and potentially catastrophic consequences, such as a major fire amidst the densely packed irradiated fuel in the pool, an accident scenario that could release massive amounts of radioactivity into the environment.”

Some environmentalists, such as Dawn Shirreffs with Clean Water Action, would simply like to get a better explanation from FPL as to how the utility plans to build the dry storage facility. They want assurances that the underground anchoring of the storage module’s 18-foot tall concrete pad will not affect the delicate environment in that area. “There are concerns that if they are putting these [anchors] underground, how they will interfere with the hydrology and the Biscayne aquifer?” Shirreffs asks. “We haven’t had the opportunity to decide how it may or may not affect Biscayne Bay and Biscayne aquifer and the surrounding area.” Among the things Shirreffs is concerned about is whether the anchors might promote saltwater intrusion in the aquifer. The aquifer supplies drinking water for 3 million people, and once the ocean’s saltwater mixes with the aquifer it could take more than a century, if it’s even possible, to fix the problem and make the water drinkable again, she adds.

[Finding a loophole]

But how did FPL manage to avoid a public discussion of the environmental concerns? FPL presented the proposed dry storage facility as an amendment to an existing certificate that DEP issued last October when the utility sought permission to ramp up its power output. In the industry, this is commonly known as “uprating.” FPL plans to begin increasing its power output at Turkey Point by 14 percent as early as 2011.

The certification for the uprating covers an area at the plant that includes the two existing nuclear reactors—Units 3 and 4—not a separate parcel where FPL wants to build the dry storage facility, said FPL’s vice president at the time, William Jefferson. In his April 3 dry storage application to DEP, Jefferson wrote, “The site for the proposed facility is east of and outside of the existing Turkey Point Units 3 and 4 certified boundaries....”

Oddly enough, to support its actions in bypassing a public hearing, DEP points to a Florida law that in part specifically allows for “a land use and zoning determination” if the applicant “proposes to expand the boundaries of the existing site or to add additional offsite associated facilities.”

The big question that remains is why FPL failed to include the proposal for the dry storage when it sought permission to increase its power output.

“There are a lot of questions here that begin with ‘Why did they do this?’” Assistant County Attorney McInnis says with a laugh.

“Essentially, it should have been included in the initial application,” Shirreffs says, noting that it would have been open for public discussion if it had. “Florida Power knew, or should have known, that they were running out of space for their radioactive waste material.”

Indeed the company did, says FPL’s Veenstra. The utility mentioned the need on its website as early as 2006 and even brought it up at various community outreach presentations. But that’s not the same as making it open to public review during the application process.

“If you’re not up front in deciding a nuclear storage facility, that seems to be a problem,” says Mills, who was credited with passing a number of environmental initiatives while serving in Florida’s House of Representatives from 1978-88. “This is an amendment to an expansion, the expansion was of some form or authority already being performed, which is production of energy. But they just amended this to include a totally different function, which is storage. It would seem to me, that is substantially different enough so that local governments would be concerned about it.”

Monica Reimer, an attorney with Earthjustice in Tallahassee, agrees. By filing the paperwork as an amendment six months after the initial certification, FPL was able to take advantage of a 1973 state law. That law, the Power Plant Siting Act (PPSA), streamlines the certification process for large power plants. Rather than require the utility to collect the necessary local and state permits, the law smooths the process by requiring only one license—a certification from DEP. The NRC handles permitting on the federal side. The DEP oversees environmental issues, while the NRC focuses on safety matters. As of early August, FPL had yet to file its dry storage application for Turkey Point with the NRC, Hannah says, although she adds there is no guarantee the agency will hold a public hearing on the matter, either.

Amendments to an existing certification are considered minor matters, not up for public discussion unless challenged by a party that has standing to do so. Radical changes to a certification, however, are considered modifications and would be subject to public review.

The PPSA speeds along the certification process, but it also provides transparency. “It makes it easier for the power company to do this, but at the same time gives the public access,” Reimer says.

Reimer takes issue with FPL’s handling of the matter. “Does this feel like an end run?” she asks. “Yes it does. It doesn’t mean they won’t be able to get away with it. It flies in the face of the Power Plant Siting Act.” She adds, “You don’t come in after you’ve done the whole certification process and say, ‘Oh, and now we have a whole new facility we want to add on.’ As a lawyer, this feels like a fairly major modification to me.”

As a lawyer, Reimer has taken on FPL and won. In 2006 the utility attempted to rezone 90 percent of Glades County to permit the building of coal-fired power plants on agricultural land. “They buried it in a table with 2,000 entries, and put a little ‘y’ for ‘yes,’” she says. “Nobody knew, and when they did, they just said they were redoing the zoning code.” So what happened in Miami doesn’t shock her. “I know how FPL operates,” she says. “FPL speaks and everybody listens. That’s how it works.”

But that’s not how it’s supposed to work, Mills maintains. “There’s a healthy concept of just discussing it and getting it out,” Mills says. “People might feel better about it, rather than finding out about it later and feeling as if it was government trying to sneak something past them. Being open about it would be just the right thing and the right policy.”

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Beaufort Observer
August 31, 2009

A practical approach to alternative energy sources vs. nuclear power

August 30, 2009

The following "Letter to the Editor" and response were taken from the September 2009 edition of "Carolina Country" published by North Carolina Association of Electric Cooperatives, Inc.

Nuclear energy's costs and spent fuel .

In the article on nuclear power [''A Comeback for Nuclear Power", August 2009], there was no discussion about what to do with the nuclear waste or the actual cost to build nuclear power plants. I have heard it may be approaching $1 billion dollars. Do not forget the cost of dealing with nuclear waste (if there is a safe way). I wonder how much solar or wind power we could build for a billion dollars.

Ron Barrett, Morganton, Rutherford EMC

A response from the Power Supply Division of North Carolina Electric Membership Corporation

Since the first nuclear power plant was commissioned. the electric industry and the generation supply options have changed. One of the most important considerations in today's electric industry is addressing climate change impacts. Climate change legislation currently being debated in Congress would require dramatic changes in the way energy is produced abd consumed in our economy. Mitigating carbon emissions as listed in current legislation and keeping electric rates affordable will require a portfolio of solutions which include hybrid electric vehicles, energy efficient homes and businesses, smart grid technology, expansion of renewable energy resources. nuclear power and advancement of new technologies to capture and store carbon emissions. Unfortunately there is no "magic bullet" for combating climate change.

Nuclear power currently provides about half of the energy needs of North Carolina's electric cooperatives - carbon free. We firmly believe that nuclear power is a vital component of any strategy to reduce carbon emissions safely, reliably and at the lowest possible cost.

The costs of all forms of energy supply have been rising in recent years, and nuclear plants are no exception. Recent estimates put the price tag for a typical 800 megawatt nuclear plant in the ballpark of $5 billion. While that is a lot of money in anyone's estimation, it helps to put in context. An 800 megawatt nuclear plant produces enough energy to serve the annual energy needs if about 6.5 million homes. An equivalent-sized photovoltaic solar facility would cost in the neighborhood of $10 billion, would serve the energy needs of 1.4 million homes (when the sun is shining) and would require about 8,000 acres to construct. Solar and nuclear both are components of a portfolio of options that need to be deployed to meet the challenge of climate change.

Most spent nuclear fuel is currently being safely and securely stored at the nation's nuclear plants in steel-lined concrete pools or massive airtight concrete and steel canisters. In 2002, Congress approved a site at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, for long-term, deep underground storage of spent fuel. An application for approval of the site for operation is under review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The industry is also working with the government to explore other alternatives such as re-processing spent fuel so that it may be re-used.. More information on safety of nuclear fuel storage can be found at the Web site of the Nuclear Energy Institute at www.nei.org

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Las Vegas SUN
August 30, 2009

Home state finds it hard to warm up to Reid

Though he’s delivered for Nevada, his positions, persona rankle many

By Lisa Mascaro

Washington — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has achieved a political stature in the corridors of power unparalleled in Nevada history — able to dial up President Barack Obama, bring top officials to Las Vegas and shower the state with unprecedented attention.

Such clout can be cause for celebration in some states, leading to an enduring bond between senator and voter. Not so in fiercely independent Nevada, where Reid, who despite his position and four terms representing the state in Washington, is not necessarily a beloved figure.

According to polls over the past three years, Reid’s approval rating hovers in the mid-30s, not a comfortable range heading into a reelection campaign. Reid’s internal campaign polls, however, show him doing decidedly better.

As Reid seeks reelection in 2010, a question arises: Just how unpopular is the top-ranking Senate Democrat in his home state?

On both sides of the political aisle, evidence of Nevadans’ discontent stacks up. His rise in national politics as the leader of the Democratic Party in the Senate has only complicated his relationship with skeptical voters across the political spectrum.

On the right, conservatives lampoon Reid as a symbol of all that is wrong with Washington, a liberal in the likeness of that other target of Republican scorn, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (“This is the only part of the country where Harry Reid is considered a liberal,” notes political scientist Ted Jelen at UNLV.)

His remarks in the service of partisanship — calling former President George W. Bush a loser, saying the war in Iraq is lost — have won few friends among conservatives in Nevada, a state with a libertarian streak as long as U.S. Highway 95.

On the left, liberals are frustrated that his Senate is often the place where Democratic dreams go to die — despite his almost single-handedly derailing the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump, banning new coal plants and launching a green energy future. He is leading President Barack Obama’s agenda on economic recovery and health care but isn’t seen by some as knocking heads hard enough, LBJ-style, to get health care done. They long for a leader who is less compromising.

And then there’s Reid himself.

Those who know him adore his quick, dry wit. But in public, when Reid isn’t issuing a barb that makes national news, his speech is often the one the audience forgot. Some call it a charisma gap. As one state Republican Party leader says, “d-u-l-l.”

Personal interactions can be rough around the edges. Reid is the son of the pioneer West, a frank-speaking upstart from the forlorn town of Searchlight. He often gives one-word quips, doesn’t suffer fools and hangs up on phone conversations — not out of anger, but simply because he thinks the call is done.

That makes some Nevadans squirm and others chuckle in Western realpolitik.

Bob Fulkerson, one of the leaders of Nevada’s liberal wing of the Democratic Party as director of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, recounts his own brush with Reid during inauguration week festivities this year in Washington. Excited to join the senator’s fundraiser at a downtown restaurant, Fulkerson strode toward Reid to shake his hand.

Upon seeing him, Reid pushed a camera at Fulkerson and said, “Oh good, Bob, take a picture,” and gathered other guests. Fulkerson dutifully snapped the shot, had a quick exchange with Reid, then slunk away, embarrassed. His companion noted that he had been squarely dissed.

“I don’t fault Reid any more for that,” Fulkerson said. “It’s just part of who he is.”

If the race were held today, Reid would be beaten by either of two potential Republican challengers, according to a recent Review-Journal poll. Even Democrats are unenthusiastic, according to another poll, paid for by unidentified Republican backers of Sue Lowden, the former state legislator and one-time television newscaster who is now the Nevada Republican Party chairwoman and considering a run against Reid.

Reid’s own polls show him running at least even with the top potential Republican challengers.

Conventional wisdom says that although Reid’s numbers may be troubling, Republicans need a viable candidate — emphasis on viable. They have yet to name one.

“Just because Nevada voters aren’t enamored with Reid doesn’t mean he’s going to lose,” said Nathan Gonzales, political editor of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report in Washington.

Reid’s campaign is preparing to reintroduce the senator to Nevada, telling the state’s 400,000 new voters the story of the dirt poor kid from dusty Searchlight who went on to lead the Senate and deliver big for his state.

Television is where the campaign will be waged, experts predict, and some expect ads could begin as soon as Labor Day.

Rothenberg has Reid at a narrow advantage to win.

•••

Reid has rarely polled well in his politically split home state, where independent voters often decide elections.

During the senator’s last serious challenge, in 1998, when then-Rep. John Ensign lost by just 428 votes, polls showed Reid’s double-digit lead quickly eroding to single digits.

But it wasn’t until Reid became leader of the Democratic Party in Washington that his numbers began an enduring nosedive.

Nevadans may have a distaste for Washington power, but Jelen, the UNLV professor, said there is nothing new in Reid’s popularity dip.

Former majority leaders, from Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota to Sen. Scott Lucas of Illinois, have faced similar troubles. The position forces them to serve two constituents — the party agenda in Washington and needs of a state back home.

Daschle and Lucas lost reelection. Reid’s race will stand as an example of lessons learned.

“This is history playing itself out again,” Jelen said.

Walking this political line between party leadership and serving his state takes great skill. Reid’s main strength as majority leader, his campaign always says, is that “he can deliver for Nevada like no one else.”

With his vast staff, Reid can bring greater resources to bear than any other Nevada elected official. With his institutional power and personal relationships, he can dial up cabinet secretaries or fellow senators to get things done.

Case in point: Derailing Yucca Mountain is a phenomenal feat by many measures, capping Nevada’s 20-year battle against the federal government’s plan to store nuclear waste in the desert. First Reid cut funding, then extracted a presidential promise to kill it outright.

As Reid rose in leadership, so did Nevada’s take of congressionally-directed earmarked money, from $77 million in 2001 to $165 million in 2009. Of that, $144 million this year is directly from Reid, according to the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste. (Nevada’s other senator, Republican John Ensign, brought home half as much.)

Among the 100 senators, Reid ranks 25th this year in securing earmarks.

Even Republican elected officials in Nevada say, quietly, that if they need something done, they go to Reid.

“You can’t argue with what the guy has accomplished for Nevada and the country,” said John Hunt, an attorney and former chairman of Clark County Democrats.

“Harry Reid is real. Isn’t that what we want from somebody, to be consistent and sincere and not put on a front?” he said. “In the end you measure somebody by their accomplishments, not their smile. His accomplishments are unbelievable, what he’s done for this state.”

Republicans are targeting that strength as a weakness, asking what exactly Reid has done for Nevada.

“I’m not sure Sen. Reid has explained what benefits Nevada has received, other than Yucca Mountain,” said Ryan Erwin, a Republican strategist in Nevada.

This is phase one of a Republican strategy to portray Reid — as they did to Daschle in 2004 — as out of touch with home-state voters. Nevada Republican strategist Robert Uithoven calls this the “disconnect.”

The strategy begins with bacon, ends with yoga mats and goes like this:

Republicans are targeting Reid for not bringing enough federal taxpayer money back to Nevada.

It’s a fragile line of attack for a party that derides earmarks as waste and opposed Reid’s work in passing the economic recovery bill that beefed up unemployment benefits, launched road projects and is paying salaries for Nevada teachers who would otherwise have been laid off. It also ignores that Nevada often gets less federal money than other states because Carson City refuses to put up required matching funds.

Still, it’s a sound-bite that internal Republican polls say might resonate in a state that’s hurting economically.

Then there’s the yoga strategy.

A small news item this month noted Reid and his entourage had stopped to buy a yoga mat during his recent visit to a conference in Denver.

A former boxer, Reid has made no secret of an exercise routine, which includes yoga, walking and hundreds of sit-ups. But for the political right, yoga is a passion of latte-sipping coastal elites who can be easily mocked.

One Republican strategist had a brainstorm: Harry Reid yoga mat campaign magnets. “I can see Harry Reid yoga mats up and down the state,” Uithoven said.

•••

Among Democrats, Reid has his own problems.

He has gained few fans with his support of a plan to tap rural White Pine County’s water for Las Vegas, support of gun owners’ rights and backing of the state’s gold mining industry.

And sometimes Nevadans of various political stripes just feel ignored by Reid.

He works long days and nights in Washington, then flies across the country to raise money for the party. Yet some Nevadans would rather see him meeting-and-greeting at the local chicken dinner.

“When we need to talk to him directly, yea, it’s difficult,” said Fulkerson of the progressive group. “We don’t have his cell phone.”

Reid’s staff notes that the senator’s packed schedule took him from Pahrump to Las Vegas to Reno this past week alone.

But as much as feeling left out may sting, it is not a fireable offense, Fulkerson said.

Think of Nevada without Reid, he suggests, recalling the last time Nevada had two first-term senators with no clout in Washington: 1987, the year the so-called Screw Nevada bill was passed, naming Yucca Mountain as the site of the nation’s proposed nuclear waste dump.

“Matching Harry Reid against Sue Lowden, for god-sakes, it’s a no-brainer. Of course we’re going to turn out for Harry Reid.”

•••

Reid’s popularity will rest as much on the mood of the state as Election Day approaches as anything else — whether the economy has turned around and voters approve of the Democratic agenda that they helped launch by sending Obama to Washington.

Reid’s race will likely be won in the middle — the 15 percent of independent voters who claim no party allegiance. For the senator who once ran on the slogan “independent like Nevada,” the party leader has to remind voters he remains one of them.

Reid’s mouth may run partisan, but his actions hew more toward the center, as he tries to do what he does best: broker a deal. That style infuriates some and disheartens others, but may be what it takes for a majority leader to get reelected in Nevada, popular or not.

“Harry Reid,” said Jelen, the UNLV professor, “is never going to win by a landslide here.”

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McClatchy Washington Bureau
August 30, 2009

Nuclear sites fear they're the alternative to Yucca Mountain

By Les Blumenthal
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — It is among the nastiest substances on earth: more than 14,000 tons of highly radioactive waste left over from the building of the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal.

As the Obama administration and Senate leaders move to scuttle a proposed repository for the waste in Nevada, the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state — along with federal facilities in Idaho and South Carolina — could become the de facto dump sites for years to come.

After spending $10 billion to $12 billion over the past 25 years studying a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, President Barack Obama is fulfilling a campaign promise to kill it as a site for the repository. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada also stands to benefit, as polls show he could be in a tough fight for re-election next year, and Nevada residents adamantly oppose a the waste site.

Local leaders and lawmakers from the sites where the waste is now stored, however, are increasingly concerned that the Energy Department will leave it in place, even though that might violate legally binding cleanup agreements.

There's no backup plan for dealing with the waste. A promised commission to study the issue has yet to be appointed.

"We don't want to become a long-term repository without even having a discussion," said Gary Petersen of the Tri-City Industrial Development Council, near Hanford, Wash. "All of this waste is supposed to be going to Yucca. Without Yucca, everyone in the weapons complex has a problem."

Jared Fuhriman, the mayor of Idaho Falls, the largest city near the Idaho National Laboratory, agreed.

"We are all concerned," Fuhriman said. "Where are we going to store the waste we have?"

If Yucca is closed, a search for a new site for a national repository likely would start with the 31 states on the original list of potential locations. In addition to Hanford and the Idaho National Laboratory, the states with possible sites include Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi and Pennsylvania.

Scrapping Yucca Mountain also could have national security ramifications. The Navy would have no place to permanently store the used reactor fuel that's powered its aircraft carriers and submarines.

"There is a national security dimension to the problem, as an eventual disposal site is absolutely critical to the handling of spent fuel from Defense Department weapons," said Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee whose district includes the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, which potentially could become a temporary storage site.

The Energy Department is fully aware of how thorny an issue Yucca has become.

In a report late last year to Congress, the department warned that by not providing adequate and timely storage for the defense nuclear waste, it would be "unable to honor" its commitments to the states where the waste is currently stored, including Washington, Idaho and South Carolina.

In a letter earlier this year to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, 25 House members issued a similar warning.

"Without a viable repository program to provide a reliable means of disposition, (the Energy Department) spent fuel and high-level waste will become stranded, and the sites themselves will become de facto repositories," said the letter, signed by House members from Washington, Idaho, South Carolina and other states.

Yucca Mountain is in the desert, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. A brothel, 15 miles away, may be the closest commercial structure. The plan is to dig deep tunnels underground where the waste could be stored for 10,000 years as it decays. The Bush administration applied for a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license to operate the site.

The decision to place the repository in Nevada was as much a political decision as a scientific one. In 1987, the hunt for a site had been narrowed to three locations: Yucca, which is on the edge of the Nevada Test Site, where nuclear weapons had been tested; Hanford, which started producing plutonium for nuclear weapons during World War II; and Deaf Smith County, in the Texas Panhandle.

Congress picked Yucca Mountain. It was a matter of political clout. At the time, the House speaker was Rep. Jim Wright of Texas, and the House majority leader was Rep. Tom Foley of Washington. Nevada was represented by a senator who suggested using a rocket ship to shoot the waste into the sun. It was referred to as the "Screw Nevada Bill."

The immediate concern was the 63,000 tons of used radioactive fuel from the nation's 104 operating nuclear power plants. The used fuel is now stored at each nuclear power plant, either underwater or in dry storage. Safety and security concerns about that approach persist, however.

Yucca was also supposed to hold the waste from the production of nuclear weapons dating back to the World War II-era Manhattan Project. The waste, which includes used nuclear fuel from reactors that produced plutonium, is stored at 16 federal sites in 13 states, though most of it is at Hanford, the Idaho National Laboratory and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

At Hanford alone, there are 53 million gallons of highly radioactive liquid waste, 2,100 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and nearly 2,000 capsules containing radioactive cesium and strontium.

The biggest concern has been the liquid waste, stored in aging and occasionally leaking underground tanks. Current plans call for the waste to be vitrified, or solidified into glass-like logs, and shipped to Yucca Mountain. The logs would be encapsulated in two-foot diameter, 14.5-foot-long stainless steel containers that would weigh about four tons each. The waste treatment plant would generate about 480 glass logs a year and somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 by the time the last of the waste is processed.

The waste treatment plant is scheduled to start producing glass logs in 2019. Yucca was scheduled to open sometime after 2020.

Neither regulators from Washington state nor the federal Environmental Protection Agency seem particularly concerned, saying the plan was always to temporarily store the glass logs at Hanford.

Stephanie Mueller, Chu's press secretary, said that the department was "honoring its commitment to manage our nuclear waste." She said Chu's commission would look at the full range of storage, recycling and disposal issues.

Petersen, of the Tri-City Industrial Development Council, remains skeptical, however.

"Have you ever seen anything more permanent than a temporary DOE building?" he said, adding that the communities surrounding Hanford and other DOE sites where waste was stored would probably "push back" to reverse the Yucca decision.

--(Erika Bolstad contributed to this article.)

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Charleston Gazette
August 30, 2009

W.Va. foolish to persist in ban on nuclear energy

Michael L. Green

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- As the U.S. Senate prepares to take up climate-change legislation, the case for lifting West Virginia's ban on nuclear energy has become compelling.

West Virginia is one of a dozen states that prohibit the construction of nuclear energy facilities. But West Virginia has the most to gain from removing the ban, since construction of a nuclear power plant would reduce our state's heavy dependence on coal and provide thousands of good-paying jobs.

Considering the public's understandable concern about climate change and the questionable value of renewable energy sources, support for nuclear power continues to grow. A recent poll shows that 81 percent of Americans favor increased use of nuclear power. There seems to be greater awareness that solar and wind energy cannot provide the large amounts of "base-load" electricity that our economy and growing population requires, and that nuclear power must play a central role if we hope to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to a safe level.

No energy source, including nuclear power, is perfect. But I would challenge anyone who thinks that today's nuclear plants are not performing commendably. Certainly this has been a key to increased public acceptance of nuclear power.

Last year, the capacity factor of the 104 U.S. nuclear plants averaged 91.5 percent. In other words, nuclear plants were generating electricity more than 90 percent of the time. By comparison, the capacity factor for wind turbines is about 30 percent, and solar energy, 20 percent. Solar and wind are of no help when the weather isn't cooperating.

Although the Obama Administration has ended the decade-long effort to establish a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, used fuel is being stored safely. It is being moved from storage in water pools to concrete-and-steel cylinders. Experts say the cylinders are built to last for 300 years or more.

The construction of new nuclear plants ought not to depend on the availability of a waste repository. More than a dozen utilities, largely in the Southeast and Texas, are preparing to build about 30 additional nuclear plants. License applications for construction and operation of the reactors are pending before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

As for spent fuel being stored at nuclear plants, it should not be mistaken for nuclear waste. Spent fuel contains valuable plutonium and uranium that can be extracted and converted into new fuel for use in producing more electricity. There are more than 60,000 metric tons of spent fuel stored in the United States.

Unfortunately, President Jimmy Carter banned such recycling in 1977, on grounds that it set a bad example for the world and could lead to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. But other countries with nuclear power programs such as France and Great Britain did not follow the U.S. lead and have continued to recycle their spent fuel. Besides producing carbon-free energy, recycling extends global uranium resources and significantly reduces the amount of nuclear waste that needs permanent geologic storage.

Congress is showing some interest in reviving the recycling process in this country. A climate change bill approved by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee directs the Department of Energy to expedite the development of a "proliferation-resistant" recycling system. The climate bill is being considered now by the full Senate, and it ought to be approved.

Meanwhile, DOE has $145 million in this year's budget for research on recycling technology, and it is building new nuclear recycling facilities at the Savannah River Site to dispose of surplus weapons-grade plutonium by converting it into fuel for use at nuclear power plants.

New energy for America is an issue affecting the lives of all Americans, today and for decades to come. Energy is the backbone of the nation's economy. The Obama Administration and Congress recognize that securing America's energy future calls for a multi-faceted approach. That approach must include more reliance on renewable energy and increased energy efficiency. But it must also include coal and nuclear power, which will continue to be our nation's leading sources of "base-load" electricity for decades to come. We cannot provide new energy if we exclude nuclear power from our plans for the future.

Green, a retired physicist, was the radiation safety officer at Union Carbide's South Charleston Technical Center and the corporate issue manager for radiation and radiation safety.

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
August 30, 2009

Nuclear waste now stored outside reactor

Kewaunee plant has run out of interior storage

By Thomas Content of the Journal Sentinel

After decades of national debate over what to do with spent nuclear fuel, and with no resolution in sight, the Kewaunee nuclear power plant in northeastern Wisconsin finally ran out of storage space inside the plant.

So over the past week, Kewaunee workers have begun storing radioactive waste in casks on the grounds of the reactor, a short distance from the shores of Lake Michigan.

After a practice run a few weeks ago, workers moved spent fuel into the first of the 25-ton, 16-foot-long casks and then transferred the cask into a concrete vault outside the building Aug. 22, said Mark Kanz, spokesman for the Kewaunee Power Station. A second cask was transferred Thursday.

An expert on nuclear waste from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's regional office in Chicago was on hand for the first procedure, said Viktoria Mitlyng, an agency spokeswoman. The process went smoothly, she said.

The casks were designed to be temporary storage for nuclear waste. This year, however, the Obama administration announced it was not going to move forward with plans to develop a permanent storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

Instead, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said he would appoint a commission to investigate a variety of alternatives for long-term nuclear waste disposal. In the meantime, Chu told Congress this year, the NRC has said storing the spent fuel at reactor sites is safe.

"The NRC has said that it can be done safely. That buys us time to formulate a comprehensive plan in how we deal with the nuclear waste," he said.

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

The halt to the Yucca Mountain project could leave the federal government vulnerable to litigation from the nuclear power industry, said Derek Sands, associate editor of Platt's Inside Energy.

"The administration is gaining a reputation for being less than supportive of nuclear power," he said.

The Kewaunee plant is owned and operated by Dominion Resources Inc. of Richmond, Va. The reactor sells electricity to the plant's former owners, Wisconsin Public Service Corp. of Green Bay and Wisconsin Power & Light Co. of Madison.

Customer costs

Wisconsin electricity customers have paid more than $344 million over the years to the federal government to help pay for the Yucca Mountain project, according to Nuclear Energy Institute data.

Wisconsin has two nuclear power plants, located within miles of one another along Lake Michigan in northeastern Wisconsin. The larger of the two plants, Point Beach, has been storing its spent fuel in dry casks since the late 1990s.

With the two transfers completed at Kewaunee this week, Dominion has no plans to transfer more spent fuel to its concrete storage facility until next year, Kanz said. The 25-ton cylindrical storage containers are ready to be shipped to another resting place for radioactive waste if and when the federal government designates a spot for the spent fuel.

Disposal of spent nuclear fuel is a responsibility the federal government agreed to handle years ago. Dominion was the first nuclear operator to move nuclear fuel assemblies into dry casks, more than 20 years ago, at its reactor in Virginia.

"All of this belongs to the federal government because it's their responsibility," Kanz said. "Until they decide to take it and do something with it, we need a place to hold onto it. Our spent-fuel pool is getting full, so this is also a good option."

The dwindling storage space in the spent-fuel pool inside the Kewaunee plant was among the factors that led Wisconsin utilities to sell the reactor to Dominion several years ago. Dominion then proceeded with plans to build the dry-cask storage system and applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to keep the plant running until 2033.

Point Beach experienced a brief fire during a spent-fuel transfer attempt in 1996. The hydrogen fire inside one of the casks produced enough force to blow a 3-ton lid 3 inches into the air. That incident resulted in an investigation and a $325,000 fine against Wisconsin Electric, which owned the plant at the time.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission later required Wisconsin Electric, which now operates under the trade name We Energies, to use a different kind of storage container for the used but still radioactive nuclear fuel.

Some Wisconsin environmental groups have been critical of nuclear power in part because of the onsite storage of radioactive waste on the grounds of the two plants.

Recycling research

Wisconsin has a stake in the demise of the Yucca Mountain proposal, environmental groups say, because before the Nevada site was selected by Congress, a stretch of northern Wisconsin was once considered a potential storage site.

"Once Yucca was canceled, there is officially nothing to do with this waste. It is just going to sit at the reactors, including the reactors in Wisconsin. That's a big problem and that's one of the reasons why we really need to not build any more reactors," said Jennifer Nordstrom of the Institute for Environment and Energy Research in Madison.

The issue of what to do with used nuclear fuel is at the heart of a debate that's expected to be resurrected this fall in Madison, as part of discussions on a state strategy to reduce emissions linked to global warming.

One proposal would relax Wisconsin's moratorium on construction of nuclear reactors by removing a requirement, now in state law, that a federal repository for nuclear waste be available to accept radioactive waste from any new reactor.

The Nuclear Energy Institute and Dominion have both been lobbying in Madison this year on the issue. Attempts to overturn the state's nuclear moratorium have failed over the last six years, but NEI has been more active in Wisconsin than in five other states with moratoriums on nuclear power plant construction, Nordstrom said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

--sidebar

PROS

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has determined that it is safe for radioactive spent nuclear fuel to be stored in reinforced concrete bunkers near the nation's nuclear reactors. The systems have been in use for more than 20 years, the NRC says, adding, "dry cask storage systems are designed to resist floods, tornadoes, projectiles, temperature extremes and other unusual scenarios."

CONS

Opponents of nuclear power criticized the Yucca Mountain proposal as scientifically flawed given the geology of the site. But they also have concerns about storing nuclear waste near Lake Michigan and other drinking water sources. U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) says a long-term solution for the nuclear waste issue is needed, noting that the former Zion nuclear plant in his district, near the Kenosha County line, continues to have spent fuel onsite.

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Pahrump Valley Times
August 29, 2009

Park surveying under way

By Gina B. Good
PVT

Pahrump's community parks are being improved and the timing couldn't be better.

At a time when families are looking for inexpensive and pleasant places to hang out that are close to home, the town is making big moves to make Simpkins, Kellog and Petrack Parks more convenient and comfortable.

On July 14, the town board unanimously passed an agreement with G.C. Wallace Inc. (GCW), an engineering, planning and surveying firm from Las Vegas, to complete individual park projects that, according to Town Manager Bill Kohbarger, have been languishing for the past 18 to 36 months from previous administrations.

On Tuesday, GCW began surveying, beginning with Petrack Park, where Kohbarger and board Vice Chairman Bill Dolan were acting as sidewalk superintendents.

"This is exciting," said Dolan. "The surveys will be given to the engineers and there should be some drastic improvements completed by the beginning of next year. And that's on top of what Matt Lewis and his great guys over at Buildings and Parks are doing."

On July 28, Lewis and his crew got the okay to proceed with plans to add bleachers, sun shades and picnic tables at Simkins Park, using money from settlement funds (formerly called Payment Equal To Taxes, or PETT funds) granted for the Yucca Mountain project.

Dolan explained when setting up the contract with GCW, he and board member Mike Darby researched survey teams and found the GCW team in Mesquite had the best record.

"People in the business told us the top survey team in the area was the crew we now have working for the town," said Dolan. "These guys have a less than 2 percent error rate"

He explained the better and more completely the survey work is initially done, the less time and money is spent redoing work later on. "We insisted on having this team, and even though we only have them part time, we have them coming in for the next two weeks."

"In these tough economic times, we want people to know that these funds have already been approved," said Kohbarger. "We are very, very happy to be moving forward for the town and our communities."

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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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