Yucca Mountain News Clips
Monday, January 4, 2010
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
January 01, 2010

Budget tips for state get reply

By Benjamin Spillman

Higher taxes on mining, gambling or sales won't improve Nevada's dismal budget outlook.

But cutting state employees' pay and reducing spending on education might.

That's according to Gov. Jim Gibbons in a letter responding to suggestions by government employees on how Nevada should cope with a deep recession that's wreaked havoc on the state's economy and its budget.

Gibbons said that increased gaming taxes would cause casino layoffs and closures, and that "adding to unemployment is no better for gaming than it would be for state employees."

An increase in the mining tax would require two separate votes of the people, as would another employee suggestion, enacting a personal income tax. This couldn't be accomplished before 2012, Gibbons stated in the letter.

Increasing the sales tax might merely steer consumers to the Internet, the governor suggested.

Gibbons spokesman Dan Burns said the letter addresses more than 1,000 responses from state employees to the governor's request for money-saving ideas.

The governor did not dismiss further reductions in state employee pay or in spending on education.

"If any further (pay) reductions are needed, we will share them with you," Gibbons said about himself and his staff.

State employees are already furloughed one day per month.

Education spending consumes 54 percent of the state's general fund, he wrote, adding, "we cannot continue to take virtually all of the budget cuts out of the remaining 46" percent.

Revenue is estimated to be $67 million below projections for the July through September quarter of the fiscal year. New numbers could come Jan. 22, when the state's economic forum is scheduled to report its estimated revenue projections, Burns said.

The forum typically meets in advance of regular legislative sessions to provide information for lawmakers and the governor to craft a budget. Burns said the upcoming meeting was scheduled to provide Gibbons with projections to help him decide whether legislative action in a special session is needed to bring expenses in line with revenue.

Former North Las Vegas Mayor Mike Montandon, who is challenging Gibbons in next year's Republican primary, called some of Gibbons' statements "incredibly short-sighted."

Montandon, who works in government affairs for a Florida-based construction company that does business in Nevada and other states, agreed that pay cuts for state employees should be on the table.

"I work in the private sector. Everybody I know is taking a pay cut," he said. "The company I work for laid off 30 percent, and everybody left got a pay cut."

Montandon described as short-sighted Gibbons' statement that "whether we support Yucca Mountain or not, we could not begin receiving royalties on nuclear waste storage soon enough to use that revenue as a viable solution to our fiscal problems."

The proposal to store spent nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nye County has been politically unpopular statewide because of safety concerns.

But Montandon said Gibbons doesn't mention the possibility of the area becoming a research site to study reprocessing of nuclear waste to make it safe to store.

"Just developing the technology to reprocess nuclear waste would be 20 years and billions of dollars in great jobs," Montandon said.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Rory Reid described Gibbons' letter as a publicity stunt.

"I think his approach is ill-advised. What he's doing is worrying about his re-election," said Reid, chairman of the Clark County Commission.

Reid said the governor should focus on creating jobs and improving the economy so that drastic cuts to education aren't necessary.

"The answer to Nevada's problems clearly is not cutting education and doing less for our children," Reid said. "There needs to be a discussion about what we can do today to put people back to work."

One source of short-term job creation is an estimated $1.5 billion in federal funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known as the stimulus law.

Reid said the state, under Gibbons' leadership, has been slow to direct the money to job-creating ventures.

"The state's effort with respect to the stimulus has been mired in partisan politics," Reid said.

Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas, complimented Gibbons for reaching out to state employees for ideas to save money.

But she disagreed with his implication that education has been spared cuts up to this point, citing a 13 percent cut to higher education as an example.

She said further cuts could hurt students, especially if they were to occur when school is in session.

"It would be unfair to the students, and I think in the end, harmful to economic recovery," Buckley said. "When you look at what businesses want, they want a well-educated work force."

--Contact reporter Benjamin Spillman at bspillman@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3861.

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Las Vegas SUN
January 01, 2010

Gibbons to state employees: No new taxes and education cuts are on the table

By Jon Ralston
In a letter this week to state employees, who apparently suggested various tax increases to alleviate budget stress, Gov. Jim Gibbons explained how long it would take to impose a personal income tax or a mining tax because of constitutional impediments. He also argued against suggestions to raise gaming and sales taxes, but there were no philosophical screeds, just a recitation of the logistical problems and possible impacts. Gibbons also indicated that education cuts are on the table and, interestingly enough, in arguing against getting money from the nuclear waste dump, he wrote "Whether we support Yucca Mountain or not...."

Was that the royal "we"?

The governor said he has received hundreds of responses to his request for suggestions. His letter is at right.

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Letter to State Employess from
January 01, 2010

OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR
December 29, 2009

Dear fellow employee of the Great State of Nevada:

Thank you for your tremendous response to my request for your comments and suggestions. Hundreds of responses have been submitted and your ideas are truly incredible .– we are reading and evaluating every suggestion.

In an effort to clarify information we received in the responses, I need to comment on some of the suggestions:

.. In the 2009 legislative session, I proposed across the board pay reductions because that was fairer to all employees. However, the Nevada Legislature chose to impose furlough days. My staff is taking furlough days and an additional 1.4% pay decrease. What the Legislature passed did not require Legislators or Constitutional officers to take either a furlough or a pay cut. I continue to voluntarily donate 6% of my salary. If any further reductions are needed, we will share them with you. Most of my staff is not eligible for overtime and we pay the same medical costs that you do. Additionally, not one of my staff has a state vehicle or a state expense account.

.. Some people recommend enacting a personal income tax. However, the Nevada Constitution would have to be amended to enact a personal income tax. To do that requires a vote of the people in two different elections. The earliest this could be done is in 2010 and 2012. Imposing a personal income tax is not a viable solution for our immediate problems.

.. Similarly, some people suggest an increase in mining and gaming taxes. Mining pays a net profit tax to Nevada, so their taxes have automatically increased. Any increase in the mining tax would also take two votes of the people.

.. Gaming has seen 22 consecutive months of declining revenues. Adding taxes for gaming would close some operations and increase layoffs for others. Reducing jobs and adding to unemployment is no better for gaming than it would be for state employees. We are trying to save your jobs in the public sector and those in the private sector as well.

.. Some people believe we should increase the sales tax. Studies have shown that increasing sales tax is often counter productive as buyers turn to the Internet to avoid paying the tax. Indeed, sales taxes were raised in the 2009 session, but our sales tax revenues continue to come in below the Economic Forum.’s estimates. Nevada is a party to the Streamline Sales Tax Initiative which, when enacted, requires vendors to collect and remit state sales taxes on Internet transactions. Existing Nevada law requires that Nevada residents pay sales or use tax on out of state purchases, but since we have no way to know when and where a purchase is made we have to rely on the honor system for payment of this tax.

.. State government has seen significant workforce reductions over the last four years. Most of that was absorbed by attrition and vacancies. I.’m sure you all feel that pinch everyday. Fewer than 100 state workers have been laid off while more than 120,000 people are receiving unemployment insurance benefits in Nevada. Nevada has the second highest unemployment rate in the nation. We need to remember that the burden of our economy is not being borne solely by state workers. Private sector employers have laid off thousands of workers and their employees have taken millions of dollars in pay reductions and/or furloughs.

.. K-12 education and the Nevada System of Higher Education receive over 54% of the state general fund budget. We all want to protect education as much as we can; however, we cannot continue to take virtually all of the budget cuts out of the remaining 46% of the state budget that funds the other state agencies. We must strike a balance to preserve as many jobs as possible, both in education and in state government.

.. Banning the importation of municipal waste from California is not an option. The court system has already determined that the Federal Interstate Commerce Clause does not allow Nevada to ban the importation of municipal waste, nor does the law allow us to tax only imported waste.

.. Whether we support Yucca Mountain or not, we could not begin receiving royalties on nuclear waste storage soon enough to use that revenue as a viable solution for our fiscal problems. You have offered some great suggestions, and we are still in the process of reading and evaluating all of them. The comments above are to provide some factual information regarding some of the points that have been made thus far.

Please keep sending your ideas to me. The email address is nevadafirst@gov.nv.gov. You can expect to hear more from me again soon.

Sincerely,
Jim Gibbons
Governor

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Pahrump Valley Times
December 31, 2009

PETT funds were a cash cow from Yucca project

By Mark Waite
PVT

When Barack Obama was campaigning at Rosemary Clarke Middle School in Pahrump just prior to the Nevada Democratic caucus in January 2008, the Pahrump Valley Times asked him how he would compensate Nye County for the loss of over $11 million annually in the payment equal to taxes from the U.S. Department of Energy if Yucca Mountain were shut down.

Obama was reminded about the federal impositions made on Nye County over the years, like the nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site, the Nellis Test and Training Range and now, a Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, for which at least the DOE has provided the annual PETT payments.

Obama's response:

"Look, obviously what we want to do is, No. 1, make sure that the federal government always compensates counties for the burden they're placing on these counties.

"I think it's also important for us to realize that if Yucca is no longer an active, functioning operation, there are other areas we can make a significant investment and that is development of clean, green technologies. I would love to see Nevada, along with the neighboring states, developed as a centerpiece for solar energy development.

"That's something that could require significant amount of lands depending on the kinds of solar energy strategies that are being developed and that's something that would help relieve some of the economic losses that might occur if Yucca proves to be a non-viable project."

The Payment Equal to Taxes has been a cash cow for Nye County since 1986.

The act designated the money as an amount the host county of Yucca Mountain would have received if it were allowed to tax the real property of the repository and any industrial activities. They are the equivalent of property taxes.

Those payments are unrestricted, unlike nuclear waste oversight money, and have included allocations of $2 million for a new county administration building at the Calvada Eye; $675,000 for 15 sheriff's patrol cars; $1.25 million for a new Tonopah fire station and $1.75 million for improving Homestead and Manse roads.

Section two, paragraph B of the May 17, 1999, settlement agreement between Nye County and the DOE provided for both parties to agree to a new schedule of PETT disbursements. The county and DOE agreed to a five-year settlement in 1999 that allowed PETT to increase from $8 million annually to $10 million for each of the next three years.

A new five-year agreement after that provided payments to Nye County of $10.25 million in fiscal year 2003-04, increasing to $11.25 million in 2007-2008.

In 2007 county commissioners appointed a PETT negotiating team to push for more than a doubling of payments, ranging from $23 million in 2009 to $29 million by 2013.

Cash Jaszczak, a Yucca Mountain consultant, said, in an interview recently, other communities reap a lot more money from nuclear facilities.

But after two 10-year agreements, the 2009 federal appropriations bill allocated a set percentage of 4.5 percent of the budget for the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management to Nye County for PETT funds.

Consequently PETT payments dropped to $8.9 million this year.

"You cannot pull the plug on Yucca Mountain without having a whole host of consequences," Jaszczak said. Unfortunately, he added, Nye County has come to rely on those payments.

The PETT agreement of 2008 specified the payments would continue through each fiscal year in which DOE receives a license to receive and possess spent nuclear fuel for disposal. If the total appropriation to the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management falls below $375 million, the DOE will provide PETT money to Nye County at 2.5 percent of the budget.

The county has five accounts for handling the PETT funds, which combined have a balance of $41.16 million, according to figures provided by Assistant County Manager Pam Webster.

The special projects are drawn out of a fund that has $13.48 million in the balance. Another capital projects fund contains $9.5 million.

County commissioners last June voted against a request by Nye County School District officials for $1.8 million out of the Education Endowment Fund. That fund has a $10 million balance. An emergency fund contains a $6 million balance while a health fund has a little over $2 million left.

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Pahrump Valley Times
December 31, 2009

Nye girds for Yucca closure

By Mark Waite
PVT

The approval of 17 annual contracts totaling $2.2 million for the Nye County Yucca Mountain Project oversight program were routinely approved by county commissioners this past month as usual.

But this time it's questionable whether there will be funding.

The license agreement is still pending for the Yucca Mountain project, of which Nye County is a cooperating agency. But a blue ribbon panel expected to be appointed by President Obama may recommend scrapping the repository project altogether.

"There's a lot of rumors about the project, but at this point we have to be prepared for the licensing proceeding," Darrell Lacy, director of the Nye County Nuclear Waste Project Office told commissioners. "If something happens, we are in a position to shut these contracts down immediately."

Nye County can terminate the contracts with a 30 day-notice for no cause.

The amount is a reduction from $2.9 million in contracts approved last year. The request for the agenda item said: "Due to the potential shut down of the YMP this year's requested dollar amount of contracts has been reduced by $875,794."

"Until such time as its fate is known, Nye County will need contractors to enable an adequate critique of DOE's license application and to support our contentions to protect Nye County interests. If the program is terminated, Nye County will need contractors to define and implement mitigation/mediation efforts to minimize impacts to the county," Lacy's report said.

Yucca Mountain consulting contracts have been routinely awarded without competition every year. The county said that is due to the technical expertise and years of experience these consultants have with the U.S. Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Yucca Mountain Program, commercial nuclear power plants, the military and other consulting experience.

Cash Jaszczak, who has a $160,000 contract for the next year as planning and policy support consultant, expressed concern about the budget after a leaked document which was highly publicized in October, from Steve Isakowitz, chief financial officer for the DOE. It lists a fiscal year 2011 budget request to the Office of Management and Budget of only $46,200 for the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, of which $21,200 is for site remediation and worker transition, and $25,000 for the archiving of data associated with the Yucca Mountain program.

"You're not going to lay people off based on rumors," Lacy said in a followup interview after the commission meeting.

Officials with the Yucca Mountain program are awaiting the president's budget request for the official 2010-11 fiscal year figures, which is expected to be submitted in February, he said.

In addition to the 17 consultants, Nye County has 13 full-time, salaried positions in the nuclear waste project office, Jaszczak said.

"The Nuclear Waste Policy Act is still the law of the land. That has not gone away. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act has been followed every step of the way, every time there was a big pronouncement by the DOE that was in response to a provision in the law. DOE didn't make any of this stuff up," said Mike Voegele, who was awarded a $200,000 contract to handle outreach and scientific oversight, policy and planning support.

While the DOE is losing a few highly-placed officials, Nye County has beefed up its consulting services with the addition of Voegele, formerly the chief scientist and vice-president of Bechtel/SAIC, the former contractor for the Yucca Mountain Project. Voegele has worked with the program since 1975, Jaszczak has been affiliated with the repository project since 1993.

Voegele said opponents of Yucca Mountain, like U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., were surprised at the quality of the license application for the repository. The NRC accepted the license application for review in September 2008.

"People, like Sen. Reid -- this is my personal opinion -- were expecting DOE to do a less than good job on that license application, then this wouldn't be an issue. They were expecting the NRC to reject it and life goes on," Voegele said. "Well they didn't."

Nye County allocated the largest contract this year, $600,000, to attorney Jeffrey VanNiel to direct the county's participation in the NRC licensing process and possibly the blue ribbon panel.

Voegele said it remains to be seen whether the blue ribbon panel will serve under the White House or the DOE. That could determine whether a geologic repository at Yucca Mountain is to be considered as an option, he said.

Jaszczak said, "The bill that was signed said the blue ribbon panel has authority to look at alternatives to Yucca Mountain." But he said U.S. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu said Yucca Mountain wouldn't be an option for study.

Voegele said a safety evaluation report on Yucca Mountain is being compiled by the DOE.

Nye County no longer needs to participate in planning for a railroad. Jasczcak said the Obama administration terminated that planning and directed DOE only to focus on the license application.

A response by the DOE Dec. 7 to contentions raised by various parties to the Yucca Mountain license application indicates the application process is still alive and well, after there were rumors the previous couple of months the application was dead, Jaszczak said.

After all the millions spent on consultants, what has Nye County accomplished?

Bob Gamble, Nye County's on-site representative at the DOE offices in Las Vegas, said the county was able to work from the inside on documents like the environmental impact statement issued in 2002. Gamble has worked on the Yucca Mountain Project since 1984.

"We were able to get our point of view written into the document. We were given a couple sections of our own to document our point of view, and I think we affected some changes in the text," Gamble said.

Voegele said the Nye County hydrologic and geologic studies have done a lot to demonstrate Amargosa Valley groundwater flow patterns. Otherwise, DOE would have no knowledge of the potential flow of contaminants.

Some of the specialists who worked on the Yucca Mountain program, and Lacy himself, have been assigned work in other areas, like renewable energy. Voegele said about 2,700 federal employees worked on the Yucca Mountain Project at the peak. That's dwindled to about 625 workers today, following three years of budget cuts.

The case is now being made that nuclear waste can be stored in above-ground, dry cask storage containers at the reactor sites instead of at one geologic repository, Jaszczak said.

"The issue of, 'can we store spent fuel,' is essentially put on a 100-year hold," he said.

Power companies with nuclear plants were told there would be a repository by Jan. 31, 1998, Jaszczak said.

"They can continue with licensing. The other thing is, if they pull the plug, zero us out, then we're in a termination mode," Gamble said.

Lacy added, "We have 40 wells that have to be shut down. We drilled those under a cooperative agreement with DOE."

Voegele said part of his job assignment from Lacy will be to keep the history of the Yucca Mountain Project available for anyone in Nye County who is interested. That information could possibly be stored at the Pahrump Valley Museum, he said.

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Grand Junction Sentinel
December 31, 2009

Time to tap abundant resources of Energy Alley

By Gary Harmon

It’s about time to start tapping the biggest tank of fuel along Energy Alley between Green River, Utah, and Rifle, a RAND Corp. analyst said.

“We need some early production” from oil shale, said James T. Bartis, senior policy researcher for RAND. “Let’s get some experience.”

While many geological and scientific questions about shale remain to be answered, it’s time for the federal government to start learning how best to manage the federal lands of Energy Alley that overlay the world’s richest sources of oil shale, Bartis said.

Oil shale isn’t the only fuel along Energy Alley that might yet be back in the nation’s energy picture, Bartis said. There is a future for coal, especially when mixed with biomass. And given that nuclear energy emits no greenhouse gases, “more and more, nuclear starts looking like an option” for baseload electricity generation, Bartis said.

At no other place is there such a convergence of resources as in Energy Alley, Colorado State Geologist Vince Matthews said.

“The oil shale alone is unique. Right there, you can stop,” Matthews said. The region’s coal, uranium, natural gas, methane and other resources only boost the richness of the mix, Matthews said.

The energy resources of Colorado and Energy Alley are “something quite frankly the state needs to take better recognition of, especially in a time of recession,” Colorado Mining Association President Stuart Sanderson said. “You really have to appreciate the fact that domestic mining and domestic resources are extremely important to national security.”

While market forces drive demand for fuels such as those from Energy Alley, energy companies need to come to terms with “the growing expectation that companies need to earn not just the government-required permits and licenses, but that there is a less formal but very real social license to operate,” said Dr. Rod Eggert, director of the Division of Economics and Business at Colorado School of Mines.

It’s time for universities in general to start their own involvement to assure the development of oil shale can be done “without making this one of the ugliest corners of the United States,” Bartis said.

The Obama administration will begin one step toward oil shale development Monday, when nominations for a second round of oil shale research, demonstration and development leases are due to the Interior Department in Washington, D.C.

Government has to be just as imaginative in preparing for oil shale development as the energy companies are in learning how to unlock it, Bartis said.

“It’s in the national interest to get a lot of production,” he said, “but it’s also in the national interest not to have an environmental disaster.”

Bartis recommends structuring an agency like a port authority to handle the leasing of oil shale for development.

Just as a port authority controls a limited number of docks and provides for common needs, such as dredging, an oil shale agency needs to control access to the lands that contain, by one estimate, almost half again the amount of oil produced from the Earth since the dawn of commercial drilling.

The federal government also needs to devise the best royalty system for oil shale, Bartis said. The existing leasing system grew out of 19th century efforts to encourage people to move west, a carrot that’s no longer needed to encourage western development, he said.

In the case of oil shale, a highly concentrated resource in relatively small areas of western Colorado, eastern Utah and southwest Wyoming, the federal government has to find a way to meet paradoxical goals, Bartis said.

“How do we reward truly pioneering companies that put down hundreds of millions of dollars and should have a good reward if they do it the right way?” Bartis said. “And how do you do that without setting it up as a giveaway?”

A major impediment to nuclear energy seems to be disappearing, Bartis said.

Spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors were to be stored deep in Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but that state’s congressional delegation fended off the proposal.

The loss of Yucca Mountain seems “really not that important” to continuing the nuclear-energy industry, and it illustrated the folly of using politics to select a disposal site, Bartis said. It now seems that the pencil-thin spent fuel rods can be safely and inexpensively stored in concrete bunkers, taking up little space and requiring the oversight of a security force, Bartis said.

The lack of a large, secure storage site hasn’t hamstrung the industry to the point it can’t operate, Bartis said.

Colorado coal also could be mixed with biomass from its farms and forests for electricity generation, he said.

The possibility of another boom for an Energy Alley fuel points out that much has changed since 1982, said Eggert of the Colorado School of Mines, referring to the oil shale bust that hit western Colorado that year.

“The economy of the Western Slope has evolved and changed,” Eggert said. “People there are looking for a more out-of-the-way place. There is more of a potential conflict.”

Universities, Eggert added, are in a position to play constructive roles and be “honest brokers” in the sometimes fractious relationship between energy development and residents of places like Energy Alley.

“It just shows God’s sense of humor,” said Reeves Brown, executive director of Club 20, the Western Slope lobbying and promotional organization. “He takes the prettiest spots on the planet and underlays them with the richest of energy resources.”

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Scripps News
December 30, 2009

Dessert: Obama: No more Mr. Nice Guy

By Dale McFeatters

President Barack Obama is brilliant, articulate, funny, unflappable, invariably pleasant, able to get his points across without screaming.

It's not working for him.

The International Olympic Committee snubs him when he tries to get the Games for Chicago. The Chinese tell him to go get stuffed on climate change. Individual senators rewrite his health-care bill with impunity. His erstwhile liberal colleagues all but accuse him of double-crossing them on the wars.

The problem, as commentators are increasingly saying, is that while even his opponents like him, no one fears him.

That was most evident in the Republican reaction to Obama's reaction to the attempted Christmas Day bombing of an Amsterdam-to-Detroit Northwest flight.

Rep. Pete King, R-N.Y., said the fact that it took Obama, who was in Hawaii on vacation, 72 hours to address the incident on camera showed that fighting terrorism was low on his list of priorities. The Democrats -- but not Obama or anyone close to him -- pointed out that then-President George W. Bush, also on vacation, took six days to comment on the Shoe Bomber.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., accused Obama of failing to defend the country even as Hoekstra used the incident to raise campaign funds.

Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., said the president "appeased" terrorists, even though the senator's holding up of a permanent head of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration is hardly throwing obstacles in the terrorists' way.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who is still waiting for the Iraqis to welcome us as liberators, accuses the president of being so preoccupied with "social transformation" that he has failed to notice the terrorists are coming after us.

Harsh stuff, and it demands a response.

King regularly bashes Obama for trying to close the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison. He says bringing the prisoners to the mainland will put us in danger. Here's an idea: Bring the 200 or so remaining detainees to Massapequa Park on the south shore of Long Island, King's district, open the door of the buses and let all the prisoners go. Maybe they're dangerous, maybe they're not. Maybe they all find work as landscapers. We'll find out. In any case, they're King's problem now.

Hoekstra is from Michigan; in fact, he's running for governor, which is why he was raising funds. Michigan should tell Obama something. After all, he's effectively the head of two of the Big Three domestic automakers. Unless Hoekstra shapes up, Obama should announce that, on reflection, the Republicans are right: The government bailout of the auto industry is socialism. Therefore, he's decided to let the free market take its course and let GM and Chrysler go under.

Obama owes Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada big time for health-care reform; therefore, opening the nuclear-waste depository at Yucca Mountain is probably out. But we've got to find someplace to store all that glow-in-the-dark garbage. It happens that South Carolina, DeMint's state, is home to a huge nuclear facility at Savannah River. Obama can reassure the senator that this is a tough security measure because there's nothing like dangerously high levels of radioactivity to keep the terrorists away.

That leaves Cheney, who emerges from hiding more and more frequently for the express purpose of denouncing Obama. The former vice president may be the most secretive individual in American public life. Obama has just issued an executive order, intended to increase public access to secret material, stating that, "no information may be classified indefinitely." This is not at all what Cheney thinks. Obama should announce that as part of that order he's throwing open all the files, papers and memos from Cheney's eight years as vice president.

It may not shut up Obama's critics, but no one will accuse him of being too nice a guy.

--Contact Dale McFeatters at McFeattersD@SHNS.com

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Los Angeles Times
December 29, 2009

Nuclear plant near Fresno planned

The deal between French firm Areva and California investors faces regulatory hurdles. Early plans call for building at least one 1,600-megawatt plant using European pressurized reactor technology.

By Marc Lifsher

Reporting from Sacramento - A French company and a group of Central Valley investors announced Tuesday that they had signed a letter of intent to build one or two nuclear power plants near Fresno.

The agreement with Areva, a Paris nuclear engineering firm, is expected to be finalized in March, said John Hutson, chief executive of the Fresno Nuclear Energy Group, a partnership of local business executives and farmers. Once that's done, the two potential partners would begin a site selection and evaluation process that could take as long as two years, he said.

Environmentalists were skeptical that the agreement would go anywhere. They point out that California has a 3-decade-old law that bans the construction of nuclear power plants unless the state can certify that the federal government has come up with a plan for the permanent storage of spent nuclear fuel, which is highly radioactive. No such facility exists in the country, and plans to open one at Yucca Mountain in Nevada have been put on hold by the Obama administration.

The California ban doesn't trouble the California investors.

"The law is archaic and will fall by the wayside on its own, in our opinion," Hutson said.

Early plans call for building one or two 1,600-megawatt power plants using European pressurized reactor technology. The cost is expected to range between $5 billion and $8 billion, Hutson said. He said no financing had been secured at this stage of the project.

The group anticipates using treated waste water from local municipalities to cool the reactors, Hutson sad. Nuclear waste could be sent to France for reprocessing into new fuel, he said.

The European technology is awaiting certification by U.S. regulators, while such plants are under construction in France, Finland and China. Half a dozen U.S. power companies have expressed interest in building European-technology generating stations once the French system is certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

But in California, environmentalists said they doubted that the Fresno nuclear group could gain the necessary federal and state permits to build one or more nuclear power plants.

"I would not invest or bet money on nuclear plants being permitted and having a source of financing two years from now," said Jim Metropulos, a senior advocate in Sacramento with the Sierra Club.

--marc.lifsher@latimes.com

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Nuclear Street
December 24, 2009

Appeals Court: Nuclear Spent Fuel Can Be Stored At Plants

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it review the NRC's rejection of a request by Massachusetts and California that it increases the risk level

Stephen Heiser

A federal appeals court has refused a request by several states to force the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to declare spent fuel pools at atomic power plants a serious environmental threat.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week in Manhattan. It denied appeals by New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts that it review the NRC's rejection of a request by Massachusetts and California that it increases the risk level.

The states had argued that spent fuel causes a greater risk of fire than previously thought. The appeals court said that it must defer to the regulatory agency's expertise.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said he will continue legal actions to force the agency to create a central national site to store nuclear waste.

Nuclear Power companies having been paying the U.S. governement to handle and store the nuclear waste since the Carter Administration.  In addition, these same utilities have storing this nuclear waste on their own premesis since the 1970s.

The government had planned to store the waste at the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada, but that program was cancelled by political wrangling.

Spent fuel is stored in two ways.  Some waste is stored underwater in huge pools of water inside nuclear plants.  The pools are carefully monitored and have been a safe and reliable solution while the utilities wait for the governement to make good on its promise to come and collect the spent fuel.

The other storage system utilizes what are referred to as dry casks that store the spent fuel in carefully constructed and closely monitored chambers.   These chambers are made up of a variety of materials that are specifically designed to handle spent fuel.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
December 22, 2009

Yucca Mountain Project experiencing brain drain

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- The acting head of the Yucca Mountain Project is retiring at the end of the month along with another top official, the latest to depart the shrinking nuclear waste program, the Department of Energy confirmed.

Christopher Kouts, 59, worked in a variety of management and technical jobs during 24 years on the project. He was the No. 2 manager and became acting director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management in January after the departure of Director Ward Sproat.

Russ Dyer, 62, the project's chief scientist, also has announced retirement effective the end of the year, the department said.

Further, Allen Benson, the project's director of communications and outreach, said he will be retiring "within the next couple of months."

They are in the latest wave of departures as the Department of Energy ratchets down its effort to build a nuclear waste repository at the once-booming desert site 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The Obama administration has declared that placing used nuclear fuel within the mountain is no longer its preferred strategy for managing the waste.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu said earlier this year a blue-ribbon commission will be formed to identify alternatives, although nothing further has been announced.

In the meantime, the Yucca Mountain work force that was centered in Las Vegas has dropped from 2,750 people over three years through several rounds of budget cuts engineered by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the program's leading critic in Congress and also the Senate's majority leader.

The most recent job cuts earlier this year put the project at about 800 workers, but departures through the summer and fall have trimmed the population to about 625, Benson said.

Most of those who remain have been assigned to respond to technical questions from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is evaluating a Yucca Mountain license application that DOE filed in June 2008.

There have been indications that effort will be dropped as well at some point.

An internal DOE budget document that was disclosed last month suggested the Obama administration budget for fiscal 2011 will contain no more than $46.2 million earmarked for worker transition, site remediation and archiving data produced during more than two decades of research.

Sources who follow the program closely say it is likely that amount will be cut even further by the time the administration's budget for 2011 is announced in February.

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

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Toward Freedom
December 22, 2009

The Dangers of Nuclear Energy and the Need to Close Vermont Yankee

by Frank Joseph Smecker

With nuclear energy, uranium atoms split inside a reactor, and radiation heats water to its boiling point creating steam to spin a giant turbine. It all seems like ingenious, efficient, and clean energy production. So where’s the mess?

Now consider plutonium, a horribly carcinogenic and highly fissionable substance, radioactive for more than half a million years. If exposed to air, it will ignite. Like little pieces of confetti, very fine plutonium particles will disperse after ignition. A single particle -- like talc, to give you some perspective -- can give you lung cancer. In the words of Helen Caldicott, M.D.: "Hypothetically, if you could take one pound of plutonium and could put a speck of it in the lungs of every human being, you would kill every man, woman, and child on earth" -- not immediately, but over time "from lung cancer," Caldicott explains.

In one year, each nuclear reactor produces at least four hundred pounds of plutonium. According to bio-physicist John Gofman, who worked with plutonium on the Manhattan Project, if only 0.01 percent of stockpiled plutonium were to leak it would add at least an "extra twenty-five million cases of cancer in the American population" over the next fifty years. Gofman has since left the industry.

So where exactly is the mess? In the case of nuclear energy in Vermont the mess is in Windham County, in the town of Vernon, sitting along the riverbank.

It is true the waste is "contained" at the moment, but one crucial mishap, such as a meltdown, and the radioactive waste will replace everything that makes Vermont the state that it is. There is no such thing as a safe-level meltdown, and as long as there is a nuclear reactor in Vermont, the threat of meltdown exists. Moreover, the CDC (Center for Disease Control) has revealed that cancer death rates in Windham County are five percent above the national average.

Vermont’s per capita energy use is one of the lowest in the nation. However, according to the Council on the Future of Vermont, "the rate of energy consumption is faster in Vermont than in the United States as a whole." Total energy consumption has actually increased by eleven percent over the last ten years. Between 1990 and 2004 the total energy demand grew by twenty-five percent. Yet according to the same report, per capita electrical consumption has actually decreased in the last decade, regardless of an increase in number of customers. In other words, the increase in energy consumption does not pertain to electrical energy, so we can do without Yankee and start working toward reducing these other levels of energy consumption that are rooted in burning gas, oil, biomass, etc.

Here are some interesting facts related to the argument that energy rates will increase without Vermont Yankee: market rates in 2009 have been lower than the current contract rate from Yankee; DPS (the Department of Public Service) research purports to show that sufficient efficiency measures can nearly replace the power Yankee currently provides the state; Yankee has yet to settle on a purchase-power contract as regards reneging their license after 2012 and, their latest offer, filed with the Vermont Public Service Board, starts at 6.1 cents per kilowatt hour -- a 52.5 percent increase from current rates, current rates that are already higher than the market rates of ’09. What’s more, Washington Electric, despite having some of the highest rates in the state, has some of the lowest bills in the state.

In addition, Yankee’s plant is one of the oldest in the world: its infrastructure is precariously decrepit and in need of urgent repair. The plant’s $100 million condenser needs to be replaced immediately and, according to Arnie Gunderson, speaking at Richmond’s Free Public Library in VT back in November of ‘09, Yankee’s turbine-pull rotates in a fashion that when it malfunctions, shrapnel is shot back toward the reactor containment box. This too needs to be replaced.

Or why don’t we just replace Yankee with renewables? That seems to be the smartest, safest, and most cost-effective decision according to provided facts and data. We could assemble 3-400 megawatt wind-generated farms -- an endeavor that would only take up five percent of Vermont’s ridges.

Aside from economic and other costs, one might guess that mishaps at nuclear facilities are far and few between. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In 2006 alone, ten percent of all U.S. nuclear facilities had an "incident." We have all heard the horror stories of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, but not nearly as many people have heard of the spill that happened in Erwin, Tennessee in March of 2006, or the incident in which thousands of gallons of radioactive coolant spilled in Nebraska back in 1992.

Even VT Yankee has had radiation leaks time and again. There has been more than one leak at Yankee because of its aging, wooden infrastructure. In fact, in just the initial two years of operating, the plant had to be shut down seventeen times -- radioactive gases exceeding legal limits were pouring out. In July of 1976, 86,000 gallons of radioactive tritium spilled into the Connecticut River. In 1980 a thousand gallons of radioactive water spilled on the plant floor. Incidents like these rack up to well over a dozen. At the beginning of 2009, two pipes leaking radioactive water and steam were reported. And then there was a leak in April, and another in the condenser was discovered in June. In 2002, the USNRC (the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission) reported that 47 percent of facility employees are afraid to report safety issues to management.

On July 25th of 2007, Scientific American disclosed that in 2006 there were a total of ten nuclear incidents in the U.S. that merited "significant spread of contamination/over exposure of a worker" and "incidents with significant failure in safety provisions." Ten may seem like a small number, but when there are only 103 operating reactors at 64 sites in 31 states, suddenly, the chances that Vermont will suffer another incident is one out of three.

Lobbyists and those who have a financial stake in Yankee will argue against all of this. At the end of the day, the elite will do all they can do to maintain their positions of power. But we as citizens also have the power to deprive them of the ability to steal from us i.e., their slapping us with a multi-billion dollar bill of radioactive waste cleanup costs, and we also have the power to deprive them of the ability to destroy the state’s landbase i.e., the fissure of uranium atoms that end up emitting deadly levels of radiation in order to heat water to spin a turbine alongside a river within an old, doddering reactor that has a history of functional mishaps.

Vermont faces a crucial decision. Renew Yankee’s license in 2012 or don’t. The Department of Public Service polls show that the state’s majority (63 percent) wants Yankee gone, but the final decision rests with our legislators.

Furthermore, despite the NEI’s (Nuclear Energy Institute) claim that nuclear energy is safe and "green" with zero emissions, analysis proves otherwise. In fact, the nuclear industry is a large contributor to the greenhouse gas aggregate and global warming. The mining of uranium is especially intensive in emitting C02, alongside having a heavy reliance on diesel fuel to operate the machinery.

If one takes into account the mining of uranium, plant construction and fuel enrichment combined for an operating facility, the equivalent of 34-60 grams of C02 are emitted per kilowatt of energy (from each operational facility), as claimed by the German Oko Institute in the paper Comparing Greenhouse-Gas Emissions and Abatement Costs of Nuclear and Alternative Energy Options from a Life-Cycle Perspective, presented at the CNIC Conference on Nuclear Energy and Greenhouse-Gas Emissions in Tokyo, November of 1997.

In 2007 the U.S.’s total generation of energy from nuclear fission was 806.5 billion kWh (kilowatt hours). That equals anywhere from 27,421 billion to 48,390 billion grams of C02 released into the atmosphere in that year alone. Global emissions are much starker, ranging anywhere from 90,429.8 billion to 159,582 billion grams of C02 released into the atmosphere. One billion grams is equal to a thousand metric tons. These numbers will only climb drastically with demand.

There are also concerns surrounding spent fuel cooling pools. According to information attained from the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) and UCSUSA (Union of Concerned Scientists), these 45-feet deep, 100,000 gallon lead and/or steel-lined concrete pools are necessary for retaining the high-level radioactive spent fuel rods that generate intense heat. Powered by diesel generators, the pools are continually cooled while pumps circulate water from spent fuel pools to heat exchangers back to the spent fuel pools. There is also the monitoring of the air and water in order to prevent radiolysis (the dissociation of molecules) so that hydrogen gas will not escape, threatening explosion. Without cooling, the pool water will heat up and boil. If that water boils away, the spent fuel assemblies will overheat, melt, or catch fire. You’ll have a meltdown.

In addition, uranium mining -- employed for Yankee’s fuel rods -- is culpable for radiological contamination of the environment and for impacting groundwater systems. It requires approximately a ton of ore to extract two pounds of uranium. The leftover debris is known as uranium tailings. These tailings are comprised of alpha-emitting substances such as thorium-230 (half-life of 80,000 years), radium-226, radon-222, lead-210, polonium-210, etc.

The above-mentioned radium-226 in uranium tailings is a highly lethal "bone-seeking" alpha-emitting carcinogen with a half-life of 1,600 years. This element is "blown in the wind, washed by the rain, and leached into waterways" from the tailings. It concentrates by factors of thousands in aquatic plants and by the hundreds in land-based plants.

Considering the genocidal impact US history has had on the North American indigenous, uranium mining will only worsen this legacy. After decades of mining on American Indian territory, many lives have been ruined. Uranium tailings, fifty to sixty feet high speck the abandoned mining sites situated on reservation lands releasing radon, actinides (responsible for long-term radioactivity), and other debris into the topsoil and groundwater of the surrounding regions. The debris that sullies the climes of Indian country is replete with radioactive substances often resulting in cancers and other degenerative diseases.

Dr. Gordon Edwards, writing for Perception magazine in 1992, explained that leftover uranium tailings contain about 85 percent of the original radioactivity found in the ore. They emit at least 10,000 times the amount of radon gas as the undisturbed ore. Radon gas can travel 1,000 miles in a day and can deposit on vegetation, soil, and water.

The NRC estimates radon emissions from uranium tailings in the Southwestern U.S. will result in over 3,000 cancer deaths per century over the entire North American continent. Other researchers say this assertion is underestimated by at least a factor of ten.

By the 1950s cases of lung cancer, pulmonary fibrosis, pneumoconiosis, silicosis, tuberculosis, birth defects, kidney damage, and more, began to show up in populations near uranium mining sites. By 1978, the GAO (Government Accountability Office) had recorded 140 million tons of "on site tailings piles at twenty-two abandoned and sixteen operational mills." There are more than 1,100 abandoned uranium mines in the Navajo Nation alone. Continued production results in the creation of six to ten tons of tailings annually, alongside small cell carcinoma for Navajo miners.

Yucca Mountain, situated on Western Shoshone Nation land, is a proposed nuclear waste repository site. Left with thousands of tons of nuclear waste per annum, U.S. nuclear power facilities are desperately seeking a place to store their ever-increasing stockpiles of deadly wastes. America’s best idea thus far is to stuff it all inside a mountain, on land that does not belong to the U.S. Backed by the Ruby Valley Treaty and the Nevada Enabling Act, Yucca Mountain and its surrounding region are not U.S. territory, therefore not for federal use.

If Vermont Yankee is re-licensed we’ll have another twenty years of anxiety over whether or not it is safe to have an industrial operation that is splitting atoms to turn a turbine in our state. Vermont’s history and political makeup is a unique blend of conservative philosophy and leftist-progressivism that often respects the unity between person and place. Let’s continue that tradition and put ecology before economy. Renewable energy is the answer. We just need to adjust our lives so that the availability of energy determines our consumption instead of the other way around.

--Frank Joseph Smecker is a student, social-worker, and writer from Richmond, VT.

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Publishers Weekly
December 21, 2009

Nonfiction Book Reviews: 12/21/2009

About a Mountain John D'Agata. Norton, $23.95 (240p) ISBN 978-0-393-06818-4

In this circuitous, stylish investigation, D'Agata (Halls of Fame) uses the federal government's highly controversial (and recently rejected) proposal to entomb the U.S.'s nuclear waste located in Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas, as his way into a spiraling and subtle examination of the modern city, suicide, linguistics, Edvard Munch's The Scream, ecological and psychic degradation, and the gulf between information and knowledge. Acting as a counterpoint to Yucca is the story of a teenager named Levi who leapt to his death off Las Vegas' Stratosphere Motel. It is testament to D'Agata skillful organization of the book, broken into “Who,” “What,” “When,” “Where,” and “Why,” and his use of a rapid sequences of montages—Levi's suicide is spliced with Orwellian Congressional debates on the stability of Yucca Mountain—that readers will be pleasurably (and perhaps necessarily) disoriented but never distracted from the themes knitting together the ostensibly unrelated voices of Native American activists, politicians, geologists, Levi's parents, D'Agata's own mother, and a host of zany Las Vegans. A sublime reading experience, aesthetically rewarding and marked by moral courage and humility. (Feb.)

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Publishers Weekly
December 21, 2009

PW Talks with John D'Agata

Not In My Backyard

by Parul Sehgal

D'Agata uses Nevada's Yucca Mountain, once a proposed site for storing the U.S.'s nuclear waste, to meditate on a variety of ecological, political, and personal topics, including the suicide of Levi, a Las Vegan teenager, in About a Mountain (reviewed on p. 53).

Why did Yucca resonate so powerfully with you?

A friend of mine, a technical writer for a subcontractor at Yucca, knew that I'd find something peculiar in what was going on there. I toured the mountain and immediately found the project interesting. An attempt to hide nuclear waste for 10,000 years? That's kind of fascinating. At a Q&A afterward, someone in the audience asked a spokesman from Yucca, “How are you going to ensure the mountain is secure?” And the spokesman matter-of-factly responded, “We're going to build a sign, and we're going to make sure the sign remains physically intact and coherent for 10,000 years.” And I thought: that's preposterous. Written language isn't even 10,000 years old! I was hooked and spent the next few years researching the goofy government-sponsored studies that had been conducted in preparation for the project. But then out of the blue, my mom moved to Vegas, and my relationship to Yucca changed. I wouldn't have written the same book if my mom weren't going to be living in the path of high-level nuclear waste. I would have written an excessively ironic book about nuclear waste being sent to a mountain outside of Vegas, America's preeminent “throw-away” culture. Hardy-har-har. Thankfully, I didn't write that book. This project made me take Yucca and Vegas more seriously. And it made me try something as a writer that I hadn't attempted before.

The book covers so much ground. Did you follow various whims or did the issues ramify as you went along?

Initially I found myself forcing a very “writerly” braiding of these issues, but these attempts felt too postured and overly processed. Eventually, I started juxtaposing material, allowing these issues to speak to each other more naturally. The risk in doing this of course is that everything can become metaphor. Is the boy who kills himself a metaphor for what's going on at Yucca, or is Yucca a commentary on this boy's suicide? But I like the ambiguity. I like not being entirely clear where the emphasis lies.

You perform a very delicate balancing act in juxtaposing Levi's suicide with a host of other issues without minimizing the tragedy of his death.

It's crude to admit it, but before I tracked down his parents, I had only been thinking of Levi as a way to talk about Yucca. But that changed once I met his parents and saw his photos on their refrigerator and his art in his old bedroom. I started feeling as if I knew him in some way, and yet, I also know that I don't understand the first thing about what he felt before he died. But it took getting to know Levi through his parents before I could really feel the potency of that kind of unknowing. This book, for me, is about that not-knowing: whether it's concerning Yucca Mountain, suicide, or the delicate vulnerability of our future as a species.

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State of Nevada
December 21, 2009

Attorney General Masto Announces NRC Adoption of New Transportation Security Requirements

Move Is Long-Delayed Victory for Nevada

Carson City: Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto has announced new regulations governing the transportation of spent nuclear fuel shipments.

More than two years before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the State of Nevada undertook an in-depth evaluation of the potential for terrorist attacks against spent nuclear fuel shipments. Nevada’s evaluation documented the vulnerability of spent fuel shipments using information readily available from public sources.

In June 1999, as a result of that evaluation, the Nevada Attorney General’s office petitioned the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) seeking amendments to regulations governing the safety of SNF shipments and for a comprehensive assessment of the consequences of terrorism and sabotage. The Western Governors Association endorsed the petition on behalf of 18 western states, and five other states (LA, MI, OK, VA, & WV) also endorsed all or part of the petition.

“After more than 10 years, NRC belatedly responded to Nevada’s petition and proposed new rules which will adopt most of Nevada’s requested actions,” stated Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto. “Our sensitivity concerning the transportation of nuclear waste has changed dramatically since 9/11 and the public needs adequate protection and a responsive, responsible NRC.”

NRC’s proposal for rulemaking recommends adopting five of the seven regulatory changes requested by Nevada. These changes would significantly improve security by:

•clarifying and expanding the definition of “radiological sabotage;”

•adopting route approval measures that would minimize movement of SNF through highly populated areas;

•requiring armed escorts for the entire route for truck shipments;

•requiring armed escorts for the entire route for rail shipments; and

•requiring additional planning and scheduling to avoid unnecessary delays and stops and ensure early involvement of affected states in selection of shipping routes.

NRC denied certain parts of Nevada’s requests, including a request for a reevaluation of the Design Basis Threat (the threat scenario used in judging whether protective measures are adequate to protect the public); a request for a comprehensive assessment of terrorism consequences; and a request that the use of dedicated trains for spent fuel shipments by rail be made mandatory. Even these denials, however, reflect NRC’s acknowledgement of the legitimacy of Nevada’s petition.

The denial of Nevada’s request for public reexamination of the Design Basis Threat was based on security considerations and does not dispute Nevada’s argument that shipping casks are vulnerable to certain types of weapons and attack scenarios.

The denial of Nevada’s request for a comprehensive assessment of terrorism consequences was likewise based on procedural and security considerations and is offset by NRC’s decision to admit six Nevada contentions (or challenges) dealing with the same transportation terrorism and sabotage issues in the Yucca Mountain licensing proceeding. DOE has acknowledged the vulnerability of shipping casks to sabotage events in the 2008 Yucca Mountain Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement.

NRC’s denial of Nevada’s request for mandatory dedicated trains for rail shipments of SNF, a major issue in 1999, is less significant now that the utilities and DOE have subsequently (and largely in response to pressure from Nevada, other states and regional groups) declared their intention to use dedicated trains voluntarily.

“Our one major disappointment is that DOE’s SNF shipments are exempt from NRC safeguards regulations,” said Attorney General Masto. “Because the Nuclear Waste Policy Act does not specifically require it, NRC has indicated that its safeguards regulations would not apply to shipments to Yucca Mountain or any future federal repository site.”

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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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