Task force supporting Yucca dump site forms

Suzanne Struglinski

Tuesday, April 26, 2005 | 9:42 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Yucca Mountain advocates created a task force Monday to try to convince the public that the nation needs to open the proposed federal nuclear waste repository in Nevada.

Yucca Mountain Task Force members want the site to open "within the shortest time frame possible --consistent with public health and safety." They will work on a grassroots effort to get Congress to fully fund the program, encourage the Energy Department to submit a license application and want a new radiation standard to be created by the Environmental Protection Agency or Congress.

The push for the project comes at the same time that Nevada's congressional delegation is calling for an independent investigation into the alleged falsifications of scientific research that supported the nuclear dump. The Energy Department discovered the problems while reviewing e-mail messages.

In the e-mails U.S. Geological Survey scientists talk about making things up and about how they "fudge" data in the messages. Nevada's congressional delegation expects the investigations into the e-mails will produce information significant enough to stop the program.

But Terry Freese, director of legislative programs for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's lobbying organization said Nevada has "overstated" the effects of the recently discovered e-mails that suggest scientific data was falsified.

Freese said the department, so far, has not found anything that affected long-term science or the site's suitability to serve as a repository. The Interior and Energy Departments and the FBI are investigating what happened.

"The industry believes it is important to keep this investigation in context," Freese said."We are taking about a relatively small, focused area in a broad, 20 years of research."

Yucca Mountain Task Force Co-Chairman David Wright, a South Carolina Public Service Commissioner said this new effort was "totally unrelated" and not a counterattack.

Martez Norris, the coalition's executive director, said the Task Force grew out of "continued frustration" about the project's failure to move forward. Yucca supporters wanted a united voice again, as they had when working on Congress to approve the site in 2002.

"Once the resolution was rectified, it was like everybody went home. and what we are trying to do is to bring everybody back to the table," Norris said. "Part of it is to educate Congress and keep it in the forefront."

Charles Pray, Task Force Co-Chairman and Maine's State Nuclear Safety Advisor, said the goal is to spread the word that nuclear ratepayers have put $24 billion toward a final storage solution they have not seen yet.

"It's been a one-sided conversation as of recent weeks, months," Pray said. " I don't think there has really been an overall discussion about the alternatives. Nobody seems to put that information out to the public."

Pray emphasized that without Yucca, nuclear waste would stay stored at nuclear power plants, which is not part of the industry's agreement with the government. The plants' storage containers are not designed to hold waste forever.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., plans to introduce a bill that would allow money from the Nuclear Waste Fund to be used to keep waste at the nuclear power plants. The bill would allow the government to take responsibility for the waste on-site, eliminating the need having to ship the waste across the country, spokeswoman Tessa Hafen said.

But Pray objects to Reid's idea of keeping waste at the plants, saying the government has spent billions doing environmental studies and tests at Yucca.

"I am not sure the federal government has the money to do that same evaluation for those 35 states," Pray said.

The Task Force want to recruit members in all 41 states where nuclear power users pay into the Nuclear Waste Fund, the account earmarked to fund the repository. Ratepayers have put $24 billion into the fund but Congress has shortchanged the department's budget requests for the project by $1 billion during the past decade.

The group wants Congress to change the budget rules so the $750 million paid annually into the fund can go straight to the project without affecting other federal project in the energy spending bill.

"It's a question of whether or not all these states, and all these counties, and all these cities and all these indian nations and all these other people who have material sitting there, who have spent the money, are going to let a small group of people focused on the state of Nevada decide what's going to happen," said Jack Edlow, president of Edlow International Co. a waste shipping company. Edlow is also in charge of the U.S. Transport Council.