Facebook
Fark
Digg
Reddit
StumbleYUCCA MOUNTAIN:
Yep, waste dump still on track for deep-sixing
Efforts to reignite Yucca project fail as Senate passes spending bill
U.S. Department of Energy
Yucca Mountain is located about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Thursday, July 30, 2009 | 2 a.m.
Harry Reid
Sun Topics
Sun Blogs
Another sign of the possible demise of the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository could be seen Wednesday on the floor of the Senate as the chamber worked its way through the annual energy spending bill for 2010.
The bill, which passed late in the day, reduces funding to develop the radioactive waste dump 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas as part of the Obama administration’s vow to terminate the project.
The bill also reflects Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s effort to reduce by half the amount of money to pay for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s review of Yucca Mountain, potentially curtailing the independent body’s ability to process the dump’s license application.
Unlike the House, which tried this month to salvage the Yucca Mountain project, the Senate was making no such gestures.
Maneuvers to breathe new life into Yucca Mountain did not materialize.
The one effort backed by the nuclear energy industry that succeeded in the Senate was an industry request to halt payments that nuclear energy utility customers have been making into a fund for waste disposal, given that the dump’s development seems unlikely.
Reid said in a statement late Wednesday that the bill’s passage affirms the president’s plan to end the Yucca Mountain project and seek alternatives.
The senator vowed to work on alternatives and “prevent Nevada from ever again being considered as the nation’s nuclear dumping ground.”
In trying to keep good on his campaign promise to Nevadans that the Yucca Mountain project would not happen under his watch, Obama announced a severe financial blow to the project when he unveiled his 2010 budget.
Obama is seeking $198.6 million for Yucca, a fraction of what the Energy Department says is needed to develop the repository.
Yet Reid’s office at the time suggested that further cuts were needed at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Development of Yucca Mountain is now in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s court. The agency plans to spend the next four years reviewing the repository’s license application with hearings in a courtroom-like setting in Las Vegas.
Because Obama did not halt the application process before the commission, some Yucca opponents doubted the project was truly terminated. They worry the application review could proceed until a new president decides to open the dump.
Observers say Obama has allowed Yucca’s application to continue because the administration wants to avoid legal battles with the utility companies while it forms an alternative. The companies have sued the government for failing to take the waste off their hands.
Plus Obama’s energy secretary, Steven Chu, the Nobel laureate, has said he sees value in allowing the science to play out in the application process.
Still, Reid wanted the Nuclear Regulatory Commission cut, and the energy spending bill reduces the president’s request from $56 million to $29 million, a nearly 50 percent slash.
The House and Senate bills have several differences that will need to be resolved for final passage.
The House bill includes a provision that would keep Yucca Mountain on the table as an option before the administration’s new commission that is being formed to study alternative waste sites.
Also to be resolved is whether to grant the industry’s request to cut customers’ payments to the waste fund, which now has amassed $22 billion.
The industry thinks it is unfair for customers to continue paying into the fund if the repository will not be built. But longtime dump foe Rep. Shelley Berkley, a Democrat, said if the industry “wanted to really do something good for families, they would join in our effort to dump Yucca Mountain.”
Discussion: comments so far…
Comments are moderated by Las Vegas Sun editors. Our goal is not to limit the discussion, but rather to elevate it. Comments should be relevant and contain no abusive language. Comments that are off-topic, vulgar, profane or include personal attacks will be removed. Full comments policy. Additionally, we now display comments from trusted commenters by default. Those wishing to become a trusted commenter need to verify their identity or sign in with Facebook Connect to tie their Facebook account to their Las Vegas Sun account. For more on this change, read our story about how it works and why we did it.
Only trusted comments are displayed on this page. Untrusted comments have expired from this story.
No trusted comments have been posted.
Post a comment
Most Popular
- Viewed
- Discussed
- E-mailed
- UNLV can move forward without the burden of losing streak to San Diego State
- A wife’s wisdom shows birth control issue needn’t be divisive
- Motorcycle accident claims life of man in northeast valley
- Surprise links, negotiated deals addressed by commissioners
- Hope and change and … what’s missing?
- We don’t need a CEO in charge
- New York mayor has the right idea
- Paying our own way
- Country has ‘given’ citizens a lot
- Jerry Tarkanian: Mike Moser impresses yet again on a day to remember former Rebel greats
Blogs
The Kats Report
Color from scene at Thomas & Mack: We have a wire job! Rebels win, and Louie Armstrong sings!
South Point owner Michael Gaughan's take on 'Vegas Stripped': 'I'll give it an 8' (4 Comments)
Author relishes writing the life story of ‘larger-than-life’ Oscar Goodman (3 Comments)
Elsewhere
Landowner: All roads could lead to Uxbridge casino
Revel reveals smoke-free casino opening
Cirque du Soleil show in Sands China casino to close this month
Meet the woman behind Sheldon Adelson
The Sun
Locally owned and independent for more than 50 years.
atta boy harry...
keep up the great work...
anyone from nevada who does not vote for you is a complete and total moron!!!
Carbon-free nuclear power is the ONLY way the world can retire emission-belching coal generating plants and possibly check global warming. If we have scientists address the nuclear waste problem, not politicians, nuclear waste can actually become a resource.
Yucca Mountain was a political solution to a scientific problem. It does not make sense to ship nuclear waste to Nevada when 96 of the 104 reactors are east of the Rockies. Nor does it make sense to store nuclear waste above the surrounding water table in the most recently formed and changing crust on earth. We should consider expanding the existing WIPP disposal site in New Mexico. It is several thousand feet under the earth in a salt deposit that's had no geological activity for a zillion years (or there abouts).
-- Robert Moen, www.energyplanUSA.com
Obama, Reid, Pelosi polls in the tank.
Reid 15%
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,5356...
hey gotjobs...
you are a complete and total moron...
have you ever heard the saying "you are willing to cut off your nose to spite your face"...
that's you...
times a million...
you poor poor terribly misguided republican clowns have got no clue...
none...
zip...
zilch...
nada...
This is one of several articles in the media elsewhere that have the lead of the story that this budget cancels the Yucca repository. The Obama administration has made clear that it intends to "terminate" the facility there, the government has yet do so. The site was approved by Congress and signed into law by the previous president (subject to getting a license from the NRC and, one imagines, court challenges.) Therefore it will take an act of Congress to cancel the project. Reid can't pull that off.
Okay, Lisa: Where's the story here?
As you mentioned, we knew from the Administration's 2010 budget, unveiled months ago, that the DOE's budget for Yucca Mountain would be around $196 million.
The bill you are describing (S. 1436), which has just emerged from the Senate Appropriations Committee, merely delivers what the Administration asked for. No surprise there. The allocation is $196 million.
DOE has already made the necessary workforce reductions to get through 2010 with a budget of $196 million. The current staffing level reflects that number. So where's the news, and how is the Yucca Mountain Project any more or less dead than it was months ago when the same sour-faced remarks issued from Our Dear Majority Leader's lips?
He looks like a man with a mouthful of fishmeat who's just discovered a bone in it.
The only real bit of news in your story, Lisa, concerns the NRC budget allocation, which does represent a departure from the Administration's FY2010 budget.
I find this the most newsworthy item to emerge from this week's cloud of idiocy and spin.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is supposed to be a non-partisan, independent regulatory agency. Its development, implementation, and enforcement of regulations is supposed to be BY STATUTE, without regard to politics (it's politics -- the legislative process -- that produces those statutes).
The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 directs NRC to review the Yucca Mountain license application and either issue or deny a construction authorization license. This review is twofold: One part, conducted by NRC Staff, is technical; the other is legal, conducted by lawyers for the interested parties (Nevada, California, DOE, the nuclear industry, Native American tribes, etc.).
But now, Harry Reid is essentially proposing a CIRCUMVENTION OF THE LAW through budget cuts, which is what he's always done, only this time more flagrantly.
It's bad enough that former Reid science adviser Greg Jaczko has been elevated to the Chairman of the NRC, which represents the ultimate conflict of interest. But to then de-fund the NRC's legally mandated review, all with Jaczko's apparent blessing -- that's the limit indeed.
Robert Moen:
Your line of argument is familiar insofar as it defeats itself by its own logic.
Of course the Yucca Mountain Project is both a political and scientific decision (political in the broadest sense as "involving the polis"). The DOE's former director of the Project said as much, and everyone jumped on him for it.
Where your own logic falls apart is in cherry picking a couple of factors among hundreds and presenting them as somehow "definitive." Do you think you are the first person to offer the idea of WIPP as a potential high-level waste repository? Don't you think that's been studied? Do you know why WIPP is a transuranic waste repository rather than a high-level radioactive waste repository? Have you ever heard the term "salt creep"? Do you understand why NRC has no involvement in WIPP, but that NRC would by law be responsible for licensing any high-level waste/spent nuclear fuel repository? Do you know about the brine over which WIPP is sited, and the consequences of that? Do you have any earthly idea of the protests, legislative battles, and legal wrangling occasioned during the development of WIPP?
And on the geology/seismology/volcanology front: Why is it that people like you always throw out descriptive phrases like "most recently formed and changing crust on earth," and yet you never cite a single study about the probability of, say, an earthquake or volcanic eruption significant enough to cause damage?
Why is it that people from a particular discipline who oppose the repository always harp on only those elements of the repository design they understand? Yucca Mountain doesn't boil down to geology or seismology or any other single discipline. An alternate site that may seem perfect from the standpoint of a geologist will look like garbage from the standpoint of a hydrologist or an engineer. Hence, the many non-Project armchair geologists out there (e.g., Allison Macfarlane) who say, "The repository needs to be in granite, or in salt." Well, you find me a site in granite or salt that also satisfies the myriad other considerations, all specific to disciplines OTHER THAN geology, that go into siting a nuclear waste repository.
And even if you find the "perfect" site from a pan-disciplinary scientific standpoint, what about the legal and regulatory standpoint? Does your site meet requirements for distance from flightpaths and population concentrations? Is it near a water table that supplies a population center, as opposed to on top of one that dead ends in the middle of nowhere?
Before you start rejecting established law and policy and science, and before you make a proposal of your own, try looking at the entire picture. That's what the hundreds of scientists and engineers and regulatory experts did when narrowing down the initial nine potential sites to three and then to one: Yucca Mountain.
I sure hope the other 49 state representatives are reading these stories today with the headline that Yucca Mountain has been killed by Sen. Reid. Based on his desires, only the other 49 states can now be considered for a future repository - Nevada can not! Seems the word "American" is being lost in this decision.
Nevada receives 16% nuclear powered electricity, has nuclear weapons protecting even it at Nellis, has the Nuclear Navy protecting us with undersea missiles and ensuring free shipping lines in the sea, and depends upon nuclear electricity keeping energy cost down worldwide so that tourism can exist to keep the casinos operating and Nevadans employed.
How strange that some Nevadans and Sen. Reid embrace the effort to end the one project that ensures their survival...