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Thursday, Jan. 14, 2010 | 5:57 p.m.
WASHINGTON – The Department of Energy and the White House are at odds over how steep to cut the Yucca Mountain budget for fiscal 2011, according to reports.
Energy Secretary Stephen Chu is balking over the White House plan to slash the budget for the nearly-doomed nuclear waste dump north of Las Vegas, according to reports in Energy Daily and the Wall Street Journal.
Apparently, the White House wants to zero out the $46 million in the Energy Department's request in the president’s new budget due next month.
Chu sent a letter to White House budget director Peter Orszag last month arguing that at least $25 million was needed to close out the Yucca Mountain office, including for the retention of “critical knowledge and data.”
Obama has pledged to stop the Yucca Mountain project, and severely cut last year’s budget for the proposed waste facility. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said Obama will zero out funding in 2011.
The NWPA is a federal law and requires that the President, the Secretary of Energy and the NRC complete Yucca Mountain. Yet Obama's budget director instead tries to zero out the funding. Only Chu apparently has the professional integrity to try to follow the law.
Senator Reid will be the first $200 billion reeelection campaign based on costing Nevadans $100 billion in employment as well as at least another $100 billion in legal penalties for not taken waste per contracts signed by DOE. It is truly amazing that the rest of America is not aware of what is going on by Obama's Administration all in the effort to get Reid reelected. The nuclear waste will stay where it is for the next 100 years, subject to local terrorist attacks and accidental releases instead of buried 2000 feet underground in a desert next to where 1000 nuclear bombs were exploded. America is truly doomed due to the stupidity and ignorance of its elected leaders as well as the uninformed electorate.
-Three superb National Laboratories said the spent fuel could be stored safely at Yucca.
-National Academy of Science said it could be transported safely with some precautions.
-About $60 billion to $80 billion would be coming to Nevada for jobs (diversity we could definitely use right now). The equivalent in jobs of about 6 to 8 City Centers being build over a 35 to 50 year period.
Oh, wait a minute, Fear monger Harry Reid, a lawyer, said it would be dangerous so vote for him and he will kill it. He was right; he could kill it spreading fear but not with technical data because that says it would still be safe.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission is looking at the application but Reid wants the application pulled prematurely based on fear, not on the merits of the technical data. What a loss to the State of Nevada and the nation.
dipstick: Isn't Simpsons a cartoon?
dipstick - intelligent comment.
However, got the spelling of your name slightly wrong. I assume you meant dipsh_t.
Reid keeps yaking about the jobs he created (i.e. CityCenter-contributed to his re-election campaign). Once construction was completed, construction workers had no jobs: nothing gained. Why did he not help with the other scuttled projects? Shutting down Yucca Mountain cost many jobs. He's done more for Nebraska and Louisana than Nevada. ADIOS REID - HAPPY TRAILS TO SEARCHLIGHT.
The Energy Daily article that broke the story Mascaro is reporting brings up the tricky subject of not just lawsuits seeking monetary damages, but also more immediate legal actions to rectify non-performance of legally mandated actions. There are surely several parties with standing (including Congress, I would suspect) that could seek a writ of mandamus or some other form of injunction under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act if the White House (through OMB) succeeds in derailing the Yucca Mountain license application currently before the NRC by zeroing out the YMP budget.
It seems to be an observation that falls on deaf ears here in Nevada, but the NWPA is the LAW OF THE LAND, and absent a repeal of that law there are legal consequences for breaking it. Section 119 of the NWPA, for example, provides for civil actions against the Secretary of Energy, the President, and/or the NRC in the event that any decisions or actions spelled out in the Act are not executed. Simply put, the NWPA calls for the construction of a national repository for nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. It also directs the NRC to review the YMP license application and either grant or deny a construction authorization based on technical and regulatory adequacy.
If Harry Reid, pulling the strings of the White House and OMB, succeeds in zeroing out both the YMP budget and NRC's budget for reviewing the YMP license application, as he has promised, there will likely be immediate legal consequences (injunctions, writs of mandamus, possible civil actions, etc.).
Of course, because none of these legal actions would threaten Harry directly, he is all the more willing to risk them. Never mind that they might waste millions of dollars and clog up the courts; the fact that Harry will be able to trumpet his "defeat of Yucca" during the campaign would naturally trump such scruples. And by the time the real legal floodgates open, if the YMP is indeed scuttled through budget cuts, the damage will have been done: Harry will have another term, and the taxpayer will be on the hook for billions of dollars awarded to nuclear utilities because of the government's failure to take possession of nuclear waste under the legally binding NWPA.
On the subject of other points brought up by davelv:
I would agree that Chu is showing some integrity relative to OMB, the White House, and Harry Reid. But remember also that Chu is essentially arguing for the minimal funds needed to close down the Yucca Mountain Project (funds for site remediation, archiving, etc.).
So really Chu is as guilty as anyone else in this fiasco insofar as he is colluding with the Administration to break the law -- the NWPA. He just disagrees on the manner of execution, like arguing over whether to kill a death-row inmate using lethal injection or the electric chair.
Also, the point you bring up about maintaining the status quo is crucial. Although Harry Reid has been pushing the "leave it where it is" solution for a long time now, we seldom hear him mention the various studies that analyze that solution. There have been several "no-action" studies that hypothesize about the potential results of leaving the waste where it is, on-site in dry cask storage and/or in cooling pools. In some of these analyses, the study will stipulate a total breakdown of institutional controls (a societal breakdown) after 100 years. Imagine, for example, a catastrophe on the order of the Haiti earthquake, but worse, leading to a long-term absence of social institutions.
Well, in those studies, the on-site storage, which is not designed as a long-term solution, predictably begins to degrade, but there are no institutional controls to address the problem -- no one to fix the inevitable leaks. The result is pretty grim. In fact, it's an environmental catastrophe involving contaminated water supplies and soil.
People -- Nevadans especially -- seem to forget that currently 160 million of their fellow Americans live within 60 miles or so of stored nuclear waste, and that nuclear waste is stored near virtually every major waterway in the nation. In the event of a loss of institutional controls, the consequences would be spread all over the country rather than confined to a mountain in the middle of an uninhabited desert and situated over a water table used by virtually no one.
One last note about the Energy Daily report that broke the story Mascaro is reporting second-hand:
It provides details about the evolving farce otherwise known as Secretary Chu's "Blue-Ribbon Commission" to evaluate alternatives to Yucca Mountain.
According to the Energy Daily, Chu and the White House had approached Rep. Lee Hamilton (of the 9/11 Commission) and asked him to chair the Blue-Ribbon Commission.
At first, Hamilton expressed interest in the position and seemed enthusiastic about it. However, when he learned that the commission would NOT BE ALLOWED to assess the Yucca Mountain Project as one of several "options" for solving the nuclear waste issue, he began to have second thoughts and may now turn down the offer.
Hamilton, who is known as much for his integrity as Harry Reid is known for his lack thereof, apparently expressed concern that the Blue-Ribbon Commission would lose all credibility and appear purely political if a credible option such as Yucca Mountain were arbitrarily excluded from consideration. It would, in short, be obvious that the Blue-Ribbon Commission was merely a cover, a kind of alibi, for Harry Reid's vendetta against the Yucca Mountain Project.
Moreover, it would be painfully obvious (as if it weren't already) that the Blue-Ribbon Commission and indeed the entire "reevaluation" of our nation's nuclear waste policy was based in politics rather than credible science.
Yucca opponents might counter that the selection of Yucca Mountain was itself based in politics, and that argument would be persuasive to a point. But two wrongs don't make a right, and a Blue-Ribbon Commission based in politics rather than science is not the answer. It just so happens that the case for Yucca is based in sound science, no matter how political the initial decision to site the repository there may have been. You cannot rectify that decision and refute that science in the same stroke. Simply reversing the political decision through a subsequent decision does not make the scientific evidence any less valid, and that is the essence of Lee Hamilton's apparent reconsideration of the Blue-Ribbon Commission. For unlike, say, Harry Ried, Lee Hamilton is a man of integrity.
There are some really excellent responses in this chain of emails. They are so good they leave me with nothing to say!
The only think I did not see mentioned is that we have had these types of commissions before, it is how we got to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 and its unfortunate 1987 amendment. The 1982 act is one that induced great respect in me for Congress, it is a well-written law. The 1987 amendment act took that respect away, it is a badly written law with strange things in it. Nevertheless, there was a basis for seeing if Yucca Mountain would be safe. A multi-attribute ultility analysis had YM as #1 out of the 5 sites then under consideration.
But is that analysis what influenced Congress' decision? Not as much as we would have hoped, it was the lack of political power in Nevada that made Congress bold at that time (Democrats and Republicans both, very bipartisan!). So killing YM settles a political score, but it does so at the expense of the entire nation, and also at the expense of the thousands of skilled union and technical workers that would be employed there for generations.
The bottom line is that it will be shown that YM is basically safe, as is the transport of the material to YM, as already mentioned in other messages above.
WE NEVADANS WIN against YM, and in doing so WE LOSE!
A lot of the State's scientists have had their positions refuted by independent national external oversight boards like the ACNW and the NWTRB. The DOE scientists Reid badmouths are among the best and brightest that this country (and the world) has to offer from our National Laboratories at Lawrence Livermore, Berkely, Los Alamos, Sandia, and other top tier organizations.
The truth is that over 99.9% of all radioactivity going into Yucca Mountain would never leave the mountain even with no engineered barriers. This is because of isolation time (radioactive decay), lack of solubility of many radionuclides, and a relatively benign environment 1,000 feet above the water table. The concept of a geologic repository is a good one. The waste can be hazardous if not handled properly, thus a repository is necessary, but honestly, this so called "deadly" nuclear waste has never actually caused even one death because of how it is required to be safely handled.
It's amazing how Reid and our leaders in State government will say anything to scare the public into their political position. I believe there's a word for spreading fear and discontent without basis and cause. Maybe terrorism is hitting closer to home than Iraq and Afghanistan.