Group items tagged

"President Obama is looking for help in collaring American nuclear power. On Friday, the Department of Energy asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to reconsider its refusal to kill the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste storage project. In doing so, Mr. Obama continues his relentless quest to throttle this politically incorrect form of clean energy while pretending to sustain it. In June, a three-judge NRC panel said the Obama administration cannot halt the licensing of the facility without approval from Congress. Now the administration hopes the full five-member commission will overturn the earlier ruling and end the project once and for all. Americans should hope that doesn't happen."

"Thirty years ago, the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board selected Yucca Mountain, Nevada, as the nation's only permanent storage site for the radioactive waste from our nuclear power plants. Work proceeded during this period to secure walls and ceilings from possible earthquakes, paving interior roads and installing more extensive infrastructure. All of this added up to expenditures of $10 billion. This past March, the U.S. Energy Department notified the board they intended to abandon the Yucca site because it was "too small." This must be government at its worst. An Energy Department spokeswoman said that the president was establishing a blue-ribbon commission to find a "safe, long term solution" within 18 months."

Since the federal government announced plans to turn Yucca Mountain into a nuclear waste dump, Nevada's governors have been unified in their opposition. The state's vigorous fight has exposed the plan's serious and dangerous flaws, and Nevada is in a position to defeat the plan once and for all. Enter Gov. Jim Gibbons. His proposed budget guts the state's Agency for Nuclear Projects, which is responsible for pressing Nevada's case. He cut the staff from seven to two. He also slashed funding for the state's legal challenges. The attorney general, for example, asked for $5 million over two years and was granted just $186,000 by Gibbons.

Democratic lawmakers on Thursday criticized the governor's plan to cut staff at the state agency responsible for battling the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. In the budget he unveiled last week, Gov. Jim Gibbons called for staff at the state Nuclear Projects to be cut from seven to two.

He warns against gutting the state agency fighting the nuclear repository By all accounts, the plan to put a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain is all but dead. The new president has said it is not safe to bury radioactive material 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who has chipped away its funding for years, has vowed to zero out its budget this year. And the state has filed more than 200 legal objections to the long-overdue application to license the repository.

The purpose of this letter is to request that you consider holding legislative hearings on the problems associated with the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA), 42 U.S.C. 7384-7385, as amended.

Perma-Fix Environmental has received the go-ahead to resume shipments of radioactive waste to the Nevada Test Site from its M&EC processing facility in Oak Ridge, but a temporary ban on shipments to NTS remains in effect for the company's facilities at Richland, Wash., and Gainesville, Fla. Larry McNamara, the chief operating officer of Perma-Fix, said today an audit last week at the Oak Ridge facility went well and satisified the previous concerns. M&EC was put on suspension following a September incident in which a container of waste leaked and had rad contamination on its exterior.

The Energy Department has recommended expanding the amount of nuclear waste that could be stored in an underground repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada to avoid the need for a second dump. It is a sensible proposal that also is an urgent reminder of how little progress has been made in solving one of the most vexing problems of the nuclear age. Tens of thousands of tons of spent fuel and military waste have been piling up at temporary storage sites around the country while the federal government has struggled, unsuccessfully, to find a long-term solution.

A state petition listing more than 200 reasons for not opening a federal nuclear waste dump in southern Nevada was filed Friday with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto. Among major concerns highlighted by Masto and other state officials at a news conference in Las Vegas was what they termed an incomplete and inadequate plan for shipping high-level radioactive waste across the country to the Yucca Mountain site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Testifying at a hearing held in Las Vegas today, Congresswoman Shelley Berkley pressed federal regulators with the Surface Transportation Board (STB) to reject Bush administration plans to build a $3 billion railroad in Nevada to haul nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain. Members of the STB convened the forum to hear from elected officials, residents and businesses concerned about the impact on communities in Nevada and across the U.S. from thousands of shipments of toxic nuclear waste targeted for burial in the Silver State. "Nevadans oppose this $3 billion "Railroad to Nowhere" and we recognize the dangers that will accompany decades of toxic nuclear waste shipments to Yucca Mountain," said Berkley. "My hope is that the STB will listen to our concerns and that they will block any effort by this White House to push forward on the Yucca Mountain rail line as they head out the door," said Berkley.

THE State of Nevada is writing a letter to Cumbria County Council outlining why an underground nuclear dump in Cumbria should be opposed. A new action group - Radiation Free Lakeland - has gained the support from the American state after the council expressed an interest to the government in hosting an underground dump. Council leader Stewart Young wrote to Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Miliband to offer Copeland as a site for a deep geological repository to store atomic waste.

The bleeding might soon begin. A few weeks after Sen. Harry Reid declared that the Yucca Mountain project was going to "bleed real hard" in the coming year, he said Monday the already reduced budget for the controversial nuclear waste plan will be cut "significantly" for the remainder of 2009, and that a 2010 White House spending request will contain "little if anything at all." The Nevada Democrat made the declaration after he brought up Yucca Mountain in a meeting with President-elect Barack Obama earlier in the day. The two have spoken about the project on several occasions since the election. After Monday's meeting, Reid said Obama reiterated his opposition to the project that he had campaigned against during the presidential race.

Both U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Congressman Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., took the occasion of a Surface Transportation Board hearing here to fire a few shots over toward the Department of Energy. Berkley essentually said Bush administration plans to build a $3 billion railroad in Nevadas to haul nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain should be rejected. "Nevadans oppose this $3 billion 'Railroad to Nowhere,'" said Berkley, "and we recognize the dangers thatb will accompany decades of toxic nuclear waste shipments to Yucca Mountain."

Among the field of candidates to replace Bob Loux as executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency are a former consumer advocate, a former mayor and an agency employee. Five people who are vying for Loux's long-held job will be interviewed Monday when the Nevada Commission on Nuclear Projects meets in Las Vegas. The commission, chaired by former Sen. Richard Bryan, will select three whose names will be sent to Gov. Jim Gibbons who will select Loux's replacement. The commission accepted Loux's resignation Sept. 29 when he stepped down amid controversy over unauthorized pay raises. He agreed to continue to serve as the agency chief until Gibbons chooses his replacement.

Proposal to increase nuke waste capacity in Nevada makes a bad idea worse On Tuesday the Energy Department asked Congress to pass legislation so the proposed high-level nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain could be built to handle far more of the deadly radioactive material than was intended when the site was first selected for study, in 1987. Congress had set a limit of 70,000 metric tons of waste for the site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas but the department said in its report that Yucca Mountain "can be expanded to accommodate three times, or more, the current statutory limit." That is based on past studies that have suggested the dump, which is now proposed to encompass 1,250 acres, could be expanded to cover as much as 4,200 acres.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman today transmitted The Report to the President and the Congress by the Secretary of Energy on the Need for a Second Repository to the President and the Congress. The report was submitted in accordance with section 161 of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, as amended (NWPA). Section 161 requires the Secretary to report to the President and to Congress on or after January 1, 2007, but not later than January 1, 2010, on the need for a second repository for the Nation's spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level radioactive waste (HLW).

The pros and cons regarding Yucca mountain are endless. It was in the late 1980s when all eyes were turned toward the State of Nevada - think about it - a small state with two new senators. There was Texas and the state of Washington with powerful leadership, as compared to our own little state of Nevada. Included in this mixture was the powerful nuclear industry pushing all the way to Nevada and Yucca Mountain. There are advantages to Yucca Mountain in that it is in a remote area along side the Nevada test site, wherein there had been nuclear testing. Think about human exposure over the next 10,000 years. Fractured rock that will provide a path down to the water table. Think also about the mountain as it sits quietly at this moment in isolation, but we have had earthquakes and this area is located in the southwestern Nevada volcanic field. There are a maze of faults and fractures beneath this mountain which make it difficult to model flow pathways.

The Bush administration said Tuesday there are no technology constraints to a major expansion of the proposed nuclear waste site in Nevada, calling for possibly tripling the amount of highly radioactive used reactor fuel that could be stored there in manmade underground caverns. In a report to Congress, the Energy Department asked that the current capacity limit of 77,000 tons of waste _ imposed by Congress in 1987 _ be removed to accommodate all of the waste expected to be generated at commercial power plants, many of which are likely to operate for another four decades or more.

The search for a successor to nuclear waste chief Bob Loux has been narrowed to three Northern Nevadans. The Nevada Commission on Nuclear Projects has selected former Sparks Mayor Bruce Breslow, former state Consumer Advocate Tim Hay and attorney Keith Tierney as the three names to submit to Gov. Jim Gibbons, who will make the final appointment.

The potent combination of President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid bodes well for Nevadans, the majority of whom don't want the nation's high-level nuclear waste dumped in this state. Both men have vowed to do everything in their power to see that a dump is never built at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. But until it is certain the dump plan is dead, Nevada has an obligation to its residents to continue fighting, through its Nuclear Projects Agency, the nuclear power industry-backed proposal. Because of the highly complex nature of the issue, it takes a fully staffed office to help research and prepare the state's arguments against a Yucca repository, which is under licensing review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.