U.S. Congress approves Yucca nuclear waste dump

["Sandy Perle" <sandyfl@EARTHLINK.NET>]

Index:



U.S. Congress approves Yucca nuclear waste dump

Nevada vows to fight on against Yucca nuclear dump

Many a Molehill Before Nuke Waste Finds Mountain

Radioactive mineral moved from education ministry to Aichi

=================================



U.S. Congress approves Yucca nuclear waste dump



WASHINGTON, July 9 (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate gave final 

congressional approval on Tuesday to President George W. Bush's 

decision to bury deadly nuclear waste from across the nation in 

Nevada's Yucca Mountain, setting aside state safety concerns already 

being argued in federal court challenges.



Senators approved a resolution to override Nevada's veto of the 

administration's plan to put the country's first permanent nuclear 

waste repository in the Nevada desert, 90 miles (150 km) northwest of 

Las Vegas. The U.S. House of Representatives approved it in May.



The Senate vote effectively clears the way for the U.S. Energy 

Department to apply to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to license 

the $58 billion project. The facility is scheduled to open in 2010 

and hold 77,000 tons (70,000 metric tonnes) of radioactive material 

that the Environmental Protection Agency says must be isolated for 

10,000 years.



The resolution passed the Senate on a voice vote after clearing a 

procedural hurdle, 60-39.



Fifteen Democrats joined 45 Republicans in approving a pivotal motion 

to consider the resolution. Three Republicans and one independent 

joined 35 Democrats in opposing it.



There are about 100 nuclear power plants across the country. Spent 

fuel from these plants is highly radioactive and is stored at 131 

sites in 39 states. Many storage tanks are nearly full and the 

government has faced lawsuits for failing to meet a 1998 deadline to 

open a permanent storage site.



"Now more than ever, we need Yucca Mountain," declared Sen. Frank 

Murkowski, an Alaskan Republican.



NOT IN MY STATE



Nevada filed federal lawsuits to try to stop the project before and 

after Bush accepted a recommendation by U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer 

Abraham in February to build the facility in the state.



Abraham says $4 billion in studies over the past 20 years have found 

Yucca Mountain to be a safe site.



"We need to move ahead," he said after Tuesday's vote. "We need 

nuclear energy to supply America with energy security -- 20 percent 

of our electricity is generated by nuclear power."



Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn declared in a statement on Tuesday, "Now the 

process moves to the federal courts where the playing field is level 

and Nevada's factual, scientific arguments will be heard by impartial 

judges. .... We are highly confident."



Guinn in April vetoed Bush's decision to put the nuclear dump in his 

state. Under the 1982 nuclear law, a governor may veto a president's 

decision to put a nuclear waste repository in his or her state. But 

the veto can be overridden by Congress with a majority vote in each 

chamber.



Opponents, including a number of environmental groups, argue Yucca 

Mountain and shipments of nuclear waste to it would provide an 

inviting target for terrorists.



But backers, who include many of the nation's top businesses, contend 

it would be safer to have the waste in one site rather than scattered 

at facilities nationwide.



Some senators who voted for the project admitted they did so because 

they feared that if it was killed, nuclear waste would be sent or 

left in their states.



As Sen. Robert Bennett, a Utah Republican, put it: "Given the choice. 

... I would rather have the waste go through Utah than to Utah."



NOT DEFEATED YET



Senate Democratic Whip Harry Reid of Nevada, who has helped lead the 

charge against the project, refused to concede defeat.



"If they think this is the end they are sadly mistaken," said Reid, 

noting he could still oppose funding and planned to assist in his 

state's lawsuits.



Leading proponents argued Congress needed to approve Yucca Mountain 

or begin all over again with what has been more than a two-decade-old 

process to find a site.



Such a delay would be a big blow to the nuclear industry, which has 

long sought a permanent disposal facility, as well as the federal 

government, which has promised to deliver one.



"If not now, when in the world are we going to do it? ... And if not 

in this place, where?" Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, a 

Mississippi Republican, asked in urging approval.

---------------



Nevada vows to fight on against Yucca nuclear dump



By Cathy Scott



LAS VEGAS, July 9 (Reuters) - Nevada officials vowed on Tuesday to 

fight on against government plans to bury nuclear waste at Yucca 

Mountain, saying the program will dump thousands of tonnes of deadly, 

radioactive material within a dice's throw of the state's glittering 

casinos and fast-growing suburbs.



The Bush administration plan received final congressional approval on 

Tuesday, opening the way for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to 

license the $58 billion Yucca Mountain project.



It is scheduled to open in 2010 and hold 77,000 tons (70,000 metric 

tonnes) of radioactive material that the Environmental Protection 

Agency says must be isolated for 10,000 years.



But Nevada officials said they would continue the court fight against 

the project -- which could mean more delays for a nuclear waste 

proposal which is backed by both President George W. Bush and the 

nuclear industry.



"The U.S. Senate vote today is the beginning of Nevada's legal and 

regulatory fight to stop the Yucca Mountain project," said Nevada 

Gov. Kenny Guinn, who vetoed the original proposal, in a statement.



"Now, the process moves to the federal courts, where the playing 

field is level and Nevada's factual and scientific arguments will be 

heard by impartial judges."



Nevada has already filed suits in federal court to try to stop the 

dump from being built at Yucca Mountain, and will now argue to the 

NRC that the mountain is an unsafe site for nuclear waste, despite 

administration claims to the contrary.



In Las Vegas, just 95 miles (150 km) from the proposed facility, 

officials said the federal government was ignoring the safety 

concerns of the region's 1.4 million people.



"The fight won't be over today, even if there is a vote in favor of 

it," said Elaine Sanchez, a spokeswoman for Las Vegas Mayor Oscar 

Goodman, who was in Washington Tuesday for last-ditch lobbying 

against the project.



"We will have our day in court," Sanchez said. "It's only a matter of 

time before there's an accident transporting nuclear waste. It'll be 

a moving target for terrorists. The world has changed and these 

things need to be considered."



Opinion polls have shown that most Nevadans are not willing to gamble 

on nuclear safety so close to home.



A poll earlier this year conducted by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research 

Inc. of Washington, D.C. for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, shows that 

83 percent of Nevadans oppose the Yucca Mountain site, although 68 

percent said they believed it was inevitable that the program would 

be approved.



One Nevadan who did not oppose the project was former Nevada Gov. Bob 

List, who represents the Nuclear Energy Institute.



List said that Nevada would have to learn to live with the prospect 

of a huge nuclear dump in its backyard. "We really need to start 

accepting the reality of the situation and figure out ways to turn 

this to Nevada's economic advantage -- and there will be economic 

advantages for Las Vegas," he told KLAS television over the weekend.



TRUCKS, TRAINS AND NUCLEAR WASTE



The U.S. Department of Energy's plan is to entomb 77 thousand tonnes 

of nuclear waste beneath the volcanic ridge northwest of Las Vegas, 

where it will remain for 10,000 years.



The highly radioactive material will be shipped from the nation's 

nuclear power plants, by rail or truck, to Yucca Mountain. The 

proposed routes cross 43 states and potentially pass some 109 cities 

with populations of at least 100,000 people.



Las Vegas Mayor Goodman, who has vocally opposed the Yucca Mountain 

dump, said transportation was a major concern following the Sept. 11 

attacks. "Even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission believes a terrorist 

attack on America's nuclear power plants are a real threat," he said 

on Tuesday.



Jack Fetters, a conductor for Union Pacific Railroad and a 

representative of the United Transportation Union, told Reuters that 

conductors and engineers are nervous about moving the waste by rail.



"Workers aren't looking forward to it," Fetters said. "As far as 

science goes, I know nothing about that. What I do know is you've got 

conductor and engineer fatigue, and maintenance of the cars and rails 

issues. I mean, you don't just put it on a train and start sending it 

from Maine to Nevada."



On Sunday, about 60 people protested peacefully against the dump in 

front of a county building in downtown Las Vegas.

------------------



Many a Molehill Before Nuke Waste Finds Mountain



WASHINGTON, July 9 (NY Times) -- The political support for burying 

nuclear waste beneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada may be as strong now 

as in 1987, when Congress first picked the site. But the Senate's 

approval of the site today, while it lets the Energy Department 

proceed, is far from the last word.



What comes next is more complicated than winning the blessing of 

Congress: transforming political momentum into sound science and 

engineering, and actually creating a functioning repository. That is 

likely to take years — if indeed it ever comes to pass.



The Energy Department, Yucca Mountain's prime sponsor, is an old hand 

at managing giant, first-of-a-kind projects, but many of them have 

horrible histories. The Superconducting Supercollider, an $11 billion 

project, was canceled in 1993 after $2 billion had been spent, 

falling victim to rising costs and daunting technical problems. The 

Clinch River Breeder Reactor, begun in 1970 as a $700 million 

project, was canceled in 1974 after $1.5 billion had been spent, as 

opponents questioned whether it was worth the effort. For similar 

reasons, the modernization of a nuclear fuel plant in Portsmouth, 

Ohio, begun in 1977, was canceled in 1985 after $3.5 billion had been 

spent. Then there was the nuclear-powered airplane, begun in 1954 and 

canceled in 1961 after $1 billion had been spent. By then, there were 

overwhelming doubts that it would fly. 



Yucca Mountain will be even tougher to pull off, in one regard. 

Congress has required that the Energy Department, a mostly self-

regulating bureaucracy, win a license from a sister agency, the 

Nuclear Regulatory Commission. That is far from easy, even for 

nuclear power companies with long experience getting approval from 

the commission for simpler projects. In the 1980's, for example, two 

commercial reactor projects in the Midwest, Zimmer and Marble Hill, 

were canceled because of licensing difficulties.



"Yucca's not a sure thing," said C. William Reamer, the deputy 

director of the commission's waste management division. The Energy 

Department will have to lay out "not just their argument, but what 

supports their argument" about why the repository will contain the 

wastes successfully for 10,000 years, he said.



Thus far, the department does not even have a design. It plans to put 

waste in an area unusually subject to rust but has little data on how 

its metal canisters will perform. It has a huge environmental impact 

statement, but critics say that in its current form, the statement 

makes many unverifiable claims.



Because Yucca Mountain is complex, Congress created a committee of 

outside experts, the Nuclear Waste Technical Review 

Board, to help assess the Energy Department's work. Its chairman, 

Jared L. Cohon, who is the president of Carnegie Mellon 

University, said today that for all the work the department had done 

so far, there was still "a relatively high level of uncertainty" 

about 

how well it would isolate the waste. Congress may have voted, Dr. 

Cohon said, but "that issue is still there." 



Too, the Energy Department needs to keep working to understand how 

water, which will spread the waste, moves through the 

mountain; then it needs to explain this to the public, Dr. Cohon 

said.



But right now, the department will probably turn its attention to 

preparing a license application. Under the law, the department is 

supposed to apply for a license within 60 days of Congressional 

approval. But it has told the commission that it will file more than 

two years late, by December 2004. In most Energy Department projects, 

including this one so far, nothing happens ahead of 

schedule and most things happen later. 



The nuclear commission is supposed to decide in three years whether 

to grant a license, but it may take a fourth. If the staff asks 

the department too many questions, the review could easily take 

longer, experts say. The commission expects an adversarial 

hearing with 8 to 10 parties, each of which can raise questions and 

make arguments. In the 1960's and 70's, when the commission 

was still licensing power reactors, a hearing with only three or four 

parties could drag on for years.



There is more potential for delay in the commission's insistence on a 

detailed safety analysis before it grants a license. The Energy 

Department's practice is to build major factories while 

simultaneously working on critical technical details, a technique 

pioneered in 

World War II to build the atom bomb, and still in use. For example, 

in the 1980's the department started work on a processing plant 

in Aiken, S.C., for solidifying liquid wastes, without figuring out 

how it would get wastes out of storage tanks and into the plant 

without producing flammable gases. Now the solidification plant is 

running but is limited in how much waste it can process because 

the flammable gas problem has not been solved.



The Yucca Mountain project has something going for it that previous 

doomed projects lacked. The federal government needs it to 

resolve its commercial dispute with the nuclear utilities. Under the 

1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the utilities all signed contracts 

with the government, agreeing to pay one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt-

hour generated at their reactors, in exchange for the 

government's taking their wastes, beginning in 1998.



But Yucca Mountain also has first-of-a-kind disadvantages. For one, 

the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is supposed to decide on 

granting a license by applying rules written by the Environmental 

Protection Agency. But those rules are being challenged by 

Nevada and by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental 

group, which argue that the agency gerrymandered the 

site's boundaries to allow for excessive leakage. The boundaries look 

like a gigantic number 9, with a three-mile ring around the 

repository and a tail of about 10 miles in the direction that water 

flows underground. Geoffrey H. Pettus, a lawyer with the Natural 

Resources Defense Council, called it "an underground septic field."



Nevada has other legal challenges under way, too.



Then there is the fact that Yucca Mountain is too small. The 

resolution passed today limits it to 77,000 tons, but the nation will 

produce more than 100,000. Congress may have to act again. 

-------------------



Radioactive mineral moved from education ministry to Aichi



TOKYO, July 8 (Kyodo) - A company owning about 13 tons of low-level 

radioactive monazite that was kept at an education ministry 

facility in Tokyo for the past year has moved it to another firm in 

Aichi Prefecture, the ministry said Monday.

 

Nampo Shigen moved the mineral from the Education, Culture, Sports, 

Science and Technology Ministry in central Tokyo on June 2 

and Sunday to Yamaguchi Taika, a fireproof brick maker located in 

Seto in the central Japan prefecture, according to the ministry.

 

Yamaguchi Taika has already sold 5.4 tons of the monazite to a health 

appliance maker and has stored the rest in its Seto factory, 

the ministry said.

 

The ministry did not notify the Aichi prefectural government or the 

Seto city government about the transfer of the radioactive 

substance in advance, but there will be no problem because the safety 

of the storage area has been confirmed, a ministry official 

said.

 

The monazite was mined in Thailand. Nampo Shigen, a trading house 

based in Asaka, Saitama Prefecture, wanted to sell it for use 

in hot springs or for research purposes.

 

But demand was poor and the firm had stored it at sites in Saitama, 

Chiba, Nagano and Mie prefectures.

 

It was found to have done this without government permission, and the 

storage conditions were below standard. The firm then 

transported the monazite to a warehouse in Katsuura, Chiba 

Prefecture, but had to abandon that plan because the local government 

opposed it.

 

The ministry had to accept it temporarily, and had kept it in an 

underground garage since July last year until the trader could find 

an appropriate place for it.

 

The monazite was kept in metal containers shielded by lead blocks and 

sandbags in the ministry garage for safety since extended exposure 

could be harmful to humans.

 

Nampo Shigen has paid 1.3 million yen of 2.38 million yen the 

ministry charged it for the storage, according to the ministry.

-------------------------------------------------

Sandy Perle

Director, Technical

ICN Worldwide Dosimetry Service

ICN Plaza, 3300 Hyland Avenue

Costa Mesa, CA 92626



Tel:(714) 545-0100 / (800) 548-5100  Extension 2306

Fax:(714) 668-3149



E-Mail: sandyfl@earthlink.net

E-Mail: sperle@icnpharm.com



Personal Website: http://sandy-travels.com

ICN Worldwide Dosimetry Website: http://www.dosimetry.com



************************************************************************

You are currently subscribed to the Radsafe mailing list. To unsubscribe,

send an e-mail to Majordomo@list.vanderbilt.edu  Put the text "unsubscribe

radsafe" (no quote marks) in the body of the e-mail, with no subject line.

You can view the Radsafe archives at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/radsafe/