Yucca Mountain Transportation Impacts and Regulatory Challenges

Yucca Mountain Transportation Impacts and Regulatory Challenges

Congresswoman Berkley speaks out against McCain, Yucca Mountain

The day before John McCain’s visit to Nevada, some Democrats are calling him out for his stance on Yucca Mountain.

Congresswoman Shelley Berkley and former Nevada Governor Bob Miller want McCain to apologize for comments he made about the safety concerns surrounding the nuclear dump.

“This will create thousands of jobs in Nevada. This will be a great boom for the economy,” says McCain. “I’m confident when we reprocess, which we can do, which the Europeans do, there will be a much smaller amount of nuclear fuel to be stored.”

Berkley believes Yucca Mountain could have devastating effects on our community.

“We need people coming to Southern Nevada to enjoy our entertainment. The last thing we need is a nuclear dump 90 miles away,” says Congresswoman Berkley.

McCain says he’ll support Yucca Mountain only when it meets environmental and safety standards, which he believes will happen.

Firm to run site at Yucca

The U.S. Department of Energy awarded a $2.5 billion management and operating contract Thursday to USA Repository Services, a subsidiary of the URS Corp., whose Washington Division ran Savannah River Site from 1989 until this year. It continues to manage its liquid waste program.
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The five-year contract, with a five-year renewal option, is to provide mission support to the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management for the nation’s first national repository for high-level radioactive waste at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.

The new partnership’s principal subcontractors are Shaw Environmental and Infrastructure Inc., and AREVA Federal Services Inc.

After two decades of debate, the Energy Department filed a formal application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in June to build the Yucca Mountain project, which would become a final resting place for radioactive material currently stored at 121 temporary sites in 39 states — including SRS near Augusta.

Yucca Mountain, a remote ridge on federal land in the Mojave Desert 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, has been under study for such a repository since the 1980s. SRS has two glass waste storage buildings, where radioactive waste encased in glass is stored in steel cylinders that could be shipped to Yucca Mountain.

According to an Energy Department press release, the contract would take effect April 1, 2009

Yucca Mountain

As one of a handful of states the two presidential candidates have determined could decide the election this year, Nevada has seen a steady stream of visits by the two men vying for the White House.

But while some political observers predicted Nevada’s battleground status would translate into greater attention to Nevada issues, both U.S. Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama have mostly stuck to national hot topics when stumping here.

“I would have expected to have more discussion on the issues of Lake Tahoe, Yucca Mountain, grazing and mining laws, and that we would be looking at Western themes like where does our water come from, how do we manage growth,” said Fred Lokken, a political scientist at Truckee Meadows Community College. “But I don’t see any of those issues really.”

DOE Wants To Build Railroad To Yucca Mountain

A new railroad could run right through Southern Neva

da toward Yucca Mountain.

The Department of Energy announced Friday its intentions to build a rail line from Caliente to the Nuclear Waste Repository at Yucca Mountain.

YUCCA MOUNTAIN: PART 2 of 2:

Today, the Yucca Mountain project is a horseshoe-shaped tunnel under 1,000 feet of an unimpressive peak in Southern Nevada.

It’s 60 miles as the crow flies to the lowest point in the continental United States, Badwater in Death Valley National Park. From Yucca’s ridge it is also possible to see the highest point in the continental United States, Mt. Whitney, as well as ancient volcanoes and a major fault line.

Chain-link gates bar entrances to the tunnel.

Since Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid led Democrats in cutting funding for the project again and again, the workforce at the mountain has dipped to 1,600, down from 2,750. Yucca Mountain Project workers seldom go into the tunnel, which has giant ventilation systems snaking from its depths.

The workers are geologists and hydrologists and other scientists performing tests to help the Energy Department prove Yucca will work and be safe.

With the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s decision this summer to begin considering the department’s application for a license to open Yucca for business, the project may well be back on track for approval.

Unless the next president intervenes.

YUCCA MOUNTAIN: PART I OF II

John McCain supports plans to store high-level nuclear waste 90 miles from Las Vegas at Yucca Mountain.

Barack Obama does not.

The question being asked by Nevadans who oppose the repository — and by those who support it, too — is whether that matters. What could each candidate actually do about it as president?

The short answer is that the next president may be the only thing standing between train loads of radioactive waste and a hole in the Nevada desert.

First, though, a more nuanced view of where they actually stand:

• McCain “supports Yucca as long as it meets environmental and safety concerns,” according to his Nevada spokesman, Rick Gorka.

McCain’s position harks back to Bush’s vow to let “sound science” dictate whether Yucca was the best site for a deep geologic repository for nuclear waste. Bush has been an advocate of the project.

“Sound science has become, in the nuanced language of nuclear politics, a wink and a nod to say, ‘I’m all for it,’ ” said Democrat Richard Bryan, a former Nevada governor who represented the state in the U.S. Senate for more than a decade. “Sound science is a euphemism.”

EDITORIAL: The ‘science’ of Yucca Mountain

Millions of years ago, Nevada and the rest of the Great Basin were covered by a shallow inland sea. The fossilized remains of creatures that lived in and along that sea can still be dug from exposed sand and gravel faces throughout this desert.

The sea eventually drained — cataclysmically — to the north, helping create the gorges of the Snake and Columbia rivers. If there had been man-made structures in the path of those waters (which there almost certainly were not), how would they have fared?

Between Europe and Asia, archaeologists report finding evidence of human settlements beneath the shallow waters of the Black Sea. In times recent enough to have been witnessed by mankind — far less than a million years ago — it seems likely there was dry land there, even though it sat beneath sea level. When the waters of the Mediterranean broke through and poured in, could there have been a flood so devastating that the tale comes down to us, altered over time, in the account of Noah and his ark? Could anything have stood in the path of such a deluge? How about written warnings posted by those long-ago occupants?

To pretend that we can foresee how the landscape around us will appear in a million years — or even 100,000 years, which far exceeds the length of recorded human history — is hubris on a biblical scale. To pretend that we can build structures whose architectural integrity will withstand such changes is even more absurd. Ice ages with their glaciers can come in go in such a time period, as can volcanoes. Compared to such time frames, the age of the pyramids of Egypt is the blink of an eye.

Yet, because the courts have ruled that guaranteeing the safety of radioactive waste storage at Yucca Mountain for 10,000 years is not sufficient (because wastes buried there could remain deadly for a million years), the federal Environmental Protection Agency has now required that those building the dump certify its safety for a million years. And Department of Energy spokesman Allen Benson blithely replied, this week, “We believe we can meet the standard.”

Nevadans deserve to hear different viewpoints about Yucca Mountain

Gov. Jim Gibbons asked for the resignation of the executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency (NNPA), Bob Loux, after he had unlawfully given pay raises of 16 percent to himself and his staff, only the latest in a series of missteps committed by that office.

The governor further ordered an audit to determine if other funds were misappropriated. But what is really needed is an overhaul of the agency to provide the citizens of Nevada with an unbiased appraisal of pros and cons of the proposed Yucca nuclear repository.

The state has spent more than $164 million in funding an agency that is supposed to oversee “nuclear projects” but instead has focused on one mission only — stopping the proposed repository. Many citizens are asking if the state should reconsider its opposition and negotiate compensation for hosting the facility, especially considering that the application submitted by the administration has been accepted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The Legislature should direct the Nuclear Projects Commission to fulfill its supposed mission — to impartially and legally analyze any proposed nuclear project, including reprocessing nuclear waste as well as waste storage. The commission/NNPA should consider an approach that would analyze the possibility of placing nuclear waste at Yucca as a temporary site, not the unverified concept now extant that the waste would have to be secured for up to a million years. The proposal would also require the federal government to authorize the reprocessing of waste fuel, and to construct a specialized reactor (hopefully near Yucca) that would provide cheap energy to Nevada.

Yucca Mountain staying in Energy Department sights until 2022

The Bureau of Land Management signaled Friday that the U.S. Department of Energy wants Nevada’s Yucca Mountain as its potential nuclear waste dump site until 2022.

The bureau (BLM) said that it published a notice Friday in the Federal Register announcing that the department (DOE) in the Bush administration has proposed extending withdrawal of 4,255 acres at Yucca Mountain for an additional 12 years, which would move the current 2010 deadline to 2022.

“The public lands are withdrawn from leasing under the mineral leasing laws in order to maintain the physical integrity of the subsurface environment at Yucca Mountain,” the BLM said in a release.

Comments on the DOE proposal and requests for a public meeting to discuss it will be accepted for 90 days, which BLM said is until Dec. 11.