Yucca rail hearing scheduled in Las Vegas

The federal railroad board has set a Dec. 4 field hearing in Las Vegas to hear public reaction to the Department of Energy’s application to build a 300-mile railway across rural Nevada to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site.

The meeting will begin at 9 a.m. at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission hearing facility, 3250 Pepper Lane.

The Surface Transportation Board is considering DOE’s bid to construct a rail line from Caliente to Yucca Mountain, where the department plans to build an industrial complex and a warren of tunnels to store more than 77,000 tons of highly radioactive material.

Speakers are required to register in advance. Go to www.stb.dot.gov for information on how to sign up.

Yucca isn’t the only difference

Before all the talk turned to the economic crisis, the energy crisis had our attention.

Remember rising electricity prices, global warming, stranded polar bears?

Here’s a breakdown of the presidential contenders’ energy policies, and how they might affect the environment and Nevadans’ wallets.

Nuclear power

The main thrust of John McCain’s energy policy is a call for 45 new nuclear power plants by 2030.

Although the plants produce no carbon emissions, making them an attractive power source in a carbon-constrained world, there are serious environmental and safety concerns with uranium mining and disposal of nuclear waste.

Barack Obama has said there must be solutions to the waste storage and safety problems before he would support new nuclear power plants.

Nevada is unlikely to see a nuclear plant built within its borders even if McCain is elected because the plants require large amounts of water. Still, local environmentalists are concerned that more nuclear plants mean more radioactive waste, which could wind up dumped at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

McCain supports the Yucca project; Obama has said he would kill plans for a repository there.

There are also concerns about the cost of nuclear plants, which would receive billions in federal subsidies under McCain’s plan.

“The real concern with nuclear power is it’s so expensive,” said Lydia Ball, a local representative of the Sierra Club.

Coal-fired power

NUCLEAR WASTE SITE: EPA sets Yucca radiation standards

The government on Tuesday issued long-awaited radiation standards for the proposed Yucca Mountain repository, setting a key public health threshold for experts to judge whether the nuclear waste site should be built.

A regulation issued by the Environmental Protection Agency purports to set the acceptable levels of radiation that people could receive from the Nevada site up to 1 million years in the future — no matter that nobody can tell what the Earth will look like then

Scientists vary in their confidence to predict climate and geology that far into the future, which helped explain why the EPA took three years to finalize the standards after floating a draft version in August 2005.

Now, in order to win a construction license, the Department of Energy must prove, through complex computer modeling, that the underground tunnel system it wants to excavate 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas to store spent nuclear fuel can meet the safety requirement.

“We believe we can meet the standard,” DOE spokesman Allen Benson said. The department’s case is laid out in a repository license application that is pending before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Yucca license application accepted for review

Federal regulators took a first step Monday toward allowing a radioactive waste dump in Nevada, agreeing to formally review the government’s license application for the dump.

It will still take the Nuclear Regulatory Commission up to four years to consider the Energy Department’s 8,600-page application and decide whether to grant the federal government permission to build the 77,000-ton dump.

Still the NRC’s determination that the license application was complete enough to be “docketed” for review was a step forward for the Energy Department, which submitted the application in June after years of delay.

County’s double-checking feds’ work on Yucca

The Clark County Commission occasionally approves contracts for tens of thousands of dollars to do work relating to Yucca Mountain.

These contracts are for environmental analysts, scientists and lawyers hired to look over the shoulder of the federal government as it plods forward with its plan to turn the mountain 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas into the nation’s nuclear waste dump.

The federal government’s goal is to move about 154 million pounds of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel rods from 126 sites across the country to Yucca, an effort that has been stalled by lawsuits and Congressional action.

PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN: New ad hits McCain on Yucca

Obama TV spot is second on nuclear waste repository

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama began airing a new television ad in Las Vegas on Thursday that criticizes Republican John McCain for supporting the proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.

The ad, “Dangerous,” states, “If you don’t want nuclear waste here, you don’t want John McCain here.”

It is the second Nevada-specific ad the Obama campaign has aired on the Yucca issue.

The new ad features local residents expressing fears about radioactive waste being shipped to the site, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, “passing through city after city and town after town.”

“He cares about his state; he really doesn’t care about Nevada,” resident Cathy Kama says in the ad. The narrator states, “John McCain says he’s opposed to nuclear waste going through Arizona. But he wants to dump it here, in Nevada.”

Obama on Yucca

That John McCain is a fervent backer of Yucca Mountain is not in dispute.

So it was hardly surprising that Barack Obama’s first Nevada-specific ad of the cycle would be on the subject near and dear to every candidate who comes to Nevada and every media person who works here, but perhaps not so top of mind to those seeming irrelevancies known as voters.

What is surprising, however, is that the part of an interview with McCain highlighted in the ad, designed to indicate that the Arizona senator balks at shipping nuclear waste through his home state but is fine with its rolling down Nevada’s highways, appears to be quite unfair to the Republican. And that is no one’s fault but McCain’s.