NEI Nuclear Notes

At the Washington Post, editorial board writer Stephen Stromberg surveys the energy scene in Taiwan: Taiwan imports about 98 percent of its energy supplies , mostly the fossil fuels that keep its fluorescent streetscapes flashing and its many factories humming. The Taiwanese are against virtually every form of carbon dioxide-free energy for various reasons. A fourth reactor on the islands faced such massive protest it has never been turned on. But Stromberg is having none of it, coming to the point of his piece: Because climate change is a global problem, the choices of Germany and Japan — both of which have shut down perfectly serviceable reactors in recent years — and Taiwan as well affect the rest of us. Their greenhouse-gas emissions mix into the atmosphere just like everyone else’s. And the big danger is that these nations will encourage the international stigmatization against nuclear power, when tough-mindedness, not self-indulgence, is necessary. The global norm s...

The ongoing discussion on used nuclear fuel has taken a number of twists and turns over the years, with interest in consolidated storage facilities growing – and Waste Control Specialists in Texas offering to provide such a facility – and and a permanent repository, such as was the purpose behind the Yucca Mountain project. It’s not an either/or proposition – the first collects used fuel from military and domestic sites – where it is safe as is – and the second will be its final resting place. Consolidation is the right word for the goal – it reduces the number of sites holding used fuel, over time, from many to some to one. It’s been a vexing issue, but not impossible. Nevada’s Yucca Mountain holds a special place in the conversation because the Nuclear Waste Policy Act specifies it as the permanent repository and because the project was progressing apace until President Barack Obama closed it down soon after his first election. This fulfilled a campaign promise he made during a ...

A posting on the Nevada Wilderness Project blog about the Silver State North Solar Project: In the case of Silver State North, we dubbed this 600-acre project 40 miles southwest of Las Vegas “smart” because the developer was willing to gather environmental input early on to avoid complications during the formal review process. From where we sat at the review table, that was a good sign. Well, it is a good sign – the desert tortoise was a particular concern. But I focused more on that 600 acres – that’s a lot of acres! Surely the project is producing an impressive amount of electricity. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar was in Nevada today to flip the switch on Nevada’ original “fast-tracked,” utility-scale solar power project – a 50 megawatt photovoltaic plant in the Ivanpah Valley. You have to start somewhere. 50 megawatts is the rated capacity, so actual production is less than half that amount – but solar power doesn’t require turbines or water, so arrays can be situa...

The American Security Project has put up an interesting podcast that asks whether recent events mark the end of the nuclear renaissance. Andrew Holland and Veronique Lee of ASP host Scott Peterson, NEI’s senior vice-president. Now, before you say, “Well, what’s he going to say?"  ASP aims to create rational debates about the issues it chooses to cover, so Peterson’s side of the discussion brings out a lot of useful datum that you may not know or have considered. You can’t really call it pro-nuclear per se because he sticks very close to facts and doesn’t editorialize much. For example, he points out that American facilities have faced a complete menu of natural disasters this year and came through them all without issue. That’s objectively true and worth hearing. Then the discussion moves on to Germany, Fukushima and issues of risk and risk management in the energy sphere. Well worth a listen. --- The problem with nuclear energy is that it is so heavily subsidized by th...

The Des Moines Register sees the nuclear energy facilities over in Nebraska surrounded by flood water and that people are fretting about them: People worry because just the phrase "nuclear power plant" conjures thoughts of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. People worry because the world is still watching as Japan deals with the Fukushima nuclear power plant from both a human health and economic perspective. Iowans worry because the Nebraska plants are separated from us by only a river rather than the Pacific Ocean. Actually, I’d be surprised if people needed to project back 25 or more years to find fear buttons to push. Any such button, fairly or not, is now labeled Fukushima. (And remember: not downplaying the seriousness of the accident, of course, but the health and economic issues resulting from the earthquake and tsunami were fantastically large.) Yet the public's concern should not be irrational or used to feed an anti-nuclear energy agenda or imply...

So how has the news about Yucca Mountain springing back to life gone over? Pretty well. Here’s Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.): Today’s decision affirms what I have been saying all along - Yucca Mountain remains the legally designated national repository for spent nuclear fuel and high level defense waste, and the Department of Energy has no authority to withdraw the license application.  Only Congress can change the law. And Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) Over the last 30 years, Congress, independent studies and previous administrations have all pointed to, voted for and funded Yucca Mountain as the nation's best option for a nuclear repository and in concert with those decisions, billions of dollars and countless work hours have been spent at Hanford and nuclear waste sites across the country in an effort to treat and package nuclear waste that will be sent here. In case you’re wondering about the attention from Washington state politicians, Murray provides the hint...

One of the most interesting races for the Senate this year will be between Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada) and Republican State Assembly member Sharron Angle. Reid has shepherded a fair number of controversial bills through the Senate and the anti-incumbency mood of the nation (however exaggerated – over 90 percent of incumbents have won their primaries) favors Angle. Some scattered polling shows the two about even, but polling is always iffy at such an early stage, with five months of television ads yet to come. Expect no prediction from us. But Reid is a consequential figure, so the battle to come will be of great interest. --- Our interest, of course, is how the candidates view nuclear energy. We know it’s an article of political faith in Nevada for politicians to oppose Yucca Mountain as a used fuel repository, and Reid has had the heft to do something about that, but he has generally not been negative about nuclear energy. But – there’s a but. Here’s what he says on his Web site: ...

Here’s something we didn’t expect to read: At the meeting, Lowden said she is committed to amending and rewording the Nuclear Waste Policy Act so that it requires Yucca Mountain be prepared not only for the long-term storage of the nuclear waste, but also for reprocessing the waste into usable fuel. A little context, perhaps? Well, the meeting was of the U.S. Nuclear Energy Foundation and Lowden is Nevada Senate candidate Sue Lowden. She leads in the Republican primary there and in poll-driven match-ups against Democrat Harry Reid, she also wins. We’d warn, though, that it’s still too far out to count on such polls, which can change on a dime. Good example: Lowden herself – she’s the candidate who picked up considerable bad press after she suggested that bartering for medical care might help contain costs and that the barter might include chickens. None-the-less, we were interested to see that opposition to Yucca Mountain is not an article of faith for politicians – that ...

Discovery News poses a series of questions to Tom Kaufmann, NEI’s senior media relations manager and Edwin Lyman, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. We really like this kind of interaction, but perhaps we could make a suggestion. Here’s a question : Often times the topic of Chernobyl comes up when nuclear energy is mentioned. Could a Chernobyl-type accident happen in the United States at a nuclear power plant? Here’s how Kauffman starts out: No. A Chernobyl-type accident can’t happen in the United States. It’s physically impossible. And then Lyman: The short answer is yes. An accident resulting in a large radiological release to the environment comparable to or worse than that of Chernobyl could definitely occur at a U.S. nuclear power plant. See the problem? Either Kauffman or Lyman are wrong here or the truest answer is too ambiguous to be definitive. From the story, there’s no way to know except to apply your own tilt (and where might t...

Bob McCracken from Nye County in Nevada has kept track for years a list of benefits Nevada could have enjoyed for hosting used nuclear fuel at Yucca Mountain. In response to the Obama Administration's recent decision to cut funding to Yucca Mountain, Bob decided to lay it all out on what might have been : ... The original Yucca Mountain legislation included a provision by which Nevada could negotiate with the federal government for benefits as compensation for accepting the repository. Nevada totally ignored this provision. * If Yucca Mountain had been built, its construction would have generated thousands of high-paying jobs in Southern Nevada and hundreds of permanent positions once the facility was in operation. * Nye County could have collected large sums for property taxes on Yucca Mountain and its associated support industries into the indefinite future. So large was the Yucca Mountain project, one could have purchased the entire Las Vegas Strip and more for its planned cost....

At a speech to be delivered later this afternoon on the quad of the University of Nevada, Reno campus, Senator Obama has some things to say about rebuilding the grid and nuclear. To create new jobs, I’ll invest in rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure – our roads, schools, and bridges. We’ll rebuild our outdated electricity grid and build new broadband lines to connect America. And I’ll create the jobs of the future by transforming our energy economy. We’ll tap our natural gas reserves, invest in clean coal technology, and find ways to safely harness nuclear power. I’ll help our auto companies re-tool so that the fuel-efficient cars of the future are built right here the United States of America.

S.C. Politics Today poses an interesting question: The chance juxtaposition of the Nevada and South Carolina primaries creates a Yucca problem for presidential candidates. In Nevada, the Democrats have been competing with each other to claim they are the most opposed to sending nuclear waste to the proposed Yucca Mountain facility there. Next week, those same candidates will be in South Carolina, the state that would benefit the most from the opening of the Yucca Mountain depository. For years, federal officials have pledged nuclear waste stored at the Savannah River Site near Barnwell would be shipped to Yucca Mountain. At a campaign stop in Nevada on Thursday, Democratic contender Barack Obama responded to a new Clinton radio ad that accused him of having financial ties to supporters of the Yucca Mountain site. "I have said over and over again I'm against Yucca," Obama said. "I'm against Yucca Mountain. I think the science is not there. I've never, I'...

That Democratic Presidential debate on Tuesday night in Nevada keeps kicking up some dust. Here's USA Today : Yucca Mountain thus becomes the latest evidence of why it's so destructive to give a few early-voting states so much clout in the presidential selection process. Already this year, candidates have gone to Iowa and promised support for wasteful corn-based ethanol, and to Michigan and pledged fealty to the ailing auto industry. In both cases, candidates catered to a single state's interests by promising bad policy for the nation. Now Nevada joins the list. At Tuesday's debate in Las Vegas, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards all vowed to block the remote Yucca Mountain site if they become president — but failed to offer any alternative except more study. In a singularly disingenuous bit of political jiu-jitsu, Edwards (who twice voted for Yucca Mountain) said he opposed using the site and then said he opposed building any more nuclear power plants becau...

The following is an early release of a story that's scheduled to run in the Monday, January 21 edition of Nuclear Energy Overview, NEI 's members only publication. It was written by my NEI colleague, Rich Bickers: The Energy Department’s director of radioactive waste management last week told Nevada legislators and the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board that a 2008 license application for the Yucca Mountain repository is still possible, even though the agency continues to evaluate the impact of a more than $100 million reduction in the repository program’s 2008 budget. The projected 2017 opening date for the repository, however, is no longer achievable, Ward Sproat, director of DOE’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, told the Nevada State Legislative Committee and the review board at meetings last week in Nevada. Sproat said DOE expects to decide on a new projected opening date sometime this spring. Sproat said that the license application process was still o...

Flopping Aces watched Tuesday's Democratic debate from Nevada, and has some questions for each of the candidates.

Betsy Newmark is taking a look at the effect that moving Nevada up on the presidential primary calendar is having on policymaking and Yucca Mountain, and she doesn't like what she sees: Policy-making is about tough choices. If the choices were easy, they'd already have been made. But our system will become even more messed up when we let the political calendar determine a position on an important policy issue. I've become very sick of seeing politicians supporting ethanol subsidies simply because of Iowa's status as the first state to hold a vote for the presidential nominations. Now we're seeing the effect of pushing Nevada up.

The following statement comes from NEI's Media Relations Department: The U.S. Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works held a hearing today on the federal government’s program to dispose of used nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear power plants and high-level radioactive waste from U.S. defense programs at a geologic repository planned for Yucca Mountain, Nev. The Nuclear Energy Institute’s chief nuclear officer, Marvin Fertel, made the following comments about the program. “As the Department of Energy moves steadily closer to the submission of a license application for the planned Yucca Mountain repository to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, today’s hearing was an opportune time to note that there is some 20 years of solid science undergirding this program. Over the past two decades, billions of dollars have been spent on analyses of the repository site by many of our nation’s leading scientific experts. This analysis will continue during construction and operation o...

The rundown on where every major candidate stands is at 2008 Central.net .

AQTEBlog reports from the scene.

From last week's Deseret News : Arizona Sen. John McCain said Friday he supports high-level nuclear waste storage in Nevada — even though Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. praised McCain as the only GOP presidential candidate who understands Western issues. Huntsman, along with most elected officials and voters in the West, opposes the proposed Yucca Mountain facility, citing concerns about radioactive waste being transported through Utah and other states on its way to the site. But McCain mocked a question about the dangers of transporting nuclear waste while speaking with Utah reporters. "Oh, you have to travel through states ... I am for Yucca Mountain. I'm for storage facilities. It's a lot better than sitting outside power plants all over America," he said, then added, "I don't mean to be sarcastic. I apologize. But I believe we can transport waste safely."