Nevada Governor Vetoes Yucca Mountain

LAS VEGAS, Nevada, April 8, 2002 (ENS) - Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn has vetoed the Bush administration's recommendation to build a permanent repository for radioactive wastes at Yucca Mountain.

"Let me make one thing crystal clear - Yucca Mountain is not inevitable, and Yucca Mountain is no bargaining chip," Guinn said Monday morning in an address at the University of Nevada. "And, so long as I am governor, it will never become one."

"Yucca Mountain is not safe, it is not suitable," Guinn continued, "and we will expose the Department of Energy's dirty little secrets about Yucca Mountain."

Guinn traveled to Washington DC today to file his official Notice of Disapproval, also known as a Governor's Veto, with both houses of Congress. In 1982, Nevada was given the unequivocal right to veto the president's recommendation that Yucca Mountain become the nation's sole repository for high level nuclear wastes - the first time a state been given the power to veto a presidential decision.

Congress will have 90 legislative days to override Guinn's veto on a simple majority vote.

"This veto belongs to each and every one of you who have battled against a project that would be detrimental to the public health and safety of our citizens, our precious natural resources and our economy," Guinn said, "and to the other 43 states and hundreds of cities and towns in America through which this dangerous waste will be transported."

In 1987, Congress selected Yucca Mountain as the only site it would study for disposal of high level nuclear wastes, the most dangerous of radioactive wastes. Guinn argued that Yucca Mountain was selected because it is located in a section of Nevada with a population of less than one million, and just four legislative representatives.

But its isolation means that Yucca Mountain is thousands of miles away from 90 percent of the nation's 110 nuclear power plants, requiring the wastes to be transported across country, passing through populated areas along the way. The Department of Energy (DOE) plans to use Yucca Mountain for the disposal of 77,000 tons of high level radioactive waste and spent fuel from throughout the United States and 42 countries.

"The fact that the Yucca Mountain decision was made without any analysis of the transportation risks to the 123 million Americans in states through which this dangerous waste will travel is the dirty little secret," Guinn said.

Citing more than $100 million the nuclear power industry has spent to promote the project, Guinn asked all Nevadans to contribute at least $1 to the Nevada Protection Fund, which has now topped $6 million.

Yes, and there was another one as well. This was really sweetest reprocessing system and was the one they studied at Idaho involving the Integral Fast Reactor. Another Rat, Clinton, killed that one, just as they were starting the run of the EBR-II to demonstrate a completely closed, on-site fuel cycle. The IFR has the bonus of being an inherently safe reactor design as well. And with the pyroprocessing technology that INEL developed, you had a true, vertically-integrated system. It was, literally, like this: fresh fuel came in one end of the plant site, electricity and preprocssed materials came out the other end, and from the side, a very, very small volume of vitrified waste that had to be held for decay (relatively short, on the order of tens of years half-lives). But, Clinton killed the IFR because he knew that if it succeeded, it might spark a true innovative renaissance in the nuclear business. And, well, the wackos, and Hillbillary, just couldn't stand the thought of that.

Now, before you go off on some tangent about "an accident will contaminate billions of square miles and kill trillions of people" or similar nonsense, let me tell you that if you apply reasonable methods of PRA to the credible accident scenarios using available (and planned) shipment methodology and technology, you get accident scenarios that involve, at most, local efforts for containment and cleanup, and no immediate or long-term fatalities or injuries to workers or the public.

Not to mention the fact that the US Government spent the fifties lighting off nuclear bombs of various sizes in the Nevada deserts, scattering to the four winds the same sort of waste that they're proposing to ship encased in enormous concrete and steel casks embedded in ceramic pellets.

Las Vegas gets 6% of its power from the dam. We have done our part for nuke testing. What really pisses most of us off is the take it and shove it attitude you and other have.You say crap like we get our power from the dam when we dont. Besides that dam is half in Nevada and we DONT get power from it. It was built for LA.

I dont mind it going to Yucca. I just dont want it traveling through Vegas to get there. I want a back door built. I dont want it on the same roads I travel on every day. There are wrecks every hour on our freeways. It is a mess.

If the canisters are so secure put the crap in a canister and plant it under the place it came from. Just dont bring it in to vegas where my and my sons future is.

I am pissed at all our politicians who are lieing scumbags. They just put on a face. They know it is coming. I say fight for a back door.Why are no politicians fighting for a back door? Because it is about money. They all suck. Put it at Yucca but let it travel through your home town to get there.

This was really sweetest reprocessing system and was the one they studied at Idaho involving the Integral Fast Reactor. Another Rat, Clinton, killed that one, just as they were starting the run of the EBR-II to demonstrate a completely closed, on-site fuel cycle. The IFR has the bonus of being an inherently safe reactor design as well. And with the pyroprocessing technology that INEL developed, you had a true, vertically-integrated system. It was, literally, like this: fresh fuel came in one end of the plant site, electricity and preprocssed materials came out the other end, and from the side, a very, very small volume of vitrified waste that had to be held for decay (relatively short, on the order of tens of years half-lives). But, Clinton killed the IFR because he knew that if it succeeded, it might spark a true innovative renaissance in the nuclear business. And, well, the wackos, and Hillbillary, just couldn't stand the thought of that. </>

I toured the IFR shortly before the Clintonistas killed it. At that time, the people running the program knew that Al Gore and Hazel O'Leary ("the dumbest woman alive" according to one engineer who knew her) were out to stop them. IFR was an impressive system. There were even plans for using the IFR to burn up surplus Soviet weapons-grade plutonium -- but even that was not enough to prevent Gore from killing the program.

i've known about reprossesing for a while now.

Then your statements are either inconsistent and contradictory, or your claimed knowledge of reprocessing technology, its history and the issues surrounding it, is of a rather shallow nature. In your post 14 you blamed the industry, saying it went ahead with the technology without knowing what to do with the byproducts when in fact, if you know about reprocessing, you will know full well that there were technologies on the table and the engineering systems proposed to accompany it that would effectively deal with the issue, if not for politics. So, what's your beef? It certainly shouldn't be with the industry, who made the efforts to develop reprocessing, which you claim to know about. Incompetance? Hardly. That's the antithesis of incompetance. In fact, if other industries demonstrated a similar level of "incompetance", we would not have millions of tons of particulates and sulfur compounds released into the air each year to be blown to all quarters of the twelve-winded sky, unmanaged, uncontained, free to go where they will, unlike nuclear "waste", which is small in volume, imminently manageable, prepackaged and isolated from the environment, with a finite half-life (i.e., its radiological hazard cleans itself up in time). Does that happen with other environmental pollutants? Not many. So you tell me, which is the more manageable problem, from a technological viewpoint?

yeah, and a lot of scientists have research supporting global warming. are you with the scientists on that?

I do not study that area. But, as a general rule, science weighs the credible evidence and tries to come up with a conclusion based on that. It's up to those proposing a theory or idea to present the credible evidence to support their hypothesis. From what I've seen of the global warming data, it appears "noisy", i.e., large uncertainties. Such is not the case with the Yucca Mountain data. We were measuring fission product migration rates that involved concentration measurements in the parts per billion range, with precisions on the order of a fraction of a percent. Hardly noisy data.

if it's so safe, why are we sending it to nevada?

Because the science, engineering, security, and economic studies show that it is the sensible thing to do. A single repository results in a more manageable system than a lot of separate, isolated, redundant, smaller systems. Having duplicative systems, where not technically justified, wastes time and resources. Redundant systems are sometimes justifiable on technical grounds, such as avoidance of common mode failure, but that is not an issue in this case. Where not technically justified, redundancy is, in general, wasteful and is unproductive from an optimization viewpoint.

The tradeoff is that you have transportation to deal with. A lot have people have made a big deal out of this, but it is a very manageable issue. The technology exists now for safe transport of these materials, and has been used for decades. The technology and infrastructure is in place. When you weigh the issues and tradeoffs, using methodology such as PRA and fault-tree analysis, it comes out in favor of the centralized site and dealing with the incremental risks associated with transport.

Nevada has land already owned and controlled by DOE, so there is that issue. They don't have to acquire more land. If you have existing territory that meets your criteria, why should you waste time and money looking elsewhere? Check my earlier post about building a house. Say you want a house in a good neighborhood on the water, close to your work. You happen to own a parcel that meets those needs. You don't have any other plans for it. Why should you waste time and money buying another lot? Just use what you've got. Make sense? Yes? No? Hello, anybody home...?

they don't want it. damn straight the governor SHOULD listen to his constituency, they're the one's he answers to, not the idiots in D.C.

i suggest wyoming, texas, d.c., and virginia. see how they like it. go rebels!

Can you provide the technical and economic justification for having these multiple sites located where you suggest? Does DOE own land in those regions that have similar characteristics to those of the Yucca Mountain site? Can you provide data to show that? If not, can you provide the justification for spending money and time to get that information, on the basis of sound engineering, management, and economic grounds? What credible data do you have that provide the technical and economic basis for suggesting that more than one national repository is justifiable?

If you do, I suggest you make it publically known, because there are any number of a few dozen or so groups of scientists and engineers, most of whom with Ph.D.s in subjects like geology, physics, systems engineering, management science, economics, materials engineering, and chemistry, that would probably be surprised to hear of it.

It was criminal what Clinton, Gore, O'Leary, Richardson, et al., did to the intellectual capital of this country. Essentially all of those IFR people got the ax. We're talking about Ph.D. types with 20 years experience in neutron transport being given the boot. To do what? You're a stupid country if you tell people like these to go dig cow chips. But that's basically what Crinton and O'Leary did. One of my collegues in the numerical analysis business became a business manager for a doctor's office there in Idaho Falls. That was what the outplacement office found for him. They made one of the techs that knew the pyroprocessing business inside and out into a forklift operator. He was the only forklift operator I knew of who could recite the chemical equations of actinide reprocessing from memory. Of course, O'Leary touted these as "success stories" (they didn't lose their jobs, they just changed careers), but any country that throws away intellectual resources like that deserves to suffer whatever economic fate the Arabs decide to dish out on the energy front, and the idiots who make the decisions to destroy the careers and livilihoods of good, decent, capable people like these deserve nothing less than to be the object of the anger of the sheeple when they run out of gas and electricity and wonder "wha hoppen"?

Guess what governor, they didn't mine the nuclear fuel from underneath the powerplants. They transported the fuel (and continue to do so) past these same 123 million people in the first place. And there's never been one problem. So now that the fuel is depleted and less radioactive, you don't want to transport the fuel back out of the populated areas into a hole in Nevada, where it can't hurt anyone.

Actually, while the fuel is in fact depleted and therefore virtually useless to a terrorist trying to create a nuclear bomb, it is in fact MORE radioactive now, depleted, as fission products, than it was as un-fissioned Uranium 235 and 238. And you are absolutely right. It is going to federal land; Nevada can refund the billions of dollars of federal welfare it has received, if the state wants to complain.

It is true that "fresh" spent fuel has a higher activity inventory than fresh, unburned fuel, that is only the case for a relatively short time. What a lot of people don't understand (but evidently you do), and what doesn't get told in the lamestream media, is that after a (relatively) short decay time, on the order of a thousand years, the activity inventory in so-called spent fuel is actually lower than that of the mined material. That is because essentially all of the fission products have decayed out, and you've burned out some of the 235U and converted some of the 238U. There's still stuff in there you'll want to isolated from the biosphere (assuming you don't reprocess it), but, from a radiological viewpoint, the "body burden" of the ecosystem, if you draw the control boundary at the outer edge of the lithosphere, decreases with time.

And you are absolutely right. It is going to federal land; Nevada can refund the billions of dollars of federal welfare it has received, if the state wants to complain.

You know, Nevada is a state with a sizable gaming industry, so if we can borrow a phrase from that, if Nevada plays its cards right, they could really come out ahead on this. For a facility that represents very little real risk, they could make a case to the feds that, hey, we're doing our part, what's in it for us...?

there's a few things i still don't understand about reprossesing. perhaps you could clear it up. do other countries use it? perhaps ones without enviro lobbies, like the commies?

There are foreign countries that have active reprocessing programs. The French nuclear program is one. I think BNFL also has reprocessing facilities somwhere in the UK, maybe Sellafield, but I'm not sure. I don't know about the FSU, but I think they also have (or had) such capabilities. I know the Soviets built some breeder plants, some of which are still operating nicely.

Political pressure brought by special interest groups played a big part in the decision by former political leaders of this country to abandon reprocessing and go with this ill-advised (from a resource utilization viewpoint) plan to dump used fuel. There was absolutely no technical basis for that decision. The science of reprocessing is fully understood. DOE, in fact, for years used to reprocess highly-enriched spent fuel at the Savannah River facility as part of the military reuse program. What we did have was a President (Carter) who had a daughter (Amy) who had an irrational fear of nuclear proliferation, and a concurrent phobia about anything having to do with plutonium. It is my opinion that Carter based his policymaking, in large part, on the fear he saw in his child. While it is generally good parenting to be aware of those things that frighten your children and to help them work through and deal with these fears, it is, in general, a bad basis upon which to formulate public policies, especially those that have impacts for generations to come on the energy security of this nation.

As I understand it, at least most of the federal lands in Nevada were not "taken from" the state of Nevada. The state of Nevada never owned them. Nevada began life as a territory of the United States -- the whole territory was owned by the federal government. The United States admitted Nevada to statehood on the understanding that large lands in Nevada would continue to be federal property.

Admission of a territory to statehood means that the Federal government yields land which it already owns to be the territory of a new political community within the United States, a new state. The United States is under no obligation to admit any territory to statehood, or to give any territory any more federal land than it wishes to give. The United States admitted Nevada to the Union without yielding to the new state certain lands within its borders which were and are owned by the United States.

I didn't know that. Thanks for the insight!

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