Free Republic

Politics: The senator who called the president a liar and never apologized may have worn out his welcome in his home state. Harry Reid may be riding the liberal agenda into political oblivion.In 2004, Republicans defeated Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle largely on the theme that he neglected his home state in favor of national party interests. The GOP is hoping that in 2010 lightning will strike a second time, and Nevada polls indicate it may be more than wishful thinking. In 1998, Reid beat John Ensign by a hair-thin 428 votes. Ensign would go on to win Nevada's other...

Cap-And-Trade: The administration likes to defend bad policies with analogies to the post office. New studies from a business group and the administration itself confirm that cap-and-trade belongs in the dead-letter bin.Along with Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Rep. Ed Markey likens the cost of the Waxman-Markey cap-and trade bill to "about a postage stamp a day," based on estimates made by the Congressional Budget Office and the EPA. But as we and others have shown, they arrive at this magical number in part by ignoring the hit on gross domestic product and employment that will occur. As Garret Vaughan, economist...

One can measure the dedication of the climate-change crowd in how they approach the zero-emissions technology of nuclear power. Some have realized that the only practical way to replace coal as a source for electricity is to invest heavily in nuclear power. Others, such as Harry Reid and his allies in the Senate, have done their best to shut the door on that path away from coal, which calls into question their motives in forcing cap-and-trade schemes onto the US. Investors Business Daily rips Reid and the administration for blocking the use of Yucca Mountain for safe fuel reprocessing, which...

Death Knell For Nuclear Power? August 03, 2009 Energy: A Senate vote to kill funding for the spent fuel repository in Nevada shows the Democratic Party and this administration aren't serious about energy independence, economic growth or environmental Killing the storage facility for the spent fuel rods produced by the nation's nuclear power industry has long been a dream of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and President Obama. Last week, the Senate granted their wish, voting to deny the resources needed to complete a review necessary for Yucca Mountain to open. "This is a major victory for Nevada," said Reid,...

Energy: A Senate vote to kill funding for the spent fuel repository in Nevada shows the Democratic Party and this administration aren't serious about energy independence, economic growth or environmental protection.Killing the storage facility for the spent fuel rods produced by the nation's nuclear power industry has long been a dream of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and President Obama. Last week, the Senate granted their wish, voting to deny the resources needed to complete a review necessary for Yucca Mountain to open. "This is a major victory for Nevada," said Reid, who is up for re-election next year. "I...

Alternative Energy: A government report says reliance on electric cars will do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and may merely shift our dependence on foreign sources from one set of dictators to another.It's a beautiful theory — highways full of electric cars emitting no greenhouse gases or pollutants after being plugged into an outlet in our garages overnight. The problem, according to a new Government Accountability Office report, is that the effort may only shift the problem somewhere else. "If you are using coal-fired power plants, and half the country's electricity comes from coal-powered plants, are you just trading...

YUCCA MOUNTAIN, Nev. -- From the top of this brown, loaf-shaped ridge about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, there is little sign that this 5,000-foot desert outcropping remains a major battleground in U.S. energy and climate policy. Twenty-five years of government work and research has been sunk into the parched, sandy soil here, along with at least $9 billion of taxpayers' money spent to carry out Congress' 1987 law requiring that this be the final repository for the nation's nuclear wastes. The goal was to have it up and running in 1998. Eleven years after that, there is little...

SALT LAKE CITY – Despite having their own radioactive waste dump, three states have shipped millions of cubic feet of waste across the country this decade to a private Utah facility that is the only one available to 36 other states, according to an Associated Press analysis of U.S. Department of Energy records. The shipments are stoking concerns that waste from Connecticut, New Jersey and South Carolina is taking up needed space in Utah, unnecessarily creating potential shipping hazards and undermining the government's intent for states to dispose of their own waste on a regional basis.

<p>It turns out we were looking in the wrong place for weapons of mass destruction.</p> <p>They weren't in Iraq.</p> <p>They were in Lehman Brothers' portfolio.</p> <p>The bankrupt investment bank holds as much as 500,000 pounds of uranium yellowcake -- enough to make a nuclear bomb -- it was learned yesterday.</p>

President Barack Obama is taking the first step toward blocking a nuclear waste dump at Nevada's Yucca Mountain by slashing money for the program in his first budget, according to congressional sources. Obama's budget to be announced Thursday will eliminate virtually all funding for the Yucca project with the exception of money needed for license applications submitted last year to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "The Yucca Mountain program will be scaled back to those costs necessary to answer inquiries from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission while the administration devises a new strategy toward nuclear-waste disposal," the Energy Department will say as...

This was undoubtedly a free-lance enterprise, and despite the success of such individual initiative in protecting national security, one supposes it couldn’t happen today, what with so many “managers,” “planners,” “controllers,” “manipulators” in the mix of things. Having an army that had always relied heavily on artillery, [the Soviets] were also particularly interested in the small shells similar to the one fired during the 1953 “GRABLE” shot. Thus, some time later, the Russians were delighted when a U.S. Army major walked into the Soviet residency in West Germany offering to rent them the latest model of a nuclear artillery shell....

I've been searching the news lately for information regarding that Iranian cargo ship that was hijacked by Somali pirates several months ago. Those of us paying attention to this stuff will remember that the pirates that attempted to plunder the cargo expired shortly thereafter due to mysterious illnesses which appear to be similar to radiation poisoning. Does anyone have any new info on this?

Swiss-based marine explorer and inventor Jacques Piccard, who was part of the deepest submarine dive in history, has died at his home aged 86. In 1960, Piccard and US co-pilot Don Walsh took a submersible developed by his father to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific. They went 11km (seven miles) beneath the surface of the sea. Their discovery of living organisms at that depth led to a ban on the dumping of nuclear waste in ocean trenches. "By far the most interesting find was the fish that came floating by our porthole," Piccard said afterwards...."

here may be a workable way to solve most of America's energy problems, end dependence on foreign oil and dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions with little pain. Remarkably, while proposals for renewed offshore oil drilling, new atomic power plants, expanded carbon trading and other proposed tactics abound in this year's presidential campaign, no one mentions the single most promising technique.This may be because its name contains the word "reactor." Combined with the fact that it depends on a sophisticated form of nuclear technology, that appears to make the notion of power plants using the Integral Fast Reactor anathema to today's...

WASHINGTON -- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced this morning it will conduct an in-depth review of the government plans for Yucca Mountain, another step forward for the controversial nuclear waste storage project. The decision by the nuclear safety agency to place a Department of Energy license application on its docket represents a milestone for the project over the objections of Nevada's elected leaders. The NRC concluded following an initial 90-day screening by its technical staff that an application that DOE filed on June 3 "is sufficiently complete" for the agency to move forward, according to its announcement. The move opens...

In the latest development of a longstanding contract dispute, a federal appeals court reversed and remanded a trio of cases concerning damages owed to nuclear utilities as a result of the government's failure to build a nuclear-waste facility. The appeals court said the damages awarded weren't calculated properly by the court of Federal Claims. As such it voided $42.8 million in damages awarded to PG&E Corp.'s Pacific Gas & Electric utility, $39.8 million to the Sacramento Municipal Utility District and $142.8 million to three former New England nuclear-plant operators. The companies originally sought compensation for having to store spent nuclear...

BOISE, Idaho - Eight Western states on Thursday rejected a company's plan to ship tons of radioactive waste from Italy for disposal in Utah, saying importing foreign loads would violate the group's rules. EnergySolutions Inc. is applying for a federal license to import 20,000 tons of waste from four Italian nuclear reactors, with a portion of it to be buried at its private disposal site in Clive, Utah. But members of the Northwest Interstate Compact on Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management said their rules would need to be changed to allow roughly five or six rail cars of waste a year...

Tibetan Government-in-exile denounced China's dumping of nuclear waste in Tibet way back in 1980s. In 1987 His Holiness the Dalai Lama released the Five Point Peace Plan for Tibet, the fourth point in this plan called for: Restoration and protection of Tibet's natural environment and the abandonment of China's use of Tibet for the production of nuclear weapons and dumping of nuclear waste. Tibetan government-in-exile's consistent condemnation of China's storing of nuclear waste in Tibet was reckoned with skepticism by the international media. The existence of nuclear waste was denounced by His Holiness the Dalai Lama at a press conference...

WASHINGTON - The longest serving member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is stepping down, and, on his way out, saying something about Yucca Mountain that few in government dare to suggest out loud: "It may be time to stop digging." The reason Commissioner Edward McGaffigan Jr. gives for his conclusion, however, is not that the mountain is a bad site or the science of storing radioactive fuel is unsound, two of the major arguments critics have mounted. Rather, Yucca Mountain is unlikely to ever open as a storage site for nuclear waste largely because the politics were flawed at the...

Science backs nuclear burial plan The facility would be deep underground Scientists have backed the government's plan to store the UK's nuclear waste deep underground.The report, from experts working across science and technology, concluded there were "no insurmountable scientific or technological barriers" to the scheme. It urged the government to maintain momentum in implementing the policy, but recommended key areas where more research was needed to move forward. These included finding suitable sites and addressing skills shortages. See how radioactive waste might be buried The report resulted from a meeting of geologists, engineers, nuclear experts and chemists that took...

Close window Published online: 10 January 2007; | doi:10.1038/news070108-6 Canned nuclear waste cooks its containerEstimates of radiation damage to materials have been too low.Philip Ball The atomic order of a ceramic is muddled into a glassy mess by radiation. Storing high-level nuclear waste without any leakage over thousands of years may be harder than experts have thought, research published in Nature today shows. Ian Farnan of Cambridge University, UK, and his co-workers have found that the radiation emitted from such waste could transform one candidate storage material into less durable glass after just 1,400 years — much more quickly...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The state of Nevada on Friday asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to reject the U.S. government's plan to store thousands of tons of nuclear waste temporarily above ground at a mountain located about 90 miles from Las Vegas. The Energy Department is set to file an application with the NRC in mid 2008 for a license to operate the Yucca Mountain permanent nuclear storage repository in Nevada, which would hold radioactive waste underground from more than 100 nuclear power plants, along with the tons of leftovers from the U.S. nuclear weapons program. The permanent storage site is...

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints urged the federal government this afternoon to promote alternatives to nuclear waste disposal. While Mormon leaders voiced objections last year to storing nuclear waste at the Skull Valley Goshutes Reservation in Tooele County in Skull Valley, they remained silent on the broader issues, such as the federal government's plan to bury reactor waste forever at Yucca Mountain, Nev. The latest statement appears to cover Yucca Mountain as well as the Skull Valley project, and it gives a boost to technologies such as nuclear reprocessing, as proposed by Salt Lake City-based EnergySolutions. "The...

It is the regular beeping that grates. But if it stops, prepare to be scared. The signal audible every second in every corridor of the high-level toxic nuclear waste plant on Britain's sprawling Sellafield site is a sign all the alarms are working. If it stops, or changes tone, something has gone very wrong. "The people who work here every day tell me they get used to it. But it tends to get on the nerves of everyone who visits the plant," Sellafield information officer Ben Chilton told Reuters on a tour of the site 480 km (300 miles) northwest...

ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration is making plans to revive nuclear fuel reprocessing, including a long-term proposal to provide reactor fuel to foreign countries if they return it to the United States to be recycled. President Bush will include a request for $250 million in his budget to be released next week as a first step toward reversing a decades long U.S. policy against nuclear reprocessing, congressional and administration officials said Thursday. The plan is part of an effort to take a fresh look at how to deal with the thousands of tons of used reactor fuel piling...

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration wants to reverse a decades-old U.S. policy that has prohibited the reprocessing — or recycling — of high-level radioactive waste from civilian nuclear power plants. Among other things, the Bush plan would pay for a pilot plant, possibly at the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site to test chemical reprocessing. If the program goes forward as planned, the domestic nuclear industry stands to reap hundreds of millions of dollars. Officials briefed on the Bush plan also said $250 million will be included in the fiscal 2007 budget in a down payment on what they expect to...

PARIS, Dec 17 (Tierramérica) - France sends thousands of tonnes of nuclear waste to Russia each year, but the details are shielded by a decree of "national security" in order to block debate on the issue, says the environmental watchdog group Greenpeace. "This kind of traffic of nuclear waste between Western Europe and Russia has gone on for more than three decades already, and allows the big nuclear energy companies, like Electricité de France, to store their radioactive waste at extremely contaminated sites in Siberia," Greenpeace-France spokesman Grégory Gendre told Tierramérica. On Dec. 1, some 20 activists from the environmental...

GROZNY, Russia, Dec 17 (Reuters) - Investigators have found nuclear contamination tens of thousands of times above safe levels on the premises of a ruined factory in Russia's Chechnya, officials said on Saturday. It was not clear why the radioactive source had been kept in the factory, but prosecutors said it posed a severe threat to anyone who came near to it. "This is above all now a threat to the population, because the leadership and officials of the firm did not take the necessary steps to isolate the isotope," said Chechen prosecutor Valery Kuznetsov on NTV television. Almost all...

Utah officials and environmental groups vow to fight company's deal with Indians WASHINGTON - The federal government on Friday approved a $3.1 billion plan by a private corporation to store tens of thousands of tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste on an American Indian reservation in Utah. .... Friday's decision by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to grant a license for the facility cemented a pact made nearly a decade ago between strange bedfellows: utility behemoths that wanted to get tons of radioactive waste off their hands and an obscure American Indian tribe that was willing to offer its land in...

When I fly from Texas to Europe, I pay $3–6 a pound, depending on how well I do buying a ticket. When a satellite or shuttle is launched into space, the customer (or taxpayer) pays over $10,000 a pound. That is the major challenge of space flight: until the cost of going into space drastically decreases, the large-scale exploration and exploitation of space will not occur. The world currently sends approximately 200 tons of payloads, the equivalent of two 747 freighter flights, into space annually. At $50–500 million a launch, very few cargoes can justify their cost. We have here...

NOW THAT CONGRESS HAS PASSED an energy bill with incentives for the development of more nuclear power, it remains to be seen whether this will lead to robust investment in nuclear energy and a new generation of nuclear plants. Results will depend on the response of some key players, specifically Congress, the investment markets, the environmental community, and the nuclear energy industry itself.Congress included liability limitations, tax incentives, loan guarantees, and risk insurance in the recent energy bill, and these should help reduce or remove some of the biggest obstacles to new nuclear plants. Congress deserves credit, but its job...

Senate OKs Continued Study of Nuclear Arms By ANDREW TAYLOR, Associated Press Writer Fri Jul 1,12:47 AM ET Research into the feasibility of a bunker-busting nuclear weapon would be kept alive under legislation the Senate passed early Friday. The research was approved as part of a $31.2 billion spending bill for energy and water projects. The bill also includes funds for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump, though not as much as President Bush requested. The bill passed 92-3 after a debate over whether to spend $4 million for research into the bunker buster nuclear warhead, which would be aimed...

LAS VEGAS -- A federal judge has denied an Indian tribe's plea to stop federal plans for a national nuclear waste dump in Nevada based on a claim that the project violates a 19th century treaty. With the Yucca Mountain repository yet to open and a disputed rail line yet to be built, U.S. District Court Judge Philip Pro ruled that the Western Shoshone National Council couldn't demonstrate "immediate and irreparable" harm. Lawyer Robert Hager of Reno, representing the tribe, said Wednesday that no immediate decision had been made whether to appeal. A spokesman for the Energy Department had no...

Proposals to send Britain's nuclear waste into space or to the bottom of the sea are impractical, a government advisory committee has warned.The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CORWM) recommends waste be either buried underground or stored temporarily in facilities above ground. Nuclear power plants and weapons have left the UK with a radioactive legacy which presently has nowhere to go. There will be yet more waste when nuclear stations are decommissioned. Locations undecided The committee has consulted experts and the public over the past 18 months, and has come up with four options which it considers viable. They are:...

LAS VEGAS (AP) - Congress is scheduling hearings about the Yucca Mountain project after recent disclosures that quality-assurance documents for the proposed nuclear waste repository might have been falsified. Leaders of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee announced Monday they will hold an April 7 hearing about the Nevada nuclear waste site. A House subcommittee led by Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., is preparing for an April 5 hearing. The Senate committee chairman is Pete Domenici, R-N.M., an influential voice on nuclear issues who has been promoting talk of alternatives while the Yucca Mountain project is delayed. The Energy Department...

WASHINGTON (AP) - About 40 percent of the nation's nuclear power plants have begun moving spent fuel out of cooling pools and into massive dry casks, embracing a storage approach that a National Academy of Sciences panel said offers safety advantages. The nation's 64 active nuclear power plants, which together house 103 reactors, all now store nuclear waste in pools of water after it is removed from reactors. Eventually, the spent fuel is supposed to be shipped to a national nuclear waste dump planned for Yucca Mountain in Nevada. As Yucca Mountain has been delayed, utilities are increasingly moving some...

YUCCA MOUNTAIN, Nev. — Things have a grand scale out here. The Nevada Test Site adjacent to this mountain is bigger than Rhode Island but smaller than Nellis Air Force Base, which also is adjacent. But the biggest thing is the dispute, now roiling a second decade, about carving a nuclear waste repository in this mountain's innards, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The Bush administration says that sound science proves this: Because of the aridity of this eastern end of the Death Valley hydrologic basin and because of what scientists have learned about the mountain's reaction to the sort...

WASHINGTON -- A proposed temporary nuclear waste storage site in Utah cleared an important regulatory hurdle Thursday, paving the way for the site widely viewed as a stopover for the nation's waste on its way to Yucca Mountain. It is now up to the five-member Nuclear Regulatory Commission to make a final decision about whether a group of nuclear power utilities can open the storage site on the Goshute Indian Reservation in Skull Valley, Utah, 50 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. In a 2-1 vote, the Atomic Safety Licensing Board of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission sided with Private Fuel...

A utility consortium planning to store 44,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste on the Skull Valley reservation achieved a major victory Thursday when a panel of Nuclear Regulatory Commission judges swept aside the last of the state's two objections to the facility. In an unusual split decision, the Atomic Safety Licensing Board voted 2-1 to set aside its own earlier ruling that the possibility of an F-16 fighter jet crash into the Private Fuel Storage spent nuclear fuel facility would pose an unacceptable risk. PFS appealed, arguing that even if a jet did crash into the open-air array of 4,00...

From the heavyweight Southern California Water Authority to the scrappy little County Council in Moab, Utah, a determined chorus is rising to urge the U.S. Department of Energy to move a 10-million-ton pile of radioactive waste away from the banks of the Colorado River. "This water supply and the health of millions of people are too important to leave to chance," a letter from the San Diego County Water Authority urges the Energy Department. "Moving the pile would lessen these risks significantly." Three of the four largest water agencies in the region have insisted that the waste pile be moved...

The company proposing a nuclear fuel factory in southeastern New Mexico on Thursday announced a deal to try to solve the plant's uranium waste disposal bottleneck. The agreement, between Louisiana Energy Services and international nuclear giant AREVA Inc., calls for AREVA to build a plant to process the fuel factory's waste— possibly in West Texas at a site just across the state line from the proposed nuclear fuel factory. AREVA and LES executives explained details of their deal in interviews Thursday morning in LES's Albuquerque office. The use of the Texas site raises the possibility that the eventual dump for...

Nuclear waste languishes Three years after an expert committee urged the building of a new central repository for Norway's most dangerous nuclear waste radioactive material is being stored behind garage doors. After 50 years of operation, four research reactors at Kjeller and Halden have produced 16 tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste - chiefly uranium fuel - and 10.1 kilograms of plutonium. This was poses an extreme potential health hazard for thousands of years and an extra security risk as an attraction for terrorists seeking radioactive material for a so-called 'dirty bomb'. Storehouses for low and medium level nuclear waste...

YAKIMA, Wash -- An appellate court has overturned a lower court's ruling barring the U.S. Department of Energy from reclassifying high-level waste at nuclear sites in Idaho, Washington and South Carolina, saying it was too soon to consider opponents' claims. A federal judge in Idaho last year barred the Energy Department from reclassifying the waste after the Natural Resource Defense Council, the Snake River Alliance, the Yakama Nation and the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes filed suit. U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill ruled the Energy Department's plans conflicted with provisions of the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The appellate court on Friday...

...There are really two presidential campaigns going on this year. There's the battle over the epic issues of the day -- of who can better defend the nation, who can better address middle-class worries -- played out in the debates, the candidates' major addresses, the nationally publicized advertisements, and the network evening news broadcasts. Then there's the campaign percolating just beneath the surface, over a welter of narrower issues. ...Those questions matter intensely to certain groups of voters. They have extra potency because this election, like the one in 2000, could be decided by a handful of electoral votes.... These...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. Our country has a problem. And we have a solution. But politics is threatening to interfere. The problem: Tens of thousands of tons of dangerous nuclear waste are stored at more than 125 sites around the nation. The solution: Bury the waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Yucca would become a giant underground repository. It's designed to contain nuclear waste for 10,000 years -- long enough for it to decay to safe levels. At Yucca, our waste would be stored safely underneath 1,000 feet of solid rock. Now comes the politics....

LAS VEGAS, Aug. 10 - Seizing on an issue that this state's Democratic senator calls "the most important to the people of Nevada," Senator John Kerry vowed Tuesday not to send nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain and accused President Bush of breaking a similar promise he made four years ago. In a state that Mr. Bush won by four percentage points in 2000, Mr. Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, hammered at the administration's support for the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. "Yucca Mountain to me is a symbol of the recklessness and arrogance...

The Boston Fog ReportAn ongoing examination of John Kerry’s “nuances and shades of gray in both foreign and domestic policy.” (Editorial, “A Primary Endorsement,” The New York Times, 2/26/04)for·a·gainst adverb. 1. To be both for and against something at the same time: e.g. “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” (Glen Johnson, “Kerry Blasts Bush On Protecting Troops,” The Boston Globe, 3/17/04)  "John Kerry's vote to make Nevada the sole repository site for waste and his later flip-flop on Yucca Mountain is just another example of a candidate who tells voters what they...

YUCCA MOUNTAIN UPDATE Scientists and the U.S. Court of Appeals reject plan, but Bush Administration says: We're confident in our science and we're moving forward." (Washington Post, 7/10/04) George Bush Is Making Yucca Mountain the Nation's Nuclear Dumping Ground FACT: 77,000 tons of radioactive waste will be dumped at Yucca Mountain over the next 24 years. That's one shipment every four hours, 365 days a year, for the next 24 years. FACT: A study by the Nevada Commission on Nuclear Projects estimates as many as 129 accidents as a result of the shipping of nuclear waste. Transportation routes put millions...

WASHINGTON - A federal appeals court on Friday rejected Nevada's arguments against a building a nuclear waste site in the state, but ordered the government to develop a plan to protect the public against radiation releases beyond the proposed 10,000 years. The three-judge panel dismissed claims by Nevada that the Bush administration's plan to build the Yucca Mountain waste site was unconstitutional and said that actions by the Energy Department and President Bush leading up to approval of the waste site were not subject to review by the court. In a victory for Nevada, however, the court rejected the government...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. WASHINGTON, July 5 - A 12-year, $4.4-billion effort to clean up a nuclear weapons plant near Cincinnati was set to enter its final phase this week, with a contractor delicately removing some of the nation's oldest nuclear garbage, left over from production of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, and preparing it for disposal. But the State of Ohio, after years of pushing for the cleanup, is demanding that the waste be left where it is, in silos at the Fernald Feed Materials Production Center, because the dump in Nevada where...