By Mark Waite
Nye County Commissioner Gary Hollis was upset Tuesday that President Barack Obama’s Blue Ribbon Commission paid a visit to Carlsbad, N.M., site of a low-level waste repository, but not to Nye County or Yucca Mountain.
Hollis charged Pete Domenici, a former U.S. Senator from New Mexico and a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission, was trying to steer nuclear waste to Carlsbad instead of Yucca Mountain.
The Blue Ribbon Commission advocated a consent-based approach, empowering local communities with generous subsidies and job benefits to overcome stiff resistance to nuclear waste. The State of Nevada has been adamantly opposed the Yucca Mountain project as well as the state’s congressional delegation, but Nye County has had a policy of constructive engagement with the U.S. Department of Energy on the project.
Hollis said the commission referred to the way Sweden and Finland handle nuclear waste. But Hollis said, “Sweden and Finland don’t have states to deal with. I’d like to see the Blue Ribbon Commission try that in the U.S. I don’t think they’re going to get much leeway, except with Nye County, which is a consent-based community.”
Hollis said Carlsbad really wants the nuclear waste. That community already has the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, where the DOE has been shipping transuranic waste. More than 11,000 shipments of transuranic waste have been made to WIPP from around the country, which is stored in salt beds 2,150 feet below the surface.
Carlsbad and Eddy County, N.M., officials believe the Blue Ribbon Commission report lends credence to Southeast New Mexico being the successor to Yucca Mountain, according to published reports.
Darrell Lacy, director of the Nye County Nuclear Waste Project Office, said the State of New Mexico is against accepting nuclear waste as well. He added the Blue Ribbon Commission didn’t address sites for nuclear waste.
The DOE is running out of transuranic waste to ship to Carlsbad, which could mean an end to the shipments by 2015 or 2016 and the resulting 700 jobs, Lacy said, a point of concern to those local officials.
“I asked the question: Why didn’t you bring the Blue Ribbon Commission to Nye County? If you’re going to bring it to Carlsbad, why didn’t you bring the Blue Ribbon Commission to Nye County so we could show you that you do have local support? They didn’t have an answer to that, other than they didn’t want to be political,” Hollis told county commissioners Tuesday.
Nye County Commissioner Joni Eastley was irate at that remark.
“Oh my God! Sorry Gary, they didn’t want to be political? That’s all they are,” Eastley said.
Lacy said afterwards the Blue Ribbon Commission wouldn’t be able to enter Yucca Mountain if they visited Nye County and if they did, the only thing they’d find was a tunnel. Lacy said Carlsbad has the only acting repository of nuclear waste, but the BRC visit gave local officials an opportunity to talk up the benefits of Carlsbad.
Hollis said there’s plenty to go around, if Domenici wants to store greater than Class C nuclear waste at Carlsbad. But he doesn’t think salt caverns are a good place to store the type of high level nuclear waste intended for Yucca Mountain. Even if the state of New Mexico agreed, Hollis said it would take 20 years to characterize a site for nuclear waste at Carlsbad.
While members got a warm reception in the town more famous for its underground caverns, the greeting wasn’t so warm when the Blue Ribbon Commission traveled to Albuquerque in January 2011; the meeting had to be shut down early after a protester was escorted off stage by police. Opponents from Citizens for Alternatives to Radioactive Dumping complained they didn’t have a chance to get a proper hearing.
“There are other communities out there who are wanting this piece of cake. So we spent $15 billion in 30 years. That mountain is the most studied mountain in the history of rock and we’re still trying to study it,” Hollis said.
Hollis said he wouldn’t have any objections with forming a government-private entity to run a nuclear waste program, a “fed corps” like the successful Tennessee Valley Authority.
If Gary wants radiation sickness, he can always move to New Mexico. No one in Nevada will try to stop him!
Since when did we vote to become a consent basis town and county? I must have missed that one.
Thank God we might be out of the trigger sites of the federal government as a dump for the nation’s nuclear waste. Hollis needs a reality check.
I wish Gary Hollis would look at the long term and not the short term. Nuke waste is a disaster for the area and will KILL Las Vegas if there is ever even a hint of a leak or some other issue. The job loss in Las Vegas would devastate the Pahrump economy even more than the current environment. It would dwarf any short term job benefit Yucca Mountain would provide. Yucca Mountain was a bad idea from the time of the “Screw Nevada” bill and has never gotten any better.
I have said in responses to Las Vegas newspaper articles several times that I feel the economic prosperity of Nye County was sacrificed to placate the urban mistress of gaming. The same unfaithful mistress spreading itself out to wherever someone will bed her, regardless of the impact on Las Vegas.
I am not a federal decision maker and am just expressing a personal view here, but look at how Nevada looks from back east: fighting tooth and nail to stop Yucca, and then threatening to do the same thing, and use the same arguments, against bringing Greater-Than-Class-C-(GTCC)low-level waste to Nevada!
Contrast that with New Mexico. A letter from the Governor of New Mexico to Secreatary Chu last year said in efect (1) bring us your GTCC, it is similar to what we are taking now, and (2) we are willing to discuss taking hot waste too, if there is a scientific basis for doing so safely. That is directly from the State level, not just Carlsbad or Eddy County.
The repository operating there has seen 12 milliom LOADED miles of totally safe transportation: transportation is not an issue. But there is the cost issue, a paper is to be presented at the Waste Management Symposium in Phoenix at the end of this month suggesting a salt repository that does what Yucca would have done will cost less than half of what Yucca would have cost.
If you were a federal decision-maker, what location would you choose? But even if there is a large new repository in salt, waste continues to be made at 2,000 metric tons of heavy metal per year, and another repository will be needed soon after the new one in salt, if that is the nation’s choice, is operating.
So there is still an opportunity for Nye County in the future, if it can convince its state government that it would be good to not be totally faithful to its totally demanding and totally fickle gaming mistress. First there were the casinos in China to take money from the newly rich there, now Florida where there is the largest concentration of well-off retired persons in the US. Enjoy your continuing affair while it lasts, Vegas.
Very well stated abevanluik.
It would be an economic godsend to Nye County- Gov. jobs and the affliated Contractors, town and county in-lieu-of taxes, etc.
Guess some Pahrumpians are just inclined to sit out our Approx. 20% unemployment waiting on those $7.50/Hr Yobs(sic) at Alien World Park because they do NOT understand the Yucca project.
Abe, your outstanding background makes you uniquely qualified to comment on this issue. I appreciate you posting on this forum.
I am VERY MUCH FOR Yucca Mountain. I wonder how many of you have ANY experience or ACTUAL knowledge of the project. Myself, I have had 25+ years as a Nuclear Inspector dealing with nuclear materials and Waste (I was even under consideration for a SAIC position @ Yucca that pays $130,000 when harry reid became Speaker of the Senate). I have actually CERTIFIED many of the shipping casks of fuel rods from DOD use that would have EVENTUALLY been entombed there . I believe these casks would actually survive a direct hit from a 1,000 bomb- they are VASTLY, VASTLY over engineered for safety IMO.
Do you want the waste here or not?
Make up your mind!
Oh, you sure like the money, don’t you? “Free” money from the feds?
Marc, your post is baffling, who is the “you” that you are addressing? I assume you mean Nye County people.
I think most people in Nye County are mature enough to see this as more than a ‘”Free” money from the feds’ issue. First, it is not free. It is payment to compensate for additional demands on existing, and currently poor, physcal and other infrastructures, like communications, roads, schools, law enforcement, medical, and first responder capabilities.
Second, it is a way to assure enhanced quality of life for Nye County residents, with sustainability in the mix, since the prospect is for a multi-generational activity that requires hard work but pays well, with ancillary industrial facilities that will be permananent.
But even more importantly, and there are people in Nye County sophiticated and American enough to accept this as a reality: accepting a repository is solving a growing national problem. A problem hitting every American taxpayer in the pocket book as the years go by and the US general fund (taxpayer money)is tapped to pay nuclear utilities for having to store waste they have already paid the government to dispose of by now.
Utilities were urged into the nuclear age by the federal government, like it or not, with the Legally binding promise (a law, in other words) that they would not have to worry about their spent fuel or high-level waste. The US government would take care of it and charge a nominal fee to the utilities (rate payers) to pay for that disposal. This was done to prevent each utility from coming up with a short term fix to their waste problem. This waste outlives its makers, hence a federal approach was wisely, I think, mandated by law.
The contract every utility signed had a date by which the government would take that waste. Instead, the government keeps taking their money, not their waste, and the courts have decreed that the taxayer is liable for these “breach of contract” damages to the utilities.
It is tempting to scoff at this and say ‘let the feds solve their own problem, but not in my backyard.’ But the problem is smeared all over the country, monetarily as alluded to, but also in terms of risk, low as it is. There is no way for a state to completely insulate itself from a federal problem except by leaving the Union. Not a good idea.
Las Vegas gets part of its power, expecially at peak times, from Arizona’ nuclear reactors. Many of the cars tourists and locals drive were made in states where nuclear power is a primary power source. Many of the Midwesterners who bring their money to lose in Vegas lived in areas where power prices were kept reasonable, allowing them to save, because of nuclear power supplying the base electric load to their cities and indutries. We all benefit from nuclear power, in other words, whether we are direct or indirect users.
Accusing anyone in Nye of wanting ‘”free” money from the feds’ is very simplistic. Nye people are not that shallow. They have lived with the NTS for generations and many know from direct experience the difference between real and imagined radiologic risks.
Sorry Mac, I inserted an ‘r’ into your handle by mistake.