Yucca Casts Short Shadow On Nevada Presidential Politics

When presidential candidates stump in Nevada, the proposed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain takes center stage. White House hopefuls and the national media zero in on the potential storage site as the state's most pivotal issue. For Nevadans, however, Yucca is not the top political priority.

"Nevada cares so deeply that Yucca Mountain may decide whether President Bush or Sen. John F. Kerry wins the state's five electoral votes on Tuesday -- and with them, perhaps the presidency," wrote Washington Post reporter Evelyn Nieves in 2004, citing Bush's approval of the site during his first term in office as an obstacle to winning a second.

Yet days after the article appeared, voters in Nevada helped push President George W. Bush one electoral vote past the 270 he needed to remain in the Oval Office.

"The media overstate Yucca," said Eric Britton Herzik, the political science chair at the University of Nevada in Reno. "I've argued that this has been going on since Yucca has been in play, particularly in 2004."

Yucca has been in play for more than two decades now, ever since it made the U.S. Department of Energy's shortlist of possible nuclear waste facilities in 1984. The proposed storage site, just 90 miles from the state's population center in Las Vegas, has become a defining issue for state politicians.

"I don't think that Yucca Mountain, at the presidential level, is the determining factor for people," said Steve Fernlund, president of the Red Rock Democrats, a party organization in the suburbs outside Las Vegas. "I'm guessing the sense is our congressional delegation is really our backstop, if you will, with Yucca Mountain."

Democratic Senator and House Majority Leader Harry Reid recently slashed the funding for the Yucca Mountain project and the state has filed multiple lawsuits in the Washington D.C. Court of Appeals. The maneuvers have been so successful that even if the project were approved today, experts estimate it would be another decade before the site was ready to receive spent nuclear energy.

Nuclear waste might not be on its way to Yucca, but the candidates are still using the project as a talking point when they campaign in the state. Presidential nominees John McCain and Barack Obama are both proponents of nuclear energy, but diverge in opinion when it comes to establishing a permanent repository for nuclear waste.

Sen. Obama has accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from employees of Exelon Corporation, an Illinois-based energy company that controls most of the nuclear reactors in the United States. But Obama has consistently denounced the proposed site at Yucca Mountain as both a senator and presidential nominee and maintains that the country needs to find new solutions for disposing nuclear waste.

Sen. John McCain supported President Bush's approval of the project in 2002 and in the beginning stages of his bid for the White House he furthered his stated stance -- until recently.

During a campaign trip in Denver, Colorado, at the end of May, McCain seemed to back away from Yucca as the ideal storage site during a speech about nuclear energy policy.

"I would seek to establish an international repository for spent nuclear fuel that could collect and safely store materials overseas," McCain said. "It is even possible that such an international center could make it unnecessary to open the proposed spent nuclear fuel storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada."

McCain reiterated support for Yucca shortly after the Denver speech -- and after being accused of backtracking by Sen. Reid.

If McCain runs away from his voting record, he "won't hold his already suspicious, conservative base," Herzik said.

Herzik's polling data shows that about 30 percent of Nevadans don't oppose Yucca, 20 percent support the project, and 20 percent not only oppose the repository but consider it a defining issue.

"For the people for whom Yucca is a to-die for issue, they're not going to vote for a Republican anyway," Herzik said.

The real question for Senators Obama and McCain should be whether focusing on Yucca as Nevada's central issue makes sense as a campaign strategy in a state that pollsters say could go either way.

"I'm not even sure most people know where Yucca Mountain is," said Rick Malone, who moved to Las Vegas 45 years ago and says the economy, not nuclear waste, should be the candidates' top priority.

Success for a presidential hopeful in Nevada could hinge on figuring out how to speak to the concerns of residents throughout the state, not just to the anti-Yucca contingent in Clark County.

"For Democrats, Yucca's a convenient club to use on Republicans," said historian and professor Mike Green. "But Yucca Mountain is just not that important as a national, political issue when people go to the polls in Nevada."

The Girl Who Silenced the World at the UN

The Girl Who Silenced the World at the UN

Born and raised in Vancouver, Severn Suzuki has been working on environmental and social justice issues since kindergarten. At age 9, she and some friends started the Environmental Children's Organization (ECO), a small group of children committed to learning and teaching other kids about environmental issues. They traveled to 1992's UN Earth Summit, where 12 year-old Severn gave this powerful speech that deeply affected (and silenced) some of the most prominent world leaders. The speech had such an impact that she has become a frequent invitee to many UN conferences.

Filing of application gives state something to shoot at

After 25 years of trying to stop it in its tracks, Nevada officials should celebrate the U.S. Department of Energy's Tuesday filing of a license application for the long-delayed nuclear waste repository in Southern Nevada.

For years, the state has been shooting at a moving target in its opposition to the plan to store tons of waste from nuclear power plants, none of which are in Nevada, under Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Now, however, the burden is on the DOE to prove that it has done all of its homework and that the proposed plan will provide a safe and effective place to store the waste. That waste has been piling up around the country while millions have been spent trying to force the repository on a state that doesn't want it.

It is critical to remember that, despite numerous promises by federal officials, including President George W. Bush, to let the science determine whether Yucca Mountain is an appropriate location for the dump, the decision to concentrate on the Nevada site was wholly political.

The process began with three possible sites. The decision to stop studying sites in New Mexico and Louisiana ostensibly was based on science but, in fact, was made under intense political pressure, primarily from the then-chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, Sen. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana. Johnston's effort to force the DOE to focus on the Nevada site became known as the "Screw Nevada" bill.

Since then, Nevada officials have raised countless questions about the process. Contractors have been caught massaging the data to fit the legal requirements for the license application, and, when the data didn't fit, officials have sought to change the requirements so they do fit.

On Wednesday, with the application for a license finally filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Agency and facing a review that could last three years, the state was able to pinpoint further objections. Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto filed the first challenge, arguing that the application lacks an Environmental Protection Agency radiation standard (a court rejected a previous attempt to use a lower standard), is missing important information about transportation and canister design and has other serious flaws.

So the fight goes on.

Most of this could have been avoided. Congress could have stayed out of the fray and allowed the science to go forward as originally envisioned. More important, Congress could have questioned the original premise of storing the nuclear waste underground and out of sight while the rest of the world was going in a different direction -- mostly toward reprocessing of spent fuel. (Elsewhere on this page, John Scire, adjunct professor of political science at the University of Nevada, offers one alternative to the repository.)

Instead, the federal government -- pressed by the nuclear power industry -- has wasted 20 years and millions of dollars on a project that Nevada officials are determined to keep out of their state.

On Tuesday, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said that the licensing application can "stand up to any challenge anywhere." We shall see.

Why the Yucca application should be rejected

Why the Yucca application should be rejected

Catherine Cortez Masto
For the Appeal
June 8, 2008, 4:01 AM


The United States Department of Energy submitted its license application for the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository to the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission on June 3.

Nevada's experts reviewed the application and quickly concluded that it is neither viable nor complete. Therefore, I directed our state's legal team to request that NRC decline to docket it and return it to DOE until the missing information can be provided and the requisite rules and regulations are fully in place.

The long anticipated license application, filed at the behest of DOE higher-ups and representatives in the commercial nuclear power industry, represents a continuation of the poor quality work and unsound science that Nevadans have been subjected to for far too many years. Some of the more glaring deficiencies include:

• Lack of a final radiation health protection standard against which DOE's proposed repository is to be evaluated. This alone is enough to have the application immediately rejected.

• Lack of final NRC repository licensing regulations.

• Absence of a final design for the repository.

• Absence of final design information for the multipurpose canister system that is intended to store, transport and dispose of spent fuel.

• Reliance on engineered barriers (thousands of titanium drip shields) for meeting health and safety standards that DOE does not intend to install in the repository until 300 years after waste has been emplaced, assuming they can be installed at all given the scarcity of titanium and the staggering costs involved.

DOE continues to try to push this project through without living up to its promise to rely on sound science and protecting the safety of our citizens. Nevadans deserve an honest and more respectful effort from their federal representatives. We didn't get that with this license application. Unfortunately, it appears Nevada will once again not get a fair shake from DOE. Therefore, I will not stand by and acquiesce to a continuing course of conduct that will injure the people of this state.

The license application comes at a time when public distrust of DOE is at an all-time high. Recent surveys undertaken by Clark County and the state show more than two-thirds of Nevadans strongly distrust DOE. After more than 25 years of trying to make Yucca Mountain work by manipulating regulations, covering up flaws, and by even falsifying and manipulating data, this clearly deficient license application only serves to reinforce and further deepen the distrust Nevadans have for this project.

DOE appears to have lost touch with the fact that the nation is moving away from Yucca Mountain and toward more realistic and workable solutions. Formerly ardent Yucca supporters like Sen. Pete Domenici and representatives of the nuclear industry are advocating putting Yucca on the back burner in favor of pursuing interim storage, reprocessing and other approaches. Even former Sen. Bennett Johnston, the architect of the 1987 legislation that singled out Yucca Mountain in the first place, has acknowledged that Yucca was a mistake and the nation should be looking for solutions elsewhere.

NRC should reject the license application submitted by DOE, decline to docket it and return it to DOE. Such action on the part of NRC will avoid unnecessary and wasteful expenditures of resources by NRC staff and other potential parties who would otherwise be required to initiate a full review of an enormous license application that is hopelessly incomplete and cannot possibly be the subject of a complete or efficient review.

Nevada is not a wasteland and its state and federal leaders stand united in this historic fight to block development of the proposed high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.



• Catherine Cortez Masto is the Attorney General for the State of Nevada.

US quits Human Rights Council

US quits Human Rights Council

HRT

6 June 08 - There was widespread consternation on Friday at the Palais des Nations in Geneva when the US mission gave up his observer status - a step backwards for human rights around the world, says Human Rights Watch.

Carole Vann/Juan Gasparini/Human Rights Tribune - The news that the US has completely withdrawn from the Human Rights Council spread like wildfire Friday afternoon (June 6) through the corridors of the Palais des Nations in Geneva. There was general consternation amongst diplomats and NGOS. Reached by phone, the American mission in Geneva neither confirmed nor denied the report. Although unofficial, the news comes at a time of long opposition by the Bush administration to the reforms which created the Human Rights Council in June 2006. Washington announced from the beginning that the US would not be an active member but its observer status would mean that it could intervene during the sessions. To date even this has rarely happened.

“We don’t understand the reasons nor the timing of the decision”, said Sebastien Gillioz of Human Rights Watch. “There have even been some positive signs during this Council. For example Belarus was not re-elected as a member in 2007 nor Sri Lanka this year”.

The stupefaction was made greater by the fact the US actively took part in the universal Periodic Review (UPR) process where 32 countries were scrutinized by their peers in April and May. In particular a series of recommendations were made regarding Romania, Japan, Guatemala, Peru, Tunisia, Ukraine, Indonesia and others.

Diplomats are equally concerned. If the current president of the Council, Doru Costea, declined to comment, his predecessor, Luis Alfonso De Alba said that he didnt see any reason to justify such a decision. Several observers mentioned Washington’s growing discontentment with the influence of the Islamic and African countries in the Council.

“It is an aberration”, said Peter Splinter of Amnesty International. “It seems that the government has lost its mind. How could it believe it is going to improve human rights by running away? It is like those who say, ‘I don’t like the way this town is governed so I’m not going to vote’”.

For Human Rights Watch (HRW), the US has shown very little commitment to human rights in general. The working group against arbitrary detention gave up going to Guantanamo last month because Washington would not allow its members to have face to face meetings with detainees. For its part, the Rapporteur against racism, Doudou Diene, has fought for years to be able to pay a visit and only recently got permission.

But Eric Sottas, director of the International Organisation against Torture sees it as a a political gesture. “The US has always clearly shown its opposition to the Council. This is a slightly more public way of putting pressure on it in order to raise the stakes. What is more the Bush dynasty is coming to the end of its mandate,” he said. “It reminds me of the time when the Nixon administration, which backed Pinochet in Chile, chastized the UN for criticising the Chilean dictator. But when Carter was elected in 1977, the American government took the floor at the Human Rights Commission to ask forgiveness. After a presidency like that of Bush, you can expect some important changes in US policy on human right.”

HRW is still worried about the withdrawal. “The message is worrying”, says Sebastien Gillioz. “ Ever since September 11, 2001, the US has constantly interpreted international standards in an “ a la carte” manner that has eroded human rights. Its behaviour has served as an example to a stream of states, including Pakistan, Egypt and other, who are not embarrassed to review human rights standards on homosexuality, abortion, capital punishment. It is a step backwards.”

Translated from the French by Claire Doole