MARK WAITE / PVT Ted Oom, a member of the Nevada Test Site Community Advisory Board, looks at displays on the wall of the Bob Ruud Community Center during an open house preceding a public hearing on the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership Monday night. Advertisement

The proposed Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, which is studying the possibility of recycling nuclear waste, should look at building sites near the Yucca Mountain repository to spur economic development.

That's the the pitch Nye County officials made at a public hearing Monday night.

The 55 members of the audience at the Bob Ruud Community Center included representatives of Pahrump Alliance Valley Economic Development (PAVED), Valley Electric Association, Nye County Yucca Mountain consultants, the Nevada Test Site Citizens Advisory Board and the Sierra Club.

It was the only public hearing held on the program in Nevada.

Darrell Lacy, director of the Nye County Nuclear Waste Project office, said the initial 70,000 tons slated for burial at Yucca Mountain isn't being targeted for recycling under the programmatic environmental impact statement.

Sal Golub, the hearing moderator for the U.S. Department of Energy, said there will be enough nuclear waste next year to fill Yucca Mountain to its 70,000-ton statutory limit set in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. Lacy said it's likely Yucca Mountain will be expanded beyond the 70,000 tons.

Golub said recycling nuclear fuel, what they called a closed fuel cycle, would actually increase the amount of transportation and handling. The current EIS isn't proposing any specific sites for nuclear reactors using recycled waste or other facilities, he said.

The possibility of recycling the nuclear waste won't preclude the need for Yucca Mountain, Lacy said. But it could reduce the volume and toxicity of the waste, extending the capacity of the nuclear repository and delaying the need to build a second one, he said.

Lacy said Nye County recommends DOE not preclude recycling of the high-level nuclear waste already destined for Yucca Mountain.

"Yucca Mountain is designed for retrievable storage and appears capable of allowing for retrieval of the wastes for a very long time period," Lacy said. "Scattering the location of GNEP facilities around the country will not optimize environmental safety and cost impacts. Co-locating facilities in close proximity to the site of the geologic repository for which the waste stream is utlimately destined is a sound approach."

Nye County Commissioner Gary Hollis said nuclear power is critical to America's energy security. He said GNEP is part of an energy policy that limits emission of greenhouse gases and reduces the volume and toxic nature of waste associated with nuclear generation.

"If Yucca Mountain becomes a reality, we believe that Nye County should receive benefits associated with the repository. We have a goal to ensure that people who work at Yucca Mountain live in Nye County and that the businesses and industries associated with Yucca Mountain are located in Nye County," Hollis said.

In addition to being the site of Yucca Mountain, Hollis said Nye County has already been burdened with years of contamination from over 900 nuclear weapons tests and should receive economic benefits from any nuclear waste reprocessing and related facilities.

Ed Mueller, Esmeralda County's consultant on nuclear waste, said nuclear resurgence will require a broad industrial and technological expansion.

"Ultimately the road to cleaner air and the success for nuclear power must run through Yucca Mountain," Mueller said.

But Jane Feldman, conservation chairman with the southern Nevada group of the Sierra Club, said nuclear energy isn't "carbon free." Carbon is produced in mining the uranium needed for nuclear power.

"If nuclear power made the air cleaner, the Sierra Club would support it," Feldman said. "The GNEP process would end up producing a higher volume of nuclear waste."

Feldman charged the nuclear industry itself isn't supportive of GNEP. She said a National Academy of Sciences study in 1996 estimated recycling uranium and plutonium from high-level waste would be hugely expensive, on the scale of the $700 billion bailout of the financial industry.

While Golub said GNEP would reduce nuclear proliferation risks, encouraging nations in the partnership to ship their spent fuel for recycling, Feldman said separating plutonium from high-level waste could also make it more susceptible to terrorists.

Feldman said the U.S. doesn't have a good track record in cleaning up tens of millions of gallons of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium. At one site in South Carolina, the DOE processed less than 3 percent of the radioactive waste for disposal, she said.

"There is nothing good, nothing clean about nuclear energy," Feldman said.

Irene Navis, planning manager for Clark County, said the EIS should be placed on hold or withdrawn.

Navis said several actions undertaken since the release of the draft, programmatic EIS was released for the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership should be included for consideration.

They include the docketing of the license application for Yucca Mountain by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; the release of an updated waste confidence ruling by the NRC; a DOE report on the feasibility of a second repository and another on interim storage and a public hearing by the Surface Transportation Board on the proposed Caliente rail line.

"For example, the DOE's second repository report calls for an expansion of Yucca Mountain to three times its current capacity, rather than the siting of a second repository," Navis said. "Based on this report, there is a high degree of certainty that all final waste products resulting from GNEP, as well as spent fuel from existing and any newly built reactors over the next several decaes, would be emplaced in the Yucca Mountain repository for long-term disposal."

Navis added President-elect Barack Obama and the new U.S. Secretary of Energy could bring new thinking to the GNEP concept. She said a new budget is likely to affect funding for GNEP, rendering much of what is included in the draft unrealistic at best.

There is speculation the new administration will appoint a blue ribbon panel to examine nuclear waste, Navis said. Clark County wouldn't object to evaluating GNEP as part of that panel's studies, she said.

Comments on GNEP are being accepted until March 16. They may be sent to: Mr. Frank Schwartz, GNEP PEIS Document Manager, Office of Nuclear Energy, U.S. Department of Energy, 1000 Independence Ave. S.W., Washington, D.C., 20585-0119 or by fax at 1-866-489-1891.