EnergyBiz - September/October 2007 - (Page 86) Q: How much would you pay to receive payments faster and easier? A: Nothing. Even if capacity is increased, there may still be problems for the Yucca Mountain Project. A March 2006 U.S. Government Accountability Office report found fault withfound fault with the Accountability Office report the qualityassurance practices of the project project andfor quality-assurance practices of the and called increased increased management attention. called for management attention. A March New York Times article reported that 60 percent of the work Sproat’s office is doing this year involves reanalyzing data that was rejected earlier because of signs of fraud. Sproat said that’s misleading. Twenty years of scientific data is being pulled together and synthesized into the license application, which is expected to be submitted in June 2008. During this process, the staff has identified data in which references were not clear or data could not be traced back to a source. This required redoing some of the past work. As the work is redone, it gets posted on a license-support network, a Web-based information-management system that contains electronically retrievable documents required for the project’s license application. All of this due-diligence work is a one-time effort. Another issue is funding for the repository. While there is a Nuclear Waste Fund of about $19.5 billion and growing, this money cannot be used to finance the building of the repository. The reason has to do with the funds being designated mandatory receipts while the program is discretionary. President Bush has proposed a fix to this problem by reclassifying the mandatory Nuclear Waste Fund receipts as discretionary. That proposal has not been approved by Congress. Until then, Sproat must submit annual funding proposals and compete with all other federal budget proposals. The amount of money that has been allocated is not enough to build the repository. In the next few months, two major milestones on the path toward licensing the facility are expected to be cleared. In November, the group intends to have the design for license application completed, and in December, the project’s licensing support network will be certified, Sproat said. Western Union® Payment Services presents a no-charge solution to collecting payments. Offering your customers more ways to send payments increases the likelihood that payments will be received on time. With 48,000 U.S. Agent locations, plus phone, Web and e-mail options, you can feel confident that payments will be there to keep your cash flow strong. Contact us today to see how you could streamline and cut costs at no charge to you. 1-800-228-6530 or billpayment@westernunion.com or westernunion.com/billpayments ©2006-2007 Western Union Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 1028_WUS0024 Western Union X 3.5 x 9.75 WUS0024_A5_M.indd 1 Energy Biz www.energycentral.com E n E rgyB i z N RGYB I Z 4/13/07 10:14:11 AM 87 http://westernunion.com/billpaymentswesternunion.com/billpayments http://westernunion.com/billpaymentswesternunion.com/billpayments
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