O'Leary addresses power executives

      In her usual charismatic style, former Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary delivered a luncheon address Thursday on the future of the power industry to a women's group at Caesars Palace.
      She wove through tables of power utility officials, sharing words of wisdom on emerging trends.
      She showed viewgraphs on strategies she encouraged industry leaders to adopt. One, titled "Energizing Cooperation," was a leftover idea from Ireland, one of her many trips or trade visits abroad.
      She braced the group for a new wave of "greener power," in which people will be willing to pay more for electricity in order to protect the environment from the harm production causes.
      And she warned about a crisis looming in the future over transmitting power.
      But in her lecture, O'Leary, whose 16 trips overseas cost $4.5 million, never mentioned the words "Yucca Mountain" -- the place 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas where the Department of Energy, pushed by the nuclear power industry, wants to entomb the nation's high-level radioactive waste.
      Most of the 77,000 tons of waste is spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors.
      The waste-disposal issue, O'Leary said afterward, has priced nuclear power out of future competition for energy production. "It gets to be tremendously emotional, especially in the board room," she said.
      "The many different designs of nuclear power plants has made the issue of safety expensive," said O'Leary, a former nuclear power company executive with the Northern States Power Co. of Minneapolis.
      The selection of Nevada as a host state for disposing the waste turned out to be political although science was factored in, noted O'Leary, who did not visit Las Vegas while in office from 1992 to 1996.
      "One of the criteria for selection obviously had to do with the least population," she said.
      "This is sadly an issue over which there ought to have been every opportunity for debate, and debate has slowed the (development of) technology" for high-level nuclear waste disposal, O'Leary said.
      "As fond as I am of Gov. (Bob) Miller," she said, "the nation is between a rock and a hard place."