Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Congress, NRC hinder dump plan

The energy industry's efforts to store high-level nuclear waste in Southern Nevada suffered a setback on two fronts this week.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said scientific reports relating to the safety of Yucca Mountain as a place to dump deadly nuclear waste will have to be improved before a license can be granted.

And Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., told the Capitol Hill publication, Congress Daily A.M., this morning the chances are "slim to none" that nuclear waste disposal legislation will make it to president Clinton's desk this session.

The Senate currently is considering a bill passed by the House to store nuclear waste temporarily at the Nevada Test Site. President Clinton has vowed to veto the measure.

"We're so close, only an inch away," Domenici told Congress Daily. "But an inch is a lot when the president says he will not sign the bill."

Domenici, who recently toured the Test Site with Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., is chairman of the Senate Budget Committee that would hold the pursue strings for such legislation.

"This means that nuclear waste interim storage is in big trouble," Reid said today.

Meanwhile, the NRC is beginning to express concern about the quality of scientific reports produced by the Department of Energy.

Without a license granted from the NRC, the DOE will not be able to use the mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as the permanent place to store the nation's high-level nuclear waste.

Although the licensing process is still about five years away, the NRC is warning the DOE now that reports must be perfectly documented because the waste will be deadly for centuries.

The NRC told state legislators Wednesday that now is the time for the DOE to start improving that documentation.

The DOE is the agency in charge of all studies relating to the mountain.

The NRC has to ensure that this first-of-a-kind nuclear waste dump will not be a threat to public health and safety before the dump can accept a single waste canister, Bill Belke, NRC on-site licensing representative, told members of the Nevada Legislature's Committee on High-Level Radioactive Waste which met in Las Vegas.

Although the DOE is projecting that the nuclear repository will open in 2010, Belke said the NRC would not approve the project if it came in front of the commission today. "That's not acceptable for licensing," Belke said referring to the DOE's scientific documentation to date.

The NRC could take four years to sift through DOE's scientific evidence collected on Yucca Mountain. NRC Chairwoman Shirley Jackson said in January that the licensing process is similar to a court proceeding.

Missing information in DOE's scientific records date back three years in some cases, displaying a pattern of failing to correct faulty data or supply missing information, Belke said.

This is not the first time the DOE's scientific information has been questioned. In the 1980s, the NRC stopped work on the Yucca Mountain project, saying the DOE failed to properly document studies and samples taken at the site. The DOE resumed its studies after meeting NRC's standards.

The NRC recently discovered in program audits of the DOE that Yucca Mountain contractors have delivered unqualified scientific reports. This is unacceptable by NRC standards, Belke said.

Even scientists' green-covered field notebooks from December through January failed in five cases to document experiments in enough detail to pass NRC muster.

In addition, final reports from two laboratory technical program audits contained errors.

The DOE was informed of the deficiencies Tuesday. Russ Dyer, DOE's acting manager for Yucca Mountain, said he was unaware of the NRC's findings and could not comment on them.

The DOE plans to produce a working draft application for licensing before submitting a final version to the NRC in 2002, said Michael Bell, NRC's acting chief of performance assessment for Yucca Mountain.

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