Missing Yucca information bothers licensing agency

Thursday, May 7, 1998 | 9:55 a.m.

Top officials in the agency that will have to approve the proposed high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain are expressing new concerns over missing scientific information which may hamper the project's approval.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission met with U.S. Department of Energy officials in charge of the Yucca Mountain project Wednesday to discuss missing DOE records including scientific data for water use and storage.

Carl Papariello from NRC headquarters said the extensive list of missing scientific evidence usually kept in bound notebooks left his view of licensing Yucca Mountain "not as rosy as some around this table."

The NRC first reported on DOE's problems at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, to a Nevada legislative committee in March. At the time, NRC field manager Bill Belke said the project could not receive a license because too much data was missing or invalid.

For example, the University of Nevada, Reno, a DOE contractor, used a laboratory which had not been approved by the DOE for analyzing natural resources work from Yucca Mountain forcing the university to re-analyze the samples -- some of which were three years old.

The DOE admitted that quality control in the collection of scientific data at Yucca Mountain has been neglected over the past three years. For example, scientists wrote their own procedures, but failed to document what they did.

Lake Barrett, acting director of the DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, said that kind of conduct is not tolerated. Scientists hired by the DOE or its contractors are now trained on how to keep scientific notebooks, he said.

"We know we have work to do," Barrett said referring to the DOE's compiling of scientific documentation.

Part of changing DOE's data collection procedures includes a bottom-up view of each topic at Yucca Mountain, such as volcanos, earthquakes, water and man-made barriers, explained Donald Horton, director of DOE's office of quality assurance.

The number of DOE staff to check scientific work at Yucca Mountain fell from 132 to 80 people in the past two years after Congress cut the budget, Horton said, which is why it has taken so long to address some issues.

The DOE has had a written program to assure the quality of scientific studies at Yucca Mountain for 10 years. The NRC is looking at the DOE to produce results from the program.

The latest round of NRC questions about scientific information comes after the licensing agency stopped work at Yucca Mountain in the late '80s. It took more than a year for the DOE to meet the NRC's concerns to resume its studies.

The NRC could take as long as four years to sift through the DOE's scientific evidence collected at Yucca Mountain before it licenses a repository. The agency has licensed U.S. nuclear reactors, but never a burial site for the commercial radioactive waste created by them.

The commission has to ensure that this first-of-a-kind nuclear waste dump will not threaten public health and safety.