Yucca official: DOE still objective

Benjamin Grove

Thursday, Dec. 14, 2000 | 11:13 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department's top Yucca Mountain administrator, Ivan Itkin, today stressed that he is confident an inspector general's investigation would prove the DOE's objective stance on the controversial nuclear waste dump had not been compromised by a recently surfaced unauthorized memo.

The Sun earlier this month reported in a copyrighted story that the memo, attached to an unreleased draft DOE report on the Yucca Mountain site, suggested that the report would be a good tool to use to convince Congress that the Nevada site is safe to bury the nation's 77,000 tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste.

DOE officials say they don't yet know the source of the memo, or the effect it may have had on officials who were reviewing the site study report.

The DOE has blamed a Yucca contractor for the memo, a missive that Nevada officials and the state's members in Congress charge stinks of DOE bias toward approving Yucca Mountain before years of scientific analysis of the mountain are complete. The memo has been removed from the report, DOE officials say.

The DOE is responsible for the ongoing studies of Yucca Mountain, but the agency has not yet published its official recommendation for the nuclear waste site. Under federal law, the DOE is required to be impartial.

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, at the urging of Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., this week launched the inspector general's investigation to determine if the memo could color the drafting of the DOE's eventual recommendation report.

"We believe the document is indeed a very objective document, irrespective of what this wordsmith (the memo's author) may have written in a note to reviewers," DOE nuclear waste chief Itkin said today. "Hopefully there is no bias in any document, and therefore we will feel comfortable releasing a document that is clean and not tainted."

Itkin brought up the topic of the memo this morning at a meeting hosted by the National Academy of Sciences, where the DOE's top Yucca administrators and scientists gathered to update the academy on the proposed repository's status. The academy is an independent body that conducts a vast array of scientific studies.

The academy's Board on Radioactive Waste Management was not familiar with the controversy surrounding the memo, Director John Ahearne said.

Nevada's top Yucca watchdog, Bob Loux, also was scheduled to speak today. Loux, who serves as Gov. Kenny Guinn's pointman on Yucca issues, said the governor was preparing a letter to Richardson asking to know the identity of the memo's author.

Nevada officials also believe the inspector general should conduct a wider investigation of pro-Yucca bias inside the DOE, an investigation that would probe deeper than just the alleged bias surrounding the memo.

"The whole delegation is concerned about bias in general in the department," Nevada's lobbysist in Washington, Mike Pieper, said. "There is a history of that kind of activity."