New cries of outrage over DOE, Yucca relationship

Saturday, Dec. 30, 2000 | 2:14 a.m.

A secret nuclear industry report boasted in September 1991 that a "beachhead" had been established in Nevada in the campaign to single out Yucca Mountain as the nation's radioactive waste repository.

The 22-page report, dubbed the "Nevada Initiative," also proclaimed that the industry had formed a "working political alliance" with the Energy Department, the agency responsible for recommending whether Yucca Mountain is suitable to store high-level nuclear waste.

When word leaked out about the industry's initiative -- a three-year, $8.7 million media blitz to turn around the anti-dump sentiment -- it created a public uproar over the DOE's handling of Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

At the time, then-Gov. Bob Miller called the covert plan an "act of war" on the state, and Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev., charged that it was more evidence of an "unholy alliance" between the DOE and nuclear utilities.

A decade later, in the wake of those protests, the beachhead has been taken back and the "Nevada Initiative" declared a failure.

But the DOE's cozy relationship with the nuclear industry lives on.

Today there are new cries of outrage over recently disclosed documents that once more show the DOE has been collaborating behind the scenes with the industry to ensure that Yucca Mountain is found suitable.

Federal law prohibits the DOE from taking sides in the expensive site-selection process.

Earlier this month, the Sun reported that a 60-page draft of a pending DOE overview of Yucca Mountain concluded that the Nevada project is safe, even though a longtime, taxpayer-financed study has yet to reach that conclusion.

That news, in itself, did not surprise Nevada officials.

What astonished them was an attached memo, apparently put together by the project's chief contractor, TRW Environmental Safety Systems Inc., that suggested the overview was designed to help the nuclear industry sell Yucca Mountain to Congress next summer.

"The overview provides information that potential supporters can use in expressing support for a site recommendation," the memo said.

Then the two-page note concluded: "In fact, the technical suitability of the site is less of a concern to Congress than the broader issue of whether the nuclear waste problem can be solved at an affordable price in both financial and political concerns."

Potential repercussions

Realizing the potential repercussions of those statements, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson and Ivan Itkin, director of the DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management -- the agency overseeing the Yucca Mountain studies -- quickly disavowed the memo, saying it had been omitted from subsequent drafts of the overview. Both assured Nevada officials that a decision on Yucca Mountain would be based solely on sound science.

But their words rang hollow with the retiring Bryan, who accused the DOE of "trivializing" the epic Yucca Mountain study.

"That is, in fact, saying the public and the health and safety of Nevada be dammed," he said.

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., called the memo the "smoking gun" to years of perceived bias against the state.

And Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the note proved to him that the DOE was incapable of "getting out of bed with the nuclear industry." Reid, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, asked the DOE's inspector general to investigate the alleged bias, which he said bordered on criminality.

Even Richardson asked the inspector general to probe whether his chief Yucca Mountain contractor had failed to do its job properly.

The revelations brought back memories of the "Nevada Initiative," which saw the nuclear industry snuggle up to the DOE and buy the loyalty of well-known Las Vegas political consultants and journalists.

Kent Oram, then a strategist for Miller and other top elected officials, and Ed Allison, an aide to former Sen. Paul Laxalt, R-Nev., and Clark County's Washington lobbyist at the time, were credited with putting together the initiative, which was sponsored by the now-disbanded American Nuclear Energy Council (ANEC), the industry's lobbying arm.

Oram, who has since cut his ties to the industry, said last week that he was flabbergasted when his and Allison's names appeared on copies of the initiative. Oram said the report actually was written by an industry employee, although he acknowledged that it was based on the duo's ideas.

The campaign was designed to build bridges with Nevada's political leaders and reshape the public's perception about the dangers of storing radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain.

Soothing ads, featuring popular sportscaster Ron Vitto, were run on local television stations to give politicians "air cover" to soften their stance against the dump. More than $800,000 was poured into the Oram-directed ad campaign before the television spots were pulled in 1992 amid much criticism from the media, which simply didn't believe the feel-good story line.

Oram also trained DOE scientists to act as a "truth squad" to counter what the industry considered were ongoing inaccuracies being reported about the dump.

And a media response team headed by another longtime political consultant, Don Williams, was put in place to deal with local reporters as friendly peers.

Williams, a strategist for Reid and then-Rep. Jim Bilbray, D-Nev., at the time, hired KLAS Channel 8 news anchors George Knapp and Brian Gresh with ANEC money. Two other well-known reporters, Doug Bradford of Channel 8, and Dan Burns, of KVBC Channel 3, went to work directly for Science Applications International Corp., a Yucca Mountain contractor.

At a May 1992 nuclear utility conference in Washington, Knapp acknowledged that part of his job was to compile "dossiers" on key Yucca Mountain opponents. He said then he regretted using that term to describe his activities, but he nevertheless defended the practice.

Williams said last week that he and his media colleagues merely joined forces with ANEC for "damage control" after it was clear that Oram's advertising campaign had been a flop.

"I was brought in to change the approach from advertising to one of education," he said. "All we did was get them back to ground zero and undo the problems that the advertising campaign had created."

Williams downplayed the dossier angle.

He said Knapp and Gresh merely kept newspaper clip files and other public information normally gathered by journalists on some of their Yucca Mountain adversaries.

Eventually the public outcry over the "Nevada Initiative" became so alarming that the industry was forced to abandoned the controversial campaign.

'A miserable failure'

"The 'Nevada Initiative' was a miserable failure," said Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, the state's chief Yucca Mountain watchdog. "People were offended by the ads and the suggestion that this stuff was harmless. It actually hardened the opposition.

"Once the industry saw the numbers, it pulled out and decided the war was better off fought in Washington."

Miller described the initiative as an "orchestrated event" aimed at duping residents.

"It was an effort to put out false information, and the public got wise to it," he said.

Most of those involved in the campaign, including Oram, Williams and the four Las Vegas journalists, assimilated back into the mainstream after the collapse of the campaign. Knapp returned to Channel 8, Bradford went to work for the county, Gresh launched his own consulting business and Burns took a job in television outside the state.

Oram, now a consultant to Gov. Kenny Guinn, Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman and Sheriff Jerry Keller, said he decided to call it quits because ANEC officials "just drove us nuts."

Oram insisted that he had struck a deal with ANEC because he believed the state wasn't being realistic about the mounting odds of landing the dump, and he wanted to correct misinformation put out by the anti-Yucca Mountain crowd.

Williams, who has been easing himself out of the political-consulting business the last several years, said he felt he had done a good job of keeping Loux and the media on its toes until he terminated his ties with the industry.

Since those stormy days, the Nevada battlefield in the Yucca Mountain fight has been relatively quiet.

The DOE, however, has pressed ahead with its study of site in what many consider arrogant fashion.

Two years ago, with the study far from complete, local DOE officials appeared so confident that Yucca Mountain would be recommended that they posted signs around their field operations center that read: "Focusing on the Mission -- Design, License, Construct and Operate Successful Repository by 2010."

After Nevada officials complained that the signs made it look as though Yucca Mountain was a done deal, the signs were taken down.

This month, the DOE seemingly slipped to an all-time low in its presumptuousness, when it allowed the 60-page draft overview and accompanying memo to be circulated within its community of experts.

Miller said the disclosure of these documents is far more damning to the DOE than the revelations about the "Nevada Initiative" because it ties the agency to the purported scheme to circumvent the federal laws mandating a fair site-selection process.

"The initiative had linkage to the DOE, but nothing as overt as this memo, which is their own document," Miller said.

Reid said the memo is particularly disconcerting because it links the nuclear industry to the Yucca Mountain contractor with the DOE's apparent blessing.

Hired guns

"As disingenuous as the 'Nevada Initiative' was, at least it was an honest approach to things," he said. "Kent Oram and Don Williams were hired to turn public opinion around. They were hired guns.

"But here we have people the DOE has given a contract to in good faith to come up with an unbiased study of Yucca Mountain, and these people are cheating. They're not being fair."

Reid said he wants to wait until the DOE's inspector general completes his report on possible bias in the selection process before holding hearings in Washington next year.

"There's a possibility of criminal activity here," he said. "I don't want to interfere with the inspector general."

Berkley, who is planning hearings in Las Vegas with Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., on the same subject, also wants to wait for the inspector general to finish up.

The investigation could take a couple of months.

"If nothing else, this has stopped the nuclear industry's momentum and highlighted to the world what we in Nevada have been saying for years," Berkley said. "Certainly the Nevada delegation will be all over this memo and demand some answers."

Guinn said he's also hoping that the inspector general will give him some answers.

In the meantime, he said he wants to arrange a summit early next year with Nevada's representatives in Washington to map out a strategy to step up the fight against the dump.

"Somebody in your back yard working in such a clandestine way: That's not appropriate," Guinn said. "We have to get to the bottom of this."

Nevada officials believe the newest revelations will force the DOE to extend its June deadline for recommending Yucca Mountain. Richardson already has said the inspector general's probe will delay the release of the overview and the massive report of the Yucca Mountain study.

Loux said he hopes the memo will be the first step toward unraveling the "DOE's bias in the project.

"They've never been a neutral arbitrator of fact," he said. "They've been engaged in what we call advocacy science from day one."

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