Editorial: Even more evidence of ineptitude

Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2001 | 8:45 a.m.

Las Vegas Sun subscribers have grown accustomed to stories about inept management and faulty science that are virtually embedded in the Yucca Mountain Project. But last week an anonymous letter surfaced, apparently written by a project insider, that will shock even jaded Nevadans. The letter to the U.S. Department of Energy's inspector general not only describes a project that is near failure, but it also details mismanagement, the skyrocketing costs of burying 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste and the project's adversarial relationship with a federal panel providing technical oversight.

Anonymous letters should be taken with a grain of salt, but this one contains details that indicates it came from an employee who has considerable knowledge about the program -- from top to bottom. The letter also should provide more fodder for a probe of the Yucca Mountain Project that already is under way. The DOE's inspector general started an investigation of the Yucca Mountain Project last month after the Sun reported that the federal department apparently had been collaborating with the nuclear power industry to gain approval to build a repository at Yucca Mountain.

The letter also mentions the program's out-of-control costs. The projected cost in 1995 was $36 billion, but today it's ballooned to $58 billion. An independent internal estimate, according to the letter, is that the cost actually will be $62 billion -- and possibly more. Aside from the costs, which are a critical issue in determining the feasibility of a repository, there also is the problem of Yucca Mountain's unsuitability to safely store high-level nuclear waste. It is disturbing to read the writer's acknowledgement that the DOE's rift with the Technical Waste Review Board, which provides guidance to the project, has hampered Yucca Mountain's assessment.

The writer also provides an internal board memo from the technical review board's executive director, Bill Barnard, who noted the disarray inside the DOE. "Without a well-defined plan for creating a technically defensible process for the secretary to select a repository design concept, it appears the DOE may be trying to sell 'a pig in the poke,' " Barnard wrote. Bob Alvarez, an employee under former Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary, told the Sun that the letter cites common DOE management problems. "Typical of a large DOE project, and that includes Yucca Mountain, contractors are virtually given a blank check and there's no oversight," Alvarez said.

If the Yucca Mountain Project were any other federal program with such huge cost overruns and mismanagement, it would have been shut down years ago. But this program has the kind of benefactor that other projects don't have -- namely the nuclear power industry, which provides a huge infusion of campaign contributions to members of Congress. Instead of canceling the program, congressmen often go out of their way to keep this project alive -- even if it means trying to weaken radiation safety standards so that it makes it easier for the repository to pass regulatory muster.

Many members of Congress also have looked the other way on problems at Yucca Mountain because they don't want the waste to stay on-site at the nuclear power reactors in their home states, or they don't want their own back yards to be considered for a repository if Yucca Mountain doesn't get approved. But as more evidence gathers about the folly of a repository in Nevada, and word spreads about the danger of shipping man's deadliest waste cross-country, the voices of reason are being heard. While a new contractor took over the reins of the Yucca Mountain Project on Monday, the problems there are so pervasive that it is essential the inspector general's probe continues unabated.