Probe delays DOE report on Yucca

Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2001 | 11:24 a.m.

Foes rally

Las Vegas businessman Stephen Cloobeck is holding a second organizational meeting of his grass-roots campaign against a Yucca Mountain dump.

AMARGOSA VALLEY -- An inspector general's investigation into a possible conflict of interest between the Energy Department and the nuclear industry has delayed the decision on whether to recommend Yucca Mountain as a high-level nuclear waste repository.

Funding cuts for scientific studies and the lack of final radiation standards played into the DOE's decision to delay its report to President Bush and Congress until late this year, Lake Barrett, acting director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, told a scientific review panel Tuesday. The recommendation had been expected in June.

Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is the only site being studied to store 77,000 tons of commercial and defense nuclear waste. If it passes scientific muster, it could accept its first shipments by 2010.

Barrett said he has no idea when the inspector general will complete an investigation launched after the Sun reported Dec. 1 that an anonymous two-page memo attached to a scientific overview showed the DOE is biased toward a repository at Yucca. The memo suggested that presenting the mountain as the best solution to the nuclear waste problem would help sell the project to Congress.

In addition, Barrett said, the Office of Management and Budget has not set a schedule for reviewing the Environmental Protection Agency's radiation exposure limit for the mountain.

The Clinton administration recommended a limit of 15 millirems of total radiation exposure each year with a 4 millirem limit in ground water. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has proposed its own standard of 25 millirems. A chest X-ray is equivalent to 10 millirems.

Congress also has slashed $150 million from DOE budgets for the Yucca Mountain project in the past four years, Barrett said. That is delaying scientific studies such as large-scale field tests in Yucca's volcanic rock, he said.

Barrett, who stepped into the acting position after Clinton appointee Ivan Itkin resigned, disavowed the memo on the draft version of the overview.

The memo was written by a non-scientist, Barrett said. "Its primary authors are not scientists, but liberal arts majors," he told the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, an independent panel of scientists overseeing DOE's work at Yucca.

"It was an unfortunate, inappropriate wrong note issued by one of the authors," Barrett said. "It was wrong. I think it is important that the inspector general investigates this, with a very competent team, and we wouldn't want it any other way."

Nye County Commissioner Jeff Taguchi said he was concerned about politics driving the repository, given Yucca Mountain's status as the only site being studied.

"We here in Nye County welcome that investigation," he said.

Nye has always insisted any decision be based on science and not politics," Taguchi said, noting that the county did not volunteer Yucca Mountain as a repository site.