Editorial: Regulators looked at for sharing info

Friday, Nov. 2, 2001 | 5 a.m.

The inspector general at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is investigating whether someone at the commission leaked a confidential memo about the Yucca Mountain Project to Department of Energy employees, contractors and lawyers. The NRC is an independent federal agency that is supposed to impartially review applications for nuclear power plants and nuclear waste storage sites. Sometime in 2002 the DOE is expected to submit its application to the NRC to bury 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste inside Nevada's Yucca Mountain. If someone at the NRC shared with outsiders the commission's internal guidelines for reviewing the likely application, then it would give the Yucca Mountain Project an unfair advantage in preparing its application.

The NRC already has a chummy relationship with the nuclear power industry, and often acts more as if it is the industry's champion rather than its regulator. So while it would be a breach of public trust, it also wouldn't be too surprising to learn that the NRC would share confidential information with the DOE. The DOE, after all, also has been known to do the bidding of the nuclear power industry, which desperately wants to see a nuclear waste dump built at Yucca Mountain.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said last week that if the leak occurred it not only would violate NRC and DOE rules, but that it also could be a violation of some federal laws. For Nevadans, the suspected sharing of information is just one more reminder of how the deck has been stacked against the residents of this state. Federal agencies that are supposed to protect us from potential danger instead have let us down and rolled over for the influential nuclear power industry.

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