GAO calls for delay on Yucca decision

Mary Manning and Benjamin Grove

Friday, Nov. 30, 2001 | 10:55 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department should indefinitely postpone a decision on whether to build a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, a Congressional audit says.

The report by the General Accounting Office is a crushing blow to the department's plans to proceed with Yucca, Nevada lawmakers said.

However, the DOE says the report will not slow plans to make a recommendation about the site to the President Bush in the coming months, a spokesman said this morning.

According to the report, the department has no reliable estimate of when or at what cost the repository could be opened, and even the project's main contractor says it is premature to recommend Yucca Mountain.

"I believe this may be the smoking gun that will derail Yucca Mountain," said Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., who is sending a letter about the report to her 434 House colleagues.

The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, launched the Yucca study in February at the request of Berkley and Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.

Reid said the report was the most damning report ever produced about Yucca Mountain. He plans to meet next week with Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., to plot strategy in using the report to kill a Yucca repository.

"It shows from an independent source -- no one has ever questioned the GAO's veracity or independence -- that the science is not ready for anyone to make a determination," Reid said. "The DOE is way ahead of itself."

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham today sent a letter to non-partisan GAO's Comptroller General David Walker. Abraham questioned the independence of the report because the draft was leaked Thursday to media and immediately trumpeted by the Nevada delegation.

"While I have great respect for GAO, this kind of premature disclosure significantly, if not irreversibly, taints the work product of any inquiry by GAO or any other investigative body," Abraham wrote. "I note that the requestors of this report have a long history of strong opposition to the Yucca Mountain project."

The report surfaced just a month or two before the Energy Department is expected to recommend to Bush establishing a permanent nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The DOE plans to move forward with its site recommendation report despite the GAO report, said department spokesman Joe Davis.

The GAO report is "fatally flawed," Davis said, because it confuses what types of data are required for a site recommendation versus data required for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to eventually approve the Yucca site.

The DOE and NRC have both said the Energy Department has sufficient evidence to make the site recommendation, Davis said.

A leading congressional proponent of Yucca Mountain also believes it is time to make a decision about Yucca.

"We feel satisfied that it is a suitable site. Nothing in life is ever 100 percent certain," said Samatha Jordan, spokeswoman for Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas.

Nevada officials say they plan to use the report to lobby Bush directly, urging him to postpone a Yucca decision.

Gov. Kenny Guinn said today it's time for the DOE to give up on Yucca Mountain.

"The conclusions of the GAO mirror those of nearly every external review that has been looking at the project, including the presidential-appointed National Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and several national and international peer review groups.

"It's becoming increasingly obvious that the Yucca Mountain project is doomed to failure," Guinn said.

The question, Guinn said, is "when will the DOE and the administration recognize that Yucca Mountain can never be found suitable and certainly is not licensable by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission."

Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., also said the Energy Department should "pull the plug" on the project.

"It is a failed scientific process," Gibbons said. "I think we will see that Yucca Mountain will turn out to be the greatest waste of taxpayer dollars in U.S. history."

Nevada lawmakers said they were troubled that the GAO said the plans for Yucca Mountain shown to Congress and Nevada residents "may not describe the facilities that DOE would actually develop."

"They're trying to sell us a project that doesn't exist -- what they're actually going to do they haven't shown us yet," Berkley said. "It's immoral, unethical and illegal."

Nevada lawmakers said they also were concerned that the report said the department, in reviewing its options, may consider a "staged" waste shipment plan in which high-level radioactive material is gradually moved to Nevada. That essentially establishes a temporary waste site in Nevada until Yucca is complete -- a plan Congress has rejected. Reid, the majority whip, said Congress likely would not again consider temporary storage.

Bush, during the presidential campaign, told Guinn that he would veto a temporary waste site because scientific issues at Yucca are unresolved.

The GAO study also put new light on the stance of the Energy Department's major contractor, Bechtel SAIC.

The report revealed that Bechtel told the government that it would take until January 2006 to complete detailed research and cost estimates for a repository. The GAO may have mischaracterized Bechtel's stance, Davis said. Attempts to reach Bechtel were unsuccessful.

The DOE and its contractors are still analyzing nearly 300 technical issues, the GAO report says.

"DOE is not ready to make a site recommendation because it does not yet have all of the technical information needed for a recommendation and a subsequent license application."

That is what state officials have been telling the department all along, said Bob Loux, director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, which acts as a watchdog for the state.

Berkley agreed. "How can the administration approve a project at a point when even Bechtel is saying that it is impossible to finish (its) analysis until all the evidence is in -- no earlier than 2006?"

Congress singled out Yucca Mountain in 1987 as the best site to bury high-level nuclear waste from the nation's 103 commercial reactors and weapons facilities. Scientists and their contractors have been studying Yucca ever since.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham is expected to recommend the mountain as a permanent tomb for 77,000 tons of nuclear waste within the next few months.

Bush then likely would recommend it to Congress. Nevada can veto the decision.

Congress would have the power to override Nevada's veto, and the site could face up to four years of review.

The GAO report recommends that if Abraham decides to recommend Yucca, he provide a detailed rationale for "proceeding without additional technical information needed for a license application."

"Furthermore, we are making recommendations to DOE to better manage the nuclear waste program and to prepare estimates of the schedule and costs for opening the repository at Yucca Mountain that are tied to a new baseline for the program," the GAO said.

The report deals a blow to the Bush administration's accelerated plans to revive nuclear power in America, where nuclear plants have not been constructed since the 1970s, Nevada officials said.

Nuclear industry lobbyists argue that the government had a legal obligation to begin hauling waste away from plants by 1998.

Nuclear officials disagree with the GAO report's assertion that there is not enough scientific data available to recommend the site, said Mitch Singer, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's top lobby group.

"The NRC has said that there is enough information available, the DOE has said there is enough information, we say there is enough," Singer said.

"Nobody is going to say that this is going to be built tomorrow. But there is no sense in stopping the whole works."

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