DOE’s ‘rush to judgment’ criticized

Thursday, Aug. 22, 2002 | 9:56 a.m.

Energy Department officials were too hasty to say a June 14 earthquake near Yucca Mountain did no damage, an activist group said Wednesday.

The day of the magnitude 4.4 temblor, department officials said the earthquake had not affected the proposed site of the nation's high-level nuclear waste dump 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Department officials were right -- the Yucca site was not damaged, later study showed. But the Energy Department had initially leapt to defend the site based on a preliminary visual evaluation, said Washington-based Public Citizen.

A thorough site evaluation was not completed until July 29, Public Citizen discovered from department documents after filing a Freedom of Information request.

The "no damage" statement issued by the Energy Department "was premature and lacked conclusive supporting evidence," the environmental watchdog group said Wednesday.

The department "appears more committed to dogmatically defending the nuclear industry's repository interests than honestly assessing new information and evaluating the suitability of the Yucca Mountain site," Public Citizen wrote in a letter Wednesday to Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., and Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, leaders of congressional energy committees.

The epicenter of the quake was about 12 miles southeast of Yucca. Public Citizen obtained a department e-mail message from a Yucca project employee that describes how workers initially visually inspected above-ground water tanks and the ground, and conducted a walk-through of the first 500 feet of the mountain's five-mile exploratory research tunnel.

Other documents said a third of the tunnel was inspected by an expert from Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico the next day, and the required technical evaluation was conducted in late July.

"Congress should investigate the extent to which this rush-to-judgment tendency characterizes other aspects of DOE's work on Yucca Mountain," said Lisa Gue of Public Citizen.

Energy Department officials say they have thoroughly studied the issue of whether an earthquake could disrupt the proposed dump and found that seismic activity would not harm the repository.