Battle over licensing looms

Benjamin Grove

Wednesday, July 10, 2002 | 11:08 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Now that the Senate has approved Yucca Mountain, project managers at the Energy Department have shifted their attention to winning the approval of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The Maryland-based NRC by law must license and regulate the nuclear waste dump.

By December 2004 the Energy Department plans to submit a license application to begin constructing the site. A three-member licensing board at the NRC would review the license and make recommendations to the five-member commission, which makes the final decision.

Ultimately the NRC would grant a license based on whether the site can meet federal safety standards, such as radiation release standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The NRC has up to three years to review the Energy Department's construction application, plus an additional year if the NRC sends the license back to the DOE to make corrections, NRC officials said.

Because the project is the first of its kind in the world, highly controversial and extremely complex, it is likely that the construction application review could take the full four years, Janet Kotra, an NRC systems performance analyst, said.

After reviewing the application, the NRC has three options:

Once the license is granted, construction of the site can begin. That process would take several years. After construction is complete, the DOE must apply for another license to accept waste at the site.

The NRC could determine that the site cannot meet safety standards and deny the license to operate, Kotra said. But it is more likely the NRC would direct the DOE to make project changes in order to meet the standards.

It's not known exactly how long construction could take.

But DOE officials on Tuesday said they still intend to open the dump by 2010. If the license review took four years, that would give the DOE just two years to construct the site and receive final approval from the NRC.

Project critics, along with Congress' General Accounting Office, say that's highly unlikely. The GAO in a report released in December said it could take the DOE until 2006 to submit its construction license.