Flaws found in Yucca procedures

Benjamin Grove and Mary Manning

Friday, April 25, 2003 | 11:07 a.m.

The Energy Department's embattled Quality Assurance program for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository project has run into more trouble.

Last month a surveillance team that routinely reviews the work of the project's "QA" program reported numerous flaws in the procedures that meticulously document how work is conducted at Yucca. The procedures were undergoing a revision by top Yucca contractor Bechtel SAIC.

The four-member team of specialists from Yucca contractor Navarro Research and Engineering, Inc., submitted its findings to the Energy Department. Department officials deemed the findings severe enough that on March 4 the department filed a "stop-work" order on Bechtel, halting the procedure revision.

The department also filed a "corrective action" report, detailing the problems that Bechtel must fix before the stop-work order could be lifted.

The stop-work order was narrow in focus and did not bring the project to a halt.

The five-page order did not immediately stop scientific data gathering and analysis; rather, it halted Bechtel's time-consuming and expensive project to revise the procedures at Yucca, sources said.

Stopping Bechtel's revision of work procedures eventually could slow actual study and data analysis, sources close to the project said. But it is not clear how the stop-work order will ultimately affect the project or the Energy Department's ability to submit an application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a Yucca license by December 2004, as planned.

Bechtel spokeswoman Bea Reilly this week referred questions to the Energy Department, where officials would not discuss the stop-work order in detail. Calls to the Energy Department in Washington have not been returned. The Energy Department's Quality Assurance Director for Yucca in Las Vegas, R. Dennis Brown, also did not return calls.

The Energy Department also is reviewing the Yucca program in regard to congressional budget cuts, although decisions about what parts of the project could be cut have not been made, said the Energy Department Yucca project spokesman, Allen Benson.

"Bechtel SAIC is going through a planning effort and after that effort, we'll see where it goes," said Benson, who could not comment in detail on the effect of the stop-work order.

A teleconference meeting set for Tuesday between the Yucca Mountain project office in Las Vegas and Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials in suburban Washington may shed light on how the stop-work order affected the project timeline, said Larry Campbell, a repository site section chief for the NRC.

"Right now, we don't know," Campbell said.

The Yucca Quality Assurance program is designed to preserve data that have been collected over years that support the department's conclusion that Yucca Mountain is a safe place to bury the nation's most radioactive nuclear waste.

The stop-work order, obtained by the Sun, was sent early last month by the Energy Department's Yucca Quality Assurance Director R. Dennis Brown to Bechtel SAIC General Manager J.T. Mitchell. Only Brown could lift the stop-work order -- after Bechtel fixed the flaws in its revised procedures, according to the order.

The corrective action report lists a number of highly technical flaws in Bechtel's procedures. One flaw is that "the establishment of an effective date" for implementing the procedures themselves has not been addressed by Bechtel, the report said. That means that Bechtel does not have a requirement for when its own work procedures go into effect.

The flaws listed in the corrective action report violate the Energy Department's Quality Assurance Requirement Document, which is required by federal law.

Because the Yucca project is such a highly technical and complex project, the document requires the department -- and its contractors -- to set procedures for everything from worker safety to scientific studies and data-gathering. For instance, there is a specific procedure for monitoring a thermal test in which scientists studied the effect of heat stress on Yucca rock.

Robert Latta, an NRC official in Las Vegas, said it's "critical to the project to have new procedures in place" for handling Yucca studies and data because quality-assured data is key to the project earning NRC approval.

The NRC ultimately will be responsible for licensing Yucca. Officials at the NRC are keeping close tabs on the project as Energy Department Yucca managers prepare to submit an application for a license to construct it.

Nevadans who have long opposed the Yucca project said they were not surprised that flaws were found in Bechtel's quality assurance procedures.

"The DOE recognizes that it has a deficient QA program," Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency director Bob Loux said. "It's always had a deficient QA program."

Loux said the department has long tried to keep project flaws tightly under wraps, Loux said.

"When the DOE finds these kinds of problems, they don't want anyone to find out about it because it would affect the whole licensing program," Loux said.

This is not the first time Yucca contractors have faced stop-work orders. Work stopped for almost a year between 1988 and 1989 when the NRC questioned the quality of some scientific information. Again between 1995 and 1998, concerns were raised about neglected quality controls for data collection at the mountain site.

This is also not the first time the Quality Assurance program -- a program designed to scrutinize how Yucca data is handled -- has itself been the subject of scrutiny. Last year, two quality assurance specialists on the project said they were shoved aside so that their concerns about the project would not come to light. Jim Mattimoe challenged his firing and a Labor Department probe ruled that he had been unfairly terminated.

The Energy Department has been studying Yucca Mountain for 20 years to determine if it is a safe place to permanently bury 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste now piling up at U.S. Defense sites and commercial nuclear plant sites. With many of the Energy Department studies completed, the department last year deemed the site suitable and President Bush and Congress agreed to make Yucca the nation's first high-level waste repository.

The next step in the project is for the department to submit the application for a license to construct Yucca. But the project has been plagued by budget cuts that critics say will delay the project.