Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Berkley seeks new Yucca probe

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., has asked for a federal probe of reports that three Yucca Mountain audit workers were reassigned to different duties after they documented flaws in project procedures.

In a letter to the General Accounting Office sent Tuesday, Berkley asked that the investigation be added to an ongoing investigation of two other Yucca workers, James Mattimoe, who was fired, and Robert Clark, who was reassigned, after they complained about how worker concerns were handled.

"I am extremely concerned about the motive and timing of these measures taken against these three quality assurance employees, and am also worried about the chilling effect these actions will have on other employees who might also have legitimate concerns regarding deficiencies of the project," Berkley wrote.

Berkley was referring to three members of a four-member Yucca audit team working for a Yucca contractor, Navarro Engineering and Research, who were reportedly reassigned. Auditor Don Harris was given his job back on Friday after three weeks off the job. Navarro officials said he was temporarily reassigned pending an internal investigation into his misconduct, but he was quickly cleared.

Navarro also disputed that auditor George Harper was "reassigned" because he was borrowed from another department to help with the audit and then returned to his old duties.

The audit team had spotlighted problems with the procedures that dictate how Yucca work is conducted.

On Tuesday a Yucca manager shed more light on problems inside the project's quality assurance program, including "inadequate supervision," failure to identify "behavior-based problems" and a lack of accountability for complying with procedures.

"Major changes" are being made to fix the problems, said John T. Mitchell, general manager for Bechtel SAIC, the top contractor at Yucca, proposed site of a repository for the nation's high-level nuclear waste.

Energy Department officials, along with their contractor managers, met via teleconference Tuesday with Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials in Rockville, Md., for a quarterly meeting.

Bechtel and the Energy Department are collecting and organizing that data for an application for a license to construct the repository at Yucca, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Department officials plan to submit the application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by December 2004.

Procedure flaws that recently surfaced inside the quality assurance program are not likely to slow the department's plans, observers say. But critics have said the problems are emblematic of inattention to detail that bodes a troubling future for the nuclear waste repository project.

"You are saying all the right words," Susan Lynch, a technical programs administrator for the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, told Yucca managers at a meeting Tuesday after they outlined how the program was fixing problems. "But we have heard this so many times over the years."

Because the NRC will be responsible for licensing Yucca, commission officials are keeping close tabs on the project. So far Yucca managers have not said publicly how the recently discovered flaws would affect the project or its timeline, if at all. They may shed more light on that during the second day of the two-day meeting today, NRC officials said.

The flaws prompted the Energy Department's Yucca quality assurance director R. Dennis Brown to issue a stop-work order, essentially forcing Bechtel to scrap its newly revised Yucca work procedures and revert to a set of out-of-date procedures until problems are fixed.

Brown also issued a report to Bechtel for fixing the problems, including instructions for better delegation of authority and properly handling document signatures, Brown said.

Mitchell said part of the problem was that Yucca personnel "chose not to comply with procedures" and that there was an "inadequate definition of roles and responsibilities" in the quality assurance program.

In other action Tuesday Mitchell revealed that Bechtel this month launched a "corrective action" program to "re-establish the authenticity of the (project) data." Mitchell said Bechtel began reviewing Yucca data in January and that Yucca managers found enough problems that they decided to launch a more comprehensive review.

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