NRC puts Yucca project on notice to shape up

Thursday, May 1, 2003 | 11:23 a.m.

During a tense teleconference meeting Wednesday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff ordered the Energy Department to prove within 30 days that its quality assurance program for a Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository is working.

"Quality is not being built into the project," NRC management leader John Greeves said. "The bottom line is that behavior in safety needs change. Right now the schedule pressures are overrunning the quality."

Supporters say the Energy Department will meet a deadline to open the repository by 2010. Critics have said for years that the schedule, not quality scientific work, is driving the department.

Because the NRC will be responsible for licensing Yucca, commission officials are keeping close watch on the project.

An audit team recently discovered flaws in the way the Energy Department's chief contractor, Bechtel SAIC, had revised procedures that dictate how work is done at Yucca so reviewers can understand it.

"It's going to be difficult to implement an effective quality assurance program for licensing," Greeves said during a contractor meeting by teleconference with Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials in Las Vegas, Rockville, Md., and San Antonio.

Asked during a break whether the NRC might reject the DOE's request to build a repository, Greeves said, "I don't know what's going to happen, but the commission could reject a license application if the quality assurance is not in place."

If the Energy Department submits a license application in December 2004, the NRC could take six months to review it. If there is not enough information, the commission would reject it.

The department is making changes to its procedures and its leadership, Energy Secretary Margaret Chu said. "It's not a quick fix," she said.

John Arthur, the Energy Department's Yucca Project manager in Nevada, said administrators have been trained to listen to employee complaints and act to improve safety. By March 29, a total of 29 complaints had been received, four of them were serious enough to take action.

He said he could not say whether three members of an audit team were reassigned because they found flaws in the program, but an investigation of those allegations is under way.

Arthur said an electrical problem at the mountain was fixed in January, improving safety conditions at the tunnel.

John Mitchell, new general manager at Bechtel SAIC, said reduced funding for Yucca has eroded efforts to plan the project's future. The project is operating on $457 million, $134 million less than the $591 million Bush administration request.

As many as 40 employees could be cut from the project in June, Mitchell said.

But, he said, he doesn't "think it will be that many, and there are no final decisions yet."

Bechtel is trying to find a balance between staying within the budget and delivering a safety-based license application to the NRC in December 2004, he said. To do that, managers discussed closing down the mountain site, which costs $50 million a year to operate.

"All of us agreed that idea was unacceptable," Mitchell said, because of ongoing experiments at the site.