Editorial: Nuke dump project gets needed rebuke

Friday, May 2, 2003 | 9:08 a.m.

This week the managers of the Yucca Mountain project were criticized by a key official of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the agency that ultimately will decide whether the Energy Department can build a nuclear waste dump in Nevada. "Quality is not being built into the project," John Greeves, the NRC's management leader, told top Yucca Mountain project officials during a videoconference meeting on Wednesday. "The bottom line is that behavior in safety needs change. Right now the schedule pressures are overrunning the quality."

The Yucca Mountain project always has been driven by unrealistic deadlines. Despite legitimate, unanswered questions about safety involving the transportation and burial of nuclear waste, last year Congress rushed to approve President Bush's recommendation to go forward with plans to build a nuclear waste dump in Nevada.

The Energy Department wants to get a license quickly from the NRC in order to open a dump by 2010, but that is a completely unrealistic goal. There have been too many shortcuts and an unwillingness by the dump's contractors, which do nearly all of the project's work, to listen to safety concerns. For instance, last week it was revealed that three auditors working on the Yucca Mountain project had been reassigned to other duties after they reported flaws in project procedures in March. That led Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., to call for a General Accounting Office investigation. She asked that it be incorporated into an ongoing GAO probe of a project worker who was fired in 2001, and another who was reassigned, after they complained that worker concerns weren't being properly addressed.

If there ever is a need for quality assurance, it's for a project that will ship and bury 77,000 tons of man's deadliest waste. The GAO should investigate the situation as Berkley has asked, and the NRC must be vigorous in its monitoring of the work at Yucca Mountain.