State demands all Yucca issues be answered

Suzanne Struglinski

Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2003 | 9:06 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- State officials called on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to make the Energy Department answer all outstanding technical questions about Yucca Mountain before the department files its license application.

In a letter to the NRC Friday, Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency, said the state "is very much concerned" over the Energy Department's plan to answer only some of the remaining technical questions, known as "key technical issue agreements," before submitting the site's license application.

The department is expected to submit the application for the high-level nuclear waste site in December 2004.

"DOE must be made to understand that it is an applicant like any other, which requires it to obey NRC's licensing rules," Loux wrote in a letter sent to William Travers, the commission's executive director of operations. "At stake are not only the rights of all the participants but the public health and safety."

At a Sept. 23 meeting at commission headquarters, Energy Department officials presented a schedule for forwarding answers to the commission on the 194 remaining issues for the nuclear waste repository planned for Yucca, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Energy Department officials said the department would address all of the questions before submitting the application, but they also said that some of the work would be completed after its license was submitted.

Loux estimated that more than 30 questions would remain unfinished by June 2004. He said this violates a commission rule that calls for all information needed to support the license to be logged into a electronic system six months prior to DOE handing in the application.

"The entire licensing procedural schedule may otherwise be thrown into disarray," Loux said, because the initial license filing sets off a timeline of when the state and other parties are required to file responses to the license application.

"If NRC accepts an incomplete application, the statutory deadline for completion of the NRC's review and hearing will be difficult, if not impossible, to meet, and the resulting blame for missing that deadline will rest with NRC, rather than DOE, where it more properly belongs," Loux wrote.

He said the answers on critical questions would be deferred on issues such as the corrosion of waste containers and the volcanic activity of Yucca Mountain.

"Indeed, waste container corrosion is perhaps the most important issue in the licensing of the repository," Loux wrote.

The 77,000 tons of nuclear waste set to be stored in the mountain will be housed in special containers designed to hold the highly radioactive material. Corrosion of the containers could lead to a radiation leak that could contaminate surrounding land or groundwater.

The NRC could not be reached for comment, and calls to the Yucca Mountain Project Office were not returned Monday.

But Janet Schlueter, chief of the commission's High-Level Waste Branch, said at the Sept. 23 meeting that the Energy Department's plans to continue addressing technical information after the license application submittal was consistent with the regulations.

And April Gil, the Energy Department's division director of regulatory interaction and strategy at the Office of Repository Development, said the license application was not contingent on the closure of all 293 issues.