DOE submits more Yucca answers

Suzanne Struglinski

Friday, Feb. 27, 2004 | 9:27 a.m.

ROCKVILLE, Md. -- The Energy Department has submitted answers to 90 of the original 293 unresolved scientific questions on its proposed Yucca Mountain projects.

Three of those 90 are some of the most important answers the Energy Department needed to provide, Gregory Hatchett, of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Division of Waste Management, told the Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste today.

The commission has not received any information on 80 of the remaining questions, and 123 are in various stages of review by the commission, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Twenty of the questions the NRC is reviewing are critical, and the Energy Department has not yet provided information on 18 of the key questions.

In 2001 the Energy Department and the NRC agreed that the department still needed to answer the 293 questions, known as "key technical issue agreements," on the proposed nuclear waste storage site planned for Yucca Mountain, which is 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The questions relate to the project's ability to keep radiation from contaminating the environment.

The department told the commission in November it aimed to answer all the remaining questions, including the ones it deemed "high-risk," before it submitted its license application to the commission by the end of this year.

Last June the department created a "bundling program" as a more efficient way to answer the questions. Related technical problems were placed into a category to be answered together.

Hatchett said that even if the Energy Department meets its goal of providing answers for the open question by August, the regulatory commission may not have accepted them all by the time the application is due in December. He did not say whether that would delay the application.