Energy Department’s document claim disputed by Nevadans

Suzanne Struglinski

Friday, July 2, 2004 | 10:59 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Despite Energy Department assurances, Nevada officials are calling into question whether the department hit a critical deadline it said it did this week on the planned Yucca Mountain repository.

On Wednesday, Energy Department officials said they had reached a key benchmark with the public release of more than 1 million documents -- backup information about the science behind the repository plan.

By law, the department has to make all of its documents publicly available six months before applying for a license to build the repository at the site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

State officials say those documents have to be on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Web site -- the Licensing Support Network.

But the NRC said Thursday that it had received less than half of the documents and noted it will be at least a month before it gets all of the documents.

The Energy Department, though, said the documents were available on its Web site, thus meeting the deadline because the site is public. The site, however, was down much of yesterday and today.

"This obviously can't be the way the system works,"said Bob Loux, executive director of the state's Agency for Nuclear Projects.

By sending those documents by the end of June, the department would be able to apply by the end of the year, and thus starting the clock on the regulatory process which could help the department meet its goal of building and opening the repository by 2010.

Attorney Joe Egan, who's representing Nevada on the Yucca issue, said he does not believe the department has met the requirements.

He said the state will challenge that the certification is "null and void" and the clock on the license process should not start ticking. Nevada has 90 day to gets it documentation together under the law once the department certifies.

"They (Energy Department officials) have botched this up to a degree that would be hard to imitate," Egan said. "Where are the documents?"

Attorney Charles Fitzpatrick, who also represents that state, was angry Thursday that the database was not complete.

Fitzpatrick said there was "no landmark reached" with the certification because it appears the department is not done going through its documents.

"They didn't complete everything," he said. "They've rendered the word certify really meaningless."

The state will have to wait for the NRC to appoint someone to handle the pre-license application before officially complaining. An officer should be appointed in the next two weeks.

Department spokesman Allen Benson said via e-mail the 1.2 million documents the department released Wednesday are loaded onto its Web site, and additional documents will come later.

"We are still working on technical documents that we may rely on for the LA (license application)," Benson said. "These would be in addition to the 1.2 million already loaded."

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is still waiting to receive documents and post them to its own network, which will be used during the license hearings.

Commission spokeswoman Sue Gagner said the commission will have about 500,000 documents available on its network "very soon." The department still needs to send the remaining 700,000. Ganger said the commission expects to receive and process them over the next five to six weeks.

The commission computer system can only index about 150,000 document a week, so it will take some time to get them all posted, she said.

The department has been sending documents to the commission since May 5. The Energy Department section of the commission's Web site was still gray and not available for searches Thursday. Meanwhile, the department's Web site has not been working.

The site went down last night, and this morning, those trying to access it received the message:

"The DOE LSN site is temporarily down for maintenance. We will be back up as soon as possible.The estimated time it will be available is 11 a.m. PDT (2 p.m. EDT) Friday July 2, 2004," according to the Web site.

Those trying to do searches on the site Thursday were warned that some software problems exists so all documents would not be available.

Michele Boyd, a legislative representative for Public Citizen, a group that opposes the Yucca project, said trying to do searches was "horrible" and she received numerous error message Thursday. The group and nine others sent a letter to the department today complaining on the Web site's quality.

"It is impossible for the public to participate in the NRC Yucca Mountain licensing process when only a small fraction of documents are indexed and available on the NRC Licensing Support Network," according to the letter, sent by Public Citizen and other environmental groups. "The usefulness of the DOE's database as currently configured is severely limited. The posted documents are not yet indexed, making it extraordinarily difficult, and for all practical purposes impossible, to navigate the database."

But Rod McCullum, senior project manager for waste at the Nuclear Energy Institute, said scientists and technical experts he had spoken with Thursday, "have been happily downloading documents all day" and did not seen any problems.