Nevada’s anti-Yucca attorneys gearing up for license fight

Suzanne Struglinski

Thursday, July 8, 2004 | 9:16 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Nevada attorneys plan to file their complaints about the Energy Department's Yucca Mountain document database by the end of the week, now that a person has been appointed to handle the complaints.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Wednesday appointed G. Paul Bollwerk III, chief of the agency's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel, to serve as the Pre-License Application Presiding Officer. The officer oversees the commission's License Support Network, a database of millions of technical documents on the Yucca Mountain project.

Bollwerk has been the chief administrative judge on the board since 1999 and has served on the board since 1991. He was a lecturer on conducting complex adjudicatory hearings at the National Judicial College in Reno.

Attorney Joe Egan, who represents Nevada on Yucca issues, said the state aims to have the department's claim that it finished a required step in the Yucca Mountain licensing process thrown out.

"There is a whole litany of things wrong," Egan said. The state will spell them out in its contention, he said.

The department said last week that it "certified" a database of 5.6 million pages of documents related to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage project by posting them on a Web site it created.

Commission rules require the documents to be made public six months before the department turns in a license application. The department has yet to send all of the documents to the commission for the official database that will be used during the license hearings and is still sorting through documents to determine if some need to be deleted.

Egan said the "rogue website" created by the department, which is up now but was not working last week, and the fact the department has not given all the materials to the commission are clear violations of what the rules require.

"The network is a mess," Egan said.

The Energy Department would not comment on what may be filed with the commission but spokesman Joe Davis said via e-mail that any questions the commission asks the department will be answered. By the end of the year, the department plans to give the commission a license application for the Yucca project, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, proving it can safely store 77,000 tons of nuclear waste inside the mountain. The technical documents in the database are there to show how the department reached its conclusions.

If the officer determined the certification was not valid, the department might not be able to file its application by the end of the year, Egan said.

Nothing in the document controversy stops from the waste from coming to Nevada but it could cause a long delay.

Egan said million of documents are missing and it could take a while for all of them to be indexed and processed correctly.

"We are not going to let this go by lightly," he said.

Egan said this was not a delaying tactic by the state, which strongly opposes the project. The state's attorneys need to see the documents to build their arguments for the license hearings, he said. He said he is "very interested in seeing the documents," for technical questions, e-mails, what the department disregarded and other insights as to how it will make its case to the commission.