Yucca documents might be missing

Suzanne Struglinski

Thursday, June 3, 2004 | 10:09 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Nevada's attorneys want to know how at least 24 million pages of Yucca Mountain project documents seem to have fallen off the Energy Department's radar screen.

It is unclear how the department pared down its list or what information would be missing from a data base of information now being compiled, according to the state's lawyers, but some could be important to help keep nuclear waste out of Nevada.

The department estimated in February and April that 3 million to 4 million documents totaling about 36 million pages could be included in the nuclear waste storage project's Licensing Support Network, expected to go online later this month, but then on May 4 estimated only 1 million documents or 12 million pages would be included.

The department starting sending documents May 6 to the License Support Network, a central data base kept by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for all Yucca Mountain project documents.

A commission spokesman confirmed the department has sent documents over to be indexed but they are not available to the public. They become public once the department "certifies" all of the documents are there.

Yucca Mountain Project spokesman Allen Benson said the department based its 3 million to 4 million document estimate on its initial data collection phase but a closer review of the documents showed only 1 million needed to be included.

Benson could not elaborate on what the review entailed or how the department decided which documents no longer needed to be included.

"We just overestimated the number, it's that simple," Benson said.

But attorney Charles Fitzpatrick of Egan, Fitzpatrick, Malsch and Cynkar, the Virginia law firm hired by Nevada to handle Yucca Mountain legal issues, said arithmetic can lead to a possible answer.

In a May 20 report the department's inspector general wrote the commission can index 150,000 documents per week, so it could take between five months to more than a year to index 3 million to 8 million documents that would need to go on the network. The IG found 5 million e-mails that still needed to be processed on top of the department's original estimate.

The inspector general estimated the commission could need until May 2005 to make all of the information public. The license application, which the Energy Department has said would be submitted by the end of this year, cannot start until all of the documents are public.

Under the regulations, the department needs to submit to the network any information it plans to use during the licensing proceeding six months before it submits the license application, and the license application must be submitted by December if the repository is to open by the target date of 2010.

Fitzpatrick said he thought the department saw the inspector general's estimate during its review and opted to make the change to stay on track.

In an April 30 response to the inspector general audit, included in the final report, W. John Arthur, the deputy director of the department's Las Vegas-based Office of Repository Development, agreed with the audit recommendations but says a "revised estimate for the initial LSN Certification will be provided to-- the NRC within the next few weeks."

A May 4 letter to the commission from Jospeh Ziegler, director of the office of license application and strategy, says the department will submit 1 million documents.

Fitzpatrick said that NRC regulations outline specifically what needs to be included in the data base.

"DOE (Energy Department) can't just up and decide out of the blue what it wants to put on the LSN," Fitzpatrick said. "It's every piece of paper you want to rely on or cite."

The state has to wait until June 23 to see the department's response, but it is prepared to file a dispute if it feels information is missing, Fitzpatrick said.

The state sent a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Wednesday asking it to assign a pre-license application presiding officer as soon as possible rather than two weeks after the department submits its documents on the network, as outlined in the commission's regulations.

"Whether the correct figure is 3 million, 4 million, or 8 1/2 million, it remains that DOE clearly is struggling to meet its artificial June deadline," attorney Martin Malsch wrote. "Nevada anticipates that, when DOE certifies later this month, there will be immediate and serious questions about whether the certification is in compliance with NRC's rules, notwithstanding the serious civil and criminal penalties that would be associated with a false certification."

The officer has the power to decide whether material the department has decided to leave out is relevant and then require the department to submit it.

Fitzpatrick said having an officer in place now would help get a jump start on the process.

Once the department loads its documents onto the network, the commission has 30 days to turn in its documentation while the state and other parties allowed to participate in the process have 90 days to get their documentation online.

Suzanne Struglinski

can be reached at (202) 662-7245 or suzanne@lasvegassun.com