Missed deadline for documents may not delay Yucca schedule

Suzanne Struglinski

Thursday, June 24, 2004 | 11:14 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department's failure to meet a document deadline for the Yucca Mountain project Wednesday may not delay the project's schedule by much.

The department did not finish sending millions of documents to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last night as intended, but a close reading of commission rules shows that the department faces few consequences if it still submits a license application in December.

The department needs to submit its license application for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage site, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, by December to stay on track to open the repository in 2010.

Under commission regulations, the department must "certify" all of the technical documents it will use to support the application six months before the submission of the application. Simply put, the department has to tell the commission that everything it knows is in the database.

The department aims to get the license application to the commission by a self-imposed deadline of Dec. 23. This made Wednesday the six-month mark to get the documents into the database, but it did not complete it.

"I see a high quality license application in December," Joseph Ziegler, of the department's Office of Repository Development told the commission's Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste today.

Ziegler said about 50 key technical issue agreements, or scientific questions, remain that will be answered by August and updates to other reports that should be completed by September -- all while completing chapters of the license application.

"I won't tell you that is not a challenge but this is where we wanted to be two years ago," Ziegler said. "I don't want to downplay the challenge, but they (department technical staff) are up for it."

"We certainly don't expect wrong answers across the board," Ziegler said. "There should be no technical errors."

Charles Fitzpatrick of Egan, Fitzpatrick, Malsch and Cynkar, the Virginia law firm hired by Nevada to handle Yucca Mountain legal issues, said it looks like the department created a "cushion" for itself by not picking a deadline at the end of the month.

He expects the certification will come in the next few days and that will allow the license application to be submitted in December, so the missed deadline Wednesday will not have much of an impact on the project. It would mean a bigger delay if the commission found the amount of documentation was not sufficient and told the department it needed more.

Bob Loux, executive director of the state's Agency for Nuclear Projects, agreed that nothing in the rules prevents the department from still submitting a license application in December, even though it missed Wednesday's deadline.

Fitzpatrick said the regulations say the department "shall" submit documents six months prior to the license application. "Shall" isn't the same as "must" in legal terms, but the only consequence if is that the commission will not put the application on its docket until at least six months after the certification.

Bechtel SAIC, the project's main contractor, will get $15 million it if finishes the application for the department by Nov. 30, and $22 million if the commission puts the application on its docket by March, so that provides an incentive for the company to get the application in on time, Fitzpatrick said.

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

Nevada will object to several aspects of the license application and needs to include everything upon which it will base its arguments.

Loux said the state will still have 90 days to gets its documentation together, but the longer the Energy Department waits, the less time the state will have to review the documents before the application goes to the commission, if the department still submits in December. If the department had gotten all its documentation in by Wednesday, Nevada would have had nine months to study documents until the commission would make a docketing decision in March, but now that amount decreases every day the department waits.

Once docketed, a three-year review clock starts for the commission to decide whether the storage site could be built. The department can ask Congress for an additional year if needed.

Yucca Mountain Project spokesman Allen Benson on Wednesday would not specify why the department did not meet that day's deadline and would not say when the department plans to submit the documents.

"We're working hard to get it done," Benson said. "The whole issue is to do it right. We are hoping it will be shortly and I can't say more than that."

Benson said the department is reviewing documents and making sure everything it submits is correct. The law specifies what needs to be sent.