State won’t give up fight against Yucca ‘fantasyland’

Suzanne Struglinski

Friday, March 12, 2004 | 9:18 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Nevada will not back down from its fight against Yucca Mountain through the upcoming Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing process, one of the state's lawyers told a room full of nuclear industry officials Thursday.

"Yucca's supporters need a strong dose of realism," said attorney Martin Malsch. "We think DOE is still living in fantasyland."

The "fantasyland" is the department's idea that it can alter its construction plans or parts of the license after submitting it, turn in an incomplete application or change the type of repository without any objection or violation of the law, he said.

But Malsch, a partner of Egan, Fitzpatrick, Malsch and Cynkar, the state's legal team in Washington, hired to fight the Yucca Mountain project, wanted to make clear at the the commission's Regulatory Information Conference that the NIMBY, or "not in my back yard," argument is not Nevada's goal.

"We just want to be sure any repository is safe," Malsch said. "Nevada's goal is compliance with the law and reliance on sound science."

Nevada will be a party during the formal licensing hearings that could start in about three years, and the state plans to raise many objections to flaws it sees in the project.

The annual conference is a three-day event open to the public to provide information on the agency, its activities and regulatory trends. Top officials and employees from nuclear utility companies, the commission, the Nuclear Energy Institute, law firms, government agencies and environmental groups attended.

Malsch reminded the group that Nevada is still waiting for the outcome of its six legal challenges to the federal nuclear waste storage site now planned for Yucca, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Malsch argued the state's case against the commission's license rules, which the state feels were skewed just to fit the Yucca site. The U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia is expected to rule on the case in the next few months.

Meanwhile, Margaret Chu, the department's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management director, who oversees the entire project, said the department still intends to meet its license application deadline by the end of year and open the site by 2010.

She said it was "premature" for her to say what the department would do if the court ruled the Environmental Protection Agency standards or other elements of the project were changed by the court.

She pointed out that the department has addressed 213 of the 293 remaining technical questions on the project, known as key technical issues or KTI's and plans to answer more in the coming months.

Martin Virgilio, director of the commission's office of nuclear material safety and safeguards said the staff is preparing to receive the application and clarified that all the KTIs do not need to be signed off by the commission for the department to submit the application.

"We have always said from the beginning that they (the KTIs) need to be addressed not resolved," Virgilio said. "That's what the licensing process is for. We would hope they are all addressed before the license application is submitted."