New Yucca legal firm is named

Suzanne Struglinski

Wednesday, March 24, 2004 | 11:03 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- International law firm Hunton & Williams will replace Winston & Strawn as the Energy Department's legal counsel for the Yucca Mountain project, the department announced today.

Hunton & Williams will represent the department before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission during hearings on its license application for the proposed nuclear waste storage site at Yucca, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The contract has a limit of $45 million for five years, department spokesman Joe Davis said via e-mail, but the actual amount paid will depend on the amount of work performed.

The department had a $16.5 million contract with Winston & Strawn to review the project, but the firm quit in 2001 after conflict-of-interest allegations surfaced.

The law firm of LeBoeuf, Greene and MacRae, which lost the contract bid, filed a lawsuit in 2002 saying Winston had a conflict of interest because it had done prior work for a Yucca contractor. A Las Vegas Sun investigation uncovered that the firm had done lobbying for the Nuclear Energy Institute. Federal law requires an unbiased review.

The U.S. Court of Appeals sent the case back to district court late last year, saying the department did not adequately prove it ruled out conflict-of-interest problems with Winston.

According to court documents filed today, LeBoeuf and the department reached a settlement for $4.5 million and LeBoeuf received a letter from the general counsel's office saying the department did not purposely leave the firm out of the bidding process. The settlement means Winston & Strawn's previous work for the Energy Department will not have to be redone, a prospect that could have set the project back years.

Davis said that when Winston worked on the project from October 1999 until November 2001, the Energy Secretary had not made a recommendation on the site and Congress had not voted on the project.

"We are at a very different point in the process now," Davis said. " We are now getting ready to file a license application with the NRC. DOE and its contractors are carefully and prudently re-examining everything done previously in the course of preparing for the licensing applications. That holds true for legal work at well if it is going to be used in the licensing process."

Nevada's legal team said that a review of Winston & Strawn's work should still be done.

"In order to be effective in representing DOE in a licensing hearing, they are going to have to go back and look at work that's been done," said Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects. "This doesn't get them all the way back on track. There is still a long way to go."