DOE might miss Yucca deadline

Suzanne Struglinski

Wednesday, May 26, 2004 | 9:03 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department has four weeks to process more than 5 million e-mails and documents for its Yucca Mountain license application, and an internal audit found that problems with document handling could prevent the department from meeting its Dec. 23 deadline for submitting the application.

The Energy Department must fully review and categorize its dump-related e-mails and other documents before submitting the required data to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, according to commission rules.

All the materials must be posted online and available to the public for at least six months before the commission's rules allow it to accept an application for a license to store high-level nuclear waste at Yucca, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

To meet the department's self-imposed deadline, documents would have to be completely processed and turned in to the commission by June 23, as commission rules require the data to be publicly available six months before the department's license application can be submitted.

The department has 87 percent of the documents and e-mails it needs, while 71 percent of the expected final tally of documents have been processed, officials said.

When all of the documents are processed, images of all of the documents will be downloaded into its License Support Network.

The network is a first-of-its-kind computer service expected to allow the state and other interested parties to access millions pages of documents related to the project.

The department has developed software for the network, but the audit noted there are still a "number of obstacles" that could "prevent" the department from meeting its deadline, according to the department audit completed on Thursday.

For example, if the department does not improve how it sends documents to the commission to be indexed, the commission may not be able to make them all open to the public until May 2005, auditors found.

Commission rules prevent it from moving forward with the license application until the public has access to everything, according to the report.

Once submitted, the commission must accept, or certify, the documentation. Once the commission certifies the documentation the department would be allowed to move forward with the project.

If the department does not submit all of its documentation or if the commission does not agree the department included all the required documents by the end of June, there is no way the license can be submitted by December, said Attorney Joe Egan, who works on Yucca issues for the state.

Egan said in the "grand scheme of things" a missed documentation deadline does not stop the project from coming to Nevada, but politically it is important.

It would raise additional questions about credibility and capability, and Bechtel, the project's main contractor, could lose millions of dollars in bonuses if it does not complete its work on time, Egan said.

In a response included in the report, W. John Arthur, the deputy director of the department's Las Vegas-based Office of Repository Development, agreed with the results and recommendations. Arthur pointed out that many of the problems are currently being handled and that the department expects to meet its deadline.

The report said project personnel have reviewed 1.4 million of the department's 6.4 million e-mail documents. The department originally had a computer program to do the review, but it did not work properly so employees have had to review their own e-mail.