Nevada urges rejection of appeal

Suzanne Struglinski

Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2004 | 10:53 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Nevada is urging the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to reject an Energy Department appeal regarding the first phase of the licensing process for the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"The carefully reasoned decision of the (Pre-License Application Presiding Officer's) Board should be affirmed," Attorney General Brian Sandoval and the state's Yucca legal team wrote in a response filed with the commission Monday.

Sandoval told the commission that if it were to accept the department arguments, the whole of the document database would be "undermined."

"An essential part of the commission's regulatory design for conducting the Yucca Mountain licensing proceeding would be replaced by an unworkable scheme that aids and abets requests for extensions of time for filing critical pleadings and provokes needless controversy."

The commission licensing board decided Aug. 31 that the Energy Department did not comply with all of the commission's requirements when the department said it made all of the Yucca project documents available on June 30. The department has to make the documents available six months before submitting the license application. It wants to hand in the application by Dec. 30.

But last week, the department asked the board to revisit its decision on the document database. The department said the board should not tie validity of its database to the commission's ability to load documents onto its own Web site. The department created it own Web site to handle the documents, which Nevada says defeats the whole purpose of having a site run by the commission.