Yucca project chief to quit

Benjamin Grove

Tuesday, April 26, 2005 | 9:42 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Acting Yucca Mountain project chief Theodore Garrish will retire May 13, the second leader of the program to depart this year.

The Energy Department has been searching for a permanent replacement for Margaret Chu, who resigned her position Feb. 25 as director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, which manages Yucca. Garrish, a Yucca deputy director, assumed her duties.

Department spokeswoman Anne Womack Kolton declined to say when a permanent Yucca chief would be named. The department is still conducting a search, she said.

Through Kolton, Garrish declined comment.

Kolton said next month will mark a "long-planned retirement" for Garrish, 62. She said his departure was not prompted by controversy that erupted March 16, when Yucca scientist e-mails surfaced that suggest project documents were falsified.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said Garrish will be "greatly missed." Bodman praised the "effectiveness" of Paul Golan, currently principal deputy assistant secretary for environmental management, who will take over Garrish's deputy director duties beginning May 8.

Garrish, a former executive with the Nuclear Energy Institute, the leading pro-Yucca lobby group in Washington, inherited a troubled Yucca program from Chu.

The top priority of Yucca project leaders has been to submit an application for a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to construct a repository for the nation's high-level nuclear waste. But long beset by budget cuts and delays, the department failed to meet its own deadline of submitting the application by the end of 2004; officials hope to submit it by the end of this year.

The department announced Chu's resignation on Feb. 11, four days after she told reporters Yucca would not open until at least 2012, contradicting a long-held department assertion that it could open by 2010. Chu said she had been planning to leave the job for months.

Yucca faces another hurdle in that a federal court last year threw out a key radiation health standard for the proposed repository, a standard now under revision by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Garrish has worked in the Energy Department's Yucca office since July 2003. During the 1980s, he worked for the department for six years in three jobs: department general counsel; assistant secretary of energy for congressional, intergovernmental and public affairs; and assistant secretary for nuclear energy.