DOE: Yucca document collection facing another delay

Suzanne Struglinski

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 | 10:37 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- During arguments made before a Nuclear Regulatory Commission panel on Tuesday, lawyers for the Energy Department said that the department's final document collection for the Yucca Mountain project may be delayed for up to another six months.

This morning, however, attorney Donald Irwin said the department is still working out its timeline.

"I don't want to speculate" about a possible delay, said Irwin, a lawyer with the Richmond, Va., law firm Hunton & Williams hired by the Energy Department.

Irwin's statements came during a conference call this morning with Nevada's lawyers, the Nuclear Energy Institute's lawyers and commission staff.

Irwin said the department has decided to follow the Atomic Safety Licensing Board's format for documents that will go on the License Support Newtork, a database of Yucca Mountain project documents.

He said he would know more about the schedule by Aug. 1, when the department must make its monthly update with the board on its timeline.

The department wanted to finalize its collection in August, but its attorneys said Tuesday that certain rules set by a panel of the Atomic Safety Licensing Board about how documents must be formatted will make them miss that self-imposed deadline.

But Irwin said during the conference call that nothing has changed the department's end-of-August goal.

"There is nothing that requires a change to that," he said.

At the hearing, Nevada's attorneys said they would be making numerous procedural challenges once the department finalized its collection because it was not following formatting rules on certain documents.

Joe Egan, an attorney who represents Nevada, who was at Tuesday's hearing said the Energy Department attorneys took a 15-minute break and then came back to say the department would not meet its certification schedule if it had to go back to redo those documents.

"It was pretty amazing, they had been sticking to that August date for so long," Egan said.

Commission regulations require the documents collection to be finished six months before it can start formal proceedings on the proposed nuclear waste repository's license application. The department tried to finish the collection last year, but Nevada objected to it, saying it was incomplete.

The NRC agreed and the Energy Department has been reworking it.

In January the NRC ordered the department, the state and interest groups to find common ground on how to handle millions of pages of documents required for the License Support Network, an electronic database of Yucca documents.

The board could issue its final ruling soon on which documents can be left out of the database collection because they are privileged and what has to go into the database.