DOE official: Yucca plans advancing

Stephen Curran

Friday, June 10, 2005 | 11:16 a.m.

PAHRUMP -- An Energy Department official pledged Thursday that the planned nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain is moving "full steam ahead," although a representative of an energy company said he was eyeing 2015 for a potential opening.

"We're moving full steam ahead with this thing," J. Gary Lanthrum, director of the Energy Department's Office of National Transportation, told the Central Nevada Community Protection Working Group. "But I don't want to get everybody energized and then have to pull back."

Delays and now the question of falsified work on the project have clouded the future of the project 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Former Yucca Mountain Project head Margaret Chu said in March that engineers were looking for a 2012 opening date, two years later than expected, but engineer David Jones, who spoke to the working group on behalf of nuclear power plant owner Exelon Energy, said company officials were now eyeing 2015 as a possible target.

Whether either date is a possibility will likely hinge on the outcome of a delayed license application engineers are now scrambling to complete before the end of the year, Lanthrum said.

Even then, the department will face a lengthy Nuclear Regulatory Commission review before it receives the final go-ahead to begin building the repository.

Despite congressional and internal investigations into a batch of e-mails that have raised concerns about the falsification of some of the science being used to support Yucca Mountain, project managers are pushing forward.

Lanthrum said the department hopes later this year to begin the conceptual design of rail cars that would carry high-level nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain.

Meanwhile the Energy Department is standing behind the scientific review of the site, said W. John Arthur, deputy director of the department's Office of Repository Development, as he discussed e-mails between U.S. Geological Survey and Energy Department scientists that brought the science into question.

"It really is the worst thing, when individuals have an absolute disrespect for quality assurance, at least allegedly," Arthur said during the working group's public meeting at the Pahrump campus of the Community College of Southern Nevada.

"The onus is on us to show this is limited to two out of the thousands of scientists working on the project. ... We have absolute confidence in the people working for us."

The widely controversial project has been the source of tension between state leaders leaders and those in the rural counties where the 319-mile rail line would run.

Rural leaders, who largely see the nuclear waste dump as inevitable, have publicly stated they intend to negotiate with federal officials for financial benefits from the project while state leaders have mostly been outspoken in bipartisan criticism of the federal government.

The working group has been a forum for rural leaders to work with the Energy Department and others on Yucca Mountain issues.

The state attorney general last year found the working group may have knowingly violated the state open meeting law when it closed doors of meetings to residents and media. The meetings were later ordered to be open after a complaint filed by the Sun and joined by the Nevada Press Association.

Nye County Commission Chairwoman Candice Trummell, a long-time proponent of the project and member of the working group, estimated the rail line could bring "thousands" of jobs during a construction process likely to last years.

Karen Leigh Kimball, a vice president for engineering firm Parsons, said no definitive studies on the economic impact on how the line could help the rural counties have been conducted but that it could likely bring about 1,000 construction-related jobs.

How many of those would be recruited locally would depend on what percentage of those workers were management-level employees, who would likely be brought in from elsewhere, she said.

Nye County, where Pahrump sits, has already seen more than $100 million in economic benefits from the Nuclear Waste Policy Act signed in the late 1980s. That legislation -- which has paid Nye County about $10.5 million a year since -- has allowed the growing county to pay for much-needed infrastructure improvements, Trummell said.

In that time commissioners have approved improvements to parks and recreation facilities, including a new community center in Beatty and numerous public safety improvements, she said.

If the Yucca project were to fail, the flow of money would stop, Trummell said.

"That money is being used and has been used," she said. "There's a lot of things we've done."

The board, on which she has sat since 2003, has been careful not to earmark the funds for necessary operating expenses, a move that will allow a county perhaps best known outside Nevada for its legalized brothels to keep running even without the windfall, Trummell said.

So, even if the project goes belly-up, "it isn't like Nye County's going to go bankrupt," she said.