Closer scrutiny of documents eyed

Suzanne Struglinski

Tuesday, May 17, 2005 | 9:45 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Nevada wants Nuclear Regulatory Commission judges to take a closer look at the documents the staff submitted to the Yucca Mountain project database last year.

The commission staff may not have included references for certain documents in its collection as required under law, leaving Nevada and others interested in the project unaware they even existed.

The state filed an "order to show cause" with the Atomic Safety Licensing Board on Monday, asking why the commission staff should not be penalized for leaving the references out. One of the penalties could be the commission losing its "party" status, meaning the staff could not participate in the licensing proceedings. If that happened, the commission's only role would be to grant or deny a license.

Nevada has argued before to exclude the commission staff as a party in the anticipated licensing proceedings and to serve only as a regulator, but the request had been denied.

At a May 4 hearing before a panel of the Atomic Safety Licensing Board, commission Attorney Tyson Smith said the staff expects up to 1,000 privileged documents, or those protected by attorney-client confidentially or other special rules in the database.

Smith told Judge Thomas Moore, the board chairman, that the commission has no privileged documents on the License Support Network, a database of documents related to the Energy Department's proposed nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Smith said the commission also did not include "headers" or descriptions of the privileged documents in the database.

Nevada believes, if Smith is correct, that the staff's action violated the database rules that say at least a basic description of a protected document needs to be in the database.

The Energy Department completed its database collection last June, and the commission staff completed its collection 30 days later, as required by law. Nevada challenged the collection and the board ultimately told the department it would need to finalize its document collection again because the first try was not good enough.

Nevada is not clear if the board's decision also voided the commission's collection too.

It will be up to the board to decide whether or not to grant Nevada's request.

Nevada is fighting for access to as many documents at it can get to create a complete record it would need to use during hearings on the license application, if the department files one.

Nevada's and the department's attorneys are set to appear before the three-judge panel again on Wednesday to discuss the rules on what documents can be protected.