Saturday, Sept. 2, 2006 | 7:29 a.m.
The enthusiastic new director of the Yucca Mountain project got his first look at the site not long ago. But the mountain had seen the likes of him before.
No fewer than 10 directors or acting directors have come and gone in the 20 years since the federal government started studying the Nevada desert for the nation's nuclear waste repository.
The new director, Edward "Ward" Sproat, now has an idea why.
"It's one thing to dig a hole," Sproat said recently after emerging from a tour of the tunnel into the hot sun. "I'm not satisfied we have all the answers."
Sproat arrived at the dusty compound 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas with an engineer's optimism: Solving problems is just a matter of working things through to conclusion.
Five minutes with Sproat and you begin to see why the Energy Department chose him. He tells you plainly and succinctly what he knows. Then he says just as clearly what it is he doesn't yet know. It's straight talk, the kind that inspires confidence: If he can run nuclear power plants for private industry, as he has for years, he can puff life into this gasping project.
His tour of the aging 5-mile tunnel, however, showed some doubt. He had questions you would expect of an engineer: How will they ever finish building the remaining 42 miles if they start at the projected rate of about 2 miles a year? Have they designed all of the necessary protections for storing deadly spent nuclear fuel?
But the most pressing question he voiced didn't have an answer rooted in science. Why does it take three tries to get anything done right at Yucca?
The never-before-tried engineering feat of storing toxic waste in a mountain has cost $9 billion so far and has suffered from countless, costly do-overs. Now, under most optimistic timetables, it is scheduled to open in 2017, almost 20 years late. An Energy Department inspector general's report last month gave skeptics another reason to sigh - potential problems continue in more than 100 procedural areas already noted for corrective action.
Touring the lonely site with Sproat, accompanied by Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., offered a reminder about the amount of work remaining - and the dwindling political will to get it done. Virtually every top elected official in Nevada opposes the project, and even its biggest boosters in Congress are starting to consider interim plans.
The 5-mile tunnel opened to great fanfare almost a decade ago, a warm-up for the show that one day was to go on inside. The tunnel serves as a lab for the central question scientists face: Will water seep through the rock, corrode the waste canisters and leak deadly spent fuel into the environment?
Project scientists say the water will trickle in, but not in big enough volumes to do harm. The chief scientist says investigation at the site is almost complete. But others, including independent Yucca Mountain researcher Allison Macfarlane, now at George Mason University, believe many questions remain.
"They have a lot of work to do," she said last week.
Sproat's tour brought home that reality.
Not much bigger around than a subway, and outfitted with a train that clickety-clacks visitors into the mountain, the tunnel feels more like an amusement park ride than an engineering marvel being watched the world over.
The tunnel's bare walls show off the hearty mountain rock that is the source of such hope and worry - strong enough to store some of the most dangerous stuff on Earth, complicated enough to keep scientists guessing about how it will shift and rumble over the next tens of thousands of years.
Workers have created a cozy workspace a mile back, redolent of the smell of dirt and diesel, with a break table and bumper sticker that reminds you to support the troops. With no natural light to set the rhythms, time slips away, as in a casino.
Ten years ago the place was buzzing with 750 workers as the tunnel was being drilled. The work has slowed considerably since then, and the workforce has been slashed by two-thirds. Workers now mostly maintain the site, replacing electrical or fire alarm systems that were never expected to stand this long.
More than anything, the tunnel feels like a driveway to a house that has yet to be built. The waste is to be set in 42 miles of storage space branching off from the tunnel. Digging it could take decades.
Sproat worries about such a prolonged building program. Yucca Mountain should be built fast, he said, as soon as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gives the project a green light - now pegged at 2011.
Also, he sees the construction challenges as less daunting than the job of fixing a management culture that has allowed sloppy documentation.
Energy Department representatives explained during the tour that the agency had just spent another $15 million and nine months redoing water infiltration tests after a 2005 scandal, when e-mails showed researchers allegedly discussing falsified quality-assurance documentation.
The redone research shows twice as much water as expected will probably seep through the rock, but Energy Department scientists say it is still not enough to be a problem. Sproat said he believes the latest science is sound.
But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission still has to be convinced. If Sproat manages that, the pace of work will pick up swiftly.
Crews will replace the rickety train with a souped-up version run by robots to carry the waste to its resting place. Another $2 billion in tracks will be set across the Nevada desert to haul in waste from around the country. All those new storage tunnels will have to be built.
Sproat spent 10 days in Nevada, meeting with researchers and managers about what it will take to get the project going. He still believes he can hit his 2017 opening date - though he has said that once he gets the project in motion, he is not likely to stick around to see it to completion.
"There's a lot of work still to be done," he said before heading to Washington. "I'm not seeing anything here that's overwhelming."
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