Editorial: Conflicts in Yucca review

Wednesday, Feb. 14, 2007 | 7:08 a.m.

If Congress wanted an independent review of events leading up to President Bush's decision to invade Iraq, would it offer the job to a panel whose members included Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice?

Of course not.

So why has the Energy Department, which last summer announced it wanted three independent reviews of the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, hired a Henderson-based consulting firm loaded with former Yucca Mountain officials to conduct the first of those reviews?

The Las Vegas Sun's Washington reporter, Lisa Mascaro, reported Tuesday that the Energy Department has awarded Longenecker & Associates a six-month, $450,000 contract to review engineering work by the Energy Department and a Yucca Mountain contractor, Bechtel SAIC.

Not only has the Energy Department turned to the consulting company in the past for work at Yucca Mountain, but also several members of the company's staff and board have extensive individual experience working at the site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, where the federal government wants to bury the nation's high-level nuclear waste.

Serving on its board is Donald Pearman Jr., a former Energy Department official who also worked at Yucca Mountain as deputy general manager of Bechtel SAIC. Among the company's staff members are Donald Horton, former deputy project manager at Yucca, and Ronald Milner, who for 10 years served as chief operating officer of the Energy Department's office that oversees work at Yucca.

The company's president, John Longenecker, told Mascaro that his 10-person review team will be a "totally fresh set of eyes," with none of the members having worked in the past for the Energy Department or Bechtel SAIC.

But that is not reassuring. Obviously, if the company's review contained criticisms of past work at Yucca Mountain, the expertise of many of its own employees who have years of experience there would come into question. A company laden with conflicts of interest has no incentive to perform a hard-hitting analysis.

Rather than waste more money reviewing 20 years of failed work at Yucca Mountain, the federal government would be wise to shut down this unsafe project.