Missed Deadline Could Stall Yucca

Missed Deadline Could Stall Yucca

Sep 07 - Deseret News (Salt Lake City)

LAS VEGAS -- The Energy Department failed to meet a self-imposed deadline for making documents public about a national nuclear waste repository in Nevada, a federal panel said in a late August ruling that might slow the Yucca Mountain project.

"Clearly, they can't move forward," said Marta Adams, a deputy Nevada state attorney general.

Adams said the decision by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, coupled with a recent court decision invalidating an Environmental Protection Agency radiation standard, seemed certain to stall the project 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

An Energy Department spokesman said lawyers were reviewing the 54- page opinion and would decide whether to appeal the panel's ruling to the full commission.

"We're continuing to move forward," spokesman Joe Davis said from Washington, D.C. "We've got a goal of opening Yucca Mountain in 2010. With all the process of getting the NRC license and congressional funding, that remains our goal."

He declined to say whether the Energy Department will meet another self-imposed deadline for submitting a license application for the project to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by Dec. 31.

The department had declared June 30 that it had made public some 1.2 million documents about its plan to entomb spent nuclear fuel from 39 states at Yucca Mountain.

The state, which opposes the repository, challenged the declaration July 12 -- just three days after a federal court in Washington, D.C., ruled that a 10,000-year EPA radiation safety standard for the project was insufficient.

Energy Department officials have insisted after both actions that they could press on toward the Dec. 31 deadline. A delay could push back the government's tight time line, which aims to open the repository in 2010.

The Energy Department is required by law to certify six months before applying for a license that all Yucca Mountain documents are publicly available on a Nuclear Regulatory Commission Web site.

The Energy Department had said it made the documents, totaling 5.6 million pages and accumulated over 20 years, available to the NRC through a DOE Web site.

The NRC panel, appointed to rule on the state's challenge, said the Energy Department had not met NRC requirements. But it added that it did not appear it would take long for the Energy Department to re-certify that the documents are available.

Davis said the process could take about a month.

Nevada and other participants in the licensing process will then have 90 days to submit their project documents.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is expected to spend several years deciding whether to allow the repository to open.

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