DOE expects to meet Yucca Mt. milestone by August

Tucson, Ariz. (Platts)--3Mar2004

DOE will address all 293 key technical issue (KTI) agreements with NRC by August, the department's April Gil said March 2. The KTI agreements were put in place in 2001 to ensure DOE supplies NRC with the information needed to review DOE's license application for a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev. in the three to four years required by law. DOE intends to submit the application in December. "Completeness of the LA (license application) depends on the extent to which DOE addresses the KTIs," Gil told a waste management conference in Tucson, Ariz. In some cases, DOE will present the results of the work it performed to address technical issues. In others, the department will describe how long-term research will proceed. The department already has submitted work on 213 agreements to NRC for review, Gil said. NRC has determined 90 of those contain sufficient information to support a license application.