Yucca Quality Assurance Targeted

Dec 11 - Las Vegas Review - Journal

The Department of Energy on Thursday announced a new push to fix how Yucca Mountain design mistakes are identified and corrected, a long-standing problem on the nuclear waste project.

"The corrective action program has been a chronic problem for the Yucca Mountain Project," said Paul Golan, principal deputy director for the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management.

"The senior management team for the project is personally involved in fixing the program and making it an effective management tool going forward," Golan said.

DOE has been criticized by auditors after recurring mistakes have been discovered in design documents and other work for the science and engineering project.

Flaws in how data can be retraced and double-checked could raise problems with regulators about Yucca Mountain safety. Nevada officials who oppose the project say quality assurance problems should have disqualified the site, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

At a meeting in Pahrump of DOE officials and staffers from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Golan outlined a new campaign for Yucca managers to screen and prioritize reported errors, identify their causes and develop "effective corrective actions."

DOE plans to hire consultants next year to evaluate whether the reforms are working, Golan said.

Susan Lynch, nuclear waste technical administrator for the state of Nevada, said DOE tries to fix its corrective action program "every couple of years, and they still have a problem with it."

"They assume if they fix one specific problem then everything will be OK, but they don't look at it globally to make sure the fix will prevent reoccurrence and that is where they have had major problems," Lynch said.

"We have heard this over and over again for 20 years," Lynch said of quality assurance reform. DOE "can talk a good line but it has been talked before."

Rod McCullum, Yucca Mountain manager for the Nuclear Energy Institute, said the Energy Department has made strides in quality assurance.

The effort announced Thursday "is not a start-over but a continuation of what they have been doing for a time now, and integrating it into how they manage the program," he said.

"Corrective action programs are not rocket science, but integrating it into how you manage is tough," McCullum said. "It gets a little bit better each step."