Tuesday, November 18, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

YUCCA MOUNTAIN: Secret sessions upset Reid, state officials

Regulators, Energy Department scientists meeting privately

Secret meetings between a team of nuclear waste regulators and Department of Energy scientists drew criticism Monday from Sen. Harry Reid, who said the department is getting special treatment to cover up flaws in the planned Yucca Mountain repository.

"The only reason I can imagine for the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to meet and deny access to the public is because they have something to hide," Reid, D-Nev., said in a statement late Monday.

"The Yucca Mountain project is a haphazard program that cannot pass public scrutiny, so the federal agencies promoting the project must meet and plot behind closed doors," the statement said.

His comments concerned closed-door discussions this week between NRC staff members and DOE scientists at the Las Vegas campus of the main Yucca Mountain Project contractor, Bechtel SAIC Co.

A telephone message left with local NRC representative Robert Latta was not returned, and an NRC spokeswoman could not be reached late Monday.

A spokesman for the Energy Department's Office of Repository Development, Allen Benson, said the NRC decided to close the meetings, which he described as "an assessment of DOE technical information, all of which will be available in a license application."

The DOE must seek a license for the nuclear waste repository, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The secret discussions, described by DOE officials as "evaluations" and "inspections," are taking place while a NRC advisory committee tours the Yucca Mountain site today and holds public meetings Wednesday and Thursday at Texas Station.

Such closed-door discussions that exclude the public and state observers are unprecedented and violate procedures, said state Nuclear Projects Agency chief Bob Loux and his full-time consultant, Steve Frishman.

"We're very perplexed about this. To my knowledge, there has never been a closed meeting before," Loux said.

"We've been quizzing NRC officials from the bottom rung all the way to the top, and nobody has given us an answer why these are closed," he said.

Frishman said he was told the assessments are similar to inspections that the NRC would give to the operator of a nuclear plant after a license has been issued. But the Department of Energy has not yet submitted a license application for the planned repository and does not plan to do so until December 2004.

"They're following a procedure that resembles what they do when they have an inspection of a licensee, but DOE is not a licensee," Frishman said.

He said the regulators' anxiety is driven by quality-control problems with tracking and verifying some of the scientific information about the site and the repository's design needed for a license.

"The first decision they made was to close the meetings then figure out what procedure to follow. Their answer is they just don't have time to work out a new policy," he said. "We can't discover why they need these meetings closed unless it's about something they don't want anybody to hear."