Last week, the Department of Energy suspended planning work on key segments of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump -- including technical work on new designs for an above-ground complex to handle arriving nuclear canisters -- after the DOE confirmed whistle-blower reports that a management contractor is again coming up short in the areas of work documentation and quality control.

Observers differed on how significant the problems are.

"This is more of a, 'Let's hold on and collect where we are, complete our review and move forward on the right path,' " contends Jason Bohne, spokesman for the contractor, Bechtel SAIC.

DOE spokesman Allen Benson seemed to disagree.

"This is a tough response," Mr. Benson said, "when you tell a contractor they no longer have the authority to submit work they are contractually required to submit because they are not following procedure."

"This is a stop work order, plain and simple," confirms Steve Frishman, a full-time technical consultant for the state of Nevada. "It's back to a problem they have had for years and years, which is design control. This is a chronic screwup in this program."

Even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, poised to evaluate an application for the repository whenever the Energy Department manages to finalize one, considers this "a significant issue," according to Elmo Collins, a NRC licensing and inspection official.

If it were really a matter of national urgency to get Yucca Mountain finished as quickly as possible, it would be hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

No one is proposing that corners be cut on safety and documentation. But this is the nation that successfully completed the Manhattan Project -- to develop the first deployable nuclear bomb -- in less than four years. Cliche though it has become, we put a man on the moon in less than a decade.

The project has been under way for a dozen years. Not a single canister has been delivered -- they haven't even surveyed the rail line from Caliente. The government -- originally ordered to start burying waste in 1998 -- long clung to the assertion that storage would begin in 2010, though the window "2012 to 2017" is now more commonly mentioned.

The meter has already rolled past $4 billion spent, and it's still running. Government bureaucrats now need eight months to plan and install a desperately needed stoplight, and more than six years to build a downtown courthouse. But Yucca Mountain -- to call the project glacial would be an insult to glaciers -- will be finished in little more time than it took to build the Clark County Regional Justice Center?

But it's only the taxpayers who pay and pay.

A few billion here, a few billion there -- didn't Sen. Dirksen once have something to say about that?