WASHINGTON -- A dispute between Nevada and the federal government over Yucca Mountain flared anew Tuesday when Gov. Kenny Guinn accused the Department of Energy of hiding more than 2 million documents concerning the nuclear waste site.
The agency has prepared science and engineering documents for placement on a licensing database for the planned Nevada nuclear waste repository but has declined to make them public until the database is certified, Guinn said.
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Certification is scheduled for Dec. 21, 2007, giving the state, environmental groups and the nuclear industry six months to review and respond to them by a licensing deadline, state officials said.
The database is expected to contain as many as 6.8 million documents.
Federal law does not require the documents to be made public until the database is officially certified, Nevada officials said.
But Guinn said the wait until certification was "needlessly punitive."
"There is no justification for withholding public access to these documents now when the task of reviewing them is so overwhelming later," Guinn said in a letter to Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman made public Tuesday.
The database administrator "literally with the flip of a switch could make these additional 2 million-plus documents publicly available," Guinn said.
He asked Bodman's help on "lifting the embargo" on material that could be made public now and others when they are indexed for public use.
A spokesman for Bodman had no comment on Guinn's letter.
Nevada has feuded with the Energy Department over access to documents backing the government's choice of Yucca Mountain for nuclear waste burial.
A Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the state filed in federal court in Reno is challenging the agency's refusal to supply Nevada officials with a copy of a draft repository license application.
Energy Department lawyers have said the document is legally shielded.
"With DOE's lawyers it is clearly the motivation to give the state as little time as possible to raise objections," said Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.
"If DOE says this is the most open program in the world, why are they not letting people look at the documents?" Loux said.
