The nation's radioactive waste chief on Wednesday countered remarks made earlier this week by veteran Nuclear Regulatory Commission member Ed McGaffigan, who told reporters the Yucca Mountain project in Nevada is deeply flawed and should be scrapped.

Ward Sproat, director of the Energy Department's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, said McGaffigan expressed similar concerns to him last year. Though he agreed with some of McGaffigan's assertions about past leadership problems tied to politics and setbacks that could have been avoided with quality assurance and the cultural mind-set, the effort to license and build a repository in the mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, should not be abandoned for some other site.

"Commissioner McGaffigan had a lot of valid points. Some of those will need to be addressed for long-term success," Sproat told a nuclear waste oversight panel that was meeting in Las Vegas.

After his presentation to the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, a nonpartisan panel of presidential appointees, Sproat said McGaffigan's comment to reporters Monday in Washington, D.C., that "it may be time to stop digging" at Yucca Mountain, wasn't a valid point.

"The site is Yucca Mountain. That decision was made in 2002. The next step is, can you license a repository at that site. That's where we are now," Sproat said during a break in Wednesday's meeting. "I believe we can license that site."

McGaffigan has said the Energy Department has "no chance" to get Congress to fix the Yucca Mountain program with legislation and that agency officials knew years ago there would be problems with land withdrawals, water rights and exemptions for toxic waste handling. He said Monday he also favors forming a government-chartered corporation to run the project and bring in long-term managers instead of letting political appointees command the program.

But Sproat said, "I'm not convinced that's the right way to go."

He acknowledged there has been "discontinuous leadership" that has resulted in some setbacks. "The program, the way it is set up, is subject to the political process," he said.

Sproat stressed that he still intends to meet his goal of submitting a license application for the NRC to review on or before June 30, 2008. "We are on that schedule and we're going to meet it," he said.

"My approach is working within the legalities and organization that exists and to make sure the program has the right people, right skills set, right processes and right culture to make it work right," Sproat said.

After seven months at the helm, he said he needs to spend a lot more time improving the organization of the Yucca Mountain program so that it will be more streamlined to overcome the technical hurdles in submitting a defensible license application. Data that is needed from past scientific endeavors should be available with the push of a button and not take five days and five people to retrieve.

In addition, he said, "I recognize the need to work with this new Congress and establish credibility."

In his presentation to the board, Sproat said, "I can tell you there is bipartisan support for this program" on Capitol Hill. The problem, he said, has been that "the Department of Energy has not given them confidence in that it will be carried out. That's where I'm going to be spending a lot of my time in the coming year."