$11 million not expected to go far for restarted Yucca licensing process

Already lawyers are battling over how the Nuclear Regulatory Commission should spend what money it has to resume licensing for the Yucca Mountain site.

As the agency weighs how to comply with a federal court order to restart hearings on the proposed nuclear waste repository, attorneys for the state of Nevada are urging the NRC to hold Yucca-related meetings in Las Vegas.

The state also is calling for the prompt reinstatement of the NRC’s “licensing support network,” the electronic library that provides Internet access to all the documents related to the case.

But a lawyer for Nevada’s Nye County says those moves would be costly and likely would eat up much of the $11.1 million the NRC says it has available for Yucca Mountain.

“These actions would only further deplete … NRC funds to continue the licensing process,” according to Robert Andersen, the county’s nuclear waste attorney. Rather than spending on administrative costs, money should be conserved “for the licensing process itself.”

Everyone agrees that $11.1 million is nowhere enough to complete a complex and contentious repository licensing process that is similar to an adversarial courtroom proceeding. In the Aug. 13 decision in the U.S. Court of Appeals, Judge Merrick Garland noted the NRC once budgeted $99 million to move forward for just one year.

The question, then, is how much can be accomplished with the money at hand. Repository proponents are pressing the NRC to make it a priority to release unredacted versions of safety evaluation reports that might provide evidence whether the site can be safe for nuclear waste.

NRC staff has indicated it would take another six to eight months and $6.5 million to complete those reports. Andersen urged original unredacted copies be released now “in the interest of fairness and transparency.”

It’s likely that when the $11.1 million is gone, so is the Yucca project that once envisioned burying 77,000 tons of highly radioactive government nuclear waste and spent reactor fuel within a mountain 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

At it is, the project currently exists only on paper since the site has been padlocked and its staff long dissipated after President Barack Obama shelved it in 2009.

The House has appropriated $25 million to continue Yucca licensing, but the Senate has zeroed out the program. If recent history is a guide, avowed critic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada will exercise his power to see that it remains zero.

The NRC has not yet indicated how it might move forward on Yucca Mountain. As part of that, agency Chairwoman Allison Macfarlane is expected to respond to a legal motion that she recuse herself from the case because of previous comments and writings raising questions about the site.

In calling for hearings to be held in Las Vegas, Nevada attorneys said in a legal filing on Friday that NRC headquarters in Rockville, Md., has no facility that can easily accommodate representatives for the 17 parties that would take part in licensing, as well as for Nevadans who would have to travel across the country to participate.

Plus, they said, holding the hearings near Washington “would engender a level of distrust in the licensing process.”

It “would aggravate the perception that the distant federal government in Washington, D.C., is seeking to impose the burden of nuclear waste disposal upon a populace via a distant and non-transparent process,” they said.

Previously the NRC leased a building near McCarran International Airport for Yucca Mountain hearings. It paid the equivalent of $467,000 in annual rent and spent at least $2 million more to install closed-circuit television, computer equipment, sound systems and airport-quality security scanners and metal detectors. It was closed in August 2011.

In a motion also filed Friday, Andersen said any costs of resuming the hearings should be borne by the NRC using administrative funds, and not money appropriated for Yucca licensing.

The attorney said for instance that the licensing support network, which the NRC has estimated could cost $5 million to reinstate, might be unnecessary. He said all relevant Yucca documents are available on compact discs.

Andersen suggested that Yucca Mountain foes, including the state of Nevada, are proposing to spend freely to get the NRC back to work in a bid to “once again stop the licensing process by depleting the available funds.”

Contact Stephens Washington Bureau Chief Steve Tetreault at stetreault@stephensmedia.com or 202-783-1760. Follow him on Twitter @STetreaultDC.