Access to electronic Yucca Mountain data ending

Government scientists who worked on the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository have called the site, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, the most studied piece of real estate on Earth.

Since 1987, the Department of Energy and, to a lesser extent, the Department of Defense have spent more than $10u2007billion studying the suitability of the site for entombing highly radioactive spent fuel and preparing a license application for review by nuclear regulators.

The task generated more than 40 million pages of studies, emails and notes, including maps of every inch of a five-mile-long tunnel that loops through the mountain and measurements of how fast water trickles through its porous volcanic rock layers.

The separate documents -- 3,692,296 as of Wednesday -- are stored electronically so that parties weighing in on the Yucca Mountain debate and the public can search them on their computers. The electronic format combines each page with an image of the page for a total of 80 million files.

On Friday, a construction authorization panel of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board will close access to this massive collection, known as the Licensing Support Network.

Funding for the Yucca Mountain Project will end Sept. 30, and the network's contractor, AT&T, needs the remaining days to clear any filing backlog and disassemble hardware, network administrator Daniel Graser said.

But one network user wonders how the public will continue to monitor the beleaguered project, which, technically, is still in the licensing mode and at the center of lawsuits.

"The LSN has been a unique element of the process that allows us to have access to information and historical documents needed to have a clear picture of all that has happened and the decisions made throughout the decades regarding Yucca Mountain," Judy Treichel, executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force, a nonprofit watchdog group, wrote in a July 28 letter to the three-judge construction authorization panel.

"Eliminating the LSN but continuing the licensing process is most unfair to those who are not admitted parties -- those who are not represented by attorneys and do not have connections with NRC or DOE to obtain information. Both agencies claim that the process is open and transparent, but it is not."

NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said the timing of the shutdown is necessary to meet the Sept. 30 deadline for decommissioning the network.

"There is nothing budgeted in dollars or manpower for any LSN work for (fiscal year) 2012," he wrote in an email to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

To put the network back on line after Sept. 30 would take two or three years and require annual operating expenses of $1.1 million and a staff of 1.5 full-time equivalents, Burnell said.

Joe Strolin, acting executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, said the agency has been braced for the network's shutdown.

"We don't have a real problem with it," Strolin said, adding that the state, which opposes the Yucca Mountain Project, forged an agreement with the Department of Energy to swap documents in a searchable format.

"Our main concern was getting our hands on DOE's collection," he said.

Strolin said shutting down the network "is appropriate. If licensing is not going forward, then there's no reason to maintain the mechanism."

Last week, Energy Secretary Steven Chu's Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future issued a draft report that recommends Congress change the law that singles out Yucca Mountain for disposing the nation's highly radioactive defense wastes and used fuel from commercial power reactors.

Instead, the law should allow a "consent-based process" for identifying states and communities that are more nuclear-waste-friendly than Nevada to host storage and disposal sites.

Contact reporter Keith Rogers at krogers@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308.