Database on Yucca challenged

WASHINGTON -- Nevada officials said Monday that a public database containing Yucca Mountain documents should be thrown out, charging that important material about the nuclear waste project still has not been posted as required.

Attorneys for the state filed a legal petition seeking to invalidate the document collection certified earlier this month by the Department of Energy.

Key documents still are not being made available to analysts trying to prepare for possible license hearings for the proposed waste repository, the state indicated. At the same time, "millions" of e-mails and irrelevant documents were put on the database to confuse reviewers, the head of the state's nuclear office said.

The Nevada petition filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is the latest move in a legal tug of war over access to millions of pages of analyses, reports and technical documents underpinning the government's effort to establish a high-level radioactive waste site in the state.

Energy Department spokesman Allen Benson defended the management of the database, which is called the licensing support network, or LSN. "DOE has made available on the LSN over 3.5 million documents consisting of more than 30 million pages," Benson said. "DOE certification of that collection complied with all NRC regulations.

"We are in the process of reviewing Nevada's challenge and look forward to responding," he added.

Nevada officials said the database still lacks key documents. "Not only has DOE failed to provide the most important documents on its LSN, but it has made the entire system unnecessarily cumbersome by stacking it with literally millions of questionably relevant documents," said Bob Loux, director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.

The Energy Department certified the Yucca Mountain database in 2004, but it was rejected by a panel of NRC judges after Nevada filed similar charges that it was lacking.

It has taken DOE three years and millions of dollars to rework the document collection. Ward Sproat, head of the Yucca project, has vowed that the new database is solid.

The database by law must be certified for six months before the Energy Department is allowed to file an application to build a nuclear waste complex at the Yucca site 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The purpose for the time element is to give Nevada and others time to review the documents and to prepare for complex license hearings.