NRC senior staffers protest Yucca Mountain shutdown

WASHINGTON -- Three senior staff members at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission signed written dissents to the agency's ongoing shutdown of the Yucca Mountain project, according to documents made public Friday.

The documents show that the controversial directive from NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko last October to halt publication of a license report on the proposed Nevada nuclear waste repository continues to reverberate at the nuclear safety agency.

The staffers in January and early February signed protests to an update prepared by the Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards detailing the ongoing termination of the Yucca program.

The status report did not "adequately characterize the confusion, chaos and anguish occasioned by the chairman's unilateral decision to disrupt the orderly process of SER development," wrote King Stablein, a project branch chief in the division of high-level repository safety.

The SER is the safety evaluation report that would have contained staff recommendations on whether a repository at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, could safely store thousands of tons of high-level nuclear waste. Volumes of the report were made public by the NRC last month, with the recommendations redacted.

Senior project manager Janet Kotra and Aby Mohseni, deputy director for licensing, also signed dissents, which were released by the NRC.

According to Stablein, staff on the high-level waste project recommended to Jaczko at an Oct. 12, 2010, meeting that completing the licensing report would benefit the nation and "would be by far the most efficient and effective use of resources."

Jaczko replied that "it would look more political to publish the SER volumes with findings" than to issue them without the recommendations, according to Stablein.

Jaczko had no comment on the meeting. The staffer's memo could add more logs to a fire surrounding Jaczko, a former science adviser to chief Yucca Mountain foe Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. Critics have accused Jaczko of politicizing the agency's handling of the nuclear waste issue.

The dissents are filed with Jaczko and the four other NRC commissioners, but there has been no indication of further action on them.