Porter receives Yucca report

WASHINGTON -- The Department of Energy is repairing chronic management and quality assurance problems at Yucca Mountain, but given the project's troubled history, it is unclear whether the fixes will stick, according to a report to Congress released Friday.

Since new project director Ward Sproat was named last year, the department has reorganized the Nevada nuclear waste program and is "invigorating" segments that had failing grades, the General Accounting Office said in the report.

But, auditors said, "it has yet to be seen" whether the changes will work fully or will prevent backsliding.

The 29-page review appeared relatively favorable to the Energy Department following a series of critical GAO assessments over the years that detailed how Yucca managers were falling short in identifying numerous problems and taking corrective actions.

Auditors also have criticized Yucca Mountain "quality assurance," a key process of scientific record keeping that is supposed to enable reviewers to retrace highly technical research.

GAO officials in the new assessment said the Energy Department "has made progress" in fixing quality assurance problems, "but it is unclear whether its actions will prevent similar problems from recurring."

For one, the report said, the Yucca project turned over nine of 17 high-level management jobs since 2001 and continues to lose key personnel such as Deputy Director Paul Golan who departed last month.

Also Sproat, who is a political appointee, is expected to leave in January 2009, when a new president takes office, it said.

Additionally, some of DOE's efforts are still in the planning stages, while some will require changes in deep-rooted organization cultures at DOE and its contractors.

"DOE has a long history of quality assurance problems and has experienced repeated difficulties in resolving these problems," auditors said.

The project missed a January 1998 deadline to have a repository open and accepting nuclear waste, and did not meet licensing deadlines in 2002 and 2004. In 2005, DOE assembled a draft license application that it determined "was not ready," the report said.

The Energy Department says it plans to complete a license application by June that is expected to lay out a case that an underground repository at the Yucca Mountain site 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas can safely store highly radioactive nuclear waste.

State officials from Nevada contend the Yucca project has been fatally flawed by bad management and questionable science, and are trying to stop it.

The GAO report was requested by Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev. He said in a statement that the Energy Department has a ways to go before Nevadans could ever be convinced the project is safe.

"It is difficult for Nevadans to feel confident about DOE's push to move forward when the GAO has reported continued concerns about this fatally flawed project," he said.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the Energy Department "has tried to patch up its quality assurance failures, but the changes have not been significant enough to really be considered effective."

"If the Department of Energy does submit an application to build the dump by the agency's arbitrary deadline of June 2008, the application will probably be poor quality and insufficient," Reid said.

Rep. Dean Heller, R-Nev., said the GAO study "underscores DOE's mismanagement of the Yucca Mountain Project from the beginning. Billions of dollars have been devoted to this project, and DOE still cannot ensure Nevadans' or the general public's safety."

And Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., noted, "While a few changes have been made, this report clearly states that there is no guarantee that any short-term improvements will last or that new policies will actually remain in place. Experience has shown us that the likely outcome will be more of the same. Like a broken record."