New Report on Yucca Mountain Licensing Process
Yucca Mountain is a proposed nuclear waste repository located 90 miles outside of Las Vegas, Nevada. The site is intended to be a national centralized repository for spent reactor fuel and high-level defense nuclear waste.
Congress approved the construction of Yucca Mountain in 2002. Before construction could begin, it was necessary for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to grant a license to build the facility. As a part of the licensing process, DOE was required to submit documents, including archived emails, which pertain to the safety and feasibility of the site to NRC.
DOE did not initially review all archived e-mails. As a result, NRC determined that DOE had not made all relevant material available. DOE then reviewed the remaining emails and submitted them to the NRC.
The submitted emails revealed that Yucca Mountain scientists may have falsified documents on environmental safety issues. The emails did not admit to falsifying evidence, but raised suspicions about the geographical analysis of the ability of water to penetrate the site. Water poses the greatest environmental safety risk at Yucca Mountain. The waste will be stored in metal canisters and if water penetrates the site, it could corrode the containers and carry radioactive waste from the site to where people could be exposed.
In March 2005, the IG Office of Investigations opened a criminal file to investigate the allegations of falsified evidence. The IG also began a separate review to examine the project's procedures and internal controls for identifying which emails contained relevant information.
The report states that the process for reviewing emails did not assure that emails which indicated problems with the project were promptly identified, reported, investigated and resolved. There was no evidence that established requirements were considered in the relevancy review which DOE used to determine which emails were to be submitted to the NRC as a part of the licensing process.
As a part of the investigation, the IG inspected emails that had previously been reviewed and found emails that indicated possible issues with the project, which had been overlooked by DOE. One email, which the IG uncovered, among the emails that DOE had been previously reviewed, states that the Office of Quality Assurance "just discovered that (quality assurance) software requirements were being ignored." Another states, "we may want to backdate the notebook to when we started putting things together."
The email controversy is the latest in a long line of safety concerns associated with the Yucca Mountain repository. These issues have led to delaying the opening of the site, which is now projected for 2012 or later.
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