Yucca Mountain News Clips
Sunday, November 20, 2005
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Las Vegas SUN
November 20, 2005
Editorial: Yucca Mountain continues to fail
Inspector general's report reveals mounting evidence of flawed documentation
LAS VEGAS SUN
New evidence from the U.S. Energy Department's inspector general underscores -- again -- the vast amount of questionable science and flawed data that has gone into the proposal to build a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain.
In a report dated Nov. 9, Energy Department Inspector General Gregory Friedman said investigators examining e-mails sent among scientists for the project found that some of the messages identified concerns that typically would be marked for further review and resolution. Yet the issues raised in these e-mails did not receive that scrutiny.
One of the e-mails cited says the project's quality assurance office had "just discovered that (quality assurance) software requirements were being ignored." Another electronic missive suggested back-dating documents.
This new information supports ever-growing suspicions among a deepening pool of Yucca critics that scientific data has been fabricated and potential radiation leak risks have been ignored or omitted in the Energy Department's 20-year quest to bury high-level nuclear waste 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The Yucca Mountain project since March has been the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation into allegations that the U.S. Geological Survey falsified underground water data in order to provide support for the project.
The House and Senate showed an apparent loss of appetite for the project earlier this month by cutting $200 million from a $650 million budget request. They also approved $50 million to promote recycling, rather than burying, spent nuclear fuel.
We can only hope that the truth continues to come out and the funding continues to be cut from this dreadfully flawed and nightmarish project.
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Las Vegas SUN
November 19, 2005
Letter: Ethics must be applied to Yucca
It is refreshing to hear that the White House staff is receiving education in ethics. All politicians and bureaucrats in the federal government can use ethics and morality in their decisions.
Now if they would only apply these lessons to Yucca Mountain and the collusion of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Energy Department and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the setting of radiation standards on Yucca Mountain.
Isn't the NRC, which makes the final decision on Yucca Mountain, in an oversight capacity of the DOE and EPA? Why wasn't the state of Nevada invited to at least watch the process? How can the NRC have a date certain on a Yucca Mountain decision in its regulations when science, not politics, is the standard?
I wonder if President Bush remembers his 2000 and 2004 campaign promises on Yucca Mountain? If so, we have nothing to worry about: This decision will be based on sound science and the courts. Ethics, not politics, will decide.
Frank Perna
Las Vegas
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Seattle Post Intelligencer
November 20, 2005
Nuclear Waste: Shrinking promise
Seattle Post-Intelligencer Editorial Board
It gets harder and harder to assess the federal government's level of commitment to cleaning up decades of nuclear waste in this state.
The government's shrinking level of commitment somewhat resembles that of a parent who is only partially keeping up with child support payments. So, how you label the federal behavior depends on your definition of "deadbeat."
President Bush this year has proposed cuts in spending on a key cleanup facility, which the government is legally obligated to have in operation by 2011. Congress seems inclined to agree, and included additional cuts of its own. Spending for the plant, which would convert liquid wastes into glass logs, may be slashed by more than $200 million.
Gov. Christine Gregoire, state Attorney General Rob McKenna and other officials are right to object and explore the state's legal obligations. This is not a partisan or dry side-wet side issue. Congressional Republicans and Democrats from both sides of the state agree on the need to clean up decades' worth of dangerous wastes, which threaten to contaminate the Columbia River.
The Bush administration is hardly the first to have trouble facing the issue. Since a 1989 federal promise to put the waste processing plant in operation, the state already has had to extend the original 1999 deadline three times. But the federal government has responsibilities for past neglect of Hanford-area residents, their health and the environment. Honest people, leaders and governments face their obligations.
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LaCrosse Tribune
November 20, 2005
Your views
By Tribune readers
Letters to the editor for Sunday, November 20, 2005
Oppose shipping nuclear waste
By Kristen Pitts
La Crosse
In 1982, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, a policy in which the U.S. Department of Energy took responsibility for all of the nation´s nuclear waste. In 1987, Congress amended the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and directed the DOE to study Yucca Mountain as an underground repository. However, since then, the DOE has run into problems including seismic activity and groundwater contamination. The DOE realized that it would not have the waste facility opened by the date promised and started looking into other short-term venues.
In 1991, a letter was sent to every federally recognized American Indian tribe, offering large sums of money for even considering hosting a nuclear dump. By 1993, the government money ran out for this program and a private consortium of nuclear utilities, Private Fuel Storage, took over.
Led by Xcel Energy, PFS was recently approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commis-sion to build a nuclear waste facility on the Goshute reservation of Utah.
“Utility companies have taken advantage of indigenous people,’ says Margene Bullcreek of the Goshute nation. “They use our sovereignty to avoid accountability.’
This is a clear case of environmental racism, where low-income and minority communities are disproportionately targeted with facilities and wastes that have significant and adverse human health and environmental effects. As of 1991, when tribes were told they would be given large amounts of money for interest in a waste facility, 31 percent of Americans Indians on reservations were below the poverty line.
If this facility is built, nuclear waste will come on trains right through La Crosse.
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Detroit News
November 20, 2005
Attention Lansing: Those are Michigan jobs flying south
By Daniel Howes
The Detroit News
Let's review:
Michigan's been losing jobs for six straight years, says the University of Michigan, a "string unprecedented since World War II."
Michigan's employers this year expect to offer 43 percent fewer jobs to college graduates than last year, says Michigan State University's Collegiate Employment Research Institute, while employers elsewhere in the Great Lakes region expect to offer 6 percent more jobs than last year.
Michigan's largest auto supplier is bankrupt. Its largest city is nearing bankruptcy. And its largest employer, General Motors Corp., is so troubled that its chairman felt compelled to tell his employees and the rest of the world that there's "absolutely no plan" to file for bankruptcy lest GM shares keep plummeting.
Junkets 'R' us
And yet, our legislators, the folks we pay $79,650 each, plus $1,200 for expenses, to manage state affairs, can't enact badly needed business tax reform because everyone's positioning for a 2006 election that can't come soon enough.
Instead, we've got Republicans touring the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal site; Republicans attending an insurance conference in San Diego (perhaps a future home of Michigan's indigenous insurance companies if Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels doesn't get 'em first); and Lord knows how many lawmakers stalking wily bucks in the north woods.
About the only thing that comes close to Michigan's deepening economic crisis, the worst of its kind since the Big War, is its leadership crisis. I mean, you cut a long-promised tax deal and then say there's no deal? Is Lansing the state capital or home to a Midwest revival of the Keystone Kops?
Yes, yes, I know about the whisper campaign: The governor and her people can't run a meeting or manage an issue; they don't understand business because few of them have ever run one; they've got a penchant for last-minute surprises; they can't move boldly if it means hacking off friends in organized labor or sullying the boss's national image as a "rising star."
Leadership vacuum
From where a lot of us sit, the logjam over business taxes bespeaks the worst kind of (GOP) legislative gridlock -- political opportunism intended to make Michigan's top Democrat twist in the proverbial wind.
Some comfort, that, to the Delphi, GM and Ford Motor Co. employees who will see thousands of jobs eliminated between now and Election Day next November. Or to businesses large and small groaning under a Single Business Tax that keeps punishing them for hiring people and offering them health insurance.
If, as she's threatened, the guv vetoes the tax package that landed on her desk as the legislative leadership bolted Lansing, they'll say it's one more example of her inability to act.
I'd say it's more like a symptom of a bigger problem: Lansing's inability to lead when Michigan needs it most.
Daniel Howes' column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be reached at (313) 222-2106 or dchowes@detnews.com.
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New York Times
November 20, 2005
Investing
Can Nuclear Power Become Just Another Business?
By Tim Gray
Londonderry, Pa.
STAND among the pumpkins and purple mums in the gravel parking lot of Anna's Garden and Gift Center and you can glimpse beyond the trees a ghost that haunts the nuclear power industry.
There hulk the twin cooling towers of Three Mile Island Unit 2, the nuclear reactor that had a partial meltdown in 1979. That event, paired with the Chernobyl explosion in Ukraine in 1986, halted the growth of the American nuclear power industry for a generation. No new plant has been ordered in the United States since the Three Mile Island accident. But existing plants have kept operating: the United States has 104 reactors, which make a fifth of its power.
Lately, the nuclear-power sector has been enjoying something of a revival, because of its operating-cost advantages over other forms of electricity production. That may prompt investors to bet on its resurgence by buying shares in nuclear power plant operators, equipment makers or fuel producers.
The economic appeal of nuclear power has risen as prices for natural gas and coal - fuels for the bulk of America's electricity - have climbed. The price of natural gas, especially, has soared. In October, it touched $14 per million British thermal units. That was nearly double the price from October of last year. "There's a big advantage for operating a nuclear plant when gas prices are in the $5 range, much less where they are today," said John C. Kohli, portfolio manager at the Franklin Utilities fund.
Many people, of course, still worry about inadvertent releases of radiation and about the long-term storage of radioactive waste. But in some circles, those fears are beginning to be overtaken by an appreciation of nuclear power's competitive advantages. As concern about global warming has become mainstream, some investors are reminded that nuclear power produces no greenhouse gases. And while nuclear power plants could be vulnerable to a terrorist attack, war and recent hurricanes have underscored the fragility of fossil-fuel supplies. Federal lawmakers have given nuclear power a nudge, too, with a raft of subsidies in the Energy Policy Act this year.
"The incentives in there were a bold statement that nuclear is going to be an important part of the U.S. electricity supply in the future," said Timothy P. O'Brien, manager of the Evergreen Utility and Telecommunications fund.
Still, investors should understand that betting on nuclear power entails risks beyond the stock market's usual shimmies and shakes. Domestic plants have operated without a major accident since Three Mile Island, but another big stumble, in the United States or abroad, could hobble the industry. And many long-term issues remain, including the questions about waste storage and the proliferation of nuclear technology, said Ernest J. Moniz, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The construction of a long-promised waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, has been delayed by years of legal arm-wrestling.
If investors choose to go nuclear, perhaps the most conservative approach is to buy shares of utilities with big nuclear operations - utilities like Exelon, Entergy, Dominion Resources and the FPL Group, said Mark C. Sadeghian, an analyst at Morningstar.
Exelon, based in Chicago, has made a hefty wager on nuclear generation, he noted. It has 17 reactors at 10 sites. If it completes a pending acquisition of the Public Service Enterprise Group, based in Newark, it will have 20 reactors at 12 sites. Exelon's stock is up more than 15 percent this year.
Among Exelon's plants is Three Mile Island Unit 1, a mirror image of its infamous sibling. Both occupy the same central Pennsylvania island, protected by glistening razor wire and guards toting assault rifles. Unit 1 generates about seven million megawatt-hours of power a year, while Unit 2 sits idle and entombed. Exelon does not own Unit 2, but monitors it for its owner, First-Energy of Akron, Ohio.
"Several years ago, when the industry started to deregulate, many companies decided to sell off their nuclear plants, and very few companies had the bright idea to buy them, though they were being sold by pennies on the dollar," said Judith A. Saryan, portfolio manager at the Eaton Vance Utilities fund. "Exelon was one of the companies that had the good sense to buy."
Operating a passel of plants helped Exelon to hone its nuclear expertise, Ms. Saryan said. "Now its nuclear fleet runs at 95 percent capacity."
Entergy, with 10 reactors, is the second-biggest nuclear operator, after Exelon. Entergy's hometown utility, Entergy New Orleans, had to file for bankruptcy-court protection after Hurricane Katrina, but that division accounts for less than 5 percent of the parent's earnings, said Shelby G. Tucker, a principal at Banc of America Securities. "About a third of their earnings comes from their large nuclear fleet in the Northeast," he added.
Those plants could soon contribute even more to profits. Entergy sells its power at below-market prices because of risk-hedging contracts, he said. As the hedges expire, "they'll be able to recontract at higher prices."
Eight power companies, including Exelon and Entergy, are trying to prepare the way for the eventual licensing of a new nuclear plant. Their coalition, called NuStart Energy, aims to test a streamlined federal licensing process and to develop a design for a new reactor.
Other countries, especially China and India, are likely to build more nuclear plants and to do so sooner. "People are talking about China building 20 to 21 new reactors," said David M. Schanzer, utility analyst at Janney Montgomery Scott.
A company that may have a role in construction abroad is General Electric, which has designed and sold parts for plants for decades. But the nuclear business accounts for just a tincture of G.E.'s sales. Buying G.E. for its atomic expertise is like buying a bag of M&M's just to eat the green ones.
A foreign company with a focus on nuclear power is British Energy, which produces about a fifth of Britain's electricity, said Charlie B. Gaffney, an analyst at Eaton Vance. British Energy owns eight nuclear plants and one coal-fired one. "So they're basically a pure-play nuclear generator," he said. "They've had some problems in the past, and they're in restructuring mode." If the company succeeds, its cheap power could yield healthy returns, he said.
Only one domestic company qualifies as a pure-play nuclear investment: USEC, a former government agency that chemically modifies uranium for use as reactor fuel; it is based in Bethesda, Md.
Since being privatized in 1998, its earnings and stock price have zigzagged. This fall, the company reorganized, cutting its staff by 6 percent, to about 2,700, and bringing in a new boss, John K. Welch, from General Dynamics.
USEC's government legacy has hampered it by saddling it with outdated technology, Mr. Welch said. Its enrichment plant was designed in the 1950's and uses more electricity than competitors abroad. That is why the company is betting on a giant centrifuge costing $1.7 billion. It should use about 5 percent of the electricity required by the current method, Mr. Welch said, adding that "we hope to have that up and running by 2011 or 2012."
A competitor - Louisiana Energy Services, yet another venture that includes Exelon and Entergy - has announced plans to bring an enrichment plant in New Mexico online at about the same time.
Ultimately, investors' best hope for nuclear power may be that it comes to be viewed as just another business, rather than the industrial offspring of a perilous technology.
IN Londonderry, Anna M. and Daniel J. Angelo, owners of Anna's Garden and Gift Center, already seem to see the industry that way.
They don't fret much about the past of Three Mile Island Unit 2. Sure, they tell tales about the huge nuclear plant - about the iodine tablets, a radiation antidote, handed out at their children's school after Sept. 11, 2001, and about the way the warm-water discharge into the Susquehanna River draws fish and anglers in the winter. Otherwise, they accept the reactor, saying it brings well-paying jobs to their area.
"We joke about having glow-in-the dark plants," Ms. Angelo said. "Other than that, people don't talk that much about it. You get so used to it."
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The Australian
November 20, 2005
Nuclear cloud of indecision over European powers
Time is running out to permanently store radioactive waste, writes Amanda Hodge
For visitors to the green fields and sprawling chateaux of France's Loire Valley, there could be few more dislocating sights than the twin stacks of a nuclear power station belching grey-white clouds into the atmosphere.
Yet in a country where the provincial idyll is considered an inviolable national heritage, the French have been remarkably tolerant of these imposing symbols of industry.
That is, until the question arises of what to do with the waste generated by the 58 atomic power stations peppering the French landscape.
As one of the largest consumers of nuclear energy, with local reactors contributing 78 per cent of its electricity supply, France never experienced the passionate anti-nuclear movement that existed in countries such as Germany, the US and even Australia.
But like a growing number of its nuclear compatriots, France is increasingly concerned about what to do with radioactive waste -- particularly given that the country's only viable storage option is an underground clay shaft in the Champagne wine region.
In the US, support within Congress is declining for the proposed national high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, and local opposition is mounting.
The Australian Government's proposed solution for its nuclear waste -- building a store on federal land in the Northern Territory -- has also drawn loud protests from the public and the Territory Government.
After 15 years of research, the French Government must decide by January whether to bury its nuclear waste, now kept at its La Hague facility; find another permanent storage site; or commit to yet another intensive research program into ways of diluting it.
With the EU pushing for all member states to find permanent disposal sites for thousands of tonnes of waste temporarily stored around Europe by 2008, France is running out of time.
So, the tiny village of Bure -- just south of Reims and home to some of the most famous Champagne caves -- is likely to bear the burden of France's 50-year nuclear power legacy.
In 2002, France temporarily stored 978,000cum of waste at nuclear facilities and its reprocessing plant. By 2020, it is tipped to climb to 1.9millioncum.
For the past five years, the national radioactive waste management agency ANDRA has built and operated a 450m-deep geological laboratory in Bure, testing the clay for long-term nuclear waste storage.
The region has become a flashpoint for a relatively alien French concept: an anti-nuclear movement.
Such has been the level of public opposition to a waste dump that the Government's plan for a second geological laboratory was abandoned.
Greenpeace France nuclear spokeswoman Helene Gassin said the issue had prompted some of the largest environmental rallies in French history. Last September, about 10,000 people protested against the proposed nuclear waste dump.
"That's very important for France and particularly away from the big cities," she said.
"At the beginning, it was just people not wanting it in their own backyard, but now more and more people are saying they don't want the nuclear industry leaving a burden for future generations. Even local people, rural people who were not against nuclear power in the beginning, now realise waste is a result of the industry."
Even government-friendly green groups such as the Nicholas Hulot foundation, founded by and named after a French television presenter, would like to see a greater mix of energy power and less reliance on nuclear power.
French nuclear power and mining giant AREVA -- which operates the La Hague reprocessing facility -- admits the waste issue is controversial but rejects suggestions it could galvanise public opinion against nuclear power.
"Yes, it's controversial, but not as much as in some other countries because the waste is already vitrified," AREVA spokesman Charles Hufnagel said, referring to the reprocessing method that dilutes and encases the waste in glass.
The Bure underground option would almost certainly be the final solution, Mr Hufnagel said.
Citing Finland -- where Europe's first new nuclear plant in a decade has just been completed -- and US plans to increase nuclear power capacity, Mr Hufnagel said he was confident countries such as Germany would be forced to reverse anti-nuclear policies in the face of local and international pressure to restrict greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.
Germany's new Chancellor, Angela Merkel, will almost certainly push back the former government's 2022 final phase-out date for nuclear energy so that no plants close during her term. But it is by no means clear that she will abandon the commitment, particularly while the problem of where to store the country's 76,000cum of nuclear waste remains unsolved.
The Gerhard Schroeder-led Social Democrat/Green alliance's decision in 2000 to phase out nuclear power was influenced by the anti-nuclear lobby's focus on the waste problem.
Mr Schroeder argued that the phase-out plan made it easier to find a disposal solution because it quantified the amount of waste to be dealt with.
In the past two decades, up to 100,000 demonstrators at a time have clashed violently with police, both over the transportation of reprocessed nuclear waste back over the border from La Hague and proposals to store the waste in a salt dome in the Lower Saxony village of Gorleben. A second salt repository in the former GDR state of Morsleben has already begun to break down and the Government faces a E2billion ($3.2billion) bill to stabilise and seal it with thousands of tonnes of concrete.
The two states with the largest number of atomic energy plants -- both CDU strongholds -- also have large areas of granite deposits, which are considered more stable sites for nuclear repositories than salt stores.
But both Baden-Wurttenberg and Bavaria have refused to entertain a dump site within their borders, and Ms Merkel is unlikely to challenge them.
"We have a temporary solution that at every single plant (there are 17), we have interim disposal facilities where the elements can cool down for about 30 years," said Bernd Warnat, from the federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety.
"It could be that (the Government) agrees simply not to agree and leaves things as they are, which wouldn't cause a problem, because we have 30 years until a final disposal site must be ready."
With the Christian and Social Democrats sharing power under a grand coalition, it seems unlikely that a final decision on waste disposal will be made during this term.
But Mr Warnat warned that deferring a decision beyond 2009 would give the next government less time to find a solution.
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Hanford News
November 19, 2005
Nevada senators blocking Bush nominee for Yucca Mountain chief
The Associated Press
LAS VEGAS (AP) - Nevada's senators are blocking confirmation of President Bush's pick to lead nuclear waste disposal efforts at Yucca Mountain.
Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said Wednesday that he and Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., have placed holds on Ward Sproat, the administration nominee to direct the Energy Department's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management.
Ensign, who met with Sproat on Nov. 2, said he and Reid will relent on Sproat "once we can get answers about where the administration is going" on nuclear waste. Reid had no comment.
Energy Department spokesman Craig Stevens said Bush administration officials "will work with senators ... to remedy their concerns."
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee approved Sproat's confirmation Wednesday by a voice vote, sending it to the Senate floor. But senators can invoke procedural holds to block final action on nominees and legislation.
The Energy Department got approval from Bush and Congress in 2002 to entomb the nation's most radioactive nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The project has been without a Senate-confirmed leader since Margaret Chu resigned in February. Paul Golan, the principal deputy director, has been serving as acting director.
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Las Vegas SUN
November 18, 2005
Editorial: Energy secret coming out
This year's energy bill favored traditional energy companies, and why it did is becoming clear as details emerge about Vice President Dick Cheney's task force
Shortly after President Bush took office in January 2001, he appointed Vice President Dick Cheney to head a task force charged with making recommendations for a national energy policy. Naturally, the task force drew the interest of environmental groups and consumer advocates. They wanted to meet with the task force and place their views about energy on the record.
Cheney rebuffed their entreaties. Furthermore, he conducted all of the task force's meetings in secret. Not surprisingly, when the task force finished its work in May 2001, it had concluded that the best energy policy was one that continued the tradition of almost total reliance on fossil fuels and nuclear power.
We wondered then, as now, about the influence wielded by the executives of nuclear power plants. Nevada's Yucca Mountain has long been singled out by the federal government as the planned site for containing the plants' high-level nuclear waste.
Nevadans -- and all Americans who would be affected by transportation of the waste -- have a right to know.
Nevadans, along with millions of other Americans, also wanted to know how much weight the opinions of conventional energy producers carried, and if any serious consideration had been given to alternative forms of energy. But Cheney steadfastly refused to reveal whom his task force had met with.
Members of Congress tried, but even they couldn't find out who attended the meetings. Following lawsuits by two nonprofit groups, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to order that the records be made public, and sent the case back to a federal appeals court for review. That court decided the issue in Cheney's favor.
But that was no guarantee that the names of those who influenced the task force would remain secret forever. This week The Washington Post reported on a White House document it obtained showing that among those the task force met with were officials from Exxon Mobil Corp., Conoco (before the oil company merged with Phillips), Shell Oil Co. and BP America Inc. The newspaper also reported that the Government Accountability Office (which argued on behalf of Congress to open the meetings) has found that Chevron Corp. "gave detailed energy policy recommendations" to the task force.
Even though the full story is not yet known, it is clear that Cheney's task force met almost exclusively with conventional energy companies. Based on what is already known, it's no surprise that the energy bill Bush signed in June was laden with subsidies for the nuclear, oil, natural gas and coal companies.
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Pahrump Valley Times
November 18, 2005
More incriminating Yucca e-mails found
'Our Best Guess. Screw 'Em' Reads One Audited Excerpt
By Steve Tetreault
PVT Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - Government inspectors said in a report Wednesday they discovered more e-mails that raise questions about work performed at Yucca Mountain, including one message that suggested backdating notebooks and another that recommended to "make up something."
The report prepared by the Energy Department inspector general refocused attention on Yucca Mountain quality assurance, an area in which DOE has been regularly criticized despite efforts at reform.
DOE spokesman Craig Stevens characterized the e-mails as a "blip in the cosmos of Yucca Mountain." Critics said the audit gave fresh evidence of management shortcomings on the proposed nuclear waste repository, located in Nye County roughly 50 miles northeast of Pahrump and 20 miles north and east of Amargosa Valley and Beatty, respectively.
"This report reinforces the complete lack of confidence I have in the ability of the DOE to honestly evaluate the safety of Yucca Mountain and to truly enforce any type of quality assurance program," said Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev.
In March, the Yucca program was tossed into turmoil with the release of a cache of e-mail messages in which authors later identified as U.S. Geological Survey hydrologists discussed possible quality assurance document falsification of water infiltration research.
The 16-page report issued Wednesday was part of an ongoing criminal investigation of those messages, which also are the topic of a probe by a U.S. House subcommittee. Auditors said they reviewed e-mails written by or associated with workers being investigated.
Auditors said the latest review "identified a number of e-mails containing language that could indicate possible conditions adverse to quality."
Investigators did not say how many questionable messages were found and whether they referred to the same matters uncovered in March or represented evidence of possible shortcomings elsewhere on the project. Five e-mails were excerpted in the report.
In one excerpt, an author referred to a report that concerned rainfall. "Our best guess. Screw 'em. It's a lovely, 85, sunny, warm breeze. It's nice to be disconnected and not caring whether it's QA or not. If you can't give them QA, that's fine."
Another said "... we may want to backdate the notebook to when we started putting things together."
Quality assurance requires scientists and engineers to meticulously record and document their research, computer modeling and field reports so they can be verified and confirmed as part of repository safety licensing.
The e-mail cache disclosed in March, and the latest messages disclosed by auditors, indicated some workers held the QA process in low regard.
Additionally, auditors said that the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management in DOE fell short in how it reviewed internal messages to ensure that possible quality control problems were being identified and investigated.
Out of 10 million e-mails that accumulated over years, DOE deemed nine million irrelevant for repository licensing. But inspectors said they found e-mails among the rejects that should have raised flags.
"We believe that OCRWM should expand its quality assurance-related search effort," auditors said in their report.
DOE spokesman Stevens said the department is responding by preparing a new review of the 10 million e-mails, plus another 4 million, using statistical sampling to examine a more comprehensive set of messages than before.
Yucca Mountain acting director Paul Golan has issued a corrective action plan that will guide the reviews, and personnel who examine e-mails for hints of problems are being retrained, Stevens said.
"The issue of the e-mails is something that has been looked at ad nauseum by people in this department," Stevens said. "When this came to the knowledge of the front office, they worked quickly to get on top of this.
"In the universe of the Yucca Mountain Project, this report isn't even a twinkle from the most distant star," Stevens said.
The audit prompted repository critics to renew calls for an independent investigation of the nuclear waste project.
"What is clear from this report is that allowing the DOE to review its own quality assurance records is like giving prisoners the keys to their own jail cells," said Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev.
Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., heads the House subcommittee that has been conducting an examination of the e-mails and related issues. He said Wednesday the audit "highlights what I think is a culture of mismanagement at DOE. They left out nine million e-mails and that troubles me."
DOE officials were not certain how long it would take to perform the new examination, which could uncover further issues that Stevens said would be investigated fully. DOE plans to spend more than a year and more than $1 million to put to rest questions about Yucca Mountain science that were raised by the e-mails disclosed in March.
Some officials have cautioned against reading much into e-mails that are offered without background or context.
Joseph Hevesi, a USGS hydrologist identified as one of the e-mail authors, told Porter's subcommittee at a hearing in June that provocative messages he wrote were merely "water cooler talk" and he did not falsify documents on the project.
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Salt Lake Tribune
November 18, 2005
Guv in D.C. for strategy session on nuclear site
Wilderness buffer: The fight is to persuade senators to keep the provision in the defense bill
By Robert Gehrke
The Salt Lake Tribune
WASHINGTON - Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. met with members of Utah's congressional delegation Thursday to plot strategy for a provision that would block rail shipments of highly radioactive material to a nuclear waste storage site in Utah.
The Utah proposal, which seeks to create a wilderness area as a barrier to the rail shipments, is entering a crucial final stage as members of the House and Senate prepare to negotiate the final version of the defense package that could include the provision.
Utah lawmakers are hopeful that blocking the rail shipments will doom the nuclear waste site and keep it from impeding the Air Force's use of the sprawling Utah Test and Training Range.
Several electric utilities formed a group called Private Fuel Storage to store 44,000 tons of nuclear fuel from commercial reactors in steel casks on the Skull Valley reservation until a permanent repository can be built, presumably at Yucca Mountain, Nev.
The House approved the Cedar Mountain Wilderness designation in the version of the defense bill it passed earlier this year, but it was not in the Senate bill completed this week.
The fight now is to persuade senators to keep the wilderness area in the final version. Twice before, similar efforts crumbled in the House-Senate conference committee.
Huntsman met mostly with Utah members Thursday to discuss strategy, but he also spoke with House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., about how to keep the Cedar Mountain Wilderness language in the defense bill.
He plans to meet today with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
Reid gave the wilderness bill a major boost last week as he agreed to drop his long-standing opposition to the plan. Reid's change came after talks with Huntsman and Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah.
Bennett also laid the groundwork for Reid's shift by his September announcement that he was abandoning his support for the Yucca Mountain waste dump.
Mike Lee, general counsel to Huntsman, said he is optimistic the state will get the Cedar Mountain Wilderness through Congress.
“The governor is an extremely effective spokesperson for the state and extremely effective in communicating the need to protect Utah's Test and Training Range, and our meetings today have gone well,’ Lee said.
The leading opponents of the Cedar Mountain proposal are Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., and Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, whose former staffer is the lead lobbyist for PFS.
Also on Thursday, Huntsman met with Commerce Secretary Carlos Guiterrez and Undersecretary for International Trade Frank Lavin to discuss a cement shortage and the potential for improving imports from Mexico “while maintaining fair trading standards,’ Huntsman said in a statement.
Huntsman also plans to discuss immigration during his meetings with McCain and Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.
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State of Nevada
Agency for Nuclear Projects
www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/
nwpo@nuc.state.nv.us
775-687-3744
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