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Yucca Mountain Project directive prompted rare NRC confrontation
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NRC documents
Commissioner William Ostendorff memo - Oct. 6, 2010
Commissioner William Ostendorff memo - Oct. 8, 2010
Commissioner Kristine Svinicki vote sheet and discussion
STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Updated: Oct. 15, 2010 | 11:10 a.m.
WASHINGTON -- A directive for scientists at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to begin closing out their evaluation of the Yucca Mountain Project prompted a confrontation among the agency's leaders, according to officials and documents made public Thursday.
One of the five commissioners who head the independent nuclear safety agency protested in a private memo shortly after the disclosure was made last week. On Oct. 8 , the commissioners voted by their method of submitting written responses.
The result, according to an agency spokesman, effectively upheld the shutdown guidance that had been issued through a budget memo signed off by NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko.
After William Ostendorff raised the issue, he and Kristine Svinicki voted to allow staff to release an upcoming safety evaluation report on Yucca Mountain. Both are Republican appointees.
The remaining three -- Democrats Jaczko, William Magwood and George Apostolakis -- "declined to participate in the matter," according to NRC sources. In the absence of a quorum, the directive stood.
"The commission did not change the existing approach as a result of this vote," said Eliot Brenner, NRC director of public affairs.
As a result, the NRC "will proceed to an orderly closure of high level waste activities," as outlined in an announcement last week. A volume of the agency's safety evaluation report that was scheduled to be released next month will not be released, and staff will archive its work with $10 million allocated for 2011, officials said.
The disclosures Thursday provided a peek into top-level deliberations at the agency. It also made clear that the Yucca project continues to be a land mine even if it may be in its final days.
The vote came to light after Ostendorff released several documents on the issue, followed by Svinicki, who announced how she had voted. The other commissioners did not comment.
The disclosure that the commissioners had taken up the matter came a day after former NRC Commissioner Kenneth Rogers requested the agency's inspector general review how Jaczko has handled the Yucca matter.
Before he was Senate-confirmed to the NRC in 2005, Jaczko was an aide to Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the leading Yucca Mountain critic on Capitol Hill who teamed with President Barack Obama to carry out a termination of the project that sought to bury 77,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste at a site 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
"As long as Senator Reid is majority leader, there will not be a Yucca Mountain," spokeswoman Meredith MacKenzie said Thursday. "Yucca Mountain will be dead."
As news of the repository work stoppage circulated, so did speculation among lobbyists, former federal officials and bloggers that the directive may have been politically motivated. No evidence of that has been offered.
"From everything I have seen from the outside, the way the chairman makes decisions and the way he speaks to the community seems perfectly consistent with what the commissioners would feel comfortable with," Rogers said in an interview.
But Rogers, who served on the NRC from 1987 to 1997, said he did not believe Jazcko had the authority to issue a shutdown order, and he feared the NRC's reputation for independence was being tainted.
"As far as the public's view, there is perception as much as reality that counts and certainly the perception is that this is political. Anyone can see that," Rogers said.
An aide to Inspector General Hubert Bell said the request for an investigation was being evaluated, as are all complaints.
Brenner said the staff directive "was reviewed by the agency's general counsel and found to be consistent with the general principles of appropriations law."
Jaczko "feels confident of the legal basis for the approach," Brenner said.
One Yucca opponent, Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., on Wednesday criticized Rogers, who was president of Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey when he was appointed to the NRC in 1987 with backing from nuclear industry leaders. He now is retired.
In an article he co-authored for the National Academy of Sciences last month, Rogers questioned the Obama administration's policy to move away from the Nevada site, saying it could hamper efforts to utilize more nuclear energy.
"This is a last ditch attempt by pro-Yucca groups who stand to make a fortune by forcing the Silver State to swallow a nuclear garbage dump Nevadans have opposed for decades," Berkley said.
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If you really believe that Yucca Mountain is bad, why aren't you alos against cars that kill 40,000 people per year?
Or planes that kill about 1500 per year in just America?
Oh, because you can see cars and planes, but not radiation? What a joke.
Americans have become pawns for politicians rather than thinking on their own.
The world is laughing at Americans now instead of looking up to them.
Pathetic.
Diversification of our state's economy should be a #1 priority. Shutting down Yucca was not a wise move. One can just look at Pantex in Amarillo, Texas. This is the only company in the country that is dismantling nuclear weapons. Right now they just got the contract to dismantle the B-53 bombs. Too bad our elected leaders don't have the vision to see the benefits that Yucca can have for our state. And when they started Yucca 25-30 years ago, you can't tell me that our leaders back then didn't know what was in store for that site?
The people of Nevada should vote on Yucca Project and decide for themselves whether it should continue..........
The representative's are a bunch of criminilist polititionist's.... Guilty of serving themselves and their political gain's instead of the populace.....
If you think about it, name something that isn't corrupt in the political world.......
The reputation of NRC is now tarnished and clearly has lost its independence and unbiased decisions. This is a bad precedence as in the future a decision could be made for an application to build a nuclear plant based solely on political patronage.
@aBadReid:
I respectfully disagree. The NRC is most certainly not a joke, though I do agree that it is not immune to political influence, and can be used as a political tool when a powerful enough "craftsman" meddler such as Harry Reid is involved.
Like any agency, sadly, NRC is run by bureaucrats at the top, and the top bureaucrat now running NRC is starting to become a poison pill, damaging the very independence and credibility you mention.
Some of this may not be his fault, but then some of it is. The language in the 2011 NRC budget proposal, which Jaczko is offering as his rationale and justification for stopping work on the license application, clearly states that any phase-out of NRC work on the Yucca Mountain license application will only begin if the application is withdrawn or the proceeding suspended. Neither of these has happened yet.
Moreover, given that the legal matter remains unresolved, it would be within NRC's rights to continue work on the license application until the matter is resolved, in the interest of obeying Congressional statute. To defer to an administration budget that zeros out funding for Yucca Mountain work, and moreover is not yet in effect due to continuing resolution, is a massive cop-out on Jaczko's part. (And in fact, DOE did the same thing in using the President's budget to "justify" taking steps to shut down the Project.)
All I'm saying is, the rank and file at NRC are good, honest, and scrupulous people. I'm pretty sure that the NRC Staff members reviewing the license application are livid that they will not get to finish their work or publish their findings, especially given the fact that their all-important Volume 3 (covering the YM postclosure safety case) is allegedly finished.
To Steve Tetreault, who usually is more or less accurate in these articles:
I don't know what you mean by saying that Commissioner Ostendorff is a "Republican appointee."
In terms of personal politics he may indeed be a Republican, but he was appointed to the NRC under the current Administration, along with Magwood and Apostolakis. He may have been recommended or sponsored by a Republican, as Jaczko clearly was sponsored by Reid and appointed under G.W. Bush (you reported this in the RJ).
However, I think the standard practice is to call someone an appointee of the Administration under which he was nominated.
More importantly, your whole article is premised on the notion that confrontations between NRC commissioners is somehow "rare," which it is not.
In fact, the current Chairman (Jaczko) is somewhat well-known for his many dissents in NRC rulings. These were especially pronounced while former NRC Chairman Dale Klein was at the helm, and there were two vacancies on the Commission. Klein and Svinicki typically agreed in rulings, and for the most part, so did Jaczko. However, in cases of dissent, Jaczko was typically the dissenter, and some of his written dissents are pretty barbed. I remember reading one, in fact, in which the other two commissioners were forced to respond and criticize Jaczko for suggesting impropriety on their part.
In short, NRC is no stranger to dissent and controversy among the commissioners, as any careful reading of their many publicly available rulings will soon reveal.
The NRC is a joke, nothing more than a political tool now! Anyone working for that committee should be ashamed of themselves and their agency as instead of being the Nation's neutral voice in keeping it safe and energy secure, it has become nothing more than an agency full of political mud and surely not worth the tax payers cost of sustaining it. THE NRC SHOULD BE ABOLISHED as they can no longer perform their mission free of political influence! http://aBadReid.com
Vote for Sharron Angle and take a chance and you will regret everything. You life and Life Style You think the oil spill was bad. See what happens if Yucca Mtn spills Bye Bye Las Vegas