Yucca director: Document job 'horrendous'

LAS VEGAS - The Energy Department underestimated how hard it would be to plug 20 years of documents into a database to support its application for a license for a national nuclear waste repository in Nevada, the departing project director said.

"People had left behind tons, millions of e-mails, and we had to sort them out, figure out criteria of what was relevant and what was not," Margaret Chu, director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, told reporters at a utility regulators conference Monday in Washington, D.C.

"The magnitude was just horrendous."

Chu announced last week she will resign Feb. 25.

The inability to post all relevant documents on an Internet database called the Licensing Support Network for review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission contributed to missed deadlines for the Nevada nuclear waste repository the Energy Department plans 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Department officials have pushed back a target date for opening the $58 billion project by at least two years. Chu said last week it may not open until after 2012.

Chu said Monday she had expected to head the Yucca Mountain program for one presidential term. She was appointed to the job in March 2002.

Chu told the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners that progress at Yucca Mountain depends on funding from Congress.

"I am confident we will eventually get there," she said.

Don Keskey, a former Michigan assistant attorney general, said utility ratepayers contributing to a Yucca Mountain construction fund were at financial risk because of delays with the program.

Electricity consumers served by nuclear utilities pay one-tenth-of-one-cent-per-kilowatt-hour into the fund, which has accumulated $24 billion since 1983. The current balance is $16.3 billion.

Keskey urged utility commissioners to consider withholding the fees, or placing them in escrow to show "that states are not ignoring this issue and are concerned."

However, Jay Silberg, an attorney representing utilities, said power companies would be caught in the middle if the commissioners acted to withhold fees.

He said licenses and governmental nuclear waste contracts could be jeopardized.