Thursday, May 29, 2003 | 11:01 a.m.
Nevada's senators and a "60 Minutes" film crew got an earful of complaints about research at the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear dump site Wednesday but they want to hear more, from two people who refused to show up at their hearing.
The witnesses who did appear at the Senate field hearing in Las Vegas complained that the Department of Energy, which has been studying the waste dump capabilities of the site, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, hasn't followed its own research game plans and has failed to correct chronic problems in a timely fashion.
But the absence of two other scheduled witnesses who pulled out earlier this week -- Robert Clark, who once ran DOE's quality assurance program and Donald Harris, an auditor with DOE contractor Navarro Research and Engineering -- drew the ire of Reid and Ensign.
They said they will use whatever means possible to compel the two experts to testify about alleged quality control problems with the nuclear waste project.
Democrat Harry Reid, the Senate minority whip, and Republican John Ensign, both opponents of plans to ship the nation's high-level nuclear waste to Nevada, blamed the DOE for applying pressure against potential whistle-blowers. They said they will even consider subpoenas if that's what it takes to get Clark and Harris to appear before the Senate Appropriation subcommittee on Energy and Water Development. The subcommittee conducted the field hearing even though only Reid and Ensign were present for it.
"We're doing whatever we can to see what we can do to compel them to testify," Ensign said. "We're looking at all legal and political means.
"Scientists are afraid to question the science because they're afraid of losing grants."
Reid said he and Ensign also plan to determine whether the DOE -- which was not invited to testify at the field hearing -- violated any federal whistle-blower laws.
"There will be other proceedings," Reid said. "That's for sure. We'll apply whatever political pressure we can."
The two senators said they hoped the sparsely attended field hearing in the Clark County Commission chambers would raise national as well as local awareness about problems with the proposed dump. The national attention may be provided in part by CBS' "60 Minutes" television news magazine, which had a film crew present as part of a plan to air a future segment on the controversies surrounding Yucca Mountain.
The witnesses who did appear were Robin Nazzaro, director of Natural Resources and Environment for the U.S. General Accounting Office, Allison Macfarlane, senior research associate with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Security Studies Program, and William Belke, a retired Nuclear Regulatory Commission official who served as its senior on-site licensing representative for the Yucca Mountain project.
Nazzaro said the GAO, the nonpartisan federal government watchdog, is still in its preliminary stages of an investigation into Yucca Mountain's quality assurance program, which is supposed to make sure the research is performed properly and adequately analyzed. But she said that the DOE's "track record of correcting problems with its quality assurance program is less than favorable."
She gave the example of a DOE computer software program whose problems have not been corrected since first discovered in 1998. Nazzaro said the failure of DOE to correct problems in a timely fashion cast doubts about whether the agency would be able to meet its goal of submitting an application to the NRC by 2004 to construct the repository.
"DOE's unsuccessful efforts to address recurring quality assurance problems, the identification of new problems since the issuance of its 2002 improvement plan, and NRC's recent comment that DOE's quality assurance program has yet to produce outcomes necessary to ensure that this program meets NRC requirements do not instill much confidence that the quality assurance problems will soon be resolved," Nazzaro said in a prepared statement.
Of 293 key technical issues that still needed to be resolved as of March, the DOE had developed strategies to tackle only 77 of those items, she said. Nazzaro also said the fact that $130 million was cut from DOE's Yucca Mountain budget this year raised doubts that the agency would be able to meet its deadline for submitting an application to the NRC.
"As we see these recurring problems DOE doesn't seem to be able to correct them," Nazzaro said. "The accountability issue has been a pervasive problem at DOE in terms of the accountability of contractors."
Macfarlane criticized DOE for failing to publish its Yucca Mountain studies in a way that would allow "peer review" by outside scientists. She said the proposed repository is the largest scientific project with which she is familiar that hasn't been properly reviewed by outsiders.
One area that she said hasn't been properly analyzed is the effect seeping water could have on the casks that are being designed to store the nuclear waste underground. Without naming names, she also told the senators that scientists have been pressured to not challenge DOE's Yucca Mountain work. They fear retaliation if they do challenge it, and there's good reason for that fear, she said.
Some of the scientists who have collected data on water-related issues that contradict DOE findings, have "taken a bashing" from the agency, Macfarlane said.
"DOE could improve the science by offering competitive research grants to research institutions," she said.
Belke likewise criticized DOE for failing to correct problems in a timely fashion and for retaliating against potential whistle-blowers.
"I don't think people should have fear of retaliation on their jobs," he said. "NRC management should also be more proactive and pay attention to deficiencies. The same deficiencies occur again and again and again.
"Right now the DOE has to prove they can do the little things. If they can't do the little things, they won't be able to do the big things in the future."
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