POWER November 2011 - 78

NUCLEAR WASTE POLICY
to stop work on the SER and that the decision
to cease work was a policy decision that should
have received full NRC consideration. In fact,
a majority of commissioners told the IG that
they did not believe that work on the SER
should have been stopped at that late date.
The report concluded that Jaczko had not
acted illegally but that his conduct was questionable,
especially with regard to his highly selective
sharing of information with fellow NRC
commissioners. However, the IG concluded that
Jaczko's strategic control of information raised
questions about his leadership capabilities
and political independence. Before President
Obama nominated Jaczko to chair the NRC
in 2009, Jaczko worked for Congressman Edward
Markey (D-Mass.), an ardent opponent of
nuclear power, before becoming science advisor
to Senator Reid. Jaczko also served as an NRC
commissioner from 2005 to 2009.
Consequential Damages
The BRC draft report suggested that many of
the technical lessons learned from the work
completed to support the DOE license application
and the NRC SER will be helpful
in developing a future repository. We're not
convinced that will be true. By pulling the
plug on Yucca Mountain so quickly, much
valuable information was lost.
FY2011 budget guidance received from
the president in February 2010 was said to
assume no funding for Yucca Mountain. In
response, the DOE undertook an ambitious
schedule to redirect its remaining FY2010
budget to terminate the repository program
and abolish the Office of Civilian Radioactive
Waste Management (OCRWM) by September
30, 2010, when funding would have
ended under the president's budget proposal.
A Government Accountability Office (GAO)
report, " Commercial Nuclear Waste, Effects of
a Termination of the Yucca Mountain Repository
Program and Lessons Learned, " released
in April 2011, reported that in implementing its
ambitious shutdown schedule, the DOE did not
consistently follow federal policy and formally
approve the shutdown plan, nor did the DOE
perform a proper risk assessment. Although the
DOE had drafted a shutdown plan by February
2010, department officials told the GAO that
it was never approved. Thus, the DOE had no
formal implementation goals or milestones to
guide progress. The DOE's IG also expressed
concern about the lack of such a plan, given
the scope and complexity of the shutdown and
impacts to the preservation of intellectual, scientific,
and technological information and the
disposition of property.
Several DOE officials told the GAO that they
had never seen such a large program under so
much pressure to close so quickly. The DOE's
primary contractor at Yucca Mountain also expressed
concern, as noted in a June 2010 letter
to the DOE, that contracts of this scale generally
take two years or more to close out; nevertheless,
the contractor agreed to meet the DOE's
September 30 date, less than four months away.
The process required using " creative and unusual
approaches, " such as the transfer of residual
work to other parties and saving interim technical
work products, without making additional
effort to document objectives, plans, status, or
path forward. According to a DOE contractor
responsible for archiving the records, the files
consist of 1.8 million electronic documents and
11,000 boxes of hard-copy documents. In other
words, the project files were collected, put in
file boxes, sealed, and stored.
In May 2010, OCRWM's prime contractor
was asked for a shutdown plan. The contractor
produced a $2.8 million proposal for
" knowledge retention packages " that would
mitigate the threat of the irrecoverable loss of
expert knowledge as staff members depart the
program. The contractor said these packages
would give the DOE the ability to resume the
license application review proceedings, if required.
In a written response to this proposal,
the DOE stated that the knowledge retention
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