Yucca’s problems

The contractors in charge of the Yucca Mountain Project must have felt generous when they spent nearly $300,000 to quiet at least one subcontractor who’d made accusations of harassment and theft in Yucca’s quality assurance team.

Then again, maybe they were just scared when David Mitchell pointed out, among other things, that one of the quality assurance team’s auditors had a fake certification. For blowing this whistle, Mitchell was fired. An out-of-court settlement kept his concerns from being aired.

You’ve gotta love how the federal government spends its money.

Dying for the day when loads of nuke waste can zoom unimpeded to southern Nevada, Yucca’s management has been reportedly lax in dealing with allegations of corruption and personnel problems in Yucca’s quality assurance program. One estimate cites millions of dollars spent to settle legal actions and to pay attorneys and legal advisers, according to lead auditor Kristi Hodges, recently interviewed by the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Most of this money would have come from the Department of Energy.

Hodges said that two years ago she’d tried to get the DOE’s Inspector General to address Yucca’s problems. No investigations ensued.

U.S. Sens. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and John Ensign (R-Nev.) will attend a May 28 hearing on the troubles with Yucca’s quality assurance program.

“My reaction is we’ve wasted billions of dollars constructing an unnecessary facility and now we find that they’re paying millions of dollars in hush money, all to the detriment of taxpayers,” Reid told the LVR-J.

In other news, shipments of low-level radioactive waste from Kentucky to Nevada were temporarily halted recently while workers try and figure out why the flatbed trailers were glowing. (OK, not glowing. Four of the eight trailers delivered to the Nevada Test Site in April, were found to have “fixed” contamination—the kind that doesn’t rub off when touched, according to Associated Press reports from Kentucky.

Earlier this month, the state of Nevada, Clark County and the city of Las Vegas in January filed another lawsuit in federal court charging the unconstitutionality of forcing a national nuclear waste dump on Nevada.

Any or all of the above are hoped to serve as more nails in the Yucca waste cask.