Nuke Regulators Slam Boss At House Hearing

The New York Times reports:

In an unusual public dissent, staff members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission told a House subcommittee on Friday that they were frustrated by a boss’s decision to halt their evaluation of a site in Nevada as a future repository for the nation’s nuclear waste.

Five staff members told the Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy that they disagreed with instructions from the regulatory commission’s chairman, Gregory B. Jaczko, to suspend their work on an Energy Department application involving the site, which followed a decision by top officials in the Obama administration to kill the project.

“Staff would have willingly followed any outcome from a faithfully executed legitimate process,” one staff member, Lawrence E. Kokajko, the acting deputy office director of the commission’s Office of Nuclear Materials, Safety and Safeguards, told the subcommittee. “The nation paid for this review, and the nation should get it.”

Another witness, N. Kingman Stablein, chief of the project management branch in the high-level waste division, said staff members, some of whom had worked for 20 years on the project, went through “agony” upon seeing it killed. And Janet P. Kotra, senior project manager, said she was instructed to follow “a highly irregular process” in closing out the evaluation.

The proposed waste storage site, at Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert, was approved by Congress in the 1980s. But Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate majority leader, vowed in recent years to block the project, and President Obama pledged during his 2008 campaign to shelve it if elected. Mr. Jaczko, a political appointee, is a former aide to Mr. Reid.