Nevada Wants Sandia Out of Yucca Plans

Nevada is asking the U.S. government to remove Sandia National Laboratories from the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project.

The state claims the company’s memos show one of Sandia’s managers prioritized meeting the federal government’s deadlines over the quality of the science used in the project, the Albuquerque Journal reported Wednesday.

Sandia is a privately owned lab doing projects for the U.S. Energy Department in California and Nevada.

Officials with Sandia, which is heading the team of scientists charged with analyzing a Yucca Mountain site the federal government wants to use for burying dangerous radioactive waste, issued a response Tuesday defending the team’s integrity.

Nevada officials claim an Oct. 10, 2006, memo sent by Sandia official Geoff Freeze to his staff revealed that Freeze considered the schedule more important than science.

My responsibility … is to ensure that the three priorities — schedule, defensibility, credibility — in that order, are satisfied, the state quoted the memo as reading.

If we do not meet the June 30 deadline, ‘we are all out of a job,’ Freeze allegedly wrote.

Common sense and experience teach that a plan which puts schedule ahead of defensibility and defensibility ahead of genuine scientific credibility is a recipe for disaster, Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto wrote to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.