Sproat: Yucca Mountain Needs to Be "Built Fast"

Lisa Mascaro of the Las Vegas Sun took a tour of Yucca Mountain with new project head Ward Sproat, and had some interesting things to say:

Five minutes with Sproat and you begin to see why the Energy Department chose him. He tells you plainly and succinctly what he knows. Then he says just as clearly what it is he doesn't yet know. It's straight talk, the kind that inspires confidence: If he can run nuclear power plants for private industry, as he has for years, he can puff life into this gasping project.

[...]

More than anything, the tunnel feels like a driveway to a house that has yet to be built. The waste is to be set in 42 miles of storage space branching off from the tunnel. Digging it could take decades.

Sproat worries about such a prolonged building program. Yucca Mountain should be built fast, he said, as soon as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gives the project a green light - now pegged at 2011.

Also, he sees the construction challenges as less daunting than the job of fixing a management culture that has allowed sloppy documentation.

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