Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Allison Macfarlane issued a decision early this week to deny the motion calling for her recusal from matters dealing with the Yucca Mountain repository licensing review. “I can state without hesitation that I have not prejudged the technical, policy, or legal issues in this adjudicatory proceeding, and that my expertise will enhance the Commission’s deliberations and decision-making. In fact, I have not looked at the DOE’s license application, the NRC’s staff’s safety or environmental reviews, or considered how to apply the law or NRC regulations to determine the adequacy of the application. And I have not made up my mind on any of the issues raised by the application,” she wrote. At a hearing yesterday on Yucca Mountain before the House Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy, Macfarlane responded to a question about her objectivity with the project by stating, “I have an open mind.”
In a letter outlining her decision, she argued that her past involvement with Yucca Mountain actually works as an attribute to her decision making. She states, “Indeed, it is often precisely because of their knowledge of and intense involvement in a specific regulated field that persons are appointed to lead regulatory commissions and, ultimately, to issue adjudicatory decisions with respect to issues arising in the field.” Macfarlane also addresses her book, “Uncertain Underground: Yucca Mountain and the Nation’s High-Level Nuclear Waste,” which many calling for her recusal point to as evidence of bias, as a piece of academic work meant to move the geological conversation about Yucca Mountain forward. “Academic work performed on the basis of data available in the early 2000s is not a basis for recusal now,” she wrote.
A motion for recusal was submitted by a group consisting of Nye County, Nev., the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners and the state of South Carolina. The motion states, “By stating her unvarnished conclusions about factual, legal and policy issues that are now the subject of a contested licensing proceeding pending before the NRC, Dr. Macfarlane has disqualified herself from serving as an impartial judge of those same issues. In fact, many believe that she, like her predecessor was chosen to chair the NRC precisely because she support’s DOE’s attempt to withdraw the Yucca Mountain license application.”
