Probe of Possibly Fabricated Reports Stalls Nuclear Dump

The Department of Energy will not consider seeking a license for the proposed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada until investigations into possible falsification of water-safety surveys are complete, officials said Tuesday.

“We have not made a final decision yet as to when or whether to file those [licensing] documents, and some of that will be based on this investigation,” Theodore Garrish, the department’s deputy director for civilian radioactive waste management, told the House government reform subcommittee on federal workforce and agency organization.

During the hearing, three members of Nevada’s congressional delegation -- Republicans Jon C. Porter and Jim Gibbons and Democrat Shelley Berkley -- called for an independent investigation into the possible falsification of agency reports affirming the safety of the Yucca Mountain site, saying that the poor management and quality control of the Energy Department and the U.S. Geological Survey, its partner in the project, allowed scientific evidence to be fabricated.

Last month, the Energy and Interior departments, along with the FBI, began criminal investigations to determine whether e-mails among scientists proved that those reports were fabricated to keep the project going. The data in question indicated that the water levels at the site would not corrode storage tanks for 77,000 metric tons of nuclear waste for 10,000 years, preventing groundwater contamination.

The project to provide a single storage place for the country’s nuclear waste from power plants and bomb production -- now kept at 131 sites throughout the country -- is 14 years behind schedule and could cost as much as $100 billion.

Gibbons said that the “culture of management” of the Energy Department and the USGS was one that “has gone forward from Day One with the idea that you can pound a square peg in a round hole, at any cost.”

“We’re seeing that today,” he said. “The e-mails that we have before us, gentlemen, are not isolated incidents, but show what I feel is pressure from above to get a product out.”

The e-mails included such statements as “If they need more proof, I’ll be happy to make up more stuff” and “In the end I keep track of two sets of files, the ones that will keep [quality assurance] happy and the ones that were actually used.”

Garrish agreed that oversight might have been a problem. “The e-mail suggests that one or more employees have deliberately circumvented our procedures, but they also show that we have well-defined standards for data integrity and a [quality assurance] program that they were well aware of,” he said.

John Mitchell Jr., president and general manager of Bechtel SAIC, the Energy Department’s main contractor on the project, told the committee that employees who reviewed e-mails had become aware of the possible falsifications in December. He said he was not informed about the problem until March 9, at which point “we immediately notified the Department of Energy.”

“Some people in that process identified these e-mails as being in question,” he said. “When those matters were brought forward, they were discussed with legal counsel. Unfortunately, the way that conversation went was less clear than it might have been as to what actions could have immediately been taken, and no action was ... taken until some time later.”

Nevada officials told the committee that the data from the reports were instrumental in the approval of legislation, passed by Congress and signed by President Bush in 2002, designating Yucca Mountain as the nation’s sole site for nuclear waste.

“The question of falsification of critical data goes directly to the suitability or unsuitability of Yucca Mountain to safely house this country’s first permanent high-level nuclear waste repository,” said Brian Sandoval, the state’s attorney general. “Such falsification irreparably damages the legality of the project, its scientific integrity and public confidence in the project.”

Nevada Gov. Kenny C. Guinn, a Republican, also cited the e-mails in questioning the safety of the site. “It is certainly suspicious, if not outright incriminating, that those USGS studies were ordered by DOE in an attempt to contradict earlier DOE and state of Nevada research findings that were not to DOE’s liking,” he said.

The subcommittee members expressed dismay that scientists who allegedly falsified documents that confirmed the safety of the proposed site still worked for the federal government. “I can’t believe that these folks are still on the payroll,” said Porter, the subcommittee chairman.

Energy and Geological Survey officials said that actions could not be taken until the departments’ inspectors general completed their investigations.

“Our position has been that because the investigation is ongoing

The scientists, whose names are being withheld, could face criminal charges if the inspectors general find the allegations in the e-mails are true.

Last year a federal appeals court threw out the Environmental Protection Agency’s standards for radioactive emissions, saying they violated federal law by not mandating safety for the life of the dump -- potentially as long as 1 million years -- instead of for 10,000 years.