Yucca Mountain Revisions Set

Work on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump, though performed by federal employees who apparently made up facts, was scientifically sound, an Energy Department report said Friday.

But the work will be redone anyway because it didn’t comply with quality-assurance rules. That will take months and could cost millions, said Paul Golan, acting director of the department’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management.

“We need to move forward based on work that meets our quality standards. And if that means redeveloping this work, taking the time and incurring the cost to do that, we just need to do that,” Golan told reporters on a conference call.

The Energy Department released the 144-page report almost a year after disclosing the existence of e-mails written by U.S. Geological Survey hydrologists indicating that they fabricated facts, deleted inconvenient data and kept one set of documents for themselves and another for quality-assurance officials.

The e-mails were written from 1998 through 2004 by scientists using computer models to determine how quickly precipitation could make its way through the dump site in the desert 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The dump is planned as a national repository for 77,000 tons of used commercial reactor fuel and defense waste now waiting at sites in 39 states.

The USGS validated Energy Department conclusions that water seepage was relatively slow, so radiation would be less likely to escape. That led Nevada lawmakers and other Yucca Mountain opponents to contend that scientists were changing data to reach a predetermined conclusion.

The Energy Department’s report, which was reviewed by three outside experts, found no problems with the water infiltration rates estimated by the USGS scientists. The conclusions were corroborated by other data and were comparable to findings by other scientists studying similar environments around the country, the report said. It found no problem with the basis for the Energy Department’s 2002 recommendation of Yucca Mountain as the site for a nuclear waste dump.

However, Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico will redo the computer models because quality assurance rules weren’t complied with, Golan said. The lab started the work in September and will finish this spring or summer.

The Energy Department is trying to recover from a series of problems with the project, including a federal court ruling that overturned the government’s original radiation protection standards for the dump.

Project managers no longer offer estimates as to when the dump might open; as of a year ago, the most optimistic estimate was 2012.