USGS employee may have falsified Yucca Mountain documents

Plans for a nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada suffered a potential setback yesterday when the Energy Department reported that documents for the facility might have been falsified, the Associated Press reported.

E-mails sent by a U.S. Geological Survey staffer between May 1998 and March 2000 "indicated that he had fabricated documentation of his work," the agency said Wednesday in a statement.

The staffer was preparing computer models on water infiltration and climate at Yucca Mountain, AP reported. Both matters would be crucial in estimating how radiation from waste stored at the site might spread, Nevada officials said.

It appears that a number of scientists were involved in the misrepresentation, AP reported. Details on specific numbers of personnel or what jobs they held were not released.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said his department is working to determine exactly what information was falsified and how that might affect the scientific basis for the storage site.

"If in the course of that review any work is found to be deficient, it will be replaced or supplemented with analysis and documentation that meets appropriate quality assurance standards," Bodman said in the statement.

This new development could delay or even undo the government's efforts to obtain a federal license for Yucca Mountain, AP reported.

Yucca program chief Theodore Garrish told a House Appropriations subcommittee yesterday that the Energy Department is "100 percent committed" to the project.

"I assure you we will not proceed until we have rectified these problems," he said.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said in a statement that the revelation "proves once again that DOE must cheat and lie to make Yucca Mountain look safe."

The falsification "is not a major impediment and can be corrected very easily," said House Appropriations Energy and Water Subcommittee Chairman David Hobson, R-Ohio. "Some people just don't want to do their job right, so they'll slip it through rather than doing their job. We don't have any evidence that somebody directed anybody to do this."