Review of DOE probe sought

Wednesday, April 25, 2001 | 11:14 a.m.

Nevada's congressional delegation today asked the General Accounting Office to review an internal Energy Department investigation that failed to document alleged bias in the Yucca Mountain site-selection process.

The delegates said they were worried that the disappearance of key e-mail may have impeded the DOE investigation, which was conducted by Inspector General, Gregory Friedman.

Sens. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and John Ensign, R-Nev., and Reps. Shelley Berkley,D-Nev., and Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., requested the review in a joint letter to Comptroller General David Walker, who heads the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress.

"While the GAO may be looking into separate allegations regarding mismanagement at Yucca Mountain, it is important they be made aware of the IG's findings and the loss of what could be important e-mail messages," Reid said this morning.

"Without this electronic paper trail, we may never be able to determine the real level of bias among the DOE contractors working on the proposed dumpsite."

Friedman spent four months investigating allegations that the DOE and its contractors were displaying bias toward Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as the site for the nation's first high-level nuclear waste dump.

On Monday Friedman informed Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham that his investigators could not substantiate the bias.

But he urged Abraham to publicly renew the DOE's commitment to a fair and objective Yucca Mountain study amid the erosion of public confidence in the agency's nuclear waste dealings. Federal law prohibits the DOE from taking sides in the site-selection process.

In his 14-page report, Friedman acknowledged that his office could not obtain all of the information it wanted, because e-mail with a DOE subcontractor at the heart of the probe had been destroyed during a computer malfunction.

The subcontractor, Colorado-based JK Research Associates, wrote a 60-page draft overview for the DOE that suggested Yucca Mountain was safe to store radioactive waste even though scientific studies haven't been completed.

A two-page JK Research memo attached to an October draft suggested the overview could be used to help the nuclear industry sell Yucca Mountain to Congress. The memo sought comments about the draft from members of the DOE's nuclear waste community.

"According to JK Research Associates, complete electronic mail records were unavailable to the Office of Inspector General due to a computer malfunction." Friedman wrote in his report.

"Consequently, because a complete record of interactions between the contractor and the reviewers was not available, the Office of Inspector General was unable to obtain a complete, verifiable history of the development of the draft overview."

John Kelly, a longtime Yucca Mountain subcontractor who runs JK Research, has declined comment.

In their letter to Walker, the Nevada delegates said they were concerned about the inspector general's inability to obtain the e-mails.

"We are troubled by this incident, because it represents a loss of information that may have provided greater insight into the development of the draft overview and related memo," the delegation wrote.

"To prevent a further erosion of public confidence in the DOE's site characterization work, we request that you expand the scope of the previous investigation to look at the circumstances of this loss of e-mail."

The GAO is probing allegations of misconduct at the DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, which is overseeing the Yucca Mountain study. The allegations were revealed earlier this year in an anonymous six-page letter from a DOE insider that was circulated on Capitol Hill.

Berkley, meanwhile, sent a separate letter today to Friedman asking him to investigate the circumstances surrounding the missing e-mails, which she maintained likely would have created a "traceable record of bias" toward Yucca Mountain.

Berkley also asked Friedman to turn over all of the documents that his office gathered during its four-month probe.

Wilma Slaughter, a spokeswoman for the inspector general, defended the investigation this morning.

"As stated in our report, our conclusions are based on over 200 interviews of knowledgeable federal and contractor officials, reviews of thousands of pages of relevant documents and our reviews of the activities of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board," Slaughter said. "Our report on this matter speaks for itself."

Slaughter declined comment on whether her office would give Berkley the requested documents.

Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, the state's Yucca Mountain watchdog, suggested JK Research might have intentionally destroyed the e-mails.

"Somebody may have gone to great lengths to keep investigators from seeing all of this," he said. "It doesn't seem inadvertent to me."

Loux said important DOE records have a history of turning up missing during Nevada's longtime battle against Yucca Mountain.

In 1986,when the DOE narrowed the number of nuclear waste dumpsites to three, the DOE told Congress that technical records showing how that decision was made were inadvertently destroyed, Loux said.

A year later Congress passed the "Screw Nevada" bill singling out Yucca Mountain as the lone site in the nation to study, he said.

"If all of the records surrounding the overview and the memo now are gone, then the inspector general really didn't give us an answer to our question," Loux said. "All of this then is nonsense."