Investigative team to see if documents violated laws

Thursday, Jan. 4, 2001 | 11:20 a.m.

A team of federal investigators is expected in Las Vegas next month to begin probing whether federal laws were broken in the drafting of Department of Energy documents recommending Yucca Mountain as the nation's high-level nuclear waste dump.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., who requested the investigation, told the Sun this morning that the DOE's inspector general, Gregory Friedman, is "assembling a team" to come to Las Vegas.

"They should be there by the first week in February," Reid said from Washington. "They've been asked to look at all of the correspondence, all of the briefing materials -- any evidence of bias that would favor Yucca Mountain."

Reid said he anticipated the investigation will not be a quick one.

"This isn't something they can do in a few days," he said. "It's going to take a matter of months. It's a big project."

Reid sent a letter to Friedman last month asking him to investigate the circumstances surrounding the preparation of documents that suggested Yucca Mountain is safe to store radioactive waste, even though lengthy studies of the Nevada site haven't been completed.

Reid said the documents appeared to show the DOE collaborating with its chief Yucca Mountain contractor, TRW Environmental Safety Systems Inc., to win approval for the Nevada site, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"An insidious DOE and DOE contractor bias in favor of rubber-stamping the Yucca Mountain site characterization process has been a problem for years," Reid wrote Friedman. "These documents suggest that any public pretense of impartiality has been abandoned by the (DOE) and DOE contractors."

Reid's request for an investigation was prompted by a Dec. 1 Sun story that had disclosed the DOE documents.

The Sun reported that it had obtained a 60-page draft of a DOE overview on Yucca Mountain declaring the site suitable for nuclear waste storage.

The newspaper also obtained a two-page memo, allegedly written by TRW, that suggested the overview could be used to help the nuclear industry sell Yucca Mountain to Congress.

The DOE had been preparing to make a recommendation on Yucca Mountain's suitability in June, but the decision has been delayed because of the inspector general's investigation.

Outgoing Energy Secretary Bill Richardson has disavowed the memo and joined Reid in calling for the probe.

Amid the furor created by documents, Richardson last month issued a public statement insisting that the site for a repository will be determined by sound science.

Yucca Mountain is the only site under study to store the nation's high-level nuclear waste.