Porter postpones Yucca hearing

Suzanne Struglinski

Wednesday, April 13, 2005 | 9:46 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Government employees involved with the allegedly falsified information regarding the Yucca Mountain nuclear dump will not appear at a House hearing that was scheduled for today.

Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., postponed the hearing until further notice. He said Tuesday that the Energy and Interior Departments have not been cooperating with his subcommittee's investigation.

"I am not surprised but extremely disappointed," Porter said.

The Energy Department announced last month that it discovered e-mails written by U.S. Geological Survey employees in which they discuss how they "fudge" or "made up" data on the Yucca Mountain project. The House Federal Workforce and Agency Organization Subcommittee released redacted copies of the e-mails and other government documents earlier this month.

Porter, the subcommittee's chairman, presided over a hearing last week with officials from the Interior and Energy departments and scheduled another hearing to take place this week to continue the discussion.

Porter asked to have three USGS employees, Joe A. Hevesi, Alan L. Flint and Lorraine E. Flint, testify at today's hearing but the Interior Department told him it would not compel them to appear.

Porter sent letters to the three scientists individually asking them to testify. One responded, although declined to come, and he has not heard from the others, he said. He did not identify which person responded.

"Subpoena remains an option and I won't hesitate to use it," Porter said.

At least 10 people are involved with the e-mails, based on what department officials told Porter last week.

The subcommittee lawyers and lawyers for the House Government Reform Committee are still working on their own investigation. Porter said issuing a subpoena "changes the rules" so the timing has to be right and all the information has to be in place. Once a subpoena is issued, an individual can refuse to talk under the Fifth Amendment and Porter said he still wants to be able to talk to the scientists. New information is coming in daily so the committee and subcommittee staff are reaching out to get all they can before taking that step, Porter said.

"Literally, this is just the beginning," Porter said. "It's a first step."

The problems have a long history, however.

Clark County Officials have compiled excerpts of past Government Accountability Office report pointing to past problems with the quality assurance program at the Yucca Mountain project.

The program, known as "QA," is designed to document and verify scientific conclusions drawn by the department. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission would use the documented steps to trace back research on the project the department would use to prove that it is safe.

The e-mail messages released by the committee show authors discussing ways to get around quality assurance steps and a general disdain for the program, with one e-mail saying "Piss on QA."

Clark County Commissioner Rory Reid, the son of Sen. Harry Reid, sent Porter an eight-page digest of GAO reports from 1988, 1991, 1997, 2002, 2003 and 2004 with concerns on quality assurance as well as insistence the process be "sound."

"Rather than being an isolated, recent sequence of events, this information may demonstrate further evidence of a long-standing pattern of blatant disregard for the federal requirements associated with this project, and DOE's (the Energy Department) willingess to defer, delay and deflect its responsibility for meeting those requirements if they impede progress on this misguided project," Rory Reid wrote in a letter to Porter sent Monday.

A report by County Manager Thom Reilly, also sent to Porter, said the quality assurance problems extend as far back as 1984, even before the government singled out Yucca as the only site to be studied as the country's nuclear waste repository.