NRC won’t get involved in current Yucca probe

Suzanne Struglinski

Wednesday, April 20, 2005 | 9:35 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will not get involved with ongoing investigations on possible falsified scientific data at the Yucca Mountain project.

The commission staff has no plans for any reviews at this time, an official told the Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste. Speaking to the committee, Nevada officials emphasized the e-mails' relevance to the underlying science on proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The department announced last month it discovered e-mails sent by U.S. Geological Survey employees that indicate some scientific data for the repository may have been falsified.

The House Federal Workforce and Agency Organization Subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., released redacted versions of the e-mails earlier this month showing employees writing about "fudging" information and their disdain for the quality assurance program.

Quality assurance is a progam designed to document and verify scientific conclusions drawn by the department.

The Energy and Interior departments' Inspector General offices are conducting investigations in conjunction with the FBI and U.S. attorney's office in Las Vegas. The Energy Department will also do its own review of the data involved, although Nevada officials and other Yucca critics want an independent commission to review the science.

C. William Reamer, director of the NRC's high-level waste management division, told the committee Monday he and his staff would "monitor closely" and "monitor intelligently" as more information on the investigation and underlying problem becomes available.

Reamer told the committee that the commission has consistently told the department that quality assurance was important.

"Historically, the department has had problems," Reamer said.

Commission staff members have done reviews of the program before but Reamer said there are no plans for any new ones or involvement in investigations.

On Tuesday, Attorney Martin Malsch, of Egan, Fitzpatrick, Malsch & Cynkar, the law firm hired by the state to handle Yucca issues, gave the committee a copy of testimony from a congressional hearing earlier this month that contained copies of e-mails the legal team have discovered on their own.

Malsch reminded the committee that these e-mails only came to light because an administrative court agreed with Nevada's objection to the department's original document database. The department did not want to review thousands of e-mails, but then discovered the messages while going through them to put in the new database.

He read excerpts from some messages that said fixing problems would be too expensive and employees should not use the word "violate" in reports to avoid a negative connotation.

Rod McCullum, senior project manager for waste at the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's trade group, said after the meeting that he has seen some of the messages but that there has been a "tremendous cultural shift in the last five years."

While he did not want to speak for the department or prejudge anything that might come out of the investigations, McCullum said the department has already reviewed a large amount of its past work so the data in question may have already been fixed and survey of employees have shown there is a better working environment.