Friday, April 29, 2005 | 5:32 a.m.
WEEKEND EDITION
April 30 - May 1, 2005
WASHINGTON -- Nevada's congressional lawmakers say e-mails that suggest Yucca Mountain documents were falsified are solid insider information that could lead to a shutdown of the program.
The e-mails are the "smoking gun" that prove Yucca is a bad place for a nuclear waste repository, Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said.
But it is not clear that the electronic missives herald the beginning of the end for the $58 billion project. Yucca advocates say the e-mails will be just another controversy that blows over in time.
"I think what we have here is wishful thinking on behalf of project opponents," said former Nevada Gov. Bob List, now a consultant for the pro-Yucca nuclear power industry. List says the state should drop its Yucca fight and negotiate for federal benefits.
"They (Congress) have spent $6 billion or $7 billion on this," List said. "They are not just going to walk away from it."
More than 100 e-mails written by scientists working on the proposed dump were released by the Energy Department after officials flagged the documents, noting that the e-mails could be evidence of fabricated work.
Some of the e-mails, written between 1998 and 2000, show a dismissive attitude of the quality assurance process, which is how scientists document and prove their work.
Many of the e-mails deal with how water seeps or moves through the mountain. That's important because scientists were designing ways to protect the stored nuclear waste from the elements, and they needed to know how much water could come through the mountain and from where.
The scientists in some of the e-mails, though, appear to take aim at some of the work.
"I don't want to be too critical here," one scientist wrote in 1998. "I could probably tear apart any of our models."
In a December 1998 e-mail a scientist wrote that the project "has now reached a point where they need to have certain items work no matter what, and the (water) infiltration maps are on that list."
Nevada officials have said the e-mails are "damning" evidence of problems at Yucca Mountain, but their effect on the program cannot be known until several questions are answered:
Could the e-mails indicate flaws in actual science, as Nevada lawmakers suggest?
Are the e-mails gripes of a few disgruntled workers or the first threads of a larger scandal?
And seven years after some of the e-mails were written -- about highly technical issues -- can the full truth ever be known?
One Yucca quality assurance officer put it this way: "This isn't going to be easy, because it is so complicated."
The questions are hard to answer -- for now. Portions of the released e-mails have been redacted, removed by those who released them. The e-mail authors aren't talking. Three investigations are ongoing.
The e-mails themselves reveal only snapshots of moments from Yucca's long history. So it's difficult to know if the e-mails suggest mere paperwork problems or something more serious. It's hard to discern how, or if, flaws have been fixed.
'It's fundamental'
The e-mails are believed to have been authored by U.S. Geological Survey scientists Joe A. Hevesi, Alan L. Flint and Lorraine E. Flint, who were working on studies related to how water would flow into and out of the proposed repository.
The issue could determine whether Yucca could isolate nuclear waste for 10,000 years. Scientists were trying to prove Yucca could meet that standard. Energy Department officials say their scientific studies show that water would not significantly corrode metal containers or carry radioactive material into the environment outside Yucca in that time frame.
Yucca critics strongly disagree.
The e-mails suggest that the hydrologists allowed themselves a "fudge factor" on quality assurance documents, disregarding rules that required them to keep meticulous records of how Yucca data were being collected.
"If they need more proof, I will be happy to make up more stuff," one e-mail says. Another put it simply, "Piss on QA."
That kind of invective is sure to get the attention of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which will examine every facet of quality assurance at Yucca to determine if research data prove the repository to be safe. Quality assurance regulations require managers to keep detailed records about experiments, equipment and collected data. The rules are in place to ensure well-documented and easily defended data.
So while quality assurance may seem like dull bureaucratic busy work, it is key to scientific research. At Yucca, quality assurance will help the Nuclear Regulatory Commission determine whether to grant the repository a license.
Energy Department officials have long understood that quality assurance was a key to the project's future, experts said.
"It's fundamental. All the science has to be backed up -- Who did it? How was it done?" said Greta Joy Dicus, who served on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for seven years until 2003. "It's clearly core to the entire process."
But some Yucca critics said there was a "culture" of frustration among Yucca scientists who tried to conduct solid research but were under tremendous deadline and budget pressure from the Energy Department and contractors of project manager Bechtel SAIC, which were in turn under pressure from Congress and the nuclear industry.
"They started cutting corners," said Washington attorney Joseph Egan, who represents Nevada on the issue.
Tremendous pressure
At the time the e-mails were written, Energy Department managers were weak, "almost a joke," charged former Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner Victor Gilinsky, now a consultant for Nevada.
Some resented having to adhere to time-consuming, strict quality assurance rules, he said. So sometimes they didn't, even though the regulations are "elementary" to a massive project such as Yucca, Gilinsky said.
Yucca critics point to a number of examples of alleged quality assurance breakdowns. Three e-mails written by Energy Department employee James Raleigh in 2000 indicate scientific equipment -- in one case, a pressure-measuring device -- was not calibrated while it was being used. At least one equipment procurement record "gives the appearance that it was falsified," one of his e-mails said.
"If you don't keep track of things like dates and calibrations of equipment, you don't know what you have," Gilinsky said. "On the basis of what we know, you can't have confidence in the science -- good or bad. You can't have confidence in the numbers."
Gilinsky suspects scientists were likely under pressure to conduct studies that helped the Energy Department make a case in support of Yucca.
"Scientists just don't behave this way unless they are under tremendous pressure," Gilinsky said. "They don't make stuff up. You get the feeling of an atmosphere that is not conducive to doing scientific work."
The fact that department officials disclosed the e-mails indicates they suspect they have a big problem, Gilinsky said. They could have quietly cleaned up a small mess, but this one probably is viewed as potentially too big to keep under wraps, he said.
"If you start looking at it, it will get worse," Gilinsky said. "And right now they are trying to figure out if they can stitch it all together."
Department officials say they have launched an in-depth investigation of the e-mails. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman sought to stem a controversy in March by promptly announcing a probe by the department's inspector general.
Department officials and industry leaders have urged critics not to jump to conclusions about how widespread alleged document falsifying might have been.
"These e-mails are part of the back-and-forth that is reflective of any collaborative scientific process," department spokeswoman Anne Womack Kolton told the Sun.
All Yucca science and safety issues will be fully reviewed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Womack added.
Culture clash
What an investigator delving into the late-1990s might find was a clash of cultures between two well-meaning sides -- "brilliant and creative" scientists who were focused on their research, and managers who were trying to get them to comply better with quality assurance requirements, said a former Energy Department Yucca manager, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Yucca budget cuts in Congress, typically negotiated by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., sometimes led scientists to spend less time and attention on quality assurance, the former manager claimed.
"When the budgets were cut, the program focused on sound science priorities, with less emphasis on regulatory documentation," the former manager said.
The former manager believes the truth about alleged falsifications will come out, at least by the time the Nuclear Regulatory Commission conducts its yearslong review of Yucca documents. In the meantime, the FBI is investigating as are the inspectors general for the Interior and Energy departments.
"No program in the history of the world has been documented like this program," the former manager said.
'Not convinced'
The e-mails do not indicate that any science was compromised, said a current Yucca quality assurance auditor who also requested anonymity. The official said no falsified work has surfaced in the years that the official has worked on Yucca, which date from before 1998.
"I'm not convinced there is any there," the auditor said. "But I'm not saying that there isn't."
The official noted a number of internal audits over the years have outlined quality assurance failures in the program.
"We were trying to make sure that the work was good by the time it got to the site recommendation" -- in 2002, when then-Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham recommended Yucca as the nuclear waste repository to President Bush, the auditor said. "And we did find a lot of things."
Allison Macfarlane, a research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has studied Yucca, agreed the e-mails do not necessarily indicate actual scientific data was falsified.
"What they indicate is a screwed up management system," she said.
Scientists at Yucca wanted "to do good work," Macfarlane said, but program managers hampered their ability to do that amid budget and deadline crunches. It was the program managers who ultimately allowed quality assurance to slip, she said.
Big improvements?
Energy Department officials say Yucca managers have made significant improvements to the quality assurance program, an assertion backed by nuclear industry officials.
The e-mails are not a "smoking gun," said Steve Kraft, director of waste management of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's lobbying arm. The department will resolve the issue to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's satisfaction, and Yucca will continue to move forward, he predicted.
It's possible that the allegedly falsified documents have been caught and fixed during previous Energy Department internal reviews of research and data, Kraft said.
Nuclear industry officials have said the Energy Department has undergone a "cultural shift" in recent years, especially as former department Yucca director Margaret Chu sought to re-direct the focus from scientific study to obtaining a license. Chu, who was Yucca chief for three years before resigning in February, put special emphasis on quality assurance, Kraft said.
"They have improved a great deal," he said.
In general, industry officials seem unconcerned about the e-mails.
When a new coalition of pro-Yucca nuclear and utility groups launched a new Yucca Mountain Task Force on Monday, leaders shrugged off questions about the e-mails. They said they are more concerned about budget shortfalls and the radiation standard under revision by the Environmental Protection Agency, they said.
Terry Freese, Nuclear Energy Institute director of legislative programs, said Nevada officials have overstated the effects of the e-mails.
Water-cooler talk
List said that in a worst-case scenario, the Energy Department faces redoing some work.
"My reading is that this will be dealt with and in the end it will all blow over," List said. "Frankly, it comes across to me as being in the category of water-cooler talk -- the kind of chatter that in the old days people exchanged on a coffee break."
List expects that between department investigators and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the controversy is certain to be "run to the ground."
The commission won't treat alleged document falsifications lightly, especially since the Energy Department has been under intense pressure to reform quality assurance by the commission, the Government Accountability Office and the Energy Department's own auditors.
Fed up with a lack of progress, the commission in May 2003 gave the department 30 days to prove its quality assurance program could work.
"Quality is not being built into the project," then-commission management leader John Greeves said, scolding Energy officials in a meeting.
An April 2004 GAO report cited "persistent" quality assurance problems, noting that audits revealed "some data sets could not be traced back to their sources, model development and validation procedures were not followed and some processes for software development and validation were inadequate or not followed."
Yucca advocates say the Energy Department has implemented changes that have dramatically improved quality assurance.
But Yucca critics aren't buying that. The e-mails likely are not an isolated case of worker griping, critics say.
"I suspect that the three individuals in question are just the tip of the iceberg," Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., said at a press briefing. Porter, chairman of a House subcommittee on the federal workforce and agency organization, is leading a probe of the e-mails.
The e-mail controversy will grow, not fade, Nevada officials say. Quality assurance failures over the years throw into question the results of scientific research on which the Energy Department has based its most fundamental case: that Yucca Mountain is safe.
"This is the most substantive evidence we've had that the program is bad and not based on science," Reid said. "There's not even anything close."
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