State officials: DOE’s Yucca woes are ‘tip of the iceberg’

Benjamin Grove and Mary Manning

Tuesday, March 22, 2005 | 11:15 a.m.

Energy Department officials knew they had quality assurance problems with Yucca Mountain documents well before it was disclosed last week, according to internal department documents.

Document review memos from 2000 also suggest that the department may have more than just documentation problems -- several memos indicate that certain scientific data was questionable due to problems with faulty equipment.

"We believe that there is so much faulty QA (quality assurance) stuff in there that we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg," Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency director Bob Loux said.

Energy Department officials last week said that they had unearthed e-mails by U.S. Geological Survey employees working on Yucca that indicated USGS workers had falsified Yucca documents. Both Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman and USGS director Chip Groat directed their agency inspectors general to investigate.

Roughly 20 e-mails sent by a USGS geologist to a supervisor between 1998 and 2000 were discovered by Energy Department contractors on March 11 that indicated documents had been falsified. The e-mails were found as part of a massive review of millions of pages of Yucca documents, as the department prepares to submit an application to construct Yucca.

Bodman disclosed the alleged falsifications last week, but did not release the actual e-mails.

Nevada lawyers, seeking to find the e-mails on a Yucca Mountain document database, uncovered some documents they say are even more damning.

In May and June of 2000 Energy Department employee James Raleigh noted lists of document and data problems in three separate internal reports. He was unavailable for comment.

In several cases, department documents indicate that equipment was calibrated before the calibration equipment had even been received. That "does not appear appropriate," Raleigh noted.

The reports catalog numerous examples of sensitive high-tech equipment not being properly calibrated, which can affect scientific data results.

In one case, the instrument used to calibrate a pressure-measuring device called a transducer was itself not calibrated. "Therefore, the data acquired are not valid," the report states.

In another case, Raleigh noted that calibration weights called "Troemner Weights" were themselves out of calibration and that "no impact evaluation was provided to justify the acceptability of the data obtained with this equipment."

The three reports authored by Raleigh also document a number of simple bookkeeping problems, including missing record numbers, errors in document title fields, even page numbering errors.

Energy Department spokeswoman Anne Womack Kolton stressed that the USGS e-mails and the Raleigh memos were completely separate sets of documents. In the first set, a federal employee allegedly willfully falsified documents, she said.

The second set represent a routine "normal back-and-forth" of information between project managers, she said. It cannot be immediately known how or whether the issues in the Raleigh documents were resolved, she said.

"One would expect that there are a number of documents of this sort, where people are discussing additional questions that need to be addressed," Womack Kolton said.

Loux said that the documents posted on the Yucca Mountain Project Web site are the final versions prepared for submitting a license application to begin building the repository.

"This is the record they intend to submit to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. This is the final record," Loux said.

Before the Raleigh memos, seven pages listing questionable data, equipment not calibrated and missing information from five weather stations used at Yucca Mountain were checked by Energy Department employee Brian Mitcheltree on June 12, 2000.

The U.S. Geological Survey came under fire for not calibrating automated weather stations. Instead, a technician applied "prorated data corrections" to the humidity probes in 1997, after two years' operation in the field, the report shows.

Rain gauges were not calibrated at any of the five stations, although "operational checks" were done on Aug. 14 and 15, 1996, but not in the field before the gauges were removed, the report indicates.

"Data produced by these rain gauges are useable for licensing purposes," the report says.

In an earlier May 10, 2000, memo all review documents for the properties of water are missing as well as all supporting records for future climate analysis.

Egan said that the scientific work under scrutiny in the USGS e-mails and in the Raleigh memo was part of the documentation used to convince President Bush that Yucca Mountain could contain highly radioactive wastes from commercial nuclear reactors and federal Defense Department nuclear weapons development.

Bush recommended the site to Congress, which approved Yucca Mountain as a repository over the veto of Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn in 2002. That decision may have been based on fraudulent information, said Joe Egan, an attorney for Nevada.

"It may be criminal," under federal and state statutes, Egan said.

Egan and a team of experts were examining thousands of documents over the weekend that had been released and posted on a Yucca database by the Energy Department as part of its license application preparations.

Ultimately, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will be responsible for reviewing and acting on the Energy Department's license application, an effort that could take four years.

While the commission has no control over the information the Energy Department is including in its license application, commission staffers are monitoring the application data. The commission staff had questions about missing information, incomplete scientific field notes and flaws in quality assurance at the Yucca Mountain project in the 1990s, said former NRC site representative Bill Belke, who retired in 2001.