FBI steps into Yucca document investigation

Suzanne Struglinski

Thursday, March 31, 2005 | 11:08 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- The FBI is examining the documents allegedly falsified by government employees working on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, a federal official says.

Chad Bungard, deputy staff director and chief counsel at a House Government Reform subcommittee, said he was told from the beginning of the inspector general investigations at the Interior and Energy departments that the FBI would also be involved.

The FBI press office would not confirm the agency's involvement or comment on the matter. The inspector general offices at each department also would not comment due to ongoing investigations.

Bungard said this will be pursued as a criminal matter until the Justice Department finds otherwise.

"That is why we are only giving our redacted information on Friday. We don't want to compromise anything," Bungard said.

The House Federal Workforce and Agency Organization Subcommittee, of which Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., is chairman, is to hold a hearing April 5 looking at the department's discovery earlier this month of e-mails sent by U.S. Geological Survey employees that suggest they falsified scientific information on how water moves through the mountain.

Water movement is a key issue in determining the proposed repository's safety because it can help radiation move through the mountain and possibly into the groundwater under the mountain.

Porter will review the documents today when he returns to Washington. The department handed them over on Tuesday.

"My instincts tell me this is the tip of the iceberg," Porter said.

The "sound science" argument has been used all along to convince Congress -- and the public -- that the dump plan is safe, but Porter said if the data has been tampered with, it puts the whole project in jeopardy. Porter said that at his hearing he will seek answers to such questions as how long the departments knew about these problems and why changes to data were made.

Rep. Shelley Berkely, D-Nev., said that like Porter she suspects the problems unveiled by the Energy Department go beyond what is known right now, which proves arguments for the last two decades that the project should not move forward.

She said she believes she knows the motives for the alleged falsification.

"When the science didn't match the reality, they used politics to change the science in order to match the reality," she said.

She welcomed the FBI's involvement because tampering with scientific data threatens the future health and safety of Nevadans.

"That someone or a group of people colluded to falsify the scientific data on which the entire Yucca Mountain project is based is nothing less than criminal and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. There is no excuse for it," Berkley said, adding that those responsible should be "put away for a good long time."

Jack Finn, spokesman for Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said Ensign was pleased the FBI was involved, since that is what the senators asked for.

Ensign and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., sent a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller a day after the Energy Department's announcement about the e-mails asking for an investigation and for protection of the documents involved.

Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., believes the FBI will be an "impartial and unbiased" investigator, said spokeswoman Amy Spanbauer. She said the issue is obviously a serious matter that brings the whole integrity of the project into question.

The investigation is the latest stumbling block for Yucca Mountain, which has hit a series of troubles with funding and its planned license application since being approved as the nation's nuclear waste repository.

A federal appeals court found that the Environmental Protection Agency did not follow the law when determining how long the mountain should hold radiation, a key scientific standard. The EPA is now reworking the standard.