Bodman refuses to halt Yucca

Suzanne Struglinski

Wednesday, May 11, 2005 | 10:59 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said he will not halt the Yucca Mountain project and has not seen any evidence of compromised science, despite Nevada lawmakers who say project worker e-mails suggest Yucca data is flawed.

Nevada lawmakers have said the recently surfaced e-mails may be enough evidence to kill the proposed nuclear waste repository program. But Bodman brushed that notion aside Tuesday after a tense meeting with the lawmakers.

Bodman seems to have already decided that the e-mails are not ultimately damaging to the project, four of the lawmakers said. Bodman also refused to hand over some Yucca documents that have not been made public that Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., has requested, they said.

Porter, chairman of a House subcommittee that is investigating the Yucca e-mails, said he is mulling the option of using a congressional subpoena to obtain the documents as part of the investigation.

"Up until this moment with the secretary, I was under the assumption that when we ask for documents and they asked for additional time, that it was in good faith," Porter said Tuesday after the meeting. "It is obvious to me today that he does not have the intention of releasing documents to the committee."

Porter's panel is a subcommittee of the House Government Reform Committee. That panel's chairman, Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., has the power to subpoena without the vote of his whole committee. Porter's chief of staff Windsor Freemyer said Davis and Porter have discussed the option several times and Davis would agree to subpoena, but only as a last resort.

Using a subpoena to obtain documents likely would have a chilling effect on the relationship between Porter's panel and the Energy Department. Porter wants to make sure he knows exactly what documents he wants before taking that step, he said.

Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., said Nevada's lawmakers were "dismayed" by the meeting with Bodman, which was held in the office of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

"They have already decided upon the end result and they are going to structure whatever they say, whatever they do or whatever documents may say or show to that end result," Gibbons said. "It gets down to playing hardball. We control their funding, they have to be willing to work with Congress."

Reid said Bodman was "not apologetic at all to us" and the implications for the project's budget or status "was of no interest to him."

Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., scoffed at the Energy Department's explanation that the reason it had not shared public documents with Porter's committee was that it did not know which ones to send.

The atmosphere of the meeting quickly turned chilly, Nevada participants said. The lawmakers said they were surprised Bodman did not show more interest in their concerns.

"I don't know if he just needs better skills on Capitol Hill or what," Ensign said. "He just brushed it off like it was really no big deal. He looked very biased in this investigation."

The delegation had asked the department to stop work on the project until Energy and Interior Department inspector general investigations had ended, but Bodman refused. The Energy Department is in the midst of its own investigation into the e-mails, which Bodman said were primarily written by two U.S. Geological Survey scientists working on the project.

The e-mails, written between 1998 and 2000, suggest quality assurance documents were falsified. But Bodman said he had not seen any evidence of compromised scientific data. The department announced in March that it had discovered the e-mails.

"Until the work is completed, I have not yet formed a judgment on the validity or lack of validity of the science that underlies the application, the potential application for a license," Bodman said. "Everybody is working hard in an effort to make that determination. I simply don't have information one way or another."

Bodman said his department's internal investigation is aimed at determining the impact that the e-mails have had on the science that supports a Yucca license application. The Energy Department aims to submit its application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by year's end. The application proves Yucca is a safe place to construct a national nuclear waste burial ground, department officials say.

"I do not consider Yucca Mountain to be dead," Bodman said. "Until I see something that indicates to me that the science of this project has been compromised, we are going to continue to go forward as planned."

The Nevada lawmakers said the meeting left them with the conclusion that the department's position is already set despite the investigations.

"I think he (Bodman) is under the assumption that they are OK," Porter said. "I think he has already made up his mind. Not unlike the science to date, I think they have already come to a conclusion and now they are building a case to get to that conclusion."

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., did not attend the meeting due to a family medical emergency. Her oldest son had an emergency appendectomy Tuesday morning.