New York Times
July 21, 2005
by Matthew L. Wald

The House subcommittee that is investigating falsification of research at the government project to bury nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada issued a subpoena to the Energy Department on Wednesday.

In their effort to clarify whether the falsification made the work unreliable, Congressional staff members said they were seeking more technical studies, as well as organizational charts and lists of acronyms. In a dispute that has lasted more than three months, the Energy Department has resisted, and department officials have complained about the committee's earlier release of e-mail messages detailing the falsifications.

In those e-mail messages government workers talked about manipulating their work to meet quality-assurance standards.

Representative Jon Porter, Republican of Nevada, who is chairman of the Subcommittee on the Federal Work Force of the Government Reform Committee, said in a statement, "I will not be deterred by the lack of responsiveness, and remain committed to pursuing and finishing what we began, a thorough and complete investigation of the safety behind the Yucca Mountain project."

A spokesman for the Energy Department, Craig Stevens, said the department had offered to let committee members see the documents, but not to have copies.

"All the documents, everything the chairman has asked for, has been here for him to come down and seek, as well as any member of the committee or staff, to view and take notes on," Mr. Stevens said.

He noted that the department was eight blocks from Capitol Hill.

In a letter to the committee, the department's acting general counsel, Eric J. Fygi, said that the Energy Department would eventually submit much of the material requested to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, to apply for a license, but that it could be subject to attorney-client privilege. A department spokesman said the decision about what could be made public was up to the regulatory commission.

But at the regulatory commission, a spokeswoman, Sue Gagner, said the initial decision to keep material secret would come from the Energy Department. The department could make a list of documents it did not want to disclose, Ms. Gagner said, and if some party to the licensing hearings, like the State of Nevada, wanted to see them, the issue would be decided by regulatory commission hearing officer.

Mr. Stevens of the Energy Department then said that the department wanted to assure the confidentiality of whistle-blowers who had made accusations under promise of anonymity.

He added, "The department has made every effort to provide the information the congressman has requested while ensuring that the documents are handled in a way that does not impair the department's ability to carry out its responsibility under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act."

The Yucca Mountain repository is already far behind schedule; it was supposed to begin accepting waste in 1998 but seems unlikely to do so for many years.

This is a financial problem for the Energy Department because it signed contracts with the companies that run nuclear reactors, promising to take the wastes in exchange for a payment for each kilowatt-hour generated in a reactor.

Now the reactor owners are suing for billions of dollars. But the department is not yet ready to file an application for a license to operate the repository.

The heart of the issue is government calculations about how fast radioactive material would dissolve into rainwater, percolate through the rock and then travel outside the boundaries of the repository, which is about 100 miles from Las Vegas.

Under the system set up by Congress to develop a burial place for radioactive waste, the Energy Department is supposed to conduct a scientific study and then apply to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license, and persuade the commission that the rate of travel is slow enough so that no one will be exposed to illegal amounts of radiation during the period when regulations apply.

The government has spent more than $6 billion looking for a place to bury nuclear waste.