Government employees studying whether Yucca Mountain would be a suitable place to bury nuclear waste acknowledged in e-mail messages to each other that they had made up details about how they had done their research in order to appear to meet quality standards, according to some of the e-mails made public on Friday.
Some of the frank exchanges included instructions to erase them.
The Energy Department, which is trying to open a waste repository at the site, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, announced the existence of the e-mail messages two weeks ago.
On Friday, a subcommittee of the House Committee on government Reform released dozens of pages of the messages.
One analyst wrote that a computer program had generated data that he could not explain, so he withheld it from the quality assurance department, known as QA.
"Don't look at the last 4 lines. Those are a mystery," wrote the scientist."
"In the end I keep track of 2 sets of files, the ones that will keep QA happy and the ones that were actually used," he wrote.
B. John Garrick, the chairman of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, a group of independent experts established by Congress to monitor the Energy Department, said it was too soon to draw conclusions but that "it is disturbing to see such loosely framed discussions between scientists."
Falsifying work
The theme running through the messages was that employees were performing work that they did not believe would meet the standards set by the quality assurance inspectors, and were sometimes falsifying their work in ways that they believed would satisfy the inspectors.
One scientist wrote that he feared he would be "taken to the cleaners" by the inspectors because his work did not refer to an established procedure laid out in a scientific notebook, and he asked if he should create such a notebook "and back-date the whole thing??"
`Sound science'
The Energy Department and the White House had said repeatedly that their recommendation of the site was based on "sound science."
"If the project has been based upon science, and the science is not correct, it puts the whole project in jeopardy," Representative Jon Porter of Nevada, a Republican who is a longtime opponent of storing waste at Yucca, said.
"I believe these e-mails show science is not driving the project; it's expedience to get the job done," he said.
In a well-done scientific investigation, he said, the methods used to derive predictions about crucial factors like water infiltration should be transparent and reproducible.
Badly fudged
A lawyer who represents the state of Nevada, Joseph Egan, said that after reading the messages, "You don't know how badly they've fudged this stuff."
Some of the correspondents explicitly discuss problems and say that they do not believe that they make any material difference to the ability of the mountain, a volcanic structure on the edge of the Nevada Test Site, to hold the waste for thousands of years.
To open a repository, the Energy Department must win the approval of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has in the past scuttled some projects because of quality assurance problems.
The subcommittee on the federal workforce, which released the e-mail messages, plans to hold a hearing on Yucca on Tuesday.
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