Yucca nuclear report's facts faked - Bush Energy Dept. says it's 'sound'

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02/18/2006 12:00 AM PST

Nuclear report's facts faked

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Work on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump, though performed by federal employees who apparently made up facts, was scientifically sound, an Energy Department report said Friday.

The Energy Department released the 144-page report nearly a year after disclosing the existence of e-mails written by U.S. Geological Survey hydrologists indicating they fabricated facts, deleted inconvenient data and kept one set of documents for themselves and another for quality assurance officials.

The e-mails were written from 1998 through 2004 by scientists using computer models to determine how quickly precipitation could make its way through the dump site in the desert 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The dump is planned as a national repository for 77,000 tons of used commercial reactor fuel and defense waste now waiting at sites in 39 states.

However, Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico will redo the computer models because quality assurance rules weren't complied with, Golan said.

"The DOE, which failed to prevent the falsification of scientific data on Yucca Mountain projects in the first place, now wants us to believe that the falsifications made no difference in the quality of the work. That's absurd," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said in a joint press release with Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev.

story: http://www.presstelegram.com/news/ci_3521470