Govt Employees May Have Falsified Yucca Mtn Docs

WASHINGTON (AP) – Government employees may have falsified documents related to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project in Nevada, the Energy Department said Wednesday. The disclosure could jeopardize the project’s ability to get a federal permit to operate the dump.

During preparation for a license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the department said it found a number of e-mails from 1998 through 2000 in which an employee of the U.S. Geological Survey “indicated that he had fabricated documentation of his work.” …

In a statement, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the development “proves once again that DOE must cheat and lie in order to make Yucca Mountain look safe.”

Chip Groat, director of the Geological Survey, said the e-mails “have raised serious questions about the review process of scientific studies done six years ago.”

The discovery of the e-mails “really casts the project in a real bad light. In lieu of the other problems, it might be the one that pushes it over the edge to cancellation,” said Bob Loux, Nevada state Nuclear Projects director and Gov. Kenny Guinn’s chief anti-Yucca administrator.

Loux said potential water transport – the issue that some of the questionable work apparently involved – is critical for the proposed waste repository. … Word that documents may have been falsified “certainly calls into question DOE’s ability to submit any kind of a license application in the near term,” Loux said.