WASHINGTON -- A final Department of Energy report issued Tuesday blamed top Yucca Mountain managers for the scandal in which several scientists appeared to suggest in e-mails that they were making up data and falsifying documents. Senior management failed to hold workers accountable and to put effective reviews in place to ensure their work met quality assurance standards, the report said. Fallout from the e-mails that were written between 1998 and 2004 by hydrologists assigned by the U.S. Geological Survey helped tie up the chronically delayed nuclear waste project since they were revealed two years ago this month.

The explosive messages prompted inquiries by Congress, raising questions about Department of Energy management and government science, and giving repository critics clips of ammunition to challenge the proposed Nevada repository. "Wait till they figure out that nothing I've provided them is QA (quality assurance). If they really want the stuff, they'll have to pay to do it right," stated one message that contributed to the furor.

By Department of Energy estimates, the episode has cost $25.6 million for investigations and do-overs of key computer models. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the report will not put the e-mail controversy to rest. "Far from it," Reid said. "This report only highlights the fact that senior managers of the Yucca Mountain project were out of touch and failed to do their jobs. "This is unacceptable when you consider the fact that we are talking about 77,000 tons of the most dangerous substance known to man," Reid said."This report is too little, too late," said Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., who convened several hearings on the e-mails as a House subcommittee chairman in 2005 and 2006. An internal department review team focused on 18 e-mails written by the hydrologists and sampled more than 900,000 other e-mails using word searches looking for similar problems. Reviewers found no evidence that information was falsified as the e-mails suggested, according to the department's review. Five other suspicious e-mails were uncovered and checked out.

The report did not find that negative attitudes toward quality assurance were widespread among scientists and engineers. But it concluded that top level Yucca officials did a poor job managing for quality. "The real root cause of the problems came back to the senior management and their unwillingness to hold people accountable to quality assurance requirements, a lack of leadership," said Ward Sproat, who heads the Yucca project as director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management. The findings echoed government audits that warned of persistent weaknesses in quality assurance, an important and meticulous record keeping process that enables research to be validated.

"The GAO must have 20 reports on Yucca Mountain, and almost all talk about management not making a commitment known to the people below them on this issue," said Bob Loux, director of the Nevada Office of Nuclear Projects. Sproat, a former nuclear industry executive and consultant, took over the Yucca program last year and has embarked on a series of reforms to the project, which is years behind schedule. In a presentation at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Sproat said Yucca Mountain has been marked by top level mishandling of quality assurance since the early 1990s, when the project was taking shape.

"I would not use the word 'indictment,' but I would say that a lot of folks who were in the director's position had not been involved in the nuclear industry and don't understand the importance of quality assurance and how to apply it," Sproat said after his presentation. Sproat said most of the managers in place when the e-mails were written are no longer with the project, as well as the e-mail authors. He said no dismissals or reassignments were planned as a result of the new findings. Sproat said he was meeting with workers to discuss his expectations. He said pay raises for managers would be tied to progress in identifying and fixing mistakes. Apart from the ongoing corrective actions, the report brings to a close the Energy Department's investigations of the e-mails.

The messages raised suspicions that data may have been manipulated and documents may have been falsified by hydrologists frustrated with the requirements for a computer model they were preparing to project how water flows through the mountain. "Once more we see the history of mismanagement at Yucca Mountain and an inability on the part of DOE to follow quality assurance procedures, which has been a chronic problem for years," said Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev.

WASHINGTON -- A former Yucca Mountain director said Thursday that flagging "political will" threatens to sink the proposed Nevada repository, but he maintained the project is worth fixing as the best solution for nuclear waste storage. "I think the program is in jeopardy," said Lake Barrett, an Energy Department manager who retired in 2002. "Everybody recognizes the political problems, which are real and they want to find a, quote, better way. "I would like to find a better way, but we should not lose what we have until we have a better way in hand," Barrett said.

Barrett discussed the Yucca project in an interview that came on the heels of an opinion article he wrote that was published Thursday in Energy Daily, a widely read newsletter. Apart from science presentations, the former DOE official's remarks were his first public comments on Yucca Mountain policy since he left the department. He was principal deputy director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management from 1993 to 2002, and stepped in as acting director five times. Barrett was running the program in 2002 when President Bush and Congress formalized the selection of the Yucca site. Since then, the repository has been mired in delays amid legal, financial and management setbacks that have pushed a projected opening to 2017 and beyond. In Energy Daily, Barrett wrote that Congress singling out Nevada for nuclear waste in 1987 "was detrimental" and set the stage for years of conflict between the federal government and the state.

"But the fact is that Yucca Mountain is as good an overall site as can be found in the United States for long-term nuclear materials management," he wrote. "There has been nothing scientifically discovered indicating the site should be disqualified." Barrett said he decided to speak out after Edward McGaffigan, a departing member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told reporters last month that DOE should set aside the Yucca site and "go back to the beginning" in search of a repository solution that could be sold to states willing to host a site. "I believe this nation needs to address these issues fairly, but not by abandoning the only site we have," Barrett said in response. He said he supported forming a high-level commission to examine the project, but in ways to improve the current program rather than scrapping it. "A fundamental rewrite and do-over would not be helpful," he said.

In the interview, Barrett said the "political will" for Yucca Mountain among its traditional supporters has been tested by the rise of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, the project's most powerful critic."Mr. Reid is a powerful individual and wields a tremendous amount of influence," Barrett said. "It is very difficult for people to stand up."

WASHINGTON -- The state of Nevada plans today to unveil a report that argues the true cost of a Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository "vastly exceeds" that of leaving radioactive waste at reactor sites for the foreseeable future. In the latest move to raise questions about the Yucca site, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, state officials commissioned an economic analysis they said shows more savings the longer spent fuel is kept on site. "The cost savings of storage relative to constructing Yucca increase the longer the repository is delayed," a summary states. Over 200 years, it would be cheaper by $24.1 billion to store waste at reactors than to build the Nevada repository, the study concludes. The study assumes that by then alternatives to Yucca Mountain will have been discovered or developed, making the Nevada site unnecessary. The Energy Department was forwarded a copy of the report Wednesday but had no comment.

The study, performed by Nevada technical consultant Michael Thorne, applies a "discount rate" accounting principle to DOE-estimated costs to build the repository versus keeping waste on site. The principle holds that a dollar spent today is worth more than a dollar spent tomorrow. Bob Loux, director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, said the White House budget office requires agencies to incorporate such discount rates into long-term projects, but he said the Energy Department for some reason did not do that for Yucca Mountain.

DOE in 2002 estimated a Yucca Mountain repository will cost $58 billion to build and operate while dry cask storage would cost $4 million per reactor per year, multiplied by 103 active plants, more costly in the long run, according to the report. "DOE did a faulty analysis that illustrated reactor storage was vastly more expensive than Yucca Mountain, but when you apply the discount rates that they were required to do the numbers come out differently," Loux said. "I would say take these same assumptions and run them through OMB or GAO or CBO and they will show these numbers are not cooked in any way," said Loux, referring to government financial agencies.

Brian O'Connell, an executive who monitors Yucca Mountain financial matters, said the analysis could prove helpful to explore long-term repository costs, an area where there still is much uncertainty. "It is the first such calculation I have seen using discount cost methodology," said O'Connell, nuclear waste manager for the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. O'Connell added that cost is only one among several reasons the government and industry have advanced for building a repository.

WASHINGTON -- The Department of Energy scaled back its planned Yucca Mountain spending in a 2008 budget it announced Monday, delaying railroad designs and deferring advanced research while focusing on forming a license application for the nuclear waste site. Department leaders sent Congress a budget requesting $494.5 million for the proposed waste repository in the year that begins Oct. 1.

It was the smallest Yucca Mountain request since fiscal 2002, and $50 million below what the Bush administration budgeted last year for 2007. That request has not been finalized on Capitol Hill, although lawmakers appeared to be settling on $445 million. "The goal is to try to create a license application in the next 18 months, that is really what the focus is," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said of Yucca at a budget briefing. "There are various other aspects we are not pursuing."

Bodman said the project is not being scaled back."It is a matter of looking in realistic ways as to where our opportunities are," he said. "It is not a matter of retrenching, it is a matter of try to recognize our priorities." Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., a repository critic, said, "I promise the highest congressional scrutiny for this waste of taxpayer dollars." Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., another critic, said the budget for the much-delayed repository was "reckless." "To ask for an additional dime for this doomed project is not only fiscally irresponsible but an insult to the residents of Nevada," Porter said.

The DOE budget contains $2.5 million for the state of Nevada to fund its own Yucca oversight programs, and $1.5 million for Nye County, where the site is located. Nye County, Clark County and other Nevada counties that border Nye, plus Inyo County in California, would split another $4 million. Within the $494.5 million request, DOE officials said they plan to allocate $131 million on completing a voluminous license application by a self-declared June 30, 2008, deadline. Another $195.2 million is budgeted to continue designing an above-ground complex where highly radioactive waste would be managed before being placed in the mountainside.

On the other hand, designs for a railroad line DOE wants to build to the Yucca site were cut back by $22 million, while spending was deferred on development of rail cars and early purchase of waste casks, a cut of $30.8 million. Research into specialty metals and other advanced technologies that might be integrated into the repository effort also was deferred. But the budget does contain $2 million for a study ordered by Congress on whether a second repository should be built, and where.

Project director Ward Sproat said Yucca Mountain was pressed by Bush administration demands to keep spending under control and to lower the federal deficit. Spending for railroad designs became expendable for now, he said, because DOE has not yet decided on competing railroad corridors to the repository site. A draft environmental impact study is expected this summer comparing an east-west corridor from Caliente to Yucca Mountain with a north-south corridor through Western Nevada.

WASHINGTON -- Ed McGaffigan, a veteran member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said Monday that the Yucca Mountain program is deeply flawed and that the Nevada nuclear waste site should be scrapped.

"It may be time to stop digging, and it may be time to rethink," McGaffigan said in a critique of the Energy Department program as he prepares to retire from the five-member commission that regulates nuclear safety.Speaking to a group of reporters, the official said the Nevada site probably could be licensed "if it had been handled properly through the years."But he said it has been doomed by failures in Congress to correct flaws in nuclear waste laws and by Energy Department missteps, including appointment of some directors "who really weren't cut out for the job." "I think Yucca Mountain has been beset by bad law, bad regulatory policy, bad science policy, bad personnel policy, bad budget policy throughout its history," McGaffigan said. "Every time somebody has done something to try to speed things up, it has backfired. "Each year that passes, we are not going to get any closer to Yucca under the current circumstances," McGaffigan said. The Energy Department has projected a 2017 repository opening, but he said 2025-2027 would be more realistic.

McGaffigan, 58, has been an NRC commissioner since 1996, making him the longest-serving member in the agency's 32-year history.He is undergoing treatment for metastatic melanoma, an aggressive cancer that he has said he does not expect to defeat. McGaffigan, who is a physicist, has questioned the Yucca program in the past. But his comments Monday were among the strongest and most direct of any federal official watching over the project.

In another instance, physicist Paul Craig resigned from the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, a DOE advisory group, in 2004 to speak out against what he saw as safety and design flaws in the proposed repository. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has monitored DOE's work at the Nevada site, and its leaders would pass judgment on the repository's safety and operational plan when the department submits an application for a license. McGaffigan's views were embraced by critics of the Yucca program, although some wondered why he waited to make them public. McGaffigan said he felt free to speak as a private citizen as his NRC tenure comes to an end.

Energy Department spokesman Craig Stevens said the criticism from McGaffigan was "highly predictable." "It is good that we are going to get somebody new with open eyes to look at this at the NRC," Stevens said, referring to McGaffigan's successor who has not yet been named. McGaffigan "is tainted in our view," Stevens said. "We believe there is no better place to store spent nuclear fuel than in the middle of the desert in the belly of a mountain," Stevens said.

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said she plans to broadcast McGaffigan's views to other lawmakers as Congress resumes debate on nuclear waste disposal. "This is akin to the generals who are leaving Iraq and speaking their minds once they are in a position to do so," Berkley said. McGaffigan "is serving in a very important position where he has had an opportunity over a period of time to get input from both sides, and he has come out squarely against Yucca Mountain."

Michele Boyd, energy legislative director at the Public Citizen, a watchdog group that opposes the repository, called McGaffigan's comments "stunning."

But, Boyd said, "I find it disturbing that he waited until he was leaving office to start saying these things. The bottom line is that these facts about the dubiousness of the project should have been brought up before." McGaffigan said the Energy Department was able to open the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico because the state thought development of the nuclear mixed-waste site was a fair process. That was not the case in Nevada, which was singled out for high-level nuclear waste by Congress in a 1987 law known as the "Screw Nevada" bill, he said. Now given opposition from Nevada leaders, McGaffigan said the department has "no chance" to get Congress to pass legislation it needs to fix the Yucca program. He said DOE officials knew as far back as the Clinton administration they were going to run into problems with land withdrawals, water rights and exemptions for toxic waste handling at Yucca Mountain.

The department did not pursue solutions aggressively because, McGaffigan said he was told, the department's thinking was that Nevada was going to back down eventually. McGaffigan endorsed formation of a government-chartered corporation with a bipartisan board of directors to run the repository project and bring in long-term managers rather than political appointees."You have to have people who are going to be there for a while, who can approach the issue analytically and not emotionally," McGaffigan said. "Having these rotating sets of leaders doesn't serve anybody's interest."

In the meantime, he said, "I think realistically we should be starting to look at other sites." "We have to look, and maybe we can create incentives and find a state, if it is a fair process, but it would have to be a fair process."

WASHINGTON -- The state of Nevada is challenging the Department of Energy's newest blueprints for Yucca Mountain that would allow large amounts of nuclear waste to be "aged" onsite before being buried inside the mountain. The protest aims at DOE plans to pour concrete pads on which nuclear fuel would be kept in reinforced containers for varying amounts of time before being wheeled into repository tunnels.

Although some above-ground components may be necessary, a DOE-designed aging facility with a waste capacity of 21,000 metric tons is "gigantic" and "goes far beyond what Congress authorized" for normal operations, according to state officials. In Nevada, officials charge that DOE is planning an end-run around a federal law that forbids nuclear waste from being placed in temporary "monitored retrievable storage" at the Yucca site in order to speed its removal from commercial power plants.

Under DOE's design, the amount of nuclear waste that could be stored above ground at Yucca Mountain is "more than five times" the amount that could be moved into the mountain in any one year, state officials said. "Clearly, DOE's proposed 'aging facility' is nothing more than an unlawful MRS (monitored retrievable storage), in embarrassingly thin disguise," state officials said in documents obtained Thursday that were scheduled to be filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. DOE officials previously have explained the aging pads are part of a "thermal loading" strategy, where the heat loads of the highly radioactive waste would be allowed to "cool" and be brought into balance before canisters are placed in the tunnels. The aging pads would cover about 75 acres and are being designed to hold 2,500 canisters, DOE spokeswoman Gayle Fisher said Thursday. She added DOE is considering whether to reduce the pad size to 45 acres.

Fisher said DOE systems engineers determined the capacity of the pads after taking into account the rates at which nuclear waste containers arrive at Yucca Mountain and could be handled at the site. But Nevada leaders and representatives of environmental groups that oppose the repository say nuclear waste stored atop Yucca Mountain could remain there indefinitely if problems develop underground.

On the mountain surface, the containers would be vulnerable to earthquakes, plane crashes or terrorist attacks, they said. "It would be a giant radioactive bull's-eye," said Kevin Kamps, waste specialist with the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. "If you concentrate it in one space you are just asking for trouble." DOE has said it plans to move nuclear waste into a Yucca repository at a rate of 3,000 tons annually, said Steve Frishman, a technical adviser to the state of Nevada. An aging system with a capacity of 21,000 metric tons would amount to seven years' worth of waste sitting atop the mountain, he said. Nevada attorneys on Friday planned to urge the NRC to set limits on how much nuclear waste could be stored above ground at Yucca Mountain.

The state will ask the NRC to decree that no waste would be allowed at Yucca Mountain unless there was "reasonable assurance" that it could be moved underground within a year, according to a copy of the petition. "Clearly, spent fuel can more easily be 'aged' where it is currently safely located -- on reactor and spent fuel storage sites," the petition states.

WASHINGTON -- While the Department of Energy has set a target month of March 2017 for Yucca Mountain to begin receiving nuclear waste, the project director said Wednesday it "most probably" won't be opened until at least three years later. Anticipated lawsuits by Nevada or others challenging a license for the Yucca site will account for the delays, Ward Sproat, director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, said in a presentation to a nuclear studies panel of the National Academies of Science.

"Bottom line is while that (2017) is a best achievable schedule, the most probable schedule is probably in the neighborhood of ... plus three and a half years," Sproat said.

Sproat's prediction did not take into account the possibility of even further delays from budget cuts and other obstacles that newly empowered Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., a leading critic of the nuclear dump, has said he will put in the Energy Department's path when Democrats take over Congress in January. Talking with reporters after his presentation, Sproat said he has not calculated and would not guess how the new makeup of Capitol Hill may affect the program, including chances to pass a bill that the Energy Department has said is crucial to keep Yucca Mountain moving forward. "I just don't know," Sproat said. "It is not my area of speculation how to get legislation through the Hill."

Elsewhere, the department took a step on another front Wednesday when it issued specifications for new multi-purpose canisters in which nuclear waste would be loaded at reactors, transported across the country and stored at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Nuclear industry vendors were invited to fabricate designs based on the specifications for 17.6-foot-long alloy containers that would weigh 54 tons when loaded with radioactive spent fuel. The containers would be 5.5 feet in diameter.

The Energy Department plans to buy 7,300 of the "transportation, aging and disposal" containers. Department official Christopher Kouts declined to estimate total costs, saying that could affect negotiations with vendors. Sproat's appearance before the nuclear studies board marked the first public showing by a Yucca Mountain manager since the Nov. 7 elections that propelled Democrats into control of the House and Senate. Speaking to the academy panel, a congressional official said House support for Yucca Mountain generally crosses party lines and is not expected to diminish much.

But in the Senate, Reid will become majority leader with stronger powers to influence the nuclear waste debate, said Kevin Cook, Republican clerk on the House energy and water development subcommittee.

"The reality is Nevada holds a stronger hand now because of Senator Reid's position," Cook said.

The day after the elections, Reid said as majority leader he would not allow bills on the Senate floor that would speed Yucca Mountain development or clear away obstacles. The Bush administration has proposed a "fix Yucca bill" that would authorize a land withdrawal, revamp the project's financing and broaden DOE powers to claim the necessary permits and manage transportation and toxic waste at the site in order to move the project forward. Sproat testified to the Senate in August there was "zero" chance for DOE to meet deadlines if the "fix Yucca" bill does not pass. Reid also said he would seek deeper spending cuts in the Yucca program. Congress has approved budgets of between $450 million and $500 million for the project in recent years, which Reid said "are not acceptable to me." Future spending "will be cut back significantly, that will be for sure," he said.

A congressional official familiar with the budget process said Reid's insistence of deeper cuts may prove persuasive. "If DOE is saying 2017 at the earliest, and Senator Reid is saying never, people are going to ask questions whether it (Yucca Mountain) is still worth spending $500 million a year on," said the official who asked not to be identified