To anyone who's followed the saga of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas,
today's news will come as no surprise.
WASHINGTON (AP) E-mails by several government scientists on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump project suggest workers were planning to fabricate records and manipulate results to ensure outcomes that would help the project move forward.
Yes, despite the fact that Congress approved the Yucca plan in 2002, concerns lingered about both the validity of the pro-Yucca lobby's scientific claims as well as the potential for disaster inherent in transporting thousands of tons of live nuclear waste from New York to the Nevada desert down Interstate 80.
But the caught-red-handed nature of today's news is, if not surprising, pretty damned entertaining...
"I don't have a clue when these programs were installed.
So I've made up the dates and names," wrote a U.S. Geological Survey employee in one e-mail released Friday by a congressional committee investigating suspected document falsification on the project.
"This is as good as it's going to get. If they need more proof, I will be happy to make up more stuff."
In another message the same employee wrote to a colleague: "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." QA apparently refers to "quality assurance."
[snip]
Many of the dozens of pages of e-mails released appear to involve not initial scientific experiments, but rather attempts to provide documentation of work done in the past. Several include admonitions from the writers to "delete this memo after you've read it" or "please destroy this memo."
[snip]
The e-mails, dating from the Clinton administration, were circulated among a team of USGS scientists studying how water moves through the planned dump site, a key issue in determining whether and how much radiation could escape.
The least surprising element of all of this is the fact that Bush - at the behest of his friends in the nuclear power sector - determined that all safety issues had been addressed and happily signed the bill.
At that time White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said: (July 23, 2002): The successful completion of the Yucca Mountain project will ensure our nation has a safe and secure underground facility that will store nuclear waste in a manner that protects our environment and our citizens.
Here's to all the folks in Nevada who continue to fight this outrageous assault on their futures.