Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Subpoena on the way for DOE, Porter says

WASHINGTON -- A House committee chairman was readying a subpoena as the Department of Energy missed a deadline Monday for supplying Congress with documents for a Yucca Mountain investigation.

Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., said the chairman of the House Government Reform Committee will issue a subpoena today to break a stalemate in an investigation of worker e-mail messages. The e-mails suggested quality assurance documents might have been falsified on the nuclear waste repository project.

"The Department of Energy has continued to be uncooperative," Porter said after meeting with the chairman, Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va. Porter leads the subcommittee conducting the inquiry.

Energy Department officials had offered to allow Porter and his investigators to review documents at agency headquarters. They have expressed concern that the Nevada lawmaker would make sensitive documents public, which they said could complicate the department's efforts to seek a repository license.

"We have made these documents available over the past three weeks, also offering to make weekend arrangements or evening arrangements for them to see whatever documents they want to see," agency spokesman Craig Stevens said. "They have yet to reach out."

Porter rejected the offer and called it an "insult to Congress."

The seeds of the dispute were planted early in April.

Energy Department officials were said to be angered when, over their objections, Porter released documents given to his federal work force and agency organization subcommittee several weeks after Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman revealed the e-mails.

Since then, an Energy Department investigation has tentatively concluded the allegations in the e-mails did not compromise Yucca Mountain science or decisions by President Bush to designate the Nevada site for nuclear waste burial.

Joseph Hevesi, a hydrologist who wrote many of the e-mails, testified before Congress last month that he did not falsify documents. He said he had a reputation of being "flippant in my e-mail."

Porter, like most elected Nevada leaders, is a Yucca Mountain opponent and has expressed skepticism of DOE's pronouncement the program has a clean bill of health.

Other state officials have expressed hope that the subcommittee's inquiry would uncover science or management flaws that could be brought up during licensing.

Stevens did not say Monday how department would respond to a subpoena.

Porter said the subpoena would demand documents he had requested to see in April, including personnel records of the three scientists who have been identified as primary e-mail authors and the research to which they contributed.

Porter had asked for a copy of a 5,800-page draft license application the DOE had been preparing for the repository.

Attorneys for the Energy Department and Nevada are in a legal dispute before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission over access to the same document.

On Monday, DOE acting general counsel Eric Fygi questioned why Porter's subcommittee needed to see the draft license paperwork.

"This sort of draft document is quite unrelated to those that chronicle activities of federal employees," Fygi said in a letter sent to the subcommittee.

Fygi said he feared the panel's document requests "could metastasize without discrete bounds" to encompass other Yucca licensing material.

The agency "has attempted to balance the concerns of the department with the needs of the committee," Stevens said. "We want to make sure we follow the letter of the law to make sure we are following the proper steps of the licensing process."