Rep. Jon Porter reads Thursday from a Government Accountability Office report at the Las Vegas Yucca Mountain Information Center. Photo by Clint Karlsen.

A new report by government auditors released Thursday by Nevada Rep. Jon Porter says Energy Department managers failed to bolster the quality of scientific work at the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project and have resorted to a "costly and time-consuming rework" to fix problems.

Porter, a Republican who chairs a subcommittee that is scrutinizing flaws with the project, said he will hold a hearing April 26 to discuss and define specific problems to which the Government Accountability Office report alluded in vague, general terms.

He said, however, that "a good share" of the report probably was based on revelations last year about e-mails sent among U.S. Geological Survey scientists on the project who made references to "fudge factors" and falsifying quality assurance documents to meet deadlines.

"We keep focusing on these documents to make sure, if there was any falsified information, we want to know how it has impacted the project and the science itself," Porter said at a briefing outside the Yucca Mountain Information Center near Meadows Mall.

He said an inspector general's probe into the USGS e-mail flap now is being examined by Justice Department attorneys.

"They want to find out if it was done maliciously or if it was done in error. They want to find out if there was any criminal activity," Porter said.

The 55-page GAO report said the Department of Energy "has been relying on costly and time-consuming rework to resolve lingering quality assurance concerns. For example, to address problems with the transparency and traceability of scientific work in technical documents, DOE implemented, in the spring of 2004, a roughly $20 million, 8-month project called the Regulatory Integration Team."

The effort involved about 150 full-time employees from the department, the USGS and a number of national laboratories including the Sandia lab and the labs in Los Alamos, N.M., and Livermore, Calif.

Porter said recurrent problems with the Yucca Mountain Project, such as being off schedule and fraught with cost overruns, is costing taxpayers "billions of dollars" over the current expenditure of $9 billion since scientific work began in the 1980s. The total systemwide cost through closure of the planned repository is expected to be $58.5 billion.

"We have 30-plus states that are trying to find a place to put nuclear waste," he noted.

"If this was a private-sector project, Wall Street would shut it down and local governments would shut it down because it does not have quality assurance in place," he said.

Porter said some of the same problems that were identified in a 2004 GAO report continue to plague the project, particularly in implementing quality assurance controls that are designed to ensure that the data is traceable, transparent, credible and reliable to keep the public and the environment safe from contamination.

"When we talk about quality assurance, we're not talking about a widget at some factory. ... We're talking about nuclear waste and how it impacts the health and safety and welfare of Nevadans and the American people," he said.

Allen Benson, a spokesman for DOE's Office of Repository Development in Las Vegas, said all the issues raised in the new GAO report "have already been identified by the department, and they've either been fixed or are on their way to being fixed."

"The department remains committed to following our obligation under the law to license, construct and operate Yucca Mountain as the nation's permanent repository for spent fuel," he said.

On March 8, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman told lawmakers that the Yucca Mountain Project was "broken, and we are trying to fix it."