Yucca Mountain e-mails show staff yucked it up

WASHINGTON -- Deep in a public database, amid seemingly endless pages of almost indecipherable technical discussions of the Yucca Mountain repository, there is this: an e-mailed photo of a carved Halloween pumpkin "vomiting" seeds and pulp into a toilet.

Elsewhere on the Web network are e-mails from employees sharing recipes and restaurant menus, off-color jokes, movie schedules for the Suncoast, personal musings and prayers.

A 1999 message circulated among a half dozen women discussed an Ann Landers column comparing the merits of husbands who are geologists with those of husbands who are engineers.

"He keeps my truck purring! what more can you ask?" wrote an engineer's wife.

One from December 1998 is a cartoon of Santa Claus squatting over a chimney, drawers dropped, with the caption, "How to Tell You've Been Really Bad."

In preparation for licensing, screening software at the Department of Energy combed through voluminous documents that were gathered over years within the computers of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste program.

As they steered 3.5 million items into an Internet database, it was perhaps inevitable that somebody's photo of their baby dressed in a cable-knit sweater and the theme lyrics to the old "Green Acres" TV show would be moved along with more pertinent, but less interesting, research material.

Attorneys for the state of Nevada gathered samples and sent them to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission earlier this month, complaining that the DOE database was "enormously bloated."

They said the network is cluttered with duplicates, clearly obsolete content and empty e-mails, plus messages like the one containing the joke about the woman who ties a ribbon around the testicles of her snoring dog.

"Some of this is pretty creative stuff," said Bob Loux, director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.

Loux's attorneys and technicians regularly search the database as they prepare legal challenges to the repository.

DOE spokesman Allen Benson said some nonrelevant e-mails mistakenly were vacuumed into the database, which is called the Licensing Support Network, or LSN.

"People use e-mails for all kinds of things, and sometimes they simply misclassify it," Benson said. "I have seen e-mails where people say, 'Are you available for lunch?'"

Benson said more than 20 million e-mails were reviewed.

"It doesn't surprise me when you are dealing with millions of e-mails that some of those would find their way onto the LSN," Benson said.

As far as content on the personal missives, Benson said, "Some were clearly included that should not have been."

The database, found at www.lsnnet.gov, was set up for DOE to disclose the scientific studies, data analyses and other technical material behind its application to build a nuclear waste complex at the Nevada site.

Its users mainly are stakeholders such as the state of Nevada, the Nuclear Energy Institute and environmental groups that will play major roles when the proposed repository's safety will be debated before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

E-mails have been a sore spot for Yucca managers since 2004, when it was discovered that several U.S. Geological Survey hydrologists had sent electronic messages suggesting they were falsifying quality assurance documentation of their research.

The allegations sparked a controversy within the Energy Department and on Capitol Hill. DOE spent several years and $25.6 million on investigations of the hydrologists and the work they conducted.

In an effort to rebuild confidence, the Energy Department commissioned Sandia National Laboratories to rebuild portions of the hydrology research.

Maynard Brusman, a workplace psychologist from San Francisco, said personal e-mail in the office is common but sometimes disclosures are embarrassing in offices where public perception is a valued commodity.

"It creates a perception that someone is not at the wheel, that something is not really right," Brusman said. "Someone could wonder if they are paying attention and focusing."

Contact Steve Tetreault at stetreault @stephensmedia.com or (202) 783-1760.