Nuclear Reaction

Four months after the revelation that scientific documentation for the nation's first nuclear waste dump may have been faked, Judy Treichel

Summertime is scramble time. There are public hearings to attend, lawsuits to press, dollars to raise and federal bureaucracies to fight as the Energy Department continues its pursuit of a license to entomb 77,000 tons of radioactive materials beneath the 1,200-foot-high ridge 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. "The e-mails should have put this thing down," says Treichel, executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force, a nonprofit organization that has waged an 18-year battle against the project.

The e-mails of which she speaks were written between 1998 and 2000. The messages appear to indicate that one or more U.S. Geological Survey hydrologists fabricated quality assurances on computer models used to determine how much water could seep through rock in Yucca Mountain, corrode the underground storage containers and carry off dangerous radioactive particles.