Nostalgia

Remember back in the old days, when it would have been a shock to learn that a government employee working on an issue that might involve life and death, and which would have ramifications for decades or more, had falsified their reports? Gosh, those were good times.

Now we're left with just sadly observing the subtle nuances of how this falsehood differs from the previously known catalog. Hmm, this time it was an actual scientist, not a bureaucrat doing the falsifying. Interesting. My, the possible ramifications could last hundreds of thousands of years. That's quite an achievement. There have been records written by the individual detailing the falsifications sitting around since the year 2000, and we're only just hearing about it? What's up with that?

Sigh.

WASHINGTON, March 16 - Government employees assigned to predict how water would flow through a proposed nuclear waste repository in Nevada, a crucial part of estimating how fast the radioactive material would leak, may have falsified some of their work, the Energy Department said on Wednesday.

One of the employees, who worked for the United States Geological Survey, wrote multiple e-mail messages from May 1998 to March 2000 describing how he had fabricated some records, the department said. The messages, whose recipients were not disclosed, came to light recently when contractors working for the department were preparing to submit a license application for the project, at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Officials are hoping to apply for a license by the end of this year, but the discovery could delay that.

The department would not give details on how the work was fabricated and whether it might have helped or hindered the project. Nor would the department give the names of any employees being investigated or say what might happen to them.

Samuel W. Bodman, the energy secretary, said in a statement that the department was reviewing other material by "identified individuals" to see if other work was affected.

At issue are computer models used to predict water infiltration and climate over hundreds of thousands of years. The fabrication was in descriptions of how the models were prepared, the department said.

Experts said they were dismayed by the announcement.