Company accused of faking toxic data

A chemist has accused his former manager at a northwest power company of falsifying data on sediment chemical contamination. According to the chemist, who resigned from the company in 2006 amidst charges of sexual harassment, employees of Energy Northwest in Richland, Wash., deliberately faked analyses of hexavalent chromium concentrations in samples from the Hanford nuclear facility in eastern Washington. In response to this claim, last month a special agent for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) filed an application for a search warrant with the U.S. District Court in Spokane. The search warrant application and accompanying affidavit were unsealed last week.According to Energy Northwest spokesman Brad Peck, the company is looking into the accusations internally, although they are not conducting an official investigation. This is a matter for the EPA, he added. "It's not our investigation, so it's not really for us to say" whether the accusations are true, Peck...