A paper in the journal authored by six BARC scientists says ``use of wrong data'' and not bad science was responsible for the mistakes in BARC's earlier publications.

The scientific paper exposing BARC's mistakes was written by BARC scientists Srinivasan Ganesan, Umasankari Kannan, P D Krishnamani, V Jagannathan, R P Jain and R Karthikeyan in the Reactor Design section.

The issue pertains to protactinium with atomic mass 231 (pa-231), an element that occurs in fission waste.

Using incorrect published data without verification, BARC scientists, according to the current science paper, came to the conclusion that pa-231 is a better fuel than uranium-235. BARC propagated the idea that afootball sized pa-231 would go "critical", a conclusion with major implications for nuclear waste disposal.

But this conclusion is totally wrong as refined analysis using accurate data has shown that pa-231 cannot become critical even if it is as big as the moon, the paper says.

Significantly, the work by Ganesan and colleagues re-evaluating BARC's earlier work on pa-231 was supported by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and not BARC.

According to a senior BARC scientist such fatal errors were committed because of BARC's reliance on freely available published data. ``The culture of doing original work towards fundamental generation, compilation, and evaluation of basic data is absent in BARC," he said.

``This is going to land us in difficulties when we go for thorium fuel cycle on a large scale because no free nuclear data is available for Thorium or Uranium-233," he said.

``Fortunately for us, the integral data for Uranium-235 and Plutonium-239 and the basic data (publicly available)were good enough to design our nuclear reactors and explosives."

The scientific paper, however, made it clear that ``use of wrong nuclear data'' and not bad science was responsible for the mistakes in BARC's earlier publications.

"It needs courage to criticize BARC's work as authorities do not encourage its staff to involve in any activity that would show BARC in bad light," a BARC scientist said in obvious reference to the victimization of a fellow scientist for speaking against India's nuclear test.