1995 Pact May Not Be Enough to Keep Nuclear Waste Out of Idaho
May 27 - Deseret News (Salt Lake City)
The Idaho congressmen who voted this week for an Energy Department spending bill that recommends storing highly radioactive nuclear waste at the Idaho National Laboratory say they're convinced a 1995 court order prevents that from ever happening.
"There is a legislative history and policy agreements between the state
and the Department of Energy which would discourage the use of Idaho for that
purpose, but they don't constitute an insurmountable barrier if Congress chooses
to rewrite that history," said Leroy, a Republican and former Idaho
lieutenant governor who served as the federal government's nuclear waste
negotiator from 1990-93.
Leroy's attempts to find a willing host for a temporary federal nuclear waste
dump among a handful of interested counties and Indian tribes failed. In 2002,
President Bush approved an Energy Department recommendation to locate the dump
at Yucca Mountain in Nevada over the objection of state leaders.
Congress has been increasingly frustrated by the legal, scientific and policy
challenges that have delayed the opening of Yucca Mountain until at least 2010,
if ever. Tuesday, the U.S. House overwhelmingly passed an energy spending bill
that gave the Energy Department money to begin taking ownership of spent nuclear
fuel from 129 commercial reactor sites around the country and temporarily
storing a portion of it at a federally operated facility by 2006. The bill now
moves to the Senate for consideration.
The House subcommittee that holds the purse strings to the agency said in a
report included with the bill that the department should consider the Hanford
reservation in Washington state, the Savannah River complex in South Carolina
and the INL compound in the desert west of Idaho Falls as possible temporary
storage sites for the radioactive waste. Called manager's reports, such
provisions in spending bills don't have the effect of law but are intended by
Congress to be marching orders for federal agency heads.
Two former Idaho governors, Democrat Cecil Andrews and Republican Phil Batt,
waged a 10-year battle against the federal government that culminated in an
unprecedented 1995 agreement between the state and Energy Department, requiring
the agency to remove all the Cold War-era nuclear waste stored at the Idaho
site.
The court-approved deal also prohibited the federal government from shipping
spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants to the Idaho site.
The state's two Republican House members Tuesday voted against an amendment
to strip the interim storage provisions from the bill and supported the overall
$29.7 billion spending package after being reassured the manager's report would
not overturn the decade-old decree of no new nuclear waste in Idaho.
"The committee's language in no way alters existing law or the
provisions of Idaho's 1995 settlement," said Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson, who
sits on the Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee that wrote
the bill.
During Tuesday's debate on the House floor, Idaho Rep. C.L. "Butch"
Otter asked the chairman of the subcommittee, Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio,
"Would the language contained within this report in any way change existing
law or alter the provisions of the state of Idaho's agreement with the
Department of Energy?"
Answered Hobson: "No, it would not."
Leroy, however, said the manager's report in the spending bill shows the
increasing political momentum to find an alternative to Yucca Mountain that may
ultimately steamroll the Idaho pact.
"For the first time, you've got somebody truly admitting Yucca is not
going to open 'til 2016 or later, saying every year it slips is another
billion-dollar price tag and saying that interim storage at a government-run
site is essentially mandatory," he said Thursday. "The history of one
set of elected or appointed officials in any branch of U.S. government
absolutely binding their successors in office to their agreements is not one I
would depend on in this case."