Re: Ward Valley Politics

[Carolworth <Carolworth@aol.com>]

The following session generated somuch interest that a WM'99 session is
planned on the Politics of Nuclear Waste.

Carol Worth (Carolworth@aol.com)
703-742-0017

Wednesday, 4 March 1998

Politics, not science, delaying waste site, nuclear official says

The Arizona Daily Star -- Wed. March 4, 1998
Alan Pasternak 



By Keith Bagwell 
The Arizona Daily Star 


The Clinton administration is delaying a nuclear waste dump west of Lake 
Havasu because of politics, an nuclear industry official charged 
yesterday. 

Alan Pasternak, California Radioactive Materials Management Forum 
technical director, said Clinton is favoring California Sen. Barbara 
Boxer, a Democrat and a dump opponent, over Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, 
a supporter. 

``Politics and not science'' is why the administration delays the 
proposed dump in California's Ward Valley, Pasternak told a University 
of Arizona-sponsored radioactive waste conference at the Tucson 
Convention Center. 

He said the Bush administration was poised to sell 1,000 acres of Ward 
Valley land, 20 miles west of the Colorado River, in 1993. Clinton since 
has held up the sale, he said. 

Pasternak's speech was interrupted briefly by a half-dozen protesters 
who called him a liar, waved a banner and charged that the Ward Valley 
land is sacred to Indians and critical habitat to endangered desert 
tortoises. 

Dozens of protesters, many of them members of five Indian tribes in the 
area, have camped at the site for years. 

The Bureau of Land Management ordered the protesters off the site on 
Feb. 13 for deep soil tests seeking radioactive tritium, but their 
numbers have swelled and they refuse to leave. The BLM is negotiating. 

Previous tests found tritium, probably from bomb tests decades ago, at 
100 feet below the surface of the site. 

Opponents, including some government and expert scientists, charge that 
radioactive materials dumped in the proposed unlined shallow pits will 
reach ground water and then the Colorado. 

Protester Chris Ford, of Tucson, said the Ward Valley dump site is 
upstream in from where the Central Arizona Project taps the Colorado for 
Tucson, Phoenix and Pinal County drinking water. 

Pasternak said other scientists, including a majority of a National 
Academy of Sciences committee, believe the dump would be safe. 

He said the Indian tribes did not raise the sacred-land issue during 
public hearings on the proposal in the 1980s. 

``Interstate 40, a power substation and power lines are about a mile 
from the site,'' Pasternak said. ``It's hardly pristine.''