Ruling Apparently Kills Ward Valley Nuclear Dump Plan

["Sandy Perle" <sandyfl@earthlink.net>]

Los Angeles Times
Saturday, April 3, 1999 

Ruling Apparently Kills Ward Valley Nuclear Dump Plan 
Environment: Judge says that U.S. doesn't need to turn over 1,000 
acres for the desert facility, which has been the subject of a 10-
year battle.  

A federal judge in Washington has dealt an apparently lethal blow 
to the bitterly contested, 10-year-old plan to build a dump for 
radioactive waste in Ward Valley in the eastern Mojave Desert 
barely 20 miles from the Colorado River. "I think [the] Ward Valley 
[dump] is dead," said Joe Nagel, president of U.S. Ecology, the 
company that was going to build and operate the dump. "This was 
really the basic case that was going to decide whether or not there 
was going to be a Ward Valley [dump]." U.S District Judge Emmet 
Sullivan ruled Wednesday that the Clinton administration does not 
have to turn over the 1,000-acre parcel of federal land near Needles 
where the state had hoped to bury about 10,000 cubic feet of 
radioactive waste a year. The waste would have come from nuclear 
power plants, laboratories and hospitals. U.S. Ecology and former 
Gov. Pete Wilson had filed the suit because of the Clinton 
administration's refusal to turn over the site over a six-year period. 
Nagel said that U.S. Ecology would not appeal this week's ruling. 
"The important issue for California, along with other states, is to 
see to it that the waste produced is then taken care of," Nagel 
added. The judge's decision would appear to bring down the curtain 
on one of the longest and most acrimonious environmental battles 
in recent state history. 

The fight pitted the Wilson administration and California's utility 
industry against a coalition of conservationists, anti-nuclear 
activists and Needles-area Indian tribes. Opponents cited concerns 
such as the possible contamination of the Colorado River, which 
provides drinking water for millions of people, and the effects on 
Native American sacred sites in the desert and fragile creatures 
such as the California desert tortoise. "Future generations will 
rejoice at this decision to put an end to such a misguided project," 
said Dan Hirsch, who heads the anti-nuclear organization Bridge 
the Gap and who guided the campaign against the Ward Valley 
dump. But the ruling does not exempt California from its duty under 
federal law to find a place to dispose of its nuclear refuse. For the 
time being, much of California's waste is being shipped to disposal 
facilities in Utah and South Carolina, while some waste is being 
stored by the firms and institutions that produce it. On the drawing 
board for a decade, the dump has been the subject of endless 
political and scientific debate, with environmentalists and anti-
nuclear activists arguing that Ward Valley's porous, shifting sands 
would not be a safe place to put deadly waste, some of which 
would remain highly toxic for at least 25,000 years. The ultimate 
nightmare--poisonous particles making their way through 
underground fissures to the Colorado--struck most scientists as 
highly unlikely but not impossible. A greater possibility was the 
migration of water-borne radionuclides from the dump's unlined 
trenches into an aquifer several hundred feet below the desert floor. 
That ground water is a potential source of drinking water.

Over the last few years, there was mounting evidence from the site 
of another desert dump in nearby Beatty, Nev., that radioactive 
tritium waste did not stay put. Responsive to those concerns, the 
Clinton administration repeatedly called for more tests and resisted 
transferring the site to the state. Exasperated by the delays, former 
Gov. Wilson and U.S. Ecology, a subsidiary of American Ecology, 
which has operated several other nuclear waste disposal facilities 
around the country, sued the U.S. Interior Department to compel 
transfer of the federal land for the facility. The suit contended that 
the federal government was obligated to honor a decision to 
transfer the land made by Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan during 
the last days of the Bush administration. But Judge Sullivan agreed 
with the Clinton administration that an earlier federal court ruling 
barred the transfer by Lujan. That ruling by U.S. District Judge 
Marilyn Patel in San Francisco in effect blocked the transfer until 
the federal government determined the impact of the dump on the 
desert tortoise, which is protected under the Endangered Species 
Act. A spokesman for the Department of the Interior said Friday 
that Sullivan's ruling frees federal and state officials to pursue 
alternatives to the Ward Valley dump. Three weeks ago, Interior 
Secretary Bruce Babbitt wrote Gov. Gray Davis calling for all 
interested parties to "explore alternatives to the proposed [Ward 
Valley] land transfer."

Davis had not responded as of Friday, according to the Interior 
spokesman. However, Davis has long been skeptical of the Ward 
Valley site and, as lieutenant governor, opposed the Bush 
administration's efforts to transfer the land. Through a spokesman, 
Davis declined to comment Friday. Deputy press secretary Hilary 
McLean said the case was being reviewed by the governor's legal 
counsel. She said the governor was vacationing Friday and could 
not be reached. She declined to say where he was staying. The 
idea for a desert dump was an outgrowth of 1980 legislation 
obligating each state to take responsibility for all "low-level" 
commercial radioactive waste that it generates. A rather misleading 
term, "low-level" waste includes virtually all types and strengths of 
radioactive garbage except spent reactor fuel. The states formed 
low-level waste compacts to deal with the issue. California is part 
of a four-state compact with Arizona, North Dakota and South 
Dakota. The Ward Valley dump would have taken waste from all 
four states. Another lawsuit remains to be resolved in which the 
Wilson administration and U.S. Ecology are also suing the federal 
government for $80 million in damages, the amount they said had 
been invested in attempts to open the Ward Valley site. The case 
is pending in a federal court in Washington. 

------------------------
Sandy Perle
E-Mail: sandyfl@earthlink.net
Personal Website: http://www.geocities.com/capecanaveral/1205


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