American Ecology : Dixy Lee Ray Named to Board

Dixy Lee Ray, who as governor of Washington temporarily shut down a low-level nuclear waste dump operated by a unit of American Ecology Corp., has been named a director of the Agoura Hills-based waste management firm.

Ray, 72, said she ordered the closing in 1979 of the Richland, Wash., facility--one of only three such waste sites in the nation--because “the people who generate the waste weren’t packaging it properly.”

In a telephone interview from her home on Fox Island, Wash., which is near Tacoma, Ray said the company was not to blame for the problem.

American Ecology also announced that its president and chief executive, William E. Prachar, 40, has taken on the additional title of chairman. He has been the company’s chief executive since it was spun off from Teledyne in 1984. Before then, Prachar was Teledyne’s corporate counsel.

The previous chairman, G. Williams Rutherford, 65, resigned from American Ecology in May. He is a vice president at Teledyne.

Ray, who has long championed nuclear energy, was named chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1973. The next year she was appointed assistant secretary of state for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs, but she resigned after a jurisdictional dispute with then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Running as a Democrat, Ray was elected governor of Washington in 1976, but failed to win her party’s nomination for reelection in 1980. Since then, she has been a consultant to the Department of Energy and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Ray filled one of the two vacancies created on American Ecology’s five-member board by the recent departure of Rutherford and Roy D. Fields, 54, who is also a Teledyne executive. The other slot was filled with the appointment of Neil Orloff, the director of the Center for Environmental Research at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

Orloff is also a consultant to the Washington, D.C.-based law firm of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, and served from 1972 to 1975 as a legal counsel to the President’s Council on Environmental Quality.

American Ecology’s principal unit, Louisville, Ky.-based U.S. Ecology, operates a low-level radioactive waste dump site in Beatty, Nev., as well as the one in Richland. Both have been involved in major disputes with state authorities, as have now-closed toxic waste sites previously operated by the company in Illinois and Tennessee.

The company was designated in December to build and operate California’s first low-level radioactive waste site, despite what a state review committee called U.S. Ecology’s “serious regulatory non-compliance” at dumps in other states.