Nuclear Waste Dump: Hot Topic In Desert

Through triple-digit temperatures, Susan Luckie Moore drove her old Datsun station wagon over a Mojave plain, pointing out desert scenery--cacti and creosote bushes here, rabbit and indigo brush there--and the possible future site of a low-level radioactive waste dump.

With the windows open, air conditioner off, Moore’s green gingham dress fluttered in the wind. “I want to feel my environment,” she said.

The daughter of an early Twentynine Palms developer, Moore, 70, has worked for more than 20 years to curb growth in this community, which has been booming along with the U.S. Marine Corps base that supports it. She has fought over zoning rules and against the installation of power transmission lines.

Now, as a director of the Morongo Basin Conservation Assn., she is opposing the potential locating of a low-level radioactive waste dump near Twentynine Palms.

Contamination Fears

Moore fears that such a dump might contaminate the community’s precious water supply. She also is worried that road traffic, already heavy when the Marines take convoys of tanks and trucks to the streets, will get worse.

But down California 62 at Denyo Agency, a small advertising firm, owner Gary Daigneault said the dump would be good for the area. The office was cool, but Daigneault’s blue polo shirt, stamped with the company logo, was soaked with sweat from a short hop outside.

“We need jobs here. If the next (federal) Administration cuts the defense budget, this place will empty out and we’ll have a ghost town on our hands,” said Daigneault, 35, who heads the economic development committee for the Twentynine Palms Chamber of Commerce.

He said his view is not popular in town: “There’s a lot of people who say, ‘The cities make that junk; let them keep it.’ Well, there’s a big difference between Sheephole Basin and Encino, folks. And the difference is, there’s nothing out here.”

Although it is still early in the site-selection process, the issue of where to place California’s first low-level radioactive waste dump has stirred strong emotions.

To those drawn to the desert by its beauty, like Moore, the expanses of sand, brush and mountains are treasures in need of protection. Others, like Daigneault, talk more about economic issues. They want to develop the desert areas.

U.S. Ecology, a Louisville, Ky., company designated last December by California to choose, build and operate the site, has narrowed its choices to 18 huge dry lake basins in San Bernardino, Riverside and Inyo counties.

Two basins--the Sheephole Basin in San Bernadino County and the Saline Valley in Inyo County--will be considered only if no other sites are available because of their proximity to federal wilderness study regions, the company said. Other “high-avoidance” areas will be revealed next month at a series of public meetings in eight desert communities.

Based on such factors as road quality, available labor, environmental impact and community support, U.S. Ecology plans to narrow its choices to three locations by November, applying to the state for a license to build a single square-mile dump in 1988.

The dump is to be a repository for low-level contaminated materials, ranging from tools and equipment used in nuclear power plants to rags, papers, filters and protective clothing from commercial and medical processes.

High-level radioactive waste, such as spent fuel from nuclear power plants, is being stored in pools of water at the power plants, pending federal selection of a site for a permanent repository.

The state will have final say in deciding to grant a license for any site, which could be in operation by 1990.

Opponents are fearful of having radioactive waste trucked through their communities. Those who have researched U.S. Ecology’s background are concerned about containment problems that the company has had at dumps in other states. And they fear harming the desert.

“We’re not willing to prostitute our land,” said Mary Sinclair, who manages the Lone Pine Chamber of Commerce office. (Lone Pine is just east of the High Sierra, near Mt. Whitney.) “We don’t need it.”

Chance for Jobs

Proponents see the dump as a way to bring about as many as 40 permanent jobs, aside from construction work for local contractors. They call much of the outlying desert a wasteland, and they minimize radioactivity’s hazards.

“I smoke cigarettes and I keep my family in the desert, where the sun is strong and unhealthy,” said Craig Mathewson, 36, branch manager for Provident Federal Savings in Blythe, just this side of the Arizona border. “I’m not going to be afraid of some gloves and smocks.”

Dumping dangerous waste is the price a society pays for its technological advances, dump proponents say.

A 1980 federal law mandated that states build their own dumps or form “compacts” with other states to arrange for disposal of low-level waste. In 1983, the California Legislature approved creation of a dump on state-owned land. The operator would pay a licensing fee to the state and charge firms sending their waste there.

Three Sites in U.S.

California’s waste is now trucked to sites near Richland, Wash., and Beatty, Nev., two of only three low-level dumps in the United States. Both are operated by U.S. Ecology, a subsidiary of Agoura Hills-based American Ecology. The third, in Barnwell, S.C., is run by Chem-Nuclear Systems of Columbia, S.C.

Throughout California, pockets of support and dissent have sprouted over the dump issue, polarizing communities. But in the desert, where it is hard to wield statewide political clout without a large population base, many are apathetic.

“People think of themselves as small potatoes out here,” said Ron Baker, 48, who is harvesting alfalfa this summer near Blythe. “We take whatever’s dumped on us because we’re in the desert. People let things impose on them here and don’t fight back.”

Although feelings are mixed in Twentynine Palms, as in other communities, Moore has spearheaded a strong opposition. By contrast, in Baker, a strip of motels, garages and fast-food joints just off Interstate 15, community leaders are lobbying to get the site, although some residents there are nervous about it.

Sandwiched between Joshua Tree National Monument to the south and the Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center to the north, Twentynine Palms relies heavily on the military for its economic livelihood.

The area was settled in the 1850s by gold prospectors and was named for the number of palms around the oasis of Mara. After World War I, Dr. James B. Luckie, conservationist Moore’s father, developed the area for veterans. The main park in town is named for him.

An unincorporated community, Twentynine Palms has experienced unprecedented growth during the last year as part of an ongoing expansion of the Marine base, said San Bernardino County Planning Commissioner Jim Bagley, who is also a local real estate broker.

According to the Chamber of Commerce, about 18,000 people live in Twentynine Palms, up 28% since 1980. Another 9,000 live on the Marine base, a figure that is expected to climb to 11,000 within three years. New home construction abounds.

Haphazard Growth

Moore said growth has been haphazard and shortsighted. She said the potential sites for the radioactive waste dump--Sheephole, Cadiz and Danby basins, all east of town--could be future water sources. Moore points out that AridTech, a Manhattan Beach company, is already experimentally growing 320 acres of grapes in the Cadiz Basin.

The Morongo Basin Conservation Assn., along with Chain Reaction, a Twentynine Palms community action group, has collected about 1,000 signatures on a petition against placing the site near Twentynine Palms. They have submitted it to the state Department of Health Services as well as to legislative representatives.

Chain Reaction, which was started last spring, says it is mainly concerned about the safety record of U.S. Ecology, chosen for the job despite what a state review committee called the company’s “serious regulatory non-compliance” at dumps in other states.

Others Dropped Out

U.S. Ecology was offered the job in December after the Department of Health Services’ first three choices bowed out, all on grounds that legal and financial risks were too great. The department said U.S. Ecology, the only bidder left, “meets requirements” in most categories, the lowest standard short of disqualification.

Health officials said they ultimately picked U.S. Ecology because state law requires that such jobs be offered to qualified bidders in the order that they are ranked. Officials of U.S. Ecology say the company’s problems occurred before 1980 and that the firm has learned from its experiences.

“We’re trying to turn concern into a movement,” said Twentynine Palms resident David Sabol, an unemployed Vietnam veteran who started Chain Reaction with the intent of blocking U.S. Ecology from building a dump anywhere in California.

Sabol, 36, moved to the desert from Venice four years ago. The living room of the stucco house that he built is packed with piles of articles, books and government reports about low-level radioactive waste. He is opposed to nuclear power in general and says he is angry over methods of waste burial that U.S. Ecology has proposed.

Up to 50 Feet Deep

Current technology calls for “shallow-land burial,” in use at existing dumps, where 55-gallon barrels and other containers are placed in ditches up to 50 feet deep and covered with soil. To prevent contamination of ground water at these sites, U.S. Ecology says it does not build dumps where the water table is not at least 100 feet beneath ground level.

“How can they dig a hole in the ground, throw the junk in there, cover it, and then say it’s guaranteed not to contaminate anything forever? It’s just total jive, man. You can’t pretend radioactivity won’t affect the biosphere,” Sabol said.

At the Ace Hardware store on Adobe Road, conversation turns easily to the dump. Steven Dix, 37, a pistachio and jojoba farmer with 15 acres of land in Wonder Valley, east of town, said he is afraid of crop contamination from a dump.

He sat at the store’s counter over a mug of coffee, gesturing excitedly with his soil-blackened hands. “Who knows what’s in those barrels? You can bet they’re not going to give us a look at what’s in there.”

But Daigneault of the Twentynine Palms Chamber of Commerce assures people that there is nothing to worry about, that the material is only mildly hazardous.

“We won’t grow as a major tourist center this far from the interstate. We can’t survive as a one-economy town,” he said. “I think we should be jumping up and down waving our arms to have that site here.”

Some leaders in Baker are doing just that. They say that the tourist town’s transient population of young people, most of whom earn close to minimum wage, cannot support meaningful growth.

Baker is also a one-economy community, a place on the way to someplace else. The self-proclaimed “Gateway to Death Valley,” it is about 100 miles southwest of Las Vegas.

A community of 500, almost all of whom live in mobile homes, Baker is a prelude to the gambling meccas of Nevada. Around the clock, travelers flock toward tall, bright-colored signs, where they gas up, grab hamburgers or arrange for tickets to casino shows.

It has always been a pit stop. The San Bernardino County community was developed in the 1930s as a watering hole for construction crews on their way to build Boulder Dam, now Hoover Dam, on the Colorado River at the Arizona-Nevada border.

Lois Clark, co-editor of the Baker Valley News and owner of one of the community’s two mobile home parks, has suggested a site to U.S. Ecology for the dump, on a slope over Silver Lake Basin, 18 miles northwest of town. U.S. Ecology is also considering Soda Lake Basin, just south of Baker.

‘The Same Stuff’

“We have trucks going through here all the time on the way to Beatty, and they’re carrying the same stuff,” said Clark, a resident for 38 of her 55 years. “Why shouldn’t we gain from it?”

Aside from new jobs, Clark said she hopes Baker can attract some services for the locals by expanding its economy. Baker has no bank, for example, and some residents regularly drive 60 miles to Barstow to cash paychecks. The nearest pharmacy is in Barstow, and retirees complain about having to make frequent trips there for medicine.

Clark’s efforts to get the dump are backed by the Baker Chamber of Commerce, which also supports a proposed county custody facility for parole violators, saying that would create another 62 permanent jobs.

“We get that nuclear site and the prison, and we’re in business,” said chamber President Donald Dabney, 52, a hefty former Kentuckian who recently retired when he sold his local restaurant, called Cone Taco.

Added Labor Force

Dabney said the two facilities would bring in new families, supplying an additional labor force of teen-agers for the gas stations and restaurants, most of which run three shifts every day. The local Burger King buses in workers from Barstow. Some employees at Pike’s, a restaurant and gas station, live in a dormitory.

In a dark bar adjacent to Baker Truck Service, Marlene Johnson, 53, mulled over the possibility of being able to see a radioactive dump from her kitchen window. One in a series of frequent power cuts to Baker had forced off the air-conditioning, and the truckers in the bar guzzled beer to cool down.

For Johnson, nuclear power is an emotional topic. She was terrified to hear about the accident at the Soviet Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Her grandchildren were in the Netherlands at the time, and she quickly arranged to fly them back.

“I don’t want to have to carry a Geiger counter with me every time I go near one of those trucks,” she said. Her son, Richard Johnson, manages the repair shop, and trucks often come in that have been carrying toxic wastes. “There’s enough of that here. No more,” she said.