COLUMN ONE : Idaho Says ‘Enough’ to Nuclear : When a $1.2-billion plutonium weapons plant was proposed, citizens asked some hard questions of a deeply troubled federal program. The project was dropped.

As the potato fields trail off and give way to the Arco Desert, the first of the buildings appear as white flecks in the distance, with hazy mountains as the backdrop.

For more than 40 years, this 500,000-acre government reservation was a testing ground of the nuclear age. Here at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory they developed 52 different types of nuclear reactors--more than any place in the world--including the first reactor for a submarine. For the people here, the lab became a huge source of income, and of pride.

But, four years ago, when the Department of Energy decided to bring in even more jobs to build a nuclear weapons plant at the lab, something went awry. A grass-roots movement took shape, composed of a smorgasbord of citizenry and led by a woman who washes windows in the summer to earn a buck. The reactors were one thing, but the movement did not want a nuclear weapons plant in the state. And, in the end, it won.

It was victory propelled by events outside Idaho, atomic disasters or frightening disclosures that occurred, in chilling succession, in places with such names as Chernobyl, Hanford, Savannah River, Fernald and Rocky Flats.

What happened in Idaho is a metaphor for America’s relationship with the atomic weapons industry, particularly in the West. That industry, once a super-secret society protected from disclosing its actions by law, is now being slowly exposed to public scrutiny. And often what is found is a degraded, and dangerous, environment.

Around the Hanford, Wash., nuclear reservation residents are beginning to come to grips with admissions by the U.S. Department of Energy that radiation releases over several decades poisoned the surrounding region. In Colorado, the governor has vowed to fight the reopening of the Rocky Flats plutonium production facility unless all safety questions are resolved. In Nevada and New Mexico, residents are fighting federal proposals to permanently store nuclear waste in remote areas.

The weapons industry’s authority is being questioned as never before, and environmental groups are wondering aloud whether these atomic facilities are indeed as beneficial as they once seemed.

For a place like Idaho, these are very tough questions. In this sparsely populated region, the answers could determine prosperity or economic stagnation. But, because of a combination of events in both Idaho and Washington, the door was shut here on the nuclear weapons industry for the first time. And the fact that it happened in Idaho served notice that perhaps never again would the atomic weapons industry have it so easy.

This immense tract of federal land, known by the acronym of INEL, is the cornerstone of southeastern Idaho, the lifeblood of 7,500 employees from places like Pocatello, Blackfoot and, of course, Idaho Falls, where the Department of Energy employs several thousand more workers. Each day, INEL buses transport workers into the desert and bring them home at the end of their shifts.

It had always been a good relationship. The people at the lab worked in almost complete isolation, doing their part for national defense, not building bombs but working on other facets of using nuclear power. For decades, no one ever really questioned what was happening at the lab. There never seemed to be much cause.

Questions Raised

When the questions finally were raised, they came from voices that were first meek, then angry.

They asked why a nuclear weapons project was being built when so much was going wrong at the other plants around the country.

They asked why the government wanted to make bomb elements at the INEL when the need for them seemed to be diminishing in this era of emerging glasnost.

And then last year they asked why no one had told them what kind of nuclear waste had been buried in the desert above the aquifer that supplies the water for this part of the country.

What brought on the questions in Idaho was a proposal to build a Special Isotope Separation Project, or SIS, in which lasers would be used to purify plutonium, one of the major ingredients of a nuclear warhead. If the project had gone ahead, the facility would have been the first U.S. nuclear weapons plant built since 1963.

In the end, the project was scrapped. And the major player in its defeat was a woman named Liz Paul, the owner of Seeing Is Believing window washing service.

Now, saying that Liz Paul washes windows for a living is but a brushstroke of the sketch. She lives in Ketchum, where Ernest Hemingway lived and committed suicide, and, when the snow flies, she teaches cross-country skiing to the tourists at Sun Valley. Paul is an athlete. Her idea of a good time is spending three days kayaking down the Snake River.

But there is another facet to her, one in which she has an uneasy fear of nuclear power and how it is being used. When she was a student at UC Santa Cruz--having grown up in Pacific Palisades--she was arrested and spent two weeks in jail for protesting the construction of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.

She marks that time as her coming of age, when, having spent time in jail for a cause, it therefore became all the more compelling.

“That sort of cemented the initial commitment,” Paul said in a recent interview. “I just couldn’t go back to my own life.”

Not that Paul was exactly living at the forefront of the anti-nuclear movement. When she was graduated from college in 1979, she moved to Ketchum for the lifestyle and the skiing. But there were skirmishes to be fought here and there, organizations to join for people concerned about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Paul did all that.

By 1984, the SIS project had been proposed, but the designated site was at Hanford, Wash., one of the three original facilities of the World War II Manhattan Project. But, as the proposal went through the approval process in Washington, things began to change as the politicians jockeyed for the huge $1.2-billion nuclear prize. The word in Washington was that Idaho might get it to help the campaign of Republican Sen. Steve Symms, who was in the midst of a tight reelection campaign. SIS, the joke went, stood for Save Idaho’s Senator.

In August of 1986, Paul was walking past the post office in Ketchum when she noticed the banner headline in the local newspaper. It said that the SIS project had been given to INEL.

“I remember thinking, ‘There goes my vacation for awhile,’ ” she recalled.

If only she had known. For the next 3 1/2 years, she and others would work to keep SIS out of Idaho by gradually forming a coalition of people under the umbrella of a statewide--but very small--organization called the Snake River Alliance.

And one of the first things Paul did at the start of the struggle was place a call to Dan Reicher in Washington. Reicher, a trim, studious-looking man, is a Stanford-trained lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that has been in the forefront of challenging Department of Energy policy.

Among other things, the council had won a case in 1984 that established that the Department of Energy had to comply with federal hazardous waste laws. Winning that suit opened the door a crack on what was going on inside America’s nuclear weapons facilities because the Department of Energy was forced to show that the plants were complying with the same laws that private industry was required to follow.

What was disclosed was alarming.

“We saw a double standard where the Energy Department attempted to avoid the rules and regulations long required by private industry,” Reicher said.

When Paul placed her call, the Natural Resources Defense Council had been following the progress of the laser isotope separator project for five years and had already developed several arguments about why it should not be built. From that call a coalition was formed between the well-funded Washington environmental organization and the Snake River Alliance.

Not that there was much thought at the time that the SIS could really be stopped. At least Paul didn’t think so.

“If anyone at the time had said we were going to stop it, I wouldn’t have believed it,” said Paul. “We just didn’t want to let them waltz in here without any friction.”

The campaign to fight the SIS was dubbed Lifeguard Idaho.

First Signs of Trouble

When Reicher arrived in Idaho in March of 1987, he was accompanied by Thomas B. Cochran, a physicist on the Natural Resources Defense Council staff and a former member of the Energy Department’s energy research advisory board.

The two of them had been working in preparation for the first of the public hearings held by the Department of Energy on the SIS project. When Cochran took the microphone, he explained in great and convincing detail why he did not believe the project was necessary--that the nation already had 100 metric tons of plutonium, most of it in 22,500 nuclear warheads, that missile reduction agreements with the Soviet Union raised the possibility of tons more being made available as warheads were retired.

Further, he said, plutonium needing purification at the Hanford and Savannah River, S.C., nuclear weapons sites would only be enough to keep the SIS in operation for no more than seven or eight years.

As Reicher would later put it: “We poked some very large holes in the Department of Energy’s justification for the plant.”

That hearing was the first time that the Department of Energy began to suspect there might be some trouble with the SIS.

Later that summer, Liz Paul called Beatrice Brailsford in Pocatello, asking her to run the local campaign against SIS for the Snake River Alliance.

Brailsford’s decision to take the job was made reluctantly. As she put it, “Heretofore, working against nuclear weapons was not a rewarding task.”

And Pocatello was hardly a place where one found a sympathetic ear. After all, many of the townspeople were INEL employees. Everybody knew someone who worked there--a neighbor, a friend, a relative. So she started off timidly, talking to small organizations, most of them women’s groups. In all of this, she was very careful to attack not INEL but the proposed weapons facility itself.

The months of organization worked. By March of 1988, after meetings and phone calls and media blitzes--most notably a flurry of radio and television commercials in which actress Mariel Hemingway and actor Scott Glenn opposed the project--a noticeable change started taking place. At a series of public hearings in the major population centers of the state, hundreds of people testified against the building of the plant. So many people signed up to testify that the hearings had to be extended.

“There was this enormous feeling of strength because it was so high profile and the statements had been so strong,” Brailsford said. “I guess that was when most people realized we were together on this all across the state.”

To put this time frame in context, the Chernobyl disaster--and predictions of 5,000 premature deaths because of it--had already been embedded in the public consciousness for almost two years. So, too, had disclosures about the Hanford site, of how radioactive gases had been released and had contaminated the surrounding countryside in the 1940s and 1950s.

In the next few months, there would be more frightening news from the Savannah River, S.C., Fernald, Ohio, and Rocky Flats, Colo., weapons plants that would paint a picture of a deeply troubled industry. Then came the rising estimates of cleaning up the weapons plants. That figure now stands at $200 billion.

Two other things happened in 1988 that had an impact on whether the plant would be built. Early in the year, then-Secretary of Energy John S. Herrington told a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee that the nation was “awash in plutonium. We have more than we need.”

Then, in October, Idaho Gov. Cecil D. Andrus stopped the shipment of nuclear waste to INEL from the Rocky Flats factory, sending a clear message that Idaho was no longer willing to be a nuclear dumping ground.

In a letter to Herrington, Andrus said Idaho would no longer take the waste because the state had been promised that it would be removed long ago and that the stockpile had grown to 2.4 million cubic feet of material. INEL is the storage place for two-thirds of all the Department of Energy’s nuclear waste.

“We’ve been bamboozled and lied to so many times, we just won’t take it any more,” Andrus said in a recent interview.

Furious Lobbying

Meanwhile, back in Washington, the Natural Resources Defense Council was lobbying furiously against the SIS facility. Eventually, Congress took note. In 1989, the House Armed Services Committee voted to suspend the money for the project for at least a year.

During that time, a series of devastating articles in the Twin Falls Times News uncovered more information that was terribly damaging to INEL: that several million cubic feet of radioactive waste--other than what was being stored in barrels and boxes--had been buried in the ground above the Snake River Aquifer.

The case against the SIS continued to grow in Idaho, just as it did in Washington. In March of this year, the SIS project was eliminated from President Bush’s budget with the explanation that there were other, more pressing items that needed funding.

Today, Bill Tiller, the deputy director of INEL, scoffs at the idea that the Snake River Alliance had anything to do with killing the SIS plant.

“It was a decision of the Department of Energy as the events progressed,” he said. In his view, it was that the need for the project could not be justified.

“That’s what killed it,” he said.

But he said also that much has to be done to improve the image of INEL, that the desert laboratory has taken some big hits, as has the rest of the nuclear weapons industry.

“We let the world pass us to a certain extent,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do. We’re only going to succeed if we perform well.”

And he reflected on how things were now, as opposed to how they had been when he joined INEL in 1963.

“The states didn’t regulate us. The Environmental Protection Agency didn’t exist,” he said. “We were pretty autonomous. We had very little need for public understanding and there was no political opposition. There have been tremendous changes over the years.”

Reflections

So there has. Liz Paul was sitting in a Boise coffee shop the other day reflecting on these last few years. She has gotten out of the anti-nuclear business. Stopping one bomb factory in a lifetime is enough, she said.

No, she said, Idaho has not turned against the Department of Energy and, if there were a vote tomorrow, the state might approve the laser project for INEL. But the questions had been raised and so had the consciousness of the state. The opposition had eroded political support for the project and made a budget cut more likely. The hard questions had been asked and answered. And Idaho would never be the same.

“It’s not a blank check (for the Department of Energy). It’s not a walk-in anywhere in the country,” she said. “It’s just never going to be like it was. They are dealing in a whole different milieu. Congress and the people are going to be breathing down their backs, and that’s what we’ve been looking for. I hope it’s never easy for them. I hope it gets harder and harder.”