Only California Is on Track for Nuclear Dump

In New York, the showdown came last spring on a bridge southeast of Buffalo. When state crews tried to inspect a proposed site for a low-level nuclear waste dump, they were met by a mob that included a column of wheelchair-bound retirees and 10 men on horseback, who charged.

In Nebraska, promoters of that state’s planned radioactive dump were greeted by ranchers toting buckets of feathers and hot tar. In Texas, the state repository stalled in court, with a ruling that set back the siting process by about four years.

It was supposed to have been everyone’s responsibility, this low-level radioactive trash--pipes and wrenches, rags and booties, hot hardware and contaminated sludge. But in the 11 years since Congress ordered each state to come up with a plan for disposing of all but its most heavily irradiated waste, dump after dump has been derailed or delayed. Only one new dump remains on track.

Inexorably, California’s Ward Valley Low-Level Radioactive Waste Facility is moving toward its 1992 opening date--with the first licensing hearing about a month away. If all continues according to plan, a 70-acre stretch of Mojave Desert 24 miles west of Needles will be bulldozed by next year into the first low-level nuclear waste dump in a generation to open in the United States.

That progress--imperative in the eyes of proponents, distressing to the dump’s prospective neighbors--has recently focused attention on California as the front line of the battle over what to do with low-level nuclear waste.

Environmental groups and anti-nuclear activists contend that if Ward Valley is built, California could end up as one of the nation’s primary dumping grounds, its desert a tomb for everything from decommissioned power plants to irradiated research animal carcasses, its taxpayers potentially liable for multimillion-dollar leaks.

State and federal health officials say those fears are exaggerated. They counter with a worst-case scenario of their own: the possibility that no new disposal sites will be built, leaving tons of potentially dangerous waste in storage at thousands of mostly urban sites.

“These materials are going to have to be handled someplace, and if it’s not in a disposal site, it will be in people’s communities by organizations that have far less experience in handling waste,” said Steve Romano, vice president of US Ecology, the firm that has contracted to build the $40-million Ward Valley dump.

“Which makes more sense for the environment and for public health?” Romano asked.

The question dates to the aftermath of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident and the flood of irradiated rubbish that followed the partial meltdown at the Pennsylvania power plant. The nation’s low-level waste is now buried in three repositories in South Carolina, Nevada and Washington. Those states, tired of serving as the nation’s radioactive trash heaps, pressured Congress to find a way to spread the dirty work around.

The next year, a law was passed requiring each state to build its own low-level dump or form a “compact” with another state planning to open one.

“The existing sites have ample room for many, many years,” said Robert Bernero, director of nuclear material, safety and safeguards for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “But South Carolina (and the other two host states) said: ‘Hey, it’s somebody else’s turn.’ ”

Congress gave the states until 1986 to come up with plans to handle the waste. When not one made the deadline, the date was pushed ahead seven years and the penalties for noncompliance were strengthened. As an added incentive, it was announced that as of 1993, the Washington and South Carolina dumps would be closed to states outside their compact, and the Nevada site would shut down. Any state without a dump by that time would have to fend for itself.

The tougher laws and looser deadlines have done little to create new dumps. About a dozen states are in the process of siting and licensing repositories, but in every case--except California’s--cries of “not in my back yard” have stalled or stymied action.

In New York, the confrontation on the one-lane bridge prompted state politicians to halt the search for a dump site. Authorities there do not expect a facility to be built at least until 1998. In Massachusetts, the sticking points have been a budget crisis and state laws requiring stringent public review.

Michigan, the designated repository for six Midwestern states, has been stalemated by a prohibition against dumps on wetlands, which effectively rules out the whole state. Texas wanted its dump in the Chihuahua Desert, but a judge determined that the site was too close, among other things, to the Rio Grande, El Paso, ground water supplies and historic Indian petroglyphs.

Nebraska, which until recently had been neck and neck with California in its siting, was set back this year after the executive director of its five-state compact commission was arrested on suspicion of embezzling about $600,000 from his agency, which is responsible for finding a site for the dump. The incident was just the latest obstacle for the on-again, off-again Nebraska dump, which has prompted mass protests, and contributed last year to the ouster of Gov. Kay A. Orr.

The only state whose progress is even close to California’s is Illinois, and even there, authorities expect to miss the deadline by about a year.

“I think there’s a problem in society in general with the few providing this kind of service for the benefits of the many,” said John Randall, executive deputy chairman of New York’s radioactive waste siting commission.

Judith Johnsrud, a member of Pennsylvania’s low-level waste advisory committee, said: “Nobody wants this stuff.”

That “stuff”--low-level radioactive waste--comes from sources as varied as nuclear power plants, aerospace factories and medical research labs. It does not include such highly contaminated waste as spent nuclear reactor fuel rods.

But the exclusion of the most dreaded types of nuclear waste has done little to make low-level waste a popular neighborhood industry. Some opponents even dispute the term “low level,” arguing that the classification includes--in very low concentrations--such radioactive elements as tritium, strontium-90, and nickel-59, which is hazardous for hundreds or thousands of years.

Romano of US Ecology said that that argument has been skewed by opponents to give the false impression that states must handle all low-level radioactive waste. In fact, he said, Congress limited state responsibility in 1985 to exclude the hottest forms of low-level radioactive waste, such as the most contaminated pieces of decommissioned reactors. Those items, along with military waste and high-level nuclear waste are now temporarily stored where they are generated. They are to go to a proposed federal dump at Yucca Mountain in southwestern Nevada, but that dump also is being fought.

The NRC’s Bernero blames part of the concern on long-held prejudices against nuclear power.

“Nuclear power alone is scary to people. You can get some very dramatic reactions,” he said. “But every form of waste disposal in the United States encounters those fears. Face it, all you have to do to get a crowd out these days is say the word incinerator. “

Dump opponents also blame the checkered history of the low-level waste industry. Of a half-dozen low-level facilities licensed in the United States since 1962, three--in Illinois, Kentucky and New York--were closed amid charges that radioactive materials leaked into the ground water. The waste facilities in Illinois and New York were run by US Ecology, which has contracted to build California’s and Nebraska’s dumps.

Romano notes that technology has improved since the 1960s, when its dumps in Maxey Flats, Ky., and Sheffield, Ill., were built. He also points proudly to the company’s dumps in Nevada and Washington, which, state officials confirm, have operated for decades with few problems and no leaks.

But critics point to the immense cleanups that have been undertaken at the defunct dumps, efforts that have spawned years of litigation and that are likely to cost taxpayers millions of dollars.

The closure of the Illinois dump in 1978 led to a $97-million lawsuit against US Ecology, which the firm settled for about $9 million last year. The Kentucky dump site was sold to the state in the 1970s. Now on the Superfund cleanup list with a price tag of up to $60 million, the site is the subject of a lawsuit involving US Ecology and about 90 others, including the federal government.

Some, such as Hugh Kaufman, a whistle-blower and U. S. Environmental Protection Agency official who led the charge against the proposed Nebraska dump, believe that “in the end, there is no technology that really works.”

But others--including Bernero at the NRC and officials at the California Department of Health Services--say low-level dumps can be maintained safely, especially in areas where the air is dry, rainfall is minimal, population is sparse, and the ground-water table is deep.

In short, they say, the safest dump is somewhere in the desert. Somewhere like Ward Valley.

California, with a half-dozen nuclear reactors, numerous biomedical research facilities and a thriving industrial base, responded to the congressional mandate in 1983 by volunteering to build its own dump.

When three of the four bidders for the dump contract dropped out, balking at the substantial upfront construction money required by the state, the state health department settled for US Ecology--even though officials had recommended against the firm because of its record.

When the search began for a suitable site, the three contenders--Needles, Baker and Trona--were not only willing, but eager for the jobs and revenue promised by a new industry.

For its part, US Ecology worked hard to foster goodwill in Needles. It opened an office there, hired a popular former high school science teacher as its liaison, bought $3,000 worth of science books for the school district, sponsored an annual $2,500 scholarship for graduating high school seniors and offered expenses-paid tours of its Beatty, Nev., site to anyone interested.

Not everyone was impressed.

“We were being sucked in, and we didn’t even know it,” said Charles Butler, 67, a retired Needles engineer. In 1988, after Ward Valley was settled on as the proposed repository, Butler and a collection of retirees, young mothers and tribal council members from the Ft. Mojave Indian Reservation began a stop-the-dump campaign.

They managed to delay the approval of an environmental impact report by three months, but their protests attracted little attention from the statewide environmental and anti-nuclear groups that had backed grass-roots opponents in other states.

Pamela Dake of the Bay Area’s “Don’t Waste California” acknowledged that most of the state’s anti-nuclear groups kept Ward Valley on the back burner until this year.

“Needles is so remote,” she said, “and it’s hard to stay on top of everything.”

But with licensing hearings for the Ward Valley site tentatively scheduled for late June, opposition to the dump has heated up. Chief among the concerns is the possibility that other states’ dumps will be delayed indefinitely, leaving California to take the place of Nevada as the nation’s third operating low-level dump.

“There are three patsies now stuck with all the radioactive waste,” said Diane D’Arrigo, radioactive waste project director for the anti-dump Nuclear Information Resources in Washington, D. C. “And under this system, we’ll get two or three more, and then the incentive for new sites will be decreased.”

Federal and state laws call for the Ward Valley site to serve only the four states in the so-called “Southwestern Compact”--California, Arizona, North Dakota and South Dakota. No waste from other states can be accepted without an environmental review and approval by a two-thirds vote of the compact commission, an eight-member body headed by the director of the California health department and dominated by Californians.

But dump opponents point to a federal amendment allowing the NRC to grant states emergency access to existing dumps if public health and safety are at stake. Bernero said the loophole is intended only as “a very tough and temporary form of relief.”

Kaufman of the EPA calls the emergency access clause “the pinprick that opens up the condom.” Kaufman said he believes the amendment will be used to make up for noncompliance in other states.

And there are other concerns. The Ward Valley waste will be buried in steel drums in unlined, 60-foot-deep trenches. Opponents say that the design is the same as the one that sprung the leak in Illinois. They call for a blueprint more like that of hazardous waste dumps, which are lined and plumbed to create a sort of plastic underground bowl laced with drainage pipes.

California water and health officials say a liner would be counterproductive because rainwater might pool in the trenches and offer a fast track for isotopes into the ground water if the liner leaks. Moreover, US Ecology’s Romano said, the wet climate in Illinois is “apples and oranges” compared to Needles, where rainfall averages five inches a year and the ground water is 700 feet deep.

Also at issue is the cleanup cost if radioactivity reached the water supply. By state law, US Ecology must carry $10 million in liability insurance on the dump, and another $15 million of coverage is to be bought with surcharges paid by the utilities and industries that generate the waste.

But that coverage cannot be tapped to pay for cleanup if the dump leaked, said John L. Quattrocchi of American Nuclear Insurers in Farmington, Conn., which has insured US Ecology’s other dumps. The kind of insurance available to US Ecology covers only claims for injury or property damage outside the dump, he said, and such claims are so rare and difficult to prove that none has been awarded from a low-level dump in the 33-year history of the industry.

D’Arrigo and others point to the lack of insurance as evidence that the network of state dumps is simply “a way for the nuclear industry to shift liability (for leaks) away from themselves and onto the taxpayers.”

But state health officials say the alternative is for the generators of the waste to handle the disposal themselves. That is a dicey proposition “that would leave waste scattered all over the state,” said Reuben Junkert, director of the low-level radioactive waste project for the health department.

The debate has been frustrating for US Ecology, which has spent $25 million on the Ward Valley project. “There is no scenario, no site under which these people would find this project acceptable,” Romano said. “A lot of these groups just oppose nuclear power.”

Whatever their motive, the Ward Valley opponents are gaining momentum. A national anti-nuclear conference this spring in Washington, D. C., focused on the Needles fight. A national coalition of grass-roots anti-dump groups called Don’t Waste U.S. alerted members this month that Needles is “the national number one radioactive dumping issue.” Kaufman has offered to “coach” protesters in California.

“It’s a whole new ballgame,” Needles activist Butler said recently. “It’s no longer a big secret.”

But dump proponents believe it is too late to derail Ward Valley.

“Federal law is what it is,” Romano said, “and this state has no choice but to carry it out.”

The Sources of Radioactive Waste

The 135,000 cubic feet of low-level radioactive waste to be buried annually at Ward Valley will come from four states--California, Arizona, North Dakota and South Dakota. State health officials list five major sources for the waste. Here is the breakdown by volume: * 45.9% industrial waste, including such things as discarded X-ray fluorescent tubes, aircraft counterweights, exit signs and smoke detectors.

* 39% nuclear waste, including contaminated concrete and piping from decommissioned power plants, reactor hardware, tools, discarded components, filters, booties and rags.

* 5.8% medical waste, including irradiated glass, plastic, tissue, used radioisotopes from bone marrow therapy and myocardial imagery.

* 4.7% academic waste, including research animal carcasses, excreta and vegetation.

* 4.6% government waste, including hospital waste from Veterans Administration hospitals, maintenance and cleanup waste from U. S. naval nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers.