Land Sale OKd for Nuclear Dump in California Desert

A controversial low-level nuclear waste dump in the Southern California desert cleared a major hurdle Thursday night, when Secretary of the Interior Manuel Lujan announced that he will proceed with the sale of 1,000 acres of federal land to the state of California for a site before the White House changes hands.

Opponents of the dump said the action virtually assures that it will be built unless the courts intervene or the incoming Clinton Administration can reverse Lujan’s decision. The action--taken as a favor for a Republican governor--was portrayed by the critics as a remarkable eleventh-hour maneuver by the outgoing Bush Adminstration.

Lujan said Thursday in a written statement that he was proceeding with the sale of the Ward Valley site “at the request of Gov. Pete Wilson.” He added, however, that the Department of the Interior “takes no position on the merit” of the proposed 70-acre dump for waste from nuclear power stations, hospitals, universities, biotechnology companies and other industry.

Until Lujan’s announcement, the ongoing two-year process of transferring land from the federal government to the state, had stood in the way of the dump’s opening. Now, it is unclear what steps the Clinton Adminstration and incoming Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt could take to stop the transfer--should they so choose. Steven Goldstein, Lujan’s spokesman, said he did not believe the incoming Administration would have problems with the action. “It is likely that Gov. Babbitt, who was a former state chief executive, would understand Gov. Wilson’s desire to bring control of this matter to the state of California,” Goldstein said.

The last-minute action generated immediate outrage from Ward Valley environmentalists and from the State Lands Commission. They have tried to slow or stop a process that could transform the wild terrain near the Colorado River into a radioactive waste dump. The lands commission already has written Babbitt, asking him to intercede and stop the sale.

State Controller Gray Davis, chairman of the commission, called Lujan’s action “incomprehensible” and said Thursday that agency lawyers are exploring the possibility of going to court to block the sale.

“The site poses danger to the Colorado River and poses considerable liabilities to California taxpayers,” Davis said. “Our lawyers concluded that we could well be liable for any accidents on site and en route to the site from other states as well as from within California.”

Daniel Hirsch, president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, an environmental organization opposed to the dump, called Lujan’s move “one of the most dastardly actions by any lame-duck administration.”

“I believe the action is so grossly illegal that it will be easily overturned,” he said. “But it is an extraordinary last-gasp effort by the governor to force that nuclear dump down the public’s throat without resolution of the outstanding environmental issues.”

But U.S. Ecology, the company that would manage the proposed dump, called Lujan’s action a major move forward. Steve A. Romano, the company’s vice president and manager of California operations, said the decision has been unduly delayed by the lands commission.

Although he noted that “this land transfer in no way presupposes a license approval” for the dump site, he expects the state Department of Health Services to grant a license soon. State Controller Davis said he believes the health department is so “biased” in favor of the Ward Valley site that it certainly will grant the license.

Although many levels of legal wrangling lie ahead, U.S. Ecology hopes to break ground within 18 months.

In 1980, the federal government mandated that by 1993 all states--which they grouped in clusters-- would be required to dispose of their own radioactive waste, with each area responsible for opening a nuclear dump site by Jan. 1. No dumps have been opened, however, and only a handful of sites have been identified nationwide. Ward Valley was the choice of the cluster of states that includes California.

However, everyone from environmentalists to American Indians and the lands commission opposed the site. Among other things, they argued that it was home to the threatened California desert tortoise, it was too close to an important urban water source in the Colorado River and that it was sacred Indian land.

Without the land transfer, the site could not be licensed as a dump by the state Department of Health Services.

“The Department of Health Services requested that this land be sold to the state last summer for the dump site,” U.S. Ecology’s Romano said. “We expect that it would have been done were it not for actions by the State Lands Commission to subvert the process.”

Environmentalist Hirsch said Lujan yanked a required environmental impact statement from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency “hours before it went to the printer” to speed up the transfer. The statement is supposed to be filed with the EPA, which then publishes it in the federal register, he said. A 30-day comment period follows, “which would have left (the decision) in the hands of the Clinton Administration.”

Tony Staed, a spokesman for the federal Bureau of Land Management in California, said his agency had “submitted the environmental impact statement to EPA, which was dealing with the transfer of the sale. We were requested by the secretary to withdraw that and we did. I guess they were trying to speed up the process.”

Hirsch said Lujan basically “waved a magic wand over the environmental impact statement and called it instead an environmental assessment, which he says doesn’t require that review.”

Should the sale be completed, Hirsch contends that licensing of the dump would be a “done deal” because Wilson has “reneged” on his promise to hold a hearing on safety issues. He said Wilson made an agreement with the state Senate to conduct the hearing but later went to court and asked to be relieved of his promise. The court still has not ruled.

Hirsch said he has no hope that the federal land appeals board, which is considering appeals on the Ward Valley site, will stand in Lujan’s way. “They work for Lujan,” he said.

Goldstein called the board “independent,” but he conceded that it is not likely to undercut the secretary’s action.