Water and Radioactive Waste: Guesswork Simply Will Not Do

A long-term threat to the water supply of much of Los Angeles and the rest of Southern California has arisen in the form of a newly licensed dump that soon may be receiving radioactive waste from all over the state and indeed all over the country. Scientific evidence exists that radioactivity could migrate via aquifers from the dump to the Colorado River, a mere 20 miles away.

Last June three experts of the U.S. Geological Survey warned that radioactivity might migrate to the river. (Later, they specified four possible paths.) Last July two possible contamination paths were specified in an independent, disturbingly convergent report commissioned by the Metropolitan Water District and drafted by Geoscience Support Services. Politely but scathingly, Geoscience asked the state Department of Health Services to take 18 major measures, most before licensing the dump. The DHS disregarded this advice, just as it had ignored a 1992 report by the Ward Valley Technical Review Panel pointing to the same danger.

For the moment, dump construction is delayed by four factors:

1. The dump site, Ward Valley, just west of Needles in the Mojave Desert, belongs to the federal government, which has yet to transfer it to the state. Unfortunately, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has now filed the last officially required environmental report. In it he dismisses the possibility of contamination, not on the basis of any independent analysis but rather on the basis of assertions made in the license application of the proposed dump operator.

2. Access to Ward Valley is controlled by the Metropolitan Water District through a right of way that it owns. The dump operator has requested an easement. Significantly, perhaps, the MWD has yet to grant it.

3. On Oct. 15, a group including the Fort Mojave Indians, L.A. Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Southern California Federation of Scientists and the Committee to Bridge the Gap brought suit to void the license given to the operator. Attorney Roger Lane Carrick of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft said, “Our review of the record of the EIR (environmental impact report) and the license raises grave questions about whether DHS considered all of the information as required before granting the license.” Sadly, this is just the question that could have been settled in the adjudicatory hearing that the MWD and the L. A. Department of Water and Power, among others concerned about the threat to the water supply, asked Gov. Pete Wilson to schedule. Wilson refused.

4. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) has declared her intent to join the plaintiffs in the suit just mentioned as amicus , having failed in three open letters and a press conference to persuade Babbitt to hold a serious hearing on the safety of the proposed dump. She will do the same in a parallel suit brought by the City of Needles. In the press conference, held Oct. 11, Boxer used the word cover-up to describe Babbitt’s refusal to permit the three Geological Survey experts to speak in their official capacity about their findings. Though her role can only be indirect, Boxer seems to be digging in for a long fight.

And what of the substance of the issue? The Times position is unchanged since, more than a year ago, we joined the MWD, the DWP and others urging Wilson to hold an adjudicatory hearing. Though the convergence of disinterested, highly qualified technical opinion is impressive, we do not choose one side over the other on the technical merits. The question of whether the proposed dump threatens a key part of Los Angeles’ water supply is only the most important of many grave and difficult questions that remain ominously unanswered. The Times contends that until those questions have been answered, construction of the dump should not go forward.

“We’ve got to have a little hearing and let everybody have their say,” Babbitt recently said to Michael Jackson on a KABC radio broadcast. But before too long radioactive garbage may start arriving in Southern California from all over the country. At such a moment we need more than “a little hearing.” We need full disclosure and then a long, hard, objective look at the facts. We need that because if this dump proves to be a mistake, it is likely to be a mistake beyond correcting. The president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, Daniel Hirsch, who has read all 11,000 pages of the dump application, reports that exactly one page is devoted to remediation in the event that radioactivity escapes containment. If radioactivity gets out, the Ward Valley dump will be not a solution to an onerous problem but rather a generator of new waste as contaminated water spreads. Faced with that eventuality, we have far more to fear from haste than from delay.

Finally, though the hazardous life of the low-level radioactive waste to be buried is measured in centuries, by terms of the license the dump becomes a California-owned facility after 38 years at most. The operator will be gone by then, well before serious problems develop even under the most pessimistic scenarios. Taxpayer, someday all this will be yours. Speak now for your water supply--to Babbitt, Boxer, Wilson or the MWD board of directors--or forever hold your peace.