Recycling Tritium

* Your editorial (March 26) noting that the California Department of Health Services may have overestimated the amount of tritium to be buried at the proposed Ward Valley nuclear waste dump to conceal the amount of nuclear power plant waste going to the dump leads to a very simple conclusion--the best way to deal with waste tritium is to recycle it, not bury it.

As The Times has noted in its articles and editorials, because waste tritium is an isotope of hydrogen, it bonds with oxygen and spreads, just like plain water, as radioactive water. In fact, tritium has leaked out of storage facilities in South Carolina and Washington. Tritium manufacturing is where a vast majority of the waste is produced, and recapturing and recycling that waste is both feasible and economical.

In 1992, Gov. Pete Wilson vetoed AB 3798 (Katz), which required California tritium manufacturers to recapture and recycle 95% of the waste tritium generated in the manufacturing process. Last year, Wilson vetoed AB 1786 (Bowen), a scaled-down version of the Katz bill, despite evidence that recycling waste tritium makes both economic and environmental sense.

Removing tritium from the waste stream wouldn’t have affected plans to build the Ward Valley dump. However, it would have focused the debate on the real issue--whether nuclear power plant waste should be buried at the site.

DEBRA BOWEN, State Assembly

D-Marina del Rey

RICHARD KATZ, State Assembly

D-Sylmar