Be Careful: Go Slow on Ward Valley
Mistakes made in the burial of radioactive waste are virtually uncorrectable, for radioactivity that escapes into the ambient soil is all but impossible to recapture. This is why the proposal that low-level (but still highly hazardous) radioactive waste should be buried at Ward Valley, just 20 miles from the Colorado River, deserves the most exacting and, equally important, the most public scrutiny possible.
More than a year ago, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, tacitly judging inadequate the safety review conducted by Gov. Pete Wilson’s Department of Health Services, declined to transfer the affected federal land to state control. Babbitt promised a public, evidentiary hearing and, in the interim, commissioned the National Academy of Sciences to conduct an independent study addressing the fear that radioactivity could migrate from the dump to ground water and through ground water to the river.
Last summer the academy’s Board of Radioactive Waste Management convened a panel and held hearings in California. There were unsettling reports at the time that the panelists’ conflict-of-interest disclosures (many have ties to the nuclear power industry) had taken place behind closed doors and that dump proponents--some of them financially interested parties--were given days to argue their case, while opponents were given just hours. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) filed an objection with academy President Bruce Alberts, but to no avail.
Now, on the eve of the delivery of the academy’s Ward Valley report, Robert Loux, executive director of Nevada’s Nuclear Waste Project Office, U.S. Sen. Richard Bryan (D-Nev.) and three New York state legislators have reported in detail--and with anger and alarm--on virtually identical academy behavior in their states. They accuse the academy of concealing its panelists’ conflicts of interest in the review of proposed nuclear waste facilities in their states and of failing to allow opponents any semblance of a fair hearing.
Lamentably enough, it begins to appear that rather than resolving others’ questions, the academy itself is in danger of becoming a question. The proposed Ward Valley facility and others like it around the country, if science can prove them safe, should not be stopped for political reasons. By the same token, science should not be compromised to fit what politicians have already decided.
We do not intend to prejudge the outcome of any inquiry into the safety of the proposed Ward Valley dump. We remain concerned, however, now as throughout this controversy, that there be no prejudgment by the relevant authorities. Babbitt and Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary must take the well-documented and disturbingly consistent reports of Sens. Bryan and Boxer and the New York legislators seriously in evaluating the academy’s record in the area of radioactive waste management
