‘Not in My Back Yard’ Storage Reality

A few Western counties expressed an interest, but not for long. The Mescalero tribe in New Mexico is willing. But when it comes to highly radioactive nuclear waste, most people say, “Not in my back yard.”

When Sen. Frank H. Murkowski (R-Alaska), whose committee will craft nuclear waste legislation later this year, suggested that a federal nuclear weapons complex in South Carolina might be suitable as an interim storage site for highly radioactive fuel from the nation’s civilian reactors, the state’s governor said, through an aide, “No!”

There weren’t too many people knocking down the door of David LeRoy, who, as federal nuclear waste negotiator, spent four years beginning in 1990 trying to persuade someone into accepting a temporary nuclear waste dump.

Despite offers of $100,000 in preliminary study grants, he got only a few bites and no one pursued the matter beyond the first round of discussion. The office was allowed to disappear earlier this year after funding was eliminated.

One of the applications came from commissioners in Grant County, N.D., in 1992. When word got around, three of the commissioners were recalled by the voters and the application was withdrawn.

Voter concern prompted other counties to back out as well. Four of five Indian tribes who sought out LeRoy also backed away. The Mescalero tribe in New Mexico is offering to build a private repository for reactor spent fuel as part of an agreement with 33 utilities.

Utility executives are approaching the deal cautiously.

The tribe, which has high unemployment with half the people at or below the poverty level, rejected the plan on a 490-362 vote last January, but then reversed itself in March. It’s still uncertain whether the $100-million repository, which would accept 10,000 metric tons of waste over 10 years, would get a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

At least two bills in Congress call for a temporary storage facility to be built in Nevada, where hundreds of nuclear bomb tests were conducted during the Cold War and where the government is trying to put a permanent underground high-level waste repository at Yucca Mountain.

“It’s asking us to accept either death by hanging or by firing squad,” said Sen. Richard H. Bryan (D-Nev.), calling a temporary site just as bad as a permanent one. Nevada officials promised to fight an interim dump hard and long.

It’s too easy for temporary to become permanent, said Bryan.