Firm’s History of Safety Violations Fuels Fears in Ward Valley
To understand why some fear U.S. Ecology’s plans to build a nuclear waste dump in California’s Ward Valley desert, it helps to know the story of the radioactive cement mixer.
In 1976, at a nuclear dump on the outskirts of the tiny town of Beatty, Nev., employees told state and local inspectors that they had illegally poured liquid radioactive waste directly into the ground for eight years.
It didn’t stop there.
Moonlighting workers had taken the dump’s contaminated cement mixer into town and poured concrete slabs, including the foundation of a house. Some of the slabs set off the inspectors’ Geiger counters.
That’s not all. Employees had opened containers of radioactive material before they could be buried. With the company president’s help, they then sold the hot contents--dishes, hand tools--to unsuspecting residents all over Beatty.
“It was out of control,” recalled then-Gov. Mike O’Callaghan in a recent interview. “The whole town was hot.”
Fast-forward 20 years. Dump owner Nuclear Engineering Co. is now called U.S. Ecology, and it wants to build a nuclear dump 18 miles from the Colorado River, the major source of tap water to Southern California.
The site would be one of only three in the country licensed to accept low-level radioactive waste, which includes virtually all trash generated by the nuclear industry, except irradiated fuel and fuel byproducts.
“Every site that they’ve run has leaked,” says Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). “They’ve left a mess wherever they’ve gone. Their record, I think, would give anyone pause.”
Needles residents, who number about 5,600, are far from thrilled about having a nuclear dump in their backyard. Some have moved. The City Council spent $500,000 in legal fees to fight it before giving up. Local Native American tribes--who say the ground is sacred--have raised protest tents on the site, along with activists from Greenpeace and other antinuclear groups.
“We feel here in Needles that we’re expendable,” said Mayor Roy Mills. “If it’s so safe, put it in Santa Barbara. Or downtown L.A.”
U.S. Ecology’s 30-year operating history at Beatty was marked by license suspensions, the first criminal fine ever levied by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, government investigations and accusations of gross corporate mismanagement.
The company’s checkered history includes other troubled nuclear dumps--its Maxey Flats, Ky., facility was put on the Environmental Protection Agency’s 1986 Superfund list of most polluted sites after plutonium and other radioactive chemicals leaked.
In 1978, the Illinois attorney general sued the firm after radioactive chemicals escaped its Sheffield dump and polluted a nearby lake.
Using much the same technology as it used in Beatty, a dump that already leaks, U.S. Ecology plans to bury radioactive waste in dirt trenches near Needles. Opponents fear the unlined repository will leak into the Colorado River, which also provides drinking water to Arizona and Mexico.
The Ward Valley dump has sparked an ugly 10-year legal and political war which erupted anew in February when the Clinton administration derailed the project for at least another year by ordering additional safety tests.
But in March, the U.S. Senate Energy Committee approved legislation that would transfer the federally owned Ward Valley land to California, a political end-run that, if approved, allows U.S. Ecology to forgo new environmental tests.
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors went on record last week against the transfer. The San Diego County Board of Supervisors took the opposite position.
Opponents say the company’s inexpensive technology is dangerous and outdated, and cite U.S. Ecology’s troubled operating record.
Proponents are California Gov. Pete Wilson, some state Department of Health Services officials and the firm itself--all of whom say that the plan is safe and that U.S. Ecology is a responsible company.
“I am pleased with U.S. Ecology’s record,” said the firm’s vice president, Rich Paton. “I think we have done a tremendous amount in trying to meet the nation’s needs.”
Paton declined to answer detailed questions about the history of the company, a Louisville, Ky., subsidiary of Houston-based American Ecology.
According to U.S. Ecology’s approved state license application, Ward Valley trenches will not leak because arid land will trap migrating chemicals, much as water poured into sand soaks mostly the surface area.
But in 1994, U.S. Geological Survey scientists studying the Beatty desert site discovered radioactive tritium had leaked 357 feet below the dump, and rested just 10 feet above the water table.
The company blames that migration on the illegal dumping of liquid waste directly into the ground. At Ward Valley, as was required by law at Beatty, liquids are to be solidified with cement before burial.
Opponents say rainwater picks up radioactive debris as it passes through unlined trenches and is to blame for migrating chemicals at Beatty. They fear the same will occur in the Ward Valley.
Paton says there is no danger: “We are a conscientious company.”
That is not what regulators said about the firm’s management of Beatty. Former Nevada human resources director Roger Trounday recalls how it started.
Someone called state officials, reporting that a cement mixer belonging to the nuclear dump was being used in Beatty to pour concrete slabs.
Alarmed state investigators brought in Geiger counters, the EPA and the NRC. Then they heard about the pouring of liquid waste and the selling of radioactive trash.
They conducted house-to-house searches and shut the town to outside traffic. Residents panicked.
“At night, all you could see was headlights going out of town,” Trounday said. “People were taking the stuff and running to the nearby canyons, trying to get rid of it.”
Some of the dump-bound items were beautiful, Trounday said: a gleaming stainless-steel scale, military clocks with radium dials that glowed in the dark. Others were utilitarian: tires, plywood, toolboxes.
They were in homes, businesses and farms where residents had daily contact with them.
Some contained such high levels of plutonium, which remains radioactive for at least 24,000 years, that people who touched them were ordered to undergo full-body testing.
No immediate signs of radiation poisoning were found, but effects from such exposure, in the form of cancer or genetic defects, can take years to appear. Government officials have never retested the exposed residents.
Investigators confiscated everything, including jettisoned cargo collected from the canyons.
The state and the NRC suspended Beatty’s operating license. The NRC later fined the firm $10,000--the first criminal sanction ever levied by the agency against a company--for willful failure to properly dispose of radioactive byproducts.
Beatty was eventually allowed to reopen, after committing to increased security and employee control. Three years later, the state twice closed it for accepting leaking containers and burying radioactive waste outside the dump.
Those violations constituted “gross corporate mismanagement by Nuclear Engineering Co.,” states a 1979 closure order issued by the Nevada Department of Human Resources.
O’Callaghan, the former governor who is now executive editor of the Las Vegas Sun newspaper, increased the company’s fees “so we could hire an additional inspector to go down there to sit on them and look down their throats,” he said.
For the next several years, Nevada health officials tried to revoke the company’s license. The firm fought those efforts in court. Meanwhile, a national crisis developed over a shortage of low-level repositories.
Nevada reluctantly agreed to keep Beatty open. In 1992, its obligation expired. Gov. Bob Miller shut the radioactive site.
“U.S. Ecology attempted to keep the dump open by state legislative means, but that failed,” Miller said. “They claimed they would provide big bucks for the state budget, but Nevadans refused to sell out. We had already done more than our fair share of nuclear waste disposal.”
