Interior Dept. to Halt Tests at Ward Valley Site

The federal Interior Department said Friday it will halt environmental safety tests at the proposed Ward Valley nuclear waste site because it believes that the California Department of Health Services lacks the authority to buy the land for a dump.

To continue testing--aimed at resolving, among other things, whether low-level radioactive waste would contaminate the water table and migrate 20 miles to the Colorado River--would be a waste of time and money, said Nina Rose Hartfield, deputy director of the Bureau of Land Management.

In a memo Friday to Ed Hastey, her director in California, Hartfield said attorneys for the Interior and Justice departments have concluded that the Department of Health Services lacks the authority to buy the federal land.

That issue, however, remains to be resolved as part of a federal lawsuit filed by the department and US Ecology, the company that would operate the dump.

That lawsuit also argues that Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt was wrong to block the sale of the federal land to the department after it was approved.

A court hearing on the land sale is scheduled for June in Washington.

The contention that the Department of Health Services cannot buy the land was raised last month in a letter to the White House by three Democratic leaders of the state Legislature--Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco), Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles) and Speaker Pro Tem Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica).

They said that Gov. Pete Wilson, who wants the 1,000 acres of California’s eastern desert developed as a nuclear dump, has known since 1991 that the Department of Health Services was trying to avoid legislative scrutiny by paying for the property with a $500,000 gift from US Ecology.

Mike Kahoe, Wilson’s deputy Cabinet secretary and point man on the Ward Valley proposal, said Friday that the state would prevail in its court arguments that the Department of Health Services can buy the land, notwithstanding the arguments by attorneys in the Justice and Interior departments.

Kuehl said the decision to halt testing “was appropriate, as a recognition that the Department of Health Services doesn’t have the authority to purchase the land.”

Ward Young, co-director of the Bay Area Nuclear Waste Coalition, which has long opposed the Ward Valley proposal, was more enthusiastic about Friday’s news.

“It means work on Ward Valley is ceasing and that it’s extremely unlikely that the dump proponents will be able to dig themselves out of their hole.”