KEEP YELLOWSTONE NUCLEAR FREE
News Update - February 17, 2000

Welcome to the weekly online newsletter of Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free.
Our goal is to bring you the latest developments, news, meeting dates, and
actions you can take to Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free.
We welcome your comments and suggestions.

Our concerns are making national headlines! This article appeared on the
front page of last Sunday's Chicago Tribune.

"PLAN TO BURN RADIOACTIVE TRASH STEAMS WYOMING"
By Judy Graham, Tribune Staff Writer
February 13, 2000
JACKSON, Wyo. -- A plan to burn toxic waste--some of it laced with
plutonium--in an incinerator some 100 miles from Yellowstone National Park
has riled the residents of this Old West resort community, including actor
Harrison Ford, celebrity lawyer Gerry Spence and World Bank President James
Wolfensohn.

They are among those contributing to environmental groups suing the federal
government to halt construction of the incinerator, which opponents claim
could spew radioactive particles across thousands of acres of forests and
the Grand Tetons.
(continuedáscroll down**)
__________________________________________________________

We are searching for an EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR.*  Please note the complete job
description below, and forward this information to friends or acquaintances
with the qualifications and interest in environmental issues, specifically
the safe stewardship of nuclear waste.
__________________________________________________________

Order checks with The Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free logo from The
Jackson State Bank.  Call Jeremy Eiss at 307-739-3735.


NEARLY 4500 LETTERS HAVE NOW BEEN SENT TO  U.S. SENATORS THOMAS & ENZI, REP.
BARBARA CUBIN & GOV. JIM GERINGER. We are making our position known to them!
If you haven't yet sent letters, they are available on our website or at:
Back Door Deli, Betty Rock Cafe, Cheap Thrills, Jackson Hole Roasters,
Gordo's, Harvest Bakery, Images of Nature Gallery, Jackson Hole Traders,
Knobe's, Pearl Street Bagels (both locations) Skinny Skis, Stone Drug, Teton
Mountaineering, Teton Rock Gym, Valley Book Store, Wild Turkey Boutique, and
Wyoming Wear.


Thank you to those who attended the Febr. 9 Public Comment Meeting re: High
Level Waste alternatives at INEEL.  Your comments that evening and at the
Jan. 25 meeting on the incinerator are vitally important, as they represent
the public's interest, and cumulatively, send a powerful message to our
elected officials.

The HLW disposal represents the largest single undertaking of waste disposal
at INEEL, yet Jackson residents were given only two weeks to evaluate the
waste disposal options contained in a four-volume, 600-page technical
document . Given the gravity of the situation, we consider this an
insufficient time-frame and are therefore requesting a one-year extension of
the public comment period, are requesting that the incinerator be halted
immediately, and the $1.2 billion allocated for the incinerator construction
be spent instead on Research & Development of safer disposal alternatives.

If you were unable to attend or do not live in the Jackson area, please know
that written comments re: the HLW options may be mailed or emailed to the
addresses below.  Deadline is March 20, 2000.

You may email comments to: http://www.jason.com/hlwdeis
Or send them to Tom Wichmann, Document Manager
US Dept. of Energy, Idaho Operations Office,
MS 1108  850 Energy Drive
Idaho Falls, ID  83401-1563


* EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR JOB DESCRIPTION
Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free, a Jackson Hole, Wyoming based non-profit
organization dedicated to stopping the Department of Energy (DOE) from
building a plutonium incinerator about 90 miles upwind from Yellowstone
National Park is seeking an executive director to oversee the direction and
management of the organization and to implement the organization's strategic
plan.
Qualifications include: extensive experience running a successful
non-profit, association or business; demonstrated experience working closely
with board of directors, members of the organization and community at large,
proven ability in communication skills, booth verbal and written; experience
in fund-raising and fiscal management; excellent interpersonal skills; the
ability to prioritize and maintain clear thinking in fast-paced environment.
Computer proficiency is desired.
Responsibilities include: developing strong staff and volunteer
coordination; directing and implementing foundation proposals; fund raising
with other organizations; preparation of materials to be used for board
meetings and other gatherings; oversight of all committees and other
programs and activities to ensure that objectives are focused, viable and
relate to strategic plan.
Executive Director must have a passion for protecting the health of people
and the environment as we promote awareness, research and funding for the
safe stewardship of nuclear waste everywhere. This position is full time.
Competitive salary and benefits.  Position available immediately.  Please
respond with letter of interest and resume, including salary history to:
Search Committee, Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free, PO Box 4838, Jackson,
Wyoming, 83001.
__________________________________________________________
**"PLAN TO BURN RADIOACTIVE TRASH STEAMS WYOMING"
Chicago Tribune - February 13, 2000
(continued)

Until last summer, many residents of Jackson, a popular Western vacation
spot and playground for the rich and famous, were blissfully unaware that a
gigantic nuclear complex lay due west over the mountains, at the Energy
Department's Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory.

Then people in Jackson heard about the department's plans to build an
incinerator on its 890-square-mile compound in the Idaho desert, where for
50 years nuclear waste has been dumped in pits, buried beneath earthen berms
or stored in buildings never meant to be permanent repositories for toxic
garbage.

Watchdog groups in Idaho have warned that the proposed nuclear incinerator
could release tiny particles of plutonium and hazardous chemicals into the
air, where they would be carried east by the wind, drifting over the jagged
mountains and quiet meadows of Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks.
The parks are among America's most popular, having 6 million visitors
yearly.

"People here are scared that this stuff is going to get into their lungs,
and they're going to die," said Tatiana Maxwell, a Wyoming native and mother
of three young children, pregnant with her fourth, who moved to Jackson for
its beauty and relative peace five years ago. "The more we learn about what
they're planning to do, the more terrifying it becomes."

Maxwell is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed by a coalition of
environmental groups, including the Sierra Club. Filed last September and
amended last month in U.S. District Court, the suit alleges that the
incinerator would harm area residents and foul the environment. Ford and
Wolfensohn are contributors to Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free, an
environmental group formed last summer to oppose the project. Spence, the
lead lawyer for the plaintiffs and a longtime resident of Jackson, says he
is donating his time.

Energy Department officials claim the state-of-the-art incinerator will
contain multiple safety systems to prevent harmful materials from escaping
when the waste--oil, sludge, lubricants, clothing, pipes, tools and
equipment contaminated with plutonium and hazardous chemicals--is burned.
State officials will monitor the facility's operations with a computer,
making it highly unlikely that any problems will go undetected, they say.

Many people don't believe the Energy Department, which only recently
acknowledged, after decades of denials, that workers at U.S. nuclear plants
were exposed to materials that might have made them ill with cancer and
other ailments. The department has promised to reimburse workers whose
illnesses can be traced to the plants and is holding meetings on the subject
at sites across the country.

There is also concern because the government's private contractor for the
$1.2 billion waste treatment project, British Nuclear Fuels Ltd., has
admitted it falsified safety records for reprocessed nuclear fuels sent to
Japan.

British Nuclear Fuels, which is owned by the British government, has
apologized to the Japanese government and has overhauled procedures at the
plant where the safety records were altered.

Its assurances that the Idaho incinerator, a sophisticated design that has
never been built before, will work without a hitch don't satisfy residents
of Jackson, 100 miles east of the Idaho complex. From millionaires in their
mansions to preschool teachers, large numbers of Jackson's 6,000 residents
have vowed to stop the incinerator.

In few other places have activists protesting Energy Department plans to
dispose of nuclear garbage marshaled so many resources. At an August
gathering, Spence raised $500,000 for Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free in less
than an hour. Residents pledged contributions in the names of their
children, grandchildren, and even their dogs, he said. A few weeks ago,
another meeting on a snowy night drew nearly 1,000 people to voice their
opposition to the incinerator project before state and federal officials.

"For the first time in Jackson, the issue of what we're doing with the waste
from the Cold War is in the face of the very wealthy and powerful," said
Paul Connett, a professor of chemistry at St. Lawrence University in New
York who studies incinerators and calls the Energy Department proposal "a
cockamamie plan."

Quietly, some of the movers and shakers have persuaded the Wyoming
congressional delegation to write to Energy Secretary Bill Richardson,
calling on him to explore alternatives to burning the nuclear junk. It's
known as transuranic waste, a mixture of dangerous chemicals, organic
solvents and plutonium.

Initially reluctant to take a stand, Wyoming Gov. Joseph Meyer has gone on
record saying he is opposed to burning the waste. Democratic presidential
candidate Bill Bradley, contacted by opponents of the project, also has come
out against the proposal.

All this activity has ruffled feathers in neighboring Idaho, a conservative
state of about 1 million people, where the Energy Department's laboratory is
the largest single employer, with nearly 8,000 workers. Argonne National
Laboratories, based outside Chicago, has its Western operations at the vast
complex, which for decades has been used to test and develop new nuclear
technologies.

Serious pollution is nothing new to the Idaho National Engineering and
Environmental Laboratory. It contains about 500 separate Super Fund cleanup
sites, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Some in Idaho argue
that if they can live with the proposed incinerator, which would affect the
people closest to it the most, then Wyoming shouldn't butt in.

"We all live here. . . . We wouldn't build something that would hurt
anybody," said Beverly Cook, manager of the Energy Department's Idaho
operations, noting that the department will comply with state and federal
clean air and hazardous waste regulations. If the last set of permits is
issued within the month by state and federal authorities--the final public
comment period ended last week--construction probably would begin sometime
in March and be complete within a few years.

Incineration is a "proven technology" and "the only approved method for
dealing with this waste" by the EPA, Cook insisted.

While the EPA acknowledges that the technology for incinerating some toxic
substances such as polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, is well-established
and that it has prescribed incineration as a method for treating dangerous
organic solvents, the agency has never recommended burning highly
radioactive materials such as plutonium, according to Wayne Pierre, the
EPA's Super Fund project manager for the Idaho laboratory.

The advanced filters designed to catch PCB or plutonium particles have been
shown to be 99.9 percent effective, but that's still not 100 percent, he
said.

"Any emission, no matter how small, is not acceptable," given the deadliness
of plutonium and the proximity of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National
Parks, said Sophia Wakefield, co-owner of Harvest natural food store in
Jackson.

"These natural treasures are part of our world heritage and must be
preserved."

No one knows what health and safety consequences could accrue from
incinerating hazardous wastes with plutonium, said Arjun Makhijani, an
expert in nuclear fusion and president of the Institute for Energy and
Environmental Research. A team of scientists who evaluated and rejected a
proposed incinerator at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in
California in 1990 concluded that burning such waste is "a violation of the
cardinal principle of radioactive waste treatment; namely, containing
radioactivity rather than spreading it."

Incinerators also have been proposed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in
New Mexico and at the Rocky Flats nuclear plant outside of Denver.

Many people in Idaho would rather see the nuclear garbage treated and then
shipped out of state for permanent storage at the Waste Isolation Pilot
Plant in New Mexico, which opened last year.

"Is there a risk involved? Yes. But is it worth what we have to do to clean
this stuff up, to send it to safe permanent storage? Yes," said Fred Sica,
president of the Chamber of Commerce in Idaho Falls, the city nearest to the
incinerator site.

The vast majority of the transuranic waste at the Idaho laboratory--some
65,000 cubic meters stored above ground, containing 1.4 metric tons of
plutonium, and 37,000 cubic meters buried in pits--comes from Denver's Rocky
Flats nuclear plant, which in 1989 was raided by the FBI amid reports that
it was deliberately violating environmental regulations. The plant has since
been shuttered.

Under a 1995 federal court-ordered legal agreement with the state of Idaho,
which sued the Energy Department for failing to treat the Rocky Flats waste,
the department agreed to remove all the above-ground materials at the Idaho
laboratory from the state by 2018.

Under federal regulations the materials, which are stored in steel drums and
wooden boxes, can't be sent to New Mexico until volatile hazardous chemicals
and organic solvents are removed or rendered inactive. Thus, the need for
some kind of treatment.

Energy Department officials argue they have to abide by the terms of their
legal agreement with Idaho, which requires them to begin treating the waste
by 2003. But in the state of Washington the agency has failed to hew to an
agreement with the EPA and state officials regarding a cleanup of its
Hanford nuclear waste facility.

Critics claim the process of deciding to build an incinerator in Idaho was
rigged from the start to exclude public input from Wyoming. The Energy
Department studied the environmental impact of the incinerator only within a
50-mile radius, they say, ignoring winds that blow over the mountains into
western Wyoming. Those claims are made in a lawsuit filed in September and
amended in January to include a class-action claim by Wyoming citizens
against the government.

"This thing has never been tried anywhere before, not even on a pilot
basis," Spence said. "They're turning us into guinea pigs."

The record of British Nuclear Fuels also bothers some observers. In Ireland,
Scotland and Northern Europe, the company has stirred an uproar because of
nuclear pollution from its plant in Sellafield, England, that has entered
the Irish Sea and reportedly has been found from the North Sea all the way
to the Arctic. Swiss authorities also have recently complained about the
quality of the operation's reprocessed nuclear materials delivered to
clients.

In the United States, there are three incinerators that burn mixed low-level
nuclear and hazardous waste, which does not include plutonium. The one that
most closely resembles the facility planned for Idaho is in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
Many workers there claim the incinerator is responsible, at least in part,
for serious health problems, including cancer. British Nuclear Fuels is a
contractor at the Oak Ridge facility.

Given the questions that surround the Idaho incinerator, "it's the wrong
project in the wrong place with the wrong company," said Makhijani, who
argues that the government should consider other alternatives.

Not so, countered Greg Anderson, mayor of Pocatello, Idaho's second largest
city. "We have already got the radioactive stuff here. We can't ignore that.
This is a safer and more effective way of managing this waste for the
long-term."
______________________________________________
*	Visit our website at: www.yellowstonenuclearfree.com for information and
links to other articles.
*	If you have comments, suggestions, or would like to be removed from this
list, email us at: jweaver@wyoming.com
*	If you have a friend who would like to receive this News Update, have them
email their name, address, phone number and email address to:
jweaver@wyoming.com