CHICAGO TRIBUNE-SUNDAY
February 13, 2000
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.

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.