By Josh Long
Jackson Hole Guide

The Idaho Department of Environmental Quality has decided against extending a public comment period on an air permit required to build a proposed Idaho nuclear incinerator, prompting some Jackson residents to investigate the possibility of a lawsuit.

Moreover, U.S. Sen. Craig Thomas has joined the Jackson Hole community in worries about the proposed nuclear and hazardous waste facility at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Lab.

The senator said Monday that he planned to call Gov. Jim Geringer and Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne to request that somebody at the INEEL facility come to Jackson and discuss the plans at the nuclear facility.

Some residents in Jackson Hole are fuming over a plan to burn 19,000 cubic meters of nuclear and hazardous waste over a 13-year period. They are worried that materials will flow to the Jackson area in the prevailing winds, causing health problems.

"We are not hopeful that - given the attitude of IDEQ - they are interested in stopping this project," said Jackson Dr. Brent Blue, who belongs to a group of local residents that have mobilized in opposition to the plan. "We will investigate the regulatory and legal remedies to prevent us from being poisoned by the people in Idaho."

Steve Allred, IDEQ administrator, said last week the state agency received more than 400 comments from residents in Jackson Hole. He repudiated local claims that people here were not informed of the proposed facility.

The Teton County Commission plans to hold a public information meeting regarding the facility on Aug. 26. Although the public comment session on the air permit has officially ended, the company that has been awarded the contract - BNFL, Inc. - needs to also obtain a hazardous waste permit, and there will be a public-comment period on that permit this fall.

Last week several members of St. John's Hospital gathered to discuss the hospital's position regarding the proposed facility at INEEL. Teton County Commissioner Sandy Shuptrine attended the meeting and said hospital staff is seeking to gather more health-related data.

Cancer rates don't implicate waste facility

Although some people are speculating that the nuclear and hazardous emissions will increase cancer in Jackson Hole, rates of cancer from 1992 to 1996 in counties surrounding the INEEL facility were the same or lower than in other Idaho counties, according to Cancer Data Registry of Idaho statistics.

And in Wyoming, some of the lowest cancer incident rates were reported in Teton County from 1993-97, ranking 19 out of 23 counties in the state for all forms of the disease.

That doesn't mean, however, there shouldn't be cause for alarm. For instance, in the '90s, the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare conducted a survey to study "higher-than-normal" brain cancer rates between 1975 and 1994 in six eastern Idaho counties near the INEEL facility. During that 19-year period, the six counties had a 182 residents with brain cancer during the period, thirty more than expected, according to the IDHF.

Their findings: "No common factor explains a higher-than-normal rate of brain cancer...."

Jay Gould, in his 1996 book "The Enemy Within," reported that breast cancer rates increased more than 300 percent from 1950 to 1989 in counties within 50 miles of the INEEL facility.

However, Idaho epidemiologist Chris Johnson questioned Gould's scientific methods, maintaining that the "increase in rates was observed because the rate for the earlier time period was very low."

Unfortunately, experts cannot examine a cancer patient and say, for sure, what the source of cancer is, according to scientists. That may change, however, according to a recent newspaper article in state of Washington Tri-City Herald. "Eventually, doctors may be able to tell if a specific case of lung cancer, for example, was caused by second-hand smoke or the radioactive radon gas," the newspaper reported on July 6.

Meanwhile, Jackson residents continue to scramble for more facts regarding the proposed nuclear incinerator and learn more about the invisible particles it may, or may not, produce.