For more than 18 months, the DOE has defended a decision to incinerate nuclear waste in the remote Idaho desert.
In front of volatile crowds, concerned mothers, skeptical doctors and a silver-tongued lawyer from Jackson, Wyo., the agency has repeated that incineration is safe.
The INEEL opened a satellite office in that resort town to calm residents' fears about air pollution. For months, it fielded questions from the national press and defended in
federal court its plan to burn radioactive waste.
On March 20, that stance changed. In a reversal some hail as a testament to the power of citizen activism and others call caving to political pressure, DOE officials said they'd
put the project on hold.
Attorneys from the Justice Department called Wyoming attorney Gerry Spence last week and said they wanted to settle the lawsuit his clients filed in September.
They made an offer to shelve the incinerator, at least while a panel of experts explores other technologies to destroy hazardous chemicals in the waste. They also agreed to pay
$150,000 in attorneys' fees to the five groups that joined the suit.
"This shows you what a little community like Jackson Hole can do when they get a concerted effort behind them," said Spence, a formidable trial attorney who successfully
represented the family of nuclear whistleblower Karen Silkwood.
In exchange, the plaintiffs agreed to drop the suit and allow the DOE and its contractor to build a treatment plant that would sort, crush and repackage most of the 65,000
cubic meters of nuclear waste that has to leave Idaho by 2018.
"We worked very hard to make sure this plutonium and toxins, this horrid stuff, is going to get taken out of there," Spence said. "We made sure that although the incinerator
goes out, our agreement with the DOE left open the door to compact this stuff."
DOE-Idaho spokesman Brad Bugger said the agency realized the entire project could be tied up in lawsuits and challenges for years, primarily over concerns about the
incinerator.
But most of the waste doesn't have to be burned. It has to be moved from bulky boxes and barrels and compacted in drums so it can be shipped to a permanent dump in New
Mexico.
"Settling this allows us to move forward with the vast majority of the project and at the same time look for alternatives to incineration," Bugger said.
In the settlement reached on Sunday, the DOE agreed to convene a panel of experts to see whether alternatives to incineration had matured since the agency awarded the
contract three years ago.
Idaho, Wyoming and the plaintiffs of the lawsuit will appoint three members of the seven-member panel. They should report their findings to the secretary of energy in
December.
The agency is also looking at ways to reduce the amount of waste that needs to be specially treated, which it had originally estimated at 22 percent.
The DOE can do that by lobbying for regulatory changes, which could cut that number to as little as 3 percent.
Nearly half of the nuclear weapons waste stored at the INEEL isn't quite radioactive enough to go to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. That's the country's final
repository for transuranic waste, which contains plutonium and other long-lived radioactive elements.
The agency planned to burn and mingle the less contaminated waste with more highly radioactive material to meet the dump's standards. Now the DOE will explore whether
WIPP can accept the waste as is, Bugger said.
Some of the refuse also contains PCBs, deadly chemicals that are destroyed during incineration.
Under current regulations, waste that contains PCBs in certain concentrations can't be buried at WIPP. The DOE will lobby to raise those limits, which would eliminate the
need to burn some of the INEEL waste, Bugger said.
Even with all the regulatory changes, which aren't guaranteed, some amount of waste will still need to be treated.
The independent panel may conclude incineration is the best technology, Bugger said. In that case, the groups could file suit again.
Bugger said the DOE has always looked for ways to reduce the amount of waste to be incinerated - partly because of public opposition and partly because it doesn't make sense
to handle waste more than is necessary.
Tatiana Maxwell, a Jackson mother of three who signed onto the lawsuit as an individual party, said that's not what the agency had been telling her friends and neighbors for
the last 10 months.
"It's an interesting perspective considering they kept telling us how safe it all was and how silly our concerns were," she said. "They kept saying that this was a requirement -
that they could not get the waste out of Idaho without the incinerator. They said that over and over."
Maxwell, who is pregnant with her fourth child, said the settlement was a mixed blessing. It stopped an incinerator she is convinced is an ill-conceived idea and dangerous
health threat.
But she said it was unfortunate it took such a massive grass-roots effort, combined with election-year politics, to force the DOE's hand.
"We embrace their change of heart," she said. "But we need to keep at the forefront of our minds that the only reason this came about was because of the concerned activism of
citizens."
Chuck Rice, former chairman of the INEEL Citizens Advisory Board and a longtime advocate of the nuclear industry, said that's not a bad change. Federal agencies nowadays
have to take public concerns into account, he said.
But he said during his six years on the citizens board, he noticed the DOE making more decisions based on political factors rather than a project's technical merits.
He said he wasn't surprised by the decision to abandon the incinerator, particularly because Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson is reportedly on the short list to be Vice
President Al Gore's running mate in the upcoming election.
It wouldn't look good to have an environmental controversy on the administration's hands, particularly when the advocates are wealthy and politically savvy.
Rice said he didn't think incinerating the waste would pose any threat, but he also believes if scientists seek other options for dealing with the waste, they will find them.
He said if the settlement allows the agency to get on with packaging the waste and preparing it to leave the state of Idaho, that takes care of the most important goal.
"It's a shame to spend large amounts of resources when I don't think the incineration is a problem - only a perceived problem," he said. "But I think the public has a larger
and larger voice on things like this, and I'm not saying that's bad."
INEEL and environment reporter Jennifer Langston can be reached at 542-6746, or via e-mail at jlangston@idahonews.com.
