Sacramento Bee, March 29, 2000
Judge Delivers Another Blow to
Proposed Desert Nuclear Waste DumpBy BART JONES
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit filed by a company that has spent 16 years trying to open what would be the nation's fourth active nuclear waste dump.
Associated Press WriterEnvironmentalists cheered the decision Tuesday, with one group calling it the death knell for the proposed Ward Valley project in the Mojave Desert.
"This is great news," said Daniel Hirsch, president of Committee to Bridge the Gap, a Los Angeles-based environmental organization opposed to the project.
Judge Robert Hodges of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C., ruled Monday that a lawsuit filed by US Ecology of Boise, Idaho, was baseless.
Hirsch said US Ecology "has now lost both federal suits it filed to force the opening of this ill-conceived, dangerous nuclear dump."
He said US Ecology has one appeal pending in a related lawsuit, and that if it loses that would effectively kill the project. US Ecology officials could not be reached immediately for comment after business hours Tuesday.
The company wanted to open a nuclear waste dump in Ward Valley near the Arizona-California border about 18 miles from the Colorado River. The waste would come from nuclear power plants and delivered by rail cars.
In the waning hours of the Bush administration in 1993, former U.S. Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan Jr. ordered the sale of the federally-owned land in Ward Valley to the state of California so the dump could be built.
US Ecology alleges the Clinton administration reneged on the 1993 agreement, and that is owed damages.
But the Judge Hodges ruled that Lujan violated a restraining order that had been issued by a federal judge, and that Lujan's order therefore was illegal.
The company says the dump would contain only low-level radioactive material and be relatively safe.
Committee to Bridge the Gap also warned that the dump could contaminate the Colorado River and the drinking water of millions of people in the Southwest.
The three active nuclear dumps in the United States are in Tooele County, Utah; Barnwell, S.C.; and Richland, Wash.