Friday, December 05, 1997
Ward Valley nuclear waste dump proposal debated anew
By Robert Jablon
Associated PressLOS ANGELES -- A planned nuclear dump in the California desert and others proposed around the nation would be costly, unnecessary and could sink the industry, an economist said.
The nation's three current dumps for low-level radioactive waste have excess capacity well into the next century because the volume of waste is sharply down because of recycling and new compaction technologies, F. Gregory Hayden, a University of Nebraska professor, said Wednesday.
A new dump such as the Ward Valley project, 117 miles south of Las Vegas, would be the final straw for struggling disposal sites, Hayden said.
"If it's opened, it will break the system that the rest of the nation depends on," Hayden said. "They're already in trouble because of the trickle of waste."
Opponents in the 17-year-old battle over a California dump brought Hayden to City Hall for a news conference. Hayden has opposed a Nebraska site in his role as state representative on one of the interstate compacts established to build new dumps.
Up to now, environmentalists, politicians and Indian tribes who live close to the proposed 1,000-acre Ward Valley site west of Needles have based their opposition on fears that the plan to bury radioactive waste in trenches at the dump would poison the water table, imperil wildlife and possibly pollute the nearby Colorado River.
But the capacity argument is conclusive, argued Daniel Hirsch, president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, an environmental group that has fought the dump.
"The very reason for this whole fight has disappeared," Hirsch said. "I feel that ... the war is over."
However, Gov. Pete Wilson intends to continue pressing for the federal government to cede land for the dump site, a spokeswoman said.
"This study changes nothing," Lisa Kalustian said. "The other sites that are named are unreliable, we don't have guaranteed access to them. The low-level radioactive waste is still being produced. ... We have a need to dispose of it responsibly in a safe, reliable, secure location, and that site is Ward Valley."
Wilson and U.S. Senate Republicans, with financial backing from the nuclear power industry, are fighting in federal court and in Congress to get the Ward Valley dump up and running.
Early next year, the Clinton administration plans to conduct safety tests to determine whether the Ward Valley site is leakproof -- tests Wilson contends are unnecessary.
Low-level wastes, which California currently ships out of state, include contaminated clothing from power plants and needles, gloves and similar items from hospitals, industry and research facilities. They are considered less hazardous than such high-level wastes as spent nuclear fuel rods or military bomb-making equipment. The federal government is studying Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as a place to entomb these high-level radioactive wastes.
A 1980 federal act required states to be responsible for handling the waste they generate and encouraged multistate compacts to build new dumps. At the time, political opposition by some states to handling outside wastes prompted threats to close the current dumps, leaving nowhere to put rising levels of waste.
But as debate over new dumps raged, "market forces have solved this problem," Hayden said.
His report, presented last month at the National Conference of State Legislatures in Washington, D.C., found that the annual volume of low-level waste shipped to disposal sites dropped between 1980 and 1996 to 422,000 cubic feet from 3.8 million cubic feet.
In California, the volume of waste dropped 94 percent to about 12,000 cubic feet, Hayden said.
The downward trend prompted officials to withdraw or reassess support for new dumps in Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas, all scheduled to be built after Ward Valley.
The decline means that the three current dump sites in Richland, Wash.; Barnwell, S.C. and Clive, Utah, have anywhere from 29 to 260 years of capacity at current disposal rates, which probably will drop even further, Hayden said.
American Ecology Corp., a Boise, Idaho, company that holds the state license to operate Ward Valley, agreed there is overcapacity but said the real issue is the 1980 act.
"It's not shortage of capacity that is prompting the efforts, it's an existing federal law ... the debate is academic," said Joe Nagel, chief operating officer. "Unless and until the Clinton administration decides to repeal the existing law, this is much ado about nothing."
Nagel said American Ecology has invested $50 million in the past 12 years on the project and "we'll continue to pursue the site."
Hayden said Ward Valley, which would serve California, Arizona and North and South Dakota, is economically unsound because of the declining volume of waste.
Hayden estimated Ward Valley would need to charge $2,500 per cubic foot to make money. Nagel said the Richland site, which American Ecology also owns, charges $62 per cubic foot and he estimated Ward Valley would charge $300 per cubic foot.