News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C.

Legislators out to kill dump plan

Bills in both the House and Senate would eliminate funding for the state agency that wants to build a landfill for low-level radioactive waste in Wake County.

By JAMES ELI SHIFFER, Staff Writer

     A group of lawmakers hopes to deal a death blow to a proposed radioactive waste landfill in Wake County by eliminating funding for the state agency in charge of the troubled project.
     Bills introduced in the state House and Senate last week are the most direct legislative attack this year on the effort to build a final resting place for the Southeast's low-level radioactive waste.
     The process has already cost $111 million -- including $31 million from North Carolina taxpayers -- without producing a facility, a state operating license or even a reliable schedule for opening the dump.
     State Rep. David Miner, a Cary Republican who co-sponsored one of the anti-dump bills, said taxpayers have spent enough money on a site that he considers unsafe for some of the Southeast's most hazardous trash.
     "I'm going to put the nail in the coffin and see that this thing dies a very fast death," Miner said.
     The bills' prospects are uncertain. But landfill opponents said the legislation will force lawmakers to take sides on an issue many of them would rather duck.
     "Let's lay it out there and see which legislators will stand up and champion this project," said Jim Warren, director of N.C. Waste Awareness and Reduction Network, an environmental group.
     The N.C. Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management Authority wants to build the landfill on 50 acres in southwestern Wake County. Radioactive trash from nuclear power plants, laboratories, factories and hospitals would be entombed in concrete containers covered with earth.
     The decade-old project has been stalled since February because of a funding dispute between the authority and the project's main backers, a group of states called the Southeast Compact Commission.
     Still, state spending on the authority has continued. Seven employees are paid to check monitoring wells at the proposed site, answer telephones, file records and bide their time to see whether the project will be resurrected. In March, the authority appealed to the General Assembly to spend another $7 million to get the project moving again.
     No politicians have openly embraced that proposal. Instead, the only ones speaking up are opponents of the landfill.
     "We really feel that this is what we have to do in order to stop this train that seems to have a momentum of its own," said state Sen. Ellie Kinnaird, a Carrboro Democrat, who co-sponsored the Senate bill.
     The bills would cut off the money authorized in the budget adopted by the General Assembly last year, would stop other state agencies from working on the project and would transfer unspent money into the general fund. A coalition of environmental groups estimates that the state could save $2 million by eliminating the waste authority.
    
     Doing so would not end the debate over how to get rid of nuclear reactor parts, irradiated medical and research trash and other radioactive refuse, however. North Carolina law still directs the state to pursue a disposal site, while the state faces lawsuits if it abandons the process.
     The lack of legislative support frustrates some of the political appointees who make up the authority. Bob Heater, an authority member and project booster, said he has tried in vain to get legislative leaders and Gov. Jim Hunt to put the issue on their agenda.
     "It's just one of those things that apparently nobody wants to touch," he said.