Nuclear-waste issue still lacks focus

Lawmakers have other priorities

By JAMES ELI SHIFFER, Staff Writer

RALEIGH -- The state's failure to build a nuclear-waste landfill could carry severe consequences, including lost jobs, radioactive waste piling up in warehouses and costly, drawn-out lawsuits, a legislative committee was told Tuesday.
     Yet the warnings did not raise much alarm on the Joint Select Committee on Low-Level Radioactive Waste, which adjourned after its first meeting in two years without deciding what to do about the stalled search for a waste site.
     The reluctance of the General Assembly to deal with the issue -- many of the Joint Select Committee members were recently appointed against their will -- shows how far the issue of disposing of North Carolina's radioactive waste has receded from lawmakers' priorities.
     Sen. David Hoyle, a Gastonia Democrat and committee co-chairman, said he had no desire to spend $7 million in taxpayer money on the project, a request made by Walter Sturgeon, executive director of the N.C. Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management Authority.
     But neither he nor the other co-chairman, Republican Rep. Dub Dickson of Gastonia, came to any conclusions after two hours of grappling with the tangled politics of radioactive waste.
     "We're still trying to struggle with what we want to do," Hoyle said.
     A decade ago, the committee was an influential participant in the search for a dump. Although it was supposed to have left the job of finding a site to a state agency, the Joint Select Committee voted in December 1988 to push for a location next to a nuclear-power plant.
     The N.C. Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management Authority followed the committee's advice by choosing a site close to Carolina Power & Light Co.'s Shearon Harris nuclear plant in the southwestern corner of Wake County.
     Critics accused the authority of bowing to political pressure, a charge that authority officials denied.
     In more recent years, the Joint Select Committee has not been actively involved in the issue of the dump. Inadequate oversight has been widely cited as one of the factors that has allowed the authority to spend $111 million in a process notable for runaway costs and missed deadlines.
     "This is not an oversight committee," said Rep. George Miller Jr., a Durham Democrat and former co-chairman. "It's more to see that the job gets done. ... Had there been any suspicion of excessive spending or unwise or unjustified spending, of course the committee would have acted on that."
     So far, spending on contractors and consultants has topped $92 million, with no conclusion as to whether the Wake County site is acceptable for a dump. The state of North Carolina has provided $31 million of the $111 million spent so far.
     Rep. David Miner, a Cary Republican who has been on the committee since 1993 and is a strong opponent of the proposed site, said the real battle over continued funding will occur in the General Assembly after it convenes in May.
     He said he would try to get the funding for the authority deleted from the budget.
     The talk in Tuesday's committee meeting seemed more about lawsuits than waste disposal.
     Leaders of the Southeast Compact Commission -- a group of states that chose North Carolina to build a dump for its waste -- threatened to sue the state to force it to keep paying for the landfill. Committee members said North Carolina should consider a lawsuit to overturn South Carolina's 3-year-old ban on accepting radioactive waste from its northern neighbor at an existing dump in Barnwell, S.C.
     Lawmakers said they were concerned about the prospect of dangerous trash filling storage rooms at nuclear-power plants, laboratories and hospitals across the state, although state regulators said none of the sites currently poses a health risk.
     They did not schedule another meeting, however.
     Hoyle said the situation resembles another government project he has encountered on a Department of Transportation oversight committee -- the failed cleanup of contaminated asphalt plants after $6 million and 10 years spent assessing the problem.
     "You know what we've done about that? Nothing," he said. "It's a never-ending story."