Editorial: Down a hole
It is clear now that the state has wasted millions during the effort to win approval of a low-level radioactive waste dump. That flawed process and questions about the site argue against spending another dime.
After more than six years on the state payroll, John Mac Millan, who headed North Carolina's effort to establish a repository for low-level radioactive waste, watched the need for a dump here evaporate. One of the most listened-to players in what has become a $111 million fiasco, Mac Millan had a change of heart: He decided that the availability of a dump in South Carolina made this expensive attempt to build one several miles southwest of Raleigh unnecessary. Yet it turns out that he never told his bosses in this or the six other Southeast Compact states. Even now, some state leaders are unwilling to jettison the project.
A recent article in The N&O chronicled Mac Millan's dilemma, part of a troubling tale of taxpayers taking a beating on the waste dump project. North Carolinians have financed $31 million of the total cost, with the rest coming from the other compact states. This state, picked to be the first in the compact to host a repository, hired Chem-Nuclear Systems Inc. to develop and run the site.
The $20 million contract was full of leaks. The company has not been penalized for nearly $60 million in cost overruns. Taxpayers spent millions in legal fees, and more millions on public affairs operatives whose job was to persuade the public that the millions being spent were being wisely invested.
Chem Nuclear, meanwhile, turned in a license application as full of holes as the state contract. And to show for all that, taxpayers have a load of paperwork, a few hard assets and a proposed dump site whose geologic suitability and thus its safety are in serious question.
Some mistakes in this process perhaps were inevitable. States had never been responsible for disposing of this kind of radioactive material, which comes primarily from power plants. This was virgin territory for North Carolina and its Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management Authority, the body formed by the legislature to find and pursue licensing of a site.
The unfamiliarity of the task offers no comfort: If the process was this shoddy and some of the participants this greedy, there's every reason to wonder if a finished waste dump would be rife with problems, too. Yet last week, within days of Mac Millan's shift being reported (he's no longer the authority's executive director), compact officials argued before a legislative committee that the state should spend even more millions to try to license the Wake County site.
Considering the whole picture -- the wasteful spending, doubts about the site's safety, other disposal options -- the decision to turn off the money spigot should be relatively easy to make.
In the meantime, advances in radioactive waste storage and disposal methods give legislators time to reconsider North Carolina's role in the compact. As some other compacts elsewhere in the nation -- and Mac Millan -- evidently have learned, the once-significant need for more such radioactive waste dumps has disappeared.