Thor Strong has served as the Associate Commissioner of the Michigan Low-Level Waste Authority since 1992. He has been on the Authority staff since 1989. He serves as Michigan's representative to the State Governments High-Level Radioactive Waste Committee. Prior to the Authority, Mr. Strong worked in hazardous waste clean-up programs for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality.
I’d like to share a little bit of my experience and Michigan’s experience with the issue of siting low-level radioactive waste facilities and some of the perspectives that I’ve gained as a result of that experience. Someone just a moment ago asked me if I was first on the agenda because Michigan had one of the first siting processes. And I said well, no, that probably isn’t true, but it might be because Michigan ran into trouble before anybody else in siting a facility.
Michigan joined the Midwest Compact in 1982. At that time Illinois was considering joining that compact and the conventional wisdom was that Illinois would become the first host state because it produced so much waste. Illinois decided to go a separate way and form a two-state compact. The seven-state compact that was left in 1987 chose Michigan as the host state for the first compact facility because with our four nuclear power plants, we were projected to produce the most low-level waste in the next 20 years. Our legislature passed enabling legislation in December of 1987 . That legislation established my office, the Low-Level Rad. Waste Authority. It set forth the basic siting process to be followed, and it established a whole series of exclusionary siting criteria; statutory criteria that were built into the law. We proceeded with the siting process. We began with a state-wide exclusionary screen that was completed by October of 1989. We announced the results of that exclusionary screen and announced our first three candidate areas in October of ’89.
By May of the next year, 1990, however, we had concluded that none of those three initial candidate areas would meet all of the statutory exclusionary criteria. And those three areas were dropped from any further consideration. At that point the issue of whether or not our siting criteria were overly restrictive came to center stage. We acknowledged that, first of all, our siting criteria were more restrictive in many ways than the siting criteria being used in other states and compacts. We also acknowledged that there was a chance that there would be no place in the state that would meet those siting criteria; however, we were not convinced of that. We did not have definitive proof that that was the case in 1990 and we were not willing to go back to our legislature at that point and seek amendments to the siting criteria.
The Midwest Compact, however, became convinced that the siting criteria needed to be revised and, in essence, refused any additional funding for Michigan’s siting process until the legislature amended those criteria. The states of Nevada, South Carolina, and Washington also got into the act by threatening access denial to their disposal facilities to all Michigan generators unless we changed the siting criteria and moved forward with the siting process. The impasse that was created led, indeed, to, first of all, a cutoff of all funding for our siting process. It resulted in November of 1990 with cutoff of access to the three national disposal facilities, and Michigan generators went for almost five years without access to disposal facilities. And it resulted, by July of 1991, with the revocation of Michigan’s membership in the Midwest Compact.
Since then, we’ve basically been just treading water. Two years ago, a policy advisory board took a broad look at the issue, and came out with a report in September of 1995 that made two basic recommendations. First of all, it acknowledged what the Midwest Compact had contended three year previous, that the siting criteria were, indeed, too restrictive. And, in order to proceed with any sort of a siting process the criteria needed to be revised.
The second basic recommendation was that we ought to scrap the top-down, the theoretical “pick-the-best-site-in-the-state” kind of siting process, and as an alternative adopt a volunteer community siting process.
We developed legislation at that point to enact into law those recommendations. It was submitted to the legislature. It actually was introduced in the legislature in November of last year; however, it died at the end of the legislative session and the legislation has not yet been reintroduced. In fact, following the recent action by the Midwest Compact and their new host state of Ohio, my commissioner wrote to legislative leaders saying in essence, “Let’s hold off on any actions on this legislation until we see how things unfold nationally.”
Now Michigan is the first, and I think only, state that’s been kicked out of a compact, but it’s not the only place where there’s been a great deal of controversy between a host state and a compact commission. However, we need to point out and realize that there have been some instances where host states and compacts have gotten along fairly well, for instance: the Southwest Compact and the State of California; the Central Midwest Compact and their host state of Illinois; the Appalachian Compact and host state Pennsylvania; and the pending Texas Compact with the other states of Maine and Vermont. It may be a little overly simplistic, but it seems to me that in those instances where there has not been conflict, the situation has been that the host state has been basically self-selected. That one state decided it was up to it to build a facility and then the compact formed around that host state. Conflict, on the other hand, has occurred where the compact has played a sole or dominant role in the choosing of a host state and then has gone on to continue to try to guide and oversee the siting process.
With all due respect to Teresa Hay, who is on the panel with me this morning and who has been a member of the Midwest Compact since Michigan was the host state, back in 1990 and ’91, the Midwest Compact was viewed in Michigan as a body made up of representatives from other states, un-elected representatives who had no responsibility for, and little accountability to, the people of Michigan, and therefore, didn’t have the right to dictate the specifics and details of a siting process going on in Michigan.
When Congress passed the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act, Congress was trying to satisfy the two basic competing goals of equity and efficiency. Now, they addressed the equity question by assigning to each state the responsibility for managing and assuring disposal of the low-level radioactive waste generated within each state. It addressed the efficiency question by encouraging the formation of interstate compacts. I would maintain that the reason we have not made further progress in implementing the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act and the reason that there’s been so much conflict between host states and compacts is because of a very flawed sense of equity. Again, the way the law defines equity, in essence, is that each state should be responsible for disposing of low-level radioactive waste, if not now, then eventually. Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever raised a rational argument for why that is so fair. And I would contend that equity, like art and beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
A personal experience. I took representatives from one of our candidate sites down to Barnwell, South Carolina in 1989. They came back with two basic insights – perspectives. First of all, they were impressed with the operation. They thought that, “Well, maybe this isn’t as dangerous a thing, as risky an enterprise as we thought it would be. It probably is safe to do.” But the other perspective they came back with was that they were even more convinced that a new disposal facility in Michigan was not needed. They were told that the Barnwell facility had the physical capacity to continue to operate for years. There were no environmental problems that would force the site to close. Finally, the folks in Barnwell liked the facility. They are happy with it there. It provides good jobs, good benefits, and they don’t want to see it leave. So why have a facility leave a place where people are happy with it and plop it down in the middle of the tomato and cucumber fields of Lenawee County?
That experience gave me the perspective on what I would call the essence of equity. I think that equity is met, or satisfied, when those people who are most affected by any kind of facility, whether it’s a low-level waste facility or any kind of facility, are comfortable with the presence of that facility in their community, and consider the benefits to outweigh the costs and risks. It has nothing to do with how many sites there are nationally, where they are, or how many states are served by a particular site.
Can it be done? Can we have a community that is supportive of a low-level radioactive waste facility? I think so. I think Barnwell is a good example. Can it be done in 1990s, recognizing that Chem-Nuclear has been in Barnwell since the early 1970s. And particularly given the fact that, and I think that it will be shared, that we don’t need 9, 10, 12 sites nationally. We need one or two. I think that we can find a community that is willing and eager to host a low-level radioactive waste facility. And I think that might be the challenge for us nationally as time goes on.
Additional Comments by Thor StrongA lot has been said today about the need for alternatives. And in fact, Dr. Makhijani is even suggesting we wait 50 years for other alternatives to develop. I think it should be pointed out that first of all there are no clear-cut alternatives. There are no alternatives that just jump out as being obviously superior than the ones we’re looking at now or that don’t have the same kinds of problems and issues that we’re facing right now. We’ve looked at the issue of the number of sites across the country. And everybody basically agrees we don’t need 9, 10, 12 sites, we need only one or two. Well, that forces somebody to overcome the stigma of taking somebody else’s waste. Because you can’t have one or two sites without those sites taking the rest of our waste. And it also requires that waste to be transported from wherever we are to wherever those sites are. We have to get around the notion that something has to be risk-free. There is no alternative, whether we pick an alternative now or wait 50 years, that is going to be absolutely risk-free. If you’re worried about radiation exposure, for those of you who smoke, you ought to check how much radiation you get in smoking cigarettes. I wonder how many people have tested their homes for radon for instance. I don’t know if it’s a problem in Nebraska; it’s a problem in some other areas of the country, including Michigan. So I appreciated the comments earlier about the need to step back to, in essence, let go of the anger and frustration and work together towards cooperative solutions. And I think that’s what we need to do.