Nukes?

Nukes?

Sluggish Domestic Market for Power Plants Doesn't Mean There's No Waste to Dump

by Barbara George

There have been no new nuclear plants ordered in the US since 1979. This leads most people in the US to believe that the nuclear industry is not expanding. However, US companies still build nuclear power plants abroad. And the industry keeps its options alive here in the US by competing in a highly subsidized government contest for new reactor designs.

Two designs have been approved so far. To protect industry profits from pesky concerned citizens and workers, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (nrc) rammed through one-step licensing . (The nrc is a government agency with the conflicting dual mission of promoting and regulating nuclear power.)

Previously, utilities were required to hold public hearings after finishing construction, before they received an operating license. Significant problems were often revealed at these hearings. For example, public hearings in California brought evidence to light that the Diablo Canyon reactor was actually built backwards because the blueprints had been reversed. It took two years to correct this error. Now, post- construction hearings are no longer required; a utility can get a license to build and operate a plant before construction begins. The public can only hope the thing is right-side up.

One-step licensing may reduce construction costs, but nuclear power will never be economical due to the enormous liability of the waste. When the costs of nuclear waste management are included, "renewable" energy sources (such as solar, wind, hydro and biomass) are much more economical than nukes. Today's reactors are financial disasters.

The real costs of nuclear power have always been clouded by the "magic"it promised. Nuclear power was supposed to provide cheap energy for world-wide US corporate enterprises, and nuclear weapons (relatively cheap, compared to ground troops, planes and ships) were intended to control countries where the US had "vital interests." Nuclear power appeared at the very moment, in the early 50s, when Arab demands for a (small) share of oil profits threatened to erode US domination of Middle East oil supplies. The US went nuclear, followed by other nations.

All those governments chose to heavily subsidize their nuclear industries, which could never survive in an open marketplace. All refused to face the most serious costs. Waste management, liability, decommissioning (dismantling) the reactors and cleanup of contaminated sites were not fully included in utility rates or government budgets. Those accounts were postponed to a future just now beginning to arrive.

Nuclear liability is a worldwide question, with some scary answers; the fall of the ussr has been attributed partly to the monetary and social costs of Chernobyl and other radioactive contamination. The US is trying to clean up its nuclear weapons complexes, at an estimated cost of $150 billion. The cost will probably be much higher, but the Republicans have slashed the cleanup fund and the government may simply abandon the effort.

All the radioactive elements in fallout from nuclear explosions are also present in the waste from reactors producing either power or weapons. Few people realize that our 110 nuclear power plants have produced twenty times more radioactivity than our nuclear weapons program!

Initially, utilities were reluctant to build nuclear plants because of the potential costs. Two factors persuaded them to go ahead: the federal government promised to remove the fuel rod waste; and Congress passed the Price-Andersen Act limiting the utilities' liability in the event of an accident. Costs from an accident near a large city were estimated to be $17 billion (in 1957 $); the utilities' liability was capped at $7 billion.

The government planned to reprocess used fuel rods to extract plutonium for use in nuclear weapons. The early commercial waste reprocessing program, however, turned out to be a technical -- as well as economic and environmental -- disaster. The government then built special reactors to produce plutonium for military use, and maintained an artificial separation between nuclear power and the nuclear weapons program ever since. None of the other nuclear powers bother with this ruse.

The utilities are now determined to force the government to honor its commitment to establish a facility for commercial fuel-rod waste. Recently, the government discarded any pretense of seeking the most stable geological site, and chose earthquake-prone Yucca Mountain, because Nevada is sparsely populated and politically weak.

The delay in establishing a fuel-rod repository makes the utilities extremely nervous, as the spent fuel storage pools at older reactors have long since filled up. The nrc allowed utilities to re-rack the pools, storing rods much closer together to increase pool capacity (and increase the risk). The nrc recently approved "Dry Casks" as an alternative storage medium. The casks offer an opportunity for "monitored retrievable storage" at reactor sites, but instead, Congress is considering a bill whereby the government would immediately take title to this waste, and transport it to an "interim" facility at Yucca Mountain, to await the opening of an underground facility.

New truck and rail casks, each holding more than 200 times the radioactivity created by the bombing of Hiroshima, would transport 16,000 shipments of fuel rods through 43 states. Transport would start in 1998 and continue for at least 30 years. Typically, the cost of training and equipping local emergency response teams for potentially cataclysmic transport accidents has been all but ignored.

Even further down the list of priorities for both the utilities and the government, is responsible care of all the other radioactive waste (non fuel-rod waste). If Ward Valley is nationalized (as will very likely happen to the first llrw dump that opens), it could become the depository for the innards of all 55 power plants due for decommissioning in the next 30 years.

For many years the federal government maintained six landfills for llrw waste. All of them leaked radiation; only one is still open (Barnwell, SC). US Ecology, the Ward Valley contractor, operated three of these landfills in the shoddiest possible manner in the states of Illinois, Kentucky, and Nevada. These states have all attempted (without success) to force US Ecology to pay for the mess they left behind. Dump rates for llrw are inadequate even for short-term cleanup, let alone for long-term dump management or cleanup, which becomes the responsibility of the state where each dump is located. At Ward Valley, US Ecology is planning to charge $350 per cubic foot of waste, a trivial amount considering the tens of thousands of years of lethal danger. After 30 years, US Ecology can walk away from the dump, which will then belong to the taxpayers of California, forever.

A discussion of the economics of nuclear power would not be complete without mention of its health costs. Numbers are hard to come by thanks to government and industry refusal to provide data to researchers. The only long-term epidemiological study (of workers at the Hanford nuclear weapons complex) was canceled when the data started to show a disturbing rise in cancer and death rates compared to the population at large. The renowned radiation epidemiologist Dr. Rosalie Bertell continued the research with private grants after the government pulled out. Bertell concluded that very low levels of radiation are much more dangerous than previously believed, because they alter the chemistry of cells without killing them, thus producing mutations, disease and sterility.

The government concedes radiation has caused some deaths, but has gone to great lengths to obscure radiation effects.

The air around Three Mile Island was not properly monitored in the crucial period right after the accident when most of the radiation escaped, and no formal epidemiological study was conducted. These omissions gave the utility "deniability" for local residents' health problems. Chernobyl data is likewise flawed because of Soviet secrecy and lack of monitoring.

In spite of the scarcity of data, scientists have long known that there are adverse health effects of radiation. It is certain that some of the increase in cancer and other diseases in the past 50 years is due to radiation; there's no way of knowing how much. Some recent news from Russia, however, gives a chilling glimpse of the scope of the problem.

Russian male life expectancy has dropped from 64 to 57 in the past four years. the death rate is nearly double the birth rate, while infant mortality has risen 15 percent in each of the last two years. More than ten percent of newborn children have serious birth defects, and half of all school children suffer from chronic illnesses. At partial fault is one of the great nuclear crimes against humanity: agricultural products from the Chernobyl-contaminated regions of the Ukraine and Belarus were deliberately shipped throughout the Soviet Union, without labeling, thus irradiating the entire population.

Dumping nuclear reactors and other so-called "low-level" radioactive waste in Ward Valley could produce similar results. After the radioactivity reaches ground water and flows into the Colorado River (or a waste truck or train has a bad accident on the bridge) a large part of North America's food supply (in the Imperial Valley and Baja) would be irrigated with radioactive water. When we're poisoning whole ecosystems, it is absurd to speak of economics at all, but this makes no sense financially or in any other way.

Barbara George is Executive Director of Focus on Energy Decisions, an organization promoting sustainable energy choices.

Update

Ward Valley Update

Opposition escalates as government pushes nuclear dump

By Tori Woodard

In Fall 1995, the nuclear industry pressured the federal government to break laws and risk contaminating the Colorado River in its rush to bury radioactive waste in Ward Valley. An amendment attached to the Budget Reconciliation Bill in Congress would exempt the proposed nuclear waste dump from all environmental regulations and transfer federal land in Ward Valley to the State of California for immediate construction of the dump. If that amendment fails, a stand- alone bill introduced by Congressman Brian Bilbray (San Diego) would do the same thing.

At the same time, the US Department of the Interior has moved closer to transferring the Ward Valley land via an administrative agreement with the State of California. In May 1995, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt promised to transfer the land only if the State of California would conduct further testing and make a binding commitment to limit the amount of plutonium that would go into the dump. Now Deputy Interior Secretary John Garamendi has offered to transfer the land without any binding commitments.

Desert Nuclear Dump Leaks

In late October 1995, the public learned that information concerning leaks at U.S. Ecology's nuclear waste dump in Beatty, Nevada, had not been disclosed to the National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed the safety of the proposed Ward Valley dump. Data show that the Beatty dump has already leaked tritium throughout the 360-foot dry zone above the groundwater there. Concentrations of tritium five times the legal drinking water standard were found at the fence that surrounds the Beatty dump site. A control sample two miles from the dump site found no tritium, confirming that the unusually high levels of tritium came from the dump, not from the testing of nuclear weapons at the nearby Nevada Test Site.

U.S. Ecology (which operated the Beatty dump and would operate the Ward Valley dump), US Geological Survey hydrologist Dave Prudic, and the California Department of Health Services (who will oversee the dump) knew of this information for over a year and kept it from the public until researchers found the cover-up.

US Ecology has used the Beatty dump as a model for the proposed Ward Valley dump, since the terrain and amount of precipitation are similar in the two locations. The new findings call into question US Ecology's prediction that it would take up to thousands of years for radionuclides to reach the groundwater under Ward Valley. The Beatty dump has only existed for 30 years, but has already leaked.

Opposition Forces Takes Action

Faced with governmental attempts to force California to host a national nuclear waste dump, opponents escalated their efforts this fall by occupying the land. Environmental groups and Native American tribes have organized large gatherings in Ward Valley, sponsored protest actions in several California cities, established an ongoing vigil on the proposed dump site, and are planning to activate an emergency response network if the land is transferred to California for dump construction.

Over 700 people visited Ward Valley during a week-long encampment in October 1995. Many participants experienced a spiritual connection to the land and renewed their commitment to stop the dump. Returning home after the encampment, people organized protests in San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, San Diego, Mendocino County, Riverside, and elsewhere. The Santa Barbara protest drew 400 people; two protests in San Francisco drew 200 and 100 people respectively.

During the October encampment, the Alliance of Atomic Veterans erected a large Army tent on the land where US Ecology plans to dig its trenches in Ward Valley. That action inspired people to maintain a continuous presence on the land ever since. The ongoing vigil, called "Nobody's Wasteland," has attracted print and radio coverage.

Native American elders endorse and welcome the ongoing vigil. Elders from the Fort Mojave and Colorado River Indian Tribes met several times with the vigilers to plan a large spiritual gathering in Ward Valley December 1 -- 3, 1995. The Tribes invite everyone, Indian and non-Indian, to join them in the occupation of the site. The on-going vigil is legal so long as the land is administered by the Interior Department. Vigilers are allowed to camp there for a total of 14 out of 28 days.

Emergency Response Network

Opponents of the dump have also set up an Emergency Response Network. Led by the Fort Mojave Tribe, members of the Ward Valley Coalition will activate the ern if they learn that either Congress or the Interior Department has acted to transfer Ward Valley land to California for dump construction. At that time, people on the ern phone tree will be given a suggested date for a mass action in Ward Valley to support the on-site vigil. Dump opponents have vowed to wage nonviolent resistance.

How To Get Involved

It is important to keep pressuring Congressional representatives, Secretary Babbitt, and President Clinton not to transfer Ward Valley land to California for a dump. To stay up-to-date on the best targets for public pressure, call (415)752-8678 or (619)326-6267.

The ongoing vigil in Ward Valley needs your financial, material, and moral support, as well as your presence. To comply with government regulations, vigilers must rotate every 14 days; individuals and small groups are needed to replace those who must rotate out. To get involved or send a donation, contact the new office of the Ward Valley Coalition and Nobody's Wasteland at 107 "F" Street, Needles CA 92363. (619)326-6267. Fax: (619)326-6268.

To be sure that you are in the Emergency Response Network phone tree, leave your name, address and phone number at (415)868-2146 or (619)326-6267. People who come to Ward Valley this winter should bring warm clothes, rain gear, a sleeping bag, a tent, food, water, utensils, and friends. Don't bring drugs, alcohol, weapons, or pets. Post-update update: at press time, Terrain learned that the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors has voted to oppose the Ward Valley nuclear waste dump. Federal officials claim the vote will have no effect on their plans to nuke the desert.

NOTE: There have been changes in the status of Ward Valley since this update. Please see the Ward Valley Diary for more:

Anatomy

The Anatomy of Nuclear Waste

by Ernest Goitein

The low-level radioactive waste facility proposed for Ward Valley would accept power plant wastes as well as medical wastes. While medical wastes are short lived; power plant wastes are hazardous for thousands of years. Besides the fact that nuclear power is no longer economical, the problem of waste disposal for spent fuel and so called "low-level" waste has never been solved satisfactorily. This article explains where the nuclear power plant low-level wastes originate and defines some of the jargon

The radioactive decontamination flush is cleaned up by resin absorption in demineralizers. These highly radioactive resins, containing corrosion products as well as the fission products and trans-uranics from the leaking fuel elements are called "low" level waste.

There are several distinct sources of low-level radioactive waste from a nuclear power plant:

Corrosion products. Water is circulated around the core of the reactor. Minute quantities of corrosion products suspended in that water pass through the reactor and absorb neutrons, changing into radioactive isotopes. This process is called "activation."

A fraction of the water is circulated to a clean-up system where the corrosion products are removed by demineralizers (where contaminants are trapped in resin) and filters. The cleaned water is returned to the reactor system.

Decontamination. Corrosion products plate out on piping and equipment. This creates a radioactive crust, or scale, that endangers repair or maintenance workers. To dissolve this coating of radioactive corrosion products a decontamination process is used during plant outages. Decontamination consists of a series of flushes alternating oxidizing mixtures (to loosen the scale) and chelating agents (to bind with and transport the loose scale). The radioactive decontamination flush is cleaned up by resin absorption in demineralizers.

Defective fuel elements. The fuel consists of low-enriched uranium oxide (uo2) pellets in a thin zirconium cladding. Each fuel element has a diameter approximately the size of a pencil. As the core heats up, the fuel swells and stresses the thin cladding. This can result in pinhole leaks in some of the fuel elements. Transuranics -- elements such as neptunium. plutonium, americium and curium created when uranium absorbs neutrons -- and the fission products -- strontium, cesium, and iodine among them -- leak into the core coolant and are absorbed by the resins in the clean up system.

These highly radioactive resins, containing the corrosion products as well as the fission products and trans-uranics from the leaking fuel elements are called low-level waste. They are hazardous for thousands of years, and are shipped to low level radioactive waste facilities.

The demineralizer resins and filters, highly radioactive and inappropriately defined as low level waste, are then packaged, usually in carbon steel drums. These would be sent to Ward Valley.

Decommissioning wastes. Once a nuclear power plant is permanently shut down, the decommissioning process begins. Under the "safe store" concept, the equipment is left undisturbed for 50 -- 100 years to allow radiation levels to decay, and make disassembly less hazardous. Many utilities have chosen not to wait. Major equipment, such as pressurizers, pumps, steam generators, evaporators, heat exchangers and even reactor vessel internals have been shipped to low-level waste facilities. The hazardous life of these components extends for thousands of years.

Gaseous wastes. Radioactive gases are created by activation and by the fissioning process. These gases are normally compressed and stored for six months to allow for partial decay. They are then released to the "off-gas system," which filters out solid radioactive daughter products, such as strontium, barium and cesium. The gases are vented through a tall stack when the wind will disperse them. The filters are shipped to a low-level radioactive waste facility.

Alternative storage concepts

Low-level radioactive wastes, by nrc definition, include short lived medical wastes as well as power plant wastes hazardous for thousands of years.

These different wastes should not be treated in the same way, or stored in the same facility. Medical and bio-technical waste streams, which have half lives of 90 days or less, and are therefore hazardous for less than 3--5 years, should be placed in a state of the art "storage-to-decay" facility. Such a facility could consist of a reinforced concrete structure with a leachate collection system, and capability to identify and repackage leaking containers. After five years' decay time these wastes are no longer radioactive and can be disposed of in landfills.

Longer-lived utility wastes should remain stored on-site until a safe and responsible method is developed to deal with their danger.

Utility wastes should never be placed in unlined trenches, as is current practice. All shallow-land burial sites have leaked and contaminated the surrounding area.

After the shallow-land burial failures, European designs for power plant wastes have evolved concrete cells 60 ft x 70 ft x 30 ft high, protected from the weather by a movable structure, complete with a remotely operated crane, and leachate collection system. The location of a leaking container can be identified, and the container can be repackaged.

It is essential that any radioactive waste facility for long lived power plant wastes be monitored (for detection and collection of leachate), retrievable (with the capability to repackage wastes) above-ground storage.

Technical terms

Roentgen -- the quantity of x-ray or gamma radiation that will produce 1 esu (electrostatic unit - a measurement of ionization) in 1 cm3 of air.

Rad -- radiation absorbed dose. It is the quantity of radiation leading to the absorption of 100 ergs of energy per gram of irradiated material.

rbe -- Relative Biological Effectiveness: a measure of comparing biological damage of ionizing radiation with that of x-rays of 200 kev energy.

Rem -- roentgen equivalent man. Dose in rems = rbe 4 Dose in rads. Alpha radiation is much more damaging for the same rads than gamma radiation. 10 rads of alpha radiation equals 200 rems, whereas 10 rad of gamma radiation equals 10 rems. A millirem (mR) is a thousandth of a rem. Background radiation is in the order of 100--200 mR/yr.

Sievert -- 100 rem. Sieverts are not as commonly used as rems, and perhaps have come into use to make the numbers appear less threatening.

Curie -- a measure of radioactivity. It is defined as 37 billion disintegrations per second.

Bequerel -- the basic unit of radioactivity in the meter- kilogram-second system. 1 Ci = 37 billion Bq

Gamma radiation -- Part of the electromagnetic spectrum, with high energies and short wave lengths. This radiation readily penetrates matter. Shielding requires dense materials such as lead. Gamma radiation occurs in the decay of elements such as cobalt60 and cesium137

Beta radiation -- electrons discharged in the decay of some radioactive isotopes. Amount of shielding required depends on the energy level. Plastics usually provide good shielding.

Alpha radiation -- the emission of the equivalent of the helium nucleus, consisting of 2 neutrons and 2 protons. Because of its weight an alpha particle will penetrate only a short distance -- a few inches -- in air, but are extremely biologically damaging if breathed in or ingested. Plutonium and all transuranics are alpha emitters.

bwr -- a boiling water reactor. Steam is generated in the reactor vessel and piped to the turbine-generator to produce electricity. The turbine and all the auxiliary equipment become radioactive during operation, and extensive shielding is required. bwrs are the product of General Electric.

pwr -- a pressurized water reactor. The hot water created in the reactor is pumped through steam generators where steam is produced. This steam, not radioactive, is used to generate electricity. More than 50% of nuclear plants in the US are of this design. The major problems have been with leaking tubes in the steam generators. This has resulted in outages and the very expensive replacement of steam generators. There is the potential for serious consequences from a s team generator tube rupture. pwrs are produced by Westinghouse, Combustion Engineering and Babcock & Wilcox.

Half life -- The time when half the radioactivity has decayed. As a rule of thumb ten half lives to 20 half lives (a factor of 1000 to one million) are necessary to render the radioactivity harmless. Radioactive daughter products of the decay must also be considered since they can add considerably more time before a radioactive element becomes benign.

Nano -- is a prefix for one billionth, 10-9

Pico -- is a prefix for one trillionth, 10-12

5000 cpm -- Five thousand counts per minute roughly corresponds to 1 mR/hr or 9 Rem/yr

Maximum occupational exposure -- 5 Rem/yr

Ernest Goitein, a professional engineer, has spent his career in power plant design and construction, with fourteen of those years as project engineer for three nuclear power plants. He is a board member of the ban Waste Coalition. -----------------

Grassroots

The Grassroots

by Stormy Williams

Grassroots groups are the sentinels, reactors and troops of the environmental movement. Grassroots groups are formed when a town or an area gets hit in the face with a flounder -- a toxic site, a cancer cluster, a toxic dump or incinerator, sewage sludge facility, waste transfer station, etc.

These groups can also form when something bad for their health and safety is proposed. These mostly small groups form to fight for their lives and they need help and support from other small groups, and from larger groups like Citizens for a Better Environment, Citizens' Clearinghouse on Hazardous Waste, California Communities Against Toxics, and Greenpeace. These large umbrella groups provide information, education, training, moral support, physical support and legal and other types of needed expertise.

In California, as well as in other states, people of color are dumped on more often than affluent people. Therefore it is vital that the grassroots groups network and receive the help they need. Finances are usually a problem; postage, phone calls and copying expenses can get so high groups can't manage them. It's necessary to have fax machines and copiers when you live in a rural area, as it is too far to travel to find these services. Usually at least one person in the group gets these needed machines, through fundraising or help from other groups.

Here in the high desert of California our small anglo group made allies with the mostly Latino group in Kettleman City that was fighting off a proposed toxic incinerator on the site of the state's biggest toxic dump. We went to most of the rallies and demonstrations -- and we hauled up food and drinks, appeared and spoke at hearings, offered any support we could, both physical and moral. Finally after many years' fight the company withdrew they permit application, I cried on and off for two weeks. I couldn't even call up there; every time I even thought about Kettleman City I'd cry. They had a festival to celebrate and I couldn't figure out what I should bring. They finally called and said it was decided I should bring the salsa! Not salad or soda. We all just howled -- they said just buy it, don't try to make it. It is a wonderful and satisfying experience working with people of different cultures. Challenging sometimes but enlightening and gratifying.

Here in California we have a string of successes in stopping toxic incinerators -- Rhone-Poulen in Martinez, Kettleman City and Alpaugh in the San Joa-quin Valley, Mojave in the high desert, Vernon near East Los Angeles, and some of us helped to keep an incinerator from starting up in Tijuana across the Mexican border. In the case of the incinerators being planned at Alpaugh and Mojave it took just one meeting to run them out of town. Not to imply that these were your generally gentle, quiet meetings. Sometimes when the proponents get a load of the mood of the locals they get the picture real fast. There is a place for polite and there is a place for I'm fighting for my life and look out!

The grassroots group in the small farming town of Alpaugh named themselves "Endangered Species, Alpaugh." They had T- shirts printed up with those words and a picture of three or four children holding hands in a circle with a slash through it. These shirts said it all -- no to poisoning our children.

The meeting up there was a classic -- the Spanish interpreter was a Methodist minister. He got so angry at the state officials and the proponents that he slammed down the mike and said he was through -- too many lies at the worst meeting he had ever attended. This just brought down the house. He stormed out. It was a classic moment -- never to be forgotten by those attending.

It is said that sometimes the grassroots don't know there is a dangerous problem in their area until illnesses show up. Most people do not go around with their antennae out looking for toxic-related or nuclear-related businesses. We all need to know what is in our neighborhoods and if we detect that something isn't right we need to get nosey and curious and start investigating. It is so sad when the detection comes too late, as it did for the nine children in my town of Rosamond who comprise California's worst childhood cancer cluster. Seven of these nine children are dead. They still don't know which of our toxic sites is at the fault. There are 24 toxic sites in the list and all are permitted businesses allowed to run amok. Over half of these children died of a rare brainstem cancer. It should never have happened.

Stormy works with the Ward Valley Coalition, ccat, Desert Citizens Against Pollution, and many other groups.

Geology

Geology Of Ward Valley

By Howard Wilshire and Jane Nielson

Ward Valley has a long geologic history, but many of the valley's geological facets relevant to nuclear waste dump siting are of quite recent origin. About 10 to 20 million years ago, as the San Andreas Fault began to move and volcanoes erupted in the Berkeley Hills, tectonic forces pulled the earth's crust apart in a belt that parallels the lower Colorado River.

This event (known to geologists as "extension") shaped the present landscape. The lower part of the extending crust was relatively hot and therefore stretched (ductile deformation), to double its previous width. The cold and rigid upper crust shattered along near-vertical faults, allowing lava to erupt. The stretched lower plate and the brittle, fractured upper plate were separated by shallow sloping and undulating "detachment faults."

During extension the fault-bounded upper plate blocks tilted; gaps between them formed basins in which sediment and volcanic rock collected. After extension, the lower plate rebounded and exposed both detachment faults and stretched rocks in areas east of Ward Valley, such as the Sacramento Mountains. These detachment faults slope gently westward under the north end of Ward Valley at a depth of a few hundred feet, then rise to the surface in the eastern Piute Mountains. Tilted upper plate blocks and basin deposits fringe the west side of the Sacramento Mountains and form the highly faulted Mopah Range and Turtle Mountains at the southeastern margin of Ward Valley.

The choice of Ward Valley as a radioactive waste disposal site ignored many important aspects of the geologic setting. For example, alluvium (decomposed rock transported by seasonal streams and gravity) derived from Cretaceous granitic rocks in the Piute Mountains is especially well- suited as desert tortoise habitat. A more dangerous assumption was that the valley fill consists of homogeneous, unfractured alluvial sediments, at least 800 feet deep. Assuming homogeneity allowed the physical properties of alluvium at the site to be mathematically modeled on the basis of very few measurements. The assumption that the materials are unfractured leads to a secondary assumption: that all water moving through the ground percolates evenly through the sediment. Most disposal sites for hazardous material have been evaluated using these same assumptions; however, at waste repository sites around the world human- produced contaminants are being discovered at much greater depths than models like the one used for Ward Valley would predict. Recent studies have focused on "preferred pathways" such as fractures, because water is transmitted much more rapidly through fractures when the ground is saturated.

Contrary to the assumptions used to model the site, actual geologic study of Ward Valley suggests that the alluvial fill is much less than 100 feet thick; construction of a pipeline a few miles south of the proposed dump site revealed granitic bedrock less than five feet down. Fractured sand, gravel, and volcanic rock, which accumulated in a basin in the upper plate during extension, are exposed near the proposed waste site in both the Little Piute and Sacramento Mountains. Seismic records obtained by the applicant suggest that such highly fractured rocks lie just under the proposed site; if so, the fractures could funnel water and contaminants to the water table under saturated conditions.

These saturated conditions now occur only locally during high rainfall, on an undetermined cycle: perhaps as short as decades, perhaps as long as centuries. Periods of high rainfall were not factored into the site assessment; instead the average annual rainfall at Needles was used to calculate water flow through the "unsaturated zone" (layers of soil and sediment above the water table). Annual precipitation at Ward Valley is almost certainly greater than at Needles: the town is further from the Pacific and lies in a potential rainshadow of the Sacramento Mountains. Further, the rate of recharge of ground water in arid areas depends on the size of individual storms, not on the annual average.

Another important factor at the site is the flow of surface water to Ward Valley from drainages in nearby Lanfair Valley to the northwest. A low divide separates the south-flowing Ward Valley drainage from Sacramento Wash, which discharges surface water from Lanfair Valley eastward into the Colorado River valley. Examination of aerial photographs shows sediment from Lanfair Valley extending in plumes south of the present divide. To change the course of some Lanfair Valley drainages from Sacramento Wash to Ward Valley would take nothing more than a shovel and a few hours of diligent digging. Lanfair Valley drainages now going into Sacramento Wash could flow toward Ward Valley in a period of high rainfall. This would increase the catchment area used to calculate flood risk by a factor of about 25; a wider area catches more water.

More ominously, subsurface connections may exist between Ward Valley ground water and the Colorado River. Fractured and tilted upper plate rocks and detachment faults may lie at shallow depth beneath Ward Valley. Such rocks are exposed between Ward Valley and the Colorado River, a strong indication that they lie close to the surface in the Valley itself. If they do, contaminants in Ward Valley's ground water could flow into the Colorado River. Whether a groundwater connection to the Colorado River constitutes a significant risk depends on the actual (and highly disputed) composition of the waste intended for Ward Valley. To change the course of some Lanfair Valley drainages from Sacramento Wash to Ward Valley would take nothing more than a shovel and a few hours of diligent digging. Lanfair Valley drainages now going into Sacramento Wash could flow toward Ward Valley in a period of high rainfall. This could send many times more water into the dump site than US Ecology officially anticipates.

Californians

Californians Oppose Ward Valley Nuke Dump

by Shannon Hart

Despite solid opposition to the Ward Valley radioactive waste dump, political leaders continue to push for the proposal to dump commercial radioactive waste in shallow, unlined dirt trenches. A recent independent statewide poll confirmed more than three-quarters of California voters strongly oppose the Ward Valley radioactive waste dump only 19 miles from the Colorado River. The independent survey, conducted by the national public policy research firm Decision Resarch, showed 75% of California voters oppose Ward Valley. Californians cite a variety of safety, health, and financial concerns for their opposition to Ward Valley.

"The politicians aren't listening," said Dana Gluckstein, president and founder of Americans for a Safe Future, a public interest organization working to stop Ward Valley. "We, the people, do not want this dump in our backyard or anyone else's backyard. Dumping radioactive waste in shallow, unlined dirt trenches is irresponsible and dangerous. This is Pete Wilson's pet project, not a project of the people."

Currently, Governor Pete Wilson is negotiating with Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt on conditions for a transfer of land from federal to state jurisdiction so the Ward Valley dump could be built. Although the negotiations have stalled, fully 85% of the voters agree that the land should not be transferred until all final safety tests have been performed, specifically tests for tritium.

Tritium is a byproduct of the atmospheric testing conducted in the 1950s and 60s in neighboring Nevada. Preliminary tests conducted by the dump operator US Ecology for the Environmental Impact Report show the presence of tritium at least 100 feet below the surface, indicating rapid migration of the radioactive nuclide. Because tritium was found so far beneath the desert surface, the National Academy of Sciences (nas) panel reviewing the safety of the site was unable to determine if tritium or any other radioactive materials could migrate and contaminate the aquifer below the proposed dump site and ultimately the Colorado River, the main source for drinking water for nearly 20 million people. The Colorado also provides water for livestock and crop irrigation in the Imperial Valley.

"The risk of eating food grown with radioactive contaiminated water is not science fiction," said Gluckstein. "If this dump leaks as the other US Ecology dumps have leaked, we are all at risk. It is essential that Babbitt and Wilson proceed cautiously and conduct the tritium tests prior to the land transfer."

The nas unanimously called for additional testing, which call Senator Barbara Boxer has echoed, adding that Lawrence Livermore Lab is capable and willing to conduct the additional safety tests before the land transfer to settle the dispute over the risk of radioactive materials migrating from the dump to the Colorado River. Boxer urged Babbitt and Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary to authorize the testing for tritium "at the earliest possible date" in a letter dated June 8, 1995.

"This is California's opportunity to have an independent, top-notch analysis of the safety of the Ward Valey dump site," Boxer said. "We are dealing with radioactive materials that have half-lives of up to 24,000 years (including plutonium239) and this test can be done in a matter of months. There is no excuse for not taking this cautionary step."

This is an extraordinary opportunity for Wilson and Babbitt to demonstrate their commitment to protecting Californians, our children, our water and our future," Gluckstein added. "An overwhelming majority of citizens agree that the land should not be transferred until the tests are completed and conclusive." "The people are not behind this dump, only the politicians and special interests," said Gluckstein.

Shannon Hart is executive director of Americans for a Safe Future.

Desert

Dumping on the Desert

by Christine Carraher

When I moved to the Mojave three years ago, I already knew about the plan to trash the desert at Ward Valley with radioactive wastes. What I didn't know was that the dump was just part of a plan to dump many types of waste in the desert. Southern California deserts have become the latest great frontier for the giant trash-and-profit waste industry.

What other dumps are planned? A brief inventory: A hazardous waste facility at Broadwell Dry Lake near Ludlow. Another toxic dump 15 miles away at Hidden Valley. Solid waste dumps of unprecedented magnitude: at Amboy, a mountain of garbage 40 stories high, 20,000 tons shipped daily for hundreds of years by train from throughout Southern California; at Eagle Mountain, one mile from Joshua Tree National Park, an almost identical plan, and yet another of the same scale at Mesquite in Imperial County.

All would bring air pollution and degradation of the environment, and would threaten scarce desert water supplies. So why the big move to the desert?

Dump advocates will give you many unsupported and self- serving arguments about how the desert is the appropriate place for landfills. But if we look past their double-talk, the reason the dumps are coming to the desert is clear: The population here is the least able to resist.

Landfills in the last ten years have become almost impossible to site in populous areas due to local opposition. The big waste companies like Waste Management Inc. and Browning Ferris Industries (bfi) are now trying to go where they think they will meet the least resistance. The sparse desert population, with low incomes, limited access to resources, and the perceived lack of sophistication common to rural people, are seen as easy marks.

Landfills in the last ten years have become almost impossible to site in populous areas due to local opposition. The big waste companies like Waste Management Inc. and Browning Ferris Industries (bfi) are now trying to go where they think they will meet the least resistance. The sparse desert population, with low incomes, limited access to resources, and the perceived lack of sophistication common to rural people, are seen as easy marks.

It's a big-stakes deal: Rail-haul mega-dumps in the desert would let metropolitan areas continue out-of-control development while sending their problems "out of sight, out of mind." At the same time, the waste giants get to team up with the big railroads, and sweeten the pot with the profits of long-distance rail-haul. Conveniently, the plan allows them to also consolidate their control of the trash business.

And who cares about the desert anyway? There's nothing out there, right? Although when I moved to the Mojave I knew I was moving to paradise, not everyone shares my view. Some who aren't familiar with the desert's beauty and abundant life perceive it as a wasteland, remote, empty, ugly and useless. Those who stand to profit from trash seem intent on turning this image of the desert as "wasteland" into a reality, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But everyone should care. What make this battle to save the desert so crucial is not just the terrible damage to a unique environment, and the willful confirmation of its image as a wasteland. It is just the threat to its exceptionally clean air and its scarce water supplies. And it is not just the injustice of heaping all of society's garbage on desert dwellers against their wishes.

This battle is crucial because it is an opportunity to help end out society's suicidal reliance on a one-way system of exploit, consume, and dump.

In the United States, we must eventually face the exhaustion of our exploited and wasted resources. We must find another way to live, based on values of sustainability. Clearly it would be best to begin to tackle now the immense changes that will lead us to a recycling-based economy, centered in waste reduction and the cycling of resources.

This will require a major change in thinking, and will not come about so long as we think we still have any "easy outs" left. Saying no to the trashing of the desert will close the door on one last major easy option. It will declare that toxic production, careless consumption and mindless dumping is no longer an alternative. And maybe it will get us started moving toward a better alternative.

The battle is here in the desert, and it is now. But the struggle is long and exhausting, and resources in these rural areas are scarce. Desert citizens are working to oppose the dumping, but we need help. We need the assistance and support of folks who see the desert as something more than a dumping ground. We need people who care about an opportunity to help turn our waste-and-dump culture around toward a sustainable society that will still hold promises for our grandchildren.

If you care about the desert, and about the future, you can find out more by contacting the Desert Environmental Response Team (dert) at (619) 361-3501, or write P.O . Box 1078, Joshua Tree, CA 92252.

Minds

Out Of Sight, Out Of Our Minds

The Rush to Bury Nuclear Waste

by Ward Young

President Clinton's August 11 decision to continue a moratorium on nuclear weapons testing is welcome news indeed, since it is difficult to create new generations of nuclear warheads without nuclear testing. Of course Clinton felt the hot breath of the world's anger at France for testing in Mururoa Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.

At the same time, the Administration is a long way from rejecting the nuclear arms race. Behind our backs and the headlines, Clinton is quietly committed to developing the National Ignition Facility, the most expensive project ever at the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory, designed to simulate nuclear explosions is the laboratory. Lab officials and weapons scientists are lobbying for continued funding for the facility, hoping to undermine the whole purpose of the nuclear test ban, which is to put a halt to the qualitative arms race.

To turn back from the nuclear precipice means much more than halting nuclear testing and dismantling some existing weapons. The nuclear dilemma will continue even beyond the struggle of peace advocates to win out against the development of new nuclear weapons and achieve what is no longer the impossible dream: the complete abolition of nuclear weapons.

The legacy of the atomic age will continue as long as the half-lives of the radioactive materials already dispersed into the environment from nuclear weapons explosions and the military/commercial nuclear fuel cycle. Several million people will die from nuclear weapons testing alone, most of them in the far future, according to International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

This legacy, as horrible as it is, may be dwarfed by the haphazard dumping of a vastly greater amount of radioactive waste from nuclear power plants and dismantled nuclear weapons. Each nuclear power plant generates 500 pounds of plutonium every year, about a hundred times the amount in a nuclear weapon. As of 1994, all of the radioactive waste from US nuclear plants totaled about 25 billion curies, thousands of times more radioactivity than was unleashed by the Hiroshima bomb.

If carried out, current schemes to bury these wastes in shallow landfills at Ward Valley and other so-called "low- level" dumps, and in irretrievable deep burial at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico and Yucca Mountain on the Nevada Test Site, are likely to guarantee that nuclear waste will pose a permanent threat.

Ward Valley could become the final grave for the dismantled remains of the Humboldt Bay, Diablo Canyon, Rancho Seco, San Onofre, Pathfinder and Palo Verde nuclear power plants, and probably others. A couple dozen scrapings taken from inside pipes at several other nuclear reactors are the subject of a fierce debate between the Nuclear Regulatory Commission working with government scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and independent mathematicians and scientists, including Lincoln Moses from Stanford University.

From the amount of plutonium found in the few scrapings, estimates can be made of the total amount of plutonium destined for Ward Valley. The independent group of scientists figures the total to be between five pounds and eight hundred pounds, while US Ecology estimates the total at a few ounces.

The debate about how much plutonium and other long-lasting radionuclides would be dumped at Ward Valley desperately needs a wider airing, since to most people, "low-level" conjures an image of slightly-contaminated hospital gowns or test tubes. The nuclear industry and its promoters in government have covered up the fact that most "low-level" radioactive waste comes from nuclear power plants and contains the same elements found in deadly spent nuclear fuel, but in smaller concentrations.

The license awarded US Ecology by Governor Wilson's California Department of Health Services to dump plutonium, cesium, strontium and other long-lived radionuclides in shallow land burial is a license to kill. The victims may never be identified, since deaths caused by long-term exposure to low doses of radiation are difficult to single out from deaths caused by other factors.

John Gofman, one of the world's leading authorities on the health effects of radiation, believes that it is the total of all radiation releases worldwide that counts. Even without another massive, Chernobyl-style release of radiation, the accumulated effects of smaller releases from leaking dumps, transportation accidents, deliberate and accidental releases at nuclear power plants and throughout the nuclear fuel cycle could lead to an intolerable burden of cancers and many other diseases.

Sociologist Kai Erickson characterizes government and industry plans for dumping long-lasting nuclear waste as "out of sight, out of our minds." Burying such waste "... deliberately poisons a portion of the natural world for an endless stretch of time and in doing so it not only leaves future generations with thousands of tons of the most dangerous rubbish on their hands but makes it as difficult as the state of our technology permits for them to deal with it."

We are not so much putting the problem in the hands of future societies as taking the solution out of their hands, Erickson continues. It is possible that knowledge developed in the future may lessen or neutralize the threat from nuclear waste, but unless the waste is kept in such a manner that it can be retrieved, such a solution will be worthless.

The nuclear industry was warned early on that no solution might be found to safely dispose of its radioactive waste. The industry ignored this advice, and now wants the public to become the custodian of its long-lived waste, perhaps the largest debt burden in history. Keep the liability for this mess with the nuclear industry, not the taxpayers. Keep the waste contained and isolated from the environment, monitor and repair containers and begin a serious search for better solutions. Unlike the irrational waste schemes in this country, most European nations keep all their long-lasting nuclear waste separated from the medium- and short-lived variety. They will study deep burial for the long-lived waste for many decades to come and only then decide what to do next, but will never bury it in shallow landfills like that planned at Ward Valley. America's unique nuclear disease is its rush to bury nuclear waste out of sight, out of our minds.

Clinton should level with the American people about the dilemma of nuclear waste. Destroying all nuclear weapons won't solve the problem of nuclear contamination from waste dumps. We need a moratorium on burial of nuclear waste.

Dreams

Savage Dreams:

A Journey Into The Hidden Wars Of The American West

By Rebecca Solnit

(Sierra Club Books, 1995, $22.00) reviewed by Joe Eaton

In Savage Dreams, art historian and antinuclear activist Rebecca Solnit takes a fresh look at two emblematic Western places: Yosemite National Park and the Nevada Test Site. This may seem a strange and arbitrary pairing at first; what, after all, does hyperscenic Yosemite have in common with the Test Site's bombed-out wastes? Solnit, in finding the parallels and connections, reframes the reader's view of both these landscapes.

After reading Savage Dreams, I will find it harder to dismiss Nevada as a featureless expanse of kitty litter or to accept the myth of pre-tourist Yosemite as pristine wilderness. The book's subtitle may also seem a little skewed.

You might think that there is nothing particularly hidden about the us government's 50-year assault on the land and people of Nevada. Here, at least, the government has acted like the rapacious hydra-headed beast of the militias' apocalyptic fantasies, seizing land, harassing residents, treating the "atomic veterans" and "downwinders" no better than the experimental pigs dressed in military uniforms and penned near the site of a 1957 bomb test to measure the protective effect (if any) of the clothing. As if the nuclear tests were insufficient insult, Nevada was also to have housed that grandiose shell game, the mx missile system.

The area remains a candidate for radioactive waste storage facilities (Ward Valley receives passing mention as another designated sacrifice area in another expendable desert). However, Solnit reveals another, less publicized face of the war in the official persecution of Western Shoshone land rights activists who refuse to conveniently disappear. Yosemite's war, in contrast, is truly hidden, part of society's collective amnesia about the destruction of the native Californians.

The area remains a candidate for radioactive waste storage facilities (Ward Valley receives passing mention as another designated sacrifice area in another expendable desert). However, Solnit reveals another, less publicized face of the war in the official persecution of Western Shoshone land rights activists who refuse to conveniently disappear. Yosemite's war, in contrast, is truly hidden, part of society's collective amnesia about the destruction of the native Californians.

As part of the "Mariposa War" of 1851, white soldiers and adventurers, including the Gold Rush freebooter James D.Savage, attempted to expel the Ahwahneechee, a Miwok-speaking people, from their homeland in what later became the national park. As a sort of consolation prize, the victors renamed Tenaya Lake after the chief (the Ahwahneechee, of course, had their own perfectly serviceable name for the lake, Pyweack).

I had encountered pieces of the Ahwahneechee story before but had not known until reading Savage Dreams that they subsequently returned to Yosemite and maintained a presence in the Valley until 1969, when the National Park Service razed the last in a series of Native American villages, deemed too unsightly for tourist sensibilities, at a time when the us government was destroying villages on a much more ambitious scale elsewhere in the world. Long before their final physical banishment from the park, the Ahwahneechee had already been expunged from its received history, with Park Service exhibits characterizing them as an extinct race.

Ironically, the open, parklike nature of Yosemite Valley that fit so well with the 19th-century Euro-American landscape aesthetic is only now being recognized, thanks to the work of ethnobotanists like Kat Anderson, as an artifact of indigenous horticultural practice, including controlled burning. What whites from Muir and Bierstadt on saw as an untouched natural paradise was in its own way as much a product of human effort as the hedgerows of England or the terraced ricefields of Java, even though its authors have been edited out of the picture.

Solnit weaves an extraordinary range of material into her accounts of Yosemite and the Test Site. Savage Dreams mixes political reportage, personal memoir, history, travel essay, philosophical speculation. The author trepasses on the Test Site's periphery as a participant in a civil disobedience action and is escorted to Ground Zero as a journalist. She helps a polyglot group of activists ("Edward Abbey would've never dared to make this up," she remarks to a co-worker) defend Shoshone ranchers Mary and Carrie Dann against a Bureau of Land Management raid. She connects with a long-lost cousin who has her own history of antinuclear commitment with Women Strike for Peace in the 1950s, discovers an austere beauty in the Great Basin desert with its macabre placenames (the Specter Range, the Funeral Mountains), and develops a taste for country/western music.

n California, Solnit meets contemporary Ahwahneechee, Park Service functionaries, and tourists who in a properly ordered world would be bear chow. (Solnit's Yosemite National Park, like the Ceylon of the old missionary hymn, seems to be one of those places where every prospect pleases but man alone, or Homo touristicus at least, is vile.) Near a shrinking reservoir in the foothills she locates the twice-moved grave of James Savage, whose brief but gaudy career as land baron reminds her of Joseph Conrad's Kurtz in Heart of Darkness (although Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King" would also work) if you want to give Conrad a rest. Illuminating parallels and contrasts keep turning up: Richard Misrach, photographic chronicler of the trashed desert, is here along with Ansel Adams, celebrator of a Yosemite free of distracting human figures

I Thoreau, from the safe domesticity of Concord, dreams of the West; Twain meets the real West and its indigenous peoples with baffled contempt. The cast of characters ranges from Werner Heisenberg to the Donner Party. Arcadians and utopians, physicists and protestors, nature and culture, landscape and land rights all figure in the narrative, along with the politics of naming, the esthetics of the highway, and walking as intellectual exercise. When the art historian in Solnit threatens to take over, she generally redeems herself with a grittily realistic account of camping in the sage flats or a lyrical evocation of place. I have only a couple of quibbles with the book. Solnit refers to the former San Joaquin valley wetland as Tule Lake rather than Tulare Lake, and I would like to see at least a 20-year moratorium on all references to the wealth of Inuit terms for snow (a notion challenged by some linguists, anyway). These are minor annoyances in comparison with the strengths of a work that helped me see familiar pieces of the West in new and instructive ways.

Flyer

Don't Waste California - 1991 Flyer

THE PROPOSED LOW LEVEL RADIOACTIVE WASTE DUMP

AT WARD VALLEY, CALIFORNIA

In 1980 the U.S. Congress enacted legislation that transferred responsibility to individual states for the storage of low-level radioactive waste (LLRW). In 1982 and 1983, the state of California enacted emergency legislation empowering the Department of Health Services (DHS) to set up regulations governing LLRW disposal; levy fees on producers, pursue reduction of low level radioactive waste; establish dump site criteria, and select a license designee.

Several companies applied to operate California's radioactive waste dumpin 1984. Department of Health Services first selected Westinghouse, which declined after considering the potential liability burden. Chem-Nuclear, operator of the Barnwell facility in S. Carolina, was selected and also declined. Every other applicant, except one, withdrew eventually. In 1985 U.S. Ecology (USE) posted a $l million performance bond and was selected by DHS as license designee.

In 1986 USE began its site selection process, based on the preliminary selections prepared by DHS. USE enlisted the assistance of the League of Women Voters to coordinate Citizen Action Committees in the three counties (San Bernardino, Riverside and Inyo) where the 18 preliminary possibilities were located. Ward Valley in San Bernardino County was selected as the primary candidate for the dump in March 1988, with Silurian Valley as an alternate site.

By the end of 1987, California had joined the Southwest Compact with Arizona, North Dakota and South Dakota. Because it had already begun the process of siting its own LLRW facility, California was designated the host state for the wastes generated within the compact.

In December of 1989, U.S. Ecology completed its license application to construct and operate a low level radioactive waste dump at Ward Valley. DHS released the Final Environmental Impact Report/Statement (FEIR/S) in May 1991 for final comments from the public.

As the final state task of licensing the dump started in June 1991, opponents of Ward Valley successfully blocked any further licensing activity when two of the three Commissioners for the State Lands Commission (SLC) publicly refused to make the necessary land transfer. The Ward Valley site is located on federal land under the control of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and federal law requires radioactive waste dumps to be sited on state land. Arrangements were made between DHS and BLM to have the SLC transfer ownership of the Ward Valley site to the state of California. Also, because the site is on federal land, both an Environmental Impact Report (state) and Environmental Impact Statement (federal) were required to proceed with the project.

The entire process of siting a radioactive waste dump at Ward Valley has been characterized by limited public access and participation. Prior to the notice in the Federal Register announcing the comment period for the DEIR/S, virtually no news of the proposed dump had reached anyone outside of the Needles area. Public hearings on the DEIR/S were limited as well to this area; at least one of three held was inaccurately noticed regarding time and location.

Though a radioactive waste dump is arguably an issue of concern to the entire state, the siting process was addressed as a local concern. It did not actively include citizens other than those near possible dump sites. Not a single environmmental group in the state was aware of the planned dump. Several members of a local chapter of the Sierra Club were involved but no technical resources were focussed on the critical siting process between 1986 to 1988.

The other participants in this process were U.S. Ecology, nuclear industry lobby (Cal-Rad-Forum) and consultants contracted by U.S. Ecology. One of the consultants, a local chapter of the League of Women Voters was given over $10,000 to help with the siting process as well as the production of an "objective" booklet on the dump. As a result the siting process was hardly more than a local public relations exercise, which succeeded in locating a site with a low water table, near a major federal highway and a small town--Needles.

Likewise, public hearings on the license application were restricted to San Bernardino County. The license application itself was available for public review in just a half dozen locations in San Bernardino and Riverside counties, the U.S. Ecology office in Agoura, and DHS offices in Sacramento.

The publication of the DEIR/S and notice in the Federal Register alerted concerned citizens around the state, however. As a result of rapid networking, numerous organizations and individuals prepared comments on the document; intense public pressure resulted in an extension of the comment period. Review of the vast amount of commentary delayed the publication of the Final EIR/S; yet even with the additional time, the lead agencies failed to address the bulk of questions raised in the comments. More public pressure ensued, resulting first in BLM's opening the federal EIS for additional comment, then the state EIR as well. One of the primary concerns raised by commentors on the draft EIR/S was the unavailability of data on which the conclusions contained in the EIR/S were based. These data-including modeling criteria, migration rates, hydrology and geology evaluations, waste stream composition, etc.-are part of the license application and were included in both the draft and final EIR/S by reference only.

DHS issued a Draft Radioactive Materials license to U.S. Ecology in June 1990. In spite of both official and public calls for full adjudicatory hearings on the license, DHS refused and held instead three hearings in three locations in the state on the same evening. With just 30 days notice, concerned groups and individuals scrambled to prepare testimony that, regardless of how carefully researched and prepared, would ultimately be non-binding on DHS's decision to grant the license. Prior to the hearings, DHS distributed a few more copies of the License Application, which was included in full by reference in the draft license, to additional locations in Riverside, San Bernardino and San Francisco. With the exception of the copy at the U.S. Ecology office in Agoura, the document was not available in Los Angeles county, where one of the hearings was held.

U.S. ECOLOGY

U.S. Ecology was not the first choice of the Department of Health Services to construct and operate a radioactive waste dump. Westinghouse was their first choice, but Westinghouse, afraid of the potential liability, refused the selection. The job was offered to two others left in the selection process, but they also withdrew. Only U.S. Ecology was left.

Who is U.S. Ecology? U.S. Ecology is a hazardous and radioactive waste management company owned by American Ecology. U.S. Ecology has a bad history of toxic and radioactive waste management. U.S. Ecology and its parent American Ecology have been the defendants in numerous suits for offsite contamination, mismanagement, negligence, etc. in their operation/management of hazardous waste sites around the country.

U.S. Ecology has operated four radioactive waste sites to date. Two, in Sheffield, Illinois and Maxey Flats, Kentucky, have been shut down because of offsite contamination. The state of Illinois filed suit for recovery of damages in the amount of $97 million. This suit was settled out of court. Maxey Flats has been declared a Superfund site by the EPA. North Carolina, which has so-called "bad-boy" legislation, denied consideration of U.S. Ecology for a license application following investigation of that company's history of waste management.

The two remaining sites operated by U.S. Ecology, Beatty, Nevada, and Richland, Washington, are said to be leaking. The Las Vegas Sun reported in March that there was evidence of offsite contamination in groundwater wells around the Beatty dump. U.S. Ecology representatives have stated that it is their belief that this contamination in Beatty was the result of workers dumping radioactive materials into the wells, and not due to leaks.

"LOW LEVEL" RADIOACTIVE WASTE

"Low level" does not mean "low risk." Low level radioactive waste is officially defined as everything that is not high level. This has nothing to do with either level of activity (Curies per unit volume), length of half-life or toxicity. High level wastes are spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors and some transuranics. Once these fuel rods and transuranics, however, are reprocessed into materials necessary for nuclear weapons manufacture the remaining (still) radioactive waste is then classified as "low level."

"Low level" radioactive wastes include medical wastes; wastes from research conducted at universities, wastes from industries as diverse as radiopharmaceuticals, civilian defense contractors, and smoke alarms; and wastes from the generation of nuclear power. Over the thirty-year operating lifetime of the proposed Ward Valley dump, the operating licenses for every commercial nuclear power plant currently online will expire. There are several reactors nationwide already set for decommissioning, including two at Rancho Seco in California. Everything from handtools to pipes to the reactor vessels themselves irradiated by years of neutron bombardment can be classified under current regulations as "low level radioactive waste", and can be disposed of at the proposed Ward Valley dump.

WASTE STREAM COMPOSITION

According to the FEIR/S, the vast majority of the waste received at Ward Valley will be relatively short lived medical wastes and very little long-lived reactor wastes. The pie charts provided as illustration include only waste from 1985-87, and do not include reactor decommissioning waste. Instead they show that 79/0 will be medical. This contradicts Department of Energy figures which show that at least 50% of low level radioactive waste is produced by commercial nuclear power reactors. According to the DOE only one half of one percent comes from medical practices.

There has emerged, only very recently, some public discussion of these discrepancies. Dump proponents allege that DOE figures place all research generated waste, including research in radiopharmaceuticals and other medical applications, in the industry category. However, even if the amount of waste attributed to industry by the DOE (approximately 47/0) were added to that agency's figure for medical practice generation (less than one percent), the total would still not equal the figure projected by U.S. Ecology and Department of Health Services.

U.S. Ecology's waste stream projections are based on manifests of radioactive wastes shipped to disposal facilities operated by U.S. Ecology during the years of 1985-87. During this time, however, no utility-owned nuclear power reactors have been decommissioned and dismantled. Yet over the legislatively mandated 30-year operational period of the proposed Ward Valley dump, every one of the 112 currently operating commercial nuclear power reactors in the nation will have reached the end of its projected lifespan.

NATIONAL IMPLICATIONS

At present most states or compacts are having trouble meeting the federally mandated milestones for the 1993 deadline. In spite of recent delays, however, California is still almost a year ahead of the mandated timeline; well on its way to having the first radioactive waste dump opened in the country in over a decade.

Though the 1985 Amendments allowed compacts to restrict waste disposed within a compact, the later compact legislation permits compacts to, on a majority vote, accept out-of-compact waste. 14 states and the District of Columbia formally requested permission of the Southwest Compact to bring their radioactive waste to Ward Valley once the dump is opened. Additionally, the 1985 Amendments grant "emergency access" to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. On petition from a generator, the NRC can allow access to any operating dump.

The Ward Valley site may also be in a dangerous position if federal regulations change. According to a report released in late 1989 by the Office of Technology Assessment, if dumps are established for every compact and non-aligned state, there will be more waste dumps than the nation needs or can probably afford. New compacting technologies alone have dramatically reduced the volume of waste created by 55% since 1980 and another reduction by half again is anticipated by 1993.

The report suggested that Congress seriously consider limiting the number of dumps rather than. letting the proposed 17 sites come on line. The report went on to say that many of the proposed dumps would become uneconomical to run. Rep. Tom Alley of Michigan suggested at the March 21 meeting of the NRC Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste that states "might look for a state such as California to take the Compact's waste on. a contract basis." In July, John Etheridge of Louisiana Power and Light proposed the establishment of "super compact" facilities, formed by combining existing compacts.

ENVIRONMENT/WATER

The Ward Valley site is situated 22 miles west of Needles, California on Interstate 40. Located 15 miles from the Colorado River, the site is also directly above an underground basin containing approximately 8.7 million acre-feet of water. The State Water Quality Control Board Region 7, Colorado River Basin, has designated the aquifer "high quality drinking water. " The Region 7 Board, however, determined that since the concern is of discharge below the site and not into surface water, federal Clean Water Act provisions do not apply.

The proposed design calls for open, unlined trenches, into which the waste will be dumped, covered with dirt and revegetated. The FEIR/S concludes that because the surface level of the basin is deep (estimated 600 feet), the region is arid and rainfall will not seep further than six inches, there is no danger of radionuclides migrating from the site into the water below. Because of the inaccessibility of the license Application, which contains the models and data used to reach these conclusions, independent hydrologists have been unable to test the veracity of these conclusions. The FEIR/S also presumes relatively short hazardous lives for the wastes (500 years or less) and states that even if migration were to reach the water, the hazard would by then have expired.

The Ward Valley site is also habitat for the endangered desert tortoise. Mitigation efforts outlined in the FEIR/S for any further danger posed to this species are limited to erecting fencing along the roadway and relocating some of the tortoises to the other side of I-40. Ward Valley is, as well, located on tribal lands. The Chemehueve and Fort Mohave tribes consider both the region and many of the native species of sacred significance.

Neither the draft license nor the FEIR/S adequately address the issues of cost or liability. Who pays for this dump? It appears the taxpayers of California. Neither the generators of the waste nor the operator of the dump will be held liable in the event of offsite environmental contamination, widespread public exposure or contamination of the water below the site.

In any case, the financial state of U.S. Ecology and its parent American Ecology, according to documents submitted as part of the license application and an independent study by the University of Nebraska, is so dismal that if the company were to be held liable for environmental damage, it would probably go bankrupt.

U.S. Ecology, as the operator, is required to have an insurance policy of $10 million, but this is meaningless. John L. Quattrochi of American Nuclear Insurers stated that "coverage cannot be tapped to pay for cleanup if the dump leaked" (L.A. Times, 20 May 1991, "only California Is on Track for Nuclear Dump")."The kind of insurance available to U.S. Ecology covers only claims for injury or property damage outside the dump, he said, and such claims are so rare and difficult to prove that none has been awarded from low level dumps in the 33 year history of the industry."

Waste generators will pay a fee to the Department of Health Services to cover operational costs and establish a contingency fund should anything go wrong at the site. Unless the law is changed, this fee payment relieves the generator of all future liability. The generators will include the cost of disposal fees in their rate bases.

Because there is no way to determine just what the costs of isolation and cleanup of a leak would be, it is impossible for the DHS to establish a fee structure that would cover all possible costs. Someone else will have to cover the difference. The state of California will own the land and the dump-the taxpayers will own tons of radioactive waste generated by commercial interests. Common law usually dictates that ownership constitutes responsibility, and liability for damages.