The Idaho National Engineering Laboratory has been receiving highly radioactive waste since the late 1940s. In recent years, it has joined the list of sites operated by the Department of Energy whose clean-up will cost taxpayers billions of dollars – without assurance that any safe resting place will be found for the long-lived radioactive contaminants.
On July 28, 1993, the governor of Idaho, Cecil D. Andrus, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, hoping to sway members to defeat a proposal to circumvent the ruling of a federal court issued a month previous. Andrus’ statement to the committee provides a good idea of the extent of environmental problems created by the DOE – and a good counter-argument to any who might suggest that Idaho is a better place than Hawai’i to store nuclear waste. Here are excerpts from Andrus’ testimony:
Background
The Naval Reactors Facility (NRF), located at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory is owned by the United States Department of Energy. The Energy Department has operated the facility for the Navy Nuclear Propulsion Program since 1949. The NRF is located on approximately 4,000 acres of land within the 570,000 acres (or approximately 900 square miles) that make up the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, a sprawling DOE complex in eastern Idaho. The INEL is a dedicated site for energy research and development, particularly for nuclear-related activities.
Over the past 40 years, spent nuclear fuel generated by the nuclear Navy has been removed from warships in ports around the country and shipped by rail to the Navy facility in Idaho. There, a small percentage of the spent fuel was examined, but the vast majority of the material was visually inspected and then readied for shipment across the INEL site to the Idaho Chemical Processing Plant (Chem Plant).
The Chem Plant was built in the 1950s to reprocess highly enriched spent nuclear fuel. The process involved a chemical liquefaction of the spent fuel and the removal of highly enriched uranium. The extracted uranium was then transported off-site to other DOE sites for use in weapons production. Enormous volumes of highly radioactive liquid wastes were generated in this process.
The liquid is processed into a solid form of highly radioactive granulated “calcine,” which is stored in stainless steel storage canisters. Presently, over two million gallons of liquid waste are waiting to be calcined at the Chem Plant, and thousands of tons of calcined waste are in storage there.
The Department of Energy plans to calcine this highly dangerous radioactive liquid waste, but even by its own best estimates this process will take over six years to perform. There is no plan in place for the removal or disposal of the calcined waste – essentially, there is no plan to deal with this material.
The reprocessing function of the Chem Plant has been reduced greatly over the past several years, and last year, then-Secretary of Energy James Watkins announced the permanent cessation of reprocessing of naval spent fuel in Idaho. From now on, all of the Navy’s spent nuclear fuel that will enter Idaho will not be reprocessed but rather will be stored indefinitely at the Chem Plant. This compounds the already troublesome spent fuel storage problems at INEL.
Gaseous, liquid and solid radioactive wastes have also been generated at the Naval Reactors Facility. The wastes have been disposed of at INELs Radioactive Waste Management Complex which, together with the Chem Plant, ranks among the two most contaminated facilities and significant waste cleanup projects facing the Department of Energy. Moreover, the NRF itself has identified 68 potentially hazardous sites, 12 of which are suspected of having both chemical and radioactive wastes requiring remedial action. Not surprisingly, the Environmental Protection Agency has made the entire INEL a Superfund site.
Beyond these problems, when the nuclear warheads for this nation’s defense were being manufactured at Rocky Flats, Colorado, the transuranic wastes from the production of these weapons were transported over the course of 30 years to the INEL for so-called “temporary” storage. Thousands upon thousands of barrels of plutonium-contaminated transuranic waste were dumped into the ground and buried above the Snake River Plain aquifer, the drinking water supply for southern Idaho. Later, many more thousands of barrels were stacked up in storage facilities at the INEL.
Over the years, injection wells also were constructed, which allowed radioactive and hazardous wastes to be injected directly into the groundwater. Radioactivity and hazardous materials have been detected in the aquifer below.
The Lawsuit
The litigation that led to the judicial order originated in Idaho’s insistence that the Department of Energy conduct a site-wide environmental impact statement assessing its operations at INEL, including operations at the Naval Reactors Facility. The Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program has steadfastly refused to have its operations fully assessed in such a statement. Of paramount concern to Idaho in this matter was the Navy’s continued shipment of large volumes of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel from its warships and submarines to Idaho for storage despite the fact that its operations, indeed, the entire issue of the storage of spent nuclear fuel at the INEL, has never been fully assessed in an appropriate environmental impact statement under NEPA.
Idaho requested the federal district court to enter an injunction against the further receipt of spent nuclear fuel at the INEL, including the receipt of naval spent fuel. Idaho recognized that the Chemical Processing Plant – charged with the receipt and storage of spent nuclear fuel from all sources – was significantly contaminated, a major cleanup site under Superfund, and that its facilities were at or near the end of their useful lives. Corrosion, environmental contamination, and other storage problems called their continued use into serious question. Moreover, the DOE’s decision to stop reprocessing spent fuel at the Chem Plant constituted a significant change in the primary purpose for which spent fuel from the nuclear Navy was shipped to INEL. Thus, Idaho asked that all spent fuel shipments into the INEL be stopped pending completion of an appropriate site-wide environmental impact statement.
In ordering the Department of Energy to conduct an EIS, and in entering an injunction against the receipt of spent nuclear fuel at INEL until the statement was completed, the court said: “Given the circumstances of this case and the very nature of nuclear waste, the court is of the opinion that the continued shipment, receipt, processing, and storage of additional nuclear waste at the INEL, under current conditions and without NEPA review, make the threat of irreparable injury sufficiently likely to warrant the imposition of an injunction.”
Further, the court found that an injunction was necessary to compel the department and the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program to prepare an appropriate statement under NEPA. The Energy Department had made “serious misrepresentations” and acted in “bad faith” in its representations. The court “was unmoved by DOE’s promise of future compliance.”
The department’s continued shipment of nuclear waste to Idaho without an EIS, moreover, is exactly the type of action that has required the taxpayers of this country to spend billions of dollars a year on the cleanup of this nation’s nuclear complex. This nation is faced with the expenditure of billions of dollars – this year alone – to clean up just a small portion of the environmental degradation wrought by years of operations by a federal agency without any apparent concern for the environment. I submit to you that if NEPA had been in place and if environmental impact statements had been required in the 1950s and 1960s, this nation would not be faced with the mind-boggling expenses of “environmental restoration” at DOE facilities throughout the country. In fact, that is why the judicially ordered environmental impact statement is so important and why the Energy Department should not be able to continue to turn the INEL into a major nuclear dumping ground until the full environmental effects of those actions and alternatives to those actions are analyzed in accordance with NEPA.
‘Temporary Storage’
The people of Idaho will not allow their desert and their water supply to be turned into the nation’s de facto dump for nuclear waste. What governor of any state in this nation could stand silently in good conscience as more and more nuclear waste piled up from outside sources without any environmental analysis indicating it was safe to do so?
My state knows better than any other what a folly the federal government has perpetrated with its failure to comply with environmental laws and properly manage nuclear waste. Idahoans have always been told that the storage of millions of cubic yards of nuclear waste at the INEL would be “temporary.” We have begun to believe that when the Department of Energy says “temporary storage,” it means a nuclear half-life of perhaps 25,000 years.
In fact, as the court in this case pointed out, “It appears that DOE is quietly attempting to make INEL the nuclear waste repository for the United States and the rest of the world. By quietly, the court means that by characterizing all of its activities as ‘ongoing’, by fractionalizing and segmenting its proposals, and by its strenuous opposition to the positions advanced by Idaho during the course of this litigation, DOE is seeking to evade NEPA review. While this court can certainly understand the critical need to find and develop appropriate sites for storing nuclear waste, DOE must understand that the selection and use of such sites must be done in accordance with NEPA and all other applicable statutes and regulations.”
For years, this nation’s attention and money has been focused on the front end of nuclear technology- how to build a bigger bomb or generate more electricity. Virtually nothing has been spent on the back end – the waste stream which stays in our environment for tens of thousands of years. How can it be that our own government has so miserably failed to address such a monumental problem? The answers go beyond mere politics or budget priorities and directly to negligence – a failure of will on the part of those who have been charged with managing the nuclear genie and its environmental effects.
Our nation can no longer afford to do business as it has in the past. We must change the way we do things, particularly when it comes to the management of this nation’s nuclear waste. We must force all our federal agencies, including the nuclear Navy, to comply with our environmental statutes.
Volume 4, Number 3 September 1993
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