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From today's Chicago trib:
U.S. HALTS PLAN FOR IDAHO
NUCLEAR INCINERATOR
OUTCRY FORCING ENERGY AGENCY TO
LOOK FOR ALTERNATIVE TO BURNING
By Judith Graham
Tribune Staff Writer
March 28, 2000
DENVER -- Responding to intense public pressure, the
U.S. Department of Energy on Monday announced it
will halt plans to build a nuclear waste incinerator in
Idaho, about 100 miles west of Yellowstone National
Park.
Instead, the agency said it will appoint a panel to study
alternatives to burning nuclear waste, in Idaho and
across the nation.
"We're ecstatic. This is a great victory for the people of
Wyoming and the U.S.," said Tom Patricelli, executive
director of Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free, a citizens
group. The group had claimed that incineration would
release radioactive materials into the environment,
potentially causing irreparable harm to people and
wildlife.
Opposition to the government's plans flared up last
summer when residents of Jackson Hole, Wyo., learned
that nuclear waste laced with plutonium would be
burned at the Idaho Engineering and Environmental
Laboratory, a vast complex in the southeastern part of
that state, just across the Grand Tetons from Western
Wyoming.
After long-time Jackson Hole residents Gerry Spence,
actor Harrison Ford, and World Bank President James
Wolfensohn took up the cause, the effort to stop the
incinerator became a cause celebre, gaining national
attention. Spence, a lawyer who represented the family
of Karen Silkwood, spearheaded a lawsuit brought
against the DOE last September in U.S. District Court in
Wyoming and amended in January to include class
action plaintiffs.
The lawsuits argued that the government had failed to
conduct an adequate environmental analysis of the
proposed incinerator, neglecting to examine the potential
impact on Wyoming or solicit input from its residents.
Two of the most popular national parks in the United
States, Yellowstone and Grand Teton, are in western
Wyoming, in range of prevailing winds that blow from
the Idaho nuclear facility, they noted.
Under pressure from Jackson Hole's citizens, Wyoming
Sen. Craig Thomas called for hearings on the Idaho
nuclear incinerator and its environmental impact on
national parks, scheduled for April 6. By settling the
lawsuit late Sunday night, after about a week of
negotiations, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson avoids
the potentially embarrassing Senate hearings.
Under the written settlement agreement, the department
said it will not pursue two permits needed to build the
incinerator. They were due to be issued soon by the
State of Idaho and the Environmental Protection
Agency. The final hearings on these permits ended
earlier this year, and construction was to begin as early
as April.
Instead of burning the waste to prepare it for permanent
storage in an underground site in New Mexico, the
Department of Energy will condense it through a process
known as supercompaction. Anywhere from 83 percent
to 97 percent of the 65,000 cubic meters of
plutonium-laced waste, currently stored above ground at
the Idaho laboratory, will be prepared for storage at
New Mexico's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant through this
process.
In its current form, the waste does not meet
requirements for permanent storage in the deep caverns
in Carlsbad, N.M., where the detritus of the Cold War
is being sent. But under a legal agreement with Idaho,
the government has an obligation to remove the waste
from Idaho.
Now that the incinerator has been stopped, attention will
turn to the contractor that the Energy Department chose
for its new $1.2 billion nuclear waste facility at the Idaho
complex. British Nuclear Fuels Ltd., which won the
privatized cleanup contract at the lab, has admitted that
it falsified quality data for reprocessed nuclear fuels sent
to Japan, and is under investigation by the British
government.
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