U.S. to Reopen Review of Nuclear Dump

The Clinton administration has decided to reopen the environmental review of the proposed Ward Valley low-level nuclear waste dump and ask the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to test the safety of the site in the eastern Mojave Desert.

A major victory for opponents of the dump, the administration’s action puts the project on hold for a year or more and represents a serious setback for Gov. Pete Wilson.

“This is a huge victory for the public health and safety of millions of Californians,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). “The tests will lay to rest critical questions and allow us finally to make a responsible decision whether to build this facility.”

An outspoken critic of the project, Boxer recommended in June that the Livermore lab look into safety issues at Ward Valley.

However, Wilson’s office condemned the administration’s action. “It’s an outrageous stall tactic, playing to a liberal Hollywood constituency and environmental supporters at the expense of California business,” said Sean Walsh, Wilson’s press secretary.

The Clinton administration’s action came after revelations about leakage of radioactive tritium, a biochemical waste, from a dump in southern Nevada where nuclear waste was buried in desert terrain very similar to that of Ward Valley.

New information about illegal dumping practices at the Beatty, Nev., site also has raised questions about the firm, U.S. Ecology, which has been licensed by the state of California to operate the Ward Valley facility. The same company, using a different name, was in charge of the Beatty facility during the years when the illegal dumping occurred.

A panel of the National Academy of Sciences that studied the environmental issues at Ward Valley gave a qualified endorsement last year, saying it was generally safe but recommending further study on the potential for tritium to leak out.

Revisiting the environmental review process will open the door to safety questions that advocates of the project have been trying to put behind them for more than a decade.

“The point of this is to take up issues raised by the National Academy Sciences, by other concerned scientists, by Native Americans who are concerned about the preservation of sacred sites in the area and by the public,” said Deputy Interior Secretary John Garamendi.

Wilson has campaigned aggressively to open the waste repository as part of his efforts to make sure that California remains a hospitable place for the booming biotechnology industry.

“California’s economic comeback is based on three pillars,” Walsh said. “And two of them--computer technology and biotechnology--create a substantial volume of low-level radioactive waste which is extremely expensive to ship out of state.”

Wilson, however, is powerless to open the dump until the federal government, which owns the 1,000-acre site, agrees to transfer the land into state hands.

The main question perplexing scientists, including some members of the National Academy of Sciences panel on Ward Valley, is how tritium penetrated 357 feet beneath the surface of the Beatty dump to a point about 10 feet above the water table.

The water table at Ward Valley is more than 600 feet below the surface, but some experts believe there are connections between that aquifer and the Colorado River, 20 miles to the east, which is a source of drinking water for millions of people.

As a low-level nuclear waste dump, Ward Valley would be able to accept virtually all radioactive debris except for the spent fuel from nuclear reactors.

Tritium is by no means the most potent form of waste that would go to Ward Valley. But if scientists concluded that it could not be stored safely, it would become exceedingly difficult to justify the burial of more toxic, long-lived waste, such as plutonium-239. Generated by the nuclear power industry, plutonium-239 retains half of its hazardous potential for 25,000 years.

Proponents of burying hazardous waste in the desert believe it is a safe place because there is so little moisture, and it takes a great deal of moisture to move waste particles several hundred feet through the ground.

The task facing researchers at Lawrence Livermore is determining whether the tritium at Beatty migrated through the ground because of rainfall or because of liquids illegally poured into the dump.

If human carelessness is found to be the cause, Ward Valley proponents will argue that improved handling and monitoring practices will eliminate the possibility of liquid migration at Ward Valley.

Investigators for the state of Nevada estimate that nearly 600,000 gallons of liquid waste were poured into the ground from the time Beatty opened in 1962 until 1976.

Regardless of what caused it, evidence that moisture has penetrated deep beneath the desert raises questions about the safety of putting highly toxic nuclear waste in unlined trenches in the desert, as is proposed at Ward Valley.

“The philosophy of these sites is that you have such large, thick zones of impermeable sediments that they trap moisture moving through,” said Martin D. Mifflin, a hydrologist and member of the National Academy panel on Ward Valley. “But if that’s not happening, we are kidding ourselves that we have an environment that acts as a good barrier against the migration of buried waste.”