House: Nuclear Waste Should Not Be Classified Less Hazardous

By J.R. Pegg

WASHINGTON, DC, October 3, 2003 (ENS) - The U.S. House of Representatives has asked the joint conference committee working on the energy bill not to include a provision that would allow the U.S. Energy Department to reclassify millions of gallons of high level nuclear waste as less hazardous.

Critics say the reclassification would allow the agency to leave high level waste on site instead of burying the waste deep underground.

The Energy Department contends the change is needed to expedite cleanups of nuclear waste. At issue is some 100 million gallons of high level nuclear waste created by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), the majority of which is currently stored in underground tanks at federal facilities in South Carolina, Idaho and Washington.

The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act requires the Energy Department to bury this highly radioactive waste deep underground - if the department reclassifies it as less hazardous, it would be permitted to leave it on site.

Attorneys general from the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and South Carolina have formally opposed the proposal.

At least 70 of the tanks at the Hanford facility in Washington have leaked some one million gallons of waste into the soil. (Photo courtesy Energy Department )

"It is very important to clean up this waste rather than just to rename it," Inslee said.

The House passed a "motion to instruct conferees" to leave out the provision by voice vote yesterday. This kind of motion is not binding, but there are signs that the conference committee will heed the request.

Texas Representative Joe Barton, a Republican and conference committee member, said the conference "had no intention to put in any language on this issue in the conference report" without the agreement and support on the issue from the Energy Department and the states who have noted their concern about the provision.

Barton says the Energy Department is in "advanced negotiations with the affected governors on a solution."

If a solution is brokered, he added, there is likely to be a renewed effort to include it in the energy bill.

The Energy Department's attempt to get the language in the energy bill comes in the wake of victory by environmentalists in federal court that blocked the department from changing the classification of the waste on its own.

In July 2003, a U.S. District Court Judge in Idaho ruled that the department violated the law when it granted itself the authority to reclassify high level nuclear waste.

The lawsuit, brought by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) in February 2002, argued that the Energy Department's decision to reclassify high level nuclear waste in storage tanks as "incidental waste," violated federal law and would allow the agency to use a substantially less protective standard of cleanup the DOD waste.

The Energy Department has appealed the ruling - but in a letter sent to the conference committee this week, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said the department is not seeking authority to reclassify high level waste "so as to dispose of it anywhere other than at a repository for spent fuel."

"All we are seeking is confirmation from Congress of our longstanding authority to classify various material from reprocessing according to the risk it presents so that it can be disposed of in a manner appropriate to those risks," according to Abraham.

The Idaho case did not to blur that authority, says Geoffrey Fettus, an NRDC attorney who litigated the case.

The Yucca Mountain site is the planned storage facility for the high level nuclear waste, but the project is frought with controversy as the United States wrestles with its nuclear legacy. (Photo courtesy Energy Department )

The decision does not bar the department from reclassifying treated wastes that it removes from the tanks, he said, rather it bars the department from "not treating the waste, renaming it and pouring concrete over it."

"The program is not boxed up at all," he told ENS. "The decision had nothing to do with the pace or flexibility of clean up."

The judge wrote that the Energy Department "does not have discretion to dispose of defense [high-level waste] somewhere other than a repository established under [the Nuclear Waste Policy Act]."

The repository chosen for disposal of this waste, which under law must be encapsulated in glass for burial, is the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada. The facility, some 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is not expected to be complete until 2010 and will not be large enough to hold all of the nation's nuclear waste.

And some in Congress are sympathetic with the Energy Department's view - Barton told House colleagues, that without further clarification, the nation could experience clean up delays and could incur "an additional $60 billion in cleanup costs."

Others see the administration's motives in a different light.

"The residents of Washington and South Carolina and Idaho are now finding out what the people of Nevada have known for years," said Representative Shelley Berkeley, a Nevada Democrat. "The Department of Energy makes up the rules as it goes along. If it confronts an obstacle that it is unable to overcome, it simply changes the rules."