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Former Governor On Holding the Department of Energy Accountable In Idaho (thebulletin.org)
Lasrick writes: "I have been involved in government at the state and federal level for a long time and have had my share of political and legal run-ins with government agencies, but rarely in more than 50 years in politics have I encountered a government agency more committed to secrecy—perhaps even deception—than the US Department of Energy." So writes former governor of Idaho Cecil D. Andrus in this account of the U.S. government's plan to ship commercial spent fuel to the Idaho National Lab for what the feds call "research" but what the Andrus (and his predecessor) feel is an attempt to store high level nuclear waste in Idaho. According to him, despite Freedom of Information Act requests, the federal government is not sharing its plan for the waste once it gets to Idaho. This is a disturbing tale of government secrecy and stonewalling, and the problem with nuclear waste: no one wants it in their backyard.
One shipment would be used to research fuel recycling techniques. The other would be used to research what happens to the fuel when it is placed in storage casks for years or decades.
INL is the perfect place to do this work.
http://www.idahostatesman.com/...
Over top of the Snake River Aquifer is to you a perfect place? Which is upstream of 3 different states and supplies water for significant percentage of the U.S. Agriculture.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/ha/ha730/...
One of the issues that we deal with in the Northwest is that the federal government, particularly the DOE, has generated (and shipped in) a lot of hazardous nuclear waste in the area over the years and has horribly mismanaged its disposition. The epic levels of contamination at the Hanford site are mind boggling--and right on the banks of the Columbia River. They buried toxic waste on the reservation at the Idaho National Lab that we now have no records of--we don't know what it was or exactly where it's buried.
They keep promising to clean up their mess, but then they never seem to quite get around to fulfilling their promises. We end up having to sue them to get them to take action. Even then, they try to shirk as much responsibility as they can. There isn't a lot of trust of the DOE in this area of the country.
Hanford was the site of the first nuclear reactor of its design, used to produce plutonium during WWII. The site was subsequently expanded to produce more plutonium, and some energy, through the Cold War. It is so messed up because of a lot of crap that went on during that time period: not knowing anything about industrial nuclear reactors, not having any kind of waste storage or processing plan, lots of scale-up, Cold War secrecy, etc. So, yeah, Hanford is a mess, but I think it is wrong to inhibit any kind of progress due to problems that were mostly documented more than 40 years ago. No waste was shipped to Hanford. The current DOE is very aware of the problems at Hanford and is actively trying to clean it up, but it takes a lot of time...and you need somewhere to store the waste. Without a waste storage facility, there is no way to clean up Hanford, and the barrels are going to keep leaking because most of them are more than 50 years old (never intended to be long-term waste storage).
I understand that the problems at Hanford have complex causes with long history. But what the former governor seems to be concerned about is a lack of transparency from DOE, which is an issue that people in the Northwest have been fighting for years (hence the lack of trust).
Listen, I understand that some level of contamination is unavoidable. But they've got liquid nuclear waste leaking out of tanks into the soil at the banks of the Columbia River, and they can't just keep telling us that they're "working on it". I'm sorry that they did such a terrible job planning for future needs, and I get that part of the reason for that is because they were doing completely new work, but another part of it was a wanton disregard for the environmental and human consequences of building their nuclear arsenal. There was plenty of money to build the bombs, but today it seems to have dried up: DOE budgets something like $3 billion per year for cleanup, but actually gets about $2 billion. I realize that's not all DOE's fault, but this is the reality. The federal government made an enormous, toxic mess in Eastern Washington and now they're dragging their feet when it comes time to clean it up.
But again, the issue in this article is a lack of trust. The DOE may be completely sincere in their cleanup efforts, but if they won't communicate about it, and we have to pry details out of them with FOIA requests, then there is no reason for the states to believe in that sincerity. This is, after all, the organization that turned 586 square miles of Washington State into the most heavily contaminated nuclear waste dump in the country. Why should the people of Washington believe that this organization has their best interests in mind?
[Also, one note: though many shipments of waste to Hanford have been stopped before they occurred, there are at least 2 shipments of nuclear waste that were delivered there from a DOE facility in California. The amount transferred is obviously dwarfed by the scale of waste products generated on site, but there is great fear that DOE just wants to ship all of this mess to Hanford and then leave it there indefinitely--likely in "temporary" storage facilities that are a continuation of the same irresponsible policies that created this problem in the first place.]