Navy Tries End Run To Resume Nuclear Dumping It Appears That All The State Can Do Is Buy More Time, Congressman Says

Snubbed by the courts, the Navy is using what state officials call unsubstantiated arguments to convince Congress to ignore the courts and immediately resume dumping nuclear waste in Idaho.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a foregone conclusion, but I do think there is a very real risk that this effort will succeed,” Republican Congressman Michael Crapo said.

While Idahoans are overwhelmingly against further waste storage at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory and the state is trying to block it, Crapo said Wednesday that it appears the best the state can hope for at this point is buying some time - several months - in the hope that some accommodation can be reached between the state and federal governments.

Navy Secretary John Dalton and Adm. Bruce DeMars, head of the Navy’s Nuclear Propulsion Program, have already won House subcommittee approval legislation essentially voiding the June 1993 court ban on further waste shipments until the government certifies they can be made safely. Otherwise, they claim, shipyard layoffs will occur and national security will be jeopardized.

That proposal of the House Appropriations subcommittee on national security - a rider to the Defense Department appropriations bill - is scheduled to be taken up by the full Appropriations Committee on Friday.

Crapo said he laid the state’s case out for Subcommittee Chairman Bill Young, R-Fla., as recently as Wednesday, and “I expect him to give us very serious consideration on this issue.

“But we must also recognize the politics,” the congressman said. “When you have the secretary of the Navy, and it’s gone that high, saying we have a problem here, … the politics are that there are a number of states that face the loss of jobs and a number of congressmen who are concerned about national security.”

Sen. Dirk Kempthorne, a member of the Armed Services Committee, said Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary, who oversees nuclear waste management, has indicated she would not support a congressional waiver of the shipment ban. But he also said that O’Leary’s support would not end the threat.

According to officials, Democratic Con gressman Norm Dicks of Washington, whose district includes the Navy’s Puget Sound Shipyard, has been leading the charge to overturn the shipment ban imposed by the late U.S. District Judge Harold Ryan, extended by U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge and upheld by a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

All three declined to accept the Navy’s claims that national security would be undermined if waste shipments are not immediately resumed. Lodge has indicated he will rule this fall on Idaho’s claim that the government invalidly determined that dumping could safely resume. In setting that schedule, Lodge cited Ryan’s declaration that the federal government had violated the law and was less than truthful in court.

As it did when Ryan first imposed the shipment ban in mid-1993, DeMars and other Navy officials are telling key congressmen that naval facilities in their districts or states face hundreds of layoffs if the ban remains in effect. After making that claim two years ago, no layoffs occurred.

And after a shaky start, Republican Gov. Phil Batt has picked up where his Democratic predecessor, Cecil Andrus, left off in disputing the Navy’s national security claims.

In court filings, the state has pointed out that the Navy knew its waste disposal needs two years ago when the shipment ban was first imposed and yet made no attempt to develop an alternative to Idaho dumping like obtaining additional casks for shipyard storage.