Minnick Wants N-Waste Shipments Stopped Until Quake Impact Answered

Democratic Senate challenger Walt Minnick renewed his call on Monday for a halt to nuclear waste shipments under Republican Gov. Phil Batt’s deal with the government, this time citing an October 1995 study raising questions about storage stability in an earthquake.

Minnick said GOP Sen. Larry Craig should secure congressional approval of a shipment moratorium and the $1 million researchers believe is needed to determine whether the geology under the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory will cushion waste storage facilities against temblors or accentuate their impact.

“It ought to be fairly easy to answer that question, and until we do that, I don’t think we ought to be playing Russian roulette with Idaho’s water and its agriculture,” Minnick said.

He again criticized the incumbent for failing to take strong action last year so Batt would not have been forced to cut the deal that allows 1,133 new shipments of high-level waste to INEL in return for promises and a court-enforced timetable for cleaning waste already stored there and removing most of it by 2035.

The deal has been endorsed by former Democratic Gov. Cecil Andrus, who has also criticized Craig’s lack of action to keep Congress from forcing the waste on Idaho.

But Craig campaign manager Mike Reynoldson said concern over the impact of seismic activity in eastern Idaho is just another reason to support the Batt agreement since it calls for stabilizing liquid waste in a solid form, moving highly radioactive material out of underwater basins into safer dry storage casks and eventually shipping it out of Idaho.

“Those are all good reasons why, if he is concerned about seismic activity, he should join Larry Craig and former Governor Cecil Andrus in supporting the governor’s agreement,” Reynoldson said.

Minnick is also backing an initiative petition drive to put the deal to a voter referendum this November.

The fate of that campaign will be known Friday.

Batt and his supporters have warned that voiding the deal will open Idaho to even more waste shipments with no guarantees of cleanup or removal.

In the review issued last fall for the state INEL Oversight Program, James Zollweg of the University of Idaho and Kenneth Sprenke of Boise State University determined that while INEL has been conducting good seismic monitoring and research into seismic hazards, the program does not appear to have answered all questions about ground-shaking levels during earthquakes.

They contended that maximum ground motion may be underestimated in the INEL analysis and that INEL’s own researchers have noted that the number of fault segments predicted in a large earthquake is fewer than what would be typical of the geology and that more information is needed on the response to an earthquake of the sediment-basalt beds under the northern part of the complex.

“We feel the INEL seismic hazard analysis is generally placing too much reliance on untested conclusions based on extrapolations from other geologic regions or on computational modeling of seismic wave behavior,” the report said.

Specifically, they said research should be done to determine whether the basalt beds cushion or aggravate ground motion from an earthquake.

Another study released last month found that leaky roofs and earthquakes could cause radiation dangers at INEL because of the way some uranium is stored, but that there was no imminent accident risk and it would take an unusual series of events to trigger a radiation accident.

Scientists reached those conclusions after spending two weeks at the INEL as part of a nationwide Energy Department study on the risks of storing highly enriched uranium.

Team leader Pranab Guha found that most potential problems had been caught.

But there was concern over a deteriorating storage building where the roof over about 150 kilograms of uranium ash was leaking.

If an earthquake cracked the cell and caused it to leak as well, the water could cause the uranium to react and release radiation.

Under the Batt deal, the uranium must be moved out of the building by 1998.