Batt Calls Court Ruling Vindication

The government must begin accepting tons of used fuel from the nuclear industry by 1998 even though a permanent storage site will not be ready by then, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

Although the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia did not specify how the Energy Department should meet the deadline, the department’s options essentially are limited to developing and operating a temporary storage site before the permanent one is constructed.

Idaho Gov. Phil Batt cited the decision as a vindication of his contested Oct. 16 agreement with the federal government that traded controlled resumption of nuclear dumping at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory for a court-enforced timetable for cleanup and removal of most waste by 2035. Included in the deal is a prohibition against any of the 92,000 commercial waste shipments being dumped at INEL.

“It’s the cleanest of the federal facilities, and I think it would have been a prime target without this agreement,” Batt said. The governor cited a federal technical report issued last March that recommended the commercial waste be stored at existing federal facilities but noted that Batt’s deal prohibited further storage at INEL.

“Critics of my agreement,” the governor said, “are absolutely wrong in their assertion that this is not a valuable agreement for the state of Idaho.”

And he warned that if those critics manage to win voter approval of their initiative to void the deal in November, “They will be opening Idaho wide up to these 92,000 shipments that are sitting at the nuclear power plants around the nation.”

But the initiative’s leading proponent, former state Sen. John Peavey, again charged that the agreement has no credibility even if it is part of a federal court order.

A three-judge panel relied on a “common sense” interpretation of the word “dispose” as it appears in a 1982 law requiring the Energy Department to dispose of the nuclear industry’s spent fuel as of Jan. 31, 1998.

“There is no indication in the statute that Congress intended the words to be used in any but their common sense,” the court said.