Ruling Gives Batt’s N-Waste Pact A Lift

The federal government has given Gov. Phil Batt an unintentional boost to his effort to save his nuclear waste agreement.

A federal court ruled that a 1982 law requiring the government to dispose of commercial nuclear waste beginning in 1998 means what it says. If the ruling stands, the government must find some place to put waste that has been accumulating at commercial nuclear plants.

Since no permanent repository is ready, a temporary site must be found.

That is no small task because estimates are that there are 92,000 shipments of nuclear waste stored at commercial nuclear plants around the country.

Nuclear waste is something that all politicians hope will go away.

Batt is proud of an agreement he negotiated last October, allowing the federal government to send more than 1,100 shipments of nuclear waste to the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory in exchange for a promise to start removing waste in 1999.

But Batt’s agreement specifically bars commercial radioactive waste from being brought into Idaho. There is no such protection for other states.

That gave the governor a powerful arguing point in support of the agreement - a point that Batt contends validates the deal.

It could be key when the federal government turns desperate for a dumping place because radioactive material has been stored in INEL’s wide-open spaces for decades, making it a tempting target yet again.

Batt has been fairly successful so far in convincing people the agreement was good in that it extracts for the first time a legal promise that INEL waste eventually will be removed, while limiting the amount and kind of waste that can still be brought in.

But others don’t agree. Stop the Shipments, led by former state Sen. John Peavey of Carey, turned in 52,423 signatures to force a vote on the agreement in the November general election.

Peavey and his supporters contend the agreement lacks teeth, and all it really does is open Idaho to 1,133 more waste shipments over the next 40 years.

Batt knows the only way to convince voters to side with him would be a campaign.

But he’s busy with affairs of state and doesn’t have time for it. Batt and other officials also are fighting another initiative, Ron Rankin’s property tax-limiting One Percent Initiative. There simply isn’t time for the governor to work on his next budget and other state matters and conduct two major initiative battles.

So the new arguing point gives him something much more solid to use in defense of the deal he believes is stopping Idaho from becoming the nation’s nuclear dump.