Anti-Nuclear Activist Resubmits Initiative

Anti-nuclear waste activist Peter Rickards resubmitted his initiative attacking the nuclear waste policy of the Batt administration Friday but without the kind of dramatic changes Attorney General Alan Lance said were needed to make it enforceable.

While Rickards responded to a few of the issues raised by Lance on Monday, his revised initiative remained in the form that Lance said “does not so much propose a law as it does express the wishes of the sponsors.”

And the attorney general warned that without those wholesale changes he would be hard-pressed to write the ballot titles required before Rickards can begin gathering signatures.

Lance has two weeks to submit those ballot titles.

In his initiative, Rickards seeks to bar the state from burying plutonium as part of the cleanup of the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. It also would require INEEL project applications for state air quality permits to include written analyses of the potential for accidents and the amount of radiation Idaho residents would sustain.

He called Lance’s assessment outrageous, claiming the proposal was written in plain English that anyone could understand.

But to answer Lance’s criticism that the original version did not specify exactly what should be done or who should do it, Rickards added what he contended were clarifying words and phrases he believes makes it clear what is intended.

In addition, he requires the accident analyses to determine the radiation dosage for every “member of the public,” including “the most vulnerable, the unborn fetus.”

No revisions were made to the form of the proposition, which Lance said made it difficult if not impossible to codify if adopted by voters.

Rickards will have to submit 41,335 registered voter signatures by July 6, 1998, to put the proposition on the November general election ballot.

The Twin Falls podiatrist has been a longtime critic of operations at the INEEL, but he elevated his profile after Gov. Phil Batt signed the unprecedented nuclear waste agreement with the federal government in October 1995.

He tried unsuccessfully to recall the governor and then staged an unsuccessful bid to oust Congressman Michael Crapo in the May 1996 Republican primary, basing his campaign on the waste deal. He also actively campaigned for the 1996 initiative to void Batt’s agreement - an initiative rejected by nearly two-thirds of the voters.