Andrus, Batt testify on INL waste

BOISE – Two former Idaho governors asked a federal judge Monday to uphold the intent of a landmark agreement reached more than a decade ago and require the federal government to dig up radioactive waste at the Idaho National Laboratory for shipment out of state by 2018.

The Department of Energy is arguing that the unprecedented 1995 Idaho cleanup agreement that grew out of the lengthy battle waged against the agency by the governors, Democrat Cecil Andrus and Republican Phil Batt, only covered 65,000 cubic meters of “transuranic” waste stored aboveground at INL, not the transuranic waste buried in barrels, crates, cardboard boxes and unlined pits.

Transuranic waste is gloves, rags and other debris contaminated with radioactive material that takes thousands of years to decay to safe levels.

The Justice Department is asking U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge to reject what it calls Idaho’s “revisionist” interpretation of the agreement or to simply void the 1995 pact altogether on the grounds that the two parties had materially different understandings of the deal.

In documents filed with the court, attorneys for the state say that DOE’s argument can be summed up as, “If we lose this case on the contract language, then we want to be let out of our contract because we secretly wanted it to mean something else.”

Testifying on the opening day of the trial, Andrus and Batt maintained they intended and believed the agreement’s reference to “stored” waste meant both aboveground and buried material at INL. They said DOE is trying to dodge its responsibility to eliminate the tons of decaying radioactive waste sitting atop the Snake River aquifer.

“This trial is nothing more than the federal government attempting to make us a permanent repository for transuranic waste,” Andrus said. “We have never said, ‘A little of this, a little of that.’ We said ‘All’ and that has always meant the stuff that was buried underground, too.”