O’Leary Gets An Earful On Nuke Problems Idaho Officials Reject Idea Of Consolidating Waste At Inel

Idaho’s U.S. senators and its senior congressman want Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary to lead the way toward a solution to the nation’s nuclear waste problem leaning less heavily on Idaho.

Republican Sens. Larry Craig and Dirk Kempthorne and Congressman Michael Crapo met for about an hour on Thursday with Assistant Energy Secretary Thomas Grumbley for what Craig called “a very blunt and direct” discussion.

The lawmakers said that they made it clear Idaho rejects the Energy Department’s tentative decision to consolidate all government waste at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and Washington’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

A final decision on making that scheme the government’s preferred alternative among several options will not be made until spring, but a department spokeswoman said O’Leary was all but certain to adopt it.

“During the course of this meeting it became painfully clear that the United States has no long-term solution for nuclear waste,” Kempthorne said. “And we made it painfully clear to the Department of Energy that the state of Idaho is not going to be that solution.”

GOP Gov. Phil Batt said on Wednesday that during a visit to Washington, D.C., early this week he made it clear to federal officials that “we have a groundswell, in fact an intolerable situation in Idaho where we will not idly sit by and let a lot of this nuclear waste come in without protest.”

On Thursday, Crapo and the senators said they told Grumbley the Energy Department eliminated a partial solution to the waste buildup by opposing continued work on INEL’s Integral Fast Reactor program.

“We told Grumbley that if O’Leary wants to lead, we’ll stand beside her. Just reshuffling the chairs on the deck is not going to solve the problem,” Craig said.