Beware, Ironclad Deal May Rust Out

We won’t know for years whether Idaho Gov. Phil Batt made a pact with the devil Monday when he agreed to accept 1,133 more shipments of high-level nuclear waste into the state.

History says he has.

The federal government has broken one promise after another and missed deadlines on nuclear waste management at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. The “ironclad” assurances made by the U.S. government to one generation often become the shifting sand of another. Ask America’s Indian tribes.

Still, Batt probably cut the best deal possible for his state while negotiating from a position of weakness. A Navy official already had persuaded the U.S. House of Representatives to force Idaho to accept 1,940 more shipments of highly radioactive waste for national security reasons.

Said Batt Monday: “We took what we could get.”

If the federal government complies, Batt has won some significant concessions. The pact guarantees most high-level nuclear waste will be removed from Idaho within 40 years, shields the state from accepting commercial waste shipments, and pumps nearly $800 million into INEL projects over the next decade.

The Clinton administration also approved two other important stipulations: The U.S. government will pay a fine of $60,000 per day if all designated waste isn’t removed by the year 2035, and it will stop shipments immediately if any of nearly two dozen waste processing or removal deadlines are missed.

Unfortunately, former Gov. Cecil Andrus was unavailable for comment Tuesday. Frustrated by repeated broken promises from federal officials to remove already stored waste, Andrus decided in October 1988 to fight nuclear-waste dumping.

In January, the former governor led the chorus of “boos” statewide that greeted Batt’s decision to accept eight more shipments of nuclear waste. Batt was convinced at the time that he couldn’t beat the Navy in court and that the federal government was earnest in its search for a permanent waste repository outside Idaho.

Clucked Andrus: “What they are promising Governor Batt is what they promised Idaho 30 years ago. They never lived up to it.”

Now, the contract with Idaho gives the Navy incentive to get serious about finding a permanent repository - that is, if the document actually is worth more than the paper it’s written on.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = D.F. Oliveria/For the editorial board