Logic, Safety Hurt By Anti-Nuke Reactors

This is the way government works, or doesn’t work, in the latter years of the 20th century.

In 1980, when Jimmy Carter was still in the White House, he and Congress enacted legislation requiring states to develop sites for the safe storage of low-level radioactive wastes, the kinds produced by medical and industrial processes.

California officials chose a 1,000-acre site in Ward Valley, a remote corner of the Mojave Desert, for a facility and began the tedious business of choosing an operator, completing the necessary environmental studies and applying to the Department of the Interior for a transfer of the land.

That was 14 years ago. And a few days ago, the latest episode in the Ward Valley saga was written by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who held up the land transfer for the umpteenth time, saying he wanted another round of environmental studies.

Babbitt’s action has absolutely nothing to do with how the environment would be affected, if at all, by placing a waste site in Ward Valley. It has everything to do with 1996 being a presidential election year.

The opposition to Ward Valley is as vocal as it is nonsensical. It consists largely of west Los Angeles liberals to whom anything with “radioactive” in its name is anathema. But these are wealthy, politically influential liberals, many of them from the entertainment world, and they have made opposition to Ward Valley a mantra that any Democratic politician in the state must chant.

The environmental argument against Ward Valley, if anything so ludicrous could be called an argument, is that somehow radioactive wastes could leak through the redundant natural and manmade barriers at the site and then percolate through 20 miles of desert and a mountain range to find their way into the Colorado River. In their even more fanciful moments, critics suggest that once established, the Ward Valley facility could become a dump for nuclear power plant residue.

After Babbitt’s last stall, he asked the National Academy of Sciences to evaluate the environmental aspects of the project and the academy’s scientists could find no validity to the expressed fears of the project’s opponents. And then the state Supreme Court rejected challenges to the state-issued license for the facility.

Babbitt, however, was undeterred and held up transfer again pending the new round of studies - which will neatly take the issue beyond the November election. Clearly, the Clinton White House did not want to generate anti-Ward Valley protests during the California campaign.

The wastes continue to pile up, meanwhile, in hospitals, factories and other generation sites - most of them located in urban areas subject to earthquakes and other calamities. And opponents of the Ward Valley site can offer no reasonable alternative.

Is Ward Valley the perfect place to store low-level radioactive wastes? Probably not. But it’s probably as good a place as California can find. And the issue really isn’t Ward Valley. The opponents would oppose any site. They just don’t like things nuclear - although one doubts whether they’d refuse to have x-rays.

Gov. Pete Wilson wrote letters to federal and biotechnology industry officials after Babbitt’s latest action, notifying them California will no longer be in compliance with the original congressional act that required the state to act in the first place.

Wilson said “the act has been rendered unworkable and must be replaced with a new law that gives this responsibility to the very federal officials who now refuse to leave it to the states.”

Wilson’s absolutely right. It’s proceduralism carried to the nth degree.

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