Too Hot for the Usual Burial

Tough compromises lead to a nuclear-waste policy

Arizona Congressman Morris Udall, aleading environmentalist, called it "a delicate fabric of agreements." An Atomic Industrial Forum spokesman acclaimed it "a masterpiece of compromise." Sierra Club Lobbyist Brooks Yeager noted, perhaps more accurately, "There's an awful lot of politics in this bill."

Whatever the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 turns out to be in history's eyes, it was not easy to achieve. Though it passed with bipartisan support in the waning hours of the lame-duck session and is scheduled for the President's signature this week, it required four years of tinkering in nine separate House and Senate committees to cobble together the 100-page bill. It authorizes the Department of Energy to find a permanent home for the 8,800 tons of toxic nuclear waste that have piled up since the dawn of nuclear power in 1957.

At the moment, this deadly garbage is housed in pools of water adjacent to the nation's 80 or so existing nuclear-power plants. By 1990, 15% of these ponds may be filled, and by the year 2000 an estimated 86,900 tons of spent fuel will be looking for a place to hide. The thorniness of the disposal problem was aptly summed up by one Senate committee aide: "We don't need to do it in my backyard," he said. "But we need to do it."

Specifically, the bill authorizes the design and construction of two repositories, 2,000 to 4,000 feet underground in rock formations stable enough to keep the deadly waste safe and dry for at least 10,000 years. The first site will be limited to a 77,000-ton capacity. The new law requires a procedure for site selection that is deliberately arduous, involving numerous reviews, full-scale tests, public hearings, environmental assessments and consultation with state and local officials. Then the President must recommend his final site choices to Congress--the first by 1987, the second by 1990.

Tough horse-trading shaped the final bill. Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire pressured the bill's backers to include an amendment permitting any Governor to veto siting of a nuclear-waste dump in his state unless majority votes in both the Senate and the House overrule him. Mississippi Congressman Trent Lott insisted on a population density-provision aimed at eliminating a potential site in his district from consideration.

Despite the compromises, the Reagan Administration was ebullient. "This is landmark legislation," crowed newly confirmed Energy Secretary Donald Hodel. The bill also cheered up the flagging nuclear-power industry, which has not had a new reactor order since 1978. Seven states in the past seven years, including California, have banned further construction of nuclear-power plants pending a legislated solution to the waste problem.

Environmentalists complained that the bill limits judicial review, glosses over technological difficulties and excludes various stages of site selection from tough environmental scrutiny. The bill does not endorse any particular storage technology, but the most likely approach will employ long, narrow metal canisters, to be loaded with spent fuel, embedded deep in the rock of large (2,000-acre) manmade caverns, then completely covered over. Aboveground, a typical waste burial site is expected to look something like a mining operation. The method of waste transport is also an issue unaddressed by the bill. The preferred mode is by train; the Energy Department claims success testing a 150-ton railcar cask able to withstand crashes and fires. In the lengthy saga of nuclear-waste disposal, acknowledged a spokesman for the Atomic Industrial Forum, a trade group for the nuclear industry, "transportation could be the next big issue." Said David Berick of the Environmental Policy Center: "One of the reasons the bill went through was because people were just tired of working on it." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.