At Last, a Dash of Prudence : Washington delays Ward Valley nuclear dump pending study
Wednesday’s announcement that the Clinton administration will order a new safety study of the proposed low-level nuclear waste dump at Ward Valley is certainly good news for opponents of the facility and a setback for proponents. But, most of all, the decision to reexamine and amplify data that might indicate whether radioactive material can contaminate underground water supplies should be regarded as simple common sense and prudence. Those qualities have been in lamentably short supply in the past year as plans for the dump have moved steadily toward groundbreaking.
That momentum halted Wednesday when the Interior Department reversed itself and announced it will delay transferring title for the Mojave Desert dump site to the State of California pending new research and analysis of the potential for underground seepage. California must hold title for the land before it can authorize construction of the dump. The builder would be U.S. Ecology, the private firm that also wants to operate the facility.
Under pressure from Gov. Pete Wilson and Congress, the Interior Department had been reluctant to delay or put conditions on the transfer. But in recent months concern over the extent of seepage has grown because scientists from the National Academy of Sciences disclosed that tritium, a radioactive isotope that would be dumped at Ward Valley, was found far below the surface there and even deeper at an abandoned dump in Nevada with similar geologic conditions. These troubling findings undermine the justification for putting the dump at Ward Valley in the first place--that radioactive material would not migrate through the sandy desert soil and endanger drinking water supplies below.
That hypothesis will now be rigorously tested. The results of these tests, which scientists from the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory will begin shortly, should determine whether, or under what conditions, a dump can be built and operated at Ward Valley. That’s as it should be.
