California Warns U.S. on Nuclear Waste Dump

California will stop trying to build a dump for low-level radioactive waste from hospitals, schools and companies if the Clinton administration does not transfer the proposed Ward Valley site within six months, Gov. Pete Wilson said Friday.

Wilson’s warning was in response to the Clinton administration’s Wednesday reopening of an environmental review of the dump site in the Mojave Desert near Needles. That will delay transfer of the federally owned land for at least a year.

“In a nutshell, if Ward Valley isn’t acceptable to the federal government, they will have to take responsibility for getting rid of the stuff,” said Sean Walsh, Wilson’s press secretary.

In letters to Congress and other federal officials, Wilson said California will be unable to comply with the federal Low Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act, which delegates disposal responsibilities to the states.

“If this impasse . . . is not resolved within the next six months, the LLRW Policy Act will, for practical purposes, have been invalidated, and the Congress will be forced to make disposal of commercial (low level radioactive waste) a federal responsibility,” Wilson said.

The governor said there was no other appropriate site in California for the storage of the waste.

Under the law, California was to be the first state to open one of a new generation of nuclear waste dumps. If it throws in the towel on Ward Valley and other states follow suit, the nation will have to rethink its strategy for disposing of non-defense-related nuclear waste.

The proposal to put radioactive debris in unlined trenches in Ward Valley, about 20 miles from the Colorado River, has been the subject of intense political and scientific debate for more than a decade. Experts have disagreed over the advisability of putting the waste in the ground so close to a major source of drinking water.

Under the Low Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act, California would also accept waste from Arizona, North Dakota and South Dakota. Pressure to build the Ward Valley facility began to grow several years ago, as virtually all other disposal sites around the country shut down or refused to take waste from other states.

In California, Wilson said, waste is accumulating at more than 2,000 unsafe locations, including storerooms and backyards, in close proximity to people.

Last year, however, one of the nation’s last such waste dumps to shut its doors, in Barnwell, S.C., reopened to other states, including California.

Although Barnwell’s reopening eased some pressures, it posed other problems, including the risk of accidents in transcontinental shipment of radioactive material as well as a risk of liability at the site, which has leaked in the past.

In his letters, Wilson offered a temporary solution only if the federal government agreed to “hold California (waste) generators” free from liability arising from problems at the site and agreed to “subsidize the amount of any transportation costs to Barnwell which exceed transportation costs to Ward Valley.”