Compassionate Bush Wants to Kill Us All - But Very Slowly With Low-Level Radiation

From the Seattle P-I (emphasis added):

Thursday, May 6, 2004 - Nuclear waste changes sought at Hanford and other sites New proposal would allow Energy Dept. to skip cleanup of the most lethal material By CHARLES POPE - SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT WASHINGTON -- A South Carolina senator, working in concert with senior Energy Department officials, has quietly proposed changing federal law to allow lethal waste at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and other nuclear weapons plants to remain in underground tanks rather than being removed and sent to a more secure disposal site. The proposal from Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., is included in the defense authorization bill. It was heavily shaped -- if not written -- by the Energy Department. Jill Lea Sigal, a deputy assistant energy secretary, is listed as "author" on the document Graham's office submitted with the legislative language. The Energy Department did not return several phone calls seeking comment on the policy and Sigal's involvement. The department has actively been pursuing the change since 2002, saying that it needs the power to reclassify waste to accelerate cleanup and direct money to deal with the most dangerous waste. Each time, however, either Congress or the courts have blocked the department, including a federal court ruling last year that prohibited the Energy Department from reclassifying waste. What the department is trying to do now through legislation amounts to the same thing, critics say. Whoever wrote the provision, all sides agree it would have profound effects on future cleanup at the Energy Department's highly contaminated weapons plants. An aide to Graham said his measure would accelerate cleanup by removing ambiguity about which waste needs to be removed. The Energy Department has argued that it should be allowed to leave some residual waste in the tanks because the cost of removing it would far outweigh the benefits. Cement would be added to the sludge to stabilize it and prevent it from leeching into water tables. At Hanford, that could leave more than 35 million gallons of highly radioactive sludge and salt cake in the ground. "Removal of the 'heel' in the tanks is technically difficult, very costly, and poses unnecessary risks to worker safety," Graham explains in a summary of his proposal. "Removing the last 1 percent of waste is nearly as expensive as removing the first 95 percent." Critics argue that the change would allow the Energy Department alone to define "clean" and would leave states little power to challenge the department's decision. "It is an enormous change. It turns the Nuclear Waste Policy Act on its head," said attorney Geoffrey Fettus, referring to the 1982 law that dictates how nuclear materials are handled and disposed. Fettus, a staff attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, successfully sued the department last year to block the policy. "It totally subverts the nuclear waste policy act by essentially allowing DOE to exempt itself ... DOE is essentially rewriting the law that they had broken. If that is a minor change then it would be a minor change to split the state of Washington into two states," he said. Graham's approach would potentially allow millions of gallons of sludge-like radioactive waste to be reclassified as less dangerous low-level waste. The Hanford nuclear weapons complex is among the most contaminated places on Earth, with large amounts of radioactive, chemical and mixed waste that were byproducts of 50 years of nuclear weapons production. Cleanup costs are estimated at more than $50 billion. The Energy Department has been struggling for decades to make progress and in 2002 it changed gears, proposing to make cleanup both faster and cheaper by leaving some of the waste behind. The danger, critics say, is that giving the department the authority to reclassify waste would allow it to declare a site fully cleaned without removing some of the most dangerous waste. Washington state has opposed the change in court and in Congress. "Trying to rename high-level nuclear waste doesn't change the fact that it is still a dangerous, toxic, radioactive sludge that needs to be cleaned up," said Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. "The DOE is just trying to circumvent what the courts have already decided, which is that they can't reclassify it and the DOE needs to clean it up." Cantwell and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., wrote a letter yesterday to the committee's chairman, John Warner, R-Va., and ranking Democrat, Carl Levin of Michigan, expressing their alarm and asking that the provision be stripped from the bill. "This amendment would give the Bush administration unilateral authority to redefine what constitutes 'cleaned up,' " the letter said. "We oppose this language because it would significantly alter the way in which DOE is allowed to define 'high-level radioactive waste,' and would minimize the role of regulators in overseeing decisions regarding this waste's disposal. In short, this language would give the administration the authority to turn the corroding, underground storage tanks at Hanford -- and elsewhere within the DOE complex -- into permanent repositories for an indeterminate amount of DOE's nuclear waste inventory. We believe this is unacceptable." Fettus agreed that the effect on Hanford could be profound. "Not only could waste at Hanford be left in tanks, it could be the recipient of waste from other facilities," he said. "Hanford has a long history of worst-case scenarios being visited upon it," Fettus said. "This provision will allow DOE to leave the most highly radioactive portion of the most radioactive waste on the site beneath a layer of grout." Opponents will try to strip the language out of the defense bill today when the Senate Armed Services Committee meets. An aide to Graham acknowledged the unexpected opposition and said his proposal might be changed to limit it to only the Energy Department's facility in South Carolina.