Editorial: Negligence and radioactive waste

Tuesday, March 24, 1998 | 11:05 a.m.

THE U.S. Energy Department seems incapable of managing nuclear waste without in turn destroying the public's trust in the agency.

The latest fiasco comes from the Energy Department's nuclear weapons plant in Hanford, Wash. For decades, managers there had insisted that leaks from the underground tanks at the plant, which has the nation's largest concentration of radioactive waste, were nothing to worry about since the surrounding soil would trap the radioactive waste.

But the New York Times reported Monday that a new General Accounting Office report cites warnings to the Energy Department -- dating back to 1989 -- that the agency should pay better attention to the issue. And less than one year ago, a plant employee was fired by a contractor for bringing up the issue too forcefully.

The Energy Department had asserted that no waste from the tanks would reach the groundwater in the next 10,000 years -- but it is already there. Contrary to the view by the Energy Department that everything was OK, the residents near the facility had every reason to be alarmed. Nearly 900,000 gallons of radioactive waste has leaked into the soil, contaminating underground water heading toward the Columbia River, which is only a few miles away.

Even the Energy Department is now acknowledging that it never studied the problem sufficiently; it apparently had no appetite to dig for the truth because it was afraid of the answer. "There's no doubt there was little enthusiasm for this," Undersecretary of Energy Ernest Moniz acknowledges.

Nevadans are all too familiar with the lies the Energy Department and the nuclear power industry have perpetrated over the years about the safety of storing the nation's high-level nuclear waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain. Scientific evidence has pointed to the folly of storing high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, yet Congress and the Energy Department keep plugging away, letting politics -- not science -- dictate where the nation's deadliest waste should be stored.

It would be comforting to think that the Energy Department has learned a valuable lesson from the Hanford nightmare. But the agency's track record at Hanford, Yucca Mountain and elsewhere belie any optimism. Instead, the GAO report only fuels more skepticism of an out-of-control federal bureaucracy that ignores the public's health and safety.