Columnist Benjamin Grove: Sununu once fought against dump in New Hampshire

Benjamin Grove

Friday, Jan. 18, 2002 | 4:35 a.m.

The voters who elected him opposed the idea, too. No one wanted radioactive spent fuel rods that had been spit out of nuclear plant reactors dumped in their back yard, left to decay over thousands of years.

The state is a "clearly inappropriate" place to dump the deadly stuff, the governor said in a United Press International wire story. He pledged to "prepare the strongest possible case to make sure (the state) is not selected."

By May 1986 the feds had backed off. And the governor, John Sununu of New Hampshire -- who is now a paid lobbyist pushing for a nuclear waste dump in Nevada -- was glad.

In the mid-1980s Sununu's battle was actually with the Department of Energy over a second national nuclear waste dump site. Back then the Department of Energy was already mulling three sites for the nation's first dump: Yucca Mountain, Nev.; Deaf Smith County, Texas; and Hanford, Wash. (In 1987 Congress deemed Yucca Mountain the most suitable site for further study.)

Logically assuming that the first repository would fill up someday, the Department of Energy was also eyeing sites in 17 states, including New Hampshire, for a second dump.

Nobody talks much about the need for a second repository anymore. Just getting the first repository constructed in Nevada has become a political, regulatory, legal and scientific nightmare for everyone involved.

But before the DOE mostly abandoned the second-dump scenario in 1986, Sununu had launched a vigorous campaign to disqualify a granite site in southwestern New Hampshire. The radioactive waste would be stored too close to five state parks, five wildlife areas, seven state forests, one geologically significant site, not to mention the Franklin Pierce Mansion, Sununu said.

"I believe I can make the strongest, most well-articulated, most credible case of any governor in the country," Sununu told the Associated Press in 1986.

Sununu's crusade was the type of anti-dump campaign that people in Nevada know well. Nevada politicians have waged a similar battle for 20 years.

So you might think Sununu would be sympathetic to Nevada, and his fellow Republican, Gov. Kenny Guinn.

Instead, 16 years later, Sununu has become a hired gun for the nuclear industry. Last week Sununu became the man Nevadans most love to hate when he suggested that tourists nationwide might cancel trips to Nevada if the state didn't do its patriotic duty to bury the country's waste.

Nevada officials roared. What about New Hampshire's patriotic duty? they asked.

They faulted Sununu's logic. Why would visitors stop coming to Las Vegas if waste is not buried 90 miles northwest of the city?

Nuclear waste dumps can't be good for tourism. And Sununu knows that. Sununu had said New Hampshire would make a bad dumpsite for lots of reasons. Among them: skiers, swimmers and foliage fanatics.

Sununu said the DOE failed "to account for the seasonal rise in population in (New Hampshire) due to tourism," according to a 1986 wire story by States News Service in Washington.

I wonder: When tourists realized that New Hampshire wouldn't be doing its "patriotic duty," did they stop traveling to the Granite State?