California offers waste compromise

Suzanne Struglinski

Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2003 | 9:49 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- California may allow some waste shipments from the Nevada Test Site to the Energy Department's waste storage facility in New Mexico, but only if an alternate route -- including one through Nevada -- can be set by 2004. The department is evaluating the idea.

California would allow the use of Route 127, as the department proposed, for 55 shipments through December 2004 as long as the department and other affected states agree to an alternate route and timetable for the remaining shipments, according to a letter sent Aug. 12 by Western Governors Association Executive Director James Souby to Assistant Energy Secretary Jessie Hill Roberson.

California had originally objected to the plan. It is unclear how many shipments will take place, but estimates show fewer than 110, according to the letter.

Last month DOE agreed to cancel the shipments until California and the Western Governors Association came up with their own plan. The department announced its plan to ship the material earlier this year.

"We are assessing it right now," DOE spokesman Joe Davis said. "We are seeing what they are proposing."

The waste would have been shipped south on Nevada State Route 373/California State Route 127, to Interstate 40, where it would head east to New Mexico.

Davis said the department has already used that route. There is not a set schedule on when it has to move the waste.

The Western Governor's Association recommends a route from the Test Site north through Nevada on U.S. 95 to U.S. 6 to U.S. 93 to Interstate 80, then east through Utah and southern Wyoming before going south to New Mexico for final storage at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.

"While this may be a longer route, the majority of the route already accepts transuranic -- waste shipments," Souby wrote. "Affected states believe this means that additional resources to support this route would be needed only to train responders in rural Nevada and provide refresher training in Salt Lake City."

The shipments would contain clothing, tools, rags and other materials laced with plutonium from nuclear weapon experiments conducted at the site from 1951 until 1992.

The parties have not agreed on a final route, but Souby wrote that they all believe it is time for the department to get involved into order to reach a compromise.

Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency Director Bob Loux said the state would not have allowed shipments on U.S. 95 through Las Vegas or through Pahrump on State Route 160, but that it will look at the proposed alternate route. He also noted that this is a department push to move the waste, not the state's.

"I don't care if the stuff ever moves," Loux said. "That stuff can stay here for 10 or 20 more years."

Should the route be approved though, Loux said "extensive" safety training would take place over a possible 18-month period before the shipments would go through.