Years after the fact, Phil Batt would recall that when he became Idaho’s governor In 1995, “the nuclear waste issue hit me right between the eyes.”
It sure did. He was taking over the office and the issue from Cecil Andrus, who had gone to court and taken other action blocking shipments of nuclear waste from entering the state, primarily around the Idaho National Laboratory (as it’s now called) site. That status was unstable and untenable for long, the legal and political case eventually likely would have been decided against the state, and Batt spent several of his early months in office figuring out how to deal with it.
The situation was not simple, and Batt understood that. He said in his memoir that he was persuaded national military capabilities were implicated, and “I believe Congress would have soon dictated our acceptance of this small amount of spent fuel rather than to idle any ships or submarines. However, I admired Governor Andrus’ actions that got the attention of both the Navy and the Department of Energy, and that generated almost universal support among Idahoans.”
What Batt negotiated over a period of months - recognizing that INL was already home to significant amounts of waste - was a complex deal intended to minimize the volume of nuclear waste in Idaho. He maintained that the agreement was the best he could get at the time, and that may be true. It was not a clean-cut or easily described decision even then, and Batt pragmatically would say of it, “I got every ounce of flesh I could get.”
That’s the backdrop to the news last week that the state agreed to a waiver of key elements of that 1995 deal. It allows for shipping a nuclear fuel cask from Virginia to the INL, and for research at the site on nuclear waste.
On the surface, the new agreement sounds reasonable, and it may turn out to be.
There’s plenty of nuclear waste in the country and we still don’t fully understand (as well as we should) what we can or should do with it. INL is a logical place to research the question, or rather continue researching it.
No one wants to store nuclear waste, and no state including Idaho wants to be known as a dumping ground, but there’s an increasing amount of it that has to go somewhere. A new study on the subject from Ohio noted, “Around the U.S., about 90,000 tons of nuclear waste is stored at over 100 sites in 39 states, in a range of different structures and containers. For decades, the nation has been trying to send it all to one secure location.”
Andrus got sideways with the federal government over nuclear waste in large part because he sensed a tendency by federal agencies to roll over the state, and concluded a sharp response was called for. After Batt negotiated his deal, he concluded that the state’s best posture was to keep an eagle eye on the proceedings. And in fact, over the 30 years since, the feds have from time to time pressed against the envelope, sometimes, possibly, breaching the agreement.
But a steady watch from all parties has averted what Andrus and Batt were most trying to avoid, the turning of eastern Idaho into a nuclear waste junkyard. It hasn’t been perfect, but it’s more or less worked.
So might this new agreement, probably the most significant development in the field for quite a few years. Only a limited amount of waste is supposed to be imported, and its purpose is supposed to involve research.
What Andrus and Batt also knew was that such agreements have to be closely monitored so they don’t become the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent.
Idaho state officials may have been right to sign off on the latest deal, but they should not take their eyes off the bottom of the tent, lest more of the camel try to ease inside.