Articles

Bid To Move S.C. Nuclear Waste Fails

Charles Seabrook, AJC Staff
June 3, 2004

After heated debate, the U.S. Senate on Thursday narrowly blocked a move to require that millions of gallons of highly radioactive sludge be transferred from South Carolina to a safer permanent site in Nevada, as provided by a 1982 law.

About 34 million gallons of radioactive waste, left over from decades of making nuclear bombs, is stored in 49 aging, leaky underground steel tanks at the sprawling Savannah River Site, just across the border from Georgia near Augusta.

Environmental groups and nuclear experts contend the government's plans to mix sludge processed from the nuclear waste with concrete and leave it in the tanks risk contaminating the groundwater of South Carolina and Georgia.

By one vote, the Senate defeated an attempt to kill an effort by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to have the sludge reclassified as low-level waste, effectively allowing it to remain at the Savannah River Site.

Controversy erupted last year when the Department of Energy proposed the low-level reclassification to avoid spending billions of dollars to send the sludge to a special nuclear waste facility in Nevada, as required by law.

An environmental group, the Natural Resources Defense Council, sued the government and won. A judge ruled the Energy Department would violate federal law if it reclassified the wastes and failed to move them.

Graham then introduced legislation to allow the low-level designation, and his proposal was tacked onto a $447 billion defense spending bill, without hearings.

The House of Representatives has refused to include the changes in its version of the defense bill and instead called on the National Academy of Sciences to examine the Energy Department cleanup proposal.

Graham said his plan would save the government $16 billion and speed the cleanup of the site by 23 years.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) claimed the Bush administration was trying to "sneak" the proposal through Congress, in closed-door proceedings without hearings.

Although Graham's plan pertains only to the Savannah River Site, Cantwell fears that it would put intense pressure on the Energy Department to ease similar cleanup plans for high-level atomic waste at the Hanford nuclear site in Washington state. The Energy Department manages both sites, where Cold War-era nuclear bomb material was produced.

Cantwell tried to strip Graham's provision from the defense bill, but her amendment died Thursday on a 48-48 vote.

The vote was almost straight down party lines, with only one Democrat, Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, joining Republicans voting to kill the measure. When Miller was Georgia's governor, he often criticized the Savannah River Site's potential to contaminate groundwater.

The vote came after a spirited floor debate in which South Carolina's Democratic senator, Fritz Hollings, argued strongly that the radioactive sludge "endangers future generations."

Officials of the Georgia Environmental Protection Division, which has expressed concern over pollution from the Savannah River Site, declined to comment on the Senate vote.

A spokeswoman for Cantwell, Charla Neuman, said opponents would try again next week to strip Graham's amendment when the Senate takes up the full defense spending bill.

The Associated Press contributed to this article.

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