Dangerous and Short Sighted
By Cecil D Andrus
Beginning in the e1950s, the government of the United States began disposing of nuclear waste in Idaho. No one asked our permission. No one discussed the consequences of positioning thousands of tons and millions of gallons of nuclear contaminated material less than 700 feet above the largest freshwater aquifer in North America. Our government wanted this material out of sight and out of mind and the eastern Idaho desert seemed remote enough to nicely fit the bill.
Had Idahoans known then what we known now, there is no way we would have agreed to be chumps for such a dump. No, some folks � well meaning, but I think misguided, are getting ready to play Idaho for the chump again.

Officials in Idaho state government and at the Idaho National Laboratory are hatching a secret scheme to �initiate a negations to produce a Revised Settlement Agreement� that would open the borders for Idaho to become the disposal for 3,000 metric tons of commercial spent nuclear fuel from all over the United States. They want to �revise� the hard-won nuclear waste agreement that I began and Gov. Phil Batt completed in 1995.
I have seen their slick presentation and, while I must give credit for the audacity of their proposal, it would be the absolute height of folly to gut an agreement that protects Idaho from becoming the home for more waste, and delay the critical deadlines for cleaning up and removing the material we�ve been storing on an �interim� basis for close to 50 years.
Idahoans with long memories know that I have had battles with the U.S. Department of Energy for years and years. The battles aren�t a partisan matter with me; I�ve taken issues with Democratic and Republican administrations that have attempted time and again to keep Idaho a nuclear waste dump.
In my first term as governor in the early 1970s, then-Atomic Energy Commission Chair Dixy Lee Ray promised that �interim� storage in Idaho would cease by the end of the decade. It didn�t happen. In the late 1980�s, the admiral in charge of the nuclear Navy passed off my concerns by saying the best place for high-level spent fuel was �in a sparsely populated area.� Now with court-enforced deadlines looming to process and remove nuclear material from Idaho, some are suggesting that deadlines be �extended� for 15 years, while we take more of the nation�s nuclear waste for what the proponents call �interim dry storage.�
The argument will be made soon, just as it�s been made to Idaho time and again since the e 1950s, that there are economic opportunities just over the horizon if only we agree to become even a bigger nuclear waste disposal site. The promise will be held out to us that if we go along with more commercial waste storage � the type of materai, by the way, that is specifically not allowed under Gov. Batt�s 1995 agreement � the Idaho National Laboratory will be the beneficiary.

Here is the bottom line: Idaho�s court-enforced settlement agreement protects us from any storage of commercial nuclear waste and established detailed timelines for when waste already here must be processed and removed. No amount of economic development should get in the way of holding the federal government to the terms of that agreement.

No conceivable benefits for future generation of Idahoans can possibly outweigh protection of the Snake River Aquifer. Idaho has been lied to, abused, misled and taken advantage of for too long. Don�t let those who would bring more nuclear waste to Idaho get away with such dangerous and short-sighted thinking.
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This column was published in the Idaho Statesman on May 20, 2012. Adrus was elected governor of Idaho four times � 1970, 1974, 1986, and 1990 � and served as secretary of the interior from 1977 to 1981. This article was reprinted in the Post Register from Idaho Falls on May 26, 2012

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Gee. That's the same way I feel about that Keystone Pipeline coming down from Canada to Houston, TX. That's the same way I feel about Oil Fraking. The only thing we can do is protest to our State Senators, and they don't bother to listen anyway. At least the Texas ones don't. It will help the corporations, damned fading fresh water supply or endangered habitat or noxious gasses. Damned the people. Up with corps. After all, the corps provides jobs. They are still sticking to the trickle down Reaganomics. They must not have read recently that the average salary for CEOs is 9.6 million per year, not matter how bad the business performed.

There is no real good answer to the nuclear waste issue. It lasts so long that no one knows even if people in 1000 years will understand the warning signs to these sites.

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- Jim

"Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving." - Albert Einstein

The keystone pipe line has some merit. It would provide a number of jobs and it can be build in such a manner so as not to damage the environment, the Alaskan pipe line is an example of that. But what happens to this oil once it gets down south? Apparently the majority is to be refined and exported. For our energy needs we will continue to import oil from somewhere else. I guess we are not to question the logic of that.

As far as the danger of using fracking to get the oil out of the ground it is debatable whether it is as dangerous as claimed. On the other hand if the real goal is to keep the oil in the ground so as to keep the price high what better way to do it. They can claim that they are saving the environment when in reality they are just saving their bottom line profits.

We can�t have those CEO�s taking a pay cut can we?

We like corporations don't we? Why don't we give more of our money to Haliberton to build a refinery in Canada using USA labor? Wouldn't that be easier and environmentally safer? They have experience with such large projects in Iraq.

There have been no problems "so far" with oil fraking, but these wells run about 4000 feet horizontally requiring many thousands of gallons of hazardous chemicals per well. Reminds me of the water situation in Fresno, actually in the whole San Juaquin valley. This area supplies 60 percent of the nations fresh produce - or at least it used to. Now the ground water is spoiled for humans due to PCBs from fertilizers seeping so far down into the unreplishable water table. At least more people have jobs running around to public places, especially schools, to check the PCB level each day. Funny, they never thought that would happen.

Yes, there has been a problem with fracking, I believe in Wyoming or one of the Dakotas. The chemicals used in fracking ruined and aquifer. People there are pretty upset about it but its only received limited media coverage.