YAKIMA – Washington state and the U.S. Department of Energy have agreed to settle a lawsuit challenging out-of-state shipments of radioactive and hazardous waste to the Hanford nuclear reservation, the two sides announced Monday.
The agreement appears to end a two-year court battle between the state and federal government over proposed waste shipments to the south-central Washington site.
As part of the agreement, the Energy Department will prepare a new environmental impact statement that evaluates the potential effects of storing, treating and disposing of certain types of waste at Hanford. In exchange, the state agreed to drop its lawsuit challenging the current environmental impact statement and will play a greater role in developing the new document.
The new impact statement is to be completed by 2008. The Energy Department will not ship waste to the site until the document is completed, with the exception of some waste the state had already agreed to accept at Hanford.
“With this agreement, both parties will be able to shift their focus and resources away from litigation and toward partnership and our shared cleanup goals,” Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said in a statement. “The settlement of this lawsuit signals a new day in our cleanup efforts, where both the federal government and the state jointly address Hanford’s cleanup challenges and seek common ground and quality solutions.”
The Energy Department manages cleanup at the 586-square-mile Hanford reservation, which is the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site following 40 years of plutonium production for the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal. Cleanup costs are expected to total $50 billion to $60 billion.
“Although I’m disappointed we had to file a lawsuit to get this result, this is a great outcome for a long and contentious case,” state Attorney General Rob McKenna said in a statement. “I’m very pleased the Department of Energy has agreed to re-examine the impacts of waste disposal at Hanford so we have greater confidence that future waste disposal will not increase the threat to the Columbia River.”
Washington sued the Energy Department in 2003 to bar shipments of offsite waste to the Hanford site on the banks of the Columbia River. The state expanded its lawsuit in 2004, challenging the adequacy of the current environmental impact statement, released that year.
A judge issued a preliminary injunction barring waste shipments to the site. Then, as part of the discovery phase in that lawsuit last year, the Energy Department discovered that the current document was based on inconsistent data about the impact of waste disposal on groundwater.
At the time, the department did not immediately withdraw the document but delayed any plans for shipping waste to Hanford.
Under the agreement, the Energy Department will prepare a new, expanded document that includes updated, site-wide groundwater analysis. Until it is completed, no low-level, mixed low-level, transuranic or mixed transuranic waste will be shipped to the site.
Low-level waste is considered mildly radioactive, and mixed waste is radioactive waste laced with hazardous chemicals. Transuranic waste, which is highly radioactive, is typically debris, such as clothing, equipment or pipes left over from nuclear weapons production.
The Energy Department had planned to ship to Hanford the equivalent of about 410,000 55-gallons drums of low level and mixed low-level waste, and at least 185 drums of transuranic and mixed transuranic waste.
The agreement is unrelated to another lawsuit the federal government has filed to challenge the constitutionality of Initiative 297, a voter-approved initiative barring out-of-state waste shipments to Hanford. That lawsuit remains in U.S. District Court in Eastern Washington.
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