Hanford required to take limited waste, judge rules

SPOKANE — A federal judge ruled that the Hanford nuclear reservation must accept some radioactive waste from Ohio but kept in place a temporary ban on shipping other such waste into the state.

The split decision by U.S. District Judge Alan McDonald of Yakima was satisfactory for the state Department of Ecology, which had sued the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) over the shipments.

"Our overall reaction to this is it is not a bad outcome for the state," said Sheryl Hutchison, spokeswoman for the Ecology Department in Olympia. "The largest volumes of waste out there are still under injunction and cannot be shipped here."

The state sued to block shipments of transuranic waste from Ohio to Hanford, where the Energy Department wants to store it before it goes to eventual permanent storage in New Mexico. State officials feared the waste would be stranded here.

Gerald Pollet, a Hanford critic with the group Heart of America Northwest, said the ruling was good news.

"The ruling bodes well for upholding the will of Washington voters to require Hanford to be cleaned up before more waste can be dumped," said Pollet, who sponsored Initiative 297 last year.

The federal government has filed suit seeking to overturn Initiative 297, which bars the Energy Department from sending any more waste to Hanford until all existing waste there is cleaned up. The initiative has not been enforced, pending resolution of the lawsuit.

McDonald earlier granted a motion by the state to allow the state Supreme Court to first decide how the measure should be interpreted.

Colleen French, an Energy Department spokeswoman at Hanford, said yesterday the agency was encouraged that the judge agreed it could safely process some of the waste.

"This work can clearly be conducted in an environmentally sound manner," French said.

In the complicated decision, McDonald:

• Granted for 90 days the state's motion to extend a preliminary injunction to cover low-level and mixed low-level wastes, to allow for additional studies of groundwater issues.

• Granted the Energy Department's motion to lift an injunction related to transuranic waste, except for transuranic mixed waste. That covered the shipments from Ohio.

• Ruled that his preliminary injunction remains in place indefinitely for transuranic mixed waste. No such waste can be sent to Hanford from other sites.

"This court believes DOE experts have offered reasonable responses and explanations to the criticisms and questions raised by the state's experts, some of which are nothing more than second-guessing," McDonald wrote.

Taking the waste from Ohio will aid the nationwide cleanup of radioactive waste, Hutchison said.

"We do have a role in the larger nationwide cleanup," Hutchison said. "Hanford is going to have to take additional waste, but it should come with very strong assurances and deadlines about how it will be handled and moved on."

The state sued the U.S. Department of Energy in 2003 to block shipments of plutonium-laced trash to Hanford out of concern that it could be left at what is already the nation's most contaminated nuclear site.

The lawsuit, which was later expanded to include other types of waste, contended the federal government failed to complete an adequate environmental review to support its decision to ship highly radioactive transuranic, low-level and mixed low-level waste to Hanford from other places.

On Monday, Washington state notified the court it would be willing to accept 37 cubic yards of radioactive waste from Ohio. The Energy Department has said the waste from the Battelle Columbus Laboratory must be removed before the Ohio site can be closed.

The waste eventually would be sent to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a nuclear-waste repository in New Mexico, the agency has said.

In January, McDonald barred the federal government from shipping mixed transuranic waste from sites around the country to Hanford unless it meets state storage requirements. The trash typically is debris — such as clothing, equipment and pipes left over from nuclear-weapons production — that has been contaminated both with plutonium and hazardous chemicals.

For 40 years, Hanford workers made plutonium for the nation's nuclear-weapons arsenal, beginning with the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bombs.

Costs to clean up the highly contaminated site are expected to total $50 billion to $60 billion, with the work to be finished by 2035.