Appeals court: Hanford initiative no good

An appeals court has upheld a lower court ruling striking down Initiative 297, a voter-approved measure that would have barred the federal government from shipping waste to the Hanford nuclear site until all existing waste there is cleaned up.

Nearly 70 percent of Washington voters approved the initiative, now known as the Cleanup Priority Act, in 2004. The federal government immediately filed suit to overturn it.

In June 2006, U.S. District Judge Alan McDonald of Yakima ruled the initiative was unconstitutional because it violates federal authority over nuclear waste, as well as the Constitution's interstate commerce clause.

The state appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which upheld McDonald's ruling on Wednesday.

"Although the desire to take action against further environmental contamination and to protect the health and welfare of the community is understandable, we conclude that the statute enacted through the passage of Initiative 297, the Cleanup Priority Act, is pre-empted by federal law," a three-judge panel of the court said.

The federal government created Hanford in the 1940s as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. The site continued to produce plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal for 40 years.

Today, it is the most contaminated nuclear site in the U.S., with cleanup expected to continue for decades.

The state has authority over hazardous chemical waste at Hanford, which can include chemical waste that is mixed with radioactive waste, but the federal government retains authority over radioactive waste.

Under a national plan to clean up all federal sites, nearly every site in the Energy Department complex would export or import waste, or both. The federal government had argued it has exclusive authority over radioactive waste and that the initiative, if allowed to stand, would slow or impair those efforts.

The state attorney general's office, which defended the initiative, had argued that the state's authority to regulate hazardous waste extended to mixed waste that includes radioactive materials. The state also argued that the federal government could not strike down a law without first seeing how it would be applied.

In July 2005, the Washington state Supreme Court ruled that parts of the initiative could stand even if a federal judge found other parts unconstitutional. McDonald, however, struck down the measure in its entirety.