Federal judge strikes down Hanford nuclear-waste initiative

A federal judge Monday struck down a voter-approved initiative that would have prohibited the federal government from shipping nuclear waste to Hanford, ruling the law unconstitutionally infringes on federal prerogatives.

The ruling isn't likely to change anything, at least anytime soon. Initiative 297 hasn't been enforced while the case was pending, and a different lawsuit has suspended waste shipments to Hanford for now.

I-297, approved by Washington voters in 2004 with more votes than any previous statewide measure, would have blocked a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) plan to make Hanford the permanent disposal site for some low-level radioactive waste and low-level "mixed" waste that is both radioactive and hazardous.

But U.S. District Judge Alan McDonald of Yakima agreed with the federal government's lawsuit against I-297 that it has pre-empted the field of nuclear-materials regulation. He said the initiative violates the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution, as well as its prohibition against state interference with interstate commerce.

"If other states start passing legislation similar to [I-297], the simple fact is that DOE will not be moving waste anywhere among its nationwide sites as it proposes to do as part of its nationwide cleanup program," McDonald wrote in a 62-page ruling.

"Decisions which need to be made at a national level addressing national concerns cannot be trumped by protectionist regulations enacted by individual states," the judge wrote.

Gerry Pollet of Heart of America Northwest, the Hanford watchdog group that sponsored I-297, said he was disappointed but not surprised. He acknowledged it's unlikely to result in any immediate changes at Hanford, one of the world's most contaminated sites.

The Department of Energy has agreed in a separate legal proceeding involving the state and DOE to suspend shipments of low-level radioactive and mixed wastes to Hanford until it reconsiders the environmental impact of its waste-disposal plans for the sprawling southeastern Washington nuclear reservation.

That work won't be done for at least two years, Pollet said.

Federal and state officials could not be reached for comment.

Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna, whose office defended I-297, said in a prepared statement he "will be carefully considering every option available to the state, including the option of appealing."

Pollet said sponsors will seek to appeal if the state doesn't. "We always believed the stakes were so high that this would be decided by the 9th Circuit [Court of Appeals], or perhaps even higher," he said.

"Judge McDonald is calling into question many of the fundamentals of the state's authority to protect its groundwater and its rivers."

As part of its plan for disposing of waste from its nuclear-weapons production plants, the Department of Energy has proposed that up to 199,000 cubic meters of radioactive and mixed low-level waste — up to 70 percent of it from outside Washington — be stored at Hanford.

High-level wastes at Hanford would be shipped to a repository in Nevada. But Hanford would serve as a packaging center for some highly radioactive "transuranic" waste — plutonium-contaminated rags, tools and other items — destined for permanent disposal in New Mexico.

Initiative 297, which passed by more than a 2-1 ratio, would have blocked DOE from shipping out-of-state waste to Hanford until existing contamination at the site is cleaned up.

The 586-square-mile Hanford Reservation was established in the 1940s as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, then continued to produce plutonium for the nation's nuclear arsenal for 40 years.

Information from The Associated Press is included in this report.

Eric Pryne: 206-464-2231 or epryne@seattletimes.com