speaking of WMD's

Published: October 1, 2003

ASHINGTON, Sept. 30 — The Energy Department has asked Congress to allow it to redefine some nuclear waste so it can be left in place or sent to sites intended for low-level radioactive material, rather than being buried deep underground.

Department officials say they thought they had flexibility in classifying what constituted high-level nuclear waste, but in July, a federal district judge in Idaho ruled that the department's plan for treating waste there violated the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, a 1982 law requiring the deep burial of high-level waste.

The argument concerns tens of millions of gallons of salts and sludges left over from weapons production that are now in tanks in Idaho, South Carolina and eastern Washington. High-level waste is supposed to be encapsulated in glass for burial. The department has chosen Yucca Mountain, Nev., as the repository site, but the site has not yet opened and when it does, it will not be big enough for all the solidified wastes and spent reactor fuel.

In the Idaho case, the Energy Department had said that some of the high-level waste was "incidental" and need not be removed from the tanks. The Natural Resources Defense Council and the Snake River Alliance, a local environmental group, along with two Indian tribes, successfully argued that the order violated a longtime policy that high-level waste must be deeply buried.