Keep your eye on the rabbit, Idaho

INL cannot permanently store nuclear waste

By Rep. Monica Church, D-Boise
Reader Contributor

There’s an old country expression my grandfather used to say: keep your eye on the rabbit, because a hunting dog that chases every rustle in the brush comes home empty. Right now, the rabbit is in plain sight — the incontestable threat to Idaho’s economic and environmental future posed by radioactive nuclear defense waste stored above the Snake River Aquifer.

Let me be clear up front: The Idaho National Laboratory has been a good neighbor. It employs thousands of our friends and family, drives world-class research and has earned a legitimate place in Idaho’s story. And credit where it’s due — over the decades, an enormous amount of work has been completed to clean up and remediate contamination. This is not an argument against the lab, against nuclear science or against the good people who make their living in the desert. It is an argument for the aquifer beneath them, and for protecting Idahoans and finishing the job.

The Snake River Aquifer is the beating heart of Idaho’s economy. The size of Lake Erie, it underlies roughly 10,000 square miles, supplies more than half the drinking water across its reach, and feeds the potatoes, sugar beets, barley, cattle and fisheries that nourish Idaho and the nation. When people talk about the “Idaho way of life,” they’re really talking about our water.

And here’s what ought to keep every Idahoan up at night: that water sits directly beneath decades of radioactive, hazardous waste stored on the Snake River Plain. Not miles away — beneath. Once contamination reaches it, there is no undo button. You can’t apologize your way back to clean water.

Today, protecting that water requires holding the Department of Energy and the Navy to their word by making sure that as shiny new opportunities are dangled in front of us, the federal government keeps complying with the cleanup and waste-disposal agreements Idaho and our tribal partners have already fought for and won. You see, for decades, acres of trenches were carved into the site for storing transuranic and other waste — much of it plutonium-contaminated material shipped by the trainload from Rocky Flats, Colo. Idaho was seen as dry, remote and unpopulated, so the waste was transported and buried, eventually seeping into our aquifer. That’s where four-time Democratic Governor Cecil Andrus drew a line: he demanded the DOE stop burying waste, pull it above ground and ship it out of Idaho for good. When Andrus blocked further shipments in the ’80s and ’90s, he wasn’t bluffing. As he told the New York Times in a 1991 interview, “I’ve got a state policeman and 15 of his friends, and all of them are prepared to do what is necessary if any truck makes it inside the borders of this state.” Proving a forceful Idaho leader could move Washington, the DOE finally opened the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant deep in the salt beds near Carlsbad, N.M., and today much of Idaho’s transuranic waste is permanently disposed of — away from the aquifer, where it belongs.

Then there’s the spent fuel, and this is where we could lose the rabbit. For decades, Idaho has reprocessed used fuel from the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program and stored reactor fuel from across the nation, including damaged fuel from the Three Mile Island partial nuclear meltdown. Reprocessing generates enormous volumes of high-level liquid waste, which has been baked into dry — but fiercely radioactive — granules and stored in underground silos. When the Bush administration ended reprocessing, Andrus and tribal leaders again fought back, fearing more spent fuel rolling into Idaho with nowhere to go would make Idaho the nation’s de facto permanent dump. So the state sued. That fight, carried from Andrus into Republican Governor Phil Batt’s term, again forced Washington to the table, producing the 1995 Idaho Settlement Agreement. The Batt Agreement, as it is called, is unique in the nation: a binding contract with real teeth, still under a federal court’s jurisdiction — handcuffs no other site must wear. It covers spent fuel, liquid and calcine waste, buried and transuranic waste and safe facility demolition, with hard deadlines, penalties and a mandate to remove the geologically unsuitable waste from Idaho. Critically, it bars any new shipments until a repository is built, away from our aquifer, something the feds have failed to do.

As Batt put it in 2015 when he and Andrus again sued the federal government for not delivering on a permanent site, “You take an ounce of waste from the federal government, they want to give you 10,000 pounds.” The former Idaho governors argued that opening a permanent site is Washington’s job, not Idaho’s, and a deal is a deal: No new waste until the settlement agreement is met.

So here’s the truth. This new chapter could be good for Idaho and the nation’s energy future, but the issue today is not how much revenue-generating research may or may not come from allowing the country’s AI tech and data center companies to test their reactors on Idaho soil. The issue today is that Idaho’s current leadership is looking the other way as Idaho’s National Laboratory becomes the de facto permanent disposal for the country’s dangerous forever-waste.

Politics loves distraction, but we must stay on point. I’ll say it the way my grandfather would have: keep your eye on the rabbit, Idaho. Protect the aquifer, and hold Washington to every word of the Batt Agreement, because the federal government will never put Idaho first; only we can do that.

Rep. Monica Church is running as incumbent Democratic legislator representing District 19A and currently serving as minority caucus chair. She is the granddaughter of former-Idaho Governor Cecil Andrus.