For the past 40 years, the tiny Town of Ashford has had a rich—or perhaps enriched is a better word—nuclear history. Located about 40 miles south of Buffalo on the road to Ellicottville, the state’s Office of Atomic Energy, in partnership with the federal government, chose that bucolic location for a commercial nuclear waste reprocessing center, called West Valley Nuclear Center. New York State acquired 3,345 acres of land in 1961 and leased it to a private company, Nuclear Fuel Services, Inc. (an offshoot of Davison Chemical Company), who began accepting shipments of nuclear waste in 1963. Three years later the reprocessing began, which meant taking military wastes and fuel rods from nuclear power plants, and pulling out the uranium and plutonium to be reused, mostly in military stockpiles.

In 1976, after four years of pursuing required modifications and updates to the plant, Nuclear Fuel Services pulled out of the venture—citing new cost-prohibitive regulations—leaving New York State with a toxic, radioactive SNAFU on its hands. Over the plant’s lifetime, it processed 640 metric tons of spent reactor fuel, generating 660,000 gallons of highly radioactive liquid waste and varying amounts of other radioactive byproducts, all of which were stored on-site.

In 1980, Congress directed the Department of Energy (DOE) to take the lead role in decontaminating and decommissioning the site. Since then, the DOE has made excruciatingly slow, if steady, progress in cleaning up West Valley, though several problems have arisen along the way. A toxic plume of unknown origin is spreading downhill from the site, overflowing burial sites have leaked waste into the local watershed and the DOE has been doing its best to run interference throughout the project, prompting the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) to file a lawsuit against the DOE.

Republican Congressman Randy Kuhl stepped into the process in 2005, proposing the West Valley Remediation Act (HR 3101), a positive piece of legislation intended to speed up the process and alleviate New York State taxpayers by transferring all responsibility for the site to the DOE. While this act has broad support from Western New York’s representatives in Washington (including Schumer, Clinton, Higgins and Reynolds), there are people closer to the issue who see potential problems with the bill.

Artvoice caught up with two such people, Judy Einach, who represents the Coalition on West Valley Nuclear Wastes, and Brian Hillery of Citizens’ Environmental Coaltion, to hear their thoughts on West Valley and the proposed legislation.

Artvoice: What’s the current status of West Valley?

Judy Einach: They’ve taken some steps to deal with the waste on-site. The most high-level waste went through a process called vitrification. Vitrification is taking high-level waste and putting it into a solid form that is something like glass. These are very long, slender, solid tubes of glass that are encased in layers and layers of steel. They’re all in one room at West Valley, and they’re separated from humans by walls that are four feet thick. Everything that’s done in the room is performed with robotics. It’s a huge concentration.

Brian Hillery: We just took a tour of the site not that long ago…they’ve done a tremendous job of vitrifying the waste. But the question is, where do you send this high-level waste now? There’s no place in the country where you can send high-level waste in any form, vitrified or not. It will continue to sit at West Valley until the government opens up some sort of high-level waste distributing center or some other site.

AV: Your concern with the West Valley Remediation Act is that it would turn West Valley over to the DOE?

JE: Well, there’s a lot more waste on-site that needs to be talked about. It was a wonderful technological advance to get this first portion of the high-level waste vitrified. Previously it was stored in underground storage tanks, and there’s still residual waste in the bottom of those tanks.

BH: We’re talking about drums with sludge at the bottom, and it’s percolated into the soil and the surrounding watershed. The Department of Energy and NYSERDA don’t have any honest idea of whether or not the stuff has been leaking. They’re guesstimating at this point, guesstimating about whether high-level waste is leaking into the watershed or not. We know for a fact that there is a plume that exists beneath the site, and it’s spreading toward Frank’s Creek, which empties into Cattaraugus Creek.

JE: The EPA has just recently suggested that these tanks be exhumed, and we’re all in favor of that. Any waste that we can get stored above ground is a good thing, because you can monitor it. There are also two burial grounds on the site, which are laid in very impermeable clay. One is the responsibility of the federal government, and one is the responsibility of the state government. The one that’s the responsibility of the federal government is one of the most complex mixes of nuclear waste that exists in the country. They don’t want to touch it, because it’s an expensive problem to solve. And New York State certainly doesn’t have the money to dig up or exhume the waste in the burial trenches that it’s responsible for.

BH: When referring to these trenches, I think it’s important to think of it almost as a bathtub made of clay. We haven’t been able to document how much waste or what kinds of waste have gone into this clay bathtub and been covered over with soil. What we do know is that, at the time, it was placed in steel drums with their tops duct-taped on. We don’t really have our hands around what exists in there. And the tack that the DOE is taking is, “Well, it’s not going anywhere at the moment. We’ve managed to cap it [at one point so much water got into the trenches that waste leaked out and washed into the surrounding area] for now.” If the DOE had it their way, they would just wash their hands of it and walk off.

AV: And the EPA is more likely to do something with it?

BH: The DOE has not commented on EPA’s proposal, which they made maybe two, two and a half months ago. NYSERDA, the state group that’s involved at the site, is in favor of it. But the DOE has not yet commented on whether or not it plans on taking this suggestion and seeing real progressive movement at the site. They want to sit on their hands.

AV: The EPA needs DOE approval?

JE: DOE is ultimately responsible for coming up with a preferred alternative in an environmental impact statement (EIS). We have an ongoing environmental impact process for West Valley that is the longest-running EIS process in the United States.

AV: How many years has it been going on?

BH: Well, the West Valley Demonstration Project Act passed in 1980, so it’s been 26 years.

JE: In 1996, they came up with a draft EIS with no preferred alternative. And since 1996, they’ve been putzing around with it, playing with it, trying to split it into a two-step process of decontamination and decommissioning. They’ve come up with other ways to begin to solve the program without facing the need to come up with a final EIS. Recently they came out with an environmental assessment that had some short-term solutions, according to the DOE, but which every single group that’s involved with watch-dogging this site spoke out against, including NYSERDA. They’re jerking everyone’s chains and doing nothing of significance.

They’re in a sort of make-work status for the employees on-site. One of the big concerns of the folks in Cattaraugus County and the surrounding area is that if the West Valley Demonstration Project is closed, if it’s decommissioned, what will happen to whatever jobs are left? Our argument is that if you did a really good job of decontaminating and decommissioning that site, you’d create jobs for decades to come. It would be a boon to the economy of Cattaraugus County to clean up this site so that there is virtually nothing left of danger.

AV: What about the plume?

JE: In some undetermined spot under the building that housed the vitrified, high-level waste, there’s something leaking, a radioactive isotope called strontium-90. It’s leaking downhill, sort of in the shape of a hand. It’s advancing at about 30 meters a year, depending on whose estimate you use. They really don’t have a good handle yet on how to contain it. They’ve tried things, and credit should be given for that, but nothing has been successful.

AV: When was the plume detected?

JE: When the Superfund came into being, they weren’t aware of it. That’s why West Valley doesn’t have Superfund status. So it’s really been since Superfund legislation that the plume was detected.

BH: And it’s headed downhill toward Frank’s Creek and Buttermilk Creek, which flow right into Cattaraugus Creek and right into Lake Erie. It’s just a matter of time, and I think what’s also important is that the entire site sits on a clay plateau that by most projections will fall into Cattaraugus Creek in the next couple hundred years, and it will poison the entire Great Lakes watershed.

JE: Zoar Valley is a stone’s throw from this site, so if you know the degree of erosion in Zoar Valley, that’s the kind of erosion we’re talking about on this site. There are some technologies that prevent erosion, but that requires perpetual monitoring. The thing is, when you think out 10,000 years, you have to think of no institutional controls, because we don’t know what society’s going to be like 1,000 years from now, let alone 10,000 years. So who will watch this if we don’t exhume it?

AV: What’s wrong with DOE taking over?

The DOE knows the problem exists, which is why they’re spending money on the site, and they are, at the moment, shipping some low-level waste off-site. So they are trying to clean up some of it, but we’re saying the reason that you can’t trust the DOE to do a good job has two aspects to it: 1) the standards to which the DOE cleans up are lower than the standards set by the EPA, and we want a very high standard of cleanup; 2) once the DOE gets its hands on land, it can do anything it wants with it.

AV: Your concerned that it’ll become a future dumping ground?

JE: Well, Western New York is known as a dumping ground for nuclear and hazardous waste. It’s a major part of our economy here, perhaps not something we talk about but it’s true. And we know about chemical waste management in Niagara County.

AV: Or mismanagement.

JE: And we know that Governor Pataki just vetoed a bill that would prohibit more landfills where hazardous waste can leak into the Great Lakes watershed. He vetoed that bill even though both the Assembly and the Senate passed it. We know that the federal government thinks of Western New York as a wasteland, so they’re likely to want to dump here. Jimmy Carter outlawed commercial reprocessing of nuclear waste, so it’s now just a military operation. But we know that George Bush is talking about rekindling commercial reprocessing. We know that there are big plans on the drawing board to expand nuclear power in this country and around the world, and waste comes here from around the world. So to have the DOE own this land, which they would get under the West Valley Remediation Act, doesn’t seem smart.

BH: There’s a lot about the Remediation Act that could work. We don’t want to appear to be environmental groups that are against removing the waste off-site. What we want is for it to be done in a responsible, productive way. We believe if we can re-tinker this and re-tool it a bit, it can certainly be something that is going to be beneficial not only to the state and federal agencies in the area, but also for the people of the Town of Ashford. There’s a lot of money that will go to Ashford in terms of its school system and in terms of its economic opportunities, and we’re all in favor of that. But it needs to be done in a responsible way, not just blindly turning it over to the DOE. Removing New York’s decision-making role in the cleanup is irresponsible.

AV: We’re the ones with the vested interest.

BH: Yes, and now we want to cash in our chips? And according to the Remediation Act, [New York State] has spent over $200 million toward the cleanup of the West Valley site, and that is unprecedented in terms of nuclear waste sites. Because we’re the only state that has this partnership with the DOE around nuclear waste, we’re the only state that’s ever put up any money for the cleanup of nuclear waste. We deserve better. The people of New York State deserve better, the people of the Town of Ashford and Cattaraugus County deserve better than this.

JE: We’ve spent our state tax dollars and our federal tax dollars on this. We’ve been double taxed, if you will, for the cleanup of West Valley. So we think that, as New Yorkers, we have a real say in what’s done with that site. We have a real vested interest in making sure that that land is cleaned up to our specifications, not DOE’s.

AV: What’s good in the Remediation Act?

JE: The Town of Ashford has paid a huge opportunity cost having that site in its borders, and the people around there have paid a huge price. We want them compensated. We like that in the Remediation Act the federal government actually steps up and says, “Yeah, we initiated this and we need to take major responsibility for the cleanup.” But what we see coming from the DOE doesn’t speak to the real cleanup that we’re looking for. It looks like it’s a cut-and-run operation: The DOE will do as little as it can and get out. If the act passes, [the DOE] inherits some things that would be very nice for them to have should they ever want to start reprocessing again, and if they want to increase our nuclear weapons production and create more waste.

JE: It’s important to say what the DOE does well and to say that we’ve had a fairly good working relationship with the folks at DOE who are on-site. The higher-ups are playing games with us, particularly with the Coalition, because the Coalition has legal rights to documents that no other group has had. The Coalition has been the one group that has been able to win lawsuits against the United States of America and the DOE so that we can have access to legal documents. But the DOE’s attorney is trying to hold up giving us what we’re asking for. The reason we’re asking for these documents is that New York State, under State Senator Young, has given the Coalition and CEC $54,000 to hire consultants to do a full-cost accounting study to really look at the alternatives involved in cleaning up the West Valley site. We want to have current information so we can do a proper study.

JE: If we did do a full exhumation on the site—and it could take us 20, 30, 40, 50 years to do that—if we did it we would invest in and develop the technology that would allow us, as citizens of the United States, to do this on other sites. It could be a wonderful thing. Make no mistake, it would be risky work for some people.

AV: How are our politicians responding to the Remediation Act?

JE: We’re worried that our elected officials will sell the Remediation Act as a way to keep costs down for New York State when, in fact, we believe that the long-term costs of turning this land over to the DOE will be a much higher price for New Yorkers to pay.

Nobody can stand the pace and the tricks that the DOE feels justified in performing. The only one in Western New York who understands why the Remediation Act should not move forward is Louise Slaughter. She has a science background. All of the others—Schumer, Clinton, Higgins, Kuhl, Reynolds—are strong proponents of the Remediation Act. We worry that they are not really informed, because they’re wondering how they can look good by saving New York money. Government only thinks its lifetime is as long as these people are in positions of power, and a lifetime is much longer that that.

AV: And a nuclear lifetime is much, much longer than that.

JE: We know that when these radioactive isotopes got into the Cattaraugus Creek, they run along the creek, then they make a right turn at Lake Erie and they hug the shoreline. The first thing they meet is the water intake valves for the county and the city—Buffalo’s water supply. So it’s pretty clear to me that at some point we were drinking the stuff. And we wonder why our rates of cancer, lupus and multiple sclerosis are so high.

For more information, visit the Coalition on West Valley Nuclear Wastes’s Web site at www.digitup.org.