...and drink up!

The Energy Department wants the authority to decide how to handle millions of gallons of radioactive waste generated in the course of making nuclear weapons, the New York Times says on June 1.

The DOE says it can cut significant time and money off the cleanup if it left the waste in aging steel tanks and covered those with a grout. Unfortunately for the department, that's illegal: A 1982 federal law requires deep burial, as a US District Court in Idaho ruled last year.

So what does the DOE do? Just what you'd expect: It wants to change the rules.

At the behest of the pollution-lovers, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) introduced an amendment to the military authorization bill to give the DOE the authority to do what it now can't: decide how much of the waste can be left permanently in the tanks.

The method, however, is inadequate.

At the Savannah River Site, near Aiken, S.C., the Energy Department has already grouted two tanks. Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, who has been studying environmental problems at Savannah River since the 1980's, said in a statement: "There is no experience with grout that can allow containment projections of this magnitude. On the contrary, experience with grout so far has been unsatisfactory."

He said that if 10 percent of the strontium-90, a prominent radioactive material in the tanks, was left behind and the tanks were grouted, leakage could not rise more than one part in 100,000 per year for a century, or underground water supplies would be contaminated above the current federal drinking water standards.

But what do they care? They probably drink imported spring water, anyway.

Footnote One: The DOE is putting on its "wounded innocent" face, arguing how upset it is that because the deep-burial site in Yucca Mountain in Nevada is at best years away from being ready, the federal court ruling has left it unable to proceed with any cleanup.

Liars. There's nothing to prevent them from using grout or some other method to improve the safety of the existing containers while Yucca Mountain is prepared; indeed, if they offered this as a temporary measure to reduce the risk of contamination until then, they likely would have had no opposition. But this was proposed as an alternative to deep burial, one that would have saved bucks by increasing the long-term risk, deferring the bill past a time they would have to pay it.

Footnote Two: Senator James M. Inhofe (R-OK) said the amendment would allow the Energy Department "to pursue the best plan to dispose of this nuclear material," calling it "safe" and "well-thought-out."

Inhofe is not only the scumbag who said he was "outraged by the outrage" over Abu Ghraib, he's also the jerk who at an international conference on climate change declared the Kyoto protocol to be "inconsistent with freedom" and said "I'm becoming more and more convinced ... that global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people and the world." I'll leave it to you to decide is his environmental counsel is one on which we should rely.