Idaho attorney general’s speech on nuclear cleanup contained one striking misstep | Opinion

Attorney General Raúl Labrador made a striking statement at Tuesday’s celebration of the Idaho Cleanup Project’s successful transition of spent nuclear fuel from wet to dry storage.

“We should be ready to have a serious conversation about interim storage, and Idaho needs to lead this conversation,” Labrador said.

It takes a little background to understand how unexpected that statement was.

The U.S. Department of Energy has committed to removing all nuclear waste from Idaho, which has included everything from old lab equipment used to handle plutonium, to radioactive liquid held in underground tanks, to barrels of material that combust simply by being exposed to air.

Much of that waste can be sent to the Waste Isolation Pilot Project in New Mexico, but the old uranium fuel rods now in dry storage don’t have a destination.

The original plan was that those fuel rods would go to the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository in Nevada, but that facility has never opened (and likely never will open). The idea of interim storage is to house waste in a facility until a permanent repository is available — at some unknowable date in the future.

Was Labrador talking about keeping nuclear waste in Idaho beyond the terms of the 1995 Settlement Agreement? He fell short of saying it outright but also didn’t close the door to the idea either when I asked him.

“We just are having a discussion about what we’re going to do,” Labrador said in an interview after the event. “Obviously, when the agreement was signed many years ago, we had a plan for where the fuel was going to wind up. We don’t know where it’s going to end up now, so we need to start discussing whether Idaho needs to be part of that conversation.”

Labrador emphasized that he didn’t have a specific proposal, that he was just proposing a conversation. But that conversation would be about abandoning the core commitment negotiated in the 1995 Settlement Agreement: that the federal government would get nuclear waste out of Idaho on a specified timeline.

This is a commitment Idaho already has. Reexamining it would be a significant concession. And if Idaho were to have an interim storage site, waste could remain here for decades. The federal government has attempted to open one permanent repository for 20 years without success. It is highly uncertain when or if a permanent facility will exist.

At the same time, Labrador did not show the level of knowledge about waste cleanup that I am used to seeing from the attorney general.