Testing halted at Ward Valley!

The federal Interior Department said Friday it will halt environmental safety tests at the proposed Ward Valley nuclear waste site because it believes that the California Department of Health Services lacks the authority to buy the land for a dump.

To continue testing - aimed at resolving, among other things, whether low-level radioactive waste would contaminate the water table and migrate 20 miles to the Colorado River - -would be a waste of time and money, said Nina Rose Hartfield, deputy director of the Bureau of Land Management.

In a memo Friday to Ed Hastey, her director in California, Hartfield said attorneys for the Interior and Justice departments have concluded that the Department of Health Services lacks the authority to buy the federal land.

That issue, however, remains to be resolved as part of a federal lawsuit filed by the department and US Ecology, the company that would operate the dump.

That lawsuit also argues that Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt was wrong to block the sale of the federal land to the department after it was approved.

A court hearing on the land sale is scheduled for June in Washington.

The contention that the Department of Health Services cannot buy the land was raised last month in a letter to the White House by three Democratic leaders of the state Legislature--Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco), Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles) and Speaker Pro Tem Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica).

They said that Gov. Pete Wilson, who wants the 1,000 acres of California's eastern desert developed as a nuclear dump, has known since 1991 that the Department of Health Services was trying to avoid legislative scrutiny by paying for the property with a $500,000 gift from US Ecology.

Mike Kahoe, Wilson's deputy Cabinet secretary and point man on the Ward Valley proposal, said Friday that the state would prevail in its court arguments that the Department of Health Services can buy the land, notwithstanding the arguments by attorneys in the Justice and Interior departments.

Kuehl said the decision to halt testing "was appropriate, as a recognition that the Department of Health Services doesn't have the authority to purchase the land."

Ward Young, co-director of the Bay Area Nuclear Waste Coalition, which has long opposed the Ward Valley proposal, was more enthusiastic about Friday's news.

"It means work on Ward Valley is ceasing and that it's extremely unlikely that the dump proponents will be able to dig themselves out of their hole."

Ward Valley dump plan takes another hit

The Clinton administration dealt Gov. Wilson another setback Friday in his attempt to gain control of federal land for a nuclear waste dump in Ward Valley, saying it will no longer spend either time or money to process the state's application to purchase the land.

The federal Bureau of Land Management, which controls the land, said in an internal memo that the state's application for the land is improper. The agency will wait for resolution of a lawsuit intended to force the land transfer that Wilson has brought against the agency before taking further action on the dump, the memo said.

Wilson has accused the Clinton administration of dragging its feet on turning over the land to the California Department of Health Services, which would oversee the construction of the dump. He sued the Bureau of Land Management and Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt in January 1977 to force Babbitt to release the land. "It's silly and laughable," Mike Kahoe, deputy secretary of Wilson's Cabinet, said of the latest federal action. "We say we have a valid contract and we'll prevail in court."

Wilson says the site, 20 miles from the Colorado River, is necessary to store the state's low-level nuclear waste from nuclear plants, hospitals and clinics. But anti-nuclear groups, Colorado River Indian tribes and Democratic political leaders such as U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer say the possible seepage from the site would threaten the Colorado River, a major source of drinking water for Southern California.

In April, the state Assembly's Democratic leadership asked Babbitt to stop work on the application. The leadership, including Senate Pro Tem John Burton of San Francisco; Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa; and Assembly Speaker Pro Tem Sheila Kuehl, both of Los Angeles, said the state Department of Health and Human Services did not have uthority to seek the land transfer. They also said that $500,000 the DHS instructed the proposed operator of the dump to pay the federal government for the land in 1993 was an illegal gift.

On May 15, The U.S. Justice Department, representing the federal government against Wilson's lawsuit, filed a court brief that agreed with the Assembly Democrats' position that the application was improper.Planned soil tests of the Ward Valley site will be postponed, said Jan Bedrosian, a BLM spokeswoman in Sacramento. "Unless the governor is saved by the court, he has lost the Ward Valley issue," said Joseph Lyou, executive director of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, a group opposed to the dump who are defendants in the lawsuit along with the the BLM.

There will be a hearing in U.S. District Court in Washington on June 17 on Wilson's lawsuit against the BLM.