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Former governors blast Otter's nuclear waste deal

KEITH RIDLER/The Associated Press | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 10 years, 5 months AGO
by KEITH RIDLER/The Associated Press
| January 16, 2015 8:00 PM

BOISE - Idaho Gov. Butch Otter is turning the state into nuclear waste repository, former Idaho Govs. Phil Batt and Cecil Andrus say.

The former governors at a Thursday morning news conference blasted Otter's recently revealed deal with the U.S. Department of Energy to allow 50 spent nuclear fuel rods into the Idaho National Laboratory for research.

"You take an ounce of the waste from the federal government they want to give you 10,000 pounds," said Batt, a Republican in office from 1995 to 1999.

The two former governors appeared visibly angry with Otter and Attorney General Lawrence Wasden for what they said was making a deal that violated an agreement Batt made with the federal government in his first year in office.

"The two of them have done to this state what every other state has opposed and we have opposed to this day and that is the importation of high-level waste into Idaho for storage," said Andrus, a Democrat who fought nuclear waste shipments when he served from 1971 to 1977 and again from 1987 to 1995.

The 1995 agreement requires the federal government to remove nuclear waste from the southeastern Idaho facility. But the federal government has missed significant deadlines in recent years.

Otter, answering questions Thursday afternoon following a public awards ceremony on a different topic, defended the decision.

"The positive impact of that decision is it could be upward of $20 million a year for the next five years for the lab," he said.

U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz in a letter to Otter dated Dec. 16 said funding for the research associated with the nuclear waste could bring up to $20 million annually through the end of the decade. Twenty-five spent fuel rods would arrive in June and another 25 in January 2016.

Andrus and Batt said the $20 million is a tiny fraction compared to what the state could lose economically if the Eastern Snake Plane Aquifer, which is under the nuclear facility, ever becomes contaminated. For one, they said, Idaho's potato growers in the region would be out of business because no one would want to buy potentially radioactive potatoes.

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