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Epilogue
- State University of New York Press
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Epilogue In December 1988, when county residents started organizing to fight the potential dump, “I wouldn’t have given them a snowball’s chance,” he said. “Now they’ve won. It’s just a question of time.” —Gary Horowitz, an administrator and former professor of American history at Alfred University, in OleanTimes Herald, April 12, 1990 ALTHOUGH IT WASN’T CLEAR to most county citizens at the time, their triumph in keeping the technical team off the Caneadea site marked the final victory for Allegany County. It also rekindled a healthy debate across the United States about storing nuclear waste. At the time of this book’s publication , no new dump site for low level nuclear waste has been built in the United States.Twelve years ago, twelve new sites were actively being planned. Ironically, Governor Cuomo, who earlier had belittled the activists’ scientific arguments, now validated them publicly. Worried that future confrontations would imperil police and protesters alike, Governor Cuomo told the siting commission to discontinue its attempts to conduct on-site testing. Just two days after the technical team’s failure to get onto the Caneadea site, the governor asked the commission to “concentrate its efforts on other more productive activities,” until he had time “to discuss this matter further with state legislators and local citizens.” The governor, however, walked a tightrope. He had to certify that New York was making progress in building a nuclear dump,1 even though he now found many of the activists’ arguments compelling. On at least two occasions 223 1. The Federal Low Level RadioactiveWaste Act of 1985 allowed the three states that then accepted low level nuclear waste (South Carolina,Washington, and Nevada) to stop accepting shipments of waste from any state that was not in compliance with the law. A state (or compact of states) was out of compliance if it did not meet (continued next page) SUNY_Pet_ch10.qxd 9/13/01 2:11 PM Page 223 he told protesters that he was grateful to them for educating federal and state officials (presumably including himself) about the serious issues involved in storing low level nuclear waste, and he urged them to stay involved. The “process put together by the federal government,” he admitted, was neither “rational” nor “fair.” He doubted that members of Congress “understood the problem well when it passed that legislation.” In any event, Congress had “acted unreasonably and unconstitutionally in imposing upon the states the legal responsibility for solving our nation’s low-level nuclear waste problem.” What did Cuomo find so objectionable? First, class C waste was far too dangerous to be categorized as low level waste; rather, it should be reclassified as high level waste and stored in a federal repository.2 Second, there was no need, he said, “to proliferate low-level radioactive waste sites all over the country. There should be one place for all of it.” Third, he agreed with the activists that Congress had no right to force the states to “take title” to nuclear waste. Although the governor himself did not explicitly fault the siting commission ’s scientific process in selecting a dump site, he told activists that he would ask the National Academy of Sciences to review the technical data. If it found the process seriously defective, he would recommend that the finalist sites be excluded from further consideration. Cuomo also suggested that the commission consider on-site storage of nuclear waste, a proposal thatTed Taylor had recommended in a technical report three months earlier. It would make more sense, he claimed, to send the “so-called low-level waste” to the same federal repository where they would be putting “the big stuff.” On-site 224 L I N K E D A R M S (1. continued from previous page) certain deadlines.Technically, all states, including New York, had failed to meet certain deadlines, but the three states with nuclear dumps agreed not to penalize any state that was making progress toward building its own facility. Even though Cuomo argued against the wisdom of the federal law, he didn’t want to risk triggering the mechanism that would prevent NewYork’s nuclear facilities from continuing to send their waste to one of the established dumps. Instead, he hoped to modify the NewYork State siting law to make it better, while continuing to argue that the federal government should revisit the issue and take responsibility for nuclear waste. After all, he said, the federal government had done all the...