[CPEO-MEF] Weldon Springs "Stewardship" Precedent

[marylia@earthlink.net]

I thought this may be of interest. Read on...

         MISSOURI OFFICIALS FIND HOLES IN PLAN TO MANAGE
                     RADIOACTIVE WASTE SITE
       St.Louis Post Dispatch -- Monday, August 26, 2002.
                         by Sara Shipley

    Missouri environmental officials are unhappy with the federal
government's latest plan for long-term management of radioactive waste
at Weldon Spring.
    The Department of Energy's second draft stewardship plan still
doesn't address key questions, such as how the agency plans to pay for
the work, said James D. Werner, director of air and land protection at
the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.
    "We're very disappointed in this next draft plan," Werner said. "It
fails to respond to our earlier comments. Also, it doesn't respond to
community concerns."
    The plan will be debated at a public meeting in St. Charles on
Wednesday night.
    Missouri officials have been wary for years of being saddled with a
monumental environmental problem of the federal government's creation.
    Cold War bomb materials produced at Weldon Spring left behind 1.5
million cubic yards of contamination, which has been capped under a
mountain of rock.
    Now that most of the $900 million cleanup is complete, the
Department of Energy is supposed to explain how it will keep Weldon
Spring safe as long as the waste is radioactive - a mere 10,000 years or
so. An agency office in Grand Junction, Colo., is taking over what it
calls the "long-term surveillance and maintenance" of Weldon Spring, the
first of dozens of similar bomb-making sites to go into mothball status.

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Marylia Kelley
Executive Director,
Tri-Valley CAREs
(Communities Against a Radioactive Environment)
2582 Old First Street
Livermore, CA 94551
Phone: 1-925-443-7148
Fax: 1-925-443-0177
Web site: http://www.trivalleycares.org is our new web site address.
Please
visit us there.

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