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     Butte County in Idaho is suing the Department of Energy (DoE) over nuclear waste stored at the desert site west of Idaho Falls. The lawsuit was filed last Monday in the U.S. District Court of Idaho’s Eastern Division. It followed the recent death of former Idaho Governor Phil Batt. He and fellow former Governor, Cecil Andrus, worked out the 1995 Settlement Agreement with the DoE. This agreement laid out deadlines governing nuclear waste cleanup in Idaho.
     The forty-nine page complaint was filed on the county’s behalf by Arco attorney Steve L. Steven. Among issues raised in the lawsuit is the federal government’s failure to create permanent national repository for spent nuclear fuel. This has forced local communities to house the spent nuclear fuel. The lawsuit says that “The interim storage of spent nuclear fuel in Butte County is now de facto permanent disposal.” The complaint went on to say that forced interim storage has “ongoing social and economic impacts to Butte County as well as social and economic impacts that have yet to occur.”
      The lawsuit argues that the storage of spent nuclear fuel at the site has “detrimental effects” and that there’s a reason that the DoE continues to store waste in places such as Butte County rather than “next to the Forrestal Building in Washington D.C. where DOE would be free from the need for state or local government cooperation.”
     The lawsuit claims that the DoE is in violation of laws which date back nearly seventy years that regulate the management of nuclear waste. The DoE has not honored commitments set forth in the Atomic Energy Act to address federal impacts to local communities. The lawsuit says the DoE has never utilized the authority “to make payments to local communities ‘where special burdens have been cast upon the State or local government by activities of the Commission.’”
    The lawsuit claimed that by not utilizing the discretionary authority that it has, the DoE demonstrates its unwillingness to acknowledge the impact of nuclear waste storage on local communities.
     The lawsuit says that weeks before the filing of the complaint, Butte County sent correspondence to the DoE’s Washington headquarters “offering to informally discuss and compromise” on the county’s concerns under the Interim Storage Fund. The DoE headquarters did not respond.
     The lawsuit notes that the county’s culture and economics livelihood are “inextricably linked” to the Idaho National Laboratory and that it “has always been and continues to be a staunch supporter of INL and its mission, except for the challenges herein presented.” According to the website of the Idaho National Laboratory, sixty percent of the site’s eight hundred and ninety square miles are in Butte County.
      The lawsuit mentions several instances in which spent nuclear fuel has been stored at the DoE’s desert site for far longer than originally intended and in facilities that were not designed to hold waste for such long periods. The lawsuit claims that the DoE provides interim storage capacity for about three hundred metric tons of spent nuclear fuel at it desert site.
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