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Thursday, July 13, 2006
State appeals ruling tossing Hanford initiative
I-297 would bar nuclear waste transfer
SPOKANE -- Washington state has appealed a judge's ruling that struck down a voter-approved initiative barring the federal government from accepting more radioactive waste at Hanford, Attorney General Rob McKenna said Wednesday.
U.S. District Judge Alan McDonald ruled last month in Yakima that Initiative 297, now called the Cleanup Priority Act, was unconstitutional.
The initiative would bar the government from accepting more nuclear waste at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation until the waste already there has been cleaned up.
Attorneys representing the state Department of Ecology filed a notice of appeal Wednesday with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
"We respectfully disagree with the federal district court's conclusion that Initiative 297 is unconstitutional, and we are not content to let this decision rest with a single district court judge," McKenna said in a news release from Olympia.
Voters approved I-297 by a nearly 70 percent margin in 2004. The federal government immediately filed suit to overturn it.
Sponsors of the initiative applauded the state's action Wednesday and pledged to work with McKenna and Gov. Christine Gregoire in moving the appeal forward.
McDonald ruled that the initiative is unconstitutional because it violates federal authority over nuclear waste, as well as the Constitution's interstate commerce clause.
He also found that the initiative impairs the Tri-Party Agreement, a consent enforcement order signed by Ecology, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency to govern cleanup at Hanford.
"Given the high level of public interest and the importance of this issue, the state of Washington's perspective needs to be reviewed by the Ninth Circuit," McKenna said.
Hanford was built in the 1940s as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. It continued to produce plutonium for the nation's nuclear arsenal for 40 years.
Today, it is the nation's most contaminated nuclear site. Cleanup costs are expected to total as much as $60 billion, with the work to be finished by 2035.
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