THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, April 26, 1995 TAG: 9504260010
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 40 lines
Portsmouth residents got good environmental news this past Earth Day.
Staff writer Scott Harper's story revealed that up to 27 tons of spent nuclear-fuel rods and other radioactive material would not be stored in Portsmouth.
It had been announced last June that Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth was one of 15 sites nationwide being considered as a long-term storage site for Navy nuclear waste.
``No one I ever talked to - not in the Navy, not in our community, not in Washington - ever said this was a good idea,'' said Marilee Hawkins, Portsmouth's director of environmental services, who opposed the plan.
But the federal government works in strange ways, and once Portsmouth was on a list of potential nuclear-storage sites, anything might have happened - with no one claiming credit, or discredit, as the case might be.
So we tip our hats to the geniuses in government who figured out that placing up to 27 tons of radioactive material at a Navy shipyard in a city was a bad idea.
As things stand, the Navy is storing radioactive wastes from its nuclear fleet at six spots, two of them in Hampton Roads: Norfolk Naval Shipyard and Newport News Shipbuilding. But it appears that waste will be transported to Idaho for temporary storage. And since at least 1987 the Department of Energy has been eyeing a permanent dumping site at Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert, where this country has tested atomic weapons since 1951.
Nevadans are protesting having nuclear waste in their desert.
But without thinking very hard, we can imagine certain advantages to storing nuclear waste in a desert, rather than in a Navy shipyard in a city. by CNB