THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 28, 1996 TAG: 9604270469
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY SCOTT HARPER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Long : 113 lines
Robert Deegan was outnumbered again. As soon as he walked into the hotel conference room, a half-dozen U.S. Department of Energy officials greeted him with weak smiles and handshakes, then surrounded him.
They flashed charts, maps and reports. But Deegan wanted more answers.
``On what route would you bring the radioactive acid into Hampton Roads?'' he asked in his disc-jockey deep, serious voice.
The material, on its way here from a Washington state nuclear weapons plant, would arrive via Route 58, probably, the officials nodded in cautious agreement.
``How many times would the trucks carrying the acid stop for a break?'' Deegan continued. ``And do the truck drivers stop for dinner? Or bathroom breaks?''
The officials stared at each other, some rolled their eyes in disbelief, before scrambling through brief cases for an explanation of departmental toilet protocol.
As chairman of nuclear issues for the Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club, Deegan frequently finds himself grilling officials about things radioactive. And he often is the only citizen doing so, as he was on this day last year, at a public hearing on proposed shipments of nitric acid through local ports.
Deegan is an unlikely environmental activist, with a specialty that few find interesting or even comprehensible: nuclear waste.
His ammunition is the government's own research - volumes of dry, footnote-laden reports that most others skim or ignore. His office inside his neat Virginia Beach home is a scattered library of old files, environmental impact reports, newspaper clippings, nuclear newsletters and correspondence.
Asked what he would tell prospective nuke-sleuths like himself, Deegan said: ``You better be ready to get out your spade and dig into the details.''
At 60, Deegan is a straight-laced retired naval commander with thick black-frame glasses, a heart condition and a penchant for fine print. In his Bermuda shorts, dark socks and dress shoes, he is hardly the picture of the stereotypical environmentalist.
He only got involved in the environmental movement during the Reagan years, in revulsion to the controversial policies of former Secretary of the Interior James Watt.
He has since become a fixture - some would say an obsessed watchdog - in policy decisions on nuclear materials in Hampton Roads.
There's plenty to watch - from nuclear refueling and decommissioning of Navy warships at local shipyards, to shipments of radioactive materials through the ports, to the storage of atomic wastes at commercial nuclear reactors.
Such issues have been fought by environmental groups for decades with mostly emotional arguments and peacenik demonstrations. Deegan goes the opposite way, insisting on facts and mutual respect.
``My objective is to be constructive, not confrontational,'' Deegan said in an interview at his neat suburban home in Virginia Beach. ``This is not personal. I just want to make sure these subjects are thoroughly researched and are not handled foolishly.''
His formula is working.
Deegan was the plaintiff in a lawsuit that blocked shipments of foreign nuclear wastes from research reactors into the United States in 1988. And now that the ban is being lifted, Deegan has been instrumental in persuading government officials to import those wastes through a military port in South Carolina, not the hectic commercial port of Hampton Roads.
Unlike other activists, Deegan is not convinced nuclear power plants are all bad. They produce no air pollution compared to coal-stoked plant, he reasons, and can work if managed carefully and properly.
``I do wish nuclear weapons would go away,'' he said, ``but I have an open mind when it comes to nuclear power.''
Nuclear waste is his biggest beef with commercial reactors, such as the ones run by Virginia Power in Surry and North Anna - or more precisely, what utilities do and don't do with their tons of radioactive fuel rods.
Currently, utilities have no storage solution, other than to keep wastes in their back yards in steel casks or in cooling pools and wait for Congress to find a proper, permanent burial site.
Under plans still being debated, the most likely site is in Nevada, beneath an old desert bombing range known as Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles from Las Vegas.
Deegan has been there, and his opinion of the site is typical of his environmental philosophy.
``A complete and thorough study should be done first; this should not be a let's-stick-it-to-Nevada exercise,'' he said. ``I say this because we might be next in line, and I'm sure Virginians would expect the same treatment.''
A Naval Academy graduate, Deegan received training in engineering and science and, perhaps most importantly, how a bureaucracy works. One of his first acts as nuclear-issues chairman of the Sierra Club, for example, was to get his name on the mailing list for the Department of Energy and Department of Defense nuclear programs.
The result can be seen each afternoon when the mail arrives. Boxes and thick packages of government studies and reports show up on his doorstep almost every day. He just received a nine-volume environmental impact study on the disposal of spent fuel rods.
``My wife kids me about that,'' Deegan said of his voluminous mail load. ``She wisely encourages me to dispose of the old stuff. Anything more than a couple years old gets dated anyway in this field.''
Deegan also keeps in touch with other nuke activists across the country, again by mail. He shares information with Sierra Club members in New Mexico, Idaho, Florida and Washington state - other hotbed states for nuclear issues.
His atomic activism came about almost by default. While serving as local Sierra Club chapter president in 1987, a small group in Portsmouth started pushing the government for answers about nuclear shipments through their community. They had trouble obtaining documents, were stonewalled by government agencies and became frustrated.
``I was very interested in their work and started looking into it myself, mostly because no one else was here,'' he said. ``When they started blocking my attempts to get information, that really got me going.''
Deegan has been digging ever since.
KEYWORDS: NUCLEAR POWER ATOMIC POWER ATOMIC WASTE NUCLEAR WASTE by CNB