As Gov. Kathy Hochul moves ahead with her plan to build atomic plants to supplement the intermittent power supply from green energy, a contaminated nuclear waste site continues to haunt Western New York. Opened in 1966, the West Valley nuclear fuel reprocessing plant operated for six years and left behind 600,000 gallons of high-level radioactive waste in underground tanks.
Estimated at more than $10 billion, cleanup of the site has been a hot potato between the state and the U.S. Department of Energy. Despite a 1980 act of Congress directing the federal government to get the job done, the 150-acre site remains contaminated with radioactive waste from both commercial reactors and military weapons facilities.
“It has the hottest of the hot; the most radioactive waste is concentrated there,” said Diane D’Arrigo, Radioactive Waste Project Director with the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. “The state gave the license to the company that has long since left that buried waste in leaking trenches. Cleanup is estimated at around $10 billion, and it is fully a New York liability.”
According to D’Arrigo, radioactive water has leaked in Cattaraugus Creek, which runs into Lake Erie, from the site about 35 miles south of Buffalo. “So New York has this huge liability, and then we're turning around and going to make more of this waste?” she said, reiterating the hazards involved with reprocessing reactor byproducts.
The nuclear activist noted that along with Gov. Hochul, Senator Kirstin Gillibrand and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are supporting atomic plants as part of the energy Green New Deal.
“We really need to do an education effort on our decision makers because some of the plutonium and uranium in the fuel is leaving behind many hundreds of different radionuclides that are processed into liquid and sludge. It's a huge mess. So it's just ridiculously stupid that they would advocate such a thing.”
Criticism is piling up on the state’s Democrats for banning fossil fuels without having practical plans to backup wind turbines and solar facilities when darkness and the lack of wind keeps them from operating. “It’s crazy to think that nuclear power will be the answer to our energy problem,” said Assemblyman Joseph DeStefano, who, among many Republicans, is pushing for modern natural gas facilities to bridge the gap. “New York has an abundance of cheap, clean energy right under our feet. Yet they won’t let us touch it in favor of intermittent sources and nuclear power. It just doesn’t make any sense.”