There's nothing like an angry mob chanting outside the hearing room to add some excitement to an otherwise boring regulatory railroading of the people of Texas. In February, final hearings on the proposed Sierra Blanca low-level radioactive waste dump came to the Stephen F. Austin building near the state capitol and were greeted by a 200-person "nuclear circus parade" protesting the ridiculously expensive and one-sided hearing process. Flying the banner of the Sierra Blanca Legal Defense Fund (SBLDF), clowns, radiation rangers and giant puppets paraded through downtown to the site of the hearings. As an official party in the contested hearing, SBLDF already had a dog in the fight on the twelfth floor. But its under-funded legal team, one attorney and no expert witnesses, was like a poodle in a room full of Doberman-lawyers, all hired by the state and the utility companies to ram through this unwanted dump, which would bring utility waste from Texas, Maine and Vermont to a low-income border community in far west Texas.
Just to even up the odds a little, SBLDF convened a feisty mob for the occasion. Things got interesting when state dump director Rick Jacobi was spotted, along with a couple of New England utility lobbyists, looking on from one of the first floor windows. Jacobi would probably have just kept watching, as if the ongoing demonstration was some kind of pre-hearing entertainment for his benefit, if EF! musician Danny Dollinger hadn't called the crowd's attention to his presence. Jacobi has made a career of lying about the safety of the nuclear industry, first as a licensing engineer at the South Texas Nuclear Project and since 1982, as the alleged "brains" of the state's nuclear dumping agency. But he's no good at face-to-face confrontations. His lips twitch and he blinks his eyes uncontrollably. A little surge from the crowd sent him scurrying upstairs. But inside the hearing, the various speakers and the chants of the crowd could still be heard loud and clear.
Since George W. Bush became governor, his appointees have rolled over so many citizen groups that you'd think it would be refreshing for his goons to finally bump up against an opposition with some backbone. Unfortunately, their response has been to keep turning the screw. The administrative hearing judges in charge of the case have left little doubt where they stand. The day after Christmas, the judges kicked SBLDF's main expert witness, Dr. Marvin Resnikoff, out of the case. The state's attorneys sought to depose Resnikoff, a senior associate with the New York-based Radioactive Waste Management Associates and a nationally-recognized expert on low-level waste, but they offered him just $70 a day for his time. Dr. Resnikoff, who was helping SBLDF pro bono, normally earns $300 an hour for testimony. When he refused $70 an hour, the Texas Low Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Authority (TLLRWDA) convinced the judges to exclude him from the proceedings, a ruling that even the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission, the final arbiters of the dump license, felt was going a little too far.
It's not as though TLLRWDA didn't have the money. It was given $5.6 million by the Texas Legislature to spend exclusively on the legal hearing. In the interest of a fair hearing (or at least the appearance thereof), many states pursuing radioactive waste dump licenses also offer opponents financial assistance to develop evidence, hire witnesses and the like. In Illinois, for example, the judges created a $500,000 fund for opposition parties to use in hiring expert witnesses and lawyers. The cost of paying for experts, lawyers, travel, missed work, long-distance calls and faxes reaches into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, just to participate minimally in a case of this sort. In Texas, the state has provided zero, zilch, nada, despite the fact that 40 percent of Hudspeth County residents (including Sierra Blanca) live in poverty. Adding insult to injury, the state won't even pay to have the key documents in the case, like the license application, translated into Spanish, although Spanish is the first language for a large percentage of Sierra Blancans.
Thus protests have followed the hearings across the state, as the mobile charade moves back and forth from west Texas to Austin. Five protests in two weeks of hearings, including one in Mexico City, garnered international press coverage and put some heat on Governor George W. Bush, a long-time supporter of the dump. Inside the hearings, cross examination of the state's witnesses by citizen-activists produced some memorable moments as well. When asked why the low-level waste dump at Maxey Flats, Kentucky, was closed, Rick Jacobi, the "brains of the state's nuclear dumping agency" responded that "it ran into some regulatory problems" not that it leaked radioactivity into the surrounding environment thousands of years before its designers predicted. When asked about long-term health effects from the Chernobyl disaster, he reported that "reputable scientists" find no health problems associated with the massive radioactive release and that only power plant workers and firefighters suffered from the accident.
On January 27, Dennis Harner, the Texas Low Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Authority's "expert" on socioeconomics reaffirmed a statement from his written testimony that the only possible negative outcome of a radioactive dump in Sierra Blanca would be disagreement among local citizens over how to spend the millions of dollars that would be paid to Hudspeth County as "impact" funds. When El Paso citizen Michael Wyatt asked if it might not be a negative for the community if the dump released radioactivity into the surrounding environment, as all previous dumps have, he was rewarded with a truly inspired nugget of nuclear wisdom from Harner, who pointed out that having a Superfund site in your county was not necessarily bad since it creates millions of dollars in remediation-related business.
The state's so-called hearing continued in Austin until mid-March. The judges are expected to announce their approv-, uh, that is, their decision, on the license in mid-May. The three Bush-appointed TNRCC Commissioners, who have not heard any of the evidence (such as it is), are expected to complete the charade with a final ruling on the license in early June. If nothing else, the hearing record created by this case, veering daily between repression and farce, should provide a clear road map for an appellate judge to review, an avenue SBLDF may pursue. Another potential avenue is killing the dump through political channels when the Texas Legislature returns next year. The Texas House of Representatives has already soured on the deal, which was barely kept alive last year by Governor Bush and Lt. Governor Bob Bullock. And a third possibility was demonstrated last month by fellow dump opponents in Ward Valley, California, who summoned several hundred defenders to occupy the sacred site in the Mojave Desert. Sierra Blanca opponents not only stand in solidarity with Ward Valley but are also looking to California for some direction on what the future may hold for west Texas. Power to the people!
For further involvement contact the Sierra Club Lone Star, scls@igc.apc.org.