Senate Backs Redefinition of Atom Waste

By Matthew L. Wald - The New York Times

WASHINGTON, June 3 -- The Senate voted Thursday to give the Energy Department the authority to reclassify nuclear waste so it could be left in aging tanks, some of them already leaking, rather than be pumped out for disposal elsewhere.

The vote would reverse a decision last July by a federal district court judge in Idaho who had ruled, in a suit brought by environmentalists and backed by several states, that the high-level radioactive material must be buried deep beneath the ground.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, had inserted language drafted by the Energy Department into a military authorization bill that would let the department reclassify wastes so they could be kept in the storage tanks at the Savannah River Site in his state.

But Senator Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington, where the largest volume of nuclear waste is stored, proposed an amendment that would have deleted the Graham language from the bill. She argued that it would set a precedent for her state and Idaho, where there are similar wastes. Some of the tanks in Washington are leaking, while those in Idaho and South Carolina are not.

Adding the amendment to a military bill in wartime, and doing so at a closed committee session, amounted to ''a sneaky process behind closed doors,'' she said. The idea should have gone through the energy committee and should have been considered in open hearings, she argued.

''I don't think anybody can seriously stand on the floor and say the change in the definition of hazardous nuclear waste is the jurisdiction of the Armed Services Committee,'' she said in debate. ''It is not.''

Mr. Graham argued that his amendment would give state regulators the final say on what constituted adequate clean-up and that South Carolina was ready to proceed with that determination before the Savannah River tanks could leak.

On a 48-to-48 vote Thursday, the Senate rejected Ms. Cantwell's amendment. After the vote, Ms. Cantwell, who had held up action on the bill for a week over the issue, said that the Senate would probably take the question up again. The provision's future in the House of Representatives is uncertain