84-282 O WEST VALLEY COOPERATIVE AGREEMENT HEARING BEFORE THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON OF THE COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES NINETY-SEVENTH CONGRESS COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY DON FUQUA, Florida, Chairman ROBERT A. ROE, New Jersey MARILYN LLOYD BOUQUARD, Tennessee BERYL ANTHONY, JR., Arkansas* LARRY WINN, JR., Kansas BARRY M. GOLDWATER, JR., California EDWIN B. FORSYTHE, New Jersey MARGARET M. HECKLER, Massachusetts VIN WEBER, Minnesota JUDD GREGG, New Hampshire RAYMOND J. McGRATH, New York JOE SKEEN, New Mexico CLAUDINE SCHNEIDER, Rhode Island BILL LOWERY, California MERVYN M. DYMALLY, California t CONTENTS Dr. C. Worthington Bateman, Former Acting Under Secretary, Depart- James E. Jensen, Research Assistant, Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight of the Committee on Science and Technology.. James Larocca, Commissioner, New York State, Energy Research and Development Administration accompanied by Philip H. Gitlen, Esquire, Whiteman, Osterman & Hanna, Albany, N.Y., and Carmine J. Cle- mente, General Counsel and Secretary, New York State Energy Re- search and Development Authority... Sheldon Meyers, Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Waste Management; David McGoff, Chief, Waste Products Management Divi- sion; Warren Bergholz, Office of the General Counsel; and Leon Silver- Page WEST VALLEY COOPERATIVE AGREEMENT THURSDAY, JULY 9, 1981 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, Washington, D.C. The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 9:30 a.m., in room 2253, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Albert Gore, Jr. (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. Mr. GORE. The subcommittee will come to order. Under the Constitution, the executive branch has the responsibility to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." This phrase contains the glue that holds our Government together. Without the implicit trust of Congress in the ability of the Executive to make agreements and administer laws according to congressional intent, the separation of powers becomes meaningless. Even the oversight subcommittees of Congress must and do assume a general level of good-faith commitment by the Executive to carrying out its responsibilities. That responsibility to faithfully execute the laws is particularly important when the society, through the Congress, is attempting to deal with sensitive problems around which only a tenuous consensus exists. Today, the subcommittee will examine a problem in which it seems clear that the executive branch fell short in its responsibilities, either through carelessness or because of overriding pressure to reach agreement with the State of New York on a nuclear waste problem that has bedeviled the country for years. On October 1, 1980, the President signed into law a bill to provide for the decontamination and decommissioning of the West Valley Nuclear Waste Site. The West Valley facility, near Buffalo, N.Y., was the only commercial nuclear fuel reprocessing plant to ever operate in the United States. It ceased operation in 1972, leaving some 600,000 gallons of high-level liquid waste in temporary storage. Last year's legislation authorized a cooperative agreement between the Department of Energy and the State of New York to solidify and dispose of the waste in the best possible manner. The law and the legislative history represented a consensus on many difficult issues, including the proper roles of Federal and State government in financing the project, the balancing of safety and environmental considerations against the economic realities of our time, the best technologies to achieve the decontamination of the site, and, indeed, the delicate questions of whether nuclear waste sites can be entirely cleaned up. (1) |