This is an editoral from the Spartanburg Herald-Journal newspaper dated Friday, April 12, 2002

Hodges should maintain his demand for enforceable deadline

Governor Jim Hodges is wise to stick to his demands for a legally enforceable plan for the plutonium scheduled to be shipped to the Savannah River Site.

A Colorado senator criticized Hodges in a congressional hearing Wednesday. Senator Wayne Allard claimed that the governor is playing political games at the expense of national security and the environment.

That's more than a bit overblown. The truth is that Hodges is trying to protect the environment of South Carolina and the health of its citizens.

Alarm is understandably eager to get rid of the plutonium stored at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in his state. That site is scheduled to be cleaned up by the federal government by 2006. Much of the plutonium is scheduled to be sent to South Carolina, and Alarm wants shipments to start as soon as possible.

But South Carolina shouldn't bear the burden of long-term storage of dangerous highly radioactive plutonium at a facility that wasn't designed for that storage.

And that is likely to happen if Hodges relaxes his demand that federal officials commit to a specific plan and timetable for the waste before shipping it to SRS.

The state agreed to host the material when the government planned to reprocess some of it into fuel for nuclear power plants and immobilize the rest for long-term storage at the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste facility in Nevada.

But State officials became concerned when federal authorities scrapped the reprocessing and Yucca Mountain plans last year. The permanent solutions were put on hold, but the temporary move of the waste to SRS was still scheduled.

Hodges and other state officials could see that South Carolina was going to become a long-term storage site for this very dangerous material. That's unacceptable. The Savannah River Site is not suitable for such storage.

Now the government has recommitted itself to reprocessing the waste and using the Yucca Mountain site. But there is not guarantee that federal authorities won't change their plans again. Various groups are protesting and suing to prevent both long-term solutions.

Despite the heated rhetoric of Alarm and other federal authorities, state officials cannot afford to simply accept the verbal assurances of Washington. South Carolina needs just what Hodges has demanded, a legally enforceable timetable for removing plutonium from South Carolina before the waste comes here.

If state officials back down and allow the waste to come here without such a contract, we will find ourselves powerless to get rid of this material.