A settlement last week over where to dump Kansas’ radioactive waste settled nothing and leaves Kansas and the nation with dwindling options for disposal of low-level waste, officials said.

After a failed appeal and months of negotiations, a compact of states agreed to let Nebraska pay $141 million to be relieved of its obligation to build a regional depository within its borders.

The decision by the Central Interstate Low-Level Radioactive Waste Compact ended years of litigation and a decadeslong effort to build a dump site in Nebraska for radioactive waste produced there and in Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana.

“It is frustrating,” said Ron Hammerschmidt, director of the Division of Environment at the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.

“The compact system hasn’t worked. Congress needs to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to handle this on a national basis,” he said.

Running out of space

In 1980, Congress told states to put together regional compacts to develop dumps for low-level radioactive waste, such as contaminated tools and clothes that are produced by nuclear power plants, hospitals and research centers.

Kansas currently sends its low-level radioactive waste to sites in South Carolina and Utah. But the South Carolina facility has told the Central Interstate compact it is closing its doors in 2008 to waste from states outside its region. The Utah site has ample capacity but doesn’t accept the more highly contaminated low-level waste, officials said.

Hammerschmidt said Kansas and other states would have time to find a solution. “We’re not going to see it show up on bags on street corners,” he said.

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But given that it has been more than 20 years since the compact system was launched and not one site has been developed anywhere in the country, officials point out that time is running out.

‘Back to square one’

Warren Wood, general counsel for the Wolf Creek nuclear plant near Burlington, noted the license application for the Nebraska site was submitted in 1990. Then Nebraska officials sought to back out of the deal, kicking off a controversy that brewed in the courts for most of the 1990s.

“There was a lot of time wasted,” Wood said. “We’re back to square one.”

Now some of the states in the compact are looking toward Texas, where a license has been filed to build a waste disposal facility in sparsely populated Andrews County. But previous efforts to locate radioactive dumps in Texas have been met with waves of opposition.

“Nobody wants to have a facility in their back yard,” Wood said. “Wherever there is an effort to get one developed there is typically opposition, and so far the opposition has succeeded.”

The money Nebraska is to pay in the settlement goes back to the compact, officials said. Utilities that have contributed to the compact probably will seek to get the money returned to them.

Nebraska in a bind

The settlement with Nebraska ended a lawsuit in which a federal judge in Lincoln, Neb., found that former Nebraska Gov. Ben Nelson, now a U.S. senator, had tried to stop the dump from being built for political gain. Nebraska officials argued they didn’t license the facility because of environmental concerns.

The compact of states voted 3-1 for the settlement. Nebraska wasn’t allowed to vote. Kansas was the lone vote against it.

James O’Connell, Kansas’ representative on the compact, said the settlement “signals a failure of the compact system when there’s no present and complete alternative site in place.”

The decision has Nebraska officials scurrying to find ways to pay off the debt amid a tight budget.

Reports have indicated Nebraska has offered to pay Texas a flat fee of $25 million to accept the compact’s waste, raising alarms by some opponents of the waste facility in Texas. They worry that if Texas opens to states outside its compact, it could become the dumping ground for the entire nation.

Meanwhile, the few current facilities continue to fill up.

“We will eventually get to the point that we have to do something,” said Wood. “There is going to have to be a solution eventually.”