This morning the House Revenue and Taxation Committee took the cake and put lots of green icing on it for a French manufacture of nuclear reactor fuel. Forget that this deal comes with as yet unspecified quantities of radioactive waste landing in Idaho to be buried as "low level waste" in pits and trenches and yet more to be stored in some sort of container awaiting final disposal with the bi-products of so many other projects which have kept the desert busy for decades north of Pocatello.
The Idaho National Lab is a leading research facility in military nuclear fuel production, disposal and clean up. I say clean up because not only has the production of nuclear fuel for military submarines left volumes of often highly radioactive materials in the desert over the Snake River Plain Aquifer but wastes were brought to Idaho from weapons plants and reactors including the Three Mile Island power plant after its nuclear accident those decades ago.
The DOE’s track record on promising to remove or find disposal or neutralization technology for radioactive wastes it brings to INL is poor to say the least. Some long lived less "hot" TRU wastes have left the state but highly radioactive spent fuels have remained here along with acre after acre of "low level" wastes which keep mounting in the desert with each additional research project which graces our sage brush and cactus deserts.
Some of this we might evaluate as worthwhile. We might say that some of this research has advanced science and produced progress in our ability to deal with the deadly wastes we continue to produce. But at what point do we stop and ask whether continuing to produce more wastes with no final location or process for disposition, at what point do we note that our state might be digging itself into a hole and asking for greater harm than good from these deals? Are we to quietly become the nation’s defacto disposal site?
By locating Ariva here and producing fuel for nuclear power plants on our own soil do we not simply fall back into a trap of paying all the cost and getting so little benefit in this deal. Even worse how do we put a price tag on the risk that these wastes will stay in Idaho forever? And why would we break what is very well understood principles of tax policy to incentivize and attract a company with a questionable track record in other nations?
We have no promise in the text of house bill 562 that we will have any jobs after construction of the plant is complete. We have no guarantee that after the city and county extend services to the facility that it will not close down or leave town because the nuclear industry in the US does not reach a state of revival because communities do not trust that they will not be left to live with radioactive wastes indefinitely. There are no clawbacks, no job or wage or benefit targets in this legislation.
In house bill 561 we extending to one company an exemption which was designed for a production process which produces a taxable product like food, fishing poles or widgets. The production exemption was designed to avoid duplicate taxation but nuclear materials are likely never going to be "sold" to any entity in Idaho. In fact these nuclear materials are technically not owned by Arevia, the manufacturer, but by the Department of Energy, which, by locating the plant here agrees to take the radioactive wastes the plant produces while we, the tax payers, foot the bill through our federal taxes and any impacts to our air water or local health from the toxic gases and byproducts of this production process.
Is this reasonable and consistent tax policy? Is this even an industry or company we want to work to bring into the state?
Why is it that again and again our tax principles fly so quickly out the window when huge dollar amounts are tossed before us?