Opinion ID: 1506273
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: maxey flats.

Text: When it enacted the 1962 legislation that created the Kentucky Atomic Energy Authority and authorized the operation of nuclear and radioactive waste disposal sites, [2] the General Assembly recognized that there would be a continuing and perpetual need to maintain, repair, and improve the containment features of such sites. It assigned that responsibility to the Commonwealth. It is recognized by the General Assembly that any site used as a radioactive waste material site will represent a continuing and perpetual responsibility in the interests of the public health, safety and general welfare, and that the same must ultimately be reposed in a sovereign government without regard for the existence or non-existence of any particular agency, instrumentality, department, division or officer thereof. In the event the Authority shall acquire and dedicate one or more radioactive waste material sites, the Authority may convey such sites to the Commonwealth for no other consideration than an undertaking of the Commonwealth to maintain, safeguard and operate the same in the interests of the public health, safety and welfare. Any such conveyance may contain an express provision that the Commonwealth thereby assumes such continuing and perpetual responsibility, and the Commissioner of Health (or other officer succeeding to his functions) is hereby authorized to sign the same and bind the Commonwealth in that regard; and any such conveyance may be made subject to any existing contractual rights of licensees using source, by-product and special nuclear materials to make use of the site or sites in the disposition of radioactive waste materials. 1962 Ky. Acts, ch. 100, § 19, codified at KRS 152.690, repealed 1978 Ky. Acts, ch. 279, § 9 (emphasis added). The Maxey Flats nuclear waste disposal site opened in 1963 under lease to Nuclear Engineering Co. (NECO). The lease was subsequently transferred to U.S. Ecology, Inc. Instead of purchasing, e.g., a DIC policy to defray the cost of its continuing and perpetual responsibility, the Commonwealth sought to build a fund for that purpose by charging burial fees to its lessees, who presumably passed those fees along to the waste haulers. See Lease between Kentucky Atomic Energy Authority and NECO, Jan. 21, 1963, at 4-6 (Pl.Ex. 49) and testimony of J. Scoville (deposition read at trial). The Commonwealth closed the Maxey Flats site in 1977. A study completed shortly thereafter determined that the site did not pose a public health hazard but that there existed a potential for migration of radionuclides to adjacent properties. In 1980, the General Assembly enacted KRS 211.898, viz: The Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Cabinet shall proceed toward the stabilization and decommissioning of any nuclear waste facility owned by the Commonwealth on July 15, 1980 as expeditiously as is reasonably possible in order to place the facility in such a condition that active ongoing maintenance is eliminated and only surveillance and monitoring are required. 1980 Ky. Acts, ch. 17, § 4. However, when the NREPC undertook to perform this mandate, it discovered that the estimated cost of complying with it far exceeded the burial fees set aside for that purpose.