Craig Welch, Seattle Times

The collection of European trash - lightning-rod heads, smoke detectors, needles used in chemotherapy - is polluted with radium, a naturally occurring, cancer-causing element that decays to radon and lasts in the environment for 16,000 years.  The shipment was loaded on trucks and will be repackaged and solidified in concrete before disposal.  

The shipment comes at a time when the state has been warring with the federal government to ensure the reservation, already embroiled in the nation's most expensive environmental cleanup, doesn't become the country's chief nuclear landfill.  Yet the state's top politician said nothing could have been done to prevent the waste's arrival.  

"To my shock, it has come to my attention that there is no federal regulatory authority over this kind of shipment," Gov.  Gary Locke said in a statement yesterday.  "No legislation, no treaty agreement, nothing regulates this particular substance or where it comes from." 

Because the radioactive material isn't man-made - like plutonium - it's not regulated by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.  Locke, state health officials and the private company that runs the dump site said the waste shipment was small, was properly handled and poses no health or environmental threat.  The same type of material has been shipped from within the country to the site since it opened for permanent storage of radioactive garbage 35 years ago.  Locke also pointed out that while yesterday's shipment contains roughly 20 curies of radioactive isotopes - double what the Health Department says is disposed of at the site each year - the facility holds more than 15 million curies of radioactive isotopes.  

But government officials and watchdog groups said the shipment raises serious questions about how much control the public has over buying and selling of waste for burial at Hanford.  And they acknowledged there was little public discussion about the shipment.  

"This is the type of material we accept every day or every week or every month," said John Erickson, director of the state Department of Health's division of radiation protection.  "But I think there's some concern about the long-term implications of this." 

Undisclosed amounts of foreign nuclear waste have been coming to Hanford through the years under secretly negotiated national-defense treaties, a byproduct of the Cold War.  But this is the first shipment of foreign waste to come to the commercial site operated by U.S.  Ecology, a private company and subsidiary of Boise-based American Ecology.  

U.S.  Ecology contracted with the Spanish Radioactive Waste Management in Madrid to dispose of the waste.  It is the only site in the United States licensed to accept such material; Spain has no low-level-waste disposal of its own.  But the waste could be as hazardous as other low-level nuclear waste, said Gerald Pollet, executive director of the watchdog group Heart of America Northwest.  

"This should be a huge policy issue," he said.  "If we have a debate about taking it from elsewhere in the U.S., we sure as heck shouldn't be accepting it from around the world." 

Last week Locke wrote to President Clinton, pointing out that neither federal officials nor the state have the authority to ban imports of foreign waste.  He wants the federal government to provide oversight of the waste.  The state also received a commitment from American Ecology to neither accept nor seek such shipments from foreign governments again.  Information from The Associated Press is included in this report.