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agree on the manner and location of a permanent storage place for spent—and highly radioactive—nuclear power-plant reactor rods.
There is the still unresolved controversy over the transportation of radioactive cargoes over the state’s highways.
While progress is being made on some of these, it is an inch-by-labored-inch process as environmental protection realities are balanced against the ever-present special interest and political worries.
Beyond these, there is a long agenda of more mundane but no less critical concerns.
With the increasing industrialization of the Commonwealth, the disposal of conventional waste will require constant monitoring and control. Similar problems will be generated by projected increases in the state’s population, especially in the various regions of the urban corridor.
Astute and perceptive long-range planning in these and such other areas of water availability, will be imperative.
All of these will impact on the ecology of the state’s rivers, streams, the Chesapeake Bay and the coastal wetlands, to say nothing of the air itself. It should be said that the governor is firmly committed to cleaning up the Bay.
The agency which should be in the forefront of this protection and planning activity is the state Council on the Environment. It is ironic—and perhaps symbolic—that this agency has been relegated to a position of near invisibility in the state bureaucracy.
From an environmentalist’s viewpoint, perhaps the most shocking and insensitive action taken during the recently concluded session of the General Assembly had to do with the on-going-kepone pollution problem in the James River.
The kepone level in the river rises and falls, requiring bans on the taking of certain species of fish from the river when the poison reaches dangerous levels.
But in the waning hours of the 1983 session, the appropriation for the monitoring of the kepone level was diverted to other items in the budget.
Unless this money is restored, on July 1 the monitoring will be discontinued. It will then be impossible to determine the degree of health hazard posed by eating fish taken from the river, or to make the appropriate decisions concerning the use of the fish as food.
From a purely political perspective, it is understandable that Gen. Robb does not wish to offend his many supporters in the business community by becoming the point man in a charge to protect the environment. This, to a degree, would have to be done at their expense.
On the other hand, there are those^who are profoundly convinced that environmental protection is one of the most sacred trusts within the stewardship of the governor, and that the critical decisions associated with it properly should be kept above politics.
At the federal level, President Reagan is learning the bitter lesson: politicizing environmental protection can have explosive and highly embarrassing consequences.
With the rumblings presently being heard around the Commonwealth about the lack of a coherent environmental policy, the governor might profit wisely from the president’s experience.
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