Melrose, Minnesota native, Joe Egan, one of the nation's top nuclear attorneys and a champion of non-proliferation causes, died May 7, 2008, of gastro-esophageal cancer. He was 53. As lead attorney for the State of Nevada in its multi-year battle against the Federal Government's proposed high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles north of Las Vegas, he arranged for his ashes to be spread across the volcanic terrain there with the eulogy, "Radwaste buried here only over my dead body."
The son of turkey farmer Dick Egan and his wife Lucy from Melrose, Egan made his way to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning three degrees, in physics, nuclear engineering, and technology&policy. He was also captain of MIT's varsity track team and an accomplished concert pianist. After working in the control room of a nuclear power plant and consulting on policy issues for the United Nations and other organizations, he attended law school at Columbia University, where he graduated with honors and went on to practice nuclear law, first at LeBoeuf, Lamb, Green&MacRae in New York, and later at Shaw Pittman in Washington, D.C. In 1994, he formed his own firm devoted exclusively to nuclear environmental and non-proliferation law. His small firm played a role in almost every significant nuclear legal dispute in the world in the ensuing years.
Teaming with nuclear shipper Edlow International Co. in 1994, Egan brought together over a dozen countries to prosecute the return to the U.S. of more than 5000 tons of weaponsgrade uranium that had been disseminated across the globe under the Government's "Atoms for Peace" program in the 1950s and 60s. Forming alliances with such unlikely partners as reactor operators, environmental groups, and arms control advocates, he lobbied the Government to reinstitute its defunct take-back program for spent nuclear fuel containing the highly sensitive uranium, and then defended that program in emergency litigation twice brought by the Governor of South Carolina to block the material from entering the country and being stored at the Government's Savannah River Site in that state. In the end, Egan saw the return and neutralization of weapons-grade uranium from nearly all of the 42 countries supplied by the U.S. The late Paul Levanthal, founder of the non-proliferation group Nuclear Control Institute, called Egan's campaign the greatest achievement in non-proliferation in his lifetime.
Representing Texas billionaire Harold Simmons in his planned development of a huge low-level radioactive waste disposal site in remote West Texas, Egan tangled with Envirocare of Utah in the late 90s, then the nation's only such dump, owned by Iranian national Khosrow Semnani. When Semnani tried to block permitting for the Texas site, Egan filed a federal antitrust suit, shutting off multi-million-dollar government shipments to the Utah dump for nearly 11 months. During that time, Egan suffered a series of harassments, including death threats, break-ins at his home and office, and late-night harassment by thugs in unmarked cars. Though he never formally pegged these infractions to Semnani, the harassment ceased when the case was settled and Semnani's monopoly was broken. Semnani, who had admitted getting his disposal license by paying Utah's chief regulator $600,000 in cash and gold coins, later sold his site to Energy Solutions, Inc. for over $500 million. Semnani was represented in the case by Brent Hatch, son of Utah's Senator Orrin Hatch, then head of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.
Egan represented 19 national governments on nuclear issues and was past president of the International Nuclear Law Association. In what became the first significant transnational environmental dispute, Egan represented the nation of Ireland in its battle with Great Britain over Britain's pollution of the Irish Sea with radioactive waste and discharges from the Sellafield facility, Britain's giant bomb-making and nuclear fuel reprocessing complex in Cambria. As was his hallmark, Egan used experts in probabilistic risk assessment to assess the risks and damages associated with operation of the facility.
Closer to home, Egan sued Lockheed Martin over its mismanagement of the Government's giant Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Paducah, Kentucky on behalf of several whistleblowers and the Natural Resources Defense Council, arguing that the firm had helped contaminate hundreds of acres of land and illegally disposed of both radioactive and hazardous wastes in the area by the thousands of truckloads. It became the first case in which the Department of Justice intervened as lead prosecutor in an environmental case of this type, arguing that the Government had been defrauded of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Egan launched his largest effort, however, as lead counsel for Nevada in its opposition to the government's proposed $77 billion high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain. He was deputized by Governor Kenny Guinn on the afternoon of the September 11 terrorist attacks, and terrorist threats became a key issue in his battle over the proposed transport of thousands of shipments of nuclear waste from across the country to Nevada. Though ardently supportive of nuclear energy as an electric power source, Egan said he took on the project after learning in 1996 that the mountain had been discovered by the Energy Department to be highly porous and would leak radioactive contamination far more quickly than was ever anticipated. Since 2001, he led several lawsuits by Nevada in the D.C. Federal Court of Appeals, some of which overturned key government actions and legal assumptions and put the project on the verge of extinction. In parallel, he argued for the safe storage of nuclear waste at reactor sites.
Yucca Mountain was not Mr. Egan's first foray into the Silver State. In 2000, he was appointed president of the Non-Proliferation Trust, Inc., a venture composed by, among others, Judge William Webster (former CIA- and FBI-Director), Admiral Bruce DeMars (former head of the U.S. Nuclear Navy), General P.X. Kelley (former Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps) Admiral Dan Murphy (former Commander of the Sixth Fleet), and Dr. Tom Cochran (a top arms control advocate) to bring a "Red October" type submarine from Russia to the Strip in Las Vegas, where it would serve as a Cold War Museum and adjacent casino. The project, part of a larger effort to enhance non-proliferation and cleanup efforts in Russia by raising $10 billion through Russia's importation of used nuclear fuel from Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, stalled for lack of U.S. government approval.
Egan is survived by his wife Patricia, daughter Jennifer, and son Warren, who live in Naples, Florida, as well as his parents and siblings Timothy, Michelle Langlas, Anne Gant, and Denise Loonan.
Tribute provided by Egan, Fitzpatrick&Malsch, PLLC
Obituary from the New York Times (Monday, May 12, 2008).
