ANTI-NUCLEAR ACTIVIST JOINS FINAL ENVIRONMENTAL PROTEST; ASHES PLACED ON PYRE AT PROPOSED DUMP SITE.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick Daily News Staff Writer

Seven months after her death, Antelope Valley environmental activist Stormy Williams took part in one last environmental protest.

Williams' cremated remains were symbolically burned again in a three-day American Indian ceremony in Ward Valley near the Colorado River, where opponents of a nuclear waste dump are encamped to block plans to drill test wells.

``I think we've won a moral victory there,'' said fellow activist Lyle Talbot, who delivered Williams' ashes to Ward Valley last week in a drawstring pouch - purple, her favorite color. ``I was especially pleased that even in death Stormy Williams is still the focal point of controversy over nuclear waste disposal.''

Federal Bureau of Land Management officials announced Wednesday that they were pulling out the law enforcement officers who had watched the encampment around the clock for three weeks, saying they would continue talks with American Indian leaders.

Anti-nuclear activists and members of five tribes that live along the Colorado River have been camped since October 1995 in the valley, which the Indians say is sacred to them but which the state wants as a dump for low-level nuclear waste, such as isotopes and gloves used in nuclear medicine or hardware contaminated at nuclear plants.

The federal government ordered the protesters off the land Feb. 13, but has made no move to remove them. Protest leaders say they don't know whether the latest action signals a change in the federal government's attitude.

Williams' ashes were placed in a funeral pyre, which was set afire and tended until sundown Thursday, when it was extinguished. The ashes were allowed to settle into a pit beneath the pyre and will be buried there.

``They did this in defiance of BLM regulations,'' said Talbot, a Lancaster resident who worked for years with Williams on Antelope Valley environmental campaigns.

Before her death last June at age 63 from breast cancer, Williams had asked for some of her ashes to be scattered at Ward Valley, Talbot said. Leaders of the Indian tribes offered to perform the ceremony, he said.

Widow of an Edwards Air Force Base rocket laboratory employee, Williams had made a name for herself for 10 years prodding regulatory agencies to clean up toxic waste in Rosamond and Mojave and lobbying against hazardous waste incinerators.

Long involved with community projects, Williams entered the environmental arena in 1987 when an organization called Southern Kern Residents Against Pollution campaigned to stop a company from building a $40 million gasification plant to burn auto fluff - a mulch made up of auto parts such as upholstery and dashboards.

``I was at a public hearing and saw the SKRAP people come in with their kids carrying signs. I thought, gee, this is great,'' Williams told the Daily News in 1993.

In 1988, she got involved when state officials announced they were investigating a cluster of nine childhood cancer cases that occurred in Rosamond between 1975 and 1985. In conjunction with the cancer study, state officials began investigating toxic contamination in Rosamond and Mojave.

Williams appeared at scores of protests and public hearings, almost always decked out in something purple and wearing a visor and sunglasses.