Store nuclear waste on reservation? Tribe split

By H. Josef Hebert

updated 9:24 a.m. ET June 27, 2006

SKULL VALLEY, Utah - Leon Bear, a stocky man in T-shirt and jeans, peers across the sagebrush-pocked valley where his ancestors once chased Pony Express riders and sees the future for his dwindling tribe: Nuclear waste.

Just west of the gun-barrel straight, two-lane road that darts through the Skull Valley Goshute Reservation, Bear wants to store 4,000 steel and concrete canisters of highly radioactive used fuel from nuclear power plants.

The tribe would reap tens of millions of dollars in rent over the next 40 years.

“I’ve been shown there’s no problem. The way they plan to handle it, it’s safe,” the 46-year-old tribal leader insists, escorting a visitor around the reservation in a glistening new pickup truck.

The truck is an example of the largess the tribe already has received from a consortium of eight electric utilities that nine years ago signed a lease with the tribe to put 40,000 tons of reactor waste on the reservation.

It’s the kind of deal other tribes have rejected, that most communities would oppose, one that spells “not in my back yard” in the brightest of colors. Utah’s establishment in Salt Lake City, the capital 45 miles away, is enraged.

Racism or riches?
Critics, including some within the tribe, call it environmental racism at its rawest.

But Bear says it’s the way to riches that will mean new homes, new jobs and better health care for the 118 members of his tribe. Only about two dozen — including children — still live on the 18,000-acre reservation, but this will bring many of the others back, he predicts.

The Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs approved the lease in 1997. The deal is yet to be consummated amid a mountain of lawsuits, regulatory hurdles and bitter opposition. It’s close, though.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a license for the dump in February. It rejected arguments that its location is unsafe because hundreds of F-16 jet fighters fly over the reservation on the way to bombing runs over nearby government land. The chance of a crash that could result in the release of radiation is one in a million, an adequate risk, the NRC said.

Private Fuel Storage LLC of Wisconsin, the consortium that would build and run the dump, has begun looking for nuclear power plant owners to sign up for waste shipments.

“We have to store this stuff somewhere,” says PFS Chairman John Parkyn. The utilities “were promised this material would be collected and removed to a central location, and now we have one.”

Waiting for Yucca
If Bear and Parkyn get their way, it will mark a watershed in addressing the thorniest problem facing the nuclear industry: where to put nearly 60,000 tons of highly radioactive reactor waste now stored at power plants in 31 states, and the additional 2,000 tons being generated each year.

The government promised to take the waste beginning in 1998, but a planned federal site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada is years behind schedule. Some say it may never be built.

The PFS consortium has spent more than $20 million so far, including licensing costs and payments to the Skull Valley tribe under its 1997 lease.

But no utility has committed to send waste to Utah, and four of the companies that helped finance the project so far have said they won’t commit any more money as long as Yucca Mountain moves forward.

If Yucca Mountain encounters more hurdles and delays, utilities will turn to Skull Valley, Parkyn predicted in an interview.

$20 million spent so far
The PFS consortium has spent more than $20 million so far. Neither Bear nor PFS will say how much of that the tribe has received or will receive over the next 40 years if the deal goes through. Speculation is that it could be as much as $100 million for the tribe.

Still, it’s hard to find people in Utah who favor the dump.

“You’re batting in the 85 percent range of people who don’t want this project to go forward. As conservative as the state is, you don’t even see those kind of percentages in things like gay marriage,” says Jason Groenwold, director of the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, which opposes the project.

The state has tried all manner of maneuvers to stop the project, with little success so far. The legislature imposed steep taxes on anyone doing business with PFS and banned local governments from providing electricity and other services. The laws were declared unconstitutional by a federal court.

Utah’s senators have lobbied the Bush administration. So far, administration officials have said only that they remain committed to opening Yucca Mountain — 350 miles south of Skull Valley — and that the PFS project is not part of the government’s nuclear waste plan.

Dump opponents do have one significant victory. Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, got Congress to create a 100,000-acre wilderness near the Goshute reservation with a finger of protected land crossing — and essentially blocking — a proposed right of way for a rail spur to bring the waste to the dump. Parkyn says he’ll just bring the waste the last 26 miles by truck.

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