Utah Resisting Tribe's Nuclear Dump
By William Claiborne
Washington Post Staff Writer
SKULL VALLEY, Utah – For years the 119 members of the Skull
Valley Band of Goshute Indians dreamed of economic development that
would bring money and jobs to their desolate desert reservation and keep
their young people from leaving, as so many already have. A casino was
out because gambling is illegal in Utah. They considered tire recycling, a
fiberglass plant and even desert tourist attractions.
But the Goshutes' reservation is surrounded by the detritus of weapons of mass destruction and other hazardous materials. On one side lies the Army's Dugway Proving Grounds and its chemical and biological warfare laboratories; nearby are three hazardous waste dumps, including one that handles low-level radioactive material. To the north stands an Army-contracted incinerator for burning nerve gas materials, and not far from that is the Tooele Army Depot, which stores 43 percent of the nation's nerve gas agents.
Unable to attract investors to their 118,000 acres, at least partly because of its proximity to such odious facilities, the Goshutes' tribal leaders adopted the adage, "When in Rome do as the Romans do." They signed a contract last year with a consortium of eight utility companies to build a temporary storage facility for spent radioactive nuclear fuel rods, which could bring the tribe tens of millions of dollars.
However, the Goshutes had not reckoned with the formidable opposition they would encounter from Gov. Mike Leavitt (R). He vowed to swap state lands for the federal property that surrounds the reservation and create what he called a jurisdictional "moat" around the Goshutes' "island." Driving home his point, Leavitt also said a state-operated "drawbridge" would be figuratively raised to stop trucks or trains from bringing in the heavy steel casks containing spent nuclear fuel rods.
This barren corner of Utah has thus become a crucible for several issues being debated across the country, with Indian sovereignty clashing with concern for the environment and economic development bumping up against fear of the nuclear and chemical wastes produced by modern technology and welcome nowhere.
In his annual state-of-the-state address, Leavitt said the battle is not between Utah's government and a small, impoverished Indian tribe. It is "one state slugging it out with major utility companies eager to spend billions of dollars of ratepayer money to move high-level nuclear waste out of their yards into ours, where it would remain lethally hot from now until the year 11,999."
Strong words, some said. But radioactivity is not just an abstract concept for Leavitt. He grew up in southwestern Utah among "downwinders," who believe they suffered sometimes fatal effects of radioactive fallout from above-ground atomic bomb testing in the early 1950s in the nearby Nevada desert.
"I've seen pink clouds of radiation float over my grandmother's house," Leavitt said in an interview in his capitol office in Salt Lake City. "I had childhood friends who died of leukemia and cancer and neighbors who lost entire sheep herds overnight from radioactive fallout."
The Goshutes' tribal chairman, Leon D. Bear, called Leavitt's moat proposal "blatantly racist." Bear characterized it as an attempt not only to shut off the reservation's opportunities for business development but also to undermine Native American sovereign rights protected by the U.S. Constitution.
"Our land is our only resource, and if this land is useful for nothing but storing hazardous waste, then that's what we will do," Bear said as he looked over the bleak landscape here, 40 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, and pointed to the proposed dump site.
Bear said the spent nuclear fuel would be safely stored in 122-ton welded steel casks only for 10 years or so, until a permanent underground repository being constructed by the federal government at Yucca Mountain, Nev., is completed. Then, he said, the fuel would be transported to the permanent dump and the facility here would be dismantled.
Nonetheless, Leavitt is leaving nothing to chance in his campaign to prevent Private Fuel Storage LLC, the LaCrosse, Wis., firm representing the nuclear power companies, from completing an environmental impact review and obtaining a license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
He has had the state assume control of a county road here so it can block one access route to the proposed 840-acre storage site. He also has secured an agreement from Rep. James V. Hansen (R-Utah) to introduce legislation that would exchange state and U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands to form his "moat" around the Goshute reservation and prevent Private Fuel Storage from building a proposed 32-mile rail spur to the site.
In addition, Leavitt is seeking wilderness designations for BLM land on the west side of the Goshute reservation, which also could be used to block the proposed rail line to the storage site if he is unable to swap state land for federal land.
The wilderness proposal, which could affect millions of acres of federal land, put Leavitt in an unlikely alliance with environmentalists and wilderness advocates with whom he has feuded for years. The governor, who long has advocated a limited, piecemeal approach to federally protected wilderness, now finds himself backing a much larger designation, which happens to include land needed by the nuclear power consortium for rail access to the proposed waste storage facility.
"We are not going to grant them the right to cross our roads or build a rail line to transport this stuff," Leavitt said. "They [the power companies] don't want it in their back yards but they want to move it into ours. That should tell you something."
Diane Nielson, director of Utah's Department of Environmental Quality, said that because of the uncertainties involved in Nevada's Yucca Mountain repository and its certification as environmentally sound, the proposed Skull Valley dump cannot be viewed as a temporary facility.
Moreover, Nielson said, studies have shown a "high potential" for seismic activity in the Skull Valley area, which could damage storage casks and lead to radioactive emissions. She said also that the storage site is on the flight path of F-16 warplanes that regularly use a nearby bombing range, posing further risk of an accidental spill in the event of a crash.
Scott Northard, project manager for Private Fuel Storage, said each of Nielson's concerns could be applied to the hazardous waste facilities that already ring the Skull Valley Goshutes' reservation. Northard said the state government had a hand in licensing all of them and it continues to accept taxes and operating fees from them. "Only when the tribe wants to do it they suddenly have endless objections," Northard said.
Calling the storage proposal "provably safe," Northard said the fuel rods, after being transported here in 100 to 200 shipments a year in containers with 8-inch-thick walls, will be inserted in 16-foot-tall concrete and steel casks and stored on a concrete pad designed to withstand even the worst earthquake.
Bear said that apart from a rocket motor testing site that the tribe licensed to an aerospace company, the Skull Valley Goshutes have been unable to generate any substantial income on their bleak reservation, which is home to only five of the band's families, the rest having moved closer to jobs in surrounding towns.
Income from a nuclear fuel storage facility would provide 40 permanent jobs in addition to 500 temporary construction jobs. It also would provide the tribe with enough revenue to build a police station, fire station, health clinic and better water and electrical services, Bear said. All of these would help attract Skull Valley Goshutes back to the reservation, he said.
Bear said he is offended by assertions that his tribe is in conflict with Native Americans' traditional reverence of the earth, particularly since it was the state government that allowed much more dangerous nerve gas storage depots and other hazardous waste dumps into the region without asking for the Goshutes' approval.
"Just because we are Indians, why are they stereotyping us with the environmental thing?" Bear asked. "We don't have any wildlife here that is anywhere near being endangered, much less becoming extinct. . . . I told them, there is nothing out there to save."
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