Dear HCN,
While Jon Christensen did
a great job of detailing Nevada’s battle against the permanent
storage of nuclear waste (HCN, 7/2/01: Can Nevada bury Yucca
Mountain?), the story unfortunately was not broad enough to tackle
the question of what if Yucca Mountain’s opening is delayed. That
issue, too, encompasses the West.
The fact is
that several of the Eastern nuclear power plants are running out of
space for their above-ground on-site storage yards, while others
are facing the deadline for agreements they made with local
communities years ago that the waste would be stored on site for
only so many years.
The answer to on-site storage
is supposed to be Yucca Mountain, but with Yucca falling through
the cracks, one powerful consortium of utilities, Northern States
Power, has looked to Utah. The consortium is acting as a parent
company to Private Fuel Storage, which has signed a still-secret
contract with the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians, whose tribe
is just 60 miles from Salt Lake City, to store waste on the
reservation for up to 40 years.
Utah Gov. Mike
Leavitt, understandably, has freaked out about this and convinced
the Utah Legislature to pass a volley of legislation, some of it
possibly illegal, to keep the waste out, but time and time again
the tribe, the consortium and even the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission point to the tribe’s sovereignty and Utah’s inability to
usurp it.
Now, in a sense, it is Utah against
Nevada. If Yucca is approved, Skull Valley likely won’t get their
interim site. If Yucca is killed, and the U.S. spends another two
decades looking for a permanent solution, waste will roll to the
Skull Valley. Such a battle is unfortunate, but increasingly real.
Jeff
Schmerker
Tooele,
Utah
The author writes for the Tooele Transcript-Bulletin.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Plenty of fallout from a Yucca Mountain delay.
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