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Subject: Utah Tribe in Nuke Dump Flap
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 13:25:22 EST
Utah Tribe in Nuke Dump Flap
.c The Associated Press
By ROBERT GEHRKE
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- For Leon Bear and 27 other members of the Skull Valley
Band of Goshute Indians, home is an 18,000-acre patch on the parched alkali
flats of Utah's western desert.
The reservation is tucked between a low-level nuclear waste dump, a hazardous
waste incinerator, an Army chemical and biological testing range, the nation's
largest storehouse for chemical weapons and an Air Force bombing range.
Those unsavory neighbors make it hard for the tribe to attract jobs, and more
and more of the band's members are leaving to find work.
So the tribe decided to make a virtue of its desolation. It contracted to
temporarily store high-level nuclear waste shunned by every other state.
But the plan has divided the tribe and placed it in conflict with state
leaders, who say they're worried the dump will become permanent. They also
shudder at the thought of waste being shipped along Interstate 80 and fear the
site's proximity to the bombing range.
Legislators have backed Republican Gov. Mike Leavitt in opposing the proposed
dump, voting for state control over a chain of dirt roads around the
reservation.
That would allow the state to block waste shipments on paved roads or rail
lines that cross the roads if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approves the
dump and it begins operating, which could happen as soon as 2002.
``We just don't want it,'' Leavitt said. ``The drawbridge will be raised to
the waste storage utilities and permission to cross refused.''
Lawmakers have also stripped the proposed dump's owners of protection from
lawsuits that could result from an accident there.
Bear, the tribal chairman, eyes the jobs, roads, sewer system, health clinic
and fire station the project backers have promised for his tiny reservation 50
miles west of Salt Lake City. He said the safety arguments weren't voiced
against the other hazardous repositories in the area, and raising them now
``is racist.''
``All we have is our land,'' Bear said. ``If this economic development can be
done in balance between the environment, our people and private corporations,
why not do it?''
But one-third of the tribe's adult members don't see it that way. They and the
state have gone to federal court to challenge the lease with the utilities.
``We are going to be waking up every morning wondering when this thing is
going to be contaminating our land,'' Margene Bullcreek, a Skull Valley
Goshute and founder of a group opposed to the facility, said in a hearing last
year. ``If they tell us they are doing us a favor by making millionaires out
of us, then why are they sacrificing our lives?''
In 1996, the tribe signed a potentially lucrative lease with Private Fuel
Storage, a consortium of eight utilities: Southern California Edison, GPU
Nuclear Corp., Northern States Power, Consolidated Edison of New York,
Illinois Power, Indiana Michigan Power, Southern Nuclear Operating Co. and
Genoatech.
Neither the tribe nor the consortium will disclose how much the tribe would
receive.
Under the plan, 40,000 metric tons of spent reactor rods would be stored in
concrete casks with 2 1/2-foot-thick walls and placed on a concrete pad 3 1/2
miles from a cluster of Goshute homes.
Only 28 of the band's 119 members live on the reservation, where a rocket-
testing facility is the main employer. Bear said the dump's 200 temporary and
50 permanent jobs are needed to keep more members from leaving and further
eroding the tribe's heritage.
Although the lease spans 25 years, with a 25-year option, Bear and the
consortium point out that it may be just 10 years before the Department of
Energy opens a permanent nuclear waste repository.
The DOE is looking at burying the waste at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest
of Las Vegas, as early as 2010. But Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn remains vehemently
opposed to the plan, which is why Leavitt and other Utah officials worry that
the Goshutes' dump would become permanent.
Leavitt says the waste should stay at the utilities' reactor sites until a
permanent repository is found. Scott Northard, the project manager for Private
Fuel Storage, says that would force the reactors to stop operating because
they can't store more waste.
Northard says one big reason for Utah's opposition is fear and mistrust
stemming in part from open-air nuclear tests in Nevada during the 1950s that
may have caused cancer in southern Utah residents downwind of the explosions.
Leavitt, a southern Utah native who had friends die of cancer, says the state
won't back down even if can't stave off the utilities in court.
``We're clearly at a disadvantage in terms of our resources but we're not at
all disadvantaged in terms of our resolve,'' he said.
Bear has seen a bottled-water company reject the reservation because of its
inhospitable surroundings. But he says the tribe will still try other economic
development options if the plans for the dump fall through.
``We're not going to die, that's for sure,'' he said. ``We're going to be out
there. We've survived all these years and will continue to survive.''
AP-NY-04-01-99 1324EST
Copyright 1998 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP
news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise
distributed without prior written authority of The Associated Press.
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Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
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