And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Source: http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/nuclear-waste-fight.html ===================================================== Tribe in Utah Fights for Nuclear Waste Dump By MATTHEW L. WALD, April 18, 1999, New York Times SKULL VALLEY GOSHUTE RESERVATION, Utah -- The desert here is silent, but for bird song and wind. The vegetation is springtime green, the mountain tops covered with snow for the next month or so, and all is still except for the jack rabbits, hawks and occasional antelope, and a rare car on the two-lane blacktop road. But this is a rough neighborhood, environmentally speaking. Behind the Stansbury mountains, the only source of potable water here, the Deseret Chemical Depot holds half the United States' chemical weapons and an incinerator. To the north, a magnesium factory has let clouds of chlorine gas loose into the reservation's air. To the northwest, a private company buries low-level nuclear waste under a license obtained after the operator gave gold coins and a condominium to a state environmental regulator. Three sites nearby store toxic chemicals. To the southwest, the Army tests protective gear for chemical and biological warfare at the Dugway Proving Ground. And to the west, the Air Force trains F-16 pilots, who sometimes crash. The reservation could also provide storage for more than half the nation's civilian nuclear waste, the tiny Skull Valley Band of the Goshute tribe says. The tribe has signed a 50-year lease with eight electric companies, led by Northern States Power Co. of Minnesota and including Consolidated Edison Co. of New York, to use 840 of the reservation's 18,000 acres for storage. The tribal chairman, Leon Bear, argues that the project is safe and that his tribe is using its last asset, its land, to assure its preservation. But Gov. Michael Leavitt, who grew up downwind of atmospheric nuclear tests, says that he will do whatever it takes to stop the plan. "I have seen with my eyes the effects of radioactive material," Leavitt said. "I had friends in childhood die, farmers lose herds of sheep only to be told by the federal government it must have been something they ate." The Skull Valley Band has about 120 members (depending on who is counting), half of them adults, but only 24 people live here, about 50 miles west of Salt Lake City. Nuclear waste could bring the others back, Bear said. "It's because of the economics, that's why people left," he said. "There's nothing there for them." The waste storage site, which would be a concrete pad covered with concrete silos, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, would produce 40 or 50 permanent jobs, Bear said, for guards, technicians and administrative workers. Today, a plant on the reservation that tests rocket motors employs a few members of the tribe as security guards. There is also a tribally owned convenience store, most of its shelves empty, which sells gas, six kinds of beef jerky, and beaded knickknacks. The "village" area, overlooking where the waste would go, is a run-down collection of sheds, shacks, trailers, campers and weather-beaten homes, some abandoned; rusting hulks of cars and farm equipment dot the area. Here the utilities would pay rent, perhaps millions of dollars a year. For all their wants, the Goshutes are a sovereign tribe. So the state cannot veto the project, which will begin accepting waste in 2002 if the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which begins hearings later this year, grants a license. The commission has already licensed similar arrangements near reactors, and opponents, who include some members of the tribe, think it will do so here. Margene Bullcreek, who lives on the reservation, argued that the lease should have been put to a vote of all the adults, not just those who came to a small meeting where it was approved. Calling the waste dangerous and inconsistent with traditional respect for the land, her faction is asking the Interior Department to overturn the Bureau of Indian Affairs' approval of the lease. "We need to fall back on who we really are and what we really want," Ms. Bullcreek said. "This is where wisdom comes in. It wouldn't be wisdom if we go for the money. "It's really pretty down there," she said. "It's not a desert. There are deer in the mountains, eagles, badgers, raccoons, foxes." Other members of the tribe see it differently. "It's just land; it just kind of sits here," said Mary Allen, vice chairwoman of the tribe. Ms. Allen accompanied a reporter past the long row of wood stakes that mark where an access road to the storage site would be built. "What can we do with this?" she said. "There's no water out here." Dianne Nielson, executive director of the state Department of Environmental Quality, said, "Outsiders may say it's in the middle of nowhere, but in fact it's in the middle of everything." What would happen, Ms. Nielson asked, if an earthquake hit the area and released some nerve gas, and forced an evacuation? A leak of radioactive material at the same time could block people fleeing the area, she said. Utah took over the paved road from Tooele County and, near the beginning of the 27-mile route from Interstate 80 down to the reservation, erected a highway sign that says, "High Level Nuclear Waste Prohibited." Then the state seized from the county two dirt roads that run near the reservation, effectively blocking the utilities from crossing the roads with a railroad spur to the site. The roads, officially designated as "highways that serve a compelling statewide public safety interest," thus became the only unpaved highways in Utah. Leavitt has vowed to build "a moat" of state-owned land to prevent waste from coming in. Bear said that if this was done, his people would be the first desert tribe to learn to swim. The state fears that once the waste gets here, it will never go away. In theory, storage here would be "interim," until the Energy Department prepared a burial spot. All reactor operators signed contracts with the department in the mid-1980s and paid it fees. In return, the department was to begin taking waste deliveries in January 1998 for disposal. Now the department says it will begin taking the waste in 2010, at the earliest, if Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas, can be shown to be suitable. By that time, some reactors are expected to be out of storage. What would happen to the waste at the end of the 50-year lease? "The government is eventually going to want to bury it where it is collected," said Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, of Takoma Park, Md. "The Department of Energy never met a repository location it didn't like," Makhijani said. "Once you take all the trouble of taking the waste to a certain place, I have a sneaking suspicion they will find geological virtues nobody knew existed," and try to bury the waste there. Bear insisted that if the tribe wanted it moved, the utilities would have to take it away: "Do you think they would relinquish it to a bunch of Indians? I don't think so." But Leavitt said that wherever the wastes are now, they are better off there. "The nature of technological life is that we all have to live with the rule 'If you create waste, you take care of it,"' he said. &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit) Unenh onhwa' Awayaton http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/ &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
