Published Sunday, July 9, 2000

Plan to store nuclear waste on reservation stirs passions

Tom Meersman / Star Tribune

SKULL VALLEY, UTAH -- Leon Bear picked up some of the chalky soil of the western Utah desert and crushed it gently into his palm. A light puff from his lips and it vanished into the air, leaving a ghostly powder covering his hand.

"That's why they call us the Goshutes," he said with a smile. "Our name means 'dusty people,' because my people always had this dust on them when they roamed the desert country."

Bear is not content to allow his economically disadvantaged 124-member band to languish in the dust any longer. As chief, he wants them to have computers, better education, a health clinic, a decent water system, new homes and jobs.

So he signed a lease in 1997 to accept as much as half of the nation's highly radioactive spent fuel from nuclear power plants in dozens of states, including Minnesota. They plan to store it for the next 20 years, or twice that long if necessary, on part of the tribe's 18,600-acre reservation about 70 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, until a permanent site is built.

"We're doing it as an economic venture," said Bear. "The benefits that'll come out of it for our people will be substantial."

But as the project moves closer to reality, opposition is building like a prairie dust storm.

The deal, which was signed by Minnesota-based Northern States Power Co. and a coalition of utility companies, has torn the small Goshute band apart and prompted charges of environmental racism.

Critics say NSP and its utility partners are taking advantage of an economically desperate community to dump unwanted and dangerous wastes.

"Northern States Power is just fortunate enough to have found a weak tribe that's going to put up with them and their partner utilities and their wastes," said Margene Bullcreek, a Goshute tribal member opposed to the project.

But Scott Northard, NSP nuclear assets director, said the criticisms are unfounded. "To say that we put them [the Goshutes] up to this is not a fair characterization," he said. "They began this on their own, they did research on their own, and they satisfied themselves about the safety of this before they ever talked to us."

The utilities say they desperately need a temporary site to store nuclear waste, and that the Utah project will not pose a danger.

Yet the deal also has angered Utah state officials, including the governor and the congressional delegation, who have vowed to challenge it in court if necessary.

And it has jolted some Utah residents to the realization that the desert just west of Salt Lake City, long a place of bombing ranges, military aircraft and weapons testing, has become a national disposal zone for all things hazardous: industrial materials, chemical and biological weapons and low-level radioactive wastes.

In late June, 60 people testified about the project at a two-day public hearing in Salt Lake City -- 80 percent of their testimony was in opposition.

"This is so typical of what happens on reservations these days," said Alberta Mason, a Navaho who is executive director of the nonprofit Environmental Justice Foundation in Provo, Utah. "There are very few successful economic development projects, and tribes face a choice between gambling casinos or nuclear wastes, because they bring the quickest cash revenue," she said. "There have got to be better choices for us."

Space crunch

The rationale for the Utah project is that the nation's 103 nuclear power plants are running out of space to store nuclear waste. The spent fuel will remain dangerously radioactive for tens of thousands of years, and a permanent federal repository will not be open until at least 2010, or even 2015, possibly at a site that scientists are studying at Yucca Mountain, Nev.

"This [the Utah project] is the bridge to Yucca Mountain," said NSP's Northard, who is also the utility group's project manager for the Utah site. "It is safe, efficient, economic and sound national policy to do this." NSP has contributed about $5 million to the initiative during the past six years as part of a coalition of eight sponsoring utilities, known as Private Fuel Storage of La Crosse, Wis.

If they don't resolve the waste problem, some utilities may be forced to shut down their nuclear plants prematurely. In Minnesota, NSP's Prairie Island nuclear plant in Red Wing is licensed to operate until about 2014; but it only has the capacity to store its nuclear waste through 2007, officials say.

The $3.1 billion Utah project would establish the first centralized storage area of its kind in the nation, and it would set off the largest mass movement of spent nuclear fuel in history: 4,000 casks from utilities in as many as 31 states, filled with spent nuclear fuel that has been stored underwater in pools in many cases since the Nixon administration.

For many critics, the biggest issue is safety.

"I have a hard time understanding why it is necessary to move this waste from one temporary site to another temporary site," said Jeri Roos, a resident of Provo, just south of Salt Lake City. "Every time the casks are moved, there's potential for danger and damage to them, and I would think we would want to move them as little as possible."

But others say it doesn't make sense to leave the wastes scattered across the country. Said Calvin Andrus, an engineering consultant on waste issues: "Which is more sensible: to store casks temporarily in a remote desert environment on concrete pads, or to leave them in relatively vulnerable pools in plants near major metropolitan areas?"

But Kerry Cartier, of the Utah-based Native American Tribal Organization, said the project does not have the blessing of other tribes.

"After the U.S. government has stolen most of our lands, your government believes that whatever Indian land is left is still good to be used as a garbage dump for your nuclear wastes that no one else with any good sense wants," Cartier said. "I cannot speak the words to tell you how absolutely abhorrent this concept is to me."

Scott Peterson, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade association, said that storing spent nuclear fuel in casks has been demonstrated to be safe at 21 nuclear plant sites, and that containers must meet rigorous safety standards.

"If it's so safe, keep it where it is," responded Roos. "The people of Utah do not want it here."

Tribal hopes

The Goshute tribe has been interested in storing nuclear wastes since 1990, Bear said. Some members have traveled to Minnesota, Sweden, England and Japan to see how radioactive material is handled and managed.

Although the financial details have been kept confidential, Bear and others say the nuclear waste project will bring prosperity to the reservation, including 42 full-time jobs. He said that 85 percent of the band's eligible voters have signed a resolution of support for the project.

"We'd like to have a lot of nice things like you white people," said Arlene Bear Wash, one of the older residents of the reservation and a supporter of the project. "Drive nice cars and have nice homes and have a lot of things and food and all that."

"I'm for it," said Miranda Wash, who left Skull Valley to work near Salt Lake City. "I want to move back to the reservation to get a job."

But tribal member Sammy Blackbear is skeptical. "The tribe has never seen the lease, and it has never voted on the lease," he said. "It's not a lot of land, but it's ours, and it goes against our culture and religion to bring something like this [nuclear waste] to Skull Valley."

"The real issue is not the money," said Bullcreek, who wants to stop the project. "The real issue is who we are as Native Americans and what we believe in. If we accept these wastes, we're going to lose our tradition and our need to keep the air, water and animals clean."

Blackbear and others have filed a lawsuit against the Bureau of Indian Affairs for conditionally approving the lease without adequate environmental or financial review. Blackbear also has accused Leon Bear of not consulting with the tribe.

But Bear said his critics represent only a small minority of the tribe. "They want the reservation to revert to the way it was," he said. "They want to live the old days all over again, and that's not going to happen."

A remote rangeland

There's no question that Skull Valley is remote. Only about 25 tribal members live on the reservation, most of them in a village of half a dozen modest houses and an equal number of trailers. Some homes have no running water, and the only commercial establishment is a small tribally owned convenience store and gas station.

The proposed site, which has not yet received a federal license, is 3.5 miles away from the village.

A draft environmental impact study by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission called the site "undeveloped rangeland which has no unique habitats, no wetlands and no surface water bodies or aquatic resources."

The study also estimated that someone living along the fenceline of the 820-acre site would receive minimal exposure to radiation, "not more than a small fraction of the normal background [naturally occurring] radiation dose in the United States."

A wider circle

Many outside the reservation say they emphathize with the tribe's dilemma, and respect its sovereign status, but strongly oppose the plan.

"What the Goshutes do on their own land is their business as long as it doesn't affect us," said Maryann Webster, an artist in Salt Lake City. "But this affects all the surrounding areas. This is not just a sovereign issue here."

Dianne Nielson, executive director of the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, said the state has dozens of concerns about the project. Among them:

Congress directed the federal Department of Energy to take title to the waste by 1998 and dispose of it. That hasn't happened, even though utilities have sued the government, lobbied for legislative changes, and tried unsuccessfully to send the spent fuel to a private storage area on the Mescalero Apache Indian reservation in New Mexico in the mid-1990s.

"All of that effort by powerful companies, yet none of that has moved the waste," Nielson said. "If the government's promise to the utilities wasn't good enough, what on earth are we offering here to assure that the PFS [Private Fuel Storage] facility will be temporary?"

Cartier, of the Utah tribal organization, agreed. "This nuclear waste dump is supposed to be temporary, but there's nowhere else to move its contents," he said. "That kind of temporary means permanent."

Peterson of the Nuclear Energy Institute said there's reason for optimism about finding a permanent site elsewhere. Last year the U.S. Department of Energy started a project in New Mexico to store radioactive military waste deep underground, he said, and there's no reason to believe that the government couldn't find a suitable spot for commercial nuclear waste, too.

What's ahead

Northard, of NSP, said that many of Utah's concerns will be addressed in more detail in hearings before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) makes a final decision about the license, probably late next year. If approved, the site could begin accepting waste by 2003.

Nielson said the state of Utah will appeal any NRC decision that grants a license for the project, and that it ultimately will take it to federal court.

Bear is particularly unhappy with Utah's opposition, which he regards as an inappropriate and illegal intrusion into the tribe's sovereign affairs. "It's a sad state of affairs when the state of Utah doesn't look at its own laws that they have on the books," he said. "According to Utah's Constitution, they say they won't bother Indian lands."

In fact, said Bear, the state of Utah had no qualms about granting permits to several hazardous waste landfills and storage areas within 30 to 50 miles of the reservation.

"It's environmental injustice to deny us this economic development on our own land," Bear said. "It's up to the NRC whether we get the license, not the state of Utah, and it's going to be done through scientific facts, not politics."

-- Staff writer Tom Meersman can be reached by email at: meersman@startribune.com

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