Nevada joins fight against Utah nuke waste site

By Mary Manning
<manning@lasvegassun.com>
LAS VEGAS SUN

Utah and Nevada officials have united to fight a proposed temporary high-level nuclear waste storage site on an Indian reservation in northwestern Utah.

The Tooele County Commission signed a deal last week worth up to $300 million over 40 years to provide services for a repository proposed by Wisconsin-based Private Fuel Storage. The Goshute Indian tribe invited the company to bring the facility to its land in Utah.

Private Fuel Services is a consortium of eight electric utilities that need to store spent nuclear fuel rods until the federal government can offer permanent disposal.

Private Fuel Storage set its sights on 840 acres of the Goshute Indian Reservation southwest of Salt Lake City. The site can hold up to 4,000 steel canisters filled with high-level nuclear waste from the utilities and other companies until a permanent repository opens.

Yucca Mountain, the only site under study by the Department of Energy as a permanent repository for 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste, will not be ready before 2010, if it can pass scientific muster. The mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, was singled out by Congress as the sole site in 1987.

But Utah and Nevada state officials have teamed to oppose any temporary storage site in the West, officials in both states said.

Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt said he opposes the temporary storage deal. Like his counterpart Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn, Leavitt has opposed dumping nuclear waste in his state based on the need to protect the public's health and safety.

Dianne Nielson, chief of Utah's Department of Environmental Quality, said that temporary storage will increase risks to the environment and to health and safety. It also is an expensive alternative.

"Nuclear utility customers will pay twice for moving the wastes," she said.

Utah officials also fear that a temporary storage area could become permanent if Yucca doesn't open.

Because the repository would be built on tribal land, the state has no jurisdiction over the site itself.

Utah plans to fight the project every step of the way, Nielson said. Utah officials are prepared to go to court to stop it if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses the site.

"We continue to be told that temporary storage is perfectly safe," Nielson said. "If it is, then let it stay where it is."

In Nevada, Robert Loux, chief of the Agency for Nuclear Projects, said temporary storage is a waste of money, because the radioactive wastes can be stored at reactor sites in dry casks for at least 100 years.

"We generally think interim storage is unnecessary," Loux said.

Besides, having the waste moved so close to Nevada is a bad sign, he said.

"We think temporary storage is detrimental to Nevada as nuclear waste creeps closer and closer," Loux said. The Nevada office will review the proposed environmental impacts and Utah's comments on them, he said.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is scheduled to open two weeks of public hearings on the temporary site in Utah on Monday.

The commission could take up to three years to grant its approval for the Utah site. Next week's hearings are only the first step in the NRC process, commission spokeswoman Sue Gagner said.

First, Private Fuel Storage will write a draft of environmental impacts this summer. After that, the NRC staff will evaluate the safety of the project and write a report expected in the fall.

The final environmental impact report will not be ready until next year, and that will be followed by more public hearings, Gagner said.

Even if environmental impacts are minimal, the NRC's Atomic Energy and Safety Board has to schedule more hearings before final license is issued, she said.

Over the 40-year life of the storage project, the contract signed by PFS and Tooele County gives the county $90 million to $300 million, depending on how many nuclear rods are stored on the site. An annual payment of $500,000 is intended to help cover police and fire protection, in addition to the storage charge.

The Goshute tribe has not said what it will receive in the deal.