Article from Salt Lake Tribune

["Jim Hardeman" <Jim_Hardeman@mail.dnr.state.ga.us>]

Colleagues -

The following article was posted yesterday in the Salt Lake Tribune.

Jim Hardeman
Jim_Hardeman@dnr.state.ga.us 

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Regulators Met by Ralliers At Waste Storage Hearing
 Sunday, June 25, 2000 
  
 
BY KIRSTEN STEWART
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

   Federal nuclear regulators were greeted by a band of anti-nuclear protesters outside Saturday's public hearing on the proposal to store much of the country's high-level radioactive waste on Utah's Skull Valley Goshute Reservation. 
    About 25 protesters stood in the hot afternoon sun outside the Sheraton City Center Hotel in downtown Salt Lake City. Carrying signs that read, "Don't Waste Utah" and "Mobile Chernobyl," they called for a moratorium on the shipment of all new radioactive waste into Utah's West Desert. 
    "This is a wake-up call to folks that each and every one of us needs to be involved," said Jason GroeneAwold, director of Families Against Incinerator Risk (FAIR), who spoke at the rally. 
    Federal regulators spent most of the week in closed sessions to hear evidence on whether a consortium of eight out-of-state utilities should be licensed to store 40,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel rods on an American Indian reservation 50 miles west of Salt Lake City. The hearings were opened for public input Friday afternoon and evening, and Saturday afternoon. 
    The consortium, known as the Private Fuel Storage, and the Goshutes are already in the final one-third of the licensing approval process, said FAIR's Groenewold. In addition, another proposal to allow Envirocare to store higher levels of radioactive waste is being fast-tracked by the government, he said. 
    "Utah's West Desert has already become the largest toxic dumping zone in the country," he warned, citing two hazardous waste landfills east of Wendover, the Tooele chemical weapons incinerator, the MagCorp plant, Hill Air Force Bombing Range and Dugway Proving Ground. "We're concerned about what this means to the health of Utahns." 
    Steve Erickson from Downwinders, which successfully lobbied against the MX missile project nearly two decades ago, and Sammy Blackbear, a general counsel member of the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians, also spoke at the rally. 
    Blackbear said he was protesting on behalf of the one-third of the Goshute tribe opposed to the storage site. He questioned the legality of the PFS-Goshute lease agreement, alleging that in three short weeks, a corrupt tribal council ushered the agreement through the Bureau of Indian Affairs with little scrutiny. 
    Blackbear also alleged that Goshute leaders bribed tribal members to vote for the site, promising them future dividends from the $3 billion disposal site. 
    The Goshute Indians have been duped, he said: "The nation has no place to put its garbage, so let's put it on Indian land." 
    The debate also raged among a group of American Indian participants in the 13th annual Heber Valley Intertribal Powwow on Saturday, where environmental and public-safety concerns clashed with the solidarity that many American Indians said they feel for the Skull Valley Goshutes. 
    "Remember, we're the first Americans," said Bill Emerson, a Dine Indian from New Mexico, who said tribal interests have too often been overlooked in the course of U.S. history. 
    "The state is ignoring the sovereignty as well as the economic development rights of the tribe," agreed Salt Lake resident Dallin Maybe, whose lineage stems from the Northern Arapahoe and Seneca tribes. 
    "There's already disposal facilities in this state, which Gov. [Mike] Leavitt has conveniently forgotten about," Maybe said. 
    Terry Begay, a northern Arizona Navajo, concurred. "They should be allowed to do whatever they want," Begay said. "It's their land and they need the money." 
    Others disagreed. 
    "I'm very opposed," said Oliver Salt, a Navajo from Spanish Fork who said the risks associated with the proposal outweigh any broad social benefits. 
    "Reservation or not, it's only for the economic benefit of one group of people," Salt said. "It's nonsense." 
    A woman who identified herself as Rio, a Wyoming Choctaw-Chickasaw, said the idea of storing such waste on American Indian land is anathema to many tribal beliefs. 
    "I'm totally against anything nuclear," she said. "Just listen to our prayers here. We respect all living things, starting with the grass we stand on." 
    Inside the public hearing in Salt Lake City, several members of the Environmental Justice Foundation agreed that storing nuclear waste on sacred American Indian land was an anathema to their traditional beliefs. They also expressed fears that what has been sold as a temporary site might become permanent. 
    "No permanent site has been established," said Anne Sword Hanson, a resident of Highland, who also raised safety concerns about the shipment and containment of nuclear waste. "There are no small mistakes when it comes to nuclear waste," she said. 
    The spent fuel is now being stored in about 20 nuclear power plants in California, the Midwest and East. The carcinogenic waste won't decompose for about 10,000 years. 
    A permanent disposal site at Yucca Mountain in southern Nevada has been proposed, but is being fought by the Nevada Governor. 
    Utah's Gov. Leavitt, and Reps. Merrill Cook, R-Utah, and Jim Hansen, R-Utah, have denounced the Utah disposal site. 
    But Kevin Crawford, former director of the University of Utah's nuclear plant, said these denouncements amount to nothing more than lip service. 
    "I heard Leavitt say that the nuclear waste was coming here over his dead body. And that's what he's doing is playing dead," he said. 
    Crawford, who is opposed to the dump site on ethical and safety grounds, is concerned that anti-nuclear activists in the state are out-gunned and under-prepared to fight it. 
    He also questioned the state's preparedness to cope with a nuclear waste site. Nevada has a state agency regulating nuclear projects, whereas Utah doesn't, he said. "This is a good sign that we're not prepared to begin talking about this issue." 
     

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