Denial of Utah nuke dump to be appealed

Tuesday, April 1, 2003 | 9:21 a.m.

The nuclear power companies that were denied a permit last month to dump nuclear waste at an Indian reservation in Utah have appealed the ruling.

The consortium of companies, Private Fuel Storage, on Monday announced it would appeal directly to the five-member Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The commission's licensing board on March 10 denied the group a permit because the board said the above-ground waste storage site would be vulnerable to a crash from military jets that fly overhead.

Private Fuel Storage also intends to appeal to the licensing board for reconsideration, arguing that even an F-16 crash at the site would fall within safety guidelines set by the NRC. The companies also intend to argue that the small size of the storage site makes a crash a "non-credible" event. Eventually, the companies want to apply for an NRC license to store 4,000 nuclear waste casks at the site.

"If we received a conditional license to operate a smaller site, we would be able to proceed with planning and construction while continuing to address (the licensing board's) concerns and make our case for a larger facility," said John Parkyn, PFS chairman.

The nation's 103 operating nuclear power plants have been storing high-level waste on-site for decades, but President Bush and Congress last year approved Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as the best site for a national waste repository. Yucca Mountain, however, won't open until 2010 at the earliest, and PFS wanted to open the temporary site in Utah as early as this year.