Yucca legal team to aid Utah fight

Suzanne Struglinski

Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2003 | 9:34 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- The legal team that is preparing to fight the Yucca Mountain Project in federal court for Nevada will now also advise Utah on its own potential nuclear waste storage site.

Egan, Fitzpatrick, and Malsch of McLean, Va., a Washington suburb, has agreed to advise Utah's legal team fighting the propose nuclear waste storage site at the Skull Valley Goshute Indian reservation, about 80 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.

Attorney Joe Egan said the firm will be focusing on the probability of an aircraft hitting waste storage units, as well as the health and safety consequences of such a crash. Egan said the firm has been interested in the issue from the Yucca perspective due to its proximity to Nellis Air Force Range and since a lot of the waste may be stored above ground before going into the mountain.

Egan did talk with Nevada officials before agreeing to work with the other state. He said the additional client would neither help or hurt the work on the Yucca court cases, set to go to federal court Oct. 3, but that the issue and outcome would be of interest to Nevada

Plane crashes have been a key issue for the potential site. Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of nuclear power companies trying to move their spent fuel off their properties. have been working on a storage facility for the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation since 1997. The site, set to hold 40,000 tons of spent fuel, is meant to be an interim solution until the opening of a federal repository, proposed for the Yucca Mountain site about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The Energy Departments plans to accept the first shipment in 2010, but still needs a to overcome several hurdles.

In March the Atomic Safety Licensing Board did not accepts the site's application saying the company needed to show that the Air Force would cut the numbers of jets flying over the reservation or alter flights patterns and that a plane crash into a storage unit "would not cause serious health and safety consequences."

But because it considered the plane crash scenario a risk, the board in May denied a revision with 336 proposed storage casks as opposed to the 4,000 casks that were originally proposed. NRC wanted a decision in by the end of the year, but the board chairman, Michael Farrar, said in August it would probably not come until sometime next year.

Egan said it is up to Utah's legal team to determine how long his firm will work with them on the case. Right now Egan's firm is helping compile expert testimony on the issue but Utah does not want to disclose with whom they are working.

Egan also noted that most of the proceedings will be safeguarded due to security concerns. He said the board wants most of the information protected even to the point that the firm bought a "big, heavy, safe" to store the documents related to the case.