Utah legislators attempt to block waste storage

Suzanne Struglinski

Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2003 | 9:38 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- A legislative strategy to block nuclear waste from being temporarily stored in Utah could foreshadow another epsiode in the fight against the proposal to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.

The Utah Test and Training Range Protection Act, introduced by Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, in July, would prohibit the Interior Department from granting a right-of-way permit needed to build a rail spur across Bureau of Land Management lands to the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation in Utah.

The Goshutes have been working with Private Fuel Storage, LLC, a consortium of eight nuclear utilities, to build an interim nuclear waste storage. The idea is that the Goshute operation would serve the Energy Department until it can build the planned Yucca Mountain permanent storage facility about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The Goshute site is between Hill Air Force Base and the Utah Test and Training Range. It is under the 10 million acres of airspace over Utah and a part of Nevada that are used for flight training. The range has the largest percentage of unrestricted airspace with planes allowed to go to an altitude of 58,000 feet said Steve Petersen, Bishop's senior policy adviser.

In 2001 more than 5,000 planes flew over the site as low as 300 feet and more than half of these carried explosives, including 2,000- pound laser-guided bombs.

"It doesn't take a rocket scientist to conclude that supersonic fighter planes loaded down with lives bombs and above-ground storage of high-level nuclear waste located downwind less than 60 nautical miles from Utah's populated Wasatch Front containing nearly 2 million people do not mix," according to Bishop's testimony from at a House subcommittee hearing on the bill last week.

The bill also designates 106,000 acres around the Cedar Mountains in Utah as federal Wilderness Areas but ensures the military could still fly training exercises over other wilderness study areas under the range air space.

Private Fuel Storage is still under review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board has sent its application back with further questions on the impact of an aircraft crash on one of the above-ground storage container.

"If it is this hard to build a 40-mile railroad over public lands in Utah, think about how hard it is going to be for DOE to build 250 miles to 320 miles of railroad largely over public lands in Nevada." said Bob Halstead, transportation adviser to Nevada's Nuclear Waste Project Office.

Halstead called the Utah strategy an "experiment" and that some of the same kinds of tactics could be used in Nevada later.

"There are some approaches to delaying or stopping (the Energy Department) that we haven't thought of," Halstead said. "If the political leadership of the state is against it, they can make it very difficult or even impossible."

Halstead said that could be part of the reason the department has not officially selected the transportation routes to be used to ship the waste through numerous states to Nevada.

He said DOE assumes it is going to be easy to get the appropriate permits on public lands, but said there are grazing and mining allotments as well as endangered or threatened species issues to worry about.

Each Energy Department route proposal involves "unique local conditions' that will need to be considered if the site gets approved and a route is selected.

Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency said the state believes there is no need for the Utah facility and that utilities should just keep their waste to themselves. As for the Wilderness Area designations, Loux said that plan would not work in Nevada since the Energy Department and the Air Force own most of the land surrounding Yucca already.

Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev.,who sits on the House Resources Committee that will consider the bill first, supports the effort, spokeswoman Amy Spanbauer said. Former Utah Republican Rep. James Hansen offered similar, but broader legislation last year that passed through the House but was ultimately left out of the Defense Authorization bill conference report signed by the president. Hansen's proposal aimed to declare 500,000 acres below the Utah Test and Training Range as federal wilderness areas. That was also an attempt to stop the Goshute nuclear storage plan.