The Other Nuclear Option

By Nicole Makris, AlterNet. Posted February 2, 2006.

Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch isn't exactly known for his strong environmental record. He's a staunch Republican who, in addition to serving as a senator since 1976, plays the piano and has made a little cash on the side as a Christian recording artist.

He's described the Kyoto Accords as a waste of time, and he's one of the Senate's most vocal supporters of the Bush administration's energy and environmental policies. He's for drilling at ANWR and other protected sites, supports road-building in wilderness areas, and is rated as one of the senators least likely to vote for legislation supported by the Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters and other environmental groups. What's more, he uses the Republican buzz-term "environmental extremism" like it's going out of style.

So it came as some surprise when, along with Utah's other senator, Robert Bennett, and Nevada senators Harry Reid and John Ensign, Hatch sided with environmental groups, and pissed off the nuclear energy lobby in the process, by presenting the Spent Nuclear Fuel On-Site Storage Security Act of 2005 last year.

The legislation requires that the nuclear waste produced at commercial power plants around the country remain where it was created until the federal government makes good on its now 24-year-old plan to move all of the nation's nuclear waste to an underground storage facility, where it can live out its deadly radioactive half-lives without threatening nearby populations.

Nuclear power has again become a seductive alternative to oil and coal as a fuel source as America struggles to find enough energy to meet consumer demand. The nation's reliance on nuclear power as a source of energy has steadily increased since the 50s, when then-president Dwight D. Eisenhower assured Americans that nuclear technology could be used for good. In his State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, Bush announced his intention to rely on "clean, safe nuclear energy" to fight our national oil addiction. But one aspect of its energy production remains the same: Nuclear waste never goes away, and the U.S. government still doesn't have a viable plan to get rid of it.

Hatch's support of the on-site storage bill is part of his ongoing opposition to the creation of a "temporary" above-ground waste storage facility in Skull Valley, Utah, a vast stretch of Utah desert approximately 40 miles east of Salt Lake City. His vehement resistance to storing nuclear waste in his state is just one example of an ongoing headache faced by the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission: everyone wants to find a "safe" place to store the nation's 77,000 tons of radioactive nuclear waste. It's just that no one wants it in their backyard.

Where is the West Desert?

Hatch, along with other legislators, public officials, local activists and members of the Native American Goshute tribe -- on whose land the temporary waste site would be located -- have fought for years to keep radioactive waste out of western Utah, where citizens already suffer from severe radiation-related illnesses due to nuclear fallout of bomb testing during the cold war. It's fine, they agree, to want to find a safe place to permanently store the nation's nuclear waste. But why risk an accident by transporting the stuff twice: once to the temporary facility and then again to the permanent one?

Utah's own "environmental extremists" beg the question further: Why does this waste keep getting made if we have nowhere to put it?

"Ultimately, we have to stop producing this stuff," says Pete Litser, executive director of the Shundahai Network, a Utah-based coalition of activists and native Americans opposed to nuclear proliferation. "We're creating hazardous material we don't know what to do with."

Charged with creating a plan for the disposal of "spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear reactors and high-level radioactive waste from national defense activities" by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, legislators came up with what seemed like a great idea: Put the waste somewhere sparsely populated with few environmental regulations, amidst good, patriotic U.S. citizens that rarely ask questions and are happy to help out Uncle Sam. One of those flat, square-like states where there aren't any cute owls or polar bears to mourn or big trees to sit in.

Enter the lower Great Basin, also known as Utah's West Desert, or Eastern Nevada: a region of the country so unremarkable no one even knows what to call it. Land of the nuclear test site, numerous bombing grounds and military bases, and some of the country's most heinous polluters, like MagCorp, which holds the title of "nation's worst toxic air polluter." It is also the site of the government's proposed permanent nuclear waste storage facility: Yucca Mountain, where scientists' insistence that seismic activity and groundwater levels make it unsafe for waste storage has delayed the site's opening indefinitely.

Nicole Makris works for the SPIN Project and has written for Mother Jones, Hyphen Magazine, and other publications.

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