Halfway to Yucca Mountain

Utah's Skull Valley is already a busy place. All arround it, the Air Force makes practice blasts in its Hill Bombing Range. Dugway Proving Grounds tests chemical and biological weapons. There's a Safety Kleen hazardous waste incinerator and landfill. The Deseret Chemical Depot stores weapons and the Tooele Chemical Demilitarization Facility burns 'em.

If the Department of Energy gets its way, Skull Valley will also be the home to so-called "temporary" high level radioactive waste on its way to the permanent waste dump in Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

With the Senate set to vote June 5 to override Nevada's veto of the Yucca Mountain facility -- the House already voted overwhelmingly to ignore Nevada's preference -- the people who live in Skull Valley are getting increasingly nervous.

The fate of Yucca Mountain has grabbed all the headlines. The fate of Skull Valley is barely a blip on the national radar. No matter whether you think the Nevada site is a good or bad place to store waste, at least it has big plans to use the best technology available, bury the waste deep underground and monitor it. Skull Valley doesn't.

At Skull Valley, waste would be shipped by rail in containers and set above ground next to the bombing range. The technology would consist of some concrete and steel and a chain link fence. The plan calls for the area to hold -- for 20 years with a 20-year extension -- enough nuclear waste to accommodate all the spent fuel for every reactor in the nation.

"If there's enough focus on Yucca, they can sneak Skull Valley in there and buy Yucca 40 more years," said Sammy Blackbear, a Goshute Indian opposing the storage site.

The only way the Department of Energy could get a lease for this halfway-to-Yucca storage site so quietly and efficiently is because it is owned by Native Americans -- the Goshute Tribe, whose Skull Valley members number about 130. Of that, 70 are voting members with authority over 18,000 acres. Fifteen have filed litigation to stop the proposed radioactive dump.

Native Americans' governments are sovereign unto themselves. As such, they don't have all those pesky laws that the State of Nevada, for instance, and even the Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission, have for environmental protection and public process. None of that applies to the Goshutes.

The legal complaints allege federal support for a Tribal Council of three whose chairman was recalled by the tribe, but returned to power by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1994. The chairman, Leon Bear, convenes an "illegitimate regime," according to filings, which "remains in power through bribery and corruption." However, when pressed for specifics, Blackbear said he couldn't release the material due to the current court battle.

Tribal chairman Leon Bear cited in a statement the potential flow of money from nuclear waste storage to the Goshute, which everyone involved agrees is impoverished.

"For a long time the tribe has been pretty much distressed over revenues that they don't have, lack of infrastructure of the tribal government. And we were looking for economic benefits or development for the tribe."

Those revenues would be provided by Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of reactor-owning companies (Consolidate Edison Company of New York; GPU Nuclear, New Jersey; Genoa FuelTech, Wisconsin; Florida Power & Light; Indiana-Michigan Power, also known as American Electric Power; Xcel, Minnesota; Southern California Edison; and Southern Nuclear Operating Company, Alabama). Private Fuel Storage has applied for a federal license to run the facility.

Private Fuel Storage is impatient about Yucca Mountain.

"There are nuclear plants that will run out of on-site storage before Yucca Mountain could open. Those plants are faced with the difficult decision to shut down their reactors prematurely, severely limiting their ability to meet the electricity needs of their customers," noted the consortium.