What do you do if you happen to be a nuclear power utility and all those pesky corroding barrels of high-level radioactive waste begin to exceed your reactor site storage capacity? Well, if the Republicans are running the country, you get them to sign off on spending billions of taxpayer dollars on a massive hole in the ground in Nevada so you can offload your casks of atomic garbage to potentially contaminate the groundwater of insignificant desert hamlets like, say, Las Vegas.
But things get annoyingly complicated when the pendulum of power swings back to the left and someone like Sen. Harry Reid actually has a say in the matter. Then, Yucca Mountain gets written off as a twenty billion dollar failed experiment in pro-business socialism and you and your fellow powerful nuclear utility buddies are left scurrying for an alternative.
So how’s this for a fine scheme: find a small group of impoverished native Americans, offer them enough pieces of silver to sell what little birthright they have left in return for turning their reservation into the most radioactive place in the USA. It’s Environmental Racism at its unethical zenith and this “Mobile Chernobyl” is once again looming large on the Utah horizon.
Back in ’87 the Reagan administration created their pet pro-nuke bureaucracy called the Office of the Nuclear Waste Negotiator in an effort to target vulnerable communities to host a nuclear waste dump. Thousands of reservation sites ended up in the ONWN crosshairs, only to be beaten back through grassroots tribal environmental activism. ONWN was subsequently defunded in ’94.
That left private enterprise to do their own heavy lifting for a change, so eight powerful nuclear utilities, led by Xcel and Exelon, formed Private Fuel Storage LLC. And it didn’t take long for this bunch to zero in on a tiny, impoverished group of Native Americans in the western desert of Utah.
The Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians Reservation is about an hour’s drive from Salt Lake City. About two dozen of the tribe’s hundred and forty or so members live on the reservation. The rest live mostly in surrounding Tooele County, which has an ossified good ‘ole boy network of entrenched county commissioners who have never met a polluter they didn’t like. The county is home to a rogue’s gallery of Bhopal-class environmental desecrators, from US Magnesium, formerly Mag Corp and a reliable top-five leader in toxic release, the Army’s own Deseret Chemical Depot, where stockpiles of VX and other nerve agents are incinerated, to Energy Solutions, which operates a massive dump that accepts over 90 per cent of the country’s class A and B radioactive waste and is currently lobbying to take in such waste from all around the world. Tooele is a town where a socially pliable, mostly LDS, politically conservative populace nonchalantly accepts the fact that households are required to have a gas mask handy for every man, woman and child.
And so, Tooele County’s philosophy that the dirtiest job is better than no job (or jobs in tourism or just about any other job) has resulted in a place that isn’t well suited for say, growing cherries. And in the parched southwest corner of the county, the Goshute Reservation must have seemed to PFS like the promised land- a holy grail of financial desperation in one of the most disproportionately toxic places in the US. “The Right Place” for 40,000 tons of commercial high-level nuclear waste. You can practically hear the town fathers' chanting "dump baby dump".
So here’s a textbook example of big business fostering environmental injustice. Under the Bush Administration, US Sec. of Energy Spencer Abraham used the full force of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to pave the way for PFS. His assumption was that the tribal members would take the lotto money offered them and like Beverly Hillbillies, move to somewhere that had, say, movie stars and cement ponds. So it came as a bit of surprise to the DOE and NRC regulators when tribal opposition to this scheme emerged, dividing the members into pro-dump and anti-dump factions. Who would have thought that these people could possibly have an attachment to their ancestral lands? To Mr. Abraham, it must have been infuriating. By golly, if it’s sentiment they want, couldn’t they just accept Jesus as their savior? What’s with this spiritual connection to some dirt? (On a tangent here, Spencer Abraham is currently CEO of the US subsidiary of a French nuclear energy company as well as operating a consulting firm serving Mideast clients.)
In addition to the Goshutes themselves, many Utahns woke up to the potential nightmare of thousands of trucks careening down ice-slicked highways with their dry-casks of plutonium laden spent fuel rods. Such radical leftists as Republican governors Mike Leavitt and Jon Huntsman vowed opposition, even former Energy Solutions lobbyist turned Congressman Rob Bishop joined against PFS. But after years of wrangling, PFS’s Goshute plan has in vampiric fashion, risen again and again in the court system, most recently in July with a federal judge ruling against Dept. of Interior officials who denied a lease to build the facility. What Judge Ebel seems to avoid is the obvious reality that the Goshute nuclear waste dump is no temporary solution. Given that the Obama administration intends to shut down the proposed site at Yucca Mountain, these unfortunate Native Americans would become the permanent recipients of 40,000 tons of the most toxic substances known to man. It’s a decision that rivals smallpox blankets in moral consequence.