Margene Bullcreek has led the resistance to the "parking lot dump" for high-level radioactive waste targeted at her community. Photo by Gabriela Bulisova.
It would have been the single largest high-level radioactive waste shipping scheme in U.S. history: 4,000 Holtec storage/transport containers of irradiated nuclear fuel, travelling by train from as far away as 2,000 miles. Thank goodness, it is not to happen. (The U.S. nuclear power establishment claims to have carried out some 2,500 truck and train shipments of irradiated nuclear fuel over the past seven decades. However, most of those were prior to the mid-1970s, when a reprocessing plant operated at West Valley, NY from 1966-1972, and another was opened for the ultimate importation of 772 tons of irradiated nuclear fuel at Morris, IL, although reprocessing operations were never actually carried out there.)
As reported by the Salt Lake Tribune, the Private Fuel Storage (PFS) Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) has given up on its plans to turn the tiny Skull Valley Goshutes Inidan Reservation in Utah into a parking lot dump (or "centralized interim storage facility") for commercial high-level radioactive waste. At one time, PFS was comprised of more than a dozen nuclear utilities, led by Xcel Energy of Minnesota, with Dairyland Power Co-Op as a front group.
In 2005-2006, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) granted PFS a construction and operating license, despite objections by traditionals with the Skull Valley band, nearly 500 environmental and environmental justice organizations, as well as the State of Utah. The plan was for 40,000 metric tons of irradiated nuclear fuel to be "temporarily stored" (for 20 to 40 years) in 4,000 dry casks on the reservation. However, as the ultimate plan was to transfer the wastes to the Yucca Mountain dump, when that proposal was cancelled in 2009, this would have meant the wastes would have been stuck indefinitely at Skull Valley.
In 2006 a very unlikely coalition, involving the likes of Mormon political leaders and wilderness advocates, succeeded in creating the first federal wilderness area in Utah in a generation. This created a "moat" around the Skull Valley reservation, blocking the railway needed to directly deliver the waste. And, after lobbying efforts at the top echelons of Republican Party decision making circles by U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) as well as Utah Governor Huntsman, the George W. Bush administration's Department of the Interior refused to approve the lease agreement between PFS and the Skull Valley band, as well as the intermodal transfer facility on Bureau of Land Management property which could have allowed heavy haul trucks to ship the waste containers the final leg of the journey to the reservation.
The Skull Valley Goshutes were first targeted by the nuclear power establishment more than 20 years ago. Altogether, 60-some tribes have been actively targeted for high-level radioactive waste parking lot dumps. All the proposals have been stopped, as through the work of Native American grassroots environmental activists like Grace Thorpe, working in alliance with environmental and environmental justice organizations.
It's good that shipments to Skull Valley, from such places as Maine Yankee on the Atlantic coast, did not happen. The plan at PFS from the start was for the wastes to eventually move, after 20 to 40 years, to the Yucca Mountain dump. But Yucca was cancelled. What was the plan then? Simply to "return to sender." In the case of Maine Yankee, that would have meant 2,000 miles of shipping risks to Utah, and 2,000 miles of shipping risks back to Maine, accomplishing nothing.
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