Decade
of Resistance 
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Shundahai Network
Dedicated to Breaking
the Nuclear Chain
Shundahai is a Newe (Western Shoshone) word meaning "Peace and Harmony with all Creation"
May 15, 2006
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Cause Unites N-Dump Foes
Politicians, four-wheelers, green activists, business and even the top leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - they all told the U.S. Bureau of Land Management what they think about plans to transport reactor waste to the Skull Valley desert. Shauna Bona, a Salt Lake City mother and businesswoman, told the agency in comments submitted Monday that the waste should not be allowed to come to Utah. It will undermine the state's goal of providing a healthy and safe environment for families and businesses like her own, she said. “I want to be involved,” Bona, cofounder of the Salt Lake City information-design firm, McKinnon-Mulherin Inc., said in an interview. “I want my opinion to be heard.” The BLM's 90-day public comment period ended Monday with well over 5,000 e-mails, faxes and letters submitted to the land agency, which is considering two applications needed to go forward with the hotly contested storage site. The comments came from New York to California and everywhere between, said agency employee Pam Schuller. One new e-mail plunked into Schuller's mailbox every minute on Monday. But she expected many more as the midnight postmark deadline approached. A consortium of nuclear-power utility companies called PFS has leased part of the Skull Valley Goshutes Reservation in Tooele County to build and operate a kind of long-term storage site for reactor waste. Up to 44,000 tons of the highly radioactive fuel can be stored safely on the site for up to 40 years, according to a license issued for the project this year by federal nuclear regulators. But the venture also needs permission from the BLM for a train-to-truck transfer station north of I-80. The effort to rally Utahns behind derailing PFS has made for one of those strange political bedfellows stories. Republicans and Democrats commented. So did environmentalists and their usual critics. Even the influential First Presidency of the LDS Church submitted comments, a rarity for an organization that last spoke out on a public policy issue 25 years ago this week on the proposed MX missile siting in Utah and Nevada. The final tally fell far short of being the BLM's biggest ever. Some land-use plans garner as many as 30,000 comments, said Schuller. The administration of Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. submitted 40 pages of comments, along with 20 related attachments, on Monday. “Judged by applicable legal requirements and the current administrative record, there is only one supportable decision BLM can make: deny both PFS right-of-way applications,” the comment concluded. BLM noted that it will not be able to decide on the transfer station until after the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs signs off on the final lease agreement between the consortium and the Skull Valley Goshutes, and no one seems to know when that decision might be coming.
http://www.sltrib.com/portlet/article/html/fragments/print_article.jsp?article=3800460
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