High-Level Nuclear Waste, Private Fuel Storage and the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians

Updated 7-20-05 By Pete Litster, Shundahai Network

The Issue:

Private Fuel Storage (PFS), a "limited-liability" consortium of commercial nuclear utilities wants to site a "temporary" above ground dump for 40,000 metric tons of high-level nuclear waste on the ancestral and Reservation land of the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians. The Skull Valley Goshute Reservation is located approximately 45 miles upwind of Salt Lake City, and is steeped in controversy within the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes and various Government and Non-Governmental entities.

Status of the PFS Proposal:

The Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation is still in the process for consideration for unprecedented "temporary" storage of America’s high-level nuclear waste, until a permanent storage facility is approved at Yucca Mountain Nevada- a mountain sacred to the indigenous Western Shoshone Nation. Skull Valley is earthquake prone, and is surrounded by various military aircraft and weapons testing grounds.

September 9, 2005: The NRC finally approves the license for the PFS/Skull Valley high-level nuclear waste facility on a 4-1 vote. The dissenting vote is cast by Greg Jasko, NRC commissioner connected to U.S. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D- Nevada). Senator Reid is a leading opponent of the proposed Yucca Mountain high-level Nuclear waste dump proposed for a site sacred to the Western Shoshone Indian Nation in Nevada.

PFS now expects to begin accepting nuclear shipments by the end of 2007. As it stands, the proposal is still on the table. Without continued and determined opposition, the dump may well get approval by the Federal government.

July 2005: The US Department of Transportation requests funding for congress to hire staff to prepare for Spent nuclear Fuel Shipments to Skull Valley. Utah’s congressional delegation vows to stop it.

May 2005: The PFS License application Passes the NRC Atomic Safety and Licensing Board by 2-1 margin after being sent back to the ASLB who had initially passed it in February 2005. This marks a defeat for dump opponents after eight years struggle to halt this project.

April 2005: A delegation of Goshutes, other Indigenous environmental justice activists, their allies from the State of Utah, and national and local non-governmental organizations travel to Washington DC to petition the NRC to stop the PFS license. They speak before the National Press Club.

October 2004: meetings with the US Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board revealed that the PFS facility may not indeed be “temporary” as promised due to the inability for the DOE to take that casks proposed for Skull Valley to Yucca Mountain

August/September 2004: PFS engaged in “secret” closed-door meetings with representatives of the disputed Executive Committee of the Skull Valley Goshute Tribal Council and the NRC.

March 2003: US Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) denied PFS its license to begin construction of the dump due to the risk of accidents involving F-16 fighter jets which routinely pass over Skull Valley en route from Hill Air Force Base to the Utah Test and Training Range- a nearby bombing range. PFS appealed the decision in May 2003, offering to reduce the size of the dump to 10% of their original proposal, but was turned down due to problems with the process by which they filed the appeal.

Risk Assessment:

The goal of PFS is to bring over 40,000 potentially deadly shipments of radioactive waste through 43 states, 109 cities with populations of over 100,000, thousands of small rural communities, over the land’s rivers and other waterways, and through America’s agricultural breadbasket as they make their way across the country to Skull Valley.

This unprecedented shipment campaign would send us dangerous casks of nuclear waste, some of which will have more radioactive cesium then 200 Hiroshima bombs put together. The Strontium-90 in just one spent fuel assembly alone (each cask could have more then 4 fuel assemblies) is enough to contaminate over 23 trillion gallons of water, twice the volume of Lake Mead.

Accidents will occur. Even the Department of Energy predicts that between 70-350 accidents and over 1000 incidents involving radioactive releases will happen during the decades of shipments to the Great Basin. Current reports show that even the release of a small fraction of the contents of a nuclear waste cask during an accident could contaminate 42 square miles and if it occurs in a city (which is the greatest likelihood) require over $9.5 billion per square mile to clean up. Knowing this, the nuclear industry has lobbied to create laws exempting them from any liability once the nuclear waste has left the reactor. It will be the U.S. taxpayers who will be paying the huge cleanup costs.

Over 1/3 of the US population lives near these potentially radioactive highway routes. For cities like Las Vegas and Salt Lake City the danger is even greater, as all of these shipments would pass close to schools, businesses and homes with hundreds of thousands exposed to a potential radioactive disaster.

Ultimately, it is Indigenous People who have borne the brunt of the entire nuclear chain.- from the thousands of native uranium miners, to tribal communities suffering from radioactive contamination from nuclear weapons and energy testing, development, and waste dumping.

Indigenous Opposition to the Dump:

Although the three-member executive Committee of the Skull Valley Goshute General Council accepted the deal in 1997, it has been actively opposed by many members of the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes, as well as by many Indigenous organizations throughout the country, and has already been turned down by six other American Indian tribes within the United States.

Ohngo Gaudadeh Devia Awareness (or OGDA, Goshute for "Timber Setting Community"), a grassroots group of Skull Valley Goshute tribal members directed by Margene Bullcreek opposes the dump in an effort to protect tradition and the health and safety of the reservation's inhabitants. Throughout the process, OGDA has filed contentions with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, continues to engage allied organizations in opposition, and participates in lawsuits to oppose the dump. Also, Sammy Blackbear, with the support of Environmental Justice Foundation, is engaged in legal actions, which impact the validity of the PFS deal.

September 2001: A team of tribal members officially challenged the Skull Valley Goshute Tribal Council's Executive Committee for a leadership election that would impact the PFS deal. To this day the results of that election are still in dispute, demonstrating the lack of consensus on the reservation for a high-level nuclear dump as a development option.

October 2001: Members of 3 regional Native Nations, as well as two regional and two national Native American organizations demonstrated their support for Goshute opponents of the dump at the historic 3-day Nuclear Free Great Basin Gathering hosted by OGDA and organized by the Shundahai Network on the Reservation. Further, since 1987, six other American Indian tribes have rejected proposals to site similar dumps on their land due to serious concerns over health, safety and the racial and environmental justice of the nuclear industry’s targeting of Native American, racial minority or economically vulnerable communities.

April 2005: 21 Native American organizations from throughout the country sign on to a letter delivered to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) urging denial of the PFS license.

Other Citizen Opposition to the Dump:

In the letter that was delivered to the NRC in April 2005, there were an additional 25 national, 294 regional/state/local, and 9 international organizations that signed on to it urging the NRC to deny the PFS license.

In addition, the State of Utah, Utah's federal congressional delegation and many Utah citizens and citizen organizations also officially oppose the dump. The State of Utah's NO! Coalition, the Shundahai Network, HEAL Utah, Utah Downwinders, are among the citizen groups who are organized to resist the dump every step of the way.

Salt Lake City and other communities along proposed routes have declared their communities "Nuclear Free Zones" in an effort to resist this and other proposals to put our communities at risk by nuclear waste shipping and dumping.