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Energy

Utah Nuclear Waste Site Advances

NRC approves private temporary storage site, but big challenges remain

by Glenn Hess
September 14, 2005

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has denied Utah’s final appeal of a federal licensing board’s approval of a private company’s plan to build a nuclear waste storage facility on an Indian reservation about 50 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.

Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. intends to challenge the NRC decision in the courts. “Although this is certainly a setback, it does not mean that spent nuclear fuel will be shipped to Utah anytime soon,” Huntsman says. “This is a battle that will take several years to fight to completion, but it is also a battle that I intend to win.”

Private Fuel Storage (PFS), a consortium of eight commercial power companies, plans to build an aboveground facility to store 44,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel on the Goshute Indian Reservation in Skull Valley, Utah.

By a 3 to 1 vote, NRC rejected Utah’s request for review of a February ruling by the Atomic Safety & Licensing Board. That board had rejected the state’s claim that the thousands of flights over the Skull Valley each year by military aircraft from nearby Hill Air Force Base pose an unacceptable risk of an accidental crash into the facility and a catastrophic release of radiation.

The proposed independent facility is designed to be temporary and would operate until the Department of Energy’s long-delayed permanent storage site for commercial waste opens at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. PFS has said the earliest its facility could begin accepting fuel is 2008.

Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), who is fighting to stop the Yucca Mountain project, has proposed storing nuclear waste at the facilities where it is being produced. “Transporting high-level radioactive waste to Utah is as dangerous as it would be transporting it to Nevada,” he remarks. “There is simply no way to safely do this.”

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