Apaches Consider Nuclear Waste Site on Pristine Reservation : Environment: New Mexico tribe’s talks with U.S. on temporary storage facility are in exploratory stage. But neighbors and state officials are already alarmed.

The ancestral homeland of the Mescalero Apache tribe was blessed by nature with an awesome beauty. Pine-forested peaks, still snowcapped in June, thrust up into a crystal sky over a landscape of rushing streams and abundant wildlife.

But scenery alone does not create jobs for the reservation’s 3,000 people. In their quest for economic self-sufficiency, the tribe’s leaders have developed a sawmill and cattle ranch, in addition to a ski area and a sumptuous resort with lake and golf course nestled amid the 8,000-foot mountains.

Now the industrious Apaches are looking at a new kind of business opportunity: the possibility of big money in storing the nation’s growing mountain of nuclear waste.

If they are convinced that nuclear waste means jobs, education and revenue, the Apaches seem prepared to assert their sovereignty against strong local opposition and welcome the material nobody else wants.

The federal government is seeking a place to store thousands of tons of used fuel from 112 nuclear-power plants until a permanent underground repository is built, probably in Nevada, in the next century.

Federal law requires the Energy Department to take title to the highly radioactive, spent fuel beginning in 1998, but the earliest a permanent repository could be ready is 2010. The nation’s nuclear utilities, their on-site waste storage pools filling rapidly, have been clamoring for development of the temporary and permanent federal storage sites mandated by Congress.

When White House nuclear-waste negotiator David H. Leroy asked every county, state and Indian tribe in the United States to study the idea of hosting the radioactive wastes until the permanent disposal site is built, the Mescalero Apaches were the first to respond.

They have received $300,000 from the Energy Department to evaluate the safety, environmental impact and economics of constructing a Monitored Retrievable Storage facility on their reservation. Now they must decide whether to seek an additional $2.8 million to identify a site and begin technical studies.

San Juan County, Utah; Apache County, Ariz.; Fremont County, Wyo., and 13 other Indian tribes have applied for similar grants. In Grant County, N.D., the county supervisors were ousted by the voters after applying for a study grant, and that project was terminated. Oklahoma’s Chickasaw and Sac and Fox tribes applied for grants but decided not to accept them.

Members of the Mescalero Tribal Council insist that they are far from a decision on whether to seek the nuclear waste facility. To them, they said, it’s just another business proposition, to be accepted or rejected on its merits after an unemotional evaluation.

But nothing is that straightforward when nuclear power and nuclear waste are involved. New Mexico’s entire congressional delegation and Gov. Bruce King are trying to block the tribe from going further, arguing that New Mexico, site of the nation’s first nuclear explosion and the first repository for plutonium wastes, has “done its part” for nuclear energy.

Prominent citizens of Ruidoso, a tourist town next to the Mescalero reservation, have strongly opposed the idea of nuclear-waste storage, regardless of what the Mescaleros’ evaluation discovers.

The twice-weekly Ruidoso News, owned by Washington Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke, ran a mammoth seven-part series about nuclear waste in which the first sentence set the tone: “It is the nightmare that will never go away.”

Tribal leaders appear unmoved by the predictable reaction from Ruidoso or by the politicians’ concern. Under the law, they can ask Leroy for whatever they want--additions to tribal land, money to build their own high school, guaranteed job training for tribe members--as part of their price for “volunteering.” Congress would have to approve any agreement.

“People always say they want us to be self-supporting. That’s what we’re trying to do,” said Silas Cochise, a member of the Tribal Council, an elected body that is the government of the reservation and board of directors of the tribe’s business ventures.

“We’re a tribe, into perpetuity,” said Tribal Council Secretary Fred Peso. “We have no interest in jumping into the melting pot and the mainstream.” The tribe wants to keep its young people at home, he said, and “this may be an opportunity to help us. If not, we won’t do it.”

Tribal leaders want it understood that they are not some downtrodden group driven by poverty into a Faustian bargain.

“No one will exploit us,” Tribal Council President Wendell Chino said in a speech last December to the National Congress of American Indians. “We can afford to walk away from this dialogue at any time. The government timetable is not our timetable. The government’s needs are negotiable. Our requirements are not.”

The Mescalero reservation covers 720 square miles in south-central New Mexico, between Tularosa and Ruidoso. A temporary nuclear waste facility, where more than 10,000 metric tons of irradiated fuel rods would be stored above ground in sealed containers approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, would cover less than one square mile.

Used nuclear fuel is intensely hot and remains dangerously radioactive for thousands of years. It must be sealed off from human contact or exposure to the environment.

But there is virtually no danger of a nuclear explosion because a storage facility is not a reactor. It would be, in Chino’s words, “the world’s most expensive warehouse, with elaborate security monitoring.”

The facility would cost about $2 billion to construct, by Energy Department estimates. Whatever jurisdiction hosts it would expect to receive property taxes--because it would be privately owned--plus millions of dollars in direct federal payments and whatever else is obtained in negotiations with Leroy.

Some environmental groups, led by the Natural Resources Defense Council, oppose the development of a temporary nuclear waste facility at any site. They fear it would become a de facto permanent storage site and ease the pressure on the Energy Department to develop an underground repository.

Chino said that will not happen if the facility is built here. The tribe would demand a formal treaty with Washington, he said, requiring that “these nuclear containers be removed within 40 years . . . or else we will shut the facility down.”