Tribal Leader’s Plan to Create ‘Nation’s Wastebasket’ Trashed

It’s easy to find the West Desert on a map of the United States: Pick out the Great Salt Lake and head south.

There are jack rabbits and mule deer, ranchers and their sheep. There are tiny mining towns turning to dust and a little city--Tooele--that gets bigger every day. And there’s the Tooele Hazardous Industry Zone, home to some of the most toxic operations in the country.

Now a tiny band of Indians wants to turn the tribe’s reservation into one of the country’s largest nuclear waste dumps. Opponents say there may be no way to stop it.

“We are doing this to the whole Great Basin. You can’t graze cattle, the minerals are gone, the water’s not suitable for human inhabitation. We’ve made it profitable the only way we know how,” said Chip Ward, author of “Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West.”

“If you can turn the Great Plains into the breadbasket of the nation, you can turn the Great Basin into the nation’s wastebasket.”

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Leon Bear knows the boundaries of his tribe’s land by heart.

From the reservoir that provides water to his tiny village, Bear sweeps his arm across the parched valley, pointing out the fences and smokestacks that ring the last remnant of his tribe’s traditional lands.

To the north, a magnesium plant sits on the shore of the Great Salt Lake; to the south, the Army tests equipment for exposure to nerve gas on a stretch of desert as large as Rhode Island. A bombing range and hazardous waste incinerator lie just over the crest of the Cedar Mountains to the west; to the east sits a stockpile of chemical weapons and the incinerator plant that’s destroying them.

“I could throw up my hands,” said Bear, the Goshutes’ tribal chairman and the project’s main supporter. “They made that an industrial waste zone out there. Nobody asked the Goshutes, ‘Do you mind if we do this out here on your traditional territory?’ Nobody said, ‘Hey, it could be dangerous for you guys to be out here.’ When a neighbor does that to you, you don’t want to be like them. So we gave our neighbor, the state of Utah, an opportunity to be a part of this, and the first reaction was ‘Over my dead body.’ ”

Opponents, including other members of the tribe, say the plan could endanger the wildlife of the West Desert, human health, the region’s economy and even national security.

But that hasn’t stopped Bear from pressing forward with the project, which he says could be the only way to save his dying tribe.

If Bear gets his way, about a square mile of the reservation will be fenced off for nuclear waste, and 450 acres will be built up with concrete pads. On top will sit 16-foot-tall concrete-and-steel casks filled with radioactive rods--as many as 4,000 of them holding 40,000 metric tons of used-up nuclear reactor fuel.

The fuel will come from Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of eight power companies from California, New York, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Florida and Alabama. Neither PFS nor the Goshutes will say what the deal is costing.

PFS also has promised to build a cultural center on the reservation to revive the tribe’s fading language and crafts, Bear says, and has pledged to give Goshutes and other tribes the first shot at jobs at the storage site.

“More jobs, more money, and a better future for your children,” says a PFS brochure touting the project.

The money is sorely needed. Most of the estimated 150 Goshutes have fled the 17,000-acre reservation for Nevada, Tooele and Salt Lake City. Fewer than 30 remain, most living in a tiny cluster of rundown trailers and dirt roads. Jobs are virtually nonexistent except for the cashier position at the Pony Express, a sparsely stocked convenience store and gas station opened on the reservation a few years ago.

It’s not that the tribe hasn’t tried. At the entrance to the village, the last few examples of one failed project--portable toilets and showers built for the military--sit unused in an empty corral. Down the road, three huge metal sheds built to test rocket engines are empty.

There were only two real options left: nuclear waste and gambling, an industry Mormon-dominated Utah considers nearly as toxic. Bear says a casino is part of the Goshutes’ long-term plan, but he’s nervous about borrowing money or sinking capital into another risky project. With the PFS lease, he says, the tribe still has control if the project turns sour.

“How can you blame Leon?” said Ward, who is one of the project’s main opponents. “What’s he going to do? Grow food? No one’s going to buy a tomato off this land.”

But some Goshutes say the plan is tearing the tribe apart.

“The split is with the native traditions,” said Margene Bullcreek, who grew up on the reservation and lives there now. “We believe in our reservation as Mother Earth, and we’re allowing our Mother Earth to be contaminated if we bring this waste onto our reservation.”

It’s a far cry from the old days, when thousands of Goshutes roamed the Utah and Nevada desert, gathering native plants and taking down the occasional deer.

That changed in the first half of the 19th century, when the first Mormon settlers arrived. They pushed the Goshutes west into the dry, desolate Skull Valley--once just a pass-through area for the tribe.

The Mormon settlement stretched as far as Iosepa, a town established in 1889 to house converts from Hawaii. Today the cemetery just north of the Goshute reservation, dotted with graves in English and Polynesian, is all that remains.

But the West Desert was not left untouched. As World War II began, Tooele County’s vast salt flat and uninhabited terrain drew the military’s attention.

In 1940, 1.8 million acres were turned into the Wendover Army Air Base. It’s where B-29 crews honed their skills at a new technique: how to drop an atomic bomb without being destroyed by the resulting shock wave.

Today the West Desert includes the Utah Test and Training Range, where the Air Force tests F-16 fighters and cruise missiles; Dugway Proving Grounds, a test center for chemical and biological weapons; Deseret Chemical Depot, which holds the Army’s stockpile of nerve and blistering agents; and the Tooele Chemical Demilitarization Facility, where those chemicals are being destroyed.

Other industries followed on the military’s heels. They include Safety Kleen, which runs a hazardous waste dump and incinerator; and Envirocare of Utah, which stores low-level radioactive waste and wants to take higher-level radioactive materials left over from dismantled nuclear power plants.

And then there’s Magnesium Corp. of America, which regularly tops a federal list of the nation’s biggest air polluters. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the plant released 57 million pounds of toxic air pollutants in 1998, mostly chlorine gas and hydrochloric acid.

MagCorp is cleaning up. This fall, the company agreed to start controlling dioxin, furans and hexachlorobenzene, all suspected carcinogens.

If the nation’s spent nuclear fuel ends up in the West Desert, it would be in keeping with the region’s toxic past.

“There is certainly a history of getting on bended knee out here for these types of projects,” said Steve Erickson of Downwinders, one of the groups opposing the Goshute project. “The Great Basin has often been perceived as a vast, useless wasteland. We’ve opened the door for these kinds of projects, and we’re finding it’s getting pretty hard to close it.”

Tooele County’s government has helped keep the door open by signing a contract with PFS, the consortium of private power companies behind the nuclear waste. PFS says it will guarantee payments of up to $300 million for the county’s support and services.

County planner Nicole Cline said the county is only protecting itself.

“It’s not that Tooele County wants or will ever want to be the nation’s dumping ground. We oppose that concept,” she said. “Hey, we’re going to be a watchdog on this thing, and if we see a truck being mishandled, we’re going to be the first ones to scream because it’s in our backyard.”

Tooele Mayor Charlie Roberts said most residents seem unconcerned.

“I see an occasional letter to the editor in the local paper, but it’s not the issue you’d think it would be,” Roberts said. The city’s population went from 13,000 to 24,000 in the last six years, and residents are more worried about schools and rush-hour traffic.

But awareness of the project might be increasing: Earlier this month, pro-PFS County Commissioner Gary Griffith was voted out of office in favor of Democrat Gene White, who campaigned on his opposition to the proposal.

There is plenty of opposition outside of Tooele County.

Leading the charge is Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, who first said the project would go through “over my dead body” and even tried to take control of the roads around the reservation as a way to block any progress.

He has support from Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson and others who think transporting the waste on Utah’s rail lines could lead to a catastrophe. They’re joined by California, which argues that such a disaster could indefinitely shut down Interstate 80 and hurt the state’s exports.

PFS disagrees, saying that there have been no major accidents reported in more than 30 years and more than 3,000 spent fuel shipments.

“This is truly a passive, environmentally benign facility,” said Scott Northard, project manager for PFS. “There’s nothing relative to ground water, and there will be nothing left behind when the fuel is eventually moved to a permanent area.”

Environmentalists say because there’s no guarantee that a permanent nuclear waste repository planned for Yucca Mountain, Nevada, will open in the near future, the Goshute storage could stay forever. They also argue that PFS should leave the spent fuel where it is, at nuclear plants scattered across the country, and shut down the plants when they run out of storage space.

“We’ve always been concerned about long-term health effects from the low-level toxins that are there,” said Jason Groenwald of Families Against Incinerator Risk. “You need to understand that there are cumulative effects here. You can’t always see it, you can’t always smell it, you can’t always taste it.”

Even Rep. James V. Hansen (R-Utah), a traditional foe of the environmentalists, has come out against the project and may have the most potent argument of all. Because the land lies under airspace used for the Utah Test and Training Range, he says, the casks could be hit by a wayward cruise missile or F-16. Or it could force the Air Force to limit use of the range, which could expose nearby Hill Air Force Base to a shutdown.

Despite the protests, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has already approved the safety measures for the project, and Bear says it’s time for outsiders to admit they can’t stop the project.

“They want us to be self-determined and they want us to be self-governed, and yet when we make these judgments, they don’t like it,” Bear said. “All Indians, all nations, we’re all at a crossroads right now. We’re going to have to support our people. We don’t expect the state of Utah to do it. We don’t expect the federal government to do it anymore, like we used to. We want to do it ourselves, and that’s what we’re trying to do now.”

https:// Private Fuel Storage LLC:

https://www.privatefuelstorage.com/

Skull Valley Band of Goshutes:

https://www.skullvalleygoshutes.org/

Downwinders:

https://www.downwinders.org

Utah office of Opposition to High Level Nuclear Waste Storage:

https://www.eq.state.ut.us/hlw_opp.htm

Families Against Incinerator Risk:

https://www.fair-utah.org/