A Strategic Embrace of Wild Side

The dry, rounded ridges of the Cedar Mountain Wilderness Area stretch from north to south for about 55 miles, framing this barren valley with its sagebrush and parched grass.

The Cedar range opens to the west on desolate salt flats, where the Air Force has sprayed nerve gas and dropped ordnance on a Rhode Island-sized bombing range, and where much of the nation’s industrial waste gets entombed for disposal.

Of all the spectacular places in Utah worthy of protection as wilderness, the Cedars never ranked high on anyone’s list. Yet, after rejecting wilderness proposals for more than two decades, Utah’s congressional delegation united behind this site.

“Whether it’s the most pristine or spectacular wilderness -- well, it doesn’t rank up there,” said Republican Rep. Rob Bishop, the prime sponsor of the wilderness measure that President Bush signed on Jan. 6.

But Utah’s congressional delegation was concerned with more than scenery. The restrictions of the Wilderness Act of 1964, intended to forever preserve virgin wilderness in a natural state, will make it impractical for a tribe of 121 Goshute Indians to accept nuclear waste for storage on their tiny patch of Skull Valley.

The Wilderness Act forbids development, and the new wilderness cuts off the only practical route for a rail spur to deliver steel casks of spent fuel rods to the Goshute Indian Reservation.

“We’re just a small Indian tribe that makes Utah cringe,” said tribal Chief Leon Bear, who professed no opinion about the state’s new wilderness area.

Bear in 1996 signed a multimillion-dollar contract with Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of nuclear-powered utilities looking to unload 40,000 tons of spent uranium fuel rods -- which have a half-life of 10,000 years -- on his reservation.

Now, Bear shrugs off the wilderness as the consortium’s problem, not his.

Even if the designation wasn’t strictly about wilderness preservation, advocates don’t care, said Kevin Mueller, executive director of the Utah Wilderness Congress.

Although it was not the top priority of preservationists, it was on their wish list -- and they didn’t even have to fight for it. In fact, they got more than they sought -- a 100,000-acre wilderness instead of the 62,100 acres called for in their original proposal for the Cedar mountain range.

“Obscurity doesn’t discredit the place. It’s wild,” Ray Bloxham, a field inventory specialist for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said on a tour of the Cedar mountains, an hour’s drive west of Salt Lake City.

The alliance has spent decades trying to protect millions of acres of red rock canyons in southern Utah that fall outside wilderness areas, but that doesn’t mean it will overlook a desert range closer to Salt Lake City where about 200 wild horses roam.

Wilderness activists are applauding Bishop, a second-term congressman, and say they look forward to forging more wilderness bills with the state’s delegation, which has de facto veto power over any effort in Congress to establish more wilderness in Utah.

Bishop also praised the collaborative effort but said it was “premature to conclude” that Utah would welcome more wilderness designations, traditionally a hated symbol here of federal control. Utah has the fewest acres of wilderness of any Western state, and the last purely Utah wilderness bill passed in 1984.

But if there’s one thing Utah politicians like less than wilderness designations, it’s an open-air nuclear-waste dump in a state that has no nuclear power plants.

“It’s quite interesting they would go that far -- to make a wilderness area just to keep out a few spent fuel rods and snub the poor old Goshutes,” said Claude Parkinson, 76, who leads tours at the nearby Donner-Reed Pioneer Museum.

The utility partners say the Skull Valley storage is temporary until the federal government can open a national repository for spent fuel at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. But try telling that to state leaders.

“The Goliaths were supposed to roll right over us and win,” Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. said in a January address to the Legislature, celebrating a wilderness bill that “not only makes it extremely difficult for anyone to bring spent nuclear fuel into Skull Valley, it also preserves the integrity of the Utah Test and Training Range.”

The Air Force uses Skull Valley as a flight path to the bombing range, and Utah earlier had argued that the odds of a jet crashing into a stainless steel cask and releasing radiation made the project too risky.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission rejected that argument and authorized a license for Private Fuel Storage last September. Utah is asking a federal appeals court to overturn the decision.

Private Fuel Storage chief John Parkyn has said he might be able to off-load the canisters from a main Union-Pacific line for trucking, but that option is fraught with problems.

Glenn Carpenter, a field manager for the Bureau of Land Management, said his agency was not likely to yield more land. And Utah is even less likely to widen the shoulderless, two-lane state road to accommodate flatbed trucks and their oversized loads.

The BLM has opened public comment on whether to grant Private Fuel Storage a right of way into Skull Valley. A decision isn’t expected for months.