Minnesota, N.M. have turned down previous dealsSifting through clips of faraway newspapers and journals uncovers a striking historical note about Private Fuel Storage's current effort to put its nuclear waste on somebody else's property.
The very thing PFS is doing in Utah today mirrors what one of its charter members has attempted elsewhere in recent times. Twice, in fact - once in rural Minnesota and then again in New Mexico.Both efforts by Northern States Power failed.
This is why PFS has now turned to Utah with a controversial proposal to store the nuclear waste from its eight member utilities (including Northern States Power) on the Goshute Indian Skull Valley Reservation in Tooele County.
Northern States Power in late 1986 sought to find storage for its growing pile of spent nuclear-reactor cores about 20 miles from one of its reactors in Minnesota. But residents of Florence Township in Goodhue County strenuously objected, according to chronicles published in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune and other newspapers in the area.
The nail in the coffin was a decision by the state's Environmental Quality Board, which concluded after extensive study that it was safer to leave the nuclear discards on-site at the reactors where they were used than to ship them by rail someplace else. (The PFS proposal for Utah would design a facility that could receive up to 40,000 metric tons, about 88 million pounds, shipped via freight trains that would go through Salt Lake City.)
"It was not considered safe," Carol Overland, an attorney for Florence Township, said in an interview this week.
Simultaneously, Northern States Power was hedging its bets by opening talks with the Mescalero Apaches, an Indian tribe situated on a reservation outside of Alamagordo, N.M.
And though Northern States spearheaded the move, it was also representing 10 other electric utilities with the same problem. This is the same group attempting the Utah project.
Because federally recognized Indian groups are sovereign nations, this angle seemed promising - if also more expensive - because it was an easier political feat. The Mescalero Apaches actually wanted the waste, as evinced by a pair of referendums among its approximately 850 voting members. Both polls saw the proposal pass comfortably because of the money the consortium promised the Apache group.
The proposed lease outlined an arrangement much like the one being offered to Utah's Skull Valley band of Goshutes.
And, like the Goshute deal, its financial terms were not openly publicized, although some publications printed estimates.
In an article smartly titled "Dances with nuclear waste," U.S. News & World Report in August 1996 said an impending Apache contract with Northern States Power would pay out from $15 million to $25 million annually for 40 years.
Eight months later, however, the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal noted talks had fizzled.
Nuclear Waste News, an industry journal, reported that the reason for the impasse was unknown. But high-level state officials in Utah have recently suggested it was because of differences over money.
Nuclear Waste News quoted project manager Scott Northard - who is also spearheading the Utah effort - as saying that the Apache negotiations "established a price benchmark for any future interim facility," however.
This speaks to one of the most-often asked questions about the Goshute proposal. Utah opponents have tried unsuccessfully so far to find out how much PFS has agreed to pay the Goshutes, a figure that has been closely guarded.
It can only be guessed at, but if the Mescalero deal set a benchmark that was used in Utah and the estimate by U.S. News & World Report is correct, then the tiny, 124-member Goshute band will reap between about $120,000 and $200,000 a year for every man, woman and child in its ranks.
This would be for the life of the PFS-Goshute lease, which is set initially for 25 years but has a renewal option for a quarter-century beyond that.