Sometimes, situations call for unorthodox solutions. Such is the situation that has millions of highly radioactive spent fuel rods sitting figuratively at Utah's doorstep.
Gov. Mike Leavitt is working on a bill that purportedly would make it extremely difficult for a consortium of Eastern nuclear power producers to move their nuclear waste to a site on the Goshute Indian Reservation, just 40 miles west of Salt Lake City.That's because it would make a toll road out of the only black-topped road going into the reservation. "The tolls would be placed so high that it would be impossible" to transport the waste to the reservation, according to a Republican legislator familiar with the bill.
To do that, however, would require that the 26-mile Skull Valley Road leading to the proposed site become a state road. The Utah Department of Transportation has already asked lawmakers to make that designation. They ought not hessitate to do so.
The fact that such tactics are needed is unfortunate. But they are made necessary by the determination of Private Fuel Storage, the consortium representing Midwestern and Eastern nuclear power plants. It will pay members of the Goshute tribe handsomely to use their land and has enlisted the aid of numerous "experts," including Nobel Prize winners, to tell Utahns how safe the nuclear fuel rods are.
The governor wisely is not listening to these folks who, as he notes, all hail from outside the state. Lawmakers and the people shouldn't listen to them either. Their agenda is to have the waste removed from the East and shipped to the West.
Unless Utah voluntarily decides to become a nuclear waste dumping ground it shouldn't be forced to take nuclear waste created by others.
If, the nuclear waste is as safe as the experts proclaim, why are states such as New York, New Jersey and Ohio so anxious to have their waste transported to Utah? People in those states obviously are no more interested in having nuclear waste than Utahns are. But the difference is that's where the waste originated. And that's where it should remain.
The waste is being stored in those states now. Shipping the 10.4 million spent fuel rods to Utah would require thousands of cross-country trips.
Those states should either keep the waste or develop a storage site in the East to house it. That not only would be the fair thing to do, it would be the right thing to do.