WASHINGTON — A Nuclear Regulatory Commission license in hand, Private Fuel Storage's chairman said Wednesday that the consortium of utilities is moving forward with its plans for a high-level nuclear waste disposal site in Utah's Skull Valley — and he doesn't think opponents can stop it.
"Yes, there is hope for our future," John Parkyn said, holding up the license at an NRC conference in Maryland, drawing applause from the crowd.
In other developments:
The state of Utah this week filed an updated challenge to the PFS proposal in the U.S. District Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C. It challenges the NRC's license, issued to PFS last month.
And Time magazine is reporting that PFS would pay the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians up to $100 million over 40 years for the right to operate its proposed repository on the band's reservation.
However, neither Skull Valley Band chairman Leon Bear nor PFS spokeswoman Sue Martin would confirm the figure to the Deseret Morning News.
In Maryland, Parkyn told the NRC conference he is seeking additional utilities with nuclear plants interested in moving waste to the PFS site, 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. And he downplayed any chances Utah's congressional delegation, governor and other opponents have at stopping PFS's plans.
That includes the recent creation of the Cedar Mountains Wilderness Area, approved by President Bush in January. The wilderness area gives federal protection to land adjoining the Utah Test and Training Range and includes PFS's preferred route for a rail line that would be built to move nuclear waste through Skull Valley to the storage site.
The congressional delegation had earlier pointed out that the wilderness designation did not stop the project outright but at least could remove a transportation option. PFS could still use a trucking option, although it still needs permission to use public land to build a transfer facility to truck the waste.
But Parkyn maintains that the wilderness area does not rule out using another rail route.
"That doesn't mean you can't put a railroad there, whether Sen. (Orrin) Hatch understands that or not. It certainly would make getting that land lease for the purpose harder.
"We will get the fuel to the site because it's a legal commodity, and we now have a license to receive it," Parkyn said.
Parkyn said the Cedar Mountain reserve is not a real wilderness either, arguing that the wilderness is in the mountains and that the delegation just "drew a bubble" around the mountains to block the nuclear waste — an argument he says could matter later down the line.
Parkyn believes other utilities will join the PFS consortium to save money and that ultimately the federal government will come on board as well.
In some cases, it would cost utilities more to keep storing waste at their plant sites — especially at nuclear power plants no longer in use — than it would to move it to Utah, Parkyn said. Although he would not disclose specific amount, he said PFS is a more cost-effective option because there is one set of security, insurance and other costs split a number of ways versus one utility having to pay for its own on site storage itself.
Companies interested in using PFS to store waste would pay a per-cask-cost, a percentage based on how much waste they would have to store there. Parkyn agreed that there are still some obstacles for the project to overcome, but individual utilities face their own sets of problems having to store waste at their plant sites, so PFS is still a viable option. He said 72 plant sites have separate costs that can be consolidated into a small share of one site.
"It's an individual choice," Parkyn said of the utilities.
The proposed PFS site in Utah would be an interim storage location. It was conceived because the Energy Department has yet to open the permanent government-owned nu- clear waste site planned for Yucca Mountain in Nevada. That site is plagued by its own set of delays and controversies. Federal law prohibits storing waste in Nevada before Yucca gets a license, and a federally owned interim waste site would need to be approved by Congress.
Parkyn said "nothing official" has taken place with the Energy Department on getting PFS to become a federal interim site, but it is "logical to not replicate it." It took PFS almost nine years to get a license, so PFS believes the government could use its site instead of creating its own.
"They (the Energy Department) know that we are here, and a lot of us have worked hard on this," Parkyn said.
'Toxic opportunity'
Meanwhile, the Time magazine article, "Utah's Toxic Opportunity" by reporter Margaret Roosevelt, has prompted discussion about how much the Goshutes in Tooele County could benefit from the project.
Jason Groenewold, director of the anti-nuclear group Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, said the $100 million figure is "pennies on the dollar, compared to liabilities the nuclear industry faces for keeping this waste where it's generated. . . .
"Given that the liabilities and risks are going to be the highest for those that live in Skull Valley, they got the short end of the stick."
But Bear, the tribe's chairman, said PFS payments would allow the band to improve health care and housing. In 2000 Census reports, the tribe's population was listed at 90, not all of whom may be members of the Skull Valley Band.
The Time article, though dated March 13, is not included in the March 13 print edition available on newstands in Utah but is available on the magazine Web site. It does not show up as a link but appears when the word "Goshute" is typed in the magazine's search engine. Time magazine did not immediately answer an e-mail query seeking to clarify why Utahns could read the article on the Internet but could not find it in the magazine, though it was reportedly published elsewhere.
Asked about the $100 million figure, PFS's Martin said, "They have always considered the amount of the lease confidential. It has never been released publicly that I'm aware of."
In fact, she added in a telephone interview, she did not know the amount.
Bear also said he didn't know how much money will be involved. "When you start talking about profits . . . , I can't speculate on that," he said Wednesday.
The agreement between the Skull Valley Band and PFS "has to do with profit sharing," Bear added, "and how do I know what the profit's going to be? I know the facility's going to cost quite a bit to build," he added.
In a June 2000 article, the Deseret Morning News reported the cost of the PFS facility would be $3.1 billion, counting construction, operations and decommissioning. Since then, Congress passed the wilderness act that derails a planned rail spur line to the site. Because of that, a separate plant apparently would have to be built to unload protective casks from rail cars and load them onto trucks for the trip to the reservation.
Asked how the tribe will benefit from PFS, he said, "We're talking about putting housing up there, police station, small tribal clinic." Another possibility is health insurance for every tribe member, he said.
Bear said the band's health provider is in Fort Duchesne, Uintah County, 250 miles away. "It's hard for our people to get out there.".
For and against
Most members of the band are in favor of the project, Bear said. "We just had our meeting a couple of weeks ago, and everybody's anticipating when this is going to happen."
People wanted to know, "now that we got the license (referring to the license that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued to PFS), how come they're not building it? I just told them that you got to understand there's a lot of other things that's got to happen before they start moving dirt around."
Among these are approval by the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Who knows what bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., are going to do? Bear asked.
Asked if he was hopeful that the project will be built, he said it was like his father always said, "If it's going to come here, it's going to come here." The facility will be built on the reservation "if that's where it's intended to go," Bear said.
Margene Bullcreek, a member of the Skull Valley Band who lives on the reservation and who opposes the project, said she does not know the terms of the agreement with PFS.
She and other opponents have been saying "this contract is not valid because we don't know what's contained in there," she said in a telephone interview.
"Hopefully, it's not going to happen," she said of the project.
The project would store "more than half of the nation's (nuclear) waste on our small, little reservation, and there's no guarantee this is as safe as they say it is, because of the man-made accidents," she said. "Why should we give up our sovereignty, our indigenous land to store this waste?" Bullcreek asked. She worried that if some irreversible incident took place, "what's going to happen to us? Are we going to relocate?"
The $100 million cited, assuming it is a correct figure, is not the only amount to be paid to Utah entities. In September 2005, this newspaper quoted Martin as saying the utility consortium could pay Tooele County up to $250 million in lieu of property tax over the project's 40-year life.
E-mail: suzanne@desnews.com; bau@desnews.com