Toxic Utah: Goshutes divided over N-storage

To get to the 18,000-acre Goshute Indian Reservation, head west from Salt Lake City on I-80 past the slag piles of the Kennecott smelter, then past the turn-off to the Deseret Chemical Depot, where the nation's deadliest chemical and biological weapons are stockpiled prior to incineration.

Keep heading west toward the MagCorp smokestack in the distance. You can't miss it. It's the one spewing more air pollution into the atmosphere than any other plant in North America.

About 45 miles west of downtown Salt Lake, turn south just before you get to two hazardous waste incinerators, a hazardous waste dump and a radioactive waste facility. You get to the reservation about 25 miles later, or about 10 miles before the Dugway Proving Ground, home of some of the nastiest byproducts of military weapons testing.

These days, the reservation boundary is marked only by a nondescript sign, a cattle guard across the road and a billboard inviting travelers to stop at the Pony Express Store, a two-pump pullout with sparsely stocked shelves. It is the only business on the reservation.

About 25 people live in this sun-baked desert where the only sound is the occasional scream of a car engine as it races along the arrow-straight highway to some place else.

A treaty more than 130 years ago exiled a small band of Goshute Indians out of sight and out of mind in one of the harshest landscapes imaginable, a place so desolate it was appropriately named Skull Valley.

"Our homeland was the Tooele Valley, but the pioneers kept pushing us west," said 44-year-old Leon Bear, just elected to his second term as chairman of the 112-member band, most of whom live in towns far removed from the reservation. "They pushed and pushed."

The Goshutes are now pushing back, tweaking the nose of Gov. Mike Leavitt and Utah's political establishment by entering into a lease agreement to allow a consortium of nuclear power utilities to store up to 40,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste in above-ground casks on tribal lands. Because the tribe has sovereignty over what happens on the reservation, the state has struggled mightily with how to stop the Goshutes from accepting the most lethal wastes known to man.

The proposal calls for temporary storage of the waste. But opponents believe once it's here, it'll stay.

Bear believes the wastes can and will be stored safely, and that the deal with Private Fuel Storage will spell economic prosperity on his impoverished reservation. The $3 billion to be spent building and operating the facility over the next 40 years will mean jobs for Goshutes, a handful of new homes, money for health services and a cultural center to help them preserve their disappearing heritage.

But the proposal has bitterly divided the tiny tribe.