Toxic Utah: Goshutes divided over N-storage

Government officials recognized years ago they would not meet the storage deadline passed by Congress. In the early 1990s, the Department of Energy invited communities and Indian tribes to apply for grants to study the possibility of temporarily accepting nuclear waste pending completion of a permanent site.

The Goshutes were among two Indian tribes that responded. They accepted two grants totaling $300,000 to conduct studies and visit nuclear power plants around the world.

"Initially, it bothered us that they seemed to be targeting Indian reservations," said Bear, who at the time was tribal secretary. "Then we went through the studies and decided it was feasible to store it, that it was safe."

A general meeting of tribal members passed a resolution supporting the idea.

In 1997, the tribal council, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and a consortium of nuclear power companies signed a 40-year lease agreement for temporary storage of nuclear waste, emphasizing to a wary public that the Skull Valley facility is a stop-gap only until the federal government completes a permanent facility. Even at a cost of $3 billion, it is money well spent if it avoids the shutdown of 10 to 20 nuclear reactors, says Scott Northard, PFS project manager.

The Skull Valley facility would cover 820 acres, most of which would be covered by rows of some 4,000 stainless steel canisters, each 18 feet tall, enclosing spent nuclear fuel rods transported to the site by rail from nuclear power plants around the nation.

If all goes as planned and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission grants the Goshutes and PFS a license to store the wastes, construction could begin by 2002. Not only will Goshutes be given preference in the construction jobs, but they will have first crack at 43 full-time jobs at the site, Bear said.

It's just the kind of economic development, Bear said, that will draw tribal members — most now living in Grantsville, Tooele and Salt Lake City — back to the reservation. And the financial windfall, he said, will help create the infrastructure that will give them something more than jobs.

Tribal survival

For most of the past century, few Goshutes have actually lived in Skull Valley. Most drifted to white communities where they could find jobs and their children could be taught in public schools.

Bear grew up playing in the arsenic-contaminated dirt of Stockton, just south of Tooele.

He worked awhile as a security guard at the missile test facility before moving permanently to the reservation in 1980 with his wife, a Paiute, where they raised their two daughters. He doesn't speak the Goshute language.