Exhaust all avenues on waste

Sens. Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett took the fight to keep spent nuclear fuel rods out of Utah to a new venue Wednesday — the White House.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, a former Utahn, offered a sympathetic ear and agreed that "temporary" storage of 4,000 nuclear waste casks on Utah's west desert is a bad idea. But it remains to be seen whether the White House will intervene in the matter, which is before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for final approval.

A congressional solution would appear less likely because many members represent states that are part of Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of nuclear power utilities that wants to ship its waste here. With the scheduled opening of Yucca Mountain pushed back to at least 2012, they can argue that there is a greater urgency to establish the PFS repository on the Skull Valley Goshute reservation in Tooele County.

What this means is that Utah's entire congressional delegation, Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. and other state leaders must exhaust every means to keep Utah from becoming Yucca Mountain by proxy. But it also means that Utahns have to be realistic about the possibilities. PFS struck a private business arrangement with a small band of the Goshute tribe. The federal government is not a party to the negotiations, and it is limited in what it can do. And because the tribe operates on a sovereign reservation, the state is virtually powerless.

Moreover, PFS has a substantial financial investment in this project. PFS officials have spent at least a decade working through the federal government's regulatory processes. The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, which reports to the NRC, recently recommended that PFS be granted a license. To hear PFS officials tell it, their proposal meets every technical requirement of its licensing application.

State and federal officials must continue to fight this proposal to the bitter end. If the NRC gives its OK and every other conceivable option is exhausted, the state must shift its energies into determining the earliest possible opportunity that the waste can be moved to the underground facility at Yucca Mountain.

The logical solution is to keep the waste where it currently is stored, at the 70 some odd nuclear facilities nationwide. But if the nation is determined to move it to a permanent repository, Yucca is far better suited for it than is Utah's Skull Valley.