Safety stressed at nuclear waste forum

If nuclear waste is stored in Skull Valley, the storage company, state and local officials and tribal elders need to go beyond the required emergency preparations.

Many of those needed preparations involve training for possible accidents involving the waste, hiring enough officers to handle an emergency and having the necessary equipment, said Connie Nakahara of the state Department of Environmental Quality during a Friday roundtable discussion at the University of Utah's Olpin Union. The discussion was part of the two-day Utah Conference on Safety and Industrial Hygiene.

The problem is that the law does not require and funding does not provide for much of the training and equipment that would probably be needed in the case of an emergency at the proposed storage facility on the Goshute reservation in Tooele County, Nakahara said. And the private company seeking to bring the waste to the reservation, Private Fuel Storage, is not bound to provide any additional assistance to the impacted agencies.

"PFS should provide training and equipment before any shipment" comes to Skull Valley, Nakahara said. "But none of it is required."

The forum included three speakers, all of whom oppose nuclear waste coming to Utah. Margene Bullcreek, a Goshute who is a member of the Ohngo Gaudadeh Devia Awareness, a grassroots group opposing the proposed nuclear waste dump, said that she has fought the dump for one simple reason: safety.

Because of the tribe's sovereignty, the state has little control over what happens on tribal lands, she said, which leaves it up to tribal members to stop the dump. But that sovereignty makes stopping the waste shipments difficult.

"Utility companies have taken advantage of the indigenous people," she said. "They use our sovereignty to avoid accountability."

Jason Groenwold, executive director of HEAL Utah, an anti-nuclear waste group, told the crowd of approximately 100 people that one of the biggest problems with the Skull Valley waste dump is that it is not an answer to the problem of how to handle the nation's nuclear waste.

"We're not solving any problems with the movement of this waste into Utah," he said. "It just allow them to produce more waste."

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E-mail: jloftin@desnews.com