Alliance's ad urges nuclear waste opposition

The Alliance for Unity, a group consisting of some influential Utahns, made a public plea Friday for residents of the Beehive State to oppose the potential storage of high-level nuclear waste here and in Nevada.

The group took advertising space in Friday's edition of both the Deseret Morning News and the Salt Lake Tribune to publish a letter calling on all Utahns to "protect our image as a beautiful, healthy, safe state."

"If we value our economic future and the health of our children," the letter stated, "we must not become the nation's nuclear garbage dump."

The group said it is concerned both about the proposal by Private Fuel Storage (PFS) to temporarily store spent nuclear fuel rods on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian reservation in Tooele County, and the possible transportation through Utah of the high-level nuclear waste headed for a proposed permanent storage site in Yucca Mountain, Nev.

"Skull Valley is only 50 miles, upwind, from one million people along the Wasatch Front," the letter noted. "The possibilities for accidents, or acts of terrorist sabotage, put the health, safety and well-being of all Utahns at unacceptable risk."

The Alliance, according to its position paper, is a group of Utah civic, religious and business leaders seeking to "foster the common good in the state." Its members include Jon M. Huntsman Sr. (father of Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.), Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, Elder M. Russell Ballard of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, University of Utah President Michael K. Young, Deseret Morning News Editor and Chief Operating Officer John Hughes and MediaNews Group Inc. President Dean Singleton, all of whom signed the letter.

One aim of the letter is to encourage Utahns to write the federal Bureau of Land Management by May 8 to oppose an application by PFS for permission to construct a rail line to move the spent rods to the reservation, or to build a transfer station on BLM land and then move the waste via trucks.

"We hope Utahns will write Pam Schuller (of the BLM's Salt Lake City office) or e-mail her (Pam_Schuller@BLM.gov) and we hope they talk to their elected representatives, because we don't need this in Utah," said Alexander B. Morrison, the alliance's executive director and an emeritus general authority of the LDS Church.

"I hope it has some impact," Morrison said of the advertisement, "because the Alliance for Unity feels quite strongly that we don't want this extremely dangerous high-level stuff ending up in Utah or being transported through the state.