Firm wants to skip road, use rail to tribal N-dump

It would appear the company seeking to store thousands of tons of nuclear waste on Goshute Indian lands in Tooele County has borrowed a page from a high school football playbook: If you can't go through your opponent, go around them.

And it has certainly captured the attention of state environmental regulators in doing that.Earlier this year, the Legislature attempted to impede the shipment of the nuclear waste to Tooele County by designating the only access road to the site as a state highway, thereby forcing PFS to comply with tough, some would say onerous, state regulations. There has even been talk of state tolls on the road that would make the transportation of nuclear waste prohibitively expensive.

PFS has now responded by proposing to bypass the state road - and any state regulations on that road - with a new railroad spur that would be located exclusively on federal and Indian lands on the west side of Skull Valley.

"I am sure the proposed alternative is a direct response to the state's efforts to ensure the Skull Valley Road was used properly," said Dianne E. Nielson, executive director of the Utah Department of Environmental Quality. "From my perspective, they recognize there are clear problems with the (road) proposal."

Scott Northard, project manager for PFS, disagreed, saying the state's actions to take control of the Skull Valley Road did not play into the decision to build a new $21 million rail access across federal lands.

"We looked at a lot of different aspects of a rail corridor and we found it a more desirable route with fewer impacts on residents and the ranchers who use the road," he said.

Northard added that the railroad route will not require the transportation of waste storage casks under I-80, making it a lot less expensive than developing the Skull Valley Road for heavy-haul trucks or building a rail line adjacent to the road.

Under the original proposal, PFS intended to transport nuclear waste south from the Union Pacific rail line at Rowley Junction, across a variety of private and Indian lands. The new proposal calls for a rail spur to be built 15 miles west of Rowley Junction on the west side of Skull Valley. The route would angle south across Bureau of Land Management lands and then east to the storage site on Indian lands, about 32 miles total.

The new route would eliminate any need to transfer the storage containers from railroad cars to heavy trucks, and that should reduce transportation risks, PFS officials maintain.

However, Nielson believes the new rail proposal creates new problems that must be addressed.