SALT LAKE CITY — According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance often find themselves at odds over wildlands, but their shared opposition to storing nuclear-plant waste in Utah has put them on the same side of the fence — or railroad tracks, in this case.
Federal regulators have agreed with SUWA that a proposed 32-mile railroad spur between Interstate 80 and the planned waste-storage facility might have too great an impact on the environment, especially 18,000 acres of the North Cedar Mountains that could qualify for wilderness designation. The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, a division of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said it wants to hear more debate on the subject before deciding on whether to license the storage facility.
“The board, in doing this, has said wilderness matters,” said Joro Walker, the attorney who handled the case for SUWA.
The Leavitt administration this year redoubled its efforts to fight the spent-fuel facility, which has been proposed by a consortium of out-of-state utility companies called Private Fuel Storage that has leased 125 acres of the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation, about 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.
The $3.1 billion facility would be an above-ground cement pad for parking spent nuclear-plant fuel in steel-and-concrete casks for up to 40 years. The storage would only be temporary, until the fuel can find final disposal, probably 500 miles away at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
In Private Fuel Storage’s plans, the rail spur would cross a patch of the proposed wilderness area for less than two miles on its route south, then east, to a train-to-truck cask transfer building.
The licensing board ruling Friday rejected Private Fuel Storage’s assertion that the North Cedar Mountains roadless area lacks natural values worth preserving. But SUWA argued the consortium had given too little attention to rail routes that might be less environmentally harmful.
The wilderness-impacts ruling adds some heft to the state’s anti-storage arguments before federal regulators, even though the state has disagreed with SUWA’s wilderness ideas for the North Cedars — and millions more proposed wilderness acreage in Utah.
The state and the environmental group are on opposite sides in federal court in a bitter argument about what parts of Utah really are roadless, thus qualified for wilderness designation by Congress.
Assistant Attorney General Larry Jensen said it is too soon to say whether the NRC ruling will have much sway in the state’s fight to stop the Skull Valley storage. But, he described the ruling as a positive development.
“It’s always nice not to be summarily thrown out on your ear, which is what SUWA did here,” he said, saying the governor and SUWA disagree on where and how much wilderness there should be, not on the value of protecting wild places. “Here the interests align.”