WP: Storage Plan (on Native American land) Approved for Nuclear Waste

[DeepModem Mom]

Storage Plan Approved for Nuclear Waste
Government Gives Go-Ahead for Facility on Native American Land in Utah

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 10, 2005; Page A02


The federal government yesterday approved a $3.1 billion plan by a private corporation to store tens of thousands of tons of highlyradioactive nuclear waste on a Native American reservation in Utah, potentially removing a major obstacle to the nuclear industry's ambitions for renewed growth.

The move paves the way for the industry to circumvent a lengthy political stalemate over a proposed public nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada and could rid dozens of overcrowded nuclear plants around the country of the need to store radioactive products that will remain dangerous for centuries.

Environmental groups and Utah officials said the decision raised the risk of an accident or a deliberate attack, and promised to challenge it in court. One faction of the deeply divided Skull Valley Band of Goshutes, which has agreed to host the facility, said the nuclear waste would debase sacred ground and destroy tribal culture.

The decision by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to grant a license for the facility cemented a pact made nearly a decade ago between strange bedfellows: utility behemoths that wanted to get tons of radioactive waste off their hands and an obscure Native American tribe that was willing to offer its land in exchange for a still-undisclosed sum of money.

While public waste storage plans such as Yucca Mountain have been plagued by political maneuvering and not-in-my-back yard fights in Congress, Private Fuel Storage, the company that will build the new facility, successfully argued that its agreement was between a private corporation and a sovereign tribe and therefore not subject to the same degree of public review. Environmental groups and the state of Utah have tried repeatedly to intervene but have failed....


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/09/AR2005090901935.html

[Lindacooks]

1. Now I wonder how long this will last before there's another disaster?

Privitizing any huge public works project is a disaster in the making. This, too, will come back to haunt bush.

[FloridaPat]

2. No, he'll be out of office and probably out of the country holed up

in some mansion with hundreds of secret service around. This will haut our children and their children etc etc etc

[Lecky]

3. America: Still Finding New Creative Ways to Screw the Native Americans

[astonamous]

4. You have know idea...

This area is just a few miles from Dugway Proving Grounds - Military Test Range. You know, with jets, helicopters and amunitions testing. Generally speaking, things that go boom and sometimes not planned. Perfect place to store nuclear waste.

http://home.comcast.net/~kknowlto/

[NVMojo]

5. There has a been a very corrupt Chairman in power out there in the past

and if you've never been there ...it makes you realize how sick and cruel the federal government was when they finally decided to stop openly exterminate the Indigenous people of this land. They then did it differently. This place the Goshute are stuck on is so damn desolute, the average person would go out of their minds living there. These folk are so poor ...so, of course, this administration will shit on them anew, with money.

[Lecky]

6. Yes I've heard horror stories about what they have had to deal

with and that the federal government doesn't even give them the time of day.

It's horrible...they don't even care. You never hear about these things on the MSM though...ever

:(

[Nevernose]

7. Old News (kind of). And NIMBY? Fuck you, WashPost!

There's been some faction of American Indians willing to screw their tribes over nuclear waste for years. Last I heard it was Navajo down in Arizona, and was/still is some Shoshone (Paiute) here in Nevada. A few others, too, including New Mexico and Colorado. Of course, the government studies that showed the safest places to store nuclear waste were in California and Texas have been not-so-conveniently forgotten at the federal level...

And "not-in-my-back" fights? Fuck you, WP. Pigeon-holing people trying to protect their homes and families from fuck-ups like the rest of the country face does not make us "nimbys." It makes us yet another victim of a corporate plan to screw the Average Joe out of their health and safety at a cost of Average Joe's safety and life in the sake of the almighty dollar. You and your shareholders can take your plutonium and blow it out your ass.

Or maybe it does make us nimbys. Go shit in your OWN backyard. Screw Nevada? Screw YOU!

[Blaq Dem]

8. Satan couldn't be more proud.

As if raping, slaughtering and dispossessing the indigenous people's of this land wasn't bad enough. When will the madness end?