F-16s Shoot Down Skull Valley Nuclear Fuel Storage

WASHINGTON, DC, March 11, 2003 (ENS) - Citing the risks of military aircraft operations conducted near Skull Valley, Utah, the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, an independent judicial arm of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, issued a ruling Monday that has blocked the issuance of a license to the Private Fuel Storage consortium to build a spent nuclear fuel storage facility in Utah on Goshute tribal lands.

The proposed above ground facility is intended to temporarily store the waste fuel from the nation’s nuclear power plants that is eventually destined for a permanent storage facility - currently planned for Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The facility would be big enough to hold all the spent fuel produced by the U.S. nuclear power industry, now being held on-site at power plants.

Drawing of the proposed Skull Valley Spent Fuel Storage Facility (Photo courtesy Skull Valley Goshute Band)

A formal hearing was held in mid-2002 in which the Licensing Board received evidence on a number of issues challenging the PFS proposal, including the likelihood of an F-16 - a single engine military jet - crashing into the facility.

The state of Utah, the proposal’s main opponent, said the site is unsuitable because it would sit under the airway that pilots use to fly thousands of F-16s a year from Hill Air Force Base down Skull Valley to the Utah Test and Training Range, the largest missile and bomb testing range in the country.

Utah Governor Mike Leavitt is opposed to the Skull Valley facility. (Photo courtesy Office of the Governor)

Utah Senator Orrin Hatch called the decision, "a tremendous victory for safety and sensibility over recklessness and short term profit. I have never thought that this proposal was in the best interests of the citizens of Utah, and I think this decision bears that out,” he said.

Scott Northard, project manager for PFS, a consortium of eight electric utility companies, said, "This partial decision is another indication of the rigorous standards that must be met to build and operate this facility. While we are disappointed with this initial partial decision, we continue to believe that our facility meets the federal regulations. We will review the Board's ruling to determine if and how we may address their concerns."

At the hearing, representatives of Private Fuel Storage claimed that the chances of an F-16 accidentally crashing into the facility were so minimal that taking precautions against that potential event was unnecessary. PFS relied heavily on a “pilot avoidance” theory, which predicts that Air Force pilots would almost always, before ejecting during an in-flight emergency, take steps to guide their crashing jets away from the facility.

Evidence presented by the state of Utah led the Board to reject that theory and to rule that the PFS facility could not be licensed until the safety concern over the F-16 crash scenario is addressed.

The PFS-Goshute plan would place up to 4,000 casks filled with 10.4 million used nuclear plant fuel rods on a three foot slab of soil and concrete that covers about 100 acres of the desert. The casks would be above ground for up to 40 years.

F-16 Fighting Falcons lined up on the runway at Hill Air Force Base, Utah (Photo courtesy U.S. Air Force)

Private Fuel Storage will also have the opportunity to convince the five Commissioners who head the NRC to overturn the Licensing Board’s ruling on appeal.

Nevada's Congressional delegation hailed the decision as clear evidence that the Yucca Mountain long term nuclear waste repository is far from a done deal, although it has been approved by President George W. Bush and Congress.

"I have always believed that the Yucca Mountain facility is a grave threat to the health and safety of Nevadans," said Nevada Senator Harry Reid, a Democrat. "While President Bush and others believe Nevadans should be forced to become the nation's nuclear waste dump, I will continue fighting this dangerous and unnecessary project. The decision today, that a smaller version of the Yucca Mountain facility is unsafe, gives us significantly more ammo in our battle to prevent Yucca Mountain from opening."

"We as Nevadans applaud and wholeheartedly agree with the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board's decision," said Nevada Congressman Jon Porter, a newly elected Republican. "Our nation's top pilots train at Nellis Air Force Base, Nellis Range, Fallon Naval Air Station, and Indian Spring, by comparison, they are a hop, skip and a jump away from Yucca Mountain. The NRC [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] must apply the same logic to Yucca Mountain that the licensing board did in the case of the Utah facility."

The Nevada based Shundahai anti-nuclear advocacy group called the Licensing Board's decision "a huge victory for the anti-nuclear movement."

Shundahai executive director Kalynda Tilges said, "While this delay in the licensing decision is a victory for opponents of the PFS dump, the issue is far from settled. The NRC has overturned the recommendations of its Licensing Board in the past, including consideration of the environmental justice contention put forward by tribal dump opponent Margene Bullcreek, a Goshute woman who lives on the Skull Valley Reservation, located approximately 45 miles upwind of Salt Lake City."

Bullcreek called the decision, "Good news for now." The Skull Valley band has made no public comment on the decision.

Workers hold simulated nuclear fuel (Photo courtesy National Spent Nuclear Fuel Program)

East of Skull Valley in the area known as Rush Valley there was once native sagebrush, pine trees, food plants, and also wild game, the band says. Today, this area serves as a nerve gas storage facility for the United States government. The world's largest nerve gas incinerator has recently been built to destroy thousands of tons of these deadly chemicals.

South of Skull Valley lies the Intermountain Power Project which provides coal fired electrical power primarily for California. Air pollution fills the skies of the western desert and impacts the Skull Valley Reservation.

Northwest of Skull Valley, is the Envirocare Low-Level Radioactive Disposal Site which buries low-level radioactive waste for the entire country. Within this immediate area there are also two hazardous waste incinerators and one hazardous waste landfill.

North of the reservation is the Magnesium Corporation plant, a large magnesium production plant which has been identified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as the most polluting plant of its kind in the United States. Chlorine gas releases from MagCorp impact the Skull Valley Reservation.

"In the citing of these facilities on the aboriginal territory of the Goshutes, the Skull Valley Tribal Government and people were never once consulted," the band says.

A copy of the 220 page decision will be available from the NRC’s website at: http://www.nrc.gov/what-we-do/regulatory/adjudicatory/pfs-decision.pdf.