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Connie Nakahara
Utah Department of Environmental Quality
Continued...
Verdoia: Is that good news or bad news or no news?
Nakahara: It means the Licensing Board does not, is not
sure it has the authority to hear the issue itself, so it has
sent the issue up to the Commission, for the Commission to hear
or to decide to sent back to the Licensing Board. So I don't know
whether it's good or bad news.
Verdoia: Concurrent with the discussion over the Skull
Valley Band and the PFS Proposal is a separate issue perhaps,
of the Department of Energy (DOE) studying the Yucca Mountain
facility and being poised to issue a scientific recommendation
on the appropriateness of that location as a permanent storage.
Would the determination of a permanent storage location substantially
impact the Utah proposal?
Nakahara: I don't believe it will have much of an impact
at all. One thing the DOE said in their Draft Environmental Impact
Statement for Yucca Mountain, was the DOE estimated a 105,000
metric tons of uranium was spent fuel, commercial spent nuclear
fuel would be generated by the year 2046 and right now, by law,
Yucca Mountain's capacity is limited to 63,000 metric tons of
uranium of commercial spent fuel and that leaves some 42,000 with
no place to go. PFS has proposed a forty thousand metric ton facility.
And yes, Congress can change the law and increase Yucca Mountain's
capacity but right now the law states that the capacity for Yucca
Mountain cannot be increased until there's a second repository
and everybody knows, nobody's even considering a second repository.
So there's a possibility that even if Yucca Mountain is built,
any spent fuel sent to Skull Valley could stay there.
Verdoia: And what we're talking about then is a "temporary
facility" potentially becoming much longer term.
Nakahara: Yes. In addition, a temporary facility is not
built for permanent disposal and therefore there are less safety
standards associated with a temporary facility. In addition, Private
Fuel Storage has always maintained that they will go forward with
the PFS proposal regardless of whether Yucca Mountain is built
or whether there's a temporary facility proposed for Yucca Mountain
- because the timing to get a temporary facility, I believe in
last years' Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the Amendment Proposal was
by 2006 or 2007 and one of the prime forces behind PFS is Xcel
Energy, formerly Northern States Power, and they apparently need
to have an alternative by 2007. And so PFS has always said regardless
of what happens at Yucca Mountain, they will move forward with
their proposal. So I don't believe it has a great impact on the
Skull Valley site.
Verdoia: There are cynical voices that exist in the world
that say the involvement of the Skull Valley Band of the Goshute
Indian tribe was triggered by the Department of Energy, which
in fact solicited the interest of Native American tribes with
$100,000 dollar grants to study whether they would like to host
radioactive waste, and there's more suspicious minds among us
who might say, if one arm of the government actually dangles the
carrot in front of a Native American Tribe, they created a mandate
for such involvement to go forward. How can the government say
we'll give you money to consider being a waste site and then say
but we may not approve? Are you concerned about the role of the
federal government and agencies seeming to be at odds with each
other in terms of coming up with a high level radioactive waste
storage solution?
Nakahara: Well definitely the federal government, when
they were looking for a temporary storage site themselves, with
the office that they called the Nuclear Waste Negotiator, the
majority of sites that the federal government looked at were on
Native American reservations. I believe they looked at around
30, and probably 27 of them were Native American reservations.
And so, yes, I agree that the federal government set up the premise
for PFS to look at a Native American site. PFS is relying on some
of the ground work that the federal government did in its Draft
Environmental Impact Statement in identifying viable alternatives.
Verdoia: What makes Native American locations and reservation
lands so attractive in this process?
Nakahara: Well one, they don't have to deal with state
or local governments and another consideration that PFS looked
at in their survey was a small tribal government. Some of the
issues that PFS considered in evaluating the different sites were
whether the tribe had sovereignty and two, whether they were less
than a 500 member tribe. And so they would have fewer problems
with, I guess, inter-tribal issues if it was a smaller tribe.
Verdoia: Smaller population, more easily managed in its
opinion.
Nakahara: Yes.
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