Home, Home on the (Radioactive) Range

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http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17390

 

 

Home, Home on the (Radioactive) Range

 

By Chip Ward, tomdispatch.com

December 15, 2003

 

The high and dry Great Basin Desert covers much of western Utah and most of

Nevada. Its vast scenery – barren gray ranges and sage covered plains – are an

acquired taste that few Americans have acquired. Most consider the lonely drive

from Salt Lake City to Reno a sleep-inducing and bladder-busting ordeal. Home to

flash floods, wildfires, coyotes and seismic catastrophes, the Great Basin is

unloved and, therefore, easily abused. It is where we once practiced atomic,

then chemical and biological warfare. It is covered with bombing ranges. Today,

it is becoming a time-bomb graveyard for nuclear waste that cannot be abided

where it is generated.

 

 

 

Those of us who live on the boundaries of such Great Basin facilities as the

Nevada Test Site, or the nuclear reservation at Hanford, Washington, or Dugway

Proving Grounds have been " downwinders " before. We know how the economics of

costs, risks, and liabilities can get translated not only into federal policy

but also into ecological disaster and human tragedy. We know that nuclear

utilities and their federal facilitators would turn our landscape into a

radioactive wasteland and that we are on the frontline of a national struggle.

 

 

 

At first glance, this does not bode well for those who have long fought nuclear

technology and its corporate owners. The Great Basin, after all, is sparsely

populated and its citizens are politically weak. Mostly Mormon, they are

inexperienced in the art of grassroots politics. A local joke goes: how many

Utahns does it take to screw in a light bulb? The answer: five – one man to

pronounce Heavenly Father's will, another to lead prayer while screwing in the

bulb, and three women to provide childcare and refreshments. Recently, however,

political activists in Utah won a big one, a hinterland victory that has gone

mostly unnoticed but should encourage activists everywhere. If a handful of

determined citizens can beat the big boys in Utah, we can win anywhere.

 

 

 

Facing a Mobile Chernobyl

 

 

 

Utah and Nevada get it both ways. After enduring the insidious consequences of

fallout from a hundred above-ground tests of our atomic arsenal, plus leakage

from hundreds of underground nuclear tests, we are now asked to abide the

results of the " peaceful atom " as well. Utilities that own nuclear power plants

elsewhere in the country have for decades been accumulating the waste stream

from Hell. So-called " spent " fuel rods from reactor cores are the most

irradiated substances on the planet and, unshielded, can kill the unwary

bystander within minutes of exposure. They remain dangerous for 20,000 years.

After fifty years of studying what to do with such " high-level " nuclear waste,

the federal government has assumed responsibility for imposing a " solution "

where there is none. Nevada is slated to get forty years' worth of accumulated

spent fuel, now stored near reactors across the nation. A " permanent " repository

under construction at Yucca Mountain near the Nevada Nuclear Test Site

will be the most expensive taxpayer-funded engineering project in history.

 

 

 

Permanence is a dicey concept out here. Yucca is not as safe as an easterner

might suspect. The desert only appears static. We live in a dynamic landscape

where the earth cracks and shifts suddenly and unimpeded winds lift dust into

the jet stream. As Mount St. Helen showed in 1980, even supposedly dormant

volcanoes sometimes blow and drift eastward.

 

 

 

The feds also promised the nuclear industry that they would facilitate the

development of a " temporary " site to park used fuel rods while they await

transfer to Yucca Mountain. When they failed to do so, a consortium of several

nuclear utilities came up with a Plan B. Calling themselves Private Fuel

Storage, they are trying to ship their accumulated spent-fuel rods to a

dirt-poor Goshute Indian reservation in Skull Valley, Utah, until the Yucca

Mountain facility can be completed in ten years or so. The state of Utah has

held PFS off, arguing that the " temporary " site will sooner or later become

permanent because an additional twenty or more years down the road, when Yucca

Mountain is filled, there will be enough accumulated fuel rods to fill Skull

Valley as well, and still leave more in storage around the power plants that

generated them.

 

 

 

Far from solving a staggering and intractable problem, Nevada and Utah argue,

Yucca Mountain and Skull Valley simply allow that problem to be replicated and

compounded again and again. The Great Basin is slated to be used as an enabler

for some very toxic collective behaviors. In the meanwhile, all that dangerous

high-level nuclear waste will be hauled across watersheds, over aquifers, and

through communities – thousands of shipments vulnerable to terrorist attacks and

inevitable accidents along the way. Most will carry the cesium equivalent of

more than two hundred Hiroshima-sized bombs. Millions of Americans will be in

the path of what critics are calling " Mobile Chernobyl. "

 

 

 

But wait, there's more. The nation's nuclear power infrastructure is aging and

must be rebuilt if nuclear power is to continue. Since it is no longer possible

to site a new nuclear power plant anywhere that lobotomy-free citizens live, the

industry cannot perform the usual " walk-away-and-let-the-government-clean-up "

act it perfected while mining and processing the uranium that is its raw

material. No, the old power plants will have to be torn apart and rebuilt in

place. The result will be yet more hot and dangerous debris, hundreds of

thousands of tons of " low-level " nuclear waste generated by ripping out and

rebuilding that infrastructure. Low-level radioactive waste comes in three

alphabetic categories: A, B, and C. B and C wastes are the hottest and most

problematic. Previous attempts to isolate and store such wastes failed badly in

wet climes like South Carolina. After all, radioactive materials migrate easily

once they reach water. To upgrade and go on, nuclear utilities

desperately need a dry rug to sweep their hot debris under, so our desert lands

are now targeted.

 

 

 

The government's policy for dealing with this developing component of our

intractable nuclear waste dilemma has also collapsed and is being conceded to

the private sector. An entrepreneur named Khosrow Semnani is becoming the

nation's first radioactive-waste multimillionaire and wants to become even

richer by filling the gap between the drive to keep nuclear utilities profitable

and the inability of federal agencies to pimp their tainted waste stream.

Semnani, who gave his corporation the tree-hugging moniker Envirocare, operates

a large landfill for A-level radioactive waste, mostly contaminated soils, on

Utah's West Desert. He has come close to establishing a monopoly of the market

for A-level radioactive waste and is now bidding to corner the emerging market

in B- and C-level debris.

 

 

 

The federal government has been an expensive, unresponsive, and careless steward

of the nation's nuclear waste. Any citizen who has tried to influence a hearing

of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission knows that its relation to sound science,

open information, and citizen inclusion is a lot like the relationship between

justice and a drive-by shooting. But the experiment in privatizing the

radioactive-waste problem on Utah's western desert has revealed the dramatic

shortcomings of that alternative.

 

 

 

When Semnani was applying to Utah for a permit to develop his dump, he paid

$600,000 in gold coins and condos to the director of the state's radioactive

waste agency who is now serving time in prison, not for extorting the money or

receiving a bribe but for failing to report his ill-gotten gains to the IRS.

Semnani's lawyers first kept him out of jail and then turned their attention to

the corporation's peskier critics – the Sierra Club's Cindy King, for example,

is fighting off a $142 million defamation suit. Despite his less than stellar

reputation, Semnani went on to become a major contributor to many Utah

gubernatorial, congressional, and legislative candidates. Utah's political

patriarchs who zealously guard their flock against the dangers of sex education

and beer commercials saw no problem in accepting Semnani's glowing largesse.

 

 

 

High Noon and the Mormon Temple of Doom

 

 

 

Just three years ago, Envirocare looked unbeatable and was rolling toward

whatever regulatory and legislative permission it needed to expand into the B

and C market when a handful of determined activists threw themselves in its

path. A grassroots group, Families Against Incinerator Risk, originally formed

to oppose the incineration of chemical weapons, led the resistance. FAIR created

literature and a web site, taught workshops, held debates, wrote letters, turned

out citizens for hearings, lobbied, generated news stories, held demonstrations,

cultivated allies, and finally morphed into a broader coalition, the Healthy

Environment Alliance of Utah, or HEAL Utah.

 

 

 

FAIR/HEAL's task was made harder by a local political culture that could not be

more hostile to change initiated from the bottom. Utah has a thin history of

grassroots and labor organizing and we haven't acquired the skills and native

leadership to resist powerful corporations and their government agency allies.

Culturally, the Mormon majority is not disposed to challenge authority. My heck,

as we would say here, we don't even have a viable two-party system. Except for

Salt Lake City itself, Republicans utterly dominate the state legislature and

local governments and a rightwing " Cowboy Caucus " dominates the Republican

Party. Here the notion of checks and balances applies mostly to banking

transactions. Debate in Utah's Legislature tends to be the intellectual

equivalent of marrying your cousin.

 

 

 

State regulators get their budgets and marching orders from legislators hostile

to regulation in general and environmental notions in particular. Because the

ideal Mormon family includes five to ten kids, our population profile is closer

to Bangladesh than Bangor, Maine, and our legislators are desperate for the

revenue necessary to educate so many. They are pleased when deserts once used as

military toilets for nerve gas and anthrax can be turned into pay toilets for

commercial hazardous waste. The result is a notoriously weak interpretation of

environmental law and policy followed by timid enforcement. Under former

governor, now EPA director Michael Leavitt, Utah regulators were more like

lapdogs than watchdogs with only one trick in their repertoire: roll over.

Predatory corporations peddling toxic waste disposal who knew an anemic civic

environment when they saw one, took full advantage. Each new environmental

horror pried opened the gate a bit further for the next poisonous

monster to slither in.

 

 

 

Semnani's bid to take on hotter radioactive wastes was held off through three

legislative sessions before a task force, stacked with Envirocare supporters,

was assigned to study the issues and resolve the debate once and for all. The

outlook seemed bleak. But within months, FAIR/HEAL, under the leadership of 27

year-old activist Jason Groenewold, managed to strip the task force of its

credibility. Recent polls show more than 85 percent of Utahns are opposed to

importing the hotter wastes.

 

 

 

The fat lady might have cleared her throat, but she wasn't quite ready to sing.

Then Utah's newest congressman, aptly named Rob Bishop, jumped into the fray. A

former paid lobbyist for Envirocare, he quietly facilitated a Department of

Energy attempt to circumvent the company's failure to get state permission to

import C-level wastes from Ohio that the feds were desperate to move. Three

years of vigorous civic dialogue was, it seemed, about to be short-circuited

with a wink and a nod. Utah citizens were outraged.

 

 

 

Crowds of angry citizens dogged Bishop's appearances, shouting to be heard. His

arrogant response to their criticism – that " lay " people, too dumb to grasp such

complicated scientific issues, should stand aside and let the technicians do

their job – only heightened the backlash. Letters to the editor flooded the

newspapers. Talk radio chimed in loud n'clear. Every major media outlet

denounced the importation of radioactive waste. When we found out that our top

political patrician, Senator Bob Bennett, had tried to create a backdoor

loophole through which Envirocare might slip the waste, the crowds turned on him

too.

 

 

 

Then a funny thing happened. Olene Walker, our quiet, bumbling, grandmotherly 72

year-old lieutenant governor took office when Leavitt moved to the EPA. We were

told that our first female governor would just fill Mike's place for a year

until a new patriarch could be chosen. But on her first day in office she

sternly denounced the Bishop-Envirocare deal as well as the importation of

hotter waste in general and vowed to block any of it from happening. Bennett,

noting the cheers for Olene and the punishment doled out to Bishop, immediately

did a 180 and proclaimed himself ever against radioactive waste. The co-chair of

the legislative task force then promptly abandoned Envirocare, followed by two

prominent Republican candidates for governor.

 

 

 

A tipping point had been reached. The final blow was delivered by the Alliance

for Unity, a coalition of the state's top religious leaders, and Salt Lake

City's Mayor Rocky Anderson, Utah's most progressive political leader. It

includes a very high official in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints

– that is, the Mormon Church. When the Alliance came out against importing

hotter waste, a gasp could be heard from one end of the state to the other. The

Mormon member would never have accepted the statement without the explicit

agreement of the church's prophet and leaders. The almighty Church itself had

spoken. Envirocare admitted defeat and withdrew its bid for the Ohio waste.

 

 

 

A grassroots citizen movement driven by an organization led by a 27 year-old

with only three staff members and an annual budget of less than $150,000 had

just soundly thrashed a well-connected corporation with an annual income of at

least $50 million and a team of top-drawer lawyers, lobbyists, and PR flacks.

While the citizen David stood triumphant, the nuke-waste Goliath covered his

wounded eye and howled. Supporting the importation of even " low level "

radioactive waste into Utah is now seen as politically suicidal and the nuclear

industry has lost a crucial option for avoiding a problem it must, but cannot,

solve.

 

 

 

There is never closure in politics. The campaign to keep high-level nuclear

waste out of Utah and Nevada and to expose the coming Mobile Chernobyl that will

be heading to Yucca Mountain is just beginning. We must educate our fellow

Americans in the East whose utilities are so ready to tag us with the risks,

costs, and liabilities of a power source we neither used nor benefited from. Our

slogan must be: " No more enabling the nuclear industry anywhere – stop the

madness now. " Other greedy and dangerous schemes will, no doubt, be hatched. But

on this one, we won – hands down. If we can win here, hope is alive and well.

 

 

 

Chip Ward is the author of Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West and

the forthcoming Hope's Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land

(Island Press). He has worked for more than a decade as a grassroots organizer,

co-founding several environmental groups in Utah where he is also the assistant

director of the Salt Lake City Public Library System.

 

 

 

 

 

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