Utah's Great Basin, the dry expansive rangeland that has become the dumping ground for the country's industrial-military contaminants, now witnesses a Native reservation as the likely repository of the nation's 40,000 metric tons of highly radioactive nuclear fuel waste.

  Everything from chemical warfare agents to nuclear weapons is stored or disposed of in some way in the desert region. The West Desert is sprinkled with the waste and destruction of modern America's energy policy, both military and civilian. The list of companies and agencies that have dumped in the desert is long and includes:

Utah Test and Training Range (cruise missile testing, F-16 testing);

Magnesium Corp. of America (has topped the list of the nations biggest air polluters);

Dugway Proving Grounds (test center chemical and biological weapons);

Deseret Chemical Depot (holds the Army's stockpile of nerve and blistering agents);

Tooele Chemical Demilitarization Facility (where such chemicals are destroyed);

Safety Kleen (waste dump and incinerator hazardous waste);

Envirocare (stores low-level radioactive waste and wants to take higher levels of radioactivity),

and; there are others.

  The Skull Valley Goshute Tribe, which was pushed west into desolate, dry, Skull Valley by white migration and lives on a 17,000 acre reservation, is seriously considering storing spent fuel rods. This would require one square mile or 640 acres most of it covered with concrete pads, where 16-foot-tall steel and concrete casks will be filled with radioactive rods, a total 40,000 metric tones of used nuclear reactor fuel.

  Goshute Chairman Leon Bear has negotiated an agreement, which he claims give the Goshutes first shot at 40 jobs on the site and would build a cultural center on the reservation. There are 30 Goshutes living on the reservation. Mormon influence in the state limits the tribe's gaming options. Chronic undereducation is another problem, one of highest rates in Indian country.

  It is a tricky decision to store nuclear waste. The material is toxic for more than 100,000 years. The tribe is at the tail end of a deal that sees half a dozen utilities from as many states form a consortium to take on the waste and thus transfer their liability. It is the type of legalized maneuver by energy utilities that is behind so much rampant pollution and so much opposition to nuclear power.

  Some Goshutes, including Margene Bullcreek, a resident, oppose the nuclear waste storage. They fear the long-term consequences for the health of the region. Others feel the tribe should move ahead on the deal.

  While tribal sovereignty is always to be respected and the inherent right to make such a decision rests with the tribe, it remains a difficult call. It is true that the waste has to go somewhere, yet the environmental implications are always large. How many generations is 100,000 years?

  Nuclear power is a bad idea whose time never quite arrived. It diminished as a trend in the past several decades when it became clear that neither the Energy Department nor the large utilities could resolve the problem of how to store such highly toxic, long-term waste. The one thousand plants projected for construction in 1970 did not materialize. Today only 104 nuclear power plants operate in the United States and re-licensing is exceedingly difficult.

  We urge Goshute residents and leaders to be careful about what they get into. Like the 1,000 abandoned uranium mines at Navajo, with their deadly run-off, or the mess left behind at Hansford Nuclear Reservation in Washington, with impacts on Yakama land, these headaches of severe contamination do not easily disappear. The long-term effects of such contaminants could remain, essentially, to haunt descendants forever.

©2000 Indian Country Today