By Joe Bauman
Deseret Morning News

State officials and activists opposed to the proposed storage of high-level nuclear waste in Utah are dismayed by the attitude of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission toward safety risks of the project.

But a spokeswoman for the company proposing to build the facility, Private Fuel Storage, said the nuclear industry has shown it is safe to transport and store such wastes.

Nils A. Diaz, chairman of the NRC, does not believe undue risks would be posed by 40,000 casks of spent nuclear fuel if they are sent to a temporary storage plant in Utah. PFS proposes to build the facility in Tooele County on land owned by the Skull Valley band of the Goshute Indians.

Located about 50 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, it would store highly radioactive spent fuel rods from nuclear power plants across the country.

Diaz said residents of the Wasatch Front would not suffer health or environmental damage because of the storage, even if a terrorist attack breached some of the containers. They "pose no radiological hazard with the present weaponry" available to terrorists, he said.

The concentration of canisters could make it so an attack by aircraft could damage a few that were knocked together, he said. But even if some were breached, Diaz added, radiation leakage would be confined to the immediate area, not reaching more than two miles beyond the site.

But suppose a train transporting spent fuel rods was attacked in a more populated setting, said Jason Groenewold, director of the Health Environment Alliance of Utah.

"If that happens in the heart of the Wasatch Front on our rail lines, that would be devastating to our economy and to our community," Groenewold said.

Estimates are that shipments of nuclear power plant radioactive wastes "would travel past the homes of approximately 50 million Americans as nuclear waste is transported to the West," he said.

Groenewold said Utah's congressional delegation should stand firmly with Nevada and insist that waste must be stored in the areas where it was generated. Nevada officials have long fought the establishment of a permanent high-level waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain.

Sue Martin, spokeswoman for PFS, said a facility like the one the company proposes building "clearly involves potentially hazardous materials." But the nuclear power industry has developed "the experience and the expertise to know that these materials can be transported and stored safely," she said.

"This is not a new technology that we are proposing," she said, noting it has been in operation for more than 20 years in some locations. "In fact, in the whole history of the commercial nuclear power industry in this country, there has never been a radiation related injury or fatality."

According to Diane Nielson, executive director of the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, the NRC's own licensing board found a year ago that the risk of an Air Force F-16 crashing into a storage site in Utah would be greater than one in a million — the cutoff point for risk, beyond which a license could not be issued.

But the board reanalyzed the situation and asked what would happen in the case of such an accident, and concluded that the risk of radiation was not high enough to stop the plant. The board made a 2-1 decision, she said.

The nuclear engineer on the board, who understood the technical problems, said this is a significant risk, she said.

"We think the nuclear engineer got it right," Nielson added.

"Regarding the other safeguard-homeland security issues, the response of the NRC really hasn't been sufficient at this point," she said.

Chip Ward, a Utah author and longtime activist concerned about PFS, denounced Diaz' position.

"The notion that if terrorists hit that storage facility or if a plane crashes into it, there's no hazard for us downwind, is self-evidently silly," he said.

He called the NRC an enabler for the nuclear industry. "If you ever wondered if the NRC has a shred of credibility left, you should no longer have doubts," he said.

Steve Erickson, director of the activist group Citizens Education Project, said a catastrophic breach of a cask is of low probability. "It's still a risk that is not worth taking at this time," he said.

Erickson has a video produced by contractors who wanted to sell a sheath around a containment cask to prevent penetration by a shoulder-fired missile, he said.

"Before the sheath was put around the cask, it (the missile) blew an 8-inch-diameter hole into it. So I'm skeptical about that assertion."

Studies show that if a cask were breached, in the worse-case scenario, "that would result in massive evacuations, latent cancer deaths and billions of dollars in cleanup." Just cleaning up could take years, Erickson said.

Utah "should not be a dumping ground for waste, including high-level nuclear waste," said Lawson Legate, the Sierra Club senior southwest regional representative, whose office is in Salt Lake City.

"If it's safe to transport and it's safe to store above ground in Utah, it should be safe to store in the various locations across the country where it was generated."

"Almost sends me back to childhood," commented Jay Truman, founder and director of the advocacy group Downwinders. Living 100 miles downwind from the Nevada Test Site, he would hear pronouncements from the Atomic Energy Commission on the radio: "There is no danger, we repeat, there is no danger."

That happened, Truman said, "as that morning's fallout clouds blew by overhead."

E-mail: bau@desnews.com