Utah's Toxic Opportunity

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That may be a useless gesture. The Goshute band, like all other federally recognized tribes, is a sovereign nation under the law, and the State of Utah can't tell it what to do. Still, other hurdles remain. Last December Congress designated 100,000 acres west of the reservation as a wilderness area--a ploy by the Utah delegation to block a 32-mile rail spur to the site. Now opponents want the federal Bureau of Land Management to deny a permit for a truck-transfer station. In Congress, a bill sponsored by Senate minority leader Harry Reid of Nevada would undercut the project by forcing utilities in 31 states to keep spent fuel on their property rather than ship it out. Nevada has long fought a federal plan to permanently store atomic waste in a $60 billion underground repository at Yucca Mountain, northwest of Las Vegas.

Underlying the uproar is a question that has haunted the nation since the 1979 meltdown at Three Mile Island: Does the U.S. want nuclear energy or not? The issue has new urgency today because electricity demand is expected to grow 45% over the next two decades and pressure is on for the country to do something about global warming. (Unlike generators fueled by coal, gas or oil, atomic reactors emit no greenhouse gases.) President George W. Bush has vowed to start building nuclear plants by the end of this decade, and last August he signed into law a multibillion-dollar package of nuclear incentives. This month Congress will launch hearings on the future of atomic energy. And a debate is expected over an Administration proposal to spend $250 million for research on reprocessing irradiated fuel--an effort abandoned three decades ago out of fear that it would encourage weapons proliferation.

Before the ground breaks on any new commercial reactors, all sides agree, the U.S. must decide what to do with the nuclear waste created by existing plants. Over the past half-century, those plants have accumulated 67,000 tons of spent fuel and radioactive waste that will remain hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years. But ever since the government focused on Yucca Mountain, the project has been stymied by fears of groundwater contamination and confusion over technical design. In the past two decades, the U.S. has spent $6 billion on studies, without making a final decision. Congress will probably grapple this spring with legislation to fast-track Yucca. But even if all the lawsuits were settled today, it couldn't be built before 2015 at the earliest.