| For years, Utahns and their leaders have fought against the transportation of high-level nuclear waste by Private Fuel Storage (PFS) to Skull Valley, a site dangerously close to the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) where live ordnance is used and directly under the low-level flight path of 7,000 F-16s every year.
I have been on the front lines of this battle for years, and the good news is, we have won. On Sept. 7, 2006, the Department of Interior (DOI) denied PFS its lease to store fuel and permission to transport it by roads. The DOI based its decision on letters and calls from thousands of Utahns who rejected the proposal to store nuclear material in Skull Valley, during a comment period that I convinced the DOI to open.
Some people may say there is still a chance that PFS could pull this off, but that seems highly unlikely. With the DOI decision, PFS has been burned to the ground. We may need to sort through the ashes and put out a few embers, but other than that, it’s stone cold dead.
Standing up for Utahns' protection from radiation is something that I've done my entire career. One of the bills I'm most proud of is the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) (P.L. 101-426), demanding that the federal government acknowledge its responsibility – and provide claims for compassionate payments – to Utah “downwinders,” miners, and others for injuries caused by fallout from above-ground atomic testing. In its first 16 years, RECA delivered more than $1 billion to the hands of people hurt by the testing. In 2007, I opposed the government's plan to perform a test - codenamed "Divine Strake" - that might have kicked up radioactive particles left by previous testing. |
