THE ENERGY BILL THAT PRESIDENT BUSH SIGNED into law in the summer of 2005 included several features designed to benefit the nuclear power industry. For example, the legislation authorized research, development, and construction of a new test reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory and established a $2 billion risk insurance program for up to six new reactors based on this design. In addition, the legislation also extended for twenty years the Price Anderson Act, which limits the nuclear power industry’s liability in the case of an accident. It also cleared the way legally for the reprocessing of nuclear waste from commercial reactors and for the use of plutonium to generate commercial energy. Most readers of The Cresset may also know that the Bush administration wants to establish the nation’s permanent underground repository for high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Few, however, may be aware that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) recently issued a license to establish an interim storage facility for this waste on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation in Utah. Once the facility is constructed, up to 4,000 casks, each storing ten metric tons of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) with a radioactive half life of at least 10,000 years, would be stored above ground for up to forty years on a portion of the tribe’s reservation. Located approximately fifty miles from Salt Lake City, the storage facility would be large enough to accommodate about eighty percent of the SNF produced by commercial nuclear reactors to date. This unprecedented project raises important ethical questions about the use of tribal sovereignty, environmental racism, and the fairest way to share the burden of storing high-level nuclear waste. Normative guidance from recent mainline Protestant ethical reflection appears to cut both ways on this question. In the 1990s, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Presbyterian Church (USA) incorporated the concept of “ecojustice” in environmental policy documents. Both churches addressed this concept in relation to four moral norms: sustainability, sufficiency, participation, and solidarity. While all four norms pertain to the situation in Skull Valley, this article focuses only on the applicability and apparent conflict between participation and solidarity.

Participation and Tribal Sovereignty

The ecojustice norm of participation emphasizes that the interests of all forms of life are important and must be heard and respected in decisions that affect their lives. The norm is concerned with empowerment and seeks to remove all obstacles to participation constructed by various social, economic, and political forces and institutions. The norm places an importance on open debate and dialogue and seeks to hear the voices or perspectives of all concerned.

The Skull Valley Band of the Goshute Indians is one of 554 Indian nations within the boundaries of the United States. The Skull Valley Band traces their claim to tribal sovereignty back to a peace treaty signed with Abraham Lincoln in 1863 and to the executive orders that Woodrow Wilson signed forty years later establishing their reservation. Like other tribes, the Goshutes had to give up vast swaths of land and make other concessions in order to gain the right of self-governance on tribal homelands and reservations. Anthropologists think that originally there may have been as many as 10,000 Goshutes roaming the Great Basin between Nevada’s Ruby Mountains and Utah’s Wasatch Range. After the first settlers arrived in 1847, the Goshute population, besieged by hunger and sickness, dropped to less than 1,000. Today the Skull Valley Band has dwindled to approximately 125 adult members, with less than thirty living on the reservation.

Early in the 1990s, the Goshutes were one of seventeen Native American tribes that expressed interest when the federal government invited communities around the United States to consider hosting a monitored retrieval storage (MRS) facility for the interim storage of spent nuclear fuel. Over the course of six months in 1996–97, the Goshutes negotiated a lease agreement with Private Fuel Storage (PFS), a consortium of eight utility companies that own and operate thirty-three nuclear reactors around the United States.¹ In December 1996, more than two-thirds of the tribe’s General Council signed a resolution authorizing the tribe’s executive committee to sign the lease agreement with PFS. While the financial terms of the lease agreement are not available to the public, a similar, though now scuttled, agreement with the Mescalero Apaches would have brought up to $250 million to that tribe.

Shortly after the NRC commenced its review of the lease agreement in 1997, several members of the tribe publicly expressed their opposition to the plan. Some unsuccessfully sued the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) for supporting the lease agreement. Others complained that the tribe’s leadership distributed “dividends” from PFS only to members of the tribe that supported the proposal. In September 2001, thirty-eight dissident members gathered to elect new leadership for the tribe. The BIA later deemed the election illegitimate because it did not include a majority of the adult members. There remains significant disagreement among members of the tribe today about the terms of the lease agreement and the wisdom of the project.

Grace Thorpe, a Native American activist, complains that tribes like the Skull Valley Goshutes are “selling our sovereignty” to utilities who will benefit from it. Thorpe writes: “The issue is not sovereignty. The issue is Mother Earth’s preservation and survival. The issue is environmental racism” (Thorpe, 54). It would be false, however, to give the impression that all Native Americans share Thorpe’s views. In fact, several tribes refuse to take a stand on the issue and affirm the sovereign right of the Goshutes to make decisions with which others may disagree.

Clearly some Native Americans inside and outside of the tribe believe this decision to build a storage facility is a misuse of tribal sovereignty, but a majority of the Skull Valley Goshutes thinks locating a temporary storage facility for spent nuclear fuel on their reservation would be an appropriate use of their tribal sovereignty. Does it matter what others think? Does the norm of participation require support for all uses of tribal sovereignty? Or are the Goshutes, in fact, victims of environmental racism— whether they realize it or not?

Solidarity and Environmental Racism

The ecojustice norm of solidarity emphasizes the kinship and interdependence of all forms of life and encourages support and assistance for those who suffer. This norm highlights the fundamental communal nature of life in contrast to individualism and encourages individuals and groups to join together in common cause and stand with those who are the victims of discrimination, abuse, and oppression. Underscoring the reciprocal relationship of individual welfare and the common good, solidarity calls for the powerful to share the plight of the powerless, for the rich to listen to the poor, and for humanity to recognize its fundamental interdependence with the rest of nature. In so far as solidarity leads to the equitable sharing of burdens, this norm manifests the demand for distributive justice.

There are two key ethical issues in this case related to the norm of solidarity. The first is whether the PFS proposal to store spent nuclear fuel temporarily on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation is an example of environmental racism and environmental injustice. The second is how the burden of storing this waste and disposing of it permanently should be shared fairly among the citizens of the United States.

Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice

The term, environmental racism, was coined in 1982 by Benjamin Chavez, the future director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, while protesting the dumping of highly toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in Warren County, North Carolina. Evidence of environmental racism can be found in the disproportionate number of waste facilities and polluting industries located in communities of people of color. Evidence of environmental racism also can be found in the way that environmental laws have been enforced, or not enforced, in white communities and communities of people of color. Environmental racism pertains not only to actions that have a racist intent, but also to actions that have a racist impact. It occurs when people of color are either targeted or bear a disproportionate level of the burden created by the disposal of toxic wastes or the pollution produced by industry. Environmental justice broadens the scope of this concern to include people of any race, class, or income level (Roberts and Toffolon-Weiss, 9–11).

President Clinton signed an executive order in February 1994 establishing environmental justice as a national priority (Executive Order 12,898, sec. 2-2). Under this order, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in the Department of the Interior is required to conduct an environmental justice review of contracts involving the lease of Indian trust lands that may impact adversely Native American tribes. NRC staff worked together with staff from the BIA and other cooperating federal agencies to review the PFS/Goshute project. This environmental justice review featured “an analysis of the human health and environmental impacts on low-income and minority populations” resulting from activities related to the PFS/Goshute MRS facility. Following NRC policy, the staff focused their impact assessment primarily within a four-mile radius around the Skull Valley Indian reservation, though a fifty-mile radius was utilized to examine the impact of local transportation routes on low-income and minority populations. The study concluded “the cumulative effect of the proposed [storage facility] and other activities on environmental justice concerns… is small.”(US NRC 2001, 6–28).

Despite this official finding with regard to environmental injustice, there are good reasons to suspect that the PFS storage agreement constitutes a case of environmental racism. In many respects, storage of spent nuclear fuel rods on the reservation of a Native American tribe could be viewed as the completion of a painful circle of death and exploitation. The vast majority of the mining and milling of uranium in the United States since 1950 has taken place on or adjacent to Indian reservations. Approximately twenty-five percent of the 15,000 workers employed in these activities were members of various tribes, especially Navajos. A large number of these workers eventually were diagnosed with diseases and other health problems caused by their exposure to radiation (Thorpe, 49). In addition, Native Americans not directly engaged in uranium extraction and processing have been exposed to dangers posed by groundwater contamination, radon exposure, and pollution of the air via tailings dust. Studies indicate that Indians living near uranium mines face the same health risks as those engaged in mining.

The Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation is ringed by toxic and hazardous waste facilities (See Figure 2). To the south lies the Dugway Proving Grounds where the US Army conducts tests on biological and chemical weapons like anthrax, nerve gas, and bubonic plague. To the west is the Utah Test and Training Range, a vast swath of desert the US Air Force uses for bombing runs and target practice by B-52 bombers and F-16 fighter jets. North and west of the reservation a private company, Envirocare, landfills ninety-seven percent of the nation’s low-level nuclear waste. East of the reservation sit the Tooele Army Depot, one of the largest weapons depots in the world, and the Deseret Chemical Depot, home to nearly fifty percent of the nation’s aging stockpile of chemical weapons. Here, the military is working around the clock to incinerate over a million rockets, missiles, and mortars packed with sarin, mustard gas, and other deadly agents.

Trapped in this desolate and degraded landscape, the financial situation of the Goshutes is dire. The tribe looked into selling bottled water from springs on the reservation but concluded that few will want to buy water they fear may be laced with toxic substances released by the nearby chemical weapons incinerator. The tribe also has considered vegetable farming, but the land may still be polluted by a Dugway nerve gas experiment that went awry in the 1960s. The only avenue that promises any economic viability is the storage of waste on the reservation. Recently, the tribe signed an agreement to landfill municipal waste generated in and around Salt Lake City on a portion of the reservation. The tribe’s leadership believes the interim storage of high-level nuclear waste is the best way to ensure the tribe’s survival.

Sharing the Burden of Nuclear Waste Disposal

Currently, 103 commercial nuclear reactors produce twenty percent of the nation’s electricity and serve approximately fifty million people (Lake et al, 73). Over ninety percent of these reactors are located east of Utah at sixty-six locations in thirty-one states (Private Fuel Storage website; NO!, 3). Through 2005, these commercial reactors had produced approximately 55,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) (Private Fuel Storage, Research regarding DEQ…, 5; see also National Academy of Science, 2006).² By 2046, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission projects that these reactors will have produced 105,414 metric tons of SNF (US NRC 1999, 8).

The federal government is legally obligated under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act to store all high-level nuclear waste and spent nuclear fuel in a permanent underground repository. Until the federal government opens such a facility, however, the generators and owners of this waste have the responsibility both to provide and to pay for the interim storage of it. To date, twenty-one reactor units have run out of room to store spent nuclear fuel in cooling ponds. Many of these utilities have received approval from the NRC to store the fuel in casks above ground, normally on the grounds of the reactor facility. By 2010, seventy-four reactor units will have run out of storage space in their cooling ponds. Some of these reactors also will have run out of storage space above ground, which may require the utilities to cease reactor operations even before 2010 (Private Fuel Storage, Research Regarding DEQ…, 2; see also National Academy of Sciences 2006). These are the driving factors behind the PFS/Goshute storage proposal.

To date, the federal government has spent over $7 billion studying the scientific feasibility of establishing a permanent repository for high-level nuclear waste and spent nuclear fuel at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. In December 2001, the General Accounting Office (GAO), the nonpartisan, investigative arm of Congress, concluded that the Department of Energy is not ready to make a site recommendation because 293 scientific and technical issues remained unresolved. Ignoring the GAO, President Bush decided early in 2002 to accept the Department of Energy’s recommendation that a permanent geological repository for high-level nuclear waste be established at Yucca Mountain. Shortly afterwards, the governor of the state of Nevada vetoed the President’s decision under rules established in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, but, under the same rules, the US House of Representatives and the US Senate voted by large margins to override Nevada’s veto in the summer of 2002. These votes in Congress cleared the way for the Department of Energy to request a license from the NRC to operate a permanent repository at Yucca Mountain. This licensing review process is currently estimated to take at least five years. Legal battles also likely will delay the construction and opening of the facility. As a result, it is not likely that Yucca Mountain will be open by 2010.

If and when Yucca Mountain does open, the facility is designed to store a total of 77,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel and high-level nuclear waste. Storage of commercially produced spent nuclear fuel is limited, however, to 63,000 tons. The remaining space in the facility is reserved for the storage of defense-related nuclear waste.

In debates about the PFSGoshute proposal, the state of Utah has expressed strong concern that Yucca Mountain cannot accommodate the total amount of commercially produced SNF that the NRC projects will be produced by 2046. If the Yucca limit of 63,000 is subtracted from the NRC projection of 105,414, the remainder is 42,414 metric tons of SNF for which there is no permanent home. The state of Utah does not believe it is coincidental that this figure is virtually identical to the amount of SNF that PFS wants to store on an interim basis for up to forty years on the Goshute Reservation. Given the uncertainty about Yucca Mountain, the state fears that the “temporary” storage facility in Skull Valley will become permanent, because the waste will have no other place to go.

In response, PFS—the consortium that will operate the Skull Valley facility—has sought to reassure the citizens of Utah that the Department of Energy and the NRC would not allow the Goshute facility to be converted to a permanent repository. This would be a violation of law, because Congress has mandated that permanent disposal must take place deep underground in a geologic repository. In addition, if the Department of Energy did not take possession of the spent nuclear fuel at the end of the forty-year lease, the utilities that own the fuel still would have a legal and financial obligation to take back the fuel and find another interim storage facility. Nothing, however, prohibits PFS from entering into new negotiations with the Skull Valley Goshutes after the initial lease expires if both parties are interested in drafting a new lease arrangement. Any new lease still would have to be approved by the NRC, however.

From this overview, it is clear that the storage and ultimate disposal of high-level nuclear waste is a major public policy issue on the verge of becoming a national crisis. From California to New York, people all around the nation are saying, “Not in my backyard!” This NIMBY syndrome is behind the decision of Congress to focus solely on Yucca Mountain as a permanent repository. The NIMBY syndrome also fuels political and legal battles around the nation aimed at rejecting pleas by utilities to increase the amount of spent nuclear fuel that can be stored on a temporary basis in casks above ground. All citizens of the United States must shoulder some of the blame for failing to muster the political will to deal with this problem in an effective way. In many respects,

U.S. citizens driven by the NIMBY syndrome have helped to drop this issue in the laps of the Goshutes. After all, no other community in the nation has stepped forward to store high-level nuclear waste on either an interim or a permanent basis. Over fifty million people in the nation enjoy the benefits of nuclear power, but most refuse to accept the burdens associated with its waste.

Some environmentalists see this waste bottleneck as the most effective way to bring to an end the nuclear energy industry in the United States. When utilities run out of places to store spent nuclear fuel on an interim basis, federal law requires them to shut down the reactors. Over time, this means that the people of the United States will have to find other ways either to produce or to conserve twenty percent of the nation’s current energy supply. Investments in renewable energy production, energy-efficient technologies, and changes in patterns of consumption could go a long way to meet this challenge, but none of these measures resolve the issue of what to do with the nuclear waste.

Even if nuclear waste is not produced in the future, the United States still is faced with the challenge of storing temporarily or disposing permanently the high-level nuclear waste that has been produced to date. This raises the question of whether it would be better to store existing stockpiles at over seventy locations around the country or to consolidate these stockpiles in one place. PFS contends that it would be more cost-effective and easier to provide a high level of security if spent nuclear fuel all was stored in one place. The state of Utah, however, argues that if it is safe to store spent nuclear fuel where it is now, then it should remain where it is—presumably in perpetuity.

There lies the rub. The radioactivity of some elements in spent nuclear fuel has a half-life of at least 10,000 years. Is it morally responsible to store thousands of steel and concrete casks containing this waste above ground at dozens of locations around the nation for thousands of years? Is it safer to entomb such highly radioactive waste in a geological repository deep underground? Like it or not, and absent any new alternative strategies, disposal underground still appears to be the best option.³ But Yucca Mountain is not open, and it is not clear it will open any time soon. Now that the NRC has awarded a license for the PFS/Goshute interim storage facility, this could give the nation forty more years to figure out how to dispose of the waste permanently. At the same time, once the waste has been transferred to an Indian reservation, it is possible that the nation will forget that a long-term disposal problem still exists.

So, who should bear the burden (and reap the benefits) from storing the nation’s high-level nuclear waste, either on an interim or a permanent basis? On the face, it seems clear that those who benefit the most from nuclear energy should also shoulder most of the waste burden. But how realistic is it to expect that millions of people in thirty-one states will abandon the NIMBY syndrome in order to muster the courage and political will to address this problem in a responsible manner? Isn’t it more likely that they still will try to externalize the costs by dumping the problem on others?

This brings us back to the PFS/Goshute interim storage plan. The Goshutes are no less intelligent than other people in the United States. Whereas most US residents live a middle-class lifestyle or better, virtually all Goshutes on the reservation live below the poverty line. In addition, while most people in the United States are members of the white, dominant culture, the Goshutes are members of a tribe that now constitutes a tiny fraction of its former glory. Once construction begins, some members of the tribe would qualify for jobs building and operating the $3.1 billion facility. Once operational, revenues from the lease agreement would provide private healthcare for tribal members on the reservation who now have to travel over two hundred miles to the closest office of the Indian Health Services. In addition, PFS revenues would be utilized to build a religious and cultural center on the reservation to help the band preserve their disappearing heritage. Funds also would be available to encourage members of the band to return to the reservation through subsidized housing construction and other infrastructure improvements. Finally, it is likely that the PFS lease agreement would make members of the band millionaires over the life of the project.

Are members of the dominant culture taking advantage of the Goshutes by tempting them to accept what could amount to virtually the nation’s entire stockpile of commercially-produced, spent nuclear fuel? Or are the Goshutes shrewdly taking advantage of the failure of members of the dominant culture to face an environmental problem of their own creation? Now that the NRC has approved the forty-year lease agreement, the Goshutes have good reason to believe that it will be safe to operate the facility for the length of the contract. At the conclusion of the lease agreement, the Goshutes should be much better off financially and will not necessarily have to sign another lease agreement. Nor is it guaranteed that the NRC would approve a new lease agreement, in which case the utilities would have to take back the fuel they had stored temporarily on the Skull Valley Reservation.

Examining the proposal from these financial and health perspectives, it is clear that there may be significant benefits for the Skull Valley Goshutes. But what about cultural concerns? Is the tribe selling its soul to accept the waste? Is the storage facility an insult or betrayal of “Mother Earth?” Are the Goshutes threatening the foundations of their very culture through this “misuse” of tribal sovereignty? How is it that Christians do not lose sleep over the invention and use of nuclear energy but expect Native Americans to maintain a principled opposition to storing nuclear waste on religious terms? Is it possible for Indian cultures to embrace the costs and benefits of certain technologies just as other cultures have done around the world? Is it the case that Christians put Indians on a pedestal and insist that they live up to some environmental ideal?

In the end, it is clear that those who have produced the waste should bear the burden of dealing with it. This moral responsibility seems to be escaping many today. Is it completely out of the question, therefore, to see the limited good (and harm) this project could do for the Skull Valley Goshutes? Is it beyond the pale of ethical respectability to support the Goshutes in their proposal to store temporarily most of the spent nuclear fuel produced in the United States? Or is this, truly, one of the most egregious cases of environmental racism to date?

Update

Recent developments put the future of the Skull Valley project in serious doubt. Although on 21 February 2006, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued a license to Private Fuel Storage for the Skull Valley facility, two other federal agencies had yet to rule on other aspects of the project. On 7 September 2006, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) both issued separate “Records of Decision” regarding the project. These agencies, apparently acting under pressure from members of Utah’s Congressional delegation, moved to block construction of the facility (Fahys, 2006).

The Bureau of Land Management offered several arguments to justify its decision (US DOI-BLM 2006). It rejected Private Fuel Storage’s (PFS) right-of-way application to build a rail spur to the Skull Valley facility, because the rail spur would be constructed in the newly created Cedar Mountain Wilderness Area.⁴ It also rejected the PFS alternative to transport spent nuclear fuel (SNF) to the facility by heavy trucks because this option would impede traffic on the two-lane road leading to the reservation. This road serves as one of only three emergency evacuation routes for the chemical weapons incinerator in Tooele Valley.⁵ The BLM also expressed concern about an increased risk of radiation exposure for workers at the rail/truck transfer facility and noted that any storage of SNF at the transfer facility would violate BLM policy regarding the storage of hazardous waste on BLM lands. Finally, BLM emphasized that the NRC’s Environmental Impact Statement for the project studied the potential of transporting SNF to the facility over the span of twenty to forty years but did not examine the potential impact of transporting the SNF away from the facility in a shorter time frame at the end of the lease period (DOI-BLM, 15).

The Bureau of Indian Affairs decision cited similar concerns and offered additional reasons for not approving the final draft of the PFS-Skull Valley lease agreement (DOI-BIA, 3). Among other issues, it noted the potential impacts of a terrorist attack on the storage facility and the possibility that the SNF might remain on the reservation beyond the duration of the proposed lease. “This uncertainty concerning when the SNF might leave trust land, combined with the Secretary’s practical inability to remove or compel its removal once deposited on the reservation, counsel disapproval of the proposed lease”(29).

Both of these decisions were greeted with dismay and consternation by PFS and the Skull Valley Band’s leadership. In the New York Times, John Parkyn, chairman of PFS, said both decisions were riddled with errors and indicated that PFS likely will appeal (Stolz and Wald, 2006). In an article published by Reuters, Leon Bear, Skull Valley Band chairman, complained “this land is held in trust for the Indian people, not for them. The Department of the Interior took it upon themselves to make this decision for us. We made a decision already, we signed the business lease, we had the resolutions where a majority of our people wanted this facility out here” (Tanner, 2006). Naturally, those opposed to the Skull Valley project received the BLM and BIA decisions with joy and appreciation.

Questions Remain

What are we to make of these developments? Have the recent decisions by the BIA and BLM protected the Skull Valley Band from becoming victims of environmental racism, or have they vitiated the band’s tribal sovereignty? Now that the Skull Valley project may no longer be viable, who should bear the burdens associated with the long-term disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level nuclear waste? Regardless of how this case ultimately is decided legally, difficult and important ethical questions remain.

James B. Martin-Schramm is Professor of Religion and Chair of the Religion and Philosophy Department at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. This article is revised and excerpted from James B. Martin-Schramm and Robert L. Stivers, Christian Environmental Ethics: A Case Method Approach, Orbis Books, 2003. It is reprinted here with the permission of the Journal of Lutheran Ethics.

Notes

1. The following companies originally were members of Private Fuel Storage: American Electric Power, Entergy Corporation, GPU Nuclear, Xcel Energy, Florida Power and Light, Southern Company, Southern California Edison, and Genoa Fuel Technology. Several of these companies have since withdrawn.

2. Since 9/11, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has restricted public access to information about spent nuclear fuel and other forms of high-level nuclear waste. In May 2002, the NRC reported 45,000 tons of commercially produced spent nuclear fuel (See US NRC, May 2002).

3. A clause in the PFS/Goshute lease agreement leaves open the possibility that the tribe may decide in the future to permit the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel stored on the reservation.

4. The Utah congressional delegation sponsored the creation of this new wilderness area in Utah. It was attached as an amendment to the FY 2006 National Defense Authorization Bill. The Bureau of Land Management’s Record of Decision states: “The Cedar Mountain Wilderness Area is atypical; low-level overflights and operations of military aircraft, helicopters, missiles, or unmanned aerial vehicles over the wilderness are not precluded” (15).

5. Traffic on this twenty foot-wide road has increased significantly since the Skull Valley Band opened a municipal waste landfill on the reservation. Each day 130–160 trucks haul baled waste to the reservation. Once operational, two trucks (12 feet wide and 150 feet long) per week would haul SNF to the storage facility during daylight hours. (See BLM Record of Decision, 13).

Works Cited

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Fahys, Judy. “Facility CEO Says Planned Site Not ‘Dead.’” Salt Lake Tribune (Salt Lake, Utah), 30 September 2006.

Lake, James A., et al. “Next-Generation Nuclear Power.” Scientific American. Vol. 286: 1 (January 2002): 72–81.

National Academy of Sciences, Board on Radio-active Waste Management. Safety and Security of Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage. Washington, DC: National Academies, 2006.

NO! The Coalition Opposed to High Level Nuclear Waste. “White Paper Regarding Opposition to the High-Level Nuclear Waste Facility Proposed by Private Fuel Storage on the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indian Reservation in Skull Valley, Utah.” 28 November 2000.

Presbyterian Eco Justice Task Force. Keeping and Healing the Creation. Louisville, KY: Committee on Social Witness Policy, Presbyterian Church (USA), 1989.

Private Fuel Storage. Research Regarding DEQ Information on Private Fuel Storage (PFS), 5.

_____. Response to Questions about the Operation of the Private Fuel Storage Facility: A Report to the Citizens of Utah, February 2001.

Private Fuel Storage website. http://www.privatefuelstorage.com, accessed December 17, 2001.

Roberts, J. Timmons and Melissa M. Toffolon-Weiss. Chronicles from the Environmental Justice Frontline. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Stolz, Martin and Matthew Wald. “Interior Department Rejects Interim Plan for Nuclear Waste,” New York Times 9 September 2006.

Tanner, Adam. “U.S. Tribe Chief Angered at Nuke Waste Plan Rejection,” Reuters, 12 September 2006.

Thorpe, Grace. “Our Homes are Not Dumps: Creating Nuclear-Free Zones,” in Defending Mother Earth: Native American Perspectives on Environmental Justice. Jace Weaver, ed. New York: Orbis Books, 1996.

US Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs. “Record of Decision for the Construction and Operation of an Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation (ISFSI) on the Reservation of the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians (Band) in Tooele County, Utah.” 7 September 2006, pg. 3. Accessed online 15 September 2006 at www.shundahai.org/skull_valley_info.htm.

US Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management. “Record of Decision Addressing Right-of-Way Applications U76985 and U76986 To Transport Spend Nuclear Fuel to the Reservation Of the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians.” 7 September 2006. Accessed online 15 September 2006 at www.shundahai.org/skull_valley_info.htm.

US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Radioactive Waste: Production, Storage, Disposal, Revision 2. Washington DC: Government Printing Office, May 2002.

_____. Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, et al., “Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Construction and Operation of an Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation on the Reservation of the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians and the Related Transportation Facility in Tooele County, Utah,” Vol. 1 (December 2001), Federal Register: Vol. 67, No. 13.

_____. “Draft Environmental Impact Statement for a Geological Repository for the Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Radioactive Waste in Yucca Mountain, Nye County, Nevada,” Vol. 1(July 1999), Federal Register: Vol. 64, No. 174.