Yucca Mountain

For more than two decades, the Shoshone and Paiute peoples, scientists, environmentalists, the federal government, Nevada citizens and politicians have wrestled over the fate of Yucca Mountain. The Department of Energy wants to use the mountain as a burial ground for deadly, high-level nuclear waste. Meanwhile, the Western Shoshone fight off federal efforts to sell their land in order to give multinational corporations access to its mineral resources. But the Western Shoshone stand firm. Raymond Yowell, Chief of the Western Shoshone National Council, says, “Western Shoshone title is still intact…. We’ve never accepted their money and never will—our land, the earth mother is not for sale and we will protect her and continue our responsibilities as caretakers under the Creator’s law.”

Report by Amy Corbin
Updated September 2007

History

Yucca Mountain is located within the Western Shoshone Nation and has long been a place of powerful spiritual energy for the Shoshone and the Paiute. To the Western Shoshone it is Snake Mountain, a place with rock prayer rings that transmit prayers to the Great Spirit and messages back to the people.  Shoshone spiritual leader Corbin Harney tells of a traditional story that Snake Mountain will one day be awakened and split open, spewing out poison.  This prophecy may predict the potential disaster of volcanic activity and nuclear waste leakage.  Shoshone ancestors are buried in the mountain and the water in the area is sacred, as it is with many desert peoples.

The 60 million acres of Western Shoshone territory in Nevada, Idaho, Utah, and California, which includes Yucca Mountain, was never deeded to the U.S. government. According to the 1863 Ruby Valley Treaty that the Shoshone signed with the government, most of the area now used by the U.S. military for nuclear weapons testing and the proposed waste storage site was explicitly recognized as Shoshone land. However, the U.S. government now claims 80-90% of it, meaning that the Shoshone are unable to control what happens on their ancestral land.   Legislators continue to try to persuade the Shoshone to accept financial compensation for this land, which most view as a way to extinguish aboriginal title and preclude future land claims, easing the way for renewed nuclear weapons testing and waste storage, as well as resource extraction.

In the late 1970s government scientists began to study Yucca Mountain as a possible repository for nuclear waste, and since 1987 it has been the only site considered for 77,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste. 98% of all the radioactive waste generated by U.S. nuclear reactors may soon be headed for the mountain. There is already more nuclear waste than the repository can hold, unless the 77,000 ton limit is raised. Though the facility will not open until 2017 at the earliest, reactor waste now sitting in pools of water around the country will fill Yucca Mountain’s tunnels and leave room for less than one third of the government’s nuclear defense waste, leaving 15,000 canisters of radioactive waste (7,500 metric tons) with no place to go. Commercial nuclear power plants produce 2,000 tons of high level waste per year, and by the time Yucca Mountain is full in 2035, there will be 42,000 tons of newly generated civilian waste at reactors around the country. Given this expansion, the Yucca Mountain repository promises to be much bigger than advertised. The estimated cost of construction and maintenance of the facility for the first 100 years of operation is $58 billion. The waste is lethal for 10,000 years and dangerous for 250,000 years.

For years, there has been continuous wrangling over legislation to authorize site approval and waste transport to Yucca Mountain, and Congressional votes have been very close. In February 2002, the Bush Administration formally recommended construction of the waste dump. As is permitted in the federal law governing the location of America’s nuclear waste repository, Nevada’s governor vetoed the Bush recommendation, but was overridden by the House of Representatives (306-117) and Senate (60-39). President Bush signed the bill making Yucca Mountain the nation’s central repository for nuclear waste on July 23, 2002. Nevada’s Republican Governor Kenny Guinn and Attorney General Brian Sandoval have sued Bush and the federal government to block the nuclear dump plan.  So far, strong opposition by politicians and citizens has delayed implementation and the projected start date for the waste repository is uncertain. However, the 2002 bill gave the Department of Energy permission to move onto the next step of preparing an application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Threat

Current Department of Energy plans call for the highly radioactive nuclear waste to be encased in steel containers and buried deep in the mountain. Since the canisters will last for 1,000 years at most, the dryness of the mountain will have to guarantee against leakage and migration — an idea that environmentalists and many scientists say is a flawed and dangerous assumption. Surface water percolates into the mountain, and will carry radioactive particles into the water table and render it toxic. This water table currently supplies water to local communities and farming regions which produce milk and other food products for the entire country. In March 2005, Secretary Bodman confirmed that internal department e-mails allude to the falsification of data on how quickly water flows through the Yucca Mountain. This revelation caused a federal investigation, and the condemnations from Congress triggered DOE to completely re-organize the Yucca Mountain project and lay off 500 employees. Robert Hager, attorney for the Western Shoshone, argues that the Yucca site would have been disqualified years ago if the true nature of the subterranean water flow was known.

With several local fault lines and a volcano nearby, earthquakes make it likely that the mountain will fracture the repository and send even more water to the waste. There are also grave concerns about the safety of transporting nuclear waste over long distances through several U.S. states, particularly in an era of terrorist threats. The Shoshone, who have been exposed to many years of nuclear weapons testing, suffer from high rates of cancer, leukemia, and other diseases— revealing the community health risk that comes from exposure to radiation.

Beyond all the safety issues lies the fact that the Shoshone should be able to determine what goes on at the mountain due to treaty rights and their historical and spiritual ties to the area. Government work has already disturbed burial remains and denied Native Americans access to the rock prayer rings. The Yucca Mountain controversy is rarely acknowledged as one that, at its heart, is about native sovereignty and the need to care for the land in a way that is spiritually responsible and environmentally sound. Even if the dump at Yucca Mountain is defeated, Shoshone and other native peoples’ homelands are continually candidates for the storage of dangerous toxic waste. Just one example is the proposed “temporary” nuclear waste dump on Goshute-Shoshone land in Skull Valley, Utah, near the Nevada border. In February 2006, the NRC issued a license to Private Fuel Storage to construct the facility, but later that year, the Department of the Interior rejected the company’s lease due to an incomplete EIS. PFS’s appeal is currently pending in federal court.

The DOE is more than a decade behind schedule in terms of receiving and storing waste from power plants, and has delayed the Yucca Mountain Repository’s estimated opening date until 2017. Already, there are over 40,000 metric tons of nuclear waste stored in pools or casks in 39 states (see the Associated Press’s “Where is the waste now?” map). Some states are getting impatient with their waste sitting in temporary storage and have sued the federal government to demand action on waste storage. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission must still assess the Department of Energy’s design and license application and decide whether to license the waste repository and approve transporting 70,000 tons of nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain. DOE is also in the process of completing various Environmental Impact Statements associated with the project, including one for building a new rail line for the transport of the waste. In March 2007 Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman sent a proposal to Congress that recommended the elimination of the 70,000-ton cap on facility’s holding and the permanent removal of the area’s land from public use due to safety issues. The latest setback to the project occurred with a September 2007 federal court ruling that upholds the state of Nevada’s right to refuse DOE’s requested 8 million gallons of water for the drilling of test holes. With the scandal over possible data falsification and the vigorous objections from many public and private entities around the country, experts now say that there is a good chance that the project will never come to fruition.

Citizens in other states are concluding that Yucca Mountain could be a very bad idea for the entire country, and are leery of having the waste shipped through their communities on rails and highways. Many believe that the process has essentially been rigged from the start, and that the decision was ultimately made not based on sound science but on who was the weakest guy in the room: Nevada has only four electoral votes. Some observers also say that the siting of the nuclear waste repository is an example of environmental racism, and that Native Americans and other peoples of color have been subjected to a disproportionately large number of health and environmental risks in their communities. The Western Shoshone National Council continues to fight the project, filing a lawsuit in March 2005 in Las Vegas federal district court, which claims that the Yucca Mountain Development Act is unconstitutional and that the federal government does not own the land. The Las Vegas court ruled that it did not have jurisdiction over the matter, a ruling the Western Shoshone National Council plans to appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

While Nevada’s congressional delegation tries to protect their state against environmental catastrophe, they worked with the Bush administration to enact a forced payment to the Western Shoshone in an effort to legitimize U.S. government control over land with rich potential for gold and geothermal energy. The $145 million settlement of the Western Shoshone Distribution Bill of July 7, 2004 was welcomed by some in the Shoshone community who thought they should accept the money since there was no chance of regaining the land, but opposed by many others who argued that their ancestral lands were too high a price to pay. This legislation paves the way for the gold mining companies Newmont and Cortez Gold Mines to continue and expand their operations in Shoshone territory.

Solution

The Western Shoshone need to be acknowledged as the rightful caretakers of their land and included in discussions about all proposed mining and nuclear waste storage. The government should consult and negotiate in good faith with the Shoshone over their treaty rights to ancestral lands, giving them the option to regain control of some of the land, rather than forcing them to accept a financial settlement.

The Shoshone people should have veto power over a high level nuclear waste dump that is being built in the heart of their traditional homeland. Whether or not you are in favor of continuing with nuclear power, it is important to speak out against a plan that represents a totally inadequate and unacceptable way of dealing with a serious, complex issue before the facts and potential consequences are fully known. Congress should refuse to pass any more legislation that would advance the Yucca Mountain project until independent scientific reviews are conducted.

Take Action

Contact your Senators and Congressional Representatives, and write to Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials, and urge them to oppose the Yucca Mountain nuclear storage project.

You may call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and leave a message for your Senators OPPOSING nuclear waste storage at Yucca Mountain.

Send postal mail:

Resources

• Western Shoshone Defense Project — defending Western Shoshone land rights
• The Shundahai Network — a grassroots coalition of nuclear disarmament activists and Western Shoshone
• Public Citizen — a national public interest group with frequent updates on energy policy
• Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force — a non-profit organization fighting nuclear waste in Nevada and providing public information about Yucca Mountain
• Citizen Alert — a grassroots environmental justice group in Nevada
• The Department of Energy’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management coordinates plans for Yucca Mountain
• “Deadly nuke rods piling up in state; Burial site project in Nevada in limbo” by Keay Davidson (San Francisco Chronicle, July 24, 2006)
• Trespassing, a documentary film about fights against nuclear waste on indigenous land in Nevada and California
• Read the Las Vegas City Life article “Fighting Spirit” about Corbin Harney and the Shundahai Network (February 15, 2001).