In a victory for environmentalists, public-safety advocates, and nuclear-watchdog organizations, the federal Atomic Safety and Licensing Board yesterday rejected plans for storing spent nuclear fuel in Skull Valley, Utah. The ruling was also a win for the state, which had lobbied against the proposed storage facility, slated to be built on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation, just a few miles from the biggest bomb-testing and pilot-training area in the nation. That proximity was the deciding factor in the board’s ruling, which found that the possibility of an F-16 crashing into the proposed facility was too high to meet safety standards. The decision does not necessarily spell the end of the project, because it could be overruled by the board’s parent agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or otherwise be successfully appealed by the consortium interested in building the storage facility.
