Utah One More Step to Becoming Nation’s Toilet

It looks like the Federal Government is at it again. They want to use Utah as their own personal toilet. The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (no link to help your Google ranking, you shmucks) has rejected a Utah petition to stop the "temporary storage" of dangerous spent nuclear fuel rods at the Goshute Indian Reservation in Utah.

As a native Utahan, let me give you some background on this. A bunch of people who benefited from using nuclear power in other states don't want to deal with the fact that generating electricity from nuclear power plants creates radioactive waste.

The Goshutes are pretty divided on this whole thing as well. Their tribal leadership wants it because it's a way to generate revenue for the tribe, but many of the actual tribal members don't want such dangerous crap on their land.

The articles I've read mention that the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board rejected the argument that the chances of a fighter jet from Hill Air Force Base crashing into the fuel casks makes the project too risky. What they failed to mention, and maybe the representatives from Utah failed to bring up, is that it is mere miles from a munitions proving site and bombing range. I'm more worried about a stray bomb landing near the fuels casks and spreading radiation throughout Tooele valley than I am about a fighter plane crashing into them.

The people that want to put this stuff here remind me of a neighbor who has eaten his dinner, enjoyed desert, turned it into feces, and don't want to use their own toilet. They want to come into my backyard and to take a dump instead.

Now, I think it's pretty rotten for a neighbor to bring his dog over and let him take a crap in your yard, let alone the neighbor himself. I certainly don't make a mess and then hand it over to my neighbors for clean up. So why are our neighbors? My personal feeling is that there is a federal disregard for both Utah and Nevada (except for Vegas). There's a lot of desert out here, and the less scrupulous leadership in other states think that the people who live out here in that desert don't matter. We didn't put them into office, so what do they care? If they get their way, they will continue to blissfully make their toxic messes, and dump them over the fence into our backyard.

Don't believe the feds want to continue to dump on us? Just think of the recent push to restart above ground nuclear testing at the Utah/Nevada test ranges. You know. The ones they tested the first atomic bombs at. The ones that caused all kinds of medical problems for the people living "downwind" of those test sites. They didn't understand the first time, and thousands of people were affected, dying of cancer and other radiation related illnesses. Apparently they haven't learned.