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Tooele County Nuclear Storage Site Canceled

Private Fuel Storage, LLC www.privatefuelstorage.com

After major opposition from Utah’s top elected officials a group of utility companies has once and for all scrapped their plans to build an above ground nuclear waste storage facility in Tooele County. The companies wanted to construct radioactive waste containers on a 100-acre area on the Skull Valley Goshute Reservation. The site also sits very close to the Utah Test and Training Range where the military frequently drops and tests explosives. Matt Pacenza of the environmental activist group HEAL Utah says that is just one of the many reasons the plan was a bad idea from the beginning.

“The Utah idea never made any sense," he says. "Moving it from an above ground location at a nuclear power plant to an above ground location in Utah was no better. It was simply putting off the need to deal with it in the long term.”

Members of Utah’s congressional delegation agree. Republican Senator Orrin Hatch told the Salt Lake Tribune he’s grateful the companies abandoned the plan saying it just didn’t make sense. Attorneys for the consortium of utility companies notified the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on December 13 that they would seek to have the license canceled. 

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