How the West Was Bureaucratized

You'd think after a couple hundred years of the American government pushing around Native Americans, telling them how and where to live their lives, it would finally leave them alone. Not so. A couple of days ago, the US Department of the Interior shot down an agreement between Private Fuel Storage (PFS) and the Skull Valley Goshutes reservation.

The agreement was pretty simple: let PFS dump spend fuel rods (nuclear waste) in an 820-acre corner of your 18,540-acre reservation and this coalition of energy companies will pay the reservation for the right to do so. For the record, there's 125 members of this reservation of which only 30 actually lives there. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal.

But in its infinite wisdom, the Interior stepped in and vetoed the deal, citing health risks and transportation problems. It's pretty clear the health concerns are bogus; the site occupies only 0.04% of the entire reservation. And the Goshutes aren't morons, either (see this link). So let's consider the transportation argument. Salt Lake City currently pays to dump some trash at the reservation, requiring 130 trucks a day along the two-lane State Route 196 (it appears the Department of Transporation is unwilling to expand the road). Because a recently declared state park blocks the path of a railway, the plan would require two additional slow moving trucks a week along that busy stretch of land.

This is a cruel joke played on the Goshutes: a government agency denies them their freedom because of the actions (or inaction) of other government agencies. In the wake of the decision, U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson declared "Utahns stand united against the East Coast dumping its nuclear garbage on the West." But only at the cost of accepting the East's most dangerous waste: bureaucracy.