Carbondale resident George Wear provided a change of pace to the public comment period ahead of the regular agenda items at the Garfield County Commissioners (BOCC) meeting on Monday, Feb. 3. “I came here today to talk to you about your support for locating a nuclear waste depository in northwest Colorado,” he said. “I assume that all of you are aware that the Associated Governments of Northwest Colorado [AGNC] is using federal grant dollars to do this.”
The BOCC is a member of the AGNC, a council of municipal and county governments including Mesa, Garfield, Rio Blanco and Moffat counties. Commissioner Mike Samson is a former chair and current treasurer of the organization. “I know somewhat about [the nuclear waste facility discussion],” he told Wear.
Wear said (and The Sopris Sun has verified) that the AGNC has received $75,000 from the Energy Communities Alliance, which bills itself as a “nonprofit membership organization of local governments adjacent to or impacted by U.S. Department of Energy [DOE] activities,” to look into nuclear energy. “They’re also looking into specifically locating a nuclear waste [storage facility] in northwest Colorado through the Northwest Colorado Energy Initiative, which is part of the AGNC,” Wear explained. “They’re working on energy transition strategies primarily for Craig. If the coal plants and the coal mines close down, what’s everybody going to do up there?”
The grants, he said, are for outreach and engagement for the DOE’s Consent-Based Siting Initiative [initiated in 2016] that identifies spent nuclear fuel stores and disposal sites. “The other two winners were: Savannah River in Georgia, which already has its share of nuclear waste and has had problems,” he explained. “The third one is Hanford, Washington, which you all probably know already has its share of nuclear waste problems.” Both are DOE sites.
Wear cited concerns about transporting nuclear fuel rods by truck and rail and leaks from the site into groundwater. “We’ve tried for a lot of years at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, spent billions of dollars and [that] didn’t go anywhere,” he said.
In 1983, based on direction from the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the DOE identified nine potentially acceptable sites for nuclear waste disposal, including six in the West and three in the South, and in 1987 settled on Yucca Mountain, about 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas, next to the Nevada Nuclear Test Site (now the Nevada National Security Site). After 30 years of approvals and reversals, lawsuits and resistance from the Western Shoshone and the Walker River Paiute Tribe, the Yucca Mountain Project was mothballed.
At Monday’s meeting, Wear told the BOCC that a consolidated interim storage facility was turned away in west Texas, opposed by the Permian Basin Petroleum Association and the New Mexico Farm and Livestock Bureau. “Nobody wants it in their backyard,” he said.
He questioned why AGNC has accepted federal money for the project. “My opinion is we’re wasting taxpayer dollars and we’re wasting our time looking into it.”
Commissioner Perry Will pointed Wear in the direction of state elected officials. Samson said he’d like to have Matt Solomon speak to the board. (Solomon is the Northwest Colorado Energy Initiative Project Manager for AGNC.)
Commissioner Tom Jankovsky stated, “I hadn’t even thought about nuclear waste in northwest Colorado, to be quite honest.” He added that the governor shut down the coal mines, which were producing “relatively clean energy.”
In other news, the BOCC approved a special event permit for River Center’s adult prom and the consent agenda, which included spending $163,161 for four brand new county vehicles. They also unanimously approved funding requests from Colorado River BOCES for $99,000, Journey Home Animal Care Center for $227,700, Garfield Clean Energy for $315,000 and $19,800 for COVENTURE.
Other smaller nonprofit discretionary fund requests were presented with decisions coming next week. Commissioner Perry Will is now the BOCC representative for the Silt Urban Renewal Authority.
Commissioners also awarded John Swartout Consulting and Mentoring a sole source contract for $36,000 to lobby state and federal agencies for the county. Jankovsky and Samson told The Sopris Sun that Swartout is knowledgeable of state matters, which will complement Robert Weidner’s work on the federal level. The county pays Weidner $7,500 per quarter.
County Landfill Director Deb Fiscus presented the annual landfill update and the BOCC agreed to send comments to the White River National Forest and the Bureau of Land Management’s Colorado River Field Office in approval of the proposed action for the West Mamm Creek Pipeline Project. Public comments on the project are due Feb. 7 at www.bit.ly/MammCreek
You can find minutes of all Garfield County Commissioner meetings at the county’s website.