by The Skull Valley Goshute Tribe Executive Committee

About the authors: The Skull Valley Band of Goshute is a small tribe of about 120 Indians who have an 18,000-acre reservation in Tooele County, Utah.

Editor's note: The Skull Valley Goshute Tribe received two grants from the Department of Energy in the early 1990s to study the feasibility of building a monitored retrieval storage (MRS) facility for spent nuclear fuel rods. The spent fuel would be stored for up to forty years in the MRS facility, after which it would be transferred to a permanent facility planned to be built in Yucca Mountain in Nevada. When the Goshutes and the Mescalero Apaches of New Mexico indicated interest in the third stage of the study—which included a $2.8 million grant—the government shut down the project...