By Bonnie Boyd
The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Utah''s petition Monday, leaving in tact the lower court''s decision that the state does not have the authority to make laws regulating nuclear waste in Utah.
The state of Utah appealed to reinstate laws to block the nuclear waste facility out of the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation.
The state''s battle against some members of Skull Valley Band of Goshute and other private companies has been going on for more than a year now.
In February, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Utah didn''t have authority to regulate nuclear waste. Utah then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but without comment the court refused to hear the case.
The Supreme Court usually agrees to take cases that are of enormous public importance, said John Fee, associate law professor at BYU.
'I''m sure they didn''t reject it lightly,' Fee said. 'But they get so many cases these days the presumption is that they won''t take it unless someone can present a very good reason why they should.'
Out of the thousands of requests the court receives, they only hear 70 or 80 cases over the course of a year, Fee said.
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After The Nuclear Regulatory Commission granted the license for the proposed waste site to Private Fuel Storage, state attorneys and other of the members of the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes argued in courts that the NRC did not have the authority to grant the license because of the state law.
The state wrote a law from 1998 to 2001 prohibiting the transportation or storage of spent fuel rods in Utah.
'The bill I sign today represents our commitment to block the storage of high-level nuclear waste in Utah,' said previous Utah Governor Mike Leavitt in March 2001 to The Associated Press. The bill banned high-level nuclear waste from coming into Utah.
A month later, some members of Skull Valley Band of Goshutes and other private companies interested in the storage site asked a federal court to declare the Utah law unconstitutional. They argued the law targeted Skull Valley directly and that the state didn''t want economic development in that area. Attorneys for Utah said executives of Private Fuel Storage could not challenge Utah''s laws because it was not even entitled to the license under federal law.
However, the 10th Circuit upheld the lower courts'' ruling. In a 3-0 decision, they said the Utah law was an infringement on federal authority and deemed it unconstitutional.
After the decision, Utah attorneys told The AP that if the state lost in the 10th D.C. Circuit their only hope was to prove the high risk of a plane or missile striking the site and releasing radiation.
The nearby Hill Air Force Base is the largest special use airspace overland within the U.S. and the Utah Test and Training Range provides the larges overland facility for aircrew training and weapons testing. Stray missiles have hit near the proposed site in the past.