JEROME, Idaho — Safety concerns dominated the first public meeting about a proposed small modular nuclear power plant in Jerome County. Sawtooth Energy Corporation has filed a right-of-way permit application with the Bureau of Land Management for the project.
"If it breaks and it goes into the aquifer, you're gonna kill a lot of people," one attendee said during the meeting.
HAVE A LOOK inside the first of four meetings for a proposed nuclear project in Jerome County:
About 50 people attended the first of four scheduled public meetings to discuss the proposal, which could move forward more quickly than usual due to a presidential executive order declaring an energy emergency.
"How are you gonna keep this from melting down, turning into a Chernobyl or something?" another attendee asked.
Project manager Dan Adamson responded that the equipment being considered has a "fail safe" design.
"It is a matter of: we have to do this. It also gives us an opportunity to talk to the public to try and ease some of their concerns about the safety issues of nuclear power," Adamson said during the meeting.
Leigh Ford, director of the Snake River Alliance, expressed skepticism about the project.
"Unfortunately, nuclear reactors create radioactive waste we have no solution for, so I don't know what could be said that could convince me to be for this project," Ford told Idaho News 6.
Adamson addressed the waste concern, explaining their plans for handling spent nuclear fuel.
"We will be required to create a vault, and our nuclear fuel is worn out," Adamson said. "We will put it in storage until we are told by the NRC where to put it."
The proposal is one of several energy projects targeting public lands in the Magic Valley, causing frustration among some residents.
"It's a wilderness area out there that these people in Idaho actually enjoy, and we're already madder than wet hornets that every time we turn around, somebody wants to put up another tower or transmission line out there," one woman said during the meeting.
Three more public meetings are scheduled: two in Jerome on Friday, July 25 and Sunday, July 27, with a final meeting in Shoshone on Wednesday, July 30.
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