Matheson’s challenger says he’s OK with foreign nuclear waste in Utah

Bill Dew doesn’t oppose foreign low-level nuclear waste coming to Utah, something Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson calls a “fundamental difference” between the two candidates in the 2nd Congressional District.
In a debate Tuesday night on the KSL program “Conversation With the Candidates,” Republican Dew said “the waste is so low-level that I have no problem with bringing and storing it here.”
He added that EnergySolutions plans to bring in 20,000 tons of Italian waste to be processed in Tennessee and then “recycle it and sell it to Japan.” The company, however, has proposed to permanently dispose of up to 1,600 tons of the processed material in Utah.
That comment caught the attention of Vanessa Pierce, director of the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah.
“It sounds like he doesn’t fully understand what that whole recycling process looks like,” she said.
The EnergySolutions contract for Italian waste is for up to 20,000 tons, and spokeswoman Jill Sigal calls it “highly unlikely” that all 20,000 tons would be accepted. However, 8 percent of the accepted amount of material would end up in Utah. That could amount to 1,600 tons of waste that would be stored in the state permanently.
Currently, Matheson is pushing a bill that would ban importation of all foreign radioactive waste unless it came from a U.S. defense facility in another country

Utah left out of loop with radioactive waste buried here

Nuclear waste from Canada and Mexico is buried in Utah, and state regulators didn’t even know.

Gov. Huntsman says the shipment of low-level nuclear waste into Utah by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is shameful. Today he’s vowing it won’t happen again.

Federal regulators granted two waste disposal licenses to a Mexican nuclear power plant and one for Canadian waste between 2004 and 2006, but no one bothered to notify Utah.

The feds say the amounts were “insignificant”, so they didn’t feel they needed to notify the state. The Mexican waste was more than 1,000 cubic feet, and the Canadian waste was more than 6,000 tons. Utah authorities want to know how much would be “significant.”

Gov. Huntsman said, “This is unacceptable, and it always will be unacceptable. The fact that we didn’t know about it in years gone by, I think is unacceptable.”

But could the feds be sneaking in more radio-active waste now? Huntsman doesn’t think so. “Our people are very, very good in working with the Northwest Compact, which regulates all of this,” he said.

The governor vows never again.

Utah got burned in weapons screw-up

Four months.
That’s how long it was supposed to take to rid Utah of its stockpile of the deadly blister agent lewisite.
The plan was to use neutralization, a chemical process that has been used in other states to eliminate swimming pool-sized stores of chemical weapons. Environmental activists broadly prefer it to incineration.
But a decade of missteps – including flawed tests that wrongly indicated neutralization didn’t work – delayed the process. And just a few years after building a multimillion-dollar facility at Tooele’s Deseret Chemical Depot to get the job done, the Army tore the building down.
Now the Army wants to try again – by building a new incinerator. And what was once a point of rare agreement between the military and its critics has turned contentious again.

Utah one-stop shop for N-waste

When some people refer to Utah as a “national treasure,” it’s not for the state’s picturesque deserts or breathtaking mountains but because of a mile-square disposal site in Tooele County for much of the nation’s radioactive waste.
Without it, rail cars of low-level radioactive waste would have nowhere to go.
That kind of notoriety is making the Utah public and policymakers uneasy, a state regulator said Wednesday.
Bill Sinclair, deputy director of Utah’s Department of Environmental Quality, advised an industry group here: “Don’t put all of your eggs into one basket.”
He was talking about Utah’s low-level waste disposal site in Tooele County.
Sinclair was speaking at a forum sponsored by Exchange Monitor Publications that involves local, state, regional, national and international regulators, as well as businesses that provide cleanup, disposal and treatment of low-level radioactive waste.

Regulator says Utah can’t be only solution for nuclear waste

A Utah regulator advised nuclear waste producers that his state might not be willing any longer to solve their many disposal problems.
Bill Sinclair, deputy director of Utah’s Department of Environmental Quality, noted that many around the nation rely on EnergySolutions Inc.’s disposal site for low-level radioactive waste in Tooele County. And it is being eyed as a solution for even more kinds of waste from more places, including international cleanups, he told nuclear waste handlers and regulators today at the RadWaste Summit in Las Vegas.
But Utah leaders and the public are growing wary of being a known as a “national treasure” because of the EnergySolutions site.

NRDC: Energy Policy Meltdown: Bush Administration and Oil Shale

WASHINGTON, DC (July 22, 2008) – In a potentially disastrous plan that would destroy large tracts of the Rocky Mountain region, the Bush administration today announced its draft regulations for opening 2 million acres of public lands in Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah for commercial oil shale production, according to experts at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).