Nuke waste: Foreign waste already finds its way to Utah
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For months, EnergySolutions Inc. has been fighting for permission to bring foreign radioactive waste to its Tooele County landfill.
Turns out, the Salt Lake City-based nuclear-waste operation has been doing so for eight years, bypassing approval of regional regulators and running counter to past company promises.
EnergySolutions Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Steve Creamer told a congressional subcommittee in May that waste shipments from Taiwan, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada and Mexico have come to Tooele County.
Creamer explained that once this mildly contaminated waste goes through the company’s treatment facility in Tennessee, it no longer is considered foreign waste – thanks to a change in that state’s regulations two years ago.
EnergySolutions points to shipments of this waste ash to its Clive landfill as evidence that it safely can bury radioactive waste from Italy – something it is seeking federal approval to do.
Utah and the regional Northwest Interstate Compact on Low-level Radioactive Waste knew about and approved the past imports, maintains company spokeswoman Jill Sigal.
“What Steve and others have been saying all along,” she said, “is absolutely true.”
If so, regulators counter, those overseas shipments via Tennessee came without a nod from the Northwest Compact, which includes Utah and seven other states
Michael Tribble, an attorney representing the Northwest Compact, would say little about how the alliance might deal with the possibility that foreign waste never should have been coming into the region.
“If EnergySolutions has been disposing of foreign low-level radioactive waste at the Clive facility without an arrangement adopted by the compact committee,” he said, “EnergySolutions is in violation of the Northwest Compact.”
Utah and compact officials say they didn’t discover the “Tennessee loophole” until about a year ago.
And they didn’t know foreign waste was reaching Tooele County.
Earlier this year, compact members clarified that the contract it has had with EnergySolutions – previously known as Envirocare of Utah – for 20 years does not include waste from outside the United States.
In a 2001 letter to the Utah Division of Radiation Control, Envirocare Senior Vice President Kenneth Alkema wrote that the company “has made the policy decision that it will not take out-of-the-country wastes.”
In 2005, the company told The Salt Lake Tribune that it never has taken radioactive waste from outside the United States.
Envirocare has since morphed into EnergySolutions, which reports that the Tooele County operation has been taking foreign waste for eight years – even under the Envirocare banner.
The company’s contention that the Northwest Compact has been approving these shipments is a central point of the lawsuit EnergySolutions filed against the alliance last spring.
The company insists the compact has no say over its privately owned operations, but the compact argues that’s exactly why Congress created the national compact system 20 years ago – to regulate the flow of waste in and out of states.
A company vice president told compact officials in May that the Italian waste would be the first waste the company accepted that would be labeled as foreign.
EnergySolutions is seeking a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to import 20,000 tons of low-level radioactive waste from Italy – some to be processed in Tennessee and 1,600 tons to be buried in Utah.
Compact officials are set to meet again Wednesday in Portland, Ore. How to handle foreign waste that comes through Tennessee is on their agenda.
“We hope to come out of the meeting with the loophole closed,” said Bill Sinclair, the former director of Utah’s radiation-control office and the state’s representative on the Northwest Compact executive committee.
fahys@sltrib.com
http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_10753978
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