EnergySolutions Inc. announced Wednesday it is dropping plans to import significant quantities of foreign radioactive waste for disposal in Utah.

The decision turns the heat down on a three-year controversy in Utah and beyond that has sizzled since the company asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to allow 20,000 tons of cleanupwaste from Italy’s defunct nuclear program to be shipped to the United States, some 1,600 tons of it for burial in Utah.

Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, called it: “A win for Utahns,” and said the state “shouldn’t be the world’s dump.”

The announcement, made at a news conference at the company’s Salt Lake City headquarters, signaled yet another dramatictransformation fora company started two decades ago as a shovel-and-truck enterprise centered at its mile-square disposal site in Tooele County.

Now international and with nuclear service contracts nationwide, EnergySolutions is shifting strategy once again to become an exporter — of nuclear waste management techniques and technologies that will help foreign nations build and operate their own specialized landfills for nuclear waste beginning with Italy and China.

“That’s the role we want to play,” said company president and CEO Val J. Christensen.

Christensen said the decision was not driven by the public outcry against the waste-import plans. It is a strategy brainstormed by employees during the past few months that will also benefit company shareholders.

“Some people view Clive [the disposal site] as our greatest asset,” he said. “It’s not. The greatest asset of our company is our people, the very smart engineers and technologists who, in the long-term strategic plan, will put us in a position to grow beyond the disposal of waste at Clive.”

“We believe,” Christensen said, “that this new strategy in the long run is in the best interests of our shareholders and the company, financially speaking, because it establishes longer-term relationships.”

Beginning with its waste-import application to the NRC in September 2007, the company planned to bring in the Italian waste, process it at EnergySolutions’ plants in Tennessee, sell any recycled metals captured in the process and bury up to 1,600 tons of remaining low-level radioactive waste at the Utah disposal site in Tooele County, about 75 miles west of Salt Lake City. The waste would be no more hazardous than what the company already accepts from 36 states and federal cleanups.

Christensen said Wednesday “residual” processing waste, including slag, will be treated as U.S.-generated waste that will be buried in the Utah site after it goes through processing plants in Tennessee, but those processing by-productswill not amount to the larger quantities the company originally planned to acceptfrom foreign sources.

Christensen told both Utah Gov. Gary Herbert and Matheson about the foreign waste announcement prior to the news conference.

Herbert, a Republican who has publicly objected to the foreign waste imports during the past year, called the announcement “welcome news for all Utahns.”

“This decision by EnergySolutions is the right one,” he said, “and is personally appreciated by me.”

Matheson, the state’s sole Democrat in Congress, called the news “an important decision for Utah.” But he renewed his call for Senate passage of bipartisan legislation to ban foreign waste imports to the United States, the Radioactive Import Deterrence (RID) Act.“No other county in the world takes another country’s radioactive waste,” he said. “I don’t see why the United States should and in particular, I don’t see why Utah should do that.”

“So while I’m pleased with this policy that the company has taken today,” Matheson said,”I still think we ought to have in law that we don’t take foreign radioactive waste.”

Although the House has passed the RID Act, the measure has been held up in the Senate because of opposition by Utah Republican Bob Bennett. The EnergySolutions site has accepted about 96 percent of the low-level waste that has gone to commercial disposal sites in the past two decades, according a U.S. Energy Department tally.

U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican who is also cosponsoring the House bill, said the EnergySolutions announcement is “one less reason to oppose the legislation” and agreed the RID Act is still needed.

“There should be less resistance to that now,” Chaffetz said, calling EnergySolutions’ announcement “the right thing” to do.

Meanwhile, a lawsuit prompted by the Italy waste proposal is moving forward, with both EnergySolutions and the target of the suit, a multi-state waste compact, eager to hear the decision of a federal appeals court. EnergySolutions filed the suit two years ago to get a judge’s ruling on its view that the Northwest Interstate Compact on Low-level Radioactive Waste has no say over operations at the Utah site.

EnergySolutions initiated the lawsuit when former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. said he would use the state’s seat on the compact board to block foreign waste imports to the Tooele County site. A U.S. District Court Judge in Salt Lake City sided with the company, prompting the appeal.

Mike Garner, executive director of the compact, said Wednesday his eight-state group was pleased with the company’s decision but will stick with the appeal.

“This is consistent with the position taken by the state of Utah that foreign waste should not be accepted for disposal at the [Tooele County] facility,” he said.

Amanda Smith, director of the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, said there remains a lot at stake in the lawsuit’s outcome, which the state has formally joined alongside the compact.

“We feel like we have quite a bit to lose,” she said, referring to the additional oversight power the state has as a Northwest Compact member.

Vanessa Pierce, director of the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, said public sentiment was “tremendously important” in the company’s decision to shift its focus to helping other countries deal with their waste.

“It’s good EnergySolutions has learned what we’ve been saying all along,” she said, “that Italy should dispose of Italian waste in Italy.”

She noted that the NRC fielded thousands of comments opposing the Italy waste-import license, more than for any other of the two dozen requests the agency has ever received. She noted that two Republican governors and a majority of U.S. House members in both parties back a ban.

“This is not a partisan issue, not a Democratic or Republican issue,” Pierce said. It’s “not an urban issue or a rural issue. It united Utahns of all stripes.”

Christensen said Wednesday the company has not withdrawn its NRC import-license request and won’t until it has discussed how to handle the strategy changes.

At the NRC, spokesman David McIntyre said it is too soon to say how the alterations to the Italy waste proposal — along with a companion export request to ship back any material that would be returned to Italy — will be handled.

“We’re going to see what the proposal is before we comment,” he said.

EnergySolutions stock closed the day at $5.05 a share, a decline of 4 percent compared to the previous day.

fahys@sltrib.com