The Salt Lake Tribune

Updated Jul 13, 2010 11:32PM
Sweet-shop metaphors were being tossed around like ammunition in a food fight Tuesday at a meeting of the state Radiation Control Board. Some likened the blending of low-level radioactive waste to concocting a sugar cookie, others to baking a layer cake.

But board members preferred less-creative analogies when considering the serious issue of various types of nuclear- reactor rubbish that EnergySolutions and others want to stir together to be buried forever at the company’s disposal site in Utah.

The Radiation Control Board a few months ago approved a position paper that said even though blended waste is not significantly more hazardous than the Class A waste allowed in Utah, the state doesn’t want any radioactive waste that is blended just to change its classification so that it can be legally buried at the EnergySolutions site.

On Tuesday, board members heard from both critics and advocates of blending.

Christopher Thomas, policy director for the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, which opposes blending, said EnergySolutions could potentially increase the radioactivity at its site threefold and undermine the state’s 2005 ban on hotter Class B and Class C waste. He compared blended waste to a layer cake, with hot spots of radioactivity.

“We’re encouraged that the board is putting measures in place to proactively take public health and safety into account before EnergySolutions comes up with the next scheme to make Utah the nuclear waste capital of the world,” said Thomas of plans for a new regulation.

Tom Magette, of EnergySolutions, told the board blending does not change what’s in the waste, only its concentrations. If the company accepts all of the blended resin waste produced in the United States, he said, it would only increase radiation levels at the Tooele County site from 2 percent of what the state allows to 3 percent.

He used a sugar-cookie metaphor, adding that blended waste now being discussed is even more homogeneous than the waste the company ordinarily receives. And, as for safety implications: “There are none,” he stated flatly.

Lisa Rutherford, a southern Utah resident who stepped up to raise her concerns about blended waste, took issue with a Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner’s reported remarks that Utah’s objections are basically a public perception issue.

“I don’t necessarily believe,” she told the board, “the public perception is wrong.”

Back in Washington, D.C., the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is dissecting some of the same questions about blending as the nuclear industry faces a disposal crunch for hotter concentrations of low-level radioactive waste, concentrations that the Utah Legislature banned in 2005.

Industry, backed by EnergySolutions and the trade group the Nuclear Energy Institute, wants the NRC to revamp 30-year-old restrictions on blending so the orphaned hotter waste can be buried with lower-concentration waste that reactors from 36 states ship to the EnergySolutions disposal site in Tooele County.

The NRC hasn’t decided what to do on blending or when that decision will be made.

And, just like the problem last year of trying to figure out what to do with depleted uranium, state regulators have opted to make sure that Utahns and their environment are protected from any unanticipated hazards by requiring a case-by-case look at minimum standards for containing these forms of waste while the NRC deliberates its own approach.

fahys@sltrib.com