It is time to talk about depleted uranium. The Radiation Control Board, the folks who are supposed to look out for you, cleared the way in an 8-3 vote last week for EnergySolutions to bring 14,000 tons of the stuff to Utah beginning a few weeks from now.

So, what's DU? What's the big deal? Well, if you are only concerned about the next few hundred years, it may not be anything to worry about. However, if you are concerned about longer times, it is a very big deal indeed.

Contrary to intuition, DU becomes much more radioactive over a long time. In fact, DU buried in Utah today will eventually become somewhere between 10 to 15 times more radioactive.

There is also a lot of it. The amount of material eventually requiring disposal may exceed 1 million tons. The half-life of DU is about the same as the age of the Earth, or 4.5 billion years. In a nutshell, DU represents a massive quantity of radioactive material in a highly concentrated form. It becomes increasingly radioactive and then stays that way forever.

Much of it could end up at the EnergySolutions facility in the west desert. That facility really isn't a bad place for "normal" waste that largely decays away in a few centuries. Ironically, the company builds its landfill liners from local Lake Bonneville clay that was deposited 15,000 years ago and is direct evidence that this site has been under water in the past.

I expect the probability is nearly 100 percent that some time in the next 100,000 years fluctuating levels of the Great Salt Lake will flood the site. Waves would almost certainly destroy the piles. Models of lake level elevations show it may only take a sustained increase in annual precipitation of a small fraction of an inch to do this.

I served on the Utah Radiation Control Board for 10 years. When appointed to the board, I swore an oath to protect the interests of the state, which I understood primarily to mean the health and safety of our environment. I had expected that such an oath would have had a similar meaning to current board members.

I did not attend the board meeting when the vote was taken, but my understanding is that a particular U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff member intimidated board members. That may explain the vote.

I did, however, participate in an NRC workshop held in Salt Lake City last week. At the meeting, the same NRC staffer was asked to explain to the panel what he had said to the board. He explained that a moratorium by the board suspending DU shipments could impact Utah's right to oversee waste coming into the state. I explained to this individual that although he may have given an honest response, it nonetheless sounded a lot like a veiled threat from Big Brother.

The purpose of the NRC workshop was to solicit feedback from affected parties on proposed regulations surrounding DU. A question posed to the panel was whether any more DU should be buried before the NRC completes its study. Is that even a question that needs to be asked? Isn't the answer obvious?

Rep. Jim Matheson has requested the owner of this waste (the U.S. Department of Energy) to halt the shipments, which it may or may not do. But other than that, who's got your back? The Radiation Control Board? No. The NRC? Very unlikely. Gov. Gary Herbert? We'll see.

So Utah, it looks like large quantities of DU are coming, beginning this fall, to a landfill near you.

Steve Nelson is a professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at Brigham Young University.