CLIVE, Tooele County — Blustery weather in Utah's west desert Tuesday slowed the initial unloading of more than 5,400 barrels of depleted uranium slated for at least temporary storage at EnergySolution's disposal facility.

The long-term fate of 3,500 tons of radioactive material that rolled into Utah Sunday night from the U.S. Department of Energy's Savannah River nuclear materials processing center in South Carolina is in limbo, pending a safety survey of the waste disposal company's site 75 miles west of Salt Lake City.

Utah Division of Radiation Control Director Dane Finerfrock said state inspectors were at the disposal site Tuesday monitoring the off-loading process.

"Our initial process goes to verifying the shipment manifest, an important document that describes what's in the barrels, its physical, chemical and radiological make up, where it came from," Finerfrock said Tuesday. "They're beginning to unload the first barrels today, and we have an inspector overseeing that offloading and placement on the site."
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Utah Department of Environmental Quality scientist Ryan Johnson was at Clive on Tuesday and said snow and windy conditions slowed transferring the barrels from the covered train cars on the east side of the facility to flatbed trucks for transport to the west side. Johnson said only four of the 52 rail cars, each of which holds 104 barrels, were unloaded by the end of the day. No issues were found in the initial inspection process or with the off-loading procedures, he said.

Utah Gov. Gary Herbert forged a compromise with the Energy Department last week, following a letter to the agency protesting the shipment of the waste before a technical study of proper disposal of depleted uranium was completed. The compromise allows for the material to be stored above ground while EnergySolutions adds long-term safety measures.

At issue is the unique composition of depleted uranium — a byproduct of the process that enriches uranium, in this case from weapons production — that results in the material becoming more radioactive over time. Storage solutions need to account for a markedly different state of the material in 10,000 years' time.

The shipment that arrived in Utah is the first of three that are expected to bring a total of about 10,500 tons of depleted uranium into the state.

All of the waste is from the South Carolina facility that was constructed in the 1950s to process uranium for use in weapons.

An Energy Department spokesman said Tuesday that the agency is paying EnergySolutions about $22 million to dispose of the depleted uranium.