State environmental officials hosted a second public hearing Wednesday on Envirocare's application to dispose of radioactive wastes much more lethal than the low-level wastes they are currently licensed to store.
Despite what will certainly become an increasingly volatile issue over the next year, only about 20 state officials and environmentalists attended the hearing to discuss whether the Envirocare site is a suitable location in Tooele County to store waste left over from nuclear power plants and medical research."It's still early in the process," said Bill Sinclair, director of the Utah Division of Radiation Control. "I expect the interest will be there as the process moves forward."
According to Envirocare president Charles Judd, the hearing was really little more than a formality, a chance for the public to comment on whether or not the site near Clive is an appropriate place to store radioactive wastes (called class B and class C wastes in regulatory jargon). And since the site is already storing class A wastes consisting of soils contaminated with small amounts of radioactivity, Judd says the same site is definitely suitable for the hotter wastes.
"We questioned whether we needed to go through this process because the same evaluation has already been done (for the class A wastes)," Judd said. "But we want the public to have every opportunity to comment. We want to know what the public is thinking."
State regulations require that any site being proposed for a waste dump be analyzed for its "suitability." That includes its relation to groundwater and underground water supplies, its proximity to the nearest community, the presence of archaeological resources and other environmental considerations.
Hearings will be held later this year on Envirocare's license application to store the hotter wastes. And Sinclair expects those hearings to be a lot hotter than the one held two weeks ago in Tooele County and the one Wednesday at Department of Environmental Quality offices in Salt Lake City.
Written comments on the site suitability document are being accepted by DEQ through Monday.
Anti-nuke activist Steve Erickson of Utah Downwinders expects state regulators will approve Envirocare's site application, admitting there is little opponents can do to argue that an existing waste dump is not a suitable site for additional waste.
"It's a tough argument to counter," he said. "But we are taking every opportunity to voice concerns and disapproval, and this step, although early in the process, is no less important than the licensing hearings later this year."
Utah Downwinders offered technical comments on Envirocare's siting proposal, but Erickson said those concerns can probably be remedied by Envirocare.
"We are taking the position that class B and class C wastes are many, many times more radioactive than the wastes they are now permitted to take, the isotopes are more dangerous and longer-lived, and the bar needs to be raised for safe disposal of those kinds of wastes. There are some inadequacies in the document that need to be addressed."
Class B and C wastes include building materials left over after the decommissioning of nuclear power plants, medical wastes, university research wastes, contaminated protective clothing, resins and sludges from cleanup equipment, and equipment used to manufacture things like smoke detectors and medical products.
Currently, only two sites in the nation accept class B and C wastes. One accepts wastes from only a limited number of states, and the other may greatly reduce the amount of waste it accepts. Envirocare hopes to capitalize on what it sees as a new market for class B and C waste disposal.
To get its state permit modified to allow the hotter wastes, Envirocare must go through a multi-tiered licensing process. The company has already received approval from the Tooele County Commission and it has submitted its site suitability application for state and public review.
State regulators will spend much of the coming year reviewing Envirocare's license application, and public hearings could be held on the proposal as soon as September or October. If regulators approve the license request, the issue then goes to the Utah Legislature and the governor for their approval. Erickson said Utah is caught in the middle of a national policy debate over what to do about radioactive wastes. Congress has repeatedly refused to address the issue even though it had promised to already have nuclear waste facilities in place.
It was the failure of Congress to build a high-level nuclear waste facility for spent nuclear fuel rods that prompted a consortium of primarily Eastern utility companies to propose a nuclear waste dump on Goshute Indian lands near the Envirocare site. Private Fuel Storage currently has its licensing request before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
State officials are actively opposing the consortium's license application, which involves spent nuclear fuel rods many thousands of times more radioactive than anything being proposed for the Envirocare dump.
"Our national policy (on what to do with nuclear waste) is in total disarray. We have no policy that makes any sense," Erickson said. "And until we come up with a coherent national policy, Utah should not be offering itself up as a savior of that wrecked national policy."