Bill Sinclair set out to battle the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Army Corps of Engineers over radioactive waste, and he had his regulatory nose bloodied in the process.
But Utah's top regulator of radioactive wastes says even though the state lost its legal battles to stop shipments of radioactive mill tailings, the state actually may have won.
Sinclair, director of the Utah Division of Radiation Control, says the Army Corps of Engineers has now agreed to not send additional shipments of radioactive mill tailings to the White Mesa uranium mill near Blanding, the only facility in Utah now licensed by the federal government to recycle the tailings.
"The corps has agreed to get our approval in writing before any more shipments are made," Sinclair said. "And they have expressed a willingness to work with the state and address our concerns."
The agreement does not extend to the Army Corp's current contract with International Uranium Corp., the owners of the White Mesa mill, to reprocess thousands of tons of radioactive soils left over from the secret Manhattan Project nuclear-bomb project in upstate New York.
The New York sites are among scores of sites around the nation that have radioactive soils. The cleanup of these sites has fallen to the Army Corps of Engineers, which has come under increasing criticism for failing to clean up sites to levels considered safe by the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency.
The Washington Post recently reported the Environmental Protection Agency has launched a criminal investigation into early disposal efforts in Tonawanda, N.Y., to determine whether the contractors hired by the corps mishandled waste and even manipulated data to disguise the true nature of the radioactive materials.
Some of those materials have made it to the White Mesa mill near Blanding where they are reprocessed for uranium left behind from the original processing.
Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-California, among others, have called for Senate hearings on the corps' practice of getting rid of radioactive wastes from the New York sites by using loopholes in the law.
Sinclair said it is more a case of the corps "using every opportunity within the law to characterize waste as something else that works to their advantage." In other words, characterizing radioactive materials as something other than radioactive waste that would have to be treated more stringently.
State regulators have maintained the radioactive materials coming to Utah from New York are indeed waste that may only be disposed at a facility licensed by both the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Utah Department of Environmental Quality. Envirocare in Tooele County is the only facility licensed to accept low-level radioactive wastes.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission disagreed with the state, ruling that because the contaminated soils are being processed for recoverable uranium, they are not waste and are therefore not regulated by state law.
"We have withdrawn our attempts to appeal the NRC rulings," Sinclair said. "The only other avenue was the (U.S. District) Court of Appeals, and we were advised by our attorneys it was not something we could win."
The state is now negotiating with International Uranium Corp. to resolve the dispute over how much uranium must be present in the mill tailings to constitute a recyclable material versus the amount that could be considered waste.
"We have had good dialogue to find the appropriate number, and we are hopeful the discussions will lead to something, a minimum level, we can all live with," Sinclair said.
You can reach Jerry D. Spangler by e-mail at spang@desnews.com