I have worked for many years to prevent my home state of Utah from becoming a dumping ground for nuclear waste. I was concerned when the owner of the only private, Class A low-level radioactive waste disposal facility in the United States recently sought a license to import foreign waste from Italy. The company has asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a permit to take 20,000 tones of waste from decommissioned nuclear reactors in Italy, process it in Tennessee and dispose of the final product—an estimated 1,600 tones of Class A waste—in its Utah disposal cell. The application makes the first time in the history of the NRC that a company has sought to dispose of large amounts of foreign-generated low level radioactive waste in the U.S.

I have written to the NRC in opposition to the permit application. Last week I joined the bipartisan introduction of legislation –HR 5632—to ban the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from authorizing importation of foreign-generated waste. The Utah policy board overseeing radiation control issues has also adopted a resolution urging federal regulators to deny the application.

Several European countries are in the process of decommissioning a number of nuclear power plants but they do not have sites for the large volume of low-level waste that will result. As our country struggles to meet its own nuclear waste storage needs, our disposal capacity should be reserved for the U.S.-generated waste that must be safely and securely contained for decades to come.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 9:14 am and is filed under Politics .