May 8 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Judy Fahys The Salt Lake Tribune



Delaying Utah-bound depleted uranium will cost the U.S. Energy Department up to $12 million.

That's the upper estimate agency officials shared recently with a citizens' advisory board in South Carolina during an update on the disposal of 15,600 drums of DU. Those 55-gallon containers were slated to be buried in the EnergySolutions landfill in Tooele County before Utah Gov. Gary Herbert asked the Energy Department for a delay.

Now, 5,408 drums sit unburied at the EnergySolutions site, about 75 miles west of Salt Lake City, and another 9,392 remain at the South Carolina cleanup site until the agency figures out what to do next. One trainload of 56 cars is already loaded.

Tom Clements watches developments at the Savannah River Site weapons-complex cleanup for the environmental group, Friends of the Earth. He attended last week's meeting and heard the report by the cleanup project's Vickie B. Wheeler.

 "I didn't pick up any urgency on this issue," said Clements. "Nor did I detect a way forward."

In February, Herbert met with Energy Department officials who agreed not to send the remaining two train shipments to Utah until the Radiation Control Board can finalize a new regulation on depleted uranium and the Radiation Control Division can implement it.

EnergySolutions expects to submit its technical report by year's end. It's expected to take another year or more to evaluate the suitability of the EnergySolutions site, where

49,000 tons of DU is already buried.

If the DU stays at Savannah River, S.C., until permanent disposal is found, it would cost an additional $2 million to $4 million, Wheeler told the citizens board. If it is shipped to a Texas storage site, the cost could be as much as $12 million.

"They made a point of saying it would be more expensive to look at off-site options," said Clements.

The original contract for the DU disposal under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was $22 million, with EnergySolutions receiving $2.6 million, according to the Energy Department.

Meanwhile, an Inspector General's report issued last month said the "driver" in the consideration of moving the waste from Savannah River, where it has been for decades, was the mandated deadline for completing stimulus contracts.

The option of sending the waste to Texas for interim storage "carries with it a number of significant logistical burdens," the auditors wrote, "including substantial additional costs for, among several items, repackaging at [Savannah River], transportation to Texas, storage at the interim site and repackaging and transportation to the yet-to-be-determined final disposition point."

Energy Department spokeswoman Katinka Podmaniczky confirmed Friday that a decision is yet to be made. She said: "The Department is currently in the process of evaluating options for the interim storage of the remaining depleted uranium."

Public comments sought on new depleted uranium rule

The Utah Division of Radiation Control began accepting public comments last week on its new regulation on beefed-up containment for DU. It would require a facility that wants to take large quantities of the waste to provide a technical report that demonstrates the waste can be contained for at least 10,000 years.

Although federal regulators affirmed last year that DU is Class A waste, exactly the stuff that EnergySolutions is permitted to accept, they and their state counterparts in Utah have determined that DU requires extra precautions because it becomes more hazardous over time -- not less, like most low-level radioactive waste.

To see the proposal and for instructions on submitting comments, see the division's web page; more information is available on the Division of Radiation Control website at: http://tiny.cc/mriqt.

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