Numerous letters have appeared in The Tribune recently against the disposal of depleted uranium (DU) at the EnvironmentalSolutions site in Utah. I’m adding yet another voice to the debate.
I served on the Utah Radiation Control Board from 2006 through 2012. During my tenure, the board addressed many interesting issues relating to radiological waste in Utah, some simple, some complicated. The DU issue falls into the complicated realm.
DU is the by-product of the enrichment of uranium ore where the fissionable U235 isotope is removed from the ore for use in power plants and munitions, leaving U238 and other non-fissionable uranium isotopes behind. The problem with the U238 isotope is that it eventually decays and becomes more radioactive with time, reaching its peak radioactivity after approximately a million years.
When the board first debated whether EnergySolutions would be a safe disposal site for DU, my initial thought was that we don’t need to worry about what is going to happen in a million years. In a million years mankind may not even exist (extinctions happen), mankind may evolve into superior beings able to solve any such problem, or something in between.
I was OK with bringing in the DU, as long as the disposal cells were engineered to withstand all feasible failure scenarios and the state taxed the heck out of it, using the tax revenues to solve real and present-day public health issues such as poor air quality, access to health care, climate change or any other pressing public health issue.
I have, since that time, changed my opinion. The Utah Department of Environmental Quality is about to finish an eight-year performance assessment on whether the EnergySolutions site can safely store the DU. I recall when the performance assessment was first discussed during board meetings, we were told that long-term modeling used for performance assessments is only reliable up to about 50,000 years, and 50,000 years is considerably less than 1 million years.
I don’t want to comment on the results of the performance assessment until it is completed. However, it is my belief that there is no way any performance assessment can, with any reasonable level of certainty, determine what events may transpire in Utah’s west desert over a million year time period. Lake Bonneville may rise and fall, and other catastrophic geologic or climate-related events may occur. The only thing that can be said with any level of certainty is that we can’t be certain what will happen in Utah’s west desert over a million years.
That being the case, I think it would be irresponsible to dispose of DU in shallow surface cells in Utah’s west desert and saddle future generations with the risks that disposal would create.
However, it appears that disposal of DU in Utah is going to happen unless Gov. Gary Herbert vetoes HB220. It may happen even with his veto, given the large number of veto-busting votes in both the House and Senate favoring the bill.
Therefore, if DU is coming to Utah, I still believe that Utah should tax the heck out of it, and earmark that money to address real and present-day public health problems, like poor air quality, access to health care, climate change, or any other pressing public health issue.
Frank DeRosso, MSPH, CIH, Millcreek, a founder, past president and current senior scientist at RMEC Environmental Inc., Salt Lake City.
