Posted: October 20, 2009
EnergySolutions requested a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to allow it to import up to 20,000 tons (approximately one million cubic feet in volume) of radioactive contaminated material to process at its Tennessee facility, dispose of 1,600 tons of that material at Clive, and export back to Italy waste that cannot be disposed of at Clive. See EnergySolutions' Proposal to Import Low-level Radioactive Waste From Italy.
The sources of this material are not fully known as of the date of this application but will be limited to Italian facilities authorized to use and process radioactive material such as reactors, fuel cycle facilities, research facilities, and materials licensees or facilities equivalent to US Superfund sites. See EnergySolutions' Cover Letter EnergySolutions' License Application to the NRC.
Utah petitioned to intervene in the NRC import licensing proceeding. NRC also received over 2,500 public comments relating to the import request. A requirement for NRC to issue an import license is that "an appropriate facility has agreed to accept the waste for management or disposal." A dispute over whether the Northwest Interstate Compact on Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management may control the flow of waste to EnergySolutions' Clive site led NRC to hold the license application in abeyance.
Utah is a member of the Northwest Compact and as such it requires EnergySolutions to obtain Compact approval before low-level waste may be disposed of at Clive. The Compact voted that its existing approval, allowing out-of-Compact waste access to the Clive facility, did not extend to imported radioactive waste. EnergySolutions filed a lawsuit in Utah federal district court challenging the authority of the Compact over the Clive facility. The district court ruled that because the Clive facility is not a "regional disposal facility" (like the Compact's disposal site at Richland, Washington), the Compact does not have authority to control the flow of out-of-Compact waste to Clive. The State of Utah and the Compact appealed the decision to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, pointing out that Congress granted approval to the Compact to control waste coming to any "facility" (i.e., any site used for the storage or disposal of low-level waste, excluding federal waste facilities) in the Compact region.
Federal legislation, The Radioactive Import Deterrence Act, H.R. 515, currently under consideration before the House Energy and Commerce Committee (and sponsored by Reps. Matheson and Chaffetz, among others), would ban the import of radioactive waste, except under certain limited circumstances.
The current status is that EnergySolutions cannot import radioactive waste from Italy until the NRC approves its import license application. NRC will likely wait for the 10th Circuit Court of Appeal to make a decision (not expected until late next year) before it addresses EnergySolutions' import license application.
Revised: November 3, 2009