Is U.K. viewing Utah as an nuclear waste site?

A British lord told Parliament this month that a representative from EnergySolutions Inc. had offered to accept radioactive waste from the United Kingdom at the company's disposal facility in Utah.

The comments by Lord Charles Patrick Fleeming Jenkin, of Roding, as well as information in a British trade-publication report, have reinforced U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson's fear that more European countries will join Italy in wanting to send their nuclear waste to the United States.

"My fear that the current proposal to import Italy's waste was just the tip of the iceberg seems valid, based on this news out of Great Britain," Matheson, D-Utah, said Tuesday in a statement. "We know the U.S. has limited storage space for domestically produced waste. If we don't set limits on foreign waste now, where will this all end?"

According to a transcript of Parliament's proceedings on May 21, Jenkin said he had talked to EnergySolutions about dealing with British nuclear waste.

"EnergySolutions has told me that, while spent fuel and waste from fuel reprocessing must go into a deep repository in this country, much of the so-called intermediate waste does not need to be managed in that way but can be either recycled for use in new nuclear build or transported to EnergySolutions' own disposal facility, called Clive, in the Utah desert," he said.

"I have no means of ascertaining this, but it claims that this could lead to substantially lower costs with a significantly smaller repository for new-build waste and so save us a great deal of money."

Earlier this month, the May 12 issue of the biweekly U.K. Nuclear Facilities Monitor included a story titled, "U.K. 'too timid' in addressing RAD waste, EnergySolutions exec says."

The publication reported that EnergySolutions' Mark Morant suggested that his company's low-level radioactive waste storage site in Clive, Tooele County, "could serve to provide much-needed capacity as several U.K. reactors move into the decommissioning phase."

The U.K. Monitor said Morant spoke in early May during the Nuclear New-Build Conference in London, quoting him as saying, "We are too timid with our waste solutions. Why not export U.K. waste to Clive? Why not near-surface disposal in the U.K.? We must find our courage."

Matheson is worried those words will translate into Utah becoming "the repository for the nuclear waste of foreign countries ...at Utah's and the U.S.'s expense."

EnergySolutions' spokesman John Ward said Morant was simply challenging the British nuclear industry to "broaden their horizons" as it considers a "nuclear renaissance" in that country.