A hearing before a board of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission could determine whether Envirocare is allowed to continue disposing of depleted uranium waste — or even dig up the depleted uranium already there.

Under Utah law, the Tooele County facility is limited to accepting waste no hotter than Class A, the least dangerous classification of radioactive material, of which depleted uranium is included.

Envirocare has accepted depleted uranium in the past, and it could become the burial site for many thousands of tons of the material to be generated by a uranium enrichment facility that Louisiana Energy Services is proposing to build in New Mexico.

Tim Barney, senior vice president for Envirocare, thinks a proposed disposal facility in Texas would be a more likely place for the LES depleted uranium waste. He believes the amount of depleted uranium to be disposed throughout the LES plant's 30-year lifetime would be up to 1 million drums of the 55-gallon size.

At Envirocare, material is placed in shallow cells with a protective cap. Envirocare has accepted just over 100,000 cubic feet of depleted uranium. By comparison, Barney said, "that's less than one-half of 1 percent of the volume we've received here to date of other material."

Two groups are claiming in a hearing before the NRC's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board that depleted uranium should not be considered Class A — that it's more dangerous than other material in that classification. Instead, they contend it should be considered as Class C, the most dangerous of the low-level radioactive material, and consigned to a deep geological repository.

If the NRC agrees, that could open questions about Envirocare receiving additional depleted uranium, or even about what will happen to the depleted uranium buried in Tooele County under the present rules.

The weeklong evidentiary hearing at NRC headquarters in Rockville, Md., is expected to wrap up today.

The NRC has said it will continue hearings in Lea County, N.M., in March, and a decision may not be issued before next summer.

Subject of the hearing is the cost of decommissioning the proposed enrichment plant "and the disposal of depleted uranium tails created by the enrichment process," says an NRC announcement.

"If you put this stuff in a shallow dump, it's a lot cheaper than trying to find a geological repository to put the stuff in," said Michele Boyd, legislative director of Public Citizen, a nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C. An organization called Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, based in Tacoma Park, Md., and Public Citizen instigated the hearing.