Matheson co-sponsors bill to prohibit foreign nuclear waste

A bill introduced Thursday in Congress seeks to prohibit the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from authorizing any company in the U.S. to accept foreign-generated nuclear waste.

The bill's inspiration came from the pending EnergySolutions application to accept waste from decommissioned nuclear reactors in Italy.

U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, joined fellow House Energy and Commerce Committee members Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., and Ed Whitfield, R-Ky. in sponsoring legislation that would ban importation of nuclear waste unless it was originally produced in the U.S. An exception would be U.S. military waste generated abroad.

Matheson said on the phone that it would be too speculative to guess whether the bill, which still needs to be scheduled for a committee hearing, could be passed in time to impact the EnergySolutions proposal. He called it a "simple" bill that Congress may be able to act on quickly.

"I don't think Utah should be a dumping ground for the world's waste," Matheson said.

He said licenses have been granted to accept waste from other countries, but it was on a much smaller scale than the current EnergySolutions application.

When national policy was set on storing low-level radioactive waste from overseas, Matheson said no one considered that larger volumes and an increasing amount of requests would be coming from other countries. Mainly, the requests are coming from countries where nuclear reactors that will soon be decommissioned and in need of a place to store the resulting waste.

"The notion of waste coming from around the world just wasn't on the table," he said. "This is really about the broader policy issue."

A press release from Gordon's office said President Bush could allow an exemption from the ban "if an application showed importation would serve a national or international policy goal, such as a research purpose." Any license to accept foreign-produced nuclear waste that was approved before passage of the bill would be grandfathered in and allowed.

EnergySolutions' wants to import about 20,000 tons of low-level radioactive waste produced in Italy for processing in Tennessee. Less than 1,600 tons of waste left over after processing would be shipped for storage at the EnergySolutions site in Clive, located in Tooele County. The company already disposes of about 90 percent of the low-level radioactive waste produced in this country.