2 hot words are guaranteed to raise hackles

Dumping ground. Those are two interesting words, especially when put together. Everyone has something to dump, but no one wants to be known as the world's dumpee.

Those two words also constitute the entirety of the only argument against a plan by EnergySolutions to accept low-level radioactive waste from foreign countries in Utah's West Desert, and to share half of the profits with the state — an estimate of between $750 million and $1.5 billion over 10 years. At a time when rock-ribbed conservative state lawmakers are eagerly lapping up all the federal stimulus money a liberal president can throw at them, this is an interesting proposal, indeed.

But Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. and Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, couldn't be more aghast. "I am outraged," Matheson said, "that Utah legislators would even consider allowing our state to become the universal dumping ground for the world's nuclear garbage." He has a bill pending that would outlaw it.

There you go. End of argument. Which is a little pathetic, actually.

The stuff EnergySolutions stores at its facility is low level. How low? Chief Executive Officer Steve Creamer describes it as "like at a power plant, it's the clothing they wear to keep radon off of them; it would be that type of clothing and the booties they wear. A lot of it is demolition debris. A lot of it comes from DOE (the Department of Energy) where they tear down a building that has had radioactive things going on inside, so it has low-level contamination on the walls." It also includes little plastic resin beads that have been used in the water at nuclear power plants to cool reactors, and which pick up slight levels of radioactivity.

Creamer is prepared with quick comparisons. "The exit sign in your office — too hot. That's class B waste. The smoke alarm at your house, that has a little pin-head element in it. You can send it to the county dump, but I can't take it, because it's class B waste." Why can the dump take it? Because, he said, when you average it over the size of the entire dump, it isn't considered hazardous.

One hundred years from now, the EnergySolutions site will be clean enough to build homes on and grow potatoes, as Creamer put it. Of course, it's doubtful anyone would want to live that far out in the desert.

But the point is EnergySolutions already is accepting this waste. All it wants to do is devote 4.3 acres of its site to the exact same stuff from foreign countries willing to pay a premium, and give half the money to the state.