This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2008, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

The proposal by EnergySolutions Inc. to accept nuclear waste from Italy has become, pardon the pun, a "hot" topic for Utah. The potential for this stroke of brilliance to have health and economic repercussions for many Utah citizens requires that every angle be thoroughly dissected in the public arena before permission is granted.

Beginning with Marie Curie, the scientific community and then government regulatory agencies have consistently underestimated the public health consequences of radioactivity exposure at every stage of evolution of the nuclear industry.

Thousands of Utahns became the victims of underestimating the toxicity of above-ground nuclear testing in Nevada. The environmental contamination of underground nuclear testing was also underestimated and it was allowed to continue until the early 1990s.

The toxicity that uranium miners were exposed to was underestimated and many died from malignancies. The mill tailings from the processing of uranium ore were initially thought to be benign, and for several years these tailings were used as building material, incorporated into the cement poured in foundations. Eventually, the folly of this practice became clear and those buildings had to be closely monitored for high levels of radioactivity. Some had to be abandoned.

X-rays were once thought to be innocuous, which resulted in the public receiving countless X-rays without consideration of the possible consequences of repeated exposures. Remember, taking X-rays of the feet used to be part of buying a new pair of shoes.

Likewise, when nuclear power plants were first built, little thought was given to the problem of disposing of the radioactive waste because the extent of the toxicity was not fully understood. Obviously we are paying now for that lack of understanding.

Because of this extensive history of tragic miscalculation, the public has every reason to be suspicious about whether practices at EnergySolutions' repository at Clive, the largest commercial nuclear waste dump in the country, and the federal regulations it must meet, adequately protect our health. The burden of proof should be on the nuclear industry to unequivocally demonstrate that the waste stored at EnergySolutions' disposal facility is harmless.

According to media reports in Europe, the disposal industry in Italy is so riddled with corruption that it is routine for that country's waste to be much "hotter" than advertised. A highly regarded British medical journal, The Lancet Oncology, has detailed higher rates of many types of cancer among Italians living near illegal rubbish dumps owned and managed by the Italian Mafia. These dumps are stuffed with radioactive and toxic waste and have been leaking deadly gases for many years.

At a hearing last week, we learned the astonishing fact that EnergySolutions has no way of verifying the concentration of radioactivity within containers of waste from any source once they have arrived at its facility.

It requires only a modest dose of skepticism to conclude that dumping Italian waste at EnergySolutions' disposal facility is a spectacularly high-risk venture that offers the public virtually no benefit and an incalculable risk.

When this same risk/benefit analysis was applied in the early 1980s to the MX mobile missile system, and to the Pentagon's "Divine Strake" test last year, the proposals were buried by courageous opposition from the public, religious organizations, and state and local governments.

Let's hope that same courage is brought to bear on the proposal to dump Italian nuclear waste in Utah.

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* BRIAN MOENCH is president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment.