This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2006, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
It looked for a time that the perpetual care fund, a pool of money to deal with environmental mishaps at the EnergySolutions landfill more than a century from now, might be on its way out.
A legislative panel rejected an advisory board's recommendation last month that the fund be beefed up to cover an unexpected disaster after the company and its mile-square hazardous and radioactive waste disposal site is defunct.
But a bill is being drafted for the 2007 Legislature that would keep the fund and probably a number of other suggestions the radiation board made after its own, lawmaker-mandated study.
Sen. Greg Bell, R-Fruit Heights, has requested a bill to go forward with the radiation board's suggestions. He said it is important to balance the public's interest in not getting stuck with the bill for a problem at the site with the concerns of profit-making ventures like the landfill.
"I think we've got to do something," said Bell.
EnergySolutions already has paid $400,000 a year for five years into a perpetual care fund to address contingencies 100 years after the site closes. The company also maintains bonds of $58 million to close the site, and to tend it for the century after closure - a period during which the disposed materials are considered hazardous.
The Radiation Control Board, with the help of an engineering consultant, determined that roughly $93 million would be needed for perpetual care after the first century. It also called for a kind of pay-as-you-go approach to the fund for closing the site, tying the sum required for closure to the amount of disposal space already used.
Rep. Jim Gowans, D-Tooele, noted that the interim committee already rejected the perpetual care fund. He has a bill to do away with the fund and, perhaps, tuck the accumulated $2 million into a separate fund to close the site.
He said the perpetual care fund is not required in the two other states with radioactive sites and that it is not fair to require EnergySolutions to maintain such a fund when the International Uranium White Mesa mill in Blanding does not have the same requirement.
"The feeling of the Legislature is we don't need it," he said.