- Wasatch Integrated Waste Management District director Nathan Rich, wondering what would happen in instruments did detect depleted uranium in shipments of waste at the Layton incinerator.

Depleted uranium burned

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The director of the Layton incinerator where Air Force personnel mistakenly burned several pounds of depleted uranium over an eight-month period said his agency is “taking reasonable and appropriate steps to ensure this doesn't happen again.”

But Wasatch Integrated Waste Management District director Nathan Rich lamented it is unlikely that any of those steps could have prevented what occurred over the last year.

Rich said his plant was exploring two modes of additional control on the waste that comes into the incinerator for disposal. He said it was likely the plant would institute a policy requiring all users to sign a document making them responsible for the content of the waste they wanted destroyed. He also said he is exploring the possibility of placing a radiation detector at the plant.

Plant managers say that Hill Air Force Base officers promised ahead of time that there was nothing dangerous in the waste they delivered in eight shipments to the incinerator. As such, Rich said, it is unlikely that requiring further documentation would have prevented the recent burn incidents.

“My understanding is that the base would have filled out the paperwork and said, 'There's nothing hazardous here,' ” he said. “But it might help us with some liability issues.”

And that, Rich said, might prompt incinerator users to think harder about what they are burning.

Rich also wasn't sure that a radiation-detection system would actually identify a small amount of depleted uranium, like that fed into the Layton incinerator. “And even if the radiation detector does go off, then what do you do?” he asked. “Do you turn it away? Do you pull off to the side and dump it on the ground, potentially increasing individual exposure by digging through it trying to find the waste that set the alarm off?”

Brian Moench, co-founder and president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, said he isn't comforted by the steps being taken to prevent further problems of this sort - not only on the part of the incinerator, but also on the part of the military, regulators and government officials.

He said that in addition to an investigation into what went wrong, Utahns need to demand a fundamental shift in the way they think about radioactive waste. “I think the basic misconception that seems to permeate everybody involved in this process is that low levels of nuclear radiation are acceptable,” Moench said. “And they are not acceptable.”

mlaplante@sltrib.com