Font ResizeUtah is joining the fight to stop EnergySolutions Inc. from burying large volumes of foreign radioactive waste in its Tooele County landfill.
The paperwork has not been filed yet, but the state's plans to appeal were revealed in papers filed last week in Washington.
Last month U.S. District Judge Ted Stewart ruled that the Northwest Interstate Compact on Low-level Radioactive Waste had no authority over EnergySolutions' Utah disposal site. And there has been some question whether the state of Utah, which is a Northwest Compact member, would join an appeal of that ruling.
Stewart's ruling, in effect, crimps Utah's power through the compact to control the low-level radioactive waste that goes to EnergySolutions, including the leftovers from cleaning up Italy's dismantled nuclear reactors that the company wants to import.
Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. aligned the state with the compact. But Huntsman has been nominated to become U.S. ambassador to China and is expected to be replaced soon by Lt. Gov. Gary Herbert, whose views on the lawsuit are unknown.
Papers filed last week at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission say Utah, along with the Northwest and Rocky Mountain compacts, intends to appeal Stewart's ruling.
"The defendants ... will appeal the district's decision to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals," the papers say.
Bill Sinclair, deputy director of the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, said Monday he
"The board felt very strongly that this was an extremely important matter that needed to be appealed," said Leonard C. Slosky, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Compact, which met last week to make its decision on an appeal.
Meanwhile, in papers filed with the NRC last week, EnergySolutions said federal regulators should not wait for an appeal and should approve the Italy waste license application.
"Now that a court of competent jurisdiction has resolved this issue, there is no further reason for delay," the company's lawyers wrote, adding the likelihood the ruling will be overturned is "a remote possibility."
EnergySolutions noted that its application has been on hold for months, pending the outcome of the case.
The company must have a license to import 20,000 tons of waste from Italy, process some it in a specialized plant in Tennessee and dispose of the remaining 1,600 tons in Utah. In order to grant it, the NRC must be assured a suitable site can take the waste, and the agency waited for the court to settle that question.
The company had no additional comment when contacted Monday.
Thousands of people have protested EnergySolutions' import request, the largest in NRC's history. And some of those people, represented by ten environmental groups, asked the NRC last week not to act on the license request until the appeal is concluded.
"[C]ontinuing to hold the applications in abeyance will prevent waste that has no final destination from coming into the country," said the groups, which include the Sierra Club.
The state of Utah in its recent filing also asks the NRC to keep the case on hold, pending the appeal's outcome.
"If the Utah district court's decision were to be overturned on appeal and the Northwest Compact's exclusionary authority affirmed," the state says, "Italian waste awaiting disposal could become orphaned or may need to be placed in intermediate storage in the United States. Moreover, Italian waste already disposed of at [the EnergySolutions site in the interim] may need to be recovered and exported back to Italy."
EnergySolutions filed suit last year, saying the regional Northwest Compact has no authority over its Utah disposal site for radioactive waste.
The state of Utah and the Rocky Mountain Compact joined the lawsuit because Congress gave compacts the right to say 'no' to out-of-compact waste, including foreign waste.
Utah says it will appeal a district court ruling in EnergySolutions' favor. The state and the two compacts are poised to try to have that ruling overturned in the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.
