EnergySolutions Inc. opened its gates Sunday night to the latest shipment of depleted uranium from the Savannah River cleanup site in South Carolina.

But the waste won't be buried just yet, under an agreement between Utah Gov. Gary Herbert and the U.S. Energy Department. Instead, the 5,408 drums of low-level radioactive waste will be unloaded tomorrow and placed in a specialized landfill cell for storage until Utah regulators have an opportunity to wrap up a proposed license change and a proposed regulation change.

Dane Finerfrock, director of the Utah Division of Radiation Control, said his staff was on hand Monday to review the shipping papers for the waste and check the paperwork against the content of a sampling of drums. They will also be on hand to watch the drums be placed into the landfill cell, probably on Tuesday.

EnergySolutions, which operates the landfill about 80 miles west of Salt Lake City, had little to say about the controversial shipment.

"Pursuant to the agreement between the governor and the Department of Energy," said company president Val Christensen, " the shipment of depleted uranium arrived at the Clive [Tooele County] facility at about 9 p.m."

Two more shipments, bringing the total to 15,400 barrels, will come to Utah in and when a site performance assessment shows that more depleted uranium can be contained in the Tooele County site for an extended period of time. That review is expected to take months.

The EnergySolutions site already contains an estimated 49,000 tons of depleted uranium, a by-product of nuclear fuel enrichment and bomb-making that has the unusual quality of becoming more hazardous over time. EnergySolutions has said it will take at least 35,000 years for the depleted uranium at its site to exceed the radiological hazard limit set in state law.