Four years later, apparently, not so much.

Huntsman now is hiding behind a deal he signed last year with EnergySolutions to quell the company's plans for a "super cell" at its Tooele County landfill. The governor says that agreement effectively muzzles him on the issue of importing 1,600 tons of detritus from dismantled Italian nuclear power plants and depositing it in Utah.

Instead, he's begging the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to establish a national policy to give him cover.

"The United States has a finite amount of space for disposal of radioactive material," Huntsman wrote in a March 13 letter to the NRC. Whether or not space should be reserved for U.S. waste or exotic imports "is a policy issue that must be addressed at a federal level."

It's a classic political deflection.

Federal regulators say their hands are tied. They have to consider technicalities. Utah's governor, they say, is the only one who can stop the radioactive imports at the border.

But Huntsman isn't the watchdog of four years ago. After a series of environmental battles with legislators, he seems worn down.

"This is a case where he is changing his position without wanting to appear too dramatically to be changing his position," says Matthew Burbank, University of Utah Political Science professor. "I don't understand what the advantage would be to appear to not be able to make the decision."

EnergySolutions is radioactive politics on Capitol Hill in Salt Lake City and Washington. The company liberally seeds both national and local politics with money, pouring $400,000 into congressional campaigns over the past three years and spending more than $1 million on lobbyists last year.

Meantime, lawmakers and the governor play word games, limiting their opposition to so-called "hotter" waste. This Italian import would be hot, but not too hot. So the governor and lawmakers can maintain their pretense of opposing really nasty radioactive waste while giving EnergySolutions' low-level landfill a free pass. (In an elaborate show four years ago, Huntsman returned $40,000 in donations from company CEO Steve Creamer.)

Utah's representatives in Congress aren't much better. Rep. Jim Matheson ($11,000 from EnergySolutions since 2006) has proposed legislation to prohibit the NRC from importing foreign radioactive waste. But the rest of the delegation has gone silent, with the exception of Rep. Rob Bishop, who is working at cross purposes with both Matheson and Huntsman.

Former EnergySolutions lobbyist Bishop (more than $20,000 from EnergySolutions and company executives since his 2002 election) told the Associated Press, "I don't see it as a federal issue."

With a June deadline for public comment looming, this falls back on Huntsman.

Vanessa Pierce, director of the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, says the governor should man up. Huntsman "needs to stop hiding behind surrogates and stand up for Utahns," she says.

If he doesn't, Utah is going to become not just the nation's dumping ground, but landfill for the world.

walsh@sltrib.com