The story "Protesters assail, state defends blended radioactive waste" (Tribune, Jan. 10), about the Utah Division of Radiation Control allowing EnergySolutions to immediately dump hotter nuclear waste, suggests that we protesters don’t want to let the camel’s nose of blended nuclear waste into the Utah tent because the rest of the camel (hotter radioactive waste) will follow.

It’s a powerful metaphor, but it’s the wrong one, because blended nuclear waste is the whole camel, not just its nose.

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In 2005, the Utah Legislature and Gov. Jon Huntsman enacted a ban on hotter Class B and C nuclear wastes. That ban has kept out dangerous materials from nuclear power plants, such as resins from reactor filter systems. EnergySolutions, always clever, has figured out how to dump those B and C resins in Utah by mixing them with enough less-hot waste so that the resulting mix is just barely Class A.

Blended waste contains all the dangerous radioactivity that was in the banned pre-blended wastes — it doesn’t magically go away. In other words, this is the whole damn camel.

Now that our regulators have failed us, it’s up to Gov. Gary Herbert to step up and keep out blended waste.

Beth Malloy

Salt Lake City