"I love to get out on a day like today and work on my swing," she said, standing atop the old Vitro radioactive tailings site in South Salt Lake. The waste, she explained, was trucked out and put safely to rest forever in a sealed site on a 1-square-mile tract of "arid land in the west desert of Utah."

That site is owned and managed by Envirocare, and this was a 30-minute paid infomercial for the business titled "Safe and Secure." It has been running on all local TV stations in the post-11 p.m. slot for more than three weeks and the company has bought time for it through the end of the month.

"It's just to educate the public," says Envirocare spokesman Mark Walker, who helped produce the ad. "We were going to start airing it in mid-October, but frankly, Envirocare is a political football and we didn't want it to come across we are trying to influence politicians."

The piece is informative, as is a tour of the Tooele County facility, which Hawkes invites people to take.

The point she repeatedly makes is that since 1988, Envirocare has safely stored the nation's low-level, "class A" radioactive waste - much of it generated from X-rays, MRIs and millions of other medical procedures. Plenty of it comes from Utah, too, so at least we are taking care of our own.

Good enough. We know the waste has to go somewhere, and most Utahns accept that.

About halfway through the promo, Hawkes mentions B and C-level waste. Only two sites in the nation can accept this level of waste, and they will be closed to 39 states in 2008. Someone has to take it. But who? Envirocare, Hawkes notes twice, is not "currently" licensed to handle hotter waste.

In any talk of Envirocare, there is always the big "what if," and it rightfully makes people queasy: What if the company, plugging away as it does like a kid pestering a parent for a dream Christmas toy, ultimately gets state permission to truck in hotter class B and C wastes? This is largely the stuff of disassembled nuclear power plants and nuclear bomb-making plants from the Cold War, and can be thousands of times more radioactive and longer-lived than class A waste.

A moratorium on class B and C licensure expires Feb. 15. A joint legislative task force recommended in October to keep the hotter waste out, but failed to pull the trigger by calling for an all-out ban.

While the state Division of Environmental Quality has approved a change in Envirocare's licensing, it can't happen unless both legislative houses and the governor approve it. With a strongly worded "NO" to DEQ, the incoming governor could put an end to this craziness his first 90 days in office.

This is where we stand. For now.

"They can call it education, but this ad shows Envirocare is gearing up for a huge push in the next two years to win over the public," says Jason Groenewold, spokesman for environmental group HEAL Utah. "It's a slick attempt to brainwash Utahns."

So stay awake. Envirocare may be buying up late-night TV, but this is no time to drift off to sleep.

hmullen@sltrib.com