The existing low-level waste rules are a "regulatory patchwork that has evolved over almost 60 years," according to the National Academies' National Research Council.

That means waste management

decisions are often based on who produced the waste - Defense Department, Energy Department or commercial reactors, for example - "rather than the waste's actual radiological hazard or potential risk."

As a result, similar types of waste from different sources have to be handled in different ways.

"It's not a useful way to deal with the efficient allocation of public resources," said David Leroy, chairman of the panel and the former U.S. nuclear waste negotiator.

The committee recommended sweeping change, urging the Defense Department, Energy Department, Nuclear Regulatory Commission and industry to come together to develop a risk-based classification system.

Such a system would allow the public to become more involved in making educated decisions about nuclear waste issues, the report said.

But overhauling it would be difficult, if not impossible, because of the scope of the necessary changes and a lack of political will.

"It's often difficult or impossible to get a sweeping change of statute passed that would consolidate or eliminate or amend all these 60 years of patchwork of acts that created the regulatory system," Leroy said.

The issue of how to manage low-level waste - which comes from national defense, private operations and different types of research - is of particular importance for Utah.

EnergySolutions, formerly Envirocare of Utah, operates one of just three licensed commercial radioactive waste facilities in the country, and one, Barnwell in South Carolina, is scheduled to close in 2008.

The report says the situation after Barnwell closes should be watched closely, as it is "undesirable" to only have one site, EnergySolutions, taking Class A waste from 30 potentially affected states, and urged other efforts for dealing with the low activity wastes.

The decommissioning of nuclear power reactors is expected to generate as much as $11.7 billion in disposal costs, according to earlier studies by the National Academies.

Mark Walker, spokesman for EnergySolutions, said the regulation of low-level waste has been debated for years, but the company had not had time to review the recommendations and declined to comment.

Vanessa Pierce, a project director with the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, said reform of the classification system is "long overdue."

Dictating how waste is handled based not on the radioactivity but who produces it "is like saying that if an apple is grown in California, it's an apple, but if it comes from Florida, it's an orange," she said.

Pierce said an example of how arbitrary the current system is came in 2003, when Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, inserted language in an energy bill to reclassify waste from a Fernald, Ohio, nuclear weapons plant.

The name change would have allowed it to be sent to Envirocare, even though it was actually more radioactive than waste allowed at the site.

Leroy said the existing system also requires longer shipments and more costly disposal of waste than might otherwise be necessary.

gehrke@sltrib.com