Voices: As a pediatrician, I’m asking Utah to pass on international radioactive waste

This time of year is pumpkin season in our home, and recently my 3-year-old and I were cooking up a frenzy — pumpkin soup, pumpkin-mango spring rolls, cheddar-pecan pumpkin scones — when suddenly he realized the mess we’d made.

“Mama, we did not clean up our mess!” he shouted while I bit into a steaming hunk of scone. “That was NOT KIND!”

In preschool, my son has been learning what it means to be a good classmate: Be kind, be respectful, clean up your mess. Even at his age, already he’s realizing that these principles also are guideposts for being a good human.

So why is the state of Utah considering allowing radioactive waste from Canada to be shipped to and disposed of — a.k.a., stored in perpetuity — in Tooele County?

As a pediatrician and parent, I am concerned about this unusual plan, which the Salt Lake Tribune shed light on recently. The company, EnergySolutions, is requesting to import the equivalent of 400 Olympic-sized swimming pools’ worth of low-level nuclear waste from Ontario, Canada, to the West Desert in Tooele County. This agreement not only could risk harming the health of children living in Tooele County and the Salt Lake Valley, but also set a perilous precedent for the future import of foreign radioactive waste into our state.

Research shows that children are more sensitive to radiation than adults, which puts kids at higher risk for both short-term and long-term health consequences. Because children’s bodies are still developing, parts of their bodies — such as the thyroid, bone marrow, breast and brain — are at higher risk of radiation-related cancers. Studying the health effects of chronic, low-level radiation exposure is difficult. But a recent meta-analysis found that people living near nuclear power plants had an increased risk of cancer, with the highest cancer risk among children under 5 years old.

These disturbing results aren’t referring to consequences of high-dose radiation from a nuclear disaster. Rather, the data is suggesting that continual exposure to low-level radiation from power plants — i.e. radiation within regulatory limits, with levels typically considered too low to cause problems like cancer — may be more harmful than we previously realized.

I am a pediatric rheumatologist, which means that my patients are children and teenagers with autoimmune diseases. So I was also concerned to learn that one study, published in a leading rheumatology journal, found that people living near a uranium processing plant had significantly increased rates of systemic lupus erythematosus — a severe autoimmune disease that can affect the whole body and cause life-long illness, including death.

The EnergySolutions proposal is currently being considered by the Northwest Interstate Compact (NWIC) on Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management. As the nonprofit Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah (HEAL Utah) underscored in a recent blog post, “Approving this request would set a poor precedent by allowing a private company to import foreign waste without clarifying the safeguards that would protect the public.”

I agree with HEAL Utah that this decision warrants public input and a thorough, independent review of potential health and environmental impacts — and until then, the proposal should be rejected. The NWIC will be voting whether to accept or deny this proposal on Dec. 19 in an online meeting open to the public. Please consider joining the meeting to share your input and concerns.

Utah already accepts significant quantities of domestic radioactive waste from other states. And as the Tribune noted, in 2007 EnergySolutions wanted to ship parts of a dismantled nuclear power plant from Italy to Utah, to which then-Gov. Huntsman responded, “Utah should not be the world’s dumping ground.”

Children living in Utah are exposed to more than their fair share of harmful toxins. We’re known for our air pollution problem, but our children’s environmental health threats extend beyond smoke and smog. This year, the EPA ranked Utah second in its list of states with the most toxic chemical releases, with the majority of toxic releases coming from the Bingham Canyon Mine (a.k.a. the Kennecott Copper Mine) just west of Salt Lake City. There are also serious health risks of chemical-laden dust from the drying Great Salt Lake — the more the lake dries, the more our children breathe this potentially toxic dust.

In other words, we already have more than enough messes to clean up. But unlike my pumpkin-splattered kitchen, Utah’s environmental challenges have serious, long-lasting consequences for children’s health. Our kids deserve for us to remember the rules of preschool: Be kind, be respectful and clean up our messes before making another.

Hanna Saltzman, MD, is a pediatrician and parent in Salt Lake City.

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