The fear that poor towns, regions or countries could become dumping areas for toxic material, including nuclear waste, was what led to protests against so-called “environmental injustice”—practices that embody the worst effects of the intrusion of market considerations into matters affecting public health.
Now it seems that the United States—Tennessee, to be exact—may be on the receiving end of the toxics-for-dollars equation. Up to 1,000 tons of low-level nuclear waste from Germany will be coming to Tennessee for processing over the next five years (“low-level” doesn’t mean that the waste contains no long-lived isotopes.) The Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the licenses earlier this month.
The material will be imported by EnergySolutions of Salt Lake City, which would incinerate the waste in its Bear Creek facility at Oak Ridge, Tenn., then return the ash to Germany. EnergySolutions has described the waste as 44 percent plastic, 30 percent paper, 10 percent textiles and 10 percent wood. It would be sent by boat to the East Coast and then trucked to Tennessee.
Knoxnews.com’s Nashville bureau chief Tom Humphrey reported, “The NRC rejected multiple requests for a public hearing on EnergySolutions’ applications, ruling that a hearing would not be in the public’s interest or help the commissioners in making a decision.”
EnergySolutions earlier lost a court battle over a plan it had formed to import 20,000 tons of radioactive waste from Italy, incinerate it and dispose of the ash in Utah. The disposal plan, which the state of Utah bitterly opposed, was the subject of the dispute; the court sided with Utah.
But the federal government has an interest in the welfare of EnergySolutions, which is part of a team of companies under contract to the Department of Energy to retrieve radioactive waste from the notoriously deteriorated tanks at Hanford, Wash.
EnergySolutions’ deal with German waste management firm Eckert and Ziegler Nuclitec—whose website states that it collects waste from all over the world, not just Germany—comes at a time when low-level radwaste disposal capacity in the U.S. may be strained if more nuclear power plants are built here. Opponents of the plan point out that neither Congress nor the NRC provided for a waste disposal system sufficient to handle foreign as well as domestic waste. A bill to prohibit imports of nuclear waste passed the U.S. House in 2009, but did not clear the Senate.
