March 17, 2014

AUDIT: UTAH REGULATORS NOT DOING ENOUGH TO PREVENT B, C WASTE DISPOSAL AT CLIVE

By ExchangeMonitor

A Utah State Legislature audit released yesterday said the state’s Division of Radiation Control, the agency charged with oversight of EnergySolutions’ Clive, Utah disposal facility, “is not providing adequate independent insight of incoming waste because of the self-policing model.” And at a Utah Legislative Audit Subcommittee meeting held in Salt Lake City yesterday, Utah Senate President Mike Waddoups (R), told Rusty Lundberg, director of the DRC, and Amanda Smith, executive director of the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, which houses DRC, “You’ve got some big problems.” Waddoups pondered aloud at the hearing whether the DRC should be disbanded, and Lundberg fired, for claims found in the audit. However, Smith, Lundberg, and EnergySolutions itself defended the state’s regulatory program against what they characterized as a fundamental misunderstanding of the environmental industry’s common self-regulating way of doing business. There was “a little bit of misunderstanding about environmental regulation and self-reporting,” Smith told the committee Sept. 11. “From that paradigm, we fell the report is a little misleading.”

The audit states plainly that “As the oversight arm for radioactive waste disposal in Utah, the DRC is not exercising sufficient controls to detect radioactive waste banned by Utah statute.” Much of the audit’s argument is rooted in 2011 incident wherein EnergySolutions disposed of radioactive materials that exceeded the state’s limit of only Class A waste. EnergySolutions in January 2011 self-reported that it had buried 23 containers of radioactive waste more highly concentrated than Class A at Clive. The waste, from 15 separate shipments over the last 20 years, came mostly from federal cleanup sites. “There are recorded instances where waste generators and brokers have shipped inappropriate waste classes to Utah,” the audit report states. “Once identified, the recorded instances of Class A violations were self-reported by EnergySolutions to the DRC, confirming our concern that the DRC is not sufficiently exercising its authority to independently review the classification of waste shipments received.” Among other things, the state auditors suggested that the DRC should perform physical verification of waste classification, and in the case of containerized waste that the DRC should provide the ability to verify a sample of the waste at the generator’s facility before shipment to Utah.

In a response included in the audit report, Lundberg wrote, “Nearly every environmental enforcement program in Utah and the rest of the nation relies in large part on industry self reporting. … Both federal and state environmental regulatory programs are based on the fundamental premise that the regulated community bears the burden of not only complying with the established requirements and standards but also providing and maintaining the necessary documentation to demonstrate such compliance.” EnergySolutions wrote in a response that the audit’s recommendations were based on “fundamentally flawed assumptions.”

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