10/02/2009 06:47:14 PM MDT - The Radiation Control Board, the folks who are supposed to look out for you, cleared the way in an 8-3 vote last week for EnergySolutions to bring 14,000 tons of the stuff to Utah beginning a few weeks from now.
So, what's DU? What's the big deal? Well, if you are only concerned about the next few hundred years, it may not be anything to worry about. However, if you are concerned about longer times, it is a very big deal indeed.
Contrary to intuition, DU becomes much more radioactive over a long time. In fact, DU buried in Utah today will eventually become somewhere between 10 to 15 times more radioactive.
There is also a lot of it. The amount of material eventually requiring disposal may exceed 1 million tons. The half-life of DU is about the same as the age of the Earth, or 4.5 billion years. In a nutshell, DU represents a massive quantity of radioactive material in a highly concentrated form. It becomes increasingly radioactive and then stays that way forever.
Much of it could end up at the EnergySolutions facility in the west desert. That facility really isn't a bad place for "normal" waste that largely decays away in a few centuries. Ironically, the company builds its landfill liners from local Lake Bonneville clay that was deposited 15,000 years ago and is direct evidence that this site has been under water in the past.
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