The hazardous waste industry, and nuclear waste in particular, have never been simple issues within Tooele County. While some along the Wasatch Front would like to see this genie put back into the bottle, most local residents have long realized our hazardous waste corridor is here to stay — requiring us to take a more pragmatic and nuanced view of the industry.

Hazardous waste has created jobs for county residents. It has also contributed millions of dollars to county government coffers in the form of mitigation fees — funds that were used to construct Deseret Peak Complex. Although that contribution has declined drastically in recent years, it remains an important revenue source within county budgets.

We believe most local residents support the hazardous waste industry’s right to generate business within the parameters that have been defined for it. Those include geographic limits — an area that county commissioners shrank from 78,720 acres to 9,440 acres in 2005 — and limits on what type of waste can be accepted. (If we don’t completely understand the risks associated with a type of waste, for example depleted uranium, we should make sure we understand it before we accept it.)

But our hazardous waste industry should operate within one more parameter: We should only dispose of waste generated in our country.

America must get out of the business of taking nuclear waste generated by Mexico, Italy or Taiwan — nations that have all shipped such waste to EnergySolutions’ Clive facility in past years.

Those who favor accepting foreign waste — a few local politicians and, naturally, EnergySolutions — argue that the foreign waste being considered for Clive is no more dangerous than the Class A waste currently being disposed of there. They also argue that America has no shortage of disposal space for domestic waste, thus not putting foreign waste in competition with our national interests.

But these narrow arguments miss a broader philosophical point: Foreign nuclear waste is inherently not in our national interest. We are the most powerful and influential nation on earth. We export our technology and expertise across the globe in sectors ranging from medicine to aeronautics. We educate the world in our universities. We occupy the top rung of the value-added food chain, enhancing the processed materials of the Second World, which derive from the raw materials of the Third World.

What we Americans don’t do is bury other people’s trash in our backyard.

Any nation sophisticated enough to produce nuclear waste should also be sophisticated enough to be responsible for disposing of that waste within its own borders.

We support efforts currently being made in Congress to ban all foreign nuclear waste imports to the United States. And we agree strongly with Rep. Jim Matheson, who earlier this month told the House Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Environment: “This is an effort to put the United States in the same position as all the other countries in the world, because no other country accepts this waste, and we should not as well.”