It was reported in last Thursday’s edition of the Transcript-Bulletin that EnergySolutions has given up plans to import foreign nuclear waste and dispose of it at the company’s Clive disposal facility (“Italian taken off menu at Clive,” July 15).

Now the company intends to assist its Italian customers with building a facility where Class A waste can be safely stored, rather than to store the waste at Clive.

This is welcome news and we think EnergySolutions has made the right decision.

In 2008, EnergySolutions sought a permit from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to import 20,000 tons of radioactive waste from Italy. The waste was to be processed in Tennessee, with 1,600 tons of remaining waste to be sent to Clive for permanent storage.

Since then, we have editorialized against accepting foreign nuclear waste. We have held a consistent stance that EnergySolutions should not accept foreign waste and that only waste generated in our country should be disposed of here. We have contended that we should get out of the business of taking nuclear waste generated by other countries, including from Mexico, Italy or Taiwan, which are all nations that have shipped such waste to the company’s Clive facility in past years. We have also said that any nation that is sophisticated enough to produce nuclear waste should also be sophisticated enough to be responsible for disposal within its own borders.

There have been some who favored accepting foreign waste, including a few local politicians. Their arguments have included that the foreign waste considered for storage at Clive was no more dangerous than the Class A waste currently disposed of there. Also, that America is not short of disposal space for domestic waste and doesn’t put foreign waste in competition with our national interests.

We thought those arguments missed a bigger point, which is that foreign nuclear waste is not in our national interest.

The company’s president and CEO Val Christensen said, “We have determined that we can best serve our international customers by exporting our skills and technologies and building longer term relationships to assist them in developing their own local facilities and capabilities, rather than pursuing a short-term disposal solution at the company’s Clive, Utah facility.”

That’s an idea we can get behind. We export our technology and expertise across the world, why not help other countries gain the knowledge needed to dispose of its own waste.

We still support efforts being made in Congress through the Radioactive Import Deterrence Act to ban foreign nuclear waste imports to the U.S., (the bill passed in the House last December, but has stalled in the Senate), but this change in international waste strategy by EnergySolutions is good news and should be applauded for making the right decision.