Nov. 8--Three scientists say federal nuclear regulators owe Utahns an apology -- and a policy change -- for allowing shallow burial of depleted uranium, including the 49,000 tons already at EnergySolutions Inc.'s landfill in Tooele County.

Geologist Stephen T. Nelson and climatologist Summer B. Rupper, both of Brigham Young University, and Kansas State University geologist Charles G. Oviatt, say it is "absurd" for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to deem depleted uranium safe for surface disposal.

The uranium enrichment waste gets increasingly hazardous for a million years, and that's too long to reasonably ensure the safety of any shallow landfills, especially one like the Tooele County site that is underwater a few hundred of every several thousand years. Those wet cycles could spread long-lived radioactive material throughout the Great Salt Lake basin, the scientists say.

The criticism comes in a letter to the regulators, who are fielding public input on whether large amounts of DU can be safely disposed at sites like EnergySolutions'.

NRC spokesman David McIntyre said his agency will consider the scientists' comments as part of its in-depth review. But, he added, the agency won't approve any more DU disposal in Utah "if we don't think it's safe."

The company said it's looking at the impacts of rising lake levels on the landfill cover, erosion potential and leaching.

"Until this assessment is completed," the company

said in a statement, "there is no basis for the speculative conclusions drawn by these individuals."

But all three scientists, none of them speaking for their universities, are experts in the geological history of Lake Bonneville -- the massive water body that has periodically covered parts of three states in the past 30,000 years but now has receded to the present-day Great Salt Lake. They say a shortage of deep, underground radioactive waste disposal is "clearly driving" the NRC's decision to let the waste come to surface disposal sites and they accuse regulators of "a programmatic failure" to plan for proper disposal of DU deep underground.

"The EnergySolutions site is appropriate for waste that decays away in a couple hundred years," said Nelson, a former member and chairman of the Utah Radiation Control Board," in press release distributed by the anti-nuclear group, the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah.

"We don't know exactly who will be living here when the EnergySolutions site is washed away," he said, "but the DU we take now could leave them a massive environmental catastrophe to clean up."

The criticism comes at a tumultuous time in the oversight of DU.