Don't Waste South Carolina

At the recent op-ed published in The State, Barnwell County Council Chairman Keith Sloan stated the following:

Then there is the theme song claim of the alarmists: "South Carolina is the nation's nuclear dumping ground." This claim is overblown and misleading. Consider the following. In 2006, 16.3 million cubic feet of low-level radioactive waste were disposed of in the United States. Barnwell last year took in about 38,000 cubic feet - that's about two-tenths of 1 percent of all low-level waste disposed of last year. Put another way, 99.8 percent of all low-level radioactive waste went somewhere else last year. Another inconvenient truth..

The truth about this statement, posted on The Truth About Barnwell website was taken from the CVSC House Sub-Committee testimony given by VSC Executive Director Ann Timberlake:

..Energy Solutions' case is misleading in other ways. Take for example the chart handed out on the bus last week with the headline that "South Carolina only takes a fraction of the Nation's Low Level Radioactive Waste." This chart claims that in 2006 of the 16,339,011cf buried at the three sites in Barnwell, Clive (Utah) and Richland (Washington), only 38,129cf (.23%) was buried at Barnwell versus..

The numbers are padded: in reality, millions of cubic feet of Department of Energy "A" waste, primarily construction rubble buried in Utah, distort the figures. If you remove the rubble and take the numbers from the "Manifest Information Management System" posted on the SC Energy Office website, which is the actual, relevant measure of curies of radioactivity, a more disturbing picture emerges.

In 2006 the total commercial Low Level waste figure was 4,046,793 cf containing 328,848 curies. Barnwell's 38,129 cf of waste contained 322,491 curies - 98% of the nation's total.

The bottom line is that South Carolina has done more than her fair share. Our elected leaders' willingness time and again to prostitute our state to the nuclear industry has caused other regional waste compacts to postpone opening sites elsewhere..