Editorial: Uranium tailings pose danger

Tuesday, Dec. 2, 1997 | 9:35 a.m.

THE danger flags should go up when authorities talk about leaving 10.5 million tons of uranium mill tailings piled next to the Colorado River near Moab, Utah.

While the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission wanted to allow the tailings, produced by Atlas Minerals from 1960 to 1984, to be capped and remain where they are, other agencies raised the warnings.

The National Park Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Utah Division of Water Quality, among others, forced another study.

A team of experts from the U.S. Department of Energy is beginning a 60-day study on the threat from the uranium perched on the river's banks.

Since the Colorado River supplies drinking water downstream to more than 35 million people (including Nevadans), it's time to take a more cautious approach than that of the NRC or the U.S. Department of Energy and its predecessors.

Anyone living or visiting in the Southwest has to worry about the risks to drinking water supplies, human health and environmental impacts from uranium tailings left from building nuclear bombs during the Cold War era on the Colorado River.

The Grand Canyon Trust produced a briefing paper on the tailings, noting that the pile contains about 8 million curies of radioactivity, or about the same amount released by the Chernobyl disaster.

When the river is low, the trust's paper said, water levels lap about 750 feet from the pile. But when the Colorado's level rises, as it has this year, the river floods against the tailings pile. The base of the pile comes into contact with the river itself.

One of the nation's leading water authorities, Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., and 19 of his colleagues from Arizona and California wrote of their concerns with the proposed NRC decision.

In a flood, they told Vice President Al Gore, the Colorado River could easily be contaminated.

Contaminated Colorado River water could reach all the way to Mexico, including into the farmers' fields in Arizona and California on the way.

It doesn't make sense for a nuclear regulatory agency to allow such a contamination threat to remain where it is.