DOE to remove uranium tailings

Monday, Oct. 9, 2000 | 11:12 a.m.

A pile of uranium mill tailings perched on the edge of the Colorado River near Moab, Utah, will be cleaned up within the next 10 years, thanks to a Defense Department budget that moves oversight of the Cold War relic from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to the Department of Energy.

The tailings, left over from 22 years of processing uranium for weapons, leach a toxic brew of radioactivity mixed with ammonia, arsenic, lead, selenium, mercury and other heavy metals into the Colorado River, which supplies drinking water to 23 million people downstream in Nevada, Arizona and California.

The NRC proposed to leave the tailings in place, but cap them with a solid substance such as clay or concrete designed to keep the toxic material from leaking. The DOE insists that a cap is not reliable and that the tailings must be removed. The Defense Department has taken responsibility for the cleanup.

The defense budget bill, which includes initial funding for the removal of the tailings, was passed by Congress on Friday and goes to President Clinton for his signature.

The DOE estimates that 28,800 gallons a day of the poisonous liquid leaks into the river. DOE Secretary Bill Richardson vowed in January to take charge of the Cold War remnants, which amount to 10.5 million tons of tailings.

Denver-based Atlas Corp., former owner of the uranium mining operation from 1962 to 1984, declared bankruptcy last year.

It will take a year for the DOE to come up with a plan to remove the tailings. Richardson sought about $10 million for two years to study the site, decide the best way to proceed with the cleanup, then hire a contractor.

It will take an estimated five to seven years to remove the tailings.

As part of the Moab cleanup, Congress approved a deal that involves the largest voluntary return of land in 100 years. The United States is giving 84,000 acres of oil- and gas-rich reserves about 80 miles north of Moab back to the Indians, Richardson said.

In return, some royalties from the sale of oil and gas by the tribe will help fund the Moab cleanup.

The Ute tribe received the land under an 1882 treaty, but the United States took it back during World War I for the petroleum. The buried treasure was never tapped.

The bill also protects scenic land along the Green River in Utah.

Environmentalists and critics of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's proposed solution were pleased with the plan approved by Congress. They had feared that a natural disaster such as the Colorado River flood of 1983 would breach the cap and wash more toxins into the river. When the river flooded in 1983 water lapped at the tailings, only 750 feet away.

"This is a landmark piece of legislation for everybody who cares about the Colorado River," Bill Hedden of the Grand Canyon Trust, an environmental oversight group, said. "We are removing a major source of contamination from the most important water source in the southwest."

The Project On Government Oversight, which released a 1998 report detailing the extent of the toxic flows into the river, hailed the congressional action as progress on the cleanup.

The change of oversight, the project's Executive Director Danielle Brian said, "shows not all environmental problems have to slip through the proverbial bureaucratic cracks."