Moab Cleanup and the Shape of Things to Come
In previous posts, I have talked about how uranium mining has been disastrous for indigenous peoples and the environment in remote and desolate areas of the world. I have also mentioned my concern that nuclear companies may go bankrupt and dump the costs of cleaning up nuclear waste on the government and the taxpayers. Today’s post brings both of these concerns together.
Near Moab, Utah, a uranium mine and mill operation started processing uranium in 1956 under the ownership of the Uranium Reduction Company. The mine and mill were purchased by the Atlas Uranium Corporation in 1962 and continued to operate until 1984. The mining operation covered over one half of a square mile that came within 750 feet of the Colorado River which provides drinking water for twenty five million people. By the time that the mine was shut down, about one third of the site was covered by a layer of radioactive uranium mine tailings over seventy five feet thick. There were sixteen million gallons of tons of tailings in that layer. Since the mine and mill were closed in 1982 due to a soft market for uranium, the pile of tailings has been leaking contamination into the soil, the aquifer below the land, and the Colorado River. By the late 1990, the level of uranium in the soil beneath the layer of tailings was over thirty times the safe limit. It is estimated that nearly thirty thousand gallons of contaminated water from the tailings flow into the Colorado River every year.
The Atlas Uranium Corporation proposed that a “cap” of rock and clay be used to cover and seal in the tailings. After an extensive regulatory battle over whether the proposed cap would be sufficient to protect the environment, the Corporation declared bankruptcy in 1998. The responsibility for cleaning up the mess at the mine was transferred to the U.S. Department of Energy for remediation in 2001. Following the bankruptcy, there were legal and legislative battles fought by local residents who wanted the tailings relocated to a safer place away from the Colorado River. Work began in 2009 to move the tailings to the Crescent Junction engineered disposal cell, about thirty miles to the north.
As of June, 2013 about six million tons or forty percent of the tailings had been shipped to Crescent Junction. The Obama administration has budgeted about thirty six million dollars for the cleanup operation in the budget for fiscal year 2014. It is estimated that the project will take until the year 2025 to complete. A 2008 estimate of the eventual cost of the project concluded that about three quarters of a billion dollars of taxpayers’ money would have to be spent.
A company in the nuclear industry made money from mining and selling uranium and then declared bankruptcy, walking away from the pile of radioactive mile tailing. The federal government will ultimately be paying nearly three quarters of a billion dollars to clean up the mess left by the company. What I would like to know is whether or not that three quarters of a billion dollars will ever be included in the calculations that we hear about the cost of nuclear power. Another question I have is how much more the U.S. taxpayers will have to pay to clean up the messes left by the nuclear industry.
