Atlas Clean-up (Back to Landscapes Program Index)

	Atlas tailings within Colorado River floodplain, Moab in background, June 2001. © GCT

Positive Outcome Assured

On July 25th, 2005 Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman announced that the preferred alternative in the Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the Moab Uranium Millsite is to load the 12 million tons of radioactive wastes on trains and carry them to a new disposal cell thirty miles away from their present location on the bank of the Colorado River.  It was a day for celebration at the Trust, where we have worked toward this outcome for nearly a decade, but we never could have achieved it without literally thousands of private and institutional partners who commented on the Department of Energy’s plans and, in doing so, changed the agency’s mind.  The passion and creativity of citizens made our democracy work the way it is supposed to, protecting the water supply for the southwest at the same time.  It is a story worth telling because, today, the rights of Americans to participate in the decisions of their government are under broad assault.

One good point of entry to this complex tale is in 1993 when the mill and tailings pile were still owned by Atlas Corporation with oversight by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.  In those days, nobody knew that the tailings were poisoning the groundwater and the river, so the reclamation plan was simply to put a cap over the mess to keep the radon in.  Because the tailings are cramped between the river and two highways, Atlas needed a variance from regulations calling for tailings impoundments to be buttressed by relatively flat, wide side-slopes.  So, in accord with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Nuclear Regulatory Commission asked the public to comment on this deviation from the rules as a mere formality before capping began.

The newly elected Grand County Council wrote comments to the effect that leaving the tailings on the riverbank met none of the major objectives for tailings reclamation, which state that they should be buried below ground at a remote site where they can be isolated for the long haul without any ongoing maintenance.  Marvelously, Senator Orrin Hatch read the comments, agreed, and instructed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to prepare a full Environmental Impact Statement on the reclamation plan.  Chalk one up for public comments.

During the years that followed, the County and Grand Canyon Trust pushed, prodded and sued as a tag team of state and federal scientists uncovered the disastrous truth about what was happening under the pile where poisons were hemorrhaging into the groundwater and bubbling up in the river.  None of this would have been known without public involvement.  Biologists documented the lethal fish-killing zone in the southwest’s most important waterway.  The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service insisted the poisoning be stopped, and Atlas, which never intended to clean the groundwater, filed for bankruptcy.  Responsibility for the site was legislatively transferred to the Department of Energy (DOE) late in the Clinton administration.

The legislation instructed DOE to remove the tailings from proximity to the river and restore the groundwater, but there was a loophole in the law allowing the agency to go back to square one and begin reclamation planning over from the beginning.  With the election of George Bush, DOE detoured through the loophole and began a brand new Environmental Impact Statement.  By the time DOE was ready to release the Draft EIS for public comment, in the fall of 2004, their project managers were telling us in every way possible, without actually saying it, that the word from Washington was that the tailings would be capped in place to save money.  That’s when the public got involved in a big way.

Locally, The Nature Conservancy commissioned studies that revealed the unrecognized fact that uranium and other toxins from the millsite have been crossing under the river to the Moab side where they could taint wells.  The City and County governments launched a critical lobbying campaign, during which they made common cause with community activists from the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.  Living Rivers and the Sierra Club, funded with a DOE grant encouraging public participation, hired a geologist and satellite photo expert who, among many contributions, made it plain that the tailings pile was built in the middle of a giant alluvial fan created by massive Colorado River floods.  He first pointed out that Moab would be filled with radiation if the pile failed during such a flood.  The Sierra Club led the way in suggesting the best possible alternate location for the disposal site.  Added to all this, 1,400 individuals wrote to express their concerns and suggest solutions.    

The Trust participated locally and nationally.  We played a central role at the table with DOE designing the reclamation plan that was eventually adopted.  We also teamed up with the County lobbying, and at our urging the governors of all the states along the river wrote DOE telling them that any plan to leave the tailings threatening the water supply would be unacceptable.  Their attorneys general, departments of natural resources, and divisions of radiation control followed suit. 

Utah, in particular, contracted with the U.S. Geological Survey to do extensive computer modeling of what big river floods would do to the tailings, and the results included the eye opening projection that the water would be 25 feet deep against the pile and moving at 14 feet per second.  The entire river could be expected to “avulse,” or catastrophically jump into a new channel that would bring it barreling down directly into the pile.  The state also showed that, if the correct groundwater cleanup standards were used, capping would be as expensive as moving the wastes to a safe place.  Not surprisingly, given these facts, senators and members of congress, and the big water districts that use the Colorado to provide drinking water for tens of millions of people downstream, once again wrote DOE telling them to move the wastes.  The Environmental Protection Agency joined in with a similar message, as did the Department of the Interior.  In the end, DOE political appointees had little option but to agree with the scientists, politicians and the public: the tailings had to go.  Few dispute that the right decision was made. 

This was not a quick process.  With two complete Environmental Impact Statements, a lawsuit, and federal legislation, it was downright cumbersome.  It would have been much simpler and cheaper to let Atlas activate its plan and cap the wastes ten years ago, leaving everybody completely ignorant about the water contamination and flood danger.  The only problem would be that it was a disastrous error.

Judging by their words and actions, the present congress and administration would prefer all of our environmental decisions to be made without the inconvenience of public input.  This began, famously, when our national energy policy was developed in private meetings between the Vice President and industry representatives, whose identities are still kept secret.  Congress is about to pass an Energy Bill that will exempt most oil and gas drilling projects on federal land from the National Environmental Policy Act.  No more alternatives developed and no more public comment considered. 

In the National Forests, the anti-public-participation coalition used legitimate fears about the state of our fire-suppressed forests to excuse government projects from many forms of environmental and public review.  Open-ended new authorities issued under the Healthy Forests Initiative exempt tree cutting projects from NEPA because the process was deemed too slow in a time of “crisis.”  Logging of remote ancient forests may be among the actions shielded from the indignity of public comment.  Then, still not content, the administration passed new Forest Service regulations in 2004, entirely eliminating consideration of alternatives and environmental effects in the development of new National Forest plans.  Among the casualties was the Reagan-era requirement that the agency retain native species on our forests and grasslands.

Today, Congressman Richard Pombo, who chairs the Resources Committee in the House of Representatives, is holding hearings around the country to gather input about “fixing” and “streamlining” the National Environmental Policy Act.  Predictably, most of those invited to testify represent industries that want decisions made quickly, assuming the decisions favor them.  What they would say to fast, quiet decisions denying their plans is less clear.  That is why NEPA calls for public discourse about a full range of alternatives. It is interesting to note, though, that Mr. Pombo scheduled public hearings as the best way to learn about the issues involved in eliminating the public’s rights to comment.  He should learn from his own instinct.  The Atlas tailings decision was far from unique—the best outcomes tend to arise when the government enlists the knowledge and experience of all the people.

History of the Atlas Issue

The Grand Canyon Trust worked for nearly a decade to secure an adequate clean up of a massive pile of radioactive uranium mill wastes that is contaminating the Colorado River near Moab, Utah.

We were instrumental in getting studies that first revealed the extent of contamination and in blocking early government efforts to literally cover up the problem by simply dumping dirt and rocks over the wastes where they sit in the river’s floodplain. Later, the Trust helped pass legislation transferring responsibility for the site from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has no money for this kind of clean up, to the US Department of Energy, which has already removed every other uranium mill tailings pile from the Colorado and its tributaries. Unfortunately, with today’s tight budgets and anti-environmental leadership, DOE has been resistant to moving these wastes away from the water supply for the entire southwest because that will cost more than covering them in place. To put this in perspective, the Atlas site is twice as large as the largest site DOE has remediated and significantly more polluting to the river than all nine of the piles removed from the Colorado River watershed combined.

The United States' first commercially operated uranium mill was built on the bank of the Colorado River near Moab, Utah by Charlie Steen's Uranium Reduction Company in 1956, and expanded by Atlas Minerals Corporation beginning in 1961. This facility extracted yellowcake uranium for nuclear bombs and reactors from ores trucked from over 300 mines on the Colorado Plateau. The slime-like wastes from the mill, laced with radium, uranium, thorium, polonium, ammonia, molybdenum, selenium and nitrates, were slurried into an unlined pond in the floodplain of the river. As more capacity was needed, contaminated soils were bulldozed up to raise the sides of the tailings impoundment. By 1984, when the mill was put on stand-by, this pile of mill wastes had grown to 12 million tons, covering 130 acres to a depth of 110 feet. 1

The Atlas site is the fifth largest uranium tailings pile in the United States and by far the most dangerously polluting. Located in a deep, narrow valley with the town of Moab, irritating dust and heavier-than-air radon gas often blanketed the community in the days of mill operations, until Atlas was required to spray a synthetic binder over the tailings in the late 1980s. From the unlined bottom of the pile, toxic seepage has turned the groundwater into a radioactive broth of heavy metals and ammonia that bubbles up in the Colorado River just a few hundred feet away. The near shore water in the river is so poisoned with ammonia that it is immediately lethal to any fish unlucky enough to swim there. 2 Today's discharge of contaminated groundwater into the river is estimated at 110,000 gallons/day. 3 In wet years, when the spring flood in the Colorado River exceeds about 45,000 cubic feet/second, the river tops its banks and inundates the base of the tailings pile, leaving it not merely leaking into, but standing in the drinking water for 25 million downstream users in Nevada, Arizona, California and Mexico. This level of flood was observed in 23 different years during the last century, most recently in 1993. 4

Southern California's Metropolitan Water District, which supplies Colorado River water to 16 million customers in 230 cities, measured gradually increasing levels of radioactivity in the river at its Lake Havasu intake. Though these contaminants could not be definitively traced to the large pollution source at Atlas, the Water District strongly supported removal of the mill wastes in order to protect its water source. The Water District cited the following reasons:

• The 13 million tons of Atlas tailings average 1,275 picoCuries/gram of gross alpha radiation (NRC FEIS on Atlas), and the groundwater beneath the site has 26 mg/l uranium, 590 times the NRC maximum level for groundwater at uranium mill sites (0.044 mg/l). Uranium levels in the river increase by 1,660% at the Atlas site. 5
• Uranium is one of the few proven carcinogens considered dangerous at any level.
• Neither MWD nor any other major water district has the water treatment equipment in place to remove uranium; that would require membrane technology, which MWD last estimated would cost them at least $10-15 billion to install, and which would impose far higher M&O costs than what they are using. San Diego, Las Vegas, the Central Arizona Project, and any other area utilizing Colorado River water would incur similar costs.
• There is a credible risk of catastrophic failure of the tailings pile, either from slumping during inundation by high spring flows in the Colorado or from a flood in Moab Wash, which historically flowed directly through the location on which the tailings pile was built.
• The federal government has already spent nearly $2 billion removing nine other tailings piles from the Colorado and its tributaries (in the DOE UMTRA Program), all of which were far smaller and much less polluting than Atlas. The primary motivation was the idea that protecting the Southwest's source water is cheaper and more effective than trying to remove the contaminants from drinking water at the other end. It makes no sense to stop the program without cleaning up the largest and dirtiest of all the tailings piles near the river.

After the mill was shut down, in 1984, Atlas Corporation began negotiating with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about how to clean up the site. Their proposal was to place a soil cover over the pile and shore it up with stone rip-rap to resist erosion. Pollution regulations would be changed at the site to accommodate the ongoing poisoning of the river. 6 This plan fell apart with the 1998 announcement by the US Fish and Wildlife Service that leakage from the pile is jeopardizing four species of endangered fish in the river. To avoid legal consequences, Atlas had to also restore the groundwater to some measure of health. Technologically, that may not be possible without removing the tailings pile, but even the engineers who think it can be done acknowledge that it will be expensive and time consuming: the State of Utah has estimated the cost of groundwater treatment alone at $77 million, and it might easily cost more. Covering and stabilizing the pile against floods will cost at least an additional $25 million, 7 and leakage is expected to continue for hundreds of years. 8 The safer and more sure-fire option of removing the pile is estimated to cost $250-300 million. 9

Faced with such costs, Atlas immediately filed for bankruptcy, reorganizing around a Bolivian gold property, and leaving behind nothing more than a reclamation bond valued at $5.25 million, a few water rights and title to the blighted property. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is purely a regulatory agency with no money or capability to clean up uranium mills, was caught in a bind. Abandoned uranium mills throughout the Southwest had been made the responsibility of the US Department of Energy by a law passed in 1978. 10 Mills active at that time, like Atlas, were supposed to clean up their own messes. The DOE is nearly finished with its remediation program, having stabilized or moved twenty former uranium mills and their tailings piles. Every other one located near a river has been moved to a safer place. Now, Atlas, far larger and more polluting than any of the DOE sites, 11 was suddenly abandoned, but it had legally missed the boat. DOE had neither money nor authority to clean it up. The only sensible solution was special legislation transferring authority from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to the DOE. In the meantime, accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers took over the pathetic Atlas assets and was named reclamation trustee of the site by NRC and the State of Utah. Their responsibility was to try to siphon some of the liquid out of the tailings and generally stabilize the pile pending a legislative solution.

In 1999, a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers overwhelmingly passed authorizing legislation that laid out a strategy for solving the problem. 12 The Atlas site was turned over to the US Department of Energy. The law contains a provision requiring DOE to move the tailings away from the river and restore the groundwater, and another one requiring DOE to consult with the National Academy of Sciences to determine the best reclamation options. Like all authorizing legislation, it did not appropriate any actual money for the work, so in late April of 2001 PricewaterhouseCoopers filed notice of its resignation from the trusteeship on the grounds that there was no further funding available.

In the intervening years DOE has taken control of the Atlas site and begun planning for the eventual reclamation. Actions to control dust and perform triage on the ground and surface water have been hamstrung by insufficient budgets, but systems are now in place to accomplish those tasks. DOE is evaluating a reclamation in place, estimated now to cost $160 million plus groundwater remediation for 80 years, versus four relocation possibilities estimated to cost between $400 million for removal to Klondike Flats and $600 million for a slurry operation to White Mesa.

The National Academies consulted with DOE as required in the legislation, but studiously avoided making a recommendation about what should happen with the tailings. Their report pointed out that the river will eventually sweep the pile away if it is not relocated, and contained a warning that reclamation actions that are cheap and easy in the short run often end up costing more as the decades wear on.

DOE studies have confirmed the size and intensity of the groundwater contamination at the site. However, as the pile continues to seep into the river over the years, the rate is naturally declining with gradual dewatering. This reduction in contamination is offset by new findings from shallow wells showing that, on two occasions in the last thousand years, floods in the river have scoured away the entire ground surface on which the pile sits to a depth of 25 feet. Thus, leaving the wastes in place essentially guarantees that they will eventually wash into the river. Utah Governor Olene Walker responded to this study by writing DOE Secretary Spencer Abraham in May 2004 requesting that he expedite the process of selecting a reclamation alternative that will remove the tailings from the riverbank.

DOE is preparing a new Environmental Impact Study due for completion in late 2004. This draft of this document will not contain a decision on the preferred alternative for reclamation: that will be decided in the Final EIS which will come out after a 90 day public comment period and revisions. Unfortunately, tight budgets are likely to be the deciding factor: something DOE spokespeople have been warning about in their public remarks. So, years later we will be back where we were when the NRC concluded in its EIS that it would be preferable in every respect to move the tailings away from the river, except it will cost more. The question is: how much is the water supply for 26 million downstream users worth?

On April 6, 2005 DOE Secretary Spencer Abraham announced that the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) for the Moab mill site would recommend moving the 12 milllion tons of radioactive waste by train to the Crescent Junction site thirty miles north of Colorado River.  This is the outcome for which the Trust fought for nine years.

The victory was the result of a remarkable outpouring of public comment on the Draft EIS.  Grand Canyon Trust played a key role in convincing the governors of Arizona, California, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah to send a strongly worded letter to DOE stating that the only solution acceptable to them was the removal of the wastes to a safe location.  The congressional coalition we organized also wrote strong letters, as did the major downstream water districts, which lobbied with us in Washington. The State of Utah commissioned a study by the USGS showing that the tailings pile lies directly in the path of large floods in the river, a point recently reinforced in the minds of many by the destructive floods experienced by those living adjacent to the Santa Clara and Virgin Rivers this winter.

The EPA filed official comments to the effect that capping the wastes would be environmentally unacceptable and should be dropped from consideration in the FEIS. The National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service also asked for the wastes to be moved to a safer place. Thousands of individuals and many conservation groups also filed comments. The story received media coverage as far away as India.

Actual work will begin after the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) is finalized and a Record of Decision (ROD) is issued this summer. Completion of the waste removal to the Crescent Junction site is expected to take ten years and cost $320 million dollars. Groundwater treatment will continue for approximately 75 years and cost about $70 million. Atlas Corporation, the former owner, left behind a reclamation bond of $4.5 million dollars, a painful reminder of the chronic underestimation of the full costs of the nuclear fuel cycle.

The Trust will watchdog the decision until completion of the FEIS and will work to assure funding is secured as a line item in the DOE budget.

Footnotes

1. Most recent estimates by PricewaterhouseCoopers' contractor Shepherd-Miller.
2. The Columbia Biological Laboratory of the USGS measured 100% mortality of fish placed in cages in the near shore environment during the winter of 2000. The level of ammonia contamination considered acutely lethal is ~2 mg/l; USGS measured levels of 1,500 mg/l in areas of the river adjacent to the tailings pile.
3. The tailings seepage flows from the unlined bottom of the pile into an aquifer that discharges into the Colorado River a few hundred feet away. Oak Ridge National Laboratory has calculated that, over the life of the pile, leakage from the tailings pile into the aquifer has averaged 57,000 gallons per day. The aquifer, in turn, discharges about 110,000 gallons of tailings tainted water into the river each day. Recently, PricewaterhouseCoopers' contractor Shepherd-Miller has calculated that tailings seepage is about 16,000 gallons per day, which is sufficient to give rise to the ammonia (and other contaminant) concentrations referenced above.
4. Data from the USGS measuring station at Cisco, Utah, upstream from the Atlas site.
5. Utah Department of Environmental Quality report on "Intensive Water Quality Sampling of the Colorado River at the Atlas Uranium Tailings Site, January 1997."
6. If the tailings are left on-site, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has authority to issue "Alternate Concentration Limits," which are site specific exemptions from contamination standards. Atlas planned no groundwater remediation, and counted on getting ACLs for a host of contaminants. As soon as it became clear that they could not count on ACLs for ammonia, the company filed for bankruptcy.
7. Atlas Corporation's last estimate of the cost of in-place capping, probably now outdated.
8. The long term leakage has been modeled and confirmed by both Oak Ridge National Lab and the Center for Nuclear Waste Regulatory Analyses.
9. Preliminary DOE estimate, based on experience moving nine other tailings impoundments.
10. The Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act of 1978 (UMTRCA).
11. At 13 million tons, the Atlas site is about three times as large as the Grand Junction, CO site that was the largest in the DOE program. None of the DOE sites was having a measurable effect on surface water except the Wind River, Wyoming site, where a small side channel of the Little Wind River was contaminated slightly. Atlas is producing a large effect in the mainstem Colorado River.
12. Included in the National Defense Authorization Act for 2001.

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