Utah Issues
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Shipments of wastes to a new disposal site at Crescent Junction commenced in April 2009.
Relocation is estimated to take 20 years and cost upwards of $1 billion.
The Grand Canyon Trust played an integral role in removing the Atlas Mill’s toxic legacy.
The Grand Canyon Trust worked for nearly a decade to ensure the adequate cleanup of a massive pile of radioactive wastes from an abandoned uranium mill that is contaminating the Colorado River near Moab, Utah. We were instrumental in...
- Promoting the studies that first revealed the extent of contamination.
- 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.
- Passing legislation to transfer responsibility from the NRC — which has no money for this kind of cleanup — to the U.S. Department of Energy, which has already removed every other uranium tailings pile from the Colorado and its tributaries. Unfortunately, DOE resisted moving these wastes because it will cost more than covering them in place.
On July 25, 2005, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman announced that the preferred alternative in the Final EIS for the Moab uranium mill site was to load the 12 million tons of radioactive wastes on trains and carry them to a new disposal cell 30 miles away from their location on the bank of the Colorado River.
It was a day for celebration at the Trust, but we never could have achieved it without literally thousands of private and institutional partners who commented on DOE’s plans and changed the agency’s mind. 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.
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