Uranium Mill Cleanup Plan Supported By Most Neighbors

Fanning themselves with neatly printed “Ford Plan Fan” hand fans, Ford residents Wednesday supported a plan to clean up the Dawn uranium mill here by importing waste from other uranium mills.

Other than state officials and Dawn representatives, most of the 60 people who filled the Ford fire hall for Wednesday’s public hearing were from this rural Stevens County community.

They said they don’t trust Dawn or the state Health Department, and that’s why five local residents spent eight years negotiating a deal that gives the community power to inspect and veto any proposed waste shipment.

Uranium mill tailings - uranium ore with most of the uranium removed - would be placed in a 28-acre plastic-lined pit that was built to hold the same kind of waste from the Dawn mill. Income from the imported waste would pay for sealing three old, unlined tailings piles and cleaning up groundwater contaminated by those piles.

After the plastic-lined pit is filled, it also would be capped with clay to keep water from seeping through the slightly radioactive tailings.

Residents said they think the plan is the best way to get the site cleaned up quickly. Dawn is nearly bankrupt and a lawsuit to force its parent company, Newmont Mining, to pay could take years and end in defeat.

“This is not a nuke dump,” area resident Ruth Vetsch said, urging people to gather their own information and ignore the “scare tactics” of critics who persist in saying the plan would create a nuclear waste dump.

Uranium mill tailings are much less radioactive than low-level nuclear waste. State Health Department officials say that, over five years, the plan would expose area residents to less than half the radiation in a chest X-ray.

“I find it incomprehensible that people from outside the area would come in at the last minute to try to shoot the plan down,” Ford resident Sandie Bowers said. She said she knows the five residents who have represented the community, “and I know they won’t do something that would hurt me.”

One of the five, Ann Keim, took exception to charges by environmentalists that the local representatives succumbed to pressure by Dawn.

“We live here and it’s our problem,” Keim said. “It’s our health and our children’s future.”

Only two people spoke against the plan: Seattle resident Greg Wingard, representing the Dawn Watch coalition of environmental organizations, and Springdale resident Owen Berio, representing the Spokane Sierra Club. Both said they planned to reserve most of their comments for a second hearing tonight at 7 in the Spokane County Health District Building, W1101 College.

Even so, Wingard spoke for 15 minutes and was the only person who had to be cut off by administrative law Judge Margaret Gilbert of the Health Department.

Wingard said the state Health Department’s worst-case analysis of a shipping accident was “more like what the coyote and the road runner would run into.” While considering improbable situations, the department failed to consider what would happen if tailings spilled into a body of water, he said.

Lincoln County commissioners Deral Boleneus and Robert Wyborney, Stevens County Commissioner Fran Bessermin and state Transportation Department planner Leonard Cash said they also are concerned that 36 daily truck shipments would affect road conditions and traffic safety. They asked the plan set aside money to cover potential problems.