DOE to move radioactive pile

SALT LAKE CITY – Ending decades of speculation and concern, the Department of Energy announced Wednesday it intends to relocate a 12 million ton pile of radioactive waste in southeastern Utah, where it sits 750 feet from the Colorado River, the water source for 25 million people.

The radioactive tailings pile near Moab is the only decommissioned uranium mill overseen by the Energy Department that hasn’t yet been cleaned up. The DOE has been in charge of it since 2001, and in November it released a report detailing four options for the waste – three of them moving it by truck, rail or pipeline to a final disposal site, the fourth leaving the waste in place and covering it with rocks.

That option would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars less than transporting it but has riled environmentalists, Western officials and Utah’s congressional delegation. They say groundwater contamination is already killing fish, and a flood in the Red Rock desert could wash the tailings into the river and expose cities throughout the Southwest to dangerous chemicals such as ammonia, residual uranium and radon.

“I certainly hoped for this decision,” said U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah.

“Moving the pile has always been, in my opinion, the right thing to do. Short-term cost considerations, I feared, were driving us to look at keeping the pile in place.”

If the waste had been swept into the river, the water could theoretically be treated, but that would be much more costly than moving the waste in the first place.

“I don’t know we even have the treatment facilities in place,” Bannister said.

The DOE said in a prepared statement that its final environmental impact statement for the site would recommend moving the tailings about 30 miles north to a site near Crescent Junction, in eastern Utah along Interstate 70.

The decision is not entirely final until the impact statement is published, probably early this summer, said Don Metzler, who manages the site from the department’s Grand Junction, Colo., office.

At the site, the waste will be buried in a hole that has been dug out and filled with a protective layer to keep it seeping into the groundwater.

It then will be covered with an additional layer of material. Depending on how the waste gets there – by rail, truck or pipeline – cleanup will cost an estimated $407 million to $472 million.