EPA picks mine cleanup plan
Radioactive wastes at a defunct Cold War uranium mine on the Spokane Indian Reservation will be dumped into open pits and covered, under a clean-up plan selected by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, officials said Tuesday.
Contaminated water from the Midnite Mine near Wellpinit, about 45 miles northwest of Spokane, will be treated at a new water treatment plant before it will be permitted to be discharged into Blue Creek, which flows into the Spokane Arm of Lake Roosevelt, the EPA said.
“After a thorough analysis of options, we believe we’ve arrived at the best solution for a tough problem,” Dan Opalski, director of EPA’s Region 10 Office of Environmental Cleanup in Seattle, said in a statement about the cleanup. “We can’t erase 25 years of mining impacts, but this cleanup will protect the health of the community and the surrounding environment.”
The Midnite Mine is a Superfund cleanup site that operated from 1955-81. The 350-acre area now is a series of open pits filled with mildly radioactive heavy metals and water that can enter nearby streams and harm humans, animals and plants, the EPA has said.
The EPA’s proposal calls for removing mine waste rock from the surface and placing it in two open pits on the site. The pits would be covered with several feet of clean soil. Other pits already filled with mining waste would also be covered, the EPA said.
Native vegetation would be planted over the pits to prevent erosion. Groundwater entering the pits would be pumped to a nearby water treatment plant, where sludge would be removed and disposed of, the EPA plan said.
Spokane tribal officials reacted favorably to the cleanup plan.
“The mine ceased operations in the early 1980s, and the tribe has been waiting since then for significant movement toward remediation,” Shannon Work, the tribe’s special environmental counsel, said in a statement. “The selection of a remedy is a long-awaited big step forward.”
The EPA plan eases some early concerns about reliance on long-term water treatment and the amount of land that will remain unusable by tribal members, tribal officials said.
“We’re happy that we’re nearing a point where the studies will end and the actual cleanup work will begin,” Tribal Councilman Gerald Nicodemus said.
The EPA estimates the cleanup work and annual maintenance will cost about $152 million. The federal regulatory agency has sued owner Dawn Mining Co. and its parent company, Newmont Mining Co., for cleanup costs.
If that fails, the EPA has said, taxpayers will foot the bill.
Dawn Mining General Manager Robert Nelson was out of the office and did not immediately return a call for comment Tuesday.
The Superfund process calls for EPA to conduct a review every five years to verify that the cleanup continues to be effective.
The final cleanup plan begins the design phase, which is expected to take several years to complete before construction begins, the EPA said.
Ores taken from the open pit mine were hauled about 25 miles to a mill near Ford. The mill site also is being cleaned up under the federal Superfund law.