Leaking Nuclear Waste Imperils Colorado River

Perched beside a lazy bend of the Colorado River, between a national park and a wildlife preserve, 10 million tons of uranium mill waste are slowly and steadily leaking contaminants into one of the nation’s most valuable waterways.

If the company that owns it has its way--and it appears likely that it will--this radioactive legacy of the Cold War era of nuclear bomb building won’t go away soon.

The 130-acre mound of nuclear waste, toxic chemicals and heavy metals is the only slag heap of its kind left beside a major waterway. Others like it were moved years ago, officials say.

In a bitterly contested decision, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has concluded that although it would be safer to move the huge slag heap, it would be too expensive to do so. Residents have protested, as have Utah’s Radiation Control, the U.S. Department of Interior, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service.

The nuclear agency is putting final touches on a plan to encase the pile of tailings in a clay and rock “cap” several feet thick and leave it where it is, on a flood plain over a fault zone.

The pile lies at the gateway of one of America’s most popular and ecologically fragile wilderness recreation areas: a labyrinth of high plateaus, gorges and sculpture gardens that wind down the Colorado from Moab south to Lake Mead.

The owner of the mill site, Denver Atlas Corp., concedes that the plan to cap the tailings pile in place won’t entirely stop nuclear waste and other hazardous material from seeping into the river. But the company insists that, after 40 years, there is no indication that the pollution has moved downriver to threaten the water supplies of the millions of people in Southern Utah, Nevada, Arizona and Southern California who get drinking water from the Colorado.

Closer to the pile, however, levels of uranium, radium, ammonia, nitrate, manganese, molybdenum, vanadium, selenium and mercury in the river and adjacent water wells exceed state standards, in some cases by large margins. Some of the same contaminants are showing up in bottom sediments and in fish, causing concern about the vulnerability of the food chain.

In this region, the Colorado is home to eagles, falcons and a variety of other birds and fish, including five endangered species.

“Contaminant concentrations are enormous,” Utah’s Division of Radiation Control concluded in a report to the commission. “Due to these massive concentrations, it appears that simple covering of the tailings pile . . . would render nearby ground water unusable for long periods of time, perhaps even centuries.”

Moreover, federal officials worry that not enough is known about the contents of the pile or its potential for harm.

“The radiological contaminants moving from the pile into the river have been incompletely studied, and some of the radioactive isotopes are of particular concern due to potential human impacts via fish consumption, drinking water and direct contact with the river and its sediments,” the department’s Office of Environmental Policy stated in a written report to the NRC.

The highest concentrations of pollution are found near the tailings pile, at the outlet of a wash that connects the pile to the river. But the contaminants don’t have to move far to do damage.

Fragile Natural Wilderness

Directly across the river is an 875-acre wetland preserve that is home to 160 species of birds. Moab, a growing community of 7,000 people, is less than three miles downstream. Arches National Park is next door. Slightly elevated levels of radioactivity have been showing up in its main water well. Downstream from Arches, along the next 300 miles of river, half a dozen parks, monuments and recreation areas draw close to 20 million visitors a year.

The Atlas property is one of about 50 defunct uranium mills in various stages of reclamation under the supervision of the NRC or the Department of Energy.

The Atlas mill once consisted of a dozen buildings scattered over 200 riverfront acres. In its heyday, the mill could process more than 500 tons of uranium a day. It was used in nuclear weapons research and production, and later, the ore was marketed to civilian reactors.

Opened in 1956, the mill was the dream works of Charlie Steen, a rags-to-riches itinerant geologist, whose uranium discovery turned southeast Utah into a modern-day version of the Klondike. In 1962, Atlas bought 85% of the mill’s stock for nearly $13 million.

The decision to build a uranium mill here was made 40 years ago when Utah’s uranium boom was in full flower and few people knew the dangers of uranium or its byproducts.

When the market for uranium bottomed out 20 years later, the mill suspended operations. It shut down for good in 1988. Under the NRC’s supervision, a slow process of demolition began.

“They buried everything eventually--buildings, chemicals, you name it, that was too ‘hot’ [radioactive] to sell for scrap,” said Joe Holonich, chief of the NRC’s Uranium Recovery Projects Branch.

That process took several years. It wasn’t until 1990, two years after the mill had closed, that Atlas began trying to slow the rate of leaking contaminants by pumping water out of the tailings pile. It was late 1995 before the last of the mill buildings was dismantled.

“A lot of things slowed us down,” said Atlas Vice President Richard Blubaugh, “changes in regulatory requirements, manpower availability. . . . At one point, the NRC diverted all of its staff to New Mexico.”

Critics of the commission’s plan to leave the tailings where they are cite the agency’s own conclusion in a 1996 environmental impact statement that it would be “environmentally preferable” to move the waste to a desert plateau 18 miles from the present site.

“The high financial cost may be the only significant disadvantage of the plateau-site alternative,” the agency conceded in the review. According to the agency, it would cost about $150 million to move the tailings as opposed to about $16 million to cap it in place.

“We are not in a position to carry the burden of the financial relocation,” Blubaugh said this month.

Blubaugh and NRC officials play down the risks of leaving the pile in place.

“The long-term impacts probably would be less if we moved it,” said Holonich. “But the impacts of capping it in place are within the range of environmental acceptability.”

They acknowledge that capping won’t entirely prevent contamination of the river where it runs closest to the pile. But Holonich and Blubaugh argue that the river’s natural flushing action dilutes the contaminants before they can cause a problem downstream.

“We’ve been monitoring the Colorado River for 20 years,” Blubaugh said. “Downstream samples look just as clean as upstream samples. Where we have a problem, by the site itself, levels of contamination are decreasing.”

Officials at Atlas and the NRC also express confidence that, once it is capped, the pile will be able to withstand earthquakes and floods.

“The fear is that something could happen to tear the pile apart, even after it was capped, and that you’d have contaminated material up and down the Colorado River,” said Mike Fliegel, NRC’s senior project manager for the Atlas site. “We have concluded that couldn’t happen. But even if you assume 20% of the pile broke off and washed downriver, it wouldn’t kill or endanger people.”

On the other hand, Fliegel said: “There would be a concern for the environment if some of the stuff settled in secluded coves or backwaters. That would be a hazard to the critters, and you probably would have to have a cleanup.”

Fears of Contamination

That is not a cheery scenario for officials such as Walter Dabney, the superintendent of nearby Arches and Canyonlands national parks. Those parks, along with Grand Canyon National Park and Glen Canyon and Lake Mead national recreation areas, draw millions of people each year. All of those places, except Arches, which is next to the pile, are downstream from the tailings pile.

“These parks are enormously important to the regional economy,” Dabney said. “I’m not confident people would keep coming if a big chunk of that pile broke off and wound up downriver.”

Fear of radioactive waste has been a consideration downriver--although for a different reason.

For more than a decade, the possibility of contaminating the Colorado has held up plans to establish a low-level radioactive waste dump 20 miles from the river in Ward Valley, near Needles.

Some of the nuclear power plant waste destined for the Ward Valley dump, if it is ever built, would be far more toxic than anything coming out of the Atlas pile.

Still, some of the stuff making its way into the river from the Atlas site is lethal to wildlife and, in high doses, hazardous to people, federal officials say.

Over the last year, tests by Utah’s Division of Radiation Control close to the site have found levels of ammonia, a chemical used to process uranium, high enough to kill fish.

“What we don’t know is how prevalent those levels are in the river, whether an actual kill zone has been established,” said Roy Irwin, a contaminant specialist for the National Park Service.

Atlas officials say that the contaminants showing up in the river today leached out of the pile 20 years ago. Once a watertight cap is in place, they maintain, much less moisture will get into the pile, and as the pile dries out, the amount of contaminated moisture leaching into the ground water will drop off significantly.

But others argue that no one knows enough about what is in the tailings pile to predict how it will behave in the future.

“The lack of information on the chemical composition of the pile and contaminated site soils is crucial,” the Interior Department reported last year. “Without knowing what is contained in the tailings material, predictions of impacts to the river or other surrounding environments are impossible.”

Utah officials, meanwhile, have taken the NRC to task for not requiring Atlas to clean up the contamination already in the ground water.

“The fact that NRC has done little to require Atlas to clean up existing contaminated ground water leaves the state with the impression that NRC is not committed to the protection of Utah’s ground and surface water resources,” Division of Radiation officials wrote in a lengthy communique to the NRC.

The NRC has said that it will not require Atlas to clean up the ground water before issuing its final approval of the plan for capping the pile.

Utah officials expect final approval this summer.

“It’s probably a done deal,” said Bill Sinclair, chief of the radiation control division.

“Atlas doesn’t have the money to move the pile. The federal government doesn’t have the money and isn’t willing to go get it.”