This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2008, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Posted: 1:01 PM- Cleaning up an immense pile of radioactive waste that flanks the Colorado River near Moab just got a new deadline.
Under a provision Congressman Jim Matheson pushed into the defense spending bill enacted this past week, the U.S. Department of Energy must finish the entire project by 2019.
Trucking radioactive tailings and contaminated soil from the 435-acre former Atlas Uranium Mill site 30 miles to Crescent Junction is expected to take five years. And that means the DOE has to get to work, said Matheson spokeswoman Alyson Heyrend.
"That's what the law is now," she said.
But the Energy Department appears confused about what it is doing to bring water to Crescent Junction for construction and maintenance of the new dump site.
A proposal crafted by Salt Lake City waste-disposal company EnergySolutions, chosen in 2006 to do the project, says the water would be conveyed 21 miles through a 6-inch pipeline from the Green River to Crescent Junction.
Grand County officials and a Green River rancher stepped up with requests to piggyback on the water delivery. Grand County suggested DOE build an 8-inch line so the county might someday be able to develop the land near the waste site.
Rancher Tim Vetere, with the support of the State Institutional Trust Lands Administration and unnamed financial backers, proposed to build a 10-inch line that Vetere might use to irrigate alfalfa fields and SITLA might employ to service industrial development.
Matheson opposed any changes in DOE plans because of the potential to delay the project, which Heyrend said already has dragged on too long.
Cincinnati, Ohio-based DOE spokesman Bill Taylor twice confirmed to The Salt Lake Tribune that Vetere's proposal was under consideration. But at the same time Taylor was speaking to the Tribune, Heyrend left a phone message saying Don Metzler, who is managing the tailings removal project from his office in Grand Junction, Colo., emphatically told her that no such project is under evaluation.
The Atlas mill processed uranium during the Cold War. The company shut down the mill in 1984 and went bankrupt in 1998. The tailings have posed a threat to the Colorado River, the primary potable and agricultural water used by more than 30 million people downstream.
In 2000, the federal government assumed ownership. Four years later, the Energy Department agreed to remove the tailings; in 2006, the agency hired EnergySolutions as the project contractor.
EnergySolutions spokesman Mark Walker said the company would evaluate any proposal the DOE brings to them, but didn't know about the Vetere-SITLA idea.
"We obviously do not want to delay the progress of this project," Walker said. "We're hopeful they make this decision quickly."