Deal to clean up uranium pile OK'd

An agreement signed Friday brings the cleanup of a 10.5 million ton uranium pile on the banks of the Colorado River in Utah a step closer for 25 million people downstream in Nevada, Arizona and California.

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson flew to La Verne, Calif., from Las Vegas on Friday to get the final signatures on the pact to remove a 150-acre pile of tailings from a former uranium mine that is contaminating the river with toxins and radiation.

The agreement between the Department of Energy, the states of Utah and California and the Ute tribe of Utah returns 84,000 acres containing oil and gas reserves taken from the Indian tribe in World War I. The Utes agreed to help pay for the cleanup with some of the royalties from the sale of the fuel.

The federal government will pay more than half of the $300 million cost to remove the pile from the site near Moab, Utah, because 56 percent of the uranium was used to build nuclear weapons. It could take 10 years to clean up the pile. The agreement still needs congressional approval.

"Millions of Americans depend on the Colorado River for their water," Richardson said, noting that "this regional problem represents a national responsibility."

The Weymouth filtration plant, 25 miles east of Los Angeles, was chosen for the signing ceremony, because the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California pushed the federal government for a solution after finding a slight rise in radiation levels from water samples taken from Lake Mead and its own intake more than 150 miles downstream.

The 40-foot-high pile is the remains of a mine that operated from 1956 to 1984. After the Denver-based Atlas Corp. went bankrupt in 1998, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission decided to leave the tailings where they are, but cap them to keep them from leaking into the river. The DOE took charge of the site and the cleanup last year.

More than 57,600 gallons of tainted water leak each year from the pile, releasing high levels of uranium, ammonia, nitrates, selenium, arsenic, lead and other pollutants, government researchers found.

The contamination, particularly the ammonia, threatened four species of endangered fish, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said.

Public health officials said there was no immediate threat to those drinking the Colorado's water downstream. However, water experts feared that a flash flood could destroy a cap put over the tailings, and that the threat of the tailings entering the river posed enough danger to remove the pile.

After the agreement is approved, the tailings will be removed to a plateau owned by the Bureau of Land Management 18 miles from the riverbank.

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