Energy secretary reassures Utahns

MOAB, Utah -- Energy Secretary Bill Richardson stood at the edge of a red cliff last week overlooking 150 acres contaminated by radioactive uranium wastes to assure residents that the Cold War remnants would be gone in 10 years.

The uranium mill tailings send into the Colorado River a toxic brew of radioactivity mixed with ammonia, arsenic, lead, selenium, mercury and other metals left from the processing of uranium ore once used in nuclear weapons.

An estimated 28,800 gallons a day of the poisonous liquid leaks into the river, threatening the water of 25 million downstream users including residents and farmers in California, Southern Nevada, Arizona and Mexico.

The Department of Energy has cleared 22 similar tailings piles around the West in the past 16 years, but this is the fifth largest nuclear site experts will tackle, Richardson said Friday, with the snow-capped La Sal Mountains in the background.

It was a project that Richardson said he had to push his staff at the Department of Energy to take on.

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and actor-environmentalist Robert Redford brought the tailings to his attention, Richardson said, because the pile, perched on the edge of the Colorado River, is a blight to visitors of the spectacular Arches and Canyonlands National Parks.

"Bruce Babbitt called me up and said, 'Bill, I've got a gift for you. Ever hear of Moab?' " the secretary said, jokingly describing how he learned about the radioactive tailings.

The DOE staff resisted efforts to shoulder the burden of removing 10.5 million tons of tailings that send a contaminated plume into the Colorado, 750 feet away, Richardson said. They were happy to leave the problem in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's hands.

The NRC had appointed a trustee with $5 million ready to begin capping the tailings with clay. Denver-based Atlas Corp., former owner of the uranium mining operation from 1962 to 1984, declared bankruptcy last year.

But state officials and environmentalists feared a major flood would wash the entire pile into the river. After all, when the river flooded in 1983, the waters lapped at the tailings.

Another capped site in Sutter, Colo., expected to last 1,000 years, began leaking radiation in less than a decade.

"I said, 'Let's find the money to do it,' " the secretary recalled.

So the DOE began to work on the cleanup and negotiations on Utah lands once owned by the Indians so work can begin immediately.

Richardson will need an act of Congress for the project. He will seek $10 million for two years to study the site, decide the best way to do it and hire a contractor. Then it will take an estimated five to seven years for the site cleanup.

Richardson, a master dealmaker who has twice been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, listened to concerned officials from California, Utah and Nevada, Indian tribes and other federal agencies to arrange the deal to settle an old score -- the acres taken from the tribes -- and raise money for the cleanup.

The complex deal involves the largest voluntary return of land in 100 years. The United States is giving 84,000 acres of oil- and gas-rich reserves about 80 miles north of Moab back to the Indians, Richardson said.

Although the Ute tribe received the land under an 1882 treaty, the U.S. needed the reserves in 1916, Richardson said, to fuel Navy ships during World War I. The buried treasure was never used.

"Today, we are doing the right thing, the right thing for the environment, the right thing for the Utes, the right thing for the state of Utah and the right thing for the American people," he said. "We are literally returning this land to the Indians."

The DOE ruled out selling the oil reserve because of cultural importance to the tribe living on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, he added.

O. Roland McCook, Ute tribal business committee chairman, said the government's move restores one of many broken promises made to the tribe. "As a result of the leadership of Secretary Richardson, however, a portion of the promise is now fulfilled," he said.

In return, some royalties from the sale of oil and gas from the reserve will help fund the Moab cleanup, Richardson explained.

Not all Moab residents welcomed the news. They worry about contaminated dust drifting off the site once the DOE begins the cleanup.

Innkeeper Paul Bruyan said he'd rather leave the tailings in place and cap them. "Uranium is all over here and it'll just raise dust," he said.

Native Moab resident Vicki Noorlander, who is part Cherokee, said that the earth would take care of the tailings. "Just like you treat water by filtering it through soil and salts, the earth will take care of uranium, because it came from the earth," she said.

But Richardson said the U.S. government has an obligation to remove the radioactive mess to a site about 30 miles north of Moab to a Bureau of Land Management parcel. "America should be cleaned up by its own government," he said.

And what a mess the DOE faces.

During the 1970s and 1980s Bill Hedden worked at the mill, watching acrid smoke and radon gas blanket the valley.

"We grew used to seeing not-so-old miners pushing their wheelchairs and oxygen tanks through grocery stores," he said. At the time 100,000 gallons of toxic liquid a day was dumped into the river.

"This mill dumped a bucketful of contaminated water into every swimming pool downstream," Hedden, now executive director of Grand Canyon Trust, said. "And Washington, D.C., is decidedly upstream."

Kimberly Schappert, Grand Canyon Council chairwoman, warned those attending the hilltop announcement that Richardson's proposal is the first step in a long process. "It's been a long battle and it's not over yet," she said.

Richardson said the Clinton administration supports the DOE's effort and President Clinton will formally announce the plan to Congress on Feb. 7.

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