Wandering the by-ways of the Internet, this news release caught my eye: More than 12 million tons of radioactive waste will be moved away from the Colorado River, which provides drinking water for more than 25 million people across the West. The Department of Energy said the radioactive tailings about 750 feet from the river near Moab in southeastern Utah will be moved, predominantly by rail, to a proposed holding site at Crescent Junction, Utah, about 30 miles from the Colorado River.

The 94-foot-tall waste pile came from Moab’s rich uranium deposits, which were mined in the 1950s. The Uranium Reduction Co. sold its mill in 1962 to Atlas Corp., which ran it sporadically until declaring bankruptcy in 1998. The Energy Department took over the site in 2001.
At the storage facility in Crescent Junction, the waste would be covered and buried in a hole, lined with a protective layer to keep the material from seeping into the groundwater. Cleanup and moving the pile is estimated to cost more than $300 million.

Critics of moving the waste argued that it has been there for decades with little effect. They contended the area is rich in uranium, leading to natural erosion and leaching of radioactive materials into the water, to which the waste added little.

I once saw this pile on the banks of the Colorado River. It stands squat on a bank that pushes into the path of the river, and my vivid imagination saw other floods I had witnessed bearing down on the sands to mingle them with the rich sediment load of the river. My eldest daughter, a civil engineer in California, once heard that flooding could bring this pile down the river and into the drinking water supplies of Huntington Beach. No amount of engineering/scientific fact argument could convince her otherwise.

And so it was with a kind of memory-relief that I read the decision to move the pile. In a saner, poorer world, this is a crazy decision. Maybe moving will be deferred pending cleanup of New Orleans. But the decision is not without precedent. On the UMTRA project we moved (if I recall correctly) at least ten of the piles to new, suitable sites. A suitable site is one that is geomorphically stable. In the west, with a good geologist who specializes in geomorphology, it is easy to appreciate the sites that have not eroded much in thousands of years and which will probably stay the way they are for thousands more.

The lesson learned for current mine developers: find a geomorphically stable site away from a river—certainly not in a river if you want to be sure of staying out of court—and build for the long haul. Because if you don’t, somebody, someday will have to undertake a long haul.