Year
2010
File Attachment
Abstract
This paper describes identification and resolution of regulatory considerations, construction challenges, development and implementation of the transportation plan and lessons learned from the movement of a small mountain of uranium mill tailings in the United States that lies on the bank of the Colorado River in Moab, Utah. In 1952, the discovery of significant uranium ore deposits on the Colorado Plateau and the subsequent nuclear arms race of the Cold War resulted in approximately 800 mines producing ore, largely used for building the nuclear arsenal for the United States of America. During the uranium mining heyday, the federal government and private industry built a number of ore processing sites on the Colorado Plateau in southwestern United States. The waste from uranium mills consists of sandy and clayey materials and contains the radioactive element radium and other chemicals, such as ammonia, vanadium, and arsenic. The mill tailings pose a potential hazard to public health and safety. By the 1980’s the uranium excitement was over and the mills were shut down. As a result, more than two dozen mill tailings piles remained at the abandoned processing sites. These piles range in volume from approximately 292,000 to 3.1 million cubic meters of mill tailings. The massive Moab pile is up to 28.5 meters (m) high and contained 9.2 million cubic meters of material covering 53 hectares of land located only 230 m from the Colorado River. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has safely remediated all other piles and in 2005 decided on the final cleanup remedy for the Moab site. It was decided to relocate mill tailings and associated wastes to the Crescent Junction, Utah, off-site waste disposal site, a distance of 48 kilometers (km) using primarily rail transportation. The first trainload of uranium mill tailings was shipped from the Moab site to Crescent Junction site for disposal on April 20, 2009. The Moab Project is scheduled to be completed by 2025.