(The following story by Judy Fahys appeared on The Salt Lake Tribune website on June 6.)
MOAB, Utah — A show of hands at the community center here confirmed Bette Stanton’s view: The best way to haul the massive Atlas Corp. uranium tailings pile out of town is not by truck but by rail.
“There’s something about contaminated trucks on the highway that scares people,” said Stanton, who has spent about 30 years in the redrock tourist town, which was a hot spot for a uranium boom about 50 years ago.
But trains vs. trucks was just one of the questions the U.S. Energy Department asked local residents to ponder Thursday night.
The federal agency overseeing the $300 million cleanup is trying to decide what will be the most cost-effective and safest way to deal with the 16-million-ton pile.
Don Metzler, who oversees the project for the Energy Department, also hinted that cleaning up the old uranium mill site by 2019, as Congress has mandated, might get the job done a decade faster than the 2028 deadline contemplated by the Energy Department, but it might cost double the $30 million annual cost for the work.
A final report on the cost of meeting a 2019 deadline, instead of the 2028 deadline, is due by June 26.
Metzler spoke to about 60 people at the two-hour meeting.
The 130-acre mound of uranium-processing waste, called tailings, leaches ammonia, uranium and other contaminants into the Colorado River, which serves more than 30 million people downstream.
The pile is just north of Moab in eastern Utah, on U.S. Highway 191, within a mile of the Arches National Park entrance. Much of the 30-mile route to a new tailings disposal cell at Crescent Junction is two-lane highway that tourists use to travel from Interstate 70.
It could cost as much as $100 million to improve the roadway for trucks hauling the tailings to Crescent Junction, Metzler said. It would take 139 trips a day, and an accident with one of the contaminated trucks could potentially shut down the cleanup for months, even if it is not the cleanup project’s fault, he said.
If rail is used, there would be a shipment a day, with 178 railcars carrying 68 containers for the first three years.
The number of cars would double in 2012 to ship 136 containers a day, he said.
The tailings would be dried, packed into hard-topped containers and delivered to the mesa-top north of the Potash Road. There, they would be picked up at an old rail spur.
Discussions are expected to wrap up with Union Pacific and with the state Department of Transportation over the cost and safety issues, Metzler indicated.
A final decision is expected this summer.