NEPA Success Stories

If there is one example that clearly illustrates the value of subjecting agency decision-making to public scrutiny, it is the clean up of the Atlas mill tailings on the banks of the Colorado River.

The United States’ first commercially operated uranium mill was built on the bank of the Colorado River near Moab, Utah by Charlie Steen’s Uranium Reduction Company in 1956, and expanded by Atlas Minerals Corporation beginning in 1961. This facility extracted yellowcake uranium for nuclear bombs and reactors from ores trucked from over 300 mines on the Colorado Plateau. The slime-like wastes from the mill, laced with radium, uranium, thorium, polonium, ammonia, molybdenum, selenium and nitrates, were slurried into an unlined pond in the floodplain of the river. As more capacity was needed, contaminated soils were bulldozed up to raise the sides of the tailings impoundment. By 1984, when the mill was put on stand-by, this pile of mill wastes had grown to 12 million tons, covering 130 acres to a depth of 110 feet.

The Atlas site is the fifth largest uranium tailings pile in the United States and by far the most dangerously polluting. Located in a deep, narrow valley with the town of Moab, irritating dust and heavier-than-air radon gas often blanketed the community in the days of mill operations, until Atlas was required to spray a synthetic binder over the tailings in the late 1980s. From the unlined bottom of the pile, toxic seepage has turned the groundwater into a radioactive broth of heavy metals and ammonia that bubbles up in the Colorado River just a few hundred feet away. The near shore water in the river is so poisoned with ammonia that it is immediately lethal to any fish unlucky enough to swim there. Today’s discharge of contaminated groundwater into the river is estimated at 110,000 gallons/day. In wet years, when the spring flood in the Colorado River exceeds about 45,000 cubic feet/second, the river tops its banks and inundates the base of the tailings pile, leaving it not merely leaking into, but standing in the drinking water for 25 million downstream users in Nevada, Arizona, California and Mexico. This level of flood has been observed in 23 different years during the last century.

On April 6, 2005 DOE Secretary Spencer Abraham announced that the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) for the Moab mill site will recommend moving the 12 million tons of radioactive waste by train to the Crescent Junction site thirty miles north of Colorado River.  This is the outcome for which Grand Canyon Trust had been fighting for a decade.

The Atlas victory was the result of a remarkable outpouring of public comment during the Draft EIS stage of the NEPA process.  This public involvement included comments from a bipartisan coalition of western Governors from Arizona, California, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah, who sent a strongly worded letter to DOE stating that the only solution acceptable to them was the removal of the wastes to a safe location. A bipartisan western congressional coalition, which included members of the House     Resources Committee, also participated in the NEPA process by submitting similarly strong letters, as did several major downstream water districts.  The State of Utah commissioned a study by the USGS showing that the tailings pile lies directly in the path of large floods in the river, a point recently reinforced in the minds of many by the destructive floods experienced by those living adjacent to the Santa Clara and Virgin Rivers this winter. The EPA filed comments to the effect that capping the wastes would be environmentally unacceptable and should be dropped from consideration in the FEIS. The National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service also participated in the NEPA process, asking for the wastes to be moved to a safer place. Thousands of individuals and many conservation groups also took advantage of public participation requirements of NEPA to file comments.

Actual work will begin after the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) is finalized and a Record of Decision (ROD) is issued this summer.

Completion of the waste removal to the Crescent Junction site is expected to take ten years and cost $320 million dollars. Groundwater treatment will continue for approximately 75 years and cost about $70 million. Atlas Corporation, the former owner, left behind a reclamation bond of $4.5 million dollars, a painful reminder of the chronic underestimation of the full costs of the nuclear fuel cycle.

Public input required by NEPA is helping the BLM correct a flawed environmental analysis (EA) for a proposed seismic survey on BLM, Forest Service, and private land near Clark, Wyoming.  The proposal submitted by Windsor Wyoming Inc. calls for drilling 74 shot holes per square miles on 47 square miles north and south of the Clark River, Wyoming’s only designated Wild and Scenic river. Explosive charges would be fired into the holes to gain 3-D picture of the resources available in the area.  After reviewing the draft analysis, private property owners and other local citizens groups noted that the initial EA failed to consider how these explosions would affect scarce water resources, game species, hunting opportunities, Native American historical sites, private property value, and crucial winter wildlife habitat.

The BLM readily admits that public input led them to reexamine the EA and consider the use of a new survey technology which would mitigate the damaging effects of the explosive charges. “The BLM plans to take a second, considerably longer, look at wildlife, habitat and traffic issues, as well as testing alternatives like “passive seismic.” Agency officials readily admit it was public involvement that brought those issues to the forefront.” Cody Enterprise editorial (July 13, 2005).  Through the public input process required by NEPA, private property owners, land managers, and industry are working towards a survey which will be appropriate for the area.

In 1989, the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forests (GMUG) in western Colorado released a draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) that would have authorized clearcutting every aspen grove on the forests to supply a waferboard plant operated by Louisiana Pacific Corporation.  The DEIS was met by public outrage, because scenery, wildlife habitat and water quality on the GMUG are essential to the region’s quality of life and tourism-recreation economy.  Faced with record-setting numbers of letters from private citizens, businesses and local officials, the Forest Service substantially scaled back the clearcutting proposal in the final EIS.

Forest Service rangers and scientists acknowledged that the initial proposal was more than the land could bear, but that they had felt pressured to “get the cut out.”

Absent the NEPA public review process, hundreds of thousands of acres of the most majestic landscapes in the Rockies would have been sold to a company with a history of air quality violations and poor corporate citizenship.

The process worked by scaling back the authorized cut to sustainable levels that would not sacrifice other uses and natural values.

The Presidential order designating Canyon of the Ancients National Monument grandfathered valid existing rights, including oil and gas leases.  However, the designation also provided that new leases would not be issued after current leases expired.  For the most part, Monument lands do not overlay productive oil or gas fields and past exploration has had mixed results.  Of course, the Monument does encompass one of the highest density, highest quality incidence of cultural resource sites in the southwest – and the entire nation – as well as other outstanding natural values.

On the eve of termination of the ten year base term of several federal oil and gas leases, lessees proposed a seismic exploration project.  The original Environmental Assessment approved by BLM was based on inadequate cultural resource surveys, and would have allowed exploration to skirt the edges of several outstanding sites, including standing “towers” and other structures as well as collections of artifacts.  This opened the Monument to both direct adverse effects, as well as future indirect damage when pothunters or casual vandals followed the exploration project tracks to discover these ancient treasures.

A coalition of groups led by San Juan Citizens Alliance filed suit in federal district court to check the project as initially approved.  The court immediately granted an emergency injunction because of sensitive nature of the threatened resources in the Monument.  Negotiations between all stakeholders – the conservation groups, BLM and lessees – resulted in a compromise exploration project that allowed lessees to obtain the desired seismic information while avoiding the most significant cultural features and endangered species habitat.

All in all, it was a win-win situation that balanced energy exploration with cultural resource protection and sustained yield, multiple use management of the public domain.  The balanced plan would not have been possible had this project been exempted from NEPA.  This success story protected vital components of America’s cultural heritage for future generations and scientific study without sacrificing the potential to develop minerals.