Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
2/21/2014
Unusually cold weather slowed down shipments at the Moab uranium mill tailings remediation project in Utah this winter, the first in which work continued all season since last year’s winter work curtailment. Cleanup contractor Portage last year undertook a three-month outage during the winter due to budget constraints, but a funding boost in FY 2014 allowed work to continue throughout the year. Winter work, though, has presented some challenges. “We probably weren’t as ready as we should have been or could have been,” Don Metzler, the Department of Energy’s federal project director for Moab, told WC Monitor last week. “It’s not that we didn’t do our homework. It’s that we didn’t do it last winter, so maybe what we knew from a few years ago going back three or four years, maybe there was a little bit of dust on the cover and we needed to really dig a little bit deeper in trying to be fully prepared.”
The project involves the removal by train of a total of approximately 16 million tons of uranium mill tailings from a former uranium-ore processing facility near Moab, Utah, on the west bank of the Colorado River to a disposal site approximately 30 miles away. But during spells of cold weather this year the site did not always ship a full train of 136 containers of tailings, slowing down the schedule. “We just made the decision, look it doesn’t have to be a full train. Safety comes first in consideration of the workers,” Metzler said. “We did use some overtime to try to approach loading a full train and then we just thought that there are just diminishing returns on that for a lot of reasons from a safety culture perspective.” He said that Moab is about 18,000 tons behind its previous schedule because of the cold weather.
But Metzler said that he hopes that the work at Moab will catch up to its schedule later this year. “Honestly since the very first day we started it on April 20 of ‘09, I don’t know if we’ve ever been behind our performance schedule,” he said. “This is something that’s a little new to us, but it doesn’t really bother us because we think our highest priority is safety and worker consideration. We think we made the right decision, but we now believe that with the remainder of the fiscal year we are going to look hard for opportunities to catch that schedule back up.” The site has many years to catch up—The work is currently not scheduled to be completed until 2025.
‘Winter Hit With Such Vengeance’
The severe cold presented a challenge in several aspects, including gelling of diesel fuel and heavy snowfall that covered the containers of mill tailings. “We chose to use water with our water trucks to knock all that snow off with a water cannon. But because it continued to be so cold for the next week, that made the conditions even worse by freezing everything up,” Metzler said. “It just looked like they came down from the North Pole. Icicles everywhere on them. Tailgates freezing with the gaskets and the way the tailgates seal, that was frozen in there. The tailings were freezing to our permanent liners within the containers so they weren’t dumping the way that they should.”
The sudden advent of the cold was also a factor. “Winter hit with such vengeance. Through most of November it was nice and mild, skies were clear, the temperatures even though they were obviously getting colder, it was in a very gradual fashion,” Metzler said. “And then it was kaboom, like a step function, it just hit so hard and so quick it caught us a little bit off guard even though we had convinced ourselves that we were truly ready for winter.”
Budget Uncertainties Lead to Mini Curtailment
Apart from the cold-weather impact, budget uncertainties led Moab to do a brief work curtailment of eight days between the Thanksgiving and New Years holidays, much shorter than last year’s three-month curtailment. “The eight days was established both for our RAC [Remedial Action Contractor] and our TAC [Technical Assistance Contractor]. … We would not excavate, transport or dispose of the tailings on those given eight days,” Metzler said. He added, “What drove the logic was just being cautious, trying to be prudent. Being conservative and knowing that we didn’t know quite what was going to happen after the holidays when we came back because we were still in a CR at that point. It was using a common-sense approach that was highlighted with caution.”
Metzler Praises Portage
Matzler praised the work so far of Portage, which took over at the site in the spring of 2012. Portage earned 96 percent of its available award fee in Fiscal Year 2013, excavated 751,428 tons over that period and earned compliments on several fronts. “They’ve done a good job. They’ve kept the project safe, they’ve shipped more tailings than what we had planned on last year. When we came out of that curtailment, they started earlier than planned and yet it was a safe, deliberate startup. I attribute a lot of it to that we just have a very dedicated workforce, and one that pays attention to our safety culture tenants,” Metzler said.
