Brian Bradley
WC Monitor
11/6/2015
The Energy Department said Thursday it aims to have cleanup at the Moab uranium mill tailings site halfway done by early 2016. The site was a uranium ore processing facility on the west bank of the Colorado River. "In early 2016, the U.S. Department of Energy plans to reach 8 million tons of uranium mill tailings shipped from the Moab site in Utah and disposed in the Crescent Junction disposal cell” roughly 30 miles away, DOE spokeswoman Paivi Nettamo said. “This is half of the total estimated 16 million tons in the tailings pile."
Work at the Moab site is being performed by Portage under a five-year contract awarded in late 2011. Prior to Portage taking over responsibility for the work, EnergySolutions held the contract. Along with the removal of the tailings, work has begun to segregate and size debris from the former ore mill buildings that were buried in the southern corner of the tailings pile, according to DOE. Portage expects completion in about 2025, as 49 percent of tailings have been moved and four trains per workweek are transporting the tailings out of the site, according to project slides posted on GrandCountyUtah.net.
