The Energy Department’s Moab Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action (UMTRA) Project in Utah recently marked 10 years of uranium mill tailings shipments to off-site disposal.
On April 20, 2009, the first load of mill tailings left the Moab site by rail. Today, more than 9.5 million tons of the estimated 16 million tons of tailings have been shipped 32 miles to the project’s Crescent Junction disposal cell, DOE said in an April 22 news release.
In February, the project increased weekly tailings shipments from two to four. In March, more than 73,000 tons of tailings were transported to Crescent Junction, according to the UMTRA website.
The tailings cleanup site sits on a larger 400-acre tract, the former location of an Atlas Minerals Corp. uranium-ore processing facility that operated from the 1950s to the 1980s. Milling is the first step in making natural uranium ore into nuclear fuel; mill tailings are a waste stream containing heavy metals and radium.
Idaho-based North Wind, through its January 2017 acquisition of Portage, is the cleanup contractor at Moab UMTRA through 2021. In April 2016, Portage received a five-year, $153.8 million follow-on task order to its initial five-year contract.
The contractor and DOE are monitoring the potential for flooding this spring at the UMTRA site. Due to winter snowpack levels, the Colorado River’s flow volume is expected to be 120% of average, which heightens the risk of flooding in the area due to runoff, according to the website.
Tailings disposal is conducted four days a week, with maintenance and security staff on-site continuously.
