Chris Schneidmiller
WC Monitor
1/22/2016
Eight million tons of uranium mill tailings have been extracted from the Moab site in Utah through the Department of Energy’s Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action Project as of this week.
That is half of the roughly 16 million tons of tailings from the former uranium ore processing site that will ultimately be sent to a disposal site about 30 miles away, close to Crescent Junction, Utah.
The project began in 2009 and is due to be completed in 2025.
“The first train shipment was in April 2009, so in less than [seven] years, we have reached the halfway mark,” Federal Project Director Donald Metzler said in a press release. He noted the boost the project received in the form of funding through the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which moved the project’s anticipated end date up from 2028. “ARRA definitely gave us a boost in shipping, but since then we have continued to make steady progress on safely moving the tailings away from the Colorado River,” Metzler said.
Through fiscal 2015, $454 million had been spent on the project, slightly more than half of the estimated $900 million life-cycle expense, Wendee Ryan, spokeswoman for contractor S&K Moab TAC Team, said by email.
Project workers through December put in 2.5 million hours without any work-related, lost-time injury or sickness under Occupational Safety and Health Administration designations, the release notes. The streak ended on Jan. 4 when a Moab site worker fell on ice and suffered a fractured kneecap, Ryan said. Prior to that, the last such incident occurred in November 2009.
“Because we are a small site within the DOE complex, it takes a long time for us to work even a million hours,” Remedial Action Contractor Project Manager Jeff Biagini said in the release. “To reach 2.5 million hours without a lost-time injury is impressive by any standard.”
