Members of the public have a few extra months to provide comments on cleanup at the site of one of the country’s worst radioactive accidents, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced this week.
The comment period for a proposed license amendment allowing the United Nuclear Corporation (UNC) to move radioactive mine waste from the defunct Church Rock uranium mine in northwestern New Mexico has been moved up to October 31, NRC said in a Federal Register notice published Wednesday. The initial deadline for public comment was May 27.
If the proposed license change is authorized, UNC would transfer the radioactive material from the Church Rock mine to a uranium mill tailings disposal site less than a mile away. The project is part of the site’s larger cleanup — in 1974 a dam breach at the mine caused 94 million gallons of radioactive slurry to flow into the Puerco River. The level of radioactivity released into the environment at Church Rock were, according to one calculation, greater than the partial core meltdown that occurred at Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station the same year.
A prominent opponent of UNC’s proposed license amendment is the Navajo Nation, which shares a border with the Church Rock site. Tribe president Jonathan Nez penned a letter to NRC in April expressing concern that the uranium waste wouldn’t be moved far enough away from Navajo communities in the area — the closest of which is about a tenth of a mile from the mill tailings site.
