Contractor North Wind Portage has now removed 14 million tons of uranium mill tailings from the Moab, Utah site near the Colorado River, the Department of Energy announced this week.
Removing 14 million of the 16 million tons of tailings from the Moab Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action Project is a big step toward remediation of the old site, DOE said in an Oct. 31 announcement.
The tailings removal is now about 88% complete. The tailings are shipped out of Moab by rail about 30 miles to an engineered disposal facility in Crescent Junction, Utah.
Several interest groups this week asked key congressional committees to order the Environmental Protection Agency to rewrite its generic standards for radioactive waste repositories.
Even though Congress and three successive presidents have opted not to permanently store waste in the congressionally approved Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada, it could still take five years or so for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to rewrite its standards, the groups said.
Meanwhile, the EPA has said it would not rewrite the standard without explicit direction from Congress. The American Nuclear Society, Energy Communities Alliance and United States Nuclear Industry Council were among those signing onto the letter.
The Department of Energy started site preparation this summer for expansion of a low-level radioactive waste landfill at the Idaho National Laboratory and the prep work should continue into July 2024, an agency official told an advisory panel last week.
Construction of the third cell for the landfill should be done around September 2025 with operation anticipated in December 2025, Doug Pruitt, DOE’s assistant manager, for environment and waste programs, told the cleanup project’s Citizens Advisory Board on Oct. 25.
A formal groundbreaking for the project occurred in September. The expansion project for Idaho’s Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act Disposal Facility should prolong its operational life by 25 years, to 2050, Pruitt said. DOE officials have said the current 390,000-cubic-meter capacity is about 80% filled. A link to Pruitt’s presentation and other materials from the advisory board meeting can be found here.
The Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site Specific Advisory Board in Ohio now has an up-to-date youtube page where videos of the panel’s meetings are carried.
During the Thursday Nov. 2 meeting, the citizens advisory board heard public comment from a half-dozen residents who live near the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant and expressed concern over cancer risk and radiological contamination from the nuclear cleanup facility. A DOE briefing on an annual environmental report was also presented.
A link to a video of Thursday’s meeting is available here.
Gary Petersen, retired vice president of the Tri-City Economic Development Council in Washington state and a former manager at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, died Oct. 27 at age 83, according to published reports.
The Tri-City Herald newspaper reported Monday that over a long career Petersen was a vocal advocate of nuclear cleanup at DOE’s Hanford Site as well as economic development around the Tri-Cities. Petersen was among Washington state residents who sued the Barack Obama administration over its decision to cancel plans for the Yucca Mountain high-level waste repository in Nevada.
Petersen retired from the regional economic development post in 2017 and was succeeded by David Reeploeg. In a 2016 interview with the Hanford History Project, Petersen said he worked at Hanford for Battelle and then the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.