nuclear-news

Vast area of uranium waste in Nevada

the towering waste piles, open pit lake and old leach ponds spread across an area the size of 3,000 football fields.

Polluted mine is back on feds’ list | Reno Gazette-Journal | rgj.com Scott Sonner, Associated Press  28 March 11, YERINGTON — Federal regulators who have spent a decade assessing the uranium and other toxic wastes seeping into the water table at an old Anaconda copper mine in Northern Nevada have concluded that the pollution can’t be cleaned up without adding the vast, abandoned site to the U.S. Superfund’s National Priorities List. Environmental Protection Agency officials say the designation would trigger funds to cover most of the $40 million it is expected to cost to begin removing contaminants from the most polluted part of the World War II-era mine. The site covers five square miles next to the rural town of Yerington, about 65 miles southeast of Reno….
EPA officials said that unless the mine is designated a Superfund site, none of the other alternatives being examined will qualify for the millions of dollars needed for the first critical stage in the most radioactive part of the mine…..

EPA has been assessing and working with the state and others since the 1990s to try to contain the towering waste piles, open pit lake and old leach ponds spread across an area the size of 3,000 football fields.

Cost projections vary widely but soar into the hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up all the hazardous waste site-wide, including the uranium, arsenic and other hazardous metals that have been leaking into neighbors’ wells.

More than 100 residents filed a $5 million class-action suit in federal court in Reno in January accusing Atlantic Richfield and BP of intentionally and negligently concealing the extent of the contamination for decades. They say their wells have been polluted by the toxic plume of groundwater slowly migrating off the site partially owned by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

Tribal action

Neighboring Native American tribes have long advocated Superfund listing and say they are considering legal action based on claims the U.S. government has an obligation to clean up their reservation lands regardless of the state’s position.
Polluted mine is back on feds’ list | Reno Gazette-Journal | rgj.com

March 29, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uranium, USA, wastes