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Show 8 - ACTIVE TIMES - OCTOBER 15I 1995 ATLAS AND ROUND MOUNTAIN (The following Atlas Tailings/Round Mtn. information is from the informal talk given by CVRR property owner, Bill Hedden, at the Annual POA meeting. Bill represents CV on the Grand County equal levels of detail. They went into great detail about covering the pile in So (Atlas)»came to the State Land Board which owns sections around place, which is what Atlas would like Round Mountain, and they asked to get to do, and they compared moving it to several places. The actual language in the report about moving it to all the different places said. “It’s too far away. a lease to mine building stone. The reason that they chose to mine building stone is bemuse that lease doesn’t It would cost a lot of gas and irreplaceable fossil fuels to move it. require a public hearing. If they had asked for a lease to get borrow material from there, which would have been the appropriate lease, they would have had Council and has been actively working on the Atlas Tailings/Round Mtn. problem for several years. We appreciate Bill’s People would get killed on the highway and it would cost a whole lot of money willingness to allow us to use this material.) , so we shouldn’t move it.’ That’s the lease to get building rock from Round total analysis that’s ever been done about moving the pile. Mountain. If the pile reclamation is approved in place they will come up here and start mining Round Mountain in order to get big chunks of rock and start “You probably all know about the Atlas Tailings Pile. There’s a tremendous amount of knowledge about the details of that. I don’t really want to go into it a whole lot, except to give you a little background so that you understand how Castle Valley gets mixed up in the reclamation plans for Atlas. There’s 11,000,000 tons of tailings sitting there beside the (Colorado) river. No one really knows exactly what’s in there because Atlas ran various different circuits in there. They ran vanadium circuits and copper circuits as well as the uranium processing circuits. So there’s a host of different reagents and a lot of different types of ore. What we do know is that it is sitting unlined in the flood plain of the river. As the river rises and falls with the seasons, it pumps the bottom of the pile. The ground water under there is a mess. It’s hundreds to thousands of times above the EPA standards for a whole host of different kinds of pollutants, like chromium, molybdenum, selenium, arsenic, as well as thorium, plutonium, uranium and a number of other radioactive species. ' The cleanup of this pile is under the auspices of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Atlas is still an existing company. If this were an orphan pile it would be cleaned up by the Department of Energy as a Superfund site. As long And yet there are potentially excellent sites on the Mancos Shale north of Moab, where there is no ground water for 500 to 600 feet and the hauling some 14,000 truck loads down soil can be compacted to be impermeable to the stuff. We’ve been trying to get them to look seriously at moving it, and they’ve been refusing to do that. the River Road. _ If the pile were moved to the Mancos Shale and bluied below grade, it would meet all the standards for Two years ago they issued an environmental assessment that was a comparison of Atlas’ plan to leave it on the bank (of the river) and cover it with the Mancos Shale out there, or to do nothing whatsoever. Those are the only things they think they need to compare at this point: doing nothing or following Atlas’ plan. The reason that all of this is important is because if the pile is going to be covered on the bank of the river, there are standards for what they need to do to protect it from floods in the Moab wash and from the river itself. The river comes up in high water and runs against the side of the pile. They have to put rip rap on the side of it. The standards for the rip rap indicate that it reclamation better than leaving it sitting in the flood plain of the water supply for the Southwest. It would also not require that they use any rip rap and they wouldn’t have to go after Round Mountain. We wrote enough comments on their Environmental Assessment that Orrin Hatch forced them to withdraw it. They’ve now gone back to restudy it. All they’ve done is mess around for about 2 years. They haven’t done any new studies. They’ve just spent time playing games. We expect a new EIS right around the first of the year. When that comes out there’s going to be a period of about 30 days for comments. We’re hoping to force them to grant an extension on that, but it’s going to be necessary for can’t be sandstone, this is sandstone land around here. So they have a hard people who oppose leaving this thing on the bank of the river and mining time searching to find igneous and Round Mountain to pay attention around the beginning of the year. We’re metamorphic rock that’s durable enough to meet the standards for rip rap. The size of the rip rap varies depending on whether it’s right down where the river comes by the pile, up on the top, or as Atlas exists, it will be cleaned up by whether it’s along the side of the wash. Atlas with oversight by the NRC. The Along the wash and along the river, NRC is proud of the fact that they’ve they need to have rock that averages never forced anyone to move a tailings pile. One pile that they oversaw the cleanup of was voluntarily moved by the Tennessee Valley Authority. But about 31 inches in diameter. When they look around here and try to find a source of rock that’s that big and that hard, the only place they can find is either in other than that no one has ever had to move a pile and they’re proud of it. In the early 1980’s, they issued an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) that was supposed to look at this clean up and compare alternatives. In an EIS, you’re supposed to look at some alternatives and compare them with to hold a public hearing. They have a Miner’s Basin or Round Mountain. Miner’s Basin is sort out of the question because they hope to do this during the off season from the tourists. They thought they could go up in the La Sals and get it until somebody pointed out that Miner’s Basin is pretty snowy. going to try to let you all know what’s happening, but you’ re going to have to try to get involved. It will probably be really important to write comments to Orrin hatch. He’s probably the key player in all of this, but also Senator Bennett. In order to alert people and get the community up to speed on this, there is going to be a public information meeting held in Star Hall on the 16th of Nov. We are trying to get the whole Moab community aware of what the situation is. We’ll go on from there. At the County level we have a law firm (Jenner and Block of Chicago) that’s ready to sue to try to stop this. But you need to be aware that it’s not very likely (to win), as the NRC has |