Moab, Utah: Beauty and the Nuclear Feast
[link to www.kcet.org]

snip


In 1956 the Uranium Reduction Company built a uranium milling plant to the immediate northwest of Moab, on a site along whose southern border the Colorado runs. Its central product was the infamous yellowcake concentration, and until the mid-1980s it processed an estimated 1400 tons a day. Sold exclusively to the Atomic Energy Commission until 1970, and subsequently to nuclear-power plants, Moab's uranium punched up the nation's Cold War nuclear stockpiles and lit up millions of homes and businesses in the American west.

The tailings made Moab glow -- and not in a good way. For nearly 30 years, the various companies that operated the facility dumped ton after ton of the radioactive sandy byproduct into an unlined impoundment area located 750 feet from the river. Over the decades, this Geiger-hot waste, which ultimately totaled 12 million cubic yards, was spread over 130 acres at a depth of more than 80 feet. According to the Department of Energy (DOE), which took over remediation of the site, the tailings "have an average radioactivity of 665 picocuries per gram of radium-226," and because the center of the monstrous pile has a "high water content...excess water in the pile drains into underlying soils, contaminating the ground water."