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- Water testing: Bell Vernieu, a hydrologist for the
Department of the Interior, took a sample from Lake Powell. Scientists
are monitoring the radioactivity level of the lake because of a nuclear
waste pile that's leaking into the Colorado River.
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- Colorado River. Radioactivity tests have been conducted
at Lake Powell because a nuclear waste site has been leaking radioactive
material into the river.
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- Contaminating the Colorado River from a dump site near
Moab, Utah, prompted radioactivity tests downriver at Lake Powell and Lake
Havasu. Both lakes showed about one-third the level considered dangerous.
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- Preliminary work is under way to cap a nuclear waste
pile that has been leaking radioactive material into the Colorado River.
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- Yet the question of what would be the best final solution
to the environmental threat to Southern California's primary water source
remains under dispute.
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- The 10.5 million ton waste site, near the southeastern
Utah tourist boomtown of Moab, is one of the largest piles of radioactive
uranium mill waste ever dumped near a major river in the United States.
It also is the only such pile in the country that has not been moved safely
away from the water.
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- Efforts to put a clay and rock cover over the pile has
many environmentalists, scientists and politicians fretting that it won't
make the pile safe. They contend the pile has to be moved.
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- "Going ahead with a plan that is so inadequate is
a waste of time and money," said Rep. Bob Filner, D-San Diego, who
has co-sponsored legislation to have the pile moved from where it sits
750 feet from the river.
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- "It just doesn't make sense. You waste the money
and don't address the danger this poses to our water."
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- The owners of the pile, Denver-based Atlas Corp., went
bankrupt and left responsibility of the site to a court-appointed trustee,
who is to begin talking with engineers and contractors by the middle of
this month to determine the best way to stretch the money set aside to
put a cap on the pile. The trustee has between $5 million and $8 million,
coupled with about $10 million in federal funds, to spend on the clean-up.
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- But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved a
plan for capping the pile at a cost estimated between $47 and $77 million.
So the larger question remains what happens when the money runs out, and
when a project that has been criticized as dangerously inadequate for protecting
the river is left unfinished.
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- An estimated 28,800 gallons of radioactive pollution
and toxic chemicals ooze into the river from the pile every day.
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- Southern California is linked to this radioactive mess
by the Colorado River, which provides San Diego County with 62 percent
of its water. In all, 240 cities in the Southwest, including Los Angeles,
Phoenix and Las Vegas, depend on the river to quench a deep thirst.
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- It's the threat to the drinking water for 20 million
people that caught the attention of Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.
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- "If they cap it, this problem will not just become
more serious, it will become catastrophic," Richardson told a gathering
of Western state governors a few months ago.
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- Richardson's interest is significant because his department
has the clout, if not the authority, to get the pile moved. The Energy
Department has spent more than a $1 billion to move nine smaller nuclear
waste piles in the Southwest -- some far less toxic -- away from streams
and rivers and bury the radioactive sludge at safer locations.
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- But the Energy Department has been excluded for years
from any involvement on the reclamation of the Moab site because of a bureaucratic
dividing line drawn by Congress more than 20 years ago. Legislation passed
in the 1970s gave control of the Moab site to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,
which has approved the plan to leave the pile by the river.
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- Two bills are pending in the House that would transfer
responsibility for the pile from the commission to the Energy Department
and authorize money to move the radioactive waste to a safe burial site
miles from the river.
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- A lively debate over the future of the pile is expected
at a meeting Wednesday in Moab that is supposed to include the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, the Energy Department and the Metropolitan Water
District of Southern California, which is concerned about preserving the
quality of the drinking water.
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- "We want to start momentum moving on this to get
it fixed right, and simply capping it won't fix it right," said Mark
Beuhler, the water district's director of water quality. "It has to
be moved for the safety of the water coming to Southern California."
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- Utah officials agree the pile must be moved.
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- "The talk about leaving the pile in place is a long
way from a certain thing," said Kim Schappert, a member of the County
Council of Grand County, Utah, where the pile is located.
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- "It's big news to the people here that they are
starting to implement the capping plan. Believe me, the final option is
still open."
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- Schappert and others want the pile moved to a high desert
plateau 18 miles from the river, where the radioactive waste would be safely
contained by a natural clay barrier. But that remedy could cost as much
as $150 million.
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- Cost comparison
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- Keith Eastin, project director for the trustee, Pricewaterhouse-
Coopers, doesn't want people to think that bulldozers will immediately
start pushing more dirt over the tailings, saying it will be years before
the pile is capped.
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- But at the same time, he makes it clear his goal is to
see to it that the plan to cap the pile is carried out.
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- "It's our job to make sure somebody rides herd on
the job; to get it done as soon as technically and financially possible,"
Eastin said.
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- As Eastin sees it, it's better "to get the job done
the sooner the better" to squeeze as much value out of the money as
possible.
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- Underlying that logic is a belief by some that Congress
will be more willing to make up the shortfall for capping the pile than
to pick up the heftier bill to move it.
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- That reasoning leaves Filner dumbfounded.
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- "If they are successful in making that argument,
then Congress will think the problem is solved when it won't be,"
he said.
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- "It's clear the safest, logical solution is to move
it. So why not use this money to start the moving process?"
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- Donald Metzler, an Energy Department supervisor who oversees
reclamation projects in Utah and Colorado, said moving piles away from
waterways has proven cheaper in the long run than maintaining the piles
to safeguard the water.
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- "There is an indication that spending those initial
dollars up front has paid dividends in less costly long-term maintenance,"
he said. "If you choose to stabilize in place, you spend a lot less
dollars up front, but you could spend considerable dollars to maintain
the sites over the years."
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- Also figuring in the debate is a small pile of radioactive
waste near Denver that was capped in the early '90s and is now being moved
because the cap began to crumble.
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- Like the plans for the cap on the Moab pile, the cap
in Colorado was supposed to protect the environment for at least 200 years
and as long as 1,000 years. But it failed in less than 10 years, and now
the costly process is under way to dig up the waste and move it to a safe
location.
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- Reassuring results
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- Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials in Washington,
D.C., have assured people who depend on the water every day that the radioactive
waste and poisonous chemicals may kill a few endangered fish but pose no
threat to humans.
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- The pile has been leaking for years without disastrous
consequences, commission officials point out. And even the possibility
that the pile could be ripped open by floods, earthquakes or the ever-changing
course of the river does not concern them.
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- But increasing concern over uranium waste leaking into
the Colorado River did prompt the Metropolitan Water District, the chief
supplier of San Diego County's drinking water, to step up its testing for
radioactivity.
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- The radioactive content of liquid leaking from the pile
into the river is 568 times higher than federal regulations allow. Although
it is diluted by the river, the radioactive contamination of the water
near the site is still 31 times higher than is permitted under Environmental
Protection Agency standards.
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- For years, California's largest water district has tested
for radioactivity at the point where the Colorado flows into the district's
distribution system at Lake Havasu, on the border between California and
Arizona.
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- Over the years those tests, 820 miles down river from
the pile, have shown slightly increasing levels of radioactivity, though
the level is not high enough to cause concern within the water agency.
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- Yet since the Utah tailings began drawing national attention,
triggered in part by a 1998 Union-Tribune story, water district officials
decided it would be wise to conduct tests closer to the pile.
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- So for the last year and a half, tests have also been
done at Lake Powell, 710 miles closer to the pile than Lake Havasu.
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- The samples are being drawn from water flowing from out
of Glen Canyon Dam and from where the Colorado, San Juan and Escalante
rivers snake into Lake Powell from a maze of red rock canyons.
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- The Colorado is the Goliath of the three rivers, accounting
for 80 percent of the water that feeds the lake.
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- And it also is the most contaminated. Tests show a level
of radioactivity at least 25 percent higher than the other rivers, though
it can't be directly attributed to the tailings pile.
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- "This will give them a pretty good idea of what
is coming out of the lake and heading down river," said Bill Vernieu,
a hydrologist for the U.S. Department of the Interior's Grand Canyon Monitoring
and Research Center.
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- Overall, the tests have so far shown the level of radioactivity
is about the same in Lake Powell as in Lake Havasu, both reaching about
one-third the level considered dangerous. But officials want to do more
tests before voicing an authoritative opinion on the water's safety.
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- "What we have seen is just a snapshot of what is
there," Marshall Davis, manager of the water district's testing lab,
said of the Lake Powell tests.
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- "That tells us enough now not to be concerned, but
what is most important is that we can be satisfied in the long term that
the source water is safe from (radioactive) contamination."
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- That's the point the water district's Beuhler says he
will emphasize at the meeting in Moab when he sits down with the government's
representatives. As he summed up his position, "We have to get those
federal agencies that have it within their power to start the process of
doing what needs to be done to fix this situation right."
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