Comment: Uranium companies mine uranium out west, left an environmental disaster and now the American taxpayers have to pay for greed of corporations!
by Craig Bigler
contributing writer
Work to relocate the Atlas uranium tailings pile will be completed by 2025, and possibly by 2022, if the process goes as planned, the U.S. Department of Energy announced last week.
Federal economic stimulus funds have accelerated the relocation effort, allowing for an additional two million tons of material to be transported to the Crescent Junction repository by the end of 2011, according to a July 29 news release from the DOE.
“The funding from the Recovery Act allowed us to accelerate our cleanup efforts and add new jobs, so the community is seeing two major benefits from this legislation,” said DOE Federal Project Director Donald Metzler, who oversees the Moab project.
DOE officials said the stimulus funding has allowed contractors to hire 92 new employees and save the jobs of 22 current workers. By fall, the project will employ 160 people, DOE officials said.
When asked what would happen to employment after the stimulus funds run out, Metzler said in a telephone interview that it is his job to run the project so well that DOE will continue to allocate additional funds to it.
“We’d like to keep the same level of employment that we [currently] have,” Metzler said, as he reflected on his personal commitment and contractor’s efforts to employ local people and the most qualified of specialists.
Another possibility may be that the project’s success will impress Congress to allocate additional funds to DOE in order to meet the 2019 deadline for project completion that Congress imposed on the DOE last year. In placing that deadline on the project, Congress did not include a commitment of additional funding.
Either scenario depends not only on his performance, but also on the community keeping up pressure on both Congress and DOE to continue the funding stream for the project, Metzler said.
If Congress does not make more money available to DOE, additional funds will come to the Moab project only if DOE takes them from another project somewhere else, Metzler has said. That will happen only if the Moab project is very successful compared to others, he said.
“The better I can position this project so it would be reasonable to fund at a higher level, the easier it will be for DOE officials to make the choice,” Metzler said.
Shipment of the 16 million tons of uranium mill tailings began April 20. As of July 24, 160,000 tons of material had been moved, including 15,000 additional tons paid for by stimulus funds, DOE officials said.
One train, moving 90 containers, operated four days a week until mid-June, when shipments were expanded to five days each week. In order to keep up with the accelerated schedule, officials have decided to begin shipping two trainloads, four days a week, as soon as enough train cars and containers are acquired, according to the DOE news release.
An underpass will be completed in November, allowing trucks hauling containers from the tailings pile to the railroad siding to cross beneath state Route 279.
“That will further reduce interactions between public and project traffic,” the news release states.
Lighting, to allow for nighttime operations, will be completed this fall. DOE officials said that lighting will be designed to comply with county requirements that lighting at the site be designed to minimize light pollution. Temporary lighting will be used until the permanent fixtures are in place, the press release states.
http://www.moabtimes.com/pages/full_story/push?article-Stimulus+funds+help+speed+up+relocation+of+uranium+mill+tailings+near+Moab%20&id=3112052&instance=lead_story_left_column
Friday, August 7, 2009
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June & July 2009 stories from the nuclear industry:
Pickering Nuclear Power Station Lacks Experienced Staff To Deal With Serious Accident, Emergencies (Calgary, Alberta):
The Chalk River nuclear reactor shutdown has Canada take a second look at its nuclear facilities. An assessment made by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission of the country's seven nuclear plants for 2008 showed that the nation's oldest power reactor in Pickering may compromise public safety because of its shortage of experienced staff to handle disaster and emergency situations. Aside from the experienced manpower lack, the assessment report, which will be presented at a hearing next week, pointed to the outages which had occurred at the Ontario Power Generation plant in Pickering because of equipment malfunction and other problem areas.’
Funds To Shut Nuclear Plants Fall Short VERNON, Vt. (AP):
The companies that own almost half the nation's nuclear reactors are not setting aside enough money to dismantle them, and many may sit idle for decades and pose safety and security risks as a result, an Associated Press investigation has found. The shortfalls are caused not by fluctuating appetites for nuclear power but by the stock market and other investments, which have suffered huge losses over the past year and devastated the plants' savings, and by the soaring costs of decommissioning. At 19 nuclear plants, owners have won approval to idle reactors for as long as 60 years, presumably enough time to allow investments to recover and eventually pay for dismantling the plants and removing radioactive material. But mothballing nuclear reactors or shutting them down inadequately presents the most severe of risks. Radioactive waste could leak from abandoned plants into ground water or released into the air, and spent nuclear fuel rods could be stolen by terrorists. During the past two years, estimates of dismantling costs have soared by more than $4.6 billion because rising energy and labor costs, while the investment funds that are supposed to pay for shutting plants down have lost $4.4 billion in the battered stock market.’
Thanks so much for your comments!
Virginia Nukes trained their own workers, no degrees just high school! (Nothing against HS but it seems to run the nuke plant maybe some type of experience would help)
A Canadian and the local uranium company are trying to mine in Virginia and the states of VA are welcoming the French Nukes warmly.
All gov’t should turn to true green power!
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