What is the White Mesa Mill?
The White Mesa Mill is the only conventional uranium mill operating in the United States. Energy Fuels owns and operates both the mill and several Colorado Plateau uranium mines that supply ore to the mill, including Canyon Mine near the Grand Canyon’s south rim.
Where is it?
The mill is located a few miles north of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s White Mesa Ute community and six miles south of Blanding, Utah.
What happens at the mill?
The mill was built in 1979 to process uranium ore from the surrounding region. About a decade later, the mill’s operator also started running “alternate feeds” through the mill and discarding the resulting wastes on-site. These feeds include uranium-bearing radioactive and toxic wastes from other contaminated places around the country.
What are the tailings impoundments?
Energy Fuels disposes of the mill’s radioactive and toxic wastes, often called tailings, in “impoundments,” large waste pits that take up about 275 acres next to the mill. There are currently five tailings impoundments (cells 1, 2, 3, 4A, and 4B) in the mill’s tailings-management system.
What are the health and environmental hazards?
- Cells 1, 2, and 3 at the White Mesa Mill were constructed with a single, thin plastic liner between a layer of soil and a layer of crushed rock. Today, these cells would be built with two liners and a system meant to detect and collect anything leaking through the first liner before it escapes into the environment.
- The mill emits radioactive and toxic air pollutants that can travel off-site, including radon, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxide. Stockpiled ore and alternate feeds that are not adequately covered can also blow off-site. White Mesa residents report smelling pollutants from the mill.
- Trucks loaded with ore and hazardous materials travel on Arizona and Utah highways to reach the mill. Ore from the mines in the Grand Canyon region travels north through the Navajo Nation and Bluff to the mill.
- There are increased levels of contaminants, such as nitrate, nitrite, and chloroform, in the perched aquifer beneath the mill site.
What are other community concerns?
- The mill was built on sacred ancestral lands of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, disturbing burial and other cultural sites.
- Many residents in the communities of White Mesa and Bluff fear that the Navajo Sandstone aquifer, which provides drinking water to the area, will be contaminated. This primary drinking water aquifer lies underneath the mill site.
- State regulators may not be requiring Energy Fuels to guarantee that enough money will be available to clean up the mill if the company fails to do so. The current guarantee—a surety bond—is for about $20 million. Other uranium mills on the Colorado Plateau have cost more than $100 million to clean up.
What is the state of Utah doing about it?
- The mill had been operating with the state’s blessing since 2007 under an expired radioactive materials license, the main operating permit for the mill. That license was renewed in 2018, giving Energy Fuels a green light to run the mill for another decade.
- The company also has a groundwater discharge permit that is meant to prevent groundwater contamination. That permit expired in 2010, and the state renewed it in 2018.
- Also in 2018, the state gave Energy Fuels permission to process a radioactive sludge left over from enriching uranium at a defunct plant near the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma run by a company called Sequoyah Fuels.
- More than 15 different radioactive waste streams have been approved for shipment to the mill from contaminated sites across the United States and as far away as Canada, Europe, and Japan.
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