As a closed Utah uranium mill seeks state approval to reopen, taxpayers are...

This story by MIT Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellow Anastasia Hufham was originally published in The Salt Lake Tribune, where it appears with additional photos and resources.

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As a Canadian company is working to restart one of Utah’s old uranium mills, federal officials are considering new steps toward cleaning up radioactive waste at another — showing the continuing toll of the last surge of uranium development in the state.

Isoenergy Ltd. announced earlier this month that it had acquired Anfield Energy Inc. and all its assets, including the closed Shootaring Canyon mill near Ticaboo and uranium mining projects across the Four Corners region.

The only conventional uranium mill currently operating in the country is at White Mesa, in San Juan County. The Shootaring mill has been on standby in adjacent Garfield County since 1982. Isoenergy has applied to restart it and expand its capacity, and hopes to begin processing uranium ore in 2026.

Uranium mills crush and chemically treat ore to create a concentrated uranium powder popularly known as yellowcake, which is shipped and processed elsewhere to become fuel for nuclear plants.

“With the global shift towards nuclear power,” said Isoenergy Ltd. CEO Philip Williams in a statement, “we believe the outlook for uranium has never been stronger.”

Another Canadian company, Western Uranium & Vanadium Corp., is working to build a new uranium mill in Emery County. It just acquired property where it hopes to build yet another mill in western Colorado.

At the same time, the Bureau of Land Management is seeking public comment on plans to expand clean-up efforts at the former Lisbon Valley Uranium Mill near La Sal, where the groundwater is still contaminated decades after the mill shuttered.

That’s only one of the sites where American taxpayers are continuing to pay to clean up waste in Utah from the last uranium boom.

Moab Mayor Joette Langianese announced at a City Council meeting last week that so far, 15 million tons of uranium tailings — the waste left over after ore has been processed — have been removed from another former mill site near the resort town.

There are still 1 million tons waiting to be moved away from the site near the Colorado River.

Reviving Shootaring Canyon Mill

Isoenergy wants to produce 3 million pounds of yellowcake a year at the Shootaring Canyon uranium mill, which was built in 1980. It started producing yellowcake in 1982, when the sharp decline in the price of uranium led it to close after just six months of operation.

Anfield Energy Inc., the Canadian mining company that sold the mill to Isoenergy, bought it from Uranium One in 2015. Uranium One had acquired the mill in 2007 from Riverton, Wyo.-based U.S. Energy Corp. The mill was never decommissioned and has been on standby for decades during its ownership changes.

Anfield submitted an application to Utah officials to renew the mill’s radioactive materials license in April. The company also asked to increase the mill’s production capacity from 1 million pounds of yellowcake annually.

The Utah Division of Waste Management and Radiation Control in July confirmed that Anfield submitted all necessary maps, drawings, figures, tables and calculations needed for a more detailed review of its application. That application has not yet been approved.

On Oct. 2, Isoenergy announced that it acquired Anfield.

“Increasing demand and support for nuclear power,” an Anfield new release about the acquisition said, “are expected to drive uranium demand and, by extension prices, coinciding with expected production and development.”

Isoenergy already owns the Tony M uranium mine, located within four miles of the Shootaring mill, which it reopened in July as a first step toward restarting production next year. It also acquired two uranium mining projects from Anfield, one in Utah and one in Colorado.

While Utah reviews the application to restart uranium processing at Shootaring, Isoenergy can send uranium ore from its mines to the White Mesa Mill near Blanding under existing agreements.

Leaking Lisbon Valley

The BLM announced last week that Rio Algom Mining has developed a proposal to increase groundwater monitoring at the former Lisbon Valley Uranium Mill, and the agency is inviting the public to comment on the draft environmental impact assessment of the plan.

The Rio Algom Mining Corp. produced 13 million pounds of yellowcake at the mill from 1972 to 1989. It also mined uranium ore from the site. The New Mexico-based company is still working to clean up the area and has been monitoring the groundwater there since 2001.

When the mill was running, two tailings impoundments on site held radioactive waste, a byproduct of processing uranium into yellowcake. But water leaked from these impoundments, contaminating the groundwater.

Rio Algom submitted a work plan for cleanup to the Division of Waste Management and Radiation Control in 2022. The company says that it needs to install more groundwater monitoring wells, drill pads and access roads “to address gaps in data at the sites to determine future corrective action,” said Dave Pals, manager of the BLM’s Moab Field Office, in a statement.

The public can comment on the BLM’s environmental assessment of Rio Algom’s plans at this link until Nov. 21.

Separate from the groundwater contamination, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, along with the BLM and the state, in 2022 found potentially harmful mine waste near the old site from two mines that hadn’t been remediated. The EPA started cleaning up the waste in 2022.

Learning from the past

As millions of tourists drive through Moab every year to enjoy its singular redrock landscapes, they can see what looks like a construction site on the banks of the Colorado River. A sign identifies it as the “Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action Project,” commonly referred to as “UMTRA.”

The site is another remnant of the historical uranium milling and mining that has poisoned people and places across the American Southwest. When White Mesa Mill started operating in 1980, the mill operating in Moab, less than a hundred miles north, was still processing uranium — and it left about 16 million tons of radioactive waste behind when it closed in 1984.

Taxpayers are still footing the bill — $67 million for fiscal year 2024 — for cleaning it up.

The Moab mill opened in 1956, processed about 1,400 tons of uranium ore per day from surrounding areas and sold its yellowcake to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission for national defense programs during the Cold War. Later, after 1970, the mill sold its product to nuclear power plants for energy generation.

The company that owned the mill in 1984, Atlas Minerals Corporation, declared bankruptcy in 1998, leaving the job of cleaning the site to the government. The Department of Energy assumed responsibility for the site in 2001.

On the 480-acre site, bulldozers and excavators push through layers of the old mill’s tailings. Then trucks take the material to a train, which transports the waste to a disposal site at Crescent Junction, north of Moab. There, the waste is stored and covered with a 9-foot layer of soil and rock.

Workers remove about 20,000 tons of waste from the former mill location each week.

“We’ve got people here whose families worked at the mill,” said Matthew Udovitsch, federal cleanup director for the UMTRA project. “There’s a huge history here with the local community.”

Alongside removing the waste, UMTRA employees are also cleaning up water supplies. Uranium and ammonia from the historic tailings pile have leached into the groundwater at the site and migrated downstream into the Colorado River.

Liz Moran, a physical scientist at the site, said that its primary contaminant is ammonia, which is toxic to fish in the Colorado River. To clean up the groundwater and prevent contamination of the river, UMTRA scientists remove contaminants using groundwater extraction wells and divert water to protect fish habitat.

“There’s a lot of groundbreaking science that’s happening in Moab that a lot of locals are unaware of,” Moran said, explaining that the project may start using artificial intelligence to monitor contaminated groundwater long term.

Work at the site is expected to be completed in 2029. When the clean-up project has ended, the local community will decide what to do with the UMTRA site. The land could become a park — like Las Colonias Park in Grand Junction, Colo., the former site of a uranium mill — or another community space.

Regardless of what the site becomes, the Department of Energy will continue monitoring the area and the disposal site.

For Logan Shumway, manager of the White Mesa Mill, the UMTRA Project is a testament to the strides made in the nuclear industry.

“The more you do something, the more you learn. The uranium industry and nuclear industry is still pretty new to us, and there were some mistakes that were made back then,” he said. As White Mesa Mill operates today, Shumway added, it “has the benefit of those learning experiences.”