Tailings Forever
Church Rock was the biggest tailings spill on record, but it was not the only one. And though the Navajo and other New Mexicans nearby were the most directly affected, people as far away as Los Angeles had cause for concern.
As Congressman Udall put it, Church Rock fit a pattern of "sloppy and haphazard" handling of mill tailings throughout the nation. Other spills, he said, had dumped "millions of gallons of hazardous liquids" and jeopardized the water supply of much of the West.30 In fact NRC statistics acknowledged at least fifteen accidental releases of tailings solution from 1959 to 1977, including seven dam breaks, six pipeline failures, and two floods. In at least ten of the events radioactivity reached a major watercourse.31 One accident cited by Udall sent twenty-five thousand gallons of slurry directly into the Colorado River. A flood washed some fourteen thousand tons of tailings directly into Utah’s Green River.32
At Durango, Colorado, a huge hundred-foot-high tailings pile sits just sixty feet from the Animas River, a tributary of the Colorado. The state Department of Health has found abnormal radium levels in water thirty miles downstream.33 According to Washington-based uranium expert David Berick operators of the Durango mill "just took the residues and threw them in the river. There’s really no way of knowing how much of it went how far downstream."34
Because the milling process renders many of the isotopes in the tailings highly soluble, they can be washed into streams and water tables by rain. A 1979 Oak Ridge National Laboratory study noted groundwater contamination at two New Mexico tailings piles.35 Company records admit to severe groundwater contamination at Colorado’s Uravan mill.36 One tailings dam near Wyoming’s Sweetwater River failed six times between 1957 and 1979 and was reporting a daily seepage rate of 1.7 million gallons.37 And a major 1976 EPA study indicated that some 200,000 kilograms of dissolved uranium had been introduced to subsurface water by seepage and "direct injection" at mills
belonging to Anaconda and Kerr-McGee. The study warned the problem was widespread: "The stark contrast between a typical 20-year mill life and an 80,000-year half life for the dominant radionuclide (thorium 230) necessitates a much greater forward look than is now evident in waste disposal practices and preservation of groundwater quality."38
Nor has the problem stayed underground. As early as 1964 the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration told a congressional hearing that fish caught downriver from the Naturita and Uravan uranium mills showed higher radium concentrations than those caught upriver. Downriver hay samples also showed contamination, as did cows’ milk. "In this case," said the authorities, "the prime source of radium intake for the cows is believed to be from eating hay irrigated with contaminated river water."39
As for Church Rock, Edwin Swanson, a water-quality expert for the state of Arizona, told us traces of the spill—though dilute and possibly undetectable—would eventually reach Arizona’s Lake Mead, 470 miles downstream.40
And though most of America’s uranium mills seem far removed from major population centers, concern is growing for such crucial water sources as Lake Mead, which supplies southern California, Las Vegas, and parts of Arizona with much of their drinking water.
The huge reservoir sits downstream from numerous uranium mining and milling operations. The distances are sometimes great, but so are the half-lives of many of the isotopes slowly making their way downriver. As early as 1972, H. Peter Metzger, writing in The Atomic Establishment, warned that bottom sediments in Lake Mead were showing three times the concentration of radium as similar sediment samples taken upstream of the uranium mills.41
The implications of a contaminated Lake Mead, and of a radioactive western water system, are catastrophic. But the uranium problem involves an immense volume of tailings and is not limited just to water quality.
According to the Government Accounting Office (GAO) at least twenty-two uranium mills had shut down on the continental United States by 1978. They left behind some twenty-five million tons of tailings in "unattended piles and ponds" in eight western states plus Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Another sixteen mills were in operation, with an additional 115 million tons on site—bringing the total to 140 million tons. In the early 1980s another six to ten million tons of tailings were being produced per year. Based on high growth estimates, the NRC in 1981 predicted another 109 mills could be operating by the year 2000 producing 470 million more tons of tailings and scores of acid ponds like the one at Church Rock.42 One estimate from Los Alamos Laboratory put the total far higher, predicting 900 million tons of tailings by the year 2000 in New Mexico alone.43 Such a total would involve some twenty trillion cubic feet of tailings.
And the piles threaten air as well as water, a problem considered by many experts—including NRC Commissioner Gilinsky—even more serious than the better-known "high-level" wastes from reactors and bomb factories. The reason is radon gas, the same deadly substance that has caused a five-fold increase in lung cancer among uranium miners. Because radon is a gas, it is possible, as Gilinsky said, "for large populations thousands of miles away from the source to be exposed, albeit to an extremely low dose."44
In fact the NRC has attempted to present long-term calculations for New Mexico tailings-gas emission levels in such distant locations as Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Washington, D.C., and New York City.45 NRC staff member Reginald Gotchy told us that despite its short half-life (3.8 days) radon gas from a tailings pile in New Mexico can carry to the East Coast of the United States. On its way contamination would appear "on grain grown in the Midwest" and elsewhere. "This stuff," he said, "goes everywhere." Gotchy hastened to add that he and the NRC consider the doses "minuscule."46
But in 1977 Dr. Chauncy Kepford, a chemist based in State College, Pennsylvania, testified during hearings on the license for Three Mile Island Unit 2 (which caused the 1979 accident) that the quantity and health effects of radon tailings emissions had been vastly underestimated. Kepford stated that the NRC had failed to account for continued emissions over the full decay chains of the elements involved. Assuming a stable human population and society, he estimated that tailings from the fuel needed to operate TMI-2 for just one year could cause a million cancer cases over time.47
In 1978 Dr. William Lochstet of Pennsylvania State University argued that the operation of a single uranium mine could result in 8.5 million deaths over time.48 And Dr. Robert O. Pohl of Cornell told the NRC that the potential health effects from mill tailings could "completely dwarf" those from the rest of the nuclear fuel cycle and add significantly to the worldwide toll of death and mutations.49
The essence of those conclusions was substantiated, surprisingly, from within the Nuclear Regulatory Commission itself. In the fall of 1977 Dr. Walter H. Jordan of the commission’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board wrote an internal memorandum arguing that the NRC "had underestimated radon emissions from tailings piles by a factor of 100,000."
Because of the long half-lives of the isotopes in the solid tailings, radiation will continue to be emitted from the tailings piles for billions of years. Said Jordan: "It is very difficult to argue that deaths to future generations are unimportant."50
In estimating the long-term effects of radon gases, the NRC assumed the tailings piles would be covered with dirt. The belief is that covering the piles will trap the gas and force it—after its relatively short half-life—to deposit its radioactive "daughters" in the form of less mobile solids.
But questions have been raised about how long dirt covering the piles would last through the millennia the tailings will be radioactive. Or if the piles can actually be covered at all. In some instances they are a hundred feet high and more, and cover hundreds of acres of ground. Huge strip-mining operations would be required just to get enough soil to do the job.51
The NRC has also considered returning the tailings to the mines from which they came. In some instances the procedure may be viable. But many workers would be contaminated in the process, and much fuel consumed. One estimate for removing the Durango tailings involves 65,860 trips with twenty-five-ton dump trucks. Returning the 140 million tons of tailings now lying around the U.S. would require more than 5.5 million such truck trips.52
In the meantime NRC Commissioner Gilinsky has warned that "none of the abandoned sites can be considered to be in satisfactory condition from the long-term standpoint."53 In fact most of the piles continue to lie exposed to the winds and rain. Residents of Durango, Colorado, have experienced plumes of dust towering thousands of feet in the air, covering cars and houses with radioactive dust. Children have played in the "dunes." The piles were "the biggest, best sandpile in the world," Greta Highland of Durango told the High Country News. "After school my friends would sneak into the mill yard and play in the tailings."54
But the consequences may be lethal. High levels of background radiation from thorium, for example, have been linked to spontaneous abortion and mental retardation.55 Leukemia and lung-cancer rates in south Durango, near the piles, have been reported higher than the rest of the town and the state.56
And Monticello, Utah (population: 1900), has also reported problems. From 1949 to 1960 the town hosted a large uranium mill, which processed weapons material for the AEC. In the mid-1960s four young residents died of leukemia. A fifth began a long battle against it. In a normal town Monticello’s size just one case would be expected every twenty-five years.
A preliminary study by the Center for Disease Control concluded that "there appears to be no relationship"
between the mill and the leukemias. But the authors conceded that such a high leukemia incidence "would be expected to occur in fewer than one of 1,000 towns this size or smaller during the same period of time." The report also said that gamma readings at the perimeter of the tailings areas "ranged up to twenty times background" and that "a nuisance and possibly a hazard also existed due to blowing of the tailings as they dried out."57 All five of the young victims had grown up within a half mile of the mill. "For a place this small, it had to be something," said Dale Maughan, whose son Alan died of leukemia in 1966, at age sixteen.58
The damage has not been limited to humans. Farmers near the Cotter mill at Canon City, Colorado, have also complained of unexplained problems with their animals, problems reminiscent of those reported by Lloyd Mixon at Rocky Flats. Local residents Clarence Ransome and Wanda Bosco told us the illnesses among their livestock included diarrhea, weight loss, hair falling out, and difficulties in reproduction. Tests discovered contamination in at least one local well and in alfalfa being raised nearby. Bosco told us the problems with her animals disappeared when they were given uncontaminated water trucked in from town.59
The presence of uranium mining and milling has also been linked to high birth-defect rates in the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah. Overall conclusions are tenuous, complicated by a wide range of social and environmental factors. But Dr. Alan Goodman, director of Program Development for the Area Health Education Center at the University of New Mexico’s School of Medicine, has cited "a disturbing pattern" of sex ratio changes and birth defects that correspond to "the same patterns of uranium mining and milling on the Colorado Plateau. I’m not saying that they are caused by uranium, but one would have to be a fool not to see that there is a possibility that
they are related."60
Particular attention has been focused on the twenty-thousand-person community of Shiprock, New Mexico, where an abandoned 1.7-million-ton tailings pile covers seventy-two acres in the heart of town. According to Dr. Leon Gottleib, a pulmonary specialist long associated with the Indian Health Service, during the rainy season, water leaching through the tailings pile carries radioactive particles into the nearby San Juan River. "Children swim in the contaminated river; cattle drink from the river; and contaminated fish inhabit these waters," he told us in a letter. In windstorms, radioactive particles are blown into school and residential areas, as well as onto grazing and garden land.
In January 1981 Dr. Evelyn Odin, a Shiprock pediatrician, told The Albuquerque Tribune that she had been disturbed by the number of babies being born prematurely with small heads. One child, she said, was born with its esophagus and trachea joined together; another was born without an abdominal wall and with its intestines hanging out.
Dr. John Ogle, also of Shiprock, hesitated to blame the defects on radiation. But he told the Tribune that "my gut feeling is that the incidence here is too high." Ogle said in six months he had seen three infants born with heart diseases two with cleft lips and palates, two with skull defects, two with Down’s syndrome one with a section of backbone missing, and several with thyroid conditions.61 A study by Sarah Harvey, director of the Community Health Representative Program, found a doubling of spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, and congenital abnormalities among children of uranium-mining families as opposed to nonminers. Her survey has formed the basis for an investigation of the area partially funded by the March of Dimes.62
Problems in the Shiprock area may be compounded by the fact that numerous local residents have built their homes with radioactive rock from the mines, or with tailings from the mills. The use of tailings as a building material was widespread throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. Despite repeated warnings from independent experts, the AEC did not investigate the possibility that such use of tailings could harm people.63
The carelessness has had a direct cost. In Grand Junction, Colorado, more than six thousand structures - including several schools - are now known to have tailings deposits in the building materials or in the landfill under them. Streets and sidewalks were also laid with them. In all at least 270,000 tons of tailings were used, resulting in dangerous radiation levels in many Grand Junction houses. A state- and federal-funded program that has thus far cost taxpayers at least $6.5 million has brought "remedial action" to only seven hundred sites. Costs have been estimated at fifteen thousand dollars per home and seventy-five thousand dollars per commercial building.64
For some the cleanup may have come late. A 1978 study by the state of Colorado indicated cancer rates in Mesa County, where Grand Junction is the prime population center, showed an acute leukemia rate twice the state average. More women were suffering from the disease than men, an indication of radiation poisoning.65
At Edgemont, South Dakota, an EPA study found sixty-four "hot spots" related to a nearby tailings pile.66 In 1978 the Neil Brafford family was forced to abandon their home there when they learned it had been built on tailings. The basement in which their young son Chris lived showed radiation levels thirty-nine times normal background. Brafford had bought the house from a mill worker and only later discovered tailings had been used as backfill. "We don’t know how much he used," Brafford explained, "but we do know that we’re never going to live here again."67
When they moved out, Brafford’s young daughter stopped suffering from a long bout of diarrhea, which had begun when the family moved in. Laboratory tests showed that young Chris Brafford had broken chromosomes. He was also suffering from aching bones, a symptom of potential leukemia. In May of 1981 the Braffords filed a forty million-dollar lawsuit against the Susquehanna Corporation, owners of the nearby tailings pile.68
30. Church Rock Hearings, p. 1.
31. Ibid., p. 9.
32. William Sweet, "Unresolved: The Front End of Nuclear Waste Disposal," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 1979, p. 45
33. Jack Miller, "Environmental and Health Effects," Uranium Information Network, unpublished. For this finding Miller cites the Colorado Department of Health, Uranium Wastes and Colorado’s Environment, second edition (Denver: Colorado Department of Health, August 1971 ), p. 10.
34. David Berick, interview, March 1981.
35. D. G. Jacobs and H. W. Dickson, A Description of Radiological Problems at Inactive Uranium Mill Sites and Formerly Utilized MED/AEC Sites (Oak Ridge, Tenn.: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, February 1979), p. 5.
36. High Country News, February 22, 1980, p. 1.
37. Ibid., December 14, 1979, p. 10.
38. Robert F. Kaufman, et al., "Effects of Uranium Mining and Milling on Ground Water in the Grants Mineral Belt, New Mexico," Ground Water 14, No. 5 (September-October 1976). See also, EPA Radioactivity in Drinking Water, EPA #570/9-81-002 (Washington, D.C.: EPA, January 1981).
39. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Public Works, Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution, Radioactive Water Pollution in the Colorado River Basin, 89th Congress, May 6, 1966, pp. 101-104.
40. Swanson interview.
41. Metzger, Atomic Establishment, p. 164. For this information Metzger cites: DHEW, U.S. PHS, Waste Guide for the Uranium Milling Industry, Technical Report W62-12 (Cincinnati: PHS, 1962); PHS, Region VIII, Radiological Content of Colorado River Basin Bottom Sedimentation, Report PR-10 (Denver: PHS, June 1963); and Radioactivity in Water and Sediments of the Colorado River Basin, 1950-1963, Radiological Health Data and Reports (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, November 1964).
42. GAO, The Uranium Mill Tailings Cleanup: Federal Leadership At Last?, EMD-78-90, (Washington, D.C.: GAO, June 1978) (hereafter cited as Tailings Leadership); and, NRC, Final General Environmental Impact Statement on Uranium Milling, Vol 1, NUREG-0706 (Washington, D.C.: NRC Office of Material Safety and Safeguards, September 1980), pp. 3-15 (hereafter cited as GEIS-Milling). See also, GAO, The U.S. Mining and Mineral-Processing Industry: An Analysis of Trends and Implications, ID-80-04 (Washington, D.C.: GAO, October 1979).
43. David R. Dreesen, Uranium Mill Tailings: Environmental Implications, LASL 77-37 (Los Alamos, N.M.: Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, February 1978).
44. Gilinsky, "Problem," p. 2.
45. NRC, Radon Releases from Uranium Mining and Milling and Their Calculated Health Effects, NUREG-0757 (Washington, D.C.: Office of Material Safety and Safeguards, February 1981), p. 7-3 (hereafter cited as Radon 0757).
46. Reginald Gotchy, interview, April 1981.
47. Chauncy Kepford, Comments on NUREG-00332 (State College, Pa.: Environmental Coalition on Nuclear Power, 1977), p. 8; and Chauncy Kepford, interview, June 1981.
48. William Lochstet, "Radiological Impact of the Proposed Crownpoint Uranium Mining Project," August 1978, unpublished manuscript.
49. Robert O. Pohl, "In the Matter of Public Service Company of Oklahoma, Associated Electric Coop., Inc. and Western Farmers Coop., Inc. (Black Fox Station Units 1 and 2," testimony before the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, Docket Nos. STN 50-556 and STN 50-557.
50. Walter Jordan, "Errors in 10 CFR Section 51.20, Table S-3," memorandum to James R. Yore, NRC, September 21, 1977; and Walter Jordan, letter to Congressman Clifford Allen, December 9, 1977.
51. NRC, Radon 0757, p. 4-7.
52. High Country News, May 16, 1980, p. 6.
53. Gilinsky, "Problem," p. 5.
54. High Country News, May 16, 1980, p. 6.
55. N. Kochupillai, et al., "Down’s Syndrome and Related Abnormalities in an Area of High Background Radiation in Coastal Kerala," Nature 262 (July 1, 1976): 60-61.
56. High Country News, May 16, 1980, p. 6.
57. Peter McPhedran and John R. Crowell, "Leukemia in Monticello, Utah," EPI-67-48-2, Memorandum to the Director, National Communicable Disease Center, Atlanta, July 5, 1967. See also, John R. Crowell and Clark W. Heath, Jr., "Leukemia in Parowan and Paragonah, Utah," EPI-67-70-2, memorandum to the Director, National Communicable Disease Center, Atlanta, April 26, 1967. In a June 1981 interview, Peter McPhedran told us a more detailed study of Monticello "looked like a good idea, but nobody asked us to pursue it any further." As a result, he said, the study was dropped. Area drinking water had not been studied.
58. Bill Curry, "Small Utah Town, 4 Leukemia Deaths," Washington Post, July 16, 1978. In a March 1981 interview Alan Maughan’s mother told us she was certain the tailings piles had caused her son’s death. Dr. Carroll Goon, whom we also interviewed, said the large number of leukemia cases surfacing at the same time did seem extraordinary, but that there was no conclusive proof they had been caused by the tailings. There has been, he said, "nothing like it since" in Monticello.
59. "Bad Water Tough on Families," Rocky Mountain News, June 26, 1978, p. 8; and Clarence Ransome and Wanda Bosco, interviews, June 1981.
60. Christopher McLeod, "Uranium Link: New Studies Reveal High Birth Defect Rate in Southwest," Pacific News Service, April 1, 1981.
61. Burt Hubbard, "Navajos Build Radioactive Homes; Offspring May be Bearing Burden," Albuquerque Tribune, January 27, 1981, p. A-2. The problems in
Shiprock were also confirmed by Dr. Leon Gottleib, who worked in the area for many years, in an April 1981 interview and in an August 23, 1981 letter.
62. Lynda Taylor, Southwest Research Institute, interview, June 1981.
63. Metzger, Atomic Establishment, p. 164.
64. GAO, Tailings Leadership, p. 8; and GEIS-Milling, p. 2-2. See also, Joanne Omang, "EPA Proposes Rules for Cleaning Up Old Uranium Mills’ Radioactive Waste," Washington Post, April 17, 1980.
65. "Mesa County Leukemia, Cancer Incidences High," Rocky Mountain News, United Press International, March 2, 1978.
66. High Country News, April 4, 1980, p. 13.
67. Neil Brafford, interview, July 1980.
68. Andrew Reid, interview, March 1981. Reid is lead attorney in the Braffords’ lawsuit.