Finally — radioactive waste leaving Moab

MOAB — Joette Langianese stood on a man-made hillside overlooking the expanse of the Colorado River, near a huge crane lifting a rail car and said the sight was so pleasing she nearly cried.

It was this equipment, these winding roads carved up the hillside and the trucks moving huge mounds of radioactive dirt that evoked such emotion.

"It's like in eight years I was able to accomplish something, a lot of people were able to accomplish this," she said.

"This" was the official celebration Monday of the removal process of the 16 million tons of mining waste left to greet visitors on the outskirts of town at the former Atlas mine, now bankrupt.

"This is a positive project, not a negative thing," Langianese said. "This is a good day for everybody."

The "Pile," as it is called, took the former Grand County Council member to the halls of Washington, D.C., to beg, barter, plead with and nag congressional members to get it removed.

"It was a lot of work that was put in place to keep it in the forefront at a state level and in Washington," she said.

Mayor Dave Sakrison recalls the time when winds from the north would blow a white cloud into town because no liquid was going onto the Pile to curtail the dust.

"The white cloud would just take over and you could actually taste the metal."

At Monday's celebratory event, Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. said the people of Grand County earned much of the credit with their hard-fought efforts to make government sit up and take notice of the problem.

"The people of Moab and Grand County so cared about this issue that they made this a priority," Huntsman said. "This is a big deal."

Huntsman said any time he has visited the area, and as any other out-of-town politician can attest, they "caught the dickens" from the locals who agitated for action.

"It was people going nuclear on this issue — because that is what it took to make the wheels of government move."

The 1952 discovery of high-grade uranium ore fueled Moab's boom years and created a thriving industry.

It was only decades later, when the price of ore dropped precipitously, that mining operations folded and their aftermath — the waste — was all that was left at the 439-acre site.

The Pile stalks the ecological health of the Colorado River, contaminating it with its residue and threatening the drinking supply of 25 million downstream users.

"This has been leaching into the Colorado River since the late 1950s and has created a real dead zone along the river," said Bill Hedden, executive director of the Grand Canyon Trust, a conservation organization promoting the health and viability of the Colorado River drainage area.