Wednesday, October 29, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
State to test for uranium at shuttered mine site
Documents raise concerns about potential pollution
By SCOTT SONNER
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Waste tailings piles at the closed Anaconda Copper Co. mine on the outskirts of Yerington are shown in this February 2001 photo. Newly revealed documents have shown more than a dozen wells at this old open pit copper mine tested positive for uranium in 1984 at levels up to 40 times higher than today's legal limit.
ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE PHOTO
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RENO-- More than a dozen wells at an old open pit copper mine in Northern Nevada tested positive for uranium in 1984 at levels up to 40 times higher than current legal limits, newly revealed documents show.
The radioactivity was so great in one waste pond at the Anaconda Copper Co.'s mine 55 miles southeast of Reno that the company entered a joint venture in the 1970s to extract and process uranium from the wastes for profit, according to copies of the documents obtained by The Associated Press.
State environmental officials said Tuesday that they will test for uranium at the closed mine site on the outskirts of Yerington as a result of new concerns about potential pollution.
But state officials said uranium occurs naturally in parts of Nevada, and they have no reason to believe there is any public health threat.
"We recognize this a concern to some parties in the community, and we are addressing it in a timely manner," said Jennifer Carr, supervisor of the remediation branch of the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection's Bureau of Corrective Actions.
Some 5,000 people live in the Mason Valley and on tribal reservations in and around the community of Yerington bordering the mine. The Atlantic Richfield Co., a former owner of the mine, is working with various government agencies to develop a plan to clean up the site, which contains such hazardous materials as arsenic, beryllium, lead, mercury and selenium.
The mine produced millions of dollars worth of copper from the 1950s through the 1970s. Production began to decrease about 1980, and the last copper was processed from tailings in the 1990s.
Former owner Anaconda and Wyoming Mineral Corp. of Lakewood, Colo., the 11th-largest producer of uranium in the United States in 1980, estimated in 1976 that the Yerington mine could produce as much as 50,000 pounds of uranium oxide annually.
Uranium oxide is better known as yellowcake uranium, the raw material for enriched uranium used as fuel for nuclear reactors, or the guts of an atomic bomb. Yellowcake is lower in radioactivity than enriched uranium, but it also is considered a carcinogen.
The joint venture apparently never developed because the companies were unable to process as much uranium as expected, documents indicate.
Conservationists say the previously undisclosed data confirming high levels of uranium should prompt new testing miles outside the 3,500-acre mine site boundary to be sure it didn't enter groundwater, which already is polluted with arsenic and other hazardous materials.
The topic is to be discussed Thursday in Yerington in a meeting of various groups with an interest in the cleanup plan. They include Atlantic Richfield, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection, Lyon County, the Yerington Paiute Tribe and the Walker Lake Paiute Tribe.
