Thursday, October 30, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Feds criticize Arco on mine cleanup

RENO -- Two federal agencies criticized Atlantic Richfield Co. on Wednesday for delaying cleanup of hazardous waste at a closed copper mine in Nevada and refusing to test for uranium contamination.

"Arco is dragging their feet in getting these (cleanup) work plans done," said Randi Thompson, spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Reno.

"This is a travesty for a place this toxic to go unchecked for 25 years," she said.

State environmental officers said Tuesday that they will test for uranium at the former Anaconda Copper Co. at Yerington as a result of concerns raised after recently uncovered documents showed more than a dozen well samples with elevated levels of uranium in 1984.

Several of the samples showed levels 40 times higher than current legal limits adopted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for drinking water. Uranium is considered a carcinogen.

The radioactivity was so great in one waste pond at Anaconda Copper Co.'s mine 55 miles southeast of Reno that the company entered a venture in the 1970s to attempt to extract and process uranium from the wastes for profit, the newly disclosed documents show.

Arco officials with the company's mining division in Butte, Mont., did not return telephone calls seeking comment Tuesday and Wednesday.

Arco, a former owner of the mine site after it purchased Anaconda Copper Co. in 1977, is responsible for the cleanup because the most recent owner, Arimetco Inc. of Tucson, Ariz., filed for bankruptcy in 1997 and abandoned the site in 2000.

Numerous tests at the site have documented hazardous wastes, including arsenic, beryllium, lead, mercury and selenium, but Thompson said Arco has balked at requests to test for uranium.

"The regulatory agencies have requested Arco to include uranium in their testing for years and they have said it is not an issue, they are not going to do it," she told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Fish and Wildlife officials had been aware of general concerns about the possibility of uranium contamination but were surprised by the newly disclosed data, Thompson said.

"We knew there was potential for the uranium, but not at these levels," she said.

Officials for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which owns about half the 3,500-acre mine site, said they share concerns about Arco's delays since the company entered into a cleanup agreement three years ago with the BLM, Environmental Protection Agency and Nevada Division of Environmental Protection.

"I think the process has definitely moved slower than we would like it to move," said Bob Kelso, who leads the hazardous materials program for the BLM in Nevada.

"This new data coming to light indicates we need to do some more sampling and do some more work to define how big of a problem it may be, or if it is a problem," he said.

Kelso confirmed federal regulators have been complaining to Arco about the lack of information available about uranium concentrations and uranium byproducts at the site.

Concerns about uranium have been discussed for two years or longer, but it "has really started to come to a head here within about the last six months," he said.

That was after a federal contractor assigned to the project returned this summer with documents from the Anaconda Document Collection-American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming.

"That's where we began to find the additional data that said Anaconda was doing an economic analysis of the feasibility of processing and producing yellowcake uranium," Kelso said.