Energy Fuels Resources, a company proposing a uranium mill project in Paradox Valley, didn’t have to come to the people of San Miguel County to present its plans. And after taking barbed questions and angry comments for an hour and a half on Wednesday, it may have wished they hadn’t.

The company hopes to build the mill on 880 private acres between Naturita and Paradox, in Montrose County, in the same basic area where the historic Uravan mill processed uranium for the world’s first nuclear weapons. That site ended up polluted with radioactive waste. Uravan cost taxpayers $70 million to clean up, and some of the miners and mill workers their health, according to the class action lawsuits filed against Umetco Minerals Corporation.

On Wednesday, residents of the region seemed anxious not to let history repeat itself.
“It seems like a very dangerous substance, and you paint it as being benign or mild,” said David Glynn of the concentrated uranium or “yellowcake” to be produced at the mill. “I am trying to get the level of exposure quantified.”

George Glasier, President of Energy Fuels and a rancher in Naturita, was eager to distinguish his proposed Piñon Ridge mill from Uravan and other mills like Cotter in Cañon City, which was plagued by health violations and shut down last year. 

Glasier said that Piñon Ridge, unlike the other mills, was located far from a river or from any groundwater, so the potential for contamination is lower. He said that Piñon Ridge would utilize new technology that had not been available when the last uranium mill was built 25 years ago — double-lined pits for the toxic tailings, a pump vac system, leak detection, and dryers so that the slurry of radioactive processing waste can be capped more quickly.

“There have been so many advancements in technology,” said Glasier.

Energy Fuels representatives said that the lifespan of the pit liners was “hundreds of years,” but skeptical people in the audience pointed out that since these liners were just created in the 1980s, that claim was hard to prove. Marie Moore lives about 14 miles from the mill site, which is about 12 miles from Glasier’s ranch. She did not seem convinced that the technology would keep the environment safe.

“Why don’t we do it on your ranch, George Glasier?” said Moore.

Other members of the crowd asked about the monitoring of uranium dust carried in the wind, and about the emergency response in the case of a spill or an accident. Craig Pirazzi lives in Paradox and is an emergency responder who might be called on if there was a problem.

“Trucks have accidents every day,” said Pirazzi. “It’s probably one of the most dangerous routes in the state, and it follows rivers most of the way. And there’s no cell service on the road.”

The mill could generate a lot of traffic, processing 1,000 tons of ore a day. Ore would be trucked to the facility and 55-gallon drums of concentrated uranium would leave the mill to be further processed in Kansas or exported elsewhere. Glasier said that the mill could also generate a lot of jobs and tax revenue for the region. He estimated that the mill itself would employ 85 people and possibly create 200 jobs in the region — better paying jobs, said Glasier, than Telluride’s tourist economy offers.

“That’s going to affect Telluride. You’re going to have to get your condo cleaners somewhere else,” said Glasier.

The scale of the project is huge. It is estimated to cost $125-150 million to build, and would run 350 days a year, 24 hours a day. The fresh water needed to operate the mill, said Glasier, is 300 gallons per minute — roughly twice the Town of Norwood’s municipal water production.

The permitting process is also expensive, but it’s a calculated gamble for Glasier and the Energy Fuels Corporation. There is only one other uranium processing mill in the United States, just west of this region in Blanding, Utah, and the demand for uranium to fuel nuclear energy has caused the price of the mineral to jump from less than $10 per pound in 2002 to more than $100 per pound in recent years. The mill in Blanding is owned by Denison Mines, the company that operates the only mines currently producing uranium in Colorado. Those mines are in San Miguel County, in the same rich mineral belt that has generated a lot of interest and has dozens of leased areas and pending permits to mine; but so far, with only the Blanding mill processing ore, no other mines are extracting uranium in the state.

Despite the corporation’s outreach to the public at the meeting in San Miguel County Wednesday, ultimately the mill will only need to satisfy the regulators at the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment (CDPHE) and the Montrose County Commissioners to get permission to operate.

“Tell the regulators you don’t want the uranium mill,” said Glasier. “You can tell me you don’t want this uranium mill, but I’m going to do everything I can to get this uranium mill built.”

— from the Norwood Post