The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013, enacted January 2013, mandates that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) prepare a report on abandoned uranium mines. Specifically, Section 3151 of the legislation requests, in part, that “The Secretary of Energy, in consultation with the Secretary of the Interior and the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, shall undertake a review of, and prepare a report on, abandoned uranium mines in the United States that provided uranium ore for atomic energy defense activities of the United States.”
The Act also requires consultation with other relevant federal agencies, affected states and tribes, and the interested public. DOE defines an abandoned uranium mine (previously referred to in draft reports, presentations, and the DOE website by the acronym AUM) as a feature or complex developed to extract uranium ore for atomic energy defense-related activities of the United States from 1947 to 1970, as verified by purchase of ore by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) or other means.
Since the primary basis of the DOE mine database is the AEC production records, defense-related uranium mines (mines) are generally associated with a patented or unpatented mining claim (established under the General Mining Law of 1872, as amended) or a lease of federal, state, tribal, or private lands. Some mines listed as abandoned may have been reclaimed or remediated. Others have current operating permits but may have abandoned mine features within the permitted area that are not yet remediated. Mines in any of these categories are included in the set of legacy mines that were considered for evaluation as part of the congressional request for this report.
The entire set is labeled as mines, and additional information in the topic reports and final Report to Congress identifies the status of these mines. A mine may be a single feature such as a surface or underground excavation, or it may include an area containing a complex of multiple, interrelated excavations. A mine may include associated mining-related features such as mine adits and portals, surface pits and trenches, highwalls, overburden or spoils piles, mine-waste rock dumps, structures, ventilation shafts, stockpile pads, mine-water retention basins or treatment ponds, close-spaced development drill
holes, trash and debris piles, and onsite roads.
For this report, a mine does not include offsite impacts or features such as ore-buying stations, ore transfer stations, or ore used in structures, roads, and general fill. Some stakeholders expressed concerns about offsite features, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that noted they found access roads made from waste materials and significant waste ore at several ore transfer stations on the Navajo Nation. EPA has conducted removal actions at two of these transfer stations. DOE, however, believes the congressional intent was to limit the scope of this report to mine sites.
DOE is required to submit a Report to Congress no later than July 2014. That report will describe and analyze:
- The location of defense-related uranium mines on federal, state, tribal, and private lands, and the status of efforts to remediate or reclaim these mines.
- The extent to which mines pose a significant radiation hazard or other public health and safety threat, and cause, or have caused, water or other environmental degradation.
- A priority ranking for the reclamation and remediation of abandoned uranium mines.
- The potential cost and feasibility of reclamation and remediation in accordance with federal law.
DOE is addressing these requirements, in detail, in four topic reports. This topic report addresses the first bullet above. Based on available information from various federal and state agency databases, tribal abandoned mine land programs, maps, and other documents, it was determined there are 4,225 mines that meet the definition above. This should be considered an approximate number, as there were duplicates in the several databases that were reviewed. Also, field visits, combined with reviews of aerial imagery and mining claim maps, showed there are sometimes numerous mines adjacent to what was recorded in the database as only one named mine site; further investigation of such sites could increase the total number of mines.
The AEC production tables list 4,140 mining records, which include claims, leases, and permits on federal, state, tribal, and private lands. These records served as the basis for the mine determination; however, these records located a particular mine only by state, county, and district. To better determine locations, these records were compared to available data that contained latitude and longitude coordinates. This review and comparison resulted in the
addition of 92 mine claims to the DOE mine database. Other reviews resulted in the removal of 7 records from the database.
Having assembled the DOE mine database, DOE reviewed the data to assess data gaps, validate the data, and perform other quality assurance/quality control checks prior to creating data tables and queries for the cost and risk evaluations that are addressed in separate topic reports. Potential duplicates were identified but not excised (except for 10 in North Dakota) from the database, since not all information about a particular mine is known at this time. Fewer than 300 mines with duplicate names were identified.
Of the 4,225 mines identified, 592 have a location known by state and county and/or mining district only. The remainder (3,633) include latitude and longitude coordinates. In a few instances (26 of 592), the state name was unknown, but information included a record of ore production.
For several reasons, location coordinates for numerous mines should be reconciled. The coordinates given in a particular database may be for a mine claim boundary corner, or for the site of the original prospect and not the actual mine. Also, the reference datum varies with the age of the data source for the coordinates, resulting in a shift from apparent to actual location.
Some of these discrepancies were spot-checked using aerial imagery and maps. Actual locations could be identified for many mines, including nearly all in the Medium and Large production size categories. The mines were assigned to production-size categories that ranged from Small (0–100 tons) to Very Large (>500,000 tons) based on the total amount of ore produced and sold to AEC. About 46 percent (1,936) are in the Small production-size category. That category also includes 82 percent (487) of the 592 mines that have an unknown location or the location is known only by county and/or mining district.
Approximately 69 percent of the mines are located in Colorado (1,539) and Utah (1,380), with another 23 percent present in Arizona (413), Wyoming (319), and New Mexico (247). The remaining mines are in the western states, along with one each in Alaska, Florida, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Of the total tons of uranium ore produced for defense-related purposes (75.9 million), New Mexico leads with over 35 million tons, followed by Colorado, Utah, and
Wyoming, each with just over 11 million tons. Arizona produced nearly 3 million tons, and Washington produced 1.1 million.
Nearly half (2,103) of the mines are located on U.S. Bureau of Land Management lands. A sizeable number the mines are on non-federal land (518, or 12.3 percent) and land of unknown ownership (657 or 15.6 percent). The non-federal category includes land owned by local municipalities or counties and property that otherwise could not be readily linked to a federal agency. Some mines have impacted groundwater, which can be a significant part of total cleanup cost.
Other mines are in areas of high naturally occurring metal constituents in groundwater, including uranium. Some of these mines may have impacted groundwater, but in those instances, the background levels of constituents need to be accounted for in establishing cleanup standards. Information provided by EPA noted that many uranium mines in the Grants, New Mexico, Mining District operated as wet mines. Over their years of operation, water was pumped to the surface and discharged into nearby drainages, resulting in significant re-saturation and, in places, contamination of the shallow alluvium and underlying bedrock aquifers.
Due to limited time and budget, DOE did not conduct site-specific evaluations of groundwater and surface water. EPA continues groundwater investigations as funding allows. The Grants Mining District is also a location of uranium mines that did not produce ore purchased by the AEC (post-1970). Mine reclamation is typically conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management or the U.S. Forest Service under their respective statutory authorities.
Remediation at Superfund sites must comply with the requirements of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act and be consistent with the National Contingency Plan. Cleanup efforts can range in scope from closing a portal to a full remediation of contaminants from land and water and the removal of site structures.
Approximately 85 percent (3,575) of the mines are not reclaimed or their status is unknown. There are 131 mines (about 3 percent) that are closed and 483 (approximately 11 percent) that have been or are in some stage of reclamation. The existing database should only be used for scoping the magnitude of the mine problem, as it lacks accurate information about the exact number, size, and mine features, except AEC production data. Even the AEC production data will not reflect any mining activity that occurred after 1970.
Field visits to representative mine locations in six states demonstrated that the recorded location of many mines is not exact and also that an AEC production claim record may reflect ore production from one mine or several mines.
Field visits to all the mines in the database should be conducted to verify size, status, and other information before any type of reclamation or remedial action begins and before preparation of accurate cost estimates for such efforts.
For 2022 funding, see: H.R.4350 - National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022 (here).
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