Emma Penrod reports that an environmental group’s long-running lawsuit against southeast Utah’s White Mesa uranium mill has been dismissed in federal court, after state regulators testified on the company’s behalf and convinced the judge that their own actions on the mill’s radioactive emissions were invalid. The Grand Canyon Trust, an Arizona-based advocacy group, sued the mill in 2014 after discovering its owner, Energy Fuels, had self-reported violations of radon emissions standards from one of the site’s tailings cells. The group's lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City, sought to speed up the cell’s closure and reclamation in order to limit the impact on the nearby communities of Bluff and White Mesa from the radon, a harmful gas associated with radioactive decay and linked to lung cancer.
Residents of White Mesa, a Ute Mountain Ute reservation town about five miles from the mill, and Bluff, about 15 miles farther south, testified that they no longer used areas near the mill for recreation or cultural purposes, fearing exposure to radon gas. But after a series of court filings by state officials, U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups last month dismissed the case, ruling that regulatory standards the mill had violated did not actually apply to the waste storage cell in question, known as Tailings Cell 2. Waddoups also turned aside other claims raised by the Grand Canyon Trust — including that the mill was operating more tailings cells that federal rules allow — on the basis that the state had not found any violations.
In a statement, officials with Colorado-based Energy Fuels said they were “obviously pleased that the District Court, after careful consideration, found in our favor.†“It has been our position from the very beginning that the White Mesa Mill operates in compliance with the law, and the court confirmed our position in their decision,†they said in an email statement. “We also believe that this was a victory for the State of Utah, and their ability to regulate the mill in an effective manner that is protective of public health and the environment.â€
Energy Fuels had not disputed the basic facts of the case — including that the company indeed detected levels of radon in excess of federal standards at Tailings Cell 2 in 2012 and 2013. Energy Fuels reported those violations, which the Utah Department of Environmental Quality acknowledged. State regulators did not issue a formal notice of violation but instead required the mill to increase the depth of the cover on top of the tailings cell to stop the radon emissions and ordered increased monitoring of the cell to ensure the remedy had worked.
In his ruling, however, Waddoups found the state’s actions “directly contradicted the plain language of the regulation.†The radon rule that both Energy Fuels and state officials believed the mill had violated did not apply to Tailings Cell 2, Waddoups wrote, because it applies only to tailings cells that actively receive waste from a uranium mill. This particular storage area, he noted, had not received new materials since 2008.
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