Move 16 (Million) Tons...: The Shrinking of the Moab Tailings Pile

Merle Travis might have written it:

Paul Robson might have done it best:

Here's a mining themed version some guy did:

Hell, the Red Army Choir gave it a try:

but no one is doing it quite like the Department of Energy, UMTRA, and Portage Inc. of Idaho are in Moab, Utah right now, times a million, about 5000 tons a day worth..
What the heck am I talking about? None other than the Moab Tailing's Pile, the byproduct of some 30 years of Uranium Mining, that currently sits in the flood plain of the Colorado River next to one of Utah's biggest tourist destination hubs.





Before I tell a sad but hopeful story about the pile, lemme set a time and place with the rags to riches to rags story of Charlie Steen, the man who found the mother lode of Uranium in the United States, the Mi Vida Mine in the Lisbon Valley of Utah, about 40 miles to the South East, near the little Mormon berg of La Sal. Don't confuse him with the Tiger Blood swilling TV hack that never would have made it in this man's old west! He's Sheen, not Crazy 'ol Charlie Steen, who is a legend of a different sort.
When America started the Nuclear Age with a series of experiments in places like the University of Chicago, Oak Ridge, TN, Idaho, Hanford, Washington, and Los Alamos, NM, culminating in the Big Bang at White Sands ("Now I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds" quoteth Robert Oppenheimer at the time). From what I can tell, we had to get our Uranium from the former Belgian Congo for the most part to do the dirty deed in White Sands, Nagasaki and Hiroshima. I will leave the meditations on this act to Oppenheimer and John Hersey, because I am trying to depict the Gee Whiz exuberance of the birth of the Atomic age and the Money Money Money that caught up a guy named Charlie Steen, the Charlie Sheen of Moab, who took the town into it's third incarnation from Indian Village to Mormon Settlement to Nuclear Mecca, which paved the way for the final incarnation, Gateway to Canyon Lands, but not without a little environmental impact.
Charlie Steen was a geologist, and at about the time that the US government started promising beaucoup bucks for Uranium, to make our Nuclear Age a home grown affair, in the Aftermath of World War II, he moved his family to south west Utah,because for some reason, from Australia to Namibia to Canada, Uranium seems to like the red rock areas, and Utah turned out to be no exception. Charlie had his own theories about Uranium and Anticlines, a geological feature that is a bit like a dome, and some hole he had dug down 200 feet proved to be his fortune when his family was broke as could be.Charlie couldn't afford a Geiger counter, so the guy at the Moab Gas Station had to spot it for him when he pulled up in his beat up old truck with a load from 80 feet deep, when he was well past it to 200 ft... He had struck it rich, the counter went nuts, and from this moment was born the crazy legends of how Steen was so sick of doing laundry by hand he would have all his clothes flown to Grand Junction to be Dry Cleaned, and he would fly up over the canyons to watch TV from the back of his plane too, since he could catch signals from Denver and Salt Lake up there... it was a grand time, and Charlie helped fuel the flood of Uranium, sold at top dollar until 1960 when the US Government finally figured out how to buy Wholesale, that gave us the Dr. Strangelove era of a 20,000 warhead arsenal and the growth of the Nuclear age that ended one morning in the 70's on Three Mile Island.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Steen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_Utah
unfortunately, if you'll pardon the pun, there was a bit of fallout from all this.. Moab got rich, which is channeled into such cultural gifts and indulgences as Milt's Stop & Eat:
http://www.miltsstopandeat.com/
people started to discover Moab and Parks were created and the tourists came, and the bottom fell out on the price of Uranium, leading to a pretty seamless transition, violence only being done in the written world, by Ed Abbey who just might have assumed that Moab would have been left just the way it was:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Abbey
But the most tangible piece of fallout was this huge pile of Uranium, and given the Merle Travis Song it almost seems too perfect to be true, an estimated 16,000,000 tons of it, so tall you didn't used to be able to see Moab from north of town when you came in on the Highway from Green River. You see, like in so much mining, The Uranium didn't come in pure veins, maybe some of it was pretty dense, but they were processing 1400 tons of rock a day on average right there north of Moab to get the Uranium they wanted, and the rest was tossed in this pile on a flat spot by the river, loaded with heavy metals and lower grade radioactive materials, heck, probably some missed uranium as well, and there it has sat, kind of like the chunk of almost pure uranium they once found in a guys back yard in Moab after a fly by with a helicopter sporting a Geiger counter, not obviously hurting anybody, but likely not in the best spot.. as people started to come to Moab for recreation more and more, not just filming westerns and mining bomb bricks , and the nation's environmental consciousness started to invade even the last redoubts of old school industry like Utah, a plan was hatched to clean it all up. Now the Moab Tailings Pile ain't a Superfund Site, people point that name around like a rattlesnake points his snout,
http://www.epa.gov/region8/superfund/ut/index.html
but it is being supervised and paid for by the Federal Government, the Department of Energy, as they are to some degree the guys who caused the whole mess to be made in the first place. They are moving the whole pile to some big hole far from rivers where it might even be reprocessed to get just a wee bit more uranium out of it. How much have they moved, well, 36% at last count, about 6 million Tons, so while we're all another day older and perhaps, due to the TARP spending, truly deeper in debt, I can't say it didn't need to be done.
They post updates often. Due to running out of Stimulus Money, they are no longer working winters but are on the move 4 days a week, maintain equipment one day a week schedule, and oh yeah, you can see Moab from the crest of the highway now...
http://www.grandcountyutah.net/pdf/UMTRA_Status.pdf
http://www.gjem.energy.gov/moab/
http://www.new.ans.org/pubs/magazines/download/a_838
Maybe someday soon, the natives of the Future, some funny combo of Mormon, Hippie Raft Guide and Navajo, will be banging drums on that very spot unaware of what had occurred, safely smokin' dope, makin' sacred undergarments out of river reeds, and having fun as the river floods once again, free of the contamination Charlie Steen and The Space Age unleashed upon the river.. 2025 if not before...

Colorado River in Canyonlands NP just down from tailings pile