A decision by a regional board has put Denver in an untenable position. The city wants to do the right thing – remove radioactive wastes from densely populated neighborhoods – but last week bureaucracy and lawsuits got in the way.
About 80 years ago, material containing radium was used as the base layer for several streets in central Denver. Radium is a naturally occurring but slightly radioactive element. It isn’t an immediate health risk, but its dust might be a hazard if it’s disturbed or displaced, as happens when underground utilities are replaced or repaired or streets are dug up.
Over about the past decade, the city has carefully and systematically dug up and replaced contaminated dirt – a complex process because many worker safety and public health precautions are required.
This summer, the city planned to finish a major part of the project, removing radium- laced material on Corona Street next to Dora Moore Elementary School. Denver had thought it would wrap up the last part of the cleanup in summer 2007.
But now Denver has had to cancel this summer’s tasks and isn’t sure if it can schedule any radium cleanup work next year. In fact, Denver doesn’t know when it can resume the necessary cleanup.
For years, Denver shipped the several thousand tons of contaminated material generated by the street cleanup to a licensed low-level radioactive waste dump in Idaho. But in December, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment licensed Clean Harbors Environmental Services to take low-level radioactive wastes at its facility near Last Chance in Adams County.
This week, the Rocky Mountain Low-Level Radioactive Waste Compact Board (which under federal law regulates low-level waste in Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico) told Denver to stop sending radium to Idaho and instead truck it to Last Chance.
Trouble is, Last Chance can’t take the stuff yet. While the state has licensed the dump for such waste, Adams County insists it also needs to certify the dump to take even low-level radioactive materials – and the county adamantly opposes letting Clean Harbors do so. A lawsuit filed in Adams County is pending and another filed in Denver is on appeal.
Clean Harbors said it would take Denver’s radium to a temporary site, but city officials say the suggested alternative may work for only a few weeks – and the lawsuits could take years to resolve.
And, sending the radium to temporary storage before taking it to a final disposal site would mean hauling tons of radioactive wastes repeatedly over Colorado highways, a risk Denver wants to avoid.
Denver can’t risk digging up the radium without knowing that there’s a safe, immediately available permanent storage facility to take it. So the city put the radium cleanup’s final stages on indefinite hold.
The regional board based its decision on the narrow economic issue of whether allowing Denver to keep sending wastes to Idaho would financially harm Clean Harbors’ dump in Adams County. But the result of that myopic approach has been to abruptly halt the impressive environmental progress Denver had been making, and admirably wanted to finish in the near future.
City officials haven’t decided whether to appeal the board’s decision to federal court, but they certainly should ask the board to reconsider. Regardless of what happens to the Last Chance dump, the board shouldn’t keep Denver from sending the last of the waste to Idaho and finish the nearly completed job.
