When the federal government suggested hauling 3
million cubic yards of low-level radioactive sand down the main
street of Blanding, Utah, the mayor and city council agreed. That
came as a shock to the Department of Energy’s project manager Don
Leske, who expected to be urged to build a highway bypass. “When
you go to a town and say we’d like to run 110,000 trucks through
here in the next two or three years, the normal reaction is, well,
a very strong “no’,” he told the Salt Lake Tribune. Instead, the
town council worried that a bypass would require an environmental
impact statement, and that inevitable appeals would kill the
tailings cleanup project and the jobs it would bring. Even worse,
town residents feared that a bypass would give tourists a way
around their town. Townspeople who fought for a bypass say their
dust and traffic concerns were largely ignored. “Blanding is a
fool’s paradise and anyone who raises an environmental question is
instantly branded a second-class citizen,” says Gene Stevenson,
president of the Concerned Citizens of San Juan County. The
Department of Energy intends to consolidate radioactive tailings
from a 40-year-old federal uranium mill in Monticello at the Umetco
uranium mill south of Blanding.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Tourists and tailings in Utah.
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