We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ EPA - But Who Would Pay?

It’s the silly season again, and we are pounded daily with the election memes: Corporations are people too, 47% of Americans are moochers, EPA job killing regulations, and on and on.  If you are a political junkie like me it’s easy to get totally consumed by it all and lose your sanity in the process.  So to protect my mental health I took an unplanned vacation and headed to southern Utah to refresh my spirit basking in the glories of our National Parks, namely Canyonlands and Arches. Nestled near the Colorado and Green Rivers and surrounding the town of Moab are some of the most spectacular red rocks, geological formations and canyons I’ve ever seen.

My mental health sojourn didn’t last long.  One cannot visit the town of Moab without driving by the “UMTRA” site and spotting the radioactive hazard symbol on signs dotting the fence along our route.

This of course lead me to find out just what this was all about.  Briefly, here’s what I found out.

The site opened in 1956 for uranium ore processing by Uranium Reduction Co., who sold it in 1962 to Atlas Corp.  Atlas operated the site until 1984.  The site is approximately 500 acres on the west bank of the Colorado River. 130 acres on this site are contaminated by uranium tailings and tailings contaminated soil stored in an unlined impoundment.  Atlas began remediation in 1988 continuing through 1995 but work ceased when Atlas’ plan to cap it in place was derailed when uranium was found leaking into the Colorado River at a rate of 530 times the federal radiation limit. To avoid legal consequences Atlas would have had to also restore groundwater health. After studying the potential cleanup cost that approached $1 billion they found it cheaper to declare bankruptcy in 1998.  Atlas relinquished their license and forfeited their reclamation bond of only $5.25 million and got out of town, leaving the Nuclear Regulatory Commission holding the bag.

The NRC cannot possess a site it is responsible for regulating, so PriceWaterhouseCoopers was appointed the trustee and they initiated reclamation with the forfeited bond money.  Eventually through an act of Congress responsibility for cleanup transferred to the Dept. of Energy in Oct, 2001. DOE studied the situation and determined removal and offsite storage of the contaminated soil and active ground water remediation were required.  The contaminants are now being moved to a storage site 30 miles north in Crescent Junction via rail, a special rail line that had to be built for this specific purpose.

The scope of the cleanup is mind boggling but equally so was the placement of the tailings site in the first place.  This pile of contamination was placed less than 750 feet from the banks of the Colorado, a river that supplies drinking water to the cities of Las Vegas, Tucson and San Diego.  Historical flood data shows that several times floods have scoured the surface and leveled the area to a depth of 25 feet, washing everything in that location eventually into the river.  And Atlas wanted to “cap in place”?  Cap in place - 16 million tons of contaminated radioactive soil, to a depth of 110 feet, the 5th largest tailings pile and the most dangerously polluting one in the country.  Go figure. (A good history of the project via Grand Canyon Trust can be found here, some of which has been used in this blog).

(Picture from Moab UMTRA Project Fact Sheet, link above)

Today the removal work is 1/3 finished with total completion expected in 2025 depending upon annual appropriations.  Currently the cleanup is proceeding at an annual cost of around $31 million/year with total cost likely to exceed $1 billion by 2019.  

My friends - this is just one project.  This is a DOE responsibility.  This is not related to any EPA Superfund site.  That’s a whole ‘nother story.

1 in 4 Americans live within 3 miles of an EPA designated super fund site.  The program began in 1980 and as of 2007 there were over 47,000 hazardous waste sites listed, with 1,569 designated as on the Super Fund National Priorities list.  From 1980 thru 1995 a tax placed on oil and chemical companies was collected for remediations, but that tax collection ended in 1995 at which point 68% of the trust fund came from the taxes collected. When the tax collection ceased, the makeup significantly flipped to the public sector.  17% of the super fund trust fund in 1995 came from “appropriations from the general funds” - meaning you and me taxpayer, while as of 2007 it was 59%.  Funds from recovery of money from the polluting company, if they could be found, was 6% through 1995 and rose to 19% as of 2007.  All of the costs and input of funds and how they are spent is well documented in a 2007 audit report from the GAO.  On average, $1.3 billion a year is appropriated from the trust fund by Congress for the EPA superfund work.

These two stories, representing BILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF TAXPAYER MONEY, are only the tip of the iceberg.  But it leads me to ask this question: If Corporations are people too why does the government own this problem?  Granted, many of these sites are from military activities and the government should rightly own those cleanups, but what about all the corporate polluters?

Today’s Libertarian and GOP followers decry big government.  Many in those ranks proclaim they would eliminate both the EPA and the DOE if they could.  EPA is repeatedly blamed for “job killing regulations”.  (I won’t ponder how many jobs EPA has actually created in subcontract work to companies doing the cleanups).  Conservatives consistently espouse ideals of “personal responsibility”, a worthy ideal.  Where is the responsibility of corporations to prevent polluting in the first place and should it occur, cleaning up after themselves? Or is it that corporations really aren’t people so personal responsibility doesn’t apply? Where is their responsibility to the rights of the public to have safe drinking water and clean air?  Why do corporations spend billions on lobbyists to try and kill any regulation that would force them to be responsible citizens given their egregious history of flouting that responsibility, yet run when forced to pay for their own mess?  They have not earned the right to be trusted with good stewardship of the earth.  If they had we would not need an EPA in the first place.  You reap what you sow.

So we don’t need no stinkin’ EPA?  Imagine our country without one.

As we left Canyonlands National Park after a wondrous day of marveling at the incredible geology overlooking the Colorado River, the road out of the park was lined with oil derricks.  The drill, baby, drill, mine, baby, mine mentality is knocking on the doors of our national treasures.  I thanked Tim DeChristopher every day for helping bring attention to the possibility of more drilling on the edge of the parks.  Ironically, the very week we were in Moab it was announced that the leases he bid on in an effort to protect the parks through civil disobedience were formally dead because the companies involved missed a 90 day deadline to file a lawsuit.  The decision of the US 10th District Circuit Court of Appeals ended years of haggling and discord over an oil and gas auction held during the Bush Administration.  Unfortunately it didn’t end Tim DeChristopher’s jail term where he is still today serving a two year sentence for trying to protect our National Parks.

How many corporate polluters, oil spillers, methane spewers, coal ash and noxious gas polluters, water and soil polluters, fracking fluid polluters are currently serving time for their lack of “personal responsibility”?  I haven’t researched the answer, but I am betting that it equates to roughly the same number of those serving time from Wall Street and banking manipulations of our financial markets.  A big fat fingered ZERO!