Uranium Contaminating Drinking Water In West

Officials with the Geological Survey's Sacramento office and elsewhere believe the amount of uranium increased in Central Valley drinking-water supplies over the last 150 years with the spread of farming.

In a trailer park tucked among irrigated orchards that help make California's San Joaquin Valley the richest farm region in the world, 16-year-old Giselle Alvarez, one of the few English-speakers in the community of farmworkers, puzzles over the notices posted on front doors: There's a danger in their drinking water.

Uranium, the notices warn, tests at a level considered unsafe by federal and state standards. The law requires the park's owners to post the warnings. But they are awkwardly worded and in English, a language few of the park's dozens of Spanish-speaking families can read.

"It says you can drink the water — but if you drink the water over a period of time, you can get cancer," said Alvarez, whose working-class family has no choice but keep drinking and cooking with the tainted tap water daily, as they have since Alvarez was just learning to walk. "They really don't explain."

Uranium, the stuff of nuclear fuel for power plants and atom bombs, increasingly is showing in drinking water systems in major farming regions of the U.S. West — a naturally occurring but unexpected byproduct of irrigation, of drought, and of the overpumping of natural underground water reserves.

An Associated Press investigation in California's central farm valleys — along with the U.S. Central Plains, among the areas most affected — found authorities are doing little to inform the public at large of the growing risk.

In the Edgemont area southwest of Rapid City, federal scientists are studying the environmental impact of the past uranium-mining era. At least two large open-pit mines remain unreclaimed north of Edgemont, and there’s a massive containment site south of Edgemont where 4 million tons of radioactive tailings — the byproduct of uranium milling — were buried.

The impact of the water-filled, open-pit mines on the surrounding environment is largely unknown but was the subject of September testing by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Results are pending.

Another uranium mine, to be operated by Azarga Uranium Corporation, is proposed in that area. Azarga's manager for the proposed mine, Mark Hollenbeck, asserts that the Azarga mine's method of extracting uranium is safer than the old system of digging underground.

Hollenbeck said Azarga will be required to post millions of dollars worth of bonds, which are yet to be calculated, if it wins regulatory approval. The bonds would serve as financial protection for taxpayers and landowners if the company is unable to reclaim the mined areas.

But critics of Azarga's plan fear regulators might loosen the water standards over time to favor Azarga.

Source: Rapid City Journal

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