Warm Sands
Subtitle: Uranium Mill Tailings Policy in the Atomic West
Edition: 1st edition
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: November 29, 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 251
ISBN-13: 9780826322807
Subjects: Nuclear issues; Waste management; Uranium mill tailings; Military - Nuclear Warfare; Government policy; History; Environmental Studies; United States - 20th Century; History: American; USA; Nuclear Energy; Environmental Science; History / United States / 20th Century; Environmental aspects; Radioactive Waste Disposal; United States
Description: "From 1978 to 1998, Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action (UMTRA) Project contractors removed and secured nearly forty million cubic yards of low-level radioactive uranium reduction mill tailings waste from abandoned mill sites in eleven states and four Indian reservations - enough material to bury 2300 football fields in ten feet of radioactive sand. The contractors also decontaminated over five thousand residential, commercial, and public properties that had been polluted with tailings. In addition to these federal efforts, the private uranium industry interred millions of tons of tailings generated by their mill operations. The UMTRA Project was the world's largest materials management program designed to shield the public from potentially hazardous radioactive waste." "This is the story of that project, contextualized within the history of American atomic power and uranium mining."--Jacket.