A truck hauling a sealed container of radioactive tailings at the Atlas mill tailings site north of Moab tipped over Wednesday, Oct. 14, spilling the contents of the container and forcing the contractor, EnergySolutions, to shut down the project for several days.

The spill occurred just outside the area where lids are placed on the containers and sealed before being hauled up to the railroad siding for train transportation to a permanent disposal site near Crescent Junction.

The lid came off the container and the contents spilled to the ground just barely outside the site’s contamination boundary, said Wendee Ryan, spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Energy project. EnergySolutions, the contractor that transports the tailings, immediately isolated the spill with a barrier connecting it to the contamination boundary, Ryan,said.

“There was no release of tailings off the site,” Ryan said.

EnergySolutions immediately notified the Grand County emergency dispatcher of the accident and shut down operations while a review of the incident as well as general safety and training procedures was conducted.

“What we did was protect the workers and the public to the fullest extent,” Ryan said.

Grand County Council chairman Bob Greenberg and Grand County Engineer Mark Wright were similarly notified, Greenberg said.

Because no one was injured during the rollover, Sheriff Jim Nyland had his deputies turn back an ambulance that was sent to the site by the dispatcher, Nyland said.

The spill was cleaned up Friday morning and rail shipments resumed on Tuesday, Oct. 20, Ryan said. She said a scintillometer test was conducted and the results assured safety officers that no radiation remained on the ground after the cleanup.

The tailings that were spilled had been “conditioned,” – dried to a desired moisture content in the open air on the tailings pile before they were loaded into the container. Following project protocol, a “dirty side” truck had hauled the container to the structure to have a lid placed on it, Ryan said.

After the lid was in place the container was then loaded on a “clean side” truck for transport to the rail siding. Just as that truck left the lidding structure it veered off the roadway, tipped over, and spilled its load, Ryan said.

The cause of the accident is still under investigation. The driver has returned to work, Ryan said.

“The decision to ship the tailings by rail, instead of by truck, is now validated,” Greenberg said as he contemplated the possibility of dozens of trucks hauling tailings on U.S. 191. The decision to move the tailings using railroad cars was prompted by a crowded public hearing in which local residents expressed their fears of accidents and hazardous waste spills on the highway.

At that public hearing DOE Project Director Don Metzler assured area residents that the lids would never leak. The containers comply with U.S. Department of Transportation hazardous material standards, and with DOE standards, Metzler has said.

But, as it turns out, the containers are not designed to be tipped over, Ryan said.

Tailings containers do not have to be “bombproof” like containers used for hauling nuclear fuel, for example, “because the tailings don’t present the same type of hazard,” Ryan said, adding that tailings are of “very low radioactivity.”