From the Deseret News (Amy Joi O’Donoghue):
In August, the Department of Energy and its primary contractor on removal, EnergySolutions, marked the removal of 2 million tons of tailings to a disposal site 30 miles to the north. An infusion of $108 million in federal stimulus funding in April 2009 accelerated the daily cleanup to two trainloads of dirt. At 3 p.m. each day, 144 containers are loaded onto the railroad cars by a Gantry crane to ferry 5,000 tons of waste to Crescent Junction. At 3 a.m., the next trainload departs. Don Metzler, the DOE’s project director, said even absent the stimulus funding, the removal is 44 trains ahead of schedule and the project is well under budget…
Cleanup of the Moab tailings site may be completed as early as 2019, with Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, pushing hard for the U.S. Department of Energy to keep funding levels the same at the 130-acre site. If the funding drops, cleanup completion could be delayed to 2025, or possibly later.