The UMTRA PEIS: A strategy for groundwater remediation

A programmatic environmental impact statement (PEIS) was initiated in 1992 for the uranium mill tailings remedial action (UMTRA) program. The PEIS kicked off the groundwater restoration phase of UMTRA, a project involving remediation of 24 sites in ten states and tribal lands contaminated with tailings from uranium mining and milling operations. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) agreed, in early 1992, that a PEIS was an appropriate strategy to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) for this second, groundwater phase of the project. This decision recognized that although a parallel effort was being undertaken in preparing a PEIS for DOE's Environmental Restoration/Waste Management (ER/WM) program, characteristics and the maturity of the UMTRA project made it more appropriate to prepare a separate PEIS. The ER/WM PEIS is intended to examine environmental restoration and waste management issues from a very broad perspective. For UMTRA, with surface remediation completed or well under way at 18 of the 24 sites, a more focused programmatic approach for groundwater restoration is more effective than including the UMTRA project within the ER/WM environmental impact statements. A separate document allows a more focused and detailed analysis necessary to efficiently tier site-specific environmental assessments for groundwater restorationmore » at each of the 24 UMTRA former processing sites.« less