Nearly 40 years later, one of Colorado’s longest-running Superfund sites still has no radioactive waste cleanup plan
by Elise Schmelzer, The Denver Post | October 26, 2023 denverpost.com
Nearly 40 years later, one of Colorado’s longest-running Superfund sites still has no radioactive waste cleanup plan
Jeri Fry was six years old when she toured the uranium mill outside town where her dad worked.
It’s the smell she remembers best, more than 60 years later: a deep sulfur odor that permeated the mill and sometimes wafted downwind to the neighborhood where she grew up, two miles away.
“I remember my dad saying to not play in the water when we watered the lawn,” Fry said.
Her father, the mill’s lead chemist, was a whistleblower who alerted authorities to the health consequences of processing the radioactive element. Now 68, Fry has been deeply enmeshed in the decades-long effort in Cañon City to clean up the mill site and the surrounding areas it contaminated.
She cofounded a local group, Colorado Citizens Against Toxic Waste, to educate people, while she and other community members have spent thousands of hours reading planning documents and attending meetings.
But nearly 40 years after federal regulators designated the mill and surrounding areas a Superfund site and mandated its cleanup, the radioactive waste remains. There still is no plan for how to deal with the millions of tons of radioactive material sitting just south of Cañon City, a city of 17,000 located about 35 miles southwest of Colorado Springs.
The dedicated group of community members that’s been pushing the site owners and government agencies to make progress is increasingly frustrated at the slow pace of change—especially after the company that took on the cleanup responsibilities ran out of money this year, delaying the already drawn-out process once again.
“We the community have been calling ‘fire’ and nobody has come running,” Fry said. “The citizens have had to hold the feet to the fire—always, always, always.”
