DOE's last uranium cleanup nears $1.16B done. The land is unclaimed

Seventy years after a private mill began processing uranium ore on the bank of the Colorado River, GAO's July 15, 2026 report puts a final number on what it has cost the U.S. government to clean it up: about $1.16 billion, of which DOE has already spent roughly $970 million through fiscal year 2025.▸ The remaining tailings -- about 1 million tons of contaminated material still buried at the site -- are due out by mid-2027, and the Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Environmental Management (EM), the agency office that runs the government's nuclear-cleanup program, expects to finish the job by 2029. Of the 52 sites under the Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act (UMTRCA), Moab is the last of DOE's original Title I sites -- the group Congress ordered remediated first -- not yet closed out; DOE finished every other Title I site by 1998.

The Moab Mill Site began in 1956 as a private uranium mill; through 1970 its concentrate went to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, DOE's precursor agency, for the national defense program, before the mill shifted to commercial nuclear-power sales.▸ The private owner shut it down in 1984 and went bankrupt; in 2000 Congress directed DOE to remediate it under UMTRCA Title I. The tailings had been stored in an unlined pond, and the surrounding groundwater is now contaminated with uranium and ammonia that threatens the nearby Colorado River -- the mechanism, not just the fact, of why this is a federal cleanup and not a fenced-off ruin: since 2003, an interim well system has pulled about 1 million pounds of ammonia and over 5,000 pounds of uranium out of that groundwater to keep it from reaching the river.

Most UMTRCA Title I sites split cleanup costs 90/10 with the state where they sit; Moab is exempted from that requirement, and the federal government pays 100 percent, funded through DOE's Non-Defense Environmental Cleanup account.▸ That single-site $1.16 billion sits inside a much larger number: DOE's FY2025 Agency Financial Report⧉ puts DOE's total environmental cleanup and disposal liability, agency-wide, at about $538.6 billion -- and the same report's independent audit found a material weakness in how EM's environmental-liability estimates are reported, flagged specifically at the Portsmouth/Paducah, Savannah River, Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and Hanford sites. Moab, by contrast, is a single project with an end date GAO can actually price.

The remaining work is itemized and dated: the last roughly 1 million tons of buried tailings move to the Crescent Junction Disposal Site by mid-2027; the groundwater remedy design, about 60 percent finished, needs the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) concurrence -- UMTRCA's primary regulator for the site -- in 2027, though remediation and monitoring at the site may continue for decades after; site restoration, including realigning the Moab Wash stream, wraps by 2029.

Then comes the handoff: EM expects to transfer the mill site and disposal site to DOE's Office of Legacy Management (LM), which takes over long-term federal stewardship of closed cleanup sites, by the end of 2029.▸ LM's own most recent Site Management Guide says 2032. The two DOE offices that have to execute the handoff have not reconciled their own paperwork on when it happens.

DOE intends to keep the disposal site and a limited slice of the mill site permanently, and plans documents point toward transferring most of the mill site's 480 acres to Grand County, Utah, the rural county whose seat is the city of Moab -- but officials told GAO they have not made a final determination.▸ DOE lacks authority under UMTRCA itself to make that transfer; it has two routes. It could use its own Atomic Energy Act authority to grant or sell the land, though officials would not say whether they'd sell or give it away. Or Congress could pass the Moab UMTRA Project Transition Act of 2025 (S.1321/H.R.2681), which would require a free transfer to the county -- introduced in both chambers, but as of May 2026 it had passed neither.

Underneath either path, about 74 percent of the site's acreage is already constrained by steep hillsides, a conservation easement, transportation rights-of-way, or flood hazard, according to Grand County's own 2023 community-vision survey of 179 residents -- the local standard the county itself set for judging what the land can become.▸ GAO found DOE fully followed seven of eight leading practices for engaging those stakeholders, but only partially followed the one about clearly communicating goals: some stakeholders told GAO they remain confused about the land-transfer process itself.

EM expects to decide by the end of fiscal year 2026 whether one remaining contaminated property near the site needs remediation, and to finish supplemental-standards paperwork for five adjacent properties by 2028.▸ The final groundwater remedy goes to the NRC in 2027. The last tailings move by mid-2027. Site restoration finishes in 2029 -- the same year EM says the mill and disposal sites transfer to LM, though LM's own planning document says 2032. None of that resolves who owns the land: that depends on a DOE administrative decision that has not been made, or on a congressional bill that has not moved since its 2025 introduction. EM and LM's 2024 memorandum of understanding gives them a 10-year window to sort out the transition -- the same decade in which Grand County expects an answer.