An environmental group’s long-running lawsuit against southeast Utah’s White Mesa uranium mill has been dismissed in federal court, after state regulators testified on the company’s behalf and convinced the judge that their own actions on the mill’s radioactive emissions were invalid.
The Grand Canyon Trust, an Arizona-based advocacy group, sued the mill in 2014 after discovering its owner, Energy Fuels, had self-reported violations of radon emissions standards from one of the site’s tailings cells.
The group’s lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City, sought to speed up the cell’s closure and reclamation in order to limit the impact on the nearby communities of Bluff and White Mesa from the radon, a harmful gas associated with radioactive decay and linked to lung cancer.