After decades of planning and four years of work, construction at the Chimney Hollow Reservoir, just west of Loveland, is now on pause. That\u2019s after Northern Water, the operator of the project, discovered uranium in the granite used to build the dam.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe determined that the source of the uranium was the granite rock at the site, which had been quarried to provide material to build the (dam) embankment,\u201d she said. \u201cMeaning the embankment is now filled with these granite rocks that contain uranium.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Chimney Hollow Reservoir is expected to become the largest dam built in the U.S. in more than two decades and will eventually serve over one million people along the Front Range, including residents of Broomfield, Erie, Fort Lupton, Greeley, Lafayette, Longmont, Louisville, Loveland, and Superior.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0The $600 million project was designed to store up to 90,000 acre-feet of water to help meet the needs of Northern Colorado\u2019s growing population. Most of that supply will be drawn from the Upper Colorado River. Northern Water says it has spent $90 million in mitigating impacts on the Western Slope, including turning off pumps when temperatures get too high for fish and only taking water out of the river during wet years.<\/p>\n
But earlier this year, Northern Water reported that they detected uranium leaching into the small amount of water currently in the reservoir. Esther Vincent, the director of environmental services at Northern Water, says it took \u201ca solid year and a half\u201d for the utility to realize there was an issue.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While there are no active uranium mines in Colorado, experts say \u201cabundant\u201d natural uranium reserves exist throughout the state \u2014 many of which have yet to be discovered. Today, uranium is the primary fuel for nuclear power plants to generate electricity and produce nuclear weapons.\u00a0<\/p>\n
According to Vincent, it\u2019s still unclear how much uranium is present in the dam. She says Northern Water has been conducting \u201cmultiple investigations\u201d to determine how much uranium could continue leaching from the surrounding rock over time. Because of that ongoing work, the timeline for completing the reservoir \u2014 and for when communities along the Front Range may begin receiving water \u2014 is now uncertain.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had initially thought that we would start moving water into the reservoir in early November, but we\u2019ve delayed that,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019ll be sometime in the new year, but we don\u2019t have a firm date yet.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even with the multiple delays to the project and many unknowns, Vincent says, \u201cThere will be no impacts to communities in terms of the drinking water that they’re going to receive.\u201d All the water in the reservoir will go to a water treatment plant before making its way to people\u2019s taps. So Vincent says, \u201cThe concern is to make sure that the [uranium] concentrations in the water that gets delivered to the treatment plants is staying within really low levels that make it manageable for these treatment plants to deal with it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Environmental Protection Agency has a set maximum contaminant level for uranium in public drinking water at 30 micrograms per liter of water. Studies have shown that while uranium is naturally occurring, it is still radioactive, so coming in contact with high levels of uranium can cause a variety of health issues, including kidney damage, increased risk for high blood pressure, and reproductive problems.<\/p>\n
Despite this, Northern Water says the reservoir remains essential for meeting future demand along the Front Range. But until investigators understand how much uranium may leach from the dam\u2019s rock over time, the project\u2019s finish line remains uncertain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After decades of planning and four years of work, construction at the Chimney Hollow Reservoir, just west of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":320857,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[9045,148352,192,147949,79,98844,282],"class_list":["post-320856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-colorado-news","tag-dams","tag-environment","tag-loveland","tag-science","tag-uranium","tag-water"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=320856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320856\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/320857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}