The civil penalty is part of a settlement Union Pacific reached with the EPA for allegedly violating the Clean Water Act and the Oil Pollution Act. In 2003 and 2004, the EPA claims the company spilled oil and coal along railroad lines in all three states and committed other violations at 20 of its rail yards.

“Today we have secured a settlement that will help prevent spills, protect water quality, and improve the safety of Union Pacific’s operations in 20 communities across Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming,” said Jim Martin, EPA regional administrator. “Union Pacific has already begun putting necessary measures in place and we will ensure they continue to do so.”

A Union Pacific Railroad locomotive.

Union Pacific will deposit $1.4 million into the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, which is used by federal agencies to respond to oil spills. The remaining $100,000 will be paid to the U.S. Treasury for the coal spills and stormwater violations.

The settlement also requires Union Pacific to develop a management and reporting system to ensure compliance with the EPA’s Spill Prevention, Control, and Countermeasure rules, Facility Response Plan regulations, and storm water requirements in all three states.

“Union Pacific must take further actions to control stormwater runoff at the Burnham Rail Yard in Denver, which are anticipated to prevent the discharge of approximately 2,500 pounds of chemical oxygen demand, 50 pounds of nitrate, 11,000 pounds of total suspended solids, and 30 pounds of zinc annually to waters in the Denver area,” an EPA press release said. “This settlement will benefit many communities in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, many of which are disadvantaged, by requiring Union Pacific to install secondary containment to safely store oil and prevent oil spills from leaving its properties.”

Union Pacific will also be required to designate an environmental vice president responsible for complying with oil spill prevention and stormwater control requirements at its 20 rail yards.

The Colorado rail yards in question are located at Burnham, 36th Street in Denver, Denver North, East Portal Moffatt Tunnel, Grand Junction, Kremmling, Pueblo and Rifle.

“Union Pacific is working to ensure our response plans are up-to-date across our entire network and that our derailment response is as swift as possible while at the same time conforming to all applicable environmental laws,” Union Pacific spokesman Mark Davis said. “We are committed to protecting the environment now and for future generations. Our employees, customers, shareholders and the communities we serve can expect our full compliance with all laws and regulations.”

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Extracting fuel from oil shale can require anywhere between three and five barrels of water for every barrel of oil — one of the many reasons why it is more costly than producing conventional crude oil. Experts say commercial oil shale production is potentially a decade away, if it ever happens at all. Yet H.R. 3408, the “Pioneers Act,” would revive a 2008 plan by the Bureau of Land Management to open about 2 million acres of public lands in Utah, Wyoming and western Colorado to oil shale drilling.

“We already face a water shortage in the West that threatens farmers and ranchers,” said Bill Midcap of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union. “We simply cannot gamble away our water on oil shale speculation at the risk of losing our farming and ranching economy that we depend upon for our food and fiber. A farm economy that is crucial for our State and that is helping our State out of the recession. We should use existing research and development projects to determine how much water will be needed before we consider commercial leasing of oil shale.”

Conservation groups challenged the plan on grounds that the analysis of impacts and the process were flawed and a new proposal re-evaluating the plan is due out soon. Lamborn’s bill (pdf) would mandate commercial leasing on 125,000 acres of public lands by 2016 even though the technology isn’t in place.

“Lamborn’s approach to oil shale is ‘Ready or not here it comes,’ and we are not ready,’’ the National Wildlife Federation’s Kate Zimmerman said. “There are still very important questions to be answered about the impacts of extracting oil shale on Colorado communities, on water quantity and quality and on fish and wildlife. Let’s wait for the results of the existing research into oil shale technology that is already taking place on public lands in Colorado and Utah before we give away more public resources.”

Oil shale was behind the huge western Colorado bust of the 1980s, when Exxon shut down a massive project that threw communities and families into economic and social turmoil. Nonetheless House Speaker John Boehner recently pointed to new oil shale legislation as a way to pay for transportation projects in the next five years — a check that may be hard to cash.

“Republicans on the House Natural Resources Committee botched Rep. Lamborn’s oil shale legislation hearing, which showed just how ridiculous the bill is,” said Matt Garrington, co-director of the Checks and Balances Project. “In two hours, the committee majority voted down guaranteeing oil shale technology to be American-made, ensuring that oil shale extraction won’t harm water supplies for municipalities and agriculture, and requiring commercial oil shale to be a proven revenue generator before handing over 2 million acres of public land for speculation. House Republicans did manage to preserve taxpayer handouts for oil companies by giving away oil shale at bargain-basement rates, undermining Speaker Boehner’s goal of raising transportation funds.”

The Lamborn bill would set royalty rates for oil shale starting at 5 percent for five years – compared to about 12.5 percent for extracted offshore oil and gas – and gradually raise the rate over several years. If they were ever paid, Garrington added, the lower royalties would mean less revenue for local governments, which would then shoulder the burden of costs associated with energy development such as new schools, hospitals, emergency services, roads, and other utilities.

The Pioneers Act is one of three bills concerning domestic energy that the committee approved. The GOP also voted to jump start offshore oil production and open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. Republicans plan to attach the bills to a $260 billion transportation package.

“Instead of legislating seriously,” said David Goldston, director of government affairs for the Natural Resources Defense Council, what the Republicans have done is put out “an inventory of all the worst ideas they’ve had for the last two decades.”

Lamborn’s bill still must pass the House and if it does, like the other measures the House Committee on Natural Resources passed Wednesday, it will face opposition in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

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The Arizona law was sponsored by Russell Pearce, a Mormon. The law being considered in Utah was also written by a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Said Joseph Cannon, the paper’s editor, “What are the two commandments? Love God and love your neighbor. These people are our neighbors — incontestably, by any definition, they are our neighbors.”

After all, proponents argued at county hearing last summer and fall, look at nearby Telluride and Moab, Utah – both places with extensive mining histories that recovered to become meccas of alpine skiing and mountain biking.

True, bikers flock to the slick rock around Moab and happily pedal past tailings piles heaped along the Colorado River without giving their content much thought. Still, the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency were concerned enough to launch the massive and very expensive Moab Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action Project.

At a cost of up to $1 billion over the course of the next eight to 10 years (much of it in the form of stimulus dollars), the DOE will oversee the shipment of trainload after trainload of uranium tailings from the old Atlas Mill in a floodplain along the banks of the Colorado River to an EnergySolutions storage site 30 miles north along Interstate 70 at Crescent Junction.

The project just hit a milestone with a 136-container, 4,700-ton train arriving last week at the wide spot in the road where many Coloradans turn south off of I-70 toward Moab, Arches National Park and Canyonlands.

EnergySolutions, based in Salt Lake City, is the same company handling the storage of depleted uranium from Cold War-era nuclear weapons manufacturing that’s being shipped in by train from South Carolina. Some politicians and state regulators now want those shipments tested for radioactivity while state officials refine their storage rules. Seems like a good plan – perhaps one that should have been implemented prior to the first trainload rolling in last month.

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“I subscribe to the all-of-the-above energy policy, which means nuclear should be a big part of our future, and the benefit of nuclear power is its green footprint,” freshman U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz said. “I recognize it comes with great risk, but if you’re serious about greenhouse gasses, then you should be a serious supporter of nuclear development.”

That sentiment echoes those of Colorado Sen. Mark Udall, a Democrat, who has introduced a bill aimed a sparking a nuclear power revival in the United States despite serious trepidation about potential accidents and waste storage nightmares among both environmentalists and the general populace.

Nuclear power currently accounts for about 20 percent of the electricity in the United States (mostly on the East Coast), but following accidents at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and Chernobyl in the Ukraine in the 1970s and 80s, no new nuclear plants have come online in the U.S. in decades.

Chaffetz wants to see 100 new nuclear plants built around the country in the coming years, and he’s confident technology can mitigate past contamination problems linked with mining and milling uranium – historically a big industry in far western Colorado and eastern Utah – as well as waste-storage issues associated with spent fuel rods.

Utah is currently embroiled in a storage controversy related to trainloads of depleted uranium from Cold War-era weapons production being stored at an Energy Solutions facility in Clive, Utah. And communities in Colorado have banded together to fight both a uranium mill proposal near Montrose and a uranium mine plan near Fort Collins.

New uranium claims have been filed across the West in anticipation of another nuclear power boom, as the industry finds more and more bipartisan support because of lower greenhouse gas emissions and a growing rep as an alternative to dirtier-burning coal, oil and natural gas. But opponents are concerned about impacts on national parks and other wild places and the risks of transporting yellowcake and nuclear waste across state lines.

Even though his Third Congressional District doesn’t include Green River or the historic uranium-mining hotbed of Moab, Chaffetz supports a statewide push to revive the industry. He said fears of increased mining impacting tourism in and around the state’s great national parks in southeastern Utah – a frequent recreation destination for Coloradans – are overblown.

“That’s a scare tactic that’s more rooted in hyperbole than it is reality,” he said. “The reality is we have borders for these national parks. These environmentalists argue there needs to be some big buffer zone, and I don’t buy into that. If we don’t want to be left beholden to the terrorist nations around the world, we’re going to have to get serious about nuclear development.”

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The paper reports the EPA and Powertech have been working on a permit for two years, and the company’s in situ mining process would contaminate part of the aquifer – something that’s allowable under certain types of EPA uranium mining permits. A number of local municipalities have officially voiced opposition to the proposed project.

In other uranium news , the Associated Press Friday was reporting a deal had been struck between the U.S. Department of Energy and the state of Utah that would forestall permanent storage of depleted uranium from weapons production in South Carolina until Utah officials can write new environmental rules addressing the impacts of such storage.

On Tuesday, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert wrote to Energy Secretary Steven Chu accusing the DOE of playing politics because of stimulus-funded jobs creation associated with the South Carolina cleanup.

In a letter to Energy Secretary Steven Chu Tuesday, Herbert urged the Department of Energy to hold off on the shipments – set to occur over the next couple of weeks – until the state can complete rule-making to put better public regulatory safeguards in place, according to the Desert News in Salt Lake City.

“As a scientist yourself,” Herbert’s letter to Chu reads, “I know you can appreciate that good public policy requires good science, and I am concerned that DOE’s decision to ship this waste to Utah now is based more on politics than on science.”

According to the Associated Press, cleanup efforts in South Carolina are being funded by stimulus dollars meant to create jobs. Critics of congressional efforts to revive the nation’s nuclear industry as a virtually carbon-free alternative power source have pointed to waste storage as one of the biggest hurdles.

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Interior Secretary Ken Salazar (Split Estate)

Last week the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States (IPAMS) issued a report skewering Salazar for reversing the Bush administration on natural gas leases on BLM land near iconic national parks in Utah.

According to the Associated Press, Salazar said huge swaths of federal land were leased for oil and gas drilling last year and another 38 lease sales are scheduled for next year, but that the new administration wants a more balanced approach to domestic energy production – one that gives more weight to renewable energy.

“We believe that our oil and gas leasing program is robust, but it is also a program that we have brought back into balance,” Salazar said. “But you wouldn’t know it if you listened to the untruths coming out of some of the corners of the oil and gas industry.”

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Federal judge Dee Benson was having none of that, according to the Associated Press, denying a motion by DeChristopher’s lawyers and essentially rejecting his defense that he jacked up the bids at a chaotic BLM auction last December in order to curtail climate change by blocking drilling near iconic national parks like Canyonlands and Arches.

Tim DeChristopher

“Unlike a person demolishing a home to create a firebreak, DeChristopher’s actions were more akin to placing a small pile of dirt in the fire’s path,” Benson reportedly wrote in his ruling – a statement that hopefully at least made sense to the judge.

Benson said DeChristopher should have demonstrated outside the auction, where he could have rubbed elbows with protesting luminaries like Robert Redford, or sued along with other conservationists who ultimately succeeded in getting much of the acreage removed from drilling consideration.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar just last month blocked the most critical acreage near national parks from drilling. The legal system apparently works, is the message there, with a Colorado auction just last week underscoring the point.

The BLM in Colorado auctioned approximately 6,000 acres for $112,969 on Thursday, according to AP, the third smallest amount of leased acres since the late 70s. Exxon Mobil was the big spender, paying a mere $215 an acre for an 81-acre parcel in Rio Blanco County, but clearly the economy and depressed gas prices are still impacting the industry.

Before the Colorado auction, Western Resource Advocates praised a BLM decision to remove from the sale 907 acres adjacent to the Black Mountain Inventoried Roadless Area on the Routt National Forest in Moffat County. WRA filed a protest on behalf of the Colorado Environmental Coalition because the land is critical deer, elk, cutthroat trout and sandhill crane habitat.

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The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is already on the record questioning the proposed leasing of up to 24,000 acre feet of the Green River to Blue Castle Holdings Inc., which proposed the power plant. The federal agency said taking so much water out of the Green could lead to several fish species being listed under the Endangered Species Act.

Two conservation groups — Living Rivers and Uranium Watch – filed protests Tuesday, according to the Sentinel, which reported another water conservation district is considering leasing 30,000 more acre feet for the project. But the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation also questioned the diversion, arguing the Green River may already be “over-appropriated.”

Recent calls for a revival of the nation’s nuclear power industry as a low-carbon alternative to fossil fuels in order to combat global warming – including a controversial pro-nuclear stance by Colorado Sen. Mark Udall – have been met with skepticism by some in the environmental community who worry about long-term waste storage and water consumption in the arid West.

The call for a nuclear revival has also led to rampant uranium-mining speculation in and around iconic public lands such as the Grand Canyon and divisive battles over mining and processing yellowcake for fuel rods, including recent hearings in Montrose County.

In calling for an investigation of oil shale lease amendments in the waning days of the Bush administration, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar Tuesday questioned just how much electrical power would be needed for full-scale commercial oil shale production.

Super heating and squeezing kerogen from shale rock and sand in the Green River Formation of northwestern Colorado, eastern Utah and southwestern Wyoming could tap into an estimated 1 trillion barrels of oil, but some analysts say at least 10 new coal-fired power plants would be required in Colorado alone.

That’s led to speculation about nuclear power as a means of providing enough electricity to power full-scale oil shale production. A nuclear power plant in Green River, Utah, would be at the epicenter of any future oil shale boom.

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