This week’s Indy Environment newsletter looks at the state’s efforts to digitize more than a century of water records, making their archive more accessible to researchers and the public.

State regulators are requiring the U.S. Department of Energy to increase monitoring of waste at the Nevada National Security Site after the agency shipped unapproved low-level radioactive waste to the site.

The Nevada Division of Environmental Protection (NDEP) is defending a groundwater report that reduced the extent of uranium and arsenic contamination linked to the former Anaconda Copper Mine in Yerington, an agricultural town about 70 miles from Reno.

When the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection released a revised report on polluted groundwater in May 2020, the agency’s administrator said in a press release that the report would “chart a path forward based on the best available science” for cleaning up a toxic mine. But a review of more than 2,000 pages of records shows the “best available science” was the product of negotiation between NDEP and a company.

An effort to privatize public land at the former Anaconda Copper Mine in Yerington would leave the federal government with little oversight over a massive cleanup led by state regulators who have faced criticism for relying on company data to assess an aquifer with high uranium levels.

Experts hired by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) expressed concerns in July that a state-approved report downplayed the groundwater pollution caused by the former Anaconda Copper Mine near Yerington, according to comments obtained by The Nevada Independent.

In May, state regulators approved a revised report holding the mine responsible for less than half of the potential contamination previously modeled, a conclusion far more favorable for ARCO. In the long term, it could mean a less extensive and less expensive aquifer cleanup.

Two top Nevada gold operators, Nevada Gold Mines and Coeur Rochester, are crying foul over the Department of Energy’s recent decision to designate a private Texas facility as the long-term storage site for mercury generated from their mining. The agency’s decision to use the Texas facility, Waste Control Specialists (WCS), came with a hefty storage fee: $37,000 per metric ton.

Nearly two decades since the mine’s last operator declared bankruptcy, workers are starting to cut off contamination pathways under an EPA deal deferring oversight of the vast cleanup to state regulators. The trickiest and potentially most long-lasting decision will come in selecting how to address the contaminated groundwater.

Under an agreement signed last year, the state is overseeing an extensive cleanup of the Anaconda Copper Mine amid criticism and a complex history.