Oral History | Uranium Memories Project | Moab Museum
February 15, 2025
INTERVIEWER
Kayley Boddy
INTERVIEWEE
Kristine Brey

Q: Okay, so I’m Kayley, I’m with the Moab Museum. Today is Saturday, February 15 and we are at the public opening of the U92 exhibit for the Moab Museum. What is your name?

A: My name is Kristine Brey and I worked at the cleanup for the uranium, for the Atlas Mill site here in Moab from 2006 to 2021 when I retired.

Q: Awesome. What would you like to share with us today about your time working there?

A: Well, looking at it today as we drove in, it was very interesting because the building was gone. The old Atlas Mill building was gone. The one thing I always remember when we went through there was the pile. And knowing now that mill building is done, it is getting close to the end of this project. But when I first came here, actually, before 2006 I came out here, contracted out of Grand Junction. They were Department of Energy, and we came out for a weekend, dust control, to make sure we weren’t spreading any of the contamination anywhere. So I worked weekends here, just the change from year to year as I worked here, then being gone for five years and coming back, the change is interesting, just the structure. Came here, we actually worked out of the mill building itself, some of the old office areas, what we could use, as we [?] still used that, and how it evolved from there, but how we got out of that and then built up the area. We worked out of two or three trailers. I think we had the construction trailer. And where I worked with the radiation protection part, we had our own part, and the access control and the scanning of people in. It you know, was tiny, teeny, tiny compared to what it is now. You know, then cleaning the underbrush out, I remember having to go down to the river pumps. From where we were, it seemed like a mile. When we cleaned the brush away, it was like about two blocks. So, I mean, just that change, looking at old pictures of the site and what we did, how we had to do the infrastructure. So I came in as a contractor, working, I think was with Mactec, and then Stoller [Gonzales-Stoller Remediation Services], and then it was awarded to EnergySolutions, and that’s when we really started working on the main infrastructure. When we put in what you see now as the trailer and assembly areas, the buildings. We put all that in, having to put that structure in. [We were] Building, what we call the queue, where the trucks are, where they’re loaded, the roadway up to the rail bench. I mean, some of the stuff that I saw going on, you know, doing the radiation and the safety part of it, it just boggled my mind that bulldozers [were] going up the hill side. And then to see the finished project before we broke ground. I believe that might have been when portage came in, that we sent our first train out, loading all those containers but the dry rounds. You know, from baby steps to walking and running. That’s what it seems like. You know, through the years, watching and then having people come in as we would escort people up to look at things, or we’d be observing things. And people would say, “that’s just like clockwork.” You know, the trucks just went, it was just a constant part with removing the tailings. And I think that first train we loaded, and I don’t know how long it took to load the maybe 16 containers we did, and then to unload them. And now I think when I left it was 136 containers. And now I hear there’s even more, so to squeeze all that into that little bench side, [the] trials and tribulations that we had with that hill site, with a rock slide that shut us down for weeks till we could put some walls up to protect our workers. But it was just from the start a priply old trailer with probably two or three people on a weekend shift. Then going to a weekday shift where maybe we had a dozen people just doing structure, cleaning up, getting ready for that, breaking ground for the admin area. [Then] 80 [people]. And now what I, like I said, when I go by the old MATLAB, the mill’s Atlas building is gone itself. It’s like, “Where’d it go?” You know, that was a mainstay when we went there was when that building would be gone. But how they utilized that old building also.

Q: Yeah you kind of put down a lot of the infrastructure to make it move a little more efficiently.

A: And before I came to even do that part, I remember coming out to the mill site to do some preliminary drilling and boring up on the mill tailings pile itself, to characterize it as we went. That we supported out of the Grand Junction office. I remember coming there and drilling through the pile and now looking at some of the displays inside [the Museum]. There was the one that brought back that memory was the picture of all the layers of the rocks. And you know, I had the geologists there naming all these, the “Wingate and the Moenkoepi” and it’s like Greek to me. And now, when I read that, it’s like now it makes more sense, as you worked with this. And you know, being in this field, being part of this legacy, is really interesting and important to society, to let everybody know what we did.