Lawrenceville leaders presented their plan Thursday night to reactivate the city's long-dormant wells, some of which have radiation contamination.

The sparsely attended public hearing laid out plans to remove unacceptably high levels of radium and uranium from drinking water in the wells.

By bringing the city's wells online, Lawrenceville theoretically could eliminate the need to draw water from Lake Lanier and Gwinnett County's water system, Mayor Rex Millsaps said.

"We have more than enough capacity," Millsaps said.

The city is considering hiring a Colorado-based cleanup company, Water Remediation Technology LLC, to filter contamination from one of the wells.

If approved by the city and cleared by the state environmental office, Lawrenceville would have the first municipal water supply in Georgia using water cleaned of radiation, said Rick Zahnow, eastern regional manager for Water Remediation.

The company's system uses two water-treatment units to draw the naturally occurring uranium onto a surface that can capture the radioactive particles, he said.

The system is expected to cost Lawrenceville about 42 cents per liter of water treated, plus an initial cost of $137,000 for equipment, Millsaps said.

Bringing 10 of the city's other wells online will cost the city from $4 million to $5 million to build a water services plant.

Three other wells have radium contamination, but the city has not settled on a method of treating those water sources yet.

With approval of the contract with Water Remediation, the city expects to bring into service within 90 days the contaminated well on Ezzard Street.

Lawrenceville closed its wells years ago, after Gwinnett County began supplying water. But the city and county continued to make investments in Lawrenceville's well system.

A recent contract dispute between the city and county over water prices, as well as the drought, led Lawrenceville leaders to look at reactivating the city wells.