How yellowcake shaped the West

[TexasTowelie]

In late August 2018, in the heat of one of the warmest and driest years on record in the Four Corners country, under a blanket of smoke emanating from wildfires burning all over the place, I piloted the Silver Bullet — my trusty 1989 Nissan Sentra — to the quiet burg of Monticello, Utah. I was on my way from one camping site on the Great Sage Plain to another on Comb Ridge, where I would feed my misanthropic side with a searing hike down a canyon, seeking out potholes that still had a smidgen of stagnant water left over from the last rain.

I took a detour through Monticello to look into one of the most contentious fronts of the long-running public-land wars, the battle over uranium mining and milling and even radioactive waste disposal. San Juan County’s public lands played a major role in what I call the Age of the Nuclear West, which reached its multi-decade apex during the Cold War and hasn’t ended yet. It was an era of innovation and greed, of hope and harm, of faith in technology and the threat of annihilation, of an almost miraculous source of energy, and of indelible wounds on the land, water and people. Today, the ghosts of that age lurk everywhere in the county. In Monticello, where for decades a uranium mill churned out poisons, residents are still grappling with the long-term health effects. And the last operating uranium mill in the nation, located just outside Blanding, has yet to give up the ghost.


THE NUCLEAR WEST dates back to 1898, long before anyone had thought of nuclear power or nuclear bombs, when Marie Curie discovered radium in unrefined pitchblende. Radium is a radioactive “daughter” of uranium that was once seen as a sort of miracle substance, so much so that just one gram of the stuff could fetch upwards of $100,000. Paint it on watch numbers or even clothing, and they’d glow in the dark. It purportedly could cure cancer and impotence and give those who used it an “all-around healthy glow,” as one advertisement put it. During the early 1900s, it was added to medicines, cosmetics and sometimes even food. The Denver-based Radio-Active Chemical Company added radium to fertilizers. The Nutex Company made radium condoms. Makers of the Radiendocrinator instructed men (and only men) to wear “the adapter like any ‘athletic strap.’ This puts the instrument under the scrotum as it should be. Wear at night. Radiate as directed.”

Shortly after Curie’s discovery, she received a sample of uranium ore from western Colorado. Curie found that it, too, contained radium, and she named the ore carnotite. A boom erupted in western San Miguel County, Colorado, just along the Utah border. Hundreds of mines were dug into mesas and extraction plants built along the rivers to get at the high-dollar miracle substance.

The boom busted in the early 1920s when huge mines opened up in the Belgian Congo that were able to supply the globe’s radium hunger far more affordably. Radium’s glow dimmed soon thereafter when the women who painted it onto watches began dying, and the inventor of the Radiendocrinator was stricken with bladder cancer.

Since uranium ore also contains vanadium, a metal that is used to harden steel and to color glass, a few mines were able to stay afloat throughout the 1930s. The Shumway brothers of San Juan County staked claims on the public domain in Cottonwood Wash and elsewhere during this time under the General Mining Law of 1872, which, like the Homestead Act, is a federal government land-giveaway. After staking the claims, the brothers were able to patent them, thereby taking ownership of public lands. Today, those parcels are private rectangles surrounded by public land.

Read more: https://www.hcn.org/articles/books-mining-how-yellowcake-shaped-the-west
(High Country News)

[abqtommy]

1. Thanks. I've bookmarked this. I'm reminded of the high cancer rate of the population of

St. George, Utah, that has always sat downwind of the nuclear testing that was done in Nevada.
There's a lot of tragedy connected with technology.

"There is a history of nuclear fallout in St. George.
During the early 1950s, St. George received a majority of the fallout that occurred at the Yucca Flats northwest of Las Vegas during the nuclear testing period of weapons development. The winds routinely carried the radiation to this area, resulting in a significant increase of cancer in the general population. From the 1950s to the 1980s, the incidents of gastrointestinal tract, thyroid, bone, and breast cancers were all higher than the general population of the United States. Melanoma, lymphoma, brain tumors, and leukemia are all at higher rates as well.

A 1962 study from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission found that children living in the area at the time of the fallout could have received doses of radioiodine as high as 440 rads."

https://vittana.org/14-pros-and-cons-of-living-in-st-george-utah