Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (P.S.)

by Peter Hessler

  All of this was done in strict secrecy. The word “uranium” was banned from official reports, and workers didn’t realize that they were contributing to the atomic bomb, at least until the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (“It kind of leaked out after that,” one elderly local told me in a slow drawl.) After the war, when the nuclear arms race heated up, the government encouraged private citizens to explore and drill for uranium. Federal agencies build backcountry roads, and the Atomic Energy Commission established guaranteed prices for ore. It became the only government-sponsored mineral rush in American history—approximately nine hundred mines were opened across the Colorado Plateau. In a region of tough names, these were the dreamers: the Hidden Splendor Mine, the King Solomon, the Silver Bell.

  There was essentially no regulation. Most mines lacked proper ventilation, and in the 1950s public-health officials discovered that radon concentrations were nearly a thousand times higher than the accepted level of safety. Miners liked their cigarettes underground, where radioactive particles attached to the smoke and were drawn deep into the lungs. Meanwhile, Uravan’s population grew to more than eight hundred, with its mill situated right in the center of town. One native told me that as a boy he descended into a uranium mine and ate lunch with his father on Bring Your Son to Work Day. If people heard that a mine was “hot”—highly radioactive—they couldn’t wait to work there. In the nuclear cycle, a major risk of public contamination is mishandled mill tailings, which contain radium and other radon emitters. In Uravan, the sandy tailings served as bedding for construction projects. People laid water lines in the stuff. Gardeners used it to loosen up the clay soil. Old mill equipment, much of it contaminated, was tossed openly onto a hill above town; kids and scavengers liked the dump so much they called it Treasure Island.

  When a remote community suffers a health crisis, it’s as if a curtain has separated people from the outside world. Typically, locals are frustrated that others fail to comprehend their pain, but the reaction in the uranium towns is the opposite. “He didn’t take it real personal,” Gayland Thompson told me when we discussed his father, a miner who died of lung cancer. “He wanted to work there.” Like other people from the Uravan region, Gayland complained that protestors from elsewhere speak in the town’s name, exaggerating health problems. From the locals’ perspective, the curtain that separates them from the world also serves as a screen, allowing others to project their own image of what happened in this distant place.

  And yet nobody denies that many miners died from small-cell lung cancer. The epidemic was first documented in 1956, when government health officials had an autopsy performed on Tom Van Arsdale, a fifty-one-year-old miner. Experts recommended that mines ban smoking, improve ventilation, and institute other safety features. But a culture of secrecy remained from the war years, and agencies buried the reports. In Colorado, stricter regulations weren’t instituted for a decade, and it took even longer for victims and their families to receive substantial restitution. In the 1970s, this battle was taken up by Stewart Udall, the Secretary of the Interior under Kennedy and Johnson. Udall represented families of Navajo Indians who died after working in terrible conditions in New Mexico; in Udall’s words, the government “had needlessly sacrificed the lives of [the Navajo miners] in the name of national security.” In 1990, Congress finally passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which provides health care and cash payments of $150,000 and more to miners and other uranium workers who become ill.

  But the cover-up doesn’t seem to cause much anger in southwestern Colorado. In the town of Naturita, I met Marie Templeton, a local historian and the daughter of Tom Van Arsdale. Templeton’s husband also died of small-cell lung cancer, but she refused to see the men as victims. She told me that they had chosen a high-risk occupation that paid well, and they noticed a trend of health problems among colleagues long before the story broke. “They knew,” she said. “It was an accepted risk, because they were earning a good living for their families.” Like everybody I met who had lost a family member, Templeton supported the new mill, and like many locals she was a sometime hoarder of uranium. She hoped the industry would return full-bore. “All of those safety features have been built in now,” she said. “Anyway, if you have a pile of high-grade uranium ore laying on the ground, you can go out there and roll in it and it wouldn’t hurt you. That’s a fact. You can check that. I had a nice piece of ore for forty years or better. It was in a close environment in my home, but nothing happened to me.”

  Even sick miners speak the same way. Billy Clark, who has pulmonary fibrosis, told me that he’d be glad to see the industry return, because now it’s better regulated. But he shook his head when I asked about his old coworkers. “Most of them goddam gone,” he said. “The ones that are around, they’re worse than me. They’re on oxygen.”

  His wife, Debbie, spoke up. “It gets to where your lungs crystallize,” she said. “My uncle passed away last year. His lungs just crystallized and he was spitting up this bloody stuff. They told us it was parts of his lungs.”

  Billy used oxygen only at night. This seems to be a point of pride among former miners, who rely on their tanks as little as possible. They often note that breathing in is easy—the hard part is breathing out. This distinction appears to be important to them, as if it might cut any unwanted sympathy in half. In conversation, they sometimes drift away from the topic of health problems in order to reminisce about old mines, whose names are pronounced as fondly as lost loves. “That Golden Cycle,” Billy said with a smile. “That stuff was so hot it’d cake up on the walls. When it was hot like that it was sticky.” He was in his early sixties, and he had started working underground as a sixteen-year-old; people in town still called him by his mining nickname of “Hard Rock.” He said the pay had always been good. I asked if he had saved much money.

  “Hell no,” he said. “They didn’t put handles on it. I spent it mostly on good times. Aw, what the hell. You only have fun once.”

  These conversations were never tense. Domestic scenes followed a certain pattern: a husband who couldn’t breathe, a wife who helped him remember, both of them chatting about the topic of sickness and death as calmly as if it were tomorrow’s weather. People often lived in a house or a trailer that was bought with a government settlement. Pat Mann put a new roof on her home after her husband died; Billy Clark’s double-wide was paid for with what his wife jokingly referred to as “blood money.” People commonly expressed gratitude for Union Carbide.

  “The way I look at it, I wanted a job,” Larry Cooper told me. He had worked for years in Uravan; his mining nickname was Coop. “They gave me a job. I didn’t ask if I was going to get cancer—which I did. It was just one of those things. I think our life wasn’t too bad, don’t you, Mom?”

  “Not at all,” said his wife, Avis. We were sitting in the living room of their house in Nucla, where they had moved after leaving Uravan. Avis was knitting an afghan with the colors of the American flag. Coop told me that half of his right lung had been removed. “But I smoked probably sixty years,” he said. “So I won’t say that the cancer was caused by Carbide.”

  Coop was in his early eighties, a big man in suspenders and Wrangler jeans. Whenever he breathed out, he hissed softly and pursed his lips, which gave him a thoughtful expression. He was strongly in favor of the new mill. “It’s going to be so much different from what the old mills were,” he said.

  Avis said, “I think this green crap that they’re putting out is for the birds.”

  “I think environmentalists are one of the ruinations of the nation,” Coop said.

  Avis said, “How many other people have had lung cancer that’s never lived in Uravan?”

  “I tell you one thing, I ain’t been worth a damn since that surgery,” Coop said. “My trouble is, I can get air in, but I can’t get rid of it.” He continued, “I smoked everything that was ever built. Dominoes, Avalon, Sensation, Wings. And I worked in the mines. I’d say the two of them caused it,
don’t you, Mom?”

  “This idea that radiation causes lung cancer,” Avis said. “All these millions of people who got lung cancer, they didn’t live in Uravan.”

  “I can’t say nothing bad about Carbide, and nothing bad about mining,” Coop said. He pursed his lips and hissed thoughtfully. “Let’s put it this way,” he said. “You’re going to live until you die. And there’s nothing you can do about that.”

  It’s never a good sign when a community posts a “For Sale” notice in front of its elementary school. The town of Nucla, which is about fifteen miles from the proposed mill site, finally put its old school building on the market in 2009, because there are so few children left. The local high school used to graduate eighty students annually; last year there were eleven seniors. The surrounding region once had a population of between six and eight thousand; now there are only about sixteen hundred people. Many locals work construction or cleaning jobs in Telluride, the prosperous ski community that is about sixty-five miles from the proposed site of the Paradox mill.

  Much of the opposition to the mill has come from Telluride. The Sheep Mountain Alliance, an environmentalist group, has filed a lawsuit to halt the project, but activists acknowledge that it’s hard to oppose development when you come from a thriving town. “I recognize how patriarchal that can seem,” Hilary White, the director of the Sheep Mountain Alliance, told me. She believed that economic problems made people receptive to the uranium industry, which she didn’t think could be trusted to follow regulations. “When you’re desperate, when you can’t afford to put food on your table, you’ll welcome people who don’t have your best interests at heart.”

  For outsiders, the local relationship with history can seem baffling, especially with regard to Uravan. “We thought that was such an obvious way to fight it, by referring to Uravan,” White said. “These people lived through it; they saw it. But this is all they know.” At a public meeting in the county seat of Montrose, the actress Daryl Hannah spoke out against the mill; she owns a home between Telluride and Paradox. “It’s kind of mind-boggling for me to hear people say, ‘I worked at the Uravan mill, and it was a booming economy at the time, and I wish we could go back to it,’ ” Hannah told a reporter. “But you look at Uravan now and it’s completely fenced off, and it says ‘Radioactive, Do Not Enter, Dangerous, Use Caution!’ ”

  Uravan thrived during the 1960s and 1970s, when the American uranium industry shifted from defense to energy production. But in the 1980s the town laid off workers, and after Three Mile Island there was increased public concern about radioactive sites. The State of Colorado successfully sued Union Carbide, forcing a Superfund cleanup so extensive that it required the town’s destruction. All remaining residents were moved out—the last to go was the postmistress—and on New Year’s Eve of 1986 Uravan was officially closed.

  For the next two decades, Union Carbide, which was acquired by Dow Chemical in 2001, worked in conjunction with the federal government in trying to remove virtually all traces of radioactive contamination from the site. A crew of as many as a hundred workers demolished the mill, the school, the houses—a total of 260 structures. All local roads were torn up. After that, the cleanup proceeded into the soil, like an archaeology of the atomic age. Workers found a vial that was believed to have contained radium, once the world’s most expensive substance. They discovered that one section of State Highway 141 passed directly over the site of the Manhattan Project’s uranium mill, so they tore up the new road and replaced it. They excavated the foundation of the first radium mill, the one intended to cure cancer, and they destroyed that, too.

  Regulations specified that everything had to be shredded and buried in four repositories atop a neighboring mesa. Uravan contained some working bulldozers, dump trucks, and Caterpillar loaders; all were ripped apart with hydraulic shears. Storerooms of unopened supplies—sinks, toilets, test tubes, lightbulbs, whatever—were torn to bits. One worker told me he shredded a brand-new stainless-steel rod worth at least five thousand dollars. They ripped up water lines; they uprooted gardens; they tore down every tree in town. Whenever equipment left the site, it was washed and checked with a Geiger counter. If a bulldozer blade or a hydraulic shear couldn’t be cleaned to strictly low radiation levels, it was destroyed on the spot. Sometimes tires had to be removed and shredded.

  To design the repositories, computers simulated the worst storm that was likely to occur in the next thousand years. The Uravan site is now fenced in, with warning signs that read, “Any Area or Container on This Property May Contain Radioactive Materials.” Soon, it will become the property of the Department of Energy, which intends to keep it closed for all eternity. The destruction of Uravan took more than two decades, and it cost $127 million, of which about $50 million came from federal funds. On the other side of the world, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are thriving cities, but the town that helped make the bomb has been wiped completely off the face of the earth.

  Today, nobody lives within nine miles of the site, which is a narrow plain pressed between two cliffs of sandstone. Each summer, former Uravan residents hold a reunion picnic nearby, and occasionally people stop by on their own, as if it were a cemetery. Whenever I accompanied visitors, there was a strange nostalgia: people leaned over the fence, which was covered with radioactive warning signs, and pointed out where they had been married, and where children had been born, and where teenage indiscretions had been committed. “I kissed a boy on the bridge on Halloween!” a woman in her fifties said, giggling. “That was the original tailings pile,” a man said fondly, pointing at an empty space beside a cliff. “We’d take old car hoods and slide down it.”

  In a region of tough people, this obscure and ruined spot sometimes seemed the sole point of sentimentality. Twice, former residents wept while talking about Uravan, which never happened during a discussion of a family death from cancer. Some of this had to do with the perception of agency: locals found dignity in mining and milling, which reflected personal decisions, whereas nobody had had a choice in leaving Uravan. But there was also a strong sense of injustice and waste. People loved the town, and they believed the cleanup was unnecessary; they hated the way outsiders assumed that Uravan natives suffered birth defects and other health problems. “U3O8, when it’s first mined, it’s not that hot,” Gene Greenwood, a former Uravan resident who had helped supervise the cleanup, told me, using the chemical abbreviation for yellowcake. He noted that people tend to conflate different forms of uranium—yellowcake, enriched fuel, and bomb material—when in fact each has a markedly different production process and radioactivity level. He said that the Uravan cleanup hadn’t been motivated by health concerns, and now the site is no more radioactive than the surrounding landscape. “It was a liability issue,” he said. “It wasn’t a safety issue.”

  The locals often speak of uranium and nuclear power in highly technical terms. They refer to “thermoluminescent dosimeters,” and they distinguish between alpha and gamma radiation. The phrase “pulmonary fibrosis” often crops up. The sudden sophistication can be jarring; once, a woman compared President Obama to Adolf Hitler and then mentioned the results of an epidemiological study on the effects of ionizing radiation. Few people have much formal education, and they have a reputation for being insular; in this remote place, folks often adopt a worldview that is fearful of the outside. But anything atomic seems to make them comfortable. They aren’t scared of radiation, and they often say surprising things. Several people insisted to me that unenriched uranium isn’t carcinogenic, and they said there’s no evidence that the low radiation levels involved in regulated mining and milling have negative health effects. Howard Stephens, who had worked in the Uravan mill, told me that the radiation levels he received there were about the same as those of someone employed in New York’s Grand Central Terminal. People said that the airline industry exposes employees to more radiation than the nuclear industry does. Ron Henderson, a county commissioner, told me that yellowcake is so harmless that it can
be mailed in the U.S. postal system. “It’s like sending powdered sugar,” he said. “You put it in a Ziploc. You just want to make sure you zip it all the way across.”

  The contrast with the environmentalists who opposed the mill couldn’t have been greater. They were better educated and more worldly, and their opinions weren’t influenced by the prospect of financial gain. But I noticed a vagueness with regard to scientific issues. “There’s always been a lot of talk of leukemia and cancer rates around these places,” Travis Stills, a lawyer who is involved with two of the anti-mill lawsuits, told me. When I asked about evidence, he said that epidemiological studies were unreliable. Activists often quoted a statement issued by the Larimer County Medical Society in Fort Collins, Colorado, which claimed that communities engaged in uranium mining have suffered a “documented increase” in leukemia, childhood bone cancer, miscarriages, genetic abnormalities, and other serious conditions. But when I contacted the physicians who issued the statement they couldn’t produce a source. (One told me that he had lost his materials to water damage.)

  And yet almost everything I heard in the uranium towns could be documented. The World Health Organization does not classify uranium as a human carcinogen. The walls of Grand Central Terminal are made of granite, which contains elements that produce radon; a worker there receives a larger dose of radiation than the Nuclear Regulatory Commission allows a uranium mill to emit to a next-door neighbor. Being closer to the sun—living in the mountains, flying in planes—also means more radiation. According to the National Council on Radiation Protection, the average airline crew member receives an annual dose of work-related radiation that is more than one and a half times higher than that of the average employee in the nuclear power industry. (Neither dose is higher than what the typical American receives from natural background radiation.) And there is no compelling evidence that low amounts of radiation cause health problems. Finally, I wondered if even the craziest things I’d heard were true, and I called the regional spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service. He told me in no uncertain terms that yellowcake is classified as a UN2912 radioactive material, and that it is strictly forbidden in the mail, regardless of whether you zip the bag all the way across.